2026-11-06 20:00:00
Since the midterms were largely about affordability and fairness, and featured a rejection of the nonstop, unregulated data center sprawl, it may be tempting for some to celebrate the idea that the hubristic AI industry finally got theirs. But they don’t get theirs without you getting yours. The rising tide of AI may not have lifted all boats, but the draining of economic enthusiasm around that industry could sink us all. It’s the AI economy, stupid. AI drives big tech and together they drive the entire economy. Stocks, bonds, credit markets, hedge funds, bank lending, stock portfolios, your retirement account, investments, venture capital … no part of our financial system, from Wall Street to Main Street to 21 Jump Street, would escape a bubble burst unscathed. “Any downturn in the AI industry, either in the buildout of its infrastructure or the valuations of its stocks, will reverberate far beyond Silicon Valley. Technology companies have dominated the stock market for years, but artificial intelligence has pushed the concentration to new heights. Tech now accounts for nearly half the value of the benchmark S&P 500 Index.” Bloomberg (Gift Article): AI Has Taken Over Every Corner of the Market.
This won’t come as a big surprise, but Trump is responding to the midterms by being even worse. Trump names Stephen Miller his new chief of staff, replacing Susie Wiles. (I can think of no better person to be the face of the Magapocalypse.) The Dems were sure that the midterms showed America couldn’t hate Trump any more than they do right now. Trump is out to prove them wrong.
+ Trump is going full speed ahead with pushing all the stuff that voters hated. Federal judge temporarily halts building work on Trump’s triumphal arch. (The Trump Arch is such a sick and stupid idea. But an Obama Arch might be nice…)
A mathematician, a microbiologist and a chemical engineer walk into an election. And all of them walked out as members of Congress. Maybe, just maybe, stupidity (both obviously faux and very real) is out of vogue in DC. These Newly Elected Lawmakers Know Something Trump Doesn’t: Science. It’s gonna be a long road back, folks. “Thousands of experts have left agencies like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Department of Health and Human Services, now led by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a vaccine skeptic whose Make America Healthy Again, or MAHA, movement has been accused of peddling junk science.” Plus, A ‘STEM wave’: Democratic doctors, scientists win record number of seats in midterms.
+ We better hurry. Stupid is as stupid does. US Measles Cases Top 5,000 for the First Time Since the 1990s.
What to Doc: Eugene Levy, John Candy, Catherine O’Hara, Martin Short, Rick Moranis … SCTV was a cult favorite that introduced a generation of mainstream stars. On Netflix, check out SCTV: The Greatest Show You’ve Never Heard Of.
+ What to Book: My local sports radio station’s weekly interview with Warriors coach Steve Kerr is now sponsored by the Contra Costa Library (which is about all you need to know about the current economics of radio). Kerr was recently asked for a book rec (which I took and enjoyed). Check out (in general, or even from the Conta Costa Library) Liz Moore’s The God of the Woods, in which a teenager vanishes from her Adirondack summer camp. (And yes, they’re already filming the Netflix version…)
Killing the Death Penalty: “State-sanctioned killing is incompatible with California’s values, undermines the foundations of our legal system and diminishes each of us. I know we cannot execute people in our imperfect legal system and remain true to our core values, first among them justice and human decency.” Gavin Newsom Commutes the Sentences of California’s 548 Death Row Inmates. It’s worth noting that California hasn’t executed anyone on death row since 2006. So this move won’t necessarily have a significant, tangible impact, but it will certainly have a political impact.
+ At the Center of It All: “The Trump administration has likened the need to build out the nation’s artificial intelligence infrastructure to the Manhattan Project, the World War II effort that produced the world’s first atomic bomb.” If it results in a few new full-floor condos in Manhattan, all the better. ProPublica: Trump Official Who Wants Data Centers on Public Lands Has Tens of Millions Invested in AI Industry. Plus, Trump doubles down on data centers.
+ A Dollar Sign of Things to Come: “Whether prediction markets can accurately anticipate election results has become a key question after the midterms. An analysis by The New York Times, using statistical methods, found that for most of the midterm race, prediction markets performed no better than election forecasts, which produce odds using polling and other indicators instead of betting activity. But as Election Day neared, prediction markets performed better as forecasts and polling became stale.” How Accurate Were Prediction Markets at Picking Midterm Winners? (Aren’t most of the people betting on elections on the prediction markets using traditional election forecasters as their guide? I mean, they’re not just betting on a hunch.)
+ Strawberry Short Take: “Strawberry growers in Ventura County grossed around $807.8 million last year, but it cost them more than $815 million to grow the strawberries.” Major strawberry grower for Driscoll’s calls it quits in coastal California.
+ You Thought Your Fill Up Was Expensive: “After Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthi rebels attacked Saudi Arabian oil tankers in the Red Sea and seized territory commanding the strategic Bab al-Mandeb chokepoint, the kingdom reached out to the group to see what it would take to arrive at a negotiated halt to the hostilities. The answer it got back: $51 billion.”
+ On Brand: “It was a reflection on the warm embrace Brand, a comedian and actor, has received from prominent Trump administration officials and other leaders in Kennedy’s ‘Make America Healthy Again’ (Maha) movement, where Brand has used his star status to criticize vaccines and vaccine mandates.” Weeks before rape conviction, Russell Brand was featured speaker for Maha group allied with RFK Jr. (Well, it’s not exactly like MAGA is anti-rape…)
+ A Net Loss: Salon, the internet’s oldest general interest publication, shuts down after 31 years.
+ Know When to Hold ‘Em: “We’re in the era of the ultralong movie. Some of this year’s biggest films, including ‘The Odyssey’ and ‘Avengers: Doomsday,’ run nearly three hours. With no intermissions, viewers have to hold it or risk missing crucial moments. They’re flocking to RunPee, an app that recommends the best times for bathroom breaks with synopses of what they’ve missed.” Hollywood’s New Superhero Is the Guy Who Tells Moviegoers When to Pee.
“She did not die because her midwife used a low-cost, low-tech intervention that was pioneered here and in other maternity wards in some of Africa’s poorest places, and that is now saving lives across the continent.” An 80-Cent Plastic Pouch Is Saving Thousands of Women From Dying in Childbirth.
