The author is Tim Whitmarsh and the subtitle is Augustus, Empire and the Making of Christianity. This is the most important book on the history of Christianity I have read in a long time, and it is also an important work in Roman history. Yet also fun and extremely readable. Excerpt:
The story I have told so far has emphasised the fit between Christianity and the Greek world of the early Roman Empire; I have given relatively little space to conflict. That has been quite deliberate. One of the commonest misconceptions about the early Roman Empire is that it was a time of ceaseless and inevitable suppression of virtuous Christians by a brutal governmental machine. This is a myth that has roots in antiquity itself, and has been pumped systematically into western popular culture since the nineteenth centuury. It is a remarkably durable myth, because it is both emotionally seductive and ideologically powerful. The idea that virtuous Christians were engaged in endless conflict with the Roman state makes for great narrative. But the reality is more banal: most Christians were fully integrated into Roman society, and no more or less harassed than anyone else…
My argument has been, rather, that Christianity could not have come into being in anything like the form we know it without the revolutionary impact of Augustus’ political reforms. It was this seismic change that fundamentally transformed Mediterranean thought…The most dramatic effect of the Augustan swirl was Christianity itself: a breakaway Judaean sect led by brilliant entrepreneurs who understood the opportunities offered by the new political dispensation, and rapidly reshaped their ideas to suit new audiences.
Definitely recommended, and not only to Christians and Romans.
I rarely talk about my workaday life before I settled into music and writing. Those days are far too strange and confusing to convey without writing a whole book about them. And I’ll never write that book because a lot of it I’d rather forget.
Other people in the creative economy have day gigs, but they are usually simple to describe—waiting on tables, tutoring school kids, driving a taxi, would you like fries with that, mister? But my work wasn’t anything like that. I took on projects that sent me into unfamiliar terrain all over the world, and thrust me into odd and unpredictable situations. The deliverables were always high stakes, the work often secret, surrounded by confidentiality agreements and cautionary warnings, and the agenda rarely going according to plan.
I’ll admit it: I was like a person with a split personality in my twenties. I was obsessed with music, working to advance my piano skills, and digging deeply into the research that would eventually result in so many later books and articles. But I also had to pay the bills, and I possessed a few highly marketable skills. I had an ability to analyze complex social, political and economic situations, a way of navigating through turbulent waters, a knack for making the right move at the right time. These skills caught the notice of powerful people, and they would put me to work to solve their problems.
And, oh man, did they have problems. They would thrust a plane ticket in my hand, and send me packing—off into situations that might involve everything and anything.
The author in the 1990s—when I was making 15-20 overseas trips per year
The good news: My bosses paid well. What they wanted was never simple or straight-forward. But if I could pull it off, I got rewarded with enough money to cover my costs during long stretches solely devoted to my music and writing.
I have little desire to dwell on the details. Many of them are still confidential, and telling too much could get me into trouble. Much of it is a blur any way—Bangkok, Medellín, Cannes, Shanghai, Prague, Copacabana, Macau, Paris, Tasmania, Jakarta, Tijuana, Frankfurt, Krakow, Tokyo and all other places I went on my various missions. So many cities, so many crazy days and long nights.
But I need to remember it, if only because I have to tell you about the Honest Broker.
This particular project brought me to China. I was trying to set up an operation in a remote province, far outside my comfort zone, and couldn’t seem to figure out how to maneuver among the various interests and stakeholders. My patron was one of the wealthiest men in Hong Kong, and by using his contacts, I gained access to people who normally operate behind layers of intermediaries and gatekeepers. But even these contacts led me on an endless runaround. My sources gave me conflicting advice and confusing directions. Everything felt wrong and nothing seemed quite on the level.
I knew I needed help, but had run out of options. Then I met the drunk Australian.
He wasn’t a contact on my list, and I can’t even remember his name. This was a chance encounter in a hotel bar late at night. But this hard-drinking Australian was talkative and had interesting things to say. He had spent most of his life bouncing around the capitals of Asia, and was a high-level operator in his own spheres. He bragged about his insider’s knowledge, and claimed—with some accuracy, as I came to discover—that he knew how to maneuver in China better than the clueless Westerners who were now appearing on the scene. He had traced the secret paths to power and knew all the dangerous mistakes amateurs always make.
He reeled off a list of them. “You go into a province or city and flash around some money, then expect the local officials will help you? Forget it. They’ll rob you blind, and even make you bribe them for the privilege. Same goes for the party leaders. From each according to his ability, and all that, my friend. And forget about lawyers—the legal protections here are like this”—he held up his empty glass, then flipped it over as if to emphasize the nothingness of what he was offering to the gods of Marx and Mao. “As for the bankers, you might as well call them wankers.”
The empty glass was also a sign that I needed to order another round of the local brew, and I quickly complied. My new friend fell into a meditative silence until further libations arrived. Finally, after another sip on the stomach-destroying glass of baijiu that passed for spirits at our watering hole, I asked the obvious question.
“So what do I do? Who can I trust?”
“That’s easy, mate. You need to find the Honest Broker.”
This sounded appealing enough, but I had zero idea what my new acquaintance was talking about. He might just as well have told me to go to Oz and consult with the Wizard.
“Who, exactly, is this Honest Broker?”
“There’s at least one in every city. But don’t expect their business cards to say ‘Honest Broker’—that’s just what I call them. But that’s exactly what they are. Sometimes they don’t even have an official position. But they are the key to everything.”
He proceeded to explain how Honest Brokers play a hidden but vital role in communities without a history of legal protections and stable institutions. Their influence and power is built solely on a reputation for straight talk and trustworthy dealings. “They are true brokers, intermediaries between others. They aren’t going to participate in your deal, no matter what it is. They are go-betweens, really. But do not underestimate the power of this kind of brokerage. Whatever you need—a loan, a building permit, political influence, a place to land a private jet, whatever—they will introduce you to the right people and steer you away from the sharks.
“And they do this for a very simple reason: their prestige is enhanced by making these connections. In many cases, they don’t even want to be paid. Or let me put that differently—you repay them by becoming a trusted contact for them in future dealings. The Honest Broker may help you for free right now, but don’t be surprised if you’re asked for assistance on something completely different months or even years later. You Yanks have a hard time grasping it, and are always looking for shortcuts. But the Honest Broker plays the long-term game, mate.
“Find your Honest Broker, and your problems will be solved.”
This proved to be valuable advice, worth far more than the cost of drinks. Over the next few weeks, I changed my approach completely. I made inquiries, compared notes, and finally found my Honest Broker—who did solve my problems, just as promised. My mission accomplished, I returned back home to California and tried to forget all about it.
I put my passport out of sight. My world shrank back to manageable dimensions, and my days were spent at the two keyboards, the piano and the word processor. I was getting back into my music groove again.
A long time went by before I realized the real importance of what I had learned in China, and how it applied to the other half of my split and fractured life. I was putting energy into a new sphere now, music criticism, and trying to create a rule book for how to make it sizzle.
Yet criticism seemed such a degraded form of writing at that juncture. I had already seen the collapse in literary criticism—in fact, I had lived through it as a student at Stanford and Oxford. The whole enterprise had turned into a circus sideshow over the course of just a few years. Critics now aspired to quasi-celebrity status, and they exploited their roles as arbiters of taste to engage in the worst sort of strutting and preening. The more outlandishly they sold out their craft, opting instead for self-aggrandizement, the larger the rewards they received. This blight took root first in France but quickly spread elsewhere. And now the taint seemed to be seeping into other forms of criticism as well. Whether the subject at hand was a movie or a meal or a TV wrestling match, the critics were the real stars, and everything else subservient to their self-serving deconstruction of anything in their path.
Music reviews seemed to occupy the lowest rung of all, with their own distinct set of vices. I saw critics who just regurgitated record label press releases. Or took all sorts of freebies from power brokers in return for—well, just guess—without a tinge of hesitation or guilt. Or used their influence to get close to stars, churning out favorable coverage in exchange for access. Or announced the arrival of some new savior of the music every month, hyping short-lived trendsetters in a never-ending process of spin. Exaggeration and hipper-than-thou pretension were the calling cards of the field. With an ample supply of those, and a backstage pass, nothing could stop you.
I admit, with some shame, that all this appealed to me in my twenties. The idea that I could adopt a pose as a critic, and launch myself into some higher sphere of coolness—and maybe even hang out with superstars as part of the deal. . . . Well, that was why you picked this vocation in the first place. Wasn’t it? There were compromises, sure, but didn’t they exist in every field? I soothed my conscience by recalling what Hyman Roth tells Michael Corleone in The Godfather II: “Michael, this is the business we’ve chosen.” You get to swagger like a wiseguy, and grab whatever you can get your hands on, just so long as you’re willing to dispose of a few bodies along the way.
I could play this game, was even good at it. I got published and started receiving some recognition for my talents. But I was troubled nonetheless. This didn’t feel right. It didn’t add up. Was this really the right way to do it?
And that’s when I remembered the Honest Broker.
The Honest Broker now reappeared in my psyche as an inner voice, an avenging angel whispering in my ear. Remember me? The Honest Broker puts forthright expression and straight dealing above everything else. The Honest Broker doesn’t look for direct benefit in any endeavor. The Honest Broker is just an intermediary, not a beneficiary.
But all that seems foolish—because what do you get out of it?
Day by day, the whispering got louder, turned into a constant drone. Do not underestimate the power of this kind of brokerage…the Honest Broker plays the long-term game, mate. Over time, that scrupulous fidelity and reputation for trustworthy advice beats out all other strategies. The Honest Broker is irreplaceable, and all the more so when other guides have become unreliable.
Again and again, I asked myself the same question: Could the Honest Broker be a role model for me as a critic? Even more to the point, did the Honest Broker represent an entirely different model for criticism? Precisely the correcting course we need at this juncture in cultural history?
And here I must make another shameful admission. My initial reaction to this line of thinking was to resist it, and even ridicule it—and for the simple reason that it didn’t gratify my ego. The critic as celebrity was much more appealing on every level. Even the title of “broker” was a huge letdown, especially when I considered the other options. Stanley Crouch had just released a book of critical essays entitled Notes of a Hanging Judge—now that sounded cool. The Hanging Judge? How could I get a nickname like that? I tried saying out loud: Notes of an Honest Broker.
Hell’s bells, it just didn’t have the same ring.
