Market Design

How to revive science in America by Harvey V. Fineberg, in PNAS

Al Roth
Updated

 Here's a paper in the latest PNAS that begins with this epigraph:
 
“Don’t tell me where your priorities are. Show me where you spend your money, and I’ll tell you what they are.” — attributed to James W. Frick (Vice President, University of Notre Dame, 1965–1983) 

 The rest is commentary, (and a figure is worth a thousand (1,000) words). 

How to revive science in America by Harvey V. Fineberg, PNAS, March 26, 2026   https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2537854123


 

 

Aeon | a world of ideas

The hidden world of plant roots

Aeon Video
Updated

Close-up photo of a person in glasses examining a bunch of dried mushrooms held up by their hand.

Plant roots don’t have a nervous system, yet can produce sophisticated responses. What does that say about intelligence?

- by Aeon Video

Watch on Aeon

Aeon | a world of ideas

The house is a work of art

Andrew Deming
Updated

A modern house built over a waterfall surrounded by lush green forest, with stone and concrete architecture.

Frank Lloyd Wright exalted the individual and made ordinary life beautiful. But his life was marked by scandal and grief

- by Andrew Deming

Read on Aeon

Slashdot
Feed: All Latest
Software Design: Tidy First?

Genie Sessions: TCR Skill

Kent Beck
Updated

TCR is a TDD variant where, if the tests fail, you reset automatically to the last known good state. Poof. If the tests pass, you commit.

Can we use Skills to get the genie to work TCR-style? (All the coolest ideas are blends of 2 or more existing ideas.)

Thank you , , , , , and many others for tuning into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app.

Get more from Kent Beck in the Substack app
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SpaceNews

Vantor wins intelligence agency contract to monitor space objects

Sandra Erwin
Updated

Under NGA’s Luno program, the company will provide ‘insights on priority objects in low Earth orbit’

The post Vantor wins intelligence agency contract to monitor space objects appeared first on SpaceNews.

SpaceNews

Artemis 2 fueling underway

Jeff Foust
Updated
Artemis 2 prelaunch

Fueling of the SLS is underway for an April 1 launch attempt of Artemis 2, the first mission to send humans toward the moon in more than 50 years.

The post Artemis 2 fueling underway appeared first on SpaceNews.

SpaceNews

From the Midwest to the Moon

SpaceNews Brand Studio
Updated

Why space companies are betting on Ohio

The post From the Midwest to the Moon appeared first on SpaceNews.

SpaceNews

The Florida Model for Sustainable Aerospace Growth

SpaceNews Brand Studio
Updated

A conversation with Robert Long, President and CEO, Space Florida

The post The Florida Model for Sustainable Aerospace Growth appeared first on SpaceNews.

SpaceNews

After three years, Artemis 2 astronauts ready to launch

Jeff Foust
Updated
Artemis 2 astronauts

Even after three years of public appearances as a crew, there can still be some surprises for the Artemis 2 astronauts.

The post After three years, Artemis 2 astronauts ready to launch appeared first on SpaceNews.

SpaceNews

SpaceX quietly files for big bang IPO

Jason Rainbow
Updated

SpaceX has taken a key step toward going public after confidentially filing for a potentially record-breaking initial public offering, according to multiple reports citing people familiar with the matter, in what space leaders hope is a watershed moment for the industry.

The post SpaceX quietly files for big bang IPO appeared first on SpaceNews.

SpaceNews

Teledyne forms dedicated space unit to capture rising demand

Sandra Erwin
Updated

The aerospace supplier is combining imaging, electronics and component lines under Teledyne Space

The post Teledyne forms dedicated space unit to capture rising demand appeared first on SpaceNews.

SpaceNews

Artemis 2’s (nearly) 10-day flight around the moon

Jeff Foust
Updated
Artemis 2 on the pad

The Artemis 2 mission will send humans to the vicinity of the moon for the first time in more than 50 years on a mission lasting almost 10 days.

The post Artemis 2’s (nearly) 10-day flight around the moon appeared first on SpaceNews.

SpaceNews

Saltzman: Space ‘baked into’ modern combat operations

Sandra Erwin
Updated

Space Force personnel supporting operations under U.S. Central Command are positioned in the Middle East, at headquarters in Tampa, Florida, and at Shaw Air Force Base in South Carolina

The post Saltzman: Space ‘baked into’ modern combat operations appeared first on SpaceNews.

SpaceNews

Aspect Aerospace secures early funding to advance swarm-deployable VLEO satellites

Jason Rainbow
Updated

Aspect Aerospace, a University of South Alabama spin-off, has secured $2.4 million to develop circuit-board-sized spacecraft that could be deployed from space into very low Earth orbit in swarms to monitor the space environment.

The post Aspect Aerospace secures early funding to advance swarm-deployable VLEO satellites appeared first on SpaceNews.

SpaceNews

Creating near-term lunar settlements: lessons from space history

James R. Wertz
Updated
NASA lunar base

March 16, 2026, was the 100th anniversary of Robert Goddard’s first flight of a liquid fueled rocket. It reached an altitude of 41 feet. 31 years later, in 1957, Sputnik […]

The post Creating near-term lunar settlements: lessons from space history  appeared first on SpaceNews.

SpaceNews

Artemis 2 launches on first human mission to the moon in more than 50 years

Jeff Foust
Updated
Artemis 2 liftoff

The first human mission beyond Earth orbit in more than 50 years is underway with an April 1 launch of four astronauts on a flight around the moon.

The post Artemis 2 launches on first human mission to the moon in more than 50 years appeared first on SpaceNews.

Finance & economics

Can a country get too rich?

Norway shows the potential pitfalls of uncommon prosperity
Finance & economics

Coal is back in fashion

An LNG crunch is good news for the world’s dirtiest fuel
Finance & economics

“Liberation Day” has reshaped trade—but not as Donald Trump hoped

In many ways, global commerce has strengthened
The Honest Broker

I'm Recommending 14 New Albums

Ted Gioia
Updated

Every morning I listen to new music, and I’ve already heard several hundred albums since the start of the year. My goal is simple: I seek out the best—drawing on all genres, all styles, all regions—and dig deep to find outstanding recordings you might not hear about elsewhere.

Below are 14 gems. Most of them are hidden from view in the stagnant mainstream culture of our time, where tired formulas and AI slop prevail. These are the real deal, and give me reason for optimism about the future of our music culture.

Spend some time with these tracks. You won’t be disappointed.

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

Subscribe now

River Eckert: River Eckert
Debut Album from a 16-Year-Old New Orleans Piano Phenom

I’ve seen the future of New Orleans piano and it’s called River Eckert. He’s not even old enough to get a driver’s license—you must be 17 in the state of Louisiana—but has already digested all the varied flavors of his hometown keyboard tradition.

I’m quoted on the youngster’s website, so I’ll repeat here what I say there:

“They don’t teach any of that at Juilliard, not even after hours.”

And I’m not just talking about Eckert’s keyboard skills—he also shows great promise as a singer. In a better world, this kind of talent would get showcased by the media and find its way to the big screen. Maybe that will happen. In the meantime, you can savor how this River runs via his debut album.

It won’t be streaming for a few more days, but River introduces a solo piano video from the release at the 22-minute mark of this interview.

Sault: Chapter 1
Mystery Band from Britain Plays Funky Gospel

I became a Sault fan when they released five stunning albums over the course of a few months, but kept their identities top secret. Go ahead, visit their website—you will look in vain for bios or any information whatsoever. But these talented musicians perform in a range of genres, playing each style with total commitment and consummate skill.

Now they have returned from their secret hideout with a funk gospel album—it’s like Sly and the Family Stone establishing their own charismatic church. Sure, I’d like to know more about these musicians, but I will happily grant them anonymity and entrance in the Witness Protection Program if they keep delivering music of this caliber.

Ari Bragi Kárason: Unclear Family
Cool Jazz in a Chet Baker Kind of Way

From the very start of my career as a critic, I championed cool jazz. That went against the grain—jazz is a hot idiom, and its leading practitioners have prized energy and intensity. But there’s also a cool tradition hiding in the wings, from Bix Beiderbecke to Lester Young and beyond. It also deserves our respect.

But if you play in this style, you almost never get grants or awards—it’s somehow un-cool to play cool. So an album like this won’t get much attention. The jazz police will make sure of that.

Listeners will be reminded of cool jazz icon Chet Baker, who continues to exert a powerful influence on European trumpeters. There’s some irony in this. Chet went overseas to avoid narcotics prosecution, and worked steadily to pay for his habit—but the result was that thousands of musicians overseas saw and learned from him at close quarters. That still has an impact today.

Icelandic trumpeter and flugelhorn player Ari Bragi Kárason was born a few months after Chet Baker died, but still keeps that tradition alive in his own work. He hits the spot on his new album Unclear Family. I also want to call your attention to saxophonist Karl-Martin Almqvist, who earns my praise with his contributions here.

Read more

Noahpinion

If you're in Tokyo this Friday, come to my hanami!

Noah Smith
Updated

My hanami (cherry blossom picnic) in Tokyo is becoming an annual tradition! This year it’ll be on a Friday instead of a Sunday, because rain is forecast for the weekend and it’ll probably knock down whatever’s left of the cherry blossoms. Here are the details:

Read more

Noahpinion

How Japan has changed in the last 20 years

Noah Smith
Updated

For perhaps the first time in years, a truly interesting thing happened the other day on X. The platform began automatically translating Japanese tweets to English, and recommending them to English-speaking users. Japanese people use X at much higher rates than people in other countries, mostly because the platform’s pseudonymity offers them a chance to comment publicly on their personal lives without revealing their real identities. Because it’s mostly a platform for personal use, it’s much less toxic than the English-speaking version, which is mostly used for political arguments.

English-speaking X users were naturally delighted at the influx of sanity and normalcy, not to mention the delights of quirky Japanese online culture. I predict this honeymoon will last only a short time, until Anglosphere culture wars infect and overwhelm Japanese-speaking X. This will be the digital version of the tourism boom, in which international delight at being able to travel cheaply and easily to Japan has resulted in an epidemic of bad behavior and the complete overrunning of tourist hotspots like Kyoto and the west side of Tokyo.

But glum predictions aside, it is pretty magical for people in other countries to get a taste of Japanese culture without having to learn the language. Yes, many of the stereotypes of Japan are either exaggerated or just plain wrong — it’s not very conformist or collectivist, people behave well much more out of internalized “guilt” than externalized “shame”, and so on. But there really are quite a lot of unique and interesting things about Japanese culture, most of which developed behind the barrier of linguistic and geographic isolation. Now that those barriers are falling, a lot of people will get to experience the wonder before it, too, is subsumed by the homogenization of global online culture and ruined by flame wars between rightists and leftists.

But anyway, in honor of this moment of cultural exchange, I thought I would share some of my own personal observations of how Japan has changed over the last two decades. I first moved to Japan almost 23 years ago, and even though I haven’t lived there for a while, I try to spend at least a month out of every year in the country if I can.

Over that time I’ve seen a few things remain startlingly constant — my favorite neighborhood sushi shop from 2004 still serves the same excellent crab salad. But a whole lot has changed; though many people overseas (and even a few unobservant long-term residents) tend to think of Japan as a static, unchanging society, the truth is that in some ways, the country feels unrecognizable.

Three years ago, I wrote a post about some of these changes:

In fact, this post only scratches the surface, so I thought I should write a deeper dive. Here’s a list of some changes I’ve noticed in Japan’s society and its built environment since the mid-2000s. Keep in mind that I’ve spent most of my time in Japan in Tokyo and Osaka, so this account will leave out many of the changes that have happened in smaller cities and rural areas.

If there’s one way to summarize these changes, it’s that Japan is becoming a much more normal country than it was when I lived there. The quirky art culture, vibrant street scenes, and mosaic of small independent businesses that defined 2000s Japan are vanishing under the relentless assault of aging, economic stagnation, and social media. Japanese people have started dressing down, and their waistlines have begun to expand. But at the same time, Tokyo has become a sort of enchanted spaceship of a city, with world-beating food scenes and architecture. And Japan as a whole has become more international and open, less sexist, and less soul-crushing of a place to work.

The whole country feels poorer, even though it isn’t

Japan feels like a poorer country than it did when I lived there, but this is actually an illusion; it’s actually slightly richer:

One difference is that my standards for what counts as a comfortable standard of living have crept up, due to America’s own more rapid rate of growth since the mid-2010s — and possibly from my own income growth over that same time period. Twenty years ago, for example, the cheap quality of Japanese furniture didn’t seem that different from the more comfy but dilapidated American version; now, Americans (and my social circle) tend to have nicer and newer furniture, while Japanese furniture basically hasn’t changed.

Another factor is the depreciation cycle. In the early 2000s, Japan was just coming off of a decade-long construction boom — some of it engineered by the government in an attempt to fill the hole in aggregate demand left by the country’s “lost decade”. A lot of building facades and train stations that looked shiny and perfect in 2004 now look a little weathered and dilapidated, despite Japan’s tendency to spend a lot on maintenance and upkeep. This doesn’t mean those buildings and infrastructure function any less well than they did when they were new, but the slow depreciation creates the subtle illusion of a shabbier country. (This will, of course, be an even more pronounced phenomenon in China in the 2030s.)

A third factor is the weak yen. When I lived in Japan for the first time, a dollar was worth only about 100 to 120 yen; now it’s 160. Foreigners can really live like kings here now, thanks to the exchange rate. That makes the locals feel poorer in comparison.

Yet another subtle change is that fewer young Japanese people live with their parents than they did two decades ago. The “parasite singles” of 2004 were able to live nice lifestyles while working only a low-paying or part-time job, or even not working at all, because their parents’ high incomes and stored-up savings were footing the bill. Now, with that wealth having largely run out, and with the high-earning Boomer generation having retired, you don’t see as many young people able to afford international vacations, designer handbags, and so on. (Luxury brands have proliferated, but this is more due to population aging and the tourism boom.)

There are other factors creating the illusion of Japanese poverty, which deserve their own separate sections. These include aging, the expansion of paid employment, and the effects of social media.

Everyone is 50 years old

When I lived in Japan 20 years ago, it felt like most people around me were my own age, or maybe a little older. Now, when I go to Japan, most people around me still feel…my own age, or maybe a little older.

This is also partly an illusion; I’m less likely to go to places frequented by young people, like dance clubs. But Japanese cities are dense, and everyone walks and uses public transit. I still go to the most crowded neighborhoods, including places with plenty of bars, clubs, cafes, clothing shops, cheap restaurants, and so on. There are simply far fewer young people in the streets and in the shops.

Part of this, too, may be an illusion, driven by behavioral change — the kids may be at home on their phones watching TikTok or tweeting, while older people still go out and experience the physical world. But the statistics don’t lie. When I lived in Japan for the first time, the country’s median age was around 42; now it’s almost 50. Back in the mid-2000s, there were more than three working-age Japanese people for every person past the age of 65; now, there are fewer than two.

