Reading archive 2026-09-08

Smithsonian chief to retire as Trump fights to reshape the institution: Lonnie G. Bunch III, the Smithsonian’s first Black secretary, said President Donald Trump’s pressure played no role in his decision and vowed to defend the institution’s independence until he leaves.

Citing ‘ethnic cleansing,’ U.K. bars imports from Israeli West Bank settlements: Numerous other European countries immediately pledged support for the effort, which prompted warnings from the United States. - "In a joint statement Tuesday, the foreign ministers of Britain, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Iceland, Ireland, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Spain and Sweden framed the trade ban and sanctions as a bid to salvage hopes for a two-state solution, with Israel and a Palestinian state as autonomous neighbors. While acknowledging Israel’s right to defend itself after the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks by Hamas fighters from Gaza, they called for immediate action by Israeli officials to control settler violence in the West Bank."

The War for the Rio Grande - "Before the river makes it even twenty miles from its headwaters, it’s pooled behind an earthen dam, into the Rio Grande Reservoir. This reservoir, like all the others along the river, was built for agriculture; in this case, it allowed growers in Colorado to plant thousands of hectares of alfalfa, hay, and potatoes. Much of the alfalfa harvested in the U.S. is shipped overseas to support massive cattle herds in countries including Japan and Saudi Arabia.

...

"Hydrologists say rivers have memory—when they’re full, they stay full; once they’re dry, they stay dry. The same is true of reservoirs. When bodies of water diminish, the lack of cool depths accelerates rates of evaporation, and salts and sediment build up.

...

"The consensus among growers in Texas was that Mexico was the true villain. Over the past three decades, agricultural water use has decreased in every American state that the Rio Grande touches. There’s one place where it has gone up.

...

"Yet he also knew there was plenty of blame to go around. In 2024 he and other lobbyists pushed the federal government to complete a study of tributary health on the American side of the border, where Texas rivers like the Pecos and Devils empty into the Rio Grande. Preliminary data from the study found that the amount of water flowing into Amistad and Falcon from U.S. sources had collapsed by a stunning 33 percent."

Mexico says US agents killed in crash weren't permitted to operate there [ed. note: from April]

Oil executives just accidentally exposed the industry’s greatest weakness: To keep drilling, Big Oil needs permission to dump treated fracking wastewater into rivers and onto cropland. We don’t have to give it to them. - "Republican state Senator Tan Parker was even more blunt. If they didn’t approve permits to dump treated fracking wastewater onto crops and into rivers, he said, 'we’re going to find ourselves in two or three years with a gun to our head.' 

"Without meaning to, Parker had just told his opponents exactly where to apply pressure."

Man Pretends to Hallucinate in Job Interview With an AI Bot, Causing It to Go Haywire: "It sounds like you're looking for a position where you can really lean into those raccoon protocols, and the plumes of gauze."

'It allows workers to experiment with the same logic their employers have been applying to them' — developers reportedly lost their jobs to an ‘AI Transformation’, so they built an AI that can replace the CEO: Fired developers turned management’s favorite cost-cutting argument against the people at the top

Mushroom hunting with LLMs: what can go wrong?: You see a mushroom in a forest, take a photo, and pass it to an AI chat.

Why Doesn’t the US Tax Its Big Corporations More?: The Myth of “Global Tax Competitiveness” - "Corporate tax is not just a business cost to be minimized but a necessity for funding the essential public goods that are the prerequisite of an attractive investment climate."

The IRS slashed its staff. One result? More taxes going uncollected

As Canada’s countertariffs kick in, Trump’s escalating threats draw political rebuke: Canadian countertariffs on $20 billion worth of U.S. imports came into effect Tuesday, as Bombardier said it valued its partnership with American companies.

As Social Security fund runs dry, some Republicans say it’s time to raise taxes: Raising the payroll tax is gaining traction as a fix — even in the anti-tax GOP — to fend off deep cuts in retirement benefits.

What the Floods Say About Xi Jinping: China’s leader behaves more like an emperor than a man of the people.

The DSA’s Problem Isn’t ‘Media Training’: Authoritarian extremists are speaking for American socialists, and a lot of people don’t like what they say. - "The idea that the DSA's troubles on prime-time television are a technical matter solvable by the right training is surely comforting, but it is also wrong. The group has a bigger problem: It is led by unpractical extremists whose views are a far cry from those that its electorally successful figures, such as Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, espouse. 

"This disconnect is partly explained by a sharp division within the DSA. One wing engages in mass politics and includes AOC, Mamdani, and other socialists committed to democratic principles. The other wing is sectarian and extremist: It evinces little commitment to democracy and includes open admirers of Hamas, the Iranian regime, and historical dictators such as Mao Zedong. If the interviews with the DSA's co-chairs were embarrassing, that's a result not of a lackluster media performance but of the actual positions the group has embraced.

