Conservative media host Megyn Kelly offered a carefully hedged reaction to newly released emails from the case files of Jeffrey Epstein. Kelly acknowledged that the documents “sound bad” for President Donald Trump while simultaneously assuring her audience that Democrats’ attempts to weaponize them are “not going to work.” “They don’t sound good,” Kelly said on Thursday. “Why didn’t he just release these?

The Justice Department has joined a lawsuit to stop new election maps from going into effect in California, setting up a fight that could determine control of the House of Representatives in 2026. Californians voted overwhelmingly in support of Proposition 50 last week, the state constitutional amendment for the new boundaries. The lawsuit, filed by the California Republican Party, asserts the new maps are based on racial gerrymandering, favoring Hispanic voters.

Mere months after he was floated for the position of U.S. Attorney General by President Donald Trump, former congressman Matt Gaetz is a trivia question, his political career effectively dead. That didn’t stop the New York Times from piling on, revealing heartbreaking details about the underage girl whose allegations upended Gaetz’s career. In a report published on Thursday, the Times shared quotes from the lawyer of the unidentified girl who claimed she had sex with Gaetz at a Florida house party and was paid $400 for the night.

House Republicans are coming out in favor of voting for a bipartisan measure to release the Justice Department‘s files on Jeffrey Epstein. The resolution has been gaining traction since its proposal by representatives Thomas Massie, R-Ky., and Ro Khanna, D-Calif., last summer. House Democrats’ release of Epstein emails earlier this week has forced some tough decisions for MAGA representatives.

The Trump administration said this week that several key pieces of U.S. economic data for October, including inflation and employment figures, will not be released. The White House cited the prolonged government shutdown, saying it left statistical agencies unable to gather or verify the information. Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters Wednesday that the Bureau of Labor Statistics could not complete its usual surveys during the 40-plus days the government was shuttered.

In the fourth season finale of “Yellowstone,” Kevin Costner‘s John Dutton III announces his candidacy for governor of Montana by proposing a simple platform. “I am the opposite of progress,” he tells the state’s prospective voters. “I’m the wall that it bashes against, and I will not be the one that breaks.” The sixth-generation rancher makes good on that promise in his victory speech, his win being a foregone conclusion from the moment he threw his wide-brimmed hat in the political ring.

In 1890, Bram Stoker began research on what would become his most famous book, “Dracula.” During this research, which spanned years, the Irish author kept extensive journals in which he scribbled down his findings from hours spent poring over ancient texts pulled from the Subscription Library in Whitby, England, and from interviews conducted with members of Whitby Harbor’s Royal Coast Guard.

New emails show that Jeffrey Epstein tried to contact Russia’s top diplomat with knowledge about President Donald Trump prior to a meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in 2018. Among the hundreds of emails released yesterday by Congressional investigators were emails in which Epstein contacted former Prime Minister of Norway, Thorbjorn Jagland, who was Secretary General of the Council of Europe in 2018.

Eagerly anticipated and decades in the making, the new adaptation of Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” from lifelong monster superfan Guillermo del Toro easily soared to the top of Netflix last Friday, after an abbreviated theatrical release. Racking up more than 29 million views by the end of the weekend, it was the streaming service’s top English-language movie in 72 countries, and the numbers suggest serious rewatch energy.

In case anyone wonders if there’s any point in taking a stand only to be forced to capitulate down the road, I would invite you to consider an episode from last summer.  When Republican members of the Texas legislature passed a bill to redraw the state’s congressional map — and give the GOP five additional seats in the House of Representatives — 

Even after eight moderate Senate Democrats cut a deal with Republicans, absent subsidies for the Affordable Care Act, to end the shutdown on Sunday evening, the party’s sweeping victory in the Nov. 4 elections has provided a jolt of energy they hope will carry them through to the 2026 midterms.  But President Donald Trump and his MAGA Republicans are far from surrendering.

The beneficiaries of President Donald Trump’s mercy in his second term have mostly been people with access to the president or his inner circle. Those who have followed the rules set out by the Department of Justice, meanwhile, are still waiting. Trump has granted clemency to allies, donors and culture-war figures — as well as felons who, like him, were convicted of financial wrongdoing.

House Speaker Mike Johnson revealed that representatives in Congress’s lower chamber would vote on whether to release the Department of Justice‘s Jeffrey Epstein case files next week. Johnson had kept the House of Representatives from convening during the government shutdown, in a ploy that many observers believed was a way to avoid the question of the Epstein files. When the House gathered to consider an agreement to reopen the government put forth by the Senate, representatives also forced the issue of a vote on releasing the files.