Even so, I saw my approach to writing change over the next few months. Without even consciously admitting it to myself, I was taking on the persona of the Honest Broker. I began measuring my own methodologies against ideal standards of fairness, and nagging myself when I strayed from them. I started paring away at exaggerations and posturing in my prose, and worked to find other ways of imparting color and vitality to my sentences. Above all, I started worrying about my reader—because, after all, wasn’t the reader the real person I was supposed to serve? Wasn’t the reader the beneficiary of my brokerage services?
This too was alarming. Pleasing musicians or editors brought more tangible rewards. What did I get out of serving some lousy, anonymous reader? The ingrate wouldn’t even recognize my noble sacrifice.
Then I reached the most abject level in this whole process of self-abasement. I started worrying about whether the reader would actually enjoy the music I was recommending.
This was a whole new consideration, one that had never dawned on me before. And I could tell by consulting various cutting edge critics, that this issue hadn’t got on their radar screens either. They didn’t give a rat’s ass for the reader’s musical pleasure. Or, if they did, they made sure to hide it at every pass. I started reading music reviews just looking for the words: enjoyment, pleasure, delight. They had gone missing in action. Why didn’t anyone talk about them? Shouldn’t enjoyment be a make-or-break part of the deal? Yes, a critic expands the readers’ horizons, informs and educates, but also guide them to pleasure. After all, wasn’t that why I listened to music? Wasn’t that what brought me to my vocation in the first place?
Lost in this maze, I started recognizing all the other priorities that people had who wrote about music. And the more I mulled over the ecosystem, the more polluted it seemed. I saw smart people who wrote entire books about music with the aim of securing tenure from their elder colleagues in a college music department. I saw others twisting themselves into all sorts of contortions in order to win a grant or please an editor or curry favor with some institutional power broker. I even read reviewers who wrote with the apparent goal of ingratiating themselves with other reviewers. Talk about the blind leading the blind!
Above all, I noticed a whole syndrome that I came to call the Clement Greenberg problem—named after the art critic who achieved enormous success (and very large paydays) by heralding the work of Jackson Pollock and other abstract expressionists. Greenberg had made it clear that the single most lucrative move for a modern-day critic was to announce the newest new thing, the coming revolution that would sweep everything else aside. And he had proven so influential that, by the time I came of age as a critic, a revolution in music was getting announced every few weeks. I couldn’t pick up a newspaper or magazine without reading about some futuristic, world-beating sound that had altered all the rules—and then a few weeks later it would be forgotten, replaced by something just as ephemeral. The whole thing was a joke to anyone who looked at it from the outside, but within the feverish world of music journalism, no one could figure out any better way to operate.
And there I was, the poor Honest Broker, with my ridiculous self-chosen nickname, and so few tools at my disposal. I had no revolution to peddle, not even a medium-sized riot or back alley scuffle.
I knew if I was going to make this work, I had to equip myself better. This would be a long, tough journey. I had to educate myself more deeply, learn as much as I could about music, especially the riches and beauties that others might miss. My new concern with musical pleasure might even turn into an advantage here, opening my ears to sounds the celebrity critics would scorn. I also had to learn how to write better, with more incision and imaginative grasp of the subject at hand. Above all, I had to think about the reader, with far more clarity than I had done before.
Perhaps the reader would even think of me some day.
Could I wear the title of Honest Broker with pride? Well, that might be too much to ask. I am just a broker, merely an intermediary. Sometimes I don’t even get paid for my services.
But maybe, just maybe, this can work. That’s what I kept telling myself, over and over: It’s the long-term game, mate. It’s the long-term game.
(Lord’s day) Up and after the barber had done he and I walked to the Docke, and so on board the Mathias, where Commissioner Pett and he and I and a good many of the officers and others of the yard did hear an excellent sermon of Mr. Hudson’s upon “All is yours and you are God’s,” a most ready, learned, and good sermon, such as I have not heard a good while, nor ever thought he could have preached.
We took him with us to the Hill-house, and there we dined, and an officer or two with us. So after dinner the company withdrew, and we three to private discourse and laid the matters of the yard home again to the Commissioner, and discoursed largely of several matters.
Then to the parish church, and there heard a poor sermon with a great deal of false Greek in it, upon these words, “Ye are my friends, if ye do these things which I command you.”
Thence to the Docke and by water to view St. Mary Creeke, but do not find it so proper for a wet docks as we would have it, it being uneven ground and hard in the bottom and no great depth of water in many places.
Returned and walked from the Docke home, Mr. Coventry and I very much troubled to see how backward Commissioner Pett is to tell any of the faults of the officers, and to see nothing in better condition here for his being here than they are in other yards where there is none. After some discourse to bed. But I sat up an hour after Mr. Coventry was gone to read my vows, it raining a wonderful hard showre about 11 at night for an hour together. So to bed.
Boris Cherny, head of Claude Code at Anthropic, was interviewed by Diana Hu on stage at Y Combinator’s Startup School 2026 last week. Starting around 20:30 in the video, he briefly discussed directing Claude to perform difficult tasks:
Cherny: I think the skill nowadays is less about prompt
engineering and more about figuring out how do you give Claude a
hard task that seems a little bit too hard. Then how do you make
it possible for Claude to verify its work along the way? The
verification is probably the single most important thing that
people do not get right, largely.
One example of this is people were — we have this desktop app
for Claude and it’s built using Electron. We’ve made it quite
fast. Now it’s a pretty awesome experience. Six months ago it was
sluggish and it wasn’t very reliable. Now it’s pretty awesome.
It’s the thing that most of the team uses. As an experiment, I
wanted to see what it would feel like if it was native. So what I
did is I started a Claude Tag session. Claude Tag is a new
product we have. It’s just Claude running in Slack. My first
question was, “Hey Tag, do you have access to a Mac OS runner on
GitHub?” It said no. Then I hooked up a runner. So it was able to
start a Mac virtual machine using GitHub. My second question was,
I created this empty code base that was a Claude desktop app
rewritten in Swift.
I asked, “Can you access this code base?” It said no. Then I
gave it access and it was like, “Okay, great. Now I have
access.” Then I said, “Okay, now what I want you to do is I want
you to rewrite the Electron app in Swift. I want you to run the
Electron app in the Mac virtual machine, screenshot it, and then
look pixel by pixel. Compare it to the Swift version. Don’t stop
until you’re done.”
Hu: And that was your prompt basically?
Cherny: That was my prompt.
Hu: And how long did this take to run?
Cherny: It’s still running.
Hu: When did you start it?
Cherny: It’s been a little over two weeks. So it’s like 14
days, 15 days.
I suppose this is interesting, but I don’t think it’s interesting in the way some people sending me links to this interview think it is. I don’t think this is a serious effort to create a truly native Mac client for Claude. And if it is, Cherny is going about it all wrong.
It’s not like the problem with the current Claude Mac client is merely the technical detail that it’s written with a bloated non-native framework. The actual problem is that it’s a poorly designed app written with a bloated non-native framework. The design itself is non-native. And aside from ignoring most Mac UI idioms, it’s just a bad design in the abstract. It’s bad on the web, bad on Windows, and thus of course it’s also bad on the Mac. So pointing Claude Code at the current Electron app and directing it to recreate it in Swift — pixel-by-pixel — could at best solve only the technical problems with the current app, not the design problems. I’d be more likely to use Claude if it were well designed but still written using Electron, than if it were ported to AppKit and/or SwiftUI but with exactly the current design. The current Claude app is like a shitty recipe made with shitty ingredients; what Cherny asked Claude Code to do is to follow the shitty recipe using better ingredients. It’s still going to taste like shit.
And it’s probably no wonder the task failed. AppKit and SwiftUI are made to create Mac-style apps. Trying to use them to recreate the utterly un-Mac-like Claude UI is like trying to brush your hair the wrong way. It’s not the way things are meant to go.
I also can’t let pass Cherny’s aside, re: the current Claude Mac app, that “Six months ago it was sluggish and it wasn’t very reliable. Now it’s pretty awesome.” I just launched the Claude app on my Mac, and it took 30 seconds before it was ready to use. The last 15 seconds of which, it showed the spinning beach ball cursor. When it finally finished it showed me a dickover. Maybe it was worse six months ago but this is not “pretty awesome”.
Floating point math is often slower than integer math because the
compiler is being conservative about how it optimizes your code. While
some programming languages already had solutions of a sort, until now
Rust did not have a good stable way to deal with this limitation. But
now, starting in version 1.98, Rust will allow telling the compiler it
can optimize your code further—but with extra control so that you can
still write numeric algorithms with minimal rounding errors.
In this article you will learn:
Why by default the compiler won’t optimize floating point math as much
as it does integer math.
Rust’s new API to solve this limitation.
Examples of using this new API, its speed impact, and how you can
control where it is used.
I came across this ten-year-old mix by Time Is Away on NTS this week, half of whose similar tracks I’d heard before, and I’d wanted to hear them together somehow:
If I’m in London before it ends I’d like to have a look at their Department of Euterpe exhibition at the Warburg Institute.
§ This week was focused on yesterday’s 80th birthday party for Mary’s step-mother, 70 guests for lunch, with catering, a marquee, and a bouncy castle for Generation Alpha.
We had to retrieve a bunch of things – chairs, signage – from the much-neglected shed which turned into a complete emptying-out-cleaning-and-restocking of the place, including earmarking a pile of decades-old things for the tip.
The marquee arrived on Thursday, and I thought I’d be surprised with how quickly these things get put up by professionals. But, no, understandably it took four or five guys several hours to construct in the high-20s sun.
In contrast it took only minutes for a very surly 16-year-old to put up the bouncy castle.
Clearly, everything should be inflatable.
A lot more setting up preceded the afternoon event, and then lots of putting everything back to normal afterwards.
It would be nice to be someone who relishes opening his home to friends and strangers, putting them at ease, connecting people, flitting lightly around making conversation. It seems like the kind of person one should aspire to be, the opposite being bad. Like being someone who gets up at the crack of dawn to do some writing, compared to someone who gets up late, who will appear lazy or antisocial, no matter how productive they might be into the night.
Anyway, as nice as that would be, to be a comfortable host, it is definitely not me. I spent much of the afternoon hiding away from all these people at our home, rather than have to make small talk. But a good time was had by everyone else.
§ We finished watching The Pitt season two this week, which continued to be very good. It didn’t seem quite as good as season one, although some of that could just be familiarity with the format now. Although about ¾ of the way through it felt like it didn’t have as much of an overall arc holding it together – it was more like just going from one event to another, everything pretty similar in scale and pace. Still, great stuff all the same.
