Featured
Pardons in the Era of Mass Incarceration. By Ronald J. Sheehy, Editor
Among the world’s advanced democracies, no nation incarcerates its people at the scale of the United States. America imprisons nearly 2 million human beings—five to ten times the rate of Canada, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, or Japan. No other modern democracy has normalized such punitive sentencing or such routine use of long-term confinement.
In a society that locks up more of its population than any other major democracy, the pardon should function as a vital corrective—an instrument of mercy to remedy wrongful convictions, extreme sentences, and the human wreckage of mass incarceration. Instead, the pardon has increasingly been twisted into a political favor, most brazenly under Donald Trump. Read more
Related: How Trump’s use of pardon power is breaking the mold. By Linda Feldman / CSMonitor
Related: What We’ll Never Know About the Trump Pardons. By Jeffrey Toobin / NYT
The Week’s Top Stories
Political / Social
Trump’s Anti-Immigration Tirade Sparks Major Backlash. By Olivia-Anne Cleary / Time
President Donald Trump is facing backlash after his speech on affordability at a rally in Mount Pocono, Pennsylvania, on Tuesday evening veered into another anti-immigration message.
Addressing the roaring crowd, Trump—who has ramped up his immigration crackdown since an Afghan national was identified as the sole suspect in the shooting of two National Guards in D.C. last month—talked about the sweeping measures he is pitching on both legal and illegal entries into the U.S. His actions have prompted concern from immigration support groups and activists who fear the far-reaching measures, impacting various communities, amount to collective punishment. Read more
Related: A Year of Hell for Immigrants. By Isabela Dias / Mother Jones
Related: ICE has arrested nearly 75,000 people with no criminal records, data shows. By and
There are two Black Americas. Not everyone is happy about it. By Theodore R. Johnson / Wash Post
The divide between natives and newcomers shows disparities in income, education and politics.
For centuries, Black migrants to America quickly learned that they would be treated the same as the Black people already here. Slavery and Jim Crow did not care if your parents were from Jamaica, Nigeria or South Carolina. Six decades after Jim Crow, though, these distinctions are a growing part of a changing country. Today, 1 in 5 Black Americans are immigrants or children of immigrants. Though racism persists, immigration reform and the successes of the civil rights movement diversified Black life in America. And not everyone is happy about it. Read more
Miami Elects First Democratic Mayor in Nearly 30 Years. Patricia Mazzei / NYT
Eileen Higgins, a former Miami-Dade County commissioner, will also be the city’s first female mayor and the first non-Hispanic mayor since the 1990s.
“Together, we turned the page on years of chaos and corruption and opened the door to a new era for our city — one defined by ethical, accountable leadership that delivers real results for the people,” Ms. Higgins said in a statement declaring victory, promising to lead a government “that finally earns the public’s trust.” Read more
Justice Department Will No Longer Investigate Claims of Systemic Racism, Sexism. By Jasper Smith / The Chronicle of Higher Ed.
The Justice Department said on Tuesday it will no longer investigate accusations of systemic racism or sexism, drastically limiting how college students, parents, and employees can accuse a university of discrimination without proof of intent.
Officials said they would eliminate disparate-impact liability from its Title VI rules, a decades-old legal concept that allows individuals to claim that race- and sex-neutral policies are discriminatory if they disproportionately harm certain groups or result in significant disparities. Tuesday’s announcement continues the Trump administration’s efforts to upend the ways college leaders have traditionally defined and addressed discrimination. Read more
John Robert’s Decades-Long Project to Neuter the Voting Rights Act. By David Daley / The Atlantic
The chief justice has been working to neuter the Voting Rights Act since the beginning of his career.
In 1982, when the Voting Rights Act was up for reauthorization, the Reagan Justice Department had a goal: preserve the VRA in name only, while rendering it unenforceable in practice. A young John Roberts was the architect of that campaign. He may soon get to finish what he started. Read more
Related: Supreme Court Says It Will Hear Trump’s Bid To End Birthright Citizenship. By
Rep. Jasmine Crockett Enters Texas Senate Race as Allred Exits. By Grace Panetta / The 19th
Rep. Jasmine Crockett, a firebrand progressive Democrat who represents a Dallas-area district, filed paperwork to enter the race Monday.
