2026-07-02 20:00:00
I decided to celebrate America’s 250th a little early; specifically, at the 45-minute mark of the US Men’s World Cup knockout win against Bosnia and Herzegovina, when Folarin Balogun scored a go-ahead goal. Balogun was born in the US to Nigerian parents who were visiting Brooklyn. They “were living in London, but visited New York when his mother was seven months pregnant. However, on their intended return flight, airline staff refused his mother permission to fly due to safety concerns over the advanced state of her pregnancy at that time.” They made their way back to London when their new baby was two months old. 24 years, 11 months, and 28 days later, Folarin Balogun scored for the US. A Nigerian birthright American who grew up in England puts the USA up by a goal? With all due respect to baseball, hot dogs (which were German and Austrian immigrants), and apple pie, it doesn’t get much more American than that. As a bonus, Folarin even has the word gun in his name! Stories like this one are exactly what make America great—along with the messy and often brutal fight to maintain that greatness. It’s not just about who’s winning games or who’s scoring goals. It’s about what makes a World Cup in America something wholly unique, and yes, uniquely great. It’s about this headline from the NYT (Gift Article): In the United States, Every World Cup Team Is a Home Team. As you’re enjoying your 4th of July hot dogs, be sure to remember how America’s sausage was made.
+ “Melting pot, tapestry, mosaic, kaleidoscope, salad bowl. Every cliché is true.” How a Nation of Immigrants Traces Its Roots.
+ “President Trump has spent years telling the world that America is closed and other countries don’t matter. The American people spent this summer proving him wrong.” The World Cup Shows What’s Great About America.
+ This World Cup isn’t all about America’s traditional values. It’s about some new ones, too. USMNT proves it’s built different with first World Cup knockout win in 24 years. “They have won three matches in a single World Cup. While that is common for the powerhouses of soccer, sometimes in the group stage alone, the U.S. had never before accomplished that. Heck, before this summer, it had won nine World Cup matches in its history. In other words, this is not a normal World Cup for the U.S. Then again, this is not a normal U.S. team.”
+ If I don’t see you at the Travis/Taylor wedding, have a great holiday weekend. NextDraft, like the US Men’s team, will be back at it Monday!
Immigration isn’t the only core American value being attacked these days. Among the other ones: Voting. NYT (Gift Article): The Many Ways Trump Is Trying to Tip the Scales for the Midterms. “The relentless assault by the president on the electoral process — both administratively and rhetorically — is likely to sow doubt and lay groundwork for extensive challenges to election results. Agencies and officials across the federal government have, at the direction of Mr. Trump, undertaken dozens of actions grounded in novel strategies and aimed at insulating Republicans from potential losses in November.”
“According to some measures, A.I. is contributing to high unemployment rates among new graduates and might already have destroyed tens of thousands of jobs. Other sources suggest companies might actually be adding workers as a result of the technology. A.I. might be contributing to the U.S. inflation problem, or part of the solution to it. It might be responsible for a recent pickup in productivity growth, or might be playing virtually no role — or the productivity boom itself might be a mirage. Researchers can’t even agree on basic questions like how many companies are using A.I. or which workers are most vulnerable to the disruptions it could cause.” A.I. Is Reshaping the Economy. Good Luck Measuring How.
+ “OpenAI has proposed giving the Trump administration a 5% stake in the company as part of a broader arrangement in which leading U.S. artificial intelligence firms would cede similar equity to the government through a sovereign wealth fund vehicle.”
“I went through the magnetometer to enter the National Mall for President Trump’s Great American State Fair this week, putting my pens, notebook, phone and wallet on the table for inspection. ‘You have to throw away these pens,’ the guard said … It’s unclear who I would have attacked with my Bic ballpoint, anyway. The musicians who were slated to perform at the fair backed out because of the partisan tenor, and several states also declined to participate. There were no lines to get in when I arrived, and the crowd inside appeared to number in the high two figures. Acres of green lawn were vacant, and three huge tents for concessions were empty. ‘You’re my first customer,’ said the vendor when I bought a $5 bottle of ice water.” Dana Milbank: Trump’s Nutty State Fair Hijacked the Fourth of July. And My Pen.
+ “‘It’s as if there were a natural disaster, and we’re looking at the damage after a hurricane. Or think of Manhattan after the World Trade Center was hit by an act of terrorism,’ Charles A. Birnbaum, the president of the Cultural Landscape Foundation, told me. ‘If you were just to parachute into Washington, you’d say: Gosh, what happened here?‘ Happy birthday, America.” The Atlantic (Gift Article): The Capital Is a Mess.
+ OK, in fairness, there are differing perspectives on the big birthday bash in DC. For example: “The woman in the yellow jersey may have said it best when she clapped her hands and shouted to her friend marching by: ‘Everything’s O.K.! Lookin’ good, lookin’ good!’ It was a grand day for the … parade in the nation’s capital today, and it was a grand parade celebrating the diversity that is America. It was warm under a hazy sun but not one of Washington’s blistering summer days, and 500,000 people, according to the official estimate, turned out to see more than 50 bands, GO floats and 90 marching units.” Oh, wait, this isn’t from the 250th, it’s from the 200th. If you’re feeling a bit bicurious, here’s a look back. 500,000 View Capital’s Bicentennial Parade. That event didn’t devolve into an authoritarian-esque, ego-driven campaign rally. In fact, Gerald Ford didn’t even attend. He was playing golf.
Different Sides of the Same Coin: “Morten Christensen made a big bet on digital tokens sold by the Trump family’s World Liberty Financial last year, hoping that a surge in value might be enough to help him retire. Instead, the value of those tokens tanked. While Christensen and many like him lost big, the president made a fortune, netting $800 million from that crypto project.” WSJ (Gift Article): Trump Made $1 Billion on Crypto Deals While His Fans Lost a Fortune. (Tying the corruption to affordability seems to be a possible sweet spot for midterm messaging.) I covered Trump’s crypto haul yesterday. “Donald Trump finally found a business he could succeed at. Presidential Corruption.” You’ve been Crypt Off.
