Elon Musk has long been in an on-again, off-again relationship with the moon. Though just last year he called it “a distraction”—saying his focus was shifting exclusively to Mars—he now seems to be rekindling things with our natural satellite. And regardless of his own feelings about the moon, NASA is paying him to get us there again.

The Artemis II mission, which returned just a week ago, set a new record for the farthest humans have ever traveled from Earth. But looping around the moon—as the four astronauts did during their nine days in space—is not the project’s paramount goal. By 2028, NASA plans for astronauts to touch down on the lunar surface, and while they’ve now demonstrated we can still shoot for the moon, landing there is another story.

No human has set foot on the moon since 1972, and the landing gear that facilitated the Apollo missions isn’t compatible with modern rockets or NASA’s goal of longer-term exploration—humans have spent a total of just over three days ambling around the lunar surface. Since the inception of the Artemis project, NASA has contracted with SpaceX, currently Musk’s most profitable company, to design more expansive landing equipment.

NASA has always relied on partnerships with private companies, but the number of unique contractors has dropped by 38 percent between 2021 and 2024 as contracts with SpaceX ballooned. According to a Washington Post investigation, Musk’s company has received nearly $15 billion from the agency all told, with contract values doubling at the inception of Artemis.

Why the pop megastar biopic has been beset with issues

Hasan Piker’s name is everywhere. Not because he won an election or passed legislation. Not because he’s a big sports star or an astronaut. It’s because he won’t stop yapping—and scores of people won’t stop listening. Depending on who you ask, he’s either one of the most dangerous voices in American politics—or one of the most honest.

Piker, an avowed Marxist, is among the loudest voices on the American left. His megaphone is a Twitch stream where he spends roughly eight hours a day, seven days a week, breaking down political news to an audience that skews young and male. He’s blunt, frequently crass, and deeply influential. There seems to be a profile of him every other day. (One such New York Times headline: “A Progressive Mind in a Body Made for the ‘Manosphere’”.) Time named him on its Top 100 Creators list. All of this is why certain factions of the Democratic Party have spent the last several weeks trying to make him a liability for the candidates he supports, pointing to off-color, if not offensive, comments he’s made over the years as evidence that he’s too toxic to touch.

So I sat down with him.

We talked about why Fox News can’t stop covering him—and why he thinks that’s a gift. We talked about the ideological fault lines inside the Democratic Party, what he actually believes about Israel and Zionism, and why people can’t stop talking about him. “We’re on the fourth week now,” he jokes. “Like, why are you still talking about me? I’m irrelevant.” We don’t think so, Hasan.

Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas should be feeling optimistic. He’s a member of the 6-3 Republican-appointed majority on the highest court that is rapidly reshaping American law in a way Thomas has always wanted. To name a few of his recent victories, Thomas and his colleagues have ended the constitutional right to abortion, banned affirmative action in higher education, helped Donald Trump return to the White House, and this term are expected to toss out what’s left of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. For a reactionary like Thomas, things are going very well.

And yet, Thomas is worried. Maybe even mad. In a radical speech that drew headlines for its thinly-veiled animosity toward his fellow judges, fellow conservatives, and political opponents to his left, Thomas warned that the nation’s founding ethos that “all men are created equal” is under threat. His remarks, delivered at the University of Texas at Austin this week, pit the ideals of the Declaration of Independence against the scourge of “progressivism.” As Thomas warned, “It is not possible for the two to coexist forever.”

Press reports were rightly attuned to Thomas’ incendiary rhetoric and the fact that this was no ordinary speech for a Supreme Court justice. But the quick dispatches missed the critical historic and legal context of Thomas’ remarks—and just what they may foreshadow. 

Thomas goes further than attacking agencies as undemocratic—to him, they are contrary to God. 

This story was originally published by the Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Minnesota’s Boundary Waters comprise a vast stretch of wilderness bordering Canada, with over a million acres of untouched forest and thousands of lakes and streams. Accessible largely by canoe, it is an ecological gem and one of the most popular spots in the country for outdoor recreation. On Thursday, Senate Republicans voted 50-49 to open the area up to mining—passing a resolution that repeals a 20-year moratorium using a little-known law called the Congressional Review Act (CRA). 

The act was designed in the 1990s by then-House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who sought to cut back on government bureaucracy by eliminating regulations. It was engineered to allow Congress to quickly overturn regulatory rules with a simple majority, rather than the usual two-thirds vote. Critics say it’s dangerous because it enables public rules and regulations based on years of research to be quickly overturned with little debate. 

