2026-04-28 20:00:00
I’m not even going to humor the idea that Jimmy Kimmel’s light joke about the Trumps’ age difference can somehow be connected to the actions of a deranged would-be assassin. Nor am I going to pretend that the most divisive, disgusting, heinous, social media troll of all time — a low-browbeater who, in just in the past few of weeks, has used his bullying pulpit to celebrate the death of the distinguished Robert Mueller, attack the Pope, compare himself to Jesus, and threaten to wipe out an entire civilization — could somehow be offended by a throwaway line during a late night show. The idea of anyone in this administration calling anyone else’s words offensive represents an act of projection of such magnitude it makes Artemis II look like a backyard stomp rocket. This is not a story about a joke told by a comedian, who offends the president because he’s funny, relentless in his resistance, and is known as a genuinely good and extremely well-liked person. It’s the story of a broken administration using the now-mangled levers of government to attack perceived enemies and settle personal grudges. (They just indicted former FBI Director Comey for a second time.) It’s a story about a corporation that shouldn’t have to Mickey Mouse around with this nonsense, but who we need to be able to count on not to tear down its values in the face of a manufactured controversy. But it’s also a story about the millions of us who wake up every morning to another set of depressing headlines that alienate us from our country, our fellow citizens, and our reality – but who are buoyed by our more public counterparts like Jimmy Kimmel who continue to fight the good fight, reminding us that we’re not alone, and that none of this is normal. The resistance celebrates Kimmel when he’s acting as the tip of the spear. But it’s more important that we stand by him when the most powerful people in America turn him, yet again, into a human shield. Kimmel opened his monologue last night with this: “You know how sometimes you wake up in the morning and the First Lady puts out a statement demanding you be fired from your job? We’ve all been there, right?” No, we haven’t experienced that. But we’re right there with you, Jimmy.
+ Reliable Sources: “Kimmel’s show went ahead as scheduled last night. None of the ABC affiliates preempted it. This morning, the Trump White House stepped up the pressure even more, with WH comms director Steven Cheung calling Kimmel a ‘shit human being’ and saying ‘ABC needs to fire him immediately.’ But that’s simply not going to happen. My sense from sources in and around Disney is that the company is ready for this fight. And make no mistake: It’s going to be a long fight. The FCC is preparing to take action that will be widely seen as retaliatory.” A repeat of Kimmelgate?
Let’s shift to a positive story. Well, it’s a positive story about something negative. Maybe that’s even overstating it, but it’s not totally negative in every way, so let’s go with it. Kit Dillon on why go bags aren’t enough in a time of increasingly common natural disasters. “Water, medication, important documents, a few days of food are all important. But true preparation isn’t something you can buy off Amazon or stuff in a bag, and it certainly won’t be found on YouTube. It’s built by people and our commitments to one another.” NYT (Gift Article): The Prepper Delusion. “Tomorrow there will be no climate havens. The sirens will sound again. Pack a bag if you want. But the real preparation begins when you knock on your neighbor’s door and invite them over.”
“Among the winners, a majority of the profits were raked in by a tiny slice of what look to be automated bots, based on the Polymarket trade records compiled by the data firm Dune. Everyone else, in aggregate, lost $131 million.” (In fairness, the bots aren’t the only ones winning. Some insider traders are doing quite well.) Bloomberg (Gift Article): Most Prediction Market Traders Are Losing Money While Bots Rack Up Gains.
+ The prediction markets recently got into sports gambling. So the sports gambling apps are getting into the prediction markets. At least it will be easy to find a place to lay a bet on which app you think will win.
“Developers plan to build six of the sprawling campuses in Archbald to power the demand for artificial intelligence, eventually covering about 14 percent of the town’s land. Those campuses would include 51 data warehouses — each about the size of a Walmart Supercenter — including seven buildings encompassing more than a million square feet.” WaPo (Gift Article): A town of 7,000 planned so many data centers, it’s like adding 51 Walmarts.
+ Ars Technica: The great American data center divide. The divide isn’t across political leanings. It’s between the companies that want to build data centers and the people who live where they want to build them.
+ The people worried about over-developing data centers could soon include those building and financing them. WSJ (Gift Article): OpenAI Misses Key Revenue, User Targets in High-Stakes Sprint Toward IPO. “The company’s CFO and board have questioned the wisdom of massive data-center spending in the face of slowing growth.”
Collapse in Judgment: Trump “claimed in a new Truth Social post that Iran has ‘just informed’ Washington that they are in a ‘state of collapse.’ Trump also said Iran wants the US to open the Strait of Hormuz ‘as soon as possible’ as they try to ‘figure out’ their ‘leadership situation,’ something he says he believes is possible. We have not been able to verify any of these claims. Iran has not commented on them yet.” The whole region is facing a critical moment as peacemakers urge Hamas to finally disarm, Israel keeps firing on Hezbollah, the UAE said it will exit OPEC, the Strait is still closed, and we’re not sure anything we’re hearing about any of it from the White House is true. Here’s the latest from AP and The Guardian. (Not everyone is bumming out about high oil prices. BP’s profits more than doubled in the first quarter. Also, not everyone is getting blocked in the Strait. Here’s a headline for the era: Russian superyacht sails through Strait of Hormuz despite blockade.)
+ King and Kong: Well, so much for No Kings. We now have two of them in DC. Here’s the latest on King Charles’ visit to America and planned Congressional address.
+ Passport in the Storm: The State Dept. is reportedly finalizing a plan to put Trump’s picture on U.S. passports.
+ Child Custody: “Charging as much as $20,000 a month, many of these facilities promise in their marketing pitches to treat adopted children for reactive attachment disorder, often called RAD. They offer a salve for desperate adoptive parents, claiming the child’s behavioral problems are caused by a pathological failure to connect with their caregivers, and they can learn to attach in faraway treatment.” An AP special report: Adopted and Locked Away: Kids promised ‘forever homes’ instead confined in for-profit institutions.
