10.29 Patrick Stewart dies at 86.
10.29 Paul Krugman: “We’ve seen this movie before. The IT boom of the late 1990s changed the world, but it also ended with many tech leaders going bankrupt because they couldn’t monetize their achievements. During the last few weeks, lenders to AI companies seem to be having a collective Wile E. Coyote moment — the point at which the character, having run off a cliff, looks down and only then, obeying the laws of cartoon physics, plunges to the ground. The financial data now clearly show that fear is spreading in the loan markets.”
10.29 Alice Huang, a Chinese executive with close ties to Nvidia CEO
Jensen Huang, passed intel directly to Beijing.
President Trump was briefed on the breach and took no action. The executive, remains employed by her company and is under surveillance.
10.28 Anne Applebaum in Conversations with William Kristol: “The new thing is that US foreign policy is not being made by diplomats. It’s not being made just by Marco Rubio. It’s being made by this group of businesspeople connected to Trump: some of the tech people who we see the most often, but also oil companies, also mineral companies, also crypto companies. And their interests are now the interests of the US. I mean, it’s always been the case that American foreign policy supports American business, but this is a little different. This is: American foreign policy supports particular businesses because they’re somehow close to the president or they’re close to the Republican Party. And that, I think, is new. So it’s not just that we’re promoting good business practice or the rule of law, which is what we’ve done for the last couple decades. We’re promoting specific people and companies. When Steve Witkoff talks about Ukraine, even when he talks about the reconstruction of Ukraine, he mentions, in front of European leaders, specific companies who he thinks should have contracts there. And that’s a real break from US policy in the past. And nobody can remember anything like it. So they’re specifically gunning for their friends to get contracts out of their decisions. What this means is that foreign policy is not about Americans. It’s not about improving anything for Americans. It’s not about the security of America or its allies. It’s not about building long-term relationships. It’s about helping our friends. I can’t speak for the nineteenth century, but in the twentieth century and twenty-first century, that’s new….Everybody now understands very well that Trump’s negotiators in Russia and Ukraine, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, are simultaneously negotiating various different business deals also with the Trump administration in which they may not personally have an interest, but people in the entourage, maybe even some of their business contacts, do. And so this is ranging from discussions of the Nord Stream pipeline, to what happens to frozen Russian assets, to the property of a Russian oil company called Lukoil. And the Trump administration, because it can decide whether the property is still sanctioned, has a role in deciding who’s going to get this property, and seems to be pushing it in the direction of Middle Eastern partners of Kushner and of others in that world.”
10.28 The Milwaukee Brewers defeat the Tampa Bay Rays 4-1, and win the World Series 4 games to 1. This was the first title in franchise history, dating to 1969.
Tom Verducci in
SI: “The Brewers
brought back a beautiful, craftsman style of baseball that the analytics, scientific-driven revolution
tried to kill. They hit the most ground balls, used the opposite field the most, used the lowest launch angle and bunted the most, all heretical to the power-loving new schoolers who preferred pulling the ball in the air and avoiding the risk of outs on the bases.”
10.28 Elke Sommer dies at 85.
10.28 Dolores Huerta dies at 96.
10.28 Barbara Barrie dies at 95.
10.27 Flavio Bolsonaro was granted a visa to enter the US after fleeing Brazil
, after he became concerned that he could face arrest following his election loss. A Brazilian Supreme Court justice yesterday ordered an investigation into alleged ties between Bolsonaro and a donor network co-founded by Vice President JD Vance.
10.26 A federal judge rules that the Justice Department unlawfully
fired Maurene Comey
10.26 Susan Saint James dies at 80.
10.26 A heckler at a Trump rally in Corinth MS: “Shove that ballroom up your fat ass!”
10.26 Heather Cox Richardson: “Today Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee released a report saying that a “growing body of evidence demonstrates that Donald Trump was an active participant in Jeffrey Epstein’s sexual abuse of young women during the mid-to-late 1990s. The DOJ and FBI are doing everything they can to keep the American people in the dark about it.” The report offered new information from Beatrice Keul, a former Miss Switzerland, who says Trump used a pageant at the Plaza Hotel as a “hunting ground” to prey on young victims and that Trump raped her there in 1993, leaving her bleeding and bruised.