+ Standing Guard: “Rescuers pulled a 43-year-old security guard alive from a collapsed basement early Thursday, ending a grueling days-long operation that became a symbol of hope after the devastation of twin earthquakes that struck Venezuela eight days earlier.”
+ Putin Attacks Kyiv: “Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha described the assault as a ‘night of horror’ and referred to Russian President Vladimir Putin as a ‘war criminal.’ ‘Putin can only wage a vile and terroristic war against civilians, women, and children. Because in his war against Ukraine’s Defense Forces he cannot achieve a single result.” Russia Launches Drone and Missile Attack on Kyiv.
+ Excommunication Breakdown: “An estimated 16,500 people gathered in Ecône for the ceremony, including members of New Force, an Italian neofascist political party, and National Future, a new far-right force threatening the Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni’s chances of winning a second mandate in general elections next year.” Vatican excommunicates all members of ultra-conservative rebel group SSPX. “Schism caused by Society of Saint Pius X ordaining four bishops without consent presents first crisis for Pope Leo.”
+ Burning Question: “One major concern stemming from wildfire prediction markets is arson.” Will betting on wildfires lead to arson? (Or to ask the same question another way: Have we lost our f-cking minds?)
+ Silver Spoon? AOL, Vimeo, Eventbrite, and Evernote. Web names from the internet past? Actually, they’re all part of a corporate roll-up that just went public. Bending Spoons IPO prices above range at $18.4 billion valuation.
+ A Loss For Words: “Every serious legal mind must inevitably face a fundamental choice: Read the Constitution and apply its words as the bedrock laws of the land, or transcend its tired text and interpret the super-secret invisible version that tells you exactly what you want to hear. Sadly, many Americans remain trapped in the former dimension of understanding; that dim-witted first stage of constitutional awareness where one looks at the document, finds the relevant words, and believes the words mean something.” McSweeney’s: The US Constitution Is for Simple Folk Still Burdened by the Belief That Words Have Meaning.
“Two Russian ‘rooftoppers’ who staged an apparent marriage proposal at the peak of the Empire State Building’s spire were reportedly arraigned in New York on Thursday on a slew of charges including reckless endangerment … They spent the first night of their reported engagement in separate cells close to lower Manhattan’s New York City criminal court … charged with burglary, reckless endangerment, criminal mischief, criminal trespass, criminal tampering, disorderly conduct, and possession of burglar’s tools.” As stressful as this all sounds, I still don’t think it adequately prepares them for the first year of marriage.
2026-07-01 20:00:00
Donald Trump finally found a business he could succeed at. Presidential Corruption. While he’s been lining the Oval Office walls with gold, he’s been giving his pockets the same treatment. In what is certainly an undercount, Trump reported $2.2 billion in revenue during his first year back in office, and a whole lot of that came from crypto payoffs. “One of his biggest hauls in 2025 came when an investment firm tied to the United Arab Emirates bought nearly half of the Trump family’s main crypto company, World Liberty Financial, a transaction that blurred the line between foreign policy and private enterprise.” Blurred is doing a lot of work there. The line has been obliterated. And I don’t mean obliterated like Iran’s nuclear arsenal, I mean like, the line is really gone. From pardons to legislation to international deals, there’s always a money-making angle, and it will likely take us years to account for all the ill-begotten gains. NYT (Gift Article): Trump’s Moneymaking Run: Unrivaled in Presidential History. “Never before in American history has there been anything like Donald J. Trump, a president who in his first year back in office has collected about $1.4 billion in new revenues from cryptocurrency businesses that directly benefited from his actions as president.”
+ As recently as 2021, Trump called Bitcoin “a scam.” So, I guess you can see the attraction. And Trump isn’t the only leader who’s getting in on the action. WSJ (Gift Article): How a crypto exchange became a major hub for illicit Iranian cash.
+ It’s not all about crypto; there are also some bucks stopping here. And many of those are coming from a combination of Trump’s two long-favored side gigs. Attacking media. And Suing. Trump Is Making Bank Off Suing News Organizations.
+ In an act of perfect symmetry, we’re getting this accounting on the same day that Trump is taking his first voyage on the plane gifted to him by Qatar. “The new jet will only temporarily be in the nation’s service, as Boeing is expected to deliver in 2028 long-delayed planes that will permanently serve as Air Force One. Trump … has said in the past that the Qatar plane would end up in a presidential library.” (Anyone wanna bet some crypto that’s not where the plane ends up?)
“Putin appeared to be making up facts as he went along. No encirclement around Rubtsi (population: 350 ) has been reported by any reliable source in Russia or Ukraine, and there is no river called Stary Oskol in that region. The Russian president’s obsession with the details of the fighting appears to have crossed the line into delusion.” Simon Shuster in The Atlantic (Gift Article): Putin Is Slipping Into Delusion. “Does that mania for war make him any more likely to cut his losses and accept a negotiated peace? Probably not. His interview on Monday illustrated what many in Ukraine and Europe have long concluded about Putin’s state of mind. He has convinced himself that the attritional math of the war favors Russia, and he will continue to press the numerical advantage of his forces regardless of how long the lines for gasoline in Moscow might get.”
+ Long lines for gas are hardly the only costs being paid for this insane invasion. NYT (Gift Article): Troop Casualties in Ukraine War Top 2 Million. “The study, published on Wednesday by the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, said Russia has borne the heavier toll, with 1.4 million troops killed or wounded since February 2022, when Russia invaded Ukraine.”