One week ago, more than 200 miles above the Earth, a refrigerator-size satellite making its way toward an attempted rescue of NASA's $500 million Swift gamma-ray observatory suddenly spun out of control.
It didn't look good. The spacecraft, named Link, was rotating on multiple axes, rendering it unable to maintain a reliable communications link with the ground and complicating efforts to arrest the spin. Two of the satellite's three reaction wheels, used for pointing, also stopped working. Through sporadic radio contact, engineers discovered a problem with some of the spacecraft's cold gas thrusters used for finer attitude control.
The Link satellite is built, owned, and operated by Katalyst Space Technologies, a satellite servicing startup that won a $30 million contract from NASA to fly up to the Swift observatory, grab onto it, and boost its orbit before succumbing to aerodynamic drag and burning up int he atmosphere.
In a classic Friday night news dump, the Department of Justice last night moved to dismiss the criminal charges against David Hearn, the U.S. Olympian the Justice Department indicted for vandalizing the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. The filing says that “damage to the Reflecting Pool in June 2026 was the result of flawed installation by the contractor, Atlantic Industrial Coatings (“AIC”), and the rush to complete the project prior to events associated with the America 250 celebration in the weeks surrounding Independence Day 2026.”
President Donald J. Trump announced in April that he was planning to renovate the reflecting pool and on May 7 said it would take a week and cost about $1.8 million. By May 8 the cost had jumped to $13.1 million, with the contract awarded on a no-bid basis. When the pool reopened on June 6, Trump declared it a triumph, writing on social media: “Thank you President Trump.”
But the day after the reservoir filled with water, algae began to bloom in it. A spokesperson for the Interior Department said the algae were “residual” and a normal part of the process of refilling the pool. “President Donald J. Trump is an expert builder who has fixed the Reflecting Pool for good unlike the failed and extremely costly attempt by Obama and Biden,” she said in a statement.
By June 16, crews from the National Park Service were pouring hydrogen peroxide into the water to kill the algae that had turned the pool bright green even as Trump insisted the pool was perfect.
By Thursday, June 18, the new blue epoxy at the bottom of the pool was peeling off and floating in the vivid green pool. David Fahrenthold reported in the New York Times that the National Park Service contracted not only the coating and painting of the pool under a no-bid contract—the price tag had jumped to at least $14.2 million—but also an additional $1.7 million contract for a water purification system.
That no-bid contract went to a firm called Greenwater Services, whose ultimate owner is the J.J. Cafaro Investment Trust, led by Trump donor John J. Cafaro, whose wife chaired the 2017 International Red Cross Ball at Mar-a-Lago and who lives near Mar-a-Lago at a mansion that is listed as the water treatment company’s address in Florida corporate records.
On June 19, U.S. Park Police officers arrested 67-year-old Hearn, a former Olympic canoe racer, who had stopped by the pool on a 52-mile bike ride and reached into the water to feel what the detached material felt like, for destruction of public property. “I didn’t vandalize anything,” Hearn told David J. Lynch and Aaron Schaffer of the Washington Post. “I didn’t destroy or break or peel anything. By the time I realized what was going on, I was being put in handcuffs.”
That night, Trump blamed “Radical Left Lunatics, most likely Dumocats [sic], who have spent their lives trying to ruin our Country,” for “some real problems with Vandalism at the beautiful Reflecting Pool.” By the next day, he was blaming “multiple individuals for vandalizing our Nations magnificent Reflecting Poll [sic]. Who would do such a thing? These are very serious crimes having to do with the destruction of National Monuments. Years in jail! Work will begin immediately on its repair.”
Minnesota governor Tim Walz commented: “Found an imaginary problem, said only they could fix it, didn’t listen to experts, hired buddies who grifted millions, failed miserably, bragged how great it went. The entire Trump presidency in a nutshell.”
Administration officials insisted that the problems with the reflecting pool renovations were entirely the fault of vandals. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt pushed back on Walz’s statement, saying “The vandalism is very real.” Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, scoffed at the idea that there had not been vandalism, telling Jesse Watters of the Fox News Channel that she had just been at the pool and “someone was intent on doing incredible damage to the pool.”
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum told Dana Bash of CNN that the contractors had nothing to do with the problems; it was “vandalism.” He insisted the government could prove there were vandals and suggested there were “photographs.” When Bash pressed him over whether the government actually had “photographs of a person or people cutting a 300- or 350-foot gash in the bottom of the reflecting pool,” he deflected, saying: “I’m not sure why you and others in the media think that you want to keep trying to question” the president’s version of events.
On June 29, Trump posted: “The Reflecting Pool, which suffered great damage due to the Vandals and Radical Left SCUM that hate our Country, has been, for the past two days, in full operation. It looks beautiful! After July 4th, we will release the water, fix the damage done to the very expensive waterproof matting, with the use of sharp knives and muscle, including the 350 foot gash along its right side, and have it looking as good as it was two weeks ago, when it was absolutely PERFECT!”
Now, of course, the Department of Justice’s filing proves that the idea of vandals was always a lie. The problems with the renovation of the reflecting pool were exactly what critics said all along: a hasty, expensive, ill-thought-out project failed. This case is so bad, Chris Geidner of LawDork noted, that Pirro went out of her way to blame the Interior Department for the misguided indictment.
The disparity between the fantasy Trump and his cronies sold to their supporters and the reality of the situation when they were forced to prove their allegations in court matters. Administration officials insisted before the media that the project had been a great success, hurt only by “Radical Left SCUM that hate our Country.” In order to prove their lie, administration officials used the power of the government to harass, indict, and threaten a random individual whom they could blame for their own failures. Then, when forced to prove their allegations in a court of law, they withdrew the claim entirely.
This has always been the pattern of Trump and his cronies: weave a fantasy story in front of friendly media cameras, a fantasy of their own great success undercut by haters, then abandon—or lose—the legal cases based on the fantasy.
For all the bluster before the cameras of Trump cronies insisting the 2020 election was stolen, Trump’s attorneys backed away from the claims. They either withdrew or lost all but one of the 60 lawsuits they brought over the election. As a headline in the Wall Street Journal put it in 2020: “Trump Cries Voter Fraud. In Court, His Lawyers Don’t.”
The one case Trump’s lawyers won found that the Pennsylvania secretary of state overstepped by allowing voters extra time to provide missing identification for mail-in ballots. Even with that ruling, Daniel Barnes of NBC News reported, Biden still won the state by more than 80,000 votes.
Even as reality makes it clear that his claims are a fantasy, Trump continues to spin his yarns, seeming to have little else to convince voters to support him. Today he doubled down on his insistence that vandals caused the problems with the reflecting pool. “I disagree 100% with Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, on the Reflecting Pool. I don’t know what she was thinking? To me, it was a pure case of VANDALISM…. There may have been some contractor difficulty, but the major damage was caused by VANDALS! President DJT”
Faux conservatism is helping destroy our liberties
Readers of The New York Times expect high-quality diversity on the opinion pages. got Ross Douthat’s often lightweight, predictable, and at times logic- and fact-challenged essays. Now he’s leaving for CBS 60 Minutes.
I hope Douthat’s replacement is a first-rate conservative thinker and encourage you to embrace that view.
When self-proclaimed conservative intellectuals fail to rigorously and thoroughly challenge their own, they foster universal mental laxity among all opinion writers.
The problem is that a lot of what passes for right-side commentary focuses on enraging rather than informing, on insignificance, and on distracting from the rapid expansion of domestic surveillance and militarization under a president who claims “the right to do anything I want” under Article II of our Constitution. Of course, that’s a lie, a dangerous lie, which authoritarians on the right embrace.
Overall, right-side American opinion journalism is intellectually flimsy. It is rife with morally bankrupt ideologues who abuse numbers and other facts. At least one prominent far-right pundit, now an American ambassador, is an outright fraud, as I documented in a five-part National Memo series a dozen years ago that exposed reactionaries and radicals posing as conservatives and explained how this hurts us all.
Rigorous right-wing analysis, grounded in facts, would elevate our civic debate.
Instead, we get lightweight and alarmist right-of-center critiques over matters of no consequence, like Obama’s tan suit, that debase the quality of our public discourse. Imagine if that energy were put into dissecting flabby centrist and left columnizing, which would benefit from factual and penetrating rightist critiques.
Every day we get sanewashing of Donald Trump’s delusional, hateful, and incompetent rants, which outside of the United States are reported on in context, even in Middle East countries with dictators friendly to Trump.
What this tells us is that right-wing intellectualism in 2026 America is bankrupt. It has, for now, no ideas to offer, no insights that would open eyes and minds. That’s why we get drivel and distraction.
Journalism, both fact and opinion, should routinely examine ideas, especially those at the core of the policies and practices of our democratic and secular governments. Daily reporting needs informing context, especially its place in the framework of what America is at its core, an idea and an ideal. Opinion writing needs to provide rich depth and context to imbue current events with meaning within the larger scope of 21st Century life.
Centrist and progressive Op-Eds devoted to knocking down silly claims and invented scandals (Obama’s nonexistent Affordable Care Act royalties) spread by far-right pundits divert public square debate from our actual problems, weakening the fabric of our Republic. But for many faux conservatives, that’s the point: make conditions worse, make government incompetent and uncaring, and in this way degrade popular support for democratic self-governance, thus encouraging authoritarianism.
A dozen years after my National Memo series ran, polls are showing just what I warned: many of the young are troubled by democracy as they know it, citing government policies that they recognize as harmful to them, but beneficial to those currently at the top in terms of economics and influence.
Earlier this year, Project Democracy found that “among Gen Z, there is a widespread lack of confidence in how democracy is actually functioning today. Many feel that the system is not meeting their needs or expectations, leading to disengagement, frustration, or even a willingness to explore extreme measures to address their concerns.”
What’s Needed
America needs thoughtful conservatism. Those who actually care about the liberties of the people—about the America that is and could be—foster ethical, honest, and serious conservatism. Doing that requires taking on the posers among their ranks.
Among liberals, we can point to the late Charles Peters, who founded The Washington Monthly, a serious public affairs magazine which broke stories sometimes decades before anyone else. In the early 1970s, for example, the magazine proposed an end to large denominational bills to thwart drug traffickers. Jim Henry, now with DCReport, wrote that piece.
Peters was always calling out his fellow liberals for not carefully thinking through what they wished for. I have yet to find a conservative counterpart to Peters.
