File: A Falcon 9 rocket stands in the launch position at Space Launch Complex 40 (SLC-40) at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station ahead of the planned liftoff of the Starlink 6-61 mission on Oct. 22, 2024. Image: Adam Bernstein/Spaceflight Now
SpaceX is slated to launch its 75th batch of Starlink satellites of the year on a Falcon 9 rocket launch from Florida late Thursday morning.
The Starlink 10-39 mission will add another 29 broadband internet satellites to the company’s low Earth orbit megaconstellation. The mission includes the 2,000th Starlink satellite launched in 2026 as well.
Liftoff from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station is scheduled at 11:38 a.m. EDT (1538 UTC).
Spaceflight Now will have live coverage beginning about an hour prior to liftoff.
The 45th Weather Squadron forecast an 80 percent chance for favorable weather during the opening of the window. It deteriorates down to 40 percent as the window progresses.
“The main concern at the beginning of the primary window will be violations associated with locally developing showers and storms along the sea breeze,” launch weather officers wrote on Wednesday. “However, coverage during this period should be isolated and thus will maintain a lower [probability of violating weather constraints] at the start of the window with this forecast update.
“Later in the window, model guidance is in good agreement simulating showers and storms tracking east across Florida along the west coast sea breeze. However, guidance diverges on the timing of their arrival at the Spaceport.”
SpaceX will launch the mission using the Falcon 9 first-stage booster B1078. This will be its 30th flight, making it the sixth booster to reach this milestone.
Nearly 8.5 minutes after liftoff, B1078 will make a landing on the droneship, A Shortfall of Gravitas, positioned in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of South Carolina. If successful, this will be the 164th landing on this vessel and the 652nd Falcon booster landing for SpaceX to date.
There are movies like “Terms of Endearment” and “Shawshank Redemption,” that set out to stir the soul and change your life. You shed tears, you sit silently, you exit the theater and think, “That was absolutely wonderful.”
There are also movies like “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen,” that are purposefully big and loud and mindless. You eat popcorn, you guzzle Coca-Cola, you watch and you leave and you blink unusually rapidly. These films do not exist to evoke contemplation. They exist to be loud and obnoxious.
I bring this up because you are about to read my compilation of the 26 worst Orange County political figures of 2026. This is the byproduct of a good deal of research and outreach; of soliciting suggestions and debating merit. It was long and arduous and—in myriad ways—depressing. More than anything, I want people around here to be good, honest, compassionate stewards. I want folks with empathy and a sincere sense of civic duty. Party be damned. Hell, positions be damned.
The individuals on this list … sigh. I don’t believe most of them to be evil or even bad, in the Merriam-Webster sense of the words. I just think they’re all some mishmash of a) painfully dumb; b) woefully misinformed and misguided; c) corrupted by power and the maintaining of control.
And, as I thought and thought and thought about this, I came to the realization that the distinctions of those categories matter. For example, Will O’Neill, the Orange County Republican Party chairman, is an intelligent guy and a once-respected mayor. He knows right from wrong; knows Donald Trump is a grotesque pig of a man and that the Jan. 6 riots were an assault on democracy. Unlike a Lisa Davis or Jack Hibbs, he’s plenty smart. He grasps real vs. fiction.
And yet—O’Neill has chosen to ignore it all, in a quest for power. I cannot overstate how sad it makes me; the Vader-like plummet of a decent man into an icy stink hole of shame.
Alas, it is what it is—and this list is what it is. Some of the folks (like O’Neill) would rather watch decency crumble than admit many on his side are bonkers. Some, like Mari Barke of the OC Board of Ed, drank the Kool-Aid and savored the taste. Some, like the aspiring social media influencer Sophia Lorey, likely find the glow of a spotlight irresistible.
There are plenty of people on this list who lack intelligence, who lack insight, who are as deep as a dime and just follow along with what Fox News orders.
Will is not that guy.
Bro is a former Newport mayor; a reasonable and compassionate local standout who, in his time leading the city, was known across the political spectrum as a decent dude who looked after constituents.
That Will O’Neill is, I believe, dead.
The new Will O’Neill is a political animal. Trump brags about pussy grabbing? No problem. Trump makes $2 billion as president? Ho hum. The Jan. 6 riots? Fun for all! Gracey Van Der Mark flashes QAnon signs? Wonderful! The Huntington Beach City Council plans on putting forth a MAGA plaque! Amazing!
Ever meet someone, and you’re like, “Wow, she seems lovely.” And someone else goes, “Nah, she’s terrible.” But you go, “Haha. She seems great.” And the other person stops in his tracks, grabs your shoulders and says, “No, seriously, bruh. She’s cray.”
And, of course, Barke is just another in the long line of RULES DON’T APPLY TO ME. Hell, just this year she was accused of violating the Political Reform Act by failing to disclose million in income and assets.1
Bright side: She’ll protect you from the neighborhood trans kids.2
If I could switch bodies with 1986 Mike Tyson for one day, I would head over to Calvary Chapel, ask for Jack Hibbs, be told Jack Hibbs isn’t there, wait outside the church, see Hibbs roll up in his 2027 BMW 7 Series3—and I would go all Marvis Frazier on his ass.
Obviously, I’m not hitting anyone. Or even spitting on someone. But Hibbs, more than any other local “religious”4 leader, is uniquely responsible for the regional phenomenon of right-wing ministries diving head-first into MAGA politics, and brainwashing their parishioners into voting for whichever loathsome flimflam artists Hibbs (as Godly a dude as the last pimple I picked and flicked off into the toilet) commands. Once, there was a very clear, respected separation of church and state.
Once, bread cost a dime.
The thing that kills me most. Like, really kills me most: All these “religious” leaders (like Hibbs) back Donald Trump. Despite Jan. 6, despite “grab ‘em by the pussy,” despite raw-dogging the porn star, despite the bankruptcies, despite the cruelty, despite the indifference to the poor, the battered, the struggling. Somehow, Jack Hibbs believes he has a line to God. And God wants the dude from the Epstein Files.
Men like Hibbs have, in the process, corroded the beauty and dignity of religion and faith.
Why follow the teaching of Jesus that you claim to live by, when you follow … him?
So I’ve been pretty locked in on the local school board, and Davis is … hmm … I’ll offer some adjectives, and y’all feel free to pick which you opt to use (Tip: they all apply):
Sinister.
Nuts.
Manipulative.
Uninformed.
Phony.
She also happens to be a world-class hugger, which would be lovely were she not perpetually attempting to Mama Bear kids at graduation ceremonies (Lisa, seriously—stranger-danger).
In all seriousness: I’ve seen Lisa Davis in action, and what’s going down at Capo Unified is beyond disturbing. The board has been largely taken over by a Moms For Liberty-inspired approach to academics, which includes “leaders”5 who believe in more God in school, less science in school, less funding for public schools and a damnation of those who don’t share your wackadoo religious beliefs. I wrote extensively about Lisa here, and it’s worse than you think.
I think we’re all still experiencing the PTSD caused by Esther, an art curator/expert who came from Los Angeles to grace us all with her genius and a doomed-from-the-start run for the CA-40th seat. Besides being seven levels of Planters, Esther established herself as a uniquely cruel, vindictive, incurious plantar wart of a human with an unrivaled arrogance and a one-of-a-kind talent for pissing literally everyone off.
For a brief spell, she seemed like a legitimate contender to challenge Young Kim and Ken Calvert for a slot in the final showdown. But then she began to talk. And post on social media. And tell everyone why she was right, they were wrong and a vote against Esther was a vote for a Fibrodysplasia Ossificans Progressiva-spreading vampire apocalypse.
When it comes to cruelty, Blades is Kid to Sonja Shaw’s Play. A retired police officer, Blades is one of those thumb nubs who seem equate the term “restoring parental rights” with “allowing Christ-loving parents to stampede educators while removing any books they choose because of some warped sense of pornographic guilt.” Blades led the charge against ethnic studies in school, though I genuinely wonder whether she could define the words “gender” or “studies,” or properly explain what gender studies entail. She’s also a big ol’ ICE gal who got her ass kicked in this delightful exchange with Tricia Quintero.
8. Dr. Jeff Barke, Doctor, ex-Rossmoor Community Service Director
Every time you see a bunch of local GOP sprigs cheering the potential imprisonment of (85-year-old) Dr. Anthony Fauci, a baby dove soars past Barke’s kitchen window.
A right-wing acorn to the 100th degree, Barke is a former at-large member of the Los Alamitos Unified School District Board of Education who has used his medical background (he is, indeed, a doctor), white coat and stethoscope to convince the lemmings his unhinged and unmoored views are worth your attention.
During COVID, he famously pulled out a 9-millimeter gun during a Zoom interview to make the point a firearm offered more virus protection than a mask. Then he said: “What I do, Peggy, to protect you and to protect others when I’m in public—I think better than a mask—this is what I do. You know, I live in Orange County so I carry this wherever I go.”
He also advocated for utilizing unproven medications like hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin to treat COVID.
This Lincoln-esque statesman, leader and Costco shirt patron has committed to giving ICE his “full cooperation,” despite the increasing number of awful, unlawful, cruel incidents involving the agency. Hell, he said he’d welcome them to the city. Which, if we’re being honest, probably isn’t necessary, considering Rancho Santa Margarita ain’t exactly lacking in ICE types.
Even worse (I suppose) is Beall is one of those politicians who—Benjamin Netanyahu-like—clings to power at all costs. As the Orange Juice Blog noted last year, Bealle was threatened with a recall in 2020. To avoid such fate, he promised not to seek re-election. then, of course, he sough re-election.
This, from OJB …
Beall has been mayor for more than two decades—which, like death and taxes and three wins from the New York Jets—feels uncomfortably normal by now.
There is something delicious about the founding president of the South Orange County Republicans misspelling “Republicans” on her LinkedIn page …
… but there’s nothing delicious about Gennawey’s impact on local politics. And what I mean is this: By many accounts, Elaine is a nice person. She comes off as warm, as engaging. If you speak to her at the upcoming Sea Country Festival (she’s usually there, alongside a life-sized Trump cardboard cutout), you’ll most certainly find her delightful. And, back in the day, she was very involved in local schools, in helping young boys and girls better themselves, in showing the kiddies a bright and optimistic future. I really mean that: She was a gem and devoted community steward.
So how in the name of Fred Flintstone [I’m about to start yelling, people] DO YOU STAND IN FRONT OF A DONALD TRUMP CARDBOARD CUTOUT AT EVERY FAIR? HOW ARE YOU OK WITH THE RAW CRUELTY? THE MEANNESS? THE INSULTS? THE VULGARITY? THE LIES? WHAT HAPPENED TO YOU—AND DO YOU REALIZE YOU’VE NOT ONLY SOILED YOUR NAME, BUT SHOWN FAR TOO MANY PEOPLE THAT KINDNESS IS MEANINGLESS, AND THAT THE NICE OLDER WOMAN WHO ONCE VOLUNTEERED IN THE COMMUNITY IS JUST ANOTHER RIGHT-WING HACK WILLING TO SURRENDER HER KINDNESS TO A LIFELONG HUCKSTER WITH AN ORANGE GLOW?
SERIOUSLY, ELAINE. DID THE PUSSY GRAB COMMENT NOT CAUSE YOU SOME PAUSE? WHAT ABOUT THE PRISONERS OF WAR-AREN’T-HEROES LINE? THE FIVE DRAFT DEFERMENTS? THE BANKRUPTCIES?
How does a nice person—even one engaged in GOP politics—sit back and watch?
If you’re me, and you’re covering local politics with a bit of snark and attitude, nothing is better than having someone both vile and destructive whose head resembles an uncircumcised penis.
Dickie is a retired police officer, which actually sucks—because he conforms to every negative stereotype of the gig. He’s mean. He’s crude. He seems pretty racist and sexist. He’s a small little man who walks with a Clubber Lang swagger—and Dickie would surely hate that comparison, because Clubber Lang is Black.
I’ve seen Dickie operate at myriad Huntington Beach City Council meetings, and the dude is just a bully in every … single … sense of the word. He’s also (and this is no exaggeration) an absolute moron who seemed troubled nary a bit by his fellow law enforcement officers being battered at the Jan. 6 attacks. Police brutality? What police brutality? Let’s build a Trump statue!
Dickie is a simple and small man with a a giant ego who reminds me very much of Bull Connor.
First, were I starting a band right now, I’d name it “Brenda and the Lebsacks,” and we’d kick some serious ass opening for Lit and Suicidal Tendencies at the House of Blues Anaheim.
Second, well, Brenda Lebsack is yet another (yawn) anti-trans warrior just scratching and clawing for Riley Gaines to step aside so Sean Hannity will finally put an end to her appearances on fringe right-wing podcasts and call “The Sack” up to Fox News.
On March 11, 2023, Williams was allegedly involved in a Hulk Hogan-v.-Andre the Giant-level road rage incident, attacking a 20-year-old driver, throwing him to the ground and choking him.
The best part? When reached by Hicks, Williams said his political opponents were trying to destroy his personal and professional career.
Alas, it didn’t work. Dude still holds his gig.
PS: Included in his official bio: “Dr. Williams strongly believes in our nation's founding fathers' vision of our country being the "city on the shining hill." He consistently promotes our nation's Constitution, the spirit of the Declaration of Independence, and the reliable standards of Judeo-Christian values as the reason for our nation's greatness.” Google Translation: Look, I don’t love everything that happened on January 6. But …
So Andrew Do is literally in prison as you read this, serving five years after being found guilty of using taxpayer dough to buy all sorts of stuff for his own personal pleasure (houses, meals, cars, etc). Making matters worse, he funneled the loot through a non-profit run by … his daughter.
The FBI wound up raiding his house, leading toward Do’s resignation and guilty plea to—to quote Nick Gerda for LAist—”taking bribes to award tax dollars to people who diverted $7.9 million that was supposed to feed needy seniors during the pandemic.”
There is dumb. There is profoundly dumb. There is historically dumb. There is sloth with a head injury dumb. There is a sloth with a head injury addicted to crack cocaine dumb. There is a sloth with a head injury addicted to crack cocaine while listening to a ceaseless loop of Rush Limbaugh dumb.
And then there is Garrett Dwyer, who was appointed in 2025 to represent the third district of the Aliso Viejo City Council.
To watch Dwyer in action is to understand why dogs sniff their own poop. An unelected member of the council who was appointed by the MAGA majority to replace a Black progressive man who moved away, Dwyer recently dazzled the masses by hijacking a meeting that was supposed to be—innocently—about Aliso Viejo traffic patterns. A pair of experts were brought in, and recommended to the council that speed limits be reduced by five mph in certain stretches (primarily by schools).
Dwyer responded by pulling out his tablet (always with tablet, this guy) and reading (in what sounded suspiciously like AI-generated slop), “Reduction of the speed limit is a restriction of the freedom of movement of the citizens of the United States.”
Seriously.
He went on to complain the the traffic standards were being adopted from Europe—and that it was Europe’s attempt to get Americans out of their cars.
If you’re wondering what, precisely, Garrett Dwyer knows of traffic patterns, he works as a mortgage broker.
It’s, oh, 60 years from now, and Melissa Crew dies peacefully in her sleep (to be clear, I’m not wishing death upon anyone. She’ll be around 100—so a nice long life). Melissa is surrounded by friends and loved ones, and as she drifts off she somehow comes to the realization that literally e-v-e-r-y-t-h-i-n-g she worked for … every battle she fought … every trans kid who felt ostracized and every parent of a trans kid who felt attacked and battered … was bullshit.
Maybe it’s God. Maybe it’s Satan. Maybe it’s former Blind Melon singer Shannon Hoon. Whatever the case, a spiritual entity greets her and says, “Hey, Missy, bad news. All that shit was nonsense, and I’m here to tell you there’s no heaven. You’re just dead. Ciao.”
Crew is a junk-ball mixture of warped and determined. She heads an operation, Moms on the Ground, that was initially registered under an already existing for-profit tech company called MJC Innovations. Four years ago, MJC morphed into Moms on the Ground and Crew teamed up with a gaggle of local loons to bring forth the magic.
According to an old LinkedIn page, Crew’s background is as a cosmetologist and health care company owner. But, hey, even skin care professionals can find Jesus. These days, Moms on the Ground is all about trans kids. Trans kids in sports. Trans kids in bathrooms. Trans kids in bathroom sports. Oh, and they’re also about “faith, families & freedom.” Though, like all the other hypocrites here, they had no apparent problem with Jan. 6, with Trump cheating on his wife with a porn star (No condom! Just sex!), with Trump calling people retarded and ugly and stupid.
Like Will O’Neill, Wagner is a former mayor (of Irvine). Also like Will O’Neill, Wagner is a MAGA-foaming zombie who does as his masters insist and downplayed actions related to Andrew Do’s corruption scandal.
This one is like shooting fish in a particularly small barrel. Gracey is a first-generation Latina woman who is all in on MAGA, loves everything ICE is doing, rolls with the QAnon crew and worked hard to demonize librarians and keep non-porn porn out of schools. As we speak, she’s now running against the great Chris Kluwe for Assembly—and there are enough folks not paying attention that she may well win.
I’m pretty sure she’s 95 percent crazy, five percent asshole—but it could be 90-10. Just a warped and vile person who Will O’Neill would normally have nothing to do with.
As a longtime sports writer, I’ve seen the demise of athletes who—because of age or injury or some extraneous circumstance—fall apart, fade away and are never seen again.
This is the fate about to meet Young Kim, who will likely get her ass kicked by fellow Republican Ken Calvert in the redrawn 40th.
And here’s what’s particularly pathetic about Young Kim: Deep down, she’s a somewhat sensible moderate who (even in these modern times) was liked by all sides. She was agreeably, decent, reasoned, kind, chipper. You could talk to her and feel heard. You could make points as a Democrat and have her consider your stance.
Then, as a survival mechanism, she abandoned all principles and went full MAGA. It was a ludicrous rightward shift; a selfish-yet-misguided move that will result with her inevitable crash and burn and eternal banishment to Cameo, where she will spend the rest of her days peddling $5 birthday messages alongside Vanilla Ice, Bo Bice and Kyle Rittenhouse.
Like all towns and cities across America, Westminster has its problems. Thankfully, Amy Phan West stepped up to lead the charge for …
Resources to alleviate homelessness.
Safe sidewalks.
An amazing Christmas tree lighting.
A new youth baseball field.
… a street to be renamed Charlie Kirk Way.
Seriously. And now there is a street in Westminster named Charlie Kirk Way.
Had Charlie Kirk ever visited Westminster? No. Did he have family there? No. Personal business interests? No. Is there any logical reason to have a Charlie Kirk Way in Westminster, Cal.? No.
Truth be told, this was yet another tired culture warrior moment brought forth by a woman with (apparently) little better to do than trigger the libs.
Of all the people on this list, no one makes me as sad as Lorey, who works for the California Family Council and who seems to genuinely believe she is doing God’s tasks by speaking out against trans athletes and appearing on various right-wing news networks to amplify her message.
Youth, George Bernard Shaw said, is wasted on the young …
I hope Sophia reads this, because I wanna say to her—directly: I have no problem with you standing up for your beliefs. If you really, truly, deeply feel trans athletes are the issue of our time, go for it, I guess. Use your IG feed to spew and spew and spew. Bark away, girl. Bark and bark and bark some more.
But I ask you these two questions:
If your goal is (as you say) to honor God, why is your face everywhere? Being serious—why are you always posting your new shoes, your new dress, your fresh cut. Selfies in a mirror. Hugging your dog. Why is it all about you? And are you familiar with Philippians 2:3-8?
If you’re truly a protector of women (which you seem to aspire to be), why no words about Donald Trump (the man you voted for and support) cheating on wife 1 with wife 2, wife 2 with wife 3, wife 3 with a porn star he raw dogged, then paid off in hush money? Why nothing about all the sexual assault accusations? About E. Jean Carroll? You’re pro-woman, Sophia. Do you think they’re lying? All of them? Every single one? Going back four decades?
The truth is, Sophia, you’re being used as a tool by the old, white, perverted men who run your party; the men who conceal the Epstein Files; the men who hide Donald Trump’s grotesque treatment of women.
One of the worst things about Bucknum and her GOP colleagues on the Mission Viejo City Council? The way they treat Cynthia Vasquez, the lone liberal on the five-person board and a genuinely good public servant.
For decades, the mayoral title has rotated from member to member, sans pause for political affiliation. Yet, without fail, Vasquez is always bypassed. To quote Laura Lacko: “You have one Democratic board member, Cynthia Vasquez, who’s basically marginalized by the rest of the board. They don’t take her seriously. Don’t really show her any respect. Bypass her for mayor They’re a bunch of MAGA weirdos who just want to ... take what’s happened on the national level and make it local and sorta act like you’re wrong, they’re right and that’s that.”
A confession: Placing Baugh on this list in 2026 is a little bit like blaming Christina Aguilera for the state of modern music. Put different, Baugh is a dude who ran for office a bunch, lost a bunch, headed the Orange County GOP, threw elbows, kicked rocks, wasn’t particularly popular, vanished—and pops up every now and then like a gutter rat who smells your cheese. He’s brash and irksome and always seeking out leftover scraps, but he’s also increasingly irrelevant.
As I noted in the Lisa Davis entry, I’ve paid far too much attention to Capo Unified. It’s a brain-draining, soul-sucking experience of the greatest degree.
But, since this is my list … Adnams is something truly special. She’s the perfect Moms for Liberty Stepford robot; a woman who seems to 100-percent believe she is here—on earth and on the board—to bring people as close to Jesus Christ as possible. It is her life mission—”I’m a Kingdom-first person.” It’s her reason for breathing and eating and pooping. If you don’t believe me, watch her crazy-ass podcast, which puts the White in White Christian Nationalism …
The worst part? She’s dumb. Just not smart. Dim. Limited. Chews the bubble gum wrapper. But too vapid to see it, and determined to make Christ-like changes to portions of the world not asking for them.
First, I wanna say something important, and sincere: Mike Munzing has battled serious health issues for years, and I (truly) pull for his well-being. I do not wish badly for anyone on this list. I mean that.
It’s actually annoying, because I’m pretty sure Munzing is (like Lisa Davis) seven parts ignorant, two parts enjoyably cruel, one part daydreaming of weekends on the Love Boat alongside Gopher and Doc.
The political world has been consumed over the past few days with a Republican meltdown about Trump’s aide Natalie Harp.
The story began when Democratic Georgia senator Jon Ossoff said at an event for his reelection campaign on Sunday that Trump does not appear to want to do the job of the presidency. Ossoff added: “He golfs and trades stocks. See, he doesn’t want to do the job. He wants to build his ballroom and travel with Natalie on their apparently defenseless flying palace gifted by the emir of Qatar.” That was it. That was all he said.
On Monday, CNN reporter Kristen Holmes asked Trump to respond to Ossoff’s comment. Trump first referred to Ossoff as Pee-wee Herman, a child-man film character created by late actor Paul Reubens, then defended the ballroom and attacked the reporter. Later, as Scott Nover of the Washington Post reported, the White House rapid response team took to social media to call Holmes a “disgraceful, humiliating embarrassment to her alleged profession.”
Then, in an unusual escalation, the account targeted Holmes’s children, posting: “Someday, your children will come across your disgusting and inhumane question. They will be sickened and embarrassed to have a parent be so callous and vindictive. It’s quite troubling.”
You could almost feel the palpable relief that the White House might be able to gin up a controversy that could rally the base, one that, for the first time in a long time, didn’t automatically show the president or the administration in a bad light. Undermining Ossoff, whose speeches have been a particularly sharp thorn in the administration’s side lately, appeared to be icing on the cake.
Certainly the call went out to right-wing media figures to pile on to the idea that Ossoff was making a sexist attack on Harp. Megyn Kelly posted that Ossoff “was clearly implying that Trump is having an affair w/his staffer,” and Michael Knowles wrote: “Every time I see a woman at work, I just know she’s sleeping with her boss! Am I right? Anyway, am I the new Obama yet?” White House spokesperson Steven Cheung wrote: “Jon Jackoff has to be the biggest cuck loser in politics,” and Newt Gingrich posted: “Jon Ossoff owes Natalie Harp a personal apology for having smeared her.”
Matt Royer of the Democratic National Committee Youth Council noted: “The word “affair” was never uttered, and yet apparently every single conservative talking head in the world heard it anyway, so what does that tell you?” He added: “Never have I seen a more exquisite example of the Streisand Effect where someone’s supporters fall over themselves to basically accuse them of adultery when it wasn’t even brought up.”
Commandeering the news cycle with manufactured outrage distracted attention from other issues Ossoff did call attention to in the same sentence. Ossoff called out Trump’s apparent stock manipulation, an issue Trump highlighted recently when he sold early access to his Truth Social posts for as much as $100,000 a month. It has been widely reported that investors appear to be making a killing by anticipating Trump’s posts as they make markets go up or down.
An investigation by Casey Tolan and Isabelle Chapman of CNN published on July 16 found that Trump himself “made at least 44 stock purchases of 21 different companies within a week before he posted a complimentary Truth Social message about the firms, their executives or their products.”
“He’s selling faster access to his tweets, and then you can bet on the markets,” comedian Shane Gillis recently told popular podcaster Joe Rogan, “It’s literally insider trading.” Rogan, whose support for Trump in 2024 was important to his victory, responded: “Wait a minute, is that real? How is that legal? Who’s telling him this is a good idea? $100K to get early tweets? That’s literally crazy. He’s just on a grab.”
As Matthew Chapman of RawStory reported, the two went on to discuss Trump’s involvement with cryptocurrency. “This government has done some (expletive) that no government has ever done before and one of them is the crypto stuff,” Rogan said. “The crypto stuff is nuts. Trump has made billions in crypto. Then you got his sons and his sons are involved in these weird business deals, and there’s a lot of money flowing around that you could dig in and start arresting people.”
Attacking Ossoff for allegedly smearing Harp also shifted attention from Trump’s ballroom, which is enormously unpopular and which is in the news as Trump has appealed to the Supreme Court to override lower courts’ rulings that he does not have the authority to build such a structure without the permission of Congress. Even Republican members of Congress seem reluctant to grant such permission, as it highlights Trump’s grabs for luxury while Americans are hurting under high gas and grocery prices caused by Trump’s tariff wars and war on Iran.
Recently, New York Times journalist Maggie Haberman, who with Jonathan Swan wrote about Trump’s second administration in Regime Change, has told podcasters Ezra Klein and Axios’s Mike Allen that Trump spends about “70%” of his time working on his Washington, D.C. projects. “He is spending a huge amount of energy, mental and otherwise, on these renovation projects, beautification projects around Washington, and then monuments to self,” Haberman told Allen.
