Faux conservatism is helping destroy our liberties
Readers of The New York Times expect high-quality diversity on the opinion pages. got Ross Douthat’s often lightweight, predictable, and at times logic- and fact-challenged essays. Now he’s leaving for CBS 60 Minutes.
I hope Douthat’s replacement is a first-rate conservative thinker and encourage you to embrace that view.
When self-proclaimed conservative intellectuals fail to rigorously and thoroughly challenge their own, they foster universal mental laxity among all opinion writers.
The problem is that a lot of what passes for right-side commentary focuses on enraging rather than informing, on insignificance, and on distracting from the rapid expansion of domestic surveillance and militarization under a president who claims “the right to do anything I want” under Article II of our Constitution. Of course, that’s a lie, a dangerous lie, which authoritarians on the right embrace.
Overall, right-side American opinion journalism is intellectually flimsy. It is rife with morally bankrupt ideologues who abuse numbers and other facts. At least one prominent far-right pundit, now an American ambassador, is an outright fraud, as I documented in a five-part National Memo series a dozen years ago that exposed reactionaries and radicals posing as conservatives and explained how this hurts us all.
Rigorous right-wing analysis, grounded in facts, would elevate our civic debate.
Instead, we get lightweight and alarmist right-of-center critiques over matters of no consequence, like Obama’s tan suit, that debase the quality of our public discourse. Imagine if that energy were put into dissecting flabby centrist and left columnizing, which would benefit from factual and penetrating rightist critiques.
Every day we get sanewashing of Donald Trump’s delusional, hateful, and incompetent rants, which outside of the United States are reported on in context, even in Middle East countries with dictators friendly to Trump.
What this tells us is that right-wing intellectualism in 2026 America is bankrupt. It has, for now, no ideas to offer, no insights that would open eyes and minds. That’s why we get drivel and distraction.
Journalism, both fact and opinion, should routinely examine ideas, especially those at the core of the policies and practices of our democratic and secular governments. Daily reporting needs informing context, especially its place in the framework of what America is at its core, an idea and an ideal. Opinion writing needs to provide rich depth and context to imbue current events with meaning within the larger scope of 21st Century life.
Centrist and progressive Op-Eds devoted to knocking down silly claims and invented scandals (Obama’s nonexistent Affordable Care Act royalties) spread by far-right pundits divert public square debate from our actual problems, weakening the fabric of our Republic. But for many faux conservatives, that’s the point: make conditions worse, make government incompetent and uncaring, and in this way degrade popular support for democratic self-governance, thus encouraging authoritarianism.
A dozen years after my National Memo series ran, polls are showing just what I warned: many of the young are troubled by democracy as they know it, citing government policies that they recognize as harmful to them, but beneficial to those currently at the top in terms of economics and influence.
Earlier this year, Project Democracy found that “among Gen Z, there is a widespread lack of confidence in how democracy is actually functioning today. Many feel that the system is not meeting their needs or expectations, leading to disengagement, frustration, or even a willingness to explore extreme measures to address their concerns.”
What’s Needed
America needs thoughtful conservatism. Those who actually care about the liberties of the people—about the America that is and could be—foster ethical, honest, and serious conservatism. Doing that requires taking on the posers among their ranks.
The late Charles Peters, founder of Washington Monthly, a serious public affairs magazine which broke stories sometimes decades before anyone else, like in the early 1970s proposing an end to large denominational bills to thwart drug traffickers and the first tests of military drones as replacements for manned aircraft.
Peters was always calling out his fellow liberals for not carefully thinking through what they wished for. I have yet to find a conservative counterpart to Peters.
Conservatism grounded in Enlightenment ideals of fact, intellectual inquiry, and reason would defend that which works well while vigorously resisting change. It would favor accountability— even strict accountability. It would also insist that change be preceded by pilot projects—with robustly funded evaluations—so that only proposals that have been thoroughly examined and shown to actually improve society are adopted.
Sadly, that is not what we are getting from many self-described conservatives whose bylines appear in our best publications.
Demons and Poltergeists
Consider Rod Dreher, whom I’ve interviewed and who wrote a book about his personal encounters with demons, poltergeists, etc. He continues to be treated as a serious conservative intellectual. The C.S. Lewis (Chronicles of Narnia author) Institute describes Dreher thusly:
Rod Dreher is an American author, journalist, and commentator known for his insights into culture, religion, and politics. He has written extensively for top publications like The American Conservative and National Review and is the author of several influential books, including Crunchy Cons, The Benedict Option, and Live Not by Lies. Beyond his books, Dreher has maintained a strong presence as a columnist and blogger, engaging in public discourse on a range of issues from religious freedom to cultural identity.
Just this month, on July 9, Douthat wrote an NYTimes column about this delusional expatriate (Dreher moved to Hungary when Orban became its dictator) as if he were clear-headed.
Here’s a revealing part of that column, taken from Douthat’s video interview of Dreher:
Douthat: I mean, we’ve checked facts with a Ouija board on this show as a rule. But go on.
Dreher: [Chuckles.] No, but I believe that there is a world of the demonic. I’m well acquainted with exorcists and spiritual warfare, and if you know any exorcists and have spent time with them, you know how real this stuff is. I believe that A.I. is going to be used as a vector for the demonic. It’s not to say every instance of A.I. is demonic, but I believe that people will come to see it as an oracle.
Neither Normal Nor Sane
To those who care about facts, this is an insult. For sure, we ought to know how widespread such delusional thinking is, but The New York Times shouldn’t publish this without context.
Douthat, in a video with Vice President JD Vance, also described what both men said was the “miracle” in a bar when a wine glass jumped on its own, crashing on the floor as the converts discussed the attitudes of fellow Catholics toward the papacy.
Douthat is just part of a much larger problem of lightweight, fact-free, and delusional thinking pervading American conservative discourse.
From obvious lies advanced by American Enterprise Institute “scholar” James Pethokouis to outright fraud by Brent Bozell III (whose signed columns were written by an associate), my 2014 series showed the damage inflicted on American beliefs by faux conservatism. Bozell is now our ambassador to South Africa, a Trumpian insult to the Black leadership there.
When self-proclaimed conservative intellectuals fail to rigorously and thoroughly challenge their own, they foster universal mental laxity among all opinion writers. Actual conservatives would find this appalling, but for anti-democracy radicals posing as conservatives, especially those who just make stuff up or regurgitate what a cub reporter could establish is nonsense, it’s just Tuesday dinner.
Frequently Asked Questions for this article about Ross Dethout’s departure from The New York Times for 60 Minutes:
What is faux conservatism?
Faux conservatism describes political commentary that adopts the conservative label while relying on misinformation, outrage, or ideological loyalty instead of facts, intellectual rigor, and principled analysis.
Why does David Cay Johnston argue faux conservatism threatens liberty?
The article argues that superficial or dishonest conservative commentary distracts from serious threats to constitutional rights, democratic institutions, and government accountability.
What role should conservative opinion writers play?
According to the article, conservative writers should critically examine ideas—including those within their own political movement—and provide evidence-based analysis that strengthens public debate.
Why is Ross Douthat discussed in the article?
The article uses Ross Douthat’s work as an example in a broader critique of what the author sees as the decline of rigorous conservative intellectual discourse in mainstream media.
What is the article’s main argument?
The central argument is that democracy benefits from strong, fact-driven conservative voices, but that many prominent commentators instead promote distraction, misinformation, and narratives that weaken democratic institutions.
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Would you like to see an example of a badly conceived policy? Here you go:
The bill to require discounts for self-checkout will probably not pass. But what’s notable is that if this bill did pass, it would have exactly the opposite of the effect its creators want. The stated justification is that customers are doing unpaid labor by scanning and bagging their own groceries, and that this discount would compensate them for that effort. But the bill is part of a more general effort to disincentivize automation in the retail industry, in order to protect working-class jobs:
Rhode Island was the first state in the U.S. to enact statewide self-checkout restrictions with its Restrictions on Self-Service Checkout Stations Act, which takes effect January 1, 2027. The act requires grocery stores to have at least one human-operated checkout station for every three self-service stations during peak hours…Similar legislation has either been introduced, enacted or considered in additional states including California, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Washington, and Ohio.
The standard objection to this bill, I suppose, would be that self-checkout already gives shoppers a discount, because it allows stores to save money on hiring human labor, and that these savings get passed on to consumers in the form of lower prices. That argument is correct as far as it goes, but it means the debate ends up as one of technocracy versus populism — protecting the livelihoods of a few cashiers versus giving a huge number of consumers very slightly lower prices. There’s no simple or easy conclusion to that debate.
But in the case of New York’s proposed self-checkout discount, the problem is that the bill would actually make grocery stores fire human cashiers in favor of more self-checkout.
To understand why this is true, first imagine an incredibly extreme version of the policy. Imagine that instead of 10%, you made a law forcing grocery stores to give a 90% discount for self-checkout. This is exactly the same as forcing stores to charge 10x for using a human cashier. Who would pay 10x for groceries, just to use a human cashier? Basically no one. So everyone would go use the self-checkout machines, and stores would have no need for human cashiers at all.
But wait, you may be thinking. How could any store afford to give a 90% discount on groceries? The same way they give discounts for seniors and students at movie theaters. You just raise the sticker price, so that the price people actually pay after the discount is the same as before. So instead of keeping human-cashier prices the same and cutting prices for self-checkout, what stores would actually do if you made them give 10% discounts for self-checkout is to raise prices across the board — not by 10%, but by enough so that overall revenue is just about the same as it was before.
How do we know this is what will happen? Because the grocery store industry is very competitive. Profit margins are almost always between 1.5% and 2.8%, which is very low compared to the average industry:
It’s not just profit margins that demonstrate this — there are tons of grocery stores, and new ones enter the market all the time. This means that if grocery stores tried to respond to the New York bill by getting rid of self-checkout and using only human cashiers — in order to charge higher prices and make higher profits — other stores would undercut them by offering self-checkout with big discounts. People would flock to those other stores, and the stores that tried to overcharge would lose business until they, too, put in the self-checkout machines.
This is kind of like if you told grocery stores to charge 10% more for Skippy peanut butter than for Jif peanut butter. Obviously stores would want to stock more Skippy, because they’d earn more money on each sale. But obviously consumers would want to buy more Jif, because it was cheaper. At the end of the day, the consumers would win, because consumers tend to win out when an industry is highly competitive. Some people would still buy Skippy, because some people just really like Skippy more, but overall, forcing one brand of peanut butter to cost more than another brand means you’ll have less of it on the shelves.
By the exact same reasoning, forcing stores to charge more for purchases scanned by human cashiers will end up getting a lot of cashiers fired and replaced with self-checkout machines.
As policies go, this example isn’t particularly hard to explain, or to understand. If you ask any economist, or any good AI, they’ll give basically the same answer, in different words. It would be a good question on an undergrad microeconomics exam. But when I tried to explain this on X, some people had a lot of trouble understanding:
The idea of a 10% discount on self-checkout as a way to incentivize human employment is pure “slopulism” — stuff that seems like populism, but wouldn’t achieve the results that people want from the policy.1 It’s snake oil that sells well based on people’s inability to see the consequences of what they’re being sold.
Slopulism is an inevitable outgrowth of populism. Once people decide that technocrats, elites, experts, and gatekeepers aren’t worth listening to, they become vulnerable to all sorts of policy scams. In general, these scams fall into two categories:
Accidental scams, where the people making the policy just don’t understand what they’re doing
Ideological scams, where ideologues sell the public on an ideologically-driven policy by pretending it offers benefits that it doesn’t really offer
The second of these is more dangerous than the first. Slopulism that arises out of pure ignorance is very hard to correct, and social media — which elevates the dumbest and loudest at the expense of the most well-informed — probably makes it harder. But in the end, patience, education, and reason can overcome accidental slopulism — and AI may help a lot.
But when slopulist ideas are being promoted by smart people with ulterior motives, it can be a lot harder to wake the populace up. At that point, there’s the danger that slopulism becomes a bipartisan equilibrium, with each party’s ideologues executing a coup against the reasonable moderates by appealing to slopulist instincts.
Oregon’s “prosperity debate” is being fueled by bought-and-paid-for distortions of authoritative academic research on what it takes to have a successful state economy in the 21st Century.
Flawed Foundations: Business Oregon’s recent taxpayer-funded studies rely on distorted academic literature to push discredited tax breaks and business climate obsessions.
Ignoring Causality: A 2022 property tax study explicitly ignored whether incentives actually caused business investments, yet officials falsely cite it as proof of economic return.
Misrepresented Experts: Recruitment reports acknowledge leading scholars like Tim Bartik, but omit or distort his core finding that up to 90 percent of incentives are wasted.
Smart Strategy: True 21st-century prosperity relies on cultivating distinct regional strengths and talent, not engaging in a race-to-the-bottom subsidy war.
State economic development strategies have been carefully studied over the past several decades. There’s an impressive body of evidence showing that widely practiced efforts to brag about a state’s business climate, slash taxes, and offer tax breaks simply don’t work. But that hasn’t stopped Oregon’s economic development agency from commissioning questionable “studies” claiming that somehow business climate and tax incentives are central to economic prosperity.
Two recent studies sponsored by the Oregon Business Development Department fundamentally mis-state the literature on economic development, and either omit, mis-state or ignore the key findings that nearly all business tax breaks go to firms for investments they were going to make anyhow, that an obsession with business climate is more likely to damage a state’s prosperity than help it, and successful strategies require states to emphasize distinctive strengths, not focus on imagined generic weaknesses. The department paid more than $150,000 for two of these studies, which are presented as representing reliable research on state economic development.
Business Oregon’s consultants evaluating the impact of property tax incentives were told to ignore whether the tax breaks played any role in driving a firm’s decision to locate in Oregon.
Another Business Oregon consultant mis-represented literature on the importance of business climate, and omitted a finding from what it called the “definitive” research on business incentives that 90 percent of incentives are wasted.
There’s an old saying about economic development: Shoot everything that flies, claim everything that falls. These reports are exactly the false claims that are rife among boosters. Sloppy, incomplete and dishonest representations about the importance of “business climate” and the effectiveness of tax incentives are not a reasonable basis for a smart economic strategy in the 21st Century.
Must Read
Mission accomplished: Time to move on from the Interstate Highway System. Admittedly, we’re a bit late with this news. The Strong Towns report “Mission Accomplished” offers a comprehensive indictment of the policy and financial bankruptcy of the federal Highway Trust Fund, which has metastasized from a “user pays” program that promised to build and maintain a system of interstate highways, to a grotesquely subsidized program that supports boondoggles and sprawl, while systematically neglecting maintenance, safety, climate and livability.
Within this culture, prudence becomes a liability. Engineers who propose maintenance over expansion are accused of lacking vision. Elected officials who delay projects are told they’re leaving money on the table. The system punishes humility; it prizes activity. The outcome is a quiet inversion of values: safety plans that widen dangerous roads, economic-development programs that subsidize endless sprawl, and maintenance budgets that shrink with every
“investment.” Because problems created by expansion justify more expansion, failure becomes proof of the need for more funding. Congestion becomes justification for widening. Maintenance backlogs justify new appropriations. Climate impacts justify “resilient” reconstruction. Each consequence of past spending feeds the rationale for more of the same.
While it gets the diagnosis largely right, there are good reasons to question the repoprt’s prescriptions, especially when it comes to transit. The Strong Towns proposal would eliminate categorical and formula funding for transit and eliminate metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs). This would leave transportation priorities to the tender mercies of states–and most likely state highway departments–to decide whether, and how much money to devote to transit. That, coupled with a road-centric performance dashboard, would likely mean the downscaling or demise of transit in many states and communities. A radical re-thinking of transportation finance is needed, but this proposal falls well short of being a good solution.
Lowering the high price of affordable housing. One of the painful paradoxes of affordable housing is that new housing constructed to be “affordable” is generally more expensive to build than otherwise comparable market-rate housing. One of the exceptions to this general rule is in Colorado, where state policies play a key role in lowering (or at least shouldering) some of these high costs. In general, construction costs (for materials, labor, design) and the like, are similar between affordable and market rate projects. But “soft costs,” including the process for planning, gaining approval, financing, and administering development of affordable housing tends to be much higher.
Writing at The Conversation, Solomon Greene explains key policies that address these issues. Colorado takes aim at soft costs by an effort to expedite what are often lengthy (and therefore costly) delays in project approvals. Colorado law provides for expedited local government approvals of development applications, and has centralized and simplified the process for applying for the complex array of financing tools that typically support affordable housing projects.
The other policy is that Colorado effectively provides a subsidy to affordable housing, by allowing public entities to convey land at for free or at low prices.
Developers paid just $1.50 per square foot, against about $23 for market‑rate builders, often on public land offered at little or no cost. That cheaper land, along with lower-cost building sites, more than offsets the higher soft costs that affordable projects still carry everywhere, Colorado included.
The overhead and high transaction costs associated with planning and financing subsidized housing, coupled with the often controversial approval processes are the key reasons for the cost paradox. Colorado shows that creative policies can address these issues.
Insights on Data Centers. The Brookings Institution has published a new report looking at the economic impacts of the surge in data center construction. Researchers gathered data on 1,200 data centers that opened over the last two decades, and looked at impacts on employment growth in affected counties, using otherwise similar counties that didn’t get a data center as a control group. The study concludes concludes that tax breaks aren’t particularly important, especially for the larger (hyperscale) data centers, and that job gains attributed to the industry are significantly exaggerated. To quote the report:
Location decisions for these facilities are driven by power availability, land, and fiber infrastructure, not by tax breaks. Naive estimates [of data center job growth] that fail to account for preexisting growth trends overstate the effect by a factor of three.”