+ Vacuum Pact: “It should go without saying, but once you threaten to invade an allied country, you don’t just place the existence of the alliance in jeopardy; you raise the possibility of allies turning into mortal enemies. You can also trigger the kind of insecurity and scramble for power that contributed to the start of World War I. In practical terms, it’s hard to see how alienating American allies puts America first.” David French in the NYT (Gift Article): Meet the New Leader of the Free World. “Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s president, is taking the next step, one that would have been unthinkable even as recently as 2024. By word and deed, he’s showing Europe and the world how the post-American free world can preserve its liberty and independence.”
+ Claw Machine: John Herrman: My Adventures With The AI That Actually Does Things. “This is a recurring theme when you try out new AI tools. You recognize that there’s a lot that might be done with them, but not much comes to you.”
+ ‘Dance with the Devil: “Paramount Skydance said the merged Paramount-Warner Bros. Discovery will be 49.5% owned by foreign investors, with about 38.5% of the equity in the new company held by a trio of Middle Eastern funds.”
“It’s not that complicated. Beginning in elementary school, students are socialized to behave this way — in the classroom, in the school yard or on a playing field. ‘Japanese sports fans at world events who clean up the stadium are behaving much the same way they did when they learned how to enjoy sports as school boys and girls.’ There is a phrase in Japanese that explains it. Tatsu tori ato wo nigosazu. The literal translation is: A bird leaves nothing behind.” Why you may see Japanese soccer fans cleaning up the stadium after World Cup games. (When the World Cup comes to the Bay Area, I’ve got to figure out a way to turn Japanese visitors into fans of my daughter’s bedroom.)
+ Rare two-colored lobster caught by fishermen off Cape Cod.
2026-04-27 20:00:00
In the moments following the arrest of a man who opened fire in the Washington Hilton, where the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner was taking place, Donald Trump issued a statement that could double as a tagline for his entire presidency: “LET THE SHOW GO ON.” Cooler heads prevailed and the remainder of the dinner was canceled. But the show? Oh, the show went on. The show always goes on. And it always has the same host. Thankfully, everyone inside the Hilton survived the evening. So did a key metaphor for our era: At an event that was attended by hundreds of members of the media, Trump was still the one breaking all the news; from what happened, to the arrest, to the first photo of the attacker, to updates on when the event (that he wasn’t hosting) would be rescheduled. Even in a situation when he’s being grabbed by Secret Service personnel and rushed from a hotel, Trump still manages to drive the news cycle, and after nearly a term and a half of his presidency, the media hasn’t figured out a way to change that dynamic. He’s the newsmaker, the news-deliverer, the news-distorter, and the news-critic in an all-hours, all-medium show that never ends.
+ Once the news is delivered, it quickly gets manipulated to address items from a long list of prior goals and grievances. What does a shooter at a hotel event hosted by another organization have to do with tearing down the East Wing and building a ballroom? Nothing. And yet… here come the headlines: Trump uses the correspondents’ dinner shooting to renew his White House ballroom push. What does this attack have to do with Jimmy Kimmel? Nothing. And yet… Melania used the news to call for him to be removed from the air, again, for supposedly violent rhetoric. (Forget that Trump’s rhetoric is a thousand times more violent than anything Kimmel has ever said. And Trump isn’t joking.) And, of course, an attack that endangered both White House officials and members of the media couldn’t possibly provide an opportunity to target the media. Sorry, folks. Let the show go on. THR: Trump Gets Defensive in ’60 Minutes’ Interview After Norah O’Donnell Reads From Suspect’s Manifesto, Calls Her a “Disgrace.” Maybe some other favorite targets like our NATO allies or Bruce Springsteen will catch some verbal shrapnel before this story runs its course. Although Springsteen already explained: “We can be critical of those in power… but there is no place in any way, shape, or form for political violence of any kind in our beloved United States.” Of course, you know that’s true, and I know that’s true. But we aren’t the ones running this show.
+ ‘I don’t expect forgiveness’: Authorities review writings of California teacher suspected of shooting.
+ “The assailant was intercepted by armed agents from the Secret Service before he came anywhere close to his intended victims. He was tackled, restrained, and arrested after sprinting past a security checkpoint, through which guests passed earlier in the evening. Shots were fired. The alleged assailant, later identified as Cole Tomas Allen of Torrance, California, hit a Secret Service agent, whose bulletproof vest and cellphone protected him.” The Atlantic (Gift Article): The Correspondents’ Dinner Was a Security Success.
+ Maybe Michael Glantz, a senior talent agent with the Creative Artists Agency, should get into the security business. He was chill. He can be seen on video “leisurely forking leaves from his burrata salad into his mouth against a backdrop of a stage just yards away.” Cool as a cucumber: man calmly ate salad as press dinner shooting unfolded. (No one told this guy that America’s salad days are over.)
“During President Trump’s first month in office, his administration upended much of the flagship global H.I.V. program that had saved the lives of hundreds of thousands of people in Zambia. The Zambian government went into emergency mode, desperate to ensure that people with the virus could continue to receive lifesaving medications. But other crucial aspects of the program had to be scrapped — interventions that had helped stop the spread of the virus and protected the most vulnerable people.” AIDS Creeps Back in Parts of Zambia, a Year After U.S. Cuts to H.I.V. Assistance. “The State Department is negotiating new health assistance funding agreements with countries that used to have U.S.A.I.D. support. These come with conditions, and Zambia’s has proved particularly thorny, because the State Department has tied support for the H.I.V. program to access to the country’s minerals.” (Before scrolling on to the next thing, just think about this for a second. The world’s richest man working with the administration of the world’s richest country is bringing back AIDs, but they will reconsider … for a price.)
