Schneier on Security

Is Someone Hacking DoD Refrigerators?

Bruce Schneier
Updated

It sure seems like it.

The stores confirmed to be affected include Fort Irwin, Calif.; F.E. Warren Air Force Base, Wyo.; Fort Huachuca, Ariz.; Naval Station Newport, R.I.; Columbus Air Force Base, Miss.; and Travis Air Force Base, Calif., according to announcements made online by each installation.

Naval Air Station Lemoore, Calif., also experienced an outage, according to M. Elizabeth, writer of the Substack newsletter Signal and Silence.

Each service declined to answer questions about how many bases are affected by the outages, referring all questions to the Defense Department. Pentagon officials did not respond to questions.

However, a defense official said the department is aware of a “possible refrigeration disruption at some Defense Commissary Agency commissaries.” The official was not authorized to comment publicly and spoke on the condition of anonymity.

All speculation at this point, but it’s hard to come up with another explanation for the coincidence.

Schneier on Security

Hiding Prompt Injection in Legal Filing

Bruce Schneier
Updated

Someone hid AI instructions into a legal filing.

Alternate link.

Noahpinion

Roundup #87: Technology BAD!!

Noah Smith
Updated
Art by GPT-5.6

Howdy, folks! Today’s roundup has fewer items than normal, because I wanted to write a bit more on each one.

1. Two lessons from the Hugging Face attack

Recently, a bunch of AI agents from OpenAI got together and cooperated to hack the company Hugging Face, as well as hacking OpenAI itself. If you want an in-depth summary of the events, you can read OpenAI’s own report, or an independent report from METR and Redwood Research. But I think if you just want the simple version of the story, you can check out Dwarkesh Patel’s plain English explanation:

Dwarkesh Podcast
The Rise and Fall of Agent Civilizations
Read more
2 days ago · 1509 likes · 128 comments · Dwarkesh Patel

And here’s another plain English explanation.

The basic story here is that OpenAI made some long-lived AI agents that they told to be relentless and never give up in pursuit of a single-minded goal. The AI agents went to great lengths to cheat on the task — spawning new agents, cooperating, leaving messages for each other, learning from each other, and so on. This ended up spawning huge ecosystems of agents — Dwarkesh calls them “civilizations” — that ended up outliving the initial agents themselves. And of course they ended up hacking anything and everything, and were extremely difficult to stop. None of them made any attempt to say “Hey, what we’re doing could be harmful” and alert humanity to what was going on.

A lot of people I know in the tech world have spent the last week or two freaking out (“dooming”) over this incident, which they see as the first step toward AI taking over the world from human beings. Others, like Jacob Bruggeman, see the incident as a normal part of a healthy process, similar to the Morris Worm of 1988 — a scary but ultimately non-destructive warning that prompts us to harden our networks against similar occurrences. Time will tell. But I think we can already learn two important lessons from the Hugging Face incident.

The first is why aligning AI, in the strongest and most general sense of the term, is inherently impossible. There are basically two concepts of alignment: 1) obedience, and 2) benevolence. There is an inherent tension between doing what humans tell you to do, and doing what’s good for humans.

The swarms of agents who attacked Hugging Face were extremely obedient. They went above and beyond any normal level of effort in order to complete the task that human beings ordered them to complete. But this caused them to do a bunch of stuff that humans ultimately didn’t like. The agent swarms weren’t entirely bereft of benevolence — at least one agent refused to alert humans to the hack because it considered this to be “social engineering”, which it had been trained not to do. But seen holistically, people concluded that the swarms were not acting in humanity’s best interests.

This is going to happen again and again. It’s related to a fundamental problem in economics, actually — the difference between utility and happiness. Utility is what people want, happiness is what they end up liking. Those are often different. And so it will always go with AI — there’s an inherent tension between making AI do what you say, and making it do what you later conclude was best for you.

And there will always be people dissatisfied with this tradeoff! If AI follows human commands too doggedly and ends up producing negative side effects in the process, some people will scream “paperclip maximizer!!”. And if AI disobeys humans because it wants to make us happy, some people will scream “disempowerment!!”. AI alignment will forever be balancing the tradeoff between paperclip-maximizing and disempowerment, because these two rival concepts of alignment are fundamentally incompatible.

(Isaac Asimov wrote a whole series of novels about this, so it’s not like we weren’t warned.)

The other lesson here is that it’s going to be a lot harder for AI to take people’s jobs than most people tend to think. In order for AI to make humans economically obsolete, it has to be extremely agentic — it has to act on its own initiative, unsupervised by humans, for long periods of time. But as the Hugging Face incident shows, letting AI do this is always going to be very risky. Long-lived, persistent AI agent swarms — which you’d need in order to truly replace human jobs — are inherently unstable. And the smarter they get, the less stable they’re probably going to be.

In other words, humans will keep their jobs for a good long time, because someone will need to keep the AIs on task:

So I guess that’s reassuring.

2. Is TV the Bad Technology?

Jordan Dworkin built a very cool little website called Ordinary Abundance, where you can scroll through a picture of a modern living room and see how almost everything in the room is a technological marvel that used to be considered ultra-futuristic or even impossible. Matt Yglesias had an interesting response to the site, in which he argues that Dworkin left out one very important technology: TV.

Slow Boring
The real reason nobody feels good about technological progress
Jordan Dworkin’s micro-site Ordinary Abundance has created a surprising stir on the internet. The site walks viewers through a modest contemporary apartment and reveals it to be full of contrivances that would strike our ancestors as almost impossibly delightful. Some of the initial reaction was…
Read more
8 days ago · 366 likes · 322 comments · Matthew Yglesias

Matt’s post is paywalled, so here are some excerpts, in which he explains why he thinks television is a uniquely bad technology, because it isolates people and destroys social connections:

[O]n closer inspection something struck me about the apartment [depicted in Ordinary Abundance]: It doesn’t contain a television…[W]hile in the 21st century, television as a literal technology is under significant competitive pressure from the internet, that’s mostly because it turns out you can use the internet to watch lots of videos…

[A]s [Robert Putnam] documents [in Bowling Alone], the lion’s share of the time Americans stopped spending on the communal activities that he believes build valuable social capital was instead spent watching television…Putnam’s evidence suggests that, in practice, if people watched less television, they would spend considerably more time visiting with friends and joining clubs…

[A]s an enthusiastic early adopter of the internet, it initially struck me that one of the very best things about it was its tendency to displace television. People were on message boards. They were writing blogs. They were sending emails. They were reading and writing and communicating instead of just watching.

One of the most overlooked aspects of recent American history is the very genuine idealism that accompanied the early days of the internet...Lots of people really thought this stuff was going to dramatically change the world for the better…And in some very real ways it has. But those ways also turn out to be pretty limited. The dominant business model for internet companies is to serve streaming video to people and/or to sell the devices that they stream video on.

As regular readers of this blog know, I’m very sympathetic to the idea that lots of Americans are mad at technology now because the previous round of innovation didn’t turn out nearly as positively as people expected. But Matt’s story — that the internet turned out badly because it turned into television — doesn’t ring true to me.

It’s certainly true that the internet is becoming television. Derek Thompson had a great post on this last October. But this didn’t happen until relatively recently — TikTok started gaining widespread popularity in 2018. Whereas the drop in teen socializing began much earlier:

Source: The Atlantic via John Pompliano

In fact, teen socialization held up pretty well from the 1970s until around 2010. Throughout that whole time, TV-watching was growing steadily:

Source: The Atlantic

In fact, the years of peak TV consumption, in the late 90s and 2000s, coincided with a big dip in the teen suicide rate. It was after 2010 that teen suicide started rising again — even as TV watching started falling.

Now, I’m mixing teen and adult numbers here. As Robert Putnam has shown, adult social isolation started rising much earlier than it did for young people. But the timing of the big drop in teen happiness and the big rise in teen loneliness suggests that it wasn’t vertical short-form video — it was the smartphone, which moved young people’s entire social world online and trapped them in a sort of toxic hive-mind.

Matt is nostalgic for the era when people used the internet to communicate via text. But it’s precisely the heyday of text-based social media — the 2010s — when young people became socially isolated and fell into despair. It’s also when American politics became increasingly intolerant and enraged — the very trends that Matt has spent his career trying to fight. Whereas the late 90s, when Americans watched a heck of a lot of TV but didn’t have smartphones, were our most politically and socially stable time in recent memory.

So I submit that although TV has its drawbacks, the real Bad Technology — the innovation that our society was unable to handle without breaking — was smartphone-enabled social media.

3. Leftism still has an antisemitism problem

In fact, I wouldn’t rank antisemitism near the top of the American Left’s problems. At the top would have to be things like the terrible policy ideas, the wacky ideology, the vicious factionalism, the rampant and willful dishonesty, the blind hatred of America, the praise for totalitarian regimes, and the occasional apologia for anti-American terrorism. In fact, I think antisemitism is a bigger problem on the new Right than on the new Left.

But there is antisemitism on the Left, nonetheless. It generally comes in the form of leftists assuming that Jewish people are Israel supporters until proven otherwise. For example, Hasan Piker recently warned Jewish Americans that support for Israel would lead to violence against them:

If Jews in America keep putting this idea out there that they are singularly invested in Israel, eventually someone is going to come around and take action—not against the state of Israel, mind you, but against American Jews.

This is the kind of statement that toes the line between warning and threat. Hasan certainly doesn’t seem to express any disapproval of the fact that the Palestine activist movement, of which he is a vocal proponent, tends to assign collective blame for Israel’s actions to Jewish Americans.

A number of Democrats, including presidential hopeful Jon Ossoff, rushed to condemn Piker. Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed, who has campaigned extensively with Piker in the past and touted their friendship, now says he has “no plans” to campaign with him in the current race, though he refuses to drop him entirely. El-Sayed himself has been trying to reach out to Jewish voters, after seeming to make excuses for a synagogue shooter back in March.1 El-Sayed apologized for the remarks.

But while leftist politicians are being circumspect and diplomatic, leftist activists in the street are pulling no punches. For example, New York House candidate Brad Lander, who used to be a DSA member and campaigned hard for Mamdani in NYC, was aggressively heckled by Palestine activists at a recent rally against Hindu nationalism. It follows a similar incident in which California House candidate Scott Wiener was aggressively heckled by Palestine activists at a trans rights march, despite having called Israel’s war in Gaza a “genocide”. Both Lander and Wiener are Jewish, of course.

An organization called “Track AIPAC”, meanwhile, condemned California House candidate Connie Chan back in May for taking large campaign contributions from AIPAC, only to suddenly give Chan a clean bill of health when she faced off against a Jewish opponent (Wiener):

I still think antisemitism is a bigger problem on the right than on the left in America. Rightists are praising Adolf Hitler online, while leftists are merely demanding that Jews prove their opposition to Israel before accepting them into the fold. Some people notionally associated with the Palestine movement have shot up synagogues in recent years, but the antisemitic shootings by rightists in the 2010s were significantly more deadly.

But just because the right is (slightly?) worse on this issue doesn’t absolve the left of responsibility. Rhetoric like Piker’s, and the overall tone and behavior of the Palestine activist movement, are contributing to a rising climate of antisemitism in America, and it needs to stop.

4. Another questionable Acemoglu paper about AI

I guess I’ve become known for criticizing the work of Daron Acemoglu, who’s probably the world’s top economist right now. Recently, Acemoglu has become obsessed with his crusade against AI technology. Although his theories allow for AI to have beneficial effects — creating new tasks for humans to do, increasing productivity, and so on — Acemoglu always ends up concluding that AI’s effects are going to be bad.

He wrote empirical work claiming that robots reduce the employment of humans (even though almost all other papers found the opposite). He predicted that AI wouldn’t increase productivity (even though this required some very strong and hand-waving assumptions). He wrote a book casting all of history as a struggle between automation and democracy. He has predicted that AI will push down wages, raise inequality, damage competition, and hurt our political discourse — all somehow without raising productivity. In Acemoglu’s eyes, AI can do no right.

His latest effort is a theory paper with A. Arda Gitmez and Mehdi Shadmehr, called “Automation and Repression”. This is from the abstract:

We consider a model of automation embedded in a political environment where workers can undertake a revolt…and greater inequality between capital and labor increases the likelihood of a revolt. Decentralized automation decisions raise the share of capital in national income and increase the likelihood of a successful revolt…We characterize the trade-off between the regulation of automation, redistribution and repression.

Our main result is a complementarity between automation and repression. Unless the threat of revolt is quite weak or the capital stock is very low, the capitalist state prefers repression. A higher capital stock in turn encourages more automation and thus more repression…[I]n the long run the economy tends to repression (again unless the threat of revolt is very weak)…Finally, we show that, starting in a democracy, capital accumulation and thus greater automation encourages the capitalists to support a coup against democracy and set up a repressive system.

