Eric Berger

In early June, Dave Margulies, owner and producer of High Sierra Music Festival, was working on a printed pocket guide with a show schedule, which organizers will hand out to attendees of the more than 30-year-old Quincy, California, event.That there even would be a festival to navigate this year wasn’t a foregone conclusion. Margulies says the festival used to sell about 7,000 tickets annually; in 2023 and 2024, it sold about 4,500 each year. “It almost sent us into bankruptcy,” he says.Indepen...

It is graduation season in the United States and with it comes a tradition of commencement speeches to departing college students, usually from high-profile figures who seek to inspire those leaving academia. But, as with many things under Donald Trump’s second term in the White House, commencement season this year has been far from normal, especially as the US president and his allies have waged conflicts against the nation’s universities.

When asked about Donald Trump’s Easter morning post wishing a happy holiday to “the Radical Left Lunatics … fighting and scheming so hard to bring Murderers, Drug Lords, Dangerous Prisoners” to the United States, Jackson Lahmeyer, an Oklahoma evangelical Christian pastor, said: “Isn’t it terrible that they are wanting to do that?” Lahmeyer, the founder of the Pastors for Trump organization, was not bothered by Trump’s extreme and divisive message on the Christian religious holiday, because, he said: “You cannot unify with evil.”

In January, a teenager in suburban St. Louis informed his high school counselor that a classmate said he planned to kill himself later that day. The 14-year-old classmate denied it, but his mother, Marie, tore through his room and found a suicide note in his nightstand. (She asked KFF Health News to publish only her middle name because she does not want people to misjudge or label her son.) His parents took him to Mercy Hospital St. Louis. According to his mother, providers told them they didn’t have beds available at their behavioral health center, so the teen spent three days in a room in a secured area of the emergency department and saw a doctor twice, one time virtually.

In both real life and on film, New York City has often been a city linked with public scandals, corruption and high drama.But even Hollywood scriptwriters, so often keen on using the Big Apple as a backdrop, would have been hard-pushed to describe the astonishing events that have played out around the mayor, Eric Adams, in recent days.Last week, the US Department of Justice moved to drop criminal charges against Adams, in what many see as a blatant quid pro quo for getting Adams onboard as a pol...

When Samantha Shaw took a new job as a research technician for a sleep-related study at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in 2021, she was excited to work on a cause that felt personal.Since high school, she said, she had trouble falling and staying asleep, so she jumped at the chance to work with experts in the field.The researchers were looking into whether a medication could help with excessive daytime sleepiness in people who worked night shifts, often in transportation or construction, that star...

About five years ago, Matt Feyerabend, co-owner of an Arkansas ice-cream business, wanted to explore new flavors and use more native fruits, so while delivering a batch of product to a restaurant in Eureka Springs, Arkansas, he asked if anyone knew a grower of pawpaws, a tree fruit native to the United States with a flavor described as a mix between a mango and a banana.

It’s late on a Tuesday night and a mob of people stand outside the entrance to Brooklyn Steel holding clusters of balloons. With the colorful bundles and their eager eyes waiting for the venue doors to burst open, they resemble a crowd waiting for a guest of honor to arrive for a surprise birthday party. These are not, however, partygoers. They’re party-sellers. “Whippets. Iced-cold,” one person says, sounding like a vendor offering Bud Light at Yankee Stadium.

Donald Trump has retained much of his political support amid his ongoing hush-money trial in part due to a combination of the courtroom’s ban on cameras and conservative media echoing his claims that both the prosecutor and judge are corrupt, media analysts say.

In the some two decades since the St. Louis Cardinals reached an agreement to obtain public funding for a new stadium, team leaders have touted its economic benefits for the area and described the agreement as unique in professional sports because of how much of the stadium was privately financed. Local officials often then repeat those leaders’ assertions. “Home games are invaluable in supporting our local businesses and helping Downtown grow and thrive,” St. Louis Mayor Tishaura Jones stated in a recent news release that claimed the team would generate $310 million in economic impact for the St. Louis metro area this season alone. While fans certainly spend millions of dollars attending Cardinals games, economists question how much public investment in professional teams’ stadiums here and elsewhere helps the surrounding economy.

Until a couple years ago, Peter Dustin, a stay-at-home father to two girls in Camarillo, Calif., always had an easy time talking with his older daughter, Dakota. But as Dakota, now 12, approaches the teen years, there is “stuff she doesn’t feel comfortable talking with me about,” Dustin said. So when she returned from Taylor Swift’s concert film in October, he was eager to share a bit of gossip.

