On Tuesday, Karen Pence’s office announced the second lady would return to a part-time gig at Immanuel Christian School, where she taught during her husband’s Congressional tenure. Pence, a noted watercolor enthusiast, will be teaching art in the academy’s elementary school. The school’s rules, as codified in a couple…

Late last summer Seema Verma, the administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, announced that beginning in 2019 most American hospitals would be required to post their full lists of “standard charges” for services rendered. You can now find many of these spreadsheets online, and they list medical…

In the nine years since Monopoly-man-come-to-life Joe Ricketts and his cartoonishly wealthy progeny purchased the Chicago Cubs from the Tribune Company, the Ricketts dynasty—publicly represented by 55-year-old investment banker and public transit enthusiast Tom—have found themselves in repeated disagreement with the…

Welcome back to The Billionaire’s Inbox, a series in which we get to hear from the other half, in its own words. Today we’re looking at how the influential Ricketts family—patriarch Joe Ricketts, Nebraska Governor Pete Ricketts, Republican National Committee finance chairman Todd Ricketts, Chicago Cubs chairman Tom…

Welcome back to The Billionaire’s Inbox, where we hear from the other half, in its own words. Today we’re looking at the Ricketts family’s political attitudes and influences. You can read the previous installments of the series, and some of Joe Ricketts’ thoughts on unions, here:

Joe Ricketts, personal net worth $2.2 billion, is a private man. With less name recognition than some dark money donors, yet a comparable interest in trading wealth for political influence, the 77-year-old conservative takes great pains to keep himself out of the press. He does not grant many interviews, preferring to…

On Wednesday Jezebel wrote about a viral story, written by the James Beard-award winning food critic Kevin Alexander in Thrillist, that appeared to be either an act of shoddy journalism or a self-serving acceptance of a single unreliable narrator’s statement of fact. The truth, Jezebel has learned, is that it was a…

Earlier this month, the James Beard-award-winning food critic Kevin Alexander wrote a long and very well-received story for Thrillist, framed as something between an act of contrition and a cautionary tale. Last year Alexander had named a Portland, Oregon burger joint called Stanich’s the “best burger in America.”…

Brookhaven Academy, in Mississippi, is a “non-sectarian school based on Christian principles” with a footbridge spanning a stream in its “outdoor classroom” and an impressive carved wooden cougar greeting visitors at its front door. The dining hall serves rib sandwiches and hushpuppies; parents purchase school…

To a lot of people, and a number of its own employees, Simple Health looked like your average insurance purveyor, albeit one that was doing particularly well for itself. There were yearly company-wide barbecues and team-building exercises in its corporate office. The firm’s CEO, Steve Dorfman, a 2015 South Florida…

Last week, as first reported by the St. Paul Pioneer Press, the University of Minnesota Twin Cities removed gender-specific language from one scholarship and is putting another “under review.” The school is the most recent institution over the last few years to bend to pressure from men’s rights activists, who argue…

Shawn Moody is a really nice guy. Everyone says so: Even the political opponents who consider him something of an empty suit, even the people who have had the uncomfortable experience of watching him answer a question as if he’s reciting the index of a business management book.

Whatever I expected from the voters of Massachusetts, it certainly wasn’t this middle-aged man in a tank top, leaning on his half-open screen door and gazing into the middle distance as he delivered a stirring speech about people born with the “soul of the woman.” Actually, he told a pair of animated canvassers right…

In the event that the people actually running for office this midterm season aren’t upsetting enough, here’s something to consider: In January, Maine’s Paul LePage, the worst governor in America—you’ll perhaps remember him from the time he called a state representative a “son of a bitch, socialist cocksucker,” or as…

Portland, ME — On Thursday night, as Maine Republican Susan Collins weighed her vote on Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation to the Supreme Court, around 60 protestors stood in a plaza across the street from her Portland office. They held signs reading “I believe her.” Tourists cut around the outskirts of the crowd. As one…

In late September, Althea Garrison, Boston’s “most perennial of perennial candidates” and a once-obscure contender for a seat on its City Council, sat in a Boston library in her signature monochrome and told me a story designed to illustrate two subjects close to her heart: how her own resolute character helped her to…

Today Rachel Mitchell, a career prosecutor who has worked in Maricopa County, Arizona, since 1993, is interviewing Christine Blasey Ford on behalf of the Republican Party. Since her role was first announced, Mitchell has been the subject of intense national scrutiny, though she has declined to speak publicly about her…

Last week, BuzzFeed shuttered most of its podcasts, which included See Something Say Something, The News, and Reporting to You. In a memo to staff written after the company learned of a forthcoming Wall Street Journal article about the decision, BuzzFeed’s VP of news, Shani O. Hilton, said that podcasts would “move to…

This week the Puerto Rican government raised Hurricane Maria’s official death toll from 64 to 2,975. In response to questions about the new, vastly increased estimate, President Trump said Wednesday he believed the response effort on the island had been “fantastic.”