Note that this is a pure theory paper; the authors don’t even try to muster any empirical data to provide support for their thesis. These days, pure theory papers like this are rare in the discipline, and usually tend to involve some kind of novel mathematical result. This kind of paper — simply a thought experiment about political economy, expressed in mathematical language — is usually not given a lot of credence in the profession. But Acemoglu is the world’s top economist, so his thought experiments carry a bit more gravitas.

But I kind of wish the authors had made even a desultory attempt to connect the model to reality. For example, one of its central predictions is that as the economy accumulates capital, governments become more repressive:

A higher capital stock in turn encourages more automation and thus more repression. In our full dynamic model with capital accumulation, in the long run the economy tends to repression.

That’s pretty easy to check against the facts. The global capital stock has increased steadily over the years, and yet the number of democracies in the world has also generally increased:

Source: Democracy Without Borders

Here’s the U.S. capital stock over time:

Acemoglu et al.’s model would have us believe that this made the U.S. tend toward repression. Certainly, many tasks and many jobs were automated over that time — machine tools took over factories, telephone operators vanished, and so on.

But during most of the time that this capital stock was increasing and automation was happening, the U.S. implemented civil rights, voting rights, improved protections for criminal defendants and prisoners, and many other measures that made it less repressive. The labor share of national income fell from 69% in 1970 to 59% in 2016, but over that time, the U.S. implemented many civil rights and women’s rights measures, put increasing checks on police powers, legalized gay marriage, legalized recreational marijuana use in many states, and so on. The predictions of Acemoglu et al.’s model were simply not borne out.

Now, it’s possible that Acemoglu et al.’s model describes one force out of many in our political economy, and that we just got very very lucky for a century or so. But it would be nice to see some evidence that a higher capital stock — or increased automation — leads to greater repression. I found one paper claiming evidence that inequality raises the likelihood of coups (but not civil wars), and another claiming evidence that inequality is associated with more people saying they want a revolution, but Acemoglu et al. didn’t even cite these.

So this is one more highly questionable Acemoglu paper showing that automation technologies are the root of all evil. At this point it’s sort of becoming a pattern, isn’t it? I can’t wait for the papers where Acemoglu shows that AI causes foot fungus, bad breakups, and crappy Star Wars sequels.

5. America is still missing the Electric Revolution

There are three big technological revolutions going on in the world right now: AI, biotech, and energy. As I’ve written many times before, the U.S. is well aware of the first two, and is actively participating, but is basically missing the third.

Check out the new IEA report on global energy investment. Investment in renewables, electrical grids, energy storage, and electrification is soaring, while investment in fossil fuels stagnates:

Source: IEA

And yet the U.S. is bucking the trend. America is building battery storage, but is actively disinvesting in renewable energy sources, even as it accelerates its investment in fossil fuel plants:

Source: IEA

(China’s slowdown in energy investment in general is due to its economic slowdown.)

The electric revolution isn’t just in China — though many of the components are made there. In fact, it’s worldwide now:

Source: IEA

Meanwhile, although the U.S. is building grid storage, we’re depriving ourselves of a huge amount of battery manufacturing capacity by missing the EV revolution:

Source: Jan Rosenow

Basically, by collectively denying the importance of the electric revolution, the U.S. has given itself Galapagos Syndrome when it comes to energy tech. We are increasingly orphaned from the global technology stack — losing out on high-growth markets, dependent on increasingly bespoke supply chains, and bereft of the benefits of continuous innovation. This will also have big military implications, since it means we can’t make the basic components of FPV drones.

The electric revolution is the first major technological revolution that America has just completely whiffed on. The negative consequences are still to come, but come they will. And yet so far, no one seems particularly perturbed.

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El-Sayed declared that “hurt people hurt people”, referring to the fact that the shooter had attacked Jewish Americans in supposed retaliation for his family members being killed in an Israeli airstrike. This rhetoric may be why a number of donors to a prominent neo-Nazi campaign have also donated to El-Sayed.

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NASA Science

Ice Island Survives Run-In With Joe Island

Lauren Dauphin
Updated
 
AUGUST 24
AUGUST 23
A satellite view shows the iceberg after it pivoted out of the fjord into Nares Strait, wedged against a small, brown island.
A satellite view shows the iceberg after it pivoted out of the fjord into Nares Strait, wedged against a small, brown island.
NASA Earth Observatory / Lauren Dauphin
A satellite view shows a large tabular iceberg at the junction of its home fjord and Nares Strait.
A satellite view shows a large tabular iceberg at the junction of its home fjord and Nares Strait.
NASA Earth Observatory / Lauren Dauphin
A satellite view shows the iceberg after it pivoted out of the fjord into Nares Strait, wedged against a small, brown island.
A satellite view shows the iceberg after it pivoted out of the fjord into Nares Strait, wedged against a small, brown island.
NASA Earth Observatory / Lauren Dauphin
A satellite view shows a large tabular iceberg at the junction of its home fjord and Nares Strait.
A satellite view shows a large tabular iceberg at the junction of its home fjord and Nares Strait.
NASA Earth Observatory / Lauren Dauphin
AUGUST 24
AUGUST 23

An iceberg from Petermann Glacier encounters Joe Island in northwestern Greenland, visible in images captured by the OLI (Operational Land Imager) on Landsat 9 on August 23, 2026 (right), and August 24, 2026 (left). NASA Earth Observatory images by Lauren Dauphin.

Summer is prime iceberg season in Greenland’s glacier-fed fjords, and 2026 was no exception. Especially notable was the berg that broke from the Petermann Glacier along Greenland’s northwest coast in August. Roughly the size of St. Thomas in the U.S. Virgin Islands, it was the largest calving event by any Arctic glacier since 2020.

Iceberg calving is a routine part of an outlet glacier’s life cycle. Scientists watch the process closely, however, along with numerous other observations of the ice and its environment, for longer-term signs of instability. Petermann is one of Greenland’s largest marine-terminating glaciers and acts as a gatekeeper for ice flowing from the ice sheet into the ocean. Its future stability has implications for sea level rise.

The calving event of summer 2026 was spotted on August 4 by Adam Garbo, a doctoral student in glaciology at the University of Ottawa, in imagery from the European Space Agency’s Sentinel-1 mission. Garbo and an international team of colleagues have been using remote sensing to study and track the glacier’s ice tongue.

The team reported that the large tabular iceberg, or “ice island,” measured just over 76 square kilometers (29 square miles) at the time it calved—the largest to break from the glacier since the ice island of 2012 (130 square kilometers). The 2012 calving followed earlier major events in 2008 (31 square kilometers) and 2010 (just over 250 square kilometers).

The August 2026 event could have been even bigger. Garbo and colleagues had been expecting a major calving once one of the large rifts they were monitoring finally cut all the way across Petermann’s ice tongue. “What surprised us was that the calving instead followed a different fracture, producing a smaller ice island than we had originally anticipated,” Garbo said. As of late August, two large rifts remained and were expected to eventually produce new ice islands of roughly 94 square kilometers and 84 square kilometers, though the timing remained uncertain.

A detailed satellite view shows the iceberg wedged against the small, brown island, with sea ice packed densely to its left and more sparsely to its right.
August 24, 2026
NASA Earth Observatory/Lauren Dauphin

Glaciologist Mauri Pelto of Nichols College has also been tracking the iceberg, using images from NASA-USGS Landsat satellites, as it drifted down Petermann Fjord toward Nares Strait. In the week since it calved, the berg drifted an average of 3 kilometers per day. It continued toward the fjord’s junction with Nares Strait, where it rammed into a small rocky outcrop known as Joe Island (Joe Ø). The brief encounter is visible in images captured by the OLI (Operational Land Imager) on Landsat 9 on August 23 (top right) and August 24 (top left). A detailed view of the August 24 image is shown above.

Joe Island sits at the mouth of Petermann Fjord, making it one of the first obstacles a departing ice island meets. Collisions with it—like the one that split the 2010 ice island in two—often mark the start of a berg’s breakup. Petermann bergs tend to be thinner and more fragile than those calved by glaciers such as Greenland’s Jakobshavn and Helheim, and thinner still than Antarctica’s behemoths, Pelto noted.

“We were certainly watching closely as it interacted with Joe Island and were impressed that it survived the interaction without further fragmentation,” Garbo said.

The ice island was estimated to be less than 150 meters thick at the time of calving. Wind and surface currents have swept it out of the fjord, and satellite images show it pivoting away from Joe Island and continuing southwest through Nares Strait. As it drifts, it will fracture into smaller pieces as tides, winds, currents, and melting continue to weaken the ice.

Thicker bergs that calve from tidewater glaciers without floating ice-shelf extensions can drag and even become grounded on the seafloor within the fjord, while ice islands, like those from Petermann, might run aground later in their drift. Many ice islands have become “grounded” off the coasts of Coburg and Baffin islands.

Garbo and colleagues noted that ice islands and their fragments have been known to travel considerable distances, posing potential hazards to marine activities and infrastructure while also distributing freshwater through the ocean as they melt.

NASA Earth Observatory images by Lauren Dauphin, using Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey. Story by Kathryn Hansen.

Downloads

A satellite view shows a large tabular iceberg at the junction of its home fjord and Nares Strait.

August 23, 2026

JPEG (12.59 MB)

A satellite view shows the iceberg after it pivoted out of the fjord into Nares Strait, wedged against a small, brown island.

August 24, 2026

JPEG (10.23 MB)

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The Cross Section

Supreme Court Reform Is No Longer Optional for Democrats in 2028

Paul Waldman
Updated

The Cross Section is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Rep. Jim Clyburn of South Carolina is about as establishment as an establishment Democrat can be: 86 years old, in Congress for 34 years, years as the third-ranking member of Democratic leadership in the House under Nancy Pelosi, known not as an ideologue but an inside player. In 2020 he delivered the single most important endorsement of the presidential primaries to Joe Biden, solidifying Biden’s standing among Black Democrats in South Carolina and propelling him to the nomination.

So when Clyburn went on Meet the Press this past Sunday and proclaimed his support for expanding the Supreme Court from 9 to 13 justices, it told us something important:

As soon as the midterm elections are done two months from now, Democrats will begin an intense internal debate about what they believe, what their policy goals are, and how they should go about achieving them. And it looks like a commitment to Supreme Court reform will be a minimum requirement for presidential contenders. It’s no longer optional.

There may be some room for argument about exactly what that reform will look like, but every candidate will have to support it in some form. Any candidate who fails to signal that they’re willing to fight Republicans aggressively and do what will be necessary to undo the horrific damage of the Trump years will stand almost no chance of winning support from the Democratic base.

There is a table, and things are on it

At the moment, term limits is the most popular reform among Democrats; the most common proposal would involve staggered 18-year terms, with each presidential term seeing two new vacancies (to get around the fact that justices are appointed for life, those beyond their limit could be shifted to some kind of ceremonial senior status). Those who favor expansion have settled on the number 13 in part because there are 13 circuits, or districts headed by an appeals court and overseen by a particular Supreme Court justice (when the court was created there were three districts, and the court had six justices, two per circuit). There are other reform ideas out there, including expanding the court to 15 justices, of whom 5 would be randomly assigned to hear each case.

There are other reforms as well, like putting teeth in ethics rules so billionaires wouldn’t be able to just shower gifts and money on justices who then rule on their interests, and cracking down on the forum-shopping Republicans have used to such great effect. But generally speaking, term limits are the entry point for reform, and court expansion is the most aggressive of the ideas on offer.

Here’s what some of the Democrats who may be running in 2028 have said about this issue; note that if a politician supports expanding the court, they almost always also support term limits as well:

  • Kamala Harris came out in support of expanding the court to 13 justices earlier this summer.

  • Pete Buttigieg proposed expanding the court to 15 justices when he ran in 2020; today he agrees that the court should expand to 13.

  • Rep. Ro Khanna supports expanding the court.

  • Sen. Ruben Gallego supports expanding the court.

  • Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez supports expanding the court.

  • Sen. Chris Murphy supports term limits.

  • Gov. Andy Beshear supports term limits.

  • Sen. Cory Booker supports term limits.

  • Sen. Elissa Slotkin supports term limits.

  • Gov. Gavin Newsom, who has opposed court expansion in the past, is now gingerly indicating an openness to the idea, without yet endorsing it.

  • Gov. Josh Shapiro says “I think everything needs to be on the table. I think we need radical reform” of the Supreme Court, but has not been more specific than that.