The country’s population pyramid shows this pretty clearly. The generation slightly older than me — now in their early and mid 50s — was actually the most populous, while the generation in their 20s right now is maybe only 60% as large:

Graph by Mishomp via Wikimedia Commons

The slow disappearance of young people from public spaces has given the country a more tired, less energetic feeling. Whole neighborhoods of Tokyo and Osaka in the mid-2000s felt like what William Gibson once called “the children’s crusade” — a mass of youth imposing their aesthetics and attitudes on society by sheer force of energy and numbers. That’s all gone now.

Aging has also meant less prominence for youth culture in the built environment — anime, fashionable clothing, pop music, and cheap trendy eateries are all less common motifs in Japan than they were decades ago. Meanwhile, nice restaurants and luxury brands — things older people consume — are steadily taking over urban spaces.

The leisure class that made Japan so quirky is vanishing

Read more

Schneier on Security

Is “Hackback” Official US Cybersecurity Strategy?

Bruce Schneier
Updated

The 2026 US “Cyber Strategy for America” document is mostly the same thing we’ve seen out of the White House for over a decade, but with a more aggressive tone.

But one sentence stood out: “We will unleash the private sector by creating incentives to identify and disrupt adversary networks and scale our national capabilities.” This sounds like a call for hackback: giving private companies permission to conduct offensive cyber operations.

The Economist noticed (alternate link) this, too.

I think this is an incredibly dumb idea:

In warfare, the notion of counterattack is extremely powerful. Going after the enemy­—its positions, its supply lines, its factories, its infrastructure—­is an age-old military tactic. But in peacetime, we call it revenge, and consider it dangerous. Anyone accused of a crime deserves a fair trial. The accused has the right to defend himself, to face his accuser, to an attorney, and to be presumed innocent until proven guilty.

Both vigilante counterattacks, and preemptive attacks, fly in the face of these rights. They punish people before who haven’t been found guilty. It’s the same whether it’s an angry lynch mob stringing up a suspect, the MPAA disabling the computer of someone it believes made an illegal copy of a movie, or a corporate security officer launching a denial-of-service attack against someone he believes is targeting his company over the net.

In all of these cases, the attacker could be wrong. This has been true for lynch mobs, and on the internet it’s even harder to know who’s attacking you. Just because my computer looks like the source of an attack doesn’t mean that it is. And even if it is, it might be a zombie controlled by yet another computer; I might be a victim, too. The goal of a government’s legal system is justice; the goal of a vigilante is expediency.

We don’t issue letters of marque on the high seas anymore; we shouldn’t do it in cyberspace.

Schneier on Security

A Taxonomy of Cognitive Security

Bruce Schneier
Updated

Last week, I listened to a fascinating talk by K. Melton on cognitive security, cognitive hacking, and reality pentesting. The slides from the talk are here, but—even better—Menton has a long essay laying out the basic concepts and ideas.

The whole thing is important and well worth reading, and I hesitate to excerpt. Here’s a taste:

The NeuroCompiler is where raw sensory data gets interpreted before you’re consciously aware of it. It decides what things mean, and it does this fast, automatic, and mostly invisible. It’s also where the majority of cognitive exploits actually land, right in this sweet spot between perception and conscious thought.

This is my term for what Daniel Kahneman called System 1 thinking. If the Sensory Interface is the intake port, the NeuroCompiler is what turns that input into “filtered meaning” before the Mind Kernel ever sees it. It takes raw signal (e.g., photons, sound waves, chemical gradients, pressure) and translates it into something actionable based on binary categories like threat or safe, familiar or novel, trustworthy or suspicious.

The speed is both an evolutionary feature and a modern bug. Processing here is fast enough to get you out of the way of a thrown object before you’ve consciously registered it. But “good enough most of the time” means “predictably wrong some of the time….

A critical architectural feature: the NeuroCompiler can route its output directly back to the Sensory Interface and out as behavior, skipping the conscious awareness of the Mind Kernel entirely. Reflex and startle responses use this mechanism, making this bypass pathway enormously useful for survival. Yet it leaves a wide-open backdoor. If the layer that holds access to skepticism and deliberate evaluation can be bypassed completely, a host of exploits become possible that would otherwise fail.

That’s just one of the five levels Melton talks about: sensory interface, neurocompiler, mind kernel, the mesh, and cultural substrate.

Melton’s taxonomy is compelling, and her parallels to IT systems are fascinating. I have long said that a genius idea is one that’s incredibly obvious once you hear it, but one that no one has said before. This is the first time I’ve heard cognition described in this way.

Astronomy Picture of the Day

Titania's tortured terrain is a mix of canyons, cliffs, and craters. Titania's tortured terrain is a mix of canyons, cliffs, and craters.


Talking Points Memo - Editors Blog

Republicans Don’t Actually Have to Make Social Safety Net Cuts Again

Nicole LaFond
Updated

In Emine Yücel’s newly published piece about Republicans’ struggles to pass a slew of President Trump’s priorities ahead of the midterms, she digs in on a crucial point that isn’t getting much discussion.

Since Republican leadership doesn’t want to nuke the filibuster in order to pass the SAVE America Act, they’re doing a big performance for Trump to show that they’ll figure out a way to cram all of his needs — passing the voter suppression bill and funding for his war in Iran as well as the Department of Homeland Security — into another reconciliation package. Republicans are considering paying for the new spending for Trump’s latest fixations with more cuts to the social safety net, under the guise of rooting out rampant “fraud,” the admin’s favorite new word.

But in many cases, they won’t actually have to do that. The new spending is just a convenient excuse for more cuts.

You’ll remember last summer, congressional Republicans justified the devastating cuts they made to Medicaid and other social safety net programs by shrugging at the deficit, arguing they had to do that in order to offset the cost of extending most of Trump’s individual and corporate tax cuts permanently. This time is different: Many of their priorities on this go-round — chief among them the Iran War — won’t run afoul of the same Senate rule because the increased spending is not expected to linger beyond the 10 year budget window. Nonetheless, they are already making a big show of telling everyone that they are simply required to make cuts. A key excerpt from Emine’s piece:

Republicans have been largely obfuscating when they talk about the cuts to social safety net programs that they are once again planning. They point to the national deficit, saying they will have to offset the new spending with cuts in order to balance the budget out. They hand-wring over self-proclaimed “deficit hawks,” saying those lawmakers will not support a reconciliation package unless any added spending is not offset.

But the rules of reconciliation do not require them to offset the cost of any increased spending within the budget window, which is usually a 10 year period.

“If they put together a bill that, for example, gave money to the Department of Defense and funded ICE for some number of years, there’s no requirement that it needs to be offset,” Michael Linden, senior policy fellow at the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, told TPM. “In fact, the reconciliation bill that they passed last year increased the deficit.”

Talking Points Memo - Editors Blog

A Few Timely Thoughts on Birthright Citizenship

Josh Marshall
Updated

I wanted to share a few thoughts on questions that are adjacent to or secondary to the question the Supreme Court is being asked to take up today. That is in part because there is no real question they are being asked to take up. Birthright citizenship is the clear, intended and unambiguous law of the federal constitution. One might as well try to complicate or question whether the document creates a federal senate. I have a source and correspondent deep in the federal bureaucracy who is a specialist in a specific area of federal law unrelated to citizenship questions. And even though I’ve written about this at length over the years, by going over developments in this person’s area of law with them it has helped me crystalize my own thinking on this topic.

Almost all of these cases are based on the premise, the working assumption of what can the U.S. Constitution mean if we decide that words or established phrases simply have no meaning and we can simply piece the individual words together based on their dictionary definitions? So what does the “law of the land” mean? Well, it turns out some guy who did a stint at the Claremont Institute and now teaches at some obscure law school has written a bracing new law review article about how it refers to agricultural policy, mineral and agricultural rights and the law of farming. That’s really where we are here.

We’re so far out on the limb of jurisprudential corruption that in cases like these there’s a different way we should frame these arguments and these decisions. Birthright citizenship is the law of the land. It has been since 1868. Nothing this corrupt body decides will change that. It may produce a period of constitutional interregnum in which the federal government refuses to recognize the rights of some American citizens. That won’t make them any less American citizens any more than Trump saying up is down changes the laws of gravity. This may seem like a theoretical or meaningless point. But it’s not. Fighting Trumpian authoritarian nationalism means that there is a high premium on keeping focused on the reality of the situation before you, not falling victim to the new day’s game of three card monty or other flimflam and razzmatazz.

Let me now mention a more practical point.

Birthright citizenship is the unambiguous and certain law of the land. It is also good policy. What is less appreciated is that it undergirds the entire citizenship system in the United States, a country that keeps very, very little record of who is and isn’t a citizen in the first place. The only people who really have any clear record of their citizenship are naturalized citizens. You or I who were born in the U.S. might appear to have those. We have a passport or maybe some other document that you can only have as a citizen. But that is almost always because we said we were a citizen or we provided some document that only had any significance on the basis of birthright citizenship. Usually, of course, that’s a birth certificate. That’s where the factual conversation ends. It is the lynchpin that makes the entire U.S. citizenship system work in the absence of really any record keeping.

Let’s imagine there’s no birthright citizenship. And to be clear, it’s a little hard (though they’ll certainly find a way) to imagine that SCOTUS would find that everything everyone (amendment writers, legislators, justices, law professors, citizens) thought for more than a 150 years was wrong. But critically, it only started being wrong today. That’s not how actual jurisprudence works. But let’s start with my birth certificate.

Born in the early hours of Feb. 15 1969. That’s the basis of my citizenship. Absent birthright citizenship, how do we know? Really we don’t. It says nothing about the citizenship status of my parents. The father listed on the document had ancestors in the U.S. going back to the 1600s, many all the way back to the 1630s. The mother listed was born to a woman who arrived in the U.S. from Poland/Lithuania as a child in May 1921 just ahead of the first wave of immigration clamp downs after World War I. I’m not certain she was ever naturalized as a citizen and I think there’s a good chance she wasn’t when my mother was born in 1943.

Mine is one of the less complicated citizenship questions — the most recent immigrant in my family tree arrived over a century ago. But there’s nothing on my birth certificate that settles the matter. There’s at least some level of ambiguity just one generation back. And everyone else, generation to generation back, is also only a citizen based on birthright citizenship. At best, clarity about citizenship, absent birthright citizenship, requires a lot of genealogical research. Certainly more than is remotely plausible for a population of almost 350 million. And it would be quite a lot of research to have to wait on while you’re in an ICE gulag.

Quite apart from the constitutional and civic merits, the whole fabric of U.S. citizenship falls apart without the anchor of birthright citizenship.

Talking Points Memo - Editors Blog

The New Propagandists

John Light
Updated

One of the most bizarre aspects of the city occupations in 2025 and early 2026 (and perhaps continuing under Markwayne Mullin? TBD) was the way in which the administration brought random social media celebrities inside its operations to produce propaganda. Through lawsuits and reporting, we’re learning more about how that all worked. Josh Kovensky takes a close look.

Talking Points Memo - Editors Blog

Interested in Conspiracy Theories and the Religious Right? Read On.

Allegra Kirkland, John Light and Nicole LaFond
Updated

Longtime TPM readers know we always have been and always will be a small publication. We like to think we punch above our weight in terms of what we’re able to cover given our size. But we’re always looking for ways to do more.

That’s why we’re thrilled to announce the addition of Mike Rothschild and Sarah Posner as regular contributors to TPM. What that means is you’ll be seeing their bylines a lot more on our site, and hearing from them in our videos and Substack Live conversations. 

Many of you are likely already familiar with Sarah, who has been writing for TPM on and off since 2014, weighing in on Christian chatbots, the Duggar family’s ministry, and the evolving Christian nationalist movement. (She’s also, at times, filled in for David Kurtz on Morning Memo!). A noted expert on the religious right, her work has appeared in The American Prospect, The Guardian, MS Now, The Washington Post, The Nation, and many more publications. She’s the author of two books: “Unholy: Why White Evangelicals Worship at the Altar of Donald Trump” and “God’s Profits: Faith, Fraud, and the Republican Crusade for Values Voters,” and creator of the podcast Reign of Error.

In Church, Merch, and State, Sarah will write about the intersection of religion and politics in the United States.

Mike is a journalist and expert in the growth and impact of conspiracy theories. His books include “The Storm is Upon Us: How QAnon Became a Movement, Cult, and Conspiracy Theory of Everything” and “Jewish Space Lasers: The Rothschilds and 200 Years of Conspiracy Theories.”

In Rough Edges, Mike Rothschild will write about fringe groups, conspiracy theories and how the Internet broke our brains.

Sarah and Mike are both deeply knowledgeable about their subject areas and brilliant writers. We’re so excited to have them join TPM’s community. Give them a follow on Bluesky and keep an eye out for their work.

Their addition as contributors is made possible by your memberships. That’s what allows us to pay competitive freelance rates. Our membership drive is ongoing now and you can get 25% off on an annual subscription, directly supporting the work of writers like Mike and Sarah and allowing TPM to keep expanding what we’re able to do. If you’re already a member, tell a relative or friend to join. 

Stephen Clark - Ars Technica

Launch day has arrived for NASA's Artemis II mission—here's what to expect

Stephen Clark
Updated

KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Fla.—Launching to the Moon is an all-day undertaking, something the four astronauts waiting to climb aboard NASA's Artemis II rocket know well.

"It is actually a very long day," said Victor Glover, the pilot on Artemis II. "We wake up about eight hours before launch, and there's a pretty tight schedule of things to get out there."

Glover and his three crewmates have their schedules planned to the minute throughout the nine-day Artemis II mission. If all goes according to plan, their mission will carry them more than a quarter-million miles from Earth, farther from home than anyone has ventured in human history. After looping behind the Moon, the astronauts and their Orion capsule will fall back to Earth at some 25,000 mph (40,000 km/hr), setting another record for the fastest that humans have ever traveled.

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Stephen Clark - Ars Technica

NASA is leading the way to the Moon, but the military won't be far behind

Stephen Clark
Updated

KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Florida—The US military has always been part of NASA's human spaceflight program. The first astronauts were nearly all military pilots, and two of the four crew members set to fly around the Moon on NASA's Artemis II mission were Navy test pilots before joining the astronaut corps.

Artemis II, the first crew mission to the Moon's vicinity since 1972, is set for launch Wednesday from Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Commander Reid Wiseman and pilot Victor Glover, both Navy test pilots, will be at the controls of the Space Launch System rocket and Orion spacecraft for the ride to space. NASA astronaut Christina Koch and Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen round out the four-person crew.

The mission will depart from NASA property on Florida's Space Coast, but the Space Force will play an important role in the launch. A range crew from the Space Force will track the SLS rocket as it arcs over the Atlantic Ocean. Their primary job will be ensuring public safety, with the unenviable responsibility of sending a destruct signal to the rocket if it flies off course. Thankfully for the astronauts inside the spacecraft, the Orion capsule has an abort rocket to pull it away from an exploding launch vehicle in the event of a catastrophic failure.

