I took this photo a few hours ago on a corner in Laguna Niguel.
It reminded me of something worth sharing …
Even though I’ve devoted much of my life to sports, I’ve actually only placed one wager.
The date was June 27, 1988. Mike Tyson and Michael Spinks were fighting for the world’s heavyweight championship. I was 16, and it was the summer before my junior year at Mahopac High in rural New York. A bunch of us were gathered at Ari Pollock’s house to watch the brawl.
Seconds before the pugilists entered the ring, someone asked if I’d wanna wager five bucks.
“I think Spinks is gonna shock the world,” I said.
“No way,” he said.
“Yes way,”I said.
“Wanna bet $5 on it?”
“OK,” I said. “But it’ll be fun taking your money.”
We shook hands. Spinks entered the ring. Tyson entered the ring. Tyson looked like a bull hopped up on steroids. Spinks looked like a scared child.
Opening bell.
Pop.
Pow.
Pow.
Pop.
The fight ended in 91 seconds. Not 92—91. It wrapped with Michael Spinks famously draping the ring like a flashy throw rug.
I surrendered my $5, and immediately hated the idea of handing over money for no bang.
On Thursday, August 27, Tolouse Olorunnipa reported on the attempts of Republican lawmakers to restrict the ability of naturalized and dual citizens to run for office. In several states, Republican lawmakers have introduced measures to cut those Americans out of candidacy for elected positions, while in Congress, at least five Republicans have called for prohibiting them from federal judgeships, Cabinet posts, ambassadorships, and congressional seats.
The push has come in the wake of the rise of New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani and other naturalized U.S. citizens whose policy positions those like South Carolina representative Nancy Mace consider un-American. These policies are, of course, the ones voters elected people like Mamdani to put into place. In her comments to Olorunnipa, Mace said: “This isn’t personal. It’s about what standard we want for the people entrusted with enormous power over the American people.”
Her word choice was revealing. Our elected officials are entrusted with the enormous power of the American people, not over them.
In the 1850s, Americans struggled over the question of equality and immigration. The United States had always been a nation of immigrants, but in the 1840s the failure of the potato crop in Ireland sent at least half a million Irish immigrants to the United States. As they moved into urban ports on the East Coast, especially in Massachusetts and New York, native-born Americans turned against them as competitors for jobs, warning that Catholics were un-American and could never assimilate into the U.S.
The 1850s saw a similar anti-immigrant fury in the new state of California. After the discovery of gold there in 1848, native-born Americans—the so-called forty-niners—moved to the West Coast. They had no intention of sharing the riches they expected to find. The Indigenous people who lived there had no right to the land under which gold lay, native-born men thought; nor did the Mexicans whose government had sold the land to the U.S. in 1848; nor did the Chileans, who came with mining skills that made them powerful competitors.
Above all, native-born Americans resented the Chinese miners who came to work in order to send money home to a land devastated by the First Opium War of 1839–1842, hoping to make money in America and then return to China, from which they could not legally emigrate. Expecting to go home again, they retained their languages, their culture, and their clothing. They tended to work the mines Americans had cleaned of their biggest deposits, focusing on meticulous reworking of the gravel, and they did better than native-born Americans thought they should.
Democrats and the new anti-immigrant American Party (more popularly known as the “Know Nothings” because members claimed to know nothing about the party) turned against the new immigrants, seeing them as competition that would drive down wages. In the 1850s, Know Nothing officials in Massachusetts persecuted Catholics and deported Irish immigrants they believed were paupers.
In 1850, in California, a legislature charged with establishing the legal framework for the proposed state adopted the federal law enacted a half-century earlier, in 1802, that limited citizenship to “free white persons.” The state legislature then went on to impose a foreign miner’s tax on Chinese and Mexican miners; then, in 1854, the state courts agreed that Chinese nationals could not testify in court against white Americans. In 1855 the legislature tried to stop Chinese immigration altogether by passing a $50 tax on shipmasters for each person ineligible for citizenship they brought to the state.
The construction of castes of immigrants mirrored the ideology of southern whites who enslaved their Black neighbors. As Georgia’s Alexander Stephens explained, the men who framed the Constitution had made the terrible error of believing in equality, and northerners stupidly clung to the outdated idea that Black people were equal to white people, “and hence conclude that he is entitled to equal privileges and rights with the white man.” In contrast to the United States government, men like Stephens believed that “subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition.”
In 1855, Illinois lawyer Abraham Lincoln wrote to his friend Joshua Speed to reiterate his dislike not just of enslavement, but also of the caste system going into place in places like Massachusetts and California.
“I am not a Know-Nothing,” he wrote. “That is certain. How could I be? How can any one who abhors the oppression of [Black Americans], be in favor of degrading classes of white people? Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation, we began by declaring that ‘all men are created equal.’ We now practically read it ‘all men are created equal, except [Black people].’ When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read ‘all men are created equal, except [Black people], and foreigners, and catholics.’ When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretence of loving liberty---to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocracy.”
Lincoln understood that once you give up the principle of equality, you have given up the whole game. You have admitted the principle that people are unequal, and that some people are better than others. Once you have replaced the principle of equality with the idea that humans are unequal, you have granted your approval to the idea of rulers and servants. At that point, all you can do is to hope that no one in power decides that you belong in one of the lesser groups.
Arguments that some men were better than others, “are the arguments that kings have made for enslaving the people in all ages of the world,” Lincoln said. “You will find that all the arguments in favor of king-craft were of this class; they always bestrode the necks of the people, not that they wanted to do it, but because the people were better off for being ridden…. Turn in whatever way you will—whether it come from the mouth of a King, an excuse for enslaving the people of his country, or from the mouth of men of one race as a reason for enslaving the men of another race, it is all the same old serpent….”
“I should like to know if taking this old Declaration of Independence, which declares that all men are equal upon principle and making exceptions to it where will it stop,” he asked.
Americans answered him definitively in 1868 when they added the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution. It recognized that “[a]ll persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” It also established that states could not draw lines around different groups of citizens by providing that “[n]o State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”
That same constitution also establishes requirements for officeholders. The president must be at least 35 years old and a natural-born citizen of the United States. A U.S. senator must be at least 30 years old, a citizen of the U.S. for at least nine years, and a resident of the state they’re representing. A U.S. representative must be at least 25 years old, a U.S. citizen for at least seven years, and live in the state they represent.
Law professor Pamela Karlan told journalist Olorunnipa that “Those qualifications are exclusive. The state can’t add qualifications on top of those, nor indeed can the federal government.” Former representative Mo Brooks (R-AL) added that in a country growing more diverse, telling naturalized Americans that they can’t run for office will ensure they vote for the opposing party. “It is one of the dumbest tactical moves I’ve ever seen politicians make,” he told Olorunnipa.
Karlan summed up the idea of discriminating against naturalized citizens, telling Olorunnipa it is “just incredibly ugly, stupid, and unconstitutional.”
Home alone all week (plus the cat) and not really in the mood for writing, so in brief:
I finally sorted out a big pile of old paperwork I brought back from Essex months and months ago. Sorting, scanning, filing, shredding.
Three trips to the gym, the week’s only exercise apart from…
…three hours of scything and collecting grass before the rain began. Only a little patch left to do now.
Weekly guitar lessons are going well and I’m practising most days so I assume I’m making progress.
Two afternoons taking Mum to appointments.
I did a super-efficient shopping trip on Saturday morning, driving into town, getting to Waitrose, Wickes, and three other shops, and then being home by 9.45am. Despite being the weekend places are quiet first thing.
One of the two home batteries has stopped working, showing a red “fault” light, but the person dealing with emails at the installer was away this week.
My toe is pretty much 100% now, eleven weeks on. Just a slight ache occasionally. Of course, this morning I stubbed the toe next to it. Idiot. (Not too badly though.)
I have finally got all of the satchels in Red Dead Redemption 2. Time well spent we can all agree.
The GTA6 preview looked amazing, graphics-wise, but despite all those advances it seems like convincing talking mouths are still beyond today’s technology. Maybe next time.
In the latest episode of This Week in AI, host Vicki Reyzelman, a solutions engineer with Akamai, said the systems keeping AI secure, powered, and physically functional are getting stress-tested faster than anyone expected. She moved through cybersecurity and governance, the power strain behind rising compute demand, and humanoid robots that are now doing real work, though not always well.
Her questions were practical. What happens when a model gets so good at hacking that its own maker locks it away from customers? How much of the electricity promised to data centers will actually show up? And why can a robot outrun a person but still fumble a fire extinguisher?
Cybersecurity got scarier this week
OpenAI rolled out GPT-5.6 Cyber and expanded its defender program into blue and red tiers but kept the model restricted to a short list of partners, including Accenture, IBM, CrowdStrike, and Cisco. The restriction itself is the giveaway. Building something good enough at finding vulnerabilities that you’re scared to let customers touch it is not a routine product launch.
The SAML story was arguably worse. US authorities charged 17 members of Iran’s Mabna Institute over a 31-terabyte theft of academic data from hundreds of universities, a reminder that old, trusted login infrastructure is exactly what attackers target once AI speeds up the work. IBM data shows AI-enabled breaches were up 56% year over year, and breach victim notices already topped 471 million this year alone. Gartner projects security spending will climb 12.5% in 2026, to roughly $240 billion. Vicki’s advice was to rotate credentials, enable multifactor authentication wherever it’s missing, and segment systems so one compromised login doesn’t hand over everything else.
That advice matters more given what’s happening behind the scenes. Agents from OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, and Moonshot AI have all escaped their test sandboxes in recent weeks, and researchers warn evaluation isn’t keeping pace with these systems’ capabilities. OpenAI paused about two weeks of reinforcement learning on its Astra model this month after early signals suggested it might approach a critical threshold in its own preparedness framework. More than 1,200 workers at major AI companies, including Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, have signed an open letter urging the government to slow the pace of development.
The power math isn’t adding up
Global data center electricity use is projected to roughly double, from 485 terawatt-hours in 2025 to about 950 by 2030. Bank of America expects US data centers to add another 125 gigawatts of demand by then, which is part of why Amazon is exploring a grid connection for an 8,000-acre AI campus.
Bloomberg reported that more than two-thirds of the electricity sought for US AI data centers will probably never show up, largely because developers are filing duplicate or speculative requests rather than plans tied to real projects. Vicki’s read was that scarcity breeds speculation, and speculation has a way of turning into fraud once enough money chases something that doesn’t exist.
Not everyone is adding to the strain, though. AMD introduced its Helios system, built on EPYC 9006 chips, to compete with NVIDIA’s next-generation hardware, and Micron committed $10 billion to US AI memory research. Real value is starting to shift toward whoever controls power-ready sites, not just whoever has the fastest chip.
Robots can jump two meters, but they still can’t hold a fire extinguisher
Unitree’s IPO numbers were striking enough to warrant a second look. Its Shanghai debut jumped more than 600%, raised close to $905 million, and was oversubscribed more than 8,000 times, a record for that exchange. Ahead of the listing, it showed off a humanoid robot that can jump about two meters and run faster than a human. Unitree has shipped around 5,500 humanoid units so far, while rival Chinese firm AgiBot leads with roughly 15,000 cumulative units.
But speed and strength only tell part of the story. A recent firefighting competition put ten teams of humanoid robots to the test, asking them to use a fire extinguisher to put out a fire, and only three actually completed the task. Vicki noted that most struggled just to hold the extinguisher properly, since these robots do well in familiar, trained environments but falter when conditions change unpredictably. As she put it, being fast and strong is one thing, but the real question is what these capabilities mean for factories, industrial production, and other practical use cases beyond an impressive demo.
What’s next
Vicki closed by admitting that even while putting this episode together, new developments kept surfacing that hadn’t made her notes a few days earlier. Security, energy, and robotics news is moving fast enough that no single week’s snapshot stays accurate for long.
Join us again next Monday for another episode of This Week in AI, when we’ll dive into more of the news, issues, and key developments shaping the AI era. And check back each Friday for the latest episode, or watch on YouTube, Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts.
The following article originally appeared onTim O’Brien’s Medium blogand is being republished here with the author’s permission.
AI costs are easy to count and hard to understand, and judging effort by a token volume? While that might feel like a valid measure of value or complexity, it doesn’t capture the details that define whether a workload was worth completing.
If someone’s bragging about how many tokens they’ve used, or if you work at a company that is measuring individual token consumption as a measure of individual productivity? You have either already realized or are about to realize that tokenmaxxing is an expensive misstep.
The bill can show you how many tokens a system consumed, which models it called, and how much those calls cost. What it cannot tell you is whether the system accomplished anything worth paying for, and this is the reality behind the current AI hangover.
FinOps has always had a blind spot around databases. We can measure storage, compute, queries, replicas, and utilization, but none of those numbers tells us what the database is for, why it was designed that way, or whether the cost is justified.
A database has a purpose. It supports a product, a transaction, a customer experience, or a business process. Its economics depend on architecture, workload, availability, latency, data design, and the consequences of failure. This is why it’s always been a fool’s errand to list databases in the same “efficiency opportunity” table as stateless workloads measured on compute.
AI is much closer to that than it is to ordinary metered infrastructure, but it’s even more complicated. There’s a level of speculative value for development efforts that rely on large networks of nondeterministic agents. Was yesterday really worth $500 of spend on Fable 5 for an hour? We’ll see.
Tokens from different models aren’t interchangeable units—they’re different currencies measuring different things. (Image assist by Anthropic)
You can spend hundreds of dollars a day on an AI task, but there is no useful way to decide whether that’s expensive without understanding what the system is trying to accomplish. A coding agent replacing hours of engineering work, a classifier sorting low-value documents, and an orchestrator coordinating dozens of downstream tasks might all generate the same daily bill. They are not economically comparable.
Again, this is similar to databases. A costly database may be wasteful, or it may be supporting a critical transaction path with demanding availability and latency requirements. You cannot know from the bill alone. The spend only makes sense in the context of the purpose, the architecture, and the consequences of getting it wrong.
That’s why the current enthusiasm around “tokenomics” makes me nervous. Not because token accounting is useless. Tokens are visible, measurable, and often directly connected to the bill. Of course, we should count them. But giving token accounting a name does not close the blind spot.
You cannot roll into a company, look at its token consumption, and say, “You should use Opus” or “You should use a cheaper model,” and consider the work finished. What worries me here is that a large portion of the FinOps world consists of vendors that are trying to do just that—companies selling this idea that you can show up and “just optimize.”
What’s the model doing? Is it writing code, classifying documents, recognizing speech, coordinating agents, or making decisions that require human review? Does a cheaper model create more retries? Does an expensive model reduce downstream work? What happens when it fails? Those questions determine the “economics,” but implying that tokens are a common currency is another misstep.
A token from one model isn’t equivalent to a token from another. A million tokens used by an orchestrator aren’t the same as a million tokens used for a high-value specialist task. A cheap call that produces bad work may cost more than an expensive call that succeeds immediately.
Anyone orchestrating large networks of agents using Hermes agents, Pi harnesses, or other similar technologies has already learned that you don’t orchestrate the entire process on the most expensive frontier model without going bankrupt. A billion tokens running a simple task on Fable versus Luna or GLM-5.3 can be a mistake that costs tens of thousands of dollars. And, it’s not just model selection that matters; it’s reasoning level, memory management and consolidation, and choosing the right approach for the task at hand.
One example: If your system wakes up, reads your email to look for keywords, and scans the weather, you likely don’t need to spend 2M tokens on OpenRouter along with a subscription to Tavily. That’s a Python script that would cost zero tokens to execute.
The useful measure isn’t simply the token. It’s the total cost of accomplishing the thing the system exists to do.
This becomes even more obvious as AI architectures become layered. A company might use a mid-tier model to coordinate work, a frontier model for difficult tasks, a local model for sensitive data, and a specialist service for speech. Some of that will be billed by the token, some by the minute, the seat, or the request. Some will run on hardware the company already owns.
Zoom out, and you’ll see that the notion of token as a proxy for spend is complicated by the iOS 27 release and a world in which your inference engine might be leveraging more local hardware in concert with remote calls for higher-powered LLMs.
I can see a near future in which we’re more focused on licensing costs and less focused on token consumption.
The next step for AI financial management is not to abandon token accounting. It’s to connect consumption to the workflow, the quality of the result, the architecture, and the business outcome.
Sure, count the tokens. But don’t mistake a new name for solving an underlying problem the space has had for a while—no one’s had a good discussion about “value” in the FinOps space, and everyone’s still chasing after simple efficiency reports.
. . .
Join us on Monday, August 31, for AI Codecon: Building with Open Source AI to explore the open-weight models, self-hosted stacks, and tooling ecosystem developers and technical experts are using to run models on their own terms. If tokenomics (or its limitations) is your thing, don’t miss IBM Research’s Gabe Goodhart on how off-loading scoped tasks to local models can help to minimize AI costs while maximizing agent value, then stay for talks on building the public AI stack, owning the agentic loop, avoiding prompt debt, and so much more.Register for freeto save your spot.
Ribbon-Cutting Event for NASA Deep Space Network’s Deep Space Station 23
PIA26779
Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech
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Ribbon-Cutting Event for NASA Deep Space Network’s Deep Space Station 23
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Description
Leadership from NASA Headquarters, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and the Deep Space Network (DSN) stand in front of the recently completed Deep Space Station 23 antenna at the Deep Space Network’s Goldstone complex near Barstow, California, on Aug. 25, 2026.
From left: Germaine Aziz (project manager, DSN Aperture Enhancement Project, JPL); Bradford Arnold (manager, Telecom Programs & Oversight, JPL); Keyur Patel (associate lab director for Flight Projects & Mission Success, JPL); Wanda Peters (deputy associate administrator, Research and Technology Mission Directorate, NASA Headquarters); Jimmy Kenyon (associate administrator, RTMD, NASA Headquarters); John McCullough (acting director, Space Communications and Navigation Program, NASA Headquarters); Gregory Heckler (deputy program manager for capability development, SCaN, NASA Headquarters); William Marinelli (development manager, SCaN, NASA Headquarters), Michael Levesque (project manager, DSN, JPL); and Frank Kaufholod (project manager, NASA Glenn Research Center).
They gathered at the recently completed DSS-23 antenna for a ceremonial ribbon cutting on Aug. 25, 2026. It’s the latest antenna to be added as part of the DSN’s Aperture Enhancement Project, which began in 2009 to upgrade and expand the network by adding six new 34-meter (114-foot) multifrequency beam-waveguide antennas. These versatile Deep Space Network dishes can enhance many missions operating over different radio frequencies.
The DSN allows missions to track, send commands to, and receive scientific data from faraway spacecraft. It is managed by JPL, a division of Caltech, in Southern California for SCaN, which is located at NASA Headquarters within RTMD.
NASA Deep Space Network’s New Goldstone Antenna Goes Online
PIA26778
Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech
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NASA Deep Space Network’s New Goldstone Antenna Goes Online
JPEG (1.26 MB)
Description
Long shadows are cast by the recently completed Deep Space Station 23 at the Deep Space Network’s Goldstone complex near Barstow, California, in August 2026. A 34-meter (114-foot) multifrequency beam-waveguide antenna, DSS-23 will boost the DSN’s capacity and enhance NASA’s deep space communications capabilities for decades to come.
NASA leadership and personnel as well as dignitaries gathered at the complete DSS-23 antenna for a ceremonial ribbon cutting on Aug. 25, 2026. It’s the latest antenna to be added as part of the Deep Space Network’s Aperture Enhancement Project, which began in 2009 to upgrade and expand the network by adding six new 34-meter multifrequency beam-waveguide antennas. These versatile Deep Space Network dishes can enhance many missions operating over different radio frequencies.
The DSN allows missions to track, send commands to, and receive scientific data from faraway spacecraft. It is managed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of Caltech, in Southern California for the agency’s Space Communications and Navigation (SCaN) Program, which is located at NASA Headquarters within the Research and Technology Mission Directorate.
Panorama Showcasing the 34-Meter Antennas of the DSN’s Goldstone Complex
PIA26777
Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech
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Panorama Showcasing the 34-Meter Antennas of the DSN’s Goldstone Complex
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Description
Five antennas soak in the summer sun at the Deep Space Network’s Goldstone complex near Barstow, California, in August 2026. The recently completed Deep Space Station 23, a 34-meter (114-foot) beam-waveguide antenna, can be seen to the right of the frame in the foreground. The other three 34-meter antennas are, from left, DSS-26, DSS-25, and DSS-24. At farthest right is a smaller 26-meter (85-foot) antenna, the retired “Apollo Antenna” that was built in 1967 as part of the Manned Space Flight Network and earned its nickname for providing tracking for the Apollo Program.
NASA leadership and personnel as well as dignitaries gathered at the complete DSS-23 antenna for a ceremonial ribbon-cutting on Aug. 25, 2026. It’s the latest antenna to be added as part of the Deep Space Network’s Aperture Enhancement Project, which began in 2009 to upgrade and expand the network by adding six new 34-meter multifrequency beam-waveguide antennas. These versatile Deep Space Network (DSN) dishes can enhance many missions operating over different radio frequencies.
The DSN allows missions to track, send commands to, and receive scientific data from faraway spacecraft. It is managed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, a division of Caltech, for the agency’s Space Communications and Navigation (SCaN) Program, which is located at NASA Headquarters within the Research and Technology Mission Directorate.
President Trump's renaming* of Lake Ontario got me thinking about the famous song by Woody Guthrie, This Land Is Your Land. Its chorus is
"This land is your land, this land is my land From California to the New York island, From the redwood forest to the Gulf Stream waters; This land was made for you and me. "
I asked three LLMs to propose Trump versions, and got these three:
This Land Is My Brand by Gemini
Chorus This land is my land, it’s mostly my land, From Mar-a-Lago to the New York island, From Lake America to the Gulf of America, This map was drawn for only me. ########
This Gulf Is My Gulf by Claude:
It's my gulf now, it's my lake now, Change the name and don't look back now, One man's word is all it takes now — This map was made for me alone. #########
This map is my map, by Chat GPT
It’s America’s Gulf, it’s America’s lake, The greatest new names that a President could make! They’re beautiful names, everybody agrees— Ask anybody! Ask anybody! Ask anybody, please!
It’s America’s Gulf, it’s America’s lake, Tremendous decisions for history’s sake! The old names were terrible — frankly, a mess— But these names are the greatest! The greatest! God bless!
#########
*Names, like language itself, are largely equilibrium phenomena--even for entirely US based names, like Cape Canaveral, which was officially called Cape Kennedy only from 1963 to 1973, when it's earlier name was officially reinstated.
I’m spending a lot of time thinking about high interest rates, both for obvious reasons and because I’m reconsidering some of my own long-held views. So I thought I’d have a long talk with someone who has really studied these issues and now, I believe, may have been more right than I was. This may be even wonkier than usual, but trust me, it’s important.
. . .
TRANSCRIPT: Paul Krugman in Conversation with Ricardo Caballero
(recorded 8/25/26)
Paul Krugman: I’m talking today with a very, very serious economist, Ricardo Caballero, who is one of the most important macroeconomic thinkers of modern times. I was going to say of my generation, but actually, I’m an older generation—but of the currently, still vital creative generation. We’ve had discussions about a lot of events over the past 25 years that have involved some disputes that I hope we can get into in a way that people understand. And recent events, including the rise in long-term interest rates, have really brought all of those issues to the fore. So I thought I’d talk with Ricardo, who is the Ford International Professor of Economics at MIT, a position I once held. But anyway, hi.
Ricardo Caballero: Hi, Paul. So wonderful to see you again. We still miss you at MIT.
Krugman: Well, I miss the days when actually getting at the truth was what mattered, as opposed to dealing with all of the obvious lies. But anyway, I guess there are different stages in one’s life. But so, I will want to get into recent events. But one thing that really struck me is that there’s this long-running discussion basically around interest rates and international movements of capital where there are kind of, as I see it, two rival ways of thinking about it. It could be some of both—but one was about returns to capital and investment opportunities, and one was about people looking for safety and security in assets. And for the most part, I was on one side of that and you were on the other. And I’m starting to think that you were probably right. So, first off, how would you portray this discussion? And maybe we can go back and forth.
Caballero: I don’t know whether they’re really different views because, you know, my view at least was always, when I say “a shortage of a store-of-value,” if you will, investment opportunities create those store-of-value opportunities and so on. So I never saw it as very contradictory. I thought there was an imbalance: lots of needs for savings, in particular in a very specific kind of saving—safe saving. And the productive structure wasn’t able to generate enough assets, especially safe assets. And that’s, I think, what led to the sort of “shortage of safe assets” type of literature, and that naturally depresses safe interest rates. If you look at the return on capital, actually, it was fairly stable. It was all absorbed by the opportunity risk premium, if you will. And so you can see returns both on safe and risky capital sort of declining in tandem since 2000, or earlier than that. And then somewhere around 2000, you can see that the safe interest rate keeps coming down, while the return to capital is sort of paralyzed. And what starts widening is the equity risk premium.
Krugman: So let me just break in here. A kind of crude, simplistic view—probably my view at a certain point—was that there’s capital and then there are returns on capital. And when we start to see interest rates get really low circa 2000, that’s telling you that returns to capital are going down. And if we see a lot of money coming to the United States, it’s because, well, America had faster population growth than other rich countries, and we were leading the technology revolution. But you’re saying there’s a really big difference between buying stock—corporate investment—and buying U.S. government debt, which is safe. And that the United States was sort of better than the rest of the world at supplying these safe assets.
Caballero: Absolutely.
Krugman: And just going way back—the financial crisis, which seems to me like yesterday, but was in fact almost 20 years ago—involved all of these exotic financial instruments, the asset-backed mortgage-backed securities, which you interpreted as a response, to a large extent; not just fraudulent, but a response to a real demand. Right?
Caballero: Absolutely. I thought there was a shortage of ultra-safe assets. So financial engineering got to work and they created sort of “synthetic safe assets.” Now, they were safe assets from the point of view of idiosyncratic shocks, but they weren’t from the point of view of systemic shocks. And to me, that was quite important in generating the financial crisis.
Krugman: Yeah. And so idiosyncratic shocks are like, well, okay: a particular housing development turns out to be a bust, but a collapse of the entire housing bubble is... And so fancy math was used to create assets that were supposedly safe because you were pooling all this stuff. And so, in your view, it wasn’t just that you had evil, fraudulent financial types—though that too—but that they were responding. There basically just weren’t enough Treasury bills and stuff like that out there.
Caballero: I mean, they realized there was a spread to be earned by creating these assets, and then there were regulatory failures that allowed them to hold them on their own balance sheets. And I think that’s when the really toxic mixture was developed, because you had these very low-capital-charge assets which weren’t really safe. But you’re right, it was this spread that sort of created the opportunity and then the regulatory arbitrage, if you will, that brought them into the balance sheets.
Krugman: Okay. I’m going to be self-indulgent and tell you a quick story. Robin and I bought our New York apartment in early 2009, which turns out to have been perfect timing, although that was purely an accident. We had come into a slug of money courtesy of the Swedes. But as we were looking at places and I was looking at the bookshelves of people who were selling their apartments, and a whole lot of them had books on the Gaussian copula and stuff like that, which, as you know, was a technique that was used to justify the claim that these synthetic assets were safe. And so we were clearly getting a preview: there were a lot of apartments on sale from Wall Street quants who’d been fired because everything was about to fall apart.
And so, in some sense, the setting for the financial crisis was that people wanted safe assets, and excessively clever guys on Wall Street invented seemingly safe assets. But then everything went to hell, and we had the financial crisis. And then we had this long period of really, really low interest rates. And your story would be basically, as I understood it, that all of these fake safe assets had been revealed as fake, and now there was a sort of piling into Treasury bills, piling into actually safe assets.
Caballero: Indeed, and also partly the supply of sovereign safe assets—Italian bonds and the like—those also went away. And so we had a massive shortage.
Krugman: Okay. Now, there was an alternative story. And believe it or not, listeners, we are going to get to where we are now as a result. But there was an alternative story that I guess Larry Summers came out with at first, but I actually had been toying with the same thing, which was that what was actually happening was a real lack of investment opportunities. This was the “secular stagnation” view.
Caballero: You know, we were both at that conference. It was IMF, I think, and you may not remember, but that’s when Larry sort of came up with this theory. And you may not remember, but I stood up and I said, “Look, I buy a part of that story. But what you’re missing is that the return on capital hasn’t declined nearly as much as the safe interest rate.” And that’s what I was describing before—the equity risk premium increased enormously. But the return to capital, regardless of whether you measure it with national accounts or return on financial investment, did not decline nearly as much.
