The New Yorker

How the Supreme Court Demolished the Voting Rights Act

For decades, the Supreme Court has steadily worked to transform the concept of discrimination based on race, from the civil-rights-era vision that the government has an obligation to remedy and prevent racial discrimination to a view that the legal and moral wrong is to see race at all and make any decisions in consideration of it. As Chief Justice John Roberts put it in a 2007 ruling that disallowed a race-conscious measure to address de-facto desegregation in public schools, “the way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.” On Wednesday, the Court issued its long-awaited decision in Louisiana v. Callais, a case about drawing electoral districts that embodied the clash between those two viewpoints. In Justice Samuel Alito’s opinion for the six-Justice majority, the Court’s idea of racial equality turned out to correspond to a downright dystopian vision of our electoral democracy. The consequence is that the Voting Rights Act of 1965—a landmark statute that was intended to insure racially equal electoral opportunity—has been read out of existence.Ratified a few years after the Civil War, the Fifteenth Amendment provides that citizens’ right to vote “shall not be denied or abridged

A King (or Two), a President, and a Troll

Two hundred and fifty years into the American experiment, it turns out that it takes a King to tell us how to run our Republic.On Tuesday, His Majesty King Charles III, the great-great-great-great-great-grandson of George III, the British monarch who lost the Revolutionary War to a bunch of impertinent colonists enamored of Enlightenment ideas about the natural rights of man, spoke to the U.S. Congress. With dry wit and a sense of irony that was surely lost on the host he so subtly trolled, Charles extolled the virtues of American-style liberal democracy now under threat by America’s own leader. What does it say about our current politics that polite British-accented clichés about the benefits of the rule of law, an independent judiciary, and the strengths that flow from “vibrant, diverse, and free societies” could end up sounding downright subversive?The King’s biggest applause line was a tribute to Magna Carta, the thirteenth-century compact between an English monarch and his restive nobles, which, Charles noted, has become a pillar of American constitutional jurisprudence, with the Supreme Court citing it at least a hundred and sixty times in its history, not least to establish “the principle that executive power is subject to checks

The Irish Drug Kingpin Daniel Kinahan Is Arrested in Dubai

How Daniel Kinahan’s Cocaine Empire Began to CrumbleAfter living freely in Dubai for a decade, the notorious Irish drug dealer has finally been arrested, and is likely to be sent back to Dublin to stand trial.April 30, 2026Illustration by Ben WisemanAlmost exactly twenty years ago, an Italian police squad burst through the door of a dilapidated farmhouse near the town of Corleone, in Sicily, and arrested Bernardo Provenzano, the capo dei capi of the Sicilian Mafia. Provenzano was seventy-three years old. He had been on the run since the nineteen-sixties. The last known photograph of him was taken in 1959. So elusive had he proved over the preceding decades that some people thought he was already dead. In fact, Provenzano had been living a peasant’s life for many years, subsisting on cheese and chicory, while directing the operations of the Mafia using encrypted notes on pizzini, or tiny scraps of paper. Detectives located him by following the meandering path of laundry, sent to him by his wife, via multiple messengers. When he was arrested, Provenzano told the officers, “You have no idea what you’ve done.” He died in custody ten years later.No such mystery surrounded the whereabouts of Daniel Kinahan,

King Charles and Queen Camilla Come to Washington

The planning for the royal visit to Washington, in celebration of America’s semiquincentennial, was under way long before the British Embassy even knew who would win the 2024 Presidential election. Last week, in anticipation of His Majesty’s arrival, maintenance crews adorned lampposts near the White House with the Union Jack—except they actually got it wrong, and hung the Australian flag. The error, as the Transportation Secretary’s office put it, was soon rectified. When King Charles and Queen Camilla landed on Monday, they were received by President Donald Trump and the First Lady in the West Wing for tea and for a tour of the White House’s new beehives; a bee landed on Trump’s outstretched palm, which he displayed for the royal couple and Melania.The next morning, as part of Charles’s welcome ceremony, American military units and bands marched through rain on the South Lawn. Occasional banging and clanging from Trump’s ballroom-construction project was audible whenever the music stopped; a crane hovered above, and the U.K. press pool joked that its operators had the best view. (Charles gently referred to the gaping hole where the East Wing once stood as Trump’s “readjustment.”)“What a beautiful, British day this is,” Trump said, looking