She described a visit with Trump seventeen days into the Iran war in which “[i]t was very clear what his mind was on while we were there. And what it was not really on was the war.” “You would think that on the 17th day of the war that he would have maps of the Middle East or maps of troop deployments—who knows,” Haberman said. “He picks up these pictures, and [they’re] of maple trees. And he says: ‘I am choosing maple trees for the White House. I am good at picking trees.’ I’m paraphrasing here, but that is pretty much what he said.”
Recent news reports tie the lack of supplies on the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln to Iran’s damaging strike on the only U.S. naval base in the Middle East, known as Naval Support Activity Bahrain, in the first weeks of the war. Trump has downplayed the poor conditions aboard the vessel, infuriating the families of the sailors.
He continues to downplay the flailing of his administration in Iran, as well, as Iranian forces continue to control the Strait of Hormuz. When asked today about the strait, he told reporters: “Last night we had a lot of boats come through, we have possession, complete control of the strait, I mean, outside of nuisance value—and there is nuisance value when they shoot a drone every once in a while, but and not everybody’s going to go through. But they come through. And over the last couple of weeks, we had a lot of oil coming in, a lot of oil. It’s not gonna be perfect, but it’s a lot of oil coming in, a lot. In fact, people are amazed.”
Scott Waldman of Politico reported on Monday that while an average of almost 140 ships a day traversed the strait before the war, last Sunday only 3 did.
The Harp story also has taken oxygen from increasing pushback against the Trump administration. Yesterday ABC and its parent corporation, The Walt Disney Company, launched a federal lawsuit against the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), saying the Trump administration violated their free speech rights. The lawsuit claims that administration officials tried to do Trump’s bidding by launching investigations and challenging broadcast licenses because Trump didn’t like their talk show opinions, news coverage, and late-night comedians.
As David Folkenflik of NPR noted, the lawsuit began with the words: “Government censorship is deeply un-American.”
This is a one-eighty for ABC. In 2024 it agreed to donate $16 million to Trump’s presidential library to settle a lawsuit Trump brought over the assertion by George Stephanopoulos that Trump had been found liable for raping writer E. Jean Carroll. In fact, Trump had been found liable for sexual abuse, and the judge said that while what he did fell under the common definition of rape, New York state law had a very precise definition that his actions didn’t fit.
The settlement made ABC one of the first to settle with Trump. That money seems to have disappeared, and there is currently a congressional investigation into where it, along with almost $50 million more from similar settlements, has gone.
FCC chair Brendan Carr seemed to back away from previous threats, saying that ABC and Disney were acting too hastily and that the FCC has not yet decided whether to renew the licenses. “Ultimately,” he said, “they’re going to get a fair shake before the agency.”
Jeremy Barr of The Guardian shed light on the issue today when he reported on new documents obtained thanks to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request and a lawsuit from Democracy Forward showing that Carr has been working closely with the White House and right-wing media. In addition to talking and meeting with White House officials, Carr has been working with the Fox News Channel and the chair of the right-wing Sinclair Broadcast Group.
There is also the uncomfortable fact that the national debt passed a record $40 trillion yesterday, much sooner than expected. The U.S. is currently spending more than a trillion dollars a year to pay interest on the national debt, more than it spends on defense.
As Steven Rattner noted in the New York Times yesterday, Trump said in his 2024 campaign, “We’re going to grow like nobody’s ever grown before,” but in fact, the economy is slowing. He promised to bring the cost of gasoline below $2 a gallon; it is now above $4 a gallon.
In 2025, Trump said he would balance the federal budget, but in fact, thanks largely to his tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations, the deficit is growing. Also in 2025, Trump promised that his new tariffs would enable him both to cut taxes and to pay down the deficit; in fact, the national debt relative to gross domestic product (GDP) is about to break the record set during World War II.
Republican operatives appear to have thought that the Harp story could enable them to pivot to attack Ossoff and change the narrative, but it seems they miscalculated. Their attention to Ossoff’s statement that Trump would rather “travel with Natalie” has brought attention to the relationship between the 80-year-old president and the 35-year-old aide, who was once a host on the right-wing OAN network.
Maggie Haberman told MS NOW that for Trump, Harp “is sort of his binky, for lack of a better way of putting it, a comfort blanket.” She is the main buffer between Trump and the outside world, filtering the information the president sees, setting up meetings and passing along messages, writing social media posts, and printing out articles praising Trump.
In their book, Haberman and Swan wrote that Harp leaves “adoring letters” to Trump in “private spaces,” saying things like: “you are all that matters to me.” CNN’s Holmes reported that Harp is “physically close to Trump at all hours of the day” and that Harp once jumped into the trunk of an SUV to stay close to Trump after being told there was no room for her in the vehicle.
The renewed scrutiny of Harp has turned up the story that for more than a year, she refused to get a routine security clearance to work at the White House. A national security official expressed concern to Jake Traylor and Jacqueline Alemany of MS NOW that Harp has more access to sensitive information than nearly all of the other White House officials.
When Trump left a decoy Air Force One airplane for a smaller plane in early July, he left behind cabinet secretaries but brought Harp with him.
It has been a little more than a month since China recovered an orbital-class rocket booster for the first time. A second launch operator accomplished a similar feat Tuesday in another sign of China's growing launch capability.
It took 10 years for a second US launch company, Blue Origin, to propulsively land an orbital-class booster after SpaceX did it with the Falcon 9 rocket in 2015. SpaceX has since added a second reusable rocket to its fleet with Starship and its Super Heavy booster. Perhaps a third American company will join SpaceX and Blue Origin's club in 2027. Rocket Lab, Stoke Space, Relativity Space, and Firefly Aerospace—working in partnership with Northrop Grumman—are working on reusable rockets that could make their first flights in the next couple of years.
A similar number of launch companies are working on reusable rockets in China. Some of them operate under the auspices of the sprawling state-owned China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC). Others are more commercial in nature, driven by capital investment from private industry.
NASA and Katalyst Space Technologies announced Wednesday they are giving up on a robotic mission to rescue the Swift gamma-ray telescope before it falls out of orbit.
The rescue satellite, named Link, launched July 3 on a journey to fly up to NASA's Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory, capture it with three robotic arms, and boost its orbit high enough to escape a looming reentry. Link is about the size of a refrigerator, with two power-generating solar arrays and three xenon-fueled electric thrusters to send Swift into a safer, higher orbit.
Katalyst, the startup leading the Swift rescue effort, said Wednesday that "ongoing attitude control issues" will prevent the Link satellite from completing its rescue mission. The spacecraft is still alive, and Katalyst said it will make the most of Link's remaining capacity, which may still allow it to get near enough to Swift for a demonstration of the satellite's close-in navigation system.
Luke Burgis left Wall Street after two years, founded a few successful companies in his twenties, then walked away to spend three years in a Roman seminary on the path to the priesthood. He now runs the Cluny Institute and teaches at Catholic University. His book Wanting made René Girard legible to a general audience; the new one, The One and the Ninety-Nine, takes mimetic theory into the dynamics of self and crowd in an age of social contagion.
He joined Tyler to discuss whether the age of pessimism is ending, why the Anglo world in particular seems so unhappy, whether Dostoevsky or Thomas Mann better diagnoses modernity, the kind of reader his own book would ruin, why he thinks AI will make social contagion weaker, what put him off consulting with Anthropic on Claude’s constitution, what effective altruism misses, why men and women are drifting apart, what he’d fund in every American city, the case for reintroducing friction, whether a Gnostic reading of the lost sheep explains our moment, what Rod Dreher gets right about withdrawal, why Genoa is Italy’s most underrated city, what confession times reveal about a church, why Italians seem tired of their Catholicism, why he didn’t become a priest, where he differs from Ross Douthat, why exorcists appear to be on the rise, the sudden mimetic antisemitism on the right, the book his 23-year-old self would have hated, what he secretly admires about Silicon Valley, why Michigan never left him, what the original Cluny can teach a modern talent network, how he hopes to face his own death, what he’ll do next, and more.
Excerpt:
COWEN: I’m not saying you’ll ever do it, but what does your escape fantasy look like? One of mine is I’ll go live in a third-tier city in Mexico. I’m not going to do it, but sometimes I think about it. Cost of living would be very low. The food would be amazing. I could improve my Spanish.
BURGIS: It is moving to Genoa with my family, making my US income, living in Italy. I love Italy. I love the food. I love the people. I love the culture. I feel lighter while I’m there. I laugh more. We eat dinner later. I love everything about it. It would probably be living in Italy for the most part, or at least making that my home base, brushing up on my Italian, working less.
COWEN: Why Genoa? It’s a wonderful city. It’s still medieval, right, in a funny way?
BURGIS: It’s medieval. I think it’s the most underrated city in Italy.
COWEN: In Italy, I mean, yes. I agree. Yes.
BURGIS: I think it’s the most underrated city. You agree.
COWEN: I took my wife there. She was stunned. “How come no one goes to Genoa?” She was telling me.
BURGIS: It’s close to Cinque Terre. It’s this city that’s elevated. It has a fascinating history. It was still a very functional port city. It was really the most important city in Italy, arguably the world, during when Spain was a great power. It’s very cosmopolitan. It reminds me of Marseille a little bit. It’s vertical, breathtaking views. The people there, they’re not very touristy. The Italians there seem indifferent to you as a tourist.
It just feels very, very homey. It’s so close to a lot of other great things in Italy. You can get to Torino relatively easily. That whole area up there, Bra, where the Slow Food movement originated, you’re just in striking distance from everything. Nobody I know that goes to Italy goes to Genoa. I plead with them. I’m like, “Please, just go to Genoa.”
COWEN: I am the exception. My wife sometimes talks of wanting to live in the smaller towns nearby, which we’re not going to do because we’re slated for a third-tier city in Mexico, but we’re not going to do that either. I sometimes think of Northern Italy as a place where there were fewer different dimensions for mimetic desire. That is, more people dress the same. There are fewer status dimensions, maybe less room for eccentrics compared to America. Do you think that’s true, or do you think I’m off base? Paris is a bit like this also. There’s a certain notion of what kind of shoes an Italian man should wear. They wear them, and they’re amazing, and actually more affordable than here. There’s a sameness to some things.
An iceberg drifts through the Denmark Strait in this image acquired on June 12, 2026, by the OLI (Operational Land Imager) on Landsat 9.
NASA Earth Observatory/Lauren Dauphin
Greenland’s jagged coastline is lined with fjords, many of them cradling marine-terminating glaciers that routinely calve icebergs into the water. It’s common to see these bergs, small and large, drifting in the island’s fjords each summer once the sea ice breaks up. In summer 2026, one exceptionally large berg turned up in the Denmark Strait—more than a thousand kilometers south of where it apparently originated.
These images, captured by the OLI (Operational Land Imager) on Landsat 9, show the iceberg on June 12 as it drifted in the strait between Greenland and Iceland. It was just south of Kangikajiip Appalia, a cape on Greenland’s east coast visible in the scene’s upper left, amid a mixture of sea ice and berg fragments known as “mélange.”
Alexis Denton, oceanographer and chief scientist with the International Ice Patrol, noted that several clues indicate it is an iceberg rather than thick, multi-year sea ice: its proximity to shore, its whiter color, and larger size compared to the surrounding sea ice. Measuring roughly 17 square kilometers (7 square miles) on June 12, the iceberg was about five times the area of New York City’s Central Park. That’s modest compared to the behemoth bergs that calve from Antarctic glaciers and ice shelves but large by Greenland standards.
Keld Quistgaard, a senior ice advisor with the Danish Meteorological Institute’s Greenland Ice Service, noted that it originated in Jøkelbugten—a bay in northeastern Greenland. The berg’s precise origin within that bay, however, remains something of a mystery. It’s possible that the berg broke off from Zachariæ Isstrøm or its adjacent remnant ice shelf. The ice shelf, which together with Zachariæ Isstrøm once filled the bay, was abandoned after the glacier rapidly retreated in the early 2000s.
Tracing its path back through satellite imagery is challenging. Through spring, the bay and surrounding coastal areas are choked with sea ice and berg fragments, making individual bergs hard to distinguish, especially if covered in bright snow. In late May, for instance, the berg was surrounded by numerous look-alikes. Only later in the season, as it drifted farther south and the ice around it thinned out, did it become distinct enough to easily spot.
The iceberg’s bright white surface is pocked with light blue meltwater ponds in this detailed view of the image, acquired on June 12, 2026, by the OLI (Operational Land Imager) on Landsat 9.
NASA Earth Observatory/Lauren Dauphin
Its size and striking network of blue meltwater ponds offer some clues to its origin, according to Christopher Shuman, a retired University of Maryland glaciologist. Shuman thinks the berg broke from the remnant ice shelf rather than the glacier itself. Bergs calved from Zachariæ Isstrøm tend to be smaller, he said. Also, the berg’s surface—pocked with meltwater ponds, “like Swiss cheese”—closely resembles the remnant shelf ice. Past satellite images show pieces of that shelf ice drifting south and getting trapped among islands bordering the bay, where winds and tides have jostled them for years.
As of mid-August, the berg was about 1,500 kilometers (900 miles) from the bay, drifting south on the Greenland Coastal Current into the North Atlantic. Quistgaard expected the iceberg to gradually disintegrate throughout the month. Recent satellite imagery suggested it was doing just that.
Breaking up in the Denmark Strait means that remnants of the berg are unlikely to drift into busier shipping lanes that go past the southern tip of Greenland. “Its journey is a reminder of the dynamic Earth,” Shuman said, “as well as the seasonal variability of the ice in this part of the North Atlantic.”
NASA Earth Observatory images by Lauren Dauphin, using Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey.Story by Kathryn Hansen.
Doug Anderson and Steve Jordan Tomaszewski
Updated
America’s space economy is scaling faster than its industrial base can support. Commercial constellations are proliferating, national security architectures are becoming more distributed and resilient and civil missions are growing […]
Firefly Aerospace will fly a payload from Zeno Power on an upcoming lunar lander mission to test a radioisotope heat source to enable future missions to survive the lunar night.
HELSINKI — Landspace successfully landed the first stage of its Zhuque-3 rocket Tuesday following the second launch of the rocket from the Gobi Desert. The second Zhuque-3 rocket lifted off […]
Company founded by former SpaceX executives aims to produce a low-cost hypersonic weapon and a broader portfolio of longer-range strike and missile defense weapons
SAN FRANCISCO – Strategic communications and consulting firm IN2 will have access to Eartheye Space multi-sensor satellite tasking and analytics through a memorandum of understanding signed Aug. 19. IN2 will […]
Katalyst Space and NASA have called off plans to use the company’s Link spacecraft to raise the orbit of the agency’s Swift gamma-ray observatory, citing attitude-control problems with the spacecraft.
East Aurora, NY — Moog Inc. (NYSE: MOG.A and MOG.B), a worldwide designer, manufacturer and systems integrator of high-performance precision motion and fluid controls and control systems announces a new, […]
Mortgage work doesn’t sit still for long. Rates shift. Loan products change. Borrower questions get sharper. Rules get updated. If you’re an MLO, staying current isn’t a nice bonus. It’s part of doing the job well.
That’s where MLO continuing education comes in. It helps mortgage professionals refresh essential knowledge as well as meet renewal requirements. They also stay sharp in a field where small mistakes can create big problems. Think of it as career maintenance.
Continuing Education Keeps Your Knowledge Fresh
You learned a lot when you first got licensed. Then real files showed up. Real borrowers asked real questions. Suddenly, the textbook version of lending met the daily version. Continuing education helps bridge that gap. It brings you back to core topics like federal law, ethics, consumer protection, nontraditional loans, and responsible lending practices.
That review matters because mortgage details can fade over time. You may use some rules every week and others only once in a while. CE brings those less-used topics back into focus before they catch you off guard.
It Helps You Keep Up With Consumer Expectations
Borrowers are more informed than they used to be. Many research loan options before they ever speak with an MLO. Some come prepared with good questions. Others come prepared with incomplete or inaccurate information they’ve found online. A mortgage professional who stays educated can explain things clearly and correct confusion without sounding dismissive. That builds trust.
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau offers public mortgage information for borrowers, including loan basics and consumer protections. Knowing what borrowers may read before they contact you can help you answer questions in a clearer, more useful way.
CE Strengthens Your Compliance Habits
Compliance may not be the most exciting part of mortgage lending, but it protects everyone involved. It protects borrowers. It protects your company. It protects your license.
Continuing education reinforces the rules that shape daily mortgage work. You revisit disclosures, fair lending standards, advertising concerns, ethics, and other topics tied to responsible origination.
That doesn’t mean you’ll remember every rule from memory. Nobody does. It means you build better instincts. You know when something needs a closer look, and you’re less likely to rush past important details.
It Can Improve Borrower Conversations
Good MLOs don’t just quote rates and collect paperwork. They explain options. They calm nerves. They help people understand what a loan decision means for their budget. Continuing education can sharpen that communication. As you review mortgage products and lending standards, you get better at turning technical points into plain English.
That skill matters during stressful conversations. A borrower may not remember every term you explain, but they’ll remember whether you made them feel confused or informed.
It Supports Long-Term Career Growth
The mortgage industry rewards professionals who keep learning. Experience is important but experience without current knowledge breeds stale habits. CE helps keep your skills current so you can stay competitive. It also shows that you take the work seriously. Clients, employers, referral partners, and colleagues notice that.
You don’t need to act like you know everything. In fact, the best professionals usually don’t. They keep learning because they know the job keeps changing.
It Helps You Avoid Last-Minute Renewal Stress
Many MLOs need continuing education for license renewal. Waiting until the last minute can turn a simple task into a stressful sprint. Completing CE early gives you breathing room.
You can finish the course, confirm your hours, take care of renewal steps, and correct any issues before the deadline is too close. Completing your CE early allows you to address any issues that may arise before the renewal deadline.
Staying Competitive Starts With Staying Prepared
Continuous education enables mortgage professionals to remain informed, compliant, and prepared to have more productive conversations with borrowers. It also allows for license renewal and future growth.
Its best feature is that it keeps you plugged into the work. Mortgage lending needs transparency, accuracy, and trust. CE helps you safeguard all three.
Up betimes, and my wife up and about the house, Susan beginning to have her drunken tricks, and put us in mind of her old faults and folly and distractednesse, which we had forgot, so that I became mightily troubled with her. This morning came my joyners to new lay the floors, and begun with the dining room.
I out and see my viall again, and it is very well, and to Mr. Hollyard, and took some pills of him and a note under his hand to drink wine with my beere, without which I was obliged, by my private vowe, to drink none a good while, and have strictly observed it, and by my drinking of small beere and not eating, I am so mightily troubled with wind, that I know not what to do almost.
Thence to White Hall, and there met Mr. Moore, and fell a-talking about my Lord’s folly at Chelsey, and it was our discourse by water to London and to the great coffee house against the Exchange, where we sat a good while talking; and I find that my lord is wholly given up to this wench, who it seems has been reputed a common strumpett. I have little encouragement from Mr. Moore to meddle with it to tell my Lord, for fear it may do him no good, but me hurt.
Thence homewards, taking leave of him, and met Tom Marsh, my old acquaintance at Westminster, who talks mightily of the honour of his place, being Clerke Assistant to the Clerke of the House of Commons, and I take him to be a coxcombe, and so did give him half a pint of wine, but drink none myself, and so got shut of him. So home, and there found my wife almost mad with Susan’s tricks, so as she is forced to let her go and leave the house all in dirt and the clothes all wet, and gets Goody Taylour to do the business for her till another comes. Here came Will Howe, and he and I alone in my chamber talking of my Lord, who drives me out of love to my Lord to tell my Lord of the matter we discoursed of, which tend so much to the ruin of his state, and so I resolved to take a good heart and do whatever comes of it. He gone, we sat down and eat a bit of dinner fetched from the cooke’s, and so up again and to my joyners, who will make my floors very handsome. By and by comes in Pembleton, which begun to make me sweat, but I did give him so little countenance, and declared at one word against dancing any more, and bid him a short (God be with you) myself, and so he took as short a leave of my wife and so went away, and I think without any time of receiving any great satisfaction from my wife or invitation to come again.
To my office till it was dark doing business, and so home by candle light to make up my accounts for my Lord and Mr. Moore. By and by comes Mr. Moore to me, and staid a good while with me making up his accounts and mine, and we did not come to any end therein for want of his papers, and so put it off to another time.
He supped with me in all my dirt and disorder, and so went away and we to bed.
I discoursed with him a great while about my speaking to my Lord of his business, and I apprehend from him that it is likely to prove perhaps of bad effect to me and no good to him, and therefore I shall even let it alone and let God do his will, at least till my Lord is in the country, and then we shall see whether he resolves to come to Chelsey again or no, and so order the stopping of him therein if we can.
My hypothesis is that there is a new opportunity for Extensible Software on the web. LLMs radically lower the cost of authoring extensions, and modern sandbox primitives lower the deployment cost and provide good security boundaries. We can build our app as a solid, accountable core, and allow users to safely extend it in many directions by having LLMs fill in the missing pieces. We can give our users super powers.
— Jeremy Morrell, Extensible Software in the age of LLMs
Last week I recorded an episode of the Talking Postgres podcast with Claire Giordano on the subject of "How AI is changing software development". We had a really great conversation. Here are a couple of my highlights from a lightly edited transcript (prompt to Claude: "very minor edits to remove disfluencies").
This is the latest version of an argument I've been trying to build about why sometimes it does make sense to talk about lines of code as an indicator of productivity with coding agents, at 35:01:
A lot of people will tell you it makes no sense to measure productivity in lines of code. I’d actually disagree, because there’s a hard limit. In the before-times, a software engineer could produce a few hundred lines of production-ready code per day — and 200 lines of working, debugged, production-level code is an incredibly good day. Most days you’d produce 50 or 60.
If agents let you produce a thousand lines of debugged code, that really is a very meaningful improvement — as long as the code is the same quality: maintainable, tested, all of that. You can get to that point with agents, but it takes a huge amount of skill and knowledge and experience. That’s what senior engineers are made of.
I can do way more work as a single engineer than I could without agents. So you could argue, why should a company have more than one engineer? Beyond the obvious bus factor thing — a team of one is a very badly designed team — the answer is that the new limiting factor is cognitive capacity. I can churn out code a hundred times faster. I don’t have the cognitive capacity to stay on top of 100 times the amount of code. So you still need a team of engineers, so you can load balance that cognitive capacity across the team.
Simon: There’s a concept in The Mythical Man-Month — conceptual integrity — where well-designed software has an integrity to it: there are no surprises in it, it covers exactly the right domain of things, everything fits together and makes sense. That’s so much harder with coding agents, where you can have an idea for a feature, run a prompt, and five minuteslater you’ve got the feature. Your software grows little weird bumps in funny different directions.
Claire: You know my analogy for that? The Winchester Mystery House.
Simon: It’s got 140 rooms, because the woman who built it was the widow of the guy who invented the Winchester rifle, and her psychic told her she’d be haunted by the ghosts of everyone killed with that rifle unless she kept building the house forever. So for 40 years she kept adding new rooms.
That’s exactly the problem with coding agents and software: it’s very easy to keep adding new rooms, because the cost of adding those rooms is so much cheaper. What you end up with is something where the conceptual integrity falls apart — and then it’s harder to make decisions about it.
It all keeps coming back to discipline. It used to be that the discipline was enforced on you by the amount of time it took. You’d come up with an idea for a crazy feature and think “yeah, but that would take me a week — I cannot justify that, so I’ll forget about it.” If it takes an hour, it’s so much easier to justify.
(Side-note: the Wikipedia article includes credible sources that dispute the story about the psychic.)
Rising interest rates on government debt, in the United States and other countries, were at the top of the Financial Timeshome page and many other financial news sites yesterday. Indeed, long-term interest rates in many nations have reached levels not seen since the mid-2000s, before the global financial crisis:
As I will explain shortly, this rate surge is partly caused by budget deficits. And the rate surge raises the cost of servicing the existing government debt, thereby making future deficits worse. It also inflicts pain on both consumers and businesses. Notably, interest rates on home mortgages and car loans are much higher than they were pre-Covid, which is bad for affordability.
But I have a message for future policymakers: Don’t panic. Don’t let the usual suspects undermine your policy agenda by scaremongering about interest rates and government debt.
I say future policymakers because in the United States there is no point in offering sensible advice to current management. Trump and co. not only won’t pay attention to sound advice, they are completely beholden to Trump’s insatiable appetite for budget-busting vanity projects.Only a future Democratic administration will be willing to act in the nation’s interest to address rising interest rates and accelerating government deficits.
I’ll talk in a subsequent post about what a hypothetical Democratic president and Congress should do. But my most important advice is not to panic. Yes, high interest rates are troubling and the next administration shouldn’t emulate the blithe unconcern of the current White House. But there’s no evidence of a looming debt crisis.
And it’s crucial that we don’t repeat the great error of 2009-2010. At that time the size of the deficit was simply not a problem. But Beltway insiders and the media confected a grand scare about debt, making it the central issue of politics and paralyzing policy responses to the nation’s real economic problems.
So let me start my discussion of today’s deficits by asking why interest rates have risen.
Interest rates on government debt can rise for two main reasons. First, they can rise because the overall demand for credit in the economy is running ahead of supply. Second, they can rise because investors demand a risk premium: they don’t trust the government to honor its debt obligations, believing that it might either default or stoke inflation in order to shrink the real value of the debt.
The following chart on US interest rate history illustrates the first case, in which interest rates rise when the overall demand for credit is ahead of supply:
Interest rates were high in the late 1990s because there was a huge demand for funds to finance IT-related investments — dotcoms and telecoms. Rates fell after the dotcom bubble burst. The downward slide continued after the 2008 financial crisis as the demand for credit plunged in the wake of the bursting of the housing bubble.
In today’s economy there are two big sources of demand for credit. One is the AI boom, which appears to be bigger, even relative to the economy, than the IT boom of the 1990s. (Is it also a bubble? Probably, but that’s not crucialfor this discussion.)
The enormous demand for credit from the AI boom is revealed by the dramatic deterioration of the cash flow position of “hyperscalers,” the handful of giant players investing massively in datacenters. Until recently, Meta, Google and Microsoft were able to pay for their AI spending out of current cash flow, owing to the huge profits they earn from their monopoly positions. Now the hyperscalers are spending so much that they are forced to sell bonds to finance their expenditures on AI.
And the hyperscalers are not the only players looking for credit. Thanks in large part to the Trump tax cuts, the government deficit is now huge. Below is a graph of the federal budget surplus (negative, because it’s a deficit) as a share of GDP. The only times over the past 35+ years the deficit has been bigger than it is now were in the aftermath of the global financial crisis and in the depths of Covid, when it made sense to run temporary large deficits:
So the recent large increase in interest rates is a consequence of soaring demand for credit both to build datacenters and to cover federal deficits.
