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In Retrospect: Poland, Russia, Europe

In April I spent a few days with Zryw, a Polish non-profit organization that recruits young people to enter politics and public life. Their aim is to build a new generation of civic leaders in Poland. I’ve followed their evolution from the beginning; my son is one of the founders. (“Zryw” means “impulse” or “burst of speed” in Polish). Julie Chmielewska, one of Zryw’s leaders, interviewed me at the event. Here is the conversation, lightly edited for grammar and context: Julia Chmielewska: Assuming that culture shapes institutions, could we conclude that some cultures are more prone to authoritarianism? Anne Applebaum: I don’t think so. Every culture, every nation, and every country has the potential for change. When we look at history, we can see that nations do change. Poland has changed, for example, from the 1980s to today. There’s a completely different mentality here than the one I encountered when I first visited, in 1988. The current generation sees the world through a different frame. So no, I don’t believe that certain nations are doomed to authoritarianism, or to anything. Of course, there are political and cultural traditions, but they can always be challenged. JC: So do you think there’s something intrinsic in human nature that pushes people to democracy, freedom? AA: I think there is something in human nature, a deep instinct, that pushes people towards freedom, yes. People who live in authoritarian countries – and I’ve heard this from them over and over again – sooner or later find themselves angered by a feeling of helplessness. They can see the unfairness of crooked courts, irrational political decisions. They naturally dislike the fact that somebody has all the power while they have none. In those circumstances, people who have no political background at all sometimes are politicized just by that frustration. I’m thinking of Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, for example, who was a Belarusian housewife, until the circumstances of her husband’s arrest forced her to become a politician. I met a woman who is a Uyghur from China, and who had come to live in Turkey. After several of her family members were arrested, she too was propelled into a political role. These kinds of experiences make people interested in democracy or political reform, even if they thought they didn’t care. I also think that the opposite is true: some people instinctively prefer homogeneity, order, hierarchy. They don’t like the confrontation of opinions or the noise of debate, and they lean towards a single leader or a unified regime. I think that most of modern history is shaped by the clash between those two different sides of human nature. JC: Which force do you find more powerful today? AA: I think they both have a lot of power and there’s no way of predicting who wins. Even in countries that seem very shut off or stuck in an authoritarian system can change. We’ve seen that happen. And vice versa, I think democracies can also begin to fail and slide into authoritarianism. So it’s very important not to be complacent in either direction. JC: I want to go into your history and your experiences. You’ve lived in Russia during a time of incredible change in the late 80s, and then you came back to do research in post-Soviet Russia. AA: I was a student in Russia just before the collapse of the Soviet Union. I then traveled and worked there extensively in the 1990s, and I met people who really were full of hope. They hoped that Russia could become a democracy, or at least a place that guaranteed freedom of speech, freedom of the press. These weren’t ideas that came from Washington. Although now the narrative in the Kremlin is different, I met many people who were working towards exactly that kind of transformation. A friend of mine ran a series of seminars – once a year, and then later several times a year, in cities all over Russia – designed to get people to discuss politics in new ways. She invited young politicians and journalists, as well as foreigners. I went to many of them, in Moscow as well as Volgograd and Novosibirsk. Over two decades, hundreds of people came to these seminars, and all of them wanted Russia to be different. I remain convinced that many Russians still want Russia to be different. It’s just that the old system, in the form of Putin, a representative of that system, returned. The KGB reimposed their power. And this wasn’t because of something to do with culture, this was to do with money and politics, and who was in charge. JC: You’ve partially answered my question... I wanted to ask whether that excitement of the 1990s was an exception from the Russian historical norm which has been rather authoritarian? AA: Of course, if you look at the history of Russia since the 18th century, there have always been liberal groups, reformers and revolutionaries. There were the Decembrists, in the early 19th century, and the rural populists later on, who tried to organize the peasantry. A significant group of liberal Russians appeared at the turn of the 20th century, people like the father of the writer Vladimir Nabokov, who was a Russian politician before the revolution. These groups were small in number, but sometimes had a broader significance. The Russian dissident movement in the 1950s and 1960s actually invented the modern human rights movement. It was their idea to hold the leaders of the Soviet Union accountable for the language they used, to remind them of the treaties they had signed and the promised they had made. They created the Helsinki group, for example, that held Soviet leadership to the language of the Helsinki Treaty, which formally ended the Second World War and which contained guarantees of human rights, at least on paper. That idea spread to Eastern Europe, and similar tactics were used here in Poland. (Benjamin Nathans recently wrote a great book about the Soviet