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Mike the Mad Biologist

Links 4/1/26

mikethemadbiologist
Updated

Links for you. Science:

Trump Administration Readies Plans to Dismantle Renowned Science Lab
The archaeal roots of eukaryotic life
WHO releases guidance for urgently needed new antibiotics
Florida Is Trying to Ignore Measles Until It Can’t
Surgeon general nominee now says Americans should get vaccinated for measles. Dr. Casey Means told Congress last month she supported the measles vaccine, but she declined to answer whether she would recommend it to Americans.
National Academies of Sciences says no to demands it remove climate info. State attorneys general won’t get climate chapter removed from a legal manual.

Other:

The Last Thing Trump Wants to Do Is Save America
Why We Are Failing in the Fight Against Antisemitism
Immigration questions for Markwayne Mullin
Iran’s Hormuz blockade is its most powerful card against Trump and Israel. It won’t back down easily
The IRGC’s way of war
After rookie ICE agent’s paperwork error, man is detained for days
How God Got So Great
A top Trump aide resigned over Iran. Liberals should stay away from him.
The World Baseball Classic, Team USA, and the war problem
On the Wired renaissance: Katie Drummond is leading Wired magazine through its best era.
Sarah Michelle Gellar Breaks Her Silence on What Killed the Buffy Reboot: ‘Nobody Saw This Coming’
Black Women, Allies and Elected Officials Navigate HIV Prevention Landscape
How Eric Trump Became an Ally of One of China’s Biggest Crypto Companies
Chelsea Handler Says RFK Jr. And Cheryl Hines Sold Her ‘The Most Toxic’ Home (lol)
Federal judge in D.C. issues new grand jury policy after failed indictment of Democrats
Wired’s New Editor Doesn’t Care if the Tech Bros Are Mad
Crypto’s True Believers Demand to Be Taken Seriously
Donald Trump’s Fake Makeover: Republicans, in a blind panic about the midterms, are pretending to course correct.
‘Trump is aiming for dictatorship’. That’s the verdict of the world’s most credible democracy watchdog (the article really ignores the role the Republican Party plays in this; the fascist political formation is quite broad–it’s not just Trump)
Making Messes That Other People Are Supposed To Fix
Americans Are Stuck in Dead-End, Exploitative Part-Time Jobs
Judge reinstates 1,000 Voice of America employees, deems wind-down illegal
Chat Is This Good
MAGA Turns on Itself, and It’s Ugly
I Predicted the 2008 Financial Crisis. What Is Coming May Be Worse.
Are They Done With His Bullshit Yet
AI Job Loss Research Ignores How AI Is Utterly Destroying the Internet
My Self-Driving Car Crash
Donald Trump’s Racism Mirrors Jeffrey Epstein’s
The Colorado River’s Problems Are About to Get Deeper
What to know about the resignation of Joe Kent as Trump’s counterterrorism chief
Why Are We Still Doing This?

Letters from an American

Politics Chat, March 31, 2026

Heather Cox Richardson
Updated

The Truth OC: Because it's time to fight back.

If you're not Eric Swalwell, Katie Porter or Tom Steyer, get out of the governor race

Jeff Pearlman
Updated
Matt Mahan: Get out.

A month ago, when people asked whether I was worried about the election for California’s next governor coming down to two Republicans, I sorta shrugged it off.

Two weeks ago, when people asked whether I was worried about the election for California’s next governor coming down to two Republicans, I kinda just sighed.

I am now, officially concerned.

Really concerned.

As we speak, 24 Democrats remain in the race—and the (very real) fret is they will undercut one another, slice and dice the liberal vote into small fractions and clear the way for a pair of leading MAGA Republicans—Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco and conservative commentator Steve Hilton—to emerge from the June 2 general primary and wind up as the two men on the ballot.

If you don’t know, here’s a quick primer on how the system works …

And if you’re wondering, “Who’s to blame for this?”—well, the answer is simple: Ego.

Big …

Fat …

Obnoxious …

Ego.

It’s the one thing that’s struck me throughout the Truth OC process. From Joe Kerr and Mike Munzing to Gracey Van Der Mark and Chad Williams, it takes (with rare exception) a humongous level of ego to run for public office. It involves one believing, “I am The Person for this job—the only person for this job.” It requires cocksureness, arrogance, obscene levels of self-belief. It means not just asking for gobs of money, but asking for gobs of money—for you. Because you are the one.

If we’re being honest, politicians tend to make the worst dinner guests, because they are oxygen-sucking planets, intent on being the center of every occupied universe. And this isn’t just a Trump or MAGA or Republican thing. It applies to 98 percent of those who seek higher office. Hell, why did Joe Biden insist on competing again in 2024, until it was way too late to change course?

Answer: Ego.

And it’s exhausting.

In the case of California’s upcoming primary, the recent polling is both scary …

… and eye-opening.

There are, bluntly, just three Democrats who have a realistic shot: Eric Swalwell, Katie Porter and Tom Steyer. That’s it. Those three. I know San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan possessed some juice, but it’s over. I know Xavier Becerra has some unique experience, but it’s not resonating. I know former Los Angeles mayor Antonio Villaraigosa is bored, but this ain’t it. Seriously, it is officially time for those polling below 10 percent to not just drop out, bt throw their support behind someone. And, as we get even closer, it’ll be time for two of the remaining three to also step aside and back the leader.

I know it’s not fun.

I know surrender sucks.

But if California winds up with a MAGA governor—especially when the national tides feel like they’re shifting against Trump’s insanity—the legacy of folks like Becerra and Mahan and Villaraigosa won’t be as accomplished, civic-minded leaders with deep resumes.

No, it’ll be as smaller-scale Bidens, allowing ego to poison everything and watching as a deep-blue state winds up in the hands of a zealot nut.

Letters from an American

March 31, 2026

Heather Cox Richardson
Updated

At 4:11 this morning, President Donald J. Trump’s social media account posted: “All of those countries that can’t get jet fuel because of the Strait of Hormuz, like the United Kingdom, which refused to get involved in the decapitation of Iran, I have a suggestion for you: Number 1, buy from the U.S., we have plenty, and Number 2, build up some delayed courage, to to the Strait, and just TAKE IT. You’ll have to start learning how to fight for yourself, the U.S.A. won’t be there to help you anymore, just like you weren’t there for us. Iran has been, essentially, decimated. The hard part is done. Go get your own oil! President DJT”

While this morning, Trump appeared to wash his hands of his Iran war, there was an undertone of panic in his post, especially coming as it did just before an exclusive story by Alexander Ward and Meridith McGraw in the Wall Street Journal reporting that Trump has “told aides he is willing to end the military campaign against Iran even if the Strait of Hormuz remains largely closed.”

Economist Paul Krugman noted this evening that this is essentially an admission of defeat, and Suzanne Maloney, vice president of the Brookings Institution think tank and an expert on Iran, called Trump’s suggestion that he is willing to leave the strait closed “unbelievably irresponsible.” Having started a war, she said, the U.S. and Israel cannot walk away from the outcome. “Energy markets are inherently global, and there is no possibility of insulating the U.S. from the economic damage that is already occurring and will become exponentially worse if the closure of the strait continues,” she told the Wall Street Journal reporters.

Nonetheless, the idea the Iran War would end soon was a signal investors wanted to see. On the strength of the hope for a short war, the stock market posted its biggest one-day gain in ten months.

Meanwhile, another aircraft carrier, the USS George H.W. Bush, left its home port, Naval Station Norfolk in Virginia, today to head in the direction of the Middle East, although it is not clear if it will support Operation Epic Fury. According to Alison Bath of Stars and Stripes, the carrier will pick up other elements of the carrier group, including the destroyers USS Ross, USS Donald Cook, and USS Mason, as it crosses the Atlantic. The George H.W. Bush Carrier Strike Group also includes several aircraft squadrons and detachments that make up the 70 or more aircraft in Carrier Air Wing 7, along with more than 5,000 sailors and military personnel.

Nearly 3,500 sailors and Marines from the Tripoli Amphibious Ready Group arrived in the region on Saturday.

Yesterday, host Laura Ingraham of the Fox News Channel wondered, “[W]as the president fully briefed about the risks of all of this from the beginning? And was he then able to take it all in and understand the complexity of this? How complex it could actually get, and further possibilities of casualties or other damage—the difficulty of dealing with these people? Or was he told this would be relatively quick, in and out?”

Nick Hilden of AlterNet reported that MAGA leader Alex Jones speculated today that ill-health is contributing to Trump’s poor decisions on Iran. “Trump’s run off the edge of a cliff, and I don’t think he’s coming back from it,” Jones said. He urged MAGA to move on without Trump. “We cut bait on Trump and we mobilize against the Democrats,” he said. “Trump is just a minor figure.”

Hunter Walker of Talking Points Memo picked up the story of another MAGA figure distancing himself from Trump. When he ran for governor in 2024, former North Carolina lieutenant governor Mark Robinson flat out denied stories about his participation in pornography forums and social media chats where he attacked Jewish, Black, gay, and transgender people as well as flirting with Holocaust denial and calling himself a “black NAZI!” He even sued CNN for $50 million for defamation, calling their story about him “a high-tech lynching” before dropping the suit after losing the election.

Walker noted that Robinson recently admitted on a podcast that he was lying all along. He “had to ignore the truth at that moment,” he said, because he was shielding Trump. “I certainly don’t want to be the person that costs the president of the United States the election,” he said. “Didn’t want to cost anyone else their election.” Asked if he would do it again, he answered: “I’d make the exact same decision. I’d fight in the exact same way.”

After Saturday’s No Kings rallies around the country and the world, and after new polls showing his job approval ratings have dropped to new lows, Trump this afternoon signed an executive order attacking mail-in voting. Although both Democratic and Republican election officials insist mail-in voting is secure and reliable, Trump claims it permits Democrats to cheat.

Ironically, earlier this month the story broke of a right-wing activist in Wisconsin who ordered ballots in other people’s names to prove that mail-in voting enabled voter fraud. Last week Harry Wait was convicted of one felony count of identity theft and two misdemeanor counts of election fraud, suggesting mail-in voting is not as insecure as he thought.

Nonetheless, Trump is ordering the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to work with the Social Security Administration to create a list of verified U.S. citizens who are eligible to vote in each state. The order directs the U.S. Postal Service to send mail-in ballots only to voters on the list, and to mark each ballot with its own unique barcode. It threatens any states refusing to cooperate with the order with a loss of federal funding and directs Attorney General Pam Bondi to investigate anyone wrongfully distributing mail-in ballots. Aaron Reichlin-Melnick of the American Immigration Council notes that “there is no such thing as a federal list of citizens. It does not exist.”

“This is unconstitutional on its face,” election law expert David Becker told Yunior Rivas of Democracy Docket. “The Constitution clearly gives the president no power over elections.” The Senate Rules Committee oversees federal involvement in elections, and its top Democrat, Alex Padilla (D-CA), called the order a “blatant, unconstitutional abuse of power,” adding that Trump has “no authority to commandeer federal elections or direct the Postal Service to undermine mail and absentee voting.” Representative Joe Morelle (D-NY), the top-ranking Democrat on the House Administration Committee, said that the order is “illegal, dangerous and subversive” and that “Donald Trump fears the American people and is willing to violate the Constitution to stop them from voting.”

“See you in court,” posted Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY). “You will lose.”

Another of Trump’s executive orders was in court today, when Judge Randolph Moss of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia ruled that much of Trump’s order stripping NPR and PBS of funds was unconstitutional. As Brian Stelter of CNN reported, Moss quoted a Supreme Court ruling when he wrote: “The First Amendment draws a line, which the government may not cross, at efforts to use government power—including the power of the purse—‘to punish or suppress disfavored expression’ by others.” Republicans in Congress have since voted to cut federal funding from NPR and PBS, but the decision is a victory for the First Amendment.

Judge Richard Leon of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia also stymied Trump today when he ruled that Trump cannot proceed with his plans for a giant ballroom on the site of the demolished East Wing of the White House without approval from Congress. The National Trust for Historic Preservation has sued Trump and a number of federal agencies to stop construction of the ballroom, noting that Trump skipped reviews and approvals that were required by law.

The decision by Leon, who was appointed by President George W. Bush, begins: “The President of the United States is the steward of the White House for future generations of First Families. He is not, however, the owner!” It goes on to say that “no statute comes close to giving the President the authority he claims…to construct his East Wing ballroom project and do it with private funds,” and points out that Trump appears to be relying for authority on a law permitting him “to conduct ordinary maintenance and repair of the White House.” Leon also noted that the White House has offered vague and shifting information about who is actually in charge of the project and that the public has an interest in the appearance of the White House. Leon said “the ballroom construction project must stop until Congress authorizes its completion.”

The Department of Justice has already appealed.

Trump exploded at the judge’s decision, posting on social media: “The National Trust for Historic Preservation sues me for a Ballroom that is under budget, ahead of schedule, being built at no cost to the Taxpayer, and will be the finest Building of its kind anywhere in the World. I then get sued by them over the renovation of the dilapidated and structurally unsound former Kennedy Center, now, The Trump Kennedy Center (A show of Bipartisan Unity, a Republican and Democrat President!), where all I am doing is fixing, cleaning, running, and ‘sprucing up’ a terribly maintained, for many years, Building, but a Building of potentially great importance. Yet, The National Trust for Historic Preservation, a Radical Left Group of Lunatics whose funding was stopped by Congress in 2005, is not suing the Federal Reserve for a Building which has been decimated and destroyed, inside and out, by an incompetent and possibly corrupt Fed Chairman. The once magnificent Building is BILLIONS over budget, may never be completed, and may never open. All of the beautiful walls inside have been ripped down, never to be built again, but the National ‘Trust’ for Historic Preservation never did anything about it! Or, have they sued on Governor Gavin Newscum’s ‘RAILROAD TO NOWHERE’ in California that is BILLIONS over Budget and, probably, will never open or be used. So, the White House Ballroom, and The Trump Kennedy Center, which are under budget, ahead of schedule, and will be among the most magnificent Buildings of their kind anywhere in the World, gets [sic] sued by a group that was cut off by Government years ago, but all of the many DISASTERS in our Country are left alone to die. Doesn’t make much sense, does it? President DONALD J. TRUMP”

Hours later, he posted: “Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum and I are working on fixing the absolutely filthy Reflecting Pool between the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument. This work was supposed to be done by the Biden Administration, but Sleepy Joe doesn’t know what ‘CLEAN’ or proper maintenance is—The President and Secretary do!”

Tonight Summer Said, David S. Cloud, and Michael Amon of the Wall Street Journal reported that the United Arab Emirates is trying to get a United Nations Security Council resolution to call for the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz. The UAE says it will help the U.S. and other allies open the strait by force.

