Reading archive 2026-02-13

What Alcohol Does to the Body: From the moment you take a sip, drinking starts to influence your biology. Here’s an inside look.

Consumers and businesses paid nearly 90% of Trump tariffs in 2025, new analysis found

Using a law deployed against mob bosses, D.C. files suit against a landlord: The suit, filed by D.C. Attorney General Brian Schwalb, claims the landlord and two of his family members enriched themselves while leaving tenants in squalid, unsafe conditions.

How to make sure the Stalinist in the Kremlin faces a grim future: Crippled by his Ukraine misadventure, Vladimir Putin is surely defining success down.

The Epstein Emails Show How the Powerful Talk About Race: The files reveal the disgraced financier’s interest in “race science.”

Zelensky Makes His Pitch to Trump: Ukraine’s president calls on his most powerful ally to not squander the chance to make peace.

This Is How a Child Dies of Measles: When your family becomes a data point in an outbreak [exemplum]

John Oliver Keeps Pushing the Rock Up the Hill: As ‘Last Week Tonight’ launches its 13th season into an atmosphere of division and anti-information, its host explains how the show has changed—and why they keep making it

Reading archive 2026-02-12

Please, Not Another Kennedy: Nancy Pelosi reportedly plans to endorse JFK’s grandson for Congress. Why? - "As a Kennedy, Schlossberg has been a lifelong celebrity in the traditional definition of the word-a person who is famous for being famous. He's been profiled in Town & Country, on the Today show, in The Washington Post, and in The New York Times. The theme of this coverage is that Schlossberg (1) is a Kennedy, (2) is handsome, and (3) posts lots of edgy content on social media. To suggest that he has failed upward would give him too much credit because failing requires having been entrusted with some responsibility in the first place."

A Foreign Policy Worse Than Regime Change: The world is threatened by the president’s self-absorption and incoherence.

Russian War Spending May be Maxed Out: The official budget deficit surged last year, as did off-balance sheet military spending via the banking system and unpaid bills. That might be tough to sustain, especially with lower oil revenues.

Trump’s Gaza Plans Are Profoundly Unserious: Conditions on the ground call for immediate humanitarian relief, not gauzy real-estate fantasies.

People Who Don’t Understand Downtowns Are Destroying Downtowns: A far-fetched plan to demolish Dallas’s seat of government reflects the city’s diminished role in the region.

What Mamdani Doesn’t Know About Tenants: Fixing New York’s affordable housing isn’t as simple as going after bad landlords.

Tariffs are just a rehearsal for taxing every American’s consumption: When staggering entitlement costs finally come due, a desperate need for more revenue will kick in. - "Those socially conscious Europeans, whatever fiscal messes they have created for themselves, have had no qualms about taxing their whole populations. The primary vehicle is sales taxation, in the form of value-added taxes, which accumulate along a product’s value chain and are ultimately paid by the consumer. VATs extract roughly 9 percent to 10 percent of middle-class incomes across the euro zone and can result in middle-income citizens paying for nearly half of all VAT revenue. Every country in the 38-member Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development except the United States has one.

"That’s a major reason the U.S., frequent misrepresentations to the contrary, has the most progressive tax system among the most developed countries. Here, the top 10 percent pay about 70 percent of U.S. income taxes, and more than half the total U.S. taxes even when payroll taxes are included. The dreaded 1 percent pick up more than a quarter of the entire federal tab."

The Myth of the Police State: No one, not even the supposed beneficiaries, is protected. - "Mass revenge simply did not happen. That seems hard for people who never experienced such a total upending of a political hierarchy to understand. But in my years in South Africa, living in rural Afrikaner towns as well as in cities, I’ve heard much more about the shock white South Africans felt at how warmly their neighbors and colleagues of color have treated them than I’ve heard complaints about the opposite. An overwhelming number of South Africans of color understand that white people’s lives were not blissful under apartheid either."

Reading archive 2026-02-11

The New Laser That Can Take Down Aircraft: Russian strikes have forced Ukraine to build high-tech air defense on the cheap.