10.26 Paul Krugman on Trump’s quote on gas prices: “When Trump says “We’re making a freaking fortune,” what he really means is that his policies are taking more than half a trillion dollars at an annual rate out of the pockets of ordinary Americans, and giving that money to the oil industry (which gave 88 percent of its 2024 campaign contributions to Republicans.) Some people might consider this a bad thing, but by his own account he “doesn’t give a damn.”
10.26 Anthropic publicly discloses its financials for the first time, ahead of what could be the largest-ever initial public offering. The maker of the Claude chatbot lost $80 billion in the first half of 2026 as it poured its investment funding into training new AI models and securing access to data centers to run its chatbot and the coding agents it sells to businesses. But revenue also grew at a staggering pace, from $1.16 billion in the first half of 2025 to $16.3 billion in the first half of 2026— a 14-fold increase.
10.25 Walter Koenig dies at 90.
10.25 President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva defeats Flávio Bolsonaro in Brazil.
10.25 Thomas L. Friedman in the Times: “The first Big Bang was set off by our creator 13.8 billion years ago. And the second Big Bang was just set off by us. It starts with the A.I. revolution, but it doesn’t end there at all. The only way forward is we as a species now are going to have to learn to detribalize, depolarize and detoxify ourselves at a speed, scope and scale we have never, ever had to even contemplate. And I know how hard that sounds, but I’m here to tell you: If we don’t do that, we are in for a world of hurt. Here’s why we need to pay attention to this second Big Bang: We have made ourselves godlike as a species in seven different ways. We’ve created an artificial brain greater than the creator endowed us with. We have disconnected intelligence from human biology — that is a godlike act. We’ve created a planetary nervous system where we’ve connected virtually everybody on the planet, and we can now hear one another whisper. We’re not quite as omniscient as the creator, but we’re getting there. Third, we’ve changed the climate. We are the first species to actually drive itself into a basically man-made climate era. No species has ever done that before. That is a godlike act. Fourth, we’ve created our own new galaxy. It’s called cyberspace, where we’re all connected and no one’s in charge. Fifth, we split the atom. We can now destroy the planet just as much as God did in the age of Noah, with a flood. That is godlike. Six: We’ve created deep learning, where we can now apprehend mysteries of the universe that previously were only the purview of the creator. And lastly, coming in five years, 10 years, maybe 15 years. But we’ll get there: Quantum computing, fusion energy and A.I.”
10.24 Obama: “After two years of chaos and cruelty and corruption and incompetence, the likes of which we have not seen in modern times, you get a chance to say enough’s enough.”
10.24 Obama on Trump at rally: ““He seems very focused on home renovations. He should be on HGTV. What’s with the gold? He’s got the White House looking like Saddam Hussein opened up a Cheesecake Factory.”
10.24 Trump, at a rally in Michigan, on Ohio Sen. John Husted: “I looked at his ass, and I’ve never done that with a man before. Off the record, women yes, men no. By the way I looked at one hell of a beautiful ass before: Nicki Minaj! That’s hard to miss! Stand up! That’s hard to miss!”
10.23 Susan B. Glasser in
The New Yorker: Is this, finally, the repudiation of
Donald Trump? In decades of covering American politics, I cannot think of a midterm election which has more directly posed that question about a President—never mind one where all indicators point, ever more starkly, to a straightforward answer: Yes.”
