Sunday, January 25, 2026

Loose Tabs

This is an occasional collection of newsworthy links and comments, much less systematic than what I attempted in my late Speaking of Which posts. The new name comes from my extensive use of browser tabs. When I get around to cleaning up, I often find tabs opened to old articles I might want to comment on and/or refer back to. So these posts are mostly housecleaning, but may also serve as a very limited but persistent record of what 20+ years ago I started calling "the end of the American empire" and nowadays feels more like "the end of civilization." I collect these bits in a draft file, and flush them out when periodically. My previous one appeared ? days ago, on November 24.

I have a little-used option of selecting bits of text highlighted with a background color, for emphasis a bit more subtle than bold or ALL CAPS. (I saw this on Medium. I started with their greenish color [#bbdbba] and lightened it a bit [#dbfbda].) I'll try to use it sparingly.

I pretty much put this file on hold while I was working on the Francis Davis Jazz Critics Poll, only returning to it on January 13. Jimmy Kimmel opened his first January monologue by explaining that "we have a lot to cover," but he had only been off the air for a week. Only a couple pieces in my draft file were dated after December 5, so I've missed more than a month (actually, 7 Music Week posts have appeared in the interim). So this will be even more hit-and-miss than usual.

I was at 57 links, 4207 words when I started my catch up and wrap up. I initially pegged Friday, January 16 at my target posting date, then backed it up to Sunday, and now I'm just letting it chew up as much of the following week as it takes. I'm not in any hury to get back to Music Week, or anything else.

Finally wrapping this up on Saturday, January 25. I may add some more stuff later, but I'm basically caught up, and there is more than enough here to chew on.

Table of Contents:

Let's start with this quote from Senator Roger Marshall's newsletter [01-21]:

President Trump's first year back in the White House has been nothing short of historic. From the moment he took office on January 20, 2025, the President set an unprecedented pace — operating under what I like to call "Trump time." Promises made, promises kept have defined this administration, starting with decisive action to secure the border, restore law and order, and put the safety of American families first. By enforcing our laws and backing those who protect us, President Trump has brought order where there was chaos and made our communities safer.

That same results-driven leadership has strengthened our economy and put working families back on solid ground. Through pro-growth policies like the Working Families Tax Cuts, fair trade, and a renewed commitment to American energy and manufacturing, the economy is moving in the right direction — creating jobs, attracting investment, and lowering costs. At the same time, the President has put us on a realistic path to healthier living, worked to bring down prescription drug prices, and restored peace through strength abroad. It has been a truly transformative year, and this is just the beginning, with the wins only continuing to pile up for the American people.

In my notebook, I originally just pulled a few select lines from this, but rather than chop it up with ellipses, I figured I should just give you the whole spiel. It's hard to find anything in this quote that is true, but it's noteworthy that this is what Republicans are telling themselves.

Topical Stories

Sometimes stuff happens, and it dominates the news/opinion cycle for a few days or possibly several weeks. We might as well lead with it, because it's where attention is most concentrated. But eventually these stories will fold into the broader, more persistent thmes of the following section.

Thanksgiving:

  • Jane Borden [11-26]: The Pilgrims were doomsday cultists: "The settlers who arrived in Plymouth were not escaping religious persecution. They left on the Mayflower to establish a theocracy in the Americas."

  • Kali Holloway [11-27]: Make Thanksgiving radical again: "The holiday's real roots lie in abolition, liberation, and anti-racism. Let's reconnect to that legacy."

Epsteinmania: Back by popular demand, as Republicans caved in and passed a law to "release all the files," leaving the cover up to the so-called Justice Department (which is a bigger oxymoron these days than the Defense Department used to be, not that renaming it the War Department is a good idea). But so far, nothing much has been revealed, and "Epstein" has mostly occurred as the reason for Trump's "wag the dog" warmaking.

  • Philip Weiss [12-19]: The New York Times ignores an essential part of the Jeffrey Epstein story — Israel: The Times article in question is The untold story of how Jeffrey Epstein got rich, which argues that "Epstein was the greatest conman and swindler that ever lived, and charmed the pants off of every powerful man he met."

    Epstein did numerous chores for Israel that investigative sites have documented and the Times does not touch: he helped Israel broker financial deals with neighbors, he had an Israeli spy living in his house for a time, and he had a close relationship with former Israeli PM Ehud Barak that included business ventures and politics in Israel.

  • Amanda Marcotte [12-21]: Epstein continues to explain everything about Trump: "From Greenland to Minneapolis, it's all rooted in his predatory ways." I don't quite buy this, but: "Like his friend Epstein — who enjoyed targeting small, helpless teenage girls — the most important thread throughout Trump's life is that he tries to feel big by harassing those who he feels can't fight back."

  • Kathleen Wallace [12-25]: Redacting our reality, one Epstein at a time.

  • Elie Honig [01-24]: How Bill and Hillary Clinton could soon become criminal defendants: This reviews their past brushes with possible criminal prosecution, but this time they may feel they're innocent and should stand on principle, as conscientious objectors.

    The Clintons almost certainly aren't going to prison, or even getting convicted. But with characteristic hubris, Bill and Hillary have walked themselves to the brink of federal charges by defying bipartisan congressional subpoenas on the Jeffrey Epstein investigation. And it's a good bet that our current Justice Department — which apparently makes critical decisions by a sophisticated litmus test that asks, "Do we like you, or not?" — will pursue criminal contempt charges.

Zohran Mamdani:

ICE stories: The last couple weeks is the point where Trump's goon squad has turned the corner from being overzealous civil servants rooting out unwanted immigrants to becoming an armed force that freely attacks ordinary Americans. They've been unleashed, with the full-throated support of Trump, Vance, and Kristi Noem, who all understand that their real problem isn't immigrants. It's Americans, especially ones that are guilty of the treason of living in cities that voted against Trump.

Venezuela: Marco Rubio's 2016 presidential campaign was a pretty lacklustre affair — I was tempted to say "sad," but he had no substance to feel regrets over. But later, I found there was one topic that really animated him, and that is overthrowing the Chavez/Maduro government in Venezuela. I was surprised when he appeared on Trump's short list of VP prospects, along with JD Vance and Doug Burgum. I figured Trump was sniffing for money: Burgum had his own, and Vance belonged to Peter Thiel. I wasn't sure who Rubio's sugar daddy was, but he undoubtedly had one. Nobody makes a serious run for the Republican nomination without at least one billionaire backer. (Newt Gingrich famously complained that Romney beat him 5-to-1 on that critical score.) That Rubio wound up with the Secretary of State post pretty much guaranteed that Trump would make war on Venezuela. That's just happened.

  • Paul R Pillar [11-10]: Dick Cheney's ghost has a playbook for war in Venezuela: "Trump flirting with regime change in Caracas carries eerie similarities to the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq."

  • Joshua Keating [12-12]: The global shadow economy behind Trump's latest move on Venezuela: "A black market has been growing for years. The escalation puts a new spotlight on it."

  • Vijay Prashad/Taroa Zúńiga Silva [01-03]: The US attaks Venezuela and seizes its president.

  • Cameron Peters [01-03]: How Trump went from boat strikes to regime change in Venezuela: "The US just attacked Venezela. How did we get here?"

  • Caitlin Dewey [01-05]: America's century-long interest in Venezuelan oil: "The long, fascinating history of US entanglement with the Venezuelan industry." Seems to me this piece is missing a lot of detail, both on the rise and fall of Venezuelan oil; e.g., how much light oil can Venezuela still produce? Or, is the decline due to political factors, including lost skills, or are they just running out of easy oil? I'm inclined to believe that Chavez and Maduro have mismanaged the industry, but that doesn't explain that much decline. Another thing I'd stress is that Trump's understanding of the oil industry is almost nil, so his motivations needn't have anything to do with reality.

  • Eric Levitz [01-05]: Did Trump really invade Venezuela for oil? "No. Also, maybe." If he's a rational actor: "no." But he's not, so: "maybe." At least he's not making up any cockamamie stories about "restoring democracy," ridding the people autocrats, etc. Those aren't reasons he in any way cares about. "Taking the oil," on the other hand, is a reason he can get behind. But, as Levitz notes, the American oil industry doesn't need or even particularly want Venezuela's crude (especially the heavy/expensive stuff in the Orinoco reserves). Oil prices are fairly depressed at present, so the last thing the industry wants is more supply from countries like Venezuela and Iran (and for that matter, Russia).

  • Elie Honig [01-07]: Why Nicolás Maduro is facing trial in lower Manhattan.

  • Terry Lynn Karl [01-16]: Trump's petrostate dilemma in Venezuela: "By capturing his Venezuelan counterpart Nicolás Maduro, US President Donald Trump sought to project power abroad but instead exposed his own political vulnerability. Despite his promise to restore Venezuela's oil industry, his overt resource grab is far more likely to fuel regional turmoil."

  • Francisco Rodriguez [01-16]: In what world would Trump's oil play actually help Venezuelans? "It would take major systematic changes both commercially and in government, and it's unclear whether any of that is in the works yet."

  • Benjamin Fogel [01-17]: We're now in the Sopranos stage of imperialism: "the transformation of US hegemony into naked extortion. As with the Mafia, loyalty may ultimately buy nothing, and deals can be broken at gunpoint."

  • Chas Danner [01-18]: How is Trump's Venezuela takeover going? Not as badly as it would be had the US actually invaded and tried to run things directly. The big question is whether Trump will be satisfied with Delcy Rodríguez as "acting president," and whether Rodríguez will be able to satisfy Trump without having the still intact Chavista power base turn against her. Thus far she's mostly conceding things that Maduro wouldn't have had any problem conceding. One could imagine a very different outcome in Iraq had Bush allowed a more amenable Ba'athist leader like Tariq Aziz to remain in power, rather than allowing Paul Bremer to push the entire Ba'athist elite into opposition. Similarly, the US could have tried to negotiate some form of power-sharing agreement with the Taliban in 2001 instead of driving them into a civil war they won 20 years later. This type of "occupation" would have been a novelty for the US, but the concept goes way back. When Alexander destroyed an enemy army, he usually converted the previous king into a satrap, paying him tribute but depending on him to maintain order, as his own army moved on to conquer other lands. The obvious problem with Trump in Venezuela is that his greed and power lust will overshoot, putting US forces into another quagmire.

    The strange thing is that I could see Trump's smash-and-grab foreign policy becoming very popular: the idea is to act brashly, demonstrating his dynamic leadership, then behave sensibly and even generously afterwards, avoiding the usual consequences and blowback. Of course, he didn't have to snatch Maduro to get a pretty decent deal from Venezuela. He could get similarly good deals from Iran and North Korea. He could have had a big win on Gaza, but there the problem wasn't a regime he refused to deal with, but one (Netanyahu) that didn't take his treat seriously. His failure in Ukraine is due to the same problem: Putin has no reason to doubt that he can just string Trump along. Sure, most of these conflicts can be traced back to Trump's earlier failures, but few people would notice that, or hold him accountable. The whole "peace through strength" line is an old con that still holds many weak minds in its thrall. Hence strong moves impress, if only one can make them without paying the price hubris.

  • William D Hartung [01-22]: Trump's doubling down on imperialism in Latin America is a formula for decline.

When war breaks out, my first instinct is to find a good history book, to help put it into context. I could use one on Venezuela, preferably by a critical thinker with leftist instincts. I always start out hopeful and sympathetic to leftist political movements, even if they often disappoint. And I distrust their right-wing opponents, who may be right on specifics but remain fundamentally committed to oligarchy and repression. Here's a list of books I've noticed, omitting a bunch of earlier books on Chávez (Tariq Ali, Rory Carroll, Nikolas Kozloff, Miguel Tinker Salas, etc.), which tended to be more hopeful):

  • Raúl Gallegos: Crude Nation: How Oil Riches Ruined Venezuela (2016, Potomac Books): WSJ reporter on "how Maduro inherited a mess and made it worse."
  • Richard Hausmann/Francisco R Rodriguez, eds: Venezuela Before Chávez: Anatomy of an Economic Collapse (2015, Penn State University Press).
  • Carlos Lizarralde: Venezuela's Collapse: The Long Story of How Things Fell Apart (2024, independent): Goes deep into history, but works backward, where the first chapter covers 1999-2019 (Chavez/Maduro), then 1922-1998 (oil), then 1498-1821 (colonial period, Columbus to Bolivar), then he returns to Chavez. Some of the missing 19th century shows up in an epilogue on "Politics Without a State, 1834-1837."
  • Carlos Lizarralde: One in Four: The Exodus that Emptied Venezuela, 2019-2024 (2025, independent).
  • William Neuman: Things Are Never So Bad That They Can't Get Worse: Inside the Collapse of Venezuela (2022, St Martin's Press): New York Times reporter, did a stint in Caracas 2012-16, critical of Trump.
  • Anya Parampil: Corporate Coup: Venezuela and the End of US Empire (2024, OR Books): Grayzone journalist, so very critical of US.
  • Joe Emersberger/Justin Podur: Extraordinary Threat: The US Empire, the Media, and Twenty Years of Coup Attempts in Venezuela (2021, Monthly Review Press).
  • Timothy M Gill: Encountering US Empire in Socialist Venezuela: The Legacy of Race, Neocolonialism and Democracy Promotion (2022, University of Pittsburgh Press).
  • Dan Kovalik: The Plot to Overthrow Venezuela (2019, Hot Books): Also wrote The Plot to Scapegoat Russia (2017), The Plot to Attack Iran (2018), and The Plot to Control the World: How the US Spent Billions to Change the Outcome of Elections Around the World (2018).
  • Francisco Rodríguez: The Collapse of Venezuela: Scorched Earth Politics and Economic Decline, 2012-2020 (2025, University of Notre Dame Press).
  • Kike Jiménez Vidal: The Collapse of Venezuela: The Untold Story of How a Rich Country Became a Failed State (2025, independent): Sees 1958-78 as a Golden Age, 1979-1998 as the Great Illusion, followed by Initial Demolition, Totalitarian Offensive, Economic Collapse, and Diaspora and Deinstitutionalization. This looks very polemical, but what I've read makes sense.
  • Javier Corrales: Autocracy Rising: How Venezuela Transitioned to Authoritarianism (2023, Brookings Institution Press): The two most reliable common code words for organizing American liberals against a foreign foe. Previously co-wrote (with Michael Penfold) Dragon in the Tropics: Venezuela and the Legacy of Hugo Chavez (2015, Brookings Institution Press).
  • Alistair Pemberton: On the Precipice: The Trump Administration and the Escalating Path Toward War With Venezuela (2025, independent): Short (45 pp), published in November.
  • Pedro Santos: USA Vs Venezuela War: What Could Possibly Go Wrong? (2025, independent).
  • Anderson M Bean, ed: Venezuela in Crisis: Socialist Perspectives (2026, Haymarket): "Writing from an anticapitalist, anti-imperialist, and anti-authoritarian perspective, this volume never loses sight of the need to stand with the Venezuelan people rather than their government — even when it claims to be struggling to build socialism." [Scheduled for 02-17]

Here's an excerpt from Gallego's Crude Nation:

Politicians, like regular Venezuelans, spend oil money generously while they still have it, because oil prices will fall eventually. And when that happens, Venezuela is usually left with little to show for it, with no savings to speak of. It soon dawned on me that Chávez and his leftist movement were really just a blip in a long history of larger-than-life leaders who promised to use oil to quickly turn Venezuela into a modern, powerful nation, only to disappoint voters in the end. For the better part of the twentieth century, Venezuela served as a cautionary tale for other nations and regions rich in natural resources, an example of the fate they must avoid.

Venezuela's troubles go beyond left and right political ideas: the world's largest oil patch hasn't learned how to properly manage its wealth. Venezuela is a country that has played and will play an important role in the global energy industry, as long as cars still run on gasoline and not on electricity, water, or cow manure. Three centuries from now, when most of the world's oil is gone, Venezuela could still be pumping crude, if no other energy soure has rendered oil obsolete. Venezuela's reality is a tale of how hubris, oil dependence, spendthrift ways, and economic ignorance can drive a country to ruin. Venezuela can teach us all an important lesson: too much money poorly managed can be worse than nothaving any money at all.

And here's an excerpt from Vidal's The Collapse of Venezuela:

Before oil, Venezuela was a poor nation, yes, but with a real productive structure. An economy based on coffee, cocoa, and livestock farming, where value was created by labor, capital, and land. It was a country of producers, not of parasitic rentiers. Exchange was voluntary, private property was respected — the the clear limitations of the time — and the currency, though weak, was backed by the tangible production of goods.

