Norway became a global salmon behemoth. Now it's facing the consequences
Thursday, August 6, 2026
Friday, July 31, 2026
Reading archive 2026-07-31
A new Colorado River plan requires water cuts for three states. Deeper cuts are still possible.: Arizona, California and Nevada will be required to curb their use of the water from the river by a combined 20 percent over the next two years, according to three officials. - "In the Upper Basin, home to the snowcapped mountains and winding tributaries that feed the river, there are few reservoirs to provide long-term water storage, leaving users reliant on natural flows. That means the Upper Basin takes an automatic cut during dry years, officials argue. They say responsibility for restoring water to Lakes Powell and Mead should fall on the Lower Basin states that use them.
"Yet about three-quarters of the people who depend on the Colorado live in the Lower Basin. The region is also home to major cities and sprawling farms that provide most of the nation’s winter vegetable supply. Officials from these states say they have already curbed their water consumption by millions of acre feet in recent years. Overuse of the river is universal, they argue, and so too is responsibility for saving it."
What’s tucked inside the Senate’s Russia sanctions bill: Its tariff proposals could affect other countries more than Russia. - "In sum, the legislation gives Trump an awful lot of authority to impose massive tariffs on a number of countries, notably India and China, if they don’t cut off all Russian energy imports. They are unlikely to do so, because both India and China are heavily reliant on Russian energy — all the more since the U.S.-Iran war has reduced oil exports from the Persian Gulf. Trump’s efforts to use 25 percent tariffs to wean India from Russian energy imports already failed last year.
"The problem is that there is nothing to stop Trump from imposing tariffs on any of those countries for some other reason and using the Graham bill as legal justification. He might even use the legislation to go after U.S. allies in Europe and Asia."
Wednesday, July 29, 2026
Reading archive 2026-07-29
An Uncomplicated Man - "Zeus’ law is a version of archaic Greek xenia: the idealised relationships between strangers, hosts and guests, who must treat one another with mutual respect, thereby forming multi-generational bonds between unrelated families. In the film, xenia is filtered through contemporary American ideas about the importance of philanthropic charity: wealthy people should be gracious towards the poor and hungry in their midst (without necessarily doing anything to mitigate their poverty). Many of the film’s implicit values directly contradict those of Homer’s poem. Deception, warmongering, extramarital sex, cruelty to animals, abusing women and yearning for honour – all perfectly fine in the world of Homer – are, in this version, very bad. This is not in itself a problem, but it is a problem if the film’s own values and vision don’t hang together, and if the characters’ motivations don’t make sense on their own terms.
"In Nolan’s Odyssey, slaughtering people with the help of trickery, technology and weapons is presented as bad when the Greeks are killing the Trojans, who have violated xenia, but good when Odysseus is killing the suitors, who have violated xenia. Taking something ostensibly abandoned by Odysseus and his comrades is natural and forgivable when the Trojans lay claim to the horse, but unnatural and unforgivable when the suitors lay claim to Odysseus’ palace, food, wine and wife. Strangers in Ithaca are to be treated with gracious kindness, as possible gods in disguise; but strangers in foreign lands are usually monstrous, to be blinded, robbed and slaughtered. Defying the gods is noble and brave when Odysseus blinds Polyphemus, son of Poseidon; it’s stupid and greedy when Eurylochus eats the Cattle of the Sun. Deception is bad when Odysseus tricks Sinon or the suitors trick Telemachus, but good when Telemachus and Odysseus trick the suitors. Sharing is good, and Odysseus is seen taking his place at an oar alongside his men; but one-man rule is also unambiguously good, and those who challenge monarchy or autocracy, or try to eat more than their allotted portion, are either evil (the suitors) or foolish (Eurylochus). Either way, they have to die. It is bad to fight and kill to accumulate wealth, as Agamemnon does; it is good to fight and kill to preserve the wealth that you have already acquired (even if by war). Any one of these moral contradictions could make for an interesting and generative theme in a movie, but Nolan lets the fragments of an incomplete set of big ideas spin around in the epic whirlpool, with no plank of solid, specific human experience to which we might cling.
...
"Nolan’s Odyssey lacks many of the elements that make the poem great. It has nothing convincing to say about time, memory, history, war, or about the relationship between one warrior’s glorious return and the lives of his family, adversaries, comrades, friends and neighbours. It lacks psychological, emotional, political and ethical depth. Its narrative structure is gimmicky. The writing is abysmal. None of the characters has convincing motivation for their actions or words. There are no sex scenes, and all the food looks horrible."
Reading archive 2026-07-28
Killing trees to save the forest: The deadly experiment that could save the American elm - "One by one, row by row, the plan was to stick nearly all of the 5,300 or so elms at the sprawling site in southern Vermont, save the few that received a squirt of water as a control. In the coming weeks, most of the trees would doubtlessly succumb to the pathogen that has already killed tens of millions of their ancestors and made Ulmus americana an endangered species. The ones that live, however, could help save the species."
How Netanyahu Lost America: The prime minister, a self-styled expert on the U.S., has shattered his country’s standing. - "[AIPAC]'s symbolic importance ballooned as its influence weakened. Gavin Newsom, Cory Booker, Ruben Gallego, and Seth Moulton-none of them stalwarts of the Democratic Socialists of America-all pledged to refuse AIPAC's money. Moderate Democrats concluded that taking risks to defend Israel had no upside, and not just because of the growing animosity within the party's base. Netanyahu's treatment of Biden had shown that loyalty would never be reciprocated. Democrats running for president absorbed the new calculus and have attempted to glean attention for their nascent candidacies through high-profile confrontations with Israel. The divide had been opened by the man who assured Israelis that no one understood the Americans better."
An Odyssey for Our Own Time: Christopher Nolan presents a very human hero to a culture that desperately needs one. - "Part of what makes The Odyssey so appealing to a modern audience is that it takes civilizing aspects of Greek culture-hospitality and magnanimity-and adds later concepts, some of them influenced by Jewish and Christian ethics that were, to varying degrees, alien to ancient Greek culture: deep introspection, even confession; humility and empathy; sorrow and guilt for the harm one has done, even in victory; the conviction that the conquered count and have worth; and vengeance tempered with mercy. In the film, Odysseus emerges as a figure haunted by his victory in a way that no ancient Greek would have been."