dissidents, To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause) JC: But seemingly, even if they do ever get power, they could never hold on to it. AA: We don’t know, because they have never really had power. But in any case, we also don’t know what will happen in the future. There is no reason to assume that Russia will forever be condemned to totalitarianism. Even during the first fifteen years of Putin’s regime there was some form of democratic politics. Only when the full-scale war began did he bring everything to an end: he shut down all remaining independent organizations and killed his most important opponent, Alexi Navalny. But does that mean he is popular, that he enjoys legitimacy? Even now, we don’t really know what Russians think about him, or about the war. There is no way of doing real polling in Russia because nobody will answer an independent pollster over the phone. JC: Do you think that the flock of young people, especially young men, who fled Russia after the start of the war represent a continuation of liberal movements that refuse to partake in the authoritarian state, or do you think they are moving for the sake of self-preservation – “I don’t want to go to the army, so I leave”? AA: I’m sure it’s both. I actually know many people who left Russia for political reasons either in the very last years before the war, or else just after the war began. JC: And do you see a change in the young generation versus the old one that have fled? AA: It’s hard for me to say because the people who I know were mostly already politicized. I do know some younger people who left, but most of them were already either active in the opposition, or working as journalists. Many of them very self-consciously think of themselves as maintaining Russian culture abroad, just as in the 20th century the Soviet dissidents or the anti-communist White Russians once thought of themselves as people who maintained the true Russian culture, outside of Bolshevik Russia. JC: Let’s move on to Poland. One of your first experiences with Poland was reporting on Margaret Thatcher’s first state visit, in the autumn of 1988. You followed her around the farmers’ market. AA: She was making a symbolic gesture. She wanted to welcome free markets, but the only one she could really visit was the farmers’ market at Hala Mirowska. JC: And I want to talk about this area because today you can look out of any window in that district, Mirów, and see rows and rows of skyscrapers. How does it feel to see a country built from the ground in such a short time, both politically and economically? AA: You know, when you’re living in a period of dramatic change, it’s always hard to know whether the change is positive or negative. The transformation in Poland created winners and losers, as well as new classes of people, new political movements of different kinds. At the time, it sometimes just felt like turbulence. Now, we can look back at the 1990s and early 2000s in Poland and see in retrospect that the country was headed in towards prosperity and European integration. In around 2009 or 2010, I remember speaking to a woman who worked cleaning government offices, and who asked me if her daughter should study in Amsterdam or in London. This seemed to me to be a real transformation, and it happened very fast: within a few years, Poles stopped feeling like second-class Europeans, and a generation of younger Poles appeared who had no qualms about crossing borders. JC: We again live in turbulent times. Do you think we’re heading towards positive outcomes? AA: I can’t make predictions, because everything that happens tomorrow depends on what people do today. Also, history doesn’t have a trajectory. It doesn’t move in a particular direction. You only think it does afterwards. As I said, you can look afterwards at Poland in the 1990s and you could say this was a period of great progress. But not everybody at the time saw that. Sometimes people are very wrong about a given country’s trajectory. I remember people writing about Ukraine in the 1990s, about how dangerous it was that Ukraine was independent, that this was going to be an anti-semitic state, that Ukrainian nationalism was going to come back... and although you can say many bad things about Ukraine, the country made many bad choices, actually it became a pretty tolerant state which now has a Jewish president and until recently a Muslim defense minister. JC: In the 1990s Poland’s and Ukraine’s GDP were roughly similar. Ukraine was even a bit richer. So the starting point was similar for both of these countries, but they’ve turned out very, very differently. Even if we stop in 2014. Why do you think Ukraine “chose East”? Was it external influence? AA: No, I think Ukraine was in a different position. First of all, central and eastern Ukraine had been part of the Soviet Union since the 1920s, and had therefore experienced a longer period of occupation, repression, Sovietization and even Russification. Ukraine did not have, as Poland did, an alternative elite: a large cadre of economists and politicians, who already had some experience in opposition politics and in independent thinking. In Poland, the transformative finance minister, Leszek Balcerowicz, had already thought about how an economy might be decentralized before he took office. We can argue about how successful he was, but at least he was prepared to try something new. In Ukraine, people weren’t prepared. For one, there hadn’t been much space even for an illegal opposition in the previous couple of decades. Ukraine was also in many ways still emerging from colonial occupation. For the previous couple of centuries, many of the most capable Ukrainians had moved to Russia, and the first generation of leaders in independent Ukraine tended to be former Soviet apparatchiks. They didn’t immediately seek to become closer to western Europe. Instead, they looked for some kind of economic and political “third way” and an accomodation with