The arrival of the oil companies wasn't a "blessing." It was the beginning of a curse. It was the equivalent of injecting a healthy but poor patient with a miracle drug that generates instant euphoria while destroying vital organs. This is what serious economists call the Resource Curse or the Dutch Disease. And what did the state do? Instead of creating the conditions for oil wealth to strengthen the private sector, it instead siphoned off revenue through concessions and centralized it in the hands of the elite in power, first under the rule of Gómez and then the military.

And then, no doubt, Chávez and Maduro. It's interesting how often revolutionaries return to the form of those they overthrew, as Stalin became another Tsar, and the Ayatollah became another Shah. I suspect the worst cases are where external pressure puts the revolutionaries on the defensive, and emboldens the old class. That's been a big part of the story in Venezuela. It also reminds us that no matter how unsavory the Chavistas are, their opponents are worse.

Iran: I haven't been following news, but my X feed blew up with tweets on Iran (protests and/or war threats) to which I ascribe very little credibility. Trying to catch up, I checked out this Wikipedia article, which tells me that anti-government protests began on December 28, spreading to many cities, and that they were met with a stiff government crackdown, including "a massacre that left tens of thousands of protesters dead." There have also been counter-protests, defending the regime. While few people doubt that the Iranian people have grievances with their government, these events are occurring against a backdrop of severe sanctions and war threats coming from Israel and the US, who are believed to support violent subversive groups within Iran, and who have long promoted propaganda against the regime. Iran has also responded by shutting down the internet. Thus we have ample reason to doubt pretty much everything we hear from anyone about what is going on. I'll pick out some representative articles below, but I don't expect to get much credible information.

  • Behrooz Ghamari Tabrizi [12-25]: Iran and the price of sovereignty: what it takes not to be a client.

    Now, the so-called 12-day war is over. Iranians have returned to the devastating perpetual violence of U.S. led sanctions and targeted assassinations by the Mossad. The Trump administration and its European allies have called on Iran to accept its defeat, surrender unconditionally, and "return" to the negotiating table. They ask Iran to dismantle its nuclear technology, halt the production of its advance missile program, cease its support of the Palestinian cause, and terminate its network of what is known as the "axis of resistance" against the Israeli and American expansionism. In other words, become a client state. Iran is one of the few remaining fronts of defiance against the American extortionist posture and the Israeli carnage that has engulfed the Middle East. That defiance comes with a very hefty price.

  • Cameron Peters [01-13]: The scariest thing about Iran's crackdown:

  • Hamid Dabashi [01-13]: How Israel and the US are exploiting Iranian protests

    : "Genuine rage over economic stagnation is being manipulated to serve western political ends."

  • Sina Toosi [01-16]: This is not solidarity. It is predation. "The Iranian people are caught between severe domestic repression and external powers that exploit their suffering."

  • Robert Wright [01-16]: The Iranian blood on Trump's (and Biden's) hands. Everything here is important and worth reading, but one could add more, especially on Israel's malign influence.

    We'll never know if the hopes for Iran that Obama's nuclear deal fostered would have been realized had Trump not intervened. Maybe commercial engagement with the world wouldn't have had any internally liberalizing effect, politically or even economically. And maybe more economic interdependence with other countries wouldn't have moderated Iran's policies toward them.

    But even if things didn't pan out on those fronts, it seems safe to say that Iran's people would be much better off economically and no worse off politically, and some now-dead protesters would still be alive. And as of today — with another war in the Middle East one distinct near-term possibility and the violent and chaotic implosion of Iran another one — that scenario doesn't sound so bad.

    It now seems pretty clear that Biden's failure to restore the Iran deal was evidence of his more subservient posture toward Israel: his failure on Iran presaged his failure on Gaza. But Obama doesn't merit much acclaim either. His rationale for negotiating the deal was that he took Israel's fears of a nuclear Iran seriously, recognizing that the only way to stop a determined Iran was to negotiate restrictions that could be enforced. On the other hand, he was careful not to resolve any other issues, let alone normalize relations, which had the effect of preserving decades of kneejerk hostility. That attitude was what made it possible for Trump to break the deal, and it gave Biden cover to keep from reversing Trump's damage.

    Three more charts of interest here: Global AI Computing Capacity (increasing quite rapidly); President Trump's Approval Rating (down markedly since the ICE shooting of Renee Good); Evening News Estimates of Iran Protest Deaths (CBS, since Bari Weiss took over, is claiming 5-24 [or 40?] times as many deaths as CNN/ABC/NBC). Also see Wright's earlier post:

    • [01-09]: Some useful Trump-Hitler comparisons (in light of Minneapolis and Venezuela).

      The joy Trump takes in the use of intimidating force extends from the domestic arena into the international arena. Indeed, it's hard to explain the escalating holiday-season campaign against Venezuela — boat bombings, then a port bombing, and finally invasion — without invoking this kind of visceral motivation. After all, Venezuela isn't the country you'd go after if drugs were your real concern. And as for oil: The basics of the administration's current plan for Venezuela — leave an authoritarian regime in place but profit from its petroleum — didn't require invading the country and snatching Nicolas Maduro; Maduro himself had agreed to that kind of deal. And, though Trump can presumably get somewhat better terms now than he'd have gotten from Maduro, there seems to be a consensus among oil experts that the foreseeable benefits are meager; with oil prices low, and Venezuela still a shaky place, US companies won't want to make the big investments required to extract oil in large quantities.

      I doubt I'll ever see a man more evidently full of pride and self-satisfaction than Trump is when he's talking about his various unprovoked international assaults — the assassination via missile strike of Iran's top general during his first term, the bombing of Iran last year, the attack on Venezuela last week. But I'm guessing that if I spoke German and combed through some recordings of Hitler in the wake of the Poland invasion I'd come close.

  • Orly Noy [01-16]: On Iran's protests, Israeli hypocrisy knows no limits: "Only moments ago, Israelis were cheering on a holocaust in Gaza — and now they dare to celebrate the valient uprising of the Iranian people."

  • Farshad Askari [01-22]: Iran's protests have gone quiet. But the revolution isn't over. This feels like a bit of a stretch, but to the extent that the protests were real, a news blackout isn't likely to keep them away forever.

  • MEE [01-23]: Trump says US 'armada' moving towards Iran: "President warns Washington is watching Tehran closely as US naval forces move into region."

Jerome Powell: Trump, who originally appointed Powell to the post of Fed Chair, is unhappy with him, ostensibly because Trump wants him to lower interest rates, which Powell had raised as the conventional antidote to inflation. So Trump is threatening to prosecute Powell, which isn't going over well with the Fed Chair, or with the bankers who effectively have captured the Fed.

  • Cameron Peters [01-12]: Trump vs. the Fed, briefly explained: "Why Trump is making a bid to control the US economy." This is somewhat misleading. The Fed doesn't control the economy. The Fed controls the money supply. This has bearing on some important aspects of the economy, like inflation and employment. And those aspects are important enough to people who have a lot of money (especially banks) that they've long insisted on keeping the Fed free of "political interference," which is to say to keep it captured by a higher power: themselves. Thus, for instance, Bill Clinton ditched his entire economic platform after being elected in 1992, because Alan Greenspan convinced him it would unsettle the bond market, probably by threatening to wreck Clinton's economy. Clinton was the first of the last three Democratic presidents to reappoint a Republican Fed chair (as Obama did Bernanke, and Biden did Powell). Like all good Democrats, they recognize that there are higher powers in America, and behave accordingly. So sure, Trump's move is a power grab, but we shouldn't fool ourselves into thinking that Powell is on our side, or think that the "independent Fed" is really a good idea. Trump's beef with Powell is supposedly about interest rates, but also about power. The thing to understand about interest rates is that high interest rates can throttle a booming economy, and very high interest rates can strangle it; but while lower interest rates can stimulate the economy, and increase employment (especially when recovering from a recession induced by high interest rates), low interest rates can also cause inflation. So Trump's move here is exactly wrong for fighting inflation. But when the Fed makes it cheaper to borrow, not everyone benefits equally. The Fed loans money to banks, who loan money to rich people, who sometimes use it to build things, but more often (especially when it's cheap) they use it for speculation, pushing up the price of assets so as to make themselves feel even richer. And that, of course, is exactly what Trump wants to see: an asset bubble.

  • Ian Millhiser

  • Mike Konczal [01-13]: The enormous stakes of Donald Trump's fight with Jerome Powell: "The Fed is the final frontier of his quest to dominate every economic institution."

  • Thomas L Friedman [01-13] Trump's scheming to sack Powell paves the road to constitutional ruin: Sure, Friedman's an idiot, and there are hundreds of other things that he could have recognized as "the road to constitutional ruin," but this (unlike, say, genocide in Gaza) seems to be his red line.

  • Ryan Cooper [01-14]: Trump's prosecution of Jerome Powell is even crazier than it looks: "Messing with Federal Reserve independence might spark inflation, and everyone hates that." That seems like something people might say, but I'm less and less convinced that the Fed's rate control is a very practical tool for controlling inflation. The belief is largely based on memory of the Volcker recession (1979-82), based on some pretty sketchy economic theories (like NAIRU), and employed like a wrecking ball to the entire economy.

  • Robert Kuttner [01-21]: The high court sinks Trump's Federal Reserve ploy: "The administration's clumsy effort to oust Fed governor Lisa Cook is stymied again."

Major Threads

Israel: I collected a bunch of articles early on, in the immediate aftermath of the ceasefire/hostage swap. Since then, well . . . Israel has regularly violated the cease fire they had "agreed" to, and their violations haven't bothered Trump in the least. I don't have time to seriously update this section, so the few additions are at best a random sampling.

  • Jonah Valdez [11-25]: Gaza humanitarian foundation calls it quits after thousands die seeking its aid: "The aid group oversaw relief in Gaza during a period defined by the killings of Palestinians seeking food during famine." This is "the U.S. and Israel-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation." When I saw this headline, I assumed that the foundation was legit, and the headline reflected some sort of Israeli win against the world's humanitarian impulses. Now it looks like "aid" was really just bait. And sure, not just to kill Palestinians, which Israel was already doing regularly and could have escalated without resorting to such tactics. Rather, the point was to psychologically bind seeking food to the experience of terror. With the ceasefire, the need for aid is undiminished. If aid was GHF's purpose, it would still have much to do. That they're quitting suggests that their real purpose was something else.

    Rather than maintain the existing model of bringing food and supplies to individuals with most need by delivering goods directly to communities, GHF established four distribution sites. The foundation also hired two American logistics and security firms — UG Solutions and Safe Reach Solutions, led by a Green Beret veteran and former CIA officer, respectively — to oversee distribution. The result was the funneling of thousands of desperate people who traveled long distances into aid sites where long lines often devolved into stampedes. Gunfire from Israeli soldiers, or private American contractors, largely former U.S. special forces, was a near-daily reality. While some of those who survived the deadly queues managed to bring home boxes of food, the supplies failed to slow the famine conditions across Gaza which only worsened. The food provided by GHF was widely criticized by nutritional experts and aid groups as inadequate to prevent hunger and difficult to prepare (most items needed water to boil, itself a scarce resource in the territory).

  • Marianne Dhenin [11-27]: International tribunal finds Israel guilty of genocide, ecocide, and the forced starvation of the Palestinians in Gaza: "The International People's Tribunal on Palestine held in Barcelona presented striking evidence of Israel's forced starvation of the Palestinian people and the deliberate destruction of food security in Gaza." The tribunal is sponsored by ILPS (International League of Peoples' Struggle), which of course would find that, not that the evidence can really be interpreted any other way.

  • Mitchell Plitnick [11-27]: Israel is violating ceasefires in Gaza and Lebanon, and Trump is allowing it: "Israel's goals are clear enough: endless war." The Trump administration's goals, to the extent one can speak of them coherently, were to win a couple immediate news cycles, free the hostages, and set up negotions to make amends to Qatar and sell more arms to Saudia Arabia. Netanyahu, as he has so many times before, chose to bend to America's will rather than risk a break, confident that he will soon enough rebound, because Trump is just another fickle American fool.

    Israel had never heeded the ceasefire to begin with. More than 340 overwhelmingly non-combatant Palestinians have been killed since the ceasefire was put in place, and over 15,000 more structures in Gaza have been destroyed, just as flooding, overflowing sewage, rains, and the cold weather of approaching winter start to hit the already battered population.

    In just the past few days, though, Israel has killed more than 60 Palestinians in Gaza, a sign of escalation. It is no coincidence that this uptick comes on the heels of Saudi Crown Prince Muhammad Bin Salman's (MBS) visit to Washington where he once again insisted, much to Trump's annoyance, that if Donald Trump wanted to see a normalization deal between his kingdom and Israel, there would need to be a clear, committed path to a Palestinian state with a timeline. Whether MBS was sincere about that or not, Netanyahu has no intention of making even the slightest gesture in that direction, and the escalation in Gaza was, at least in part, his response to that part of the Trump-MBS confab.

  • Qassam Muaddi

  • Huda Skaik [11-28]: Gaza's civil defense forces keep digging for 10,000 missing bodies: "Members of Gaza's Civil Defense force describe pulling decomposing bodies from collapsed buildings, and digging in hopes that someone remains alive."

  • Connor Echols:

  • Craig Mokhiber [12-01]: How the world can ressist the UN Security Council's rogue colonial mandate in Gaza. This offers "several ways that states and individuals worldwide can challenge its illegality." I'm far less concerned about the legal issues, which get an airing here, or even the political ones. The resolution is inadequate, and probably doomed to failure, but do we really want to "block the implementation"? The pre-resolution baseline was genocide. The only path away was to get Israel and the US to agree to stop, which could only happen on terms favorable to those powers, and therefore far short of justice. While a better resolution would ultimately be better for all concerned, the immediate need is to hold Israel and America to the terms they've agreed to — starting with recognition of Israel's violations of the ceasefire, and Israel's continued aggression elsewhere (beyond the scope of the Gaza resolution). Moreover, even if Israel relents and honors the ceasefire, the delivery of aid, etc., Israel still merits BDS due to its treatment of Palestinians in the West Bank and within the Green Line.

  • Philip Weiss [12-02]: The Israel lobby is melting down before our eyes: "The American Newish community is in open crisis over its support for Israel after two years of genocide in Gaza. A key issue in this crisis is a topic once considered too taboo to criticize the Israel lobby."

  • Ramzy Baroud [12-02]: The US-Israeli scheme to partition Gaza and break Palestinian will: "United Nations Security Council Resolution 2803 is destined to fail. That failure will come at a price: more Palestinian deaths, extensive destruction, and the expansion of Israeli violence to the West Bank and elsewhere in the Middle East."

  • Matt Seriff-Cullick [12-02]: Stop calling right-wing criticism of Israel 'anti-Zionism': "Recent comments by Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens have drawn more attention to right-wing critiques of US support for Israel., However, it is a serious mistake for those on the left to see this anti-Israel criticism as 'anti-Zionist.'" Response to pieces like Jeet Heer [11-07]: The return of right-wing anti-Zionism — and antisemitism. While it's generally the case that antisemites support, or at least endorse, Israel — it's local Jews they hate, and Israel offers a convenient option to rid themselves of Jews — while leftist critics of Israel are almost never antisemitic (we see diaspora Jews as our natural allies, and indeed many are among us). The primary motivators here are domestic politics, although the more Israel acts like a fascist state, the more consistent the left-right differences become. The subject here is the small schism of right-wing critics of Israel, who may well be antisemitic, but could just as well be driven by something else: especially the notion that Israel has been dragging the US into wars and/or globalization that impinges on their "America-first" fetishism. In this it helps to distinguish between pro-Israel (which is mostly about military dominance and alliance) and Zionist (which is about Jewish immigration to Israel). Right-wingers can favor Zionism while rejecting the notion that we need to send arms to Israel.

  • Joe Sommerlad [12-03]: Hilary Clinton claims TikTok misinformation is influencing young people's views on the Israel-Palestine conflict: "unreliable media on TikTok, making it difficult to have a 'reasonable discussion' about events in the Middle East." This is pretty short on details, but Clinton's remarks were delivered at "Israeli newspaper Israel Hayom's New York City summit," so her complaint seems to have less to do with "pure propaganda" than with whose "a lot of young Jewish Americans who don't know the history and don't understand" are exposed to.

  • Michael Arria:

  • Michael Leonardi [12-12]: The criminalization of solidarity: The global war on Palestinian voices and their supporters, from Israel to Italy and across the western world.

  • Eve Ottenberg [01-09]: By suspending 37 aid orgs is Israel pushing toward a final expulsion? "At the very least, the decision to cut loose every major Gaza humanitarian group could led to the utter collapse of Trump's peace plan."