Crockett was elected to the U.S. House in 2022 from a safe blue district. She’s gained a national profile and media visibility with her sharp criticisms of Republicans, including through her role on the House Oversight Committee. She sought an even more visible position as the top Democrat on the panel, but withdrew her candidacy. Read more
Education
Texas GOP turns schools into indoctrination machines. By Lisa Needham / Daily Kos
Showing that he’s always laser-focused on what really matters, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has ordered all high schools to have a Turning Point USA chapter called “Club America.”
Sure, Texas has basically frozen per-student funding for years, which means that—thanks to inflation—funding is actually decreasing. And, yes, Texas is hiring uncertified teachers and closing schools. It’s also true that 73% of Texas schools are underfunded. But surely turning every school into a shrine to Charlie Kirk will fix it. Read more
Morehouse Rhodes Scholar Sets New Standard for HBCU Excellence. HBCU Editors
A Morehouse College Rhodes Scholar student has earned one of the world’s most prestigious academic awards, making history as one of the few HBCU students selected for international postgraduate study at the University of Oxford. According to reporting from Face2Face Africa, the scholarship recognizes intellectual excellence, leadership, and a demonstrated commitment to service. The Rhodes Scholarship will fund graduate study abroad, covering tuition, travel, and living expenses.
For Morehouse, this achievement marks another milestone in a campus culture rooted in leadership, global awareness, and innovation. The Morehouse College Rhodes Scholar student is set to join a storied list of scholars from around the world who have gone on to distinguished careers in research, policy, business, and advocacy. Read more
MacKenzie Scott Keeps Giving – Another $25M Goes to Lincoln University. By Bernadette Giacomazzo / Complex
The unrestricted gift, announced by the school on Friday, December 5, marks Scott’s second contribution to the Pennsylvania-based institution and continues her ongoing series of large-scale donations to HBCUs across the country.
In 2025 alone, Scott has given nearly a billion dollars to HBCUs, tribal schools, and other minority-first underfunded organizations. Read more
State Universities Are Scrambling to Appease the Bigoted MAGA Regime. By
From Oklahoma to Indiana to Alabama, state schools are bending over backward—suspending student magazines and even disciplining instructors—to preemptively satisfy the Trump administration.
A graduate student at the University of Oklahoma is the latest in a growing list of college instructors to face disciplinary action after being targeted by Turning Point USA, the right-wing campus pressure group founded by the late Charlie Kirk. Read more
World
Trump Warns Europe About “Civilizational Erasure.” By Hafiz Rashid / TNR
The Trump administration is invoking racist tropes in a policy document, claiming that Europe is facing “civilizational erasure.”
The White House’s new National Security Strategy, posted Thursday night, called the European Union antidemocratic and seemed to make an openly bigoted jab at the demographics of European NATO states, saying, “Over the long term, it is more than plausible that within a few decades at the latest, certain NATO members will become majority non-European.” Read more
Related: Trump’s foreign policy vision: Make Europe white again. By Andrew O’Hehir / Salon
A Weakened Hamas Still Dominates Gaza, Building Day by Day. Adam Rasgon / NYT
A cease-fire after two years of war with Israel has allowed Hamas to tighten its grip on power again. “It’s still standing,” one Israeli official said.
Over two years of war, top Hamas commanders and thousands of fighters have been killed, and the group’s arsenal has been severely depleted. It now controls less than half of the territory in Gaza, with the rest occupied by Israel. Yet Hamas has managed to reassert its power in Gaza, according to Israeli security officials and an Arab intelligence official. They spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal assessments. Read more
Related: This Is the Story of How the Democrats Blew It on Gaza.
Related: Prosecutors at International Tribunal on Palestine Accuse Israel of Ecocide. By
Not All Targeted Killings Are the Same. Hegseth’s Boat Strikes Are Illegal. By Jeh Johnson / NYT
Mr. Johnson, a lawyer, was a secretary of homeland security in the Obama administration, and, before that, general counsel of the Department of Defense. A Morehouse graduate.
