On Wednesday, the Washington-based magazine that has surveyed science and the natural world for 135 years reached another difficult passage when it laid off all of its last remaining staff writers.

The cutback — the latest in a series under owner Walt Disney Co. — involves some 19 editorial staffers in all, who were notified in April that these terminations were coming. Article assignments will henceforth be contracted out to freelancers or pieced together by editors. The cuts also eliminated the magazine’s small audio department.

In a further cost-cutting move, copies of the famous bright-yellow-bordered print publication will no longer be sold on newsstands in the United States starting next year, the company said in an internal announcement last month.

President Biden might not seem like a revolutionary, but he is presiding over a fundamental change in the nation’s approach to economics. Not only is he proposing a major break from the “trickle-down” policies of Ronald Reagan, as Biden highlighted in a speech in Chicago on Wednesday. He is also departing from many orthodoxies that shaped the presidencies of Democrats Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.

Government is no longer shying away from pushing investment toward specific goals and industries. Spending on public works is back in fashion. New free-trade treaties are no longer at the heart of the nation’s international strategy. Challenging monopolies and providing support for unionization efforts are higher priorities.

Heightened competition with China and the urgency of dealing with climate change are part of the story. So is the long rise of wealth and income inequality accompanied by the collapse of many of the country’s industrial communities. The breakdown of supply chains during the pandemic put an accent on resiliency and an emphasis on bringing home manufacturing, for semiconductors especially but for other products, too.

The shift also has to do with who Biden is, his long-standing alarm over the Democratic Party’s alienation from working- and middle-class voters and an unease with the Reagan-era economic consensus that hovered over Democratic administrations.

The confidence Biden and his lieutenants have in the new path is reflected in their eagerness to tout the word “Bidenomics,” a label the president now embraces after initially being abashed about paternity for a school of economic thinking. The word was splashed across posters all around the Old Post Office as he spoke.

...“No Labels” [is conducting] a potent campaign fueled by truckloads of dark money, much of it from conservative donors, and most of it hidden from public view.

This is a dangerous stunt, and we’ve seen the damage it can do. Jill Stein of the Green Party got just 1 percent of the vote in 2016 but it was enough to tip the election in favor of Donald Trump. The numbers don’t lie. Had Stein supporters voted Democrat, Hillary Clinton would have won Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin – enough to make her the first woman president in American history.

Ralph Nader did the same favor for George W. Bush in 2000. In Florida and in New Hampshire, his vote total was enough to knock Al Gore from first place. Both he and Stein were warned, and both ignored the speed bumps and proceeded with their egotistical exercises that did such damage to the country.

Now, No Labels is reading from the same sheet of music. Unlike Stein and Nader, they are presenting themselves as centrists. They are raising tons of money, and they have already secured ballot spots in Alaska, Arizona, Colorado and Oregon, with Florida, Nevada, and North Carolina next up.

Dallas real estate billionaire Harlan Crow paid tuition for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’ grandnephew for two years at two private boarding schools, according to a statement released Thursday by a longtime friend of Thomas’.

The statement came in response to a ProPublica story that disclosed Crow had paid the fees at two schools for Mark Martin, a relative who Thomas had legal guardianship of and said he was raising “as a son.” Thomas did not include the payments in the financial disclosures he is required to file each year.

Mark Paoletta, the friend, acknowledged that Crow paid Martin’s tuition at both Randolph-Macon Academy in Virginia and Hidden Lake Academy in Georgia, saying Crow paid for one year at each school. Paoletta did not give a total amount but, based on the tuition rates at the time, the two years would amount to roughly $100,000. Martin attended Randolph-Macon for multiple years, and the statement did not say who had paid for the remainder of his high school education.

Paoletta, Crow and Thomas did not respond to further requests for comment.

In a bombshell revelation during a meeting with military service members at the Kremlin, Putin, who for years denied any state link to Wagner, admitted for the first time that the mercenaries were fully state-financed. He added that Russia paid the Wagner Group more than $1 billion from May 2022 to May 2023, while Prigozhin’s Concord company was paid almost $1 billion to supply food to the military.

“I hope that no one stole anything or stole not much, but we will deal with all this,” he said, referring to Wagner’s leadership without uttering Prigozhin’s name, which he has avoided saying since the start of the crisis Friday.

The admission that Russian authorities spent so much money on a “private” mercenary group could backfire on Putin, as a telling example of the cost of the Ukraine war, which the Kremlin generally has sought to obscure from the public. The disclosure could be especially damaging after Prigozhin’s repeated accusations that Russian military leaders are minimizing the death toll in Ukraine, which he claims has run as high as 1,000 soldiers a day either killed, seriously wounded or deserting.

Russia’s Defense Ministry on Tuesday also announced that steps were being taken for Wagner to hand over heavy weapons that the government has provided the mercenaries to wage war in Ukraine.