The traditional western format has long featured the “Cowboys vs. Indians” archetype. These are often tales of good vs. evil, where a gun-slinging cowboy leaves a trail of dead, “savage” Indians in his wake as he traverses the wild American West. But what if the cowboys were also Indians? This is the question that Métis writer, Blair Palmer Yoxall, ponders in his debut novel, Treat Them as Buffalo, out this week. 

Through the eyes of a 12-year-old Métis boy named Niko, Yoxall tells the story of the Northwest Resistance of 1885, when the Métis and some First Nations peoples led an armed rebellion against the Canadian government. Set in the fictional town of Lac-aux-Trois-Pistoles, the events of the Northwest Resistance are the backdrop for young Niko’s world, where he and his cousin play buffalo hunters. But when his cousin and other young boys start to go missing, one at a time, a string of violence destroys Niko’s understanding of his world, his family, and himself. 

As the police show little interest in investigating the boys’ disappearance, a coalition of Métis women in Niko’s community takes on the task of finding them. They set up camp near a remote lake and hide out from the kidnappers. There, the women organize daily and nightly search parties, scouring the area for the abducted boys and protecting those still in their care. Riding horses and armed with guns, the women perform patrols and devise plans to save the captured boys and apprehend their kidnappers. In Treat Them as Buffalo, Yoxall creates a community where tenderness and mutual care abound, even amid tragedy and high tensions. 

Yoxall drew his inspiration from traditional western novels like Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian and Guy Vanderhaeghe’s The Last Crossing, but he resented how they portrayed Indigenous people—as scalped, killed, raped, or stupid. He wondered, “What’s the fucking point of this other than watching myself die?” as he put it in our interview. From that question came Treat Them as Buffalo, which Yoxall calls an “anti-western,” working against the stereotypes that have saturated the genre. 

Ahead of the publication of his novel, I spoke to Yoxall about Indigenous cowboys, building community, and writing the Métis experience. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

Talk to me about what led you to write this story. I know you’re Métis yourself, so were there family histories or personal stories that inspired you? 

Growing up, I loved westerns because the land was familiar and the people were familiar. I wanted to capture that feeling of being in awe with westerns, but also by being angry. I wanted to write something that showed Indigenous people being powerful and us winning, and to represent something that felt more authentic to my family and to where my family’s from. I just wanted to write something where we could be proud of ourselves. We could bring our own perspective to history. The Métis Nation didn’t win our conflict with Canada. We’re talked a lot about, but we’re not talked to a lot, and over the years, that means that we’ve lost a lot of our own histories, and I wanted to bring that back.  

Yeah, you weave a lot of Métis history and culture into the story. How are you able to take creative liberties as a fiction writer within the constraints of actual historical fact? 

The constraints of history and geography—that’s not limiting. I have all this structure to work with and around, and it’s like a fun house that I get to play in. I’m also working with a part of history that is mythologized in Canada, but not very well understood, even among Métis people. But this history did affect Indigenous people all across the northern plains. When you’re reading, it’s kind of hard to tell what’s real and what’s not and what came out of my mind and what came out of a newspaper. I really like that sense of “Holy shit, did all of this potentially happen?” So for me, working with history was so much fun because I knew the consequences. I knew what the outcomes were going to be, but I had no idea what the experience was in reaching those outcomes. I really wanted to recreate that sense of experiencing history as it’s happening. 

I found myself thinking about the characters when I wasn’t reading, especially the protagonist Niko, who is 12 years old and being thrust into adulthood. It’s heartwrenching to watch him grapple with this kind of colonial violence and also family secrets. Why take a 12-year-old’s point of view? 

I wanted readers to take the agency of children seriously and take their experiences seriously, and to trust that they are the experts in their own lives. Kids are gonna have a crazy world exposed to them—whether you want it to happen or not—especially during these colonial projects. I wanted us as readers to kind of struggle with that agency and to demonstrate that kids are people too. We, as Indigenous people, have had our families being broken up from Indian Residential schooling, and here in Canada, we did have sterilization campaigns for Indigenous women. So I really wanted to put the power of parenthood back in our own hands, but I also wanted childhood to be taken as a serious aspect of life. 

I’d love to talk more about the community that you’ve built. Does it feel reflective of the communities that your family comes from? 

One of the super important aspects of the cowboy identity in the book is from my family—all those Indigenous people are also cowboys. So one of the things I wanted to demonstrate is that Indigenous people have complex enough cultures that we can have subcultures too—an Indigenous community could be a cowboy community. We’re not stereotypes. We’re not caricatures. We’re full human beings. We’re going to disagree with each other. In books, I want to demonstrate how important feeling safe and at home in your community is for building a sense of community and obligation. I wanted the characters to be diverse enough to really demonstrate the diversity that we have in our own cultures and our own communities. We’re not a monolith. Community is a very complex and complicated—but intensely restorative—aspect of identity and growing up. In the book, this community can only save itself by taking care of itself, by putting itself first, and being unapologetic about it. Niko could only be saved by his community.

What impressions do you hope readers come away with after finishing? 

It sort of depends on who’s reading it. I just want us to be seen as human beings. One of the things that I struggle with as an Indigenous person is being reduced to a product of the land or an artifact of history. And I wanted to really demonstrate that we’re just as human as every other human being. I’m hoping that non-Indigenous readers have a more human understanding of how Indigenous people see each other and how we see our communities. Conversely, for other Indigenous readers, I just want us to feel seen and inspired. We can start claiming space without needing to re-traumatize ourselves. A story can be both joyful and difficult. 

