2025-05-30 20:00:00
You had me at Heil. Actually, after ruining my social media addiction to Twitter and spoiling the Tesla brand, I couldn’t stand Elon before he heiled. Now that’s he’s supposedly departing his official government duties, we’ll start to see two kinds of stories in the media. The first kind of story will be the result of pent up leaks, like today’s NYT (Gift Article): On the Campaign Trail, Elon Musk Juggled Drugs and Family Drama. “Mr. Musk’s drug consumption went well beyond occasional use. He told people he was taking so much ketamine, a powerful anesthetic, that it was affecting his bladder, a known effect of chronic use. He took Ecstasy and psychedelic mushrooms. And he traveled with a daily medication box that held about 20 pills, including ones with the markings of the stimulant Adderall.” This hardly seems like new news. And it definitely doesn’t qualify as surprising news. Can you imagine running several of the largest companies in the country and the country itself without shoveling handfuls of drugs down your gullet? I can barely write NextDraft without consuming enough coffee to redefine meth as a sedative. (And I don’t even want to get into what I have to take to get over writing NextDraft. At this point, my psychiatrist writes out so many prescriptions he’s implemented a surcharge for ink.) The second kind of Musk story we’ll see is the more important kind; a reflection on the enormous damage he did. Michelle Goldberg sums that part up pretty well in the NYT (Gift Article): Elon Musk’s Legacy Is Disease, Starvation and Death. “Musk apparently did not anticipate that it would be bad PR for the world’s richest man to take food and medicine from the world’s poorest children … If there were justice in the world, Musk would never be able to repair his reputation, at least not without devoting the bulk of his fortune to easing the misery he’s engendered. Musk’s sojourn in government has revealed severe flaws in his character — a blithe, dehumanizing cruelty, and a deadly incuriosity. This should shape how he’s seen for the rest of his public life.” (Spoiler Alert: It probably won’t.) I said we’d see two kind of stories following Musk’s departure from government. The truth is we’ll soon be seeing a third kind. The stories that explain how he never really left at all.
+ “Musk’s failure to follow through on his boasts, though, should not detract from a clear-eyed assessment of the extraordinary amount of damage he succeeded in wreaking. The wise men are laughing Musk out of town, and I get it. His ‘performative vandalism,’ as Jonah Goldberg put it on CNN, was in some respects just a pernicious, highly dangerous new variant of a Washington perennial: the pol who makes promises he cannot keep. But it is hard to think of any other unelected official who has done so much harm to the U.S. government in such a short period of time. The fact that the deficit may get even bigger at the end of the day only worsens the injury.” The New Yorker: Elon Musk Didn’t Blow Up Washington, but He Left Plenty of Damage Behind.
+ Even one guy with a lot of money and a ketamine tsunami coursing through his veins can’t do this kind of damage alone. The destruction of agencies, and especially of foreign aid, has been a team effort, and one, that whether we like it or not, now represents America. ProPublica: Death, Sexual Violence and Human Trafficking: Fallout From U.S. Aid Withdrawal Hits the World’s Most Fragile Locations. “‘It is devastating, but it’s not surprising,’ Eric Schwartz, a former State Department assistant secretary and member of the National Security Council during Democratic administrations, told ProPublica. ‘It’s all what people in the national security community have predicted. I struggle for adjectives to adequately describe the horror that this administration has visited on the world … It keeps me up at night.'” (The only thing that keeps Elon up at night is the Adderall.)
“During the Biden years, Trump liked to say that ‘the world is laughing at us.’ Now it really is.” Dana Milbank in WaPo (Gift Article): The bully gets punched in the nose. Part of this article focuses on the comical (unless you invest, hold, use, or like money) tariff negotiations. But as I mentioned yesterday, the tariff chaos is less about TACO (Trump Always Chickens Out) and more about CHALUPA (Congress Has Acquiesced Like Unbelievably Pathetic A**holes).
+ Trump Accuses China of ‘Violating’ Its Trade Agreement With the U.S., Laments Being ‘Mr. Nice Guy.’ (Is this claim about China rooted in reality or a reaction to the TACO claim? Don’t bother trying to answer that. The story will change before you have the chance…)
OK, let’s lighten things up a bit with one of the great ledes in recent memory. “A pair of hikers in New York called emergency services to report that a third member of their group had died, but when a park ranger responded to rescue them it turned out they were just high on hallucinogenic mushrooms.” (The good news is that no one actually died. The bad news is that these two hikers are now running DOGE.)
What to Movie: Michael Fassbender and Cate Blanchett play a couple of spies who also happen to be a married couple in Black Bag on Peacock.
+ What to Watch: “As she wrangles three teens, an aging father and vulnerable kids from her social services job, Pørni somehow finds time for everyone — except herself.” I’m only one episode into the Norwegian show Pernille on Netflix, but I can already tell I’m gonna watch all five seasons (in part because watching TV nonstop is my way of coping with everything else in this newsletter, and in part because you can tell how good it is right from the start).
+ What to Read: “The widow’s most important, and perhaps unusual, request was that the building sit exactly on the nations’ common border. Inside, black tape representing the boundary ran along the hardwood floors, a symbol not of division but of the enduring friendship between the two lands. Then one day, the leader of the country to the south threatened to annex his neighbor to the north.” Nowhere was the friendship between the US and Canada more clear than in a library that shared a common border between the two countries. And now, nowhere is our stupidity more clearly on display. NYT (Gift Article): The U.S.-Canada Border Runs Through This Library. That’s Now a Problem.
Zip Code of Conduct: “It undervalues the devastating consequences of allowing the Government to precipitously upend the lives and livelihoods of nearly half a million noncitizens while their legal claims are pending.” Ketanji Brown Jackson dissenting from The Supreme Court decision to “allow the Trump administration to temporarily pause a humanitarian program that has allowed nearly half a million people from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela to enter the U.S. and remain here legally for two years.” (Feel safer?) Meanwhile, welcome to the new America: Children zip-tied at San Antonio immigration court in new crackdown.
+ Crack a Smile: “Despite decades of data proving its efficacy at protecting teeth from decay—particularly children’s teeth—two states have now banned the use of fluoride in public water, and communities around the country have followed suit or are considering doing the same.” RFK Jr.’s fluoride ban would ruin 25 million kids’ teeth, cost $9.8 billion.