...

"This pro-left-authoritarian orientation explains why DSA electoral observers shamefully reported no fraud when they were dispatched to monitor the electoral sham organized by Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in 2024. Those results were so bogus that even the left-wing governments of Brazil, Chile, and Uruguay couldn't accept them. Yet at a DSA session on the subject, a pro-Maduro organization's assessment that Venezuela's electoral system was 'one of the very best in the world' was presented as fact, as was the false claim that Venezuela's main opposition candidates were 'fascist.'"

Reading archive 2026-09-07

Democrats try a novel path to defeat a battleground Republican: Moving to the left: Antiestablishment candidate Randy Villegas is testing the conventional wisdom about what it would take to unseat Rep. David G. Valadao in California.

Federal government awards $2.7M to company to fix Reflecting Pool algae problem: Government spending data shows American Ag Energy, Inc. was awarded the contract last week to fix issues with the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool.

Orlando held a fight in its city-owned arena. Then came the Nazi salutes.: A kickboxer known to his online followers as “GypsyCrusader” served time in federal prison after prosecutors said he pushed a “race-based civil war.” Organizers booked him to fight a Jewish opponent. - "[the neo-Nazi] Miller’s opponent, Azoulay [who is Jewish], sells online courses about attaining 'limitless wealth' and has posted videos supporting the Tate brothers, who built a massive social media empire championing hyper-masculinity and now face sex-trafficking and rape charges."

The mystery behind an audio clip that helped upend a Senate race: Artificial intelligence tools increasingly allow political actors to fool voters — and help candidates cast doubt on reality.

Prosecutors Say Trayon White Is Trying to ‘Tamper’ With Jury Pool: The Ward 8 D.C. Council member, whose federal bribery trial starts this month, commented on jury selection in an Instagram video.

The Growing Lawlessness in California’s Forests: Two frog biologists were kidnapped in the woods. More bizarre situations may come. - "A sense of lawlessness seems to be growing on the public lands in the region. People on Howe's staff have returned to find their cars stripped at trailheads-no wheels, no batteries, gas siphoned. They've encountered mountain roads blockaded by hostile civilians. Michael Kauffmann, an ecologist and the executive director of the Bigfoot Trail Alliance, told me that he's recently instituted more training for his researchers and trail crews on safety measures and defusing confrontations. More than anything, Kauffmann has noticed a greater disregard for the rules-more graffiti, a lot more garbage, and less appreciation for these lands as places to care for rather than to joyride over with guns and four-wheelers. One person who regularly hikes in the area around Gumboot Lake told me that he'd felt safer during 'close encounters with bears and lions' than with some of the armed and unfriendly people around."

The Netherlands Will Never Be Rid of Louisiana Crawfish: What will it take for the Dutch to eat them? - "The crayfish invasion started decades ago, but in recent years, the red swamp crayfish (also known as the Louisiana crawfish) has become a particular pest, Pim Lemmers, an ecologist at Radboud University who has dedicated his career to researching crayfish, told me. In the 1980s, it was brought to the Netherlands as food, and people naively released the animals into the environment. The waterways in the Netherlands are very interconnected and became a "crayfish highway" of sorts, Ivo Roessink, an aquatic ecotoxicologist at Wageningen University & Research, told me. But crayfish can walk and breathe on land, too, and have been spotted in parks, along bike lanes, and at Schiphol airport, where the birds use the runway to crush them."

The Hasan Piker Question: Many Democrats would like him to go away. - "But it was El-Sayed who first made Piker central to his campaign by bringing him out on the trail, partying poolside with him at an influencer event, and celebrating with him during his Election Night rally. In his thousands of hours of streaming, Piker has produced a dense catalog of comments spanning the spectrum from stupid to incredibly offensive, including several iterations of the phrase 'I hate America' and, perhaps most memorably, that 'America deserved 9/11.' (He quickly attempted to walk it back.) Piker also flaunts his authoritarian sympathies, calling Mao Zedong 'one of the great leaders of this world' and counting the collapse of the Soviet Union among the 'catastrophes' of the 20th century. Last week, he warned that 'eventually someone is going to come around and take action' against American Jews who are 'singularly invested in Israel.'"

The MAGA Right Is Only Pretending to Be Censored: The conspiracy theory that persists even though no evidence supports it - "The failure to produce evidence is not for lack of trying. During the Biden administration, MAGA allies and politicians filed multiple lawsuits with the goal of exposing alleged censorship. None has done so. One of them, brought by the Missouri attorney general, made it all the way to the Supreme Court before justices asked for underlying evidence that the government had censored anyone. The answer was no. Another, brought against the Stanford research project by America First Legal - Stephen Miller's team - failed in July, when a judge found the suit had no standing, no jurisdiction, and, after a discovery process requested by the plaintiffs, no evidence. There was no proof, in other words, that the Stanford research had resulted in anyone being censored. Other cases against the Biden administration were simply settled by President Trump's Department of Justice without finding any evidence of 'censorship' either.

