Last month, the story broke (alternate link) that Madison Square Garden uses facial recognition software on everyone entering the facility, and—among other groups—flags activists that oppose using facial recognition.
Turns out that the system was shut off for Taylor Swift’s wedding.
Evan Greer—one of the people that MSG alerts on—comments:
Ironically, Swift herself has reportedly used facial recognition at her own concerts to identify stalkers. This “privacy for me, surveillance for thee” attitude feels like a perfect encapsulation of the future we’re already living in: one where wealthy elites can afford privacy, while the rest of us are forced to live in a corporate surveillance panopticon.
Whatever privacy measures Swift had in place for the wedding seems to have worked. No photos have leaked online.
One of the technological breakthroughs was the onboard use of a spinning wheel confocal microscope, nicknamed the Squid, which uses lasers to scan microscopic details of how organisms are put together. “That opens up a whole new world of exploring. We could see cells interacting with each other, exchanging material and building skeletons. And we could do that live on the ship, when usually it takes a couple of weeks of staining and mounting to see anything,” Osborn said.
The expedition discovered thirty-one new marine species in two weeks. The article doesn’t say if any of them were new species of squid.
As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered.
On the IPI benchmark, Opus 5 improved over Opus 4.8, reducing the probability of an attacker succeeding within 15 attempts from 5.5% to 2.0%, and from 0.5% to 0.2% on 1 attempt. It also improved on Sonnet 5 (5.9% at k=15) and Mythos 5 (2.6%), making it the most robust model evaluated. Opus 5 also outperformed all non-Claude models on this benchmark. The most robust non-Claude model was Muse Spark at 16.5% within 15 attempts—more than eight times Opus 5’s rate. The most capable GPT 5.6 variant, Sol, was comparable to its predecessor GPT 5.5 (20.0% versus 20.8% within 15 attempts), and was 10 times as likely to be successfully attacked as Claude Opus 5 at 2.0%. The other GPT 5.6 variants are less robust, at 30.4% (Terra) and 43.9% (Luna). A single attempt against GPT 5.6 Sol succeeded 3.1% of the time, higher than the 2.0% an attacker achieved against Opus 5 after fifteen attempts.
We know that preventing prompt injection is impossible in the general case. But we are getting much better at blocking it in specific cases.
Hey folks, Fireside this week, as I am fresh back from a short family trip before the jaws of the Fall semester close upon me. I did get a chance to see Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey and I wrote a review of it for Foreign Policy (alas, paywalled, I assume), although by far the most discussed review has been that of Emily Wilson, noted translator of Homer. I have a few scattered thoughts about the film that either didn’t fit into the FP piece or have been occasioned since then, which I thought I’d put here. Spoiler warnings, I suppose – Nolan does actually have a surprise or two (he is willing to bend the poem a bit to get it) – so if you don’t want that, skip to the second cat picture to get to recommendations.
Percy hard at work helping me plan out my Teaching Paradox: Hearts of Iron series.
First off as level setting, my general impression of the film: it was good. It aims to evoke emotions and largely does so. The actors are very skilled and it shows. Christopher Nolan does not like dialogue and that…also shows. As I said in my review, however, this is a ‘remix’ not a cover; Nolan feels perfectly free to put his own spin on the story, to shift themes around and so on. And that’s fine, people have been remixing the Odyssey since forever.1
I think this is one place where Wilson and I part ways in our review. As a Homerist, Wilson sees everything missing in Nolan’s film, which is fine to point out but at the same time of course there is no way that anyone was going to fit all of the subtly and themes of 12,000 lines of Greek into a film that needs to run a bit under three hours. At the same time, Wilson has written her review quite sharply, with some lines that come off more cutting than necessary given that, while The Odyssey might not have been the film of Wilson’s dreams, it is evidently a ‘good’ film to judge by audience reactions.
More broadly, I can’t help but think that, in a moment where the field of Classics is quite evidently sinking, it would have been helpful to be seen as sailing with the wind of a popular new adaptation of Homer, rather than nitpicking against it. In a way, Wilson’s critique because it is written so sharply (quoth Wilson, “I would be ashamed to have written any part of this script”) comes off as excessively contemptuous of both the film and its audience. There are, I would suggest, ways to make these very same critiques which avoid being so alienating in a context where Wilson must know that the media was bound to make her the ‘face’ of Classics (as indeed, they have done). Such a sharp critique risks coming off as belittling or condescending to a large audience of very enthused movie-goers (the film has a 97% positive audience rating on Rotten Tomatoes) and it is simply not a very good time for the public’s sense of classicists (such as they think of us at all) to be “The Odyssey was good and I like Homer but classicists are mean snotty killjoys who get angry when I enjoy things the ‘wrong’ way.” That public perception is a recipe for more department closures, especially at public institutions (Wilson teaches at a private, Ivy League institution).
There is a resolute refusal for the highest profile members of the field (and this goes for history as much as for classics) to ever consider for a moment that they might be in a position of speaking for the field which might bring with it deeper and greater obligations; instead we acknowledge no such obligations (except as pertain to more junior scholars at less impressive schools, of course) and then act surprised as the field wilts. This is especially true of figures in tenured positions at elite private universities who are wholly insulated from the costs of alienating the public – their jobs will never be at risk – but who are often elevated in the media to speak for the field as a whole.
To return to the film, prior to release there was a lot of discussion of its ‘historical accuracy.’ Seeing the film, I think much of that discussion missed the point, as the vibe here was in some ways ‘grounded’ but also impressionistic, almost dreamlike in quality. This is especially true of the flashback sequences, told from the perspective of Odysseus or Menelaus. Notably, these are the sequences in which nearly all of the supernatural stuff happens and one gets the sense that neither of these fellows might be entirely reliable narrators. A lot of the wild armor and costumes (like Agamenon’s horse-spine helmet) exist in these sequences, where we’re really not all that tethered to literal reality anyway.
More broadly, this is a film that isn’t trying for specific accuracy to either the 8th century of the poem’s composition of the 12th century of the Late Bronze Age Collapse. Instead, it is using the Odyssey to evoke some specific ideas: the rupture of norms (particularly those involving kindness towards strangers, foreigners, immigrants) and civilizational collapse. And while Homer’s Odyssey doesn’t have a collapse of civilization narrative, it is there in broader Greek mythological thought: the heroes of the Trojan War are the last full generation of heroes. The generation of their children seem almost like a half-generation, by and large restricted to working out the consequences of their more consequential parents and living (and dying) in their shadows (think Orestes, Electra, Neoptolemus/Pyrrhus, Telemachus himself, etc).
Using the Odyssey in particular to do this lets Nolan position himself as speaking for, rather than against the western tradition or western canon. Thus the irony that I noted in my Foreign Policy piece that the ‘chuds’ hated this movie before it came out because of the casting, but if they had seen it and also understood subtext, they would hate the movie because it is a full-throated, violent rejection of them and their entire worldview. Effectively Christopher Nolan donning a mask of Homer to declare, on behalf of the tradition the chuds claim they stand for, “you know nothing of my work.” Not because Nolan is ‘super-woke’ – the film is, if anything, quite conservative in outlook – but rather because he isn’t and thus can argue for norms from a traditionalist lens.
None of which means everyone has to like the movie. I will say right now, a lot of the dialogue is stilted. In particular, Nolan is a subtle as a brick about connecting this to the Late Bronze Age Collapse, with characters saying things like “our Age of Bronze is collapsing” and “you are the Sea Peoples?” I can imagine someone more familiar with the background here, who has thus already picked up on the subtext (and it isn’t all that subtle as subtext) would be annoyed by it suddenly becoming text as Christopher Nolan basically has Anne Hathaway and Matt Damon walk into the audience to explain, “And now the moral of the story is…”
On the other hand, if I have come to realize just about anything about the general audiences for films these days it is that a lot of folks really do not grasp subtext at all. Watching folks revel obliviously in movies that revile them has given me a new appreciation for the Greek Chorus walking on stage and just straight up singing the moral at the audience between acts. So while I did find some of the very on-the-nose lines a bit off-putting, I find I understand the instinct to include them anyway.
By way of example, I saw more than one person on social media complaining that Athena (played by Zendaya in the film) looked wrong, because she didn’t look like a divinity, was simply dressed, didn’t wear Athena’s distinctive helmet and breastplate (the aegis with its distinctive gorgoneion) and looked too young for the role. Which misses – and this is the spoiler if you do not want the spoiler, stop reading because here is the spoiler – the point that Odysseus is seeing the form of a young Trojan priestess of Athena that his men murdered in cold blood in front of him during the sack of the city which we see later in the film.
Now the film is quite deliberately ambiguous as to if this is just Odysseus processing his trauma and what we’re seeing is trauma disassociation – I think ‘Athena’ never tells Odysseus anything he couldn’t himself know, for instance – or if this is Athena taking the form of this slain woman to communicate to Odysseus (since Athena regularly takes such disguises in the poem!).
Likewise, some of the chatter about the fate of Odysseus’ men misses the (re)framing of the film as a complete whole. We’re flat out told in the Underworld that Odysseus’ men are going to die, that conditions will be put before them to kill them relentlessly until they do and we also – and this is a departure from the poem – we also see exactly why, because once we finally get the full flashback to the fall of Troy, while Odysseus stands basically stunned by the horror of it (and only fights other armed men), his soldiers take part in the butchery of civilians, including, most evocatively, Zendaya’s priestess. In that moment, we see that Circe’s description of them – delivered earlier in the film but later chronologically – was not about something they might do to her but about things they had already done at Troy.
And so we get this motif: the men take part of Circe’s food and Odysseus does not, they take part of Helios’ cattle and Odysseus does not because they took part in the brutal sack of Troy in a way that Odysseus did not (and don’t show any remorse for it afterwards, unlike Odysseus). Odysseus’ men have already done the core violation and they are going to get one occasion after another until they break a rule so hard that it kills them.
If it seems strange that an angry Greek god might want to lure someone into a further act of sacrilege in order to punish them for it, that’s actually something that does happen! I am put in mind of a brief bit in Herodotus (Hdt. 1.157-161). Pactyes of Lydia has fled the wrath of the Persians and taken shelter as a suppliant – a protected refugee, in essence – in Cyme and the Cymeans are understandably worried that the Persians will attack them, so they want an excuse to get this guy gone. So they send a man to an oracle of Apollo to try to get a favorable oracle.
And the god Apollo gives them the oracle they seek, but the guy they sent (Aristodicus) is clever enough to know that something is up, so he makes a show of rousting out some of Apollo’s sacred birds and when Apollo essentially demands, ‘what the hell, man?’Aristodicus replies with, ‘yeah, I want to know why you are telling us to betray a suppliant too?’ to which Apollo replies (and this is a direct quote, trans. A.D. Godley), “Yes, I do command them, so that you may perish all the sooner for your impiety, and never again come to inquire of my oracle about giving up those that seek refuge with you.”
Basically, Herodotus has Apollo so angry that the Cymeans are even asking the question, trying to wriggle out of their duty here, that he is giving them the wrong answer so as to further justify his divine wrath. In the event, the Cymeans figure it out and move Pactyes along to another city and when that city also tries to betray him, they smuggle him out at the last minute to a third city (which also betrayed him, no one wants to get wrecked by Persia), thereby satisfying their obligation and thus avoiding Apollo’s wrath.
So the idea of the sacred cattle being a lure to bring the already-condemned-for-sacrilege men of Odysseus to their death is perfectly fitting with the way Greek gods roll in mythology.
Percy thinks this is his tent. It is not his tent.
And then in a sort-of-related recommendation, I thought there were quite a few good points in one of Jamelle Bouie’s recent Takes over in YouTube, “There are no white people on Middle-Earth.” It touches on modern culture war politics, of course, but the fundamental point he is making, I think is important and valid that our modern conception of race is just that: quite modern. And so while people in the past (or in fictional worlds) can obviously see skin tone, the broader categories of ‘white,’ ‘non-white’ and ‘black’ didn’t exist (or may not exist, for the fictional worlds) for them in the same way. Bouie doesn’t use this example, but I come back to a short comment in the Odyssey that Odysseus thought Memnon, the King of the Ethiopians, to have been the most attractive man he had ever seen – the idea that ‘whiteness’ was a universal beauty standard for all genders simply doesn’t exist in Homer’s world. And while we’re here, a careful look at Tolkien’s text suggests that his world is not quite so fair-skinned as it is usually cast: Samwise Gamgee, in a sense the truest hero of the work, has his skin described as grown more than once and while you might assume that’s because he’s outside all the time, he is a descendant of Harfoots who in turn are described as darker in complexion than other Hobbits. But that simply doesn’t matter to anyone because ‘white’ and ‘black’ aren’t the categories in Middle Earth that they are in our Earth.
Meanwhile, in civil-military thinking, I ran back over an April piece at History Does You by the always-worthwhile Secretary of Defense Rock on “The Myths of McMasterism” which is well worth the time. I think read alongside something like Kori Shake’s recentThe State and the Soldier(2025) – which I need to give a closer read but may end up recommended here before too long too – it brings out how the sense in the American military that they had largely ‘solved’ the problem of civil-military relations has been an illusion, quite vividly exposed as such. Of course I had my own thoughts on this last year as well.
There’s been a lot of Percy lately, so to balance it out, here is Ollie – sitting, as he does, on a cat bed that is on a cat bed.
For this week’s book recommendation, I thought I might make a bunch of recommendations together to answer a question I (and every other classicist) get asked regularly: what translations of the Iliad and Odyssey do I recommend?
The thing is, there are a lot of very capable translations of both works and so choosing between them is basically always going to be something of a matter of taste and de gustibus non est disputandum (“on taste, there can be no disputes”). As we’ve discussed before, a translator (especially of poetry) is dealing with trying to balance incompatible demands of meaning, style, rhythm, and brevity. So Instead of offering one translation, I’ll suggest three with what I think are their relative merits and then you can have your pick.