+ Poking for Likes: White House targets Harvard again with social media screening of all foreign visitors to school. (Our bureau of tourism has its work cut out for it.)
+ Health Check Your Work: In part due to faulty use of AI programs and in part because of a predilection for lying, the White House Health Report Included Fake Citations. (Maybe the real news here is that this headline also suggests that a White House report included some real citations, too.)
+ Despite and Malice: “President Trump has nominated 30-year-old conservative lawyer Paul Ingrassia, to lead the U.S. Office of Special Counsel, a government ethics office, despite Ingrassia’s ties to multiple antisemitic extremists.” (Are we sure despite is the right word here?)
+ Ball Huggers: “Could the final frontier following the short-shorts explosion be straight dudes wearing briefs on the beach without blinking an eye?” GQ: Are Straight Guys Ready for Speedo Summer? (Don’t ask me, I wear jeans on the beach.)
+ The Glide of Frankenstein: The amazing video of the Chinese paraglider getting sucked into a cloud was a little too amazing. It was AI generated. (I choose to believe that all of 2025 so far is AI generated.)
“In a world first, NHS England will offer patients with lung and breast cancer access to ‘liquid biopsy’ tests to help speed up their access to treatment.” NHS offers ‘revolutionary’ blood test for cancer in world first. (Science is good.)
+ Faizan Zaki wins Scripps National Spelling Bee a year after coming in 2nd. The winning word: Éclaircissement. (A French word describing the bloating caused by too many desserts.)
+ Alaska man survives after being trapped face-down in creek by 700lb boulder.
+ Copenhagen was just named the happiest city in the world. The top US city was NY coming in 17th.
+ Experience: I’ve made the longest chain of chewing-gum wrappers in the world.
+ New urinal designs could prevent up to 265,000 gallons of urine from spilling onto the floor each day.
+ There are upsides to refusing to bend the knee. One of them is that you can get a minute-long ovation for a speech after just saying the word, Welcome.
2025-05-29 20:00:00
By the time a court blocked President Donald Trump from imposing sweeping tariffs on imports under an emergency-powers law, a meme had already taken hold among Wall Streeters and made its way to a presidential press conference. “The TACO trade, short for Trump Always Chickens Out, is a tongue-in-cheek term coined by the Financial Times columnist Robert Armstrong. It has been adopted by some analysts and commentators to describe the potentially lucrative pattern in which markets tumble after Mr. Trump makes tariff threats, only to rebound sharply when he relents and allows countries more time to negotiate deals.” While the TACO acronym might ring muy verdad, this issue never should have made it to the courts. Liberation Day only turned into Litigation Day because the legislative branch failed to stand up to a rogue president by claiming its unique role when it comes to imposing tariffs. The law on this matter really couldn’t be more clear, so why have legislators failed to stand up for themselves or the country? Let’s call it what it is: Congress Has Acquiesced Like Unbelievably Pathetic A**holes. Or it you prefer the acronym: CHALUPA.
+ TNR: A Trade Court Stopped Trump’s Tariffs. Why Didn’t Congress? “None of this should have required this court to step in and save the day. The ersatz national emergency that Trump cooked up as justification for his revenue-hungry tariffs ought to have been put to rest by means of a congressional joint resolution. Before Trump, no president had ever claimed [International Emergency Economic Powers Act] authority to impose a tariff. But today’s Republican-controlled Congress is James Madison’s worst nightmare, too frozen by terror of a vindictive chief executive to check his power.”
+ QZ: The trade war enters a new phase: What to watch over the next 10 days. Forget the next 10 days. Let’s focus on the next 10 minutes. An appeals court has already paused the trade court’s ruling and we should hear from SCOTUS on the matter soon.
“The people languishing in this modern-day gulag – mapped by matching first-hand accounts with satellite imagery, cellphone data and other open-source material – aren’t the Soviet dissidents of the last century that Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote about in The Gulag Archipelago. They are Ukrainian children, abducted from their homes and families over the course of Russia’s war to destroy Ukraine.” The Globe and Mail: The Children’s Gulag.
For now, a judge has blocked the Trump administration’s effort to bar Harvard from enrolling international students. The ruling offers a nice reprieve on Harvard’s Commencement Day, but the battle is likely just beginning. And no matter how it turns out, the administration has done severe damage to America’s brand when it comes to attracting the best and brightest from around the world.
+ It’s not just universities, America’s brand as a destination has been damaged, and we’re only a few months into the new administration. “European airlines are freezing their transatlantic growth and pulling back from major U.S. cities like New York, Miami, Los Angeles, and Chicago as they redirect flights to Canada, Mexico, Brazil and Caribbean, where bookings are rising and demand is outpacing the American market.”
+ Meanwhile, Benjamin Wittes responds to the notion that any of the attacks on Harvard and higher ed have to do with protecting Jews from antisemitism. “There is only one system that has ever truly protected Jews over time, and that is liberalism. And American liberalism is the only version that has ever done it at scale—which is to say more than 10 times the scale of any other non-Jewish country. The reason? Jews don’t rely on some liege lord’s ‘protection.’ We rely on a system of rights and limits on government power that protect everyone.” Thanks but No Thanks. “There will come a Pharaoh who knows not the Kushners … The lesson is not to stay in Pharaoh’s good graces and enjoy it while he screws your enemies. The lesson is that Pharaohs suck and Jews shouldn’t live in societies ruled by them.”
“In 1982, a peculiar commercial aired on televisions across Japan. An actress in a pink floral dress and an updo drops paint on her hand and futilely attempts to wipe it off with toilet paper. She looks into the camera and asks: ‘Everyone, if your hands get dirty, you wash them, right?’ ‘It’s the same for your bottom,’ she continues. ‘Bottoms deserve to be washed, too.’ The commercial was advertising the Washlet, a new type of toilet seat with a then-unheard-of function: a small wand that extended from the back of the rim and sprayed water up. After its release, Toto, the Washlet’s maker, was deluged with calls and letters from viewers shocked by the concept. They were also angry that it was broadcast during evening prime time, when many were sitting down for dinner.” Well, they got over the shock and anger and their bottoms are all the better for it. “Washlet-style bidets, sold by Toto and a few smaller rivals, are a common feature in Japan’s offices and public restrooms and account for more than 80 percent of all household toilets.” Is the magic water wand finally catching on America. You bet your ass it is. NYT (Gift Article): The Rise of the Japanese Toilet. “Toto is selling more bidets in the United States. Toto’s president says not even tariffs will halt its advance.” (The article mentions a few celebrities and influencers, but it’s a safe bet that none of them has done as much to spread the Toto gospel as Howard Stern. He’s been consistently describing his use of the product in extremely specific terms for years.)
