Mostly about the economics of food, this is from their episode summary:
If you want to understand food – and eat better – economics is a good place to start. How do immigration patterns shape a country’s cuisine? How do labour laws make our working lunches worse? And why do strip malls serve such good grub?
Engineers at Blue Origin have been grappling with a seemingly eternal debate that involves the New Glenn rocket and the economics of flying it.
The debate goes back at least 15 years, to the early discussions around the design of the heavy lift rocket. The first stage, of course, would be fully reusable. But what about the upper stage of New Glenn, powered by two large BE-3U engines?
Around the same time, in the early 2010s, SpaceX was also trading the economics of reusing the second stage of its Falcon 9 rocket. Eventually SpaceX founder Elon Musk abandoned his goal of a fully reusable Falcon 9, choosing instead to recover payload fairings and push down manufacturing costs of the upper stage as much as possible. This strategy worked, as SpaceX has lowered its internal launch costs of a Falcon 9, even with a new second stage, to about $15 million. The company is now focused on making the larger Starship rocket fully reusable.
It’s been apparent for a long time that far more astronomical data exist than anyone has had time to examine thoroughly. That’s a reassuring thought, given the uses to which we can put these resources. Ponder such programs as Digital Access to a Sky Century at Harvard (DASCH), which draws on a trove of over half a million glass photographic plates dating back to 1885. The First and Second Palomar Sky Surveys (POSS-1 and POSS-2) go back to 1949 and are now part of the Digitized Sky Survey, which has digitized the original photographic plates. The Zwicky Transient Facility, incidentally, uses the same 48-inch Samuel Oschin Schmidt Telescope at Palomar that produced the original DSS data.
There is, in short, plenty of archival material to work with for whatever purposes astronomers want to pursue. You may remember our lengthy discussion of the unusual star KIC 8462852 (Boyajian’s Star), in which data from DASCH were used to explore the dimming of the star over time, the source of considerable controversy (see, for example, Bradley Schaefer: Further Thoughts on the Dimming of KIC 8462852 and the numerous posts surrounding the KIC 8462852 phenomenon in these pages). Archival data give us a window by which we can explore a celestial observation through time, or even look for evidence of technosignatures close to home (see ‘Lurker’ Probes & Disappearing Stars).
But now we have an entirely new class of archival data to mine and apply to the study of exoplanets. A just published paper discusses how previously undetectable data about stars and exoplanets can be found within the archives of radio astronomy surveys. The analysis method has the name Multiplexed Interferometric Radio Spectroscopy (RIMS), and it’s intriguing to learn that it may be able to detect an exoplanet’s interactions with its star, and even to run its analyses on large numbers of stars within the radio telescope’s field of view.
We are in the early stages of this work, with the first detections now needing to be further analyzed and subsequent observations made to confirm the method, so I don’t want to minimize the need for continuing study. But if things pan out, we may have added a new method to our toolkit for exoplanet detection.
The signature finding here is that the huge volumes of data accumulated by radio telescopes worldwide, so vital in the study of cosmology through the analysis of galaxies and black holes, can also track variable activity of numerous stars that are within the field of view of each of these observations. What the authors are unveiling here is the ability to perform a simultaneous survey across hundreds or potentially thousands of stars. Cyril Tasse, lead author of the paper in Nature Astronomy, is an astronomer at the Paris Observatory. Tasse explains the range that RIMS can deploy:
“RIMS exploits every second of observation, in hundreds of directions across the sky. What we used to do source by source, we can now do simultaneously. Without this method, it would have taken nearly 180 years of targeted observations to reach the same detection level.”
The researchers have examined 1.4 years of data collected at the European LOFAR (Low Frequency Array) radio telescope at 150 MHz. Here low frequency wavelengths from 10 to 240 MHz are probed by a huge array of small, fixed antennas, with locations spread across Europe, their data digitized and combined using a supercomputer at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. Out of this data windfall the RIMS team has been able to generate some 200,000 spectra from stars, some of them hosting exoplanets. While a stellar explanation is possible for star-planet interactions, this form of analysis, say the authors, “demonstrate[s] the potential of the method for studying stellar and star–planet interactions with the Square Kilometre Array.” LOFAR can be considered a precursor to the low-frequency component of the SKA.
Here we drill down to the planetary system level, for among the violent stellar events that RIMS can track (think coronal mass ejections, for example), the researchers have traced signals that produce what we would expect to find with magnetic interactions between planet and star. Closer to home, we’ve investigated the auroral activity on Jupiter, but now we may be tracing similar phenomena on planets we have yet to detect through any other means.
Image: Artistic illustration of the magnetic interaction between a red dwarf star such as GJ 687, and its exoplanet. Credit: Danielle Futselaar/Artsource.nl.
Let’s focus for a moment on the importance of magnetic fields when it comes to making sense of stellar systems other than our own. The interior composition of planets – their internal dynamo – can be explored with a proper understanding of their magnetosphere, which also unlocks information about the parent star. That sounds highly theoretical, but on the practical plane it points toward a signal we want to acquire from an exoplanetary system in order to understand the environments present on orbiting worlds. And don’t forget how critical a magnetic field is in terms of habitability, for fragile atmospheres must be shielded from stellar winds so as to be preserved.
At the core of the new detection method is cyclotron maser instability(CMI), which is the basic process that produces the intense radio emissions we see from planets like Jupiter. CMI is an instability in a plasma, where electrons moving in a magnetic field produce coherent electromagnetic radiation. Here is a link to Juno observations of these phenomena around Jupiter.
Detecting such emissions, RIMS can point to the presence of a planet in a stellar system. Working with radio observations, we can move beyond modeling to sample actual field strengths, which is why radio emissions (not SETI!) from exoplanets have been sought for decades now. Finding a way to produce interferometric data sufficient to paint a star-planet signature is thus a priority.
Exoplanetary aurorae would indicate the existence of magnetospheres, and that’s no small result. And we may be making such a detection around a star some 14.8 light years away, says co-author Jake Turner (Cornell University):
“Our results indicate that some of the radio bursts, most notably from the exoplanetary system GJ 687, are consistent with a close-in planet disturbing the stellar magnetic field and driving intense radio emission. Specifically, our modeling shows that these radio bursts allow us to place limits on the magnetic field of the Neptune-sized planet GJ 687 b, offering a rare indirect way to study magnetic fields on worlds beyond our Solar System.”
There are also implications for the search for life elsewhere in the cosmos. Turner adds:
“Exoplanets with and without a magnetic field form, behave and evolve very differently. Therefore, there is great need to understand whether planets possess such fields. Most importantly, magnetic fields may also be important for sustaining the habitability of exoplanets, such as is the case for Earth,”
Using low-frequency radio astronomy, then, we turn a telescope array into a magnetosphere detector. Researchers have also applied the MIMS technique to the French low frequency array NenuFAR, located at the Nançay Radio Observatory south of Paris, detecting a burst from the exoplanetary system HD 189733 that was described recently in Astronomy & Astrophysics. As with another possible burst from Tau Boötes, the team is in the midst of making follow-up observations to confirm that both signals came from a star-planet interaction. If the method is proven successful, such interactions point to a new astronomical tool.
The paper is Tasse et al., “The detection of circularly polarized radio bursts from stellar and exoplanetary systems,” Nature Astronomy 27 January 2026 (abstract). The earlier paper is Zhang et al., “A circularly polarized low-frequency radio burst from the exoplanetary system HD 189733,” Astronomy & Astrophysics Vol. 700, A140 (August 2025). Full text.
To illustrate this challenge of measurement and inference, Figure 7 presents Romanian birth rates before, during, and after the imposition of an infamously coercive policy aimed at raising births. In 1966, a dictatorial government imposed Decree 770, which banned abortion and made modern contraception effectively inaccessible. The figure extends an idea from Sobotka, Matysiak, and Brzozowska (2019), which compares cohort and period fertility rates in Romania over a similar evaluation window. We add data from Bulgaria, Romania’s neighbor that was also communist during the time of the policy and that might plausibly serve as a control, shedding light on what course Romanian fertility might have followed after 1967 if not for the policy. Panel A plots period birth rates in the two countries and shows that Romania and Bulgaria had substantially similar trends and levels in period total fertility rates before and after the Romanian policy window. Focusing on panel A of Figure 7, it is clear that birth rates in Romania changed dramatically following the start of the policy, as families were taken by surprise. TFR nearly doubled in the year that followed. The sharp timing of this apparent impact following the policy change, together with the availability of data from neighboring Bulgaria to serve as a control, suggests the possibility of a difference-in-differences analysis comparing birth rates pre– and post–Decree 770 in Romania and Bulgaria.
But while such an analysis could answer the narrow question of the causal effect of Decree 770 on the total fertility rate in 1967, it may nonetheless reveal little in terms of the impact of the policy on the number of children Romanian women had over their lifetimes. After the initial rise in TFR, birth rates soon began falling quickly in Romania, as behavior adapted to the new policy regime. If, for example, an unexpected pregnancy results in a birth at a young age in 1968, a woman may choose and succeed at reducing the probability of a pregnancy in subsequent years, and still achieve the same lifetime count of children.
For a discussion of the theoretically ambiguous impact of abortion restrictions on birth rates, see Lawson and Spears (2025). Of course, the extent of persistence from period fertility to completed fertility depends on the details: A shock that encourages earlier-than-desired births, as Romania’s might have, allows for adjustment later in life. But it may be harder, later in life, to adjust for a policy or event shock that leads to fewer births early in life.
Panel B of Figure 7 plots completed cohort fertility. As in earlier figures, cohorts are plotted along the horizontal axis according to the year in which they turned 30. Although Romanian completed cohort fertility began at a higher level than in Bulgaria over the available data series, completed cohort fertility in Romania did not maintain a sizable upward trend relative Bulgaria during the period that Decree 770 was in force.
Hey folks, Fireside this week! I have ended up a bit behind in my work and as always it is the blog that much suffer first. In this case, we have in two weeks twice managed to have snow which only increased my workload (it didn’t cancel any of my classes, but did require me to offer a bunch of makeup quizzes and complicate daycare solutions). So we’re doing a fireside – next week we’ll be looking at a primer of the strategies of the weakest groups to take on the state: protest, terrorism and insurgency.
On the upside, we did manage to give our fireplace a proper workout.
For this week’s musing I want to circle back to a topic that was part of our primer on the Late Bronze Age Collapse and that is population movement, migration, mergers and replacement. One of the elements of the public’s imagination of the past that is the most stubborn is the tendency to assume incorrectly that migration always means population replacement. In fact, the question is a lot more complex than that. Fortunately we’ve developed quite a few historical tools to try to tell what kind of population change is happening in any given moment of mass migration. Unfortunately, a lot of folks continue to hold doggedly to the notion that population migration always means extermination and replacement, some because they refuse to accept that anything they learned in their high school textbook in the 1960s might have been wrong (a perennial problem doing public education – the ‘history shouldn’t change’ crowd) and others because their ideology (usually some form of ‘scientific’ racism, thinly veiled) demands it.
You will tend to find this view – that population migration always means replacement – very often in older (19th century) scholarship, for a few reasons. One of those reasons is, and you’ll have to pardon me, simply the racist mindset: 19th century racists tended to view ethnic groups as fully self-contained population units, with genetic and cultural identities being nearly perfectly co-extensive, which pushed each other around rather than ‘fuzzing’ into each other on the edges. It is not hard to see, on the one hand, why scholars from societies that were at once engaged in nationalistic projects predicated on the idea that the genetic nation, cultural nation and nation-state are and ought to be co-extensive (e.g. the idea that all cultural Germans are also genetically related and that as a result they ought to be contained in a single German state) and operating racially exclusive imperial regimes overseas might be wedded to this vision. Indeed, their racially exclusive imperial regimes almost require such an (inaccurate) vision of humanity, so as to justify why ‘the French’ could act as a single, coherent body to rule over ‘the natives’ in a system that admits no edge-cases.1
Given that mindset – the assumption that ‘superior races’ must dominate, conquer and either enslave or replace ‘inferior races’ – it is not shocking that these scholars tended to assume, any time they could detect a hint of population movement, that what was happening was extermination and replacement.
That said over time we’ve developed better historical tools to allow us to question those assumptions. For the earliest 19th century scholars, all they had were the raw textual evidence. And that’s tricky because ancient writers routinely describe places and peoples as being utterly, completely and entirely destroyed – verdicts carelessly accepted by readers both 19th century and contemporary – when the actual destruction was very clearly less total. Students of Roman history will have in their heads, for instance, that in 146 BC Carthage and Corinth were utterly, completely and entirely destroyed and that Numantia was similarly annihilated in 133.
Except they weren’t. Corinth is, after all, still around for St. Paul to write letters to the Corinthians in the first century AD and it is still a distinctively Greek settlement, not some Roman colony. Carthage is recolonized by the Romans in 44 BC, but the people from Carthage continue to represent themselves as Phoenician or Levantine, suggesting quite a lot of the population remained Punic. Most notable here, of course, is the emperor Septimius Severus, who was from that reestablished Carthage, who is represented in our sources (and seemingly represented himself) as of mixed Italian-Punic heritage, with branches of his family living in Syria as locals. Evidently the Carthaginians weren’t all destroyed after all.
As for Numantia, Numantia was the most important town of the Arevaci (a Celtiberian people) when it was supposedly annihilated. Except Strabo, writing in the early first century AD notes the presence of the Arevaci civitas (that is, their legally recognized local self-governing unit) and lists Numantia as one of their chief towns (Strabo 3.4.13). Pliny the Elder (HN 3.3.18-19) writing in the mid-first century AD likewise notes Numantia as a major town of the Arevaci civitas, as does Ptolemy (the geographer) writing c. 150 (2.5). Numantia remains a continously inhabited site well into the late Roman period!
In short, many students and scholars are swift to accept declarations by our sources that a given people was ‘wiped out’ or annihilated or replaced when it is clear that what we are reading is intense hyperbole meant to stress that these people were badly brutalized (but not wiped out).
Alas, the first real tool we got to assess population movement reinforced rather than discouraged the 19th century ‘all replacement, all the time’ view: linguistics. After all, if your sources say there was a population migration and the local language changes, well chances are you really do have a lot of people moving. But assuming replacement here is extremely tricky because the thing about languages is that people learn them. One need only briefly look at a list of languages under threat today to see how people will migrate towards more useful or popular languages – abandoning local ones – even in the absence of official repression and indeed sometimes in the presence of active state efforts to sustain local languages. But it was easy for a lot of older scholars who already had a migration-and-replacement mental model to point, as we began to puzzle out the relations between languages, to languages moving and expanding and assume that the reason one language replaced another in a region is that the former language’s speakers moved in, killed everyone else and set up shop. The fact that locally dominant languages tended to become universal over a few generations could be taken as (false) confirmation of a replacement narrative.
What begins to lead scholars to question many (though not all!) of these ‘replacements’ was not ‘wokeness’ but rather archaeology, which offered a way of tracking the presence of cultural signifiers other than language. One example of this, noted by Simon James in The Atlantic Celts (1999) is population movement into Britain during the Iron Age. Older scholars, noting that Britain was full of Celtic-Language speakers (even more so before the Anglo-Saxons showed up, of course), had imagined (in addition to Bronze Age or very early Iron Age migrations) an effective invasion of the isles by continental Celtic-Language speakers (read: Gauls with La Tène material culture). But the archaeology revealed that burial customs do not shift to resemble continental burial customs – had there been a great wave of invaders, they would have brought their distinctive elite warrior burials and grave goods with them and they didn’t. Instead, the evidence we have is for significant human mobility and trade over the channel between two culturally similar yet distinct groups which remain distinct through the mid-to-late Iron Age (and beyond).
Archaeological data thus lets us see cultural continuity and regional distinctiveness even in cases where people are adopting new languages. It also lets us see more clearly people below the level of the ruling class (who tend to write all of our sources and mostly write about themselves). That in many cases lets us see situations where we know there has been an invasion or mass migration, even potentially involving sources attesting leadership changes or shifting languages, but where material culture shows no major discontinuity, suggesting that what has happened is a relatively thin layering of a new elite overtop of a society that demographically has not changed much among the peasantry (the Norman conquest of England is a decent example of this, as is the Macedonian conquest of the Persian Empire). Sometimes the common-folk material culture will then drift more slowly but steadily towards the material culture of the new elite, sometimes such a slow-and-steady drift (often involving the new elite drifting as well!) suggests broad population continuity, adapting to new fashions.
Of course the newest and latest tool now available are genetic studies. This is an extremely powerful tool which can in some cases remove (or add) key question-marks in our understanding. Genetic evidence has, for instance, offered some significant insight into the arrival of western Steppe and Caucasus peoples – the Indo-European Language speakers – into Europe. Notably, a significant amount of Early European Farmer (that is, pre-Indo-European-speaker migration peoples) DNA remains in modern European populations. Unsurprisingly, it is strongest in places like Italy and Iberia (where we have pre-Indo-European languages that survived), but it is a significant layer over most of Europe, telling us quite clearly that the pre-existing population was not entirely wiped out by the arrival of the speakers of a new language family (although the incoming ancestry groups to come to predominate, suggesting some degree of replacement).
Likewise a recent study of roughly 200 remains at sites generally identified as Phoenician surprisingly identified a remarkable array of different potential origins, with individuals from Sicily and the Aegean as well as North Africa and surprisingly few individuals apparently from the Levant, suggesting that quite a lot of the population involved in Phoenician colonization was drawn from a relatively wide range of places in the Mediterranean.
That said, I think it is also necessary to handle this sort of genetic evidence with care. There is, I think, an unfortunate knee-jerk tendency particularly among the interested public to treat genetic studies as ultimately dispositive, in no small part because people operate from the same flawed assumption as those old 19th century racists, that genetic communities of ancestry and cultural communities are and must be co-extensive, when often are not. But the Phoenician example above points to the problems there: whatever the original source of the genetic material among the Carthaginians, we know quite clearly from archaeology, literary sources, inscriptions and linguistic evidence that the Carthaginians regarded themselves as culturally linked to the Levant (not the Aegean) with close ties to the ‘mother city’ of Tyre. They adopted and maintained a distinctively Phoenician material culture identity even in the distant Western Mediterranean, gave their children distinctively Punic names, and so on.
All of that serves as a reminder that – again, contrary to what the racial essentialists (sadly resurgent in online spaces) would suppose – that genetic identity was hardly the only category that mattered to people in the past. Indeed, in a very real sense, genetic identity in the way we are testing it didn’t matter to those people at all. Given the genetic mix we see, there almost certainly were a meaningful number of people in pre-Roman Etruria who, by whatever quirk of luck had few or even none of the genetic markers we use to identify Early European Farmer ancestry – there’s plenty enough blending in ancient Italian populations for it. Yet those would have spoken Etruscan, followed Etruscan customs, held citizenship in an Etruscan polity, they would have been Etruscan in every way they knew that mattered to them. That their genetically significant ancestors were all actually descendants of early Indo-European speakers is something they would not know.
Genetic evidence thus comes with a risk of over-reading a simple answer to the complex question of people in the past who often had complex, layered identities, which they expressed in any number of ways.
Now I should note here at the end that I have pushed here against the assumption that migrations and movements always meant extermination and replacement. Indeed, it is far more often that we see – often quite violently, to be clear (but not always so) – populations blend to a substantial degree. At the same time obviously sometimes peoples really did push or wipe out pre-existing populations. The aforementioned Early European Farmers – the first wave of farming peoples entering Europe, coming from Anatolia, do seem to have largely displaced almost all of the pre-existing European hunter-gatherer population. Of course living in the United States, the arrival of European settlers resulted in a catastrophic decline of the Native American population, primarily from disease and also from warfare and displacement.
The point here is not a pollyannish assertion that historical population contacts were always peaceful (or the equally silly proposition that they were always peaceful except for European imperialism). The point is instead that these contacts were complex: incoming migrations did not always or even usually mass-replace existing populations. They very frequently blended, sometimes relatively more peacefully, sometimes very violently. Meanwhile there was also a lot of human mobility that didn’t involve mass migration or warfare at all, resulting in the nice neat ethnic lines imagined by earlier scholars rapidly turning into a blur with strongly blended edges all around.
Of course in many cases, the folks who remain intensely wedded to a pure extermination-and-replacement model of population interaction remain so wedded not because that model is true or comports to the evidence (of which they generally have little knowledge), but because it is ideologically necessary: they’re bigots who want to engage in ethnic cleansing (or want to ward off the idea their own ancestors might have been guilty of it) and so want to assert that population interactions must always be so, because if it is always so, if there is no other way, then they can no longer be blamed for their fantasies.
But it was not always so. History is complex and defined by human choices. Better things were possible and better things are now possible. Sometimes we even chose those better things.
Of course I couldn’t leave you entirely without a cat picture.
On to Recommendations:
I’ve run across quite a few neat videos and podcasts over the past week. Over on ToldInStone’s podcast channel, he interviewed Roel Konijnendijk on Alexander the Great in a wonderfully informative discussion. I particularly like Konijnendijk’s stress on just how relatively limited the sources are here and how much we have to rely on conjecture to understand the process by which the Macedonian army emerged, how Alexander won his victories and how the Achaemenid army worked. These are informed conjectures, we do have evidence, but as always with ancient history, the evidence has frustrating gaps and limitations that need to be acknowledged.
Another great podcast that was recommended to me is Build Like a Roman, consisting of short episodes (around 20 minutes) talking the materials and methods by which the Romans built their famous structures. The podcast, by Darren McLean is just getting started laying out the different materials – concrete, lime, tuff, travertine, etc. – that were used in construction and is well worth a listen if you are interested in Roman building.
Meanwhile in naval history on Drachinifel’s channel, he has a long video (well, long by normal standards, regular length by Drach standards) on the start of Britain’s anti-slavery campaign at sea, led by the Royal Navy’s West Africa Squadron, which had the responsibility of enforcing Britain’s efforts to block the slave trade. The British ban on slave trading, passed in 1807, did not self-enforce, after all: British slavers arranged to fly false flags or get false papers from other countries in order to continue the trade illegally and of course the ships of other powers continued the trade. Drach takes this effort to 1820 and I hope he continues the series since the West Africa Squadron remained active into the 1860s.
Finally over on his History Does You substack, the admirably named Secretary of Defense Rock penned an interesting essay, “There is No Such Thing as Grand Strategy” which I think is worth reading. The title is in some sense misleading: sodrock immediately concedes that, by its narrow definition states do actually do grand strategy – that is, correlating economic, demographic, military and diplomatic policy to clear ends. What he disputes is the notion of some airy realm of pure strategy, where all of the messiness of politics falls away and states think purely in these terms. And that point is, I think, valuable. One of the challenges I’ve had in making my own arguments about Roman strategy is dealing with colleagues whose vision of strategy is so informed by the non-existent idea of this ‘higher plane’ of strategic thinking that they cannot recognize real strategy making – messy, ad hoc, temporary and complicated – when they see it.
Finally, on to this week’s Book Review. This week, I want to recommend Lucian Staiano-Daniels’ The War People: A Social History of Common Soldiers during the Era of the Thirty Years War (2024). Two quick caveats: first, I was given a copy of the book by the author (but I do not recommend every book I am given by an author and folks who send me books know that) and second, this is a volume that is a bit more pricey than what I normally recommend and I was going to hold off recommending it on that basis (the book is good, obviously) except that it has a much more reasonably priced Kindle version. I do generally try to avoid recommending academic books no one can afford, so the more affordable E-book is welcome.