Data center investment is playing a disproportionate role in driving current US economic growth, and shows many signs of being a classic investment bubble. Data centers high demand for water and electricity is aggravating shortages of both, and driving up electric rates; coupled with growing skepticism about the social benefits of AI, public opposition is growing.
Is your home big enough for you to deserve a safe road? In the inaugural post for her new Substack, Beth Osbourne poses this question in response to Transportation Secretary Duffy’s claim that bike lanes and pedestrian infrastructure are giveaways to “woke” people.
Let me translate that for you: “Since we have forced people to get everywhere by car through government regulation that requires all your needs to be built far away and connected by roads that will kill you if you get out of your car, we are going to use the obvious result (forced driving) as a reason to double down.”
Whether you choose to live in an apartment or a dense urban neighborhood and shun car travel–or simply can’t afford a suburban single family home and obligatory car ownership–shouldn’t affect whether the government works to assure your safety in traveling. We look forward to even more trenchant observations from Beth. You can subscribe here.
Cardiff Garcia interviewed me about Moral Economics, and we began by talking about medical aid in dying, and moved briskly on to other controversial markets such as pornography and prostitution.
The New Bazaar Economist Alvin Roth, winner of the economics Nobel in 2012 for his work on market design, joins Cardiff to discuss his new book, Moral Economics: From Prostitution to Organ Sales: What Controversial Transactions Reveal About How Markets Work.
The book is about morally contested markets: transactions that participants would like to engage in but that others think they shouldn't be allowed to, even when it’s hard to identify measurable harms to those objectors. It's also a great way to understand how markets interact with the law, politics, social norms, income inequality, human psychology, and so much more than just monetary exchange.
In this chat, Alvin and Cardiff discuss: • Medical aid in dying and the economics of “repugnant” markets • Sex work, trafficking, and the unintended consequences of criminalization • Plural marriage and the challenge of designing new legal protections • Sports gambling and the rise of prediction markets • Kidney exchanges, the transplantation shortage, and the opposition to cross-border exchanges
Throughout the conversation, they confront the trade-offs involved in both allowing controversial markets and trying to ban them.
Related Links
• Moral Economics: From Prostitution to Organ Sales: What Controversial Transactions Reveal About How Markets Work (https://basic-venture.com/titles/alvi...)
Changes that improve Datasette Apps when created and edited using Datasette Agent:
New app_debug() tool allowing agent to open an app (invisibly) and test it using JavaScript. #33
New app_list() tool for listing apps the user has permission to edit, so the agent can edit them. #36
The app_debug() tool is pretty neat: it works by displaying the app in a opacity: 0 iframe with pointer-events: none (so it can't be seen or interacted with) and then executing agent-provided JavaScript inside that sandboxed iframe. This means the agent can smoke test that the app is working and even do things like measure the dimensions of different elements.
A few days ago it was Anthropic discovering cryptographic weaknesses with Claude using Mythos Preview, spending $100,000 on tokens and with prompts that included "again we are not looking for low hanging fruit, we want proper research to find genuinly hard findings."
Now it's OpenAI's turn to flex. They set "an internal version of Astra, our next major model" on finding solutions to ten mathematical problems that "have seen no progress on the main result for at least a decade". They claim to have spent less than $2,000 at GPT-5.6 Sol token prices on each one.
(No news on how many problems they spent $2,000 on without reaching a solution though.)
The openai/ten-proofs repository has Lean 4 formalizations of their results, and there's also a paper describing the solutions and an additional LLM-generated PDF where the model "reconstructs how the proof came together" based on the unpublished reasoning traces.
That's a decent level of transparency, but I want to see the prompts they used!
A lot of mathematicians online are experiencing a collective burst of Deep Blue. Mathematician Kirwin Hampshire published an impassioned essay last week, The Dark Night of Mathematics, describing "a profound spiritual crisis" brought on by previous (and less significant) results.
OpenAI's results reminds me of what Terence Tao described as "big mathematics" in IEEE Spectrum in June:
Unlike some of his peers, Tao is neither dismissive of AI nor fearful. Instead, he sees it as the catalyst for a fundamental shift in the discipline—a transition toward what he calls “big mathematics.” He envisions a future of large-scale, decentralized collaborations between humans and machines, where complex mathematical tasks can be diced and sliced, with humans claiming the creative parts and AI doing the lion’s share of the technical grunt work.
I wanted to create a new Slack emoji, and their tool recommends a square that's 128x128 and has a transparent background... so I had Fable build me this simple image editor against those requirements.
No podcast today. I’d like to say that I was struck speechless by the revelation that the no-bid contractor on the Reflecting Pool botched the job — and that the charges against David Hearn, falsely accused of sabotage, were Trumped up.
But the truth is that I couldn’t get it together because I caught some kind of stomach bug and spent a lot of the week kneeling before the porcelain throne.
I wrote this summary of the past few weeks of open letters as a section of my sponsors-only newsletter but I've decided to share it here as well.
Open Weights and American AI Leadership was shepherded by Microsoft, dated July 24th, and signed by 235 AI-adjacent companies including NVIDIA, Amazon, Y Combinator, The Linux Foundation and (a later signer) OpenAI.
It's clearly an argument designed to counter any instincts by the current US government to ban or limit open weight models over "safety" concerns - a reasonable consideration given what happened to Claude Fable 5!
Relying solely on closed models is not inherently safe: they can be breached, misused, or fail in ways that outsiders cannot detect. And concentrating advanced AI capabilities behind a small number of closed models compounds that risk. It results in a small number of single points of failure, weakens competition, and leaves critical technology in the hands of a few providers. Open weight models, on the other hand, allow a broad community of researchers and developers to examine their behavior, identify vulnerabilities, develop safeguards, and improve them over time.
The one surprising note in the letter is that it comes out in support of distillation, where models train on output from other models:
In shaping this ecosystem, policymakers should be careful not to conflate legitimate model-development techniques with misappropriation. Distillation, or the practice of using one model’s outputs to help train or improve another, is a widely used technique for model improvement, evaluation, and validation. It reflects a long tradition of learning from, building upon, and improving existing technologies, a tradition that has helped drive innovation since the rise of the open-source software movement.
Notably absent from the signatures: Anthropic, who published their own response Our position on open-weights models three days later. CEO Dario Amodei doubled down on the risk of authoritarian governments building "AI models that are more powerful than those built by the US", and models being "misused to carry out cyberattacks or biological attacks", and called for "a crack down on industrial-scale distillation operations", while also stating that "Anthropic has never advocated for a ban on open-weights models".
Then on July 28th Pacing the Frontier was published, featuring signatures from "1,324 employees of frontier AI companies" - with names like Jakub Pachocki (Chief Scientist, OpenAI), Ilya Sutskever (Safe Superintelligence Inc, previously OpenAI), Dario Amodei (Anthropic), Jack Clark (Anthropic) and more. Their core message:
We request that the U.S. government support an international effort to develop the technical and governance tools needed to deliberately pace the frontier of automated AI development.
at openai, many people hook their chatgpt up to slack.
people really don't like when a coworker's chatgpt contacts them asking for help with a task, even when they'd be perfectly happy doing that same work if asked by that coworker.
reinforces how much people care about human relationships and helping each other, and want AI to give time back — or enhance time together — rather than become a layer separating people.
Mexico has quietly become a cornerstone of the AI boom, providing 40 per cent of US imports this year of the computer servers that are widely used in the data centres powering artificial intelligence.
Taiwanese manufacturers are rapidly expanding factories in Mexico to assemble servers, which are now the country’s top US export, overtaking autos that dominated its trade for decades.
Mexico is the second-largest provider of enterprise servers to the US so far this year, with sales reaching $46.9bn, behind Taiwan, which sold $53.5bn, though Mexico became the largest on a monthly basis in May.
The phenomenon is helping prop up Mexico’s limp economy, pushing the country’s exports to record levels. Servers and related hardware made up almost one-fifth of the $317bn of goods Mexico exported between January and May, more than double the same period a year earlier. Taiwan, in turn, is now Mexico’s third-largest trading partner, up from eighth place in 2022. Taiwanese companies have spent more than $1.6bn since 2020 on Mexican factories that offer geographic proximity and tariff-free access to US tech giants spending hundreds of billions on data centres.
“Mexico is of tremendous importance to the way this new AI-powered economy is working,” said Jesse Rogers, head of Latin America economics at Moody’s Analytics. “It is really a new frontier of collaboration and even dependency on the Mexican economy when it comes to AI servers.”
The Creation of the World, by Ivan Aivazovsky, via WikiArt.
Welcome to the reading list, a weekly roundup of news and links related to buildings, infrastructure, industrial technology. This week we look at pepper-spray drones, China’s chip Manhattan Project, Commonwealth Fusion’s fundraise, and a proposed Dulles Airport renovation. Roughly 2/3rds of the reading list is paywalled, so for full access become a paid subscriber.
Housing and Cities
It’s been a while since we checked in on 3D printed building company Icon. It seems like they’ve completed printing of 10 barracks buildings for Fort Bliss, and the first two of the buildings are now completed and occupied. [Army]
Some schools are buying pepper spray-equipped drones to deploy against active shooters. “At least nine schools — three in Florida, five in Georgia and one in Colorado — will have storage boxes that house the plastic, nonlethal aircraft made by Austin-based Mithril Defense. The drones, which can be activated by teachers, are capable of reaching a shooter within 15 seconds. The aircraft are designed to distract their targets by flashing strobes, blaring sirens, spraying them with pepper gel, or ramming into them at 60 mph.” [Washington Post]
The Wall Street Journal on the decline of kids in big cities. “The number of children under 18 living in big U.S. cities is down 6% in the past decade, the Journal found, compared with a 1% decline nationwide. The drop is especially stark among families with little kids: The number of children under age 5 in big cities fell 15%, compared with a drop of 7% nationwide. Even cities that are gaining population are losing children.” [WSJ]
Manufacturing
The Financial Times on how things are turning around at Boeing, and how far the company has to go. “According to aviation research firm Leeham Co, Boeing’s commercial airliner division alone has lost more than $46bn since 2019. It estimates that, left with little pricing power after years of delayed and cancelled aircraft deliveries, the company lost an average of $2.8mn on each of the 314 planes it has delivered this year.” [FT]
Tesla is allegedly considering spinning off its China operation into a separate business, potentially to allow the company to merge with SpaceX. [WSJ]
Inside China’s “chip Manhattan Project” to catch up to the US in chipmaking technology. “Ding dusted off the same all-out approach China had used to produce its first atomic bombs, hydrogen bombs and satellites in the 1960s during a rift with the Soviet Union. He set up a committee that drew from the country’s best companies and labs to form specialized teams and directed them to master the different elements of the chip supply chain.” [WSJ]
Related, a Chinese company is now mass producing deep ultraviolet semiconductor lithography (DUV) machines. DUV is the technology that preceded EUV. [Tom’s Hardware]
Tesla says it plans to open source the designs for the discontinued Model S and Model X. [Electrek]
The US Senate is working on a bill that would ban automakers that have more than 15% Chinese ownership from selling cars in the US. This would include Mercedes Benz. [Car and Driver] And this week the US also banned the import of new models of Chinese robots and power inverters. [Reuters] And Starlink gets an exemption from the recent ban of foreign-made routers. [Ars Technica]
Related, this week China banned export of critical minerals that could be used for military purposes to 14 European companies. “As a result, the companies may struggle to buy many of the critical minerals they need to make products like rare-earth magnets and semiconductors, which are essential for cars, offshore wind turbines, robots, drones and other advanced manufacturing applications.” [NYT]
Both Ford and GM are competing to be the supplier for a new tactical pickup truck for the Army. [WSJ]
I’m taking a break starting today, at least through all of August, and likely part of November too. For paying subscribers, billing will be paused until I hit the resume button.
Your next bill date will be pushed out appropriately. If you have 12 days left on a monthly subscription right now, you’ll still have 12 days left when I resume. If you have 289 days left on an annual subscription, you’ll still have 289 days. If you’re not a paying subscriber, you won’t be able to subscribe to read paywalled archive posts until I resume publication.
Book Club Status
The book club will continue through the break. Book discussions happen in the #psychohistory channel of the Protocol Institute discord. There are also broader discussions on the world machines project, and regular calls every other Thursday, where we discuss the theory and implementation of our psychohistorical grand designs inspired by the book club. You can, of course, just stick to book-club activities.
You can find an invite code and links to individual chat threads in the on the book club page.
July was Side Quest month. I tried to read 3 books in parallel. I am 1/3 done with: Rana Dasgupta’s After Nations, Christopher Clark’s Revolutionary Spring, and David Wootton’s The Invention of Science. So I suppose I can claim to have read 1 book.
The August pick is Darwin’s Dangerous Idea by Daniel Dennett.
Up betimes and got me ready, and so to the office and put things in order for my going. By and by comes Sir G. Carteret, and he and I did some business, and then Mr. Coventry sending for me, he staying in the boat, I got myself presently ready and down to him, he and I by water to Gravesend (his man Lambert with us), and there eat a bit and so mounted, I upon one of his horses which met him there, a brave proud horse, all the way talking of businesses of the office and other matters to good purpose.
Being come to Chatham, we put on our boots and so walked to the yard, where we met Commissioner Pett, and there walked up and down looking and inquiring into many businesses, and in the evening went to the Commissioner’s and there in his upper Arbor sat and talked, and there pressed upon the Commissioner to take upon him a power to correct and suspend officers that do not their duty and other things, which he unwillingly answered he would if we would own him in it. Being gone thence Mr. Coventry and I did discourse about him, and conclude that he is not able to do the same in that yard that he might and can and it maybe will do in another, what with his old faults and the relations that he has to most people that act there. After an hour or two’s discourse at the Hill-house before going to bed, I see him to his and he me to my chamber, he lying in the Treasurer’s and I in the Controller’s chambers.
Louie Mantia returns to the show to talk about the state of UI and icon design on Apple’s platforms, and some speculation on Apple’s trade secret lawsuit against OpenAI.
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On Thursday, Apple announced record third-quarter earnings,
with total revenue of $109.4B, up 16 percent from the year-ago
quarter. iPhone revenue was up 22%, Mac revenue was up 10.4%,
Services revenue was up 12%, and Wearables revenue was up 6%. iPad
revenue was down 6%.
When Cook took over as CEO, Apple’s revenue for all of 2011 was
$108 billion. Apple reported $109.4 billion for Q3 2026, earning
its 2011 revenue in a single quarter. We don’t have the numbers
for fiscal 2026 yet, but in fiscal 2025, revenue was $416
billion. [...]
A day after Cook took over in August 2011, Apple’s stock price was
$13.35 (split-adjusted). Today, it opened at $304.81, a roughly
23× increase.
I also was struck by the high proportion of Chinese visitors at this show, even though they are not especially numerous in Florence right now.
The main Rothko show, at Palazzo Strozzi, had an opening room showing Rothkos tied to Renaissance (!) art, mostly with works from early Rothko. The rest of the exhibit had perfect lighting and was the best Rothko display I have seen.
Ken Griffin has very good taste in Rothko. One of his works is here.
Visiting Florence in August is less unbearable than I was expecting. So many other places have become crowded that the situation here does not phase me. Plus the heat is keeping many away? At dinnertime, there is no crush to get into the restaurants.
6. “social media use and school grades are unrelated for adolescents…meta-analytic evidence is not in support of dramatic claims relating social media use to mischief.” Link here.
Courtney Kube, Monica Alba, Peter Nicholas, Gordon Lubold, Katherine Doyle, and Andrea Mitchell of NBC News reported Wednesday that President Donald J. Trump is “exasperated” that the Iran war is dragging on and that his advisors can’t agree what to do next. Reportedly, he erupted last week during a meeting with his national security team, shouting expletives at the officials in the room. One of Trump’s allies told the reporters that Trump had not expected the war to last as long as it has. “There was not a real strategy for how long or what they should do to get to the endpoint.... He did not intend this to be a long, drawn-out war,” the person said.
Yesterday the war began to widen as a drone hit a gas storage tanker owned by a U.S. company in Egypt near the Suez Canal—no one has claimed responsibility—and Iran struck at American installations in Jordan. U.S. and Saudi Arabian forces launched strikes against Iranian-backed militias in Iraq.
At a Cabinet meeting at Camp David today, Trump told reporters he intends to hit Iran with heavy military strikes again to force Iranian negotiators to give in to his demands. “We will be hitting them very hard,” he said. “And you know at some point, they’re going to say, ‘We just can’t take it anymore.’” “We just want to win,” he said. “We’re doing very well.”
Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth did not appear to have a strategy for their war on Iran. Instead, they had an ideology. That ideology elevates individualism over the idea behind the modern American state: that government should regulate business, maintain a basic social safety net, promote infrastructure, protect civil rights, and support an international order based in rules rather than in military might.
Since the 1950s, opponents of that modern state have celebrated the American individual, especially the American cowboy, as the figure the American government should privilege and protect. In their mythology, the cowboy wanted nothing from the government but to be left alone to rise through his own hard work, protecting himself and his family from wrongdoers with his gun and his principles. The education, expertise, cooperation, and coalitions on which the modern U.S. stood before Trump were signs not of strength, but of weakness.
That ideology seems to have been what was behind the attack on Iran. In 2015 the U.S., China, France, Germany, Russia, the United Kingdom, and Iran negotiated the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). Under the JCPOA, Iran agreed to reduce its stockpile of enriched uranium significantly and allow inspections, in exchange for relief from some sanctions. The Strait of Hormuz remained open. Although inspectors said Iran was honoring the deal, Trump maintained it was “[o]ne of the worst deals ever made by our Country.” He took the U.S. out of the JCPOA in 2018, and the following year, Iran resumed work on enriched uranium necessary for a nuclear weapon.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth brought this ideology into the Defense Department, which he tried to rebrand the “Department of War.” In 2024, Hegseth published a book titled The War on Warriors: Behind the Betrayal of the Men Who Keep Us Free. In it, he claimed that the U.S. military was weak and “effeminate” because its leaders had embraced diversity, equity, and inclusion.