+ Here’s the story of one of those deaths. The Prom Went On in Kyiv, but Masha’s Date Danced Alone.
“This is a shocking development that should upend all expectations that this court can be trusted to apply the most basic constitutional guarantees when a Republican president seeks to nullify them. If a theory flatly rejected by all serious legal scholars and historians can come one vote away from success, no rights are safe. Everything is on the table.” The Supreme Court’s 5–4 Vote in the Birthright Citizenship Case Is a Scandal.
+ To really understand how extreme (and extremely nuts) the (slim) minority opinions were in this case, I recommend these two segments from Lawrence O’Donnell’s episode on the case. Here’s Laurence Tribe on the law. And Pulitzer Prize-winning Yale historian David Blight on the history.
“The possibility that artificial intelligence will steal all our jobs has been hyped by industry leaders. It has roused politicians to sound the alarm. It now ranks at or near the top of the public’s concerns about the new technology.” Is it the right thing to be worried about? I’ll have an answer for that question when AI replaces me. Zeynep Tufekci with some interesting takes on the matter in the NYT (Gift Article): The Unstoppable Force of A.I. Hype Is Meeting One Immovable Fact. “Air Canada disabled its chatbots after they mistakenly promised a customer a refund — and the customer sued and won. McDonald’s scuttled the bot taking orders at its drive-throughs after a number of viral videos showed it to be wildly dysfunctional. In one case, the bot mistakenly added hundreds of dollars of chicken nuggets to a customer’s order. These scary — OK, OK, funny — incidents aren’t the result of coding errors. They’re the result of an essential, inescapable fact about the artificial intelligence that has become so common in so many aspects of our daily lives: Large language models are not reasoning machines. They’re plausibility engines.”
250 Ways To Leave Your Govern: “Inevitably, the Trump administration has destroyed the nation’s 250th-anniversary celebrations. I was 11 in 1976, during the bicentennial, and that July 4, I was at a summer camp in North Carolina. I remember celebratory flag-raising and patriotic songs, as well as sparklers in the evening. At the time, we didn’t think there was a permanent cultural divide between red states and blue states. In retrospect, I’m sure some of my fellow campers came from families with views different from mine. It didn’t matter to our celebration of the bicentennial, mostly because we were 11. But it also wouldn’t have mattered even if we were adults, because everyone knew that the bicentennial was for all of us. The tall ships, the fireworks, the Freedom Train that carried a moon rock around the country—all of these were symbols we shared, no matter which part of America we came from. President Gerald Ford didn’t try to make the events of that year about himself or his base, or his tribe, or his bank account. This year is different, because the White House is inhabited by people who don’t believe in the ‘abstractions’ that we usually celebrate on the Fourth of July. And this affects the rest of us, whether we want it to or not.” Anne Applebaum nails it in The Atlantic (Gift Article): Trump’s Anti-Patriotic Trap. (I think the best bet is to focus on the local and enjoy your friends and family this Fourth. I’m going to watch the SF fog light up in different colors the same way I do every year. Hopefully, America’s 252nd-and-a-half birthday is going to be the greatest party in history.)
+ Strike Struck: As the Pentagon stays quiet, AP reconstructs a US strike that killed over 100 Iranian children. “In almost any other conflict, these haunting truths would be seared into national memory. Yet more than 120 days since at least one U.S. missile struck an Iranian primary school, there remains no final accounting of what happened.”
+ Deport to a Storm: “The plane carrying 146 Venezuelans deported from the United States arrived at Venezuela’s main airport last Wednesday — just eight hours before the ground began to violently shake. Venezuelan officials welcomed the deportees — 120 men, 19 women and 7 children — and recorded carefully staged videos celebrating their arrival after spending weeks in U.S. detention centers. Most, if not all, were then ferried away from the cameras to a state-run holding facility, where they settled into bunk beds and were told they would be released the next day, after being processed.” Killed by the Venezuelan Quakes Just Hours After Being Deported From U.S.
+ Unnatural Disaster: “Venezuela’s man-made disasters didn’t take long to exacerbate the natural one. For 28 years and counting, Venezuela’s rulers have stolen or squandered much of the oil revenue of the most oil-rich country in the world. Oligarchs pocketed the petrodollars of the late-aughts oil boom and left the nation somehow poorer and more indebted. In the hours just before the earthquakes struck, the regime released a total figure for the amount that it owed its creditors: $240 billion. The humanitarian consequences of this wastefulness were well documented before last Wednesday. Now they have acquired a fresh urgency.” The Atlantic (Gift Article): The Vultures Arrived Before the Rescue Teams. “The lack of preparation is unforgivable. Worse, the regime led by Delcy Rodríguez—under the heavy-handed management of the Trump administration—has taken active steps to make matters worse. The government deployed the military to the disaster areas not to help but to diffuse any expression of public discontent.”
+ Establishing a Trend: First, it was New York. Now it’s Colorado. Politico: Anti-establishment avalanche buries a pair of Colorado Democratic stalwarts.
+ Anthropics Or It Didn’t Happen: “The Trump administration and Anthropic have reached an agreement to restore access to the company’s most recent general-access artificial-intelligence model, resolving a fight that showed how the White House is intervening to address security concerns in the fast-growing industry.”
+ City on a Mission: “Mission Dolores was founded by Spanish missionaries the same year the U.S. declared its independence. It has borne witness to its own version of the American story—not the one you learned in school but one with much to say about what it means to be American.” Esquire: The San Francisco Church That Holds America’s Secrets.