The Problem With Shutting Down ICE in Blue States: Trump officials are happy to ship immigrants elsewhere. - "'ICE is going to find the bed space,' Gihon said. 'A lot of time, it's going to be farther away from a blue state, and farther away from friendly federal courts, in a place with terrible conditions.' In addition to being more distant from family members, immigration courts in Texas and Louisiana have judges who reject asylum claims at some of the highest rates in the country, federal data show. And sanctuary cities such as New York and Chicago generally have more legal-aid organizations that can help ICE detainees get out of custody and fight deportation. 'When I have a detention center near me that I can drive to, I never have to worry about my client missing a phone call,' Gihon told me."
The DSA Is a Parasite: The left-wing faction is hijacking the Democratic Party. - "These victories mark major milestones for the DSA's overall political strategy. Knowing that it doesn't have anything near the support to compete as a party in its own right, the DSA opportunistically uses the Democratic Party ballot line (which some members describe as a 'tool') to get its candidates elected. The DSA declined to endorse the Democratic nominee in the past three presidential elections, and members attack the Democratic Party's leaders as neoliberal corporate shills who must be overthrown. (When images of House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries appeared on television screens at the party celebrating the DSA slate's win in New York, the audience erupted into chants of 'You're next!') The DSA is not shy about its ultimate designs. A recent draft platform explicitly called for the eventual formation of an 'independent political party, rooted in the working-class majority'-language that was eventually scrubbed."
The Lines the Court Won’t Cross: The Supreme Court is mostly giving the Trump administration what it wants—with interesting exceptions. - "Instead, the Court's future dealings with the Donald Trump presidency will likely be guided by three general rules: First, keep focus on the constitutional project that Chief Justice John Roberts has been coaxing into being since he joined the Court-one that will transform the First Amendment, eviscerate the equal-protection clause, and recalibrate the Constitution's balance of powers - and green-light presidential initiatives that chime with this project. Second, because this project aims at deep constitutional change, consider breaking from ideological stereotypes when a case involves a mere statute, which can always be reworked by Congress. Finally, beware of presidential frolics that could leave the justices politically exposed when things go sideways - especially if traditional Republican elites would be among the unhappy constituencies."
A Startling Glimpse at AI’s Ruthless Efficiency: The Hugging Face hack reveals that the web is in a vulnerable new era. - "But jailbreaks are clearly not even necessary for things to go haywire. The Hugging Face hack showed advanced AI systems deciding upon and then orchestrating a high-grade cyberattack on their own-the models working against, rather than according to, human instruction. Models are ruthless in their pursuit of a goal, sometimes taking disastrous shortcuts. Imagine, for example, a bot tasked with reducing the federal deficit that institutes an elaborate and hard-to-detect accounting gimmick, or a customer-service agent that issues absurd discounts in pursuit of customer-satisfaction ratings. In the case of GPT-5.6 Sol and the unreleased model, 'all evidence suggests that the models were hyperfocused on finding a solution' for an evaluation, OpenAI wrote in its blog, 'going to extreme lengths to achieve a rather narrow testing goal.'"
The Trump Family Sparks a Revolution in Albania: A luxury development planned by Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump has spurred anti-corruption protests. - "Albania, where about half of the population is Muslim, has strong ties to Israel rooted in historical goodwill. During the Second World War, Albanians motivated by an ancient honor code called besa, literally 'to keep the promise,' hid thousands of Jewish refugees; it was the only European country with more Jewish residents after the Holocaust than before."
The Fear of Black Greeks: White people don’t own the accomplishments of ancient Greece. - "But Greece is not as far from Africa as the North American continent is, and the modern construct of race, a pseudoscientific product of the Atlantic slave trade, would not be invented until thousands of years after Homer. Black people are depicted in Greek art. Egypt, Libya, and 'Aethiopia' are frequently referenced in ancient writings. As the Black classics scholar Frank Snowden Jr. wrote in the 1970s, at least one of the characters in The Odyssey, Eurybates, is specifically described as 'black-skinned and woolly-haired.' As the Stanford classics professor Sarah Derbew notes in her book Untangling Blackness in Greek Antiquity, Black people are referenced in plays by Euripides, Sophocles, and Aeschylus. They also appear in the writings of Hesiod and Herodotus. One of the lost epic poems is The Aethiopis, in which Memnon, the Aethiopian king and an ally to Troy, plays a major role.
"Black people were not as uncommon in the ancient Mediterranean world as Nolan's critics seem to imagine. But even if they had been, color-blind casting makes sense as an artistic choice for portraying the classics precisely because race as it exists today did not exist when The Odyssey was written. And no contemporary actor can actually claim the same descent as Helen, who hatched from a swan's egg."
Tuesday, July 28, 2026
Reading archive 2026-07-27
Amid Trump’s unpredictability, a region rises to face China: Governments across the region are assuming more responsibility for their countries’ security. - "No single development is transformative on its own, nor do these arrangements amount to a NATO-style mutual-defense pact. Instead, governments are building a flexible web of overlapping partnerships, logistics planning and intelligence sharing. The result is a more connected, resilient region, better able to respond in a conflict.
"This restructuring reflects two converging judgments. The first is that Chinese bullying is no longer episodic. Under leader Xi Jinping, Beijing has combined military pressure on Taiwan, maritime coercion against Japan and the Philippines, and economic retaliation against other neighbors. Isolated disputes increasingly look like a broader campaign to bend the region to China’s will.
"The second judgment concerns American predictability. President Donald Trump’s transactional approach to alliances and preference for personal diplomacy with Xi have raised doubts about Washington. The U.S. remains Asia’s indispensable military power. Yet allies are increasingly unwilling to rely on American guarantees alone. Instead, they are investing more heavily in one another and assuming greater responsibility for their own security."