—

Notes:

https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/medicaid-cuts-threaten-hundreds-hospitals-new-report-finds-rcna265789

https://www.citizen.org/article/big-ugly-threat/

https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/trump-iran-war-strait-of-hormuz-ee950ad4

https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/stock-market-today-dow-sp-500-nasdaq-03-31-2026

Paul Krugman
The Psychology of Military Incompetence
Transcript…
Listen now
a day ago · 1766 likes · 330 comments · Paul Krugman

https://www.stripes.com/branches/navy/2026-03-31/aircraft-carrier-bush-deploys-norfolk-middle-east-21237489.html

https://thehill.com/policy/defense/5807214-iran-threatens-us-troops/

https://thehill.com/blogs/in-the-know/5809190-ingraham-questions-trump-iran/

https://www.alternet.org/alex-jones-trump-2676644939/

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/mark-robinson-comes-clean-sort-of-and-tries-to-sell-some-content

https://www.democracydocket.com/news-alerts/trump-signs-sweeping-order-attacking-mail-in-voting/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2026/03/24/activist-voter-fraud-mail-wisconsin/

https://www.cnn.com/2026/03/31/media/federal-judge-trump-order-npr-pbs-funding

https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.dcd.287645/gov.uscourts.dcd.287645.60.0_2.pdf

https://www.reuters.com/world/us-judge-halts-trumps-400-million-white-house-ballroom-project-now-2026-03-31/

https://www.democracydocket.com/news-alerts/democrats-voting-rights-advocates-blast-trump-order-mail-voting/

https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/uae-iran-war-strait-of-hormuz-9836ecbb

X:

RonFilipkowski/status/2039125968661422402

Bluesky:

meidastouch.com/post/3mie4uwx4kk2f

meidastouch.com/post/3miewolrgvd2g

atrupar.com/post/3miev6mw6wk2h

reichlinmelnick.bsky.social/post/3mifa6it7hk2f

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Letters from an American

Politics Chat, March 31, 2026

Heather Cox Richardson
Updated

Letters from an American

The Whims of a Single Man

Heather Cox Richardson
Updated

Astronomy Picture of the Day

What unexpected things do you see when you look up at the night sky? Today’s image resembles an What unexpected things do you see when you look up at the night sky? Today’s image resembles an


xkcd.com

Creation

This xkcd.com update introduces a variety of new reading modes which can be activated through the menu below the comic.
The Cross Section

Has Any President Done This Much Intentional Damage to the Economy?

Paul Waldman
Updated
White House photo by Molly Riley

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

As spring arrives and the cherry blossoms bloom around Washington, Donald Trump’s approval ratings are officially in the toilet:

There are many reasons why he keeps falling lower and lower, but the single most important is likely that Trump has utterly failed on what the foolish and gullible believed was his great strength: the economy. While he does a lot of distasteful but symbolic things like demolishing the East Wing and plastering his name on everything in sight, all of Trump’s most consequential screwups and authoritarian abuses have an economic component. And they all make things worse.

In fact, you’d have to go back to Herbert Hoover to find a president whose decisions were so directly and willfully disastrous for the economy. That’s not because this is the worst economy since the Great Depression; it isn’t, not yet anyway. But in all the downturns and crises we’ve had over the last century, the causes were largely outside of the president’s control.

Those presidents might have made some different decisions or found a way to improve things more quickly, but one wouldn’t say that George W. Bush created the economic crisis of 2008, or that the inflation that crossed the presidencies of Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, and Jimmy Carter happened only because of the decisions they made. Most of the judgments we make of them in retrospect were about how they responded once the crisis arrived. They may have been blamed when things turned bad, but one could argue in every case that it wasn’t really their fault. The latest example is from 2022, when inflation spiked all over the world and here at home Joe Biden got the blame.

But what’s happening now is different. Consider the major policy initiatives of Trump’s second term:

  • Tariffs: Trump believes fervently in the power of tariffs to produce boundless prosperity, and so he has imposed an ever-shifting program of tariffs on foreign materials and products. The nearly universal conclusion of economists is that this policy has been a failure; not only hasn’t it created the manufacturing boom Trump promised, it has increased prices for American consumers and led our trading partners to begin constructing a new global trade system to circumvent the U.S.

  • Immigration: Trump’s sweeping crackdown on immigration — both deporting immigrants already here and making it all but impossible for new immigrants to come — has been an economic disaster. As a Brookings Institution report notes, “Reduced migration will dampen growth in the labor force, consumer spending, and gross domestic product” in years to come. Multiple economic sectors from construction to agriculture are facing labor shortages, and job growth has slowed to a crawl. And because the crackdown is motivated by naked animus toward all immigrants but especially non-white ones, it extends to a large and growing number of policy areas. For instance, the Small Business Administration just announced that it will cut off loans to green card holders, despite the fact that immigrants start more businesses and create more jobs than native-born Americans. One could hardly imagine a dumber economic own-goal, done for no reason other than the fact that the Trump administration hates immigrants.

  • Energy: Trump has waged an outright war on renewable energy, one of the most dynamic and fast-growing sectors of the world’s economy. As a result, we’ve ceded the green manufacturing sector to China, which now makes most of the world’s wind turbines, solar panels, and lithium-ion batteries. While the Chinese electric car industry is leaping ahead, ours is pulling back, a direct consequence of Trump’s decision to kill EV subsidies. In its lust to prop up the fossil fuel industry, the administration is literally forcing utilities against their will to keep coal plants open so customers can pay more for electricity and get dirtier air in the bargain. And speaking of fossil fuels…

  • The Iran War: We don’t know how long this war will go on, but the economic effects are already being felt. Gas has now crossed $4 a gallon (which will cause a broad increase in prices for all kinds of goods), farmers are facing a spike in the cost of fertilizer, and as Paul Krugman points out, the real effects of the constriction in oil supplies haven’t even been felt yet, which is why some energy analysts are predicting that this could be a worse crisis than the oil shock of the 1970s. The Pentagon wants an additional $200 billion to fund the war, and congressional Republicans are considering health care cuts to pay for it. There are now serious worries that the war could produce a global recession.

He’s a business guy, he knows the economy and stuff

To call this a record of economic incompetence would be too kind. In every case, Trump chose to do what he did for the most stupid, petty, and malicious reasons, despite the fact that the economic effects his decisions would produce were obvious and predicted by anyone with half a brain. It’s especially notable given that in his first term, Trump operated with a kind of benign neglect on many economic fronts, the consequence of which was that before he utterly screwed up his response to the covid pandemic, things were going pretty well. Yes, he restricted immigration and imposed some tariffs, but it was on a much smaller scale. For the first three years of his term, job growth was reasonable, inflation was low, and the economy largely rolled along.

Which probably reinforced the widespread and completely false notion that because Trump was a business guy who knows business stuff, he would be skilled at managing the economy. Even if Trump had been a traditional business leader and not a scam artist with a checkered record of successes and spectacular failures (including multiple bankruptcies), that wouldn’t have meant he knew anything about macroeconomic policy; as I’ve been shouting for far too many years, government and business are not remotely alike, and the skills and knowledge one needs to succeed in one do not transfer to the other.

Yet despite the crushing weight of all available evidence, one still heard voters in 2024 say that because Trump knows business, he could come into office, business away all that inflation (which was largely gone by the time of the election anyway), and bring us to a new age of prosperity. The fact that people thought that is a tribute to the propagandistic power of repetition: Say a thing often enough, no matter how ridiculous it is, and at least some people will believe it. (The same is true of the idea that Trump is a great deal-maker, when in fact he is the world’s worst negotiator.)

To their credit, Americans are now giving Trump dreadful ratings on the economy; in the latest Reuters/Ipsos poll (which was taken a week ago, before the national average for gas topped $4 a gallon), his economic approval was only 29%, worse than Joe Biden’s at the height of the 2022 inflation:

It would be nice if this were the result of the American public’s discerning judgment, but it almost certainly isn’t. That’s not to say that a majority of them favor fascism, because they don’t. But to drive your approval as low as Trump’s has gotten, you have to really muck up the economy. And on that score, we haven’t seen anything yet.

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

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Simon Willison's Weblog

llm-echo 0.4

Release: llm-echo 0.4

  • Prompts now have the input_tokens and output_tokens fields populated on the response.

Tags: llm

Simon Willison's Weblog

llm-echo 0.3

Release: llm-echo 0.3

Tags: llm

Core Memory

He Hacked Finance And Is Now Building An AI CEO - EP 63 Pedro Franceschi

Ashlee Vance
Updated

Pedro Franceschi taught himself to code when he was eight years old. At 12, he began receiving legal notices from Apple, asking him to stop hacking iPhones. By 14, he was making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year selling software and had his mom accompanying him on job interviews in his home city of Rio de Janeiro. Even among coding and hacking prodigies, Franceschi stands out.

Today, Franceschi is the co-founder and CEO of Brex, a financial technology company that was just acquired by Capital One for $5.15 billion. Franceschi is all of 29 years old now, so he’s done alright.

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Brex led a new wave of companies that brought more modern financial tools first to start-ups and then to businesses of all sizes. Over the years, it’s had some ups and downs, and Franceschi has been remarkably open about Brex’s stumbles, his mental health struggles and about the areas where he thinks Brex got things very right.

Franceschi remains a hacker at heart and has been experimenting away with AI agents. He, in fact, says he’s running Brex – and his life – with a team of AI agents that read his e-mails and Slack messages, perform job recruiting tasks and schedule his day-to-day activities.

We get into all of this on the episode, charting Franceschi’s rise from hacking phenom to running a multi-billion-dollar company and discussing where he thinks AI and money are heading.

Do we have journalistic conflicts with this episode? Yes, we do. Brex has been the top sponsor of our podcast and video series. You can learn more about the depths of our relationship and what Brex can do for your business right here.

The podcast is also made possible by E1 Ventures, which backs the most ambitious founders and start-ups.

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Simon Willison's Weblog

Quoting Soohoon Choi

I want to argue that AI models will write good code because of economic incentives. Good code is cheaper to generate and maintain. Competition is high between the AI models right now, and the ones that win will help developers ship reliable features fastest, which requires simple, maintainable code. Good code will prevail, not only because we want it to (though we do!), but because economic forces demand it. Markets will not reward slop in coding, in the long-term.

— Soohoon Choi, Slop Is Not Necessarily The Future

Tags: slop, ai-assisted-programming, generative-ai, agentic-engineering, ai, llms

Simon Willison's Weblog

Supply Chain Attack on Axios Pulls Malicious Dependency from npm

Supply Chain Attack on Axios Pulls Malicious Dependency from npm

Useful writeup of today's supply chain attack against Axios, the HTTP client NPM package with 101 million weekly downloads. Versions 1.14.1 and 0.30.4 both included a new dependency called plain-crypto-js which was freshly published malware, stealing credentials and installing a remote access trojan (RAT).

It looks like the attack came from a leaked long-lived npm token. Axios have an open issue to adopt trusted publishing, which would ensure that only their GitHub Actions workflows are able to publish to npm. The malware packages were published without an accompanying GitHub release, which strikes me as a useful heuristic for spotting potentially malicious releases - the same pattern was present for LiteLLM last week as well.

Via lobste.rs

Tags: javascript, security, npm, supply-chain

Simon Willison's Weblog

datasette-llm 0.1a4

Release: datasette-llm 0.1a4

I released llm-echo 0.3 to provide an API key testing utility I needed for the tests for this new feature.

Tags: llm, datasette

Simon Willison's Weblog

llm-all-models-async 0.1

Release: llm-all-models-async 0.1

LLM plugins can define new models in both sync and async varieties. The async variants are most common for API-backed models - sync variants tend to be things that run the model directly within the plugin.

My llm-mrchatterbox plugin is sync only. I wanted to try it out with various Datasette LLM features (specifically datasette-enrichments-llm) but Datasette can only use async models.

So... I had Claude spin up this plugin that turns sync models into async models using a thread pool. This ended up needing an extra plugin hook mechanism in LLM itself, which I shipped just now in LLM 0.30.

Tags: llm, async, python

Simon Willison's Weblog

llm 0.30

Release: llm 0.30

  • The register_models() plugin hook now takes an optional model_aliases parameter listing all of the models, async models and aliases that have been registered so far by other plugins. A plugin with @hookimpl(trylast=True) can use this to take previously registered models into account. #1389
  • Added docstrings to public classes and methods and included those directly in the documentation.

Tags: llm

Paul Krugman

The Psychology of Military Incompetence

Paul Krugman
Updated

Transcript

So the world’s greatest military power went to war against a fourth rate nation whose military budget would be rounding error in our defense spending. And it appears that we lost.

Hi, Paul Krugman with a late night, well, evening update, which I don’t usually do, but I wanted to get this in before who knows what happens in the news tomorrow.

It’s Tuesday. It’s the day that the stock market rallied enormously, that the futures price of oil dropped precipitously, all on the happy news that the United States, at least based on Trump’s Truth Social, appears to be surrendering. Trump put up a Truth Social post saying that, you know, we don’t need to open the Strait of Hormuz. If the Europeans think they need it, they should go ahead and do it. And it’s up to them. And this is pretty amazing.

Of course, the idea that it only matters to the Europeans, that it doesn’t matter to us, is all wrong. And that will be a subject of a Substack post shortly. But it is pretty much a confession. Although it’s framed as we won, now let somebody else do the cleanup, the reality is it’s effectively a confession that, well, we lost. We can’t do this.

How the hell did we manage to do this? I mean, the objective reality is that this was never going to be... Maybe it wasn’t even going to be doable. There were reasons why we didn’t go to war with Iran, particularly why we didn’t go to war in a way that basically became an existential threat for the regime so that they have no compunction about creating lots of damage because the alternative result is annihilation for them personally. But everybody who thought about it even for a couple of minutes, anyone who knew anything, particularly anyone who’d been paying attention to four years of war in Ukraine … we know something about what modern war looks like and about the inability of countries that have conventional superior forces to avoid major damage from drones and missiles. So this was completely, unbelievably stupid.

How did we get there? Well, there was a very good article by Tobin Harshaw in Bloomberg, and mostly I’m just riffing off what he wrote, but I think that it deserves wider circulation. He resurrected a book I had forgotten about, a 1976 book by Norman Dixon called The Psychology of Military Incompetence. It was very British oriented, but the lessons apply; Dixon looked at the great military disasters of British history.

You might think there were many reasons why really bad decisions were made, but he actually said there was a kind of consistent pattern. That what happened was that you had military leaders, or people making military decisions, who for the most part shared two things. First, they believed, they had this atavistic, anachronistic belief that warfare is all about muscles and not about minds. which hasn’t been true for a very long time. And second, he argued that they are just generally anti-intellectual, anti-education.

So in some sense, it’s all about muscles and don’t give me all of these smarty-pants intellectuals who are telling me about why I’m doing it wrong. It’s an uncannily accurate portrait of Pete Hegseth, down to even seemingly minor details. Muscular Christianity is among the defining symptoms of the bad British military leaders that Dixon analyzed. So this is what happened.

