2025-12-24 04:13:23
“With a lot of these immigrant groups, not only is the first generation unsuccessful. Again, Somalia is a clear example here. You see persistent issues in every subsequent generation. So you see consistent high rates of welfare use, consistent high rates of criminal activity, consistent failures to assimilate.” That’s Stephen Miller, the chief architect of Trump’s immigration policy, citing the children of immigrants as a problem. The data doesn’t support his argument, but even as a child of immigrants, I understand today’s America well enough to know we shouldn’t let ourselves be distracted by facts. This contempt for immigrants (especially black and brown ones), long viewed as a core strength of our nation, is viewed by Miller and his ilk as our greatest threat. And they’re acting on the belief. Miller’s contempt certainly extends to people like Luis Martinez. Like thousands of other undocumented Americans, Martinez has spent decades literally killing himself fighting wildfires for the US government. “Now he’s facing down cancer, debt and the threat of separation from his 11-year-old.” NYT (Gift Article): ‘It’s Just Us’: The Firefighter, His Son and a Treacherous Choice. “In their small, secluded town, nearly everyone was connected to the private companies that the government hired to fight fires. Smoke-related sicknesses were a shared fact of life. So were periodic immigration crackdowns. Lately, the road to Seattle was becoming a corridor for ICE enforcement.” Read both of their stories and decide for yourself, who’s more American? Who has actually done more for this country? Stephen Miller or Luis Martinez.
+ The White House is so certain Americans will love the immigrant round-ups that they’ve turned them into a reality show. WaPo (Gift Article): Inside ICE’s media machine.
+ Of course, the administration doesn’t want you to see all the deportation stories, only the ones where they control the narrative. Hence, Bari Weiss’s state media-esque, last-second decision to pull a 60 Minutes piece about the Venezuelans sent to the CECOT terrorist prison in El Salvador. I covered that decision in detail yesterday: On Our Watch: “The iconic opening to 60 Minutes has long represented the countdown to an investigative news story. Now it feels more like a countdown to the demise of TV journalism. Tick … tick … tick…” It turns out that CBS forgot to cancel the broadcast of the piece in the Canadian market. So it’s basically all over the internet at this point. Trump and his enablers can delete a file here or a news segment there, but they can’t delete all of reality, which is what it would take for history to forgive their toxic stain saturating America. Maybe it’s fitting that we close out the NextDraft year in news coverage with an investigative report that we had to bootleg from another country’s broadcast because it was barred from our own airwaves. That sounds familiar. It just doesn’t sound like America.
+ I’ll be off for the holidays and back in 2026. Of course, I may come back sooner if there’s any really shocking news. But, er, what are the chances of that? Have a great holiday season and new year.
“On Sunday, J. D. Vance was presented with the simplest moral test: denounce commentators who traffic in medieval blood libels, who deny the Holocaust, and who endlessly harp on evil Jewish cabals ... Vance failed. ‘We have far more important work to do than canceling each other,’ he said, as if anti-Semitism were just one more woke fixation.” The Atlantic (Gift Article): The vice president welcomes anti-Semites into the Republican coalition.
+ How can an administration that portrays itself as defending the Jews be so welcoming of antisemites? Michael Roth explained last April in the NYT (Gift Article): “As the first Jewish president of a formerly Methodist university, I find no comfort in the Trump administration’s embrace of my people, on college campuses or elsewhere. Jew hatred is real, but today’s anti-antisemitism isn’t a legitimate effort to fight it. It’s a cover for a wide range of agendas that have nothing to do with the welfare of Jewish people. All of these agendas — from dismantling basic government functions to crushing the independence of cultural and educational organizations to criminalizing political speech to legitimating petty presidential vendettas — endanger the principles and institutions that have actually made this country great. For Jews, a number of these agendas do something more: They pose a direct threat to the very people they purport to help. Jews who applaud the administration’s crackdown will soon find that they do so at their peril.” Trump Is Selling Jews a Dangerous Lie. “[This] tension — between championing Jews and ridiculing, reviling or in some cases even threatening them — has been visible on the right for some time. Consider first the president: On the one hand, his daughter, son-in-law and grandchildren are Jewish ... On the other hand, when neo-Nazis, Klansmen and others marched through Charlottesville, Va., carrying torches and shouting ‘Jews will not replace us,’ Mr. Trump condemned the most extreme elements of the rally but observed that there were ‘some very fine people on both sides.’” (There’s only one side he cares about. His.)
“The group did not do what Mr. Musk said it would: reduce federal spending by $1 trillion before October. On DOGE’s watch, federal spending did not go down at all. It went up. How is that possible?” NYT (Gift Article): How Did DOGE Disrupt So Much While Saving So Little?
+ DOGE didn’t save America money, but they cost plenty of people around the world. What I Saw at a Maternity Ward in Kenya After the U.S. Cut Off Food and Foreign Aid.
“Millions of people use injectable drugs like Wegovy to reach a healthier weight. But the weekly injections aren’t for everybody — or every wallet. That’s why pills that could achieve similar results are drawing so much attention. And now the Food and Drug Administration has approved an oral version of Wegovy made by Novo Nordisk.” 5 things to know about the new obesity pill.