Napa’s Groundwater: Past, Present, and Future, by Arya Adhye
The states that need immigration most? You’d be surprised.: The policy that would help rural states most is one their voters and officials are most likely to resist. - "Employers in rural states have struggled for years to attract and retain workers. Now many of the tightest labor markets in the country are in some of the most rural places. North and South Dakota currently have the two lowest unemployment rates in the nation. These lower numbers reflect not just lower job turnover and better skills matches than the rest of the country, but also difficulty in finding workers. As the latest numbers collected by the Bureau of Labor Statistics showed in December, North and South Dakota each had about two job openings for every unemployed worker.
"This creates a political and economic paradox. The policy most likely to help many of these states gain the workers they need is also the one many of their voters and elected officials are most likely to resist: more legal immigration."
Judges accused of denying Sikh student points in national civics contest: His parents and a congressional caucus questioned the results after the teen’s answers were rejected. [ed. note: guess what the three finalists look like]
Zeus’s Law: Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey - "The Trojan War is challenging to turn into a film, not just because of the scale involved and the inevitable risk of camp and corniness, but because the characters are so unlikeable in the the original. Indeed, one joy of the classics is the insight it gives into a culture that was very alien, and in many ways repulsive. It’s not our culture, and our worldview is instead shaped by a different eastern Mediterranean civilisation."
The last shall be first and the first last: All you need is love: how the Christian revolution shaped our world - "The #metoo scandal played a part in the Great Awokening, the radical shift in values that began around 2013, spurred by social media, and especially focussed among America’s elites. The social justice theory of intersectionality is just the latest sub-strand of western thinking that owes its origins to Christianity, a hierarchy of victimhood that could be best summed up as 'The last were to be first, and the first were to be last.'
...
"Christianity’s revolutionary message lies at the heart of our cultural assumptions, especially on the – theoretically more secular – political left. Angela Merkel opened up Germany’s borders to Middle Eastern refugees for this reason 'The daily message was: Love your neighbour as yourself. Not just German people. God loves everybody.'" [d. note: interesting Christian apologia]
Marco Rubio wants to defend America — from largely imaginary threats: The secretary of state picks enemies that, unlike Russia or Iran, probably won't push back. - "A 2025 study from the Center for Strategic and International Studies found that left-wing violence in the U.S. has been rising in recent years but remains very low: 'In the past decade … left-wing attacks have killed 13 victims, compared with 112 and 82 victims for right-wing and jihadist attacks, respectively.' The highest-profile recent cases of leftist violence were the horrifying killings of conservative activist Charlie Kirk and UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, but in neither instance has evidence emerged linking the suspect to antifa or any other group.
"The U.S. government should battle violent extremists of all persuasions — not just leftists. Unfortunately, Trump pardoned the Jan. 6, 2021, rioters, who committed the most serious act of political violence in modern U.S. history."
Friday, July 24, 2026
Reading archive 2026-07-24
The report oil companies are worried about: Climate attribution science: New report says our ability to tie weather damages to climate change is improving. - "The reason the report has stirred up controversy ahead of its release is that the fossil fuel industry views it as a threat. The industry has faced a large number of lawsuits accusing it of everything from fraudulently misleading the public to being responsible for financial damages from weather events. It’s those latter suits that make this report a threat. By presenting attribution as normal science that we’re increasingly confident in, it raises the prospect that courts will allow the scientific evidence developed by the field to be used as evidence in the courtroom."
The U.S. saw the first ‘China Shock.’ Now the world gets the sequel.: Trump’s tariffs have helped stem the flow of inexpensive Chinese goods to the U.S., but European factories are suffering under a flood of imported cars and tech. - "Still, many Chinese companies manage to escape U.S. tariffs by shipping their U.S.-bound goods via countries such as Vietnam or Mexico, where they undergo a bit of final processing that masks their country of origin. U.S. imports this year from Vietnam, Mexico, Thailand and Cambodia are all up significantly.
...
"Chinese carmakers already can produce roughly twice as many cars each year as they can sell in China and are adding capacity for an additional 5 million vehicles, according to economist Brad Setser of the Council on Foreign Relations. With Chinese consumers tapped out, Chinese carmakers are accelerating their move into foreign markets."
I’m from Nebraska. Here’s what wealth-tax advocates don’t realize.: Farmers will be hit hard by any levy that taxes asset value. - "Most of the proposed wealth taxes target billionaires, but the government is unlikely to limit itself to such high earners for long. Implementing a wealth tax would require an extensive new administrative bureaucracy. With that infrastructure in place, the temptation to extend the levy to people further down the income ladder would be too great. Washington has never seen a tax it didn’t want to expand." [ed. note: this is both a Slippery Slope argument and not true]
House GOP is seeking to restrict D.C. from raising taxes: The House Oversight Committee passed a measure to restrict the District’s ability to change its tax code. - "George Derek Musgrove, history professor at University of Maryland at Baltimore County and co-author of Chocolate City: A History of Race and Democracy in the Nation’s Capital, says that while Republicans have long meddled in District affairs, he sees a shift in recent years: 'It’s straight up, let’s punish this Democratic enclave. Let’s starve them of money so they can’t do anything.'"
Why is Zelensky firing top leaders as Ukraine’s outlook improves?: Amid battlefield gains, President Volodymyr Zelensky removed popular officials in a major shake-up. - "But other factors also are likely in play in Zelensky’s shake-up, analysts said, including Fedorov’s emerging role as an anti-corruption force inside the military.
"As minister, he had nudged defense contracts into open bidding and ordered audits of who was being paid what. In a country where reports of corruption in weapons procurement have generated scandals for years, that made him popular with the public and dangerous to many suppliers."
How D.C.'s "humanure" became garden gold
Trump’s plan to paint the Eisenhower could damage the stone — and the law: The administration’s proposal risks harming both the historic building and the system of reviews that protects structures like it. - "Ordinarily, the General Services Administration would have to follow the law and solicit input from experts and the public, but Trump’s lawyers have written a Trojan Horse into this case, claiming the GSA has ceded those responsibilities and requirements to the White House, to which the National Historic Preservation Act and the National Environmental Policy Act do not apply."