  • Ramzy Baroud [01-18]: A war without headlines: Israel's shock-and-awe campaign in the west bank. I've always been skeptical of "shock and awe" as a military tactic: in order to be shocked, you have to survive, in which case whatever awe there may have been has been dissipated by the fact that it's now something you have survived. However, while a single blow dissipates, multiple poundings accumulate:

    In her book The Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein defines "shock and awe" not merely as a military tactic, but as a political and economic strategy that exploits moments of collective trauma — whether caused by war, natural disaster, or economic collapse — to impose radical policies that would otherwise be resisted. According to Klein, societies in a state of shock are rendered disoriented and vulnerable, allowing those in power to push through sweeping transformations while opposition is fragmented or overwhelmed.

    Though the policy is often discussed in the context of US foreign policy — from Iraq to Haiti — Israel has employed shock-and-awe tactics with greater frequency, consistency, and refinement. Unlike the US, which has applied the doctrine episodically across distant theaters, Israel has used it continuously against a captive population living under its direct military control.

    Indeed, the Israeli version of shock and awe has long been a default policy for suppressing Palestinians. It has been applied across decades in the occupied Palestinian territory and extended to neighboring Arab countries whenever it suited Israeli strategic objectives.

    In Lebanon, this approach became known as the Dahiya Doctrine, named after the Dahiya neighborhood in Beirut that was systematically destroyed by Israel during its 2006 war on Lebanon. The doctrine advocates the use of disproportionate force against civilian areas, the deliberate targeting of infrastructure, and the transformation of entire neighborhoods into rubble in order to deter resistance through collective punishment.

    Gaza has been the epicenter of Israel's application of this tactic. In the years preceding the genocide, Israeli officials increasingly framed their assaults on Gaza as limited, "managed" wars designed to periodically weaken Palestinian resistance.

There's no way to catch up on what's been happening in Israel, so let's just jump ahead to the last week or so, where we find the genocide little inconvenienced by Trump's so-called peace plan. For what little it's worth, I don't think Trump and Netanyahu are on the same page regarding Gaza: the former is fitfully pushing his peace/corruption agenda forward, while the latter sabotages it wherever possible, knowing that even when he has to bend a bit he can outlast his dullard opponent. And while it would be nice for the world to reject them both, it's easy to think that the US is the only party capable of influencing Israel, so the best we can possibly do is to go along with Trump. Given the people involved, it's a lose-lose proposition, but one hopes that not every loss is equal. And nobody's willing to risk bucking the trend. Russia, China, and Europe have their own problems with Trump, as do lesser powers like Iran, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia. None of them care enough about the Palestinians to make a stink. Nor are they inclined to risk anything for the principle of a more rational, more just world order.

Russia/Ukraine: This has become the forgotten war. It's been a stalemate for several years, prolonged initially because Biden had no desire to negotiate, continued because Trump has no "art of the deal," and because Putin isn't losing enough to cut his losses. One thing that isn't clear to me is how intense the war has been in 2025. It does seem to have been much less intensely reported, perhaps because Trump sees less value in demonizing Russia so has cut back the propaganda effort, perhaps because an exhausted media has had to turn to many other conflicts.

  • Jackie Abramian/Artin Dersimonian [01-01]: Listening to what regular Ukrainians are saying about the war: "A number share their views on how to end what they are calling the 'conveyor belt of death.'"

  • MarkEpiskopos [01-06]: Despite the blob's teeth gnashing, realists got Ukraine right: "As usual, critics are still trying to launder their abysmal policy records by projecting their failures and conceits onto others." On this evidence, I'm not very impressed by the "realists" either.

  • Stavroula Pabst [01-07]: US capture of Russian-flagged ship could derail Ukraine War talks: "Experts say this could also give Europeans permission to seize Moscow's ships and kill relations." Refers to this, which suggests the target wasn't Russia but Venezuela:

  • Tamar Jacoby [01-07]: Germany's rearmament is stunning: "The country is determind to strengthen its armed forces in the wake of Moscow's aggression and Washington's volatility, but doing so doesn't come easily to a nation chastened by its past." I'm old enough to think that rearming Germany and Japan is backsliding of the worst sort, but the US has pursued both for decades now, and has customarily been indulged, mostly as a form of tribute. The US has few worries, given continued occupation of bases and control of the supply chain: US weapons are fragile and inefficient, which makes them both lucrative and harmless. But it's also a stupid waste on the part of the countries that indulge us, and it could easily become worse if/when Germany and Japan find they can no longer trust the US (which is certainly true with Trump). By the way, Jacoby's main beat is Ukraine, where Europe tends to be more hawkish than Trump (if not more hawkish than Biden). Recent pieces:

    • [10-23]: Can Europe turn tough talk on Russia into action? "Facing the Russian threat with less help from America, the continent forges closer ties to beef up defense."

    • [11-25]: Three lessons from Trump's latest plan for Ukraine: "Whatever emerges from US-Ukrainian talks in Geneva, nothing good is likely to come from this recipe for appeasing Moscow." But paranoia over "appeasement" is a recipe for perpetual war. This derives from the notion that the conflict is purely a power contest between Russia and NATO, both of which are unlikely to be phased by costs which are largely suffered by Ukrainians. We need to refocus this on finding a better outcome for the people involved.

  • Anatol Lieven [01-15]: If Europe starts attacking Russian cargo ships, all bets are off: "The consequences will be negative, from shattering the order it claims to defend all the way up to a possible nuclear confrontation."

Trump's War and Peace: We might as well admit that Trump's foreign policy focus has shifted from trade and isolation to war and terror.

  • Pavel Devyatkin [10-30]: Reckless posturing: Trump says he wants to resumt nuke testing: "The president thinks he is signaling power to Russia and China but this could be the most dangerous gambit yet."

  • Jack Hunter [12-31]: 4 ways Team Trump reminded us of Bush-Cheney in 2025: "From WMDs to bombing Iran, the president who consistently mocked the GWOT is now pushing the same old buttons."

  • Vijay Prashad [12-02]: The angry tide of the Latin American far right. I know little about this, but the news, especially from nations that had leaned left of late (like Bolivia and Chile) seems grim. Popular anger against the establishment should favor the left, but periods of ineffective power only seem to revitalize right-wing politicians whose own period of power should have thoroughly discredited them.

  • Joshua Keating [12-02]: Why is Trump suddenly so obsessed with Honduras? "As the US considers strikes on Venezuela, another Latin Amemrican country has caught the president's attention."

  • Elie Mystal [12-03]: Pete Hegseth should be charged with murder: "Nop matter how you look at the strikes on alleged 'drug boats' — as acts of war or attacks on civilians — Hegseth has committed a crime and should be prosecuted."

  • Eric Levitz [12-03]: The twisted reason why Trump is bombing Venezuelan boats: "For this administration, war crimes are a feature, not a bug."

  • Blaise Malley [12-04]: Trump's USIP [United States Institute of Peace] rebrand wields an olive branch as a weapon: "Trump's name was added to the independent institute after his administration purged staff." It's now the "Donald J. Trump United States Institute of Peace," in honor of "the greatest dealmaker in our nation's history."

  • Andrew Ancheta [12-04]: Washington's gallery of puppets: "From Venezuela to Iran, the United States can always find ambitious would-be leaders willing to advocate regime change. But they don't have their countries best interests in mind."

  • Cameron Peters [12-04]: Trump's war crimes scandal, briefly explained: "War crimes allegations are engulfing the Pentagon after a deadly strike in the Caribbean."

  • Eldar Mamedov [12-30]: Five restraint successes — and five absolute fails — in 2025: "Trump's promise of an 'America First' realism in foreign policy has delivered not a clean break, but a deeply contradictory picture." I will note that the "successes" are relative and marginal, while the failures are Iran, Venezuela, Syria, Israel (which they soft-pedal, but is really much worse), and "Congressional derelictin of duty on War Powers."

  • Zack Beauchamp [01-05]: Donald Trump was never a dove: "How critics of American interventionism fell for a myth." These are all important points. I'd add several points. One is that while some "critics of American interventionism" defected to Trump (e.g., Tulsi Gabbard), in some ways the bigger problem was how so many supporters of American interventionism fell for the myth and flocked to support Harris (e.g., the Cheneys), and the welcome she showed them cemented her credentials as a warmonger (relatively speaking). My second point is that while Trump might not be as enthusiastic about war as some conservatives (e.g., Hitler, Netanyahu), he shares with virtually every other conservative a lust for violence in the support of power, and this is what in a pinch predisposes him to start wars that people with more democratic instincts would wish to avoid. My third point is that it was his opponents (Harris and Hillary Clinton, who both felt more need than Biden felt to signal "commander-in-chief toughness") who let Trump get away with his "man of peace" con. It shouldn't have been hard to expose Trump, but they didn't know how or dare try.

    The truth is that an unconstrained Trump, acting on his longstanding hawkish impulses, could cause all sorts of chaos in his remaining three years. While US military interventionism is very precedented, Trump's particular brand of it — naked pre-modern imperialism backed by a modern globe-spanning military — is not.

    Americans should be prepared for things to go very, very wrong.

  • Joshua Keating [12-27]: Why is the US bombing Nigeria? "Humanitarian intervention, MAGA-style."

  • Joshua Keating [01-06]: What is the "Donroe Doctrine"? "Trump's new approach to Latin America is a lot like America's old one." Evidently the New York Post coined the term "Donroe," which is where it should have died. My own coinage, which I haven't seen elsewhere (even though it's pretty obvious) is Bad Neighbor Policy — a reversion to the pre-FDR era that at the time was most often referred to as "Gunboat Diplomacy," or as Smedley Butler put it, "a racket." Of course, you can't exactly go back. America's old attitude toward Latin America was formed from a sense of racist superiority. Trump's is tinged with envy, especially for caudillos like Bolsonaro, Millei, and Nayib Bukele, who exemplify the abuse of power Trump aspires to. If Maduro really was the "narco-terrorist" of his indictments, Trump would probably love him.

  • Eric Levitz [01-06]: The one line that Trump's foreign policy still hasn't crossed: "After Venezuela, how far could Trump really go?" He's referring to sending large numbers of American troops into a hostile country. That may be a matter of time — the argument that he can't control a nation like Venezuela without putting troops in is hard to resist once you've decided that control you must — but for now it is also a matter of design. Trump is basically just a gangster, seeking tribute, employing extortion to get it. He will break any nation that resists. He won't promise to rebuild the nations he breaks. If they don't fall in line he'll just break them again. This, by the way, isn't an original idea. The neocons c. 2000 were very big on this idea, which like much of their mindset was based on Israel. Rumsfeld pushed this line viz. Iraq, but Bush couldn't let all that oil go to waste, so he set up a crony government and spent a debilitating decade trying to defend it, to little avail. I'm not going to argue that Trump is too smart to make that mistake again, but his basic attitudes — favoring hard power over soft, never making amends, complete disregard for however his acts impact other people — are consistent with Israel's ultra-nationalism writ large, on a global scale.

  • Ben Freeman/William Hartung [01-08]: The reality of Trump's cartoonish $1.5 trillion DOD budget proposal: "This dramatic escalation in military spending is a recipe for more waste, fraud, and abuse." While promoting "waste, fraud, and abuse" is by far the most likely rationale between any Trump increase in spending, one shouldn't overlook the name change from Department of Defense to Department of War, which would seem to imply a mission change way beyond ordering new stationery.

  • Michael Klare [01-08]: Plunging into the abyss: "Will the US and Russia abandon all nuclear restraints?" The New START treaty lapses on February 6, which is the last of the historic arms reduction treaties that Reagan and Bush negotiated with the Soviet Union in the 1980s. I don't know to what (if any) extent Putin wants to unshackle Russia from the agreements of the Soviet era, but several times during the Ukraine conflict he's threatened to use nuclear weapons should the US/Europe/Ukraine overstep imaginary "red lines." A sane US president would take this as a signal to tone conflict down, settle disagreements, and restore peaceful coexistence, but Trump isn't one, and in this regard I can't say much better of Biden and Obama. The neocons have been chafing at any sort of restrictions on American power since the 1990s, and they have a powerful lobbying ally in the nuclear industry, which has been pushing a $1.5 trillion "modernization" of an arsenal the only purpose of which is apocalypse. Not only is Trump's sanity open to question here, he is blatantly using the threat of US military and economic power to extort submissive behavior, including tribute, from friends and foes alike. He has crossed the fine line between legitimate business sharks and gangsters. And nowhere is that more dangerous tha in unleashing an unbridled nuclear arms race.

  • Cameron Peters [01-09]: Trump's Greenland push, briefly explained: "Is Trump really serious about Greenland?" I doubt it, but we suffer from this cognitive limit, where we find it hard to comprehend that other people believe things that make no sense whatsoever. The real question with Trump isn't is he serious? It's can he get away with it? And he's getting away with a lot of crazy shit no one took seriously when he first broached it. Sometimes he does it as distraction — it's probably no accident that Greenland is back in the news after Venezuela. But once he floats an idea, it then becomes a test of his power, and he's always up for that. He certainly doesn't want or need Greenland for bases or business, as the US already has free access to all that. There's no reason to think he wants the people. The only reason I can come up with is that he looked at a Mercator map, which shows Greenland as huge, but also it would add a bit of visual symmetry with Alaska, like a pair of huge Mickey Mouse ears floating above the face of America. Maybe he also thinks that Canada will surrender once it sees itself surrounded on three sides. Or maybe he's just recycling 19th century fantasies of ever-expanding American imperialism? Is he really that stupid? Well, he's also embraced the idea of tariffs, which comes from the same period, and is every bit as discredited as colonialism and slavery — another old idea he's disconcertingly fond of.

    Other pieces on Greenland, some taking this seriously:

    • Fred Kaplan [01-08]: Trump is talking about taking over Greenland. The world is taking him seriously. He dismisses security concerns, and minerals, but does bring up an idea that has occurred to me: that Trump is easily fooled by the distortion of Mercator projection maps, which make Greenland look much larger and more strategic than it actually is. He notes alarm about US reliability, not just in Europe but in South Korea and Japan. "The world is very worried, and we should be too."

    • Ryan Cooper [01-08]: Donald Trump's degenerate plans for Greenland: "The worst president in history wants conquest for its own sake, even if it opens America up to nuclear attack."

    • Joshua Keating [01-08]: Can anyone stop Trump from seizing Greenland? "Europeans and Greenlanders are strongly opposed to an American land grab. But their options are limited." I can think of a few options if anyone wants to take this seriously:

      1. Expel the US from NATO. Cancel all existing US arms orders, and replace them (if needed) with European products (reverse engineering US ones if that helps, but most US weapons, like the F-35, are crap). Free from NATO, Europe could probably cut a better deal with Russia over Ukraine, etc., which might save them from having to re-arm. (I suspect that Russia fears independent European re-armament more than they do US global adventurism, which in any case is more focused on China.)
      2. Sanction the Trump family personally, including seizing their properties in Europe, and impounding their funds. This could be selectively extended, but they don't need to sanction all American businesses, or boycott American companies.
      3. Have the ICC file charges against Trump and his chief operatives, and not just over Greenland.
      4. Pull the plug on Israel. This can involve sanctions and trade restrictions.
      5. Overhaul intellectual property laws, to phase out American claims in Europe, or at least to tax exported royalties. I'm pretty certain that Europe would come out ahead if most or even all such laws were abolished. [PS: See Dean Baker [01-19]: Time for Europe to use the nuclear option: Attack US patent and copyright monopolies.]
      6. Shut down US bases in Europe, as well as agreements that allow US vessels to dock, planes to land or overfly, etc.

      It's time for Europeans to realize that the US isn't their friend, and that Trump in particular cannot be trusted and should not be appeased. Literally fighting to defend Greenland may be out of the question. And fueling a guerrilla operation to drive the Americans out, like happened in Afghanistan and Vietnam, could be a lot more trouble than it's worth. So sure, "options to stop it are limited," but so is America's desire to paint the map with its colors. And note that most of what I just suggested would be worth doing even without Trump's provocation in Greenland. The main thing that Trump is doing here is to drive home the point that after so many years of "going along to get along" America has led Europe into a dark and dreary cul de sac. Realization of that was bound to happen sooner or later. Trump will be remembered as the accelerant in the great bonfire of the Americas.

    • Pavel Devyatkin:

    • Lois Parshley [01-16]: The tech billionaires behind Trump's Greenland push.

    • Sam Fraser [01-17]: On Greenland, Trump wants to be like Polk: "The president's motivation isn't security or money, it's manifest destiny."

    • Kevin Breuninger/Luke Fountain [01-17]: Trump says 8 European nations face tariffs rising to 25% if Greenland isn't sold to the US.

    • Anatol Lieven [01-18]: Trump's new 'gangster' threats against Greenland, allies, cross line: "The president declares that he will tariff the life out of countries if they do not obey him."