Russia. Ukraine became stuck in this position, half-in, half-out and became pretty profoundly corrupt. JC: The Polish alternative elite had a vision of where they wanted the country to go. I think the general perception now is that this vision ends with the next election, right? Is this a natural process of gaining power? AA: Their vision, and it was shared by the time by politicians who now call themselves both left and right, was that Poland should join the EU and NATO, as fast as possible. My husband (Radek Sikorski) was in the very first government that said it wanted to join NATO. At the time this was taken very badly in Washington: the demand for NATO membership absolutely came from Poland, not from the US. But even then, in the early 1990s, many Poles already understood that the Russian sphere of influence would grow once again, that it was important to become part of the transatlantic alliance and an integrated Europe as fast as possible: NATO, the EU, the Council of Europe, all of the trading and security alliances. That consensus lasted through several different governments and over many years, even governments containing former communists. For twenty years, right, left and center disagreed about many things, but they all agreed on the direction that the country should go. In retrospect, that consensus created the basis for prosperity in Poland. JC: And regarding the Polish-Ukrainian relations. We know that antagonisms, e.g. the myth of Wołyń [a massacre of Poles that took place in what is now Western Ukraine, in 1943] are increasingly used in Polish political discourse today. In Ukraine, nationalist historians make heroes out of UPA, the Ukrainian revolutionary army, which is held responsible for this tragedy. Where do you see a start for burying the hatchet? Is the reconciliation of our nations possible? AA: So here’s a strange thing: For more than a decade after they both gained independence, Poland and Ukraine participated in a number of projects that were designed to solve exactly these kinds of Polish-Ukrainian differences. Books were published that were jointly written by Polish and Ukrainian historians, monuments were built. These projects were successful: If you’d asked me this question in 2010, I would have said that there are no real historical issues between Poland and Ukraine, that the two countries had mostly reconciled. For a number of reasons, this began to shift. In Poland, children and grandchildren of victims of the Wołyń massacre felt their tragedy hadn’t been fully recognized. In Ukraine, nationalist groups wanted the UPA partisans who had fought against the Soviet Union recognized for their heroism, despite the fact that some in this broad and not well-defined group were also linked to Wołyń. In both eastern Poland and western Ukraine, the memory of the ethnic cleansing that took place there in the late 1940s - Poles were moved West, Ukrainians East - to accomodate new borders has left feelings of displacement and bitterness. The wave of Ukrainian immigration, which started before the war, may have provoked some of this. But don’t underestimate the role played by Russia, which has always wanted to create discord between Poland and Ukraine, and pumps out propaganda to that effect in both countries. Vandalism on both sides of the border, damage done to cemeteries and monuments, is sometimes carried out by provacateurs working for Russia, just to create bad feelings. The Polish-Ukrainian conflict also hides a different reality: although there are real grievances and bad memories, the truth is that the biggest tragedies both nations experienced in the twentieth century were inflicted by the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. That should unite these two countries, not divide them. JC: This week (19.04.2026 – Ed.) in Hungary we saw that using historical narratives to create grievance has no longer worked. Are you optimistic about the direction after Orban’s loss? AA: The Hungarian election was really important because it shows that people can actually resist powerful, dominant propaganda. The ruling party Fidesz controlled all of the TV, 90% of the newspapers, the constitutional court, the bureaucracy... and yet people had the nerve to vote against it and resist it. It’s also an important election because Hungary created a huge network of well-funded think tanks and foundations that were funding other far right groups and projects. So that loss is going to have a knock-on effect in other places too, maybe even in Poland. JC: What you’ve said about resisting propaganda reminds me of one of the interviews you did about talking to Russians in the post-Soviet era who claimed that people knew that the system was lying. Why do people choose to believe in these regimes anyway? AA: Because it’s useful. Stephen Kotkin, an American historian, once described how people would learn how to “speak Bolshevik”: It was just a language that you needed to use in order to get by in society. If you didn’t talk the way the regime wanted you to talk, then you might have problems, or lose your job, or your kids would not get into university. It was a way of getting along. Communist Poland was similar, at least in the early years. When I was writing a book about the Sovietization of Eastern Europe after World War II, I met a lot of people who wanted to talk a lot about the war, when many of them had done really heroic things. But almost nobody wanted to talk about the decade afterwards, between 1945 and 1956. This was when you had the short period of terror, violence and Polish Stalinism. To stay safe, people felt the need to just go along with what others were saying, or stay out of politics, or use communist jargon without necessarily believing it. I don’t judge them for it, and I wouldn’t describe all of those people as collaborators. It’s easy to feel moral certainty in retrospect, because we know that communism ended. But if you were living in 1949, it might not have been