Broadsheet

References & Resources

Bureau of Meteorology, via Instagram (2026, April 26) What is fog? Accessed May 11, 2026.

Bureau of Meteorology, via Facebook (2025, May 15) When viewed from above, fog takes on intricate, branching shapes. Accessed May 11, 2026.

MetService (2016) Valley Fog. Accessed May 11, 2026.

NASA Earthdata (2026) Fog. Accessed May 11, 2026.

NASA Earth Observatory (2018, October 26) It’s Valley Fog Season. Accessed May 11, 2026.

NOAA (2023, September 29) The Sea Breeze. Accessed May 11, 2026.

Parks Victoria, The Victorian alps. Accessed May 11, 2026.

Zoom Earth (2026, May 11) Satellite Live. Accessed May 11, 2026.

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Stay up-to-date with the latest content from NASA as we explore the universe and discover more about our home planet.

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Low clouds blanketed the delta while parallel cloud bands rolled over the Bay of Bengal during a January cold wave.

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As winter turned to spring, the skies over the Gulf of Alaska displayed textbook examples of numerous cloud formations.

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After the Laurentide Ice Sheet retreated from present-day Hudson Bay, rebounding land has revealed striking nearshore topography.

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Description

NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover used its Mast Camera, or Mastcam, to capture this view of a rock nicknamed “Atacama” on May 6, 2026, the 4,877th Martian day, or sol, of the mission. The rock had gotten stuck to the drill on the end of Curiosity’s robotic arm on April 25. Engineers spent several days repositioning the arm and vibrating the drill to try and get the rock loose, finally detaching the rock on May 1.

Atacama is estimated to be 1.5 feet in diameter at its base and 6 inches thick. It would weigh roughly 28.6 pounds (13 kilograms) on Earth (and about a third of that on Mars). The circular hole produced by Curiosity’s drill is visible in the rock.

This mosaic is made up of eight images that were stitched together after being sent back to Earth. The color has been approximately white-balanced to resemble how the scene would appear under daytime lighting conditions on Earth.

Curiosity was built by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which is managed by Caltech in Pasadena, California. JPL leads the mission on behalf of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington as part of NASA’s Mars Exploration Program portfolio. Malin Space Science Systems in San Diego built and operates Mastcam.

To learn more about Curiosity, visit:

[Sponsor] Drata

Daring Fireball Department of Commerce

Updated 2026-05-12 00:54:09

There were two very different celebrations in Russia and in Hungary yesterday.

Russia celebrated Victory Day, the anniversary of the Soviet Union’s victory over Nazi Germany in World War II. Most of the Allies honor Victory in Europe Day, or V-E Day, on May 8, the day in 1945 that jubilant celebrations broke out as news spread of the Nazis’ unconditional surrender in Reims, France, on May 7, 1945. The Russians celebrate victory over the Nazis on May 9, for by the time the Germans surrendered to the Soviets in Berlin, the time difference meant it was already May 9 in Moscow.

May 9 is an important national holiday in Russia, marked with parades and honoring of relatives who fought in the war. In 2005, when Russia was still embracing democratic nations, more than fifty world leaders attended the sixtieth anniversary of Victory Day, including President George W. Bush; the leaders of China, France, Germany, Japan, Italy, Spain, and Denmark; the secretary-general of the United Nations; and the president of the European Commission.

But for the past several years, Russia’s president Vladimir Putin has used the event to demonstrate the nation’s military strength and to rally supporters behind him and the war in Ukraine. He has showcased troops and military hardware in a grand parade in Moscow’s Red Square.

This year, as Zahra Ullah of CNN reported, Putin followed his usual pattern of equating the troops fighting in Ukraine with those who fought in World War II. As he has often framed the war as a struggle against the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), he claimed today’s soldiers for Russia are “standing up to an aggressive force armed and supported by the entire NATO bloc.”

But the similarities between past celebrations and yesterday’s ended there. This year, the parade was dramatically scaled back. The parade included four parade units, including some from North Korea, and there was no heavy military hardware. Instead, screens spread across Red Square showed pre-recorded videos of drones, air defense forces, and submarines that state media claimed were from the front lines.