Conservatism grounded in Enlightenment ideals of fact, intellectual inquiry, and reason would defend that which works well while vigorously resisting change. It would favor accountability— even strict accountability. It would also insist that change be preceded by pilot projects—with robustly funded evaluations—so that only proposals that have been thoroughly examined and shown to actually improve society are adopted.
Sadly, that is not what we are getting from many self-described conservatives whose bylines appear in our best publications.
Demons and Poltergeists
Consider Rod Dreher, whom I’ve interviewed and who wrote a book about his personal encounters with demons, poltergeists, etc. He continues to be treated as a serious conservative intellectual. The C.S. Lewis (Chronicles of Narnia author) Institute describes Dreher thusly:
Rod Dreher is an American author, journalist, and commentator known for his insights into culture, religion, and politics. He has written extensively for top publications like The American Conservative and National Review and is the author of several influential books, including Crunchy Cons, The Benedict Option, and Live Not by Lies. Beyond his books, Dreher has maintained a strong presence as a columnist and blogger, engaging in public discourse on a range of issues from religious freedom to cultural identity.
Just this month, on July 9, Douthat wrote an NYTimes column about this delusional expatriate (Dreher moved to Hungary when Orban became its dictator) as if he were clear-headed.
Here’s a revealing part of that column, taken from Douthat’s video interview of Dreher:
Douthat: I mean, we’ve checked facts with a Ouija board on this show as a rule. But go on.
Dreher: [Chuckles.] No, but I believe that there is a world of the demonic. I’m well acquainted with exorcists and spiritual warfare, and if you know any exorcists and have spent time with them, you know how real this stuff is. I believe that A.I. is going to be used as a vector for the demonic. It’s not to say every instance of A.I. is demonic, but I believe that people will come to see it as an oracle.
Neither Normal Nor Sane
To those who care about facts, this is an insult. For sure, we ought to know how widespread such delusional thinking is, but The New York Times shouldn’t publish this without context.
Douthat, in a video with Vice President JD Vance, also described what both men said was the “miracle” in a bar when a wine glass jumped on its own, crashing on the floor as the converts discussed the attitudes of fellow Catholics toward the papacy.
Douthat is just part of a much larger problem of lightweight, fact-free, and delusional thinking pervading American conservative discourse.
From obvious lies advanced by American Enterprise Institute “scholar” James Pethokouis to outright fraud by Brent Bozell III (whose signed columns were written by an associate), my 2014 series in The National Memo showed the damage inflicted on American beliefs by faux conservatism. Bozell is now our ambassador to South Africa, a Trumpian insult to the leadership there.
When self-proclaimed conservative intellectuals fail to rigorously and thoroughly challenge their own, they foster universal mental laxity among all opinion writers. Actual conservatives would find this appalling, but for anti-democracy radicals posing as conservatives, especially those who just make stuff up or regurgitate what a cub reporter could establish is nonsense, it’s just Tuesday dinner.
Frequently Asked Questions for this article about Ross Dethout’s departure from The New York Times for 60 Minutes:
What is faux conservatism?
Faux conservatism describes political commentary that adopts the conservative label while relying on misinformation, outrage, or ideological loyalty instead of facts, intellectual rigor, and principled analysis.
Why does David Cay Johnston argue faux conservatism threatens liberty?
The article argues that superficial or dishonest conservative commentary distracts from serious threats to constitutional rights, democratic institutions, and government accountability.
What role should conservative opinion writers play?
According to the article, conservative writers should critically examine ideas—including those within their own political movement—and provide evidence-based analysis that strengthens public debate.
Why is Ross Douthat discussed in the article?
The article uses Ross Douthat’s work as an example in a broader critique of what the author sees as the decline of rigorous conservative intellectual discourse in mainstream media.
What is the article’s main argument?
The central argument is that democracy benefits from strong, fact-driven conservative voices, but that many prominent commentators instead promote distraction, misinformation, and narratives that weaken democratic institutions.
“FREEDOM OF THE PRESS IS NOT JUST IMPORTANT TO DEMOCRACY, IT IS DEMOCRACY.” – Walter Cronkite. CLICK HERE to donate in support of our free and independent voice.
Would you like to see an example of a badly conceived policy? Here you go:
The bill to require discounts for self-checkout will probably not pass. But what’s notable is that if this bill did pass, it would have exactly the opposite of the effect its creators want. The stated justification is that customers are doing unpaid labor by scanning and bagging their own groceries, and that this discount would compensate them for that effort. But the bill is part of a more general effort to disincentivize automation in the retail industry, in order to protect working-class jobs:
Rhode Island was the first state in the U.S. to enact statewide self-checkout restrictions with its Restrictions on Self-Service Checkout Stations Act, which takes effect January 1, 2027. The act requires grocery stores to have at least one human-operated checkout station for every three self-service stations during peak hours…Similar legislation has either been introduced, enacted or considered in additional states including California, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Washington, and Ohio.
The standard objection to this bill, I suppose, would be that self-checkout already gives shoppers a discount, because it allows stores to save money on hiring human labor, and that these savings get passed on to consumers in the form of lower prices. That argument is correct as far as it goes, but it means the debate ends up as one of technocracy versus populism — protecting the livelihoods of a few cashiers versus giving a huge number of consumers very slightly lower prices. There’s no simple or easy conclusion to that debate.
But in the case of New York’s proposed self-checkout discount, the problem is that the bill would actually make grocery stores fire human cashiers in favor of more self-checkout.
To understand why this is true, first imagine an incredibly extreme version of the policy. Imagine that instead of 10%, you made a law forcing grocery stores to give a 90% discount for self-checkout. This is exactly the same as forcing stores to charge 10x for using a human cashier. Who would pay 10x for groceries, just to use a human cashier? Basically no one. So everyone would go use the self-checkout machines, and stores would have no need for human cashiers at all.
But wait, you may be thinking. How could any store afford to give a 90% discount on groceries? The same way they give discounts for seniors and students at movie theaters. You just raise the sticker price, so that the price people actually pay after the discount is the same as before. So instead of keeping human-cashier prices the same and cutting prices for self-checkout, what stores would actually do if you made them give 10% discounts for self-checkout is to raise prices across the board — not by 10%, but by enough so that overall revenue is just about the same as it was before.
How do we know this is what will happen? Because the grocery store industry is very competitive. Profit margins are almost always between 1.5% and 2.8%, which is very low compared to the average industry:
It’s not just profit margins that demonstrate this — there are tons of grocery stores, and new ones enter the market all the time. This means that if grocery stores tried to respond to the New York bill by getting rid of self-checkout and using only human cashiers — in order to charge higher prices and make higher profits — other stores would undercut them by offering self-checkout with big discounts. People would flock to those other stores, and the stores that tried to overcharge would lose business until they, too, put in the self-checkout machines.
This is kind of like if you told grocery stores to charge 10% more for Skippy peanut butter than for Jif peanut butter. Obviously stores would want to stock more Skippy, because they’d earn more money on each sale. But obviously consumers would want to buy more Jif, because it was cheaper. At the end of the day, the consumers would win, because consumers tend to win out when an industry is highly competitive. Some people would still buy Skippy, because some people just really like Skippy more, but overall, forcing one brand of peanut butter to cost more than another brand means you’ll have less of it on the shelves.
By the exact same reasoning, forcing stores to charge more for purchases scanned by human cashiers will end up getting a lot of cashiers fired and replaced with self-checkout machines.
As policies go, this example isn’t particularly hard to explain, or to understand. If you ask any economist, or any good AI, they’ll give basically the same answer, in different words. It would be a good question on an undergrad microeconomics exam. But when I tried to explain this on X, some people had a lot of trouble understanding:
The idea of a 10% discount on self-checkout as a way to incentivize human employment is pure “slopulism” — stuff that seems like populism, but wouldn’t achieve the results that people want from the policy.1 It’s snake oil that sells well based on people’s inability to see the consequences of what they’re being sold.
Slopulism is an inevitable outgrowth of populism. Once people decide that technocrats, elites, experts, and gatekeepers aren’t worth listening to, they become vulnerable to all sorts of policy scams. In general, these scams fall into two categories:
Accidental scams, where the people making the policy just don’t understand what they’re doing
Ideological scams, where ideologues sell the public on an ideologically-driven policy by pretending it offers benefits that it doesn’t really offer
The second of these is more dangerous than the first. Slopulism that arises out of pure ignorance is very hard to correct, and social media — which elevates the dumbest and loudest at the expense of the most well-informed — probably makes it harder. But in the end, patience, education, and reason can overcome accidental slopulism — and AI may help a lot.
But when slopulist ideas are being promoted by smart people with ulterior motives, it can be a lot harder to wake the populace up. At that point, there’s the danger that slopulism becomes a bipartisan equilibrium, with each party’s ideologues executing a coup against the reasonable moderates by appealing to slopulist instincts.
Cardiff Garcia interviewed me about Moral Economics, and we began by talking about medical aid in dying, and moved briskly on to other controversial markets such as pornography and prostitution.
The New Bazaar Economist Alvin Roth, winner of the economics Nobel in 2012 for his work on market design, joins Cardiff to discuss his new book, Moral Economics: From Prostitution to Organ Sales: What Controversial Transactions Reveal About How Markets Work.
The book is about morally contested markets: transactions that participants would like to engage in but that others think they shouldn't be allowed to, even when it’s hard to identify measurable harms to those objectors. It's also a great way to understand how markets interact with the law, politics, social norms, income inequality, human psychology, and so much more than just monetary exchange.
In this chat, Alvin and Cardiff discuss: • Medical aid in dying and the economics of “repugnant” markets • Sex work, trafficking, and the unintended consequences of criminalization • Plural marriage and the challenge of designing new legal protections • Sports gambling and the rise of prediction markets • Kidney exchanges, the transplantation shortage, and the opposition to cross-border exchanges
Throughout the conversation, they confront the trade-offs involved in both allowing controversial markets and trying to ban them.
Related Links
• Moral Economics: From Prostitution to Organ Sales: What Controversial Transactions Reveal About How Markets Work (https://basic-venture.com/titles/alvi...)
Changes that improve Datasette Apps when created and edited using Datasette Agent:
New app_debug() tool allowing agent to open an app (invisibly) and test it using JavaScript. #33
New app_list() tool for listing apps the user has permission to edit, so the agent can edit them. #36
The app_debug() tool is pretty neat: it works by displaying the app in a opacity: 0 iframe with pointer-events: none (so it can't be seen or interacted with) and then executing agent-provided JavaScript inside that sandboxed iframe. This means the agent can smoke test that the app is working and even do things like measure the dimensions of different elements.
