2026-07-10 20:00:00
As much as AI “search” results have changed your internet experience, it’s nothing compared to the way it’s changed things for online publishers. For the entirety of the web’s brief history, using every search engine optimization trick to achieve a high page rank and appear among the top few search results was the name of the internet game. The quest to achieve search result prominence drove nearly every textual element of internet design. But then everything changed. Google stopped sending traffic to web publishers and instead started inhaling the content it indexed and providing searchers with concise summaries of what they were after. Goodbye links, hello answers. Oh, and goodbye web traffic. The strategy may have saved you a click, but it leaves one wondering if anything can save online publishers. Their golden goose is now quite literally sucking the life out of them. How bad is it? Publishers are considering the nuclear option. AdWeek: Once Unimaginable, Publishers Are Preparing to Opt Out of Google Search. “For decades, publishers have done everything in their power, from the legal to the not-explicitly illegal, to rank as highly in Google Search as possible. For many websites, traffic from the search engine was their single greatest source of audience and, as a result, revenue. Now though, a handful of influential players in the digital media ecosystem have begun moving in the opposite direction, laying the groundwork for what was once unthinkable: removing themselves from Google Search.”
Back in September of our Covid year, I was sitting outside on the deck with my 96 year-old dad who grew up in Poland during WWII, was the only member of his family to survive the Holocaust, and spent years fighting the Nazis as part of a Partisan group. I mentioned that the numbers were looking pretty good for Biden, and Trump was starting to lose his grip (political and mental). My dad said, “Yeah, but he’ll never accept the results.” It was one of many predictions my dad got right over the years. He didn’t live long enough to witness January 6, but nothing about it would have surprised him. He’d seen these kinds of stories play out before. It’s about time that everyone stops being surprised by the extent to which Trump (and his enablers) will go to overturn election results. The latest example: Armed with new powers granted by the SCOTUS majority, “the Trump administration has forced out the three remaining members of an independent, bipartisan commission that supports states in administering their elections, the White House confirmed on Thursday. The move comes as President Trump seeks to cast doubt on the outcome of the upcoming midterms and impose control over how ballots are counted.” NYT (Gift Article): Trump Administration Fires Members of Independent Election Group. “Mr. Trump has been laying the groundwork for months to claim that Republicans would face a tough midterm election, not because of the broadly unpopular war in Iran and plummeting approval ratings on the economy, but because the country’s election system is fraudulent.”
While searching for a different person, federal immigration officers in Houston shot and killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo. They later explained that Araujo tried to ram them with his van before they opened fire. Sound familiar? Witnesses of ICE Killing in Houston Dispute the Official Account. “Three men who witnessed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo’s killing by federal immigration officers in Houston disputed the Department of Homeland Security’s account and said the victim never tried to run over a federal agent. The men, who were inside the vehicle, were arrested during the Tuesday encounter and spoke from immigration detention with their lawyer, Hugo Balderas-Ibarra. They said that Mr. Araujo, a 52-year-old Mexican immigrant who was driving to work at a construction site, did not use his vehicle as a weapon or attempt to run over the immigration officers who opened fire.”
+ Texas ICE Killing Darkens: Rep Says Witnesses Pressured to Self-Deport.
+ “A federal immigration agent killed a man from Mexico on Tuesday in Houston, firing into the car that the man was driving. It was at least the 21st shooting by agents involved in President Trump’s deportation crackdown since he took office for his second term in January 2025. Five people, including three U.S. citizens, were killed as a result of those shootings, nearly all of which involved officers firing at people in vehicles.”
What to Watch: From the creators of For All Mankind comes Star City on AppleTV, which imagines a future (from the Soviet perspective) in which the Soviets got to the Moon first. You don’t need to have watched For All Mankind first to enjoy Star City. But you’ll probably want to start on that show next.
+ What to Read: I first heard about Vijay Gupta’s memoir, Restrung: A Memoir of Music and Transformation from my friend Joel Stein’s newsletter. “By age twenty-five, Vijay Gupta had lived several lifetimes: he played Carnegie Hall at eight, studied at Juilliard and Yale before most had finished high school, joined the Los Angeles Philharmonic at nineteen, gave a celebrated TED Talk seen by millions, and launched a nonprofit. But behind the accolades was estrangement, addiction, and a private unraveling.” In addition to being a great musician, Gupta is also an excellent writer. This is a very personal story about personal achievements, family relationships, and how music really connects us, from symphony halls to Skid Row. (Bonus content: What Skid Row Taught Acclaimed Violinist Vijay Gupta About Music.)
+ What to Doc: Rafa on Netflix is a four-part docuseries on the rise and injuries of Rafael Nadal. This docuseries is part of a trend of docs essentially produced with their subjects, so you don’t necessarily get any hard-hitting insights. But if you’re into tennis, you will definitely enjoy this look at the mental and physical challenges faced by one of the greats. (FWIW, his trainer Uncle Toni has basically the same mentality as my pilates teacher.)
Cease Ceased: U.S. President Donald Trump said on Friday that Iran had asked to continue talks and the U.S. had agreed, but that the ceasefire was over. (Of course, we can’t be sure of any of that because of the source.)
+ Playing with Housing Money: Housing affordability bill is about to become law, even after Trump refuses to sign it in PROTEST.” (So he gets to enrage his own party with nothing to show for it.)