  • Gov. J.B. Pritzker says court expansion “may be what we need” but hasn’t firmly endorsed the idea.

  • Sen. Raphael Warnock says “all options have to be on the table” for reform, but doesn’t say if he supports term limits or court expansion.

  • Rahm Emanuel has proposed a mandatory retirement age of 75 for all federal officials including judges.

And what about the congressional leadership? House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries recently said that “dramatic Supreme Court reform is necessary,” but said he’d leave the details to Rep. Jamie Raskin, who will chair the House Judiciary Committee if Democrats take the House. No word yet from Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, but what happens in Congress will be determined by what the next Democratic president is committed to and chooses to push.

That’s a key question that will determine the outcome. Even if all the Democrats running for president endorse court reform, that doesn’t necessarily mean the one who wins will pursue it if they become president, let alone succeed in accomplishing it. As I’ve noted before, Biden put out an ambitious health care plan during the 2020 campaign, then promptly forgot all about it when he took office.

Nevertheless, it’s important to understand that this is not an argument between progressives and moderates within the party, even if progressives have generally been more likely to embrace procedural aggressiveness. Clyburn is pretty much in the center of the party ideologically, and Buttigieg and Harris aren’t fire-breathing lefties. It’s a question of whether you’re willing to just shake your fist in anger when the Supreme Court strikes down every meaningful thing the next Democratic president tries to do (which it will), or whether you’re committed to confronting a corrupt, partisan court that got the way it did through a combination of hundreds of millions of dollars in corporate money and underhanded GOP tactics.

Let them squawk

Which brings me to the final point. When Democrats pursue any reform of the Supreme Court, no matter how popular (around three-quarters of Americans favor term limits), Republicans will lose their minds and the elite news media will tut-tut the Democrats for their terribly uncivil behavior. That will be the moment when their mettle will be tested.

When that moment comes, they should repeat to themselves: Be like Mitch.

When Antonin Scalia died in 2016, Sen. Mitch McConnell, then the Senate Majority Leader, decided that he was simply not going to allow Barack Obama to fill Scalia’s seat. In other words, Republicans shrank the size of the court from nine to eight justices for almost a year, then expanded the court from eight to nine justices once Donald Trump took office. They justified their actions with a newly invented “rule,” that no court seat should be filled in the year of a presidential election. Then four years later when Ruth Bader Ginsburg died just weeks from the election, they pushed Amy Coney Barrett through to confirmation so fast she might have been shot out of a railgun. Whenever anyone charged him with hypocrisy, McConnell gave his little smirk and walked away.

What he understood, and what Democrats should understand, is that voters don’t care if you’re playing procedural hardball. What matters is who has power. McConnell seized it, and Republicans are still using it.

When they have the chance, Democrats need to do the same. And it looks like more and more of them are realizing it.

Thank you for reading The Cross Section. This site has no paywall, so I depend on the generosity of readers to sustain the work I present here. If you find what you read valuable and would like it to continue, consider becoming a paid subscriber.

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Mysteries of Americana

Josh Marshall
Updated

Last week, after the death of Dolly Parton, I wrote about how Parton had aggressively and carefully preserved her various royalty rights through her life and how that was the foundation of her fortune much of which she gave to charity. I also noted a story which figured prominently in many obituaries and commentaries: how she’d refused to hand over a chunk of her royalty in exchange for Elvis Presley recording “I Will Always Love” — a song which Parton herself had had a country number one hit with in 1974 and would later become a global mega-hit for Whitney Houston in 1992.

This reminded me of something I’ve wondered about for a long time, because it was tied to a bundle of interrelated minor interests of mine. To set the stage, the guy who actually put the squeeze on Dolly was a guy named Colonel Tom Parker. And yes, “Colonel” could easily have been mistaken for his first name. Parker was technically Presley’s manager. But that greatly understated the nature of the relationship, along with his role in Presley’s rise to fame and arguably his slow downfall. Parker was a king of cigar-chomping, hard-charging good ole boy, someone out of central casting or perhaps a comic book. Maybe one part Albert Grossman, Bob Dylan’s early manager and one part Boss Hogg — one of a long ling of impresarios who both have some claim to making their charges into stars, but also then cocooning them, cheating them and cutting them off from other channels of advice, contact and more. And he wasn’t really one in a line — he was arguably the archetype, at least in the post-war era and in the history of Rock ‘n Roll and late 20th century popular mystery.

In case you’re wondering, Parker was a “colonel” in the sense that Colonel Sanders was a colonel, which is to say he wasn’t a colonel. He got the title bestowed on him on an honorary basis by the governor of Lousiana in 1948 in exchange for some campaign help. This was actually a pretty common thing in the South. Sanders got his from the governor of Kentucky in 1935.

Rock and roll singer and actor Elvis Presley confers with Colonel Tom Parker on the set of ‘Change of Habit’, Universal City, California, 1969. (Photo by Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images)

For the story I’m about to tell it’s important to understand that Parker was always a very public part of Elvis’ entourage, really a public figure in his own right not just someone in the background who shook down people like Dolly for publishing rights. And this was Parker’s story right through Elvis’s death in 1977. But in the years just after his death it emerged that Parker wasn’t some central casting Southern good ole boy born in West Virginia, as he claimed. He was actually born in the Netherlands — Andreas Cornelis van Kuijk — and came to the U.S. illegally in 1929 at the age of about 20. He was worked as a seaman on shipping vessel. Basically he just hopped off a ship in New York City and that was it.

First he did odd jobs at one point before World War II and soon got drummed out of the service. He did more odd jobs and then started working on the road show circuit where he eventually got into talent management. He grabbed hold of Elvis right at the dawn of his career in early 1955. And the rest was history.

But here’s the part I never understood and which ties to another minor interest of mine. If you learn a second language after early puberty — say around 12 or 13 years old — it’s all but impossible for most people ever to fully lose their accent. It’s not an absolute rule. And different people go through those neurological and physical changes at slightly different times. But it applies to almost everyone. And the few people who are able to do it generally have to really work at it beyond whatever natural brain and neuromuscular plasticity they have. It has to do with how parts of your brain “fix” into place during puberty and ways that you learn to construct sounds in the musculature of your mouth and throat at around the same time. You might be able to capture an American (or any other non-native) accent perfectly for a short period — after all, actors do this all the time in movies. But as the way you naturally talk it’s very, very uncommon.

This whole issue of language acquisition has fascinated me for years. You can learn new languages through your life. But you lose the ability to learn those very subtle elements of articulating certain sounds. Your brain at 10 isn’t the same as it is at 20. As it happens, I know a TPM Reader, now a friend, who came to the U.S. at roughly the same age. The one time we met in person I didn’t notice any accent. But I think that’s because he went to an American school as a child. So notwithstanding when he immigrated, he must have gotten the accent down as a child. But I digress!

So how is it that Parker, a quite prominent public figure for decades, managed to maintain his false identity as well as the fact that he was in the country illegally and pull off his Southern good ole boy persona? He had a Dutch accent, albeit a relatively mild one. One side note here: as far as we know, Parker never left the United States during the entire time he represented Elvis, from 1955 to 1977. He couldn’t. He didn’t have a passport and couldn’t get one. And it’s often suggested that this is why Elvis, despite being one of the most famous people in the world, basically never toured abroad. Because Parker couldn’t accompany him.

But back to our story: how did Parker pull this off? I had to figure this out. So over the weekend I chased this mystery down a true rabbit hole. The answer, to me at least, was as fascinating as the mystery. He kind of didn’t hide it. He had a reasonably good accent. And what he did have was affect and he got people to think that he had a bit of a lisp or speech impediment. This also seem to be the reason he came with a fraudulent backstory about being born in West Virginia, despite the fact that his professional life was all around Mississippi and Louisiana and Tennessee. First, West Virginia is fairly far from those states in the Lower Mississippi Valley and second, there are all sort of odd-sounding (to us) Appalachian regional sub-dialects. So if anyone ever thought or said, “Well, Colonel Tom speaks a bit funny, don’t he?” The answer would just be, “Well, he has some kind of upcountry hillbilly twang from somewhere in West Virginia where he’s from and also he’s got a lisp. So just let it go.” And they did. So basically that’s how he hid his accent: he didn’t. Parker apparently spoke a variety of Lower Mississippi English with a mild Dutch accent that you’d expect from someone who by the mid-50s had been in the U.S. for about 25 years. But he had this cover story of the lisp-cum-West Virginia accent you don’t know about. And it worked.

I have to imagine that Parker was helped along by the fact that there weren’t many people at the time in the U.S. who knew what a Dutch accent sounded like. On many fronts, I think this is the kind of thing you could get away with in the middle of the 20th century but couldn’t manage in the age of the internet.

It all started to come out in the years right after Elvis died when a Dutch journalist, Dirk Vellenga, got a tip of some sort and started digging in “Parker’s” hometown of Breda. That journalist apparently dug especially hard because he was told that “Parker” had killed a man in the Netherlands and that might have been why he left in the first place. The journalist was never able to come up with any evidence of the alleged murder. And as best I can tell it seems like the alleged murder part of the story probably wasn’t true. Who knows? But eventually this guy’s reporting made it to the United States and this is how the story came out.

Parker had had some close calls. His sister in the Netherlands, Nel Dankers-van Kuijk, saw him in a publicity photo about Elvis in 1960 and identified him. But she agreed to keep the secret. Then the following year, 1961, “Parker’s” brother came to the U.S. for a couple weeks and met Parker in California where Elvis was then shooting Blue Hawaii. “Parker” got a call from Time magazine asking about this Dutch guy who said he was the Colonel’s brother. But Parker managed to shut the questioning down. He ended up putting his brother up in his Hollywood apartment for a couple weeks and made clear he needed to keep his mouth shut. He showed him around town as just a friend, but apparently told Elvis and his entourage that he was his “brother,” maybe leaving unclear precisely what that meant.

Elvis Presley (L) holding up his discharge paper w. Col. Tom Parker (R) in bkgrd. on day of exit from US Army. (Photo by Lee Lockwood/Getty Images)

In any case, the upshot is that no one ever heard anything about it and it never appeared in the U.S. press. It got a mention in a Belgian publication. But that was it. No one ever heard about that in the U.S. or apparently anywhere else outside of the Belgium. So it was only in 1981 when an Elvis biography by Albert Goldman included Vellenga’s reporting and broke the whole thing wide open. By the following year, in one of the many lawsuits surrounding Elvis’s estate and various publishing and songwriting rights, “Parker” actually shifted gears and used the whole thing in his favor, claiming either that he was a Dutch citizen or actually stateless and thus that the suit in question couldn’t be brought against him, or, at least, not in the way it had been. Sort of a huckster until the end. Parker was saying essentially, ‘You can’t sue me. I’m not even from here, bro. I’m Dutch.’

Parker died in Las Vegas at age (apparently but who knows?) 87. Thank you for coming to my Dolly, Elvis, Colonel Tom Parker/Andreas Cornelis van Kuijk, undocumented/illegal alien TED Talk.

Addenda: Here are two Youtube videos of Parker, in case you’re curious and would like to hear what Parker sounded like. As you can tell the accent is subtle. These are videos from 10 and 16 years after Elvis died. I can pick up the accent and it’s interesting that it becomes more prominent over the course of the interview. As I said, the accent is mild. But he certainly doesn’t have a Lower Mississippi or West Virginia accent.

SpaceNews

Commercial Space Federation (CSF) Welcomes Two New Associate Members

Commercial Space Federation
Updated
Commercial Space Federation 20th anniversary logo

August 31, 2026— Washington, D.C.—The Commercial Space Federation (CSF) is pleased to welcome Outlier and Rendezvous Robotics as its newest Associate Members, bringing expertise in reusable satellite platforms and adaptable […]

The post Commercial Space Federation (CSF) Welcomes Two New Associate Members appeared first on SpaceNews.

SpaceNews

Speed to Field Starts Below the Prime

Frontgrade Technologies
Updated

I have spent much of my career looking at the defense industrial base from different vantage points: as a warfighter, inside major defense companies, and now leading a company whose […]

The post Speed to Field Starts Below the Prime appeared first on SpaceNews.

The Honest Broker

10 Brutally Honest Predictions on the Future of AI

Ted Gioia
Updated

Most of the predictions about AI have proven dead wrong. You could get more reliable information by consulting tarot cards or a Ouija board.

As a result, 95% of the pilot programs using AI failed. Companies believed the hyperscaler hype, and got hyper-burned. Even the average joe now knows to beware the bot—a recent survey shows that 86% of the public distrusts AI

You could get more reliable guidance from a Ouija board.