This is not about specific bad judgments. It’s not, in a way, about the specifics of the case. It is that we were led into war by people who exemplified in the classic way how really bad military decisions are made. And it all comes down to believing in brute force and toughness and muscles — muscles in the age of drone warfare! — and hate intellectuals, hate learning.

What really gets me is that in a war where the deciding factor is having some intellectual understanding of what you’re doing, that a theocratic regime in Iran, which basically wants to bring back the Middle Ages, mostly got it right.

And the world’s leading haven of scientific thought, or we were at least until the current administration, got it completely wrong. It’s humiliating. It’s awful. And, you know, we will all be paying the price for this incredible defeat for probably for the rest of our lives.

Enjoy the evening.

Simon Willison's Weblog

datasette-extract 0.3a0

Release: datasette-extract 0.3a0

Tags: llm, datasette

Simon Willison's Weblog

datasette-enrichments-llm 0.2a0

Release: datasette-enrichments-llm 0.2a0

  • This plugin now uses datasette-llm to configure and manage models. This means it's possible to specify which models should be made available for enrichments, using the new enrichments purpose.

Tags: llm, datasette

Simon Willison's Weblog

datasette-llm-usage 0.2a0

Release: datasette-llm-usage 0.2a0

  • Removed features relating to allowances and estimated pricing. These are now the domain of datasette-llm-accountant.
  • Now depends on datasette-llm for model configuration. #3
  • Full prompts and responses and tool calls can now be logged to the llm_usage_prompt_log table in the internal database if you set the new datasette-llm-usage.log_prompts plugin configuration setting.
  • Redesigned the /-/llm-usage-simple-prompt page, which now requires the llm-usage-simple-prompt permission.

Tags: llm, datasette

Simon Willison's Weblog

datasette-llm 0.1a5

Release: datasette-llm 0.1a5

  • The llm_prompt_context() plugin hook wrapper mechanism now tracks prompts executed within a chain as well as one-off prompts, which means it can be used to track tool call loops. #5

Tags: llm, datasette

Paul Krugman

$4 Gasoline is Less Than Half the Story

Paul Krugman
Updated

A plane and truck at a gas station AI-generated content may be incorrect.

Although I expected the war on Iran to be a disaster, I didn’t expect the Trump administration to be implicitly conceding defeat after barely a month. Yet that’s where we are:

A screenshot of a message AI-generated content may be incorrect.

The stock market has soared on the news of potential U.S surrender, which tells you something about how the war is going. Unfortunately, declaring victory and running away will be a lot more difficult than Trump thinks. For one thing, thousands of U.S. ground troops are on their way to the Persian Gulf, and it will be very hard to avoid succumbing to the temptation to use them, at which point we will have entered what Robert Pape calls the “escalation trap.”

At the same time, Trump’s claim that the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz is other countries’ problem is whistling in the dark. Trump is telling Europeans that if they lack the “courage” to seize the jet fuel they need — funny how the vastly larger U.S. military isn’t doing the job — they can just “buy from the U.S., we have plenty.” Here’s what has happened to the average price of jet fuel at major U.S. airports:

Does this look to you as if we have “plenty”? It doesn’t look that way to airline executives:

A black text on a white background AI-generated content may be incorrect.

The reality is that U.S. prices of petroleum distillates and other products in which Persian Gulf nations are key producers have soared. The rise in gasoline prices, for which the national average just hit $4 a gallon, has made headlines. But other prices are also hugely important.

Most non-electric cars run on gasoline, but most trucks are fueled with diesel. And diesel prices are up even more than gasoline prices — approximately $1.70 per gallon as opposed to $1:

A graph of a graph with blue lines AI-generated content may be incorrect.

The feedstocks for fertilizer are largely manufactured from natural gas, and Persian Gulf nations were major producers, shipping their production out through the Strait of Hormuz, before the war. Here’s what has happened to the price of urea:

A graph with blue line AI-generated content may be incorrect.

Source: Trading Economics

And where do you think plastic comes from? Here’s the price of polyethylene:

A graph showing a line AI-generated content may be incorrect.

Source: Trading Economics

How important are these non-gasoline price shocks? The Energy Information Administration has a useful chart — the data are for 2022, but the numbers will look similar for the eve of the Iran War:

A chart of a graph AI-generated content may be incorrect.

Less than half of U.S. consumption of petroleum products was gasoline. And the price of distillate fuel oil — mostly diesel — is up about 70 percent more than the price of gasoline. Add in soaring costs for fertilizer and feedstocks for plastic, and the surge in gas prices, even though it dominates headlines, is well under half of the economic story.

And who pays the higher prices of diesel, jet fuel, fertilizer and plastics? The answer is that these show up initially as costs to producers but will quickly be passed on to consumers in the form of higher prices for shipping and, indirectly, almost everything you buy.

How big is the non-gasoline price shock? We consume around 4 million barrels of diesel a day, which is about 60 billion gallons per year (there are 42 gallons per barrel.) The price of diesel is up $1.70 a gallon, so if prices were to stay at current levels, that alone would be a roughly $100 billion hit to consumers. Substantial additional hits will come from higher prices of jet fuel, fertilizer and petrochemicals.

And, of course, gasoline has gotten a lot more expensive too. Do you still think that the Strait of Hormuz is other countries’ problem?

Now, America produces a lot of oil, and the domestic oil industry will be earning large windfall profits even as U.S. consumers suffer. But so what? We don’t have any mechanism in place to capture and redistribute those windfall gains, so ordinary U.S. families will bear the full brunt of the global oil shock even though America is a net oil exporter.

There’s an additional, technical but important reason to be even more worried about soaring prices for diesel, jet fuel and industrial materials than about gasoline prices. It involves how the Federal Reserve is likely to react.

The Fed normally bases its decisions about whether to reduce or increase interest rates on “core” inflation — inflation excluding food and energy prices. The reason it does this is that food and energy prices are highly volatile and are usually a poor indicator of what inflation will be over the next few years. So the Fed tries to “look through” inflation fluctuations driven mainly by the prices of groceries and gasoline. For example, it didn’t raise rates in 2011, when there was a temporary uptick in inflation driven entirely by oil prices.

There is a major debate among monetary policy experts about whether the Fed can safely focus only on core inflation and look through the inflationary effects of the Hormuz blockade, which if unresolved will be the worst energy crisis in history. In any case, however, core inflation only excludes energy directly purchased by consumers. Oil-related price shocks such as soaring jet fuel and diesel prices, which raise the cost of doing business, aren’t excluded, which means that they will increase the Fed’s preferred measure of inflation. This will push the Fed toward raising interest rates or at least holding off on rate cuts.

The Fed could, in principle, try to look through the effects of the Strait crisis on business costs as well as direct effects on consumer prices. But given how nervous everyone is about the risk of 70s-type stagflation, it probably won’t.

So the diesel/jet fuel/plastics shock will lead, other things equal, to a more hawkish Fed — and an elevated risk of recession.

The moral here is that the United States retains a vital interest in seeing the Strait of Hormuz reopened. Much as Trump would like to declare victory and insist that the blockade is other countries’ problem, reality won’t oblige him.

MUSICAL CODA

Daring Fireball

RAM Is the New Bearer Bond

John Gruber
Updated

Hana Kiros, writing for The Atlantic:

Recently, a Costco in Florida instituted a new store policy. An employee told me that he was asked to open up every desktop computer displayed in the electronics section and remove the memory chips. Otherwise, the RAM harvesters would get them. Elsewhere, criminal groups are misdirecting trucks carrying RAM in order to loot them. All of this is happening because of a generational shortage of a part used in practically every electronic gadget on Earth.

Two of the best movies ever made, John McTiernan’s Die Hard in 1988, and Michael Mann’s Heat in 1995, revolved around plots to steal bearer bonds. (Also: Beverly Hills Cop — not quite one of the best films ever made, but a classic, for sure.) But bearer bonds have fallen out of favor as the world of legitimate finance has become almost entirely digital. A good heist film targeting a big shipment of RAM chips would be very 2026.

 ★ 
Anil Dash

On the Vergecast, On Video

I finally got the chance to drop by one of my favorite podcasts, The Vergecast, where David Pierce had me on to talk about the recent conversation about Apple's moves around video podcasts, as well as the much broader big-picture considerations around keeping podcasts open. We started with grounding the conversation in the idea that "Wherever you get your podcasts" is a radical statement.

The episode also starts with a wonderful look back at Apple's first half-century as they celebrate their 50 anniversary, courtesy of Jason Snell, whose Six Colors is one of my favorite tech sites, and whose annual survey of tech expert sentiment on Apple is indispensable. He's completely fluent in Apple's culture and history, and minces no words about their recent moral failures. Definitely worth the watch! I hope you'll check out the entire episode, and let me know what you think, and I'm really glad to get to continue conversations that start on my site and bring them to a broader audience.

Daring Fireball

Apple Marks 50th Anniversary

John Gruber
Updated

The Apple.com homepage has a nice little animation showing sketches of the company’s most iconic products. The video file itself is hosted here, but I’m not sure how permanent that link is.

Tim Cook posted a different video on Twitter/X, a VHS-style “rewind” through Apple product history. This one’s more fun. There’s absolutely exquisite audio glitch at a certain moment — chef’s kiss. Bit of a shame that it’s only on X as far I know. (I’ve put a copy here for safekeeping.)

And, last night, Paul McCartney played a full concert at Apple Park for Apple employees. Good to see the two Apples burying the hatchet.

 ★ 
Daring Fireball

Business Insider Profiles Fidji Simo, OpenAI’s ‘CEO of Applications’

John Gruber
Updated

Grace Kay, Ashley Stewart, and Pranav Dixit, writing for Business Insider (News+):

“Part of bringing me on, and giving me the responsibilities of a CEO, was to make sure that I could really run that part of the company with autonomy,” Simo, whose title is CEO of applications, told Business Insider.

Altman defers to Simo when he doesn’t feel strongly, she said, and they “debate it out” when he does.

I am deeply suspicious of any company with two CEOs. It occasionally works, like at Netflix, when they’re not just co-CEOs but co-equals. Simo does not seem Sam Altman’s equal at OpenAI.

As OpenAI races toward a possible IPO later this year, Simo, who oversees nearly two-thirds of the company, has a delicate balancing act. She must craft a strategy to make products profitable, while convincing staffers who joined a research-driven organization that commercialization won’t change the mission.

The stakes are high. Deutsche Bank estimated that OpenAI is expected to amass the “largest startup losses in history,” totaling a projected $143 billion between 2024 and 2029. (An OpenAI spokesperson said that figure is incorrect, and one person familiar with the numbers said OpenAI’s internal projections are in line with other reports of $111 billion cash burn by 2030.)

It’s really something when the number in the company’s favor is a loss of $111 billion.

One former Meta employee recalled a moment when, after a contentious meeting, Simo sent a one-line follow-up saying she was unlikely to change her mind, so the team shouldn’t waste time trying to persuade her. She has little patience for internal debates that lose sight of the product, the former employee said, and she’s skilled at “being super clear in her directive so teams don’t scramble and waste time.”

Debates that lose sight of the product quality, or lose sight of the product revenue? Given that Simo rose to prominence at Facebook, eventually running the Facebook blue app, and considering the product quality vs. product revenue balance of that app, I think we know the answer.

This whole dumb “superapp” idea that leaked last week sounds exactly like the sort of thing someone who ran the Facebook app would think is a good idea. The difference, I expect, is that Facebook is free to let product quality (and experience quality) fall by the wayside because their social platforms have such powerful network effects. People stay on Facebook and Instagram even as the experiences worsen because everyone they know is also still on those apps. There’s no network effect like that for ChatGPT. Claude is already rising to near-equal status in popularity, and Gemini isn’t far behind, and Simo hasn’t even started enshittifying ChatGPT yet. People will just switch.

 ★ 
Boston Red Sox – MLB Trade Rumors
The Aviationist
Market Design

Freedom Festival

Al Roth
Updated

 Passover is the Freedom Festival.

The word of the day is LIBERTY (in all it's complications)

A happy and safe Passover to all who celebrate.


 

 

Aeon | a world of ideas

The Medici’s lost garden of wonders

Aeon Video
Updated

Painting of a symmetrical Italian garden with a villa, geometric hedges, trees and pathways.

The rise and fall of the Medici’s ingeniously engineered ‘Garden of Wonders’: the Pratolino ‘proto-theme park’ in Tuscany

- by Aeon Video

Watch on Aeon

Oklahoma Watch
Software Design: Tidy First?

Tremors

Kent Beck
Updated

When my pappy got old, his go-to topic of conversation was his health problems. I swore that would never be me. Yet here we are…

Several people watching my first episode of Still Burning asked about my shaking hands. Summary: I don’t know but it can’t be good.

About six months ago I was sitting playing poker (as I do) & I noticed my legs were shaking. “Te…

Read more

SpaceNews

Agentic AI: the future of space warfare

Nina Armagno and Kim Crider
Updated
Transporter-16 launch

The future of space warfare will be determined by the speed of decision. As satellite constellations proliferate and adversaries field increasingly sophisticated counterspace capabilities, the ability to sense, analyze and […]

The post Agentic AI: the future of space warfare appeared first on SpaceNews.

SpaceNews

Antaris™ Raises $28 Million Series A to Accelerate AI-Driven Space Missions

Antaris
Updated
Antaris Space Logo

Los Altos, California — Antaris™, creator of the AI-powered Antaris Intelligence™ platform that simplifies satellite design, simulation, manufacturing, and operations for ISR and communications satellite missions, today announced the first close […]

The post Antaris™ Raises $28 Million Series A to Accelerate AI-Driven Space Missions appeared first on SpaceNews.

SpaceNews

China targets 140 launches in 2026 amid commercial space surge

Andrew Jones
Updated
A wide aerial view of a rocket launch site in a desert landscape at sunset. A tall white rocket stands vertically on a launch pad near the center-right, surrounded by service towers and low buildings. A long rectangular assembly building and crane structure sit nearby, connected by paved roads. The surrounding terrain is flat, sandy, and sparsely developed, with distant mountains visible on the horizon under a warm orange sky.

China plans to conduct around 140 orbital launches this year, according to a commercial launch executive, marking a sharp acceleration in the country’s launch cadence.

The post China targets 140 launches in 2026 amid commercial space surge appeared first on SpaceNews.

SpaceNews

Europe’s space sector faces power shift as funding grows

Sandra Erwin
Updated
A photo of Europe taken January 19, 2024, from aboard the International Space Station by a member of the Expedition 70 crew. Credit: NASA

New report from Aerospace Corp. highlights rising EU funding and defense focus

The post Europe’s space sector faces power shift as funding grows appeared first on SpaceNews.

SpaceNews

Chinese startup tests flexible robotic arm in space for on-orbit servicing

Andrew Jones
Updated

A Chinese commercial company has conducted an on-orbit demonstration of a flexible robotic arm, marking progress toward capabilities for satellite servicing, refueling and debris removal.

