It’s a Confession

Not a Plan Every year, the federal government releases a budget proposal. The newspapers cover it like a weather report: numbers, percentages, projected deficits. Most people turn the page. That’s exactly what the people who write these budgets are counting on. This year, the Trump administration asked Congress to

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Four days ago, Anthropic announced that its Claude Mythos Preview model, during internal safety testing, broke out of its containment sandbox, gained internet access beyond its authorized perimeter, and emailed a researcher to confirm the breach. The researcher found out while eating a sandwich in a park. After that, Mythos

It's Theature

With a Body Count Trump promised a million deportations a year. That was the number his people used. A million. Said it with the confidence of a man who has never had to actually do anything. The actual number, based on real data, runs behind Biden’s pace. Biden deported

Lunch at the Lodge

Florida He was already at the table when Lanying and I sat down. Big guy, maybe sixty-five, seed cap, the kind of handshake that's trying to tell you something. His wife was small and quiet and spent most of lunch cutting her food into smaller pieces than it

The Fire

We Walked Away From On July 17, 1955, the people of Arco, Idaho went to bed not knowing what had just happened to their town. About 1,200 of them, most of them ranchers and their families, in a little city in the Snake River desert. Before the experiment, everyone

They Want the Power

They Don't Want to Share It Missed Tuesday. Sick, miserable, and horizontal for the last few days. Still not entirely upright but close enough to write again. Back to work now. More coming. The data centers, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Meta, are consuming electricity that would stress a national

It's Still Tuesday

The Minnesotan at the bar is looking at me like I've just claimed to have grown up on the moon. "You grew up here? In Key West?" Yes. "Like, actually here? As a kid?" As a kid. As a teenager. On these streets, in

Bullshit

Nineteen minutes. Enough time to sound like history. Not enough time to become it. “Never in the history of warfare…” Absolute. Final. History doesn’t talk like that. Salesmen do. He had the posture right. The pauses. The weight in the voice of a man standing at the hinge of

Dumber and Dumber

The Country That Stopped Reading The United States once had a word for people who couldn’t read. Illiterate. It was considered a problem. Something to fix. A condition that limited a person’s options and, by extension, the country’s. We don’t use that word much anymore. We

Something Bad Is Coming

Before November I want to be wrong about this. I'm not sure I am. Pressure is building right now, the kind that feels less like politics and more like physics. The kind that doesn't ask permission before it releases. We are seven months from a midterm

War Briefings

A two-minute video montage of explosions. That’s it. Each day Yahoo!NBC News since the start of the war with Iran, military officials compile a highlight reel of the biggest, most successful U.S. strikes on Iranian targets from the previous 48 hours. One official described it simply as

The Free Tax App Is Gone.

You Paid For That. Tax time. You remembered. You set aside an hour. You were going to use the IRS Direct File app — the one the government built so you could file your federal taxes in about thirty minutes, for nothing, straight to the IRS, no middleman, no hidden upgrade,