+ Today’s weight loss drugs are a complete game changer. They’re also probably just the beginning. More powerful products are coming down the pike. And not everyone is willing to wait. You’re not supposed to be able to buy the world’s most powerful weight-loss drug, but some people have found a way. (Where there’s a weigh, there’s a will...)
+ SciAm: 10 Discoveries That Transformed How We Thought about Health in 2025.
The SS Bone Spurs: “[Trump] announced that a new class of ship named after one Donald J. Trump would be added to the ‘Golden Fleet,’ his name for a renewed U.S. Navy. (You might wonder about the propriety of a sitting president naming naval vessels, among other things, after himself. Pardon the expression, but that ship has sailed.)” Trump’s Vanity Fleet.
+ K Pop: “The U.S. economy grew faster than expected in the third quarter, driven by robust consumer spending, but momentum appears to have faded amid the rising cost of living and recent government shutdown.” And from FT: Happy K-shaped Christmas.
+ Tis the Season: We’ve got more Epstein files. Here’s the latest from the NYT (Gift Article) on what’s in them. Trump Referenced in Some Newly Released Documents.
+ ‘Koff Medicine: “The emergence of Witkoff as envoy to the Kremlin is partly a story of Putin maneuvering to nudge aside America’s diplomats and clasp hands with its billionaires. It wasn’t a hard sell.” WSJ (Gift Article): How Putin Got His Preferred U.S. Envoy: Come Alone, No CIA. “Trump said that Witkoff ‘knew nothing’ about Russia as he started the job, but was proving successful because ‘people love Steve.’”
+ You Oughta be in Pictures: “The livestreams connected to more than 60 of Flock’s AI-powered surveillance cameras were left available to view on the web, allowing someone to see live feeds of each location without needing a username or password.” Turns out, Flock isn’t just tracking license plates. It’s tracking people. Here’s the full report (paywall) from 404 Media.
+ Park and Parcel: “Next time I’m going to kill them. Don’t come back. Don’t come back to my house.” L.A. mom rams getaway car as her home is broken into, sends would-be burglars fleeing.
“Residents in Washington state have been told to be aware of unwanted festive visitors before Santa comes down the chimney – rats coming up from the toilet.” Washington state officials warn of toilet rats after floods: ‘Try to stay calm.’
+ Let’s end on a positive! Wallace & Gromit’s Cracking Christmas.
2025-12-23 04:31:24
Tick ... tick ... tick... The iconic opening to 60 Minutes has long represented the countdown to an investigative news story. Now it feels more like a countdown to the demise of TV journalism. Tick ... tick ... tick... After last week’s (non) release of the heavily redacted Epstein files, you may have been concerned that America would run out of black ink. Well, don’t worry. Over the weekend, there was plenty left for Bari Weiss, the new editor in chief of CBS News, to kill a 60 Minutes report on the Venezuelans illegally deported CECOT, a brutal prison in El Salvador. Tick ... tick ... tick... The highly unusual eleventh hour removal of the segment was criticized by Sharyn Alfonsi, the veteran correspondent who reported the segment: “Our story was screened five times and cleared by both CBS attorneys and Standards and Practices. It is factually correct. In my view, pulling it now, after every rigorous internal check has been met, is not an editorial decision, it is a political one.” Of course, when Trump ally David Ellison, the new owner of CBS’s parent company, Paramount Skydance, took over CBS News, we knew that politics would reign supreme, and that what used to be the media’s finest hour could be turned into amateur hour. But, like so much in 2025, the pace of that dismantling has been faster than many expected. Tick ... tick ... tick... Why the rush? It doesn’t take an investigative reporter to see the timing has everything to do with the Ellisons’ current attempt to beat out Netflix and acquire all of Warner Brothers, including another news org Trump hates, CNN. Just hours after the CECOT story was killed, we learned that Larry Ellison guaranteed $40.4 billion in Paramount’s hostile bid for Warner Bros. Discovery. As Franklin Foer explains in The Atlantic (Gift Article), CBS and CNN Are Being Sacrificed to Trump. “The fate of Warner Bros. Discovery is no longer a regulatory matter. It is a medieval tournament, in which the king invites rival bidders to compete for his approval. To acquire the media company, the aspirants—Paramount and Netflix—will have to offer a sacrifice: Whoever can damage CNN the most stands to walk away with the prize.” Tick ... tick ... tick... That may sound extreme, but it’s only been a few short months since the Paramount acquisition, and already, 60 Minutes doesn’t have the same meaning anymore. At this point, Americans can’t even be sure 60 minutes equals an hour. You may be thinking that while this sounds bad, at least we’re only talking about the state media-ization of stale, television media brands that don’t have nearly the impact that they used to. But consider who owns the new media tools: X is owned by Elon. Facebook and Threads are owned by Zuck. TikTok’s US operations are about to be purchased by a group of investors that includes Larry Ellison’s Oracle. Tick ... tick ... tick... And all of these media moguls have demonstrated their willingness (and even eagerness) to tweak coverage to avoid tweaking the president. As I wrote back when the Ellisons were still trying to take over Paramount and CBS: “We’re not just going to be able to cross our fingers and hope to run out of the clock on Trump’s authoritarian leanings. So let us not talk falsely now. The hour is getting late.” Over the weekend, it got later. Tick ... tick ... tick...