With this move, Senate Republicans “disrespect tribal treaty rights and directly risk those tribes’ guaranteed access to their traditional way of life.”

At the start of this week, there were three men in Congress whose reputations had imploded after being accused of misconduct against women: Reps. Cory Mills (R-Fla.), Tony Gonzales (R-Texas), and Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.). On Tuesday, Gonzales and Swalwell resigned rather than face potential expulsion. Mills is different. He is hanging on despite facing a staggering number of scandals.

As I reported in a profile of Mills in February, the Florida congressman has been accused of hiring sex workers while on a “rescue mission” overseas, punching someone in Ireland while serving in Congress, earning a Bronze Star through false claims about saving the lives of multiple former Army comrades in Iraq, and of threatening to release sexually explicit content of an ex-girlfriend. In October, a Florida judge placed a temporary restraining order on Mills after finding that he subjected that ex-girlfriend to “dating violence” via cyberstalking. (Mills was also implicated earlier in 2025 in an alleged assault involving a different girlfriend, although the allegation was later retracted.)

Mills has gotten off surprisingly easy for someone facing thoroughly documented accusations. But that is now starting to shift. “I’m glad that Eric Swalwell is leaving. I’m glad that Tony Gonzales is leaving,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) said earlier this week. “Frankly, I think Cory Mills should probably be on that list as well.” Rep. Susie Lee (D-Nev.) said bluntly about Mills on Tuesday, “He should be expelled.”

Republicans have been more interested in removing Rep. Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick (D-Fla.), who was indicted in November by a federal grand jury. The indictment alleges that she and her brother stole about $5 million in FEMA funding and then used some of that money to make illegal straw donations to her congressional campaign. In late March, the adjudicatory subcommittee of the House Ethics Committee found a pattern of “progressive and compounding corruption” on Cherfilus-McCormick’s part. Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) said on Tuesday that he believes House members will expel the Florida Democrat. 

On Wednesday, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth introduced a religious service at the Pentagon by offering a prayer, which he said he had learned from military leaders. “They they call it CSAR 25:17,” he said, using the acronym for Combat Search and Rescue missions, “which I think is meant to reflect Ezekiel 25:17.”

The prayer he recited, though, doesn’t appear in the Bible. Rather, as internet observers quickly pointed out, it bore an extremely close resemblance to the monologue that Samuel L. Jackson delivers in the 1994 film Pulp Fiction, just before he executes someone.

The Pentagon was quick to explain away Hegseth’s apparent conflation of the Bible and a violent Tarantino classic. The prayer “was obviously inspired by dialogue in Pulp Fiction,” tweeted Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell. “Both the CSAR prayer and the dialogue in Pulp Fiction were reflections of the verse Ezekiel 25:17, as Secretary Hegseth clearly said in his remarks at the prayer service. Anyone saying the Secretary misquoted Ezekiel 25:17 is peddling fake news and ignorant of reality.” (On Thursday, Hegseth also used religious language to describe journalists. “I sat there in church and I thought, our press ​are just like these Pharisees,” he said, referring to the Jewish enemies of Jesus.)

“Dads push us to take risks. Moms put the training wheels on our bike. We need moms, but not in the military.”

Last week, conservative influencer Isabel Brown celebrated 100 episodes of her podcast, where she sings the praises of motherhood, frets about the dangers of open borders, and asks rhetorical questions about homosexuality and what she frequently terms “radical” Islam.

To celebrate, Brown had a party thrown by the Daily Wire, the right-wing site that hosts her podcast. The event was also sponsored by Meta, the mega-company that owns Facebook, Instagram, and Threads, among other sites. The decorations included an archway that read “Seeking Truth to Save The West,” underneath the words “Presented by Meta” and the company’s logo. An Instagram post from Brown celebrating the party thanked “my amazing team at the Daily Wire and our friends at Meta for throwing me the cutest ‘save the west’ party right in the heart of dc,” and reiterated that the tech company had made “this special celebration possible.”

Meta hasn’t trumpeted their sponsorship of the party, but the Daily Wire, which advertises heavily across Facebook and Instagram, did, including in a Facebook ad that offered a video recap of the event and in an Instagram post that included the hashtag #MetaPartner.

Brown, who got her start working with right-wing activist factories Turning Point USA and Prager University, described herself in her TPUSA bio as “a Generation Z conservative activist who endured years of leftist indoctrination in college.” Last month, during an appearance at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference, she called for parents to push their children to “have more kids than they think they can afford, before they think they’re ready” and for women to quit taking birth control pills. The comments generated several days of headlines after a panelist on The View called it the “stupidest” advice.