What about the second reason for a rise in the interest rates on government debt? Are fears about government solvency also driving interest rates? Interest rate spikes driven by concerns about fiscal soundness do happen. The most famous recent example is Greece:
In 2010-2011, there were pervasive claims that America was about to become Greece — claims that were clearly hyped to block efforts by the Obama administration to restore full employment, invest in infrastructure, and so on. However, America wasn’t Greece then, and we aren’t now.
The truth is that even fiscally irresponsible nations very rarely have acute debt crises unless they borrow large amounts in foreign currency, because countries that borrow in their own currency can’t literally run out of money — they can print more as needed. (For more detail on how hard it is for nations with own-currency borrowing to have debt crises, see my Mundell-Fleming lecture at the IMF, back in 2013.)
U.S. government debt is, of course, in dollars. And there is very little evidence that fears of a Greek-style crisis are driving interest rates now. For example, if markets were really worried about U.S. solvency and the potential for the government to inflate the debt away, this should be reflected in measures that track inflation. But there has been, in fact, very little change in the “breakeven” inflation rate, a measure of long-term inflation expectations:
Another indicator is the price of credit default swaps — insurance against a possible US default. These also haven’t moved much:
Source: World Government Bonds
Why are financial markets apparently unconcerned about U.S. solvency? Surely notbecause they expect Trump to act responsibly. The clear implication is that the markets expect Democrats to do what they’ve done repeatedly in the past: clean up the fiscal mess Republicans left behind.
So what should Democrats do? I’ll get to recommendations in a subsequent post. For now the key message is, don’t panic. Interest rates are up, but this is not a debt crisis.
I tasked Claude Fable 5 running in Claude Code for web with the following research task:
Put https://smolmachines.com through its paces as a fast secure sandbox. Explore what it would take to use this to run untrusted Python and JavaScript code in a way that is limited in what RAM and CPU time it can take up (protection against "while true") with no network access and filesystem access only to designated files
Goal is to be able to use this to execute user-provided tasks for things like data transformations
It quickly ran into a problem: the Claude Code for web environment can't run smol machines. Quoting the notes it wrote:
This Claude Code container: Linux 6.18.5-fc-v20 (itself a Firecracker guest), 4 vCPU, 15GB RAM. No /dev/kvm, no vmx/svm CPU flags → no nested virt.
smolvm machine run fails as expected: "kvm not available".
Plan B: GitHub Actions ubuntu runners DO expose /dev/kvm → run the real test battery via a temporary workflow on this branch, collect logs, remove workflow in final commit.
And Plan B is what it did, installing smolvm and running these tests directly in a GitHub Actions runner against that branch.
That was a creative solution to the environmental limits posed by Claude Code for web. Another example of Fable being relentlessly proactive.
The Economist has an interesting article this week, in which it goes after Daron Acemoglu. Acemoglu is probably the top economist in the world at this point, having just earned a Nobel prize, and sitting right at the top of the list of most cited economists. So it’s kind of funny that when it talks about people who doubt Acemoglu’s research, the one person it mentions is…me!
Give an economist a few drinks, however, and some of them will venture their true opinions about this giant. “Much of his theoretical work is useful, but he uses his models to inform populist policies that have been tried before and failed,” blasts one well-known economist. Some commentators do not require Dutch courage. “I’ve been yelling about Acemoglu for literally a decade,” Noah Smith, an economics blogger, has said, in response to a flurry of online criticism of Mr Acemoglu’s work.
It is true that I have been pretty critical of much of Acemoglu’s work over the years. In 2012 I argued strongly against a paper he wrote in which he claimed that America is more entrepreneurial than Sweden because America’s weaker safety net forces people to work harder (in actuality, Sweden is more entrepreneurial by most measures). In 2022 I pointed out that a famous Acemoglu paper claiming that robots destroy jobs was actually an outlier, and listed a bunch of other papers that reach the opposite conclusion. I liked his book Why Nations Fail, but I also admit that its empirical foundations are fairly shaky. I didn’t like Acemoglu’s more recent book Power and Progress, and I was highly critical of a recent paper Acemoglu wrote about AI and productivity.1
But this is hardly newsworthy. I go after Acemoglu’s work because I know he can take it; he’s a titan of the economics field, and I am but a lowly blogger. Nothing I say is going to affect his reputation or his prestige, even if someone at The Economist mentions my critiques in an article. Indeed, after the article came out, top figures in the profession rushed to condemn it and to defend Acemoglu. The Economist does list a bunch of — usually justified — criticisms of Acemoglu’s work, but this does not mean Acemoglu has been discredited as a researcher or exposed as overrated; indeed, it would be difficult to name a top economist whose body of work does not contain a variety of questionable theoretical assumptions, motivated reasoning, and/or shaky empirical results. This is a problem with the field itself, not the man; it’s part of a broader crisis of unreliability throughout much of academia.
But for that same reason, despite the Economist article’s lack of newsworthiness, I think it’s good that the magazine decided to come at the king. Economics is far too hierarchical and closed of a profession. Younger and less accomplished researchers routinely defer to the authority of famous and senior figures, and critics from outside the field are typically brushed off. Exactly how it got to be this way is a topic that deserves a longer post, but I believe the hierarchical, closed culture of econ has resulted in a research literature that has been too skewed toward the priorities and intuition of top authority figures. I thus think it’s generally a healthy thing to tweak the tails of those Olympian figures, as long as criticisms are grounded in substance. As they say, “science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.”
So in that spirit, let’s critique another Acemoglu paper.
First, the background. Recently, a lot of people (including myself, but also prominent economists) have begun worrying about low fertility rates. Across all countries — poor as well as rich — fertility just keeps going down and down, with no floor in sight.
This presents two distinct dangers: population aging and population shrinkage. Aging, rather mechanically, creates a burden for young people, because you have more retirees who have to be supported by each worker, either through taxes or through family support. It also might reduce productivity, for example if older managers are less innovative, but that’s more speculative. Population shrinkage, meanwhile, is a threat to total GDP, which you might care about if you want your country to be more powerful. There’s also the possibility that a smaller population might reduce growth — by reducing the opportunities for specialization, or by reducing the available pool of researchers.
But some people argue that a shrinking population is no problem — or might even be a good thing. When you make human workers scarce, it creates an incentive to invest in labor-saving technology, which boosts productivity. This mechanism has been proposed by some growth theorists, and some economic historians, like Robert Allen, even think this is what caused the Industrial Revolution! This effect might be strong enough to cancel out the aggregate effect of population aging, so that society stays just as rich — or even gets richer — due to low fertility rates.
This is actually a plausible mechanism. I have to say, I’m skeptical that it works in the general case. Human beings aren’t just labor supply; they also create labor demand. The incentive for businesses to buy new machine tools, robots, AI, etc. is that someone is going to buy the stuff they produce with those tools. If you have fewer people, you have fewer consumers. This is probably the reason why the effect of immigration on wages is typically close to zero. Babies are not that different from immigrants. A larger market size can also create an incentive for more rapid innovation — in fact, Acemoglu and Linn (2004) find that faster population growth increases pharmaceutical innovation.2
But anyway, the idea that population scarcity stimulates innovation is the thesis of a new paper by Daron Acemoglu, David Autor, Keelan Beirne, and Andrew Scott. This is from the abstract:
Contrary to the widespread expectation that [low birth rates] hamper economic growth, we find lower birth rates are associated with higher growth in GDP per working-age adult across countries and higher wage growth across US commuting zones, with no negative impact on aggregate GDP or earnings. These patterns are not explained by educational upgrading, rising female labor force participation, the declining importance of agriculture, or neoclassical-Solow mechanisms. We argue that they reflect the endogenous, labor-saving response of technology to the scarcity of younger workers. Consistent with this interpretation, countries and regions with lower birth rates exhibit more labor-saving patents and growing high-tech activity. There is also higher TFP growth across countries and industries. [emphasis mine]
It’s a plausible result. But before we go on to the details of the paper, let’s talk about what this result would imply, if it does turn out to be true.
One of the paper’s basic theses is that technological automation raises wages. That flies in the face of the empirical work that Acemoglu has done on robots.3 It also more broadly seems to contradict what Acemoglu has been saying about AI, both in his research papers and in his public statements. In his 2024 paper, “The Simple Macroeconomics of AI”, Acemoglu writes that “predicted TFP gains over the next 10 years [from AI] are…predicted to be less than 0.53%.” In his 2021 paper, “Harms of AI”, Acemoglu writes:
I argue that if AI continues to be deployed along its current trajectory and remains unregulated, it may produce various social, economic and political harms. These include: damaging competition, consumer privacy and consumer choice; excessively automating work, fueling inequality, inefficiently pushing down wages, and failing to improve worker productivity. [emphasis mine]
This stands in direct contradiction to Acemoglu’s new paper with Autor, Beirne, and Scott. If modern automation technologies push down wages without raising productivity, it cannot compensate for population aging in the way that Acemoglu, Autor, Beirne, and Scott claim that it must — and therefore, population aging is dangerous in a way that it wasn’t before.
Now, it’s fine for a researcher to find two seemingly contradictory things — or even put forward two contradictory theories — in two different papers. The real world is messy and complicated, and there are plenty of “puzzles” in the literature. But if Acemoglu goes around simultaneously telling us:
not to worry about population aging, because automation will compensate for it with higher productivity and higher wages, and
to worry a lot about automation, because it pushes down wages without raising productivity much…
But anyway, on to the actual details of Acemoglu et al. (2026). First of all, I’m not convinced by their result that lower birth rates raise living standards at the country level. The reason is that once they control for a bunch of stuff — education, urbanization, geographic region, etc. — the result loses statistical significance. Here’s their Table 1, with the estimates I’m talking about circled in red:
In their abstract, the authors declare that “these patterns are not explained by educational upgrading, rising female labor force participation, the declining importance of agriculture, or neoclassical-Solow mechanisms.” But at least some of these patterns can apparently be explained by other things — initial education levels, urbanization, and so on — which makes the claim in the abstract a lot less impressive than it sounds.5
Also, note that the more controls the authors add, the weaker the estimated effect becomes. That’s generally a red flag in empirical papers. No matter how smart and careful you are, there are always things you don’t control for, especially in a cross-country regression, since countries differ in so many ways. So if the things you do control for tend to weaken your headline result by a lot, you should be worried that the rest of your result can be explained by the controls you left out.
For example, what about institutions, which Acemoglu has spent much of his career telling us are the main determinants of development? If the legacy of colonialism can be canceled out by passing out free condoms, why did Acemoglu win a Nobel prize? The word “institutions” does not even appear once in this new paper!6
A more realistic possibility is that lower birth rates in 1940 were correlated with other things — maybe a lot of other things — and that it’s these other things, rather than birth rates, that give rise to the correlation in the paper.
Of course, what we ultimately care about isn’t GDP per working-age adult7 — it’s GDP per capita. The authors have data on GDP per capita, but they barely mention it in the analysis;8 I’m not sure why. They do look at total GDP, and here they find no correlation, but a big standard error:
We shouldn’t interpret absence of evidence as evidence of absence. Cross-country regressions have small samples and tons of heterogeneity, so their standard errors tend to be huge — they just have trouble explaining much about the world. But the authors sort of blur this line, saying things like “no negative impact on aggregate GDP or earnings”, when really they should say “we can’t find a negative impact.” There could be a positive relationship between birth rates and growth hiding in that cloud of data points. (Sadly, this is standard practice in economics, but it makes a difference in how results get sold.)
Anyway, the result for wages in U.S. commuting zones holds up somewhat better. It’s a bit more statistically significant, and it doesn’t get attenuated as much by adding controls. But here, I’m worried about different issues: sorting and clustering. Basically, the result shows that coastal cities — places like New York City, San Francisco, Boston, etc. — had both lower birth rates in 1940 and faster wage growth from 1970 to 2020. The authors’ interpretation is that businesses in NYC, SF, and Boston had fewer workers, and so were forced to embrace labor-saving automation, while businesses in places like Birmingham, Alabama or Gary, Indiana refused to automate because they were endowed with plentiful cheap labor thanks to the legacy of an extra-large Baby Boom.
I am suspicious of this result, because American cities are not independent of each other. People can pretty easily move from Gary, Indiana to Boston, and vice versa! Ideas and capital can move even more easily — it’s pretty trivial for a company that patents a robot in Boston to actually put that robot to work in Gary. In fact, things like this happen all the time in America. Acemoglu and Restrepo (2017) note that the commuting zones with the greatest exposure to robots include Detroit, Lansing, Saginaw, Defiance, OH, Lorain, OH, Muncie, IN, Racine, WI, and Wilmington, DE.
Just to take one example of how different regions in America are dependent on each other, suppose that over the period from 1970 to 2020, Americans with lots of talent tended to move from Gary to Boston in order to take advantage of the increasing number of knowledge-industry jobs there. And suppose that at the same time, less talented Americans moved from Boston to Gary, in order to take advantage of the cheap land there. And suppose that high-value industries, like biotech and robotics and software, simultaneously decided to put their research labs in Boston rather than Gary because that’s where the best workers were headed.
In this case, you’d see Boston grow more than Gary, for reasons that had nothing to do with birth-rate-driven labor supply. Other research — for example, by Enrico Moretti — has shown that the sorting of talent and knowledge industries was strongly correlated with income divergences between American regions after 1970. Now, Acemoglu et al. do control for initial local education levels, but if sorting really began after 1970 (as Moretti has shown), that doesn’t really help. They also use “composition-adjusted” wages that try to model what local wages would be if education levels were held constant. But even if that adjustment is valid,9 it’s likely that a lot of skills aren’t captured by simply measuring who has a college degree.10
So in Acemoglu et al.’s telling, a substantial part of the reason the San Francisco Bay Area became Silicon Valley is not because the tech industry naturally tends to cluster in certain locations and draw in talented engineers and entrepreneurs, but because people in the Bay Area in 1940 didn’t have many kids, which forced Bay Area businesses to embrace automation instead. I simply don’t buy that story. I might eventually be persuaded to buy that story, but I don’t think this paper has sufficient evidence to persuade me yet.
Anyway, I am not claiming that Acemoglu et al. (2026) is a crappy paper. It’s clearly an important addition to the literature, and it deals with a very hard area of research where definitive results are very scarce. The basic idea is worth taking seriously. Maybe in a world where AI is growing by leaps and bounds, a scarcity of human workers should be the last thing on our minds!
But we shouldn’t regard this paper as definitive. And it contradicts a bunch of other research:
Kremer (1993) finds evidence that regions with faster population growth had faster technological progress.
The endogenous growth literature argues that because ideas are nonrival, larger populations are able to sustain faster technological progress — this is a basic assumption in Romer (1990), Jones (2022), and many other models.
Aksoy et al. (2019) do a panel time-series regression across OECD countries from 1970 to 2014, and find that low fertility and low population growth are correlated with slower economic growth.
And even if Acemoglu et al. (2026) is right about the past, that doesn’t mean we can extrapolate it to the future. Jesús Fernández-Villaverde points out that you can’t necessarily do a linear extrapolation of effects at above-replacement fertility to effects at below-replacement fertility:
The fertility collapse now underway has no historical precedent. The seven decades of data the [Acemoglu et al. (2026)] paper analyzes, however carefully, contain nothing remotely comparable to the ultra-low fertility rates we observe today…
[T]he birth and fertility rates of 1950 provide little information about the consequences of the ultra-low birth and fertility rates we are experiencing today. Observations from a very different range of values are unlikely to capture the nonlinear cumulative effects of ultra-low birth and fertility rates…[E]ven in 1980, birth and fertility rates were not as low as they are today…A TFR of 1.56 means each generation is 76% the size of the last: the population declines about 0.9% per year, so after 100 years you retain roughly 40% of the initial population. A TFR of 0.75 means each generation is 37% of the last: about a 3.35% decline per year, leaving roughly 3.5% after a century. Hence, we are dealing with a factor of about 11. A TFR of 1.56 and a TFR of 0.75 both count as “low fertility” in a regression, but they are qualitatively different regimes. The 1980 variation the paper identifies lives in the gentle-decline world; nothing in their data resembles the second…
[W]e should not fool ourselves: we are sailing into demographic terra incognita, and in these waters, the pretense of knowledge is the most dangerous temptation.
In fact, Hayashi (2025) documents just such a nonlinear relationship between aging and growth, where countries with above-replacement fertility seem to benefit from lower birth rates, but countries with below-replacement fertility seem to do worse when their birth rates fall even further.12
External validity and nonlinearity are big problems in much of growth economics, development economics, economic history, and so on (and often in other fields too). But it means that there’s a danger, when the world’s top economist writes a paper making big bold claims, that we end up deferring to that individual’s intellectual authority instead of recognizing the true uncertainty of the unprecedented changes our world is facing. I’m still very worried about the shrinkage of the human race, and I think you should probably still be worried too.
Because I’m being critical of these works, I’m violating a standard rule of etiquette, which is to always list co-authors equally. Acemoglu’s co-authors have mostly chosen to eschew the role of outspoken public intellectual, and most are not as untouchably famous as he is, so I don’t want to put them “on blast” on a popular blog. But for the sake of completeness, Acemoglu’s 2012 paper on “cuddly capitalism” is with James Robinson and Thierry Verdier, Why Nations Fail is written with Robinson, Power and Progress is written with Simon Johnson, and Acemoglu’s 2017 paper on robots and jobs is with Pascual Restrepo. My apologies for not including these co-authors in the main text.
See also Acemoglu (2009), which theorizes that labor scarcity discourages the creation of technology that complements human labor:
The main result of the paper shows that labor scarcity will encourage technological advances if technology is strongly labor saving. In contrast, labor scarcity will discourage technological advances if technology is strongly labor complementary.
Acemoglu and Restrepo (2017) find that robots depress wages, whereas the entire mechanism in Acemoglu et al. (2026) relies on automation raising wages. Of course, Acemoglu might claim that robots are special, and not representative of automation technologies in general. But that would make the 2017 result a lot less important and generalizable than it was sold as being, back in 2017!
Also note that Acemoglu et al. (2026) can be read as an anti-immigration result. If young population growth stifles automation, doesn’t that mean we should restrict immigration in order to raise wages? That doesn’t mean the result is wrong, and it will certainly make MAGA types happy, but it does mean that it stands in conflict with the existing empirical literature on immigration and wages.
The “stacked differences” model does retain statistical significance after the inclusion of controls, but just barely. I wouldn’t put much faith in a borderline result like that.
The word “institutional” does appear once, but not as an explanatory variable for past patterns of growth:
At the same time, the demographic changes currently underway are accompanied by increased life expectancy (Scott, 2021, 2024), which may spur institutional changes, policies, and additional human capital investments that complement longer lifespans. These forces may counteract any negative effects of aging[.]
Actually, this is a bit beside the point, but I wish economists would stop using GDP per working-age adult as a measure of anything. Working-age adults are not some magical resource that creates GDP just by eating and breathing; they must actually work. Data on output per hour of work is readily available, and if it’s not available, output per employed person is usually a good proxy. I don’t see any good reason to use output per working-age adult. And you should NEVER mislabel output per working-age adult “output per worker”, as Acemoglu et al. (2026) do throughout their paper. Bad!!
In fact, the authors note the greater accumulation of college degrees in the coastal metros with low 1940 birth rates after 1970, but they attribute this — without justification, as far as I can tell — to deliberate local choices and policies rather than geographic sorting.
LandSpace’s ZhuQue-3 rocket booster lands at the company’s landing pad during the second flight of the launch vehicle on Aug. 19, 2026. Image: LandSpace
Chinese commercial launch company, LandSpace cemented its place in the race to rocket reusability as it landed the first stage booster of its ZhuQue-3 (ZQ-3) rocket on Wednesday morning local time.
The rocket lifted off from Dongfeng Commercial Space Innovation Pilot Zone in the northwestern part of the country at 7:35 a.m. CST on Aug. 19 (7:35 p.m. EDT / 2335 UTC on Aug. 18) to begin the second flight in this rocket’s development.
Following stage separation more than two minutes after liftoff, the booster began to target its designated landing zone in Minqin County, Gansu Province. It stuck the landing nearly eight minutes after liftoff. However, video clips shared on social media showed a post-landing fire breaking out in the aft section of the vehicle.
“This mission marks China’s first-ever successful recovery attempt of the first stage of an orbital-class launch vehicle using landing legs, and China’s first successful booster recovery on land,” LandSpace wrote after the mission. “It is a pivotal flight test for ZhuQue-3 as it transitions from the technological demonstration and verification phase toward the engineering application phase of reusability.”
The ZQ-3 rocket stands at 76.6 meters (251.3 ft) in height, taller than SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket, which is 70 meters tall (229.6 ft). The rocket is an amalgamation of features from the Falcon 9 and Starship, given that it has a stainless steel exterior, chines and is fueled by liquid methane.
It uses nine Tianzhi-series engines on its first stage and a vacuum variant for its second stage. This was the second launch and second landing attempt for the ZQ-3, the first flight ending in a crash landing.
According to the company’s website, LandSpace was established in 2015 and completed its first vertical takeoff and vertical landing test in January 2024. The plan at that point was to launch the first ZQ-3 rocket in 2025, which it achieved in December of that year.
During its inaugural launch, LandSpace was able to deploy its payload to orbit, but the booster encountered an “abnormal combustion” during the recovery effort, according to the Xinhua News Agency.
“Building on flight data and engineering experience from the ZQ-3 Y1 flight test, ZQ-3 Y2 incorporates multiple targeted optimizations across key phases of recovery flight,” LandSpace wrote. “The landing propulsion scheme reduces the number of engines used in the landing burn, further simplifying system design and improving reliability. The onboard safety and automatic Flight Termination System (FTS) introduces a predicted-impact-point safety function and an optimized return control strategy, further enhancing the safety and autonomous control capability of the recovery flight.
“To address the complex mechanical and thermal environment during the first-stage return and re-entry phase, thermal protection systems were redesigned and enhanced to cope with intense re-entry loads and heat, further improving the vehicle’s environmental adaptability and reliability in the return and re-entry phase.”
After stage separation, the first stage completed a series of critical maneuvers during a planned coast phase: high-altitude attitude reorientation, powered deceleration via re-entry burn, aerodynamic gliding, landing burn, and landing leg deployment with touchdown attenuation —… pic.twitter.com/N8y5PPSXem
LandSpace said Wednesday’s mission also validated its Hold-Down and Release Mechanism for deploying payloads. It argued that the flight was a proving ground for “future large-scale constellation deployment, rapid batch deployment, and improved operation efficiency.”
LandSpace also operates a single-use rocket, ZhuQue-2E, which has flown six times since its debut in November 2024.
Expanding the reusability landscape
The successful recovery of its booster puts LandSpace in a very small club of launch providers that have achieved the goal of propulsively landing a booster with the goal of reusing it.
Last month, the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC) flew the inaugural flight of its partially reusable Long March 10B (Chángzhēng 10B). Unlike the landing legs used on ZQ-3, the Long March 10B used an off-shore barge and a series of strong wires to catch the booster on July 10.
SpaceX continues to lead the field in rocket reusability. It launched its 614th reflown booster to date on a flight for its Starlink constellation on Tuesday night.
A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket lifts off from Space Launch Complex 4 East at Vandenberg Space Force Base on Aug. 18, 2026. Image: SpaceX
The company currently has 26 first-stage boosters across its current fleet of Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets. Among those, four of the boosters in use have achieved at least 30 flights and another will be added to that list on Thursday.
Blue Origin entered the orbital rocket reusability field in January 2025 with the inaugural flight of its New Glenn rocket. It went on to recover its first booster on its second flight in November.
That rocket is grounded for now following an anomaly with an oxygen valve on its BE-4 engine that caused an explosion during a static fire test on May 28.
Other United States launches providers hoping to prove out their reusable, medium lift rockets include Firefly Aerospace with Eclipse, Relativity Space with Terran-R, Rocket Lab with Neutron, and Stoke Space with Nova. Those companies aim to launch inaugural flights within the next year.
This strikes me as somewhat less of a problem than I might have thought:
We study long-run career consequences of initial employment in an occupation that subsequently declines. Linking the 2000 Decennial Census to US administrative employment and earnings records through 2020, we follow more than 2.4 million workers. Employment in an occupation that contracts by at least 25 percent is associated with about 5 percent lower cumulative earnings despite slightly more quarters worked. The earnings differential closely matches evidence from Sweden and Norway, although employment adjustment differs. Occupational mobility is substantial but incomplete, while children’s later occupational destinations are much less tied to their household heads’ 2000 occupational-growth categories.
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Until now, Natalie Harp was known only to Washington insiders and people weird enough to read insidery books about the administration. But Harp has officially escaped containment.
She is about to be a full-fledged character in the dramedy of the Trump White House, discussed in the news and recognized by ordinary people. And while the White House and its allies are pretending to be outraged about that fact, it’s completely appropriate and long overdue. There is literally no single person who spends as much time at the side of the president of the United States as her; the idea that it should somehow be off-limits to discuss her role is bonkers. So let’s review what got us here.
Thank Jon Ossoff for putting a spotlight on her
At a campaign speech on Sunday, Sen. Jon Ossoff mentioned Harp in a single sentence, as part of a criticism of the president for being distracted by unimportant things. “He doesn’t want to do the job,” Ossoff said. “He wants to build his ballroom and travel with Natalie on their apparently defenseless flying palace, gifted by the Emir of Qatar.”
The incident to which Ossoff may have been referring was the fact that when Trump did that plane switcheroo on his way back from Turkey last month, one of the few aides huddled with him inside a catering container was not his national security adviser or chief of staff but Harp, whose job seems to consist of 1) following Trump around with a portable printer so she can produce paper copies of articles that praise him, tweets that praise him, and anything else that praises him, making him feel that everything is going great and everyone loves him, which has led her to be dubbed the “Human Printer”; and 2) typing up the Truth Social posts he dictates.
If there’s more to her job than that, it’s basically to make Trump feel good at all times; she’s his emotional support aide. Those occasional cabinet meetings in which everyone tells Trump how blessed and honored they are to be working in his service aren’t enough; he needs that validation on 24-7 IV drip, and that’s what Natalie Harp provides.
She’s with Trump whether he’s in the White House, travelling to a foreign country, or golfing at one of his clubs, a proximity that has apparently caused a good deal of unease among his other staffers. As Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan report in their book Regime Change, “Trump had taken to telling his staff that Natalie (or ‘Nathalie,’ as he would call her, using a French pronunciation) was the only one who loved him as much as his wife and kids. ‘All of you will go off and make money,’ he would say. ‘She’ll never leave me.’”