With its strikes on suspected drug couriers in the Caribbean, our government is conducting extrajudicial killings on the high seas — plain and simple. Some Americans may wonder how this is any different from the targeted killings of other bad guys around the world by previous administrations, including that of Barack Obama, in which I served. Read more
Related: Cowardly Pete Hegseth Is This Week’s Proof of the GOP’s Moral Rot. By
Trump’s closure of Voice of America is coming back to bite him. By Editorial Board / Wash Post
As the president threatens Venezuela, Russia and China are filling the information vacuum.
President Donald Trump has said he won’t rule out anything when it comes to removing Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro from power. Yet he is missing an important tool from the arsenal: the Voice of America. Since Trump’s March executive order dismantling the news agency, most of VOA’s 1,300 staff members and contractors have been fired or placed on administrative leave, its website has been frozen and the 83-year-old broadcaster has gone dark for the first time since its founding during World War II. Read more
Ethics / Morality / Religion
Why Is Christianity So Hard to Find in the Trump Administration? By Ross Douthat / NYT
As soon as he was nominated to be secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, with his Crusader cross tattoo and his attendance at a hard-edge Calvinist church, became a natural vessel for liberal fears about that dread concept, “Christian nationalism.”
The administration has offered a lot of general rhetoric about the value of Christianity to American civilization, along with presidential complaints about Christian persecution overseas and pious social media posts on Catholic holidays. But in the absence of religious-informed policymaking, this sometimes feels more like a performance of a Christian politics than a full reality. Read more
Two governors — a Mormon Republican and a Jewish Democrat — team up to stop political violence. By Adelle M. Banks / RNS
Utah Gov. Spencer Cox, right, and Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, center, participate in a discussion titled “Toward a Better Politics,” moderated by Savannah Guthrie, left, Dec. 9, 2025, at Washington National Cathedral in Washington.
“I don’t care what color his politics are,” Cox said, sitting next to Shapiro on Tuesday (Dec. 9) at an event titled “Toward a Better Politics” at Washington National Cathedral. “In that moment, we were two Americans who were deeply saddened and struggling. And I’m grateful that there’s somebody I can trust even though we disagree on a lot of things. We agree on this thing.” Read more
Trump loyalists ‘declare war on the Catholic church. By Lesley Abravanel / AlterNet
Despite Pope Leo XIV to calling on his Catholic leadership to issue a forceful statement condemning President Donald Trump’s “villification of immigrants,” Trump loyalists, writes John Kenneth White in The Hill, have responded by declaring war on the Catholic church.
By a nearly unanimous vote, the United State Conference of Catholic Bishops issued their first special message in 12 years, saying they were “saddened by the state of contemporary debate and the vilification of immigrants,” and “concerned about the conditions in detention centers and the lack of access to pastoral care.” Read more
Historical / Cultural
The Best Black History Books of 2025. By AAIHS Editors
We are pleased to release this year’s AAIHS list of the best books published in 2025! Check out this extraordinary list of great books from 2025 that offer varied historical perspectives on the Black experience in the United States and across the globe.
From books on Black women and state-sanctioned violence to an in-depth analysis of Kwame Nkrumah’s life and legacy, the diverse selections included in this list will enhance your reading list for the new year and deepen your understanding of Black people’s ideas and experiences in every part of the globe. Read more
“Honor Our History”: Trump Slammed for Ending Free National Park Entry on Juneteenth & MLK Day. By Amy Goodman / Democracy Now
Denigrating Black history “can’t erase the truth,” says Carolyn Finney, who served on the National Parks Advisory Board during the Obama administration. “It’s not going to change how we feel, not just as Black Americans, but Americans in general, about honoring our history.”
We also speak with Audrey Peterman, author of Our True Nature: Finding a Zest for Life in the National Park System, who says “the entire history of America, the entire history of every racial and ethnic group in America, is in the national park system.” Read more
Related: A fight over restoring Confederate names on schools heads to trial. By Karina Elwood / Wash Post
What we get wrong about the Montgomery bus boycott – and what we can learn from it. By Jeanne Theoharis / The Guardian
The movement’s success was never a given. It took much longer and required repeated action and tremendous sacrifice, without any certainty it would work
The Montgomery bus boycott, which began 70 years ago on 5 December 1955, is now understood as one of the most successful American social movements. And yet, much of how it is remembered is romanticized, inaccurate and even dangerous – distorting how we imagine social change happens. Read more
Where Are the Black Panther Party Leaders Today? By
A look at the Black Panther Party’s most influential figures, their fight for justice and where they are today decades after the party’s movement disbanded.