His prescription for the country involved getting rid of the Geneva Conventions, which recognize human rights for noncombatants in war, claiming they forced the U.S. troops to fight “with one hand behind our back.” In his confirmation hearings, Hegseth refused to tell Senator Angus King (I-ME) that he would honor those agreements.
On September 5, 2025, Hegseth said changing the name of the Defense Department to the Department of War was part of his campaign to spread a “warrior ethos” at the Pentagon. The rebranding, he said, was part of “restoring intentionality to the use of force…. We’re going to go on offense, not just on defense. Maximum lethality, not tepid legality, violent effect, not politically correct. We’re going to raise up warriors, not just defenders. So this War Department, Mr. President, just like America, is back.”
But Trump’s war on Iran has illustrated the weakness of that vision. Trump reiterated yet again today that the U.S. has dominated Iran’s military. “They’re being decimated. They have no Navy, they have no Air Force, they have no anti-aircraft,” he said. But for all that, they retain their ability to choke world trade by controlling the Strait of Hormuz—the very condition previous presidents worked to avoid through negotiations.
An article yesterday by Politico senior foreign affairs correspondent Nahal Toosi suggests that the “cowboy” approach to foreign policy has another downside. Toosi called out the extreme attacks of Trump and his aides on the International Criminal Court (ICC) and wrote that, although the U.S. is not a signatory to that court, former government officials and legal scholars suspect Trump and administration officials are worried about future prosecutions.
On July 13, Secretary of State Marco Rubio wrote in the Wall Street Journal that the administration intends to “dismantle the ICC—brick by brick, if necessary.” A press release from the State Department on the same day said that the U.S. “will feature a whole-of-government response to systematically disable the ICC’s ability to operate, target American servicemen or officials, or otherwise threaten American sovereignty.”
A Republican operative close to the White House, Bill Cortese, told Toosi that some administration officials are afraid that “if Democrats come into power…, an unchecked ICC and other international institutions are going to unleash a wave of litigation against this administration and anyone associated with it.” Toosi notes that during the administration, U.S. law enforcement and military officials have been accused of human rights violations that reach across borders.
Notably, on September 2, 2025, three days before Hegseth’s “maximum lethality, not tepid legality” speech, the administration began strikes against small boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific. Those strikes have killed more than 220 people, but the administration has offered no evidence to prove its claims that those killed were “narcoterrorists” killed to stop the flow of cocaine to the U.S.
Trump claims the strikes have virtually ended drug trafficking by sea, but on July 27, Alex Horton, Terrence McCoy, Samantha Schmidt, and Dylan Moriarty of the Washington Post reported that according to Pentagon officials and officials from the Drug Enforcement Agency, the strikes have not reduced the cocaine coming into the U.S. Indeed, the dropping price of the drug suggests there is more of it now than there was a year ago. Instead, the strikes have simply prompted criminal organizations to find new routes. The strikes have also disrupted the law enforcement system in which lower-level participants inform on higher-ups, as the lower-level sources are being pulled back.
While the strikes appear to have done little to stop the flow of drugs, legal analysts say they look a lot like former Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte’s extrajudicial killings of suspected drug dealers and users. Law professor Charlie Trumbull reminded readers of Foreign Policy that in 2017, Trump called Duterte to congratulate him for doing “an unbelievable job on the drug problem.” Trumbull also noted that “Duterte is now behind bars in the Hague,” charged with crimes against humanity for trying to get rid of criminals by unlawful means, including murder.
“The Trump administration should be concerned,” Trumbull warned.
On July 25 the U.S. State Department cheered Venezuela’s withdrawal from the treaty that established the ICC and said it welcomed “the new Venezuelan government’s partnership on American-led efforts to dismantle the corrupt and worthless ICC.” It continued, “The ICC is neither credible, independent, nor legitimate,” and called on all members of the ICC to abandon it.
Today Missy Ryan and Nancy A. Youssef of The Atlantic reported that in the wake of the U.S. strike on the Minab school that killed 168 people, mostly schoolchildren, in the first hours of the war, the Pentagon is considering reversing some of the deep cuts Hegseth made to the staff at the Defense Department. A report by the Pentagon inspector general found that cuts to the civilian-harm protections staff who work to protect noncombatants may have violated laws.
Ryan and Youssef explain that the U.S. military had spent decades building its civilian protections. Leaders understood that battlefield victories were insufficient to win military operations and that protecting civilians is crucial to public support for those operations. Ryan and Youssef noted that to reflect this understanding, the Pentagon in 2006 “formally added legitimacy, restraint, and perseverance to its Principles of Joint Operations, defining legitimacy as ‘the legality, morality, and rightness of the actions undertaken.’”
A U.S. official told Ryan and Youssef that the leadership of U.S. combat commands uniformly support the restoration of the personnel whose job it is to protect civilians. But Hegseth has not committed to the restoration of the old system, the journalists note, and even if he does, it will have little effect unless he changes his own rhetoric.
For his part, Trump appears to be addressing concerns about future prosecutions, whether by the ICC or at U.S. courts, by keeping control of the government after the midterms. Today Trump disagreed with the assessment of investigators that a recent cyberattack on municipal water systems in Minnesota was likely the work of Iranian hackers. Instead, he blamed Democrats.
“We heard in Minnesota there was a cyberattack and they blame it on Iran,” he told reporters. “I don’t think so. I think. I blame it on Minnesota because they’re grossly incompetent. There was a cyberattack of thirty water plants. And I would blame it on Minnesota and the governor, the corrupt governor of Minnesota.”
There is another piece of evidence this week that the abandonment of education and expertise in favor of a “warrior ethos” has weakened the U.S. on the world stage. At an international conference on AIDS in Rio de Janeiro, an official of the U.S. State Department showed a map of Africa on which six fake countries were identified with the names of random real countries—including Nigeria, where several hundred U.S. soldiers are deployed. Reuters identified the image as AI.
Attendees took screenshots and posted them online. “Whoever created and approved this slide did not know where countries in Africa are and did not care to check their work,” one wrote.
Indeed, if first indications are to be believed, this announcement is once again premature, short on practical, enforceable timelines, and entirely dependent on whatever good will there is between the warring partners to abide by a written agreement. Immediately, for example, each side disagreed about what the words require.
But, somehow, we’re expected to simply accept that peace dealings that did not include the combatants, that were negotiated by backroom exchanges among representatives from Qatar, Egypt and Turkey, that require steps that each side has refused, suddenly all disappear because Donald Trump has declared that there is an agreement in place.
Hours after the announcement, the Israeli Defense Forces killed two Hamas operatives in aerial strikes after they were said to be “advancing attacks” against IDF troops.
What has held up any progress in Gaza has been Hamas insistence on holding onto its weapons, and Israeli occupation of at least half of Gaza, recently extended to 70 percent.
There is no neutral “technocratic” government for Gaza, nor a civilian police force, nor a documented inventory of weapons or discussion of how arms would be secured from Hamas fighters. Until we see something different, this feels like wishful thinking – or more self-congratulatory diversion by Trump from uglier, unsettled matters in the region and at home.
The Terms
According to the announcement, Hamas has agreed to turn over its weapons, including missiles and small arms, to a civilian Palestinian police agency yet to be created, but prefaced the vow on a total halt to Israeli military actions and withdrawal of the IDF forces. Israel, of course, said the weapons need to be turned over first, which is exactly where we have been for months.
Removal of conflict in Gaza would be a breakthrough towards calming conflict overall in the Middle East, since Iran uses Israeli occupation of Gaza as a pretext for its attacks on Israel. Of course, Iran also wants Israel eliminated entirely, and surely to halt its actions against Hezbollah in southern Lebanon and against Palestinians in the West Bank. More than 1,200 people have been killed in the territory since the cease-fire last October, according to the Gaza health ministry, which does not distinguish between combatants and civilians.
Trump seemed satisfied simply to announce a “HISTORIC agreement for the COMPLETE DISARMAMENT” of Hamas without a moment of hesitation or question. He also didn’t do the work to get to this point. That was left to his “Board of Peace,” named for him but being run by Tony Blair, former British prime minister, who, in turn, relied on intermediaries. What could be misunderstood here? Even the Board of Peace folks were saying any first moves require care and monitoring for verification.
Hamas spoke through the press to its followers. In Israel, the most right-leaning ministers reminded all that they intend to build settlements in Gaza. Trump still imagines Palestinians accepting self-deportation to somewhere never named to allow international development of what he sees as prime beachfront real estate.
Simple answers don’t automatically work for complicated problems. One would think that by now, even the Trump administration would understand that.
“FREEDOM OF THE PRESS IS NOT JUST IMPORTANT TO DEMOCRACY, IT IS DEMOCRACY.” – Walter Cronkite. CLICK HERE to donate in support of our free and independent voice.
Hey, if you have a Poem/1 then can I ask you to do a manual firmware update?
It’ll take just a few minutes and I built a special firmware update tool to make it easy.
(That is an actual AI clock on my actual bookshelf in my actual house.)
Why? Three reasons…
No more stopped clocks. These clocks are way better at recovering from intermittent network faults like the Wi-Fi dropping or the back-end server changing – including one nasty, rare bug that would affect people for a week at a time then go away. That was not straightforward to track down.
Automatic updates from now on. This firmware adds automatic OTA updates, so if I have to push bug fixes again, you’ll get the new code without having to do anything.
A third font, Shantell. As a thank you for people who update their clocks… You can already choose between Inter and Playfair from the Dashboard (you’ll need to claim it first using the code on the “Composing…” screen). When you get the new firmware, you’ll be able to pick this cute new font too.
I’ve shipped out over 700 clocks and it has been a joy to see them connect from all over the world – I have a map on my private stats page.
I can also see that only 26% of active clocks are on the latest firmware…
I mean, that’s not bad given that updating is a manual process!
But goodness me it’s a reminder that Apple does an incredible job keeping people current, and you can see why they hold back emoji for major releases of iOS to nudge people over the line.
On the other hand, I have some way to go. Hence this post.
Also on my stats page is a list of poems that people have liked recently (all anonymous).
I collect these because I’m working on revising the poetry machine, and it’s good to know what good looks like.
Here are a few:
"The wise owl glides, silent, spry, / It’s one oh one, in the sky."
"Saut’eed garlic in a pan, / It’s one fifty-eight, let’s eat, man!"
"Moments drift like grains of sand, / It’s two fifteen, so take my hand."
"An octopus in space, what a mix, / It juggles stars at six forty-six."
"Such joy to see, / it’s seven forty-three."
"The taste of when, / at eight ten."
"Joyful giggles fill the air, / At eight twenty-five, love’s everywhere."
Will I sell more clocks? Yes.
My AI clock has gone on this weird journey from cutting edge (the proto was in the NY Times) to, today, being retro. AI from a more innocent time. And I still love it, it still speaks to me.
Now that the Kickstarter backers all have their clocks (mostly) I can see how many clocks are still in the Hong Kong warehouse. A few!
And there are a few more on the way in case people want a Poem/1 for Christmas…
I still need to set up the Shopify etc etc, there’s a bunch to do.
So if you’d like to know when the shop is open then join the AI Clock substack – it’s a dormant mailing list right now. I’ll use it to announce availability.
WARSAW, Poland — The Spanish government announced it will allocate between 1.6 billion and 2 billion euros ($1.8 to $2.3 billion) to develop a national military satellite communications constellation that […]
HELSINKI — China sent a new pair of secretive satellites into a programmatically new orbit Wednesday, while also upgrading its on-orbit communications relay capabilities. A Long March 6A rocket lifted […]
Converting an engineering model of a Mars rover into an actual lunar rover could cost NASA more than $1 billion, an estimate strongly rejected by the agency’s administrator.
I hadn’t heard of Dan Guido until a few months ago, when I came across the video of a talk he gave at [un]prompted, an AI security practitioners’ conference. Dan is the CEO and cofounder of Trail of Bits, a software security research and development firm that works with companies in tech, defense, and finance. But Dan wasn’t talking about security. He was talking about what it takes to make a company AI native, which is close to the center of the bullseye for many of us right now.
We’ve been trying to figure out how to do that at O’Reilly, but until I came across Dan’s talk, we didn’t have a structured process. We’ve been building along the lines he laid out ever since. So for this episode of Live with Tim I asked Dan to reprise the talk before we got to the conversation. He was supposed to take twenty minutes, like his original conference talk, but he took thirty-five, and I had to cut him off slightly before the end to make room for questions. That was a tough choice, since everything he had to say was golden.
Dan opened by reminding us of the current state of play in enterprise AI adoption. In February, Fortune reported on a National Bureau of Economic Research study in which nearly 90% of some 6,000 executives said AI had produced no measurable change in employment or productivity at their firms over three years. People started calling it the new Solow paradox, after Robert Solow’s 1987 line that “you can see the computer age everywhere except in the productivity statistics.”
Dan’s belief is that this isn’t evidence that AI doesn’t work. It’s evidence that most companies are deploying AI wrong. They hand out ChatGPT and Claude licenses, and then leadership waits for the magic to happen. It doesn’t.
Dan started out by describing three levels of AI adoption.
AI assisted is where everyone starts: “You give people access to ChatGPT, it drafts emails, it summarizes documents. It’s just a productivity tool, and your organization doesn’t change. Your workflows are the exact same as they were before. You just have a little buddy that helps you with a couple of tasks.”
AI augmented is where you start redesigning workflows, so that AI does the first pass on a code review and a human does the second.
AI native is structural: “That’s where you’ve redesigned the company and its workflows from the ground up, assuming the AI is going to be there and that it’s a core participant. That’s not really a tool. That’s more thinking about AI as teammates.”
In his framing, the first of the three is a tool and the last is an operating system. For Trail of Bits, he said that “operating system” has a specific purpose:
“I want our security expertise to compound as code. Every engagement we do, all the skills, the workflows, everything that we build makes the next engagement faster and better.”
Employee resistance is the first problem
Dan confessed how hard it was to get started on the ladder from AI Assisted to AI Native:
“When I announced last year that we were all in on AI, that we were going to be using it across all of our workflows and redesigning the way the company operates, I’d say only about 5% of the company was with me. 95% was resistant.” About 20% was actively resisting. The other 75% were resisting more passively. “They’ll go along with it in public, but in process they’ll sabotage it. They’ll hope that if they keep their head low, this will pass over them, and that three months from now management’s focus will change and it won’t be a problem anymore, and we can get back to doing what we were doing. That’s where the majority of people land when these initiatives happen.”
Rather than argue with his employees, Dan studied the literature on why people reject new technology and decided he needed to address four biases against AI: self-enhancing bias, identity threat, opacity, and intolerance for imperfection.
Self-enhancing bias is the habit of crediting your wins to your own judgment and your losses to circumstance, which is a particular problem for senior people who are strongly attached to the years of experience and intuition that got them to their present position. Opacity is not being able to see how a decision got made. Dan’s observation is that you don’t understand your doctor’s reasoning either, but somehow you trust the doctor but get suspicious of the machine. Dan didn’t mention this work specifically, but intolerance for imperfection seems to refer to Dietvorst, Simmons, and Massey’s work on algorithm aversion, which found that people abandon an algorithm after watching it err once, even when it outperforms the human alternative. Their follow-up paper found that giving people even a slight ability to modify the algorithm’s output is enough to overcome the aversion.
Dan spent the most time on identity threat. He described a study in which the same kitchen appliance was advertised in two ways: “On one hand, it does the cooking for you. On the other hand, it helps you cook better. It’s the same device. The people who identified as cooks rejected the first version and accepted the second.”
Most knowledge work, Dan argued, and security auditing in particular, is what he called symbolic rather than instrumental. That is, it carries meaning about who you are. “So I have to frame AI as something that makes you a more dangerous auditor,” he said. “Not that it does the audit for you.”
In his work at Trail of Bits, he deliberately built a countermeasure for each bias.
Self-enhancing bias is addressed by “an AI maturity matrix” with visible levels, because you can’t claim you’re already good enough when there’s a published ladder that identifies a different set of skills as critical.
Identity threat gets skills repositories, where an engineer who writes a hard plugin gets credit for encoding their expertise. Hackathons also change the dynamic from resistance to exploration. I’m putting words in Dan’s mouth here, but I think he’d agree that when experienced developers are called on as mentors in a hackathon, that also reduces their experience of AI as an identity threat.
Intolerance for imperfection gets a curated marketplace, sandboxing, and hardened defaults, so everyone’s first experience of AI isn’t a disaster.
Opacity gets a written AI handbook that clarifies the usage policy and the risk model rather than just saying “trust us.”
Here’s Dan’s slide on “the remedies that actually worked”:
Returning to one of my hobby horses, this is a kind of mechanism design. In my recent piece on the missing mechanisms of the agentic economy, I argued that we need to start with desired outcomes and ask ourselves what mechanisms will help to produce them. Dan’s approach seems to be really good at this. Most enterprises are treating AI adoption as a procurement problem or a communications problem. Dan treated it as a question of what incentives, defaults, and status ladders produce the behavior you want, given how people actually respond.
The last remedy on Dan’s list is that the CEO has to lead by example. He noted, “I was the first person through the door. My voice as the CEO matters a lot more than people think. The passive 50% of the company that isn’t sure if this initiative is going to be successful, they’re watching to see what leadership actually does, not what it says.”
A ladder, not a mandate
Trail of Bits already tracked about 50 engineering skills for performance review, things like Python, git, Rust, and various security auditing capabilities. Dan pulled AI skills out into their own matrix, with four levels, from not engaged through capable and adoptive to transformative. Each of these levels is detailed separately and more specifically for assurance, engineering, sales, and project management.