At a fundraiser in early January, Nevada Republican Gov. Joe Lombardo outright admitted to donors he wasn’t the most inspiring candidate. “I am not enough of a motor—uh, a motivator—as a governor candidate to get them off the couch,” he said on a recording obtained by the Nevada Independent.

But the governor had a plan to fix it. “We have a couple ballot initiatives we’re going to initiate in order to get voters out,” he reassured the room. One measure would mandate photos IDs at the polls, a policy that targets racial minorities. The other initiative would tap into a newer but no less virulent strain of right-wing grievance: “The second thing we’re going to do is this thing called Men in Women’s Sports,” Lombardo said at another event last October, referring to a Nevada constitutional amendment he proposed earlier this year that would ban trans girls and women from playing on girls’ school sports teams.

“Yay!” a few listeners responded. “Yeah!”

“That’s going to get people out to vote,” the governor continued. “Because, just from the groans in the room, I think they’re going to support it.”

After years of well-funded attacks on transgender people’s rights and dignity by conservative activists and GOP politicians, it’s no news that a Republican official is trying to win votes for the upcoming midterm elections by championing a policy targeting trans teenagers. Voters still largely endorse equal treatment and nondiscrimination for people whose gender identity doesn’t match their birth sex, but they also tend to rank trans rights at the bottom of their priority lists. Meanwhile, public opinion has shifted rightward on a carefully selected set of trans-related wedge issues, from trans girls’ inclusion in girls’ school sports to specialized pediatric healthcare treatments.

Now, Republicans like Lombardo are banking on the attitudes their party has spent years cultivating, putting these pet issues directly to voters in the form of ballot initiatives. Six transgender-related measures have been approved for the ballot so far, in Colorado, Maine, Missouri, and Washington. Others are in the works in Nebraska and Arizona, in addition to Nevada.

And while Lombardo might be the only one to say the quiet part out loud, several of the measures look like they could have been designed to drive Republican results in competitive midterm races. “This is absolutely being used as ballot candy,” Quentin Savwoir, director of programs and strategy at the left-leaning Ballot Initiative Strategy Center (BISC), said at a recent press briefing.

Take, for instance, Missouri, where Republican state officials fought tooth and nail to stop a 2024 constitutional amendment to guarantee the right to an abortion prior to fetal viability, which is roughly 24 weeks. Despite their efforts, the measure made it to the ballot and won with a narrow 51.6 percent of the vote, overturning the state’s total abortion ban. In response, this year, state Republican lawmakers proposed their own constitutional amendment. It would make providing abortion illegal again in virtually all cases. And it would touch an entirely different issue as well: It would ban doctors from providing puberty blockers and hormone therapy to treat kids with gender dysphoria.

Trans youth health care is already illegal in Missouri under a law that expires in 2027. But lumping that issue together with abortion appears seems to be making this year’s proposed constitutional amendment more popular with voters. A February survey by St. Louis University and YouGov found that the initiative was polling 7 points ahead, with 12 percent of likely voters still undecided. Just 43 percent of respondents would outlaw abortion in early pregnancy. But two-thirds—including most of the undecideds—would prefer to ban gender transition treatments for minors. The inclusion of a gender-affirming care ban in the constitutional amendment “is going to be the key difference between what we saw, say, two years ago and now,” poll director Steven Rogers, and SLU political science professor, told St. Louis Public Radio.

Missouri isn’t the only state where voters are being asked to cement an already existing anti-trans law in their state constitution. A similar effort is underway in Nebraska, where last summer the governor signed a law banning trans girls from playing on girls’ school sports teams.

Never mind that trans students were barely present in Nebraska school sports to begin with, with fewer than 10 participating in either girls’ or boys’ sports between 2015 and 2025, as NBC News reported. Despite the tiny scale of the issue and the existing ban, a group calling itself Fairness for Girls started gathering signatures in March to add a ban on trans girls playing girls’ sports to the Nebraska constitution. Republican state Sen. Kathleen Kauth, the original sponsor of the sports ban bill (as well as a host of other anti-trans legislation), told Nebraska Public Media that the constitutional amendment was necessary so that future lawmakers couldn’t undo her handiwork. “One of the things we always worry about when we pass a law is that it can be un-passed,” she said.

Rainbow Parents of Nebraska, an LGBTQ advocacy group, called the proposed Fairness for Girls amendment “another distraction and an attempt to increase conservative voter turnout.”

Indeed, a look at Fairness for Girls’ campaign finance filings suggests there may be deeper political forces at play. The group, formed March 9, has a war chest of a whopping $1.6 million dollars, provided entirely by a dark money group called Restore the Good Life Inc., according to its March disclosure. While Restore the Good Life Inc. doesn’t have to disclose its funders, the Nebraska Examiner has examined potential links between the group and Sen. Pete Ricketts, the wealthy Republican former governor of the state who now serves as its junior US senator. Restore the Good Life Inc. was last active during the 2022 gubernatorial election to replace Ricketts, when it paid for an attack ad against an opponent of Ricketts’ preferred successor, using one of Ricketts’ talking points, the Examiner reported. Its treasurer is a Ricketts political appointee who has served as his surrogate at at least one political event. Ricketts, in 2022, denied personally contributing to the group. (Ricketts’ campaign did not respond to a request for comment).

