Eric Berger

Christian Vivas has spent more than 15 years running a photography and video studio and, for the past year, working as an artificial intelligence strategist at an advertising software company in Miami. Yet despite that seemingly successful career, the 38-year-old has returned to school, enrolling at Miami Dade College to pursue a bachelor’s degree in a fast-emerging field: A.I.

Carlos Collado, a Dominican immigrant who owns five independent grocery stores in the Bronx and Manhattan, has succeeded over the last three decades despite obstacles that he blames on local and state governance.His stores have faced an increase in shoplifting, he said. The city has provided tax benefits to big corporations that opened grocery stores and took business away from his.Now, he says, New York’s new mayor, Zohran Mamdani, will make it even harder for him and other grocery store and bodega owners to succeed because of his plan to open five city-owned grocers.

Hannah Rejali, 34, lived through the failed so-called “Kansas Experiment” in the 2010s, when the Republican governor cut the state’s income tax to try to give a “shot of adrenaline” to its economy but instead left the state with a $900m budget shortfall.That meant, for example, that in 2015, at least eight school districts ended their academic year early.“You say, [former Kansas governor Sam] Brownback, to anyone on the Kansas side, and they shudder,” Rejali said.

Faced with high demand for GLP-1 drugs, some American cities and states that previously covered the cost of the weight-loss medication for low-income residents and public employees have now started to restrict or eliminate coverage. The pullback stems from the dramatic increase in public spending on drugs such as Ozempic and Wegovy in recent years.

In his teens and early 20s, Tyler Adolfo showed an ability to communicate effectively. A local newspaper in Massachusetts published a front-page story about his success in a speech contest. He won his college’s talent contest with a rap performance. And in October 2021, he helped craft a campaign on behalf of his fraternity to increase awareness of sexual assault in Greek life, before speaking with a New York Times reporter about the issue. Over the next six months, Adolfo’s words kept attracting attention — except this time because they were bizarre.

In the spring this year in New York, Chris St Lawrence would finish work as a naturalist on a whale-watching boat and then quickly make the 90-minute trek to Central Park to arrive in time for sunset, when a pair of coyotes would often start to creep out. St Lawrence, who is also a photographer, said it’s taxing to stand for four hours on a boat, keeping his eyes peeled for marine mammals, and then to remain just as alert at the park in the middle of Manhattan, looking for Romeo and Juliet.

In early June, Dave Margulies, owner and producer of High Sierra Music Festival, was working on a printed pocket guide with a show schedule, which organizers will hand out to attendees of the more than 30-year-old Quincy, California, event. That there even would be a festival to navigate this year wasn’t a foregone conclusion. Margulies says the festival used to sell about 7,000 tickets annually; in 2023 and 2024, it sold about 4,500 each year. “It almost sent us into bankruptcy,” he says.

It is graduation season in the United States and with it comes a tradition of commencement speeches to departing college students, usually from high-profile figures who seek to inspire those leaving academia. But, as with many things under Donald Trump’s second term in the White House, commencement season this year has been far from normal, especially as the US president and his allies have waged conflicts against the nation’s universities.

When asked about Donald Trump’s Easter morning post wishing a happy holiday to “the Radical Left Lunatics … fighting and scheming so hard to bring Murderers, Drug Lords, Dangerous Prisoners” to the United States, Jackson Lahmeyer, an Oklahoma evangelical Christian pastor, said: “Isn’t it terrible that they are wanting to do that?” Lahmeyer, the founder of the Pastors for Trump organization, was not bothered by Trump’s extreme and divisive message on the Christian religious holiday, because, he said: “You cannot unify with evil.”

In January, a teenager in suburban St. Louis informed his high school counselor that a classmate said he planned to kill himself later that day. The 14-year-old classmate denied it, but his mother, Marie, tore through his room and found a suicide note in his nightstand. (She asked KFF Health News to publish only her middle name because she does not want people to misjudge or label her son.) His parents took him to Mercy Hospital St. Louis. According to his mother, providers told them they didn’t have beds available at their behavioral health center, so the teen spent three days in a room in a secured area of the emergency department and saw a doctor twice, one time virtually.