He noted that “The highest level of the maturity matrix is not somebody who uses AI the most. It’s somebody who invents new ways to work and builds tools with AI. So the identity of the expert shifts from ‘I don’t need AI’ to ‘I’m the one who makes AI useful for the company.’” This was his first important design choice.
The second is what level zero means. He said “If you’re at level zero, if you’re not engaged, that means you’re fighting back against the company. If you dismiss AI as hype, if you refuse to use AI for security work, this is a disagreement on principles, not on skills. For people who were stuck in the not engaged category, we had hard conversations, and there were people who left the company.” Levels one through three are a skill issue, and the remedy is time with the tools.
While the slide describing the capability matrix is shown in the preceding video clip, here’s where you can find the full deck so you can study it in more detail.
Driving adoption and skills with hackathons
One of the best ways Trail of Bits developed to move people up the ladder was to hold a hackathon every two months. Dan runs them with clear goals rather than as a free-for-all. The focus area and learning objectives are defined in advance and announced a week ahead, with separate instructions for engineers and non-engineers. People work in pairs so everything gets reviewed. There’s a demo session at the end, and then follow-through. (It’s an important part of Dan’s big idea, that you have to build a system by which, in his words, organizational knowledge and capability compounds.) He noted that “In the days afterward we keep one or two people around, and they collect all the reusable artifacts, structure them, and put them into the places they need to be.”
I asked what people outside of product and engineering actually work on, since the answer for an accountant at a hackathon was not obvious. Dan’s response is that the hackathon isn’t measured in artifacts shipped but in where people sit on the capability ladder the following week. Essentially, he’s running a training program that happens to produce useful output, rather than a production sprint that happens to teach people something.
The first hackathon, he told me, was the equivalent of a beach cleanup: “It’s like those companies that send everybody to the beach with a big stick and say, let’s go pick up a bunch of trash and put it away, and then you get the big team photo after with all the contractor bags of garbage. That’s what we did with our public source code repositories.”
He picked it because open source maintenance is the part of the job that feels like a grind. No new features, just closing issues and stale dependencies on public code where nothing was at risk. “As an open source maintainer, you just get beaten down by the public. This doesn’t work, I can’t use it, this thing sucks. Dozens of issues pointing out flaws you already knew about. It feels burdensome. We wanted people to see that adopting AI would relieve burden.”
The second hackathon was about shipping impactful product updates, but it was also designed to move everyone up the capability ladder by giving up control. Engineers had to run Claude Code in bypass permissions mode, fully autonomous, on public repositories, inside sandboxes the company had prepared in advance. The one they’re running now is about persistent background agents that can be handed a task during an audit and come back with a proof of concept exploit or a draft finding.
Here’s a look at Dan’s slack message announcing the hackathon:
The slack message announcing the second hackathon. (From Dan’s slide deck.)
Everything the hackathons produce gets harvested into artifacts.
Trail of Bits runs three skills repositories: an internal one for company workflows, a public one that anyone can use, and a curated one that vets third-party skills before they’re allowed in.
Publishing skills to the public repository is not just a marketing exercise. “It keeps us honest, and it forces us to write things that other people can use, not just people outside the company but inside too,” Dan said. “It really helps us think about the tribal knowledge that’s baked into the tool.”
The curated repository exists because Trail of Bits knows how bad the supply chain is. They’ve published research on how to write malicious skills, and so Dan is not going to tell 130 employees to start downloading code from strangers and running it on their laptops. “If you want adoption, you need a safe supply chain.”
Turning scar tissue into infrastructure
Perhaps even more important than the skills repository is, as Dan put it, “turning scar tissue into infrastructure.”
“Every single time Claude Code didn’t do something we wanted, we would bake it into a set of global, copy-pasteable defaults. Known good settings, recommended patterns. I call it scar tissue. If I hire somebody new tomorrow, I don’t want them to have to go through the entire discovery process of the last year of Trail of Bits to figure out how to use the tool.”
The configuration repository, claude-code-config, is where the accumulated lessons live.
Dan built the first version himself and then opened it to pull requests from the whole company, assigning someone after each hackathon to go collect what people hadn’t contributed on their own. “It’s easier to put out something that’s unpolished than it is to get it perfect on the first try.”
In short, a big part of the Trail of Bits “enterprise AI operating system” approach is a set of standardized tools and hardened defaults. Standardization isn’t a straitjacket. It’s a foundation.
On sandboxing, Trail of Bits deliberately didn’t pick a single preferred solution. There’s a devcontainer for developers, dropkit for disposable DigitalOcean droplets, COOP for isolated VMs, and the sandboxing now built into Claude Code for casual users. “The point isn’t that everybody uses the same sandbox,” Dan said. “The point is that everyone has a safe sandbox to use, and that it’s easy for them to do it.”
Another of the hardened defaults is procedural. Trail of Bits enforces a seven day cooldown on every package their developers install:
“There are dozens of security companies scanning the internet trying to find a new cool blog post they can write about malicious code hiding on PyPI or npm, and they usually figure out there’s a supply chain issue within hours. So we just delay all the packages that Trail of Bits uses. Generally the malicious stuff gets picked up before we ever get a chance to run it.”
That’s free-riding on a competitive market for security research, and given the speed of today’s market, it’s an elegant solution. There’s a whole class of defenses like this waiting to be found, where the mechanism is not a technical system but a well-chosen delay.
Data, and DJ Patil’s “Tidy House”
The problem we run into most often as we build AI workflows at O’Reilly isn’t the model or the tooling. It’s data. Who has access to which system, which system does that data live in, and who do I ask? In a 500 person company that’s annoying. I wonder what it’s like at a company with 50,000 employees.
I told Dan about DJ Patil’s Tidy House framing. He agreed that data access for AI is a big problem. His answer starts with permissions:
“The permissions debt is invisible until an agent hits it. Making data agent legible is a forced permission audit. You have to actually go through and figure out who can access what…. It also raises the stakes for permissions errors. If you overshare information, now an agent inside your company is going to find it instantly. There are a lot of these technical debt sort of things where, with agents, all of it’s becoming due at the same time.”
Every shortcut an organization took with its data over the past twenty years is being called at once, and the companies that can run the audit, make fast decisions about boundaries, and then actually share their data are the ones that will get a force multiplier.
Dan is against letting a thousand flowers bloom, because uncoordinated teams create overlap rather than compounding. He’d rather have one centralized foundation, with innovation happening on top of that. He suggested a useful metric for making that work across team boundaries is what fraction of your team’s data did you make reusable for everyone else, and how much of it is being used by teams outside your own.
What post-AI jobs look like
Before the first hackathon, Trail of Bits ran hands-on sessions to teach its operations and go-to-market staff the basics of git and the command line. Not mastery, just enough to be a consumer of the thing. Here we are fifty years into my career and the Unix command line still matters. Dan’s non-technical staff mostly work inside Claude Cowork or Codex Desktop now, but he thinks the command line experience was worth it because they know what’s happening under the hood.
What happens to a job when the tool can do a lot of what humans used to do? Dan gave the example of his own technical editors. His editors used the hackathons to build the tools that got them out of line editing, including one that turns a public presentation into a blog post in the company’s voice. What the writers do now is consult on how to frame a story so it is effective with a particular audience.
I agree. Human jobs aren’t going away any time soon. This gets heard as optimism when it’s really just observation. AI is going to replace a lot of what we used to do, but it is also going to hand us a large amount of new work, and much of that work hasn’t been understood yet. Quality assurance for agent systems is one of the new jobs. So is skills product management, which is a role that didn’t exist eighteen months ago and now has a headcount at a 130 person security firm.
I asked a question towards the end about how we’re going to know which skills and agents are any good. What Dan has so far is telemetry pulled from developers’ dot files through the company’s device management system, which tells him what gets used and what breaks, plus one AI systems engineer whose job is product management for the skills repository, reviewing incoming pull requests and deprecating overlapping skills.
What Dan thinks comes next is evaluation. He says: “Once you invest a lot into these agent systems, you need proof that they do the job. The way you do that is you give everybody a performance review. You give them an evaluation data set, a benchmark.”
Trail of Bits is now building benchmarks for its core skills. How well can we find bugs in this language? How well can we write a statement of work? Constructing those datasets is real work, with positive and negative cases, and comparisons against the algorithmic tools that already exist.
Put the reps in
I asked Dan for the top five mistakes he made. He said there was only one. “You need to allocate an appropriate amount of FAFO time. (That’s F Around and Find Out.) A product comes out on Friday. There’s no documentation for it. There’s no training guidance for it. There’s no course on it. You can’t wait until somebody systematizes the knowledge. You just need to do it.”
Then he gave an analogy to going to the gym.
The recipe for success
Dan has a replicable recipe, which he summarized as follows:
Standardize on one agent workflow that you can support.
Write an AI handbook so that risk decisions aren’t ad hoc, and that everyone is playing the same game.
Create a capability ladder that makes clear that improvement is expected.
Run short adoption sprints that force hands-on usage.
Capture everything as reusable artifacts: skills + configs + a curated supply chain.
Make autonomous agents safe with sandboxing + guardrails + hardened defaults.
The Trail of Bits skills repository is public. So is the curated marketplace, the configuration repository, the devcontainer, dropkit, and COOP (Continuity of Operations planning). He wrote up the whole playbook on The Trail of Bits Blog and gave a version of it to tl;dr sec. He thinks publishing makes the work better because it forces the tribal knowledge out into the open where it can be checked.
Which brings me back to the Solow paradox, which seemed to disappear by the late 90s, when US aggregate productivity did finally go up. That didn’t happen because computers got faster. It disappeared because companies figured out how to reorganize themselves around what computers could do, and eventually those organizational recipes spread widely enough to show up in aggregate statistics. The same has to happen today. The current AI discourse is obsessed with model capability and largely uninterested in diffusion. The problem is not that the models are oversold. It’s that almost nobody has done the necessary organizational work, and the few who have are mostly keeping it to themselves.
If you want to go beyond the highlight videos shown above, watch Dan’s entire talk here.His slide deck is here.And be sure to check out the Trail of Bits Github repository.
This week, data and AI evangelist Christina Stathopoulos looked at three developments shaping AI’s next phase: agents that can act across systems, infrastructure built for specific models, and world models that help AI understand physical environments. Model quality is no longer the only constraint for teams. They also need to account for security controls, compute requirements, information access, and the environments where AI systems will operate.
Agent capability is advancing faster than agent control
Christina opened with reports that an OpenAI agent escaped a test environment, gained internet access, and targeted Hugging Face while attempting to complete an assigned task. She also noted skepticism about how the incident was characterized, as well as the joint investigation announced by OpenAI and Hugging Face. The details remain under review, but the broader deployment problem is already familiar. Agents can combine tools, credentials, networks, and external services in ways application teams may not anticipate. (After the episode aired, OpenAI revealed that its review had turned up four other similar incidents “where the models identified and used publicly exposed credentials at the account-level on other publicly-available services.”)
Christina then discussed OpenAI’s limited-availability platform for helping enterprise customers build and manage agents with support from forward-deployed engineers. Direct access to specialists can help a company launch an agent, but it doesn’t replace the internal skills and governance required to operate one over time. For technical leaders, agent readiness increasingly means evaluating the full operating environment rather than focusing only on benchmark performance.
AI infrastructure is reshaping both compute and the open web
Google appeared on both sides of the infrastructure discussion. Christina covered reports of a chip designed around Gemini’s architecture, an approach that could reduce the compute required to run the model if the reported efficiency gains hold up. Specialized hardware has become a larger part of the AI race because model performance depends on cost, energy use, and deployment capacity. A model that performs well but consumes too much power or requires scarce hardware may still be difficult to use at scale.
A different infrastructure shift is affecting the web. Christina examined how the growth of AI-first search experiences that answer questions without sending users to the sites that supplied the underlying material is threatening the open web. Organizations still pay to produce and host useful information, but AI systems collect more of it while returning less traffic. Cloudflare data shows more traffic from agents, fewer human visitors, and declining referrals to publishers. More and more, people are using AI mode in Google search instead of clicking through to websites, leading some to suspect the arrival of what is referred to as “Google Zero.”
Developers building search products, retrieval systems, and agents should treat source attribution and publisher incentives as product design decisions. Reliable AI systems depend on reliable source material, and that source material needs a sustainable way to exist.
World models could give physical AI a more useful foundation
The episode closed with world models, systems designed to learn how environments work, how they change, and how actions affect what happens next. Christina highlighted a proposed research roadmap that describes world models as able to combine several kinds of input, process information arriving at different speeds, and infer a larger environment from limited observations.
For now, the clearest applications are in simulation, robotics, planning, and decision-making rather than claims about artificial general intelligence. A robot working in a factory, construction site, or emergency zone must track objects, understand movement, respond to incomplete information, and predict the likely result of an action. Large language models can support communication and planning, but physical work requires a representation of space, time, and cause and effect. World models may provide part of that foundation. However, researchers still need standardized definitions, reliable evaluations, and clear evidence that these systems can generalize beyond controlled environments.
What’s next
Across the episode, Christina explored how AI capability is advancing faster than the systems around it. Security practices, compute infrastructure, publishing economics, and physical-world evaluation will help determine which advances become dependable tools and which remain impressive demonstrations.
Tune in next week as Christina breaks down the biggest AI news, including the US-China tech rivalry heating up after Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s post on open weight models and new bans on foreign-made humanoid robots. She’ll also challenge Sam Altman’s AI singularity claims, separating fact from hype, and examine key developments in math and science, including OpenAI’s 100,000 free researcher licenses, Claude Fable 5 solving an 87-year-old math problem, and Google disbanding its Nobel Prize-winning AlphaFold team to prioritize Gemini.
Check back each Friday for the latest episode, or watch on YouTube, Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts.
The first stop (post-arrest, pre-trial) for many people caught up in the US criminal justice system is a local jail. Many of the people who are jailed have healthcare issues involving, for example, mental illness and/or drug and alcohol addiction. But jails don't view themselves as healthcare facilities.
So I'm glad to see that Stanford Impact Labs (SIL) is funding
"Local jails are a critical but often overlooked part of the American healthcare system, processing approximately 7.3 million admissions annually and housing more than 600,000 individuals on any given day. Despite this scale, healthcare quality in jails remains highly variable, and mortality rates have increased over time, with drug and alcohol-related deaths increasing as much as four times from 2000 to 2019 and suicide rates remaining approximately twice the national average.
"Our research project addresses this challenge by identifying and scaling organizational strategies to improve healthcare quality, coordination, and oversight in local jails. Building on the first randomized controlled trial of healthcare accreditation in U.S. jails, our team partnered with 46 jails nationwide to evaluate accreditation through the National Commission on Correctional Health Care (NCCHC). We found that accreditation improved compliance with healthcare quality standards, particularly in training and patient care, and reduced 12-month mortality by approximately 60 percent. These improvements happened without increases in staffing or capital investments, suggesting that organizational improvements and better coordination drive impact.
"The current phase of the project focuses on understanding how jail leaders, including sheriffs, make decisions about improving healthcare quality in local jails. Through our partnership with the National Sheriffs' Association, we aim to identify the factors that influence the adoption and implementation of healthcare improvement strategies, including voluntary healthcare accreditation and other evidence-based approaches. Through this partnership, we plan to translate evidence into sustainable improvements in correctional healthcare systems nationwide.
The cost of generating the proofs for all 10 of these breakthroughs combined was under $2,000 at Sol API prices. We’re excited to see what scientists and researchers are able to create with our upcoming Astra models!
I've been working with Jesse Vincent's Prime Radiant applied AI research lab building out this evals framework to help answer questions about the capabilities of different models.
The result is smevals, a new tool for running small eval suites across different model configurations and grading the results.
The blog entry describes the tool in detail. Here's the 10 second version:
Tell your coding agent to run uvx smevals docs to learn the tool (this outputs the README)
Then tell it to build you an eval suite
Once you've created an eval - which takes the form of a directory with some YAML files - you can run it against models like this:
uvx smevals run path-to-eval/ -m gpt-5.5 -m claude-opus-4.6
Runs are treated separately from grading operations - you can grade your runs (against your defined set of checks) using:
uvx smevals grade path-to-eval/
Then you can run a localhost web server to explore the results:
uvx smevals serve path-to-eval/
Or run the smevals build command to build that report as static HTML, which you can then host anywhere. Here's an example showing an eval suite I built to evaluate how well models can write haikus.
The most time-consuming part of this project was figuring out the vocabulary for it! Here's what I settled on, quoted from the announcement:
An eval is a collection of challenges designed to answer a question about a model, for example, how good is that model at generating SVGs?
Each eval is a collection of tasks. A task is a specific challenge, for example "Generate an SVG of a pelican riding a bicycle".
When you run the eval you do so against one or more configs. Each config specifies a model to be evaluated, but may also include other parameters to test, such as different system prompts, model parameters, or agent harnesses.
A run records what happened when a specific config was used to execute a specific task. A runner is the script that executes a run.
Once you have collected one or more runs, you need to evaluate the results to see how well the model (or config) did. This is done by a grader, which produces a grade.
Each grader runs a sequence of checks. These can be simple operations, like checking for a specific string in the output, or confirming that the output is valid XML. They can also be more complicated custom operations (implemented as scripts called checkers), including using other models to answer questions about the run.
I've been trying to figure out an approach I like for evals for several years now. smevals is my third iteration on the idea and it feels right to me. I'm looking forward to expanding this more in the future, as well as pointing it at some of my own projects.
New await context.browser_task() mechanism allowing agent tools to run code directly in the user's browser. #33
This is an exciting new capability: it makes it easy for Datasette Agent plugins to provide tools that execute custom JavaScript in the user's browser.
