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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.⁠
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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.

In 2022, the Supreme Court overturned the right to legal abortion. Since then, one counterintuitive trend has emerged: Even as 19 states have enacted total or near-total abortion bans, the number of abortions provided in the U.S. each year has risen.⁠
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The reason is a confluence of advances in medical, logistical, and communication technology. During the first trimester, a pregnancy can be terminated with a series of pills. Those pills can be sent through the mail, and doctors can easily prescribe them on a video call, over the phone, or through digital forms. The expansion of telehealth services during the COVID-19 pandemic offered a way for clinicians to get abortion medication to patients in every state once Roe v. Wade fell, even in places that outlawed abortion. ­­⁠
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The future of that revolutionary advancement in reproductive health was placed in jeopardy earlier this month when the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals issued a ruling that would have placed new limits on telehealth abortion. Abortion providers were then given a dramatic reprieve on Thursday, when the Supreme Court granted a full stay on that 5th Circuit decision. 🔗 in bio for more.

In two recent interviews, President Donald Trump admitted that there is no real reason to continue his war against Iran. Instead, in remarks that revealed both a clear understanding of certain facts and a narcissistic way of framing them, he said he couldn’t stop fighting now because of “public relations” and a vague need to “feel good.”⁠
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On a Fox News show on Friday, host Bret Baier asked Trump whether it might be feasible to retrieve Iran’s enriched uranium. Trump replied that it would be very hard for either the Iranians or U.S. troops to get at the material because his attack last June—a bomber raid on three sites encased inside a mountain—left the “nuclear dust” (as Trump called it) buried under heavy granite rubble.⁠
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“It was hit so hard,” Trump said, “the mountain literally collapsed on it.”⁠
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This seemed to startle Baier. “Why isn’t that good enough?” the host asked. “If your goal was to set back …”⁠
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“It is good enough,” Trump replied, “but you know what, it isn’t good enough public-relations-wise.”⁠
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🔗 in bio for more by Fred Kaplan.

Justice Alito is big mad that blue states outsmarted his attempt to end the right to abortion #supremecourt #abortion #alito #mifepristone

Under Donald Trump, the nation’s capital is getting a face-lift. ⁠
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The president has torn down the White House’s decades-old East Wing to make room for a massive ballroom that could end up costing taxpayers $1 billion or more. He ordered the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool to be painted blue. He covered the Oval Office with golden tchotchkes, redid the Lincoln bathroom in marble, paved the Kennedy-era Rose Garden into a patio, and resurfaced a White House walkway with black granite sourced from Africa and carved in Italy (so much for America First). In some cases, the attempts to remake the city in Trump’s image have been literal; the neoclassical facades of the Justice Department and other federal buildings now feature giant banners of the president’s scowling visage.⁠
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He isn’t done either. Trump also wants to build a triumphal arch between the Lincoln Memorial and Arlington National Cemetery that would dwarf similar monuments in Paris and Rome. He has pledged to redevelop a swath of the National Mall into a “National Garden of American Heroes” that could reportedly feature dining facilities, an amphitheater, and hundreds of statues of famous Americans. On Thursday, his administration unveiled plans to transform one of the capital’s unassuming municipal golf courses into a luxe, 18-hole expanse that could someday host major tournaments. 🔗 in bio for the full story.

As wealth disparity continues to grow, politicians in New York and California have suggested raising revenue through taxes that are aimed at their wealthiest residents. But the rich didn’t get that way by just letting themselves get taxed, now did they? 🔗 in bio for this episode of What Next.

It has long been clear that the second Trump administration exists primarily as an avenue for déclassé, C-level celebrities to mount a career comeback by using the entire federal governing apparatus as leverage. ⁠
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This is why, say, Dr. Oz is on television warning the country about ill-defined widespread medical fraud, why Kristi Noem spent much of her time at Homeland Security filming Orwellian videos to be broadcast in TSA lines, and why Kash Patel seems dead set on becoming the world’s first “celebrity FBI director.” No surprises there. Donald Trump himself originally ran for president in order to make himself more famous; it is only natural that he would attract a fleet of flunkies eager to fit the mold. (One we forgot to mention: Ron DeSantis’ new Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives–style pivot.)⁠
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But if there is anything unique about this late and increasingly febrile chapter in the president’s reign, it is how even the bit players of his administration—those occupying the most cushy and overlooked roles, who were once happy to revel anonymously in the spoils of victory—want in on the action. ⁠
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"At least, that is what I found myself thinking about after watching the trailer for Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy’s forthcoming reality show," writes Luke Winkie. 🔗 in bio for more.