+ Nolan Wells: “Nolan Wells was last seen boating with friends around 3 p.m. Saturday on Horn Island, a barrier reef off Mississippi accessible only by boat, the Jackson County Sheriff’s Department said. He was wearing blue swim trunks and sunglasses. Wells’ mother reported him missing that night after he did not return on the boat with the rest of the group.” Investigation underway into death of Mississippi 18-year-old who vanished on July 4 boating trip. (This feels like it’s going to become a massive story.)
+ Parasite Unseen: “There’s a lag between when people consume the parasite that causes the illness and when symptoms appear, making it tough for those infected to remember what they ate to pinpoint the problem. Health officials are alarmed by the rapidly growing number of cases, which they say are likely undercounted because some people recover without medical care and are not tested.” Why we don’t know what food is spreading the parasite sickening thousands.
+ The Recline of Western Civilization: “Life is full of ethical dilemmas, some more consequential than others. Should you eat meat? While you decide, the lives of countless animals hang in the balance. Will you use Claude to write your cover letter? While you contemplate, your integrity is at risk. In comparison, seat reclination is small-scale. Only a few inches are at stake, perhaps for just a few hours. And yet that little wedge of space and time looms large: whether you seize it seems to suggest something about how you treat other people, or even conceive of society in general.” The New Yorker: Should You Recline Your Airplane Seat? “Investigating the central dilemma of our time.” (There are still some airplane activities we can all agree are bad. For example: Passenger partly sucked out of window soon after takeoff from Greece…)
+ Messi Business: “They discovered that the name they had chosen in honor of Lionel Messi violated an obscure 1969 Argentina statute prohibiting the use of surnames as first names.” This is why there aren’t thousands of Argentinians named Messi.
“You do not have time for this. You do not have time to sit in a 200-degree box, as if you were a slice of leftover pizza. You do not have time to spend a half-hour in a hotter-than-even-standard sauna, then immerse yourself in a bath of water that is extremely frozen if not actual ice, shocking the eggshell of your sanity from the membrane of your gelatinous insides. You — meaning I, who have lately been thinking of myself as a you — truly do not want to do what is called cold-plunging.” Taffy Brodesser-Akner: I Survived a Cold Plunge and All I Got Was Everything I Ever Wanted.
+ “Long-tenured workers like Barzar are Costco’s secret weapon. They are reliable and experienced, able to speed shoppers through a checkout line and serve as mentors to newer workers, passing down the company’s unique culture.” He Earns $33 an Hour as a Costco Cashier. Now He’s a Millionaire.
+ This program gives Black single moms $1,000 a month for a year. The results are undeniable.
+ Female US rower reflects on ‘surreal’ record-breaking journey from California to Hawaii.
+ A tiny eye implant invented by a Stanford scientist is helping blind people read again.
+ Jesse Eisenberg Explains Why His Decision to Donate a Kidney Was Very Easy.
+ How Olivia Rodrigo Is Getting Back at the Trump Administration.
+ In any language: English speakers are tuning into World Cup broadcasts in Spanish. There’s really only one word you need to know. Goooooooal.
2026-07-09 20:00:00
If you want a trip to the future, you can either invent a time machine or get a ticket to an event at Madison Square Garden. In addition to being the home court of the NBA champs and recently being transformed into a wedding venue, James Dolan’s MSG also provides a pretty decent glimpse into our looming surveillance society. Everyone who enters the Garden is scanned, and if you’re a known visitor, you’re entered into a database and given a risk rating. “People of concern are ranked on a scale, the source explained. ‘Flag’ is the lowest, an indication to discuss the VIP with a supervisor. Next is ‘low risk’—that’s the marking for [Edie] Falco, [Tracy] Morgan, and Ben Stiller, their fellow Knicks ride-or-die. After that is ‘medium risk’ (Lily Allen, her ex David Harbour, and the country singer Morgan Wallen) and ‘high risk’ (the hip-hop stars Freddie Gibbs, Lil Jon, DaBaby, and A Boogie Wit da Hoodie). The rapper Lil Tjay, who recently was involved in an altercation at the Garden’s Hulu Theater, is ‘BANNED FROM MSG,’ according to the database.” But high-profile visitors aren’t just given risk rankings. “The talent database also tracks some celebrities’ race, gender identity, and sexual orientation; 93 entries are marked as ‘LGBTQIA.’ Why MSG felt the need to label Ricky Martin or Phoebe Bridgers or Geese’s Emily Green in this way is unclear.” Wired: Madison Square Garden Kept a List of Gay Celebrities. “An MSG database tracked and categorized hundreds of celebs, famous Knicks superfans, and even some of Taylor Swift’s wedding guests.” Some of these tactics are unique to MSG, but it won’t be long before this is all considered garden variety surveillance. And how do we know about this list? It was accessed and released by a hacker group. Hey, you said you wanted to see the future…
+ More from an earlier Wired piece: The Shocking Secrets of Madison Square Garden’s Surveillance Machine.
+ More from the podcast, Pablo Torre Finds Out: Tracking Taylor Swift Wedding Guests.
