Instagram Story Viewer

Neil Gorsuch might not be the flashiest justice on the Supreme Court but he did somehow become the court’s most unpredictable—and most important—sitting justice.

Hosted by Susan Matthews, the new season of Slow Burn tells the story of Trump's first transformative appointment to the high court. Gorsuch is a mild-mannered, self-styled Westerner with good hair, and maybe the one some Americans would struggle to identify in a photo of the current Court.

But he's the wild card on the most powerful Supreme Court in modern history, the swing vote in certain, critical cases, and a central pillar of the conservative supermajority reshaping American life. To understand this Court and where it's headed, you have to understand Gorsuch.

“I started covering the Court in 2016, and Neil Gorsuch was the first big legal story I worked on,” Matthews said. “Almost a decade later, I'm convinced his appointment is when things really started to go off the rails. This season is my case for why everyone should be paying attention to him, even if you don't have a law degree.”

You don't want to miss this season. Follow Slow Burn on your favorite app now or via the link in our bio.

Slow Burn: Becoming Justice Gorsuch. Out May 13th.

🚨New game just dropped: SoundBites, Slate's new weekly puzzle.⁠
⁠
Every clue you solve has a sound hiding inside it. Collect them all, say them together, and they spell a mystery word. It's a little bit crossword, a little bit phonics, and entirely dependent on the fact that English pronunciation makes no sense. Play it by ear. New puzzle every Friday. 🔗in bio to play.

🚨New game just dropped: SoundBites, Slate's new weekly puzzle.⁠
⁠
Every clue you solve has a sound hiding inside it. Collect them all, say them together, and they spell a mystery word. It's a little bit crossword, a little bit phonics, and entirely dependent on the fact that English pronunciation makes no sense. Play it by ear. New puzzle every Friday. 🔗in bio to play.

🚨New game just dropped: SoundBites, Slate's new weekly puzzle.⁠
⁠
Every clue you solve has a sound hiding inside it. Collect them all, say them together, and they spell a mystery word. It's a little bit crossword, a little bit phonics, and entirely dependent on the fact that English pronunciation makes no sense. Play it by ear. New puzzle every Friday. 🔗in bio to play.

🚨New game just dropped: SoundBites, Slate's new weekly puzzle.⁠
⁠
Every clue you solve has a sound hiding inside it. Collect them all, say them together, and they spell a mystery word. It's a little bit crossword, a little bit phonics, and entirely dependent on the fact that English pronunciation makes no sense. Play it by ear. New puzzle every Friday. 🔗in bio to play.

🚨New game just dropped: SoundBites, Slate's new weekly puzzle.⁠
⁠
Every clue you solve has a sound hiding inside it. Collect them all, say them together, and they spell a mystery word. It's a little bit crossword, a little bit phonics, and entirely dependent on the fact that English pronunciation makes no sense. Play it by ear. New puzzle every Friday. 🔗in bio to play.

There’s a pernicious form of viral video that’s reshaping our collective reality, and it’s not even related to artificial intelligence. These videos are very real—albeit subtly engineered to generate entire trends.⁠
⁠
Over the past year, the cultural saturation of unorthodox figures like “looksmaxxer” Clavicular, alt-rocker Cameron Winter, stunt comedian Druski, and white nationalist Nick Fuentes has brought wider attention to the practice employed by their paid teams (and, to a lesser but still potent extent, their volunteer stans) to successfully maximize their reach: clipping, which refers to the act itself and the name of a pioneering company in the space.⁠
⁠
The practice is straightforward: Take a long-form video, like a Twitch stream or podcast video, and cut it into a (potentially) viral clip to be shared on social media. Multiply the number of people who take these clips, and multiply the number of accounts these “clippers” have control over, and you can land a high impact with few resources—far-reaching engagement and impressions for brands and creators without relying upon traditional ad agencies. ⁠
⁠
Companies that hire clippers to flood the feeds—on behalf of clients who could be individual influencers or big-name orgs such as, allegedly, Kalshi and the NFL—will often have their own “fake” pages and aggregation accounts, with followings that have built up over time, as an extra bit of vertical integration. Best part: The clippers work for cheap, and none of the promotional aspects need to be publicly disclosed, thanks to a federal-regulation loophole that relaxes transparency standards on ads that don’t sell tangible products. (No longer does a watermark automatically confer authority.) 🔗 in bio for the full story.

Law professor Kimberlé W. Crenshaw coined the term “intersectionality” decades ago. It is also one of the “DEI terms” that the Trump administration and Project 2025 was eager to do away with once they got back into power. ⁠
⁠
But to understand what just happened to the Voting Rights Act, a little critical race theory would go a long way. And in Trump 2.0, we need her work more than ever.⁠
⁠
@kimberlecrenshaw joins Mary Harris on What Next to talk about why she isn’t going anywhere.⁠
⁠
Listen to the entire conversation now on What Next. 🔗 in bio.