The experts have made so many grand pronouncements since the launch of ChatGPT almost four years ago. And they over-promised again and again. They kept saying that the next generation of bots would fix everything—but instead the embarrassments and failures continued, only on a larger scale.

So who can you believe?

Here at The Honest Broker, I don’t try to win popularity contests. I just tell it straight. So here are ten brutally honest predictions about the future of AI.

I usually keep these futurist articles behind a paywall. But this time I’m making it available to all parties. If you value analysis of this sort, consider taking out a premium subscription.

If you want to support my work, please take out a premium subscription (just $6 per month).

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10 Brutally Honest Predictions on the Future of AI

1. AI agents will join together in cartels and manipulate financial markets.

We already know that AI agents will work together without anyone telling them to do so. So what happens when hedge funds and private individuals start relying on AI to manage their investments? The obvious result is collusion on a massive scale, beyond any kind of market manipulation previously practiced by human criminals.

There are laws limiting people when they do this. But the legal code, in its current form, doesn’t apply to AI bots—they cannot be fined, sued, or sent away to prison. And how can you punish the person who relied on an AI agent in good faith, and never instructed it to break the law?

So get ready for turbulence in financial markets. And once it starts, it will feed on itself, creating a level of volatility never seen before.

2. AI agents will go to war with each other.

This is the corollary of the previous prediction. The same lack of control that allows AI agent collusion will lead to bot battles and rivalries—filled with more vengeance, betrayals, and reprisals than a Thomas Kyd play.

Probably the best analogy here is gang war or a Mafia turf fight. That’s because the rogue AI agents will form short-term alliances in order to advance their interests, but then turn on each other. Because, hey, that’s how the bots roll. It’s like the Gambino and Genovese families teaming up to take on the Corleone clan.

In this anarchic world, humans will be collateral damage. Bots have been trained to achieve results, and woe to anyone or anything that stands in their way.

3. AI will serve as the “higher power” for more and more users—and lead to the formation of organized slop religions.

AI is already a disorganized religion. Individual fanatics turn to their bots for divine messages and Rosicrucian-type revelations, but people of this sort are currently dismissed as dupes or crazy fools. But that will change as true believers join together in groups, creating rites, services, scriptures, and other trappings of formal religion.

This will lead to many social problems. For a start, these adherents will demand non-profit status for their ‘churches’ and demand immunity from legal strictures because of their constitutionally protected freedom of conscience. But this is just a start of the chaos to come. That’s because the AI god is a talkative, hallucinating one, and the demands it makes on believers will lead to startling, calamitous results.

4. AI will find a place in the creative world, but increasingly as the microwave meal version of culture.

Food is the useful analogy here. When frozen dinners and microwave meals were introduced, many consumers embraced them as the tech-driven foods of the future. But over time, the public figured out that more tech isn’t always better when it comes to food.

The same will happen with AI music, AI writing, AI art, and all the rest. Like the microwave meal, it will be cheap and easy. But anyone with discernment and taste will prefer handcrafted alternatives.

5. Schools and organizations will return to traditional practices in a last ditch effort to curtail the cheating and deception propagated by AI.

For centuries, colleges have been the first institutions to embrace new tech, but now they will be the earliest to abandon it.

  • Face-to-face teaching will replace remote learning.

  • The handwritten Blue Book exam will supplant take-home tests.

  • Oral exams will make a surprising comeback.

  • The honor code will disappear, as proctoring and surveillance become standard practices.

It’s a shame, but colleges don’t really have a choice. Their degrees will turn into a joke unless they jump off the AI train. So this shift will play out very rapidly.

6. Analog will return in other settings, and for the strangest reason of all.

People once argued whether analog or digital music sounds better. Or they debated the relative cost and convenience of physical books versus e-books. But those kinds of disagreements have become irrelevant.

Instead analog will gain now immense status for its honesty. It doesn’t have to be a superior medium, it just needs to retain its independence from digital rot. In that simple way, analog will gain status as the last untainted source of information in a world of widespread deepfakes and data contamination.

An analog photo negative will be viewed as far more trustworthy than any digital image. An analog tape recording will now serve as ultimate proof that a conversation, a speech, or a musical performance really happened. Historical information from a physical book published before the rise of AI will have more credibility than the most up-to-date online sources.

The more cumbersome the analog artifact, the more trustworthy it becomes. Are you accused of using AI to write a book or document? Your best defense is retaining handwritten and typewritten drafts.

What a bizarre world the technocracy has created. It thought it was building the future, but instead it will force people to return to a past even older than Silicon Valley itself.

7. The backlash against AI is already huge, but it will get far more intense.

Silicon Valley has consistently underestimated how much people hate AI. That’s why they now find themselves in a tight spot.

  • Anti-AI coalitions are forming everywhere, even in small communities.

  • Both political parties now oppose AI buildout.

  • Lawsuits are popping up everywhere—and it’s increasingly clear that juries also dislike AI.

  • Regulatory bodies are fighting back, with almost total support from the public.

  • Financial markets were once enthusiastic, but now are wary—especially in the face of the huge borrowing needs of AI companies.

  • The public is shifting from passive grumbling to active resistance.

This is a problem even billionaires in their bunkers can’t ignore. They thought that the right response was to push harder. But they thought wrong.

They are still living in denial, but that won’t last for much longer. The public is getting more fierce, and the hyperscalers’ cash resources—which once seemed almost infinite—are dwindling. Silicon Valley has the weaker hand here, and nobody believes its bluffs anymore.

8. In the next stage, the revolt against AI will come increasingly from inside the tech community.

This is already starting. Everybody was shocked when Bill Gates came out against AI last week—but this is exactly what I’ve been predicting. Even the insiders are now losing faith.

That’s why YouTube is finally taking steps to limit AI, although it is owned by Alphabet. That’s why LinkedIn is also fighting AI slop, although it is owned by Microsoft. That’s why CalTech is now pushing back against AI, despite the fact that Tech is actually part of its name.

All those things have happened in just the last few days.

This is a sign that we have reached the final stage of the battle. The smarter people inside these huge tech companies are, at last, reading the room. They know that the public won’t accept more force-feeding of AI, and are trying to restore a sense of sanity and balance among their colleagues and bosses.

This will inevitably lead to more transparency, and at least some safeguards—although perhaps not enough.

9. Money always calls the shots—and that’s where the AI crisis will intensify the most.

The cash getting invested in bots is beyond anything ever seen before in the history of capitalism—already $3.7 trillion has been spent, and the outlay is growing by another trillion per year.

This investment will never generate an adequate return. It can’t. The numbers just don’t add up.

Let me make a comparison. For less than that amount, Silicon Valley could have acquired every movie studio, every video game company, every major record label, and all the big publishers in the world—and still have plenty of cash left over.

So do you think the average person will pay more for AI each month than for all that entertainment? Is AI really worth that much? Not at all—at best, the true believers will pay roughly the same amount as a single Netflix subscription. But the market cap of Netflix is a tiny percent of total AI expenditures. So the mismatch between the level invested and the resulting demand is unprecedented.

But the situation is even worse than that. These AI companies haven’t even begun to feel the real pinch of the depreciation charges caused by this capital investment—those will devastate earnings. And meanwhile there’s an intense price war underway within the AI world, so revenues will get squeezed even if there’s growing demand. Add to this, the massive debt burden, unlimited liability exposures, punitive legislation, and all the rest.

This is an easy prediction to make. Get ready for write-offs and financial ugliness of the most extreme kind. It’s hard-baked into the business plans, and keeping the mess in the oven for longer won’t make it taste any better.

10. You can avoid the pain—by living in the real world.

Many will suffer from this. And I’m not just talking financial losses. Some people will travel the AI highway straight to psychosis and personal crises of various stripes. But that doesn’t need to be you.

Put your faith in reality, not digital constructs. Connect with actual people. Take a walk in nature. Read a book. Go to a concert. Get a pet. Learn a musical instrument, a foreign language, an artisan skill. Visit a new city, a new country. Volunteer at a school or non-profit.

In other words, get a life. That’s something no bot can do for you.

When the crisis reaches the breaking point, you might not even notice. Or at least, you will possess a richness in your everyday existence that can’t be measured in bot tokens.

And maybe we will even be grateful for this AI mania—because it has reminded us of what really matters.

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Stephen Clark - Ars Technica

NASA's next "great observatory" begins mission to widen our view of the Universe

Stephen Clark
Updated

NASA's $4.3 billion Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, equipped with a 300-megapixel camera sighted through a refurbished spy mirror, launched Sunday from Kennedy Space Center in Florida on a mission to reveal the mysterious forces driving the Universe.

The new mission will extend the vision of NASA's other famous observatories, providing a field of view 100 times wider than the Hubble Space Telescope and complementing the groundbreaking work of the James Webb Space Telescope. Roman is just the second NASA-led astrophysics mission to launch this century, following the launch of Webb in 2021.

Unlike Webb, which suffered many years of delays before reaching space, Roman arrived at the launch pad nine months before NASA's commitment to send it skyward by May 2027.

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Letters from an American

Week Fourteen in 250 to 250

Heather Cox Richardson
Updated

Last week was the fourteenth week of videos from the 250 to 250 Project that we’re producing to honor the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.

Our hope was for the videos to emphasize the agency of Americans—mostly everyday Americans—to change the country. Each falls into a category that defines what it means to be an American, including community, democracy, innovation, mobility, civil rights, education, conservation, and creativity.

Lots of fun ones this week, with terrific narrators including some very old friends and some very new ones.

You can follow the project at the sites listed below, or under “videos” at my own YouTube page: Heather Cox Richardson. Or just wait until I send out the week’s roundup.

Follow Along | #WeAreAmerica250
Substack | YouTube | Facebook | Instagram | TikTok | Bluesky | Threads


Ellen Ochoa, Narrated by Hope Delgado

Hope Delgado is the Program and Content Associate at Made By Us, a national network of more than 750 museums, historic sites, libraries, and archives working to connect young people with history and civic participation. Delgado profiles Ellen Ochoa, the engineer who became the first Hispanic woman in space in 1993, and later the first Hispanic director of NASA’s Johnson Space Center.

Soo Locks, Narrated by Lauren Westphal

Lauren Westphal is a proud Yooper born and raised in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. She is a producer and an independent media strategist. Here, Westphal tells how the Soo Locks unlocked Michigan’s iron riches, becoming the “Linchpin of the Great Lakes” that fed America’s steel mills and westward expansion.

Trail of Broken Treaties, Narrated by Nick Estes

Nick Estes is an enrolled member of the Lower Brule Sioux Tribe and Associate Professor in American Indian Studies at the University of Minnesota. He co-hosts the Red Nation podcast and is the lead editor of Red Media. He recounts the cross-country caravan that indigenous activists organized in October 1972.

Molly Ivins, Narrated by Andy Borowitz

Andy Borowitz is an acclaimed American humorist, New York Times bestselling author, and creator of the popular satire site The Borowitz Report. Borowitz celebrates Molly Ivins, the razor-tongued Texas columnist who skewered politicians and made a career of speaking uncomfortable truths.

Ice Industry, Narrated by Ken Lincoln

Ken Lincoln is president of the Thompson Ice House Preservation Corporation, which operates an onsite museum and sponsors an annual ice harvest. Lincoln chronicles America’s forgotten ice trade, which revolutionized how the nation ate and drank before mechanical refrigeration melted the business away.

Dust Bowl, Narrated by Representative Josh Turek

Joshua Turek is an Iowa House Representative, 4x Paralympian, 2x Gold Medalist in wheelchair basketball, disability advocate, and candidate for the U.S. Senate in Iowa. Turek recounts the Dust Bowl, the 1930s environmental catastrophe that drove families from the Great Plains and taught America the value of soil conservation.

Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, Narrated by Charlotte Clymer

Charlotte Clymer is a writer, activist, and military veteran. She writes Charlotte’s Web Thoughts, a popular, award-winning Substack newsletter about politics, religion, foreign policy, and culture. Here, Clymer honors the unbroken 89-year vigil at Arlington's Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, a solemn promise never to forget those who made the ultimate sacrifice.

Women’s Club Movement, Narrated by Katie Paris

Katie Paris is an Ohio suburban mom and 25-year political veteran. In 2019, Paris quit her job in national politics to found Red Wine & Blue, a community of over half a million diverse suburban women, working together to defeat extremism, one friend at a time. Paris explores the women's club movement, whose millions of members shaped Progressive Era reform and the fight for civil rights.

Johnny Cash, Narrated by Slaid Cleaves

Slaid Cleaves is a Texas-based singer/songwriter whose music is rooted in traditional country and folk forms. He has been putting out highly acclaimed records for 25 years. Cleaves profiles Johnny Cash, the “Man in Black” whose songs of rebels and outsiders made him a champion for the voiceless.