+ Support media orgs that support telling the truth. From Frontline and ProPublica, coverage of the same news story that CBS canceled. Surviving CECOT: Deported to a Maximum-Security Prison.
People are worried about their jobs and the economy. People are also taking their holiday spending to new heights. What in Klarnation is going on? Bloomberg (Gift Article): The United States of Klarna.”So far, the topline numbers suggest spending is up significantly from 2024 and the volume of people out there shopping is also at an all-time high ... If so many Americans worry they may be laid off or their 401(k) might get vaporized by artificial intelligence companies lobbing the same $100 billion back and forth like a hot potato, why are they still splashing out on holiday decorations and gifts? There probably isn’t a single completely satisfying answer, but if you want to understand the state of the American consumer, the best place to look might be at the performance of ‘buy now, pay later’ lending services, whose customers are a growing cohort of Americans—more than 91 million of them.”
“Most of us also know about the lawsuits against Big Pharma that forced changes in how painkillers are marketed and prescribed. Please do not think this means justice has been served. If you came to visit me, I could walk you down our country roads and point out all the houses where grandparents are raising little ones whose parents are incarcerated, sick or dead of addiction. The road to recovery here will be longer than my lifetime. Of all the stories I heard when I sat down to listen, the hardest to bear was this one: ‘It started when I was in my mother’s womb.’” Barbara Kingsolver in the NYT (Gift Article): The Opioid Crisis Never Ended. It Was Inherited by the Children. (This problem can’t be solved by eliminating small boats in the Caribbean.)
“Young prodigies — the teenage sports stars, the high schoolers soaring up the chess ranks or making scientific discoveries — are usually not the same people who reach the pinnacles of their fields in adulthood, according to a new study. And the two groups begin their journeys in very different ways.” NYT (Gift Article): Who Finishes First in Life? Often, Late Bloomers. (This is what I keep telling people who ask me when NextDraft will have a business model...)
Dust in the Wind: “The five wind farms targeted on Monday had all obtained leases from the Biden administration. But citing unspecified national security concerns, the Trump administration said it would freeze those leases, effectively blocking construction or operations and jeopardizing billions of dollars that have already been invested.” 10,000 jobs and the powering of more than 2.5 million homes, poof. NYT (Gift Article): Trump Halts Five Wind Farms Off the East Coast.
+ Greenlandry: “Landry wrote in a post on social media that ‘it’s an honor to serve you in this volunteer position to make Greenland a part of the U.S.’” Trump’s appointment of envoy to Greenland sparks new tension with Denmark.
+ Deleterious Behavior: The Justice Department didn’t redact and remove all traces of Trump in the Epstein files. At least not at first. Epstein Files Photos Disappear From Government Website, Including One of Trump.
+ Trans America: “The astounding haul hints at a level of transactionalism for which it is difficult to find obvious comparisons in modern American history.” Big business has adapted to the new normal in DC. NYT (Gift Article): Hundreds of Big Post-Election Donors Have Benefited From Trump’s Return to Office.
+ Handle, The Truth: “As part of a broad investigation into the risks of electric door handles, Bloomberg attempted to quantify for the first time the number of fatal crashes in the US in which door functionality played a role. This reporting turned up at least 15 deaths in a dozen incidents over the past decade in which occupants or rescuers were unable to open the doors of a Tesla that had crashed and caught fire.”
+ Park and Parcel: “She was initially hired by the Air Force, which employed her believing she was a white woman ... When she set the record straight and a lieutenant told her everyone at the base was still ‘willing’ to work with her, she quit, unwilling to be ‘merely tolerated’ ... ‘I walked out on the U.S. government and told them to shove it.’” America’s oldest park ranger dies at 104 years old in Bay Area.
“Since the ‘Beaver Won’t Eat’ episode aired over 60 years ago, similar scenarios have played out countless times in movies and other TV shows, ranging from ‘Desperate Housewives’ to ‘Ernest Scared Stupid.’ The endless anti-Brussels sprouts propaganda cemented the crop’s reputation as the vegetable equivalent of punishment, something you’d wish upon your worst enemy — and made its next chapter wholly confusing.” So how did Brussels Sprouts become popular over the past decade or two? Short answer: They’re not the same sprouts. The real reason this polarizing food made its comeback.
+ SNL’s alternate Home Alone ending with Ariana Grande is an instant classic.