Perhaps coincidentally, Ricketts is running for reelection to the Senate this year—and facing a strong challenge from Dan Osborn, a former labor leader running as an independent. As of February, the two candidates were polling neck and neck, a feat for Osborn in a state Trump won by more than 20 points last election cycle. Ricketts, who has repeatedly pushed for a national trans sports ban, is supporting the initiative. Osborn’s campaign did not respond to questions about his stance on the measure.

To recap, someone is spending $1.6 million to duplicate a Nebraska law that would have affected 10 total Nebraskans in 10 years into the state constitution. And it just so happens they’re putting the question on the ballot alongside a close Senate contest involving a fabulously wealthy incumbent who has vocally opposed inclusive policies for trans athletes.

Similar dynamics appear at be at work in Maine, another state with massive spending on a trans sports ballot initiative during a high-stakes Senate election. The race between incumbent Republican Sen. Susan Collins and likely Democratic challenger Graham Platner could determine which party controls the US Senate.

Last year, at a White House governors meeting, President Donald Trump said that the trans athlete issue would be the political downfall of Gov. Janet Mills, who was another leading Democratic candidate for Collins’ seat until she suspended her campaign in late April.

At the meeting, Trump told Mills he would withhold federal funding if Maine didn’t follow a trans sports ban he tried to impose via executive order.

“See you in court,” Mills told Trump from the other side of the room.

“I look forward to that, that should be a real easy one,” Trump shot back, before adding a thinly veiled threat: “And enjoy your life after, Governor, because I don’t think you’ll be in elected politics.”

As the Senate campaigns got underway, Republican megadonor Richard Uihlein—the billionaire owner of the business supply company Uline—started pouring money into a Maine ballot initiative that would not only require public schools to sort athletes onto sports teams according to the sex on their original birth certificates, it would also restrict access to school bathrooms and locker rooms by birth certificate. As of January, Uihlein had given $800,000 to the committee pushing the initiative and was its sole funder. Maine’s lawmakers declined to vote on the measure this spring, which means it will be sent to voters in November. Leyland Streiff, the principal officer of the committee behind the ballot initiative, Protect Girls’ Sports in Maine, said in a statement that the group would have preferred for the Democratic-majority legislature to enact their bill rather than sending it to voters. “Our initiative reflects the will of the people, not the will of one political party,” Streiff wrote, arguing that the measure was needed to prevent “males invading female private spaces.”

But opponents of the Maine measure have argued that the issue is being blown out of proportion in service of a larger agenda. A lawsuit filed by the Trump administration against the state education department last year identified just three trans girls playing girls’ high school sports in the state. “We really want Mainers to understand that this is not about sports, it’s about a national extremist attempt to take over Maine politics and drive the conversation in November,” Destie Hohman Sprague, executive director of the Maine Women’s Lobby, told the Beacon.

It’s already driving the conversation, though it remains to be seen whether it will make a dent in voters’ behavior in November. The candidates have weighed in: Collins personally signed the petition to put the measure on the ballot. Platner, on the other hand, called the controversy over trans athletes an “invented culture war scare” on a Slate podcast episode in March.

Then he put a finer point on it. Maine’s ballot initiative “is funded by an out-of-state billionaire to make sure that we have this discussion,” Platner said, “and we don’t talk about raising his taxes.”

“Who would you never invite back to the Met Gala?” 

That’s what Late Late Show host James Corden asked Anna Wintour, then-editor-in-chief of Vogue, in 2017, during a game called “Spill Your Guts or Fill Your Guts.”

“Donald Trump,” the fashion executive answered, to thunderous applause. And although neither Trump nor his immediate family have been present at fashion’s biggest night since before the start of his first term, Wintour seems to have no issue with MAGA-adjacent benefactors of his administration’s assault on culture—as evidenced by this year’s lead sponsors and honorary co-chairs: Jeff and Lauren Sánchez Bezos, who were front and center at Trump’s second inauguration.

In defense of the guest list which she oversees, Wintour, who stepped down as editor-in-chief of Vogue last June but remains Vogue’s global editorial director and head of the Met Gala, told CNN that she’s “grateful” for Sánchez Bezos’ “generosity.” (The amount contributed by Sánchez Bezos and her husband, Jeff, is currently unknown.) Wintour added that Sánchez Bezos is “a great lover of costume and obviously of fashion, so we’re thrilled she’s part of the night.”

Examining the broligarchs’ foray into fashion, in which they attend shows in Milan and Paris clad in couture and court the luxury fashion industry with charity, I can’t help but feel that no matter how many runway shows they attend or which designers they wear, they still come up short in their struggle to conquer cool.

Bezos and Sánchez attended the Met Costume Institute’s spring exhibit and annual fundraiser in 2024. And Big Tech firms like Amazon, TikTok, and Apple, with their deep pockets and powerful algorithms, have been welcome sponsors of the event since the early 2010s. But this year’s benefit has attracted increased scrutiny since Silicon Valley officially hitched its wagon to the Trump train, with anti-billionaire protestors papering the New York City subway with posters calling on passersby to “boycott the Bezos Met Gala” and criticizing Amazon for its allegedly poor working conditions. 

Amazon donated $1 million to Trump’s 2024 inauguration fund and subsequently spent a baffling $75 million on a vanity doc about Melania. And as owner of the Washington Post, Bezos blocked the paper from endorsing Kamala Harris ahead of the 2024 election.

