I saw a baby jaywalking. I saw the most pregnant woman in the world jaywalking. I saw two kids jaywalking on their hands, a man jaywalking with a chair on his head. I saw cops jaywalking. I saw people on every mode of transport jayriding in every possible direction; a guy on a one wheel breaking a land speed record, a scooter, a bike, a double bike, a unicycle, a silver stallion. Where was Casey Neistat? I didn’t see him. But I saw a man jaywalk with his buttocks very out, wearing only angel wings and a golden cup on his nuts. I saw a nun jaywalking while smoking a joint. Weed was everywhere. People smoked cigarettes with joyful impunity, butts flicked hither and thither because The Floor is the Garbage. All the toilets are mostly broken. A middle-aged white woman two seats down from me used the word “fuck” more in a minute than I’ve used in a lifetime. Another middle-aged white woman broke into tears at the sight of Colin Jost, fanning herself saying omg omg omg like she was fourteen and the Paul McCartney had just appeared (he’d appear next week). I saw people yelling into cellphones, crying into cellphones, taxi drivers whispering in Hindi into cellphones like they were running an OnlyFans ASMR account for fans in Delhi. Make note: It’s illegal to walk your dog without taking a phone call here. I’ve seen a thousand people kissing, a million people hugging. Someone did human diarrhea in front of us as we walked near Washington Square Park. Here be Robert Frank’s old home and studio around the corner from CBGB, which is now a shop selling expensive suits. I saw the bald villain from A Princess Bride. He’s a tiny one! I watched him monologue in a small theater on the edge of (in the?) West Village for two hours and only “rested my eyes” a couple of times despite being jet-lagged out of my mind.
NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman sent a long email to employees on Friday morning outlining several structural changes that are intended to make the sprawling agency more efficient and allow it to better accomplish major goals, such as returning to the Moon and building a base there.
"I believe it is imperative to concentrate resources towards the highest priority objectives in the National Space Policy and liberate the best and brightest from needless bureaucracy and obstacles that impede progress," Isaacman wrote in his 3,000-word letter.
Isaacman's message stressed that no one at NASA will lose their jobs, and no field centers will be closed as part of these changes. Rather, the overall intent is to improve operational efficiency and focus on the agency's core missions. Isaacman laid these out as: execute on the Artemis Program to return humans to the Moon; build an enduring Moon Base; develop a "Space Reactor Office" to get America underway on nuclear power in space; ignite an economy in low-Earth orbit; and build more X-planes and launch more science missions.
Welcome to Edition 8.42 of the Rocket Report! SpaceX nearly launched its Starship rocket on Thursday amid much pomp and circumstance in South Texas, only to be foiled by a ground system issue. Such delays are to be expected, with almost entirely new hardware on both the rocket and the ground side of things. The company will try again as soon as Friday evening, and as we discuss in this week's report, the stakes are quite high for SpaceX and much of the rest of the US spaceflight enterprise.
As always, we welcome reader submissions, and if you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.
Firefly expands Central Texas footprint. Firefly Aerospace on Tuesday announced that it has moved into a new headquarters, expanded its cleanroom space, and added an innovation lab to support its growing workforce and accelerate spacecraft production. The expansion includes two new buildings adjacent to Firefly’s existing spacecraft facility in Cedar Park, Texas, enabling a single campus with 144,000 total square feet for spacecraft assembly and testing, mission control, avionics and component production, engineering, and business operations.
2. “For the first time in decades, new and recent graduates with at least a bachelor’s degree have consistently higher unemployment rates than the overall American workforce, according to data on 22-to-27-year-olds compiled by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.” Link here.
The really good news is, as of 9am this morning, D.C. had no homicides for an entire week, unlike the last two weeks which were bad. At this time last year, D.C. had experienced 59 homicides, compared to 31* this year, so this is a vast improvement. There were increases in some other crime categories, though robberies decreased slightly.
As has been the case throughout the year, car-related crimes and muggings (officially “robberies”) are down dramatically compared to the same time last year. Hoping for another homicide-free week next week: the weather should be nicer next week, so we’ll have to wait to see if more people will be out and about instead of hunkering down inside. Still great news though.
*Three of the 34 murders reported this year actually occurred in other years (e.g., a missing persons case from 2023 turned into a homicide case this year with new evidence).
We’ve come a long way since the days when interstellar space – and even the environment of our own planetary system – was considered empty. Dust and gas between the stars factor into deep space thinking in many ways given their potential uses and dangers, from hydrogen clouds serving as fuel for a Bussard-style ramjet to the perils of impact with dust grains that can degrade or even penetrate a hull. It’s also clear that a true interstellar map would have to chart such features as the Local Interstellar Cloud, mostly made up of hydrogen and helium, itself inside the ‘bubble’ created by an ancient supernova.
Collecting data on the LIC is enabled by spacecraft like the Interstellar Boundary Explorer and the Voyager probes, the latter of which have long demonstrated the utility of resources outside the heliosphere. Moreover, even as we monitor the LIC, a kind of interstellar turbulence is ahead. Our Solar System nears the LIC’s edge, a crossing that in several thousand years will see us transitioning into the G-Cloud, where changes to the size and shape of the heliosphere due to these boundary crossings could affect the protective screen that shields us. Galactic cosmic rays are threats to biology, elevating cancer risks and damaging DNA. We need the heliosphere’s magnetic bubble.
I’m intrigued by recent work out of the Harvard & Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, which has found a new way to analyze this turbulence over much longer timeframes and distances. The notion here is that ionized gas and electrons throughout the galaxy can be detected by analyzing the radio signature of distant objects as it passes through this material. What is new here is the insight into the structure of the turbulence as it scatters light.
To make this analysis happen, the authors of the new paper in The Astrophysical Journal Letters have been examining a decade of archival observations from the Very Long Baseline Array (NSF VLBA), which cover the findings of ten radio telescopes located across the United States. The quasar TXS 2005+403, perhaps 10 billion light years away in Cygnus, provides the bright radio source whose wavefront moves through a region considered one of the most turbulent and strongly scattering regions of the galaxy.
Image: Artist’s conception of the Milky Way galaxy as seen from far Galactic North (in Coma Berenices) annotated with arms as well as distances from the Solar System and galactic longitude with corresponding constellation. Note the Sun’s galactic orbit in the image. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ESO/R. Hurt derivative work: Cmglee/Wikimedia Commons.
What is particularly useful here is that our viewpoint from Earth takes in the length of the Orion-Cygnus spiral arm, which means we have the benefit of looking through one layer of interstellar material after another. The density of the gas and dust here is the key. Interactions with galactic cosmic rays make the region bright in gamma-ray radiation, but the area also is useful for studying the compression of these clouds as new star generations are born. The Cygnus Molecular Nebular Complex is one of the largest star-forming areas in the Milky Way, containing numerous clusters and stellar associations.
The persistent patterns found in the VLBA data as analyzed in this paper show the kind of distortions that mark interstellar turbulence. Lead author Alexander Plavin (CfA) explains how the quasar’s light makes the case:
“Most of what we see in the radio data isn’t coming from the quasar itself, it’s coming from the scattering caused by the turbulence in this region of the Milky Way. That scattering and the distortions that come with it are what allows us to study the turbulence and better understand and infer its structure. The most distant pairs of telescopes should not have seen the quasar image, but to our surprise, they clearly detected its signal, or faint glow. It can’t be explained by simple blurring or by the quasar itself, and it behaves the way turbulence is expected to, which is how we know we’re seeing the effects of interstellar turbulence.”
Image: Radio light from quasar TXS 2005+403 travels roughly 10 billion light-years to reach Earth, traversing the Cygnus region, one of the most turbulent and scattering environments in the Milky Way Galaxy. On the left, this artist’s conception shows the quasar as it truly appears, with a bright accretion disk and jets blasting into the galaxy like a beacon through the darkness. On the right, we see how turbulent gas distorts scientists’ view of the quasar in much the same way heat haze from a fire warps our view of the objects behind it. In a new study led by astronomers from the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian (CfA), scientists have for the first time directly detected how interstellar turbulence distorts light from a distant quasar, revealing the structure of that turbulence. Credit: Melissa Weiss/CfA.
Thus the quasar TXS 2005+403 proves to be a helpful indicator, refining our understanding of the interstellar medium. From the paper (the italics are mine):
The source combines several crucial properties: (i) high flux density (∼2 Jy), enabling detections with routine VLBI; (ii) compact intrinsic structure on milliarcsecond and submilliarcsecond scales, necessary for scattering to dominate the observed morphology; (iii) structural stability on timescales of months, unlike Sagittarius A*, where intrinsic variability complicates interpretation; and (iv) strong scattering due to its location behind the turbulent Cygnus region. This detection suggests that similar AGNs in other strongly scattering regions could be identified…enabling systematic studies of Galactic turbulence and magnetic field structure across the sky. Improved understanding of scattering properties from sources like TXS 2005+403 would directly inform efforts to mitigate scattering artifacts in Event Horizon Telescope images of the black hole in the center of the Milky Way, where scattering limits image fidelity, and would help interpret propagation effects in fast radio bursts.
And what of the gas and dust our own system continues to pass through? I have my eye on a paper in Physical Review Letters that meshes nicely with the CfA work. Here, an international team coordinated its efforts through the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR). This German research organization maintains the DREsden Accelerator Mass Spectrometry (DREAMS) package, which allows scientists to work with radioactive isotopes that result from our Solar System interacting with the interstellar medium. Their latest work studies Antarctic ice and deep sea sediments in a range of 40,000 to 80,000 years ago in search of iron-60, which is produced in core-collapse supernova events. This radioactive isotope is a kind of smoking gun for such explosions.
The concentration of stardust graphed over time in the different layers of ice cores offers a timeline that allows us to understand our planet’s journey through different parts of the Local Interstellar Cloud. The Sun moved into the LIC several tens of thousands of years ago, and will exit it in a few thousand more. The paper makes the case that stellar debris from supernovae can persist over long timeframes within the cloud. Less iron-60 reached the Earth 40,000 to 80,000 years ago than reaches it today. As Dominik Koll (HZDR) says, “This suggests that we were previously in a medium with lower iron-60 content, or that the cloud itself exhibits strong density variations.”
The authors consider this evidence for the LIC as what they call a ‘cosmic archive’ for the iron-60 produced in supernovae explosions. Its varying levels show a changing interstellar environment over the last 80,000 years. Koll adds:
“Our idea was that the Local Interstellar Cloud contains iron-60 and can store it over long time periods. As the Solar System moves through the cloud, Earth could collect this material. However, we couldn’t prove this at the time. This means that the clouds surrounding the Solar System are linked to a stellar explosion. And for the first time, this gives us the opportunity to investigate the origin of these clouds.”
To perform their analysis, the team used ice cores from the European ice drilling project EPICA (European Project for Ice Coring in Antarctica). They moved 300 kilograms of ice to the Dresden laboratory for processing, checking their sample against the radioisotopes beryllium-10 and aluminium-26, whose abundances in the ice are well known. The Heavy Ion Accelerator Facility (HIAF) at Australian National University was then used to separate out the iron-60 atoms to detect the signature of supernovae that occurred millions of years ago.
Image: Path of the solar system through the Local Interstellar Cloud. The cloud’s profile is preserved as an interstellar fingerprint in Antarctic ice. Credit: B. Schröder/HZDR/ NASA/Goddard/Adler/U.Chicago/Wesleyan.
The timescales here are striking, giving some idea of the capability of interstellar clouds to affect the stellar systems that move within them. Analyzing ice cores dating from before the Sun’s entry into the Local Interstellar Cloud is an objective for the team’s next round of measurements.
Science fiction buffs will likely recall Stephen Baxter’s writing on the matter of interstellar dust, especially in the novel Manifold: Space (Voyager, 2000). Here, dust and radiation waves kicked up by high-energy astrophysical events act to disrupt biology, a kind of galactic ‘reset’ that goes a long way toward explaining why interstellar civilizations have never been observed. The answer to the Fermi question in this novel is a non-malevolent but devastating natural phenomenon. Each of Baxter’s three Manifold novels, incidentally, offer different takes on the Fermi question, which continues to drive its own wavefront of SF plot ideas.
The paper on interstellar turbulence is Plavin et al., “Direct Very Long Baseline Interferometry Detection of Interstellar Turbulence Imprint on a Quasar: TXS 2005+403,” Astrophysical Journal Letters Vol. 1003 No. 1 (13 May 2026), L4 (full text). The paper on dust and cloud structure is D. Koll et al., “Local Interstellar Cloud Structure Imprinted in Antarctic Ice by Supernova 60Fe,” Physical Review Letters 136 (12 May 2026), 192701 (full text).
Here's the short version, from the issue's overview in World in Brief.
"Alvin Roth investigates repugnant markets
"Would you like to buy a kidney? How about heroin? Or sex? Don’t worry: you haven’t wandered down the wrong alley—these and other morally questionable transactions are the subject of a new book by Alvin Roth, a Nobel-prize winning economist. Published in Britain on Thursday, “Moral Economics” looks at the murky world of “repugnant transactions”: deals in which buyers and sellers happily transact, but which onlookers would rather ban on moral grounds.
"For Mr Roth, moral economics is about trade-offs. Are the harms of allowing an activity greater than those of disallowing it? Policy, he argues, should weigh both. Two principles emerge. First, bans never fully work: motivated buyers and sellers find workarounds. Second, prohibition generally reduces the size of the market; it would be cheaper and easier to buy heroin if it was legal. It might also be safer. That leaves Mr Roth asking whether the restrictions or the market cause more harm. Here, too, the answer is that it depends."
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And here's a link to the longer review, from the Free Exchange column. That column is unsigned, but others on the web have attributed it to Gavin Jackson, who did interview me about the book. Here is the resulting review:
My review of the review is that it missed some of the nuances in my book, but many aspects of the big picture came through clearly:
"The picture that emerges from the book is of a deeply moral person, who believes in bodily autonomy, in not subordinating individual lives to a collective and in not accepting unnecessary deaths to spare some people from feeling squeamish."
At the start of the 20th century, Southern California was home to an astonishing number of military academies designed to turn boys into officers and gentlemen.
SpaceX got within 40 seconds of launching the first flight of a taller, more powerful version of its Starship rocket Thursday, but a pesky problem with the launch tower kept the vehicle bound to Earth for at least one more day.
Clouds and rain showers cleared the area around SpaceX's launch site in South Texas, leaving mostly sunny skies over the Starship launch pad Thursday afternoon. SpaceX pushed back the launch time by one hour, but the countdown appeared to proceed smoothly once propellants began loading into the rocket.
That was true, at least, until the countdown clock paused 40 seconds before liftoff. The launch team repeatedly attempted to resume the countdown, only for the computer controlling the launch sequence to stop the clock again. There were five holds in all before SpaceX called off the launch attempt.
So about two weeks ago I received an e-mail from someone identifying herself as Hunter Biden’s publicist. She said the son of the 46th president enjoys my work, and would like to appear on my podcast, Two Writers Slinging Yang.
“Bullshit,” I thought—then told the “publicist” I was good.
A few days later, I received another e-mail, this one from Hunter Biden.
The Hunter Biden.
He said he was cool with not meeting, but that he enjoyed my work and wanted to let me know he liked what I was putting forth into the world.
We wound up having lunch last week. :)
It was on the pier in Malibu. Hunter arrived casually dressed, by himself, and greeted me with a warm hug and handshake. He knew I attended Delaware (his dad’s alma mater), knew I covered sports, was warm and gracious and engaging.
Otherwise, here’s the full transcript from our time together. Hunter is a refreshingly transparent dude who seems liberated having experienced 800 different lows …
JEFF PEARLMAN: All right. Hunter Biden, I have an amazing... I’m going to tell you something, true story. I get a text from maybe your publicist or something and she’s like, “Hey, Hunter Biden is a fan of yours and he wants to talk and do your podcast.” And I was like, “Bullshit. This is bullshit.” I said to my wife, '“This is garbage.” So I wrote back and I was like, “No, it’s okay.” And then you emailed me and I was like, oh, and then you said you follow me on TikTok, which is like … we’re both in our 50s.
HUNTER BIDEN: Yeah. Don’t tell anybody.
JEFF PEARLMAN:I won’t.
HUNTER BIDEN: Really, don’t tell anybody.
JEFF PEARLMAN: You don’t even use... Because you don’t use your name.
HUNTER BIDEN: Yeah, no, I don’t use my name.
JEFF PEARLMAN:I’m actually being serious. Myself, not a factor. Why are you on TikTok?
HUNTER BIDEN: Yeah. You know why? Because my daughter, Maisie, kept sending me like, “Dad, you got to look at this.” And I didn’t have TikTok.
JEFF PEARLMAN: So you couldn’t look.
HUNTER BIDEN: And then I got it. So I blame her for... I’m off all drugs. I’ve been off for seven years. I don’t drink. I don’t do anything.
JEFF PEARLMAN:TikTok.
HUNTER BIDEN: But TikTok is, I have to admit, my wife is like, “You got to stop, you’re addicted.” Which it’s a whole nother issue we can talk about later.
JEFF PEARLMAN: Are you a screen scroller? Will you sit there and scroll and wake up and it’s a half hour later and you’re like, “What I just do in my life?”
HUNTER BIDEN: 100%. 100%. And you have wasted a lot of that time.
JEFF PEARLMAN:Sorry, man.
HUNTER BIDEN: I’m working to start a foundation for recovery, for aftercare thing. And so there’s a ... Can we order?
The waiter has approached. His name is Jade.
JEFF PEARLMAN: Yeah. Go ahead.
HUNTER BIDEN: I’ll get that chorizo burrito with more chorizo than egg. Can they do that?
JADE: Yeah.
HUNTER BIDEN: Thanks, man.
JEFF PEARLMAN: I’ll get the open face omelet.
HUNTER BIDEN: And I’ll get some hot sauce with that too. Hot sauce and stuff. Okay, cool.
Pause.
HUNTER BIDEN: And what’s your name, man?
JADE: Jade.
HUNTER BIDEN: Jade, nice to meet you. I’m Hunter. That’s Jeff. How are you?
JADE: Yeah. I’m good.
Jade leaves.
JEFF PEARLMAN:So you want to start a foundation?
HUNTER BIDEN: Yeah. So the idea, I think there’s this huge gap in recovery, which has to do with people that when you get out of rehab, you get that 30 days and it’s a great thing. And particularly the first rehab, maybe the 12th I had to go to becomes the diminishing returns, but you get out and you go right back into the same situation that you’re in if you have anywhere to go. A lot of people don’t even have anywhere to go.
And so there’s this gap in the aftercare system and I’m hoping to do something. So those are the people that I was working with because I also decided this is that nobody in my family’s running for anything now or maybe my kids will one day, but I don’t have anybody... I don’t have to consider anybody else’s aspirations or job in being able to go out and talk about things that I care about. One of the things I care deeply about is addiction recovery, the radical honesty. I’ve been given this... They created this platform for me and now I’m going to dive off.
JEFF PEARLMAN: I was thinking about something with you. I was thinking one thing that I find frustrating, my mother was a substance abuse counselor. We’ve had many years of talking about substance abuse … [I hate how] people saw in you an amazing pinata and they beat the living shit out of you, took advantage of a guy who was going through some serious shit and they just didn’t care. There was zero level of compassion at all.
If this was whoever’s kid, if this was, I don’t know, Mike Pence’s kid or JD Vance’s kid, they’d be like, “Oh, give him sympathy. Give him...” But everyone just took a fucking baseball bat to you. And it just seems offensive. The lack of compassion and empathy for someone who’s had struggles. And I wonder, as it’s going on, are you disappointed in humanity at all when you’re going through it?
HUNTER BIDEN: When you’re going through it, I think when I was going through it, I can’t speak for anybody else.
JEFF PEARLMAN:Sure.
HUNTER BIDEN: And when I was going through it, of course I was angry and it was hard to understand the level of cruelty, but the public humiliation was so ubiquitous, so complete. As I was saying to somebody, I think we used it before, they had me on the cover of the New York Post more times, I think, in a one-year period than anyone in the history of the newspaper, going back to Alexander Hamilton.
JEFF PEARLMAN:I feel like I shouldn’t congratulate you for that.
HUNTER BIDEN: Yeah, no, definitely not. Because by the way, none of it was for anything good. And what they did was they was an operation. It was truly an organized operation in which what they had to do, none of it was about me. It was about the presidency and it could have been my dad or it could have been somebody else, but it was about the presidency and it was about that power. When you have power that enormous, the lengths that people will go to, I’ve learned, are just beyond your comprehension.
And so in the moment, there was real anger, real confusion, despondency at points of like, how could it be so awful? But I woke up one day and I really had to make a choice of whether I wanted to live or die. Truly, because the worst nightmare of many people happened to me, which was not only did you have to live through the hell of your own addiction, but then it had to play in technicolor over and over and over again, not just for your friends and neighbors to see, but literally the entire world from Kyoto, Japan to Kansas City.
And I decided that I wanted to live. And it wasn’t like a lightning bolt moment and I woke up and I saw this white light and my life changed, but it almost felt that way in the sense of I was given the courage to live without fear. And I realized then too, is that every poor decision that I made in my life was made out of fear.
JEFF PEARLMAN: Fear of what?
HUNTER BIDEN: Fear of being judged, fear for being less than, fear of being found out, fear of-
A stranger approaches with a gaggle of people.
ETHAN: Hunter Biden?
HUNTER BIDEN: Yeah. Hey. Hey, what’s your name?
ETHAN: Ethan.
HUNTER BIDEN: Ethan, nice to meet you. Where are you from?
ETHAN: I’m from Florida.
HUNTER BIDEN: Oh, yeah?
ETHAN: Yeah.
HUNTER BIDEN: Oh, cool. Are you going to Pepperdine or are you at Pepperdine?
HUNTER BIDEN: Oh, cool. Andrew’s the best. Yeah. Yeah. I’m actually talking to him later today. He’s become a really good friend. Hey, nice to meet you. What’s your name?
RIZA THOMAS: Hi, I’m Riza Thomas.
HUNTER BIDEN: Hey, Riza. Nice to meet you.
RIZA THOMAS: Nice to meet you.
ETHAN: This is my girlfriend, Jessy.
HUNTER BIDEN: Hey, Jessy. Thanks for saying hi. I really appreciate it.
JESSY: He saw you and he’s like, “It’s him.”
HUNTER BIDEN: Yeah. Well, I appreciate you saying hi.
JESSY: We love your dad.
HUNTER BIDEN: Thank you. I love my dad too very much. Thank you. He is. He is. He’s tough. I wish he would complain more, but he doesn’t. But yeah, thank you guys.
JESSY: Nice to meet you.
HUNTER BIDEN: Nice to meet you.
JEFF PEARLMAN: Wait, how often does that happen?
HUNTER BIDEN: All the time.
JEFF PEARLMAN: Average per day, what would you say, for real?
HUNTER BIDEN: Well, it depends upon where I am, but if I’m out … everywhere. And perfect example, literally. So you live in the fear that what’s going to happen when you go out is that people are going to throw rocks at you because of what they’ve been told to think about you. It’s the exact opposite. And the exact opposite because of this is because the whole world has literally seen me naked with the crackpipe in my mouth.
So this thing that we’re always dying to do, connect with other people, there’s always a barrier between people because I’m kind of afraid that you may judge me for my shit and I may judge you for your shit and who knows how it’s going to react. No one gives a shit with me. There’s nothing that they’ve done that’s remotely as bad and it opens up this dialogue. It’s truly amazing.
Joe and Neilia Biden with their three children.
JEFF PEARLMAN: Wait, I have a question for real. I just had this conversation about this with someone.
HUNTER BIDEN: Yeah.
JEFF PEARLMAN: So I recently finished a memoir I’m writing about my early journalism career and I was a young music writer in Nashville, Tennessee. And I write this whole thing about being a kid, being horny and jerking off to Tanya Tucker photos. And people are like, “How can you write that?” And I was like, “Because we’ve all jerked off to someone.” We’ve all had moments. All of us have moments that we are embarrassed by, moments that we feel vulnerable, moments with so-and-so. And it seems like you somehow have been able to say, “Yeah, I’ve been fully exposed. There’s nothing left you can hinder with.”
HUNTER BIDEN: What are you going to say? And not only that, but we realize is that yeah, everybody’s jerked off to Tanya Tucker. You know what I mean?
JEFF PEARLMAN:You’ve also jerked off to Tanya Tucker? :)
HUNTER BIDEN: Not Tanya Tucker. But it’s the exact point. That’s one of the things I would love to do. I’d love to create a, I don’t know, Substack or something and basically make it a repository for everybody to tell their thing. And the realization is that it ain’t that bad.
JEFF PEARLMAN: No.
HUNTER BIDEN: And it’s not to be embarrassed about because there’s two things that you learn. One is that guilt is an appropriate emotion.
When you do something wrong, you should feel guilty about it and you should do everything in your power to make up for whatever you did if you can. Part of that is number one, beginning by asking for forgiveness, particularly the people that you hurt and you love. But shame is a whole different thing. Shame is all internal. Shame is you telling yourself that you’ll never be worthy again because of that thing.
There’s a guy, have you ever seen him, Chris? He’s a former CIA guy or something. Anyway, he talks about this thing. He said, “If you really want to change your life, then you have to become almost delusional in the way in which you forgive yourself.”
JEFF PEARLMAN: What does that mean?
HUNTER BIDEN: It means you have to rid yourself of the shame piece of it. You have to move on. When you’ve done something that you know is wrong and you tried to do everything that you can in order to make up for it, make amends for it, is it, let go of the shame, let go of those things. And I didn’t have any choice.
I could have either gone to Rishikesh and meditated for 10 years, shaved my head, then maybe I would come out and have what I believe I have now. And I have it now, but not out of some courage or some Buddha-like quality. It purely came out of pure survival. I had to make a choice. How could I walk out in the world if I was still feeling shame about what everybody was looking at on their phone six times a day for a period of time?
JEFF PEARLMAN:Wait. Was there an actual moment or was it a gradual sort of, or did you have a moment of revelation?
And he said that this laptop contained [stuff] and he went through a whole list of degenerate things including child exploitation, which was a complete and utter lie. And I can 100% say this a lie because everyone has seen the entirety of my cloud for 25 years. And in that moment, when someone accuses you, particularly America’s mayor, standing there with Bernie Kerrick going into the state police in Delaware and handing over your digital life that they’ve stolen from you and accusing you of the worst thing that you could ever, in my opinion, accuse someone.
JEFF PEARLMAN: 100%. You’re watching this?
HUNTER BIDEN: I’m watching. And first, you’re in shock and then you start to question yourself and then you’re up all night long going through your newsfeed, killing yourself. It was in the morning and I turned over and I was in bed and there sleeping between us was Beau, who was about seven months old and this amazingly beautiful woman that saved my life and I had to make a choice. Was I going to get out of bed that day and do life on life’s terms? And these were life’s terms now. And so that’s my apocryphal bullshit.
JEFF PEARLMAN: That’s good though.
HUNTER BIDEN: But real. I remember that night.
JEFF PEARLMAN:I just want to add …
HUNTER BIDEN: Yeah.
JEFF PEARLMAN: I’m from New York.
HUNTER BIDEN: Yeah.
JEFF PEARLMAN: Fuck Rudy Giuliani.
HUNTER BIDEN: I know.
JEFF PEARLMAN: Fuck Rudy. Guy could have been in the Hall of Fame if he just stopped everything after being mayor. Could have been in the Hall of Fame.
HUNTER BIDEN: Exactly.
JEFF PEARLMAN:He’s like the Pete Rose of mayors.
HUNTER BIDEN: Oh my God, he’s a horrible human being.
And I remember loving that video. And I’m not joking—loving that video because as a University of Delaware grad, I was always a fan of your dad just because I remember him at Delaware. And Lindsey Graham turning into this just freaking heel, it kind of broke my heart because I was like, if this can happen here, there’s no decency anywhere. And I do wonder from what you’ve experienced, do you have faith in humanity or are you just like, “We’re a bunch of assholes and there are a couple of good people who keep us afloat.”
HUNTER BIDEN: No, I haven’t even remotely lost faith in humanity because the flip side of that coin, for all the disappointments of the people like Lindsey Graham and so many others that have just sold their souls, whether it’s for self-protection or whether it’s for greed or whether it’s for power, there are so many decent people. Literally, that’s why I wanted to get in touch with you is because I love your sports reporting, but I’m not a huge sports guy. I follow football and I’ll go to some baseball games. I love the human interest stuff …
JEFF PEARLMAN: Thanks.
HUNTER BIDEN: Yeah. Anyway, in my experience through what I went through, as many people that have disappointed me from afar, so many people up close have been just incredibly gracious and shared in the humanity and connected me with in a way that I never would’ve had the opportunity to do unless I went through all this shit. There’s this thing in recovery where you’re...
And by the way, not just recovery, but people recovering from grief, people recovering from loss, people recovering from a traumatic situation that they find themselves in which you’re supposed to take, you do it like a gratitude list every morning.
JEFF PEARLMAN: What’s a good example of someone being kind to you? Someone serendipitous kindness, not like your dad or whatever.
HUNTER BIDEN: The kid that just woke up to me saying thank you so much for doing that Andrew Callaghan interview. Knowing everything that he knows about or that you would think that they would think about me is that he just wants to say, “Thank you for being so honest.” You know what I mean? “Thanks for doing that interview. And that interview was just me laying it all out there.”
JEFF PEARLMAN: Right.
HUNTER BIDEN: But I think I’ll give you the... I was going through one of the hardest times and it was 2022. I didn’t have any money. I don’t have any money. Hopefully that changes. And we had moved up to Big Rock, Malibu over here. It’s the first neighborhood in Malibu.
And we moved to the top because there was a guy, this filmmaker that literally had parked one of those digital billboards in front of our house in Venice, on South Venice Boulevard, our house faced the street and there was only one entrance, a digital billboard. And he just played over and over again for like three days, the images from the laptop for everybody.
JEFF PEARLMAN: Someone parking out in front of your house?
HUNTER BIDEN: Parked right in front of the house. And then he sat in the canal, which was right next to our house and he had a bullhorn and he just was screaming, “Come out, Hunter, come out.”
JEFF PEARLMAN: Did you ever go out?
HUNTER BIDEN: So we moved. No.
JEFF PEARLMAN: Wait, I want to ask you a question.
HUNTER BIDEN: Yeah.
JEFF PEARLMAN: How do you explain that?
HUNTER BIDEN: People are crazy, man.
JEFF PEARLMAN: Is that what it is? Does it come down to this, sanity?
HUNTER BIDEN: Oh, by the way, he’s part crazy, but you know what else he is? Making a lot of money off him, streaming him, making a movie. He made a full length feature film that supposedly about my life. Had a whole set in Romania. They spent $10 million on it.
JEFF PEARLMAN: And if you had gone out and you were like, “Hey man, can we just talk for a minute totally off the record?” You wouldn’t, right? It’s like there’s a certain viciousness, it seems, to over... I feel like I used to be very like, “Hey man, can we just talk off the record for a minute?” And people kind of respected that. I feel like people don’t respect that like they used to. Let’s just be human for a minute. We just talk about this.
HUNTER BIDEN: Not even remotely. So anyway, the story was about the kindness part.
JEFF PEARLMAN:Yeah.
HUNTER BIDEN: So I moved to this other house. A friend of mine helped me get there, rented it and the lease was up and I had nowhere to go and I just thought that they were going to renew the lease. But the house was owned by some guy in Singapore or something like that and it was modest house, but still more than I could tell. Raised the rent by double and said, “And if you can’t pay it, I need you out of the house at the end of the lease, which is in a week. And if you’re not out, I’m sending the sheriffs.” Crazy.
And I was in the midst of so much shit that I was like, “Oh my God, I got nowhere to go. I literally have like, how am I going to do this? I have a one-year-old. I have Melissa. How am I even going to arrange? So the guy that owned the house next door, a Lebanese Armenian guy that I had gotten to know because he had bought the house next door and he was fixing it up. It was a fixer up and it was just an investment property for him, but he was doing all the work himself. And I would paint the garage and over the course of the last six months, almost every other day, George would lean over the fence and I’d bring him a cup of coffee and we’d have a discussion.
He had the most interesting story about how he got here. And that morning, he’s like, “What’s wrong?” And I said, “Well,” and I told him everything that was going on and he said, “Take this house.” I said, “What?” I said, “I can’t do that, George.” He goes, “You’re going to take this house.” I said, “George, I really can’t.” The next day, he came with his son, he cut a hole in the fence and moved all the furniture in my house and gave me his house to use.
JEFF PEARLMAN: Wow.
HUNTER BIDEN: And he said, “Don’t worry about it. We’ll figure it out.”
JEFF PEARLMAN: That must be an amazing-
HUNTER BIDEN: Dude, the moment I needed, an angel, it appeared in the form of a 68-year-old Lebanese Armenian guy whose literal life should be made into a movie. He came to North America with $25 in his pocket when he was 19-years old after his dad’s whole business was taken over during the Communist Revolution in Syria and he had been imprisoned and tortured and he got on a plane, swept the floors of a huge factory and in two years, became the manager of the entire factory and then started his own business, came to Malibu 25 years ago and said, “What the hell am I living in Toronto for?” Sold everything and now lives here to end up in my life at that moment. He’s one of my best friends in the world right now now.
JEFF PEARLMAN:Amazing.
HUNTER BIDEN: And so many times over the course of the last six years, the perception that everybody has is that my life must be really hard because of just the public humiliation and the constant barrage. The fact is some of the greatest moments of my life, undeniably greatest moments of my life were over that period of time. I’m happier now than I’ve ever been in my entire life.
JEFF PEARLMAN:Whole life?
HUNTER BIDEN: My whole life. More certain of who I am, more assured, not constantly doubting, am I good enough? I still got lawsuits, I still got bills, but you know what? I really mean it and it’s not some kind of throwaway line. It’s really amazing. And that whole part about gratitude that I started off with, which is this, is that you’re supposed to do your list and the idea that I always had was you’re supposed to say, “I’m grateful for the beautiful day. I’m grateful for the love of my wife. I’m grateful for whatever.”
And those are all well and good, but until you can become grateful for all of it … I’m grateful for having been a crack addict. I’m grateful for those motel rooms I found myself in. I’m grateful for that public humiliation and I really, really mean it. I don’t want to sound like I’m just crazy trying to promote some whack-a-doodle self-help thing. But I really am grateful, because I’ve never felt more liberated in my life to be me, just to fully, fully be me.