Dad unlawfully killed daughter in Texas shooting, coroner rules

Nate Silver Is Making This Up as He Goes: Once a principled data journalist, the FiveThirtyEight founder has revealed himself as just another hack spouting off on social media. [ed. note: from 2019]

Jeffrey Epstein Introduced Melania to Donald Trump, New Bombshell FBI Files Claim

Kremlin and Kazakhstan Both Have Kompromat on Trump, Says Ex-KGB Spy Chief: The ex-KGB official and Kazakh spy chief who claimed Donald Trump had been recruited by the KGB on his watch now says that Kazakhstan tried to used kompromat videos to blackmail Trump.

Trump’s family is embroiled in a $500m UAE scandal. We’ve hardly noticed: A crypto startup founded by Trump’s family signed a huge deal with the UAE president’s brother. Where’s the political fallout? - "Two weeks after MGX’s $2bn investment in the Trump family’s crypto firm, the Trump administration allowed the UAE to buy hundreds of thousands of advanced computer chips critical for AI development. The chips are made by US companies, especially Nvidia, and the Biden administration had restricted how many chips certain foreign countries can buy to prevent the technology from being misused. But Trump scrapped those restrictions."

The case for keeping your garden dark at night: Outdoor lighting is having an outsize impact on the flora and fauna that share our habitats.

Inside the Kennedy Center’s scorched-earth Washington National Opera split: How an opera leader plotted a path to leave the legendary arts center after the Trump takeover alienated audiences.

She bounced a $25 check in 2014. ICE tried to deport her.: A Missouri grandma and lawful resident spent months in detention for a decade-old misdemeanor, underscoring the massive scope of the administration’s deportation efforts. - "When Donna was detained, Jim wrote to every member of Missouri’s congressional delegation. He struck out, but then help came from an unexpected place: Rep. Seth Magaziner, a Democrat who represents Rhode Island. Magaziner brought Jim to Washington to speak at a panel on Trump’s immigration crackdown. At the event, Jim was asked why he had voted for Trump. He paused. 'Because I was an idiot,' he answered."

Amtrak’s new trains are arriving soon. Here’s what to expect.: Upgrades mean no more fighting for power with your neighbor or touching icky bathroom handles.

Reading archive 2026-02-10

Trump Has Betrayed the People of Coal Country. They Love Him Anyway.: "He thinks our people are idiots."

A Raid in a Small Town Brings Trump's Deportations to Deep-Red Idaho: Wilder, Idaho, prided itself on comity. Then federal agents stormed a racetrack outside of town in October, and the reverberations are still shaking the community.

Trump is making voters uneasy. Democrats are pushing them away.: Punishing the wealthy might make Democrats feel good, but it won’t convince many voters. [ed. note: shill from libertarian think tank]

Don’t Let Climate Fatalism Become a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy: The idea that it’s “too late” to reduce emissions fuels cynicism and despair, putting us on an even worse trajectory. - "And finally, stress less about the small stuff — recycling, plastic bags and food wrappers, food miles, turning the lights off, leaving devices on standby — especially if it comes at the expense of the big things listed above. This is a concept called 'moral licensing,' in which people feel they’ve contributed to the small stuff and therefore ignore their more carbon-intensive behaviors. People will often feel proud about bringing their plastic bag to a supermarket (which has a tiny carbon footprint) and then fill it with meat and dairy (which has a much bigger impact)."

Should you feed a cold and starve a fever? Here’s what experts say.: What nutrients do you need to help your body as it fights an infection?

Buy-it-for-life coffee makers can save money, reduce waste, brew better: That new $50 drip coffee maker on your counter? Destined for the landfill after a few years of dispensing mediocre coffee.

Student injured, another arrested in shooting at Wootton High in Maryland: Police in Montgomery County arrested the suspect near the school in Rockville.

The history of figure skating’s most controversial trick — the backflip: This is the first Olympics to feature backflips in over 25 years.

Two men were paid by D.C. to stop violence. Both are charged with homicide.: Frank Johnson is the second violence interrupter in the city to face charges in the fatal shooting of a former college basketball star. - "Johnson previously worked for Life Deeds, according to documents The Post obtained through a records request. He was terminated from Life Deeds in December 2023, three months after the fatal shooting of Bozeman, after he was charged with an unrelated felony gun possession offense. Johnson was convicted — only to be rehired as a violence interrupter last year for a different organization receiving D.C. government grant funds. Now, he has been fired again following the murder charge, according to the Rev. Judie Shepherd-Gore, the executive director of InnerCity Collaborative Community Development Corporation, where Johnson had worked as a violence interrupter since last year.