Although foreign leaders have attended the event in the past, this year there were few. As Matthew Luxmoore noted in the Wall Street Journal, Russian allies Venezuela and Hungary have recently lost their pro-Russian leaders, and Russian ally Iran is at war with the U.S. China’s leader Xi Jinping attended last year but did not attend this year. Russian officials allowed few foreign reporters to cover the event and warned people there could be restrictions on texting and the internet “to ensure security during the festive events.”

Putin’s scaled-back celebration reflects fear of Ukrainian drone strikes, which are hitting deep inside Russia. It also reflects growing discontent over the war and its devastation of the economy, and anger at the increasing repression with which Putin is trying to control opposition.

As former U.S. ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul noted in McFaul’s World, Putin’s war on Ukraine has now lasted longer than the Soviet Union’s war with Nazi Germany and has achieved none of the goals Putin set out for the conflict. He has not subjugated Ukraine and has not succeeded in regime change. He has not “demilitarized” Ukraine; indeed, Ukraine is more militarized than ever before and has become an important player in global weapons systems. And not only has Putin failed to stop NATO from expanding, but in response to his invasion of Ukraine, both Finland and Sweden have joined the defensive alliance.

Instead of achieving Putin’s goals, the war has killed or wounded more than 1.2 million Russian soldiers and eaten up the economy. As criticism of the regime has become more outspoken, the Kremlin has curbed access to the internet, not only exacerbating that criticism but also, as McFaul notes, making it harder for people to use mobile banking, order a taxi, or use other online services. Rumors are circulating that Putin is increasingly concerned for his own safety. Rather than walking to the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier to lay flowers as usual, yesterday he took an armored bus.

Russia had announced a ceasefire for Friday and Saturday, but when it unraveled, President Donald J. Trump announced that he had persuaded Russia and Ukraine to agree to a three-day ceasefire that would cover the Victory Day celebration and allow an exchange of 1,000 prisoners from each country. After the announcement of the ceasefire, Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky trolled Putin with a formal presidential decree to “allow” a parade in Moscow. It said: “For the time of the parade…the territorial square of Red Square shall be excluded from the plan of application of Ukrainian weapons.”

By Sunday—after the parade—the ceasefire had already broken down.

Today McFaul noted: “Ukrainian warriors have stopped the invading Russian hordes. Putin is losing his war in Ukraine…. Putin would be wise to cut his losses.”

In Hungary, a different kind of celebration was underway as Péter Magyar took the oath of office as prime minister after winning a landslide victory over Putin ally Viktor Orbán.

In his 16 years of rule, Orbán rejected the liberal democracy his country used to enjoy, saying that its emphasis on multiculturalism weakened the national culture while its insistence on human equality undermined traditional society by recognizing that women and LGBTQ people have the same rights as straight white men. The age of liberal democracy was over, he said, and a new age had begun.

In place of equality, Orbán advocated what he called “illiberal democracy” or “Christian democracy.” “Christian democracy is, by definition, not liberal,” he said in July 2018; “it is, if you like, illiberal. And we can specifically say this in connection with a few important issues—say, three great issues. Liberal democracy is in favor of multiculturalism, while Christian democracy gives priority to Christian culture; this is an illiberal concept. Liberal democracy is pro-immigration, while Christian democracy is anti-immigration; this is again a genuinely illiberal concept. And liberal democracy sides with adaptable family models, while Christian democracy rests on the foundations of the Christian family model; once more, this is an illiberal concept.”

Orbán focused on LBGTQ rights as a danger to “Western civilization.” Arguing the need to protect children, his party has made it impossible for transgender people to change their gender identification on legal documents and made it illegal to share with minors any content that can be interpreted as promoting an LBGTQ lifestyle. After Orbán put allies in charge of Hungarian universities, his government banned public funding for gender studies courses. According to his chief of staff: “The Hungarian government is of the clear view that people are born either men or women.”

The American right wing championed Orbán, who called for the establishment of a global right wing to continue to work together to destroy liberal democracy and establish Christian democracy. Before Hungary’s April election, Trump not only repeatedly endorsed Orbán but also promised “to use the full Economic Might of the United States to strengthen Hungary’s Economy, as we have done for our Great Allies in the past, if Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and the Hungarian people ever need it.” Vice President J.D. Vance actually traveled to Hungary to campaign for Orbán.

