Written Saturday, April 18, 2026 Trump declared victory Friday. Iran's foreign minister had announced that the Strait of Hormuz was fully open. Oil dropped twelve percent. Trump posted on Truth Social that Iran had agreed never to close the strait again. A great and brilliant day for the
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
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
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
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
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 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
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
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
money, politics, and a nation in crisis
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
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
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
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,
Than Governing This is an extra. Free. Posted this morning because Trump’s corruption didn’t cross the line—it erased it. Waiting would be dishonest. So it goes out now. Paul Krugman used the word "treason" this morning. Not as a rhetorical flourish. As a description of
The FBI has a new label for something that doesn’t have a flag, doesn’t have a manifesto worth reading, and doesn’t want anything you could negotiate over. They’re calling it nihilistic violent extremism. The name is clunky in the way government names always are, but the
A Confession in Numbers Alec Smith was twenty-six years old and three hundred dollars short of his insulin. He’d been a restaurant manager in Minneapolis, making $35,000 a year—too much to qualify for Medicaid, not enough to cover the $1,300 a month his body required to
You Still Don't Believe Her. Charis Kubrin has spent twenty years doing the work. Not punditry. Not talking points. Research—peer-reviewed, replicated, published across seventeen papers and two books. The finding never changed: immigration doesn't push crime up. It may push it down. In June, Sweden&
Sorry I'm late. Yesterday was Key West. If you've never done the drive down the Keys, it starts to feel like the ocean is closing in around you, which it is. Strip of road, water on both sides, and eventually the end of the country. We&
How Jeffrey Epstein Survived Decades of Institutional Failure The press writes Jeffrey Epstein as a dark magician who appeared from nowhere, bought half the ruling class, and carried his secrets to the grave. That version is dramatic. It is also too easy. It lets institutions off the hook. The real
The war started on a Saturday morning, the way the worst ones usually do. Trump announced it on Truth Social — a platform he owns a controlling stake in, worth about $1.2 billion — not in a televised address to the nation, not before Congress, but as a digital dispatch on
Hillary Clinton’s Opening Statement: What She Said Hillary Clinton said congressional investigations are too often “partisan political theater.” “The Committee justified its subpoena to me based on its assumption that I have information regarding the investigations into the criminal activities of Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell. Let me be