How Putin and Zelensky View the War in Iran

On April 14th, as Kyiv braced for a round of Russian strikes, the Ukrainian President, Volodymyr Zelensky, was seven hundred and fifty miles away, in Berlin, forging a defense agreement with Germany, part of a tour of European allies to raise support for military aid. But his mind seemed to be focussed on a different war, thousands of miles away, in the Middle East. In an interview with the German broadcaster ZDF, Zelensky griped that America’s top negotiators for both Ukraine and Iran, the special envoy Steve Witkoff and President Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, “are constantly in contact with Iran and have no time for Ukraine.” Zelensky then noted severe shortages of the U.S. Patriot air-defense system, a vital tool for responding to Russian ballistic missiles. He suggested that the shortfall was due to more Patriot interceptors being used to counter Iranian attacks on America’s allies in the Middle East. “If the war lasts longer, there will be fewer weapons for Ukraine,” Zelensky said, adding that, “we have such a deficit right now, it can’t get any worse.”Hours later, Zelensky was in Oslo. The Iran war was still on his mind. He told journalists that Russia might strike that

Donald Trump’s Lose-Lose Negotiations with Iran

On Saturday, President Donald Trump called off a trip to Islamabad that two of his chief negotiators—Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff—were planning to make in the hopes of ending the war in Iran. That conflict, including Israel’s campaign in Lebanon, has cost thousands of lives and caused untold worldwide economic damage, and shows no signs of ending, despite the fact that Trump has extended a ceasefire that he declared earlier this month. Iran is still keeping the Strait of Hormuz largely closed; the United States is still blockading Iran’s ports; and Iran and the U.S. do not appear any closer to an agreement on Iran’s nuclear materials.I recently spoke by phone with Ali Vaez, the director of the Iran Project at the International Crisis Group. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed what’s really keeping the two sides from reaching a deal, how the leadership of the Iranian regime has changed since the killing of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and why this war is likely to continue being a lose-lose situation for both sides.As time ticks on without a formal end to the war, and we continue with some version of a ceasefire, how do

Kash Patel’s Implausible Lawsuit Against The Atlantic

On Friday, April 17th, The Atlantic published a two-thousand-word story about the F.B.I. director Kash Patel’s alleged excessive drinking. Titled “The FBI Director Is MIA,” the piece recounted multiple sources’ serious concerns about the drinking—how it was affecting Patel’s ability to deal with F.B.I. matters and, potentially, putting national security at risk. The reporter, Sarah Fitzpatrick, said that she had spoken to dozens of sources, including current and former F.B.I. officials, Department of Justice officials, lawyers, lobbyists, and hospitality workers, who painted a picture of a director who frequently gets visibly drunk at night clubs, including one in Las Vegas called the Poodle Room. Patel’s drinking allegedly resulted in him often being unavailable to fulfill his duties or asleep at critical times. In a particularly striking anecdote, according to multiple sources, a request for “breaching equipment” was made to smash down a locked door to a room when agents were unable to get a response from Patel, who was inside. (It’s unclear whether the door was actually broken down.) Fitzpatrick later described sources who were so concerned about the national-security risk of a regularly incapacitated director that they felt alarm “bordering on panic.”The piece includes statements of support for Patel

Can the E.P.A. Survive Lee Zeldin?

Last summer, more than a hundred and fifty staff members at the Environmental Protection Agency sent a letter to the agency’s head, Lee Zeldin, outlining their concerns about his leadership. Topping the list was Zeldin’s naked partisanship. The administrator often used his official communications to trash Democrats. This “politicized messaging,” the letter said, was undermining trust in the agency. So, too, were Zeldin’s gutting of the E.P.A.’s research division and his tendency to ignore the findings of its scientists. The missive noted that it reflected the staffers’ personal, rather than professional, opinions, and had been written on their own time. It ended by urging Zeldin to “correct course.”“Should you choose to do so, we stand ready to support your efforts,” it said.The employees who signed the letter did not expect it to have much effect. “I thought, Here’s a letter the staff is going to present to the administrator,” one told me. “He’s going to take a look at it and put it in the wastepaper basket. And we will go on with our work.”That’s not how things played out. Zeldin, or at least his deputies, launched the electronic equivalent of a manhunt. In e-mails that were eventually obtained by