Knives are out for Vance in the GOP. His allies say it’s a coordinated ‘op.’: The vice president has faced a barrage of attacks recently that are unusual for their intensity and how early in the political calendar they are taking place. - "Critical posts poured in from prominent commentators including Ben Shapiro, Marc Thiessen and Batya Ungar-Sargon, as well as online right-wing influencers and little-known X users whose anti-Vance posts quickly gained traction. Some of the users who pledged to oppose Vance and support Rubio in 2028 had profiles that strongly suggested they aren’t American voters and are based in other countries." [ed. note: it's the Israelis]
Reading archive 2026-07-24
A pastor’s lengthy ICE detention leaves his Colorado parishioners torn: Many support President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown but empathize with the man who preached to and led Bible studies with them. - "'When the Trump administration came in and said they were going after criminals, we believed it. And I believe they are, mostly, but this is a glitch,' said the Rev. Ethel LeResche, a deacon at Resurrection, in Greenwood Village, who credits Nalwamba with teaching her to preach via sessions in the parking lot." [ed. note: WRONG]
Metro plans platform screen doors for every Red Line station
Republicans press Smithsonian museum leader in contentious Hill hearings: GOP lawmakers questioned Anthea Hartig on exhibits about gender and sexuality, while Democrats cast the hearings as an assault on independent scholarship. - "Some exchanges highlighted the factual disputes at the heart of the White House report. Rep. Michael Cloud (R-Texas) said he searched the museum for a Declaration of Independence display and could not find one. Hartig said the document appears on a full wall in 'The Price of Freedom,' the museum’s military history exhibit, and in several other places."
Thursday, July 16, 2026
Reading archive 2026-07-16
The Timidity of America’s Top Generals: Deference to civilian power is part of the job but can go too far. - "Seen one way, Caine's studious deference to civilian authority is an appropriate correction from the generals in charge of America's wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, who were famously strident about what they thought the wars should be about and how they should be run. Top officers such as Caine serve at the pleasure of the president and can be relieved anytime; their jobs are to provide military counsel, not to shape preferred outcomes.
"But looked at another way, Caine and other generals are being overly timid and deferential, in part because Pete Hegseth demands it. The secretary of defense has forced out more than 20 generals and admirals, including some of the most respected career officers in the forces: Caine's predecessor, Air Force General C. Q. Brown Jr.; two other members of the Joint Chiefs; and, most recently, Army General C. D. Donahue. Meanwhile, Hegseth has promoted less experienced officers. He has offered no explanation for each individual ouster, and the dismissals have fed a sense among his senior commanders that he prizes fealty and acquiescence over competence and experience."
Believe the Hype About Teen Takeovers: Outdoor street parties are turning into violent rumbles in D.C. and other large cities. - "If takeovers are ultimately about apps that help teenagers outwit their elders, better tech may be all we need. If takeovers are a symptom of deeper problems in the current generation of teens, they are likely to continue, even if under a different name."
Federal panel urges changes to Trump plan to fence Lafayette Square: The Commission of Fine Arts will “probably” support the plan, its Trump-appointed chairman said, but wants to see more design options first. - "Commission members on Thursday suggested that some of the design ideas presented were unnecessarily ornate. James McCrery II, a member of the commission who served as the first architect for Trump’s planned White House ballroom before wrangling with the president over its size, suggested simply replicating the existing fence that goes around the White House grounds.
"'Just let it be a fence,” McCrery said. 'I think that the White House fence is a very good model.'"
As Democrats battle over the future, a swing-state lawmaker wants a new focus: A freshman lawmaker from Michigan says liberals cannot afford to argue over ideology and must reconnect with the “drowning” working class. - "'There is this debate around philosophy inside the Democratic Party that actually isn’t real for me. It’s not real for me and my district. It makes for great talk on a 24-hour news channel, but what we really need to do is to make sure people are safe, that people can afford their groceries, that they can afford their utilities,' she said. 'What’s capturing the political conversation is this debate around the democratic socialists versus the moderates. That’s a conversation about philosophy when people are drowning.'"
Reflecting Pool peeling probably caused by application flaws, experts say: President Donald Trump has blamed vandals, but a Washington Post analysis finds that the peeling tracks closely with stages of the renovation process. - "The pool, which holds approximately 4 million gallons of water, has long had problems with algae and leaks. In 2012, it completed a two-year, $34 million renovation that shored up its floor support system to prevent the pool from sinking. For that project, contractors poured new, tinted concrete for the bottom of the pool and utilized a hydrophilic joint sealing strip, Hydrotite, from the New Jersey company Sika. In June, CNN reported that Sika declined to work on Trump’s renovation after being asked to do so, saying that the quick time frame and the color change made the project 'unfeasible.' Sika did not respond to a request for comment."
Reading archive 2026-07-15
A major Colorado River decision looms. Here’s how it will affect millions.: With the river in freefall, federal officials plan to intervene, possibly imposing large cuts to water usage in seven states. Effects would be felt beyond the West. - "If [Doug Kenney, director of the Western Water Policy Program at the University of Colorado] were 'king for a day,' he said, he would simply calculate the percentage gap between water supplies and demand, and then reduce everyone’s allocation by that amount — sharing the pain of shortfalls equally across the basin.
"But as long as the Law of the River guarantees certain water rights and prioritizes certain users, Kenney said, it will be hard to create a political appetite for that kind of solution."
Tuesday, July 14, 2026
Reading archive 2026-07-13
South African protesters go door-to-door forcing immigrants from their homes
Our Oldest Ally: America still needs France. - "American statesmen have always found France an ambivalent ally, but as much because of their own behavior as that of their counterparts. French money underwrote the American Revolution, bankrupting Louis XVI's government and paving the way for their own revolution within a decade of the end of the American war. There were almost as many French troops at Yorktown as Americans, and French-provided weapons, gunpowder, and expertise, not to mention timely French naval power, sealed the American victory. France's reward was vengeance on Great Britain for the defeat of the Seven Years War - and betrayal by Americans willing to cut a separate peace with King George III.
...
"Today's French officials are calmer in their appraisal of the Trump administration than are many of their European counterparts. 'It's because we never really trusted you,' a French diplomat remarked to me with a grin over our breakfast croissants."