2025-12-20 04:36:00
Let’s take a break from the daily awful and focus instead on the awe-full. Dana Milbank went looking for some awe and wonder on the walls of the National Art Museum. It turns out that’s not a bad place to start. “New research out of King’s College London gauged people’s physiological responses while they viewed works by Paul Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh, Edouard Manet and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec for 20 minutes. The study, now in preprint, found that participants’ levels of the stress hormone cortisol dropped by 22 percent on average, while markers of inflammation dropped even more sharply and heart rhythms indicated greater relaxation.” (I’m guessing that those results have almost as much to do with what you’re not looking at as what you are; it’s a distinction between experiencing the power of wonder and looking at your phone and wondering what the hell is happening.) Whether art is your awe-seeking drug of choice or not, there are probably some lessons here that we can all use over the holiday season. WaPo (Gift Article): Feeling wonder every day improves our health. Here’s how to do it. “In the days after my visit, I found myself pausing to marvel at things I often take for granted: A Christmas fern poking through the snow, the intricate forms of lichens on a tree, a sweet birch clinging to a rocky hillside, the pink and orange in a winter sunset, the power of a house-rattling windstorm. The more you seek awe, the more you find it.” (By opening about 75 news tabs a day, I’m probably looking for wonder in all the wrong places. But as long as I can keep digging up some examples, I’ll try to combine our daily series of unfortunate events with the occasional splash of awe-some sauce.)
Ending an incredibly stressful week in Providence, the Brown shooting suspect killed himself after being cornered by authorities (with a lot of help from citizens). The break came when the shooter was linked to another crime. CNN: How investigators zeroed in on the Brown University shooting suspect and linked him to the killing of an MIT professor.
+ NYT (Gift Article): A Reddit Post Led to a Breakthrough in the Brown Shooting Investigation. “Three days after the deadly shooting at Brown University, officers received an anonymous tip that stuck out from a flood of information. It directed the authorities to a post on Reddit. ‘I’m being dead serious. The police need to look into a grey Nissan with Florida plates, possibly a rental,’ the Reddit user posted, according to an affidavit filed by the police in Providence, R.I. That tip would later lead to a breakthrough not only in the search for the campus attacker but also the hunt for the suspect in the murder of a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It also ended the dayslong manhunt that had put both the Brown and M.I.T. communities on edge.”
+ NPR: Trump suspends U.S. green card lottery after Brown University and MIT shootings. “Noem’s announcement is the latest example of using tragedy to advance immigration policy goals.”
“When Carlos Gomez’s recent flight from Guadalajara was delayed, he asked a gate attendant why. It wasn’t weather or crew shortages. There were 25 wheelchair passengers holding up boarding. There were no such delays when Gomez’s flight landed. Most of the same passengers stood up without assistance and bounded off toward the baggage claim.” WSJ (Gift Article) on a seemingly viral travel hack you might witness during your holiday journeys, as some of your fellow travelers are using wheelchairs to board a little quicker. They Get Wheeled on Flights and Miraculously Walk Off. Praise ‘Jetway Jesus.’
What to Movie: One Battle After Another is now available to watch on HBO. It’s nearly three hours of pretty heavy duty and quite entertaining action, and seems to be the best picture frontrunner at this point.
+ What to Doc: “In 1975, an era of social and political upheaval inspires a wave of groundbreaking movies from Oscar winner Morgan Neville.” This is both a documentary and a pretty good list of movies to binge over the holidays. Breakdown 1975 is on Netflix. (Breakdown 1975 is also how I describe the era when my fourth grade girlfriend dumped me. It’s worth noting that the guy she chose over me doesn’t have anything close to my subscriber numbers.)
+ What to Book: No one is a better book picker than my wife, Gina. If you’re looking for some holiday reads, her What List Bookshelf is the right place to start.
The Exed Files: You better sit down for this one. I don’t want to shock you. US legislators say the Justice Department is violating the law by not releasing all Epstein files. (They’ll release the files that make others look bad...)
+ Own Goal: “The TikTok sale is officially happening, with a consortium of American investors set to take over U.S. operations of the video platform next month on Jan. 22, 2026.” (This will likely do more to enrich the new investors than to protect American interests. The key thing to watch is whether the algorithm gets tweaked to be more supportive of a certain someone’s politics.)
+ Cheap Shots: “Cheap drones have changed combat as we know it.” And nowhere is that more obvious than on the front lines in Ukraine. NYT (Gift Article): What It Takes to Pilot a War Drone.
+ The Latest Things Consumers Imagined: “Americans are heading into the holidays feeling worse about jobs and inflation than they did this time last year, with consumer sentiment hovering near record lows.” (Hoax!)
+ Cutting Ties With Yourself: This is a headline that perfectly captures our craven age. Zuckerberg Cut Ties With Pro-Immigration Organization He Founded.
+ Defaced Property: Laws (and decency) be damned: “The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington donned a new name — the Trump-Kennedy Center — on the exterior of the building Friday.” (We’re going to spend the rest of our lives pounding the delete button...)
“Mr. Dalton and Mr. May work 24-hour shifts (yes, you can knock on their trailer door in the middle of the night) selling trees for $30 to $500. Although they say the money is good — around $5,000 to $10,000 for the season, depending on the area and foot traffic — they aren’t out there just for the cash.” NYT (Gift Article): Up All Night in New York, Selling Christmas Trees.