+ US added 165,000 jobs in October, trouncing expectations.
+ There’s a new feeling in America as kindness drives out cruelty (with a little nudge from gas prices…)
+ Yosemite visitors join forces to perform extraordinary rescue on Half Dome.
+ Scott Colom Flips Forrest County, Named for Ku Klux Klan Founder. (It sure looks like he’s gonna flip the whole state…)
+ “The Golden State Valkyries’ championship parade, like almost everything the team has done in its brief lifetime, felt flawless, unique and perfectly Bay Area. A uniting, inclusive, delightful bolt of energy.” (Those are going around this week…)
+ In a mental, physical and logistical feat, William Goodge ran a marathon distance in all 50 states in 22 days, 17 hours, 16 minutes and 34 seconds.
+ Rescuers save roe deer trapped in ice in Russia’s Far East
+ No more Cybertrucks; Musk moves on from the angular metallic flop. (I view this as a road beautification project.)
+ Jesse Welles, a modern-day protest singer, sings about the midterms.
2026-11-05 20:00:00
I was recently visiting Harvard Square, where I was looking forward to showing my daughter around. But it quickly became clear that she would be the one giving me the tour (even though she had never been there before). Between social media and the ubiquity of chains, she knew all the places where we should look, eat, and drink, and thanks to her superior GPS skills, I ended up following her from place to place. My daughter had never been to this specific neighborhood. But she had definitely been there and done that. While standing on some street in some city, the Dutch Australian data scientist Lauren Leek explained the feeling: “What we see in front of us used to be culturally diverse. Now it is culturally generic. Most of what we see is the big chains we see everywhere. It creates a sense of placelessness. We could be anywhere.” NYT (Gift Article): Why Does Culture Feel So Monotonous? A Walking Tour Reveals the Math. “Leek recently posted a Substack article, with the headline ‘Temperature Zero for Culture: Why Everything Is Starting to Look the Same,’ that analyzed the ‘flattening’ effect that predictive algorithms have had on music, movies, hospitality and almost every aspect of today’s consumer culture … Taking 640 shopping streets in London as a test case, Leek used advanced data-analysis tools to examine how predictive algorithms have helped create what she calls a homogeneous ‘monoculture’ in which, she writes in her Substack post, ‘we lose the ability to tell the difference between what people wanted and what the system made easy to want.'” (I’m thinking of taking my daughter back to the street where I grew up. I could use a tour guide.)
The heart wants what the heart wants. And it wanted something very different deep in the heart of Texas. The adage that everything is bigger in Texas definitely held up during Tuesday’s election, when an epic blue wave swept across the state and proved (in a shocking manner) that those who assumed that Texas would be forever red were all hat and no cattle. Consider that James Talarico “got 4,397,474 votes in early voting—more than the 4,249,373 votes that his Republican opponent, Texas Attorney General James Paxton, received overall.” From Rachel Monroe in The New Yorker: The Night That Texas’s Seemingly Unchangeable Republican Identity Vanished. “Last night, I drank tequila and exchanged stunned, giddy texts with friends back home, as it became increasingly clear that something extraordinary was happening. Paxton and Abbott were losing, but so was Dan Patrick, the lieutenant governor, who fought to install the Ten Commandments in every public-school classroom in the state; and Don Huffines, the comptroller, who has equated abortion with murder; and Bo French, the candidate for railroad commissioner, who once asked on X whether Muslims or Jews were a bigger threat to the country. The whole statewide G.O.P. apparatus—men who felt so secure in their power that they had nearly persuaded me to accept their inevitability—was teetering. Before yesterday, Texas had not elected a Democrat to statewide office in thirty-two years; now, nearly every key position will be held by a Democrat.” (I can’t wait to see how the characters on Landman react to all of this.)
+ “Elon Musk warned that Talarico would usher in the end of the American experiment. Ted Cruz said that “if Texas falls, everything changes.” Texas has fallen now, in almost every conceivable way. Gina Hinojosa defeated three-term Gov. Greg Abbott. Democrats are poised to flip all 17 statewide offices that were on the ballot and take control of the Texas House of Representatives for the first time since 2002. They could net one seat in Congress from a map Republicans just redrew to flip five. Democrats went into Election Day cautiously optimistic. They ended it with the single most shocking set of results, at scale, that I have seen in my lifetime.” Tim Murphy in MoJo: The Texas Miracle.
+ Some of the changes will be immediate and local: “Less than 24 hours after a historic sweep of Texas’ statewide elected offices by Democrats, the state’s attorney general-elect Nathan Johnson said Tuesday he will not continue Ken Paxton’s practice of suing doctors in other states for sending abortion medication to patients here.” Some of them will be enduring and widespread. Vox (Gift Article): Democrats just seized one of the Republican Party’s most powerful weapons. “For years, Texas was the locus of the Republican Party’s quest to shape policy through litigation, especially during Democratic presidencies when Republicans could not use the US Department of Justice to bring cases.” That just changed, bigly.
“The tool collects vast quantities of location data from smartphones via commonly used weather, gaming, email and religious apps. It can build a detailed picture of where a smartphone has been over the past 12 months, and update the data hourly, showing the movements of people on a near real-time basis. Law enforcement officers can use Webloc to zero in on a map and look at all phones that were present at a specific place and time, analyzing ‘billions of location data points.’ … The Supreme Court ruled in 2018 that law enforcement agencies must obtain a warrant from a judge to obtain location data from telecommunications companies. But the Justice Department has since argued that the principle does not apply to location data that agencies purchase from commercial sources, and Webloc users now include US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, at least two branches of the US military, and more than a dozen American police forces.” Bloomberg (Gift Article): Ads in Popular Apps Give Police a Powerful Tool to Spy on Users.
“The Korean government has a K-pop contract template that guarantees the right to education and to physical and mental health. The NewJeans contracts stripped away that language. The contracts banned such behavior as having an ‘insincere attitude,’ entering ‘inappropriate romantic relationships’ or criticizing the record label. The agreements included steep exit clauses and allowed the label to sell NewJeans music after the end of the deal, while slashing payments to the band. And it gave the label the right to use A.I.-generated NewJeans voices indefinitely.” NYT (Gift Article): Secret Deals Reveal K-Pop’s Firm Grip on a Top Girl Group.