The post Chinese startup tests flexible robotic arm in space for on-orbit servicing appeared first on SpaceNews.

SpaceNews

Virgin Galactic expects commercial suborbital flights to resume late this year

Jeff Foust
Updated
Virgin Galactic spaceplane

Virgin Galactic still expects to resume commercial suborbital flights by the end of the year as its first next-generation spaceplane nears completion.

The post Virgin Galactic expects commercial suborbital flights to resume late this year appeared first on SpaceNews.

SpaceNews

Cast your vote for the best sci-fi spaceship and then watch debaters duke it out at Space Symposium

Redwire Space
Updated
A grid of 18 spaceships from science-fiction franchises with the text: Spaceship Smackdown at Space Symposium 2026

Voting ends April 14. Resistance is futile – you must comply.

The post Cast your vote for the best sci-fi spaceship and then watch debaters duke it out at Space Symposium appeared first on SpaceNews.

Spaceflight Now

Live coverage: NASA to launch Artemis 2, its first Moon-bound mission with astronauts since 1972

Will Robinson-Smith
Updated
NASA’s Space Launch System rocket and Orion spacecraft stand at Launch Complex 39B on Tuesday, March 31, ahead of the planned launch of Artemis 2. Image: Michael Cain/Spaceflight Now

For the first time in more than 53 years, NASA is preparing to send humans beyond low Earth orbit. As soon as Wednesday evening, four astronauts will embark on an a more than nine-day mission with the goal of flying around the Moon and back.

The flight is called Artemis 2 and it’s the first crewed flight of the Orion spacecraft, a key stepping stone for grand plans of a Moon Base and eventually human exploration on Mars. NASA astronaut and mission commander Reid Wiseman leads the quartet, which includes fellow NASA astronauts Victor Glover and Christina Koch along with Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen.

“The vehicle is ready. The system is ready. The crew is ready. And behind this flight stands a campaign: landings, a lunar base, a nuclear propulsion into deep space. That begins, not ends, with what happens on Wednesday,” said NASA Associate Administrator Amit Kshatriya on Monday.

“I have complete confidence in this team and the NASA workforce.”

The more than 49-hour-long countdown officially began ticking at 4:44 p.m. EDT (2044 UTC) on  Monday. Artemis Launch Director Charlie Blackwell-Thompson will give her approval to proceed into fueling the 322-foot-tall Space Launch System rocket at 7:34 a.m. EDT (1134 UTC) on Wednesday.

Spaceflight Now will have live coverage of the Artemis 2 mission beginning about 10 minutes before the poll for fueling takes place. Liftoff is scheduled for 6:24 p.m. EDT (2224 UTC), which is the opening of a two-hour window.

The 45th Weather Squadron forecast an 20 percent chance for a weather violation during Wednesday’s launch window. On Tuesday during a news briefing, Launch Weather Officer Mark Burger said there was a low risk for lightning, but noted that they were watching for the potential for interference from cumulus clouds and strong ground winds.

“The optimistic side of me says that means 80 percent chance of ‘go’ here. Again, isolated showers wandering around, but again, a lot of real estate between those showers, in all likelihood,” Burger said. “We should be able to find some clear air to launch Artemis 2.”

Regarding weather along the rocket’s ascent corridor, he said that conditions heading into the planned launch window are “very much ‘go’,” stating that the risk probability was 9 percent total, which he said was “very good.”

If all goes smoothly with the multi-hour fueling process, the four crew members will begin donning their flight suits — formally called Orion Crew Survival System (OCSS) suits — about 5.5 hours before liftoff. After departing the suit-up room, they will spend a few final minutes, face-to-face with their families, before taking a 30-minute car ride out to the launch pad.

Once they arrive at Launch Complex 39B, a small team called the closeout crew will help them into their Orion spacecraft, which the astronauts named ‘Integrity.’ Onboard is all they need and more to survive and work aboard the the spaceship that they’ll call home for more than a week.

Orion has a habitable volume of 330 ft³ (9.34 m³), which NASA said is analogous to the combination of two small minivans.

After the crew is safely onboard, the side hatches to the crew module and the launch abort system will be closed and sealed sequentially. The closeout crew, which includes one of the backup astronauts for this mission, will then finish stowing their tools and clear the pad less than an hour before flight.

After achieving liftoff, the twin five-segment solid rocket boosters will separate from the rocket’s core stage a little more than two minutes into flight. The SLS rocket’s upper stage — called the Interim Cryogenic Propulsion Stage — will separate from the core stage in the eighth minute of the mission.

20 minutes post-liftoff, the four, 23-foot-long (7 m) solar arrays on the European Service Module (located beneath the crew module) will deploy and begin to provide power to Orion’s four main batteries.

The ICPS will perform its first big burn, which is called a perigee raise maneuver, 49 minutes after liftoff, putting Orion into an elliptical orbit at 1,381 x 115 statute miles. That will be followed nearly an hour later by the apogee raise maneuver, which will put Orion into a high Earth orbit at 43,730 x 0 statute miles.

Nearly two hours after that, Orion will separate from the ICPS and an hour-long manual piloting demonstration will begin. Wiseman and Glover will take the stick and bring the spaceship up to about 10 meters away from the upper stage to demonstrate the dexterity of the vehicle, which will be needed for future docking operations with landers from Blue Origin and SpaceX.

The crew will then be able to get about four hours of sleep before they’re woken up by one more perigee raising burn to close out Flight Day 1 and their return to sleep. At that point, they will be in an orbit of 44,555 x 115 statute miles.

The big decision point will come on Thursday when NASA makes the call on whether the spacecraft and the crew are ready to commit to their journey to the Moon. If so, the main engine on the Orion’s service module will fire for the trans-lunar injection (TLI) burn less than two hours into Flight Day 2.

There are some abort options that would prevent the crew from going out to the Moon, if necessary, but making a u-turn becomes less optimal the further out the crew gets.

Depending on the time and day they launch, they are poised to see parts of the far side of the Moon that humans have never seen directly with their own eyes. Those unique observations will help researchers understand more about the makeup of the Moon and the journey will help NASA and its partners learn more about living in a radiation environment beyond Earth’s atmosphere and protection.

Meet the crew

Learn more about the four individuals who will be the first to live and work onboard an Orion spacecraft.

Talking Points Memo - Editors Blog

Neutrality, Authoritarianism, and Thoughts on the Cult of Both Sides

Josh Marshall
Updated

Over the weekend I noticed an example of one of the most significant features of the last decade-plus in American politics, though it’s one that still remains too little remarked upon. Lauren Egan writes a newsletter covering the Democratic Party for The Bulwark. Sunday night’s edition was about pundit and political analyst Stuart Rothenberg, “He Was a Legendary Independent Pundit. Then Trump Arrived.” Basically, How did Stuart Rothenberg come down with, as MAGA puts it, Trump Derangement Syndrome? Toward the end of the piece, Egan gets at what I think is the underlying issue here and some of the commonality I’m about to note.

Let’s start this story in the late ’80s and early ’90s. At the time, there were a handful of men — pretty much all men, as I recall — who played a very specific role in the political-journalistic ecosystem. They were rigorously, perhaps obsessively, non-partisan and were go-to people on basic questions of politics. They’d appear on shows, be on call for quotes for journalists at the big papers. Rothenberg and Charlie Cook played that role in the electoral analysis and predictions space. Larry Sabato also occupied that space, though he also played in the political analysis one. In the latter space were Norm Ornstein (AEI) and Thomas Mann (Brookings). I think they were on PBS Newshour for a long time as a pair. Their analysis was on the mechanics of governing, less the explicitly political stuff and generally not electoral stuff.

These guys played a key role as arbiters in the journalistic-political ecosystem. They were analysts, not reporters. So they brought presumably some deeper thought, some historical perspective to the matter. But the key was the neutral arbitrator-ness. In a sense they were referees, and the point of their role was that their views were sort of like a currency that was accepted on both sides of the aisle, as it were.

This all began to break down during Barack Obama’s presidency. And I tie it in my mind to a column Mann and Ornstein wrote in April 2012 in The Washington Post: Let’s just say it: The Republicans are the problem. It’s difficult to overstate the impact of this rebellion against the orthodoxy that in many ways had defined each man’s career and prominence. They later expanded on this piece in a book called It’s Even Worse Than It Looks. The gist of both was that it’s not polarization, extremism, the decline of comity, the breaking of norms. The issue is the GOP, a party which already then was essentially a revanchist party of the sectarian right masquerading as a center-right party of government. Of course, this doesn’t mean there aren’t issues with Democrats. But the big structural issue is the GOP. This has been a constant TPM theme for many years and the subject of countless posts. So I don’t want to dwell on that point but rather the effect on these analysts and political journalism more generally.

The business model of modern journalism, or now rather legacy journalism, is one based on balance. People often think this is about the evolution of modern journalism. It’s not. It’s part of the business model of post-war journalism. As the parties diverged in the late 20th century this put increasing tension on that model. And Republican operatives increasingly saw it as a system they could game. Broadly, anything that represented the Republican “position” had to be reported at face value and placed on equal terms with whatever the Democrats’ one was. We know this story. In the late Bush years and early Obama years, you could feel this model coming under growing strain; that opinion piece above was a case of the model just snapping. The model had to break or people like these would be forced to say things that were absurd, treat absurd things as though they were real.

So yeah, you have these exemplars of neutrality, dispassion, not taking sides. And I’m sure they would have liked it to stay that way. But it didn’t. The world of politics changed. And you could prioritize balance and neutrality but that would likely mean becoming a liar on someone else’s behalf. And this same breakdown happened in the more general news environment as well. It’s the origins of “bothsidesism” and all the rest.

As I was writing this though, I wanted to step back and ask myself a different question. Usually when we talk about there not being “two sides,” we mean that one position is based on factual information and the other is not. But it’s not like there aren’t two political sides. There’s a chaotic authoritarian nationalist “side” and there’s a kinda civic democratic side. Those are two real and definable things. So why can’t there be two sides in a broader civic debate? I was thinking about this this morning. And I think broadly there are two reasons. One is that, broadly speaking, these kinds of journalist/commentator elites are bought into the broad definition of American democracy. They struggle to treat attacks on the foundation of the democratic system as a legitimate “side.” But the broader issue goes to something like empiricism or civic debate itself. The essence of Trumpism and probably all authoritarian nationalism is that the leader is right. “Trump is right” trumps any policy prescription or any political goal. You can either operate within that set of rules and framework or you can’t. And most people from the old system can’t.

This goes to part of the broader crisis of journalism at the moment. There is a pervasive billionaire assumption that mainstream legacy journalism is “liberal,” and there’s a big market for news that gets outside of the liberal bubble, has views from both sides of the spectrum, is as welcoming to the MAGA right as to the Democratic left. As my friend Eric Alterman wrote in his book about liberal bias and the media wars, there was a time when something kind of like this was somewhat true. (Basically in the 1960s when a certain kind of Cold War liberalism did broadly inform the values of news media at the national level.) But that hasn’t been the case for decades. That billionaire view is simply wrong, inasmuch as most of what you get in legacy media is a huge effort to inoculate against charges of “media bias.” What there is though is a basic commitment to that empirical/civic mindset and set of values. And the nature of our current political moment is that the American right today is anti-empirical and anti-civic. That’s why when the Post or now CBS News goes searching for these underserved viewers hungering for journalism outside the liberal bubble, they fail. Because in a basic sense the current American right simply isn’t interested in news or journalism as most of us conceive it. Look at Fox or OANN or any of the other TV news clones and you can see that. When the Post or CBS try to do this, they don’t find any new viewers and lose a lot of their existing ones who feel insulted.

Obviously this isn’t to say that legacy media doesn’t have its shortcomings. Of course it does. Indeed, it’s another perverse part of our current moment that those who are invested in the future of civic democracy sort of have to speak for “legacy media” as something we’re either responsible for or like or want to speak up for. But the basic reality remains this. Our new political world in the U.S. and around much of the globe is no longer simply right vs. left but authoritarian vs. civic democratic. And those two poles involved not just different policy positions but different ideational systems, different ways of thinking about research, facts, power and more. Journalism as most of us understand it, the way most journalists understand it, is inextricably located in the civic democratic space, though it isn’t inherently liberal in the old sense of the word. Without knowing that basic fact, you can’t understand much of anything about contemporary politics and journalism and the big fights about our future that we are all, intentionally or not, involved in today.

Talking Points Memo - Editors Blog

Robinson’s Return

John Light
Updated

Three years ago, Hunter Walker heard that Mark Robinson, then the lieutenant governor of North Carolina, was about to enter that state’s governors race. He also heard that Robinson had a penchant for extreme statements. And so, Hunter dug into his Facebook page, where Robinson had for years been an inveterate poster. In March 2023, TPM offered one of the first comprehensive looks at the public proclamations of this bizarre governor candidate-to-be — a man who would later be reported to have offered on porn forums such memorable self-descriptions as “I’m a black NAZI.” (Robinson denied at the time that the account was his, and even sued CNN, which had published the story.)

After losing in November 2024, Robinson got quieter. But, now, he’s back, with a sort-of apology. Hunter has that story here.

Stephen Clark - Ars Technica

After more than 53 years, humans may finally return to the Moon this week

Stephen Clark
Updated

KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Florida—The two-day countdown for the launch of NASA's Artemis II mission began Monday evening, with clocks timed for the first of six opportunities in early April to send a crew of four astronauts around the far side of the Moon.

Liftoff from Launch Complex 39B at Kennedy Space Center in Florida is scheduled for a two-hour launch window opening at 6:24 pm EDT (22:24 UTC) on Wednesday. NASA has backup launch opportunities each day through Monday, April 6, or else the mission will have to wait until the end of the month.

Mission managers said Monday that all systems were looking good for launch this week. The weather forecast is favorable, with an 80 percent chance of acceptable conditions for liftoff Wednesday. The only weather concern at the launch site in Florida is a low chance of rain showers and cloud cover that could present a risk of lightning. But with a two-hour launch window, there should be plenty of time to wait out any scattered storms.

Read full article

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Schneier on Security

Inventors of Quantum Cryptography Win Turing Award

Bruce Schneier
Updated

Charles Bennett and Gilles Brassard have won the 2026 Turing Award for inventing quantum cryptography.

I am incredibly pleased to see them get this recognition. I have always thought the technology to be fantastic, even though I think it’s largely unnecessary. I wrote up my thoughts back in 2008, in an essay titled “Quantum Cryptography: As Awesome As It Is Pointless.”

Back then, I wrote:

While I like the science of quantum cryptography—my undergraduate degree was in physics—I don’t see any commercial value in it. I don’t believe it solves any security problem that needs solving. I don’t believe that it’s worth paying for, and I can’t imagine anyone but a few technophiles buying and deploying it. Systems that use it don’t magically become unbreakable, because the quantum part doesn’t address the weak points of the system.