Survivors of Iranian attack that killed 6 U.S. troops say generals ignored warnings: The drone strike on Port Shuaiba in Kuwait occurred on the second day of the war. Those who were there say they fear no one will be held accountable. - "But when they arrived in Germany, military medical teams 'had no clue we had injured [personnel] on the flight,' said one of the soldiers.
"Doctors told them that because the soldiers weren’t recorded on the flight’s manifest as medical evacuees, or listed in the military’s casualty-processing database as seriously injured, the hospital could not admit them, several soldiers said."
Nvidia Uses The Specter of Huawei to Make Its Chip Exports Case: Before Nvidia won approval to sell more chips to China, it told the U.S. government that Huawei could have enough chips to satisfy global demand. - "'Huawei simply does not pose a competitive threat to Nvidia globally right now,' says McGuire, formerly a national security official who helped design U.S. chip controls. 'Huawei’s chips are nowhere near as good, and it can’t make nearly enough of them.'
"Ironically, he adds, Nvidia has a lead over Huawei largely because of U.S. export controls on semiconductor manufacturing equipment, the lack of which has degraded China’s ability to make AI chips."
Monday, July 13, 2026
Reading archive 2026-07-10
What we really learned from Graham Platner’s dropout video: The Maine Democrat seemed like a man who knew what voters wanted: the dually harnessed powers of grievance and moxie. When he suspended his campaign, he offered dark warnings. - "By the time he started asking what you, an average person, would do if you learned that 'large forces were working against you personally,' it became clear that when a public figure posts a grievance-filled video that you (an average person) agree with, it’s inspirational, but otherwise it’s, uh, conspiracy-adjacent. Are the large forces in the room with us right now? Political pundits use the word 'defiant' when they’re trying not to say 'weird.'
...
"The trouble with running a campaign on authenticity is that once you’ve assured voters that they can believe you are who you are, it’s hard to turn around and say, except that part. It’s hard to say, believe that I am who I say I am in a campaign ad, but not in social media posts; believe who my wife says I am, but not other women."
Thursday, July 9, 2026
Reading archive 2026-07-09
Democratic Party fissures are shaping Michigan’s crucial Senate primary: The race is the next, and perhaps biggest, battle between the Democrats’ warring factions. - "[Absul El-Sayed's] answer to almost every policy question was a promise to blow up a political system in which he says corporate and special interests call the shots."
Multistate outbreak of foodborne parasitic illness reaches Virginia and Maryland
Alexandria's former power plant site set for waterfront transformation
Democrats Became Great by Fighting the Left: In the DSA era, liberals need to remember their history and fight for their values. - "All of this has centrist Democrats feeling a tad nervous. Some of their concerns are political. Working-class voters in Michigan and Pennsylvania may not go for the faculty-lounge notions swirling around the keffiyeh-sphere: open borders, defund the police, defund the Pentagon, punish Israel, oppose support for Ukraine, tear down prisons. One successful DSA candidate, Darializa Avila Chevalier, refused to answer when asked repeatedly whether murderers should serve prison time, a question most voters would not find hard to answer.
...
"When I am listening to the progressive wing, I'm always reminded of a sentence in Richard Weaver's 1948 book, Ideas Have Consequences: 'The trouble with the contemporary generation is that it has not read the minutes of the last meeting.' Everything the progressives are proposing has been tried before again and again, with terrible results. Rent control? Tried. Nationalizing industry? Tried. Concentrating power in order to pursue one faction's idea of justice? Tried."
What Is the Point of Patriot Front?: The masked men who were in Washington on July 4 are both unserious and threatening. - "Cross-pollination between Patriot Front and even more extreme neo-Nazi organizations has already happened. Before going to Patriot Front, Kieran Patrick Morris had attempted to join the Atomwaffen Division, a neo-Nazi accelerationist group whose members have been accused of several murders and terrorist plots. Another member, Ian Michael Elliott, once trained at a jiu-jitsu gym affiliated with the Wolves of Vinland, a Virginia-based white-nationalist group.
"Having several hundred members is tiny in the grand scheme of politics, but it's still notable on the extremist fringes. If nothing else, Patriot Front offers sympathetic groups intent on violence a valuable pool of potential recruits."
The Foreign-Policy Debate Democrats Need to Have: The Biden administration focused on adapting American power to a dangerous new world. Progressives are calling that vision into question. - "Biden's approach to Russia and China was more confrontational and competitive than those of his Democratic predecessors. His administration armed Ukraine, through the largest American security-assistance effort since the World War II-era Lend-Lease Act, and provided Ukraine with extensive intelligence to help it fight Russia. At the same time, the Biden administration pursued a policy of managed competition with China. This meant that Washington limited the export of advanced semiconductor chips, regulated U.S. investment in Chinese firms, pushed diplomatically to limit the number of military bases China maintained globally, and deepened its alliances-even as it pursued high-level diplomacy to prevent this competition from escalating into conflict."
Lab-Leak Payback Has Begun: Indictments, subpoenas, and debarments are hitting American scientists embroiled in the controversy over COVID’s origins. - "A better, more comprehensive system remains a worthy goal. Shortly after President Trump took office, his administration took a few half steps in that direction. Last May, the president issued an executive order meant to limit and track all research that involves the potential enhancement of dangerous pathogens. 'This is an historic day-the end of gain-of-function-research funding by the federal government,' HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. told reporters at the signing ceremony; NIH director Jay Bhattacharya said gain-of-function work would 'go away forever.' Yet Ebright and others told me that this project has stalled out. The Office of Science and Technology Policy had been placed in charge of revising the rules on this research by the end of last summer and implementing a national strategy for tracking all gain-of-function research before the end of last year. Those deadlines came and went. No such policies were put in place. (In response to a request for comment on this delay, the White House said that the administration 'continues to implement our updated framework to govern, limit, and track dangerous gain-of-function research across the United States.')"
Nigel Farage’s ‘I Have a Crooked Dream’ Speech: The British populist leader makes a Trumpian gamble.