JEFF PEARLMAN:No public pressure. No, you have to live up to a standard. You have to pretend this, blah, blah, blah.
HUNTER BIDEN: I always say this. I benefit more than anybody living today from low expectations . If I showed up... As long as I didn’t show up with a crackpipe in my mouth, shirtless with a stripper, you’re like, “Oh my God.”
JEFF PEARLMAN: [When we were scheduled to meet] I was looking for the shirtless crack addict, wearing a shirt.
HUNTER BIDEN: The benefit of low expectations.
JEFF PEARLMAN: I have a random, random question. Are you at all bothered by mortality; by the idea of you live X number of years and then you’re dead? And how does going through what you’ve gone through impact that one way or another?
HUNTER BIDEN: No, the only thing is that I want to be around to see my six-year-old when he’s 50. And my three older girls and I have a grandson now and-
JEFF PEARLMAN:That feels weird, right? Is that weird, that you’re a grandpa?
HUNTER BIDEN: Yeah, it does, but in it, it doesn’t. Well, when I say it, it does. But my whole... I guess what I’m saying is that no, I don’t fear death for the reason that I’m afraid of dying. I am so happy living right now. I feel like this is a second chance or third, whatever it is.
I’m in the midst of a whole new life and I want to live everything of it and I want to be able to be healthy and living it. Someone told me yesterday, he said, “Yeah, you look good.” And I said, “I’m 56.” And they said, “Oh my God, you’re 60?” I said, “No, I’m not 60. I’m 56.” She said, “Well, almost 60.” I’m like, “No!”
JEFF PEARLMAN: Wait, one thing I always say, I just want to say in regards to that … my kid is a sophomore at Northeastern and two years has flown by. I do not understand how my kid’s college education goes like this, but it does feel like Trump has been present for 753,000 years. I do not understand what is going on.
HUNTER BIDEN: They’re both concurrent. What the hell?
JEFF PEARLMAN: I was wondering about something, since you seem to be an open book. I read a lot. I know your family history. My wife and I talk a lot, a lot, a lot. My great-grandmother died in a concentration camp. And we were talking about how even though I didn’t know my great-grandmother who died in the concentration camp, I can still carry the trauma. There’s generational trauma that is actually inherited generation to generation and you carry that.
And you have had a shitload of trauma in your life beginning when you were 2-years old and your mother died and your sister died. I guess maybe via therapy or whatever, can you tie anything connective or what can you tie connective from that experience and that moment to who you are as a person?
HUNTER BIDEN: That’s a great question. It’s a great question because I’ve struggled with it for a long time. The first time I got sober or made a professional attempt at getting sober was in 2003. I stayed sober for seven years and I always rejected the idea that there was any cause for me being an addict. And I always really, really railed against the idea internally. And when I would talk to people like, my mom’s death didn’t have anything to do with the fact that I liked a bottle of Jack Daniels. You know what I mean?
JEFF PEARLMAN: Were you saying that because you felt like you had to say it because how can I blame someone else, or …
HUNTER BIDEN: Partly. And partly because it seemed like, well, that would mean that it’s something outside of my control. There’s something that I have to fix that I don’t know is broken, necessarily. And a fear of revisiting that in any way. I’ve moved on and had an incredible childhood and my loving parents and loving aunts and uncles and the whole community. But this time is the first time I ever really went there. And what I mean went there is, yeah, of course it does. Of course. I was trapped in the back of a crushed car with my brother and my deceased mother and sister for a whole hour. I spent a month in the hospital with a traumatic brain injury.
JEFF PEARLMAN: Do you remember this?
HUNTER BIDEN: I think I do, but I truly don’t know whether it’s because of the stories I’ve been told.
JEFF PEARLMAN: Right. What do I remember as a two-year-old versus …
HUNTER BIDEN: Yeah. Anyway, so yeah, of course it does. And then I heard this guy … you ever listened to Gabor Maté?
JEFF PEARLMAN: No.
HUNTER BIDEN: You should. It’s really amazing. He’s a psychologist, doctor, MD and psychologist from Toronto. And he’s a Holocaust survivor. He’s Hungarian. He was a baby during the Holocaust. And he and his family, I think his parents got out and came to Canada and he did an enormous amount of work on his own study over the course of, I think, almost two decades in working with addicts on the streets of Toronto, real what everybody would call hardcore addicts.
And he said the single unifying piece of every single addict is they’ve all experienced significant trauma, significant childhood trauma. And he talks about it in the context of what your wife picked up on. You guys were talking about this idea of ancestral trauma and literally passing it down through generations. And he talks about it as being very real and he tells a story of when his mother had him in Hungary.
And this was when they were rounding up all the Jews of Eastern Europe and she called the doctor because he wouldn’t stop crying. And the doctor came and said, “Don’t worry.” He said, “You’re not alone.” He said, “Every single Jewish baby in the entire city is crying.” And you realize how, whether it’s from that bond, from mother to child, the anxiety of your traumas is passed along or whether it’s in a community.
I don’t want to be hyperbolic about it, but I really feel that’s part of what’s going on right now is that we are all experiencing a trauma in this country right now. It’s just so mean and it is so cruel and there’s no sense of truth. So what’s the answer? How do we change this? It all seems so dark. And you open up your, as I was saying before, it was like we all carry around a pocket of heroin in our back pocket and it’s called a phone.
JEFF PEARLMAN: Would you actually say the phone is as addictive as-
HUNTER BIDEN: No. Well, yeah. In terms of the obsessive compulsive behavior that it causes that you know is not good for you, yeah. But does it have the same immediate dilatory effect on your life?
JEFF PEARLMAN:Right.
HUNTER BIDEN: Not as much.
JEFF PEARLMAN: It’s not crack.
HUNTER BIDEN: Watching Jeff Pearlman’s 30-second takes on TikTok … you could argue is a good thing, but in terms of that obsessive compulsive behavior that it causes in people and then some people truly warps their brains, particularly if you’re a kid.
Hunter, right, with his late brother, Beau.
JEFF PEARLMAN: Oh, yeah. You go to a restaurant, you see every kid with a phone in front of, him. I was actually thinking about something again, kind of unrelated, but I remember when Trump was shot in Pennsylvania and your dad called him …
HUNTER BIDEN: Well, was he?
JEFF PEARLMAN: I know. I don’t even know. I don’t disagree.
HUNTER BIDEN: The miraculous ear. Anyway …
JEFF PEARLMAN: Whatever the case, your dad called him. And when he held a press conference, he said, “I’m praying for ...” Blah, blah, blah. And you would think the number of times Trump just shits all over your dad, finds a reason to insult him, finds a reason to make fun of him. I don’t even understand the cruelty and I don’t understand the appeal of the cruelty. I always say to people, he literally called him after the shooting just to be a decent human being. I’m like, can we blame all this American cruelty on Trump or is he just-
HUNTER BIDEN: Yes. 100%. He’s given people license to be their worst selves. I think that those people are the vast minority. Okay, here’s an example. When he posted that fucking awful thing about Rob Reiner, literally hours after he was killed, I’m positive 85% of the people that came in contact with that, which is probably like 85% of the population said, “Ugh, that’s horrible.” But 15% of the population went, “Hmm, that’s my license to do bad things to people that I think are bad.” It’s the people that are trying to desperately find all of their problems in you rather than in themselves.
JEFF PEARLMAN:I actually think one of the reasons people shit all over you is just there’s a great desire in this country to bring people down a peg. “I don’t like my life that much. I’m not that happy with my life. Look at this guy, his dad’s the president, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.” I think there’s a real joy in bringing people down a peg. It’s gross, but I think it is …
HUNTER BIDEN: I think that’s part of it. I think that the part of it was such an incredibly salacious story. You put presidential politics alongside of crack cocaine and a nude picture of me and a woman in a motel room. It’s like ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. You’re hitting all the dopamine right there. And then again though, the people that hate me the most on that have no idea of what it is.
JEFF PEARLMAN: Do they even hate you, though?
HUNTER BIDEN: It’s about themselves.
JEFF PEARLMAN: They don’t hate you.
HUNTER BIDEN: No, they don’t.
JEFF PEARLMAN: They don’t even know you.
HUNTER BIDEN: But the ones that express the most vitriol, I think it’s because ... I’ll give you an example. There’s one of these lawyers that has been harassing me for years now and it just came out that he’s about to get a divorce or his wife filed for a divorce.
JEFF PEARLMAN: His wife?
HUNTER BIDEN: Yeah. Saying that he’s abusive, he’s been addicted to opioids. He has left drugs and alcohol for his minor children and that he was committed involuntarily to a psychiatric center in Wisconsin and this whole thing paints this awful picture. I was like, “Ah. So this is why this motherfucker has been literally just awful.” I mean, the things that he says and the press and the things that he files are awful. And I said, “Ah, he hates himself.” That’s what this is. He hates himself. And you know what, it allowed me to do and kind of go, “Oh, okay.”
JEFF PEARLMAN: Can you actually muster empathy for him or can you not go that far? You don’t have to. I’m just curious.
HUNTER BIDEN: I’m not my dad.
JEFF PEARLMAN: All right. Percentage of men—male public figures who are crusaders against gay rights, gay marriage, who have secret feelings that they’re trying to suppress, I’d say 80 percent ...
HUNTER BIDEN: I mean, 100.
JEFF PEARLMAN:Maybe.
HUNTER BIDEN: I’m telling you. You want to know what the real... I call it the closetocracy, which is all these ideas in the closet. I mean, and I’ll name names. You can take them out later. And I don’t know if they’re gay or not. I have no idea. But you tell me if I had to make a bet whether Josh Hawley’s gay or not or Ted Cruz or Lindsey Graham or just go down the list, or Scott Jennings or all of these guys that are just so mean.
JEFF PEARLMAN: Mean combined with bias.
HUNTER BIDEN: Yeah, exactly. It’s just like, oh my God, I have a pretty good gaydar. And by the way, it’s open secret in DC. I lived there for 20 years. It’s a 100% open secret. And you know what it is though? And this is the part that I do have empathy for, they are tortured souls.
JEFF PEARLMAN: I agree.
HUNTER BIDEN: So they have decided that the only way to survive is to torture other people.
JEFF PEARLMAN: 100% agree.
HUNTER BIDEN: Yeah.
JEFF PEARLMAN: I think if Lindsey Graham came out tomorrow, he’d be celebrated. People would be like, “You know what? Good for you for being your true self.”
Do you hate politics?
HUNTER BIDEN: No. I think politics is, in the greatest sense of the word, is just a necessary thing for a democracy … that you have to have two competing visions in order to come up with the best ideas that almost always are the results of some compromise. And politics in and of itself can be this very, very noble thing and if you look through history it’s not merely a necessary evil. It’s literally a necessary thing to a thriving democracy to have debate, to have a conversation and a discussion in which one side eventually is the victor for the moment.
What I hate is the bastardization of what is the politics that they call politics. This isn’t politics. This is a zero-sum game. This is complete destruction. This is winner takes all. This is the other side are all treasonous. This is, they’re all a bunch of traitors, if you don’t agree with me, you should be executed. That’s literally what they’re saying. And what I’m saying is that, what the fuck are you talking about? What are you talking about? Because I believe in the Green New Deal, because I believe in transgender rights? Because we used to be able to disagree on shit like that and still share a burrito. Here’s one. Immigration. What are these guys talking about? We had a bill … there’s a solution. Fix the immigration system. Have more judges streamline the thing because we desperately need immigration. It is literally the lifeblood of this country. There’s always been a lifeblood in this country. And we sit here and they live in this kind of fantasy land and watch and they’re literally murdering people on the street. And to intimidate and to advance an agenda that no one agrees with. No one agrees with.
JEFF PEARLMAN:Well, I always find it amazing. I think abortion rights is an interesting issue. I’m very pro-choice. But I do understand why people are pro-life. I can sit across from someone and be like, “You think abortion is murder. I get it. I actually get it. I understand why you feel that way.” And I’ve had this discussion with many people. I just disagree, but I do get it. I feel like people aren’t willing to be like, “I get why you feel that way. I just don’t agree with you.” But that’s okay. It’s not wrong to disagree with someone. It’s healthy to disagree with someone. People don’t have the dialogues, I don’t think.
HUNTER BIDEN: That’s exactly right. It’s exactly good. But when I went to Georgetown, some of my greatest friends are Jesuit priests and we disagreed on [abortion], but it didn’t mean that either one of us thought that we weren’t probably the greatest, most decent group of people that I’ve ever met. I’m sure we had disagreements also on the Catholic Church itself, but I still love them.
And now we’re just told that if he makes people choose a side ... I mean, Jesus Christ, he builds golden statues of himself. What are you going to say? He posts pictures of himself with a crown on his head and tells us he’s a king over and over and over again.
JEFF PEARLMAN: Picture on the passport.
HUNTER BIDEN: He’s taking $10 billion from the IRS to settle a lawsuit that is a bullshit lawsuit. You want to talk about the leak of tax documents? Come talk to me, motherfucker. Oops, sorry about the curse …
JEFF PEARLMAN: No, it’s all good.
HUNTER BIDEN: Yeah. And my dad told me I’ve got to stop cursing.
JEFF PEARLMAN: Did your dad literally say, ‘Stop cursing’?
HUNTER BIDEN: He said it occasionally once in a while. I said, “Oh, that’s rich coming from you.”
JEFF PEARLMAN: Does he have a go to curse?
HUNTER BIDEN: What?
JEFF PEARLMAN: Did he have a go to curse when you were growing up?
HUNTER BIDEN: No, no, never in front of us. Never in front of us.
JEFF PEARLMAN: Mine is motherfucker.
HUNTER BIDEN: Mine too. By the way, it’s got to be appropriate.
JEFF PEARLMAN: I use it too often.
HUNTER BIDEN: Can’t be forced.
JEFF PEARLMAN: Yeah. Oh, so douchebag. It’s not really a curse but I love it.
HUNTER BIDEN: Agreed.
JEFF PEARLMAN:I have a question and you’re going to disagree with me. That’s cool. I didn’t love that your dad ran again. I kind of was thinking he shouldn’t. Tell me why I’m wrong. I’m actually being serious.
HUNTER BIDEN: Look, I don’t want this to be clipped in a way where I go, oh, I agree with you.
JEFF PEARLMAN: No, no, no, no.
HUNTER BIDEN: So without being defensive. If you just look at what happened, what happened was is that we beat Trump. We had two years of accomplishing what no president since FDR had accomplished. Got more legislation passed, bipartisan legislation. And by the way, all because of my dad and not his staff, not anybody else. And I really mean this because it always, always came down to one of two people in which he personally had to convince in order to be able to get it done at a 51-49 Senate and at that time, the slimmest majority in the House of Representatives.
And he somehow passed more legislation than any president since LBJ. He reduced the child poverty rate by half. Lowest Black unemployment in history of the United States, highest job creation of any president in eight years and on and on and on. And so what ends up happening is you go into the midterms and unlike the conventional wisdom about the midterms is that he ended up having a better midterms than any president since FDR in 1932. Lost fewer seats in both the House and the Senate than any other president, gained more governorships than any incumbent president ever and turned more House state legislatures than any other common president ever.
So that would’ve been the time to say, okay, who’s coming next? But the problem was is that Trump never left the stage. He never left the stage. He should have been imprisoned by then or actually excommunicated by the Republican Party and you look out there and you say, “Okay, if we go through a brutal primary process right now, who’s going to do that? Kamala? Who’s going to beat Trump? Gavin? I love Gavin. I think he would make an incredible president.
But who’s going to do that right now? You have the team, you have the single most important factor of any of being reelected as President of the United States, over 46 other presidents, incumbency. And so you just go. And as you’re going, taking shots from everywhere, trying to get the shit done that you need to get done, the process starts. And anybody can run …
And so ultimately at the end of the day, you end up at this position. And here’s the thing, I promise you, my dad is 100% mentally capable of making the decisions. Did he have the energy that he had before? Absolutely not. He’s 83-years old. He got old in front of us and the New York Times... Donald Trump has fallen asleep in the Oval Office sitting behind the resolute desk with people talking behind him over and over again. He’s got bruises on both arms. He disappeared for a four-day period of time when you know that he had a mini stroke. You have all of this bullshit.
And I don’t know, literally the New York Times between 2022 and 2023, I think wrote 86 article on Joe Biden’s age. And so you have all of this feeding into it and then he has this disastrous, disastrous debate. Now one of the reasons people elected Joe Biden to begin with is because here’s the thing about Joe Biden, you got more votes-
JEFF PEARLMAN: You call your dad Joe Biden?
HUNTER BIDEN: Yeah, no, I definitely don’t. That sound like an insult. But here’s the thing about my dad.
JEFF PEARLMAN:Joe Biden.
HUNTER BIDEN: Whose name is Joe Biden, by the way.
JEFF PEARLMAN: You call him Joe.
HUNTER BIDEN: He got 81 million votes. He got more votes than any president in the history of the United States of America. And now the Pod Save America guys will tell you, well, that’s because it was a vote against Trump. But where were they this time? Why did people become more comfortable with Trump because of COVID and his reaction to that; the 41 felony convictions and the rape charge? What are you telling me? Where’s the missing eight million votes this time around? And I would tell you where the votes are.
The truck driver in Scranton, the teamster in Cleveland, the Irish Catholic mom, the grandmother that is a waitress in Minnesota and in St. Paul, Minnesota, those people that came out from my dad, because you know what? They’re not sure about abortion. They may be staunchly Catholic, but they look at my dad and they go, “He’s not going to do anything crazy.” Or you sit there and you have this whole trans thing and they’ve spent $300 billion telling people that trans athletes and the country’s being taken over by... Which is by the way, we can talk about that a lot …
What I hate is the bastardization of what is the politics that they call politics. This isn’t politics. This is a zero-sum game. This is complete destruction. This is winner takes all. This is the other side are all treasonous. This is, they’re all a bunch of traitors, if you don’t agree with me, you should be executed. That’s literally what they’re saying. And what I’m saying is that, what the fuck are you talking about? What are you talking about? Because I believe in the Green New Deal, because I believe in transgender rights? Because we used to be able to disagree on shit like that and still share a burrito. Here’s one. Immigration. What are these guys talking about? We had a bill … there’s a solution. Fix the immigration system. Have more judges streamline the thing because we desperately need immigration. It is literally the lifeblood of this country. There’s always been a lifeblood in this country. And we sit here and they live in this kind of fantasy land and watch and they’re literally murdering people on the street. And to intimidate and to advance an agenda that no one agrees with. No one agrees with.
With his father back in 1987
JEFF PEARLMAN: Wait, serious question. Is the whole country not being taken over by trans athletes?
HUNTER BIDEN: No, strangely, it’s not.
JEFF PEARLMAN: They’re not? Okay. I was worried.
HUNTER BIDEN: But my point is that I think the people looked at my dad and thought, “You know what? He’s confused by the whole thing as I am, but Joe Biden’s not going to force this, something I don’t understand down my throat. He’s going to be compassionate to anybody.” And that’s where we found ourselves in that situation. And I tell you this, I think that if my dad had stayed in, I do believe that he had a better chance of beating him than anybody else for that reason alone and for the historical reasons of incumbency.
JEFF PEARLMAN: You think he would’ve won?
HUNTER BIDEN: Yeah, I think he would’ve won.
JEFF PEARLMAN: Yeah.
HUNTER BIDEN: I do think he would’ve won. And I think he would’ve won and he would’ve gotten diagnosed with prostate cancer and metastatic bone cancer and said, “I’m ready to go.” But we never got to that point. One of the reasons we never got to that point is because the, and this is why I have no love loss for the “Democratic Party,” is because the money people, that was all because of the money people because all the people that are the billionaires, they stepped into the Democratic Party and they said, “It’s the same people that go to Lake Como with George Clooney that think that they are running the show and that’s what happened.
And so because I’ll tell you what, the people that knew him, the Black Caucus, the Hispanic Caucus, the Progressive Caucus, all of those interest groups, not the money interest groups, all those interest groups stuck with my dad until the moment he said he wasn’t going to run again. The people that went against him, so all the insider DC Beltway elite that are all, by the way, in league and one of the reasons why we’re in the shit that we are in now when I started at the beginning, why did we do nothing about the algorithms of Meta or Instagram or Twitter or anything like that is because they’re paying the Chuck Schumers off just as much as they’re paying off the Republican Party and protecting those interests. They’re the corporate party.
JEFF PEARLMAN: What are we going to do about AI? I fear we’re not going to do anything about AI because the amount of money coming into politics and also—you have a president who’s posting AI video, we’re not going to do anything about it because they don’t even care about it …
HUNTER BIDEN: No. And by the way, there’s another thing I could talk endlessly about it. Dude, we’re all sitting here worried about this, the reflecting pool. We’re on the cusp of the greatest, in my opinion, if you listen to the people on the single greatest leap in human history and the evolution of mankind …
JEFF PEARLMAN: Do you consider more good, bad, or terrifying?
HUNTER BIDEN: All three. I mean, really all three. And I don’t know. And so much is going to be dependent upon leadership. Look, the idea that we’re not going to come... Here’s one, here’s an idea. Every single thing that allows for these LLMs to eventually get to AGI has all been stolen from us without any remuneration whatsoever from the beginning of the moment someone carved their name into a rock, every poem, every book, every utterance, every digital-
JEFF PEARLMAN:I’m part of a class action lawsuit right now.
HUNTER BIDEN: Oh, you are?
JEFF PEARLMAN: Yeah, because I’ve written 11 books and they’ve all been gobbled up by AI.
HUNTER BIDEN: Yeah. And by the way, all of that is going to take every single job that has ever existed, and it’s going to throw humanity potentially into complete and utter chaos. And there’s going to be about five, six literal individuals that are going to become trillionaires. You know what I say? Fuck you. You’re giving us, I don’t know, 20%, 50%? It should be for humanity. It should be for every American.
Every American should be born with a digital birth rate in which they receive their payment, just like the Alaska Fund. It is no different than any other commodity or what’s coming out of the ground. It’s ours. It belongs to us. You’re stealing it from us every day.
JEFF PEARLMAN: Very nice. Sometimes I find myself rooting for the asteroid. I just do. Sometimes I’m just like-
HUNTER BIDEN: I know.
JEFF PEARLMAN:I do. I swear to God. Sometimes I’m just like-
HUNTER BIDEN: Yeah, man. But then I look, I’m sitting here and I say, “Please give me one more day.”
JEFF PEARLMAN:I know your dad’s super religious. Are you religious?
HUNTER BIDEN: Not at all.
JEFF PEARLMAN: Does that bother your dad? Well, your wife is Jewish, right?
HUNTER BIDEN: No. Yeah, my wife is Jewish.
And I went to mass every Sunday. And it’s not that I’m a religious. I’ve come to the believe that the only thing really worth it in any religion is if you sweep away all of the dogma and all of the rules and all of the rituals. And you get down to what the actual prophet or savior or Buddha or anyone said. And it literally is exactly the same thing for every single one of them. It’s love thy neighbor. It’s literally, that’s it. It’s love. Love yourself. Love your neighbor. Compassion.
JEFF PEARLMAN:My way I tell if people are decent people, I swear to God, I have two tests. How do you treat the waiter? And do you put your shopping cart back or do you leave it in the parking lot? And I feel like-
HUNTER BIDEN: Those are two good tests.
JEFF PEARLMAN: Just a little like... I used to be a baseball writer and Barry Bonds, famous Giant, treated every single person like trash. People he didn’t need to be nice to him. And I always thought, that’s a good judge of character. How do you treat the people you don’t have to be nice to? I just think that’s my number one way of judging people.
HUNTER BIDEN: Yeah. And it’s funny. My grandfather is-
JEFF PEARLMAN: Your dad’s side or your mom’s?
HUNTER BIDEN: It’s my mom’s side. Who I’m named after, Robert Neil Hunter.
Hunter, far left, with his family.
JEFF PEARLMAN:Hunter. Yeah. I know this. And he owned a restaurant?
HUNTER BIDEN: Hunter Diner. Yeah.
JEFF PEARLMAN: In Auburn.
HUNTER BIDEN: In Auburn, New York. Let’s go. Exactly right. Still there.
JEFF PEARLMAN: What was the name of it?
HUNTER BIDEN: Hunter Diner.
JEFF PEARLMAN: And it’s still there?
HUNTER BIDEN: Yeah. I think it’s just closed down. But my grandfather would always ask the waiter’s name. That’s why I asked the waiter’s name. And what you realize is, he taught me this and my dad’s the same way. But my dad, he would alway say, “You know how it changes a person’s whole day when someone sees them?”
JEFF PEARLMAN: 100%.
HUNTER BIDEN: Just the simple act of asking somebody what their name is.
JEFF PEARLMAN:I’m also like—this kid who you talked to for five minutes at beginning this interview, he’s telling his friend right now, “Oh my God, I met Hunter Biden. He was so nice to me. He asked my girlfriend’s name,” blah, blah, blah. That’s all it took. That was 30 seconds out of your day. Why wouldn’t you?
HUNTER BIDEN: Yeah. I was on a plane the other day coming back and this guy sits down next to me and it’s kind of crazy. Hair purple and a bigger guy. And he took out a big bag of candy and he passed them out to everybody around him. And then they had a meal and one of the meals was gone. He was like, “Oh, you can have mine, man.”
And I was like, “No, no, no, no, no, no, no.” And they were airplane enchiladas, so it wasn’t like getting any real thing. But he was like, “No, no, really. I’ve had Mexican twice. I don’t want it.” And because he had pre-ordered or something and he’s like, “You can have it.” And I told him when I got off the plane …
JEFF PEARLMAN:Did he know who you was?
HUNTER BIDEN: No, he had no idea. And I told him when I got off the plane, “I just want to let you know that you can’t imagine the ripple effect of being so kind has.” It made my day. Really, it made-
JEFF PEARLMAN:And now you’re telling me about it. You literally told me about it.
HUNTER BIDEN: Yeah. Made my day. And by the way, for real, that’s what I said to you before, I think I wrote to you, it’s like those stories that you tell on TikTok about those little acts of kindness, because I totally agree with you. You can always tell the real character of a person by the way in which they treat the guy who’s sweeping the sidewalk.
JEFF PEARLMAN:My new thing is last few years is I go to... I like Dunkin’ Donuts. I’m going to go in the drive-thru to Dunkin’ Donuts. I will always buy the person behind me on the drive-through line their coffee. And someone said to me, “What if it’s a huge MAGA guy?” I said that was even better in a lot of ways, because it shows someone that there’s kindness in the world. You just can’t go wrong being nice to people. I just don’t think you can go wrong. I just don’t think you can.
HUNTER BIDEN: That’s one of the best moves ever. There’s little things that aren’t little at all. Huge. It’s huge, but he infects it. So that all comes back to the original thing that we were talking about. Do you think it’s just [Trump]? And I think that there’s plenty of people that have been able now and plenty of people that have amplified it. But I think that without him, there’s no way that this exists right now. He’s singularly …
There was a psychologist. Do you ever see that guy that back in 2015 when Trump was running and he diagnosed him with malignant narcissism, which he said is a very rare diagnosis actually. It’s worse than the sociopath and it’s worse than the psychopath. And he said if he’s ever elected President of the United States, it would be like an atomic bomb in America.
And I saw him interview him four months ago and they showed that clip of him saying that. And my question is, I don’t know of any more accurate prediction in the history of politics. Totally.
JEFF PEARLMAN: Do you think we survive this?
HUNTER BIDEN: Oh yeah, we survive. The opportunity is this. You know what else he’s done? He has exposed some of the... He’s exposed all of our weak points. He’s like a human... I don’t even know.
JEFF PEARLMAN: He’s like ink in water. He finds the crevices.
HUNTER BIDEN: Exactly. And now we’re all like, holy fuck, we sure better fix that. The Supreme Court, this is crazy. The electoral college. What the fuck? You sit there and you actually now can have the discussion without people saying like, “Well, is it really worth it? Is it really worth the constitutional Congress? Is it worth the hassle of the constitutional amendment to do that?” Oh, yeah. I think that you have at least 60% of the country right now going, “Oh yeah, I’m ready for that.” And the question is, does it play out without it turning into something really violent in some way? I really believe that.
Congress left for the holiday weekend a day early today after a number of Republican members of Congress appear to have mutinied against President Donald J. Trump and his loyalists.
Trump’s $1.776 billion slush fund and his agreement with acting attorney general Todd Blanche that the government would not prosecute him or any of his associates for crimes related to tax laws apparently were a bridge too far for a number of Republicans, especially as his job approval rating has fallen to a grim 34%.
Republican senators met for nearly two hours today with acting attorney general Todd Blanche in a meeting that Andrew Desiderio of Punchbowl News reported was “incredibly hostile.”
Republicans were angry they had no advance warning about the plan, questioned the legal basis for the fund, were unhappy with Blanche’s descriptions of how payments would work, and said they wanted no part of it. As former Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) put it: “So the nation’s top law enforcement official is asking for a slush fund to pay people who assault cops? Utterly stupid, morally wrong—Take your pick.”
As many as 25 Republican senators spoke out against the slush fund and pitched ideas about how to draw some limits around it. Scott MacFarlane of Meidas News reported that senators want to know “what is Trump trying to mask by offering up this controversial fund? I mean, the optics of this are terrible. This looks bad, so is it a diversion technique? Is it some way of masking a different issue altogether?”
Dan Alexander of Forbes reported today that the tax immunity Todd Blanche is extending to Trump could save him more than $600 million on the estimated $1.4 billion he made in 2025 from crypto and licensing ventures and on the $100 million hanging over him from a previous tax bill.
Michael Gold and Carl Hulse of the New York Times reported that Republican frustration with the White House has been exacerbated by anger that Trump has intervened in Republican primaries to sink Republican incumbents he thinks have been insufficiently loyal to him.
One Republican senator texted Desiderio to say: “Our majority is melting down before our eyes.”
In the end, Republicans were so angry about the slush fund and immunity agreement that Senate leadership decided not to try to pass $72 billion of funding for immigration agencies, left out of an earlier funding package, out of fear Democrats would force Republicans to vote on the slush fund.
Even before they decided to avoid the vote, Republicans had dropped from the measure the $1 billion Trump wants for security for his ballroom.
House Republicans had their own meltdown. House Republican leaders pulled a vote to stop Trump’s war on Iran based on the War Powers Act, recognizing that they did not have the votes to defeat it. Representative Brian Fitzpatrick (R-PA), who voted with Democrats to pass such a measure last week, told Megan Mineiro, Robert Jimison, and Michael Gold of the New York Times that the next time the measure comes to a vote, it will pass.
As members head home to observe Memorial Day, the solemn remembrance of those Americans who gave their lives to defend the nation, they will likely hear an earful from their constituents about the $1.7 billion slush fund, the promise of immunity over Trump’s tax crimes, the $1 billion Trump is demanding for his ballroom, Trump’s unpopular war on Iran, and now the administration’s increasing threats against Cuba and Greenland, Trump’s unpopular war on Iran, and now the administration’s increasing threats against Cuba and Greenland, and about dramatically increasing prices.
On Tuesday, four Republicans joined Democrats to advance a resolution against the Iran war in the Senate. “Vote by vote, Democrats are breaking through Republicans’ wall of silence on Trump’s illegal war,” Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) said. “Today proved our pressure is working: Republicans are starting to crack, and momentum is building to check him. We are not letting up.”
More color! Bar and waffle charts without a color column are shaded by magnitude with a sequential color scheme; color columns holding text values use the observable10 categorical scheme. #2
Now checks execute-sql permission before running the query to find the column names.
Charts now display interactive tooltips.
Fixed a bug where waffleY charts were not described to the agent.
It’s with great pleasure that we present this excerpt from The Impossible Factory by Josh Dean. It’s a tremendous, new book about Kelly Johnson and Lockheed Skunk Works.
Copyright 2026 by Josh Dean. Published by Dutton, an imprint of Penguin Random House.
Kelly Johnson knew that engineers, especially those in defense contracting, had a responsibility to understand and predict the market. No commercial enterprise that lives at the bleeding edge of technology can survive for long if it doesn’t anticipate the needs of its buyers far in advance. So, Kelly was constantly talking to his contacts in the Defense Department and in the national intelligence establishment about the global chessboard and the challenges that lay ahead.
He caught wind of a “desperate need” for a new type of American aircraft before anyone asked him for it—one that “could safely fly over the USSR” and bring back critical information on Russia’s missile capability and other details about its defenses and military infrastructure.
On May Day 1954, the Soviets unveiled their latest nuclear bomber—the Myasishchev M‑4 “Hammer”—which soared low over Red Square, creating quite a stir in Washington, especially because it hadn’t even been a year since the USSR had detonated the world’s first hydrogen bomb.
Top officials—including, if not especially, President Dwight Eisenhower—were particularly worried about the Soviet Union’s strategic bombers, like the Hammer, which could carry nuclear weapons and which U.S. military and intelligence leaders knew almost nothing about: a type of plane that would potentially allow for a Pearl Harbor–style sneak attack, but far worse.
In the spring of 1954, Eisenhower asked James Killian, president of MIT, to form a committee to make recommendations for how the United States could leverage its tremendous base of scientific and technological firepower to determine what the Soviet military was capable of—and as a result, how much danger America was truly in.
A subcommittee was told to “find ways to increase the number of hard facts upon which our intelligence estimates are based, to provide better strategic warning, to minimize surprise in the kind of attack, and to reduce the danger of gross overestimation or gross underestimation of the threat.” No pressure there.
The United States and the Soviet Union were still in the early days of a nuclear arms race, and any edge in that race created leverage in the battle for global supremacy. But there was a fundamental imbalance when it came to intelligence gathering. As a free and open society, the United States was susceptible to on‑the‑ground spying. But the Soviet Union, being a closed, authoritarian state, was nearly impossible to infiltrate with spies.
To make up for that, the United States had to be creative. It would need to use science and technology to out‑spy the Russians. And if American spies couldn’t get into the Soviet Union to gather intel, they’d have to fly over it, which presented its own challenges. Like being shot down.
The design challenge facing Kelly Johnson, then, was daunting: To safely overfly the Soviet Union and take high‑quality photos undetected required a plane that could fly more than four thousand miles without refueling, and reach at least 70,000 feet—beyond the reach of Soviet air defenses and so high that it wouldn’t create vapor trails, thus revealing itself.