+ A Tough Cell: “Scientists have long dreamed of discovering the alchemy by which chemicals can be turned into life. On Wednesday, a team at the University of Minnesota announced that it had taken a major step toward that vision. Blending together dozens of ingredients, the researchers have synthesized simple cells that feed, grow, reproduce and compete with one another for food. If these cells are not yet fully alive, they have most of the hallmarks of life.” NYT (Gift Article): This Cell Feeds, Grows and Reproduces. And It’s Manmade. (Call me when it can distill the news…)
Attention Kmart shoppers: “One customer shared photos of a T-rex balloon she purchased for her child, only to discover something unexpected about the item’s design. ‘Bought this balloon for my daughter’s birthday, and there’s something a little off-putting about the blow hole.'” (Hey, even inflatable dinosaurs deserve some pleasure in this life. But if your T-Rextion lasts more than four hours…)
2026-06-30 20:00:00
Call it a judicial man bites dog story. A 6-3 decision actually went the right way. Even though it should have been 9-0, we’ll take what we can get from this Court. The Fourteenth Amendment states: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States.” And this time around, six judges agreed that the Constitution means what the Constitution says. “The ACLU’s Cecillia Wang, herself a birthright citizen born to Chinese parents, argued the birthright case in April before the Supreme Court. As she put it, the men who wrote the Fourteenth Amendment deliberately chose to confer automatic citizenship on the child, not the parent, the idea being that ‘in America we do not punish children for the sins of their fathers, but instead we wipe the slate clean. When you’re born in this country, we’re all American, all the same.'” NPR: Supreme Court upholds birthright citizenship on constitutional grounds. It’s nice to know some of those grounds are still above ground.
+ WSJ (Gift Article): “The decision rebuffs Trump’s bid to upend the deep-rooted understanding that virtually everyone born on American soil is automatically a U.S. citizen. That understanding, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote, was enshrined in the Constitution in 1868.”
+ Back to our regularly scheduled 6-3 decisions: “The Supreme Court yet again loosened campaign finance restrictions on Tuesday by striking down limits on how much political parties may raise and spend on candidates. By a 6-to-3 vote along ideological lines, the court ruled the law, which had been enacted in 1974, violates political parties’ First Amendment rights. Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote the majority opinion.”
+ SCOTUS “upheld state laws barring transgender girls and women from playing on school athletic teams, in another setback for transgender people. The court’s six-justice conservative majority, which has repeatedly ruled against transgender Americans in the past year, ruled that state bans in Idaho and West Virginia don’t violate the Constitution. The court unanimously agreed that barring transgender girls and women also doesn’t run afoul of the federal law known as Title IX, which prohibits sex discrimination in education.”
+ NYT (Gift Article): The Major Supreme Court Decisions in 2026.
“During the presidential campaign, Donald Trump promised again and again that he would end the war in Ukraine in 24 hours. Of course he didn’t. We are now more than 1,580 days into this war and it still rages. But here is the irony. Trump’s own actions, none of them meant to help Ukraine, may have brought the end of this war closer than anything that came before … One of his first moves was to choke off American money and weapons. He demanded that Ukraine pay America back for Biden’s aid through a one-sided minerals deal. And he humiliated Volodymyr Zelensky in front of the world in that Oval Office meeting, telling him, ‘You don’t have any cards.'” It looked like a disaster at the time. But it turns out that not having Trump on his side may have been just the card Zelensky needed. Bill Browder: Despite his best efforts, Trump may just have won the war for Kyiv. “Once Washington no longer bankrolled Ukraine, Washington could no longer give Ukraine orders. The leash was off. The United States could no longer demand that Ukraine spare targets inside Russia. That single change has altered the course of the war.”
+ For example: Putin Faces Increased Pressure as Moscow Is Again Attacked by Drones.
“Two climbers—an experienced mountaineer and his girlfriend, a novice—set out to take on Austria’s tallest peak in the dead of winter. After the woman was found frozen to death near the summit, a court in Innsbruck had to decide whether the hike was merely a tragedy, or a case of homicide by neglect.” The always excellent William Finnegan in The New Yorker: No Return: “Did an experienced alpinist leave his girlfriend to die at the top of a mountain?” (Alt link.)
Let’s focus on something about America we can all celebrate. Our food history. “When Thomas Jefferson travels to Paris in 1784, he brings along James Hemings, an enslaved man who has worked at Monticello since childhood. Hemings studies French cooking, and when they return, he cooks at formal events hosted by Jefferson.” What came out of that trip? Mac and Cheese. (Yup, thank you, France!) In the 1810s, we got canned food. In the 1840s, the gold rush brought us something even more valuable: Chinese restaurants. 1880s: Coca-Cola. The 1920s brought us a great invention and equally great “American linguistic yardstick for innovation:” Sliced Bread. Then came Cheetos and McDonald’s. All that said, our winning streak may be over. In 2026, we’re all about suppressing appetites and looksmaxxing. But before you go from hungry to hangry, let’s celebrate. NYT (Gift Article): The Pursuit of Hungriness: 250 Years of American Food Innovation.
Sliding Into Your DMs: Early on, one of my biggest worries about AI was that evil politicians would use it to identify what people wanted to hear, tweak the truth to match those desires, and then deliver targeted, personal messages to manipulate the public. I was a little off the mark. It’s not just the evil ones who are doing it. NYT (Gift Article): How A.I. Is Changing the Way Politicians Run for Office. “Behind the scenes, campaigns are using the technology to analyze voter data, craft campaign materials and write custom messages.”
+ Ooh, Aah, Ooh, Awful: “It is general knowledge in our practice that for $2 million, you can have a pardon.” The White House Considers Granting 250 Pardons for the Nation’s Birthday. (Sometimes, it’s unclear if we’re marking a birthday or a funeral.) Meanwhile, Trump’s July 4 fireworks to start much later and last much longer. And they’ll follow a Trump speech. He can’t even take the Fifth on the Fourth.