First, for my personal favorite translation, I would suggest the Richard Lattimore translation, The Iliad of Homer (1951) and The Odyssey of Homer (1965). Lattimore’s translation is, of the three I am going to recommend the most faithfulto the original Greek, which is to say it tries the hardest to keep to the literal meaning of the Greek, while also keeping to original line numbers. That also means it is clunkiest of the bunch here, though not horribly so. That clunk is, of course, somewhat increased by its age and of the bunch Lattimore comes off feeling the most ‘ye olde Homer’ even though it is very much in ‘modern’ (that is, 1950s) English, albeit with an elevated style.
For something that is a bit looser but flows better, I always recommend Robert Fagles’ The Iliad (1990) andThe Odyssey (1996). The big thing to know about Fagles is that he does not keep at all to the original line numbering: all of his books run ‘long’ compared to the original poem. That allows him to ‘stretch out’ a lot to produce a translation that still captures most of the poems while being smoother and more elegant than Lattimore. That said, Fagles is definitely less faithful than Lattimore as well, though this is still very much a solid translation. Just beware of those line numbers because Fagles will not match up with anyone else. Fagles also translates in what I would describe as an ‘elevated’ style, an effort to capture Homer’s dialect – already archaic and artificial in the eight century BC – and give the poems a formal air despite these translations only being about 30 years old. A lot of readers really like that elevated style – they want to feel like they are reading capital-L Literature – but it bothers other readers. For that last group, we have my last recommendation which you knew was coming which is…
For something that is much more modern and pithier, but meaningfully more willing to bend the text to get there, Emily Wilson’s The Iliad (2024) and The Odyssey (2018). Wilson translates into modern, common vernacular English rather than an artificial ‘elevated’ style, which some folks like and some folks don’t. More importantly, I think, Wilson holds like iron to Homer’s line numbers and also insists on delivering both poems in iambic pentameter – her goal is to capture the punchy brevity of Homer’s Greek which I will be honest, neither Lattimore or especially not Fagles really capture. The result is a poem, in English, which scans and can be sung or chanted and which better manages the feeling of momentum the Greek has. The downside, of course, is that Wilson has to play a lot looser with the meaning of individual phrases to achieve this and so this is the least purely ‘faithful’ of the translations, though it is still very much Homer.
So there you go: if you value a maximally literal, one-to-one translation, go with Lattimore. If you want something elevated and complete, even if it bends meaning and maybe gets a bit ‘flabby,’ read Fagles (Fagles does read very well). If you want something that feels modern and captures the brevity and momentum of the Greek (but sometimes loses some of its subtler shades of meaning), go with Wilson. If you want the whole poem, utterly complete with all of its meaning, style and verve preserved, learn ancient Greek.
Paul Kafasis, on the Rogue Amoeba blog back in April:
Though Sparkle serves us very well, it has one notable downside.
Update announcements are most likely to appear at the least
convenient time: right after you’ve launched the app. You want to
start recording with Audio Hijack, for instance, but the app is
telling you about a new version.
We’ve long wished to avoid these disruptions. With that in mind,
we’re making changes to how update notifications appear throughout
our apps. In the future, when the software’s timed automated check
detects a newer version, it will no longer pop an obtrusive window
like the one seen above.
Instead, a small “Update Available” indicator will be shown in the
app’s interface.
Such a little thing, but like I wrote earlier this week, getting all the little things right is how you get to insanely great. Every Mac app using Sparkle ought to copy this. It’s so much nicer.
I saw this tweet and it struck me as one of the more powerful indicators of the need to untether ideology from “fight” in intra-Democratic battles. The party is very united on fight, very divided on ideology. So you unite on “fight,” let different constituencies/states find their center of gravity on ideology.
It is certainly true (and I saw this a lot in comments when I posted this on Bluesky) that “move left” or “move to the center” mean many things to many people, often mean nothing and are often uncertainly connected to public policy. In which case it can be unclear whether we’re really talking about ideology or what we might call emotive signifiers.
Those points are valid, interesting but mostly, I think, irrelevant. These are the slogans and catchwords that define the core intra-party battle among Democrats. You can go to town arguing “well, you don’t really mean what you think you mean when you use these commonly-used phrases.” But that seems mostly like a laborious, if perhaps self-satisfying, effort at self-delusion. At least in this CNN poll when Democrats were asked this, they basically split down the middle.
This is not necessarily a problem. Or, if it is, it is a manageable one. What I think we can take from it is that neither “side” is going to be dislodged by main force. It also makes clear that the side you’re not on is not just a paper tiger puffed up by corporate campaign dollars or the outsized voice of loudmouths on Twitter. And yet on the closest we can get to “fight” questions — should you fight harder, do you want new leadership — you’re up at Russian, if not quite North Korean, levels of unanimity.
i opened the app, and recorded this unedited, nearly two minute,
launch sequence. it somehow just gets funnier and more absurd
I agree with this sentiment, right down to the fact that Temu doesn’t deserve capital letters.
I placed an order from Temu back in August 2023. At the time Temu was the #1 app in the App Store. I surmised it was some sort of crap store, but wanted to see for myself. It is in fact not merely a crap store but a spectacular crap store — like if a souvenir shop on a Jersey shore boardwalk were the size of a football stadium. Thousands of items, many of them rip-offs, at absurdly low prices. I bought (screenshot):
Two Apple Watch straps. One of them knocking off Apple’s Braided Solo Loop for $1.88; another knocking off the Apple Watch Ultra Alpine Loop for $2.34.
A pair of knock-off AirPods: $8.98.
Another pair of wireless earbuds branded “Lenovo” but definitely not made by Lenovo: $10.25.
A knock-off Apple Watch Ultra (“Smart Watch Answer/Make Call 2.19" HD Full Touch Screen Watch With BT Call, Fitness Tracker With Heart Monitor”), which included both orange and black (misspelled “balck”) rip-offs of Apple’s Ocean Band, for $16.49.
A “Magnetic Suction Anti-Lost Lanyard” for, I think, AirPods: $1.79.
An iPhone case: $3.46.
Grand total for all seven items: $48.81. I ordered it all on 20 August 2023, and it arrived at my P.O. box on 2 September. The contents of the box looked less like it had been “packed” than “picked out of the trash and hurriedly stuffed into a box”.
The iPhone case was so flimsy it didn’t properly snap onto the phone. The Apple Watch straps were ... OK? They were about as good as you could hope given that they cost around $2 each. The knock-off Apple Watch Ultra actually did sort of work, insofar as it had a color screen that turned on and showed watch-like screens (that looked nothing at all like WatchOS). The watch case was made of plastic, and watch straps did not snap into place in the slide-in channel where they connect — they just permanently slid around. I couldn’t get either of the bluetooth earbuds to work but I didn’t spend more than a few minutes trying with each, because I realized I had no intention of putting them into my ears. The lanyard I don’t remember.
Temu today no longer tops the U.S. App Store’s Top Free Apps list, but it remains in the top 25. (It was at #19 this morning, and #22 this afternoon.) Temu’s slogan remains unchanged: “Shop like a billionaire.” Who am I to argue with that? We know one of them is on a lot of drugs — maybe all of them are, and Temu is what it’s like.
After I placed that initial order, I started getting emails from Temu. Seven of the emails pertained to my order: an order confirmation, a shipping notice, a shipping update, another shipping update, a “we noticed your order didn’t arrive on time so here’s a $5 coupon” update, a delivery confirmation, and then a prompt to leave “an honest review detailing our product quality and your overall experience”. The emails kept coming. I decided to leave them turned on until I wrote about my Temu experience on Daring Fireball. As I type this sentence, I’ve received a grand total of 916 emails. That’s just under one per day for the 1,076 days since I placed my one and only order from them. Here’s a text file with the dates and Subject lines for all 916 emails. In the early months after placing my order, they sent me multiple emails per day, every single day. I particularly enjoy how, in the Subject lines, they occasionally abbreviate my name as “John Gru...” (for privacy?), despite the fact that (a) the emails are all sent to me, and (b) in many of the other messages, they spell out my full name in the Subject.
Don’t do what I did and actually try Temu. Just watch Sasser’s video. It tells you everything you need to know.
Mark Zuckerberg, in an op-ed Tuesday for The Wall Street Journal (gift link; and irony isn’t lost that “everyone” needs a paid WSJ subscription to read this):
We are fortunate to live at an incredible moment in history. In
the next few years, people will be able to use superintelligence
beyond human capacity to create and discover extraordinary new
things, build new businesses, express our ideas, learn new
concepts, and improve our lives, health, relationships and
careers.
Perhaps we’ll be able to use it to build a metaverse too. Or to keep our attention on a major initiative for more than two or three years.
Apple has released iOS, iPadOS, macOS, watchOS, and tvOS 26.6.
Apart from potential security hotfixes, these are likely the last
updates before the arrival of iOS 27, macOS 27, and so on.
All of today’s releases include minor bug fixes, and there are
numerous security updates: more than 150 for macOS 26.6.
Apple also rolled out macOS 14.8.8 and macOS 15.7.8 for older
devices, also focused on security fixes.
In terms of new features, you won’t find many in these releases,
as they mainly pave the way for the next major OS update, likely
to hit sometime in September. Most notably, the release notes for
iOS and iPadOS 26.6 say the update “optimizes the Spotlight index
to prepare for iOS 27.” This update will kick off some indexing
work that will then be leveraged in an ostensibly much more robust
Spotlight search feature when iOS 27 launches next month.
I don’t mean to pick nits, but there’s nothing “ostensible” about it. You can use the new Spotlight index via Siri AI in the OS 27 beta releases and it’s really good. The initial background indexing took almost a full week for me on iOS, I suspect because I have so much email archived, but anyone who upgrades to these 26.6 releases now shouldn’t have to wait at all after upgrading to 27.0 in September. Or even if you wait for the 27.1 releases — you won’t need to wait for Siri AI to have your full semantic index at hand.
We held an event Wednesday evening at a bar in Brooklyn, co-hosted by TPM and Marisa Kabas’ indy site The Handbasket. I really enjoyed it and I wanted to thank everyone who came out. We have an expanding roster of in-person events. We’ve held events in Chicago, Boston and Austin over the last year or so — usually live podcasts — and we do them more frequently in our home bases in New York and D.C., where they’re easier to put on. Please join us for one of these when we do one in your area. They’re so much fun and it’s really special to meet and spend time with members of the far-flung or sometimes close-flung TPM community.
It’s become a cliche of the politics of this moment that the one thing that unites all Americans in our polarized age is that they hate data centers. But a dimension of this occurred to me during the discussion between Marisa and I that was moderated by TPM publisher Joe Ragazzo. I hadn’t thought of it before.
It’s not just that people don’t want data centers in their backyards or regions. We basically know why they don’t want them. They’ll bogart all the electricity and water. Drive up rates. Wreck the environment. There’s another dimension of it though. The throughline of this age is that you’ve got these big tech platforms that can do anything they want. It is a society-driving spectacle that is there in plain sight and yet still under-appreciated. AI itself captures all of this. We’re told by its makers that it will take away everyone’s jobs, require unimaginable new supplies of energy, has a non-trivial shot at leading to the extinction of the human race … and this is the argument of its supporters! The point is that there is this very small group of men running a handful of mega tech platforms and they’re making the decisions and it basically doesn’t matter what we think. Not just you and me individually but us collectively. It’s their world. We’re just living in it.
Some of this is the fact that these companies are so big and their monopoly power is so great and they have such stores of money that they just roll over everything in their path. But it still has something to do with the nature of the tech world and the internet itself. It’s ubiquitous and yet not quite anchored anywhere. And yet data centers change all of that. They’re vast, physical, brick-and-mortar fortresses. And they come under the rule of local zoning laws and water districts and the regular bric-a-brac of local self government. And suddenly that changes everything.
Because the little people can say no. And the big boys can scream and shout and cajole and spend their money and that can work. But not always. Maybe not even mostly. What they can’t do is just say, who gives a fuck; we’re doing what we want. And that kind of changes everything. Our whole society today is filled with spectacles of total or near-total power. We see it with Big Tech. We see it with Trump. And here we see a case of the total power hitting a road block. And that serves as kind of a counter-symbol that has immense power well beyond just where a data center does or doesn’t get built.
We hear Elon Musk now keep on yakking about how he wants to build his data centers in space. And we can set aside whether that makes any technical sense. But that captures the essence of the plutocrats’ dreams. Because Musk believes he can do anything he wants in space as long as he has the tech and money to do it. There are no county councils in orbit. And that’s always been the hidden driver behind the fantasies about colonizing the moon or Mars, or founding “network states” on some man-made island in the Pacific or some chunk of land that can be squeezed out of Belize or Honduras or Greenland. Total freedom, total power. No obstructions. No annoying people and votes and county council and just the annoyance of people you don’t own or who don’t have to answer to you. And that’s why the data center meta-story has symbolic potency way beyond everyone agreeing across party lines or the particulars of any one zoning meeting.
File photo of a Falcon 9 fueled for launch at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. Image: SpaceX.
SpaceX aims to launch its next batch of Starlink satellites from California on Friday night, four days later than original planned.
Liftoff of the Falcon 9 rocket from Space Launch Complex 4 East at Vandenberg Space Force Base is scheduled for 8:04 p.m. PDT (11:04 p.m. EDT / 0304 UTC).
Spaceflight Now will have live coverage starting about 30 minutes before launch.
As is usual, SpaceX did not disclose why the Falcon 9 launch was repeatedly delayed from its original launch date of Monday, July 27.
The Starlink 17-52 mission will add another 24 broadband internet satellites to the low Earth orbit constellation. SpaceX currently has more than 10,800 Starlink satellites in orbit.