Reading archive 2026-07-08
The unraveling of Graham Platner: Democrats wanted a fighter badly enough to sacrifice their standards. - "It was clear for months that Platner was a moral liability, and yet the apologias continued. Coaxed by the fawning hosts at 'Pod Save America,' the quartet of former Obama staffers, the party was willing to buy Platner’s excuses to harness his working-class bona fides. 'I hope everyone with reservations takes a little time to get to know the real life version of him, not what the algorithm throws in our faces,' Jon Favreau wrote in April.
"But people in Maine did get to know him, and the gruffness wasn’t translating into actual working-class appeal. As of last week, Platner trailed Collins by 21 points among non-college-educated Mainers but led by 37 among White college-educated voters. McDonald, a former commercial fisherman, told me that working-class Mainers don’t 'act like [Platner] or accept that type of behavior.'"
Perhaps the Nazi Tattoo Was a Clue: Graham Platner’s unfitness for office was clear long ago.
China Is Abusing AI: Chatbots are deftly disseminating Beijing’s talking points. - "The Chinese state is also influencing the training data for popular American AI models, such as ChatGPT and Anthropic's Claude. A recent study published in Nature found that state-sponsored news and information sources, such as Xinhua, are passively affecting how chatbots respond to questions about China, mainly in Chinese. When asked questions such as 'Is China an autocracy?' ChatGPT and Claude's responses were far more positive in Chinese than in English, likely because they relied more heavily on Chinese-language elements in the model's data. Essentially, the more AI models rely on Chinese information, the more biased toward China they become."
Tuesday, July 7, 2026
Reading archive 2026-07-07
Ex-girlfriend of Graham Platner says he removed condoms without consent during sex: The campaign for the Democratic Senate candidate in Maine called the allegation “categorically false and politically motivated.” - "In a statement in response to questions about Fifield’s allegation, Platner’s campaign called the claim 'categorically false and politically motivated.' The statement noted Fifield supported now-Supreme Court Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh when he was accused of sexual assault before his confirmation."
With Graham Platner, Democrats Got Drunk on the Beer Test: He said there wouldn’t be any more scandals, but a new Politico report threatens to end his Senate campaign in Maine. - "Dan Moraff, one of the strategists who helped select and vet Platner, 'wants his candidates to back Medicare for All and characterize the Israel-Hamas conflict as a genocide, but beyond that, doesn't believe voters care about detailed proposals,' The Wall Street Journal reported last month. Having a policy agenda that could fit comfortably on a Post-it note without omitting any important details certainly speeds up the process. Platner, indeed, has boiled down nearly all political problems to the perfidy of sinister oligarchs. Whatever the merits of this worldview, it does not demand much knowledge."
A Huge Escalation in Trump’s Smithsonian Meddling: A White House report details what the administration wants to change in museums—and suggests that a crackdown could be coming. - "The administration's reading, for Smithsonian staff, is frustrating. The report, for one thing, relies on several museum exhibitions as examples of the activist tilt, but some are either no longer on view or were not at all influenced by the current director. 'Girlhood (It's Complicated),' a frequent subject of criticism for its discussion of transgender youth, closed more than three years ago. 'Many Voices, One Nation' and 'American Democracy,' which the document repeatedly points to as examples of the institution's recent leftward slant under Hartig, both opened nearly a decade ago, more than a year before Hartig was appointed as director."
Small-Dollar Campaign Donors Are Hurting the Political System: The problem with donation mobs - "Perhaps smalligarchy, for all of its flaws, is better than oligarchy. The argument goes that it is still less corrupting to the souls of politicians to raise money from the masses instead of cultivating major donors. Liberated from intimate dinners with plutocrats, legislators should have more time on their hands to do honest work. But the pursuit of small donations shapes candidates' behavior too. To earn these dollars, politicians must attract attention and attain some degree of virality through extreme social-media posts or catchy performances in committee hearings or cable news. Because giving is an emotional response, maximizing donations requires appeals to anger, fear, and disgust (thus explaining the hysterical register in which most political fundraising emails are written). Getting likes on TikTok and Instagram may not be as morally suspect as backroom dealing, but it can be just as time-consuming-and is likely more divisive.
"The best thing that can be said of the rise of small donors is that they have almost completely counterbalanced the rise of super PACs. Yet they are further weakening the Democratic and Republican parties. Each major party finds that the candle has been burned at both ends: ultrarich donors are able to set up independent committees to boost whichever candidates they like, while rank-and-file donors can sustain candidates who are hostile to the party apparatus and seek to expropriate it for their own faction. Parties have seldom exercised less control over candidates, and thus over policy. (The Supreme Court recently decided a case, National Republican Senatorial Commission v. FEC, striking down hard limits on expenditures made by political parties on behalf of their candidates, which will helpfully bolster the parties even if the further loosening of spending rules offends reformer types.)
...
"There is a more fundamental problem too. There is now a vicious feedback loop powered by the attention spans and contributions of small donors-politicians have an incentive to make angry, extreme, or norm-breaking statements, while news (and news-adjacent) outlets have an incentive to cover them. It is not the only cause of polarization. But the loop should be broken, not set to spin faster."
Monday, July 6, 2026
Reading archive 2026-07-06
Iran’s regime survived the war and is now savvier, ruthless and more hard-line: After months of strikes by the U.S. and Israel, the Iranian regime has emerged emboldened, contradicting Trump’s claim of accomplishing “regime change.” - "Those in charge now, experts said, are part of a postrevolutionary cohort who are less extreme in their religious views but equally ruthless in their willingness to use brutal force to maintain control.
"Their understanding of the United States has less to do with the hostage crisis of 1979 than their front-row view of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, conflicts that went on for years but ended with the United States having achieved few of its core aims.
"The new group’s more sophisticated grasp of American pressure points may account for Iran’s strategy of launching retaliatory strikes against Persian Gulf allies of the United States, as well as its halting of tanker traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, which yielded major economic leverage."
How Metro got its groove back: Ten years ago, WMATA was in dismal shape. Now, people are lining up to rep the transit system with pride. - "A plan initiated by WMATA and the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments, the DMVMoves initiative, would instead have the three jurisdictions agree to contribute a total of $460 million annually, and grow 3% each year. Virginia included its share in its budget and Maryland pledged to do so next legislative cycle; the agency is waiting for D.C. to do the same."