+ More Signal Noise: “The identities of nearly all of the group members are visible, revealing even broader use of Signal by top Trump-administration officials than was previously known. The names of the groups are also telling, including one called ‘Iran/Ukraine Planning’ and another labeled ‘State USAID.’ The records raise the possibility that top administration officials failed to follow federal laws that require the preservation of government records.” Hegseth, Rubio, and Caine Had an Auto-Deleting Signal Chat.
+ Assistant (to the) General Manager: “Congress passed the consumer protection law, the No Surprises Act, with wide bipartisan support in 2020. It aimed to prevent unexpected charges for patients treated in the emergency room by a doctor who didn’t take their insurance.” Well, it didn’t quite work out as planned. $22,000 Per Hour: Assistants Use a Legislative Loophole to Outearn Surgeons. (Seems like good news for Dwight Schrute.)
+ Millionaire Apparent: The world added nearly a million new millionaires in 2025 — but most people got poorer.
+ Search for Rescues: “Jennifer Raymond waited until the dead of night to make her move. On April 12, the animal welfare advocate pushed through thick brush and cut a hole in her Fortuna neighbor’s fence, trespassing with one goal: to uncover the truth about the animal rescue next door.” It didn’t take much digging. She bought a NorCal Victorian, and then found a mass dog grave next door.
+ Put Some Pep in Your Step: FDA panel on peptides will include experts who promote the unproven chemicals favored by RFK Jr.
+ Gray Area: “Ford executives said they have hired 350 veteran engineers — some of them were former employees, while others had been working at suppliers — after artificial intelligence and automated systems failed to deliver the desired quality level … To be clear, this doesn’t mean Ford is abandoning its AI plans entirely. Instead, it’s using the rehired employees — referred to as ‘gray beard’ engineers — to train younger staff and reprogram AI tools.”
Penalty kicks are stressful, stupid, genius, luck, skill, joyous, painful, ridiculous, and ridiculously awesome. They are the human condition. And we’ve already had some crazy ones in the World Cup knockout rounds. So you may be wondering how goalkeepers win penalty shootouts. “It’s not like you’re going, ‘Eeny, meeny, miny, moe.'” (It actually looks like they’re going eeny meeny at most…)
+ The World Cup is getting amazing. The World Cup After Hours with James Corden is a fun watch and makes many of the storylines more accessible for part-time football fans.
2026-06-29 20:00:00
I’m thinking of changing my name to DAIve. These days, you can’t get anywhere in business without having AI as a core ingredient. AI isn’t just driving startup fundraising, innovation, and you crazy. It’s the engine that’s basically driving the global economy. Because of the financial scope of this endeavor, it’s not only a story about where money is going. It’s also a story about where it isn’t. It’s pretty simple math: If all the investment and lending dollars are going to DAIve, Dave is shit out of luck. And if DAIve doesn’t work out, the hit to the economy will take Dave (and everyone else) with it. “Many economists believe that at a time of rising inflation, a weakening job market and global unrest, this boom is keeping the U.S. economy afloat … A.I. is vacuuming up so much of our land, talent, semiconductor chips, building materials — and, above all, so much of our money, that it is beginning to crowd out the rest of the economy. In other words, A.I. isn’t merely compensating for the weakness in the rest of the economy. It is, at least in part, causing it.” Jennifer M. Harris in the NYT (Gift Article): The Generational Force Hollowing Out the Economy. We’ve seen this story play out before. Recently, the dotcom boom led to a recession in the early 2000s. And a little further back, railroads followed a similar track. “All the investment funneling into A.I. bears similarities to the early years of railroad expansion and the internet. The railroad buildout that began in the 1820s absorbed a yearly average of 2 percent of America’s gross domestic product during the 1850s. But years later, when the railroad boom didn’t deliver the financial benefits investors promised, the economy sank into a depression. Roughly 18,000 businesses vanished within two years. By 1876, unemployment had reached about 14 percent.” (And Railroad even has AI in it…)
+ The Bank for International Settlements “drew parallels to earlier technology cycles, including canal construction in the 1830s, British railways in the 1840s, electrification in the late 1920s, and the dot-com boom of the late 1990s — all of which ended in investment reversals that triggered economy-wide recessions.” The central bank for central banks warned that the AI spending frenzy could crash markets.
There are still a few non-AI industries that are booming. For example: Corruption. “When Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick met with Kazakhstan’s president at the St. Regis Hotel last September in New York, President Trump jumped in by phone as the men sealed a deal on a top priority for Washington.” But it wasn’t only a top priority for Washington. It was also a top priority for the Lutnicks and the Trumps. “Their sons were soon doing business with partners in a deal that their fathers were negotiating, continuing a pattern of self-enrichment in the second Trump administration that has few precedents in American history.” Trump Cut a Billion-Dollar Mining Deal. His Sons Stand to Profit. Yet, we spent a lot more time writing articles about Hunter than these gatherers…
+ Trump bought as much as $5 million in Axon stock before ICE sought a $220 million Taser deal. But don’t worry. No conflict here. “The White House has said that Trump’s assets are held in a trust managed by his children.” (Phew…)
“The U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday overturned a 91-year-old precedent that has prevented presidents from removing members of independent agencies at will. The decision represents a significant win for the Trump administration and a major expansion of the president’s control over parts of the government once seen as a check on his powers.” (The 6-3 decision did limit the president’s ability to fire members of the Fed because even the Court’s extreme majority doesn’t want this lunatic to ruin their 401Ks.)
+ Sotomayor’s dissent: “The Court gives the President a power unknown even to the English Crown against which the Founders revolted, elevating him above his once-coequal branches by transforming a duty to take care that the laws be faithfully executed into a license to act in defiance of those very laws … [the country’s founding Framers] “never intended to give the President ‘the complete set of powers that the English Crown held, let alone more.'”