But the Hungarian people overwhelmingly rejected Orbán and his party, giving Magyar’s party more than a two-thirds majority in parliament. This will give it the power to overturn not only the laws Orbán and his party passed, but also the changes Orbán made to entrench himself and his party in power permanently. Magyar promised to root out the corruption that has made Orbán and his cronies rich, to restore the rule of law and freedom of speech, and to repair Hungary’s ties with the European Union, which Orbán had frayed almost to the breaking point with his loyalty to Vladimir Putin.

In his inauguration speech, Magyar vowed to “serve my country, not rule over it.” He noted that the corrupt members of the outgoing government “stole from the pockets of Hungarians” and left behind a huge budget deficit and a broken healthcare system. He vowed accountability for those who plundered the country and broke its laws, and promised to rebuild the nation’s shattered checks and balances. He urged Hungarians always to criticize their leaders and hold them accountable.

“We inherited a country where politics deliberately pitted Hungarians against each other,” he said, and he explained how Orbán mobilized supporters with hatred and fear, poisoning “the collective psyche of an entire nation.” “The Hungarian state must never again do this to its own citizens,” he said. He vowed to heal the country: “We will once again learn to think of ourselves as one nation,” he promised.

Then Magyar and members of his party walked out to the crowd outside the parliament on Lajos Kossuth Lajos Square. Magyar urged them to see themselves as one community. He assured them that the story of the day had not been written by politicians in backrooms, but by them. “[I]t was all of you. You wrote it, through your work, your hope, your concern, and your determination. This is now your transition to democracy, this is your homeland, your National Assembly, and we thank you!”

After Magyar spoke, as Roma singer Ibolya Oláh, a lesbian, began performing her anthem “Magyarország,” the crowd crossed the reflecting pool in front of the parliament building to surge forward, taking back their public spaces and their parliament, illustrating their faith in a new era for their country.

—

Notes:

https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-war-moscow-parade-ceasefire-cde7ec7a0fb10a3e2563171b931485e8

https://edition.cnn.com/2026/05/09/europe/russia-military-parade-ceasefire-intl-hnk

https://www.wsj.com/world/russia/putin-victory-day-parade-moscow-803efb57

McFaul's World

Growing Cracks in Putin’s Dictatorship

Since coming to power in 2000, Russian leader Vladimir Putin has built one of the most repressive and effective dictatorships in the world. That process accelerated sharply after his full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, when, increasingly paranoid about his society’s reaction to the wisdom of that war, Putin cracked down on all internal diss…

3 days ago · 1614 likes · 79 comments · Michael McFaul

https://www.csis.org/analysis/russias-grinding-war-ukraine

https://www.npr.org/2026/05/09/nx-s1-5816478/trump-russia-ukraine-ceasefire

https://www.politico.eu/article/donald-trump-economic-support-viktor-orban-hungarian-election/

https://www.npr.org/2026/04/09/nx-s1-5779235/jd-vance-stumps-for-hungarys-orban

https://apnews.com/article/hungary-peter-magyar-inauguration-orban-a12b25cb022dedb777a54686e59c65a8

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/9/13/17823488/hungary-democracy-authoritarianism-trump

https://visegradpost.com/en/2018/05/12/viktor-orbans-full-speech-for-the-beginning-of-his-fourth-mandate/

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2021/11/19/22787269/conservatives-america-chris-rufo-patrick-deneen

https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2022/09/15/hungary-is-no-longer-a-full-democracy-but-an-electoral-autocracy-meps-declare-in-new-repor

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/may/10/vladimir-putin-suggests-ukraine-war-is-coming-to-an-end

https://telex.hu/english/2026/05/09/i-will-serve-my-country-not-rule-over-it-peter-magyar-sworn-in-as-hungary-s-new-prime-minister

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zsoltsb/status/2053198434333544570