We’re in an era when we need to rock down to Electric Avenue. But we’re in danger of ending up on the Boulevard of Broken Dreams. “Lately Americans have become fixated on the explosion in data centers and the power needs of artificial intelligence. That is actually a small part of a much bigger problem. Our grid is too old and our supply of electricity too small. If we don’t meet this moment, we will face an impoverished future of more expensive, less reliable energy, and slower economic growth.” Robinson Meyer in the NYT (Gift Article): It’s the Age of Electricity and America Isn’t Ready. “If you want to fix the grid, you first have to understand it. The place to start is your electricity bill.”
“Nearly seven years have passed since Eliud Kipchoge ran 1:59:40 in Vienna, Austria, at INEOS’ carefully curated 1:59 Challenge. The wait for an equivalent performance in record-legal conditions, while always a case of when and not if, had been getting tantalisingly longer. That was until Sunday, when Kenyan Sabastian Sawe clocked 1:59:30 in London. Yomif Kejelcha, just 11 seconds behind him, is arguably an even more impressive story — this was the Ethiopian’s marathon debut after years of success on the track and in the half marathon.” The Athletic (Gift Article): Super shoes and perfect conditions — how Sabastian Sawe broke the two-hour mark at the London Marathon. (I can’t even procrastinate before exercising in under two hours.)
+ These guys are basically sprinting for two hours. Check out this NYT (Gift Article) from a few years ago. How Fast Is Eliud Kipchoge? You’ll Fall Down When You Find Out.
The Vance Advance: When things don’t go according to plan, the leaks start. And you get stories like this from The Atlantic (Gift Article): Vance Doubts the Pentagon’s Depiction of the Iran War. “In closed-door meetings, J. D. Vance has repeatedly questioned the Defense Department’s depiction of the war in Iran and whether the Pentagon has understated what appears to be the drastic depletion of U.S. missile stockpiles.” Meanwhile, “Iran has offered to end its chokehold on the Strait of Hormuz in exchange for the U.S. lifting its blockade on the country and an end to the war, two regional officials said Monday. Under the proposal, discussions on the larger question of its nuclear program would come later. U.S. President Donald Trump seems unlikely to accept the offer.” Here’s the latest from AP.
+ In Context: “That Obama-era agreement suffered from flaws and omissions. It would have expired after 15 years, leaving Iran free after 2030 to make as much nuclear fuel as it wanted. But once Mr. Trump withdrew from the deal in 2018, the Iranians went on an enrichment spree much sooner, leaving them closer to a bomb than ever before. Now, Mr. Trump’s negotiators are dealing with the consequences of that decision, which he made over the objections of many of his national security advisers at the time.” NYT (Gift Article): Trump Seeks to Abolish Iran’s Atomic Stockpile, a Problem He Helped Create. (And this probably won’t improve Trump’s view of NATO: US is being ‘humiliated’ by Iran’s leadership, says German chancellor Friedrich Merz.)
+ All That Gold Does Not Glitter: “The Mint buys gold that originates in a Colombian drug cartel mine. It makes Lady Liberty coins out of gold from Mexican and Peruvian pawn shops and from a Congolese mine that is part-owned by the Chinese government, records show. Some Mint gold has come from a company in Honduras that dug up an Indigenous graveyard for the ore underneath.” U.S. Mint Buys Drug Cartel Gold and Sells It as American.
+ Netanyahu Let the Dogs Out? “As is usually the case with Netanyahu, who is legendary for his short-term approach to politics, the long-term damage to the American Jewish community and to Israel’s standing in the United States is a problem for another day. With an Israeli election looming later this year—and as his seemingly endless trial for public corruption continues—Netanyahu appears more focused on his immediate political problems. For american jews, however, the problem is in the here and now.” How Netanyahu Hurt America’s Jews.
+ Ground Control to Major Calm: “We see students all the time change majors. That’s not new or different. But it’s usually for a ton of different reasons. The fact that so many students say it’s because of AI — that is startling.” College students are changing course in search of ‘AI-proof’ majors. But no one knows what they are.
+ Florida (Gerry)Man: “The path toward redistricting in Florida is difficult. The state outlaws political gerrymandering, or redrawing lines for partisan gain. Other states allow partisan gerrymandering and that was the reason politicians have used to justify joining the race Trump kicked off last year.” Florida’s DeSantis unveils a voting map that could add to Trump’s GOP redistricting
+ Boon Walk: I mean, at this point, knowing what we know, people wouldn’t want to see a Michael Jackson biopic that totally avoids any mention of child sexual abuse, right? Hah. The Michael Jackson film scored the top launch ever for a biopic domestically after passing up ‘Oppenheimer,’ as well as the best global opening for a music biopic.
+ Springing in the Rain: “In experiments with rice seeds, the team found that the sound of falling droplets effectively shook the seeds out of a dormant state, stimulating them to germinate at a faster rate compared with seeds that were not exposed to the same sound vibrations.” Plants can sense the sound of rain, a new study finds.
WSJ (Gift Article): San Francisco Is Going Nuts Over a Giant Sea Lion Named Chonkers. “Last week he delighted visitors by shooting his one-ton body out of the water and hopping up on one of the floating docks west of the pier, sending two of the previously lounging 700-pound California sea lions skeetering into the bay’s frigid water.”
