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.
Recent polling shows that the younger you are, the more you want your romantic partner to be politically aligned with you.
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.’ ”
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
computa, turn ICYMI into a Times Square billboard 🤖✨
Thank you to @amazonmusic & @playmorepods ! We’re so excited to see ICYMI in Times Square 🤩
Listen to ICYMI on Amazon Music now. And be sure to swipe ➡️ to see us try and capture the moment.
Everyone would probably hate A.I. less if we could just see some upside to it. But despite all the investment—into the companies, into infrastructure like data centers, so much into marketing—it’s widely known: artificial intelligence sucks.
Nilay Patel (@reckless1280 ), co-founder and editor in chief of @verge , joins Lizzie O'Leary on What Next: TBD to discuss why Software Brain is eating Silicon Valley and why so many Americans hate AI.
Watch now on YouTube via the link in our bio.
The announcement on Wednesday that South Carolina’s state Supreme Court has overturned Alex Murdaugh’s 2023 conviction for the murders of his wife, Maggie, and son, Paul, was the latest sensational twist in the story of one of the most notorious crimes of the past decade. Murdaugh’s counsel successfully argued that Becky Hill, the court clerk during the murder trial, had tampered with the jury.
While casual observers might be startled by this development, James Lasdun is not. Lasdun, who covered the case for the New Yorker and recently published The Family Man: Blood and Betrayal in the House of Murdaugh, wrote about Hill’s problematic behavior during the trial and the even sketchier memoir she published afterward about her time at the Colleton County Courthouse in Walterboro, South Carolina. Hill’s book, Behind the Doors of Justice: The Murdaugh Murders, was later withdrawn by its publisher for reasons unrelated to the jury interference charges, and in yet another unrelated incident, Hill was sentenced to probation after pleading guilty to showing photographs from sealed court exhibits to a reporter and then lying about it in court.
Slate's Laura Miller spoke to Lasdun on Wednesday about the woman who inadvertently overturned Alex Murdaugh’s murder conviction and set the stage for yet another trial. 🔗 in bio for their conversation.
BREAKING: The Supreme Court preserved access to abortion pills by mail … but one justice said providers should be prosecuted and imprisoned. #supremecourt #abortion #abortionaccess #clarencethomas
The fallout from the Supreme Court gutting Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act in Louisiana v. Callais is in full swing, as red states are locked in a mad dash to implement new congressional maps that will secure more seats, sacrificing minority voters in nearly every circumstance. Lower courts are equally busy, with legal challenges being brought left and right by both Republicans and Democrats to stymie each other’s power grabs and limit the damage in midterm elections that are now just six months away. Strap in, as we use this week’s newsletter to unpack the state of play in the U.S. gerrymandering wars.
Typically, states create new congressional maps every 10 years, in line with the national decennial census. However, last summer, President Donald Trump upended this practice when he urged Texas to redistrict mid-decade in order to net Republicans more congressional seats, an attempt to mitigate Democrats’ expected sweep in the 2026 midterm elections. Texas enacted a new map that gave Republicans five new House seats, but California responded with its own tit-for-tat gerrymander which also netted the country’s largest Democratic state an additional five Democratic seats. Other Republican-leaning states, including Ohio, Utah, and North Carolina, jumped in to follow suit. 🔗 in bio for this edition of Executive Dysfunction.
The Supreme Court is reviving Jim Crow across the South because it thinks Black people have too much political power. #supremecourt #election #voting #louisiana #alabama
A redrawn Virginia electoral map looked like it could offset at least some red state gerrymandering—until the Virginia Supreme Court stepped in. But if Democrats—in the commonwealth or elsewhere—have a way to keep Republicans from redistricting themselves into permanent power, now’s the time.
Jamelle Bouie, New York Times opinion columnist, joins Mary Harris on What Next and makes the case for fighting dirty.
Watch the full conversation now on YouTube via the link in our bio.