+ Supreme Court Upholds Mississippi Late-Arriving Mail-In Ballot Law. (By a 5-4 decision, they decided voting still counts.)
+ And a little reminder of who’s getting these royal powers: Supreme Court Lets $5 Million Sex Abuse Verdict Against Trump Stand.
+ NYT (Gift Article): The Major Supreme Court Decisions in 2026.
In an aging America, more elderly homeowners want to stay in their own homes for the duration. In an economically divided America, more young people are looking for good deals on a rental. Hence, a roommate opportunity. NYT (Gift Article): Older Adults Turn to ‘Golden Girls’ Housing. (Instead of Golden Girls, I’m going to opt for ‘The Office’ housing, and live out my final years making That’s what she said jokes on a beet farm.)
Aftershocks: “A 21-year-old man was pulled from rubble in La Guaira state after being trapped for 106 hours.” There are still a few miracles coming out of Venezuela, but mostly it’s grief for the victims and the missing, and a building anger toward the government. Here’s the last from BBC and The Guardian. And here is a collection of photos. Rescue and Recovery in Venezuela.
+ Driving Wedge: “It is rare that a single scientific paper shapes how people think about a challenge as daunting as climate change. But one, known as ‘Wedges,’ published 22 years ago by researchers at Princeton University, told an irresistible story. It made solving climate change seem possible, even simple.” But here’s the rub. The study was funded by BP. ProPublica: How Oil Execs Shaped a Landmark Climate Study.
+ Hit the Pine, Meet: “President Donald Trump said the Islamic Republic had requested a meeting with U.S. counterparts and that they planned to convene Tuesday in Doha, Qatar … Tehran insisted it has not agreed to meet with the U.S.” And we don’t know who to believe. AP: US and Iran pause strikes but disagree over next steps on talks.
+ Buttigieg Case: “You’ve probably heard of ‘swatting.’ It’s a cruel and dangerous kind of hoax that has started happening more frequently in recent years … Now imagine the same concept, but with Child Protective Services instead of a SWAT team. Hadn’t thought of that? Me neither, until a few days ago when a police officer and a CPS worker showed up at our home and politely asked to speak with me.” Pete Buttigieg: A Terrible Thing Happened to My Family. This is truly crazy. And NYT (Gift Article): “The former transportation secretary recounted being kept away from his 4-year-old twins overnight after an anonymous report accused him of posing a threat to them.”
+ We Had 250 Years to Prepare! “Propaganda has a way of being blissfully unconcerned with material reality, and the state fair is no exception. When I arrived Thursday morning, workers were still assembling fencing, and I spotted bits of metal on the floor in Kentucky. North Carolina had no power. At one point in the afternoon, the ‘Faith & Family’ pavilion—where the booths included the Museum of the Bible, Hillsdale College, and an evangelical-Christian stall labeled The Great Awakening—was entirely in the dark.” The Great American State Fair Isn’t Very Great. (It’s also basically empty…)
+ Puttz: “Interviews with 19 sources reveal two incidents of lewd language and unwanted advances, and the behavior that led to his departure from two additional golf clubs.” Phil Mickelson’s Long History of Misconduct.
+ A Little Bird Told Me: “A scientist who decoded the vocalizations that a bird uses to communicate has won a $100,000 prize for making progress towards a world in which humans can talk to the animals.”
“Americans tend to interpret discomfort as a failure of infrastructure, whereas Europeans seem much more willing to regard it as part of life. These contrasting views have resulted in far too much air-conditioning on one side and not remotely enough on the other.” Thomas Chatterton Williams: The Overlooked Reason Europe Doesn’t Have AC. Maybe this will convince them they need more: Heat forces yodelers at annual Swiss festival to sing in fountains.
2026-06-26 20:00:00
Training for the World Cup can be brutal. Consider Andrés Cantor, who could have a starring role in more than twenty games. Months before the competition even begins, you can find Cantor rigorously repeating his conditioning exercises, such as blowing water from a straw or pressing his fingers to his cheeks. Unlike other World Cup stars, for Cantor, the training is not about running, kicking, or heading. It’s about extending a single syllable that, for millions, has become the sound of soccer. For those keeping score, Lionel Messi has scored five goals in the World Cup. Andrés Cantor hit 12 seconds calling one of them. NYT (Gift Article): The Man Who Cried Goooooooooooal.
“The United States government has repeatedly extended these T.P.S. designations because these countries remain too dangerous to permit safe return. During this time, T.P.S. has allowed hundreds of thousands of Haitians and thousands of Syrians to live and work lawfully in the United States. But no longer.” NYT (Gift Article): This Decision Is a Slap in the Face to Immigrants Who Followed the Law. (Like many things in this era, it’s also a slap in the face to core American values.)
+ “Immigrants began making plans to sell or rent their homes, secure bank accounts and figure out thorny issues like child custody arrangements. Business owners started calculating how many days they can continue to employ workers whose legal status is set to expire. And nursing home leaders warned they would have fewer beds to offer if health aides are forced to leave the country.” WaPo (Gift Article): Nursing homes, factory owners and immigrants brace for fallout from Supreme Court ruling. “Some of those immigrants have lived in the United States for decades and said they feared being sent back to conflict-ridden homelands that they barely know and whose languages some do not speak.” (Feel safer?)
+ As I explained yesterday, this ruling and Trump’s asylum policies are as much about race as anything else. The White Elephant in the Room.
The internet lost one of its favorite sons this week with the passing of Om Malik. Om was a web pioneer, had a philosopher’s touch when writing about tech, and was one of the first people to turn blogging into a business. More importantly, he was a really nice and caring guy whose impact can be seen in tributes from the many people he helped, advised, and supported over the years. Reading these tributes brings me back to the early days of the internet when we had so much hope for the web and the creative revolution it empowered. Back then, it really was a community, and that community gathered online once more to pay tribute to one of our own. In many ways, the early internet lost its soul. Om never lost his.