From Boston to Los Angeles, thousands of people rallied on Saturday to protest the presidency of Donald J. Trump, including his handling of the war in Ukraine, his stance on reproductive rights and the firing of federal workers.About 300 protests, organized to commemorate International Women’s Day, were scheduled around the country. Some, like the one at Washington Square Park in Manhattan, attracted at least a few thousand demonstrators. Others, in smaller cities like Richmond, Va., Sarasota, F...

In both real life and on film, New York City has often been a city linked with public scandals, corruption and high drama.But even Hollywood scriptwriters, so often keen on using the Big Apple as a backdrop, would have been hard-pushed to describe the astonishing events that have played out around the mayor, Eric Adams, in recent days.Last week, the US Department of Justice moved to drop criminal charges against Adams, in what many see as a blatant quid pro quo for getting Adams onboard as a pol...

When Samantha Shaw took a new job as a research technician for a sleep-related study at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in 2021, she was excited to work on a cause that felt personal.Since high school, she said, she had trouble falling and staying asleep, so she jumped at the chance to work with experts in the field.The researchers were looking into whether a medication could help with excessive daytime sleepiness in people who worked night shifts, often in transportation or construction, that star...

About five years ago, Matt Feyerabend, co-owner of an Arkansas ice-cream business, wanted to explore new flavors and use more native fruits, so while delivering a batch of product to a restaurant in Eureka Springs, Arkansas, he asked if anyone knew a grower of pawpaws, a tree fruit native to the United States with a flavor described as a mix between a mango and a banana.

It’s late on a Tuesday night and a mob of people stand outside the entrance to Brooklyn Steel holding clusters of balloons. With the colorful bundles and their eager eyes waiting for the venue doors to burst open, they resemble a crowd waiting for a guest of honor to arrive for a surprise birthday party. These are not, however, partygoers. They’re party-sellers. “Whippets. Iced-cold,” one person says, sounding like a vendor offering Bud Light at Yankee Stadium.

Donald Trump has retained much of his political support amid his ongoing hush-money trial in part due to a combination of the courtroom’s ban on cameras and conservative media echoing his claims that both the prosecutor and judge are corrupt, media analysts say.

In the some two decades since the St. Louis Cardinals reached an agreement to obtain public funding for a new stadium, team leaders have touted its economic benefits for the area and described the agreement as unique in professional sports because of how much of the stadium was privately financed. Local officials often then repeat those leaders’ assertions. “Home games are invaluable in supporting our local businesses and helping Downtown grow and thrive,” St. Louis Mayor Tishaura Jones stated in a recent news release that claimed the team would generate $310 million in economic impact for the St. Louis metro area this season alone. While fans certainly spend millions of dollars attending Cardinals games, economists question how much public investment in professional teams’ stadiums here and elsewhere helps the surrounding economy.

Until a couple years ago, Peter Dustin, a stay-at-home father to two girls in Camarillo, Calif., always had an easy time talking with his older daughter, Dakota. But as Dakota, now 12, approaches the teen years, there is “stuff she doesn’t feel comfortable talking with me about,” Dustin said. So when she returned from Taylor Swift’s concert film in October, he was eager to share a bit of gossip.

In late June, Jim Schuls and his 16-year-old son, Michael, woke up at 4am for their usual drive from their apartment in Florence, Wisconsin, to begin work at 5am at a sawmill. Father and son made this journey together five times a week in the summer, when Michael worked longer hours than he did in term time. His two older brothers had also worked at the same mill when they were about his age. Their day at Florence Hardwoods – one of the largest employers in the town with a population of about 2,000 – began as normal. Jim operated a forklift outside while Michael worked alone inside the mill. Jim says he never worried because he believed “young kids were stacking lumber”, not operating dangerous machines.

About 1,000 protesters gathered early in the afternoon in two locations, in Times Square and at the United Nations headquarters. The demonstrations were among dozens of largely peaceful protests across the United States, with events in Chicago and Atlanta drawing hundreds of people. But tensions rose in New York City later on Sunday afternoon as roughly 500 pro-Palestinian demonstrators and supporters of Israel confronted one another outside the Israeli consulate in Midtown Manhattan.