...

"It was the second time in five years that Wynn, who was well known in the violence intervention space, was charged with murder. He was also accused of committing a homicide in 2020. Prosecutors dropped that case for lack of evidence, and Wynn was allowed to continue working as a violence interrupter."

How Not to Defeat Authoritarianism: Moderation used to help Democrats win, but its advantages now have been greatly exaggerated. - "This brings us back to a crucial point: successful anti-authoritarian movements don’t win by moderating their positions on a traditional left-right axis but by creating an entirely new one. They mobilize previously disengaged citizens by framing the struggle not as a contest over policy, but as a fight for the fundamental fairness of the system itself.

...

"Scholars of democratic breakdown know that moments like this demand institutional coordination, civil society mobilization, and the political courage to name and confront the authoritarian threat on its weakest flank. Every democracy facing this challenge has learned you don’t defeat authoritarians by being more reasonable. You defeat them by being more determined and by uniting the country against their most visible vulnerability: their corruption."

Forum How Not to Defeat Authoritarianism: Moderation helps when margins are small. - "But, of course, [an ideologically dogmatic party] runs the risk of empowering fascists, threatening the foundations of American electoral democracy, costing millions of people their health insurance, subjecting the country to a terrifying new regime of internal immigration enforcement, making less-than-zero progress on climate change, and depriving millions of women of their basic rights. To me, that makes “shoot the moon” a bad bet—Democrats have been trying a version of shoot-the-moon since Obama’s reelection, it has hurt, and the solution is to stop doing it. But it would be an intellectually stimulating debate. Highly ideological leftists are aware, I think, that the mood in the Democratic Party is very alarmed by Trump and Trumpism and that if we had square argument about the benefits and risks of shooting the moon, their side would lose."

How Not to Defeat Authoritarianism: Trans rights aren’t tanking the Democrats.

How Not to Defeat Authoritarianism: We need reconstruction, not restoration—as FDR knew.

How Not to Defeat Authoritarianism: Democrats must rebuild in rural America. - "Each of the last six times Republicans won majority control of the Senate, they were elected by a group of states in which less than half the county’s population resides. Moreover, because the Senate is tasked with confirming nominees to the Supreme Court, this electoral bias translates into outsized power to shape the judiciary and, in turn, the rulings it hands down. Four of the six sitting conservative justices were confirmed by senators from states that are home to less than 50 percent of the U.S. population. In short, the rural-urban divide helps facilitate minoritarian rule."

How Not to Defeat Authoritarianism: Macroeconomics is the driver, not median voters. - "Unless Democrats offer a message far stronger than anything they have in a long time—unless, in Warren’s words, they 'aggressively challenge the status quo' and 'chart a clear path for big, structural change,' especially on the economic front—they will remain easy targets for caricature. Promoting a Whig revival around democracy and Obamacare tweaks, supply-side tinkering and free trade, or abundance-by-deregulation, jobs, AI wonders, and all the rest risks cementing their status as a permanent minority party."

How Not to Defeat Authoritarianism: The focus should be fighting plutocracy.

How Not to Defeat Authoritarianism: The antidote to cynicism is going big. - "The notion that moderation would serve as a corrective to this perception is wildly off base. The millions of Biden voters who sat out crave more differentiation, not less, and a grander vision of an economic and political system that they could thrive within. None of them were in the mood to tinker around the edges. The antidote to cynicism isn’t to get small but to go big."

How Not to Defeat Authoritarianism: Jesse Jackson’s campaigns point the way. - "The path is clear: seek out an authentic candidate with an agenda that expands our ideas of what is politically possible, someone who can lead a diverse coalition united by a renewed sense of justice and collective purpose."

How Not to Defeat Authoritarianism: Public opinion is only partly malleable.

How Not to Defeat Authoritarianism: We have no choice but to fight.

How Not to Defeat Authoritarianism: Voters don’t think like strategists. - "Bonica and Grumbach are correct that the empirical case for moderation has largely collapsed. But the more significant lesson from our collective work is that the entire moderate-progressive debate constitutes an elite construction—one that projects the strategist’s hyperideological conception of politics onto an electorate that predominantly does not reason in those terms. When one abandons the pretense of optimizing one’s way to electoral victory, something clarifying emerges: the necessity of determining what one actually believes, and campaigning accordingly. That, after all, is what democratic politics is supposed to entail."

