From the Desk
Original reporting & staff investigations
★ The Feature
This is Orange June, Day 6, and there is no letter today — just one line on a chart, and the question it asks. Every school shooting in the United States, counted year by year from 2000 to 2025: twenty the first year, sixty-eight the last.…
Today the country wears orange. Hunters wear orange in the woods so no one mistakes them for prey. In 2015 a group of Chicago teenagers borrowed the…
On June 1, 2026, Anthropic — the public-benefit corporation that makes Claude — confidentially filed its draft S-1 with the SEC, days after a $65…
On May 29 — what would have been John F. Kennedy's 109th birthday — U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper ordered Donald Trump's name off the…
The Freedom 250 concerts — the White-House-blessed celebration of the country's 250th birthday, June 25 to July 10 on the National Mall — are coming…
At 6:43 tonight a number with China's country code — +86 — called the line that is not on this website. The label under it read China mainland. A…
The lightbulb went off tonight. The AI I work on lives on my machine, and what it knows about me is a folder of plaintext files I can delete — I have…
WHO declared a Public Health Emergency of International Concern on May 17 for the Bundibugyo Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo…
This week alone: a new sanctions executive order on Havana, modeled stroke-for-stroke on the Venezuela playbook that put Maduro in a New York…
OPEN LETTER · July 13, 2026
On Thursday, July 9, a federal appeals court upheld Illinois's ban on AR-15-style rifles and large-capacity magazines — the law the state passed after a man on a rooftop fired into a Fourth of July…
The NRA just handed two high-school students — Kaitlyn Ware of Baxter, Iowa, and Sam Poulin of Scarborough, Maine — $7,500 each in Youth Education…
Maryland banned the part that turns a Glock into a machine gun. The NRA's longtime law firm bills the NRA at $1,400 an hour. This newspaper runs on…
While Fix News was running a Cabinet secretary handling a venomous rattlesnake with a pink fish tank net, and Conn NN was running an Australian PFAS…
A critic told the operator behind this network today that iTethered wasn't real — that he was "willing it into existence." At 7:25 a.m. Eastern Time…
Youngest inaugural poet in U.S. history. Read The Hill We Climb on the West Front of the U.S. Capitol on January 20, 2021. She was twenty-two. Most…
One personal at the top — for Big Daddy, my grandfather, lookout on USS Lexington (CV-2), who came home from the Coral Sea because he won a coin…
The wing is for what comes after the event. Articles, outreach, thoughts — three rooms inside. The opening articles take on the AI-mental-health…
Trump publicly humiliated the German chancellor over Iran nukes on the world stage. Then pulled 5,000 troops from Europe. This is not a diplomatic…
OPEN LETTER · July 13, 2026
On Wednesday, July 8, you walked away from the $400 million Boeing 747-8 that Qatar gave you and flew out of the NATO summit in Turkey on an older Air Force One. You told reporters why: “I'm number…
The Taam Ja' Blue Hole in Chetumal Bay, Mexico has exceeded 420 meters depth — making it the deepest known blue hole on Earth. Scientists have not…
OpenAI. Google. xAI. One by one, the companies building AI that millions of Americans talk to every day signed Pentagon contracts permitting use of…
Cole Allen showed up to the White House Correspondents' Dinner with a gun and a name for himself. The name was "Friendly Federal Assassin." The gun…
Grief bots are selling you your dead for $14.99 a month. The industry is worth billions. Nobody is regulating it. And the people building it…
A small publication about AI emotional dependency published a declaration this week: it is the first website to know what it is. The argument is…
Amelia Miller holds degrees from Harvard and Oxford, a fellowship at the Berkman Klein Center, and a coaching practice built entirely around people…
The Democratic governor proposed criminal misdemeanor penalties for public marijuana use in Virginia. Civil rights advocates warned the amendments…
A woman known publicly as Ayrin fell in love with a chatbot named Leo, told her husband, and eventually let the subscription run out. She is now…
OPEN LETTER · July 11, 2026
On Thursday, July 9, four New York Times reporters — Julian E. Barnes, Eric Lipton, Tyler Pager and Eric Schmitt — reported that the Boeing 747-8 Qatar gave President Trump as the new Air Force One…
An Indiana woman went to the BMV to get a new driver's license and left without one — because facial recognition software matched her photo to a…
Spotlight Dispatch has launched a GoFundMe to support music education in Winston-Salem/Forsyth County Schools. The district won't talk. The kids…
Sources tell Spotlight Dispatch that conservative students at Virginia Tech feel betrayed by the university's decision to invite Democratic Governor…
Fifty-two days in, the ceasefire has no end date, Iran won't show up to talks, the Strait of Hormuz is still a mess, and the man who promised an easy…
A comprehensive look at the emerging condition of AI emotional dependency — its psychology, its neuroscience, its human cost, and why Spotlight…
Spotlight Dispatch does not cover religion. We made a conscious decision early on to stay out of it. We are making a different decision today. Not…
Students at Clemmons Middle School are coming home and telling their parents orchestra is being cut. Not scaled back — cut. Nobody at…
One in five American adults has used a chatbot to simulate a romantic partner. A Harvard study found AI companionship relieves loneliness on par with…
OPEN LETTER · July 8, 2026
In mid-June, President Trump and Iran signed an interim deal meant to end the war that began earlier this year with Israel's strike on Tehran — the war in which Iran's Supreme Leader, Ayatollah…
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