While the Met Gala has long been dismissed as a gross display of wealth (tickets cost $100,000, more than the median down payment on a house in the US), the involvement of the third-richest man in the world, whitewashing his reputation through a fundraiser for one of the country’s most storied museums while contributing to Trump’s war on culture, sort of obscures the costumes with its glaring irony. 

Since taking office last January, Trump has canceled National Endowment for the Arts grants, imperiling hundreds of arts organizations across the country; threatened museums via executive order to comply with his anti-“woke” agenda; and taken over the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, renaming it after himself. 

Bezos isn’t just a passive observer in these attacks on arts and culture. Under his leadership, the Post laid off wide swaths of its staff as subscribers fled, shuttering its books section and dealing a severe blow to media coverage of the arts. 

As the Bezoses, Wintour, and a trio of famous women greet celebrity guests on the Met steps Monday evening, socialist mayor Zohran Mamdani and first lady Rama Duwaji reportedly have other plans. (It’s probably for the best, considering the debacle over Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s 2021 “Tax the Rich” dress and recent uproar over boots Duwaji borrowed for her husband’s inauguration earlier this year.)

Still, though, I know they would have come dressed to impress—and slayed, effortlessly.

For a little while, crypto mogul Justin Sun represented everything the digital currency industry could want from Donald Trump. But Blockchain Camelot is over, and the dueling lawsuits are here.

Sun, a Chinese-born crypto-billionaire known for his antics—he is the guy who paid $6.2 million for a banana duct-taped to a wall at Art Basel—was already facing a slew of civil fraud allegations leveled by the Biden-era SEC when he entered the Trumps’ orbit. Shortly after the 2024 election, Sun made a huge investment in digital tokens issue by World Liberty Financial, the newly launched crypto firm run by the Trump family and their allies.

Sun tweeted loudly about his, and the crypto industry’s, love for Donald Trump, and when the new administration came to power, his regulatory and legal troubles eased. The SEC agreed to put its lawsuit against him on hold; he recently settled the case for the relatively low sum of $10 million. Sun and Trump, it seemed, embodied a new political and economic order.

But it didn’t last.

Two weeks ago—after a months-long dispute—Sun filed a lawsuit against World Liberty Financial, accusing the company of “engaging in an illegal scheme to seize property” by preventing him from selling his tokens. On Monday, World Liberty Financial hit back, filing a defamation lawsuit that accuses Sun of trying to ruin the company with lies. Sun, who usually doesn’t hold back his opinions on anything, quickly responded, insisting that the suit was “nothing more than a meritless PR stunt.”

The details of what exactly each side is alleging are also quite representative of the crypto industry—complicated, arcane, and full of protestations of transparency and insistence that the other side is not what it seems. But here’s the gist:

• Sun owns 4 billion World Liberty tokens, including 1 billion that the company awarded to him in exchange for serving on a World Liberty advisory board. The tokens were awarded very early in the company’s existence, and company rules barred him from selling them quickly. The tokens are supposed to grant holders the right to vote on major decisions about World Liberty’s future.
• Sun said in his lawsuit that he should have become eligible sell some of his tokens last September. But without warning, according to Sun, World Liberty froze his accounts, blocked the sale of his tokens, and wouldn’t tell him why. In addition, Sun claims, World Liberty’s management never allowed Sun, or any other token holders, any substantial amount of say in company decision-making and instead have focused on enriching themselves.
• In its own lawsuit, filed Monday, World Liberty Financial said it knows Sun’s secrets. The company claims he engaged in transactions with World Liberty tokens when he shouldn’t have; improperly purchased tokens for other people; and secretly engaged in short-selling.

In short, World Liberty says Sun has been a bad investor who secretly seeks to undermine the company. And Sun says World Liberty has been a bad company that secretly seeks to undermine its investors.

One thing that is clear is that the price of World Liberty—or WLFI, for short—tokens has been plummeting for months. WLFI first hit the market last August, at $0.45. That turned out to be its peak price. Since then, it’s fallen more than 80 percent (though it did rise on Monday). It’s now worth about 7 cents per token.

The people involved are what makes this otherwise extremely complicated, crypto-bro fight more than just a blockchain nerd squabble. Sun may own 4 billion WLFI tokens, but Donald Trump and his family own about 22.5 billion. The Trumps have a controlling interest in the company. But one of other partners is Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, aka the brother of the United Arab Emirates’ monarch, who controls a trillion-dollar investment fund and runs the small Arab country’s intelligence apparatus. He paid $500 million for his stake. And a World Liberty Financial affiliate has signed deals with Pakistan’s government, under the watchful eye of that country’s army chief.

So this odd little crypto company and its sliding token price are suddenly in the middle of everything.

This is a story about how we—you and us here at Mother Jones—beat Jeff Bezos. Let me explain.

Remember the moment, a couple of months back, when Stephen Colbert was at a loss for words: “I don’t even know what to do with this crap,” he said on his show, before crumpling up a memo from his network bosses and depositing it in a dog poop bag. “I’m just so surprised that this giant global corporation would not stand up to these bullies!”