Blunt and Center: WSJ (Gift Article): “Americans’ vote for candidates and ballot measures to ban or slow data-center development could rein in AI’s rapid growth and become a big business problem for the companies on the edge of technological progress. It also threatens to hobble an AI boom powering the U.S. economy.” (Data center contempt is part of a broader distrust of AI, specifically, and big tech more broadly. Election results aside, tech companies have to address these issues.) Meanwhile, the day after the election, the market soared. The day after that, things turned upside down.
+ JD’s Just Desserts: JD Vance is trying to save someone from the blue wave: JD Vance. “The vice president and 2028 hopeful is desperately trying to evade responsibility for the GOP’s bloodbath this week—by laying all the blame on his boss.” (To establish himself as the GOP frontrunner in 2028, JD Vance has to do two things: One, distance himself from Trump. Two, stop being a charisma-free, hateable, evil, boring, awful in every way, piece of garbage loser who is immediately despised by all who encounter him. It should be interesting to watch.)
+ MelaNEO: Is She the One? “Speaking at the White House, the first lady expressed hope that the six-day ceasefire around Oleshky would inspire a peace ‘more enduring than a temporary ceasefire,’ before praising the ‘highly cooperative’ Russian and Ukrainian leaders for helping bring about the pause.” Is Melania now in charge of peace talks? Does her husband know? Last we checked, he was back in the ballroom. “Now envision chandeliers all over.”
+ The Old College Trial: “If passed by enough states, the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact would effectively nullify the Electoral College and, with it, the possibility of a candidate being elected president without winning the popular vote. Since the compact was introduced in 2006, 19 states have passed it, agreeing to assign their electoral votes to whichever candidate wins the national popular vote. That amounts to 222 of the 270 electoral votes that a candidate needs to win the presidential election.” Democrats Win Enough Seats Nationwide to End Electoral College.
+ Bomb Threats: Hoax bomb threats target European airlines and airports for the second time in a week. “Flights to Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, France, Italy, Poland and Romania were affected. An Aer Lingus plane from Dublin to Rome was diverted to an air base in France and Italian fighter jets escorted Finnair’s Helsinki-Rome flight.”
+ On Brand: Russell Brand has been found guilty of rape and sexual assault. The judge told Brand the consequence of the verdicts was a ‘significant custodial term.’ Here’s the latest from The Times.
+ LA Mode: “Raman, 45, who is part of the Democratic Socialists of America, unseated Bass, a former six-term congresswoman and a fixture of California’s political scene for decades. The result means three major cities will be led by democratic socialists, with Raman joining New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Janeese Lewis George, who won the mayor’s race in Washington, D.C., this week.” Nithya Raman defeats Karen Bass in the Los Angeles mayor’s race.
+ LIV and Let Die: “Even as LIV Golf circled the drain in bankruptcy court, people around the league insisted that it had the means and vision to turn around the troubled outfit. Just last week, two-time major champion Bryson DeChambeau, LIV’s most popular player, appeared on a podcast saying he was hopeful it could live forever.” (Or, maybe not.) LIV Golf Is Finished After Last-Ditch Revival Efforts Fail.
Ever wonder what all those low-orbit satellites would look like if you could capture them in a photo? Well, someone did it. And while it makes a glorious image, it doesn’t paint a pretty picture. A Stunning Image of Our Satellite-Choked Night Skies.
2026-11-04 20:00:00
You’d be forgiven for assuming I used AI to write this post. After years of suffering from electile dysfunction, I’m hardly trained in the art of writing positive political stories. But I’m not sure AI could handle this task either. Even after solving for some of the most convoluted equations, it’s not clear that we have enough data center number-crunching computing power online to fully measure the scope of the blue wave that Democrats just surfed from the redwood forest to the Reflecting Pool waters. Even some of the deepest red districts were somehow left tangled up in blue, as the Dems took the House and Senate by margins, and in places, that stunned even the most optimistic prognosticators. For two years, the traditional corporations didn’t stand up for democracy. Big tech didn’t stand up for democracy. The powerful didn’t stand up for democracy. The people stood. Stood up against corruption, cruelty, cowardice and cluelessness, in a complete repudiation of Trumpism; one so sweeping that even the election denier in chief has to accept the results. So to those who stood — from the streets of Minneapolis to courtrooms across America to campaign war rooms to voting lines in towns where the unthinkable was achieved — I mean it when I say: Thank you for your attention to this matter.
+ Knock, Knock. Blue’s there. That’s it. That’s the whole joke. The shift in voting patterns was so dramatic, it’s all you need. NYT (Gift Article): How Americans Voted in 2026. (The exit polls suggested people knew dumb had a b at the end.)
+ “Trump has been forced to face his political mortality. He asked voters to make these midterm elections a referendum on him, to imagine that his name was on the ballot. They listened—and then rejected him. It is a stunning, widespread rebuke.” Jonathan Lemire in The Atlantic (Gift Article): Repudiation. And from Helen Lewis in The Atlantic (Gift Article): A Night of Pure Trumpenfreude. “In the end, not even Jon Husted’s phenomenal ass was enough to save the Republicans. Nor Elon Musk’s $500 million in campaign donations. Nor those helpful visual aids showing the great improvement in the caulking of the Reflecting Pool.” (Trump is still dangerous as hell, but less so, and there’s electoral light at the end of the tunnel.)
+ “The resurgence penetrated states long thought of as bedrocks of conservatism, with Democrats pulling off unexpected upsets in Kansas and South Carolina and clinching Texas, which until Tuesday had been the nation’s most populous conservative state and a symbolic center for the Republican Party.” The 7 States That Flipped and Broke Republican Control of the Senate. And it wasn’t just the House and Senate. Republican Implosion Flips State Control to Unlikely Democrats. Plus, Ten historic firsts: the winning US midterm candidates making waves.
+ As the smoke clears, let the extremely small finger pointing begin. After Midterm Drubbing, Trump and Republicans Start Pointing Fingers. JD Vance has already jumped ship in an effort to distance himself from the stain of Trumpism. But JD, you are the stain. WaPo (Gift Article): Vance blames Republicans’ midterm losses on Iran war, cost of living.