How Not to Defeat Authoritarianism: Democrats can’t simply react to polls. They must lead.

Reading archive 2026-02-09

 Killers without a cause: The rise in nihilistic violent extremism: “The message is there is no message.”

The AI boom is so huge it’s causing shortages everywhere else: The $700 billion AI spending spree has few precedents. Good luck finding an electrician or a reasonably priced smartphone.

Another ludicrous canceling of a name from the past: Shaming the dead is an asinine culture warriors’ pastime. Now it’s the great diarist Samuel Pepys’s turn. - "It is notable that the ire of activists never seems to be directed at Karl Marx, whose repeated use of the most objectionable racial slurs in his personal correspondence is curiously overlooked. Meanwhile, protesters in Portland, Oregon, in a 2020 demonstration that organizers called an 'Indigenous Day of Rage,' tore down statues of former presidents Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt."

Ice dance will incorporate queer culture unlike in any other Olympics: Officials asked teams to open their millennial playlists and skate their first program to music from the ’90s.

Will Texas elect a Democratic senator?: James Talarico, a liberal minister-in-training, fights an uphill battle to capture a GOP Senate seat in deep-red Texas.

The unflinching hosts of ‘I’ve Had It’ aren’t backing down: Jennifer Welch and Angie Sullivan have emerged as effective political commentators.

American Milk Has Changed: A dramatic increase in fat content is causing pains in the dairy industry.

Reading archive 2026-02-06

Good news: We saved the bees. Bad news: We saved the wrong ones.: Honeybees have never been in danger of extinction. But scientists are finding that they can accelerate the demise of native bee populations.

Ron Wyden Only Talks Like This When The Spies Do Something *Real* Bad: No, I don't know what they did. But I have a lot of experience with the senator

The Means-Testing Industrial Complex - "The CBO conservatively estimates that these rules will strip Medicaid coverage from over 7 million people. For millions of working Americans this maze of new rules will mean losing their life-saving health insurance and financial ruin. For Mark Begor, Equifax, and other government contractors, this maze of new rules means profit.

...

"With governments entirely reliant on Equifax to administer life-saving benefits to millions of low-income Americans, steep price hikes quickly followed. The New York Times uncovered that in many places, the toll paid to Equifax for the Work Number doubled, then tripled, and more than quadrupled in only a few years. Local, state, and federal agencies have helplessly watched their public funds raided, boxed in by the dual forces of means-testing requirements and unconstrained market power.

...

"Again, new work requirements for Medicaid highlight the profits to be made from adding complexity to the safety net. Since Georgia implemented work requirements in 2020, they have spent twice as much on Deloitte consultants and administrative costs as on healthcare for people. As the other 55 states and territories are now forced to join Georgia and implement new work requirements, millions will lose their healthcare and Deloitte will cash in."

James Comer Gives Dems an Unexpected Gift: The House Oversight Committee swung at Clinton but might have hit Trump. [ed. note: dragging an ex-president in front of Congress sets a precedent that Trump doesn't like]

Tulsi Gabbard is showing why her job shouldn’t exist: Trump’s director of national intelligence is making worse the problems with the ill-conceived role.

What Democrats are demanding in exchange for funding ICE: Republicans have criticized Democrats’ proposals as “a ridiculous Christmas list” but say they’re willing to negotiate.

Trump shares, then deletes video depicting Obamas as apes: Tim Scott, the sole Black Republican in the Senate, called it “the most racist thing I’ve seen out of this White House.”

Bollywood Embraces a Taj Mahal Conspiracy Theory: The internet and a new film have breathed life into old conspiracy theories about one of the world’s most famous landmarks. - "The film’s promotional materials promised to 'reveal the untold history' of the landmark. It doesn’t. What it has done instead is rehash discredited claims that once were relegated to the fringes of the internet, giving prominence to efforts to inflame sectarian tensions.

...

"[P.N. Oak, inventor of this lie] also published numerous other books claiming that Christianity and Islam were in fact offshoots of Hinduism and that many physical landmarks of those faiths, including St. Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican and the Kaaba in Mecca, were originally Hindu temples. 