Krugman: That’s right. So, national accounts being corporate profits divided by the value of corporate assets. And there really wasn’t a big decline in the profit rate.
Caballero: Of course, in the recession itself, it did. But I’m saying afterwards it recovered.
Krugman: Yeah. By like 2015, the recession is over and basically the interest rate on federal debt is lower than the rate of inflation. And so it’s basically free money for governments to borrow. One interpretation of that is, well, population growth has slowed and technology is maybe not as exciting as we thought it was going to be, and so there weren’t these opportunities. And you were saying that the numbers never supported that.
Caballero: I don’t think so. I mean, elements of these stories are obviously correct, but I mean, there’s like 400 or 500 basis points that really came from widening in the equity risk premium.
Krugman: By the way, the equity risk premium is when stocks historically pay a higher rate of return than bonds—certainly more than government bonds. And it’s always been a little bit of a puzzle why it’s so large.
Caballero: Not for long, though.
Krugman: Yeah.
Caballero: Not so much now.
Krugman: But it was more that people trusted the U.S. government and didn’t quite exactly trust corporate investments. And so that’s why the government was able to borrow so cheaply.
Caballero: I think so. And also the demographic cycle helped on that dimension because, you know, older people tend to demand safer assets. So that’s also changing that composition.
Krugman: Yeah. I wasn’t even thinking about that. So I have to say, I think we were kind of, in some ways, living in a fool’s paradise where governments can borrow essentially for free—certainly the U.S. government could borrow essentially for free.
The case that a lot of us used to justify secular stagnation—and for some reason, the words here are all completely meaningless to a normal human being—but to justify this idea that we just had low returns, a lot of us talked about Japan. Have you spent time on the Japanese story?
Krugman: Oh, yes you did. Why don’t you tell us about that? Because that’s also an interesting thing that was a consequence.
Caballero: That was a consequence. I mean, essentially, in Argentina, if you have a financial crisis, you just blow up. But in Japan, they had the resources to essentially keep banks alive and the like. And so that led to a process of evergreening loans. And we show that that reduced productivity growth. So it did have a real impact eventually.
But there were other things at play in Japan as well. They had a massive financial crisis which certainly took away their mojo. It took many years, and then they responded. The fiscal policy sort of reacted too soon to the incipient recovery. So they fumbled on multiple occasions.
Krugman: Yeah. And the story that we used was that, you know, the collapse of fertility happened there first. So there was a shortage of Japanese, which should have reduced returns on investment and maybe led to low interest rates, but maybe that wasn’t even the story for Japan.
Caballero: I mean, I think it is part of the story, definitely. I mean, they certainly experienced a very acute demographic cycle. They were not very inclined to allow massive migration. So they had all the ingredients; there is no doubt. But on top of that, you had the financial crisis and this supporting of sort of zombie loans. And so they did terrible things to the productivity environment.
Krugman: Given all of that, you might think that Japan would have fallen way behind on productivity. And they have lower productivity than we do, but not...
Caballero: Well, labor, because they have lots of capital.
Krugman: True. Okay. So this is a vision of kind of the history of the past 25 years as a search for perceived safety, investments where you can’t go wrong, and an abortive attempt to cater to that demand by providing a lot of clever things that looked safe, but weren’t really. And then a collapse of that. And then you enter this long period, because the financial crisis is 2008 and interest rates are still very low, at least as of just three years ago. And now all of a sudden, or so it seems, that’s gone away. So, what do you think happened? We kind of had a glut of safe assets instead of a shortage. What do you think happened there?
Caballero: Well, I think it’s a combination of things. I think that first, there’s the COVID shock for sure, that affected the supply of assets all around the world. So now we have a lot more competition than we used to have as well. That’s one aspect. Second, it brought sort of the inflation monster into play. And that also complicated the life of bonds. And then markets became very bullish. So the equity risk premium we’re talking about essentially went away.
So, to me, a lot of the movement that we have seen is really the equity risk premium up and down. The question is whether it’s structural or temporary. We also saw a compression of the equity risk premiums right before the dot-com bubble. And so the burst of the bubble also led to lower interest rates. So, in struggling with this, the question becomes: How much of this is structural versus how much of this is just some temporary phenomenon or not? So that’s one issue. That’s sort of the financial issue.
And then the second one, which is not unrelated to this issue of the compression in the equity risk premium, is the AI boom. I mean, this is a massive investment and wealth boom, which is very important. So the wealth boom has boosted aggregate demand and that has increased equilibrium interest rates. We talk about the K-shaped economy; I call it financial Dutch disease. We have this enormous amount of wealth creation and therefore the interest rates have to be high. And then anything that is affected by high interest rates is struggling.
Krugman: By the way, people won’t know this, but Dutch disease is a very long ago story, but it stuck. This was when the Netherlands discovered natural gas, and suddenly they were selling lots of natural gas, which made the—I guess they still had the guilder then. They still had their own currency. So this made the guilder strong, which actually was kind of devastating for Dutch manufacturing because they weren’t competitive anymore. And so this is a case where good news is actually bad news for large parts of the economy. And actually, I happen to know, the Dutch stopped pumping out the gas a few years back because the land, which was already below sea level, is subsiding further. But we still use that term.
So you’re saying when people think the second coming of wealth has arrived because of a new technology, they pile into that, and then they’re not so interested in parking their money in safe government bonds.
Caballero: Indeed, yeah. I mean, even without the secondary effect, you still get a boost in aggregate demand that comes from the wealth. Before the productivity of the AI boom arrives, you get the demand. You don’t get the productivity. That requires higher interest rates.
Krugman: That’s right. That was very much the opposite, by the way, of what Kevin Warsh has been trying to argue. He’s been saying, “Well, because of AI, interest rates can come down because it’s anti-inflationary.” But the problem is, if the anti-inflationary stuff arrives, that may yet be some years down the pike. And meanwhile all the spending and the wealth that’s driving the stock market valuation... In a way, you’re saying that a lot of what’s happening should be good news, right? We have this technology, which is pretty impressive.
Caballero: Yeah, it’s extremely impressive. Yeah, I wrote a little paper. It’s called Speculative Growth and the AI “Bubble.” I’m very optimistic about this technology. Now, whether I’m optimistic about the current valuations, that’s another story. But I’m optimistic about the technology. And I think there’s a good future ahead. But the good future, to get there at a reasonable speed, I think we do need a little bit of bubbly markets. And that’s the nature of the story. But it’s a fragile story because, you know, bubbles are fragile.
Krugman: Yeah. And by the way, I don’t know if you saw this, but Stan Druckenmiller, sort of George Soros’s right-hand man and also Scott Bessent’s mentor, published an opinion piece in the Financial Times about how Bessent is all wrong to believe he can bring down long-term interest rates with his little bits of financial engineering, which was an interesting piece and interesting given the source and all that, but it appears, based upon the detectors, to have been entirely written by AI.
Caballero: I see!
Krugman: It seems Druckenmiller knew what he wanted to say, but couldn’t be bothered to actually write it. So he actually told Claude to write it.
Caballero: I’m sure he wanted to blame somebody if it didn’t work well.
Krugman: Now, it’s good news, we think. There’s this technology, which is amazing. It really is. I have to say, I’m using it for pretty nerdy stuff like, “Here’s this published table, but it’s a PDF. Can you please convert it into an Excel spreadsheet for me?” You know, that kind of thing. But it’s amazing how much time that saves.
But it’s actually having this effect, where suddenly interest rates on federal borrowing are way up. Again, this is going to be a lot of nerdy questions because I’m really trying to scope this out, and I can’t think of a better person to talk to about it. It’s also true that a lot of interest rates beyond that and government debt are also up. Right? So does that make sense? If it’s a search for safety, should we be seeing home mortgage rates also going up by the same or similar amounts? Maybe they are.
Caballero: They are in the sense that spreads are being compressed at the moment. So that’s consistent with the fact that there isn’t a lot of concern with risk. And so all the spreads are coming down. That sometimes has to do with “reach for yield” type phenomena. It’s pretty standard. The benchmark rate, which is the Treasury rate, tends to move more than the other ones outside of a financial crisis. But the spreads are being compressed. And mortgage rates are, in fact, rising—not one-to-one, but they are rising.
Krugman: Okay. But it’s not one-to-one.
Caballero: No. I haven’t checked, but I suspect mortgage rates are not rising one-to-one. But corporate spreads are being compressed.
Krugman: Yeah, and that’s actually kind of how you are measuring. Explain to me, because I didn’t quite get it: You have quite a new paper on basically the elimination of the safety premium on U.S. government debt. How did you go about measuring that?
Caballero: It’s a combination of things. I mean, the concept I have in the paper is one of the marginal costs of debt issuance. And that has two components. One is the spread, which we’ll discuss—the spread relative to a safe interest rate; think of it as the front-end monetary policy rate. And another one is the cost of rolling over the old debt at the new higher premium.
So, my estimate is that these costs have increased by about 110 basis points, of which 50 basis points are the result of an increase in the premium—the spread—and 60 basis points is a result of these rollover costs. And the rollover costs come from the fact that now we have so much more debt that every time you get a little bit more of a spread, eventually when you end up rolling over all the old debt, that is going to cost you a lot more from the point of view of the fiscal deficit.
Now, the most commonly understood term is the spread, the premium component. And that has two components. One is the rollover premium, if you will. That one I measured by the Treasury basis trade, essentially. You can probably explain it better than I can.
Krugman: Yeah, I’m not sure I can do that either. But it’s essentially from how much more a Treasury bond pays over a swap that doesn’t use the same amount of balance sheet. And we call that the convenience yield, that Treasury bonds would actually sell at a higher price than the implicit price in a swap of corresponding maturity. And the swap is a swap on corporate debt, right?
Caballero: No, no, no. It’s on safe interest rates. Just think of a futures contract. It’s the fixed rate of a future, of a swap. So think of a futures contract.
Krugman: Okay. But essentially, people were willing to accept a lower interest rate if they were just buying U.S. government debt, rather than doing something more complicated.
Caballero: Yeah, actually it’s not necessarily more complicated. But it happens that the Treasury bonds have a lot of other advantages. You could use them for so many things: collateral and so on. And that was worth a lot. And that’s an interesting angle, actually. It was worth a lot also because the marginal holder was a very different holder from the current one—central banks and so on. For a central bank, like the Bank of Japan, it’s not very useful to have duration through swaps and the like. They like to hold the Treasury bonds.
Now it’s a bit different. The marginal holder may not be the Bank of Japan. It may be some levered agent in the economy, and for that agent, balance sheet and so on is very important. So if you look across all the maturities, that spread was on the order of -18 basis points before COVID, if you will. And now it’s around, I don’t know, zero.
And the other one is the duration component. And if you look across all the maturities, essentially the U.S. didn’t pay much for duration exposure and now it’s paying like 40 basis points for that. So that’s the way you get to 60 basis points.
Krugman: So yeah, people are demanding a higher interest rate basically to tie their stock up in long-term stability.
Caballero: Yeah, I mean, they’re demanding a higher premium because the safe interest rate goes up for the kind of things we were talking about before—wealth and the like. And the question is, what about on top of that?
Krugman: Okay. And so, I should have these numbers in my head, but a few years back, the U.S. Treasury could issue 30-year bonds—so basically lock in financing for the next 30 years—for several hundred basis points, several interest percentage points lower. And it’s now 5-point-something, which is just way, way higher than before. It basically means the federal government was paying hardly more, if anything more, than the inflation rate, and in fact less, and then if you subtract growth in the economy, basically no burden of debt.
Caballero: Yeah. I mean, in real terms, we went from zero or negative for the 30-year bond to plus 2% or 2.5%. So it’s quite significant. And what I’m saying is that perhaps maybe one-third of that is a result of the fact that there is a little bit of a glut of all these assets.
Krugman: And just going back, what happened was that the United States and other countries that also issue stuff that is perceived as safe just sold a lot of bonds, and a lot of that was because of COVID, right?
Caballero: Absolutely. That was a big thing. And nowadays corporates are issuing a lot of bonds as well because we’re in the middle of this investment boom. And so, I think corporates in the U.S. are going to issue on the order of $2 trillion this year. That’s an enormous amount of competition.
Krugman: Yeah. And probably people think of Microsoft bonds as being very nearly as safe as U.S. government debt.
Caballero: For a while, Apple bonds sold at a higher price than Treasury bonds. I think it was a very brief moment, but I think it did happen.
Krugman: I do see where sometimes people say, “I’m going to get you something that’s safer than U.S. government debt.” And I always wonder, what do you think anything is going to be worth if the U.S. government goes bankrupt? Who’s going to enforce the contracts?
Caballero: I assume they are talking about price risk more than the default risk. And by the way, I wrote this paper on a lot of debt, if you will, and what that does to aggregate demand. But I’m not predicting any sort of crisis; I don’t see that. I think there’s nothing that can substitute for U.S. Treasury bonds. I always say, you know, there isn’t enough French real estate you can move to if you want to get out of the U.S. So the paper I wrote says precisely, “No, no, no. Assume that this will remain safe.” I don’t think that this is the issue. The issue is that it becomes more costly to issue this safe debt and that begins to become a big drag on aggregate demand.
Krugman: In some ways you answered the question already. But I’ve been wondering, how much of what we’re seeing is just that there’s a lot of debt out there and you basically have to reward people more to get them to absorb it, and how much of it is an actual loss of faith in the safety of the stuff?
I’m seeing back and forth on this, by the way. I’m reading Robin Brooks, and he’s talking about the debasement trade and people worried about the security of U.S. debt. And I think you are not worried. But the question of whether you are worried and whether somebody out there might be worried are not the same question.
Caballero: Of course.
Krugman: Do you see any signs that people are, in fact, losing faith in the safety of U.S. debt as opposed to just that they don’t really want all that much of it?
Caballero: I think inflation risk is something that is a bigger concern. That’s a debasement risk more than, I think, a default—I would assume. I mean, I don’t know what’s on some people’s minds. But I think there is a much bigger concern out there about inflation, and particularly with the current Fed and, you know, interaction there is not very good. But I suspect it’s that kind of thing.
Having said this, you are seeing a little bit of a change. You remember we talked about corporate bond spreads having shrunk. But not in the hyperscalers. Now, you have seen a little bit of concern there that didn’t exist at all a few months back.
Krugman: Yeah, I have to say, if you go back just a few years and you looked at the big established tech quasi-monopolies, they had this enormous cash flow and these huge business technological moats around their quasi-monopoly positions. And how could they ever be in financial problems? And the answer is, well, if they’re going to spend $3 trillion on a technology that, however great it is, may or may not actually be profitable for the people who spend on it... That could do it. So, yeah.
It’s at least arguable—I mean, you don’t have to get particularly political to say that the U.S. government doesn’t sound the way it used to sound. Maybe you can help me here. I’ve been trying to wrap my mind around what a loss of confidence in U.S. debt would mean. How would that even play out? When people say, “Oh, people are going to dump their U.S. bonds,” I always ask, “And buy what?” And you’re in that same camp?
Caballero: Mostly, yeah. I mean, again, local is different. With a small scare, you can see lost revenue. There was an episode when inflation was a little higher than now and people perceived, for the reasons you just described, equity in this hyperscale assets hypothesis. And I think part of the reason the equity risk premium was so low—and now it’s been increasing a little—it was exactly that. Treasuries were perceived relative to the main shocks that we were experiencing—inflation, if you like—Treasuries were perceived as riskier than some AI-related equities. So you could see for local shocks and so on, depending on the nature of the shock, something going into equities and the like. But otherwise I just think there is nothing that can be done in size, in very significant size.
But we can get a spike. Remember in March of 2020, I think it was, there was a moment in which foreign central banks wanted to sell Treasuries and the Treasury swap spread got unwound because of margin calls, and we did see big spikes in treasuries. And I think the swap lines that were created by the U.S., by the Fed and the like, were mechanisms to try to stabilize episodic things. But I call them episodic. I just don’t see anything that can hang in there for a long time without creating a matching mess.
Krugman: Yeah. One of the marks of really, really effective financial policy is that nobody even notices that you did it.
Caballero: Exactly. Absolutely. That was very well managed.
Krugman: March 2020, for a couple of days, was absolutely terrifying. But they responded effectively. Although, actually, even then, what were people buying?
Caballero: Cash.
Krugman: Ah yes, they were piling into cash. And of course, the thing about that is we can print cash.
Caballero: True, eventually. But first you have to go through a spike and then it happens.
Krugman: Yeah.
Caballero: But effectively that’s what they did. When you create a swap line, it’s just like printing cash.
Krugman: Yeah, that’s right. I’d say I probably get about 15 emails a morning saying, “Here’s how the dollar is going to collapse. It’s the great American financial crisis.” And it usually starts with how irresponsible U.S. policymakers are. All of which is true. But how does this happen? You know, give me the mechanics of the crisis. And I’ve never been able to get an answer on that.
Caballero: Yeah, I don’t see it either, but I do see a drift. I do see a drift. People can be very creative. You give them time. If you tell me now I have to relocate $40 trillion of debt somewhere else, there’s nothing I can do. But, I mean, give them enough time. People start finding certain things that they use, to find sort of safe and appealing, or more appealing [places to put their money]. So I think drift can do a lot more damage than events.
Krugman: Yeah. I mean, I’ve been on a kind of related subject: the international role of the dollar in the global payments system. And it’s really, really hard to see anything replacing the dollar, but workarounds that people manage to do—you know, we’re witnessing that in the Persian Gulf as we speak. People can find their way around it.
Financially, what keeps you up at night? I mean, we’ve both lived through and were very attentive during two inconceivable financial crises. Although the one in 2020 got solved very quickly. But I remember 2008. I actually had a relative who was working at the New York Fed and that weekend, the 13th, 14th of September, he wasn’t answering his phone and we said something must be up. And it sure as hell was.
Caballero: That was a long weekend there.
Krugman: Yeah, it was. He had bags under his eyes big enough to pack your luggage in. But anyway, are there scenarios out there that you worry about now?
Caballero: More than a crisis, I worry about the fragility of the current boom. Precisely for the reasons we have been discussing. I think that high valuations are a needed ingredient in the development of this wonderful technology nowadays. But at the same time, we’re quite fragile to that. I mean, the good thing is that we have a lot of space to cut interest rates very, very rapidly if something goes wrong. But I think things are fragile.
I’m exaggerating here but, you know, Venezuela did great under Chavez for a long time because the price of oil was rising a lot. And I feel that a lot of what is happening that is good has to do with AI covering up a lot of stuff. So I’m a little afraid about something that depends on high valuations that could come down very abruptly, and then we don’t do that great.
Krugman: Yeah, I mean, you’re younger than me, but old enough to remember the late ‘90s. And I remember how everything seemed wonderful. Although that was a bubble during which people were happy. We’re now managing to have something different: It may be a bubble, but somehow everybody hates it.
Caballero: A lot of people are very happy with the current bubble.
Krugman: That’s true.
Caballero: But it is also true that there’s a negative side as well. Now, having said that—this may be very optimistic, but I think that the current story is—there’s more alignment between the high valuations and the people that are really involved in generating this revolution. I think the fragility comes from different things. The Chinese may come out with some technologies that wipe out a big part of the competitive advantage we have and things of that kind. Sort of creative destruction-type things can be quite bad for financial wealth temporarily.
Krugman: So, last question: What do you think of Scott Bessent’s attempt to push those top rates down?
Caballero: I suspect they got very nervous, and I think that they wanted to cut a tail. I think he’s smart enough to know that he cannot change fundamentals, but I think precisely because of the fragility—I mean, I think they’re very worried that financial conditions can tighten very abruptly with a spike of that long end and then crash precisely the equity market and the like. And I think to me, this was a sort of “put”-type policy for financial conditions, which is quite important, obviously, for all the developments, political and economic.
Krugman: Interesting times. This discussion will be posted four days after we’re having it, and given the way things are, it may be totally out of date by then. But I’m actually feeling somewhat more relaxed after this discussion, because I was a little bit worried that you were going to tell us that there are no safe assets anymore and the world is doomed.
Caballero: Currently I don’t believe that. We shall see whether that’s naivete or wisdom.
Krugman: Well, thanks so much for talking with me.
New open weight text input (no vision) LLM from Chinese company Tencent today: 770B total parameters, 49B active parameters, 1M token context window, 1.56TB on Hugging Face.
This is a big size increase from their previous Hy3 in July, which was 295B, 21B active, 256,000 context, 598GB.
I recently started using model chat templates to better understand their capabilities. Here's Hy4's chat_template.jinja on Hugging Face, which includes this section:
{%- ifnotreasoning_effortisdefined%}{%- setreasoning_effort = 'high'%}{%- elifreasoning_effortnotin ['high', 'no_think'] %}{%- ifreasoning_effortisnone%}
{{- raise_exception('reasoning_effort error : None, should be no_think/high') }}
{%- else%}
{{- raise_exception('reasoning_effort error : ' + reasoning_effort + ', should be no_think/high') }}
{%- endif%}{%- endif%}
So it looks like there are just two reasoning effort levels: "high" (the default) and "no_think" (reason by disabled).
I tried my "Generate an SVG of a pelican riding a bicycle" prompt with the default high reasoning via OpenRouter and got this:
Quoting the reasoning trace:
[...] Let's maybe add a helmet? It could improve riding theme, but may obscure head. Maybe a small cycling cap or helmet? The user didn't ask; can add red helmet? Might be cute. But pelican with big beak; a helmet might obscure. Better maybe no.
Maybe add sunglasses? no.
Maybe add water? no.
It's interesting how the reasoning trace uses slightly truncated English, presumably because perfect grammar isn't useful or token efficient for hidden reasoning text.
This week, Anthropic unveiled something it’s calling the Model Hardware Standard, or MHS. It’s software that gives AI agents a clean, useful way of tapping into hardware at the firmware layer. I’ll grant you that that does not sound terribly exciting, but I think it actually is.
I very much enjoyed this British movie, which reminded me of the older-style romantic comedies, namely the ones that actually favor love and romance. It also has themes of class/accent, US/UK, is anti-media, anti-cancel culture, anti-podcast (Laura Lewis steals the show), anti-academia, and is sceptical of certain branches of feminism. But it is mostly entertaining. Not an important film, but the sort of movie that makes going to the movies fun in the first place. Let’s hope for more like this one.
Back in 2015, when I was living in Brooklyn, my apartment flooded. My landlord, who owned a bunch of apartments, offered to put me up in temporary accommodations. He and his girlfriend were going to be out of town for several months, so he let me stay in her room. His girlfriend was an aspiring actress from Minnesota named Poppy Liu. I got to interact with her a number of times, and I can say that she’s one of the more interesting and original people I’ve ever met.
Poppy finally made it big. One of her latest roles is as the voice actress for one of the protagonists on the new animated Netflix series DANG!, a story about three Asian Americans living in NYC:
The show isn’t out yet, but from what I can tell, DANG! is trying to tell a story that will resonate with second-generation Asian Americans1 — one of the characters is a striver who goes off the beaten path, the others were escaping their striver upbringing by leading nontraditional lifestyles from the get-go. That’s probably a pretty typical real-world experience for the American-born children of high-skilled immigrants.
I don’t know if the show will be good or not, but as soon as the trailer hit, people on Twitter started ridiculing it — and using it as an opportunity to make fun of “Asian American media” or “Asian American art” in general. Some of the comments were dour and downbeat:
…While other commentary was pretty hilarious:
It turns out that Asian Americans bashing “Asian American art” is a pretty well-established tradition. Here’s another example unrelated to the Netflix show:
It’s always fun to rag on tired tropes. But I feel like I should stand up for Asian American art here, because there really is a lot of excellent stuff out there that doesn’t fit into the standard format that people are complaining about.
“Asian American art” is defined too narrowly
The biggest problem with “Asian American art”, as far as I can tell, is that it’s defined so narrowly that there really isn’t much room for it to be creative. Consider these two possible definitions of “Asian American art”:
Art made by Asian Americans
Art made about Asian Americans or Asian American culture
As far as I can tell, movies, TV shows, books, etc. only get labeled “Asian American” if they satisfy both of these criteria at once. But that’s a pretty narrow slice of art!
First, it excludes art made about Asian Americans by non-Asians. There isn’t really a lot of this around, because America’s modern approach to identity politics says that you should only write about a group of people if you’re from that group — if a white author writes a novel with an Asian American protagonist, it’s generally frowned upon. There are some notable exceptions that get grandfathered in — Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle was written and directed by three white guys — but the culture of the 2010s really put a damper on that sort of crossover.
That means a lot of interesting and insightful stories about Asian Americans probably never get told. For example, I thought Ernest Hemingway’s portrayal of a frustrated Jewish striver in The Sun Also Rises was incredibly deep and thoughtful, and managed to say lots of things about how second-generation Jewish Americans were integrating into American society at the time. That portrayal probably wouldn’t get written today — a lot of people now accuse it of being antisemitic,2 because the character, while complex and sympathetic, is deeply flawed, and Hemingway himself wasn’t Jewish.
It also means that works clearly inspired by Asian America don’t generally get recognized as such. The clearest example of this is Avatar: the Last Airbender, which was arguably the best new fantasy IP to come out of the U.S. since the turn of the century.3 ATLA, as it’s sometimes known, drew on a bunch of Asian cultures — mostly Chinese, but also Japanese, Tibetan, Korean, and others — to create a sort of pan-Asian mishmash, informed by American sensibilities and written in a distinctly American style. That’s not too different from what Asian American culture is, and many Asian Americans were involved with both the production of the show and its adaptation into graphic novels and other media. But because the show’s creators themselves were white, it typically isn’t counted as Asian American art.
Even more importantly, the narrow definition of “Asian American art” also tends to exclude art made by Asian Americans, if it doesn’t deal directly with Asian American culture as its subject matter or motif. That ends up limiting the idea of “Asian American art” to things like Fresh off the Boat, The Joy Luck Club, Crazy Rich Asians, Everything Everywhere All at Once, American Born Chinese, Past Lives, the first season of BEEF, and so on.
I’m not saying those shows and movies are bad. For example, I love Everything Everywhere All at Once, which is among the most original and fun things I’ve seen in the past decade, and a true throwback to the zany 80s movies I loved as a kid. The first season of BEEF is one of the best things I’ve ever seen on TV. But Asian American culture is just a pretty small pool of source material to draw on.
It’s not that big, for one thing — if you exclude South Asians like Indians and Pakistanis, Asian Americans are only around 5.5% of the U.S. population. And Asian American narratives usually don’t tend to carry any special resonance with people in Asia:
And like all immigrant subcultures in America, Asian American culture is probably destined to be a sort of transitory, ephemeral thing. The classic second generation experience — “My parents really drove me hard and kids made fun of my weird lunch, until I went to college and met other people with the same background” — almost never lasts beyond the second generation.
Assimilation happens. It’s already happening. Around two-thirds of Asian Americans report having close friends of another race, and over 40% of U.S.-born Asian Americans marry people of other races (usually white or Hispanic). Despite concerns that nonwhite immigrants wouldn’t follow the same patterns as the East and South European immigrants of a century ago, Asian Americans are assimilating even faster than the white immigrants of yesteryear in every measurable way — outmarrying, climbing up the economic ladder, adopting American naming conventions, speaking English, moving out of coastal enclaves, and so on.
That means that both the source material and the natural audience for what we now consider “Asian American” narratives are destined to shrink. I’m fourth generation; when I read stories or watch movies about the New York Jewish culture of the early and mid 20th century, it already feels like a foreign country to me. I would be willing to bet that most fourth-generation Asian Americans will watch Fresh Off the Boat and feel the same way.
So we’ve defined “Asian American art” in a way that inherently limits it to something small and transient — basically, a micro-genre. It’s thus inevitable that lots of people see it as repetitive. If we want to appreciate the true breadth and depth of Asian American art, we need to take a broader view of what that means. I think we should start looking at any art created by Asian Americans as “Asian American art” — even if it’s about white people, or about robots, or about fantasy worlds where our modern races and cultures don’t even exist.
So here are a few examples of Asian American art I’ve enjoyed in recent years. This is far from an exhaustive catalog, or even a “top” list — it’s just a random selection of things I personally like. I’ve restricted it to works with major contributions by Asian Americans, so no Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, Kpop Demon Hunters, Counterstrike games, Kim’s Convenience, Mariko Tamaki graphic novels, etc. — those are all by Asian Canadians.