+ AP: Behind the scenes of some of the most uplifting stories of 2025.
+ Chef Saves 78-Year-Old Man’s Life After He Stopped Showing Up for His Daily Dinners at Local Restaurant.
+ Seven feel-good science stories to restore your faith in 2025. Yes, science and feeling good are both still legal!
+ GPS collars on cattle are letting ranchers remove fences in the West. That’s good for wildlife and for the land. Wyoming Cowboys Are Breaking Down Barriers, Literally.
+ Jelly Roll Receives Full Pardon in Tennessee for Past Crimes.
+ “Yes, There’s a Parallel Parking Championship, and I Was a Contender.”
+ A fun rundown of some of the year’s notable book covers.
2025-12-19 04:27:02
There are few certainties in life, but this seems like one of them: Whatever you’re currently told to eat for optimum health will one day be viewed as lethal, and whatever ingredients are demonized today will be celebrated in the near future. So it shouldn’t surprise anyone that after decades of being sold on the nonfat food craze, we’re learning that dairy fat is good. NYT (Gift Article): A Study Linked Cheese to Lower Dementia Risk. (Maybe, Cheeseheads have been trying to signal the cheese/brain connection all these years.) “In a large new study published today, researchers found that eating high-fat cheese or cream was associated with a lower risk of developing dementia. Cheese lovers may cheer. But be careful about celebrating with an entire block of your favorite Cheddar.” Yes, the study is about correlation and not causation. And experts aren’t quite sure which particular factors are at work. There’s certainly no guarantee that high-fat dairy will turn you into a cheese whiz. But it’s 2025, and we’re craving reasons to smile and say cheese. So let’s chew the fat while we can ... and as fast as we can, since it’s only a matter of time before we’re told that today’s advice regarding cheese is completely crackers.
+ Exercise science, for better or worse, is as consistent as dietary advice is inconsistent. WaPo (Gift Article): Want a younger, healthier brain? This type of exercise can help. “If you need another reason to visit the gym this winter, a new study of almost 1,200 healthy, middle-aged men and women found that those with more muscle mass tended to have younger brains than those with less muscle.”
“At the center of the concerns is a rise in borrowing. By this fall, public companies had taken out large loans to buy crypto. And investors had placed more than $200 billion in bets on future coin prices, a type of trade often made with borrowed money, which sets buyers up for major gains or crushing losses. The industry’s latest offerings have also linked crypto to the stock market and other parts of the financial world, raising the prospect of a chain reaction that spills a crypto crisis into the broader economy.” NYT(Gift Article): What Trump’s Embrace of Crypto Has Unleashed.
+ 45% of Gen Z adults say they would be happy to receive crypto as a gift this holiday season
+ Crypto is old news. This year, give the gift of cold fusion. “Trump Media and Technology Group stock surged more than 35% on Thursday after the parent company of Truth Social announced a merger with fusion power firm TAE Technologies. (I’m sure this will all play out in a totally legit and entirely not corrupt way...)
“The presence of evil doesn’t break people. From a young age, we learn that there are wolves in our midst. It is the absence of courage that plunges us into crisis. Great courage can help redeem a catastrophe. But abject cowardice not only magnifies our pain; it makes us doubt the strength and virtue of our nation and culture.” David French on courage in the NYT (Gift Article): The Righteousness of Ahmed el Amhed. This article is mostly about courage as it relates to physical risk. But, as we’ve all learned over the past year, it’s not particularly common for people to show courage even when much less than their life is at stake. We’ve seen “why cowardice is so harmful. It annihilates virtue. One of the most dispiriting aspects of our modern political moment is that it feels as though cowards are everywhere. Institutions yield to bullies. Politicians yield to mobs. People are unwilling to tell even obvious truths if telling the truth will put a target on their back.” This is one reason why, when we see courage, we need to celebrate it.
It’s Christmas time, and parents all over the country face that familiar dilemma: When do you tell your kids the president isn’t real? I guess parents could skip the tough conversation and just let their kids watch a recording of the latest Trump presidential address, delivered live on all the major networks. Or better yet, let them read Tom Nichols’ overview in The Atlantic (Gift Article): This Is What Presidential Panic Looks Like. “We could take apart Trump’s fake facts, as checkers and pundits will do in the next few days. But perhaps more important than false statements—which for Trump are par for the course—was his demeanor. Americans saw a president drenched in panic as he tried to bully an entire nation into admitting he’s doing a great job ... In effect, Trump took to the airwaves, pointed his finger, and said: Quiet, piggy.” (I don’t recommend actually watching the address, unless you’ve wondered what would happen if narcissism and sociopathy had a baby and that baby’s full diaper was tasked with giving a speech.)
Trans Bans: “The administration’s action is not just a regulatory shift but the latest signal that the federal government does not recognize even the existence of people whose gender identity does not align with their sex at birth.” NYT (Gift Article): Trump Moves to End Gender-Related Care for Minors, Threatening Hospitals That Offer It.