    • Jeffrey Gettleman [01-19]: Read the texts between Trump and Norway's Prime Minister about Greenland: "In the exchange on Sunday, Norway's leader sought to 'de-escalate' the growing conflict over Greenland and Trump's latest tariff threat."

    • Jonathan Alter [01-21]: Greenland and the Benjamins: "There's a method behind Trump's madness and it's colored green." Greenland has lots of physical assets, and very few people to claim them, which makes the land ideal for Trump's kind of graft. Sure, this fits roughly into "an 19th and 18th century imperialism tradition, where big countries and big businessmen use these smaller and weaker countries to extract resources." But that's only part of the hustle:

      The new way they want to do this, ultimately, is through what are called crypto-states. The reason that Trump pardoned the former president of Honduras, who was a drug dealer, was because he and other conservatives in Honduras, plus Peter Thiel (JD Vance's mentor) and like-minded free-enterprise authoritarians (no longer a contradiction in terms) in the U.S., favor the establishment of an island state off the coast of Honduras that would be backed by non-transparent crypto and free of any regulation by the Honduran government.

      The goal now is to do the same with other countries, to create crypto-states attached to the Marshall Islands, Nigeria, Panama (one of the reasons Trump is going after the canal) and Greenland.

      These crypto-states would be unregulated, yielding huge profits not just for crypto bros, but for companies trying to extract resources, and for the politicians (and their families) who helped them do so.

    • Pavel Devyatkin [01-21]: Trump's threats against Greenland: When "national security" becomes imperial expansion: "America has become the threat its own allies need protection from."

    • Lukas Slothuus [01-21]: Trump's Greenland push is about global power, not resources: Interesting info here on mining on Greenland, which seems like a very long-term proposition at best. I don't really buy the "global power" argument either, at least beyond the matter of Trump ego.

    • Matt Stieb [01-25]: Will Trump's Greenland deal come with any actual benefits: Evidently, on his way home from Davos, Trump backed down from his Greenland threats and claimed victory with some kind of nebulous deal. Malte Humpert tries to explain.

    PS: An old friend of mine wrote on Facebook:

    I don't always agree with what President Trump says, but I trust him to do the right thing. As a 20 year military veteran, I know that Greenland is a vital part of our global defense. This share shows a long history of our involvement in Greenland. I believe Trump wants some form of alliance, treaty or more to secure our defense as well as the citizens of Greenland.

    I wrote a comment on this, but when I returned to Facebook, the post had disappeared:

    I never trust Trump to do the right thing. Even when he gets boxed in and forced to make a decent gesture, as when he finally told the Jan. 6 rioters to go home, he makes plain his discomfort. But the argument that there is some defense necessity for seizing Greenland is a flat out lie. The US already has all the alliances and treaties needed to build any imaginable defense network in Greenland. Moreover, the way he's going about this threatens to break NATO apart, which if you buy any of the US "defense" dogma is a much bigger risk than any possible gain in Greenland. I don't know what Trump's real reason for his aggressive pressure on Greenland is, because nothing I can think of makes much sense (even given his clearly deranged mind), but one thing I am sure of is that it has nothing to do with defense.

  • Peter Kornbluh [01-13]: Trump's predatory danger to Latin America: "The United States is now a superpower predator on the prowl in its "backyard."

  • Leah Schroeder [01-14]: Trump's quest to kick America's 'Iraq War Syndrome': "Experts say the 'easy' Venezuela operation is reminiscent of George H.W. Bush's 1989 invasion of Panama, which in part served to bury the ghosts of Vietnam." Not a very precise analogy, not least because it involves forgetting that the Panama operation wasn't as fast and easy as they'd like to remember. But even there, the key to success was getting out quickly — a lesson they ignored in invading Afghanistan and Iraq. But thus far, Venezuela is a far more limited operation than Panama was. It's more akin to the "butcher and bolt" small wars Max Boot writes about in his 2002 book, The Savage Wars of Peace, which was meant to affirm that "small wars" always work out fin, so don't worry, just fly off the handle and let the chips fly. Of course, at that point Afghanistan was still a "small war" in its "feel good" days, and Iraq was just another hypothetical cakewalk. Thus far, there is a big gap between what the US has done in Venezuela and Trump's talk about running the country. If he's serious, and with him it's impossible to tell, he's not going to kick anti-war syndrome, but revive it.

  • Edward Markey [01-15]: Donald Trump's nuclear delusions: "The president wants to resume nuclear testing. Is he a warmonger or just an idiot?"

  • Valerie Insinna [01-16]: First Trump-class battleship could cost over $20 billion: That's the CBO estimate, with follow-on ships in the $9-13 billion range.

    • Alfred McCoy [01-20]: Trump's foreign policy, the comic book edition: "How to read Scrooge McDuck in the age of Donald Trump." Refes back to Ariel Dorman's famous Marxist critique of capitalism, How to Read Donald Duck (1971). Plus ça change, . . .

    • Mike Lofgren [01-21]: The Trump-class battleship: Worst idea ever: "It's not just ruinously expensive; it would weaken the Navy." This opening is pretty amusing, but it's also rather sad to see critics resort to Bush-Obama-Biden madness to argue against Trump madness:

      It is virtually impossible to name a single initiative of Donald Trump's that isn't either supremely stupid or downright satanic. From dismantling public health to pardoning criminals who ransacked the U.S. Capitol to brazen international aggression, Trump and his toadies seem hell-bent on destroying the country. With help from Pete Hegseth and other Trump lackeys in the Pentagon, the president has set his sights on weakening the military that Republicans claim to love so fervently.

      I agree that they're "hell-bent on destroying the country," but I'd caution against confusing the country with the Navy. What I see in the battleship is a probably futile attempt to take a real and inevitable decline in strength and dress it up as egomaniacal bluster, especially as the latter's existence will surely tempt the egomaniac-in-chief to use it.

  • Peter Kornbluh [01-21]: Is Cuba next? "As the US attempts to reassert its imperial hegemony across the hemisphere, Havana is clearly in its crosshairs."

Trump Regime: Practically every day I run across disturbing, often shocking stories of various misdeeds proposed and quite often implemented by the Trump Administration -- which in its bare embrace of executive authority we might start referring to as the Regime. Collecting them together declutters everything else, and emphasizes the pattern of intense and possibly insane politicization of everything. Pieces on the administration.

  • Matt Sledge [11-26]: This commission that regulates crypto could be just one guy: an industry lawyer: "Mike Selig had dozens of crypto clients. Now he will be a key industry regulator."

  • Zack Beauchamp [12-03]: The dark reality behind Trump's new anti-immigrant policies: "His administration is now openly advancinga worldview built by white nationalists in the 2010s."

  • Umair Irfan [12-04]: Trump's anti-climate agenda is making it more expensive to own a car: "The president hates EVs. But is policies are making gas cars more expensive too."

  • Dylan Scott [12-05]: RFK Jr.'s anti-vax committee is recklessly overhauling childhood vaccine policy: "America's vaccine playbook is being written by people who don't believe in them."

  • Sara Herschander [12-05]: 200,000 additional children under 5 will die this year — thanks to aid cuts: "The historic increase in global child deaths, explained in one chart."

  • Cameron Peters [12-10]: The "Trump Gold Card," briefly explained: "A fast-tracked green card — for $1 million." Of course, where there's gold, platinum is sure to follow.

  • Merrill Goozner [12-17]: Trump's concepts of a non-plan on health care: "The so-called Great Health Care Plan would do next to nothing to lower overall costs or premiums paid by individuals, families, and employers."

  • Christian Paz [12-18]: Is the Trump administration just a reality TV show? "What influencers can tell us about Trump's second term." Inerview with Danielle Lindemann

  • Avishay Artsy/Noel King [12-21]: What does Trump's AI czar want? "David Sacks, Trump's go-to adviser on all things tech, may help decide who wins the AI race between the US and China." I seriously doubt there is an actual race, except perhaps to determine which vision of the future bottoms out first. A race implies a set of common goals. In America, the goal is what it always is: to build shareholder value for the companies that control the technology. In China, that may be part of it, but they may also have other factors to consider. Sacks is also "crypto czar," so he's no doubt up on all kinds of scams.

  • Dylan Scott [12-29]: The year measles came back.

  • Sophia Tesfaye [12-31]: Project 2025 has been a success — with the help of the press: "Too often, mainstream journalists treated Project 2025 as a claim to be adjudicated rather than a document to be analyzed. They asked whether it was 'Trump's plan' instead of examining how likely its proposals were to be implemented by a Trump administration staffed with its authors." Related here:

    • Amanda Becker/Orion Rummler/Mariel Padilla [12-22]: How much of Project 2025 has actually been accomplished this year? Quite a bit, but I think the key thing was how quickly and forcefully Trump seized control of and politicized the federal bureaucracy — something that conventional rules should have made very difficult. The key thing here was not just the policies being defined, but the personnel being lined up for a blitzkrieg. I don't think that DOGE was part of the Project 2025 plan, but it built on the model of seizing executive control, including the power to fire people and impound funds, thereby gaining an unprecedented amount of political control. So even if the media had recognized that Project 2025 was the master plan, and debunked Trump's denials of relationship or interest, they still would have come up short in anticipating the threat. I think that's because they had little insight into just who the Republicans were, and how committed they were to what they saw as their mission to save America and remold it in their own image. They knew full well that had Harris won, a good 80% of the issues she campaigned on would never have gotten off the ground — as indeed had been the case with Clinton, Obama, and Biden. Democratic campaign failures are not just due to the perfidy of the politicians. It's also because to change anything significant, they have to buck a lot of established but well hidden power centers (especially business lobbies). Republicans don't have that problem, and can easily ignore countervailing forces like unions, so they're able to move much more forcefully than Democrats or the media could ever imagine.

  • Miles Bryan [01-02]: How the US shut the door on asylum-seekers: "One of the most consequential changes to immigration in the US under Trump, explained." Interview with Mica Rosenberg, of ProPublica. I have several thoughts on this, including a certain amount of sympathy with the feeling that the US should limit the number of people it gives asylum to. But sure, I disapprove of the callousness and cruelty that Trump is campaigning on. There should be a universally recognized right to exile. One thing this would do is provide a firmer standard of applicability than the notion that anyone who has fears should be eligible for asylum. Also, from the exile's viewpoint, it shouldn't matter where they move, as long as the conditions that led to exile no longer exist. A right to exile doesn't mean a right to move to the US, or any other specific country. You could come up with a formula to make the distribution more equitable. You could also allow rich countries to pay other countries to fulfill their obligations. But this also sets up some criteria for rich countries to calibrate aid in ways that generate fewer exiles. That could include reducing gang crime, overhauling justice systems, promoting civil liberties, reducing group strife, restricting guns, better economic policies with wider distribution of wealth. The main forces driving people to emigrate are war, repression, economics, and climate change. Asylum policy, for better or worse, only treats the symptoms, not the problems. If Trump was serious about reducing the number of asylum seekers, he'd change his foreign policy (especially viz. Venezuela, but Somalia is another glaring example) to help people stay where they are.

  • Cameron Peters [01-05]: Trump's big change to chidhood vaccines, briefly explained.

  • Arwa Mahdawi [01-13]: Stephen Miller wants us to fear him. Speaking of Miller:

  • Umair Irfan [01-14]: Trump's EPA is setting the value of human health to $0: "The agency's new math to favor polluters, explained." The whole idea of trying to run a cost-benefit analysis on public health hazards has always been fraught with moral hazard: who can, or should, say how much government or business should spend to save a life, or one's heath? There's no valid answer, and much room for debate in adjusting the cost-benefit models, there are two answers that are certainly wrong: infinity, which would make it impossible to do anything, no matter how unlikely the risks, and $0, which would allow everything, no matter how grave the risks. Trump's cronies just picked one of the wrong answers — the one that best fits their model of corruption. This is one of the worst things Trump has done to date. Moreover, this is going to have longer term consequences beyond the Trump administration: any project approved under these rules will be all that much harder, and more expensive, to kill in the future, and the sunk costs will be unrecoverable.

  • Cameron Peters [01-14]: The latest on Trump's weaponization of the DOJ, briefly explained: "A big week for Trump's DOJ doing what he wants."

  • Emma Janssen [01-16]: The student loan report the Trump administration didn't want published: "CFPB's whitewash of the report comes on the heels of repeated attempts to fire virtually the entire staff and defund the agency. . . . The bulk of the deleted content from Barnard's report focuses on the struggles borrowers face and the private student loan companies that exacerbate them."

  • Ryan Cooper [01-20]: How Trump doomed the American auto industry: "Ford and GM made a big bet on electrification. Then Trump plunged a knife into their backs."

    Almost all of the EV subsidies in the IRA were repealed, as part of Trump's One Big Beautiful Bill Act. Now, thanks to that betrayal, plus Trump's lunatic trade and foreign policy in general, the American auto industry is bleeding out. . . .

    Contrary to the triumphalism of various EV critics, all this horrendous waste does not mean that the global EV transition is now in question. As I have previously detailed, in 2025 a quarter of global car sales were EVs, led by Southeast Asia, where the EV share of new car sales in several nations has soared past the 40 percent mark, with many more nations just behind. China, the largest car market in the world, went from almost zero to more than half in just five years. America's failure to gain a serious toehold in EV production — particularly very cheap models — is a major reason why the Big Three's share of the global auto market has fallen from nearly 30 percent in 2000 to about 12 percent today, while China's share has risen from 2 percent to 42 percent.

  • Brandon Novick [01-23]: Encouraging crime: settlement rewards Medicare Advntage fraud.

  • Spencer Overton [01-23]: 12 ways the Trump administration dismantled civil rights law and the foundations of inclusive democracy in its first year.

  • Corey G Johnson [01-24]: Complaint accuses Trump's criminal attorney of "blatant" crypto conflict in his role at DOJ: "Todd Blanche ordered changes to crypto prosecutions while owning more than $150,000 in digital assets."

Donald Trump (Himself): As for Il Duce, we need a separate bin for stories on his personal peccadillos -- which often seem like mere diversions, although as with true madness, it can still be difficult sorting serious incidents from more fanciful ones.

  • David Dayen [10-28]: Here's what Trump's ballroom donors want: "A comprehensive rundown of Prospect reporting on the companies that gave to Trump's monument to himself on the White House grounds."

  • Cameron Peters [12-02]: Trump's confounding pardon of a drug lord, briefly explained: "The former president of Honduras was convicted of trafficking cocaine. Why did Trump pardon him?"

  • Rebecca Crosby & Noel Sims [12-04]: Trump Jr.-backed startup receives $620 million Pentagon loan. This is followed by a related piece, "Trump family crypto scheme runs into trouble."

  • Jason Linkins [12-06]: Hey, does anyone want to talk about Donald Trump's infirmities? "He's clearly slipping, mentally and physically, but the political press suddenly finds it less newsworthy that we have a woefully aging president."

  • Constance Grady [12-08]: The Kennedy Center Honors continue Trump's vengeance on liberal Hollywood.

  • John G Russell [12-12]: Sgt. Trump: The art of implausible deniability: Starts by quoting Sgt. Schultz from Hogan's Heroes ("I know nothing"), a claim I've heard Trump saying many times.

    One would think Americans would have had enough of Trump's falsehoods. Credited with telling 30,573 lies during his first term, he repeats them so relentlessly that the media, numbed by their frequency, no longer bothers to keep count.

    Lies may endure forever, but liars themselves are mortal. At 79, Trump's days in political power are numbered, yet the damage he has wrought will outlast him. We must brace ourselves for a post-Trump America, one that, I fear, may prove as corrosive as his current reign. The Pandora's box he has opened has unleashed a flood of white supremacism, misogyny, xenophobia, and transphobia, leaving Hope to cower meekly inside. Whether that pestilence can ever be contained again remains uncertain, particularly as it thrives on post-Obama white racial resentment and dreams of restored hegemony.

    I'm less concerned about the "Pandora's box," which I believe remains long-term decline even without the inhibitions that before Trump made it less visible, than by how difficult it's going to be to restore any measure of public trust. It is for this reason that Democrats along Clinton-Obama-Biden lines have been shown to be total failures. Most of what Trump has been able to do has been made possible by the view that Democrats cannot be trusted. One result is that it will be even harder for Democrats to regain that trust.