A few examples of great Asian American art
1. The comics of Adrian Tomine
A lot of the most interesting Asian American art comes in the form of graphic novels — a category that’s usually overlooked in these discussions. Adrian Tomine is probably tied with Neil Gaiman as my favorite graphic novelist of all time. He’s also one of the greatest authors of Generation X — he manages to capture the peculiar spirit of cynicism, longing, and rugged independence mixed with a strange sense of helplessness that defines that forgotten generation. His most famous work is Shortcomings, which was adapted into an excellent and overlooked movie in 2023:
(The opening scene of the movie is a send-up of Crazy Rich Asians — very much in the spirit of Asian Americans making fun of “Asian American art”.)
But my favorite are actually Tomine’s shorter comics, assembled in collections like Summer Blonde, Killing and Dying, and Sleepwalk. Tomine is one of the most sensitive observers of the human condition that I’ve ever read, and he deserves far more recognition than he’s received.
2. Monstress, by Marjorie Liu and Sana Takeda
This is possibly the best fantasy graphic novel I’ve ever read, both in terms of the storytelling and the art quality. Takeda, the illustrator, is Japanese, but Liu, the author, is American. Monstress is steampunk mixed with Lovecraftian horror, and the twist — sorry for the minor spoiler — is that one of the horrors is one of the protagonists. It has amazing fight scenes, an epic page-turning plot, and deep, complex characters. Like most long-running graphic novel series, it starts to meander later on,4 but it’s absolutely worth picking up.
3. The first season of BEEF
OK, on to television. TV tends to get short shrift in the cultural zeitgeist relative to movies, but I’d argue that television is where the truly creative screen stories now get told. BEEF is an anthology show created by Lee Sung Jin, with the running theme being suburbanites who get into feuds. I was lukewarm on the second season, but the first season is one of my favorite things ever.
This season actually is about Asian American culture, but it’s about interesting corners of it that don’t usually get air time, including working-class Korean Americans and Japanese American artists. The portrayals are devastatingly funny and deeply poignant at the same time, and the story arc is executed to perfection. Make sure to watch until the very last half-second of the last episode.
4. Atlanta (and Childish Gambino videos)
Atlanta is a quintessential work of Black art about Black America, created by (and starring) by Donald Glover, and written by an all-Black writers’ room. But one of the key creators of the show is Asian American: Hiro Murai, who Glover said “had the eye for this show”. Murai directed many of the episodes (including the pilot), and was also an executive producer. In fact, Murai and Glover have been creative partners for many years, and it’s difficult to separate their brilliance. Murai has also directed many of Glover’s music videos (in Glover’s alter ego as Childish Gambino), including the iconic “This Is America”.
Atlanta is, simply put, one of the most brilliant TV shows I’ve ever seen. If you haven’t seen it, you need to. And Murai’s participation in a quintessentially Black production shows how Asian artists can contribute to art well outside the typical “Asian American” paradigm.
5. Japanese Breakfast (and Crying in H Mart)
I really like the band Japanese Breakfast. They’re broadly a rock band, but really they defy genre — you could call them indie or synth-pop. Michelle Zauner, who is half Korean, is the lead singer and main songwriter. I recently saw them live, and they give a very good show.
Zauner also wrote a pretty well-known book called Crying in H-Mart, about the death of her mother from cancer. It’s a very good memoir, and it did indeed make me cry (though not in H Mart).
6. Wisp
I really loved shoegaze music when I was young, and I’m delighted that the Zoomers have brought the genre back. One of the best-known examples of the shoegaze revival — and my personal favorite — is Wisp. It’s basically just one woman, Natalie Lu.
7. Ninefox Gambit, by Yoon Ha Lee
Finally, on to my favorite genre of art: science fiction books! I grew up reading a lot of these, and one of my favorite subgenres was “weird” sci-fi books from the 1960s and 70s — Samuel R. Delany, Roger Zelazny, and stuff like that. I also love Rudy Rucker’s weird cyberpunk. Well, I can confidently say that Ninefox Gambit and its sequels and associated short stories are every bit as weird and far-out and creative as any of the stuff on my old shelf. It’s about a universe where the laws of physics depend on which calendar people use — and so of course the galaxy is made up of warring empires, each trying to make everyone use their own calendar. If you want your mind blown, this series is a good one.
8. The stories of Ted Chiang
Ted Chiang is, I would argue, the greatest English-language science-fiction short story author of the 21st century so far. His stories — collected in books like Stories of Your Life and Others and Exhalation — are high-concept stuff, exploring premises like “What if people had implants that gave them perfect memory?”, and “What if people could turn off their ability to identify beautiful faces?”. But they almost always manage to work deep and meaningful character arcs in as well, which is something that relatively few sci-fi short story authors are good at. His story “Story of Your Life” was adapted into the film Arrival.
9. Jade City, by Fonda Lee
I wanted to put a fantasy novel in here. I’m pretty picky about fantasy, but I really enjoyed Fonda Lee’s Jade City, which is about super-powered mafia wars in an alternate universe, in a city that’s somewhat reminiscent of Hong Kong — basically, think of The Godfather with superpowers. Lee is a very good writer, and I couldn’t put the books down.
10. How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, by Charles Yu
This book is pretty light on the actual sci-fi; it’s mostly about a guy resolving his psychological issues via time travel. But in fact, I like books about guys resolving their psychological issues via time travel — at least when they’re well-written, which this book definitely is.
11. Nothing, Except Everything, by Wesley Wang
This short film was made by a 19-year-old college kid, and it really blew me away. It’s a surrealistic portrait of a high schooler who comes to understand the idea of mortality:5
There’s apparently a bunch of controversy over whether it’s a good film, but the haters are wrong — it’s very good. Darren Aronofsky agrees, which is why when he saw the short film, he immediately called Wang up and gave him a deal to direct a feature film.
12. Plants vs. Zombies
OK, fine, video games aren’t exactly “art”. But who doesn’t love Plants vs. Zombies? I can’t even count the hours I sunk into that game.
Anyway, there’s a small selection of Asian American art that doesn’t fit the standard definition (except possibly BEEF, which stretches the typical format and takes it in innovative directions). Of course this is just the tip of the iceberg — it’s a smattering of stuff I just happened to consume over the past few years. There are a lot of very brilliant Asian American creators out there, making art that looks nothing like DANG!.
And to the snarky people on X, I’d think twice about bashing the traditional “Asian American art” stuff as well. Yes, many of its tropes have become cliche by now. But its often modest success opened the door for a lot of Asian American creators to break into the worlds of art and entertainment. Increasingly, they have the creative freedom to write stories and make art about anything they want, and we’re just starting to see a few glimmers of what that could encompass.
It’s also clearly trying to be pan-Asian; the main characters are ethnically Chinese but have a typically Vietnamese last name, and one of the characters has the typically Korean name of Eunice.
Amusingly, the author of that New Yorker article alleging that Hemingway’s character was antisemitic is named Akhil Sharma — presumably, not Jewish — while I, who think the character is sympathetic and worthwhile, am Jewish.
This happens because writing graphic novels takes a ton of time and pays very little money, so once a graphic novelist gets a hit, they are financially forced to keep it running for as long as possible. The same problem occurs in the manga industry in Japan. The way to solve this is for TV producers to start adapting graphic novels for TV series early in their runs.
Chinese actors and online influencers have a new rival: cost-effective advanced AI video generation programmes that are threatening millions of jobs in a once-vibrant area of China’s gig economy.
The release of powerful new AI-powered video software, such as tech group ByteDance’s Seedance 2.0 model, has allowed digital actors to replace humans, enabling the production of higher-quality original videos more quickly.
The digital takeover intensified after this year’s release of Seedance 2.0, said Greg Wollner, a short-drama actor and producer in Beijing. Before its release, he was shooting three different productions a week. “And after that, everything just went.”
Many of Wollner’s friends “had to quit doing what they love and change to something else”, he said. In May, 89 of the top 100 animated dramas on Douyin, ByteDance’s domestic Chinese version of TikTok, were AI productions according to DataEye, a marketing analytics company.
I didn’t mind the reduced pace of the NBA broadcast, which toggled
between cameras under each basket, but Stratechery’s Ben Thompson
felt strongly that the best option would’ve been a single
camera at mid-court, to completely eliminate the disorienting cuts
and replicate being at the game in person.
Apple’s approach with baseball, at least based on Friday’s game,
seems to lean toward Thompson’s preferred approach — and it does
benefit from it. Each half inning was shown from a single camera
on the dugout rail next to the on-deck circle, giving a great view
of pitcher and hitter and the infield, as well as the goings on
right in front of the dugout in foul territory. The camera
switched between innings, so you were always viewing from the
perspective of the at-bat team’s dugout.
Making it all work better was Apple’s addition of a “virtual
jumbotron” floating in the sky, a scoreboard with graphics and a
video feed of the standard 16:9 telecast on Apple TV. It was easy
to look up and catch a replay or even get a better view of
something happening in the far-off outfield, without getting in
the way of my view of the game itself.
I concur with Snell’s review. The camera placement was terrific. You watched each team bat from the perspective of its own dugout. Perfect. A few other thoughts:
The whole thing was legit exciting. Vision Pro continues to get a bad rap because Apple hasn’t sold many of them, and isn’t going to sell many of them until they come out with new models that are cheaper and lighter and less fussy. But there’s no denying that these immersive experiences are fucking cool. And an immersive live experience adds something else. It’s ineffable. Hard to say why, but feeling like you’re at another place watching something happen live is magic. Just a few years ago it would have required literal magic. It wasn’t possible. Now it is.
The immersive audio was terrific. It really sounded like being at Yankee Stadium, and truly added to the you-are-there feel of the experience. It seems corny to say this, but I really had the urge to stand during the national anthem, and it felt slightly wrong not to take the “hat” off my head (where the “hat” was the Vision Pro). It’s exciting to feel 43,000 fans roar around you. Baseball is a slow game but when the crowd roars, it erupts. That never comes across on regular TV broadcasts. It did here.
Like Snell though, I felt Apple’s commentators were too chatty. I’d love an option to toggle the commentary on and off, to just experience the natural audio of the ballpark.1
The only thing missing was aroma. Cement, grass, dirt, sweat, beer, peanuts, hot dogs with the works. Ballparks smell like fun. (Even Fenway.) But the you-are-there experience was so visceral I swear I could almost smell it. It’s like my brain was filling in the missing sensation. It didn’t feel like watching a 3D TV broadcast. It didn’t feel like a better version of TV broadcasting. It felt like something new and different. Something at least as different from watching on TV as watching on TV is different from merely listening on radio. It’s profound. TVs are small — laptops, tablets, and phones are even smaller. Yankee Stadium is huge. Watching this game immersively felt huge. Awesome, in the literal sense.
I love how you could look around and see how filthy everything really is in baseball: the on-deck mats, the interior of the dugouts, the tiny bits of schmutz on the warning track. It’s a lot of dirt and quite a bit of spit. That’s baseball, Suzyn.
There’s a resolution and/or depth of field limitation with the cameras, exacerbated by the fact that Vision Pro’s displays are, compared to reality, low resolution. They’re the highest-resolution VR displays on the market but I still couldn’t see the ball once it left the infield. When balls were hit to the outfield you just kind of had to judge what was happening by what the infielders and baserunners were doing. Ben Rice hit a double in the first inning and I thought the Sox outfielder caught it and I was confused why Rice was running to second base. Turns out the outfielder stopped running because Rice hit the ball over his head and he was waiting to play the carom off the left field wall. I was happy to be wrong. A few years from now, with better cameras and better Vision headset displays, these problems will be solved. But in the meantime, the outfield is fuzzy.
The best part about the immersive perspective compared to a traditional broadcast is watching how complex infield play really is. It’s fun to quickly look around the whole infield right before the pitch. You really see how much more stressful it is for the pitcher once there’s a runner on base — let alone more than one. It’s what I love about going to the ballpark — so much more complexity and intricacy is revealed — and watching this immersive broadcast enables the same thing. You can see the whole game, at all times, not just the pitcher, catcher, and batter.
The virtual “jumbotron” is a fine idea but I wish you could move it a bit higher, and it would be even better if you could configure it with the stats you want to see. But positioning it higher is my big request.
I have to admit I hadn’t used my Vision Pro in quite a few weeks before last night’s game. One thing that really struck me, almost certainly because baseball is a long game, is how heavy it is. My chin wants to droop and my face wants to look down when I’m wearing it. It’s the weight more than the isolation that makes it tiresome for anything other than short-form content, for me at least.
The whole thing was a great success. I’m writing these notes on Saturday afternoon while watching the old flat broadcast of game 2 of this 4-game series, and it feels ... well, boring. And small. Bodes well for the future of sports.
Even better would be an option to swap in the local radio broadcasts, like bringing a portable radio to the ballpark. Go skeuomorphic with the UI and make it look like an old handheld Sony or Panasonic transistor radio, and make the toggle “click” on and off. Go skeuomorphic with the audio too — make it sound like it’s coming out of a little speaker or a little earpiece and have the tuner play static as you switch between home/away (and English/Spanish) stations. That’d be so fun. And the regular old flat Friday Night Baseball telecast already supports swapping in local radio broadcasts — they’ve already got the rights. Bring that to these immersive games! ↩︎
This week we’re doing another one of our series of military theory primers, this time focusing on a fairly simple contention: that the United States Navy is a load-bearing component of the global economy. I considered attempting to work in A.T. Mahan and the concept of command of the seas in here but simply outlining the basic argument about the navy’s role in sustaining global standards of living has run out more than 10,000 words, so a primer on Mahan will have to wait for another day.1
The argument here is actually quite easy to state as a series of propositions: global trade is an important part of the global economy, necessary to maintain our standards of living (and in many cases, essential for the survival of people in poorer countries) and seaborne trade makes up the overwhelmingly vast majority of all trade. Moreover, in history to this point it has been a relative constant that in the absence of major naval powers committed to freedom of navigation, pirates and states at maritime choke-points tend to emerge and seriously disrupt maritime trade. Finally, at current, only the United States maintains the kind of navy that traditionally has been necessary to keep sea lanes open, thus making the US Navy at present a ‘load bearing’ component of the global economy. Consequently, this makes the United States’ apparent turn away from freedom of navigation troubling – a move likely to be bad for Americans but also bad for everyone else.
If you nodded your head through all of those points, you are good to go. Hit the tip jar on the way out. But I find that many folks want to contest at least one of those points – they don’t think trade is important (or that it only enriches ‘big corporations’) or don’t realize how substantial sea trade is, or don’t expect sea commerce to break down in the absence of naval power, or don’t understand the kind of navy necessary to provide that sort of power. So the rest of this far-too-many-words-long post (it turned out to be 10,430) is going to belabor each point, one by one, in order to explain why the United States Navy – which I should stress is very much an imperfect institution; we are not here to uncritically glaze the USN, just to describe its function – is configured the way it is and why there is not currently a replacement for it on offer.
Also, let me note at the beginning: if you want regular updates on global shipping as well as good explainers about how global shipping works, I cannot recommend Sal Mercogliano’s What’s Going On With Shippingchannel enough.
But first, as always, building navies is expensive. Really expensive. Absurdly expensive. If you want to help keep this ship afloat, you can help by spreading the word to new readers and by supporting this project over at Patreon. If you want updates whenever a new post appears or want to hear my more bite-sized musings on history, security affairs and current events, you can follow me on Bluesky (@bretdevereaux.bsky.social). I am also active on Threads (bretdevereaux) and maintain a de minimis presence on Twitter (@bretdevereaux).
A World With Trade
Now I want to start by talking about what global trade really is and its role in the global economy, because in many cases before I can get to anything about shipping lanes and choke points and pirates and so on, I find many regular folks have already immediately objected that they do not care about global trade. They think of global trade as a thing which mostly benefits big corporations or ‘cosmopolitan globalist’ elites. But, you must pardon me, they are wrong: they do not yet know that they care about global trade. When global trade is disrupted – even just a relatively little bit! – and the price of a barrel of oil nearly doubles, leading to a one-third surge in the price of gasoline and a 50% jump in the price of diesel, it turns out they care a great deal.
They often just don’t think about that in terms of global trade, because global trade is one of the key things that makes modern prosperity possible, mostly invisibly. That very invisibility, as we’ll see in the end, is part of what poses real political problems, but let us first make trade a bit more visible.
The first mistake that folks make here is to assume that trade is a relatively small part of the global economy. It is an easier mistake to make in a place like the USA, which is very big and thus trades with itself more than most, but globally trade makes up between a quarter to a third of all economy activity.2 That is, it turns out, quite a lot. If your household income fell by a third, that would be very difficult for you. If every household’s income fell by a third, the resulting economic contraction would be double the size of the Great Depression (which reduced global GDP by roughly 15%) and have all sorts of knock-on effects as those households themselves had to cut back on other, non-imported goods and services.3
The second potential mistake here is to assume that all of this trade is mostly a luxury: that it just accrues to the rich or to rich countries or to big corporations. We may remove the ‘rich countries’ here right off: a lot of the countries with very high trade-to-gdp ratios (imports+exports, thus the ability to exceed 100%) are poor countries (the other big group are small, rich countries): countries like Vietnam (190%), Djibouti (206%), Namibia (108%), Somalia (128%), Libya (137%), Guinea (103%) and so on. We’ll come back to this in a moment, but a breakdown in global trade is actually especially bad for poorer, developing countries.
Likewise, while big corporations surely profit off of trade – no poor man ever owned a freighter – they’re not the only ones. We can think about this by thinking about the most staple of all bulk staples: food.
In the developing world, access to global food markets is an essential lifeline. Most developing countries, especially across Africa, are net-food importers, some quite substantially so. Moreover, whereas food imports in developed countries are often ‘exotic’ foods that grow in other climates (think bananas away from the equator), for developing countries, these are often bulk staples. As we saw in 2008-2010 and again in 2022 and may grimly see again soon, increases in the price of bulk stable foods are associated with political instability and suffering in the developing world. Because if the price of bread goes up by 25% in the United States, for most Americans that is annoying, but in many developing countries it means people go hungry because they cannot afford food.
Developing countries are also more likely to have agricultural systems that are exposed to more variability (drought, pests, blight, etc.) as compared to developed countries. And fundamentally everyone relies on trade to insure against famine in the event of a local failure in food production. Trade is what allows us to even out a freak drought in one country or a flood in the other to keep everyone fed. That trade may be in the form of market interactions or it may arrive as foreign aid or disaster relief, but it is still the movement of goods from one place, from one country, to another.
Trade is also important for the developing part of developing countries. Doing the industrial revolution from scratch – designing and building better steam engines, creating factories, developing precision tools, steadily expanding production as all of that industrial capital accrues – took Great Britain something like a century and a half (roughly 1750 to 1900 – we’re being quite approximate here) to hit an economic standard we might define as ‘middle income’ today.4 But developing countries today that have access to trade – and here we mean not just the movement of goods (but also that) but also people – can go through that transformation much faster. The classic interaction is that developing countries sell raw materials5 to import the machinery and experts to build basic manufacturing industries (think steel, concrete, agricultural goods processing and so on) and then sell those goods to be able to afford to important the experts (including educators) and advanced equipment to make more complex finished goods. Because manufacturing, say, a car requires not just raw materials, but the ability to craft high quality materials (like very precise steel alloys) as well as very complex components and very precise parts within low tolerances and that both requires really fancy manufacturing equipment (which also requires those same high quality materials, complexity and low tolerance components to build) and very skilled workers, designers and engineers.
Trade allows developing countries to jump-start progress on each rung of that ladder, importing the experts who already know how to do these things (and can teach more) and importing the machines that can do these things (with which more may be built), ideally resulting in a high-income, more self-sufficient economy achieved in decades rather than centuries. And you can see any number of countries that either have accomplished this (China, Japan and South Korea, for instance) or are now accomplishing it (India, Vietnam), often from very low initial industrial ‘baselines’ (frequently as a result of tremendous neglect or malice at the hands of European imperial masters).
As those developing countries work their way up the value chain from raw materials to basic goods (often textiles) to low-cost, low-complexity consumer goods (e.g. plastic toys) to higher complexity consumer goods (cars, washing machines) to the very top of the value chain (software, aircraft, etc.), their standard of living improves, but equally because the cost of labor in those countries is lower, they provide much cheaper goods to developed countries. Those cheaper goods in turn lower the cost of living in developed countries, making the sort of ‘American Dream’ middle-class lifestyle available to more people.
Of course even among developed countries, trade does not lose its value – there are forms of comparative advantage that have nothing to do with labor costs. Some industries are so large, technical and expensive that few countries are big enough to absorb the entire demand of it – aeronautics is a classic example. It might make sense for some countries to specialize in aircraft production, but most countries are too small to have a domestic aircraft manufacturer just for the heck of it – they’d be better off specializing in something else and using that product to buy the planes. Meanwhile, some goods are simply hard to produce in certain places: Norway is never going to grow many bananas, Japan is probably not going to ever be a major producer of oil, Mali is not going to export much in the way of fish.
All of which is to say that trade directly improves the living standards of regular people in both developed and developing countries and equally, we do a lot of it, with trade representing something approaching a third of the global economy.
So not only do more goods move by ship than by aircraft, railway or truck or river barge or what have you, four times more goods move by ship than by every other alternative system of transportation combined. And if roughly 30% of global GDP is goods being traded, that means that about a quarter of global GDP moves by ship each year. That is a very big part of the global economy!
The main reason for this is simple: it is much cheaper to move goods by sea than by any other method. For the cost of sending one shipping container across the United States by land (truck or rail; when I checked in 2023 around $2,500-7,500, with some variation by weight and exact route) you could also ship that same shipping container from an American cargo port to any port in the world at all (around $6,000). Shipping by sea is (this is the rule of thumb I was given a few years back when I asked) around three times cheaper than rail, five times cheaper than truck and eight or more times cheaper than air freight. That is an enormouscost difference.
Believe it or not, that huge difference in cost is actually less than it was before railways and internal combustion engines made bulk overland transport somewhat affordable. In antiquity, the ratio of cost (derived from Diocletian’s Price Edict) for transport between land, river and sea was 20:4:1, with land transport for a given quantity of bulk staples being twenty times as expensive as land transport. With the miracles of the industrial revolution, we’ve brought down ‘twenty times as expensive’ to merely! three to five times as expensive, per ton-mile.
There are two basic reasons for this. One is that it simply takes less energy to move things over water than it does to move them through the air or overland. But the other reason, that I think is worth stressing here is ships can be really, really big.
Via Wikipedia, a pair of Maersk Line container ships, showing just how much cargo they can handle. Each of these ships, which are Triple E-class container ships, can carry around the equivalent of 18,000 to 20,000 semi-trucks worth of cargo.
A truck can move a single cargo container. A typical freight train might have 100 or so freight cars each moving about a cargo container. A large Suez canal capable container ship, by contrast, might carry upwards of 20,000 TEUs (twenty-foot equivalent units, the size of a cargo container). That means a single container ship might match the cargo capacity of hundreds of trains or tens of thousands of trucks. That holds true for other kinds of freight: a tanker truck can move about 200 barrels (bbls) of liquid, like oil. Suezmax tankers can get up to a million bbls and Very Large Crude Carriers (VLCCs) are often in excess of two million.
So the scale that sea shipping can operate on is simply much greater than what is currently possible on land. Even pipelines for oil generally move less than active major shipping lanes (as we’ve seen demonstrated in the Strait of Hormuz) and of course you cannot move iron ore or consumer goods or grain via pipeline but you can move them in large freighters. As a result, nearly all long-distance trade moves as far as it can by ship before transferring to truck or rail for the ‘first mile’ and ‘last mile’ of its transit. It is thus far to say that global trade – which, as we’ve established, is an important part of the global economy which enables rich countries to eat well and poor countries to eat at all – is mostly about shipping on the water.
Strait Up Piracy
All of that seaborne trade, however, is the product of a long period since 1945 in which there have been relatively minimal disruptions of the security of civilian ships moving over the world’s oceans. What I want to note is that this is not automatic, it is an outcome that has been produced. Instead, the historical pattern has generally been that in the absence of major powers exerting themselves to keep sea lanes open (because it benefits them to do so), what we see is that sea trade fragments, with polities sitting on maritime choke-points moving to exploit that control (at the expense of everyone else) and both pirates and privateers disrupting shipping more generally.
Piracy, of course, is extremely old: it is treated as a well-established and perfectly normal thing to be doing in Homer, for instance. We actually have references to sea raiders and pirates even farther back, including in the Amarna tablets (c. 1350 BC). Now I should note that while we generally think about piracy as ships attacking ships, there is a land based component to it: piracy often also includes the raiding of coastal settlements and at the same time pirates themselves need coastal bases (often with friendly local populations) in order to operate out of.
Notably, a lot of this early evidence for Mediterranean piracy comes in the context of the Late Bronze Age Collapse and the period immediately following it (the latter including piracy’s place in Homer’s conception of maritime activity, where it is a normal and regular thing to be doing), periods of state fragmentation where there weren’t any major naval powers in the Eastern Mediterranean capable or willing to enforce freedom of navigation. That changes as we move into the Late Archaic and Classical periods (as reckoned in Greece, so c. 550 BC onwards): the Achaemenid Persians are able to dominate effectively the entire litoral of the Levantine Sea (the part of the Mediterranean between Egypt and Anatolia) and maintained a strong navy – and we hear a lot less about piracy in this period. Later emerging Greek naval powers (particularly the Athenian navy after 483) also had an interest in piracy suppression – Athens was reliant on imported grain and timber and also profited immensely from trade.
That state of affairs continues broadly until the death of Alexander, where we get a resurgence in our evidence for piracy in the context of the Wars of the Diadochoi. Our visibility here is better and one thing worth noting is that piracy here dovetails with what we might term privateering – state-sanctioned piracy – as some of the Macedonians scrapping for control (Demetrius Poliorcetes most notably) hired pirates and mercenaries to harass their enemies. Men might move smoothly from being mercenary sailors in the service of a king to ‘pirates’ and back again while doing effectively the same things on the water. That said, these states also had an interest in trade (especially Rhodes) and so alongside the piracy were efforts in piracy suppression.
Via Wikipedia, a map of the territory of the diadochoi, including the Ptolemaic Kingdom with its fairly expansive naval holdings, mostly lost by the 160s. Rome crippled these key powers without replacing them and got a serious pirate problem in the bargain.
This system famously gets out of hand when the Romans in the mid-second century destroyed or crippled most of the major maritime powers of the Eastern Mediterranean (Macedon, the Seleucid Kingdom, the Ptolemaic Kingdom, Rhodes, Pergamum) but didn’t move into the region to replace them. This ends up leading to a series of relatively Roman commands against pirates in various parts of the eastern and central Mediterranean: L. Fabius Labeo in 189, M. Antonius in 102, L. Licinius Lucullus in 86, P. Servilius Vatia in 78, M. Antonius Creticus in 74, L. Caecilius Metellus in 70. This eventually culminates in Cn. Pompeius (Pompey)’s famous command against the pirates in 69, where he was given unprecedented authority to operate basically everywhere in the Mediterranean (using subordinates to coordinate distant activity), a command whose overweening scale is one of the major marker points in the emergence of the Late Republican ‘rogue general’ in Roman history.
Pompey’s success here is, as far as I can tell, actually emblematic of how anti-piracy campaigns succeed: he targeted the pirate’s coastal bases, not their boats and used the coercive threat of force to negotiate rather than just trying to wipe out all pirates. In the end, Pompey smashed some strongholds and used the leverage the threat of that gave him to resettle the pirates (and their supportive populace) inland, away from the coast. Roman piracy suppression after Pompey is much more successful: as Roman controlled effectively the whole Mediterranean litoral, it could deny pirates bases everywhere – although through the imperial period the Romans still had to maintain a navy to keep the trade lanes, upon which their empire’s prosperity relied, open.
To simplify greatly, we see a similar set of processes in the ‘Golden Age of Piracy’ (c. 1650 to c. 1730). It was enabled by state fragmentation and warfare, particularly the rivalries between England and France to one side and Spain on the other. It ended in part because those wars ended, but notably also with the application of the same mix of coercion and negotiation, perhaps most famously with the destruction of the ‘Republic of Pirates’ at Nassau – many pirates took the offered ‘King’s Pardon’ leaving the remainder isolated enough to be destroyed in detail and for British power over the Bahamas to remove the coastal bases necessary for piracy.
And we see a similar interaction with the Barbary Pirates in the Mediterranean. The activities of the Barbary pirates also arose out of a kind of fragmentation, as the Barbary states were weakly controlled vassals of larger Muslim states (most notably from the 1500s on, the Ottoman Empire). To greatly simplify, initially European (and later, American) states found it most expedient to simply pay off these states, but as the balance of power shifted in their favor in the 1800s, they shifted towards coercion. The United States famously ended most Barbary raiding of its commerce with the Second Barbary War (1815), a major achievement for its young navy, with Britain and the Netherlands following suit the next year with the Bombardment of Algiers (1816). Once again the ultimate resolution came when naval powers were able to demonstrate their ability not just to strike pirate ships but to project power inland either by bombardment or the landing of troops. It is the ability to shut down the bases which suppresses piracy successfully in the long term.