10.22 Keith Humphreys and Brent Orrell in The Atlantic: “For many men, dropping out of the workforce is not a catastrophic outcome. A century ago, men who did not work—and frequently, their wives and children as well—were in truly desperate situations and at risk for destitution, homelessness, and malnutrition. Real GDP has increased about 20-fold since then, and the federal safety net is exponentially more robust. In such a rich country, inequality notwithstanding, forgoing work incurs much less risk and hence becomes more tolerable. A further, informal safety net has expanded outside of government: Women have flooded into the workforce over the past 75 years, many of whom are now bringing home paychecks to these men. This is not to say that unemployment is congenial. Quite the opposite: It still leads to worse physical and mental health. But it is not as harsh as it once was. The more consequential factor may be what men are doing with all of the hours that they aren’t working. The economist Nicholas Eberstadt, the author of Men Without Work, made an intriguing observation about the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Time Use Survey, which provides data on Americans’ daily activities. According to a 2020 Brookings Institute report, prime-age women outside the labor force spend about six hours a day on caregiving and other unpaid work at home; their male counterparts spend fewer than three. The average man without a job devotes less than an hour to such purposes. What these men are spending time on is an unprecedented array of affordable, addictive goods and services—including an average of 5.5 hours a day watching television and movies, plus many more on other screen-based activities such as watching pornography and playing video games. One recent study found that 52 percent of men ages 18 to 49 have an online sports-betting account.”
10.22 Vivek Ramaswamy runs a campaign ad featuring his Democratic opponent Amy Acton’s estranged mother. In it, she called her daughter, who accused her stepfather of sexually abusing her at age 12, a “liar.” Erika Smith on Bloomberg: “Ramaswamy has, in essence, chosen to ally himself with the ally of an alleged pedophile. And he is doing so at a time when polling shows 75% of Americans believe the Trump administration has been protecting the wealthy men connected to the late financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.” writes. Yet Ramaswamy’s campaign, Vice President JD Vance and President Donald Trump continued to defend the ad.
10.22 Noah Feldman in NYRB: “Independent agencies were conceived in the late nineteenth century to deliver expert rational policymaking and independent judgment. In their place, we are getting personal rule by personal whim. A president who can fire anyone he hires—the fundamental principle of the unitary executive—is a president who can bend agencies to his will based on personal preference, favoritism, even overt self-enrichment. And because in 2024 the Supreme Court also insulated the president from any criminal consequences for official actions, and because impeachment is now moribund after its twin failures during Trump’s first term, there is nothing anyone can do about it. The result would be utterly fascinating if it weren’t so horrifying: a historic movement toward caudillo-like presidential power. It is occurring not in a weak democracy like Italy, a former authoritarian state like Hungary, or even a democracy like India with a tradition of near-imperial prime ministerial control, but in the United States, the political scientists’ model of supposedly balanced government. This stands in sharp contrast with the classic Weberian observation that charismatic power gives way to bureaucratized, rationalized institutional power. What we are seeing is something like the opposite: the Supreme Court is actively enabling the transformation of our neo-Madisonian constitutional model of divided government into an elected presidential dictatorship.”
10.22 Tom Skerritt dies at 93.
10.22 Dave Lee on Bloomberg:
70% of all websites in the world narrowly avoided catastrophe yesterday by installing
a patch to fend off an attack on their programming language.
10.22 Matteo Wong in The Atlantic: “The internet could be on the verge of a total meltdown. Yesterday, someone posted to a public forum that two major security flaws had been found in a programming language that undergirds the web. The language, called PHP, is used by as much as 70 percent of websites. In order to protect themselves from hackers, a number of government, hospital, and school websites across Europe went dark this morning. The organization that maintains PHP quickly confirmed it was preparing to announce two major vulnerabilities alongside patches for them. Both weaknesses, officially disclosed today, appear to have existed in PHP for more than a decade but were only just discovered with the use of AI tools. Hackers have already been detected trying to exploit them, likely with the help of AI, and implementing the fixes to address the vulnerabilities could take companies days or weeks. In the meantime, tens of millions of servers, databases, and devices are exposed. “PHP is one of the fundamental pieces of technology that supports the internet,” Sam Rubin, a senior vice president at the cybersecurity firm Palo Alto Networks, told me. As of now, the websites of the Finnish health agency, the Port of Rotterdam, the Paris police force, 4Chan, and an unknown number of others are all down while they address the PHP vulnerabilities. . . .The past 24 hours represent a tipping point. Bulking up IT departments, implementing passkeys, and using two-factor authentication remain important. But the most urgent and practical advice being given now is to retreat: Prepare to simply go offline. The NSA advised companies that cannot immediately fix the PHP vulnerability to take down affected digital services. Hospitals, water utilities, and other crucial services are all preparing for hacks by relearning to operate analog. Store your data in fewer places. We’re running out of time to prepare for the AI-hacking deluge. The dam may have already broken.”