House Republicans are going after GOP senators who stand to collect millions of dollars courtesy of a veiled provision within a bill seeking to end the government shutdown. The provision would give members of the Senate the ability to sue the government for obtaining their phone records without notification by the Justice Department. In 2023, the department obtained…

Donald Trump tried to wave away recently released emails from Jeffrey Epstein, saying that House Democrats were perpetrating a “hoax” to “deflect on how badly they’ve done.” “The Democrats are trying to bring up the Jeffrey Epstein Hoax again,” he wrote on Truth Social. “Only a very bad, or stupid, Republican would fall into that trap… There should be no deflections to Epstein or anything else.”

At the end of Election Day, incumbent Seattle Mayor Bruce Harrell appeared to have a comfortable path to reelection. Harrell lead challenger Katie Wilson by more than 10,000 votes in the early tally. The race tightened dramatically as late-arriving and mail-in ballots were counted over the following days. Wilson, a longtime progressive activist running for office for the first time, now…

Democrats on the House Oversight Committee released emails Wednesday in which convicted sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein said President Donald Trump spent significant time at Epstein’s house with one of his victims. The emails, taken from thousands of pages reviewed by the committee and independently reviewed by CNN and NYT, appear to suggest Trump knew about Epstein’s actions. In one email to accomplice…

In placing his spin on the “Predator” universe, director Dan Trachtenberg has ushered in several crucial firsts. His 2022 debut, “Prey,” is the first major movie to feature a Native American woman, Amber Midthunder, as the lead in a film released with a Native American language overdub. Trachtenberg’s “secret” follow-up that landed earlier this year, the animated “Predator: Killer of Killers,” is the first to provide a glimpse of the lethal alien race’s home world, Yautja Prime.

President Donald Trump’s defense of the H-1B visa program during a Fox News interview with Laura Ingraham this week set off one of the sharpest MAGA backlashes of his presidency. Pressed by Ingraham on whether he would continue allowing large numbers of foreign skilled workers into the country, Trump rejected her argument that the U.S. should “raise wages for American workers” instead of flooding “the country with tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands” of foreign workers.

President Donald Trump has engaged in many televised rants since he entered politics. In fact, most of his appearances could be classified as such. But one of the most stunning he’s ever given came in his Nov. 2 “60 Minutes” interview with Norah O’Donnell. Trump spoke in his usual stream of consciousness style, but there was one extended riff that was substantially cut in the…

Ever since Donald Trump and Republicans routed Democrats in the 2024 election, the party has been listless, confused, uncoordinated — politically moribund. When I think about today’s Democrats, I see a person performing an autopsy on themselves, looking for signs of life, like they are in a David Cronenberg body horror film or George Romero’s “Day of the Dead…

In the wake of a measles outbreak in Canada that has infected thousands of people over the past year, an international health agency revoked the country’s measles-free status on Nov. 10, 2025. The Pan American Health Organization, which serves as the World Health Organization’s regional office for the Americas, made this announcement after the agency’s measles elimination commission met in Mexico City to review the latest public health data.

President Donald Trump marked Veterans Day with a high-profile ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery, laying a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier alongside Vice President J. D. Vance and other officials. In his speech, Trump declared that Veterans Day would also be recognized as “Victory Day,” honoring U.S. triumphs in World War I and World War II. An idea he floated earlier when Memorial Day came around, similar to Harry Truman’s…

The Heritage Foundation is in the midst of a public and internal reckoning, but it has nothing to do with their association with Project 2025. Multiple members of its National Task Force to Combat Antisemitism have resigned in protest after president Kevin Roberts defended Tucker Carlson following Carlson’s interview with white nationalist Nick Fuentes. The dispute highlights tensions between Heritage’s historical policy focus and its current embrace of partisan spectacle.

Almost at the beginning of Steven Sebring’s documentary “Patti Smith: Dream of Life,” a film and art installation and photography book that have been 12 years in the making, we hear a narration from the eponymous rock goddess-poet, declaiming a short version of her life story in her husky, incantatory contralto. As Sebring shows us black-and-white images of a train journey, perhaps suggestive of the journey Smith once took from rural southern New Jersey, where she grew up, to New York, where she would make her name — and perhaps suggestive of the journey from birth to death — Smith breaks it down.