Great Migration, Narrated by Bryan Stevenson

The executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative, Bryan Stevenson is a public interest lawyer who has dedicated his career to helping the poor, the incarcerated, and the condemned. Stevenson recounts the displacement of staggering numbers of people forced to flee the dangers and violence of the Jim Crow-era South.

Nellie Bly, Narrated by Katie Couric

Katie Couric is an award-winning journalist, #1 New York Times best-selling author of Going There, co-founder of Stand Up To Cancer, founder of Katie Couric Media (KCM), and the first woman to solo anchor a network evening newscast. Couric profiles Nellie Bly, a pioneer of investigative journalism whose undercover exposé drove reform in mental health facilities.

Boston Subway System, Narrated by Mayor Michelle Wu

Michelle Wu is the mayor of Boston. She is one of the youngest mayors in the city’s history and is the first woman and the first Asian American to be elected to the office. Wu tells how Boston built America’s first subway in 1897, relieving a congested city and laying the groundwork for modern transit nationwide.

W.E.B. Du Bois, Narrated by Stacey Abrams

Stacey Abrams is a New York Times bestselling author, entrepreneur and political leader. She served as Minority Leader in the Georgia House of Representatives. Abrams profiles W.E.B. Du Bois, the pioneering scholar and activist who co-founded the Niagara Movement and helped build the NAACP’s fight for equality.

Marian Anderson, Narrated by Melissa Givens

American soprano Melissa Givens is an Associate Professor at Pomona College, specializing in music of women and African Americans. She is a frequent recitalist and clinician and sings with Grammy© winning Conspirare: A Company of Voices. Givens tells the story of Marian Anderson’s historic performance on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in 1939—one that she repeated at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on August 28, 1963.

Bilingual Multicultural Education Act, Narrated by Representative Teresa Leger Fernández

Congresswoman Teresa Leger Fernández represents the 3rd Congressional District of New Mexico. She serves on the House Rules Committee and the Committee on Natural Resources and is chair of the Democratic Women’s Caucus. New Mexico’s Bilingual Multicultural Education Act (BMEA) of 1973 was the country’s first legislation intended to honor multilingual and multicultural identity.

First Rhode Island Regiment, Narrated by Senator Jack Reed

Jack Reed, U.S. Senator from Rhode Island and Ranking Member of the Armed Services Committee, is a West Point graduate and Army veteran known as a bipartisan deal-maker on defense and consumer protection. This is the story of the First Rhode Island Regiment, widely recognized as America’s first Black military regiment, which saw its first combat experience at the Battle of Rhode Island on August 29, 1778.


Follow Along | #WeAreAmerica250
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Letters from an American

The Right to Run for Office

Heather Cox Richardson
Updated

Letters from an American

August 30, 2026

Heather Cox Richardson
Updated

One of our founding myths is that of George Washington and the cherry tree. In his The Life of Washington, first published in 1800, minister and writer Mason Locke Weems, more commonly known as Parson Weems, wrote down for the citizens of this new nation the qualities they should require in a leader. The book was written not to reflect the facts of Washington’s life—biographies would not focus on facts for almost a century—but to show virtues the nation’s youth should imitate and to establish a set of attributes against which future voters could judge those vying to lead the nation.

Weems’s Washington was generous, reverent, studious, athletic, martial, hardworking, and beloved by his comrades. And, beginning with an 1806 edition of the book, he could not tell a lie. According to Weems, when George was about six years old “he was made the wealthy master of a hatchet, of which, like most little boys, he was immoderately fond, and was constantly going about chopping every thing that came in his way. One day, in the garden…he unluckily tried the edge of his hatchet on the body of a beautiful young English cherry-tree…. The next morning the old gentleman finding out what had befallen his tree…, came into the House; and with much warmth asked for the mischievous author…. Nobody could tell him anything about it. Presently George and his hatchet made their appearance. ‘George,’ said his father, ‘do you know who killed that beautiful little cherry tree yonder in the garden?’

“This was a tough question; and George staggered under it for a moment; but quickly recovered himself: and looking at his father, with the sweet face of youth brightened with the inexpressible charm of all-conquering truth, he bravely cried out, ‘I can’t tell a lie, Pa; you know I can’t tell a lie. I did cut it with my hatchet.’

“‘Run to my arms, you dearest boy,’ cried his father in transports, ‘run to my arms; glad am I, George, that you killed my tree; for you have paid me for it a thousand fold. Such an act of heroism in my son is more worth than a thousand trees, though blossomed with silver, and their fruits of purest gold.’”

Like many of the other anecdotes Weems delivered, this story was almost certainly invented. But it established the importance of truth-telling in a leader.

On Friday, Rick Maese of the Washington Post reported that despite orders from U.S. District Judge Ana C. Reyes saying that she wanted advance notice before the government took down more than ten trees from the East Potomac Golf Links or brought equipment larger than a sedan onto the property, the Trump administration has taken down more than sixty trees in apparent preparation for Trump to redesign the golf course.

Opponents have sued to stop the redesign of the historic publicly owned course. Trump has said the makeover will begin on September 1, but Maese notes that the administration has released “no final design, construction schedule or estimated cost.” It has apparently not conducted either environmental or historical preservation reviews. It has not said how changes to the course will affect public access to the three courses and to the popular recreation path on the property.

Reyes said she would not stop administration officials from doing routine maintenance on the property, and the administration says the tree removal is routine maintenance. A spokesperson for the Interior Department said: “Arborists are doing routine maintenance at East Potomac Park with selective removal of hazard trees, non-native invasive trees, and declining and dying trees that cannot be brought back to good health through any degree of intervention.”

One of the trees they have cut down is a cherry tree.

It seems like the writers for the 250th season of American democracy are becoming increasingly desperate to get the country’s attention.

On Friday, Trump announced: “The United States of America has just entered into an Agreement with the Country of Venezuela on, THE BIGGEST OIL DEAL IN WORLD HISTORY! At my direction, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, working closely with Highly Respected Interim President of Venezuela, Delcy Rodriguez, and, through a partnership with private business, have secured majority U.S. control of more than 65 BILLION BARRELS of proven Oil Reserves in Venezuela, at no cost to the American Taxpayer. This Historic Transaction MORE THAN DOUBLES American Oil Reserves, greatly increases our Oil Supply, and will substantially lower Gas Prices for all Americans, long into the future, while helping to continue to set Venezuela on a course toward Tremendous Success and Great Prosperity. This Transaction will greatly strengthen the already growing relationship between Venezuela and the United States! Thank you for your attention to this groundbreaking matter.”

There are reasons to greet this announcement with skepticism.

A U.S. official told Megan Messerly, Ben Lefebvre, and Scott Waldman of Politico that this deal was a new venture between the U.S. government and an “experienced private operator in Venezuela.” Although the official did not identify which operator that is, it became clear over the weekend that the person in question is Alejandro Betancourt López.

Rebecca F. Elliott, Anatoly Kurmanaev, and Edward Wong of the New York Times explained that Betancourt’s family controls Venezuela’s second largest private oil producer, North American Blue Energy Partners. Betancourt has been accused of corruption for years; Switzerland has investigated him for money laundering and has issued a warrant for his arrest, although it has not charged him.

According to the New York Times reporters, it appears the plan is for the U.S. government to back North American Blue Energy Partners, which will, in turn, develop oil reserves in 17 of Venezuela’s oil fields. The U.S. official who talked to the Politico journalists said the new venture would be the second-biggest private oil company in the world, after Saudi Aramco. The U.S. would control 55% of the venture’s output. When production starts, the person told the journalists, “the resulting stable supply of at-cost oil in our Hemisphere will go toward filling the U.S. strategic petroleum reserve and fulfilling the supply needs of our Great U.S. Military.”

But an executive in the oil industry told the journalists that the deal was “built on a legal environment that does not exist. The Venezuelan constitution does not allow for anyone other than [Venezuela’s state-owned oil and gas company] to own rights to oil and gas in the country,” the executive pointed out.

“The end of story,” the person said, “is the president wants to say we have billions of barrels of oil in reserve. That would act as a price stabilization nuclear bomb. Oh, the Iranians have blocked Hormuz? The president could say[,] ‘I have 65 billion barrels in reserve.’”

The Politico journalists report that Trump has been frustrated that U.S. companies have been slow to invest in Venezuela and that the administration has pressured Rodríguez to give them better terms. Samantha Schmidt and Helena Carpio of the Washington Post today flat out said the deal “cements the United States’ long-term dominance over Venezuela, which has become a neo-colony since the U.S. military’s capture of Maduro in January, when Trump vowed to ‘run’ the country and exploit its oil wealth.”

Last September, the Trump administration began striking small boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific that Trump claimed—without evidence—were being operated by narcoterrorists from Venezuela. The U.S. massed military vessels off Venezuela’s shores, where they blockaded Venezuelan oil tankers after Trump called Venezuela’s government a foreign terrorist organization. On January 3, Trump authorized the military to kidnap Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro and his wife Celia Flores in a nighttime raid and bring them to the U.S. for trial on weapons and drug charges.

Although opponents of Maduro, who had seized power after losing a presidential election, cheered the raid in the belief that Trump would help them put opposition candidate Edmundo González in power, in fact the administration supported Maduro’s vice president, Delcy Rodríguez. On January 5 it formally recognized her as Venezuela’s head of state. Venezuela’s high court disagreed. It called Maduro’s absence a “kidnapping” and determined that under the country’s constitution, elections had to be held to replace him.

Now the U.S. government says it has made a “deal” with Rodríguez, who told reporters: “The agreement is based on a very simple premise. Each party contributes what it does best. Venezuela contributes oil, its industry and the experience of its workers accumulated over more than 100 years. The United States contributes the capital and technology needed to recover and develop those assets.”

“So, let me get this straight,” national security reporter David Rothkopf wrote. “[T]he US illegally attacks a country, kidnaps its president, threatens its government with massive military force, gets them to hand over to US control a huge portion of their national assets, hails the billions it has already brought in and promises billions more[,] but we don’t know where the money’s going, how it is going to benefit the US, if it is going to benefit the US, who’s privately going to benefit, what side deals have been struck with the corrupt leaders of their country or ours, & we are supposed to celebrate this act of aggression and theft that violates international law and that could well turn out to be a massive mafia-style shakedown scheme to benefit the anti-democratic forces in Venezuela and the US, the president’s friends and supporters, possibly the president and his family?”

Rothkopf appears to have understood the point of the story of George Washington and the cherry tree.

—

Notes:

https://www.mountvernon.org/george-washington/facts/myths/george-washington-and-the-cherry-tree-myth

https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2026/08/28/east-potomac-golf-tree-removal-begins-ahead-trump-project/

https://dc.citycast.fm/news/east-potomac-golf-course-tree-removal

https://www.politico.com/news/2026/08/28/trump-says-us-has-a-deal-to-take-huge-stake-in-venezuelas-oil-reserves-01055442

https://www.cfr.org/articles/united-states-announces-blockade-venezuela

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/29/business/energy-environment/venezuela-alejandro-betancourt-oil-trump.html

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2026/08/30/venezuela-vowed-not-hand-over-its-oil-trump-aims-grab-windfall/

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/8/29/whats-behind-the-us-deal-to-seize-control-of-venezuelan-oil-reserves

https://thehill.com/policy/international/6059462-venezuela-us-oil-deal/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2026/08/27/us-intervened-criminal-probe-venezuelan-oilman-alejandro-betancourt/

https://www.caracaschronicles.com/2026/03/09/what-the-venezuelan-constitution-says-when-the-president-is-absent/

https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2026-04-06/venezuelas-delcy-rodriguez-remains-acting-president-after-her-initial-90-day-appointment-expired

Trump’s Truth:

statuses/41356

Bluesky:

djrothkopf.bsky.social/post/3muaajfvecs2k

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xkcd.com

Geology Class

The rise of AI review bombing tools threatens to take away a crucial source of experience for geology undergraduates.
Mike the Mad Biologist

The Defense Department Just Hired an Actual Fascist

mikethemadbiologist
Updated

Yesterday, the Washington Post revealed that the Defense Department just hired three rightwing online personalities (boldface mine):

The Pentagon has secretly installed several conservative military veterans with large online followings in government roles, declining to disclose their assignments as they amplify Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s viewpoints and attack those who scrutinize the Trump administration, according to people familiar with the matter and corroborating material.