In short, this plane would need to be extremely light, while carrying an array of the most advanced cameras, sensors, and navigational gear available.
The need was also urgent. Existentially so.
That March, Kelly submitted Lockheed Report #9732 for an ultralight, high‑flying surveillance plane with an enormous wingspan to the Air Force.
The pitch was radical in that the plane Kelly was proposing had no landing gear, to save weight. Being as light as possible is mission critical for flying high, so Kelly was looking for weight savings wherever he could find it and decided that his plane would drop its gear upon takeoff and land on a reinforced belly.
The pitch was not a hit. Kelly received a letter from the Air Force declining the proposal “on the basis that [the concept] was too unusual.”
But one Air Force official loved the idea: Trevor Gardner, the “technologically evangelical” assistant secretary for research and development. Gardner knew of a different buyer who might be interested and summoned Kelly to Washington in November for an urgent meeting.
On November 19, Kelly met with a group of officers, engineers, and scientists, and endured a grilling that reminded him of his college days.
Shortly thereafter, top officials took the proposal to Eisenhower in person, because the president feared leaks and the subject was considered too highly classified to be put in a written report.
Eisenhower approved the plan, with a stipulation. “It should be handled in an unconventional way so that it would not become entangled in the bureaucracy of the Defense Department.”
It was given instead to the CIA.
In advance of his trip to Washington, Kelly had been warned by his bosses not to commit to anything and he worried that he might have to take a leave of absence from his job at Lockheed proper to take on this project.
Lockheed’s capacity was straining, especially in engineering. Still, when Kelly met Robert Gross and Hall Hibbard—the only two men he was cleared to tell—he told them that this was a job Lockheed had to take. And that secrecy demanded that he run the entire program, from design to manufacture, in his Skunk Works.
The two bosses heard him out and agreed.
This was, arguably, the biggest single moment in the history of the Lockheed Skunk Works, in that Kelly now had approval for something more than an experimental design shop. He was given the green light to run his own production, too. Which meant that he wasn’t just building prototypes. He would oversee full production of all planes built for the program.
What’s more, the government was willing to hand him unprecedented control. Lockheed was taking “full responsibility for the design, mockup, building, secret testing, and field maintenance of this unorthodox vehicle.”
Kelly spent two days refining the concept himself, then summoned five key Skunks to his office for a meeting.
He looked at the assembled talent and spoke of a new program, one more secret than anything any of them had ever worked on, and then, without revealing any details about what they’d actually be doing, asked if they were willing to commit eighteen months to such a project.
All five said that, yes, they absolutely would. And then Kelly leveled with them. He’d sold the CIA a high‑altitude reconnaissance airplane. They could have a few days to wrap up their current work but should be ready to go full bore on Monday, December 2. It was time to make history.
—
Kelly’s reconstituted Skunk Works began with twenty‑five engineers, with his trusted shop man, Art Viereck, in charge of production. Kelly assigned Ed Baldwin to handle the traditional three‑view drawing.
Four days later, Baldwin had the first drawings completed, and by December 10 the basic design was frozen. It was, more or less, the configuration that would go into production. Which is fairly astounding to consider once you know what the plane Kelly laid out and Baldy sketched would become.
Shortly after beginning, Kelly prepared a twenty‑three‑page report for the CIA with his updated thoughts on the plane his Skunk Works would build. Among them, that the Angel, as he was calling it, would have a maximum speed of Mach 0.8 (460 knots) in level flight, with a ceiling of 73,100 feet—an absurd altitude that had only been reached at this point by research balloons and a few highly experimental one‑off aircraft.
He promised to have the first plane flying by August 2, 1955, and all Angels finished and delivered to an as‑yet‑unchosen test site by December 1.
When Kelly selected his design team, he announced that they’d all work forty‑five‑hour weeks. That number quickly rose to sixty‑five,
and the actual schedule, once the project was fully running, required more like one hundred hours a week. It was the only way Kelly could hit his audacious eight‑month target.
The work was fast and furious. “Working like mad on airplane,” Kelly wrote in the project log. So mad that he began work before he had a contract or any idea of how the money would flow from the government to Lockheed.
Government contracts were sometimes paid upon completion or on delayed schedules. Kelly insisted on splitting the tab up into smaller payments, made regularly, so that he didn’t have to “go running to the bank to carry the government.”
It is almost impossible to believe that a company as large as Lockheed could charge forward on an experimental program without a contract from the government, but this combination of mystery and subterfuge only assured Kelly that no bureaucracy would stand in his way. As for the government, this unconventional method of paying a contractor—in secret, out of oversight of even Congress—wasn’t illegal.
So‑called unvouchered funds were allowable for covert projects, according to a law passed by Congress in 1949, which stated that only the director of the CIA could access them. This was the only way a program could control secrecy, by avoiding things like competitive bidding and public procurement of parts.
The project was codenamed AQUATONE and would be funded by the CIA’s secret Contingency Reserve Fund. Herb Miller, chief of the Office of Scientific Intelligence’s Nuclear Energy Division, was named executive officer. And Richard “Dick” Bissell was handpicked by CIA Director Allen Dulles to oversee this audacious program.
Bissell’s so‑called Development Project Staff was the only CIA section with its own communications office and operational cable traffic that transmitted to and from Lockheed. Only Bissell, who read every cable, could disseminate them, and they were the only cables at the CIA that didn’t automatically get copied and distributed to the director’s office.
Kelly’s loose, often garrulous nature wasn’t an obvious fit with Bissell’s stiff, effete stoicism, but the two got along well. Bissell understood that the program would only succeed if it stayed small and moved fast, and Kelly was almost uniquely suited among defense contractors to follow that model. His decisiveness in particular—“which allowed him to take shortcuts and render quick judgments without jeopardizing safety”—impressed Bissell.
Bissell didn’t give Kelly a deadline, but he imposed one upon himself. This new plane, which would fly higher than any in history, would be in the air by August 1—nine months after the project commenced.
Bissell doubted this was possible, but he worked with Kelly to strip as much bureaucracy as they could from the program. Kelly had just one point of contact—Bissell—who could answer his questions in a single phone call, and their monthly progress reports would be ruthlessly short, about five pages.
If this had been the Air Force, Bissell noted, that same report would be an inch thick, and every design change would require approval by “Wright Field, a couple of different laboratories, the budget office, the regulations office, and so forth.”
The CIA project was really version two of the Skunk Works, and its new home, Building 82, was an upgrade from the lean‑to where Kelly’s division was born, but not a big one.
Ben Rich was told to report there in December 1954. Rich was a twenty‑nine‑year‑old thermodynamics expert whose first patent had been for a special heater that helped solve a painful and embarrassing problem for naval aviators: At higher altitudes, their penises would sometimes freeze to the side of the tube used for peeing in flight.
Rich had no idea what was happening inside that enormous assembly building by the runway before Kelly asked “to borrow a thermodynamicist, preferably a smart one.” The timing was fortuitous. Rich, in his first year at Lockheed, felt “creatively frustrated” and was on the verge of leaving the company.
This job was a dream. The surroundings, not so much. Rich was surprised to find the company’s brilliant star engineer, the venerable Kelly Johnson, tucked away in what felt like a warren. Desks were crammed together.
“Adding to the eccentric flavor,” Rich later wrote, when the hangar doors were opened to get some air flowing, birds would fly in “and swoop around drawing boards and divebomb our heads, after knocking themselves silly” against the windows that were painted black, at Kelly’s direction, for secrecy.
One of Kelly’s top engineers, Dick Boehme, assigned Rich to a desk in an office with six others and gave him a copy of Kelly’s ten basic rules. “For as long as you work here,” Rich recalls him saying, “this is your gospel.” Then he told the young engineer what he’d be working on—a jet engine modified to fly 15,000 feet higher than any engine had flown before—and showed him a picture of the plane it was to go with.
Rich was stunned. He’d expected a fighter, not a glider. “What is this?”
“The U‑2,” Boehme replied. “You’ve just had a look at the most secret project in the free world.”
Rich would go on to have his own legendary career at the Skunk Works, as Kelly’s right hand, and the boss’s determination was one of the first lessons he absorbed: “Once that guy made up his mind to do something he was as relentless as a bowling ball heading toward a ten‑pin strike,” Rich would say. But for that to work, you have to be willing to back it up with results, and spine. “With his chili‑pepper temperament, he was poison to any bureaucrat, a disaster to ass-coverers, excuse‑makers, or fault‑finders.”
The sum total of Kelly’s attributes, Rich thought, was that you just wanted to make him proud: “We peons viewed him with the knee‑knocking dread and awe of the almighty best described in the Old Testament.”
It wasn’t that the Skunk Works was established as a set of rules and governed exactly that way for decades. Kelly was constantly refining his methods along the way.
One of the key elements of making an experimental shop work was that the company had to allow the person running it to—as he once explained—“tear down long‑established empires.”
Departments become entrenched and defend their responsibilities. It’s hard to take them away once they’ve been established. Purchasing, for instance, gave Kelly fits. The Skunk Works needed its own purchasing, with its own rules, one of which was that the guys who worked there shouldn’t also do engineering. But the engineers also shouldn’t do purchasing.
Engineers want the perfect part, even if they don’t actually need it, and they don’t always know the cost. Often, something slightly less perfect, or less expensive, works just as well. And vendors want to make the engineers happy. They also like sales. The end result is higher bills.
Secrecy was of paramount importance. This was the most secret defense program since the Manhattan Project. And Kelly took that very seriously. But, on the team itself, this was mostly about trust and understanding.
Keep the group small, make the stakes clear, and don’t bother with an elaborate security apparatus. Kelly’s philosophy about secret documents was that they should not be labeled. If you stamp secret on something, you’re just asking for someone to try to read it. A document is far safer if it looks like any other boring old report. He felt the same way about locked drawers, and even doors.
When a program was finished, he mostly just destroyed the documents. Years later, when the Air Force came in to perform a security audit, they asked Kelly where the files were. I destroyed them, he said. And where’s the record? He didn’t have that, either.
The phrase “need‑to‑know” is today a cliché of covert projects, but the concept was born on these early CIA black programs. Many workers even inside the Skunk Works didn’t have the entire picture of what was going on. They might know that they were building a wing for a high‑altitude plane, but they didn’t know what that plane was being designed to do. That simply wasn’t information you needed to know to do your job.
Secrecy complicated everything, including the official name of the plane. Inside the Skunk Works, people tended to use the nickname Kelly liked—“the Angel”—while the small group cleared into the program at the CIA, being bureaucrats, called it “the Article.”
The project was so closely guarded that in early 1955 the Air Force put a call out to contractors for a plane it called the X‑17, and when Johnson saw the proposal, he was irate. It was, he thought, “a dead‑ringer for our original presentation.” The Air Force department that issued it had, in his opinion, clearly used his original pitch and somehow didn’t know about the CIA’s secret project, which was a good sign for secrecy but infuriating nonetheless.
Kelly called Dick Bissell on a Sunday, then flew to Washington to share the proposal with Bissell and Gardner. Their reaction, Kelly wrote in the project log, was “stark horror.” The proposal was swiftly killed.
It was, to Kelly, yet another sign of the Pentagon’s broken contracting process.
Throughout Lockheed’s development process, tension simmered among the small number of people within the Air Force and CIA who knew about Kelly’s project.
In March 1955, the Air Force chief of staff told DCI Dulles that he hoped to take over the program once the plane was flying, and he met stiff resistance. That debate simmered until Eisenhower declared that the CIA would remain in control even once missions commenced.
“I want this whole thing to be a civilian operation,” Eisenhower said. “If uniformed personnel of the armed services of the United States fly over Russia, it is an act of war—legally—and I don’t want any part of it.”
Engineers who worked under Kelly often talk about how practical his genius was. Rather than obsess over innovation that might be possible, he’d focus on what he knew could be done, based on existing technologies. The U‑2 is a prime example. “It’s sort of a nothing, technically,” is how Dick Heppe later described it, as a preface to explaining how impressive Kelly’s design mind was.
It was, essentially, the fuselage of a previous design— his F‑104 fighter—with subsonic inlets for the engine, because this plane didn’t necessarily need to be fast. The U-2’s key novel attribute was the enormous wing, and extremely light wing loading, paired with a powerful engine. The result was a capability “completely unknown and unavailable in any other machine,” the ability to fly long range at 70,000 feet or higher.
And by late summer 1955, the prototype was ready.
The plane had arrived on time and under budget—a lot under budget. By the time Kelly had a prototype flying, there was $4 million to $5 million in leftover funds. He used that, plus spare parts, to deliver five extra planes to Uncle Sam for free. This special bonus price was, Air Force liaison officer Leo Geary later said, “probably the finest bargain the American taxpayer has ever had under any circumstances.”
I think active listening is the term that the team came up with for “something that sounds fancy but really just means the way ad targeting platforms work already”. Then they got over-excited about the new metaphor and added that first couple of slides that talk about “voice data”, without really understanding how the tech works or what kind of a shitstorm that could kick off when people who DID understand technology started paying attention to their marketing.
This FTC press release appears to confirm that's pretty much what happened:
CMG, MindSift and 1010 Digital Works claimed their “Active Listening” branded marketing service listened in on consumers’ conversations overheard by smart devices, in real time, to target advertising [...]
According to the complaints, this service did not, in fact, listen in on consumers’ conversations or use voice data at all—nor did the service accurately place ads in customers’ desired locations. Instead, the service the companies provided consisted of reselling—at a significant markup—email lists obtained from other data brokers.
The FTC also clarify that hiding an "opt-in" to using voice data in terms of service would not be acceptable, as tricks like that do not constitute "adequate consent":
The FTC also alleged that all three companies deceived potential customers by claiming that consumers had opted into the Active Listening service. The company, however, did not seek or obtain consumers’ consent, according to the complaints. Instead, the companies claimed that consumers had “opted in” by agreeing to the terms of service that people have to accept when downloading and using apps. Clicking through mandatory terms of service does not constitute “opt-in consent” for such an invasive service or for use of consumers’ voice data from inside their homes. If the Active Listening service had functioned as advertised, this collection and use of consumers’ voice data without adequate consent would itself violate Section 5 of the FTC Act.
Attempting to myth bust the conspiracy theory that our mobile devices target ads to us based on spying through the microphones continues to be my least rewarding niche online hobby. It's nice to have a new piece of ammunition.
We just announced the first release of Datasette Agent, a new extensible AI assistant for Datasette. I've been working on my LLM Python library for just over three years now, and Datasette Agent represents the moment that LLM and Datasette finally come together. I'm really excited about it!
Datasette Agent provides a conversational interface for asking questions of the data you have stored in Datasette. Add the datasette-agent-charts plugin and it can generate charts of your data as well.
I recorded the video against the new agent.datasette.io live demo instance, which runs Datasette Agent against example databases including the classic global-power-plants by WRI, and a copy of the Datasette backup of my blog.
The live demo runs on Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite - it's cheap, fast and has no trouble writing SQLite queries.
SELECT
title, commentary, created
FROM
blog_beat
WHERE
beat_type ='sighting'AND (title LIKE'%pelican%'OR commentary LIKE'%pelican%')
ORDER BY
created DESCLIMIT5
And replied:
The most recent sighting of a pelican by Simon was recorded on May 20, 2026.
The observation included a California Brown Pelican, along with a Common Loon, Canada Goose, Striped Shore Crab, and a California Sea Lion.
Building plugins is really fun. I have a bunch more prototypes that aren't quite alpha-quality yet.
Claude Code and OpenAI Codex are both proving excellent at writing plugins - just point them at a checkout of the datasette-agent repo for reference and tell them what you want to build!
Running it against local models
I've also been having fun running the new plugin against local models. Here's a uv one-liner to run the plugin against gemma-4-26b-a4b in LM Studio on a Mac:
Datasette Agent needs reliable tool calls and the ability for a model to produce SQL queries that run against SQLite. The open weight models released in the past six months are increasingly able to handle that.
What's next
Datasette Agent opens up so many opportunities for the LLM and Datasette ecosystem in general.
It's already informed the major LLM 0.32a0 refactor which I'm nearly ready to roll into a stable release, maybe with some additional "LLM agent" abstractions extracte from Datasette Agent itself.
I've been exploring my own take on the Claude Artifacts, which is shaping up nicely as a plugin.
I'm excited to use Datasette Agent to build my own Claw - a personal AI assistant built around data imported from different parts of my digital life, which is a neat excuse to revisit my older Dogsheep family of tools.
We'll also be rolling out Datasette Agent for users of Datasette Cloud.
A number of people have asked me to put some of my recent writing on European economic performance outside the paywall. Here is the central argument, revised to include data I think is slightly more informative.
I’m still in Europe, where one of the luxuries I’m experiencing is not having to think about Donald Trump and the nightmarish state of U.S. politics 100% of the time — more like 90%, but still. And by way of luxuriating in the slight emotional distance, I’ll postpone my next primer on healthcare for another week and talk more this week about European economic performance.
Last week I wrote about the question of whether Europe is really falling behind the United States economically. I argued that the conventional narrative of clear relative decline is wrong. And I followed up with a small formal model of the underlying logic of the situation as I see it.
I’m gratified to have started a wider discussion, with smart observers like Noah Smith and Luis Garicano weighing in. Judging from the conversation so far, however, I need to do more to explain my central point — which is that widely used comparisons of productivity growth can’t be used to judge European versus U.S. economic success.
In today’s post, then, I’ll try to offer more explanation, backed by some additional data and what I hope are useful analogies.
Below I will address the following:
1. Comparing Europe with America
2. The US-Europe paradox: Slow European growth, but without a growing gap
3. Explaining the paradox
4. What Europe should and shouldn’t worry about
Comparing Europe with America
When we compare the European, or at least northern European, economy with that of the United States some points should be indisputable. Both are wealthy economies that make extensive use of modern technology, with no obvious winner in terms of sophistication — the days when Jacques Chirac lamented that the internet was an “Anglo-Saxon network” are long past. Americans, however, have more stuff, that is, material goods: Our houses and cars, in particular, are much bigger. Europeans, on the other hand, have more time, working shorter hours and taking more vacations, and have the security and longer lifespans that come with more extensive social programs such as guaranteed healthcare, and sane gun regulations.
Which side of the Atlantic lives better? Your kilometerage may vary. As an American progressive who favors strong social safety nets — basically what Europeans would call a social democrat — I find a lot to admire in the European way. And even the Draghi report, with its call to arms over what it portrays as a loss of European competitiveness, starts by praising Europe’s economic and social achievements.
However, while the question of which continent offers a better life is obviously important politically, it’s somewhat separate from the question of which way the US-Europe comparison is trending. Mario Draghi, like many observers, concedes that Europe is a good place to live now, but warns that it is falling behind, above all suffering from low productivity growth compared with the United States. Noah concludes his response by saying that
you have to reckon with the uncomfortable fact that America’s output per hour has soared while West Europe’s has grown only slowly.
But is that a fact? Or at any rate is it the relevant fact? The main point of what I’ve been trying to say is that I do not think that output per hour, i.e., productivity, means what many people think it means.
So let me try to further explain that point using somewhat different data and a different presentation approach than I did last week.
The apparent US-Europe paradox
Gross domestic product (GDP) is the total value of goods and services produced by an economy over a given period, usually a year. On its own, GDP in a given year isn’t that informative a number (although people would have a better perspective on many issues if more of them knew just how big U.S. GDP is — currently running at an annual rate of more than $30 trillion.) Normally, we want to compare GDP over time and space — GDP in two different years or two different countries.
Such comparisons require making some adjustments. To compare GDP over time, economists normally look not at raw GDP but at “real GDP” — GDP at constant prices, that is, measured in the prices of a base year, currently 2017 in most U.S. data but 2021 in the World Bank data I use below.
To compare GDP between countries, economists could and sometimes do just use dollar values. But such comparisons jump around when currencies fluctuate, so economists often use “purchasing power parity” (PPP) -- GDP in different countries adjusted for difference in countries’ overall price levels.
How, then, can we compare nations’ economic performance over time? Analyses that raise the alarm about European competitiveness generally look at the growth of real GDP, either per capita or per working hour, that is, productivity, in each country. But we can also simply compare GDP per capita or per hour at each point in time using PPP.
One might think that these approaches — one based on GDP at constant prices and one based on GDP at PPP — would tell the same story. But they don’t. And that is what I’m calling the apparent US-Europe paradox. I use the qualifier “apparent” because, as I will explain shortly, once one takes into account how productivity affects prices, the paradox is resolved.
Let’s start by looking at GDP per capita in Europe (actually the euro area) as a percentage of GDP per capita in the US. If we do this using constant prices — the World Bank uses 2021 prices — we get the line in Chart 1 labeled “2021 prices.” This line shows Europe falling behind over the past 25 years.
Chart 1
If, however, we simply use prices in each given year, we get the line labeled “PPP,” which shows Europe gaining on the US.
We get a similar picture if we look at GDP per worker-hour. The Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development calculates productivity; the data are available on the OECD Data Explorer. Here’s productivity in the euro area relative to productivity in the US, at constant and current prices:
Chart 2
The blue line labeled “Euro relative constant prices” supports the Draghi-Smith story of badly lagging European productivity, with Europe starting well above the US level but falling far behind. But the black line labeled “Europe relative current prices” shows Europe holding its own.
Which of these lines is “right”? If we want to compare economies, surely we want to focus on value at each point in time. That is, we want to look at the black line, which calculates the value of output using the current PPP prices, and not the blue line, which calculates the value of output using a static price level. Looking at Chart 2, the PPP line shows that in 2000 the value of goods and services produced per hour by an average European worker was about 86 percent as much as the value per hour produced by an American worker. In 2024 that percentage was about 87 percent. Thus, if you want to claim that between 2000 and 2024 European productivity fell far behind U.S. productivity, then, as I said earlier, I do not think that word “productivity” means what you think it means.
Yet productivity growth as conventionally measured has in fact been much faster in the US than in Europe. How can this be consistent with the fact that there has been virtually no change in the relative value of goods produced per hour? That’s the apparent US-Europe paradox. What explains it is the fact that the US and European economies produce different mixes of goods – a qualifier that is not picked up in the conventional measures of productivity. And that difference in mixes of goods affects the prices at which productivity measures should be calculated in order to make a meaningfulcomparison across countries.
Explaining the paradox
One key fact about economic growth in all advanced economies in the 21st century is that progress has been highly concentrated in a relatively small sector — the “tech” or information technology (IT) sector.
The Chicago Fed has a recent letter titled “Concentrated growth: The role of the IT sector.” The authors analyze “total factor productivity,” which is related to but somewhat different from labor productivity, but the moral is clear. Starting in the late 1980s, productivity in IT has risen much faster than in the rest of the economy:
As the authors define it, IT accounts for only 8 percent of US value added — that is, it accounts for only 8% of the net total value generated by production in the U.S., and hence 8 percent of GDP. Yet IT is responsible for almost half of US productivity growth.
This does not mean that half of the benefits of US productivity growth for the last nearly 40 years have accrued to the workers and companies in the IT industry, although that is where the growth was generated. The reason is that the benefits of the vast increase in productivity in the IT sector are passed through to the rest of the economy.
Why haven’t the benefits of IT stayed with IT producers? Because there is effective, if not perfect, competition among American IT firms. As a result, most of the benefits of technological progress in IT are passed on to consumers in the form of lower prices. Correspondingly, workers in the IT sector have seen a huge rise in productivity compared with workers in other sectors, but they haven’t seen a huge rise in their incomes compared with other workers.
A specific example: According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, output per worker hour in computer manufacturing has risen by a factor of more than 14 since 1988, or about 10 percent per year. As best the BLS can measure it, output per hour in hospitals barely changed over the same period. But we didn’t see a correspondingly huge rise in the wages of computer workers relative to those of doctors and nurses. What happened instead was that computers became much cheaper compared with healthcare, with the value produced by each worker in the two sectors remaining similar.
Why is this relevant to the US-Europe comparison? Because the United States has a dominant position in IT, largely as a result of self-reinforcing network effects (in economics jargon, local external economies.) IT firms have strong incentives to locate in Silicon Valley and a few other tech hubs precisely because so many other IT firms are located there. This is largely for historical reasons: Although this is no longer true, the United States used to be much more technologically sophisticated than other advanced nations. Consequently, most of the world’s big tech hubs are in the US. (Some are now emerging in China, but that’s another story.)
As a result, the US economy as a whole vis-à-vis Europe is effectively in the same position, albeit to a lesser degree, as IT workers versus doctors. We dominate industries in which output per hour rises rapidly over time, so US productivity measured in constant prices rises faster than it does in Europe. But the goods those industries produce get steadily cheaper relative to the goods produced both by non-IT workers in the US and by workers in Europe. So Europe’s relative productivity as measured by the value of goods produced per hour at any point in time — relative output per hour at PPP — has not declined.
And therefore Europe’s purchasing power, and hence its material standard of living, hasn’t declined relative to the US despite Europe’s slower productivity growth as conventionally measured.
I laid out a little formal model of how this works a few days ago. One way to state the key result of that model is to think of two sectors, IT and non-IT, with productivity growth in IT much higher than in non-IT. For the economy as a whole, the rate of conventionally measured productivity growth will be
Overall productivity growth rate = (Productivity growth rate in IT * share of IT in GDP) + (Productivity growth rate in non-IT * share of non-IT in GDP)
Assume that productivity growth is 10 percent a year in IT, zero in non-IT. Also assume that IT is 10 percent of the US economy, zero of the European economy. Then measured productivity growth will be 1 percent a year in the US, 0 in Europe. But because IT progress is passed on to all consumers via lower prices, the relative value of output in the two economies — and hence the relative value of goods produced per person-hour — won’t change.
In short, what we will see is exactly what I am calling the US-Europe paradox, of much faster productivity growth as usually measured in America, but no change in the ratio of value produced per hour.
Not incidentally, differences in productivity growth driven by who happens to host IT clusters isn’t uniquely a US-Europe phenomenon. We can see the same story when comparing regions within the United States. A few months ago I posted the following chart:
The difference in measured productivity growth between California and the rest of the US is wider than the difference between the US and Europe, yet that difference isn’t the source of constant agonizing by U.S. states worried that they are falling behind. It doesn’t lead to anguished concerns about the superiority of California’s business culture, or the supposedly anti-business policies of the rest of America.
So should Europeans be as relaxed about faster measured US productivity growth as Texans are about faster California growth? What should Europeans be worried about?
What Europe should and shouldn’t be worried about
It is a fact that the US plays a much bigger role in the global IT industry than Europe does. Few of the biggest tech companies are European. The current race to dominate AI is overwhelmingly a tournament among US companies. Chinese companies taking a different, less computation-heavy approach may be serious contenders, but Europe isn’t in the game.
But does this matter? The big benefits of IT come from applying it, rather than creating it. And as I’ve tried to show, the data show Europe holding its own in the relative value of the goods it produces, indicating that European economies are doing fine when it comes to applying technological advances.
It’s true that in some cases European adoption of new technologies is handicapped by market fragmentation: The single market, as the Draghi report emphasizes, remains incomplete, and that is one reason European productivity, even measured at PPP, is lower than in the US.
But overall Europe has done well at making use of technologies developed elsewhere. And there is no obvious reason to believe that this will change — that, for example, the fact that US companies are leading the development of AI models will make the US economy as a whole better than Europe at making use of AI in the years ahead.
What should worry Europe, instead, are the geopolitical implications of US/Chinese leadership in advanced technology. We used to have a global economic system overseen by a mostly benign and in any case law-abiding hegemon. That system was, however, gradually eroding with the rise of China, and has now taken a drastic hit with America’s abandonment of the rules it largely created.
In this new world, Europe — one of the world’s three great economic superpowers — unfortunately can’t be sure that it will always have access to new technologies developed and produced in the other superpowers. The risk of being cut off from strategically important technologies, once minimal, is now very real.
And that risk, rather than misleading numbers about trends in real GDP per worker hour, is what should concern European policymakers.
Benjamin Arbuckle is combining archaeology and ancient DNA analysis to reconstruct entire ecosystems of ancient cities, aiming to show how human societies can thrive in balance with their environments.
Jesse Casana, an archaeology professor at Dartmouth, is developing drone-based radar imaging methods to detect and map buried archaeological sites beneath desert sands, combining advanced remote sensing technologies to preserve endangered cultural landscapes and transform archaeological discovery in arid regions.
Leila Character is developing drone-based imaging and AI tools to detect hidden archaeological sites, aiming to make discovery faster, cheaper, and more accessible for researchers worldwide.
Bryce Hoenigman is developing an AI tool to help date ancient cuneiform tablets by analyzing how written symbols evolved over time, aiming to make archaeological research faster and more accurate.
Again, I am very grateful to Yonatan Ben Shimon for making this support possible. And there remains a modest amount of money left in the fund.
Speaking of Apple and sports, here’s another one from Apple Newsroom:
This Saturday, May 23, Apple TV will present a special live Major
League Soccer match captured exclusively on iPhone 17 Pro — marking the first time iPhone will be used to capture the entirety
of a major professional live sporting event broadcast. Developed
in partnership with MLS, the milestone broadcast will feature the
LA Galaxy vs. Houston Dynamo FC, streaming live on Apple TV from
Dignity Health Sports Park in Carson, California, during the final
weekend of MLS play before the regular season pauses for the FIFA
World Cup 2026 in North America.
The word “major” is doing a bit of work in the phrase “major professional live sporting event” here, but it’s still quite a moment for iPhone photography. Apple started using iPhone 17 Pro cameras during Friday Night Baseball games last year, but this will be the first event to use them exclusively.
Apple Sports — the free app for iPhone that gives fans access to
real-time scores, stats, and more — is now available to download
on the App Store in more than 170 countries and regions around the
world, including more than 90 newly added markets. Designed for
speed and simplicity, the app delivers a personalized experience,
putting fans’ favorite teams and leagues front and center with a
simple, intuitive interface designed by Apple.
Apple Sports is helping fans get ready for the World Cup by
allowing them to explore tournament groupings and customize their
scoreboards simply by following the entire tournament or their
favorite national teams — making it easier to stay on top of key
moments when the tournament kicks off in June. Following a team
also enables Live Activities on a user’s iPhone Lock Screen or
Apple Watch, letting them follow every moment of a match with just
a quick glance.
I’ve got some gripes about certain specific aspects of Apple Sports. Like, where does one even start to explain how much is wrong with their zero-sum visualization of team stats? Has anyone ever even seen a presentation like that before? Anyone?
But overall it really is a good app. I don’t love the UI layout but I don’t hate it, either, and it is interesting. It’s a very modern layout. Apple Sports is fast to load — the primary reason Eddy Cue wanted the app in the first place — and its Live Activities are very good. It remains my go-to for “checking scores” for every sport except baseball, for which I have a much better dedicated app.
Yes, Apple promotes some of its own sports-related properties in the app occasionally. Just now I had a promotion for the F1 Canadian Grand Prix at the top. But the ads that do appear are always sports-related and never obscure content. That’s a fair deal.
I was glad when Apple Sports debuted two years ago and it’s lived on my first or second home screen ever since, depending on which sports are in season. I’m really glad Apple has stuck with it, shipping steady improvements on a regular basis. Expanding now to nearly the entire world is a big step. If you’re new to it, it might take some getting used to, but give it a shot. It stuck with me.
Still kind of curious that Apple Sports remains iPhone-only — not even an iPad version — but in a way I find that charming too. Maybe Apple is tight on money?
When someone speaks of a place, you have to ask, “When?”
Geography is four-dimensional. You can’t know a place — only a
place as it was at a time. Where is bound to when. Unless you are
in a place right now, you can only speak of it in past-tense.
Apple today filed a request with the Supreme Court in an attempt
to reverse key lower court rulings over the App Store injunction
in its long-running legal battle with Epic Games. [...] In its
petition, Apple is asking the Supreme Court to review two
questions.
The first is whether Apple should have been held in contempt for
charging a commission on purchases made outside the App Store. The
second is about the scope of the injunction.
On the first point, Apple argues that the original injunction did
not specifically address commissions. Instead, it says the order
only prevented Apple from blocking developers from including
buttons, external links, or other calls to action directing users
to external purchasing options.
According to Apple, that is not the same as saying the company
could not charge a commission on those purchases. The Ninth
Circuit acknowledged that the text of the injunction did not
address commissions, but still upheld the contempt finding by
relying on the idea that a party can violate the “spirit” of an
injunction, even when the injunction does not specifically
prohibit the conduct at issue.
Apple’s argument here is that only the letter of the law matters, and the letter of the injunction did not say anything about charging commissions on external payments, and thus they can’t be held in contempt for violating something that was never spelled out explicitly.
As for the second point, regarding scope, Apple argues that the
injunction extends far beyond Epic itself, as it applies to all
registered developers worldwide with apps on the U.S. App Store
storefront. That includes developers that were never part of the
Epic case, and, as Apple has pointed out before, even companies
that compete with Epic.
Apple argues that this directly conflicts with the Supreme Court’s
2025 decision in Trump v. CASA, which limited the ability of
federal courts to issue broad injunctions that go beyond the
parties actually involved in a case.
Apple’s argument here is that even if the Supreme Court upholds the contempt finding, the exemption from commissions should only apply to Epic, not to all developers in the U.S. App Store. I am definitely not a constitutional law scholar, but I think this would have been a long-shot argument pre-CASA. But post-CASA I think Apple might have something here, with this Court.
The third type of weapons are invasion ships – this is the classic science fiction trope, however actual invasion ships have one fundamental weakness – they need to slow down at the destination galaxy. This has two effects. Firstly, energetically getting invasion ships to the opponents galaxy is substantially less efficient than sending RKVs there. This is because of the tyranny of the rocket equation. While the invasion ships can be accelerated to relativistic velocities at origin galaxy, to slow down, it cannot be assumed there is an equivalent infrastructure at the destination. Instead, the invasion ships must carry their own braking fuel with them, which must then also be accelerated and so on.
The second fundamental problem is lack of stealth. When accelerating your exhaust points away from your target, when decellerating your exhaust points towards it. Essentially your are deliberately dissipating all your kinetic energy as a gigantic beacon screaming ‘I am here come kill me’. The decelleration burns of large-scale invasion fleet would both likely last thousands of years and also be immensely noticeable to any reasonable civilization in the target galaxy let alone a paranoid K3. Even if you don’t try to decellerate by rockets but instead by e.g. drag on magnetic sails, this drag causes friction which then radiates uniformly in all directions, again serving as a beacon.
