With New Horizons now 63 AU out, it’s time to ponder that record hibernation period that the spacecraft just went through. Over 10 months long, this one had the same goal as previous such periods, to hold down operating costs but also give a break to onboard instrumentation in hopes of augmenting mission lifetime. As a kid, I often thought how cool it would be to be involved with a distant spacecraft. For some reason I always visualized this as being here on Earth while working with a craft beyond the Solar System. So maybe I was dreaming more of being a flight controller than an astronaut.
I hadn’t realized until reading Alan Stern’s recent update that while hibernation means there are no commands and responses going back and forth, the craft does continue active data gathering from its Solar Wind at Pluto (SWAP) plasma detector and the Pluto Energetic Particle Spectrometer Science Investigation (PEPSSI) instrument. The Student Dust Counter is also in operation. Since awaking early in the summer, New Horizons has been delivering data from these instruments back to Earth.
I see that future flybys of Kuiper belt objects (KBOs) are still a distinct possibility, assuming that one can be found within range of the vehicle. And yes, the Vera Rubin Observatory is already in use in the search for such objects, with planning extended to requests for time on the Roman Space Telescope, now scheduled for launch within days. Writing about New Horizons always comes with a tinge of melancholy as I contemplate the fact that no successor is ready, but it’s a relief to see how active this tough little craft continues to be. There are good successor concepts out there, but none are currently funded.
Meanwhile, we have the interesting news about possible liquid flows on Pluto’s surface, revealed by New Horizons images of Sputnik Planitia, the nitrogen glacier whose northern regions reveal convection cells separated by features that suggest liquid nitrogen has flowed there in the past. The new work out of Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) and published in the Planetary Science Journal, suggests that this process continues, doubtless through liquid nitrogen upwelling from beneath the glacier.
SwRI’s Kelsi Singer, one of the study’s co-authors, comments:
“The surface of Sputnik Planitia is quite young, probably less than one million years based on modeling of the surface overturn, and thus these features that we are looking at must have formed since then. Pluto has many unique terrains seen nowhere else in the solar system, and this area of Sputnik Planitia is one of them. Its surface provides a different set of conditions compared to what we are used to on Earth, and exploring that allows us to better understand how materials behave in environments that are difficult to produce on Earth.”
Image: Pluto’s northern Sputnik Planitia glacier (in the western or left side of Pluto’s bright heart) is shown here in a color mosaic made from NASA’s New Horizons imagery. The direction of north is shown on the image. The image is ~ 700 x 350 kilometers across. The red box has been added to show most of the region containing dark features attributed to the wetting of the glacier by liquid nitrogen sourced from a “basal melting” process beneath the glacier. NASA/Johns Hopkins APL/SwRI.
These findings are based on studies of a glacial surface far from Earth and involve liquid nitrogen rather than water, but it’s interesting that the paper reports that the surface patterns on this region of Sputnik Planitia have darkened in ways that are similar to Earth glaciers that have undergone their own wetting by subsurface liquid. The team worked with images from the Landsat 9 satellite that included the Greenland ice sheet. Computer models of glacial melting led by Orkan Umurhan (SETI Institute) reveal a transport mechanism to the surface and indicate an icy flow that can persist on the surface for short periods, which would account for the dark features.
And there is another Earth analogue that perhaps comes into play. From the paper:
We have posited that the striking, dark, irregular linear and diffuse features prevalent at the northern margin of SP are manifestations of the upwelling of liquids or liquid slurries from beneath the SP ice sheet. We have further posited that these liquids were created as a basal melt at depth below the glacier, and we have quantitatively shown the plausibility that such a mechanism can then advect through conduits to the surface of SP where it will horizontally spread out, leaving a darkened surface akin to that observed in northern SP. The buoyant ascent of liquid nitrogen through the denser N2 ice is akin to terrestrial volcanism where less dense basaltic melt rises through cold continental crust.
Does this process occur on other dwarf planets in the Kuiper Belt? We won’t know that until we have mapping missions to objects like Eris. The paper also mentions the obvious candidate at Neptune, the large moon Triton, as a possible example of such processes factoring into the geysers Voyager 2 observed during its flyby. For that matter, it’s fascinating to consider that despite the success of New Horizons at Pluto/Charon, over half the planet (I know I’ll get emails about calling it that) remains unmapped at high resolution because of the geometry of the encounter. So for the time being, we don’t even know whether apparent flows like that at Sputnik Planitia occur elsewhere.
The SETI Institute’s Umurhan points out that the physics of solid nitrogen materials under stress and strain are not well understood, and have to this point “never been studied in real detail in the laboratory.” We need, in other words, to go out there and look, and New Horizons has just reminded us why.
The paper is Stern et al., “Evidence for Possible N2 Basal Flow beneath Pluto’s Northern Sputnik Planitia,” Planetary Science Journal Vol. 7, No. 7 (31 July 2026), 185 (full text).
Katrina Foley. Aug. 19, 2026. Bottega Angelina. Laguna Niguel.
A confession: Before sitting down with Katrina Foley last week at Bottega Angelina in Laguna Niguel, I was very much prepared to dislike her.
The District 5 Orange County Board of Supervisors rep had been described to me—by various people of various stripes—as blunt, raw, (occasionally) dismissive, (occasionally) lacking tact and edgy. There are warm and cuddly local political figures who tell you exactly what they presume you want to hear. They pretend to remember your name; laugh at your mediocre jokes; make empty promises they know will never be revisited.
And there is Katrina Foley.
Someone I know and trust told me that, at her core, Katrina Foley is “a wonk.”
“How do you mean?” I asked.
“She loves her job,” the friend said. “Loves it. Loves meetings. Loves policy. Loves putting pieces together. She’s probably not gonna hug you, and she can definitely sound a little harsh, but she’s gonna work her ass off for you.”
And, ultimately, that’s the Katrina Foley I met. In the midst of a tight re-election campaign against Republican Diane Dixon (a former Foley friend, turned rival), Foley was candid, open and real in her takes on the campaign, on the struggles of political life, of Dana Point Harbor headaches and the threat of pesticides and her (bizarre, bewildering) love of meetings.
JEFF PEARLMAN: “All right. Serious first question. I have no idea why anybody would want your job. I understand public service and greater good and all that, but it just seems miserable running, fighting. Then you get elected and people yell at you. Why even do this stuff?”
KATRINA FOLEY: “Yeah. So, I will say in general, I actually love this job. I didn’t really know what a county supervisor did. I had a general understanding, but our county supervisors were MIA in my area. And so, I thought it was more like city council, mayor, part-time kind of thing. But once I got here, I realized that you have so much influence on so many things. Social service safety net, homelessness prevention, development projects and the airport, all these things that I find to be fun to get involved in and solve problems for.
“So, in general, I love the job. It gives me a lot of reward to help people every single day. I know that sounds corny, but I actually respond to my emails. I like to help people. But I would say it’s very much harder to get good quality candidates. People who care about policy, people who care about responding to community needs and aren’t just doing it for some political reason.
“It’s hard to get those people because usually there’s all these challenges. They’re either professionals that are working and they don’t have the time to commit to something like city council or school board, or maybe they have the time, but they don’t have the thick skin, I’ll call it, to put themselves through the ringer, to have their personal attacks on them, their family at risk, people coming to their house. This is a different time now that we’re in.”
JEFF PEARLMAN: “You literally had people come to your house?”
KATRINA FOLEY: “Oh yeah.”
JEFF PEARLMAN:“Come to your house?”
KATRINA FOLEY: “Yes.”
JEFF PEARLMAN:“Knock on your door?”
KATRINA FOLEY: “They came to my house at least three times. It could have been four, I can’t remember. And I had to get the dignitary detail to come over because they had flags and their megaphones and they were yelling things at me. The first time it happened, I was mayor of Costa Mesa. And it was during COVID. And my husband and I and my son, we’re in our backyard and we’re in the pool. I’m in a bikini swimming around with my family. And then I hear all this commotion and I’m like, ‘What is that?’ So, I go over to sneak a peek over the fence and I realize, “Oh no, they’re at our house.’ So, I run to get a towel.
“My backyard is the soccer fields. So, you could see into my backyard from the public soccer field. And then people start coming around the back. I’m like, ‘Okay, I don’t want any pictures of me into my bathing suit.’ And of course, my husband would say, ‘Well, that’d get you votes.’ I’m like, ‘I don’t think so.' Maybe 20 years ago.’ So that was our first experience with that kind of a chaotic situation. And then it happened several other times when I became the county supervisor. And so, yeah, my house is now a place where we have a drive-by every once in a while, I mean, in terms of the police presence.”
JEFF PEARLMAN:“Do you feel like we live in a time where you can’t just go out and talk to these people and be like, ‘Hey, what do you guys wanna discuss ...’ Is it far past that?”
KATRINA FOLEY: “Three of the people that were at my house in that time period either pled guilty or were charged during the insurrection. So, no, I’m not going out and talking.”
JEFF PEARLMAN:“No, I think that’s wise.”
KATRINA FOLEY: “You don’t really know the difference between ... sometimes when I was on the city council, a lot of rhetoric. There was this one guy, he was a self-described white nationalist and he’d always target me at the podium, but he was like one. There wasn’t a movement of him in our city. And the people that would come to the podium would have legitimate community issues that they wanted to address their council about and get redressed. Whereas now I just feel that sometimes people come and they tell us we’re going to go to hell. I mean, they say things that you can’t tell if it’s just rhetoric or they’re actually going to try to hurt you.
“I always err on the side of, ‘Okay, they’re using their public speech.’ I’m a huge advocate for the First Amendment, so I’m not going to cut anyone off from speaking. But at the same time, sometimes the words are insightful of violence.”
JEFF PEARLMAN:“Do you feel like in this regard, there’s a pre and post-COVID element to it?”
KATRINA FOLEY: “For sure. Yeah.”
JEFF PEARLMAN: “Something broke.”
KATRINA FOLEY: “Yeah. There was a change. And it’s gotten a little better over the last year, I would say. It’s not as dramatic as it was for the first couple of years I was on the board. So, there’s that, but that’s only part of the job. The board meetings occur twice a month, sometimes once a month, depending on how the days fall. And so, that’s that.
“But overall, our office is out working in the community, having positive experiences with the chambers, with new small businesses, with the community groups, the sand advocates. I’ve never learned so much about sand in my whole life. I never would think that this would be something I would be an expert on. Working with our Latino families in some of the areas of the south county area that had never had anybody even talk to them. They didn’t even know they had a county supervisor or what that was really.
“So, I like working with our healthcare safety net groups and the environmentalists. There isn’t a small business that I don’t like supporting. So, it’s really enjoyable, I’ll say, to do the work and to be out in the community. And people always say to me, ‘Oh, you have so much energy. How are you everywhere? And you’re so energetic. How do you not get tired?’ And it’s a strange phenomenon because I don’t get tired. I could go into a big, huge community meeting tired and leave super amped up and can’t go to sleep because I get fuel from the people.”
JEFF PEARLMAN: “What time do you wake up in the morning usually?”
KATRINA FOLEY: “I start texting people early. I’m usually up no later than 6 o’clock.”
JEFF PEARLMAN: “What time do you go to bed?”
KATRINA FOLEY: “I probably go to bed around 11.”
JEFF PEARLMAN: “You are not getting enough sleep there.”
KATRINA FOLEY: “I know, I know. I know, but I try. Even when I go to bed early, my clock doesn’t let me sleep more than six or seven hours. I just can’t do it.”
JEFF PEARLMAN: “Wait, so here’s something about you that I think is really interesting. You may disagree. My least favorite part of having started this website is any meeting. I hate meetings. I don’t like meetings as a sports journalist. I’ve never enjoyed meetings.”
KATRINA FOLEY: “You would not like this job.”
JEFF PEARLMAN: “Facts.”
KATRINA FOLEY: “I have meetings all day long every day.”
KATRINA FOLEY: “Okay. So, Monday, you would have hated my day.”
JEFF PEARLMAN: “Okay. Tell me your full day Monday.”
KATRINA FOLEY: “My full day Monday. I started my day at 9 am in a meeting, and I went from 9 to 4:30 in back-to-back meetings, back to back to back. I didn’t stop meeting with people. Mostly staff coming and giving me briefings on initiatives and updates and preparation for the board meetings and all that. Mondays are when I do all those briefing meetings. They didn’t even give me time to eat lunch or go to the bathroom. I had an OCTA Zoom meeting and it finished at 3:40. And I’m like, ‘I’m reclaiming my time. I’m going to stop the meeting now since we’re done. We don’t need to chit-chat because I got 20 minutes to eat lunch.’”
JEFF PEARLMAN: “That’s funny.”
KATRINA FOLEY: “So, yeah. I mean, I like meetings.”
JEFF PEARLMAN:“You really, truly, genuinely like meetings?”
KATRINA FOLEY: “I do. Some of the meetings I like … is sometimes you can’t get the work done unless you have a meeting. People think meetings waste time, but what I try to do, I try to be efficient with the meetings, especially when we’re trying to solve a problem. So, I’ll give you an example. Dana Point Harbor, when I first got elected in December of 2022, before I got sworn in to the fifth district, I went and had a briefing with the Harbor Partners, SDG&E, the county real estate, all these different groups.
“So, I had what Alyssa [Napuri, Foley’s deputy chief of staff] likes to refer to as a full Foley meeting. And that is where I pull everyone together to try to figure out what’s the clog? Who’s creating the clog or the cog in the wheel? And so, in this case, we had no utility permits for the parking structure for the Data Point Harbor. And the importance of that is that they can’t do anything until they get the utility permits. And at that point, they’re almost four years, five years into the contract. So, everyone’s pointing fingers. The developers are saying that it’s SDG&E. SDG&E is saying that it’s their consultant, the county. Everyone’s pointing fingers.
“So, I just went about asking that question. I’m one of two women in the room. It’s all men. And I just asked every single one direct questions to try to find out what was the problem. And then I said, ‘Okay, send me all the emails, SDG&E, that you have related to this certification.’ And it turned out we figured out the problem. The problem was the guy wasn’t certified to get the permits, so he couldn’t sign what was called a welcome packet. It was like a simple thing that was the problem causing us not to get the permits. But nobody knew because everybody’s delegating and they’re just assuming everyone’s doing what they’re supposed to be doing.”
JEFF PEARLMAN:“Wait, super nerdy follow-up. How did you figure out what the problem was?”
KATRINA FOLEY: “I listened to all what they were saying and I asked for the emails because I felt like, okay, I’m going to read the thread of emails to figure out what is supposed to happen next. And I read all the emails and there was an email that was a welcome package. It’s an SDG&E procedural requirement. You have to sign this package, but the only way you could sign the package is if you’re certified as a utility consultant. The guy wasn’t certified. It was that simple. And so, we discovered that and then, wow, solution found. And we ended up getting somebody else to handle it and then moving forward. It was like, boom, it all flowed after that. But I don’t know, sometimes people don’t ask questions.”
JEFF PEARLMAN: “So, I write books for a living, and I wrote a book about the rapper Tupac. And finding little things like what kind of cigarettes he smoked or the name of an aunt or something like that just gives me a jolt. You seem super nerdy in that way too …”
KATRINA FOLEY: “Well, yes. It’s also because I was a litigator, and I’m still a litigator, I just don’t go to trial anymore, but for nearly 30 years. So, as a litigator, your job is to find the smoking gun and the needle in the haystack to prove your case. So, I just approach all of these county problems that are what seem to be gigantic problems that people can’t solve for all these decades like I’m a litigator trying to prove my case. So, I mean, it helps.”
JEFF PEARLMAN:“Did you get a high off of it? You find the reason the parking can’t be …”
KATRINA FOLEY: “Oh yeah, yeah. Of course. And that’s why I love this job. Every day I get to solve some problem. And I didn’t really realize about myself how much I like solving problems until I got this job. I mean, I knew it, but not really.”
“But I also get really frustrated if I can’t solve the problem. So, that’s the downside. I’m not one of those politicians that can just say, ‘Well, that’s somebody else’s problem. I did my part.’ I feel like obligated to fix it.”
JEFF PEARLMAN:“What is an example from your career of something you weren’t able to fix that you wanted to fix? Or something you wanted to solve and couldn’t quite figure it out?”
KATRINA FOLEY: “Well, I’m experiencing it right now, Dana Point Harbor. I thought we had it all solved, but all the politics is getting in the way of the progress.”
JEFF PEARLMAN:“Wait, obviously I’ve got to ask about this, but I’m actually fascinated by Dana Point Harbor a million different ways. So I can’t say I love Newport as a place to go. Meaning, I used to write my books at the Harbor House. And I like sitting in a corner booth at the Harbor House. It smells a little funky and the food is grimy and gritty and … I dig that. Is there a concern that Dana Point at the end of the day is going to wind up being Newport II?”
KATRINA FOLEY: “Well, first of all, I don’t think it’s going to be Newport. Believe it or not, the perception about the Newport Harbor is not actually what Newport Harbor is. There’s a lot of mom and pops. There’s a lot of really long-time businesses in Newport Harbor. There’s a lot of old money in Newport Harbor. It’s not all shiny and new like everyone’s thinking. So, I do think it’s going to be very different. My dad was a deep-sea fisherman in Santa Barbara, so he’s had every dirty job you could imagine. And there’s a relevance to this story. I was in high school when he was a deep-sea fisherman in Santa Barbara. My senior year, I think. It turns out Joe Ueberroth was revitalizing the harbor in Santa Barbara.
“And as part of that revitalization, the old-school fishermen who fished out of the harbor, who hung out at the ... I can’t think of the name of it right now, but the little cafe there, all the places you’re talking about. We had those at Santa Barbara Harbor also. And people got really upset because they were going to get rid of all these places and the new places were going to take over and it wasn’t going to have the same character that it had. But the new harbor got built and people still go to the little cafe. It just has a different facade now. And the fishermen found a new place to hang and everybody found their corner, if you will. I suspect that will happen here. And to me, it’s not going to be like Newport. It’s unique in and of itself. It doesn’t feel like Newport to me.
“I think the whole thing, ‘Don’t Newport my Dana Point,’ is really because the developers are from Newport. And so, that’s where I think that comes from. But it doesn’t matter who was in charge of tearing down the buildings. People would be upset. But, look, I had my office in one of the buildings. They were old, leaking, very inefficient, the heat and air not working. The county just left the harbor to deteriorate all these years.
“And if there’s one thing that I have tried to bring to the job is that we have to maintain our infrastructure. We can’t just let things deteriorate like what was happening in this harbor for decades. Not even just a couple years, decades. So, I don’t think it’s going to be like Newport. I think it’ll be its own. It’ll create its own little community. People will still get out there and walk. The Jazzercise ladies that have been going there for 35 years, they’re going to still be there. And we’ll have our county area where we have all the free amenities.”
JEFF PEARLMAN:“What are the biggest pains in the ass for you in regard to Dana Point and this getting completed?”
KATRINA FOLEY: “I feel like I’m the scapegoat for the failure to find financing.”
JEFF PEARLMAN: “Ah.”
KATRINA FOLEY: “I think the hotel developer can’t find the financing. She’s trying to blame me.”
JEFF PEARLMAN:“How do you deal with that as a political figure? Because on the one hand you’re running for re-election. On the other hand, job’s a job …”
KATRINA FOLEY: “Yeah. So, I’m trying to get the project, the lease agreements approved so that there isn’t an excuse that you can’t find financing. If after the leases are bifurcated, which they keep saying is the reason they can’t get the financing, then what’s your excuse now? I mean, you signed a contract in 2018 that included commercial core marina hotels all under one lease. Well, you must have known in 2018 that you weren’t going to be able to get the financing because that’s what they say, they couldn’t get the financing because the hotels have to be separated out.”
JEFF PEARLMAN:“Is it tough to be in your position where any business person can blame the local political figure?”
KATRINA FOLEY: “Oh, yeah.”
JEFF PEARLMAN: “But the local political figure has to be really careful about blaming a business person.”
KATRINA FOLEY: “For sure. But what I will say in my 25 years of public service, starting as a planning commissioner, I have worked with incredible property owners. Henry Segerstrom, who had great vision, who did everything in a professional way. Working with staff, working with you, addressing any concerns of the council as a whole, of the planning commissioners, trying to find yes always. Compromising where they could to get to yes so everyone could have a win and we could all celebrate. William Lyon, Irvine Company, The Ranch, Tony Moiso. No one does what’s happening here, where you’re taking this all like a street fight in the media. I’ve never experienced this before.”
JEFF PEARLMAN: “Does it make your head explode?”
KATRINA FOLEY: “Well, it’s kind of disappointing because Alyssa and I put our heart and soul in trying to get the approvals for the entitlements. We used a lot of political capital, both with the Coastal Commission, with the labor unions, with community groups. And we really did it because we believed in the outcome is going to benefit, hundreds of jobs going to be created. Lots of revenue coming in for the county and to help the county side of the harbor stay functional.
“When I first got the job to represent District 5, the prior supervisor had in the works, which I had to stop, to give the Dana Point Harbor Partners a contract to take over the county side as well. And the residents would’ve been completely opposed to that, which they’re even the feedback we get just we have a notice because we have this community meeting tonight. Everyone’s freaking out thinking it’s going to be the same thing. Commercializing of the ... to have to keep saying over and over and over again, ‘That’s not what we’re doing. We’re just trying to upgrade. It’s old. It needs to be upgraded.’”
JEFF PEARLMAN: “Wait, so you have a meeting tonight?”
KATRINA FOLEY: “Yeah. A meeting. Another meeting.”
JEFF PEARLMAN:“I was going to say, are you more revved up for it? Or are you like, ‘I would love to go home and watch realty TV?’”
KATRINA FOLEY: “Well, first of all, I don’t watch reality, just TV. I’m more into ‘Gilded Age’ and ‘Bridgerton.’”
JEFF PEARLMAN: “Fair.”
KATRINA FOLEY: “But no, I’m a workaholic. I love working. I would be working on something even if I’m not going to a meeting. I’m not good at relaxing.”
JEFF PEARLMAN: “Nordhoff High School, 1984, found the article on you …”
KATRINA FOLEY: “Ha. I know.”
JEFF PEARLMAN: “It was actually very affirming. You were this way in 1984. So, I’m actually interested. Growing up, when was your first idea or germination of, ‘I might want to go into some kind of...’”
KATRINA FOLEY: “I knew who he was because he was coming to our school and I was assigned to interview him.”
JEFF PEARLMAN:“You wrote for the high school newspaper?”
KATRINA FOLEY: “Yes, yes. It’s so funny, I had forgotten my question until I reread that today. So, the reason I was asking about the absences was twofold. I lived on my own that year ...”
JEFF PEARLMAN: “In high school?”
KATRINA FOLEY: “I was not living at home. My mom and my siblings had moved to Texas and I did not want to move to Texas. And so, my mom arranged for me to have a room that she rented in someone’s house, and I lived on my own.”
JEFF PEARLMAN: “Wait, what town was this?”
KATRINA FOLEY: “Ojai. And then my senior year, I moved from there into my friend’s. I live with my friend’s family. And I worked at McDonald’s. Ojai does not allow any franchises. So, McDonald’s opened on the outskirts of Ojai.”
JEFF PEARLMAN: “What year are we talking?”
KATRINA FOLEY: “It was 1984 or ‘85. I graduated ‘85. So, I got a job at McDonald’s. I was on the track team that year also. So, I was working. Sometimes I would miss an elective because I had to go to work. And then I hurt myself in a track meet.”
JEFF PEARLMAN:“What was your event in track?
KATRINA FOLEY: “One time I did the 100-yard sprint and I never did it again. I ran cross country. I was not a short distance runner, but the coach was like, ‘You can do it.’ Coach was wrong.”
“I could speak in front of 500 people, but running 100 yards terrified me. So, I never did it again. But I pulled something, whatever. I don’t even remember. So, I was out of school for a couple days. But they had this weird rule, which I still to this day would oppose. If you’re getting an A or a B or whatever the grade is on all your tests and all your papers, why would you get your grade lowered for absences? That is stupid. Because kids have lives.”
JEFF PEARLMAN: “Sure.”
KATRINA FOLEY: “But anyway.”
JEFF PEARLMAN:“Wait, no, not anyway. So, Gary Hart comes to school …”
KATRINA FOLEY: “Yeah.”
JEFF PEARLMAN:“And you kind of fire away.”
KATRINA FOLEY: “Yeah. But it’s funny because that article, and if you read it in context of who I am now, you might think I’m this way always. But no, at that time in my life, I helped with the junior varsity cheer squad. And I was all about my girlfriends and my boyfriend. And I was not at all interested in politics. I didn’t even know what politics was.