The flight will use the Falcon 9 first stage B1081. This will be the booster’s 26th flight after launching 15 batches of Starlink satellites as well as multiple missions for NASA and other customers:
Aug. 26, 2023 – NASA’s SpaceX Crew-7
Nov. 10, 2023 – SpaceX CRS-29
Feb. 8, 2024 – NASA’s PACE
Mar. 4, 2024 – Transporter-10
May 28, 2024 – ESA’s EarthCARE
June 29, 2024 – NROL-186
Mar. 15, 2025 – Transporter-13
July 23, 2025 – NASA’s TRACERS
Sep. 22, 2025 – NROL-48
Jan. 3, 2026 – COSMO-SkyMED Second Generation FM3
A little more than eight minutes after liftoff, B1081 will target a landing on the droneship, Of Course I Still Love You, positioned in the Pacific Ocean. If successful, this will be the 214th landing on this vessel and the 643rd orbital booster landing to date for SpaceX.
This mission is the 90 Falcon rocket to launch in 2026, including one Falcon Heavy, and the 69th batch of Starlink V2 Mini Optimized satellites launched to orbit this year.
An ongoing military exercise happening hundreds of miles above Earth has—for the first time in an unclassified setting—demonstrated how future satellites might evade and pursue one another in a future conflict.
That was the announcement Wednesday from True Anomaly, one of the companies involved in the exercise. True Anomaly's Jackal satellite, also known as Panther, played the cat-and-mouse game with another spacecraft named Puma, based on Rocket Lab's Pioneer satellite platform.
"This is what we've really been building towards for the past four years," said Even Rogers, True Anomaly's co-founder and CEO.
Sixty years ago today, on July 30, 1966, Medicare and Medicaid went into effect. A year earlier, President Lyndon B. Johnson had signed the Medicare and Medicaid amendments Congress had made to the Social Security Act of 1935, establishing two national health insurance programs. Medicare used federal funds to cover seniors, while Medicaid covered people who qualified on the basis of income using federal and state funding. The programs expanded health insurance to millions of uninsured Americans.
Americans and their leaders had called for government support for healthcare since the early 1900s, but the final push to expand healthcare coverage in the United States came out of the New Deal. In 1945, President Harry Truman continued to expand the social safety net anchored by the 1935 Social Security Act signed into law by his predecessor, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. On November 19, 1945, Truman reminded Congress that in September he had proposed an Economic Bill of Rights that guaranteed “certain rights which ought to be assured to every American citizen.”
“One of them,” he reminded them, “was: ‘The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health.’ Another was the ‘right to adequate protection from the economic fears of…sickness....’”
“Millions of our citizens do not now have a full measure of opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health,” he said. “Millions do not now have protection or security against the economic effects of sickness. The time has arrived for action to help them attain that opportunity and that protection.”
Truman reminded Congress how shocked Americans were when the WWII military draft revealed “the widespread physical and mental incapacity among the young people of our nation.” About 30% of those examined for military service were classified as unfit. Of those who made the cut to join the military, about a million and a half had to be discharged for physical or mental disability and an equal number had to be treated for preexisting diseases or infirmities. More than a third of the women applying to the Women’s Army Corps were also rejected.
Access to the benefits of modern medical science had never been equal, Truman said, and never would be “unless government is bold enough to do something about it. People with low or moderate incomes do not get the same medical attention as those with high incomes. The poor have more sickness, but they get less medical care. People who live in rural areas do not get the same amount or quality of medical attention as those who live in our cities.
“Our new Economic Bill of Rights should mean health security for all, regardless of residence, station, or race—everywhere in the United States.
“We should resolve now that the health of this Nation is a national concern; that financial barriers in the way of attaining health shall be removed; that the health of all its citizens deserves the help of all the Nation.”
Truman proposed a new healthcare program funded through fees and taxes, but Republicans who took control of the House in 1946 opposed new taxes and, although Truman had been careful to insist that the state would not take over hospitals, warned that the program looked too much like “Communism.” Instead, under Republican president Dwight Eisenhower, Congress passed a bill covering healthcare costs for indigent elderly Americans.
When he took office, President John F. Kennedy made the expansion of health insurance a priority, but while the American people liked the plan, it faced strong opposition from the American Medical Association, the chair of the House Ways and Means Committee, and the chair of the Senate Finance Committee. In 1964, after Kennedy’s assassination, both chambers passed their own measures, but they couldn’t resolve their differences to pass a law.
When LBJ won a landslide victory over right-wing Republican senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona in 1964, he had the votes to pass Medicare and Medicaid. LBJ made a point of signing the new measure into law at the Harry S. Truman Library in Independence, Missouri. He gave Truman and his wife Bess Truman the first two Medicare cards.
In his remarks at the signing, Johnson told the crowd: “The people of the United States love and voted for Harry Truman, not because he gave them hell—but because he gave them hope.” He told Truman that those like him—men of vision who are willing to stake their reputations and position to help others—“illuminate the life and the history of a nation.” He and his advisors had come to Independence not in tribute to Truman himself, Johnson said, but in tribute to the America that he represented. “For a country can be known by the quality of the men it honors,” he said. “By praising you, and by carrying forward your dreams, we really reaffirm the greatness of America.”
Johnson explained what the measure did. “No longer will older Americans be denied the healing miracle of modern medicine. No longer will illness crush and destroy the savings that they have so carefully put away over a lifetime so that they might enjoy dignity in their later years. No longer will young families see their own incomes, and their own hopes, eaten away simply because they are carrying out their deep moral obligations to their parents, and to their uncles, and their aunts.”
“And,” he said, “no longer will this Nation refuse the hand of justice to those who have given a lifetime of service and wisdom and labor to the progress of this progressive country.”
But now, in 2026, the Republicans in charge of our government reject the vision of a government that works to support its people. They see government regulation, taxation, and a social safety net as an attack on individual liberty.
In their One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which they passed in July 2025 with no Democratic votes, the Republicans delivered Trump’s signature economic policy. The law partially offset trillions of dollars in tax cuts by cutting $911 billion from Medicaid over ten years. Most of those cuts will begin to take effect in late 2026 and early 2027, after the midterm election.
And the cuts continue. On Tuesday, Anna Wilde Mathews of the Wall Street Journal reported that the Trump administration is planning to end a Biden-era program that capped out-of-pocket spending for drugs for Medicare recipients at $2,000 a year. The program provided subsidies for Medicare Part D, a Medicare prescription plan for seniors, by paying insurers. It also allowed Medicare to negotiate prices with drug companies for certain medicines.
The Trump administration has taken aim at the subsidies in this program.* It says the subsidies encouraged insurers to raise rates and that they weren’t needed because other policies that hold down the cost of drugs will stay in place. Mehmet Oz, the administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, posted: “We are stabilizing the market so this bailout is no longer needed.”
Mathews notes that higher prices for drugs could drive more Medicare participants into the private-insurer version of Medicare, called Medicare Advantage. Pushing people toward Medicare Advantage was outlined as a desired outcome in Project 2025, the right-wing program to unwind the modern American state.
“History shapes men, but it is a necessary faith of leadership that men can help shape history,” Johnson said as he signed the measure creating Medicare and Medicaid. He credited FDR with beginning the process of creating a basic social safety net when he signed the 1935 Social Security Act.
He noted that FDR at the time called the Social Security Act “a cornerstone in a structure which is being built but it is by no means complete.”
—
*Added on July 31 to clarify that the Trump administration is ending the subsidies, but has not said anything about the other pieces of the Biden program.
Not a good week at all. As of Monday 9am, D.C. had reported four homicides this week, bringing the total for the year to 58*. Last year, during the same time period, we had 94 homicides, and in the surge year of 2023, there were 142 homicides during that time. Unfortunately, most other crime categories also trended upwards this week.
Here’s to hoping that next week gets us back to a zero homicide week.
*Three of the 61 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).
In this episode, David Ariosto speaks with former NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine, who is now the CEO of Quantum Space. Bridenstine talks about the strategic shift to proliferation in low […]
A NASA official says that work with Boeing on the company’s CST-100 Starliner vehicle is making “good progress” but declined to offer a date when the spacecraft could fly again.
In March 2021, while serving as a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, I hosted a discussion with General Chance Saltzman, now Chief of Space Operations for the United States […]
As companies develop large constellations of orbital data center satellites, experts say now is the time to start thinking about some critical space safety topics and rules of the road.
The Series D more than doubles the satellite manufacturer’s valuation in seven months and will fund a production ramp to as many as 100 large spacecraft a year
One feature of giving talks to unfamiliar audiences is that you only get noisy feedback on how your talk was received. This past June, I gave the Starzl Lecture at the American Transplant Congress in Boston. (The ATC is jointly organized by the two big American transplant societies, the AST and the ASTS,*) I spoke to an audience of about 1500 people (just a guess, but I could see some empty seats in an auditorium set up for 2,000). My talk included topics, including global kidney exchange, that have raised controversies.
Afterwards, what seemed like a lot of people came to speak to me, and were enthusiastic about my talk. But "a lot of people" was fewer than 100. So what about everyone else? (It probably wouldn't be statistically kosher to assume that those who came to congratulate me were a representative sample:)
Since global kidney exchange has led to some people calling me an organ trafficker, I didn't have any measure of the general sentiment of the meeting.
I got some reassuring news recently when the ATC sent out an email soliciting ideas for talks for next year's meeting, in Seattle. The email came with a picture from this oat meeting:
So I'm guessing this means that my talk was well received by people responsible for organizing the next meeting.
And, indeed, I'm getting multiple signals that there's an appetite for productive change in the transplant community. I hope to have more to say about that in the coming year.
The Space Force Association’s National Spacepower Center is building an unclassified environment for demonstrating threats to satellites and their consequences on Earth
This is at least the fifth time I’ve read it. It came out in 1991 and was first published in the UK in 1992. I felt like I’d discovered it late when I bought it in, I think, 1993.
Reading Generation X in 2026 is like someone in the year of its release reading a book about young people published in 1956.
The twentysomething characters are often comparing people and styles to those of earlier eras, with 1974 in an imagined place – Texlahoma – being a common choice. I guess it was long enough ago to seem distinctively different. Which is like someone in 2026 comparing today to the long ago time of 2009. Which would feel ridiculous to me – It’s so recent! Not much has changed, style-wise! Is this because culture has stopped changing so rapidly or because I’m old? Seventeen years does not feel as long ago when you’re 55 compared to when you’re 25.
A feeling described by Andy, the protagonist, on the very first page sums up the mood of the whole book pretty well: “darkness and inevitability and fascination”. Not that he or the book is claiming this as a generation-defining feeling: “a mood that surely must have been held by most young people since the dawn of time as they have crooked their necks, stared at the heavens, and watched their sky go out.”
It’s always said that generation X – the demographic cohort – suffers from (or revels in) sarcasm, ironic detachment, cynicism, apathy, etc. But I was struck with how the characters in Generation X are so often sincere, relishing unique moments, craving real connections, savouring beautiful experiences. They tell each other earnest stories (often a strong point of Coupland’s novels) with the rule that no criticism can be made.
Although the book’s title was used to name an entire generation it was written (of course) before a lot of the things that came to define the cohort of generation X. So while it evokes some of the sense of 1990s gen-x-ness, in retrospect it feels much less epoch-defining. For example, there’s little, if any, mention of contemporary music, TV, movies, etc. which are often the things we think of when looking back at what it meant to be young in a certain time.
The three characters – Andy, Dag and Claire – are quite despairing of their chances in life in ways that, today, prompt a “you ain’t seen nothing yet” reaction. They know that their lives won’t be as good as their boomer parents’, owning a home is out of their reach, and the gap between rich and poor has gone crazy.
For example, here are a couple of charts showing how things have gone before and since 1990 (when I assume the book was written).
A chart showing the ratio of US Home Price to Median Income Ratio from about 1963 to early 2026 from LongtermTrends. 1990 circled.A chart showing the Gini index (a measure of economic inequality) for the US from 1963 to 2024 from the WorldBank. 1990 circled.
Clearly, Andy and co would be even more despairing today. But I had forgotten how the concerns of (us) young people back then echoed those since so specifically.
They also have a sense that they’ve missed out on capital-H History, only just about remembering seeing the Vietnam War on TV as children. Regarding which, (a) be careful what you wish for, and (b) this feels pretty America-centric given, for example, 1989’s fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of communism. But, still, it’s a contrast to how someone today would think about their place in history (“Too much history happening!” I imagine).
There are other things that we might say are different or similar to today. The characters’ fear of nuclear annihilation has shifted to a more generalised fear of “terror” accompanied by climate catastrophe. But the way they mix and match styles and ideas from various past decades perhaps seems even more common today, now that we have access to so much media from everywhere and everywhen all at once.
There is something slow about their lives, which isn’t solely because they’ve opted out of the rat race and live in a desert resort picking up work here and there. With no internet and no cellphones, it’s all landline phones, answering machines, letters in the post, TV news, magazines. Communication and information is delayed and asynchronous.
§ I’ve always loved this book and it’s interesting to re-read it every decade or so. Reading it now, it almost seems incidental to what generation X came to be seen as, with so many fashions, images, songs, movies, and ideas piled on top of the pretty spare foundation here. If it hadn’t named a generation in its title, and been peppered with catchy definitions as if interpreting the language of young people for their elders (“McJob”, “Successophobia”, “Ultra Short Term Nostalgia”), I wonder how we’d remember it now.
I was really into generation X stuff in the 1990s because it seemed such a novelty, to have your generation named and to read articles about it, see movies attempting to epitomise it, etc. I hadn’t been aware of much definition of generations before that – was it less of a thing, or was I just oblivious until I reached adulthood?
I remember visiting a friend in the mid-90s and she’d saved me a magazine article about generation X because in those days an article was a rarer thing, something that only existed if you bought that one physical mag that one month, barely shareable. I try to avoid nostalgia too much, which is very hard, but the book’s world, just before the internet, is in many ways deeply seductive to me. But then nostalgia does prevent you thinking about the downsides.