  • Christian Paz:

    • [12-12]: Trump's support is collapsing — but why? "How Trump's winning coalition is unraveling in real time." This is mostly theories, with three offered to explain parts of the "coalition" that have gone wobbly:

      1. Low-propensity voters
      2. Affordability voters
      3. "New entrant" voters

      But aren't these all just variants on the theme of people who simply didn't know any better? That such voters exist at all is an indictment of the Harris messaging campaign, and the conflicted, confusing, and apparently corrupt stances of many Democrats. For Democrats to regain a chance, they're going to have to campaign for votes, and not just expect Republicans to drive voters into their arms, while they raise cash and spend it on ads nobody can relate to. One more point here: "affordability" isn't the only issue that Trump misled voters on and has since proven them to be naive at best and more likely stupid: what about all the folks who thought they wee voting against the Biden-Harris war machine?

    • [12-29]: The most volatile group of voters is turning on Trump: "There's a new line dividing young Americans." New polling shows: "Younger Gen Z men are more pessimistic about the state of the nation." They're also "slightly less likely to disapprove of Donald Trump," but the numbers there are from 64% to 66% for their 23-29 elders.

  • Garrett Owen [12-18]: Kennedy Center board vote to rename venue after Trump: "The president's hand-picked board voted to add his name to the performing arts venue."

  • Heather Digby Parton

    • [12-18]: Trump's primetime speech was a master class in gaslighting: "The president's false claims about economic conditions are the latest indication that he's in serious trouble."

    • [12-21]: Trump's crackdown on the left has decades of precedent: "The Justice Department's plans to target leftist organizations is taking alarming shape." This was in response to Trump's NSPM-7 (a presidential memorandum on "Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence"), targeting the phantom "antifa organization" or maybe just the general idea that fascism — or Trump, since he's the prime example of fascism these days — should be opposed. (For more, see Trump's orders targeting anti-fascism aim to criminalize opposition.) The "decades of precedent" reflects how easy it's always been to red-bait supporters of labor unions, civil rights, world peace, and freedom of speech, but is that still the case? Trump repeats the magic words about "radical leftists" endlessly, but who still listens to them? His true believers, and a few shell-shocked liberals whose cowardice and lack of principles helped the red-baiters run roughshod over decent, reform-minded people.

    • [01-01]: Trump's cultural coup is doomed to fail: "Artists are protesting Trump's Kennedy Center takeover — and creating art in defiance of his repression."

    • [01-08]: War has become fashionable again for the GOP: "The right's detour into pacifism under Trump was never going to stick."

    • [01-15]: Trump is something worse than a fascist: She's pushing for "tyrant": "an ancient word that should nonetheless be familiar to anyone who recalls the founding ideals of this country." But finding the perfect epithet is not the real point: each one illuminates (or doesn't) some facet of a more complex and fractious whole. The question is whether it helps you understand the problem Trump presents. But once you do understand, they're all pretty much interchangeable.

  • Ron Flipkowski:

    • [12-26]: 25 worst villains of the Trump admin: "The most difficult part of this exercise was only picking 25." Nonetheless, your favorites are here, with Stephen Miller at 1 ("the easiest selection"), followed by Howard Lutnick, Pete Hegseth, Russ Vought, and Todd Blanche, with Kristi Noem and Tom Homan down at 8 and 9.

    • [12-27]: 500 worst things Trump did in 2025: "A comprehensive list": This is just the first 100, which still leaves us in February, with more than 300 employees of the National Nuclear Security Admin fired then reinstated after they realized "no one has taken any time to undersand what we do and the importance of our work to the nation's national security. Also: "After JD Vance met with the co-leader of Germany's far-AfD party, one German expert here in Munich said: 'First, America de-Nazified Germany. Now, America is re-Nazifying Germany.'"

  • Zack Beauchamp [12-16]: Trump's war on democracy is failing: "And it's his own fault." Author diagnoses something he calls "haphazardism." I think he's trying to impose reason on madness. Trump doesn't really care whether he kills democracy as a concept, as long as it falls into place and does whatever he wants. Maybe if he did have a master plan to destroy democracy, he'd do a more effective job of it. But actually, he's pretty much succeeding, even if he suffers occasional setbacks by making it look inept and, well, haphazard. And while haphazardism isn't as ruthlessly efficient as, well, Hitler, its incoherence offers a bit of deniability that lets people so inclined to cut him some slack. One can say something similar about Israel and genocide. Ineptness and inefficiency seems to be part of the plan, but both in terms of intent and practice, that's exactly what they're doing. Just not as efficiently as, well, Hitler.

    Beauchamp spends a lot of time quoting the following piece, which I'd argue is a good example how focusing on ideological terms like "democracy" and "authoritarianism" misses the mark:

    • Steven Levitsky/Lucan A Way/Daniel Ziblatt [12-11]: The price of American authoritarianism. Levitsky splits hairs arguing that Trump is running an "authoritarian government" but not an "authoritarian regime," because Trump's "systematic and regular abuse of power" is "likely to be 'reversed' in the near future." That's a novel definition of "regime," the only purpose being to posit a hypothetical system even worse than Trump's. I tend to use "regime" to describe any government, however stable or fleeting, that flaunts and abuses its power. Trump may not do that 100% of the time, but he's gone way beyond any previous norms, which is why I'm more inclined to say "regime" than "administration." What's new with Trump isn't ideology but an opportunism that is rooted in a gangster mentality: the power has long been there when presidents want to abuse it, but Trump has done so to an unprecedented degree. That's because gangsters believe in force, don't believe in limits, and pursue wealth and power until someone stops them.

  • Cameron Peters [01-06]: Trump's January 6 victory lap: "Five years later, the White House is still rewriting January 6."

  • Dustin DeSoto/Astead Herndon [01-07]: How Trump brought the World Cup to America: "The Trump-FIFA connection, explaind."

  • Moustafa Bayoumi [01-13]: 2026 is already pure chaos. Is that Trump's electoral strategy? The key argument here is that Trump wants to take the challenge of making himself the central issue in the 2026 Congressional elections. This shows a degree of partisan commitment that recent Democratic presidents never even hinted at. Trump understands that he needs loyal Republicans to implement his extremist programs, whereas the Democrats rarely tried to do anything Republicans didn't buy into. It also expresses confidence that Trump's charisma is so strong he can motivate his most clueless voters to come out and vote as he directs. That's a big ask given that Democrats have been much more motivated in midterms where Republican presidents were the issue (e.g., in 2006 and 2018). It also depends on Trump being much more popular in November 2026 than he is now, or ever has been.

  • Sasha Abramsky [01-16]: The week of colonial fever dreams from a sundowning fascist: "The news was a firehose of stories of authoritarian behavior. We can't let ourselves drown."

  • New York Times Editorial Board [01-17]: For Trump, justice means vengeance: Well, where do you think he ever got such a stupid idea? It's almost impossible to watch a cop or law and order show and not be told that the good guy's chief motivation is "to get justice" for someone. And that almost always boils down to vengeance. I've never managed to read John Rawls' much-admired A Theory of Justice, which evidently ties justice to a concept of fairness, but I'm probably fairly close in asserting that the point of justice is to restore one's faith in the fair ordering of society. That suggests to me that the pursuit of justice can never be attained by simply balancing off injustices. Any punishment the state metes out must make the state appear to be more just than it appeared before. Vengeance doesn't do that. Vengeance just compounds injustice, in the vain hope that somehow two wrongs can make a right. Ergo, Trump's pursuit of vengeance (or redemption, as he often calls it), is anti-justice.

    PS: In looking up Rawls, I see that Robert Paul Wolff wrote Understanding Rawls: A Reconstruction and Critique of A Theory of Justice (1977). That's out of print, but probably the place to start. I read several of Wolff's books early on — A Critique of Pure Tolerance, The Poverty of Liberalism, In Defense of Anarchism — probably before I went to college. Those books showed me that it was possible to derive intuitively correct moral postulates from reason alone, and that in turn convinced me to use reason to try to find my way out of schizophrenia (at least as Bateson defined it). More than anything else, I owe those books my life, and what little I have accomplished in the 55 years since I read them.

    By the way, here's a brief quote from Wolff's A Credo for Progressives:

    The foundation of my politics is the recognition of our collective interdependence. In the complex world that we have inherited from our forebears, it is often difficult to see just how to translate that fundamental interdependence into laws or public policies, but we must always begin from the acknowledgement that we are a community of men and women who must care for one another, work with one another, and treat the needs of each as the concern of all.

    In my formulation of this, "complex" is of critical importance, as the more complex life becomes, the more trust matters, and that in turn depends on justice, in the sense of confirming that the world is ordered in a fair and reasonable manner.

  • Melvin Goodman [01-19]: Donald Trump, poster child for megalomania:

    Megalomaniac: Someone with an extreme obsession for power, wealth, and self-importance, characterized by grandiose delusions of being more significant or powerful than they are, often linked to a tenuous grip on reality.

    "The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed — and hence clamorous to be led to safety — by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary." H.L. Mencken, "Baltimore Evening Sun," 1920.

    The mainstream media continues to describe Donald Trump as an "isolationist," or a "neo-conservative," or more recently as an "imperialist." These terms are irrelevant; the term that should be applied is "megalomaniac" or "narcissist." These terms fit Trump and help to understand the threat he poses to the peace and security of the United States and much of the global community.

    As he notes, "Trump's narcissism has been on display for decades. What turns narcissism into megalomania is power.

  • Harold Meyerson [01-20]: 25th Amendment time for Mad King Donald: "His narcissism has become psychotically megalomaniacal." I expect a regular stream of 25th Amendment pieces, but the chances of his hand-picked cabinet of cronies taking his keys away are extremely slim, even if he was basically a good sport, which he isn't. His staff are even less likely to move against him (as we saw with Biden). And sure, this article mentions Mad King George III, but not that he ruled for 43 years after he lost the American colonies in 1776.

  • Ed Kilgore [01-22]: Trump only accepts polls that proclaim his greatness. Trump polls seem to be part of Kilgore's beat:

  • Trump in Davos:

    • Sasha Abramsky [01-23]: At Davos, the world watched the rantings of a despot: "President Donald Trump has turned his back on the liberal world order — and Europe is unlikely to follow." While I don't doubt that Europe would be wise to break with Trump, I'm not optimistic, either that they will, or that they'll opt for something better. Right now, Europe is much more hawkish over Ukraine than the US is. While Obama did most of the dirty work in Libya, it was largely at Europe's behest — Libya meant little to the US (or Israel), but much to France and Italy. More generally, while Europe is more "social democratic" than the US, in theory at least, the EU is pretty completely in thrall to neoliberal ideologists, and the continent is chock full of revanchist right-wing parties, making it more likely that an anti-US backlash will come from the right than from the left.

    • Heather Souvaine Horn [01-23]: Trump's terrifying Davos speech is a wake-up call to the global elite: "The World Economic Forum has long suggested that its annual lavish party is about saving the world. Trump just shredded that myth."

    • Margaret Hartmann [01-21]: The 12 stupidest moments from Trump's Davos speech.

  • Margaret Hartmann: She's been busy of late, as her main theme is "Trump's stupidest moments":

We should also make brief mention of Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney's Davos speech, which provided a stark contrast and a rare moment of opposition to Trump:

  • Gabrielle Gurley [01-23]: The Davos challenge: "Canada's leader steps out to redefine the global order in the face of American expansionism." As he noted, "the middle powers must act together, because if we're not at the table, we're on the menu."

  • Cameron Peters [01-23]: The week the US and Canada broke up: "What Mark Carney said in Switzerland, briefly explained."

Democrats:

  • Timothy Shenk [09-29]: Democrats are in crisis. Eat-the-rich populism is the only answer. Much here on Dan Osborn, whose independent campaign for a Senate seat from Nebraska in 2024 fell 7 points short, in a state where Trump beat Harris by 20. His pitch: "a blistering assault on economic elites, a moderate stance on cultural issues and the rejection of politics as usual." But he also talks about Mamdani, and what they have in common. This is the first piece in a series, which doesn't look all that promising — devoted Israel war hawk Josh Shapiro is "the future of the Democrats"?

  • Zach Marcus [11-12]: Draining the online swamp: "Instead of accepting the existing digital political battlefield as inevitable, Democrats should challenge it as a root cause of our dysfunctional politics, and vow to be the party that cleans it up." When I saw this article, I was hoping for something rather different, but this is a big subject, with many components, and eventually some things that I would focus on do show up in the fine print. But the key points are: (1) the online cybersphere is indeed a swamp, where money functions like water in physical swamps, and could just as well be drained; (2) Democrats should see draining this swamp as a political opportunity, not with a view toward biasing politics in their direction, but because the swamp is imposing hardships on literally everyone. A large book could be written about this: abuse comes in many forms, but it mostly comes down to attempts to profit: to sell or solicit, directly or through by exploiting information. One should take care, as few politicians do, not to impose their own moral and political stances. But any serious effort to cut back the scams and fraud is bound to be popular, and how hard can it be to have a significant impact? What is hard is getting Democrats to see that they need to do a much better job of serving their voters than their current focus, which is raising money from the exploiters.

  • Virginia Heffernan [12-05]: No, progressives don't want "purity." They just want some courage. "When left-leaning Democrats complain about corporate influence, it's not a 'purity test.' It's a demand for a better poliltics."

  • Elizabeth Warren [01-12]: Elizabeth Warren's Plan for a Revived Democratic Party: "The Massachusetts senator argues that, in order to prevail in the midterms, the party needs to recover its populist roots — and fighting spirit."

  • Erica Etelson [01-15]: Democrats really can compete in rural America: "The results for the 2025 election cycle send a powerful message regarding strategies that connect outside of urban centers." Given who they're running against, Democrats should be able to compete in literally every district in America.

  • Perry Bacon [01-21]: Abigail Spanberger's first move as Virginia Gov. was a masterstroke: "Even moderate Democrats can be boldly anti-MAGA. Other centrist Democrats should follow her example." What she did was move to force the resignation of several Republican appointees to university boards. That's the sort of thing Trump has done like crazy, and the people she's replacing are the sort of partisan hacks Trump has been appointing.

Republicans: A late addition, back by popular demand, because it isn't just Trump, we also have to deal with the moral swamp he crawled out of:

Economy and technology (especially AI): I used to have a section on the economy, which mostly surveyed political economics. Lately, I run across pieces on AI pretty often, both in terms of what the technology means and is likely to do and in terms of its outsized role in the speculative economy. I suspect that if not now then soon we will recognize that we are in a bubble driven by AI speculation, which is somewhat masking a small recession driven largely by Trump's shutdown, tariffs, and inflation. In such a scenario, there are many ways to lose.

  • Robert Wright [01-23]: Which AI Titan should you root for? He makes something of a case for Demis Hassabis ("head of Google's DeepMind"). While the technology is difficult enough to understand, the business models are even harder to grasp, because they are based on very large bets on very strange fantasies of world domination. In this world, even a tiny bit of self-conscious scruples seems to count for a lot. Still, this is shaping up as a race to the bottom, where even tiny scruples will be quickly discarded as signs of weakness.

  • Jez Corden [11-29]: OpenAI is a loss-making machine, with estimates that it has no road to profitability by 2030 — and will need a further $207 billion in funding even if it gets there. I'm not even trying to follow things like this, but somehow found the tab open, and decided to note before closing. My impression is that most tech companies over the last 30-40 years have been overvalued without a realistic profit path, but a small number of survivors seem to be reaping the monopoly rents the speculators hoped for. Still, it wouldn't be hard to deflate them if we had the insight and political will.

  • Robert Kuttner [12-01]: Sources of America's hidden inflation: "How market power jacks up prices, andhow Trump's policies add to the pressure." I've been alluding to this often of late, so it's nice to see so many of these points being made.

  • Ronald Purser [12-01]: AI is destroying the university and learning itself: "Students use AI to write papers, professors use AI to grade them, degrees become meaningless, and tech companies make fortunes. Welcome to the death of higher education." I'm not sure this is the right analysis, and not just because I don't have much love for the old meritocracy that is being wrecked, and not just becuase it never secured much merit in the first place. The "system" has always been crooked, which is something folks with the right skills or hunches have always been able to take advantage of. AI changes the rules, which means that different strategies and different people will win, and some of that will seem unjust. I personally know of a recent case in Arkansas where an AI program was used by a school to detect possible AI use and falsely accused the bright daughter of a friend of cheating. We had a long and fruitless discussion after this on how can someone so charged prove that the AI program is wrong, but the more important question is why does it matter? Which gets us back to politics: in your hypothetical meritocracy, do you want the "merit" (for more people) or the "ocracy" (to empower and enrich the few)? The stock bubble behind the AI companies assumes that AI can be monopolized (kept artificially scarce) allowing its masters extraordinary powers over everyone else. Does anyone but a few monomaniacal entrepreneurs actually want that? Much more that can be unpacked here.