Donald Trump’s Pardon Economy

“I have great respect for you,” Donald Trump told Rod Blagojevich. “I have great respect for your tenacity, for the fact that you just don’t give up. But, Rod, you’re fired.” It was April, 2010, week four of the third season of “The Celebrity Apprentice,” and Blagojevich, the pugnacious former governor of Illinois, had bungled the assignment: to design a promotional campaign for a new Harry Potter exhibit at Universal Studios. In truth, Blagojevich had bigger things to worry about. He was broke—hence the “Celebrity Apprentice” gig. More worrisome, he was about to stand trial on corruption charges, for, among other things, trying to profit from naming Barack Obama’s replacement in the Senate. Blagojevich was ultimately convicted and sentenced to fourteen years in prison. He served eight of them, until Trump, in his first term as President, commuted his sentence. Blagojevich, a Democrat, had launched a lobbying blitz and received support from Jesse Jackson, Rudy Giuliani, and the legal scholar Alan Dershowitz. A full pardon came later, at the start of Trump’s second term. The weekend after the Inauguration, the President “called me on a Saturday night to say he’s gonna pardon me,” Blagojevich said. Speaking with me recently, he

The Lessons from Jerome Powell’s Defiance of Donald Trump

On Tuesday morning, the seven Washington-based governors of the Federal Reserve and the twelve presidents of the system’s regional reserve banks will gather at the Fed’s headquarters in Foggy Bottom to discuss the economy and what to do about interest rates. Since Congress created the central bank, in 1913, these policy meetings have been held in times of war, sky-high inflation, and raging pandemics, but never in circumstances like these. The meeting is scheduled to be the last presided over by Jerome Powell, whose term as Fed chair expires next month. But when the nomination of the Republican banker Kevin Warsh, Donald Trump’s pick to replace Powell, stalled in the Senate over a deeply dubious Justice Department investigation into Powell’s handling of cost overruns on a Fed renovation project, Powell vowed to stay on until the succession issue was resolved. A few days ago, it seemed perfectly possible that he would still be there in June for the next policy meeting. It was an unprecedented standoff.Last Friday, Trump backed down. His longtime friend and ally Jeanine Pirro, a former Fox News commentator who now serves as the U.S. Attorney for Washington, D.C., announced that her office was closing its investigation

Laurie Metcalf’s Third Act

Somewhere in the bowels of Lincoln Center, Laurie Metcalf was in a rehearsal room, quietly conferring with the director Joe Mantello. It was February, days before the new Broadway revival of Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman” would move into the Winter Garden Theatre. Four weeks into rehearsals, the cast—led by Nathan Lane, as the delusional, doomed salesman Willy Loman—was still refining the Loman family’s implosion. Metcalf, playing Willy’s enabling wife, Linda, had read the play in high school but had purposefully avoided ever seeing a production. “I thought maybe down the line I’d be able to play the part, so I didn’t want somebody’s performance in my head,” she explained. The same went for Martha in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” and Mary Tyrone in “Long Day’s Journey Into Night”—characters that Metcalf had tackled in the past decade and a half. “I stayed away from bucket-list-type roles, just in case,” she said, then let out a hearty laugh. “And now, in my dotage—here they come!”Metcalf’s turn as a Broadway eminence was far from assured. Since the nineteen-eighties, TV audiences have known her as the rootless, rubbery Aunt Jackie, from the sitcom “Roseanne.” The more stage-savvy know her as a