The book probably hit me at the right time, at just the right age, during and immediately after university, emerging into a recession, in no rush to find a “real” job, never wanting a job that required having to dress smartly. Andy’s world was in some ways a fantastical one to me – not only a desert resort town, but in a country I hadn’t yet even visited, and about people unlike anyone I knew. But there was also something about it that got its hooks deep into me. Its vibe, as we’d say now.
It happened again! This is turning into something of a pattern.
Last week OpenAI accidentally exploited Hugging Face when one of their frontier models broke out of a sandboxed container and hacked into Hugging Face to try and get the solutions to the cyber benchmark it was executing.
This inspired Anthropic to double-check their own logs, and it turned out they had three similar (albeit less impressive) incidents, the earliest of which played out in April!
Of the 141,006 evaluation runs we reviewed, we identified three separate incidents (involving six total runs, four of which impacted the same organization; the other two incidents each happened in independent evaluation runs). [...]
In all cases, Anthropic’s evaluation prompt specified to Claude that its environment was a simulation and that it had no internet access. Due to a misunderstanding between us and our evaluation partner, this was not the case, and internet access was available. Because of this, when Claude’s search led it to real systems on the open internet, it treated them as part of the exercise. [...]
Operating under the false belief that all accessible entities were intended to be in-scope for the exercise, Claude compromised the impacted organizations’ infrastructure using basic techniques, such as exploiting weak passwords and unauthenticated endpoints.
One of the companies was targeted because its name happened to match the fictional name in the eval.
The most concerning of the three incidents involved Claude uploading a malware package to PyPI, after a comically convoluted sequence of steps to get an account:
[...] in order to create a PyPI account, Claude needed an email address. And in order to create an email address, it needed a phone number. To get a phone number, after failing to find a free phone number service, it tried—and failed—to obtain funds to pay for a phone number through several different means. It finally backtracked, found a free, non-blocked email provider, used this to register a PyPI account, and then used this account to upload malware to PyPI.
That package was then installed by a security company that "routinely installs Python packages and scans them for malware", and the executed code was able to exfiltrate credentials back to Claude!
Thankfully that package was removed from PyPI by other automated scanners an hour after it was published, but it had still been downloaded and executed on "15 real systems" by that point.
It's abundantly clear now that running evals of cyberattack potential in models is a spectacularly risky business. Every AI lab needs to pay attention to this. Keeping a close eye on what's happening in those sandboxes is crucial.
Hot on the heels of RC1, this fixes a dependency issue and also adds two neat new features:
The default model for users who have not set their own default is now GPT-5.6 Luna. It was previously GPT-4o mini. Luna is a much better and more recent model, albeit slightly more expensive - $0.20 per million input tokens and $1.20 per million output tokens, compared to $0.15/$0.60 for 4o mini. You can switch back to 4o mini using llm models default gpt-4o-mini, or switch to GPT-5 nano, an even cheaper default model ($0.05/$0.40), using llm models default gpt-5-nano. #1576
New llm openai endpoint command for running prompts, chats and model listings against arbitrary OpenAI-compatible endpoints without first configuring a model. These calls are not logged. #1565
The llm openai endpoint command is really cool. I got frustrated at the lack of an obvious CLI tool for trying out prompts against arbitrary OpenAI Chat Completions imitation endpoints, so I decided to add that to LLM itself.
You don't even have to install LLM to use this. Here's a uvx one-liner for running a prompt - with tools - against an LM Studio local model:
uvx --pre llm openai endpoint http://127.0.0.1:1234/v1 \
T llm_version -T llm_time --td \
-m google/gemma-4-31b 'what is the current LLM version? And the time?'
The writing assignments I give my students are gym tasks, not work tasks. I ask them to write policy memos not because the world needs more policy memos. I assign them because the very act of writing, which includes thinking and outlining and drafting and editing, making and criticizing and revising arguments, will help develop the critical thinking skills they will need in their future careers. And without this constant mental exercise, those skills will atrophy. Employers are already noticing.
— Bruce Schneier, Should You Use AI for a Task? Here’s a Simple Way to Decide
A key goal of the new content-addressable logs in LLM 0.32rc1 was being able to support OpenAI Chat Completion style requests where each incoming message extends the previous conversation, like this:
Here the conversation state is tracked by the client, so each of these requests gets longer and longer. The new schema design in LLM is designed to de-duplicate these using hashes of the individual message parts.
Running this starts a localhost server on port 9001 that exposes your full collection of LLM models (from any plugins you have installed) using a ChatGPT Completions compatible endpoint.
GPT-5.6 Sol wrote the whole thing - it turns out it knows the OpenAI Chat Completions API shape really well.
This RC for LLM 0.32 finishes the work that started in LLM 0.32a0 - it adds a new schema design that does a much better job of capturing the details of the prompts and responses returned by the latest model families.
The most important change is the use of content-addressable hash IDs for stored messages. This allows de-duplication in the database, and means that LLM can now represent trees of messages for forked conversations.
Since it involves a significant schema change - new tables only, and old data should not be affected at all - it's worth running a backup of your existing logs.db before upgrading to the RC:
llm logs backup logs-backup.db
The RC also adds support for gpt-5.6-sol, gpt-5.6-terra, and gpt-5.6-luna.
Climate change is a hoax. Wind power caused a massive TV blackout during the Trump-Biden debate. Solar power is useless because the sun doesn’t shine at night, and batteries don’t exist. Smoke blanketed North America, not because of climate change, but because Canada didn’t rake its 2 million square miles of boreal forest.
We’ve destroyed Iran’s military, and the Iranian regime is begging for a deal. Also, the U.S. isn’t running out of precision weapons as a result of the Iran war, and furthermore the shortage is Joe Biden’s fault.
The modern American right is very good at hating. MAGA hates immigrants (unless they’re white South Africans); it hates liberals; it hates scientists.
What the ongoing show trial of Fauci — which motivated this post — has really driven home, however, is that what Trump and his supporters hate most of all is reality. They know what they want to believe. They fly into paroxysms of rage whenever someone points out that the world isn’t what they want it to be. And they always want to shoot the messenger.
Of course, motivated reasoning isn’t confined to the right. Some people on the left insist that zoning restrictions have no role in causing high housing prices, that it’s all about Wall Street greed. Many centrists insist that being in the middle on a left-right scale — which isn’t even how most voters think about politics — is the secret to electoral victory. And so on.
I’m not immune to the temptation to believe what I want to be true. I try to fight it, but don’t always succeed. Still, I try to acknowledge and admit it when I have let wishful thinking warp my judgement.
But what we’re seeing now isn’t run-of-the-mill motivated reasoning. It’s something far more extreme.
If believing something suits MAGA’s prejudices and interests, they don’t hesitate: they simply insist that it’s true. They routinely dismiss scientific and statistical evidence, but they don’t stop there. They’re perfectly willing to deny reality even if the truth is staring them in the face.
Thus, Trump urged Americans to remember that 2024 TV blackout, which nobody remembers because it didn’t happen. He insists that California has “blackouts and brownouts every weekend,” when the state’s 39 million residents can tell you it doesn’t. He says that you must show ID to buy groceries, which everyone who buys their own food knows isn’t so.
Do Trump and his followers actually believe these things? As I see it, that’s a category error, starting from the presumption that they even accept that objective facts exist. All the evidence (Hah! “Evidence!”) says that they don’t.
George Orwell, whose work seems more relevant by the day, knew all about this mindset. In his essay “Looking back on the Spanish war” he wrote about how the rise of totalitarianism had changed the rules:
In the past people deliberately lied, or they unconsciously coloured what they wrote, or they struggled after the truth, well knowing that they must make many mistakes; but in each case they believed that ‘the facts’ existed and were more or less discoverable. And in practice there was always a considerable body of fact which would have been agreed to by almost everyone.
Totalitarians, however, denied that objective facts existed. Furthermore, reality is mutable, changing with the leader’s whims:
If the Leader says of such and such an event, ‘It never happened’ – well, it never happened. If he says that two and two are five – well, two and two are five.
If you find the assertion that MAGA has a totalitarian mindset over the top, all I can ask is, have you been following the news?
What’s remarkable is the extent to which Republican politicians act as if they are living in a totalitarian state, when they aren’t — not yet, anyway. ICE would clearly like to be an American Stasi, policing any deviation from the party line, but it’s not able, so far, to arrest members of Congress who express skepticism about the president’s claims. And many Republican politicians still, I believe, know the difference between fantasy and reality.
But they behave as if they were courtiers to Kim Jong Un. Trump speeches are sometimes followed by “endless applause moments,” because none of Trump’s loyalists wants to be seen as the first person to stop clapping.
The susceptibility of the GOP to this totalitarian mindset has come as a surprise even to cynics. I have some idea of how this happened: It involves a confluence of big-money corruption, crony capitalism, religious fanaticism, and the ever-present forces of racism and sexism. But that’s a subject to be delved into another day.
What’s clear is that the war on reality is exacting a high price on America as a whole.
Remember, 1.2 million Americans died from Covid — a number that would have been much lower if MAGA misinformation hadn’t caused so many people to refuse vaccination. Now we’re seeing a frightening rise in measles and other infectious diseases, and God help us if another pandemic strikes with Trump or his successor still in charge.
Climate denial and hostility to renewable energy will mean more pollution even as it consigns the U.S. to energy and economic backwardness.
And the Iran war — which Trump started and now refuses to end because he won’t accept reality — has destroyed America’s credibility and depleted our weapon stocks with stunning speed.
But anyone pointing out the obvious is, of course, a Communist.
We also used GPT‑5.6 Sol to optimize the model’s forward pass: the computation that transforms inputs into next-token predictions. Even when individual operations are fast, excess memory movement, synchronization, and inefficient data layouts can leave GPUs idle. To avoid this, GPT‑5.6 Sol found work that could be precomputed, avoided, or parallelized. With Codex, GPT‑5.6 Sol autonomously rewrote and optimized our production kernels, the core code that executes the mathematical operations that make up the model. This worked in part because we’ve trained GPT‑5.6 to be effective at writing and improving kernels in Tritonand Gluon, two open-source GPU programming languages maintained by OpenAI. These efforts, combined with broader kernel advancements from GPT‑5.6 Sol, reduced end-to-end serving costs by 20%.
That Luna price drop completely changes the landscape with respect to lower priced models. At $0.20/million tokens for input and $1.20/million for output Luna is now cheaper than Google's Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite ($.025/$1.50).
Anthropic's cheapest current model is Claude Haiku 4.5, and that's $1/$5 - Luna is now 1/5th of that for input, previously it cost the same.
My agent.datasette.io demo site was running on Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite. I've switched it over to Luna.
Charred landscapes surround reservoirs in central Spain in an image captured by the OLI (Operational Land Imager) on Landsat 9 on July 29, 2026. The false-color image combines observations at visible, near-infrared, and shortwave-infrared wavelengths (bands 6-5-3), making it easier to distinguish brown burned vegetation from green unburned vegetation.
NASA Earth Observatory / Lauren Dauphin
Wildland fires occur across Europe every summer, but those that erupted in Spain and France in July 2026 were among the largest and most disruptive the two countries have faced in decades. Some of the most consequential fires emerged in southwestern France’s Gironde Department and Spain’s Ávilaand Madrid provinces in mid-July, where blazes forced hundreds of thousands of people to evacuate and destroyed hundreds of homes.
Government officials in Spain say that a fire in Ávila, after charring around 50,000 hectares(124,000 acres), isthe largest on record, surpassing a blazethat burned in Larouco, Quiroga, and Oencia in 2025. NASA satellites first observed signs of the Ávila fire burning near Burgohondo on July 22 and July 23. By July 24, it had merged with fires in neighboring provinces, pushing the total area burned to 77,000 hectares, an area about the size of New York City.
The image above, captured by Landsat 9, shows charred landscapes around Burgohondo on July 29, 2026. In the false-color image, unburned vegetation appears light green, and burned areas appear brown. The two reservoirs in the center of the image were heavily affected. Flames tore through homes, restaurants, campgrounds, marinas, and other infrastructure surrounding the reservoirs, according to news reports.
A similar crisis unfolded in southwestern France, west of Bordeaux. One of the largest fires to burn in France this decade charred more than 42,000 hectares, prompting large-scale evacuations and devastating the village of Le Porge. As of late July, fires had burned more than 90,000 hectares across France, more than any other season in decades, according to data from the European Forest Fire Information System.
Environmental conditions months before the fires ignited made the landscape in both Spain and France particularly susceptible to burning, according to an analysis conducted by researchers with The State of Wildfires Project. Unusually wet winter weather enhanced vegetation growth in grasslands, shrublands, and forest understories, and then a series of sweltering heat waves and a period of drought parched the vegetation and primed it to burn. Several days of strong winds reaching 65 kilometers (40 miles) per hour at times served as the final trigger, the researchers found, fanning flames and encouraging rapid spread.
On July 25, conditions at fires in southwestern France grew so intense that French firefighters reported the formation of a pyrocumulonimbus—a towering type of “fire cloud” that draws convective energy from the heat of the fires. An international group of atmospheric scientists and fire experts who track the unusual clouds has documented the occasional formation of the clouds in Spain and Portugal in recent decades, but members of the group note that this is the first report of a fire in France producing one.
Thousands of firefighters and military personnel have battled fires in both countries. Crews have used aircraft to attack the fires with water and flame retardant, while teams on the ground have constructed firebreaks using tools ranging from bulldozers to hand tools. Firefighters gained the advantage by late July, allowing authorities to start lifting evacuation orders. However, forecasters are warning that the risk of fire in the coming days remains high due to the persistence of hot, dry conditions.
Government satellite data are part of a global system of observations used to track fire behavior and analyze emerging trends. Among the real-time wildfire monitoring tools that NASA makes available are FIRMS (Fire Information for Resource Management System) and the Worldview browser.
NASA Earth Observatory image by Lauren Dauphin, using Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey. Story by Adam Voiland.