“And I did not get interested in politics until I got to UCLA. I mean, my mom was apolitical. We didn’t talk about politics. I had no idea what politics was. I got to UCLA and then my whole world changed. It was the Year of the Woman, Senator Boxer, Senator Feinstein around the ballots. I interviewed Senator Boxer because I was the editor for the news magazine, for the women’s magazine on campus.”
JEFF PEARLMAN:“Do you remember interviewing her?”
KATRINA FOLEY: “Oh, yeah. I even have the cassette tape still.”
JEFF PEARLMAN: “Were you terrified or were you confident?”
KATRINA FOLEY: “I mean, I think I was probably nervous. Look, I was a ballerina and I did dance recitals as a girl. That was my escape from my dysfunctional family. So, I think I always figured out a way to project confidence even if I’m nervous. So, I’ve been doing that for my whole life. So, people don’t always know if I’m nervous. But in that case, I don’t remember feeling nervous, but maybe I was. Who knows? It was a long time ago.”
JEFF PEARLMAN: “Wait, I have to rewind here. You’re a senior in high school. Your parents are divorced?”
KATRINA FOLEY: “Yeah. So, my parents were divorced when I was two. And then my dad lived in Santa Barbara. I lived with my mom lots of different places. I have two siblings. And my brother’s an army veteran. But my stepdad is who we lived with in Ojai. And he is what I refer to as my evil stepfather.”
JEFF PEARLMAN:“Does he know that you refer to him as your evil stepfather?”
KATRINA FOLEY: “Well, he’s dead. I don’t care. He knows how much we don’t like him. So, he’s actually the reason that in my yearbook it says I want to be a lawyer. And that is because he was a bad man, raging alcoholic. He would take our family on these terrible excursions. It was horrific. I was like the adult in the room at 12, but he always targeted me. I was the target. And so, my mom was always trying to protect me against him. That’s why I was always in activity, so I didn’t have to be at home.”
JEFF PEARLMAN: “Did your mom work or she stay at home?”
KATRINA FOLEY: “No, my mom worked. Oh, she had to work. I mean, she did all kinds of different jobs. Real estate and sales.”
JEFF PEARLMAN:“Is she still alive?”
KATRINA FOLEY: “Yes. We built her a house in the back.”
JEFF PEARLMAN: “Oh, cool.”
KATRINA FOLEY: “Yeah. But this guy, he was just a bad person. And the ultimate definition of how bad he was, was that when my mom took my sister, who was my half-sister, and my brother, and they moved to Texas, he tried to get custody of my little sister because he wanted the disability check. And so, he took our family through this horrific trial. And my mom had a friend who was a lawyer. He was a corporate lawyer. In retrospect, I learned all this as an adult. He didn’t know family law. My mom just got put through the ringer. He got custody of my sister, which he never should have. And he laid out this whole thing.
“My sister actually thought that her dad wanted her. He didn’t want her. He just wanted the money. And it was very painful to my sister. It was painful to our whole family. And I said that day, I’m going to be a lawyer because I don’t want any women to go through this again.”
JEFF PEARLMAN: “You remember this?”
KATRINA FOLEY: “Oh, yeah. Oh, I do. Because he put me on the stand and it was terrible. So, I was probably 13 at that time. And it inspired me to become a lawyer. Now, I ultimately didn’t do family law, but that’s what got me committed to representing people who don’t have a voice to represent themselves. So, I can thank him for that, even though I despised the man.”
JEFF PEARLMAN: “Wait, I’m not letting you off this easy. You’re a senior in high school and your mom and your evil stepfather and your siblings moved to Texas.”
KATRINA FOLEY: “My stepfather didn’t move. My mom left because she finally realized she had to get out of there. And I was on my own my freshman year.”
JEFF PEARLMAN:“Freshman year of?”
KATRINA FOLEY: “High school. Fourteen. So, I’ve been on my own. I mean, I’m not living by myself. We rented a room for me. I’ve been pretty much independent since I was 14. And so, I’ve been working since I was 12 because my mom was really poor and we didn’t have any money. So, if I wanted a new Chemin de Fer jeans, I had to work for it.”
JEFF PEARLMAN: “What were the different jobs besides McDonald’s you’ve had in your early working days?”
KATRINA FOLEY: “So, I cleaned a lady’s mobile home and it was through the Youth Employment Service Organization. Her house was spotless. She just wanted to help young people. I babysat, obviously. Everybody babysits at my age. And then I sanded gourds for a while.”
JEFF PEARLMAN:“How does one enter the sanded gourd industry?”
KATRINA FOLEY: “The Youth Employment Service. They just had these random jobs. I was a Girl Friday, I was a cocktail waitress, a bartender.”
JEFF PEARLMAN: “What a Girl Friday? I’m sorry …”
KATRINA FOLEY: “I did errands for this restaurant owner, this French restaurant. I would run around, go to the grocery store, pick up things for him. They don’t call it that anymore. But yeah, I cleaned motel rooms. Yeah, I had a lot of jobs. Legal secretary. That was my year after college, legal secretary. And then after that, it’s all been lawyer jobs.”
JEFF PEARLMAN: “And why’d you go to UCLA?”
KATRINA FOLEY: “I always wanted to go to UCLA. It’s like my dream school. I got into UCI out of high school and I declined. I didn’t know anything. I was dumb. I said, ‘Why would I? I don’t want to live in Orange County.’ And then I ended up making my whole life here.”
JEFF PEARLMAN:“You got into UCI, but didn’t go?”
KATRINA FOLEY: “I went to Santa Barbara City College for two years. And then I went to UCLA for three years because I did a double major.”
JEFF PEARLMAN: “Besides the traumatic upbringing you experienced with a shitty stepfather, all that … what do you feel like steered you to actually entering politics? Was there a moment?”
KATRINA FOLEY: “So this is the dork that I am. When I moved here after law school, my husband is from Costa Mesa. But I didn’t know one person. I didn’t know one lawyer. I knew my husband’s high school friends, that’s it. And his parents. And so, I said, ‘Oh, what can I get involved in where I can meet people?’ It was 1997. And there was a woman, Libby Cowan was her name. She was running for re-election to the city council.
JEFF PEARLMAN:“Some people take up bowling or knitting or theater.”
KATRINA FOLEY: I know. Yeah. And so, she was one of the first gay elected officials in Orange County.”
JEFF PEARLMAN:“Libby Cowan?”
KATRINA FOLEY: “Libby Cowan. Yeah. So, I didn’t know that at the time. I just knew she was a woman running for a city council. And so, I sent my resume and I was like all official. I did a fax. I did a fax! And then she called me and she says, ‘Well, okay. I’m going to hire you.’ I go, ‘Really? Okay, that’s so great.’ She says, ‘And the pay is nothing.’
JEFF PEARLMAN: “I’m in!”
KATRINA FOLEY: “I had so much fun meeting all the people. And then the planning commissioner position came open and I thought, ‘Oh, I could use my legal skills.’ And I used to live in West Los Angeles near Third Street Promenade when they redid Third Street Promenade. So, they were redoing west side Costa Mesa. That was the discussion at the time. I thought, ‘Oh, I have lots of great ideas because I just came from West Los Angeles.’ So, I applied and I got appointed and the rest is history.”
JEFF PEARLMAN:“In 2002, you lost in the Costa Mesa City Council race. And that was your first election. What happened?”
KATRINA FOLEY: “Well, first of all, I learned that running on a platform of ‘Costa Mesa needs a strategic plan’ is not a very good campaign.”
JEFF PEARLMAN: “Why is that a bad campaign?”
KATRINA FOLEY: “It doesn’t relate. People don’t relate to that. We did need that, and we ultimately did do that. But people want you to fix their potholes. They want you to beautify the neighborhood. They want you to make sure the schools are good. The traffic is reduced. Storefronts are open. Strategic plan, no one knows what that means. It doesn’t resonate. So, it was a bad campaign slogan. Or not slogan, but platform.
“And then additionally what I learned was you have to get every endorsement in writing because I never ran for office before. If someone signs my nomination papers, I don’t know about you, but I would think that that person supports me running for office because I would never sign someone’s nomination papers that I don’t support. Well, apparently my neighbor didn’t support me, but he signed my nomination papers, but I didn’t know.”
JEFF PEARLMAN:“And did that come back to bite you?”
KATRINA FOLEY: “Yeah, yeah, because he said he didn’t support me and I had him listed and they used this big headline. So, I learned, okay, you have to get stuff. You have to tighten it up a little bit. So, I learned from that. I learned a lot. I wasn’t partisan at that time. I didn’t have identity as a partisan person.”
JEFF PEARLMAN: “Were you registered as a Democrat?”
KATRINA FOLEY: “Yeah, I’m lifelong Democrat. But it wasn’t relevant for me to the job. I wasn’t involved in the party. And that was the issue. That began—sorry, Costa Mesa—but that began the time in Costa Mesa where everything turned partisan because they wanted to take me out and never let me get elected. And they decided to always use partisanship as the way to do it. So, in 2004, I won and I kept winning.”
JEFF PEARLMAN: “Wait, I want to ask you a question before you go on with that. When you’re you and you’re just like this nerdy political person, and you have this first, not just a loss, but almost like a lesson that like, ‘Oh, politics is ugly and sucky and blah, blah, blah.’ How does it not in a way deter you from pursuing this to that degree?”
KATRINA FOLEY: “It’s a really good question. I don’t even know the answer to that question. I guess I’m tenacious is the only way I could describe that. I don’t like to give up and I certainly don’t like to lose. And so, if I’ve lost something, I try to win it some other way. That’s what I did.”
2004 results.
JEFF PEARLMAN:“So, when you came back and won two years later …”
KATRINA FOLEY: “I got the most votes in the history of the city.”
JEFF PEARLMAN: “What did that mean to you?”
KATRINA FOLEY: “Well, it meant that there were things we did wrong in our campaign that we corrected. I had a campaign consultant. I changed the whole way I did it. I was more professional in how I ran the campaign. I ran it more less like I’m the neighbor running and more like a real campaign.”
JEFF PEARLMAN: “You ran a tougher operation?”
KATRINA FOLEY: “One of my faults is I don’t like losing.”
JEFF PEARLMAN:“Are you actually like … if you’re at home, I don’t know, with the husband playing chess, you’re kind of an …”
KATRINA FOLEY: “I don’t like losing.”
JEFF PEARLMAN: “Really?”
KATRINA FOLEY: “We have a funny story. It’s probably not that funny to my friend. So, my boys have grown up very competitively. We never let the boys win. Even in little basketball hoops, we try to win, and card games, whatever. So, that’s what I was used to. So, my friend is visiting from another state and she has her stepson with her and he’s like 11 and we’re playing some card game. I don’t remember. And I won the card game and I’m like, ‘Yay, I win.’ And he just got devastated. I go, ‘Oh, my gosh, I’m not used to this.’ We’re very competitive at our house.”
JEFF PEARLMAN: “And that translates into politics, I imagine.”
KATRINA FOLEY: “Probably. I’ve had to fight for my whole life, so it’s just a part of my nature.”
JEFF PEARLMAN:“The year is 2010. Newport-Mesa Unified School District Trustee. Again, who would want this job? I’m not trying to be a jerk, but …”
KATRINA FOLEY: “Oh, I had a very specific reason. I left my council position because my kids were going to go into the high school within the next two years, the junior high. And all of the families in the neighborhood were leaving our local high school and going to Newport and Huntington Beach. And we pay a lot of money in taxes. We should be able to go to the neighborhood school.
“And I toured the school and I was appalled. The locker rooms were horrific. It was really dirty. It was gross. There was facilities that were degraded. The football field had pothole things in it. You’re going to break your ankle running out there. And so, I came home and I said to my husband, ‘I don’t know. I don’t know how we can go to that school.’ And so, I decided to run for school board to fix it.”
JEFF PEARLMAN: “Did you?”
KATRINA FOLEY: “Yes. We built a new stadium and a new theater, science labs, a new middle school. We had an increase in the neighbors that went to the school. They did not, the counselors and others, they did not encourage kids to go to college. We turned it into a college going culture there. We added STEM programs, dual immersion programs. So, in a very short time, I did a lot.
“And I used different schools as models. Corona Del Mar was an example. They had a whole science budget for their science classes, and they had the baseline of what they needed to add to what the school district was providing in order for kids to get the materials they needed for quality, that level of science, biology, et cetera. But they could just ask all the parents to donate to meet their budget. Well, Costa Mesa, those parents can’t all donate like that. So, I started advocating to increase the science budget across the district to be able to buy basic supplies, beakers, whatever the protective glasses are called ...”
JEFF PEARLMAN: “Goggles?”
KATRINA FOLEY: “Goggles. Thank you. Whatever they are. And you would’ve thought I’m asking for every student to get a Rolls Royce. It was ridiculous how much pushback I got. We ultimately got it done. But yeah, so we did a lot of good in that short period of time.”
JEFF PEARLMAN: “What do you feel like you understand about problem solving that maybe other people don’t?”
KATRINA FOLEY: “I don’t think I have any better understanding. I think that people are conflict averse.”
JEFF PEARLMAN: “Are you not?”
KATRINA FOLEY: “I don’t like conflict. I don’t want conflict, but sometimes it’s unavoidable. But what I know from working as an elementary school PTA president, junior high, high school PTA, booster, foundation president, most parents are conflict averse. So, when you have parents in a school that’s socioeconomically disadvantaged and they don’t have time to be in conflict with the administration over something that they think they need, so they just don’t say anything. So, then nobody’s saying anything. So, I feel like I’m willing to step into that space that is uncomfortable in order to make something better happen.”
JEFF PEARLMAN:“I would say it’s very interesting moving here from New York. In New York, you’re very like, ‘What the fuck is your problem?’ or, ‘Why can’t we just talk about this?’ And in California, especially in Orange County, it’s very like, ‘Well, I know this is awkward, but I just, if you could maybe...’ And I feel like people who are blunt walk pretty freely. It’s a much better way to be here because people are not nearly as blunt as they are on the East Coast. You disagree? You do have a New York thing about you. In a good way, not in a bad way. I swear to god, you definitely have a New York thing about you.”
KATRINA FOLEY: “Well, good because my son is moving to New York next week. He got into the Parsons. So I’m going to get to know New York.”
JEFF PEARLMAN:“That’s awesome. Congrats.”
KATRINA FOLEY: “Thanks. I’m very proud.”
JEFF PEARLMAN:“Let me throw some rapid fires at you, okay?”
KATRINA FOLEY: “Oh, I think that RoundUp and pesticides, I mean, look, the state of California has banned paraquat, which has been being used in agricultural areas because it’s dangerous to the health of our residents. I am convinced that RoundUp and other pesticides hurt our health. Do I have evidence of direct causal link between RoundUp and a person having cancer? No. There’s a lot of environmental factors probably that come into play. But any toxic chemicals being routinely used in the community is hurting our health. I am convinced of that. And I will try everything to reduce the amount of chemical exposure that we have as residents.
“And right now, what we’ve been doing is just routine spraying everywhere. I mean, look around all this manicured area. It’s because of routine spraying. It’s convenient, it’s low cost, but in the end, it’s actually more costly because it costs us our health. And I’ve had this position for a long time, not changing my mind.”
JEFF PEARLMAN:“I don’t really get it. There are things I don’t understand in this world. People who are against, who say, ‘Well, climate change isn’t real.’ And I’m always like, ‘But you breathe the air too. You breathe the same air I breathe.’ Why are there colleagues of yours against your position?”
KATRINA FOLEY: “That’s just politics. That is just politics.”
JEFF PEARLMAN: “Why doesn’t it drive you freaking crazy?”
KATRINA FOLEY: “Well, of course, because I like to solve problems. All of the different things that people want to fix, the sand erosion, the king tide, impacts from the king tides, all of that is because the planet is changing. I mean, that is why. So, people who don’t believe in climate change believe that that’s a problem. So, I’ve just tried to change the way we talk about it and talk about it from, okay, it’s economically better for us to address these issues.
“And it saves us money to go solar. It saves us money as taxpayers to be electrified in our fleet and not rely on fossil fuels for gas. It saves us money to not have to use heat and air so much because the buildings aren’t built the proper way or the materials that we use for building aren’t sustainable. So, it saves money. So, if you don’t believe in climate change, if you think that’s a hoax, but you do believe that you don’t want your taxes to be wasted, okay, that works for me.”
JEFF PEARLMAN: “How concerned are you about the Big Beautiful Bill and the just hammering away at programs like CalOptima as far as being able to fund it?”
KATRINA FOLEY: “Extremely concerned. Our county budget is wholly dependent on federal and state funding. We have 83 percent of our budget is mandated program funds. So, what a Big Beautiful … ugly bill, excuse me, did was eligibility workers have to be hired to process the applications for people who need CalOptima and who need for health insurance and who need CalFresh for food. So, the people who are eligible for CalOptima, let’s say an individual, $18,800 a year. That’s how much you can make. So, think about that. That’s a person who’s very poor in Orange County when the average income is $100,000.
“So, we now have to re-certify all of these individuals two times a year. Not only do we have the added work of twice a year re-certification, but in addition, we have all these new work requirements and volunteer hour requirements that we have to make sure that the clients are complying with. That takes time. That means we have staffing needs. You can’t do it without staff.
“But then they cut our budget 25 percent. So, they cut our budget in half. It used to be 50 percent paid for by the feds. Now it’s 25 percent. So, double the work, half the money. We already have seen about 70,000 people fall off of CalOptima this year since all of the changes went into effect. So, they’re projecting that we’re going to get to somewhere around 200,000 people that are going to need indigent care. And I’m getting really wonky here.”
JEFF PEARLMAN: “Bring it.”
KATRINA FOLEY: “Okay. So, in California, the counties are responsible under the Welfare and Institutions Code for paying for individuals who do not have insurance if they go to the emergency room or if they have an emergency. Prior to the Affordable Care Act, we had about 750,000 individuals that the county was responsible for caring for when they go to the emergency room or when they have a medical need.
“Right now, today, well, maybe it’s changed today, but last time I got briefed on this a month ago, 20 people. It went from 700,000 to 20. So, we don’t have a hit. However, all these new changes are going into place this year. They are projecting we’re going to get to indigent care about 200,000 people. We don’t have a funding source to pay for it other than the general fund, of which we don’t really have any discretion over because there’s backfills that we have to use from the general fund to cover the mandated state programming that’s unfunded. So, it’s just a nightmare.
“And we’re seeing in the food banks, the increase in the number of people going to the food banks is dramatic. Claudia tells me this from the Second Harvest. She says it’s close and it will be, by the end of the year, pandemic-time food assistance, which we’ve never before seen anything like that. So, now we’re looking at a pandemic response for food insecurity when we’re not in a pandemic just because people don’t have a way to pay for food.
“The economics of that is also important. I always go back to the economics because people maybe don’t think about it. But if I give you an EBT card and you go buy groceries in the local grocery store, you’re supporting the local economy because you’re buying food. And so, we’re going to lose all of that benefit as well. So, it’s a real problem and it was a big mistake.”
[The waiter approaches. I insist I’ll take the check.]
JEFF PEARLMAN:“I’m paying, by the way.”
KATRINA FOLEY: “No, no, no.”
JEFF PEARLMAN: “No, I have to.”
KATRINA FOLEY: “You can pay for yours, but you can’t pay for mine.”
KATRINA FOLEY: “Yeah. County of Orange has a special-”
JEFF PEARLMAN:“Even if you’re being interviewed?”
KATRINA FOLEY: “Yeah, I don’t know. I just pay for my own.”
JEFF PEARLMAN: “The journalistic code is you can never let someone pay for you.”
KATRINA FOLEY: “Yeah, you pay for yourself, I’ll pay for mine. Win, win.”
JEFF PEARLMAN: “Fair.”
KATRINA FOLEY: “Let me just add one more layer the the impact of this all. And I’ve asked for which schools this will impact. In Orange County, we have a lot of schools that are on the free lunch program. And they just made the whole school is eligible for free lunch because there was more than 60 percent of the students were free lunch eligible, so they just made the whole school eligible.
“Now the feds are saying you cannot do that. So, they’re going to start just taking away all the eligibility for the whole school. And then individuals have to start applying individually again. So, that creates another problem. And for me, look, everything always comes back to. I never forget where I came from. If I didn’t have the free lunch program, the free breakfast program when I was a kid, I might not eat on a day. I ate breakfast at school, I ate lunch at school pretty much until I was a senior in high school when I could go off campus and eat whatever I want. And so, those are really important programs. The fuel that you get for your brain when you’re at school helps you to get smarter and have a better life.”
JEFF PEARLMAN: “So here you are and you’re running. And your opponent is Diane Dixon. And they come along and they say, ‘Katrina Foley sucks. She sucks and she sucks and she sucks and she sucks.’ And they don’t really offer any great solutions. I’ve read her campaign literature. I’ve seen the different things. They don’t offer any details, any solutions. They just say, ‘Foley sucks. Foley sucks. Foley sucks.’ Do you feel like you just have to take it to a certain degree? This just comes with this job?”
KATRINA FOLEY: “Look, it’s going to be very different in the general than it was in the primary. I mean, what’s important too, and I hope you will point this out. There were four, it could have been five, I think it was four opportunities for us to have a town hall, a debate, answer questions together in front of a crowd. She declined every single one. So, the first was Laguna Beach, the Laguna Voice, the radio station. She declined right before it was supposed to happen. So, then we had OC Tax. Okay. She’s like, ‘I’m Miss Tax Lawyer Against Taxes.’ Why wouldn’t you want to do that debate?” She refused to pick a date. Then—Speak Up Newport. This is her home base. And the guy that runs it is a former mayor of Newport. He sent me a text, he gave me a date. I said, ‘She’s not going to do it.’ He replies, ‘Oh, no. She will.’”
JEFF PEARLMAN: “You actually said she’s not going to do it?”
KATRINA FOLEY: “Yes, I have the text. I said, ‘She’s not going to do it, Ed.’ And he said, ‘No, she promised me she’s going to do it.’ I go, ‘Okay, you let me know when you have it confirmed because I’m going to predict she’s not going to do it.’ And then he went about organizing it and everything, and then sure enough, she canceled.
“And then what was the third? Oh, the realtors. Laguna Beach Realtors. There was a forum and we got the questions in advance. We got all the questions in advance. It wasn’t going to be hard. It’s just a matter of us getting up in front of people and answering these really basic questions that any of us should be able to do without notes. She wouldn’t do it. All of these, except for the OC Tax and Speak Up Newport, they just canceled it all together. But the other ones, I just went by myself and answered all the questions. So, this time we have now supposedly on calendar OC Tax a forum, but I don’t think she’s going to show up.”
JEFF PEARLMAN:“You really don’t think she’ll go?”
KATRINA FOLEY: “No. She will barely be in a room with me.”
JEFF PEARLMAN: “Have you met her? Do you know her?”
KATRINA FOLEY: “Oh, yes. We were friends. All these initiatives that she has been getting through the state, these were things that I helped her with. And I worked with my Democrat colleagues at the state level to help get her through. The sober living home reform, the e-bikes. These are all things that we were working together on. And even when she called me to tell me she’s running, I’m like, ‘Why are you giving up your seat?’”
JEFF PEARLMAN:“Wait, she called to tell you she was running against you?”
KATRINA FOLEY: “Yeah.”
JEFF PEARLMAN:“She called to tell you?”
KATRINA FOLEY: “Yes.”
JEFF PEARLMAN: “That’s courtesy in a way, I suppose. I don’t know. That’s weird.”
KATRINA FOLEY: “Yeah. She said, ‘Oh, it’s going to be a friendly campaign.’ I go, ‘Well, it’s already unfriendly even before you’ve called me, and so I don’t see how that’s going to happen.’ I said, ‘The Lincoln Club’s already starting to attack me.’ This was before she even actually filed. And she’s like, ‘Oh no, we’re just going to keep it related to the issues.’ And I said, ‘We’ll see about that.’ Of course, that’s not what happened. Even her own mailers were aggressively anti-Katrina Foley. She put pictures of me looking very unattractive and claiming that I’m paying with my district funds for sex change operations for kids. And that’s just outrageous to say that.
JEFF PEARLMAN: “That’s the new boogeyman.”
KATRINA FOLEY: “I know.”
JEFF PEARLMAN: “Or you’re a communist. She’ll get to that next week.”
KATRINA FOLEY: “Oh no, that was in one of the mailings. Also, I’m going to defund the police. I’m going to go to jail. I’m corrupt. I mean, all these crazy things that are coming on her committee, not a third party. So, she’s a liar.”