At around noon Eastern on Tuesday, FX’s The Bear surprised-dropped a stand-alone episode called “Gary.” The hour-long two-hander, set before the events of the show’s first episode, arrived with so little advance notice that Ebon Moss-Bachrach, who announced the event on his Instagram feed, had to tell his followers to search for it by name, presumably since it hadn’t yet been added to the show’s homepage on Hulu.⁠
⁠
“Gary” was co-written by Moss-Bachrach and Jon Bernthal, who play The Bear’s Richie and Mikey, and the timing of the drop suggested it was meant to get a boost from the Tony nominations, since the two are also currently starring in Dog Day Afternoon on Broadway. (It also gets the episode in under the wire for Emmys consideration.) The play, a rudderless adaptation of the classic 1975 movie, didn’t make out as hoped, Tony-wise, but it’s a reminder that the duo, who also acted opposite each other in the Netflix series The Punisher, make for a great double act, especially when they’re free to just bounce off one another with no need to advance any kind of a plot, writes Sam Adams. 🔗 in bio for more.

Last month, the anti-abortion movement crossed a major new redline. A South Carolina Senate committee voted to advance a bill that would, with almost no exceptions, not only ban abortions but also classify abortion as a misdemeanor crime for patients. The proposed law includes a highly unusual misdemeanor punishment of two years in prison. This has never happened before.⁠
⁠
Until recently, there was a fracture in the post-Dobbs anti- abortion movement surrounding just how far it was willing to go to criminalize abortion-seekers. So-called abortion abolitionists believe that nothing short of homicide charges for women who have abortions and full personhood status for embryos and fetuses is acceptable, while other factions have taken a less absolutist approach, particularly with respect to abortion criminalization. ⁠
⁠
Thanks to the men leading the “abolitionist” movement—and they are all men—15 such “abortion as homicide” bills were introduced in 2025, something that would have been unthinkable just a few years ago. Although none of this legislation made it out of committee, many of the bills required a national outcry, a coordinated organizing effort, and hours of testimony and lobbying to ensure they didn’t move forward. That all changed in South Carolina last month.⁠
⁠
South Carolina Senate Bill 1095, which creates a misdemeanor charge that carries a two-year prison sentence for obtaining or self-managing an abortion, made it out of committee and may be the first such bill in the nation to be voted on by a state legislative chamber. 🔗 in bio for more.

When Abdul El-Sayed ran for governor of Michigan back in 2018, folks were comparing him to Barack Obama. This time around, as a Michigan Senate candidate, people are now referring to him as the "Michigan Mamdani."⁠
⁠
Mary Harris of What Next, Slate's daily news podcast, wants to know: "Do you get sick of these comparisons?"⁠
⁠
Listen to their entire conversation on What Next. Now on YouTube. 🔗 in bio.

"[The Sheep Detectives], directed by Kyle Balda and adapted by Craig Mazin from Leonie Swann’s novel Three Bags Full, is endlessly charming and pleasingly clever, as well as surprisingly moving in spots. And, oh yes, it’s about death.⁠
⁠
We’re watching not a jaded detective who comes upon a bloody corpse and starts dispassionately scouring it for telltale clues, but characters who’ve willfully convinced themselves that no one ever ends up that way finally coming to an understanding that it’s better to reckon with heartbreaking truths than embrace a life of cozy ignorance. It’s a hard lesson wrapped in a soft warm blanket, one that cushions the blow and might even mop up the occasional tear," writes Sam Adams. 🔗 in bio for the full review.

Former U.S. Attorney Barbara McQuade explains why the charges against former FBI director James Comey, rooted in the claim that he threatened to kill President Trump – via the medium of seashells on Instagram – are unlikely to stick, no matter how hard Trump’s Acting (and actively auditioning) Attorney General Todd Blanche tries. ⁠
⁠
Listen to the entire interview on Amicus. 🔗 in bio.

There is a particular kind of violence the U.S. Supreme Court majority prefers because it can deny it while it is happening. This has never been more obvious than in its ruling in Louisiana v. Callais.⁠
⁠
Louisiana is soaked in what was done to Black people to make the state exist, and there is no honest way to talk about this case without starting there. Louisiana, like every other Southern state, built its wealth and political order through a system that treated human life as something to be violated and exploited and then insisted on calling that arrangement natural. The violence that enforced Black subjugation was not hidden in the way people now prefer to imagine. It was visible, repeated, justified, and graphic. And when enslavement ended, those lessons did not disappear so much as settle into new forms, into politics that could be controlled, participation that could be managed, rules that could be defended, and eventually into legislative maps that could accomplish stealthily what open terror once did in daylight.⁠
⁠
The modern version of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act that the court struck down last week was written for a world in which discrimination rarely announces itself cleanly, a world in which it can be diffuse, embedded, cumulative, and still devastating in its effects. Congress knew that. By its terms, the statute asks courts to look at patterns, outcomes, and how race and politics actually operate together to decide whether the voting process is equally open in any meaningful sense. 🔗 in bio for more.