Donald Trump’s Spring Cleaning

In the midst of a war, Donald Trump has started to get rid of his senior officials. The exact reasons are often left vague, and the successors to be determined, but people are leaving. On March 5th, Trump fired Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem; on April 2nd, it was Attorney General Pam Bondi, and, on April 20th, Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer stepped down under pressure—three Cabinet secretaries, all women, gone in less than two months. By last week, the F.B.I. director, Kash Patel, seemed to be headed for trouble, too.The President is also reportedly annoyed with his National Intelligence director, Tulsi Gabbard, and with his Commerce Secretary and friend, Howard Lutnick, about, as Politico put it, “how much Lutnick’s family has been profiting off their association with the President’s brand.” The atmosphere is one of discontent and distraction. A month into the Iran war, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth fired the Army chief of staff, Randy George. Then, after reciting a prayer that Hegseth said was inspired by Scripture but seemed directly lifted from “Pulp Fiction,” last week he ended a vaccine mandate for soldiers—a protocol initiated by General George Washington, in 1777—and fired the Secretary of the Navy, John Phelan,

After Magnus Carlsen, Chess Has Entered a New Age

When Gukesh Dommaraju was a small child growing up in Chennai, India, his parents wanted him to be an athlete. Tennis, they thought. But Gukesh was drawn to another tactical game: chess. He was one of millions of Indian children who grew up under the influence of Viswanathan Anand, whose five world-championship titles led to an explosion of interest across the country. When Gukesh was seven, he watched Magnus Carlsen, then twenty-two years old, defeat his hero, Anand, to become the new world champion. Gukesh dreamed of being the one to bring the title back to India. In the fourth grade, he won the under-nine Asia championships, which convinced his parents of his potential, and they made the sort of sacrifices that families of aspiring champions in any sport often make—especially in chess, a game in which early specialization can bring outsized rewards.Gukesh’s training was unusual in certain respects. For one thing, his coach, the grand master Vishnu Prasanna, eschewed computer chess engines for young players. Almost alone among the new generation of top players, Gukesh did not start working with computers until after he became a grand master—at twelve years, seven months, and seven days, the second-youngest ever to

Has Steve Kerr Had Enough?

Plainspokenness is an endangered attribute in pro sports. Players and coaches have become maddeningly mealy-mouthed, striving to avoid upsetting agents, sponsors, owners, fans, thin-skinned politicians, and whoever else might object. Not so with the Golden State Warriors head coach Steve Kerr, who has publicly dubbed Donald Trump a “blowhard” who uses “racist, misogynist” words and is “ill-suited” to be President. (Trump, for his part, has called Kerr a “scared” “little boy.”) Kerr’s success is as rare as his candor. “I’m the luckiest guy in the N.B.A.’s history,” he said last weekend, as his twelfth coaching season came to a close, earlier than desired, during the play-in round. Kerr has won nine N.B.A. championships—more than any franchise but the Lakers and the Celtics—and counted Michael Jordan, Scottie Pippen, Tim Duncan, David Robinson, Gregg Popovich, Steph Curry, Kevin Durant, and Jimmy Butler among his coaches, teammates, and players. Not a bad group of co-workers.Butler’s A.C.L. tear, back in January, effectively doomed Kerr’s already slim chances of winning a tenth title with a graying core of star players. Ten rings would put him just three behind Phil Jackson, who was Kerr’s coach on the nineties Chicago Bulls team that became the N.B.A.’s first

Inside the White House Correspondents’ Dinner as Gunshots Rang Out

In the spring of 1981, President Ronald Reagan was shot outside the Washington Hilton on his way out of a luncheon. Cabdrivers sometimes call it the Hinckley Hilton—a weird local homage to the shooter, John Hinckley, Jr. On Saturday evening, I walked by the hotel, in the rain, as antiwar protesters yelled through bullhorns at journalists streaming inside for the annual White House Correspondents’ Association dinner. It was the War Crimes Correspondents’ dinner, they shouted. I was on my way to the White House to join the press pool, the small contingent of media that travels with the President wherever he goes. We loaded into vans in the motorcade and waited for Donald and Melania Trump to enter the Beast, the President’s bulletproof limousine. A reporter next to me scrolled through posts on George Santos’s X account, where he was criticizing the red-carpet fashion. As we rode through the streets of downtown D.C. back to the Hilton, the motorcade slowed for a long-languishing construction project around Dupont Circle. When we pulled up to the hotel, I saw a Trump official I know standing on the street corner in his tuxedo. “I’m late as fuck,” he texted me.Trump was attending the