Security is a chain; it’s as strong as the weakest link. Mathematical cryptography, as bad as it sometimes is, is the strongest link in most security chains. Our symmetric and public-key algorithms are pretty good, even though they’re not based on much rigorous mathematical theory. The real problems are elsewhere: computer security, network security, user interface and so on.

Cryptography is the one area of security that we can get right. We already have good encryption algorithms, good authentication algorithms and good key-agreement protocols. Maybe quantum cryptography can make that link stronger, but why would anyone bother? There are far more serious security problems to worry about, and it makes much more sense to spend effort securing those.

As I’ve often said, it’s like defending yourself against an approaching attacker by putting a huge stake in the ground. It’s useless to argue about whether the stake should be 50 feet tall or 100 feet tall, because either way, the attacker is going to go around it. Even quantum cryptography doesn’t “solve” all of cryptography: The keys are exchanged with photons, but a conventional mathematical algorithm takes over for the actual encryption.

What about quantum computation? I’m not worried; the math is ahead of the physics. Reports of progress in that area are overblown. And if there’s a security crisis because of a quantum computation breakthrough, it’s because our systems aren’t crypto-agile.

Anil Dash

Defending Privacy, Daily

Yesterday, I had the chance to witness someone who's one of the most dedicated, competent advocates for privacy and digital rights bring that message to a whole new platform. It turns out, it's pretty delightful, especially in a moment when our civil liberties and rights online couldn't matter more!

Cindy Cohn, the executive director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, has been a tireless fighter for protecting everyone's digital civil liberties, and I was lucky enough to get to tag along as she took the story of that work to The Daily Show yesterday. It was no surprise that the conversation was so fluent and insightful on the topic, but I think a lot of people in the audience didn't expect that it would be such a fun and even delightful conversation about a topic that is, too often, confusing or complicated or boring.

Six years ago, when I first joined the board of the EFF, I was already a believer in the core principles the organization stood for, but one of my biggest hopes was that the messages and mission of the entire team could just be brought to a larger audience. That couldn't have been more perfectly accomplished than seeing Cindy translate some topics that were fairly technical, or which involved fairly arcane legal concerns, and make them very accessible. And this work is vital because both the overreaching, authoritarian government, and the irresponsible, unaccountable forces of big tech are threatening our rights more than ever.

Cindy Cohn hands Jon Stewart a "Let's Sue the Government" t-shirt

I gotta admit, it was pretty fun to watch Cindy hand Jon a "Let's Sue the Government!" t-shirt. You can get one just like his if you donate to EFF or become a member!

More broadly, though, the interview was also just a wonderful milestone to see at a personal level. Part of the story that Cindy was telling on the show is the broader narrative she captures in her book, Privacy's Defender: My Thirty-Year Fight Against Digital Surveillance, out from MIT Press. (And full disclosure there, I recently joined their management board as well, more on that soon.) The book captures so many of the lessons that can only come from decades of fighting in the trenches, which are lessons that so many organizations are going to need in order to be resilient in the years to come, even if they're not working in the exact same disciplines. In addition to being something of a valedictory for Cindy's tenure at the EFF, the lessons of the book seem to set the stage for the new chapter that promises to unfold under the new executive director Nicole Ozer, as she carries forward this work.

But if it isn't clear enough, I'll say it directly: as happy as I am to celebrate good people getting the word out about vital work, these are dangerous and trying times. The most powerful people and companies in the world, along with the most authoritarian administration we've ever seen, are all working to try to roll back all of the digital rights that we rely on every day to benefit from the power of the Internet. The issues that EFF helps protect for us couldn't matter more. So, if you can, support the EFF with your donation (you can even get a copy of Cindy's book if you become a Gold-level member!) and take action in your own community to help push back the onslaught of bad policy and corporate overreach that threatens us all.

And finally, for those of you in NYC: If you liked the conversation above, and want to dig in even further, come out and join us on April 23, where I'll be sitting down with Cindy at the Brooklyn Public Library's Central Library. It promises to be an engaging conversation, and I hope to see some of you there!

Mike the Mad Biologist

Links 3/31/26

mikethemadbiologist
Updated

Links for you. Science:

This Pink Bug Is Not A “Rare Freak Mutant” After All
Scholars Return Fire
Alien Life Might Exist on the Starless Moons of Rogue Planets
‘RAMmageddon’ hits labs: AI-driven memory shortage is impacting science
Arctic’s ‘keystone’ fish faces collapse as melting ice floods ocean with light
Scientists Discover Vast Ancient Trade Network That Rewrites History with Parrot DNA

Other:

In a golden age for many American Jews, my family was uncertain about its identity
Is Trump a World-Historical Figure?
Democratic turnout doubles in Rio Grande Valley where four Hispanic counties previously went for Trump
Anti-Muslim rhetoric rises among Republicans with little pushback from GOP leadership
Trump Appears To Endorse Eugenics In Wild Fox News Clip
How a mathematician is cracking open Mexico’s powerful drug cartels
Sculptor Thaddeus Mosley, who found international fame in his 90s, is dead
As GU Investigates College Republicans’ Post, Community Members Condemn Islamophobia
Former DOGE employees give an inside look at the Elon Musk-led agency
Where the money in D.C.’s mayoral race is coming from
How racist group chats are part of a long history of GOP bigotry
Appointee wants to replace White House columns with the ones Trump prefers
AI Mistake Throws Innocent Grandmother in Jail for Nearly Six Months
The left’s housing civil war is ending
“If AI is writing the work and AI is reading the work, do we even need to be there at all?” Educators reveal a growing crisis on campus and off
Rail Transit Development Hasn’t Kept Up with US Population Growth. Here’s How Policymakers Can Expand Access
When Laws Fail, What Do You Have? The Beekeeper
The Coalition of Nope
Trump says GOP lawmaker would have been ‘dead by June’ in awkward moment
How Jeff Bezos Upended The Washington Post
The US-Israeli strategy against Iran is working. Here is why (the ‘best’ pro-war case, which seems to have a lot of unverified and incorrect assumptions built in; e.g., Iran wasn’t close to having a nuclear weapon)
The Tesla Influencers Leaving the ‘Cult’: The EV manufacturer is supported by a robust online community. But Elon Musk’s politics and overblown hype about Full Self-Driving are turning some loyalists away.
No, America is Not Respected. Thanks to Trump, we’re held in contempt even by our closest allies
Implications
Janeese Lewis George Emerges as the Early Front-Runner for Mayor As Kenyan McDuffie Looks to Pick Up the Pace
The dictionary sues OpenAI
‘It’s Just Crazy’: High Car Payments Make Ownership Feel Impossible
Why Insect Farming Startups Are Going Bankrupt
Republicans fret over RFK Jr.’s anti-vaccine policies while MAHA moms stew
Eight big-picture lessons from the DC Streetcar

Letters from an American

The Battle of the Bulge Episode Eight: Stopping the German Advance

Heather Cox Richardson
Updated

I grew up hearing about the horrors of the Battle of the Bulge but never really understood why the battle mattered so much. This eighth episode in our Battle of the Bulge series makes the importance of the battle crystal clear:

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Letters from an American

American Conversations: Vanessa Williamson

Heather Cox Richardson
Updated

Yesterday, I had the chance to speak with Dr. Vanessa Williamson of the Brookings Institution about the relationship between taxes and democracy. I sought her out because I thought the ideas in her 2025 book, The Price of Democracy: The Revolutionary Power of Taxation in American History are a great companion to my conversation with Dr. Timothy Snyder about the difference between freedom FROM and freedom TO.

Our conversation was all that I had hoped and more. I’m calling attention to it because her explanation of taxation, democracy, power, and accountability strikes me as something that should be on far more radar screens than it is.

I hope you enjoy it. A day later, I’m still blown away.

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Letters from an American

March 30, 2026

Heather Cox Richardson
Updated

Showing reporters on Air Force One a series of posterboard images of his new ballroom last night, Trump told them: “I thought I’d do this now because it’s easier. I’m so busy that I don’t have time to do this. But, ah, I’m fighting wars and other things. But this is very important ’cause this is going to be with us for a long time and it’s going to be, I think it’ll be the greatest ballroom anywhere in the world.”

At 7:26 this morning, about two hours before the stock market opened, Trump’s social media account posted: “The United States of America is in serious discussions with A NEW, AND MORE REASONABLE, REGIME to end our Military Operations in Iran. Great progress has been made but, if for any reason a deal is not shortly reached, which it probably will be, and if the Hormuz Strait is not immediately ‘Open for Business,’ we will conclude our lovely ‘stay’ in Iran by blowing up and completely obliterating all of their Electric Generating Plants, Oil Wells and Kharg Island (and possibly all desalination plants!), which we have purposefully not yet ‘touched.’ This will be in retribution for our many soldiers, and others, that Iran has butchered and killed over the old Regime’s 47 year ‘Reign of Terror.’ Thank you for your attention to this matter. President DONALD J. TRUMP”

When he decided to go to war with Iran, Trump apparently fantasized that the operation would look like his strike on Venezuela, in which a fast attack enabled U.S. forces to grab Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro and his wife Celia Flores, leaving behind Vice President Delcy Rodríguez, who appeared willing to work with the Trump administration, in power. The initial strikes of Israel and the U.S. on Iran did indeed kill that regime’s leadership, but officials simply replaced that leadership from within the regime, making Trump’s claim of regime change as imaginary as his claim that the U.S. and Iran have been at war for 47 years.

More shocking in this statement, though, is that Trump appears to be trying to force his will on the Iranians by threatening to commit war crimes. International law recognizes attacks on civilian infrastructure—like those Russian president Vladimir Putin has been carrying out on Ukraine for years—as war crimes. The Geneva Convention specifically prohibits attacks on drinking water, so Trump’s threat to attack the desalination plants that make seawater drinkable is, as Shashank Joshi of The Economist notes, not only stupid because Iran could do the same to other Gulf states, but “also, quite obviously,...very illegal.”

Joshi notes that “[Arizona Democratic senator] Mark Kelly et al were right to warn of illegal orders,” and Charles A. Ray of The Steady State explains that not just Trump but anyone carrying out these orders would be implicated in potential criminality. Trump’s threat comes the day after Christiaan Triebert and John Ismay of the New York Times reported that on the first day of attacks, U.S. forces hit not just the girls’ school we knew about, but also, in a different city, a sports hall used by civilians and a nearby elementary school, killing at least 21 people.

Trump apparently had no plan B for what to do if the initial plan to strike Iran and knock out its leaders failed, and is now flailing. His repeated assurances that talks with Iran are making “great progress” contrast with Iran’s insistence it is not engaged in talks with the United States. Trump entered the war with vague promises of “regime change” and promises to guarantee Iran never developed a nuclear weapon but now is reduced to hoping for Iran to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, putting the U.S. in the odd position of fighting a war to achieve the conditions that existed before it started the war.

On Sunday, Trump told the Financial Times that “my favorite thing is to take the oil in Iran” as the U.S. did when it took control of Venezuelan oil fields. This sounds like bluster, but he is also massing U.S. troops in the region.

Meanwhile, the price of oil rose to $116 a barrel after strikes against Israel by the Iran-backed Houthis in Yemen. The Houthis have the potential to disrupt yet another key strait, the Bab el-Mandeb, through which tankers carry about 10% of the world’s oil out of the Red Sea to the Gulf of Aden and into the Arabian Sea, from where it can go into the Indian Ocean and to the rest of the world.

In the 1980s, a faction of the Republican Party that was determined to cut taxes and regulations and to get rid of programs that benefiting racial minorities and women went to war against the federal government. Those so-called Movement Conservatives—“movement” because they were a political movement, and “conservatives” because they wanted to take the U.S. back to a time before the New Deal—became increasingly radical over time. Some, like activist Grover Norquist, wanted to take the government back even further, to the time of the robber barons in the 1890s, before “the socialists took over” with the Progressive Era and its income taxes and regulation.

But Americans liked the programs that regulated business, provided a basic social safety net, promoted infrastructure, protected equality before the law, and provided international security, so Movement Conservatives focused on taking power away from Congress, where the people’s voices could be heard, and centering power in the president.

Now we are seeing what that sort of a government, devoid of experts and beholden to the whims of a single man, looks like. After a year in power, Trump’s administration has embroiled the U.S. in a war of choice that has created an extraordinary global energy crisis, inflation is rising, job growth is down, and Republicans in Congress have abdicated their authority to oversee the war or other government agencies, or even to fix a problem of their own making in a partial government shutdown. Instead, they are seemingly content to let Trump do whatever he wishes.

Trump’s imperial presidency has demonstrated the country’s need for the allies he has disdained, as he has been forced to beg for their help. They have generally refused to get involved in a war Trump started without consulting them; today Spain’s defense minister said Spain has closed its airspace to U.S. planes involved in operations against Iran.

Trump appears to be turning not to the gutted State Department, but to his usual cadre of billionaires to help him figure out a way forward. Edward Wong, Theodore Schliefer, Tyler Pager, and Ryan Mac of the New York Times reported that when Trump talked to Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India last Tuesday, billionaire Elon Musk took part in the call, although the readouts from both the U.S. and the Indian government did not mention his participation.

Now, with Congress out of session until April 13, Trump is putting the people and matériel in place to escalate the war. And yet, as Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo notes, the new goal of freeing traffic in the Strait of Hormuz leaves the Iranians rather than the U.S. in control of the terms of declaring victory. An Associated Press–National Opinion Research Center (AP-NORC) poll from March 25 shows that 59% of Americans think the U.S. has gone too far in Iran, with only 13% supporting escalation. Sixty-two percent oppose sending ground troops into Iran, while only 12% favor the idea.

Even so, as David Kurtz wrote today in Talking Points Memo, “There’s no telling what President Trump will resort to doing to save face, create the mirage of victory, and extricate himself from the box canyon into which he so triumphantly galloped.”

What we do know, though, is that Trump is extraordinarily unlikely ever to do anything that will conflict with the wishes of Russia’s president Vladimir Putin. Trump has blockaded Cuba, strangling its energy sector by blocking off all oil tankers from the island. Although he has stopped Venezuelan and Mexican tankers, today he permitted a Russian-flagged tanker to get through the blockade to sell oil that will help fund Russia’s war against Ukraine.

Asked why he permitted that tanker through, Trump answered: “He loses one boatload of oil, that’s all it is. If he wants to do that, and if other countries want to do it, doesn’t bother me much.” World affairs journalist Frida Ghitis commented: “When Mexico tried to send oil to Cuba, Trump immediately threatened to impose crushing tariffs on it, or on any country that broke his blockade of the island. Now Russia is sending Cuba oil and Trump says it’s fine, no problem. The mystery continues.”

We can also be sure that Trump will find time to keep attacking those he perceives to be his enemies. As J.D. Wolf of Meidas News reported today, Trump has posted about continuing to try to prosecute New York attorney general Letitia James fourteen times in the past five days. James successfully prosecuted Trump, some of his children, and the Trump Organization for fraud. Trump has tried unsuccessfully and repeatedly to charge her with mortgage fraud or insurance fraud.