AlexTaylorNews/status/2053164567023288723

SzabadonMagyar/status/2053147093624078789

Bluesky:

united24media.com/post/3mlglex7ayp2t

onestpress.onestnetwork.com/post/3mlgb25wu7c2h

onestpress.onestnetwork.com/post/3mlg54y44mk2u

maks23.bsky.social/post/3mlfzb4ui6c2o

wartranslated.bsky.social/post/3mlegfaz7js25

#!/usr/bin/env -S llm -t model: gpt-5.4-mini system: | Use tools to run calculations functions: | def add(a: int, b: int) -> int: return a + b def multiply(a: int, b: int) -> int: return a * b

Failing to pass a defense budget is a self-inflicted wound in the space race

Thomas “Tav” Taverney

Updated 2026-05-11 12:45:00

References & Resources

NASA (2026) Phytoplankton Exploration. Accessed May 7, 2026.

NASA Earthdata (2026, April 2) Spring Has Sprung in the Northwest Atlantic. Accessed May 7, 2026.

NASA Earth Observatory (2025, December 8) What are Phytoplankton? Accessed May 7, 2026.

NASA Earth Observatory (1999, April 26) What is a Coccolithophore? Accessed May 7, 2026.

NASA Worldview (2026, May 3) Corrected Reflectance/Chlorophyll a. Accessed May 7, 2026.

ScienceDirect (2025) Coccolithophore. Accessed May 7, 2026.

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Vivid green blooms form, drift, and fade in Hartbeespoortdam reservoir over the course of a year.

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David Beckworth recently interviewed Basil Halperin on his podcast MacroMusings. The interview focused on two primary issues: the effect of AI on the macroeconomy and how to think about optimal monetary policy. I see Halperin as a pragmatist in the tradition of Bennett McCallum, which is one reason why he’s my favorite young macroeconomist. Later, I’ll offer some comments on recent trends in the economy.

Halperin’s model suggests that if extremely rapid AI growth were to occur, it would lead to much higher interest rates. The fact that we do not see extremely high rates is taken as evidence that the financial markets do not expect explosive growth over the next decade or two:

Halperin: . . . I think it’s totally plausible that we just get something like the late ’90s, the dot-com boom, where we have a large surge in growth. AI companies make a lot of money and continue to have really fast revenue growth, like the 10 times a year that Anthropic has had last year. Not reaching the 30% GDP growth, certainly in the next five years, again, that some people take very seriously.
Maybe 20 years down the line, things change. I do think that rapid acceleration really is possible in the long run if we have something closer to full automation of human labor. Those sci-fi scenarios, I actually do think our models say that’s quite possible. Economic history says rapid economic speed-ups are quite possible. In the next five years, the next 10 years even, maybe even the next 20 years, that’s where the markets are not seeing this. Markets are pretty good at predicting the future, its own form of artificial intelligence.
Beckworth: You’re hopeful that, within my lifetime, I will see transformative AI?
Halperin: “Hopeful” is a strong word because big changes are both good and scary.

Others have argued that an AI boom might actually lower interest rates, but I don’t find the assumptions about income distribution in those models to be plausible.

The interview is full of great observations. Here he pushes back on the view (which I once held) that AI might solve our public debt problems:

Faster growth means higher tax revenue, but faster growth in general equilibrium means higher interest rates, that is, higher rates on new debt. The average maturity of Treasuries is like six years or something so the US has to roll over its debt stock every six years or something like that. After six years, we’re going to be stuck with all those higher new interest rates. Hence then, the question is this R versus G, or really R minus G, is the effect of AI on interest rates or on growth larger? What determines that? . . .
And this is what the empirical estimates in my paper with Zach and Trevor would find where . . . we have some nice data showing that R and G are indeed lined up. Higher growth leads to higher interest rates or correlationally leads to higher interest rates. We estimate something around one for the slope of that relationship, this elasticity of intertemporal substitution. I would say that higher growth leads to one-for-one higher interest rates so that new debt is not any easier or any harder to pay off as a response to AI. That would say that AI is not a magic solution to our debt problem.

Halperin is a fan of NGDP targeting, citing the influence of George Selgin’s book Less Than Zero:

[Selgin’s] book has influenced me a lot. I think, to my very idiosyncratic taste, it’s one of the most conceptually important works on monetary economics in the last 30 or 40 years because it really drills in on what should central banks actually be doing from a number of directions that the formal literature eventually developed on, even if George’s work wasn’t mathematically formalized so much and wasn’t so much directly cited. He previewed works in top journals that were published 20 or 30 years later, including inspiring my paper that you mentioned with Daniele Caratelli.