2026-04-24 20:00:00
In the vintage Life commercial, two kids are hesitant to try a cereal that’s supposed to be good for you. So they decide to push it off to a younger kid. “Let’s get Mikey. He won’t eat it. He hates everything.” Well, as you probably recall, he likes it. Hey Mikey! This classic tale of the younger generation leading the older ones into a new world of products seems to be playing out in reverse when it comes to AI. The younger folks, who use the technology the most, are the ones who tend to have the most negative feelings about it. As Nilay Patel explains in The Verge: “The polling on this is so strong, I think it’s fair to say that a lot of people hate AI, and that Gen Z in particular seems to hate AI more and more as they encounter it. There’s that NBC News poll showing AI with worse favorability than ICE and only a little bit above the war in Iran.” The People Do Not Yearn for Automation. “Poll after poll shows that Gen Z uses AI the most and has the most negative feelings about it. A recent Gallup poll found that only 18 percent of Gen Z was hopeful about AI, down from an already-bad 27 percent last year. At the same time, anger is growing: 31 percent of those Gen Z respondents said they feel angry about AI, up from 22 percent last year … This is a fundamental disconnect between how tech people with software brains see the world and how regular people are living their lives.” Young people could be the most angry at AI because they’re worried about its potential impact on their job market. It could also be because the future of AI depends in large part on the people who run AI companies (and the always online younger generation is quite aware of what, in technical terms, you could call the evil douche factor) and government regulation (and the only thing this generation believes in less than good tech leadership is good government leadership). In places where there is more trust in the government to regulate the tech, the vibes are different. Rest of World: AI optimism surges in Asia, unlike in the US. Whatever the reason, it’s notable that the Americans who use and know AI the most also hate it the most. As a side note, even though he is alive and well, John Gilchrist, the kid who played little Mikey in the Life commercial, was rumored to have died from a stomach rupture caused by consuming Pop Rocks and Coke. Sounds like the kind of thing AI might hallucinate.
“The spell is broken not by some moral awakening, but by these concrete disasters. Once a sufficient portion of the loyal supporters realize they have been duped, the leader will eventually fall. The energy required to deceive is unsustainable. Reality is relentless. The tyrant who chooses to fight it is doomed.” Danny Hillis in Noema Mag with a good (and timely) explanation of why bad leaders fail. The Rise And Fall Of Petty Tyrants. “Every leader is confronted with difficulties and must face that same fork in the road. The honest leaders chose truth. The dishonest chose denial and, as a consequence, they failed. Petty tyrants cause real suffering and harm, but they leave few enduring legacies. The lasting institutions of effective leaders are not undermined by reality. They are sustained by it.”
Prosper and live long is the new live long and prosper. “Perhaps you saw this video last September, when it went viral: The two most powerful autocrats in the world — Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin, both of whom have been heads of state for well over a decade, and neither of whom shows any signs of intending to relinquish that power — caught by an interpreter’s hot mic discussing their own apparent shared desire for immortality.” NYT Mag (Gift Article): The Rich and Powerful Want to Live Forever. What if They Could? “Over the past decade or so, democracy has been retreating against a rising tide of illiberalism and plutocracy. Power, in much of the world, is becoming more and more concentrated in the hands of a few authoritarian leaders and a small number of expansively ambitious tech billionaires. As average life expectancy has increased, inequality — in income and in access to health care — has widened. And amid all of this, the world’s wealthiest and most powerful have developed a persistent hope, and perhaps even generated some small possibility, that death might be eradicated entirely, or pushed back so far that its existential force is diminished.” (The idea of some of these guys living forever makes the rest of us feel like dying. At least irony is eternal.)
What to Binge: The new season of Beef on Netflix has hints of White Lotus, stars Oscar Isaac and Carey Mulligan, and includes couples fighting, country club scandals, and a lot of blackmail. Enjoy!
+ What to Movie: Streaming on Hulu, the Bradley Cooper-directed Is Thing On? stars Will Arnett and Laura Dern as a couple that separates shortly before Arnett’s character discovers open mic nights. Jordan Jensen plays one of the other comedians in the movie. Don’t miss her excellent standup special on Netflix, Take Me With You.
New Lease on Life: The Justice Department has dropped its ridiculous case involving Jerome H. Powell’s handling of the Federal Reserve’s renovation. The case wasn’t dropped because it was a bunch of nonsense manufactured in a desperate attempt to target one of Trump’s enemies. It was dropped to clear the way for Kevin Warsh, the president’s pick for Fed chair, to be confirmed. The lesser corruption was removed to make way for the greater one. Welcome to 2026.
+ A Fact of Life: “The U.S. has burned through so many munitions in Iran that some administration officials increasingly assess that America couldn’t fully execute contingency plans to defend Taiwan from a Chinese invasion if it occurred in the near term, U.S. officials said.” WSJ (Gift Article): Fully replacing stockpiles of weapons fired in the Middle East could take up to six years. Meanwhile, the financial firm slash diplomacy team of Witkoff and Kushner is headed back to Pakistan for peace talks. Here’s the latest from The Guardian.
+ You Bet Your Life: “Federal prosecutors on Thursday unsealed an indictment against a U.S. Army special forces soldier, accusing him of using his insider knowledge of the clandestine military operation to capture Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro in January to reap more than $400,000 in profits on the popular prediction market site Polymarket.” Meanwhile, “Authorities in France are investigating possible tampering with a weather monitoring device at Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris after an unusual temperature spike was recorded around the same time a Polymarket trader cashed in.” Yes, these cases of insider trading are worrisome. But don’t get lost in the weeds. There’s a whole jungle of problems related to prediction markets and the broader gambling ecosystem. US gambling addiction is ‘out of control’ as betting markets boom, policy expert warns.
+ On Life Support: “After it launched in December, Lutnick said that the government had sold $1.3 billion ‘worth’ in just several days, as Trump stood by holding up the gilded ticket and said, ‘essentially it’s the green card on steroids.'” More like just another lie on steroids. Trump’s ‘gold card’ visa starting at $1 million granted to just 1 person so far.
+ Life Isn’t All Sunshine and Rainbows: “Some critics say large solar farms are a public health threat. While there is little reputable evidence for this, their claims have helped power a backlash.” ProPublica: Unfounded Health Concerns Are Powering a Solar Backlash. (Coming soon: The Joe Rogan episode arguing that we should extinguish the sun and replace it with peptides.)