In the “crap” statement, CBS explained why it had essentially forbidden Colbert from airing his interview with Senate candidate James Talarico of Texas: The network said it had received “legal guidance” that the interview might violate the Federal Communications Commission’s equal time rule—a rule that late-night talk shows have been exempt from for almost 20 years. Surely it was ­coincidental timing that CBS chose to obey in advance just as its parent company, Paramount, sought the Trump administration’s blessing for its proposed merger with Warner Brothers Discovery. Just like last year, when then–­Paramount owner Shari Redstone reportedly let it be known that 60 Minutes shouldn’t offend President Donald Trump until she consummated the network’s sale, which also needed approval. Or when the current owners of Paramount—David Ellison and his billionaire father, Larry—appointed Bari Weiss, who made her name attacking major media as too far left, CBS’s editor-in-chief.

It’s not just CBS that has been plagued by coincidences in the Trump era. Jeff Bezos’ Washington Post spiked the paper’s endorsement of Kamala Harris. Soon after sitting onstage at Trump’s second inauguration, Bezos announced that the Post’s opinion pages would henceforth publish only pieces supporting “personal liberties and free markets.” A year later, the Post laid off 40 percent of its staff.

None of this was coincidental. It was a result of the longest-running problem plaguing American journalism: that we’ve entrusted this vital public service (mostly) to for-profit companies whose allegiances shift with the political winds and the bottom line. CBS began squeezing its news division to grab ratings and profits in the mid-1980s (add Broadcast News to your Netflix queue) and suppressed its landmark interview with tobacco industry whistleblower Jeffrey Wigand in 1995 (watch The Insider next). The New York Times missed the boat on the AIDS epidemic and, along with other big newsrooms, fell for the racist “superpredator” narrative in the ’90s. In the runup to the war in Iraq, the Post buried its own—excellent—reporting on the Bush administration’s lies about weapons of mass destruction while the Times let reporter Judith Miller amplify the WMD lies.

Throughout, America’s media companies delivered a lot of fantastic reporting. But they also had to deliver quarterly returns for multinational parent companies (GE, Westinghouse, Verizon, Comcast) and hedge funds (Alden Global Capital) to whom news was a sideshow at best, an inconvenience at worst. This is why, for decades now, we’ve heard that giant sucking sound of newsrooms being emptied out across the country. Newspaper employment stood at 425,000 in 2000. By 2026, it was down to 79,000—a drop of more than 80 percent. Coal mining jobs, by comparison, have declined 50 percent.

Which brings us to Mother Jones. This magazine was founded 50 years ago as an independent nonprofit precisely because, even in 1976, it was clear that journalism was never going to be the driving passion of a plutocrat.

Fifty nail-biting, scratching and clawing, experimenting and innovating years later, we are still here and bigger—if not in budget, then in impact—than many for-profit newsrooms. Our newsroom is still a lot smaller than the Post’s, but our audience on YouTube—where many, especially younger people, get their news—is growing faster; about 50 percent more people watch each of our videos, on average, than the Post’s. Their print circulation is down almost 90 percent from 20 years ago; ours is up more than 10 percent. (And along the way, we’ve published some killer exposés on Amazon.)

Would MoJo have made good use of the cash—at least $700 million—that Bezos sank into the Post? Hell, it would have covered our entire budget for more than 25 years. Am I crazy proud of our team for doing better than a billionaire despite all the headwinds? Hell yes.

And who else am I crazy proud of and grateful for? You. You are the only reason we are still here after 50 years, the reason we have been able to grow as corporate media crumbled around us. You are why we can stand strong as others bend the knee. And together, we even beat Bezos and all his billions. So thank you, and bravo.

The Supreme Court on Monday temporarily reinstated a Food and Drug Administration rule allowing the abortion pill mifepristone to be prescribed via telemedicine and dispensed through the mail. 

The order, by Justice Samuel Alito Jr., paused a ruling by the federal Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals that sought to block nationwide access to mifepristone by cutting off online providers. The Fifth Circuit ruling, issued Friday, caused providers, advocates, and patients to scramble all weekend to put in place contingency plans to keep abortion medication available. Almost two-thirds of abortions in the US now occur with pills, and nearly 30 percent take place via telemedicine.

Louisiana filed suit against the FDA last fall, claiming that a 2023 rule change by the Biden administration allowing mifepristone to be prescribed by telemedicine was “arbitrary,” “capricious,” and politically motivated. The drug, part of a two-pill regimen that also includes the medication misoprostol, was approved by the FDA in 2000.

Louisiana had asked lower courts to issue a nationwide injunction on the telemedicine rule and reinstate a requirement that abortion pills be prescribed and dispensed in person. The trial court judge declined to do so, but the Fifth Circuit, packed with anti-abortion ideologues, complied. The telemedicine rule “injures Louisiana by undermining its laws protecting unborn human life and also by causing it to spend Medicaid funds on emergency care for women harmed by mifepristone,” the Fifth Circuit said in a 3-0 ruling. “Both injuries are irreparable.”

In Monday’s order, Alito granted temporary relief to mifepristone’s manufacturer, Danco Laboratories, and a generic manufacturer, GenBioPro, which had filed emergency appeals of the Fifth Circuit ruling over the weekend. Alito paused the case until at least May 11.

Alito, of course, is the ultraconservative author of the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision that overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022 and ended the national right to abortion. Monday’s order comes almost exactly four years after the Dobbs opinion was leaked, throwing abortion access into a state of turmoil from which it has never recovered.