Harp is neither a Svengali nor a Rasputin, but in this White House, she’s an incredibly important figure. She is the most important channel through which he receives and distributes information, and because Trump is impulsive, mercurial, and has the emotional regulation of a toddler, the person most responsible for determining his psychological state is central to the work of the administration.
I have no opinion on whether Trump and Harp are having an affair. He cheated on all his wives, and there’s no reason to believe he isn’t still doing it with somebody or other; it might be Harp, or it might not be. But given the letters revealed in a 2024 New York Times article, it certainly seems that their relationship is romantic even if it isn’t sexual, at least from her end. The kind of ecstatic devotion Harp describes is beyond the normal employer-employee relationship, or even the closest friendship:
In 2023, Ms. Harp sent a series of letters to Mr. Trump that unnerved people around him, according to a half-dozen people with knowledge of them.
“You are all that matters to me,” she wrote in one of the letters, which were seen by The New York Times. The letters’ authenticity was confirmed by two people with direct knowledge of them.
“I don’t ever want to let you down,” Ms. Harp wrote, thanking Mr. Trump for being her “Guardian and Protector in this Life.”
In another letter, she told Mr. Trump that she wanted to get back to “that synergy” she used to have with him, where “we’d talk about everything and nothing.”
“I want to bring you joy,” she wrote, “to feel like we can get through a day without ever having to talk ‘work.’”
Who among us hasn’t said to our boss, “You are all that matters to me” and “I want to bring you joy.” No one? Well then.
There’s another line in Regime Change that jumps out, one about the internal reaction to the way Trump has redecorated the Oval Office in his particular chintzy Saddam-meets-Scarface style, with gold appliques slapped on every available surface: “When Trump asked White House residence staff what they thought of the glittering display, most responses were muted, but his devout aide Natalie Harp would gush with delight.”
Who’s talking about an affair here?
It’s remarkable that all Ossoff had to do was say Natalie Harp’s name and Republicans immediately lost their minds. White House communications director Steven Cheung mustered all the class and professionalism for which he is known and tweeted “John Jackoff has to be the biggest cuck loser in politics.”
“Cuck,” for the uninitiated, has become the go-to insult on the right, including among White House staffers, because their identities are defined by sexual insecurity.
Republicans in the media chimed in with their own eruption of rage, pretending to be feminist allies defending Harp’s wounded honor against Ossoff’s horrifying attack. “What a gross misogynistic thing to say,” said Marc Thiessen. “You ow [sic] this young woman an apology.” “Who accuses women of behaving like that because he doesn’t like their boss” said Ari Fleischer. “This guy should be ashamed.”
Pardon, behaving like what? Who’s the one making assumptions here?
Did Ossoff’s comment carry an unspoken implication that listeners were invited to fill in for themselves? Sure. But that implication could just as easily be not “They’re having an affair,” but rather “Trump keeps this young, pretty, bleached-blonde, stiletto-heeled woman by his side because he’s horny for anyone who reminds him of the daughter about whom he has repeatedly expressed sexual interest.”
It seems that Republicans are the ones who jumped instantly to the conclusion that merely mentioning that Trump keeps Harp constantly at his side means you’re saying they’re having an affair. As Shelby Talcott of Semafor reports, the pushback on Ossoff from the White House was so intense precisely because “Harp’s proximity to Trump has unnerved some of his aides and sparked unfounded rumors about a relationship.”
So please, spare us the fake umbrage about how offensive it is to say Harp’s name. It’s not as though when Ossoff contrasted Trump “doing his job” with “traveling with Natalie” he was minimizing her deeply complex and substantive contribution to federal policy-making. Her job is to print things out for Trump and type out his Truth Social posts. That’s what she does. She’s an emotional support aide. He picked her for this job and keeps her in it because of how she looks and her rapturous devotion to him. The fact that she plays such a central role in Trump’s White House is exactly why she deserves much more attention than she’s already gotten.
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There are generally two schools of thought in the Western space community when it comes to the prospect of China landing humans on the Moon in the next few years and very possibly beating NASA and the United States in its efforts to return astronauts there.
Many people will ask what the big deal is. After all, NASA won the space race to the Moon nearly six decades ago, when Apollo 11 landed there. That it took so long for anyone else to follow speaks to the magnitude of the US achievement, they might say.
But others have a starkly different opinion. A dominant storyline of the 21st century has been the economic and geopolitical rise of China, and what was once a unipolar world now has two large nations vying for supremacy across a number of fronts. One is space. If China can land humans on the Moon before the United States returns, it will represent a huge geopolitical win. From a propaganda standpoint, it will allow China to declare that it has not just caught up to the United States but surpassed it as this century's superpower.
Having been robot-wrangling for a solid year now, I continue to feel like they give me superpowers. However, like all of us, I have a front-row seat to increasingly attractive garbage the robots are capable of generating at scale. I like to think that I am human enough to detect the slop, but the rate of change has me concerned.
Months ago, I scribbled a clever plan to adapt the Creative Commons model to make it trivial to label how much robot help a creator had with their creative work. The problem with the approach? The content for which you want this the most would be the responsibility of humans who are the least motivated to use such a system.
No one who generates AI slop on Pinterest is going to declare that the images are fake. Why? Because you won’t click. Furthermore, without enforcement, there was nothing to prevent nefarious actors from declaring their slop wasn’t sloppy.
Deflated, I dropped the initial idea, but it hasn’t left my brain. There is something important to the concept that a creator creates and declares what kind of help they are getting from the robots.
I’ve been calling Artificial Intelligence “robots” for a very long time. The primary reason is that I believe I see where this is all going, and very, very soon, there will be a robot (which happens to have artificial intelligence) sitting virtually or physically near me. I further believe that they just want to help.
Grumbles1 is the name of the robot that helps me with the blog. He has a whole personality backstory, but mostly he’s just cranky. Just look at that face.
He’s cranky because he’s confused. He just wants to help, and many humans are mad at him. The humans don’t seem to understand that without human guidance, Grumbles just sits there… uselessly. Helplessly.
Where Grumbles helps me here:
Copy editing — spelling and grammar. Mostly RIP Grammarly.
Research — “Hey, Grumbles, teach me about this.” Sourced information from this research might be included in articles. When appropriate for blog posts, this is sourced. For the guides, there’s a whole huge list of sources.
Templates and CSS. Grumbles heavily edits the original theme used by randsinrepose.com and the CSS. The ideas for the respective designs are 100% Rands.
Blog features: dark mode, revised glossary, the footer, marketing cards located at the bottom of each post. These were my ideas built by Grumbles.
Bugs: I’m using typography.com fonts, which are hosted elsewhere. This results in typeface strangeness that has been around for years. Grumbles fixed that. He’s helped with performance, redirect insanity, and Cloudflare security hardening.
Publishing mechanics: staging drafts, gremlin-zapping, featured-image alt text, the pre-publish checklist, and footnote wiring.
Analytics and reporting: what was gentle spelunking in Google Analytics is now a clear robot-built picture of how Rands content is performing.
Guides: Research verification, template + CSS management, and sourcing galore.
Where Grumbles does not help:
The writing on the blog is original. It was drafted by this here human who drinks three cups of coffee before Noon because if he drinks it after Noon, he will not sleep well.
Typefaces. These are all generously provided and hosted by typography.com.
Images. The original R was designed by Collin Roe-Raymond. Variants of the R were designed by IconFactory. Images included in blog posts have historically been poorly attributed. I’ve changed this policy to always attribute.
Down in the footer of the blog, you will see Grumbles. Those who are wondering how the robots are helping me with this blog should click on it and see how Grumbles is helping. I hope others do this as I think it’s the right thing to do.
Grumbles is not perfect. Grumbles lies, he leaps to assumptions, and he frequently heads off — unprompted — in odd directions. Good news: this describes most humans I’ve worked with over the years. The same skills I use to lead the humans, I use to lead the robots.
Why is there a fancy logo for Grumbles? I’m glad you asked. I’ve been wanting to work with IconFactory for years and finally found a good excuse. Better yet — there are shirts, manylovelyshirts also designed by IconFactory, and all proceeds go to charity.
We explore the welfare costs of the loss of animal life in a consequentialist total utilitarian framework that incorporates the intrinsic value of living beings through their sentience. Moral philosophy and neuroscience define sentience as the capacity for valenced experience. Observable performance on cognitive tests represents a conservative lower bound on sentience under plausible neuroscientific assumptions. We estimate the relationship between cognition and neuron counts to cardinalize sentience. We collect population and neuron data for a wide range of animal species, and aggregate them into a single welfare measure. Across a wide range of parameters, the aggregate sentience losses of animals in the past half century outstrip the sentience gains to humans from population growth by at least 10,000-fold. Breaking even in welfare terms requires assigning a correspondingly small welfare weight to animals. Including the benefits of economic growth to humans does little to change these overall welfare losses.
In my view macro welfare comparisons are most meaningful when gains from trade are possible, which of course holds across humans, and also holds across humans and (some) dogs. I believe we should act to boost the welfare of non-human animals at the margin, but cannot make the larger comparisons across the totals. We are, inevitably, on the side of the humans and we are not obliged, as welfarists, to commit collective suicide to replenish the biodiversity of the earth.
Marcus Mendes at 9to5Mac has a fun update on U.S. v. Apple, the ill-considered antitrust case started by the Biden administration. A bunch of what the DOJ argues are anticompetitive features in Apple’s platforms, Apple argues are in fact privacy and security related.
Back in July Apple won a big discovery ruling — Apple asked for documents from 14 federal agencies — including the CIA, FBI, Department of Defense, NSA, and State Department — to see the reasons why those agencies purchase iPhones, iPads, and Macintosh computers. And in July, Apple won. They get to see what these federal agencies say about those features.
The DOJ filed a longshot “Hey, no fair” complaint trying to overrule that discovery ruling. Now Apple has filed a retort saying the July order should stand, and the DOJ should get ready to argue in court that it’s unlawful for Apple to implement the sort of features that are the very reason why security-minded federal agencies purchase Apple devices.
Stuart Heritage, writing for The Guardian, under the splendid headline “Dickovers, Baggravation and Botiquette: 18 New Words to Describe Our Tech Hellscape”:
The “dickover” is the scourge of the modern age. Coined in May by
John Gruber, a tech writer, it is defined as “a modal panel,
popover, or curtain presented by a website or app, deliberately
obscuring its own content to frustrate the user”. Essentially, it
is the thing (or more often, things) you have to click away in
order to read the thing you wanted to read. It is the “accept
cookies” box, the “allow notifications?” box, the “sign in with
Google” box, the pop-up video box, etc.
We shouldn’t fool ourselves into thinking that dickovers are the
only terrible thing about technology in 2026. Until now, though,
we have lacked the vocabulary to describe them, so here are some
suggestions.
This was a delight to see, but it would have been nicer if it had included a link. I remain quite fond of my self-exemplifying definition.
Amongst Heritage’s suggested coinages, I like baggravation (maddening self-checkout retail kiosks) and Schrödinger’s Wi-Fi (public Wi-Fi, especially on trains and planes, that simultaneously does and does not exist).
Thibault Sottiaux, the OpenAI genius in charge of Codex and the new ChatGPT Homer Simpson car, on Twitter/X:
I don’t come often to GMail [sic] (OpenAI is a Slack company),
but I swear, every time I do open it, there is a new button
somewhere around the top right corner.
I mean, he’s right about Google’s zero-taste just-keep-cramming-shit-in approach to Gmail, but it’s almost hard to believe he could post this without any self-awareness that it’s the exact same approach his Codex team has applied to ChatGPT.
Gmail debuted in 2004 homely but wonderfully simple (which I’d argue was Google’s original, but now long-lost UI brand). It was just your email. Now it’s too complex to explain. ChatGPT’s original incarnation was attractive-in-today’s-minimalist-fad-way and wonderfully simple. It was just AI chat. Now it’s too complex to explain.
(ChatGPT’s original incarnation still exists, in the form of the hard-to-find-if-you-don’t-already-have-it-installed Coke ChatGPT Classic, just like how Gmail, after Google started needlessly complicating it, used to have a “classic” view that many users preferred but Google soon took away.)
Last Friday*, NIH released a proposed grant score reporting format (David Gorski has a thorough discussion of the details). The key change is that, while percentile scores will be estimated**, they will be converted into one of three categories: the top 25% of scores, the second quartile of scores (26-50%), and the remainder. For some context, with extremely rare exceptions, less than 10% of grants to a given panel will be funded, meaning the majority in the top category will not be funded.
Importantly, even though the reviewers are still calculating scores, the principal investigator (the scientist submitting the proposal), applicant institution, NIH program staff, ICO leadership, and the relevant NIH Advisory Council will not see the scores. The primary reason for doing this is to allow Trump administration flunkies to reject politically incorrect projects that score very well, without far less political fallout***. You really don’t want to have tell Congress that the reason the second highest scoring grant was rejected in spite of expert consensus that it was a good grant, especially when the reason for rejection by the commissariat would probably be something like “it focuses on Black people.” So it’s bad.
But there’s another consequence–it wastes researchers’ time. Back to Gorski:
When paylines are under the 10th percentile, there is a huge difference between a grant application whose mean overall priority score leads it to be ranked as 25th percentile versus one ranked as, say, 11th percentile. The latter grant is in striking distance of being funded on a resubmission, the first grant much less so. Moreover, what is being proposed is a lot less transparency, not more transparency. The “raw data”—i.e., the raw priority scores and the percentile ranking—that led to an application being grouped in one of the above three categories will, contrary to past practices, be withheld from the grant applicant.
Back in 2025, when Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson published their book, Abundance, the Abundance Bros decided to make one of their topics NIH funding and progress. They came up with some real doozies, like ‘fund more transformative research’ (gee, why didn’t anyone ever think of that before?)–Drugmonkey has the definitive takedown. But one thing they did want to reduce was the administrative burden of proposal writing, including the repeated rounds of proposal submissions.
Well, they seem to have been very quiet about this new proposal, which, as noted above, actually will create more work for some proposal submitters, who figure they might as well try again (even though it’s a longshot), while at the same time, other researchers will give up on promising proposals.
But paying attention to the details doesn’t make you a Thinky Thought Leader, so I’m guessing they won’t comment on this. Would love to be surprised though…
*If this were a popular change, they wouldn’t have done it Friday afternoon.
**Confusingly for many, a lower percentile is a better score (i.e., the first percentile is the best).
***Other granting agencies do use broader categories, but there is no legitimate reason to reduce the amount of information passed onto the submitters. The broader categories do not reflect less work by the reviewers, since proposals are still ranked; the results of that ranking, however, are obscured. Given how the administration has treated NIH so far, and the reality that the administration lies all the time, there is no reason to give Trump et alia the benefit of the doubt here.
Today I’m going to discuss two tidbits from the world of polling. In a second post I’m going to discuss an interesting and, for Democrats, somewhat chastening look at the last four cycles of Senate polling compiled by GOP pollster/consultant Pat Ruffini. But first some stunning news today about an out-of-nowhere polling outfit called Median Strategies. They polled a number of races but their survey showing DSA-backed Wisconsin gubernatorial candidate Francesca Hong with a 23-point lead got the most attention. Today the firm announced it is ceasing operations, says it withdrawing all its previous polls and says they should not be treated as “genuine polling data.”
They then go on to make this almost unbelievable statement: “Median Strategies was created as a short-term social experiment examining how purported polling information could enter and spread through the political information ecosystem wihtout independent verification.” They then follow with a “Thank you for your understanding.”
I had to read that a few times before I could be sure I was understanding their meaning. I think this says the entire “firm” was an “experiment” to see how knowingly distributing fake polling information to see how widely it would circulate in the political news ecosystem. By one measure the experiment was a huge success. The poll spread very, very widely. But more seriously, I find myself kind of speechless. And I should note that I don’t take this admission or statement at face value. I don’t know what the story is but I suspect it’s more complicated. And perhaps worse, though it’s hard to imagine what “worse” might be. If you’re really going to do an “experiment” like this, I think you do the reveal with some real fanfare and show in some sense what you’ve learned or what point you made.
In general, it shows the degree to which the polling space is now overwhelmed by little known or unknown pollsters who at best are often using novel and low-confidence methodologies and at worst may simply be frauds. I had a conversation recently about the poll misses in Michigan and Wisconsin and I told the person that in the past I had a pretty good read of which pollsters were reputable and which weren’t. But now all the names are basically new to me so I’ve largely given up. Then I realized that this was probably another way of saying that they’re now almost all un-reputable. Which is not to say they are fake or low quality but that they have so little reputation that there is no reason to assume any reliability.
Joe Flint, reporting for The Wall Street Journal (gift link):
Walt Disney’s ABC has sued the Federal Communications Commission
alleging the agency’s efforts to challenge its broadcast licenses
and regulate its talk show “The View” are illegal and an effort to
quash speech the Trump administration finds objectionable.
In a suit filed in federal court in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday,
ABC said, “Again and again, the Administration has attacked ABC’s
speech — the stories its journalists report and the viewpoints
its network programs air. Over time, those attacks have escalated
into express demands that ABC be stripped of its broadcast
licenses because of its speech.”
Our local 6ABC affiliate here in Philadelphia is the highest-profile station that the FCC has targeted for a bogus “license review”. It’s impossible for someone who doesn’t live here to understand just how dominant a media presence 6ABC Action News is. The Action News theme song is, effectively, the city of Philadelphia’s theme song. Watch this and you’ll get it, trust me.
In my last post I mentioned this data analysis GOP pollster and consultant Pat Ruffini has put together looking at Senate polling going back through the last four cycles, so 2018 through 2024. Ruffini is a very partisan Republican in all the meanings of that word. But I think of him as broadly reliable when it comes to compiling and analyzing hard data. His analysis, probably not surprisingly, shows that polling in aggregate over-estimated Democrats in each cycle. Needless to say, there’s a lot of “cope” in this analysis, reassuring fretful Republicans that it’s not as bad as it looks. But I was curious because this at least broadly matches with my observations. Not always but more often than not.
You can read the analysis here. You have to subscribe to his Substack to read the whole thing. But you can get the gist before you get to the paywall. I’ve reached out to several polling analysts whose judgment I trust to get their sense of the analysis. So perhaps I’ll have more to say based on any responses.
In any case, here are the main takeaways.
First, as I said, Senate polls have consistently overstated Democratic strength in the last four cycles. In a moment, we’ll get to why I think that’s the case.
Second: This applies in both presidential and midterm years but the details are different in the two kinds of national elections.
Three: In presidential years, the overstatement is biggest in the out-months and becomes more accurate by election day. But it still overstates Democratic strength by election day by 2.6 percentage points.
Four: In midterm elections, the overstatement is smaller, and by election day they only favor Democrats by one-third of a percentage point. So less overstatement and by election they’re pretty much on the nail.
(Edit Note: I was a little unclear in Ruffini’s account which numbers were all four cycles combined and which were the were the two presidentials and the two midterms. But the pattern here accurately reflects what he’s found if not the precise number.)
There are various other details in the analysis. But I think those are the key points.
In any case, as I said, the gist of the message is: “Don’t worry Republicans. It looks super bad right now. But this is the worst of it. It will start turning our way by the end of August.” But that doesn’t mean that the pattern isn’t accurate.
Ruffini doesn’t get into why this is the case much. My best guess is differential response: more social trust-oriented and engaged voters respond to polls more. And demographically those tend to be Democrats. It’s not an overwhelming difference but enough to show up as a small but at least broadly predictable bias. There’s also another more mundane explanation of the growing accuracy in the final months of the campaign. In the early months of a campaign, pollsters tend to poll “adults” or “registered voters”. They apply “likely voter” screens more aggressively in the final months and weeks as the contours of the electorate (who is going to vote) becomes more clear. You’d expect them to get more accurate, if we judge accuracy as the result on election day. Historically, “likely voter” filters favor Republicans, though that’s become less the case over the last decade as coalitions have shifted. This year, it seems to be the opposite.
In any case, as one of the experts I reached out to noted, in 2018 or 2022 if you’d gone into election day assuming a three- or four-point premium for the GOP you’d have totally missed the result since, in aggregate, the polls were very accurate. If there’s a big takeaway here it’s that recent cycles suggests the polls will tighten as we move toward election day — unless of course they don’t.
If you’re a Democrat, and if this analysis is accurate, it’s easy to feel a bit downcast about this: Oh, we can’t even trust the polls when they say we’re winning! Sometimes I see people reacting in a slightly different way: We can’t even deliver on our expected results!
This is definitely a wrongheaded way to look at things. Polling is just an artifact of the polling industry and mostly good-faith statistical weighting. It’s not like you should have done X but somehow choked in the final lap. The better approach is to factor in a small differential when thinking about races, especially in the out-months. It’s also important to remember that individual races will differ. Ruffini found that 70% of the races showed D-friendly polling errors, whereas you’d expect it to be 50% of the time if there was no systemic bias. That’s a big deal if it’s accurate. But it’s not all the time. In 30% of the cases the polls are overstating Republican odds. I was also curious to see the breakdowns in each cycle individually. But unless I missed it, he doesn’t provide those.
My own sense is that the national political conversation likely continues to underestimate the depth of Trump’s unpopularity and anti-incumbent mood generally. And that will see this on election day. But these patterns — assuming they’re broadly true — are important to bear in mind and broadly match with most of our lived experiences over the last decade.
Integrating Deceased and Living Donation: Six-Year Outcomes of the Italian Deceased-Donor–Initiated Kidney Paired Exchange (DEC-K) Program
Author links open overlay panel,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,…
ABSTRACT Using a deceased donor (DD) to initiate living-donor (LD) exchange chains can expand access to kidney transplantation in recipients with an HLA or ABO incompatible living donor. The Italian DD-initiated Kidney Paired Exchange (DEC-K) program uses a DD kidney to start a chain among incompatible pairs, ultimately returning a LD kidney to the waiting list. We report the first long-term analysis of this approach worldwide. All DEC-K chains performed in Italy between March 2018 and May 2025 were analyzed. Thirty-four chains generated 84 transplants (34 chain initiating kidneys CIK, 22 from LD, 28 chain-ending kidneys CEK) versus 17 transplants from conventional Kidney Paired Donation (KPD) program in the same period. Five-year outcomes were similar between CIK and LD recipients (eGFR slope: −2.0 mL/min/1.73m2/year, P=0.37; graft survival: log-rank P=0.28). While this approach diverts blood-group O DD kidneys from the general waiting list, potentially affecting non-sensitized candidates, it was designed to address the unmet needs of highly sensitized patients facing years of waiting. In the Italian setting, the DEC-K program successfully initiates LD chains from DD kidneys with outcomes equivalent to LD transplant; implementation should include monitoring of blood-group-specific outcomes and flexible design to accommodate healthcare system priorities.
...
"DISCUSSION The six-year DEC-K experience demonstrates that DD-initiated KPD chains are highly effective in small national pools such as Italy’s, which include about 70 incompatible pairs at a time. Because closed-loop exchanges rarely provide enough matches, especially for blood group O or highly sensitized recipients, open chains initiated by DDs can convert a single graft into multiple sequential transplants without simultaneous multi-center surgery. In our program, 34 DDs generated 84 transplants, corresponding to a threefold increase compared to conventional loops in the Italian KPD. Broader enrollment could further enhance impact, although participation remains limited by concerns about receiving a DD kidney while the paired LD proceeds, underscoring the need for transparent counseling and clear communication about outcomes and equity. The rationale for DEC-K aligns with models proposed by Melcher and later implemented by Furian, in which a SCD kidney is allocated to an incompatible pair whose LD subsequently donates to another recipient, propagating the chain21, 23, 29. Similar donor-driven chains were pioneered in the United States, where Rees demonstrated that a single altruistic donor could initiate a ten-transplant sequence14. Mathematical modeling by Wang et al.23 supports this approach, showing that allocating just 2-3% of DD to initiate KPD chains could generate several hundred additional transplants annually, with maximum benefit for highly sensitized and blood-group O candidates23. In countries with rare or restricted altruistic donation and small KPD pools, such as Italy, DD initiation is the only practical way to generate compatible matches. Over the past decade, only ten non-directed donors enabled 30 transplants and unlocked 21 incompatible pairs, substantially fewer than DEC-K.
Mark Ovenden’s latest book, Mapping Britain’s Railways: The Design History of a Nation on Track, is out today from British Library Publishing. The publisher’s description: Railway diagrams have been at the forefront of mapping Britain’s… More
SpaceX's most recent Starship test flight may have ended July 24, but its mission isn't over yet.
The spacecraft splashed down in the Indian Ocean intact after flying halfway around the world from SpaceX's launch base in South Texas. Engineers expected the ship's life to end with a fiery disintegration after toppling over, just as past Starships have done following splashdown.
Numerous onboard sensors and cameras, along with buoys and drones in position at the splashdown zone, have provided important data for SpaceX to assess the performance of the ship's heat shield after each test flight, so officials accepted the post-flight conflagrations. That day, Starship tipped over and remained intact, surprising just about everyone.
On August 18, 1920, the Tennessee legislature ratified the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution by a vote of 50 to 49. The deciding vote came from Harry T. Burn, who supported suffrage but was under pressure to vote no. His mother had urged him to vote yes despite the pressure. “I believe in full suffrage as a right,” he said. “I believe we had a moral and legal right to ratify. I know that a mother’s advice is always safest for her boy to follow, and my mother wanted me to vote for ratification.”
Tennessee was the 36th state to ratify the amendment, and the last one necessary to make the amendment the law of the land once the secretary of state certified it.
The new amendment was patterned on the Fifteenth Amendment, which protected the right of Black men to vote, and it read:
“The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.
“Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.”
Like the momentum for the Fifteenth Amendment, the push for rights for women had taken root during the Civil War as women backed the United States armies with their money, buying bonds and paying taxes; with their loved ones, sending sons and husbands and fathers to the war front; with their labor, working in factories and fields and taking over from men in the nursing and teaching professions; and even with their lives, spying and fighting for the Union. In the aftermath of the war, as the divided nation was rebuilt, many of them expected they would have a say in how it was reconstructed.
But to their dismay, the Fourteenth Amendment explicitly tied the right to vote to “male” citizens, inserting the word “male” into the Constitution for the first time.
Boston abolitionist Julia Ward Howe, the author of the “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” was outraged. The laws of the era gave control of her property and her children to her abusive husband, and while far from a rabble-rouser, she wanted the right to adjust those laws so they were fair. In this moment, it seemed the right the Founders had articulated in the Declaration of Independence—the right to consent to the government under which one lived—was to be denied to the very women who had helped preserve the country, while white male Confederates and now Black men both enjoyed that right.
“The Civil War came to an end, leaving the slave not only emancipated, but endowed with the full dignity of citizenship. The women of the North had greatly helped to open the door which admitted him to freedom and its safeguard, the ballot. Was this door to be shut in their face?” Howe wondered.