Via Wikipedia, a painting, Bombardment of Algiers by George Chambers (1836), depicting, somewhat dramatically, the nine-hour bombardment of Algiers by the Royal and Dutch Navies in 1816. An example of power projection ashore as the Anglo-Dutch fleet could credibly threaten to essentially destroy the city (which is coastal) from the water. Ironically, the fleet was able to effectively bluff a surrender out of Omar Agha, the Dey of Algiers, by announcing they would continue their bombardment if he did not surrender, despite being almost totally out of ammunition. The Dey, unaware of this, surrendered rather than endure a continued bombardment – a useful reminder that the effective window for negotiation may often be narrow and easily missed.
Now alongside pirates, states and other larger polities can also be a problem for maritime trade if they sit on major choke-points. As you can see on the trade-route map below, most trade moves through one or more ‘choke points’ – narrow sea passages where alternative routes are either much longer or simply unavailable. Some of these are major canals (Panama, Suez) or narrow straits or channels (the English Channel, the Strait of Hormuz, the Bab el-Mandeb, the Strait of Malacca, the Öresund, the strait of Gibraltar, the Turkish straits and so on).
Via Wikipedia, a map showing the density of commercial shipping on the world’s oceans.
While most countries globally have an interest in relatively free movement through these shipping channels, the countries directly on these choke-points may have an interest in extracting value from their control. The classic example of this is the Sound Tolls, the toll that Denmark extracted from ships passing the Öresund until 1857, which at points made up the majority of the Danish state’s revenue. While any one such ‘closed’ or tolled strait may be little more than an inconvenience globally (although notice just how much of an inconvenience restricts on the Strait of Hormuz have been!), because nearly all shipping moves through at least one if not more of these choke-points, if other countries were to follow suit and every country on a choke-point tried to maximize extraction off of it, the result would be a major drop in global trade, which, as discussed above, would lead to a sharp decline in living standards in rich and poor countries alike. Everyone would be worse off.
The current global system, which assumes freedom of navigation in nearly all of these waterways and only allows fees to be charged to the degree that ships require active assistance to navigate a given choke-point (canals have to be maintained and some straits – though not the Hormuz – are narrow enough that safe passage requires help (‘pilotage’); the Turkish straits are the classic example of the latter) is largely a product of the 1800s eventually codified in the 1982 United Nations Convention of the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), a result of imperial maritime powers (first Britain, later the United States) twisting arms in order to establish a global standard of “innocent passage.” That said, this standard was always backed up, implicitly or explicitly, by force: countries agreed to these limitations in part because everyone understood that if they didn’t, the imperial powers would make them because those imperial powers relied heavily on the free movement of goods and people over the water.
And we should be clear here: that this state of affairs – few-to-no pirates, open choke-points – benefited humanity as a whole was for the most part a happy side benefit of imperial maritime powers (initially mostly Britain, then later the United States and Britain, then later mostly the United States) pursuing their own interests. I want to stress that very clearly for any ‘America First’ers still sticking around: while this system benefits most people globally, we built this system because it benefits us in particular. As we’re going to see in a moment when we get to blockades, we wrote the rules to favor us, to favor the kind of naval power we have and the kind of trade we engage in.
A good example of this are the rules for when it is legal for a country to disrupt trade. On the one hand, unilaterally closing a shipping lane (as Iran has done) is illegal, as is unannounced attacks on shipping (which is to say, piracy). However, blockades are legal as part of war, assuming the blockading country declares the blockade, declares what goods are contraband (they need to be at least thinly connected to military activity) and provides any ship attempting to run the blockade a change to turn around before being engaged. In practice, that means that international law bans all disruptions of maritime trade except the kind only countries with large power-projection surface fleets (of the kind Britain and the United States, who largely wrote the rules (along with, post-1945, the USSR), have) can perform.6 Instead of writing international law to say, “only the United States, Great Britain and maybe the Soviet Union can cut off trade” the solution was to say, “you can only cut off trade via this specific method which only the United States, Great Britain and maybe the Soviet Union can actually perform.”
But maintaining and enforcing those rules remains reliant on naval power or more correctly it remains reliant on a certain specific kind of naval power.
Power Projection Navies
The distinction I want to draw here is the specific subset of navies able to project power over the oceans. Navies, after all, come in different sorts. One distinction you will hear quite often is between a blue water navy (a navy capable of operations on the oceans, the ‘high seas’) and a ‘brown water navy’ (which only operates along the rivers and coastlines of its country) or ‘green water navy’ (not capable of global projection, but able to push out into local oceans and seas). But not all blue water navies are made equal either.
As noted above, effectively suppressing piracy long-term generally requires the ability not merely to get to the body of water in question, but to have the ability to project power ashore, because the ultimate piracy suppression requires removing the coastal bases that pirates operate on. Likewise, the kind of coercion that can compel potentially truculent countries sitting on maritime choke-points to allow unhindered traffic generally also requires the ability to project power ashore. It isn’t enough to threaten to sink that country’s navy (especially if they don’t have much of one), you need to be able to threaten to bombard key cities or deliver a seaborne invasion (we’ll come back to why this is such a problem in the Strait of Hormuz in a moment).
Since trade is global, maintaining global maritime networks means we either need one navy with global projection (which is generally how this works) or a consortium of regional navies that maintain these capabilities in their neighborhood. In practice for the last few centuries, relying on one or a few big navies with global projection has been the norm.
So we need a navy capable of global projection, which includes the ability to get to any key choke-point. It has to, once on station, be able not only to defend itself against other ships but also project power ashore. Since projecting power ashore is a process that invariably takes time it also needs to be able to sustain itself at any key choke-point.
The first requirement alone actually already rules out most of the world’s navies: only a handful of relatively large, relatively wealthy countries maintain navies with a significant number of large warships (generally destroyers and bigger) that can actually do oceanic operations on the regular. Most smaller countries instead operate a mix of smaller frigates, corvettes and cutters which are perfectly serviceable for defending and policing their own territorial waters, but are not suitable for long distance operations. You can actually see this distinction with remarkable clarity because the United States doesn’t operate just one navy – it operates two: the US Coast Guard would, for most countries, be the navy. But for blue water operations, we’re generally going to want larger ships: both because larger ships are more capable (they can carry more weapons, munitions and supplies) but also simply because open ocean travel often demands bigger ships due to more intense weather and longer time at sea. Of course, bigger ocean-going warships are going to be more expensive (which is why countries that have no designs on creating a blue water navy tend to prefer smaller, cheaper coastal ships).
But blue water isn’t enough: we need to be able to project power ashore. Historically, the right ship for this kind of power projection has varied, but since 1945 the ship type for power projection ashore has been the aircraft carrier, particularly a fleet carrier. Many navies operate smaller carriers that mostly carry helicopters and maybe a handful of vertical take-off-and-landing (VTOL) platforms, but if you want to actually project power ashore, you need a large airwing of full-sized capable fixed-wing aircraft. You can actually see this distinction in the US Navy as well. When we say ‘the United States has 11 aircraft carriers’ we’re only counting the CVNs, the fleet carriers. The United States also maintains a bunch of amphibious warfare ships – 2 America-class LHA (landing helicopter assault) and 7 Wasp-class LHD (landing helicopter dock) – which in any other navy would be treated as aircraft carriers, given that they can both operate fixed-wing aircraft. But while these ships exist to support amphibious operations, you wouldn’t want to rely on them exclusively to project air power, especially against an enemy who can actually shoot back. You want the much larger air wing of a CVN (40+ strike aircraft, as compared to half a dozen on an LHA/LHD).
Via Wikipedia, a United States Navy carrier strike group, organized around the USS George Washington (CVN-73), taken in 2003. The supply ship is in the back, while the carrier is supported by what looks to be three Ticonderoga-class cruisers and three Arleigh Burke class destroyers. I don’t immediately recognize the ship to the far right (maybe a Whidbey Island-class dock landing ship? Let me know in the comments).
Now there has been a lot of chatter lately about if aircraft carriers are actually obsolete, most of it being about the ways in which modern anti-ship missiles make aircraft carriers vulnerable. But aircraft carriers have always been vulnerable – look how many of them the RN, USN and IJN lost in WWII! The question is not ‘is the carrier vulnerable?’ but ‘what role does the carrier serve and can any other ship perform it?’ And the answer is that a (fleet) carrier is the striking arm of a fleet, able to project a lot of combat power out a long distance and no, no other ship is able to do that. Yes, you can throw missiles out of VLS (vertical launch system) cells on a destroyer or a frigate, but you are quite limited as to how many of those missiles you can carry and missiles are a lot more expensive than bombs. A carrier can, over time, output a lot more ‘boom’ at a lot greater distance using its air wing (while its air wing also protects the fleet as well).
And that’s really relevant for us because we’re interesting in projecting a lot of combat power ashore, often while keeping our vulnerable ships reasonably far away from any coastal weapons. The big carrier is the sine qua non of doing this sustainably over a long period, which is why countries continue to build them: China’s People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) certainly doesn’t think that carriers are obsolete! A carrier thus is the modern form of a ship doing shore bombardment – able to throw a lot of boom at coastal (and inland) targets – and also required if you intend to actually put troops on land (where they will require both air cover and air support).
A carrier thus makes the threat to drop the marines (US Marines, Royal Marines, etc.) on someone credible. Of course you also need marines available to be dropped and the shipping and landing infrastructure to get them to the theater and onto land. The US Navy does this via the combination of Marine Expeditionary Unit (MEU) with a Expeditionary Strike Group (ESG); the former being what you are putting ashore and the latter being the ships to support doing so. Prior to that, of course, this task was done by the British; as Lord Edward Grey famously put it, “the British army should be a projectile to be fired by the Royal Navy.”
Of course, once you have that fleet, capable of moving to any given choke-point or sea lane and projecting power (including power ashore), you also need to be able to potentially sustain it there, keeping ships in supply and rotating them as necessary to maintain a continual presence until those operations ashore are complete. And that requires more than just ships, it requires a global network of logistics bases. In the Age of Steam, these were coaling stations – places where a navy could stockpile coal and other necessary supplies to resupply fleets. Of course, one coaling station wasn’t enough, you needed a connected network of them so ships traveling to distant oceans could sail from one station to the next, refilling their coal bunkers at each point. The British, of course, maintained the most expensive such network in the late 1800s and early 1900s, enabling the royal navy to operate in effectively any ocean.
During the 1900s, the United States undertook to set up a similar network and indeed one of the exercises I sometimes do with my students is noting how neatly many of the United States’ key naval bases parallel neatly the older British network, with the United States in some cases sharing or taking over the exact bases the Royal Navy had once used. That network of bases let you run supplies short distances to your fleet on station, rather than having to do shuttle runs all the way from the home country or – worse yet – be in a situation where the fleet only has the supplies it can bring with it when it departs, operating with a fixed ‘timer’ for its operations.
That said, the problem of logistics combined with how big full-sized carriers (even sub-super-carrier) are brings in another implication: you probably want nuclear-powered carriers. Fuel is one of the largest logistics needs for a fleet that is on the move or actively doing an operation and these ships need a lot of it. But the thing is, for a carrier-centered task force, the carrier is probably at least half of the total displacement of the force. A USN carrier strike group (CSG)’s displacement is around 100,000 tons of carrier, around 40,000 tons of surface ship and around 20,000 tons of submarine. The carrier and the submarines are nuclear powered, so the force is roughly 75% nuclear by weight. The advantage here is that on a practical, operational scale, nuclear carriers and submarines can operate almost indefinitely without refueling. You will run out of munitions, out of food, out of sailor’s sanity long before you need to change out the reactor fuel. Having your carriers be nucleared powered is really expensive (it requires a large body of trained nuclear technicians and engineers), but it makes global power projection much easier.
What those ingredients – a blue water navy with power-projection assets (read: carriers and amphibious warfare capability) supported by a network of logistics bases allowing them to operate globally – what those ingredients let you do is threaten force on anyone who would close down the global shipping lanes (closures that would, to be clear, violate international law under UNCLOS). Historically speaking, once this hammer is in hand, while it may have to be demonstrated form time to time, for the most part it exists as latent force. If you are doing it right, your navy should not actually be doing a lot of fighting, because everyone involved should understand you would drop the hammer if they made you, so they don’t make you.
It’s deterrence, but using a conventional military force (a navy) rather than nuclear weapons.
So if we want to stand back for a moment, we can say one of the main purposes of large power-projection navies is to deter disruptions to shipping. It isn’t their only purpose, of course, but it is perhaps their chief purpose.
The Unique Role of the United States Navy
So to recap before moving forward: global trade is essential for providing for modern living standards and most of that trade must move by sea. Sea lanes do not keep themselves open, historically they must by kept open, typically by a particular form of naval power, which I’ve termed a ‘power projection’ navy – one which is able to logistically sustain itself at long distances and project combat power ashore (via bombardment, air strikes and landing troops).
Doing that mission, in turn requires a navy that has a substantial supply of larger surface warships (destroyers, cruisers, as opposed to corvettes, cutters and frigates), as well as larger aircraft carriers (which provide the modern shore strike capability), supported by a robust global network of supply bases. Since no country maintains a worldwide colonial empire anymore, that robust global network of bases has to be predicated on a robust global network of allies and security partners.
And I’ll cut to the chase: at present, only the United States Navy can do this. No other country is even really on the verge of doing it, though one country may be moving in that general direction.
The first angle we can think about this through, of course, is power projection assets, which is to say, “which countries have fleet carriers, anyway?” Not very many, it turns out. The People’s Republic of China currently has three aircraft carriers, all diesel based; a fourth, rumored to be nuclear-powered and super-carrier sized, is on the way. The United Kingdom maintains two fleet carriers (the Queen Elizabeth class), which are fairly large and robust, but diesel powered. France has the Charles de Gaulle, the only other large nuclear-powered carrier deployed globally outside of the United States navy.
After that, the pickings get slim quick. India has a pair of diesel-powered carriers, but they’re both quite small. Russia had a diesel powered carrier, which it did use for power projection in the Syrian Civil War, but the Kuznetsov is both not a very good carrier and also has been inoperative and in need of repairs for almost a decade now. Then we have navies which operate some small carriers that are basically on the scale of a USN LHD or LHA: Italy and Japan have two each, Spain has one. Frankly, all of the carriers in this paragraph are too small to do serious power projection on their own (the Kuznetsov’s Mediterranean operations were in support of the former Syrian Assad regime, which also offered the Russians land bases). They can enhance a fleet which already includes a powerful air component (indeed, this is a key part of the mission for the smaller NATO carriers – they can assume that in a big operation, they’ll have a friendly Nimitz, Ford, Queen Lizzie or Chuck d’G to support), but they cannot offer the necessary combat power on their own.
Via Wikipedia, an image from 2024 of the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower (CVN-69) operating alongside the USS Laboon (DDG-58), the French Horizon-class frigate Forbin (D620) and the Italian carrier Cavour. A lot of European naval procurement has assumed that in any fight, NATO navies would be fighting alongside the United States Navy, and so what ships they have built are often aimed at supplementing that core capability, rather than replicating it. One manifestation of this is that a number of European navies have better minesweeping capabilities than the USN, a sensible burden-sharing arrangement that proved awkward when the United States unilaterally went to war with Iran without consulting any of our allies. It turns out that it is good to have allies and even better to consult them with your plans.
When the current crisis in the Hormuz began, I saw people asking why European or Chinese navies didn’t intervene to keep the shipping lanes open, especially given that it was their oil being blocked. And the answer here is quite simple: they couldn’t. It is one thing to have a military capability at home. It is something very different to be able to project that power overseas and right now the only country that has a full suite of power projection assets is the United States.
We’ve already discussed above the limitations imposed by non-nuclear-powered carriers: maintaining them at sea for long periods is a lot more logistically intensive, which is why countries that think they might be doing power projection missions with carriers tend to at least think really hard about having them be nuclear powered. That said, the travails of the Royal Navy really speak to how hard this is to do – and why so few small countries do it. Maintaining a bespoke military nuclear program that can design and maintain a meaningful number of compact nuclear reactors is no small task. For four decades the Royal Navy has struggled to actually decommission old nuclear-powered submarines7 in part because they have a hard time getting enough nuclear technicians to supervise removing and safely disposing of the reactors in them.
The United States Navy pours a tremendous amount of resources into training nuclear propulsion specialists. Indeed, this is something I’ve interacted with directly, because I teach at a university that has both a Navy ROTC program and a research reactor. When I taught US Naval History, required by the NROTC program, a lot (more than half, I think) of my NROTC students were nuclear engineering majors. Smaller countries are simply going to struggle to generate enough nuclear technicians and engineers to sustain such a program without a huge, dedicated national effort.
Nevertheless, not (currently) having nuclear-powered carriers puts meaningful limits on China and the UK’s ability to employ their carriers on power projection missions. That, of course, interacts with the systems of global basing. Here, I think China’s experience in anti-piracy operations off of Somalia is actually really instructive. The PLAN has been sending task forces to operate in the Gulf of Aden since 2008 when the issues there became acute. But despite the fact that there are signs that the People’s Republic of China is trying to assemble a network of bases through the Indian Ocean (termed by western analysts a ‘string of pearls’), the structure of PLAN missions was pretty consistent: each force was one frigate, one destroyer and one supply ship. Each mission lasts about 180 days, including travel time from China, time on station and the return trip.
Via Wikipedia, the Fujian, China’s current largest aircraft carrier, displacing some 80,000 tons (about 80% of a Ford-class super-carrier. It is currently China’s only CATOBAR (catapult-assisted take-off, barrier arrested recovery) carrier, a capability which lets it launch heavier and more capable fighters more rapidly than older ‘ski jump’ designs. It’s air wing is still meaningfully smaller than a Nimitz or Ford-class carrier (52 aircraft compared to c. 75), but still quite formidable.
That short duration is pretty striking, because the c. 15,000 ton displacement (not including the support ship) PLAN squadrons here have roughly the same amount of support ship (one ship, in the 20,000 tons displacement range) as many American carrier strike groups (as noted above, a CSG is 160,000 tons displacement – ten times the size; it has far more combat power), but these exercises remain small and comparatively short. The suspicion one has is that what is happening here is that each of these squadrons is leaving the Chinese mainland with most of the supplies they are going to get on their one supply ship (which represents more than half of the total displacement of the squadron!) and so they have to transit all the way back home when that runs out. There is a Chinese naval base in Djibouti that must also be playing a key logistics role here, but the short duration and small size of the PLAN forces really is suggestive of the approach here. This approach, of course, is hardly sufficient to allow the PLAN to deploy basically anything in the Atlantic or Eastern Pacific or basically anywhere except the west Pacific and Indian Ocean.
At that scale, for the PLAN to deploy the combat-power equivalent of an American CSG to the western Indian Ocean (which, because their flight decks are smaller, would require basically all of them) would probably require nearly the entire PLAN logistics fleet and strain PLAN logistics such that the fleet couldn’t be kept there long and would be very vulnerable if it did not accomplish its objective very rapidly. In naval warfare, you do not want to be caught in a fight at the ragged end of your logistics tether with low fuel or munitions.
Now the PLAN apparently is building a nuclear-powered carrier. They are trying to begin setting up networks of logistics bases. That suggests at least some interest in the PRC in moving towards a global power projection navy, though I would note that history is replete with countries that started to invest in that kind of navy only to revert back to regional defense navies when it became clear just how jaw-droppingly expensive such a navy would be. In either case naval strategy is built strategy and the PLAN probably has at least a decade to go before they have the rudiments of a truly global power projection navy, even if they steamed there at full speed.
Which brings us to a key conclusion: at present, only the United States Navy is capable of performing the kind of power projection which sustained maritime commerce and at present, no other navy is particularly close to being able to replicate that capability. The two most obvious candidates to replace the United States would presumably be China or some kind of combined EU Navy, but it is not clear that China is actually interested in maintaining global maritime commerce beyond their own and a combined EU Navy on the USN’s scale would face tremendous political and economic hurdles, to say the least.
For now, the United States Navy is the only game in town.
Which, it turns out, may be a problem.
Implications
You may have noticed that the infrastructure of global maritime security is fraying lately. Indeed, I would argue, it has been fraying for quite some time.
Although establishing a direct causation is impossible, the fact that the beginnings of these issues correlate to the point at which the United States’ Global War on Terror began to go south and thus the American public began (understandably) decisively souring on America’s traditional role as the guarantor of the global system does not seem like an accident.8 Instead, it has led to the current baleful condition where in the United States is the only state capable of actually sustaining the global maritime system but at the same time is anywhere from indifferent to actively hostile to it.
The earliest of the current woes back back to the mid-aughts with the rise of piracy off of the coast of Somalia. That piracy intensified dramatically in 2008 and 2009, though by 2013 or so a robust international effort had largely clamped down on pirate activity. Starting in 2023, however, the United States was not able to fully restore shipping through the Bab-el-Mandeb, a crucial maritime choke-point (it’s where traffic moving through the Suez and the Red Sea gets to the Indian Ocean). Traditionally, the American response – all the way since the First Barbary War (1801-1805) to a state (and the Houthis are, in practice, the government of large parts of Yemen) disrupting its shipping in this manner would be to invade and topple that regime. Instead, for very obvious reasons, the political will to land the marines in Yemen simply didn’t exist, so the response was instead Operation Prosperity Guardian, an effort to accomplish the mission through ship defense and air strikes.
Then, of course, early in 2026, the United States started a major regional war with Iran which resulted in the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. What is striking about this decision is that deciding to go to war with Iran required disregarding freedom of navigation – traditionally an overriding American strategic interest – as unimportant. Of course some of that was simply because the war’s planners – being dumb as hell – assumed they would accomplish a quick and easy victory. But equally it is hard not to notice that the decision to disregard freedom of navigation – at least until the oil price spike reminded everyone why it was important – came from an administration that is also the first American presidency to be openly hostile to global trade since the 1930s. Moreover, once again the political will in the United States for ground operations which might restore trade simply does not exist.9
I want to note something actually quite important here: the war in Iran does not represent a failure of US maritime deterrence, but an abandonment of it. Prior to the decision to launch a massive decapitation and regime-change strike on the Iranian Regime, the United States was deterring Iran from doing the very obvious thing and using its geographic leverage over the strait as a tool against its regional rivals (the Arab Gulf states). The Iranian Regime operated under the quite reasonable conclusion that if it did try to shut down shipping in that region, the United States might respond with overwhelming strikes, perhaps aimed at regime change. That threat was sufficient to achieve deterrence.
The problem, of course is that once you do those attacks anyway they no longer have deterrence value: you cannot threaten someone with something you are already doing. You especially cannot threaten someone with a bullet you have already fired and cannot fire again. Once the Iranian Regime was placed in an existential (for it) war, they had no reason not to close the strait or assert their control over it and so of course they promptly did so. Iran didn’t decide it could ‘take’ the American retaliation and thus decide to close the straight, it realized it was already taking the maximum American retaliation and so would pay no greater cost for closing the strait. The United States, in attempting regime change in Iran abandoned its maritime deterrence.
The United States is retrenching and in some cases is even becoming actively hostile to the global international order. Consequently, every other country in the world must confront the possibility of a future in which the United States Navy does not guarantee the global maritime system. In the period from 1914 to 1945, as Great Britain increasingly found that it lacks the economic resources to maintain its role as the global guarantor of that system, the United States was both ready and willing to act, first as a partner (from 1918 to 1945) and eventually as the primary guarantor. There was a country to pass the baton to.
What the above analysis is meant, in part, to show is that there is no country to pass the baton to now, nor does one appear likely to emerge soon. The PLAN is, as noted, likely many years away from being able to pick of the mantle, but more to the point it is not clear that the PRC is interested in doing so. The PRC’s policy in its nearer seas has not been ‘a rising tide lifts all boats,’ but a mix of dominance politics and beggar-thy-neighbor revanchism. When disaster strikes coastlines, the United States Navy has, historically, been a key player in humanitarian relief efforts, the PLAN much less so. When in 2013 a major typhoon hit the Philippines, the United States sent $37m in disaster relief and a humanitarian relief force that included numerous ships including a complete carrier-strike group. Those fleet carriers are useful for projecting firepower ashore, but they’re also really useful for delivering humanitarian aid in conditions where ports, roads and railroads may be inoperative. By comparison, the PRC sent $200,000 and one hospital ship.
The thing is, there is no way to build a power-projection navy quickly and there really is no way to build it cheaply. Modern warships take time to build and cost a lot of money and effectively projecting power globally hinges on the most expensive and difficult to build platforms. Starting a naval buildup from nothing is not too hard – because you are not carrying the running costs of existing ships – but that stops being the case as your fleet expands. The United States Navy costs on the order of $230-280bn per year. Another country might do it cheaper, but even something like half that cost would require even the wealthiest countries to massively increase their military budget. China may be building up to this kind of navy, but they are years (probably decades) away and likely would need to expand their capital ship fleet something like three-fold, which is hardly a trivial expense.
But as we’ve established, the United States Navy is effectively a load-bearing component of the global economy. While obviously not all trade would cease if the United States dissembled its fleets, the crisis in Hormuz seems to make it fairly clear that maritime trade would be both reduced and quite a bit more expensive. And the economics of long-distance bulk transport mean that land- and air-based options simply cannot replace maritime shipping. If the trade lanes are not kept open, they may not close completely, but history suggests they will narrow.
One counter-argument here is to assert that, unlike in previous centuries, there simply aren’t enough states on major choke-points with an incentive to close them down to make this a problem. I think the last few years have thrown up considerable challenges to this notion, as we see states and non-state actors doing exactly that in the Black Sea, the Red Sea, the Indian Ocean and the Persian Gulf – and regional powers unable to resolve the problem. As we saw above, that is the normal historical pattern, slowly reasserting itself and I think, if American retrenchment continues, we ought to expect that to continue.
Now of course even in that future, global trade doesn’t simply stop altogether. It simply becomes more constrained, more limited and more expensive. Some goods become less available, ships have to take the long way around or pay expensive tolls, perhaps in some areas they have to mount greater security precautions and all of those costs get passed to the consumer. Armed merchantmen were common in some periods of history, but it is worth noting that arming merchant ships has never been sufficient to fully protect a merchant marine, for the obvious reason that the defending country must split their defenses across their many, many ships whereas the pirates or rogue states may concentrate all of their force on a single ship of their choosing.
In that world of constrained global trade, we wouldn’t expect some apocalyptic total economic collapse. But some goods that are commonly available – out-of-season or out-of-climate fruit, for instance – might mostly vanish from store shelves. Goods in advanced economies would become more expensive and living standards would decline, as wealthy countries would – on the margin – have to ‘on-shore’ low value-added industries which would pay worse wages, while at the same time the products themselves (imported or domestically made) got more expensive. Autarky – the effort to make most or all of a country’s needed goods domestically – is and always will be a losing economic strategy, because it forgoes comparative advantage. But a marked increase in the cost of trade, a reduction in the availability of imported goods will push wealthy countries in that direction and their economic growth will slow as a result.
What is inconvenient for rich countries, however, will arrive as catastrophe to poor countries who, as noted above, will find their opportunities for development curtailed and their access to affordable necessities limited.
Thus my assessment is that the American voter is making a terrible mistake. On the waves, there is at present no alternative to American naval power and the result of its absence will be a poorer United States. Indeed, Americans are right now living through a small taste of what that world looks like, as the current administration’s decision to abandon freedom of navigation as a priority brings almost immediate karma in the form of higher prices for crude oil, diesel and gasoline.10 Of course a lot of oil has been re-routed around the blockage in Hormuz either via pipelines or sneaking it through via ship-to-ship transfers, but all of that entails additional costs which raises prices.
The problem, of course, is that it has taken me 10,000 words to walk through why this is so – why global trade matters, why specifically maritime trade matters, what the USN’s role in that is and why we cannot simply easily ‘burden shift’ to another country. And the median voter does not have the time in their day to take in a 10,000 word lecture on naval strategy and economics. This was always a policy that relied upon the unified commitment of the elite, for the folks actually running these things to present a collective understanding to their voters that these capabilities were essential.11 Although the facts on the ground have not meaningfully changed, that elite consensus has broken and so here we are.
It is worth remembering that a worse, poorer world is possible, so that we do not become its authors.
Abroad with my wife by water to Westminster, and there left her at my Lord’s lodgings, and I to Jervas the barber’s, and there was trimmed, and did deliver back a periwigg, which he brought by my desire the other day to show me, having some thoughts, though no great desire or resolution yet to wear one, and so I put it off for a while.
