2026-03-05 04:37:07
The market has managed to take in stride things like massive regional wars, Constitutional crises, attacks on law and order, illegal tariffs, and the cracking of the foundation that underpins the modern global order. Even with all these factors at play, nothing moves the market like AI news. For a while, that meant that any press release indicating a company was digging deeper into AI led to a share price boost. More recently, many of the bigger movements have been reactions to the threat posed by AI. The Saas-pocalypse hit many big tech players when investors worried that their functions would be replaced by OpenAI and Anthropic. So tech companies know they have to play the AI market right, and that they have to play the AI news and hype cycle right. And, as is the case with many of the answers you get from LLMs, it can be almost impossible to dissect reality from hallucinations (some of which are intended).
At this point, there’s little doubt that the AI revolution will have an outsized impact on white collar jobs, from how they’re done to how many of them will survive. We’re already seeing worrying signs in the job market. But we’re also seeing signs that corporate CEOs looking to lighten costs via layoffs might use the emergence of AI as an excuse for doing so. This can play as good news in the investment world, which loves lowering costs through layoffs and loves any signal that a company is becoming an AI company. Thus, telling the market you’re preemptively laying off thousands of employees and replacing them with AI can create a perfect storm for a company’s share price. For employees, it’s more of a shitstorm.
Aaron Zamost, a former employee of Block, examines that company’s recent layoffs made in the name of AI, and what they might mean for both the future of public companies and the stories they spin. “Look closer at specific cuts — like shrinking the policy team and eliminating diversity and inclusion roles, former colleagues told me — and Block’s latest reorganization reads like standard prioritization and cost management, not an A.I.-driven reinvention ... Fear that the A.I. tsunami will destroy the traditional software field has led investors to pummel the valuations of long-established companies like Salesforce and Adobe. Like those businesses, Block is not an A.I. company. It is a financial services tech business, and it understandably wants to avoid ‘software dodo’ extinction before it comes for its industry. In that respect, A.I. is both a story line and a survival strategy.” NYT (Gift Article): I Worked for Block. Its A.I. Job Cuts Aren’t What They Seem. Of course, in the market, news is like stock shares. The only thing that matters is what investors buy. And they bought Block’s story. “Wall Street rewarded Block handsomely, sending the company’s stock up 24 percent after the announcement. That incentivizes the rest of corporate America to follow Block’s lead and announce traditional layoffs while playing the A.I. card. I’m sure it will.”
The situation in Iran and the region is fluid. Two fluids in particular might drive the course and duration of the war. You can probably guess the first one. WSJ (Gift Article): Strait of Hormuz: The Oil Bottleneck Threatening the Global Economy. But there’s another fluid that could also be at risk. Javier Blas in Bloomberg (Gift Article): The Iran War’s Most Precious Commodity Isn’t Oil. “The CIA calls it the ‘strategic commodity’ of the Middle East. But it’s not referring to oil or natural gas. What the American spy agency has in mind is far more prosaic: drinking water. Don’t underestimate it, though, because if military hostilities continue to escalate, water could become the geopolitical commodity that decides the war between the US and Iran.”
+ “The president specializes in exploiting the weaknesses of his opponents; having watched Israel decimate Iran’s proxy armies and air defenses over the past few years, he sought to capitalize on the regime’s moment of maximum vulnerability. Other countries—most notably Israel and Saudi Arabia—potentially stand to benefit from Trump’s war. But the decision to start it was his alone, and no amount of spin from his surrogates should obscure this fact.” Yair Rosenberg in The Atlantic (Gift Article): The Real Reason Trump Went to War. (I don’t pretend to be able to understand the inner workings of Trump’s mind. But there’s no doubt that the 12-day war showed the region and the world how weak and vulnerable Iran is. Whether this invasion was the best way to respond to that weakness remains to be seen.)
+ The U.S. has been remarkably effective at blocking attacks from Iran. But doing so, at this point, requires the use of expensive munitions to block cheaper ones. That could be a factor as this war plays out. And it is very likely on the minds of America’s stronger and more dangerous adversaries. The Dangerous Munitions Mismatch Between America and Iran.
+ “The U.S. has torpedoed an Iranian ship in international waters in the Indian Ocean, among 20 vessels the U.S. military says it has struck.” And bigger strikes may still be coming. According to Hegseth, America and Israel would soon be able to deliver “death and destruction all day long.” (Which is exactly how you don’t want your secretary of defense to talk.) Meanwhile, “NATO air defenses had shot down a ballistic missile fired from Iran that had been heading toward Turkish airspace.” Here’s the latest from NBC, ABC, and NYT.
“A lingering question is why the group was clustered together if the guides knew the group was traveling below avalanche terrain. Standard backcountry protocol is to expose only one person at a time if traveling through an avalanche path.” There were several small decisions that led to a massive disaster in the Sierras. The Atlantic (Gift Article): California’s Deadliest Avalanche Turned on One Choice.
“One senses that the climate crisis is not only threatening to destroy property, but is also challenging the confidence of both the insurers and the insured, perhaps providing a hint at fault lines in the economic system.” In fact, economic dangers go hand in hand with climate dangers. Here in California, we’re already seeing insurance companies flee or move customers to much higher-priced and less secure plans. I’ve said it many times. If you want to know how real the threat of climate change is, just follow the re-insurance companies. Aeon: The insurance catastrophe.
+ The sea is higher than we thought and millions more are at risk, study finds.
Talarico-Dependent: There were several primaries across the country on Tuesday, as the 2026 midterms officially kicked off. None were more watched than the ones in Texas, on both sides of the aisle. Does a matchup between James Talarico and either Ken Paxton or John Cornyn suggest the state may really be in play for Dems? Politico: ‘A perfect storm is lining up for Texas Democrats’
+ Trans Parent: “An emergency Supreme Court ruling to temporarily bar California from enforcing a state law that prevents public schools from outing transgender students has advocates raising concerns about its potential to further roll back protections for transgender youth.” (This SCOTUS may surprise us occasionally on economic issues like tariffs, but never when it comes to the religiosity war in America.) Advocates Fear Supreme Court Is ‘Going After the Transgender Community Deliberately.’