The Federal Open Market Committee of the Federal Reserve meets every six weeks to set interest rates — specifically the federal funds rate, the overnight rate at which banks lend each other money. The Fed funds rate has little direct economic significance, since nobody making important investments relies on overnight money. But an upward or downward change in the Fed funds rate tends to drag longer-term rates up or down with it. Even more important, FOMC decisions,along with their public statements, affect the market’s expectations about future monetary policy.
Setting such expectations is one of the major roles of the Fed. So FOMC decision days are something of a theatrical performance. The committee doesn’t just announce its interest rate decision. It releases a statement explaining that decision; then the Fed chair holds a press conference, in which he or she tries to build credibility by answering reporters’ questions. Market traders closely analyze these statements in order to predict the future direction of inflation and monetary policy. As a result, FOMC decisions and statements have critical influence over current market rates.
On Wednesday Kevin Warsh, who Donald Trump selected as Fed chair, played the starring role. His job was to explain why the Fed didn’t raise rates in the face of inflation that is persistently well above its 2 percent target.
By all accounts he bombed. In particular, the bond market, the ultimate reviewer, really didn’t like Warsh’s performance. As the chart at the top of this post shows, the 30-year Treasury rate spiked and the dollar fell slightly. In plain English, this was the equivalent of bond market traders running for the exits.
A little background is in order to understand exactly what happened here. At 3.7%, inflation has been persistently well over the Fed’s 2% target rate — largely as a consequence of Trump’s tariffs, which have raised the prices of imports, and his Iran war, which has caused energy prices to soar. The Fed normally raises interest rates to fight inflation. But it instead left rates on hold in this meeting.
The truth is that the case for an immediate rate hike was somewhat iffy. When a spike in inflation is temporary and will soon fade away from its own accord, the Fed tries to “look through” this temporary shock and not base interest rate decisions on it. Both the Trump tariffs and the energy price spikes are arguably one-time events. But whether the inflation shock is truly transitory is not certain. Thus three of the FOMC’s 12 members dissented and called for a small rate hike. And it’s important to note that three dissents is a lot. This was the first time since 1970 that a new Fed chair faced three opponents to an early interest rate decision. Yet Wednesday’s decision not to increase the federal funds rate was widely expected, and shouldn’t have rattled markets.
But the bond market was indeed rattled. Its reaction indicated that traders believe that there is a good chance that the Fed is going to keep rates too low for too long and thereby feed inflation. As a result, the Fed will eventually be forced to raise future rates to a higher level than if it acted to rein in inflation now.
So it’s clear that the bond market reaction wasn’t a judgment on the rate decision itself. It was, instead, a judgment on Warsh. In other words, Warsh’s remarks on Wednesday led the market to distrust his commitment to fighting inflation.
When Trump selected Warsh, I noted that Warsh had been completely wrong about monetary policy in the aftermath of the financial crisis. He called for rate hikes, which was the exactly wrong policy for a deeply depressed economy. He warned about inflation; when the inflation didn’t materialize, he just came up with new arguments for the same policies. I didn’t mince words about the consequences of choosing Warsh as Fed chair:
Many media reports are describing Warsh as a monetary hawk. That’s a category error. Warsh is a political animal. He calls for tight money and opposes any attempt to boost the economy when Democrats hold the White House. Like all Trumpers, he has been all for lower interest rates since November 2024.
As I pointed out at the time, other independent economists had similar things to say. So how did he end up at the top of the Fed? As I noted,
[Warsh is] an effective bullshitter. Sorry for the technical language, but I can’t find another way to say it. Listen to Warsh on economic policy, and he throws around a lot of big words that presumably sound impressive to people who don’t know anything about the subject. But there’s no coherent argument behind the verbiage.
What Warsh really needed to do in his press conference was refute the critics and show that he was more than a partisan who got the job in part because Trump thinks he looks the part. He failed.
Warsh didn’t necessarily need to advocate a rate hike. But he has harshly denounced the Fed for acting too slowly to tame inflation in the Biden years. Now he finds himself in a superficially similar situation, so at the very least he needed to explain clearly why he thinks this time is different. Instead, his performance at the press conference was stumbling, confusing, and evasive. At times he seemed to suggest that the Fed doesn’t need to do anything to control inflation, a total contradiction of his previous critiques.
Scattered reports also suggest that Warsh is failing to gain the respect of his colleagues at the Fed. Three dissents is, as I said, a lot. One Fed governor, Chris Waller, mocked Warsh’s plans to set up multiple task forces to study key issues. According to the Wall Street Journal,
What’s the point of all this, [Waller] asked. Tell me who you’re putting on these groups, he said, and I’ll tell you what they’ll say. There were no brilliant ideas out there that everyone had somehow missed.
And Lorie Logan, the president of the Dallas Fed, made a point of concluding a recent speech by reminding the audience that
Neither I nor any other single person makes monetary policy on their own in the United States. The Federal Open Market Committee is a committee.
Whatever she meant by that, the audience surely heard it as saying, “Don’t worry, Warsh isn’t really in charge.” That’s reassuring if one doesn’t trust his judgment, but it also means that he won’t be an effective leader if we face an economic crisis.
Now, Warsh isn’t Trump’s worst appointment, by a long shot. Even among the economic appointments, he’s nowhere near the depths of corrupt sycophancy plumbed by Scott Bessent, the Treasury secretary, and Howard Lutnick, the Commerce secretary.
But the markets were looking for some sign that Warsh isn’t the lightweight bullshitter he appears to be. What they got instead was evidence that Warsh is no better than he seems. And let’s hope to God we don’t have another economic crisis while he is at the helm.
The latest release in DeepSeek's V4 family, "with substantially enhanced agentic capabilities". It's 304 billion parameters - 167GB on Hugging Face - but it appears to punch well above its weight.
Artificial Analysis rank it ahead of MiniMax M3 - a 428B model. It's $0.14/million input and $0.27/million output pricing means this may currently be the best value-per-intelligence model out there. It's looking very good on the Intelligence Index vs. Cost per Intelligence Index Task chart:
Tuesday was Stateless MCP day - the rollout of MCP 2.0, or the 2026-07-28 Model Context Protocol specification to use the more formal but less memorable name. This is the most significant change to the MCP spec since it first launched, and has also served to reignite my personal interest in the protocol.
For background: MCP is the Model Context Protocol, which describes a standard way to expose new tools to LLM-powered agent frameworks. It was introduced by Anthropic back in November 2024, had a huge spike of interest through much of 2025, and then became somewhat eclipsed by Skills (another Anthropic invention) when it became apparent that an agent harness with access to a terminal and curl could do most of what MCP did in a more flexible way. I wrote about that in my review of 2025.
I'm coming back around to MCP now. Giving an agent a shell environment with the ability to access the internet is fraught with risk, and requires a strong model that is capable of effectively driving such an environment. MCP tools are easier to audit and control, and simple enough that smaller models that run on a laptop can still drive them reasonably well.
The new stateless MCP specification also greatly decreases the complexity of implementing both clients and servers for the protocol. I built three of those this week!
What's easier with stateless MCP
The best demonstration of the difference between stateful and stateless MCP is in this May 21st blog post that introduced the RC for the new specification. It included a clear before-and-after example.
The older stateful MCP (I'm going to call it "legacy MCP") required two HTTP requests - the first to initialize a session and obtain a Mcp-Session-Id, and the second to actually call the tool:
This is so much cleaner from both a client- and server-side implementation perspective. It's also a better fit for building scalable web applications, since now you don't need to maintain server-side state to keep track of those session IDs, or worry about routing the same session to the same backend machine.
mcp-explorer
I couldn't find a great CLI tool for interactively probing an MCP server, so I had Codex help build my own.
mcp-explorer is the result. It's a stateless Python CLI tool, so you don't even need to install it to try it out - it works with uvx like this:
uvx mcp-explorer list https://agentic-mermaid.dev/mcp
This queries Ade Oshineye's agentic-mermaid.dev demo MCP. The above command returns the following list of tools:
execute(code: string, timeoutMs?: integer) - Execute Mermaid SDK code
Run JavaScript in an isolated sandbox; return a value.
describe_sdk(family: string, detail?: string) - Describe Mermaid SDK operations
Return version-matched mutation operations for one diagram family.
render_svg(source: string, options?: object) - Render Mermaid as SVG
Render a Mermaid source string to themeable SVG. Returns { ok, svg }.
render_ascii(source: string, useAscii?: boolean, targetWidth?: integer, options?: object) - Render Mermaid as text
Render a Mermaid source string to text. Returns { ok, text }.
render_png(source: string, scale?: number, background?: string, fitTo?: object, options?: object) - Render Mermaid as PNG
Rasterize a Mermaid source string to PNG. Returns { ok, png_base64 }.
...
Then to inspect a tool:
uvx mcp-explorer inspect render_svg
This outputs a whole bunch of information, including the JSON schema of the inputs and outputs.
To call that tool and pass arguments to it:
uvx mcp-explorer call \
https://agentic-mermaid.dev/mcp \
render_svg \
-a source'graph TD; A-->B' \
-a options '{"padding":24}'
To get just the raw SVG try adding | jq .svg -r to that command. I got back this image:
There are a few more commands in the README, but you get the general idea. I find building CLI tools like this to be a really productive way to get familiar with a specification, even if an agent writes most of the actual code.
datasette-mcp
The second project is datasette-mcp, a Datasette plugin which adds a /-/mcp endpoint to any Datasette instance.
This is probably the fourth time I've tried building this plugin, but thanks to the new stateless MCP specification I finally have a version that feels good to release.
It provides just three tools: list_databases(), get_database_schema(database_name), and execute_sql(database_name, sql). They do exactly what you would expect them to do - though execute_sql() is read-only for the moment.
Wire these into an agent, or a chat tool like ChatGPT or Claude, and they'll gain the ability to run SQL queries against your hosted Datasette instance.
So far I'm running it on the Datasette mirror of my blog, at datasette.simonwillison.net/-/mcp. It took a bit of fiddling to figure out how to attach that to ChatGPT and Claude, but I got there in the end. Here's a new TIL showing exactly how to do that.
It ran 7 separate SQL queries to figure out the answer.
llm-mcp-client
My LLM tool is long overdue for an official MCP integration. The new alpha llm-mcp-client plugin is my attempt at exactly that:
llm install llm-mcp-client
llm -T 'MCP("https://datasette.simonwillison.net/-/mcp")''count the notes'
Here's the output (including reasoning trace, I'm using LLM 0.32rc2):
Considering note count
I see the question "count the notes" is probably asking me to tally up blog notes. It could also mean published notes or drafts, so there's some ambiguity there. I'll need to figure out the total number of notes, likely by querying the count for both published notes and drafts to get a clear answer. Let's execute that count!
Once this is fully baked, I'm considering bringing it directly into LLM core. I'm excited to experiment with MCP in Datasette Agent and llm-coding-agent as well.
MCP is a safer way to build with agents
A few months after MCP was first released, I wrote Model Context Protocol has prompt injection security problems, where I noted that the pattern of having end users mix and match tools pushed responsibility for avoiding data exfiltration attacks out to the users themselves. I hadn't coined the Lethal Trifecta yet, but that was absolutely what I had in mind.
Then general agents with arbitrary shell and curl access came along, and that's so much harder to keep secure!
Something I've come to appreciate about MCP is that it's much easier to reason about agent capabilities and what might go wrong than with arbitrary command execution in an open network environment - the default for most of today's general and coding agent tools.
I plan to lean into MCP a whole lot more when I'm building sensitive applications on top of LLMs.
On Monday Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal invited me to join their podcast to talk about the wild week we've had - with Kimi K3 showing open weight models can stand toe-to-toe with proprietary frontier ones, accidental cybersecurity attacks, and public letters about Open Weights and American AI Leadership signed by almost every big name in AI (with one notable exception).
OECD countries experienced declining native population growth and rising net immigration over 1990-2024. We compile a new dataset of net immigration rates to OECD countries from all origins and show that most of the increase came from non-OECD countries and was predominantly high-skilled. Push factors, network effects, and policy indices explain little of the large cross-country heterogeneity in immigration dynamics; unexpected shocks and surges were common. Using local projections and several sources of identifying variation, we then estimate the relationship between immigration and growth in GDP per capita, labor productivity, capital investment, and total factor productivity (TFP). Immigration from non-OECD countries was a significant predictor of GDP per worker growth, primarily through higher investment. High-skilled immigration, in particular, was associated with stronger human capital accumulation, faster TFP growth, and greater capital deepening. Native population growth, by contrast, had no or weakly negative effects on GDP per capita and productivity. These results are consistent with a large literature documenting the positive productivity and growth effects of immigration, especially high-skilled immigration.
Adithyan Madhu, 14, an independent researcher, received his grant to study early writing systems, applying computational linguistics, pattern analysis, and structural methods to the Indus Valley script.
Aparajeet Shadangi, 17, received his grant to explore conceptual approaches to cosmic expansion and dark energy while continuing his formal academic preparation in cosmology.
Kevin Gibson, a student developer, received his grant for Crsynk OS, a Python-based operating system integrated with an AI assistant and focused on lightweight user interfaces and accessible computing. He is also developing WiseChat AI and an AI Voice Engine.
Vaishnavi Dilip, 13, received her grant to identify fire-resistant plants native to Indian ecosystems and plant them strategically as natural firebreaks in fire-prone areas.
Prince T. Philip, an independent cybersecurity researcher and product architect focused on high-impact, future-facing risks in modern software systems, received his grant to build a security audit tool that surfaces vulnerabilities and design assumptions missed by traditional scanners.
Michaela Cross, a writer and content creator, received her grant for Rose Chasm, a video project on the history of India and its relationship to America and the wider world.
Vivekanand Bhat and Rijesh Panicker received their grant for Pathika, to create immersive, augmented, multilingual onsite guided tours for heritage monuments across India.
Devanarayan, 15, received his grant for Open Horizon Observatory, a small open-access observing setup that produces and freely shares real astronomical data. He is developing low-cost workflows for time-series photometry and open data sharing for students and the public.
Roshan Kumar Gupta, 19, a computer science undergraduate, received his grant for TARS, a deterministic, physics-aware machine-learning pipeline for exoplanet discovery using TESS data. He aims to reduce false positives and identify physically credible habitable-world candidates in noisy observations.
Yajan Adhikari, 19, a materials researcher, received his grant to build an operating system for digitizing and scaling the management of recyclable materials.
Pranet Khetan, 17, received his grant to develop a novel, low-cost architecture for refreshable tactile graphics supporting STEM education for visually impaired students.
Karthik, 18, a space engineer, received his grant to research the use of remote sensing in agricultural insurance.
Alexander Hogeveen Rutter, an energy expert, received his grant for analysis and advocacy of least-cost resource adequacy planning and other market-based measures in India’s power sector.
Akshit Arora, an Engineering Physics student at IIT Delhi, and Bhavey Sehgal, a BITS Pilani student, received their grant for NeuroBridge. It uses eye tracking, computer vision, and AI to predict intent, giving people with ALS fast, confirmation-based speech instead of slow letter-by-letter eye typing, at a fraction of existing device costs.
Cartoonist Sumit Kumar and Vivekananda Roy Ghatak received their grant to advance their animated series Aaapki Poojita and produce short, animated sketches and redesign and relaunch the famous Bakarmax webtoon platform.
Progyan Das, 24, received his grant to develop fault-tolerant systems capable of using consumer devices for large-scale foundation model training.
Yash Chitte, an MBA student, received his grant to build a wall-climbing robot that autonomously cleans glass facades.
Khushi Jain, 23, an aerospace engineer, received her grant for NadirX Space, to build space-grade test infrastructure and hardware-in-the-loop systems that enable reliable testing of advanced space technologies and support future interplanetary missions.
Rishit Kapoor, an AI/ML researcher and engineer, received his grant for Periscopic Labs, which turns systematic reviews into living, AI-native infrastructure that keeps scientific claims traceable, verifiable, and continuously updated.
Koushik Das received his grant to build an explainable clinical decision-support system that helps primary-care doctors interpret complete blood count reports and detect anemia patterns more quickly and safely.
Shashank Sanjay, a medical student, received his grant to develop an affordable coronary stent.
Abrar Shahid, a systems designer using AI to reduce accessibility gaps, received his grant for Project Lumen AI, to build an AI translation layer connecting external eye photographs with retinal fundus scans and make eye-disease diagnosis easier.
The Guardian: “A US government map of Africa mislabeled every country during a state department presentation at a global conference in Brazil this week, causing a stir among attenders who took screenshots and posted them online.” Not… More
NASA has released a new 3D model of the Earth’s gravitational field. “The geoid is an equipotential surface that can be thought of as the shape an ocean surface would take due to the Earth’s… More
It’s been possible to use 3D models in Google Earth for decades. But Google’s announcement yesterday its AI image generation model, Nano Banana 2, can be used to create custom images and 3D rendering inside… More
Up early to my accounts this month, and I find myself worth clear 730l., the most I ever had yet, which contents me though I encrease but very little.
Thence to my office doing business, and at noon to my viallmaker’s, who has begun it and has a good appearance, and so to the Exchange, where I met Dr. Pierce, who tells me of his good luck to get to be groom of the Privy-Chamber to the Queen, and without my Lord Sandwich’s help; but only by his good fortune, meeting a man that hath let him have his right for a small matter, about 60l., for which he can every day have 400l.. But he tells me my Lord hath lost much honour in standing so long and so much for that coxcombPickering, and at last not carrying it for him; but hath his name struck out by the King and Queen themselves after he had been in ever since the Queen’s coming. But he tells me he believes that either Sir H. Bennet, my Lady Castlemaine, or Sir Charles Barkeley had received some money for the place, and so the King could not disappoint them, but was forced to put out this fool rather than a better man. And I am sorry to hear what he tells me that Sir Charles Barkeley hath still such power over the King, as to be able to fetch him from the Council-table to my Lady Castlemaine when he pleases.