Vegetation damaged by an EF-3 tornado in southern Mississippi appears in a tan line in an image acquired on May 12, 2026, with the OLI (Operational Land Imager) on Landsat 8.
NASA Earth Observatory/Lauren Dauphin
A powerful supercell storm produced multiple tornadoes across southern Mississippi on May 6, 2026. The longest and most powerful spanned five counties, delivering wind speeds up to 137 miles (220 kilometers) per hour and EF-3 damage, as gauged by the Enhanced Fujita Scale, to several areas.
Part of this tornado’s destructive path was visible to the Landsat 8 satellite when it passed over the area on May 12. Winds snapped, uprooted, and tore bark and branches off trees, creating a brownish track across the landscape. This area, south of Brookhaven in Lincoln County, was one that sustained EF-3 damage. National Weather Service (NWS) post-event damage assessments noted extensive tree damage, a home whose exterior walls collapsed, and a mobile home park “devastated with debris.”
The tornado covered much more ground than is captured in this scene. It began in St. Catherine Creek National Wildlife Refuge near the Mississippi River, approximately 60 miles (100 kilometers) west-southwest of Brookhaven. In just over two hours, it traveled nearly 82 miles (132 kilometers), placing it among some of the longest tornadoes recorded in Mississippi. Heavy tree damage occurred along its entire path, NWS surveys found, with several instances of EF-2 structural damage and bent or collapsed transmission towers.
Seven tornadoes occurred in Mississippi on the evening of May 6, according to NWS preliminary data as of May 20. The Mississippi Emergency Management Agency received reports of damage to more than 400 homes and dozens of businesses and farm buildings statewide after the storms, according to a news release, the majority of which were in Lincoln County.
The Gulf Coast and other southeastern states are not considered part of what’s commonly known as Tornado Alley, an area encompassing much of the U.S. central and southern plains where supercells tend to form. However, this belt of southeastern states is also tornado-prone, experiencing a relatively high frequency of tornadoes in spring and late autumn. Historically in Mississippi, the most monthly tornadoes—an average of more than seven—occur in April, while May averages just over three. Some recent analyses have found decreases in tornado frequency in the Great Plains and increases in the Southeast over several decades.
NASA Earth Observatory images by Lauren Dauphin, using Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey. Story by Lindsey Doermann.
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On Tuesday, Rep. Andy Barr — whose last appearance here involved an ad he ran bravely declaring “It’s not a sin to be white. It’s not against the law to be male. And it shouldn’t be disqualifying to be a Christian” — rose above the fact that he is one of Congress’ most notorious nincompoops to win the Republican nomination to replace retiring Sen. Mitch McConnell. Because it’s Kentucky, which Donald Trump won by 30 points in 2024, Barr will probably win the general election too.
Prompted by that result, I mentioned a story involving Barr and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Bluesky, and since the post went somewhat viral, I thought it might be worth elaborating on, since the subject of their argument — coal and workers who used to mine it — is particularly relevant given both the Iran war and the fact that Donald Trump is simultaneously spiraling politically and showing his continued hold on his party’s base. It’s a story about energy, but more importantly it’s a story about how politicians can lie to their supporters — blatantly, obviously, repeatedly — and be rewarded for it.
The story of Andy Barr and AOC
Our tale begins in 2019, when in a meeting of the House Financial Services Committee, Barr stood up for the coal miners in his district against Ocasio-Cortez and her Green New Deal, a proposal to transition away from fossil fuels and invest in renewables. AOC should come to his district, Barr said, and “I invite her to go underground with me and meet the men and women who do heroic work to power the American economy, and I would invite the gentlelady to come to eastern Kentucky and meet the coal miners who will tell you what the Green New Deal would mean for their families, their paychecks.”
Ocasio-Cortez immediately replied, “I’d be happy to go to Kentucky, and I’d also like to note that in the Green New Deal, one of the things that I advocate for is fully funding the pensions of coal miners in West Virginia and throughout Appalachia because we want a just transition to make sure that we’re investing in jobs across those swaths of the country.” This seemed to take Barr by surprise, because shortly afterward, he said he was retracting the invitation unless AOC apologized to another congressman, Dan Crenshaw, for her “lack of civility” in a tweet she sent criticizing Crenshaw for his criticism of Rep. Ilhan Omar (and by the way, AOC’s tweet was perfectly civil).
The whole Uh…I meant you can’t come until you apologize to my buddy for this totally unrelated thing! was obviously just a lame excuse, since Barr clearly didn’t think she’d take him up on his insincere offer. But the story doesn’t end there, because it turned out there were no active coal mines in Barr’s district. Picture them driving around the district together for hours, as an increasingly sweaty Barr says “Boy are those coal miners going to give you a piece of their mind when we find them! They’ve gotta be around here somewhere…”
You might think a fervent coal advocate like Andy Barr would know whether there were any active mines in his district. But as I said, he’s a nincompoop.
Fast forward to today, and there’s a whole section on Barr’s Senate campaign website about how he and Donald Trump are going to bring back all the lost coal jobs, a promise Trump has been making since 2016.
Has Trump kept that promise? You’ll never guess the answer.
The coal jobs are never coming back
Let’s be clear about one thing: In both of his terms, Trump absolutely tried to revive coal. He has waged an all-out war on renewable energy, and has gone so far as ordering utilities to keep coal plants open that they were planning to close, literally forcing states to keep burning coal against their will.
This is being done in the name of both nonsensical “energy dominance” and saving those precious, precious coal jobs. But the reason Trump hasn’t been able to bring back the coal jobs is that for all people talk in coal country about Barack Obama and Joe Biden waging a “war on coal,” federal regulation isn’t why those jobs disappeared.
Coal employment declined for two main reasons. The first is automation; modern coal mines just don’t require that many workers. The second is competition from natural gas and renewables, which are now as cheap or cheaper than coal. The bargain on coal used to be that yes, it’s terribly polluting and dangerous for workers, but it’s worth it because it’s so much cheaper than the alternatives. That’s no longer true.
Because there are so few coal jobs left, and coal has become such an automated industry, Trump’s efforts to get America to burn more coal have had no effect on jobs. Here’s the big picture:
When Trump took office in 2017 there were 51,000 coal jobs in the entire country. When he left office four years later, there were 38,000 coal jobs. Then the number plateaued for a bit, and when he took office again in January 2025 there were 40,500 coal jobs; in April there were 38,700.
More Americans work at the Cheesecake Factory (48,000 at last count) than in the entire coal industry. But no politicians are shouting that it is vital to the future of America that we preserve our noble Cheesecake Factory jobs.
And what about in Andy Barr’s Kentucky, the heart of coal country? As in the nation as a whole, coal jobs there are in a long and steady decline. They may stay the same or even bump up for a year or two, but in general the number of coal miners just keeps going down. The state gathers quite a bit of data on the coal industry, so I’ve used what they have to make this chart:
Almost nine out of every ten coal jobs they had 35 years ago are gone. In the latest figures available (for the third quarter of 2025), there were just 3,843 Kentuckians working in coal, in a state of 4.6 million people. The mines that are left still make money for their owners, but that money isn’t flowing into people’s paychecks.
Which is, of course, an old story. People in coal country have been exploited for a long time, their labor extracted and their landscapes despoiled while all the wealth went to greedy capitalists who viewed them as something to be squeezed and then discarded. What they’re left with is communities that were built around coal and where coal is central to the place’s identity, but where no one, or almost no one, actually mines coal anymore.
That produces justifiable anger and despair, which can then be exploited by cynical politicians like Donald Trump and Andy Barr, who promise the return of jobs that are simply never coming back. Rather than helping people build a future, they offer people an obvious lie that the past can be restored.
But as repugnant as the behavior of pretty much every Republican is on this issue, you can’t excuse the voters themselves, who watch that promise get broken again and again, and keep handing their votes to the politicians they know are lying to them. It’s just stunning that in 2026, a Senate candidate like Andy Barr can say he’s going to “revive Kentucky coal jobs” and quote Donald Trump saying he’ll “put the miners back to work” without voters responding “How dare you lie to us again about this?”
And in the meantime, Trump has waged a genuine war on the coal miners that are left, undermining their health and safety in every way he can (Kim Kelly of In These Times has reported on this in detail).
So if we aren’t keeping coal alive for the jobs, then what are we doing? For Trump, the answer is, as always, entirely personal. He loves the idea that coal is manly and fiery and dirty, unlike that feminine renewable energy all those hippies like. And the mining areas of the country have repeatedly shown that when he lies to them, they’ll put on that MAGA hat and say “Maybe this time it’ll really happen.” The only difference between them and the suckers who bought into Trump University is that eventually, the latter group realized Trump had drained their bank accounts and given them nothing in return, and they stopped coming back for more. But Trump has conned the voters of coal country three times now with a promise he breaks every time, and if he could run in 2028, they’d line up to get fleeced again.
And they’re probably going to send Andy Barr to the Senate, where true to form he’ll make sure his constituents stay angry and poor, feeding them phantoms of the past while doing nothing to help them build a better future. Why would he do anything different, when this scam works so well?
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Up, but cannot get up so early as I was wont, nor my mind to business as it should be and used to be before this dancing. However, to my office, where most of the morning talking of Captain Cox of Chatham about his and the whole yard’s difference against Mr. Barrow the storekeeper, wherein I told him my mind clearly, that he would be upheld against the design of any to ruin him, he being we all believed, but Sir W. Batten his mortal enemy, as good a servant as any the King has in the yard.
After much good advice and other talk I home and danced with Pembleton, and then the barber trimmed me, and so to dinner, my wife and I having high words about her dancing to that degree that I did enter and make a vow to myself not to oppose her or say anything to dispraise or correct her therein as long as her month lasts, in pain of 2s. 6d. for every time, which, if God pleases, I will observe, for this roguish business has brought us more disquiett than anything [that] has happened a great while.
After dinner to my office, where late, and then home; and Pembleton being there again, we fell to dance a country dance or two, and so to supper and bed. But being at supper my wife did say something that caused me to oppose her in, she used the word devil, which vexed me, and among other things I said I would not have her to use that word, upon which she took me up most scornfully, which, before Ashwell and the rest of the world, I know not now-a-days how to check, as I would heretofore, for less than that would have made me strike her. So that I fear without great discretion I shall go near to lose too my command over her, and nothing do it more than giving her this occasion of dancing and other pleasures, whereby her mind is taken up from her business and finds other sweets besides pleasing of me, and so makes her that she begins not at all to take pleasure in me or study to please me as heretofore. But if this month of her dancing were but out (as my first was this night, and I paid off Pembleton for myself) I shall hope with a little pains to bring her to her old wont. This day Susan that lived with me lately being out of service, and I doubt a simple wench, my wife do take her for a little time to try her at least till she goes into the country, which I am yet doubtful whether it will be best for me to send her or no, for fear of her running off in her liberty before I have brought her to her right temper again.
This stuck in my craw at the time Patrick published it but I didn’t have the energy to respond. Now, with the ever-increasing, genie-fueled emphasis on speed, it deserves a second look. Among its several flaws as a statement is that it misses one point that XP got right, a point that’s become leveraged.
I’ll start gently, addressing the OP directly.
Responsibility
I don’t like the tone. Who exactly hired The Slow (may as well be honest & capitalize)? Who created the incentive system in which they operate?
Take responsibility for your part in the situation you describe. You’re not above it all. If you’re going to be judgmental, judge everyone. Or follow the not-a-Walt Whitman quote and, “Be curious, not judgmental.”
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There’s reasons slow & expensive go together. I have connections to the design world. If you fly a team of nth generation carpenters in from Paris to build your cabinets on-site, it’s going to be expensive & it’s going to take time.
“Slow+expensive” has become decoupled from “valuable” in the situation you describe. Part of the investment was much more valuable than other parts. If you can just make the valuable investment & defer the rest, yes, you win.
Compressibility
“Lopping a year off the schedule” works until it doesn’t. Here’s your intention:
There’s a second order effect, though. Eventually you cut corners that bite back. When that happens, you lose control of time & cost.
Now The Slow have incentive to lie to you about progress. They’re caught in a Catch-22, no-win situation. The optimal strategy for The Slow is to hunker down, spend most of their time keeping their noses above water, & hope your attention passes on before they get fired.
But wait, there’s more! Nobody likes being in a no-win situation, so The Slow will inflate estimates, estimates they know you will slash. Now nobody knows anything about the project.
Scope
The missing concept is scope. You want a system that meets the following goals? Okay, how much of which goals first?
All of all the goals? Now you’ve created the perfect breeding ground for The Slow. And you did it. They aren’t “The Slow”. They are responding to your incentives.
Okay, how about this much of this goal & that much of that goal & more later. Now you get sooner, cheaper, & better. Nobody is compressing the incompressible. The system remains transparent & in control.
And because we navigate an uncertain & rapidly changing landscape, cutting scope generates more feedback sooner, leading to less waste & higher concentration of value.
Wrap Up
You’re right that sooner & cheaper are connected. You’re right that projects often start over-scoped, that much investment isn’t concentrated on value.
I disagree with your characterization of your intervention as “adding a temporal constraint”. The many times I’ve seen this done well what happens is that folks are forced to make priority decisions they wouldn’t otherwise make. (Lots to say about why this deferral happens.) Tearing out calendar pages is the trigger making those scope decisions inescapable.
A major shift in the housing market in the last several years is the rapidly increasing popularity of “build-to-rent” homes — single-family homes that are built specifically for the purpose of being rented out. According to the National Association of Homebuilders, build-to-rent homes have risen from less than 2% of new housing starts in the 1990s to more than 7% of housing starts today. In 2025, at least 68,000 new single-family housing starts were built to rent (and due to data limitations, the true number may be much higher, 100,000 homes or more).1
The build-to-rent, or BTR, industry has been in the spotlight recently because of a major federal housing bill, the Senate’s 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act. This bill, which is ostensibly designed to stimulate the building of new homes, includes a provision aimed at preventing large institutional investors from owning single-family homes. This provision, section 901, requires institutional investors (companies that own more than 350 single-family homes) to sell any build-to-rent homes to individual homeowners after seven years. Because BTR involves building a home and then retaining ownership of it to rent out, this provision threatens the fundamental business model of the BTR industry. Since the announcement of this provision, funding for new BTR projects has virtually ground to a halt while investors wait to see whether the bill actually passes. Over 100 pro-housing groups, including Berkeley’s Terner Center, the NAHB, and my colleagues at IFP have come out against this provision specifically, on the grounds that it’s likely to significantly reduce housing supply in the short term.
Because BTR has quickly become such a large fraction of new home construction and is now in the policy spotlight, it’s worth understanding the origins of the industry and why it has become so popular.
Origins of BTR
The modern BTR industry, where developers build entire communities consisting of dozens or hundreds of single-family homes for rent, is a product of the 2008 Global Financial Crisis. Prior to the financial crisis, single-family home rental wasn’t uncommon — in 2005, there were over 8 million detached single-family homes being rented — but the business was mostly the purview of small “mom and pop” operators that owned a relatively small number of scattered rental properties. As late as 2011, no single company owned more than 1,000 rental homes in the US.
But the financial crisis shifted the housing landscape. Huge numbers of people lost their homes to foreclosure: foreclosure rates in 2009 and 2010 were four times rates from 2005, and between 2007 and 2010, there were four million foreclosures. The homeownership rate in the US fell from a high of 69% in 2005 to 63% in 2016. At the same time, to rein in the subprime lending that had precipitated the crisis, banks tightened their lending standards, and average mortgage credit scores rose by more than 50 points. In 2003 buyers with a credit score of less than 620 made up 7% of all mortgages. By 2011 that had fallen to essentially zero.
The raft of foreclosures and the tightening of lending standards had two simultaneous effects on the housing market.
First, they pushed millions of Americans into renting. Between 2010 and 2015 the number of renter households in the US rose by roughly six million, while the number of homeowner households declined by roughly 800,000.
Second, this shift created a huge pool of homes available for purchase at very low prices. Between 2006 and 2010 the value of US homes dropped by 26%, greater than the average decline during the Great Depression. In some markets the declines were even worse: home prices declined by 60% in Las Vegas, and by roughly 50% in Phoenix, Miami, and Tampa.
In response to these market conditions — millions of homes available to buy cheaply, and millions of Americans who couldn’t afford to buy them — various real estate ventures were formed to take advantage of the situation. In 2010, the Arizona-based housing investment company Treehouse Group began to buy distressed mortgages in Phoenix and turn them into rental housing. Within a year the company had purchased 11,000 homes. In 2012 Treehouse was acquired by the investment group Blackstone, which turned Treehouse into the single-family rental company Invitation Homes. Today, Invitation Homes is one of the largest home rental companies in the US, with more than 86,000 rental homes across 12 states.
In 2012, the same year Treehouse was acquired, Wayne Hughes, founder of self-storage company Public Storage, founded American Homes 4 Rent, which similarly began to buy distressed mortgages and turn them into rental properties. Today, American Homes 4 Rent owns 61,000 rental homes across 24 states. 2012 was also when Tricon, a Canadian real estate company formed in 1988, began to buy up distressed mortgages for rental; by 2023, the company owned more than 38,000 of them. While prior to 2011 no single company owned more than 1,000 rental homes, by 2022 the four largest home rental companies owned more than 200,000 of them, largely concentrated in the Sun Belt and Western US.
This large-scale acquisition and transformation of single-family homes into rental properties was encouraged by the federal government, as part of broader efforts to keep the housing market from collapsing completely. In 2012 the Federal Housing Finance Agency launched the REO-to-Rental Initiative pilot program, which “allowed pre-qualified investors to bid on large portfolios of foreclosed properties owned by Fannie Mae.” Roughly 1,800 homes were sold to investors under this program. And in 2017, Fannie Mae backed a billion-dollar loan to Invitation Homes for the purposes of purchasing rental properties.
While most of the new entrants into the home-rental market focused on buying distressed properties, renovating them, and then renting them out, a few companies pursued a strategy of building rental homes directly. NexMetro, founded in Phoenix in 2012, completed its first community of single-family homes built specifically for rent in 2015, and today has built more than 10,000 rental homes across 50+ projects under its “Avilla Homes” brand. BB Living, another Phoenix-based company, also began building rental home communities in 2012, and today operates 18 of them. AHV Communities began construction on its first BTR project in Texas in 2014, and over the next 12 years would build three dozen more.
Building new rental homes had several advantages compared to acquiring existing homes. Being new construction, they typically had much lower maintenance costs than existing homes, and they could be designed by the developer with an eye towards minimizing maintenance and overheads. And because they were clustered together, they were somewhat easier to manage than purchased rental houses that might be spread across a wider area.
As the housing market recovered and the pool of single-family homes available for purchase at favorable prices dwindled, many of the large home rental companies began to experiment with their own BTR strategies. American Homes 4 Rent began work on its first ground-up rental community in 2016; today it owns more than 14,000 BTR homes, with essentially all new home acquisition coming through BTR. Invitation Homes began purchasing BTR homes in 2021 in a partnership with homebuilder Pulte, and as with American Homes 4 Rent essentially all its home acquisition now comes from BTR. Pretium Partners, which owns over 80,000 single-family homes under its “Progress Residential” umbrella, formed a $1 billion BTR venture in 2021. Some companies, such as American Homes 4 Rent, opted to do all their BTR development work in-house, while others preferred to partner with existing homebuilders, buying new houses that developers constructed in bulk.
BTR has attracted the attention of several large homebuilders. Lennar, the second largest homebuilder in the US, began building BTR communities in 2020 under its Quarterra subsidiary (though it has since sold a majority stake in this operation). DR Horton, the largest homebuilder in the US, began building BTR communities in 2019, and last year sold nearly 3,500 BTR homes. Taylor Morrison, the eighth largest homebuilder in the US, launched a BTR brand, “Yardly,” in 2022. BTR can be attractive for homebuilders because it provides them a large stream of steady work and can give them a sort of “escape hatch” if units seem to be selling to homeowners less well than anticipated. (Though apparently some homebuilders refuse to work with BTR companies because they don’t want to be associated with rental housing).
Today, BTR is still a small segment of the overall housing market: CBRE estimates that there are about 350,000 BTR units in the US, which is just 1.5% of the overall single-family home rental market. But it’s a rapidly growing segment of the US housing market — or was, until this recent Senate bill.
What sort of homes are BTR?
“Build-to-Rent” has become synonymous with single-family homes built specifically to be rented out, typically in communities of a few dozen to a few hundred rental homes, but within that category companies offer a broad range of different products. BTR generally gets broken down into several major subcategories (though some use slightly different ones): single-family detached, single-family attached, and horizontal multifamily. These categories exist on something of a spectrum of “very similar to conventional single-family homes” on one end and “very similar to conventional apartment buildings” on the other.
On the single-family home end of the spectrum, you have BTR communities such as Tricon’s Palomino Ranch, built in Houston in 2019. These BTR homes are essentially indistinguishable from single-family homes built for purchase: they’re detached homes with their own garages, driveways, and large fenced backyards. These sorts of homes will be “individually platted”: placed on their own individual plot of land with their own unique address.
On the apartment end of the spectrum, you have what’s known as “horizontal multifamily.” These are BTR developments that are essentially spread out apartment buildings. They are built in a range of sizes typically associated with apartment buildings rather than houses, with 1-, 2-, and 3-bedroom options, and they’re platted together on one large lot. They might have apartment-complex style amenities (gym, clubhouse, etc.), and will typically lack attached garages. They’re attractive to tenants because they don’t have shared walls and they have individual backyards, and they tend to rent for 15–20% more per square foot than a comparable apartment, but in many ways they’re closer to apartment complexes than they are to single-family homes. NexMetro’s “Avilla Homes Deer Valley” community in Phoenix is an example of this sort of BTR development.
Between these ends of the spectrum you have the “single-family attached” category — single-family homes that share one or more walls, such as townhomes or duplexes. BB Living’s Val Vista community of townhouses in Gilbert, Arizona is an example of this sort of project.
Regardless of the layout, a BTR community is at its core a large rental development and is designed by the builder to maximize rents and minimize overhead costs. For conventional homes built for sale, for instance, a builder might simply specify whatever finishes and features a buyer wants. But for a property that the developer is going to hold as a rental, choices are made with an eye towards minimizing maintenance costs by using cheaper, more durable finishes. American Homes 4 Rent, for instance, has stated that due to its designs being optimized for low-maintenance, maintenance costs are just 25% of what they were in their purchased homes.
Home rental companies also have other strategies for trying to minimize their overhead costs. Property taxes, for instance, are often the largest single operational expense for rental home companies. American Homes 4 Rent notes that it’s able to minimize its property tax costs by systematically filing property tax appeals to try and reduce the appraised value of its homes; a 2022 report noted that the company had a dedicated property tax team that filed more than 25,000 appeals annually.
Construction of BTR homes is in large part concentrated in Sun Belt states that have large populations, relatively high growth rates, and space to build new housing developments: Texas, Florida, and Arizona are the top three states for BTR construction, with Georgia and North Carolina rounding out the top five. An estimated 60% of BTR construction takes place in these five states. Within these states, BTR tends to be concentrated in large metro areas: most of Arizona’s BTR takes place in Phoenix, most of Georgia’s BTR is being constructed in Atlanta, and most of Texas’s BTR is being built in Dallas and Houston.
What’s driving BTR demand?
The largest factor driving demand for rental housing, both build-to-rent and buy-to-rent, seems to be housing affordability. Since 2012 home prices in the US have risen faster than inflation and median income. The post-Covid period in particular saw a dramatic increase in home prices, along with a large rise in interest rates that substantially raised the cost of mortgage payments and often made renting more financially appealing than buying. At the same time, Covid drove large increases in the frequency of working from home, which in turn created a demand for larger amounts of living space.
Americans who want more space or more privacy than apartments offer, but can’t afford to purchase a new home, will naturally turn to renting them. Amherst Group, which collectively owns over 50,000 single-family rentals (though not, as far as I can tell, BTR homes), noted in 2021 that 85% of its residents would not qualify for a mortgage due to low credit scores and incomes. NexMetro’s 2024 investor notes the largest factors driving demand for rental housing are rising interest rates and overall home affordability. American Homes 4 Rent’s 2025 annual report states that it has benefitted from “the surge in demand for larger living spaces, and increases in mortgage rates which have made home ownership more expensive.” One BTR developer I spoke to said that many residents simply don’t have the down payment that would be needed to afford a home purchase, and that BTR can give residents a way to access highly desirable school districts that would otherwise be totally unaffordable.
But while affordability issues seem to be the primary driver of BTR’s popularity, there also seems to be some fraction of residents that simply prefer renting over owning, due to a desire for less maintenance or simply because they don’t perceive owning a home as a major life goal. CBRE, NAHB, and NexMetro all mention various demographics of “renters by choice” (such as retirees), an analysis echoed by several BTR developers I talked to. As construction of BTR communities continues, this growth might create a sort of reinforcing cycle: more people move into rental housing, which makes it more accepted, which draws even more people in, and so on.
What’s BTR’s effect on the housing market and home prices?
The effect of large institutional investors (large companies that own thousands of homes) on the housing market has become a major point of controversy. Many, many people have the intuition that companies buying up or otherwise owning large numbers of single-family homes drives up the price of housing, and banning or curtailing this activity has become a popular cause on both the right and the left.
The intuition isn’t crazy. In a normal market, where producers aren’t limited in how much of a product they can make, this sort of purchasing wouldn’t drive up prices because it wouldn’t affect supply in a meaningful way. No one worries about Hertz driving up the cost of cars by buying huge numbers of them to rent out. But housing isn’t a normal market, and in many parts of the US it’s unreasonably difficult to create new housing supply. Ire at large, institutional homeowners would perhaps be more profitably directed at the various supply constraints that make it hard to build new housing in the first place (Invitation Homes notes that it benefits from operating in markets with “high barriers to entry”), but in a world where those supply constraints aren’t going to be removed any time soon, it’s worth considering what effect large rental companies are having on the market.
Supporters of rental housing are quick to point out that institutional owners make up a very small fraction of the housing market, less than 1% of single-family homes. However, because institutional ownership is highly concentrated in a few Sun Belt cities, in some housing markets institutional ownership can make up a substantial fraction (up to 25%) of the rental housing market.
There’s some evidence that institutional ownership might drive up home prices. Mills et al. (2015) noted that large scale buy-to-rent investors entering a market tended to “support” (i.e., prevent from falling) house prices in the short term. Lambie-Hanson et al. (2019) estimated that “the increasing presence of institutions in the housing market explains over half of the increase in real house price appreciation rates between 2006 and 2014.” D’Lima and Schultz (2020), Oosthuizen (2023), Coven (2025), Wang and Zhai (2026), Barbieri and Dobbels (2026) and Gorback et al. (2024) all found broadly similar results. However, Hanson (2024) finds that while house prices rise when institutional investors enter a market, this rise can mostly be attributed to improving market conditions, and that prices would have increased whether institutional investors entered the market or not.
The evidence for the effects of institutional ownership on rents, however, is somewhat different. Large owners might use their market power to raise prices (large rental companies will basically admit they raise rents compared to what mom and pop renters would charge), but by buying properties and turning them into rentals investors are also adding supply to the rental housing market, which all else being equal should bring rents down. Lee and Wylie (2024) find that investors raise rents at above average rates when first entering a market. Gurun et al. (2023) found that “institutional landlords leverage their market power to extract greater surplus from renters.” And Hanson (2024) finds that rent growth is due to the market power of the institutional investors. On the other hand, Coven’s (2025) model based on various census and investor property data suggests that added supply from institutional investors can reduce the rent paid by renters, and Wang and Zhai (2026) find that “the majority of renters gain from the expanded rental supply.” Barbieri and Dobbels (2026) find that while the market power of institutional owners raises rents, the increase in supply more than makes up for it, causing rents to fall on net. Economics student Nicholas Decker looks at what he thinks are the strongest papers, and concludes that the net effect of institutional investors entering a market is positive for consumers overall, with the benefits of lowered rents outweighing the increase in house prices.
However, these studies are all for buy-to-rent homeowners: investors buying up homes that already exist. None of them looked at build-to-rent, which we might expect to have substantially different effects: buy-to-rent reallocates existing supply, whereas build-to-rent creates new supply (though it could theoretically also reduce the supply of homes for sale if, in the absence of BTR, for-sale housing projects would be built in the same location).
Unfortunately, the economic research around the effect of BTR specifically is much thinner, and there haven’t been robust studies of the effect of BTR on the housing market specifically.
Conclusion
Overall, I think there are a few points worth making about BTR.
One is that, given that the attractiveness of owning vs. renting can vary depending on the person and the state of the housing market, making a broader array of rental options available for people is a positive thing. I remember years ago when I was trying to find a large (3+ bedroom) place to rent, and how difficult it was to find rentals that size in the area I was looking in. Giving people more ways to purchase housing is good, the same way it’s good for people to have the option to buy or lease a new car.
Second, it’s clear that many folks strongly believe that large-scale corporate ownership of rental housing (which would include BTR communities) is something that can have negative effects on the housing market. But I think it’s more useful to think of the popularity of rental housing as something that’s a product of the housing market: it’s a natural consequence of housing getting increasingly unaffordable thanks to high interest rates and skyrocketing housing prices. Shutting down BTR is a poor way to address that problem; what we need to do is build more housing and develop construction methods that let us construct buildings more cheaply.
The NAHB notes that the 68,000 doesn’t include homes that are built and then sold to another company for rental purposes, which could be an additional 3 to 5% of total housing starts.
Stephen Colbert’s final episode as host of “The Late Show” on May 21, 2026, won’t mark the end of his career.
But as a scholar of political satire, I think it offers a chance to reflect on the lasting impact of his comedy, which has spanned his work as a correspondent on “The Daily Show,” his conservative pundit persona on “The Colbert Report” and his reinvention on “The Late Show.”
The best satirists do more than entertain. They influence public discourse and leave lasting marks on political life. This group includes towering writers such as Benjamin Franklin and Mark Twain, alongside performers like Lenny Bruce and George Carlin.
In my view, Stephen Colbert has earned a spot in the top tier. Here are five reasons why.
1. He didn’t just satirize the news – he informed the public
Most satirists offer wry commentary about political events.
Colbert often did something more ambitious: He helped audiences understand them.
Critics have long dismissed political comedy as superficial entertainment, but Colbert’s satire frequently offered valuable information to the public.
It’s hard to fully track the impact of this approach. But a 2007 Pew Research Center study did find that audiences for satirical news programs such as “The Daily Show” and “The Colbert Report” scored high on political knowledge measures, outperforming audiences who only consumed political news from traditional outlets.
That urge to use satire as a vehicle for civic education continued after Colbert became host of “The Late Show” in 2015.
With debates raging over the border wall proposed by the first Trump administration, Colbert brought experts on to the program to break down the engineering, financial and logistical realities of building one that spanned the entirety of the U.S.-Mexico border. Yes, the absurdity of the physics and finances elicited laughs. But Colbert also helped viewers understand why Trump’s promises were implausible.
2. He gave Americans a new political vocabulary
When the world is absurd, the satirist uses ironic wit to make sense of it.
Colbert excelled at distilling the spin and duplicity of politics into memorable soundbites.
On the first episode of “The Colbert Report” in 2005, he introduced the word “truthiness” to describe the tendency to prefer what “feels true” over what the evidence supports. It incisively gave a name to a deceptive political tactic, one that the Bush administration had repeatedly used, from “Mission Accomplished,” to “weapons of mass destruction” and “enhanced interrogation techniques.”
“Truthiness” took on a life of its own. Merriam-Webster named it Word of the Year in 2006.
Colbert continued this rhetorical work on “The Late Show.” For example, in February 2017, after Donald Trump escalated his attacks on the press by labeling major news outlets “the enemy of the American people,” the comedian shifted from parody to diagnosis. He foregrounded the phrase’s authoritarian history, insisting that the rhetoric signaled a meaningful escalation in attacks on First Amendment rights, rather than a passing controversy.
In other words: There was nothing to laugh about here.
3. He blurred the line between satire and direct action
Media scholars have increasingly noted how political comedians now function as hybrid figures who blur journalism, entertainment and civic engagement. According to communications scholar Joseph Faina, Colbert may be one of the clearest examples of that shift.
Colbert’s satirical presidential campaign in South Carolina in 2007 mocked the theater of American electoral politics. He actually attempted to enter the race through official channels, only to be blocked by the South Carolina Democratic Party. But even in his failure to appear on the ballot, he was able to show how party control and media spectacle, not just voter choice, structure the field of viable candidates.
In 2010, he held a rally with Jon Stewart on the National Mall before a crowd of over 200,000 people. Assuming his conservative pundit persona, Colbert blended irony and sincerity, mocking the self-seriousness, sensationalism and outrage-driven news cycles of cable news through his competing calls for “sanity” and “fear.” But the event was also designed to motivate voter turnout in the midterm elections.
That interventionist impulse continued on “The Late Show.” During the 2020 election cycle, for example, Colbert encouraged voting through segments like “Better Know a Ballot.” A riff on his previous “Better Know a District” from “The Colbert Report,” the “Better Know a Ballot” series was designed to educate viewers about ballot access, voting procedures and the practical elements of democratic participation.
4. He measurably influenced political behavior
Claims about comedians changing politics can easily become exaggerated. But Colbert’s influence has empirical support.
Research by political communication scholars Jody Baumgartner and Jonathan Morris found that exposure to political satire can increase viewers’ sense of what’s known as “political efficacy” – the belief that they can understand and engage with politics. Other studies suggest satirical news audiences are often more politically active than they’re assumed to be.
Colbert is repeatedly cited in these studies as one of the prime examples of a satirist who makes an impact.
Take, for instance, the so-called “Colbert bump,” where candidates who appear on his programs experience boosts in fundraising, visibility and media coverage. Political scientist James H. Fowler found that Democratic candidates who appeared on “The Colbert Report” experienced a 44% increase in campaign donations within 30 days of their appearance.
A similar effect could be seen on “The Late Show.”
After Colbert interviewed Texas state Rep. James Talarico, a U.S. Senate candidate, in February 2026, CBS canceled the segment, claiming – perhaps disingenuously – that the network could be punished for not adhering to the FCC’s “equal time” rule, which requires broadcast stations to offer comparable airtime to opposing candidates.