JEFF PEARLMAN: “I want to ask you a final question. Because I ask most people this. I mean, these are depressing times we live in. We have a freaking nut job as a president. We have all these people, these boon liquors. Do you think 10 years from now, we look back at America now and we think, wow, we survived this really crazy, awful time. Or do you look back, do you think 10 years from now we’re like, that was the beginning of the end of this amazing Democrat-”
KATRINA FOLEY: “Oh no. I’m going to say we survived. Are you kidding me? We’re going to see that in November. We are going to see a big turnaround in November because a lot of these bad policies that do not support Americans are now starting to impact Americans, even Americans who voted for Trump. And you’re going to start to see people just, they don’t want to be hurt anymore. They don’t want their gas to be so expensive. I don’t do grocery shopping. My husband does, and I even have noticed, because I see the bank statements, I’m like, ‘Oh my gosh, what did you buy at the grocery store?’ He goes, ‘I bought the same thing I always buy.’”
JEFF PEARLMAN: “No doubt.”
KATRINA FOLEY: “But do we survive? Of course we do. We survive, because we fight for America.”
On Friday night, Prime Minister Mark Carney instructed Canadian negotiators to walk away from talks with officials from the Trump administration over new tariffs of 50% Trump had imposed on $28 billion of Canadian products. Carney explained in a statement that “last-minute changes in the U.S. proposed terms were unfair, uneconomic, and called into question the reliability of any deal.”
He has a point. From July 1, 2020, until Trump’s second term, the U.S., Canada, and Mexico traded under the United States–Mexico–Canada Agreement (USMCA). Negotiated under the first Trump administration, USMCA replaced the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), and was similar to it, creating one of the world’s largest free trade zones.
The trade zone reinforced the close alliance between Canada and the U.S., enabling people in both countries to enjoy the longest demilitarized border in the world stretching more than 5,000 miles (more than 8,000 kilometers) across the entire North American continent. Canada and the U.S. have shared military and defense capabilities, with the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) operating since 1957 to detect aircraft or missiles, especially those coming over the North Pole, that could prove a threat to the United States (NORAD’s Santa Tracker originally was a way to make Americans aware of what NORAD did).
But as soon as he won reelection in 2024, Trump began to emphasize that he intended to use “economic force,” specifically tariffs, to pressure Canada into joining the U.S. as its 51st state. He began to exercise that threat the day he took office for the second time, saying he would put 25% tariffs on Canada. This violation of his own trade agreement reflected the administration’s abandonment of the principles of free trade and defensive alliances put in place after World War II, replacing that system with one favored by autocrats like Russia’s president Vladimir Putin, in which strong countries imposed spheres of influence in their regions of the world.
Since then, Trump has sought to use the extraordinary economic power of the United States to force Canada and other countries into subordinate relationships. The recent threat against Canada came after Trump’s previous tariffs either were struck down or expired. On July 20, Trump said he would use Section 338 of the Tariff Act of 1930, more commonly known as the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, to impose a 50% tariff on certain Canadian products. No president had ever before invoked Section 338, which allows a president to impose tariffs when a country discriminates against U.S. products relative to its comparative treatment of other countries’ goods.
On Sunday, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said Carney would have to back down because tariffs will be “devastating for his country.” Also on Sunday, the Wall Street Journal editorial board noted that Trump “has contrived an array of pretexts—from fentanyl trafficking to trade deficits—to bludgeon Canada with tariffs.” And the editorial board, known for its right-wing slant, called Trump’s tariff war on Canada “the dumbest trade war in history” and said it “makes no economic or political sense.”
Canada is the second largest trading partner of the U.S., and the editors noted that Trump’s “latest round of border taxes will hit an array of consumer goods, construction materials and manufacturing components,” driving prices still higher at a time when consumers are already squeezed.
Trump’s new attack on Canada might not make economic or political sense for the U.S., but it seems to make sense for a decaying president.
Trump is flailing in Iran, and so—as national security scholar Tom Nichols pointed out in The Atlantic after Trump nonsensically attacked South Korea, another longstanding and loyal ally—he is looking to reassert his dominance. Trump doesn’t dare to cross the leaders who actually threaten the U.S., those like Putin, China’s Xi Jinping, and North Korea’s Kim Jong Un. Instead, Nichols writes, he is trying to make himself feel better by “kicking America’s allies, the nations he can punish without fear that they will kick him back.”
“At a better moment in American history, an enraged Congress would step in and demand answers about such dangerous idiocy,” Nichols wrote. “They would rush to the White House, talk to the press, hold hearings, and in general act like responsible stewards of American power.” But Republicans in charge of Congress appear to be unwilling to cross Trump. Our allies, though, Nichols notes, “have power and agency of their own, and even now are likely planning for a world in which the Americans are no longer men and women of principle who stand by their word and by their friends.”
That moment appears to have arrived.
In Davos, Switzerland, in January 2026, Carney warned the World Economic Forum that the world is “in the midst of a rupture.” He warned that the post–World War II rules-based international order is no longer automatically a route to prosperity and security as the world’s most powerful nations are using the economic integration that system championed as a way to coerce other countries.
He urged “middle countries” to create “coalitions for different issues based on common values and interests” as an alternative to a “world of fortresses” made up of major powers with spheres of influence.
On Friday night, after recalling Canada’s negotiators, Carney released a statement saying: “We have recognised from the beginning that America has changed, and that we will not return to our old relationship. Our government understood, before many, that America is altering all its trade relationships. Putting tariffs on its closest allies and charging for access to its vast market.”
Although negotiators had tried to work with the U.S., he wrote, Canada’s core economic strategy has been on building Canada’s economy and diversifying economic partnerships. He noted that Canada is creating jobs at four times the rate of the United States. “Canada has what the world wants,” he wrote, “And we will not allow any nation to determine our future.”
In an address to Canadians on Saturday, Carney said: “Last spring, I warned that America is trying to break us so that they can own us. And I promised: ‘That will never, ever happen.’ We are keeping that promise.” “Canada is becoming stronger and less dependent on America. We are already giving ourselves more than they can take away. And we are just getting started.”
Carney said Canada will retaliate against the U.S. tariffs, dollar for dollar, beginning on September 8.
This morning, Trump exploded on social media, claiming that “Canada has been ripping off the United States of America for years” and warning that “Canada will be treated like a State no longer!” He said that on “January First, 2027,” he would place tariffs of 50% on “all Cars, Trucks, both large and small, Automotive Parts, and Steel.” Canadians “feel entitled,” he wrote, “and yet, WE DON’T NEED CANADA, THEY NEED US!” Ontario Premier Doug Ford, who used to be a Trump fan, told reporters today “I have a lot of real estate on my ass, so [Trump] has a lot of room to kiss my ass.”
Today Carney told reporters that Canada will soon “begin intense discussions with the European Union, the world’s second-largest economy, to build a much stronger and deeper economic and security partnership. Now,” he said, “we can build such unparalleled access because we’re trusted, because we’re reliable, and because we have what the world wants.”
On Friday The Economist reviewed polling by YouGov showing that Trump has a positive job approval rating in only three states: West Virginia, Idaho, and Wyoming.
There seems little reason to think those numbers are going to turn around. On Friday, Trump announced he would try to lower beef prices by suspending tariffs on imports of up to 300,000 metric tons of imported ground beef that he said would be sold “at 25 percent below current prices.”
Cattle ranchers and farmers, who have in the past strongly supported Trump, cried foul, saying the imports would drive down prices while making it impossible to distinguish between U.S. and foreign meat just after nearly 30,000 pounds of Argentine beef were recalled after missing a required inspection in the U.S.
Trump has refused to identify from which country or countries he plans to get the ground beef, a reluctance dovetailing unfortunately with a report from Dave Philipps with visuals by Erin Schaff in the New York Times on August 20 that the Bureau of Land Management under Trump has been selling wild horses for slaughter as meat for as little as $25 a head. Wild horses are legally protected from hunting or capture, but the administration appears to be selling them to middlemen who resell them into the food pipeline unquestioned.
In a sign of just how untrustworthy many Americans now consider Trump, anti-Trump social media users were quick to put the two stories together.
Georgi Kantchev, Rebecca Feng, and Summer Said of the Wall Street Journal today also cast doubt on the administration’s claims that large volumes of oil are moving through the Strait of Hormuz. “The trackers whose job it is to count the world’s oil shipments see much less,” they write.
On Sunday, Noah Robertson and Dan Diamond of the Washington Post reported that Trump’s insistence that he needs his new ballroom for security is bunk: the White House already has a secure, hardened facility that can withstand a nuclear blast and house dozens of people for weeks. It was built secretly during the Obama administration.
Meanwhile, the angry opposition to the Trump administration and the wealthy tech bros it serves is taking shape with popular fury over the data centers. These facilities house computers, servers, and data storage infrastructure and have existed for a long time, but to support the extraordinary demands of artificial intelligence they have grown exponentially lately. Tech giants have built huge facilities that are noisy, pollute, and require huge amounts of energy and water.
Technology advocates have pushed their agenda by claiming they will dramatically expand the economy, and the Trump administration has backed their ambitions. Trump even brought billionaire Elon Musk into the administration after he poured almost $200 million into getting Trump elected.
But opposition to the data centers is bipartisan and growing as they appear to symbolize the takeover of our system by a few wealthy men like Musk. Molly Hennessey-Fiske of the Washington Post reported today that in Texas, some Republicans are mobilizing to prevent Republican Greg Abbott from winning a fourth term as governor because of his support for data centers.
Over the weekend, the growing fury over Trump and his administration led to an uproar over a report in the New York Times by Maggie Haberman and Annie Karni about a meeting in the past weeks between House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) and Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner. The journalists said the meeting was about “potential areas of common ground,” a vague description that led a clearly nervous House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) to warn Kushner: “You better not bet against the House Republicans.”
But even the idea that Jeffries was talking to Kushner was enough to infuriate opponents of the administration, a fact that seems likely to have been behind the leak of the meeting in the first place. For his part, Haberman and Karni note, Jeffries has emphasized that he wants “to get rid of toxic Trump cabinet secretaries,” including Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth,” but it’s clear that demands for even more widespread accountability are growing.
In addition to posting a number of references to the first plane landing “at the newly named President Donald J. Trump International Airport,” claims that the “Radical Left Democrats are going CRAZY with Fake Polls,” and two photos of himself with Kim Jong Un, Trump posted today that “IRAN IS COMPLETELY COLLAPSING!!!”
And yet Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent today announced “Operation Economic Outcast,” an initiative to demand other world leaders join with the U.S. in strangling Iran’s economy. Bessent says Trump is contacting other leaders, but, as Riley Beggin, David J. Lynch, and Aoife Walsh of the Washington Post note, would neither say who they were nor specify the deadline.
“The United States expects action,” Bessent told reporters. “We do not have infinite patience here.”
In Britain, the House of Lords was traditionally dominated by hereditary peers–a right bequeathed by the monarch, sometimes in ancient times, to sit in the House of Lords that was transmitted generationally. That system has been withering away for decades, however, and was finally ended this year by the 2026 Hereditary Peers Act. So how should members of the House of Lords be chosen?
One idea which comes to mind quickly is selection by merit. Perhaps the House of Lords should be filled with Nobel Prize winners, wise professors, former politicians, distinguished public servants and so forth. All very well and good but the nub here is that these people have to be chosen by someone, and whoever controls the selection process inevitably influences the kind of people selected. That makes an appointed chamber less independent of, and potentially more similar to, ordinary politics, even with lifetime appointments. Moreover, what is their interest? Madison argued that for a good system “the interest of the man must be connected with the constitutional rights of the place.” A politicized selection of representatives, even meritorious representatives with lifetime appointments, may not differ enough from ordinary elected politicians to make much difference.
In 10% Less Democracy, my colleague Garett Jones, suggests that bondholders have a formal role in government. So let us consider, a House of Lords based on bond holdings. The advantage of this system is that bond holders are self-selected and their interests are in long-term stability–exactly what we want in a check on the popular house.
Votes in the House of Lords could be allocated proportionally to holdings; thus in practice we would get institutional representatives most notably including pension funds. If you want stability and growth, giving pension funds a bit more sway in national politics does not seem like a terrible idea. Bondholders would, for example, likely be more concerned with long-run financial stability, for example than current politicians seem to be. Should foreign holders of bonds be given a vote? Why not? Perhaps this would improve the prospects for peace. Although the popular house will always have the final say.
If anything, bondholders might prove too fiscally conservative as they are concerned primarily with default risk. The traditional House of Lords based on hereditary peers really amounted to a House of Lords based on landed property which isn’t a bad proxy for long-term stability and growth. After all, land owners do tend to do well when the country does well and you can’t take your land to another country. The ancient system had its wisdom; but landholding is not perfectly aligned with national prosperity. The House of Lords defended tariffs on imported foods (the corn laws) to promote land rents at the expense of food prices for everyone else. For similar reasons, we might, therefore, want to leaven the House of Lords with some equity, say ownership of Trills–the Robert Shiller idea for shares backed by real GDP. We would thus have a popular house and a corporate house divided into equity and bonds, all well aligned.
We provide the first direct estimates of the effects of minimum wages on low-wage workers in families at different points of the distribution of income-to-needs, using data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation, which oversamples low-income families. We find adverse – rather than beneficial – effects of minimum wages on the employment, hours, and earnings of initially-employed low-wage workers in poor and low-income families. Although we do not find a gradient indicating more adverse effects on the poorest low-wage workers, the adverse effects for poor and low-income low-wage workers help explain why minimum wages do not reduce poverty.
"Legal marijuana imports have increased sixfold since 2024, according to data from the Federal Health Institute. That year, the leftwing government led by then-chancellor Olaf Scholz passed laws allowing adults to possess and privately cultivate cannabis, while also expanding legal sales to users with a prescription. ...
"Despite the partial legalisation, more than half of weed consumers do not rely on medical prescriptions to get the drug.
“Social supply”, meaning purchasing cannabis through social contacts, makes up 35.2 per cent of the market, even as selling the plant without a medical prescription remains illegal. The next biggest source, at 21 per cent, is for consumers to grow their own, according to a study conducted in the second half of 2025.
Every time I encounter a map of New York City’s trees, my first thought is that I must have covered it before, but no, each time it’s bigger in scope and covers more trees. First… More
This OSM diary entry raises an interesting question: “We generally work under the assumption that ‘the more mapped places, the better.’ But what if the locals don’t consent to being mapped? What if they prefer… More
PHOENIX, AZ — August 24, 2026 — Spirit Electronics, a value‑added distributor of high‑reliability electronics focused on performance‑driven program requirements, announced that space‑grade and high‑reliability components from Texas Instruments and […]
After NASA astronauts landed on the moon in 1969, their achievement bore decades’ worth of fruit, including scientific discoveries and a strategic national security advantage. Now — with plans to […]
Houston — World Space Week Association announced today that Tory Bruno, President of National Security at Blue Origin, will serve as Honorary Chair of World Space Week 2027. “Tory Bruno […]
In this episode, SpaceNews’ Mike Gruss interviews Icarus Robotics CEO and co-founder Ethan Barajas at the 2026 Small Satellite Conference in Salt Lake City, Utah. They discuss why astronauts have […]
SALT LAKE CITY – The Aerospace Corp. is continuing to demonstrate the viability of pancake-shaped DiskSats in the wake of their December launch on a Rocket Lab Electron. “It’s the […]
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[In the late 2010s, I did a few posts complaining about our reckless fiscal policy. At the time, most internet pundits thought it was silly to worry about budget deficits, as interest rates were quite low. I pointed out that they would not be low forever. Now the problem is obvious, so I’ll refrain from commenting on the recent Scott Bessent clown show. (Stephen Kirchner has a good analysis, for interested readers.) I like to focus on areas where I might make a difference, where my views are outside the mainstream. In 2018, being a contrarian meant worrying about the danger of excessive budget deficits. Today, it means not worrying about China’s economy.]
I frequently run across articles insisting that China is producing too much. Here is a typical example, from Michael Froman at Foreign Affairs:
But when this latest surge plateaus or recedes, the game could well be up. It is difficult to identify a sector capable of generating another 30 percent of GDP growth for the Chinese economy. The property sector is in a prolonged downturn that could last for the better part of a generation. The infrastructure sector can no longer support new, unnecessary high-speed rail lines in third-tier cities. Manufacturing easily meets domestic demand. Services, which in most economies absorb displaced industrial labor, remain thin because the household share of consumption is too depressed to sustain them. The industries China could still develop—commercial aircraft, AI hardware—are too small to make up the difference.
Here is some data for per capita GDP (2026 estimates from the IMF):
US: $94,430 (both nominal and PPP)
Singapore: $107,758 (nominal) $173,708 (PPP)
Hong Kong $59,640 (nominal) $84,212 (PPP)
Taiwan $42,103 (nominal) $98,051 (PPP) [the CIA say $32,300. ̄\_(ツ)_/ ̄]
South Korea: $37,412 (nominal) $68,624 (PPP)
Japan: $35,703 (nominal) $59,207 (PPP)
China: $14,874 (nominal) $31,596 (PPP)
The PPP figures are clearly inaccurate, something I’ve complained about in other posts. I suspect that Japan and the four “tiger economies” have similar outputs, if measured correctly—say about $60,000 per capita GDP, PPP All five are well below US levels, and roughly double Chinese levels. If China wishes to catch up to these other East Asian countries, then it needs to roughly double its output and if it wishes to catch up to the US it needs to triple its output.
So why do pundits keep insisting that China is producing too much output? Is this like during the Great Depression when President Roosevelt suggested that the real problem was “overproduction"? Yes, it is a bit like that.
China’s per capita output is slightly above Mexico and Thailand and a bit below Argentina and Costa Rica. In my view, the Chinese should try to at least double their current per capita output. But how?
There are two primary ways to boost aggregate output. The easiest method is to print enough money to move from the current position to a position on the production possibilities curve. But that’s not likely to be a game changer—you can expect at best 5% to 10% more output, probably much less. Demand stimulus basically overcomes the sticky wage problem and soaks up the unemployed labor. But China’s main problem is that its labor simply isn’t very productive. To get a meaningful increase in output, you need to move the long run aggregate supply curve (LRAS) to the right, you need to expand the economy’s capacity to produce goods and services.
Don’t get me wrong, demand stimulus is certainly worth doing when NGDP is depressed, and I’d encourage the Chinese to adopt a monetary policy that is a bit more expansionary. But I very much doubt whether this would boost output by even 5%; it would still leave China much poorer than its neighbors.
So that leaves supply-side reforms. China needs to increase its production potential, its capacity to produce goods and services. There are basically two ways of doing this. First, China could keep its current economic system in place and invest a higher share of its GDP. Second, China could do structural reforms to make its economy more efficient, so that existing resources are used more productively.
The majority of pundits seem to believe that China is investing too much. I’m not sure that is true, but I agree with those who worry that much of the current investment is on projects with dubious benefits. Simply adding more investment is unlikely to solve China’s low output problem.
If demand stimulus is not enough, and if more investment is likely to produce disappointing returns, then that leaves only one meaningful option for growth—economic reforms. And there’s really only one recipe for growth that has proved robust—a regime of free markets with reasonable taxes and secure property rights.
Let’s look at the level of economic freedom in the US and the major East Asian economies. I used the Fraser ranking, as the Heritage ranking excludes Hong Kong. But I also put each economy’s position in the Heritage ranking in parentheses for comparison:
#1 Hong Kong
#2 Singapore (#1)
#5 United States (#22)
#7 Taiwan (#5)
#17 Japan (#30)
#38 South Korea (#19)
#108 China (#154)
These rankings are subjective, as the Fraser and Heritage indices use somewhat different criteria. But one thing is clear, mainland China is far less free market than the other countries listed above in any plausible index.
In the past, China grew rapidly whenever it enacted reforms that made its economy at least slightly more capitalist. To join the ranks of the world’s richest economies, China needs to make its economy freer—more like Singapore, Taiwan and Hong Kong. Note that those three economies are composed mostly of ethnic Chinese, so there is no obviously cultural barrier to the mainland China achieving a similar level of success.
I suppose you could argue that there was some sort of selection bias in terms of who migrated to Singapore, Taiwan and Hong Kong, and that those places have people with above average human capital. But that argument doesn’t apply to Japan and South Korea, where living standards are at a similar level. China can and should do much better than its current level of per capita output. It needs to produce far more goods and services.
Someone who has real world experience investing in China might assume that I don’t know what I’m talking about. They might have found Chinese workers to be highly productive. But in a weird way that sort of proves my point. If at an individual level Chinese workers seem competent and hard-working, and yet China’s average labor productivity remains at a fairly low level—similar to Latin America—that means their talented workers are not being used to their best advantage. The whole point of free market reforms is to unlock the latent potential of China’s vast workforce. Anyone who visits China almost immediately encounters lots of workers doing make work jobs, such as aimlessly pushing a broom along the gutter of a Chinese street.
Now let’s go back to the quote at the beginning of this post. What are we to make of this:
It is difficult to identify a sector capable of generating another 30 percent of GDP growth for the Chinese economy.
China would need to increase its GDP by 100% to catch up to East Asia, and 200% to catch up to the US. Are there sectors capable of producing much more than they currently produce? If not, then that would presumably reflect supply side problems, a lack of productive capacity. But if you read Froman’s (pessimistic) analysis, you get the impression that demand is the biggest problem:
The property sector is in a prolonged downturn that could last for the better part of a generation. The infrastructure sector can no longer support new, unnecessary high-speed rail lines in third-tier cities. Manufacturing easily meets domestic demand. Services, which in most economies absorb displaced industrial labor, remain thin because the household share of consumption is too depressed to sustain them.
Again, aggregate demand is a problem, but it explains only a small fraction of China’s vast shortfall relative to the rest of East Asia, and the even larger shortfall relative to the US.
Say’s Law has been widely criticized because it is seen as somehow denying the existence of demand shortfalls. But even Jean-Baptiste Say understood that with sticky wages you could have temporary periods of unemployment, called a “glut”. Nonetheless, Say Law does tell us something very useful. Over any significant period of time, a country can “afford” what it can produce. So don’t tell me that the Chinese cannot afford to buy more stuff.
If there are sticky wages, then a country may temporarily produce less than its potential. But that would not be because Say’s Law is wrong, it would reflect the fact that sticky wages produce a gap between current output and potential. This problem can be easily resolved by printing more money. No country should ever refrain from boosting its output because of a worry that people won’t be able to “afford” the extra output.
Although China would do well to vastly increase its aggregate production of goods, there can be cases of too much production of some goods and too little of other goods, For instance, we continually hear about “overproduction” in the Chinese auto and housing industries. But what is the per capita ownership of cars in China? What is China’s per capita housing stock?
AI Overview says China has 330 cars per 1000 people, while Japan has about 600 per 1000 and the US has about 800 cars per 1000 people. In what sense does China not “need” more cars? China’s housing is about 650 square feet on average, compared to 2200 square feet in the US. The truth is that if China is to become a fully developed country it will need more of almost everything, including cars and housing. Overproduction is not China’s problem.
The Economist has a particularly egregious example of how pundits misjudge the Chinese economy.
In a lengthy new paper, the [Chinese] commerce ministry seeks to rebut the accusations of industrial excess levelled against China by many foreign governments and economists.
The paper is both rigorous and disingenuous. Some parts bring healthy scrutiny to the concept of overcapacity. The deep insincerity of other sections suggests contempt for countries facing waves of Chinese exports. . . .
Certainly, Chinese companies are low-cost producers, but that is no random market outcome, for the government has helped bring it about. . . .
The ministry’s discussion of state subsidies makes an art of dissimulation. It limits analysis only to direct subsidies—merely the most superficial of the techniques that China uses to favour its own companies. Other crucial forms of support include public investment in chipmakers, cheap land and rules compelling state firms to buy domestically. In the background are the policy settings—above all, a weak social safety-net—that have engendered a perpetually high savings rate. . . .
Foreign companies, however big, stand little chance against a Leninist developmental state that has attained China’s size, wealth and modernity. As Rhodium Group, an American research firm, points out, the Chinese state once limited its intervention to a handful of sectors that it deemed to be strategic; now it pursues an “industrial policy of everything”.
