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I loved Russell Shorto’s The Island at the Center of the World so I am looking forward to reading his upcoming Taking Manhattan: The Extraordinary Events That Created New York and Shaped America.

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Is Social Media Doing You Dirty? Apply the CUE Test.
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Some Wild Ice Skating
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Kendrick Lamar's Super Bowl Halftime Show. Kendrick said, "The revolution 'bout to be televised. You picked the right time but the wrong...
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One of the attributes of the modern condition is an inability to be bored. "In one study, nearly half of participants left alone for 15...
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This is a great thread on how an ordinary person stepped up to help her community during a crisis (her kids' school burned down in the...
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Federal software contractor Dan Hon (who's worked with HHS, Head Start, Medicaid/Medicare, DOD) has a great & informative thread about...
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A Programming Note
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"The Oligarchs Who Came to Regret Supporting Hitler"
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Doechii's Tiny Desk Concert
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Extinction Burst Explains MAGA Voters' Racist Anger
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The Musk staffer who broke into the Treasury Dept system has quit after the discovery of racist Twitter posts (gift link): advocating...
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"The Government's Computing Experts Say They Are Terrified"
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Civil Servants Are Not America’s Enemies. “Washington created the modern civil service to make the government efficient in the first place, ending a patronage system wracked with graft and incompetence.”


Unsurprising: a recent study of 32M tweets from politicians from 27 countries shows that “far-right populists [are] much more likely than the left to spread fake news” and “amplifying misinformation is now part of radical right strategy”.


Is Social Media Doing You Dirty? Apply the CUE Test.

In a recent episode of the Uncanny Valley podcast about quitting social media, Lauren Goode talked about a framework she applies to see if the time she’s spending on social media is serving her well. From the transcript:

I have been toying with this idea of a framework for a while as I’ve thought about social media and how to manage it and how I actually really would love to get off social media. I came up with this acronym, CUE: community, utility and education. Bear with me here. The C, community, is what you just described, Mike.

Here is what Mike described:

I really feel like the community aspect is the thing that makes it healthy. When I know that I can open an app and find all of my people, that makes me happy and it makes me want to open the app. I think probably the best illustration of that is the experience that we’ve all had where you’re live tweeting something, right? You’re watching a television show, or you’re watching some event happening and you have your phone in your hand and you are posting and you’re replying to other people’s posts, and you’re faving things and you’re reposting re-xing, re-skeeting things, and it adds to the experience. It enhances the experience. It makes it feel like you’re hanging out with your friends while you’re doing this thing together, even if you’re all alone. To me, that’s a good, healthy thing that social media can provide.

Ok, back to CUE:

Utility, it could be something like messaging, which is also a part of community too, but it could be something kind of simple like you’re messaging to get an address or you’re checking the weather, that’s a utility, right? Then there’s education. You’re actually using the apps to learn something real and true and valid that you would not have learned otherwise. I think once you get into the, “I’m not using this as a utility or for education, it’s not serving me in any way, it’s not a tool, it’s not building community, it’s fraying community, and I’m just doom scrolling,” then you’re outside of the CUE. You need to log off.

I like this framework, but I feel like there’s something missing. Another E for entertainment? It’s OK to log on to Instagram to watch skateboard tricks and capybara soaking in citrus-infused baths and people finally succeeding in throwing a CD into a thin slot from across the room. But when it stops being entertaining and starts to feel compulsive, like gambling or pressing a button to get a treat, then it’s time to stop.

Whether it’s CUE or CUEE, the important part is thinking about your social media use, how it makes you feel (both in the moment and afterwards), what needs or desires it’s filling in your life, and what it might be taking away from you (or taking you away from). And then, hopefully, taking steps so that social media sparks joy instead of inciting dread or dispensing numbness.

Personally, I’ve scaled way back on my Instagram usage in the past month (focusing mainly on the community aspect when I do use it) and have stopped using Facebook & Threads. I’ve been using Bluesky a ton for work…it’s been essential in tracking what’s going on and who’s doing the best reporting and contextualization on the coup.