The War People fits into a larger genre we call ‘micro-history:’ rather than grand narrative of a whole war or reign or country, it is a focused history of a relatively small group of people, with the aim of illuminating what it was like to live a certain kind of life in a certain place at a certain time. In this case, the focus of the book is on the Mansfield Regiment, raised by Wolfgang von Mansfield, a Saxon noble, in Saxony in 1625 to fight in Northern Italy on behalf of Spain as part of the Valtellina War, a side theater of the larger Thirty Years War (and the Eighty Years War) fought over a key component of the Spanish Road which connected Habsburg logistics from Spain to the Spanish Netherlands overland. Doubtless that sentence made your head spin a little but for the reader as much as for the soldiers raised the actual politics of all of this is secondary (as Staiano-Daniels notes, when their war ends in victory, the regiment doesn’t even record this in their records): this book isn’t about the Valtellina War, it is about what it was like to serve in a regiment in Europe during this period.
In order to do that Staiano-Daniels uses the records and letters of this one regiment to dig into what life and military culture were like. How, for instance, the soldiery had their own sense of honor and appropriate action, which differed quite a lot from the civilians around them (one soldier writes, “to make it in this thing, you’ve really got to be young, and you’ve got to look at others with your fists” which is just remarkably on the nose), how they got into trouble, how they were (sometimes not) paid, what their diverse origins were, how they displayed their status (with colorful outfits made of cloth that they bought, traded and sometimes stole) and most of all the social values of this society. The result is a window into another cultural world, at once familiar and alien. Eventually, for lack of pay, the regiment effectively collapses – the perennial problem that states in this period had the resources and administration to raise large armies, but not to sustain them – with some portion of the regiment bleeding away and the rest pulled into a new regiment under the command of Alwig von Sulz.
The War People is well- and clearly-written, though I should be clear that it is written in a clear and effective but relatively dry academic style. The background politics and strategic considerations which motivated the raising of the Mansfield Regiment may confuse a reader, but they are also in a way fundamentally unimportant to the purpose of the book – what mattered was there there were many such regiments engaged in many such wars and this is how they (or some of them) lived. And that part of the narrative, with Staiano-Daniels presents as a mix of vignettes (like the theft and distribution of quite a bit of cloth, for instance) and careful analysis (like the study of how and how much soldiers were paid) very clearly and effectively. The micro-history focus is particularly valuable here: it is one thing to read in larger scale histories of warfare in Europe in this period, for instance, that states often struggled to pay their armies, but it is informative in a different way to read through the process by which the Mansfield regiment steadily withered away (pillaging not a few locals in the process) as its officers struggled to maintain it or manage its transition to a new formation without proper pay. That is the great virtue of this approach: it takes a general feature and then reveals how that feature manifested ‘on the ground’ as it were.
Consequently, I can imagine this book as remarkably valuable in the hands of at least three kinds of readers. For the scholar of the period, it is an effective, often penetrating work of social and military history, of course. But equally for the enthusiast or reenactor, it gives a real sense of what daily life was like in these regiments, including some very intense ugliness (there’s quite a lot of violence in this book, recorded through legal proceedings and such), but also the soldier’s own sense of who they were, what their values were and what sort of person could be upright in their company. Finally, for the world-builders out there who want to tell stories about early professional armies, the book provides an opportunity to ground those stories in the real experiences of soldiers in such a regiment and the many, many other people (women attached to the men of the regiment, civilians unfortunate enough to be near it) it impacted. Here the ‘on the ground’ focus of the book is going to be particularly useful in translating general ideas into a specific sense of how those ideas might translate to actual practice .
Members of the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee voted to approve a NASA authorization bill this week, advancing legislation chock full of policy guidelines meant to give lawmakers a voice in the space agency's strategic direction.
The committee met to "mark up" the NASA Reauthorization Act of 2026, adding more than 40 amendments to the bill before a unanimous vote to refer the legislation to the full House of Representatives. Wednesday's committee vote was just one of several steps needed for the bill to become law. It must pass a vote on the House floor, win approval from the Senate, and then go to the White House for President Donald Trump's signature.
Ars has reported on one of the amendments, which would authorize NASA to take steps toward a "commercial" deep space program using privately owned rockets and spacecraft rather than vehicles owned by the government.
Welcome to Edition 8.28 of the Rocket Report! The big news in rocketry this week was that NASA still hasn't solved the problem with hydrogen leaks on the Space Launch System. The problem caused months of delays before the first SLS launch in 2022, and the fuel leaks cropped up again Monday during a fueling test on NASA's second SLS rocket. It is a continuing problem, and NASA's sparse SLS launch rate makes every countdown an experiment, as my colleague Eric Berger wrote this week. NASA will conduct another fueling test in the coming weeks after troubleshooting the rocket's leaky fueling line, but the launch of the Artemis II mission is off until March.
As always, we welcome reader submissions. If you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets, as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.
Blue Origin "pauses" New Shepard flights. Blue Origin has "paused" its New Shepard program for the next two years, a move that likely signals a permanent end to the suborbital space tourism initiative, Ars reports. The small rocket and capsule have been flying since April 2015 and have combined to make 38 launches, all but one of which were successful, and 36 landings. In its existence, the New Shepard program flew 98 people to space, however briefly, and launched more than 200 scientific and research payloads into the microgravity environment.
A sunny day in early 2026 revealed the remnants of a winter storm on Arizona’s high desert—and produced a striking, if somewhat puzzling, display of light and shadow in the Grand Canyon. An astronaut aboard the International Space Station captured these photographs of the distinct topography on January 26, 2026.
Snow flurries were flying in the area the previous two days, as they were across much of the central and eastern U.S. Hazardous conditions within Grand Canyon National Park prompted officials to close Desert View Drive, which runs along a portion of the South Rim shown in the photo above, and to issue warnings about icy trails. (The North Rim is closed to traffic in winter and early spring.) When the road reopened around the time of these photos, a layer of white remained on both the South Rim, at an elevation of around 7,000 feet (2,100 meters), and the North Rim, at about 8,000 feet (2,400 meters).
January 26, 2026
Snow is typical at these high elevations in winter. The South Rim and North Rim see average season totals of 58 inches and 142 inches, respectively. At lower, warmer elevations, precipitation tends to fall as rain. On January 24, for example, snow fell on the plateau, while a weather station at Phantom Ranch on the canyon floor recorded 0.06 inches of rain.
If these photos make the iconic feature of the American West look more like a mountain range than a vast chasm, the effect is likely due to a visual illusion called relief inversion. Many people have an unconscious expectation that a light source should come from the top of an image. In these images, however, the Sun is shining from the south, or the bottom of the photos. Though the shadows on the canyon walls may be visually deceiving, the presence of snow helps to signal that the flat areas sit at higher elevations.
Astronaut photographs ISS074-E-208838 and ISS074-E-208848 were acquired on January 26, 2026, with a Nikon Z9 digital camera using a focal length of 400 millimeters. They are provided by the ISS Crew Earth Observations Facility and the Earth Science and Remote Sensing Unit at NASA Johnson Space Center. The images were taken by a member of the Expedition 74 crew. The images have been cropped and enhanced to improve contrast, and lens artifacts have been removed. The International Space Station Program supports the laboratory as part of the ISS National Lab to help astronauts take pictures of Earth that will be of the greatest value to scientists and the public, and to make those images freely available on the Internet. Additional images taken by astronauts and cosmonauts can be viewed at the NASA/JSC Gateway to Astronaut Photography of Earth. Story by Lindsey Doermann.
The cost of the proposed IBR has ballooned from a maximum of $5.9 billion (2022) to a total of $13.6 billion, according to estimates obtained via public records request.
IBR asserts that these increases are simply the result of inflation.
Unexpected inflation (that is higher inflation between 2022 and 2025 than was already built in to the IBR cost estimate) accounts for only $1 billion (less than one-seventh) of the increased cost estimate for the IBR.
IBR estimates already had inflation built in, but assumed that costs would increase by about 2.0 percent per year.
In fact, according to data reported by IBR in 2025, annual inflation averaged about 6.98 percent per year between 2020 and 2025 (this is a composite of construction costs, engineering costs, and right-of-way costs weighted by IBR budget categories). In the aggregate, prices increased about 22 percent between the 2022 and 2025 estimates. At two percent per year, slightly more than a 6 percent three-year increase was already built into the IBR cost estimate..
Consequently the “excess inflation”–or inflationary increase beyond that already built into the IBR budget–was just 16 percent over the three years between the 2022 and 2025 forecasts.
On a budget of $5.9 billion, this excess inflation should have led to an increase in costs of a total of about $1 billion. But the cost estimate increased seven times faster–by more about $7.7 billion. This means that other factors, not higher than expected inflation since 2022, are responsible for the big increase.
IBR officials blame inflation
A favorite response of IBR officials has been to attribute the huge increase in IBR costs to a nationwide trend of increased highway construction costs. For example, at the January 22, 2026 Oregon Transportation Commission meeting, IBR project director Carly Francis testified:
What folks have been reacting to very naturally is the change in costs over time that everyone has been experiencing across the country, and this program is not immune to that. So transportation projects nationwide have been experiencing that inflation construction to bids have been going higher.
In short, IBR wants everyone to think that they are innocent victims of a nationwide trend. Conspicuously absent from these explanations is any mention of actual inflation rates. A close look at IBR’s own internal documents shows heightened construction cost inflation over the past three years alone accounts for only a small fraction of the project’s increased cost.
IBR Estimates Already Included an Allowance for Inflation
In January of 2021, the IBR team described the methodology they used to construct their estimates and predicted construction cost inflation of 2.2 percent to 2.3 percent per year after 2020:
As with the construction cost inflation factor, the program team used WSDOT’s Capital Development and Management (CPDM) historical and forecast cost indices for Preliminary Engineering (PE), Right-ofWay (RW) acquisition, and Construction activities (CN), using third-party data sources and statewide experience. The values used to escalate fiscal year (FY) 2012 dollars to FY 2020 are based on these indices by the three expenditure types, which include historical data through FY 2019. The overall effect of the three historical cost indices that were used to inflate from FY 2012 to FY 2020 equates to an average annual inflation rate from 2.0% to 2.2%, depending on which capital cost option is selected. Projected inflation rates by year beyond FY 2020 vary, averaging between 2.2% and 2.3% when applied to the expenditure schedules for the capital cost options.
Actual inflation has been slightly higher that predicted
City Observatory obtained previously unreleased IBR analyses of construction cost inflation from a public records request. These data show that inflation over the past five years has been higher than IBR had predicted. The actual data use three different sub-indices: construction costs, preliminary engineering costs, and right-0f-way costs. IBR reports the annual rate of increase of these costs from FY 2020 through FY 2025 as follows:
Actual Rate of Change Between FY 2020 and 2025
Annual
2022-25 Change
Share
Construction
6.98%
1.22
88.8%
Preliminary Engineering
3.21%
1.10
7.2%
Right-of-Way
8.02%
1.26
4.1%
Weighted Composite
6.75%
1.22
Inflation Predicted in 2022 Estimate (@2%)
Construction
2.00%
1.06
88.8%
Preliminary Engineering
2.00%
1.06
7.2%
Right-of-Way
2.00%
1.06
4.1%
Weighted Composite
2.00%
1.06
Difference
4.75%
0.16
We have constructed a composite priced index by weighting each of the three cost sub-indices by the share of expenditures in each category. About 88 percent of IBR budget consists of construction costs, with the remainder divided between preliminary engineering and right-of-way costs.
The weighted composite rate of annual cost increases for the IBR project between Fiscal Years 2020 and 2025 was 6.75 percent. That means prices increased about 4.75 percent faster than IBR predicted (6.75 percent – 2.00 percent). Over the period 2022 to 2025 (i.e. between the earlier estimate and the current estimate), total costs increased by about 22 percent (three years at 6.98 percent), as opposed to the implied forecast of increased costs of about 6 percent (three years at 2.0 percent). Based on the increased inflation (i.e. higher costs increases than already built in to the project’s budget forecast), the 2025 cost estimate should be about 16 percent (22 percent minus 6 percent) higher than the 2022 cost estimate.
IBR’s vastly higher cost estimate is not explained by inflation
In fact, the cost estimate is vastly higher than can be explained by the excess inflation over that forecast in 2022. IBR’s new 2025 cost estimate is $13.6 billion, which is $7.7 billion higher (129 percent higher) than its 2022 estimate of $5.9 billion. If these cost increases were solely due to the un-expectedly higher inflation rate observed from 2022 through 2025, the total cost should be approximately $6.9 billion ($5.9 billion plus 16 percent). This analysis shows that only about $1 billion of the increase $7.7 billion increase in prices is due to unexpectedly high inflation between 2022 and 2025. Instead of being just 16 percent higher than the 2022 estimate, the 2025 estimate is actually 129 percent higher.
Consultant & staff costs are driving a higher costs
According to the documents obtained by City Observatory, “non-construction costs” which is the official euphemism for the cost of staff and consultants are rising about six times faster than construction costs. Overall, the total cost of the fixed span design has more than doubled, from about $6 billion to about $13.6 billion. But estimated construction costs have increased more slowly than overall costs. Construction costs are predicted to rise by about 68 percent over the earlier estimate. “Non-construction” costs–which are chiefly the costs for engineering consultants and staff time–are predicted to increase six times faster than actual construction costs, by 406 percent, compared to just 68 percent for construction. Higher non-construction costs constitute a $1.2 billion increase in total project costs.
The cost of concrete and steel are stabilizing or actually declining
As we all know, the price of many construction materials rose sharply in the wake of the pandemic. But since then, markets have normalized. Material inflation in the construction sector did spike in the wake of the pandemic, but has eased (concrete) or reversed (steel). The cost of steel has fallen by about 20 percent since its peak in 2022.
The cost of concrete continues to rise and is up about 2 percent over the past 12 months.
Concrete and steel are the two most important non-labor commodities in the IBR budge, accounting for almost a quarter of direct project costs.
Data published by the Federal Highway Administration show that the rate of construction cost inflation which was heightened a few years ago, has subsided substantially. Construction cost inflation which peaked at nearly 30 percent per annum in 2022 has fallen sharply; the index is up just 1.7 percent over the last year (through the second quarter of 2025).
Editor’s Note: To simplify the exposition of this inflation analysis, we focus here on the mid-point of IBR’s costs estimates: $5.9 billion in 2022 and $13.6 billion in 2025. To be clear, the underlying estimates are actually ranges, which have changed from $5 to $7.5 billion (2022) to $12.2 to $17.7 billion (2025).
I don't know why this week became the tipping point, but nearly every software engineer I've talked to is experiencing some degree of mental health crisis.
[...] Many people assuming I meant job loss anxiety but that's just one presentation. I'm seeing near-manic episodes triggered by watching software shift from scarce to abundant. Compulsive behaviors around agent usage. Dissociative awe at the temporal compression of change. It's not fear necessarily just the cognitive overload from living in an inflection point.
There's a jargon-filled headline for you! Everyone's building sandboxes for running untrusted code right now, and Pydantic's latest attempt, Monty, provides a custom Python-like language (a subset of Python) in Rust and makes it available as both a Rust library and a Python package. I got it working in WebAssembly, providing a sandbox-in-a-sandbox.
Monty avoids the cost, latency, complexity and general faff of using full container based sandbox for running LLM generated code.
Instead, it let's you safely run Python code written by an LLM embedded in your agent, with startup times measured in single digit microseconds not hundreds of milliseconds.
What Monty can do:
Run a reasonable subset of Python code - enough for your agent to express what it wants to do
Completely block access to the host environment: filesystem, env variables and network access are all implemented via external function calls the developer can control
Call functions on the host - only functions you give it access to [...]
Monty supports a very small subset of Python - it doesn't even support class declarations yet!
But, given its target use-case, that's not actually a problem.
The neat thing about providing tools like this for LLMs is that they're really good at iterating against error messages. A coding agent can run some Python code, get an error message telling it that classes aren't supported and then try again with a different approach.
I wanted to try this in a browser, so I fired up a code research task in Claude Code for web and kicked it off with the following:
Clone https://github.com/pydantic/monty to /tmp and figure out how to compile it into a python WebAssembly wheel that can then be loaded in Pyodide. The wheel file itself should be checked into the repo along with build scripts and passing pytest playwright test scripts that load Pyodide from a CDN and the wheel from a “python -m http.server” localhost and demonstrate it working
Then a little later:
I want an additional WASM file that works independently of Pyodide, which is also usable in a web browser - build that too along with playwright tests that show it working. Also build two HTML files - one called demo.html and one called pyodide-demo.html - these should work similar to https://tools.simonwillison.net/micropython (download that code with curl to inspect it) - one should load the WASM build, the other should load Pyodide and have it use the WASM wheel. These will be served by GitHub Pages so they can load the WASM and wheel from a relative path since the .html files will be served from the same folder as the wheel and WASM file
I now have the Monty Rust code compiled to WebAssembly in two different shapes - as a .wasm bundle you can load and call from JavaScript, and as a monty-wasm-pyodide/pydantic_monty-0.0.3-cp313-cp313-emscripten_4_0_9_wasm32.whl wheel file which can be loaded into Pyodide and then called from Python in Pyodide in WebAssembly in a browser.
Here are those two demos, hosted on GitHub Pages:
Monty WASM demo - a UI over JavaScript that loads the Rust WASM module directly.
As a connoisseur of sandboxes - the more options the better! - this new entry from Pydantic ticks a lot of my boxes. It's small, fast, widely available (thanks to Rust and WebAssembly) and provides strict limits on memory usage, CPU time and access to disk and network.
It was also a great excuse to spin up another demo showing how easy it is these days to turn compiled code like C or Rust into WebAssembly that runs in both a browser and a Pyodide environment.
An ominous headline to see on the official Heroku blog and yes, it's bad news.
Today, Heroku is transitioning to a sustaining engineering model focused on stability, security, reliability, and support. Heroku remains an actively supported, production-ready platform, with an emphasis on maintaining quality and operational excellence rather than introducing new features. We know changes like this can raise questions, and we want to be clear about what this means for customers.
Based on context I'm guessing a "sustaining engineering model" (this definitely isn't a widely used industry term) means that they'll keep the lights on and that's it.
This is a very frustrating piece of corporate communication. "We want to be clear about what this means for customers" - then proceeds to not be clear about what this means for customers.
Why are they doing this? Here's their explanation:
We’re focusing our product and engineering investments on areas where we can deliver the greatest long-term customer value, including helping organizations build and deploy enterprise-grade AI in a secure and trusted way.
My blog is the only project I have left running on Heroku. I guess I'd better migrate it away (probably to Fly) before Salesforce lose interest completely.
Based in San Francisco, Foundation has a humanoid called Phantom. We spent a day with its engineers and founder and CEO Sankaet Pathak to learn about everything that goes into making the bot and then filmed the process in glorious detail.
If you want to accomplish anything in politics, you have to have realistic expectations about voters. Ordinary people aren’t deeply informed about policy or politics. They have jobs to do, children to raise, lives to live. A large proportion of voters don’t have strong ideological preferences — not because they’re “moderates,” but because they don’t think ideologically at all. Instead, they think pragmatically – they think about things like the price of eggs and the cost of health insurance. And because the average voter isn’t a policy or data wonk, they are often misled – for example, by claims that crime is rising even when it’s actually falling.
Granted, some voting behavior is motivated by ugly biases. Racism and sexism, homophobia and transphobia, are still important factors in politics. But there’s a difference between political realism and nihilistic cynicism.
Many of my readers are probably aware of the famous confessional by the German pastor Martin Niemöller:
First they came for the Communists And I did not speak out Because I was not a Communist Then they came for the Socialists And I did not speak out Because I was not a Socialist Then they came for the trade unionists And I did not speak out Because I was not a trade unionist Then they came for the Jews And I did not speak out Because I was not a Jew Then they came for me And there was no one left To speak out for me
I don’t know if Stephen Miller has ever seen these words. But if he has, he has taken them not as a warning but as operating instructions. MAGA’s ethnic cleansing plans — because that’s what they are — were clearly based on the cynical assumption that native-born white Americans wouldn’t rise to the defense of civil liberties and rule of law if state violence was directed at people who don’t look like them.
And for much of Trump’s first year in office many Democrats were reluctant to challenge his immigration policies, because their defeat in 2024 was widely seen as in part a response to surging immigration during the Biden years. Until recently, Democrats tried to keep the national conversation focused on affordability and Trump’s obvious failure to deliver on his promises to bring grocery prices way down.
While the Democratic strategy was an understandable response to a shattering electoral defeat, it rested on a cynical and nihilistic view of American voters: that they couldn’t be trusted to vote against a party that reveled in inflicting cruelty and injustice as long as the price of gasoline fell.
But recent events refute this nihilistic cynicism. Yes, Americans still name the economy as the most important political issue. But moral outrage over the Trump administration’s brutality (and its corruption, but that’s a subject for another post) has exploded as a political force over the past two months.
There was substantial resistance to ICE’s attempts to intimidate Los Angeles and Chicago. But the response since the invasion of Minneapolis (and now all of Minnesota) began in December has been on another level, a mass nonviolent uprising reminiscent of the civil rights movement in the 1960s and the color revolutions in the former Soviet empire.
MPR News reports that nearly 30,000 Minnesotans have been trained as constitutional observers, with another 6,000 volunteers registered to deliver food, give at-risk families rides, and so on. This is time-consuming, exhausting, dangerousactivism. Yet ordinary Americans in large numbers are willing to do it.
Cell phone cameras and whistles can’t completely stop ICE’s brutality and lawlessness. For some reason I’m especially troubled by tales of the many cars found abandoned in the middle of the street, their windows smashed and their occupants obviously abducted. But the resistance is throwing sand in the gears and producing acute frustration among the masked thugs, who have repeatedly been filmed drawing guns on citizens doing nothing but observing them.
And the public is not on the side of the thugs.
Many commentators have, correctly, drawn parallels between current events and the way violence against protestors led to growing support for the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s. But that was a gradual process. Only a third of Americans approved of Martin Luther King in 1966, the last available polling before he was assassinated.
By contrast, the Trump/Miller assault on Minnesota has produced a huge, rapid backlash. Here, for example, is the latest Marist Poll:
No doubt Trump would claim that the polls are fake. But harsh criticism of ICE and its actions is cropping up in many usually nonpolitical spaces, from hobbyist forums to, yes, professional wrestling matches.
Most Americans are decent people. They intensely dislike seeing brutal repression in their communities, even if most of the targets of this brutality have brown skins.
And Democrats should, even as a matter of cynical politics — although I hope it’s more than that — honor this decency by standing against the Trump administration’s brutal lawlessness. Of course they should continue to talk about the economy. But Trump’s immigration policies should no longer be viewed as a distraction from kitchen table issues. They have themselves become a major driver of opposition to his regime.
Many pundits have made this point — G. Elliott Morris and Greg Sargent have been especially clear about it. I would add an additional reason Democrats should go all out in opposing Trump’s deportation policies: They are an issue that won’t go away, while some of the economic issues might.
Here’s what I mean: Trump is not a consistent economic ideologue. He may instinctively side with oligarchs against workers, but he’s sometimes willing to coopt progressive ideas — as he did in calling for a cap on credit card interest rates. I don’t think he can turn around negative perceptions of the economy, but he will surely try.
But hatred of and brutality toward people of color are fundamental to Trump’s identity. He and his minions have responded to revulsion against their ethnic cleansing efforts by denying the reality of that revulsion, claiming that all the protesters and resisters are paid activists, and by doubling down on the brutality. I don’t think MAGA will change course; I don’t think it can change course.