...

"Belatedly, even some part of the Trump administration appears to have quietly concluded that all of this has gone too far and that maybe, in fact, it would be useful for the U.S. government to understand how hostile governments seek to manipulate the internet. In May, the State Department put out a tender for software developers who could help analyze 'foreign adversarial propaganda' and thus replicate the work once done by the Global Engagement Center. In August, a State Department contractor also posted a job opening for research analysts who can, among other things, "evaluate how foreign governments, state-sponsored organizations, terrorist groups, and other malign actors use social media and digital communications to influence public opinion and targeted audiences." 

"As DiResta wrote this week, 'they're hiring people to do the very job they just spent 16 months claiming was a conspiracy.' So much time, energy, and money was wasted pursuing a fiction. Now more time, energy, and money will need to be spent to clean up the damage."

The White House Wants to Make the Smithsonian a Pariah: A renewed threat underscores the museum complex’s isolation—and the limits of Trump’s pressure campaign.

Reading archive 2026-09-03

MLB players on salary cap, CBA talks, potential lockout, more

Trump is set to mark a dangerous first for the labor force: A drop in the number of workers in the economy is uncharted territory. - "Donald Trump is on track to become the first president in a century to oversee a U.S. labor force that will be smaller when he leaves office than when he entered. Since the start of his second term, the number of people in the United States who are either employed or looking for a job has dropped by 1.6 million — and it’s largely because of Trump’s immigration restrictions. Unless those policies change, a shrinking workforce will cause slower economic growth and lead to more expensive public debt."

Republicans fear Trump will keep super PAC money and not spend on the midterms: With the window for spending starting to shrink, a Trump-allied nonprofit is putting $1 million toward ads featuring the president, but his PAC hasn’t spent in contested races.

Trump administration threatens to cut off agencies’ ties to Smithsonian: Echoing White House attacks, an Interior Department letter threatened the institution “under current leadership” with loss of support for sourcing artifacts and more.

D.C. sues landlord over broken AC, rodents, other problems at apartments: The owner of the Delta Pearl accumulated nearly 200 code violations for problems such as piled up trash and broken locks, D.C's. attorney general's office alleges. - "In an email to The Washington Post, [building owner Buwa] Binitie acknowledged the “serious” conditions at the Delta Pearl and said unpaid rent and repeated vandalism by residents are partly to blame. Binitie said roughly two-thirds of the building’s residents are behind on their rent, and the property is carrying more than $1.8 million in delinquencies."

Why Trump is planting controversial genetically modified trees near the White House: The Agriculture Department deregulated a variety of engineered American chestnuts, known as Darling 54, easing permitting rules for planting.

Reading archive 2026-09-01 pt 2

 The Fight Between Texas and Minnesota Should Never Have Gotten This Far: A legal battle over one ICE agent’s future is a sign of serious strain between red and blue America.

Reading archive 2026-09-01 pt 1

What it’s like to drive a car that runs on sunshine: Test-driving a car coated in solar panels gave me a preview of a future without gas pumps or charging cables.

A Smithsonian museum director departs for the Guggenheim: Melissa Chiu has led the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden since 2014.

Smithsonian, Hirshhorn end ‘Bubble’ project [ed. note: from 2013]

Smithsonian changes course, will put Latino museum in existing building: Regents voted to put the museum in a 145-year-old building instead of constructing a new one, which would require congressional approval.

Mother, daughter killed in interstate crash with wrong-way driver, police say: The driver was charged with two counts of homicide by motor vehicle while impaired by alcohol. - "Saturday’s crash comes shortly after the Montgomery County Police Department confirmed it would dissolve its unit combating drunken driving and impaired driving, a change set to take place soon. The department said the cut is necessary due to staffing shortages and operations needs."

China's Xi tells Putin that foundations of ties will be stronger

Israel signs $3.5 billion air defense deal with Greece

The devastation of NSA Bahrain is a national security warning - "It’s important to understand that NSA Bahrain is more than just a headquarters. Among its many functions, the installation provides a regional naval operating base for U.S. Navy forces in the Middle East. NSA Bahrain is home to NAVCENT and U.S. Fifth Fleet, along with numerous tenant commands.

...

"The idea that the U.S. could not prevent and defend against a predictable attack on a Fleet Headquarters — and our sailors stationed there — is quite startling. It likely is just as alarming to our allies."