    As for the death of higher education, Jane Jacobs analyzed that in her 2004 book, Dark Age Ahead, where higher education was one of the five "pillars of civilization" she identified decay in (the others were: community and family; science; government; and culture. In education, she blamed the focus shifting from learning to credentialism. I think that shift largely happened in the 1980s, when conservatives decided that education should be reserved for elites, and enforced that by jacking up the costs to ordinary people, creating scarcity and desperation, while the rewards for avarice became ever greater. While AI may be useful as a tool for learning, its applicability to scamming credentialism is much more obvious. I'm not someone who believes that technology is "value neutral," but the values of the politico-socio-economic system do have profound effects on how any given technology is used.

  • Eric Levitz [12-17]: Can money buy Americans happiness? "The real cause of America's 'vibecession.'" Part of a series on The case for growth ("supported by a grant from Arnold Ventures"), the point of which is that the "degrowth movement" is wrong, because, well, "more is more." These arguments seem shallow to me. Sure, there are areas where growth would still help. But there are other areas where all you really need is better distribution. And there are other areas where we already have too much, and would be better off slowing down, or even reversing course. To my mind, "degrowth" is a useful conceptual tool, one that moves beyond the kneejerk notion that growth fixes everything. Some (not all) more pieces in the series:

    • Andrew Prokop [12-12]: Why America gave up on economists: "Both parties have turned their backs on traditional economic advice. Is the country paying the price?" Seems like a lot of false equivalence here. Republicans use economists to ratify their schemes, and sometimes applaud a crackpot idea that they can use (e.g., the Laffer Curve), but they make little pretense of following economics, and will readily dispose of any arguments that question their pet projects (like Trump's tariffs). Clinton and Obama, on the other hand, sought out neoliberal economists and gave them a lot of power, because they start from shared pro-business principles. Biden too, except that a few past figures (like Larry Summers) have been discredited. Prokop offers an example where Democrats supposedly have broken with economic orthodoxy, but I've never seen any evidence of it: price controls. (Unless he means rent control, which is a way to address certain market failures?)

    • Bryan Walsh [12-06]: Breaking free of zero-sum thinking will make America a wealthier country: "The affordability crisis is a growth crisis." Title is true. Subtitle is false, stuck in a mindset that sees growth as a panacea. That so much is unaffordable is only partly due to scarcity (which in many cases is deliberately imposed). It's mostly due to systematic maldistribution.

    • Marina Bolotnikova [12-19]: We need to grow the economy. We need to stop torching the planet. Here's how we do both. "Let's fix the two massive efficiency sinks in American life." She identifies those two "sinks" as "animal agriculture" and cars, and spends most of the article attacking them (and implicitly those of us who like and want them), all the while insisting that vital growth would be much better elsewhere.

  • Ryan Cooper [12-23]: Bari Weiss is the propagandist Donald Trump deserves: "The would-be dictator would get a much better class of censor if his regime didn't hoist the biggest morons in the country in to leadership positions." I'm reminded of an old adage attributed to David Ogilvy: "First-rate people hire first-rate people. Second-rate people hire third-rate people." That's far enough down the slope to make the point, although with Trump and his flunkies, perhaps you should denote inferior classes. Trump seems to hire people who are unfit for any other job. Sure, Weiss only indirectly works for Trump, but his worldview infects his supporters.

  • James Baratta [01-08]: Ransomware recovery firms share in the hacking spoils: "Incident response firms negotiate with hackers while also processing payments to them, leading to potential betrayals of their clients' trust." Sounds like the principal-agent problem, or more specifically the risks of trusting agents who are also paid by other sources (which is most of them these days, even without considering self-interest conflicts). Needless to say, the problem is worse in high-inequality societies, especially where marginal variations take on considerable importance. The greater the inequality, the harder it is to trust anyone. America is more inequal now than ever before, which is reflected in the dissolution of trust.

  • Adam Clark Estes [01-10]: AI's ultimate test: Making it easier to complain to companies: "Imagine actualy enjoying a customer service experience." Sure, it could work, sometimes. I like the idea of being able to get answers without having to interact with workers, but I've rarely connected with something the robots could actually answer or handle, so we spend a lot of time thrashing, which is aggravating to me, but of course neither the machine nor the company care. AI is mostly used these days to insulate companies from human contact with customers, and to train customers into expecting less service. Perhaps if we had competitive companies, such tactics would be self-limiting, but more and more we don't.

  • Constance Grady [01-10]: Grok's nonconsensual porn proble is part of a long, gross legacy: "Elon Musk claims tech needs a 'spicy mode' to dominate. Is he right?"

  • Harold Meyerson [01-19]: A new low for American workers: "The share of American income going to labor is at its lowest level since measurements began."

  • Jeffrey Selingo [01-20]: The campus AI crisis: "Young graduates can't find jobs. Colleges know they have to do something. But what?" Starts with a young college graduate who applied to 150 jobs, to no avail. "How much AI is to blame for the fragile entry-level job market is unclear." The author sees an analogy to his own college years, 1991-94, when the Internet suddenly became a big thing, causing disruptions as colleges had to scramble to seem relevant — as they are doing now with programs like "AI Fluency." I'm afraid I don't have any insight here. AI still strikes me as a lot of hype wrapped around a few parlor tricks, most of which have very little relevance to the core economy of goods and services. But then no one can see the future, or even the present. All we can do is look back, and try to imagine what that portends. But the 1990s analogy reminds me of Robert Reich's 1991 book The Work of Nations: Preparing Ourselves for 21st Century Capitalism, where he came up the the idiotic idea that we didn't need manufacturing jobs anymore, because we'd just get high-paying jobs as "symbolic manipulators" and everything would be wonderful. His buddy Bill Clinton read that and saw it as a green light to implement NAFTA. We're still reeling from the consequences of Reich's fantasy. (Clinton may have realized what would happen to US manufacturing, and simply not cared, but was he prescient enough to anticipate the damage to Mexican agriculture, the subsequent explosion of emigration to the US, and the repercussions for American jobs and politics?) About the only thing I'm sure of viz. AI is that if Reich's cornucopia of "symbolic manipulator" jobs had occurred, AI would devastate them, because symbolic manipulation is literally all that AI does and can ever do. Sure, it may, like all stages since the dawn of computing, contribute some productivity, but we'll still depend on real people doing real work for everything we need to sustain life.

Miscellaneous Pieces

The following articles are more/less in order published, although some authors have collected pieces, and some entries have related articles underneath.

Spencer Kornhaber [05-05]: Is this the worst-ever era of American pop culture? "An emerging critical consensus argues that we've enered a cultural dark age. I'm not so sure." I don't recall why I opened this loose tab — possibly because the article opens with a quote from Ted Gioia, who used to be a reliable Jazz Critics Poll voter but abandoned us as he became a Substack star. So, unable to read the piece, I asked Google to summarize it, and got this gibberish back:

Spencer Kornhaber's "Is This the Worst-Ever Era of American Pop Culture?" argues that modern pop culture suffers from stagnation, cynicism, isolation, and attention rot, driven by nostalgia-focused economics (IP, old music catalogs), identity politics stifling creativity, technology fostering loneliness, and algorithmic distractions eroding focus, leading to a "gilded age" of superficially polished but shallow content. While acknowledging real problems like AI and pandemic disruptions, Kornhaber explores this "narrative of decay" in music, film, and art, but also discusses potential counter-narratives and signs of hope. . . .

Kornhaber suggests these issues create a paradox: a Gilded Age where prestigious shows look amazing but lack substance, and where technological abundance paradoxically leads to cultural scarcity and decline. He questions if it's truly the worst era, but details the significant challenges facing creators and consumers, pointing to a breakdown in cultural progress and originality.

Google also offered a link to:

My own thought on this is that culture increasingly became wedded to big business over the 20th century, but the bindings have started to fall apart, as artists are becoming less dependent on capital, and capital is less able to profit from art. As a consumer, or just as a person with the luxury of some leisure time beyond what it takes to satisfy baser needs, I don't see this as, on balance, a particularly bad thing. While capitalism promoted art in the 20th century, there is every reason to expect art to continue being created even without the profit motive. The art will be different: it will be smaller, less flashy, more personal, more in tune with people's feelings, as opposed to the ubiquitous sales schemes of the culture industry. I can think of numerous examples, especially in jazz — which is much more vital as an art than as a business.

On the other hand, I'm pretty vigilant about picking the music I listen to, the video I see, the links I follow, and so on. So I'm inclined to think I'm relatively immune to the effects found in Kyle Chayka: Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture, but it's hard to be sure, and they've certainly warped the size and shape of everyday culture. It's hard to maintain any semblance of control when you're constantly bombarded by too any options: a state which reduces both creators and consumers while extracting maximal shares for the platform.

Lulu Garcia-Navarro [10-18]: The culture wars came for Wikipedia. Jimmy Wales is staying the course. Interview, airs out numerous political attacks on Wikipedia, mostly from people who don't understand facts, or who understand them all too well. Kurt Andersen linked to this, and commented: "Reading this Jimmy Wales interview reminded me in our Fantasyland age what a remarkable and important creation it is. True pillar of civilization. Runs on only $200 million a year. Requires out support. So I'm finally donating." By the way, Wales has a book, The Seven Rules of Trust: A Blueprint for Building Things That Last.

Current Affairs [07-16]: Rent control is fine, actually: "Regulating rent prices is often called 'bad economics.' But it isn't. The effects of rent control are complex." Unsigned, but substantial article, covering most of the bases. A still more obvious point is in the very name: although "rent" is a word most often used regarding housing, the word itself has more general economic significance, in that it represents any profits in excess of free competition. It is, in other words, a market failure, which can only be constrained by regulation.

Alex Skopic [10-09]: This is why you don't let libertarians run your country: "In Argentina, President Javier Milei has screwed the economy up so badly he needs a $20 billion bailout. That's because his 'free market' economics don't actually work."

Even more so than Donald Trump to his north, Milei was the kind of erratic crackpot you can see coming a mile off. This was a man who dressed up in a superhero suit to sing sad ballads about fiscal policy, "floated legalizing the sale of human organs" on the campaign trail, and told reporters he takes telepathic advice from his dogs, who are clones of his previous dog. You didn't need any special insight to know he wasn't leadership material. But even those personal foibles would be inoffensive, even charming, if Milei had a sound economic agenda. More than the psychic dogs or the yellow cape, the really unhinged thing about him was that he took libertarianism seriously, aiming to slash the functions of the Argentinian state wherever he could. Now, Milei is facing a spiraling series of crises, from unemployment to homelessness to the basic ability to manufacture anything. He should serve as a big, red alarm bell for people far beyond Argentina's shores — because right-wing leaders in the U.S. and Britain are explicitly modeling their economics on his, and if they're not stopped, they'll lead us to the same disastrous end point.

Bad as this sounds:

Dean Baker: This is mostly catching up, but doesn't include every post, especially in December, but most are worth noting:

  • [12-08]: In search of Donald Trump's booming economy: "Trump's claims of historic economic success collapse under data showing rising costs, declining manufacturing, and no evidence of his imagined investment boom."

  • [12-13]: Jeff Bezos uses the Washington Post to proote inequality: "The Washington Post's defense of massive CEO pay illustrates how billionaire-owned media justify inequality despite weak evidence that it benefits workers, shareholders, or society." Refers to a column by Dominic Pino [12-11]: Starbucks's CEO was paid $95 million. It could be worth every cent. The rationale is: "Brian Niccol's compensation history reflects a turnaround skill that can mean billions of dollars."

  • [12-21]: How many manufacturingjobs has Trump actually lost? "More comprehensive employment data show manufacturing job losses under Trump may be worse than standard monthly reports suggest."

  • [12-23]: Donald Trump wants us to pay more for electricity because he is angry at windmills: "Trump's move to cancel wind projects will increase power costs, kill jobs, and slow the clean energy transition."

  • [12-27]: Washington Post's Trumpian ideology boils over: "A critique of Washington Post editorials that distort healthcare and EV economics to align with Trump-style ideology."

  • [12-28]: Did Mark Zuckerberg throw $77 billion of our money into the toilet? "Mark Zuckerberg's $77 billion Metaverse gamble wasn't just a corporate misstep, but a massive diversion of talent and resources with real economic costs as Big Tech now pours even more money into AI." I think what he's saying here is that when a company blows a huge amount of money, that's not just a book loss for the investors, it's also an opportunity loss for everyone. I'm not sure where he wants to go with this, but I'm tempted to say that tech companies aren't necessarily good judges, especially as so many of their schemes are little better than scams.

  • [01-05]: Venezuela will pay for its own reconstruction: "Comparing Iraq in 2003 to Venezuela today shows that Trump's claims of an easy, self-financing intervention are far less believable than Bush's already-failed promises." While the analogies are too obvious to ignore, the differences may matter more. In 2003, there were real fears of running low on oil, so bringing more oil to market could be seen as a general economic gain, even if the oil companies would prefer to just drive the prices up. But we have a glut of oil right now, and that's with Venezuela, Iran, and Russia largely out of the market. So I wouldn't bet on Trump wanting to reconstruct Venezuela, regardless of who plays for it.

  • [01-05]: Walz pulls out: chalk up another one for racism, coupled with Democratic Party and media ineptitude: "Tim Walz's exit shows how exaggerated fraud claims, media failure, and racialized politics can end Democratic careers."

  • [01-07]: Trump's United States as number three: "Trump's threats and economic bluster ignore the reality that the US is now only the world's third-largest economy and increasingly isolated from larger democratic blocs." Behind China and Europe (EU + United Kingdom, Switzerland, and Norway). Lots of smaller economies are also gaining ground: add them together and the US could slip a notch. Baker cites several examples where Trump's tariffs failed because the US simply didn't have the economic muscle to enforce them. That leaves American superiority in arms, which may explain why Trump is becoming increasingly trigger-happy, but converting that to genuine economic power may be difficult:

    Ordinarily, the old line about herding cats would apply here, but a government that claims it can do anything it has the military force to do can help focus minds. Hitler managed to bring together Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin. Trump may have a comparable effect in uniting the world today.

  • [01-08]: Donald Trump's $6 trillion tax hike and increase in military spending: "Trump's $600 billion military plan would be financed by higher tariffs that raise prices for US consumers." But surely it wouldn't just be tariffs paying for this. Income taxes are a more practical option. If that's impossible, and it goes straight to the deficit, won't it ultimately be paid for with inflation? And what about opportunity costs? Imagine spending that kind of money on something actually useful. Then, of course, there are risks: the chance that some of these extra weapons will be used in wars, and everything that entails. Risks on that level cannot even be hedged against.

  • [01-09]: Jobs report and remembering Renee Good "The official response to the killing of Renee Good — marked by falsehoods from Trump administration figures — signals a dangerous erosion of accountability for state violence."

  • [01-12]: Three bad items and three good items in the December jobs report: "The December jobs report shows a softening labor market, with higher underemployment offset by lower unemployment and slightly faster wage growth."

  • [01-12]: Donald Trump, Mineral Man, vs. sodium batteries: "Trump's mineral strategy is undermined by China's move toward sodium batteries that make lithium less critical."

  • [01-13]: The billionaires and the November election: "Markets barely reacted after Trump moved to threaten the independence of the Federal Reserve."

  • [01-14]: Trump takes responsibility for post-pandemic inflation: Trump's attempt to blame Biden for inflation nearly a year into his term undercuts his own record and exposes the lagged effects of Trump-era policies."

  • [01-15]: Can the AI folks save democracy? "The AI stock bubble is sustaining Trump's political support — and its collapse could change US politics fast."

  • [01-16]: We're paying the tariffs #53,464: "Import price data confirm that Trump's tariffs are largely a tax on Americans, not foreign countries.

  • [01-19]: Trump wants to hit us with a huge tax hike for his demented Greenland dreams: "Trump's Greenland fixation would hit Americans with a massive tariff tax while serving no real security or economic purpose."

  • [01-19]: Time for Europe to use the nuclear option: Attack US patent and copyright monopolies: "Trump's Greenland obsession would raise prices for Americans, while Europe has a far more effective response by suspending US patent and copyright protections." As I noted under Greenland above, this is the kind of medicine that's actually good for you.

Ray Moulton [12-30]: Children and helical time: Starts with a chart which asserts that half of your subjective experience of life occurs in childhood, between age 5 ("start of long term memory") and 20 ("midpoint of subjective life"). The math is just a log function. The question is whether this intuitively makes sense. I'm not sure it does, and not sure it doesn't. Perhaps that's because most of the story is focused on kids, and I only know about being one, not about having them, or even much about living vicariously through other folks' kids. But I do feel that, in thinking about memory, I feel an intensity of focus between ages 5-20 that I lack for anything that came after then

Ian Millhiser: Vox's legal beat reporter, author of Injustices (2015). If he writes a sequel, it will be twice as long and only cover 10 years. Some more pieces filed elsewhere.