“Secretary of State Marco Rubio has invited senior ministers from more than 60 countries to a meeting next week about what the Trump administration views as a major peril: the ‘resurgence of transnational far-left terrorism.'” WaPo (Gift Article): Rubio tries to enlist other nations in antifa fight, but some allies recoil. (I know it sometimes seems like Rubio is one of the comparatively decent ones. But, sadly, it’s time to recoil from that notion.) “The meeting has prompted consternation among career and political U.S. officials, some European allies and independent analysts who do not see the threat in the same terms. Some U.S. officials told The Post that they worry it is part of a Trump administration effort to use powerful counterterrorism tools to crack down on U.S. activists they view as left-wing extremists.”
+ Related: “For much of the past year, DHS has been going after people who criticize President Donald Trump’s immigration policies in emails and social media posts, accusing them of threatening federal personnel or ‘doxing’ agents whose identities are already known to the public. OPR has opened more than 100 investigations into ‘incidents of doxing and threats’ involving ICE.” The Verge (Gift Article): ICE agents are making house calls for online critics.
+ Also Related: Three More People Charged With Damaging Reflecting Pool.
“On a sloping patch of ground less than a dozen miles from where the wealthy pay to swaddle their bushes, on a day cold enough to freeze a brook running through the woods, one of the men who stitched burlap around hedges disappeared on a Thursday in February.” NYT (Gift Article): Where Billionaires Summer, a Gardener Died in the Snow. “The workers’ plight isn’t new. In 2022, a concierge for some of the Hamptons’ wealthiest patrons gave an interview describing how he had spent two years living in a six-by-six-foot tent in the woods. In 2024, a Guatemalan laborer who was living in the woods was struck and killed on a highway while walking to a bus stop, leading to an outpouring of concern. But advocates for the workers say that the scale shifted in the last year. Where once the tents were clustered together, the workers have now spread out for fear of raids by Immigration and Customs Enforcement.”
“This is not the approach of a president who’s running a war; this is the flailing of a man who’s in over his head and is reacting to events, rather than guiding them. Lest this kind of equivocation lead the Iranians to doubt Trump’s resolve, the president has added that he’s still considering two other terrible ideas: an invasion of Iranian territory, and a campaign of probable war crimes.” Tom Nichols in The Atlantic (Gift Article): Iran, Not Trump, Is in Control of This War. “Trump is now going through something like the stages of wartime grief: Denial that America failed; anger, which has led to renewed attacks; and then bargaining, as if the Iranians could somehow be bought off like a gang of recalcitrant construction workers in New York. None of it has worked. Depression and acceptance await.” (That would actually be a perfect new tagline. NextDraft: Depression and Acceptance Await.)
+ For now, it looks like the ceasefire is officially off. Here’s the latest on the renewed and accelerating fighting from BBC and The Guardian.
+ The resumption of hostilities with Iran led the Secret Service to advise the president against using his new Qatari-donated jet. That means the jet was never ready in the first place. So Trump took the old Air Force One and then lied about the reason. Just another day of madness.
Bibi Cued: “Rahm Emanuel, a potential Democratic presidential candidate and longtime defender of Israel, warned Wednesday that the country has become increasingly isolated as its leadership has turned it into a ‘territorial pariah,’ in a speech at Tel Aviv University on Wednesday. ‘You cannot fight indefinitely against a world that has stopped believing you have the right to fight. You must instead find a new sustainable path to peace, security, and economic prosperity.'” Here’s the full speech. And from NPR: In a West Bank cave, Israelis and Palestinians hold an out-of-the-ordinary lunch. (You can love and want to defend Israel and think its leadership is terrible. Just like you can love and want to defend America and think its leadership is terrible.)
+ The View From Canada: “The rupture of the world order is going much better than expected. At first there was rage at America’s betrayal, when President Trump called for the annexation of Canada, threatened Greenland, imposed tariffs on its friends and began his campaign to undercut NATO, which continued at its latest meeting this week, in Ankara, Turkey. Now, a strange feeling is emerging in some of the countries that used to be known as America’s allies: Optimistic determination.” Stephen Marche in the NYT (Gift Article): The Zombification of America. “Zombie America creates, at least in the short term, contradictions. In Canada, the North American Aerospace Defense Command, jointly operated with the United States, continues to be our most important alliance. Yet civil servants here have also started training with drones for the possibility of asymmetrical conflict with the United States. Real security can be found only by removing your country from American influence, on every front as far as possible.”
+ The Reign in Maine Circles Drain: “Behind the scenes, his campaign was messy, disorganized and haphazardly run. Mr. Platner did not disclose explosive, politically damaging secrets to key members of his team. And he was guarded by an insular and zealously protective inner circle of advisers who did not always seem to grasp the seriousness — or strangeness — of what quickly became a steady drip of scandal … Repeatedly, Mr. Platner promised there was nothing else damaging from his past to come. And each time, he was wrong.” ‘A Slow-Rolling Disaster’: Inside the Implosion of the Platner Campaign. (Given his resignation video, it’s not clear that the implosion dust has settled.) Related: US appeals court rejects Trump’s latest bid to delay paying E Jean Carroll $5.8m. (I’m beginning to wonder if politics is attracting our best and brightest.)
+ FanDuel and Your Money Are Soon Parted: “By late November 2024, Thompson had incurred steep losses and resorted to desperate measures to fund his addiction. Then, one afternoon, he flicked open his phone and received a FanDuel reward that momentarily distracted him from his debts: a personalized video message from Philadelphia Phillies superstar Bryce Harper.” FanDuel sent a personal message from Phillies star Bryce Harper to a customer with a gambling addiction.