While John Lewis was beaten in Selma, while Freedom Riders died registering voters in Mississippi, and while President Lyndon Johnson muscled the Voting Rights Act through Congress, the boy who would grow up to eviscerate it rode bikes through tree-lined streets steps from the shore and was cosseted in private schools in a town built for white residents only.⁠
⁠
Now that Chief Justice John Roberts has completed his decadeslong effort to undo the most successful civil rights legislation in American history, a simple question remains: Why? Is he a racist? What would lead a privileged graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Law School to dedicate so much of his life’s work to rolling back the victories of the Civil Rights Movement?⁠
⁠
Maybe it’s as simple as this: Roberts was raised in the 1960s amid lily-white affluence in a tiny Indiana beach town where property deeds long forbade selling homes to Black or Jewish people. As a kid, he spent little time around Black people. From childhood to adulthood, he never lived anywhere, or close to anyone, who compelled him to feel empathy for the reality that experiencing freedom, like voting, wasn’t as easy for some Americans as it was for him. The chief justice has seemingly worn blinders for life. 🔗 in bio for the full story.

Last week, the Supreme Court issued one of its most damaging decisions in decades, essentially ending the protections of the Voting Rights Act, in Louisiana v. Callais. ⁠
⁠
The decision means that Republican state legislators in the South will now be able to eliminate districts drawn to grant Black citizens some form of representation in Congress, and replace them with districts dominated by white voters, dismantling one of the great achievements of the Civil Rights era. The court has blessed this move, so long as these state legislators call their racial gerrymanders “partisan” instead. Louisiana, Alabama, and Tennessee have already begun plans to redraw maps to eliminate majority-Black voting districts. Nationally, Republicans stand to gain large numbers of new seats by 2028 and beyond, when states are expected to kick the redistricting wars into high gear while wiping out minority representation in Congress.⁠
⁠
But what about the Democrats? Memes have gone around social media showing blue states like California gerrymandering every one of their districts to oust every single Republican in response to Callais. This may be the fantasy of some Democrats, but the truth is, it’s far easier to draw one of these maps than to actually implement it, given the collateral damage Democrats would have to inflict on their own minority voters.⁠
⁠
No matter what path Democrats take, something’s gotta give. In order to make sense of the stakes involved in Republicans’ and Democrats’ redistricting push, Slate's Shirin Ali spoke with Pamela Karlan, law professor at Stanford University and co-director of Stanford’s Supreme Court Litigation Clinic. 🔗 in bio for this edition of Executive Dysfunction.

Last week, the Supreme Court issued one of its most damaging decisions in decades, essentially ending the protections of the Voting Rights Act, in Louisiana v. Callais. ⁠
⁠
The decision means that Republican state legislators in the South will now be able to eliminate districts drawn to grant Black citizens some form of representation in Congress, and replace them with districts dominated by white voters, dismantling one of the great achievements of the Civil Rights era. The court has blessed this move, so long as these state legislators call their racial gerrymanders “partisan” instead. Louisiana, Alabama, and Tennessee have already begun plans to redraw maps to eliminate majority-Black voting districts. Nationally, Republicans stand to gain large numbers of new seats by 2028 and beyond, when states are expected to kick the redistricting wars into high gear while wiping out minority representation in Congress.⁠
⁠
But what about the Democrats? Memes have gone around social media showing blue states like California gerrymandering every one of their districts to oust every single Republican in response to Callais. This may be the fantasy of some Democrats, but the truth is, it’s far easier to draw one of these maps than to actually implement it, given the collateral damage Democrats would have to inflict on their own minority voters.⁠
⁠
No matter what path Democrats take, something’s gotta give. In order to make sense of the stakes involved in Republicans’ and Democrats’ redistricting push, Slate's Shirin Ali spoke with Pamela Karlan, law professor at Stanford University and co-director of Stanford’s Supreme Court Litigation Clinic. 🔗 in bio for this edition of Executive Dysfunction.

Last week, the Supreme Court issued one of its most damaging decisions in decades, essentially ending the protections of the Voting Rights Act, in Louisiana v. Callais. ⁠
⁠
The decision means that Republican state legislators in the South will now be able to eliminate districts drawn to grant Black citizens some form of representation in Congress, and replace them with districts dominated by white voters, dismantling one of the great achievements of the Civil Rights era. The court has blessed this move, so long as these state legislators call their racial gerrymanders “partisan” instead. Louisiana, Alabama, and Tennessee have already begun plans to redraw maps to eliminate majority-Black voting districts. Nationally, Republicans stand to gain large numbers of new seats by 2028 and beyond, when states are expected to kick the redistricting wars into high gear while wiping out minority representation in Congress.⁠
⁠
But what about the Democrats? Memes have gone around social media showing blue states like California gerrymandering every one of their districts to oust every single Republican in response to Callais. This may be the fantasy of some Democrats, but the truth is, it’s far easier to draw one of these maps than to actually implement it, given the collateral damage Democrats would have to inflict on their own minority voters.⁠
⁠
No matter what path Democrats take, something’s gotta give. In order to make sense of the stakes involved in Republicans’ and Democrats’ redistricting push, Slate's Shirin Ali spoke with Pamela Karlan, law professor at Stanford University and co-director of Stanford’s Supreme Court Litigation Clinic. 🔗 in bio for this edition of Executive Dysfunction.