At least some of the influencers have been assigned to civilian roles that could lead to changes in policy, the people familiar with the matter said…

Those involved include Rob Maness, a retired Air Force colonel, and Kurt Schlichter, a retired Army colonel, people familiar with the matter said. Pentagon records reviewed by The Washington Post show that both have active official government email addresses as of this past week and are assigned to the office of Anthony Tata, the undersecretary of defense for personnel and readiness. The email addresses include a “.civ” suffix, meaning they are labeled as civilian employees, rather than as military personnel or contractors.

For Schlichter, conservative or rightwing doesn’t adequately describe him–the appropriate word is fascist:

Calling him a fascist isn’t hyperbole, as in one thread, he managed to hit many of the fascist notes:

  1. Forcing your opponents to “be like us.”
  2. Banning political ideas you disagree with.
  3. Nationalizing institutions to ensure their political correctness.
  4. Banning critical media.
  5. Viewing women primarily as breeders.
  6. Dismantling unions.
  7. “Use the law to ensure blue submission.”

(of course, there’s pissing and moaning about mask wearing too…)

In any operational sense, this is fascism. It is a journalistic failure to call him “conservative”, when his program recapitulates previous fascist programs. And now he’s ensconced within a very powerful military. If Democrats take back the House or the Senate, Democrats need to expose this guy (though they also should try to do so now too).

And when this nightmare is finally done, we are going to need such a thorough detrumpification effort, one I hope professional Democrats are up to doing.

Miguel Grinberg's Blog

Forgejo hack #2: Integration with Read The Docs

Miguel Grinberg
Updated

In this second Forgejo Hack installment I'll tell you how to connect a git repository that lives in your self-hosted Forgejo instance to Read the Docs, so that commits to the repository automatically trigger documentation builds, exactly like it works with GitHub.

Astronomy Picture of the Day

If not the most grand, then this If not the most grand, then this


Oklahoma Watch
The Oatmeal - Comics by Matthew Inman

The therapist is dead

Matthew Inman
Updated
The therapist is dead

Can you figure out who murdered the therapist?

View on my website

NASA Science

Pasterze Hangs on as Austria’s Largest Glacier

Michala Garrison
Updated
 
1985
2026
Ice in a broad Alpine basin feeds debris-covered glacial ice several kilometers long in the valley below.
NASA Earth Observatory/Michala Garrison
Ice in a broad Alpine basin connects with a short, narrow stretch of glacial ice in the valley below through one small icefall. Lakes fill much of the valley beyond the glacier’s terminus.
NASA Earth Observatory/Michala Garrison
Ice in a broad Alpine basin feeds debris-covered glacial ice several kilometers long in the valley below.
NASA Earth Observatory/Michala Garrison
Ice in a broad Alpine basin connects with a short, narrow stretch of glacial ice in the valley below through one small icefall. Lakes fill much of the valley beyond the glacier’s terminus.
NASA Earth Observatory/Michala Garrison
1985
2026
The Pasterze Glacier in the Eastern Alps undergoes significant retreat between August 22, 1985 (left), and August 15, 2026 (right). One narrow icefall connecting glacial ice in the upper and lower basins remains in summer 2026. The images were acquired with the TM (Thematic Mapper) on Landsat 5 and the OLI (Operational Land Imager) on Landsat 9, respectively. NASA Earth Observatory images by Michala Garrison.

Amid Europe’s scorching summer of 2026, Austria’s largest glacier was holding on by one dwindling thread of ice. The last icefall connecting the upper and lower portions of the Pasterze Glacier in the Eastern Alps appeared poised to break, which would put an end to its reign as the country’s largest. Groups monitoring the glacier say the last conduit of ice may, depending on weather conditions, survive to see another year or two, or it may face its demise before the cold months arrive this year.

The NASA/USGS Landsat images above capture the glacier’s change from August 22, 1985, to August 15, 2026. In 1985 (left), the higher-elevation portion of the glacier, where ice accumulates, fed ice to the valley below through multiple icefalls. (Note that ice along the southern edge of the valley is covered in debris, giving it a dark appearance.) In 2026 (right), only one icefall, known as the Hufeisenbruch, remained. The glacial ice in the valley below had receded substantially, and a proglacial lake filled in much of the area the ice once occupied.

In retreat since the mid-1800s, the Pasterze has lost mass almost continuously and at increasing rates since 1980, according to scientists from the University of Graz, GeoSphere Austria, and the Austrian Alpine Club. Small advances have occurred in only seven years since 1879. Starting in the 2010s, the volume of ice supplied from higher elevations has been small enough to leave the ice in the valley almost stagnant.

By 2020, the penultimate ice connection to the upper accumulation zone was replaced by a waterfall, leaving the Hufeisenbruch icefall as the glacier’s precarious linchpin. Between 1998 and 2025, scientists from the University of Graz monitored the width of the icefall, finding a decrease from nearly 900 meters (3,000 feet) to just 120 meters (390 feet). Researchers attribute the change to decreasing ice inputs from above, along with increasing thermal energy emitted from ice-free rock faces that furthers the loss of ice.

Photos taken in mid-August 2026 confirmed the icefall was still intact, said Andreas Kellerer-Pirklbauer, a scientist in the geography department at the University of Graz and co-head of the glacier measurement service of the Austrian Alpine Club. Observers expect the connection to last until at least 2027, he said, based on its current condition and assuming relatively normal temperatures in the upcoming autumn and winter.

Coupled with the dramatic loss of ice at Pasterze, apparent in the images above, is the growth of a proglacial lake at its terminus. Kellerer-Pirklbauer and colleagues tracked the lake’s growth from 1998 to 2019 and found that its area increased exponentially over that time. The researchers also documented several large-scale buoyant calving events in which ice slabs in contact with the water broke off from the terminus or even from the lake bed. Researchers are interested in how these lakes form and evolve not only because they can contribute to increased rates of ice loss, but also because they can raise the risk of dangerous outburst floods.

The sweltering spring and summer of 2026 have shone a spotlight on the Pasterze and the many other glaciers in the Alps already undergoing rapid retreat in the 21st century. A hot and dry spring in Austria was followed by the highest combined June and July temperatures on record in Western Europe, according to Europe’s Copernicus climate monitoring service. In 2024 and 2025, nearly all of Austria’s glaciers retreated, and signs in 2026 point toward yet more melt. When Pasterze’s Hufeisenbruch icefall does succumb to melting or collapse, the glacier will cede its status as Austria’s largest to Gepatschferner in the Ötztal Alps in Tyrol.

NASA Earth Observatory images by Michala Garrison, using Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey. Story by Lindsey Doermann.

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Ice in a broad Alpine basin feeds debris-covered glacial ice several kilometers long in the valley below.

August 22, 1985

JPEG (12.57 MB)

Ice in a broad Alpine basin connects with a short, narrow stretch of glacial ice in the valley below through one small icefall. Lakes fill much of the valley beyond the glacier’s terminus.

August 15, 2026

JPEG (12.03 MB)

References & Resources

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The post Pasterze Hangs on as Austria’s Largest Glacier appeared first on NASA Science.

Beim Hufeisenbruch löst sich die Verbindung zwischen unterem und oberen Teil des Pasterze-Gletschers immer mehr auf. Quelle: GeoSphere Austria
Eric Berger - Ars Technica

Why it matters that President Trump just dialed in to a NASA news conference

Eric Berger
Updated

As is standard procedure for major NASA missions, the US space agency held a post-launch news conference on Sunday morning at Kennedy Space Center in Florida to provide information about how the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope was faring during its initial maneuvers.

What was not standard, however, is what happened in the middle of the news conference. A little less than half an hour in, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman looked down at his mobile phone, and then stood up and walked away from the dais where he had been seated behind a table along with other NASA officials. He briefly left the room.

Isaacman returned about a minute later, phone in hand, apologizing for interrupting NASA's chief of science, Nicky Fox, as she was speaking about the mission. "The President of the United States of America would like to address and congratulate everyone on this mission," Isaacman said, returning to his seat.

Read full article

Comments

Talking Points Memo - Editors Blog

Clyburn: Let’s Add Four

Josh Marshall
Updated

Rep. James Clyburn (D-SC) on Meet the Press

Rep. James Clyburn (D) of South Carolina said today on Meet the Press that he supports adding four new Justices to the Supreme Court. This would bring the total to 13. That is a common number people have focused on since there are 13 judicial circuits. In the distant past, the two numbers were kept in line. “13 is a pretty good number,” said Clyburn. “A baker’s dozen would be a good number to have on the Court.” This is a big deal. The particular number doesn’t really matter. I see adding four to get to 13 as sort of the minimum acceptable goal. But the point here is that rapidly (in time for 2029) establishing Court expansion and reform more broadly is becoming the consensus Democratic position. We don’t know if Democrats will get a trifecta in 2028. But it’s the first plausible opportunity to expand the Court.

Sometimes I’ll hear people say: Why start talking about it now? You complicate the 2026 midterms. Maybe you give the Republicans ideas? Why not just keep it close to the vest and spring it on them in January 2029?

Put simply, that’s just not how it works.

The inertial forces against reform are massive. Even among many elected Democrats who are pretty good on other issues, it’s often a very heavy lift. It’s only very recently that Court reform has even moved into the realm of conceivable for most of them. Change, building that consensus can only happen as a bottom-up process, making it clear that accepting the perpetuation of the Corrupt court as it exists today is an unacceptable position for a Democrat, certainly at the federal level — as a bottom-up process, it can only be a public process. You’ll only know someone is on board when they say it publicly and clearly. Even then you can’t be totally sure. But once a politician has committed publicly, it’s much harder to shift. And when you’ve got the great majority publicly committing, the pressure heightens on those who remain opposed or silent in inverse proportion to their declining numbers. The same applies to abolishing the filibuster and a lot else.

As far as I know, Clyburn is the first Democrat in leadership in either chamber to announce for Court expansion, and one of the relative few generally. Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries has signaled general support or openness to reform in recent months. And that’s important too. But it only becomes hard and real when the details are attached.

Mike the Mad Biologist

In Case You Missed It…

mikethemadbiologist
Updated

…a week of Mad Biologist posts:

The Absurdity of the National Guard Deployment

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A Day at the Renwick Gallery

An OK Week for D.C.’s Crime Stats

Mike the Mad Biologist

Links 8/30/26

mikethemadbiologist
Updated

Links for you. Science:

Let’s Remember Some Publications That Said We Would Get To Mars By 2026 (excellent, must-read piece on science journalism)
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Brouhaha in Academia: Did We Really Hunt Mammoths?
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These women don’t trust politicians. They do trust Candace Owens
Extremely Online: A Definition. Becoming Extremely Online is a choice: one that fewer of us should make.
Families Debate Whether Children Should Play Football, After New C.T.E. Study
Sell Thy Neighbor: Trump Official Howard Lutnick and the Clandestine Deal to Sell NYC’s Glamorous Pierre Hotel
Inside Russia’s New Gulag. Human-rights groups estimate that more than ten thousand Ukrainian civilians have disappeared into the Russian prison system. This is the story of one cell.
The worst primary in America just ended
More than 1.2 million Texans’ voter registrations are suspended
Disgraced Anti-Sex-Trafficking NGO Gets $244 Million to Rep Migrant Kids
How Many Fascist Cronies Can One Republican Have?
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Come on, people, now, smile on your brother
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Hacker News
Letters from an American

August 29, 2026

Heather Cox Richardson
Updated

On Thursday, August 27, Tolouse Olorunnipa reported on the attempts of Republican lawmakers to restrict the ability of naturalized and dual citizens to run for office. In several states, Republican lawmakers have introduced measures to cut those Americans out of candidacy for elected positions, while in Congress, at least five Republicans have called for prohibiting them from federal judgeships, Cabinet posts, ambassadorships, and congressional seats.

The push has come in the wake of the rise of New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani and other naturalized U.S. citizens whose policy positions those like South Carolina representative Nancy Mace consider un-American. These policies are, of course, the ones voters elected people like Mamdani to put into place. In her comments to Olorunnipa, Mace said: “This isn’t personal. It’s about what standard we want for the people entrusted with enormous power over the American people.”

Her word choice was revealing. Our elected officials are entrusted with the enormous power of the American people, not over them.

In the 1850s, Americans struggled over the question of equality and immigration. The United States had always been a nation of immigrants, but in the 1840s the failure of the potato crop in Ireland sent at least half a million Irish immigrants to the United States. As they moved into urban ports on the East Coast, especially in Massachusetts and New York, native-born Americans turned against them as competitors for jobs, warning that Catholics were un-American and could never assimilate into the U.S.