+ Mail Nurse: “In his job as a nurse and healthcare administrator, Chris decided on appropriate treatments for patients and checked their vital signs. Sometimes, he monitored up to 10 patients in intensive care — and he did it all from Manila, thousands of miles away from the U.S. hospital he worked for.” Your next nurse may monitor you from the Philippines.
+ Error Bags: “The air bag, it turned out, had been purchased on eBay and installed by the Texas dealership that sold him the used car. When he crashed, it sent metal shards flying into Kang’s face.” WSJ Gift Article): Counterfeit Air-Bag Parts Are Killing U.S. Drivers—and the Government Can’t Stop It.
+ Garbage In, Farage Out: “When British right-wing populist leader Nigel Farage announced he was resigning as a lawmaker and triggering a special election in the face of a swirl of allegations over personal financing, he sought the high ground, declaring that the ‘judges of my actions’ should be his constituents. Instead, rival parties dismissed his actions as a stunt and said they would sit out the election, leaving his principal opponent as a garbage-can wearing comedian whose policies include forcing rule-breaking cyclists to ride unicycles.”
+ You Token to Me? M.G. Siegler has been waiting a long time to talk to his computer. And with the latest iteration of ChatGPT, that wait may be over. The First True AI Chatbot. “As in, actually chatting. As in, with voice.”
Pickle Pie. Cracklin’ Corn Ribs. Butter Brew Mustache Pretzel. Yeah, our brand has suffered a bit of late. But it’s Summer, and America is gonna America! Buckle up: Here is this year’s crop of new State Fair foods.
2026-07-08 20:00:00
I’m going to keep this short. If I don’t, you won’t read it. That’s at least what one can glean from reading (or at least skimming or asking ChatGPT to summarize) the latest book stats from the National Endowment for the Arts. If you’ve been procrastinating when it comes to getting around to finally writing that novel, you might want to skip it altogether. “Fewer than half of all adults reported having read a book of any kind in 2022. Only 38 percent read a novel or short story. A study analyzing 236,000 responses to the American Time Use Survey found that the proportion of Americans who read for pleasure on any given day fell from 28 percent in 2004 to 16 percent in 2023. (The study looked at people who had read a book, magazine, or newspaper; listened to an audiobook; or read an e-book.) Gambling has become a more common leisure activity than reading a book: Last year, 57 percent of Americans placed a bet. The decline in reading cuts across age groups, gender, and education levels. Even the demographics that traditionally read the most—retirees, women, and college graduates—have seen a collapse.” (At least this explains my book sales.) Rose Horowitch in The Atlantic (Gift Article): The End of Reading Is Here. “And yet, strangely, Americans are probably reading more words than ever before. What has changed is what they read, and how. People are bombarded with emails, text messages, X posts, Reddit threads, Instagram captions. This explosion of textual fragments has come at the expense of devoting sustained attention to longer written works that convey rich and complicated information. Maryanne Wolf, a cognitive neuroscientist at UCLA, argues that people are losing the ability to think deeply about writing. That doesn’t mean they are forgetting how to decode individual words. Rather, they are losing the higher-order abilities of comprehension and synthesis. America, in other words, isn’t illiterate. It’s postliterate.” (America is getting close to be postAmerican, too.)
+ It’s not just that people are reading fewer books. The way certain books become hits has also changed. And that change has circled back to how books get written and which books get published. It’s out with the librarian and in with TikTok. “Whether a given book is well written, structurally ambitious, or intellectually dense does not seem to matter much on BookTok. In fact, a book being poorly written is not at all an impediment to a recommendation as long as it otherwise fulfills the requisite tropes and themes set out by its genre expectations, which are precisely what engineer those strong emotional reactions. Even when a book is considered ‘cringe,’ ‘flat and formulaic,’ or ‘written like an 11 year old,’ BookTok users may ‘still love it with all [their] heart’ because it manages to achieve the chief objectives of its genre conceit.” The New Yorker: The Rise of the ‘As Seen on TikTok’ Sticker.
“I think it’s over. I don’t want to deal with them anymore … They’re scum. They’re sick people. They’re led by sick people … If they had a nuclear weapon, they’d use it. As far as I’m concerned, it’s over.” And with that, Trump announces that the ceasefire with Iran is basically over. (Trump also confused Iran with Japan and Zelensky with Putin during the discussion. So maybe everyone should keep their defenses on alert.) Trump also lashed out at Spain, saying he’s going to cut off all trade with them. In a whiplash-inducing shift, Trump praised Zelensky and said he will let Ukraine build Patriot missiles. (This definitely gives one the sense that US intel is advising Trump that Ukraine has the upper hand in the war. Or maybe there’s a bribe involved.) Here’s the latest from The Guardian.
+ “Mark Carney swept to power on a backlash to President Trump’s talk of making Canada the 51st state, which many Americans took for mere shtick. But for the new prime minister, reading intelligence reports detailing the gravity of the crisis, it was a breaking point. In private phone conversations with Carney’s predecessor, Justin Trudeau, Trump had threatened to scrap the 1908 agreement delineating their shared border. ‘I tear that up and your whole country unravels,’ Trump told Trudeau in one call.” WSJ (Gift Article): The Canadian Who Steered Europe Away From the U.S.