As I have written, the Louisiana lawsuit “reflects widespread anger within the anti-abortion movement over the continued availability of abortion pills in the post-Roe era, even in states with near-total bans.” Louisiana, for example, prohibits abortions in almost all cases, classifies the abortion medications mifepristone and misoprostol as “controlled substances,” and equates abortion providers with “drug dealers.” Yet every month, nearly 1,000 patients there are getting abortion pills from telemedicine providers.

The case is similar in key ways to 2024’s FDA v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, also from the Fifth Circuit, in which a coalition of anti-abortion medical groups and doctors sought to overturn the FDA’s initial approval of mifepristone as well as the more recent rules’ changes. In that case, the Supreme Court ruled 9-0 that the doctors lacked standing to bring the lawsuit because they could not show that the FDA regulations caused them any direct harm. But the ruling left open the possibility that states might have standing to sue the FDA on their own. Last fall, Louisiana brought its own case in federal court, as did Texas and Florida in a separate lawsuit. A third suit, involving three states, is pending in Missouri.

As I noted last week, the Louisiana case puts abortion on the SCOTUS docket at a critical political moment.

[T]he Fifth Circuit ruling suddenly makes abortion a huge issue in the midterm elections—something Donald Trump has been hoping to avoid, says abortion historian Mary Ziegler, a law professor at the University of California, Davis. Telemedicine “has been why people in abortion-ban states have been able to get access to abortion,” she says. “It’s been the centerpiece of absolutely everything.” Voters who have been showing signs of complacency over the abortion issue, thanks in large part to telemedicine, won’t be complacent any longer, she says. “It’s going to be a major political pressure point.”

Last Tuesday, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT.) released a report showing just how intensely the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights has failed students. The report found that there were zero resolution agreements in 2025 “involving sexual harassment, sexual violence, seclusion or restraint, racial harassment, or discriminatory school discipline.”

Overall, just one percent of complaints submitted to the Ed Department’s OCR received a resolution agreement. Sanders noted that OCR has been “decimated”—nearly half of OCR employees received a reduction-in-force notice in March 2025. The report highlighted the fact that 2025 saw the fewest resolution agreements in 12 years.

“When a child with a disability is denied the education they are entitled to, when a student faces racial or sexual harassment — they turn to the Office for Civil Rights for help,” Sanders said in a press release. “Yet the Trump administration has decimated this office. As a result, tens of thousands of students facing discrimination have been left with no recourse. That is beyond unacceptable.”

Department of Education—which President Donald Trump keeps trying to dismantle–is led by Secretary Linda McMahon, who claimed she believes that “discrimination is a bad thing.” But, no one would know that based on how the office is run.

Individuals and their families can still sue schools for discrimination in court, but this can be an expensive processs, unlike how OCR investigations are supposed to work. Essentially, if anyone feels that they are discriminated against in schools, they can file a complaint and OCR is supposed to seriously consider an investigation.

A Government Accountability Office report from January 2026 also found that 90 percent of cases received between March and September 2025 were dismissed outright. The report recommends encouraging staffing in the Education Department’s OCR.

While it is harmful that there have been few resolution agreements across types of discriminatory categories, the lack of resolutions when it comes to disability issues is telling. This is because, as ProPublica noted in February 2025, OCR staff were specifically instructed to continue with disability focused cases and to ignore ones pertaining to gender and race. However, ignoring race in disability discrimination cases will lead to OCR dropping the ball, for instance, in situations where a Black disabled male student may be disproportionately secluded in comparison to a white disabled male student.

Still, rates for disability-focused cases remain low. In 2025, zero resolution agreements were reached for cases involving seclusion and restraint, with 172 pending cases on this topic. For disability harassment, there was one resolution agreement and 595 pending cases. For cases involving access to appropriate education, there 1,887 pending cases and just 40 agreements.

“This report shows federal civil rights enforcement in education, an essential tool provided by Congress to help fight disability discrimination, is being denied to students with disabilities,” said Katy Neas, CEO of The Arc, in a press release. “OCR is where families turn when a student is denied accommodations or accessibility, pushed out of learning time, or harassed or disciplined unfairly because of disability. 

This 18-second clip of Bernie Sanders went viral over the weekend. It’s not because, at 84-years-old, he demonstrates near-perfect form. Or because he drains four consecutive shots. Or even because he ends the whole thing with a characteristically grumpy “that’s it!” before stopping. It’s because on that Minnesota basketball court, in town to stump for Lt. Governor Peggy Flanagan (D-Minn.) for the U.S. Senate on his Fighting Oligarchy tour, Sanders reminded America generally, and the Democratic party specifically, that inspiring a new generation of elected officials is all fine and well, but he coulda been our guy, but we blew it. And we know it.

It’s not the first time basketball has played a nostalgic role in reminding America of times past. Former President Barack Obama was campaigning for Joe Biden during the 2020 election when he oh-so-casually drained a three-pointer. Spring in his step, all swagger, he lowered his mask and said, “That’s what I do!”

When distinguished guests and A-listers gather tonight for this year’s Met Gala, two new faces will greet them on the receiving line: Lauren Sánchez Bezos and Jeff Bezos, both of whom will be at Monday’s event as honorary chairs, in addition to their roles as lead sponsors.

The appointment, which prompted a small outcry and calls for a boycott, is something of an apotheosis for the Bezoses, who have spent recent years effectively inviting themselves into some of the most exclusive corners in high fashion. There they were in January, sitting next to Anna Wintour herself, at the Paris couture shows. During the same visit, Sánchez Bezos was seen palling around with Zendaya’s stylist, the highly influential “image architect,” Law Roach. (The following day, Sánchez Bezos was spotted tripping in sky-high heels on her way to dinner with her husband.) And in June 2025, Sánchez Bezos became one of the exceedingly few brides to have their nuptials celebrated with a Vogue cover.