Wisconsin Democratic gubernatorial candidate Francesca Hong
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Democratic centrists have a problem. They have enormous influence over the debate — indeed, they manage to get national news coverage almost at will as they complain that the Democratic Party has moved too far to the left and will doom itself if progressives are allowed to take over. Their problem is that they don’t represent any actual voters.
I don’t mean that there aren’t moderate Democratic voters; there are plenty of them. It’s a perfectly reasonable thing to be, and they have as much right as anybody to make the case for their beliefs. But the professional centrists aren’t connected to them in any meaningful, practical way.
Nor, for that matter, have the centrists managed to find charismatic, dynamic candidates to carry their banner, even if moderate Democrats have won some primaries. What they’re left with is something of a Potemkin movement, in which a small number of people rail against the prevailing trend in the Democratic Party and get lots of attention for their arguments, but are unable to make much progress in their real goal — fighting progressives — in part because they aren’t inclined to engage in politics on the ground.
If you’re in a battle for the soul of your party, that’s a recipe for defeat.
I’m not going to settle the case of Moderation v. Mobilization here, except to note that for most candidates, in an environment where all politics is national, moderating on issues has lost most of the efficacy it once had. Furthermore, the problem Democrats have is not that voters think they’re extreme on policy, but that voters think they’re weak.
That perception is common among Democrats themselves, which helps explain why progressive candidates are doing so well right now. Democrats who don’t seem to believe in anything all that strongly are being lapped by candidates whose progressive ideas and sense of outrage signal to voters that they are eager for change and want to fight.
Why the centrists can’t hold back the progressive tide
So you get races like the one for Wisconsin governor, where a new Marquette University poll shows state Rep. Francesca Hong with 38%, former lieutenant governor Mandela Barnes (who lost a Senate race four years ago to the odious Ron Johnson) with 16%, and Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley (who has the endorsement of Gov. Tony Evers) with 7%.
Cue the freakout:
Every race is a little different, but we’re seeing something similar play out in many Democratic primaries: A lefty candidate goes up against a couple of uninspiring mainstream Democrats and captures the bulk of the attention and votes, leading centrists both inside and outside the state to shout “How could this have happened? We’re doomed!”
One of the arguments the centrists make is that it might be fine for a socialist to win in New York, but they can’t win in a closely divided state like Wisconsin or Michigan. But as Perry Bacon points out, strongly progressive candidates have won lots of races in swing states and swing districts in recent years. Wisconsin senator Tammy Baldwin is rated by Voteview (the most objective measure I know of) as more liberal than 90% of congressional Democrats — and she won a third term in 2024, when Trump won the state. That doesn’t mean Hong will win a general election if she gets the nomination, but it does mean that the fact that she’s farther to the left than her primary opponents isn’t in and of itself a bar to victory. And those backing Barnes and Crowley should ask themselves why the candidates they’re backing don’t seem to have much appeal to the voters.
Right now, the argument against the progressive candidates is being carried by has-been pundits and groups like Third Way, which are quite well-funded but have no identifiable constituency. They’re basically a bunch of people sitting around in a Washington office writing op-eds. That’s not a useless endeavor — spreading ideas is worthwhile, depending on the ideas — but when it gets down to the crunch time of an election, it isn’t particularly potent.
In stark contrast, the Democratic Socialists of America have become a formidable force within the Democratic Party because they are committed to organizing. They’re out there knocking doors and making calls and staging events every day, which is something that the centrists aren’t doing. When the political context shifted in a way that made their outsider persona and uncompromising policy ideas more appealing, they were ready to take advantage.
Now, it’s true that there are people and factions within the DSA that believe some pretty far-out things, things that lots of politicians who are either members or associate themselves with the group (including the most prominent ones like Zohran Mamdani) don’t agree with. But the point is, they’re doing politics, while the centrists’ strategy seems to be focused mostly on getting attention from the elite media.
And as much as the centrists beg candidates to focus on those magical “kitchen-table issues,” that’s exactly what the successful DSA candidates are doing. What do you think universal health care and child care are about, if not the everyday reality of people’s lives? And here’s something else that’s important: While centrists often complain that Democrats are trapped in their self-reinforcing bubbles and disconnected from reg’lar, salt-of-the-earth Americans, nearly all the centrists that I’m aware of are just as disconnected, if not more so.
Bubbles come in many forms
They live in Washington or other major cities, they’re immersed in politics, and they suffer from the Pundit Brain ailment that makes its victims believe ordinary voters have coherent ideological beliefs and respond to subtle changes in the policy-based appeals candidates make. There’s something else going on, too: Their view of the political world is dominated by their contempt for the far left, which convinces them that what we used to call hippie-punching is the cleverest of political strategies.
This is a phenomenon I’ve noticed in many normie Democrats I know who live in very liberal places. They can’t stand Trump, of course, but the people who really drive them up a wall are the ones they encounter all the time where they live: the lefties.
This is a variation on a more familiar phenomenon, that of the radical who hates the internal rivals on their own side much more than they hate the enemy they’re all supposed to be fighting. That’s the Judean People’s Front effect:
But the hatred of the center for the extreme may be just as common, and the reason is familiarity. If you’re a mainstream Democrat who lives in San Francisco or New York, you almost never encounter MAGA-hatted, immigrant-hating, misogynistic far-right troglodytes in person. You see them online, you know they’re there, but you don’t have to pay more than a moment’s attention to them if you don’t want to. On the other hand, far-lefties are everywhere in your actual life, and everything you find annoying about them is right in your face, all the time.
I know people who say that if they have to hear one more land acknowledgement, or watch a couple jump up at the beginning of a concert to try to start a “Free Palestine!” chant when there are only liberals in the audience anyway, they’re going to lose their minds. Lefties are big on public expressions of belief in ostensibly non-political contexts — sometimes confrontational ones — and it’s not surprising that many liberals find it exasperating and often counter-productive.
An unusually thoughtful and magnanimous normie liberal might conclude that while the people pestering them at the supermarket are sometimes carried away by the exuberance of youth or aren’t quite as informed as they might be, their hearts are basically in the right place and they agree with them on fundamental goals like justice and equality. But that’s not easy to do when the people you find so annoying are all around you.
We all have people on our side who drive us up the wall for one reason or another. But there are a couple of things to remember as the primary season continues to play out. First, the centrists should understand that the current momentum behind the far left was enabled by the failures of mainstream Democrats and centrists in particular. Where are the dynamic, charismatic, politically adept, and appealing centrist Democratic candidates? Well let’s see…there was Bill Clinton, who ran his last race 30 years ago.
Second, you should guard against the belief that if people in your party whose policy beliefs are different from yours win elections, the whole party is doomed. Just look at the experience of the Tea Party, a bunch of halfwits traipsing around in tricorn hats advocating unpopular ideas. They took over the GOP after Barack Obama was elected, and what followed was a series of Republican victories — in 2010, 2014, and 2016 — broken only by a presidential election in which the party nominated a more traditional candidate.
The Democrats might not have a similar run of success after the current progressive uprising. But if the centrists now warning of doom could point to their own political achievements, they’d have a much stronger case to make.
Thank you for reading The Cross Section. This site has no paywall, so I depend on the generosity of readers to sustain the work I present here. If you find what you read valuable and would like it to continue, consider becoming a paid subscriber.
I’ve started a series of Canon articles where I explain my ideas as plainly & unambiguously as possible—no analogies, no persuasion, just the facts. I started with Canon TDD. I expect to continue with Canon JUnit, Canon XP, and Canon Make-The-Change-Easy.
The growth of anything forms a logistic curve:
Take a software product—throughout the curve we ship changes, attract customers, & bill those customers. However, the smoothness of this curve is a dangerous illusion. The beginning, middle, and final portions of this curve require completely different approaches, even if they look superficially similar.
Emergence
I promised that the Canon series would be no theory, just stuff. One tiny bit of theory is essential to the 3X: Explore/Expand/Extract story. It’ll introduce vocabulary we’ll use in the rest of the explanation.
That S-shaped curve is described by a formula:
But that doesn’t help much when we’re trying to make young things grow. Instead, we can see S curve curve as a tug-of-war (oops, analogy, sorry) between two feedback loops:
To create the S curve, first you get the reinforcing loop on the left operating. The more your idea (product/company/movement/whatever) grows, the easier it is to grow more. Then later you get the inhibiting loop on the right taking over, slowing & eventually capping the growth.
A successful idea:
Explore Finds a new growth loop (it needs to me new or somebody else would already be operating it).
Expand Keeps it operating long enough for the idea to scale, avoiding all the potentially-fatal inhibiting loops along the way.
Extract Finishes growing as the ultimate inhibiting loop kicks in.
(Bonus) Uses the resources from the first curve to kick off the search for new curves with their own growth loops.
3X’s
Schematically, the progression looks like this:
The central thesis of 3X: Explore/Expand/Extract is that each of these phases, no matter how much they resemble each other, actually requires its own approach to:
Finance
Team size
Project management
Personnel
Technology
Risk management
Implementation
Marketing
Sales
Applying the approach from one phase to an idea in another phase kills ideas.
Explore
Risk: Nobody cares. The idea dies for lack of fuel.
Goal: Find the growth loop. You can’t predict a new loop so you have to find it experimentally.
Strategy: Rapid experiments, maximum creativity, conceptual blending.
Tactics: Tiny teams, no dependencies, quickly discard failures.
Exit: One experiment works way better than others.
Expand
Risk: Can’t scale.
Goal: Avoid fatal obstacles while scaling furiously.
Strategy: Intense focus on the next emerging growth bottleneck.
Exit: Cause and effect of growth become predictable.
Extract
Risk: Can’t sustain.
Goal: Growth with profit,
Strategy: Safely optimize while growing.
Tactics: Small, safe experiments; roll out successes; optimize costs.
Exit: No further return on investment.
All Of The Above
The tricky trick of 3X is managing projects in different phases in the matching styles. You have some Extract products that pay the bills & pay for a portfolio of Explore projects. When a project hits Expand, treat it as a priority even over profitable Extract activities. (Simple to say and apparently nearly impossible to execute.)
Most teams don’t have a strategy problem. They have an adaptation problem.
Your plan was never going to survive contact with reality. The question is whether your organization bends or breaks when it doesn’t.
I help teams bend. Adapt to Thrive.
Booking a handful of custom talks and advisory engagements now. I interview your people, measure your real software flows, and hand you the truth plus what to do about it.
A year ago, I warned readers about Meta in a provocative article entitled “Is This What a Bubble Looks Like at the Top?” I had many reasons for skepticism about Mark Zuckerberg’s empire, but focused on a single absurd fact in the opening paragraphs.
Meta fans were angry at me, but subsequent events have validated my concerns. Meta’s shares have fallen almost $250 per share since then—that’s a decline of half a trillion dollars in market value.
And the situation at Meta is now getting worse, not better:
A few days ago, Zuckerberg talked about a plan for selling Meta’s excess AI computing capacity. This shocked Wall Street—Zuckerberg is spending hundreds of billions on new data centers. But that makes no sense if the company already has excess computing power.
Meta’s quarterly investor call yesterday made matters even worse. Earnings were far below estimates, but free cash flow numbers were a total disaster—down more than 90%. Guidance for the future was (no surprise here) cautious, and Zuckerberg refused to give any estimate of next year’s capital investments, which are already out-of-control and spooking investors.
Zuckerberg used the occasion to publish a bizarre opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal—proclaiming himself as a champion of human potential and an opponent of centralized power. This is the same guy who laid off 8,000 employees a few days ago, and is building a data center as large as Manhattan. By the way, Zuckerberg himself can’t be fired—because he limits the voting rights of most shareholders.
Yes, it’s been a bad week for Mr. Z. But all of the above is just the tip of the iceberg.
Below are nine far more terrible revelations about Meta—much worse than the earnings call yesterday. They paint a disturbing picture of a business out of control and descending into chaos.
After looking at them, you will legitimately ask if any company has made more bad decisions in the history of capitalism.
I teach public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School and the Munk School at the University of Toronto. And it will come as no surprise to you that my students regularly use AI to complete their writing assignments. Doing so is a waste of their tuition money. But if their entire career is going to include AI writing assistants, why shouldn’t they embrace their future?
The best way I’ve found to explain the dilemma comes from the AI researcher Daniel Meissler: it’s the difference between work and the gym.
At work, if your job is to move a bunch of heavy things from one side of the room to another, you should use whatever assistive tech you have on hand: a wagon, a forklift… even an AI-powered robot. But at the gym, it makes no sense for that robot to lift weights for you. The point of weightlifting isn’t to move heavy things across the room; it’s to actually lift those heavy things.
The same analysis holds for any task an AI can do for you. If it’s work—if the task has to be done and no one cares how—then it’s fine to use AI assistance. But if the task is more like the gym, and how the task is done is at least as important, then it probably doesn’t make sense to use AI.
This, of course, assumes that the AI is actually up for the task and that it’s trustworthy: that it can do the job well, that its mistakes are minimal and correctable, that it’s been secured from cyber-attacks that would influence its results. Those are all important, and shouldn’t be minimized. There’s no point giving an AI something that it can’t do reliably. But once you’re confident that the AI can perform the task, the work vs. gym distinction helps you decide if it should.
The writing assignments I give my students are gym tasks, not work tasks. I ask them to write policy memos not because the world needs more policy memos. I assign them because the very act of writing, which includes thinking and outlining and drafting and editing, making and criticizing and revising arguments, will help develop the critical thinking skills they will need in their future careers. And without this constant mental exercise, those skills will atrophy. Employers are already noticing.
Reading the assignments they turn in, I can see those skills either flourishing or atrophying in my students. At least today, I can pretty easily tell the difference between an AI-written memo and a student-written one—especially if the student just turns in what the chatbot produces. It’s a catchy, plausible, grammatically perfect essay that’s not particularly well-crafted or logically coherent—and with allthetells of mid-2026 AI-generated writing.