+ Europe may be moving away from the US government, but it’s not moving away from US software. NATO quietly puts trust in Palantir to move troops and identify targets. “If Russia moves its elite soldiers from the 76th Guards Air Assault Division closer to the border with Estonia, Palantir’s system will flag it. Military officers will be alerted to vulnerabilities in the alliance’s force structure across Europe, and which troops to move from where to fend off a Russian attack. At any one time the system knows how many troops NATO has, where and when, so it can advise what to do next.” (The next world war will be software vs software, with humans caught in the crossfire.)
“Scientists refer to this vast, unexplored terrain as biology’s dark matter. Our bodies are home to more bacteria — on our skin, up our noses, in our guts and mouths and around our genitals — than there are stars in the Milky Way. These microbes have evolved not only with us but inside us, and scientists who study them closely say that hardly a biological process or system exists in which they do not play a role. They helped create our digestive systems and our immune systems. They influence the size and shape of our bodies. At least some research suggests that they also affect our brains, moods, personalities and behaviors. And yet, most of them have still not been identified, let alone studied.” NYT Magazine (Gift Article): Our Bacteria Are Talking. We’ve Just Begun to Understand What They’re Saying. (You can be pretty sure they’re talking shit.)
+ The NYT discovered regularity. Should I Be Taking Psyllium Husk? (For Jewish sons, chugging a first glass of Metamucil with their fathers is a right of passage—it’s like a Talmudic version of playing catch in the backyard.)
“In just the last decade, berries have completed the journey from fragile, local, seasonal treat to worldwide refrigerator staple and marketing juggernaut … Most of that growth has been driven by Driscoll’s, a $7 billion California company that began as a multifamily farm in 1904, patented its first strain of strawberries in 1958 and is still controlled by family members. In 1989, its board made what the company calls the Meadowood Declaration, a resolution that seemed preposterous at the time: to make all four berries available, in every season, in every part of the world. Today the company is the undisputed global market leader, shipping four billion containers of highly perishable fruit across 60 countries each year. (The company developed its signature hinged, ventilated plastic clamshell in the 1990s.) According to Circana, a market research firm, Driscoll’s is now the second-highest-earning brand in American supermarkets, behind only Coca-Cola.” Why Are Berries Everywhere, in Every Season? Driscoll’s.
Chain Yanked: “The global economy is set to slow sharply in 2026 after the war with Iran disrupted energy supply chains and triggered a fresh bout of inflation.” (And the IMF issued this warning before today’s announcement that the truce is potentially off.)
+ K Stop: “‘Oh no,’ she recalled the director saying upon hearing the child’s name. The parents, the director said, had declined the vitamin K injection newborns routinely receive to help blood clot. Without it, infants are vulnerable to spontaneous bleeding.” As Parents Reject Vitamin K Shots, Some Babies Develop Devastating Bleeding.
+ Passing Fancy: 30 million people watched USMNT-Belgium, making it the most-watched soccer match in U.S. history. (For comparison, the NBA Finals deciding game drew about 24.5 million viewers.)
+ British Invasion: “I remember thinking to myself: My goodness, how are journalists ever going to come down off this high … the adrenaline roller-coaster ride of such big news almost every day? How are they ever going to return to engaging with dreary minutiae of NHS reform, when we’re giving them such big stories all the time? And I remember genuinely thinking this feels consequential. And dreadful.” How smartphones (and Brexit) broke British politics.
+ In a Rutte: A Danish reporter asked a question to NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte that should probably be asked of a few hundred American politicians as well. “Mark, you sit next to Donald Trump in moments where he talks about conquering Greenland, talked about lashing out at allies like Spain, starting trade wars—things that [don’t] seem like the old Mark Rutte would approve of. Does this have any effect on your self-respect when you sit next to him like that and say nothing?” (Spoiler alert: Nah.)
+ No Pitt Stop: The Pitt, Hacks, Widow’s Bay, Pluribus, Beef, and DTF St. Louis are among the leaders in this year’s Emmy noms. Here are some snubs and surprises.
+ Cream Sinks to the Bottom: “The Covid-19 pandemic had supercharged America’s snacking habit: Some 70% of consumers were eating at least two per day, Smucker said. Buying the owner of Ding Dongs and Donettes gave the jam-and-jelly maker entry into a $65 billion market for snacks. Smucker had beat out other suitors for Hostess, most notably General Mills. Three years later, the deal isn’t tasting quite so sweet.” There are a lot of interesting reasons Why Smucker’s $5 Billion Bet on the Twinkie Flopped.
“Everyone has a strategy so particular to their concerns that following someone else’s might not always work for you. In the end, the challenge and the reward of the buffet are exactly the same: In a limited time, with endless distractions, you must figure out what you really want.” NYT: The Disappearing Las Vegas Buffets Hold a Mirror to the American Soul. (Better than a mirror to the body after I go to one of those things.)
+ Two teens learn the hard way not to do toy gun drive-bys from a Waymo. (Cut to the scene where the other guys in the prison yard ask, “So, what are you in for?”)