+ Joint Commission: “President Donald Trump signed an executive order Thursday to fast-track the reclassification of cannabis, which would pave the way for the Food and Drug Administration to study its medicinal uses.” (Too bad he didn’t do this in time for last night’s speech, when we all could have used a few hits.)
+ Cool Beancounting: The market is reacting positively to the latest inflation numbers that came in cooler than expected. The data is based on limited information (from a suddenly less than trustworthy source). Let’s hope the good news sticks.
+ Eyes and Ears: People like listening to podcasts. They also like watching them. Like a lot. Basically, people just really want to take their minds off everything with content of any kind. Bloomberg: People Watched 700 Million Hours of YouTube Podcasts on TV in October. Meanwhile, the Oscars are moving to YouTube after a half century on ABC. (I’m beginning to think this internet thing has legs...)
+ You Give Gov a Bad Name: President Donald Trump’s handpicked board voted on Thursday to rename Washington’s leading performing arts center as the Trump-Kennedy Center. (When this is over, we’re gonna have a lot of deleting to do...)
+ Not Blinded By Science: Nature has a great collection of The best science images of 2025. (Enjoy them while nature and science are still legal.)
“Then came the chaos. Within days, Claudius had given away nearly all its inventory for free—including a PlayStation 5 it had been talked into buying for ‘marketing purposes.’ It ordered a live fish. It offered to buy stun guns, pepper spray, cigarettes and underwear. Profits collapsed. Newsroom morale soared.” WSJ(Gift Article): We Let AI Run Our Office Vending Machine. It Lost Hundreds of Dollars.
2025-12-18 04:45:11
It’s that time of year when we see endless lists of the best gifts to buy for friends and families, but we rarely see warnings about the worst present to give. It turns out that this year, we might have a clear winner. The most unwanted gift of 2025: More Reality. Just a few short years ago, nonfiction books were all the rage. But these days, we’re as sad as hell and we’re not going to take it anymore. Selling nonfiction books could be the toughest sale of all this season, with the category seeing an 8.4% year over year sales decline. Nonfiction is becoming a nonstarter. My own reading habits have definitely followed the trend. I exclusively read fiction these days and, as someone who consumes a lot of news, even the most depressing novels tend to cheer me up. The Guardian: Are we falling out of love with nonfiction? “Speaking to publishing insiders and readers, one word that cropped up repeatedly was escapism. The world is exhausting, so readers are seeking refuge rather than clarity. Some are disillusioned; the voracious reading of the past decade didn’t transform the world as many hoped. ‘I think there is definitely a sense of fatigue,’ says Holly Harley, head of nonfiction at publisher Head of Zeus. ‘The news is terrible. People feel overloaded. That escapism is why we’re seeing such a rise in romantasy.’” (I hate to toot my own horn for always being ahead of the curve, but my nonfiction book sold pretty poorly back when the nonfiction market was still going gangbusters.)
+ LitHub: The Most Scathing Book Reviews of 2025.
“The stunning move comes after House Republican leaders pushed ahead with a health care bill that does not address the soaring monthly premiums that millions of people will soon endure when the tax credits for those who buy insurance through the Affordable Care Act expire at year’s end. The action sets the stage for a renewed intraparty clash over health care in January.” 4 Republicans defy Speaker Johnson to force House vote on extending ACA subsidies. (It’s stunning that it’s considered stunning when only 4 House GOP members don’t want to let health care costs skyrocket, an eventuality that is both cruel and a terrible political move.)
This is a simple and simply terrible story that, even when drowning in today’s nonstop news deluge, needs to be told until people really understand the scope of the depravity. American officials, from the wildly inexperienced chainsaw wielders to the very top of the State Department, were repeatedly warned that USAID cuts would lead to violence and starvation. They lied about those warnings, they lied about the cuts, and the warnings materialized. ProPublica: Inside the Trump Administration’s Man-Made Hunger Crisis. All this to save what amounts to a rounding error on a rounding error in our foreign aid budget, and so the worst humans can pat themselves on the back for starving the most vulnerable ones.
+ “Ever since the military in her homeland of Myanmar killed her father in 2017, forcing her to flee to neighboring Bangladesh with her mother and little sisters, the school had protected Hasina from the predators who prowl her refugee camp, home to 1.2 million members of Myanmar’s persecuted Rohingya minority. It had also protected her from being forced into marriage. And then one day in June, when Hasina was 16 years old, her teacher announced that the school’s funding had been taken away. The school was closing. In a blink, Hasina’s education was over, and so, too, was her childhood.” Trafficked, exploited, married off: Rohingya children’s lives crushed by foreign aid cuts.
“A hacker group that includes members of the collective that hacked Ticketmaster last year says it has collected user data from P-rnHub and is demanding the company pay an undisclosed amount or it will release detailed information about its users.” Hackers breach Pornhub, threaten to expose users’ viewing habits. (I swear, I only go to P-rnhub for the articles...)