What to Watch: The Bear is out with its final season on Hulu. You might want to start with the newish series prequel episode that leads nicely into the final season: Gary.
+ What to Book: Elizabeth Strout is always great, as she is in her latest novel, The Things We Never Say, which meets one man at the intersection of very public changes and extremely private secrets. Bonus, it was copyedited (as are all of her novels) by the excellent Benjamin Dreyer!
+ What to Movie: “An anxious law school dropout (Matthew Shear) stumbles into a job babysitting his psychiatrist’s three granddaughters and falls for the girls’ mother (Amanda Peet), an actress in a rocky marriage.” Fantasy Life.
Nuclear Meltdown: “A desultory, grievance-filled speech on what should have been a joyous occasion. The last-minute cancellation of a rare bipartisan bill signing in favor of yet another push for doomed, unpopular legislation. A loud confrontation with members of his own party followed by sneering remarks about some of the nation’s oldest allies. And a nonsensical accusation that, if we have it right, blames the algae-filled Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool not on his rushed renovations but on knife-wielding vandals … and maybe Barack Obama. And that was just yesterday.” Jonathan Lemire and Russell Berman in The Atlantic (Gift Article): The Meltdown. (He’s taking the country with him…)
+ Stink Flamingo: “Every day, for nearly a month running, tens of thousands of Albanians have taken to the streets, a peaceful mass movement seeking nothing less than a complete overthrow of the government.” MoJo: How Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump Sparked a Movement to Overthrow the Government of Albania. “Their vision of swank resorts in protected areas set off a ‘Flamingo Revolution.'”
+ In the Room Where Shit Happened: John Bolton, former Trump national security adviser, pleads guilty in classified documents case. (According to experts, this case had some merit. Not as much merit as the classified documents case against Trump, but some…)
+ Venezuela Quakes: “Rescue workers are overwhelmed. They are pulling people out with their bare hands.” Thousands are still missing in the search for survivors following Venezuela’s back-to-back earthquakes. Here’s the latest from BBC.
+ Out With the Good: “In recent months, President Trump, upon advice from Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, has relieved or forced the retirement of some of the finest officers that have ever served this nation.” William H. McRaven: Americans Deserve Answers From Hegseth.
+ Tricky Dick Measuring Contest: JD Vance, an admirer of Richard Nixon: “If Watergate happened tomorrow, it would be like a 12-hour news story. The idea that it would have taken down a presidency is crazy.”
+ Matchmaker, Matchmaker, Catch me a Catch: “Dropping vaccination rates have caused some infectious diseases to roar back, putting infants, the elderly and immunocompromised people at particular risk, per public health experts. Data reported by the CDC shows that non-medical exemptions for childhood vaccines have reached an all-time high. At the same time, CDC reports show whooping cough and other vaccine-preventable diseases rising — and in the case of measles, growing to outbreaks not seen in decades.” But once-solved diseases are not all that’s in the air. So is love. WaPo (Gift Article): Anti-vaxxers are coupling up on apps for ‘Unjected’ singles. (This could really save Darwin some work…)
“For the nation’s semiquincentennial, we asked Times Opinion columnists and writers to pluck a moment from this complicated history that represents the best of what this country can be. What are the accomplishments, movements and ideas that continue to inspire us? Here are 16 nominations for America’s highlight reel.” NYT (Gift Article): It’s America’s Birthday. What Are We Celebrating? (For one thing, we don’t look a day over 249.)
+ “Rob, who repairs virtually unfixable bicycles for free and gives them away in his community, is working to keep bikes out of landfills. But he’s also working on something else: feeling useful again, and figuring out what his brain is capable of after a catastrophic accident.” After a brain injury, he found purpose fixing bikes no one else would bother with.
+ Buildings May Soon Have ‘Immune Systems‘ That Fight Airborne Disease.
+ “Thirty-five nations are working together to build a massive magnetic fusion device in France to prove the feasibility of nuclear fusion as a large-scale and carbon-free source of energy.” Photos: Building the World’s Largest Fusion Reactor.
+ Dua Lipa Opening Physical Library for Banned and Censored Books.
+ Dad Gave Up His Dream Car to Raise 6 Sons. Decades Later, His Youngest Bought It Back. (Maybe my kids can find my old Walkman…)
+ “You didn’t buy it because it looked enticing. Not because of its retro pink-and-gold packaging, and certainly not because of the photos on the box, which make the muffins look like tortilla-chip-sprinkled cups of raw ground beef. You bought it because your oldest kid is about to graduate from high school, and you’re shaky on your feet. You’re lucky you didn’t pull the box off the shelf and collapse into a freezer full of toaster waffles.” Trader Joe’s Strawberry & Corn Flake Muffin & Loaf Cake Mix.
2026-06-25 20:00:00
Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. The Supreme Court majority and the Trump administration seem to be collaborating to rewrite that Emma Lazarus line to something more like: Give me your white people. Consider today’s 6-3 (of course) Supreme Court decisions that “allowed President Trump’s aggressive crackdown on immigration to move forward, permitting the administration to both expel some migrants from the country and to turn away others at the southern border.” The ruling that allows Trump to remove Temporary Legal Status “clears a path for the potential deportation of 350,000 Haitians.” NYT (Gift Article): Supreme Court Expands Trump’s Power Over Immigration. In her dissent, Justice Elena Kagan referred to Trump’s constant derogatory comments about Haitian immigrants: “The statements fairly shout, in their racial undertones and overtones alike, that race entered into the president’s resolve to remove Haitians from this country.” Race isn’t just a factor in who the president (and let’s be honest, the SCOTUS majority) wants out of the country, it’s also the key factor in who is getting in. Mojo: US Accepts Only White Refugees For Sixth Consecutive Month. And from the NYT (Gift Article): How Trump Turned America’s Refugee Program Into a Pathway for White People.