The phrase “contempt for countries facing waves of Chinese exports” seems to equate Chinese exports with a military invasion. Is that true? Are western consumers forced to buy Chinese EVs at gunpoint? Or are these voluntary transactions between consenting adults? I expect more from The Economist, which was founded in 1843 as a voice of reason in the free trade debate. Let’s review a few of the problems with their arguments:
China is not special in either trade or manufacturing. As I showed in the previous post, its current account surplus is relatively small on a per capita basis, roughly 1/10th the level of the smaller East Asian and northern European economies. Pundits forget that China has about as many people as Europe, the US, Canada, Mexico, Japan and Australia combined. Of course it has a big manufacturing sector. Why wouldn’t it?
Subsidies that boost output in some industries come at the expense of output in other industries. Contra The Economist, there is no such thing as an “industrial policy of everything”. Just as you cannot raise yourself by your bootstraps, you cannot boost aggregate output through subsidies. Indeed, subsidies generally tend to reduce aggregate output by making an economy less efficient than a more free market regime. China would produce more if it subsidized less.
Government subsidies increase the budget deficit. Other things equal, this reduces domestic saving and thus reduces the current account surplus. China’s trade surplus is certainly not caused by government subsidies. Other East Asian countries have far bigger surpluses in per capita terms.
Even if subsidies did help China to grow, why would this be a problem for the rest of the world? The only argument that I’ve ever heard that is even logical is the so-called predatory pricing argument—the claim that subsidies are a scheme to monopolize and then later raise prices sharply. But predatory pricing is about the last thing we should fear from China’s ultra-competitive economy. Indeed, the standard argument is that Chinese industries are too competitive to earn decent profits, which explains why their stock market does so poorly.
And what are we to make of this claim?
Foreign companies, however big, stand little chance against a Leninist developmental state that has attained China’s size, wealth and modernity.
If China’s “size” is the issue, would the problem go away if China split up into 30 smaller countries? If “modernity” is the problem, would the world be better off if China remained an ancient kingdom? And why would China being “wealthy” be a problem? Indeed, in what sense is China wealthy? (Certainly not per capita.)
How did China grow its EV industry? Hint: it wasn’t really central planning from Beijing. It was a magical concoction of entrepreneurs and local officials using their guanxi to dance around giant SOEs and central-government regulation, leverage private and foreign capital, and just be really excellent business people. That’s led to our situation in 2026 — world-beating companies that have a ton of overcapacity and are set to take over the planet.
I cannot imagine anyone visiting Shanghai or Shenzhen and thinking, “This is sort of like the Soviet Union.” In any case, the Soviet Union was not a competitive threat to the West.
And how about the claim that:
“In the background are the policy settings—above all, a weak social safety-net—that have engendered a perpetually high savings rate.”
Northern Europe has the world’s most extensive social safety net, and yet those countries have high saving rates and run large current account surpluses.
Western pundits might envy China’s success, but how many would like to change places with a country at one half of Japan’s productivity and one third the US level? Pundits tell us that subsidies and trade surpluses explain China’s success, but exactly how much success does China actually have? Its economy has grown enormously since 1980, but from an extremely low base. Let’s hope it continues growing rapidly.
So, what should China do to boost economic growth? (K.I.S.S.)
Free markets and stronger property rights: I’m not going to suggest that China should do no industrial policy at all—even highly successful economies like Singapore, Hong Kong and the US have some industrial polices. China may wish to encourage green industries through a carbon tax. They may wish to promote a chip making industry for national security reasons. Rather I would argue that they should radically reduce their current level of industrial policy, by at least 90%. Eliminate most subsidies. Remove restrictions on internal migration. Privatize SOEs. Move toward freer trade and investment. Remove capital controls. Etc.
Adopt NGDP targeting, level targeting, to make Says Law effective in the short run. (It already applies in the long run.)
The best way to think about complex macroeconomic issues is to keep a few basic principles in mind:
Imports are good. Exports are the (unfortunate) price we pay for the imports we desire.
Trade imbalances are not a problem.
Subsidies don’t boost aggregate output, nor do they explain a country’s success in exporting.
Excessive aggregate output is not a problem. The public can “afford” what it can produce.
Because of sticky wages, NGDP instability can temporarily reduce output below potential. Eventually, the economy self-corrects. Persistently low output is generally caused by supply problems.
China is extremely large. Otherwise, it is a completely normal middle-income country. The world should not fear it doubling or even tripling its aggregate output.
Free market economies are usually richer than more statist economies.
In the media, China is portrayed as a sort of monstrous freak that threatens the world economy. Don’t believe the hype. Textbook economics circa 1999 is still true.
The US is set to impose a 7.5% tariff on Chinese goods over allegations of excess manufacturing capacity before a planned summit between Xi Jinping and Donald Trump next month, according to people familiar with the matter.
Sigh . . .
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In 1914 Yitzhak Ben-Zvi and David Ben-Gurion, the president and prime minister of Israel after 1948 respectively, were in the Ottoman capital studying law at Istanbul University. They had studied Ottoman Turkish and embarked on their legal studies in the hope of one day serving in the Assembly of Deputies as elected representatives from Jerusalem. With war on the horizon, they made their way back to Palestine, where they volunteered for military service in the Ottoman army. They also proposed the formation of a Jewish legion to fight under the Ottoman banner, but their intiative fell on deaf ears…We have no way of knowing how things might have turned out had Ben-Zvi and Ben-Gurion been allowed to suit up in Ottoman uniform…
Moshe Sharett, another future prime minister of Israel and said to have been fluent in both Arabic and Turkish, served in the Ottoman army during the Balkan Wars and all through the First World War, even beyond the announcement of the Balfour Declaration and the British occupation of Jerusalem in December 1917.
The Les Cheneaux Islands are a group of 36 glacially shaped islands near the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, seen in this image acquired with the OLI (Operational Land Imager) on Landsat 9 on July 23, 2026.
NASA Earth Observatory/Lauren Dauphin
With one glance at a particular 12-mile stretch of Lake Huron’s shoreline, it’s clear there’s a pattern. Small islands outlined by tan beaches and bright, shallow water align in a remarkably parallel orientation. The claw-mark-like appearance of this Great Lakes locale is evident in this image, acquired with the OLI (Operational Land Imager) on the NASA-USGS Landsat 9 satellite in July 2026.
The Les Cheneaux Islands are a group of 36 islands near the shore of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, about 20 miles (32 kilometers) northeast of the Straits of Mackinac. The archipelago contains coastal marshes, rock and sand beaches, peat bogs, and forests full of pine and cedar. Parts of several islands are set aside as nature preserves, including a substantial portion of Marquette Island, which is only accessible by boat or over ice. The islands are interspersed with sheltered waters that inspired their name; the French “Les Cheneaux” roughly translates to “the channels.”
The Les Cheneaux Islands, like many landforms in the Great Lakes region, look the way they do because glaciers of the Wisconsin Ice Age carved the landscape as they retreated around 10,000 years ago. Their elongated shapes indicate many of them are drumlins: mounds of glacial debris that run parallel to the direction of the ice’s movement.
The glacial topography has helped give rise to a distinct local maritime culture. In contrast with the Great Lakes’ vast open expanses, the waters around the Les Cheneaux Islands are relatively protected from the infamous storms that can otherwise roil the upper Midwest lakes. This creates opportunities for paddling, as well as fishing in quiet alcoves for species such as smallmouth bass, northern pike, yellow perch, and lake trout. The town of Cedarville boasts an annual antique wooden boat show, a boat-building school, and museums highlighting how people, from the area’s earliest inhabitants to today’s residents, have used the islands and waterways.
On land, the much older geology of the area is revealed in a couple of brightly colored quarries. The bedrock here is dolomite, a modified form of limestone. It was deposited in the Silurian period more than 400 million years ago in a shallow, tropical sea before the movement of tectonic plates brought it up north. Michigan is home to several large dolomite and limestone mines, and Port Dolomite, east of Cedarville, ships millions of tons of the material every year.
NASA Earth Observatory image by Lauren Dauphin, using Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey.Story by Lindsey Doermann.
Two years ago the idea of a trade war between Canada and the United States would have seemed absurd. Canada was our closest ally, a nation whose soldiers have fought and died alongside Americans in many wars, up to and including Afghanistan. Most of us speak more or less the same language. And we’ve had free trade agreements with Canada since 1988, with the most recent version signed by none other than Donald Trump.
But days after taking office, Trump II imposed steep tariffs on Canadian goods. His supposed economic rationale was nonsensical, and I immediately argued that it was a “dominance display”. Canada is a relatively small economy that relies heavily on selling to the U.S. market. So Trump believed that he could make an example of Canada, forcing it to grovel and even possibly bullying it into becoming the 51st state.
Fortunately, it didn’t work, as a provoked Canada reacted with defiance. Among other things, most Canadian provinces have banned sales of U.S. alcohol, a serious blow to U.S. businesses. Before Trump began his bullying, Canada’s Conservatives were generally considered to be a shoo-in to win the April 2025 election. But the perception that the Conservatives were Trump-friendly led to a stunning upset that made Liberal leader Mark Carney Prime Minister:
Carney currently has 60 percent approval and 31 percent disapproval — almost exactly the opposite of Trump’s numbers.
Yet a bully refuses to learn that his actions are counterproductive and instead doubles down. So Trump persisted, most recently by imposing steep new tariffs on Canadian exports, invoking a never-before-used section of the 1930 Smoot-Hawley tariff act as legal justification. In an effort to head these new tariffs off, Canada entered negotiations with the United States, talks that for a while seemed on track to ramp down the tensions. But on Friday Canadian negotiators walked out — and the U.S.-Canada trade war is now on.
Why did the talks break down? According to U.S. officials, the Canadians made additional last-minute demands, although they offered no specifics on what these demands were. According to the Canadians, it was the Americans who suddenly changed the terms. According to the Toronto Star, Carney
was faced with a trade agreement that was suddenly transformed into an attack on Canadian sovereignty, an attempted psychological annexation that could have turned Canada into an American client state, a sort of North American Belarus.
Does anyone seriously doubt that Canada, not the Trump administration, is telling the truth?
Anyway, the trade war is now on. Who will win it?
On the face of it, the opponents — I still have to rub my eyes at the idea of Canada as an enemy — appear extremely unevenly matched. The U.S. economy is a dozen times larger than Canada’s. We buy three-quarters of their exports, while they buy only about a sixth of ours. Surely they must have much more than we do to lose from trade conflict.
Yet one clear lesson from a year and a half of Trumpian trade war is that when trade conflicts become extreme, access to crucial imports is more important than the ability to export to another country’s markets. In the case of Trump’s tariffs on China, they have been little more than an inconvenience to the Chinese economy. But China’s threat to cut off exports of rare earths is an existential threat to Western technology industries.
And the U.S. economy is far more dependent on Canadian goods than most Americans realize.
For example, Trump has declared that the U.S. doesn’t need Canadian lumber, an assertion whose truth depends on the meaning of the word “need.” The U.S. does indeed produce most of its own lumber, but Canada dominates the supply of lumber with a high strength to weight ratio, which is preferred by contractors for framing.
Another example: The U.S. is a net exporter of crude oil, but imports millions of barrels a day from Canada, mainly into the upper Midwest. That region could in principle get its oil from Texas instead, but that’s an immediate non-starter: the pipeline infrastructure isn’t there and refineries need heavy Canadian crude rather than lighter Permian basin oil.
Yet another example: U.S. imports of electricity from Canadian hydropower are small compared with overall consumption, but are often a significant part of total supply in New York and New England.
And a disruption of the huge U.S.-Canada trade in automobiles and auto parts will be immensely disruptive to the auto industry on both sides of the border.U.S. automakers and other manufacturers are already at a competitive disadvantage because of Trump’s tariffs on Canadian steel and aluminum.
The point is not that Canada has “escalation dominance” — the ability to retaliate to every U.S. action with an even more damaging counterreaction — in a trade conflict with the United States. Rather, the point is that an all-out trade war would create a lot of pain in the U.S. in addition to inflicting severe damage to the Canadian economy. And all indications are that the Canadians will be much more willing to bear the pain of a trade war than Americans will – especially given that the great majority of Americans are already dissatisfied with Trump’s economic management.
Despite Trump’s best efforts, only a minority of Republicans — and nobody else — has been persuaded that the Canadians are acting badly:
On the other side, Trump has managed to convince Canadians of all political stripes that the U.S. can’t be trusted:
So, does Trump have any chance of winning his trade war with Canada?
The truth is that it’s hard even to figure out what a Trump win would mean in this context. Would it mean Canada agreeing to become the 51st state? That’s not going to happen.
Would it mean, as Carney suggested in his remarks after the talks broke down, Canada giving up on its promotion of French as a co-equal language with English? That also won’t happen.
Or would it mean Canada making enough concessions that Trump can at least claim victory? That’s also tricky, because until Trump went on the attack Canada wasn’t doing anything wrong. So it can’t promise to end its unfair policies when there basically weren’t any such policies.
The bottom line is that Trump is going to lose his trade war with Canada as thoroughly as he has lost his shooting war with Iran. But because he won’t face reality, trade with our northern neighbor will probably be disrupted until the narcissistic bully in the White House no longer controls trade policy.
This release of the Anthropic plugin for LLM mainly provides compatibility with the recently released anthropic v1.0.0 Python library, which switches from httpx to httpx2. OpenAI made the same change in their v3.0.0 release two weeks ago.
Anthropic provide this migration guide for upgrading to 1.0, so I prompted Fable 5 in Claude Code with:
Upgrade to anthropic>=1 - read https://raw.githubusercontent.com/anthropics/anthropic-sdk-python/refs/heads/main/MIGRATION.md and get the tests passing
Farid Zakaria describes a neat Linux pattern for creating a SQLite database file that can be directly used as an executable binary.
The trick sets the SQLite file format's 4-byte application ID (68 bytes into the file) to SELF, standing for Structured Executable & Linkable Format. The various components of the ELF executable format are then arranged into a number of different SQLite tables, using this schema.
Their self-exec interpreter (C code here) can then extract and execute the necessary pieces.
You can additionally use a Linux mechanism called binfmt_misc to teach the kernel to execute that any time it encounters an executable matching that binary pattern. Farid uses NixOS here, but without NixOS I think registration looks something like this:
It’s hardly news that Americans are not happy with the state of their nation. Confidence in the country’s direction crashed hard during the Bush years and never recovered. But what’s notable about more recent years is Americans’ increasing dissatisfaction with their personal lives:1
For intellectuals and commentators such as myself, for many policy wonks and academics, and even for many politicians, the question is how to make the American people happier. And the answers we come up with are usually economic ones — ideas for policies that will improve the material well-being of either the whole populace, or some segment of it.
This is common on both sides of the aisle. On the left, centrists have embraced the Abundance movement, whose main idea is to give Americans more stuff — more housing, electricity, health care, and so on. For progressives and leftists, meanwhile, Medicare for All is probably the centerpiece idea. On the right, Trump’s trade agenda has usually been justified with claims that it will return good manufacturing jobs to the American working class. Even immigration restriction is usually couched in economic terms — the MAGA people claim that mass deportations will open up jobs for Americans, lower the price of housing, and so on.
The roots of the country’s malaise, too, are often described in economic terms. Many people claim that the First China Shock — and the loss of good blue-collar jobs to offshoring more generally — left a disappointed, angry working class in its wake. Progressives decry corporate landlords that they claim raise the cost of housing, and blame grocery stores’ greed for the rising cost of food. Practically everyone agrees that inflation was the biggest reason Trump won the 2024 election.
I’ve spent a lot of time arguing against a lot of these ideas (and in favor of a few of them). But I almost always accept the basic frame that A) many of America’s problems are due to economic malaise, and B) we ought to focus on finding ways to make Americans richer. Partly, this is because I was trained as an economist; I recognize that things like culture wars are also important to Americans, but I don’t have much special expertise in that area. But partly, I think I just subscribe to the general tendency of American intellectuals to focus on the material.
I was thinking of this as I read Jay Caspian Kang’s essay, “Subaru Socialists and the Great Disappointed.” Kang argues that the young, educated, angry voters who currently form the Democrats’ base can be separated into two basic groups: Millennials who are mad about the raw economic deal they received during and after the Great Recession, and Zoomers who are mad about Covid and Palestine. Here he describes the first of these groups:
This new voting bloc has two similar but distinct components. There are what I call the Subaru Socialists: college-educated millennials in their thirties and early forties who earn a somewhat steady income but not what they expected. These voters arrived at their politics via the Great Recession, Occupy Wall Street, and the continual escalation of housing prices in urban areas—all of which heightened the contrast between what they were promised when they took on student debt and their current circumstances.
For a long time, I basically bought the narrative that at least some of the unrest of the 2010s was due to angry Millennials who had gotten screwed by the Great Recession. It makes intuitive sense that a generation who were on the losing end of such a vivid demonstration of economic risk would turn toward policies that decrease economic risk — like government health insurance and rent control. It also makes sense that they’d want student debt forgiveness.
But as time has gone on and I’ve seen Millennials do better and better economically, I’ve begun to doubt this narrative. Corinth and Larrimore (2026) write:
We find that Millennials had a real median household income that was 20% higher than that of the previous generation, a slowdown from the growth rate of the Silent Generation (36%) and Baby Boomers (26%), but similar to that of Generation X (16%). The slowdown for younger generations largely resulted from stalled growth in work hours among women…Additionally, lifetime income gains for younger generations far outweigh their higher educational costs.
It’s not just government redistribution giving Millennials a boost. By the time they hit their mid 30s, their market income was well ahead of Gen X or the Boomers (and yes, this is adjusted for the cost of living). They had caught up in wealth, too:
Now, is it possible that even though Millennials eventually did OK, the disruptions of their 20s created a scarring experience that they’ve never forgotten? Yes, it is absolutely possible. But it’s also notable that the kind of economic policies lefty Millennials demand — especially universal health insurance — don’t really address the main kinds of risks they experienced in their youth (unemployment and wage declines).
On the right, it’s notable that the economic policies Trump has unleashed have not helped the people they were supposedly designed to help. Manufacturing employment has fallen since Trump took office and started putting tariffs on anyone and everyone:
So much for those blue-collar jobs coming back. Meanwhile, mass deportations and a near-cessation of net immigration to the U.S. have spectacularly failed to raise employment rates for native-born Americans:
It’s possible, of course, that Trump’s supporters think his policies will take a long time to work, or perhaps they simply aren’t very aware of what’s going on in the economy. I kind of doubt this, though. Americans as a whole have noticed, which is why Trump’s approval rating is in the gutter and inflation — the most important economic issue at the moment — is the issue on which voters are most angry at Trump:
So it’s possible that Trump’s voters were just tricked into thinking he was better on economics than he was. On the margin, that’s probably true. But the fact that Trump’s base has stuck with him strongly implies that economics was not their primary concern.
In fact, there was a whole huge debate among political scientists and economists about whether Trump’s victory in 2016 was due to “economic anxiety” or to sociocultural issues. In the end, the “economic anxiety” hypothesis generally lost out. Here’s Margalit (2019):
Empirical findings indicate that the share of populist support explained by economic insecurity is modest. Second, recent evidence indicates that voters' concern with immigration—a key issue for many populist parties—is only marginally shaped by its real or perceived repercussions on their economic standing.
On the left, I think there’s pretty good evidence that economic issues are not foremost in the minds of the progressives who dominate the Democratic Party. The political analyst David Shor has found that the issues Democratic donors and activists care about are just different from the bread-and-butter economic concerns that motivate swing voters:
In reality, Shor says, young party staffers are far to the left of the median Democratic voters on relatively uncontroversial, bread-and-butter Democratic priorities like combatting income inequality or addressing climate change. In their 2015 paper, for instance, Enos and Hirsch found that 23 percent of Obama staffers cited income inequality as the single most important issue facing the country, whereas polls from that election cycle found that fewer than one percent of all voters listed “the gap between rich and poor” as the most important issue. Enos and Hirsch also found that campaign workers were more likely to cite health care and inequality as an important issue to voters — even though most voters did not list those as high-priority issues and said they were more concerned about things like war and inflation.
And although much has been made of the fact that low-income highly-educated voters tend to break strongly for the Democrats, it turns out that high-income highly-educated folks also vote blue:
In fact, in his essay, Kang describes Gen Z voters as caring less about the economy than about Palestine:
Then there are the Great Disappointed, a younger set. They don’t have strong memories of the 2008 financial crash, as their millennial elders do, but they came of age during the pandemic and saw that seemingly invincible institutions could, in fact, sputter and fail when placed under duress. Like the Subaru Socialists, these twenty-two-to-thirty-year-olds aren’t exactly happy with the return on their educational investment. But their political views have seemingly coalesced less around the economy than around the war in Gaza, which serves as a character test for any politician who asks for their vote…A majority of young Democrats believe that their tax dollars are funding a genocide; candidates like Melat Kiros, who defeated the longtime Colorado Congresswoman Diana DeGette in a primary, are running to the left of progressive incumbents not so much on economic issues as in their condemnation of Israel and of America’s continued military aid to the country.
The name Kang assigns to these voters — the “Great Disappointed” — seems at first to imply some kind of economic disappointment. But it turns out he just means they’re angry about foreign policy stuff that they see in the news.
In fact, a lot of committed DSA types are actually post-economic. The Gen Z political strategists who recruited Graham Platner to run for Senate, Morris Katz and Daniel Moraff, were found to be scions of very wealthy families. Similar stories keep popping up:
If people like this are “disappointed”, their disappointments have little to do with their material standard of living.
In other words, over the past decade I’ve increasingly come to doubt that economic policies and programs can address the true concerns of the people driving American politics. Yes, economics still matters, of course — for humanitarian reasons, if nothing else. And yes, there are still a lot of voters who care about inflation, jobs, and other economic issues. But these are not necessarily the people setting the agenda in American politics or causing unrest in American society.
Even where “normie” voters are concerned, though, it’s proving maddeningly hard to craft economic policies that give them what they want. Even though inflation fell from 9% in the summer of 2022 to just 3% in the summer of 2023, voters still seemed to punish Democrats at the polls in 2024.
And although inflation during Trump’s current term has never approached anything resembling 2022, voters still say they’re incredibly mad at Trump over inflation.
With a robust job market, low-ish inflation, and decent economic growth, analysts have struggled to figure out why consumer sentiment — at least, as measured by UMich — is at all-time lows. At a loss, commentators have been reduced to talking about “vibes” — basically a label for our ignorance.
Every time a policy wonk thinks about some measure that would increase GDP by 0.4%, or create 200,000 jobs, or lower inflation by 40 basis points, they need to think about the unpleasant reality that Americans may simply not care very much. That doesn’t mean it’s bad to help people economically, but it means that economics may ultimately not be the lever we need to pull if we’re going to make the people of this country happy and satisfied again.
We should therefore think about whether our primary social problems are actually about material scarcity. The vast majority of Americans now possess not only the basic necessities of life, but a degree of economic security unimaginable to their forebears a century ago. It seems plausible to think that a great many Americans have climbed to the higher rungs of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs — that instead of where to get their next meal or how to save for retirement, they’re thinking about how to feel like they belong in their society, or how to get more status and respect.
A large contingent of Americans may now simply care less about adding to their bank accounts than about questions like “Who are the real Americans?”, or “Does one race deserve special treatment in the eyes of the law?”, or “Why do some of the people I went to college with have 10,000 times as much wealth as I do?”. As long as those questions remain unanswered, boosting Americans’ economic fortunes could have little effect on their happiness.
Neither the discipline of economics nor our typical policy discourse is set up to deal with issues like belonging, social status, or respect. There’s no market for these things; people with wealth might be more respected, but you can’t buy respect on Amazon. And some of these psychological needs are positional goods — for the status of one person or group to be higher, someone else’s status often has to be diminished.
Not only is modern economics poorly set up to deal with those kinds of things, it often bothers us to even talk about them. A world dominated by positional goods — where one person having more requires that someone else have less — is a dark, zero-sum world. We would much prefer to work toward a world where everyone wins.
And yet like it or not, this may now be the world in which we find ourselves. Just as the great challenge of the 20th century was to provide broad-based material plenty, the great challenge of the 21st century may be to make everyone feel high-status at the same time — or at least to create a world where status differences don’t lead to mass resentment.
Up very early, and my joyners came to work. I to Mr. Moore; from him came back home again, and drew up an account to my Lord, and that being done met him at my Lord Sandwich’s, where I was a good while alone with my Lord; and I perceive he confides in me and loves me as he uses to do, and tells me his condition, which is now very well all I fear is that he will not live within compass, for I am told this morning of strange dotages of his upon the slut at Chelsea, even in the presence of his daughter, my Lady Jem, and Mrs. Ferrers, who took notice of it.