+ That’s What Kalshi Said: “On Kalshi, people have placed bets on everything from football games to foreign affairs. The prediction market’s CEO, Tarek Mansour, says this doesn’t count as gambling—and is actually good for society.” Let me counter slightly. It is gambling. And, along with the sports betting sweeping the country (particularly among young men), it is terrible for society. And I’d bet on that. Steven Levy in Wired: How Is Kalshi Not Gambling?
+ Destigmatize: “This government initiative, called One of Us, works with people who have mental health challenges — the program calls them ambassadors — to share their stories in schools, hospitals and police stations, with a focus on their recovery.” NYT (Gift Article): A Danish Program Takes On the Stigma of Mental Illness.
+ Dunkin on Someone: RFK Jr “took aim at processed foods and singled out Dunkin’ and Starbucks for particular scrutiny ... ‘We’re going to ask Dunkin’ Donuts and Starbucks, ‘Show us the safety data that show that it’s OK for a teenage girl to drink an iced coffee with 115 grams of sugar in it ... I don’t think they’re gonna be able to do it.” (I don’t either. But I also don’t think fighting Dunkin’, Starbucks, and teenage girls, all at once, is a winning strategy. Also, I’d rather my daughter get a Frappuccino than measles.)
+ Is Neo the One: Apple unveils its entry into the lower-priced laptop market, and begins to sort of merge mobile with MacBooks. The Verge: Our first hands-on look at Apple’s MacBook Neo. (Why do the lower-priced versions of tech products often get the cooler color choices?)
+ Photo Finish: Finalists from the 2026 Sony World Photography Awards Professional Competition.
Crystal Meth: “If you give a chimp a crystal, she might not give it back. Researchers learned this the hard way. They gave quartz, calcite and other types of crystals to chimpanzees in a rehabilitation center. The apes responded with great interest, and the researchers ended up needing to trade large amounts of bananas and yogurt to get back the largest crystal. Others were never retrieved.” Chimpanzees Are Really Into Crystals.
2026-03-04 03:15:30
In The New Yorker, Susan Glasser goes over some of the reasons we’ve been given that America launched the Iran war. “In the two and a half days since Donald Trump unleashed a new war in the Middle East, the President and his Administration have come up with an astonishing array of different, even contradictory, rationales for the American military attack on Iran. By my count, and I’m sure I’ve missed a few, these include outright regime change, assistance to the oppressed peoples of the Islamic Republic, stripping Iran of ‘the ability to project power outside its borders,’ stopping future Iranian-sponsored terrorist attacks while exacting revenge for past ones, preëmptive action against an imminent Iranian threat to attack U.S. forces, preëmptive action to block Iran from building ballistic missiles that could hit the U.S. mainland, and preëmptive action to stop the Iranian nuclear program that Trump had, as recently as last week, claimed was ‘obliterated.’ Many of these explanations are based on false premises; some already seem to have been abandoned.” Can Donald Trump Win a War with Iran If He Can’t Explain Why He Started It? I touched on this issue in yesterday’s edition, where I argued that Epic Fury looks a little more like Blind Fury. Among the most preposterous reasons given for launching an attack when they did was served up by Marco Rubio, who explained that the US had to strike Iran before Israel did—because an Israeli pre-emptive strike would have put troops in the region in danger, so the U.S. was cornered into striking first. This could be one of the more gutless falsehoods ever spewed by buck-passing men famous for spewing them nonstop. Has Bibi been pushing for the US to strike and reduce the threat posed by a regime as determined to destroy Israel as it was to violently squelch dissent among its own citizens? Yes. Were there a lot of other voices across the region (including Saudi Arabia) lobbying Trump to make a move? Yes. But a government that spent months building up forces in the Middle East, changing its defense department name to the Department of War, and tough-talking its lethality, can hardly pass the buck and say, our ally made us do it (even though Let’s the blame the Jews can be a convenient reflex among this crowd). No, this is Trump’s war. Don’t take my word for it. Take his. He was none too pleased with Rubio’s assessment. “If anything, I might have forced Israel’s hand. We were having negotiations with these lunatics, and it was my opinion that they [Iran] were going to attack first.”
+ The broader issue remains. It’s still unclear to everyone from the American public to top Congressional officials exactly why we attacked now and what our ultimate goals are. Just today, Trump told reporters: “I guess the worst case would be — we do this, and then somebody takes over who’s as bad as the previous person… That could happen.” Are we watching a war unfold or waging one? I suppose if you have no clearly defined goals, you can always claim any outcome as a victory. Maybe we can rephrase The New Yorker headline: Can Donald Trump Lose a War with Iran If He Refuses to Explain Why He Started It? Let’s hope that the actual outcome is something other than a worst case.
+ Apparently, a lot of different people have a lot of different motivations. According to indie journalist Jonathan Larsen: U.S. Troops Were Told Iran War Is for ‘Armageddon,’ Return of Jesus. “A combat-unit commander told non-commissioned officers at a briefing Monday that the Iran war is part of God’s plan and that Pres. Donald Trump was ‘anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to Earth,’ according to a complaint by a non-commissioned officer.” (Editor’s note: If true, holy shit...)
“Israel stepped up airstrikes on Iranian missile launchers and factories Tuesday, and Iran retaliated against Israel and across the Gulf region, disrupting energy supplies and travel. As explosions rang out in Tehran and in Lebanon — where Israel said it struck Hezbollah militants — the American embassy in Saudi Arabia came under drone attack.” AP: Israel steps up airstrikes in Tehran, as Iran widens its response across the region.
+ NYT (Gift Article): Iran’s Strategy: Expand the War, Increase the Cost, Outlast Trump. (One of the biggest questions moving forward is how countries in the region that have become the targets of Iran’s missiles and drones will react. Iran is betting they’ll push Trump to stop the war. But they could also join the fight.)
+ Middle East war could be decided by who runs out of missiles or interceptors first, analysts say.