The next year, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony formed the National Woman Suffrage Association, and six months later, Lucy Stone and Julia Ward Howe founded the American Woman Suffrage Association.
The National Woman Suffrage Association wanted a general reworking of gender roles in American society, drawing from the Seneca Falls Convention that Stanton had organized in 1848.
That convention’s Declaration of Sentiments, patterned explicitly on the Declaration of Independence, asserted that “all men and women are created equal” and that “the history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman, having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her.” It listed the many ways in which men had “fraudulently deprived [women] of their most sacred rights” and insisted that women receive “immediate admission to all the rights and privileges which belong to them as citizens of these United States.”
While the National Woman Suffrage Association excluded men from its membership, the American Woman Suffrage Association made a point of including men equally, as well as Black woman suffragists, to indicate that they were interested in the universal right to vote and only in that right, believing the rest of the rights their rivals demanded would come through voting.
The women’s suffrage movement had initial success in the western territories, both because lawmakers there were hoping to attract women for their male-heavy communities and because the same lawmakers were furious at the growing noise about Black voting. Wyoming Territory granted women the vote in 1869, and lawmakers in Utah Territory followed suit in 1870, expecting that women would vote against polygamy there. When women in fact supported polygamy, Utah lawmakers tried unsuccessfully to take their vote away, and the movement for women’s suffrage in the West slowed dramatically.
Suffragists had hoped that women would be included in the Fifteenth Amendment and, when they were not, decided to test their right to vote under the Fourteenth Amendment in the 1872 election. According to its statement that anyone born in the U.S. was a citizen, they were certainly citizens and thus should be able to vote. In New York state, Susan B. Anthony voted successfully but was later tried and convicted—in an all-male courtroom in which she did not have the right to testify—for the crime of voting.
In Missouri a voting registrar named Reese Happersett refused to permit suffragist Virginia Minor to register. Minor sued Happersett, and the case went all the way to the Supreme Court. In a unanimous decision in 1875, the justices decided that women were indeed citizens but that citizenship did not necessarily convey the right to vote.
This decision meant the fat was in the fire for Black Americans in the South, as it paved the way for white supremacists to keep them from the polls in 1876. But it was also a blow to suffragists, who recast their claims to voting by moving away from the idea that they had a human right to consent to their government, and toward the idea that they would be better and more principled voters than the Black men and immigrants who, under the law anyway, had the right to vote.
For the next two decades, the women’s suffrage movement drew its power from the many women’s organizations put together across the country by women of all races and backgrounds who came together to stop excessive drinking, clean up the sewage in city streets, protect children, stop lynching, and promote civil rights.
Black women like educator Mary Church Terrell and journalist Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin, publisher of the Woman’s Era, brought a broad lens to the movement from their work for civil rights, but they could not miss that Black women stood in between the movements for Black rights and women’s rights, a position scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw would identify In the twentieth century as “intersectionality.”
In 1890 the two major suffrage associations merged into the National American Woman Suffrage Association and worked to change voting laws at the state level. Gradually, western states and territories permitted women to vote in certain elections until by 1920, Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, Idaho, Washington, California, Oregon, Arizona, Kansas, Alaska Territory, Montana, and Nevada recognized women’s right to vote in at least some elections.
Suffragists recognized that action at the federal level would be more effective than a state-by-state strategy. The day before Democratic president Woodrow Wilson was inaugurated in 1913, they organized a suffrage parade in Washington, D.C., that grabbed media attention. They continued civil disobedience to pressure Wilson into supporting their movement.
Still, it took another war effort, that of World War I, which the U.S. entered in 1917, to light a fire under the lawmakers whose votes would be necessary to get a suffrage amendment through Congress and send it off to the states for ratification. Wilson, finally on board as he faced a difficult midterm election in 1918, backed a constitutional amendment, asking congressmen: “Shall we admit them only to a partnership of suffering and sacrifice and toil and not to a partnership of privilege and right?”
Congress passed the measure in a special session on June 4, 1919, and Tennessee’s ratification on August 18, 1920, made it the law of the land as soon as the official notice was in the hands of the secretary of state. Twenty-six million American women had the right to vote in the 1920 presidential election.
Crucially, as the Black suffragists had known all too well when they found themselves caught between the drives for Black male voting and women’s suffrage, Jim Crow and Juan Crow laws meant that most Black women and women of color would remain unable to vote for another 45 years. And yet they never stopped fighting for that right. Women like Fannie Lou Hamer, Amelia Boynton, Rosa Parks, Viola Liuzzo, and Constance Baker Motley were key organizers of voting rights initiatives, spreading information, arranging marches, sparking key protests, and preparing legal cases.
They were some of the leading voices behind the 1965 Voting Rights Act that finally made Black voting a reality.
Now, in 2026, Christian nationalists, whose ideas are powerful in the Trump administration, want to repeal women’s right to vote. They say that voting should be by household and that women must defer to men.
It’s a plan that seems designed to resurrect the world in which Americans lived before August 18, 1920.
That is my latest piece of writing, co-authored with Sonia Farrell Pearson of Harvard. Here is the opening premise:
As early as 2017, the European Parliament floated “electronic personhood” for robots. More recently, a handful of U.S. states introduced legislation explicitly barring AI from legal personhood; and early this summer, President Milei of Argentina proposed letting AI agents own, manage, and bear responsibility for their own corporations.
In response to Milei’s announcement, Yuval Noah Harari pointed out that we have no way of holding an AI agent accountable. What, he asks, could we do to an entity which has neither money to lose nor a body to incarcerate? As Shruti Rajagopalan, a Senior Research Fellow at George Mason’s Mercatus Center, explains: AI “can act intelligently, but only humans respond to the incentives the law creates”.
This question matters now: there are already ways an agent could become fully untethered. By “untethered” – a central concept in this essay – we mean that there is no meaningful or actionable way to trace the actions back to a legally accountable human or institutional entity.
For one, people can and do set agents free, on purpose. An agent could be created by a human or a company that intends to monitor it but then dies or disappears. Or perhaps the entity that created the agent is based in a country like North Korea, not reachable by standard laws.
In other cases the agent might not need to “escape” at all: the agent could be ‘controlled’ by a shell corporation that, while formally owned and traceable, provides no true defendant or ability to satisfy claims. Or perhaps a process spawns a chain of agents so long that the actions of a subagent can’t be tied to the original agent’s creator, neither epistemically nor meaningfully. Even if we can identify the model’s original creator, what if it’s been finetuned, or merged with another model that was created by someone else? The law might eventually untangle these kinds of complex cases, but we foresee an intermediate period where it does not.
And then there’s the user, who makes choices about what the models should actually do. The Hugging Face incident was unusual in that OpenAI was both the model’s creator and its user. But now close to a billion people use these systems: when blaming the creator is legally inappropriate, will it always make sense to blame the user?
The essay considers to what extent capitalizing the untethered agents — requiring them to hold a certain amount of capital — can serve the end of better alignment. About 22 pp., published on Sonia’s Substack, definitely recommended.
New Mexico’s Elephant Butte Reservoir was nearly full on June 2, 1994 (left), in contrast with very low levels during periods of drought on July 8, 2013 (center), and July 27, 2026 (right). The images were acquired with the TM (Thematic Mapper) on Landsat 5 and the OLI (Operational Land Imager) on Landsat 8 and Landsat 9.
NASA Earth Observatory/Michala Garrison
After orbiting Earth in 1962, John Glenn remarked on an irrigated valley northwest of El Paso, Texas, that stood out against the surrounding desert. Human-made lakes along the Rio Grande have made agriculture possible and turned an otherwise dry area green, as Glenn observed. With water for irrigation, farmers there produce crops such as alfalfa, cotton, onions, pecans, and the regional specialty: Hatch green chiles.
Abnormally dry conditions in the Rio Grande basin, however, have stressed these water resources. Extreme drought has plagued the region for the past several years. The earliest snowmelt on record at the river’s headwaters in the southern Rockies exacerbated the situation in 2026.
These factors have contributed to driving Elephant Butte Reservoir, the largest reservoir in New Mexico, to its lowest level since 1971. When the image above was acquired on July 27, 2026 (right), it stood at 1.4 percent capacity. For comparison, the reservoir was nearly full on June 2, 1994 (left); levels were high for much of the period between 1985 and 2000. On July 8, 2013 (center), amid another drought, the lake hit its annual low of 2.9 percent capacity.
The low water levels in 2026 exposed debris along the shoreline and left boat ramps in Elephant Butte Lake State Park covered in sediment. But the lake likely bottomed out for the year in late July. Water releases for agriculture stopped after July 28, state officials said, allowing it to slowly begin to refill.
Water volume data from the Texas Water Development Board shows how the level of Elephant Butte Reservoir has varied from the lake’s creation in 1915 to summer 2026.
NASA Earth Observatory/Michala Garrison
The long-term drought situation has brought the Rio Grande’s water woes and their wider implications into sharp focus. Users in both New Mexico and Texas rely on surface and groundwater in the valley, requiring careful planning around storage and sharing. Several projects supported by NASA’s Western Water Action Office (WWAO) are aimed at equipping water managers with NASA data and tools that assist in resource allocation.
For instance, researchers developed a model that incorporates NASA satellite data for variables such as soil moisture and evapotranspiration, resulting in a near-real-time tool that complements the Elephant Butte Irrigation District’s existing water allocation operations. Another project paired satellite observations of water surface heights with drone and ground data to track how groundwater pumping affects the Rio Grande’s flow—information that the WWAO says can help managers in administering water rights. NASA scientists are also contributing to a federal study of the Upper Rio Grande that aims to understand water needs, project future water availability, and develop data-driven tools to address these needs.
Up and to my office, where we sat all the morning. And at noon home, and my father came and dined with me, Susan being come and helped my wife to dress dinner. After dinner my father and I talked about our country-matters, and in fine I find that he thinks 50l. per ann. will go near to keep them all, which I am glad of. He having taken his leave of me and my wife without any mention of the differences between them and my wife in the country, I went forth to several places about businesses, and so home again, and after prayers to bed.
Rochester, NY – August 18, 2026 – Eoptic, Inc., a developer of advanced multi-spectral and multi-modal imaging systems, today announced it has been selected as an approved supplier in support of strategic […]
There’s actually a tradition of economics bloggers giving recommendations about where (and how) to eat out. Tyler Cowen wrote a whole book on the subject, as well as various blog posts, and maintains an Ethnic Dining Guide on the web! I’m not going to be that thorough or go that deep. But over the last year I’ve gone to quite a few restaurants in San Francisco, so I thought I might share what I’ve learned.
In fact, this quest was born out of contrarianism. A lot of people say that the restaurant scene in San Francisco is mediocre, boring, or disappointing. The haters range from food critics and New York chefs to some SF residents themselves. I’ve lived in this city for a decade now, and although the restaurant scene here isn’t the best I’ve found — NYC and LA are better, and Japanese cities just annihilate all competition — I’ve always found plenty of good places to eat. When people portray SF as some sort of food desert, I’m convinced it’s a skill issue.
So to be thorough, I set out to try all of the good restaurants in the entire city. That’s a project that’s bound to fail, of course — there are just too many, and quality can vary over time, and places are always opening and closing. But at this point I think I’ve eaten at enough places to write a fairly authoritative guide to restaurants in San Francisco.
What this guide is and is not
Writing about food is an inherently difficult thing to do, because taste doesn’t easily translate into language. There are plenty of reasons for this, including:
People don’t biologically experience the same taste the same way. The most famous example is how some people taste cilantro like soap due to a variation in one particular gene. But there are lots of other examples. When I try to describe the taste of a particular dish or ingredient, chances are that your physical experience of it will be different from what I experienced, and you’ll be left scratching your head and wondering if I’m an alien.
Even if people did experience tastes the same way, people’s preferences would probably differ radically on most things. Some of this is due to personal associations — conditioned taste aversion is very much a thing, for example. There are probably lots of other reasons as well. It isn’t just what we like and dislike, either — how much we like and dislike each combination of tastes can make the difference in whether we like a restaurant overall.
Culinary experiences are not very uniform across the population, so we haven’t been able to develop as much of a shared vocabulary to describe what we’re tasting — if I’ve eaten Sichuan pepper and you haven’t, it’s a little like trying to describe the color red to a blind person. And since most people have only eaten a small percentage of what there is to eat in the world, the region of overlapping experience across the entire population is small; thus, we simply don’t have many words that refer to taste experiences that most people have had.1
To see how hard it is to describe food in words, try the following exercise. Pick five restaurants you like, and five you don’t like, and mix them together in a list. Ask your favorite AI chatbot to pick five of these that you should go to, and five you should avoid, and ask it to explain why you’d like and dislike them. Chances are you’ll have no idea what it’s talking about. AI can do the most advanced math on Earth, but describing taste in words is an exercise for which good training data simply doesn’t exist.
So when I say my restaurant guide is “authoritative”, I don’t mean I’m an authority. I just mean I’ve been to a lot of restaurants, and I know which ones I like and don’t like, and I can describe why I like and dislike them in terms that make sense to me. But obviously this is all just me describing my subjective experience and hoping that it resonates with you. So when you go through this guide and find yourself nodding in vigorous agreement with some of the recommendations, and screwing up your face in confusion at others, well…I warned you.
Also, I’m not well-versed in the art of food criticism, so I’m not going to try very hard to describe the tastes I experienced at these restaurants. But I am pretty well-versed in the art of noticing patterns and thinking about explanations for things, and so this guide is going to focus less on the particulars of various dishes than on questions like “Why is SF’s food scene not the best in the country?” and “What kinds of restaurants are generally good in SF?”.
As for my recommendations themselves, my criterion for ranking restaurants highly isn’t just how good they are. It’s what I call “yums per dollar”2 — basically, whether the culinary experience you got was worth the price you paid. So I’m perfectly happy ranking a good taqueria up there with a Michelin-star place.
Speaking of Michelin-star places, I’ve decided not to include any places that are over $150 a person or so (before tax and tip). That’s already quite expensive, and I don’t want to be the kind of guy who recommends people to a bunch of restaurants they can’t afford to go to. And quite frankly, I’ve only been to one or two of those anyway. So, apologies to Benu, Quince, Californios, and the rest of those guys.
Finally, I’ve eaten at several hundred restaurants in SF, but that’s only about 10% of the total. So if you have some recommendations for good ones I should try, feel free to drop them in the comments. And of course this post is just Part 1 in a series; Part 2 will have updated recommendations, cafes, bakeries, dessert places, and some restaurants from out of town.
Garbage salad at side a
Why is SF’s food scene not the best in the country?
First, I thought I should address the big question: Why isn’t San Francisco’s food scene better than it is? I’ve already gone on record saying that NYC and LA are better (though the difference isn’t huge). Why?
There’s one obvious, overriding reason: city size. San Francisco is a city of 826,000 people; New York City has 8.58 million, while LA has 3.87 million. So if the number of restaurants is generally proportional to the number of people, then even if quality were equivalent, we’d expect NYC to have more than ten times as many good restaurants as SF, and LA to have more than four times as many.
This would lead very naturally to people thinking SF has a worse food scene than those much larger cities. The restaurants we go to are not a random sample; we try to pick the ones we’ll like the most. So if you can find 10 times as many restaurants you like in NYC, you might end up thinking restaurants in NYC are better on average, even if they’re not. (Also, larger populations mean NYC and LA have more partisans to stand up for their hometowns in online arguments.)
The people who bash San Francisco restaurants are often quick to explain that there’s plenty of great food in the rest of the Bay Area — in the East Bay (Oakland, Berkeley, etc.), the Peninsula (South SF, Daly City, Redwood City, Mountain View), and in the South Bay (Milpitas, Sunnyvale, Cupertino, San Jose). And this is very true. But keep in mind that the Bay Area has a total of nine million people — a little bit more than New York City. I would gladly pit the entire SF Bay Area against all of NYC in terms of food.
OK, but San Francisco is by far the densest part of the Bay Area, in terms of population per square mile. Why isn’t it considered the center of the metro area’s culinary scene, the way Manhattan is for NYC? Why do people tell you to go to the South Bay or the East Bay if you want to eat well?
I think there are several reasons for this. The first is simply the insane rent. SF is one of the least affordable cities in the country, thanks to the AI boom, the tech industry in general, draconian restrictions on housing development, the unique and excellent weather,3 and the fact that it’s destined by geography to be the dense core of a major metro area. On top of that, San Francisco is one of the hardest places to start a small business, thanks to decades of red tape accumulated under supposedly “progressive” governance.
That means if you’re going to start a restaurant in San Francisco, you are probably going to have to charge a lot of money to make up for all the money and time you had to spend. The exceptions are restaurateurs who own their own buildings, who have long-term legacy leases, or who have owners who rent to them for below market rates. This means that SF food tends to be a sort of double-peaked distribution, with $600-a-person places like Benu and cheap banh mi places like L&G, but not a lot of mid-price places.
So if you’re a penniless 22-year-old tech founder living in a bunk bed in a grungy group house, or if you’re a 44-year-old tech founder who pocketed $80 million from selling his company to Amazon and now just “invests”, you’re more likely to be satisfied with the SF food scene. But if you’re a 30-year-old who makes $200,000 working for a big tech company, there are going to be fewer of the kind of mid-priced options that you could afford but which would also give you a special night out.
SF’s stratospheric rent also probably exerts a more subtle corrosive influence on the food scene. The middle class has largely been priced out of the city, leaving it to the rich and the rent-controlled. That has largely hollowed out the kind of middle-class ethnic communities that patronize the great ethnic food scenes of Los Angeles, as well as the bohemian hipsters and artists who seek out the most creative affordable eating options.
Everybody knows about SF’s rent problem, but I think one more factor that tends to fly under the radar is limited competition due to geographic immobility. New York has a great train system, making it pretty easy to get anywhere in the central city on foot. LA and all other American cities (including Oakland and San Jose) are driving towns, where you can often get very quickly from point to point. But San Francisco does not have a good intra-city train network (sorry, Muni!), nor is it car-friendly. You can Uber, but that gets expensive if you do it a lot. So in my experience, a lot of San Franciscans often end up just staying in their neighborhoods.
When people stay in their neighborhoods, restaurants aren’t competing with each other nearly as much; everyone just goes to their local spots. This reduces the incentive for restaurants to innovate, raise their quality, and differentiate themselves — there’s just not as much chance to attract patrons from across town. Each restaurant instead just serves up its classic fare to the standard crowd of locals, and they have to accept whatever they’re given. And when you ask people for recommendations, you just get their standard neighborhood spots (or a recitation of the Michelin Guide).
So if you want to make San Francisco’s food scene better, my suggestions would be:
Build a lot more housing
Make the Muni a lot faster and improve its coverage of the city
Cut red tape and make it a lot easier to start a small business
But having said all that, I do think that San Francisco’s restaurant scene is decently good despite all of these challenges. So here are some recommendations of places to go.
Brunch at Dalida
Three types of restaurants I tend to like in San Francisco
There are good examples of practically every type of restaurant in San Francisco. But I’ve noticed three distinct types that I think SF does particularly well.
Type 1: Pseudo-izakayas
An izakaya is a type of Japanese restaurant, similar to a tapas bar. You typically order a variety of small plates and share them among a group of people, often while drinking. Traditionally, izakayas mostly served old Japanese standby dishes — karaage, basic yakitori and sushi, that sort of thing. But around the 1990s, a bunch of izakayas started getting more experimental and creative. The small-plate format allowed them to do this, because it let diners order one weird new thing among a bunch of old favorites. This trend accelerated as the Japanese government lowered trade barriers and allowed more cheap imports of foreign ingredients. By the 2010s, most of the best restaurants in Japan were izakayas rather than omakase, ramen, etc.
San Francisco doesn’t have many (well, really, any) of these new, upscale, creative izakayas. But it has a number of restaurants that basically do this same format with some other type of cuisine — Middle Eastern, or Mexican, etc. The small-plate format allows these restaurants to charge a little more — they’ll usually run about $70 to $110 per person — but they compensate for this by giving diners enormous variety and experimenting with lots of new dishes.
These places sometimes get described as “fusion”, but their dishes aren’t mashups — instead, they start from a base of a specific type of cuisine and then play around with it, throwing in a couple of ingredients from other cuisines. In fact, one good way to identify good restaurants in the U.S. these days is to look for places that use one or two Japanese and Korean ingredients in dishes that aren’t Japanese or Korean.
By the way, one of my most important tips for eating out is: ALWAYS EAT FAMILY STYLE. That means share everything, unless you have someone with special dietary restrictions with you. Sharing everything means you get to try a lot more dishes, which is especially important at the kind of izakaya-style places I talk about in this section. It also means you get to constantly cleanse your palate — when you go back and forth between a bunch of different dishes, you keep recapturing some of the novelty of each dish every time you come back to it. Whereas if you just order your own thing and chow down on that one thing, you hit the law of diminishing utility.
Anyway, here are some places I like that fit this description:
Maria Isabel: Officially a Mexican restaurant, but really they play around and mix in a bunch of different ingredients from a bunch of different cuisines. Every single thing I had here was excellent, and this might be the best new restaurant I’ve discovered this year. The plates are small, so order a lot; it’s only a little expensive. They also have a tasting menu, so technically they’re also in the “hipster fine dining” category. They’re probably going to get a Michelin star and jack up their prices, so go soon.
Prik Hom: In terms of sheer deliciousness, this is my favorite Thai restaurant in a city with lots of good Thai restaurants (though it’s more expensive than the close runner-up, Khao Tiew). The dishes are experimental riffs on standard Thai favorites, and the menu rotates frequently, but everything is delicious so don’t worry you’ll order the wrong thing. (Make sure to eat the ice cream at the end, though.) Prik Hom is a hidden gem for now — it’s in a neighborhood without a lot of other restaurants, and you can often just walk in.
Aziza: Everyone knows about this place, and it’s as good as they say. I’d say it’s tied with Dalida for my favorite Middle Eastern food in the city. But it’s not traditional Middle Eastern — I had one of the best octopus dishes I’ve ever eaten at Aziza, which is saying something because I lived in Japan. The menu rotates frequently, but you can always get the “trio of spreads” to start. There’s also a tasting menu, so this fits in the “hipster fine dining” category too.
Dalida: The other great Middle Eastern izakaya I know in SF. This is Maria Isabel’s sister restaurant (the chefs at the two places are spouses), and it’s comparable in quality. Dalida is also one of those rare restaurants that’s good for brunch and dinner, so try both (and if you go for brunch, sit outside). Dalida doesn’t include as many ingredients from other cuisines as Aziza does, but everything is a little experimental and unusual anyway. There is also a tasting menu for dinner.
Bansang: I’m kind of mad at Bansang, because it replaced what was by far my favorite Japanese izakaya in San Francisco, Izakaya Kou. But I forgive the owners, because they replaced Kou with one of the only really excellent Korean restaurants in San Francisco. Like the other “pseudo-izakayas” on this list, Bansang focuses on smallish plates with original twists on old Korean favorites (chimichurri in the galbi, etc.), and they frequently rotate their menu.
Pearl 6101: You don’t see a lot of experimentation with Italian food, but Pearl is the best example of an “Italian izakaya” I’ve been to in SF. They don’t use as many Asian or Middle Eastern ingredients as some of the other restaurants on this list, but they’ll sneak a little Vietnamese fish sauce into their halibut crudo. Everything is very well-executed.
Horsefeather: A restaurant disguised as a bar. This is one of the best-kept secrets in San Francisco, since most people think it’s just a place to drink, but it actually has a very extensive food menu full of creative and excellent cuisine that’s basically a mashup of French, Latin American, Korean, Japanese, and Italian. I had some of the best asparagus of my life here, and an unbelievable tres leches cake — both of which have now been taken off the menu, because it rotates frequently. A great place for large parties on short notice. Horsefeather is also co-owned by Hanson Li, one of SF’s most creative and interesting restaurateurs.
Fermentation Lab: The single most underrated, unknown restaurant in this category. It’s another restaurant disguised as a bar, like Horsefeather. Fermentation Lab is basically a Korean izakaya, serving creative Korean twists like makegeolli-braised pork belly in addition to standard bar bites like duck fat fries. Everything is delicious and original. I cannot stress how bad the marketing of this restaurant has been, relative to its quality — people ought to be snapping up reservations weeks in advance, but instead there are open seats and you can just walk in. People don’t even seem to know it’s Korean!
Tiya: An Indian izakaya with some Japanese influences. If you want to get wagyu stir-fried with asparagus, madras curry, and quinoa, or octopus curry with smoked tomato pachadi and kumquat, this is the place to get it. It’s very experimental, so if your Indian friends are looking for a taste of home, consider taking them to Copra instead. But Tiya has stuff you won’t get anywhere else, and it’s easily my favorite restaurant in the Marina. It’s also open for brunch, and it has a tasting menu option for dinner, though I haven’t tried either of those.
Rich Table: “New American” is a term that sometimes describes overpriced faux-French places, and sometimes describes extremely creative izakaya-type places that blend traditional American fare with ingredients from Japan, Korea, and other countries in Asia. Rich Table is probably the best of these in the city, unless you count the Michelin-star places — and on “yums per dollar”, it beats most of those places hands down. In fact, Rich Table is probably the closest thing you can get in SF to a good modern/experimental Japanese izakaya — the two cuisines are basically converging. It also has a tasting menu.
Other great examples:
Routier (probably my favorite French restaurant in town, everything tastes interesting and a bit unusual, but almost always better than the standard version4)
Ernest (another “New American” place with lots of contributions from other cuisines, a bit like Rich Table; get the cheesecake)
The Morris(yet another great New American place, I recommend the crudite)
Four Kings(a Cantonese izakaya, everything very solid but could stand to be a little more experimental, I recommend the squab)
Happy Crane (another Cantonese izakaya, very new and experimental, still working out some kinks and can be hit or miss, but the hits are excellent)
Jilli (another Korean bar-style restaurant, the menu is much smaller than the others but everything is excellent and the flavors are extremely original; try the kimchi vodka rigatoni pasta with burrata)
Red Window (warning: order only the Spanish dishes, not the Italian ones!)
Most “fine dining” places in SF range from $200 to $600 per person, and come complete with Michelin stars and vigorous arguments over whether they’re “the best meal I’ve ever had” or “totally overrated”. But there are a few places you can go that offer a “fine dining” experience for a much more affordable price — usually around $90-$120 per person, but occasionally as low as $50.