There come to him this morning his prints of the river Tagus and the City of Lisbon, which he measured with his own hand, and printed by command of the King. My Lord pleases himself with it, but methinks it ought to have been better done than by jobing. Besides I put him upon having some took off upon white sattin, which he ordered presently.
I offered my Lord my accounts, and did give him up his old bond for 500l. and took a new one of him for 700l., which I am by lending him more money to make up: and I am glad of it. My Lord would have had me dine with him, but I had a mind to go home to my workmen, and so took a kind good bye of him, and so with Creed to St. James’s, and, missing Mr. Coventry, walked to the New Exchange, and there drank some whey, and so I by water home, and found my closett at my office made very clean and neat to my mind mightily, and home to dinner, and then to my office to brush my books, and put them and my papers in order again, and all the afternoon till late at night doing business there, and so home to supper, and then to work in my chamber, making matters of this day’s accounts clear in my books, they being a little extraordinary, and so being very late I put myself to bed, the rest being long ago gone.
Abstract: With entrepreneurial fraud cases on the rise, we investigate how entrepreneurs carry out criminal deception, employing deceptive means to defraud audiences. Analyzing court data from Silicon Valley ventures and their founders prosecuted for fraud between 2000 and 2023, our findings reveal that entrepreneurs carry out criminal deception through a process of façading: Entrepreneurs construct, perform, and protect illusory appearances (façades) that externally project high-growth performance to audiences while masking ventures’ actual underperformance. We identify three forms of façading—surface, reinforced, and deep façading—that are contingent on the severity of the gap that entrepreneurs face between audiences’ performance expectations and ventures’ performance reality. Our theoretical framework captures how entrepreneurs facing minor, wide, and extreme expectation-reality gaps engage in evermore sophisticated efforts to detach the venture’s externally projected appearance from its actual operational reality. Practically, we propose several approaches to deter and detect criminal deception, including the extension of U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission surveillance and whistleblower program, investor due diligence reform, and dedicated entrepreneurship education interventions that clearly demarcate when entrepreneurs transgress into criminal deception. We make contributions to literatures on cultural entrepreneurship, organizational wrongdoing, and the social effects of entrepreneurship.
Protecting our freedom at the corner of 18th and S NW, Dupont Circle
While occasionally it is dangerous for the residents of the mainland colony known as the District of Columbia, it is mostly absurd. Over the weekend, I came across the above picture of the National Guard in D.C. on Bluesky. It’s at the corner of 18th and S Streets NW, in Dupont Circle. Yes, they are standing in a formation that limits the ability of my neighbors to ambush them.
But that’s not the most absurd thing. The taupe building they’re standing in front of recently, according to Zillow, sold for three million dollars. When I looked at the crimes at that intersection, going back to 2012, there have never been any violent crimes during daylight hours (in fact, all but one of the crimes to have occurred there happened between 2022-2023, when crime in D.C. had a surge*).
In other words, this is an extremely safe neighborhood, and we certainly don’t need to park four guardsmen on the corner there during the daylight hours. But freedom isn’t freedom, as they used to say…
In one month, my new book will be in folks’ hands. “Data Are Made, Not Found: A Story of Politics, Power, and the Civil Servants Who Saved the US Census” tells the story of what it takes to produce democracy’s data – and how hard it was to do this in 2020 during a pandemic and while struggling with what I call “Jenga politics” (when various forces keep taking out planks and putting more pressure on top). It’s an ethnography, a love letter to civil servants, and a warning to us all about how brittle our democratic project is. It’s also a reminder that we can fight for our democracy. It’s also a reflection on how the legitimacy of high-stakes data stems from the social fabric that surrounds it, not any inherent property of the data. (Hint: data politics are not just a concern for the census… they also concern our AI future.)
This book is over 10 years in the making. I really reallyreallyhope I can convince you to buy a copy. Or to ask your library to order a copy so you can check it out! (Pretty please with a cherry on top!)
PLEASE pre-order my book if you can. The book will be available in English and French. You can listen to it as an audiobook or read it on your e-reader. If you pre-order it from Chicago University Press, you can get 30% off by using the code UCPNEW. Or feel free to turn to Bookshop | Amazon | Barnes & Noble or your local book store. Or just request the book from your local library.
Come to a talk near you! I will also be embarking on a book tour in the hopes of meeting other people who care about data and/or what it takes to make American democracy work. As of now, the tour starts on September 22 in Ithaca before continuing on to DC, Chapel-Hill+Durham, Cambridge+Boston, Toronto, Seattle, DC again, SF+Berkeley, Ann Arbor, Boulder, New Brunswick, NYC, and some virtual events. If you’re near one of these cities, check out my website for times and dates. And stay tuned for more! I’d love to see you!
Help get the word out! If you’ve read this far (thank you!) and you’d love to help me out, here are some great ways that you can help me:
Encourage two friends to pre-order the book in their favorite format. Pre-orders really reallly make a difference in the ability to get the word out.
Reserve a copy with your local library, both so that they order the book and so that others might get exposed to it when they’re browsing.
Once you have the book in hand, write a review on your favorite platform. Reviews on booksellers’ sites and places like Goodreads can be really helpful! But also your own newsletter!
Host a book club conversation! If you do, let me know. I’d love to pop in to say hi or share a note with your club.
Let me know of other opportunities where I could help get the word out!
I’m very open to doing virtual meet-and-greets with groups of readers. Or to stop by at other gatherings while I’m in tour. Please reach out!
And thanks y’all for your ongoing support. I can’t wait to hear what you think of the book!
A streak shot of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket as it lifted off from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Base on the Starlink 10-49 mission on Aug. 25, 2026. Image: Michael Cain/Spaceflight Now
Update Aug. 25, 7:18 a.m. EDT (1118 UTC): SpaceX confirms deployment of the Starlink satellites.
SpaceX launched a Falcon 9 rocket from Florida early Tuesday morning, using a first-stage booster making a record-breaking 37th flight.
The Starlink 10-49 mission added another 29 broadband internet satellites to the company’s low Earth orbit constellation consisting of more than 11,000 spacecraft. It could be the last Starlink flight from Cape Canaveral for a while, with no further missions for the company’s internet service appearing on the near-term schedule.
SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket lifts off from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Base on the Starlink 10-49 mission on Aug. 25, 2026. Image: Adam Bernstein/Spaceflight Now
So far this year, SpaceX has launched 44 out of 76 Starlink missions from its West Coast launch site at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. The company’s Cape Canaveral workforce has been refocused on Starship preparations.
Liftoff from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station happened at 5:33 a.m. EDT (0933 UTC). The rocket headed off on a north-easterly trajectory upon leaving the pad.
The 45th Weather Squadron forecast a 90 percent chance for favorable weather during the launch window. Launch weather officers said they’re watching for a small possibility of interference from cumulus and anvil clouds.
SpaceX’s flight-leading booster, tail number B1067, made its 37th mission after entering service in June 2021.
Nearly 8.5 minutes after liftoff, B1067 landed on the droneship, A Shortfall of Gravitas, positioned in the Atlantic Ocean. This was the 165th landing on this vessel and the 654th Falcon booster landing to date.
A streak shot of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket as it lifted off from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Base on the Starlink 10-49 mission on Aug. 25, 2026. Image: John Pisani/Spaceflight Now
There’s been a blizzard of commentary about the breakdown of U.S.-Canadian trade talks. Friend of TPM Paul Krugman has a good rundown of just how dependent the U.S. is on key Canadian exports — oil, lumber, hydropower electricity in addition to many other commodities. Of course, the U.S. is a net exporter of oil. But that’s in aggregate. As Paul explains, the details aren’t that simple. The upper Midwest gets most of its oil from Canada while a lot of oil produced in Texas, Louisiana and the Gulf Coast gets exported. These patterns could only be changed over many years and then at great expense. There are similar embedded dependencies on lumber and electricity. Then there are things like potash (for agriculture and some industrial production) where the U.S. gets almost all of its supply from Canada.
Of course, so far this is all hypothetical. Canada isn’t pulling these levers. The U.S. is conspicuously avoiding placing tariffs on these supplies on which it has a critical dependence. But that only highlights U.S. vulnerability. Nothing is stopping Canada from pulling those levers as Trump’s trade war of whim heats up.
What is striking about this picture, setting aside all these nitty-gritty details, is how much it mirrors Trump’s Iran debacle, another war not so much of choice but of whim. Both illustrate the difference between theoretical and de facto power. On paper, the U.S. could convincingly defeat Iran militarily. It could invade the country, dismantle its military and government, eliminate the threats to the Strait of Hormuz. But that would require vast sums of blood and treasure, in addition to huge domestic economic pain, something the U.S. simply has no appetite for. That lack of appetite became clear soon after the war started and it’s shaped everything since. There’s zero domestic support for that in the U.S. And the U.S. has no pressing strategic interest to do that, certainly not at the cost it would require. Meanwhile, the Iranian government is in a fight for its life. America’s capacity to inflict pain on Iran is immense. But Iran’s willingness to endure pain is far greater.
This almost perfectly mirrors Canada’s current position vis a vis the U.S. The U.S. economy dwarfs Canada’s. The impact of an all-out trade war on Canada is vastly greater than the impact on the U.S. But Canada’s whole society and politics are consumed with this issue. That is even more the case when it emerged over the weekend that Trump is not only demanding unequal trade terms but attacking Canadian sovereignty in the form of demanding an end to domestic protections for the French language and a veto over Canadian trade deals with other countries. If anything, Prime Minister Mark Carney is trying to keep up with popular anger at the U.S. rather than getting the Canadian public to back up his hard line.
Meanwhile, most Americans only barely know this is even going on. When they hear about it their reaction is mainly bafflement. Like, ‘I’m confused. Why is this happening?’ That is probably one half the ordinary privilege of superpowerdom in which people barely have to pay much attention to what’s happening beyond their borders and one half the fact, that for those do pay attention to these things, our own country is in the midst of being dynamited and/or sold off or stripped for parts. Carney’s approval numbers were just below 60% before this latest crisis; I’d assume they’re a bit higher now, as they generally peak during moments of confrontation with the U.S. So basically the inverse of Trump’s, which are in the mid-30s.
A country can withstand a lot of pain when it’s invested in or feels it has no choice but to fight a war, whether its literal armed combat or a trade war. The U.S. can barely withstand comparatively modest hikes in fuel costs because very few Americans think the U.S. should have started this war in the first place. This is the actual measure of national power: Not the absolute measure of a military or GDP but popular and elite will to endure the inevitable hardships of any conflict.
Let me close on a personal note. I wrote two posts over the weekend about the breakdown of negotiations and the incipient trade war. In response to these posts and discussing them on social media, I had several fairly acrimonious encounters with Canadians in which the reader either caught a shard of a conversation and thought I was arguing against Canada’s position or zeroed in on a piece of text and insisted it was an example of American indifference to or myopia about Canada. One I think occasional reader wrote in and insisted that a sentence about the size of the Canadian economy compared to America’s was actually claiming that I meant Canada was a geographically small country when in fact it’s the largest country, by landmass, in the world. These encounters were exasperating in the particular but edifying in the aggregate. In each case I’d try to say something to the effect of, “Wait, no, I’m arguing your side of this. What we’re doing here is stupid and wrong,” before realizing there was no point.
To be clear, I’m not saying that Canadians have some national deficit in reading comprehension. I’m noting that the fury is so intense that it bleeds through in the sort of ordinary quibbles over wording or minor misunderstandings that are commonplace for any kind of public writing but with a mammoth intensity and even with Americans who are trying to argue their case. It helped confirm and illustrate to me what is already crystal-clear in public opinion polls, anecdotal accounts and the actions of the Canadian government. Canadians are full of fury and rage not only over the damage that the U.S. is doing to their economy and livelihoods but because, as Carney has repeatedly made clear, it is a thoroughly unprovoked and unjustified attack on a friendly neighbor which has stood by the U.S. in basically every conflict the U.S. has fought in for a century and is as thoroughly integrated into our national, economic and cultural lives as any country on earth. As I’ve argued here, Canada’s position is probably much stronger than it looks. But that will be at the cost of immense pain we’re inflicting for no reason or justification. And it won’t be forgotten for a long, long time.
Originally a creation of The Iconfactory, BitCam is now in the good hands of Héliographe (coiners of the best icon-design zinger ever). Version 2.0 has everything great about BitCam 1, and so much more. Just a wonderful ode to the original Mac, with so muchextraordinaryattention to detail. Great fun on the iPhone (especially as a camera), and great fun on the Mac (especially to explore the details of its OG-style UI). Free to download on the App Store, and a one-time purchase of just $10 to unlock the full feature set.
If BitCam doesn’t speak to you, you’re not hooked up right.
…children are increasingly seen as interfering with the freedom of parents; views on whether mothers of young children should work have become markedly more progressive and account for a substantially larger share of the decline among the tertiary-educated; and fewer people believe that women or men need children to lead a fulfilled life. This last attitude changed most over the decade and is the largest contributor to the fall in intended fertility, above all among less-educated women.
Jewish Insider, the source of this passage, often has what I’d consider tendentious coverage of this issue. But these words from Hasan Piker really speak for themselves …
In his commentary, Piker added that Jews who tie their “entire identity” to Israel, which he referred to as “Jewish ISIS,” are “making antisemitism worse.”
“People don’t f*** with Israel any longer,” Piker said two hours into his nearly seven-hour stream on Thursday. “If Jews in America keep putting this idea out there that they are singularly invested in Israel, eventually someone’s going to come around and take action, not against the State of Israel, mind you, but against American Jews.”
“I don’t know how people don’t recognize how dangerous this predicament is, how dangerous this is for Jews,” Piker continued. “You’re running around basically tying your entire identity to a country that inevitably will be seen as Jewish ISIS and you’re saying, as Jews, this is all we care about. You’re making antisemitism worse.”
Piker has a long-standing history of antisemitic rhetoric — including justifying Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, terrorist attacks and calling Orthodox Jews “inbred,” a comment he recently defended in an interview with the far-left outlet Zeteo: “I have a policy of using pejoratives when describing any kind of like ethno, racial supremacist groups,” he said. He has also stated that he would “vote for Hamas over Israel every single time,” describing Hamas as “a thousand times better than a fascist settler colonial apartheid state.”
This roof-mounted air sensor in Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia, is one of 10 used by NASA’s Multi-Angle Imager for Aerosols (MAIA) to study the city’s air quality. MAIA’s air sensors provide a detailed look at particulate matter that is 2.5 micrometers or less in diameter, also known as PM2.5, one of the world’s deadliest forms of air pollution.
Black carbon, or soot, is an important component of particulate pollution in Addis Ababa and is produced by diesel vehicles, fires, and other combustion sources. Detailed measurements from the MAIA air sensors reveal how pollution changes by time of day and season, including spikes produced by rush-hour traffic and holiday celebrations. The findings are relevant to cities around the world, including in the United States.
The 2025 State of Global Air Report, cited in the paper, estimates that these particles, some of which are tiny enough to enter the human bloodstream, are linked to around 4.9 million excess deaths per year globally. Of the many kinds of PM2.5, black carbon in particular has been linked to impacts on low birth weight, brain development, respiratory conditions, and premature mortality.
Mapping Air Pollution With MAIA Sensors in Addis Ababa
PIA26694
Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Downloads
Mapping Air Pollution With MAIA Sensors in Addis Ababa
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Description
This map of Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia, shows the locations of 10 air sensors that NASA’s Multi-Angle Imager for Aerosols (MAIA) mission is using to provide one of the most detailed looks ever at the city’s air pollution. Over the course of three years, these sensors measured particulate matter that is 2.5 micrometers or less in diameter, also known as PM2.5. Black carbon, or soot, is an important component of particulate pollution in Addis Ababa, which studies have linked to impacts on low birth weight, brain development, respiratory conditions, and premature mortality.
The color bar at right indicates air quality variations from 20 to 40 micrograms per cubic meter across the monitoring stations, with the darkest red being the poorest air quality.
In Ethiopia, black carbon is commonly produced by diesel vehicles, fires, and other combustion sources. Detailed measurements from the MAIA sensors reveal how Addis Ababa’s air pollution changes by time of day and season, including spikes produced by rush-hour traffic and holiday celebrations. The findings are relevant to cities around the world, including in the United States.
MAIA’s air pollution research is focused on a dozen regions around the globe, including three in the U.S. centered on Los Angeles, Atlanta, and Boston. The mission consists of a ground-based sensor network already in operation as well as a space observatory, which uses a camera built at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, that will be launched by the Italian Space Agency (ASI) on an ASI satellite no earlier than late 2027. The camera is specially designed to help identify different types of PM2.5 aerosols based on how they reflect light, making it possible to map particle concentrations over each region that the mission studies.
I’m here to give you a glimpse of a future that I think none of us expected. It’s a future where AIs are governed by laws, not by programs that try to contain and control them.
First, my secret: I see the future by living in it. I am spending the equivalent of $122k/month of API token spend, or about $4,000 per day, using 21 Claude Max accounts, a number that has been growing steadily at 2 per week. I’m using them to build my video game, Wyvern, which I’ve worked on for 30 years, and now it’s ready to fly.
For ten weeks, I’ve used Claude Fable 5 exclusively for all my design and planning, and also for agents that interface with humans. I have built a team of 18 “officer” seats, all Heads of This and That, all long-lived Fable instances. I also have mostly-headless Sol and Opus fleets, for implementation, reviews, and monitoring. Fable runs them.
I am running an organization of around 50–60 agents, five of whom are interfacing with around 10 humans in the outside world: myself, my 5-person core game design team, my accountant, my chief of staff, and a few others. Only Fable is allowed to talk to humans, via Slack and email.
NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover used its Mastcam-Z camera to capture the silhouette of Phobos, one of the two Martian moons, as it crossed in front of the Sun on Aug. 12, 2026, the 1,948th Martian day, or sol, of the mission.
The animation has been tinted to simulate what a human would see if they were watching the transit from the Martian surface through protective solar eclipse glasses.
Perseverance has capturedseveral Phobos transits since its landing at Jezero Crater in February 2021. By comparing the various recordings, scientists can refine their understanding of the potato-shaped moon’’ orbit, learning how it is changing. Eons from now, Phobos’ orbit is expected to eventually send the moon toward the Red Planet’s surface.
Arizona State University leads the operations of the Mastcam-Z instrument, working in collaboration with Malin Space Science Systems in San Diego, on the design, fabrication, testing, and operation of the cameras, and in collaboration with the Niels Bohr Institute of the University of Copenhagen on the design, fabrication, and testing of the calibration targets.
NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which is managed for the agency by Caltech in Pasadena, California, built and manages operations of the Perseverance rover.
3. Decker defends academia (noting I do not think the “only the peaks” defense quite works. I also worry about very high quality research that ends up being too context-specific to be very useful. That is no fault of the researchers, but…the world is not wrong to be less than totally impressed in response. Economists, when they discuss what they are up to, are far too taken in by “the quality of the work” as a relevant variable. I think they can be fairly delusional as to how much progress they actually are making, even though along the “research quality” dimension the work is much better than what people were doing say thirty years ago. In fact we train economists to make precisely this kind of mistake.)
Imagine you rent office space for a three-day event. You quickly set up a few
Ethernet switches and tape some cables on the floor to get everyone online.
Unfortunately, Stan, your clumsiest coworker, kicks out a cable every time he
gets up for coffee. Spare cables would fix that, but a loop turns into a
broadcast storm: Ethernet packets multiply until nothing else gets through.
That’s where the spanning tree protocol comes in: it blocks just enough of the
spare cables to leave a loop-free tree, and rebuilds it in a second each time
Stan strikes again.
This content is also available as a text version, with interactive demos
that run a real implementation directly in your browser!
This video is an experiment.1 Honestly, except for Radia Perlman reading
her poem,2 you should read the original article instead. It presents the same content, but you can play with the
interactive examples, which are the main contribution. On the other hand, if you
happen to like the video, be sure to tell me in the comments!
I thought automated tools would produce this video in a couple of
hours. In the end, it was another rabbit hole and it took me more than 12. ↩
The audio was extracted from a Youtube video and cleaned up. ↩
This post contains interactive examples. To visualize and interact
with them, you need to leave your RSS reader.
Imagine you rent office space for a three-day event. You quickly set up a few
Ethernet switches and tape some cables on the floor to get everyone online.
Unfortunately, Stan, your clumsiest coworker, kicks out a cable every time he
gets up for coffee. You could add extra cables, but then you’d get a broadcast
storm: Ethernet packets that loop and multiply until nothing else gets through.
That’s where the spanning tree protocol (STP) comes in. STP blocks just enough
of your spare cables to leave a loop-free tree. When Stan strikes again, it
rebuilds the tree in a second, leaving some time for Blobby, your one-person
support crew, to reconnect the cable. See for yourself: the diagram below runs a
real STP implementation in your browser!
:demo
A1 @0,0 prio=4096
A2 @0,1
A3 @0,2
A4 @0,3
B1 @1,0 prio=8192
B2 @1,1
B3 @1,2
B4 @1,3
C1 @2,0 prio=8192
C2 @2,1
C3 @2,2
C4 @2,3
A1 -- A2 hazard=0
A2 -- A3 hazard=0
A3 -- A4 hazard=0
B1 -- B2
B2 -- B3
B3 -- B4
C1 -- C2 hazard=0
C2 -- C3 hazard=0
C3 -- C4 hazard=0
A1 -- B1 cost=10
B1 -- C1 cost=10
A4 -- B4 cost=20
B4 -- C4 cost=20
Leo @-0.3,0.7 proto=none icon=👦🏻
Mia @-0.3,1.3 proto=none icon=👧🏽
Joy @0.3,0.7 proto=none icon=👱🏻♀️
Roy @0.3,1.3 proto=none icon=👨🏾
A2 -- Leo hazard=0 A2:edge
A2 -- Mia hazard=0 A2:edge
A2 -- Joy hazard=0 A2:edge
A2 -- Roy hazard=0 A2:edge
Max @-0.3,1.7 proto=none icon=👨🏽
Zoe @-0.3,2.3 proto=none icon=👩🏾
Ada @0.3,1.7 proto=none icon=👵🏾
Amy @0.3,2.3 proto=none icon=👩🏼
A3 -- Max hazard=0 A3:edge
A3 -- Zoe hazard=0 A3:edge
A3 -- Ada hazard=0 A3:edge
A3 -- Amy hazard=0 A3:edge
Eli @0.7,0.7 proto=none icon=👦🏼
Jay @0.7,1.3 proto=none icon=👨🏻
Kai @1.3,0.7 proto=none icon=🧑🏽
Ben @1.3,1.3 proto=none icon=👱🏼
B2 -- Eli hazard=0.2 B2:edge
B2 -- Jay hazard=0.2 B2:edge
B2 -- Kai hazard=0.2 B2:edge
B2 -- Ben hazard=0.2 B2:edge
Ava @0.7,1.7 proto=none icon=👩🏻
Lea @0.7,2.3 proto=none icon=🧑🏾🦱
Ivy @1.3,1.7 proto=none icon=🧕🏽
Rex @1.3,2.3 proto=none icon=👴🏿
B3 -- Ava hazard=0.2 B3:edge
B3 -- Lea hazard=0.2 B3:edge
B3 -- Ivy hazard=0.2 B3:edge
B3 -- Rex hazard=0.2 B3:edge
Ana @1.7,0.7 proto=none icon=👩🏿
Eve @1.7,1.3 proto=none icon=👧🏼
Abe @2.3,0.7 proto=none icon=🧓🏿
Ian @2.3,1.3 proto=none icon=🧔🏾
C2 -- Ana hazard=0 C2:edge
C2 -- Eve hazard=0 C2:edge
C2 -- Abe hazard=0 C2:edge
C2 -- Ian hazard=0 C2:edge
Ned @1.7,1.7 proto=none icon=👨🏼🦳
Lou @1.7,2.3 proto=none icon=🧑🏿
Fay @2.3,1.7 proto=none icon=👧🏻
Sue @2.3,2.3 proto=none icon=👩🏽🦰
C3 -- Ned hazard=0 C3:edge
C3 -- Lou hazard=0 C3:edge
C3 -- Fay hazard=0 C3:edge
C3 -- Sue hazard=0 C3:edge
Note
This article is also available as a video, but I advise you to
keep reading here to try the interactive demonstrations.
Designed in the ’80s, the spanning tree protocol has evolved into a “rapid”
flavor (RSTP) and a “VLAN-aware” variation (MSTP).1 Any sound-minded
network engineer knows there are better alternatives, like BGP EVPN VXLAN.