The 1850s saw a similar anti-immigrant fury in the new state of California. After the discovery of gold there in 1848, native-born Americans—the so-called forty-niners—moved to the West Coast. They had no intention of sharing the riches they expected to find. The Indigenous people who lived there had no right to the land under which gold lay, native-born men thought; nor did the Mexicans whose government had sold the land to the U.S. in 1848; nor did the Chileans, who came with mining skills that made them powerful competitors.

Above all, native-born Americans resented the Chinese miners who came to work in order to send money home to a land devastated by the First Opium War of 1839–1842, hoping to make money in America and then return to China, from which they could not legally emigrate. Expecting to go home again, they retained their languages, their culture, and their clothing. They tended to work the mines Americans had cleaned of their biggest deposits, focusing on meticulous reworking of the gravel, and they did better than native-born Americans thought they should.

Democrats and the new anti-immigrant American Party (more popularly known as the “Know Nothings” because members claimed to know nothing about the party) turned against the new immigrants, seeing them as competition that would drive down wages. In the 1850s, Know Nothing officials in Massachusetts persecuted Catholics and deported Irish immigrants they believed were paupers.

In 1850, in California, a legislature charged with establishing the legal framework for the proposed state adopted the federal law enacted a half-century earlier, in 1802, that limited citizenship to “free white persons.” The state legislature then went on to impose a foreign miner’s tax on Chinese and Mexican miners; then, in 1854, the state courts agreed that Chinese nationals could not testify in court against white Americans. In 1855 the legislature tried to stop Chinese immigration altogether by passing a $50 tax on shipmasters for each person ineligible for citizenship they brought to the state.

The construction of castes of immigrants mirrored the ideology of southern whites who enslaved their Black neighbors. As Georgia’s Alexander Stephens explained, the men who framed the Constitution had made the terrible error of believing in equality, and northerners stupidly clung to the outdated idea that Black people were equal to white people, “and hence conclude that he is entitled to equal privileges and rights with the white man.” In contrast to the United States government, men like Stephens believed that “subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition.”

In 1855, Illinois lawyer Abraham Lincoln wrote to his friend Joshua Speed to reiterate his dislike not just of enslavement, but also of the caste system going into place in places like Massachusetts and California.

“I am not a Know-Nothing,” he wrote. “That is certain. How could I be? How can any one who abhors the oppression of [Black Americans], be in favor of degrading classes of white people? Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation, we began by declaring that ‘all men are created equal.’ We now practically read it ‘all men are created equal, except [Black people].’ When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read ‘all men are created equal, except [Black people], and foreigners, and catholics.’ When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretence of loving liberty---to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocracy.”

Lincoln understood that once you give up the principle of equality, you have given up the whole game. You have admitted the principle that people are unequal, and that some people are better than others. Once you have replaced the principle of equality with the idea that humans are unequal, you have granted your approval to the idea of rulers and servants. At that point, all you can do is to hope that no one in power decides that you belong in one of the lesser groups.

Arguments that some men were better than others, “are the arguments that kings have made for enslaving the people in all ages of the world,” Lincoln said. “You will find that all the arguments in favor of king-craft were of this class; they always bestrode the necks of the people, not that they wanted to do it, but because the people were better off for being ridden…. Turn in whatever way you will—whether it come from the mouth of a King, an excuse for enslaving the people of his country, or from the mouth of men of one race as a reason for enslaving the men of another race, it is all the same old serpent….”

“I should like to know if taking this old Declaration of Independence, which declares that all men are equal upon principle and making exceptions to it where will it stop,” he asked.

Americans answered him definitively in 1868 when they added the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution. It recognized that “[a]ll persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” It also established that states could not draw lines around different groups of citizens by providing that “[n]o State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”

That same constitution also establishes requirements for officeholders. The president must be at least 35 years old and a natural-born citizen of the United States. A U.S. senator must be at least 30 years old, a citizen of the U.S. for at least nine years, and a resident of the state they’re representing. A U.S. representative must be at least 25 years old, a U.S. citizen for at least seven years, and live in the state they represent.

Law professor Pamela Karlan told journalist Olorunnipa that “Those qualifications are exclusive. The state can’t add qualifications on top of those, nor indeed can the federal government.” Former representative Mo Brooks (R-AL) added that in a country growing more diverse, telling naturalized Americans that they can’t run for office will ensure they vote for the opposing party. “It is one of the dumbest tactical moves I’ve ever seen politicians make,” he told Olorunnipa.

Karlan summed up the idea of discriminating against naturalized citizens, telling Olorunnipa it is “just incredibly ugly, stupid, and unconstitutional.”

—

Notes:

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/2026/08/naturalized-citizens-ban-elected-office-trump/688415/

https://quod.lib.umich.edu/l/lincoln/lincoln2/1:339?rgn=div1;view=fulltext

https://www.battlefields.org/learn/primary-sources/cornerstone-speech

https://georgepwood.com/2012/07/04/abraham-lincolns-speech-at-chicago-illinois-july-10-1858/

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NASA Science

Ribbon-Cutting Event for NASA Deep Space Network’s Deep Space Station 23

Rafael Alanis
Updated
2 Min Read

Ribbon-Cutting Event for NASA Deep Space Network’s Deep Space Station 23

Ten people in professional attire pose together outside under a clear blue sky, with a massive white satellite dish standing directly behind them.
PIA26779
Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech
 

Downloads

Ribbon-Cutting Event for NASA Deep Space Network’s Deep Space Station 23

JPEG (1.10 MB)

Description

Leadership from NASA Headquarters, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and the Deep Space Network (DSN) stand in front of the recently completed Deep Space Station 23 antenna at the Deep Space Network’s Goldstone complex near Barstow, California, on Aug. 25, 2026. 

From left: Germaine Aziz (project manager, DSN Aperture Enhancement Project, JPL); Bradford Arnold (manager, Telecom Programs & Oversight, JPL); Keyur Patel (associate lab director for Flight Projects & Mission Success, JPL); Wanda Peters (deputy associate administrator, Research and Technology Mission Directorate, NASA Headquarters); Jimmy Kenyon (associate administrator, RTMD, NASA Headquarters); John McCullough (acting director, Space Communications and Navigation Program, NASA Headquarters); Gregory Heckler (deputy program manager for capability development, SCaN, NASA Headquarters); William Marinelli (development manager, SCaN, NASA Headquarters), Michael Levesque (project manager, DSN, JPL); and Frank Kaufholod (project manager, NASA Glenn Research Center).

They gathered at the recently completed DSS-23 antenna for a ceremonial ribbon cutting on Aug. 25, 2026. It’s the latest antenna to be added as part of the DSN’s Aperture Enhancement Project, which began in 2009 to upgrade and expand the network by adding six new 34-meter (114-foot) multifrequency beam-waveguide antennas. These versatile Deep Space Network dishes can enhance many missions operating over different radio frequencies. 

The DSN allows missions to track, send commands to, and receive scientific data from faraway spacecraft. It is managed by JPL, a division of Caltech, in Southern California for SCaN, which is located at NASA Headquarters within RTMD.

For more information about the DSN, visit:

https://www.nasa.gov/communicating-with-missions/dsn/

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NASA Science

NASA Deep Space Network’s New Goldstone Antenna Goes Online

Rafael Alanis
Updated
1 Min Read

NASA Deep Space Network’s New Goldstone Antenna Goes Online

A massive white satellite dish antenna stands on a desert plain under a clear blue sky, bathed in warm sunlight alongside small facility structures.
PIA26778
Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech
 

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NASA Deep Space Network’s New Goldstone Antenna Goes Online

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Long shadows are cast by the recently completed Deep Space Station 23 at the Deep Space Network’s Goldstone complex near Barstow, California, in August 2026. A 34-meter (114-foot) multifrequency beam-waveguide antenna, DSS-23 will boost the DSN’s capacity and enhance NASA’s deep space communications capabilities for decades to come.

NASA leadership and personnel as well as dignitaries gathered at the complete DSS-23 antenna for a ceremonial ribbon cutting on Aug. 25, 2026. It’s the latest antenna to be added as part of the Deep Space Network’s Aperture Enhancement Project, which began in 2009 to upgrade and expand the network by adding six new 34-meter multifrequency beam-waveguide antennas. These versatile Deep Space Network dishes can enhance many missions operating over different radio frequencies. 

The DSN allows missions to track, send commands to, and receive scientific data from faraway spacecraft. It is managed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of Caltech, in Southern California for the agency’s Space Communications and Navigation (SCaN) Program, which is located at NASA Headquarters within the Research and Technology Mission Directorate.

For more information about the DSN, visit:

https://www.nasa.gov/communicating-with-missions/dsn/

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NASA Science

Panorama Showcasing the 34-Meter Antennas of the DSN’s Goldstone Complex

Rafael Alanis
Updated
2 Min Read

Panorama Showcasing the 34-Meter Antennas of the DSN’s Goldstone Complex

A wide desert landscape featuring several large white satellite dishes pointing toward a bright sun shining in a clear blue sky above distant mountain ranges.
PIA26777
Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech
 

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Panorama Showcasing the 34-Meter Antennas of the DSN’s Goldstone Complex

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Five antennas soak in the summer sun at the Deep Space Network’s Goldstone complex near Barstow, California, in August 2026. The recently completed Deep Space Station 23, a 34-meter (114-foot) beam-waveguide antenna, can be seen to the right of the frame in the foreground. The other three 34-meter antennas are, from left, DSS-26, DSS-25, and DSS-24. At farthest right is a smaller 26-meter (85-foot) antenna, the retired “Apollo Antenna” that was built in 1967 as part of the Manned Space Flight Network and earned its nickname for providing tracking for the Apollo Program.

NASA leadership and personnel as well as dignitaries gathered at the complete DSS-23 antenna for a ceremonial ribbon-cutting on Aug. 25, 2026. It’s the latest antenna to be added as part of the Deep Space Network’s Aperture Enhancement Project, which began in 2009 to upgrade and expand the network by adding six new 34-meter multifrequency beam-waveguide antennas. These versatile Deep Space Network (DSN) dishes can enhance many missions operating over different radio frequencies. 

The DSN allows missions to track, send commands to, and receive scientific data from faraway spacecraft. It is managed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, a division of Caltech, for the agency’s Space Communications and Navigation (SCaN) Program, which is located at NASA Headquarters within the Research and Technology Mission Directorate.

For more information about the DSN, visit:

https://www.nasa.gov/communicating-with-missions/dsn/

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The post Panorama Showcasing the 34-Meter Antennas of the DSN’s Goldstone Complex appeared first on NASA Science.

Noahpinion

In defense of Asian American art

Noah Smith
Updated

Back in 2015, when I was living in Brooklyn, my apartment flooded. My landlord, who owned a bunch of apartments, offered to put me up in temporary accommodations. He and his girlfriend were going to be out of town for several months, so he let me stay in her room. His girlfriend was an aspiring actress from Minnesota named Poppy Liu. I got to interact with her a number of times, and I can say that she’s one of the more interesting and original people I’ve ever met.

Poppy finally made it big. One of her latest roles is as the voice actress for one of the protagonists on the new animated Netflix series DANG!, a story about three Asian Americans living in NYC:

The show isn’t out yet, but from what I can tell, DANG! is trying to tell a story that will resonate with second-generation Asian Americans1 — one of the characters is a striver who goes off the beaten path, the others were escaping their striver upbringing by leading nontraditional lifestyles from the get-go. That’s probably a pretty typical real-world experience for the American-born children of high-skilled immigrants.

I don’t know if the show will be good or not, but as soon as the trailer hit, people on Twitter started ridiculing it — and using it as an opportunity to make fun of “Asian American media” or “Asian American art” in general. Some of the comments were dour and downbeat:

…While other commentary was pretty hilarious:

It turns out that Asian Americans bashing “Asian American art” is a pretty well-established tradition. Here’s another example unrelated to the Netflix show:

(See also here.)

It’s always fun to rag on tired tropes. But I feel like I should stand up for Asian American art here, because there really is a lot of excellent stuff out there that doesn’t fit into the standard format that people are complaining about.

“Asian American art” is defined too narrowly

The biggest problem with “Asian American art”, as far as I can tell, is that it’s defined so narrowly that there really isn’t much room for it to be creative. Consider these two possible definitions of “Asian American art”:

  1. Art made by Asian Americans

  2. Art made about Asian Americans or Asian American culture

As far as I can tell, movies, TV shows, books, etc. only get labeled “Asian American” if they satisfy both of these criteria at once. But that’s a pretty narrow slice of art!

First, it excludes art made about Asian Americans by non-Asians. There isn’t really a lot of this around, because America’s modern approach to identity politics says that you should only write about a group of people if you’re from that group — if a white author writes a novel with an Asian American protagonist, it’s generally frowned upon. There are some notable exceptions that get grandfathered in — Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle was written and directed by three white guys — but the culture of the 2010s really put a damper on that sort of crossover.