What’s your relationship to social media like these days?

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Democracy is Crumbling. Is Anybody Doing Anything? Sherrilyn Ifill has a list of what people are doing to counter the coup and more importantly, what you can do. I’m working on this one: “Make sure you have and can share good information”.


Five Former Treasury Secretaries: Our Democracy Is Under Siege. “[We’re writing] this piece because we are alarmed about the risks of arbitrary & capricious political control of federal payments, which would be unlawful & corrosive to our democracy.”


Voting for the Mayor Who Promised to Blow Up the City Doesn’t Mean I Approve of the Mayor Blowing Up the City. “I just wanted him to fix the old bowling alley like he promised in passing once.”


How People & Institutions in Budding Autocracies Obey in Advance

In a piece called The Chilling Consequences of Going Along With Trump, Russian exile M. Gessen outlines the five different types of arguments used by people & institutions when they engage in “anticipatory obedience” (aka, obeying in advance). For example:

The second argument is the higher-purpose argument, which is a close cousin of collective hostage-taking. In 2012, during the winter when more than 150,000 Russians protested against rigged elections and Putin’s intention to assume the presidency for a third term, a popular actress, Chulpan Khamatova, broke ranks with the liberal intelligentsia and came out in support of Putin. Khamatova had co-founded an organization that helped children with cancer. She faced some criticism but said, “If it meant that another hospital was built, I would do the same thing again.” Her dignity was, after all, a small price to pay for saving children’s lives.

I suspect that some American hospital administrators who are discontinuing trans care for young people are using similar logic: To serve their patients, they must protect their federal funding — even if this means that they stop serving another group of patients.


One of the attributes of the modern condition is an inability to be bored. “In one study, nearly half of participants left alone for 15 minutes with no stimulation chose to have an electric shock.” !!!

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From Greg Storey, a list of “ways to take in information without getting pulled under”. Including the Control Test: “Is this within my control? If yes, what’s my next step? If no, how do I adjust to move forward anyway?”

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“The private companies in control of social-media networks possess an unprecedented ability to manipulate and control the populace, to keep them in a kind of algorithmic cage divorced from reality.”


It’s a Coup, But It’s Not Just Musk’s Coup

This piece at The Verge from Elizabeth Lopatto is a great recap of Elon Musk’s coordinated attack on the infrastructure of the US federal government. I particularly appreciate the dozens of links throughout the piece that provide context for the text, a demonstration of the powerful utility of hypertext.

But I do have a criticism and I think it’s an important one: this is not solely Elon Musk’s coup. Here’s the lede:

Almost 250 years after the Declaration of Independence, America has gotten herself a new king. His name is Elon Musk.

“Wait a minute,” you may be saying. “What about President Donald Trump?” Trump ran, much like Silvio Berlusconi before him, primarily to avoid prosecutions. He has never liked being president and he has already gotten what he wants. He’s not the power center. Musk is.

Consequently I will not be bothering with whatever statements Katie Miller of DOGE and White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt are putting out. We all have eyes; we can see what is going on. Musk has taken over the civilian government. This is a billionaire pulling a heist on the entire nation.

The Verge is not alone in asserting this — Carole Cadwalladr’s latest piece is almost entirely about Musk’s actions. While I agree that Musk is the sharp end of the spear and what he’s doing (and has already done) is of unprecedentedly massive concern, this single villain view of the coup is incomplete, for two main reasons:

  1. The executive branch is fully participating in the coup. Musk is acting on behalf of Trump and with his public approval. This cover matters, even if Trump isn’t actively directing what Musk is doing (he surely isn’t), even if Trump doesn’t actually know what exactly Musk is up to and why (he probably doesn’t), and whether Musk’s and Trump’s agendas overlap (only partially).

    Additionally, through his executive orders, Trump is also attempting to seize governmental power that doesn’t reside in the office of the president. The data & systems that Musk now has access to will be useful to Trump in executing these power seizures. The chaos Musk is creating will also be useful in distracting from Trump’s own authoritarian objectives.