+ After telling voters to “pretend I’m on the ballot” at least 47 times, Trump is trying to pretend this wasn’t about him. “I wasn’t on the ticket, and because I wasn’t on the ticket, we couldn’t get enough people out to vote.” Not even Natalie Harp’s printer believes that at this point. I guess that’s why they call it the blues…
While Texas is hardly the reddest place to go blue, they felt the dramatic voting shift there in Texas-sized proportions. “Texas’ governor, lieutenant governor, attorney general and every other statewide candidate fell, upending the state’s political power structure in one night.” Texas Tribune: Democrats seize power in Texas, ending decades of GOP dominance. This shellacking follows years of particularly cruel and occasionally tragic attacks on women’s health. Let’s hope those policies change as quickly as the political winds they stirred.
+ And if Texas leans blue in 2028, it changes everything.
“Here are a few things $474 million can buy: roughly 77 million Big Macs, about 12,814 Tesla Model 3s, or approximately 2,724 years of a U.S. senator’s average salary. If you’re Elon Musk, it could also buy you one deeply disappointing evening in November.” $500 Million Bought Elon Nothing. (It also basically amounts to nothing for him.)
+ “Elon Musk spent nearly $500 million supporting Republican candidates in the midterm elections, especially in his home state of Texas. After Democrats won sweeping victories in the midterm elections, gaining control of both houses of Congress and capturing other important state races, shares of SpaceX and Tesla, which are both run by Mr. Musk, fell sharply on Wednesday.” Elon lost big. But I wouldn’t worry about him. The money he spent was a rounding error. There’s a bigger story here, though. We’ve learned that money alone, especially when it comes from a largely despised source, doesn’t win elections. Thankfully, neither does gerrymandering.
“What is your favorite way to spend an evening? … Last year, when more than 2,000 survey participants answered this open-ended query, many of them described a very different kind of scene: a night at home, cozied up with family. When researchers analyzed the long answers, they found that 43 percent of respondents mentioned time with family or a romantic partner—the most common activity, tied with watching a TV show.” (This was exactly how my wife and I spent our evenings, until we watched all of TV. Now we’re in a holding pattern.) The Socializing That’s Replacing Friend Time.
Data Crunching: “Combining Hinojosa’s victory with those of other Democrats who won gubernatorial races from Georgia to Ohio and Pennsylvania could leave half of proposed AI data center additions across the US vulnerable to stricter local scrutiny and pushback. All of them made more aggressive data center regulation a central part of their campaigns.” Bloomberg (Gift Article): AI Data Center Boom Set for Upheaval After US Election Rout. And from The Atlantic: Americans Really Don’t Like Data Centers.
+ Down for a Count? There are still many races in play. Democrat Scott Colom leads the Mississippi Senate race by 43 votes against Republican Cindy Hyde-Smith. (Colom having a chance in Mississippi was on exactly no one’s bingo card.) Plus, Navy admiral fired by Hegseth flips Mace’s South Carolina seat. By the time she’s sworn in for her job, he may be out of his.
+ Dow for a Count? The market seems to like the election results. Bigly.
+ Out for Blood: “A cyberattack on several blood banks sought to raise temperatures to extremely high levels but was thwarted before it could do any damage to blood products or samples, French authorities said.” I covered this last week. AI-powered hackers are out to be destructive just to destroy things. Teach a Man to Phish.
+ A Colonel of Truth? “Thanat Tantinam, a colorectal surgeon in Thailand, knows a lot of things from his medical training, like the ins and outs of the human digestive system, or bowel cancer rates. But also: Never eat Kentucky Fried Chicken at work. Since he was a medical student, around a decade ago, the American fast food franchise has been the subject of an odd superstition among Thai doctors, many of whom believe that eating its chicken at work will lead to intolerably busy shifts.” NYT (Gift Article): Why Doctors in Thailand Fear KFC.
Let’s take a brief break from politics and spend the five minute respite between political texts about the 2026 election and political texts about the 2028 election with a look at this year’s Winners of the 2026 Good Dog Photo Contest.
2026-11-03 20:00:00
Few have done as good a job as Ken Burns when it comes to chronicling the American story. I really hope his preview of the story of these midterms plays out as he envisions. “I’m optimistic that the American people recognize that our democratic institutions and sense of decency can bring us together. We have come back from crises before. We were more divided than we are today during the Revolution, the Civil War, Reconstruction and Vietnam. For 250 years, our country has prevailed in fits and starts, forging achievements, however imperfect, related to race and equality in American life.” NYT (Gift Article): Ken Burns: Why I’m Optimistic About the Midterms. To the extent I’m capable of the disposition, I share some of Ken Burns optimism. But I’m not optimistic because I think the voters who put Trump in office suddenly care much about our democracy or our institutions. My optimism around the midterms is driven less by high ideals and more by high gas prices, tariff-fueled inflation, the successful messaging to effort to connect the economic woes of the average American to the corruption of the first family, an ill-conceived, poorly executed, and unpopular war, and a couldn’t be worse if he tried campaign season that ended with the president discussing algae in front of the Reflecting Pool — or as Susan Glasser put it, “a closing speech on Monday afternoon which channelled that same Marie Antoinette vibe—if, that is, the condemned queen had been a disoriented octogenarian who fancied herself an expert on granite.” Burns closes his piece with this: “Most midterm elections are seen as referendums on the policies of the president. This one is no different. But there’s something more fundamental at stake here, beyond policy differences. This election is about the people — who are empowered to check our chief executive — and the candidates running for Congress, who either have sworn an oath to the Constitution or hope to do so. Whether they are prepared to honor their oath should matter enormously to everyone who values the idea of us — the idea of America.” Of course, I agree. But, at this point, I’ll settle for a midterm win by any means, and for whatever reason, necessary. In the meantime, I’ll keep hoping that Americans rediscover the idea of America. But, just in case, I’ll also keep hoping my industrial-sized storage drum of Pepto Bismol arrives before the returns start pouring in.
+ “Studies have found a significantly higher chance of arrhythmias in the weeks just before and after elections, and an increased rate of hospitalizations for heart attacks right after voting day.” How Election Day can affect your heart. (I’d advise you to avoid the stress and just not watch any of the breathless cable news coverage of the early results. But that would be futile. The heart wants what the heart wants.) NYT (Gift Article): A Guide to What We’ll Know on Election Night, Hour by Hour.