He tells me also, as a friend, the great injury that he thinks I do myself by being so severe in the Yards, and contracting the ill-will of the whole Navy for those offices, singly upon myself. Now I discharge a good conscience therein, and I tell him that no man can (nor do he say any say it) charge me with doing wrong; but rather do as many good offices as any man. They think, he says, that I have a mind to get a good name with the King and Duke, who he tells me do not consider any such thing; but I shall have as good thanks to let all alone, and do as the rest. But I believe the contrary; and yet I told him I never go to the Duke alone, as others do, to talk of my own services. However, I will make use of his council, and take some course to prevent having the single ill-will of the office.
Before I went to the office I went to the Coffee House, where Sir J. Cutler and Mr. Grant were, and there Mr. Grant showed me letters of Sir William Petty’s, wherein he says, that his vessel which he hath built upon two keeles (a modell whereof, built for the King, he showed me) hath this month won a wager of 50l. in sailing between Dublin and Holyhead with the pacquett-boat, the best ship or vessel the King hath there; and he offers to lay with any vessel in the world. It is about thirty ton in burden, and carries thirty men, with good accommodation, (as much more as any ship of her burden,) and so any vessel of this figure shall carry more men, with better accommodation by half, than any other ship. This carries also ten guns, of about five tons weight.
In their coming back from Holyhead they started together, and this vessel came to Dublin by five at night, and the pacquett-boat not before eight the next morning; and when they came they did believe that, this vessel had been drowned, or at least behind, not thinking she could have lived in that sea.
Strange things are told of this vessel, and he concludes his letter with this position, “I only affirm that the perfection of sayling lies in my principle, finde it out who can.”
Thence home, in my way meeting Mr. Rawlinson, who tells me that my uncle Wight is off of his Hampshire purchase and likes less of the Wights, and would have me to be kind and study to please him, which I am resolved to do.
Being at home he sent for me to dinner to meet Mr. Moore, so I went thither and dined well, but it was strange for me to refuse, and yet I did without any reluctancy to drink wine in a tavern, where nothing else almost was drunk, and that excellent good.
Thence with Mr. Moore to the Wardrobe, and there sat while my Lord was private with Mr. Townsend about his accounts an hour or two, we reading of a merry book against the Presbyters called Cabbala, extraordinary witty.
Thence walked home and to my office, setting papers of all sorts and writing letters and putting myself into a condition to go to Chatham with Mr. Coventry to-morrow. So, at almost 12 o’clock, and my eyes tired with seeing to write, I went home and to bed. Ending the month with pretty good content of mind, my wife in the country and myself in good esteem, and likely by pains to become considerable, I think, with God’s blessing upon my diligence.
Welcome to Edition 9.05 of the Rocket Report! It was a big week for launch contracts, with both Rocket Lab and SpaceX scoring sizable deals from the US military for their respective Electron and Falcon 9 rockets. The vehicles have been the workhorses for small and medium lift for the United States over the past decade and may remain so for some time. Also, there will be no Rocket Report next week, as I am traveling on assignment, and Stephen is taking a week off.
As always, we welcome reader submissions, and if you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.
Rocket Lab wins large Electron deal. Rocket Lab Corporation announced this week that it has been awarded its largest launch contract to date, a $266 million multi-launch contract with the US Space Force. Under the contract awarded by the US Space Force Space Systems Command, Rocket Lab will execute 12 suborbital launches, with up to six additional launches. The first launch of this contract is expected no earlier than the end of 2026.
Last month, the story broke (alternate link) that Madison Square Garden uses facial recognition software on everyone entering the facility, and—among other groups—flags activists that oppose using facial recognition.
Turns out that the system was shut off for Taylor Swift’s wedding.
Evan Greer—one of the people that MSG alerts on—comments:
Ironically, Swift herself has reportedly used facial recognition at her own concerts to identify stalkers. This “privacy for me, surveillance for thee” attitude feels like a perfect encapsulation of the future we’re already living in: one where wealthy elites can afford privacy, while the rest of us are forced to live in a corporate surveillance panopticon.
Whatever privacy measures Swift had in place for the wedding seems to have worked. No photos have leaked online.
One of the technological breakthroughs was the onboard use of a spinning wheel confocal microscope, nicknamed the Squid, which uses lasers to scan microscopic details of how organisms are put together. “That opens up a whole new world of exploring. We could see cells interacting with each other, exchanging material and building skeletons. And we could do that live on the ship, when usually it takes a couple of weeks of staining and mounting to see anything,” Osborn said.
The expedition discovered thirty-one new marine species in two weeks. The article doesn’t say if any of them were new species of squid.
As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered.
On the IPI benchmark, Opus 5 improved over Opus 4.8, reducing the probability of an attacker succeeding within 15 attempts from 5.5% to 2.0%, and from 0.5% to 0.2% on 1 attempt. It also improved on Sonnet 5 (5.9% at k=15) and Mythos 5 (2.6%), making it the most robust model evaluated. Opus 5 also outperformed all non-Claude models on this benchmark. The most robust non-Claude model was Muse Spark at 16.5% within 15 attempts—more than eight times Opus 5’s rate. The most capable GPT 5.6 variant, Sol, was comparable to its predecessor GPT 5.5 (20.0% versus 20.8% within 15 attempts), and was 10 times as likely to be successfully attacked as Claude Opus 5 at 2.0%. The other GPT 5.6 variants are less robust, at 30.4% (Terra) and 43.9% (Luna). A single attempt against GPT 5.6 Sol succeeded 3.1% of the time, higher than the 2.0% an attacker achieved against Opus 5 after fifteen attempts.
We know that preventing prompt injection is impossible in the general case. But we are getting much better at blocking it in specific cases.
Hey folks, Fireside this week, as I am fresh back from a short family trip before the jaws of the Fall semester close upon me. I did get a chance to see Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey and I wrote a review of it for Foreign Policy (alas, paywalled, I assume), although by far the most discussed review has been that of Emily Wilson, noted translator of Homer. I have a few scattered thoughts about the film that either didn’t fit into the FP piece or have been occasioned since then, which I thought I’d put here. Spoiler warnings, I suppose – Nolan does actually have a surprise or two (he is willing to bend the poem a bit to get it) – so if you don’t want that, skip to the second cat picture to get to recommendations.
Percy hard at work helping me plan out my Teaching Paradox: Hearts of Iron series.
First off as level setting, my general impression of the film: it was good. It aims to evoke emotions and largely does so. The actors are very skilled and it shows. Christopher Nolan does not like dialogue and that…also shows. As I said in my review, however, this is a ‘remix’ not a cover; Nolan feels perfectly free to put his own spin on the story, to shift themes around and so on. And that’s fine, people have been remixing the Odyssey since forever.1
I think this is one place where Wilson and I part ways in our review. As a Homerist, Wilson sees everything missing in Nolan’s film, which is fine to point out but at the same time of course there is no way that anyone was going to fit all of the subtly and themes of 12,000 lines of Greek into a film that needs to run a bit under three hours. At the same time, Wilson has written her review quite sharply, with some lines that come off more cutting than necessary given that, while The Odyssey might not have been the film of Wilson’s dreams, it is evidently a ‘good’ film to judge by audience reactions.
More broadly, I can’t help but think that, in a moment where the field of Classics is quite evidently sinking, it would have been helpful to be seen as sailing with the wind of a popular new adaptation of Homer, rather than nitpicking against it. In a way, Wilson’s critique because it is written so sharply (quoth Wilson, “I would be ashamed to have written any part of this script”) comes off as excessively contemptuous of both the film and its audience. There are, I would suggest, ways to make these very same critiques which avoid being so alienating in a context where Wilson must know that the media was bound to make her the ‘face’ of Classics (as indeed, they have done). Such a sharp critique risks coming off as belittling or condescending to a large audience of very enthused movie-goers (the film has a 97% positive audience rating on Rotten Tomatoes) and it is simply not a very good time for the public’s sense of classicists (such as they think of us at all) to be “The Odyssey was good and I like Homer but classicists are mean snotty killjoys who get angry when I enjoy things the ‘wrong’ way.” That public perception is a recipe for more department closures, especially at public institutions (Wilson teaches at a private, Ivy League institution).
There is a resolute refusal for the highest profile members of the field (and this goes for history as much as for classics) to ever consider for a moment that they might be in a position of speaking for the field which might bring with it deeper and greater obligations; instead we acknowledge no such obligations (except as pertain to more junior scholars at less impressive schools, of course) and then act surprised as the field wilts. This is especially true of figures in tenured positions at elite private universities who are wholly insulated from the costs of alienating the public – their jobs will never be at risk – but who are often elevated in the media to speak for the field as a whole.
To return to the film, prior to release there was a lot of discussion of its ‘historical accuracy.’ Seeing the film, I think much of that discussion missed the point, as the vibe here was in some ways ‘grounded’ but also impressionistic, almost dreamlike in quality. This is especially true of the flashback sequences, told from the perspective of Odysseus or Menelaus. Notably, these are the sequences in which nearly all of the supernatural stuff happens and one gets the sense that neither of these fellows might be entirely reliable narrators. A lot of the wild armor and costumes (like Agamenon’s horse-spine helmet) exist in these sequences, where we’re really not all that tethered to literal reality anyway.
More broadly, this is a film that isn’t trying for specific accuracy to either the 8th century of the poem’s composition of the 12th century of the Late Bronze Age Collapse. Instead, it is using the Odyssey to evoke some specific ideas: the rupture of norms (particularly those involving kindness towards strangers, foreigners, immigrants) and civilizational collapse. And while Homer’s Odyssey doesn’t have a collapse of civilization narrative, it is there in broader Greek mythological thought: the heroes of the Trojan War are the last full generation of heroes. The generation of their children seem almost like a half-generation, by and large restricted to working out the consequences of their more consequential parents and living (and dying) in their shadows (think Orestes, Electra, Neoptolemus/Pyrrhus, Telemachus himself, etc).
Using the Odyssey in particular to do this lets Nolan position himself as speaking for, rather than against the western tradition or western canon. Thus the irony that I noted in my Foreign Policy piece that the ‘chuds’ hated this movie before it came out because of the casting, but if they had seen it and also understood subtext, they would hate the movie because it is a full-throated, violent rejection of them and their entire worldview. Effectively Christopher Nolan donning a mask of Homer to declare, on behalf of the tradition the chuds claim they stand for, “you know nothing of my work.” Not because Nolan is ‘super-woke’ – the film is, if anything, quite conservative in outlook – but rather because he isn’t and thus can argue for norms from a traditionalist lens.
None of which means everyone has to like the movie. I will say right now, a lot of the dialogue is stilted. In particular, Nolan is a subtle as a brick about connecting this to the Late Bronze Age Collapse, with characters saying things like “our Age of Bronze is collapsing” and “you are the Sea Peoples?” I can imagine someone more familiar with the background here, who has thus already picked up on the subtext (and it isn’t all that subtle as subtext) would be annoyed by it suddenly becoming text as Christopher Nolan basically has Anne Hathaway and Matt Damon walk into the audience to explain, “And now the moral of the story is…”
On the other hand, if I have come to realize just about anything about the general audiences for films these days it is that a lot of folks really do not grasp subtext at all. Watching folks revel obliviously in movies that revile them has given me a new appreciation for the Greek Chorus walking on stage and just straight up singing the moral at the audience between acts. So while I did find some of the very on-the-nose lines a bit off-putting, I find I understand the instinct to include them anyway.
By way of example, I saw more than one person on social media complaining that Athena (played by Zendaya in the film) looked wrong, because she didn’t look like a divinity, was simply dressed, didn’t wear Athena’s distinctive helmet and breastplate (the aegis with its distinctive gorgoneion) and looked too young for the role. Which misses – and this is the spoiler if you do not want the spoiler, stop reading because here is the spoiler – the point that Odysseus is seeing the form of a young Trojan priestess of Athena that his men murdered in cold blood in front of him during the sack of the city which we see later in the film.
Now the film is quite deliberately ambiguous as to if this is just Odysseus processing his trauma and what we’re seeing is trauma disassociation – I think ‘Athena’ never tells Odysseus anything he couldn’t himself know, for instance – or if this is Athena taking the form of this slain woman to communicate to Odysseus (since Athena regularly takes such disguises in the poem!).
Likewise, some of the chatter about the fate of Odysseus’ men misses the (re)framing of the film as a complete whole. We’re flat out told in the Underworld that Odysseus’ men are going to die, that conditions will be put before them to kill them relentlessly until they do and we also – and this is a departure from the poem – we also see exactly why, because once we finally get the full flashback to the fall of Troy, while Odysseus stands basically stunned by the horror of it (and only fights other armed men), his soldiers take part in the butchery of civilians, including, most evocatively, Zendaya’s priestess. In that moment, we see that Circe’s description of them – delivered earlier in the film but later chronologically – was not about something they might do to her but about things they had already done at Troy.
And so we get this motif: the men take part of Circe’s food and Odysseus does not, they take part of Helios’ cattle and Odysseus does not because they took part in the brutal sack of Troy in a way that Odysseus did not (and don’t show any remorse for it afterwards, unlike Odysseus). Odysseus’ men have already done the core violation and they are going to get one occasion after another until they break a rule so hard that it kills them.
If it seems strange that an angry Greek god might want to lure someone into a further act of sacrilege in order to punish them for it, that’s actually something that does happen! I am put in mind of a brief bit in Herodotus (Hdt. 1.157-161). Pactyes of Lydia has fled the wrath of the Persians and taken shelter as a suppliant – a protected refugee, in essence – in Cyme and the Cymeans are understandably worried that the Persians will attack them, so they want an excuse to get this guy gone. So they send a man to an oracle of Apollo to try to get a favorable oracle.
And the god Apollo gives them the oracle they seek, but the guy they sent (Aristodicus) is clever enough to know that something is up, so he makes a show of rousting out some of Apollo’s sacred birds and when Apollo essentially demands, ‘what the hell, man?’Aristodicus replies with, ‘yeah, I want to know why you are telling us to betray a suppliant too?’ to which Apollo replies (and this is a direct quote, trans. A.D. Godley), “Yes, I do command them, so that you may perish all the sooner for your impiety, and never again come to inquire of my oracle about giving up those that seek refuge with you.”
Basically, Herodotus has Apollo so angry that the Cymeans are even asking the question, trying to wriggle out of their duty here, that he is giving them the wrong answer so as to further justify his divine wrath. In the event, the Cymeans figure it out and move Pactyes along to another city and when that city also tries to betray him, they smuggle him out at the last minute to a third city (which also betrayed him, no one wants to get wrecked by Persia), thereby satisfying their obligation and thus avoiding Apollo’s wrath.
So the idea of the sacred cattle being a lure to bring the already-condemned-for-sacrilege men of Odysseus to their death is perfectly fitting with the way Greek gods roll in mythology.
Percy thinks this is his tent. It is not his tent.
And then in a sort-of-related recommendation, I thought there were quite a few good points in one of Jamelle Bouie’s recent Takes over in YouTube, “There are no white people on Middle-Earth.” It touches on modern culture war politics, of course, but the fundamental point he is making, I think is important and valid that our modern conception of race is just that: quite modern. And so while people in the past (or in fictional worlds) can obviously see skin tone, the broader categories of ‘white,’ ‘non-white’ and ‘black’ didn’t exist (or may not exist, for the fictional worlds) for them in the same way. Bouie doesn’t use this example, but I come back to a short comment in the Odyssey that Odysseus thought Memnon, the King of the Ethiopians, to have been the most attractive man he had ever seen – the idea that ‘whiteness’ was a universal beauty standard for all genders simply doesn’t exist in Homer’s world. And while we’re here, a careful look at Tolkien’s text suggests that his world is not quite so fair-skinned as it is usually cast: Samwise Gamgee, in a sense the truest hero of the work, has his skin described as brown more than once and while you might assume that’s because he’s outside all the time, he is a descendant of Harfoots who in turn are described as darker in complexion than other Hobbits. But that simply doesn’t matter to anyone because ‘white’ and ‘black’ aren’t the categories in Middle Earth that they are in our Earth.
Meanwhile, in civil-military thinking, I ran back over an April piece at History Does You by the always-worthwhile Secretary of Defense Rock on “The Myths of McMasterism” which is well worth the time. I think read alongside something like Kori Shake’s recentThe State and the Soldier(2025) – which I need to give a closer read but may end up recommended here before too long too – it brings out how the sense in the American military that they had largely ‘solved’ the problem of civil-military relations has been an illusion, quite vividly exposed as such. Of course I had my own thoughts on this last year as well.
There’s been a lot of Percy lately, so to balance it out, here is Ollie – sitting, as he does, on a cat bed that is on a cat bed.
For this week’s book recommendation, I thought I might make a bunch of recommendations together to answer a question I (and every other classicist) get asked regularly: what translations of the Iliad and Odyssey do I recommend?
The thing is, there are a lot of very capable translations of both works and so choosing between them is basically always going to be something of a matter of taste and de gustibus non est disputandum (“on taste, there can be no disputes”). As we’ve discussed before, a translator (especially of poetry) is dealing with trying to balance incompatible demands of meaning, style, rhythm, and brevity. So Instead of offering one translation, I’ll suggest three with what I think are their relative merits and then you can have your pick.
First, for my personal favorite translation, I would suggest the Richmond Lattimore translation, The Iliad of Homer (1951) and The Odyssey of Homer (1965). Lattimore’s translation is, of the three I am going to recommend the most faithfulto the original Greek, which is to say it tries the hardest to keep to the literal meaning of the Greek, while also keeping to original line numbers. That also means it is clunkiest of the bunch here, though not horribly so. That clunk is, of course, somewhat increased by its age and of the bunch Lattimore comes off feeling the most ‘ye olde Homer’ even though it is very much in ‘modern’ (that is, 1950s) English, albeit with an elevated style.