  2. In standing by and allowing Trump & Musk to seize power that is not constitutionally theirs, the Republican-controlled Congress is fully participating in the coup. Most of the power being grabbed here is that of Congress…and they are just letting it happen.

Let me put it this way: let’s say this afternoon Elon Musk is somehow stopped, fired, thrown out of the country, divested of all his companies. The coup would continue. Perhaps not as vigorously as before, but it would continue because the executive branch and Congress are fully on board. It’s important that we don’t lose sight of this larger picture.


This is a great thread on how an ordinary person stepped up to help her community during a crisis (her kids’ school burned down in the recent LA fires).

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The Power of Chaos

The events of the last few weeks reminded me of this succinct summary of Timothy Ryback’s book, Takeover: Hitler’s Final Rise to Power fron Adam Gopnik in the New Yorker:

Ryback details, week by week, day by day, and sometimes hour by hour, how a country with a functional, if flawed, democratic machinery handed absolute power over to someone who could never claim a majority in an actual election and whom the entire conservative political class regarded as a chaotic clown with a violent following. Ryback shows how major players thought they could find some ulterior advantage in managing him. Each was sure that, after the passing of a brief storm cloud, so obviously overloaded that it had to expend itself, they would emerge in possession of power. The corporate bosses thought that, if you looked past the strutting and the performative antisemitism, you had someone who would protect your money. Communist ideologues thought that, if you peered deeply enough into the strutting and the performative antisemitism, you could spy the pattern of a popular revolution. The decent right thought that he was too obviously deranged to remain in power long, and the decent left, tempered by earlier fights against different enemies, thought that, if they forcibly stuck to the rule of law, then the law would somehow by itself entrap a lawless leader. In a now familiar paradox, the rational forces stuck to magical thinking, while the irrational ones were more logical, parsing the brute equations of power. And so the storm never passed. In a way, it still has not.


Kendrick Lamar’s Super Bowl Halftime Show. Kendrick said, “The revolution ‘bout to be televised. You picked the right time but the wrong guy.” — with the wrong guy sitting in the audience.

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Judith Butler: “Once you decide that a single vulnerable minority can be sacrificed, you’re operating within a fascist logic, because that means there might be a second one you’re willing to sacrifice, and a third, a fourth, and then what happens?”


Some Wild Ice Skating

When Fairlee, Vermont’s Lake Morey freezes over in the winter, a 4-5 mile loop is cleared by a local resort for wild ice skating. I was able to get out on the ice with my family for a couple hours on Friday; it was great fun, and I’m looking forward to going again soon.

a frozen path on a snowy lake

lake ice with cracks and marks from ice skates

a man on a frozen path on a snowy lake

lake ice with cracks and a spiral pattern

I hope you got out this weekend and did something outside or active or new or comforting…we’re going to need to replenish our reserves in the coming weeks and months.

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Extinction Burst Explains MAGA Voters’ Racist Anger

This fantastic two-minute video, from a guy named Rich, neatly explains why the anger and frustration of Trump’s supporters has been growing over time — why the pushback on things like diversity, equity, inclusion, trans rights, and LGBTQ+ issues seems to be increasing and the hate grows more overt. It has to do with an idea called an extinction burst.

Here’s a transcript of the video:

The Trump spike in racism, sexism, and hate — it’s the emotional foundation for the entire Make America Great Again movement, that nostalgia for when life in America was simpler and paler. But as soon as we began addressing it — boom! extinction burst.

This term is why I love science so much. You can take an idea from one field, like psychology for example, and apply it to another field, like political science, and the principles still apply.

Extinction burst is actually really simple. It’s when you have a behavior and a reward, and you withdraw the reward in order to change the behavior. When you do that, usually to change an undesirable behavior, the behavior itself increases in frequency and intensity for a short period of time until ultimately the subject changes the behavior and then that behavior goes extinct.