+ The surest prediction I’ve read comes from David Frum in The Atlantic (Gift Article): If the Dems take Congress, Things Are Going to Get Ugly. “He will get angrier, noisier, and crazier. He doesn’t care about the future of his party. He doesn’t care about the future of the country. He will want to punish a nation that, in his view, has ungratefully rejected him. Corruptly obtained money never feels secure. Trump, his children, and his inner group of close friends and sycophants most enriched in the past two years have a lot to worry about as the minutes of Trump’s presidency tick down. The worst is yet to come.” (In retrospect, that would have been a perfect tagline for this newsletter…)
+ As I mentioned yesterday, I’ve been too damaged to make predictions, even in an election that seems as clear as this one. “For years, I’ve been backed up, aching, and swollen with a prolonged case of blue ballots. No one wants to feel the release of a pent-up blue surge that sprays across an election map more than I do. While things seem promising enough to expect a climax that looks like a Diet Coked-up Steve Kornacki being fired out of a T-shirt cannon, I’m not willing to make any predictions.” Blue Ballots: What to Expect When You’re Electing.
“By the time the three hikers called for help from a rocky face on Mount Shasta in Northern California, they’d made a series of bad decisions. They didn’t bring enough food, and they’d overestimated their fitness. Instead of turning back in late afternoon when they hadn’t yet reached the top, they summited at 7:30 p.m. and had to descend in the dark. Their lack of preparation and poor planning, as they admitted later, came partly from relying on Google’s artificial intelligence chatbot Gemini. By morning, they were lost on a gnarly part of the mountain.” HighCountryNews: AI gets people into trouble in the backcountry. “I think they kind of turned their brains off.” (That’s definitely going around these days…)
+ “We are, moment by moment, doing less sensing, navigating, remembering, walking, choosing, and attending.” Aeon: Deskilling the body.
“Google announced Tuesday that early next year it would turn off artificial intelligence tools in its popular software for K-12 students, unless school administrators explicitly choose to make such tools available. Executives at the tech giant said they wanted to be responsive to educators and parents who have asked for more control in how children interact with A.I. But there is a catch: Schools that choose to restrict A.I. entirely will also lose access to Google search.” This is yet another example of the power and influence of big tech (and a reminder of how they use it). It’s also something that will probably be a non-issue soon, as what was once known as Google search is being replaced by AI.
“Edward Freytag doesn’t remember what happened on that sunny afternoon in July five years ago. But something — a deer, perhaps? — caused him to lose control of his motorcycle on a gentle mountain curve near Murfreesboro, Tenn. When one of his riding buddies found him 30 feet away from his bike, on the shoulder of the road, his mouth was packed with grass and dirt. He had fractured 11 bones. His helmet had a finger-size dent on the front-left side, and his brain had been badly bruised. When he woke up in the hospital, he was disoriented, experiencing short-term memory loss and having trouble finding words. But doctors told his wife, Joanna, that the prognosis was good. Edward, a 66-year-old middle school music teacher, would probably make a full recovery in three to six months. As his brain healed over the next six months, however, something remarkable happened, something that would land Edward in the annals of neuroscience case history.” NYT Mag (Gift Article): The Brain Injury That Made Edward Freytag a Musical Genius.
Are We Having Fund Yet? “President Donald Trump said Tuesday that he has made a deal with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for the United States to stop sending $4 billion in aid annually to Israel. It was not immediately clear which exact funding Trump meant.” (To us, or him.) Prepare for a new deal that will include graft.
+ Stand Up for Comedy: “Where were you when the A.I. revolution came for stand-up comedy? I was looking at my phone this month when all of a sudden my social media scrolls filled with teasingly seductive female comedians in front of brick walls, drawing hundreds of thousands of followers through flirty onstage punchlines. If the jokes of these Stepford stand-ups, packed into crop tops and body suits, seemed familiar, that’s because they were stolen.” Invasion of the Sexy A.I. Joke Thieves. (If this tech comes after news puns, I’m history.)
+ Virtual Insanity: “The Texas Legislature gave virtual schools a tremendous boost last year when it mandated that virtual schools get the same per-pupil funding as their brick-and-mortar counterparts. That’s despite their lacking the physical plants, maintenance staff and bus fleets, and many of the extracurriculars, that make up a big chunk of the costs of a neighborhood school. Stride doesn’t need to put unspent money back into its schools as traditional public schools would. That gives the company more for things such as advertising and executive compensation — and for a healthy operating profit, about $450 million across the whole company in the most recent academic year.” Bloomberg (Gift Article): Texas Pays Online School Empire For Kids Who Don’t Show Up.
+ Big Old Jet Onliner: “Many of their engines haven’t been fired up for years. But America’s soaring demand for electricity to power data centers is bringing them back to life. Several companies are racing to strip the engines out of old aircraft to convert them into electrical generators. And data centers, desperate for power, are snapping them up.” Old, Polluting Jet Engines Are Being Scavenged to Power Data Centers. (Claude, please tell me you didn’t come up with this idea…)
+ Do Harm? A West Point cadet drugged his girlfriend to force an unwanted abortion. Then he went to grad school. “He wrote … that he was interested in ‘the intersection of emergency medicine, addiction and public health’ and aimed to become a physician.”
+ Try Cycle: “What Ridwell will rid you of is diverse: Orange prescription bottles become glasses frames, while bike inner tubes are made into wallets. Hard-to-recycle plastics, electronics, lightbulbs, batteries and even old pickleballs are accepted.” WaPo (Gift Article): One company promises to recycle almost everything. I gave it a try.
+ Thrones and Drones: WSJ (Gift Article): The Wild Rise of a Trump-Backed Drone Company. “Assembled from $5.7 million in assets, Powerus has grown within months into a $300 million enterprise, led by an unlikely cast of characters that includes a public golf-course operator in Florida; a sushi restaurateur; a Democratic donor with a New York cleaning business; and a former child-modeling talent scout who has settled claims of defrauding parents.” Oh, and of course, they have some likely investors: Eric and Don Jr.