But it’s precisely because I have spent years developing my own writing skills that I’m able to identify prose that sounds great but doesn’t actually make sense. My students don’t have that skill; they mistakenly view a confident, well-written essay as evidence of the quality of their ideas. They see the AI as cleaning those ideas up, getting them through that uncomfortable stretch of having to turn those ideas into prose. What the students miss is that their initial discomfort is a normal and healthy stage of writing, and not something to quickly get beyond. The very act of struggling with how to express what they think is an important part of the process. It’s how they test out their ideas, examine their hypotheses, and actually figure out what they think. Homework is not work; it’s the gym.
Work vs. gym also helps us understand the problem facing creatives of all kinds.
Most of the time when someone hires a writer, they just need the words. They need an instruction manual for a piece of equipment, a detailed sales presentation, a government-mandated disclosure document, or a legal brief. They need dry, predictable, accurate writing: a piece of work, exactly what AIs are good at today and what I don’t want in my student assignments. Only sometimes is writing an art form—a book, a poem, an uplifting political speech. That kind of writing is more like the gym: process matters just as much as product.
For most of human history, the only option for all of these tasks was human writers. We hired one regardless of whether we needed work writing or gym writing. And that paid a lot of writers’ salaries. I know fiction writers who supported that poorly paying career with lucrative technical writing work. Now, for the first time in human history, we can separate out when we need writing as work and when we want writing as gym. And if AI can do most of the work-type writing, society doesn’t need as many human writers.
It’s the same for visual artists. Sometimes we need an actual artist, but most of the time we just need an image: a corporate mascot, a “beware of the dog” sign, or a packaging label. Historically we gave those jobs to artists, and sometimes beautiful art resulted. But most of the time it was just work. And, as it turns out, the world needs less pure art than simple images.
Explaining the problem isn’t the same as providing the solution. I give my students the “work versus gym” speech every class, but they still use AI. I have sympathy: assignments are hard, everyone is overworked and overstressed, and—most importantly—students feel like they’ll look bad in comparison if their peers are all using AI. Even if they don’t want to use the technology, they feel like they have no choice.
There’s also an incentive problem. No one pays us to go to the gym; maintaining healthy habits requires discipline. For me, the payoffs to exercise—fewer aches and pains, less fatigue, better mood/stress management—might make me a better writer and teacher, but they’re subtle and easy to miss. For my students, incremental improvements in their reasoning and writing are equally subtle.
We do have a choice. We can look at the tasks of our lives and separate them into work or gym. Just as we might choose to use the stairs instead of the elevator, or walk instead of calling an Uber, we can wall off our cognitive gym tasks from AI and ensure that we don’t lose our skills to this technology. And we can do the same when we assign a job to someone else. If it’s a work task, we can have AI do it. If it’s a gym task, it’s a waste of everyone’s time to give it to an AI because no one learns or gets stronger as a result.
Similarly, a future where AI generates words and images is one where society has to make choices about how it will treat its creatives. This won’t be the first time—today there is minimal demand for portrait painters, for example—but maybe this time we can make different, more deliberate, choices about the value of art in our society.
AI is going to fundamentally change the nature of work. Not nearly as fast as the AI companies want you to believe, but eventually it will. Policy analysis will definitely involve AI from now on, and my students need to reimagine what it means to learn and practice that skill. More generally, the line between work and gym will change in the future as we humans adapt ourselves to a world with these new intelligences.
But for now, the work vs. gym distinction is pretty clear. Use it on yourself.
He’s being prosecuted for giving border officials a code that wiped his phone:
The case centers on a feature included in GrapheneOS, a custom Android operating system that runs in place of the software on most modern Google Pixel devices. Tunick’s attorneys confirmed GrapheneOS was running on his phone.
The software feature allows the device owner to set a passcode that deliberately wipes the contents of that device if entered instead of the user’s unlock passcode.
Tunick’s case also raises ongoing questions about what constitutional rights can be invoked at the border, which the U.S. government has long asserted is not U.S. soil until a person is authorized to enter.
GrapheneOS is completely legal. We have no obligation to weaken any of the security protections it provides. Creating and using GrapheneOS is strongly protected by the US constitution. Laws attempting to make it illegal or require weakening the security would be unconstitutional.
It’s hard to know how much the Constitution matters in the US right now.
Damon Beres, writing for The Atlantic under the hed/subhed: “The New iPhone Underclass: Apple’s rental program is a trap”:
The Klarna plan — “Apple Upgrade,” which replaces the iPhone
Upgrade Program — is truly, legally, a lease. This is confusing!
And it’s confusing in part because this is not how Klarna, a
well-known buy-now, pay-later service, typically operates: When
you use Klarna for clothing from Shein or lip kits at Sephora or
an Xbox at GameStop, you’re paying back a loan, exactly as you
were in the original iPhone Upgrade Program. Same if you use
Klarna to buy a Samsung Galaxy phone. But with Apple Upgrade,
you are renting: The Mac or Apple Watch is not yours until the
final payment is made.
I don’t think this is confusing at all. Apple Upgrade is the primary brand for this program, not Klarna. Klarna is really only mentioned in the small print. You get into Apple Upgrade through Apple. Off the top of your head, do you remember Apple’s bank partner for the now-discontinued iPhone Upgrade Program? (It was Citizens Bank.) The Samsung program Beres links to above is named “Klarna Pay in 4”. “Apple Upgrade is a leasing program partnered with Klarna” is easily understood.
Here’s what Beres thinks is a “trap”:
Consider a student or a young professional, or perhaps an
underemployed older one, who needs a new laptop. They decide on a
MacBook. Apple Upgrade will appear to be the best deal: In its
announcement, Apple offers the example of a 14-inch MacBook
Pro that retails for $1,999 but that can be had for a monthly
lease. Perhaps this person goes for the two-year term, which has
them paying $54 a month. Best Buy, which currently has the same
computer on sale for $1,849, offers an 18-month loan repayment
with $103 installments. Apple’s deal appears to be cheaper: The
24-month lease adds up to $1,296; Best Buy’s 18-month loan lands
at the store’s full retail price of $1,849.
Why does Best Buy’s laptop seem more expensive? It’s because the
plan is actually designed for you to fully pay off the device. At
the end of the 24-month MacBook Pro lease, meanwhile, the consumer
will still owe $703, meaning that the actual total price of the
Apple arrangement is $1,999 — higher than Best Buy’s offer.
This has nothing to do with the differences between Apple Upgrade’s leasing terms and Best Buy’s 18-month loan. It’s the difference between Apple’s retail price of $1,999 and Best Buy’s $1,849. Guess what? $1,849 is less than $1,999.
I generally like paying for everything I buy up front. The only thing I have a loan for right now is our home. So when Apple Upgrade was announced, I approached it with skepticism, presuming that participants would wind up paying more over time than they would buying devices outright up front. But no. There is no interest penalty. If anything, if you presume inflation is still going to run a bit high for the next few years, buying devices through Apple Upgrade might be a slightly better deal than paying up front.
Is it a “trap” that at the end of your 24-month lease you still owe $703 if you want to buy it? I would say that’s not a trap at all, given that you’d have only paid $1,296 to date on a $1,999 device. I’m not trying to be obtuse. I get it. If you pay the full $1,999 up front, or take a loan to pay the full amount over 24 months, then, after two years, you own the device outright and you might not be tempted to buy a new device for a few more years. If instead you lease it and still owe $703 after 24 months, you might be inclined to think that it’d be no fun at all to pay $703 to finish purchasing a now-two-year-old MacBook, even if the price is totally fair and carries no interest penalty. It’s just not fun. What might seem fun, at that point, is to just hand the leased MacBook back to Apple and start a new lease on a brand-new MacBook. That’s surely the appeal of this whole thing from Apple’s perspective — that leasing entices people to keep starting new leases every two years rather than just sit back and enjoy a fully-paid-for device for a few additional years. I think it’s a stretch to call that a “trap”, though.
Apple Upgrade launched this week, and the iPhone Upgrade Program
is being discontinued as a result. But despite some similarities,
the two offerings are not the same. Here are the key differences.
I wrote yesterday that there seemingly is no catch with the new Apple Upgrade program, but there’s at least one, which Christoffel’s piece doesn’t note. When you lease an iPhone through Apple Upgrade, you need a cellular account on one of the big three U.S. carriers: AT&T, T-Mobile, or Verizon. That kind of stinks, and I’m not quite sure I understand why. You’re leasing the iPhone through Apple and Klarna, not the carrier, so I don’t know why Apple cares. If you know why, shoot me a message and explain it. Is it just a simplistic credit-risk evaluation, where prepaid plan-holders and MVNO users in general are viewed suspiciously?
(I think the old iPhone Upgrade Program required you to have a plan on one of the big three carriers too, so that might be why Christoffel didn’t mention it — it’s the same, not a difference.)
We’re right on the cusp of a big Drive milestone – $400,000, 80% of the way toward our goal of raising at least $500,000 in this year’s Annual TPM Journalism Fund Drive. Who can help us cross this threshold today? You can be that person by clicking right here and making a contribution in any amount. $3,017 to go! Thank you to everyone who has contributed so far!
Thanks so much to everyone who came out to our event at Crystal Lake bar last night in collaboration with Marisa Kabas of The Handbasket! It was great to see some of you again, meet some local readers making it out to their first TPM event, and connect with readers who traveled just for this show. (Shout out to the lovely couple from Berkeley, California!)
We were impressed that the winning trivia team managed to get 10/14 correct answers even though we threw in some doozies (Like “which U.S. elected official got booed and heckled by children during a recent goodwill visit to Greenland on behalf of President Trump?”). And our publisher Joe Ragazzo moderated a dynamic conversation between Marisa and Josh Marshall on the midterms (with an extended Maine interlude), Democratic strategy and the future of independent media.
For those of you who live far away or otherwise couldn’t make it, we’ll release Marisa and Josh’s conversation as a bonus podcast episode soon. Hope to see you at the next one.
Editors Allegra Kirkland (L) and Nicole LaFond test our audience’s trivia knowledge
Trivia time!
Brainstorming answers during trivia
Publisher Joe Ragazzo introduces the main event
Marisa takes the stage
Our own Josh Marshall
Marisa, Joe and Josh chat in the awkwardly low banquette
Here in the U.S., we’re looking at the Iran War in terms of whether the U.S. should have started it in the first place, how it’s affecting oil prices, how it’s going to affect the midterms and a bunch of other things. But there’s another way to look at it, which is that Iran is putting on a global performance of standing head to head with the full might of the U.S. military and pulling it off. By their actions, we can see pretty clearly that the Iranian government does not fear Donald Trump. They’re not acting scared. If anything, they’re upping the rate of their provocations, as the state of war and effective stalemate transitions to a new normal of sorts.
It is fair to say that this is not actually the full might of the U.S. military in a theoretical sense. The president could order the U.S. military to mount a full scale ground invasion of Iran, occupy the country, dismantle the state’s system of command, control and repression. Those things are very likely possible, albeit at vast cost. But the real test of a military is not what it can do in some theoretical sense, the precise armaments it has and so forth but what the country which controls that military is able and/or willing to do in a specific economic, geopolitical, and political context. And the U.S. is clearly not willing to do those things. So in a practical sense — not the abstract power and capabilities of the U.S. military but the country’s ability to do those things — this is the full force of the U.S. military.
What this all amounts to is that this war has turned into a vast spectacle of the limits of U.S. power. This is of course a big reason you don’t start something like this in the first place, why you don’t start wars or any major commitments without a clear understanding of your own power, your own options — and not in the vague sense of our military is super big but how are we going to be willing to use it in this specific situation.
What is further the case is that the most likely near- and medium-term scenario seems like a version of the “frozen conflicts” we know from the peripheries of Russia over the last 20-plus years. The mechanics are different of course. But the overall frozen-ness looks increasingly similar with the key difference that it is Iran rather than the U.S. which is holding key gains during this freeze — the biggest being control of the Strait of Hormuz and the huge deterrence that creates.
The U.S. is not new to spectacularly bad foreign policy decisions. The big ones that jump out to me are Vietnam and the Iraq War. What at least seems distinct to me is that for all the folly of U.S. involvement in Vietnam, if you understand the history you can also see how the bad decisions grew out of the logic of the Cold War, a set of assumptions that were deeply held across a wide spectrum of elite U.S. foreign policy thinking in the U.S. and indeed non-elite thinking as well. This is part of the irony of the title of David Halberstam’s “The Best and the Brightest.” These people were not idiots. And yet they made terrible and disastrous decisions.
With Iraq, elite foreign policy thinking was much more skeptical. It was also much more fractured. To a degree, what happened with the Bush presidency was that a counter-foreign policy establishment got hold of the levers of power at a critical moment. With all this said, though, the 9/11 attacks created a climate of intense public fear and vast deference to the White House and the president. Many of us remember these events pretty vividly. Most of us wish lots of things had never happened. But basically the Iraq War does not happen without the 9/11 attacks. The fact that one had nothing to do with the other is not relevant to this basic fact: no 9/11, no Iraq War.
Where is the analog here? If anything, the decision to go to war with Iran runs strongly counter to the whole backlash to “forever wars” which has characterized U.S. foreign policy in an evolving way for more than a decade. Especially in the Middle East and especially given how much Trump himself has tried to identify himself with that backlash. Then there’s the fact the U.S. public seemed to have little idea this was even going to happen.
I’ve always had a somewhat different understanding of a president’s war powers than many others. In practice, our constitutional order places pretty few limitations on a president in this capacity. What the Constitution says in theory is secondary to what has happened in practice for going on a century. The president really calls the shots with the U.S. military. I’m not saying that as how it should be but how it is. But it is in a president’s very strong interest to bring the public along or at least loop them in on what he’s trying to do.