Sweden signs French warship order to boost defense

College student steps into traffic, is killed after losing immigration status: Pierre Damas Bel’s family said he took his own life on a busy highway after the Trump administration canceled protections for thousands of Haitian immigrants and ICE officers placed him in an ankle monitor. - "'I know that I’m a pastor and I’m supposed to be forgiving,' he said. 'But right now as I sit with a broken family, I’m crying out to God for righteous judgment in those who made this happen.'"

What Trump’s ballroom win really says about the Supreme Court: The justices reject a challenge on standing grounds. - "It’s a shame that the separation of powers didn’t work as intended, with Trump and Congress agreeing on what reasonable construction would look like." [ed. note: is this the sentence that convinces me to cancel my subscription?]

Military leaders warn Hegseth against extending Iran war operations: A recent classified assessment advised that prolonged large-scale operations in the Middle East risk weakening U.S. capabilities elsewhere.

The Singular Triumph of Driving Down Peanut Allergies: When pediatricians issued new advice about peanuts, parents listened. Why have vaccine recommendations met with so much more resistance? - "A study published last year found that the rate of peanut allergies in American kids under 3 decreased by 43 percent in the period after the new recommendations were put in place. (The study did not prove that the drop in allergies was caused by the guidelines change, but 'it's a very, very tight association temporally,' a different David Hill, a pediatric allergist at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia and a co-author of the study, told me.)"

We Are Living in the Fantasy World of 13-Year-Old Boys: Many of the tech billionaires who built our world have taken the wrong lessons from their favorite science fiction. - "What one gathers from these misreadings is not so much that science fiction itself is nefarious, but that arrested development might be. Because teenagers are teenagers, their young imaginations tend to overpower their ethics. These particular boys seem to have never moved beyond a misplaced excitement, and came to fetishize the books they had read rather than revisiting them with adult eyes. When Musk sent up a SpaceX rocket in 2018, he put one of his Tesla Roadsters inside it, and in the car he placed a copy of Asimov's Foundation - unironically. Thiel genuinely felt he was promised the fantastic technologies he'd read about as a kid, and once lamented that if inventors had taken them as seriously as he did 'we'd have colonies on the moon, you'd have robots, you'd have flying cars, you'd have cities in the ocean, under the ocean.'"

China Is Flatlining: The country’s “stability” hides a host of problems.

Reading archive 2026-08-31

Meet the ex-Republicans running as Democrats in the midterms: In races across the country, former GOP politicians are leaning into their pasts.

Tree removals at East Potomac golf course raise alarms

Trump officially plans for civilian federal pay freeze in 2027: The alternative pay plan that the White House issued this week carves out exceptions to give larger raises to federal law enforcement and military personnel.

Kelly Clarkson’s last talk show episode showed why she broke the daytime curse: “The Kelly Clarkson Show,” which ended after seven years, signed off with an hour centered on music — and fans.

With shutdown looming, House leaders aim to quickly pass funding bill: House lawmakers are poised to vote this week on a Senate-passed measure to fund U.S. agencies through Dec. 11, avoiding a federal shutdown before the midterms.

Daniel Lurie, San Francisco’s quiet radical: While his party debates abolishing prisons and owning grocery stores, Democratic Mayor Daniel Lurie is cleaning up his city.

South Carolina turns into a historic Senate race: Darline Graham’s unapologetic honesty helped set up all-female clash.

Trump’s bullying has backfired: Might he try persuasion instead?

RFK Jr. once again proves his critics correct: As a measles outbreak kills in Pennsylvania, the HHS secretary spreads falsehoods about the MMR vaccine.

Months after primary, Lewis George is returning to public stage with D.C. forums: The democratic socialist in line to lead D.C. knows people are pinning their hopes on her. Here’s what she says she’ll do about it. - "Still, he thinks she will have to make some tough choices to get to [72,000 new homes in five years]. 'If you talk to capital right now, they largely don’t want anything to do with D.C. from a housing standpoint,' due in part to the difficulty in collecting rent and having a timely eviction process, he said, adding that making business-friendly changes could upset her base."

Pirro’s special grand jury probing D.C. schools, city oversight of youth: The unusual investigation appears to have a broad scope. Prosecutors have contacted D.C. Public Schools personnel to question them about truancy and graduation rates.

Dispute offers new details on settlement that followed notorious Dupont Circle killing: The estate of Robert Wone says former defendants in a wrongful-death suit have failed to make agreed payments that help fund a scholarship in his name.

The Crisis for Democrats in Michigan: The Senate election presents liberals with a grim choice. - "What's more, El-Sayed has already said that he intends to use his victory as a platform to reshape the party. Him winning could invite a future in which the United States has not just one party that is open to bigots but two."

Reading archive 2026-08-29

Trump lauded low prices at Freedom Fuel. A supplier says some gas wasn’t paid for.: Mansfield Oil Company alleges in a lawsuit that a distributor never paid for gas that was supplied to some Freedom Fuel stations.