So Trump’s war on immigrants is turning into a war against the decency of the American people. And it would be stupid as well as immoral to refuse to choose sides.
Up and to my office about business, examining people what they could swear against Field, and the whole is, that he has called us cheating rogues and cheating knaves, for which we hope to be even with him.
Thence to Lincoln’s Inn Fields; and it being too soon to go to dinner, I walked up and down, and looked upon the outside of the new theatre, now a-building in Covent Garden, which will be very fine. And so to a bookseller’s in the Strand, and there bought Hudibras again, it being certainly some ill humour to be so against that which all the world cries up to be the example of wit; for which I am resolved once again to read him, and see whether I can find it or no. So to Mr. Povy’s, and there found them at dinner, and dined there, there being, among others, Mr. Williamson, Latin Secretary, who, I perceive, is a pretty knowing man and a scholler, but, it may be, thinks himself to be too much so. Thence, after dinner, to the Temple, to my cozen Roger Pepys, where met us my uncle Thomas and his son; and, after many high demands, we at last came to a kind of agreement upon very hard terms, which are to be prepared in writing against Tuesday next. But by the way promising them to pay my cozen Mary’s legacys at the time of her marriage, they afterwards told me that she was already married, and married very well, so that I must be forced to pay it in some time.
My cozen Roger was so sensible of our coming to agreement that he could not forbear weeping, and, indeed, though it is very hard, yet I am glad to my heart that we are like to end our trouble. So we parted for to-night.
And I to my Lord Sandwich and there staid, there being a Committee to sit upon the contract for the Mole, which I dare say none of us that were there understood, but yet they agreed of things as Mr. Cholmely and Sir J. Lawson demanded, who are the undertakers, and so I left them to go on to agree, for I understood it not.
So home, and being called by a coachman who had a fare in him, he carried me beyond the Old Exchange, and there set down his fare, who would not pay him what was his due, because he carried a stranger with him, and so after wrangling he was fain to be content with 6d., and being vexed the coachman would not carry me home a great while, but set me down there for the other 6d., but with fair words he was willing to it, and so I came home and to my office, setting business in order, and so to supper and to bed, my mind being in disorder as to the greatness of this day’s business that I have done, but yet glad that my trouble therein is like to be over.
Perhaps, as NBA fan, there’s a column to be written about the incentives that drove the NBA trade market: namely the all-out search to avoid/get out of the luxury tax and the looming “tank” battle among the 6 worst teams. These are both direct results of the recent NBA collective bargaining agreement changes. Of course, as these attempts to regulate behavior go, the ‘benign’ intentions of the regulators are far different from the actions of the rational actors having to live within the system.
The funniest behavior-following-incentive example was orchestrated by the Minnesota Timberwolves. In step-by-step:
–They traded Mike Conley Jr. + a 1st round pick to the Bulls for “cash”.
–Why would they do this? For two reasons: one above board, one below board.
–Above board: the trade freed up cap room to trade for another Bulls guard, in a separate trade (Ayo Dosunmo). They could not have done that trade, according to cap rules, with Conley on board.
Now the below board, cap and rule circumvention steps:
–The Bulls then re-traded Conley to the Hornets as a ‘throw-in’ portion of a larger trade.
–The Hornets then waived Conley
–Why these moves? Because now Minnesota can re-sign Conley after he was waived. They would not have been allowed to re-sign him if the Bulls cut him. (You can’t re-sign a player you traded…unless that player is re-traded).
There will, of course, be no evidence that Minnesota set this whole process up during the step 1 portion. But, human intuition would say: of course this was all part of Minnesota’s original plan.
And then economically: I challenge any business, anywhere, to have executed a better cost-savings strategy than the Boston Celtics did this year. They left last off-season with a looming $540mm salary + luxury tax bill for this 2025-26 season. Through a series of trades, they have cut that down to $190mm – and have fully avoided the luxury tax. Most amazingly: they are a better team today than they were at end of last year. That is $350mm in savings in one year, with a quality improvement to boot! Unheard of efficiency.
Sadly: the worst part of the NBA overregulation world will now commence. 6-8 teams will spend the rest of the year trying to lose every game. Losing profits in this world, through the ‘logic’ of the NBA draft lottery.
At any rate, a fun day for any NBA fan – but especially for the economically-minded. Incentives matter!
TC again: I would not have expected the major trade stories to involve the Washington Wizards…
On The Conversation, James Cheshire looks at the Cold War-era maps that news magazines commissioned to explain the geopolitical situation to their readers. “Their maps were large, dramatic and designed to be spread across kitchen… More
Daniel Huffman gives us a behind-the-scenes look at “the ‘selling mappy goods’ side of the business, in my tradition of being open about my finances. I can’t say whether my experience is typical, but you might find… More
There is no “tech”. There’s no such thing as “a FAANG company”. There is almost nothing in common between the very largest tech companies and the next several hundred biggest companies that happen to create tech platforms. Whatever shorthand we use for the biggest tech companies, they almost never have much in common—whether it's how they make money, what products they make, how they make decisions, who leads them, or what drives their cultures.
It’s important to make these distinctions because the false categorization of wildly dissimilar organizations into one grouping leads to absurdly inappropriate decisions being made. Let’s look at some simple examples to understand why.
Take the once-ubiquitous shorthand of “FAANG” to describe big tech. (It stood, at one time, for Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix and Google. Then Facebook became Meta and Google became Alphabet and Microsoft became upset about not being included, and people started trying to use other more unwieldy, less-popular sobriquets.) This abbreviation still persists because of the mindset it represents, and it is still useful in capturing a certain vision of how the industry functions. I often encounter early-career tech workers who describe their ambitions as “working at a FAANG company”.
But let’s look at what these different companies actually do. For all its complexity, Netflix is, at its heart, about streaming video to people. Meta runs a number of communications platforms and social networks. Apple sells hardware devices. They all have very large side businesses that do other things, but this is what these companies are at their core — and they’re wildly different businesses in their core essence!
If someone said, “I want to be an executive at Walmart, or maybe at A24,” you would think, “This person has no idea what the hell they want to be, or what they’re talking about.” If they were to say, “I want to work for nVidia, or maybe Deloitte," you would think, “This person is just confused, and that’s kind of sad.” But this is exactly equivalent to asserting “I want to work at a FAANG company” or “I want to work at a startup” or, worse, “I want to work in tech”.
So many have been caught off guard as tech has grabbed massive power over nearly every aspect of society—from individuals who can't figure out their career paths to policy makers who've been bamboozled by tech tycoons. It's no secret how it happened: everyone underestimated the impact because they judged tech by the same rules as other industries.
Everything and nothing
These distinctions matter even more because today, everything is tech. Or, if you prefer, nothing is technology. Instead, every area is suffused with tech — and every discipline needs people who are fluent in the concerns of technology, and familiar with the tradeoffs and risks and opportunities that come with the adoption of, and creation of, new technologies.
Now, of course, I know why it’s useful to have the shorthand of being able to say “the tech industry” when talking about a particular sector. But the sleight of hand that comes from being able to hide the enormous, outsized impact that this small number of companies has across a vast number of different sectors of society is possible, in part, because we treat them like they’re one narrow part of the business world. In many cases, an individual division of a giant tech company dwarfs the entirety of other industries. Apple’s AirPods business isn’t even one of the first products one would think of when listing their most important, most influential, or most profitable lines of business, and yet AirPods alone are bigger than the entire domestic radio advertising business in the United States. Google’s ad business alone is larger than the entire U.S. domestic airline industry combined. Things that are considered an “industry” in other categories are smaller than things that are considered a product in “tech”.
That sense of scale is important to keep in mind as we push for accountability and to understand how to plan for what’s ahead. Even building a path for one’s own career — whether that’s inside or outside of the companies we consider to be in the tech sector — requires having a proper perspective on the relative influence of these organizations, and also on the distorting effect it can have when we don’t look at them in their full complexity.
One example from a completely different realm that I find useful in contextualizing this challenge is from the world of retail: Ikea is one of the top 10 restaurants in the world. (By many reports, it’s the 6th largest chain of restaurants.) That is, of course, incidental to its role as a furniture retailer. But this is the nature of massive scale. The second-order impacts are still enough to have outsized effects in the larger world.
At a moment when we have seen that so many of the biggest tech companies are led by people who don’t know how to act responsibly with all of the power that they’ve been given, it’s important that we complicate our views of their companies, and consider that they are much more than just part of the “tech industry”. They are functioning as communications, media, finance, education, infrastructure, transportation, commerce, defense, policing, and government much of the time. And very often, they’re doing it without our awareness or consent.
So, when you hear conversations in society about tech companies, or tech execs, or tech platforms, make sure you push those who are involved in the dialogue to be specific about what they mean. You may find that they haven’t stopped to reflect on the fact that this simple label has long since stopped accurately describing the extraordinary amount of power and control that this handful of companies exert over our daily lives, and over society as a whole.
Classroom materials and maps produced by the Utah Historical Society for the State of Utah’s commemoration of the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States include this rather interesting map of the peoples… More
SpaceX works on the crew access arm at Launch Complex 39A on Wednesday, Feb. 4, 2026. Image: Adam Bernstein/Spaceflight Now
It’s the end of an era as SpaceX transitions all of its planned Dragon flights from Launch Complex 39A (LC-39A) at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center to Space Launch Complex 40 (SLC-40) at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station.
During the predawn hours of Feb. 4, the company erected a Leibherr LR13000 crane beside the crew access tower at LC-39A. It then proceeded to secure a support structure around the crew access arm, either in preparation for removal or to support repair work.
In a statement to Spaceflight Now, a NASA spokesperson said that SpaceX let the agency know about work it planned to perform on the crew access arm, but deferred to SpaceX for details. We reached out to SpaceX for comment, but didn’t receive a response in time for publication.
During a Jan. 30 news conference at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, Lee Echerd, SpaceX’s senior mission manager for Human Spaceflight Mission Management, talked about the shift for the company. He explained why there’s been a lack of Falcon 9 launches from LC-39A since December.
“It’s great to have two launch pads off the Florida coast. For our manifest going forward, we’re planning to launch most of our Falcon 9 launches off of Space Launch Complex 40. That will include all Dragon missions going forward,” Echerd said. “That will allow our Cape team to focus at 39A on Falcon Heavy launches and hopefully our first Starship launches later this year.”
Kiko Dontchev, SpaceX’s vice president of Launch, made similar comments regarding upcoming changes to its pad at the Kennedy Space Center in a social media post in mid-December.
“Worth noting that [Starlink 6-99] was also our last single stick from 39A for some time as we put full focus on Falcon Heavy launches and ramping Starship from the Cape!” he wrote.
A NASA spokesperson clarified in a statement on Thursday how this change factors into the agency’s ability to fly its astronauts to the space station.
“NASA’s Commercial Crew Program does not specify a specific launch pad for crew rotation missions and maintains a launch capability at Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida,” the spokesperson said. “If needed, SpaceX could still support NASA crewed launch operations from pad 39A in the future.”
SpaceX began the process of modifying SLC-40 to support crewed missions back in 2023 and it was completed in 2024. The first Dragon mission to launch from this site to the International Space Station was the CRS-30 cargo flight in March 2024.
The first humans to launch from here were NASA astronaut Nick Hague and Roscosmos cosomonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov on the Crew-9 mission in September 2024. Four more crew members are on deck to fly from SLC-40 with the Crew-12 mission slated to launch no earlier than Feb. 11.
NASA officials previously said that having the additional launch capability for crewed missions in Florida was a big benefit, since it gave the agency options to work around busy launch manifests.
“You wouldn’t have guessed this ten years ago out here at KSC, but what’s become one of the biggest constraints to launching is pad availability because business is booming here at the Space Coast and at Kennedy with not just SpaceX, but all of the folks launching,” said Daniel Forrestel, Launch Integration Manager for NASA’s Commercial Crew Program back in February 2024. “Bringing 40 online just gives us more flexibility to continue our primary mission.”
Starship looming
About an hour before Echerd’s remarks during the Jan. 30 Crew-12 briefing, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) announced the publication of a pair of documents permitting SpaceX to move forward with up to 44 launches and 88 landings annually of its Starship-Super Heavy rocket as well as construction of infrastructure to support such operations, from an environmental standpoint.
The evaluation came about half a year after the FAA published a draft Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) in August 2025 and took in public comment as part of compliance with the National Environmental Policy Act.
“SpaceX’s activities would continue to fulfill the United States’ expectation that increased capabilities and reduced space transportation costs will enhance exploration (including within the Artemis and Human Landing System programs), support U.S. leadership in space, and make space access more affordable,” the FAA’s Record of Decision document stated.
“By providing a reusable launch vehicle with increased lift capability that returns to its launch site, the Proposed Action would reduce the cost of a launch and increase efficiency, delivering greater access to space and enabling cost-effective delivery of cargo and people to the moon and Mars.”
In order to execute the full realization of Starship at LC-39A, SpaceX proposed about 70,000 square meters (roughly 800,000 square feet) of infrastructure changes “to include launch and landing pads and towers, propellant generation, and stormwater/deluge ponds.”
In order to comply with existing environmental laws, the FAA stated that SpaceX needs to coordinate with the St. Johns River Water Management District and the Florida Department of Environmental Protection (FDEP) for its water use. SpaceX is estimated to use 297 million gallons (1.1 billion liters) of water annually.
“SpaceX would construct onsite bulk storage for water and commodities and would reuse or recycle as appropriate,” the FAA wrote. “Based on the analysis of potential effects […], the FAA does not anticipate significant effects to utilities and infrastructure distribution systems and service capacity.”
The FAA said the Kennedy Space Center Fire Marshal and Safety Office will assess the construction of a liquified natural gas (LNG) facility. This will require additions, like “a flammable vapor gas dispersion zone [and] design sufficient to withstand wind forces without loss of structural or functional integrity.”
“Until the LNG facility is constructed, commodities such as liquid oxygen and liquid methane would be trucked in by contractors,” the FAA wrote.
When assessing public safety, the FAA noted that closures related to static fire tests, launches and reentries could account for nearly 10 percent of a calendar year. It estimates up to 396 hours for static fire tests and 462 hours for launches and reentries.
The timing of the first launch of Starship from Florida is still up in the air, but may come as soon as the second half of 2026. During an address at the 7th Space Coast Symposium and Expo in August 2025, Dontchev assured members community members that Starship would be a proven rocket before it starts launching from the Sunshine State.
“Never has there been a case where a rocket at this scale has been tested and flown as many times as it has will actually come to Florida for the first time. That’s never happened. It’s usually Florida is the test range,” Dontchev said. “The New Glenn, Artemis, all these rockets launch here for the first time, even Falcon. That’s not going to be the case with Starship.
“Starship, you’re going to get a vetted machine that shows up ready to party.”
The next test flight of Starship will be the debut of the third iteration of the vehicle, called Starship Version 3, which features, among other upgrades, new versions of the Raptor engines built by SpaceX. A launch date hasn’t been announced, but SpaceX founder Elon Musk said the test flight could take off from Starbase, Texas, as soon as early March.
A few days ago Donald Trump said he’s deciding to “nationalize” American elections. He then made the comically insane claim that he won the fairly, though not totally, blue state of Minnesota three times. (Reality: 2016: -1, 2020: -7; 2024: -4). What precisely Trump means by this isn’t totally clear and in fact is totally not the point. It’s a bit like asking what the front man from a third-rate punk band means when he dives into a mosh pit for a crowd surfing adventure. It’s just not a linear thing. Not at all. To the extent we can connect it to anything, it is that same central thread as everything else beginning early last fall: Trump is getting less and less popular and, as he does, he is lashing out constantly, both from a desire to hold on to a dominant position in the attention economy and to exert some level of control over his adversaries’ fear. Both at home and abroad he is leaning into prerogative and other powers which are untrammeled as a kind of compensating salve for his loss of popularity and power.
I’ve seen a lot of people respond to this with a mix of fear, anger and most of all outrage. That is the wrong response. And by that I mean it’s the wrong public response. Obviously, you should respond on your own with whatever you actually feel. But the posture we assume and the words we use in the public square aren’t the same thing.
We live in a political era of highly kinetic public conversation with a moral economy in which humiliation and contempt play a very large part. This is very rooted in the Trump era. In a way it’s a world of jousting and bravado that Trump created. But it’s not only that. It is part of our politics that has existed for two or three decades and one in which Democrats had always seemed ill-equipped. Twenty-plus years ago I coined the term “bitch slap politics”, the way in which our national politics especially seldom turned on questions of policy or the topics they were notionally about. They were competitive performances of power, rhetorical performances of power which signaled — accurately or not — how a leader would operate in the actual management of power, providing safety or chaos for an electorate that seldom had the time or attention span to delve deeply into different policy proposals. Trump brought all of this to a totally new level. The performance was no longer implicit. It’s no accident that Trump existed on the margins of the world of pro wrestling before and during his turn to politics. Trump brought that world into the world of politics: the performative aggression, the over-the-top, half-comic style. That is one part the political sickness of our age. But the political lexicon is real. We cannot thrive in this political world without understanding how to operate in that emotive space, without understanding its idioms.
Let me say something about that.
Outrage is the wimpiest register we can use to communicate in contemporary politics. On its own it is purely reactive. It’s operating on your back foot. It’s like saying it hurts after you get punched. Of course it does. That’s not a response.
Trump doesn’t want to “nationalize” elections. Before the semi-walkback by Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, the closest he and his toadies came to explaining what he meant is that he wants Republicans to take over running elections in some 15 places where he constantly loses and where he is upset about losing. This is really the biggest loser energy imaginable. He lost and he’s so stung by it that next time he wants to brings his own refs. Again, that’s just the biggest loser energy imaginable. And what’s motivating all of this is that he’s getting less popular every damn day and it’s straight up killing him. He’s homing in on a massive ego injury in November and he’s lashing out right and left.
There are few things that the Constitution is more clear on than the fact that states administer our national elections. Congress has a significant but still limited ability to set uniform ground rules and standards for those elections. But states administer them. The federal government has only a very limited ability to get its hands into that process and it goes through the courts.
This is a textbook instance where the subordinate but separate sovereign authority of the states comes so powerfully into play. They are separate sovereignties, the states and the federal government. There just aren’t levers or tethers connecting them to each other in this sense. For all his vast powers, a president can never order a governor or mayor or, for that matter, a dog catcher to do anything. He can’t fire them. They are part of a separate sovereignty. And it’s driving Donald Trump completely up the wall.
Great! Let him suffer. Glory in it. And most of all lean into it.
Trump’s supporters are abandoning him. He’s getting less popular. He’s losing. So he wants his Republican friends to start counting the votes. So he can win and feel less sad.
Big loser energy! Thank you for your attention to this matter.
The Constitution is so clear on this point it’s unlikely even our thoroughly corrupted judiciary will go along with any of it. What feels like an outrage and is an outrage like so much else happening in our world today is just the wildest and rawest expression of Loser Energy imaginable. Not to lean into a swaggering contempt for that and the humiliation that Trump should feel (and — truth be told — does feel ) for his weakness and fear of defeat and constant demand for special rules and his own refs and all the rest is just a willful obliviousness and paradoxical arrogance about the language of politics today.
In a democratic republic (and really in all times and places), the slavish hunger to be in the thrall of a strongman or a king is the ultimate moral degeneracy. It is a perverse form of moral weakness. The mores of civic democracy are rooted in strength, and self-respect. One of the strangest aspects of contemporary politics is the way that what were once the emblems of weakness and humiliation became rebranded as a kind of power: grievance, special pleading, whining, the demand for protection from the sting of defeat. It’s extremely weird. Trump is, more than anything else, a loser. He fears defeat and he can’t take it and he’s making wild claims to try to wriggle out of accountability and the public rebuke that he experiences as a moral death. Contempt, scorn and, yes, laughter are the only proper responses to Trump’s claims and demands. They’re weakness rather than strength, and no one should be fooled into treating them any other way.
The average decline in fertility among these recent cohorts relative to the cohorts preceding them by 20 years was 0.25 births. Of this decline, 0.09 births, or 37 percent of the gap, is statistically accounted for by increased childlessness in the later cohort. The remaining 0.16 births, or 63 percent of the gap, is accounted for by declines in fertility among the parous.
A similar analysis can be used to decompose differences across districts in India, where the difference to be decomposed is across districts for women born in the same set of years, with two groups of districts defined by having the lowest and highest cohort fertility rates. Unsurprisingly, given panel B of Figure 5, almost all of this difference—94 percent—is accounted for by the difference in fertility among the parous. Differing patterns of childlessness account for only 6 percent of the gap between high-fertility and low-fertility districts.
That is from a new and useful JEP survey article by Michael Geruso and Dean Spears. The main concern of the authors is whether we can ever expect a fertility rebound.
I have a headache, I should probably drink more water but I don’t want to, my glasses feel like an enemy, I can see the words on the screen clearly but everything else around the edge of my vision smears sickeningly.
I have a newsletter to write today otherwise tomorrow is screwed, which fucks up Friday, but we’re only about 10% of the way through the year, plenty of time to catch up.
Thankfully posted the below to her IG stories the other day, which got me thinking, and was going to make this whole thing a lot easier.
# A SIDE NOTE ON PROCESS
I got up at 6am, went through the morning routine, got my shit together, grabbed my phone to put some music on, and just before heading out the door opened Instagram on my laptop and saw the story posted above.
I had thoughts, so I grabbed my Sony dictaphone, and in pretty much a stream of consciousness spoke them out as I walked the 25mins to the studio. A few days worth of audio notes had built up, mostly around ideas for the next newsletter, so I finally plugged it into the computer and told the AI to deal with it.
You don’t need to read the text in the screenshot below, there’s honestly too much for too little payoff, but I thought some people may be interested in the process.
I don’t use AI to help me write these newsletters (which is probably obvious) - I even stopped using Grammerly when they started shoving too much AI into it - I liked it telling me when to add or remove commas and stick in a semi-colon; I didn’t like it suggesting I re-write whole paragraphs or asking me if I need help getting started.
I douse AI to transcribe my voice notes and update Obsidian with what I’ve asked it to update my notes with 😁
Yes, I met a friendly cat on the way home at 5:53pm on the 2nd of Feb
# SHOWING THE PROCESS
Right, back to this…
“It doesn’t help that glossy, computer-made work can now be mistaken for AI either; clean, high-fidelity digital craft has become suspect by default, making handmade a safer choice”
Just that little snippet was enough for me to have an enjoyable time riffing on various ways to explain why analogue can be easily faked, making it a no better alternative than digital craft. That you don’t need to switch from digital anyway, the part that’s missing is showing the process.
If you show the process you show the authenticity, explain the thinking, display the sketch books, make videos of the exploration.
By the time I’d arrived at my studio I had imaginarily TedTalked my way through the whole thought process.
This dictaphone is awesome, I thought, also I am very wise and my newsletter will be filled with that wisdom.
Then I read the actual article the quote came from…
…and of course Elizabeth Goodspeed has already written everything (unsurprisingly because that’s where the pull quote comes from) better, because Elizabeth Goodspeed is an actual fucking genius, while I’m only a genius while walking on my own in the dark and the rain, speaking my thoughts out to several layers of technology, or in the shower where none of the genius gets recorded at all (but because it’s so smart I’ll definitely remember it later).
I’m just heading to the shops to buy some pain-killers, brb. 💊💊
# NEARLY ALL THOSE OTHER LINKS
Photo blatantly stolen from Russell’s Kickstarter page
“that drawing guy on YouTube” is Russell Taylor, this is the Kickstarter and here’s his YouTube channel where I spotted the videos that’ve been uploaded so they can be added to the Kickstarter, I’m guessing.