This week, we learned that the Internal Revenue Service is considering settling a $10 billion lawsuit with president Donald Trump, who brought the suit against the agency for the leak of his old tax returns during his first term. ⁠
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Perhaps recognizing the optics of such a deal—the president of the United States ordering the leaders of a federal agency, whom he appoints, to personally pay him billions of dollars—would be less than ideal, Trump has supposedly settled on a new idea. In exchange for dropping his IRS lawsuit, the president wants a $1.7 billion compensation fund created that will pay out anyone who alleges the Biden administration “weaponized” the legal system against them. It’s a classic shakedown meant to enrich Trump and his political cronies, yet again. 🔗 in bio for more.

Recent polling shows that the younger you are, the more you want your romantic partner to be politically aligned with you. ⁠
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This bothers a lot of people, including Dana Perino, a Fox News host and former George W. Bush press secretary, who currently has a book in its second week on the New York Times bestseller list. Perino’s Purple State sports one of those Emily Henry–style cartoon covers, and it’s a self-professed “romcom”—a fantasy about liberal women falling for conservative men. Perino, who previously wrote an advice book for young women, told the Wall Street Journal that although she’s never had children of her own, she thinks of “all of these young people as my little nieces. … My hope for all of them is, ‘Please don’t worry your young life away.’ ” ⁠
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Young liberal women’s strong interest in politics is, to Perino, a misdirected anxiety. “I want the message of this book to be that politics can be what you’re interested in. It might even be what you do for a living. But it doesn’t have to be who you are. I urge everyone to wear your politics lightly,” she told the Wall Street Journal.⁠
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Romance is a good genre for a writer interested in this kind of ostensibly apolitical project that actually seethes politics from every pore. Just as late-19th-century Americans gobbled up love stories about white Northern men and white Southern women, yearning for postwar national harmony, so people trying to figure out our hyperpartisan era have tried telling stories about liberal women loving conservative men. ⁠
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"Purple State sets a very ambitious table for itself, but it leaves the reader frustrated, and hungry," writes Rebecca Onion. 🔗 in bio for more.

If you already thought the stock market’s booming reactions to this geopolitically chaotic economic moment were irrational—well, it’s about to get much more surreal, because the rules governing the trade are about to change dramatically. You can thank Elon Musk and the Trump administration for that.⁠
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Right now, the indices are seeing a reinvigorated boom—in spite of coming Strait of Hormuz supply shocks and other mounting recession indicators—because investors are looking to what may become the biggest IPOs in history, courtesy of artificial intelligence. OpenAI, Anthropic, and most importantly SpaceX (which now owns xAI) all hope to hit the charts this year with trillion-dollar valuations, in an unprecedented global first. It may seem like a great opportunity to get more transparency from these notoriously private firms, but the opposite is likely to happen. ⁠
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The incoming IPO wave is rewriting stock market rules in real time so that companies can attract massive public investment with fewer safeguards, less transparency, and more risk pushed onto ordinary investors, as well as the funds that will determine how comfortably you’ll be able to retire. 🔗 in bio for more.

The Supreme Court restored telehealth access to abortion pills on Thursday in an emergency order that provoked seething dissents from Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito. ⁠
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With just the two noted dissents, the court halted a decision by the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that had prohibited providers across the country from prescribing and mailing mifepristone through telemedicine. Blue states have preserved access to this drug, the first used in a medication abortion, by authorizing their providers to prescribe and mail the pills across state lines. At Louisiana’s request, the 5th Circuit had tried to halt this flow from mifepristone into states that criminalize reproductive health care, but SCOTUS has kept the pipeline open—for now. In dissent, Thomas accused these providers of participating in a “criminal enterprise” and implied that they should be imprisoned. Alito, meanwhile, fumed that blue states had undermined his decision overturning Roe v. Wade by outsmarting anti-abortion lawmakers.⁠
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On this week’s Slate Plus bonus episode of Amicus, co-host Mark Joseph Stern discussed Thursday’s decision with Madiba Dennie, deputy editor of Balls and Strikes and author of The Originalism Trap. 🔗 in bio for their conversation.