Pete Tucker [12-04]: How the game is played: Pull quote talks about how the Koch network put Antonin Scalia's name on the George Mason law school, and added something called "the Global Antitrust Institute" ("which works to ensure that Big Tech isn't broken apart like the monopoists of over a century ago"). But the article itself starts with a long prelude on Stephen Fuller, a Washington Post-favored pundit whose "quotes came cloaked in academic objectivity, owing to his dual titles as an economics professor at George Mason University and leader of the school's Center for Regional Analysis" (later renamed the Stephen S. Fuller Institute).

Jeffrey St Clair:

  • [12-12]: Gaza Diary: They bulldozed mass graves and called it peace. The only things that are dated here are the number of Palestinians killed since the "cease fire," and the amount of money the US has spent in aid to Israel, including military operations in Yemen, Iran, and the wider region (then pegged at $31.35-$33.77 billion since 2023-10-07).

  • [12-19]: Roaming Charges: The politics of crudity and cruelty: Starts with a story about Rob Reiner, which leads into his murder, followed by Trump's tweet, where Reiner "passed away, together with his wife," after long suffering from "the anger he caused others through his massive, unyielding, and incurable affliction with a mind crippling disease known as TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME." As St Clair notes:

    This is evidence of a sick mind: petty, petulant, crude and sadistic . . . but but also one that likely needed help writing this depraved attack on two people whose blood was still wet from having their throats slit by their own tormented son, since the words "tortured" "unyielding" and "affliction" don't come naturally to Trump's limited lexicon.

    Some more notes (and I'm writing this nearly a month after the fact):

    • In the last five years, the wealthiest 20 Americans increased their net worth from $1.3 trillion to $3 trillion. Whether the economic policies are those of the neoliberals or the Trump Republicans, the same people keep making out.

    • David Mamet has always been a jackass, but whatever's below rock bottom, he just hit it . . . [Reference to Mamet's piece, "Why Dr King, Malcolm X and Charlie Kirk were modern prophets."]

    • Erika Kirk, already a millionaire before the Lord Almighty claimed her husband, has raked in another $10 million+ since Charlie ascended to the heavens, according to a report in the Daily Mail. It really is the prosperity gospel!

    • John Cassidy, writing in the New Yorker, on how the Trump family ventures have cashed in on his presidency:

      As the anniversary of Donald Trump's return to the White House approaches, keeping up with his family's efforts to cash in is a mighty challenge. It seems like there is a fresh deal, or revelation, every week. Since many of the Trump or Trump-affiliated ventures are privately owned, we don't have a complete account of their finances. But in tracking company announcements, official filings, and the assiduous reporting of several media outlets, a clear picture emerges: enrichment of the First Family on a scale that is unprecedented in American history . . . in terms of the money involved, the geographic reach, and the explicit ties to Presidential actions — particularly Trump's efforts to turn the United States into the "crypto capital of the world" — there has never been anything like the second term of Trump, Inc.

  • [12-25]: Goodbye to language: the year in Trumpspeak. The earth's atmosphere is divided into various layers — troposphere, stratosphere, ionosphere (which now seems to be subsumed into the mesosphere) — as the density of air changes various physical properties. Perhaps we could subdivide the media into analogous layers. One would be the Trumposphere: the fantasy realm where only what Trump says — and to some extent what others say about Trump, although that's reported mostly to keep the focus on Trump — and this seems to account for at least a third of all "national" news. This is a long piece which offers pretty comprehensive documentation of 2025 in the Trumposphere. It is horrifying, or would be if you weren't so used to it by now.

  • [12-05]: Roaming Charges: Kill, kill again, kill them all: Starts with this:

    Pete Hegseth is a producer of snuff films. The media-obsessed, if not media-savvy, Hegseth has produced 21 of these mass murder documentary shorts in the last three months, featuring the killings of 83 people — if you take his word for it. Hegseth introduces these kill shots like Alfred Hitchcock presenting an episode of his old TV show — without the irony, of course. There's no irony to Pete Hegseth. No intentional irony, that is. It's all bluster and protein-powder bravado to titillate the Prime-time Fox audience as they nibbled at their TV dinners. . . .

    The irony, lost on Hegseth, is that these are the precise kinds of videos that ethical whistleblowers like Chelsea Manning used to scrape from the secret vaults of the Pentagon and ship to Wikileaks. Videos of crimes committed by US forces. In his dipsomaniacal mind, Hegseth seems to believe these snuff films are proof of the power and virility of the War Department under his leadership. In fact, each video is a confession. The question is: will he be held to account and who will have the guts to do it?

  • [01-09]: Roaming Charges: An ICE cold blood. Opens with:

    Many of the people who have spent the last five years denouncing the killing of Ashli Babbitt for raiding the Capitol in an attempt to overturn an election are celebrating the murder of Renee Nichole Good, a terrified mother killed by masked men from unmarked cars who chased her down a neighborhood street and shot her in the face. . . .

    These kinds of raids, while shocking to most Americans, are familiar to many immigrants from Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador, countries still haunted by the death squads funded, armed and trained by the CIA. Horrors that they fled and have now reappeared like ghosts from the past here on the streets of Chicago and Minneapolis and Los Angeles. They know all too well that collateral damage is a feature of all paramilitaries.

    With the murder of Renee Good, ICE has now advanced from scaring the hell out of American citizens to killing them.

    Also lots of good information here on Venezuela, including "The New York Times interviews Beelzebub [Elliott Abrams] on Venezuela, who, surprise!, wants more kidnappings and bloodshed." He also notes that Israel has violated the ceasfire 969 times over 80 days, "including the killing of 420 Palestinians, the wounding of 1,141 and allowing only 40% of the aid tracks andated by the truce into Gaza." Also: "Israel has killed more than 700 relatives of Palestinian journalists in Gaza." Also:

    • Stephen Miller: "We live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time." Almost invariably, people who have lived by this "iron law" have tended to come to rather unpleasant ends. [I would have unpacked this view rather differently. One of the maxims I learned early was "power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely." Even if one starts with good intentions, the resort to power perverts them, and ultimately becomes an obsession with obtaining and defending ever more power. And that, of course, produces a backlash, which if unsuccessful drives the powerful to ever greater atrocities. Whether such people die in a bunker like Hitler or in bed like Stalin isn't really the issue. Either way, their memory is cursed by our wish to have stopped them earlier. Of course, if you don't start with good intentions, you descend faster, as Miller has done.]

    • Of course, there was something deeply wrong with this country long before Donald Trump came to power. Imagine playing a New Year's Day football game just down the road from Ground Zero in Nagasaki, as a celebration of an atomic blast that killed 70,000 people only five months earlier?

  • [01-16]: Roaming Charges: What a fool believes:

    • It's revolting, but hardly surprising, that a woman (Kristi Noem) who thought bragging about the time she shot her puppy in the head for disobeying a command and dumped its body in a gravel quarry would advance her political career, also thinks it's entirely justified to shoot a mother of three in the head for "disobeying" confusing commands from her ICE agents.

    • Trump has sent 13.6% of all ICE agents to Minneapolis, a city that represents .13% of the population of the United States.

  • [01-23]: Roaming Charges: Are we not men? No, we are DAVOS: "But a funny thing happened on the way to Davos":

    The stock market collapsed. The Prime Minister of Canada cut a trade pact with China and urged other countries to do the same. Denmark told Trump to fuck off (literally). Unhelpfully for Trump, the Russians chose this week to publicly endorse his scheme to snatch Greenland from the Danes. The European Union, usually so timid and fractious, resisted his impetuous bullying and threatened to join military exercises in defense of Greenland and levy retaliatory tariffs of their own against the increasingly frail US economy.

    Trump landed a deflated man. During his nearly incoherent speech at the World Economic Forum, Trump looked morose and sounded peevish. The words slurred, the fraying sentences trailing off into the ether. His insults lacked fire and punch. He rambled aimlessly. His cognitive decline, never a fall from alpine heights to begin with, was on full public display.

    Was this the fearsome tyrant, so many had trembled in obeisance before? He looked like an old man, frail in body, infirm in mind. Not the new Sun King of his cult-stoked fantasies, but a patriarch deep into his autumn, struggling to find the words for retreat. Trump's strategy (if you can call it that) for cultivating more enemies than friends was always doomed to backfire on him. The only question was how long it would take and how many he'd drag down with him.

    So, Trump backed down. The intemperate bombast was spent, replaced by wheezing and stammering. He backed down on invading Greenland. He backed down on imposing new tariffs against European nations. He backed down in front of the elites he both despises and envies.

    Bullet points:

  • Bari Weiss memo to CBS News reporters and anchors: "Yes, Trump referred to Greenland as Iceland 7 times in his speech, but make clear that he referred to Greenland as Greenland 13 times."

  • This week, there was another death in ICE custody. That's 6 in the last 18 days, one every 72 hours — not counting the people they shoot in their cars.

Matt McManus [01-02]: Why Fascists always come for the Socialists first: "Here's why the left poses such a threat to them." This is a long and very well researched and thought out piece. I've long been skeptical of the usefullness of labeling anyone fascist, but I've changed my thinking somewhat over the past year. I think the key thing is that we mostly understand events through historical analogy. Those of us on the left were quick to pick up the early warning signs of fascism, but as long as alternative explanations were possible, most people resisted the diagnosis. What's different now is that we've reached the point where fascism is the only close historical analogy. Sure, there are minor minor deviations, but no other historical analogy comes close. The point of identifying Trump as a fascist is less to check off a list of similarities than an assertion that we take him very seriously as a threat to our world. While many other comparisons may occur to us, none quite match our fear of fascism.

Eric Levitz [01-12]: The fiction at the heart of America's political divide: I don't quite understand why someone who recognizes and basic difference between left and right can twist himself in such knots of nonsense as the Hyrum and Verlan Lewis book The Myth of Left and Right. Levitz shows he understands the difference when he writes:

The ideological spectrum was born in France about 237 years ago. At the revolutionary National Assembly in 1789, radicals sat on the left side of the chamber and monarchists on the right, thereby lending Western politics its defining metaphor: a one-dimensional continuum between egalitarian revolution and hierarchical conservation. The more a faction (or policy) promoted change in service of equality, the farther left its place on this imaginary line; the more it defended existing hierarchies in the name of order, the farther right its spot.

There are some corollaries, but that's it: hierarchy on the right, equality on the left. Perhaps the most obvious corollary is that the right's defense of hierarchy is inherently unpopular, so they are quick to defend it with violence. The left, on the other hand, has become increasingly opposed to violence. This should be simple, but Levitz, like most political analysts, likes to muddy the waters by saddling left and right with arbitrary positions on other issues that don't intrinsically divide between hierarchy and equality. He doesn't fully accept the Lewis case that parties are just competing interest groups whose policy differences follow group rathern than ideological dynamics, but he readily assumes that all Democrats are leftist and all Republicans are on the right.

Robert P Baird [01-15]: The crisis whisperer: how Adam Tooze makes sense of our bewildering age: "Whether it's the financial crash, the climate emergency or the breakdown of the international order, historian Adam Tooze has become the go-to guide to the radical new world we've entered." There's more here — Tooze has moved from academia into the public intelligentsia racket as impressively as anyone else I can think of, and that includes Jill Lepore, Paul Krugman, and Stephen J Gould — but let's start with the section on Biden Democrats that Jeffrey St Clair pointed me to:

It was notable, then, that after joining the Brussels panel, Tooze didn't waste much time before stating flatly that the Biden team had "failed in its absolutely central mission, which was to prevent a second Trump administration". Not only that, he argued, but the dismantling of the liberal world order — something discussed with much rueful lamentation at the conference — had been hastened, not hindered, by the Biden veterans on stage. As he'd written a few months earlier, Tooze saw Biden no less than Trump aiming "to ensure by any means necessary" — including strong-arming allies — "that China is held back and the US preserves its decisive edge".

"I feel the need to say something," [Katherine] Tai said, when Tooze was finished. She recalled a parable Martin Sheen had delivered in front of the White House during the 25th anniversary celebration of The West Wing, the haute-liberal political fantasia that remains a touchstone for professional Democrats. Sheen's story concerned a man who shows up at the gates of heaven and earns an admonishment from St Peter for his lack of scars. "Was there nothing worth fighting for?" St Peter asked the man. Tai turned the question on Tooze: "Where are your scars, Adam? I can show you mine."

Recalling this exchange several months later, Tooze was still flabbergasted. "I'd be silly if I didn't admit that it was a bruising encounter," he told me recently, in one of three long conversations we had over the past year. Nevertheless, he said, "it confirmed my underlying theory about what was going on. These were a group of entirely self-satisfied American liberal elites who were enacting a morality tale in which Sheen and The West Wing and that whole highly sentimental vision of power and politics is a central device. She says this, I think, meaning to sound tough, like, 'I'm the warrior. Who are you? You're just some desktop guy.' Which just shows how little she understands what I'm saying, which is: 'You people are a bunch of sentimental schmucks who don't understand that you lost. If you had any self-respect, you would not be on any podium again, ever, sounding off about anything. Because comrades, if we were in the 30s, I would have taken you out and shot you. You fail like this, you don't get to come back and show off your wounds.'"

That's a bit extreme for me: the 30s aren't exactly remembered for best political practices, and even as a lapsed Christian I'm still inclined to forgive sins that are sincerely repented. But Tai and her other Biden hands not only haven't repented for their failures, they're still in denial, blind-sided by events they thought they were handling just fine. (In this, the Queen Bee of denial remains Hillary Clinton, which is why she has absolutely nothing to contribute to the party she once led.) The piece has much more on Tooze — enough to convince me to order his book Crashed. It also summarizes a critique of him by Perry Anderson.

Kate Wagner [01-21]: The Line, a Saudi megaproject, is dead: "It was always doomed to unravel, but the firms who lent their name to this folly should be held accounable." I knew nothing about this project, so found the Wikipedia entry to be helpful background. Also see the longer List of Saudi Vision 2023 projects, of which NEOM (including The Line and Trojena) was by far the most expensive. This reminds me of some of the Shah's extravagant projects shortly before the revolution overthrew his regime. I've been thinking a bit about Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf states in relationship to the "resource curse" theory, which explains so much of what went wrong with Venezuela. Saudi Arabia doesn't look like the economic basket case we find in Venezuela and Iran, but perhaps that's just because they've been able to keep selling oil, and thereby able to keep their own bubble economies from collapsing. They've managed this by being very submissive to the US and western capitalism, while they've managed political stability at home through a generous welfare state for their citizens, combined with the large-scale import of "guest" workers. Still, their oil wells generate so much money that they wind up investing in a lot of extravagant schemes — the Line is relatively benign, at least compared to the jihad-fanning, gun-running, war-mongering adventurism in Yemen, Syria, Sudan, Libya, Afghanistan, etc. In terms of GDP, these petrostates are among the richest in the world, but one can't help but feel that there is rot and mold just under the surface, and that whole edifices could suddenly collapse (as they did in Iran, Iraq, Libya, and Venezuela). Also that the risk of that happening is much sharper with megalomaniacs in charge like Mohammed Bin Salman, and especially as Trump turns the US into a pure gangster state.

Chas Danner [01-24]: All the terms you need to know for the big winter storm: "From frost crack to Arctic blast to thunder ice."

Music end-of-year lists: I started collecting these when they were few and far between, and didn't keep it up. See the AOTY Lists for more. Also the Legend for my EOY Aggregate. While substantial (2776 albums), I've done a very poor job of keeping this file up to date, as is obvious when you compare this year's legend (116 sources) to the one from 2024 (610 sources). While I'm likely to add more data to this year's EOY aggregate, I'm unlikely ever again to match the 2024 total.

Of course, the most important EOY list [for me, anyhow] is: The 20th Annual Francis Davis Jazz Critics Poll: See the essays on ArtsFuse, by yours truly except as noted:

On listmaking:

  • Album of the Year: 2025 music year end list aggregate: Rosalia edging out Geese (413-404) was a surprise, especially as a late-breaker among two albums I didn't especially are for, but both the landslide wins over two of my A- records — Wednesday (203) and CMAT (187) — and a following mixed bag: my A- records were by Clipse (6), Lily Allen (11), Billy Woods (14), Water From Your Eyes (27), Big Thief (29), Sudan Archives (32), Tyler Childers (43), and Rochelle Jordan (50). One interesting note here is that they systematically devalue unranked lists, allowing 5 points each if the list is 10 albums or less, 3 for 25 or less, and 1 for ore than 25 albums; ranked lists are given 10 points for 1st place, 8 for 2nd, 6 for 3rd, 5 for top 10, 3 for top 25, 1 for other. That's a bit more generous to unranked lists than my own scheme for my EOY aggregate, and also offers a bit more spread for 1-2-3 albums, but the basic logic is similar.