The enthusiasm with which the Bezoses have stormed the gates of the fashion world is the latest attempt among today’s oligarchs to seize cultural cachet. These titans of industry, apparently no longer satisfied with enormous wealth and power, now seem hellbent on sealing their reputation as fashion insiders.

But is any of this landing with the public? Will serving as honorary chair at the top of fashion’s biggest staircase cement the Bezoses’ status in high fashion? I talked to Anne Higonnet, an art historian at Columbia University, for more.

Lauren Sánchez’s eagerness to join fashion royalty is well established at this point. Now, as honorary chairs for the Met Gala this year, a sort of “storming the gates” image is invoked.

I’m going to use that image to say that what we have been witnessing in our culture is that the gates have been moved to a new place, and the most visible peak of the phenomenon is the Met Costume Institute. We are witnessing a sea change in cultural values, with fashion rising in the hierarchy of the arts with lightning speed, and the power of the super-rich to control culture. And this is the moment where the change really becomes visible. You’re absolutely correct that Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez have realized that this is the gate.

Can you point to any historical precedents for this? The rich and powerful attempting to gain further influence through fashion?

Yes and no. In the larger scheme of clothing history, every society has expressed its hierarchy through clothing. Societies used to be run by a very tiny group at the top, or even just one or two people. Basically, a king, who sometimes has a queen, would get to wear something different from what anyone else was allowed to wear. The birth of modernity overturned many of those rules, including what art forms were considered to have more prestige. Of course, there were other prestigious art forms, but before modern times, clothing was much more powerful as a marker of hierarchy than we tend to remember.

What’s happening now is that the hierarchies of the art world are tumbling around, and fashion is really rising in the cultural scheme. As it does that, the super-rich, who are smart, are increasingly involved in fashion. One very, very visible, important way to do that is to be the chair of the Met Gala. So, surprise, surprise: Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez are the chairs of the Met Gala.

Relatedly, Big Tech is set to have a major presence at this year’s event. These are people who have enormous wealth and seemingly everything. Why are they so eager to conquer fashion?

Because fashion has become so much more visible and important, largely thanks to social media, where you see much more [content] about fashion than painting, sculpture, or architecture, which used to be the three dominant arts. This power is quantifiable, too. Just look at the number of followers fashion influencers have versus how many followers high art museums have. Consider that the floor plan of the Met has always been a map of cultural power. And now, with this gala, the Met recently decided to allocate its prime real estate on the ground floor to the Costume Institute because it is so commercially important. It will be the first thing people see when they enter, instead of the gift shop.

At the same time, the announcement of the Bezoses’ honorary chair appointments was tucked into the end of a two-page memo. Is there an implication here that organizers, namely Anna Wintour, understand that this is a controversial appointment?

Anna Wintour rides controversy like the wind. She’s one of the great culture power brokers of our time, and perhaps the single most visible power broker today. She’s way too smart not to realize that something is changing. The way I would put it is that she understands the magnitude of the move she’s made with [the Bezos appointment]. It’s as big a change as people think it is, whether you approve of it or you don’t approve of it. She’s doing it, and she’s being bold. She’s riding the wind of cultural change.

Evidence number one is the Sánchez Bezos appointment to the gala. Evidence number two is the new location of the Costume Institute inside the Met. Evidence number three is the theme of the show and of the gala, “fashion is art.” Because while it is not historically specific or even thematically specific, it’s a power manifesto. It’s not begging for fashion to be recognized as art. It’s just announcing, painting, sculpture, and architecture—move over.

Let’s talk about Sánchez’s fashion more broadly. How would you describe her style?  What is the story that Sánchez is trying to tell us through her clothing?

Her clothes are self-objectifying showcases of Bezos’ wealth. There’s this brilliant economic historian, Thorstein Veblen, who wrote these essays about what he called “conspicuous consumption.” Even though it’s from the 1890s, my students just love this concept and totally understand why it’s as relevant now as it ever was. He said clothing can manifest conspicuous consumption to show everyone that you have money to waste. Veblen also made a brilliant gender point by noting that we live in a world that is controlled by men, and the ultimate way in which [men] show their wealth is how their wives or mistresses dress. It was the ultimate show of power, because they got to do all the conspicuous consumption with none of the bother of having to wear the clothes that were not comfortable or practical in any way.

Some have argued that despite the expensive clothes, Sánchez often comes away looking cheap or tacky. Why?

That’s because her clothes have to be screamingly expensive. Style has to do with individuality and an affirmation of one’s aesthetic place in the world; it’s very much an affirmation of self. And the greatest style in the world is the most confident, understated style, which we call elegant or chic. Sánchez Bezos is neither. She’ll never be elegant, ever.

The mayor, who, at least to my mind, is on the opposite end of this, is not coming. What is he signaling here?

Well, first of all, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez got in big trouble for going in 2021. So he hasn’t forgotten that. I mean, if you’re a socialist, and you go to an event where the seats cost $75,000, you’ve got a lot of explaining to do.

But also, look at his wife, who is actually quite elegant because she conveys that she is a person in her own right and that her worth in the world does not depend on money.