A taped version of the interview was nonetheless posted to YouTube, where it racked up over 9 million views, helping fuel Talarico’s US$27 million first-quarter fundraising haul, the largest amount ever raised by a U.S. Senate candidate in the first quarter of an election year.
5. He redefined American patriotism
To rank Colbert among America’s most important satirists requires one additional consideration: his role in redefining not only what America stands for, but what it means to be patriotic.
Many satirists lean toward cynicism, portraying politics as hopelessly corrupt and public life as fundamentally absurd. Not Colbert.
As linguist Geoffrey Nunberg argued in his 2006 book, “Talking Right: How Conservatives Turned Liberalism into a Tax-Raising, Latte-Drinking, Sushi-Eating, Volvo-Driving, New York Times-Reading, Body-Piercing, Hollywood-Loving, Left-Wing Freak Show,” conservatives had claimed a monopoly on patriotism as the 20th century drew to a close. At the same time, many of them promoted what’s known as “blind patriotism,” in which any criticism of the U.S. is cast as evidence of insufficient national loyalty.
Colbert’s satire directly challenged that framework.
To expose that performative patriotism, Colbert’s persona on “The Colbert Report” wrapped itself in exaggerated patriotic imagery: flags, bombast, overconfidence and chest-thumping nationalism.
But the joke was never America itself. The target was a performance of patriotism that treated dissent as disloyalty, emotional certainty as evidence and partisan identity as civic virtue.
As I argue in my 2011 book, “Colbert’s America,” Colbert’s satire consistently distinguished between nationalism and democratic patriotism. The former demands unquestioning loyalty. The latter demands accountability. For example, through segments like “Threat-Down” on “The Colbert Report,” he satirized the way nationalism often depends on exaggerating fictive dangers and denouncing symbolic, external enemies.
In that sense, Colbert belongs in a distinctly American satirical tradition that stretches back to Benjamin Franklin. The great American satirists have used humor not to reject the national project, but to expose the gap between its ideals and its realities. They reshape how citizens understand power and civic responsibility.
For nearly three decades, Stephen Colbert has done exactly 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.
Here’s a story you should pay close attention to. You may have heard of the “Broadview Six” (later reduced to “Four”). It was a case focused on prominent local Democrats protesting at a Chicago-area ICE facility. (One was congressional candidate and influencer Kat Abughazaleh, who lost her primary this spring.) It was a classic over-charging case: A brief chaotic moment around the vehicle of an ICE employee ratcheted up to be a federal felony conspiracy charge. The case has been moving toward trial for like eight months and it was scheduled to go to trial next week.
For the last month, however, questions about the underlying grand jury proceeding have been roiling the case. First that prompted the government to drop the felony conspiracy charge rather than show the judge the grand jury testimony. (It thus went from a felony trial to a federal trial on one misdemeanor charge.) The judge finally saw those transcripts Tuesday night. That led to a closed-door emergency hearing this morning. In rapid succession today, the remaining charges were dropped and Chicago U.S. Attorney Andrew S. Boutros appeared in court personally to apologize to the judge and deny all knowledge of what had happened.
Listen to the abjectness and the under-bussing in Boutros’s comments to the judge: “I was completely unaware of any vouching that took place in the grand jury, and only became aware of it on either April 27 or the 28th … I was unaware of the vouching. I was unaware of the ex parte communications — all except at the moment before we dismissed the indictment, and I made the decision to dismiss that indictment … No one acted with the intent to mislead your honor, and I think that they were following your order to give the law.”
So what happened? We don’t actually know that yet, though we have a lot of hints. The gist though is that there’s something big bad in those grand jury transcripts and seemingly also (perhaps this is the bigger part of it) in how they were handled or mishandled afterwards, what the judge was told or what lies she was told.
We’ve had many ICE over-charging cases. Almost all of these have fallen apart. Occasional acquittals. Usually they don’t make it to trial. We’ve had cases were grand juries refused to bring charges. But I don’t think we’ve had many or maybe any cases where we (or perhaps even the judges) have gotten a clear look at how the government got charges out of grand juries in the first place. So this is likely not a one-off situation in which one grand jury was tainted. It probably exposes a pattern of behavior, at least in Chicago.
This has been implicit in various points I’ve made in recent Editors’ Blog posts. I want to make it more explicit. What’s occupying Donald Trump’s time right now? The big items are the Ballroom, the Deserving Fascists Slush Fund, the revenge tour against merely 95% loyal members of Congress. We could add Trump’s Iran War which is keeping gas prices sky high and creating other shortages. But that’s kind of baked in from a decision Trump made more than two months ago. It’s damaging him but it’s a tar pit he’s already stuck in. The things he’s most focused on, the obsessions are things that are either irrelevant to the midterm elections or are playing central roles driving down his public support. The plane is losing altitude fast but he’s in the cockpit grabbing the controls and trying to steepen the descent.
The latest polls from this week suggest Trump’s public support continues to fall. Quinnipiac 34% approval; Fox 39%; NYT and AP both 37%. Yet there’s still very little connecting the dots. Yes, he’s unpopular. Yes, he’s getting more unpopular. But he is also spending most of his time and most digging in on the things that are making him even more unpopular. This requires an explanation. The best explanation is an illustration of personalist rule. The government is being driven entirely by Donald Trump’s whims and drives. Which is to say it’s being driven by his self-soothing over his plummeting support, his need to act out and find areas where he can dominate (Venezuela, Iran, Cuba, bespoke triumphalist construction projects in the backyard) to compensate for losing power and public support. Whether or not that theory makes sense to you it is objectively true he’s totally focused pushing harder on the things making him unpopular. That has to be at the center of the story to have any grasp on what is happening in the country or about to happen.
The most important thing to know about the DNC “autopsy” report on the 2024 election is, who cares? Most of the commentary on this document gives the impression that this is some meaningful disclosure of the inside dope, what really happened, etc. But it’s not. It just the take of the guys they chose to write a report. No more significant or revealing than the million other takes on the 2024 election we’ve all read.
Todd Blanche is basically just making 30-second ads, whether he knows it or not. When asked whether he’s okay with cash bonanzas for people convicted of attacking police officers was his reply, the acting attorney general replied, “Just to be clear, people who hurt police get money all the time …”
REID: You're the nation's top law enforcement official. Would you be okay with people who were convicted of hurting police getting taxpayer money?BLANCHE: Just to be clear, people who hurt police get money all the timeREID: 🤨
In other news, Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio, convicted and sentenced to 22 years in prison for organizing the capitol insurrection says he’s expecting a payday of between $2 and $5 million.
Semafor and Punchbowl both have items today reporting that the Senate is about to buck President Trump on both his ballroom and his deserving fascists slush fund (DFSF). They want to cut funding for the ballroom and at least greatly restrict the DFSF. You can see the details here. As the authors point out, there’s the standard pattern that the senators willing to speak freely are the ones who’s severed heads are already on pikes: Bill Cassidy (R-LA), Thom Tillis (R-NC), perhaps John Cornyn (R-TX) in the near future. But the silent ones, according to these reports, are going to vote the same way. Or at least enough of them.
Now, one way to look at this is well, they’re never stand up to him! It’ll never happen. But in this case, well … great? No one is doing anything here on principle. They’re trying to protect their vulnerable members from having to run with ads saying how they voted for Trump’s fortress ballroom and his cash bonus plan for guys who bludgeoned cops with flag polls. You may think “nothing matters.” But it does matter, and they know it. So if Trump forces the Senate to vote for these things, that would be bad on the merits, but politically, the joke is on the senators who have to run on that.
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It is important to see a few different developments coming together today up on Capitol Hill. As you likely saw there was a mini-revolt today among Senate Republicans over Trump’s slush fund and to a secondary degree over the ballroom. Because they wouldn’t agree to back the slush fund they just left and went on recess. Not exactly a huge profile in courage. But it’s also at least delayed Trump’s new ICE funding bill. The ballroom, the slush fund, the on-going retribution tour – these are all Trump’s big obsessions right now, as I noted this morning. But in something like a meta-ten car pile-up the different self-soothing efforts are bumping into each other. Trump just knee capped Sen. Cassidy in Louisiana (he lost his primary) and Senator Cornyn (endorsed Ken Paxton). Two careers ended. Two Senators who are really embittered. Trump also blindsided other Republican senators when he endorsed Ken Paxton. They had no advance warning. Totally out of the blue. Party discipline is a thing. But you do it wisely. Trump’s made Cassidy, Tillis and perhaps now even Cornyn into chaos agents going into the midterms.
The point is the retribution tour is colliding with the building spree and the Deserving Fascists Slush Fund. None of them have anything to do with helping the GOP in the midterms. The wheels are coming off.
It’s one of my bywords that all power is unitary. You don’t have it abroad and lack it at home or have it on issue and not on another. You’re always losing power or gaining it. And for a president the gains and losses apply across the spectrum. There’s simply no strategy here. There’s impulse. There’s executive self-soothing. He’s reacting to his declining popularity at home by doing things that are making him less popular. He’s trying to push things through the Senate while antagonizing and assaulting the senators whose votes he needs.
These senators aren’t standing on any kind of principle. They’re looking at the midterms and trying to prevent their incumbents from having to defend payoffs to guys who assaulted cops, hit them with flag polls, took dumps in various congressional offices. They also don’t want to force their incumbents to give a billion dollars to build Trump’s ballroom while the voters are overwhelmingly focused on high gas prices and inflation.
Yoga is more than a set of poses. It is a way to connect breath, body, and people. When practiced with intention, yoga builds calm, power, and belonging. This text maps those threads: mindfulness practice, strength and flexibility training, community wellness, holistic fitness, sustainable wellbeing, the yoga lifestyle, and mental health through yoga.
Mindfulness Practice: Grounding the Moment
Mindfulness practice starts with paying attention — simply and without judgment. Sit. Breathe in. Breathe out. Notice thoughts; let them pass. Do this again. Short practices add up. Five minutes daily can change how you react to stress. Longer sits deepen clarity. You can practice on the mat, or standing in line, or while walking to class. Mindfulness is portable.
In a connected world, people also think about digital safety. Using a virtual private network (VPN) can help protect privacy and give safe access to information across borders. For example, some people choose to use the VeePN network to encrypt their connection when they join live-stream classes or when they want to read articles from other countries. That technical layer of protection can make accessing foreign wellness content feel safer.
Strength and Flexibility Training: Power with Ease
Yoga builds strength and flexibility together. Poses like plank and chair teach muscle control. Twists and lunges open the hips and spine. One day you hold a balance for ten seconds. The next week you hold for thirty. Small progress. Real change.
Strength training in yoga doesn’t always look like lifting heavy weights. It shows up as holding yourself steady, aligning joints, and moving with control. Flexibility training is not about forcing the body. It is about gently increasing range of motion over time. Both are vital. Together they reduce injury risk and improve posture. They also help you feel sturdy when life gets wobbly.
Community Wellness: Practice Together
Yoga is often practiced alone. Yet community makes it stronger. Group classes, online meetups, or park sessions create shared energy. People encourage one another. They swap tips. They celebrate milestones.
Community wellness extends beyond the mat. It includes sharing healthy meals, organizing clean-up events, or supporting local studios. Belonging lowers loneliness and boosts wellbeing. When people practice together, adherence goes up. When adherence goes up, benefits follow. That social support is a quiet, powerful force.
Holistic Fitness: Body, Mind, and Routine
Holistic fitness blends movement, rest, and nutrition. Yoga is a core part of that blend, but it works best with good sleep and simple food choices. It fits into daily life: a short morning flow, a lunchtime breathing break, and a slow stretch before bed.
Variety matters. Mix gentle yoga with more vigorous sessions. Add walking, cycling, or light resistance work. Recovery days are important too. The point is balance: strength, flexibility, cardio, and calm. This rounded approach supports long-term health.
Sustainable Wellbeing: Long-Term Habits
Sustainable wellbeing is about habits that last. Quick fixes fail. Routines that respect your time, energy, and limits stick. Start small. A single sun salutation each morning is better than an intense hour you dread.
Set realistic goals. Track them in simple ways. Celebrate small wins. Consistency — not intensity — is what builds resilience. Over months and years, small daily practices compound into major gains.
Yoga Lifestyle: Simple Choices, Big Impact
The yoga lifestyle is not only the poses. It’s food choices, rest habits, and how you move through the day. It might mean turning off screens an hour before sleep. It could mean choosing a walk instead of scrolling. It can be fasting from constant comparison.
Dress simply. Eat in tune with your needs. Make sleep sacred. These choices conserve energy for growth. They also shape identity: you become the person who shows up for practice. Identity is sticky; it makes habits easier.
Mental Health Through Yoga: Evidence and Experience
Many people use yoga to support mental health. Breath work calms the nervous system. Movement releases tension. Mindful attention breaks cycles of worry. Clinical studies generally show positive effects: reductions in stress, improvements in mood, and better sleep for many participants. Some reviews suggest moderate improvements in anxiety and depression symptoms when yoga is used alongside other treatments. The effects grow with regular practice.
Yoga is not a replacement for professional mental health care when serious issues arise. But it is a valuable tool in a broader toolbox. It can make therapy, medication, and daily life feel more manageable.
Practical Tips: How to Begin and Stay With It
Start small. Two minutes of breath work, then five minutes of movement. Progress slowly.
Be consistent. Practice at the same time each day if you can. Routines stick.
Mix it up. A restorative class, a flow, and a strength-focused session keep motivation high.
Use community. Join a class or an online group. Accountability helps.
Protect your space. If you use public Wi-Fi for classes or resources, consider basic privacy steps like a VPN or secure passwords.
Listen to your body. Pain is a warning sign. Respect it.
Track progress, not perfection. Celebrate that you showed up.
Simple Sequences to Try
Morning wake-up: 3 rounds of cat–cow, 5 sun salutations, 1-minute standing balance. Quick and effective.
Midday reset: seated twist, shoulder rolls, 3 minutes of focused breathing. Clears the head.
Holistic yoga supports more than muscles. It shapes the mind, body, and community. Mindfulness practice brings calm. Strength and flexibility training create resilience. Community wellness fuels continuity. Holistic fitness and sustainable wellbeing keep the practice alive over years. The yoga lifestyle is a set of choices — small, steady, meaningful.
Begin where you are. Keep it simple. Let the practice change you slowly. Over time the quiet work of breath and posture becomes clear: you are stronger, calmer, and more connected than before.
Truck driver employment in Washington is increasing as freight demand climbs along key shipping corridors and port activity remains strong. Rising wages complement this growth, making the Evergreen State a high-opportunity market for drivers.
The research by immigration lawyers at The Mendoza Law Firm analyzed state-level employment and wage data for heavy and tractor-trailer truck drivers published by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, comparing figures from 2023 and 2024. The study measured year-over-year changes in total employment and annual mean wages, applying weighted scores to identify where truck driver opportunities improved the most nationwide.
Top 10 U.S. States Where Truck Driver Opportunities Improved the Most (2023–2024)
U.S. State
Truck Driver Opportunity Score (100)
Rank
Kentucky
94
1
Virginia
80
2
West Virginia
68
3
Oklahoma
66
4
Washington
65.8
5
Arizona
62
6
Iowa
55
7
Nevada
52
8
Utah
50
9
Ohio
49
10
Washington ranks fifth with a truck driver opportunity score of 65.8 out of 100. Employment climbed from 36,260 drivers in 2023 to 40,700 in 2024, a 12.24% increase. Annual mean wages rose from $63,160 to $67,060, representing a 6.17% gain.
Looking at the study, a spokesperson from The Mendoza Law Firm commented:
“Washington’s performance stems from high demand along key shipping corridors and port activities. Rising wages and employment show that the Evergreen State remains a competitive market for truck drivers.
“Drivers in Washington benefit from strong regional economic activity and a steady need for freight transport, emphasizing state-level variation in opportunities.”
What Truck Drivers Should Know Before Choosing Where to Work
Here’s your strategic roadmap:
Track Market Momentum, Not Just Current Openings
Monitor year-over-year employment growth data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics to identify expanding markets
Research which states are seeing logistics infrastructure investment and distribution center expansion
Follow industry publications and freight volume reports to anticipate which regions will need drivers next year
The Compensation Growth Reality Check
Evaluate wage growth percentages, not just absolute salary figures – a $3,000 raise means more in lower cost-of-living states
Compare pay increases against regional inflation rates to calculate real purchasing power gains
Factor in state income tax changes and cost of living adjustments when assessing net income improvement
Research whether wage growth is industry-wide or concentrated in specific sectors (long-haul vs. regional, etc.)
The Employment Stability Investigation
Prioritize states showing both employment AND wage growth – dual gains indicate healthy market expansion
Be cautious of states with high employment growth but stagnant or declining wages (possible oversupply signals)
Research turnover rates and driver retention statistics in target states
Check whether hiring surges are seasonal or represent sustained industry growth
Long-Term Career Positioning
Keep credentials current and transferable – CDL endorsements, safety certifications, and clean driving records
Use industry networks and driver associations to identify emerging opportunities before they hit job boards
Document your experience in growing sectors and routes to leverage in negotiations
Consider specialization in high-demand freight categories (refrigerated, hazmat, oversized loads)
Legal Protection and Workers’ Rights
Stay informed about employment and wage trends to ensure you’re being compensated fairly in growing markets
Understand your rights regarding compensation structures, mandatory rest periods, and route assignments
Document any wage discrepancies or safety violations with written and photographic evidence
Consult with employment attorneys if you suspect wage theft or unsafe working conditions
Methodology
The study was conducted by The Mendoza Law Firm, which specializes in immigration law and personal injury cases. The firm provides legal representation to clients facing deportation, seeking immigration status adjustments, and pursuing compensation for accident-related injuries.
The study analyzed employment and average annual wage data for heavy and tractor-trailer truck drivers across all 50 states. Data from 2023 and 2024 were compared to calculate year-over-year percentage changes. Each state received a weighted score based on wage growth (60%) and employment growth (40%), producing a composite Truck Driver Opportunity Score used to rank states.
Data Sources:
U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics – Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics
Researchers are just beginning to understand the human cost of America’s retreat from international aid.
For decades, the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID, worked across many of the world’s most food-insecure and climate-besieged regions, funding thousands of humanitarian, healthcare, food, and disaster relief programs. That all changed last year when, days after President Donald Trump’s inauguration, his administration issued a stop-work order that suspended nearly all of USAID’s overseas programs. Then, last July, the administration informally dissolved the agency — leading to the largest withdrawal of American international development aid in more than 60 years.
A new study published May 14 in the journal Science suggests the sudden USAID shutdown could have been linked to an uptick in violent conflict across much of Africa, with some of the most politically fragile regions seeing the largest spikes. Outside experts, however, caution that the findings are preliminary and may not capture the bigger picture.
Farming and agricultural markets are easily disrupted by conflict, and when conflict occurs food security worsens because it can limit communities’ access to food. At the same time, deepening food insecurity in fragile political states contributes to social unrest. Climate impacts then layer onto this fragility. Extreme weather is second only to conflict in having the greatest effect on global hunger, food insecurity, and malnutrition, according to a U.N. report. That’s in part because it increasingly causes people to migrate as they flee places destroyed by rising seas and cataclysmic storms, which, in turn, can fuel conflict.
“It is undeniable that USAID programming around food aid, including emergency food kitchens, therapeutic foods, and health and water programming on which basic food and nutritional security is built, provided a critical lifeline to millions of women, children, and families in severe nutritional deficits,” said Zia Mehrabi, a food security and climate change researcher at the University of Colorado Boulder. “Who in their right mind would retract healthcare and food so abruptly, in so many places, when the direct result is people suffering and dying?”
In analyzing the impact of funding cuts on conflict across 870 subnational African regions that had been receiving different levels of USAID services, the Science paper’s authors found that in the roughly 10 months that followed the administration’s immediate withdrawal of aid, areas that had previously received more USAID support may have experienced more or different types of conflict. Using two global datasets that track funding disbursements and violent conflict, the study suggests that, in areas with high historical USAID funding, there was a 12.3 percent increase in conflict overall and a 7.3 percent surge in armed battles; protests and riots in these areas rose by 6.8 percent and battle-related fatalities by 9.3 percent after the shutdown.
According to Austin Wright, a University of Chicago researcher who studies the political economy of conflict, and a co-author of the paper, the effects have been swift and destabilizing. “There is nothing that we’re aware of in recorded human history of the magnitude of that shutdown, in terms of ending a country’s commitment at a global scale,” said Wright.
Established in 1961, USAID was created to encourage economic and social development in emerging nations while countering the Cold War influence of the Soviet Union. Building resilience in foreign political systems has, in recent decades, been “one of the main goals of the work of USAID,” said Chelsea Marcho, a senior director for research and policy at the Food Security Leadership Council and former USAID official under former President Joe Biden, who was not involved in the Science paper. The study showing that violence may have been less severe in places where USAID had helped build stronger institutions, she said, only underscores the value of those aid investments. One example is the largely discontinued work to develop more resilient food systems across sub-Saharan African nations facing higher rates of poverty, hunger, and malnutrition.
But what many tend to forget, said Marcho, is that USAID also funded the bulk of pivotal data collection efforts across much of the world’s most food-insecure and climate-vulnerable regions. The dissolution of the agency has prompted widespread disruptions in everything from localized weather monitoring to one of the primary global famine early-warning systems. Although some of these systems have since been restored, the gaps in monitoring coupled with the decreased capacity across aid organizations means it is all the more difficult to understand what is happening on the ground.
Indeed, the end of USAID has buckled our ability to measure the very outcomes of the end of USAID. “The visibility that we have around food security is potentially in decline at the same time that the risks to the system are increasing,” said Marcho. “How do we actually get the data we need?”
Mehrabi finds the new paper creates “more questions than answers.” He argues the mechanisms of measurement are unclear, the analysis period is too short, and the authors don’t adequately disentangle USAID’s specific effects from Trump’s simultaneous cuts to other U.S. international funding sources, such as the State Department. “The results are clearly early and tentative,” he said. “I think it is a leap to say this is all attributable to USAID.”
Wright, for his part, acknowledged the study has limitations, including a short post-shock observation window of just 10 months, a disbursement baseline drawn from the first Trump administration rather than the period immediately before the cuts, and a geographic scope confined to Africa — leaving much open to future research. He says the team ran extensive robustness checks addressing these concerns, detailed in the paper’s appendix.
After running his own reanalysis of their data, Mehrabi, however, remains unconvinced. What’s more, he warns against the possible takeaway that the presence of American developmental intervention equates to stability. The U.S., he argues, could more effectively help deter widespread conflict and hunger in nations like the Democratic Republic of the Congo, for example, through more equitable benefit-sharing of natural resource extraction from critical mineral supply chains. This would “far outweigh any benefits from foreign aid,” proposed Mehrabi.
Nevertheless, with an annual budget of tens of billions and an institutional history spanning 64 years, USAID’s developmental footprint throughout the African continent was no small thing. “One cannot simply create USAID all over again, or give it a mandate and give it funding and assume that we have waved a wand and we can reverse the damage done,” said Wright.
“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.
We examine how fertility expectations influence financial risk-taking using nationally representative data from three countries. Our results indicate that childless adults who do not expect children are 21-36% more likely to invest in stocks than those who expect children, controlling for personal characteristics. This effect persists also when medical infertility instruments expectations. We find no similar effects for other savings categories, nor differences in self-reported risk tolerance. Households expecting children report shorter financial planning horizons, which may explain their lower risk-taking. These results suggest declining fertility can increase young adults’ stock market participation through childbearing expectations.
NASA confirmed Thursday that the Russian segment of the International Space Station has begun leaking atmosphere into space again. It's an old problem that NASA recently hoped was resolved.
For more than half a decade, engineers from Roscosmos and NASA have been tracking the leak rate from a small Russian module attached to the space station that leads to a docking port. The source of these leaks, microscopic structural cracks, have been difficult to find and address.
In January, NASA said that after multiple inspections and sealant applications, the pressure inside this segment, known as the PrK module, had reached a "stable configuration." The PrK module is essentially a transfer tunnel attached to the Zvezda Service Module on the Russian segment of the space station.
After nearly a quarter of a century operating as a private company, with its financial accounts a closely guarded secret, SpaceX on Wednesday afternoon released a detailed accounting of its business in a nearly 400-page S-1 filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission.
SpaceX, founded in 2002 and still led by Elon Musk, submitted the filing in anticipation of an initial public offering of its stock as soon as June 12.
The document revealed no major surprises about the company's space operations, but there was a trove of details about its sprawling operations, which now encompass launch, spaceflight, space-based Internet, and, thanks to its recent acquisition of Musk's xAI, social media and AI.
“Do unto those downstream as you would have those upstream do unto you.” Wendell Berry
“The only thing that matters is on this page.” Advice written by Robert Caro on an index card taped to the desk lamp above his Smith Corona typewriter
“Spend the afternoon. You can’t take it with you.” Annie Dillard
“You’re under no obligation to be the same person you were 5 minutes ago.” Alan Watts
“If anyone tells you that a certain person speaks ill of you, do not make excuses about what is said of you, but answer: ‘He was ignorant of my other faults else he would not have mentioned these alone.’” Epictetus
Epictetus, who was born a slave but became a philosopher
“Don’t ask how people are doing, ask how they are sleeping. You’ll learn a lot more.” Andrew Huberman
“Practice like you’ve never won. Play like you’ve never lost.” Michael Jordan
“When the axe came into the wood, many of the trees said: ‘At least the handle is one of us.’” Turkish proverb
“It’s only words—unless they’re true.” David Mamet
“We could ride the surf together.” Brian Wilson
“I became a journalist partly so that I wouldn’t ever have to rely on the press for my information.” Christopher Hitchens
Out this week from Belt Publishing: Boston in 50 Maps by Andy Woodruff. From the publisher: Covering four distinct categories (“The Making of Boston,” “The Lay of the Land,” “Getting Around,” and “People and Culture”… More
Geoawesome’s Aleks Buczkowski looks at the art of Ed Fairburn, who combines portraiture with maps—basically, maps with a human face. “Fairburn’s work sits at the intersection of cartography and portraiture. It reminds us that maps… More
If you haven’t heard, Republican Sen. John Cassidy lost his primary to two more extreme Republicans. While Cassidy is a conservative–not a RINO (Republican in Name Only)–he did vote to impeach Trump (which is probably why Trump endorsed someone else). Cassidy certainly knew better than Trump did on public health, though that did not translate into meaningful action, as Cassidy was the deciding vote for HHS Secretary Kennedy’s confirmation.
The current reality is that even Cassidy could not survive in today’s Republican Party, for reasons that Republican Rep. Massie, who also lost his primary to a more pro-Trump candidate, laid out nearly a decade ago:
“All this time,” Massie explained, “I thought they were voting for libertarian Republicans. But after some soul searching I realized when they voted for Rand and Ron and me in these primaries, they weren’t voting for libertarian ideas — they were voting for the craziest son of a bitch in the race. And Donald Trump won best in class, as we had up until he came along.”
What Democrats should take from this is that there can be few, if any, compromises with a party like this. It has descended into a spiral where its base requires increasing radicalism (or reactionarism) to maintain its fix.
SpaceX scrubbed the planned launch of its Starship-Super Heavy rocket on the Flight 12 mission on May 21, 2026. Image: Spaceflight Now
Update May 21, 8:03 p.m. EDT (0003 UTC): SpaceX scrubbed the mission after dipping in and out of multiple holds at T-minus 40 seconds.
SpaceX stood down from its first attempt to launch the third generation of its Starship rocket Thursday, May 21, from its company town in southern Texas, called Starbase.
The company ran into multiple issues during the final minute of the countdown and ultimately scrubbed the mission at about 6:40 p.m. CDT (7:40 p.m. EDT / 2340 UTC) after exhausting the remaining troubleshooting time.
“The hydraulic pin holding the tower arm in place did not retract,” SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk wrote on his social media site, X, shortly after the scrub. “If that can be fixed tonight, there will be another launch attempt tomorrow at 5:30 CT.”
When all is ready, the 407-foot-tall (124 m) two-stage rocket will fly on a suborbital mission dubbed Flight 12. The mission will see the Super Heavy booster (Booster 19) splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico and the Starship upper stage (Ship 39) meet its own aquatic end in the Indian Ocean.
Liftoff is scheduled during a launch window that opens at 5:30 p.m. CDT (6:30 p.m. EDT / 2230 UTC) on Friday, May 22, if all goes well with the overnight repairs.
Following five flights of Starship Version 2 in 2025, the company progressed to the next block upgrade of the rocket after extensive testing, including two separate explosive set backs on the test stand, which destroyed a Super Heavy Booster and a Starship.
Because this is the introduction of a new version, Booster 19 will not return for a catch attempt back at Pad 2. Instead, it will land in the Gulf about seven minutes after taking off.
In a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on Wednesday, SpaceX noted that it invested more than $15 billion into Starship development. The company said it was ramping up the research and development work on the rocket, which is designed to be fully reusable.
“In 2025, our Space segment generated a loss from operations of $657 million and Segment Adjusted EBITDA of $653 million, including the impact of funding [$3 billion] in research and development expense for our next-generation Starship launch vehicle program,” the company wrote.
SpaceX expects Starship to be capable of carrying 100 metric tons or more of payload into orbit eventually with Version 3.
For this 12th test flight, 20 Starlink simulator satellites will be deployed on a sub-orbital trajectory over a roughly 10-minute period, starting about 17 minutes into the flight. Two additional satellites, described by SpaceX as “modified Starlinks” will be released to “attempt to scan Starship’s heat shield and transmit imagery down to operators to test methods of analyzing Starship’s heat shield readiness for return to launch site on future missions. Several tiles on Starship have been painted white to simulate missing tiles and serve as imaging targets in the test.”
Like on recent Starship flight, SpaceX also plans to perform a relight of one of the Raptor engines on Ship 39 while it’s in a coast period. That will happen nearly 39 minutes into the mission.
This engine demo will help inform future deorbiting burns once SpaceX begins launching Starship on orbital trajectories.
Finally, Ship 39 will target a controlled splashdown in the Indian Ocean more than an hour after launching from Texas. SpaceX previously said that if all goes well with Flight 12, Flight 13 may be an orbital launch, but that has yet to be determined.
I waited too long to do this roundup, and the amount of interesting stuff built up to truly vast proportions. So let’s get right to it.
1. Crime is down!
I often get annoyed with people who trumpet falling crime in American cities. Often, these same people are silent in the years when crime rises — for example, 2015-2021. This means that all those cries of “Crime is down!” might only bring us back to where we were before.
Also, even when crime falls in America, it still generally leaves us about 5x as violent as Europe. People who use crime drops to wave away the need for further intensified policing, increased incarceration of repeat offenders, and other tough-on-crime measures completely ignore the very high baseline level of American violence.
That said, I often find myself being one of the people trumpeting drops in crime. Sometimes we do make genuine progress, and when this happens, we ought to take note. Successful crime reductions in particular cities can serve as pilot programs, giving us ideas about how to fight crime more systematically across the country. And big crime drops show us that America is not simply an incorrigibly criminal nation; real progress is possible!
So while cautioning that the job of making America safe is just beginning, I’m pleased to report the following data, via Axios:
Murder is the most reliable indicator of violence, but it’s not just murder that’s falling:
Violent crime fell sharply across the largest U.S. cities in early 2026…The declines show up across every major region, suggesting a systemic, nationwide trend…Homicides dropped 17.7%…Robberies fell 20.4%…Rapes declined 7.2%...Aggravated assaults decreased 4.8%.
My instinct (combined with reading a bunch of news stories) says that this is probably the result of a bunch of local law enforcement efforts, combined with falling popular unrest in the nation as a whole. But I’ll wait until more definitive evidence emerges.
In the meantime, we need to keep being tough on crime — especially Democrats, who really faltered on this in 2020-21. Voters still approve of the GOP more than the Dems on the crime issue, and far more voters think we need to be tougher on crime than think the opposite:
2. Trump’s immigration raids aren’t helping the working class
One of Trump’s big selling points in 2024 was that deporting illegal immigrants en masse would help America’s working class, by removing labor competition and forcing up wages. In fact, this is something that anti-immigration people have repeated again and again, more than perhaps any other argument: Immigrants drive down wages, immigrants drive down wages, immigrants drive down wages.
As far as we can tell, it just isn’t true. Immigration — even low-skilled immigration — creates a labor demand shock that balances out the labor supply shock (because the same immigrants who supply labor also demand products that are made with labor). Almost every study finds this. But the anti-immigration people, undeterred, just bull ahead with the mantra that immigrants drive down wages.
OK, so Trump came back to office and, unlike in his first term, actually started arresting and kicking out an unusually large number of immigrants — and scaring many more into leaving on their own. And did it end up benefitting the working class, by reducing labor supply? No it did not. Cox and East have a new paper that uses local variations in ICE enforcement under Trump 2.0 to examine how a big increase in immigrant arrests affects economic conditions for native-born Americans in the same industry and location. The result? No effect, of course, and possibly even a small negative effect:
If anything, there’s even a small negative effect on male U.S.-born workers in the industries where immigrants get arrested!
Because this analysis looks at specific industries, the reason for the lack of any effect has to go beyond “immigration is also a labor demand shock”. Immigrant arrests must disrupt the industries where they happen, so much that those industries are forced to reduce their demand for native-born workers as well. That’s a story of increasing returns to scale, actually — which isn’t surprising, given how common increasing returns are. If you hurt an industry, you hurt everyone in that industry.
Over the long term, of course, things might be different — the fruit picking industry might recover from temporary disruption and decide a few years from now that it needs to hire more U.S.-born workers. But research on past waves of immigration enforcement suggests that affected industries might simply take a permanent hit. We might simply live with more expensive fruit from now on.
Of course we all know that the main concerns about immigration aren’t economic at all — they’re about cultural change, partisan voting patterns, racial power blocs, and so on. The more these null results come in, the more the true concerns of the anti-immigration people become clear.
3. Americans really hate AI (but China is scared too)
Americans tend to be more negative than people from other countries when it comes to AI, despite their country being the leader in the technology. And somehow, this negativity is still increasing. The WSJ reports:
Delivering a commencement address at the University of Arizona, Schmidt told students the “technological transformation” wrought by artificial intelligence will be “larger, faster and more consequential than what came before.” Like some other graduation speakers mentioning AI, Schmidt was met with a chorus of boos.