A Chernobyl Widow’s Tragedy, Forty Years Later

Nataliia Khodymchuk’s last evening at home was like many that had come before. She stayed in the neat confines of her three-bedroom apartment in Kyiv, slicing garlic to preserve and knitting socks and scarves to send to Ukrainian soldiers. She moved slowly; the November light faded outside her windows as the darkness of early winter crept in. Typically, Nataliia called her daughter around dinnertime, but she wasn’t feeling well that night and decided to settle in early, on a patterned green couch in the hallway. She called the corridor, with its two thick walls, her “bunker.” It was her best protection from Russian air strikes.Nataliia, who was seventy-three, lived on the seventh floor of a blocky Soviet-era apartment building on Kyiv’s Left Bank, not far from a power station. Locals called the complex the “Chernobyl House” because it was largely populated by families who had been displaced from the Soviet city of Pripyat, in 1986, following the nuclear disaster. Nataliia’s husband, Valerii Khodemchuk, had been the first person killed in the meltdown, and he was the only victim whose remains were never recovered—his body was lost in the nuclear reactor, buried beneath thousands of tons of concrete and steel. He

How Big a Threat Are Iranian-Backed Cyberattacks?

On April 7th, when the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) issued a warning that cyber actors affiliated with the Iranian regime had gained access to internet-connected programmable logic controllers (P.L.C.s), small computers used by myriad American critical-infrastructure sectors—including municipal energy, water, and wastewater agencies—to automate their systems, Operation Epic Fury was in its thirty-eighth day. April 7th was also the day that President Donald Trump declared both a “total and complete victory” over Iran and a fragile two-week ceasefire while negotiators attempted to hammer out a peace plan. The CISA advisory, which noted that the Iranian-linked cyber actors were “conducting this activity to cause disruptive effects within the United States,” was a blunt reminder that, in the digital age, the battlefield has expanded to encompass the geography of everyday life.Conventional warfare, in which bombs are dropped, shipping channels are mined, and the Geneva Conventions apply more broadly, tends to be time-limited (even if the conflict endures for a long period of time). Nation-state hacking, in contrast, is a constant feature of geopolitics. The Iranians have been knocking around in the United States’ critical infrastructure for years. In 2013, according to the Department of Justice, a hacker affiliated with the

Trump and the Iran Deal That Wasn’t

So how, exactly, does America’s war with Iran, the one that Donald Trump said would probably be over in a couple of days, or four to six weeks, nearly eight weeks ago, end?Since Trump has thus far failed to achieve the peace deal that he—and the world’s financial markets—had anticipated by the end of his two-week ceasefire with the hard-line Iranian regime, the conflict has entered into a liminal state that Gideon Rachman, of the Financial Times, called “the fog of peace.” It’s a murkiness befitting a President who has conducted this conflict in the Middle East as a one-man smoke machine obscuring reality behind such a cloud of lies and disinformation that it’s difficult to imagine that even Trump himself could keep straight what is real and what is fiction. On Monday, he told the New York Post that Vice-President J. D. Vance was in the air, en route to Pakistan, to seal an agreement with Iran. But Vance had never left, and days later he still hadn’t. By Tuesday, after variously threatening to bomb all of Iran to smithereens and claiming that he was on the brink of a “FAR BETTER” deal to halt Iran’s nuclear program than

LIV Golf Is Dying of Boredom

You shouldn’t count other people’s money, but I can’t help thinking that the kingdom of Saudi Arabia could’ve found better uses for five billion dollars than sinking it into the upstart golf league LIV. Several news outlets have reported that the Saudi Public Investment Fund, which has been pumping about a hundred million dollars a month into LIV since the league’s launch, in 2022, will be pulling its funding at the end of the year. The league isn’t officially dead, but it doesn’t seem long for this world. What happens, then, to LIV’s players, who received absurdly lucrative contracts to defect from the P.G.A. Tour, and may be banned from returning? Was this all just a waste of time? What do I do now with all of my team merch for Cleeks Golf Club and the HyFlyers?In the end, LIV was less evil, as a geopolitical project, than many people claimed, and more soulless, as a sport, than I thought possible. Since LIV’s inception, the press has widely labelled it an exercise in “sportswashing”—image rehabilitation for Mohammed bin Salman, Saudi Arabia’s crown prince, after the murder and dismemberment of the Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi. In LIV’s first season, I