+ Your Money or Your Life: “For most students, Stanford is a normal competitive school, where people go to class and coffee shops and fall in love and freak out over finals. But a select few attend something else: a Stanford inside Stanford, where venture capitalists pursue 18- and 19-year-olds, handing out mentorships and money and invites to yacht parties in an attempt to convert promise into profit.” This is less the story of Stanford than the story of modern day Silicon Valley. Theo Baker in The Atlantic (Gift Article): The Stanford Freshmen Who Want to Rule the World. (If they wanted to rule the world, they should have gone to Cal.)
+ Life Imitates Art: If AI re-wrote the story of the boy who cried wolf, it might go something like this: “A 40-year-old man was arrested after using artificial intelligence to generate a fake image of a runaway wolf that South Korean authorities said obstructed an urgent investigation.” (The man should just say he thought he had created an image of a doctor.)
“Suicides among young adults dropped most sharply in states that actively embraced the 988 crisis line.” Youth Suicides Declined After Creation of National Hotline.
+ UK Approves Lifelong Ban on Smoking for People Born After 2008.
+ It’s crazy that any journalists are attending this year’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner. If you want the jokes without the soul-selling, just enjoy Jimmy Kimmel’s Alternative White House Correspondents’ Dinner.
+ “In Japan, a 350-year-old brewery holds fast to tradition: wild yeast, ancient songs, and a mixture of muscle and finesse.” NYT (Gift Article) with the sights and sounds of Sake Made the Hard Way.
+ Michigan Gas Clerk Helps Save Kidnapped Teen Girl Who Mouthed ‘Help’.
+ “Brianna Avalos and her husband were riding in the balloon to celebrate their 10th wedding anniversary. She said the pilot informed passengers that he needed to make an emergency landing because of low fuel and a shift in winds.” Hot-air balloon carrying 13 people lands in California backyard: ‘out of a fairytale’.
+ Condom prices could rise 30% due to Iran war. (This isn’t positive news, but when you think about it, it will probably qualify as feel good news.)
2026-04-23 20:00:00
During a war with a current focus that has been dialed in on a body of water, Pete Hegseth fired the Secretary of the Navy, who had zero Naval experience when appointed. He’ll be replaced by a guy with a lot of Naval experience and also a lot of experience being a rabid partisan with sometimes fully crazy ideas. Does it ever feel like we are a nation adrift? This news broke on Wednesday, and by Thursday, it had already floated out of the headlines, and military personnel decisions are unlikely to move the needle when it comes to voting trends or approval ratings. American voters have always been more about navel gazing than Naval gazing. But it does seem like it’s worth pausing long enough to reflect on the fact that outgoing Navy Secretary John Phelan, the latest in a series of people squeezed out by Hegseth, “had not served in the military or had a civilian leadership role in the service before Trump nominated him for secretary in late 2024. He was seen as an outsider being brought in to shake up the Navy.” (Well, mission accomplished, I suppose.) And the new acting Secretary of the Navy? Well… “Hung Cao warned of rampant ‘witchcraft’ in a California city while running for a U.S. Senate seat in Virginia two years ago as a Republican. Cao, a 25-year Navy combat veteran who lost to Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., in the 2024 election, said he was running for Senate in part to prevent witchcraft from establishing a foothold in Virginia.” (I actually hope witchcraft establishes a foothold in America. Maybe they can make news headlines disappear.)
+ NYT (Gift Article): Navy Secretary Is Fired as Infighting Roils Pentagon.
+ The cabinet members haven’t lost the faith. Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum just explained the Iran situation: “Brilliant on President Trump’s part. The world is already a safer place than it was two months ago, thanks to President Trump, and I’m super optimistic about where the world is gonna be going coming out the backside of this.” (The world coming out the backside is actually a perfect description for this era.)
“He relies heavily on the advice and guidance of the board members, and they collectively make all the decisions … The generals are the board members.” There’s been a regime change of sorts in Iran. The question is how the new regime differs from the old one. It’s being led by a new Khamenei, who has a very different leadership style than his father. That could be because of his current predicament. He has almost no direct contact with advisors because of fears that Israel “may trace them to him and kill him.” And his health is bad. “One leg was operated on three times, and he is awaiting a prosthetic. He had surgery on one hand and is slowly regaining function. His face and lips have been burned severely, making it difficult for him to speak, the officials said, adding that, eventually, he will need plastic surgery.” The NYT (Gift Article): A New Era and New Leadership: The Generals Who Are Running Iran. “President Trump has said that the war, along with the killings of layers of Iran’s leaders and security establishment, has ushered in ‘regime change’ and that the new leaders are ‘much more reasonable.’ In reality, the Islamic republic has not been toppled. Power is now in the hands of an entrenched, hard-line military, and the broad influence of the clerics is waning.” (This makes negotiations difficult. It also doesn’t bode well for the Iranian people who may be left with an even harsher political environment.)
+ Maybe Trump is right when he says: “Iran is having a very hard time figuring out who their leader is! They just don’t know! The infighting is between the ‘Hardliners,’ who have been losing BADLY on the battlefield, and the ‘Moderates,’ who are not very moderate at all (but gaining respect!), is CRAZY!” (In America, by contrast, we get conflicting signals, different stories, changing negotiating positions, and contradictory updates … but it’s all coming from the same person.) Here’s the latest from The Guardian, NBC, and BBC.
“To help care for her mother, who has Alzheimer’s disease, Dr. Jack uses an array of high-tech tools, some of which didn’t exist just a few years ago. She manages her mother’s medications with a smart pill box. She changes her television channels with an app, sends appointment reminders through a digital message board — and, with her mother’s blessing, uses cameras for communication and monitoring.” NYT (Gift Article): How ‘Age Tech’ Might Help You Grow Old at Home. “America is aging rapidly. Roughly 11,000 people are turning 65 each day in the United States. And many of them — 75 percent of people over 50, according to AARP’s most recent survey, from 2024 — hope to spend their remaining years in the comfort of their homes, rather than in assisted-living or other care facilities.” (Doordash, Netflix, and televised Giants games are all the age tech I really need.)