A few days ago it was Anthropic discovering cryptographic weaknesses with Claude using Mythos Preview, spending $100,000 on tokens and with prompts that included "again we are not looking for low hanging fruit, we want proper research to find genuinly hard findings."
Now it's OpenAI's turn to flex. They set "an internal version of Astra, our next major model" on finding solutions to ten mathematical problems that "have seen no progress on the main result for at least a decade". They claim to have spent less than $2,000 at GPT-5.6 Sol token prices on each one.
(No news on how many problems they spent $2,000 on without reaching a solution though.)
The openai/ten-proofs repository has Lean 4 formalizations of their results, and there's also a paper describing the solutions and an additional LLM-generated PDF where the model "reconstructs how the proof came together" based on the unpublished reasoning traces.
That's a decent level of transparency, but I want to see the prompts they used!
A lot of mathematicians online are experiencing a collective burst of Deep Blue. Mathematician Kirwin Hampshire published an impassioned essay last week, The Dark Night of Mathematics, describing "a profound spiritual crisis" brought on by previous (and less significant) results.
OpenAI's results reminds me of what Terence Tao described as "big mathematics" in IEEE Spectrum in June:
Unlike some of his peers, Tao is neither dismissive of AI nor fearful. Instead, he sees it as the catalyst for a fundamental shift in the discipline—a transition toward what he calls “big mathematics.” He envisions a future of large-scale, decentralized collaborations between humans and machines, where complex mathematical tasks can be diced and sliced, with humans claiming the creative parts and AI doing the lion’s share of the technical grunt work.
No podcast today. I’d like to say that I was struck speechless by the revelation that the no-bid contractor on the Reflecting Pool botched the job — and that the charges against David Hearn, falsely accused of sabotage, were Trumped up.
But the truth is that I couldn’t get it together because I caught some kind of stomach bug and spent a lot of the week kneeling before the porcelain throne.
I wrote this summary of the past few weeks of open letters as a section of my sponsors-only newsletter but I've decided to share it here as well.
Open Weights and American AI Leadership was shepherded by Microsoft, dated July 24th, and signed by 235 AI-adjacent companies including NVIDIA, Amazon, Y Combinator, The Linux Foundation and (a later signer) OpenAI.
It's clearly an argument designed to counter any instincts by the current US government to ban or limit open weight models over "safety" concerns - a reasonable consideration given what happened to Claude Fable 5!
Relying solely on closed models is not inherently safe: they can be breached, misused, or fail in ways that outsiders cannot detect. And concentrating advanced AI capabilities behind a small number of closed models compounds that risk. It results in a small number of single points of failure, weakens competition, and leaves critical technology in the hands of a few providers. Open weight models, on the other hand, allow a broad community of researchers and developers to examine their behavior, identify vulnerabilities, develop safeguards, and improve them over time.
The one surprising note in the letter is that it comes out in support of distillation, where models train on output from other models:
In shaping this ecosystem, policymakers should be careful not to conflate legitimate model-development techniques with misappropriation. Distillation, or the practice of using one model’s outputs to help train or improve another, is a widely used technique for model improvement, evaluation, and validation. It reflects a long tradition of learning from, building upon, and improving existing technologies, a tradition that has helped drive innovation since the rise of the open-source software movement.
Notably absent from the signatures: Anthropic, who published their own response Our position on open-weights models three days later. CEO Dario Amodei doubled down on the risk of authoritarian governments building "AI models that are more powerful than those built by the US", and models being "misused to carry out cyberattacks or biological attacks", and called for "a crack down on industrial-scale distillation operations", while also stating that "Anthropic has never advocated for a ban on open-weights models".
Then on July 28th Pacing the Frontier was published, featuring signatures from "1,324 employees of frontier AI companies" - with names like Jakub Pachocki (Chief Scientist, OpenAI), Ilya Sutskever (Safe Superintelligence Inc, previously OpenAI), Dario Amodei (Anthropic), Jack Clark (Anthropic) and more. Their core message:
We request that the U.S. government support an international effort to develop the technical and governance tools needed to deliberately pace the frontier of automated AI development.
at openai, many people hook their chatgpt up to slack.
people really don't like when a coworker's chatgpt contacts them asking for help with a task, even when they'd be perfectly happy doing that same work if asked by that coworker.
reinforces how much people care about human relationships and helping each other, and want AI to give time back — or enhance time together — rather than become a layer separating people.
Mexico has quietly become a cornerstone of the AI boom, providing 40 per cent of US imports this year of the computer servers that are widely used in the data centres powering artificial intelligence.
Taiwanese manufacturers are rapidly expanding factories in Mexico to assemble servers, which are now the country’s top US export, overtaking autos that dominated its trade for decades.
Mexico is the second-largest provider of enterprise servers to the US so far this year, with sales reaching $46.9bn, behind Taiwan, which sold $53.5bn, though Mexico became the largest on a monthly basis in May.
The phenomenon is helping prop up Mexico’s limp economy, pushing the country’s exports to record levels. Servers and related hardware made up almost one-fifth of the $317bn of goods Mexico exported between January and May, more than double the same period a year earlier. Taiwan, in turn, is now Mexico’s third-largest trading partner, up from eighth place in 2022. Taiwanese companies have spent more than $1.6bn since 2020 on Mexican factories that offer geographic proximity and tariff-free access to US tech giants spending hundreds of billions on data centres.
“Mexico is of tremendous importance to the way this new AI-powered economy is working,” said Jesse Rogers, head of Latin America economics at Moody’s Analytics. “It is really a new frontier of collaboration and even dependency on the Mexican economy when it comes to AI servers.”
The Creation of the World, by Ivan Aivazovsky, via WikiArt.
Welcome to the reading list, a weekly roundup of news and links related to buildings, infrastructure, industrial technology. This week we look at pepper-spray drones, China’s chip Manhattan Project, Commonwealth Fusion’s fundraise, and a proposed Dulles Airport renovation. Roughly 2/3rds of the reading list is paywalled, so for full access become a paid subscriber.
Housing and Cities
It’s been a while since we checked in on 3D printed building company Icon. It seems like they’ve completed printing of 10 barracks buildings for Fort Bliss, and the first two of the buildings are now completed and occupied. [Army]
Some schools are buying pepper spray-equipped drones to deploy against active shooters. “At least nine schools — three in Florida, five in Georgia and one in Colorado — will have storage boxes that house the plastic, nonlethal aircraft made by Austin-based Mithril Defense. The drones, which can be activated by teachers, are capable of reaching a shooter within 15 seconds. The aircraft are designed to distract their targets by flashing strobes, blaring sirens, spraying them with pepper gel, or ramming into them at 60 mph.” [Washington Post]
The Wall Street Journal on the decline of kids in big cities. “The number of children under 18 living in big U.S. cities is down 6% in the past decade, the Journal found, compared with a 1% decline nationwide. The drop is especially stark among families with little kids: The number of children under age 5 in big cities fell 15%, compared with a drop of 7% nationwide. Even cities that are gaining population are losing children.” [WSJ]
Manufacturing
The Financial Times on how things are turning around at Boeing, and how far the company has to go. “According to aviation research firm Leeham Co, Boeing’s commercial airliner division alone has lost more than $46bn since 2019. It estimates that, left with little pricing power after years of delayed and cancelled aircraft deliveries, the company lost an average of $2.8mn on each of the 314 planes it has delivered this year.” [FT]
Tesla is allegedly considering spinning off its China operation into a separate business, potentially to allow the company to merge with SpaceX. [WSJ]
Inside China’s “chip Manhattan Project” to catch up to the US in chipmaking technology. “Ding dusted off the same all-out approach China had used to produce its first atomic bombs, hydrogen bombs and satellites in the 1960s during a rift with the Soviet Union. He set up a committee that drew from the country’s best companies and labs to form specialized teams and directed them to master the different elements of the chip supply chain.” [WSJ]
Related, a Chinese company is now mass producing deep ultraviolet semiconductor lithography (DUV) machines. DUV is the technology that preceded EUV. [Tom’s Hardware]
Tesla says it plans to open source the designs for the discontinued Model S and Model X. [Electrek]
The US Senate is working on a bill that would ban automakers that have more than 15% Chinese ownership from selling cars in the US. This would include Mercedes Benz. [Car and Driver] And this week the US also banned the import of new models of Chinese robots and power inverters. [Reuters] And Starlink gets an exemption from the recent ban of foreign-made routers. [Ars Technica]
Related, this week China banned export of critical minerals that could be used for military purposes to 14 European companies. “As a result, the companies may struggle to buy many of the critical minerals they need to make products like rare-earth magnets and semiconductors, which are essential for cars, offshore wind turbines, robots, drones and other advanced manufacturing applications.” [NYT]
Both Ford and GM are competing to be the supplier for a new tactical pickup truck for the Army. [WSJ]
I’m taking a break starting today, at least through all of August, and likely part of September too. For paying subscribers, billing will be paused until I hit the resume button.
Your next bill date will be pushed out appropriately. If you have 12 days left on a monthly subscription right now, you’ll still have 12 days left when I resume. If you have 289 days left on an annual subscription, you’ll still have 289 days. If you’re not a paying subscriber, you won’t be able to subscribe to read paywalled archive posts until I resume publication.
Book Club Status
The book club will continue through the break. Book discussions happen in the #psychohistory channel of the Protocol Institute discord. There are also broader discussions on the world machines project, and regular calls every other Thursday, where we discuss the theory and implementation of our psychohistorical grand designs inspired by the book club. You can, of course, just stick to book-club activities.
You can find an invite code and links to individual chat threads in the on the book club page.
July was Side Quest month. I tried to read 3 books in parallel. I am 1/3 done with: Rana Dasgupta’s After Nations, Christopher Clark’s Revolutionary Spring, and David Wootton’s The Invention of Science. So I suppose I can claim to have read 1 book.
The August pick is Darwin’s Dangerous Idea by Daniel Dennett.
Up betimes and got me ready, and so to the office and put things in order for my going. By and by comes Sir G. Carteret, and he and I did some business, and then Mr. Coventry sending for me, he staying in the boat, I got myself presently ready and down to him, he and I by water to Gravesend (his man Lambert with us), and there eat a bit and so mounted, I upon one of his horses which met him there, a brave proud horse, all the way talking of businesses of the office and other matters to good purpose.