Moving Companies: “China’s mass detention and surveillance of ethnic Uyghurs turned its far western region of Xinjiang into a global symbol of forced labor and human rights abuses, prompting Congress to ban imports from the area in 2021.” What did China do then? They moved the Uyghurs. NYT (Gift Article): Far From Home: Uyghur Workers in Factories Supplying Global Brands. (Reminder: It’s not that we don’t need tougher standards and deals when it comes to trading with China. It’s that our current efforts are counter-productive.)
+ Clean and Jerk: “More than $14 billion in clean energy investments in the U.S. have been canceled or delayed this year, according to an analysis released Thursday, as President Donald Trump’s pending megabill has raised fears over the future of domestic battery, electric vehicle and solar and wind energy development.” (Even if you don’t care about climate issues, that’s a lot of spending and jobs down the tubes.)
+ What Elon Strange Trip It’s Been: Elon Musk’s official role within the United States government is coming to an end. A breakup was inevitable. But much of the analysis I see of the split reads more like an Elon press release, taking everything he says at face value, ignoring the heinous damage he’s done, and discounting the role his efforts to increase his stock price plays in all this spin. (And don’t be too happy about the Schadenfreude. Elon leaves his government gig with many massive government deals and, despite the damage he’s done to his brands, he’s still more than twice as rich as the world’s second richest person.)
+ RF KO: “The decision also forfeited the U.S. government’s right to purchase doses ahead of a pandemic, and canceled an agreement set up by the Biden administration in January to prepare the nation for a potential bird flu pandemic.” U.S. Cancels Contract With Moderna to Develop Bird Flu Vaccine. (Relax, everyone. It’s not like a deadly disease could mutate and spread from birds to humans and then require a remarkable vaccine to save millions of lives…)
+ Tough News to Swallow: It’s a small study, but new research out of UCSF suggests that cannabis presents cardiovascular risks, even when its consumed via edibles.
+ Detached Reality: “A Swiss Alpine village was largely wiped out on Wednesday after a massive glacier carrying rock and debris detached and roared down the mountainside, destroying everything in its path.” (The accompanying video is crazy.)
+ Field of Dreams: ” Justin seems normal, too. He’s 36, tall and slender, and wears a backward baseball cap most days that gives him the look of a slacker teen. But for a certain subset of people, Justin is far from a normal person.” How to Become a Fantasy-Sports Millionaire.
“The creator of ‘The White Lotus’ is doing a second season of ‘Survivor.’ He’s also competed on ‘The Amazing Race’ — twice — and even appeared on an episode of ‘The Dog Whisperer.'” Mike White, the Guy Behind the Most Prestigious Prestige TV Series, Can’t Stop Doing Reality Shows.
+ Chinese paraglider survives accidental 8,000m-high flight. He got caught in something accurately described as a cloud suck. (Now I need a new phrase to describe my bong hits.)
2025-05-28 20:00:00
So you want to repossess a yacht. The first step is pretty hard. Find the yacht. The second part is a lot harder. Prove which oligarch owns the yacht. To do that you’ll need to dig through a global economy very much distinct from the one most of us operate in (or are even aware of). It’s where drug cartels launder money. It’s where authoritarian regimes move their ill-begotten gains. It’s where arms dealers and terrorists work around pesky international laws and sanctions. “Though it’s often called a system, the offshore world is really more of an archipelago — a constellation of territories and nations operating with the same general aim of helping wealthy people move and hide their money. This world encompasses places as diverse as Hong Kong, Dubai, the Isle of Man, South Dakota and Curaçao and includes not only notorious tax havens like Switzerland and the Cayman Islands but also institutions and jurisdictions in the hearts of the countries that usually rank highest in global transparency indexes.” NYT Mag (Gift Article) with a very interesting glimpse into that other economy. How to Hide a 350-Foot Megayacht. And spoiler-alert. The other economy has a new participant and proponent. He’s in America’s Oval Office. “Amid the fracas, it would have been easy to miss two lines, buried on the fourth page of a Justice Department memo, circulated two weeks into Trump’s second term: An interagency task force, colorfully named KleptoCapture, would be disbanded. Though KleptoCapture was hardly a household name, its demise was portentous — it indicated the administration’s unwillingness to fight the financial systems that not only allow Kremlin allies to disguise their wealth but also enable international drug cartels to operate with impunity, corrupt officials to launder money from bribes into luxury real estate and the ultrawealthy to avoid paying taxes.”
In recent years, journalists and others who have warned of impending dangers in America were written off as being overly hysterical. In retrospect, they could rightly be criticized for having understated the threat. So these days, when I see a headline that includes the word Beware, I beware. M. Gessen in the NYT (Gift Article): Beware: We Are Entering a New Phase of the Trump Era. And it’s not his phase. It’s ours. “Once you’ve absorbed the shock of deportations to El Salvador, plans to deport people to South Sudan aren’t that remarkable. Once you’ve wrapped your mind around the Trump administration’s revoking the legal status of individual international students, a blanket ban on international enrollment at Harvard isn’t entirely unexpected. Once you’ve realized that the administration is intent on driving thousands of trans people out of the U.S. military, a ban on Medicaid coverage for gender-affirming care, which could have devastating effects for hundreds of thousands, just becomes more of the same. As in a country at war, reports of human tragedy and extreme cruelty have become routine — not news.”
“More than three-quarters of Americans (77%) want companies to create AI slowly and get it right the first time, even if that delays breakthroughs.” Well, as Mick and Keith suggested, you can’t always get what you want. The AI arms race is on, it will make other tech advances of the internet age seem sluggish and quaint, and it could dramatically change the way our workforce looks. Quartz: The age of AI layoffs is already here. The reckoning is just beginning.