+ Iran war heralds era of AI-powered bombing quicker than speed of thought. And about those Pentagon software vendor pronouncements. US Military Using Claude to Select Targets in Iran Strikes.
+ “When FBI Director Kash Patel fired a dozen FBI agents and staff last week for their role in the classified documents investigation of Donald Trump, he targeted an elite counter espionage unit that investigates threats from foreign adversaries and specializes in Iran.” (No one at the hockey game could have warned him about this?) And a reminder of The Intern in Charge: Meet the 22-Year-Old Trump’s Team Picked to Lead Terrorism Prevention
+ Here’s the latest from BBC, The Guardian, Times of Israel, and NBC.
Maybe, instead of self-driving cars we needed to invent self-driving automakers. “They have been whipsawed by tariffs. Chinese carmakers are breathing down their necks around the world. Self-driving taxi companies like Waymo are changing the very nature of transportation. Software has replaced horsepower as a key selling point. Sales are flat almost everywhere, and profits are declining. How U.S. carmakers cope with this pivotal moment will determine whether they survive as global players or slide into irrelevance, becoming niche manufacturers of pickups and sport utility vehicles that only Americans buy. The early indications are not promising.” NYT (Gift Article): US Automakers Risk Being Reduced to Niche Producers of Gas Vehicles.
“To be free, one must be feared. To be feared, one must be powerful.” So said French President Emmanuel Macron as France Floats Nuclear Deployment Across Europe.
Contributing to the Delinquency of a Minor: “A Georgia father was found guilty on Tuesday of ignoring warning signs and allowing his son unfettered access to an assault-style rifle that prosecutors say the teenager used in a deadly school shooting.” Man Who Gave His Teen a Rifle Is Guilty of Murder After School Shooting.
+ Strike That, Reverse It: “The Trump administration indicated on Tuesday that it planned to renew its defense of executive orders that it had leveled against law firms, a sharp reversal a day after asking a court whether it could abandon the fight.” (Someone didn’t like the press coverage of the first decision.)
+ Cancer Trend: “Colorectal cancer rates in people under 65 are surging, with nearly half (45%) of new diagnoses occurring in this age group, up from 27% in 1995. At the same time, colorectal cancer rates are falling in people 65 and older.” Rectal cancer rates are rising in U.S., driving an increase in illness in younger adults.
+ Mortgaging, The Future: “If you’ve secured a loan and you are closing on a new home in the near future, congratulations. You’ve taken part in an essential middle-class rite of passage—and you’re one of the lucky few.” Annie Lowrey in The Atlantic(Gift Article): The Disappearing American Mortgage.
+ Plus None: Donald Trump Says He’ll Attend This Year’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner, Ending His Boycott. (No self-respecting journalist should attend a Correspondents’ Association Dinner with Trump there. Nothing about any of this is a laughing matter.)
+ A Cozy Getaway: Mark Zuckerberg’s $170 Million MansionBuy Breaks Miami Price Records. Very related from yesterday’s edition: The Hole World in Their Hands.
“Meta’s Ray-Ban smart glasses are a privacy nightmare, with footage of naked people, sensitive information, and violent acts captured and seen by Meta’s AI and an army of employees.” What privacy? As expected, Meta Ray-Bans are a privacy disaster.
2026-03-03 04:47:24
During his first press conference of the Iran war, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth explained that Operation Epic Fury is not a so-called regime change war. That may surprise many observers because the first salvos of the operation decapitated the regime. No, the war is about denying Iran’s nuclear ambitions. But we were told that America’s bombing runs in 2025 obliterated that nuclear program. America and Israel chose this moment to attack Iran because, since October 7, Iran has shown its military and intel weakness, and has become increasingly isolated in the region. Of course, Iran’s weakness could also just as easily be used as a reason not to attack them now, at a moment when the overall risk they present is relatively low. Trump has told Iran’s security forces to surrender, but it’s unclear that there’s anyone to surrender to. Trump told the Iranian people to rise up. But the attack comes after thousands of them were killed by the regime while doing just that. At different points over the weekend, we were told to expect this war to last days, weeks, months or some other amount of time, but that it definitely won’t be endless. We’ve been offered no such duration assurances when it comes to how long the contradictions will continue. Most administrations spend a lot of time justifying and explaining their strategies before taking the country to war. This administration isn’t giving clear explanations even after starting one. Maybe that shouldn’t come as a surprise. Our Contradicter in Chief ran on an agenda that called for an end to global interventions, and yet, “no president in the modern era has ordered more military strikes against as many different countries.” During the 12 day war, Iran was outed as more of a paper tiger than anyone in the Middle East imagined; one that had been fully infiltrated by foreign intelligence. The fall of the regime has seemed more likely than ever. Whether this is the right way to get rid of the regime, or whether Bibi, Trump, and Hegseth are the right guys to do it, is a different matter. Here’s what we know so far. The leaders of an evil and destabilizing regime behind much of the world’s terrorism have been eliminated and that is a great thing for the region and the world. Unless something worse follows. So let’s hope this is a so-called regime change war and not an endless, destructive quagmire that recent history suggests is a very real possibility. How will it turn out? Don’t ask me. And don’t ask the Trump administration, either.
+ “I hope this effort to topple the clerical regime in Tehran succeeds. It is a regime that murders its people, destabilizes its neighbors and has destroyed a great civilization. There is no single event that would do more to put the whole Middle East on a more decent, inclusive trajectory than the replacement of Tehran’s Islamic regime with a leadership focused exclusively on enabling the people of Iran to realize their full potential with a real voice in their own future. Second, this will not be easy, because this regime is deeply entrenched and is hardly going to be toppled from the air alone.” Thomas Friedman in the NYT(Gift Article): How to Think About Trump’s War With Iran. “This is the most plastic, unpredictable moment in the Middle East since the Iranian Revolution in 1979. Everything — and its opposite — is possible.”
+ The Atlantic (Gift Article): Hubris Without Idealism. “Today, it’s impossible not to feel happy for Iranians inside the country and overseas as they celebrate the deaths of their oppressors, above all that of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, whose rule destroyed the lives of so many people, especially young ones. But the surest way for worse to follow is to fail to believe that it can.”