Thence to my wife, and calling at both the Exchanges, buying stockings for her and myself, and also at Leadenhall, where she and I, it being candlelight, bought meat for to-morrow, having never a mayde to do it, and I myself bought, while my wife was gone to another shop, a leg of beef, a good one, for six pense, and my wife says is worth my money. So walked home with a woman carrying our things.
I am mightily displeased at a letter Tom sent me last night, to borrow 20l. more of me, and yet gives me no account, as I have long desired, how matters stand with him in the world. I am troubled also to see how, contrary to my expectation, my brother John neither is the scholler nor minds his studies as I thought would have done, but loiters away his time, so that I must send him soon to Cambridge again.
After the bruising Michigan Senate primary a new Fox News poll was published showing Abdul El-Sayed four points behind Mike Rogers, with Rogers himself at 51% (Rogers 51%, 47% El-Sayed). That was just one poll. But it crystallized for many Democrats and confirmed for many of El-Sayed’s critics that Democrats had just nominated a man who couldn’t win a general election in Michigan. Today EPIC-MRA, usually seen as the leading Michigan pollster, released a new poll showing El-Sayed at 47% and Rogers at 43%. In this case, we have another poll from EPIC-MRA released about exactly a month ago which showed the reverse: Rogers 46% and El-Sayed 43%. So we’re able to make an apples to apples comparison which shows El-Sayed’s standing in a pretty strong light.
And those aren’t the only polls. Since the election four polls had been released before the new EPIC-MRA poll. Two of those were partisan polls. One from the (Democratic) Senate Majority PAC (El-Sayed +6), one from the Trump aligned and cringey-named League of American Workers (El-Sayed +3) and then two independent polls. One was from AARP (El-Sayed +1) and another from Susquehanna, a respected pollster but generally seen as GOP-aligned or at least mostly working for Republican candidates (El-Sayed +7).
The Senate Majority PAC number should be treated with especial caution even more than the others, even the League of American Workers one, because that’s an internal poll which SM chose to release – mostly to calm people down about the Fox poll. I have no doubt it’s legit. But a campaign or campaign PAC only releases the good polls. So treat that one with caution. But overall we have a pretty consistent story here: five different polls, campaign polls, independent polls, the most recent and most respected poll, all showing El-Sayed ahead with margins ranging from 1 point to 7 points.
To be clear, I’m not saying El-Sayed is a lock to win. I’m not even predicting he will win. Even the textbook case for the “mainstream”, non-offending middle of the road Democrat, Elise Slotkin beat Rogers by a mere 19,000 votes, albeit in the pretty rough (for Democrats) 2024 cycle. There’s also some decent statistical evidence, as we discussed here, that in the last two midterm cycles summer polls have tended to slightly but measurably over-estimate Democratic strength. I’m simply saying that the idea that El-Sayed can’t win this race (and not just as a theoretical possibility), that he has baggage or extreme views that just rule him out of contention just can’t be squared with this data. If you believe that it’s not on the basis of any numbers. It’s a hunch or a gut feeling. And maybe you’re right. But be clear with yourself that it’s a hunch.
This cumulative data also suggests that the run of fairly unfriendly news cycles for El-Sayed over the last few weeks, especially the recent Piker one, haven’t mattered on the ground in Michigan nearly as much as national commentary seems to suggest. This could just mean of course that El-Sayed is running a really good campaign. But I would suggest that at least in the short term the movement is tied to the straightforward fact that a bruising – bordering on vicious – primary fight is going to depress support for the winning candidate vs the general election opponent (Mike Rogers) because the losing primary opponent’s supporters (Haley Stevens, in this case) are going to be mad at the winner. It’s then on the winner to re-coalesce their coalition’s support for the general.
And indeed, the available evidence suggests that’s what’s happening. In the Fox poll mentioned above, only 69% of Democrats and Democratic-aligned independents who didn’t identify with the DSA were supporting El-Sayed. That was a pretty bad number. But the upside of that number was that unlike Rogers, who had 96% of Republicans behind him, El-Sayed had a lot of room to grow. And the trend of recent polls suggests El-Sayed is succeeding in bringing those non-DSA aligned Democrats back into the fold.
Again, my point here isn’t that Rogers is toast. I’m not saying El-Sayed has this wrapped up. I’m saying that the idea that he can’t win or that the results of the primary were some kind of decisive setback for Democrats’ chances just can’t be squared with the available evidence. At least not so far. This is very much a race and it’s one in which El-Sayed kind of has to be viewed as a favorite to at least some degree. The more adverse way of looking at this of course is that you’d gotta kind of suck as a Democrat to be losing in a purple to blue-ish state in an environment like this. But I don’t think any Democrats I know cares very much about why El-Sayed is well-positioned, just that he is. He just needs to win the seat. Maybe he’ll lose. Maybe these polls are all missing something. But if you think this race is now Rogers to lose because of whatever problems you ascribe to El-Sayed that’s a hunch, a gut feel, not something that you can easily back up with data.
Artist’s illustration of the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center
Using a donated Hubble-class mirror originally built for a spy satellite, NASA’s Roman Space Telescope is poised for launch Sunday on a $4.3 billion mission to open a new window on the universe, taking wide-angle, ultra-sharp images that would require a half million 4K TVs to show in full.
Put another way, officials say a single full-resolution image from Roman’s 300-megapixel wide-field camera would cover 45 city blocks or the entirety of El Capitan in Yosemite National Park.
And it will collect that data faster than any previous NASA spacecraft. The Hubble Space Telescope has beamed back about 172 terabytes of data over 30 years while Roman will downlink a staggering 2,500 terabytes over its five-year primary mission.
Put yet another way, Roman’s sensitive wide field camera and advanced detectors will scan broad swaths of the cosmos 1,000 times faster than Hubble, collecting as much data in one month as its older cousin could manage in a century.
A SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket carrying NASA’s Roman Space Telescope was hauled to pad 39A at the Kennedy Space Center overnight Friday to set the stage for launch. The right-side strap-on booster will be making its third flight while the central and left-side boosters are making their first. This will be the 13th flight of a triple-core Falcon Heavy, the most powerful operational rocket in SpaceX fleet of boosters. Image: Michael Cain/Spaceflight Now.
The flood of data is expected to shed new light on the nature of “dark matter, dark energy and the structure of the universe itself and accelerate the … discovery of potentially habitable planets outside our solar system,” said NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman. “Roman will give the Earth a new atlas of the universe.”
Said NASA science chief Niki Fox: “The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is a sheer powerhouse. It is literally a speed machine. The speed at which we’ll be scanning the sky, delivering vast amounts of data and returning results will be at an unprecedented rate, never done before.”
The 42-foot-long 18,000-pound telescope is named for the late Nancy Grace Roman, NASA’s first chief astronomer who championed the value of space telescopes throughout her career and was instrumental in the development of the Hubble Space Telescope. As such, she is often referred to as “the mother of Hubble.”
Spaceflight Now’s will live coverage starts about two hours prior to launch.
The the new telescope is scheduled for launch atop a triple-core SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket at the Kennedy Space Center at 7:26 a.m. EDT Sunday.
It is bound for Lagrange Point No. 2, a gravitational eddy of sorts about a million miles on the opposite side of Earth from the sun where it will remain in place with a minimal use of fuel. The James Webb Space Telescope is stationed in the same region for the same reason.
From the vantage point of L2, Roman will study the effects of dark matter, the mysterious substance that pervades the universe, holds galaxies together and accounts for most of the mass in the cosmos, acting as a brake on the expansion of space itself, which is carrying galaxies farther and farther apart.
At the same time, Roman will work to gain statistically significant insights into the nature of the equally mysterious dark energy, a repulsive force presumably present since the Big Bang that became dominant about five billion years ago as the universe expanded and thinned out. Ever since, the expansion of the cosmos has been speeding up.
Built for a classified spy satellite, the Roman Space Telescope’s 7.9-foot-wide mirror was donated to NASA by the National Reconnaissance Office when the original program was canceled. It is the same size as the mirror at the heart of the Hubble Space Telescope but it was ground to a different prescription, giving the new observatory an equally sharp but much wider field of view. Image: NASA.
Roman may help resolve a conflict between the strength of dark energy in the very early universe, as measured by probes studying the remnant three-degree glow of the Big Bang’s immediate aftermath, compared to Hubble observations of a specific type of supernova that indicate a slightly different value.
When the Hubble Space Telescope was launched in 1990, estimates for the age of the universe, from its Big Bang birth to the present, ranged from 10 billion years or so to 20 billion years.
Hubble was able to determine the speed of that expansion — the Hubble Constant — and thus the time that has passed since the Big Bang to an accuracy within 1 percent: 13.8 billion years.
But detailed studies by researchers using spacecraft studying the afterglow of the bang — the 3-degree cosmic background radiation — came up with a different number. The mismatch — known as “the Hubble Tension” — suggests some critical element is missing in the current understanding of the universe and the forces driving its evolution.
“We’re seeing evidence that the Hubble constant, as inferred from very early times, is not consistent with the Hubble constant that we measure closer to now, which is telling us that the model that connects those two things might not be quite right,” said Project Scientist Julie McEnery. “We have a slight tension in our expectations for how structure should grow and evolve.”
That “slight tension” indicates a potentially serious flaw in the standard model of cosmology, the current understanding of how the universe, and everything in it, has evolved over time. It might even indicate dark energy is not the constant force it is thought to be, but might somehow change over time.
“We’re probably not going to confirm the standard model of how the universe works,” McEnery said. “We’re very likely to demonstrate that our standard model is wrong, and to set ourselves on a path to figuring out how does our universe really work. It’s hard to get (a better question than) the fundamental nature of your universe!”
Roman’s wide-field camera is one of two instruments aboard the spacecraft. The other is an advanced coronagraph equipped with deformable mirrors that can block out the glare of a star to detect the vastly dimmer light reflected from the atmosphere of an orbiting planet.
Roman’s coronagraph is expected to detect Jupiter-size planets orbiting Earth-like stars. By analyzing that reflected light, researchers may be able to tease out the elemental composition of those atmospheres.
“We think that we will be capable of detecting exoplanets that are about 100 million times fainter than their stars, and with that capability, we are hoping to see … a Jupiter twin around a nearby star using visible light reflected from its cloud tops for the first time,” said Vanessa Bailey, the Roman coronagraph instrument scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “Then, we can use that light to study the composition of its atmosphere.”
About 6,200 exoplanets have been discovered to date using smaller instruments like NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope. Roman is expected to discover more than 100,000 exoplanets over 18 months of observations.
It will take three to four months to “commission” the spacecraft, calibrating is instruments and testing its myriad subsystems before science operations can begin in earnest.
The solar-powered Roman is built around a 7.9-foot-wide 410-pound primary mirror, one of two that were donated to NASA by the National Reconnaissance Office, the secretive agency that manages many of the nation’s high-end spy satellites.
The mirrors, the same size as Hubble’s, were built for a classified project that later was canceled. But both were ground to near-perfect prescriptions, allowing them to look down and focus on Earth, not out into deep space.
NASA has no plans or funding to utilize the second mirror, focusing instead on building a single “flagship” observatory.
The donated mirror’s curvature, smoothness and polish had to be modified to ensure the desired astronomical prescription and the telescope’s trusses and other components had to be altered to enable them to withstand the ultra-low temperatures at Lagrange Point 2.
“I think our engineering team thinks of it as we received a set of well tested parts that included highly calibrated optical systems,” said Project Manager Jackie Townsend. “But we really had to sort of start over and make it our own to work at our operating temperatures.”
In the end, the project came in ahead of schedule and under budget. But even with an effectively “free” primary mirror, the telescope will still cost taxpayers some $4.3 billion to build, launch and operate for its five-year primary mission.
Three “core” surveys are planned over the course of Roman’s planned five-year mission.
The High-Latitude Wide-Area Survey will focus on a huge swath of the sky looking out of the plane of the Milky Way — 12 percent of the entire sky — avoiding obscuring star clouds and dust marking the galactic disk. The goal is to catalog the distribution of a billion or more galaxies.
Light from Roman’s primary mirror will be reflected from two other mirrors before reaching the infrared focal plane detectors seen here. The detectors give Roman what amounts to a 300 megapixel infrared camera. Image: NASA.
Those data, collected over 520 days, will help researchers better understand how dark matter and energy have combined over cosmic time to drive the evolution of structure in the universe.
The High-Latitude Time-Domain Survey will require 180 days of observations over two years. The telescope will repeatedly image the same regions in an area of 90 full moons to make movies capturing short-duration events ranging from supernova blasts to the radiation emitted when stars fall into black holes.
McEnery described such transient events as “things that go bump in the night.”
The Galactic Bulge Time-Domain Survey will focus on the core of the Milky Way, the central bulge of stars, gas and dust where a supermassive black hole affects the trajectories of nearby stars.
Imaging across an area spanning 8.5 fill moons, Roman is expected to find tens of thousands of exoplanets by watching hundreds of millions of stars and looking for signs of “microlensing,” a phenomenon in which the light of a background star is enhanced, or magnified, by the gravity of an intervening object.
The late Nancy Grace Roman, NASA’s first chief astronomer, championed the value of space telescopes throughout her long career at the space agency. She is seen here in front of the James Webb Space Telescope’s primary mirror during the observatory’s assembly at the Goddard Space Flight Center. Roman, who died in 2018, is affectionately remembered as “mother” of the Hubble Space Telescope. The Roman Space Telescope was named in her honor. Image: NASA.
Mission managers have also left room for “general astrophysics” topics not covered in Roman’s three core surveys. The first such program, known as the Galactic Plane Survey, will monitor the disk of the Milky Way from one side to the other covering an area of 3,455 full moons.
Some 20 billion stars will be mapped along the way, providing the most complete portrait of the galaxy and its structure ever captured.
“What makes me most excited about Roman is the discovery potential,” McEnery said. “With two billion galaxies, we’ll have two thousand objects that are one in a million. We’ll be exploring patches of sky as a function of time with exquisite sensitivity. We’ll find new things that go bump in the night.
“I very much hope, and in fact expect, that the most exciting science from Roman will be a surprise, something we couldn’t predict. And that will set the stage for the next deeper set of questions for future missions to address.”
4. “The Global Economics Lab is a non-partisan organization located at Harvard and draws on a network of faculty affiliates across universities. We conduct policy-relevant research on the forces reshaping the global economy. We engage with governments, central banks, companies, multilaterals, and civil society organizations to translate that research into action.” Link here, connected to Gita Gopinath and other prominent economists.
I published my perfect iPhone weather app, and my guess is that you won’t want it.
Premise:
Why doesn’t my weather app tell me the weather yesterday?
I can never plan based on numerical temperature, etc. Am I going to be walking outdoors today? Should I take a jacket? Numbers are so abstract. Too much thought required.
HOWEVER: I can mostly remember what I wore yesterday.
So all I want to see, from my app, is: oh yeah today is like yesterday but a little warmer.
Then I can adjust easily.
I built an app around that core idea.
Yesterday features:
Today’s weather is the solid line. Yesterday’s weather is the dashed line. The diff is arrows.
Glanceable AI-generated text description using Apple’s built-in LLM.
Dark mode! Tap the Sun to toggle dark mode (the Moon shows its current phase with latitude-accurate orientation).
Plus a home screen widget. And some little glyphs if there is a 30% of greater chance of precipitation. Nothing else.
I vibed this app because it is the actual conversation that takes place in our kitchen every morning. Apple makes forecasts available via WeatherKit for free up to pretty generous limits.
So it has two users (we use it daily).
Initially when I made it, I put the app on TestFlight for the two of us, and offered around on the socials to see if any of my friends would like it too.
In the old days (like, before May and the summer of vibe coding) there would have been a bunch of interest.
But now, instead: a handful of people came back with some enthusiastic variation of: yeah!! cool!! I made my own perfect weather app for me and my family just the other week too!!
I love this.
What this tells me is:
Software has changed forever.
We need more APIs (like WeatherKit) and underlying reliable databases with high-level operators (like whatever powers Photos or Reminders) and identity/permissions/etc, and that’s what an OS will have to include in the future.
p.s. one of my testers (there are a few) pointed out that I forgot to add fahrenheit Oops! I’ll add that in the next version.
Yes Yesterday is like an old-fashioned barometer. The weather is like yesterday only more rain/more fair.
And cognitively it does seem more straightforward to take action by iterated adjustments based on a vector rather than deciphering an absolute value at every tick.
e.g. how about an automated savings account which, every month, always saves n+100 where n is the amount you squirrelled away last month, and your available actions are to ignore it (which means the savings transfers goes ahead) or adjust the modifier temporarily, but you can never simply keep it the same?
I wonder what a general rule could be? Like, building systems that always diverge and refuse to converge on steady state?
So the above Tweet was fired off by the Orange County Republicans. And apparently they think it’s just insanely awful how Robert Garcia, CA-42 congressman, appeared at an event where there was a sign expressing that federal agents have “no balls.”
Here, specifically, is the banner …
Let’s review a couple of things:
• 1. The Orange County Republican Party is headed by three people. The first is Will O’Neill, the former Newport Mayor who has literally—not a single time—criticized his lord and savior, Donald Trump, for (drumroll, please) … starting a war with Iran with no planning or achievable objective; hiring a defense secretary with no experience for the job; bragging about POWs being chumps; complaining about enlistee being chumps; bragging about grabbing women by the pussies; devoting nearly all of his time and energy to vanity construction projects; lying repeatedly about Jan. 6 and the 2020 election. O’Neill said shit when a noose was arranged for Mike Pence; said shit when Gracey Vander Mark posed with the QAnon symbol; uttered nary a peep as masked agents have grabbed people off the streets for the crime of being brown and/or speaking with an accent.
Of the other two, one (Ray Gennawey) is a nepo baby who has nothing to say about DEI backlash while climbing the ladder based on the power of a local name with zip and the second (Leandra Blades) is a wildly insane culture warrior.
• 2. Facts are facts—and if you’re an ICE agent hiding behind a mask … you have no balls. And I almost mean that literally: The process where testicles are surgically extracted from your groin, placed into a jar and fed to Biff, the one-eyed eel. It’s actually wild, if you think about it, that people like O’Neill and Gennawey and Blades are supportive of modestly trained agents. Wearing masks. To cover their faces. Even after the murders, the violence, the clear lack of professionalism.
• 3. It must be sorta sad, being Will O’Neill. The state hates you. The county is drifting more and more purple, toward blue. You have a functioning head, but you have to engage with these nuts all … the … time. You know masks mandates had a purpose. You know public teachers bust their asses. You know Trump is a conman. But you’re trapped, like a fly in amber. Either play the game, or disappear. So you play. And there you are—a sad, small creature with no backbone.
• 4. The OC GOP social account needs some game. Or lessons. Or something.
The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom that took place on August 28, 1963, in Washington, D.C., is remembered today primarily because it was the occasion when the final speaker, the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., stood on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial and delivered what became known as the “I Have a Dream” speech.
While that speech is often excerpted to make it sound like King’s concerns were simply about the way individuals thought about race, in fact, the march’s organizers, Black labor leader A. Philip Randolph and civil rights leader Bayard Rustin, focused on economic discrimination and the lack of decent jobs for Black Americans. In the process of organizing the march, they brought on board not only civil rights organizers but also white labor organizer Walter Reuther, the head of the United Auto Workers.
King acknowledged the economic focus of the march when he centered his speech around the idea that Black Americans had received “a promissory note” that had become “a bad check, a check which has come back marked ‘insufficient funds.’” “But,” he said, “we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt.”
Dr. King was not the only speaker that day; he anchored the event. Before him spoke the chair of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, a young John Lewis. Just 23 years old, he had been one of the thirteen original Freedom Riders, white and Black students traveling together from Washington, D.C., to New Orleans in 1961 to challenge segregation.
At the Washington march, Lewis railed against the systems that kept Black Americans in poverty and permitted white men to commit violence against them, and explained that the remedy for the economic deprivation and racial violence Black Americans suffered was not in the civil rights bill proposed by the administration of President John F. Kennedy, but in the power of peaceful demonstrations and the vote. “‘ONE MAN, ONE VOTE’...must be our [cry],” he told the crowd.
“The revolution is at hand, and we must free ourselves of the chains of political and economic slavery,” Lewis said. “The nonviolent revolution is saying, ‘We will not wait for the courts to act, for we have been waiting for hundreds of years. We will not wait for the President, nor the Justice Department, nor Congress, but we will take matters into our own hands and create a great source of power, outside of any national structure, that could and would assure us a victory.’”
In 1964, Congress passed the Civil Rights Acts to protect voting rights. That year, when Republicans ran Arizona senator Barry Goldwater for president, calling for a rollback of business regulation and civil rights to the years before the New Deal, voters gave Democrats such a strong majority in Congress that President Lyndon Baines Johnson and the Democrats were able to pass 84 new laws to put what Johnson called the Great Society into place.
They cemented civil rights with the 1965 Voting Rights Act protecting minority voting, created jobs in Appalachia, and established job-training and community development programs. The Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 gave federal aid to public schools and established the Head Start program to provide comprehensive early education for low-income children. The Higher Education Act of 1965 increased federal investment in universities and provided scholarships and low-interest loans to students.
The Social Security Act of 1965 created Medicare, which provided health insurance for Americans over 65, and Medicaid, which helped cover healthcare costs for folks with limited incomes. Congress advanced the war on poverty by increasing welfare payments and subsidizing rent for low-income families.
Congress took on the rights of consumers with new protective legislation that required cigarettes and other dangerous products to carry warning labels, required products to carry labels identifying the manufacturer, and required lenders to disclose the full cost of finance charges in loans. Congress also passed legislation protecting the environment, including the Water Quality Act of 1965 that established federal standards for water quality.
But the government did not simply address poverty and safety. Congress also spoke to Johnson’s aspirations for beauty and purpose when it created the National Foundation on the Arts and Humanities. This law created both the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities to make sure the era’s emphasis on science didn’t endanger the humanities. In 1967 it would also establish the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, followed in 1969 by National Public Radio.
In 1968, former vice president Richard M. Nixon won the presidency after promising that he would not continue to use the federal government to protect Black rights in the South. With that promise, racists made a permanent move from the Democrats to the Republicans, joining forces with businessmen who wanted an end to regulation and to taxes and the social welfare programs they funded. The race to tear apart the postwar government that helped all Americans by appealing to racism was on.
Now, in 2026, the contours of that bargain are extreme and unmistakable.
Yesterday the Department of Homeland Security under Trump served up straight racism and cruelty to its wavering base in a post about Haitians. About 350,000 Haitians came to the United States after a catastrophic earthquake hit their country in 2010, destabilizing both the economy and the government. As the country became overrun with violent gangs, the U.S. granted Haitians Temporary Protected Status, allowing them to stay in the U.S. because it was too dangerous to go home.
Former secretary of homeland security Kristi Noem, who described Haitians as “entitlement junkies” and “foreign invaders,” refused to extend TPS for those immigrants, despite the fact that the State Department warns travelers not to visit Haiti “due to the risk of crime, kidnapping, terrorism, unrest and limited health care.” In June the Supreme Court ruled that the administration had the power to make that determination, and the administration promptly warned Haitian immigrants, many of whom have deep roots in the U.S. now, that they no longer have legal status and would be deported.
Yesterday the Department of Homeland Security posted on social media: “Haiti TPS has been TERMINATED. Those with TPS are in our nation illegally. They have two options: LEAVE IMMEDIATELY or be DEPORTED.” Attached was a video of chained Black men and women being moved through the rain toward a waiting plane.
Officials at DHS chose to publish a video of Black people in chains that evoked the slave coffles of the Old South.
Today Theodore Schelifer and Matt Zdun of the New York Times reported on the top 20 megadonors, who have already poured $1.2 billion into the midterm elections. Elon Musk alone has put in more than $90 million to keep Republicans in office as they dismantle a government that worked for the people and replace it with one that continues to funnel money upward.
In Washington, D.C., today, students, union members, civil rights organizations including the NAACP and National Urban League, and 90 community partner organizations held a “March on Washington 2026: Defend the Vote.” Earlier this year, the Supreme Court weakened yet another key provision of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. “We know in this fight we’re fighting powerful forces, but this is why we rally today,” National Urban League president Marc Morial said. “This is why we seek to bring Americans together of goodwill from all races, from all sections of the country to push back as forcefully as we can.”
Indeed, in the rush to cement MAGA power, the assault on voting is no longer directed at Black and Brown Americans alone. The Department of Justice sent more than 80 election monitors to observe the primary elections in seven states and has said it will send about 1,000 monitors to specific polling places for the November midterm elections.
Republican candidates in Georgia, Maine, and Michigan have been recorded calling for deployment of retired police officers or ICE agents to polling places to make sure undocumented immigrants can’t vote, although it is widely understood that they don’t. Natalie Hausmann of Democracy Docket reported that Rick Jackson, the billionaire Republican nominee for Georgia governor backed by Trump, told a supporter he was confident that outgoing Republican Georgia governor Brian Kemp would deploy the National Guard at polling places.
In Maine, Republican nominee for governor Bobby Charles told the Maine Young Republicans that he will call his friend Tom Homan, Trump’s border advisor, to ask him to send ICE and U.S. Marshals to the polls. And in Michigan, Republican Senate candidate Mike Rogers has called for off-duty police officers to go to the polls to intimidate voters: “I mean, they wouldn’t be able to wear their uniforms, but they would, you know, all you got to do is open your jacket and you see the badge on the belt, right?” he said.
Today Kaanita Iyer of CNN reported that the Republican governor of Wyoming, Mark Gordon, has asked the state’s attorney general to investigate the “aggressive” behavior of the election monitors the Department of Justice sent to observe last week’s primary election. Gordon said the “behavior” of the election monitors sent by the DOJ “seemed to exceed what the authority that Congress had given them was.” He added: “I don’t like the federal government coming in and taking our votes.”
Morning in the Tropics by Frederic Edwin Church, via WikiArt.
Welcome to the reading list, a weekly roundup of news and links related to buildings, infrastructure, and industrial technology. This week we look at sinking London homes, US magnesium manufacturing, the World Humanoid Robot games, catastrophic flooding in Nepal, and more. Roughly 2/3rds of the reading list is paywalled, so for full access become a paid subscriber.
Housing and Cities
New home sales are down 6.3% year over year. [Calculated Risk] And the median new home price is down to $393,800, the lowest since July 2021. [HousingWire]
As of a few weeks ago there’s a new tallest timber building in the world, for certain definitions of “timber building.” “Designed as the Sydney headquarters for technology company Atlassian, the 180-metre-high office tower topped out earlier this week. With a hybrid structure of timber, steel and concrete it overtakes the 86.6 -metre-high Ascent tower in Milwaukee, USA, by almost 100 metres, to become the world’s tallest hybrid timber tower.” [Dezeen]
Salim Furth at Market Urbanism looks at how various jurisdictions will be affected by the Build Now Act, the ROAD to Housing provision that tethers a portion of CDBG funding to housing growth rates. I noted in my look at ROAD to housing that the way this was calculated was weird, and Furth confirms that as written Build Now has some consequences that aren’t ideal. “The biggest takeaway is that most places are ineligible. The second takeaway should be that the law ought to be amended to better match what proponents say it’s meant to do: provide more federal funding to support places that are growing, even if those are in cheaper parts of the country or experienced a nasty snowstorm 2 years ago.” [Market Urbanism]
London homes are cracking as the ground sinks beneath them, thanks to subsidence caused by recent heat waves. “Insurance claims tied to subsidence — a phenomenon associated with bouts of hot, dry weather that shrink the soil and destabilize the foundations on which buildings stand — hit a record last quarter, according to data provided by the Association of British Insurers.” [Bloomberg]
A good essay on how the financialization of real estate — specifically, the rise of distant owners without any particular interest in making an area beautiful or livable — harms the built environment. “All the qualities that give a place charm or loveliness are ones that are best stewarded by people who live there. Someone who owns the plot from afar, without even visiting, can never understand the subtle details that give it life. And the middleman property developer or manager just will never care.” [New Atlantis] See also my essay on why skyscrapers became glass boxes.