In late June, Jim Schuls and his 16-year-old son, Michael, woke up at 4am for their usual drive from their apartment in Florence, Wisconsin, to begin work at 5am at a sawmill. Father and son made this journey together five times a week in the summer, when Michael worked longer hours than he did in term time. His two older brothers had also worked at the same mill when they were about his age. Their day at Florence Hardwoods – one of the largest employers in the town with a population of about 2,000 – began as normal. Jim operated a forklift outside while Michael worked alone inside the mill. Jim says he never worried because he believed “young kids were stacking lumber”, not operating dangerous machines.

About 1,000 protesters gathered early in the afternoon in two locations, in Times Square and at the United Nations headquarters. The demonstrations were among dozens of largely peaceful protests across the United States, with events in Chicago and Atlanta drawing hundreds of people. But tensions rose in New York City later on Sunday afternoon as roughly 500 pro-Palestinian demonstrators and supporters of Israel confronted one another outside the Israeli consulate in Midtown Manhattan.

In 2021, Red Bull executives visited a San Francisco bar, Butter, where the combination of Red Bull and vodka was allegedly popularized in the ‘90s. The energy drink company had paid for Butter’s owners to create a neon sign stating, “Original Home of the Red Bull Vodka.” “They said that they are really proud of the relationship,” says Vlad Cood, one of the bar’s owners. “They were just really happy to know that we were one of the original accounts, and we are still here, and we are still doing the same thing.” The Red Bull brand hasn’t always celebrated use of the drink as a mixer, however, despite Red Bull Vodka — or Vodka Red Bull, as it’s also commonly referred to — becoming a nightlife staple.

When Savannah Crosby started posting videos on TikTok about using berberine, a dietary supplement, for weight loss, she had about 500 followers. About two months later, Crosby now has more than 21,000. “I have a lot of joy and gratitude over the fact that sharing my experience has been able to help other women with the same struggles that I have” in trying to lose weight, said Crosby, a 34-year-old who lives in San Antonio and works for a property management company.

Why two states remain holdouts on distracted driving laws Missouri and Montana are the only states without distracted driving laws for all drivers. With traffic fatalities rising, lawmakers are eyeing bills that would crack down on texting while driving. Max Herrick pulled over on the interstate near Harrisonville, Missouri, on a spring night in 2020 to offer antifreeze to a woman whose car had overheated. He had lost a grandson to an overdose just hours before, but aiding stranded motorists was second nature to the 73-year-old retired school custodian, who remembered thousands of students’ names and regularly brought food pantry donations to a retirement community.

It was not shocking that people listening to musicians covering Grateful Dead and Phish songs in October at a dive bar here would be interested in trying a new drink containing delta-9 THC, the primary psychoactive ingredient in weed. What was unusual was seeing a bar owner – in this case, Pop’s Blue Moon’s Joshua Grigaitis – grab cans of the drink and give them to customers without looking over his shoulder in a state where recreational pot remains illegal, for now. Missouri voters will decide whether to liberalize the law in the Nov. 8 election.

Suzan Kennedy wasn't concerned earlier this year when a bartender in St. Paul, Minnesota, described a cocktail with the cannabinoid delta-8 THC as "a little bit potent." Kennedy's Wisconsin roots meant she could handle booze, she said, and she had smoked marijuana before. Hours after enjoying the tasty drink and the silliness that reminded Kennedy of a high from weed, she said, she started to feel “really shaky and faint” before collapsing in her friend’s arms.

In 2013, Tonya Taylor says, she was suicidal because her epileptic seizures kept coming even though she was taking a long list of medications. Then a fellow patient at a Denver neurologist’s office mentioned something that gave Taylor hope: a CBD oil called Charlotte’s Web. The person told her the oil helped people with uncontrolled epilepsy. The doctor, however, would discuss it only “off the record” because cannabidiol was illegal under federal law, and he worried about his hospital losing funding, Taylor said. The federal government has since legalized CBD, and it has become a multibillion-dollar industry. The Food and Drug Administration also has approved one cannabis-derived prescription drug, Epidiolex, for three rare seizure disorders. But not much has changed for people with other forms of epilepsy like Taylor who want advice from their doctors about CBD.

Before the Capitol attack on 6 January, Robert Pape, a University of Chicago professor, had studied political violence around the world but not in the United States because there had not been much to examine, he said. Pape worries that could soon change because of politicians like Eric Greitens, a former Navy Seal from Missouri running for Senate, who recently released an advertisement in which he racked a shotgun and led a team of armed men as they stormed a house to hunt more moderate members of his own party, know derisively as Rinos, as in “Republicans in name only”. “Join the Maga crew,” Greitens, a former Republican governor, declares in the ad. “Get a Rino hunting permit. There’s no bagging limit, no tagging limit, and it doesn’t expire until we save our country.”