+ WSJ (Gift Article): Trump’s Shifting Goals for Iran Complicate Military’s Mission.
+ Pentagon tells Congress no sign that Iran was going to attack US first.
+ “The American bombardment of Iran has been launched without explanation, without Congress, without even an attempt to build public support. Above all, it has been launched without a coherent strategy for the Iranian people, and without a plan to let them decide how to build a legitimate Iranian state.” Anne Applebaum in The Atlantic (Gift Article): Trump Has No Plan for the Iranian People.
+ “Trump is telling lies about the war that not only contradict one another, but contradict themselves internally. Is it about a nuclear program that doesn’t exist? Or is it about a regime change that we haven’t thought through? Or is it about an imaginary Iranian threat to elections?” Timothy Snyder: Losing the War on Truth.
+ U.S. Races to Accomplish Iran Mission Before Munitions Run Out.
+ What would a free Iran mean for the world?
+ A strike on a girls school may have killed as many as 175 people, at least four members of the American military have been killed, nine people in Beit Shamesh were among those killed in Israel by Iranian missiles, three US planes were shot down by Kuwaiti friendly fire, in addition to attacking Israel, Iran has fired missiles and drones at countries throughout the region, Hezbollah attacked Israel, and the war, for now, continues to spread. Here’s the latest from the NYT, Times of Israel, NBC, and CNN.
“The Jackson Hole region has long been a refuge for the rich, but an explosion of new affluence has allowed a growing cadre of extraordinarily wealthy people to dominate both the local economy and Wyoming state politics. Teton County is not merely the richest county in the country, per capita, by far; it is a window into America’s near future, as the country enters a new gilded age, one in which millionaires are turning into billionaires overnight.” NYT (Gift Article) with a very on-point article for this moment in time. Welcome to Wyoming, the Frontier of America’s New Gilded Age.
“Across social media and the AI industry, people immediately began to challenge Altman’s claim. Why, they asked, would the Pentagon suddenly agree to these red lines when it had said — in no uncertain terms — that it would never do so? The answer, sources told The Verge, is that the Pentagon didn’t budge. OpenAI agreed to follow laws that have allowed for mass surveillance in the past, while insisting they protect its red lines.” The Verge (Gift Article): How OpenAI caved to the Pentagon on AI surveillance. (We’ve got the wrong people making the most important decisions.)
+ Anthropic said no to the Pentagon. Not coincidentally, they just overtook ChatGPT in the app store. As with many other political controversies, the American consumer is the last line of defense.
“Thanks to decades of such refinements, today’s jets may be the world’s most reliable machines. Flying in them is less likely to kill you than walking on staircases. It’s the sky that’s grown more unreliable. Fierce storms and erratic winds are increasingly common with climate change. But the rise in clear-air turbulence, often far from storms and undetectable by radar, is especially alarming.” The New Yorker: Buckle Up for Bumpier Skies.
I Fought The Law and... “The Trump administration has decided to drop its prolonged court fights against four law firmswith ties to Democrats, after it had sought and failed to cut out the firms’ access to the federal government as part of an apparent retribution campaign by President Donald Trump.” (Seems like there’s a lesson here for those firms that immediately bent the knee...)
+ Rx Post Facto: “The destruction that Kennedy has wrought in 1 year might take generations to repair, and there is little hope for US health and science while he remains at the helm.” ‘One year of failure.’ The Lancet slams RFK Jr.’s first year as health chief.
+ Austin Shooting: “Three people died and 14 people have been hospitalized in a shooting on West Sixth Street in Austin early Sunday. The incident is being investigated by the FBI as a potential act of terrorism.”
+ Patty Meltdown: “Burger King is launching an AI chatbot that will live in the headsets used by employees. The voice-enabled chatbot, called ‘Patty,’ is part of an overarching BK Assistant platform that will not only assist employees with meal preparation but also evaluate their interactions with customers for ‘friendliness.’”
+ Stuck in the Middle With You: “Ottawa and Delhi vowed to reach a multi-billion dollar trade deal this year, the latest step in a recent push by Canada’s leader to knit together an alliance of so-called middle powers in an effort to resist US and Chinese dominance.”
+ It’s Not the Years, Honey; It’s the Mileage: The SAG awards were dominated by Sinners and The Studio. The highlight was Harrison Ford’s life achievement acceptance speech.
Heated Rivalry’s Connor Storrie hosted SNL over the weekend. And the appearance by real-life hockey players was perfectly played.
2026-02-28 04:21:41
Because we live in an age when the worst-case scenario is always the most likely one, Larry and David Ellison’s Skydance Paramount “won” the bidding war over Netflix, and is now positioned to own Warner Bros. By refusing to up the ante on an already ridiculously overpriced transaction, Netflix looks like this deal’s real winner. The rest of us are the losers. We’ve already seen the damage that the Ellison lineage has done to CBS News. CNN’s fate is likely to follow a similar path. You may argue that CBS is old news and CNN hasn’t really been reporting on the news since they replaced Bernard Shaw with nonstop, endlessly irritating opinion panels. But the billionaire bankrolling of media includes new and old media. The Ellisons will have CBS, CNN, and a huge chunk of the American version of TikTok. Bezos has WaPo. Zuck owns Facebook, Instagram, and Threads. Elon owns X. The Murdochs own Fox, WSJ, and a host of other sources. Local TV news stations are being bought up by right-leaning conglomerates. From old media printed newspapers to new-fangled AI answer machines, the American brain is increasingly being fed a steady diet of feeds by mega-billionaires who probably have very different political views and goals than you do. And if their media machines don’t sway enough people, their ability to spend endlessly to support political candidates and causes should do the trick.
+ Given the buyers’ relationship with Trump, federal approval of this deal is a given. Can California stand in the way of a merger that will hurt jobs as much as it hurts democracy? California now biggest obstacle to Paramount’s Warner Bros takeover.