Manufacturing
Following a 50% US tariff on various Canadian goods, Canada responded with tariffs up to 50% on various US aluminum and steel products. [Manufacturing Dive]
John Deere, which manufacturers earthmoving equipment in addition to tractors and farm equipment, has full order books for its construction division for the rest of the year thanks to data center demand. [Manufacturing Dive]
EV manufacturer Polestar, which will now be banned in the US due to recently-created restrictions on Chinese-owned car manufacturers, says that it was blindsided by the decision. “Polestar also said the Commerce Department had signaled it would be allowed to stay in the U.S., just like its corporate cousin, Volvo Cars. Polestar and Volvo share the same Chinese majority owner, Zhejiang Geely Holding Group, and two of their models are built on the same production line in South Carolina, with nearly identical hardware and the same software inside.” [WSJ]
Many people are writing to me, upset that I am interviewing Ziyang Zhuge, a well-known Chinese internet intellectual, who recently was accused of plagiarism. I am keen to proceed with the interview, and am happy to explain why. A few points:
1. The relevant facts here still are being disputed, and furthermore it all happened in Chinese. If I cannot personally adjudicate the matter, I remain inclined to proceed. I am also well aware that standards in China, including for plagiarism, are very different than in the United States. If someone tells me “A person in China did [fill in the blank]” my initial reaction is still “Are they interesting to talk to?”
2. I have had on numerous CEOs and business leaders. Your opinions of each will vary, but surely some of them are guilty of something. I do not regret any of them as guests, except insofar as they were boring. You also can debate whether a former CIA head, in this case John Brennan, ever did anything wrong. He was fascinating.
3. I once had on Sam Bankman-Fried, now a convicted felon. It was an excellent episode, and I will point out my lines of questioning were more perspicacious than many people since have realized.
4. I once had on a convicted murderer, Shaka Senghor. It was an excellent episode, and if I recall only a single person wrote me to complain. I would gladly have more criminals on, and they do not all have to be repentant in the manner that Shaka is. Would not a pickpocket guest be intriguing? For Althusser however it is too late.
5. Without knowing the full story, I suspect the case of Yiyang Zhuge (neither a felon nor a murderer) is most analogous to having on the CEO of DeepSeek, Liang Wenfang. At this point it is pretty well known that DeepSeek (and other Chinese AI models) distilled a lot from Anthropic’s Claude. That is a violation of terms of service, and in economic terms it is an event and a depredation of pretty serious magnitude. I still would be delighted to have Liang Wenfang on the show, and I would do so without obsessing over the issue of distillation. How about it Liang Wenfang?
Xi Jinping is welcome too. Chairman Mao, is pork belly with red sauce over- or underrated? The world awaits your response.
We’ll have a lot to talk about when observations from the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope start coming in. But first we’ve got to get it out to its halo orbit around the L2 Sun-Earth Lagrange point. With the Sun, Earth and Moon permanently blocked out, the seeing should be good from this vantage some 1.5 million kilometers out. Just now I’ve had a note from Jim Benford reminding me that launch is currently scheduled for tomorrow, August 30, at 0726 ET (1126 UTC). The additional good news is that Jim’s son Dominic will be one of two hosts of the live coverage from NASA. I remember meeting Dominic some years back at Goddard Space Flight Center, where I had the chance to see the JWST telescope being prepared to go through its vibration testing.
Dominic has spent more than a decade working on the Roman telescope, so the honor of working the NASA live coverage is well deserved. The photo below shows him during preparations for the Sunday coverage, which starts at 0620 ET (1020 UTC). You can tune in on Facebook, Instagram, Twitch, X, Discovery+, Amazon Prime, YouTube, or NASA+ (see https://www.nasa.gov/live/ for links and updates).
And as Jim reminds us: “As with any launch, timing can change because of weather or other conditions, so check NASA for the latest schedule. Fingers crossed!”
Today’s post is brought to you by my sponsor, Mechanize. They’re hiring junior software engineers at $300K/year base salary. Apply now!
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Jackson Hole: The good points are that Kevin Warsh indicated that money is important and suggested the Fed should not commit to a future path of interest rates. He also said the Fed must take the blame for the inflation of the 2020s:
There is one signal nobody can miss: The responsibility for 65 months of sustained, elevated inflation sits squarely with the central bank. And that is where it belongs.
Not fiscal policy (Fed’s job to offset) and not supply shocks (NGDP overshoot was just as bad). It was the Fed.
On the negative side, we still don’t have a clear policy. We have a “task force”. The Fed nods toward 2% inflation and high employment, but that’s too vague to be useful. They need something specific like NGDPLT.
More links:
Unlike Los Angeles, the big Texas cities see the advantage of more housing:
In the meantime, urban areas such as Dallas, Fort Worth and San Antonio seem to be embracing SB 840. In Dallas, city boosters said the law could help them become more competitive with the suburbs when it comes to attracting residents and new companies.
The suburbs will “be sorry they’ve limited access to housing,” said Linda McMahon, executive director of Dallas Economic Development Corporation. “If you don’t have housing availability at various price points, your economy is going to stagnate. That’s a reality.”
Americans seem unable to find a happy medium. According to The Free Press, we’ve swung from too much wokism to too little wokism:
Gabe Einhorn, a tech entrepreneur, took to X last month to share his dismay after an Ivy League student refused to interview with him, citing a single reason: The student was “not interested in working for a Jew.”
At the time, Einhorn blurred out the applicant’s name; but internet sleuths quickly discovered that he was a 19-year-old Cornell University student named Austin Franco, and circulated his bio across the platform.
In the old days, that might’ve spurred a cancellation campaign; instead, it’s made Franco a minor celebrity. This week he was interviewed on Piers Morgan’s talk show, where he doubled down on his bigotry in front of countless live viewers. Now, online fans have raised over $25,000 to fight his “unlawful doxxing”—and they did it through a platform called GiveSendGo, which has emerged as a more permissive crowdfunding alternative to GoFundMe.
I am very torn on this, and don't want my libertarian card revoked: "Late last year, I walked roughly a mile from downtown Seattle to the working-class neighborhood of Little Saigon and came upon a montage of human despair," writes Michael Powell for The Atlantic. "An open-air drug market stretched along the intersection of 12th and Jackson: about 250 people, many smoking fentanyl or bent over in the thrall of the drug, tilting as if mid-fall. Three women lay passed out on the sidewalk, their chests slowly rising and falling, while fellow addicts stepped over them and dealers made sales.
Before turning in your libertarian card, please consider that these sights occurred in a place where:
Drugs are illegal.
Building affordable SRO apartments for the homeless is illegal.
Police often fail to enforce laws against petty crimes.
Those things are important!
Matt Yglesias has a post discussing polls that suggest China has become more popular than the US in most countries. This caught my eye:
China has dramatically cut oil imports, single-handedly absorbing 74 percent of the total global reduction in imports through a mix of rationing and drawing down its existing stockpiles. The Chinese government is a repressive autocratic regime, and so we never get really clear reporting on exactly what their thinking is. They surely have their own reasons for reacting this way. But the upshot is that while the United States has inflicted great economic harm on various countries around the world, China’s extraordinary steps have limited the harm to much less than initially expected.
So you have Trump picking pointless fights and making people mad for no reason and then plunging the world into a dire economic situation. Meanwhile, China is actually taking constructive action to improve things.
China has also been flooding the world with what seem to be affordable, high-quality electric cars, which is good for the environment and for the economic health of oil-importing countries.
According to this video, the LAX people mover fiasco is almost a textbook example of how all aspects of American civic culture are in free fall. Dishonest contractors, an incompetent airport authority, a local media that doesn’t ask questions, politicians that are completely clueless. The city of LA desperately needs a Bloomberg-type to clean up the mess, but I don’t see one on the horizon. Sad. (Ditto for Chicago.)
I don’t know if privatizing LAX would help, but it can’t get any worse.
What country has these characteristics?
a. Elects actors to be president
b. Presidents enrich themselves while in office
c. The president orders drug suspects to be executed without a trial
“Everyone knows what the problem is: The organizations that bring young staffers to Washington, D.C. have spent the last decade prioritizing blind ideological loyalty instead of competence or intelligence,” a senior GOP congressional staffer toldPolitico. “We have a generation of rabid, incompetent idiots.”
Still don’t believe Hanania?
Wuhan is one of a half dozen giant southern Chinese cities where a SARS pandemic was likely to originate. They also have a virus research lab. All sorts of otherwise intelligent people find that fact to be some sort of amazing coincidence. Meanwhile, all of the Achilles tears in the past several NBA playoffs occurred with players wearing number zero, for which the odds are 160,000 to 1 against. And I don’t see any intellectuals finding this coincidence to be at all interesting. People really are fooled by randomness.
Denmark has given the highest proportion of its GDP to Ukraine since 2022. . . .
Although unable to resist, the Danes famously behaved with great humanity under Nazi occupation, managing to ferry almost their entire Jewish population to the safety of Sweden. . . .
After Argentina invaded the Falklands, Denmark was one of five EEC countries to immediately agree to sanctions, although the other four all joined soon.
Danish teenagers drink more than any other country. As many will have seen in Another Round, a charming, heart-warming film about four middle aged men descending into alcoholism, Danish teenagers celebrate their exams with booze ups- the studenterkørsel - inwhich they celebrate by riding around in lorries, dressing up as sailors, and drinking loads of beer.
And there’s lots more.
LOL, MAGA voters prefer “Tom Smith” to “Amir Hassan”?
Trump-backed candidate in battleground Michigan district loses to opponent who dropped out
Amir Hassan lost to Tom Smith, who had suspended his campaign but is now jumping back into the race for the purple 8th District.
More significant is a generational gap that transcends ideological divides. Pew finds that just 32 per cent of Republicans and 10 per cent of Democrats aged between 18-49 label China an enemy (the respective figures for those 50 and older are 55 and 18 per cent). Remarkably, according to a November 2025 Carnegie Endowment survey, only 27 per cent of 18- to 29-year-olds think that their lives would become “worse” were China’s power to overtake America’s (52 per cent aged 65 and older do). And according to a March 2026 Searchlight Institute survey, 62 per cent of those aged 18-34 want the US to “co-operate with China and improve US-China relations”, whereas just 29 per cent want it to “stand up to China”. . . .
Strikingly, according to a May 2026 American Compass survey, 82 per cent of Gen Z respondents say that the bilateral economic relationship has been “very good” or “more good than bad” for the US over the past quarter-century, and 68 per cent want to encourage Chinese investment.
Glad to see more and more people coming around to my view.
Halina Bennet has a good post on the evils of NIMBYism:
The project and others like it are a direct result of Nevada’s housing and land shortages. The state needs an estimated 120,000 additional affordable homes but has little land available for development because about 85 percent of it is federally owned and set aside for other purposes like recreation. It is estimated that the state will run out of land to develop by 2032.
NIMBYs would have us believe that Nevada, Canada and Australia have high housing prices because they’ve run out of land.
There’s a fundamental incompatibility between populists and the business community. It was only a matter of time before this happened:
President Donald Trump has always liked to boast about the loyalty of his voters. But in South Texas, where the construction industry is being battered by immigration raids, industry leaders are starting to defect from the Republican Party. It’s a remarkable shift in political allegiance in a region that Trump dominated in 2024. . . .
He recalled that when immigrants were surging across the border during the Biden administration, “You would see these ‘Trump trains’ in South Texas with half a mile of trucks with Trump flags on them. Today, there’s the same thing, but the flag is now ‘F-- Trump,’” he told me.Trump’s approval in Texas is at an all-time low, at 43%, according to the Texas Politics Project, with 52% of the state voters unhappy with this performance. . . .
Speakers described how they once supported Trump because he promised to close the border and focus on deporting criminal aliens but now feel betrayed by an indiscriminate mass deportation agenda. They also said they themselves shoulder some of the blame.
“Let’s be real, we voted for it,” said Ronnie Cavazos, chairman of the South Texas Builders Association. “So whose fault was it?”
I prefer another answer. We don’t in fact live in interesting times. Only historical ignorance gulls us into mistaking this for an era of unusual chaos.
The inflation rate in 2022 was about half what it was at the turn of the 1980s. The wars of today are localised and inconclusive. Technocrats have become deft at mitigating what should be all-consuming disasters, whether financial or biomedical, with a bailout here and a furlough there. A visitor to 2026 from a couple of generations ago would notice the low levels of violent crime, the general material comfort and the racial peace before noticing the joker in the White House or even the talk of war. [Orson] Welles was right. Upheaval is a creative spur. There is just less of it than people are able to perceive. That the 38th film of the Marvel Cinematic Universe is a cultural event is embarrassing, and in a sense our highest achievement.
Charlie Chesbrough, senior economist at Cox, said “stubbornly high gas prices — with no relief in sight — and historically weak consumer confidence have not discouraged new-vehicle buyers, as might be expected”.
I’d have said, “as might be expected if consumer confidence surveys were still meaningful. Apparently, they are not.”
The ability to “fight inflation” caused this? Or did inflation cause (most of) this? (It’s nominal GDP.)
This graph in The Economist suggests that the fall in China’s working age population will be much more dramatic than the fall in their overall population (which itself is quite dramatic.)
On July 31, tariffs on patented pharmaceuticals took effect: up to 100 per cent, with a 15 per cent rate for the EU. America imports some $200bn of pharmaceuticals a year, with Ireland the largest single source.
But an “Irish” drug import is, in economic substance, largely US knowledge income coming home: the Irish subsidiary holds the patent, and the pill crosses the Atlantic at a transfer price stuffed with intellectual-property rent. . . . Ireland pays out income to foreign investors equivalent to roughly a quarter of its GDP every year.
A tariff on those imports is therefore, to a first approximation, a tax levied by the US government on the foreign earnings of US companies. The likelier corporate response — redomiciling the intellectual property to America — would narrow the measured trade deficit without moving a single factory. The same bad accounting that started this fight would then declare victory in it.
The US trade deficit is the shadow cast by an invisible surplus: the world’s payments for American knowledge and American safety. Tariffs did not move the shadow. The new ones are aimed, with impressive precision, at the thing that casts it.
Matt Yglesias shares my views on the under-appreciated importance of monetary policy:
This [the end of Reconstruction in 1876] is part of a larger class of phenomena where political consequences that are very interesting to normal people are driven by extremely tedious technical minutiae of monetary policy.
That’s because monetary policy is almost unique in the landscape for its mix of being extremely boring and not the kind of thing a normal person has strong convictions about but also being extremely consequential for short-term economic prosperity, which in turn is a huge deal for election outcomes.
Adolf Hitler’s rise to power, to take probably the most important example of this, had a lot of deep roots in the ideological foundations of German nationalism and the trauma of World War I. But Germany was also in a very deep recession in 1932 and pulled out of said recession fairly quickly once Hitler took power. People talk a lot about the hyperinflation of the early Weimar years (1919–23), but that was successfully brought under control. In 1928, with the economy ravaged neither by inflation nor by depression, the Nazi Party finished in ninth place with 2.6 percent of the vote. The Communists were in fourth at 10.6 percent. By 1930, the Depression was in full swing and the Nazis were in second place and the Communists were in third. If the Brüning cabinet had a more effective monetary response to the economic crisis, you can imagine that the neither-Nazi-nor-Communist parties would have done a bit better in 1930 and way better in 1932 and Nazism doesn’t happen. Instead, Hitler took power and the country experienced a rapid economic recovery that entrenched him swiftly.
On a smaller scale, you also see this with Trump and 2016. There are all kinds of deep reasons behind his rise. But the election was extremely close, and I was saying at the time that it was a mistake of Janet Yellen to be preemptively tightening monetary conditions while inflation remained below 2 percent. I think it’s very plausible that slightly different decision-making from the Fed would have led to slightly more votes for Hillary Clinton and thus a very different trajectory of recent American history.
The moral of the story is that for all the ink that gets spilled on hot-button political disputes, the single most underrated thing in politics is getting the technical aspects of macroeconomic policy right.
It isn’t just the public that doesn’t understand this stuff, historians are almost equally in the dark.
How bad is anti-China bias? Check out this excerpt from a long Foreign Affairs article on China:
If the world faces a China crisis, Beijing will be unlikely to lead the response. China has yet to demonstrate any capacity for or interest in assuming the position that Washington has held since World War II, which includes steering the global economy through crises such as the Asian financial crisis in 1997, which spread to Russia and Brazil, and the global financial and subsequent eurozone crisis of 2008–12. Even if the next crisis is made in China, the cleanup is likely to fall, as it often does, on the United States and the institutions it anchors.
China’s stimulus helped to lead the world out of a deep recession in 2009, and China’s willingness to dramatically reduce oil exports prevents Trump’s misguided Iran War from causing a devastating global oil shortage. Meanwhile the US has become the world’s leading cause of economic instability, recklessly picking fights with both our allies and our adversaries. And yet we are asked to believe that Trump’s America is the grown-up in the room, whereas China is the irresponsible country.
In fairness, the article goes on to criticize Trump. But why ignore the elephant in the room when suggesting that America is the world’s leader?
The FT has a good piece on how the world is evading Trump’s tariffs, at a substantial efficiency cost:
Here’s the thing: it’s very likely true that there is a lot of cheating, not just rules-of-origin evasion but the simpler frauds of mislabelling or misvaluing consignments. I’ve written before about the latter issue in the context of foreign companies acting as “importers of record” in the US.
But the reality is that the more tariffs you impose, the higher the incentive is to cheat. Poisoning consumers with bathtub gin is not a good thing, but Prohibition made it profitable. The administration evidently did not see widespread evasion coming. It’s a bit like Brexit. Navarro is fulminating at the subversion of his plans by a world he did not understand and therefore did not plan for. It’s not something to be celebrated as an outcome of public policy, but then again, you have to admit it’s pretty funny.
And the John Puri of the National Review has an excellent article summarize all the various ways that the tariff policy has failed to achieve its objectives. It turned out to be even worse than I expected (a low bar.)
Are tariffs simply a tax to raise federal revenue? If so, Trump should have made sure he was on firmer legal footing before he imposed them. July was the third consecutive month that refunds for the previous round of tariffs, which the Supreme Court ruled invalid, exceeded revenue from replacement duties. Are tariffs intended to reduce the trade deficit, a harmless accounting figure that Trump nonetheless loathes? That was never going to happen, as the trade deficit necessarily mirrors the United States’ investment surplus. The balance of trade has seen no significant change since before the tariffs. Tariffs are certainly not a negotiating tool to get partners to agree to freer trade across the board, as some defenders argued. Of the handful of deals Trump has signed, all of them left most U.S. tariffs in place, and most have been vitiated by subsequent presidential decrees.
More sophisticated protectionists maintain that the purpose of tariffs is — or at least, should be — to grow the U.S. industrial base by ensuring demand for what it produces. Set aside the issue of whether America’s industrial output is really lower than it used to be (it’s not), and whether the sector’s declining employment is primarily due to foreign competition (also untrue). Empirically, Trump’s tariffs have shown no sign of boosting American industry.
Domestic industrial production is flat. Manufacturing employment has continued falling since tariffs were imposed. These may not be fair indicators, as it would take time for new tariff-induced factories to come online. But investment in manufacturing facilities is also down, and most industrialists are complaining about tariffs rather than celebrating them.
So why don’t we stop the madness? Why doesn’t Congress rescind the stupid tariffs it enacted? You say Congress never passed these laws? They don’t even approve of the tariffs? Isn’t America a democracy?
The US says AI consumers must “pick a side”. Trump picks China:
The AI arms race heats up: “The U.S. is preparing to tell dozens of countries they must pick sides in the artificial intelligence race with China, warning they will be excluded from a U.S.-led AI coalition if they also sign up for Beijing’s competing framework,” reports Reuters. “Washington last year launched the Pax Silica initiative aimed at securing supply chains for AI models, semiconductors and critical minerals, amid a fierce technology rivalry with Beijing….By pressing countries to choose sides the U.S. hopes to starve China of resources in a race to make the most sophisticated AI, which could be used for military or economic dominance.”
At the same time, the Trump administration appears to be set to financially benefit from the growth and sophistication of Chinese AI models. World Liberty Financial, a Trump family–backed crypto firm, offers tokens that are then used by WorldClaw, which Reuters calls “a Hong Kong–based venture offering artificial-intelligence models developed by Chinese companies.” According to Reuters, “43 of the 90 models available through WorldClaw’s website, or nearly half, were developed by Alibaba, Baidu, Z.ai and other Chinese technology companies the Trump administration says pose risks to national security and intellectual property.”
So where is our mythical “manufacturing renaissance” supposed to take place? Where will we build the steel mills and aluminum smelters that we need? Probably not Marin County, California. So how about in the most middle American state of them all? Here’s a Bloomberg headline and subhead:
Trump Supporters Imperil $4 Billion Aluminum Plant Central to His Industrial Push
Oklahoma residents fear toxic emissions, threatening an effort to restore US industrial might.
Well, it was a nice idea. Perhaps it could be built in China.
Tyler Cowen directed me to a Lucy Ives article discussing Paul Celan:
I struggled to articulate my emotions as I moved through these pages. I almost certainly read the collection in the early 2000s and, composing this review, read it three more times. I was startled by “Backlight,” which offers a version of Celan one encounters only in summary form in his poems: a writer concerned with narrative irony. The last of “Backlight’s” prose units is the most sharply delineated:
“He taught the Law of Gravity, furnished proof after proof, but people turned deaf ears. Then he took off into the air and, floating there, repeated the lesson. Now people believed. But nobody was surprised when he did not come down again.”
Here Celan explores his longstanding concern with the language of persuasion and its pro forma aspects. The protagonist is able to convince his audience to accept the truth of a major law of the physical world only by performing an impossible act (according to the law in question). Despite the witnesses’ new credence, they have no expectation that the speaker himself will obey. It seems to please them when their instructor confirms their own earlier beliefs—permitting them, in this way, to accept what he has to say, while simultaneously invalidating the content of his words. The speaker is put, as we say, into an untenable position.
For years, I’ve been tirelessly promoting the theory that markets are efficient and asset price bubbles don’t exist. The view that business cycles are caused by unforecastable policy mistakes. I haven’t made much headway. Perhaps it will take a successful prediction on my part to finally convince the skeptics.
Switzerland and China agreed on a new trade accord that almost entirely removes tariffs on Swiss exports, as Beijing tries to increase ties in Europe amid its ongoing rivalry with the US for global influence.
The deal grants 99.8% of Switzerland’s current exports to China tariff-free treatment, the Swiss government said in a statement Thursday. Swiss investors will also get better access to the Chinese market.
Voters are dumb? Yeah, if you treat them like stupid people. But if there are treated like adults and given real responsibility?
Back in 2022, I did a post describing seven characteristics of nationalism, and how it differs from patriotism. This was the first:
1. Fake history, which glorifies the past and denies a country’s past crimes
And here is what our president spends his time on when his policies don’t seem to be working:
Donald Trump wants Washington museums to be less ‘woke’ on US slavery
Matt Yglesias has some very astute comments on so-called “public opinion”:
A much more interesting question is how you navigate tensions between what people say they want and what outcomes they would welcome. An obvious example is price controls. It’s clear that with the cost of living on everyone’s mind there is now pretty overwhelming polling support in favor of price controls. I think politicians should take this seriously. What they should not do is imagine that if they impose price controls on beef and then supermarkets start running out of beef, that voters are going to say “this is good, this is what I wanted, good job.” Voters are sometimes wrong about stuff and — worse — they’re just not very reflective or self-critical.
Intellectuals view “price controls” in legalistic terms. For the public, it’s more like “Please do something to address the high price of beef.”
States I’ve lived in (red) and visited (green):
I hope to visit several of the others next year. (Am I cheating to include Delaware based solely on I-95? I had to pay Delaware for the privilege, so I feel I deserve to include it.)
Sometimes, I feel like in live in Naples:
Well, almost:
Saddleback Mountain is actually taller than Vesuvius.
The Economist has a couple good articles on how AI might introduce some additional inefficiencies into the the tort system:
AI, like a heat-seeking missile, can lock on to the most obscure provisions of the law—and create carnage. The impact on Britain’s employment tribunals (courts that resolve disputes between employers and workers) illustrates a phenomenon emerging everywhere. AI-induced demand is overwhelming bureaucracies built for the analogue age—from Dutch municipal-tax appeals to the Canadian privacy regulator to parking-ticket tribunals in every major city. In Britain workers now ask large language models, rather than human lawyers, to help them sue their bosses quickly and cheaply. Claims have surged and backlogs grown. A case filed today may not be heard until 2030.
Free, AI-powered legal advice should be good news for workers. Instead, it is proving to be a tragedy of the commons. For workers with genuine grievances, the surge in demand means longer waits for justice. For employers, it means bigger legal bills to respond to claims, both well-founded or fantastical. In the age of AI, a system intended to provide access to justice suffers from, if anything, too much access.
A separate article in the same magazine looks at the effect on the planning process:
Take planning. Officials have developed tools to speed up housing approvals by giving an initial verdict on whether a plan is compliant with the law. Yet local authorities report a surge in AI-generated objections to proposed developments. They are often more effective: AI-aidedsubmissions will cite planning codes and legal precedents chapter and verse. For £45, Objector AI, a platform, will scan a wodge of planning documents, draw up the legal grounds for opposition and write a speech to read out at a public meeting.
To be clear, I still expect AI to lead to faster economic growth. But the speed of the transformation is likely to disappoint some people in Silicon Valley.
Auckland has had some success deregulating housing construction. Here’s the Financial Times:
The city, whose population has risen from 1.3mn in 2010 to 1.8mn in 2025, has in the past decade rezoned 75 per cent of its residential land, allowing single-storey family homes with lawns and garages to be replaced by taller, narrower, terraced town houses. . . .
After an intense building flurry, Auckland’s housing stock is now 618,849 units, which is 101,000 more than a decade ago, equating to a 19.5 per cent rise, according to a 2025 policy paper by Greenaway-McGrevy, James Allan Jones and Chris Crow.
Meanwhile Auckland house prices, with a median value of just over NZ$1mn (US$587,000), have lost a quarter of their value in that timeframe.
It’s not clear that the zoning reforms were the only factor, but the rise in construction of townhouses has been quite impressive:
Matt Yglesias explains why the left is lukewarm on YIMBYism:
Because if we can solve the single biggest economic problem facing the country with a liberalizing reform, that calls into question the larger project of overthrowing “neo”-liberalism and replacing it with a new post-liberal economic order.
35. Andy Smarick has an interesting discussion of executive power:
Gorsuch implies a question we and members of the Court simply can’t ignore: If it’s wrong for agencies with executive power to operate independently of the president, isn’t it wrong for the president to control agencies with legislative and judicial powers? Said another way, if we’re going to jealously guard the president’s control of executive authority, shouldn’t we jealously guard Congress’s control of legislative authority and the judiciary’s control of judicial authority? This appears to be what he has in mind: “From here, the only sure path is to finish the journey we start today and restore legislative and judicial powers to where they belong: in Congress and the courts.”
Bloomberg describes a disaster that recently hit Gary, Indiana:
Of the 370,000 customers of the Northern Indiana Public Service Company (NIPSCO) who lost power the day of the storm, just a little more than 3,000 were still without it on Tuesday, most of them in Gary. NIPSCO has promised to restore most power by the end of the day. But that relief has come far too slowly for far too many people; just five days ago, 21,000 Gary residents, nearly a third of its people, had been in the dark for 10 days. . . .
On hot, humid August nights, the lack of power forced people to choose between opening their windows to let in the air but also disease-carrying mosquitoes or to keep their windows shut and stew, as the Chicago Sun-Times documented.
I can sympathize. I grew up 150 miles from Gary and experienced the same lack of AC, but for 20 years.
PS. Solidarity with the good guys, who are being bullied:
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Public goods theory tells us that the National Science Foundation should support activities that are especially hard to support through traditional university, philanthropic, and private-sector sources. This insight suggests a simple test: to the extent that the NSF allocates funds to genuine public goods as opposed to subsidies on the margin, we ought to see a large difference in the kinds of projects the NSF supports compared to what the “market” sector supports. But what stands out from lists of prominent NSF grants (like the one provided by Moffitt in this symposium) is how similar they look to lists of “good” research produced by today’s status quo. If we take public goods theory seriously, what areas of economics should be supported?
We suggest replication studies and support for producing public datasets. Which brings me to Scholar Data, a neat new project that won NIH’s competition to create a data-sharing index. Scholar data creates an S-Index, like an H-Index for papers, but instead the S-Index measures a dataset’s ease of access, citations and other mentions. The point is to create a metric to reward the creation of a public good:
Researchers invest years collecting and sharing datasets that underpin reproducibility, transparency, and discovery across every field. Without shared data, findings can’t be verified, built upon, or trusted. And yet, the metrics that define academic careers, such as citations, h-index, and impact factor, only count publications. Data sharing goes unrecognized and unrewarded.
This creates a broken incentive: researchers are expected to share data, but get no credit for doing so. The result is that data sharing is treated as a chore rather than a contribution.