2026-07-07 20:00:00
One day we were celebrating headlines like this: In the United States, Every World Cup Team Is a Home Team. And the next day, our beloved squad was soundly defeated by Belgium, and our nation was being mocked with disdain as the winning team ridiculed America with a clownish Trump dance and a post that read, Overturn This. As Jerry Brewer writes in The Athletic: The United States’ dream didn’t die. It was overturned. “The president didn’t rescue Folarin Balogun. He didn’t give the U.S. greater odds to win. He didn’t fix the tournament by correcting a mistake. He repossessed the World Cup. He made Balogun, whose class and character represented the entire squad, the face of a fix. He helped create the snooty American attitude that gave Belgium a motivational boost.” What can I say: Football is life. And this is life with Trump. The whole charade was “in many ways, yet another crystallisation of America’s philosophy under Trump, where a rules-based international order can be swept aside when it is deemed to be in the interests of the U.S. One day, it may be climate change co-operation, or it could be economic tariffs on long-standing partners. On another day, it may be withdrawing from the World Health Organization, or threatening to seize Greenland or making Canada the 51st state.” And Trump’s MAGA-red card insertion into the World Cup is a pitch perfect metaphor for the kick-off of today’s NATO meetings, where Trump will further antagonize allies, destroy America’s leadership role, and provide yet another reminder that the election of 2024 was the own goal of the century.
+ “You are not dealing with an administration that has processes, you are dealing with a single volatile individual.” The WSJ (Gift Article) with the backstory of Europe’s split with America. “Hours passed as people talked over each other in a conversation with such seismic implications it seemed surreal: In its 250th year, had America, protector of Europe, now become a threat?” ‘There Is No Going Back’: The Inside Story of Europe’s Rupture With America. The Europeans learned faster than Trump’s American sycophants that even the authoritarian-pleasing false praise has its limits. “The fragile consensus on flattery was starting to splinter, a trend captured by Britain’s MI6. That form of diplomacy, per an assessment from the spy service, was ‘subject to the law of diminishing returns.'” (That’s the one law the administration upholds.)
+ “In remarks to reporters, Trump reiterated his view that the U.S. should take control of Greenland. ‘It should be controlled by the United States, not by Denmark.'” This follows Trump’s posting of a picture of himself and Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni “with the caption ‘restraining order needed,’ a reference to his earlier comments that Meloni ‘begged’ him for a photo during the Group of Seven summit of leading industrialized nations last month.” Here’s the latest from NBC and CNN.
It’s never a good sign when your Nazi tattoo ends up being one of your better attributes by comparison. Graham Platner, the controversial Senate candidate running against Susan Collins in Maine has weathered many political storms. He won’t be able to weather the latest one. Politico: Woman who dated Graham Platner says he sexually assaulted her.
+ “The allegation is the latest in a string of controversies Platner has faced and so far weathered since the oyster farmer and Marine veteran entered the race. But the seriousness of the assault claim has put the Maine contest — and Democrats’ ability to win control of the Senate — at risk, with even some of his strongest supporters questioning whether Platner should continue his campaign.” (Pretty much everyone has called for him to quit the race. The big question is whether this means Maine is down the drain.)
+ “While I’m assigning blame, I shouldn’t leave out myself. Last October, when stories about Platner’s tattoo and Reddit posts first broke, I went to Maine to write about him. I tried to convey what I saw: a campaign that was electrifying angry Maine voters. But I deeply regret that, impressed by Platner’s political charisma, I wrote that he was ‘nothing like the edgelord caricature I encountered online.’ If anything, he seems to be significantly worse.” Michelle Goldberg in the NYT (Gift Article): Lessons From the Graham Platner Disaster.
Is he alive? If he’s alive, how alive is he? Why is he in the hospital? What treatment is he receiving? In normal times, these aren’t the questions one would be asking about one of America’s most prominent senators. But these aren’t normal times. McConnell Has Been Hospitalized for 3 Weeks, and Aides Won’t Say Why.
Netflix has a retention problem. You watch the first season of a show, but you don’t come back for subsequent seasons. There are probably a few reasons why this is the case, and one of them could be the business model. “Netflix pays upfront production costs for both originals and outside productions, owns the international distribution, and offers a massive pay bump if the show makes it to season three. This makes sense if your business model is based on gaining new subscriptions. You’re not buying long-running audience-sustaining properties to reliably run ads against. You’re buying newness. So there’s very little incentive in, say, building a solid audience for your live action Avatar: The Last Airbender adaptation, but there’s a huge incentive in announcing you have one.” Ryan Broderick in Garbage Day with a good overview of the second season problem, and how it mirrors other issues in the digital content business. Netflix and the value of streaming shovelware.
Fire and Ice: “Of course, there have always been heat waves, thunderstorms, power failures and floods. But climate change has been a steroid injection for such disasters, making them stronger and more damaging. And increasingly, as in New Jersey this week, all of these nightmares arrive in tandem, creating compound disasters. In the process, they’re exposing just how unprepared for them we are.” Bloomberg (Gift Article): New Jersey’s Hell Week Is a Warning for Everyone. And the latest weather pattern to worry about: Hail. Inside the United States’ Billion-Dollar Blind Spot. “These balls of ice aren’t just academic curiosities. They are the reason your insurance premiums keep rising.”
+ Out of Le Pen: “The court shortened her ban on running for elected office, potentially reopening the path for her to run. However, it ruled she must wear an electronic ankle tag for a year, making a campaign both logistically and politically difficult.” French court allows far-right leader Marine Le Pen to run for president with ankle tag. (In this political environment, that might be a plus.)