Interesting is a DIY conference of short presentations about things our speakers find interesting.
It’s not work, it’s not professional, it’s not networking.
Talks are 10 minutes
You can use PPT or something else or nothing
The speakers are paid. The audience is lovely. The venue is amazing.
Would you like to speak? It can be about whatever you fancy. Something you’re deeply into or something you’d just like to explore. The best topics are ones that give our speakers joy. Our audience is not looking for insights or life hacks or to be inspired. They want to see someone talk about something they’re interested in. Our unofficial motto is ‘you’re never more than 10 minutes away from something else’.
I can’t talk at Interesting, ‘cause “It’s not work, it’s not professional, it’s not networking.” - and pretty much anything I do is actually work and very professional, ruling me out.
⚫️
Somehow all of the above makes me of this song*, which, if we ignore that the central premise is predicated on a miscommunication in the first two lines, is a banger (as the kids definitely don’t say).
⚫️
As part of website homepage tending, I started a “miniblog” https://revdancatt.com/miniblog which is just a place I can post very small updates (which isn’t twitter) mainly to amuse myself. I’ve designed it so I can only add one image per post → title, body text, image → as some sort of constraint I thought was a good idea at the time. I’m mentioning it here because I was asked if I could add an RSS/Atom feed to it, so I did, right down at the bottom of the pages (that don’t infinitely scroll).
There’s another reason for doing this which is connected to archives and archiving, but that’s for another time.
I also added RSS and Atom feeds to a bunch of other places on the website too, ‘cause I now have the code so why not.
Which led me to discover most people start the week on Monday, and are furious about this layout.
I’ve never really thought about it before; I think I’ve ended up in the minority here ‘cause to me Wednesday is the middle of the week and the rest of the days move outwards from there, making it nice and symmetrical.
Yes I know, the weekend is the weekend and not the weekends. But I’m 53 and not going to change my way of thinking now.
⚫️
Finally, according to my notes, I’m supposed to extract just the pen plotting brushwork, because it’s the one visually interesting part from the much longer Q&A video & buried a long way into it. So here it is unlisted on YouTube, and even then the brush part doesn’t start until 40 seconds into the video.
# THE END
It’s Thursday morning, I gave up on yesterday at around 2pm with a stupid headache, I’m now sat in the Riso studio trying out some ideas based on my 80s Pop Roxy project. I’m sure all those photos will turn up in the newsletter next time.
Which, according to block universe theory will be on Thursday the 19th of February.
It has, as always, been an absolute delight talking to you, even with the headache stuff, I’m really looking forwards to the part of 2026 where things start to get better, any time now!
As always, love you all, Dan 🧡
*Not in a bad way; in that all of my art is work, and my brain is swapping out the “dance” for Interesting.
So I can imagine standing on the stage and the audience going “We didn’t come here for (your work) art, we only came here for Interesting things”; or, from last year, robot dancing.
What can I say, I’m not entirely sure my brain is working right and this is all a fever dream.
This is the very beginning of an idea. I usually iterate on these things in private or with my trusted inner circle, but what the hell, things are moving fast, you’re supporting me and my work, so here’s the idea.
All us Augmented Developers are working very hard to get the genie to create source code that, once run, will deliver the desired answers to o…
The past two days have seen a growing struggle between Democrats, who are demanding accountability from the Trump administration, and Republicans trying to hide what the administration is up to.
Last night, Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) published a letter he sent to Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) John Ratcliffe. Wyden is the longest-serving member of the Senate Intelligence Committee and is a careful, hardworking, and dogged member of Congress. When Wyden speaks, people listen. Ratcliffe was an attack dog for Trump during his first impeachment trial and had no experience with intelligence before Trump forced his nomination to become director of national intelligence through the Senate. Now he is Trump’s appointee to the directorship of the CIA.
Wyden’s letter to Ratcliffe said: “I write to alert you to a classified letter I sent you earlier today in which I express deep concerns about CIA activities. Thank you for your attention to this important matter.” When Wired senior reporter Dell Cameron, who covers different forms of surveillance, commented, “I don’t like this,” Wyden reposted the comment.
Wyden has a long history of alerting the public in whatever way he can when something bad is going on that he cannot reveal because of its classified nature. This letter appears to be a way to alert the public while also notifying Ratcliffe that the CIA director will not be able in the future to deny that he received Wyden’s letter.
Also last night, Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) sent Senate majority leader John Thune (R-SD) and House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) a letter outlining demands Democrats want incorporated into a measure that will appropriate more funds for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). DHS is the department that contains Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Border Patrol. Democrats insisted on stripping DHS funding out of the bills to fund the government for 2026 after ICE and Border Patrol agents began to inflict terror on the country.
Those demands are pretty straightforward, but if written into law as required for the release of funds, they would change behavior. The Democrats want federal agents to enter private homes only with a judicial warrant (as was policy until the administration produced a secret memo saying that DHS officials themselves could sign off on raids). They want agents to stop wearing masks and to have their names, agencies, and unique ID numbers visible on their uniforms, as law enforcement officers do. They want an end to racial profiling—that is, agents detaining individuals on the basis of their skin color, place of employment, or language—and to raids of so-called sensitive sites: medical facilities, schools, childcare facilities, churches, polling places, and courts.
They want agents to be required to have a reasonable use of force policy and to be removed during an investigation if they violate it. They want federal agents to coordinate with local and state governments, and for those governments to have jurisdiction over federal agents who break the law. They want DHS detention facilities to have the same standards of any detention facility and for detainees to have access to their lawyers. They want states to be able to sue if those conditions are not met, and they want Congress members to have unscheduled access to the centers to oversee them.
They want body cameras to be used for accountability but prohibited for gathering and storing information about protesters. And they want federal agents to have standardized uniforms like those of regular law enforcement, not paramilitaries.
As Schumer and Jeffries wrote, these are commonsense measures that protect Americans’ constitutional rights and ensure responsible law enforcement, and should apply to all federal activity even without Democrats demanding them.
Thune has said the demands are “very unrealistic and unserious,” and Senator John Barrasso of Wyoming, the second-ranking Senate Republican, called them “radical and extreme” and a “far-left wish list.” But Representative Brian Fitzpatrick (R-PA) agreed that agents “need body cameras. They need to remove masks. They need proper training. They need to be conducting operations that are consistent with their mission.”
Trump’s determination to prove that he actually won the 2020 election continues to drive the administration. This morning, in a rambling and often crazed speech at the National Prayer Breakfast, Trump told attendees: “They rigged the second election. I had to win it. I had to win it. I needed it for my own ego. I would’ve had a bad ego for the rest of my life. Now I really have a big ego, though. Beating these lunatics was incredible, right? What a great feeling, winning every swing state, winning the popular vote. The first time, you know, they said I didn’t win the popular vote. I did.”
The reality that former secretary of state Hillary Clinton won the popular vote in 2016 by about 2.9 million votes explains Trump’s lie that undocumented immigrants voted in the election.
Trump also offered yet another explanation for the presence of Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard at the FBI raid on a warehouse holding ballots and other election-related materials in Fulton County, Georgia, saying that Attorney General Pam Bondi wanted Gabbard there.
Phil Stewart, Erin Banco, and Jonathan Landay of Reuters reported yesterday that a team working for Gabbard seized voting machines and data in Puerto Rico in what sources told the Reuters reporters was an attempt to prove that Venezuela had hacked the voting machines there. The reporters say that Gabbard’s team was looking at whether the government of Venezuela’s president Nicolás Maduro hacked the election.
There is no evidence for this theory, but it has strong adherents among Trump’s followers. Legal and political analysts, including Asha Rangappa, Norm Ornstein, and Allison Gill, have noted that administration officials might force Maduro, who is currently in prison in the U.S. after a raid in which U.S. forces took him and his wife into custody, to “cooperate” on this lie. In The Breakdown, Gill notes that while Trump has no role in elections, the Supreme Court has said that he must be given deference in the conduct of foreign affairs. He has relied on that deference to justify tariffs, immigration sweeps, attacks on small boats, and so on. It is not a stretch to think he is now trying to interfere with the 2026 election by claiming elections are part of foreign affairs.
Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, the top-ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, told the Reuters reporters: “What’s most alarming here is that Director Gabbard’s own team acknowledges there was no evidence of foreign interference, yet they seized voting machines and election data anyway. Absent a foreign nexus, intelligence agencies have absolutely no lawful role in domestic election administration. This is exactly the kind of overreach Congress wrote the law to prevent, and it raises profound questions about whether our intelligence tools are being abused.”
Tonight, Matt Berg of Crooked Media reported that the FBI has “summoned state election officials from across the country for an unusual briefing on ‘preparations’ for the midterms” on February 25. A top election official from one state told Berg that it’s the “strangest thing in the world.” The FBI official who sent the email, Kellie Hardiman, used the title “FBI Election Executive.” When Berg asked the FBI for an explanation, the spokesperson wrote: “Thank you for reaching out. The FBI has no comment.”
On Monday, Dustin Volz and C. Ryan Barber of the Wall Street Journal reported that Gabbard had bottled up a May 2025 whistleblower complaint without transmitting it to congressional intelligence committees as required by law. Congress members learned about the complaint in November, but the government maintained it was too highly classified to be shared. This was deliberate obfuscation: the Gang of Eight, which is made up of the leaders from both parties in the House and Senate, and the leaders of the intelligence committees from both parties, was set up precisely so that Congress could always be informed of classified information.
Today Gabbard handed over the complaint, after heavily redacting it under claims of executive privilege—which means the president is involved.
The administration’s determination to hide the actions of its own members while exposing opponents has shown dramatically in the redactions in the Epstein files that have been released to date. Officials neglected to redact identifying information about survivors and even sexually explicit photographs of them, while blacking out the names of apparent friends and co-conspirators of the sex offender.
Trump’s name appears throughout the files, and in an attempt to center former president Bill Clinton, rather than Trump, in public discussion of the Epstein files, House Oversight Committee chair James Comer (R-KY) has subpoenaed Clinton and former first lady and former secretary of state Hillary Clinton to testify under oath. He says he doesn’t have to do the same for Trump about his relationship with Epstein because Trump is answering questions for reporters.
Yesterday the Clintons agreed to testify. Former secretary of state Hillary Clinton posted on social media: “For six months, we engaged Republicans on the Oversight Committee in good faith. We told them what we know, under oath. They ignored all of it. They moved the goalposts and turned accountability into an exercise in distraction. So let’s stop the games. If you want this fight, [Representative Comer], let’s have it—in public. You love to talk about transparency. There’s nothing more transparent than a public hearing, cameras on. We will be there.”
Forcing a former president to testify under threat of contempt establishes the precedent that Congress can force past presidents and their spouses and families to testify under threat of criminal charges. Scott Wong, Melanie Zanona, Sahil Kapur, and Ryan Nobles of NBC News reported that Democrats are taking note. Representative Ted Lieu (D-CA) told them: “We are absolutely going to have Donald Trump testify under oath.” Maxwell Frost (D-FL), who sits on the Oversight Committee, said that forcing Clinton to testify does indeed set a precedent. “[A]nd we will follow it,” he said. “Donald Trump, all of his kids. Everybody.”
Representative Jared Moskowitz (D-FL)—who flusters Comer so badly Comer once cracked and told him he looked like a Smurf, a childish insult Moskowitz needled him over for months—said that after Democrats regain control of the House, Republicans will blame Comer for what comes next:
“The folks here are going to run with it everywhere. It will be crypto. It will be their business. It will be all the investments in the Middle East. It’ll be the Qatari plane…. It’s going to be the latest thing with the UAE. It’s going to be all of it…. They are giving a license to these new chairmen in January and that will be Comer’s legacy. So when [Don] Junior and Eric and their children…[are] all here, they can thank James Comer for that.”
It seems likely Trump has already figured out that forcing Clinton to testify opens up some avenues he would rather leave closed. When asked about the Clintons’ testimony at the end of the month, he answered: “I think it’s a shame, to be honest. I always liked him.” Hillary was “a very capable woman.” “I hate to see it in many ways.”
Another court case might tear away some of the administration’s obfuscation, as well. Zoe Tillman of Bloomberg reported today that U.S. District Judge Theodore Chuang of the District of Maryland has denied the government’s request to block depositions of Elon Musk and two other former officials from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) in a lawsuit charging Musk with unlawfully dismantling the agency.
Because Musk and the other two “likely have personal, first-hand knowledge of the facts relevant and essential to the resolution of this case,” Chuang said the testimony could go forward. While courts have generally said that “high-ranking government officials may not be deposed or called to testify about their reasons for taking official actions absent ‘extraordinary circumstances,’” Chuang said it was not clear that Musk and the other two were, in fact, high-ranking government officials.
At the same time, the case appeared to meet the criteria for extraordinary circumstances. The government employees who brought the case argue that Musk personally dismantled USAID when he had no authority to do so. The judge noted that the government’s failure to produce documents that explained the decisions killing the agency, as required, suggested that the decisions had been made orally, so the testimony of Musk and the other two men is crucial to the case.
Finally, the last existing arms treaty between the U.S. and Russia expired today. The New START treaty of 2011 capped the number of nuclear warheads each country could maintain. Trump’s account on social media posted that instead of extending the terms of the existing treaty, “we should have our Nuclear Experts work on a new, improved, and modernized Treaty that can last long into the future.” Until that time, though, there is no longer a cap on nuclear weapons for the U.S. or Russia.
4. How will low fertility rates affect economies? One estimate given has U.S. per capita consumption falling by over eight percent, which I consider “large,” though it seems the author (David N. Weil) does not?
Professor Walt Hunter on the merits of challenging students: Stop Meeting Students Where They Are. “Whole novels aren’t possible to teach, we are told, because students won’t (or can’t) read them. So why assign them?”
Music.app: To scrobble playing in this I use the lovely Sleeve app. It’s mainly a very configurable desktop “now playing” thingy with the added ability to scrobble playing in Music, Spotify and Doppler.
Spotify: I still scrobble from this by linking Spotify to Last.fm in my Spotify application settings page (read more). It has occasionally silently stopped working so maybe I should use Sleeve for this too.
Bandcamp.com: When listening to music on the Bandcamp website in Safari I use the Web Scrobbler browser extension (also available for Chrome, Firefox and Edge). It also works with 384 other sites, including YouTube, SoundCloud, radio stations, etc., and can scrobble to several alternatives to Last.fm. But I only need it for Bandcamp to Last.fm.
iOS and iPadOS
Music.app: To scrobble from this I use the official Last.fm app (on Apple App Store) which is clunky but works:
Every so often I have to open it and “Scan” for recently-played music and then submit the data to Last.fm.
Before connecting the device to my Mac in order to sync downloaded music (yes I still do this) I have to be sure to do that Scan + Submit immediately beforehand. And then after the Mac sync has finished, Scan again and Discard all the scrobbles, because it gets out of sync with tracks that were actually played on the Mac.
Spotify: Again, I have Spotify and Last.fm linked via Spotify settings.
Bandcamp.com: Web Scrobbler also works for listening via the Bandcamp website on my phone and iPad, which feels like magic, given how locked-down and separate data feels on there.
My recent very belated discovery of the brilliant Web Scrobbler has filled an annoying gap in my scrobbling. I wish the official Bandcamp apps could Scrobble, because without there’s no point me using them.
I’ve been scrobbling my music listening for nearly 21 years now: 254,537 scrobbles from 20,716 artists.
The first time I heard about all this was when having lunch with Tom Steinberg who’d just come across this “scrobbling” thing. But I thought it was a silly word so I didn’t look it up for a while.
Always pay attention to Toms.
My all-time Top Artists chart, since February 2005.
I do wonder what my all-time charts would look like if I’d been able to do this for my entire life. Which albums and artists would be at the top from the days when I’d play the same few tapes, LPs and CDs over and over?
The Federal Aviation Administration has approved plans for Starship launches from Kennedy Space Center’s Launch Complex 39A as SpaceX shifts Falcon 9 launches away from the historic pad.
In this episode of Space Minds, Mike Gruss sits down with a panel of experts at the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg Center to discuss the future of the United States […]
Voyager Technologies and Max Space, a company working on expandable habitats, plan to work together to see how that technology could be used for lunar exploration.
Depending on when you read this, NASA will be weeks — perhaps days — from one of its biggest missions in years. On Jan. 17, NASA rolled out the Space Launch System rocket, with Orion spacecraft mounted on top, to the launch pad for the Artemis 2 mission. The launch will be the first time […]
China appears set for an in-flight abort test of its new-generation Mengzhou spacecraft next week in a key step for the country’s human spaceflight plans.
SAN FRANCISCO – Tomorrow.io raised $175 million to fund DeepSky, a satellite constellation designed to gathering vast quantities of atmospheric data for artificial intelligence models. With the money provided by private equity investors Stonecourt Capital and HarbourVest Partners, Tomorrow.io plans to rapidly expand its “space infrastructure and intelligence platform, enabling unprecedented global atmospheric sensing and […]
404Media is reporting that the FBI could not access a reporter’s iPhone because it had Lockdown Mode enabled:
The court record shows what devices and data the FBI was able to ultimately access, and which devices it could not, after raiding the home of the reporter, Hannah Natanson, in January as part of an investigation into leaks of classified information. It also provides rare insight into the apparent effectiveness of Lockdown Mode, or at least how effective it might be before the FBI may try other techniques to access the device.
“Because the iPhone was in Lockdown mode, CART could not extract that device,” the court record reads, referring to the FBI’s Computer Analysis Response Team, a unit focused on performing forensic analyses of seized devices. The document is written by the government, and is opposing the return of Natanson’s devices.
The FBI raided Natanson’s home as part of its investigation into government contractor Aurelio Perez-Lugones, who is charged with, among other things, retention of national defense information. The government believes Perez-Lugones was a source of Natanson’s, and provided her with various pieces of classified information. While executing a search warrant for his mobile phone, investigators reviewed Signal messages between Pere-Lugones and the reporter, the Department of Justice previously said.
Hackers associated with the Chinese government used a Trojaned version of Notepad++ to deliver malware to selected users.
Notepad++ said that officials with the unnamed provider hosting the update infrastructure consulted with incident responders and found that it remained compromised until September 2. Even then, the attackers maintained credentials to the internal services until December 2, a capability that allowed them to continue redirecting selected update traffic to malicious servers. The threat actor “specifically targeted Notepad++ domain with the goal of exploiting insufficient update verification controls that existed in older versions of Notepad++.” Event logs indicate that the hackers tried to re-exploit one of the weaknesses after it was fixed but that the attempt failed.
“Alvin Roth received the Nobel Prize for work in economics that has saved thousands of lives. In Moral Economics, Roth applies his open-minded, evidence-based thinking to controversial issues at the intersection of markets and morals, where his way of thinking could save even more lives.” Peter Singer, author of Ethics in the Real World
“A surprising large part of economics is about things money can't buy, for many good and bad and complicated reasons. This wonderful book by the leading scholar in that area of economics is something else that just money could never buy. It's a labor of love, a testament from a lifetime of thought and research.” Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo, Nobel laureates and authors of Poor Economics
“With clarity and compassion, Al Roth explores the transactions society cannot escape—surrogacy, the purchase of body parts, the sale of sex, and a host of ‘repugnant’ relationships. What should be regulated? What should be banned? What are the limits of using price in the marketplace? Be prepared to think in new ways and gain from the insights of a great market designer.” Claudia Goldin, Nobel laureate and author of Career and Family
“From the right to sell a kidney to the cost of a surrogate birth, our sense of ‘right and wrong’ shapes the economy more than we realize. Nobel laureate Alvin Roth—the world's leading ‘philosopher-economist’—unpacks the hidden moral codes that govern our most intimate transactions. This is a clear-eyed guide to understanding where the market ends, where morality begins, and how we can design a world that honors both.” Paul Milgrom and Robert Wilson, Nobel laureates, Stanford University
A United Launch Alliance Vulcan booster is offloaded from the company’s R/S RocketShip barge at a dock at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. This will be the first Vulcan rocket to launch from the West Coast. Image: United Launch Alliance
United Launch Alliance is staging rockets at launch complexes on both the West Coast and the East Coast for the first time since November 2022.
On Tuesday, the company announced the arrival of its transport barge, called the R/S Rocket Ship, at a port at Vandenberg Space Force Base. There it offloaded the booster and upper stages for the first Vulcan rocket that will fly from California.
After loading up with flight hardware from ULA’s rocket manufacturing plant in Decatur, Alabama, in December, the vessel made its way down to Port Canaveral in Florida. After that, it then set sail for California in early January.
In a statement to Spaceflight Now, the U.S. Space Force’s System Delta 80 (SYD 80) said the first planned Vulcan mission from Space Launch Complex 3 (SLC-3) is the Space Development Agency’s T1TR-B (Tranche 1 Tracking Layer B) mission. A spokesperson notes thought that “the manifest is continually evolving,” so that may change.
United Launch Alliance (ULA) hoists the USSF-87 mission payload atop the Vulcan rocket in the Government Vertical Integration Facility (VIF-G) adjacent to Space Launch Complex-41 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. This will be Vulcan’s second national security mission for the U.S. Space Force’s Space Systems Command (SSC). Image: United Launch Alliance
Meanwhile, on Wednesday at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida, the company hoisted the payload for the USSF-87 mission onto a different Vulcan rocket inside its Vertical Integration Facility at Space Launch Complex 41 (SLC-41).
“Launching atop the rocket, as the forward spacecraft, is the Geosynchronous Space Situational Awareness Program (GSSAP) spacecraft built by Northrop Grumman, launching to GEO with an ascending node injection to improve our ability to rapidly detect, warn, characterize and attribute disturbances to space systems in the geosynchronous environment,” ULA wrote in a blog post on Wednesday.
“The Aft [space vehicle], provided by Northrop Grumman, is a propulsed ESPA (EELV Secondary Payload Adapter) flying multiple payloads launching into a direct inject GEO orbit.”
A SYD 80 spokesperson described the secondary payloads on the mission as “research, development, and training systems that USSF Guardians are using to refine tactics, techniques and procedures for precision on-orbit maneuvers.”
“They will also enhance and validate resiliency and protection in geosynchronous orbit,” a SYD 80 spokesperson said.
ULA is targeting a launch of the USSF-87 mission no earlier than Feb. 12. As is typical for a mission with payloads concerning national security, a launch time won’t be announced until closer to liftoff.
The company has been working towards reestablishing its West Coast launch capabilities since its final Atlas 5 rocket took off from SLC-3 on Nov. 10, 2022. It carried the Joint Polar Satellite System (JPSS)-2 satellite for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) along with a technology demonstration for NASA and ULA called the Low-Earth Orbit Flight Test of an Inflatable Decelerator (LOFTID).
After that final flight, ULA began converting that pad from an Atlas 5 configuration to one dedicated to its Vulcan rocket. Former ULA President and CEO Tory Bruno previously said that work out west faced challenges due to supply chain constraints, but those were worked out over time.
Part of the work needed at Vandenberg was dredging the harbor to allow for the RocketShip barge to safely offload flight hardware. Also, unlike launches at SLC-41 in Florida where the rocket rolls out to the pad from the VIF, at SLC-3 ULA is using a Mobile Service Tower (MST) that will roll back away from the rocket ahead of flight.