clear to you that communism was going to end. In very repressive societies, maybe about 10% of people who are really evil – collaborators, torturers. Maybe 10% of people are really brave and who find ways to resist. And then around 80% of people have kids, they have parents, they have to have jobs and they’ve had to get through it somehow. Strange though it may sound, I’ve found that the work I did on that book is now very useful in explaining some of what’s going on in the United States today. There are plenty of members of the Republican Party in Congress who know perfectly well that Donald Trump says many things that aren’t true. But they avoid criticizing him because it’s inconvenient, because they would get in trouble, because someone would attack them on the internet. So actually you don’t even need mass terror to get people to conform. JC: Is Gen Z reinventing agency? AA: We’ll see. In any generation you can find groups of people who want agency. If you live in a society that’s unfair, for example where a tiny number of people have captured most of the wealth, then at a certain point people rebel. This is always easier for younger people, who have you have less to lose. The question now is how the internet will affect the relationships between citizens and the state, and how it will change organizations. The “Twitter revolutions” people spoke about as early as 2008-9, mass protests organized online, have often proved to be very superficial. Although you can easily join something just by clicking, the work of creating a real movement requires physical participation. Successful mass movements of the past, for example the Civil Rights movement in the United States, were built by people who had spent many years together. They had participated in non-violent workshops together. They practiced and prepared. Just using the you can get everybody to show up at a certain moment, but then when the protest is broken up, nothing happens. It’s also true that the repressive regimes have more recently learned how to use the internet to undermine leaders and movements. Most of all, they now understand how to make people cynical. The form of propaganda that most modern authoritarians use - and I think the Russians really pioneered this - deploys sneering cynicism. Instead of praising the rulers, the regime propagandists mock the opposition movement leadership for being supposedly corrupt or sexually degenerate, with the goal of undermining any kind of idealism. JC: MAGA grew on the internet? AA: MAGA is a real grassroots movement. They had symbols, red hats, they showed up at rallies. But you’re right that the cynicism, the sarcasm and the distrust that the movement embodies came originally from the internet, and this is different. Fifty years ago, most European political parties had a social base in real organizations, in trade unions for Social Democrats, in church groups for Christian Democrats. As people stopped going to church and as the trade unions became smaller, the social base of these parties disappeared. Now people who wouldn’t have known one another in the past meet on the internet and create new movements, many of which don’t last. JC: Is history ending? Going in stale circles? AA: History never ends. In truth, human beings want contradictory things at the same time: order and freedom, stability and change. These things are never resolved, and when a society swings too far in one direction, people always push it the other way. But each time that happens, the result is different. Certainly it is true that we are now in a period when old philosophers and ideas from the 1930s are undergoing a revival. Carl Schmitt, who was a philosopher who was very influential on the Nazis, is back as an influence on both the far left and the far right, once again inspiring people to think that all politics has to be existential, that all politics is about defining and defeating enemies. In the US, some are also bringing back dominionism, the idea that we need a Christian and not a secular state. It’s also true that we are living through a more fundamental shift. The old left-right divide, which was mostly about the size of the state, is much less important now. Instead, we are arguing about more fundamental things: what are our rights, what protects our freedom. Or how much power do we want to give small elites, versus how much power to give ordinary people. In America a small group of very wealthy people now control information, because they control the social media platforms and AI, which means they determine what people will read and learn. Finding a way to preserve preserve zones of autonomy and independent thinking, this is going to be the main task for the next generation. JC: What is the one book that a person interested in Central Europe should read? AA: You could read my book “Iron Curtain: the Crushing of Eastern Europe” which tells the story of how the Soviet Union imposed its culture on the region. Or read Tim Snyder’s history of the region, “The Reconstruction of Nations: Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus 1569-1999.” And everyone should read “The Captive Mind” by Czesław Miłosz, which describes exactly the phenomenon we were talking about: why do people collaborate? I joined Scott Galloway and the brilliant Fiona Hill in a discussion about the wars in Ukraine and Iran, the future of global power, and what these conflicts reveal about America's role in the world. Scott told us that this was the 400th edition of his podcast, which is quite a number: My friend Francesco Chiamulera runs a brilliant series of literary events, Una Colline di Libri, A Hill of Books, in the Prosecco Hills, a region of vineyards and elegant hill towns in the Veneto, north of Venice. We did an event in Vittorio Veneto and also drove and biked around the countryside. Buy Autocracy Inc Buy Iron Curtain Open Letters, from Anne Applebaum is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Subscribe