Milton Friedman is another influence:

Halperin: . . . If the real interest rate is going to rise, if r-star is going to rise, that means monetary policy needs to pay attention to that, to either not keep interest rates too low so that you have some inflationary outcome, or not have interest rates too high to have excess unemployment, like the Citrini scenario. That’s the second point.
A third point is that I think monetary policy can be helpful to not screw up how the economy goes during an AI-driven transition, but cannot solve the problem. This really is a question for fiscal policymakers. It is a question of redistribution. What monetary policy should be sure to do is just not screw things up. I keep saying Friedman in this episode, maybe appropriately because he’s the GOAT, as your boss, Tyler, would say.
What monetary policy can do versus what it can’t do: What it can do is ensure that it doesn’t screw up the economy in response to shocks. That’s the fundamental lesson of his 1968 presidential address, famous paper. Implementing the less-than-zero policy that Selgin recommends or this countercyclical inflation that comes out of my work would be one plausible way of doing that.

Halperin agrees with Bennett McCallum that because we don’t know exactly which form of wage and price stickiness is the most important, we need a robust approach to monetary policy that is relatively optimal under a wide range of assumptions.

Halperin: Even zooming out, is sticky prices obviously the most important nominal friction in the world? I’ve written a paper on this. That’s still not clear to me. Sticky prices as opposed to sticky wages or sticky nominal debt contracts or sticky information. No one’s done a head-to-head comparison of all these different frictions. I think that’s desperately needed. Though, it’s not clear how you do that. Otherwise, I would have written the paper. . . .
That’s the core logic of what we show to be optimal in the model. The way that gets you NGDP targeting or nominal wage targeting or this countercyclical inflation is that if this firm was having a positive productivity shock, it’s producing more stuff. Output’s going up. Y is going up. It’s cutting its price. Every other firm is keeping prices constant, but that one firm is lowering its prices. The average level of prices in the economy is then falling. Y up, P down. In a baseline setup, those are one for one. P times Y, nominal GDP, is kept constant. You can also see this as nominal wage targeting. Stabilizing nominal wages ensures that the nominal costs of all those unaffected firms is stabilized so that they don’t want to change their prices. Nominal wage targeting is another way we frame optimal policy in the paper. All of these terms—NGDP targeting, nominal income targeting, nominal wage targeting—all of these things are pointing to this countercyclical inflation, looking through shocks rather than aiming for strict inflation stabilization, which is the baseline new Keynesian logic. . . .
The way I think about this is that NGDP targeting or something like it is eclectically optimal.

Back in 2011, I had this to say about Bennett McCallum:

McCallum first proposed NGDP targeting some time around 1980. McCallum has an interesting position within the field of macroeconomics. Unlike me, he is comfortable with the IS-LM approach. Unlike me, he is comfortable working with rather sophisticated new Keynesian models. But unlike people like Michael Woodford, he has always insisted on the importance of the quantity of money (rather than merely the effects of monetary policy on interest rates.) And unlike most new Keynesians, he’s argued that NGDP targeting is superior to the various flexible price inflation targets that are frequently proposed. I think this is rather unusual, as when your model includes both P and Y separately, there is no obvious reason to put the same coefficient on the reaction function for each variable. So I’ve always seen him as being in the mainstream of modern macro research, but a little off to the side of that mainstream.
I met him only once, and that was at a conference in March. He has a very appealing personality; quiet and very polite. . . . I have great respect for his intuition. He seems to have a good sense of which developments in macro are fruitful and which are not.

Like McCallum, Basil Halperin seems to have absorbed both the best of New Keynesian economics and the best of Milton Friedman thought. He also favors NGDP targeting. He also seems to have excellent intuition about which sort of macro models are plausible and which are not—a skill that’s hard to teach. Even their personalities seem a bit similar, as both come across as being very polite. (Here’s a much longer post explaining McCallum’s excellent intuition.)

Next, I’ll offer some related observations on the current state of the economy.