Finally, things are bad out there. Economic inequality, war, constant dystopia. Parties like this can feel a bit strange. Historically, though, is there something to say about fashion’s role in class struggle?

Clothing’s role in expressing social hierarchy is the rule, not the exception, of history. Now, in our modern post-French Revolution, universal rights of man, way of thinking, we don’t think that clothing should necessarily express social hierarchy. But at the same time, as with all forms of art, some people do it better than others. I’ve seen homeless people with more style than some supermodels. Style is why I’ll never stop loving clothing as an art form. Clothing and style are also one of the most democratic of all the arts. We all do it. We all can do it.

This story was originally published by Inside Climate News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Every spring, Florida’s Miccosukee Tribe observes its corn dance season on lands the tribe holds as sacred within the fragile Everglades. But this year’s festivities are different because of the migrant detention site that now looms among the tribal lands, Alligator Alcatraz.

One hindrance is that the light emanating for miles from the facility interferes with an important aspect of the Miccosukee’s religion, the orientation of the stars, said Curtis Osceola, the tribe’s chief operating officer. If not for the light pollution, the stars would gleam bright here in the night sky above the vast sawgrass prairies and cypress marshes of the remote river of grass.

“It’s hard to explain, and not everyone will understand our relationship with the land,” he said. “It’s as if someone went to a holy place, whether it was like church land, and said, ‘We’re going to raze this church land and put up a prison and put up a detention center.’ People would be up in arms. This is our place of worship. This is a sacred place. This doesn’t seem fair.”

The tribe, along with environmental groups, says they will continue their litigation over Alligator Alcatraz, where thousands of undocumented migrants have been detained since the facility opened last summer as part of the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown. The 11th US Circuit Court of Appeals last week invalidated a preliminary injunction issued by District Judge Kathleen Williams, who had ordered in August a winding down of the facility. The case now will go back to Williams, who will decide the next steps.

The ruling means the detention site may keep operating while the environmental groups and the tribe’s litigation proceed. In this case, the Miccosukee and their fellow plaintiffs accused the federal and state governments of unlawfully rushing the facility to completion without a required environmental review under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). The government agencies have contended that the site is a state and not a federal one, and that the federal review is not necessary. The agencies also said the facility’s impact on the environment is minimal. The Everglades, which span central and south Florida, are responsible for the drinking water of millions of people in the state. A $27 billion restoration effort is among the most ambitious of its kind in human history.

The appeals court, in siding with the government agencies, said the plaintiffs failed to prove the federal government controlled the site. Judges William Pryor and Andrew Brasher also said Williams’ preliminary injunction violated, in part, a statutory prohibition on enjoining immigration enforcement. The judges reasoned that for the site’s Florida operators to follow federal immigration standards does not transform the facility into a federal one. They compared the situation with that of an office building owner who adheres to the Americans with Disabilities Act. Compliance with the federal law does not make the building federal, they said.

But Judge Nancy Abudu dissented. She characterized the federal and state roles in Alligator Alcatraz as one where the federal government enlisted the state not as an equal partner but as a “deputy of the federal government operating at its request.” She said her colleagues’ analogy involving the office building owner and the Americans with Disabilities Act was weak.

“Here, the detention facility’s only goal is to house thousands of people under DHS and ICE’s control, in a secluded area, away from the public, without any accountability,” Abudu wrote. “If not for its partnership with DHS and ICE, Florida’s housing of these individuals (and in some cases families) would be more akin to kidnapping and, at its most extreme, perhaps human trafficking. The state cannot detain a non-citizen without the proper authority to do so.”

The court’s ruling was disappointing, but the environmental groups and tribe remain optimistic they eventually will prevail, said Elise Bennett, Florida and Caribbean director and senior attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity, one of the plaintiffs in the case.

“We were prepared for any potential outcome, but that doesn’t make it sting any less because we know that there is irreparable harm ongoing in the Everglades, from water pollution to impacts to the Florida panther and bonneted bat,” she said. “We were hopeful we would put an end to that harm in the early stages in the case. Now we’re reinvigorated to get back in there and win.”

Friends of the Everglades, the third plaintiff in the case, said public records obtained through a separate lawsuit filed by the advocacy group show the Federal Emergency Management Agency promised hundreds of millions of dollars to Florida to build and operate the facility. Friends of the Everglades and the Center for Biological Diversity filed the lawsuit last June in the U.S. District Court in the Southern District of Florida, with the Miccosukee Tribe joining later on. The Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, acting director of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, executive director of the Florida Division of Emergency Management, and Miami-Dade County, which owns the property, are named as defendants in the case. The government agencies did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the appeals court ruling.

During the First and Second Seminole Wars, in the first half of the 19th century, the Miccosukee were pushed deep within the watery wilderness of the Everglades and found sanctuary on the tree islands scattered here. For them, the land is sacred because it saved their tribe from annihilation. Osceola said the detention site’s close proximity to tribal lands and the Big Cypress National Preserve is a concern. Within a three-mile radius of Alligator Alcatraz are 10 Miccosukee villages, including one a mere 1,000 feet from the facility. A school is 10 miles away.

“We survived in the Big Cypress. It cared for us. The Everglades likewise cared for us and helped us survive. The plants and animals of those lands sustained our existence, and we were able to make it through that wartime period,” he said. “We have a very strong religious connection with the land. And so activities like this are going to disrupt that relationship, that sort of strong relationship we have with the sacred land.”