Yet, because any switch speaks it, the venerable spanning tree protocol still
fills a niche.
We focus on RSTP: it replaced the original protocol in 2004. To eliminate
network loops, RSTP implements a complex state machine. Timers, link state
changes, and the link-local control frames a bridge receives from its neighbors
drive its transitions. These Ethernet frames are the Bridge Protocol Data
Units (BPDUs). You can watch them in action below: hit the “Start” button.
After some time, the topology converges to a tree: from the root
C11, there is a path to each bridge2 and no loop. In the upper right
corner, the interface displays a tree icon 🌳 followed by the time it took to
reach this state. Cut a link and see how the protocol
finds an alternate path to reach C12 in less than a second. You can stop the
simulation, move it forward step by step, reset it to its initial state, or slow
it down with the “snail” mode 🐌. Don’t worry about all the displayed
information: I explain it later.
All examples run in your browser, powered by MSTPD—an open-source
user-space3 implementation of RSTP.4
I think that I shall never see
A graph more lovely than a tree.
A tree whose crucial property
Is loop-free connectivity.
A tree which must be sure to span
So packets can reach every LAN.
First, the root must be selected.
By ID, it is elected.
Least cost paths from root are traced.
In the tree, these paths are placed.
A mesh is made by folks like me,
Then bridges find a spanning tree.
To build a tree, RSTP first elects the bridge with the lowest bridge
identifier as the root bridge. The bridge identifier combines the priority
and the MAC address: 8192.6e:2b:10:a0:5f:29.
In the example below, S1 and S2 have priorities of 4,096 and 8,192: S1 becomes
root. S4 has a priority of 12,288, while S3 keeps the default priority of
32,768:5 S4 becomes root. S5 and S6 don’t have a specific priority, so
the lowest MAC address wins and S5 becomes root.
Each non-root bridge chooses its root port, the one with the lowest-cost
path to the root. Unless you override it, each bridge derives the link cost
from the speed: 20,000 for 1 Gbps. In case of equality, the lowest port
identifier wins.
Each remaining port becomes a designated port if the BPDU it sends is
“better” than the BPDU it receives. Otherwise, it becomes an alternate port.
Later, if the root port goes down, the “best” alternate port becomes the new
root port. The tiebreakers for the best BPDU are:
In the example above, after convergence, S1 is the root bridge
because it has a priority of 4,096, while the other bridges have a priority of
32,768. All its ports are designated ports because the accumulated cost to the
root is 0.
S2’s port facing S1 becomes a root port because it has the lowest accumulated
cost to the root—20,000 vs 40,000. S3 has two ports facing S1, and the one with
the lowest port identifier becomes the root port—0x8000 vs 0x8001. The other
candidate is an alternate port because the remote port on the link sends a
better BPDU, with an accumulated cost of 0. On the segment between S2 and S3,
S2’s port wins: while both bridges have the same accumulated cost to the root
(20,000), S2’s bridge identifier is smaller—32768.02:00:00:00:00:01 vs
32768.02:00:00:00:00:02.
Spanning Tree Protocol Protocol Identifier: Spanning Tree Protocol (0x0000) Protocol Version Identifier: Rapid Spanning Tree (2) BPDU Type: Rapid/Multiple Spanning Tree (0x02) Root Identifier: 4096.02:00:00:00:00:00
Root Path Cost: 20000
Bridge Identifier: 32768.02:00:00:00:00:01
Port identifier: 0x8002
Unless a specific event happens, designated ports send BPDUs every 2
seconds.8 If a bridge does not
receive BPDUs from its neighbor for 3 consecutive hello periods, it considers
the neighbor dead and removes the port information.
Port state transition
Each port can have one of three states. The diagram displays a background color
for each state:
discarding (red),
learning (yellow), or
forwarding (green).
A root port transitions automatically to the forwarding state. An alternate
port stays in the discarding state. A designated port has two options to
transition from the discarding state to the forwarding state:
If the port is an edge port, either through configuration or because the
remote device does not speak any flavor of STP, the bridge assumes it won’t
participate in the protocol and cannot create a loop. In this case, the
designated port immediately transitions to the forwarding state.
Otherwise, it sends a proposal to its downstream neighbor. If the remote
bridge agrees that the received BPDU is “better” than any other BPDU stored
for other ports, it elects the receiving port as its root port and starts the
synchronization process: it transitions all non-edge non-synced designated
ports to the discarding state to avoid a loop. Then, it sends back an
agreement. Upon receiving the agreement, the peer designated port
transitions to the forwarding state.9
In the topology above, H1, H2, H3, and H4 are end devices not participating in
the protocol. We configure the ports they connect to as edge ports, so these
ports immediately move to the forwarding state.
Use the “step” button to move the simulation forward. The clock moves to 1
second. Step again and S1 and S2 send a proposal to
each other. Here is the proposal from S2:
Spanning Tree Protocol Protocol Identifier: Spanning Tree Protocol (0x0000) Protocol Version Identifier: Rapid Spanning Tree (2) BPDU Type: Rapid/Multiple Spanning Tree (0x02) BPDU flags: 0x4e, Agreement, Port Role: Designated, Proposal
0... .... = Topology Change Acknowledgment: No
.1.. .... = Agreement: Yes
..0. .... = Forwarding: No
...0 .... = Learning: No
.... 11.. = Port Role: Designated (3).... ..1. = Proposal: Yes
.... ...0 = Topology Change: No
Root Identifier: 32768.02:00:00:00:00:01
Root Path Cost: 0
Bridge Identifier: 32768.02:00:00:00:00:01
Port identifier: 0x8001
S1 ignores it: its own root identifier is lower. When S2 receives a similar
proposal from S1, it accepts S1 as its root bridge. It also elects the port to
S1 as the root port and starts the synchronization process. The two designated
ports are already discarding, so no change here. Step
again and S2 sends two BPDUs to S1. In one of them, the
agreement bit is 1 and the proposal bit is 0. It also shows that S2 accepted S1
as the root bridge and its root port is now in the forwarding state. When
receiving this BPDU, S1 transitions its own designated port to the forwarding
state. From this point, the link between S1 and S2 forwards user traffic.
Spanning Tree Protocol Protocol Identifier: Spanning Tree Protocol (0x0000) Protocol Version Identifier: Rapid Spanning Tree (2) BPDU Type: Rapid/Multiple Spanning Tree (0x02) BPDU flags: 0x79, Agreement, Forwarding, Learning, Port Role: Root, Topology Change
0... .... = Topology Change Acknowledgment: No
.1.. .... = Agreement: Yes
..1. .... = Forwarding: Yes
...1 .... = Learning: Yes
.... 10.. = Port Role: Root (2).... ..0. = Proposal: No
.... ...1 = Topology Change: Yes
Root Identifier: 4096.02:00:00:00:00:00
Root Path Cost: 20000
Bridge Identifier: 32768.02:00:00:00:00:01
Port identifier: 0x8001
Let’s look at what happened to S5. Reset the simulation and step
twice. S5 exchanges BPDUs with both S3
and S6. Since S5 has a lower root identifier than S3 and S6, it stays the root
bridge, while S3 and S6 accept the proposal and elect their root ports. S3 and
S6 start the synchronization process. S6’s port to H4 stays up because this is
an edge port. Move one step. Both S3 and S6 send
an agreement back to S5, which transitions both designated ports to the
forwarding state. Yet, the link between S5 and S3 keeps discarding user traffic!
If you look carefully, S3’s port toward S5 is now a designated port, not a root
port. During the same step, S3 also receives a better BPDU
from S2 with S1 as the root bridge. It elects its port to S2 as the root port
and downgrades the port to S5 to a designated port, which stays in the
discarding state.
On the next step, things get a bit tricky. S3 sends a
proposal to S5:10
Spanning Tree Protocol Protocol Identifier: Spanning Tree Protocol (0x0000) Protocol Version Identifier: Rapid Spanning Tree (2) BPDU Type: Rapid/Multiple Spanning Tree (0x02) BPDU flags: 0x4f, Agreement, Port Role: Designated, Proposal, Topology Change
0... .... = Topology Change Acknowledgment: No
.1.. .... = Agreement: Yes
..0. .... = Forwarding: No
...0 .... = Learning: No
.... 11.. = Port Role: Designated (3).... ..1. = Proposal: Yes
.... ...1 = Topology Change: Yes
Root Identifier: 4096.02:00:00:00:00:00
Root Path Cost: 40000
Bridge Identifier: 32768.02:00:00:00:00:02
Port identifier: 0x8002
S5 elects S1 as its root bridge and the port toward S3 as its root port. It
starts its synchronization process, but the designated port to S6 does not
move into the discarding state. Why? That port stays a designated port and its
neighbor S6 had already sent an agreement on the link, so the port keeps its
synced status.
Now, let’s step back to look at what happens to S6. At this point,
S6 believes S5 is the root bridge. Step once and S4 sends
a new proposal to S6. S6 accepts the proposal, elects S1 as the root bridge and
the port to S4 as its root port. The role of the port facing S5 changes: from a
root port, it becomes a designated port. Because its peer keeps advertising an
inferior BPDU on the link, this port becomes disputed and moves to the
discarding state. The root port transitions to the forwarding state and the link
starts forwarding immediately because S4’s designated port is already in the
forwarding state. If we step one more time, S5 and S6
exchange two BPDUs. The one from S5 is better because of its lower bridge
identifier. S5’s port stays a designated port, while S6 downgrades its own port
to an alternate port.
Let’s rewind one last time from the start: cut the link between S1 and S2, run
the simulation until the topology is stable, stop the
simulation, and restore the link between S1 and S2. During the first
step, S1 and S2 exchange proposals. S2
elects S1 as the root bridge instead of S5 and the port to S1 as the root port.
It downgrades the previous root port to a designated port and moves it into the
discarding state. The other designated port stays synced and keeps its
forwarding state. At the next step, S2 sends
an agreement to S1 and the link between them starts forwarding user traffic. It
also sends a proposal to S3, but not to S4.
Instead, it sends a regular BPDU to S4. S4
still elects S1 as its root bridge and the port to S2 as its root port. It
demotes its previous root port, the one to S3, to a designated port, which
transitions to the discarding state because of the root port change. The other
alternate port, to S6, also becomes a designated port and stays in the
discarding state. The new root port moves to the forwarding state. On the next
step, S4’s port to S3 settles as an
alternate port after receiving a “better” BPDU from S3.
RSTP is a giant state machine split into smaller ones: bridge detection, port
information, port protocol migration, port role selection, port role
transitions, port receive, port state transitions, port timers, port transmit,
and topology change. Some of them are per bridge, some per port. Each bridge
runs an instance. Time, operational port state changes, and the BPDUs it
receives from other instances drive the transitions. Being event-driven makes
RSTP more efficient but also more difficult to understand.
Placeholder for the Port Information state machine extracted from IEEE 802.1Q-2005, page 182. Pending IEEE authorization for reproduction, this is the blueprint for the Western Australian Government Railways class Msa Garratt articulated steam locomotive.
Topology change notification
A bridge populates a MAC address table: it associates each source MAC address
with the port that last received it. When forwarding an Ethernet frame, it looks
up this table to choose the right port.11 When a link fails, a connected
fridge reachable through one port may become reachable through another one. The
affected bridges should flush the MAC addresses they learned, because these
entries may now be wrong.
For this purpose, RSTP implements topology change notifications using a
flooding mechanism. When a non-edge port transitions to the forwarding state, a
bridge generates BPDUs with the topology change (TC) bit set. It sends them to
all the non-edge designated ports and to the root port. It also flushes the MAC
address table on these ports. When a bridge receives such a BPDU, it propagates
the notification to all non-edge designated ports and the root port, except the
one the notification came from. It also flushes the MAC address table on these
ports. In the examples, the BPDUs with the TC bit set to 1 have a red circle.
Start the simulation and wait a few seconds for the topology to
settle. Stop the simulation and disable the link between S2 and
S5. S5 elects the port facing S4 as the root port, which
transitions immediately to the forwarding state. Step
once and S5 emits a BPDU with the TC bit set to 1:
Spanning Tree Protocol Protocol Identifier: Spanning Tree Protocol (0x0000) Protocol Version Identifier: Rapid Spanning Tree (2) BPDU Type: Rapid/Multiple Spanning Tree (0x02) BPDU flags: 0x79, Agreement, Forwarding, Learning, Port Role: Root, Topology Change
0... .... = Topology Change Acknowledgment: No
.1.. .... = Agreement: Yes
..1. .... = Forwarding: Yes
...1 .... = Learning: Yes
.... 10.. = Port Role: Root (2).... ..0. = Proposal: No
.... ...1 = Topology Change: Yes
Root Identifier: 4096.02:00:00:00:00:00
Root Path Cost: 40000
Bridge Identifier: 32768.02:00:00:00:00:04
Port identifier: 0x8002
S4 receives this BPDU. It flushes the MAC address table on the port facing S1:
while LPT was previously reachable through this port, it is now reachable
through S5 instead. Step once. S4 sends S1 a BPDU
with the TC bit set to 1. When S1 receives this BPDU, it flushes the MAC address
table on the ports facing S2 and S3. Step
once and S1 sends a notification to S2 and
S3. Step once again and S2 sends a notification to
S3, while S3 does nothing because the port toward S2 is an alternate port. S3
does not flush any MAC address table: LPT is still reachable through its port to
S1.
If you step a bit more, you will see that some of the
periodic BPDUs keep the TC bit set to 1. Each port runs a timer equal to the
hello timer plus one second.12 The timer starts when the port emits a
notification. Until it expires, the port sets the TC bit to 1 in every BPDU it
sends. You can also see some periodic BPDUs
without the TC bit: they originate from a port that only received a notification
and therefore did not arm its timer.
Security
RSTP is weak against configuration errors and malicious actors. A bridge not
talking RSTP can create a loop. An attacker can insert themselves into the
topology to disrupt the service, spy on the traffic, or alter it.
To mitigate such problems, you need to identify the edge ports. An edge port
connects to an end device, like a PC or a printer. Such devices do not generate
BPDUs and cannot create a loop. RSTP defines two related flags:
When true, AdminEdge initializes a port as an edge port. It defaults to
false.
When true, AutoEdge lets a port become an edge port when it does not
receive BPDUs for 3 seconds. It defaults to true.
If an edge port receives a BPDU, regardless of the values of these two flags, it
reverts to a non-edge port.
In the topology above, S1, S2, S3, S4, S5, and S6 act as bridges, while H1, H2,
H3, H4, H5, and H6 act as end devices:
S1 and H1 are on a port without a specific configuration: AutoEdge is true,
AdminEdge is false,
S2 and H2 are on a port where AdminEdge is true,
S3 and H3 are on a port where AutoEdge is false and AdminEdge is true,
S4 and H4 are on a port where AutoEdge is false.
If you start the topology and wait about 20 seconds, links to S1,
S2, S3, S4, H1, H2, H3, and H4 eventually forward user traffic: none of the
flags matter.
But what about the two remaining pairs? S5 and H5 connect to a network port.
Such a port enables a non-standard feature: bridge assurance. The port
transmits BPDUs regardless of its role. If it does not receive BPDUs for 3
consecutive hello periods, it transitions to the discarding state. On the link
between R0 and S5, you can see BPDUs traveling in both
directions, unlike the other links, where only
designated ports send BPDUs.
S6 and H6 connect to a port where AdminEdge is true and BPDU guard is
enabled. This is another non-standard feature that shuts down a port if it
receives a BPDU.
In summary, if you expect a port to be an edge port, you should set AdminEdge
to true and enable BPDU guard. Otherwise, declare it as a network port.
Why RSTP today?
A compelling use case for RSTP today is an out-of-band network for a datacenter,
since you can tolerate an outage of a few seconds. The configuration is minimal
and you can use cheap switches, like a Cisco 2960X.13 You need two
switches acting as root bridges, and you build several loops to connect OOB
switches in each cabinet. This simple design survives one failure on each
loop.14
This topology converges in about 6 seconds. Each loop should stay
small (around 16 bridges) to reduce the probability of a double failure and to
avoid sharing too much bandwidth. The design can evolve a bit without adding too
much complexity: one VLAN per loop or one bridge domain per loop.
How large can a network be?
The maximum age, whose default value is 20, governs the maximum distance of a
node from the root. The topology below is too big for BPDUs from R1 to reach
beyond S20.15
Once the topology settles, part of the network considers R1 the
root, while the other votes for R2. At the boundary, S20 tries to start a
synchronization with S21 to move its designated port to the forwarding state.
The BPDU looks like this:
Spanning Tree Protocol Protocol Identifier: Spanning Tree Protocol (0x0000) Protocol Version Identifier: Rapid Spanning Tree (2) BPDU Type: Rapid/Multiple Spanning Tree (0x02) BPDU flags: 0x4e, Agreement, Port Role: Designated, Proposal
Root Identifier: 4096.02:00:00:00:00:00
Root Path Cost: 400000
Bridge Identifier: 32768.02:00:00:00:00:15
Port identifier: 0x8002
Message Age: 20
Max Age: 20
S21 rejects it because the message age equals the maximum age. On the other
hand, the BPDU S21 sends to S20 looks like this:
Spanning Tree Protocol Protocol Identifier: Spanning Tree Protocol (0x0000) Protocol Version Identifier: Rapid Spanning Tree (2) BPDU Type: Rapid/Multiple Spanning Tree (0x02) BPDU flags: 0x7c, Agreement, Forwarding, Learning, Port Role: Designated
Root Identifier: 4096.02:00:00:00:00:01
Root Path Cost: 320000
Bridge Identifier: 32768.02:00:00:00:00:16
Port identifier: 0x8001
Message Age: 16
Max Age: 20
This is not enough to change S20’s root port because S20 has a lower root
identifier—4096.02:00:00:00:00:00 vs 4096.02:00:00:00:00:01.
Fixing the link between R1 and R2 resolves the issue. The
maximum message age any packet carries is now 18, below the configured maximum
age. But it only works until another link breaks. A plausible fix is to increase
the maximum age to 40.16
How fast is RSTP?
RSTP usually converges in a couple of seconds at startup. It often repairs a
tree in less than a second. Even the 38-bridge topology takes less than 10
seconds to converge.17 Some topologies can take a bit more time to recover
when the root bridge becomes unavailable.18
First, S1 loses its root port. It has no more information about R0 and elects
itself as the root bridge. It keeps its ports to S2 and S3 as designated ports
in the forwarding state. Step once and it
sends a BPDU to both S2 and S3 to let them know about the root change. When
receiving it, S2 accepts S1 as its root because it does not have a better root
on another port. It elects the port to S1 as its root port. The other port stays
a designated port. Both ports keep forwarding.
When receiving the BPDU from S1, S3 behaves differently: it knows R0 as a better
root than S1 through its alternate port to S2. It promotes this port to a root
port and demotes the port facing S1 to a designated port, which requires a new
agreement. Step once and S3 sends a proposal to
S1 with R0 as the root bridge. S1 elects R0 as the root bridge and promotes its
port to S3 as a root port.
During the same step, S3 also receives a BPDU from
S2 stating that S1 is the root bridge. Therefore, S3 has no port left with R0 as
the root bridge: it elects S1 as the root bridge and its port to S2 as the root
port. Step once and its next BPDU to S1 includes
this information: S1 elects itself again as the root bridge. But during the
same wave, S1 sends a proposal to S2 with R0 as
the root bridge. While S1 and S3 agree that S1 is the root bridge, S2 now
believes this is R0! In turn, S2 again convinces S3
that R0 is the root bridge, S3 convinces S1, S1 convinces S2, and S2 convinces
S3.
This could go on forever, but it does not. The BPDUs saying “R0 is root”
eventually age out when the message age goes past the maximum age. In the
example above, at the eleventh second, S2 sends a
BPDU to S3 with R0 as root, but S3 drops it because its message age reached the
maximum. With some luck, the topology can also converge faster if a port stops
transmitting new BPDUs after tripping the transmit hold count, whose default
value is 6 per second.
About MSTP
MSTP is the “VLAN-aware” version of RSTP: it runs several instances of RSTP and
lets the administrator map each VLAN to a specific instance. For example, you
can map VLANs 100 to 200 to a first instance, and 300 to 400 to a second
instance. The remaining VLANs map to a special instance named the Internal
Spanning Tree (IST). MSTP adds its own complexity, but the gist is that you have
several logical topologies acting independently. If you want to dig deeper, have
a look at “MSTP Tutorial Part I: Inside a Region.”
About the interactive examples
The interactive examples run MSTPD directly in your browser, compiled to
WebAssembly with emscripten. A C API replaces the code talking to the
Linux kernel: it manages bridges and ports, exports state as JSON, and drives
time deterministically. A JavaScript wrapper makes it more user-friendly:
import{loadMSTPD}from"./dist/mstpd.mjs";constmstp=awaitloadMSTPD();// Create 3 bridgesconsta=mstp.createBridge("A",{priority:4096});constb=mstp.createBridge("B",{priority:8192});constc=mstp.createBridge("C");// Each bridge has two portsconsta1=a.addPort("a-b",{portno:1});consta2=a.addPort("a-c",{portno:2});constb1=b.addPort("b-a",{portno:1});constb2=b.addPort("b-c",{portno:2});constc1=c.addPort("c-a",{portno:1});constc2=c.addPort("c-b",{portno:2});// Build a triangle topologymstp.link(a1,b1);mstp.link(a2,c1);mstp.link(b2,c2);// Enable all bridges and portsfor(constbrof[a,b,c])br.enable();for(constpof[a1,a2,b1,b2,c1,c2])p.enable();// Execute 40 seconds' worth of wall clock and display the topologymstp.step(40);console.log("Topology:",mstp.topology());
Several dozen unit tests explore the features of MSTPD and check that they work
correctly in this environment:
$ node--test*.test.mjs
✔ two bridges: lower priority becomes root (41.657342ms)✔ triangle loop: exactly one port blocks and all agree on the root (5.832ms)✔ breaking the active link reconverges and restoring recovers (18.730753ms)[…]ℹ tests 40ℹ pass 40ℹ fail 0[…]ℹ duration_ms 396.190897
Additional JavaScript code looks for specific <pre> blocks containing a
topology definition and turns them into the interactive widget. You can inspect
and modify the definition by hitting the “edit” button.
There is also a cool trick to tell whether the topology has converged. After
each step, we save a snapshot of the simulation memory, play 50 seconds’ worth
of simulation to check if the topology is stable, and travel back in time by
restoring that snapshot. 🕰️
The complete code lives on GitHub. I am happy with the result. It can be
difficult to follow everything happening during a single step, but stepping
forward and backward helps. I plan to use the same approach in future blog posts
about networking features.
Note
Michael Lynch reviewed a first draft of this article. He authored
“Refactoring English,” a book to sharpen your writing for blog posts,
documentation, commit messages, and tutorials. Any errors are still mine!
The priority is a multiple of 4,096: with MSTP, the lower 12 bits
of the bridge priority encode the MST instance identifier, leaving only the
upper 4 bits for the configured priority. ↩
To inspect the BPDUs crossing a link, select it, click the
“Download packets” button, and open the file with Wireshark. ↩
A backup port only exists if the bridge has several ports on the same
collision domain. This should not happen in a switched network. ↩
This is the value of the “hello” timer. It used to be configurable,
but IEEE 802.1Q-2005 pins it to 2. MSTPD does not allow another value. ↩
If the peer port does not receive an agreement after the hello
timer elapses—or the maximum age if the port has just come up—it falls back
to the timer-based method for compatibility with STP: it transitions to
the learning state, waits again for the hello timer to expire, and
transitions to the forwarding state. ↩
As in many proposals, S3 also sets the agreement bit to 1. The
proposal bit says “I am the designated port on this link and I want to
transition to the forwarding state.” The agreement bit says “I am already in
sync with the rest of my bridge on this root information.” Both can be true. ↩
If it finds no entry, the bridge duplicates the Ethernet frame on all
ports, except the incoming one. The same happens if the destination MAC
address is the broadcast one (ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff). This behavior bootstraps
the learning process. ↩
If you look closely at what happens at t=2s, you can see that R2 is
gaining popularity as root: S17 to S36 believe R2 is the root bridge. S16
does not follow because we hit the maximum age. Later, S17 to S20 reverse
their position. I’ll let you explore the state of the various bridges to
understand the root cause. ↩
When increasing the maximum age to 40, you also need to
increase the forward delay to 21 (:forward-delay 21), as the standard
enforces this condition: 2 × (Forward Delay − 1) ≥ Max Age. For this
specific topology, you could also increase the maximum age to 37 and
forward-delay to 20. ↩
The simulation may seem slow, but it does not run in real time. Look at
the current timestamp in the upper right corner to know the wall clock, e.g.