“‘We’re going to be doing foreign aid. We’re going to be doing humanitarian relief, disaster relief,’ Rubio told his former Senate Foreign Relations Committee colleagues … There’s just one problem: They’re not doing it. Despite months of assurances by Rubio that the administration planned to maintain “lifesaving” aid, there has been a catastrophic halt to programs that — by any reasonable definition — prevent people from dying or being brutally harmed.” WaPo (Gift Article): The White House keeps promising ‘lifesaving’ aid that’s not coming.
+ A B.U. professor has developed a tool for Tracking Anticipated Deaths from USAID Funding Cuts. It’s not pretty. As Bono explained to Jimmy Kimmel during an interview in which he defended Bruce Springsteen, we’re demolishing “instruments of mercy and compassion.” Even musicians like Bono and Springsteen know those are the most important instruments we have.
Med Dread: “We’re probably going to stop publishing in the Lancet, New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA and those other journals because they’re all corrupt.” That’s RFK Jr on plans to stop publishing in the world’s most trusted medical journals. The new plan? In-house publications. RFK Jr. says he may bar scientists from publishing in top medical journals.
+ Forecast of Hundreds: “The projections come from more than 200 forecasts using computer simulations run by 10 global centers of scientists.” And what’s the consensus? Heat. Get ready for several years of killer heat, top weather forecasters warn. (Don’t worry. It’s a dry heat.)
+ Partners in Crime: “President Trump will fully pardon the reality television stars Todd and Julie Chrisley, who were convicted three years ago of evading taxes and defrauding banks of more than $30 million to support their luxurious lifestyle.” (In fairness, they were on reality TV, they didn’t pay their taxes, they duped people into giving them money, they lied to banks, and they celebrated faux religiosity. How could Trump not pardon them?) NYT (Gift Article): Trump to Pardon Reality-Show Couple Convicted of $36 Million Fraud.
+ Cost Overrun: Netanyahu says Israel killed elusive Hamas leader Mohammed Sinwar in a recent Gaza strike. Hamas is a murderous organization and its leaders deserve their fate. But at this point, even Israel’s staunchest allies are suggesting the price of the ongoing war is too high. Tom Friedman in the NYT (Gift Article): The Flashing Signals That I Just Saw in Israel. “I did see signals flashing that more Israelis, from the left to the center and to even parts of the right, are concluding that continuing this war is a disaster for Israel: morally, diplomatically or strategically.”
+ FIFA Fo Fum: “Their case quickly erupted into the biggest corruption scandal in modern sports history. It eventually led to 31 guilty pleas and multiple trial convictions. It recovered hundreds of millions of dollars. It triggered a reckoning at FIFA, the global soccer governing body at the center of the storm, and led to a raft of promised reforms.” But ten years later, has anything at FIFA changed? How FIFAgate, soccer’s biggest scandal, became ‘a missed opportunity’ for reform. “FIFA, meanwhile, now boasts of ‘excellent relations with President Trump [and] the Trump administration.'”
+ Teaching the Big Lie: “Starting with the next academic year, Oklahoma students in U.S. history classes will be asked to ‘identify discrepancies in 2020 elections results by looking at graphs and other information,’ including on ‘sudden batch dumps, an unforeseen record number of voters, and the unprecedented contradiction of ‘bellwether county’ trends.'” ‘Stop the Steal’ in U.S. History Class.
+ Meth Odd Actor: “Early on Memorial Day, a Florida man was bitten by an alligator as he swam across a lake. Bleeding from a bite to his right arm but undeterred, he climbed out, grabbed a pair of garden shears and walked into a gated neighborhood, alarming residents, according to local authorities. Within minutes, the man, Timothy Schulz, 42, of Mulberry, Fla., was dead — shot by sheriff’s deputies after, they say, he charged at them with the shears, failed to be subdued by a stun gun and tried to grab either a shotgun or rifle from their cruiser.” NYT (Gift Article): Bitten by Alligator, Man Is Killed After Charging at Deputies, Sheriff Says. “Sheriff Judd also said that Mr. Schulz had a lengthy criminal history, which he described as ‘meth arrest, meth arrest, meth arrest, meth arrest, meth arrest.'” (Seems like a decent starting point to begin to piece together a theory of the case.)
“‘All the people at the top said they were going to steal my title but this is mine,’ a shirtless Kopke declared as he clutched his prize — the 7-pound circle of cheese. ‘I risked my life for this. It’s my cheese. Back to back.'” Runners trip, stumble and roll their way to victory in annual downhill cheese chase. And the photos are as great as you’d imagine.
2025-05-27 20:00:00
All that glitters is not gold. Some of it is gold plated or merely gold paint. Included among the many ways America has been changed in the first few months of Trump 2.0 is the transformation of the White House into a gilt complex. “Lately the American president has been spending quite a bit of time redecorating the Oval Office. The results can only be called a gilded rococo hellscape. If our leader’s appearance is a depiction of the country … Is this us?” (After electing a guilty man into the highest office, sadly, the answer is yes. Call it gilt by association). Trump, whose style has been called dictator chic is obsessed with all things gold, from gold in the Oval Office, to the Golden Dome he hopes will protect America from incoming missiles, to ordering in his favorite food from the Golden Arches. The NYT (Gift Article) on the updated White House stylings that give new meaning to fool’s gold: All Hail Our Rococo President! “The most unusual additions to the office are two gilded mirrors that hang on either side of the fireplace. This is so quintessentially Mr. Trump that I’m surprised he didn’t think of it earlier. When standing in front of one, your reflection joins the pantheon of great leaders above you. It’s just like they say: In America anyone can grow up to become president.” (That adage used to be viewed as a positive.)