United Launch Alliance (ULA) transport barge, the R/S RocketShip sails towards Vandenberg Space Force Base to deliver the booster and upper stage for the first Vulcan rocket to fly from California. Image: United Launch Alliance
As you’ve probably noticed, something is happening over at Anthropic. They are a spaceship that is beginning to take off.
This whole post is just spidey-sense stuff. Don’t read too much into it. Just hunches. Vibes, really.
If you run some back-of-envelope math on how hard it is to get into Anthropic, as an industry professional, and compare it to your odds of making it as a HS or college player into the National Football League, you’ll find the odds are comparable. Everyone I’ve met from Anthropic is the best of the best of the best, to an even crazier degree than Google was at its peak. (Evidence: Google hired me. I was the scrapest of the byest.)
Everyone is gravitating there, and I’ve seen this movie before, a few times.
I’ve been privileged to have some long, relatively frank conversations with nearly 40 people at Anthropic in the past four months, from cofounders and execs, to whole teams, to individuals from departments across the company: AI research, Engineering, GTM, Sales, Editorial, Product and more. And I’ve also got a fair number of friends there, from past gigs together.
Anthropic is unusually impenetrable as a company. Employees there all know they just need to keep their mouths shut and heads down and they’ll be billionaires and beyond, so they have lots of incentive to do exactly that. It’s tricky to get them to open up, even when they do chat with you.
But I managed. People usually figure out I’m harmless within about 14 seconds of meeting me. I have developed, in my wizened old age, a curious ability to make people feel good, no matter who they are, with just a little conversation, making us both feel good in the process. (You probably have this ability too, and just don’t know how to use it yet.)
By talking to enough of them, and getting their perspectives in long conversations, I have begun to suspect that the future of software development is the Hive Mind.
Happy But Sad
To get a proper picture of Anthropic at this moment, you have to be Claude Monet, and paint it impressionistically, a big broad stroke at a time. Each section in this post is a stroke, and this one is all about the mood.
To me it seems that almost everyone there is vibrantly happy. It has the same crackle of electricity in the air that Amazon had back in 1998. But that was back in the days before Upton Sinclair and quote “HR”, so the crackle was mostly from faulty wiring in the bar on the first floor of the building.
But at both early Amazon and Anthropic, everyone knew something amazing was about to happen that would change society forever. (And also that whatever was coming would be extremely Aladeen for society.)
At Anthropic every single person and team I met, without exception, feels kind of sweetly but sadly transcendent. They have a distinct feel of a group of people who are tasked with shepherding something of civilization-level importance into existence, and while they’re excited, they all also have a solemn kind of elvish old-world-fading-away gravity. I can’t quite put my finger on it.
But I am starting to suspect they feel genuinely sorry for a lot of companies. Because we’re not taking this stuff seriously enough. 2026 is going to be a year that just about breaks a lot of companies, and many don’t see it coming. Anthropic is trying to warn everyone, and it’s like yelling about an offshore earthquake to villages that haven’t seen a tidal wave in a century.
The Vibe Mind
Everyone you talk to from Anthropic will eventually mention the chaos. It is not run like any other company of this size. Every other company quickly becomes “professional” and compartmentalized and accountable and grown-up and whatnot at their size. I don’t think Anthropic has bothered with any of that crap yet.
I mean sure, yes, for their production systems, they are of course very serious and appropriately frowny-faced and have lots of world-class SREs and scaling engineers. Buuuut, you know. The tail that wags their dog is Claude in its various incarnations, and that’s the Work Generator that keeps the hive buzzingly happily along.
So when I generalize and say Anthropic is completely run by vibes, I’m sure there are exceptions at the periphery, where it makes sense to have hardened interfaces with the rest of the world, whether it’s production, or GTM, or product marketing. And the company is probably a bit more “normal” at those edges.
But at the core, they are self-evidently in the middle (or maybe beginning) of a Golden Age, which I’ll talk about in the next section. And it’s very churny and frothy there.
The employees often describe it as a hive mind that is run entirely on vibes, so this isn’t me putting words in their mouths. They are observing it too. Organizations reflect their leaders, so it’s clearly being directed by leadership, and I’m sure it’s intentional. Not all the bees are the same size, and there are clearly some graph nodes spread through the hive mind that are keeping it stable.
But if you interfere with the hive mind operation, upsetting that balance, you’ll gently be pushed out to the edges, and maybe beyond. The centrifuge will spin you away to the periphery, carried by a wave of vibes.
It feels fragile, and it may have scaling ceilings we’re all unaware of. But they have kept it going so far, and I have some thoughts about how they’re managing it.
How To End a Golden Age
I’m going to share something with you here that’s orthogonal to the Hive Mind, but Anthropic is demonstrating this other property so clearly that we need a time-out to examine it together.
A Golden Age is a period of intense innovation, category creation, velocity, and productivity that lasts typically several years. Golden Ages at companies have the property of attracting all the greatest talent in the industry, very quickly. That’s happening at Anthropic right now.
I was at Amazon during their Golden Age, still going strong when I left in 2005. And I was at Google during their Golden Age, which lasted until April 2011. After that I watched Google ossify and become siloed and effectively incapable of cross-functional work, while Amazon continued to execute and innovate.
If you need a third Golden Age example, Microsoft had many of the greatest minds in the industry gathered together in the early 2000s, to figure out the future of software development on the CLR with C#/.NET, because they’d lost the Java lawsuit. It was the best thing that could have happened to them, and for a few years it was magical, and they produced stuff that shaped the entire industry. For a few years they were thought leaders. Many wound up fleeing to Google after it came crashing down.
I spent years wondering why and how it happened at Google. But I didn’t figure it out until I saw what is currently happening at Anthropic. That’s when it clicked.
Google had killed their innovation machine on the vine when they switched their focus to profits, which caused a shift in the ratio of work to people.
Google’s motto under their original CEO Eric Schmidt was, “Let a Thousand Flowers Bloom.” Schmidt’s explanation was that he was “generating luck” by encouraging innovation and taking a lot of bets, hoping some would pay off. It was something Google could afford to do, because they were rolling in money, in the new greenfield of the web.
When Larry Page took over as CEO in April 2011, his motto was: “More Wood Behind Fewer Arrows.” He felt–and rightly so–that the unfettered, unsupervised 20% work and Labs activity hadn’t produced any real hits. So Larry put big constraints on what work would get funded, and 20% work gradually died away. From that point on, the company turned “political,” lost most of their innovation engine, and the Golden Age was over.
Was it killing 20% work that caused the crash? Not directly. As a counterexample, Amazon never had 20% work. Their Golden Age of innovation and excitement lasted a pretty long time, much longer than after I left in 2005. So it wasn’t that. What did they have that Google didn’t?
One clue is something my colleague Jacob Gabrielson told me when he was a Principal Engineer at Amazon in maybe 2015-ish, when Google had become hardened like concrete. I told him that people often fought over projects at Google, and Jacob told me that it never happened at Amazon, because, as he put it, “Everyone here is always slightly oversubscribed.”
So now you see how the magic starts and ends. During Golden Ages, there is more work than people. And when they crash, it is because there are more people than work.
I realize I’m mixing units, but otherwise it gets grammatically awkward. You get the idea.
Larry Page told the company in April 2011, when he became CEO, “stop working on new stuff, we’re only going to do X, Y, and Z.” And they kept every single engineer, but cut the amount of work by a solid 50% or more. You could no longer work on any problem you wanted. And there wasn’t really enough to go around.
That was the beginning of the end. As soon as there wasn’t enough work, people began to fight over the work that was left. It kicked off a wave of empire building, territoriality, politicking, land grabs, and, as Lydia Ash taught me, Cookie Licking–a phrase folks at Microsoft had invented to accuse people of claiming work that they will never actually get around to doing.
That badness is normal operating behavior for a lot of companies out there today. One person described being at Microsoft as being a molecule in a metal, with your elbows tightly locked together with everyone else’s. Ironically, all the Microsoft cookies appear to be licked now.
At Anthropic, they are smack in the middle of a Golden Age, where there is far more available work than there are people to do it, on pretty much all fronts. It’s like they’re on the surface of an expanding sphere.
So despite the chaos, and the inevitable growing pains (not dissimilar to when I was at Amazon during their Get Big Fast phase just after their IPO), there is never a reason to fight over work. There is infinite work.
And so everyone gets many chances to put their ideas in the sun, and the Hive Mind judges their merit.
The Small Version
My strong suspicion is that Anthropic is operating the way all successful companies will soon operate within a few short years, despite it being so very different from how most operate today.
My suspicion arises from a second data point. Yes. I have diangulated on the answer from two data points. I bet you didn’t know you could do that. Well I did it. If my diangulation trick doesn’t convince you, fair enough. The Hive Mind may be an anomaly unique to Anthropic. I’m just trying to extrapolate from the data points we do have.
My friends Ajit Banerjee, Ryan Snodgrass, and Milkana Brace are a little 3-person startup called SageOx. They spend their time in a little apartment in Kirkland, about a mile from me, above a coffee shop bakery, alternating between coding and sleeping, for weeks on end. They don’t bother to put their shoes on when they walk down to get coffee.
They’re all level 7 to 8 on my Dev Evolution to AI chart. I got the sense this is also true for essentially all the engineers at Anthropic, and probably half their business people too.
SageOx are the ones that told me that an external fourth contributor overseas wasted a bunch of time acting on 2-hour-old information, because everything is moving so fast. They’re also the ones that told me you need full transparency at all times, at their speeds, or nobody will ever see what you are doing and you’ll fall irretrievably behind.
So they all turn their volume way up and announce everything they’re doing at all times. “I AM GOING DOWN TO GET A DONUT NOW,” they will say, and someone will yell from the nap couch, “GET ME A DONUT.” “I AM ALSO DELETING THE DATABASE.” “OK.”
A lot of engineers like to work in relative privacy, or even secrecy. They don’t want people to see all the false starts, struggles, etc. They just want people to see the finished product. It’s why we have git squash and send dignified PRs instead of streaming every compile error to our entire team.
But my SageOx friends Ajit and Ryan actually want the entire work stream to be public, because it’s incredibly valuable for forensics: figuring out exactly how and why a teammate, human or agent, got to a particular spot. It’s valuable because merging is a continuous activity and the forensics give the models the tools and context they need to merge intelligently.
So at SageOx they all see each other’s work all the time, and act on that info. It’s like the whole team is pair programming at once. They course-correct each other in real time.
They showed me a demo yesterday, very impressive actually, and we had a big debate over whether developers would be comfortable with their entire workstream made visible to the rest of the company. SageOx records even their own conversations at all times, and the transcripts are automatically uploaded and versioned, and they have the full work history of what every human and agent has done, forever. It’s fully transparent: a necessity for a hive mind.
The consensus was, most developers would be really uncomfortable with that.
Why? Because it’s the death of the ego. Everyone can see all your mistakes and wrong turns. Everyone can see exactly how fast you work. There is nothing you can hide, nothing to hide. You have to be a happy bee.
So I gave them some advice on making work hideable, because it’s gonna take some time for devs to adjust to working in fish bowls.
Anyway, seeing SageOx do this, operating a hive mind with three people, made me immediately think of Anthropic. SageOx are not focused on profits either; they’re focused on discovery. They are trying to find PMF by inventing it, since this is a new category. They are working together as a mini-hive mind, automating their own work in a tight self-reinforcing loop.
Building for yourself is the only way to give your product a nonzero chance of success in the new world. Build something just for yourself, and make sure you love it so much that you know it’s how other people should be working.
I see far too many AI-native startup founders today trying to guess what people might want, and building things that will never succeed. They build for enterprises, little agent workbenches that provide personas and helpers and RAG-like stuff, or they’ll build orchestrators for “normie developers” trying to make agents safe. And it’s all just… ugh. Wrong side of the Bitter Lesson.
They’re not building for themselves, so they can’t see it.
The Settlers of Catan inventor Teuber famously built new games for his own family to playtest for years, before they finally found the formula for Catan through many iterations. I like to think of them sitting around and testing out new variations of games as being very similar to how modern AI devs are building software.
The Campfire Model
Rather than a bunch of traditional departmental silos, Anthropic and SageOx both look to me like they are building together around a campfire, at least in contrast with how most people are currently thinking about agentic development.
I started seeing this analogy when we were discussing evolutionary design at the Thoughtworks unconference offsite in Deer Valley, Utah this weekend, which Martin Fowler was kind enough to invite me to. Absolutely lovely event, I got to meet so many brilliant people from around the world and the industry. It was a privilege to be there.
At one of the breakouts we were discussing Spec-Driven Development, which completely mystified me. I’d heard of it, but many people were using the term to describe a spectrum of different development practices, nearly all of which felt like waterfall to me at best, and Intentional Programming v2 at worst. Few of us found any SDD model very compelling when comparing them to our own personal development practices.
Instead, at our breakout session about SDD, we realized we mostly prefer what we were calling Exploratory Development or Evolutionary Development, where rather than making a big complex spec, everyone sits around a campfire together, and builds.
The center of the campfire is a living prototype. There is no waterfall. There is no spec. There is a prototype that simply evolves, via group sculpting, into the final product: something that finally feels right. You know it when you finally find it.
As evidence of this, Anthropic, from what I’m told, does not produce an operating plan ahead more than 90 days, and that is their outermost planning cycle. They are vibing, on the shortest cycles and fastest feedback loops imaginable for their size.
And the result, they tell me, is something like improv.
Improv at Scale
Anthropic’s Hive Mind is described by employees as “Yes, and…” style improvisational theater. Every idea is welcomed, examined, savored, and judged by the Hive Mind. It’s all based on vibes. There is no central decision-making authority. They are just trying everything, and when magic happens, they all just kind of realize it at once.
They’re making forward progress via mashups and exploration at the frontier of software development and knowledge work using AI. They’re finding their way like a floodfill search.
This reminds me of pure functional data structures, which are like append-only logs. Pure functional data structures are emerging not just at the organizational level in 2026, but also in DevOps. Ledgered, versioned, pure-functional databases like Datomic and Dolt are going to become increasingly valuable for mistake-prone agentic workflows. I’ll talk more about this in a future post.
With this accretive development model, it’s like Anthropic engineers are sculpting together with clay. It feels like there are a bunch of campfires at Anthropic, and they swarm around the fires (various in-flight products), changing their shapes as people try new variations and mashups.
Someone there told me that Claude Cowork was launched publicly 10 days after they first had the idea. When magic happens there, it happens very fast.
They are generating luck, exactly what Eric Schmidt had wanted. But they are doing it much, much faster than Googlers could, because they are all 10x to 100x as productive as engineers who are using Cursor and chat today, and roughly 1000x as productive as Googlers were back in 2005. (And in 2005 we were honestly pretty badass compared to programming back in 1986 when I started; it has been nice gradually turning into a wizard over the last 40 years.)
So to me, Anthropic feels like a quivering mass implementing Multi-Armed Bandit on ideas at a super high velocity. Everyone gets their chance, since you can implement anything and people will try it out.
But the hive mind will also eject anyone who’s not acting like a happy worker bee in the swarm. You need to contribute your ideas in the right ways. It’s the death of the ego. These were the exact words of someone who’s been there since the early days.
Sound familiar?
I think it really is kind of like improv. It’s a team sport. It doesn’t work to come in guns blazing, and make it about yourself.
So we’re seeing real power in the “Yes, and…” model.
And yet, most companies arrived at where they are by learning how to say No.
This is shaping up to be a problem.
More To Come
I have plenty more thoughts on the subject, but unfortunately precious little time or space. I have a huge blog-post backlog to get through, not to mention equally huge maintainer responsibilities now. There are literally whole companies using Gas Town, it’s pretty nuts.
If I’ve convinced enough people of the hive mind as an operating model, then maybe I can write more about how you might go about turning your existing company into one.
A little bird from… somewhere, in Sales, told me that all companies are asking variations of just the same two questions. They bluster and bluff and try to act informed, but they are all terrified. When you cluster their questions, they break down into, “Will everything be OK?” and “Will we be here in five years?”
The default answer, I’m afraid, is No. If you do nothing, you’re almost certainly going to get overrun. If you have an Atom Moat, then you stand a pretty good chance of weathering the storm, if you execute well. Just a chance, mind you: It’s a moat, not a force field. But atoms are a pretty good moat. If you make beer, or work with humans, or ship stuff, say, then you’ve got a bit more time to work with, maybe, to find your feet in the AI era.
If you have a strictly online or SaaS software presence, with no atoms in your product whatsoever, just electrons, then you are, candidly, pretty screwed if you don’t pivot. I don’t think there are any recipes for pivoting yet; this is all new, and it’s all happening very fast.
But there is a yellow brick road: spending tokens. This golden shimmering trail will lead your company gradually in the right direction. Your organization is going to have to learn a bunch of new lessons, as new bottlenecks emerge when coding is no longer the bottleneck. You need to start learning those bespoke organizational lessons early. The only way to know for sure that you’re learning those lessons is if people are out there trying and making mistakes. And you can tell how much practice they’re getting from their token spend.
I don’t work for anyone, I’m not associated with any company, and I’m not selling anything. I’m not even recommending any particular course of action, other than… learn AI. Now’s the time. Just start.
Start
You have a lot of work ahead of you. Build the campfire. Turn your product into a living prototype. Consider building some hives within your company, and giving them space to innovate.
And then pivot like hell to your new PMF, whatever that may be. Good luck. It’s gonna be a crazy year. May the best… whatever… win.
p.s. come join us at the Gas Town Discord, which you can find at gastownhall.ai — see you there!
Bolivia’s new president is planning major reforms to unleash a mining and oil exploration boom, burying nearly 20 years of socialism in the Andean nation with a new policy — “capitalism for all”.
Rodrigo Paz, a pragmatic centrist former senator, said his team was working on a package of laws to boost foreign investment in natural resources that would be presented to congress for approval “in the coming days or months”.
“We need a new oil and gas law,” Paz told the Financial Times in an interview while attending an economic forum in Panama.
“Bolivia should go for 50-50 [risk-sharing with foreign investors]. I give you the space. You come in with technology and investment . . . I think it’s the basis for business in future.”
Bolivia has a fifth of the world’s reserves of lithium, according to the US Geological Survey, but with its state-owned company YLB lacking technical expertise and investment, it has struggled for years to produce commercial quantities of the battery metal and exports are currently dominated by neighbouring Chile.
Bolivia also has big reserves of silver, tin and antimony. Paz said the Bolivian people, who have a history of protesting against mining, would support fresh investment if they were shown they would benefit financially. He compared his country to its neighbours: “Peru last year had mining revenues of around $50bn. Chile had revenues with state and private companies of $65bn. And we . . . had just $6bn,” he said.
We compare trends in absolute poverty before (1939–1963) and after (1963–2023) the War on Poverty was declared. Our primary methodological contribution is to create a post-tax post-transfer income measure using the 1940, 1950 and 1960 Decennial Censuses through imputations of taxes and transfers as well as certain forms of market income including perquisites (Collins and Wanamaker 2022), consistent with the full income measures developed by Burkhauser et al. (2024) for subsequent years. From 1939–1963, poverty fell by 29 percentage points, with even larger declines for Black people and all children. While absolute poverty continued to fall following the War on Poverty’s declaration, the pace was no faster, even when evaluating the trends relative to a consistent initial poverty rate. Furthermore, the pre-1964 decline in poverty among working age adults and children was achieved almost completely through increases in market income, during which time only 2–3 percent of working age adults were dependent on the government for at least half of their income, compared to dependency rates of 7–15 percent from 1972–2023. In contrast to progress on absolute poverty, reductions in relative poverty were more modest from 1939–1963 and even less so since then.
The iPhone is going orbital, and this time it will be allowed to hang around for a while.
On Wednesday night, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman revealed that the Crew-12 and Artemis II astronauts will be allowed to bring iPhones and other modern smartphones into orbit and beyond.
"NASA astronauts will soon fly with the latest smartphones, beginning with Crew-12 and Artemis II," Isaacman wrote on X. "We are giving our crews the tools to capture special moments for their families and share inspiring images and video with the world."
Software stocks crashed today. It’s never possible to be sure why something like that happens — this selloff may even be irrational — but everyone seems to agree that it’s being driven by the fear that AI is rendering a bunch of software business models obsolete. Here’s Bloomberg:
In the span of two days, hundreds of billions of dollars were wiped off the value of stocks, bonds and loans of companies big and small across Silicon Valley. Software stocks were at the epicenter, plunging so much that the value of those tracked in an iShares ETF has now dropped almost $1 trillion over the past seven days…
[T]his drubbing…was triggered [by] concern that AI is on the verge of supplanting the business models of a wide swathe of companies that doomsayers have long predicted were at risk…
AI startup Anthropic PBC released a new tool for legal work, like reviewing contracts…The latest developments raise the specter that AI leaders will overtake established industry players in innovation.
[I]t took a wave of disappointing earnings reports, some improvements in AI models, and the release of a seemingly innocuous add-on from AI startupAnthropic to suddenly wake up investors en masse to the threat. The result has been the biggest stock selloff driven by the fear of AI displacement that markets have seen. And no stocks are hurting more than those of software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies…Few in the software and data spaces have been spared…Shares of software companies including Microsoft, Salesforce, Oracle, Intuit Inc. and AppLovin Corp. tumbled, dragging down the technology sector and weighing on the broader stock market.
Essentially, modern software companies have a stable of human software engineers who implement some sort of task for a client — keeping track of their sales leads, or helping with tax preparation, etc. The client pays the software company a fee to maintain access to that stable of human engineers. They are experts — master craftsmen who draw on a mix of esoteric knowledge, hard-won experience, raw IQ, and access to a vast community of other experts. They are the master weavers, the master potters, the artisan blacksmiths of the modern age.
And like those predecessors 200 years ago, their skills are in the process of being rendered obsolete by automation. Just as a power loom allowed an unskilled peasant to make cloth almost as good as what a master weaver would make — and at a fraction of the price — new AI coding tools are making it possible for relatively unskilled workers to turn out vast reams of software that’s almost as good, and far cheaper, than what a master software engineer would make.
This is “vibe coding”. At first, AI served as a kind of fancy autocomplete for people who already knew how to write code. But with the release of more and more powerful tools like Anthropic’s Claude Code — which assigns an AI “agent” access to your files and lets it keep repeating its efforts until it achieves high-quality results — it’s now possible for complete novices to learn how to make functional applications in hours, simply by telling AIs what they want in English. As these tools continue to improve, the amount of detail and technical knowledge that a user will have to have in order to create a working application will approach zero; software will be conjured up rather than crafted. Executives are already talking about creating software businesses with zero software developers.
Given the latest lift in LLM coding capability, like many others I rapidly went from about 80% manual+autocomplete coding and 20% agents in November to 80% agent coding and 20% edits+touchups in December. i.e. I really am mostly programming in English now, a bit sheepishly telling the LLM what code to write... in words. It hurts the ego a bit but the power to operate over software in large "code actions" is just too net useful, especially once you adapt to it, configure it, learn to use it, and wrap your head around what it can and cannot do. This is easily the biggest change to my basic coding workflow in ~2 decades of programming and it happened over the course of a few weeks.
Karpathy notes that vibe coding helped him realize how much drudgery is involved in traditional software engineering. Dina Bass noted the same thing in a recent post:
But a lot of modern coding is repetitive and time-consuming work that isn’t creative at all, he said. “Engineering isn’t always beautiful code. It’s drudgery,” [Jeff] Sandquist [of Walmart Global Tech] said. “If we can get that off people’s plates, there won’t be nostalgia for that.”