In other SCOTUS decisions announced today, the Court Rejected a Lawsuit Alleging Roundup Weedkiller Caused Cancer and overturned a Hawaii gun law “that barred carrying concealed weapons without permission onto private property open to the public.”
+ Here’s a look at The Major Supreme Court Decisions in 2026.
+ Few SCOTUS decisions have had as big an impact on modern America as Citizens United. We’re seeing that impact play out bigly as we approach the midterms. WaPo (Gift Article): Meet the megadonors pouring more than $1.3 billion into the 2026 election.
Americans who travel to Europe and complain about the shortage of AC and the lack of ice in their beverages might be relieved to learn that even the French are starting to come around. But it wasn’t your complaining that convinced them. “A summer escape to Paris, at least in the American mind, evokes a certain set of images: quiet strolls along the canals, long hours in bookstores and museums, a pleasant park bench, a glass of wine. Those pleasures are now contending with one of the most brutal and dangerous heat waves that Europe has faced in decades, a muggy, enervating stretch of weather that has forced millions of people across Europe, many of them in homes without air-conditioning and with few options for refuge, to endure triple-digit temperatures.” The Atlantic (Gift Article): Perhaps France Should Reconsider AC. (The tricky part is that more AC causes more climate change which causes the need for more AC, and so on…)
This headline probably won’t surprise you much: FIFA clashes with Iran, Egypt over rainbow symbols at World Cup Pride Match, considering the two countries playing the game criminalize homosexuality. But you might be surprised that we have a Pride controversy in San Francisco. It started when four Giants pitchers responded to Pride Night by writing Bible verses on their caps. And it’s only gotten worse from there as the Giants organization has utterly failed to address the situation for their inclusive fanbase in a city where the rainbow flag was first unfurled on this day in 1978. “The team’s president of baseball operations and face of the franchise refused to comment on the Pride Night fallout, which was the result of three pitchers adding a Bible verse to their Pride cap and another choosing not to wear the hat for the June 12 game. Posey declined to speak about his own experience as a member of the team that has celebrated and recognized the gay community for the past 32 years.” Ann Killion: Buster Posey didn’t just fail to meet the moment, he made Giants’ Pride controversy worse. There’s a decent chance Posey and other Giants brass are covering their ass to avoid the wrath of Trump’s justice department. But these fraught times are precisely the reason why it’s so important that leaders, especially in San Francisco, stand up for inclusivity and decency. I’m a season ticket holder and an addicted fan, and I turn the channel whenever one of the Giants’ Phobic Four takes the mound, and I know others who have turned off the Giants altogether. The team can’t ignore the fans and the Pride Day controversy. It may be your team, but it’s our town.
Venezuela Quakes: “At least 188 people were killed and more than 1,500 injured in back-to-back quakes on Wednesday, the president of Venezuela’s national assembly said. The toll from the quakes, which struck the country’s populous northern states, was virtually certain to rise as rescuers began to reach the hardest-hit areas.” Here’s the latest on the earthquakes that hit Venezuela. And from The Guardian: Some of the scenes of destruction.
+ Post Dobbs: “You might have guessed that when more than a dozen states banned abortion, there would be fewer abortions happening in those states and that the overall number of abortions would go down. That’s not what has happened.” 4 surprising things to know about abortion in America since Dobbs.
+ A Trip Up Memory Lane: Apple is so big and so powerful that they can usually hold off trends like higher memory prices. Not this time. “Apple Inc. shares fell after it raised prices of all Macs, iPads, home devices and the Vision Pro on Thursday, seeking to offset cost hikes caused by an unprecedented shortage of memory chips and storage … An Apple spokesperson said that ‘the rapid expansion of AI data centers has created an extraordinary surge in demand for memory and storage’ and that the company has ‘never seen a component price increase this much, this quickly.'”
+ For Whom the Toll Tolls: “The Islamic Republic estimates that charging for security, safety and environmental services in the strait would bring in $40 billion a year in revenue for states involved, according to officials familiar with the matter. The idea, if implemented, would give Tehran cash flow and control that it didn’t command before the war.” WSJ (Gift Article): Iran Estimates $40 Billion Windfall From Reopening Hormuz With Gulf States. Remember, nothing about the new deal that emerges can be assessed without comparing it to the deal Trump foolishly tore up. Here’s some background on that in a good interview of one of the people who negotiated it, John Kerry.
+ OMG: “Texas is on the verge of passing a sweeping, new state book list, which will establish for the first time a common set of books that millions of students across the state must read, including excerpts from the Bible.” NYT (Gift Article): Texas Public School Students May Soon Be Required to Read the Bible.
+ The Grass Got Greener: “I’ve been working on a golf book for the past two years, and I can tell you the phone-app wrecking of the sport is getting worse. Jabronis have realized they can’t do anything at an NFL or NBA game to improve their chances of cashing in, but they sure can at a golf tournament, where the traditional cocoon of silence before a shot is just waiting to be trashed.” Rick Reilly: Heckling from app-wielding bettors is wrecking golf. The age of betting on everything is going to impact more than just golf.
“Lebowski used to stand out because he didn’t hold a steady job. Today, that makes him mainstream. Some 10% of California adults are unemployed or underemployed, according to the Public Policy Institute of California. On top of that, another 11% of the state’s workforce is primarily self-employed, and nearly two-thirds do independent contracting or own unincorporated businesses, like the Dude.” The Big Lebowskization of California. “Aging. Jobless. Drinking Canned White Russians and Smoking Pot. Golden State Residents Resemble the Dude.” (There’s really no need to get personal…)