This is like you’re at the store and you’re swiping your credit card, and it doesn’t work, and so then you swipe your credit card like 15 more times until you’re so angry you’re freaking out, and you’re about to scream an F-bomb in the middle of Toys R Us. And then you say, “I’ll just pay with cash”. Swiping is the behavior and the payment is the reward. So when the swiping doesn’t work and you don’t get the reward you need, you get madder and madder and you try it more and more until you change the behavior, which then results in the extinction of the original behavior.

Now, extinction burst at the national level is much slower, but in this case we actually know very clearly what triggered it: it was Obama’s election in 2008. Sarah Palin, the Tea Party Movement, the birther movement, and ultimately MAGA. It is a 10-year tsunami of rage in the face of inevitable extinction.

This is why Republicans are still so angry. They know they know Trump winning can’t stop it, and they know Trump in office can’t stop it — they can feel the inevitable extinction of their own terrible beliefs.

At this point, the only thing that’ll stop it is if we let up. If you stop interfering with that undesirable behavior, it will go back to normal. So no, you’re not crazy; yes, you are doing the right thing; and yes, if you persevere, the extinction burst will end.

Note that this isn’t an explanation of where the Tea Party & MAGA movements came from; many people have written about how MAGA can be understood as a reaction to Obama’s election — subsequent events like Black Lives Matter, the Me Too movement, the election of a Black woman as vice-president, the legalization of gay marriage, etc. have kept the indignities coming.

Rather, the extinction burst concept explains why the reaction seems to be getting more extreme, from QAnon to an increased number of book bans to anti-trans laws to anti-abortion laws to Elon Musk doing Nazi salutes in public to openly expressed racism by many Republican politicians to January 6th to the 2025 Coup. We are seeing behavior that 15-20 years ago would have been almost unthinkable — now it’s daily. They are swiping the card and getting madder and madder.

You can read more about extinction bursts, including some examples of extinction bursts in children:

Tantrums: A child who has learned that tantrums result in attention from their parents may initially escalate their tantrum behavior when their tantrums are no longer reinforced. This escalation is an extinction burst, as the child is attempting to regain the attention they once received.

Protesting: When a person has been reinforced by being excused from a task or activity, they may initially increase their protest behaviors, such as whining or arguing, when the reinforcement is no longer provided. This increase in protest behavior is an extinction burst.

Persistence: In some cases, individuals may persistently engage in a behavior that previously led to reinforcement, even if the reinforcement is no longer present. For example, a child who used to receive a treat for asking repeatedly may continue to ask repeatedly, hoping for the treat, even when the treat is no longer given. This persistence is an extinction burst.

And in adults:

Cell Phone Addiction: If an individual is accustomed to receiving instant gratification through social media notifications on their cell phone, they may experience an extinction burst when they attempt to reduce their screen time. They may initially intensify their checking behavior, hoping to regain the previous level of reinforcement.

Gambling: In the context of gambling, an individual who has previously experienced wins and rewards may exhibit an extinction burst if they suddenly stop winning. They may increase their gambling behavior, hoping to recreate the past reinforcement.

Smoking Cessation: When someone tries to quit smoking, they may experience an extinction burst in the form of increased cravings and even heightened smoking behavior. This burst occurs because the expected reinforcement (nicotine) is no longer being received, leading to an initial escalation in smoking behavior.

(via @karenattiah.bsky.social)

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According to Wired’s reporting, a US Treasury Threat Intelligence Analysis has called the incursion by “DOGE” staff “the single greatest insider threat risk the Bureau of the Fiscal Service has ever faced”. And it recommends suspending their access.


Doechii’s Tiny Desk Concert

Hi, friends. It’s Friday and I don’t know about you, but I think we need to unwind a little bit with this Tiny Desk Concert from Doechii. Aaron posted this back in December but it’s popped up in my feed and inbox a few times in the past few days — must be that shiny new best rap album Grammy — so I thought I’d pop it in here again.