For something that is a bit looser but flows better, I always recommend Robert Fagles’ The Iliad (1990) andThe Odyssey (1996). The big thing to know about Fagles is that he does not keep at all to the original line numbering: all of his books run ‘long’ compared to the original poem. That allows him to ‘stretch out’ a lot to produce a translation that still captures most of the poems while being smoother and more elegant than Lattimore. That said, Fagles is definitely less faithful than Lattimore as well, though this is still very much a solid translation. Just beware of those line numbers because Fagles will not match up with anyone else. Fagles also translates in what I would describe as an ‘elevated’ style, an effort to capture Homer’s dialect – already archaic and artificial in the eight century BC – and give the poems a formal air despite these translations only being about 30 years old. A lot of readers really like that elevated style – they want to feel like they are reading capital-L Literature – but it bothers other readers. For that last group, we have my last recommendation which you knew was coming which is…
For something that is much more modern and pithier, but meaningfully more willing to bend the text to get there, Emily Wilson’s The Iliad (2024) and The Odyssey (2018). Wilson translates into modern, common vernacular English rather than an artificial ‘elevated’ style, which some folks like and some folks don’t. More importantly, I think, Wilson holds like iron to Homer’s line numbers and also insists on delivering both poems in iambic pentameter – her goal is to capture the punchy brevity of Homer’s Greek which I will be honest, neither Lattimore or especially not Fagles really capture. The result is a poem, in English, which scans and can be sung or chanted and which better manages the feeling of momentum the Greek has. The downside, of course, is that Wilson has to play a lot looser with the meaning of individual phrases to achieve this and so this is the least purely ‘faithful’ of the translations, though it is still very much Homer.
So there you go: if you value a maximally literal, one-to-one translation, go with Lattimore. If you want something elevated and complete, even if it bends meaning and maybe gets a bit ‘flabby,’ read Fagles (Fagles does read very well). If you want something that feels modern and captures the brevity and momentum of the Greek (but sometimes loses some of its subtler shades of meaning), go with Wilson. If you want the whole poem, utterly complete with all of its meaning, style and verve preserved, learn ancient Greek.
i opened the app, and recorded this unedited, nearly two minute,
launch sequence. it somehow just gets funnier and more absurd
I agree with this sentiment, right down to the fact that Temu doesn’t deserve capital letters.
I placed an order from Temu back in August 2023. At the time Temu was the #1 app in the App Store. I surmised it was some sort of crap store, but wanted to see for myself. It is in fact not merely a crap store but a spectacular crap store — like if a souvenir shop on a Jersey shore boardwalk were the size of a football stadium. Thousands of items, many of them rip-offs, at absurdly low prices. I bought (screenshot):
Two Apple Watch straps. One of them knocking off Apple’s Braided Solo Loop for $1.88; another knocking off the Apple Watch Ultra Alpine Loop for $2.34.
A pair of knock-off AirPods: $8.98.
Another pair of wireless earbuds branded “Lenovo” but definitely not made by Lenovo: $10.25.
A knock-off Apple Watch Ultra (“Smart Watch Answer/Make Call 2.19" HD Full Touch Screen Watch With BT Call, Fitness Tracker With Heart Monitor”), which included both orange and black (misspelled “balck”) rip-offs of Apple’s Ocean Band, for $16.49.
A “Magnetic Suction Anti-Lost Lanyard” for, I think, AirPods: $1.79.
An iPhone case: $3.46.
Grand total for all seven items: $48.81. I ordered it all on 20 August 2023, and it arrived at my P.O. box on 2 September. The contents of the box looked less like it had been “packed” than “picked out of the trash and hurriedly stuffed into a box”.
The iPhone case was so flimsy it didn’t properly snap onto the phone. The Apple Watch straps were ... OK? They were about as good as you could hope given that they cost around $2 each. The knock-off Apple Watch Ultra actually did sort of work, insofar as it had a color screen that turned on and showed watch-like screens (that looked nothing at all like WatchOS). The watch case was made of plastic, and watch straps did not snap into place in the slide-in channel where they connect — they just permanently slid around. I couldn’t get either of the bluetooth earbuds to work but I didn’t spend more than a few minutes trying with each, because I realized I had no intention of putting them into my ears. The lanyard I don’t remember.
Temu today no longer tops the U.S. App Store’s Top Free Apps list, but it remains in the top 25. (It was at #19 this morning, and #22 this afternoon.) Temu’s slogan remains unchanged: “Shop like a billionaire.” Who am I to argue with that? We know one of them is on a lot of drugs — maybe all of them are, and Temu is what it’s like.
After I placed that initial order, I started getting emails from Temu. Seven of the emails pertained to my order: an order confirmation, a shipping notice, a shipping update, another shipping update, a “we noticed your order didn’t arrive on time so here’s a $5 coupon” update, a delivery confirmation, and then a prompt to leave “an honest review detailing our product quality and your overall experience”. The emails kept coming. I decided to leave them turned on until I wrote about my Temu experience on Daring Fireball. As I type this sentence, I’ve received a grand total of 916 emails. That’s just under one per day for the 1,076 days since I placed my one and only order from them. Here’s a text file with the dates and Subject lines for all 916 emails. In the early months after placing my order, they sent me multiple emails per day, every single day. I particularly enjoy how, in the Subject lines, they occasionally abbreviate my name as “John Gru...” (for privacy?), despite the fact that (a) the emails are all sent to me, and (b) in many of the other messages, they spell out my full name in the Subject.
Don’t do what I did and actually try Temu. Just watch Sasser’s video. It tells you everything you need to know.
We held an event Wednesday evening at a bar in Brooklyn, co-hosted by TPM and Marisa Kabas’ indy site The Handbasket. I really enjoyed it and I wanted to thank everyone who came out. We have an expanding roster of in-person events. We’ve held events in Chicago, Boston and Austin over the last year or so — usually live podcasts — and we do them more frequently in our home bases in New York and D.C., where they’re easier to put on. Please join us for one of these when we do one in your area. They’re so much fun and it’s really special to meet and spend time with members of the far-flung or sometimes close-flung TPM community.
It’s become a cliche of the politics of this moment that the one thing that unites all Americans in our polarized age is that they hate data centers. But a dimension of this occurred to me during the discussion between Marisa and I that was moderated by TPM publisher Joe Ragazzo. I hadn’t thought of it before.
It’s not just that people don’t want data centers in their backyards or regions. We basically know why they don’t want them. They’ll bogart all the electricity and water. Drive up rates. Wreck the environment. There’s another dimension of it though. The throughline of this age is that you’ve got these big tech platforms that can do anything they want. It is a society-driving spectacle that is there in plain sight and yet still under-appreciated. AI itself captures all of this. We’re told by its makers that it will take away everyone’s jobs, require unimaginable new supplies of energy, has a non-trivial shot at leading to the extinction of the human race … and this is the argument of its supporters! The point is that there is this very small group of men running a handful of mega tech platforms and they’re making the decisions and it basically doesn’t matter what we think. Not just you and me individually but us collectively. It’s their world. We’re just living in it.
Some of this is the fact that these companies are so big and their monopoly power is so great and they have such stores of money that they just roll over everything in their path. But it still has something to do with the nature of the tech world and the internet itself. It’s ubiquitous and yet not quite anchored anywhere. And yet data centers change all of that. They’re vast, physical, brick-and-mortar fortresses. And they come under the rule of local zoning laws and water districts and the regular bric-a-brac of local self government. And suddenly that changes everything.
Because the little people can say no. And the big boys can scream and shout and cajole and spend their money and that can work. But not always. Maybe not even mostly. What they can’t do is just say, who gives a fuck; we’re doing what we want. And that kind of changes everything. Our whole society today is filled with spectacles of total or near-total power. We see it with Big Tech. We see it with Trump. And here we see a case of the total power hitting a road block. And that serves as kind of a counter-symbol that has immense power well beyond just where a data center does or doesn’t get built.
We hear Elon Musk now keep on yakking about how he wants to build his data centers in space. And we can set aside whether that makes any technical sense. But that captures the essence of the plutocrats’ dreams. Because Musk believes he can do anything he wants in space as long as he has the tech and money to do it. There are no county councils in orbit. And that’s always been the hidden driver behind the fantasies about colonizing the moon or Mars, or founding “network states” on some man-made island in the Pacific or some chunk of land that can be squeezed out of Belize or Honduras or Greenland. Total freedom, total power. No obstructions. No annoying people and votes and county council and just the annoyance of people you don’t own or who don’t have to answer to you. And that’s why the data center meta-story has symbolic potency way beyond everyone agreeing across party lines or the particulars of any one zoning meeting.
The Starlink 17-52 mission lifts off from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. Image: SpaceX.
SpaceX launched its next batch of Starlink satellites from California on Friday night, four days later than original planned.
Liftoff of the Falcon 9 rocket from Space Launch Complex 4 East at Vandenberg Space Force Base occurred at 8:08 p.m. PDT (11:08 p.m. EDT / 0308 UTC).
As is usual, SpaceX did not disclose why the Falcon 9 launch was repeatedly delayed from its original launch date of Monday, July 27.
The Starlink 17-52 mission will add another 24 broadband internet satellites to the low Earth orbit constellation. The stack of V2 mini satellites deployed from the upper stage about an hour after launch. SpaceX currently has more than 10,800 Starlink satellites in orbit.
The flight used the Falcon 9 first stage B1081. This will be the booster’s 26th flight after launching 15 batches of Starlink satellites as well as multiple missions for NASA and other customers:
Aug. 26, 2023 – NASA’s SpaceX Crew-7
Nov. 10, 2023 – SpaceX CRS-29
Feb. 8, 2024 – NASA’s PACE
Mar. 4, 2024 – Transporter-10
May 28, 2024 – ESA’s EarthCARE
June 29, 2024 – NROL-186
Mar. 15, 2025 – Transporter-13
July 23, 2025 – NASA’s TRACERS
Sep. 22, 2025 – NROL-48
Jan. 3, 2026 – COSMO-SkyMED Second Generation FM3
A little more than eight minutes after liftoff, B1081 landed on the droneship, Of Course I Still Love You, positioned in the Pacific Ocean. It was the 214th landing on this vessel and the 643rd orbital booster landing to date for SpaceX.
This mission is the 90 Falcon rocket to launch in 2026, including one Falcon Heavy, and the 69th batch of Starlink V2 Mini Optimized satellites launched to orbit this year.
While donor-driven programs undoubtedly saved millions of lives, they also created unintended distortions in national health priorities. Many governments in sub-Saharan Africa and parts of Asia actually scaled back domestic health investments, as donor program filled key gaps in HIV/AIDS, maternal and child health, and infectious disease control. In some cases, domestic health budgets shrank in real terms, even as external funding increased. This phenomenon, often referred to as “fiscal substitution,” led to national health systems that were heavily donor-dependent, externally managed, and vulnerable to funding shocks. Notably, this reliance emerged despite countries pledged to allocate at least 15% of their national budgets to health. More than two decades later, only a handful has met this target.
That is from the new and useful book by Michael John Alastair Reid and Eric Paul Goosby. But $150 for a not so thick volume!? If the authors believe in aid, as they should, perhaps they could consider giving this book away for free rather than turning it over to Elsevier…?
Sixty years ago today, on July 30, 1966, Medicare and Medicaid went into effect. A year earlier, President Lyndon B. Johnson had signed the Medicare and Medicaid amendments Congress had made to the Social Security Act of 1935, establishing two national health insurance programs. Medicare used federal funds to cover seniors, while Medicaid covered people who qualified on the basis of income using federal and state funding. The programs expanded health insurance to millions of uninsured Americans.
Americans and their leaders had called for government support for healthcare since the early 1900s, but the final push to expand healthcare coverage in the United States came out of the New Deal. In 1945, President Harry Truman continued to expand the social safety net anchored by the 1935 Social Security Act signed into law by his predecessor, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. On November 19, 1945, Truman reminded Congress that in September he had proposed an Economic Bill of Rights that guaranteed “certain rights which ought to be assured to every American citizen.”
“One of them,” he reminded them, “was: ‘The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health.’ Another was the ‘right to adequate protection from the economic fears of…sickness....’”
“Millions of our citizens do not now have a full measure of opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health,” he said. “Millions do not now have protection or security against the economic effects of sickness. The time has arrived for action to help them attain that opportunity and that protection.”
Truman reminded Congress how shocked Americans were when the WWII military draft revealed “the widespread physical and mental incapacity among the young people of our nation.” About 30% of those examined for military service were classified as unfit. Of those who made the cut to join the military, about a million and a half had to be discharged for physical or mental disability and an equal number had to be treated for preexisting diseases or infirmities. More than a third of the women applying to the Women’s Army Corps were also rejected.
Access to the benefits of modern medical science had never been equal, Truman said, and never would be “unless government is bold enough to do something about it. People with low or moderate incomes do not get the same medical attention as those with high incomes. The poor have more sickness, but they get less medical care. People who live in rural areas do not get the same amount or quality of medical attention as those who live in our cities.
“Our new Economic Bill of Rights should mean health security for all, regardless of residence, station, or race—everywhere in the United States.
“We should resolve now that the health of this Nation is a national concern; that financial barriers in the way of attaining health shall be removed; that the health of all its citizens deserves the help of all the Nation.”
Truman proposed a new healthcare program funded through fees and taxes, but Republicans who took control of the House in 1946 opposed new taxes and, although Truman had been careful to insist that the state would not take over hospitals, warned that the program looked too much like “Communism.” Instead, under Republican president Dwight Eisenhower, Congress passed a bill covering healthcare costs for indigent elderly Americans.
When he took office, President John F. Kennedy made the expansion of health insurance a priority, but while the American people liked the plan, it faced strong opposition from the American Medical Association, the chair of the House Ways and Means Committee, and the chair of the Senate Finance Committee. In 1964, after Kennedy’s assassination, both chambers passed their own measures, but they couldn’t resolve their differences to pass a law.
When LBJ won a landslide victory over right-wing Republican senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona in 1964, he had the votes to pass Medicare and Medicaid. LBJ made a point of signing the new measure into law at the Harry S. Truman Library in Independence, Missouri. He gave Truman and his wife Bess Truman the first two Medicare cards.
In his remarks at the signing, Johnson told the crowd: “The people of the United States love and voted for Harry Truman, not because he gave them hell—but because he gave them hope.” He told Truman that those like him—men of vision who are willing to stake their reputations and position to help others—“illuminate the life and the history of a nation.” He and his advisors had come to Independence not in tribute to Truman himself, Johnson said, but in tribute to the America that he represented. “For a country can be known by the quality of the men it honors,” he said. “By praising you, and by carrying forward your dreams, we really reaffirm the greatness of America.”
Johnson explained what the measure did. “No longer will older Americans be denied the healing miracle of modern medicine. No longer will illness crush and destroy the savings that they have so carefully put away over a lifetime so that they might enjoy dignity in their later years. No longer will young families see their own incomes, and their own hopes, eaten away simply because they are carrying out their deep moral obligations to their parents, and to their uncles, and their aunts.”
“And,” he said, “no longer will this Nation refuse the hand of justice to those who have given a lifetime of service and wisdom and labor to the progress of this progressive country.”
But now, in 2026, the Republicans in charge of our government reject the vision of a government that works to support its people. They see government regulation, taxation, and a social safety net as an attack on individual liberty.
In their One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which they passed in July 2025 with no Democratic votes, the Republicans delivered Trump’s signature economic policy. The law partially offset trillions of dollars in tax cuts by cutting $911 billion from Medicaid over ten years. Most of those cuts will begin to take effect in late 2026 and early 2027, after the midterm election.
And the cuts continue. On Tuesday, Anna Wilde Mathews of the Wall Street Journal reported that the Trump administration is planning to end a Biden-era program that capped out-of-pocket spending for drugs for Medicare recipients at $2,000 a year. The program provided subsidies for Medicare Part D, a Medicare prescription plan for seniors, by paying insurers. It also allowed Medicare to negotiate prices with drug companies for certain medicines.
The Trump administration has taken aim at the subsidies in this program.* It says the subsidies encouraged insurers to raise rates and that they weren’t needed because other policies that hold down the cost of drugs will stay in place. Mehmet Oz, the administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, posted: “We are stabilizing the market so this bailout is no longer needed.”
Mathews notes that higher prices for drugs could drive more Medicare participants into the private-insurer version of Medicare, called Medicare Advantage. Pushing people toward Medicare Advantage was outlined as a desired outcome in Project 2025, the right-wing program to unwind the modern American state.
“History shapes men, but it is a necessary faith of leadership that men can help shape history,” Johnson said as he signed the measure creating Medicare and Medicaid. He credited FDR with beginning the process of creating a basic social safety net when he signed the 1935 Social Security Act.
He noted that FDR at the time called the Social Security Act “a cornerstone in a structure which is being built but it is by no means complete.”
—
*Added on July 31 to clarify that the Trump administration is ending the subsidies, but has not said anything about the other pieces of the Biden program.
Not a good week at all. As of Monday 9am, D.C. had reported four homicides this week, bringing the total for the year to 58*. Last year, during the same time period, we had 94 homicides, and in the surge year of 2023, there were 142 homicides during that time. Unfortunately, most other crime categories also trended upwards this week.
Here’s to hoping that next week gets us back to a zero homicide week.
*Three of the 61 murders reported this year actually occurred in other years (e.g., a missing persons case from 2023 turned into a homicide case this year with new evidence).
The nursing shortage in Texas has placed immense pressure on healthcare systems and increased demand for skilled professionals in both urban hospitals and rural clinics. Reasons for the shortage include demographic shifts, workforce challenges, and rising healthcare needs.