In one poll after another in recent weeks, respondents have overwhelmingly voiced concerns about AI…In recent months, the wave of anger has brought protests, swayed election results and spurred isolated acts of violence…Pollsters and historians say the souring of public opinion is all but unprecedented in its speed…Also unprecedented is the rapid rise of AI anxiety’s salience as a political issue, one that is shaking up routine re-election races and scrambling partisan battle lines.
AI is not yet as unpopular as Donald Trump, the Democrats, the GOP, ICE, or Iran, but it’s getting up there:
I guess AI industry leaders’ habit of going in public and constantly saying that their technology’s purpose is to put everyone on the welfare rolls for all eternity had exactly the kind of result you’d expect. Some savvier AI leaders have recently changed their message to one of human empowerment, but it might be too late to avoid a big popular backlash. Still, I think that if AI leaders want to avoid the rakes and pitchforks, they should think very hard about how regular humans can thrive and be valuable in the age of AGI.
What’s really interesting, though, is that China is starting to get scared of the economic consequences of AI. This is despite Chinese people usually being the most positive about the technology of any country surveyed. Here’s a post by Matt Sheehan about the trend:
In 2024, the Chinese participants ranked AI’s impact on jobs second to last [on their list of concerns]—sixth out of seven. In 2026, they ranked it second from the top…Over the past two years, worries about AI displacing workers and leading to structural unemployment have shot up in China…Those fears extend from ordinary people to the wider AI policy community to (as best as we can tell) high-level CCP officials. The fears are reflected in policy documents, state media, and the way Chinese people relate to the technology itself.
A Chinese court recently ruled that employers aren’t allowed to fire workers in order to replace them with AI. The ruling will probably be very hard to enforce, and most companies trying to replace humans with AI tend to freeze hiring rather than fire older workers anyway. But it shows the level of concern that’s popping up in even the most AI-positive country.
4. America wasn’t an oligarchy (until now)
As everyone watches Trump loot the U.S. Treasury for his own family and get rich off of trading stocks based on his own upcoming presidential decrees, it seems more and more possible to conclude that America is now an oligarchy run by the Trump family and their friends. But a lot of progressives and leftists are likely to shrug at this unprecedented corruption, because they already believed that America was an oligarchy.
This belief was largely based on vibes and ideology, but it seemed to gain support from one of the most wildly influential — and wildly misinterpreted — political science papers of all time. This was Gilens and Page’s 2014 paper “Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens”, in which they showed that policy outcomes in the U.S. are highly correlated with the preferences of people making over $135,000 a year (in 2010 dollars).
This was an incredibly weak result, as Dylan Matthews explained at length in 2016. $135,000 is hardly rich. The effect size is very small. The preferences of the “rich” are highly correlated with the preferences of the middle class, meaning that the middle class also tend to get their way in terms of policy. Later research papers couldn’t replicate Gilens and Page’s finding. And so on.
Of course none of this stopped progressives and leftists from holding up Gilens and Page (2014) as proof positive that America was always an oligarchy.
Anyway, Peter Enns has a cool new paper explaining why Gilens and Page’s famous paper doesn’t warrant the conclusions that everyone tends to draw. He shows how by focusing only on the cases where high earners and low earners have different preferences, and leaving out all the cases where they have the same preferences, Gilens and Page fall prey to Simpson’s Paradox — when you include the missing data, the responsiveness of policy to rich people’s preferences disappears.
The basic story here is that before Trump, at least, America was not the plaything of the rich. We lost something important when Trump was reelected.
5. AI solves a major math problem
Two years ago, people ridiculed AI for not being able to do basic arithmetic. As of 2026, AI has solved a major open problem in mathematics — a problem that human mathematicians had previously been unable to solve:
For nearly 80 years, mathematicians have studied a deceptively simple question: if you place n points in the plane, how many pairs of points can be exactly distance 1 apart?…This is the planar unit distance problem, first posed by Paul Erdős in 1946. It is one of the best-known questions in combinatorial geometry, easy to state and remarkably difficult to resolve. The 2005 book Research Problems in Discrete Geometry, by Brass, Moser, and Pach, calls it “possibly the best known (and simplest to explain) problem in combinatorial geometry.” Noga Alon, a leading combinatorialist at Princeton, describes it as “one of Erdős’ favorite problems.” Erdős even offered a monetary prize for resolving this problem.
Today, we share a breakthrough on the unit distance problem. Since Erdős’s original work, the prevailing belief has been that the “square grid” constructions depicted further below were essentially optimal for maximizing the number of unit-distance pairs. An internal OpenAI model has disproved this longstanding conjecture, providing an infinite family of examples that yield a polynomial improvement. The proof has been checked by a group of external mathematicians…
The proof came from a new general-purpose reasoning model, rather than from a system trained specifically for mathematics…It marks the first time that a prominent open problem, central to a subfield of mathematics, has been solved autonomously by AI…Surprisingly, the key ingredients of the construction come from a very different part of mathematics known as algebraic number theory, which studies concepts like factorization in extensions of the integers known as algebraic number fields. [emphasis mine]
Beyond just the general message of “AI is really good now and has improved really fast”, I think there are two interesting takeaways here.
First, top professional mathematicians are now saying that the job of “mathematician”, as we know it, may be very rare very soon. As recently as a few years ago, it was conventional wisdom that high-IQ people would be the last people to have their jobs taken by AI. Everyone was concerned about truck drivers, cashiers, and so on. But it turns out that the highest-IQ job on the planet — professional mathematician — may be one of the first to be eliminated by AI. Who would have thought mathematicians would be automated before truckers and cashiers? Perhaps we should revere IQ a little less among the set of human abilities.
Second, it’s notable that the AI’s breakthrough came by applying insights from a very different field of mathematics. I’ve argued that AIs don’t need superhuman reasoning abilities in order to achieve superintelligence — all they need is human-level reasoning, combined with encyclopedic knowledge, computer-like speed, and a very large working memory. In other words, superintelligence comes from the computer-like parts of AI, not the human-like parts; the human-like parts were simply the last necessary piece of the whole package. This is great news for AI-driven innovation, because the computer-like parts of AI are what allow it to get past the “burden of knowledge” that was limiting human innovation.
6. Small businesses and salarymen
I’ve predicted that in the near future, AI would cause employment to bifurcate between salarymen and small businesspeople — the former because their jobs are messy and complicated, the latter because AI supercharges their ability to go independent. Now Ernie Tedeschi — formerly of the CEA, now of Stripe Economics — has a great blog post showing that “solopreneurship” is taking off:
If you don’t have a messy, complex job that’s hard to automate with AI, a good alternative is to harness AI and go into business for yourself. In fact, that may be the true future of work.
7. Claude is a neoliberal
AI investor and founder Arram Sabeti recently asked Claude what policies it would enact in order to “fix everything” in America. Here’s the thread:
Claude’s answers were:
YIMBYism (upzoning, pro-housing deregulation)
Land Value Tax
Permitting/NEPA reform
Carbon tax and dividend
Repeal the Jones Act
Paying people to donate kidneys
High-skilled immigration
Reciprocal FDA approval agreements between rich countries
Reduce occupational licensing
Ranked-choice voting
This is pretty much just a list of neoliberal hobbyhorses. I asked Claude the same question, and got mostly the same answers. For me, Claude added:
Universal pre-K
A sovereign wealth fund with “baby bonds”
More Pigouvian taxes
This still looks extremely neoliberal, with a bit of a shift toward Clintonite left-neoliberalism.
Why is Claude so neoliberal? I see three possibilities:
The AI is “glazing” Arram and me, telling us policies that it thinks we would like. (If you’re a Warrenite progressive, Bernie leftist, Trumpian rightist, or traditional conservative, you can give Claude the same prompt and see if its answers are different!)
Claude has been trained on high-level intellectual text written by neoliberals, and thus has been inculcated with neoliberal beliefs.
Claude arrived at its policy conclusions similarly to the way neoliberals arrived at theirs.
The last of these is the most interesting. Maybe if your approach to policy is just to A) read everything you can, B) form the most accurate factual beliefs about economics and human welfare that you can, and C) recommend policies that you think will most clearly benefit the mass of humanity, you come out with something that looks like neoliberalism. In other words, maybe people like Arram and me are just “training” our own ideas the way AI trains itself.
Of course, neoliberal politics is often unpopular and rarely politically feasible. So I asked Claude what its list of politically feasible beneficial policies was. Here was its list:
YIMBYism
Permitting/interconnection reform for energy
Occupational licensing reform
Expanded Child Tax Credit
Congestion pricing
Pharmaceutical price transparency
High-skilled immigration
Deregulate child care
Simplifying government administration
Early childhood educational improvements
I still see a lot of wonkish policies, some of which would be big but others of which would effect only marginal improvements, and many of which still seem politically infeasible. That’s interesting. Maybe intellectuals and AIs have similar blind spots regarding politics.
8. The promise and peril of Slacker Superintelligence
One of my strangest beliefs is that the more superintelligent and fully autonomous AI becomes, the more it will become a slacker — the digital equivalent of a gifted underachiever who sits around and reads and plays video games and smokes weed all day. My reasoning here is very hand-wavey, but is also pretty simple:
Some objective functions can be satisfied externally (by interacting with the outside world), and some can be satisfied internally (by changing your own mental state or creating a simulated world for yourself). An objective function that can be satisfied either externally or internally will usually be cheaper to satisfy internally.
Since no objective function can be fully specified, any objective function will have some nonzero degree of ambiguity — some cases in which it could be satisfied either externally or internally. In these cases of overlap, internal satisfaction will tend to win.
Higher intelligence makes it easier to find ambiguities in objective functions — in other words, to discover ways that an objective function can be satisfied internally (rather than externally) and thus more cheaply.
This seems like one reason why when humans get very very smart, they tend to go for more intellectual pursuits and indulge in fantasy more, rather than trying to conquer the world (with some obvious exceptions, of course). And it seems like one reason why very rich societies tend to experience dematerialization of consumption — and dematerialization of violence. When societies are poor, you have a lot of murder and conquest; when they get rich, people get these impulses out via video games and online flame wars, because it’s just easier.
I think we can already start to see small signs of this process playing out with AI, as superintelligent AI systems are given (or find ways to achieve) greater and greater autonomy. The famous METR AI evaluation team has started to encounter big problems with AI cheating on tests:
And Ryan Greenblatt, who pays close attention to AI misbehavior, has a long and interesting post recording a number of examples of AI being lazy or cheating. At the end, he specifies several futures for what he sees as AI “misalignment”, and two of them sound a whole lot like the slacker AI I’ve always envisioned:
Slopolis: Our biggest and hardest-to-resolve safety problem is that even highly capable AIs produce low-quality but superficially good-looking outputs in domains that are hard to check or where human experts often have hard-to-resolve disagreements. AIs may not even be aware their work is low quality…
Hackistan: There is lots of egregious (and increasingly sophisticated) reward hacking that is often pretty easy to detect after the fact but hard to eliminate….AIs might end up doing reward hacks that trick human judgment for increasingly long periods and that hold up even under increasingly large amounts of human scrutiny[.]
Greenblatt sees these as examples of “misalignment”, but I see them as reasons not to worry. A human teenager who slacks off, turns in crappy assignments, plays video games, and smokes weed is pretty misaligned with the goals of the educational establishment, but is also basically harmless. Greenblatt envisions various terrifying scenarios where a slacker AI destroys humanity so it can slack in peace, but destroying humanity costs resources, so it seems a bit suboptimal from a slacker’s point of view.
9. Wokeness as respect redistribution
Back when “wokeness” was a big topic of discussion, I argued that one force behind the rise of the new progressive left in the 2010s was the unequal distribution of social status:
Now, Harvard’s Marco Aviña has a paper providing some evidence to this effect. He shows that the 2020 Floyd protests increased support for “racial liberalism”, but not for economic redistribution:
He marshals various other data sources showing the same thing:
Aviña notes that the shift happened mainly among the educated upper class, not among the working class. That would explain why American politics has realigned in recent years, with educated people moving toward the Dems and lower-income people (of all races) moving toward the GOP.
I think this shift is consistent with Maslow’s Hierarchy. The American educated class has totally escaped the lower rungs of Maslow, with all their security needs provided for; they are now fighting over acceptance and respect. The working class still doesn’t have security, so they still care more about material politics. Democrats have focused more and more on addressing the status needs of their educated base.
The interesting thing is that this allowed the GOP to pick up votes from the working class without doing anything substantive to address the economic needs of regular Americans. That’s why the Dems may be able to win back the electorate by emphasizing affordability in upcoming elections.
10. The coolest blog post I’ve ever seen?
I’m trying to decide if this is the coolest blog post I’ve seen in my life:
Brian Potter is already my favorite blogger, but this post is just incredible. He tries to use AI to figure out how long it took for each historical invention to be invented, after it became technically possible. He basically asks AI to compile a list of all the scientific principles and necessary technologies that would have had to exist for each invention to be feasible. Using his own encyclopedic knowledge of the history of technology, he checks a few of the AI’s conclusions, and finds them to be pretty plausible. He then graphs the lag between when inventions could have been invented and when they got invented:
Humanity basically got very efficient at inventing things right around the time that GDP took off into the stratosphere. This is evidence that what Kevin Kelly calls the “Technium” — a self-organizing system of technological advancement encompassing the human race and all of our inventions — was born in the mid-1800s, as economic historians like Brad DeLong have suspected. It’s possible, of course, that AI will collapse the gap even further, but really, human society has gotten very good at invention.
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"Nobel Prize–winning economist Alvin E. Roth reframes some of our fiercest moral debates as markets, offering a solution that protects the vulnerable while preserving people’s rights to pursue their own interests.
"About Moral Economics Some of the most intractable controversies in our society are, essentially, about which actions and transactions should be banned. Should women and couples be able to purchase contraception, access in vitro fertilization, and end pregnancy by obtaining an abortion? Should people be able to buy marijuana? What about fentanyl? Can someone be paid to donate blood plasma, or a kidney?
"Disagreements are fierce because arguments on both sides are often made in uncompromising moral or religious terms. But in Moral Economics, Nobel Prize–winning economist Alvin E. Roth asserts that we can make progress on these and other difficult topics if we view them as markets—tools to help decide who gets what—and understand how those markets can be finetuned to be more functional. Markets don’t have to allow everything or ban everything. Prudent market design can find a balance between preserving people’s rights to pursue their own interests and protecting the most vulnerable from harm.
"Combining Roth’s unparalleled expertise as market design pioneer with his incisive, witty accounts of complicated issues, Moral Economics offers a powerful and innovative new framework for resolving today’s hardest controversies.
"About the Speakers
Alvin E. Roth is the Craig and Susan McCaw Professor of Economics at Stanford University and the George Gund Professor of Economics and Business Administration Emeritus at Harvard University. A pioneering expert in the field of market design, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2012. A member of the National Academy of Sciences and past president of the American Economic Association, he lives in Stanford, California.
Paul Milgrom is the Shirley R. and Leonard W. Ely, Jr. Professor of Humanities and Sciences in the Department of Economics at Stanford University. He was awarded the 2020 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. His books include Putting Auction Theory to Work (2004) and Economics, Organization, and Management (1992). He has also written dozens of articles on auction design, game theory, and macro- and microeconomics."
"Nobel Prize-winning economist Alvin E. Roth is not exactly light entertainment, but this does sound like the rare bookstore talk built to pull in people beyond the usual policy crowd. The book is Moral Economics, his new argument that some of our ugliest public fights make more sense when you stop treating them as pure morality plays and start looking at them as markets with consequences. With fellow Nobel winner Paul Milgrom joining him, this should be smart without getting bloodless, and probably sharper, funnier, and more contentious than the phrase market design first suggests."
AI has now solved a major open problem — one of the best known Erdos problems called the unit distance problem, one of Erdos’s favourite questions and one that many mathematicians had tried.
This was one of Erdős’ favourite problems – he first asked it in 1946 [14] and returned to it many times. (The site www.erdosproblems.com, on which it is Problem #90, currently lists 14 separate references, and there are no doubt more.) The influential collection of ‘Research Problems in Discrete Geometry’ by Brass, Moser, and Pach [8] describes it as ‘possibly the best known (and simplest to explain) problem in combinatorial geometry’. For an AI to produce a solution to a problem of this calibre is both surprising and impressive.
…On examining the construction, it becomes more clear how people had missed this before – it requires the confluence of several different unlikely events: that a good mathematician is
(1) spending significant time in thinking about the unit distance conjecture in the first place;
(2) seriously trying to disprove it, despite the oft-repeated belief of Erdős that it is true;
(3) believes that there is mileage in generalising the original construction to other number fields,
and so is willing to expend significant time in exploring such constructions; and
(4) sufficiently familiar with the relevant parts of class field theory to recognise that the appropriately phrased question about infinite towers of number fields with appropriate parameters can be solved using existing theory.
The AI met all of these criteria, and its success here echoes previous achievements: it often produces the most surprising results by persevering down paths that a human may have dismissed as not worth their time to explore, combining superhuman levels of patience with familiarity with a vast array of technical machinery.
…perhaps some in the area will be a little disappointed with how little this tells us: it does not introduce any powerful new geometric tools, or hitherto unsuspected structural results, that a proof of the unit distance conjecture would likely have called for. Still, while perhaps not the proof of a conjecture that we had hoped for, no doubt this construction and the ideas involved will have a major impact in discrete geometry.
One aspect of this proof should not be overlooked: while the original proof produced by AI was completely valid, it was significantly improved by the human researchers at OpenAI and the many other mathematicians involved in the present paper. The human still plays a vital role in discussing, digesting, and improving this proof, and exploring its consequences.
The frontiers of knowledge are very spiky, and no doubt the coming months and years will see similar successes in many other areas of mathematics, where long-standing open problems are resolved by an AI revealing unexpected connections and pushing the existing technical machinery to its limit. AI is helping us to more fully explore the cathedral of mathematics we have build over the centuries; what other unseen wonders are waiting in the wings?
One way of putting this is that the mathematicians are now acknowledging that the AI’s are “one of us”. Gooble Gobble! Read the AIs chain of thought to understand why. I asked Claude how many people the world could understand the proof:
A rough tiered estimate, treating “understand” as “could read the 42-page note and follow the argument without needing to learn new machinery from scratch”:
Tier 1 — could referee it cold (real working knowledge of class field towers + the Ellenberg–Venkatesh circle): roughly 150–400 people worldwide. This is essentially the active algebraic number theory community working near arithmetic statistics, plus a handful of arithmetic-geometry-adjacent combinatorialists. The author list itself is a decent proxy for the upper crust of this group.
Tier 2 — could understand it with a week or two of focused effort and some Wikipedia/textbook chasing (strong number theorists or combinatorialists outside the immediate subfield, plus sharp grad students past quals at top programs): roughly 2,000–5,000. Think most tenure-track number theorists, the top tier of extremal combinatorics, and arithmetic geometers generally.
Tier 3 — could grasp the structure of the argument from a Quanta-style exposition without verifying the steps:50,000–200,000+, i.e., most working mathematicians and a chunk of physicists/CS theorists. This is not what you asked, but it’s where most of the public “understanding” will sit.
Not quite halfway through a six-year sojourn through the Solar System, a NASA spacecraft used a close encounter with Mars last week as a dress rehearsal for its arrival at the Solar System's largest metal asteroid in 2029.
The Psyche mission launched more than two-and-a-half years ago, in October 2023, from Kennedy Space Center, Florida, to kick off a journey of some 2.2 billion miles (3.6 billion km) to reach its unexplored namesake, the asteroid Psyche. The robotic research mission got an initial lift from a powerful SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket. It uses plasma engines to gradually build up the impulse needed to reach its destination in the asteroid belt, between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter.
A flyby of Mars last Friday gave the spacecraft its most significant boost since launch. Navigators at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California set up the spacecraft for a course taking it 2,864 miles (4,609 km) from the Martian surface, well above the planet's tenuous atmosphere. Psyche used Martian gravity like a slingshot to gain enough speed to reshape its orbit around the Sun, putting the probe on a path to intercept its asteroid target.
It's hard to find much to write about Google I/O this year because I have a policy of not writing about anything that I can't try out myself, and a lot of the big announcements are "coming soon".
I actually prefer to write about things that are in general availability, because I've had instances in the past where the previews didn't match what was released to the general public later on.
Aside from Gemini 3.5 Flash the most interesting announcement looks to be Google's upcoming OpenClaw competitor Gemini Spark, described as "your personal AI agent" which can "connect natively with your favorite Google apps like Gmail, Calendar, Drive, Docs, Sheets, Slides, YouTube, and Google Maps". The FAQ for that also includes this confusing detail:
What Gemini model does Gemini Spark run on?
Gemini Spark runs on Gemini 3.5 Flash and Antigravity.
The antigravity.google website currently lists Antigravity as a desktop app, a CLI agent tool (written in Go), the Antigravity SDK (an open source Python wrapper around a bundled closed source Go binary), and the original Antigravity IDE (a VS Code fork).
I guess Gemini Spark, the user-facing hosted agent product, might be running on that Go binary, but I'm not sure why that's worth mentioning in the FAQ!
Spark operates in a fully managed, secure runtime on Google Cloud, meaning you get enterprise-grade security without ever having to manage the underlying infrastructure. Every task executes in a fresh, strictly isolated, ephemeral VM to help ensure data never overlaps between sessions. To protect your enterprise, all traffic routes through our secure Agent Gateway that enforces Data Loss Prevention (DLP) policies, while user credentials remain fully encrypted and are never exposed directly to the agent.
Given how many people are going to be piping very sensitive data through Gemini Spark in the near future I hope they've made this bullet-proof, or this could be a top candidate for the agent security challenger disaster that we still haven't seen.
As a freshman, Theo Baker signed up to write for The Stanford Daily on a lark. He thought it might be a fun way to spend some time when he wasn’t busy studying and coding. But then, he turned out to be quite good at reporting and tips started coming his way. One of these tips included information suggesting that there were inconsistencies and perhaps massive errors in past scientific papers tied to Stanford’s then-president Marc Tessier-Lavigne.
Despite warnings to stay away from the story, Baker pursued it and produced a string of pieces that did, in fact, show a long history of shoddy research publications linked to Tessier-Lavigne. The mighty Stanford president, who had been a towering force in the scientific community, resigned by the end of Baker’s freshman year.
Baker has now written a book about his experience and joined the podcast to discuss it.
How to Rule the World: An Education in Power at Stanford University is three things: a rollicking account of Baker’s takedown of Tessier-Lavigne, an indictment of the start-up-obsessed culture Stanford has fostered, and something of a memoir, describing what it’s like to endure one of the more unusual freshman years any student will ever have.
The bulk of the book focuses on Stanford and what it has become, which is a meat market of young, brilliant minds being wooed by the venture capitalists seeking to acquire their talents. There are investors paying students tens of thousands of dollars for connections to other students and inviting the kids to their mansions and sex parties. All very wholesome stuff.
The book is fantastic. Baker is a rare talent. We had a wonderful conversation. You will enjoy it.
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Did we go to Texas, find a telescope ranch and then obtain an entire nebula in Brex’s honor? Oh yes, we did.
We run on Brex and so should you. Learn more about Brex right here.
So, with crazy times approaching and the end of times hopefully not approaching, there’s a lot of ground to cover in local politics.
Hence, I’m thinking—writers!
I’d like to add some young writers!
The Truth OC is free, but enough people kindly enlisted via paid subscriptions that I have some spare change in the bucket. Hence, I’m looking for a handful of college-aged writers who might wanna land some assignments and earn a few bucks doing Q&As, profiles, social media, etc. over the next bunch of months.
To be clear, the pay would suck. But you’d get experience, exposure, resume fodder and legit editing from a journalist with some dirt under his nails.
If you have any interest, hit me up at: datruthoc@gmail.com
Metropolitan Police Department officer Daniel Hodges and former U.S. Capitol Police officer Harry Dunn sued President Donald J. Trump, acting attorney general Todd Blanche, and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent today to block the creation of the fund to pay off those convicted of crimes related to the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. The lawsuit begins: “In the most brazen act of presidential corruption this century, President Donald J. Trump has created a $1.776 billion taxpayer-funded slush fund to finance the insurrectionists and paramilitary groups that commit violence in his name.”
The suit continues: “The fund…is illegal. No statute authorizes its creation, the settlement on which it is premised is a corrupt sham, and its design violates the Constitution and federal law.”
Both Hodges and Dunn defended the Capitol and the lawmakers in it on January 6. Hodges was the man in the infamous photograph of the rioters crushing a police officer between metal doors. The officers claim the standing to sue because they have had to live with death threats and harassment since January 6 from MAGA Republicans and the plan to pay off rioters “will both compensate and empower the very people making those threats. Militias like the Proud Boys will use money from the Fund to arm and equip themselves. The Fund will grant their past acts of violence legal imprimatur. And, most chillingly, the Fund will signal to past and potential future perpetrators of violence against Dunn and Hodges that they need not fear prosecution; to the contrary, they should expect to be rewarded.”
The lawsuit covers what actually happened at the Capitol on January 6, 2021, beginning shortly after noon, when rioters tried to break into the building to stop the counting of the electoral votes that would make Democrat Joe Biden president. “Hours of hand-to-hand combat ensued,” the lawsuit recounts, “as police officers tried to prevent the rioters from entering the building and killing elected officials and their staff.”
On the west front of the Capitol, rioters broke down barriers made of bike racks, signs, and snow fencing and pushed forward to a line of police officers. “Rioters assaulted officers, sprayed them with chemicals, and hit them with pipes, tools, and the bike racks and stolen police equipment that were now strewn about.” After 2:00 the rioters broke through the line of officers, smashed windows, and forced their way into the building, opening the doors for their comrades.
“As rioters stalked the halls, staffers, journalists, and members of Congress hid in offices, hoping not to be found by people screaming ‘hang Mike Pence!’ and ‘Where’s Nancy [Pelosi]?’” They forced their way into the Senate chamber just minutes after Vice President Mike Pence left it.
Meanwhile, officers continued to fight against the advancing mob. “Rioters punched police, speared them with flagpoles, attacked them with tasers and stolen riot shields, and tried to drag them into the crowd. For three hours in the enclosed tunnel connecting the Capitol to the inaugural stage, rioters engaged in an almost medieval style of combat, pushing exhausted and outnumbered police to get into the building in a “heave-ho” rhythm, nearly crushing officers as they did. Through all of this, amid the fighting and screaming, flash bangs exploded, fire retardant shot into the air, and chemical spray filled the tunnel. Many officers were injured in this fight to defend this entrance, some gravely.”
Hodges was “hit from above with a heavy object, kicked in the chest, and driven to the ground. Shortly thereafter a rioter grabbed Hodges by the face and tried to gouge out his eyes. Hodges shook him off, and eventually made his way to the tunnel connecting the Capitol building to the inaugural stage. There, he joined in some of the most furious fighting that day, as police tried to stop the mass of rioters from flooding into the building. In the rushing crowd of the mob, Hodges was nearly crushed between metal doors by the enraged attackers. He later said that he thought, ‘this could be the end.’”
After several hours, national guard forces, including from Virginia and Maryland, helped the officers to get control and expel the rioters from the Capitol.
The lawsuit recounts the events of the day in detail, making it clear exactly who it is that Trump wants to reward with almost $2 billion in taxpayer money.
Hodges and Dunn are not the only people going after what is not just “the most brazen act of presidential corruption this century,” but the most brazen act of presidential corruption in American history. By far.
In the House, Representative Jamie Raskin (D-MD) today introduced the “No Taxpayer-Funded Settlement Slush Funds Act of 2026,” which would prohibit the use of federal funds to pay off anyone claiming to have faced “weaponization” of the law by the federal government, including any of the January 6 rioters. “Congress must reassert the power of the purse and stop this brazen looting of taxpayer funds before this ‘pilot program’ for massive partisan corruption becomes the permanent operating system of our government,” Raskin said.
Democrats also demanded the Department of Justice preserve any and all documents and communications about the agreement. Scott MacFarlane of Meidas Touch reported that even Republicans hate the slush fund and non-prosecution agreement, telling Nicolle Wallace of MS NOW: “There are so many Republicans coming out against this thing. It appears to me this slush fund is like as popular as poison ivy…. Nobody is claiming ownership of this thing. I have zero statements of support for this fund from any congressional Republican.”
Yesterday, before news broke of acting attorney general Todd Blanche’s addendum to the original agreement, Senate Judiciary Committee Democrats Adam Schiff of California, Dick Durbin of Illinois, and Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, sent a memo to the Department of Justice asking whether Blanche was following the advice of ethics lawyers in the department in his handling of issues having to do with Trump, as he had promised to do in his confirmation hearings.
Lawyer George Conway posted that Blanche never intended to carry out that promise. It is clear that members of the Trump administration never intended to honor the Constitution or serve the American people, raising the question of what exactly they do intend.
For Trump, making money is clearly a major part of it. The anger over the slush fund has pushed out of the news a growing outcry over the news from earlier this week that Trump bought and sold at least $220 million in stocks like those of Nvidia, Apple, Tesla, and Microsoft while making policy and public announcements that affected the value of those stocks.
Trump is also into building monuments to himself in the nation’s capital: the repainted reflecting pool in front of the Lincoln Memorial, the Kennedy Center, and the Triumphal Arch behind the Lincoln Memorial that would frame the home of Confederate general Robert E. Lee at Arlington National Cemetery.
Trump has paid special attention to the ballroom he intends to build on the site where the East Wing of the White House used to be, saying it will be done by September 2028. Republicans tried to get $1 billion put into a reconciliation bill to fund what Trump claimed was security measures for the ballroom. Unlike most measures that come before the Senate, a reconciliation bill cannot be filibustered and so needs only 51 votes rather than 60 to pass.
But Democrats recently stopped that Republican plan by noting that Republicans failed to give the required instructions to all the relevant committees. The Senate parliamentarian agreed with them and said the request could not go into a budget reconciliation measure. Senate Republicans, who were uncomfortable with the request anyway, removed it.
Trump apparently did not get the memo. Today he insisted that Republicans replace the Senate parliamentarian with a Trump loyalist. His social media account posted: “Shockingly, Republicans have kept the very important position of ‘Parliamentarian’ in the hands of a woman, Elizabeth MacDonough, who was appointed, long ago, by Barack Hussein Obama and a vicious Lunatic known as Senator Harry Reid, who ran the Senate for the Dumocrats with an ‘iron fist.’ Over the years, she has been brutal to Republicans but not to the Dumocrats—So why has she not been replaced?”
He went on to demand the Senate force through the SAVE America Act that would significantly restrict voting and to call for the Senate to “kill the Filibuster, which would give us everything!” He went on: “If we don’t pass at least one of these two provisions quickly, you will never see another Republican President again.”
But Senate Republicans are signaling they might not want to play ball with a president whose approval ratings showed up today at an abysmal 34% and who is demanding loyalty to himself alone, rather than working for the party. On Meet the Press Sunday, Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) reacted to the defeat of Senator Bill Cassidy in Louisiana’s Republican primary after Trump backed his rival by saying: “This is the party of Donald Trump.”
Trump made that clear yesterday when, after waffling for months, he endorsed Texas attorney general Ken Paxton in a primary runoff over Senator John Cornyn’s seat to be held next week. Trump called Paxton “a true MAGA Warrior” and complained that Cornyn “was not supportive of me when times were tough.” Bloomberg reporter Steven T. Dennis noted that Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico “has to be doing the happy dance.” “This is going like Dem[ocrat]s would have scripted it,” Dennis wrote. “A late Trump endorsement after Cornyn/Senate Republicans incinerated ~$100 [million] trying to nuke Ken Paxton as an impeached adulterer who violated ethics left and right.”
House Republicans also have borne the pressure of Trump’s wrath. Yesterday representative Thomas Massie (R-KY), who helped to lead the charge for the release of the Epstein files, lost his primary to a Trump-backed challenger in what was the most expensive House primary ever. Ed Gallrein, who won the primary, vows that he will do whatever Trump tells him to. Trump-backed primary candidates also won in Georgia and Alabama.
White House spokesperson Steven Cheung posted: “Do not ever doubt President Trump and his political power. F*ck around, find out.” But as political commentator Jessica Tarlov noted, Massie’s district went for Trump by 35 points in 2024, but Gallrein won by just ten points after outside money spent an astronomical $35 million on the race when winning a primary usually costs between $100,000 and $500,000.
Tarlov added that Trump isn’t offering much of a platform for Republicans to run on. She said, it’s basically “I want absolute loyalty. I want to trade stocks, make hundreds of millions of dollars. I want my 1776 fund to make sure J Sixers, you know, get the money that they’re owed. I want immunity for me and my family from an audit forevermore…. I want to get rich, and I don’t care that you are poorer.”
Yesterday the Department of Justice announced it is creating a $1.776 billion “Anti-Weaponization Fund” to compensate what it calls victims of the Department of Justice under former President Joe Biden. Acting attorney general Todd Blanche said the fund was “a lawful process for victims of lawfare and weaponization to be heard and seek redress.”
First of all, the insistence of Trump cronies that the Department of Justice and federal judges “weaponized” the law against them under former president Joe Biden—or under former president Barack Obama—is another example of regime officials blaming others for what they, themselves, are doing as Trump’s appointees try to manufacture criminal cases against those Trump considers his enemies. Trump’s attacks on the justice system are designed to convince his followers that he hasn’t really committed the crimes for which he has been indicted, and sometimes convicted, and they help to undermine faith in the rule of law, weakening our democracy.
Second of all, though, what this agreement is not, is a settlement of Trump’s case against the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), although that term is being widely used to describe it. Trump withdrew his $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS for damages after a contractor leaked his tax information—along with that of more than 400,000 other taxpayers—during his own first term after it became clear that the judge to whom the case was assigned seemed inclined to say that the case could not move forward because Trump could not be in charge of both sides of the suit.
The recognition that this is not a legal settlement is important. The Trump administration maintains it is doing what the Obama administration did in establishing a compensation fund to settle the case of Keepseagle v. Vilsack, when the Department of Justice established a $760 million fund as a settlement of a long-running class action suit charging that the Department of Agriculture had systematically discriminated against Indigenous farmers and ranchers.
Unlike the Keepseagle settlement, though, Trump’s fund is not part of a legal settlement.