Backed by a full band, horns and two background singers, Doechii’s performance was a masterclass in creativity. Sporting vintage academia looks, complete with matching cornrows and beads, Doechii delivers a freshly rearranged medley of cuts from ALLIGATOR BITES NEVER HEAL, tailored specifically for Tiny Desk. While hip-hop remained at the core, she truly gave us everything: a jazz arrangement of “BOOM BAP,” heavy rock vibes on “CATFISH” and a Southern praise break outro on “NISSAN ALTIMA.”

She closed her set with “Black Girl Memoir” from her debut album, Oh The Places You’ll Go. Before performing, she shared, “I wrote this song specifically for Black women. As a dark-skinned woman, there’s a very unique experience I’m trying to internalize … This is dedicated to all the beautiful Black women in the room.” While her star has been steadily on the rise since her debut, 2024 is shaping up to be the year Doechii cements herself as a household name.

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Some Actions That Are Not Protesting or Voting, including donating to a food program, volunteering your skills to local groups, joining or starting a union, and helping with disaster relief.


David Kurtz argues that we should refer to Trump’s mass removal of federal employees as purges, not as “firings” or “layoffs”. “Business terms provide a totally wrong conceptual framework for the purges underway.”


“The Government’s Computing Experts Say They Are Terrified”

Charlie Warzel and Ian Bogost from The Atlantic talked to four experienced federal-government IT professionals who have all “built, modified, or maintained the kind of technological infrastructure” that Elon Musk’s team of young hackers are attacking. They are beyond concerned about the potential consequences.

Based on what has been reported, DOGE representatives have obtained or requested access to certain systems at the U.S. Treasury, the Department of Health and Human Services, the Office of Personnel Management, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, with eyes toward others, including the Federal Aviation Administration. “This is the largest data breach and the largest IT security breach in our country’s history—at least that’s publicly known,” one contractor who has worked on classified information-security systems at numerous government agencies told us this week. “You can’t un-ring this bell. Once these DOGE guys have access to these data systems, they can ostensibly do with it what they want.”

What exactly they want is unclear. And much remains unknown about what, exactly, is happening here. The contractor emphasized that nobody yet knows which information DOGE has access to, or what it plans to do with it. Spokespeople for the White House, and Musk himself, did not respond to emailed requests for comment. Some reports have revealed the scope of DOGE’s incursions at individual agencies; still, it has been difficult to see the broader context of DOGE’s ambition.

The four experts laid out the implications of giving untrained individuals access to the technological infrastructure that controls the country. Their message is unambiguous: These are not systems you tamper with lightly. Musk and his crew could act deliberately to extract sensitive data, alter fundamental aspects of how these systems operate, or provide further access to unvetted actors. Or they may act with carelessness or incompetence, breaking the systems altogether. Given the scope of what these systems do, key government services might stop working properly, citizens could be harmed, and the damage might be difficult or impossible to undo. As one administrator for a federal agency with deep knowledge about the government’s IT operations told us, “I don’t think the public quite understands the level of danger.”

For example:

Many systems and databases in a given agency feed into others, but access to them is restricted. Employees, contractors, civil-service government workers, and political appointees have strict controls on what they can access and limited visibility into the system as a whole. This is by design, as even the most mundane government databases can contain highly sensitive personal information. A security-clearance database such as those used by the Department of Justice or the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, one contractor told us, could include information about a person’s mental-health or sexual history, as well as disclosures about any information that a foreign government could use to blackmail them.

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Trump tried to illegally fire US Federal Election Commission Chair Ellen Weintraub. She refused to leave: “There’s a legal way to replace FEC commissioners — this isn’t it.” She pledges to continue to “stir up some good trouble”.


A kid named Big Balls (with some shady stuff in his past) hacked into gov’t computer systems for Elon Musk, but “there’s little chance that he could have passed a background check for privileged access to government systems” (that he now has access to).

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Wired is reporting that the Treasury Secretary and the White House press secretary lied about “DOGE” staffer Marko Elez (who recently resigned, for being a racist (after being hired for same)) having write-access to the Treasury’s payment system code.