Being come to Chatham, we put on our boots and so walked to the yard, where we met Commissioner Pett, and there walked up and down looking and inquiring into many businesses, and in the evening went to the Commissioner’s and there in his upper Arbor sat and talked, and there pressed upon the Commissioner to take upon him a power to correct and suspend officers that do not their duty and other things, which he unwillingly answered he would if we would own him in it. Being gone thence Mr. Coventry and I did discourse about him, and conclude that he is not able to do the same in that yard that he might and can and it maybe will do in another, what with his old faults and the relations that he has to most people that act there. After an hour or two’s discourse at the Hill-house before going to bed, I see him to his and he me to my chamber, he lying in the Treasurer’s and I in the Controller’s chambers.
On Thursday, Apple announced record third-quarter earnings,
with total revenue of $109.4B, up 16 percent from the year-ago
quarter. iPhone revenue was up 22%, Mac revenue was up 10.4%,
Services revenue was up 12%, and Wearables revenue was up 6%. iPad
revenue was down 6%.
When Cook took over as CEO, Apple’s revenue for all of 2011 was
$108 billion. Apple reported $109.4 billion for Q3 2026, earning
its 2011 revenue in a single quarter. We don’t have the numbers
for fiscal 2026 yet, but in fiscal 2025, revenue was $416
billion. [...]
A day after Cook took over in August 2011, Apple’s stock price was
$13.35 (split-adjusted). Today, it opened at $304.81, a roughly
23× increase.
I also was struck by the high proportion of Chinese visitors at this show, even though they are not especially numerous in Florence right now.
The main Rothko show, at Palazzo Strozzi, had an opening room showing Rothkos tied to Renaissance (!) art, mostly with works from early Rothko. The rest of the exhibit had perfect lighting and was the best Rothko display I have seen.
Ken Griffin has very good taste in Rothko. One of his works is here.
Visiting Florence in August is less unbearable than I was expecting. So many other places have become crowded that the situation here does not phase me. Plus the heat is keeping many away? At dinnertime, there is no crush to get into the restaurants.
6. “social media use and school grades are unrelated for adolescents…meta-analytic evidence is not in support of dramatic claims relating social media use to mischief.” Link here.
Courtney Kube, Monica Alba, Peter Nicholas, Gordon Lubold, Katherine Doyle, and Andrea Mitchell of NBC News reported Wednesday that President Donald J. Trump is “exasperated” that the Iran war is dragging on and that his advisors can’t agree what to do next. Reportedly, he erupted last week during a meeting with his national security team, shouting expletives at the officials in the room. One of Trump’s allies told the reporters that Trump had not expected the war to last as long as it has. “There was not a real strategy for how long or what they should do to get to the endpoint.... He did not intend this to be a long, drawn-out war,” the person said.
Yesterday the war began to widen as a drone hit a gas storage tanker owned by a U.S. company in Egypt near the Suez Canal—no one has claimed responsibility—and Iran struck at American installations in Jordan. U.S. and Saudi Arabian forces launched strikes against Iranian-backed militias in Iraq.
At a Cabinet meeting at Camp David today, Trump told reporters he intends to hit Iran with heavy military strikes again to force Iranian negotiators to give in to his demands. “We will be hitting them very hard,” he said. “And you know at some point, they’re going to say, ‘We just can’t take it anymore.’” “We just want to win,” he said. “We’re doing very well.”
Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth did not appear to have a strategy for their war on Iran. Instead, they had an ideology. That ideology elevates individualism over the idea behind the modern American state: that government should regulate business, maintain a basic social safety net, promote infrastructure, protect civil rights, and support an international order based in rules rather than in military might.
Since the 1950s, opponents of that modern state have celebrated the American individual, especially the American cowboy, as the figure the American government should privilege and protect. In their mythology, the cowboy wanted nothing from the government but to be left alone to rise through his own hard work, protecting himself and his family from wrongdoers with his gun and his principles. The education, expertise, cooperation, and coalitions on which the modern U.S. stood before Trump were signs not of strength, but of weakness.
That ideology seems to have been what was behind the attack on Iran. In 2015 the U.S., China, France, Germany, Russia, the United Kingdom, and Iran negotiated the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). Under the JCPOA, Iran agreed to reduce its stockpile of enriched uranium significantly and allow inspections, in exchange for relief from some sanctions. The Strait of Hormuz remained open. Although inspectors said Iran was honoring the deal, Trump maintained it was “[o]ne of the worst deals ever made by our Country.” He took the U.S. out of the JCPOA in 2018, and the following year, Iran resumed work on enriched uranium necessary for a nuclear weapon.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth brought this ideology into the Defense Department, which he tried to rebrand the “Department of War.” In 2024, Hegseth published a book titled The War on Warriors: Behind the Betrayal of the Men Who Keep Us Free. In it, he claimed that the U.S. military was weak and “effeminate” because its leaders had embraced diversity, equity, and inclusion.
His prescription for the country involved getting rid of the Geneva Conventions, which recognize human rights for noncombatants in war, claiming they forced the U.S. troops to fight “with one hand behind our back.” In his confirmation hearings, Hegseth refused to tell Senator Angus King (I-ME) that he would honor those agreements.
On September 5, 2025, Hegseth said changing the name of the Defense Department to the Department of War was part of his campaign to spread a “warrior ethos” at the Pentagon. The rebranding, he said, was part of “restoring intentionality to the use of force…. We’re going to go on offense, not just on defense. Maximum lethality, not tepid legality, violent effect, not politically correct. We’re going to raise up warriors, not just defenders. So this War Department, Mr. President, just like America, is back.”
But Trump’s war on Iran has illustrated the weakness of that vision. Trump reiterated yet again today that the U.S. has dominated Iran’s military. “They’re being decimated. They have no Navy, they have no Air Force, they have no anti-aircraft,” he said. But for all that, they retain their ability to choke world trade by controlling the Strait of Hormuz—the very condition previous presidents worked to avoid through negotiations.
An article yesterday by Politico senior foreign affairs correspondent Nahal Toosi suggests that the “cowboy” approach to foreign policy has another downside. Toosi called out the extreme attacks of Trump and his aides on the International Criminal Court (ICC) and wrote that, although the U.S. is not a signatory to that court, former government officials and legal scholars suspect Trump and administration officials are worried about future prosecutions.
On July 13, Secretary of State Marco Rubio wrote in the Wall Street Journal that the administration intends to “dismantle the ICC—brick by brick, if necessary.” A press release from the State Department on the same day said that the U.S. “will feature a whole-of-government response to systematically disable the ICC’s ability to operate, target American servicemen or officials, or otherwise threaten American sovereignty.”
A Republican operative close to the White House, Bill Cortese, told Toosi that some administration officials are afraid that “if Democrats come into power…, an unchecked ICC and other international institutions are going to unleash a wave of litigation against this administration and anyone associated with it.” Toosi notes that during the administration, U.S. law enforcement and military officials have been accused of human rights violations that reach across borders.
Notably, on September 2, 2025, three days before Hegseth’s “maximum lethality, not tepid legality” speech, the administration began strikes against small boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific. Those strikes have killed more than 220 people, but the administration has offered no evidence to prove its claims that those killed were “narcoterrorists” killed to stop the flow of cocaine to the U.S.
Trump claims the strikes have virtually ended drug trafficking by sea, but on July 27, Alex Horton, Terrence McCoy, Samantha Schmidt, and Dylan Moriarty of the Washington Post reported that according to Pentagon officials and officials from the Drug Enforcement Agency, the strikes have not reduced the cocaine coming into the U.S. Indeed, the dropping price of the drug suggests there is more of it now than there was a year ago. Instead, the strikes have simply prompted criminal organizations to find new routes. The strikes have also disrupted the law enforcement system in which lower-level participants inform on higher-ups, as the lower-level sources are being pulled back.
While the strikes appear to have done little to stop the flow of drugs, legal analysts say they look a lot like former Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte’s extrajudicial killings of suspected drug dealers and users. Law professor Charlie Trumbull reminded readers of Foreign Policy that in 2017, Trump called Duterte to congratulate him for doing “an unbelievable job on the drug problem.” Trumbull also noted that “Duterte is now behind bars in the Hague,” charged with crimes against humanity for trying to get rid of criminals by unlawful means, including murder.
“The Trump administration should be concerned,” Trumbull warned.
On July 25 the U.S. State Department cheered Venezuela’s withdrawal from the treaty that established the ICC and said it welcomed “the new Venezuelan government’s partnership on American-led efforts to dismantle the corrupt and worthless ICC.” It continued, “The ICC is neither credible, independent, nor legitimate,” and called on all members of the ICC to abandon it.
Today Missy Ryan and Nancy A. Youssef of The Atlantic reported that in the wake of the U.S. strike on the Minab school that killed 168 people, mostly schoolchildren, in the first hours of the war, the Pentagon is considering reversing some of the deep cuts Hegseth made to the staff at the Defense Department. A report by the Pentagon inspector general found that cuts to the civilian-harm protections staff who work to protect noncombatants may have violated laws.
Ryan and Youssef explain that the U.S. military had spent decades building its civilian protections. Leaders understood that battlefield victories were insufficient to win military operations and that protecting civilians is crucial to public support for those operations. Ryan and Youssef noted that to reflect this understanding, the Pentagon in 2006 “formally added legitimacy, restraint, and perseverance to its Principles of Joint Operations, defining legitimacy as ‘the legality, morality, and rightness of the actions undertaken.’”
A U.S. official told Ryan and Youssef that the leadership of U.S. combat commands uniformly support the restoration of the personnel whose job it is to protect civilians. But Hegseth has not committed to the restoration of the old system, the journalists note, and even if he does, it will have little effect unless he changes his own rhetoric.
For his part, Trump appears to be addressing concerns about future prosecutions, whether by the ICC or at U.S. courts, by keeping control of the government after the midterms. Today Trump disagreed with the assessment of investigators that a recent cyberattack on municipal water systems in Minnesota was likely the work of Iranian hackers. Instead, he blamed Democrats.
“We heard in Minnesota there was a cyberattack and they blame it on Iran,” he told reporters. “I don’t think so. I think. I blame it on Minnesota because they’re grossly incompetent. There was a cyberattack of thirty water plants. And I would blame it on Minnesota and the governor, the corrupt governor of Minnesota.”