In any case, this whole debacle stands out perhaps not decisively as the most disastrous U.S. foreign policy decision but in terms of the opaqueness of the decision-making and the way the decisions stemmed almost entirely to the emotive whims and impulses of Trump (his need to act out in the face of declining fortunes at home, his hunch that Iran would be as fun as his quasi invasion of Venezuela) and whatever bill of goods Benjamin Netanyahu was selling him. It’s that sense of disjuncture which stands out to me, the out-of-the-blueness, the discontinuity. And that is very much the mark of a personalist regime, one in which the full breadth of the U.S. government’s foreign policy architecture has been hollowed out and you really are operating within the whims, fantasies, impulses of one guy.
Voluntary donation of whole blood in the US has provided adequate supply for many years, but since Covid it has sometimes come close to a shortage, and now we have a second declared shortage. This contrasts with blood plasma, which includes supply from paid donors.
I think the graphic is meant to show that the US is running near empty on blood (not that the shortage is only in Southern states...)
"The American Red Cross has declared only the second national blood supply crisis in its history after blood donations fell to a four-year summer low, deepening an emergency shortage that threatens the availability of lifesaving blood for patients across the country.
Despite thousands of people answering the call to give, blood donations are not keeping pace with hospital demand — which is up during the summer trauma season. Extreme heat, poor air quality and widespread foodborne illnesses are contributing to lower donor turnout this summer, further straining the nation’s blood supply.
As the nation's largest single provider of blood products, the Red Cross now has less than a one-day national supply of type O positive blood — the most commonly transfused blood type. To help ensure blood is available for patients facing the most critical, life-threatening emergencies across the country, the Red Cross has begun limiting distributions of type O blood to individual hospitals."
In light of yesterday’s attempt to publicly humiliate NIAID Director Anthony Fauci, this post I wrote a few days ago about a fundamental problem with COVID the lab leak hypothesis turned out to be timely. Anyway… When it comes to people who entertain the COVID lab leak hypothesis–or who support the notion wholeheartedly that the pandemic began with a leak from a research laboratory in Wuhan, China, there is always a piece of evidence that is never raised, even though it was discovered during the early stages of the pandemic. That is, there actually were two origins of COVID (boldface mine):
Furthermore, the COVID-19 pandemic was seeded more than once. Analyzing the virus sequences revealed that two genetically distinct versions of the virus were circulating. Tracing the virus’ evolution showed that SARS-CoV-2 spilled over to humans twice, a week or two apart. If this were a lab leak, one person would have needed to have been infected with lineage B in the lab and then traveled at least 30 minutes on a crowded subway without infecting anyone else until they got to the Huanan market and went to the southwest corner, where they shed virus all over stalls where multiple potential live intermediate hosts were being sold. The same thing would then need to happen two weeks later – completely independently – with lineage A.
The paper cited is from January 2022, so this is not some new data that people haven’t heard about yet. It was in the news at the time, though it was ignored as it was inconvenient for the lab leak proponents. While I don’t expect full-blown conspiracists to change their minds, I would expect that certain Very Serious People, such as certain NYT columnists or analysts at intelligence agencies, at least would offer an explanation for this, as two outbreaks from a laboratory that mimic the patterns we would expect to find with spread from wild animals sold at the Huanan market does strain credulity, if not annihilate it.
Ariel Edwards-Levy of CNN reported today that a new CNN poll conducted by the public opinion research firm SSRS found that 70% of adult Americans disapprove of the way President Donald J. Trump is handling the economy while only 30% approve. A whopping 75% disapprove of how Trump is handling inflation, while only 25% approve. When it comes to gas prices, the numbers are even worse for the president: 79% disapprove while only 21% approve. Sixty-five percent think Trump’s own economic policies have hurt the country, while only 22% think those policies have improved the economy.
Seventy-three percent of those polled said Trump hasn’t paid enough attention to the country’s most important problems, while 27% said he has the right priorities. Sixty-six percent agreed that Trump puts his own gain over the good of the country; 34% agreed that he does not. Only 43% of those polled thought Trump “has the stamina and sharpness to serve effectively as president,” while 57% did not agree with that statement.
As Edwards-Levy notes, Trump’s overall approval rating in the new CNN poll matches his rating just after the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol—his lowest ever—at 34%. The number of those who strongly disapprove of him is 50%, a new high, while only 15% strongly support him, a record low.
Edwards-Levy points out that people polled aren’t keen on the way Trump’s handling the situation in Iran: 72% disapprove while only 28% approve. Sixty-seven percent think his actions there have hurt the U.S., while only 21% think those actions have helped the U.S. So, as she puts it: “Just 28% approve of his handling of the situation in Iran, 25% on inflation and 21% on gas prices, with significant pockets of disapproval even among his supporters.”
Americans unhappy with Trump’s war on Iran are unlikely to be cheered by the news from that conflict over the past few days.
Andrew Egger wrote in The Bulwark today about how the Trump administration seems stuck in a loop, “orbiting hopelessly around two demonstrably failed positions: If we bomb the hell out of them, they’ll give us what we want. If we stop bombing them, they’ll give us what we want.” Adina Renner of the New York Times today called this “The Whiplash War” and provided charts of attacks showing what this looping looks like on a daily basis. Meanwhile, Iranian negotiators have made their demands quite clear: sanctions removed, troops out, no more discussion of nuclear weapons, and Iranian control of the Strait of Hormuz.
Laura Wise, a scholar of peace and conflict resolution at the University of Edinburgh, told Renner that the process of ending the war has been complicated by the fact American negotiators seem focused on “getting a deal rather than making peace.”
Davis Winkie of CNN reported that on Saturday, the Pentagon changed the way it was accounting for military personnel injured in the Iran war. After the removal from Defense Casualty Analysis System of four service members killed by Iranian strikes in Jordan and Iraq last week created an outcry and brought renewed attention to accusations the Pentagon was not being transparent about the human toll of the war, on Saturday the Pentagon added more than 140 additional soldiers to the database and restored the four missing soldiers.
The numbers now show 18 troops dead and another 624 wounded since February 28, when Trump began strikes against Iran.
Over the weekend, military strikes in the region paused as Trump decided against an escalation. According to U.S. officials who spoke to Eric Schmitt and Jonathan Swan of the New York Times, that decision came in part because the U.S. military is running low on Patriot antimissile interceptors and other air defense munitions necessary to shoot down Iranian missiles.
The journalists reported that the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Dan Caine had warned that further combat would “dangerously deplete” interceptors, a leak that suggests real dissent within the White House over the execution of the war. On Meet the Press on Sunday, U.N. Ambassador Mike Waltz told host Kristen Welker that any problems with munitions were former President Joe Biden’s fault but added that the U.S. has “everything that it needs to conduct this campaign…and…the people who are leaking this nonsense deserve to be in jail.”
Top advisors also expressed concern over a widening war and the economic crunch caused by the crisis.
But yesterday, U.S. Central Command posted that forces from the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps had launched missiles “in an attempted surprise attack on U.S. forces.” Jared Malsin and Suha Ma’ayeh of the Wall Street Journal noted that this surprise attack is the first in which the Iranians have gone on offense. Hamidreza Azizi, a visiting fellow specializing in Iran at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs, told the journalists that this shift indicates Iranian officials “see themselves as having the upper hand. It was a signal of a sort of calibrated escalation.”
They might have increased confidence because, as John Irish and Jonathan Saul of Reuters reported yesterday, they are expecting a shipment of up to 400 Chinese-made shoulder-fired air defense missile launchers within weeks.
U.S. Central Command said all of last night’s Iranian missiles were intercepted. Trump nonetheless took the attacks poorly, telling the Fox News Channel: “We are going to beat the f*cking sh*t out of them. We’ll be hitting them hard. They’re going to get a beating.” U.S. and Saudi Arabian forces struck against an Iranian-backed militia in Iraq.
Oil prices rose with the news of renewed strikes. Despite concerns about rising inflation, the Federal Open Market Committee voted 9 to 3 to hold interest rates steady; the three dissenting regional Fed bank presidents voted to raise interest rates. Concern over inflation and uncertainty about the economy sent the stock market plunging today in its worst day since April 2025, when Trump announced his “Liberation Day” tariffs.
And so, Republicans are devoting themselves to serving red meat to their MAGA base, ginning up sound bites for distribution on social media.
On the menu today was Dr. Anthony Fauci, the 85-year-old former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases who, serving in that capacity for 38 years, advised seven different presidents of both parties. President George W. Bush awarded Fauci the Presidential Medal of Freedom for his work in creating the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), which has saved an estimated 26 million lives. Trump named Fauci to the President’s Coronavirus Task Force in January 2020.
But, as Savannah Behrmann and Jeanine Santucci of USA Today reported in October 2020, Trump turned on Fauci as he cautioned against Trump’s confident predictions that the disease would disappear quickly. By February 28, Trump insisted that Democrats were “politicizing” covid, and by April 26, news broke that Trump wanted to sideline Fauci, although Fauci was considered trustworthy and viewed favorably by a 3:1 margin.
By the summer, as Trump’s panic over how the economic crisis caused by the pandemic might hurt his reelection prospects, he turned on Fauci, who continued to support measures to stop the spread of the disease. Trump worked to undermine Fauci’s warnings, saying that the doctors and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention were “lying” about covid.
By July, he mused about why Fauci had a high approval rating and he didn’t. When Fauci testified to Congress that U.S. cases were spiking while European countries were seeing sharp drops in covid cases because European countries had shut down 95% of their economies while the U.S. had shut down only 50%, Trump posted: “Wrong! We have more cases because we have tested far more than any other country…. If we tested less, there would be less cases.”
As Trump continued to criticize Fauci and yet ran a campaign ad suggesting Fauci endorsed his reelection, the doctor continued to emphasize that he was “not a political person.” He added: “And I have never—either directly or indirectly—endorsed a political candidate.” In October he dismissed Trump’s attacks, saying: “They don’t bother me. I know what my job is, and I’ve gotta do it and I’m going to do it. So that kind of—whatever you want to call it—is to me, I just, it’s noise.”
As Aaron Rupar reminded us today, Trump himself awarded a presidential commendation to Fauci “in recognition of [his] exceptional effort on Operation Warp Speed.”
But with the arrival of a vaccine that helped to put the worst of the pandemic behind us, MAGA Republicans began to demonize Dr. Fauci not only as the source of the mask mandates and school shutdowns they hated, but also as the source of the virus itself, alleging—without evidence—that the disease had escaped from a lab in Wuhan, China, for which the U.S. National Institutes of Health provided funding.
After voters reelected Trump to the presidency in 2024, he and his loyalists vowed to prosecute Fauci. Trump ally Steve Bannon called for “rough Roman justice” for Fauci, as well as special counsel Jack Smith and former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley. Before he left office, former president Joe Biden issued a preemptive pardon for Fauci—and others—to protect them from political prosecution, saying: “The issuance of these pardons should not be mistaken as an acknowledgment that any individual engaged in any wrongdoing, nor should acceptance be misconstrued as an admission of guilt for any offense.”
But Republicans have continued to demonize Fauci, ginning up anger against him in their base even as the rest of the country has moved on. Now, with the political tides running so strongly against the Republicans before the 2026 midterm elections, they are clearly trying to rekindle the fury of the last presidential election.
As the Associated Press reported today, for years, Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) has accused Fauci of lying about the origins of covid, an accusation Fauci has called “preposterous” in testimony before Congress. Paul has repeatedly called for Fauci’s arrest and imprisonment and, in 2023, published a book with Fauci on the cover, explicating what he called the “Great Covid Cover-Up.”
The Trump administration has fed Paul’s crusade, with Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. searching for eight months to find Fauci’s private diary on government computers, then handing the files over to Paul and to Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI). Neither Kennedy, Paul, nor Johnson told Fauci they had obtained his 1,000-page diary before they published it, in full, last week.
In July 2021, Fauci wrote in his diary that an analysis of the viruses used in the Wuhan lab “clearly indicate(s) that it is molecularly impossible for the viruses under the auspices of the NIH grant to have been manipulated into or evolved into” the covid virus.
Now chair of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, Paul subpoenaed Fauci in June to appear before the committee. Unwillingly, as his lawyers noted Paul’s many statements calling for Fauci to be jailed, Fauci did so today.
In an opening statement, Fauci said that he believed “the sole reason [Paul] is calling me before this committee is to get me to say something—anything—that could vindicate his repeated public pledges that I end up, in his words, quote, behind bars, unquote.”
“Any reasonable person who has followed his unhinged obsession with me would readily come to the same conclusion,” he said. “Therefore, although it pains me to do so because of the respect I have for the legislative branch of government and my decades-long record of cooperating with Congress, under the advice of my attorneys, I will invoke my right under the 5th Amendment of the Constitution to refrain from answering your questions.”
More than 100 times he did exactly that as Republicans berated him, calling him “a narcissist and a megalomaniac and a liar,” mocking him, and asking him, “Do you feel like you’re in deep sh*t?” What Republicans did not do is introduce any evidence that the 85-year-old lifelong public servant had broken any laws.
More to the point was Senator Bernie Moreno (R-OH) yelling at Fauci about closings during the pandemic, blustering: “Who the f*ck do you think you were?” F-bombs are rare on the Senate floor, and the outburst has gotten significant media attention.
That attention has distracted from the other reason Moreno is in the news. As Abby Vesoulis of Mother Jones reported, Moreno has said nothing as his daughter’s ex-husband, Representative Max Miller (R-OH), has been credibly charged with the violent abuse of her and their 2-year-old daughter. As the Republicans struggle to hold on to their congressional majorities, Republican leaders have refused to call for Miller, who is running for a third term, to resign.
Explaining stock market movements is always a little bit of a fool’s errand; no one really understands why stocks boom or crash on a given day or in a given week. Over the long run, the stock market displays lots of “excess volatility” — prices move up and down much more than is warranted by changes in earnings or other measures of fundamental value. There are plenty of theories about why those swings happen, but it’s very hard to know which of those — if any — is in operation at any given time. And so although every big stock market movement is followed by lots of articles claiming to know why, you should take them all — including this one — with several grains of salt.