"Oak didn’t disguise his intentions. Born in the British colonial era (and having fought on the Japanese side in World War II), he founded the Institute for Rewriting Indian History, which sought to recast the nation’s history as one of conquest and colonization of its true Hindu identity."

Reading archive 2026-02-05

Washington Post Lays Off More Than 300 Journalists: The layoffs cut into The Post’s local, international and sports coverage, and reduced its entire work force by about 30 percent. - "Much of [Weill Lewis's] tenure has been tumultuous, including a shake-up of newsroom leadership and scrutiny of his ties to a phone-hacking scandal while he worked for News Corp. Just before the 2024 presidential election, Mr. Lewis announced a new policy from Mr. Bezos ending presidential endorsements by The Post’s editorial board, which blocked a drafted endorsement of the Democratic candidate, Vice President Kamala Harris. Hundreds of thousands of Post subscribers canceled their subscriptions in response. 

"In a staff meeting in 2024, Mr. Lewis warned that The Post was in trouble. 'We are losing large amounts of money,' he said. 'Your audience has halved in recent years. People are not reading your stuff.'"

House rejects D.C. tax changes, potentially costing the city $600M in revenue: If passed by the Senate, the measure could lead to a months-long suspension of the city’s tax filing system.

No, Billie Eilish, Americans are not thieves on stolen land: Civilization depends on secure property titles, not sincere apologies. - "It is easy to call land stolen, but what about the innocent purchasers who acquired in good faith in the interim? Are they thieves? Is Eilish a thief because, as the Tongva tribe recently asserted, her $3 million mansion in Los Angeles sits on its ancestral homeland?"

What to know about the rare condition Catherine O’Hara had: The late actor and comedian was born with a condition called situs inversus. Here’s what that means.

As West goes after Russia’s oil fleet, Moscow fears for its war funding: New European measures to crack down on Russia’s shadow fleet could severely hurt its economy at a time when it is looking increasingly vulnerable.

Democrats have an early front-runner: Gavin Newsom’s bet on joyful combat and coiffed charisma is paying dividends.

Gavin Newsom is very similar to Kamala Harris: Two San Francisco local elected officials who successfully ran statewide in CA - "My point, though, is that going from holding statewide office in California to running in a national election is not like the A.F.C. champion going to the Super Bowl. 

"It is hard to win these jobs, and getting them involves a real display of political skill. But that skill is not beating Republicans in elections. It’s catering to Democratic Party insiders and affiliated advocacy groups and generating media buzz and endorsements. And this environment is a bad training ground for developing politicians who are good at beating the opposition party. It’s as if you took the winning team from the Champions League and then sent those players to the N.B.A. Finals on the theory that they’re top-notch athletes. You’re selecting on the wrong thing. And it shows."

Our 2024 Wins Above Replacement (WAR) Models: The races where fundamentals pointed to one outcome, but candidate quality led to another

He lost a pinkie trying to kill a man. From prison, he made things worse.: A case in Maryland involving a former high school wrestling star challenged a judge with a difficult question: Who deserves mercy?

Why this vegan environmentalist thinks meat is the future: A new book argues that people will never give up meat — and that plant-based and lab-grown meat will be the “next agricultural revolution.”

D.C.’s largest office-to-residential conversion is officially underway: A former office in Dupont Circle will become a 15-story, 532-unit apartment building, the kind of transformation that D.C. officials see as key to downtown’s future.

On Greenland, Europe stood up, Trump blinked, and the E.U. learned a lesson: For some in the often fractured E.U., Trump’s retreat on the Arctic territory proves that retaliation — not conciliation — is the answer to his hardball tactics.

ICE surge creates new headache for Maine’s Susan Collins: The most vulnerable Republican in the Senate would not say whether she supported the federal enforcement effort.

On a paradise island in the Pacific, meth and HIV epidemics rage: International criminal syndicates have been using Fiji as a transshipment point for drugs originating in Southeast Asia and Latin America. - "Law enforcement officials, customs agencies, U.N. officials and others who investigate drug syndicates believe that the groups operating in and around Fiji are working with each other, bringing together Chinese triads, Mexican cartels, Australian biker gangs and other syndicates with connections as far away as Nigeria."