There is another piece of evidence this week that the abandonment of education and expertise in favor of a “warrior ethos” has weakened the U.S. on the world stage. At an international conference on AIDS in Rio de Janeiro, an official of the U.S. State Department showed a map of Africa on which six fake countries were identified with the names of random real countries—including Nigeria, where several hundred U.S. soldiers are deployed. Reuters identified the image as AI.
Attendees took screenshots and posted them online. “Whoever created and approved this slide did not know where countries in Africa are and did not care to check their work,” one wrote.
Indeed, if first indications are to be believed, this announcement is once again premature, short on practical, enforceable timelines, and entirely dependent on whatever good will there is between the warring partners to abide by a written agreement. Immediately, for example, each side disagreed about what the words require.
But, somehow, we’re expected to simply accept that peace dealings that did not include the combatants, that were negotiated by backroom exchanges among representatives from Qatar, Egypt and Turkey, that require steps that each side has refused, suddenly all disappear because Donald Trump has declared that there is an agreement in place.
Hours after the announcement, the Israeli Defense Forces killed two Hamas operatives in aerial strikes after they were said to be “advancing attacks” against IDF troops.
What has held up any progress in Gaza has been Hamas insistence on holding onto its weapons, and Israeli occupation of at least half of Gaza, recently extended to 70 percent.
There is no neutral “technocratic” government for Gaza, nor a civilian police force, nor a documented inventory of weapons or discussion of how arms would be secured from Hamas fighters. Until we see something different, this feels like wishful thinking – or more self-congratulatory diversion by Trump from uglier, unsettled matters in the region and at home.
The Terms
According to the announcement, Hamas has agreed to turn over its weapons, including missiles and small arms, to a civilian Palestinian police agency yet to be created, but prefaced the vow on a total halt to Israeli military actions and withdrawal of the IDF forces. Israel, of course, said the weapons need to be turned over first, which is exactly where we have been for months.
Removal of conflict in Gaza would be a breakthrough towards calming conflict overall in the Middle East, since Iran uses Israeli occupation of Gaza as a pretext for its attacks on Israel. Of course, Iran also wants Israel eliminated entirely, and surely to halt its actions against Hezbollah in southern Lebanon and against Palestinians in the West Bank. More than 1,200 people have been killed in the territory since the cease-fire last October, according to the Gaza health ministry, which does not distinguish between combatants and civilians.
Trump seemed satisfied simply to announce a “HISTORIC agreement for the COMPLETE DISARMAMENT” of Hamas without a moment of hesitation or question. He also didn’t do the work to get to this point. That was left to his “Board of Peace,” named for him but being run by Tony Blair, former British prime minister, who, in turn, relied on intermediaries. What could be misunderstood here? Even the Board of Peace folks were saying any first moves require care and monitoring for verification.
Hamas spoke through the press to its followers. In Israel, the most right-leaning ministers reminded all that they intend to build settlements in Gaza. Trump still imagines Palestinians accepting self-deportation to somewhere never named to allow international development of what he sees as prime beachfront real estate.
Simple answers don’t automatically work for complicated problems. One would think that by now, even the Trump administration would understand that.
“FREEDOM OF THE PRESS IS NOT JUST IMPORTANT TO DEMOCRACY, IT IS DEMOCRACY.” – Walter Cronkite. CLICK HERE to donate in support of our free and independent voice.
Hey, if you have a Poem/1 then can I ask you to do a manual firmware update?
It’ll take just a few minutes and I built a special firmware update tool to make it easy.
(That is an actual AI clock on my actual bookshelf in my actual house.)
Why? Three reasons…
No more stopped clocks. These clocks are way better at recovering from intermittent network faults like the Wi-Fi dropping or the back-end server changing – including one nasty, rare bug that would affect people for a week at a time then go away. That was not straightforward to track down.
Automatic updates from now on. This firmware adds automatic OTA updates, so if I have to push bug fixes again, you’ll get the new code without having to do anything.
A third font, Shantell. As a thank you for people who update their clocks… You can already choose between Inter and Playfair from the Dashboard (you’ll need to claim it first using the code on the “Composing…” screen). When you get the new firmware, you’ll be able to pick this cute new font too.
I’ve shipped out over 700 clocks and it has been a joy to see them connect from all over the world – I have a map on my private stats page.
I can also see that only 26% of active clocks are on the latest firmware…
I mean, that’s not bad given that updating is a manual process!
But goodness me it’s a reminder that Apple does an incredible job keeping people current, and you can see why they hold back emoji for major releases of iOS to nudge people over the line.
On the other hand, I have some way to go. Hence this post.
Also on my stats page is a list of poems that people have liked recently (all anonymous).
I collect these because I’m working on revising the poetry machine, and it’s good to know what good looks like.
Here are a few:
"The wise owl glides, silent, spry, / It’s one oh one, in the sky."
"Saut’eed garlic in a pan, / It’s one fifty-eight, let’s eat, man!"
"Moments drift like grains of sand, / It’s two fifteen, so take my hand."
"An octopus in space, what a mix, / It juggles stars at six forty-six."
"Such joy to see, / it’s seven forty-three."
"The taste of when, / at eight ten."
"Joyful giggles fill the air, / At eight twenty-five, love’s everywhere."
Will I sell more clocks? Yes.
My AI clock has gone on this weird journey from cutting edge (the proto was in the NY Times) to, today, being retro. AI from a more innocent time. And I still love it, it still speaks to me.
Now that the Kickstarter backers all have their clocks (mostly) I can see how many clocks are still in the Hong Kong warehouse. A few!
And there are a few more on the way in case people want a Poem/1 for Christmas…
I still need to set up the Shopify etc etc, there’s a bunch to do.
So if you’d like to know when the shop is open then join the AI Clock substack – it’s a dormant mailing list right now. I’ll use it to announce availability.
HELSINKI — China sent a new pair of secretive satellites into a programmatically new orbit Wednesday, while also upgrading its on-orbit communications relay capabilities. A Long March 6A rocket lifted […]
The first stop (post-arrest, pre-trial) for many people caught up in the US criminal justice system is a local jail. Many of the people who are jailed have healthcare issues involving, for example, mental illness and/or drug and alcohol addiction. But jails don't view themselves as healthcare facilities.
So I'm glad to see that Stanford Impact Labs (SIL) is funding
"Local jails are a critical but often overlooked part of the American healthcare system, processing approximately 7.3 million admissions annually and housing more than 600,000 individuals on any given day. Despite this scale, healthcare quality in jails remains highly variable, and mortality rates have increased over time, with drug and alcohol-related deaths increasing as much as four times from 2000 to 2019 and suicide rates remaining approximately twice the national average.
"Our research project addresses this challenge by identifying and scaling organizational strategies to improve healthcare quality, coordination, and oversight in local jails. Building on the first randomized controlled trial of healthcare accreditation in U.S. jails, our team partnered with 46 jails nationwide to evaluate accreditation through the National Commission on Correctional Health Care (NCCHC). We found that accreditation improved compliance with healthcare quality standards, particularly in training and patient care, and reduced 12-month mortality by approximately 60 percent. These improvements happened without increases in staffing or capital investments, suggesting that organizational improvements and better coordination drive impact.
"The current phase of the project focuses on understanding how jail leaders, including sheriffs, make decisions about improving healthcare quality in local jails. Through our partnership with the National Sheriffs' Association, we aim to identify the factors that influence the adoption and implementation of healthcare improvement strategies, including voluntary healthcare accreditation and other evidence-based approaches. Through this partnership, we plan to translate evidence into sustainable improvements in correctional healthcare systems nationwide.
The cost of generating the proofs for all 10 of these breakthroughs combined was under $2,000 at Sol API prices. We’re excited to see what scientists and researchers are able to create with our upcoming Astra models!
The latest release in DeepSeek's V4 family, "with substantially enhanced agentic capabilities". It's 304 billion parameters - 167GB on Hugging Face - but it appears to punch well above its weight.
Artificial Analysis rank it ahead of MiniMax M3 - a 428B model. It's $0.14/million input and $0.27/million output pricing means this may currently be the best value-per-intelligence model out there. It's looking very good on the Intelligence Index vs. Cost per Intelligence Index Task chart:
Tuesday was Stateless MCP day - the rollout of MCP 2.0, or the 2026-07-28 Model Context Protocol specification to use the more formal but less memorable name. This is the most significant change to the MCP spec since it first launched, and has also served to reignite my personal interest in the protocol.
For background: MCP is the Model Context Protocol, which describes a standard way to expose new tools to LLM-powered agent frameworks. It was introduced by Anthropic back in November 2024, had a huge spike of interest through much of 2025, and then became somewhat eclipsed by Skills (another Anthropic invention) when it became apparent that an agent harness with access to a terminal and curl could do most of what MCP did in a more flexible way. I wrote about that in my review of 2025.
I'm coming back around to MCP now. Giving an agent a shell environment with the ability to access the internet is fraught with risk, and requires a strong model that is capable of effectively driving such an environment. MCP tools are easier to audit and control, and simple enough that smaller models that run on a laptop can still drive them reasonably well.
The new stateless MCP specification also greatly decreases the complexity of implementing both clients and servers for the protocol. I built three of those this week!
What's easier with stateless MCP
The best demonstration of the difference between stateful and stateless MCP is in this May 21st blog post that introduced the RC for the new specification. It included a clear before-and-after example.
The older stateful MCP (I'm going to call it "legacy MCP") required two HTTP requests - the first to initialize a session and obtain a Mcp-Session-Id, and the second to actually call the tool:
This is so much cleaner from both a client- and server-side implementation perspective. It's also a better fit for building scalable web applications, since now you don't need to maintain server-side state to keep track of those session IDs, or worry about routing the same session to the same backend machine.
mcp-explorer
I couldn't find a great CLI tool for interactively probing an MCP server, so I had Codex help build my own.
mcp-explorer is the result. It's a stateless Python CLI tool, so you don't even need to install it to try it out - it works with uvx like this:
uvx mcp-explorer list https://agentic-mermaid.dev/mcp
This queries Ade Oshineye's agentic-mermaid.dev demo MCP. The above command returns the following list of tools:
execute(code: string, timeoutMs?: integer) - Execute Mermaid SDK code
Run JavaScript in an isolated sandbox; return a value.
describe_sdk(family: string, detail?: string) - Describe Mermaid SDK operations
Return version-matched mutation operations for one diagram family.
render_svg(source: string, options?: object) - Render Mermaid as SVG
Render a Mermaid source string to themeable SVG. Returns { ok, svg }.
render_ascii(source: string, useAscii?: boolean, targetWidth?: integer, options?: object) - Render Mermaid as text
Render a Mermaid source string to text. Returns { ok, text }.
render_png(source: string, scale?: number, background?: string, fitTo?: object, options?: object) - Render Mermaid as PNG
Rasterize a Mermaid source string to PNG. Returns { ok, png_base64 }.