“The first time Jarell Carter entered a Pilates studio, he was expecting an easy workout. A fitness influencer and a former N.F.L. athlete, Mr. Carter is able to squat more than 500 pounds. He bench-presses more than 400. But less than 20 minutes into his first Pilates session, his “legs were shaking uncontrollably,” he said. ‘I was struggling and sweating profusely,’ he added. ‘Making noises that I just couldn’t control. I was just trying to hold it together.’ His first coherent thought? ‘Whoever created Pilates hates men.'” The Pilates Bros Have Arrived. I’ve been doing pilates 3 times a week with a teacher my wife and I refer to as The Monster. As soon as I have a coherent thought, I will share it here.
+ A potato that tastes like roast chicken? (But I ordered the chicken that tastes like fries…)
2026-11-02 20:00:00
I’ve been backed up, aching, and swollen with a prolonged case of blue ballots for years. No one wants to feel the release of a pent-up blue surge that sprays across an election map more than I do. While things seem promising enough to expect a climax that looks like a Diet Coked-up Steve Kornacki being fired out of a T-shirt cannon, I’m not willing to make any predictions. I’ve spent too many election nights, alienated from my fellow Americans, and moaning in the fetal position. Yes, yes, I know that the polls keep looking better and better for Dems. We’ve been told for weeks that the MAGA faithful have been eyeing the exits. I’ve seen Trump’s approval slip with each bizarre rally monologue, the latest ones oddly fixated on the posteriors of both women and men (yes, he’s an Ass Man in addition to being an Ass, Man). And it doesn’t scream confidence that Trump has already announced plans to issue pardons to Elon Musk and others, or that he’s come up with a self-declared moniker: Mr. Veto. And it seems like a bad, self-defeating sign that Trump’s final midterm pitch is being held in front of the Reflecting Pool — even DNC headquarters would have been a better choice of venue. But I’m worried. I’m worried because the American voter has let us down in the past. I’m worried about what Trump will try to do before and during the election, and I’m especially worried about the Jan 6-style malfeasance and subversion that the known insurrectionist and his band of sycophantic, dictator-tot, co-conspirators will pull after the election. But if ever there were a person and a party that deserved to be covered in the shame of an oppositional tsunami, it’s these guys. Come on, America. If you don’t blow it, I finally can.
+ Peter Wehner channels my concerns, and my hope, in the Atlantic (Gift Article): The MAGA Reckoning Arrives. “The election, and especially the reelection, of Donald Trump caused me, for the first time in my life, to question the fundamental decency of America. I could not understand how anyone, especially my co-religionists, could look at such a squalid figure and vote for him, let alone support him enthusiastically. How could they defend his indecency time after time after time? Doesn’t partisanship have limits? Don’t honor and integrity matter? Isn’t Trump’s peculiar form of madness an obvious disqualifier? For tens of millions of Americans—more than 77 million in 2024 alone—the answer has been no. That stain is now a permanent part of the American story. But the story isn’t over. We can move beyond this grotesque chapter to something better, though the path won’t be smooth. Even if Democrats sweep the midterms, Trump will still be president, and his closing act will likely involve trying to tear the country apart. We can’t allow him to do that. We need to get to the other side of this era with our institutions, our bonds to one another, and our commitment to justice and the rule of law intact, and then begin the work of reclaiming American ideals. A wipeout of the party of Trump on Tuesday would be an awfully helpful step in that direction.”
I just hope that the end of campaign season brings an end to the deluge of political spam texts. About half of mine address someone named John. But sadly, they are not Dear John letters. Dhruv Mehrotra feels our pain in Wired: My Journey to the Center of America’s Political Spam Text Hell. “For years, I diligently opted out. I’ve replied ‘STOP’ 49 times since 2021, by my phone’s count. Sometimes ‘Stop2End,’ when that was the magic word. In November 2025, I told Jon Ossoff’s campaign some version of ‘stop.’ It did not stop. Since then, I’ve received 13 more texts boosting his campaign, from nine different numbers. When the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee texted to inform me that Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden were calling me personally to action, I replied ‘eat shit.’ That didn’t work either.” (It says everything about what the internet has become that the most commonly typed word among humans is, Stop.)
Next time you order a bagel (or anything else) online, make sure you’re ordering from the actual site. Hackers are using AI to essentially re-create sites and shopping carts. Boichik Bagels among Bay Area victims of massive credit card skimming machine.
+ And the global freeze-out continues. European grocery chains’ freezers, refrigerators targeted in apparent cyberattacks. (Hackers can break your freezer from anywhere, but if your freezer needs to be fixed, someone is gonna have to come out to the house…)
My niece announced to our global family chat that she’s been supporting the Valkeries “from the start.” And she’s right. But “the start” wasn’t too long ago. The Valkeries, as it turns out, only have fair-weather fans since the weather has been fair since the team has existed. In only their second year, a band of misfits, castoffs, and also-rans just took home the WNBA championship in the league’s first Game 7. Gabby Williams’ 30-point night leads Valkyries over Dream in Game 7 for team’s first championship.
+ I’ve never seen a brand (let alone a sports team brand) evolve this quickly. “Even the biggest women’s basketball events often have a way of feeling niche. Not so within the Bay Area, where the Valkyries have sold out every home game since their inception. And Game 7 was a capital-E Event in the minds of everyday commuters, Uber drivers, hotel receptionists, and flight attendants. In just two years, the Valkyries have given their fans, players, and staff something that many professional sports franchises spend decades trying to create: a genuine sense of identity, purpose, and belonging.” The Golden State Valkyries Just Changed the WNBA Forever.
Corruption Interruption: “Corruption is topping voter concerns in recent polls, dominating Democratic messaging, and forcing Republicans to play defense in red states. If that marks a sharp shift from recent American elections, in which such allegations have played a relatively minor role, it mirrors a growing global trend. Around the world, a backlash against corruption has roused voters and undercut populist, right-wing politicians.” The Atlantic (Gift Article): The Backlash to Corruption Is Going Global. (So, it seems, are protests: German Protests Turn Violent as Activists Clash With Police.)
+ Getting Even With Stevens: “The about-face by Rep. Haley Stevens (D-Michigan) to endorse Republican Mike Rogers — and appear with him at a Detroit church Sunday, instead of at an event she had been scheduled to attend with El-Sayed — triggered denunciations by Democratic leaders nationwide, along with an apparent surge in fundraising for El-Sayed.” El-Sayed campaign reports $2.4 million fundraising day as Stevens endorses GOP rival.
