At Glendale Community College in Phoenix, Arizona, on May 15, 2026, dozens of graduates walked across the stage and heard nothing. The college had deployed a new AI-powered name-reading system for commencement. The system mispronounced some names. It skipped others entirely. The names on-screen stopped matching the people walking. The ceremony paused twice. College President Tiffany Hernandez apologized and called…

In April, I wrote about the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians and the Spirit Lake Tribe. They sued North Dakota over a redistricting map that diluted Native voting strength. They won at trial. A federal court ordered new maps. Three tribal members got elected under those maps. Then the Eighth Circuit said they couldn’t sue. Not that they were…

In 1978, you could sit in economy class with 35 inches between your knees and the seat in front of you. The seat was 19 inches wide. A meal came with the ticket. Your bags flew free. You didn’t choose this. It was just what the seat was. In 2026, economy class offers 28 to 31 inches of pitch. The…

In Marietta, Georgia, there is a garden with more than four hundred Cherokee plants. Bloodroot for red dye and skin medicine. Wild ginger — present in seventy percent of Cherokee medicinal formulations. Black walnut for food and crafts. Tulip poplar for canoes and shelter. Heirloom vegetables grown from seeds shipped from the Cherokee Nation seed bank. In Oklahoma. That’s the…

Apple’s revamped Siri will offer auto-deleting chats. Users can set conversations to vanish after 30 days, one year, or keep them indefinitely. Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reports the options mirror what iMessage already offers. The feature ships with iOS 27 this fall. Privacy as product. Apple’s signature move. Here’s the timeline. In July 2019, a Guardian whistleblower revealed that Apple contractors…

Kalshi is not a sportsbook. Kalshi is a “designated contract market” regulated by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. It offers “event contracts” — financial derivatives that happen to resolve based on the outcomes of NFL games, NBA games, college football games, and boxing matches. Ninety percent of its $178 billion in annualized trading volume comes from these contracts. It raised…

The melody: “fiscal responsibility.” Reducing spending. Eliminating redundancy. The language of budgets, which is the language of reasonable men making difficult choices. The lyric: In 1978, Congress passed the Tribally Controlled Community College Assistance Act. The federal government would fund tribal colleges the way states fund state universities — not as charity, but as trust responsibility. The legal relationship between…

The verse they teach goes like this: the largest lithium deposit in the Western Hemisphere is in northern Nevada. When it’s operational, it will produce 40,000 metric tons of battery-grade lithium carbonate per year — enough for 800,000 electric vehicles. General Motors owns 38% of the joint venture. The U.S. Department of Energy backed it with a $2.26 billion federal…

Two states. Two governor’s races. Same question nobody wants to answer directly. In Maine, the Wabanaki nations — Penobscot, Passamaquoddy, Maliseet, Mi’kmaq — are the only federally recognized tribes in America still treated like municipalities. The Maine Indian Claims Settlement Act of 1980 gave them $81.5 million. It took their sovereignty. Forty-six years later, they can’t regulate clean air on…

“Where would I be deported to? Because I’m a U.S. citizen, and this is all I’ve known.” That’s Leticia Jacobo, Salt River Pima-Maricopa. Booked into Polk County Jail in Des Moines for a suspended license. Scheduled for release November 11, 2025. Held longer because jail staff flagged her with an ICE detainer. Her sister asked what everyone should have asked:…