+ In the grand scheme of things, slapping a little gold plating on the White House walls isn’t a particularly big story. But it is connected to a very big one: our new transactional presidency, where everything has a price and no one is quite sure where the money is ending up. “Even seasoned practitioners of Washington pay-to-play have been startled by the new rules for buying influence. In December, a seat at a group dinner at Mar-a-Lago could be had for a million-dollar contribution to maga Inc., a super pac that serves as a war chest for the midterms. More recently, one-on-one conversations with the President have become available for five million. The return on investment is uncertain, a government-affairs executive told me: ‘What if he’s in a bad mood? You have no clue where the money is eventually going.’ Another lobbying veteran described the frank exchange as ‘outer-borough Mafia shit.'” Evan Osnos in The New Yorker: Donald Trump’s Politics of Plunder.
+ “When Hillary Clinton was first lady, a furor erupted over reports that she had once made $100,000 from a $1,000 investment in cattle futures. Even though it had happened a dozen years before her husband became president, it became a scandal that lasted weeks and forced the White House to initiate a review. Thirty-one years later, after dinner at Mar-a-Lago, Jeff Bezos agreed to finance a promotional film about Melania Trump that will reportedly put $28 million directly in her pocket — 280 times the Clinton lucre and in this case from a person with a vested interest in policies set by her husband’s government. Scandal? Furor?” NYT (Gift Article): As Trumps Monetize Presidency, Profits Outstrip Protests.
+ While there are plenty of big financial scandals, the small ones are nearly endless. Everything is for sale. NYT (Gift Article): Trump Pardoned Tax Cheat After Mother Attended $1 Million Dinner. One assumes the dishes were gold plated.
“She had flown to Scotland to attempt to lift a massive set of boulders known as the Dinnie Stones, each outfitted with an iron ring. In the 120 years since a Scottish strongman famously hoisted the stones, thousands had tried and failed the test of strength. Of the 11 who had succeeded, all were men. She was 5-foot-7 and 195 pounds; the stones together weighed 733 pounds.” Jan Todd lifted the boulders on her way to becoming known as the world’s strongest woman. She also was on of the first and strongest proponents of strength training as part of a healthy lifestyle, right up there with aerobic exercise. That idea has never been more in vogue. NYT (Gift Article): Jan Todd May Be the Reason You’re Lifting Weights. (OK, now we just need to figure out who to blame for aerobic exercise and healthy eating…)
Humans have long searched for a drug that could offer a panacea for all of our ills. Have we already stumbled upon it? “Should Ozempic be added to the water supply? That is the kind of half-joking question that doctors kick around when a new class of drugs begins to help a big chunk of the population. Cardiologists used to quip about spiking water systems with cholesterol-reducing statins because of their ability to prevent heart attacks. Now, Ozempic and others in the ‘GLP-1’ category of drugs are approaching that critical mass. They are showing promise for an ever-expanding list of diseases, beyond today’s most common uses of weight loss and treating diabetes. Heart, kidney and liver diseases. Sleep apnea. Arthritis. Alzheimer’s disease. Alcohol addiction. Even aging. Some of these are potential benefits that need further study.” WSJ (Gift Article): Should Everyone Be Taking Ozempic? Doctors Say More People Could Benefit.
“The warlords who sacked rome did not intend to doom Western Europe to centuries of ignorance. It was not a foreseeable consequence of their actions. The same cannot be said of the sweeping attack on human knowledge and progress that the Trump administration is now undertaking—a deliberate destruction of education, science, and history, conducted with a fanaticism that recalls the Dark Ages that followed Rome’s fall.” (That is a lede for the ages.) The Atlantic (Gift Article): The New Dark Age. “The Trump administration has launched an attack on knowledge itself.”
+ Trump administration moves to cancel all remaining federal contracts with Harvard.
Chuck Roast: In a rare speech from the throne in Canada, King Charles warned of dangers facing the country. “We must face reality: since the Second World War, our world has never been more dangerous and unstable. Canada is facing challenges that, in our lifetimes, are unprecedented … many Canadians are feeling anxious and worried about the drastically changing world around them.” (Yes, the King of the United Kingdom is warning Canada of the threat posed by the United States. Irony aside, it’s one of our closest allies warning another of our closest allies about us. Not exactly a crowning moment.)
+ Americorpse: “About 32,000 low-paid AmeriCorps service workers lost their jobs over a few days in April.” WaPo (Gift Article): A big Trump administration cutback went nearly unnoticed. “The April 25 move was one of the biggest government cutbacks since the Trump administration took office, but went largely unnoticed because most of the jobs were concentrated in nonprofit human services agencies that help underserved communities.”
+ Exits Paved with Gold: “Blanco’s imprisonment came after more than a year navigating America’s arcane immigration system. His story underscores how companies make money at nearly every step of the deportation process—earning more than $13 billion in the last decade.” WSJ: The Billion-Dollar Business Behind Trump’s Immigration Crackdown.
+ Losing Allies: “Israel’s former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert says he now believes his country’s relentless assault on the Palestinian people amounts to ‘war crimes‘ and must be stopped.” That internal pressure on Bibi is matched by frustration from Israel’s top allies. Israel’s Netanyahu under pressure from allies over Gaza.
+ Liverpool Rampage: “The incident late Monday afternoon turned a jubilant parade into a tragedy that sent 50 people to hospitals for treatment of their injuries. Eleven remained hospitalized Tuesday in stable condition.” Driver arrested on suspicion of attempted murder after Liverpool soccer parade tragedy.
+ RFK Fires First Shot: Kennedy says COVID vaccines no longer recommended for healthy children and pregnant women. (And masks only need to be worn if you work for ICE.)
+ Blue Skies: “The radio antenna in Spain where the piece is being broadcast is about 115 feet across, and is operated by the ESA. It supports uncrewed European missions to study the surface of Mars, create a map of the stars and take up-close pictures of the sun. On Saturday, it will take a break from that work.” NPR: The European Space Agency will beam the famous ‘Blue Danube’ waltz into space. (Seems like something by Kid Rock might better represent the humankind of this moment.)
“Fans of viral Labubu dolls have reacted angrily online after its maker pulled the toys from all UK stores following reports of customers fighting over them.