+ History Buff: “The buff George Washington statue in the National Museum of American History speaks for itself. Taking in the washboard abs and determined expression of the 1840 work by Horatio Greenough, a visitor would be hard-pressed to see anything but a Founding Father rendered as a Greek god. Yet in a searing 162-page report on the Smithsonian museum released on July 4, the Trump administration takes issue with the lack of patriotism in even this exhibit.” A Huge Escalation in Trump’s Smithsonian Meddling.
+ Hey Bub: “The document, the existence and contents of which have not been previously reported but was obtained by NOTUS, is a significant departure from the Trump administration’s public tone, which has focused on encouraging unrelenting investment to unlock exponential growth.” Treasury Has an Internal Report Warning About the Dangers of an AI Bubble.
+ Ring a Bell? Vox: Your Ring camera isn’t stopping crime. But it might be making you paranoid. People generally understand this, but they’ll always choose security options, even ones that don’t necessarily provide security. Well, not all people. US Air Force engineer charged with sawing down flock surveillance cameras receives thousands of dollars from supporters across the country.
+ Allies: An Afghan national who fought with U.S. forces died of an allergic reaction in ICE custody. (Feel safer?)
+ Midtown Evacuation: “A safety manager reported that a steel beam was compromised on the 21st floor, according to Buildings Department records. The Fire Department said that two support columns inside the building were buckling, and several upper floors were sagging … A ‘frozen zone’ was set up from 40th to 45th Streets between First and Third Avenues.” Mamdani Warns That Midtown Manhattan Building Remains Unstable.
+ Corruption Eruption: IOC lifts ban on Russian Olympic Committee, clearing path for athletes’ return to Games. (They should have waited. This is supposed to be the week for Trump/FIFA corruption.)
+ It’s About the Journey: There’s been a hell of a lot of hype leading up to the release of Christopher Nolan’s latest movie, The Odyssey. It sounds like it lives up to it, and then some. Variety: First Reactions Are Raves for Christopher Nolan’s ‘Astonishing’ Epic and ‘Flawless Filmmaking’: ‘Breathtaking, Bold and Perfection.’ (I haven’t read raves like that since I first launched NextDraft.)
“Check your bathroom cabinet, as CVS Health has recalled thousands of medicated hemorrhoidal wipes due to a lack of child-resistant packaging.” Here’s a shocker: “As of July 2, CVS was not aware of any injuries related to the recall.”
2026-07-06 20:00:00
I call offside. I need sports as an escape from the Trump-dominated news cycle. Since my wife and I have watched TV (all of it, seriously), and I’ve memorized the first five seasons of The Office, sports are the only escape I have left. And no sporting event has provided that escape as powerfully as the World Cup. And it worked for a while. But, like everything else, the beautiful game has been soiled by the ugliest American. The place we all went for a break from Trump is now being dominated by headlines about him. There is no escape. The World Cup has become one more algae-filled pool reflecting the orange pathological prevaricator whose distorted open-mouthed image ripples over everything. I guess we need to offer some credit where credit is due. You know how hard it is to be more corrupt than FIFA? “President Trump called Gianni Infantino, the president of FIFA, in the hours after the United States men’s soccer team played Wednesday and asked him to review the suspension of the team’s top goal scorer in the World Cup, Folarin Balogun, after he was given a red card, according to four people familiar with the conversation. On Sunday, FIFA reversed the suspension, announcing that Mr. Balogun would be eligible to play Monday against Belgium. The reversal is highly unusual and is the first time since 1962 that FIFA has allowed a player to appear in a game when they would have been suspended after being sent off in the World Cup.” (Maybe Trump can get Infantino to negotiate a new peace deal with Iran…) I’m partly leading with this story because it’s dominated headlines across the globe, and it fits into a storyline that has more countries viewing America as corrupt. And I’m partly leading with it in what will probably be a futile effort to get it out of my mind and into a newsletter in time for me to actually enjoy the game this evening. I mean, this has got to be the last time Trump will insert himself into this story. It’s not like he’s giving out the winning trophy. Oh, wait…
+ “Following Wednesday’s victory against Bosnia and Herzegovina, White House FIFA World Cup Task Force executive director Andrew Giuliani alerted President Donald Trump to Balogun’s punishment for a rash tackle — removal from the Bosnia match and a routine one-match suspension that would keep him out of a must-win encounter against Belgium.” Politico: Inside the White House push to get Folarin Balogun back on the field. And from the WSJ (Gift Article): Inside the White House Campaign to Overturn a World Cup Red Card. (I would say it’s ironic that Trump’s intervention in this matter will result in a birthright American getting to play for the US, but Trump had irony overturned, too.)
+ Here’s the latest from The Guardian.
Here in the Bay Area, we wrapped ourselves in overcoats and huddled under blankets to watch a Golden Gate Bridge fireworks show that mostly just made the low-hanging fog glow. And believe me, we know how lucky we were compared to much of the rest of the country, where (like much of the rest of the world), it was brutally hot. You aren’t the only one surprised by the climate in your neck of the woods. So are the experts, even the ones who predicted the worst. Bloomberg (Gift Article): Extreme Heat Isn’t the Only Climate Impact Shocking Scientists. “While scientists have long braced for climate change, the growing severity of its impacts is shocking them.”