Jun 13 • 4:15 AM EDT • Politics • anneapplebaum.substack.com

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Jun 12 • 10:57 AM EDT • Health • wpr.org

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Jun 12 • 8:00 AM EDT • Business • palmcoast.gov

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Social Security is Facing a Political Crisis

On Tuesday the Social Security Trustees released their latest report on the system’s finances. The numbers didn’t change much: Unless something is done, the Old Age Survivors and Disability Insurance (OASDI) program, Social Security’s official name, will be unable to pay full benefits starting in either 2032 or 2034, depending on some technical issues. That’s not far away: If the Trustees are right, the prospect of a Social Security crisis will loom over the next presidential administration. It’s important to understand, however, the nature of the looming crisis. It won’t be an economic crisis. It won’t even be a serious fiscal crisis. Whatever you may have heard, Social Security isn’t in danger of going bankrupt. What we’re facing, instead, is potential political crisis. Congress and the White House could easily take action to sustain America’s retirement system. But given the current state of our politics, there’s no guarantee that they will. 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There is, however, a legislative issue. As long as the Social Security Administration can pay benefits out of payroll taxes and its cash reserve, there’s no need for Congress to vote each year to authorize benefits — they just keep going out until further notice. However, once those resources become insufficient, benefits will fall —by 17 percent according to the Trustees — unless Congress passes new legislation that “tops up” Social Security’s finances. Yet the current administration and Republican party are such extremists that there is a real risk that Social Security will be held hostage on behalf of their goals. If this should come to pass, the hostage-takers will claim that shoring up Social Security is unaffordable. Right on cue, Mike Johnson, the Trump-sycophant Speaker of the House, declared on Monday that “entitlement programs” like Social Security “have to be adjusted and fixed,” and that Republicans will introduce a plan to that effect next year. But this is a ploy, because while the cost of maintaining Social Security benefits at their promised level isn’t trivial, it is in fact affordable. According to the Trustees’ report, the actuarial balance of OASDI up through 2050 — the amount of additional funds it would need to keep paying full benefits for the next 25 years — is 1.06 percent of GDP. To put that number in perspective, the Trump administration proposes increasing military spending next year by $420 billion, equivalent to about 1.4 percent of GDP – without any discussion of whether that’s affordable Yet how did we get to the point where Social Security will need to be topped up? The main answer is that we have an aging population, with a growing ratio of retirees collecting benefits to workers paying into the system: Trump’s anti-immigration policies are making this problem worse. According to the Trustees’ report, lower immigration will deepen Social Security’s financial hole because many immigrants are working-age adults who will pay into the system for decades before they collect benefits. In fact, this problem may be much bigger than the report acknowledges: The report’s baseline assumption is that we’ll have net immigration of almost 1.2 million people a year, and even the pessimistic case assumes 750,000 a year. Meanwhile actual net immigration has already been cut far below that — and may now be negative. Moreover, Social Security is being financially damaged by growing income inequality in America. Payroll taxes are levied only on wages up to $184,500, and they don’t touch capital income. With the distribution of income increasingly shifting from labor to capital, as well as becoming more unequal among wage-earners, revenue from the Social Security payroll tax has been falling as a share of national income. From 1990 to 2024, it fell from 5.02 percent of gross domestic income to 4.46 percent. Which brings me to the question that, these days, we ask about everything: How might Social Security be affected by the advent of AI? A short answer: If, as many of us fear, AI accelerates rising income inequality, it will further reduce the payroll tax receipts that currently pay for Social Security and further endanger its finances. On the other hand, if AI, as its advocates promise, leads to faster economic growth, it will increase the potential tax base that could and should be used to support Social Security and other social insurance programs. But to take advantage of that larger base, we’ll have to get serious about taxing wealth and capital income. Is Social Security in trouble? Yes, but only because of the way its financing is currently structured — a structure that no longer works well because our society and economy have become so unequal. Moreover, Trump’s immigration policies are further endangering its already deteriorating financial condition. So don’t believe Republicans’ gaslighting that it will be necessary to cut Social Security benefits. All that is necessary to preserve Social Security is political will to raise taxes on the wealthy and a sensible immigration policy. MUSICAL CODA Actually 67 under current law.

Jun 11 • 6:34 AM EDT • Politics • paulkrugman.substack.com

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Jun 11 • 6:00 AM EDT • Politics • idahocapitalsun.com

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Conspiracy theories are filling the void.

Jun 10 • 5:44 PM EDT • Politics • theatlantic.com

Democrats Try to Move Past ‘Cultural Pandering’ to Latinos for Midterm Elections

The party is trying desperately to win back some voters in the key swing group.

Jun 10 • 5:29 PM EDT • Politics • nytimes.com

UF trustees advance President-elect Stuart Bell to final state board vote

The vote advances Bell, the former University of Alabama president, to the final stage of a hiring process that has become entangled in culture-war battles over diversity, equity and inclusion.

Jun 10 • 4:47 PM EDT • Politics • miamiherald.com

Tuned-Out Middle

Tuned-Out Middle are defined largely by their relatively low levels of interest in politics and participation in elections. While they are roughly equally likely to associate with the Republican and Democratic parties, most don’t identify as partisans, and they tend not to hold strong positions on political issues. Just 32% voted in the 2024 election. […]

Jun 10 • 2:03 PM EDT • Politics • pewresearch.org

PARAGON SPORTS- Specializes in NYC

Paragon Sports, New York City's independently owned Sports Specialty Store, today announced a series of in-store transformations and brand partnerships that underscore the company's strategy as the definitive sports specialty retail authority of New York City. The announcement coincides with the company being voted the #1 Sporting Goods Store in the United States by the USA Today Readers' Choice Awards.