Outrage Fatigue Is Real. These Tips May Help. “Repeated exposure to outrage-inducing news or events can lead to emotional exhaustion. An expert who studies online outrage says there are ways to cope.”


You Can’t Post Your Way Out of Fascism. “When it comes to addressing the problems we face, no amount of posting or passive info consumption is going to substitute the hard, unsexy work of organizing.”


“In 2022, one of Peter Thiel’s favorite thinkers envisioned a second Trump Administration in which the federal government would be run by a “CEO” who was not Trump and laid out a playbook for how it might work. Elon Musk is following it.


The world has probably passed ‘peak air pollution’. “Global air pollution is now falling, and we can save many lives by accelerating this decline.”

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State Attorneys General to Sue Over Musk’s Access to Government Systems. “The president does not have the power to give away our private information to anyone he chooses, and he cannot cut federal payments approved by Congress.”


Mister Rogers on How to Talk to Kids About Distressing News Events

Mr Rogers Trolley

In 2002, Fred Rogers wrote a parenting book as a resource for caregivers of children aged two to six. One of the topics he covered was how to talk to children about tragic events in the news. Rogers begins by noting that even young children can pick up on when adults are feeling distressed:

In times of community or world-wide crisis, it’s easy to assume that young children don’t know what’s going on. But one thing’s for sure — children are very sensitive to how their parents feel. They’re keenly aware of the expressions on their parents’ faces and the tone of their voices. Children can sense when their parents are really worried, whether they’re watching the news or talking about it with others. No matter what children know about a “crisis,” it’s especially scary for children to realize that their parents are scared.

In times of crisis, kids need to feel safe:

In times of crisis, children want to know, “Who will take care of me?” They’re dependent on adults for their survival and security. They’re naturally self-centered. They need to hear very clearly that their parents are doing all they can to take care of them and to keep them safe. They also need to hear that people in the government and other grownups they don’t even know are working hard to keep them safe, too.

Parents need to step away from the news in order to be present for their kids and for their own well-being. The 2025 equivalent of limiting TV viewing would be “put down the phone”:

It’s easy to allow ourselves to get drawn into watching televised news of a crisis for hours and hours; however, exposing ourselves to so many tragedies can make us feel hopeless, insecure, and even depressed. We help our children and ourselves if we’re able to limit our own television viewing. Our children need us to spend time with them – away from the frightening images on the screen.

We need to let kids know that whatever they’re feeling is natural:

If we don’t let children know it’s okay to feel sad and scared, they may think something is wrong with them when they do feel that way. They certainly don’t need to hear all the details of what’s making us sad or scared, but if we can help them accept their own feelings as natural and normal, their feelings will be much more manageable for them.

Angry feelings are part of being human, especially when we feel powerless. One of the most important messages we can give our children is, “It’s okay to be angry, but it’s not okay to hurt ourselves or others.” Besides giving children the right to their anger, we can help them find constructive things to do with their feelings. This way, we’ll be giving them useful tools that will serve them all their life, and help them to become the worlds’ future peacemakers — the world’s future “helpers.”

And of course, we can urge kids to look for the helpers:

When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, “Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.” To this day, especially in times of “disaster,” I remember my mother’s words and I am always comforted by realizing that there are still so many helpers — so many caring people in this world.

Update: On the first anniversary of 9/11, Fred Rogers recorded this brief message about tragic events in the news. Here’s the video followed by a full transcript:

Hello, I’m Fred Rogers. Some parents wonder how to handle world news with their young children. Well, we at Family Communications have discovered that when children bring up something frightening, it’s helpful right away to ask them what they know about it. We often find that their fantasies are very different from the actual truth. What children probably need to hear most from us adults is that they can talk with us about anything and that we will do all we can to keep them safe in any scary time. I’m always glad to be your neighbor.

This was one of Rogers’ last recordings before he died in early 2003.