+ If you’re looking for a silver lining, this is a really bad deal for the buyers. “Mr. Ellison’s deal for Warner Bros. Discovery, which values the company at $31 a share, is an outcome few would have predicted just months ago. Shares of the media giant were trading as low as $12 a share in September, as it faced headwinds in its traditional television business.” NYT (Gift Article): Netflix Backs Out of Bid for Warner Bros., Paving Way for an Ellison Takeover. (Sort of like the Roadrunner always paves the way for the Coyote to win the race, by stopping at the edge of the cliff.)
If the absolutely massive buildup of arms in the Middle East didn’t convince you of the real possibility of a US attack on Iran, this headline might. U.S. tells embassy staff in Israel to leave now if they want amid Trump threats to attack Iran. It seems Marco Rubio didn’t send that memo, or like it very much. Marco Rubio orders US officials to stop commentary that could strain Iran talks. (Of course, even though Rubio is Secretary of State and Acting National Security Advisor, he’s not the one actually negotiating with Iran. That gig was given, again, to Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner.)
+ “As they made their public case this week for another American military campaign against Iran, President Trump and his aides asserted that Iran has restarted its nuclear program, has enough available nuclear material to build a bomb within days, and is developing long-range missiles that will soon be capable of hitting the United States. All three of these claims are either false or unproven.” NYT (Gift Article): In Trump’s Case for War, a Series of False or Unproven Claims. (False and unproven claims are the bread and butter of this administration. Why would war be different?)
+ And, as if things weren’t complicated enough ... Pakistan Strikes Afghanistan in ‘Open War’ Against Taliban Government.
“The Pentagon’s version of Claude could not be used to facilitate the mass surveillance of Americans, nor could it be used in fully autonomous weaponry—situations where computers, rather than humans, make the final decision about whom to kill. According to a source familiar with this week’s meeting, Hegseth made clear that if Anthropic did not eliminate those two guardrails by Friday afternoon, two things could happen: The Department of Defense could use the Defense Production Act, a Cold War–era law, to essentially commandeer a more permissive iteration of the AI, or it could label Anthropic a ‘supply-chain risk,’ meaning that anyone doing business with the U.S. military would be forbidden from associating with the company.” Anthropic is refusing to bend. The Atlantic (Gift Article): Anthropic Takes a Stand.
+ “The danger is not that Silicon Valley will wield too much power over the military. It is that neither will fully understand the systems it is rushing to deploy—and that the consequences of that ignorance will be tested not in a laboratory, but on the world.” Thomas Wright: The Real Reason Anthropic Wants Guardrails. “AI is too powerful and too new to be set free from human oversight.” (And that’s even considering that human insight can look like this: Pentagon Fires Another Laser at a Drone, Prompting a New Air Closure.)
+ Anthropic might not be the only holdout. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman shares Anthropic’s concerns when it comes to working with the Pentagon.
+ You can be sure not every AI CEO will be so careful. WSJ(Gift Article): Government Agencies Raise Alarm About Use of Elon Musk’s Grok Chatbot. “Warnings about xAI’s safety and reliability preceded Pentagon decision to approve Grok for use in classified settings.”
What to Watch: The second season of Paradise is off to an excellent start. While the first season takes place in a bunker city, the second season starts off in an even weirder location. Graceland. Paradise is on Hulu.
+ What to Book: Ann Patchett’s The Dutch House is “a richly moving story that explores the indelible bond between two siblings, the house of their childhood, and a past that will not let them go.”
+ What to Movie: In the excellent Triangle of Sadness, a cruise for the super-rich sinks, leaving survivors, including a fashion model celebrity couple, trapped on an island. It’s like Send Helpmeets The White Lotus. If you haven’t seen it, it’s now available on Netflix.
Block of Sh-t: “We’re not making this decision because we’re in trouble. Our business is strong. Gross profit continues to grow, we continue to serve more and more customers, and profitability is improving. But something has changed.” Jack Dorsey’s Block lays off 4,000 and blames AI. If humans are stupid enough to believe Block’s layoffs are not actually about over-hiring, mismanagement, and a flat stock price over the last four years, maybe we really do need AI to take over. But that obvious reality didn’t stop the market from celebrating Block’s announcement. Expect to see a lot more of this. “Wall Street rewards CEOs who make steep cuts and attribute those cuts to AI. That could embolden other management teams to follow suit.” As I wrote yesterday, news like this is why it’s not just the tech we don’t trust. It’s the technologists.
+ Church and Seizure: “The Trump Justice Department secured a new indictment charging 30 more people in connection with an anti-ICE protest at a church in St. Paul, Minnesota, in January.” Killing innocent people, ok. Protesting those killings, not ok.
+ Hasta La Vista, Babies: “Not so long ago, women like Ms. Paz — in their early 20s, from backgrounds that are far from privileged — would have been among the most likely to be having children. Now this group is a key contributor to the country’s declining birthrate, which is at an all-time low, down by over 25 percent since 2007, the year the fall began.” The Birthrate Is Plunging. Why Some Say That’s a Good Thing. (And why some are freaking out.)
+ Look Younger? “As brands sell children eyeshadow, lip gloss and skincare, parents face a dilemma: How young is too young to expose children to beauty?” WSJ (Gift Article): 6-Year-Olds Want Makeup. These Brands Are Cashing In.
+ The Kreme Always Rises: Ozempic and other weight loss drugs have drastically changed our eating habits. But don’t count out the carbs just yet. Krispy Kreme Shares Jump as Turnaround Gains Traction.
“Akbar’s medal comes with a quiet footnote: He is believed to be the last newspaper hawker left in Paris. A job that once dotted street corners across the city has almost vanished, pushed out by the internet and the collapse of print journalism sales. In a city that now gets most of its headlines on phones, Akbar still delivers them by hand.” Ali Akbar, who’s sold newspapers on the streets of Paris for 50 years, is now a knight.
+ “The couple had about 15 extra invitations and decided to send them out to companies they liked, including In-N-Out Burger, Trader Joe’s, Sephora and Pokémon, in hopes of receiving some freebies. Also on the list was Bad Bunny, Mr. Wolter’s favorite artist, whom they bonded over on their first date. At best, maybe they would receive a signed postcard, they thought.” They Met in an E.R. and Were Married at the Super Bowl.