Jun 10 • 1:46 PM EDT • Sports • finance.yahoo.com

Trump-backed David Flippo wins Nevada Republican primary for U.S. House seat

Democrats also hoped for a Flippo victory, thinking it would make it easier for them to win over less partisan voters in November.

Jun 10 • 1:06 PM EDT • Politics • pbs.org

From The Daily: For a different kind of politics, vote El-Sayed on August 4

From a policy standpoint, El-Sayed’s broad, sweeping vision is best for all Michiganders. He is the only candidate who is running to pass Medicare for All, and his public health background equips him with the necessary experience and vision to improve the U.S. healthcare system.

Jun 10 • 12:42 PM EDT • Politics • michigandaily.com

Arlington council renames entertainment district in bid to add the area to statewide network

The council voted unanimously to rename the district. It now awaits state approval.

Jun 10 • 11:01 AM EDT • Entertainment • fortworthreport.org

BOXABL and FG Merger II Corp. Stockholders Approve Business Combination

BOXABL Inc. ("BOXABL") and FG Merger II Corp. (Nasdaq: FGMC) ("FGMC"), a publicly traded special purpose acquisition company, today announced that stockholders of FGMC and BOXABL voted to approve the previously announced business combination between FGMC and BOXABL (the "Business Combination") at their respective special meetings of stockholders held on June 9, 2026 (collectively, the "Special Meetings").

Jun 10 • 8:30 AM EDT • Business • finance.yahoo.com

Craig Federighi Explains Why Apple Pivoted to a Siri Chatbot App

Apple senior vice president of software engineering Craig Federighi has explained why the company launched a standalone Siri app in iOS 27, after previously characterizing a dedicated chatbot as contrary to its Apple Intelligence strategy. The new Siri app, announced at WWDC earlier this week, gives users a centralized place to manage and revisit their conversations with Siri AI.

Jun 10 • 8:07 AM EDT • Technology • macrumors.com

Commentary: Spencer Pratt could have been a real contender. His greatest enemy was himself

Spencer Pratt had a few things going for him when he launched an insurgent campaign to become Los Angeles' next mayor.

Jun 10 • 6:00 AM EDT • Politics • latimes.com

Opinion | A Different Kind of ‘Values Voter’ Will Power the 2026 Midterms

A new politics of morality is rising in the Democratic Party.

Jun 10 • 5:03 AM EDT • Politics • nytimes.com

Kean misses narrow vote giving Trump immigration effort $70 billion NJ Spotlight News

'These gulags shouldn't exist in our country,' says Conaway, while House speaker praises GOP for doing 'responsible thing'

Jun 10 • 12:15 AM EDT • Politics • njspotlightnews.org

News 10 Sports Director Tim Staudt nominated for Michigan Sports Hall of Fame

You can vote for Tim through Friday, June 12.

Jun 10 • 12:08 AM EDT • Sports • wilx.com

Platner wins Maine primary to challenge Collins

Voters also headed to the polls in primary elections in Nevada, North Dakota, and South Carolina ahead of the midterms.

Jun 9 • 9:55 PM EDT • Politics • bbc.com

Resolution honoring LGBTQ health center in Arlington rejected by Tarrant commissioners

County commissioners voted along party lines not to honor the HELP Center for LGBTQ+ Health.

Jun 9 • 9:08 PM EDT • Health • fortworthreport.org

Polls close in Maine as voters weigh Graham Platner’s scandals

Jun 9 • 9:07 PM EDT • Politics • cnn.com

Election update: Republican Steve Hilton to face Becerra in November

The British former Fox News host has secured enough votes to advance to the November governor's race election

Jun 9 • 7:45 PM EDT • Politics • calmatters.org

Primary election results will determine final candidates for governor

Voters had until 7 p.m. on June 9 to cast their ballots in the South Carolina gubernatorial primaries.

Jun 9 • 7:05 PM EDT • Politics • greenvilleonline.com

Following primary election, new Proposition 50 congressional races take shape

Seven months after California voters overwhelmingly approved new congressional district lines mid-decade, the races for November are taking shape

Jun 9 • 7:03 PM EDT • Politics • spectrumlocalnews.com

Business owners worry no DORA could mean fewer sales ahead of Salem Super Cruise

SALEM, Ohio (WKBN) — The Salem Super Cruise is about to roar back into town, but not everyone is happy with the fact that alcohol won’t be allowed. City Council voted against allowing a…

Jun 9 • 6:25 PM EDT • Business • wkbn.com

Redding nurses, health care workers to hold strike vote and picket for safe staffing

Registered nurses and caregivers at Shasta Regional Medical Center in Redding, Calif., will hold a strike vote and picket on Thursday, June 11, to protest management’s refusal to address patient care and safe staffing issues. Nurses and health care workers at Shasta Regional, a Prime Healthcare facility.