Pop Mart, which makes the monster bag charms, told the BBC it had paused selling them in all 16 of its shops until June to prevent any potential safety issues.” This sounded like another story about entirely unrelatable, crazy collectors … until I clicked through and realized how much I want a Labubu doll…
2025-05-23 20:00:00
At this point, it’s not exactly dropping a dime to say that the Trump family’s effort to make a quick buck by turning the presidency into a crypto cash cow is going to cost America’s reputation a pretty penny—enriching a family that shouldn’t have two nickels to rub together while much of America struggles to afford the dollar store. At this point, the financial shenanigans are a dime a dozen, but perhaps none have been as brazen as the selling of access to the president of the United States to a leaderboard of purchasers of his coinage. “The memecoin dinner … was unlike anything in recent American history — not a campaign fund-raiser but a gathering arranged by the president’s business partners to directly enrich the first family. As guests were flowing into the club, protesters held signs with slogans like ‘Stop Crypto Corruption,’ ‘Release the guest list’ and ‘No Kings.'” Knowing the Trumps, those signs will probably be made into NFTs that will be sold off the highest bidder. NYT (Gift Article): Hundreds Join Trump at ‘Exclusive’ Dinner, With Dreams of Crypto Fortunes in Mind. Senator Jeff Merkley, Democrat of Oregon described the dinner as the Mount Everest of corruption. (Imagine an event standing out for its bribery and corruption during a week when Trump took ownership of a gifted 747.) Can America retain the trust and status required to be the world’s economic leader with a self-dealing, access-selling president in the Oval Office? Honestly, it’s probably a coin toss.
+ “The black-tie dinner was a special reward for the top 220 holders of the president’s personal $TRUMP meme coin, with those in the room having contributed millions in investment in his crypto token. The 25 biggest investors got an even more exclusive privilege — access to a small VIP reception with the president. Media reports estimate the purchases and associated fees of the coin have generated an estimated hundreds of millions in fees for its issuer.” Inside the room at Trump’s meme coin dinner.
+ Don’t worry. The Trumps aren’t keeping all the crypto gains to themselves. WSJ (Gift Article): The Father Pursues Trump’s Diplomatic Deals. The Son Chases Crypto Deals. “A month before President Trump’s inauguration, Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff flew to the United Arab Emirates with two goals: discussing regional issues with the Abu Dhabi royal known as the ‘spy sheikh,’ and attending a cryptocurrency conference. Less than five months later, Witkoff’s son, co-founder of the crypto venture World Liberty Financial, took the stage at a conference in Dubai to announce the company had struck a deal for the sheikh’s company to buy $2 billion of their new cryptocurrency.”
+ “The racism and the corruption are coming together … as the top 220 holders of the $TRUMP coin join the president at a private dinner. A Bloomberg analysis of the top 25 wallets shows that 19 are owned by individuals from outside the United States, and many of the winners are companies looking for access to the president. Many of them dumped their $TRUMP coins as soon as they made the cut for the dinner. Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington reported today that 50 of the people attending Trump’s dinner tonight hold crypto assets with names from the alt-right, including Pepe the Frog and swastikas, or that have names that are racist or antisemitic, including the n-word and ‘F*CK THE JEWS.'” Heather Cox Richardson connects all the dots, from the House budget bill to the immigrant fear-mongering to the meme coins. Corruption is the bow that ties it all together.
NYT (Gift Article): Judge Blocks Trump Effort to Bar International Students at Harvard. “The administration action, and Harvard’s response, signified a dramatic escalation of the battle between the administration and Harvard. And the university’s forceful and almost immediate response served as evidence that stopping the flow of international students to Harvard, which draws some of the world’s top scholars, would destabilize Harvard’s very existence.” This isn’t just harming students. One of America’s key global advantages has been the ability to attract and often keep the world’s brightest minds. However this battle plays out, why would future students want to risk coming here?
+ And keep in mind that these attacks on Harvard aren’t about antisemitism or any of the other excuses being offered by the administration. Steven Pinker in the NYT (Gift Article): Harvard Derangement Syndrome. If you read nothing else today, read this excerpt: “Mr. Trump’s strangling of this support will harm Jews more than any president in my lifetime. Many practicing and aspiring scientists are Jewish, and his funding embargo has them watching in horror as they are laid off, their labs are shut down or their dreams of a career in science go up in smoke. This is immensely more harmful than walking past a ‘Globalize the Intifada’ sign. Worse still is the effect on the far larger number of gentiles in science, who are being told that their labs and careers are being snuffed out to advance Jewish interests. Likewise for the current patients whose experimental treatments will be halted, and the future patients who may be deprived of cures. None of this is good for the Jews. The concern for Jews is patently disingenuous, given Mr. Trump’s sympathy for Holocaust deniers and Hitler fans. The obvious motivation is to cripple civil society institutions that serve as loci of influence outside the executive branch. As JD Vance put it in the title of a 2021 speech: ‘The Universities Are the Enemy.'”
+ The latest ruling is par of the course for the administration. But at this point, it’s unclear to what extent the courts can limit the damage being done to institutions and individuals. “Even assuming all those rulings were to be upheld on appeal, some of Mr. Trump’s actions would be easier to undo than others. And the slow pace of litigation means the judiciary is often many steps behind and in some cases, unable to catch up.” NYT (Gift Article): Judges Keep Calling Trump’s Actions Illegal, but Undoing Them Is Hard.
We hear a lot about the flow of dangerous drugs from Mexico to the United States. We hear a lot less about the flow of something even more dangerous going in the opposite direction. And the numbers are staggering. The Conversation: Mexican drug cartels use hundreds of thousands of guns bought from licensed US gun shops – fueling violence in Mexico, drugs in the US and migration at the border. “To estimate weapons flow, we gathered trafficking estimates and combined them with previous research, firearm manufacturing totals and the ATF trace data. We generated a model that arrived at a conservative middle estimate: About 135,000 firearms were trafficked across the border in 2022. By way of comparison, consider that Ukraine, engaged in a war with Russia, received 40,000 small arms from the United States between January 2020 and April 2024 – an average of 9,000 per year. That is just under 7% of the trafficked firearms flow that our model showed from the U.S. to Mexico.”
What to Watch: Sarah Silverman’s latest comedy special is less of her traditional standup and more of a reflection on her parents who recently died a few days apart. Postmortem.