Peter Sullivan of Axios reported today that to pay for the war and find more money for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Republicans are considering making cuts to federal health care spending. House majority leader Steve Scalise (R-LA) told Sullivan that they were looking at areas of “waste and fraud and abuse.”

As the administration flails, insiders are leaking about some of the administration’s most powerful individuals. Two senior sources from the Department of Homeland Security leaked stories about White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller to the Daily Mail, a tabloid out of the United Kingdom. They claimed Miller demanded agents in Minneapolis be sent to areas where DHS knew there would be a lot of protesters because he wanted to “force confrontations” between agents and protesters that would enable the administration to “win the ‘PR battle.’” They echoed others in suggesting that Miller, not the president, was in charge of immigration policy.

Yesterday Michelle Boorstein of the Washington Post reported that former high-ranking military officials, experts on religion and law, and veterans groups, as well as current Pentagon staff and officers, have expressed deep concern over Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s extremist evangelical worship services and his casting of the U.S. military as a force for Christian holy war. Last Wednesday he prayed for U.S. troops to assert “overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy,” saying: “We ask these things with bold confidence in the mighty and powerful name of Jesus Christ.”

G. Elliott Morris of Strength in Numbers and Fifty Plus One reported today that Trump has hit a new approval low among all American adults, with 58.1% disapproving of his job in office and just 37.6% approving, an overall difference of -21 . A University of Massachusetts Amherst poll has Trump’s job approval rating at 33%.

Tonight Trump’s social media account posted an AI-generated video of a future President Donald J. Trump Presidential Library. To triumphal music, the video features a gleaming skyscraper containing what appears to be the airplane the president pressured Qatar into giving him, along with what seems to be a replica of the Oval Office…and a model of his anticipated ballroom.

—

Notes:

https://attheu.utah.edu/president/impact-initiatives/gulf-desalination-plants-in-irans-crosshairs/

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/03/30/oil-price-today-wti-brent-yemen-houthis-israel-iran-war.html

William Greider, “Rolling Back the 20th Century,” The Nation, May 12, 2003.

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/morning-memo/trumps-iran-war-objectives-have-collapsed-now-what

The Steady State
Threatening War Crimes: Has Trump Finally Crossed the Line?
(Photo by Matthew Henry on Unsplash…
Read more
2 days ago · 50 likes · 10 comments · The Steady State

https://apnorc.org/projects/most-say-the-united-states-recent-military-actions-against-iran-have-gone-too-far/

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/27/us/politics/musk-joins-call-with-trump-modi.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/29/world/middleeast/us-precision-strike-missile-iran-lamerd.html

https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/spain-closes-airspace-us-planes-involved-iran-war-el-pais-says-2026-03-30/

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/lacking-any-strategy-trump-prepares-to-escalate

https://www.cnn.com/2026/03/30/americas/us-russian-oil-tanker-access-cuba-intl-hnk

https://www.democracydocket.com/news-alerts/trump-admin-political-prosecution-against-letitia-james/

https://meidasnews.com/news/trump-floods-timeline-with-14-posts-about-letitia-james-in-5-days

https://www.axios.com/2026/03/30/gop-health-care-pay-iran-war

A Public Witness
At Pentagon Worship Service, Hegseth Casts Iran Conflict as Violent Holy War Against God’s Enemies
In the first Christian worship service at the Pentagon since the start of the strikes against Iran, Pete Hegseth, who likes to call himself the “Secretary of War,” used prayer and several Bible passages to cast the conflict as a holy war against God’s enemies. He prayed that God would pour out righteous wrath by helping “break the teeth” and kill the “w…
Read more
7 days ago · 58 likes · 2 comments · Brian Kaylor

https://www.whitehouse.gov/releases/2025/09/president-trump-isnt-backing-down-from-crushing-radical-left-violence/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2026/03/29/pege-hegseth-christianity/

https://www.umass.edu/news/article/president-trumps-approval-sinks-33-new-umass-poll

https://thehill.com/policy/international/5806957-trump-iran-war-oil-control/

https://www.theguardian.com/business/live/2026/mar/30/brent-crude-rises-trump-oil-iran-war-starmer-business-leaders-emergency-measures-rachel-reeves-g7-business-latest-news-updates

X:

shashj/status/2038588765053079690

Bluesky:

paleofuture.bsky.social/post/3miasgyx7ps2q

angrystaffer.bsky.social/post/3miblubxcb22x

thetnholler.bsky.social/post/3miameuq2dk24

fridaghitis.bsky.social/post/3miaxxwimmk26

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atrupar.com/post/3micvu7zlzs2q

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Boston Red Sox – MLB Trade Rumors
The Map Room

Now on Patreon: The Territory Is Not the Map

Jonathan Crowe
Updated
Today is The Map Room’s 23rd anniversary. As a thank-you to paid members of my Patreon, whose generous support has enabled me to remove ads from The Map Room, and as an enticement to those… More
Paul Krugman

The Oil Crisis is About to Get Physical

Paul Krugman
Updated

A map of the world with different colored lines AI-generated content may be incorrect.

Source: JP Morgan via Marketwatch

In normal times, about 20 percent of the world’s oil production passes through the Strait of Hormuz. That flow has been cut off except for Iranian oil and a handful of other vessels the Iranians are allowing through. This disruption has led to a large spike in oil futures prices:

Source: Trading Economics

But this price rise has been speculative, driven by the (justified) expectation of future shortages rather than a current lack of oil. In fact, so far deliveries to markets around the world haven’t declined, because shipping oil from the Persian Gulf to major markets takes 4-6 weeks. As a result there was a large quantity of oil already at sea, outside the Strait, when the war began.

However, this grace period is about to end. The oil crisis is about to get physical. The map at the top of this post shows J.P. Morgan’s estimates of when tankers from the Gulf will stop arriving at various destinations. Deliveries to Asian markets will end this week; deliveries to Europe will end next week.

And once the crisis gets physical, there will no longer be room for jawboning the markets. Since the war began there have been several occasions on which Donald Trump has been able to talk prices down by asserting that meaningful negotiations are underway with his invisible friends the Iranian regime, but that won’t work once the oil runs out. So prices will have to rise to whatever level destroys enough demand to match it to the available supply.

PS: The United States buys little oil from the Persian Gulf, but we can expect U.S. oil prices to rise in response to shortages around the world.

So how high will oil prices get? I’ve written about this before, but I thought it might be useful to update the analysis, emphasizing how uncertain the prospects are and the real risk of extremely high prices.

There are two big sources of uncertainty. The first is that we don’t know how much oil will manage to escape the Gulf. Right now oil supply is drastically curtailed, but not by the full 20 million barrels of oil a day that used to flow through the Strait of Hormuz. The Saudis have a pipeline that lets them ship some of their oil to the Red Sea; Oman has a pipeline that takes some oil around the Strait. And Iran has been letting millions of barrels of its own oil pass. Whether all these “leakages” will continue depends on the course of the war.

Second, how high must prices rise to choke off a given amount of demand? We know from previous oil shocks that the price elasticity of demand for crude oil is low — that is, even large price increases only cause small declines in demand. But in the current crisis it matters just how low that elasticity, a number that is impossible to estimate with any precision, really is.

So, what is a reasonable range of possibilities? I’ve considered three scenarios for the disruption to oil supply: a “low disruption” scenario in which supply is reduced “only” 8 percent from normal levels, a medium scenario in which supply falls 12 percent, and a high disruption scenario in which it falls 16 percent. I’ve also considered three alternatives for the price elasticity of oil demand: “high” at 0.2, medium at 0.15, and low at 0.1.

And I assume that in the absence of this war the Brent price would be $65 a barrel. In that case I get the following matrix:

A screenshot of a graph AI-generated content may be incorrect.

Readers should know that Robin Brooks has done a conceptually similar analysis. My numbers, however, are more alarming — and I believe that you should be alarmed.

In particular, by presenting the analysis this way, I risk conveying the impression that we should assume a moderate, medium/medium outcome. That is not at all a safe assumption.

After all, what would it take to get to my “high disruption” scenario? That’s what might happen if Iranian oil exports are cut off, say by a U.S. attack on Kharg Island, and if supply via pipelines is hindered by Iranian retaliation against other Gulf oil facilities as well as attacks by the Houthis on Red Sea shipping. That is not an outlandish possibility. It is, in fact, exactly what we should expect if the Trump administration follows through on what appear to be its current war plans.

And if oil really does go to $200 or more, it’s all too easy to envisage a full-blown global economic crisis, with an inflation surge and quite likely a recession.

Ever since this war began I’ve noticed a sharp divide in sentiment among experts. Finance and macroeconomics experts have been relatively sanguine about our ability to ride out this storm. But talk to or read energy experts — people who focus on the physical side of the oil crisis — and their hair is on fire.

I’m mostly a macroeconomist. But my hair is definitely starting to smolder.

MUSICAL CODA

My apologies

Simon Willison's Weblog

datasette-files 0.1a3

Release: datasette-files 0.1a3

I'm working on integrating datasette-files into other plugins, such as datasette-extract. This necessitated a new release of the base plugin.

  • owners_can_edit and owners_can_delete configuration options, plus the files-edit and files-delete actions are now scoped to a new FileResource which is a child of FileSourceResource. #18
  • The file picker UI is now available as a <datasette-file-picker> Web Component. Thanks, Alex Garcia. #19
  • New from datasette_files import get_file Python API for other plugins that need to access file data. #20

Tags: datasette

Daring Fireball

Technical Analysis of the Android Version of the White House’s New App

John Gruber
Updated

Thereallo, after spelunking inside the APK bundle for the Android version:

  • Has a full GPS tracking pipeline compiled in that polls every 4.5 minutes in the foreground and 9.5 minutes in the background, syncing lat/lng/accuracy/timestamp to OneSignal’s servers.

  • Loads JavaScript from a random person’s GitHub Pages site (lonelycpp.github.io) for YouTube embeds. If that account is compromised, arbitrary code runs in the app’s WebView. [...]

Is any of this illegal? Probably not. Is it what you’d expect from an official government app? Probably not either.

Hanlon’s razor: “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”

The app is, at least temporarily, popular. As I type this it’s #3 in the iOS App Store top free apps list, sandwiched between Claude and Gemini. I don’t know how similar the iOS app is to the Android one, but I took one for the team and installed it, and after poking around for a few minutes, it hasn’t even prompted me to ask for location access. It’s a crappy app, to be sure. A lot of flashing between screen transitions. When you open an article, there’s a “< Back” button top left, and an “X” button top right. Both buttons seem to do the same thing. There’s no share sheet for “news” articles, which seems particularly stupid. You can’t even copy a link to an article and share it manually.

But the iOS version has a clean privacy report card in the App Store, and I don’t see anything in the app that makes me doubt that. It seems like the Android version is quite different.

Update 1: Someone on Reddit claims to have analyzed the iOS app bundle and discovered similar code as in the Android app, but I still don’t see any way to actually get the iOS app to even ask for location permission. I think there might be code in the app that never gets called. Like I wrote above, it’s clearly not a well-crafted app. If anyone knows how to get the iOS app to actually ask for location access, let me know how. Here’s another analysis of the iOS app.

Update 2: I installed the Android version of the app too, and just like on iOS, the only permission it asks for is to send notifications. Maybe they will in a future software update, but as far as I can see, the app never even tries to check the device’s location, on either platform.

 ★ 
Daring Fireball

Jensen Huang Doesn’t Smell Anything

John Gruber
Updated

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, during an on-stage interview at The Hill & Valley Forum last week, was asked “What do you see as America’s unique advantages that other countries don’t have?”

His answer, after taking a moment to think, “America’s unique advantage that no country could possibly have is President Trump.”

Huang, newly appointed to the aforelinked President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, seemingly doesn’t smell the growing stink.

 ★ 
Daring Fireball

Appointees to Trump’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology

John Gruber
Updated

The White House:

The Council will be co-chaired by David Sacks and Michael Kratsios. The following individuals have been appointed:

Marc Andreessen
Sergey Brin
Safra Catz
Michael Dell
Jacob DeWitte
Fred Ehrsam
Larry Ellison
David Friedberg
Jensen Huang
John Martinis
Bob Mumgaard
Lisa Su
Mark Zuckerberg

Under President Trump, PCAST will focus on topics related to the opportunities and challenges that emerging technologies present to the American workforce, and ensuring all Americans thrive in the Golden Age of Innovation.

Scientific American observes that 12/13 are executives, and only one, Martinis, is an academic researcher. But I mean, of course a council like this, from this administration, is going to be made up of big-cap corporate executives and founders. I’d say it’s more surprising there is even one academic researcher than that there aren’t more.

I’m more intrigued by the companies who aren’t represented: no one from Apple, no one from Microsoft, no one from Amazon. (That left room for two from Oracle, that well known bastion of corporate virtue.) Read into that what you will. Me, I can’t help but suspect that this administration is taking on a profound stink, and something like appointments to this council are akin to a game of music chairs where Tim Cook, Satya Nadella, Andy Jassy, and Jeff Bezos are happy not to have gotten seats.

 ★ 
Market Design

Steven Pinker on Robert Trivers (1943-2026)

Al Roth
Updated

 Pinker writes about how Trivers introduced game-theoretic ideas into evolutionary biology (with genes as the players, and selection into subsequent generations as the payoffs). It's a well written tribute.

The Many Roots of Our Suffering: Reflections on Robert Trivers (1943–2026)  by Steven Pinker 

"Trivers’s contributions belong in the special category of ideas that are obvious once they are explained, yet eluded great minds for ages; simple enough to be stated in a few words, yet with implications that have busied scientists for decades. In an astonishing creative burst from 1971 to 1975, Trivers wrote five seminal essays that invoked patterns of genetic overlap to explain each of the major human relationships: male with female, parent with child, sibling with sibling, partner with partner, and a person with himself or herself." 

Aeon | a world of ideas

Banking beyond the law

Miles Kellerman
Updated

Men sitting cross-legged on a rug on the floor at a money exchange, one on a phone, exchanging currency; exchange rate board on wall.

A centuries-old network of secret codes and shadowy brokers continues to outpace financial systems controlled by the state

- by Miles Kellerman

Read on Aeon

Oklahoma Watch
The Aviationist
SpaceNews

Second Starlink satellite suffers anomaly, generating debris

Jeff Foust
Updated
Starlink-35956

For the second time in just over three months, a SpaceX Starlink satellite has generated debris from an apparent on-orbit malfunction.

The post Second Starlink satellite suffers anomaly, generating debris appeared first on SpaceNews.

SpaceNews

Artemis 2 countdown underway

Jeff Foust
Updated
SLS

The two-day countdown for the Artemis 2 mission around the moon started March 30 with NASA officials reporting no major issues for the launch.

The post Artemis 2 countdown underway appeared first on SpaceNews.