+ Probable Claws: “A federal magistrate judge on Monday threw out charges against two former F.B.I. intelligence officials accused of lying to Congress, excoriating prosecutors for what he described as a failure of one of their most basic responsibilities: showing there was any probable cause that crimes had been committed in the first place.” (Little details like that aren’t going to stop this DOJ anytime soon, especially when it comes to enemies and elections.)
+ Under the Influencer: “What this marketing often fails to acknowledge is the potential for kratom to lead to addiction, liver injury, seizures and in some cases, fatal overdoses.” They Tried Kratom for Its Purported Health Benefits, Then They Became Addicted. “Some say they were introduced to the drug through wellness podcasts, free samples at gyms or fitness influencers.”
+ Bet Your Reputation: “As durably profitable as it has been for celebrities to arbitrage their fanbase’s attention and affection, they should remember that for it to remain so, people do still have to like them. Continuing to cheerfully feed regular people into gambling’s meat grinder might not be the safest bet.” Amanda Mull in Bloomberg (Gift Article): Do Celebrities Endorsing Prediction Markets Not Have Enough Money Already?
+ Flat Chance: “The man who helped develop the technology for liquid crystal displays — the screens in flat-panel televisions and laptops — has died at 101.” That Giant HDTV That Fits in Your Living Room? Thank Cyril Hilsum. And he may have left us with something even more precious. A guide to longevity. “Dr. Hilsum died on Sept. 23 at an assisted-living facility in London, his family said. He was 101, having survived into his 11th decade by avoiding fresh vegetables and subsisting largely on TV dinners, chocolate and red wine.”
+ Snake Eyes: “Once you see a snake in Bangkok, the snakiest capital in the world, you see snakes everywhere … On an average half-day shift, Mr. Pinyo, the top snake catcher in Thailand’s capital, wrangles more than 20 snakes, the reptiles secreted in sewers, curled in flowerpots and toilets, enmeshed in recycling, and pressed against branches ready to snack on geckoes and tree shrews. He catches cobras, pythons, kraits and pit vipers. Those are the scary snakes. Harmless species, at least to humans, include tree snakes, rat snakes, kukris and sunbeams.” This is probably not what Pinyo Pukpinyo expected when he signed up to be a firefighter. He’s the Top Snake Catcher, and Business Is Booming. There’s Just One Problem.
“In ancient myth, Achilles and Patroclus were two Greek heroes of the Trojan war whose intense bond was believed by some to have turned into a sexual relationship. In modern science, they are a bull, Achille, and a donkey, Patroclo, whose tender interspecies affair has helped to shed new light on social and sexual interactions between animals.” Tender bond between male donkey and bull baffles scientists.
+ David Letterman and Matt Damon as extras on The Gilded Age? Sure, why not?
2026-10-30 20:00:00
In the early days of the internet, tech industry folks were justifiably excited about the possibilities presented by the internet. What we weren’t really thinking about was the fact that the bad guys would have the same access to the tools as the good guys do. We’re not nearly as naive this time around, but we’re still creating massively powerful AI tools that will give the nefarious a new set of weapons to deploy, more quickly, more cheaply, and more maliciously. I’m not sure that AI is really going to destroy a large percentage of humanity, but the age of empowered hackers has already arrived. Tech has released the tools that most endanger the future of tech. But in this fight, we’re all in the ring. From individual phishing attempts made on your parents to major attacks on healthcare infrastructure, we’ve entered into a sort of war in which the same companies are essentially providing the weapons to all sides. DJ Patil, the nation’s first Chief Data Scientist, posted a good overview in LinkedIn. It’s mostly aimed at cybersecurity professionals, but anyone can (and should) get the gist. We Built for Peacetime. Prepare for Wartime: The AI Cybersecurity Reckoning Is Here. “Sustained, destructive, adaptive pressure used to require the resources of a state. It now requires a laptop, a few dollars of compute, and a model that does not get tired. When the price of relentless hostility falls to zero, you should expect relentless hostility from actors who could never have afforded it before — including some who want nothing from you but your absence. That is the new equilibrium: an environment in which someone is always trying to hurt you, and in which the tools you would use to fight back are themselves targets.” We came for the cute cat photos, we ended up in a war.
+ “Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, said on Thursday that it had halted withdrawals after it was attacked by hackers who made off with more than $6 billion in digital coins, in what appears to be the biggest crypto heist in history.”
+ Wired: Massive Leak Exposes 41,000 Homeland Security Workers—Including Undercover ICE Agents.
If you look at traditional measures from the economy to polling to America’s role in the world, the first two years of Trump’s second term has been an abject failure. But those are probably not the measurements Trump and his family (and those who have fallen in line) are using. When you consider the pace at which the system has been corrupted, along with the financial gains of those who took advantage, it’s been a hell of a run. Noah Shachtman in the NYT (Gift Article): Is This the End for Trump’s Princelings? Or Just the Start? “President Trump’s second term has ushered in a starkly different arrangement. Tariffs, prosecutions and regulations are all now subject to one man’s whims. Business leaders are being asked to underwrite government projects, such as the White House ballroom. The government assigns to itself a cut of private businesses. The White House bestows enterprises from oil fields to social media platforms on loyal allies. A coterie of top officials, their children and their gaggle of hangers-on move through the world like princelings. The rule of law can seem situational at best. It’s a throwback to an old style of governing, centered on a father figure who treats the nation like an extension of his household, and who dispenses resources and favors and jobs like a dad handing out candy to his kids. In an environment like this, fealty to the national patriarch can seem like the surest — in some cases only — way to get ahead.” (And plenty of people and companies are taking that way.) “Wealth can still buy political power, just as it did in the oligarchy’s previous iteration. The difference today is that a new gusher of cash has erupted and is flowing in the opposite direction. Political power, or even just proximity to it, is generating wealth to a degree unknown in modern American history.”
+ Has the war in Iran been a success? Depends how you measure: U.S. Oil Industry Earned Over $130 Billion in Profit During Iran War.