+ What to Binge: Overcompensating on Prime “is a college-set ensemble comedy about the chaotic journey of Benny, a closeted former football player and homecoming king, as he becomes fast friends with Carmen, an outsider on a mission to fit in at all costs.” It’s pretty raunchy and fun. And it’s definitely getting a lot of buzz. See if you recognize the head frat bro from season 2 of White Lotus. The roles are remarkably different.
+ What to Movie: If you’re having Andor withdrawals, the show flows right into the movie Rogue One. If you haven’t watched Andor yet, then your three day weekend is set.
+ What to Hear: Bruce Springsteen spoke some truth about America during the second Trump term. Trump warned Springsteen to stop. Springsteen repeated the warnings, and then released them as part of a live EP.
A Tax of the Killer Tomato: “President Trump on Friday said he had run out of patience with trade negotiators from the European Union and has decided to set the tariff on imports at 50% starting on June 1 … The president warned in a separate post that he would put a tariff of at least 25% on imported iPhones, and said he had warned Apple CEO Tim Cook to move his manufacturing to the United States.” Even with a 25 percent tariff, Apple has little incentive to bring manufacturing back home. (The phones made here would still be more expensive. Never mind the nonsense required to tell Apple to start the manufacturing process in the US in a few weeks.)
+ Dome-estic Squabble: “President Donald Trump left out a key detail this week when he outlined his plans for a massive missile and air defense shield over the continent: He can’t build it without Canada. And it’s not clear America’s northern neighbor wants in.” (Gee, I wonder why Canada would be less than enthusiastic about helping out its old friend?)
+ Bibi King: Israel’s Netanyahu Accuses France, Britain, and Canada Leaders of ‘Emboldening’ Hamas: ‘You’re On the Wrong Side of History.’ (Attacking one’s allies is all the rage these days.)
+ Fed Zeppelin: Supreme Court insulates Fed as it backs Trump firing of agency leaders. (The Court basically said anything goes in terms of canning people, except please don’t tank the global economy.)
+ Beak Performance: “According to a recently published study in Global Change Biology, the use of human-made hummingbird feeders has changed the beak sizes and shapes of Anna’s hummingbirds.” California hummingbird beaks transformed by feeders.
+ Hey Latte, Latte, Latte: “Walk into any Starbucks in South Korea right now, and there are some names you definitely won’t be hearing. Six to be exact – and they happen to be the names of the candidates running in the upcoming presidential race. That’s because Starbucks has temporarily blocked customers who are ordering drinks from using these names, which would be called out by baristas.
The company said it needed to ‘maintain political neutrality during election season.'”
+ Cargoes There: Man wakes up to find a giant cargo ship in his yard. (Every day, there seems to be a new metaphor for what it feels like to be a news curator in the Trump era.)
“The Ditch Weekly, a paper by middle and high schoolers in Long Island, is covering the Hamptons from a new angle.” NYT (Gift Article): They’re 15. Wait Until You Read Their Newspaper. And yes, it’s actually paper.
+ “Endangered water voles in Wales are being fed edible glitter in a bid to save them from extinction … The Initiative for Nature Conservation Cymru hopes that by offering the animals something sparkly to eat, the sparkle should come out the other end – providing some much-needed answers.” (Dear Metamucil, have I got a product idea for you!)
+ Infrared contact lenses let you see in the dark.
+ “His frustration sparked an idea: the Heli-Hydrant, a relatively small, open tank that can be rapidly filled with water, enabling helicopters to fill up faster for urban fires rather than flying to sometimes distant lakes or ponds.” Urban fires can mean long trips for helicopters to get water. One firefighter had a better idea.
+ ‘Sesame Street’ Saved, Inks New Streaming Deal With Netflix.
+ Have a great three day weekend. See you back in your inbox on Tuesday.
2025-05-22 20:00:00
“You could easily mistake Alec Harris for a spy or an escaped prisoner, given all of the tradecraft he devotes to being unfindable. Mail addressed to him goes to a UPS Store. To buy things online, he uses a YubiKey, a small piece of hardware resembling a thumb drive, to open Bitwarden, a password manager that stores his hundreds of unique, long, random passwords. Then he logs in to Privacy-com, a subscription service that lets him open virtual debit cards under as many different names as he wishes; Harris has 191 cards at this point, each specific to a single vendor but all linked to the same bank account. This isolates risk: If any vendor is breached, whatever information it has about him won’t be exploitable anywhere else. Harris has likewise strictly limited access to his work and personal phone numbers by associating his main phone with up to 10 different numbers … When using Uber, he provides an intersection near his house as his pickup or drop-off point. For food deliveries, he might give a random neighbor’s address and, after the order is accepted, message the driver, ‘Oops, I typed out the address wrong. Let me know when you’re here, and I’ll run out.'” And this is all just for starters when it comes to a privacy and security company CEO’s efforts to maintain what used to be a relatively normal level of anonymity. But these days, our privacy has been all but eliminated. Who you are, where you live, what you buy, how much you pay, your health, your interests, the shows you watch, the people you associate with, your location, your politics, the sites you visit, every breath you take, every move you make; all of it is tracked, shared, sold, and easily accessible. But what if you wanted to be a little more private? It’s possible. But it’s not easy. Benjamin Wallace in The Atlantic (Gift Article): How to Disappear. (Perhaps nothing is more emblematic of this modern condition than the fact that a guy who has deployed every imaginable tactic to remain invisible is the star subject of an article that describes all of his habits.)
“New tax cuts. Massive spending on border security. Cuts to social safety net programs. Pullbacks on investments to fight climate change. New limits on student loans. If it becomes law, President Donald Trump and congressional Republicans’ massive bill will reshape much of the federal government — and the U.S. economy.” The House passed Trump’s spending bill by a single vote in the middle of the night. We’ll see how the Senate reacts to some of the provisions. For now, from WaPo (Gift Article): What’s in Trump and Republicans’ giant tax and immigration bill? And from NPR: Here’s what’s in the GOP megabill that’s just passed the House.
+ The Atlantic (Gift Article): “House Republicans worked through the night to advance a massive piece of legislation that might, if enacted, carry out the largest upward transfer of wealth in American history. That is not a side effect of the legislation, but its central purpose. The ‘big, beautiful bill’ would pair huge cuts to food assistance and health insurance for low-income Americans with even larger tax cuts for affluent ones.”