That means a lot of interesting and insightful stories about Asian Americans probably never get told. For example, I thought Ernest Hemingway’s portrayal of a frustrated Jewish striver in The Sun Also Rises was incredibly deep and thoughtful, and managed to say lots of things about how second-generation Jewish Americans were integrating into American society at the time. That portrayal probably wouldn’t get written today — a lot of people now accuse it of being antisemitic,2 because the character, while complex and sympathetic, is deeply flawed, and Hemingway himself wasn’t Jewish.

It also means that works clearly inspired by Asian America don’t generally get recognized as such. The clearest example of this is Avatar: the Last Airbender, which was arguably the best new fantasy IP to come out of the U.S. since the turn of the century.3 ATLA, as it’s sometimes known, drew on a bunch of Asian cultures — mostly Chinese, but also Japanese, Tibetan, Korean, and others — to create a sort of pan-Asian mishmash, informed by American sensibilities and written in a distinctly American style. That’s not too different from what Asian American culture is, and many Asian Americans were involved with both the production of the show and its adaptation into graphic novels and other media. But because the show’s creators themselves were white, it typically isn’t counted as Asian American art.

Even more importantly, the narrow definition of “Asian American art” also tends to exclude art made by Asian Americans, if it doesn’t deal directly with Asian American culture as its subject matter or motif. That ends up limiting the idea of “Asian American art” to things like Fresh off the Boat, The Joy Luck Club, Crazy Rich Asians, Everything Everywhere All at Once, American Born Chinese, Past Lives, the first season of BEEF, and so on.

I’m not saying those shows and movies are bad. For example, I love Everything Everywhere All at Once, which is among the most original and fun things I’ve seen in the past decade, and a true throwback to the zany 80s movies I loved as a kid. The first season of BEEF is one of the best things I’ve ever seen on TV. But Asian American culture is just a pretty small pool of source material to draw on.

It’s not that big, for one thing — if you exclude South Asians like Indians and Pakistanis, Asian Americans are only around 5.5% of the U.S. population. And Asian American narratives usually don’t tend to carry any special resonance with people in Asia:

And like all immigrant subcultures in America, Asian American culture is probably destined to be a sort of transitory, ephemeral thing. The classic second generation experience — “My parents really drove me hard and kids made fun of my weird lunch, until I went to college and met other people with the same background” — almost never lasts beyond the second generation.

Assimilation happens. It’s already happening. Around two-thirds of Asian Americans report having close friends of another race, and over 40% of U.S.-born Asian Americans marry people of other races (usually white or Hispanic). Despite concerns that nonwhite immigrants wouldn’t follow the same patterns as the East and South European immigrants of a century ago, Asian Americans are assimilating even faster than the white immigrants of yesteryear in every measurable way — outmarrying, climbing up the economic ladder, adopting American naming conventions, speaking English, moving out of coastal enclaves, and so on.

That means that both the source material and the natural audience for what we now consider “Asian American” narratives are destined to shrink. I’m fourth generation; when I read stories or watch movies about the New York Jewish culture of the early and mid 20th century, it already feels like a foreign country to me. I would be willing to bet that most fourth-generation Asian Americans will watch Fresh Off the Boat and feel the same way.

So we’ve defined “Asian American art” in a way that inherently limits it to something small and transient — basically, a micro-genre. It’s thus inevitable that lots of people see it as repetitive. If we want to appreciate the true breadth and depth of Asian American art, we need to take a broader view of what that means. I think we should start looking at any art created by Asian Americans as “Asian American art” — even if it’s about white people, or about robots, or about fantasy worlds where our modern races and cultures don’t even exist.

So here are a few examples of Asian American art I’ve enjoyed in recent years. This is far from an exhaustive catalog, or even a “top” list — it’s just a random selection of things I personally like. I’ve restricted it to works with major contributions by Asian Americans, so no Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, Kpop Demon Hunters, Counterstrike games, Kim’s Convenience, Mariko Tamaki graphic novels, etc. — those are all by Asian Canadians.

A few examples of great Asian American art

1. The comics of Adrian Tomine

A lot of the most interesting Asian American art comes in the form of graphic novels — a category that’s usually overlooked in these discussions. Adrian Tomine is probably tied with Neil Gaiman as my favorite graphic novelist of all time. He’s also one of the greatest authors of Generation X — he manages to capture the peculiar spirit of cynicism, longing, and rugged independence mixed with a strange sense of helplessness that defines that forgotten generation. His most famous work is Shortcomings, which was adapted into an excellent and overlooked movie in 2023:

(The opening scene of the movie is a send-up of Crazy Rich Asians — very much in the spirit of Asian Americans making fun of “Asian American art”.)

But my favorite are actually Tomine’s shorter comics, assembled in collections like Summer Blonde, Killing and Dying, and Sleepwalk. Tomine is one of the most sensitive observers of the human condition that I’ve ever read, and he deserves far more recognition than he’s received.

2. Monstress, by Marjorie Liu and Sana Takeda

This is possibly the best fantasy graphic novel I’ve ever read, both in terms of the storytelling and the art quality. Takeda, the illustrator, is Japanese, but Liu, the author, is American. Monstress is steampunk mixed with Lovecraftian horror, and the twist — sorry for the minor spoiler — is that one of the horrors is one of the protagonists. It has amazing fight scenes, an epic page-turning plot, and deep, complex characters. Like most long-running graphic novel series, it starts to meander later on,4 but it’s absolutely worth picking up.

3. The first season of BEEF

OK, on to television. TV tends to get short shrift in the cultural zeitgeist relative to movies, but I’d argue that television is where the truly creative screen stories now get told. BEEF is an anthology show created by Lee Sung Jin, with the running theme being suburbanites who get into feuds. I was lukewarm on the second season, but the first season is one of my favorite things ever.

This season actually is about Asian American culture, but it’s about interesting corners of it that don’t usually get air time, including working-class Korean Americans and Japanese American artists. The portrayals are devastatingly funny and deeply poignant at the same time, and the story arc is executed to perfection. Make sure to watch until the very last half-second of the last episode.

4. Atlanta (and Childish Gambino videos)

Atlanta is a quintessential work of Black art about Black America, created by (and starring) by Donald Glover, and written by an all-Black writers’ room. But one of the key creators of the show is Asian American: Hiro Murai, who Glover said “had the eye for this show”. Murai directed many of the episodes (including the pilot), and was also an executive producer. In fact, Murai and Glover have been creative partners for many years, and it’s difficult to separate their brilliance. Murai has also directed many of Glover’s music videos (in Glover’s alter ego as Childish Gambino), including the iconic “This Is America”.

Atlanta is, simply put, one of the most brilliant TV shows I’ve ever seen. If you haven’t seen it, you need to. And Murai’s participation in a quintessentially Black production shows how Asian artists can contribute to art well outside the typical “Asian American” paradigm.

5. Japanese Breakfast (and Crying in H Mart)

I really like the band Japanese Breakfast. They’re broadly a rock band, but really they defy genre — you could call them indie or synth-pop. Michelle Zauner, who is half Korean, is the lead singer and main songwriter. I recently saw them live, and they give a very good show.

Zauner also wrote a pretty well-known book called Crying in H-Mart, about the death of her mother from cancer. It’s a very good memoir, and it did indeed make me cry (though not in H Mart).

6. Wisp

I really loved shoegaze music when I was young, and I’m delighted that the Zoomers have brought the genre back. One of the best-known examples of the shoegaze revival — and my personal favorite — is Wisp. It’s basically just one woman, Natalie Lu.

7. Ninefox Gambit, by Yoon Ha Lee

Finally, on to my favorite genre of art: science fiction books! I grew up reading a lot of these, and one of my favorite subgenres was “weird” sci-fi books from the 1960s and 70s — Samuel R. Delany, Roger Zelazny, and stuff like that. I also love Rudy Rucker’s weird cyberpunk. Well, I can confidently say that Ninefox Gambit and its sequels and associated short stories are every bit as weird and far-out and creative as any of the stuff on my old shelf. It’s about a universe where the laws of physics depend on which calendar people use — and so of course the galaxy is made up of warring empires, each trying to make everyone use their own calendar. If you want your mind blown, this series is a good one.

8. The stories of Ted Chiang

Ted Chiang is, I would argue, the greatest English-language science-fiction short story author of the 21st century so far. His stories — collected in books like Stories of Your Life and Others and Exhalation — are high-concept stuff, exploring premises like “What if people had implants that gave them perfect memory?”, and “What if people could turn off their ability to identify beautiful faces?”. But they almost always manage to work deep and meaningful character arcs in as well, which is something that relatively few sci-fi short story authors are good at. His story “Story of Your Life” was adapted into the film Arrival.

9. Jade City, by Fonda Lee

I wanted to put a fantasy novel in here. I’m pretty picky about fantasy, but I really enjoyed Fonda Lee’s Jade City, which is about super-powered mafia wars in an alternate universe, in a city that’s somewhat reminiscent of Hong Kong — basically, think of The Godfather with superpowers. Lee is a very good writer, and I couldn’t put the books down.

10. How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, by Charles Yu

This book is pretty light on the actual sci-fi; it’s mostly about a guy resolving his psychological issues via time travel. But in fact, I like books about guys resolving their psychological issues via time travel — at least when they’re well-written, which this book definitely is.

11. Nothing, Except Everything, by Wesley Wang

This short film was made by a 19-year-old college kid, and it really blew me away. It’s a surrealistic portrait of a high schooler who comes to understand the idea of mortality:5

There’s apparently a bunch of controversy over whether it’s a good film, but the haters are wrong — it’s very good. Darren Aronofsky agrees, which is why when he saw the short film, he immediately called Wang up and gave him a deal to direct a feature film.

12. Plants vs. Zombies

OK, fine, video games aren’t exactly “art”. But who doesn’t love Plants vs. Zombies? I can’t even count the hours I sunk into that game.

Anyway, there’s a small selection of Asian American art that doesn’t fit the standard definition (except possibly BEEF, which stretches the typical format and takes it in innovative directions). Of course this is just the tip of the iceberg — it’s a smattering of stuff I just happened to consume over the past few years. There are a lot of very brilliant Asian American creators out there, making art that looks nothing like DANG!.

And to the snarky people on X, I’d think twice about bashing the traditional “Asian American art” stuff as well. Yes, many of its tropes have become cliche by now. But its often modest success opened the door for a lot of Asian American creators to break into the worlds of art and entertainment. Increasingly, they have the creative freedom to write stories and make art about anything they want, and we’re just starting to see a few glimmers of what that could encompass.

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1

It’s also clearly trying to be pan-Asian; the main characters are ethnically Chinese but have a typically Vietnamese last name, and one of the characters has the typically Korean name of Eunice.

2

Amusingly, the author of that New Yorker article alleging that Hemingway’s character was antisemitic is named Akhil Sharma — presumably, not Jewish — while I, who think the character is sympathetic and worthwhile, am Jewish.

3

The Song of Ice and Fire books, which inspired the Game of Thrones series, first came out in the 1990s.

4

This happens because writing graphic novels takes a ton of time and pays very little money, so once a graphic novelist gets a hit, they are financially forced to keep it running for as long as possible. The same problem occurs in the manga industry in Japan. The way to solve this is for TV producers to start adapting graphic novels for TV series early in their runs.

5

This probably resonated with me in part because my mom died when I was 19.

Hacker News
Daring Fireball

Finalist 4

John Gruber
Updated

My thanks to Finalist for sponsoring last week at Daring Fireball. Finalist is a remarkable, ambitious, and novel app for iPhone, iPad, and the Mac from indie developer Slaven Radic. It’s a planner inspired by paper day planners. I wrote quite a bit about Finalist when it first sponsored DF back in December — you should read that post. I’ve been using Finalist ever since. It’s a really good app. I’ll just reiterate from the first post that what really resonates for me is the idea of adding tasks to days, not assigning dates to tasks. If you add some tasks and then never actually do them, they’re still there, but they’re in the past, not harassing you in an ever-growing list of undone stuff today.

Finalist 4, which just came out a few weeks ago, is the biggest update yet. The headline new feature is notes, in the app or as a folder of Markdown files that round-trips with Obsidian. Tasks in those files land on the right day, next to your reminders and events, even inside the Mac menu bar app. Finalist’s rebuilt Timeline lets you pencil tasks into your day, and Apple Pencil gets special powers to sketch the plan in seconds.

There’s tons more, brewed over four months with 1,000 beta testers. Try it free on the App Store — for iPhone, iPad, Mac, and now Apple Watch.

 ★ 
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