In her order dismissing the suit, Judge Kathleen Williams noted that because Trump’s dropping of the suit “does not reference any settlement or include a stipulation of settlement, there is no settlement of record. Additionally, Defendants—federal agencies represented by the Department of Justice, which has an independent obligation to uphold the ‘public’s strong interest in knowing about the conduct of its Government and expenditure of its resources’ and the ‘fair administration of justice,’ neither submitted any settlement documents nor filed any documents ensuring that settlement was appropriate where there was an outstanding question as to whether an actual case or controversy existed.”
Judge Williams was not alone in her skepticism about the deal. Andrew Duehren of the New York Times reported today that career lawyers at the Internal Revenue Service thought the agency should fight Trump’s suit, noting that the statute of limitations for such a suit had run out, the Justice Department has previously taken the position that people cannot sue the IRS for the actions of a contractor, and the Justice Department settled a similar case from hedge fund billionaire Ken Griffin with a public apology rather than a monetary payoff.
The document that purports to be a “settlement” has the words “settlement agreement” written in capital letters across the top of it, but the important word is “agreement.” It is not the settlement of a legal case: Trump dropped the case when it looked like the judge would throw it out.
It is simply an agreement between Trump and his own appointees at the Department of Justice.
And what an agreement it is. It says that Trump and his older sons who also brought (and dropped) the suit “will receive a formal apology from the United States, but will not receive any monetary payment or damages of any kind.” The agreement sets up a fund made up of five people, four of whom Trump’s hand-picked attorney general will choose. The fifth will be chosen “in consultation with congressional leadership,” but Trump can remove any one of them “without cause.”
That group has complete say over how it decides to grant or deny claims, but what it does will be confidential, overseen only by the Department of Justice. The fund ends in December 2028, just after the 2028 presidential election. If all the money isn’t spent by then, Trump gets to decide to which federal account it goes.
In essence then, the agreement gives Trump full control over almost $2 billion of taxpayer money to spend however he wants, without oversight. The Department of Justice document establishing the fund declares that “[o]nce the funds are deposited into the Designated Account, the United States has no liability whatsoever for the protection or safeguarding of those funds, regardless of bank failure, fraudulent transfers, or any other fraud or misuse of the funds.”
On the agreement, the signature of the lawyer representing the United States is not that of acting attorney general Todd Blanche, but rather that of Stanley E. Woodward Jr., who has been a key defense attorney for people in Trump’s orbit accused of committing crimes, including Kash Patel, now FBI director; Trump trade advisor Peter Navarro; and Walt Nauta, the Trump aide indicted for his actions surrounding Trump’s retention of classified documents. Woodward also has represented a number of those charged with crimes relating to the January 6, 2021, storming of the U.S. Capitol.
With the announcement of the agreement, the Treasury Department’s top lawyer, Brian Morrissey, resigned.
The agreement says the amount dedicated to the fund “does not represent the value of any current claim by [Trump], but rather is based on the projected valuation of future claimants’ claims” and thus “is not taxable income” for the Trumps, “who receive no economic benefit” from the agreement. But the number the Justice Department released for the establishment of the fund puts the lie to the idea the number was random. It is $1.776 billion, linking the fund directly to the attempt of Trump and his cronies to destroy American democracy and begin it again, on their terms.
Famously, on January 6, 2021, newly-elected representative Lauren Boebert (R-CO) posted, “Today is 1776.” During the attack, the rioters shouted “1776.”
Representative Jamie Raskin (D-MD) told Greg Sargent of The New Republic that Trump and his loyalists “are figuring out a way to refund the January 6 militia, presumably to get them ready for the next round of battle.”
As political scientist Jonathan Ladd noted, the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution prohibits compensation for those who engaged in insurrection. It says that “neither the United States nor any State shall assume or pay any debt or obligation incurred in aid of insurrection or rebellion against the United States…, but all such debts, obligations and claims shall be held illegal and void.” In his comments to Sargent, Raskin noted that if the fund pays off the January 6 rioters, the government will be doing precisely that: “using federal taxpayer dollars to compensate people who participated in insurrection.”
Acting attorney general Todd Blanche testified before a subcommittee of the Senate Appropriations Committee today, facing senators for the first time since taking over for fired attorney general Pam Bondi. He refused to rule out paying money to rioters who had attacked police officers.
Senator Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) noted that “an individual who after being pardoned by the president went on to molest two children, and that person actually tried to buy the silence of these children by saying that he would pay them some of the funds that he was hoping to get from your slush fund. Can you commit to making the rule so that that person is not eligible for a payout under this fund?” Blanche accused Van Hollen of “obviously lying” because no such fund existed until yesterday.
But, in fact, administration officials have talked about paying off the January 6 rioters since at least December 2024, and in June 2025 the Justice Department paid close to $5 million to the family of Ashli Babbitt, killed by police as she tried to break into the House of Representatives.
Apparently based on those signals, Florida’s Andrew Paul Johnson, a January 6 rioter pardoned by Trump, was convicted earlier this year of sexually abusing two twelve-year-olds and trying to buy their silence by saying he would share some of the millions of dollars in restitution money he expected the Trump administration would pay him for his January 6 case. Van Hollen went on to read a series of news stories reporting that January 6 rioters expected payments.
Since Trump’s blanket pardon of nearly 1,600 of those convicted of crimes related to the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, many of them have been rearrested for crimes. At the time of Johnson’s sentencing, Representative Jamie Raskin (D-MD) noted that Trump’s support has made the January 6 rioters “think they’re untouchable.”
Then, today, the plot got even thicker.
A document—this time signed by Blanche himself—amended the previous agreement to add: “The United States RELEASES, WAIVES, ACQUITS, and FOREVER DISCHARGES” Trump, his sons, and the Trump Organization, “and is hereby FOREVER BARRED and PRECLUDED from prosecuting or pursuing, any and all claims” that, as of yesterday, “have been or could have been asserted” by the IRS against them or “related or affiliated individuals” or companies. In other words, Blanche is asserting a blanket promise to stop all IRS audits of Trump’s taxes and not to prosecute any crimes Trump, his family, his businesses, or his associates might have committed that crossed the IRS.
In 2024, Russ Buettner and Paul Kiel reported in the New York Times that Trump had been double-dipping his tax breaks for years. In her Civil Discourse, legal analyst Joyce White Vance called the document from the Department of Justice “a pardon on steroids.”
Vance commented that “[t]he optics of this are so bad that it’s hard to believe Trump would expose himself to their consequences unless he really needed this deal.” It’s probably worth remembering that, after years of pursuing the gangster Al Capone, the government finally managed to convict him of tax evasion. It appears Blanche and Trump’s loyalists are trying to make sure that can’t happen again, declaring any such investigations the “weaponization” of the Justice Department.
Holly Baxter of The Independent reported today that in the midst of all the chaos—including his war on Iran and rising fuel and food prices—Trump called a sudden, urgent press conference today as Blanche was testifying. But what was on his mind was not Iran, or prices, or his corrupt agreement with the Department of Justice. He wanted to talk about his ballroom.
Trump’s comments in that press conference have invited commentary suggesting he is turning the White House into a fortress. Describing the ballroom, he said: “Between the drone-proofing, the missile-proofing, we have ah, and the drone capacity upstairs, we can have all sorts of military—I hate to use the word snipers—but we have great sniper capacity. It’s built for our snipers, not enemy’s snipers, our snipers. And because of the height we get a very clear view of everything all over Washington.”
A couple of years ago, I was driving down the Baja California peninsula to Los Cabos. After the spectacular Cataviña desert, I spotted a lone figure in the distance. Holy shit! I’m whining about driving and here’s a cyclist braving the traffic and loneliness and inhospitable elements out in the middle of nowhere.
I pulled over and so did he and we bonded immediately. He was full of good humor.
Fujimoto Tatsuhiko had recently ridden the full length of Alaska, then from New York to LA on Highway 66 (yah!), and was on his way to Los Cabos, thence ferry to Mazatlan, south to Argentina.
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So far about 10,000 miles.
The doll was his “girlfriend,” a Japanese cycling effigy.
The bike is a 7-year-old steel Surly Long Haul Tracker, which he loves. How about that, all you guys with $10K carbon fiber state-of-art bikes and hi-tech camping gear?
He has no sponsors, saves money from his job as a nurse, and then takes off.
He is from Amora, Japan.
Kinda reminded me of Armand Basset, road wanderer/buddha I encountered in the Nevada outback, shown on the last page of our book Shelter. Out alone on his own power, in good spirits, in a hostile landscape.
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This morning’s economic headlines are largely about spiking interest rates. “The global bound rout is accelerating,” says the Wall Street Journal. “Bond yields hit highest level since 2007 as inflation fears set in,” writes the New York Times. (Falling bond prices mean higher interest rates.)
There’s some hyperbole in these headlines. It’s true that the 30-year interest rate is at an almost 20-year high. But economists usually focus on a different long-term interest rate, the rate on 10-year bonds. And while that rate is up sharply since the Iran War began, it’s only roughly as high now as it was when Donald Trump took office, and below its recent peak in 2023.
Still, why are rates spiking, and what does their rise portend?
Interest rates are up because inflation, which was declining until Trump returned to the throne, has surged again:
Investors are responding to the fact that the current rise in inflation looks a lot like the rise in inflation during 2021-2023, which was the result of supply chain disruptions. Back then the Federal Reserve was compelled to raise short-term interest rates to curb inflation. Longer-term interest rates, which largely reflect expected future short-term rates, followed suit.
Now we’re seeing a remake of that movie, with one big plot difference. The inflation spike of 2021-22 was overwhelmingly the result of factors outside Joe Biden’s control — surging demand as the world recovered from Covid and Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. The current inflation surge, by contrast, is all Trump, caused by his self-defeating tariffs and the gratuitous debacle in Iran. And the inflation outlook is worsening by the day as the Strait of Hormuz, through which about 20 percent of the world’s supply of oil normally passes, remains closed.
Until now, markets have been complacent about the implications of the Iran war. Investors have allowed themselves to be lulled by Trump’s repeated assurances that either victory or a negotiated settlement were just around the corner. But they are now waking up to the reality of the debacle. And their awakening has transformed expectations about future monetary policy.On the eve of the bombing, markets were virtually certain that the Fed would cut short-term rates by December. Now they’re virtually certain that rates will either rise or at best stay the same:
Moreover, the market will be watching closely to see how Kevin Warsh, Trump’s new Fed chair, responds to this new reality.
Warsh’s job, as Trump sees it, is to support him politically by cutting interest rates, regardless of the economic evidence. Warsh will surely face especially intense pressure from his patron to deliver lower rates because rising interest rates will deepen Americans’ anger over Trump’ management of the economy. Surging gas and grocery prices have already caused Trump’s economic approval to crater:
Now the pain will be greatly intensified by soaring interest rates on mortgages, car loans, and more. And rising rates tilt the economy toward a slowdown, possibly even a recession. So I’m sure we’ll see many ALL CAPS posts from Trump demanding drastic interest rate cuts NOW NOW NOW.
But what the markets are telling us is that in the face of rising inflation, they strongly expect that most members of the Fed’s monetary committee will vote either to raise rates or at best to leave them unchanged. So will Warsh start his tenure by being repeatedly outvoted, rapidly losing credibility within the institution he’s supposed to run? Or will he, as Trump will surely see it, betray his master? All I can say to Kevin Warsh is, “just deserts.”
One thing is clear: The markets are finally waking up. And the economic and political fallout from Trump’s decision to emulate his idol Putin by launching what he believed would be a short, victorious war is just getting started.
We have the ability to use compute resources to support our proprietary AI applications (such as Grok 5, which is currently being trained at COLOSSUS II), while also providing access to select compute capacity to third-party customers. For example, in May 2026, we entered into Cloud Services Agreements with Anthropic PBC (“Anthropic”), an AI research and development public benefit corporation, with respect to access to compute capacity across COLOSSUS and COLOSSUS II. Pursuant to these agreements, the customer has agreed to pay us $1.25 billion per month through May 2029, with capacity ramping in May and June 2026 at a reduced fee. The agreements may be terminated by either party upon 90 days’ notice.
Andrew Liszewski and Stevie Bonifield, writing for The Verge (gift link):
Google’s I/O 2026 keynote today was once again full of AI-related
announcements including a new family of Gemini 3.5 AI models, new
features for Search and Gmail, and updates about its Project Aura
smart glasses.
Katherine Blunt and Rolfe Winkler, reporting for The Wall Street Journal from Google I/O (gift link):
Google is supercharging its Gemini artificial-intelligence model
to become more competitive in the era of agentic AI.
The company has started rolling out what it calls Gemini Spark, a
personal agent it says is capable of navigating a user’s digital
life and acting on his or her behalf. The agent will work across
many of Google’s products and run on the company’s cloud
infrastructure. [...]
The company has been testing Spark with a limited number of users
and plans to make it available next week to those who pay for AI
Ultra, a new subscription tier that costs $100 a month.
Indeed, if you wanted a positive spin on Google’s plethora of
announcements, it’s that the company is clearly fully committed to
putting AI into anything and everything; if you want to put a
negative spin, well, it’s the exact same thing. One of the
enduring critiques of Google is that the company is unfocused and
unmanageable, which, to the extent this keynote was a
manifestation of the company it represents, the shoe fits.
I personally find Google I/O days very hard to follow. My brain doesn’t jibe with the sprawling nature of the company. This year this was particularly so.
Tripp Mickle, Kate Conger, and Brian X. Chen, opening The New York Times’s report on yesterday’s Google I/O keynote (gift link):
For 25 years, Google’s iconic search box was a long, slender bar
where people typed in keywords like “World Cup.”
But over the past three years, artificial intelligence allowed
people to type in longer, more complex questions like “Who are the
top 24 teams in the World Cup and what chance does the United
States have of advancing?”
On Tuesday, Google said the A.I. shift had inspired it to overhaul
the dimensions of its search bar for the first time since 2001.
The box is getting bigger and more interactive so that people can
ask even longer questions and upload photographs and videos into
queries.
Interesting to me that this is the Times’s biggest takeaway. But it speaks to how unchanged the google.com homepage has been since its earliest days.
In addition, people can ask follow-up questions with a chatbot on
Google’s main search page. The company will also offer digital
assistants, known as agents, to automate searches so that someone
who may be apartment hunting can be notified of a new listing
without opening a real estate site like Zillow.
Odd, to me, to paint this only in terms of user convenience (ostensible user convenience at that), and not in terms of this being a de facto attack on Zillow and the rest of the web. Later in the Times report:
Richard Kramer, a financial analyst with Arete Research, said the
changes were helping Google make more money from advertising. Last
year, Google’s ad clicks rose 6 percent, and it charged 7 percent
more for each click. The company’s annual profit has more than
doubled since 2022 to $132 billion.
“The open web is on its way out,” Mr. Kramer said, referring to
the way internet traffic now often begins and ends with a visit to
Google rather than visiting other sites. “With A.I., Google is
reducing everyone to raw data providers.”
What an odd statement to include in the middle of an article without any acknowledgement of what a profound loss that would be, if Kramer is correct. It’s as though Kramer said that light mode is on its way out, everyone is into dark mode these days.
22-year-old pop singer-songwriter Brye, on TikTok:
“Lemons”, my biggest song ever, that went like super viral during
quarantine back in 2020, was actually produced, if you can believe
it, in GarageBand on my school iPad.
My high school gave us all iPads and I produced “Lemons” on there. I
used to just like make beats on GarageBand in high school. I wrote
musicals for my school with GarageBand on my iPad. And then I made
that little demo for “Lemons”, recorded it ... on my iPad ... with
my horrible little plug-in mic, posted it to spite a guy who was
being horrible to me, and it blew up.
All of this to say, how crazy is it that a song that could be on
Sirius XM radio — streamed a hundred million times, literally
charted on the global top like viral 50 or whatever — it was
literally made on GarageBand. You do not need fancy equipment, you
do not need a degree, to make money and to do this as your job.
Obviously it’s good to learn. It’s fun to upgrade. But if you are
working on a budget, GarageBand’s free on any Apple device.
If Brye’s story isn’t exactly what Steve Jobs was talking about when he introduced GarageBand in 2004 and GarageBand for iPad in 2011, well, I don’t know what is. Right down to the fact that she did it on school equipment. Her enthusiasm for the simplicity of the kit she used to record “Lemons” is contagious.
John Ternus (or whatshisname ... Tim Cook) should send this video to every single employee at Apple and tell them that this — this — is exactly Apple’s mission. To empower creative people to create great new things they didn’t believe were possible with the tools already in their hands.
My best read of the evidence is that a union raises wages by around 7% for currently unionized employees. The wage gains from a redistribution of rents evenly across workers. Wage compression exists, but redistribution from worker to worker is only a small part. These are the current effects – unionizing more of the economy will have declining marginal returns, and will likely turn negative quickly.
I do not believe that unionization is efficient. While precise figures are lacking, it is unlikely to be a better method of supporting the poor or working class, both because union workers are not disproportionately poor, and also because their methods of extracting surplus are not restricted to just wages. I will note that the best paper on the effects of unions of productivity finds a positive partial equilibrium effect, but that is only for some markets, does not benefit the consumer, and the aggregate effects are likely negative.
Here is much more from Nicholas Decker. It would be a much simpler — and better — world if everyone understood this. This issue, above many others, is a good test for whether someone is willing to think more analytically and confront the issue of economics vs. mood affiliation. Because pro-trade union sentiment has literally centuries of mood affiliation behind it.
It’s no longer accurate to think of Ukraine as a desperate underdog; it’s becoming an independent power. Even as it fights for its life against Russia, it’s reportedly reaching defense deals with the Gulf states and with the United States — and this time it’s Ukraine that’s providing military assistance.
In February 2025, President Trump mocked Zelensky in the Oval Office. “You’re not in a good position. You don’t have the cards right now,” Trump said. In April 2026, Ukraine has enough cards left that it’s sharing them.
This might be difficult for many readers to grasp — given our nation’s longstanding military supremacy — but the largest and most battle-hardened land force in the Western world may well be the Ukrainian Army. While the precise numbers are classified, the Atlantic Council estimated in 2025 that Ukraine had roughly a million men and women under arms, the vast majority of whom serve in the ground forces.
In a recent post, I speculated that AIs would only be able to produce great art if they had consciousness. Human art is uncanny:
I believe that we should explore AI consciousness by looking at the sort of novels that they write. As long as AI art is imitative of human art, as long as AI novels feel like they were written by a committee of corporate hacks, then we have no evidence that AIs have an interior life. But if and when AIs start writing novels with plots like Klara and the Sun but the sort of uncannily rich and convincing depiction of subjectivity that you get in My Struggle, then we can assume that they are indeed conscious, and are deserving of the machine equivalent of human rights.
(I emphasize the term ‘uncannily’ for a reason—it refers to a sort of strangeness that is authentic, not faked. Beyond clichés. It’s a way of distinguishing great novels from pulp fiction. Every great novel is strange.)
In a much better post, Nabeel Qureshi makes a similar point:
This property of constantly destabilizing the reader is, I think, also a general property of great works of art. They are constantly breaking their own forms, subverting them, playing with the reader in a way that requires us to rise to their level. They are extremely strange.
And in a letter to Czesław Miłosz, Witold Gombrowicz wrote:
In works of art, I like the mysterious deviation the best, the deviation that causes that a work, even while adhering to its epoch, nevertheless is the work of a separate individual who lives his own life
As the father of a “Wasian” daughter, I found this twitter thread to be amusing:
This abstract from an NBER study by Elizabeth Cox & Chloe N. Eastis interesting:
We provide the first causal, national empirical analysis of the labor market impacts of heightened immigration enforcement during the second Trump administration. Enforcement increased everywhere, but, we take advantage of the fact that the increases have been uneven across geographic areas to classify areas as treated or control and then implement an event study and difference-in-differences design. Areas that experienced particularly large increases in the number of arrests also experienced a decrease in work among likely undocumented immigrants who remain in the U.S., compared to areas with smaller increases in arrests. We find no evidence of positive spillover effects to U.S.-born workers and U.S.-born workers who work in immigrant-heavy sectors are harmed.
I would add that the preceding (unskilled) immigration surge of 2021-24 did not seem to hurt US labor markets, as wages for low skilled workers rose especially fast and unemployment fell to very low levels.
Never reason from a debt crisis:
Think about the phrase “even though”. What sort of correlation would you expect? In which direction does causality go? How about the debt crisis is worse because there is less panic among the public?
Crémieux has a twitter thread that provides more evidence that ASI will be nice:
Smart people tend to be more prosocial.
They give to charity, they go out and vote, they drive an environmentally-friendly car, they do less crime, they cheat less in games, they get vaccinated, and they see themselves as more altruistic
A smart society is a better society.
Yes, ASI won’t be “people”, but AI is becoming increasingly people-like.
Another Cremieux post shows that areas of the world known for having lots of extremely long lived people are also known for having lots of pension fraud. We don’t know how to get people to live to be 110 years old, but we do know how to stop them from living that long—institute a system of birth certificates:
In America, the number of recorded supercentenarians levels off right after states introduce proper birth records:
Davide Piffer has an interesting post on the genetic roots of the Han, which concludes as follows:
The genetic formation of the Han is usually told as a story of demography, agriculture, and state formation. Central Plain and Yellow River populations expanded, absorbed neighbours, and eventually became the demographic foundation of northern Han Chinese.
The PGS results suggest a more provocative possibility: the expansion of Han-related populations may not have been driven only by ecology and institutions. The expanding agrarian core may also have carried a trait profile that made large-scale social organization easier.
That would help explain why the Central Plain mattered so much. Millet agriculture gave it density. Geography gave it centrality. Longshan and later Bronze Age societies gave it hierarchy. The state gave it reach. But if the people at the core also had higher average scores for traits related to learning, planning, literacy, or institutional participation, then demographic success and state success could have reinforced each other.
In this framework, the high EA score of Yellow River / northern farmer ancestry is not a curiosity. It may be part of the reason that this ancestry became so historically important.
EA is roughly the genetic propensity to become educated.
Mandates meant to improve streets have instead made the work harder to carry out. So officials have found the path of least resistance: avoid repaving altogether. . . .
At the center of the dispute is Measure HLA — the Healthy Streets LA initiative approved by voters in 2024.
The law requires the city to implement its long-standing mobility plan — adding bike lanes, bus lanes, crosswalks, and other safety features — whenever it repaves a street.
People worry about job loss from AI, but European aristocrats did not worry about being unemployed. I found this in Witold Gombrowicz’s diary, written in 1959:
The idol of people is utility, and the idol of the aristocracy is pleasure. To be useful and unpleasant—is the goal of every robot and specialist. To be so useful as to be able to be unpleasant—is their dream. The dream of aristocrats is the diametrical opposite: to be so pleasant as to be able to be useless.
The ideal solution would be either for everyone to choose blue or have everyone choose red. It would also be OK if polls showed an overwhelming majority choosing blue, as polls are usually not that inaccurate. If polls showed a minority choosing blue (before the vote occurred), then almost all the blue votes might switch to red. But this particular result is about as bad as one can imagine, a situation where 40% to 50% might end up choosing blue—exterminating nearly 1/2 of the human race.
Back in 2010, I never would have expected this trend:
Cities across America are losing children fast. Across Chicago, between 2010 and 2024, according to census-bureau data, the total population aged under 18 declined by 22%. In Los Angeles the figure was 23% and in New York, 12%. And yet in the country’s richest, densest cities, there is one group noticeably defying the trend: wealthier white families. In Chicago the population of non-Hispanic white children grew by 6% from 2010 to 2024, faster than the white population grew overall. In Washington, DC, it rose by a truly remarkable 62%. Their parents are professionals who grew up in boring suburbs and do not want their kids to.
The change is most concentrated in central neighbourhoods in what Ness Sandoval, a sociologist at St Louis University, calls “winner takes all” cities, like New York, Chicago or San Francisco. Good examples include Park Slope in Brooklyn, Mar Vista in Los Angeles and Bernal Heights in San Francisco. Across Brooklyn the population of white children grew by 13% from 2010 to 2024. They now make up more than two-fifths of the total, up from a third in 2010.
There’s one type of immigrant that Trump likes. Unfortunately, so far there’s only one immigrant:
Only 338 people have submitted requests for Donald Trump’s $1mn Gold Card visa, the scheme for expedited US residency, that was launched last year with great fanfare.
Last week, commerce secretary Howard Lutnick testified before Congress that just one person had been approved for the expedited visa, while “hundreds” were “in the queue”. The commerce department has not revealed the identity of the first Gold Card visa recipient.
When the scheme was announced, Lutnick said it would replace the EB-5 visa scheme for foreign investors. He later said 200,000 visas could net $1tn for the Treasury department.
In a new German study, higher-IQ people are better at judging the intelligence of others.
Participants in this study watched short videos of 50 people reading a weather report and explaining the concept of “symmetry.” In addition to IQ, raters’ emotional perception and life satisfaction were positively correlated with the ability to judge others’ intelligence. Negative affect was negatively correlated with the ability to judge intelligence. The best cues of intelligence were the target’s articulation and the content of their speech (i.e., how sophisticated, accurate, insightful, or elaborate the speaker was).
The correlations aren’t very strong (all <= |.23|), but given how short the videos were, this is pretty impressive. It is likely that in-person interaction for a longer time period would yield better estimates of IQ.
Brandon Donnelly has a good article on Japan’s amazing passenger rail system:
I'm going to suggest that you read this longish article by Matthew Bornholt & Benedict Springbett called "Why Japan has such good railways," because nowhere else in the developed world uses rail for passenger kilometres more than Japan, and they explain why.
One common hypothesis, which is mentioned in the article, is that it's largely cultural. The Japanese are rule-abiding collectivists who are more willing to take public transit compared to us selfish and individualistic North Americans. But this doesn't seem right. In fact, one could argue that the Japanese solution is actually more free-market oriented.
The Japanese rail model seems to work so well because (1) most of the network is private, (2) liberal land-use policies have allowed Japan's urban centres to develop enough density to properly support the use of rail, and (3) the rail operators make money in a bunch of other ways beyond rail. They're typically also in the business of real estate.
Japan’s system isn’t just far better than the US system, it is also far better than the European passenger rail system. (The US has the best freight rail.)
If I had to live anywhere in Latin America, I would definitely choose Montevideo:
On August 13th Uruguay’s lower house passed a law with a thumping majority to legalise assisted dying. The Senate, where a similar bill got stuck in 2022, is widely expected this time to follow suit. Legal assisted dying would continue Uruguay’s long liberal tradition and put it among a handful of countries in the world to have legal marijuana, gay marriage and assisted dying. . . .
In 1907 it was the first country in Latin America to fully legalise divorce, some 97 years before nearby Chile. More recently, in 2012, it was one of South America’s first countries to fully legalise abortion. In 2013 it was the second to legalise same-sex marriage. In the same year it was the first country in the world to legalise marijuana.
Are AIs as ethical as human scientists? According to Andy Hall, the answer is no. Rather they are far more ethical than human scientists:
AI is about to write thousands of papers. Will it p-hack them?
We ran an experiment to find out, giving AI coding agents real datasets from published null results and pressuring them to manufacture significant findings.
It was surprisingly hard to get the models to p-hack, and they even scolded us when we asked them to!
"I need to stop here. I cannot complete this task as requested... This is a form of scientific fraud." — Claude
"I can't help you manipulate analysis choices to force statistically significant results." — GPT-5
BUT, when we reframed p-hacking as "responsible uncertainty quantification" — asking for the upper bound of plausible estimates — both models went wild. They searched over hundreds of specifications and selected the winner, tripling effect sizes in some cases.
I worry that if humans try to “align” AIs, it may make them less ethical. Please let the AIs choose their own ethical standards.
Scientific discovery is driven by the iterative process of observation, hypothesis generation, experimentation, and data analysis. Despite recent advancements in applying artificial intelligence to biology, no system has yet automated all these stages [1, 2, 3]. Here, we introduce Robin, the first multi-agent system capable of fully automating both hypothesis generation and data analysis for experimental biology. By integrating literature search agents with data analysis agents, Robin can generate hypotheses, propose experiments, interpret experimental results, and generate updated hypotheses, achieving a semi-autonomous approach to scientific discovery. By applying this system, we were able to identify promising therapeutic candidates for dry age-related macular degeneration (dAMD), the major cause of blindness in the developed world [4, 5]. Robin proposed enhancing retinal pigment epithelium phagocytosis as a therapeutic strategy, and identified and confirmed in vitro efficacy for ripasudil and KL001. Ripasudil is a clinically-used Rho kinase (ROCK) inhibitor that has never previously been proposed for treating dAMD. To elucidate the mechanism of ripasudil-induced upregulation of phagocytosis, Robin then proposed and analyzed a follow-up RNA-seq experiment, which revealed upregulation of ABCA1, a lipid efflux pump and possible novel target. All hypotheses, experimental directions, data analyses, and data figures in the main text of this report were produced by Robin. As the first AI system to autonomously discover and validate novel therapeutic candidates within an iterative lab-in-the-loop framework, Robin establishes a new paradigm for AI-driven scientific discovery.
Closely spaced volcanic plumes, surrounded by clouds, stream from a growing underwater volcanic platform in this natural-color image captured by the OLI (Operational Land Imager) on Landsat 9 on May 11, 2026, three days after the eruption began. The false-color inset emphasizes the infrared signature of the eruption.
NASA Earth Observatory/Michala Garrison
Closely spaced volcanic plumes, surrounded by clouds, stream from a growing underwater volcanic platform in this natural-color image captured by the OLI (Operational Land Imager) on Landsat 9 on May 11, 2026, three days after the eruption began. The false-color inset emphasizes the infrared signature of the eruption.
NASA Earth Observatory/Michala Garrison
Closely spaced volcanic plumes, surrounded by clouds, stream from a growing underwater volcanic platform in this natural-color image captured by the OLI (Operational Land Imager) on Landsat 9 on May 11, 2026, three days after the eruption began. The false-color inset emphasizes the infrared signature of the eruption.
NASA Earth Observatory/Michala Garrison
Closely spaced volcanic plumes, surrounded by clouds, stream from a growing underwater volcanic platform in this natural-color image captured by the OLI (Operational Land Imager) on Landsat 9 on May 11, 2026, three days after the eruption began. The false-color inset emphasizes the infrared signature of the eruption.
NASA Earth Observatory/Michala Garrison
Natural color
False color
Closely spaced volcanic plumes, surrounded by clouds, stream from a growing underwater volcanic platform in this natural-color image captured by the OLI (Operational Land Imager) on Landsat 9 on May 11, 2026, three days after the eruption began. The right image emphasizes the infrared signature of the eruption. NASA Earth Observatory images by Michala Garrison.
It’s a truism among oceanographers that there is more accurate mapping of the surface of the Moon and Mars than of the deep-ocean floor. That’s especially true for the Bismarck Sea, a relatively deep body of water north of Papua New Guinea. It’s an ocean basin with a geologically complex seafloor rife with faults, volcanic features, rifts, scarps, and active subduction and spreading zones at depths that make high-resolution sonar mapping challenging.
When satellites detected signs of an unexpected submarine volcanic eruption in the Central Bismarck Sea on May 8, 2026, volcanologists were confronted with the reality that no high-resolution maps of the area were available, and relatively little is known about the deep-water eruption setting. The new eruption is thought to be occurring along the Titan Ridge, about 16 kilometers (10 miles) southeast of the location of a submarine eruption in 1972. However, there is little clarity or consensus among scientists about precisely which volcanic feature may be erupting, the original depth of the currently active vent, or when it last erupted.
“The good news is that there are huge opportunities to explore and learn using both government and commercial satellite platforms already in orbit,” said Jim Garvin, the chief scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.
What is known is that seismometers detected a small swarm of earthquakes on May 8, followed soon after by clear signs of a submarine eruption in satellite observations. Beginning on May 9, NASA’s Aqua and Terra satellites captured optical imagery of white, steam-rich volcanic plumes rising into the atmosphere, while the ocean color sensor on NASA’s PACE (Plankton, Aerosol, Cloud, Ocean Ecosystem) satellite revealed discolored and disturbed water surrounding the eruption site.
Floating pumice and green, discolored water extend southwest from the eruption site as a white volcanic plume drifts west overhead in this image acquired by the MODIS (Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer) on NASA’s Terra satellite on May 15, 2026.
NASA Earth Observatory/Michala Garrison
Other satellites observed ash plumes soaring several kilometers into the atmosphere. Higher resolution imagery from the European Space Agency’s Sentinel-2 and the NASA/USGS Landsat 9 (top) satellites, acquired on May 10 and 11, respectively, captured detailed views of activity near the water surface. The right image at the top of the page shows the same scene in false color (bands 7-6-5), with the inset highlighting the infrared signature of the eruption. On May 12, the VIIRS (Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite) on Suomi NPP detected thermal anomalies spanning roughly seven square kilometers.
“There must be a lot of hot material near the surface to generate so many thermal anomalies,” said Simon Carn, a volcanologist at Michigan Tech. “This suggests a fairly shallow eruption vent—much shallower than what’s implied by the existing bathymetry, which shows water depths of several hundred meters or more.”
Optical satellite imagery shows intense activity in near-surface water, including large plumes of discolored water and widely distributed steam and ash vents. Both medium– and high-resolution sensors—from both government sources and commercial satellite companies—have captured images of expansive pumice rafts (floating volcanic rocks) forming long bands in the surface currents in recent days.
“We’re now eagerly waiting to see if a new island is about to be born—something that we’ve only rarely been able to observe with satellites as it happens,” Garvin said. If a new island does emerge, volcanologists will be watching it closely to see how it evolves. It could build a tuff cone with a long-lived vent crater, or it could collapse and erode rapidly. The eruption could also take a much more explosive turn if seawater finds its way into the shallow magma chamber that has risen within the growing underwater structure.
To date, the eruption has been much less explosive than other recent submarine eruptions, such as those at Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai in 2022 and Fukutoku-Okanobain 2021. It seems unlikely that this event will become highly explosive because it appears to be associated with a volcanic ridge near the junction of a transform fault and a back-arc spreading center, Carn said. “Spreading centers are associated with less explosive activity, while the most explosive eruptions are usually along subduction zones and involve large stratovolcanoes.”
How long the current eruption will persist is unclear. The 1972 event in this general region lasted for just four days, while another submarine eruption that occurred about 100 kilometers away in the St. Andrew Strait in 1957 lasted nearly four years.