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A list of all the lawsuits related to Trump administration executive orders. “More than thirty lawsuits have been filed and we are trying our best to keep this page updated in real-time.”

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The Musk staffer who broke into the Treasury Dept system has quit after the discovery of racist Twitter posts (gift link): advocating repealing the Civil Rights Act, “You could not pay me to marry outside of my ethnicity”, and “Normalize Indian hate”.

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“The Oligarchs Who Came to Regret Supporting Hitler”

Historian Timothy Ryback, the author of Takeover: Hitler’s Final Rise to Power who also wrote the popular article How Hitler Dismantled a Democracy in 53 Days, has a new piece in The Atlantic about Adolf Hitler’s relationship with the rich German industrialists who helped him rise to power, many of whom subsequently “ended up in concentration camps”.

The parallels to the present political situation in the US start right in the first paragraph:

He was among the richest men in the world. He made his first fortune in heavy industry. He made his second as a media mogul. And in January 1933, in exchange for a political favor, Alfred Hugenberg provided the electoral capital that made possible Adolf Hitler’s appointment as chancellor. Before Hugenberg sealed his pact with Hitler, a close associate had warned Hugenberg that this was a deal he would come to regret: “One night you will find yourself running through the ministry gardens in your underwear trying to escape arrest.”

And from later in the piece, he describes how German businessmen participated in enslavement and murder:

For the industrialists who helped finance and supply the Hitler government, an unexpected return on their investment was slave labor. By the early 1940s, the electronics giant Siemens AG was employing more than 80,000 slave laborers. (An official Siemens history explains that although the head of the firm, Carl Friedrich von Siemens, was “a staunch advocate of democracy” who “detested the Nazi dictatorship,” he was also “responsible for ensuring the company’s well-being and continued existence.”)

These companies did this in service of the bottom line, in keeping with Milton Friedman’s doctrine of shareholder value. Friedman’s idea that the primary social responsibility of business is to increase its profits, along with the Corleone doctrine of “it’s just business”, still holds sway in boardrooms & C-suites across America, nowhere more so than in Silicon Valley. We’ll see how it works out for them.

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Business foot traffic is up within the [NYC] congestion pricing zone. “People were concerned that fewer vehicles would mean fewer people visiting the zone, and that seems to not be the case at all.” (It never is!)

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Resegregation, Coups, Orwell, and the Importance of Precise Language

Karen Attiah wrote a short opinion piece about how the nationwide assault on diversity, equity and inclusion led by conservatives is actually aimed at resegregation and how being precise in our language about what’s happening is crucial.

These facts, taken together, point to the removal of Black people from academic, corporate and government spaces: resegregation.

People are vowing to push back with their wallets — to shop at Costco and boycott Target, for example. But I believe the fight starts with language. Journalists have a role and an obligation to be precise in naming what we are facing.

Frankly, I wish the media would stop using “DEI” and “diversity hiring” altogether. Any official, including the president, who chooses to blame everything from plane crashes to wildfires on non-White, non-male people should be asked whether they believe that desegregation is to blame. Whether they believe resegregation is the answer. We need to bring back the language that describes what is actually happening.

When I write about difficult or contentious topics where I want to take great care to not be misunderstood and to be as accurate as I can be, I always think about this piece by history professor Michael Todd Landis on the language we use to talk about the Civil War & slavery.

Specifically, let us drop the word “Union” when describing the United States side of the conflagration, as in “Union troops” versus “Confederate troops.” Instead of “Union,” we should say “United States.” By employing “Union” instead of “United States,” we are indirectly supporting the Confederate view of secession wherein the nation of the United States collapsed, having been built on a “sandy foundation” (according to rebel Vice President Alexander Stephens). In reality, however, the United States never ceased to exist. The Constitution continued to operate normally; elections were held; Congress, the presidency, and the courts functioned; diplomacy was conducted; taxes were collected; crimes were punished; etc. Yes, there was a massive, murderous rebellion in at least a dozen states, but that did not mean that the United States disappeared.