...
Then to inspect a tool:
uvx mcp-explorer inspect render_svg
This outputs a whole bunch of information, including the JSON schema of the inputs and outputs.
To call that tool and pass arguments to it:
uvx mcp-explorer call \
https://agentic-mermaid.dev/mcp \
render_svg \
-a source'graph TD; A-->B' \
-a options '{"padding":24}'
To get just the raw SVG try adding | jq .svg -r to that command. I got back this image:
There are a few more commands in the README, but you get the general idea. I find building CLI tools like this to be a really productive way to get familiar with a specification, even if an agent writes most of the actual code.
datasette-mcp
The second project is datasette-mcp, a Datasette plugin which adds a /-/mcp endpoint to any Datasette instance.
This is probably the fourth time I've tried building this plugin, but thanks to the new stateless MCP specification I finally have a version that feels good to release.
It provides just three tools: list_databases(), get_database_schema(database_name), and execute_sql(database_name, sql). They do exactly what you would expect them to do - though execute_sql() is read-only for the moment.
Wire these into an agent, or a chat tool like ChatGPT or Claude, and they'll gain the ability to run SQL queries against your hosted Datasette instance.
So far I'm running it on the Datasette mirror of my blog, at datasette.simonwillison.net/-/mcp. It took a bit of fiddling to figure out how to attach that to ChatGPT and Claude, but I got there in the end. Here's a new TIL showing exactly how to do that.
It ran 7 separate SQL queries to figure out the answer.
llm-mcp-client
My LLM tool is long overdue for an official MCP integration. The new alpha llm-mcp-client plugin is my attempt at exactly that:
llm install llm-mcp-client
llm -T 'MCP("https://datasette.simonwillison.net/-/mcp")''count the notes'
Here's the output (including reasoning trace, I'm using LLM 0.32rc2):
Considering note count
I see the question "count the notes" is probably asking me to tally up blog notes. It could also mean published notes or drafts, so there's some ambiguity there. I'll need to figure out the total number of notes, likely by querying the count for both published notes and drafts to get a clear answer. Let's execute that count!
Once this is fully baked, I'm considering bringing it directly into LLM core. I'm excited to experiment with MCP in Datasette Agent and llm-coding-agent as well.
MCP is a safer way to build with agents
A few months after MCP was first released, I wrote Model Context Protocol has prompt injection security problems, where I noted that the pattern of having end users mix and match tools pushed responsibility for avoiding data exfiltration attacks out to the users themselves. I hadn't coined the Lethal Trifecta yet, but that was absolutely what I had in mind.
Then general agents with arbitrary shell and curl access came along, and that's so much harder to keep secure!
Something I've come to appreciate about MCP is that it's much easier to reason about agent capabilities and what might go wrong than with arbitrary command execution in an open network environment - the default for most of today's general and coding agent tools.
I plan to lean into MCP a whole lot more when I'm building sensitive applications on top of LLMs.
OECD countries experienced declining native population growth and rising net immigration over 1990-2024. We compile a new dataset of net immigration rates to OECD countries from all origins and show that most of the increase came from non-OECD countries and was predominantly high-skilled. Push factors, network effects, and policy indices explain little of the large cross-country heterogeneity in immigration dynamics; unexpected shocks and surges were common. Using local projections and several sources of identifying variation, we then estimate the relationship between immigration and growth in GDP per capita, labor productivity, capital investment, and total factor productivity (TFP). Immigration from non-OECD countries was a significant predictor of GDP per worker growth, primarily through higher investment. High-skilled immigration, in particular, was associated with stronger human capital accumulation, faster TFP growth, and greater capital deepening. Native population growth, by contrast, had no or weakly negative effects on GDP per capita and productivity. These results are consistent with a large literature documenting the positive productivity and growth effects of immigration, especially high-skilled immigration.
Adithyan Madhu, 14, an independent researcher, received his grant to study early writing systems, applying computational linguistics, pattern analysis, and structural methods to the Indus Valley script.
Aparajeet Shadangi, 17, received his grant to explore conceptual approaches to cosmic expansion and dark energy while continuing his formal academic preparation in cosmology.
Kevin Gibson, a student developer, received his grant for Crsynk OS, a Python-based operating system integrated with an AI assistant and focused on lightweight user interfaces and accessible computing. He is also developing WiseChat AI and an AI Voice Engine.
Vaishnavi Dilip, 13, received her grant to identify fire-resistant plants native to Indian ecosystems and plant them strategically as natural firebreaks in fire-prone areas.
Prince T. Philip, an independent cybersecurity researcher and product architect focused on high-impact, future-facing risks in modern software systems, received his grant to build a security audit tool that surfaces vulnerabilities and design assumptions missed by traditional scanners.
Michaela Cross, a writer and content creator, received her grant for Rose Chasm, a video project on the history of India and its relationship to America and the wider world.
Vivekanand Bhat and Rijesh Panicker received their grant for Pathika, to create immersive, augmented, multilingual onsite guided tours for heritage monuments across India.
Devanarayan, 15, received his grant for Open Horizon Observatory, a small open-access observing setup that produces and freely shares real astronomical data. He is developing low-cost workflows for time-series photometry and open data sharing for students and the public.
Roshan Kumar Gupta, 19, a computer science undergraduate, received his grant for TARS, a deterministic, physics-aware machine-learning pipeline for exoplanet discovery using TESS data. He aims to reduce false positives and identify physically credible habitable-world candidates in noisy observations.
Yajan Adhikari, 19, a materials researcher, received his grant to build an operating system for digitizing and scaling the management of recyclable materials.
Pranet Khetan, 17, received his grant to develop a novel, low-cost architecture for refreshable tactile graphics supporting STEM education for visually impaired students.
Karthik, 18, a space engineer, received his grant to research the use of remote sensing in agricultural insurance.
Alexander Hogeveen Rutter, an energy expert, received his grant for analysis and advocacy of least-cost resource adequacy planning and other market-based measures in India’s power sector.
Akshit Arora, an Engineering Physics student at IIT Delhi, and Bhavey Sehgal, a BITS Pilani student, received their grant for NeuroBridge. It uses eye tracking, computer vision, and AI to predict intent, giving people with ALS fast, confirmation-based speech instead of slow letter-by-letter eye typing, at a fraction of existing device costs.
Cartoonist Sumit Kumar and Vivekananda Roy Ghatak received their grant to advance their animated series Aaapki Poojita and produce short, animated sketches and redesign and relaunch the famous Bakarmax webtoon platform.
Progyan Das, 24, received his grant to develop fault-tolerant systems capable of using consumer devices for large-scale foundation model training.
Yash Chitte, an MBA student, received his grant to build a wall-climbing robot that autonomously cleans glass facades.
Khushi Jain, 23, an aerospace engineer, received her grant for NadirX Space, to build space-grade test infrastructure and hardware-in-the-loop systems that enable reliable testing of advanced space technologies and support future interplanetary missions.
Rishit Kapoor, an AI/ML researcher and engineer, received his grant for Periscopic Labs, which turns systematic reviews into living, AI-native infrastructure that keeps scientific claims traceable, verifiable, and continuously updated.
Koushik Das received his grant to build an explainable clinical decision-support system that helps primary-care doctors interpret complete blood count reports and detect anemia patterns more quickly and safely.
Shashank Sanjay, a medical student, received his grant to develop an affordable coronary stent.
Abrar Shahid, a systems designer using AI to reduce accessibility gaps, received his grant for Project Lumen AI, to build an AI translation layer connecting external eye photographs with retinal fundus scans and make eye-disease diagnosis easier.
I have felt since it was announced that the Apple iPhone Upgrade
Program has not just been a deal, but a steal. The
specifics:
You apply for a loan for a full-price iPhone at 0%.
If approved, your payments are split over 24 months.
Pay for 24 months, and the phone is yours.
That was just the deal; the steal was that it was low effort every
single year to get a new phone. I’d re-up for a new phone, and
Apple would forgive the remaining payments of the loan because I’d
signed up for another 24 months. Oh, and bonus, AppleCare was
included, which was a total steal because I hate iPhone cases
(iPhones are designed to be felt) and, uh, also I have been known
to drop my phone. [...]
At first glance, the new plan looks cheaper. The original plan:
one year of iPhone 17 Pro (256GB, $1,099 sticker) was ~$57/month.
12 payments, trade-in, restart: ~$684 for the year. The new
one, same phone: $45.99/month on the 12-month lease: $552 for
the year.
But wait! The first and most important change to the new plan is
that AppleCare is no longer included. Adding it back to this
phone at $13.99/month: $720 for the year.
That’s probably the single best argument for “the catch” in the new plan. The old iPhone Upgrade Program included AppleCare coverage, and the new Apple Upgrade leases do not.
Personally, I haven’t purchased AppleCare for any device, for me or my family, since I got it for my college Macintosh LC in 1991. Apple products come with good warranties. I’ve saved thousands of dollars in the intervening decades by never paying for AppleCare and instead paying for very occasional repairs out of pocket. (I’ve twice cracked my iPhone screen and paid to have it replaced.) But I know that some people wouldn’t even consider buying an iPhone (in particular, as a potentially dropped device) without AppleCare. Update: Lopp’s AppleCare math is for monthly AppleCare; if you pay annually ($139, for a $1,099 iPhone) then the annual cost for the monthly Apple Upgrade payments plus AppleCare is $691 — which is very close to the $684 annual cost for the old iPhone Upgrade Program.
My thanks to Agent Fone for sponsoring last week at DF. Agent Fone is a crazily ambitious new smartphone that doesn’t merely ship with a built-in AI assistant. Instead, the entire concept is that it enables you to create custom software, right on the phone itself. Ideas for new apps that you’ve had in your notes for years. Weird little app ideas that only you would want. Describe your idea, answer a few questions, and Agent Fone builds an app, or widget, and it’s on your home screen. They’re looking for 50 people and small teams to sell the first 50 hardware units to. If you’re interested, check out their website for all the information you need, and broader description of the platform.
Market Design