+ Just when you thought there wouldn’t be a solution for climate change… NYT (Gift Article): To Beat the Heat, the Wealthy Are Building Snow Rooms. “A snow room is more or less the opposite of a sauna — a cavelike space of ice and snow. In some, white flakes descend gently from the ceiling to create the feeling of being inside a snow globe.”
“Over the course of the past two decades, the US has lost 2,000 golf courses and 7,000 bars and nightclubs, and Americans now own 1.3 million fewer boats. It’s prohibitively expensive to open a new summer camp and practically impossible to build a beachfront resort or marina. Venue shortages afflict musicians looking for performance spaces, children looking to play in local sports leagues and adults looking to go out dancing. The best time to book a rental for this summer was last summer, and the best time to book for next summer is … well, it may already be too late. America appears to be suffering from a fun shortage.” Bloomberg (Gift Article): The Fun Shortage Is Real, and It’s Making America Miserable.
“The lightbulb. The internet. The telephone and the iPhone. Since the founding of the United States, we have built airplanes, refrigerators and Costco. We dreamed up the microchip and we gave the world chocolate-chip cookies. But the greatest American innovation that you won’t ever find on a list of America’s innovations might just be one that you see every day. It’s an unsung idea that changed a nation and spread all over the world—and it was driven by one guy.” WSJ (Gift Article): This Simple White Line Is America’s Greatest Unsung Innovation. “In the 1950s, around the time Jonas Salk cracked the polio vaccine, a metallurgist named John V. N. Dorr became the champion of a different lifesaver: a white line on the right side of the road.”
Unmasked: “Hundreds of masked men carrying banners, including the Confederate flag, marched through Washington DC on the Fourth of July, the 250th anniversary of the US’s inception … Members chanted ‘Life, liberty, victory!’ and ‘Reclaim America!’ during the Saturday demonstration, according to video posted on social media.” Hundreds of masked white nationalists march in Washington on Fourth of July. (The sick display resulted in what may be the most revealing image of 2026, from Cheney Orr of Reuters).
+ Dealer’s Choice: “What Trump offers is an easy escape from the pain. To every complex problem, he promises a simple solution. He can bring jobs back simply by punishing offshoring companies into submission. As he told a New Hampshire crowd—folks all too familiar with the opioid scourge—he can cure the addiction epidemic by building a Mexican wall and keeping the cartels out. He will spare the United States from humiliation and military defeat with indiscriminate bombing. It doesn’t matter that no credible military leader has endorsed his plan. He never offers details for how these plans will work, because he can’t. Trump’s promises are the needle in America’s collective vein.” That is a powerful commentary. Guess who wrote it? JD Vance in 2016. The Atlantic (Gift Article): Opioid of the Masses. (This was before JD became a dealer…)
+ RSVP Minus One: “Iranian state media showed huge crowds at the Imam Khomeini Grand Mosalla — a large prayer complex in Tehran — visiting the casket of Ayatollah’s Ali Khamenei, who was killed on Feb. 28 at the start of the U.S.-Israel war against Iran. The caskets of four of his killed family members were also on display.” Dayslong funeral for slain Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei begins in Tehran. Not everyone is attending. Time: Khamenei’s Funeral Is Meant to Project Strength. But Iran’s New Leader Has Yet to Appear.
+ Fishing Expedition: “Government officials and agencies closest to the action, at sea and on America’s streets, tell a different story. In hearings, official reports, and interviews they have all but given up the pretense that the campaign has succeeded in reducing the flow of drugs into the U.S., even as 221 people have been killed in more than 60 strikes.” The Results Are In On Trump’s Boat Strikes Campaign.
+ Ven Diagram: “When a giant earthquake struck Haiti in 2010, the United States mounted an enormous relief effort involving more than $3 billion in aid, 7,000 U.S. troops on the ground and a halt to deportations of Haitians to their devastated country.” Things have changed. With $8 Billion in Venezuelan Oil Money, U.S. Gives $300 Million in Quake Aid.
+ Packing Heat: “In the view of critics and even some A.T.F. veterans, the agency, in closely mirroring the demands made by gun owners and manufacturers to lighten their regulatory burden, is enacting changes at the expense of public safety. The moves, they worry, come as the bureau has already been weakened, with hundreds of its officials diverted to immigration enforcement.” Trump Administration Rolls Back Dozens of Gun Regulations.
+ Walk This Way: Can you outrun dementia by walking really fast? NPR: Fast walkers in their 80s cut their risk of cognitive decline by half, a study finds.
+ Humanoidian Slip: “Around small pets, around small children, there’s still work to be done.” The robots are coming. Are we ready? More importantly, are they? The New Yorker: Are Humanoid Robots Ready to Be Deployed?
+A Nietzsche Business: My kids wanted to get into coding. But told them to follow the money and get into a major that pays off. Philosophy. NYT (Gift Article): The Revenge of the Philosophy Majors.
“The red-white-and-blue popsicles are the ultimate shorthand Americana — a throwback to the simple days of ice cream trucks, July 4th fireworks and humid summer nights. But after the Bomb Pop came on the market in July 1955, some parents revolted over the symbolism of selling a frozen weapon of war to children.” Bomb Pops, the Kansas City invention that defined American summers and patriotic nostalgia. (Greatest popsicle ever.)
+ During his team’s epic win over Mexico, England’s Jordan Henderson got a yellow card and suffered a serious wrist injury. Even though he didn’t play.
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.