“What Virginia Democrats did by redrawing the congressional maps was antidemocratic, and it should be illegal. But, for those who care about ensuring the future of democracy, it was the least bad option of those available.” The Atlantic (Gift Article): The Virginia Gerrymander Disenfranchises Republicans.
+ I made the same basic argument yesterday, but I put it in a slightly different way. The GerryMandalorian: “There were two elements the Empire didn’t expect: First, the Force (here, the voting public) would be with the rebels. And second, Vader’s poll numbers would be historically low.”
Joint Venture “President Donald Trump’s acting attorney general on Thursday signed an order reclassifying state-licensed medical marijuana as a less-dangerous drug, a major policy shift long sought by advocates who said cannabis should never have been treated like heroin by the federal government.” (I inhaled at some point in the eighties and I didn’t exhale until about 2019, so I’m hardly opposed to more reasonable marijuana classifications. But I’d be willing to bet this has more to do with blazing a trail for a new cash grab than anything else.) It is amazing how much has changed when it comes to our legal relationship with weed. Jimmy Kimmel and Scott Lonker just released a set of short docs on Hulu: 4×20 Quick Hits. Watch the Harold & Kumar one for the nostalgia and the one about the bong industry to get a reminder of just how different the latest attorney general announcement is from the paraphernalia arrests of yore.
+ Drunk on Power: “The F.B.I. began investigating a New York Times reporter last month after she wrote about the bureau’s director, Kash Patel, using bureau personnel to provide his girlfriend with government security and transportation, according to a person briefed on the matter.”
+ Afford Focus: “Republicans pushed through the plan on a nearly party-line vote of 50 to 48. It came after an overnight marathon of rapid-fire votes, known as a vote-a-rama, in which the G.O.P. beat back a series of Democratic proposals aimed at addressing the high cost of health care, housing, food and energy. The debate put the two parties’ dueling messages on vivid display six months before the midterm elections.” Senate Adopts G.O.P. Budget, Defeating Democrats’ Affordability Proposals.
+ RSVP Brains: Margaret Sullivan on this weekend’s White House correspondents’ dinner. Why are White House journalists partying with Trump? (Spoiler alert: There’s no good answer.)
+ It’s the Corruption, Stupid: Eric Trump Brags About $24 Million Pentagon Deal His Company Landed. (The amount alone indicates corruption. The Pentagon spends more than $24 million on a set of pens.)
+ Separate Lives: “It captures a harrowing moment: a family separated by the state.” World Press Photo announces Photo of the Year 2026.
+ Everything Means Less Than Zero: “President Trump has claimed that he has secured discounts of 400 to 1,500 percent on prescription drugs. A price discount cannot be more than 100 percent because that would lower the price to zero.” (In fairness, plenty of his businesses have achieved these numbers.) NYT: RFK Jr. Defends Trump’s Mathematically Impossible Drug Discount Claims. “Eventually, Mr. Trump began to insert some uncertainty into his claims, saying that the discount depended ‘on how you want to calculate it.’ ‘You could say it’s an 80 percent reduction,’ Mr. Trump said in January. ‘Or you could say it’s a 1,000 percent reduction. You could say whatever you want.'” (Words and images have lost all meaning. Why shouldn’t numbers be down for the count?)
Imagine having to explain this when your cellmate asks what you’re in for: “A California man pilfered thousands of dollars in Lego toy sets from the retailer Target in a return-based scam, sometimes swapping valuable figurines with dried pasta pieces and before returning the construction-centric toys, authorities recently alleged.” (Even in the age of Ozempic, I’d rather have the pasta than the Lego.)
+ “The set made it 114,790 feet above Gwynedd County in the United Kingdom. That’s almost 22 miles straight up. According to Guinness, the set then stayed up in the air for over eight hours before coming back to Earth, hence the record for ‘Highest Altitude Launch and Retrieval of a Lego Set.'”
2026-04-22 20:00:00
In the Star Wars series The Mandalorian, a lone bounty hunter travels to the far reaches of the galaxy to protect an infant named Grogu (affectionately known by fans as Baby Yoda). The Mandelorians are bound by a set of ethics and conduct, represented by the mantra, “This is the way.” The Gerrymandalorians are a group of elected leaders and voters across several states who are fighting to keep Darth Trump and the Empire from unfairly gerrymandering their way to a Congressional midterm win. The rebels know that gerrymandering, the “practice of dividing or arranging a territorial unit into election districts in a way that gives one political party an unfair advantage in elections,” is a generally unhealthy trend. But using the popular vote to overcome attempts by the Empire to rig the midterms beats just sitting back and letting an election be stolen. So, for now, the rebel alliance will have to live with the mantra, “This is the way, at least until we send the Sith Lord back to Mar-a-Lago.”
+ For the rebels, the war to redraw battle lines was hardly fair. “For more than a decade, they’ve tried to be the party of good government on redistricting. But Democrats’ support for letting independent commissions draw legislative maps has cost them seats in key blue states, and their push to ban gerrymandering nationwide flopped in the courts and in Congress.” Meanwhile, the GOP just needs a willing governor and legislature to redraw maps (as we saw in Texas). But there were two elements the Empire didn’t expect: First, the Force (here, the voting public) would be with the rebels. And second, Vader’s poll numbers would be historically low. Russell Berman in The Atlantic (Gift Article) on how the Republican redistricting effort backfired: Trump’s Enormous Gerrymandering Blunder. “GOP lawmakers had both the will and the power to draw their party new seats, while Democrats were hamstrung by limits of their own making. The question was not whether Republicans could expand their edge in Congress, but by how much. This morning the landscape looks a lot different, after Virginia voters yesterday approved a lopsided new House map that could hand Democrats an additional four seats that Republicans currently hold. The Democratic redistricting victory is the party’s second in a statewide referendum. When combined with new lines that California voters endorsed in November, Democrats have now succeeded in drawing districts that will likely yield them nine more seats this fall, at least matching what Republicans have been able to achieve in states that they control.” Next stop in the gerrymandering wars: The Empire (tries to) strike back in Florida. Or as it will undoubtedly come to be known: The Battle of Florida Man-dalorian.