10.22 Ron Duguay dies at 69.
10.22 Paul Krugman: “Control of Starlink must, one way or another, be taken away from Elon Musk. It’s a matter of national security: we cannot let private individuals make foreign and defense policy, and it would be totally irresponsible to leave a crucial military asset in the hands of a racist, authoritarian conspiracy theorist.”
10.22 David Frum in The Atlantic: “Medicare for All means transition to a new kind of program that needs a new kind of funding mechanism that requires a new and highly visible tax that will fall on many, many people. And if you think no Congress will ever pass that thing—which is kind of what I suspect—then when you talk about Medicare for All, you are promising something that you know you cannot deliver. One of the reasons I think that American politics has seen so much demoralization and polarization over the past 15 years is because you’ve had politicians– Trump is the worst offender, but he’s not the only offender—who promise things they know can’t happen. You’re not going to restore American manufacturing and make America great again by keeping out foreign products. You can’t pass tax cuts forever and have no spending cuts. Those things, it doesn’t work. Gravity, math—they all exist. And people, if not the candidates themselves, people around the candidates, they know they’re promising things they can’t do and Medicare for All is just such a thing.”
10.22 Metaphor of the Year! According to the Washington Post, the Pentagon houses two giants floor globes said to be used by
Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower during World War II.
Pete Hegseth wanted one for his office–and pronto. “ Ordinarily, moving historical items within the building is a deliberate process overseen by trained curators. Instead, Hegseth’s staff dispatched its own team to relocate an Eisenhower globe. They lost control of the artifact and dropped it, sending the globe crashing onto its base and impaling the fragile shell near Antarctica. . . . . The resulting gash appears to be several inches wide.” The good news: at least this crashing disaster did not impede the flow of oil.
10.20 Max Boot in The Washington Post: “What explains Trump’s bizarre affinity for Putin? . . . Zelensky had a compelling theory when he told the Financial Times last week that Trump simply has a fondness for autocrats and the uber-wealthy: “He speaks about it openly and loudly that he loves such people and he respects such people.” It hadn’t occurred to me that Trump views Putin as a fellow billionaire, but it’s true. Putin’s net worth has been estimated at $70 billion to $200 billion. Trump, who made more than $2 billion last year, no doubt respects anyone who manages to make so much money in office while clinging to power for so long. He seldom has a cross word for any dictator, while regularly berating democratic allies. Whatever the explanation, Trump’s willingness to do the bidding of a murderous despot is despicable and dangerous.”
10.19 Paul Krugman: “Trump says that he won’t order a strike [on Iran] before the midterms. But Robert Pape, author of the Substack Escalation Trap, argues that we shouldn’t believe him — that the bombs may well drop before the midterms. And while I am not a strategic expert, I believe that Pape may well be right, because his analysis of Trump’s political position is something I recognize from financial economics. You see, it’s a well-understood proposition that the owners of businesses that are on the verge of going bust often engage in destructive behavior. And Trump is about to go bankrupt — not financially (he’s made billions through corruption) but politically. So he, like a failing businessman, has strong incentives to wreak havoc…I suspect that Trump’s impending political bankruptcy will have even worse consequences than Pape suggests — and that these consequences will continue and intensify after the midterms. Freedom, wrote Kris Kristofferson, is just another word for nothing left to lose. Once the midterms are over, Trump, with nothing left to lose, will be free to be his worst self — a malignant narcissist who instinctively supports authoritarians and is preoccupied with revenge against anything and anyone that threatens his fragile grandiosity.”
10.19 Elon Musk on X: “Next year, I will give one of my SpaceX shares to every kid in America. This will be the first of many.”
10.18 Washington Post: “Alexander Hermann, a researcher at Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies, said median homes used to cost three times the median income or less in 75 of the nation’s largest 100 housing markets in 1990. Today, that’s true in only three out of 100 markets. . . .[T]he average price-to-income ratio of homes shot up in the 2000s when interest rates were low. Amid today’s high rates, it hasn’t come down. It’s much harder to afford a house with a high interest rate when the house itself is far pricier.”