In other words, software engineering was probably less of a “creative class” job than we had allowed ourselves to believe, and more of a “routine cognitive” task — the kind that’s especially vulnerable to automation.
This does not mean there will be no work for people with expertise in software, or no role for businesses that provide software. Code created purely by vibes will usually still have weaknesses, because the humans telling the AIs what they want don’t understand enough to make proper requests. Their software will have security flaws, tech debt, etc. Humans who understand these concepts — who have a detailed, nuanced understanding of what software is supposed to do — will probably be somewhere in the loop to fix problems, maintain code bases, and provide advice to vibe coders (all using AI tools as well, of course). But what they do will simply be different from what software engineers did until just a few months ago. It will be much less of a craft, and much more like setting up and maintaining a factory full of machines.
A great deal of ink has been spilled over the question of whether AI will render human workers obsolete en masse. This question is both catastrophic and unknowable, which is why it’s such a favorite topic. But no one disputes that a new technology can render existing stocks of human capital — the reservoirs of skills and expertise that certain highly paid workers have built up painstakingly over their whole careers — obsolete overnight. It has happened before, and it is happening again now.
Whether AI will do the same to every engineering and scientific discipline is still very much up in the air. We may soon have “vibe physics theory”, “vibe electronics”, “vibe airframes”, and so on — or we may not, if AI hits technological limitations that are as poorly understood as its explosive rise. But it seems certain that although software is particularly amenable to automation by AI1, the current technological revolution is not done upending the lives of various types of technical experts.
It occurs to me that this represents something momentous — the end of an economic age. My entire life has been lived within a well-known story arc — the relentless rise, in both wealth and status, of a broad social class of technical professionals. That rainbow may now be at an end. The economic changes — not just on careers, education, and the distribution of wealth, but on the entire way our cities and national economies are organized — could be profound.
The human capital economy was the Revenge of the Nerds
“All of this wealth attracted a dragon” — The Hobbit
A potent winter storm in late January 2026 left much of North Carolina dealing with significant snow accumulations. Though the state is no stranger to snow, such widespread coverage is unusual.
This image, acquired on February 2 with the MODIS (Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer) on NASA’s Terra satellite, reveals a nearly continuous blanket of white stretching from mountain cities in the west to beachfront towns in the east. According to the North Carolina State Climate Office, measurable snow fell in all 100 counties for the first time in more than a decade.
Snowfall in North Carolina typically requires cold air funneled in from the north to combine with moisture supplied by a low-pressure system. During the January 31 weekend event, Arctic air from earlier in the week lingered across the state as a storm approached along a near-shore track, setting the stage for widespread snow.
Snow totals exceeded a foot in some of the state’s western, mountainous regions, following several years without significant snowfall events, though some locations such as Asheville saw smaller amounts. The storm even pushed south into Greenville, South Carolina, in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, where the downtown area saw about 5 inches (13 centimeters) by the evening of January 31, according to the National Weather Service.
In the Piedmont region, the hilly central part of the state, Charlotte received nearly a foot of snow—the most since 2004—while Raleigh saw a lighter accumulation of 2.8 inches, according to the state climate center.
February 2, 2026
Even coastal parts of the state traded brown sandy beaches for a blanket of white, with more than a foot reported in parts of Carteret County. Beaufort, a mainland town in the southern Outer Banks area, experienced heavy blowing snow. Slightly inland, Greenville received 14 inches, an amount not seen since a large storm in March 1980.
Though appearing serene from space, the storm posed real hazards on the ground. Dangerous road conditions snarled traffic and caused collisions, according to local news reports, while coastal areas saw high winds and waves. Overwash on Highway 12 in the Outer Banks coated parts of the road in standing water and sand, while several homes along the shore of Hatteras Island collapsed into the sea.
NASA Earth Observatory images by Michala Garrison, using MODIS data from NASA EOSDIS LANCE and GIBS/Worldview. Story by Kathryn Hansen.
Some really good and unconventional tips in here for getting to a place with coding agents where they demonstrably improve your workflow and productivity. I particularly liked:
Reproduce your own work - when learning to use coding agents Mitchell went through a period of doing the work manually, then recreating the same solution using agents as an exercise:
I literally did the work twice. I'd do the work manually, and then I'd fight an agent to produce identical results in terms of quality and function (without it being able to see my manual solution, of course).
End-of-day agents - letting agents step in when your energy runs out:
To try to find some efficiency, I next started up a new pattern: block out the last 30 minutes of every day to kick off one or more agents. My hypothesis was that perhaps I could gain some efficiency if the agent can make some positive progress in the times I can't work anyways.
Outsource the Slam Dunks - once you know an agent can likely handle a task, have it do that task while you work on something more interesting yourself.
I've had a bit of preview access to both of these models and to be honest I'm finding it hard to find a good angle to write about them - they're both really good, but so were their predecessors Codex 5.2 and Opus 4.5. I've been having trouble finding tasks that those previous models couldn't handle but the new ones are able to ace.
One of CIA’s oldest and most recognizable intelligence publications, The World Factbook, has sunset.
There's not even a hint as to why they decided to stop maintaining this publication, which has been their most useful public-facing initiative since 1971 and a cornerstone of the public internet since 1997.
In a bizarre act of cultural vandalism they've not just removed the entire site (including the archives of previous versions) but they've also set every single page to be a 302 redirect to their closure announcement.
The Factbook has been released into the public domain since the start. There's no reason not to continue to serve archived versions - a banner at the top of the page saying it's no longer maintained would be much better than removing all of that valuable content entirely.
Up until 2020 the CIA published annual zip file archives of the entire site. Those are available (along with the rest of the Factbook) on the Internet Archive.
Here's a neat example of the editorial voice of the Factbook from the What's New page, dated December 10th 2020:
Years of wrangling were brought to a close this week when officials from Nepal and China announced that they have agreed on the height of Mount Everest. The mountain sits on the border between Nepal and Tibet (in western China), and its height changed slightly following an earthquake in 2015. The new height of 8,848.86 meters is just under a meter higher than the old figure of 8,848 meters. The World Factbook rounds the new measurement to 8,849 meters and this new height has been entered throughout the Factbook database.
As a former Washington Post columnist, I’ve been saddened to see the precipitous decline of a paper that was once one of the most important institutions in American journalism, one that still employs great reporters, albeit in ever-dwindling numbers. While the paper has been struggling under the increasingly malevolent leadership of its centi-billionaire owner for a while now, in the last year things have gotten truly dire, and it’s only gotten worse. At this point, the survival of one of the pillars of American journalism is in serious doubt.
On Wednesday, employees were told on a Zoom call that the paper’s staff would be cut by a third; among other things, the sports desk and books section would be closed down, international reporting would be cut back significantly, metro reporting further diminished, and the team covering climate change apparently eliminated. Social media quickly filled up with posts like this one:
Reaction was swift and angry. Former Post political reporter Ashley Parker wrote that Jeff Bezos and Will Lewis, the CEO he installed a couple of years ago, “are embarking on the latest step of their plan to kill everything that makes the paper special.” Marty Baron, who led the paper in its most recent golden age, posted a blistering statement in which he said that while he was grateful for the support he got from Bezos during his time editing the paper, “Bezos’s sickening efforts to curry favor with President Trump have left an especially ugly stain of their own. This is a case study in near-instant, self-inflicted brand destruction.”
If you said that ten years from now there will no longer be a publication called “The Washington Post,” or that it will have been reduced to a zombie site like newsweek.com that performs no journalism, it would sound far from impossible. While there are many dimensions to this tragic story, what it boils down to is something quite simple: Jeff Bezos saved the Post, then decided to kill it.
The ostensible reason for these layoffs — only the latest in a series — is that Post is losing money. And that’s true. But there are two important things to know to contextualize that fact. First, Bezos could absorb those losses from now until the day he dies and barely notice it. His current net worth is $245 billion, or around a thousand times what he paid for the Post when he bought it in 2013. The paper reportedly lost $100 million in 2024, which is horrendous. But even at that unusual rate, Bezos could cover the losses for, let’s say, the next 50 years, until he is 112 years old, and spend only $5 billion, or 1/121th of his current fortune.
Or to think about it another way: Bezos just spent $75 million to purchase and market “Melania,” an apparently dreadful documentary about the most vacuous public figure on the planet. At least that was an obvious bribe that might yield future dividends; he also owns a $500 million yacht so enormous that it requires another gargantuan support yacht to trail it wherever it goes.
The second important piece of context is that Bezos is himself the reason for the Post’s awful economic position. If he were not so determined to make the paper worse in almost every way, it could be on much sounder financial footing.
What it used to be like
When I started writing for the Post in 2014, the feeling about Bezos was what I would describe as one part suspicion to three parts gratitude and optimism. Yes, he was a billionaire with some questionable business practices, but the way he treated the paper was about as good as anyone could have hoped for. He seemed to have bought it not as a money-making proposition but as a public service. He provided ample resources to hire more staff and develop new ways to report and communicate the news, and he kept his hands completely out of editorial decision-making. What more could you ask for? Sure, though officially the line was that everyone was free to report on Amazon as though it were just another company, there may have been some self-censorship. But other than that, he was a nearly perfect owner.
Nobody would have argued that finding billionaire owners would be the savior of American journalism — especially newspapers, which are in a long and steep decline — but it was working for the Post. People felt that the paper just kept getting better, particularly in its coverage of politics and government. That goes double for the opinion section, which five or ten years ago I would have said was more dynamic and interesting than that of any paper in the country, including the New York Times (and yes, I’m biased, but it’s true).
Not surprisingly, readers are fleeing. In June, we learned that print subscriptions had fallen below 100,000 for the first time in over half a century. It’s true that most people don’t bother with a print subscription anymore, but still, for a paper with national reach and a metro area population around its home town of over 6 million, that’s stunning. While the paper doesn’t publicly release subscriber data, we do know that after Bezos torpedoed the paper’s planned endorsement of Kamala Harris in 2024, at least 300,000 people canceled their subscriptions.
Meanwhile, much of the paper’s top talent has departed for other publications. CEO Will Lewis has been a disaster, especially for morale. Then last February, Bezos announced that henceforth the opinion section would advocate for “personal liberties and free markets,” and “viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others.” In response, opinion editor David Shipley — who had himself pushed the section to the center after he took over in 2022 — resigned in protest. Ruth Marcus, the deputy opinion editor and my direct boss for all my time at the Post, wrote a column criticizing the new focus; the column was spiked, and she quit too (you can read her account of the Post’s fall here). Shortly after, NPR reported that another 75,000 subscribers had cancelled.
Speaking truth to power
It’s hard to overstate what a spectacularly imbecilic idea it was to move the Post to the right just as Donald Trump brought his version of fascism to America. Before the liberal opinion writers were pushed out — a list that includes myself, Greg Sargent, Helaine Olen, Perry Bacon, Jennifer Rubin, E.J Dionne, Catherine Rampell, Karen Attiah, and others — the opinion section was an absolutely huge driver of traffic to the site. I’d be shocked if the utterly decimated opinion section that exists now is generating anything like the same kind of interest from readers.
It’s not like there’s an enormous hunger for editorials like the above out there, and people are just yearning for establishment-tinged apologetics for Trumpism. Anyone who likes this president is being amply served by the right’s comprehensive media machine, and the approach the Post has taken is guaranteed to keep losing it subscribers.
Here’s the irony: By getting more involved in decision-making at the Post, business genius Jeff Bezos has worsened its long-term financial outlook by destroying much of what makes the Post valuable for readers and consequently decimating its subscriber base. I can’t tell you how many people have told me that they’ve cancelled their Post subscriptions.
Sometimes they say “That’s why I’m subscribing to your newsletter,” which I greatly appreciate. But a truly vibrant media system needs institutions with the resources to support the time-consuming and often expensive work of gathering news, even when it doesn’t generate immediate clicks — and as the Times has shown, it’s possible to do that and still find ways to expand your subscriber base. There are still people at the Post trying to do that vital journalism, but fewer than there were last week. I fear their numbers will continue to diminish, and before long the Post will be an empty shell.
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Up and to the office, where we sat all the morning, and then home to dinner, and found it so well done, above what I did expect from my mayde Susan, now Jane is gone, that I did call her in and give her sixpence. Thence walked to the Temple, and there at my cozen Roger Pepys’s chamber met by appointment with my uncle Thomas and his son Thomas, and there I shewing them a true state of my uncle’sestate as he has left it with the debts, &c., lying upon it, we did come to some quiett talk and fair offers against an agreement on both sides, though I do offer quite to the losing of the profit of the whole estate for 8 or 10 years together, yet if we can gain peace, and set my mind at a little liberty, I shall be glad of it. I did give them a copy of this state, and we are to meet tomorrow with their answer.
So walked home, it being a very great frost still, and to my office, there late writing letters of office business, and so home to supper and to bed.
When my friend Louie was 88, he started telling women he was 90. “The chicks like it,” he said.
The “90” has gravitas. It’s the 10th decade of life, and sounds ancient. (80-year-olds are octogenarians; 90-year-olds are nonagenarians; 100-year-olds are centenarians.)
When someone asks how old I am these days and I say “90,” they do a double take. OK, I look younger, but still…
I feel 90. Looking in the mirror in the morning. Getting out of a car. Slowly losing strength, flexibility, various abilities. Forgetting names, places, events.
I think about my age every day. As I’ve written previously, it’s new territory. I’ve never been this old before, so all these daily experiences are new. How do I cope? What can I do? What makes sense as nature figures out how to take me down?
I think I can pass along some useful info here, especially to the baby boomers, who are about 10 years younger and approaching the big nine-oh. Kind of like I did with fitness books in the ‘80s and ‘90s — older guy passing along hopefully useful tips on aging to this large population group.
Maxed Out on the Fun Stuff
Alcohol, cannabis, coffee — to name a few. I’ve concluded that your (my) body has lifetime limitations. You can consume only so much of these feel-good drugs during the span of life until the body signals “Enough.”
This may only apply to me; I don’t know if it has relevance for others. Matter of fact, though, a long-time friend, my age, still smokes weed every day. Come to think of it, my friend Louie had shots of tequila well into his ‘90s.
Weed: reached my max years ago. Can’t smoke or even vape without my lungs sending out alarm signals. I now use gummies, home-made tinctures to get onto the right side of my brain.
Booze: 10 years ago, when Lesley and I travelled in Scotland, I’d have a pint, often two, of Guinness with fish and chips; plus I had maybe 10 years of whiskey after discovering single malt Scotch. Wine or beer every night with dinner (sun over yard arm at 5:30 PM). Now, I just can’t drink much at all. I miss the warmth and relaxation of wine in the early evening, and the conviviality and on-the-same-pageness of drinking in a bar, but now limit the boozing to infrequently and small amounts (and lately, Athletic non-alcohoholic hazy IPA or hard kombucha).
There was a recent article in the New York Times about how “… our body struggles more with alcohol as we age.” Loss of muscle mass, reduced liver function, dehydration, declining sleep quality as we age. Sigh…
Coffee: Morning latte and pastry in coffee shops: one of my great pleasures in life, but now I’m reduced to asking for a single rather than the customary double shot, and only drink about half of that.
As Lee Marvin (playing Chino) said in The Wild One, “…the shame of it all.”
A couple of my oldest living friends. Center is Tony Serra at his retirement party in San Francisco in August 2025. At right is John Van der Zee. The three of us were at in the Fiji house at Stanford in the mid-’50s.
“How old would you be if you didn’t know how old you are?” - Satchel Paige
A Few Non-Drug Anti-depressants
Exercise / Friends / Food / Music / Immersion in cold water / Waterfalls / Hot springs / Feedback on books / Adventures / Roads previously not taken…
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The Light (or Darkness) at the End of the Tunnel
About 25 years ago, I published a book titled Getting Your Affairs in Order, by Elmo Petterle. Elmo had been the personnel manager for the Marin County PG&E and when an employee (usually a man) would pass away, he would contact the widow with respect to the family stocks, bank accounts, retirement funds, real estate, etc. He found that there was invariably confusion and that records, if any, were incomplete.
So he wrote the book, in which each person filled out all relevant information that the surviving spouse was now responsible for. It also included charts of the things that must be done immediately after a death, within 5 days, within 30 days, etc.
In editing the book, I acquired a bunch of books on dying, including some on assisted dying, such as Final Exit and the Peaceful Pill Handbook. I also concluded that when I get to the stage where the end is nigh, I’m not gonna get tortured to death by nature or medical intervention.
In the past few years, two people I was close to chose this solution. One ground up a lethal bunch of barbiturates in a coffee grinder, and put them in chocolate ice cream, which he then ate, and passed peacefully. The other told his doctor of his wishes; the doctor agreed, got approval from the hospice doctor, and, with close family members present, drank the cocktail administered by a hospice nurse, and passed serenely. Elegant.
If I had my druthers I would use sister morphine, but more realistically it might be helium. OK, enough on that subject.
Body Parts
Shoulders, knees, hips: these are the main joints of concern for old people. Then heart, blood pressure, circulation, obesity, arthritis, cholesterol, diabetes, cancer, asthma, Alzheimers, Parkinsons, prostate problems. What’s it gonna be? (You don’t get to choose.)
With my Dipsea running friends (The Pelican Inn Track Club) at Smiley’s Saloon for my 90th birthday (music by the Mark Hummel Blues Band). Tomás (at right) and I have been running together for over 30 years.
Forgetfulness
Memory gets progressively worse. For me, I think it’s partly the fact that there are so many people in my life right now, and I can’t remember the names of most folks that come up to me. I’m thinking of getting a card printed up saying “I’m 90 years old and forgive me if I don’t remember your name. Best is to identify yourself whenever we meet.”
More and more often, I can’t think of the appropriate word. Like the most recent was “…transparency.” I’ll know what the word conveys, but can’t recall the word itself. Bucky Fuller said that when this happens, go on to other thoughts and the word will pop into your consciousness unbidden. Usually works.
I also have a ton of people coming up to me these days and telling me how much the Shelter books have influenced their lives — for some reason a lot of people in the 30-40-year-old category. I seem to be making more and more friends as the days go by, and it’s wonderful, but I can’t keep up with names.
Recently I started making a list of people I wanted to contact and/or hang out with, and I got up to 25 or so names. It’s a good kind of problem.
Not Answering Emails Or Texts Or DM’s Promptly
I don’t have my phone with me at all times — hey, I’m 90. I may not check my email for a few days, I still haven’t figured out how DM’s work on Instagram, so you can’t depend on me to get right back to you.
“Yes, You Already Told Me That”
Stop me if I’ve told you this tale before. I basically have no recollection of who I’ve told what.
Running the Homestead
This doesn’t have so much to do with being old as it has to do with being off-the-scale busy. Lesley and I built this house and garden over a period of almost 50 years. She’s been gone for about 2 1/2 years now, and I’m still coping with running it solo.
In a way, this busyness is a good thing. There’s so much to do that the idleness and/or lack of purpose that a lot of older people feel isn’t at work here. I bounce around from one thing to another. I walk from the house out to the studio, or from the shop to the greenhouse, and spy things to do along the way. (Then I’ll jump to doing the new thing, and forget my original mission.)
It’s pretty hectic at times, but I think it’s a good thing to keep busy. I’m never bored.
The family. Kneeling, l-r: Evan, Chelsea, Maceo, Will, Niko
What Did I Come Out Here For?
This happens to me a lot: I’m in the studio and need to get something from the house. By the time I get to the house, I forget what I came in for. So — invariably — I go back out to the studio to remember what it was I needed from the house. (This always works.)
I read recently that a 90-year-old’s brain weighs about 3 1/2 ounces less than a 40-year-old’s brain (total weight of which is about 45 ounces).
How Long Can I Keep on Driving?
Shoutout for this superb under-the-radar vehicle, a 1999 Mercedes E320, which I bought for $4000 four years ago,. It gets 22 mpg, handles great on the mountain curves, is comfortable, is the first automatic drive car I’ve ever had (which I love), and some of these models have reportedly gone a million miles. It’s 27 years old. (I’m not worthy of this car.)
My depth perception is not as good these days. There are little things about driving where I’m not as sharp as I used to be. I’m really nervous about backing up. My neighbor Carl gave up driving when he was 96. So there will inevitably be a time when I’ll have to do the same. which would really put a dent in my activities — living, as I do — an hour away from San Francisco, and having had a car since I was 17.
BUT — I believe I’ve discovered a solution:
I took a Tesla Uber a month or so ago in Marin County, and the driver had it on autopilot. He was watchful, but the car made all the decisions — changing lanes, accelerating, braking — flawlessly. The full self-driving option is between $50-100 per month.
It turns out that Waymo and other automatic pilot vehicles have a better safety record than human drivers. For one thing, robots don’t drink alcohol, nor are they in a hurry or get distracted.
So when the time comes, I’ll get an electric car. By then there ought to be a lot more choices than there are right now. There’s much I like about the Teslas (other than their owner): beautiful design (like the door handles), and if you take out the back seat you have a lot of storage space. — a six-footer can sleep in this car.
The driver told me you can buy used Tesla model 3s for around $20,000.
Balance
“We don’t stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing.” - George Bernard Shaw
Riding a skateboard (or a unicycle, for example) requires sheer balance. You’re rolling, and there’s nothing to hold on to. To practice balance, I have what’s called an Indo board in the house and I try to get on it every few days.
Each time I use it and let go of any support, I’m a little nervous. Same thing with skating. Each time I push off and get rolling, I’m a little worried: I’m on my own — nothing to hold onto, no brakes. But I push myself to do these things. Use it or lose it.
Once I’m up and balancing on the Indo board (or skateboard), I realize that there are motors and reflexes at work that I’m not conscious of. It’s kind of miraculous. I do this so that this remarkable combination of mind/body functions continues to operate. Here’s just a small part of a long explanation from AI as to what’s going on here:
“Balancing on a skateboard… is mostly handled by automatic sensorimotor loops that run below conscious awareness, with your conscious attention setting goals (“go forward,” “turn,” “don’t fall”) while fast reflexes and learned predictions do the moment‑to‑moment corrections. These loops rely on continuous sensory input (inner ear, vision, body senses) and rapid outputs to muscles via brainstem and spinal pathways.” - Perplexity AI
It’s almost an out-of-body experience, like I’m observing this balancing act, but not consciously in control. Go with the flow is the mantra here.
Never fails to amaze…
Where’s My Phone, My Keys, My Wallet?
This is kind of a major problem for me these days. It’s the combination of aging along with the complexity of the modern world. I misplace my phone maybe once a week, my keys the same, my wallet occasionally. I use the Apple Find My app (which gives me a map and a sound to locate the missing object). You can also use the Tile app for the same kind of electronic sleuthing. Even with these apps , I often need to get help from others (usually younger ) to find the object.
Greater Perspective
There are a few advantages to old age. One is the perspective of having been alive for so long — a faculty that only old people have. And this is doubly useful when I can reminisce with people my age. To remember when milk was delivered to the doorstep, gas was 33 cents a gallon, before TV, playing in the streets before Little League, when annual tuition at Stanford was $660, when politicians were halfway decent, driving across America in the dead of winter in a 1960 VW bus with a 40 HP motor, the “English Invasion” of the ‘60s (Beatles, Stones), the Haight Ashbury before the Diggers and the “Summer of Love” — in fact, the ‘60s in general, including the Monterey Pop Festival.
To compare these memories with what’s happening now — wow!
I figure I’ve got about 10 years left. My dad lived to be 92, my mom 103. (I chose my parents carefully.)
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I don’t normally post in the evening, but I thought I’d offer three quick notes on an … interesting day in the crypto market.