+ Could a vaccine prevent dementia? Shingles shot data only getting stronger.
+ “We have senior citizen retirees showing up saying, ‘I’m an old white woman — how can I help?’ We have students from community colleges and universities. We have people who look like longtime activists and people who look like they’ve never done this before.” Older, white Angelenos are joining Latino volunteers to monitor ICE raids.
+ A children’s hospital is renamed for Dolly Parton and hopes to transform pediatric care in Tennessee.
2026-02-27 04:15:47
Good luck movin’ up
‘Cause I’m moving out
-- Billy Joel
Americans are known for voting with their feet. Recently, they’ve been voting with planes, too. While the politics of the moment have been fixated on immigration, emigration isn’t getting nearly the attention it deserves. A growing number of Americans are exchanging the American dream for a one-way American dream-trip to any country they believe will be more affordable and safe. You may assume that the increasingly common choice to book an exodus out of this place is being driven by Trumpism (if that State of the Union address went on for another five minutes, I may have called my own travel agent). But this trend can’t be painted with such abroad brushstrokes. It has been ramping up and to the right for a while. “Some commentators have labeled this wave of American emigrants the ‘Donald Dash’ since numbers have spiked under President Trump’s second term. But the phenomenon has been building for years—fed by the rise of remote work, mounting living costs and an appetite for foreign lifestyles that feel within reach, especially in Europe.” There are multiple factors behind the trend. There would have to be, because the shift is so stark. “When Gallup asked Americans during the 2008 recession how many wanted to leave the U.S., the answer was one in 10. Last year: One in five.” WSJ (Gift Article): Americans Are Leaving the U.S. in Record Numbers(Alt link). “The exodus poses elemental questions for a country that has always prided itself as a destination. Are the new American emigrants a credit to the strength of their homeland’s economy? After all, it is America’s enviable salaries that allow a new class of students, remote workers and retirees to finance a second chapter abroad ... Or do these émigrés personify a loss of faith in America’s future and way of life?”
+ I have no plans of moving, either from the country or from this couch. But I did try to get out of the house on Monday night to avoid the State of the Union address. Apparently, I wasn’t the only one. TV ratings were way down, and many of you could relate to my efforts. If you missed yesterday’s SOTU wrap... Not on My Watchlist.
“Even as more than half of Americans have tried large language models (and virtually everyone who has done anything online has inadvertently used A.I.), studies show that people are far more worried than they are excited. According to Pew, 61 percent of respondents to a 2025 survey said they wished they had more control over how A.I. was used in their own life.” NYT (Gift Article): People Loved the Dot-Com Boom. The A.I. Boom, Not So Much. On one hand, this makes perfect sense. The dot com boom threatened to give you pet food delivery and streaming movies. The AI boom is threatening to take your job. But I think there’s more to it than that. People are worried about the AI boom in part because they don’t trust (and in some cases, deeply hate) the messengers who are leading and promoting the revolution. The companies are too big. The CEOs are too rich and too powerful. Some have already proven they don’t care about our privacy. Others have repeatedly bent the knee to our current AI regulation hating-regime. Some heil in public. It’s not just the tech we don’t trust. It’s the technologists.
+ Elon Musk’s makeshift AI power plant generates sound and fury in Mississippi.
+ Of course, whether we like it or not, AI is here to stay, and it will play a bigger and bigger role in our lives. As rabid is the race for consumer adoption, the race to win the war to fight future wars is even more extreme. And more dangerous. Bloomberg(Gift Article): Anthropic’s Pentagon Showdown Is About More Than AI Guardrails. “The confrontation has exposed the Defense Department’s reliance on Anthropic in a head-to-head military rivalry with US adversaries including China. Yet the battle also amplifies the tension between Silicon Valley and the Pentagon over who controls the future of AI as a tool of war and surveillance, including whether the rapidly evolving technology can be used in a lawful manner.”
“Pro-Trump activists who say they are in coordination with the White House are circulating a 17-page draft executive order that claims China interfered in the 2020 election as a basis to declare a national emergency that would unlock extraordinary presidential power over voting.” WaPo: Trump, seeking executive power over elections, is urged to declare emergency. Trump has already shown he’ll go to great lengths to remain in power. And the current polling trends couldn’t be much worse. So you can expect emergency declarations and actual emergencies.
+ This doesn’t mean Trump’s efforts will work, of course. He doesn’t control elections, states do. And a state of emergency doesn’t equal an emergency in a state. But there is some value in expecting the worst, especially when the past has shown you it’s coming. Josh Marshall: Time for the States to Gear Up for Trump’s Fake Elections Exec Order. “The issue is not simply President Trump’s never-ending efforts to destroy the Republic, violate the Constitution, etc. Again, the Constitution is crystal clear about who runs and controls elections. States do that with guidelines set by Congress. Period. The issue is whether we — everyone, the opposition, everyone who purportedly needs to be in perpetual orbit around Donald Trump’s degenerate brain — need to always be allowing him the initiative.”
“Few countries anywhere in the world are passing new climate policies into law anymore. After a period of growing concern and accelerating momentum, the project of greening the world’s energy systems certainly feels as if it has been thrown into reverse. But by the most straightforward measures, that’s simply wrong. There is more green stuff being installed than ever, and judged simply as a global infrastructure project the volume is pretty staggering. In 2024, 92.5 percent of all new power capacity installed around the world was renewable. In 2025, it’s believed that global green installations were even greater. And even in Trump’s United States, which has been behaving in many ways like a petrostate, more than 92 percent of utility-scale electricity capacity planned for 2026 is green.” David Wallace-Wells in the NYT (Gift Article): Don’t Look Now, but the Green Transition Is Still Happening.