+ In two years, American democracy has been turned into the plot of your average mob movie. Trump Erupted After Learning of Alina Habba’s $50 Million Deal. He wasn’t mad that his pardons are for sale. He was mad that he didn’t get a taste. “Angry about the scale of a contract signed by one of his former lawyers with the family of a wealthy pardon seeker, the president told allies he wanted some of the money to go to his future presidential library.” (In the business, we call this making her an offer she can’t refuse.)
+ The tech market is looking dangerously shaky. What if things go really south and the bubble bursts? Guess who’s in charge of the bailout? The Atlantic (Gift Article): Can Democracy Survive the Next Financial Crash? “If the crash happens on Donald Trump’s watch, his administration would likely sidestep Congress entirely. A Trump bailout would proceed on whatever terms please the president and his allies, who would use it as a bonanza to enrich their favored companies and CEOs, even if they were the ones who caused the crisis to begin with.” So, yeah, the midterms are a pretty big deal.
Here’s a lede that captures this moment in higher education: “A top administrator at Dartmouth College has resigned after a faculty committee found he used artificial intelligence to shape his writing, including in a guest column in The Washington Post on AI cheating.” Dartmouth Provost Santiago Schnell resigns following accusations he used artificial intelligence for writing. “The college paper, The Dartmouth, then ran other publications from Schnell through an AI detector. Writing that predated ChatGPT’s 2022 public release was found to be human-written, but high rates of AI use were detected in his recent writing.” One wonders whether that trend is at all uncommon. But wait, there’s more… “Schnell told the paper in an email last month that he uses AI for ‘language refinement, copyediting, improving clarity and organization and making writing processes more efficient.’ The paper ran the statement through an AI-detector and found it was AI-written.” (At this point, it probably makes more sense for journalists to talk to the AI directly…)
What to Doc, Doc, Doc: This collection of weekend whats is going to be documentary themed. All three picks on Netflix are about the creative life, the love life, and, to some extent, the end of life. And all are, in their own way, very life-affirming. Martin Mull was a very successful musician, comedian, and actor. And none of those were even what he did best (or liked doing most). Who is Martin Mull? “Beloved for blurring performance and personal crisis, Maria Bamford unpacks the mental health journey behind her fearless comedy in this documentary.” Bamford is the comedian’s comedian. She once performed an entire show in her parents’ living room. Paralyzed by Hope: The Maria Bamford Story. And one from a few years ago: “Literary icon Joan Didion reflects on her remarkable career and personal struggles in this intimate documentary directed by her nephew, Griffin Dunne.” Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold. We could sure use Didion’s voice to add some context to what America is going through today.
She Shed: Another day, another top general squeezed out at the Pentagon. And, in this case, Lt. Gen. Brett Sylvia is being referred for criminal prosecution because of possible leaks. General ousted by Hegseth referred for possible criminal prosecution, officials say. My first reaction to this story was that the administration probably wanted Sylvia out because his last name sounds female-ish. As per usual, the reality is more ridiculous than any joke you could come up with. “When asked by a reporter Thursday what proof the administration has that the general leaked classified information, President Donald Trump appeared unaware that Sylvia is a man. ‘She’s going to have big problems,’ he said. ‘Long-term problems.'” Plus, Hegseth Fires Top General After Laura Loomer Targets Him. From the party of strong defense to the party of Laura Loomer in the blink of an eye…
+ Jump to Conclusions: Why would Hegseth be so concerned about leaks? Because the truth sucks. A Sailor Jumped From the U.S.S. Lincoln. The Navy Punished Him.
+ The Dan Plan: The faux outrage about the Alaska Dan Sullivan(s) controversy is leading to some very real legal moves. “But there’s a long history of political operatives from both parties deploying the tactic — and largely getting away with it. ‘It’s a time-honored tradition,’ said Thomas Kahn, director of the Center for Congressional and Presidential Studies at American University. ‘It’s not a good practice,’ Kahn added, but ‘if trying to confuse voters was a crime, then every politician would be in jail.'” Three Bob Fergusons and two JFKs: A brief history of same-name ballot shenanigans.
+ Infrared Light Brigade: “All the research is driven by mounting concerns over the long-term brain health of contact-sport athletes. A study published on Wednesday used a statistical model to estimate that three in four former National Football League players who died between 2008 and 2023 most likely had signs of C.T.E. in their brains at death.” Can Scientists Make Football Safer? “A college football team in Utah is donning some curious caps this season. As part of their regular recovery routine, many Brigham Young University players are wearing headsets that shine near-infrared light onto their scalps — and up their noses.”
+ Oh Captain, My Captain: “Patrick Stewart, who overcame a bleak childhood in England’s coal-mining country to find acclaim as a Shakespearean actor before making an unlikely career pivot in middle age that would bring him his greatest fame, playing a noble starship captain on the TV series ‘Star Trek: The Next Generation,’ died on Wednesday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 86.”
+ Glazed Over: The Atlantic (Gift Article): Just Noting That Your Candy Corn Is Made of Bug Secretions. And hating Candy Corn isn’t enough to avoid this. It’s all about something called confectioner’s glaze.
+ Reef Madness: A ship that was once celebrated as “the fastest passenger liner in the world, is scheduled to be sunk in the Gulf of Mexico in November, creating what will be the world’s largest artificial reef.” The name of the ship: The SS United States. (Sometimes, the metaphors just sink themselves…)
“US schools are often named after presidents, historical figures and civil rights leaders. And soon joining those ranks is a retired longtime Texas school custodian known for going above and beyond her duties by buying classroom supplies for children in need and helping students with their assignments.” New elementary school in Texas named after beloved longtime school custodian.
+ “Surrounded by that kind of innovation, a visitor might overlook the lab stocked with little more than tubs of white powder and paint pots. After all, how interesting can white paint be? When it comes to adapting to a hotter planet, the answer is: very.” Bloomberg (Gift Article): Why I’m Excited About a Bucket of White Paint.
+ Ruth Ben-Ghiat: Strongmen Fall When Corruption is on the Ballot.
+ Pittsburgh NICU nurse creates handmade Halloween costumes for babies.
+ This College of Magic turns ordinary kids into cool magicians.
+ Oksana Chusovitina, the 51-year-old gymnast who refuses to retire: ‘I think about the Olympics all the time’. (I also think about the Olympics all the time. Watching them.)