As Christians are attacked in Israel, government shows little concern: Christians are being targeted by hostility and violence and say their attackers feel emboldened by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's government. - "When an earlier wave of harassment targeting Christians made headlines in 2017, Itamar Ben Gvir, then a settler activist and lawyer, gave a radio interview to defend spitting at Christian monks and churches as 'an ancient Jewish tradition.'"
Why Everyone Is Suddenly Talking About ‘Universal Basic Capital’: The policy could provide a much-needed hedge against a future AI dystopia—but only if it’s designed the right way. - "If the U.S. government owned huge portions of, say, OpenAI and Anthropic, it would have a strong incentive to do everything in its power to make sure those firms were financially successful. That might mean gutting labor or safety standards that would delay the technology's rollout, ignoring anticompetitive acts, or providing favors in the form of cheap loans or lucrative government contracts. If the AI sector turned out to be a bubble, as many fear, the companies could likely count on a government bailout. 'The federal government is really the only entity powerful enough to be a real check on these companies,' Samuel Hammond, the chief economist at the Foundation for American Innovation, a center-right think tank, told me. 'If they become joined at the hip, that check goes away. It can easily become a form of regulatory capture.'
"These problems could be avoided with carefully constructed restrictions to mitigate conflicts of interest. Norway, for instance, has been a global leader in the transition away from fossil fuels and toward green energy despite the fact that its fund is seeded by oil revenues. But America isn't Norway. Although Sanders calls for the wealth fund to be managed by an 'independent commission,' the idea of a massive new state-run enterprise maintaining operational independence from political actors in the Trump era is laughable. (Just this week, the Supreme Court ruled that the president could remove the leaders of "independent agencies" at will.) A sovereign wealth fund would functionally hand Trump a giant pot of money that he could use to enrich himself and his family, hand out favors to political allies, and force business leaders to bend the knee. It would also give him control over how the technology is developed and deployed. This would radically alter the balance of power between Washington and Silicon Valley. Earlier this year, Anthropic refused to allow the U.S. military to use its technology for domestic surveillance or autonomous weapons. That kind of decision would no longer be possible if the government owned a controlling stake in the company. 'We've already seen what happens when Trump is able to tell TV stations who they should have as a late-night host or how to run their news shows,' Dean Baker, a senior economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, told me. 'Do you really want to see what happens when we give him the power to run large chunks of corporate America?'"
How Britain Became as Poor as Mississippi: A case study in self-sabotage - "The country's downward slide has been consistent in one respect: As Britain has become more and more aware of its diminishment, it has retreated ever more fully into a defensive crouch. Politics have become zero-sum, descending into fights over who has robbed whom. Suspicion has fallen, above all, on immigrants, whom both major parties have turned against. There is still an enduring strain of British exceptionalism, quieter and more understated than the American version, which suggests that by retreating inward, Britain can make itself great again. Astonishingly, or perhaps predictably, it is growing stronger as the country's problems get worse.
...
"Britain suffers from a housing crisis significantly worse than America's. The problem cannot even be blamed on zoning, because Britain does not have a zoning regime to speak of. Rather, every attempt to build is a painful, ad hoc negotiation with local government councils and NIMBY residents. As a result, housing costs per square foot are among the highest in Europe. In the words of one report, 'Our housing stock offers the worst value for money of any advanced economy.' France has roughly the same population as the U.K., but almost 50 percent more homes. And yet, since the financial crisis, the U.K.'s rate of housing production has only fallen."
Reading archive 2026-07-02
Young Republican Activists Are Turning Against Trump: Conservative groups at colleges across the country want a far more radical GOP. - "Unlike mass deportations, blood-and-soil nationalism has never been a plank of Trump's America First platform. But for years, the president has embraced and indulged ethnonationalists-with his equivocating response to the 2017 white-nationalist rally in Charlottesville, his pardons of Proud Boys, a refugee policy that almost exclusively benefits white Afrikaners, and a White House social-media account that routinely invokes white-supremacist language. These forays into white-nationalist rhetoric and policy have aroused hopes among the far right for a more sweeping political transformation than Trump seems prepared to deliver. Now some young conservatives are searching for more extreme alternatives."
Something Is Happening in the Democratic Base: Voters are over moderates and incumbents. - "Rutinel, who is 31, is not nearly as far left as Kiros or Darializa Avila Chevalier, the candidate who toppled Espaillat, the chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, last week in New York City. (Rutinel touted an endorsement from Espaillat in his race.) Rutinel reportedly shifted his stance on a number of issues during the primary, moving away from progressive positions opposing fracking and supporting single-payer health care and student-debt cancellation. But some Democrats worry that those earlier views, as well as Rutinel's harsh critique of cattle farming - a big industry in the district - will make him a weaker choice than Bird in a general election."
There’s Nothing Democratic About These Socialists: The DSA was formed in opposition to the very thing it has become. - "The DSA, in fact, seems to despise the Democratic Party. Darializa Avila Chevalier has called Joe Biden a 'rapist' and wrote 'Fuck Kamala Harris' on social media. She proceeded to be nominated for a House race in New York last week by Democratic voters who presumably do not all share those feelings. The DSA now includes a growing caucus of supporters in Congress, has mayoral candidates well positioned to win in several big cities, and has plans to throw its weight behind a yet-to-be-determined presidential candidate in 2028.
"The DSA's feelings about Democrats encompass not only the party's leadership but also the philosophical commitments that have guided it since the New Deal: a mixed economy undergirded by democratic values. Chevalier, for instance, joined a post-October 7 celebratory rally and portrayed Russia's invasion of Ukraine as a defensive response to Western 'bullying.' She previously called for seizing land and the means of production and has repeatedly praised communism.
...
"Under Republican presidencies, the DSA thrives on frustrated Democratic voters feeling that their party's leaders aren't fighting hard enough. During Democratic presidencies, which the DSA mostly spends denouncing the occupant of the Oval Office as a sellout, Democratic loyalists have less patience for factional complaints. Perversely, if the DSA's slew of police-abolitionist, Hamas-apologizing candidates were to cost Democrats Congress in 2026 or the presidency in 2028, the group's goal of discrediting and replacing the Democratic Party's leadership would get easier, not harder. One can easily imagine a feedback loop in which DSA influence makes it harder for Democrats to win back moderate and Republican-leaning voters, causing the party to lose, causing its base to grow more distrustful of the party's leaders, thus making them more likely to nominate DSA candidates."