Jun 9 • 6:09 PM EDT • Health • nationalnursesunited.org

A Turning Point for Conservative Women

Some sounded vaguely feminist; another doesn’t want women to vote

Jun 9 • 5:48 PM EDT • Politics • theatlantic.com

Why the GOP’s voter fraud theories in California don’t make sense

The last week has brought the largest resurgence of election denialism since the aftermath of the 2020 election. Many on the right have cried foul over late shifts toward Democrats in results from California’s June 2 primary.

Jun 9 • 4:26 PM EDT • Politics • cnn.com

What voters need to know about BREC’s millage renewal

The millage funding BREC's maintenance and operation of parks, facilities and recreation services throughout East Baton Rouge Parish is heading to the ballot for renewal, with early voting set to begi… Already an INSIDER? Sign in. Already an INSIDER? Sign in

Jun 9 • 3:52 PM EDT • Business • businessreport.com

Live Results: South Carolina midterm primaries

South Carolina voters will choose nominees for governor and other offices in a state primary on Tuesday, the latest test of President Donald Trump’s sway over Republican voters.

Jun 9 • 3:45 PM EDT • Politics • pbs.org

California's slow vote count faces changes as Supreme Court decision on late ballots looms

The U.S. Supreme Court could soon rule that California cannot accept ballots after election day. Experts are unsure what effect that would have on the counting process, but say there are other steps the state could take to speed things up.

Jun 9 • 3:45 PM EDT • Politics • latimes.com

FHSAA votes to add Open division in multiple sports beginning this year

The Open division is now a reality in high school sports, ushered in by a unanimous vote by the Florida High School Athletic Association’s board of directors on Tuesday morning.

Jun 9 • 3:37 PM EDT • Sports • news4jax.com

House Votes to Advance $70 Billion G.O.P. Immigration Bill

The test vote cleared the way for final passage of Republicans’ megabill to fund immigration enforcement through the remainder of President Trump’s term.

Jun 9 • 2:45 PM EDT • Politics • nytimes.com

Scheffler campaign: Voters win: WEC unanimously rejects challenge to Scheffler's ballot access

APPLETON, WI — Mark Scheffler for Congress campaign calls a press conference for 3:00 p.m. this afternoon at Houdini Plaza in Appleton to issue the following statement and to take questions from the media: “Last week, the Secretary of the Brown County...

Jun 9 • 2:33 PM EDT • Politics • wispolitics.com

Inside Iowa Politics: Potential 2028 presidential candidate’s advice to Democrats

Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear offered advice to Democrats on how to talk with voters.

Jun 9 • 1:20 PM EDT • Politics • ktiv.com

A majority of voters who changed their political party switched to Republican

Twelve of 23 counties shared data on voter party registration after this year's deadline.

Jun 9 • 1:07 PM EDT • Politics • wyomingpublicmedia.org

Councilmember Cindy Bass declared herself the winner of a Philly Democratic ward election — and may have violated party rules

In a brief meeting Monday, Bass said she won against her progressive challenger in the 22nd Ward and rejected demands for a roll call to clarify the vote.

Jun 9 • 12:54 PM EDT • Politics • inquirer.com

Progressive Nithya Raman advances to November runoff against Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass

The election will test whether voters in the heavily Democratic city want to move further to the political left to address long-running problems of homelessness, buckled streets and sidewalks and climbing rent and home prices.

Jun 9 • 12:53 PM EDT • Politics • pbs.org

What to watch in Tuesday's primaries as Platner seeks Senate nomination in Maine

Voters across Maine, Nevada, South Carolina and North Dakota head to the polls Tuesday for another day of primary elections in America, but much of the political world will be focused on Maine's high-stakes U.S. Senate contest.

Jun 9 • 12:24 PM EDT • Politics • pbs.org

ICE funding bill is up for House vote after weeks of Republican delays

The legislation, which the Senate passed Friday, has been held up by disputes over President Donald Trump’s ballroom and the $1.8B payout fund.

Jun 9 • 12:07 PM EDT • Politics • washingtonpost.com

Albany County Legislature OKs purchase of 3 more former Saint Rose properties

Legislators voted Monday to spend $5.7 million on the three former college properties.