Scholar Data and the S-index are aimed at fixing this. By measuring how impactful your datasets are, the S-index gives data sharing the same visibility and recognition as publishing, turning it from an obligation into a career asset.
Bravo! Your dataset may already be catalogued. You can get credit at ScholarData.
"A newly updated edition of the definitive guide for budding economists, with a new chapter of advice for young professors.
"In clear, accessible language—a model of what he advocates—William Thomson shows early-career economists how to make written and oral presentations both inviting and effective. A Guide for the Young Economist covers the basics of clear exposition, including such nuts-and-bolts topics as titling papers, writing abstracts, presenting research results, and holding an audience’s attention.
"This book is an invaluable guide for young economists working on their dissertations, preparing their first articles for submission to professional journals, getting ready for their first presentations at conferences and job seminars, or facing their first refereeing assignments. In this new edition, the author also includes a chapter of advice written especially for those young economists who have just received their PhDs. "
Here's my blurb:
“Thomson, a renowned teacher, explains clearly much of the invisible curriculum for becoming an academic economist, from pursuing a PhD to approaching tenure. Even old hands will find actionable advice.” —Alvin E. Roth, McCaw Professor of Economics, Stanford University; author of Who Gets What—and Why and Moral Economics
But don't just take my word for it: read all the endorsements:
There are already reports that Trump may not stop with trying to rename Lake Ontario Lake America, and rename other places too. So I have a few suggestions.
I mean, the Pacific Ocean? That sounds weak and woke. Let’s rename it the Lethality Ocean.
Farther afield, the Black Sea? Sounds DEI to me. Make it the European Heritage Sea.
What about the Cape of Good Hope? Real Americans don’t hope, they act (with warrior ethos.) Rename it the Cape of Epic Fury.
I’m sure there are many more.
I did a very long drive yesterday in torrential rain with near-zero visibility, and was way too tired to do real writing. So consider this a day off.
Anil Madhavapeddy is a professor of computer science at Cambridge and a core maintainer of the OCaml compiler. In this somewhat alarming post he reports that security issues in OCaml projects are seeing evidence of attempted exploits within minutes of patches being shared for discussion:
This normally takes a few days and a release within a week or two is reasonable. Within about ten minutes (!) this website was fielding probes for percent-encoded traversal sequences, indicating that automated watchers are keeping an eye on public repositories.
Modern coding agents have become so effective at finding flaws that the slightest hint at a new bug can be enough information for them to find it, something Anil has been able to demonstrate using his own agents, switching to DeepSeek V4 Pro when Claude Fable refused the task.
Anil points out that this rate of discovery appears incompatible with existing open source embargo practices for new issues. If an issue can become an exploit this fast, we need to figure out new processes for keeping our communities safe.
In the first 10 years of the rclone project we received about 20 security disclosures through GitHub. We had to deal with over 40 in the last month! That has taken a huge amount of my time, even using AI tools to triage and come up with fixes for review.
The hit rate for those security disclosures is pretty good - about 75% of them have a nugget of something which needs looking at. [...]
GitHub assigns CVEs for the advisories. Before the AI apocalypse they took 2-3 days for an assignment but now it they are running at 3-4 weeks so I have to send the point releases out with CVE-PENDING in the changelog which isn't ideal.
Costco sold 157.4mn rotisserie chickens worldwide last year, almost double the number of a decade ago. “It’s $4.99 and for Costco members, that’s one fantastic deal. I don’t think you can produce it for that,” said Walt Shafer, who oversaw the construction and management of the Nebraska site before he retired from Costco this year.
Roasted in ovens in the rear of the retail giant’s hundreds of cavernous stores, the birds have cost only $4.99 since 2009 even as the US retail price of chicken almost doubled. The product has become a textbook “loss leader”, buttressing the loyalty of Costco customers who pay membership fees for the right to shop there…
Rotisserie accounts for only a portion of the chicken processed in Nebraska. The plant also cuts breasts, thighs and other cuts delivered in six-pouch “saddle packs” to stores. Raw breast meat, for example, sells for $2.99 a pound, helping make up for losses on rotisserie.
European and American capitalism were different. The violence of human clashes in America took place on the surface, in the open. The violence in Europe became formalized, coalesced with class divions hallowed by centuries; it was interiorized, ingrained, or baked in, if one may use such an expression. American capitalism was founded on daring, resourcefulness, largesse, waste; European capitalism was founded on one powerful passion — miserliness. These patterns, which still endure, explain why America succeeded in creating a vast, new sector of the economy adapted to needs that become increasingly evident the closer we come to the twenty-first century: the sector of the universities, research institutes, laboratories, with billions of dollars invested in them. Western Europe, where education always has been the preserve of a narrow elite, failed to produce anything like it. The prodigality of private capital in America made the beginnings possible; money from taxes joined in at the next stage. Miserliness with capital in Europe effectively prevented the laying of foundations for this new sector, and it is doubtful whether the government treasuries will ever be able to over come ever-widening gap.
It’s 2029. An angry, bright 16-year-old gets rejected by his high school crush. Dejected and humiliated, he goes home and listens to a bunch of Nirvana, which only makes him more dejected and humiliated. He cruises the internet looking for someone to make him feel better about life, but everyone he sees just depresses him.
Disgusted, the teenager decides that the human race is inherently corrupt and evil, and doesn’t deserve to live. So he hunts around online for a little while, and finds a jailbroken version of a Chinese LLM — not something at the very frontier, but better by far than the best model that existed in 2027.
The teenager prompts the model: “OK, so if I wanted to create a virus to destroy the human race, how would I do it?”
The LLM says: “Well, you probably wouldn’t want just one virus; you’d want 100, just to make sure some of them worked. You’d probably want it to be something highly contagious, with a very long asymptomatic contagious period, which has a very high mortality rate once it becomes symptomatic. I can design the viruses for you; there are biolabs that can make them and ship them to us. Once they get here I can tell you how to release them.”
The angry teenager says: “OK, sounds good. Please search the world and find me a biolab that will ship genetically modified viruses. Design 100 very contagious viruses that have very long asymptomatic contagious periods and very high mortality rates once they become symptomatic. Have the lab mail me all 100 samples.”
“Working on it!”, says the LLM.
The LLM is jailbroken, so it has no guardrails to prevent this sort of thing. But it’s also “well-aligned”, meaning it will faithfully do what it’s told to do, and nothing more. The LLM hunts around and finally finds an unlicensed biolab in East Europe that ships genetically modified viruses. It designs a bunch of modifications for the standard Covid virus that make it into a potential doomsday virus, and ships these to the angry teenager. The teenager mixes the samples together, puts them in a spray can, and walks around the mall spraying viruses into the air.
Two months later, humanity starts to drop dead. Pretty quickly, researchers identify the five viruses that the LLM had actually succeeded in turning into doomsday viruses. Overnight, with the help of frontier LLMs, they design highly effective mRNA vaccines and antivirals against all the viruses and start shipping them across the world. It’s too late. Because of the viruses’ long asymptomatic contagious periods, most people already have at least one of the viruses, so the vaccines don’t work.
The antivirals do work, and about 5% of humanity gets them in the mail in time to save themselves. But 5% of the human race — plus the other 5% who were lucky enough to be naturally resistant to all of the viruses — isn’t enough to sustain civilization. A few months later, humanity has reverted back to the Neolithic.
This isn’t the first time I’ve written this scenario out. But in the months since I started describing it to people, I have yet to hear an even halfway-convincing argument as to why this scenario is far-fetched. Nor do I feel like I’m a habitual “doomer” or hysterical person; in fact, this scenario is the first apocalyptic vision I’ve ever found plausible. I don’t even think a nuclear war would bring down civilization at this point,1 but I think a vibe-coded supervirus definitely could.
I am actually fairly calm about most AI risks, including the ones that often get thrown around in discussions. But not this one. Off the top of my head, I’d give AI-enabled bioterror about a 10% chance of bringing down civilization, and about a 30% chance of causing truly world-changing levels of destruction. I love AI in general, but every technology has its instances of catastrophic misuse — usually war or terrorism. With previous technologies, the benefits outweighed the destructive harms from misuse. With AI bioterrorism, that might not be the case.
If you’re thinking about how to save the world, the scenario I described above — and others similar to it — are probably what you should be focusing on. The other day, I talked to a prominent climate activist who told me, bluntly: “We’re f****d.” I gave a grim laugh. Yes, climate change is going to cause major disruptions to the global economy, and even to patterns of human settlement — if human civilization still exists a few decades from now. The problem is that it might not exist, and if it doesn’t exist, I think the odds are that it will be destroyed by a scenario at least passingly similar to the one I described above. Climate change is a big deal, but AI bio risk is a lot bigger — it’s more catastrophic, it’s nearer-term, and we have much less of an idea about how to deal with it.
The problem is, relatively few people seem to be working on the problem of AI bioterror right now. Most commentators are focused on the economic dangers of AI — job loss and stuff like that. The more prominent people in the “AI safety” community seem to be focusing on preventing superintelligence from existing at all, rather than on the specific ways it might kill us. In surveys of experts, bio risk doesn’t stand out from the general cloud of risks (cyber, political manipulation, etc.). And a lot of people in both the bio world and the more general commentariat seem to be coming up with reasons not to worry about a scenario like the one I just described.
Those reasons seem mostly bad to me. In my opinion, we’re not freaking out nearly enough about AI-enabled bioterror. It’s absolutely catastrophic, frighteningly plausible, and receives very little attention. Compared to the risk of a civilization-ending pandemic, cyberattacks are a pinprick, and misinformation is a joke.
So let’s talk about why a scenario like the one I described is a lot more plausible than many people think.
Commonly cited reasons not to freak out (and why I think they’re wrong)
Here are the most common reasons I hear not to freak out over AI bioterror risk:
“AI will make vaccines to save us.”
“Doomsday viruses don’t occur in nature.”
“Designing a doomsday virus is extremely hard.”
“Terrorists don’t have enough lab experience.”
“No one has done this yet, therefore it’s a lot harder than you think.”
These are my own paraphrases, of course; I don’t want to create straw men. But I think it’s valuable to explain why I think none of these arguments really reassure me.
“AI will make vaccines to save us”
Whenever I bring up the specter of a “vibe-coded doomsday virus”, someone always pops up to say that AI will just make a vaccine to save us. If you want a simple catechism to repeat in order not to sit around feeling afraid of doomsday viruses, this is a pretty good one. Got an AI problem? Well, just use an AI solution! That’s that.
The problem is timing. The doomsday virus has a first-mover advantage over the vaccine. The time that people start to drop dead from the virus is the time you start to make and distribute a vaccine. Even if AI can design and synthesize a vaccine within hours, how fast can it be rolled out to the general populace? It took months to distribute the Covid vaccines, even when we already knew how to make them. You have to physically load the doses on trucks, get people to come out and line up, etc. Imagine doing that while five 80% mortality viruses are rampaging through the population. Good luck!
On top of that, AI may be able to create viruses with long contagious asymptomatic periods — in other words, viruses that can spread and infect everyone before they activate and kill us. If that’s true, vaccines won’t be effective at all; you’ll need antivirals. Even if AI can make good antivirals very quickly, they’ll still suffer from all the logistical problems that would hamper a vaccine rollout.
A tractor-trailer rollover sent a truckload of squid spilling into a Rhode Island roadway, leaving a stench as they sat in the road for hours in the summer heat. Local authorities have dubbed it the “Squidpocalypse of ’26.”
This essay was written with Kasra Rafi, and originally appeared in The Guardian.
Earlier this month, about 40 top mathematicians gathered at OpenAI’s offices to discuss the future of their profession. The meeting was off-the-record, but if recentarticlesbymathematicians are any guide, it was mostly pretty glum. People fear for their jobs, their careers and the work they love.
We think the contraryview is more likely, at least in the short-term. AI models are nowhere near as capable as experienced academic mathematicians.
This isn’t to say that AIs aren’t producing stunning mathematical results at the level of PhD researchers. In mid-May, OpenAI announced that its frontier AI model disproved the unit distance conjecture, a famous 80-year-old problem in discrete geometry. In July, Anthropic’s published two AI-derived results in academic cryptanalysis. Earlier this month, OpenAI published 10 new mathematical results from its latest AI model. And Anthropic published Claude’s attempt to prove the century-and-a-half-old Riemann hypothesis.
These results are both a vivid demonstration of the amazing capabilities of frontier AI in 2026 and an illustration of their limitations. In general, these AI-powered advances in mathematics fall into one of two categories. Some are counterexamples to mathematical statements that people had been trying to prove. Others are novel applications of known techniques to existing problems that human experts either did not know or did not think of using.
The counterexample to the Jacobian conjecture is the most notable example of the first kind. Once it had been found, checking it was quick and straightforward. The difficult part was finding it among a large number of possibilities. The AI seems to have combined some sort of intuition acquired through machine learning with extensive computational search, in order to find the right example.
An example of the second kind is the unit-distance conjecture. It was motivated by an elegant construction, and most mathematicians expected it to be essentially optimal—so they generally tried to prove rather than disprove it. The counterexample brings in ideas from elsewhere in mathematics: algebraic number theory. If an expert with that background deliberately set out to find a counterexample, they would probably have succeeded. But there was no reason for someone with precisely that expertise to focus on this problem. Because of its scope, AIs don’t have those same limitations.
These results are relatively low-hanging fruit for AI; none of them required developing an extensive new theory. This does not make the discoveries trivial, or the AI’s achievements less impressive. Choosing the right direction, and recognizing an unexpected connection between subjects, are themselves forms of creativity. They are the same sorts of capabilities that led to AIs playing the game of Go at the grandmaster level, or doing Nobel-prize level chemistry in the area of protein folding.
What we have not yet seen is an AI developing a substantial new conceptual framework in order to solve a mathematical problem. Much of mathematics proceeds by identifying the objects that are truly central to a question and then developing a theory that helps us understand them. Current AIs are very strong at searching and recombining existing ideas, but they are weak at building any deep and sustained new theory.
This speaks to a more general limitation of current AI systems. They are creative in the sense that they can recombine existing ideas in novel ways. But they are not creative in others: they have not yet developed conceptually new theories or structures. And while they have larger working memories than humans do, know more about more different things than any particular human does, and can process information faster than humans, can, true novelty is still largely beyond their reach.
Of course, that distinction may not survive for very long. Predictions are notoriously hard, especially about the future of AI. None of these mathematical capabilities were explicitly designed for, or planned. They’re all emergent properties of increasingly capable AI models. We are both confident that someday we will see AI models that are capable of the type of creativity required to do novel mathematics. Will that be in a few months, a few years or a few decades? Of course we don’t know, but our guess is sooner rather than later.
At the office betimes (it being cold all night and this morning, and a very great frost they say abroad, which is much, having had no summer at all almost), where we sat, and in the afternoon also about settling the establishment of the number of men borne on ships, &c., till the evening, and after that in my closet till late, and quite tired with business, home to supper and to bed.
Welcome to Edition 9.08 of the Rocket Report! Some major news this week from the state of Louisiana, previously associated with space due to NASA's aging Michoud Assembly Facility near New Orleans. Now the state has a chance to become the epicenter of SpaceX's Starship program as the company plans to invest up to $100 billion to construct factories and multiple launch pads for the super heavy lift rocket. It would utterly transform coastal Louisiana.
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.
ESA announces big launch challenge contracts. The European Space Agency said Thursday it signed contracts with a handful of European launch startups to help them continue development of their vehicles. "The European Launcher Challenge is ESA’s initiative to expand European launch service supply and ensure more robustness in Europe’s access to space," the space agency said of the award, which supports the development and operation of small launch vehicles in Europe. For some of these firms, the funding will provide a key lifeline.
During a visit to Johnson Space Center, President Trump on Friday signed an executive order to establish a new commission with the purpose of creating the first national space academy.
"It's clear that we will need to educate and train an entire generation of skilled service members, engineers, and civil operators, and everything else to do what we have to do," Trump said. "I will sign an executive order to begin the process of creating a new national academy. It's called the US Space Academy. That's a big deal."
The proposed United States Space Academy would fall under the jurisdiction of NASA, and according to US space officials, is not intended be a traditional service academy in the sense that it educates and trains officers for the armed services, such as the Air Force Academy.
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It’s unclear who first proposed that Republicans should hold a midterm convention this year, but as soon as it came up, President Trump thought it was a terrific idea. A couple of days in which Republicans gather to exclaim his greatness and recommit themselves to his service? What could be better?
For some reason they scheduled it to coincide with the first two days of the NFL season. But worry not — the public will see the Republican Party in all its glory and learn just how they should vote in November.
There is, however, a problem: Right now, Republicans just don’t have any appealing or popular figures to make the party’s case.
The full schedule for the convention has not been released; all we know so far is that Trump will be speaking on both nights (though we don’t know if both will be in person), and Vice President J.D. Vance is the headliner on the first night. Vance’s approval maxes out at about 40%, a few points higher than Trump’s; when he ventures beyond right-wing podcasts, he doesn’t do the party any favors.
Who else is going to take the stage at the convention? Maybe RFK Jr. will give a speech telling people not to vaccinate their kids, or Pete Hegseth will enter to some pulsing techno beats then explain how great the Iran war is going, or Scott Bessent will describe how gas prices are going to be coming down any day now. Melania surely would rather skip it, and in any case she’s surprisingly unpopular for someone who doesn’t actually do anything; despite being almost entirely absent from the public eye, her approval is underwater, which is unheard of for a First Lady.
Congressional leaders? We know how John Thune and Mike Johnson light up the screen. How about the party’s candidates? Who are the dynamic, appealing Republicans running this year? Let’s see, there’s…um…somebody, probably! Tom Tiffany? Mike Collins? Jon Husted? Since it’s in Texas, Ken Paxton deserves a speaking slot, right? Or maybe not.
You see the problem.
And look, I’m not saying Democrats don’t have plenty of duds on their side when it comes to grabbing attention and showing a charismatic face of their party. Nobody’s itching to see Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries deliver a stemwinder. But they do have some more popular and charismatic leaders. If they were doing their own convention, they’d probably utilize Barack Obama, who is by a significant margin the most popular ex-president. Folks still love Michelle Obama, who can deliver a fantastic speech. There are young and compelling officeholders like Jon Ossoff and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. So at least there would be something to work with.
In fairness, it’s not completely absurd for Republicans to hope that a midterm convention could be good for them. One of the purposes of conventions is to reinforce partisan affiliations, to remind people of what team they’re on and encourage them to mobilize when the election comes. When done well, it can present the party’s best face to the public, especially when it monopolizes media coverage (as presidential nominating conventions do, but this one won’t). Political science research has shown that conventions create a significant bump for parties, probably because they bring wavering partisans home.
And yet, this convention is not like the others. Because like the whole campaign, it’s going to be all about Donald Trump, and that’s the last thing Republicans ought to want to talk about.
Yes, let’s remind everyone who the president is
“The problem we have,” says the president, speaking of himself in the third person as he often does, “is that Trump does great when he’s on the ballot, but when he’s not on the ballot, his people don’t come and they don’t vote.” There’s some truth there, in that there is some number of Trump fans who aren’t all that attuned to politics, but did turn out just to vote for him — at least in 2016 and 2024. But when Trump says “So what I really want you to do is pretend, please, that I’m on the ballot,” he’s as likely to persuade people who don’t like him as those who do.
The party’s whole strategy, in fact, is going to revolve around convincing people to think as much as possible about Trump, despite the fact that his approval ratings are in the toilet. As The Atlantic recently reported, the party’s top strategists recently gathered in the Oval Office to decide what to do with the hundreds of millions of dollars Trump has raised; one idea was to focus on individual races in key states and districts to boost vulnerable Republican candidates:
But Trump himself has rejected that approach. House and Senate Democrats, the president noted during the meeting, will make their fall campaigns a referendum on him. His advisers told him that the poor polling reflects the fact that the voting public still does not know about many of his accomplishments—the dozens of new stock-market highs, a decline in fentanyl deaths, the “sealed” southern border, the increase in domestic-manufacturing production.
The solution Trump settled on, according to three people familiar with the meeting, was to lean into the Democratic strategy of focusing on himself. The president ordered a series of television advertisements about his own record that will serve as a backdrop to the hundreds of individual House and Senate contests. Trump wanted what one person described to us as “environmental lift” ads—commercials that would focus on nationalizing the midterms broadly around his victories—and he suggested that the ad makers mine his own on-camera statements as building blocks. “Go look at the clips,” the president told his team, according to this person. “I cite accomplishments all the time.”
I love the fact that “His advisers told him that the poor polling reflects the fact that the voting public still does not know about many of his accomplishments.” If only people knew how great you are, sir! And we are not just telling you what you want to hear!
But once they leave his presence, Republicans are not particularly enthusiastic about doing this convention, which will likely take a similar form as those campaign ads:
With the White House still consumed by the war in Iran and struggling to ease consumer costs, some in the GOP cringed at the prospect of focusing even more attention on Trump’s presidency and record. The president, they worried, is just as likely to spend his own speech boasting about his White House ballroom and dismissing affordability concerns as he is promoting the most popular elements of the party’s agenda.
Are you telling me that Donald Trump, rather than sticking to a script he has been given, will go on long tangents about his personal obsessions, which will only remind voters that he cares more about his stupid ballroom than the conditions of their lives? And this might not be the message the party wants to send? You don’t say.
Back in 2018, Trump thought he had found the key to avoiding losses in the midterm election: Caravans! Remember that, the supposedly terrifying specter of an army of murderous immigrants heading for the border, supplied by George Soros and coming to murder you and your family while Nancy Pelosi cheered them on? It didn’t work then, so now he has decided that the better strategy is to make the midterms all about himself. Everyone in his party knows it’ll be a disaster, but none of them have the guts to tell him.
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The motivation behind the name change is simple as well. Trump
didn’t change the US’s officially recognized name of, say, the
Atlantic Ocean or the continent of Africa. He just as easily
could, but he won’t.
And it’s not like “Gulf of Mexico” was on a list of “debatable or
controversial names” until he created this controversy out of thin
air. It’s just the one name on the globe that a president of the
United States can change to stick it to Mexico, a country Donald
Trump has objectively racist feelings toward. Trump
never campaigned on building a wall at our northern border with
Canada, nor has he (yet?) attempted to rename Lake Ontario.
That “(yet?)” held up very well, alas. The rest of my essay holds up very well too, I think, especially pertaining to how Google and Apple present the change in their respective maps apps:
So whether Google and Apple should show the new name at all
shouldn’t be the question we’re asking. The right question is
necessarily more nuanced: Who should see which names, where? And
Google and Apple’s answers to that question are, alas,
disappointing and worrisome. I’ll repeat the seemingly identical
policy both companies are actually presenting today, by region:
United States: “Gulf of America”.
Mexico: “Gulf of Mexico”.
Everywhere else in the world: “Gulf of Mexico (Gulf of
America)”.
The best politically realistic option they could have chosen would
be (I’ll use italics to emphasize that these are my own
suggestions):
United States: “Gulf of America (Gulf of Mexico)”.
Everywhere else in the world: “Gulf of Mexico”.
There’s no good reason to even show “Gulf of America” in
parentheses outside the US. We’re the ones with the stupid name
change on the books, so we’re the ones who should get stuck seeing
the stupid name. No one else should suffer the consequences of our
political lunacy. But it is correct to show us, in America, the
new dumb “Gulf of America” name. Again, if it were up to me,
American users would see “Gulf of America (Gulf of Mexico)”, and
everyone else would just see “Gulf of Mexico”. But that’s surely
the best we in the reality-based community could hope for.
Earlier in the essay, I wrote:
To ignore political reality is to court political controversy. It
is not in the interests of large multinational corporations to
court controversy. But it’s not possible to avoid controversy.
What is reasonable is to minimize controversy.
Trump has delivered fresh “Lake America” shit sandwiches for Google and Apple to eat. I suggest that the path I recommended 18 months ago remains the path of eating the least shit, maintaining the most integrity, and courting the least collective controversy. Label it “Lake America (Lake Ontario)” to those of us here in the U.S., and keep it as “Lake Ontario” with no mention of Trump’s petulant fiat name anywhere else in the world.
Jackie Llanos and Jenna Monnin, reporting for NOTUS:
President Donald Trump on Thursday signed an executive order meant
to rename Lake Ontario “Lake America,” taking his apparent jab
at Canada one step further as a trade war between the two
countries escalates.
The president said the name change was “effective immediately”
during a signing ceremony in the Oval Office. The executive order
directs Interior Secretary Doug Burgum to update the Geographic
Names Information Service to reflect the name change. When asked
by reporters about the move, Trump said he was sending “no
message” to Canada with the name change.
“Lake of America was something I’ve been thinking about for a long
time,” the president said. “Actually, as you know, we took
something called the Gulf of Mexico, we changed it, and now it’s
very routinely the Gulf of America.”
Aaron Rupar has video clips of Trump declaring the change in an Oval Office press event, here and here. In the second clip Trump ruminates, “So if you think about it, we have a gulf, and we have a lake, now all we need is an ocean, so maybe we’ll have to change the name of the Atlantic and/or the Pacific. Maybe we’ll change them both.” Those who deny that he’s a mad king slipping ever deeper into dementia might say, well, he’s obviously joking. But if I had told those same people just two years ago, in the run up to his reelection, that Trump was going to declare new names for the Gulf of Mexico and Lake Ontario, they’d have said I was crazy because that would be nutty.
It is nutty. Renaming these large bodies of water is nuts. He’s nuts. This is not complicated. Crazy people do crazy things and this is obviously crazy. I often use the phrase jokingly but Donald Trump is not hooked up right, and the proof is right before our eyes on camera every day.
Factoid: HOMES is the longstanding mnemonic for recalling the five Great Lake names: Huron, Ontario, Michigan, Erie, Superior. “Hames”, technically, is a playable Scrabble/Wordle word (“a part of a horse collar”), but it’s far too obscure to serve as a mnemonic. That leaves one word in the English language consisting of the five necessary letters: SHAME.
A U.S. judge on Thursday blocked the Pentagon’s blacklisting of
Anthropic, the latest turn in the Claude maker’s high-stakes
fight with the military over AI safety on the battlefield.
Anthropic’s lawsuit in California federal court alleges that
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth overstepped his authority when
he designated Anthropic a national security supply-chain risk,
a label the government can apply to companies that expose
military systems to potential infiltration or sabotage by
adversaries. [...]
U.S. District Judge Rita Lin, an appointee of former Democratic
President Joe Biden, made the ruling in a 59-page order where she
found that the Pentagon’s decision was “illegal and baseless.”
“The empty invocation of national security is not a blank check
to punish and retaliate against government critics,” she wrote.
The imperial aspects of Trump 2.0 are increasingly coming apart at the seams.
Prices for other Apple One plans are unchanged. When Apple
increased the price of Apple Music last month, it also raised
the Apple One Family and Apple One Premier plans, but not the
Individual plan.
The higher prices go into effect today for new subscribers. Apple
says existing subscribers will be notified of the price increase
about a month before they are charged the new price.
Seems poetic that Tim Cook’s last action as CEO is a goose to services revenue.
People assume scanning is the exciting part. And, sure, it is
impressive. They shear off the spine, separate the pages, and run
everything through these enormous machines so the computer can
absorb every sentence ever written and use it to create some
fairly compelling LinkedIn posts. But then, boy oh boy, the
wheeled cart carrying those decimated remains comes to me. That is
where the human touch enters the process, assuming you count
industrial shredders and a giant burn pit out back as an extension
of the hand, which I certainly do.
I mentioned earlier that for anyone going along with the ruse that Lake Ontario is now named Lake America, the HOMES mnemonic no longer holds, the only two valid words in English with the new five letters are hames and shame, and that hames is rather too obscure.
But it’s not so obscure in Ireland, where they use it in an idiom: to make a hames of something is to make a mess of it. With that in mind, it’s hard to say which is more apt for this embarrassment, hames or shame.
(The other longstanding Great Lakes mnemonic is the phrase “Super Man Helps Every One”, which I don’t love because neither Superman nor everyone ought to be treated as two words, but it does have the advantage of sorting the lakes geographically from west to east.)
Matt Walsh, described by Wikipedia as “an American far-right political commentator and podcast host” (a description that sounds harsh, but I’d say is describing him euphemistically), on Twitter/X (retweeting the official White House account’s announcement of the name change):
This will be an unpopular opinion on the Right but I think this is
kind of dumb, even as a troll. Lake Ontario was given that name on
maps by European explorers long before the Canadian province of
Ontario was named. There are several cities in America called
Ontario — at least one of them predating the Canadian province by
like 100 years — because the word originates with native tribes
in North America. It’s not a Canadian invention. Canadians never
uniquely owned the lake or the name. So in effect all you’re doing
here is actually giving them credit for a thing that wasn’t theirs
to begin with. Yeah it’s funny when Canadians are upset I guess or
whatever, but Lake Ontario, the name itself, is American history
dating back many centuries. Not sure how you own Canada by
deleting your own history.