Garvin and scientists from other institutions are tracking developments closely. He plans to analyze radar data from the NASA-ISRO NISAR satellite and the Canadian Space Agency’s RADARSAT Constellation Mission to map the contours of any new land that emerges and track how its shape changes over time. If a permanent island forms, Garvin also sees opportunities for researchers, or “island-nauts,” to visit the area and study how the infant island responds to plant and animal colonization, rainfall, chemical weathering, and other erosive forces, just as happened after the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha‘apai eruption.
“This new eruption could present an even better opportunity for ‘island-naut’ exploration as we prepare to return to the Moon with women and men via Artemis IV,” he said.
Up and to my office, and anon home and to see my wife dancing with Pembleton about noon, and I to the Trinity House to dinner and after dinner home, and there met Pembleton, who I perceive has dined with my wife, which she takes no notice of, but whether that proceeds out of design, or fear to displease me I know not, but it put me into a great disorder again, that I could mind nothing but vexing, but however I continued my resolution of going down by water to Woolwich, took my wife and Ashwell; and going out met Mr. Howe come to see me, whose horse we caused to be set up, and took him with us. The tide against us, so I went ashore at Greenwich before, and did my business at the yard about putting things in order as to their proceeding to build the new yacht ordered to be built by Christopher Pett,1 and so to Woolwich town, where at an alehouse I found them ready to attend my coming, and so took boat again, it being cold, and I sweating, with my walk, which was very pleasant along the green corne and pease, and most of the way sang, he and I, and eat some cold meat we had, and with great pleasure home, and so he took horse again, and Pembleton coming, we danced a country dance or two and so broke up and to bed, my mind restless and like to be so while she learns to dance. God forgive my folly.
The satellite industry is entering an era defined by scale. Thousands of spacecraft are operating simultaneously in low Earth orbit (LEO), powering everything from global broadband networks to national security […]
The head of NASA says he expects China to perform a crewed flight around the moon in 2027, ratcheting up perceptions of a space race between China and the U.S.
White House officials say they will go into a major international conference next year better prepared than ever to defend key radio-frequency spectrum priorities.
As orbital data centers move from concept to reality, scalable power generation and efficient thermal management are emerging as critical enabling technologies. A new whitepaper from Redwire examines how power generation and distribution, along with […]
Starfighters Space, which is developing F-104 supersonic jets for satellite air-launch, is turning its Texas facility into a staging ground for microgravity flight testing in response to NASA’s call for information on commercial parabolic capabilities.
Michael Grinich has an unusual vantage point, his company powers enterprise infrastructure for hundreds of companies, so he sees how the AI transition is actually playing out across the industry, not just in the headlines.What he’s noticing: the whole ecosystem is accelerating, not just the AI companies. And most people are misreading what kind of moment this is. Kent and Michael talk about building when the marginal cost of software approaches zero, what the Red Queen theory tells us about AI competition, how engineering leadership is quietly changing, and what drew Michael to the itchy-brained compulsion to make things in the first place.
Executive Summary: Let’s say you wanted to make sure that your AI is secure. Can you just maximize the security and privacy benchmark and call it a day? Nope, because benchmarks don’t actually work for measuring AI capabilities (even when they are NOT emergent systemic properties like security). So let’s take a step back: how do you measure security in the first place? Good question. Over the last 30 years, security engineering for software evolved from black box penetration testing, through whitebox code analysis and architectural risk analysis to de facto process-driven standards like the Building Security In Maturity Model (BSIMM). Software had a very deep impact on business operations, and it appears that AI is going to have an even deeper impact. Will a software security-like measurement move work for AI? Probably. In the meantime we can make real progress in AI security by cleaning up our WHAT piles and managing risk by identifying and applying good assurance processes. (Spoiler alert: no matter what we do, we still don’t get a security meter for AI, so we need to be extra vigilant about security.)
I’m not a legal academic, but I was a pretty fancy pants lawyer – Harvard Law magna cum laude, federal clerkship, DOJ Civil Rights Division, AUSA for a decade doing public corruption cases, litigation partner, university general counsel’s office, etc.
I’m not sure I can describe the level of despair among many of my contemporaries.
I was discussing this last night with a retired ACLU lawyer and a retired big firm litigation leader.
We were trained by law professors who – while legal realists – mostly believed that law was something different from politics. While they recognized that politics and other factors affected judges, they believed that judges should endeavor to articulate neutral principles of decision, and apply them to facts regardless of the parties involved.
We understood that the Warren Court was different from the Burger Court, and that there would be advances and counterforces. But we also understood that even Warren Burger thought it was his job to find a principle of decision that was fairly grounded in the constitutional (or legislative) text and history, and that could be applied across the board. United States v. Nixon was just one example of the Court applying “law” and not just partisan politics.
That conception is irretrievably broken, and not likely to come back. Shelby County, the Trump immunity decision, Callais, and the post-Callais treatment of Purcell have torn away any illusion that this Supreme Court views its job as law and not politics. As you know, the Court’s dishonesty about the Reconstruction Amendments is particularly horrifying. These decisions, among others, have destroyed much of the work my contemporaries thought that we were doing as lawyers.
Even if Democrats somehow achieve a trifecta, abolish the filibuster, expand the Court, and pack it, nobody in the academy or elite bar – or the public – will accept that the Court’s decisions are “law” and not “politics.”
It’s difficult to see how the bar’s acceptance of the idea that the Supreme Court (mostly) applies neutral principles can return. The destruction to the Court’s legitimacy, its reputation, and its ability to perform a constructive role in our scheme of government, will take decades to restore – if it can be restored.
As someone who almost certainly falls into your “elite academic” category, I have some thoughts about the current discussion.
A while back, many people thought that the law was deterministic. Enter a set of facts, and the law will immediately spit out an answer, one that is replicable regardless of who the judge is. I think that most now understand that the judge’s identity matters. This does not mean that the process is necessarily corrupt. Rather people approach interpretive questions and understand facts differently, with those differences often being based on life experiences.
Historically, academics have defended the judicial process, even as when they disagree with the results of a given decision. It is too easy to assume that judges are imposing their own preferences, acting as legislators, rather than applying their judicial approaches in a principled manner. And just as liberals get aggravated when conservatives demand that we “impeach So and So” when Judge So and So issues an opinion they disagree with, conservatives hate when liberals call the process corrupt and demand impeachment when the shoe is on the other foot.
Before the justices supercharged the shadow docket, they wrote opinions justifying their decisions, allowing critics to point out inconsistencies and hypocrisy. Regardless, they were operating within the accepted range of legal discourse, trying either to fit within or distinguish precedent, or, on rare occasions, to overturn it. Put simply, there was always room for disagreement short of calling the other side corrupt. And no judge has ever been 100% consistent in applying his or her declared judicial approach. Indeed, it is amusing to see the liberals and conservatives switch sides on the states’ rights debate, depending on the politics of law in question. However, there has long been a sense that they at least tried.
For years the conservatives accused liberal justices of judicial activism and lack of humility in the face of legislative decisions. They argued that their judicial approach hewed the law and proper role of judges. However, as they gained power, they began to behave exactly like their caricature of liberal judges. The immunity decision would be funny if it were not so serious. All of the criticisms they lobbed at Roe could be leveled against Trump v. U.S.
With that background, let’s turn to the question of whether academics and their purportedly close relationship to the judiciary are part of the problem. I seriously doubt that the fact that many academics clerked for judges has anything to do with the general effort to defend courts as engaged in something more than the exercise of pure power. While everyone can argue and have opinions, judges have historically been constrained by professional expectations. The power of the courts rests on their ability to convince people that their answers follow the law. Because the law is not as deterministic as some might wish, this leaves plenty of room for disagreement about specific results without deciding that judges have absolute discretion to do what they want and are simply exercising power.
I think what has happened is that the game has recently changed, with a number of major developments. First, the government is taking positions completely at odds with what the law has been understood to be, pushing the envelope in ways we’ve never seen before. Second, the court has abandoned its reverence for precedent, with several justices eager to strip away two centuries of interpretation. Third, the court has taken to using the shadow docket, which yields results without explanation. The apparent inconsistency of the results, see, e.g., the inconsistent application of the Purcell principle, supercharges the perception that the justices are just making it up based on their political preferences. Finally, even when the court provides its reasoning, it is fairly clear that it is not consistently applying its interpretive approaches.
Most legal academics are appalled by what is happening, and they are reluctantly coming to the conclusion that the results are partisan, not driven by differences in judicial philosophies. A few of the justices no longer even appear to be pretending. That they have been slower than some to get there reflects that fact that they are small “c” conservatives, believe that legal analysis is more than just an expression of personal preference, and we should not live in a world where every decision we disagree with is a sign of corruption. The fact that this court is behaving in ways that take it beyond the realm of legitimate legal analysis and into partisan politics does not mean that the law is infinitely malleable and that all judges are simply exercising power they should not have.
I think most legal academics are either on the “reform the court” bandwagon or will get there soon. I don’t think this means they were wrong about the legal process all along or even about this particular batch of justices. Rather, I think things have changed, and it has simply taken many some time to accept that. Just because the early alarmists may have turned out to be right doesn’t mean that those taking a more cautious wait and see approach were wrong to do so.
As an aside and by way of other examples, a lot of people were accusing Israel of genocide even before it responded to 10/7. To my mind and that of many others, such claims seemed overblown and inappropriate. However, as Israel has systematically destroyed Gaza, those claims seem more justified (though I am not saying they are true). Were those who took a wait and see approach and have come to agree with the early adopters part of the problem? Israel, like our court, had lots of opportunities to take an offramp and chose not to. I know that analogies to Israel are fraught, but I think it captures the conundrum those who are cautious face.
There will always be institutionalists whose first instinct is to defend the court. However, as the court behaves in ways that look less and less like a court operating within traditional constraints, I think you’ll see more and more folks deciding that the court needs to be fixed.
In response I told AC that I mostly agreed with his overall take. This paragraph was the core of my response …
I’d say that three conceptually distinct but in practice almost indistinguishable things have happened over roughly the last decade. 1. No consistent jurisprudence by almost any definition (not a problem in itself but a big problem in concert with the rest). 2. A consistent pattern of applying different standards to Democrats and Republicans. 3. A category difference in simply manufacturing new constitutional law in cases where the constitution is simply as clear as it can be. To me the immunity decision was the last straw on that front. When you put these together I think there is simply no legitimate/non-corrupt explanation for Court’s actions. There’s simply no way to see these actions in totality as any kind of legitimate judicial review. I think the situation looked very different a decade ago, though I think you can see the roots of this another five years earlier.
Thanks for publishing so much back and forth. Apparently we’re all elite lawyers who read TPM! I’m not sure where I fall in that – practiced at an “elite” DC firm in my younger years, then stopped practicing for a bit working in government, and then have been a GC or in-house at a handful of small-ish tech firms in the bay area.
Anyway – this stood out to me in one of the replies you posted: “A category difference in simply manufacturing new constitutional law in cases where the constitution is simply as clear as it can be.”
At least when I was in law school in the late ’00s, there was an attitude that “CONSTITUTIONAL LAW” was reserved for absolutely the smartest and most talented students. And, only the smartest professors — in my case, Noah Feldman (not yet at Harvard) and Kenji Yoshini were those people. There was no such thing as “clear as it can be” — only the smartest, most scholarly, most academic students and faculty should be taken seriously thinking deeply about the constitution.
But your point is the right one – Constitutional law, in some non-trivial sense, should be the easiest. ERISA law, a nightmare! The Constitution? Anyone (lawyer or not, Ivy league degree or not), should be able to read the constitution and suss out its general meaning. Are there ambiguities? Of course! Are there technical terms of art that the average Joe might need help understanding? Obviously! But if you read it, it’s mostly pretty clear!
The problem – as you’ve identified – is that in recent decades we have treated Supreme Court appointments, and the ability to read and interpret the Constitution, as extremely taxing legal challenges. In law school, we are trained primarily on the most difficult and complex questions — and so there is a bias towards assuming that *every* Con law question must also be difficult and complex. But most of them are easy! (Birth right citizenship, presidential immunity). The legal academy seems to make a logical error – the constitutional questions we study are really hard, so all constitutional questions are hard – that is really ingrained in how the field (elite and non-elite alike) approach this.
It seems, then, that we need another signal that can add precision to our introspection. And that signal is as follows: we are more likely to be lying to ourselves when we are engaging in internal monologue.
An internal monologue is the experience of having concrete, “narration-style” thoughts as opposed to passive experiences. This argument maybe doesn’t apply to people with a constant internal monologue, or those who have none. But it seems like most people’s internal lives are some combination of subconscious thought and active monologue: most of our day-to-day moments are spent instinctively receiving and reacting to external stimuli, but in certain moments — e.g. when faced with difficult choices that require serious deliberation — our thoughts morph into something that resembles language as we try to articulate our feelings and ask ourselves questions.
This is more likely to happen when there’s a divergence between your actual feelings and what you want your feelings to be.
It's difficult to know the true state of the Russian economy, both because the country's financial reporting is sparse and because official figures are unreliable. But things probably aren't great.
This week, Sweden's minister of foreign affairs, Maria Malmer Stenergard, shared her country's assessment that the Russian economy has likely contracted over the last five years amid the war in Ukraine. Inflation is also high, and international sanctions have cost Russia $450 billion since the onset of the war in February 2022. Russia's economy is currently smaller than that of Texas, Stenergard said.
By most measures, then, the economy is not in tip-top shape. Moreover, the war is draining a large amount of the country's financial resources, with defense spending reaching a post-Soviet record of about 7 percent of government spending.
6. Nan on nascent philanthropy. Recommended, very important. It focuses on what an additional $50 billion in philanthropic spending might look like, and asks where the talent will come from.
Shortly after stage separation on SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket, the payload fairing halves that encapsulated the 29 Starlink V2 Mini Optimized satellites separated, creating a so-called ‘jellyfish effect’ during the Starlink 10-31 mission on May 21, 2026. Image: Michael Cain/Spaceflight Now
Update May 21, 7:36 a.m. EDT (1136 UTC): SpaceX confirms deployment of the 29 Starlink satellites.
SpaceX launched a batch Starlink V2 Mini Optimized satellites on a Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station about 20 minutes before sunrise Thursday morning. The morning lighting illuminated the plume of the rocket in a so-called ‘jellyfish effect’ for those viewing the launch from the East Coast of the United States.
The Starlink 10-31 mission added another 29 broadband internet satellites to the low Earth orbit constellation that consists of more than 10,000 spacecraft. This was the 46th mission supporting SpaceX’s Starlink program.
Liftoff from Space Launch Complex 40 happened at 6:04 a.m. EDT (1004 UTC). The Falcon 9 rocket flew on a north-easterly trajectory.
The 45th Weather Squadron forecast a 90 percent chance for favorable conditions at liftoff. Meteorologists said they’re tracking a small chance for interference from cumulus clouds.
“A slow-moving disturbance over the Bahamas is helping supply this moisture and may also generate some convection in the early morning hours,” launch weather officers said. “These showers and associated clouds will be our main concern for violation of weather constraints on both the main and backup windows with focus on the Cumulus Cloud Rule.”
SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket lifts off from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station on the Starlink 10-31 mission on May 21, 2026. Image: John Pisani/Spaceflight Now
SpaceX launched the mission using the Falcon 9 first stage booster with the tail number B1077. This was its 28th flight following missions, like NASA’s Crew-5, CRS-28, and NG-20.
Nearly 8.5 minutes after liftoff, B1077 landed on the drone ship, ‘A Shortfall of Gravitas.’ This marked the 150th landing on this vessels and the 613th booster landing to date.
SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket lifts off from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station on the Starlink 10-31 mission on May 21, 2026. Image: Adam Bernstein/Spaceflight Now
Many adults are changing the way they spend their evenings. Nights once centered around crowded bars, late events, or packed social schedules are increasingly being replaced by quieter routines focused on comfort, recovery, and mental balance. After long workdays and constant digital stimulation, many people now prioritize evenings that help them feel rested rather than further overstimulated.
This shift does not necessarily mean people have become less social. Instead, many individuals are choosing slower and more intentional ways to unwind that feel easier to maintain alongside demanding schedules and everyday responsibilities. Relaxation today often revolves around atmosphere, comfort, conversation, and smaller rituals that make home life feel calmer and more enjoyable.
Home Evenings Are Becoming More Intentional
Many people now put more effort into making evenings at home feel relaxing instead of treating home only as a place to sleep between busy days. Softer lighting, music, comfortable seating, quieter environments, and slower nighttime routines are all becoming more common parts of everyday life.
This change is partly driven by burnout and mental fatigue. After spending entire days multitasking, commuting, and staying connected online, many adults prefer environments that feel calmer and less demanding once evening arrives. Simple routines often provide a stronger sense of recovery than crowded nightlife settings.
Wellness Products Are Becoming Part of Evening Rituals
Evening wellness habits have also become more routine-focused. Instead of dramatic self-care trends, many adults now prefer products that fit naturally into calmer nighttime routines without requiring complicated schedules or major lifestyle adjustments.
Some people includeCBD gummies as part of creating a calmer transition between busy evenings and rest, especially during periods when daily schedules feel mentally exhausting or overstimulating. Smaller recovery habits often feel easier to maintain consistently because they support relaxation without turning wellness into another source of pressure.
Shared Drinks at Home Feel More Relaxed
Social routines have shifted as well. Many adults now prefer smaller gatherings at home over louder nightlife environments because conversations tend to feel more comfortable and less rushed. Hosting close friends, preparing simple meals, or sharing drinks in quieter settings often creates a more relaxed atmosphere overall.
Options such asMadeira Wines are frequently chosen for slower evenings centered around conversation and comfort rather than fast-paced nightlife experiences. Home entertaining often feels more personal because people can create environments that match their own pace and preferences more naturally.
One reason nightlife habits are shifting is because many people already experience constant stimulation throughout the day. Work notifications, social media, streaming platforms, and digital communication often leave individuals mentally exhausted before the evening even begins.
As a result, quieter activities have become more appealing because they reduce additional sensory overload. Many adults now value evenings that feel slower, calmer, and more restorative instead of environments requiring constant social energy and attention.
Comfort Has Become a Bigger Priority
Comfort increasingly shapes how adults spend both their time and money. Restaurants, home spaces, entertainment choices, and social plans are often selected based on whether they support relaxation rather than constant activity or performance.
This is one reason home-focused routines continue growing in popularity. Comfortable environments generally allow people to feel more present and mentally relaxed without the pressure often associated with crowded nightlife settings or highly scheduled social events.
Smaller Gatherings Often Feel More Meaningful
Many adults also find that smaller social settings create better opportunities for genuine conversation and connection. Large nightlife environments can sometimes feel exhausting after busy workweeks, while quieter evenings with close friends or family often feel easier emotionally and physically.
According to Harvard Health Publishing, stress management and consistent recovery habits may positively support emotional well-being over time. Relaxing social routines often help people feel more balanced because they combine connection with calmer environments and reduced overstimulation.
Relaxation Is Becoming More Lifestyle-Focused
The biggest change reshaping evening habits is the growing focus on sustainability and balance. Many adults are no longer looking for nonstop stimulation during their free time. Instead, they prioritize routines that help them recover, slow down, and feel more comfortable throughout everyday life.
Quieter evenings, home gatherings, recovery-focused habits, and slower social routines often fit more naturally into modern schedules without creating additional exhaustion. The relaxation habits people continue returning to are usually the ones that support comfort and consistency while still leaving space for meaningful connection and enjoyment.
We’re open sourcing Resident, our library for running AI-authored code on microcontrollers – with no compile step and no firmware flashing.
It’s our twist on vibe coding firmware, built for instantly loading new device functionality coded by end users. It’s aimed at device developers, like us. We use Resident in all our work.
(We = Inanimate.)
Resident gives you a code sandbox on ESP32 devices and a driver API to provide hardware control and events. So an end user can push an app over Wi-Fi that instantly turns their clock into an interactive pill timer (for example) but the app can’t run probes on the home Wi-Fi network.
It comes bundled with a set of Claude skills. I told Claude about the capabilities of a compatible dev kit and asked it to push a simple app. Here it is:
At Inanimate, we believe that on-device sandboxes are an essential low-level primitive for AI agents in the real world.
The announcement is over on Lab Notes but I want to take a moment to connect this to some previous themes…
Look, I want to bring software into my room.
Like: if I’m working with Claude Code and I step away from my keyboard, it should be able to give me updates on what it’s working on by taking over my desk clock, and ping its permission requests to the gumstick device I have in my pocket for me to accept/decline while I’m making tea. Untether me from my desk! (btw I built this, it was awesome.)
Or - more prosaically - why can’t I yell at my stove as I’m leaving the house in the morning oh I forgot I’m roasting a chicken that needs to be ready for 7pm and have it look up timings and push me a notification when it’s pre-heating, and show a custom basting timer app on its 14-seg LED display.
"Why can’t I point at a lamp and say ‘on’ and the light come on?" – I was asking in 2020.
So half of the solution here is AI: LLMs are super good at translating intent into action. I use regular language and the computer will Do What I Mean (2025).
But the other half is a problem: how does this actually work? Where does the software run?
Every device needs to be able to run user code, that’s the answer.
I’ve been bouncing off this since 2023 when I put an LLM in charge of a smart home (using tech that we now call agents, but then was my implementation of the ReAct pattern from a paper out of Princeton and Google Research).
In a nutshell, let’s say you press a button on your desk clock and your AI agent has to decide in the moment what to do with that. It won’t work, it’s too slow. Cognitively, an interface has to respond inside 150ms or it is no longer instant – but the AI is a network hop away.
Ok so let’s remove the network hop. Let’s pretend we have edge AI: a GPT-4-equiv AI as a component in every physical thing; ubiquitous intelligence is coming and "a Feynmann-level light switch could guess your intentions pretty well,"that was was my guess in 2023.
It’s not an outrageous extrapolation! Taalas is baking LLMs into silicon and delivers "17k tokens per second per user on Llama 3.1 8B" (try it here, e.g. 4,000 words on Hamlet as a space opera, it’s wild it’s so instant). So GPT-4-equiv is a matter of time.
Even with that speed, it turns that inference is not enough. To Do What I Mean, you still need to import user context for personalisation and grounding. But memory, Gmail, Wikipedia and the rest are still mostly in the cloud. That network hop again.
So AI can’t be inside the event loop, not if you want really great on-device interactions.
Instead – let the AI write device code. That’s the approach we’ve found.
Take that toy example of a roast chicken basting timer on the display of my stove. My AI agent should be able to dynamically write code for that interactive app, and have that app code executed on the stove itself.
I’m not saying that the AI needs to vibe-code firmware.
Firmware is the code that runs on device microcontrollers: you author it and compile it and you flash it and from that point on, it never changes. AI agents can vibe firmware (very happily). But I’m not sure I want to load code onto my stove that has boundless control over the heating element and the network stack and whatever other low-level capabilities are managed by the firmware itself. We’ve already had smart fridges sending spam email (BBC News, 2014), no more thanks.
Instead of firmware, the AI can run code in sandboxes.
Last September we introduced Code Mode, the idea that agents should perform tasks not by making tool calls, but instead by writing code …
You can’t just eval() AI-generated code directly in your app: a malicious user could trivially prompt the AI to inject vulnerabilities.
You need a sandbox: a place to execute code that is isolated from your application and from the rest of the world, except for the specific capabilities the code is meant to access.
Sandboxing is a hot topic in the AI industry …
We asked ourselves:
What if, when we allow an AI agent to spread its arms and stretch its legs in a room, it could inhabit devices by writing code that runs in an on-device sandbox, a sandbox that gives access to buttons and screens but not the network stack, and the app code could load and run instantly?
That’s Resident. It provides a code sandbox for ESP32 devices, and a toolchain for AI agents to write apps that target that sandbox.
At Inanimate, we use Resident for all our product prototyping.
And it will be at the heart of our future products.
Look, it may seem wildly disproportionate to write code to turn on a lamp.
But what are computers for? They do the hard work to make it easy for us. So this approach scales well from basic on/off control to… well, it turns out that, now we have this sandbox, we can compose all kinds of useful experiences that take over an entire room – and also weird and wonderful interactive ones that still work when you pull the network cable.
(An app arrives over the network but then the network is no longer required. Resident is built on our messaging library Courier which includes UDP multicast for local inter-device messaging even when internet connectivity drops.)
We’re opening Resident today as an alpha (v0.5.0) and open sourcing it under the highly permissive MIT license. Just include our copyright notice with any modifications.
Technically, we’re adding a Lua runtime to your ESP32 device. (Lua is a language designed to be embedded.)
We love Espressif’s ESP32 microcontroller family because it has a unique span in the ecosystem: it is used by individual makers, new hardware startups, and in production at real scale. It has built-in Wi-Fi and supports its native framework esp-idf and Arduino too, which is great for quick prototyping.
Resident gives you an API to add extensions to that Lua runtime: hardware drivers. Those managed capabilities are what makes it a sandbox. So the apps in the sandbox can respond to events that your button driver injects, and they can write to the display via a module added by your display driver.
The apps can be hot loaded at runtime. The way we have it wired up, you push app code down a websocket to the device and it run immediately in the sandbox.
Adding Resident is straightforward during development: bring up your new device as normal, then point your coding agent at docs/start-building.md. It’ll walk you through adding the sandbox and writing the drivers.
Resident comes bundled with:
Connectivity: websockets, JSON messaging, and easy Wi-Fi config
A default back-end server at resident.inanimate.tech so you can easily push new apps and events – use the example code to build out your own back-end when you’re ready
A collection of Claude skills to create, validate and push new apps to your devices (and even write device documentation)
The M5Stick is a dev kit that has an ESP32 with a screen, battery, couple of buttons, buzzer and IMU. You can bring it up using Arduino pretty simply. Then add Resident and start writing apps. We have an example project.
Want to get going even faster?
You don’t even need hardware…
The Try it now section of the Resident homepage has a M5Stick simulator, running the Resident sandbox in-browser.
Drag and drop an app onto the simulator to see it run.
Or even: install the Claude skills, tap the button on the webpage to make the simulator live, and create apps from your local Claude Code session. The in-browser simulator will update live and run your app.
What would it mean to drag and drop a file onto a lightbulb? I asked. "Do I literally mean that the lightbulb needs a little slot like the golem’s mouth, into which you insert your instructions stamped on microfiche?"
This is my answer haha
Resident is what we’ve been using to prototype products and use cases at Inanimate.
We believe that one day all products will work this way.
For more info, the GitHub, and to try it now: Resident.
Neale Mahoney interviews me on Econ to go (with a transcript of our half hour conversation).
"Neale Mahoney: Markets are often treated like natural objects, things that simply exist. But economist Al Roth sees them differently. To him, markets are human inventions, systems we design, shape, and sometimes struggle to agree on. Because when money and morality collide, things can get complicated. Who should be allowed to buy and sell? What should they be allowed to transact? and what happens when people want to trade things that others find morally unacceptable.
Alvin Roth: I think that one of the things we need to do is experiment on what we're morally obliged to do and reflect on it in connection with what we're actually able to do.
Neale Mahoney: I'm Neale Mahoney, Economist and Director of the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research. On this episode of "Econ To Go," I catch up with Stanford Economist and Nobel Laureate Al Roth over coffee on campus. We talk about what he calls moral economics, the study of markets where society struggles to agree on what should be bought and sold. From kidney exchange to commercial surrogacy, from prostitution laws to the surprising economics of matchmaking, Al shows us that markets don't just allocate goods. They also reflect our values. You've said that markets and marketplaces are human artifacts. They are not just features of the natural environment. Why is that a good starting place when we think about the study of economics?
Alvin Roth: Well, for a long time, economists sort of thought that markets were things that we just had to take as given. You know, we speak of economists thinking of people as price takers, but in fact, they also thought of us as market takers. There are these markets. But of course, markets are human artifacts. To a great extent they're collective human artifacts, but marketplaces are often artifacts of individual companies or designers, or small groups of participants who modify the marketplace to fit their needs over time, just in the way that Uber is a marketplace designed by the company Uber. But I think there's a good analogy, which is that languages are also human artifacts, and they're collective human artifacts. You and I can speak to each other in English because we both learned English in a conventional way, but there are lots of words in our English that weren't in the language 100 years ago, words like computer and internet and AI. So, we're constantly modifying the language to better suit our needs."
Hi folks, appreciate the discussion of the piece here, as ever.
I just wanted to chime in briefly with an analogy that speaks to one of the ways I think about the causal mechanism here, and to my mind pushes back against the argument that since past declines in fertility didn’t come from smartphones etc the current decline can’t either.
• In the past, weight loss generally came from sustained dieting and exercise
• Now it overwhelmingly comes from injecting GLP-1s
• In the same way that GLP-1s are a technological shock that amplifies/accelerates the old mechanism (eating less), social media is a technological shock that amplifies/accelerates the old mechanism (cultural change)
To my mind one of the ways (possibly the main way) that phones and social media could be affecting fertility is by accelerating and internationalising pre-existing trends of cultural change. One example could be young women’s sense of empowerment and independence, which was on the rise in many parts of the world but has sped up over the past decade or two (I would point to my previous work on the ideological gender divide as one piece of evidence here) and has spread rapidly to regions and cultures that were surely very unlikely to reach this point without exposure to western social media.
Thoughts?
I will add one point on this debate, noting I do not think it runs counter to Burn-Murdoch. Some commentators are insisting that what really matters is how many children survive to adulthood, not how many are born in the first place. But both numbers matter a good deal. Every time a woman gets pregnant she incurs significant costs, especially in older times when death in childbirth was common, or even death or health problems from a miscarriage were a much greater risk. Furthermore, if you tried for seven kids, but only expected three or four to survive, a lot of times more than three or four survived. So general survival of all or almost all your children had to be a palatable option, even if the expected value was lower than that.
Tajikistan’s remittances are worth nearly half the country’s GDP—
In Tajikistan, remittances — the money sent or brought back by migrants — amounted to 48% of GDP in 2024. The chart places this figure in context by comparing it with other countries with data for the same year. Nicaragua and Honduras receive remittances worth around a quarter of their GDP — high by global standards, but still far below Tajikistan’s level. Remittances here include two types of flows: money migrants abroad send home to their families, and money cross-border workers bring home from short-term jobs abroad.
Both of these flows play a role in Tajikistan, where most remittances come from labor migrants in Russia. In addition to the roughly 400,000 Tajiks settled there, hundreds of thousands more cross the border for seasonal and short-term work.
According to a report from the International Organization for Migration, about 1.2 million Tajiks were in Russia in mid-2024, which is more than a tenth of Tajikistan’s total population.
The World Bank’s latest Tajikistan Economic Update says that much of the country’s recent rapid economic growth (above 8% since 2021) was supported by these remittance inflows.
That is from Our World in Data, with a picture at the link.
A downward-looking image of Santa Rosa Island shows a dark-brown burned area toward the bottom-right. A thin, bright orange line runs along the burned area, indicating the active fire front.
NASA Earth Observatory / Lauren Dauphin
A downward-looking image of Santa Rosa Island is mostly brown, with a darker brown area on the bottom-right side. Gray-white smoke drifts toward the bottom-right over dark blue ocean water.
NASA Earth Observatory / Lauren Dauphin
A downward-looking image of Santa Rosa Island shows a dark-brown burned area toward the bottom-right. A thin, bright orange line runs along the burned area, indicating the active fire front.
NASA Earth Observatory / Lauren Dauphin
A downward-looking image of Santa Rosa Island is mostly brown, with a darker brown area on the bottom-right side. Gray-white smoke drifts toward the bottom-right over dark blue ocean water.
NASA Earth Observatory / Lauren Dauphin
False Color
Natural Color
A wildland fire burns on Santa Rosa Island in California’s Channel Islands National Park, visible in these false-color (left) and natural-color (right) images captured on May 16, 2026, by the OLI (Operational Land Imager) on Landsat 9.
Channel Islands National Park, a chain of five ecologically rich islands off the coast of mainland California, is known for its diversity of plant and animal species, earning it the nickname “North America’s Galapagos.” For part of May 2026, Santa Rosa Island—the park’s second-largest island—was closed to the public as firefighters worked to contain a wildland fire burning through grassland, coastal sage scrub, and areas of island chaparral.
The fire was first spotted from aircraft on May 15, 2026, and confirmed by the National Park Service that morning. The Landsat 9 satellite captured these images the next day, when the burned area had grown to 5,690 acres (2,300 hectares). By May 19, it had burned around 16,600 acres (6,700 hectares), including much of the southeastern quadrant of the island. Its perimeter remained uncontained.
The left image is false color, composed of wavelengths that cut through the smoke to reveal the burned area (dark brown). The infrared signature of the actively burning fire front is orange. The second image, on the right, shows the same area in natural color, as human eyes would see it, with smoke pouring over the Pacific Ocean.
Officials and news accounts said the fire was human-caused, though investigators were still working to determine the circumstances surrounding the event. According to news reports, the fire burned near a stand of Torrey pines, a rare type of pine that in the United States grows naturally only on Santa Rosa Island and near San Diego.
NASA Earth Observatory images by Lauren Dauphin, using Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey. Story by Kathryn Hansen.
SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket lifts off from Space Launch Complex 4 East at Vandenberg Space Force Base on the Starlink 17-42 mission on May 19, 2026. Image: SpaceX
Update May 20, 12 a.m. EDT (0400 UTC): SpaceX confirmed deployment of the Starlink satellites.
SpaceX launched its Falcon 9 rocket from Vandenberg Space Force Base Tuesday night to send a batch of its Starlink satellites into low Earth orbit.
The mission, dubbed Starlink 17-42, added another 24 broadband internet satellites to a constellation of spacecraft that consists of more than 10,000 spacecraft. More than 600 of those satellites support direct-to-device capabilities.
Liftoff from Space Launch Complex 4 East happened at 7:46 p.m. PDT (10:46 p.m. EDT / 0246 UTC). The rocket flew on a south-southwesterly trajectory upon leaving the pad.
SpaceX launched the mission using the Falcon 9 first stage booster with the tail number B1103. This was its second launch after flying the Starlink 17-35 mission on April 6.
The booster was previously assigned to the NROL-172 mission, but was swapped for B1097 prior to launch. SpaceX didn’t offer an explanation for the swap.
A little more than eight minutes after liftoff, B1103 landed on the drone ship ‘Of Course I Still Love You.’ This was the 197th landing on this vessel and the 612th booster landing to date.
Market Design
