The Sunday Read: ‘A Republican Election Clerk vs. Trump Die-Hards in a World of Lies’

For years, social media companies have relied on an impenetrable first amendment protection to shield them from legal claims that their products are dangerous to children. But now, a cluster of plaintiffs are trying a different tact. Cecilia Kang, who covers technology, explains why these new lawsuits pose an existential threat to social media giants, and how those companies are likely to defend themselves.

The intense fallout from Alex Pretti’s death has forced President Trump to publicly change course in Minneapolis.The White House reporters Zolan Kanno-Youngs and Tyler Pager discuss the changes, and whether they are real or merely symbolic.

Since December, the U.S. has been stopping and seizing oil tankers traveling in and out of Venezuela. They are part of what is known as a ghost fleet — tankers that try to secretly move oil around the world, funding states such as Venezuela, Iran and Russia. Christiaan Triebert, a reporter on the Visual Investigations team, explains what these ghost fleets are and why their days might now be numbered.

Warning: This episode contains strong language. Border Patrol agents shot and killed Alex Jeffrey Pretti, a Minneapolis resident, on Saturday. It was the second fatal shooting by federal agents in the city during protests against a ramped-up immigration enforcement effort by the Trump administration. Devon Lum, from the Visual Investigations team, and Ernesto Londoño, who covers the Midwest, explain how the shooting unfolded and what may come next.

Pop culture has not been kind to the Neanderthal. In books, movies and even TV commercials, the species is portrayed as rough and mindless, a brutish type that was rightly supplanted by our Homo sapiens ancestors. But even 40,000 years after the last Neanderthals walked the earth, we continue to make discoveries that challenge that portrayal. New research suggests Neanderthals might have been less primitive — and a lot more like modern humans — than we might have thought. The Times science reporters Carl Zimmer and Franz Lidz discuss recent discoveries about Neanderthals, and what those discoveries can tell us about the origins of humanity.