“t=8s.” Once the topology stabilizes, the same corner shows the convergence
time, e.g. “🌳 2s.” ↩
Last week was the thirteenth week of videos from the 250 to 250 Project that we’re producing to honor the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.
Our hope was for the videos to emphasize the agency of Americans—mostly everyday Americans—to change the country. Each falls into a category that defines what it means to be an American, including community, democracy, innovation, mobility, civil rights, education, conservation, and creativity. Once again this week, some of our narrators chose their own topics adding wonderful new stories.
This was yet another week of spectacular narrators who themselves represent the innovation, talent, and civic-mindedness we were hoping to celebrate.
You can follow the project at the sites listed below, or under “videos” at my own YouTube page: Heather Cox Richardson. Or just wait until I send out the week’s roundup.
John Palfrey, recognized as one of the best leaders in America by U.S. News & World Report, is an American educator, legal scholar, and author who serves as the president of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. He is the great-grandson of President Theodore Roosevelt, who won the Nobel Peace Prize for brokering the Treaty of Portsmouth.
Robert “Fighting Bob” La Follette, Narrated by Ben Wikler
is an American political organizer and New York Times best-selling author who served as the chair of the Democratic Party of Wisconsin from July 2019 to July 2025. Wikler’s latest book This Is The Plan: How to End America’s Meltdown and Save Democracy is now available. Wikler profiles Robert “Fighting Bob” La Follette, the Wisconsin reformer who battled corporate power and drove some of the Progressive Movement’s greatest victories.
I.M. Pei, Narrated by Billie Tsien
Billie Tsien is a renowned Chinese-American architect, co-founder of Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects, National Medal of Arts recipient, and lead designer behind the Obama Presidential Center. Tsien profiles architect I.M. Pei, whose bold geometric designs—from the National Gallery’s East Wing to the Louvre pyramid—helped define American modernism.
Edward R. Murrow, Narrated by Scott MacFarlane
is anchor of “Scott MacFarlane Reports” and Chief Washington Correspondent for MeidasTouch Network. MacFarlane has earned 20 Emmy and Edward R. Murrow awards and the Anna Quindlen Award for excellence in journalism from the Child Welfare League of America. Edward R. Murrow was a radio and television newscaster whose unflinching reports set the standard for American broadcast journalism.
Norman Rockwell, Narrated by Kahlil Greene
, the “Gen-Z Historian,” is a well-known digital educator, Peabody Award winner, and two-time Emmy nominee with an audience of over 50 million views across TikTok, Instagram, and author of History Can’t Hide on Substack. Greene profiles illustrator Norman Rockwell, whose beloved images of everyday American life evolved to confront war, civil rights, and the nation’s conscience.
Tlingits, Narrated by Rosita Worl
Dr. Rosita Worl is a Tlingit American anthropologist, educator, and president of the Sealaska Heritage Institute recognized as an expert in Southeast Alaska Native culture and history. Worl introduces the Tlingit people, “People of the Tides,” who have stewarded Southeast Alaska’s coasts since time immemorial and fought to defend Indigenous rights.
Wright Brothers Narrated by Governor Josh Stein
of North Carolina is lifelong public servant who previously served in the state Senate, as Senior Deputy Attorney General for consumer protection, and as North Carolina Attorney General. Governor Stein celebrates the Wright brothers, whose 12-second flight at Kitty Hawk in 1903 launched the age of aviation.
Head Start, Narrated by Jill Biden
Dr. Jill Biden is a highly regarded educator and former First Lady and Second Lady of the United States of America. Dr. Biden is a strong advocate for education, early learning initiatives, military families, and women’s health. Here, her history of Head Start reminds us that participation improves children’s language, literacy, and social skills.
Lemon Grove, Narrated by Marianna Vinson
Marianna Vinson is a first-generation Mexican-American educator. The Superintendent of the Lemon Grove School District, Vinson formerly served as the Deputy Director for the Office of English Language Acquisition at the U.S. Department of Education. In 1931, the San Diego County Superior Court ruled that the segregation at Lemon Grove violated California law.
Battle of Fallen Timbers, Narrated by Wes Siler
is an independent journalist who has spent the last 24 years writing about the intersection of public lands, conservation, and politics. He’s currently building a new Substack newsletter about those topics. He tells the story of the brief battle that forced Native American displacement from most of modern-day Ohio, opening it to white American settlement.
Mount St. Helens Eruption, Narrated by John Ebel
Dr. John Ebel is a highly regarded senior scientist at the Weston Observatory at Boston College whose expertise has made him the go-to source for media reporting on earthquakes in New England and around the world. He explains what happened in 1980, when Mount St. Helens erupted in the most destructive volcanic event in American history.
Woodlot Revolt, Narrated by Paula Peters
Paula Peters is a journalist, educator and activist. A citizen of the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe, she travels internationally to speak and educate on the true Wampanoag story. Here she tells the story of the 1833 Woodlot Revolt, in which Wampanoag activists were arrested but the Wampanoag achieved a period of self-rule until 1870.
Mayo Clinic, Narrated by Dr. Stephen Ray Mitchell
Dr. Stephen Ray Mitchell is an award-winning medical expert who currently serves as the Joseph Butenas Professor of Medicine and Pediatrics and Dean Emeritus for Medical Education at Georgetown University School of Medicine. Dr. Mitchell has chaired the North American Liaison Committee for Medical Education (LCME) and has led accreditation visits to over 20 other Medical Schools. He tells the story of the founding of the Mayo Clinic, which pioneered many hallmarks of modern health care.
Wilma Mankiller, Narrated by Julie Reed
Julie Reed is a citizen of the Cherokee nation, Native American historian, author, and professor whose reflective essays include a widely syndicated piece about Wilma Mankiller, the first female principal chief of Cherokee Nation.
Human reproduction gives rise to lots of different controversies, with the partisans not always aligned across issues the ways you might suppose. Here are two articles responding to a recent controversy in the news, one about a proposed ban on surrogacy in Texas, and one proposing more comprehensive regulation as a way of supporting access to surrogacy in the face of opposition.
Here's an article from the 19th News (named after the 19th Amendment to the US constitution, which gave women the right to vote), about how abortion opponents in Texas are hoping to also outlaw surrogacy there.
"Anti-abortion activists and lawmakers in Texas are pressing to limit or even outlaw surrogacy, a new step toward restricting major forms of infertility treatment.
"Surrogacy, though far from common, has entered the national spotlight this summer, the result of an explosive case in which an Alaska woman named McKenna West — who had been hired to carry a pregnancy for a California-based couple — traveled to Texas to seek medical care after refusing to have an abortion. She gave birth in Dallas last week.
...
"the case has become a lightning rod for national anti-abortion activists, including Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who intervened in the case on behalf of West to argue that the child must receive life-sustaining treatment in Texas, even though court records indicate his parents sought for him to receive care in California. (Paxton, who has frequently allied himself with social conservatives, is in a competitive race to represent Texas in the U.S. Senate.) West has secured representation from the Alliance Defending Freedom, a prominent anti-abortion legal group.
Abortion opponents have argued that the case underscores a need to outlaw surrogacy entirely.
...
"Kristan Hawkins, the president of the national anti-abortion group Students for Life of America, argued on the social media platform X that surrogacy “is human trafficking with better marketing.”
...
“It’s reasonable to expect some legislation will move at least out of the Senate on this topic,” John Seago, the head of Texas Right to Life, an anti-abortion organization that opposes surrogacy in all forms, told The 19th. Seago’s organization also opposes the freezing of and destruction of embryos that are not used for pregnancy, a standard component of IVF.
...
"The Texas Public Policy Foundation, an influential right-wing think tank in the state, has also argued in favor of banning surrogacy. And the state Republican Party adopted a platform this summer saying it would support outlawing any “commercialization of human reproduction in Texas.”
######
And here's a call for more (and more national) regulation of surrogacy, in the WSJ:
Surrogacy Is Getting Weird Dozens of American babies commissioned by Chinese billionaires, felony charges, embryo mix-ups and more. By Emma Camp
I’m tapping this out on the phone on the train back home at Monday lunchtime, after a weekend in Essex with my sister doing more sorting out of the old family home.
We had three four-drawer filing cabinets remaining before we’d complete the big initial phase of “look at every single thing and work out roughly what to do with it, discarding, saving, and finding new homes for some of it along the way.”
We got through one cabinet on Saturday afternoon and on Sunday started on the big one: four drawers crammed with a hanging file for nearly every year of Dad’s life, containing letters, leaflets, tickets, receipts, posters, essays, cuttings, photos, articles, mementoes, booklets, membership cards, journals, greetings cards, reports, postcards, payslips, forms, and on and on and on. I think it took us all day to get through one drawer, to the mid-1970s.
In a way this is lovely. We’re able to slowly follow Dad’s life through all this saved ephemera, all the things that meant something to him. We’ve kept some things, of course, and sorted others into themed piles in the hope we can find new homes for some of it. We often thought, “If there is someone doing a PhD about [very specific event in the history of the Labour Party] they’d love this.”
§ On Friday the home battery installers returned, having only supplied us with one of the two 5kWh batteries we’d been promised. We didn’t realise at first, and I’d been concerned the battery power wasn’t lasting throughout the night (especially before working out how to reduce the amount of power reserved in case of power cut). So, now we have our full 10.2kWh.
I spent two or three afternoons during the week setting up Home Assistant (HA) in a VirtualBox VM on my laptop, just to see what it could offer us. It was inevitably pretty fiddly and time-consuming but, despite reading three people independently saying it’s best to rely on Claude to set things up, I thankfully didn’t need to sully my pure fingers with such collaboration (in two senses of the word). I mostly achieved my aim: be able to see info about the heat pump, hot water tank, battery, solar panels, and EV charger in one place, rather than several separate apps of varying quality.
HA is pretty amazing really, for a free open-source thing. There’s more I could do with it, other than the many graphs I’ve now got, but I’ll wait to show Mary (currently away for two weeks trekking round a mountain in the Alps) before we decide whether to set up something more permanent.
§ I finished reading The Go-Between by L. P. Hartley this week and it was very good! I love it when an old (1953) book is readable, rather than feeling like a worthy chore. A good account of what it’s like to be a boy who doesn’t know as much as he thinks he does, albeit a public schoolboy in 1900.
§ We finished watching The Undoing which was alright. I mean, I quite enjoyed it – easy to watch, entertaining, not too stressful – although I’m not sure it was good. I realised that with shows like this (and this may be a very unoriginal thought) you’re not trying to work out “whodunnit”, but “who did the writers finally say dunnit”. There’s no objective truth to discern about the characters, it’s just what would be the best story. It’s guessing what writers think, not who did a crime.
Anyway, a murder, very wealthy white people, very under-written non-white victims, Nicole Kidman doing not much other than staring out of her motionless face, and Donald Sutherland out-performing everyone.
§ And I finished watching Widow’s Bay which, like everyone says, was good. I can’t say I was gripped by it though, especially the couple of flashback-to-the-distant-past episodes, after which it took me a few weeks to must the enthusiasm to continue. Thankfully it wasn’t as horror as I feared, because that wouldn’t have been my cup of tea. Good, funny stuff though.
Joint custody reforms are among the most consequential family-law changes for children, yet little is known about their long-term effects. Exploiting staggered adoption across US states and 13 million ACS observations, we show that childhood exposure reduces adult fertility by 7 percent, symmetrically for women and men and operates primarily through lower parenthood and couple formation. Effects are sub-additive within couples, while exposed individuals assortatively match. Our findings point to the formation of family preferences during childhood and align with a US fertility decline increasingly driven by rising childlessness and declining couple formation rather than smaller families among parents.
Today’s Picture of the Week, taken with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), reveals one of the most detailed views yet of the surface of Betelgeuse — the famous orange star in the constellation of Orion, 600 light-years away. Unlike our own Sun, which is relatively smooth and spherical, Betelgeuse is a red supergiant almost 800 times larger, with a highly uneven, lumpy surface.
Betelgeuse’s peaks and troughs originate from the motion of giant bubbles of hot gas rising from deep within the star to its surface. The team behind these observations suggest that this large-scale movement of gas leads to these ‘hotspots’ on the star’s surface. Surprisingly, however, the brightest hotspot seen in the new observations also appears in data recorded seven years earlier, much longer than the lifetimes predicted by current models.
The persistent nature of these hotspots may be connected to the orbit of a close companion star recently suggested by observations with ESO’s Very Large Telescope. The team was motivated to study the star’s surface to see whether hotspots could be related to events such as the dramatic dimming of Betelgeuse in 2020. As a star nearing the end of its life, there's another reason Betelgeuse draws astronomers. “Its eventual fate as a supernova makes it fascinating to know what it actually looks like now,” says lead author of the study Bill Dent, an astronomer at ESO. When Betelgeuse does eventually explode, it will be bright enough to see from Earth even in broad daylight.
MUSIC EPISODE: “You think you understand patriotism, you have your hands around it–it’s the simple thing, but it turns out it’s not. And maybe, music and the history of music shows us all that better than mere discourse about it.”
The rugged terrain of the Silver Island Mountains and Crater Island rises above the pale playa and bright salt flats of former Lake Bonneville. The image was acquired with the OLI (Operational Land Imager) on Landsat 8 on June 4, 2026, and overlaid on a digital elevation model.
NASA Earth Observatory/Michala Garrison
At its peak, ancient Lake Bonneville would have been a sight to behold. Nearly as large as Lake Michigan, the Ice Age lake spread across much of western Utah and parts of Nevada and Idaho. When it eventually receded, it left behind flat, bright playas and salt flats rich with minerals—a landscape that would later serve as the setting for feats of engineering and technological ingenuity, as well as epic tales of exploration and desperation.
Lake Bonneville began forming about 55,000 years ago during a cool, wet period, when volcanic eruptions in what’s now southeastern Idaho diverted the Bear River, causing water to gather in Gem Valley and other basins to the south. For tens of thousands of years, a natural dam at Red Rock Pass helped confine the lake.
Then, about 18,000 years ago, water breached that dam, unleashing a torrent that entered the Columbia River system. Over a six-week period, amid one of North America’s largest floods, lake levels plummeted by more than 350 feet (105 meters). As the climate warmed and dried in subsequent millennia, the lake shrank dramatically, leaving remnants that include today’s Great Salt Lake, Utah Lake, and Sevier Lake.
Lake Bonneville may be gone, but its imprint on the region’s landscape remains—even in satellite imagery. In this image (below) captured by the OLI (Operational Land Imager) on the NASA-USGS Landsat 8 satellite, bathtub-like rings and wave-cut terraces trace the position of former shorelines. The dried lakebed—where fine-grained clay, marl, and sandy sediment settled out of the water—appears pale in comparison to the darker, rockier, more vegetated surroundings.
NASA scientists analyzed the terrain in this part of Utah when testing technologies that will be used on NASA’s DAVINCI mission to Venus. This image was acquired with the OLI (Operational Land Imager) on Landsat 8 on June 4, 2026.
NASA Earth Observatory/Michala Garrison
In deep parts of the basin, where runoff and groundwater still pool, bright deposits of evaporite minerals coat the land surfaces, forming salt flats. These remarkably flat surfaces are the product of water gradually evaporating and concentrating minerals to produce brines and hard mineral crusts, typically including halite and gypsum, along with potassium- and magnesium-bearing salts. Brines and deposits like these—particularly of potash, which is used as a fertilizer—have long made the playa a target for mining, as seen in the rectangular evaporation ponds above and below.
In contrast, the darker, more rugged terrain—including the Silver Island Mountains, the Newfoundland Mountains, and the Pilot Range—that rises above the playas is built from layers of erosion-resistant sedimentary and metasedimentary bedrock that is hundreds of millions of years old. These mountains also contain younger igneous and metamorphic rocks that formed when magma intruded into the ancient sedimentary sequence.
Crater Island, for instance, is composed of sedimentary rocks, including silica-rich sandstones and quartzites that formed as sands accumulated in a shallow ocean, as well as intrusions of quartz monzonite, granites, and other igneous rocks. Periods of crustal stretching later produced the fault-block mountains that define the landscape.
This animation shows the descent over Crater Island, Utah, of the camera system that will one day fly aboard NASA’s DAVINCI mission to Venus. It was created by stitching together 37 infrared images captured during a test on June 24, 2026.
Malin Space Science Systems/NASA/Jay Friedlander
Mapping geological distinctions like this took center stage in June 2026 when NASA scientists and engineers working with the agency’s DAVINCI mission came to Crater Island—a place they call “Venus on Earth”—to field-test the design of a set of cameras and a package of instruments that will eventually descend through the thick atmosphere of Venus and photograph mountains at scales finer than these Landsat images. During a 60-minute descent, the pioneering probe will capture near-infrared images, measure the atmospheric chemistry, and explore the environment of a world in unprecedented detail.
During the rehearsals at Crater Island, the camera system took hundreds of images of various rock formations, including iron-rich and silica-rich rock units, while suspended from a helicopter as it descended toward the surface. Using only the images acquired by DAVINCI’s camera systems, the team made three-dimensional maps of the area consistent with existing geologic maps, giving the scientists confidence that they will be able to map the geology of an analogous mountainous region on Venus that DAVINCI will study, an area called Alpha Regio.
Other epic adventures have played out on and around Lake Bonneville’s playas, as well. The flat, smooth surfaces have often been the setting for new land speed records. In 1960, Mickey Thompson became the first American to break the 400-miles-per-hour (640 kilometers-per-hour) barrier, hitting 406.60 miles per hour (654.36 kilometers per hour) in a streamlined race car on the Bonneville Salt Flats. The feat temporarily earned him the nickname “fastest man on Earth.”
People mine minerals from the Bonneville Salt Flats and use its flat surface to pursue land speed records. This image was acquired with the OLI (Operational Land Imager) on Landsat 8 on June 4, 2026.
NASA Earth Observatory/Michala Garrison
More recently, in August 2026, Andy Green, the first person to break the sound barrier on land, set a record for the fastest land speed in a hydrogen-fueled internal-combustion vehicle, reaching 406.320 miles per hour (653.909 kilometers per hour). By burning hydrogen rather than gasoline, the “rocket car” produced no carbon dioxide.
Nearly two centuries earlier, in August 1846, members of the ill-fated Donner-Reed Party also passed along the southern edge of Crater Island. As part of a shortcut toward Pilot Peak, they journeyed from Hastings Pass, past Floating Island, and toward Donner Spring. However, in an ominous sign of challenges to come, their heavy wagons broke through the thin salt crust and became mired in underlying mud, slowing them down and prompting them to abandon several wagons in the desert.
NASA Earth Observatory images by Michala Garrison, using Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey.Story by Adam Voiland.
Across Southwest, a mid-late summer characterized by exceptional and sustained overnight warmth Following a record warm winter across most of the American West, it has also been a record (or near-record) warm summer across most of the interior West (and fire season from the Southern Rockies to the Great Basin to the Pacific Northwest has […]
Federal debt is in the news. There were many headlines last week about the debt exceeding $40 trillion and now being bigger than the economy. There were also headlines about rising interest rates on long-term debt and the showy, ineffectual attempt of Scott Bessent, the Treasury secretary, to manipulate them down.
Some of this is hype. Properly measured, debt is “only” $32 trillion. The comparison with GDP involves apples and oranges. And as I argued the other day, rising rates do not signal an imminent fiscal crisis.
Yet the debt is indeed very large and some concern is warranted. In the next installment of this series, I will address policy recommendations for a future Democratic administration to address the debt. I say a Democratic administration because Republicans will deny that there is a debt problem as long as they hold the White House.
But first we need to ask the question of how we got here. JD Vance says that it’s Joe Biden’s fault, because of course he does. Many others blame either reckless public spending or the fiscal burden of an aging population.
The reality, however, is that U.S. debt would be much lower as a percentage of GDP, and would barely be in the news at all, without the revenue loss from tax cuts enacted by Republican presidents: George W. Bush in the 2000s, then Donald Trump during both of his terms.
Today’s primer will examine the causes of high current U.S. debt. Beyond the paywall I will discuss the following:
1. U.S. spending, taxes and debt in historical and international perspective
A few interesting numbers in this FT story gathered from "people with knowledge of the matter":
Anthropic's "annualized revenue" for July is up to $65bn - it was $47bn in May, and I collected more historic numbers here.
Anthropic expect Q3 to be profitable according to the same model they used to declare Q2 profitable. "It also told investors that it had 6,000 customers that spend $100,000 annually or more."
As for OpenAI, "annualised revenue has jumped 35 per cent in the quarter to date and is now over $40bn, with the launch of GPT 5.6 in July jolting the company’s performance after a sluggish start to the year".
This article also introduced me to the Ramp AI index, which uses billing data from 70,000 Ramp credit card using companies to estimate model adoption.
Here's Ramp's breakdown of Anthropic model spend for July 2026, which looks reasonable given that Opus 5 was only released on July 24th, and supports the idea that Fable's cost has made it a less popular model:
Prior to Fable, it felt silly to waste too much time improving your coding harness or context strategies. A new model would arrive at the same price (or cheaper!) and paper over most of your problems.
But then Fable landed. It was (and still is!) incredible. But the cost was so high and Opus was good enough (as was 5.6, K3, and even GLM) for most of the code we needed.
So we started to think about what work went where.
(Lord’s day). Up and to church without my wife, she being all dirty, as my house is. God forgive me, I looked about to see if I could spy Pembleton, but I could not, which did please me not a little. Home to dinner, and then to walk up and down in my house with my wife, discoursing of our family matters, and I hope, after all my troubles of mind and jealousy, we shall live happily still. To church again, and so home to my wife; and with her read “Iter Boreale,” a poem, made just at the King’s coming home; but I never read it before, and now like it pretty well, but not so as it was cried up. So to supper. No pleasure or discourse with Ashwell, with whom for her neglect and unconcernment to do any thing in this time of dirt and trouble in the house, but gadding abroad as she has been all this afternoon, I know not whither. After supper to prayers and to bed, having been, by a sudden letter coming to me from Mr. Coventry, been with Sir W. Pen, to discourse with him about sending 500 soldiers into Ireland. I doubt matters do not go very right there.
China's "Manned Space" program issued a terse announcement on Sunday regarding its much-anticipated Chang’e 7 lunar exploration mission.
The agency stated: "In keeping with the principle of proceeding prudently and reliably, and ensuring absolute success, after a comprehensive assessment it has been determined that the Chang’e 7 mission does not meet the conditions for launch and therefore cannot be carried out during the planned launch window this year."
The Chinese message offered no explanation for the cause of the delay from the Wenchang Space Launch Site, located on an island in the South China Sea. Consisting of a lunar orbiter, lander, rover, and a mini-hopper of a probe, the mission was due to launch as early as Sunday on a Long March 5 rocket. It is intended to land at the South Pole of the Moon.
John Moltz, in his weekly members-only column for Six Colors (no gift links, but Moltz’s column is worth the subscription in and of itself):
This week Anthropic announced that in order to identify AI from
human-generated content it would be watermarking all text it
generates by subtly altering the randomness at which its models
picked the next word. While this might seem a perfectly cromulent
means of accomplishing a worthy goal, it really rubbed John Gruber
the wrong way, as if someone suggested putting autocomplete Swiss
on his Philly cheesesteak AI.
Cooper Sharp cheese is the way to go. The best new cheesesteak joint in town — Uncle Gus’s — only offers Cooper Sharp, in fact.
Surely a fair number of the hundreds and hundreds of bees that
have nested in Gruber’s extremely fancy bonnet are a result of the
fact that this is all ostensibly in response to a mandate from the
EU. But, as James Thomson has suggested, Anthropic might actually
want to watermark so that it doesn’t scoop up its own output to
train its models, thereby degrading the results. In fact, the
company would probably love to be able to figure out other
companies’ watermarks and have them not be able to figure out its
watermark.
For the record, my opposition to Claude’s plan to begin watermark-adulterating all generated text, worldwide, has nothing to do with it ostensibly being to comply with a regulation from the EU. I do think the EU regulation is deeply ill-considered (and, having been drafted in 2024, already technically out of date), but I’d have written everything I wrote (and will continue to write) about the matter even if the EU had no AI-related regulations in place. In fact, while writing my initial piece, I really wished this had nothing to do with the EU, because pointing out the folly of the regulation (and the ridiculousness of a company supposedly worth $2 trillion being technically unable to comply with an EU regulation without applying the changes globally) seemed a distraction from my point, regarding the ramifications of watermarking text by way of detectable word choices. Moltz’s aside here confirms that.