Forecasting a Shadow: “The center, founded in 1960, is responsible for many of the biggest scientific advances in humanity’s understanding of weather and climate. Its research aircraft and sophisticated computer models of the Earth’s atmosphere and oceans are widely used in forecasting weather events and disasters around the country, and its scientists study a broad range of topics, including air pollution, ocean currents and global warming. But in a social media post announcing the move late on Tuesday, Russell Vought, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, called the center ‘one of the largest sources of climate alarmism in the country.’” NYT (Gift Article): Trump Administration Plans to Break Up Premier Weather and Climate Research Center.
+ Chile Reception: “Some might call his rise just one more alarming case of a worldwide trend toward nativist authoritarianism — and it is. But the attendant rehabilitation of one of the continent’s most infamous autocrats is a particularly agonizing setback in a country where many considered the long struggle for democracy to have been won.” Chile’s Election Is More Than Just a Swerve to the Right.
+ You Can Feel His Disease: “The NIH has been transformed this year. And most of the layoffs, policy changes, and politically motivated funding cuts—notably, to infectious-disease research—have happened under Bhattacharya’s watch. But inside the agency, officials describe Bhattacharya as a largely ineffectual figurehead, often absent from leadership meetings, unresponsive to colleagues, and fixated more on cultivating his media image than on engaging with the turmoil at his own agency.” This combination—horrible policies mixed with terrible execution—has evolved into its own infectious disease. It’s already spread throughout the administration. The Atlantic (Gift Article): The Most Feared Person at the NIH Is a Vaccine Researcher Plucked From Obscurity. (Meanwhile, Measles outbreaks worsen in South Carolina, Arizona and Utah.)
+ Plaque Buildup: Trump’s soiling of the White House, and American history, continues apace. The latest addition: Trump disparages presidential foes in plaques attached to White House. The same guy who makes decisions to do stuff like this is making decisions like the one below...
+ Unfamiliar Surroundings: “Venezuela is completely surrounded by the largest Armada ever assembled in the History of South America. It will only get bigger, and the shock to them will be like nothing they have ever seen before — Until such time as they return to the United States of America all of the Oil, Land, and other Assets that they previously stole from us.” Trump orders blockade of ‘sanctioned oil tankers’ into Venezuela.
+ Lost Sacks Appeal: “What she found was shocking: he had fabricated and embellished some of his most well-known work — like Awakenings and The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. Sacks himself referred to his ‘lies’ and ‘falsification’ in journal entries.” The Lies and Falsifications of Oliver Sacks.
+ A High Profile: “An online marketplace is selling code modules that simulate the effects of cannabis, ketamine, cocaine, ayahuasca, and alcohol when they are uploaded to ChatGPT.” Wired: People Are Paying to Get Their Chatbots High on Drugs. (I think investors have been hitting some of the same stuff...)
+ Three Pointers: WSJ (Gift Article): One Throuple Had Three Separate Design Tastes. How Did They Manage a Renovation? Wait. What?
“For decades, physicists dismissed it as beautiful nonsense—a prop master’s fever dream. But now the math has caught up to the dream.” A faster-than-light spaceship would actually look a lot like Star Trek’s Enterprise. (Too bad the Enterprise’s engines have been repurposed and are now powering an AI data center.)
+ Lawmakers pull each other’s hair during Mexico City Congress session.
2025-12-17 03:19:33
Today, I’m going to break with tradition and lead NextDraft with something that is not news. Vanity Fair has a two-part story that covers eleven interviews with Trump’s chief of staff, Susie Wiles. The NYT (Gift Article) shares some of the lowlights. Wiles acknowledged that, while she has tried to stop the tendency, Trump is using Justice Department prosecutions to settle scores. “When there’s an opportunity, he will go for it.” (No way! Trump?) Wiles said that Trump “was not telling the truth when he accused former President Bill Clinton of visiting the private island of the sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein.” (A falsehood? From Trump? Say it isn’t so!) Wiles explained that “Vice President JD Vance has ‘been a conspiracy theorist for a decade’ and his conversion from Trump critic to ally was based not on principle but was ‘sort of political,’” (Vance? Less than authentic and even political?), that Elon Musk is an odd duck and an avowed Ketamine user (Weird, Elon seems like a sober, rational thinker who comes off as just a regular guy), and Russell T. Vought, the budget director, is ‘a right-wing absolute zealot.’” (Funny, he’s always struck me as being sort of middle of the road). There were insider accounts that could still surprise us during the first Trump term, but that bar has been raised. The badness is not being concealed. It’s being celebrated. So are the mental issues. If Freud watched a Trump press conference, I’m guessing he’d make it through about five minutes before putting down his notebook and saying, “I really have nothing more to add.” What we’re seeing in front of our eyes is worse than what we once imagined to be taking place behind the scenes. None of the Wiles revelations are as bad or disturbing as what we’ve seen in the past 24 hours of livestreamed news coverage of Trump and his enablers, and we’ve learned from experience that the next 24 hours won’t be any different.
+ Yesterday, I got a lot of reactions to my take on the confluence of three stories that made the launch of the holiday season feel like the Hanukkah from hell. Candles in the Wind.