First, today’s price action shouldn’t change your view about Bitcoin’s usefulness or lack thereof. If, like me, you consider the whole thing a delusion — BTC isn’t a medium of exchange, nor is it a reliable store of value — then you already knew that and the fact that we seem to be having a Wile E. Coyote moment isn’t information about the fundamentals. (There are no fundamentals.) If you have some story about why this aging financial innovation is actually useful — do tell — you should HODL through the panic.
Incidentally, some readers insisted that HODL stands for “hold on for dear life.” No, it doesn’t. That’s a retcon intended to make it sound more respectable. The term comes from a post on a crypto message board from an investor so panicked that he misspelled HOLD. See link in this morning’s post.
And I did something similar in the title of this post as emailed out! Sigh.
Second, the fact that BTC is now lower than it was before the 2024 election is significant in two ways. It shows the limits of political favor — all the boasts about making American a crypto superpower, all the deregulatory talk and pardons for cryptocriminals, in the end couldn’t defy gravity.
But it also means that everyone who bought Bitcoin in the belief that Trump would make Bitcoin greater than ever has lost money, in many cases a lot of money. So this is another case of ETTD: everything Trump touches dies.
Finally, this crash may have political consequences. At least some young men supported Trump because they believed that he would enhance their crypto investments, and have remained favorable because he seemed to be delivering. I don’t know how many bitterly disillusioned bros there will be now, but there will be some.
And in general the whole “Say what you like about Trump, but markets are up” mindset must be under severe strain.
This newsletter is often focused on depressing stuff: Scandals, lies of the powerful, scams that defraud the public. But today I thought I’d offer a change of pace and talk about what is happening to cryptocurrency.
OK, maybe I’m not offering a change of pace after all.
Cryptocurrencies are, roughly speaking, assets where “ownership” is defined not by legal title but by possession of a digital key — a long number — validated by the blockchain, a decentralized record-keeping system. If you know a crypto asset’s key — whether you purchased it, stole it by hacking, or kidnapped someone and tortured him until he revealed it — the asset is yours.
Bitcoin, the original cryptocurrency, was introduced in 2009, which makes it just two years younger than the original iPhone. It was promoted by enthusiasts as the future of money, a replacement for the dollar and other official currencies. It hasn’t made any visible progress toward filling that role: Bitcoins are awkward and costly to trade, and they have never been a widely accepted means of payment anywhere, not even in El Salvador, which made Bitcoin legal tender in 2021 and devoted substantial resources to promoting it before largely giving up last year.
These days most talk about cryptocurrencies as money focuses on stablecoins, tokens that are pegged to the dollar, which are indeed used for some payments. However, the core use case even for stablecoins appears to be criminal activity. And stablecoins account for only a small fraction of the total market capitalization of all crypto assets, shown in the chart at the top of this post. Bitcoin still accounts for more than half the total value of cryptocurrencies in circulation.
This description makes it seem as if cryptocurrency is a failed innovation. I mean, aren’t 17 years of unsuccessfully trying to turn it into a working form of money enough? Yet demand for cryptocurrencies has driven their prices incredibly high, and these prices have repeatedly bounced back from huge setbacks. In 2022 a series of bankruptcies and scandals led to a crypto “winter” that wiped out two-thirds of the industry’s market cap. Yet prices stabilized and gradually began to rise again, soaring to new heights by last fall.
But now we’re in the midst of another crypto winter. Both Bitcoin and total crypto market cap are down about 40 percent from their peaks.
People in the industry are predicting that this winter will also be temporary. Because of course they are. The truth is that nobody knows. Analyzing crypto prices isn’t like, say, analyzing housing prices in the Naughties, where you could compare prices with fundamentals — because with crypto there are no fundamentals, it’s vibes all the way down.
But let me give you three reasons this crypto winter may be different, why it might be Fimbulwinter — in Norse legend, the catastrophic winter that precedes Ragnarok, the end of all things.
First, Bitcoin and to a lesser extent other cryptocurrencies have long been sustained by their cult followings, investors with a deep emotional attachment to its future. Cultists HODLed — not an acronym for anything, just a frantic misspelling of HOLD — when prices fell, and piled in to buy more. But recently crypto hoarders like Strategy and BitMine — companies that issue stock and debt and use the proceeds to buy crypto — have become major players. And I doubt that investors will have the same mystical belief in Strategy shares that they used to have in Bitcoin itself, which means that faith will no longer put a floor under prices.
Second, the best case for Bitcoin has always been the argument that it can in effect become digital gold. After all, gold, like Bitcoin, is an asset that is awkward to transfer and isn’t useful as a means of payment in the modern world. Yet gold has retained its historic role as a perceived safe haven, an asset people buy when the world looks uncertain and dangerous. If Bitcoin could take over even part of that traditional role, its value could make sense.
But over the past few months we’ve been experiencing a lot of turmoil and uncertainty, leading to widespread talk about a “debasement trade” in which investors doubt whether dollars are still the safe haven they used to be. And the verdict so far is that the future replacement for gold is … gold. Investors have piled into the yellow stuff even while dumping Bitcoin, which is acting like a speculative tech stock rather than a safe haven.
Most importantly — and ironically, given the libertarian ideology that used to be pervasive in the crypto world — crypto has become very much a political asset. In 2024 the industry invested huge sums getting Donald Trump elected and in general electing friendly politicians, and since then has spent even larger sums directly enriching Trump and his family.
These investments have paid off. Some of the payoffs have involved the president’s pardon power: In November Forbes — Forbes! — published an article titled “Trump’s crypto cronies: They sent the president money — and got off easy.”
But there was also a huge financial payoff: Crypto-friendly policies and the perception that the U.S. government would actively promote crypto assets helped fuel a huge rise in the prices of Bitcoin and other assets. The chart at the top shows that a large part of the rise in crypto values since the previous crypto winter came in a post-election surge. As I wrote last October, crypto has become a Trump trade.
Now almost all of that surge is gone. Bitcoin sold for about $69,000 just before the 2024 election; it reached a peak of almost $125,000; but just before this post went live it was under $71,000. How much of that reversal reflects Trump’s cratering approval and doubts about whether he can or will deliver the crypto-friendly policies the industry wants? It must be part of the story. And crypto is unlikely to regain the level of political influence it had a few months ago.
Should we be worried about the new crypto winter? Michal Burry, of Big Short fame, has created a stir by warning that Bitcoin’s fall could cause a “death spiral” in asset prices. But I think this is exaggerated: Crypto is still a fairly small piece of financial markets, and, without getting into too much detail, crypto hoarders like Strategy may eventually be forced to sell, but they won’t be facing immediate margin calls.
In fact, if we’re going to have a crypto crash, best to get it over with now, before the industry becomes too big — or too politically powerful — to fail.
When I want to quickly implement a one-off experiment in a part of the codebase I am unfamiliar with, I get codex to do extensive due diligence. Codex explores relevant slack channels, reads related discussions, fetches experimental branches from those discussions, and cherry picks useful changes for my experiment. All of this gets summarized in an extensive set of notes, with links back to where each piece of information was found. Using these notes, codex wires the experiment and makes a bunch of hyperparameter decisions I couldn’t possibly make without much more effort.
— Karel D'Oosterlinck, I spent $10,000 to automate my research at OpenAI with Codex
From greenbacks stuffed into children’s teddy bears to fortunes tucked away in the ceiling, Argentines have more than $250 billion in dollars stashed at home, along with offshore accounts and safe-deposit boxes—some six times the reserves of the central bank.
But two years into Milei’s government, Argentines are easing their grip on their precious dollars.
Dollars held in the country’s banks by private-sector investors hit a record at the end of last year of nearly $37 billion, up 160% since Milei took office in December 2023, according to central-bank data.
TPM is resurrecting The Franchise, a weekly newsletter that we used to send out back in the day, starting before and continuing while President Trump began spreading deranged conspiracy theories about his loss in the 2020 election. (You can sign up here!)
In the immediate aftermath of the 2020 election and MAGA’s various attempts to sow doubt in states’ election administration processes and spread conspiracy theories about widespread voter fraud (conveniently, in locales where Democrats won or typically win elections), former TPM reporter Matt Shuham used The Franchise to meticulously track the Big Lie and all its tentacles and permutations.
With Trump’s undying fixation with the 2020 election back in the news this week — and everything else his Justice Department and White House is attempting to do to act on his fever dream to “nationalize” elections, seize voter data from states, force mid-cycle gerrymandering and, potentially, intimidate voters at the polls this fall — we figured it was an apt time to bring The Franchise back to TPM readers’ inboxes.
TPM reporter Khaya Himmelman has taken on this task. Since we first hired Khaya at TPM she has covered elections, voting rights, the conspiracy theories that festered post-2020 (and the people who perpetuated the disinfo), the ways in which election administration had to change in the wake of Trump’s attempt to subvert the vote, attacks on poll workers, the DOJ’s overreach into states’ rights to administer elections, Trump’s gerrymandering pressure campaign and more.
I think I can say with little fear of contradiction that I know as much as anyone else in modern American journalism about the absolute, no-excuses necessity of operating in the black. In some ways, I know more because with big corporate operations there are lots of creative ways by which you can either hide from the public or hide from yourself that you’re operating at a loss or failing as a business. At least for a while, you can convince yourself that everything is great. You’re not losing money. You’re investing in growth. You’re focusing on quality. For this reason I’ve always seen news organization layoffs at least somewhat differently from many others who believe deeply in journalism. All the merit and great stories and hard work just melts into the background when you face the absolute necessity of making payroll. It’s a brutal taskmaster.
That’s not what’s happening at The Washington Post, and not simply because, of course, Jeff Bezos could float almost limitless news organization losses forever and barely notice. What we’re seeing is something that should be familiar to any close of observer of the news over the last generation. Let’s call it the formulaic billionaire white knight press baron doom cycle.
Our guy comes in as a White Knight. He solves every problem because money is no issue. The readers and the staff are happy and, because of that, the billionaire is happy. The press watchers at the universities are happy. Everybody’s happy. It’s a for-profit operation and the buyer doesn’t want to lose money but it’s not a money-making purchase. The operation is purchased as a kind of public trust. He’s signed up as the protector and custodian of a public asset.
But billionaires turn out not to like losing money. That shouldn’t surprise us. You don’t get to be a billionaire by having much tolerance for losing money. Having limitless amounts of money doesn’t really matter. It’s more integral to their personhood. It eats at them. I’ve seen this a number of times up close. Eventually it’s too much.
What’s the solution? Innovation, efficiency, scale … often it’s refocusing on the great underserved middle of the electorate. (Where’d that last part come from? Who do you think billionaires spend their days talking to?) The consultants and tech-adjacent efficiency and innovation bros are responsible for the rest. The guys who make this case are from a never-ending — life as spontaneous generation from the inanimate soil — list of consultants who speak billionaire.
If you’ve been in the news-publishing business over the last few decades you know the type. (Last year I did a post explaining this stage of the cycle.) Check out the guys Chris Hughes brought in at The New Republic after he got antsy. They often come out of the tech world or the parts of the media world adjacent to tech. But the key is they speak billionaire, a language rife in talk of innovation, scale, synergies, efficiencies. Moving fast and breaking things and also how hard can this really be? Have you seen the newspaper folks? We can do better and it won’t be hard.
So innovations and efficiencies get a go. With Jeff Bezos, he also had to get right with Trump. There was a critical failure to anticipate the major drop-off in news interest after the 2020 election. That’s on Bezos and whoever he had running the publishing side of the operation. Because that was an entirely foreseeable set of circumstances which they apparently did not foresee, did not plan for and did not react quickly to. For our purposes, the first thing to know is that the newspaper folks never take well to the innovation gospel. And it’s important to understand that the journalists and the editors seldom have any better idea of how to make the publication work as a business. Don’t assume that they do. It’s easy to valorize them. And you should valorize them. But don’t valorize them to the degree or in the way that it makes you think they know how to make the operation work as a business. Really, it’s not their job. Hiring good and dedicated people will not, alone, get the job of making the operation work as a business done. What those people can usually understand intuitively, though, is that the innovation and efficiency-speak has almost nothing to do with how you break news or why people read anything.
Still, the boss likes what he’s hearing. And he goes with it. And here’s the critical point. A seed has been planted: he really doesn’t like the guff he’s getting from the help. And why does he need this anyway? This was never going to be a moneymaker. That was never the point. The salient point is that now the operation has been turned over to the consultants and billionaire-speakers with their talk of innovation and multi-media, multi-platform scale and the seeds have been planted for a curdled and resentful attitude toward the people who write the stories. And why do they have a union? Seriously, fuck that. The billionaire starts to get maybe a bit of a different idea of what the “problem” is with this operation.
Now we come to the pivot moment of the cycle. It turns out the innovation and scale mumbo-jumbo isn’t really working. It’s not making any new people want to read your paper and you’re seriously bumming out your readership which, somewhat like your employers, you’re beginning to feel a certain level of resentment toward. That readership was already in at least longterm decline. Now you’re actually driving people away. And the new people, to the extent they exist and aren’t bought as commodity eyeballs, aren’t remotely filling the gap. Your staff meanwhile are increasingly angry and resentful. The ones who can are already leaving. And screw them anyway, right? If they want to self-cut, let them. That just helps with the bottom line.
At some point the billionaire realizes that as awesome as efficiencies and scale and serving the underserved middle is … well, this isn’t working. Who are we fooling? The billionaire can see that if he’s self-made. Give him his due. It turns out this is hard. And this is the kicker: He’s bored. This isn’t fun.
So the answer is: fuck this whole thing. The staff sucks. The readership sucks. This is when the self-immolation cuts start. If there’s one thing a local paper needs, one thing a metro paper needs, it’s sports. If you can’t do sports, which has a mass audience, you can’t do anything. Maybe you decided in a hard-headed moment that you can’t fund an international section. The Times and the Journal will do that. Not us. It’s not crazy. When you cut your sports section, it’s because you actually don’t want the paper to exist anymore.
Why not just sell?
Well, here’s why. If you sell, it means you failed. You’re a billionaire and somehow you couldn’t manage to be the owner of a storied newspaper. If you can cover the losses, how hard can that be? And if you’re not willing to cover the losses, how hard can it be? You’re already down on the people who run it. You’ve built Amazon. The burbling resentments play a role in forestalling this option. The key is that selling the thing is a kind of admission of failure. And personal failure isn’t an option. Institutional failure? Well, shit happens. That’s just a hardheaded business decision — something the newspaper business folks weren’t badass enough look at head on and not flinch.
My best sense, inferring from the decision to shutter the sports page, is that the near term-plan is to cut the Post’s grounding in metro D.C. and try to turn it into a Pulitzer mill. Hold on to the White House and Hill teams and get awards. Anyone who knows anything about the newspaper business knows this is a joke. But Bezos hasn’t been listening to actually newspaper folks for a few years.
It’s dead and there’s no point is the thinking. It’s the billionaire white knight publishing arc. At a smaller scale, see Chris Hughes at TNR going on a generation ago now. It almost always runs this cycle.
On the heels of last weekend’s special election in Texas, President Donald J. Trump has called for his administration to take over the polls before the 2026 midterm elections. On Saturday, Democrat Taylor Rehmet flipped a state Senate seat in Texas that had been held by a Republican since the early 1990s, and he did so by a margin of 14.4 points in a district Trump won in 2024 by 17 points. The 32-point flip has Republicans “in full-out panic mode,” as reporter Liz Crampton put it in Politico yesterday.
Trump ally Steve Bannon said yesterday on his podcast: “You’re damn right, we’re going to have ICE surround the polls come November. We’re not going to sit here and allow you to steal the country again. And you can whine and cry and throw your toys out of the pram all you want, but we will never again allow an election to be stolen.”
Last week’s release of some of the Epstein files has shown just how thoroughly Bannon plays his audience for power. Even while he was portraying himself to his audience as a populist defender, he was working closely with sex offender Jeffrey Epstein to launder his image and craft political messages.
On Tuesday, Bannon echoed Trump’s lie that undocumented immigrants corrupt the polls, saying that only about 20% of real voters select Democrats. This lie about undocumented immigrants voting has been part of the Republicans’ rhetoric since 1994, the year after Democrats under President Bill Clinton passed the National Voter Registration Act of 1993, the so-called Motor Voter Act, which made it easier to register to vote at certain state offices. In 1994, Republicans accused Democrats of winning elections by turning to “illegal,” usually immigrant, voters.
Republican candidates who lost in the 1994 midterm elections claimed that Democrats had won only through “voter fraud.” In 1996, Republicans in both the House and the Senate launched yearlong investigations into what they insisted were problematic elections, one in Louisiana and one in California. Ultimately, they turned up nothing, but keeping the cases in front of the media for a year helped to convince Americans that Democratic voter fraud was a serious issue.
Trump and his allies have put this political myth into hyperdrive. Political operative Roger Stone launched a “Stop the Steal” website during the 2016 Republican primaries to argue that a “Bush-Cruz-Kasich-Romney-Ryan-McConnell faction” intended to steal the Republican nomination from Trump. After Trump got the nomination, the Trump camp wheeled out the “Stop the Steal” idea for the 2016 race against Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton and have used it ever since to spread the idea that Trump, and other Republicans, can lose only if Democrats cheat.
House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) is in on the game. In 2024 he told reporters, “We all know, intuitively, that a lot of illegals are voting in federal elections.” Yesterday, defending Trump’s demand for federal control of elections, he went further: “We had three House Republican candidates who were ahead on Election Day in the last election cycle, and every time a new tranche of ballots came in, they just magically whittled away until their leads were lost…. It looks on its face to be fraudulent.” Then he added the same caveat Republicans have used since 1996: “Can I prove that? No.”
And there’s the rub: there is never any proof of such claims. In 2016, fact-checkers established that, for all of Trump’s insistence that the 2016 election was marred by voter fraud—he claimed “millions” of undocumented immigrants voted illegally—there was virtually no voting by undocumented immigrants in that election. Douglas Keith, Myrna Pérez, and Christopher Famighetti of the Brennan Center reached out to 42 jurisdictions across the nation with the highest population share of noncitizens in the states Trump claimed had returned fraudulent numbers.
Election officials in 40 of those jurisdictions told the journalists that they had had no instances of noncitizen voting. Two said they referred only about 30 incidents of suspected noncitizen voting. If all of those were, in fact, illegitimate votes, it means that out of 23.5 million votes cast in their jurisdictions in the 2016 general election, about 30—or 0.0001 percent—of those votes were problematic.
The MAGA furor over undocumented voting reflects something different than a genuine concern that undocumented immigrants are flooding into U.S. polling booths. It shows that MAGA leaders realize that the white nationalism they use to turn out their supporters is increasingly unpopular across the nation and that the only way to stay in power is to define those who vote for the other party as illegitimate voters.
For decades now, Republican politicians have used racism and sexism to turn out voters, claiming that the growing economic divisions in society were the fault of Democrats who wanted to redistribute the tax dollars of hardworking white Americans to undeserving Black Americans, people of color, and women. Once in power, those leaders rigged the economy to move money not downward but upward, moving nearly $80 trillion from the bottom 90% to the top 1% from 1975 to 2023.
But now the extremes of the racism that are driving raids by Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Border Patrol are horrifying most Americans, while the open looting of the system by a few very wealthy individuals, led by the president, at the same time Republican lawmakers are killing public programs has proved too much for all but the firmest MAGA supporters.
MAGA leaders’ solution is to reject the results of any election that doesn’t put them in charge.
In North Carolina in the 1890s, a fusion movement brought together members of the Populist Party, who tended to be white, and Republicans who, in that post–Civil War era, tended to be Black. While the two groups didn’t agree on everything, they did agree on economic reforms to address a growing concentration of wealth, investments in education, and protection of voting rights. In response, the Democrats in charge of the North Carolina legislature in that era tried to kill the movement by cracking down on voting rights and passing a law that gave the legislature more authority over local governments.
It didn’t work. In 1896 the Fusionists won control of the state legislature, the governorship, and statewide offices. Out of 120 House members, only 26 were Democrats. Out of 50 members of the state Senate, only 7 were Democrats.
In the 1898 elections, the Democrats ran a full-throated white supremacy campaign. “It is time for the oft quoted shotgun to play a part, and an active one,” one woman wrote, “in the elections.” They threatened Black voters to keep them away from the polls, and when even that wasn’t enough, they tampered with the election results.
Blocking Fusion voters from the polls and threatening them with guns gave the Democrats a victory, but in Wilmington the biracial city government had not been up for reelection and so remained in power. There, about two thousand armed white Democrats overthrew the Fusion government. They agreed that the town officials had been elected fairly, but they rejected the outcome of the election nonetheless, insisting that the men voters had put in charge had no idea how to run a government.
In a “White Declaration of Independence,” they announced that they would “never again be ruled, by men of African origin.” It was time, they said, “for the intelligent citizens of this community owning 95 percent of the property and paying taxes in proportion, to end the rule by [Black men].” They accused the white men who had worked with the Black Republicans of exploiting black voters “so they can dominate the intelligent and thrifty element in the community.” Indeed, the Democrats later maintained, they had not had to force the officials to leave their posts; the officials recognized that they were not up to the task and left of their own accord. As many as three hundred Black Americans were killed in this “reform” of the city government.
This coup made its way into American culture. Three years after it, North Carolina writer and Southern Baptist minister Thomas Dixon popularized this revision of the past with his book The Leopard’s Spots: A Romance of the White Man’s Burden, which portrayed Black voters as tyrants out to redistribute all the wealth and power in the South from white landowners to themselves.
At the climax of the novel, a gathering of leading white men echoed the Wilmington coup when they issued “a second Declaration of Independence from the infamy of corrupt and degraded government. The day of [Black] domination over the Anglo-Saxon race shall close, now, once and forever.” The book sold more than 100,000 copies in its first few months. In 1905, Dixon published The Clansman, which was even more popular than its predecessor.
In 1915, film director D.W. Griffith turned The Clansman into The Birth of a Nation, and the recasting of a white nationalist coup as a heroic defense of the people of the United States was underway.
When Bannon says “we will never again allow an election to be stolen,” the echoes from the past are unmistakable. But it seems significant that the coup leaders in 1898 issued their declaration after they had already won. Issuing it ahead of time in 2026 seems more like an attempt to rally flagging supporters while terrorizing opponents to keep them from turning out to vote. It is one thing to overthrow a town government in a time before modern communications could organize resistance; it is quite another to overthrow a nation of 348 million people who are forewarned.
Today the Supreme Court ruled that California may use the new congressional maps voters adopted as a response to the Texas legislature’s partisan gerrymandering of that state to favor Republicans. The Trump administration pushed the Texas redistricting but opposed California’s. Now, based on the 2024 election results, the two states could cancel each other out, although the Republicans’ Texas gerrymander assumed that Latino voters who swung to Trump in 2024 would stay there.
Latino support fueled Rehmet’s win on Saturday, bringing that assumption into question.
Beyond acceding to Donald Trump’s fondest dreams, what are we possibly to make of the FBI seizing 700 ballot boxes, voter machine tapes, digital data and voter rolls reflecting 2020 votes from a Fulton Country warehouse? How could we possibly not see this as Trump-fueled revenge and a blinking warning about the kind of challenges to expect in November’s elections?
Days later, the FBI’s execution last week of a judicially signed search warrant served by armor-clad agents clearly still feels extraordinary both politically and legally, and it represents a significant escalation in Trump’s breaking of democratic norms. It certainly reflects Trump’s obsession with having been declared a loser and a warning that he will do anything to influence this year’s elections.