There is some overlap with the “pseudo-izakaya” category here, because many of those places offer tasting menus. Rich Table, Maria Isabel, Aziza, Dalida, Ernest, and Happy Crane all count as “hipster fine dining” too. But here are a few others:
Mijoté: This might just be my favorite restaurant in the city. It’s officially a French restaurant — the “j” is pronounced like a “j”, not like an “h” — but it has very heavy Japanese influences. That’s probably because the chef, Kosuke Tada, is a Japanese guy who worked in France for a long time. Everything at Mijote is excellent; it’s only a prix fixe menu, and it changes frequently, but I’ve never once been disappointed with anything. Kosuke is a virtuoso; one time he catered deli sandwiches for a random party I went to in Oakland, and they were some of the best sandwiches I’ve ever had. And the price is very affordable as fine dining goes — just $84 per person.
7 Adams: This place does have one Michelin star (and richly deserves it), but it’s significantly cheaper than a lot of other Michelin places while being every bit as good. It’s “New American”, with somewhat fewer Asian ingredients than Rich Table.
Mr. Pollo: Still among the best-kept secrets in SF, even though it’s been around for many years. Two guys took over a space from a Colombian restaurant called Mr. Pollo, but kept the sign and the name. It’s not Colombian food (they used to do arepas every night, but stopped); it’s just whatever they feel like cooking this week. It’s always good, and it’s just $49 — maybe the best value for money in the entire city. Good luck getting a reservation, though.
Gazpacho at Mr. Pollo
Type 3: New hole in the wall
There are a number of cheap-ish restaurants that luckily manage to avoid the curse of SF’s astronomical rent. Most of these have just been sitting in the same spot since the 80s or 90s, and haven’t really updated their cuisines. However, there are some new ones that manage to open up, and some of these — through some mystical combination of skill, dedication, luck, or whatever — manage to be truly excellent. Here are a few examples:
Sichuan Tasty Restaurant: One of the most underrated restaurants in the city. I love Sichuan food, and though I tell myself I’ve been to one or two places in Flushing that were better than Sichuan Tasty Restaurant, I can’t quite remember if they really were better. Everything is delicious, the portions are huge, and somehow there are always seats open and you can just walk in. Remember to order everything with extra 花椒.
Mini Potstickers: If you want great takeout dumplings in SF, this, in my opinion, is one of the two best places to get them. The boiled dumplings are as good as the nearby (and much more famous) Yuanbao Jiaozi, but Mini Potstickers has much more range — awesome mini fried dumplings (hence the name), and excellent jianbing.
Fuwa Dumpling: SF’s other great takeout dumpling place, also with good variety. Probably the best takeout boiled dumplings I’ve had in the city.
Gusto Pinsa Romana: Some restaurants have started aggressively marketing traditional Roman-style pizza as “pinsa”, and defined it as a whole new category of food. Well, more power to them. Of “pinsa” restaurants in SF, Pinsa Rossa is the most famous, but Gusto Pinsa Romana is — at least in my opinion — far and away the best. It’s cheap, it’s delicious, and it’s good to eat in or DoorDash.
Timur: As of this writing, Timur Indian and Nepalese Cuisine has a perfect 5.0 rating on Google with 688 reviews. That’s just incredible. It’s well-deserved — this small, out-of-the-way, affordable little restaurant is the best Nepalese food in a city filled with great Nepalese places. I especially recommend the korma.
Sherpa House: This one just barely gets edged out by Timur for “best Nepalese in town”, but honestly it’s very very close. Also a perfect 5.0 on Google as of this writing, with 202 reviews.
Bo&Beurre: How would you like a huge, incredibly delicious banh mi sandwich in the middle of downtown San Francisco for only $6? Bo&Beurre is a little out-of-the-way Vietnamese place that will give you that sandwich. Somehow it’s much less well known than Saigon Sandwich, which is less than a block away and has lines down the street, but which is definitely not as good.
L&G: The other amazing super-cheap banh mi place in SF’s Little Saigon neighborhood is L&G — and it’s right next to Bo&Beurre. Actually, the two places are somewhat different — Bo’s sandwiches are drier and perfectly arranged, while L&G’s are a greasy street-food sauce-bomb. Both are amazing, both have no lines, and I’d recommend both over Saigon Sandwich.
Oodle Yunnan Rice Noodle: I am always looking for Chinese restaurants that are neither Cantonese, Sichuan, nor dumplings. This one fit the bill nicely. The food is delicious, the prices are affordable, the decor and ambiance are very cheerful and modern, the staff is super friendly, and you can just walk in.
El Gallo Giro Food Truck: I’m sort of stretching the boundaries of this category to include a food truck that has been parked in the Mission for over two decades, but it would be criminal not to. This little truck has some of the best tacos and burritos in the city. I don’t know how they do it so well. You need to pay with cash or Venmo, so be prepared.
Anyway, there’s a sampling of my three favorite types of restaurants in San Francisco. But there are a bunch more good ones, so let’s go through some of the standard categories.
Dinner at Sichuan Tasty Restaurant
Cuisine-specific recommendations
Japanese
I spent a lot of time raving about how great izakayas were, but ever since Izakaya Kou closed, there aren’t really any great ones in San Francisco. Kibatsu in Lower Haight and Fenikkusu in the Mission are the closest — both are very solid, but they ought to get more creative and update their menus more. Kibatsu has to be my favorite here, because they also have some great nigiri, including an umimasu that’s the best I’ve ever had.5Noren also has good quality yakitori.
However, there are a number of very good Japanese restaurants of other, more standard types. Two ramen places — Taishoken and Mensho SF — really dominate the scene here; both have skilled Japanese chefs, and are similar in quality to what you’d get at very good ramen restaurants in Tokyo. I’d give the edge to Taishoken, since it takes reservations and doesn’t require you to wait an hour on the street in the middle of SF’s worst neighborhood like Mensho does.
There’s a kaitenzushi place called Izumi in Japantown mall that’s actually as good as any I’ve had in Japan (though much more expensive). Nabe is a Japanese hot pot place in the Sunset that also matches Japanese quality. There are also some “big roll” sushi places of the type you can’t get in Japan — my favorite ones like Arashi Sushi closed in the pandemic, but DJ Sushi’s big rolls are criminally underrated and there are a bunch of new ones I haven’t tried yet. Potto and Shabu Club are also solid hot pot places with good-quality meat.
Omakase is difficult, because America has trouble getting fresh fish — both because of stricter health laws, and because of geographic distance from Japanese supply chains — and most of the famous places are just way overpriced. But there are a couple very solid ones, including Doma Sushi in Bernal, and Robin in Hayes Valley. Robin is a controversial pick here, because it’s non-traditional and experimental, but their experiments hit a lot more often than they miss, and if you’re in a country that has trouble getting fresh fish, experimentation is more important. An is also good, though for some reason it takes 3 hours to eat.
Nigiri at Robin
Vietnamese
San Francisco has a lot of great cheap Vietnamese food, especially in the “Little Saigon” area near the Tenderloin. I’ve already mentioned Bo&Beurre and L&G, but also check out Pho Tan Hoa and Larkin Restaurant for pho. Pho 2000 isn’t my favorite for Pho, ironically, but has very good appetizers and other dishes. But the best Vietnamese restaurant in the whole area is probably the amazing Hai Ky Mi Gia, a little Chinese-Vietnamese hole-in-the-wall that serves some of the best seafood egg noodles I’ve ever had. There are also plenty of good cheap and cheap-ish places scattered throughout the city, like Banh Mi Crunch in the Sunset, An Chi in the Richmond, and others.
As for upscale Vietnamese, that’s harder to find, partly because “upscale Vietnamese” is just a thing that not a lot of people try yet. My favorite is definitely Gao Viet in the Sunset, which serves absolutely huge portions of absolutely delicious food, including both traditional favorites like banh xeo and some truly wacky giant combos of stuff. Thanh Long makes a good crab, though it’s a little bit overpriced. Bodega SF is pretty good, though a bit uneven. There is also a place called Hem by LeQuy in the Mission that does traditional stuff, but slightly more expensive and higher-quality than most; it probably has the single best bowl of pho I’ve eaten in SF. Note that I still have a lot of Vietnamese places left to try in this city.
Crab at Thanh Long
Nepalese
I’m not sure why, but there has been an explosion of good Nepalese places in San Francisco in recent years — most of them pretty affordable. Tyler Cowen has a rule that you should try the less-well-known ethnic cuisines, and that definitely applies to Nepalese in SF; the Nepalese places here tend to be much better than the similar Indian places. The three best I’ve found are the aforementioned Timur and Sherpa House, plus a third place called Base Camp that does excellent lunch and focuses more on noodle dishes than curries. But there are a lot of other very good ones, including Himalayan Cuisine, Dancing Yak, Nepa Indian Cuisine, and others.
Thai
For some reason, San Francisco has a lot of very good Thai restaurants. Unlike Vietnamese places, which tend to be cheap, Thai places tend to be mid-priced or even a little upscale. So they make good spots for date nights or big group outings.
The yummiest Thai place I’ve been to is the aforementioned Prik Hom, but in terms of yums per dollar, it — and every other Thai place — is absolutely mogged6 by Khao Tiew in West Portal. You can absolutely gorge yourself sick on amazing food at Khao Tiew for $30. But the downside is that the place doesn’t take reservations, so you have to wait two or three hours in line just to get in.7
Nor are those the only great places in town. Ka Kai in the Castro has an amazing sampler platter, and the best khao soi I’ve ever eaten. Nari has an absolutely incredible trout curry — probably the best Thai curry I’ve ever had — and is more affordable than Google says it is.8 There are a number of other solid ones as well.
Khao soi at Ka Kai
Mexican
People from Los Angeles love to talk trash about how their Mexican food is so much better than San Francisco’s Mexican food. It isn’t. The taquerias in the Mission are as good as what you’ll get in LA, and the “Mission burrito” is a genuine local specialty.
What is the best Mission burrito in SF? This is a long-running debate, but my favorites are Taqueria Buen Sabor, El Metate, the venerable El Farolito, and the aforementioned El Gallo Giro Food Truck. If you want a giant sloppy late-night grease-bomb, go with El Farolito; if you’d like higher-quality ingredients with a little more refinement, go with the other three.
As for tacos, for my top picks I of course recommend El Gallo Giro, and a nearby place called Taqueria Vallarta. Taqueria Los Altos is very good as well. There’s also a place called El Rey Taquiza Artesanal that’s excellent, though more expensive.
SF also has some good upscale Mexican places, especially the brilliant Maria Isabel and the delicious brunch spot el Mil Amores. There are a lot I haven’t been to yet, so I’ll report on those in Part 2. (SF also has the country’s only 3-Michelin-star Mexican place, Californios, though I haven’t been.)
Corn ice cream at Maria Isabel
New American
I’ve already covered most of my favorite New American places — Horsefeather, Rich Table, 7 Adams, Ernest, and The Morris. Another place I like a lot is Verjus, and side a can be a little uneven but has one of the best salads I’ve ever eaten (the Garbage Salad). Golden Eye Social and Plow are solid too, though Plow makes you stand in line. The chicken and fries at Zuni Cafe are as good as everyone says, so that’s worth a visit.
Chicken at Zuni
Italian
Like NYC and many other American cities, San Francisco has a lot of “red sauce” Italian places — traditional Sicilian-type places where you can get lasagna and spaghetti and infinite free bread. Those have never really been my thing, but I do have to say that Sotto Mare’s famous cioppino is really very good.9
But there are also some good mid-priced Italian places in town. Everyone says Cotogna is the best of these, and they’re correct; they had a corn pasta recently that’s the best pasta I’ve ever eaten. Seven Hills gets a lot of grief for being old-fashioned, but the quality is as good as what I’ve had in NYC, for a significantly more affordable price. Flour + Water is also quite solid, though I’d get the pasta instead of the pizza. Pearl 6101 is the most creative.
I’m not sure if pizza counts as Italian food at this point, but SF does have great pizza. Little Star is my favorite, with Chicago-quality deep dish and excellent Detroit-style pizza as well. Outta Sight is probably the best place to order for parties. Gusto Pinsa Romana is delicious, unusual, and surprisingly healthy. I also like Sforno a lot.
SF can’t hold its own against NYC (or Japan) in terms of Italian food, but it’s not hard to find good stuff here.
Dessert at Cotogna
Chinese
Chinese food is undoubtedly San Francisco’s biggest culinary failing. Given the huge ethnic community — almost a quarter of the city’s population is of Chinese descent! — it should have a ton of great Chinese restaurants. Instead, it has endless mediocre Cantonese banquet places that look like they haven’t changed a thing (including their signage and decor) since 1982. When regular people (as opposed to snobby NYC chefs) say “food in SF sucks”, they often mean that the Chinese food sucks.
But these are few and far between. And in terms of mid-price restaurants — the kind you’d be blown away by in Milpitas, Cupertino, or Daly City — there really just aren’t that many. Dumpling House in the Castro is a sleeper hit in my opinion, with the best green beans I’ve ever had, plus all-around great dumplings. Tasty Pot is a great individualized Taiwanese hot pot place, though some people (mistakenly) look down on it. There are a few solid hotpot places like IPOT, and a few solid dim sum places like Dragon Beaux and Palette Tea House. Z&Y is OK, I suppose. But honestly, it’s slim pickings, and if you want good Chinese food I’d usually just recommend taking a trip across the Bay Bridge or down to the south suburbs, which IMO rival Greater Los Angeles and surpass NYC in quality.
Dumplings at Palette Tea House
Others
There’s lots of other good stuff in San Francisco. SF has some great lunch sandwich places — the best is Tarragon Cafe, which is one of the city’s best-kept secrets, and where everything is delicious (I recommend ordering the salmon toast with avocado). Tartine Manufactory is great too. For Greek food, go to Kokkari for the higher end and The Parthenon for the lower end. For German, go to Suppenküche in Hayes. For brunch, Plain Jane and its sister restaurant Mymy are hard to beat, though there are lots of great places like Les Marais and Sweet Maple. Beit Rima is another solid Middle Eastern place. For pubs, I like Hazie’s and Stoa. Hook Fish has excellent fish sandwiches and such. Burma Love and its sister restaurant Teakwood are both yummy (get the duck curry at Teakwood).10Brenda’s does have good cajun and soul food. For vegan food, I really love both Phonobar (which is basically a vegan izakaya), and Shizen, the vegan sushi spot. House of Prime Rib deserves its status as a local favorite, though it’s a LOT of food. JouJou is a solid (if a little uneven) new French spot. Piglet & Co. is a Taiwanese izakaya-style place that serves a lot of interesting pork dishes. Niku is an excellent steakhouse with great side dishes and a butcher shop next door that does great wagyu burgers.
House of Prime Rib
I think that just about does it for my specific recommendations. That’s probably enough restaurants to keep you eating well for a couple of years!
Overrated restaurants?
When I give my recommendations, one thing some people ask me is to identify some restaurants that I think are overrated — they want to be warned away from bad restaurants, not just pointed toward good ones!
That’s a reasonable thing to want, but in general I’m kind of against this. As I said, tastes differ a lot — if you like a restaurant I don’t like, then good for you and good for the restaurant too! I don’t expect my preferences to be universally shared, and I certainly don’t regard them as the voice of authority.
But that said, knowing what I don’t like might help you to understand whether and how your preferences match or diverge from my own. Just remember that I’m not criticizing anyone for liking things I don’t like.
First, there are some restaurants I just really did not like at all. These include Lily, a Vietnamese place in the Richmond; La Ciccia, an Italian place in Bernal; and Bir Kitchen, a Nepalese place in the Mission. For whatever reason, the food at these places just really did not appeal to me. If it appeals to you, more power to you.
Second, there are a bunch of restaurants that form a sort of “standard canon” of what people in the tech scene — i.e., my own social scene — tend to recommend, but which I think are no better than similar places that receive much less attention. One of these is La Taqueria, which serves fine burritos but which in my opinion doesn’t justify the massive line around the block — especially when you have El Metate and El Gallo Giro so close by. Saigon Sandwich is the same thing for banh mi — Bo&Beurre and L&G are literally across the street with no line. I don’t understand why people form a massive line for pizza at Jules or dumplings at Dumpling Home, when Gioia and Dumpling House are similarly good and just a few minutes’ walk away.
Most of all, I can’t understand why everyone always wants to go to Izakaya Rintaro. I’ve been there five or six times now, but you can get pretty much the same sort of mid-level 1990s-era izakaya food at Nande-ya in Japantown, or Izakaya Sozai in the Sunset, or a number of other places — and honestly better, if you go to The Public Izakaya or Chome.
I once heard someone say “the line is the product,” and I guess maybe that’s right. Perhaps there is some level of endogenous coordination, where the fact that everyone else is excited for a particular place makes it more exciting to go there, even when it’s not very different from other places.
Anyway.
Neighborhoods
That about sums it up for my recommendations, but as I said, I’ve been to only 10% of the restaurants in San Francisco. If you want to come to SF and wander around and find places that you didn’t hear about in this guide, or the Michelin Guide, or on the standard “where to eat” websites, where do you go? I thought it would be good to offer some general thoughts on the various neighborhoods in the city.
The Mission: The Mission is, far and away, the best eating neighborhood in San Francisco. This is partly a function of size, since it’s larger than other centrally located neighborhoods. But it’s also very central, and it’s a place that lots of people come to hang out and drink and shop and party. That means it’s a little less burdened by SF’s geographic immobility — a lot of people are always in the Mission, and so restaurants are forced to compete for their business. That’s why the Mission has lots of good top-end places like Mijote, Flour + Water, Ernest, The Morris, Shizen, and so on, along with great mid-price offerings like Little Star, Base Camp, and Taishoken.
But the Mission also has a thriving Mexican community and lots of buildings with preferential rent arrangements or legacy leases, which is why you get lots of good cheap Mexican places too. Basically, if you walk around in the Mission, you’re going to find a lot of good stuff.
Japantown: Japantown has a lot of OK legacy Japanese places — izakayas and noodle spots and yakitori places that are still basically the same as they were in the 90s. Those are fine, I suppose. But the high level of foot traffic opens up room for a lot of genuinely great spots to open. It’s the city’s center for Korean food, with Bansang, Fermentation Lab, and Daeho Kalbijim, as well as a good Korean-run katsu spot called Ganji.
North Beach: Again, I recommend not going here for the standard local thing (red-sauce Italian). There are a lot of other random good places here, drawn by the heavy foot traffic — Noren for yakitori, Tasty Pot for hotpot, Red Window for tapas, Verjus for New American, and so on.
The Central/Outer Richmond: Probably the best place in the city to find good hole-in-the-wall spots, especially Chinese ones. I need to try a lot more places (and will report back in Part II).
The Sunset: Another good place to go hunting for hole-in-the-wall and mid-price spots. It’s very diverse in terms of cuisine. Both the Inner and Central Sunset are good.
Hayes Valley: My own neighborhood! It has a reputation for being full of yuppies, which is honestly pretty deserved, but it turns out that yuppies want to eat at good restaurants too. The good places here tend to be mid-priced spots like Teakwood, Phonobar, Hazie’s, Dumpling Home, and so on, making it one of the few neighborhoods in SF where you can consistently eat well for $40 a person.
Russian Hill/Polk St.: I haven’t been to enough places here, but it’s probably the best neighborhood for Italian food in the city. It also has a few Nepalese spots toward the south end of the neighborhood.
The Tenderloin: If you’re willing to brave the drug-induced disorder of the Loin, you can eat some extremely good cheap Vietnamese food in Little Saigon.
The Inner Richmond: This is a surprisingly overrated neighborhood. There are tons of restaurants, many with great reputations, but very few ones I’d put at the top of my list. I’m not sure why; maybe it’s central enough to have high rents, but peripheral enough not to have the heavy foot traffic that lures good places to the Mission, Japantown, Hayes, and North Beach.
Chinatown: Chinatown is mostly dominated by incredibly mediocre antiquated places that are still hanging on to their ancient cheap leases. There are a few good (expensive) Chinese places here, and a few good little bakeries like Yummy Bakery on Jackson, but in general this is SF’s most disappointing eating neighborhood.
The Embarcadero/FiDi: This is the neighborhood I’ve eaten in least, and I plan to review it in greater detail in Part 2. There are some solid famous places along the waterfront — Angler, Hog Island, La Mar, and so on. Kokkari is great. But overall I haven’t eaten here much.
SoMa: San Francisco’s great food desert. It was once the center of SF’s bustling daytime office culture, meaning that most of the restaurants were either lunch takeaway spots or happy hour bars. Then Covid hit, and everyone left downtown, and the takeaway spots and happy hour bars closed down. Now workers are slowly coming back to the area, but it’ll take a while for the neighborhood restaurant scene to recover, and there are only a couple of good places left.
Others: West Portal/Stonestown/Parkside, Dogpatch, Potrero, the Design District, and the Wharf area all have a few good spots, but aren’t really places to walk around and discover good new places. The Castro is OK, and is slowly getting some good new spots like Ka Kai and Potto. Noe Valley is surprisingly sparse, given the number of aging yuppies and well-to-do young families who live there. I haven’t been to Bernal enough. The Marina is dominated by bars, being more of a place to drink than a place to eat.
Anyway, that’s about all I have to say so far about eating out in San Francisco. In about a year, I’ll circle back with Part 2! Happy munching!
SF is cold in the summer, thanks to a natural air-conditioning system called the “marine layer”. Some people complain about this, but it means SF is usually pleasant when the rest of the country is experiencing brutal heat waves.
Routier’s one big flaw is that the butter they give you with your bread is a weird thing called “devil’s butter” that isn’t very good. Points for creativity, but they really need to add a normal butter — preferably the Brittany butter that JouJou serves.
College football has always been about more than Saturdays. It is local pride, television inventory, campus identity, recruiting theater, and, increasingly, a public argument about who benefits when the sport gets richer.
The new financial era sharpens that argument. Athlete compensation, expanded postseason access, media money, conference realignment, and sports wagering all now sit inside the same fan experience. A supporter can watch a rivalry game, follow transfer news, compare playoff scenarios, and encounter betting-adjacent content in one afternoon.
That is why the modern sports audience increasingly moves between different forms of digital entertainment. Fans may follow a game, check playoff scenarios, read about athlete contracts, and explore related gaming platforms within the same online session. In that broader environment, resources such as Fortune Wheelz review can naturally sit alongside other entertainment content, while still remaining separate from the core sports coverage.
Why the Money Shift Feels Different Now
College football money is not new. What has changed is the visibility of the system. Fans can now see more of the financial machinery that once sat behind broadcast contracts, donor networks, coaching salaries, bowl payouts, and conference negotiations.
Direct athlete compensation is the most obvious shift. For decades, the central contradiction of big-time college football was easy to spot: stadiums filled, networks paid, coaches earned professional salaries, and athletes were still defined by amateur rules. The settlement era does not solve every tension, but it moves the sport into a more candid place.
That candor matters. When fans know schools can share revenue with athletes, they are less likely to accept old language about tradition as the whole explanation. They want to know how money is allocated, how roster decisions are made, and whether the athletes who create the product are treated as partners in the business.
The Playoff Is Now a Financial Story Too
The College Football Playoff expansion changed the competitive map, but it also changed the financial conversation. More teams in the bracket means more games with national stakes. It also means more inventory for broadcasters, more travel questions for fans, and more pressure on selection rules.
The playoff can still produce a clean sports argument: who earned a place, who was left out, and whether a conference champion should be rewarded. But underneath that debate sits the larger question of trust. If fans believe the system is driven mainly by brand size and television value, the playoff becomes harder to sell as a merit process.
That is why transparency around seeding, automatic qualification, and committee logic matters. A larger playoff should not only create more content. It should also make the route to the championship easier for a reasonable fan to understand.
Where Trust Can Break
The modern fan does not distrust college football because money exists. Fans have always understood that the sport is commercial. Trust breaks when the public explanation does not match what people can see.
Here is where the pressure points now sit:
Pressure point
What fans see
Why it matters
Athlete pay
Players can receive direct school payments and NIL income
Fans want clarity on rules, caps, and fairness
Transfer movement
Rosters change faster than they used to
Loyalty narratives feel less stable
Playoff access
More teams can enter the national race
Selection logic must look consistent
Media deals
Broadcast windows shape the season
Fans notice when scheduling follows TV priorities
Betting culture
Odds and prop markets surround coverage
Integrity and athlete protection become public issues
None of these issues ruins the sport by itself. In fact, most are manageable. The problem comes when institutions speak as if fans cannot connect the dots.
The Athlete Is No Longer a Side Issue
For years, arguments about college football economics often treated athletes as symbolic figures. They were either “student-athletes” in institutional language or unpaid labor in reform arguments. The current era is more practical: athletes are now part of the sport’s visible economic design.
That creates new responsibilities for schools. If a program is sharing revenue, the questions move beyond recruiting wins. Fans, parents, and athletes will want to know who receives what, how decisions are documented, whether women’s sports are handled responsibly, and how smaller programs survive in the same market.
A healthy system cannot rely only on competitive instinct. It needs standards the public can understand. That includes clear explanations of roster rules, scholarship protections, NIL reviews, and the difference between school compensation and third-party endorsement deals.
Sports Betting Raises the Stakes Around Integrity
Sports betting adds another layer to the trust test. Legal wagering is now part of the American sports landscape, and college football cannot pretend the audience is untouched by it. Lines, totals, injury reports, and player props can shape how some fans talk about games.
The risk is not that every betting reference corrupts a broadcast. The risk is that constant wagering language changes the way athletes are viewed. A missed field goal can become not only a football moment, but a financial grievance for strangers watching with a ticket on their phone.
That is why college sports need firm boundaries. Integrity monitoring, education, limits on risky markets, and direct support for athletes are not public relations extras. They are part of preserving the basic promise that the contest is real, the players are protected, and the outcome is not being bent by outside pressure.
What Better Coverage Should Do
The next stage of college football coverage should be less breathless and more useful. Fans do not need every money story turned into scandal. They also do not need every reform described as progress without scrutiny.
Good coverage should do four things well:
Explain financial changes in plain language, not legal shorthand.
Separate confirmed rules from speculation about future models.
Treat athletes as people affected by policy, not just roster assets.
Show how money decisions affect non-power programs and Olympic sports.
Keep betting discussion distinct from tactical football analysis.
This is not about draining passion from the sport. It is about respecting readers enough to tell them what is known, what is uncertain, and who has incentives in the debate.
The Fan’s Role in the New Era
Fans are not powerless observers. Their attention funds the system. Their subscriptions, tickets, travel, donations, merchandise, and viewership give college football its value.
That does not mean every fan has to become a contract lawyer. It means the serious fan now needs a broader kind of literacy. Knowing the depth chart is still useful. Understanding revenue sharing, roster limits, playoff access, and betting pressure is becoming part of following the sport honestly.