Jun 9 • 11:21 AM EDT • Politics • spectrumlocalnews.com

Sen Collins slams Bernie-backed Graham Platner as too far-left for Maine voters

Sen. Susan Collins calls Democratic challenger Graham Platner too extreme for Maine voters, while Platner charges Collins is the "radical" candidate.

Jun 9 • 10:56 AM EDT • Politics • foxnews.com

Pratt loses in LA mayor race, Trump stokes conspiracies

Pratt lost ground with every new batch of vote dumps

Jun 9 • 10:40 AM EDT • Politics • theweek.com

Texas Republicans won by going all-in on MAGA. Now they have to sell it to everyone else

Some political scientists in the state believe going all-in on MAGA may have drawn a line in the sand, potentially hampering how well GOP nominees attract swing voters.

Jun 9 • 10:21 AM EDT • Politics • houstonpublicmedia.org

Voters take to polls in primary races

With ranked-choice voting, some results may take more than a week to tabulate.

Jun 9 • 9:20 AM EDT • Politics • spectrumlocalnews.com

The Latest: Maine primary election tests Platner’s support following mounting scandals

Voters across Maine, Nevada, South Carolina and North Dakota head to the polls for another day of primary elections in America, but much of the political world will be focused on Maine’s high-stakes U.S. Senate contest

Jun 9 • 8:48 AM EDT • Politics • washingtonpost.com

Holland & Knight Health Dose: June 9, 2026 | Insights

The U.S. Senate passed a reconciliation package on a 52-47 vote that will provide $70 billion in funding to support U.S. immigration enforcement agencies and their activities.

Jun 9 • 8:00 AM EDT • Health • hklaw.com

Using Trump-Hitler and Weimar analogies is bad politics

Warning voters of Germany’s past is not what will change minds.

Jun 9 • 6:15 AM EDT • Politics • washingtonpost.com

Only half of U.S. adults trust the CDC’s public health recommendations, poll finds

The only group for whom trust in the CDC has increased over the past year are Republican voters — 67% this year, slightly up from 63% when the poll was conducted in April 2025

Jun 9 • 6:00 AM EDT • Politics • pbs.org

Only half of U.S. adults trust the CDC’s public health recommendations, poll finds

The only group for whom trust in the CDC has increased over the past year are Republican voters — 67% this year, slightly up from 63% when the poll was conducted in April 2025

Jun 9 • 6:00 AM EDT • Health • pbs.org

Can Democrats take the Senate? Maine voters may provide a clue

Democrat Graham Platner appears likely to become the party's nominee against Sen. Susan Collins. Platner has been accused of engaging in volatile behavior with women, among other controversies.

Jun 9 • 6:00 AM EDT • Politics • latimes.com

Will Platner Scandals Dampen Democratic Vote? What to Watch in Tuesday’s Primaries.

Any indication of tepid support for Graham Platner, a Democratic candidate for Senate in Maine, will be seen as a warning sign about his chances against Senator Susan Collins, the Republican incumbent.

Jun 9 • 5:02 AM EDT • Politics • nytimes.com

A first test for Platner and other key races to watch in Tuesday’s primaries in Maine and beyond

Primaries in four states on Tuesday will offer clues about how much tolerance voters have for candidates embroiled in controversies, while testing President Donald Trump’s sway in a crowded Republican primary and setting up a key race for governor in one of the country’s premier presidential battleground states.

Jun 9 • 5:00 AM EDT • Politics • cnn.com

Charlie Crist grows fundraising haul to $1.6M, rolls out major vote-by-mail effort

The Crist campaign and its allied committee raised more than $330,000 from March 1 through May 31.

Jun 9 • 4:15 AM EDT • Politics • floridapolitics.com

Business, unions unite against Swiss immigration cap push

Swiss business leaders and unions are mobilising ahead of a vote Sunday on capping immigration, which has triggered fears of dire impacts on employment and trade relations with the European Union.Majo...

Jun 9 • 1:29 AM EDT • Business • yahoo.com

South Carolina Republicans try to extend winning streak as Sen. Lindsey Graham seeks fifth term

South Carolina voters are narrowing down candidates in key races for governor and U.S. Senate

Jun 9 • 12:12 AM EDT • Politics • washingtonpost.com

What to watch in Tuesday's primaries as Graham Platner tries to clinch Senate nomination in Maine

Voters across Maine, Nevada, South Carolina and North Dakota head to the polls for another day of primary elections in America

Jun 9 • 12:09 AM EDT • Politics • washingtonpost.com

What to watch in Tuesday's primaries as Graham Platner tries to clinch Senate nomination in Maine

Voters across Maine, Nevada, South Carolina and North Dakota head to the polls for another day of primary elections in America.

Jun 9 • 12:04 AM EDT • Politics • news4jax.com