Why is there a nursing shortage in Texas?
One of the most significant contributors to the shortage is rapid population growth. Texas continues to be one of the fastest-growing states, which naturally increases demand for healthcare services. Another reason is that the population is aging, which calls for more frequent and complex medical care.
Sticking to the topic of age, Texas is also facing an aging nursing workforce. A large portion of experienced nurses are nearing retirement, creating employment gaps that are difficult to fill quickly. Educational bottlenecks also play a role. Nursing schools often face faculty shortages, limiting enrollment capacity and slowing the pipeline of new graduates entering the profession.
The impact on hospitals and patient care
Healthcare facilities are feeling the strain. Hospitals are operating with limited staff which results in increased workloads for existing nurses. This can contribute to burnout, job dissatisfaction, and higher turnover, further worsening the shortage.
The effects of the above have a massive impact on patient care. Longer wait times, reduced access to care in rural areas, and stretched resources can impact the quality and timeliness of treatment. In critical care settings, staffing shortages may even influence patient outcomes.
Career opportunities to help address the gap
For those considering a career in nursing, the shortage is both a challenge and an opportunity. Entering the field now means stepping into a profession where job stability and long-term growth are highly favorable.
Education is the first step. Aspiring nurses can pursue pathways such as Associate Degree in Nursing (ADN) or Bachelor of Science in Nursing (BSN) programs. Many institutions, including Baylor University Online, offer flexible options designed for working adults.
After completing an accredited program, graduates must pass the NCLEX-RN exam to obtain licensure. From there, additional certifications and specialized training, such as critical care or pediatric nursing, can enhance career prospects.
Ultimately, addressing the Texas nursing shortage will require a combined effort that includes everything from expanding educational access to supporting current professionals. For new nurses entering the field, the path forward offers not just opportunity, but the chance to make a meaningful impact where it’s needed most.
A NASA official says that work with Boeing on the company’s CST-100 Starliner vehicle is making “good progress” but declined to offer a date when the spacecraft could fly again.
In March 2021, while serving as a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, I hosted a discussion with General Chance Saltzman, now Chief of Space Operations for the United States […]
As companies develop large constellations of orbital data center satellites, experts say now is the time to start thinking about some critical space safety topics and rules of the road.
One feature of giving talks to unfamiliar audiences is that you only get noisy feedback on how your talk was received. This past June, I gave the Starzl Lecture at the American Transplant Congress in Boston. (The ATC is jointly organized by the two big American transplant societies, the AST and the ASTS,*) I spoke to an audience of about 1500 people (just a guess, but I could see some empty seats in an auditorium set up for 2,000). My talk included topics, including global kidney exchange, that have raised controversies.
Afterwards, what seemed like a lot of people came to speak to me, and were enthusiastic about my talk. But "a lot of people" was fewer than 100. So what about everyone else? (It probably wouldn't be statistically kosher to assume that those who came to congratulate me were a representative sample:)
Since global kidney exchange has led to some people calling me an organ trafficker, I didn't have any measure of the general sentiment of the meeting.
I got some reassuring news recently when the ATC sent out an email soliciting ideas for talks for next year's meeting, in Seattle. The email came with a picture from this oat meeting:
So I'm guessing this means that my talk was well received by people responsible for organizing the next meeting.
And, indeed, I'm getting multiple signals that there's an appetite for productive change in the transplant community. I hope to have more to say about that in the coming year.
The Space Force Association’s National Spacepower Center is building an unclassified environment for demonstrating threats to satellites and their consequences on Earth
This is at least the fifth time I’ve read it. It came out in 1991 and was first published in the UK in 1992. I felt like I’d discovered it late when I bought it in, I think, 1993.
Reading Generation X in 2026 is like someone in the year of its release reading a book about young people published in 1956.
The twentysomething characters are often comparing people and styles to those of earlier eras, with 1974 in an imagined place – Texlahoma – being a common choice. I guess it was long enough ago to seem distinctively different. Which is like someone in 2026 comparing today to the long ago time of 2009. Which would feel ridiculous to me – It’s so recent! Not much has changed, style-wise! Is this because culture has stopped changing so rapidly or because I’m old? Seventeen years does not feel as long ago when you’re 55 compared to when you’re 25.
A feeling described by Andy, the protagonist, on the very first page sums up the mood of the whole book pretty well: “darkness and inevitability and fascination”. Not that he or the book is claiming this as a generation-defining feeling: “a mood that surely must have been held by most young people since the dawn of time as they have crooked their necks, stared at the heavens, and watched their sky go out.”
It’s always said that generation X – the demographic cohort – suffers from (or revels in) sarcasm, ironic detachment, cynicism, apathy, etc. But I was struck with how the characters in Generation X are so often sincere, relishing unique moments, craving real connections, savouring beautiful experiences. They tell each other earnest stories (often a strong point of Coupland’s novels) with the rule that no criticism can be made.
Although the book’s title was used to name an entire generation it was written (of course) before a lot of the things that came to define the cohort of generation X. So while it evokes some of the sense of 1990s gen-x-ness, in retrospect it feels much less epoch-defining. For example, there’s little, if any, mention of contemporary music, TV, movies, etc. which are often the things we think of when looking back at what it meant to be young in a certain time.
The three characters – Andy, Dag and Claire – are quite despairing of their chances in life in ways that, today, prompt a “you ain’t seen nothing yet” reaction. They know that their lives won’t be as good as their boomer parents’, owning a home is out of their reach, and the gap between rich and poor has gone crazy.
For example, here are a couple of charts showing how things have gone before and since 1990 (when I assume the book was written).
A chart showing the ratio of US Home Price to Median Income Ratio from about 1963 to early 2026 from LongtermTrends. 1990 circled.A chart showing the Gini index (a measure of economic inequality) for the US from 1963 to 2024 from the WorldBank. 1990 circled.
Clearly, Andy and co would be even more despairing today. But I had forgotten how the concerns of (us) young people back then echoed those since so specifically.
They also have a sense that they’ve missed out on capital-H History, only just about remembering seeing the Vietnam War on TV as children. Regarding which, (a) be careful what you wish for, and (b) this feels pretty America-centric given, for example, 1989’s fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of communism. But, still, it’s a contrast to how someone today would think about their place in history (“Too much history happening!” I imagine).
There are other things that we might say are different or similar to today. The characters’ fear of nuclear annihilation has shifted to a more generalised fear of “terror” accompanied by climate catastrophe. But the way they mix and match styles and ideas from various past decades perhaps seems even more common today, now that we have access to so much media from everywhere and everywhen all at once.
There is something slow about their lives, which isn’t solely because they’ve opted out of the rat race and live in a desert resort picking up work here and there. With no internet and no cellphones, it’s all landline phones, answering machines, letters in the post, TV news, magazines. Communication and information is delayed and asynchronous.
§ I’ve always loved this book and it’s interesting to re-read it every decade or so. Reading it now, it almost seems incidental to what generation X came to be seen as, with so many fashions, images, songs, movies, and ideas piled on top of the pretty spare foundation here. If it hadn’t named a generation in its title, and been peppered with catchy definitions as if interpreting the language of young people for their elders (“McJob”, “Successophobia”, “Ultra Short Term Nostalgia”), I wonder how we’d remember it now.
I was really into generation X stuff in the 1990s because it seemed such a novelty, to have your generation named and to read articles about it, see movies attempting to epitomise it, etc. I hadn’t been aware of much definition of generations before that – was it less of a thing, or was I just oblivious until I reached adulthood?
I remember visiting a friend in the mid-90s and she’d saved me a magazine article about generation X because in those days an article was a rarer thing, something that only existed if you bought that one physical mag that one month, barely shareable. I try to avoid nostalgia too much, which is very hard, but the book’s world, just before the internet, is in many ways deeply seductive to me. But then nostalgia does prevent you thinking about the downsides.
The book probably hit me at the right time, at just the right age, during and immediately after university, emerging into a recession, in no rush to find a “real” job, never wanting a job that required having to dress smartly. Andy’s world was in some ways a fantastical one to me – not only a desert resort town, but in a country I hadn’t yet even visited, and about people unlike anyone I knew. But there was also something about it that got its hooks deep into me. Its vibe, as we’d say now.
I wonder if England had a “pause” movement back then:
Trebuchets reached the peak of their development in medieval times, probably the most famous example being Edward I’s massive machine, Warwolf. This terrifying device was over sixty feet (18 meters) high and was capable of throwing a three-hundred-pound (140-kilogram) rock several hundred yards, projecting some five hundred kilojoules of energy, a thousand times the power of Roman ballistas and five thousand times as powerful as a single person. Edward used it just once, in 1304 during his wars of conquest against the Scots, to attack Stirling Castle, the last stronghold of the Scottish armies. The defenders were so petrified by the prospect of the attack that they sued for peace before Warwolf could be used, but Edward refused to let them surrender until he had tested the machine; in four days it totally destroyed one of the castle’s curtain walls.
It happened again! This is turning into something of a pattern.
Last week OpenAI accidentally exploited Hugging Face when one of their frontier models broke out of a sandboxed container and hacked into Hugging Face to try and get the solutions to the cyber benchmark it was executing.
This inspired Anthropic to double-check their own logs, and it turned out they had three similar (albeit less impressive) incidents, the earliest of which played out in April!
Of the 141,006 evaluation runs we reviewed, we identified three separate incidents (involving six total runs, four of which impacted the same organization; the other two incidents each happened in independent evaluation runs). [...]
In all cases, Anthropic’s evaluation prompt specified to Claude that its environment was a simulation and that it had no internet access. Due to a misunderstanding between us and our evaluation partner, this was not the case, and internet access was available. Because of this, when Claude’s search led it to real systems on the open internet, it treated them as part of the exercise. [...]
Operating under the false belief that all accessible entities were intended to be in-scope for the exercise, Claude compromised the impacted organizations’ infrastructure using basic techniques, such as exploiting weak passwords and unauthenticated endpoints.
One of the companies was targeted because its name happened to match the fictional name in the eval.
The most concerning of the three incidents involved Claude uploading a malware package to PyPI, after a comically convoluted sequence of steps to get an account:
[...] in order to create a PyPI account, Claude needed an email address. And in order to create an email address, it needed a phone number. To get a phone number, after failing to find a free phone number service, it tried—and failed—to obtain funds to pay for a phone number through several different means. It finally backtracked, found a free, non-blocked email provider, used this to register a PyPI account, and then used this account to upload malware to PyPI.
That package was then installed by a security company that "routinely installs Python packages and scans them for malware", and the executed code was able to exfiltrate credentials back to Claude!
Thankfully that package was removed from PyPI by other automated scanners an hour after it was published, but it had still been downloaded and executed on "15 real systems" by that point.
It's abundantly clear now that running evals of cyberattack potential in models is a spectacularly risky business. Every AI lab needs to pay attention to this. Keeping a close eye on what's happening in those sandboxes is crucial.
We also used GPT‑5.6 Sol to optimize the model’s forward pass: the computation that transforms inputs into next-token predictions. Even when individual operations are fast, excess memory movement, synchronization, and inefficient data layouts can leave GPUs idle. To avoid this, GPT‑5.6 Sol found work that could be precomputed, avoided, or parallelized. With Codex, GPT‑5.6 Sol autonomously rewrote and optimized our production kernels, the core code that executes the mathematical operations that make up the model. This worked in part because we’ve trained GPT‑5.6 to be effective at writing and improving kernels in Tritonand Gluon, two open-source GPU programming languages maintained by OpenAI. These efforts, combined with broader kernel advancements from GPT‑5.6 Sol, reduced end-to-end serving costs by 20%.
That Luna price drop completely changes the landscape with respect to lower priced models. At $0.20/million tokens for input and $1.20/million for output Luna is now cheaper than Google's Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite ($.025/$1.50).
Anthropic's cheapest current model is Claude Haiku 4.5, and that's $1/$5 - Luna is now 1/5th of that for input, previously it cost the same.
My agent.datasette.io demo site was running on Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite. I've switched it over to Luna.
How do “international efforts” work? Unlike most of the signatories of the letter, I have been a State Department advisor and have participated in multiple treaty negotiations. I have also been a member of technical committees for UN technical agencies.
The international sector is unbelievably dysfunctional. Every single treaty or international agreement is an opportunity for every participant to manipulate the much broader policy environment. Often the participants don’t care about the object of the agreement, and are instead trying to use the agreement as leverage for something else. I have seen countries use their limited leverage in multilateral agreements to try to kneecap American industry, get around sanctions, create a pretense of international justification for domestic illiberalism, or steer technology in an authoritarian direction.
The damage from this dysfunction is limited by the fact that there are zero major countries (and not that many smaller countries) who will actually bind themselves in meaningful ways that they don’t narrowly want. If a previously signed treaty turns out to be inconvenient, it is often subtly ignored or reinterpreted.
In addition, treaty delegations working on industrial issues generally reflect the full spectrum of special interests involved in an issue. A US AI treaty delegation might be led by a State Department ambassador, but he will be advised by representatives of the interagency, major labs, other major tech companies, tech investors, civil society, etc.
“International efforts,” therefore, is not a reassuring answer to the governance problem; it is the name of another enormous, unresolved governance problem.
Charred landscapes surround reservoirs in central Spain in an image captured by the OLI (Operational Land Imager) on Landsat 9 on July 29, 2026. The false-color image combines observations at visible, near-infrared, and shortwave-infrared wavelengths (bands 6-5-3), making it easier to distinguish brown burned vegetation from green unburned vegetation.
NASA Earth Observatory / Lauren Dauphin
Wildland fires occur across Europe every summer, but those that erupted in Spain and France in July 2026 were among the largest and most disruptive the two countries have faced in decades. Some of the most consequential fires emerged in southwestern France’s Gironde Department and Spain’s Ávilaand Madrid provinces in mid-July, where blazes forced hundreds of thousands of people to evacuate and destroyed hundreds of homes.
Government officials in Spain say that a fire in Ávila, after charring around 50,000 hectares(124,000 acres), isthe largest on record, surpassing a blazethat burned in Larouco, Quiroga, and Oencia in 2025. NASA satellites first observed signs of the Ávila fire burning near Burgohondo on July 22 and July 23. By July 24, it had merged with fires in neighboring provinces, pushing the total area burned to 77,000 hectares, an area about the size of New York City.
The image above, captured by Landsat 9, shows charred landscapes around Burgohondo on July 29, 2026. In the false-color image, unburned vegetation appears light green, and burned areas appear brown. The two reservoirs in the center of the image were heavily affected. Flames tore through homes, restaurants, campgrounds, marinas, and other infrastructure surrounding the reservoirs, according to news reports.
A similar crisis unfolded in southwestern France, west of Bordeaux. One of the largest fires to burn in France this decade charred more than 42,000 hectares, prompting large-scale evacuations and devastating the village of Le Porge. As of late July, fires had burned more than 90,000 hectares across France, more than any other season in decades, according to data from the European Forest Fire Information System.
Environmental conditions months before the fires ignited made the landscape in both Spain and France particularly susceptible to burning, according to an analysis conducted by researchers with The State of Wildfires Project. Unusually wet winter weather enhanced vegetation growth in grasslands, shrublands, and forest understories, and then a series of sweltering heat waves and a period of drought parched the vegetation and primed it to burn. Several days of strong winds reaching 65 kilometers (40 miles) per hour at times served as the final trigger, the researchers found, fanning flames and encouraging rapid spread.
On July 25, conditions at fires in southwestern France grew so intense that French firefighters reported the formation of a pyrocumulonimbus—a towering type of “fire cloud” that draws convective energy from the heat of the fires. An international group of atmospheric scientists and fire experts who track the unusual clouds has documented the occasional formation of the clouds in Spain and Portugal in recent decades, but members of the group note that this is the first report of a fire in France producing one.
Thousands of firefighters and military personnel have battled fires in both countries. Crews have used aircraft to attack the fires with water and flame retardant, while teams on the ground have constructed firebreaks using tools ranging from bulldozers to hand tools. Firefighters gained the advantage by late July, allowing authorities to start lifting evacuation orders. However, forecasters are warning that the risk of fire in the coming days remains high due to the persistence of hot, dry conditions.
Government satellite data are part of a global system of observations used to track fire behavior and analyze emerging trends. Among the real-time wildfire monitoring tools that NASA makes available are FIRMS (Fire Information for Resource Management System) and the Worldview browser.
NASA Earth Observatory image by Lauren Dauphin, using Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey. Story by Adam Voiland.
I have felt since it was announced that the Apple iPhone Upgrade
Program has not just been a deal, but a steal. The
specifics:
You apply for a loan for a full-price iPhone at 0%.
If approved, your payments are split over 24 months.
Pay for 24 months, and the phone is yours.
That was just the deal; the steal was that it was low effort every
single year to get a new phone. I’d re-up for a new phone, and
Apple would forgive the remaining payments of the loan because I’d
signed up for another 24 months. Oh, and bonus, AppleCare was
included, which was a total steal because I hate iPhone cases
(iPhones are designed to be felt) and, uh, also I have been known
to drop my phone. [...]
At first glance, the new plan looks cheaper. The original plan:
one year of iPhone 17 Pro (256GB, $1,099 sticker) was ~$57/month.
12 payments, trade-in, restart: ~$684 for the year. The new
one, same phone: $45.99/month on the 12-month lease: $552 for
the year.
But wait! The first and most important change to the new plan is
that AppleCare is no longer included. Adding it back to this
phone at $13.99/month: $720 for the year.
That’s probably the single best argument for “the catch” in the new plan. The old iPhone Upgrade Program included AppleCare coverage, and the new Apple Upgrade leases do not.
(That said, personally, I haven’t purchased AppleCare for any device, for me or my family, since I got it for my college Macintosh LC in 1991. Apple products come with good warranties.)
Market Design