The various costs related to the Iran war just had a midair collision with another affordability issue. Spirit Airlines nears deal with Trump administration for $500 million rescue package. “The deal, which has not yet been finalized, would offer $500 million to the discount airline, according to a person familiar with the matter. It would give the airline additional liquidity as it works toward emerging from bankruptcy and grapples with elevated fuel costs due to the war with Iran … After Spirit emerges from bankruptcy, the U.S. government could own up to 90% of the airline.” (For some reason, this reminds me of the Trump Shuttle: An airline that lasted less than three years before defaulting on its debt and going bust.)
“‘The chatbot advised the shooter on what type of gun to use, on which ammo went with which gun, on whether or not a gun would be useful at short range,’ Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier said at a news conference Tuesday. ‘If it was a person on the other end of that screen, we would be charging them with murder.'” ChatGPT allegedly advised Florida State shooter when and where to strike. (This is definitely an interesting case, but it seems like we may be missing a more dangerous class of weapons. I’d rather be held point-blank by an LLM than a semi-automatic gun.)
“They promote nicotine patches, gums and lozenges as well as pouches, which are often filled with nicotine salt powder and give people a convenient way to consume the compound. To these boosters, nicotine is another ‘natural’ product that the medical establishment has unfairly demonized, like beef tallow, peptides or raw milk.” NYT (Gift Article): Influencers Are Spinning Nicotine as a ‘Natural’ Health Hack. (They’re not lighting the nicotine, but they’re definitely smoking something.)
Cease Desisting? “Iran attacked three ships in the Strait of Hormuz this morning, saying its Revolutionary Guard seized two of them and further inflaming tensions over the key waterway. It comes after U.S. forces seized an Iranian ship and boarded a tanker linked to Tehran’s oil trade.” The ceasefire hangs in the balance. Here’s the latest from NBC, The Guardian, and BBC.
+ The Great Betrayal: “After halting a U.S. resettlement program for Afghans who helped the American war effort, President Trump is in talks to send as many as 1,100 of them to the Democratic Republic of Congo.” NYT (Gift Article): Trump Is Said to Be in Talks to Send Afghans Who Aided U.S. Forces to Congo. (Nothing like selling out allies from the last war while failing to find allies for the latest one…)
+ Truth Immunity: “The acting head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has canceled the publication of a study that found that the Covid vaccine sharply cut the odds of hospitalizations and emergency visits last winter.” (Shhh. We wouldn’t want anyone to know the Covid vaccine was a friggin miracle.) Related: Hegseth to the Troops: We Are Bringing Back the Flu!
+ Mythos in the Wild? Bloomberg (Gift Article): “A small group of unauthorized users has accessed Anthropic PBC’s new Mythos AI model, a technology that the company says is so powerful it can enable dangerous cyberattacks.”
+ Wagyu the Dog: “At a time when the American cattle herd is at its smallest since the 1950s and beef prices are at record highs, Wagyu is seemingly everywhere. But it’s not always clear to diners what they’re paying for.” ‘Wagyu’ Used to Guarantee Quality Beef. What Are You Paying for Today?
+ Natural Selection: On Earth Day, check out these “images of the incredible resilience of nature: the many ways that plants, animals, and natural processes reclaim abandoned human places and find ways to thrive.” Reclaimed by Nature. (I’d like to see this for the new White House ballroom…)
Smarty Supreme: “The feat has been hailed as a milestone for robotics, a field that has long seen table tennis – and the lightning-fast reactions, perception and skill it demands – as one of the toughest tests of how far the technology has advanced.” AI-powered robot beats elite table tennis players. (Meanwhile, Kylie Jenner was seen cuddling with the robot at Coachella…)
2026-04-21 20:00:00
Briefs. Oral arguments. Questions and answers analyzed by experts and an interested public. This is how we’ve long experienced major, often nation-altering Supreme Court cases. But something changed just after 6 p.m. on a February evening in 2016. The Court was considering one of those big, impactful cases, in which they would decide whether to block or allow President Barack Obama’s Clean Power Plan. You probably didn’t read any of the submitted briefs or hear any of the oral arguments. Because there were none. But that doesn’t mean the case wasn’t decided. America was caught with its briefs down, as the Roberts Court halted the environmental plan. “They acted before any other court had addressed the plan’s lawfulness. The decision consisted of only legal boilerplate, without a word of reasoning. At the time, the ruling seemed like a curious one-off. But that single paragraph turned out to be a sharp and lasting break. That night marks the birth, many legal experts believe, of the court’s modern ‘shadow docket,’ the secretive track that the Supreme Court has since used to make many major decisions, including granting President Trump more than 20 key victories on issues from immigration to agency power.” The adage suggests that what you don’t know can’t hurt you. That, like so many of the cases that are now decided in secret and rendered with no explanation, seems like a notion worthy of a public hearing. The NYT (Gift Article): The Inside Story of Five Days That Remade the Supreme Court. “Rulings with no explanation or reasoning, like the sparse paragraph from that February night, have become routine. The emergency docket is now a central legacy of the court led by Chief Justice Roberts.” How dramatically will that legacy change our legal system and our country? Only the Shadow knows.