10.18 Steve Rosen, in Conversation with William Kristol: “Changes have taken place which fundamentally alter the strategic position of the United States globally. For the first time ever, the United States homeland cannot be taken for granted as a secure rear area against non-nuclear attacks. We’re just used to the idea of: At home, in North America, we’re safe from a physical attack. And we’re not. And that has repercussions quite up and down the strategic food chain….We need to think about doing business in a very different way. And we haven’t gone through that kind of radical rethinking of our defense position—or defense posture—and the character of forces since the 1930s, when, for the first time, the United States really had to take into account that there was a possibility of a massive Eurasian military power that could threaten the United States.. . . In December of 2023, there was a sustained, sophisticated drone incursion over Air Combat Command at Langley Air Force Base in Virginia, where our F-22s are based. It went on for days. These were not hobbyists. In March of 2026, there was a sustained drone incursion over Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana, which is where American B-52s are home-based. The idea that people could, by very different means, introduce sophisticated precision strike weapons to neutralize the core of our strategic capabilities is no longer speculative; it’s no longer hypothetical—people are exercising this capability now. The deputy commander of the North American [Aerospace] Defense Command said two weeks ago, “The United States has no effective defenses against drones in the continental United States.”
10.18 Washington Post: “Two weeks from Election Day, Republicans face a bleak political landscape. President Donald Trump’s approval rating has fallen to a new low, and support for Democrats in the race for control of Congress is rising as inflationary pressures contribute to an acrid mood among voters, according to a Washington Post-ABC News-Ipsos poll. Trump’s approval among U.S. adults now stands at 33 percent, with 66 percent disapproving; 52 percent said they disapprove strongly. That approval rating is four percentage points lower than in July and eight points lower than at this point last year. It’s lower than at any point in his first term. Among likely voters, Trump’s approval is 38 percent, with 62 percent disapproving.”
10.17 In Paris and other cities, large scale anti-government protests against the high cost of living and inflation involving students, labor unions, farmers, and other groups turn into riots, arson, and looting. In Limoges in Central France, the roof and clock tower of the 143 year-old Hôtel de Ville collapsed after masked protesters set it on fire.
10.17 Sense and Sensibility
10.16 After five days on the job, White House Press Secretary Katie Zacharia resigns. Earlier in the day, Trump spoke to reporters about her. “We’re talking about doing something,” Trump said, adding that he told Zacharia to “reconsider” whether she “need[s] this” job. “I told her, ‘I think you’re better off being happy and I don’t think you could ever be happy in this job,'” Trump said. “I want her to have a good life. I don’t want [her] to have a life like she’s led in the last three days. She is being brutalized by the media.”
10.16 Ta-Nehisi Coates in Vanity Fair: “Donald Trump is not just the most acquisitive politician of his era, he is also the most visionary, gifted with the ability to appreciate his country’s darkest pathologies and profit from them. Perhaps more importantly, Trump understood that the inanities and shibboleths of this country’s alleged institutional guardians, its senators, lawyers, elite universities, and free press, were little more than that, and the guardrails of this liberal democracy were illusions easily dispelled by one who would dare. One such as Trump.”
10.16 “Grandpop! That’s SO inappropriate!”
10.15 Mujtaba Rahman in the Times: “The French have a phrase for it: “un engrenage,” a vicious spiral. That’s what France is in. Several crises have been long in the making; each now threatens to accelerate the others. The first is a crisis of liberal democracy. Polls suggest that the far right may take power in the presidential election next spring. The second is a crisis of fiscal mismanagement. France’s public debt has reached a record $4 trillion, with the cost of new government borrowing surging above that of Italy and Greece. The third is a crisis of youth disaffection. French students, protesting against dilapidated schools and diminished life chances, have blocked nearly half of the country’s high schools in the past few weeks. Clashing with police and bearing inspiring banners, the students have riveted the world’s attention. The protests are certainly dramatic and significant. So too is the rise of the far right. But the fiscal crisis is the most dangerous, underlying many of the country’s woes and threatening to bring it to ruin. France, truly, is on the brink.”