Some miscellaneous music links:

  • Tom Lane [01-20]: 2026 Rock Hall Nominee Predictions: Something I have no opinion about, not least because I have no idea who's in or out, what the eligibility rules are, and therefore who's missing, even though hall of fames are something that has always fascinated me. My rough impression is that the R&R HOF has always been too lax in its selections, unlike virtually every other HOF. (In jazz, DownBeat's HOF is hopelessly backlogged, and their peculiar Veterans Commitee rules have actually made the missing seem to be more glaring.) Only one on this list I'd be tempted to vote for is B-52s, although Beck had a couple of very good albums, my early dislike of De La Soul may have been misguided, and I wouldn't scoff at Oasis or Luther Vandross (although I wouldn't pick them either). Speaking of B-52s, I wonder whether Pere Ubu is in, and if not why not? [Not: eligible in 2001.] They're linked in my mind because I saw both bands at Max's Kansas City in the late 1970s, back when they both only had singles (and really great ones at that).

  • Nathan J Robinson [01-20]: Jesse Welles is the antidote to everything that sucks about our time. I was tipped off to the folksinger-songwriter recently, and will review albums in the next Music Week.

Books:

  • Sasha Abramsky: American Carnage: How Trump, Musk, and DOGE Butchered the US Government: "follows eleven federal workers, in eight government agencies, from the time they were told they were fired in the early weeks of Donald Trump's second presidential administration through to the summer of 2025. . . . Their stories, which show a country in a profound moment of crisis and dislocation, are America's stories. What happened to them — the bullying, the intimidation, the deliberate removal of financial stability — also happened to hundreds of thousands of other employees."

  • Sven Beckert: Capitalism: A Global History:

    • Nelson Lichtenstein [12-04]: Sven Beckert's chronicle of capitalism's long rise. Review provides what looks like a good summary of the book, which is huge and sprawling. Most interesting point to me is that he starts early and looks everywhere:

      "There is no French capitalism or American capitalism," writes Beckert, "but only capitalism in France or America." And there is also capitalism in Arabia, India, China, Africa, and even among the Aztecs. In his narrative of merchants and traders in the first half of the second millennium, Beckert puts Europe on the margins, offering instead a rich and, except for specialists, unknown account of how the institutions vital to commerce and markets, including credit, accounting, limited partnerships, insurance, and banking flourished, in Aden, Cambay, Mombasa, Guangzhou, Cairo, and Samarkand. These are all "islands of capital," a recurrent metaphor in Beckert's book. For example, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Aden was host to a dense network of merchants who played a pivotal role in the trade between the Arabian world and India. It was a fortified, cosmopolitan city of Jews, Hindu, Muslims, and even a few Christians.

      Capitalism spread from these "islands of capital," initially through trade but increasingly through war, especially where forced labor proved advantageous for producing fungible goods.

    • Seven Beckert [11-04]: The old order is dead. Do not resuscitate. The "old order" he is referring to is what is commonly alled "the neoliberal order" ("and that held sway until very recently"):

      Capitalism is a series of regime changes. Thinking about what unites them will help us better navigate the current reverberations and think more productively about the future. All these transitions, and perhaps the present one as well, were characterized by the inability of the old regime, in the face of economic crisis and rebellions, to reproduce itself. All featured disorientation, and an elite belief that a few tweaks to the old order would allow it to continue. All confronted a world in which the previous economic regime felt like the natural order of things — slavery in the mid-19th century, laissez faire in the 1920s, Keynesian interventionism in the 1960s and market fundamentalism in the 2000s.

      Not once was the old regime resurrected. Instead, capitalism forged ahead in entirely new directions. We had better accept this about today, as well.

      Unclear what his answer is here, or even whether he has one. He sees critiques of neoliberalism both on the left and on the right. He notes that "China was never beholden to the neoliberal agenda." Also that "the politicization of markets is rapidly making a comeback," for which he offers both Trump and Biden examples.

  • Marc J Dunkelman: Why Nothing Works: Who Killed Progress — and How to Bring It Back:

    • Sean Illing [01-12]: How America made it impossible to build: "A system built to stop government from doing harm stopped it from doing anything." An interview with Dunkelman. I'm someone who's strongly oriented toward building things, so I should be sympathetic to books like this (the more famous one is Abundance), but I often choke when I see actual project proposals (especially things like new sports stadia). One thing I agree with here is "the trust problem is enorous." That's largely because projects are being driven by private greed-or-glory-heads, and depend on public finance from politicians beholden to their sponsors. What we need instead are more projects driven by consumer/user groups, with compensation for anyone adversely affected, and some clear criteria for when the downside exceeds the benefits. If you could do that in a system that most people could trust, ticking off the checkboxes could go much quicker (and if they don't tick off, the reasons will be clear, and not just a game of who bribes whom).

    • Miles Bryan/Astead Herndon [12-28]: Ezra Klein's year of Abundance: We've kicked this around before, so might as well file it here. Klein notes in here that his original title was "Supply-Side Progressivism," which makes more explicit that this is a pitch to business that at best hopes to trickle down some more general value.

  • Eoin Higgins: Owned: How Tech Billionaires on the Right Bought the Loudest Voices on the Left:

    • Ed Meek [08-02]: How to buy left-wing journalists: Review of Owned, where the most prominent journalists mentioned are Matt Taibbi and Glen Greenwald.

      Higgins follows Taibbi's investigation into Hunter Biden's laptop (a favorite target of MAGA supporters). The Biden administration, with Twitter's cooperation, may have suppressed information about wrongdoing in these files, but Taibbi never really found anything substantial. Meanwhile, he was critiqued by the left, relentlessly, for investigating what partisans saw as a trivial distraction. This led to Taibbi's move to Substack, where he has a big following. Higgins points out that Substack was funded by Andreessen (founder of Netscape) as a way to move liberal journalists out of mainstream publications. Along with creating a space for independent voices, Owned posits that the right wing has been very effective at manipulating and creating new media to influence Americans to support Republicans. Substack was part of that divide-and-conquer strategy.

      I read Greenwald's initial 2006 book, How Would a Patriot Act?, but didn't follow up with later books, and haven't tried since he bowed out of The Intercept. I read Taibbi as long as he was in Rolling Stone (but Rolling Stone itself is paywalled these days), then followed him on Twitter. I read most of his books up through 2019's Hate Inc.. He's always had a weakness for both-sidesing (e.g., singling out "9-11 Truthers" as a left-equivalent of the right's paranoid tendencies), but his critical views of the right remained sharp. If he was still freely available, I'd check him out. I don't consider him to be a traitor/enemy, like David Horowitz.

      I hadn't read that point about Substack before, but there is considerable logic to it. Yglesias and Krugman are prime examples, although their former publications are also paywalled these days. I've rarely looked at their Substacks, but so far have managed to see everything I've looked at. The bigger point is that they're trying to price any sort of critical commentary out of the reach of most folks. This follows the same general logic as the move to quell student demonstrations in the 1980s by making college much more expensive: on the one hand, you exclude the riff-raff; on the other, you saddle those who survive the gauntlet with a lifetime of debt, forcing them to keep their nose to the grindstone, which is to say work for the increasingly dominant rich. They probably didn't plan on Google and Facebook sucking up all of the advertising revenue, but that's what's given them the chance to starve out any sort of free press.

    • Will Solomon [2025-01-05]: How tech billionaires bought the louest voices on the left and right: An early review of Eoin Higgins: Owned.

    • Eoin Higgins [12-27]: Yes, I'm being sued by Matt Taibbi: This is the story that got me looking at Higgins' book, so that's why I'm digging up links from a year ago. I don't see a lot more, at least recent, on his Substack (and sure, he has one) to stick around, but a couple titles are Marjorie Taylor Greene makes her move and Weasel World comes to Minnesota.

  • Gene Ludwig: The Mismeasurement of America: How Outdated Government Statistics Mask the Economic Struggle of Everyday Americans: Former Treasury official under Clinton, a connection that gets him a nice blurb from Hillary here, set up a nonprofit in 2019 "dedicated to improving the economic well-being of low- and middle-income Americans through research and education," starting with his 2020 book, The Vanishing American Dream: A Frank Look at the Economic Realities Facing Middle- and Lower-Income Americans.

    • Jared Bernstein [10-03]: Measuring the Vibecession: "Why top-line federal statistics miss the economic pain average Americans feel." Biden's best economic adviser reviews Ludwig's book, quibbling that the standard measures aren't "mismeasurement" but merely incomplete. For instance, the Consumer Price Index is an average, which masks different impacts among various groups. Unemployment understates underemployment and other precarity.

  • Harriet Malinowitz: Selling Israel: Zionism, Propaganda, and the Uses of Hasbara:

  • Olivia Nuzzi: American Canto: A journalist of some fame and ill repute, wrote a memoir, teasing dirt on an affair with RFK Jr.

    • Scaachi Koul [12-02]: Olivia Nuzzi's book has the audacity to be boring: "Never mind the dogshit writing, the self-mythologizing, the embarrassing metaphors. How can you make this story so incredibly dull?"

      Historians will study how bad this book is. English teachers will hold this book aloft at their students to remind them that literally anyone can write a book: Look at this, it's just not that hard to do. Three hundred pages with no chapter breaks, it swerves back and forth through time, from Nuzzi's interviews with Donald Trump over the years to her combustible relationship with fellow annoying journalist Ryan Lizza to her alleged affair with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as he was running for president himself. Reading it is like spending time with a delusional fortune cookie: platitudes that feel like they were run through a translation service three times.

  • Tim Wu, The Age of Extraction: How Tech Platforms Conquered the Economy and Threaten Our Future Prosperity:

    • Rhoda Feng [12-10]: The internet's toolbooth operators: "Tim Wu's The Age of Extraction chronicles the way Big Tech platforms have turned against their users."

      The process by which companies metastasize from creators into extractors goes something like this: First, they make their platform "essential to transactions"; next, they hobble or buy rivals; then, they clone winners, lock partners in, and finally ratchet up fees for both buyers and sellers. The convenience we prize — our one-click orders, our autoplay queues — becomes, in Wu's mordant phrase, "a long slow bet on laziness": a wager that users will tolerate almost any indignity rather than face the costs of leaving.

      If the platform extraction model has become the dominant template of 21st-century capitalism, Wu emphasizes that it is by no means confined to technology. Since the 2008 financial crisis, investors have begun platformizing entire industries and reorganizing them around centralized ownership and predictable revenue streams.

      He offers examples from health care and housing, showing that this is not just a high-tech issue. But right now, big future bets are being placed on tech monopolists:

      According to a recent report by Public Citizen, Trump's return to power has brought a bonanza for Big Tech. Of the 142 federal investigations and enforcement actions against technology corporations inherited from the previous administration, at least 45 have already been withdrawn or halted. The beneficiaries read like a who's who of Silicon Valley: Meta, Tesla, SpaceX, PayPal, eBay, and a constellation of cryptocurrency and financial technology firms.

      Since the 2024 election cycle began, tech corporations and their executives have spent an estimated $1.2 billion on political influence — $863 million in political spending, $76 million in lobbying, and a further $222 million in payments to Trump's own businesses. The return on investment has been immediate: a sweeping "AI Action Plan" directing the Federal Trade Commission to review and, where possible, rescind consent decrees that "unduly burden AI innovation." Among the cases at risk are investigations into OpenAI and Snap for generative AI harms and antitrust cases against Microsoft.

    • Tim Wu [10-25]: Big Tech's predatory platform model doesn't have to be our future.

A few end-of-year books lists:

  • Connor Echols [12-26]: The 8 best foreign policy books of 2025:

    • Seth Harp: The Fort Bragg Cartel: Drug Trafficking and Murder in the Special Forces
    • Francisco Rodriguez: The Collapse of Venezuela: Scorched Earth Politics and Economic Decline, 2012-2020
    • William D Hartung/Ben Freeman: The Trillion Dollar War Machine: How Runaway Military Spending Drives America into Foreign Wars and Bankrupts Us at Home
    • Emma Ashford: First Among Equals: US Foreign Policy in a Multipolar World
    • Michael Schaeffer Omer-Man/Sarah Leah Whitson: From Apartheid to Democracy: A Blueprint for Peace in Israel-Palestin
    • Kenneth P Vogel: Devils' Advocates: The Hidden Story of Rudy Giuliani, Hunter Biden, and the Washington Insiders on the Payrolls of Corrupt Foreign Interests
    • Charles L Glaser: Retrench, Defend, Compete: Securing America's Future Against a Rising China
    • Hussein Agha/Robert Malley: Tomorrow Is Yesterday: Life, Death, and the Pursuit of Pece in Israel/Palestine

  • Constance Grady [12-16]: The 10 best books of 2025: In addition to The 9 best books of the year so far (from back in July).

Some notable deaths: Mostly from the New York Times listings. Last time I did such a trawl was on November 24, so we'll look that far back (although some names have appeared since):

Tweets: I've usually used this section for highlighting clever responses and/or interesting ideas, but maybe I should just use it to bookmark some of our leading horribles.

  • Molly Jong-Fast [11-29]: Cites quote from OpenAI is a loss-making machine, with estimates that it has no road to profitability by 2030 — and will need a further $207 billion in funding even if it gets there: "All of this falls apart if humans don't adopt the tech. This is why you've seen Meta cram its lame chatbots into WhatsApp and Instagram. This is why Notepad and Paint now have useless Copilot buttons on Windows. This is why Goodle Gemini wants to 'help you' read and reply to your emails."

    Imagine if they just subsidized newspapers and magazines the way they're subsidizing this slop

  • Doug Henwood [01-06]: Recalls a Michael Ledeen quote, from 1992:

    "Every 10 years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business."

  • Tom Carson [01-16]:

    Minneapolis or no Minneapolis, it's ridiculous and insulting to say MAGA supporters are a bunch of Nazis. A good many of them, perhaps a majority, are innocuous Nazi sympathizers, Nazi enablers, Nazi-neutral in a Too Soon To Tell kinda way, Nazi-curious thanks to The Night Porter or Ilsa, She-Wolf of The SS, or else plain dimwits who used to go into daily comas during history classes back when they still had 'em at good old Lowenbrau High. There, does that clear everything up? We may be angry, but that doesn't give us a license to be unfair.

    Also [01-18]:

    Some of you stunned people have caught on over the years I'm not the world's biggest Trump fan. I know, I know, strange but true. But that's not the most urgent business at hand. The bottom line is that he's gone drooling loco, stone crazy, beyond barking mad, Old Yeller would sue for plagiarism AND libel if they hadn't shot him and Rin Tin Tin's gone MAGA and won't take the case, pretty soon Merriam-Webster will redefine "white as a sheet" as the penultimate step in the Republican Party before canonization. He's beyond Renee Good and Evel Knievel, I stole that from Nietzsche but never trust a Kraut who can't even take charge of his own mustache, let alone Poland, at least Hitler knew how to dress for success. He's beyond delusional and so deep in transactional the last man up his butt will have to bring along a comb to tart up the President's hair. Arse brevis but hair longa as Mussolini only wished with his drying Fred Trumpth I mean dying breath, chump. Siri where's the nearest gas station he's all hung up on learning to fly and you alone can fix it. He's as goofy as the Black Plaque his dentist can't find a final ablution for, probably a Jew ya know, you'd be getting long in the tooth yourself if we hadn't taken care of those with the pliers, Dr. Rosenfeld. He's non compos Mentos (he needs candy), looney as Looney iTunes, more gaga than a gag order shutting Kristi Noem up for Christ's sake, just plain nuts as the 101st Airborne used to say at Bastogne only this time we'll get creamed, no sugar. He's got so many screws loose a whorehouse madam would go bankrupt. And none of the earthworms in baggy boxcar suits and red ties overrunning the WH, the Capitol, and SCOTUS are going to do a blessed thing about it, so you can rest easy in this green land, Mr. President. With love to Allen Ginsberg, your fellow citizen, Tom.

    Also [01-22]:

    The interview I'm hoping to see, and who knows but I may get my wish. Q: "General Spackleheimer, are you concerned about the President's mental state?" SPACKLEHEIMER: "Well, I'm not a psychiatrist, so I don't have any standing to attest to that as a licensed mental-health expert, of course. That said, it's kind of jazzy to remember I DO have standing as a professional soldier who's got so many medals the Army had to tailor a special jacket that currently reaches to my knees, and I'm as tall as Fred Gwynne on stilts. So yeah, he's fucking nuts. I mean loco, [gestures with his former saluting hand], zoom!, you know? I mean, we're so deep in the shithouse all the cows are on strike."

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