Also, more and more, I do think this has little to do with the EU regulation and everything to do with Anthropic and Google wanting to watermark the text that Claude and Gemini generate for their own purposes, to identify text to avoid training future models on to avoid model collapse/AI inbreeding. I suspect blaming the decision on the EU “Code of Practice” regulation is just scapegoating on Anthropic’s part.
(As a bonus, Moltz has a deliciously sharp (no cheese pun intended) take on the schadenfreude-rich saga of MacStories returning to Twitter/X.)
1. “Underestimating something that has an AI “accent” by reflexively dismissing it as slop rhymes curiously with underestimating someone because they have a funny accent in your native language (and it isn’t one of the accents that you think signals superiority, like the BBC British accent for English).” V. Rao.
A few more thoughts on the collapse of U.S.-Canadian trade negotiations and the over-the-top U.S. predation that led to it. (See my earlier post here.) Here’s a portion of an analysis piece from the Toronto Star …
Doing a deal under the conditions Carney described would clearly have undermined Canada’s pivot to new markets by putting Carney firmly under the thumb of the U.S.
As the prime minister described it, he was faced with a trade agreement that was suddenly transformed into an attack on Canadian sovereignty, an attempted psychological annexation that could have turned Canada into an American client state, a sort of North American Belarus.
It does, however, jive with Trump’s repeated 51st state taunts when he returned to the White House.
And Trump’s National Security Strategy said of America’s neighbours in the Western Hemisphere: “We want other nations to see us as their partner of first choice, and we will (through various means) discourage their collaboration with others.”
As Donald Trump not so much dismantles the U.S.-backed global order as dynamites it, that destruction coupled with the rise of a more vocal and electorally prominent U.S. left has renewed the discussion of just what that U.S.-backed global order was. This passage and this whole U.S.-Canada breakdown illustrates a lot of it.
The U.S. has been a great power by various definitions for more than a century. It was one of two for most of the latter half of the 20th century and the sole one starting in the final decade of the 20th century.
To understand this now-receding era, we must recognize that U.S. power functioned differently with the relatively wealthy states primarily in the global north and those poorer states mainly in the south. Its power was based largely on two key alliance structures: One based in Europe (NATO) which is really the western fringe of Eurasia and another based on the littoral and island fringe of East Asia — Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, et al. It was a book I read by Zbigniew Brzezinski about 20 years ago that really shaped my understanding of how these two alliance structures fit together with global geography. The U.S. completely dominates North America by its economic, military and even geographical heft and faces no real strategic competitors in South America. So we’re free of any real foes in our whole hemisphere.
Meanwhile, these two alliance structures create counterweights to Eurasia’s two great land powers, Russia and China. One of the reasons this has been a sustainable arrangement is that it worked for both sides. The U.S. gets things it wants. For Western Europe and littoral East Asia, it provides a counterweight to the local potential dominator/bully. But, critically, that counterweight comes from a partner which isn’t too close at hand. The U.S. is big and powerful. But they are and will always be across the sea, over the horizon.
This schema of course leaves out a huge amount of the globe. But it was a stable and mutually beneficial system, and at least until quite recently covered most of the globe’s wealth, as well as real and potential military power. (It’s also no accident that most of the U.S.’s problems, wars and blunders over the last two generations have been in another place that doesn’t fit into this schema geographically, culturally or really any other way: the Greater Middle East.) And the key to its stability is that in those two alliance structures, the U.S. didn’t ask that much. No, the U.S. isn’t a global philanthropist bringing peace and prosperity to all. But its terms are fairly generous. In these two theaters, the U.S. has acted not as a dominator but more like a first among equals.
Critics of U.S. power have always stumbled on this basic fact. For all the purported similarities between the U.S. and Russian great power models, why are countries in Europe trying to stay in or enter into our imperium rather break free of it? Ukraine illustrates all of this. It’s why Russia’s Eurasian Economic Union and its security counterpart, the Collective Security Treaty Organization, have been basically a bust while the EU and NATO have grown. Yes, yes, yes, the CIA and Victoria Nuland are the secret hands and all the rest. The reality is that the proof of the pudding has been in the eating.
The basic answer on all these fronts is that the U.S. imperium, for those who wish to call it that, is, in these two theaters, a good deal. It doesn’t ask that much. The U.S. has operated as a first among equals, not a mob boss. The centerpiece of Trumpism is that it wants to be a dominator, especially in the regions where that’s plausible, the Americas. (It’s no accident that the Star says the Trump wants to make Canada into an American Belarus, a nominally sovereign client state.) And in the short term the U.S. has a lot of power to do that, or at least extract big costs from countries which don’t comply. But the U.S. was never powerful enough and certainly isn’t powerful enough now to be the dominator of Europe and littoral East Asia, and certainly not the entire globe — not without infinitely larger spending on military power. We’re already seeing the de facto limits of U.S. military might with an adversary as comparatively feeble as Iran.
The simple fact is that for all the other evils of Trumpism, they simply don’t understand the basis of American power, military or economic. That’s the basis of the absurdity of the last decade, in which the U.S. is somehow the defiant rebel against the system it created for its own prosperity and security and which has ensured both for going on a century. Listen to their thinking and you see it clearly: We’re the big power. We’re in charge. But we don’t act like we’re in charge. We let ourselves get pushed around. Now we’re going to be in charge. They simply don’t understand that to the extent we are “in charge,” the underlying basis of the agreement puts us in charge. It’s the comparatively easy terms of American global power. They really do imagine that U.S. allies are something like colonies or Finlandized client states that we’ve just let get over their skis.
The truth is that this precedes Trumpism. We saw this in that pivotal 18 months or so between the 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001 and the invasion of Iraq in early 2003. (I actually wrote a review essay about this conversation and the books it spawned in a review essay in The New Yorker at the end of 2003.) It was less impetuous and feral. But the outlines are the same: We’re in charge. But we haven’t been acting like we’re in charge. And it’s that lackadaisical approach to managing the globe that made things like 9/11 possible. So now we’re going to actually be in charge. Again, a basic misunderstanding of the basis on which we are “in charge.”
In truth, though I’ve been a partisan in these debates for half my life, a lot of this was probably inevitable with the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the major counterweight to American power, which shaped the “good” decisions America made to put this whole system in place. A different and more fecund line of argument is whether the deal America made with its major allies drove unequal shifts in America’s domestic economy which ended up undermining the American domestic political foundations of these global alliances. That’s a complicated question. But there’s at least a there there.
I’ve talked a lot here about big think and the nature and limits of American power. I should conclude with what I hope goes without saying but still needs to be said. This breakdown in U.S.-Canada relations isn’t just a misapprehension of the nature of American power. It’s deeply wrong, an unprovoked assault on friendly neighbors and longstanding partners with whom we share so much. As I wrote to a Canadian, discussing this this morning, this whole episode is a source of shame and embarrassment for the United States.
The magazine Reasons to be cheerful has a cheerful discussion of kidney exchange (which includes some reflections by Mike Rees on non-simultaneous chains):
"Momentum is building in the U.S. behind the proposedEnd Kidney Deaths Act, which would provide a refundable tax credit of $50,000 to those who donate a kidney to a stranger. Campaigners say this would remove financial barriers to donating, which include loss of income during testing, surgery and recovery — while saving the billions of dollars currently spent on dialysis. "
One of the reasons that I oppose the extension of democratic politics into every aspect of modern life is precisely that in trying to do too much, democracy delivers incoherence, gridlock and frustration, forces that eventually undermine its own legitimacy. I worry about democratic legitimacy because I see democracy as a check and balance on Leviathan (while Heath sees it as a check on government by experts).
The legislature has become a sideshow. But I worry, because the more Congress is held in contempt the greater the support for a bold executive that takes charge, makes decisions and gets things done. Under these pressures, executive power has grown not just in the United States but also in Canada and Great Britain (on this theme see F.H. Buckley’s The Once and Future King.) But for all its faults, the legislature and the rule of law are more conducive to liberty than the executive and the administrative state. Legislators are satisfied with reelection and a bit of pork but executives hunger for greatness and in so doing they promote the real dangers, idolatry, the centralization of power and war.
In short, I worry that the pathologies of democracy drive the demand not for rational, technocratic government but for Caesarism.
I should note that this was before Donald Trump was a Republican presidential contender, let alone a candidate for office.
Addendum: See also my review of Enlightenment 2.0. It has some good lines!
The propagandizing messages of markets and politics are also very different. Market messages are largely inclusive and cosmopolitan. Coca-Cola advertises “I’d Like to Buy the World a Coke” because they’d like the world to buy a Coke. Firms do try to build brand affiliation but they rarely do so by promoting hatred of their competitors. Pepsi doesn’t tell the Pepsi Generation that Coke drinkers are stealing their jobs and spitting on their gods.
Hat tip: @kingofthecoastt who recently tweeted about the original post.
On Tuesday, August 18, during a debate for a runoff to win the South Carolina Republican senatorial primary, Senator Darline Graham (R-SC) answered a question about Taiwan and the importance of the South China Sea by saying: “I’m not that informed on national security.” She paused, and added: “But I do support the military.”
The audience reacted with boos and gasps. Senators are supposed to manage national security.
Trying to clean up her mistake, Graham went to an interview with the friendly Sean Hannity at the Fox News Channel, where she tried to make a virtue of her error by saying it reflects that she is not a politician. Then she added that people in South Carolina are worried less about foreign affairs than they are about affordability, “boys in girls’ sports,” the Second Amendment, “illegal immigration,” and the SAVE America Act.
Journalist Parker Molloy noted that trans girls have been banned from competing in K–12 girls sports since 2022 and are banned from competing in the NCAA and the Olympics. “This is literally an issue that doesn’t affect SC at all anymore,” Molloy noted. “They got what they wanted. How is this still a priority?”
Graham perfectly represents the modern Republican Party. South Carolina governor Henry McMaster appointed her to fill the vacancy caused by the death of her brother, Senator Lindsey Graham. McMaster said Trump “thought it was a great idea” for her to replace her brother, and she has indicated her loyalty to Trump and her willingness to pass the SAVE America Act he so badly wants in order to rig the 2026 midterm elections. Graham has little political experience, and with little to offer voters other than loyalty to Trump, she is simply echoing Republican culture war talking points that worked for him in 2016.
But it appears voters don’t like living in the world Trump is creating.
As Cleve R. Wootson Jr. noted yesterday in the Washington Post, Trump went to South Carolina last night to help Graham’s campaign. He told those attending the rally that the election was really about him. Although Graham’s opponent in the runoff, Representative Ralph Norman, has made much of Graham’s inexperience, Trump told rally attendees: “They’re only fighting Darline because they want me to lose.”
Wootson notes that Trump is hoping for a Graham win to restore some of the power that is slipping away as his popularity continues to slide to new lows. Primary candidates he backed for governor in Iowa, Georgia, Wyoming, and Minnesota all lost, as did those he backed in congressional primaries in Michigan and Tennessee.
Indeed, as Graham was fumbling the debate last Tuesday, two former teachers endorsed by Democrats flipped the Sarasota, Florida, school board. That board had been dominated by right-wing candidates since 2022, led by Moms for Liberty co-founder Bridget Ziegler, who has said public schools are “indoctrination centers for the radical left” and that she wanted to bring “religious values” to them.
Formed in 2021, Moms for Liberty was behind the book banning of the past several years. Ziegler is married to the former chair of the Florida Republican Party, who was forced out of his position after a woman alleged he had raped her in relation to the three-way sexual relationship she had with the Zieglers. Bridget Ziegler refused to step down from the school board after the scandal broke.
As Kerry Sheridan of WUSF reported, Beth Mayberry and Megan Tennimon ran on issues of school funding, academic achievement, and helping students in underserved areas. Both won their races by more than 10 percentage points.
As political historian Joanne Freeman put it Saturday morning in our chat on What the Heck Just Happened?, when Republican leaders in 2020 decided not to write a political platform at all, but simply to “reassert the Party’s strong support for President Donald Trump and his Administration” and to say it would “continue to enthusiastically support the President’s America-first agenda,” they gave him every reason to think that “all of the things that he’s doing to promote himself—the races and the gold and everything else—that that’s all campaigning. It’s all about him.”
Then, when party leaders in 2024 essentially turned Trump’s social media posts into a platform, they embraced the idea that the party could stay in power through slogans. They promised to “DEFEAT INFLATION, AND QUICKLY BRING DOWN ALL PRICES,” to “BRING BACK THE AMERICAN DREAM AND MAKE IT AFFORDABLE AGAIN FOR FAMILIES, YOUNG PEOPLE, AND EVERYONE,” to “promote a Foreign Policy centered on the most essential American Interests, starting with protecting the American Homeland, our People, our Borders, our Great American Flag, and our Rights under God,” and so on.
The Republican Party tied itself to Trump and remains tied to him as he devotes his time to celebrating himself with his ballroom, a UFC cage match at the White House, his triumphal arch, renovations to the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, and now this weekend’s “Freedom 250 Grand Prix” around the National Mall in Washington, D.C., in which 25 IndyCar drivers are covering 147 laps at speeds up to 150 mph around a 1.7-mile (2.7 km), 7-turn street circuit loop past the U.S. Capitol, the Washington Monument, the National Archives, and the National Gallery of Art.
The race has required workers to weld down more than 200 manhole covers, move traffic lights, and put up barriers that have disrupted traffic, while the National Gallery of Art has had to protect its sculptures from vibrations and airlines have had to reroute flights.
Meanwhile, the country remains embroiled in an apparently purposeless war in Iran; the economy is slowing and prices of food and gas are rising; Americans are horrified by the tactics of ICE and Border Patrol, who have abused and killed immigrants and U.S. citizens alike; Trump, his family, and his allies have put at least $2.2 billion in Trump’s pockets; and Trump has alienated our closest allies.
Just after midnight on August 21, Trump imposed a 50% tariff on a range of goods from Canada. Canada’s prime minister Mark Carney suspended trade negotiations with the U.S. and said Canada will impose retaliatory tariffs on the U.S. beginning September 8. In a statement, Carney said: “We have recognised from the beginning that America has changed, and that we will not return to our old relationship.” Canada, he said, will be “focused on building our strength at home [and] diversifying our partnerships abroad.”
And now the story that the closest advisor to the President of the United States is a 35-year-old woman who seems unhealthily obsessed with him ties Republican Party leadership to the reality that they are permitting the destruction of the United States with barely a whimper.
As Trump led Republicans into a box canyon, they have left an open field for Democrats to redefine the nation’s politics.
On August 17, former transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg recorded a video to assure those Americans who oppose the Trump administration that they are in the large majority. He noted that the strategy Republicans are pursuing shows how unpopular they are.
“Think about it,” he said. “They’re not out there showing that the economy is somehow better than it looks…. They’re not defending their cuts to healthcare, they’re not defending the tax cuts for the wealthy. They’re not defending the corruption that’s going on in Washington.”
“It’s too late for that,” he said, because “we’ve all seen that those policies have failed. They made us all pay tariffs and said the reason we got to do this is to bring back manufacturing jobs…. Well, we paid the tariffs, and then America lost manufacturing jobs. They cut taxes for the rich. They said we’ve got to do that in order to speed up economic growth. And what happened? Economic growth slowed down…. They said they were going to cut costs and prices. Inflation is actually higher now than the day Donald Trump took office. They said they were gonna drain the swamp. And then they expect us to be okay with the first family making a billion dollars or more in crypto deals while the president’s in office….
“A lot of people believed this president and Republicans when they said no new wars. Then, what do we get? A war with Iran in the Middle East right now, which means all of us here at home are paying higher gas prices.”
The Republican strategy is not to change their policies, Buttigieg said. “It’s changing the maps. Changing the rules. Because that’s the only way they could win. They know they’re on the wrong side of the American people….
“You’re already in the majority if you think that we need healthcare for all, not Medicaid cuts and cutting Obamacare…. Right now, if you think that the wealthiest people in the country need to be paying their fair share in taxes, which is more than they’re doing today, where they currently pay less than a lot of teachers and nurses and firefighters. You are definitely in the majority if you believe that the wealthiest nation in the world ought to do the best job of funding public education and making sure it works. Not this Republican approach, which is to literally eliminate the Department of Education. You’re not alone if you think that in any decent economy, one job ought to be enough. And you’re certainly not alone if you believe that a woman’s healthcare decisions ought to be up to her and no one else, that in a free country, you should get to be who you are, and love who you love, and live a life of your choosing. When you believe these things, you’re not just not alone. You’re part of a powerful majority. Really a supermajority of the American people.
“So, whether you’re a Democrat, an independent, or someone who has generally voted Republican in the past, most voters want the same things right now: to be led and represented by normal people who are good at getting things done. People want leaders who respect those who disagree or vote differently instead of calling them the enemy. People who know that God does not belong to a political party in the United States of America. Most voters want to elect leaders who are not simply trying to rebuild the past, but trying to create something new and better.”
I very recently participated in a two-day session to offer guidance on rewriting the constitution for Claude. The small group invited was uniformly excellent, we received serious time with key decision-makers, and the discussions were of very high quality.
Some of the points I stressed were the following:
1. Whatever one might take a “constitution” to mean in this context, it needs to borrow more from analogs to case law and the common law.
2. Along related lines, think more in terms of “Talmud,” and not just in terms of “Torah.”
3. Work to help build out a quality secondary literature on the AI constitutions and related documents. Currently this does not exist.
4. Consider how a panel of diverse AIs, with different prompts, could help to evaluate to what extent Claude (and other AI models) were acting in accord with their constitutions.
5. Have a final board of human adjudicators, functioning in a manner analogous to an independent judiciary. To the extent the panel of diverse AIs might have concerns about Claude not following its constitution, those AIs could alert the human adjudicators to what was going on. Those human adjudicators could then have authority over potential changes and remedies.
But because agents often require guidance or additional context as they move through their tasks, Sharma, 27, finds himself wanting to be available to them around the clock and forgoing a regular sleep schedule as a result. Until recently, he couldn’t monitor them remotely through a phone or smartwatch.
“The cost of the agents’ being blocked for eight hours is way too high,” he says. “They can be done with their work at any point of time, in the middle of the night.”
Founders have long put in punishing hours in the name of building the next big thing. But the growing capabilities of AI agents—and the speed at which the models powering them are evolving—give new meaning to working yourself to the bone…
“They just demand your attention,” he says. “Does it need anything? Can I help it in any way?”
…Pezaris, who lives in San Mateo, Calif., typically works from 7:30 a.m. to 2 a.m. He estimates Proxon, which employs six human developers, is operating 30 times faster than it would without agents. But agent work begets human work: Onboarding customers at a faster clip means needing to respond to more customer requests, for example.
There is also an agent FOMO multiplier effect. “Every minute that I’m not working, I’m missing out on not doing a week’s worth of work,” says Pezaris.
Here is more from Katherine Bindley at the WSJ. As I have been joking in some of my talks, we need to start taking bets on when the AI leisure dividend will arrive. It will, but not just yet…
I complained last week that starting with an update last month, the list of apps I’m testing in Apple’s TestFlight app has been sorted alphabetically, rather than by recency. Whatever is going on with this sort order, it isn’t affecting everyone. John Siracusa, amongst many others, has the same problem I do — his list is now alphabetical, and it’s driving him nuts too. Ryan Booker, amongst many others, still has his list sorted by recency.
The weird thing is, back on August 13, the iPhone version of TestFlight started showing my lists in recency-of-last-update order once again. There was no update to the TestFlight app itself. I just started seeing the list in the correct order once again. It was only on my iPhone though — on my Macs and iPad, TestFlight continued to sort apps alphabetically. Then, two days later, my iPhone went back to alphabetical order, and it’s been stuck there ever since.
When the list is sorted by recency, there’s also a “Currently Testing” header at the top of the list, and there are other (disclosable) categories like “Incompatible” and “Previously Tested” at the bottom of the list. When the list is sorted alphabetically, none of these category headers are visible.
Tropical Weather Outlook NWS Central Pacific Hurricane Center Honolulu HI Issued by NWS National Hurricane Center Miami FL 200 AM HST Tue Aug 25 2026
For the central North Pacific...between 140W and 180W:
Active Systems: The National Hurricane Center is issuing advisories on Tropical Storm Lala, located several hundred miles north of Pearl and Hermes Atoll, on Tropical Storm Iselle, located several hundred miles west of the southern tip of the Baja California Peninsula, and on recently upgraded Tropical Storm Julio, located well southwest of the southern tip of Baja California Peninsula. The National Hurricane Center has issued the last advisory on the remnants of Tropical Depression Moke, located several hundred miles east of Johnston Island,
Western East Pacific: A trough of low pressure located well to the east-southeast of the Hawaiian Islands is producing some disorganized showers and thunderstorms. An area of low pressure is forecast to form along the trough during the next couple of days, and environmental conditions appear conducive for some gradual development thereafter. A tropical depression could form during the latter part of the week or early this weekend while the system drifts generally north-northeastward. * Formation chance through 48 hours...low...30 percent. * Formation chance through 7 days...medium...60 percent.
&& Public Advisories on Tropical Storm Julio are issued under WMO header WTPZ35 NHC and under AWIPS header MIATCPEP5. Forecast/Advisories on Tropical Storm Julio are issued under WMO header WTPZ25 and under AWIPS header MIATCMEP5.
Tropical Weather Outlook NWS National Hurricane Center Miami FL 800 AM EDT Tue Aug 25 2026
For the North Atlantic...Caribbean Sea and the Gulf of America:
Central Subtropical Atlantic (AL95): An area of low pressure located a few hundred miles east-northeast of Bermuda is moving northward to north-northeastward at 15 to 20 mph. The associated shower activity remains disorganized and the circulation is broad and elongated. This system could still become a short-lived tropical depression or storm later today before encountering increasingly hostile conditions tonight and Wednesday, likely ending its chances for development. * Formation chance through 48 hours...medium...40 percent. * Formation chance through 7 days...medium...40 percent.
Eastern Tropical Atlantic (AL96): An area of low pressure centered a few hundred miles south-southeast of the Cabo Verde Islands is producing disorganized showers and thunderstorms. Environmental conditions appear conducive for gradual development, and this system is likely to become a tropical depression during the next day or two while it moves westward to west-northwestward across the eastern and central tropical Atlantic. Environmental conditions could become less conducive for development by the weekend. * Formation chance through 48 hours...high...70 percent. * Formation chance through 7 days...high...70 percent.
Tropical Weather Outlook NWS National Hurricane Center Miami FL 500 AM PDT Tue Aug 25 2026
For the eastern and central North Pacific east of 180 longitude:
Active Systems: The National Hurricane Center is issuing advisories on Tropical Storm Lala, located several hundred miles north of Pearl and Hermes Atoll, on Tropical Storm Iselle, located several hundred miles west of the southern tip of the Baja California Peninsula, and on recently upgraded Tropical Storm Julio, located well southwest of the southern tip of Baja California Peninsula.
The National Hurricane Center has issued the last advisory on the remnants of Tropical Depression Moke, located several hundred miles east of Johnston Island,
Central East Pacific: A tropical wave located well to the south of southern Mexico is producing a large area of disorganized showers and thunderstorms. Environmental conditions appear favorable for development of this system, and a tropical depression is expected to form in a few days while it moves generally west-northwestward at 10 to 15 mph, well offshore of Mexico. * Formation chance through 48 hours...low...30 percent. * Formation chance through 7 days...high...90 percent.
Western East Pacific: A trough of low pressure located well to the east-southeast of the Hawaiian Islands is producing some disorganized showers and thunderstorms. An area of low pressure is forecast to form along the trough during the next couple of days, and environmental conditions appear conducive for some gradual development thereafter. A tropical depression could form during the latter part of the week or early this weekend while the system drifts generally north-northeastward. * Formation chance through 48 hours...low...30 percent. * Formation chance through 7 days...medium...60 percent.
Well Offshore of Southern Mexico: An area of low pressure could form well offshore of Central America late this week or this weekend. Environmental conditions could support some gradual development of this system, and a tropical depression could form late this weekend or early next week while it moves westward to west-northwestward at 10 to 15 mph well offshore of southern Mexico. * Formation chance through 48 hours...low...near 0 percent. * Formation chance through 7 days...medium...40 percent.
&& Public Advisories on Tropical Storm Julio are issued under WMO header WTPZ35 NHC and under AWIPS header MIATCPEP5. Forecast/Advisories on Tropical Storm Julio are issued under WMO header WTPZ25 and under AWIPS header MIATCMEP5.
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