What the U.S.-Iran War Means for China

The past three Presidents have all made noises about “pivoting to Asia” and reorienting American foreign policy around competition with China. But, in a darkly literal metaphor for the failure of the United States to adequately address China’s growing influence, President Donald Trump postponed an April summit with the Chinese leader Xi Jinping because of the war he launched against Iran in February. Iran is China’s largest trading partner in the Middle East, but China’s diverse energy sources have shielded it from the heavy economic toll and energy crisis that the war has caused for other countries in East Asia. China has called for a ceasefire, and recently said that the Strait of Hormuz should be reopened; American officials have said that U.S. intelligence agencies may have found evidence that China is sending offensive weapons to Iran.I recently spoke by phone with Jonathan Czin, a fellow at the Brookings Institution’s John L. Thornton China Center, who also served in the Biden Administration as the director for China at the National Security Council. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed how the warmth of China-Iran relations has been overstated, why China sees the Trump Administration

Is Dynamic Pricing Ruining the World Cup?

In the mid-two-thousands, Barry Kahn was getting a doctorate in economics at the University of Texas at Austin. He also worked part time in the university’s athletics department, home to the Texas Longhorns, then one of the leading teams in college football. People were camping out to buy tickets for Longhorns games, and some tickets ended up on resale sites, like StubHub, where they changed hands at a big premium compared with their face values, Kahn told me when I called him up last week. Other professional sports teams and concert promoters were dealing with the same issue. “The question was should we try to stop this, or get a piece of it,” Kahn said.Scalping tickets wasn’t new, of course, but Kahn believed that its formalization online provided sports teams, and other entertainment businesses, with valuable information about demand that could enable them to make more money without alienating their most loyal fans. He founded a software company, Qcue, to help sports teams exploit this opening. Qcue’s first client was the San Francisco Giants, which began using dynamic pricing in 2009. Rather than setting fixed prices for tickets, Qcue’s software adjusted them over time based on demand and timing. If

The Extremes of Israeli Public Opinion

Since the U.S. and Israel attacked Iran, at the end of February, more than three thousand Iranians have died, and the global economy is now at risk of heading into a recession. But unlike in the United States, where the war has hurt President Trump’s political standing, the war remains popular in Israel. (Israel, following rocket fire from Hezbollah, has also invaded southern Lebanon; eighteen-hundred Lebanese have been killed.)To better understand the state of public opinion in Israel, I recently spoke by phone with Dahlia Scheindlin. A polling expert, Scheindlin is a policy fellow at the Century Foundation, a columnist for Haaretz, and the author of “The Crooked Timber of Democracy in Israel.” During our conversation, which was edited for length and clarity, we discussed why Jewish Israelis are opposed to a ceasefire despite thinking the war is not going well, the complicated political calculations facing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and why so much of the Israeli public thinks military force is the only way to solve international problems.How would you describe the way Israelis feel about the war with Iran?There is great disappointment in the ceasefire. I think of myself as somebody who’s pretty in touch with Israeli public

Israel’s War in Lebanon Has Not Stopped

Since the U.S. and Iran agreed to a temporary ceasefire, on Tuesday night, Israel has continued pummelling Lebanon with air strikes, killing more than three hundred people on Wednesday and wounding over a thousand more. After the U.S. and Israel attacked Iran, in February, Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed Shia paramilitary group in Lebanon, fired missiles at Israel; this was followed by a heavy Israeli response across the country, and a ground invasion of southern Lebanon. Israel has forced out over a million people from their homes, and killed more than a thousand, in a country of some five million, vowing to hold many of these areas as buffer zones. (The Israeli defense minister, Israel Katz, has compared the strategy to the one his country used in Gaza.) And the New York Times reported that Israel has recently made allowances for religious groups other than Shia Muslims to remain in the “evacuation zone.” Meanwhile, Israel and Lebanon are set to hold talks next week, but Iran and the United States have not yet reached an agreement on whether the ceasefire covers Israeli operations in Lebanon.I recently spoke by phone with Maha Yahya, the director of the Carnegie Endowment’s Middle East Center, who