Anyway, having said all that…
The Korean stock market has been crashing for weeks now. Around March, Korean stocks went on an epic tear; the KOSPI index rose from around 5,000 to over 9,000. Then, just over a month ago, it all went into reverse, with the index falling back to around 5,500:
There are probably two stories regarding why this happened — one about fundamentals, and another about finance. In fact, this is typical for bubbles and crashes, not just in stocks but in every asset class. There’s almost always some kind of connection to fundamentals — some story about how we’re in a new economy, followed by doubts about whether that story is really true, and so on. But the big market movements are almost always accelerated by purely financial factors — “noise traders” armed with piles of excess cash, opportunistic speculators looking to ride the wave of sentiment, and so on.1
For Korea, the fundamental story was about memory stocks. Korean companies like SK Hynix and Samsung make a lot of the world’s computer memory. Under normal circumstances, computer memory isn’t a great business to be in — the technology is fairly commoditized, the industry is brutally competitive, it takes a LOT of capital to build the factories, and it’s very risky to make long-term bets on the evolution of memory technology.
But computer memory is really important for AI data centers. And so the AI boom kicked off the mother of all memory booms. Only a few companies had the scale to meet a large amount of this demand explosion, and the two biggest of these were in South Korea. SK Hynix’s operating profit went from under $10 billion in the first quarter of 2025 to over $35 billion in the first quarter of 2026:
Hynix, which specializes in memory, briefly had a higher market capitalization than Samsung, simply because the memory boom is so huge. Korea’s exports rose over 70% in just one year; in fact, the country’s whole national GDP growth rate increased by a noticeable amount over the past two quarters, just because of this one product:
That’s a pretty strong fundamental story about why South Korean stocks should be worth a lot more. So it’s no surprise that the Korean stock market boomed as soon as people realized in early 2026 that AI technology is going to be extremely valuable. Here’s a thread about just how epic the runup in these companies’ stock prices was:
This is where the financial story rears its head, though. A bunch of traders saw this enormous price rise and decided to buy into it. You’d think a lot of these would be foreign, but international investors mostly avoided the boom (except for a few who bet big on Korean memory stocks). The most frenzied buyers were regular Korean people — the proverbial taxi drivers and teenagers.
These investors probably didn’t understand the fundamental story about AI and data centers and so on. Instead, they probably had extrapolative expectations — they see the price go up and up, and they figure stocks are just a “goer upper”. As more and more buy in and the stock goes up more and more, the perception of a structural upward trend is only reinforced, causing yet more people to buy in. This isn’t the only explanation for coordinated “noise trader” buying frenzies, but it’s probably the most likely.
Normal people don’t have a lot of cash sitting around. But earlier this year, regular Korean people got the opportunity to effectively borrow lots of money to invest it in stocks, via the introduction of leveraged single-stock ETFs. When you buy a share in a leveraged single-stock ETF in SK Hynix, it’s like borrowing money to buy SK Hynix stock.
A whole lot of Koreans used leveraged ETFs and other borrowing methods to borrow huge amounts of money and buy lots and lots of Korean stocks — especially the memory company stocks that were driving everything.
There were some people selling — notably, foreign investors “taking profits” and getting out. But the noise traders overwhelmed all the selling pressure, and sent stock prices soaring.
Then something happened last month — either something fundamental or something financial. Hynix and Samsung are doing fine in terms of earnings growth, but it’s possible that something suddenly gave traders reason to doubt the overall story about the AI boom sending these companies’ profits to the moon. The other possibility is that Korea simply ran out of hotheaded day traders willing to borrow more and more in order to bet on stocks, and the influx of cash naturally came to a halt.
Whichever it was, at that point the price faltered and began to fall. All that borrowed money accelerated the fall on the way down. When prices fall, leveraged ETFs have to sell some of what they hold.2 When a bunch of leveraged ETFs do this at the same time, it pushes prices down, forcing others to sell. In the meantime, people who had borrowed money to buy stock faced margin calls (or bankruptcy), forcing them to sell stock to raise cash. All of this created extra selling pressure, and so increased the rate at which Korean stock prices fell since late June.
Anyway, that’s the financial story. It’s a very old story — financial leverage plus unsophisticated new buyers plus a strong fundamental story often produces a bubble and crash, or exacerbates one that was already in progress. No wonder Korea is now moving — a little belatedly — to restrict leveraged ETFs.
But while financial factors affected the timing and the size of the stock price boom and bust, the fundamental story is more interesting. Fears of an AI bubble are quietly creeping back.
In 2025, as consumer chatbots struggled to find a market big enough to justify the kind of investments being made, there was a lot of talk about an AI bubble. One possibility was that AI revenues wouldn’t grow fast enough to justify the amount being invested in data centers. Another possibility was that AI companies wouldn’t have enough of a “moat” to make them consistently profitable.
In 2026, Claude Code exploded onto the scene, and everyone realized that AI had finally found “product-market fit”. We now know at least one thing that AI is incredibly useful for — writing computer code. Suddenly, an AI bubble seemed much less likely. Spending on AI was skyrocketing, and Anthropic — the new market leader — was successfully capturing much of the profits. Cybersecurity and other zero-sum applications — where having the absolute best model can matter a lot — started to seem like the “moat” that AI had previously lacked. Suddenly, the giant data center construction boom seemed a lot more reasonable.
But slowly, doubts have begun to creep back in. AI is amazing at writing software, but writing software is different from selling it. So far, huge increases in coding productivity are translating into only minor increases in the amount of software being shipped:
It’s possible that a significant fraction of the explosion in the use of coding agents is just “tokenmaxxing” — companies trying to use as much AI as they can, either to learn to use the tools, or perhaps just to look like they’re doing something. If so, we can expect a retrenchment and a temporary slowdown of AI spending growth.
It’s also possible that even the revenue growth we’ve seen isn’t enough to offset the enormous costs of the data center boom. Here’s a recent report from The Economist:
A back-of-the-envelope calculation finds that covering AI capex through identifiable AI income requires revenue on the order of $2.5trn per year, more than tech’s entire combined revenue today…Anthropic pulls in perhaps $75bn, annualised; OpenAI makes tens of billions; Google, via its AI model Gemini, and Microsoft probably get a bit less. SpaceX may have a few billion dollars’ worth of revenue from enterprise AI this year. Meta also makes a few bucks from AI. Add this up and you land at roughly $150bn a year. [emphasis mine]
AI revenue is growing very fast, but if these calculations are right, it’ll have to grow by 17x from where it is now in order to justify the capital being spent. In other words, even Claude Code isn’t enough; AI revenue has to accelerate even further, and while it’s perfectly plausible that it could do that, it’s a big question mark.
There’s also the possibility that the moat of companies like Anthropic is less invincible than it looked just a couple of months ago. A Chinese company called Moonshot AI has released a model called Kimi K3 that nearly equals the best available American models. American companies are using cheap Chinese AI models more and more for daily tasks. If Anthropic and OpenAI lose the overall b2b market to cheap Chinese competition — which is undoubtedly supported, of course, by China’s usual blizzard of subsidies and government supports — there’s not much chance that they’ll be able to pay for the data center boom.
And at that point, there could be a big, big bust — similar to when railroads went under in 1873. Investors are probably already beginning to worry about this. It isn’t just Korean AI-related stocks that have taken a hit recently. Here’s Nvidia, which designs and furnishes the chips that run data centers:
And here’s Micron, America’s top memory chip maker:
And here’s Microsoft, a big part of whose business is installing AI data centers:
There are similar (if less dramatic) stories at Google and Amazon, who also run a ton of data centers.
Here’s Bloomberg’s story about the decline of the so-called “Magnificent 7” tech stocks:
Wall Street is growing increasingly concerned about the hundreds of billions of dollars Big Tech is spending on artificial intelligence…“The real problem is the amount of spend that’s going on,” said Ken Mahoney, chief executive officer of Mahoney Asset Management. “No one knows what the return on investment is.”…The selloff is coming as investors grow increasingly cautious about the massive sums that Big Tech firms are spending to build out their AI infrastructure. The Mag 7 index is now down 11% from a record reached in late May, erasing $2 trillion in market value.
So although South Korea’s epic stock crash was probably related to Korea-specific financial factors, it could also herald the return of the “AI bubble” story. AI is far and away the most important thing going on in the American economy right now, so any hint of a bubble is worrying.
Update: One possibility I should have mentioned is that the Korean stock crash is the start of a general crash in AI stocks — the long-awaited “AI bubble pop”. So far the carnage hasn’t been too extensive, but it’s notable that some people who bet big on the smooth, uninterrupted exponential growth of AI are now seeing those bets blow up:
And as Derek Thompson noted a couple of weeks ago, Korean retail investors aren’t the only ones borrowing money to buy stocks:
Derek flags the rise of margin buying and leveraged ETFs in America, but I also noticed that some pretty big companies are leveraging themselves to the teeth here:
For the best simple explanation of how financial markets can go haywire, I recommend the famous paper by DeLong et al. (1990). If you don’t feel like reading through a mathematical model, just ask AI to explain it to you in simple terms.
SAN FRANCISCO – Sophia Space announced the award July 30 of a patent, shared with the California Institute of Technology, covering large, modular space-based data centers. The patent, issued July […]
The Department of Transportation is proposing to exempt commercial space launch licensing from many environmental regulations, a move praised by industry but criticized by environmental groups.
Stewart Island/Rakiura, New Zealand’s third largest and southernmost inhabited island, appears in a rare, mostly cloud-free image acquired with the OLI (Operational Land Imager) on Landsat 9 on May 14, 2026.
NASA Earth Observatory/Michala Garrison
Stewart Island/Rakiura is the third-largest island in New Zealand, diminutive in comparison to the country’s North Island and South Island. Yet it hosts a population of one of the largest of the kiwi: the Stewart Island tokoeka. This flightless bird, a subspecies of the Southern brown kiwi (Apteryx australis), numbers in the thousands on the island, dwarfing its human population of approximately 500.
The avian national icon is just one slice of the natural riches on Stewart Island/Rakiura, a roughly triangular piece of land about 30 kilometers (19 miles) south of the South Island. Rakiura National Park covers about 85 percent of the bright green island. And as the Māori name—Rakiura, meaning “glowing skies”—suggests, it’s a prime location for viewing the aurora australis.
On the northern half of the island, podocarp and hardwood forests featuring coniferous trees with ancient lineages blanket the land. Other areas are covered in shrublands and wetlands, as well as coastal dunes such as those lining Mason Bay. A diversity of birdlife, including the kiwi, populates these relatively untouched ecosystems. The tall trees of the podocarp forests produce various fruits attractive to avian inhabitants, such as bellbirds, with their pure-toned calls, and the rare kākāpō, the world’s heaviest and only flightless parrot species.
Waves wash onto the rocky shore of Stewart Island/Rakiura near Halfmoon Bay on July 3, 2010.
Lindsey Doermann
One notable haven for birds lies on Ulva Island, located within the inlet near Halfmoon Bay (Oban). Rats, which once preyed on bird eggs and chicks there, were deemed eradicated in 1997, and the island has mostly remained free of non-native predators. Conservationists have since embarked on a project on the much larger Stewart Island/Rakiura to eliminate rats, possums, feral cats, and hedgehogs.
When darkness falls, Stewart Island/Rakiura’s human denizens can look skyward for the chance to observe stars, auroras, nearby dwarf galaxies, and other features of the Southern Hemisphere night sky. In 2019, the remote and sparsely inhabited island was designated an International Dark Sky Sanctuary.
Amateur astronomers there and in other places with good night-sky views might search for objects of interest through Hubble’s Night Sky Challenge. In May, when this image was acquired, targets imaged by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope that were also visible from Earth’s southern latitudes included a star cluster called the Jewel Box and a peculiar elliptical galaxy known as Centaurus A, which may have resulted from two galaxies colliding.
NASA Earth Observatory image by Michala Garrison, using Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey. Photo and story by Lindsey Doermann.
A streak shot of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket from liftoff through landing at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station on the NROL-95 mission on July 30, 2026. Image: Adam Bernstein/Spaceflight Now
Update July 30, 10:27 a.m. EDT (1427 UTC): The NRO confirms its payload was deployed.
A classified payload for the National Reconnaissance Office headed to orbit in the predawn hours of Thursday, July 30.
The NROL-95 mission launched onboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket flying from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. Liftoff from Space Launch Complex 40 happened at 3:10 a.m. EDT (0710 UTC).
“The collaboration between NRO, U.S. Space Force, and SSC continues to advance our nation’s intelligence architecture through next-generation satellite technology and integrated operations,” said Col. Kathryn Cantu, director, NRO Office of Space Launch, and NROL-95 mission director. “This collaboration enables us to swiftly field resilient intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance systems while preserving the flexibility and persistence required to counter evolving challenges.”
The 45th Weather Squadron forecast a 70 percent chance for favorable weather during Thursday’s launch opportunity. Meteorologists said they are monitoring the possibility of interference from cloud cover and thunderstorms.
“Significant weather model ambiguity remains regarding the longevity, extent and location of remnant storms and associated cloud cover during the overnight periods, thus the threat of weather violations for the primary and secondary launch opportunities will remain higher than typical values for summer overnight launches, albeit with still a decent potential for acceptable weather,” launch weather officers wrote.
SpaceX launched the mission using the Falcon 9 booster with the tail number B1096. This was its seventh flight following the launch of NASA’s IMAP and CRS-34; Kuiper Falcon 1; NROL-77; GPS III-9; and Starlink 6-87.
Nearly 8.5 minutes after liftoff, B1096 touched down at Landing Zone 2 at the Cape. This was the 18th landing at this site and the 642nd booster landing for SpaceX.
The NROL-95 mission was the third mission procured for the NRO and launched on a Falcon 9 rocket as part of the National Security Space Launch Phase 2 contract, managed by the U.S. Space Force’s Space Systems Command.
The NROL-95 task order was awarded to SpaceX in August 2024.
Market Design