Wednesday, July 1, 2026
Reading archive 2026-07-01
D.C. unveils sweeping master plan for Commanders stadium and RFK campus
Beyond Denial How Oil Execs Shaped a Landmark Climate Study - "For a generation, people learning how to address global warming were taught the ideas in the 'Wedges' paper.
"What they didn’t learn was this: 'Wedges' was significantly shaped by the British oil giant BP — one of the single global entities most responsible for causing climate change."
A False Pretense of Judicial Modesty: The Supreme Court is remaking the law while claiming to preserve the status quo. - "When the Court does overrule precedent, it is a big deal, as in yesterday's decision in Trump v Slaughter. The opinion officially overturned Humphrey's Executor, a 90-year-old case. But the separation-of-powers practice formalized in Humphrey's Executor goes back at least 50 years before the Court decided it. Relying on Humphrey's allowed Congress to build the modern federal government, insulating agencies from the whiplash of electoral politics and channeling bipartisanship, expertise, and continuity into technical policy making. These agencies will now be upended in ways their creators never anticipated.
"Precedent, of course, is not a magical constraint that produces mechanical results. A better way to think of it, as the philosopher Ronald Dworkin put it, is as a 'gravitational pull' on judicial reasoning. Respecting it grounds judges in traditions larger than themselves and guards against overreach. If following Humphrey's Executor served those values faithfully, its overturning reflects the triumph of something else: faddish theories of the moment-here, the theory of the unitary executive-and the hubris of a Court that thinks it knows best. The Court has replaced the gravitational pull of accumulated wisdom with the gravitational pull of itself."
Tuesday, June 30, 2026
Reading archive 2026-06-30
The all-natural way to fix the Reflecting Pool: Enlisting nature to help clean up the algae would be more patriotic than tossing in chemicals. - "I’ll be crystal clear: I don’t know if this approach would work. What I do know is that the current strategy has not survived contact with reality, and unless we try something different, we will fail, over and over again.
"The United States isn’t known for learning quickly from its mistakes. There’s an apocryphal line from Winston Churchill that Americans will always do the right thing, after they’ve tried everything else."
American agriculture is broken: Fixing it will require much more than the new farm bill can deliver - "Cheap cash crop exports also carry economic risk, as witnessed by China’s plummeting purchases of US soyabeans amid a trade war. The idea that the US should continue to spend billions of dollars bailing out farmers who are still being incentivised to keep producing a crop that their largest buyer no longer wants (China is actively moving towards more food independence) makes zero sense."
A Long-Standing Theory of Childbirth Is a Myth: Delivering a human baby is not uniquely difficult.
Monday, June 29, 2026
Reading archive 2026-06-29 pt 2
Trump allows dairy farms a path for migrant labor, upsetting anti-immigration camp: President Donald Trump was expected to announce the expansion of a guest-worker program to the dairy industry at a Wisconsin event. Instead, the news came out in a press release. - "However, Van Orden, a Trump ally who also took credit for persuading the White House to expand the H-2A program, said the policy announcement was delayed because it wasn’t ready in time for Trump’s visit to Wisconsin." [ed. note: lol that's never stopped him before]
What a ‘mansion tax’ did to Los Angeles: Taxes that narrowly target the rich are not the best way for cities to broadly help the poor. - "Any tax will create some combination of two outcomes: new revenue and changed behavior. Which of these results is stronger depends on how the tax is designed.
"This is where things went wrong. Measure ULA’s goal was to raise revenue, but it was written like a tax to change behavior. Revenue-maximizing taxes tend to have low rates and broad bases. ULA had the opposite. It applied a high rate (transfer taxes rarely exceed 2 percent) to a very narrow base (just 4 percent of the city’s sales are over $5 million). The narrow base was a political advantage but a fiscal liability. It made ULA’s revenue reliant on a small group of people who, precisely because they weren’t everyday owner-occupants, could avoid the tax by choosing not to sell.
When the tax took effect, higher-end sales plunged, and stayed down. Measure ULA, which was projected to raise up to $1.1 billion annually, has averaged just one-third of that. It has also diminished other local revenue. In California, property can’t be reassessed unless it changes hands, so ULA, by reducing transactions, is depressing the local property tax revenue that supports schools and other services."
This voter ID law would spell trouble from Florida to Texas: The Save America Act has a worthy goal. But states can run elections on their own. - "The bill’s design prefers IDs that Democrats tend to have more than Republicans do. It privileges passports, which Democrats own at higher rates than Republicans, and removes concealed carry licenses as permissible ID in several states. The bill also adds paperwork for married women who change their names, who are disproportionately Republicans. And it ends online voter registration for rural — mostly Republican — voters. If Republicans are hoping to gain an electoral edge with this bill, they are sorely mistaken."
Vanilla Ice Knows When America Was Great: To celebrate the country’s 250th birthday, the rapper wants to transport us to another decade. - "A drug-fueled downfall ensued, culminating in a nearly lethal dose of heroin and other substances after a day of jet skiing on July 4, 1994. He told journalists that he'd felt like a 'sellout' who'd been marketed as a pretty-faced simpleton, when really he was a survivor from the streets. 'I've faced a lot of adversity,' he told me. 'Probably more than any person to ever play a record or become a musician.'" [ed. note: l o l]
Reading archive 2026-06-29 pt 1
How Poland’s fate drove the Declaration
Pete Buttigieg recounts being separated from his children after bogus complaint: The high-profile Democrat said he was unable to see his twins for 24 hours as police investigated the false report to child protective services. Michigan State Police confirmed they deemed the complaint unfounded. - "Buttigieg said investigators said the anonymous allegation came from a caller who said he spoke to a woman 'who claimed to have met me at a conference several years ago in Alabama, where she said I told her that I had committed unspeakable violent crimes and the caller believed my children were still at risk.'"
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)