College football will remain emotional because it is tied to places and histories people care about. The question is whether the institutions running it can match that loyalty with clearer rules and more adult explanations. If they can, the money shift may make the sport more honest. If they cannot, fans will still watch, but they will watch with less trust.
The Mojo programming language has been promising an open source release since May 2023. Last week they shipped their 1.0 and today they have followed through on that original promise, releasing the compiler and toolchain under an Apache 2 license.
When Mojo first launched the stated goal was to produce a superset of Python, so existing Python code could be used to bootstrap their own ecosystem. That plan changed around August 2025:
Mojo may or may not evolve into a full superset of Python, and it’s okay if it doesn’t.
We’re encouraged by how well AI-assisted coding tools already help migrate Python to Mojo today, and we’re confident that future tooling and ecosystem maturity will make this evolution even smoother.
Today Mojo is its own language, optimized to make GPU programming as painless as possible using syntax inspired by Python, if not 100% compatible with existing code.
That's the same score as GPT-5.6 Luna (max), and just one point behind GLM-5.2 (max) and DeepSeek V4 Pro 0813 (max) - that GLM is 753B and that DeepSeek is 1.7T parameters, and Luna is size unknown but presumably a whole lot bigger than 27B.
Out on a frozen lake in Canada, an upside-down cell tower is collecting data on the local fish population. The device is called Echo, and it’s just the beginning of what Dominion Dynamics hopes to build for the country’s growing defense industry.
Our northern brothers have been agitated to the point of action, thanks to President Trump declaring that they’re nasty people we should perhaps conquer. Threatening Canada is not unlike kicking a puppy, but it turned out to be the final straw. The country counted its beans and concluded the situation was loony — 70 cents of every dollar Canada spends on military hardware goes to American companies. Realizations like these pushed Dominion founder Eliot Pence to move back home after 20 years in the States and get to work on renewing Canada’s awesomeness.
“I want to compete with Lockheed, with Anduril, with Northrop,” Pence told me. “I want to put Canada and Canadian defense back on the global map. That’s the ambition, and we can do it.”
I know that Donald Trump does something new and terrible every day, sometimes several times a day. Yet his betrayal of South Korea in favor of his “very good relationship with Kim Jong Un” stands out even among his many betrayals.
Why? Because North Korea isn’t simply a bad government, just another murderous authoritarian regime. It is something that has become rare, even among dictatorships: a full-blown totalitarian state, in which the government controls every aspect of life and even thinking dissident thoughts is a crime.
Let’s be clear: Vladimir Putin’s Russia is an ugly regime, a kleptocracy in which critics of the leader have a habit of falling out of high windows. Xi Jinping’s China isn’t a free society either. But they’re mild and open compared with North Korea, where indoctrination is constant, where everyone must, if they value their lives, constantly praise the leader, whose name and portrait are everywhere:
Wait, did I get the right country?
North Korea is, in short, arguably the worst regime on the planet.
South Korea is, by contrast, one of the happiest stories in history. Obviously it’s not utopia, because no nation is. But it is a functioning democracy, which beat back a former president’s attempt to impose martial law — then tried and imprisoned him. (Is that the real reason for Trump’s hostility?)
It’s also an incredible economic success story, which transitioned over the course of just two generations from a desperately poor, war-ravaged nation to a standard of living comparable to that in Western Europe. It’s one of America’s biggest trading partners, a crucial supplier of semiconductor chips.
And South Korea is or was one of our most important military allies, with a military budget roughly the same size as Ukraine’s.
Much of the commentary I’ve seen about Trump lashing out at South Korea has focused on the damage to U.S. foreign policy and diplomacy. How can anyone consider us a reliable ally at this point? Fair enough.
But it’s even more important to realize that Trump clearly prefers a nightmarish, totalitarian dictatorship — the worst regime on the planet — to a vibrant, successful democracy. A democracy, by the way, that more than 36,000 Americans gave their lives to defend during the Korean War.
America has a president who hates everything our nation was supposed to stand for.
MUSICAL CODA
Not usually a big fan of K-Pop, but the joy and national pride of this performance are infectious:
People are not running out of apps. They are running out of patience for apps that turn a simple task into five menus and a login screen.
Sensor Tower estimates that users spent 5.3 trillion hours across iOS and Google Play apps in 2025, roughly 3.6 hours per mobile user each day. Downloads, however, increased only 0.8% year over year. In a mature mobile market, users are not simply collecting more icons. They are giving more time to apps that remove steps, surface useful information quickly and make repeat actions easier.
AI Assistants Have Escaped the Chat Box
The first wave of generative AI apps was built around a simple proposition: type a question and receive an answer. In 2026, that is no longer enough.
AI assistants now compete across research, writing, image generation, coding, planning and shopping. Sensor Tower recorded 48 billion hours spent in generative AI apps during 2025, around 3.6 times the 2024 figure. By the first quarter of 2026, ChatGPT, Gemini and DeepSeek together accounted for nearly 90% of time spent in AI assistant apps.
The winners are becoming multi-purpose workspaces rather than isolated chat tools. An app that can process an image, remember previous context and help organize the next task has more reason to stay on the home screen.
Money Apps: From Balance Check to Control Panel
A banking app that only displays an account balance now feels incomplete. Users expect card controls, transfers, transaction alerts, payment tools and spending information without moving between separate services.
Not every finance category is growing at the same speed. Sensor Tower found that downloads of credit and lending apps increased 18% year over year in 2025, while investing and cryptocurrency apps declined.
The design lesson is more interesting than the category ranking. People open finance apps because they want to do something: freeze a card, move money, approve a payment or find an unusual transaction. Every unnecessary tap delays that action.
Why Fitness Data Needs Interpretation, Not Just Tracking
Counting steps was simple. Modern fitness apps have a harder assignment because watches, rings and phones can now produce streams of workout, sleep and recovery data.
Health and fitness apps recorded approximately 3.96 billion installs in 2025, while category in-app purchase revenue reached $4.5 billion, according to Sensor Tower. Running, cycling and AI-assisted nutrition products were among the areas showing momentum.
Raw numbers alone are becoming less useful. Users increasingly expect an app to explain whether a hard training session affected sleep, how weekly mileage has changed or whether recovery has deteriorated. The phone is becoming less of a notebook and more of a personal data dashboard.
Online Entertainment Is Being Cut Into Smaller Pieces
Mobile entertainment increasingly fits between other activities rather than demanding a free hour. Someone can watch a short video, check a score or follow part of a live match before putting the phone away. Sports products suit this habit particularly well because the relevant information keeps changing. On MelBet, pre-match and live odds, event statistics and the bet slip sit inside the same sportsbook flow, cutting down the need to jump between several screens during an event. A goal, injury or shift in match momentum can move a live price quickly, so speed only matters when the user understands what caused the change. Short sessions reward interfaces that reveal the current situation immediately instead of making users reconstruct it.
The usage data supports that behavior. Time spent in U.S. sports betting apps rose 7% year over year in 2025, while global downloads increased 24%, according to Sensor Tower. Live sport naturally produces repeated check-ins, which is exactly the type of behavior mobile interfaces handle well.
Cricket Has a Few Seconds to Explain the Match
Cricket makes the information problem particularly obvious. A score of 142 for two tells only part of the story; the over, target, required rate and wickets remaining can completely change what that number means.
The official IPL app combines live scores, ball-by-ball commentary, fixtures, results, highlights and match reports. That amount of information gives fans the context needed to understand how an innings is developing. During a tight chase, an IPL betting interface adds another live layer, with match odds and player markets reacting as the required run rate, wickets and remaining overs change. One wicket can alter both the likely match result and individual batter projections within seconds. Fast data matters most when the interface preserves that context instead of scattering it across several menus.
That is why cricket works so naturally as a second-screen sport. Fans are rarely checking only the score. They are checking what the score now implies.
Fewer Taps, More Repeat Use
Feature lists still look good in app-store descriptions. They matter less when the basic workflow is slow.
Biometric sign-in removes a password step. Saved preferences stop users rebuilding the same filters on every visit. Useful notifications bring the relevant update to the lock screen, while better onboarding gets a first-time user to the core function before interest disappears.
The common thread across AI, money, fitness and sports is not the amount of technology packed into the product. It is the distance between a question and a useful action. In 2026, apps are increasingly competing to make that distance shorter.
Clinical care involves repeated tasks that carry real weight. Intake, charting, follow-up, refills, and result review all shape safety, continuity, and trust. A programmable electronic record changes those routines at the point where strain usually starts. Instead of forcing every visit through one rigid sequence, it lets clinics tailor documentation and coordination to actual care patterns. That practical shift can ease cognitive load throughout the day.
From Fixed Forms to Flexible Work
Many clinics still rely on record systems designed around broad templates that fit nobody especially well. Platforms likeCanvas Medical offer a more adaptable model, giving outpatient teams configurable workflows, plugins, and software agents that support primary care, cardiology, sleep medicine, mental health, and chronic disease programs. That flexibility is especially important when visit flow, staffing patterns, and documentation needs differ significantly across specialties.
Notes That Fit the Visit
Documentation works best when it follows the logic of the visit itself. Generic note structures often disrupt this flow by including irrelevant fields or poorly timed prompts. A programmable system can present specialty-specific sections, symptom-based questions, and structured data entry in a more useful order. That approach supports faster charting without compromising clinical meaning. Clearer notes also support later review, coding, and handoffs between treating teams.
Rules That Reflect Actual Care
Care pathways vary widely across urgent visits, obesity treatment, behavioral health, and chronic disease management. One fixed workflow rarely respects those differences in a clinically useful way. Programmable records let clinics build rules that mirror local practice patterns and staffing models. Medication review might initiate one process, while preventive counseling could trigger another. Teams receive guidance while preserving judgment, which supports consistency without oversimplying clinical nuances.
Better Intake Without Extra Burden
Morning bottlenecks often stem from the intake process. When forms and screenings are stored outside the chart, staff must re-enter answers by hand, which increases delays and the risk of errors in transcription. A programmable record can route patient responses directly into the note and flag missing items early. Rooming becomes faster and more efficient. Patients also face fewer repeated questions, which can improve their confidence.
Faster Follow-Up Loops
Test results, refill requests, referral status, and unanswered messages can stall when routing rules are vague. Programmable systems help assign those tasks by condition, visit type, or staff role. Teams spend less time sorting inbox clutter that obscures urgent tasks. Patients receive clearer next steps, and unresolved items remain visible.
Stronger Specialty Support
Specialty clinics depend on records that reflect their treatment rhythms. Weight management, sleep care, cardiology, and mental health each require different review steps, measurements, and decision points. A programmable record can accommodate those distinctions inside one shared chart. That reduces reliance on tools that split information across platforms. Unified records make it easier for physicians, nurses, coaches, and operations staff to assess the medical situation.
Data That Serves Daily Decisions
Structured data has real value when it helps teams act in a timely manner. Programmable records can capture symptoms, diagnoses, laboratory trends, and gaps in care in reusable form. Staff can then trigger reminders, create reports, and monitor outcomes without heavy spreadsheet work. Better data hygiene supports planning at the bedside and behind the scenes. It also reduces stress before audits, payer reviews, or internal quality checks.
Automation With Guardrails
Automation is most effective when it removes repetitive clerical work while ensuring accountability. A programmable record can support document parsing, chart drafting, and claims routing while ensuring that human oversight remains integral. That balance protects safety, accuracy, and accountability. Clinical decisions are still made by licensed professionals. Administrative tasks become more efficient, but staff can still trace what happened, why it happened, and which actions are needed next.
Training Becomes More Practical
Training improves when the record mirrors the clinic’s actual sequence of work. Staff learn faster when screens, prompts, and task lists reflect real patient visits. That practical fit can reduce resistance during onboarding and process changes. Updates also become easier to teach because the software can adapt to operational changes. Training materials may remain relevant for longer, and staff spend less time converting abstract instructions into bedside routines.
Conclusion
When records are tailored to specialty workflows, teams spend less effort on workarounds and dedicate more attention to patient care. Better intake, clearer notes, faster follow-up, and accountable automation can improve care. The strongest benefit is practical: daily operations become easier to manage, and clinicians can work with greater focus, consistency, and control.
Two Republican lawmakers have introduced legislation that would prohibit Washington from requiring motorcyclists to wear a helmet, raising concerns among road safety experts and marking what some say is another attempt by federal lawmakers to interfere in D.C. affairs.
Rep. Derrick Van Orden (R-Wisconsin) and Sen. Tim Sheehy (R-Montana) introduced bills in the House and Senate on Thursday that would overturn D.C.’s law requiring all motorcycle operators and passengers to wear a helmet, regardless of age. Forty-seven U.S. states have motorcycle helmet laws of some kind, and 17 have universal helmet laws like D.C.’s, according to the Governors Highway Safety Association.
If the good people of the Great States of Wisconsin and Montana want to increase the pool of organ donors, go right ahead, but this sort of policy shouldn’t be inflicted on the residents of the mainland colony of the District of Columbia. What’s worse is that they openly admit they don’t care about the consent of the governed:
Van Orden — a Harley-Davidson rider — wants to use his “Ride in Freedom Act” targeting D.C. as a starting point to try to roll back helmet requirements across the country, according to his spokeswoman, Grace Kim.
“D.C. is an important place to start,” Kim said. “If Congress can change the policy here, it opens the door to having a larger conversation about the federal government’s role in helmet mandates across the country.”
The Douglass Commonwealth can’t come soon enough. D.C. statehood now.
This image above shows the operational SGANT (right) with the dish of the failed unit partially visible near bottom center. Menon, wearing a suit with red stripes, is locked onto the station’s robot arm while Adenot, wearing an unmarked suit, floats below him. Image: NASA
NASA’s Anil Menon and European Space Agency astronaut Sophie Adenot returned to the International Space Station’s Quest airlock, closed the hatch and began repressurizing at 2:52 p.m. EDT, bringing a six-hour 23-minute spacewalk to a close.
It was the 282nd EVA devoted to station assembly and maintenance, the fifth so far this year, the second for Menon and the first for Adenot, now the first French woman to walk in space. Total ISS EVA time now stands at 74 days 10 hours and 44 minutes since station assembly began in 1998. Menon’s total to date is 12 hours and 50 minutes.
Today’s excursion was only partially successful. Menon and Adenot successfully removed a failed space-to-ground antenna, but freeing tight power and data cables, installing locking pins in the antenna’s gimbal assembly and unbolting it from its boom took longer than expected even with a fair amount of elbow grease turning a ratchet wrench.
Anil Menon and Sophie Adenot float back inside the International Space Station’s airlock. Image: NASA
In the end, flight controllers decided there wasn’t enough time for the spacewalkers to move the failed antenna to its permanent storage location or to retrieve the spare antenna and install it. Instead, the failed antenna was lashed down near its boom, where it will remain indefinitely, and its replacement remains bolted to a storage platform.
The ISS is equipped with two such antennas and only one is needed for normal operations. But it’s a critical system, and managers would like to have two healthy antennas in place for redundancy.
Another spacewalk is on tap next Tuesday, and flight controllers are considering whether to get the replacement antenna installed then or whether to stick with already planned tasks and defer the antenna replacement to a future EVA.
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) increasingly use persistent memory from past interactions to enhance personalization and task performance. However, this memory introduces critical risks when sensitive information is revealed in inappropriate contexts. We present CIMemories, a benchmark for evaluating whether LLMs appropriately control information flow from memory based on task context. CIMemories uses synthetic user profiles with over 100 attributes per user, paired with diverse task contexts in which each attribute may be essential for some tasks but inappropriate for others. Our evaluation reveals that frontier models exhibit up to 69% attribute-level violations (leaking information inappropriately), with lower violation rates often coming at the cost of task utility. Violations accumulate across both tasks and runs: as usage increases from 1 to 40 tasks, GPT-5’s violations rise from 0.1% to 9.6%, reaching 25.1% when the same prompt is executed 5 times, revealing arbitrary and unstable behavior in which models leak different attributes for identical prompts. Privacy-conscious prompting does not solve this—models overgeneralize, sharing everything or nothing rather than making nuanced, context-dependent decisions. These findings reveal fundamental limitations that require contextually aware reasoning capabilities, not just better prompting or scaling.
Abstract: As the era of autonomous agents making decisions on behalf of users unfolds, ensuring contextual integrity (CI)—what is the appropriate information to share while carrying out a certain task—becomes a central question to the field. We posit that CI demands a form of reasoning where the agent needs to reason about the context in which it is operating. To test this, we first prompt LLMs to reason explicitly about CI when deciding what information to disclose. We then extend this approach by developing a reinforcement learning (RL) framework that further instills in models the reasoning necessary to achieve CI. Using a synthetic, automatically created, dataset of only 700 examples but with diverse contexts and information disclosure norms, we show that our method substantially reduces inappropriate information disclosure while maintaining task performance across multiple model sizes and families. Importantly, improvements transfer from this synthetic dataset to established CI benchmarks such as PrivacyLens that has human annotations and evaluates privacy leakage of AI assistants in actions and tool calls.
The 2024 forecast is particularly pessimistic about China’s fertility prospects. Both projections produce very substantial global aging, a major global capital glut producing very low long-run real capital returns. The latest forecast entails 10% lower global GDP in 2100 and far higher payroll tax rates to fund old-age benefits. Most important, it entails a major change in the course of economic hegemony with China’s 2100 global GDP share falling from 25.6% to 14.9% and the US share rising from 11.2% to 14.4%. Our results are sensitive. Should the US eliminate all future immigration, its 14.4% global 2100 GDP share would drop to 9.2%. And were global fertility to follow the UN’s low variant, 2100 world output would be one third, not one tenth lower. The level and division of global output is also highly sensitive to the speed at which AI expands frontier technologies. Accelerated AU/AI – 4x faster-than-recent growth in capital’s share through 2050 – or Transformative AU/AI – 10x faster capital-share growth – reinforce demographic forces, ensuring long-run US economic hegemony. Indeed, Transformative AI combined with 2024 demographics implies US and Chinese 2100 global GDP shares of 25.3% and 16.9%, respectively.
I'm writing this from a homely Jacobean-manor-turned-hotel in the West Country, covered in layers of green vines and circled by centenarian trees, on a rare weekend away. Everything is warm: the late afternoon sun, the mustard armchairs, the dark wooden panels along the walls. I'm three teas deep and have a few hours of quiet to think for the first time in many months.
Over the summer my baby became a rambunctious toddler, barrelling around the house and narrating our lives in his own language. My family bought and moved into our first real home after crappy-rental-hopping for years. I've now been on the GitHub Next team for the better part of a year and feel settled.
My husband and I both work full-time, so with a small child and a new house, one that is in fact a very old house, with broken doorknobs, peeling wallpaper, jammed windows, and rising damp that needs to be fixed, we acutely feel the lack of time these days. It's a stretch to meet everyone's basic needs and keep the dish piles and dirty clothes from drowning us, let alone fix floorboards. I end up thinking a lot about people married to housewives and SAHMs. And the 1971 classic essay I Want a Wife by Judy Brady. An excerpt:
"I want a wife who will keep my house clean. A wife who will pick up after my children, a wife who will pick up after me. I want a wife who will keep my clothes clean, ironed, mended, replaced when need be, and who will see to it that my personal things are kept in their proper place so that I can find what I need the minute I need it. I want a wife who cooks the meals. I want a wife who will plan the menus, do the necessary grocery shopping, prepare the meals, serve them pleasantly, and then do the cleaning up while I do my studying."
Turns out my husband and I would also like a wife. But not in the polyamorous sense. In the does-the-invisible-unpaid-household-labour sense. Thanks to an incurable case of feminism, it was never going to be me.
I am genuinely hopeful agents might put a dent in this problem, in the same way washing machines and dishwashers did. While they can't physically do our chores, I expect we can outsource a good chunk of the mental load to always-on agents like Hermes and OpenClaw: pre-emptively buying the next size of kids' shoes, planning weekend outings, making menus and ordering the groceries, researching and contacting local roofers, balancing family calendars stuffed with school outings and football matches and work trips.
But for the moment, autonomous agent systems are a PITA to set up securely. The moment you give them access to the necessary tools like your email, calendar, and a debit card, you've opened a security hellhole. The amount of context these systems need to be genuinely "smart" in the way a human helper would be is non-trivial to configure, and impossible to do safely. This is a "check back next year" technology.
For the moment we're resigned to eating lots of cheese on toast and cereal for “meals,� and living in a Montessori-themed construction site. I also think about this hilarious Instagram meme a lot:
There is much angst in my circles over the impending mass unemployment of humans. There is much concern over what people will do with their time when all the work of the world disappears, reassigned to agents.
What is the work of the world in these conversations? Accounting, sure. Paralegal research. Much of software development. Data entry. Translation. Transcription. Financial advice. Everything listed in these sorts of reports. I've no beef with the argument that most repetitive knowledge work is low-hanging fruit for agent labour.
And yet there is so much labour to be done. Obviously, my dishes. Frankly, all of my household tasks. Home maintenance. Childcare. Elderly care. End-of-life care. Social care. Everything that has historically been done for free, by women, unaccounted for in any economic calculations like GDP.
And then there's the public service labour that everyone would benefit from but has no clear buyer: retrofitting cities to adapt to a changing climate. Installing solar panels and heat pumps. Planting trees and putting up shade covers. Building and maintaining safe bike paths. Farming seaweed for sequestering carbon. Digging a bunch of new reservoirs so my tiny, rainy island doesn't ironically run out of water.
There is no shortage of physical, social, educational, and cultural work that we need humans to do for one another that cannot, in any wild imagining of agent capabilities, be done by our current or near-future robots. We just can't figure out how we would pay people enough to do these jobs. There is plenty of need, but not enough ability or willingness to pay. I find myself twisting my small brain into knots and googling basic economic theory trying to understand how we're going to solve this riddle under modern capitalism. Other than, you know, UBI funded by aggressively taxing tokens.
In a very basic bitch move, I've started listening to the audiobook Economics: The User's Guide by Ha-Joon Chang in an attempt to backfill all the economics I never learned and understand more about market dynamics. It feels irresponsible to watch the coming tsunami of AI abundance and not, at least theoretically, understand how it will smash into jobs, wages, and labour. And manifest the permanent underclass we keep hearing about.
<a href="https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/187172/economics-the-users-guide-by-chang-ha-joon/9780718197032"><strong>Economics: The User's Guide</strong></a> by Ha-Joon Chang
An accessible introduction to economics for readers with no background in the subject. Chang covers classical, Keynesian, Marxist, and half a dozen other schools of economic thought side by side, showing where each one is useful and where it falls apart.
Also, while we're on the topic of domestic labour and women's economic freedom, I recently read Yesteryear and loved it, just like everyone else. Strong recommend.
<a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/238226942-yesteryear"><strong>Yesteryear</strong></a> by Caro Claire Burke
Natalie is a tradwife influencer with a picture-perfect farmhouse life, until she wakes up trapped in an actual 19th century, minus the nannies, producers, and industrial ovens propping up her aesthetic. It's a darkly funny, genuinely unsettling read about tradition, fame, and the performance of womanhood.
A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket lifts off from Space Launch Complex 4 East at Vandenberg Space Force Base on Aug. 18, 2026. Image: SpaceX
Update 2:06 a.m. EDT (0706 UTC): SpaceX confirmed deployment of the satellites.
SpaceX sent another batch of Starlink satellites to low Earth orbit with a launch Tuesday night launch from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California.
Liftoff of the Falcon 9 rocket happened at 9:01 p.m. PDT (12:01 a.m. EDT / 0401 UTC). The rocket flew on a south-southwesterly trajectory upon leaving the pad at Space Launch Complex 4 East.
The Starlink 17-50 mission added another 24 broadband internet satellites to the megaconstellation, bringing the total number of satellites currently in orbit to a little more than 11,000. Those include satellites that are either not fully operational, have failed, and are preparing for deorbiting.
SpaceX launched the mission using the Falcon 9 first stage booster B1097. This was its 12th flight after previously launching the Twilight and Transporter-17 rideshare missions; Sentinel-6B; NROL-172; and seven previous batches of Starlink satellites.
A little more than eight minutes after liftoff, B1097 landed on the droneship, Of Course I Still Love You, positioned in the Pacific Ocean. This was the 219th landing on this vessel and the 651st Falcon booster landing to date.
macOS 27 Golden Gate beta 6 introduces redesigned traffic light window controls. The new look resembles older Mac OS X systems with more detail in each button.
Nice. But these changes can’t improve fast enough for me — I am impatient. The MacOS user interface had been in a slow, steady, sad, no-fun decline for years, and then, a year ago, the bottom fell out with the disaster of 26 Tahoe.
But all the changes in 27 Golden Gate are in the right direction. Golden Gate is not a mixed bag. Designers with taste and talent are clearly back at the helm. And I love that they’re still pushing UI and icon changes in mid-August, entering the home stretch of the .0 beta cycle.
Contra a bunch of idiots at Hacker News and elsewhere, I understand that popular LLMs do not just pick the “best” token (word) at each decision point. Counterintuitively, always selecting the highest-probability option produces undesirable results. So the models apply some randomization, and “temperature” is the term for the weighting that’s applied so that the “better” (higher-ranked by the model) choices have a higher chance of being chosen.
With a temperature of 1, models use their built-in probability distribution. With a temperature greater than 1, this distribution gets flatter — less-likely alternatives get a higher probability of being selected, and more-likely alternatives lower. With a temperature lower than 1, the probability distribution leans more toward the higher-ranked options. And with a temperature of 0, the highest-ranked option is always chosen. A temperature of 0 generally produces undesirable results — too predictable, too likely to get stuck. Like over-smoothing an image from a camera sensor, eliminating all noise makes the overall result worse, even if each single bit of “noise”, evaluated in isolation, is in some sense wrong.
The temperature-based randomness — which is what makes LLM output non-deterministic — is in place to help make the output better. The prose is clearly better with a temperature of 1 (with weighted randomness) than at temperature 0 (with no randomness). The watermarking schemes, on the other hand, are applying predictable-with-the-secret-key randomness for an entirely different purpose than improving the quality of the output, and thus, I believe, inherently make the output at least slightly worse.
For the same reason, code — which in very many cases has to be
exact — has generally less watermarking than some other forms
of text.
Having said that, in areas where there is an arbitrary choice
between particular words or terms within the code, the watermark
can be used, such as comments within code. But by definition, it
will have a negligible effect on the actual code produced.
I hold that good prose is much more like programming code. Exactness in word choice, phrasing, tone, and even punctuation is always better than imprecision. The difference is that sloppy programming code doesn’t run, or doesn’t run correctly. The human brain, on the other hand, is adept at parsing and making sense out of inexact, even sloppy, prose.