Kansas Backwards: “Please note that the Legislature did not include a grace period for updating credentials. That means that once the law is officially enacted, your current credentials will be invalid immediately, and you may be subject to additional penalties if you are operating a vehicle without a valid credential.” Kansas informs trans residents their driver’s licenses become invalid on Thursday. “Governor Laura Kelly vetoed the bill on February 13, calling it ‘poorly drafted,’ but the Legislature overrode her veto days later. In addition to the driver’s license provisions, the law bans transgender people from using bathrooms matching their gender identity in public buildings and creates a bathroom bounty hunter system allowing citizens to sue transgender people they encounter in restrooms for at least $1,000 in damages, including potentially in private restrooms.” Erin Reed: Kansas Sends Letters To Trans People Demanding The Immediate Surrender Of Drivers Licenses.
+ A College Try: “Department of Homeland Security agents allegedly detained a Columbia University student early Thursday morning after making ‘misrepresentations to gain entry’ to a residence hall.” And the US justice department sues UCLA over alleged antisemitism amid pro-Palestinian protests. (I don’t think it will work, but I have a feeling there will be an increased effort to make colleges the enemy because polling was better back when that was a focal point.)
+ Hill v Hill: “You have compelled me to testify, fully aware that I have no knowledge that would assist your investigation. in order to distract attention from President Trump’s actions and cover them up despite legitimate calls for answers. If this committee is serious about learning the truth about Epstein’s trafficking crimes, it would not rely on press gaggles to get answers from our current president on his involvement; it would ask him directly under oath about the tens of thousands of times he shows up in the Epstein files.” Hillary Clinton says she has no new information on Jeffrey Epstein in testimony excoriating Republicans. Meanwhile, while Americans are being distracted by this nonsense, people around the world are paying a price for Epstein connections. World Economic Forum chief quits after Epstein investigation. This is part of a broader trend. Adam Serwer in The Atlantic (Gift Article): How America Chose Not to Hold the Powerful to Account.
+ Six Figure: “The average long-term U.S. mortgage rate slipped this week below 6% for the first time since late 2022, good news for home shoppers as the spring home-buying season gets rolling.”
+ Point Taken: “The crypto bros who spent millions getting Donald Trump elected seemed to get virtually everything they might want: a longtime industry investor elevated to White House adviser; one type of crypto given the imprimatur of the federal government; the near annihilation of effective regulatory scrutiny; invitations to White House dinners hosted by Mr. Trump. But instead of cementing crypto’s legitimacy, the administration has only pulled back the curtain on the fundamental worthlessness of its assets.” NYT (Gift Article): Crypto Is Pointless. Not Even the White House Can Fix That. (Well, not pointless. It provides the means to a lot of crime and corruption and financial gains for insiders.)
+ Fraudian Slip: White House to pause $259M in Minnesota Medicaid dollars in fraud crackdown. Gov Walz: “His [U.S. Department of Justice] is gutting the U.S. Attorney’s Office and crippling their ability to prosecute fraud. And every week Trump pardons another fraudster.”
+ Snowball Effect: Mayor Mamdani has his first controversy. It’s about snowballs.
“People of all ages and body mass indexes line up like spandex-wearing cattle outside the Marina del Rey Marriott on a recent Wednesday morning and are ushered to the sand for a group photo. A 20-something man cups his genitals as he jogs to the lifeguard tower in nothing but red underwear. A middle-aged woman does some last-minute scissor kicks in the parking lot. The 50-degree weather doesn’t stop some contenders from slow-motion running in the water. Yes, the dream of becoming Hollywood’s next David Hasselhoff or Pamela Anderson is palpable.” ‘This Whole Thing Is Not Normal’: Inside the ‘Baywatch’ Reboot Casting Call With 2,000 Wannabe Lifeguards.
2026-02-26 04:47:00
As an experiment, I decided to experience the State of the Union as if I were an undecided swing state voter: I didn’t watch it. That effort took some strategic time-killing and attention-distracting moves for a news addict faced with a buzzy event that was streaming everywhere and lasted long enough to qualify as a miniseries. Shortly before show time, my wife offered to take an Uber to catch a flight. No, I exclaimed. I’m your loving husband. Please, please let me drive you to the airport. Sadly, traffic was lighter than I had hoped. So I stopped by one of my favorite burrito places that was completely out of the way, and where I knew parking would be a challenge. And it was. But not challenging enough. When I finally made it home, Trump was still going. I peeked at my social media accounts, where I saw this quote: “I believe the tariffs, paid for by foreign countries, will, like in the past, substantially replace the modern-day system of income tax, taking a great financial burden off the people that I love.” Oh god, why did I look? This was crazier than I thought. I finally understood why Elvis shot TVs. My sanity was at stake. Happily, there was a Warriors game to distract me. Sadly, my home team was down by double digits to the lowly Pelicans. Ugh, too painful to watch. Drastic times called for drastic measures. I turned off all my screens and sat in silence and quietly hummed (with all the screens off, I wanted to give my beagles some sign that I was still alive). Since the start of the speech, an hour had passed, an hour ten minutes, an hour twenty, an hour thirty. Every now and then, I’d pop on the TV to see if the coast was clear, but he was still talking and his Stockholm syndrome-suffering sycophants kept cheering (Guys, if your genuflection lasts more than four hours, call 911...). I started mumbling to myself, This SOTU shall pass, this SOTU shall pass. But, after a while, I didn’t know if it would. Speeches need term limits. At long last, the fili-bluster ended. Because I’m required to report back to you, I started watching and reading the analysis, and man, did that make me wish I was back stuck in traffic, looking for parking, or humming quietly to my dogs. It didn’t take long to realize that I actually hadn’t missed a newsworthy event at all. What we got was more of the same: Lies, divisiveness, hate ... even with polls nose-diving and his own midterm-challenged party in desperate need of the plot twist, the big show was just another re-run.
+ “The longest State of the Union in modern history is now over. Donald Trump held court in the House of Representatives and said little of substance, but substance wasn’t the point. This year, he intended to put on a show, with an array of guest stars and special appearances. He was happy because he was playing the roles he clearly loves: game-show host, ringmaster, emcee, beneficent granter of wishes—and, where the Democrats were concerned, a self-righteous inquisitor. Trump did his usual rote lying about the economy—pity the fact-checkers who tried to keep up even in the first 10 minutes or so of the speech—along with some of his other greatest hits, including the many wars he stopped and the magic of tariffs.” Tom Nichols in The Atlantic(Gift Article): President Trump’s State of the Union Variety Show. “The only thing Trump did not do was explain his policies—especially about war and peace—to Congress or the American people.”