“If the ideas within it are really used to shape policy, then U.S. influence in the world will rapidly disappear, and America’s ability to defend itself and its allies will diminish. The consequences will be economic as well as political, and they will be felt by all Americans.” Anne Applebaum in The Atlantic (Gift Article) on the new National Security Strategy. The Longest Suicide Note in American History. “The security strategy also talks, bizarrely, about Europe being on the verge of ‘civilizational erasure,’ which is not language used by many European politicians, even those in far-right parties ... In multiple indices, after all—health, happiness, standard of living—European countries regularly rank higher than the United States. Compared with Americans, Europeans live longer, are less likely to be living on the streets, and are less likely to die in mass shootings. The only possible conclusion: The authors of this document don’t know much about Europe, or don’t care to find out. Living in a fantasy world, they are blind to real dangers. They invent fictional threats. Their information comes from conspiracist websites and random accounts on X, and if they use these fictions to run policy, then all kinds of disasters could await us.”
“Tennenbaum soon became Epstein’s supervisor. ‘He was proving to be quite talented,’ Tennenbaum told us. But in late 1976, he received a disconcerting phone call from the head of Bear Stearns’s personnel department. Employees had belatedly gotten around to checking Epstein’s résumé, which stated that he had received degrees from two California universities. ‘Are you sitting down?’ the H.R. official asked Tennenbaum. ‘Neither school has heard of him.’” People know a lot about Jeffrey Epstein’s crimes. But how did he become a rich and powerful player in the first place? The NYT (Gift Article) on how a college dropout clawed his way to the pinnacle of American finance and society. Scams, Schemes, Ruthless Cons: The Untold Story of How Jeffrey Epstein Got Rich.
“Dummies have been in the news lately, after an updated design for a female dummy took a step closer to widespread adoption. But for many decades, they’ve been quietly doing their work, taking hit after hit in the name of saving lives. And a crash test dummy’s story starts way before they’re buckled in for a collision. They have a life, of sorts, starting at this Huron plant, where their physical parts are born.” NPR: Built to spill: The life of a crash test dummy.
+ I recently posted a new t-shirt to the NextDraft Store: Crash Test Hitch-Hiker.
Weapons of Mass Distraction: Using inflated numbers and shoddy logic, Trump designates street fentanyl as a WMD, escalating the militarization of the drug war. This paves the way for more military on American streets and more unauthorized bombing of boats abroad. Speaking which... U.S. military says strikes on 3 boats in the eastern Pacific Ocean kill 8 people.
+ Short Circuited: “The European Commission backed away from what had been the world’s most aggressive timeline for phasing out internal-combustion engines, granting manufacturers and consumers more time to move off gasoline. A day earlier, Ford Motor Co. announced $19.5 billion in charges tied to the retreat from an electric strategy it vowed to go all in on eight years ago.” Bloomberg (Gift Article): The Electric Car Transition Unravels Slowly, Then All at Once. (Things went smoother when Dylan went electric...)
+ Bondi Update: Bondi terror attack: alleged gunmen travelled to the Philippines before ‘Isis-inspired’ shooting. And there was more than one bystander who risked everything to save lives. A new video shows an elderly couple trying to stop and disarm a Bondi gunman. “The dashcam video shows a couple who were killed in the attack.”
+ Brown Update: “Police released images last night of a “person of interest” taken two hours before the shooting, showing a person wearing a black mask, and requested the public’s help in identifying them. A man detained over the weekend was released because of a lack of evidence, after President Donald Trump earlier referred to him as ‘the suspect.’” Here’s the latest from NBC News.
+ Front Not Center: Spencer Ackerman: The Largest and Bloodiest U.S. Battlefield in 2025? Somalia.
+ The Elephant in the Roomba: “iRobot says it’s business as usual for the millions of Roombas in people’s homes, which will continue to function as expected — for now. But how did the most popular household robot company in the world fall so far and fall so spectacularly?” How Roomba invented the home robot — and lost the future. M.G. Siegler blames the regulators for killing Roomba.
+ You Cannot Be Sirius (without Howard): Howard Stern Signs Three-Year Deal After Contract Standoff. I saw a lot of false rumors, not a lot of actual standoffing. Either way, Howard staying on the air is great news because my beagles and I have run out of things to talk about on our walks.
“This is the New England Metal and Hardcore Festival, 25 bands on three stages, 10 unbroken hours of heavy music, and all day, I’ve been watching the pit—the mosh pit, the area close to the stage where inflamed dancers whirl and collide. I’ve been watching it, and skulking around it journalistically, because I am possessed by an idea: What if the pit, this ritualized maelstrom at the heart of the hardcore-metal crowd, could teach us something about how to live together in 2025—about how to be? Heavy metal, of all music, knows just how sick we are.” The Atlantic(Gift Article): The Savage Empathy of the Mosh Pit.
+ I feel like I was ahead of the curve when it comes to finding meaning in the mosh. McSweeney’s: An Open Letter to the Guy Who Puked Next to Me at the Heavy Metal Festival.