+ These bills always have small, unrelated items that are slipped into the tomes. Sometimes, those small, unrelated items are a really, really big deal. Robert Reich on how this spending bill actually prevents courts from holding the Trump administration in contempt when they refuse to follow rulings (a habit for which they’ve shown an enthusiastic proclivity). The hidden provision in the Big Ugly Bill that makes Trump king.
+ ‘Trump accounts’ for newborns passed the House. Here’s why financial experts don’t like them. (I wonder if newborns can invest their Trump Account money into meme coins in exchange for being able to drink formula at Mar-a-Lago with the president?)
+ One thing you don’t need to worry about in the new budget is pennies. The U.S. will soon mint its last penny. (Don’t worry, there are still more than 114 billion pennies currently in circulation.)
“The American Jewish Committee had been hosting an event at the Capital Jewish Museum aimed at bridge-building in the Middle East and North Africa. Lischinsky and Milgrim had exited the event when they were fatally shot.” Two Israeli Embassy staffers shot dead outside D.C.’s Capital Jewish Museum. It’s important to note that the victims happened to work for the Israeli embassy, but they were shot outside a Jewish museum. There is an international aspect to this story, but there’s also an antisemitism aspect to it; the latter is part of a clear trend that can be seen in public figures heiling, popular artists describing themselves as Nazis, Holocaust denialism, and increased violence against Jews. As authoritarian leanings rise, so does antisemitism.
+ As with all violence, there’s also the human side of the story. “A few months ago, Ms. Milgrim, 26, told her parents that she planned to travel with Mr. Lischinsky, 30, to meet his family in Jerusalem for the first time. What they didn’t know, and would only learn after the shooting, is that he had bought an engagement ring before the trip.” They Were Days From Getting Engaged. Then They Were Killed in D.C.
What will the future of AI technology look (and potentially feel) like? Part of that answer depends on what the new combination of Sam Altman and Jonathan Ive come up with. Om Malik: “There are no two ways to say it — OpenAI, made the biggest acquihire in Silicon Valley’s history. Sam Altman and his crew bought Jony Ive and his coterie of ex-Apple hotshots for a whopping $6.5 billion … In 2021, OpenAI was valued at $6.1 billion. Now they are buying a 55-person company with a mystery product for $6.5 billion.”
+ “Altman and Ive offered a few hints at the secret project they have been working on. The product will be capable of being fully aware of a user’s surroundings and life, will be unobtrusive, able to rest in one’s pocket or on one’s desk, and will be a third core device a person would put on a desk after a MacBook Pro and an iPhone.” WSJ (Gift Article): What Sam Altman Told OpenAI About the Secret Device He’s Making With Jony Ive.
On a Rightwing and a Prayer: “An evenly divided Supreme Court rejected a plan on Thursday to allow Oklahoma to use government money to run the nation’s first religious charter school, which would teach a curriculum infused by Catholic doctrine. In a tie, the court split 4 to 4 over the Oklahoma plan, with Justice Amy Coney Barrett recusing herself from the case, and the decision provided no reasoning.” Deadlocked Supreme Court Rejects Bid for Religious Charter School in Oklahoma. The decision is definitely a bit of a surprise given the leanings of this Supreme Court. But it’s still notable that the principle of the separation of church and state now drives a split decision.
+ This Isn’t Rocket Science: “The funding decreases touch virtually every area of science — extending far beyond the diversity programs and other ‘woke’ targets that the Trump administration says it wants to cut.” NYT (Gift Article): Trump Has Cut Science Funding to Its Lowest Level in Decades. “These cuts are the height of self-inflicted harm … If they succeed in these cuts, the result will be slower economic growth, less innovation and new tech startups, and even more diminished competitiveness vis-à-vis China.”
+ International Flight: “Harvard can no longer enroll foreign students and existing foreign students must transfer or lose their legal status.” Another salvo in Trump’s war on Harvard. Trump Administration Halts Harvard’s Ability to Enroll International Students. (Among other ramifications of this attack, the best and the brightest are going to stop looking to America as a destination. We seem to be doing everything possible to weaken America’s leadership.) More from The Harvard Crimson. Of course, part of this move is the Trump administration’s effort to convince other institutions to bend the knee. It’s also part of a broader attack on education and critical thinking. Judge Blocks Trump Administration From Dismantling Education Department.
+ Light of My Life, Fire of My Coins: “On Thursday, President Donald Trump will sit down for an intimate evening at his Northern Virginia golf club with 220 of his favorite people in the world: a group of cryptocurrency speculators who have spent an estimated $148 million on Trump’s eponymous memecoin, making the president and his associates millions of dollars in the process. Even by Trump’s standards, this dinner will be the culmination of one of the most cartoonish episodes of executive-branch graft in recent memory.”
+ Energy Drink: “AI’s integration into our lives is the most significant shift in online life in more than a decade. Hundreds of millions of people now regularly turn to chatbots for help with homework, research, coding, or to create images and videos. But what’s powering all of that? Today, new analysis by MIT Technology Review provides an unprecedented and comprehensive look at how much energy the AI industry uses—down to a single query—to trace where its carbon footprint stands now, and where it’s headed, as AI barrels towards billions of daily users.” MIT Tech Review: We did the math on AI’s energy footprint. Here’s the story you haven’t heard. (Hopefully, they did the math using a calculator with a relatively light carbon footprint.)
+ Guitar Picker: “Irsay doesn’t just leave behind a legacy in the NFL. He also leaves behind what is considered one of the greatest guitar collections in the world.” Jim Irsay, longtime Colts owner and music memorabilia collector, dies at 65.
+ Garden Hosed: “While the Pacers are no strangers to incredible playoff comebacks, this one was special even by their standards. Remarkably, New York held a 99.7 percent win probability when it led 119-105 with 2:51 remaining.”
“I’m so humbled by it. I’m kind of taking this seriously — as seriously as a singing, dancing frog can take anything.” The University of Maryland commencement address will be delivered by Kermit the Frog. (What can one say? It’s 2025. And this makes more sense than most headlines.)
+ Chess grandmaster Magnus Carlsen’s match against more than 143,000 opponents ends in a draw after 46 days.