+ David Frum in The Atlantic (Gift Article): The State of the Union Revealed a Sad Reality. “President Trump’s State of the Union address last night was very like the man who delivered it: divisive, abusive, and childish. The speech turned reality on its head in many ways. The president who has enriched himself and his family by more than a billion dollars in his first year in office called on Congress to clean up its corruption. The president who has collected about $175 billion in illegal tariffs from the American people falsely told them that he had given them a great big tax cut. The president solemnly condemned political violence—the same president who ended his first term by inciting a mob to sack Congress and overturn an election. Maybe most shocking, Trump demanded that members of Congress rise to agree that it’s the first duty of government to protect American citizens—even as his own government by its brutal police methods has shot American citizens dead on the streets and then tried to deceive the country about how those Americans had been killed and why. Then of course there were the many misstatements of fact about the economy, about crime, and about wars and peace—many of which look like deliberate decisions to deceive the public watching on television.”
+ CNN: Trump’s 2026 State of the Union address, annotated and fact-checked. (I won’t be surprised if CNN fact checkers offer to pick my wife up at the airport when she gets back...)
“The materials are F.B.I. memos summarizing interviews the bureau did in connection to claims made in 2019 by a woman who came forward after Mr. Epstein’s arrest to say she had been sexually assaulted by both Mr. Trump and the financier decades earlier, when she was a minor.” Here’s a headline that is not surprising, but is highly disturbing (and one that Trump definitely didn’t want the morning after his SOTU). Epstein Files Are Missing Records About Woman Who Made Claim Against Trump.
+ The fallout from the Epstein files continues. Larry Summers will resign from teaching at Harvard during review of Epstein ties. Leader of Columbia Brain Institute Quits Over Friendship With Epstein. Bill Gates Apologizes to Foundation Staff Over Epstein Ties.
“The hospital corridors were full of bloodied people. All the hallways and walls were covered in blood” ... “A 7-year-old girl died in my own hands. She had been hit by live military ammunition” ... “One of our experienced colleagues, after helping a large number of injured people, was temporarily detained and interrogated. After that, he was placed under surveillance and his communication channels were monitored.” NYT (Gift Article) talked to doctors and nurses about the thousands of protesters killed by Iranian officials. “As street protests spread across Iran in early January, the authorities turned off the internet. Most of the world didn’t see the bloody crackdown that followed. But Iran’s doctors and nurses did.”
“Over the past decade a seismic shift has created a growing demand for watch repair—and, in turn, for competent repair people. A historic stock market run (and a new-moneyed class of crypto capitalists) minted a contemporary order of very rich people, and when the pandemic briefly turned off many of the ways those people spend money, a lot of them got into watches. It’s estimated Rolex now sells over a million watches a year for the first time in its history (while pulling off the remarkable trick in the luxury business of making its product seem rare). Meanwhile, the secondary watch market is flourishing thanks to improving e-commerce platforms and a growing hobbyist culture. Yet there are fewer than 2,000 watchmakers in America capable of mending a timepiece, let alone a luxury one.” GQ: Rolex Opened a College—and It’s as Selective as Harvard. (Alt link here.) I’m guessing that being late to class is frowned upon...
Putin’s War: Putin thought he could take Ukraine in a matter of days or weeks. Here we are, four years of destruction and defiance later. Photos: Four Years of War in Ukraine.
+ Super v Powers: NYT (Gift Article): F.B.I. Raids Los Angeles Schools Chief’s Home and District Headquarters. “The investigation’s target was unclear. The school district is the nation’s second largest, and as superintendent, Alberto Carvalho has one of the highest-profile jobs in K-12 education.”
+ Soft Power: “In 2023, Anthropic committed to never train an AI system unless it could guarantee in advance that the company’s safety measures were adequate. For years, its leaders touted that promise—the central pillar of their Responsible Scaling Policy (RSP)—as evidence that they are a responsible company that would withstand market incentives to rush to develop a potentially dangerous technology.” But we are in a race without rules, and self-regulation doesn’t stand a chance. Anthropic Drops Flagship Safety Pledge. Meanwhile, the company is being strong-armed by the Pentagon to remove all restrictions on the use of its AI. “Anthropic has long stated that it doesn’t want its technology used for mass surveillance of Americans or for fully autonomous weapons.” Will this position hold? Anthropic won’t budge as Pentagon escalates AI dispute. And this seems related: AIs can’t stop recommending nuclear strikes in war game simulations.
+ Market Movers: “Is the Citrini story … compelling? plausible? accurate? These are the questions colonizing all of financial and tech media at the moment. But to me, those questions miss the deepest and most interesting feature of this strange episode: What does it say about the state of AI and AI anxiety that a literal science-fiction story had the power to move a trillion dollars?” Nobody Knows Anything. “The fact that a piece of AI science fiction rocked the stock market this week is a clear indication that absolutely no one knows how the next few years will go.”
+ Between a Flock and a Hard Place: Across the US, people are dismantling and destroying Flock surveillance cameras.
+ Driven to Distraction: “When the light turns yellow, this Waymo does not speed up. It does not calculate whether it could make it. It does not believe in ‘probably.’ It waits. Behind you, a human driver honks. The Waymo absorbs this without flinching. You feel the honk deep in your shoulder muscles.” The New Yorker: Is This Waymo a Better Person Than You? (In fairness, your software hasn’t been updated in years...)
“As the shoe works hard to keep its grip, tiny sections of the sole change shape as they momentarily lose then regain contact with the floor thousands of times per second — at a frequency that matches the pitch of the loud squeak we hear.” A Boston Celtics game-inspired friction test finally pinned down the sneaker squeak.
+ You Want a Lot of Iced Coffee? Dunkin’ Has a Bucket for You. (Toss in a few shots of espresso and I can finish the whole newsletter on one serving.)