+ Steve Vladek wrote a highly regarded book on this topic: The Shadow Docket: How the Supreme Court Uses Stealth Rulings to Amass Power and Undermine the Republic.
Techno-optimists and pessimists likely agree on a couple things: AI is only getting more powerful and nothing is going to stop that trend. So what does one do when one is faced with the prospect of the singularity, “the moment when superintelligent machines, having surpassed the feeble cognitive abilities of humans, begin to act in ways contrary to the interests of humanity.” Well, you can’t count on computers getting dumber. So you’re gonna need to create smarter humans. MoJo: Creating Baby Geniuses to Thwart the AI Threat? (Yes, Really.)
+ “Heavier AI users are generally more optimistic about its effects on their careers than occasional users and non-users. That’s still true. But Gallup found that even heavy AI users within Gen Z are growing more pessimistic.” Gen Z Is Souring on AI. (No worries. We’ll just program the new babies to be more enthusiastic…)
“In the lead-up to the war, which Trump launched without consulting Congress, making a case to the American people, or assembling allies, many of his aides believed that Trump was not taking seriously the risks and trade-offs involved … Once the war began, Trump received updates that were screened and bowdlerized for him. He has long been inattentive to briefings—early in his first term, aides realized that he liked maps and graphics and would glaze over if given much information in text—but he has reportedly been starting his day off with a sizzle reel of stunning explosions rather than with hard info.” The Atlantic (Gift Article): The Aides Keeping the President in the Dark.
+ None of the ignorance keeps Trump from participating in delicate negotiations by way of social media. CNN: A deal to end the Iran war seemed close. Then Trump started posting on social media.
+ “Vice President JD Vance’s trip to Pakistan for a second round of negotiations with Iran has been put on hold after Tehran failed to respond to American positions, a U.S. official with direct knowledge of the situation said Tuesday. Iran, for its part, said it had not yet decided whether to resume talks with the United States.” But don’t worry. Trump says, “We’re going to end up with a great deal.” (Maybe we should all be shown the daily sizzle reel. It seems to cheer him up.) Here’s the latest from NYT, The Guardian, and NBC.
Steve Jobs was known as the visionary. Tim Cook was more of a get things done CEO. And he definitely fulfilled that role. “When Tim Cook took over Apple in 2011, leaders from Silicon Valley to Wall Street predicted that the company’s best days were behind it. They feared that without Steve Jobs, Apple’s innovative chief executive, the company would falter. They were wrong. Over 15 years, Mr. Cook has engineered Apple’s rise from a Silicon Valley darling worth $350 billion into a cash-generating giant worth $4 trillion.” NYT (Gift Article): Tim Cook Was Very, Very Good at Making Money.
+ “Cook inherited a company with extraordinary potential growth in front of it, but in deep existential grief. He led the company — and its community — through that grief and achieved that potential. The transition Apple and Tim Cook announced today is entirely different. No one’s hand was forced. There is nothing unpleasant.” John Gruber: Another Day Has Come.
The Fog of Warsh: “Kevin M. Warsh, President Trump’s pick to lead the Federal Reserve, asserted repeatedly at a combative confirmation hearing on Tuesday that he would not cut interest rates simply because President Trump wanted him to, pledging to be ‘strictly independent’ if confirmed for one of the world’s most powerful economic positions.” We’ve been down this hearing road before. He’ll say he’s independent and will be normal. Everyone in the Senate knows that’s not true. He’ll get confirmed, anyway. Corruption will ensue. Bad things will happen. No one will be surprised. Meanwhile, “Lori Chavez-DeRemer, President Trump’s embattled labor secretary, stepped down on Monday as multiple scandals and investigations closed in on her.”
+ Donny on the Spot: NYT (Gift Article): ‘Donnyland’? Ukraine Proposes Renaming Part of the Donbas in Trump’s Honor. “That a name evocative of Disneyland has been applied to a depopulated, decimated swath of Ukrainian coal-and-steel country could appear jarring as Europe’s deadliest fighting since World War II continues to rage. But it also reflects a global reality in which governments appeal to Mr. Trump’s vanity in order to get American might on their side.” (It’s sad that an ally would think this way. They are also right to think this way.)
+ Targeting the Good Guys: “When we began working with informants, we were living in the shadow of the height of the Civil Rights Movement, which had seen bombings at churches, state-sponsored violence against demonstrators, and the murders of activists that went unanswered by the justice system. There is no question that what we learned from informants saved lives.” Southern Poverty Law Center says it faces a Justice Department criminal probe over paid informants,
+ Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? “When Donald Trump attends the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner for the first time as president on Saturday, the pressure will be on the journalists’ organization to make some sort of a statement about the president’s relentless attacks on the media, which he has labeled the ‘enemy of the people.'” Hundreds Of Veteran Journalists And Groups Urge WHCA To ‘Speak Forcefully’ About Trump’s Attacks. (Better idea. Don’t attend the damn dinner.)
+ Beak Softly and Carry a Big Stick: “In 2021, a disabled parrot named Bruce made headlines worldwide for creating his own prosthetic beak. He didn’t stop there: Scientists reported on Monday that Bruce has now become the alpha male of his group. And he did it by learning to joust.” How Bruce the Parrot Landed Atop the Pecking Order, Without a Beak. (There’s a lesson here somewhere, and I think it has to do with the importance of jousting.)
+ Bible Trumper: “President Donald Trump and many of his leading Christian supporters and top Republicans are taking part this week in a marathon reading of the Bible in an America 250-themed event billed as encouraging a ‘return to the spiritual foundation that has shaped our country.'” (If there’s a god, I’m pretty sure we’d hear him laughing right now.)
“In recent years, the NFL draft has attracted hundreds of thousands of fans to the cities that host it. This week, Pittsburgh will be no exception. And that influx of people has led the local school district to make a controversial decision: canceling in-person school.”