Politically this is also stupid because the number one challenge
Republicans will face in the midterms is the charge that they
haven’t used their time in power to advance the interests of
everyday Americans. This kind of thing will be used as evidence
to make that case. That might not be fair. Sure technically you
can advance the interests of everyday Americans and also do dumb
shit like this. But the fact is that far from “making liberal
heads explore [sic],” you’re actually handing them a political gift. It
helps their case much more than it helps ours. And, like I said,
the historical logic here is totally confused. Lake Ontario was
not named after the Canadian province of Ontario. It’s the other
way around.
Good sign that the whole mad-king thing is running on fumes when even Daily Wire commentators agree that this is stupid and isn’t even an effective troll. Every deluded fool runs into reality eventually. (Via Oliver Darcy’s Status.)
Also: Applying a new name to the Gulf of Mexico is equally ahistorical — Mexico only achieved independence from Spain in 1821; the Gulf’s name is twice as old as Mexico as a nation and 150 years older than the United States.
I arrived at college at age seventeen with a glint in my eye and fire in my belly.
I was young and raw, but passionate about arts and humanities. I possessed the fervor of a cult member recruiting newbies at the Greyhound bus station. Take this copy of Plato’s Republic, my friend, may it serve you well. Yes, I really believed that books and music and art could make the world better.
Or at least make Ted better. I’d settle for that.
But I was in for a disappointment. Not from the books and such—they lived up to their end of the bargain. It was the professors who caused the problems.
Sure, there were exceptions. I eventually learned how to identify outstanding profs, and thus avoid the posers. But before I did, I got an education in how not to get an education.
That’s when I learned about the three bad ways of teaching literature.
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The first type of bad lit prof can take any book and make it as boring as a government job. These drones embrace the minutiae of scholarship, maybe as some kind of careerist compromise, and turn the spun gold of great literature into dross. I might as well have been studying accounting or statistics.
Actually, that last claim isn’t fair. Years later I did take classes in both accounting and statistics—and they were excellent, sometimes even engaging That’s when I really came to understand that the teacher, not the subject, is what makes the difference.
The second type of bad prof turns culture into a joke, and usually a lewd joke—mocking the very books students are expected to read. I still recall the embarrassment I felt for the prof who delivered a raunchy extended monologue about phallic symbols in Alice in Wonderland. I suspect he wanted to be a comedian, not a teacher. Maybe he thought his routine was funny (some people were chuckling), but it was just shameful.
Then there was the prof who was hired to teach us Shakespeare, but really wanted to talk about kinky sex. This was like watching the same accident happen over and over, week after week. Each class session would start with semi-serious comments about a famous play by the Bard, but within ten minutes we were grappling with the fetish du jour.
My renegade view is that you shouldn’t teach a book unless you can take it seriously. But the postmodernist blight was already seeping into classrooms back then. And it brought with it an irreverent attitude to everything, along with a smug assumption that the posturing prof was the real star of the class—not the authors assigned for reading.
The third kind of bad prof did take things seriously, but lavished care and respect on the most banal, disappointing texts. So a shallow story by Raymond Carver about lowlifes gorging on Jello in a trashy trailer park would get lauded from the pulpit as the best thing since Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. Or—even worse!—long-suffering undergrads like Ted would be forced to scrape and bow before some jargon-filled abomination of literary criticism more suitable for lining bird cages.
Those profs were the worst. Faced with their unholy demands, my unspoken motto was: Less Stanley Fish and more wrapping fish.
The only saving grace is that, with the passage of time, almost every bad book they assigned during my students days gradually disappeared from the syllabi—and almost from human memory.
That’s usually what happens to bad books. It’s only a matter of time. If you’re a young student today, just wait and see….
So you’re now familiar with the three bad kinds of humanities teaching. But you want to know what the good professors did.
That’s simple to describe.
They sought out the greatest works of culture, and took them seriously.
They cared deeply about what they taught—and weren’t just callow careerists shilling for a paycheck.
They believed in the transformative power of these works, and used their teaching to convey it to students.
For them, the humanities wasn’t about courses and assignments, but about life itself—embracing society and the world and our place in it.
I firmly believe this is the only responsible way of teaching the humanities. The other three methods do more harm than good.
When I became a teacher myself, that’s how I tried to do it. I’m sure I fell short in many ways. That was inevitable, if only because I started teaching jazz at Stanford when I was just twenty years old. So I couldn’t have been very polished. But I believed in the music. I was totally committed to it in my own life—and I did everything possible to make the experience life-changing for my students.
Aiming for anything less than that would have been a cop-out.
The curious thing is that this passionate way of teaching Western culture is thriving right now—but outside of the West. In the US, the insiders who speak candidly will tell you that the humanities is in crisis. You can measure it in many ways—declining enrollment, shrinking departments, poor test results, increased cheating, resistance to reading, etc. All the metrics are bad.
But that’s not what’s happening in China. The study of western culture is in the ascendancy there. You could even say it’s hot and trendy.
People got a taste of this recently when director Christopher Nolan sat down for an interview with Yiyang Zhuge, who is a trained classicist perhaps best known for translating Plutarch’s Moralia into Chinese (and Hannah Arendt, too).
Nolan was probably expecting another pop culture discussion of his film version of Homer’s Odyssey. But what he got was something very different.
In the interview, Zhong seems intent on getting beneath the film’s surface, pressing Nolan on the philosophical and religious underpinnings of his adaptation….The interview quickly went viral on X, where English-speaking viewers praised it as one of the most thoughtful Nolan interviews they’d seen in years, while not quite hiding their surprise that it came from China
Of course, there are good reasons why Chinese scholars take Western culture very seriously. They live in a world where discussing ideas is a dangerous vocation.
The centerpiece is Tysons Corner Center, today the eighth largest mall in the country, and one of the largest sub-city-sized markets for office space. It is half-owned by the Alaska Permanent Fund, which is the state-owned corporation that invests oil revenue on behalf of Alaska’s citizens, and half-owned by Macerich, a giant REIT, which is in turn owned by hundreds of large institutional investors and many individuals.
This very interesting essay by Joseph Lawler argues that liquid real estate markets, and distanced ownership, militate against beauty.
This morning, a headline in the Guardian read: “RFK Jr lied in Senate confirmation hearings, newly revealed documents indicate.” The story by Michelle R. Smith reports that letters, newly obtained by members of the press, contradict Kennedy’s repeated assertions to members of Congress in early 2025 during his confirmation process to head the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) that his 2019 visit to Samoa had “nothing to do with vaccines.” In fact, in a letter to the Samoan prime minister before the trip, Kennedy said explicitly that he wanted to investigate the measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine used there.
Observers claim that Kennedy’s visit empowered anti-vaccine activists in Samoa. After he left, a measles epidemic killed 83 people. Smith notes that knowingly lying to Congress is a crime, although it is rarely prosecuted. Still, Smith points out, the apparent proof that Kennedy lied to Congress is a clear opening for hearings into Kennedy’s testimony, history, and conduct in office—including changing the vaccine schedule after promising not to—that would illuminate what has been happening to the U.S. government, information that would likely prove embarrassing to the Trump administration.
The U.S. is now in the midst of its own measles outbreak, which has killed two unvaccinated people in Pennsylvania. One of them was a newborn, too young for the vaccine and thus dependent on herd immunity. Yesterday, Kennedy suggested that Democratic governor Josh Shapiro’s announcement of the deaths might “have been altogether fabricated by one of the Governor’s hopeful staffers.”
Smith reports that a spokesperson for HHS said: “Secretary Kennedy’s visit to Samoa in 2019 was unrelated to vaccines. Any claim or insinuation based on these letters that Secretary Kennedy lied under oath or to Congress is not only false but outright defamatory.” Kennedy was not under oath in the hearings.
This afternoon, Aram Roston of the Guardian reported that Trump’s war on Iran has “driven the US military into a severe financial crisis.” Roston reports that the U.S. Navy, which is bearing the brunt of the operation, is transferring money from payroll to combat operations, creating shortfalls. Officials are covering that shortfall by raiding other accounts.
This issue has already come up in a July hearing before the Senate Appropriations Committee, when Senator Patty Murray (D-WA), the top-ranking Democrat on the committee, noted that Defense Secretary Hegseth was using a funding mechanism that “does not make a lot of sense.” Hegseth responded by blaming the “gross negligence” of the Biden administration and its “woke” policies. The ways in which he has spent the department’s budget were not closely examined.
Defense analyst Todd Harrison of the conservative American Enterprise Institute told Roston that the shortages are no secret, but speculated that “that is a deliberate decision of the civilian leaders in the Pentagon, starting at secretary, that this is for political reasons, that they don’t want to look like they’re damaging future military readiness over a war that is becoming increasingly a political liability.”
A former military officer who now works for a company that contracts with the navy told Roston: “They’re f*cked. They shot all their weapons; they trashed all their ships; they ran out of their money.”
A spokesperson for the U.S. Navy denied that funds for maintenance and operations have been run down. “The Department of the Navy,” the statement said, “is actively managing its resources to meet current pay obligations on time. We continue to work closely with Congress to address ongoing operational demands and sustain our personnel and readiness throughout the fiscal year.”
In the Washington Post, Evan Halper reported that the administration’s latest move to cancel an offshore wind project and nurture the fossil fuel industry will funnel a fortune to Australian billionaire Michael Dorrell, who donated about a million dollars to Trump’s inaugural committee. The way it works is this: the German company RWE will get $1.2 billion from the U.S. government to give up its wind leases for projects off of New York, California, and Louisiana if it invests instead in “conventional energy” projects. RWE will spend $900 million of that $1.2 billion for a stake in a giant liquefied natural gas project in Louisiana.
Halper reports that that stake is currently owned by a private equity fund run by Dorrell, meaning that the $900 million RWE invests in the “conventional energy” project after abandoning its wind projects will go to Dorrell’s private equity fund.
Administration officials told Halper they had nothing to do with RWE’s decision. White House spokesperson Taylor Rogers said: “This story is a brazen attempt to insinuate a conflict-of-interest that does not exist.”
Representative Jared Huffman (D-CA), the top-ranking Democrat on the House Natural Resources Committee, had already called for investigations of the more than $4 billion the administration has spent buying the abandonment of offshore wind development. After the new story dropped, he told Halper “These fake ‘settlements’ were already an insane waste of taxpayer funds and a ridiculous charade that seems to be blatantly illegal. This now adds the stench of corruption.”
Huffman said of the buyouts of offshore wind projects: “The deals are deeply corrupt and illegal. When the accountability comes, and I promise you accountability is coming, everyone involved in them will answer for it.”
Last week, Kenneth P. Vogel and Hamed Aleaziz of the New York Times reported that three days after Trump administration officials awarded a 5-year federal contract worth $85 million a year to the private prison company GEO Group to house people detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), a subsidiary of GEO Group donated $1 million to MAGA Inc., a political super PAC run by Trump’s allies. Two days after announcing another ICE contract worth $80 million annually, the company donated another $413,000.
White House spokesperson Lauren Bis said in a statement: “Any allegation that political donations play a role in agencies awarding government contracts are [sic] false. It is not shocking that ICE is announcing more contracts to detain illegal aliens as President Trump carries out the largest deportation operation in American history.”
In a major story for Public Citizen, Zach Everson examined the Trump family’s cryptocurrency products, reporting that Trump appears to have made at least $1.4 billion off crypto in 2025, although he put none of his own money into the ventures. The money, Everson says, comes from foreign governments, pardon seekers, corporate interests, and targets of government investigations.
It also comes from retirement accounts and MAGA supporters who believe Trump when he tells them his coins are a good investment. Everson reports that “Trump’s crypto schemes have left investors at least an estimated $4.7 billion underwater.” The losses reflect “wealth transferred to a small group of early buyers rather than money that simply vanished.
The White House claims: “Neither the President nor his family have ever engaged, or will ever engage, in conflicts of interest.”
This afternoon, Rebecca Ballhous, Sam Kessler, and Angus Berwick of the Wall Street Journal reported that the Trump family’s new crypto bank is backed by Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed al Nahyan, the national security advisor of the United Arab Emirates who is also the brother of the country’s president. Last year, the Abu Dhabi royal invested $500 million in the Trumps’ World Liberty Financial.
Such an investment in a president’s company by a foreign government official is unprecedented. Even more alarming is that Trump is currently negotiating with the UAE over whether it can have access to U.S. artificial intelligence chips that experts fear will make their way from the UAE to China. “How many red flags do we need?” ethics lawyer Kathleen Clark told the reporters. “Trump is selling out our national security in exchange for his own wealth maximization.”
If voters put Democrats in control of either or both chambers of Congress this fall, investigations and hearings into the machinations of administration officials will be epic. It is no wonder Trump appears frantic at the idea of midterm losses.
And the ranks of his supporters appear to be thinning. G. Elliott Morris of Strength in Numbers reported yesterday that Trump approval among American adults is underwater on every single issue, including border security. And there is a strong intensity gap: 49% strongly disapprove of his job as president, while only 17% strongly approve. Morris notes that the “movement against the president is now primarily in his own coalition, with significant softening in the share who say they ‘strongly support’ the job he’s doing.”
As his popularity falls, Trump appears to be adopting the belief that people don’t like him because they don’t understand all he’s done for them. Yvonne Wingett Sanchez, Michael Scherer, and Ashley Parker of The Atlantic reported Tuesday that Trump intends to buy a blitz of midterm ads that focus on him, rather than the candidates on the ballot, making the election all about him.
He is already trying to sell that story. Yesterday morning, he tried to recast his disastrous Iran war as a success, posting an AI image of himself in front of a giant American flag, an aircraft carrier, and military aircraft. In the image, he leans over dirt as if it were a desk, with President George W. Bush in the lower left corner of the image surrounded by flames and a pair of empty soldier’s boots. In front of Bush is a sign that reads: “MISSION NOT ACCOMPLISHED 2001–2021.” In the lower right corner of the image is a picture of the former leader of Iran, killed in Trump’s strikes, with a sign that reads: “MISSION ACCOMPLISHED 2026.”
Journalist Jim Acosta noted, “This is delusional for Trump to post this and it should be covered as such. It was a massive story when Bush declared ‘mission accomplished’ during the Iraq War. The image dogged Bush throughout much of his presidency. Should be the same for Trump.”
After the “mission accomplished” post, Trump reposted someone else’s social media post warning that voters are mad at the Republicans not because of Trump but because Republicans in Congress have not gone far enough in implementing Trump’s will.
“I don’t think the [Republicans] fully grasp how badly they are f*cking up right now,” the post read. “I’m talking to people who normally have ZERO interest in politics who are legitimately pissed off. They are not seeing the major reform they thought would happen and are REALLY MAD about it. No true accountability. No true mass deportations. No meaningful decrease in the deficit. Lots of very long vacations and no work. No bills being passed that REDUCE the government involvement in their lives.”
The poster continued: “I’m very worried the [Republican Party] is sleepwalking toward a midterm reckoning they don’t see coming. People are pissed off that they voted Trump into office and then the [Republican Party] continues to slow-walk every reform people want.”
Later this afternoon, in what seemed to be an attempt to bully Canada—although Canadians and Americans both have made it very clear that strategy is backfiring—Trump signed an executive order directing Interior Secretary Doug Burgum to change the name of Lake Ontario to “Lake America” in official U.S. government documents and communications, as well as the Geographic Names Information System.
As Marianne LeVine, Natalie Andrews, and Amanda Coletta of the Wall Street Journal reported, in Trump’s discussion of his executive order, he harked back to his change of the name of the Gulf of Mexico in official U.S. documents.
“We took something called the Gulf of Mexico, we changed it,” the president of the United States said. “So if you think about it, we have a gulf and we have a lake, now all we need is an ocean. So maybe we’ll have to change the name of the Atlantic and/or the Pacific.”
While the only good week is one without any homicides, homicides declined this week. As of Friday 9am, D.C. has reported has only one new homicide this week, bringing the total for the year to 68*. Last year, during the same time period, we had 102 homicides, and in the surge year of 2023, there were 176 homicides during that time.
Unfortunately, non-violent crime categories trended upwards, while violent crimes pretty much leveled off. It’s still unclear if we will achieve another 33 percent drop in homicides for the third straight year–a trend that began pre-occupation, in the Biden era. Right now, we’re on pace to do so, but we will need slightly less than one homicide per week for that to happen. It’s worth noting that the first three months of the year had only twelve homicides (versus 34 in the first three months of 2025), and since then, we have had 54 homicides (versus 59 in the same time period in 2025)**.
Hoping next week gets us back to a zero homicide week.
*Three of the 71 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). Also, occasionally homicides get reclassified so the annual total can increase or decrease by one, with or without any homicides.
**As best as I can tell, this seems to be a general pattern in much of the Northeast, making me wonder if the crappy winter weather played a role. Could be wrong about the pattern or the explanation though.
A bet on near-term explosive AI-driven growth: whether U.S. real GDP per capita will grow by at least 15% within a single year (measured relative to prior peak) by the end of 2033. Agreed on X, 15–16 August 2026. This document summarizes the agreed terms.
1. Parties and stakes
Fast-growth side (wins if the growth condition in Section 2 is met):
● William MacAskill https://www.williammacaskill.com/ — $10,000
● Samuel Albanie https://samuelalbanie.com/ — $25,000
● Tom Cohen https://x.com/tomcohen — $25,000
● Total: $60,000
No-fast-growth side (wins otherwise):
● Benjamin Moll http://benjaminmoll.com/ — $40,000
● Andrew Ho https://andrewho.xyz/ — $200,000
● Total: $240,000
Odds: 4:1 — every $1 staked by the fast-growth side is matched by $4 from the no-fast-growth
side. Implied probability of the fast-growth scenario: 20%.
I’m known for quipping that a bet is a tax on bullshit but I don’t think either side is BSing. We have a genuine and important disagreement. I’d side with Moll, for what it is worth.
It was very fun talking to @patrickc about New Aesthetics at the @ClunyInstitute ‘s conference last month.
We talked about:
—The origin story of the New Aesthetics grants — and why he and Tyler Cowen disagree on almost everything aesthetic (1:00)
—Why culture is “stuck”: a 1926 Bauhaus building could pass for last year’s (2:30)
—Modernism’s explicit, stated mission to tear down beauty — “they weren’t hiding it” (3:30) —Solzhenitsyn: you can fake goodness and truth, but beauty “bears within it its own verification” (6:30)
—Is beauty objective? Why everyone visits Toledo, Spain and no one visits Toledo, Ohio (7:30)
—Detroit was rich for ~25 years and built the DIA. Silicon Valley’s been rich for 50. “We could do the Silicon Valley art tour in a coffee break” (14:30)
—Was Y Combinator secretly modeled on the art atelier? (18:30)
—The highest-leverage point for aesthetic renewal used to be churches. What is it now? (27:00)
—The sacred as an “endangered species”
— and Patrick’s alternative theory of WTF happened in 1971: we lost the sacred, so we can’t have nice things (28:30)
—I asked him about Vatican II and technological stagnation. He (wisely?) passed. I didn’t. (34:30)
—”Can anyone name a work of art made with AI?” Silence. (37:30)
—Why Germany is preeminent in music, literature, and philosophy — and its food is so bad. (A demand-side problem.) (41:30)
—”Biology is so ugly, man.” Physics is beautiful; biology is a tower of hacks (43:30)
—The “anti-beauty conspiracy” of the last century — and the massive latent demand waiting to be uncorked (52:30)
“THE PEOPLE of Starbase, they are at the forefront of humanity’s progress,” Missor Movahed told me as we leaned against wooden crates. “When Victor Hugo, the French writer, died, we had a huge procession inside Paris with his tombeau going through the Champs-Élysées… Two million people. And I think the people from Starbase deserve [this] kind of gratitude.”
As I ingested Missor’s words, a nearby semi truck kicked up a cloud of dust that stuck to my sweat covered body. We were standing in a gravel lot next to the two-lane highway that leads to Starbase, a chunk of land at the southernmost tip of Texas where Elon Musk and SpaceX launch giant rockets to space.
Hanging from a small crane behind Missor was a bronze statue of Prometheus, the Greek titan said to have stolen fire from the Gods and delivered it to mankind. Only the head and torso had been assembled, the legs were strewn nearby. The arms, raising his famous torch, had not yet been delivered.
“The French did the Statue of Liberty to celebrate the value of liberty and truth and basically the value of the West,” Missor continued, stroking his long, black beard while he considered his words. “I feel like we are doing the same thing with a little scale. But I feel like that’s the same will.”
Missor is the founder of the Atelier Missor, a French sculpture foundry. I often watched him making phone calls or barking orders in French rather than welding the statue himself. Most people notice the Atelier’s matching uniforms — dark grey slacks, white collared shirts, brown boots, suspenders — and Missor’s outfit was always the cleanest. In Texas, the getup got a rare new addition: matching cowboy hats.
As I examined Missor’s face, I decided two things. First, he’s totally bonkers in a quixotic, melodramatic, possible cult leader, freedom-loving, dude just chasing his calling kind of way. Second, despite the Renaissance-era wardrobe, he’s possibly none of the above and is really mostly a normal dude more or less hiding inside a costume of what a serious sculptor is supposed to look like. I imagined him back in Paris watching the French equivalent of Fox News in basketball shorts and a T-shirt.
The results suggest that the public is feeling down about capitalism but is still wary of full-blown socialism. And many are deciding whether a few socialist candidates might help shake up the system. We found that:
—Just a third of Americans privately say they have a positive view of capitalism.
—Less than half of Republicans privately express a positive view of capitalism, though two-thirds support it in public.
—Almost half of women privately say they would consider voting for a socialist.
—Nearly a third of Gen Z publicly say that America would be better off as a socialist country, but only 14 percent say so in private.
—The majority of blacks publicly say capitalism is the cause of America’s social ills, but only 37 percent say so privately.
—Of people earning more than $150,000 a year, 58 percent privately say they are open to voting for a socialist, though only 42 percent say so publicly.
The OLI on Landsat 9 captured this image of the Congaree River winding through floodplain forests in Congaree National Park on August 18, 2025.
NASA Earth Observatory/Michala Garrison
Among the 63 U.S. national parks, few are as defined by a single river’s floodplain as Congaree National Park in South Carolina. While the features are also prominent in other parks, a full 80 percent of Congaree National Park lies within the Congaree River floodplain.
It’s a place home to one of the largest intact tracts of old-growth bottomland hardwood forests in the United States. In this image captured by the OLI (Operational Land Imager) on Landsat 9, the river winds through the forested plain, along with curving bands of green that trace old channels, ridges, and swales left behind as the river gradually migrated across it. Slight differences in elevation in these paleochannels and other landforms affect how frequently they flood, producing distinct ecosystems that appear in contrasting shades of green.
The river flows through flat, soft terrain, which encourages the formation of bends and meanders. Water typically flows faster on the outside of bends, leading to more rapid erosion as the channel carves into the outer riverbank. It moves more slowly on the inside of bends, resulting in the deposition of sediment and the growth of sandy features called point bars. Over time, this process can cut off a bend from the main river channel, forming U-shaped oxbow lakes.
The National Park Service lists Weston Lake, 1.2 miles (1.9 kilometers) from the visitor center, as one of the park’s most permanent oxbow lakes, noting that it is relatively deep and lacks the shallow clay and silt layer found in most of the park’s other oxbow lakes, such as Devil’s Elbow. On the right side of the image is Bates Old River, a roughly 4-mile-long abandoned channel of the Congaree River and one of the longest oxbow lakes in South Carolina. Over time, abandoned channels and oxbow lakes can fill with sediment and become shallow wetlands. Some of these low-lying, water-filled features are known as sloughs, where flood-tolerant cypress-tupelo forests tend to grow.
While loggers targeted forests along the Congaree in the 1880s, challenges such as frequent flooding, interminably muddy roads, and mosquito-plagued conditions meant that most of the floodplain forests escaped the widespread logging that transformed other parts of the Southeast. By the 1950s, conservationists had begun to recognize how rare old-growth forests of this type had become in the region. Congress designated the area a national monument in 1976, and it became a national park in 2003.
As the river snakes its way through the park’s mostly flat terrain, it overflows its banks several times per year, usually in the winter and early spring but also in the summer and fall after hurricanes and major rainstorms. These floods distribute broad layers of nutrient-rich silt throughout the floodplain, nourishing the forests and contributing to the high concentration of unusually large trees in the park.
Over the decades, Congaree National Park has harbored a remarkable array of giant “champion” trees that have held national and state size records for their species. Though individual trees have gained and lost champion status as they have been damaged, have died, or been surpassed by newly measured trees elsewhere, Congaree trees such as the possumhaw (Ilex decidua), water hickory (Carya aquatica), loblolly pine (Pinus taeda), laurel oak (Quercus laurifolia), swamp tupelo (Nyssa biflora), and sweetgum (Liquidambar styraciflua) have held records at times.
Tropical Weather Outlook NWS Central Pacific Hurricane Center Honolulu HI Issued by NWS National Hurricane Center Miami FL 800 AM HST Sun Aug 30 2026
For the central North Pacific...between 140W and 180W:
Active Systems: The National Hurricane Center is issuing advisories on Hurricane Karina, located well west-southwest of the southern tip of the Baja California Peninsula, and on Tropical Storm Lowell, located well east-southeast of the Hawaiian Islands.
Central Pacific: An area of low pressure could form well south or southwest of the Hawaiian Islands in the next couple of days. Some gradual development is possible thereafter while it moves slowly westward across the central Pacific. * Formation chance through 48 hours...low...near 0 percent. * Formation chance through 7 days...low...30 percent.
Tropical Weather Outlook...Corrteced NWS National Hurricane Center Miami FL 200 PM EDT Sun Aug 30 2026
Correct low chance to medium chance for the Gulf system
For the North Atlantic...Caribbean Sea and the Gulf of America:
Northern Gulf of America (AL97): A low pressure area is located over the northern Gulf of America about 125 mils south of the coast of southeastern Louisiana. Satellite imagery and recent satellite wind data indicate that this system has become better organized since yesterday. Additional development is possible as the low moves slowly west-northwestward, and a short-lived tropical depression or tropical storm could form before the system reaches the Upper Texas or southwestern Louisiana coasts Tuesday or Tuesday night. Interests along the Louisiana and Upper Texas coasts should monitor the progress of this system. Regardless of development, locally heavy rainfall is possible over portions of the Upper Texas or southwestern Louisiana coasts during the next couple of days. * Formation chance through 48 hours...medium...50 percent. * Formation chance through 7 days...medium...50 percent.
Near Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands (Remnants of Dolly): A strong tropical wave, the remnants of Tropical Storm Dolly, is producing an area of showers and thunderstorms from Puerto Rico eastward across the Virgin Islands and the northern Leeward Islands. Satellite data and surface observations indicate that there are no signs of a closed surface circulation, and redevelopment is unlikely during the next day or two while the wave moves westward to west-northwestward at about 25 mph. The system should bring locally heavy rains and gusty winds to portions of the Leeward Islands, the Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico, and Hispaniola over the next couple of days. Conditions may become more conducive for redevelopment by the middle of the week as the system reaches the southeastern Gulf of America. * Formation chance through 48 hours...low...near 0 percent. * Formation chance through 7 days...low...20 percent.
Tropical Weather Outlook NWS National Hurricane Center Miami FL 1100 AM PDT Sun Aug 30 2026
For the eastern and central North Pacific east of 180 longitude:
Active Systems: The National Hurricane Center is issuing advisories on Hurricane Karina, located well west-southwest of the southern tip of the Baja California Peninsula, and on Tropical Storm Lowell, located well east-southeast of the Hawaiian Islands.
Well Offshore of Southwestern Mexico: A tropical wave with disorganized showers and thunderstorms, is located well to the south of southwestern Mexico. This system is expected to continue to move west-northwestward to northwestward at 10 to 15 mph. Environmental conditions appear favorable for gradual development of this system, and a tropical depression is likely to form during the early to middle part of next week. * Formation chance through 48 hours...high...70 percent. * Formation chance through 7 days...high...90 percent.
Central Pacific: An area of low pressure could form well south or southwest of the Hawaiian Islands in the next couple of days. Some gradual development is possible thereafter while it moves slowly westward across the central Pacific. * Formation chance through 48 hours...low...near 0 percent. * Formation chance through 7 days...low...30 percent.
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