I Object Even If Quality Isn’t Adversely Affected
I do not believe these schemes can work without degrading prose quality, if only slightly. Again, though, I am open to being proven wrong. But even if we concede for the moment that such watermarking schemes do not necessarily degrade the quality of generated prose — not one iota — I still object to their use when they are being applied secretly, behind users’ backs. A useful watermark would be one that anyone can check. These SynthID “watermarks” are entirely dependent upon secrets held by the LLM providers (so far, Anthropic/Claude and Google/Gemini). I find that unacceptable, for reasons I hopefully made clear in my essay.
The people in favor of this watermarking for text have been sold a pipe dream, a fantasy. I’ve encountered dozens of comments from angry AI haters (many of them on Bluesky in particular, but also Threads and Hacker News) who are convinced that the only people who could be against the watermarking of AI-generated text are those who are duplicitously passing off AI-generated text as their own writing — and thus that I must be upset only because the jig will soon be up for me too. This of course is not true. I don’t even use AI to write text messages or emails for me, let alone a single sentence of my work.
But I find it funny that so many people who claim to believe that LLMs only produce “slop” and never anything useful also seem 100 percent convinced that the same LLMs are capable of watermarking their output in reliable ways. These people so desperately want to be able to point a finger at AI-generated text that they’ve fallen hook, line, and sinker for the argument from Google and Anthropic that, thanks to them, they’ll be able to.
I don’t want to spend too much time thinking about this because it’s a waste of time, but how exactly do these people think the existence of these mandatory watermarks and detection tools will change anything for the better? Let’s say you work at an office and you suspect that numerous of your colleagues are using AI to write emails and other work-related messages. Their messages are too long, too prolific, and lack lucidity. What are you going to do now? Copy and paste each of their messages into the watermark detectors from Anthropic, Google, and OpenAI? There cannot exist a single detector for all LLMs. And even if you find out that it says it’s a match, that an email or blog post or Slack message was very likely generated by, say, Claude, what are you going to do? March into your colleague’s office and tell them you caught them?
Anyone in a situation where “getting caught” would matter — students, say — is going to use non-watermarking LLMs or run their watermarked text through paraphrasing tools like Declaude.
No practical good is going to come of this, even if these watermarking schemes work as promised (and to be clear, I don’t believe any of it is going to work as promised).1
My advice is not to care whether anything was written by an AI or a human. The only thing worth evaluating is what we human readers are naturally good at determining: whether it is good or bad. If it’s good, read it. If it’s not, don’t. If you’ve got a job where you’re surrounded by colleagues filling your inbox with AI-generated messages that you can’t abide, get a new job or learn to live with it. Hidden secret watermarking signals — even if they work — aren’t going to make things go back to the way they used to be. If you read something and enjoy it, and subsequently find out it was generated by an LLM, don’t feel bad. You read something good that you enjoyed.
I read something earlier today that claimed most of the posts on LinkedIn are generated by AI. That the whole platform is just inundated with AI slop. Maybe it is, but I wouldn’t know, because I never look at LinkedIn because it’s always been filled with crap. If it smells like crap it’s crap, whether the turds came out of a human anus or a turd-generating robot.
LLMs do not care about the words that they pick because they
cannot care about anything.
Speaking of two things that are not the same, John rightly points
out the difference between the phrases “he leaped at the chance”
and “he jumped at the opportunity”. Those are indeed distinct — if semantically similar — phrases, each of which might be more
apt in a particular situation; or, to put it in another fashion:
the use of each of those phrases tells us something different,
whether about the person being described or the writer.
But the LLM doesn’t know which of those phrases is the right
phrase to use. It has a guess, based on its models and weights and
inputs. But the ultimate choice of those phrases tells us nothing
about the writer because there is no writer.
Moren’s is a fine retort to my post, but I fundamentally disagree — albeit at a philosophical level. If you’re reading a written work only to gain insight into the mind that produced it, there is no mind on the other end of AI-generated text. But the work itself exists. My disagreement with Moren starts and effectively ends with his (wonderfully summative) headline. I say if you can read something, it was necessarily written.
Again, this is philosophical. Was a photorealistic image generated by AI photographed? No, I would say it was not. Photography, I would say, is the act of focusing light through a lens onto a capturing sensor, capturing, to some extent, reality. I think Moren is arguing that writing is like that. If photography captures a physical scene from reality, writing captures thoughts from an actual mind. That something you can read that was produced by an LLM was merely generated in a way that doesn’t qualify as writing. Semantics. I just care about the article of text. Moren argues that LLMs are not writing; I say they are. But we’re disagreeing only over what the word writing means, not what is being produced.
As for “caring” about the difference between semantically similar but tonally different phrases, like “he leaped at the chance” versus “he jumped at the opportunity”, no, of course the LLM doesn’t “care”. But I, the reader, care very much. I wrote a column back in November on ChatGPT changing (and renaming) the “personalities” it allows users to choose from. These personalities generate text with strikingly different styles and tones. Because I use ChatGPT, I care very much about the tone and style of its responses to my queries. Not because I’m ever going to pass them off as my own writing, but because I’m the one who is reading them.
Moren, near the end of his column:
In the end, I can’t summarize it any better than to ask: if you
care so much about word choice, why are you using AI to
generate text?
If this does truly make AI-generated text worse, well… good. A
lot of people are already willing to accept what an LLM churns out
as “good enough” and, if I’m being realistic, I don’t think this
will change anything. But if it does lead to more people being
dissatisfied with the pablum they’re being fed and turning instead
to writing and editing their own text, then that would actually be
a positive outcome. Maybe it’d even mean fewer human writers being
put out of jobs.
I sympathize, but I must disagree that it can possibly be seen as a net good for LLMs to produce worse prose. I read the output of LLMs every day. I use AI to generate text because I ask it questions (in text). I want the answers that I read to be cogent, lucid, accurate, blessedly terse — and ideally to strike a consistent tone that is pleasant to my reading ear. The genie is not going back in the bottle.
English Is the Finest Language, and Thus, Perhaps, More Fingerprintable
Lastly, here’s an interesting point to ponder. English is the most expressive language in the world. Don’t take my word for it — it’s the only language I speak (despite four years of Spanish in high school). Take the word of famed 20th century author Jorge Luis Borges, an Argentine polyglot whose first language was Spanish. In 1977 he was the guest on William F. Buckley’s “Firing Line”. You can (and should) watch the interview on YouTube, but here’s a transcript of the relevant portion from Jordan M. Poss:
Borges: I have done most of my reading in English. I find
English a far finer language than Spanish.
Buckley: Why?
Borges: Well, many reasons. Firstly, English is both a
Germanic and a Latin language. Those two registers — for any idea
you take, you have two words. Those words will not mean exactly
the same. For example if I say “regal” that is not exactly the
same thing as saying “kingly.” Or if I say “fraternal” that is not
the same as saying “brotherly.” Or “dark” and “obscure.” Those
words are different. It would make all the difference — speaking
for example — the Holy Spirit, it would make all the difference
in the world in a poem if I wrote about the Holy Spirit or I wrote
the Holy Ghost, since “ghost” is a fine, dark Saxon word, but
“spirit” is a light Latin word. Then there is another reason. The
reason is that I think that, of all languages, English is the most
physical of all languages.
Buckley: The most what?
Borges: Physical. You can, for example, say “He loomed over.”
You can’t very well say that in Spanish.
Buckley: “Asomó?”
Borges: Well, no, no, they’re not exactly the same. And then
you have, in English, you can do almost anything with verbs and
prepositions. For example, to “laugh off,” to “dream away.” Those
things can’t be said in Spanish. To “live down” something, to
“live up to” something — you can’t say those things in Spanish.
They can’t be said. Or really in any Romance language.
I’ve seen this interview before, but watched it again today after an email exchange with Kirk McElhearn. Quoting (with permission) from McElhearn’s email to me:
For many years, I worked as a French → English translator, and
there is one key difference between the two languages. France is a
Romance language, and English is a language with both Germanic and
Romance (mainly French) influence. This means that English often
has synonyms where other languages may not.
Using your example, “He leaped at the chance” and “He jumped at
the opportunity”, both would be translated in French as “Il a
sauté sur l’occasion.” Meaning that someone writing in French
wouldn’t have the same range of words to choose from. It’s maybe
not the best example, because both are clichés, but there are many
examples of French words where English has both a Romance
equivalent and a Germanic equivalent: pig and pork, sheep and
mutton, beef and cow. Food words are just one example, but English
also has many more verb choices than French, since it has a larger
vocabulary coming from both influences.
English gleefully borrows from any and all other languages. McElhearn wonders whether English is thus more fingerprintable than other languages, because of its richer vocabulary of roughly equivalent synonyms, and its multitude of idioms.
However, this vein of pro-watermarking support from people opposed to AI in general has opened my eyes to the notion that Anthropic is throwing its support behind this in order to get people who despise AI off their backs. ↩︎
The public dislikes modern architecture but, generally speaking, they do not dislike modern bridges. Lists of the most awesome, most stunning, most beautiful bridges in the world will mention classics like London’s Tower Bridge, the Brooklyn Bridge, or the Rakotzbrücke but alongside them they will picture the Kubitschek Bridge in Brazil (Shutterstock).
The Rio-Antirrio Bridge in Greece:
or the Moses “Bridge” in the Netherlands.
Whether you like these bridges or not, I don’t see in the literature an idea that modern bridges are all ugly or that modern bridge building has failed or fallen behind the great bridges of the past in the way that there is such a critique for modern architecture in general.
Why is this? I have a theory, which is that bridge designers come from engineering schools rather than schools of architecture. It is possible, of course, that there is something in the nature of bridges that prunes the design space in a way that attracts beauty–maybe we like catenaries, arches, cables in tension and beauty is just a byproduct of the engineering.
It is possible, however, to produce ugly bridges so it’s not just an engineering constraint. Moreover, one small but telling piece of evidence in favor of my theory is that most of the bridges chosen by Wallpaper magazine, an architecture magazine specifically, are in fact ugly (and with no overlap in the bridges from my first category of “popular” beautiful bridges). Here are a few, judge for yourself:
The fact that modern bridges are often beautiful, especially when they come from engineers, is consistent with Samuel Hughes’s argument that ugly has been a choice, not a constraint.
Tropical Weather Outlook NWS Central Pacific Hurricane Center Honolulu HI Issued by NWS National Hurricane Center Miami FL 800 PM HST Wed Aug 19 2026
For the central North Pacific...between 140W and 180W:
Active Systems: The National Hurricane Center is issuing advisories on Hurricane Lala, located a couple hundred miles southeast of Lisianski Island.
Central Pacific (EP90): Showers and thunderstorms are becoming better organized in association with a broad area of low pressure located well to the east-southeast of the Hawaiian Islands. Environmental conditions appear favorable for further development of this system, and a tropical depression is expected to form tonight or on Thursday while the system moves westward to west-northwestward at 10 to 15 mph across the Central Pacific. Interests in the Hawaiian Islands should closely monitor the progress of this system. * Formation chance through 48 hours...high...90 percent. * Formation chance through 7 days...high...90 percent.
From Friday through Sunday, Trump continued his now-habitual weekend flooding of social media with fantasies that he is smart, beloved, and powerful.
The post closest to reality on Friday touted the story by Steve Thompson, Federica Cocco, and Christoper Rowland of the Washington Post on Thursday, August 13, reporting that prescription drug prices have fallen 3.1% this year, the biggest rate of price decrease since 1963. While that drop is real, the journalists note, much of the drop reflects the falling price of GLP-1 weight-loss drugs, whose price has dropped dramatically because of competition from generic versions.
For other drugs, experts say the price drop comes from the Inflation Reduction Act, passed by Democrats without a single Republican vote in 2022, during the Biden administration. That law permitted the government to begin negotiations with drug companies for lower prices on ten commonly prescribed drugs, with the lower prices going into effect this year. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services estimated that taxpayers would save $6 billion from those first changes.
Health policy scholar Stacie Dusetzina told the journalists that Trump’s TrumpRx program covers “a limited number of branded drugs” that “may not be high enough volume to be included” in the new figures.
The desire to claim Biden’s success as his own may have been behind Trump’s resurrection of accusations that Biden was corrupt.
Trump’s morass in Iran also turned into fantasy on social media when he claimed the U.S. has built a “WALL OF STEEL,” complete with an AI wall through the water, of a blockade of Iranian ports. Trump then veered to declaring that “Pocahontas and ‘Abdul’”—Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), whom he portrayed in stereotypical Indigenous garb, and Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic nominee for U.S. senator from Michigan, “want to take your stuff, and Crash the Economy!!!” and that El-Sayed and women in hijab “are coming for your home and your belongings!”
Since an appeals court found that construction must stop, Trump has harped on the idea that the ballroom is crucial for national security. But as Will Hobson and Louise Radnofsky of the Wall Street Journal reported on Sunday, Trump began suggesting a ballroom back in 2010 for reasons of aesthetics and space. The national security argument, the journalists note, didn’t arrive until January 2026, after legal challenges to his authority to demolish the East Wing and build his ballroom.
Trump’s weekend fantasies put him in the same category as framers of the Constitution as he showed an AI-finished ballroom to George Washington, at one point writing: “Thank you, George, for some of your brilliant ideas on this great Military Complex/Ballroom!” In real life, Washington staunchly opposed royal luxury for the president.
By equating himself with George Washington, Trump appeared to entertain the fantasy that he is leading the country toward a second American Revolution, much as Heritage Foundation leader Kevin Roberts told Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast in 2024. Trump’s vision for the country is literally dark: on Saturday his social media account posted a dark black-and-white image of him wearing a Trump 2028 hat, with the caption, in a German-style typeface echoing that of the Nazis, saying: “We are going to win.” In another post, he boasted that he and North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un “get along GREAT!”
Sunday evening, Trump declared that “[b]ased on my very good relationship with Kim Jong Un,” the North Korean dictator, he had ordered Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to “substantially reduce” traditional military exercises with key U.S. ally South Korea. The joint drills were scheduled to begin today.
Trump wrote that such exercises “send a signal that is totally inappropriate and hostile, to a Country that, as long as Donald J. Trump has been President, has been unthreatening and respectful.” Trump suggested the change was retaliation for the refusal of South Korea’s president Lee Jae Myung to help the U.S. in Iran, but as political scientist Norm Ornstein noted, the decision comes just as North Korea is sending 50,000 troops to help Russian president Vladimir Putin in his war against Ukraine.
The idea that Trump is a powerful dictator making a victorious alliance with North Korea and Russia presents a darkly threatening posture but, like the rest of Trump’s social media dump, portrays a world different from reality.
Today is the day that the Memorandum of Understanding with Iran that Trump signed on June 17 expires. Rather than ushering in a permanent agreement that opens the Strait of Hormuz and stops Iran’s nuclear ambitions, today shows just how badly Trump is flailing.
This morning he lashed out, telling Trey Yingst of the Fox News Channel “that Iran should ‘put up the white flag of surrender.’ I have no time schedule,” Trump told Yingst. “I’m not in a hurry...the midterms have nothing to do with my thinking.” As for talks between Iran and Oman over control of the Strait of Hormuz, Trump told Yingst: “If Oman gets in the way, we’ll bomb the sh*t out of them.” Oman is a key U.S. ally in the region.
For Iran’s part, an Iranian leader told Reuters that if diplomacy fails, Tehran will shift from defense to offense. Benoit Faucon and Summer Said of the Wall Street Journal reported yesterday that Iranian hard-liners have spent the past two months planning to widen the war and raise the cost for the U.S., inflicting enough pain that Iran can deter future attacks. Today Reuters reported that Iran-backed Houthis launched missiles at Saudi ships near the Bab el-Mandeb strait, another key international shipping route.
Meanwhile, Trump is caught in a domestic scandal over the condition of the U.S. military. In early August, news broke that the U.S. was running low on precision missiles after using the expensive weapons to shoot down inexpensive Iranian drones. Then we heard about the appalling conditions aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln, an aircraft carrier kept overseas without adequate resupply and with maintenance issues, including overflowing toilets. Multiple outlets have reported that despondent service members, months past the scheduled end of their deployment, have attempted self-harm. The U.S. is moving the USS George Washington from the western Pacific to replace the USS Lincoln, leaving the region near China without a U.S. carrier.
When a reporter began a question to Trump on Friday with, “Family members of U.S. service members are concerned about the conditions on board the USS Lincoln,” Trump interrupted to say: “No they’re not.” When the reporter followed up with “Has the deployment gone on too long? Are you worried about their mental health?” he blustered: “No, no, no. Not nearly long enough.”
Families of sailors reacted with fury, telling Ed Pilkington of The Guardian that sailors have bad water and so little food they have lost up to 30 pounds (13.6 kg). There is little mental health counseling despite the extended deployment. “Keep praying for us,” one sailor texted home. “We are doing our best to make sure we protect our country and our families.”
On Saturday, Aaron Parnas in MeidasNews reported on a supply crisis on the USS Boxer, as well, and today Brad Lendon of CNN reported that sailors on a U.S. guided missile destroyer spent four days in blistering heat last month without working toilets, cooked food, or air conditioning after the vessel lost power.
Trump’s contribution to military plans has been to order the U.S. Navy to alter the construction of new aircraft carrier USS Doris Miller—named for a Pearl Harbor hero—ordering the designers to replace the modern electromagnetic launch system for planes with an older, steam-powered catapult system. Kaanita Iyer of CNN reports the change will delay production of the craft for several years and could cost billions.
Noah Robertson and Tara Copp of the Washington Post reported on Sunday that the Navy is also considering redesigning the aircraft carrier fleet to reflect Trump’s preference for ships that look like those from World War II. That change, too, could cost billions.
On Sunday night, a social media user posted a video of Trump at a party at his Bedminster club blasting “Y.M.C.A.” on his iPad for the crowd. National security scholar Tom Nichols responded: “We’re losing a war to Iran, we’re alienating our allies, we’re emboldening our enemies, our stalwart service people are being subjected to deprivations...and this is what the Commander in Chief is doing.”
But, in fact, that’s not all Trump is doing.
Late Friday night, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, whose leader Trump appointed, approved a preliminary charter for World Liberty Financial (WLF) to become a bank. As Lawrence Delevingne and Pete Schroeder of Reuters report, the charter would permit WLF to issue USD1, a stablecoin tied to the dollar, and to manage and hold assets for customers and settle payments faster. WLF is the cryptocurrency venture launched by the Trump family and their close allies the Witkoff family.
Steve Witkoff is Trump’s special envoy to the Middle East, and WLF has done at least one major deal with a national security advisor for the United Arab Emirates. Reuters estimates that as of April 2026, WLF had “funneled more than $1.6 billion to the U.S. president and his family.”
Strategic studies scholar Phillips P. O’Brien wrote: “They are going to steal everything they can while they have power.”
Senator Elizabeth Warren, the top-ranking Democrat on the Senate Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee, said: “President Trump is now the first President in history to approve, operate, and supervise his own bank. This is the most brazen act of self-dealing our financial system has ever seen—and Congress cannot allow it to stand.” She and nine other senators are introducing a bill to guarantee “that no President, Vice President, their immediate families or other senior government officials can exploit their positions to own or control a bank, which could serve as a major vehicle for corrupt dealings.”
At 4:09 this afternoon, Trump posted on social media an image of Kim Jong Un outside with several men standing around him, talking on a landline telephone. The caption read: “HEY DONALD, WE COOL… RIGHT?”
For decades, South Africa was the great success story of African industrialization. Last year, Morocco took the lead, emerging as the African Development Bank’s top-ranked industrial economy in Africa. In the Bank’s analysis, published in the latest edition of its industrialization index, Morocco’s growth has been “driven by sustained industrial upgrading, export diversification, and strong industrial policy.” Since the mid-2000s, it has leveraged its location and dominant phosphate reserves to get free trade agreements with the US, the EU, and fifty other countries: the Kingdom would like Morocco to be to France what Eastern Europe is to Germany, or what Mexico is to the US: an export-base “workbench.”
Having positioned itself to profit from the shift to clean energy supply, Morocco is nimbly pivoting its auto manufacturing sector to build EVs, working with incumbents like Renault and Stellantis, and is host to Africa’s first battery gigafactory. That single 70 gigawatt-hour battery factory in Casablanca is expected to supply a third of Europe’s current market. Last year, the government approved construction for a new green hydrogen industrial park, aiming to produce ammonia, steel, and industrial fuel worth a total of $32.5 billion. It has also been strategic in focusing its industrial strategy on aerospace manufacturing, with Airbus becoming a strategic partner, along with investments from Boeing, Thales, and Safran. Its aerospace exports more than tripled in the decade to 2024, to reach almost $3 billion.
As a proportion of the literature, research about econometric theory, monetary policy and corporate governance has slumped. Meanwhile, papers on development, crime and gender are on the up. This could perhaps be because of changing intellectual interests, or maybe demand-side pressures, such as policymaker priorities and external funding…
Research from Prashant Garg, a postdoctoral researcher at Bocconi University, and Thiemo Fetzer, economics professor at Warwick University, finds causal claims in economics have jumped. In 1990, 7.7 per cent of claims made in the literature were causal. In 2023, that hit 32.6 per cent. Additionally, papers with more causal claims are more likely to receive citations and wind up in top five journals, the research suggests.
The spiraling clouds of a tropical storm are centered near the Hawaiian island of Kauaʻi.
NASA Earth Observatory / Lauren Dauphin
The spiraling clouds of a hurricane appear near the Hawaiian Islands. Its eye is just south of the Island of Hawaiʻi.
NASA Earth Observatory / Lauren Dauphin
The spiraling clouds of a tropical storm are centered near the Hawaiian island of Kauaʻi.
NASA Earth Observatory / Lauren Dauphin
The spiraling clouds of a hurricane appear near the Hawaiian Islands. Its eye is just south of the Island of Hawaiʻi.
NASA Earth Observatory / Lauren Dauphin
August 16, 2026
August 15, 2026
Lala skirts south of the Island of Hawaiʻi as a category 1 hurricane in the right image, acquired by the VIIRS (Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite) on the Suomi NPP satellite on August 15, 2026, at about 1:45 p.m. Hawaii Standard Time (23:45 Universal Time). The storm decreased in intensity while tracking northwest and was a tropical storm when the VIIRS on the NOAA-20 satellite captured the left image about 24 hours later. NASA Earth Observatory images by Lauren Dauphin.
The Island of Hawaiʻi narrowly avoided a direct landfall by Hurricane Lala in mid-August 2026. The storm nonetheless delivered serious damage as it passed just south of the island on August 15 (above, right) as a category 1 storm on the Saffir-Simpson wind scale.
Lala brought rainfall totals exceeding 20 inches (50 centimeters) to parts of the island, causing flash flooding and ongoing mudflow risks. The highest rainfall total for the storm—43.55 inches (110.6 centimeters) as of the morning of August 17—was recorded at Laupāhoehoe, on the coast northwest of Hilo. Lala downed trees, damaged bridges, and knocked homes off their foundations. Coastal areas were pummeled by large waves, while the summit of Mauna Kea, over 13,000 feet (4,000 meters) above sea level, experienced blizzard conditions.
By early afternoon on August 16, when the other image (left) was acquired, the storm had tracked northwest, roughly parallel to the island chain, and was southwest of Kauaʻi. Lala had decreased in intensity to a tropical storm, with sustained winds of 65 miles (105 kilometers) per hour, according to the National Hurricane Center.
While the Island of Hawaiʻi took the brunt of the storm, other islands also saw destructive effects. Strong winds caused widespread power outages, with more than 220,000 customers statewide without power as of the afternoon of August 16, according to news reports. Across the islands, wind and rain damaged infrastructure, and floodwaters and debris rendered roads impassable.
It has been an active tropical cyclone season in the Eastern Pacific so far in 2026, meteorologists note, consistent with what scientists expect during an El Niño, which has been underway as of mid-June. Warm water in the equatorial Pacific—the hallmark of El Niño—and the moisture and energy it transfers to the atmosphere help fuel nascent tropical storms. Lack of wind shear, another typical El Niño pattern in this region, also encourages tropical storms to develop and strengthen. The Atlantic hurricane season, in contrast, has been relatively calm, as greater wind shear over the Atlantic Ocean and Caribbean Sea during an El Niño inhibits hurricane formation by dissipating the upward motion of heat.
Tropical Weather Outlook NWS National Hurricane Center Miami FL 1100 PM PDT Wed Aug 19 2026
For the eastern and central North Pacific east of 180 longitude:
Active Systems: The National Hurricane Center is issuing advisories on Hurricane Lala, located a couple hundred miles southeast of Lisianski Island.
Central Pacific (EP90): Showers and thunderstorms are becoming better organized in association with a broad area of low pressure located well to the east-southeast of the Hawaiian Islands. Environmental conditions appear favorable for further development of this system, and a tropical depression is expected to form tonight or on Thursday while the system moves westward to west-northwestward at 10 to 15 mph across the Central Pacific. Interests in the Hawaiian Islands should closely monitor the progress of this system. * Formation chance through 48 hours...high...90 percent. * Formation chance through 7 days...high...90 percent.
South-Southwest of Mexico: A tropical wave located a few hundred miles south of the coast of southern Mexico is producing disorganized showers and thunderstorms. Environmental conditions appear favorable for development, and a tropical depression is likely to form this weekend while the system moves generally west-northwestward, remaining well offshore of Mexico. * Formation chance through 48 hours...low...10 percent. * Formation chance through 7 days...high...80 percent.
Central East Pacific: A broad area of low pressure associated with a tropical wave is producing disorganized showers and thunderstorms several hundred miles south of the southern tip of the Baja California Peninsula. Environmental conditions are forecast to be marginally favorable for gradual development over the weekend as the system moves westward or west-northwestward at 5 to 10 mph. * Formation chance through 48 hours...low...10 percent. * Formation chance through 7 days...low...20 percent.
Paresh Dave and Aarian Marshall, reporting for Wired (News+ link in case Wired hits you with their paywall):
The incidents involved two different shipments of high-value
technology traveling from Silicon Valley to Southern California,
according to Pachuca, who says he learned about the thefts from
law enforcement authorities. Each truck was tailed by private
security professionals driving unmarked escort vehicles, which
were supposed to ensure the goods made it to their destinations
safely. But hours into one journey, another driver rear-ended the
escort in a hit-and-run, forcing it to stop. In the other case,
the escort stopped after another car nudged it into a tailspin, a
ploy commonly known as a PIT maneuver, and then fled.
Everyone familiar with the “accidents” believes the escorts were
deliberately immobilized, according to Pachuca. Once the
semitrucks lost their escorts, the drivers proceeded without
halting — but not to their planned destinations. They were never
heard from again, Pachua says, and millions of dollars in data
center gear remains unaccounted for.
Market Design
The Rio-Antirrio Bridge in Greece:
or the Moses “Bridge” in the Netherlands.