The Black Panther Party for Self-Defense (BPP) reshaped the political battleground of the 1960s, forcing America to confront its racism, its policing, and its abandonment of Black communities. Led by young organizers from Oakland, the revolutionaries challenged the state so directly that the government, COINTELPRO in particular, declared them a threat to national security— raids, imprisonments, and deliberate infiltration included. Nearly 60 years later, the question lingers: what became of the people who once stood at the front lines of Black revolution? Read more
NYTimes: Best Jazz Albums of 2025.
The most compelling releases of the year reimagined hip-hop tracks, deep-rooted collaborations and longstanding inspirations. Marcus Gilmore’s (Shown) first album under his own name is a standout.
In a year that saw the deaths of two leading drummers, Jack DeJohnette and Al Foster, other drummers both young and old — including Billy Hart, Kassa Overall, Joe Farnsworth and Marcus Gilmore, the M.V.P. of 2025 — shone as elite bandleaders. The trend was just one indicator of the way jazz is constantly renewing via an ongoing intergenerational conversation. Read more
Sports
The WNBA is growing, so where are the Black woman head coaches? By Sean Hurd / Andscape
When next season tips off, there will be no Black women leading teams despite several offseason openings and candidates with strong résumés
When Noelle Quinn was introduced at a news conference as the first Black head coach of the Seattle Storm in 2021, she paid homage to every Black woman who’d been a head coach in the league’s 24 seasons that preceded her own opportunity. The list even included Black women who had been interim head coaches. It took her just 17 seconds. If Quinn had updated her list in 2025, she would have added only two names. When the Storm fired Quinn in September, it left the league without any Black female head coaches in its ranks. Read more
Stephen Jackson Tells Stephen A. Smith To ‘Stick To Sports You Never Played’ After His Jasmine Crockett Comments. By Aria Bell / Blavity
Retired NBA player Stephen Jackson is speaking out about how Stephen A. Smith addresses prominent Black figures versus those who are non-Black.
According to an Instagram post from Complex Sports, Jackson published a video online comparing Smith’s past loud stances with LeBron James and, most recently, Rep. Jasmine Crockett to his latest encounters with Alexis Ohanian, who is the husband of Serena Williams. He noted how Smith was more composed when confronted by Ohanian, who happens to be white. Read more
George Altman, Slugger in Negro Leagues, M.L.B. and Japan, Dies at 92. Michael S. Rosenwald / NYT
The rare player to compete in all three, he had an impressive career, becoming a three-time All-Star in the major leagues and later a fan favorite in Japan.
The son of a tobacco and cotton farmer, Altman was one of three men in history to play in the Negro Leagues, Major League Baseball and Nippon Professional Baseball. (The others were Don Newcombe and Larry Doby.) Read more
Knicks’ Jalen Brunson has flipped the script of his scoring prowess. By James L. Edwards III / The Athletic
Jalen Brunson spent all of last season putting rival teams to bed. His crossovers were like a light kiss on the forehead. His jumper tucked them in. His and-1 finishes turned out the lights.
New York’s captain won last season’s NBA’s Clutch Player of the Year award, an honor that goes to someone who routinely wills their team to victory in the game’s most intense moments. Brunson did it in the regular season and the playoffs. He did it while being defended by players three inches taller, some 20 pounds heavier. A scorer’s scorer. Read more
Michigan president says Sherrone Moore investigation will continue: ‘All of the facts here must be known.’ By Austin Meek and Sam Jane / The Athletic
In an email to University of Michigan students and faculty on Thursday, Michigan president Domenico Grasso touted the school’s quick action in firing head football coach Sherrone Moore and pledged that the investigation into Moore’s behavior would continue.
“Earlier this week, the Department of Intercollegiate Athletics dismissed head football coach Sherrone Moore with cause for violating University policy by engaging in an inappropriate relationship with a staff member,” Grasso wrote in the email, which was reviewed by The Athletic. “When the findings of a University investigation into Coach Moore’s behavior were presented on Wednesday, we immediately terminated his employment. Read more
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