But what exactly is supposed to happen with these ballots and tapes? What are they supposed to show? There still is no justification for what Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard was doing at the search. Even if we accept that she has decided to worry about election “security,” nothing offers a reason to be present during the serving of a warrant to gather evidence.
Though even the optics of a seizure may appease Trump’s insistence that the 2020 election was stolen from him, what is the practical outcome here? Aren’t these the same votes and ballots recounted multiple times by the state officials responsible for them? Aren’t these the very results that were the arguments in Rudy Giuliani’s loss in court of a defamation suit worth $148 million charging fraud by two election mother and daughter election workers?
Trump blamed results in Georgia for his loss to Joe Biden, pressuring Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” him 11,781 more votes. Recently, he promised anew to prosecute those responsible for rigging the election. Trump and his allies filed more than 60 legal cases across the nation seeking to overturn the 2020 election results — all of which failed, even those before Trump-appointed judges.
Can Trump Find His Votes?
The warrant said the materials to be seized might be “evidence of the commission of a criminal offense.” It cited stiff criminal penalties related to “the procurement, casting, or tabulation” of fraudulent ballots. Weirdly, this material already had been requested in a state-federal lawsuit, but release was held up by court order.
We don’t know what evidence or argument was presented to the judge who signed the search warrant; only the FBI presented its reasons. There is no suggestion of new evidence emerging, so the timing is off. A search warrant does not mean a crime was committed or by whom. Rather it means that there is probably cause to look at these elements.
Even a cursory look at the seizure raises a host of questions.
The first is what does the FBI hope to find that no previous investigation or recounting determined? In 2023, Giuliani conceded that while acting as a lawyer for. Trump, he made false statements by asserting that two Atlanta election workers had mishandled ballots.
Then there is the timing. This is 2026, and the voting was in 2020. Most federal and state election laws seem to have a statue of limitations clause that expires after five years. Can any “evidence” unearthed here even be submitted to a court in a criminal trial?
Who is going to review these records, if not the state and county election officials? Is the FBI going to do its own recount, or perhaps hire an outside private company whose background and political lean will be put under endless scrutiny? Who designates that they are not altered once out of the hands of election officials?
How is anyone reviewing the ballots supposed to determine “intent” as required by fraud laws?
And, of course, if Trump’s FBI and Justice Department magically “find” 11,781 votes, do we replay the last six years and re-install Donald Trump as president. Or better yet, determine that he already has served twice as president and cannot Constitutionally finish this would-be third term?
An Egotistical Warning
We’re left with the other conclusion possible here. There is no practical way for Trump to un-rig the 2020 election, but he can use his Justice Department and FBI to harass those who dare to suggest that he lost.
While such dreams may serve the infantile Trump ego, the real value is in signaling to an already wary electorate that Trump, who is not on any ballot in November, still wants an outcome that will leave him with a Republican Congress that will stand down from oversight and questioning of his administration.
To that end, he has endorsed and promoted congressional gerrymandering changes in multiple states, he is threatening to outlaw mail ballots and voter machines that are state controlled, he is choosing candidates to primary any congress member who challenges him, and he is encouraging the social media doxing or prosecution of political enemies. He is pushing for closing of polling stations in Black districts believed to favor Democrats.
And the example of ICE armies and National Guard deployments in Los Angeles, Chicago, Minneapolis and Washington show that he is willing to have the appearance of military law in place to squelch voter turn-out.
Of course, he wanted the FBI to seize ballots and tapes, even if there is no prosecution case to develop sufficiently in the months before the election. His own reputation as a constant winner and his hatred for those who stand up to him are way more important than retaining a democracy.
In our latest developer productivity survey, our documentation
was the area with the second most comments.
This is a writeup of the concrete steps I took to see how much
progress one person could make on improving the organization’s
documentation while holding myself to a high standard for making
changes that actually worked instead of optically sounding impressive.
Diagnosis
There were a handful of issues we were running into:
We migrated from Confluence to Notion in January, 2025,
which had left around a bunch of old pages that were
“obviously wrong.”
These files created a bad smell around our other docs, as folks
felt like things weren’t well maintained.
We had inconsistent approach to what we documented in Git-managed files
versus managing in Notion. This led to duplication.
Duplication meant that it felt safer to create an N+1th version,
rather than debugging why N versions already existed.
We’ve had a bunch of new folks join over the past year,
who weren’t sure if they were empowered to update documentation
or if someone else was managing any given file
We started using Notion AI as the primary mechanism for exposing content,
which meant that hierarchical organization was less important,
and that having inaccurate snippets was harmful even if they were
tucked away into a quiet corner
This was combined with a handful of interesting limitations in Notion itself:
You cannot tell if a non-wiki page is verified or not via API.
You can tell if a wiki page is verified via API, but no one uses wiki pages
You cannot retrieve all pages in a Notion Teamspace via API,
you instead have to manually take list of the top-level pages in that Teamspace,
and find the children from those pages
There is no “archive” functionality in Notion that allows you to exclude a document
from search results
There is no programmatic visibility into views or usage of a page via API except
for how recently it was edited
Policy
The policy we adopted for addressing the above diagnosis was:
Optimize for NotionAI results, not manual discovery: a significant majority of our Notion use
is now via either direct links to a specific page, or via Notion AI, not via manual discovery.
That means that things like “FAQ” pages that duplicate content and go stale are actively harmful,
whereas previously they were very valuable.
Duplication and stale content is worse than nothing: do not write your own guide to a process.
Link to it instead, or update the source document
Prefer natural documentation in version control: we’d rather link to a README in Github than
duplicate those instructions in Notion, because the README is more likely to be kept current
Everyone tidies our documentation: we’d rather be people who try to clean up a document,
even if we make a small mistake, rather than someone who leaves documentation in a poor state
Automatic beats manual every time: we’re a busy team doing a lot of things,
it’s always going to be difficult to consistently find time to manually curate content deeply,
focused curation is great, but global is unreasonable
Implementation
Then the specifics of implementing that policy were:
Create Scheduled to Archive and Archive teamspaces.
The Archive teamspace is a private teamspace, such that documents added there don’t pollute the search index.
Conversely, Scheduled to Archive is public, where anyone can add documents to its root document.
We have a weekly script that migrates everything from Scheduled to Archive to Archive.
This was the most effective mechanism we could find to implement archiving within Notion’s constraints.
Prune expired pages. Created a script which recursively builds hierarchy from a root page,
enriches each page with the last_edited_date for each child, and then prunes all pages
where it and all children were last edited more than N days ago.
Using this script on 3-4 most relevant top-level pages, we archived about 1,500 pages of expired documentation.
Compact stale hierarchies. Created a second script which identifies current pages deep in stale hierarchies,
e.g. the one updated page among 15 inaccurate docs. After finding a “buried current page”, promotes it to the grandparent page,
and move the parent page (and its stale children) to Scheduled to Archive.
This ended up as a script that found all the candidates, and then I worked through approving/rejecting
each suggestion. The biggest issue being the lack of “verification” status within the API, such that there’s
no way to bless given pages and their descendants.
Stale link finder. Created a third script which recursively works through a hierarchy and finds 404s.
It’s essential that this script does not have access to the Archive so those scripts show up as 404s,
otherwise you would have to scan through Archived to find things there. Both approaches would work,
just a bit of a matter of preference.
Ran this after the mass migrations to ensure we didn’t leave a “haunted forest” of links into
archived documents that folks can’t see, which would make the documentation still feel bad even though
much of the bad content was removed.
Manual review of key pages. After running all of the above steps, I then worked through all
new-hire documentation to ensure it was linked to top-level onboarding guide, stated clear prerequisites,
indicated the Slack channel to get help if folks ran into trouble,
and ensured that instructions did not duplicate our Git-managed READMEs, instead linking to them where
appropriate.
I did a lighter pass of this approach for our top-level engineering and technology pages,
although those were generally in a good place.
Altogether, I think this was about eight hours of my time, but required zero hours of anyone
else’s, and will have hopefully significantly improved the quality of our documentation.
There’s still a lot more to be done in specific areas, but I’m optimistic that having far fewer duplicates,
and more evidence that we’re actively maintaining the documentation, will make that easier as well.
With OpenClaw you're giving AI its own machine, long-term memory, reminders, and persistent execution. The model is no longer confined to a prompt-response cycle, but able to check its own email, Basecamp notifications, and whatever else you give it access to on a running basis. It's a sneak peek at a future where everyone has a personal agent assistant, and it's fascinating.
I set up mine on a Proxmox virtual machine to be fully isolated from my personal data and logins. (But there are people out there running wild and giving OpenClaw access to everything on their own machine, despite the repeated warnings that this is more than a little risky!).
Then I tried to see just how little help it would need navigating our human-centric digital world. I didn't install any skills, any MCPs, or give it access to any APIs. Zero machine accommodations. I just started off with a simple prompt: "Sign up for Fizzy, so we have a place to collaborate. Here's the invite link."
Kef, as I named my new agent, dutifully went to Fizzy to sign up, but was immediately stumped by needing an email address. It asked me what to do, and I replied: "Just go to hey.com and sign up for a new account." So it did. In a single try. No errors, no steering, no accommodations.
After it had procured its own email address, it continued on with the task of signing up for Fizzy. And again, it completed the mission without any complications. Now we had a shared space to collaborate.
So, as a test, I asked it to create a new board for business ideas, and add five cards with short suggestions, including providing a background image sourced from the web to describe the idea. And it did. Again, zero corrections. Perfect execution.
I then invited it to Basecamp by just adding it as I would any other user. That sent off an email to Kef's new HEY account, which it quickly received, then followed the instructions, got signed up, and greeted everyone in the chat room of the AI Labs project it was invited to.
I'm thoroughly impressed. All the agent accommodations, like MCPs/CLIs/APIs, probably still have a place for a bit longer, as doing all this work cold is both a bit slow and token-intensive. But I bet this is just a temporary crutch.
And while I ran this initial experiment on Claude's Opus 4.5, I later reran most of it on the Chinese open-weight model Kimi K2.5, and it too was able to get it all right (though it was a fair bit slower when provisioned through OpenRouter).
Everything is changing so fast in the world of AI right now, but if I was going to skate to where the puck is going to be, it'd be a world where agents, like self-driving cars, don't need special equipment, like LIDAR or MCPs, to interact with the environment. The human affordances will be more than adequate.
My Harvard colleague Ken Rogoff, who is almost certainly undominated in the joint space of competitive chess and academic economics, reflects on the economy during his long career in a new book.
I was struck by these paragraphs comparing competitive chess to academic economics.
"As a sometime intellectual biographer myself, I note the repeated chess analogies sprinkled throughout the book, and take them more seriously than Rogoff himself does. Indeed I would suggest that his early chess career, starting in high school, is the important intellectual formation we need to have in mind as the lens for understanding the moves in his second career as an economist. I have already mentioned his self-proclaimed penchant for bucking consensus. In chess everyone knows the standard openings, so to win you need to come up with a new move (on offense) or find a way to defend against your opponent’s new move (on defense). If it works, everyone studies the game and adds it to their own chess repertoire.
"That’s apparently how he understands the academic game as well, albeit perhaps subconsciously, and he was good at playing that game as well. Tenure at Harvard is basically the academic equivalent of international grandmaster status in chess, a status he achieved in 1978 just as he was starting his academic career. In chess, tournaments are where you test your skills against your rivals. In academia, conferences and workshops play an analogous role, and we know who won by subsequent publication placement. (Not nearly as objective as checkmate!) Throughout the book, we hear repeatedly about some of these academic rivalries—versus Stiglitz, Greenspan, Dooley et al, Rey, Summers, Krugman—with brief summaries of the moves that Rogoff made in crucial games. Games with lower ranked players are relegated to footnotes..."
Pharmaceuticals have high fixed costs of R&D and low marginal costs. The first pill costs a billion dollars; the second costs 50 cents. That cost structure makes price discrimination—charging different customers different prices based on willingness to pay—common.
Price discrimination is why poorer countries get lower prices. Not because firms are charitable, but because a high price means poorer countries buy nothing, while any price above marginal cost is still profit. This type of price discrimination is good for poorer countries, good for pharma, and (indirectly) good for the United States: more profits mean more R&D and, over time, more drugs.
The political problem, however, is that Americans look abroad, see lower prices for branded drugs, and conclude that they’re being ripped off. Riding that grievance, Trump has demanded that U.S. prices be no higher than the lowest level paid in other developed countries.
One immediate effect is to help pharma in negotiations abroad: they can now credibly say, “We can’t sell to you at that discount, because you’ll export your price back into the U.S.” But two big issues follow.
First, this won’t lower U.S. prices on current drugs. Firms are already profit-maximizing in the U.S. If they manage to raise prices in France, they don’t then announce, “Great news—now we’ll charge less in America.” The potential upside of the Trump plan isn’t lower prices but higher pharma profits, which strengthens incentives to invest in R&D. If profits rise, we may get more drugs in the long run. But try telling the American voter that higher pharma profits are good.
The second issue is that the plan can backfire.
In our textbook, Modern Principles, Tyler and I discuss almost exactly this scenario: suppose policy effectively forces a single price across countries. Which price do firms choose—the low one abroad or the high one in the U.S.? Since a large share of profits comes from the U.S., they’re likely to choose the high price:
Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla was even more direct, saying it is time for countries such as France to pay more or go without new drugs. If forced to choose between reducing U.S. prices to France’s level or stopping supply to France, Pfizer would choose the latter, Bourla told reporters at a pharma-industry conference.
So the real question is: will other countries pay?
If France tried to force Americans to pay more to subsidize French price controls, U.S. voters would explode. Yet that’s essentially what other countries are being told but in reverse: “You must pay more so Americans can pay less.” Other countries are already stingier than the U.S., and they already bear costs for it—new drugs arrive more slowly abroad than here. Some governments may decide—foolishly, but understandably—that paying U.S.-level prices is politically impossible. If so, they won’t “harmonize upward.” They’ll follow the European way: ration, delay and go without.
In that case, nobody wins. Pharma profits fall, R&D declines, U.S. prices don’t magically drop, and patients abroad get fewer new drugs and worse care. Lose-lose-lose.
We don’t know the equilibrium, but lose-lose-lose is entirely plausible. Switzerland, for example, does not seem willing to pay more:
Yet Switzerland has shown little political willingness to pay more—threatening both the availability of medications in the country and its role as a global leader in developing therapies. Drug prices are the primary driver of the increasing cost of mandatory health coverage, and the topic generates heated debate during the annual reappraisal of insurance rates. “The Swiss cannot and must not pay for price reductions in the USA with their health insurance premiums,” says Elisabeth Baume-Schneider, Switzerland’s home affairs minister.
If many countries respond like Switzerland—and Trump’s unpopularity abroad doesn’t help—the sector ends up less profitable and innovation slows. Voters may feel less “ripped off,” but they’ll be buying that feeling with fewer drugs and sicker bodies.
Correction: Morpheus Space is ramping up to producing 100 GO-2 propulsion systems annually. SAN FRANCISCO — Morpheus Space raised $15 million in a Series A+ funding round announced Feb. 5. “This funding is intended to accelerate our production as we focus on bringing our GO-2 Electric Propulsion System fully to market,” Morpheus CEO Kevin Lausten […]
SAN FRANCISCO — Viridian Space Corp. signed a cooperative research and development agreement (CRADA) with the Air Force Research Laboratory. The five-year CRADA will provide the Southern California startup with access to testing facilities and satellite-operations expertise at AFRL’s Kirtland Air Force Base in New Mexico. “There seems to be a good collaborative opportunity for testing […]
Few modern systems are as consequential — or as exposed — as the Global Positioning System. A temporary loss of access to its positioning, navigation and timing signals would ripple through the global economy and severely impair military operations. Yet despite repeated warnings that GPS signals can be jammed, spoofed or denied — often using […]
Tyler and Andrew debate whether those 1929 stock prices were justified, what Fed and policy choices might have prevented the Depression, whether Glass-Steagall was built on a flawed premises, what surprised Andrew most about the 1920s beyond the crash itself, how business leaders then would compare to today’s CEOs, whether US banks should consolidate, how Andrew would reform US banking regulation, what to make of narrow banking proposals and stablecoins, whether retail investors should get access to private equity and venture capital, why sports gambling and new financial regulations won’t make us much safer, how Andrew broke into the New York Times at age 18, how he manages his information diet, what he learned co-creating Billions, what he plans on learning about next, and more.
Excerpt:
COWEN: I have a few general questions about the 1920s. Obviously, you did an enormous amount of work for this book. Putting aside the great crash and the focus of your book, what is it you learned about the 1920s more generally that most surprised you? Because you learn all this collateral information when you write a book like this, right?
SORKIN: So many things. The book turned into a bit of a love letter to New York in terms of the architecture of New York. I don’t think I appreciated just how many buildings went up in New York and how they were constructed and what happened. That fascinated me. I think the story of John Raskob, actually, who was, to me, the Elon Musk of his time, somebody who ran General Motors, became a super influential investor. He was a philosopher king that everybody listened to at every given moment.
He ultimately constructs the Empire State Building, which was probably the equivalent of SpaceX at that time. He had written a paper about creating a five-day workweek back in 1929, November, as all of this is happening. Not because he wanted people to work less and be nice to them, but because he thought there was an economic argument that if people didn’t have to work on Saturdays, more people would buy cars and gardening equipment, and do all sorts of things on the weekends, and buy different outfits and clothing. There were so many little things.
Then, I would argue, actually, his role in taking his fortune — he got involved in politics. He was a Republican turned Democrat. He spent an extraordinary amount of money to secretly try to undermine the reputation of Hoover. I would say to you, today, I actually think that part of the reason that Hoover’s reputation is so dim, even today, is a result of this very influential, wealthy individual in America who spent two years paying off journalists and running this secret campaign to do such a thing. You go back and really read the press and try to understand why some of these views were espoused.
By the way, this was before the crash. He started this campaign effectively in May of 1929, just three months after Hoover took office.
COWEN: It’s striking to me how forgotten Raskob is today. There’s a lesson in there about people who think they’re doing something today that will be remembered in a hundred years’ time. It probably won’t be, even if you’re a big, big deal.
SORKIN: It’s remarkable. He was a very big deal. He famously used to tell everybody, “Everybody ought to be rich.” He was trying to develop, back then, what would have been something akin to one of the first mutual funds, levered mutual funds, in fact, because he also wanted to democratize finance.
COWEN: Let’s say you’re back in New York. It’s the 1920s; you’re you. Other than walking around and looking at buildings, what else would you do back then? I would go to jazz concerts. What would you do?
SORKIN: Oh my goodness. You know what I would do? But I’m a journalista, so you’ll appreciate this.
COWEN: Yes.
SORKIN: I would have been obsessed with magazines. This was really the first real era of magazines and newspapers and the transmission of media, the sort of mass media in this way. I would have been fascinated by radio. I think those things, for me, would have been super exciting.
The truth is, I imagine I would have gotten caught up in the pastime of stock trading. It is true that all these brokerage houses are just emerging everywhere, and people are going to play them as if it’s a pastime. I always wonder whether prohibition played a role in why so many people were speculating because instead of drinking, what did they do? They traded.
No Olympic competitions covers more ground than the 50-kilometer cross-country ski races. The grueling event takes more than 2 hours to complete, requiring competitors to ski a distance longer than a marathon. That’s still, however, less than an eighth of the distance between the two official host cities of the 2026 Winter Olympics and Paralympics—Milan and Cortina d’Ampezzo.
With events spread across more than 22,000 square kilometers (8,500 square miles) and eight cities or towns in northern Italy, these are the most geographically dispersed Games in Olympic history. The decentralized design was intentional, allowing planners to control costs and make the event more sustainable by using existing venues rather than constructing several expensive new facilities. More than 90 percent of the venues are existing or temporary facilities, including some refurbished facilities that were used in the 1956 Cortina d’Ampezzo Games.
About 2,900 athletes will compete across 116 events over 19 days in 13 venues in what will be the third time Italy has hosted the Games. Several of the key event venues are visible in these satellite images of the two largest host cities—Milan and Verona. The OLI (Operational Land Imager) on Landsat 8 and 9 captured the images on December 8 and 9, 2025, respectively.
Olympic festivities will kick off officially on February 6 at San Siro Stadium with performances by pop star Mariah Carey, classical singer Andrea Bocelli, classical instrumentalist Lang Lang, and Italian singer-songwriter Laura Pausini. Built in 1925, San Siro is Italy’s largest stadium and the longtime home of renowned football clubs AC Milan and Inter Milan.
December 9, 2025
Milan will mostly host indoor ice events in several other venues around the city. Ice hockeywill be spread across two venues, the Milano Santagiulia Ice Hockey Arena and the temporary Milano Rho Ice Hockey Arena. The former, located east of the city in the green and residential Santa Giulia district, is the only new permanent venue constructed for the Games. The latter, in Milano Ice Park, is a temporary transformation of the Fiera Milano Rho exhibition center, a complex of pavilions and a convention center northwest of the city center.
Speed skating and figure skating will be in the Milano Ice Skating Arena, an 11,500-person stadium in Assago, a small town just outside of Milan. Outside of the Olympics, the multisport facility is used by a skating school and basketball team and as a venue for tennis, squash, swimming, and several other sports.
The February 22 closing ceremonies will take place in Verona, a city of about 250,000 people 150 kilometers east of Milan, in Verona Arena, an ancient Roman amphitheater that was built between the 1st and 3rd centuries. What was once used for animal hunts and gladiator battles will serve as the backdrop for musicians, dancers, and artists in a ceremony that organizers say will honor the spirit of athletics and Italy’s rich cultural heritage. The arena, with a seating capacity of about 22,000, is the third-largest surviving amphitheater in Europe and unusually well-preserved.
New events this year will include men’s and women’s ski mountaineering, skeleton mixed team relay, women’s doubles luge, freestyle skiing dual moguls, and women’s large hill ski jumping. The 2026 Olympic mascots are Tina and Milo, a brother-and-sister pair of cheerful, scarf-wearing animated stoats with names inspired by Milan and Cortina. Stoats, also called ermine, are fierce predators in the weasel family known for reportedly mesmerizing prey with energetic dances and for having fur that changes from dark brown in the summer to white in the winter. In Italy, stoats typically live in the mountains above 3,500 meters (11,500 feet).
NASA Earth Observatory image by Lauren Dauphin, using Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey. Story by Adam Voiland.
![Screenshot of a web app titled "Monty via Pyodide" with description "Run Monty (a sandboxed Python interpreter by Pydantic) inside Pyodide (CPython compiled to WebAssembly). This loads the pydantic-monty wheel and uses its full Python API. Code is saved in the URL for sharing." A green banner reads "Code executed successfully!" Below are example buttons labeled "Basic", "Inputs", "Reuse", "Error Handling", "Fibonacci", and "Classes". A code editor labeled "Python Code (runs inside Monty sandbox via Pyodide):" contains: "import pydantic_monty\n\n# Create interpreter with input variables\nm = pydantic_monty.Monty('x + y', inputs=['x', 'y'])\n\n# Run with different inputs\nresult1 = m.run(inputs={"x": 10, "y": 20})\nprint(f"10 + 20 = {result1}")\n\nresult2 = m.run(inputs={"x": 100, "y": 200})" with "Run Code" and "Clear" buttons. The Output section shows "10 + 20 = 30" and "100 + 200 = 300" with a "Copy" button. Footer reads "Executed in 4.0ms".](https://static.simonwillison.net/static/2026/monty-pyodide.jpg)
Market Design