Landis notes that scholar Edward Baptist also uses different language:

In his 2014 book The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (Basic Books), he rejects “plantations” (a term pregnant with false memory and romantic myths) in favor of “labor camps”; instead of “slave-owners” (which seems to legitimate and rationalize the ownership of human beings), he uses “enslavers.” Small changes with big implications. These far more accurate and appropriate terms serve his argument well, as he re-examines the role of unfree labor in the rise of the United States as an economic powerhouse and its place in the global economy. In order to tear down old myths, he eschews the old language.

German museums and public remembrances of the Holocaust use similarly precise language:

Just as important, the language they used on the displays in these places was clear and direct, at least in the English translations. It was almost never mealy-mouthed language like “this person died at Treblinka”…like they’d succumbed to natural causes or something. Instead it was “this person was murdered at Treblinka”, which is much stronger and explicitly places blame on the Nazis for these deaths.

This is why I’ve been so insistent on describing the events of January 6, 2021 as an attack on Congress and as a coup attempt:

This was not an attack on the Capitol Building. This was an attack on Congress, the United States Government, and elected members of our government. It was a coup attempt. Can you imagine what the mob in those videos would have done had they found Nancy Pelosi? Kidnapping or a hostage situation at the very least, assassination in the worst case. Saying that this was an “attack on the Capitol” is such an anodyne way of describing what happened on January 6th that it’s misleading. Words matter and we should use the correct ones when describing this consequential event.

In writing about the 2025 Coup, I’ve been careful to call it a coup because it is. I’ve been repeating words like “illegal” and “unconstitutional” because these actions attacks by Trump and Musk are just that. Our government’s computing systems have been “seized” or “broken into to” or “hacked” (illegal!) rather than “accessed” (sounds routine). In his piece yesterday, Jamelle Bouie argued for more precision in how we describe the coup:

To describe the current situation in the executive branch as merely a constitutional crisis is to understate the significance of what we’re experiencing. “Constitutional crisis” does not even begin to capture the radicalism of what is unfolding in the federal bureaucracy and of what Congress’s decision not to act may liquidate in terms of constitutional meaning.

One of the reason people get so upset at media like the NY Times and Washington Post is because the language they often use is so watered down that it’s actually not truthful. Take the initial opening paragraph to this NYT piece about Trump’s statement about wanting to ethnically cleanse Gaza:

President Trump declared on Tuesday that he would seek to permanently displace the entire Palestinian population of Gaza and take over the devastated seaside enclave as a U.S. territory, one of the most audacious ideas that any American leader has advanced in years.

(They later changed “audacious” to “brazen”.) Audacious? Brazen? Advanced? Ideas? These words all have meanings! And when you put them together, it makes Trump sound like some genius superhero statesman. And “seaside enclave”? That is technically correct but it sounds like they’re talking about fucking Montauk. This is terrible writing that fails to communicate the truth of the situation.

Here’s why this matters: imprecise and euphemistic language is the language of fascists, authoritarians, and oppressors — power-craving leaders who either don’t want people to know what they are doing or don’t want them to think too hard about the illegality or immorality of their actions. The Nazis had all kinds of euphemisms — the “Final Solution to the Jewish Question”, “protective custody”, “work-shy”, “enhanced interrogation” — to mask their mass imprisonment activities and mass murder.

In 1946, Nineteen Eighty-Four author George Orwell published an essay called Politics and the English Language in which he decried the “lack of precision” of political writing:

Each of these passages has faults of its own, but, quite apart from avoidable ugliness, two qualities are common to all of them. The first is staleness of imagery; the other is lack of precision. The writer either has a meaning and cannot express it, or he inadvertently says something else, or he is almost indifferent as to whether his words mean anything or not. This mixture of vagueness and sheer incompetence is the most marked characteristic of modern English prose, and especially of any kind of political writing. As soon as certain topics are raised, the concrete melts into the abstract and no one seems able to think of turns of speech that are not hackneyed: prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated hen-house.

And from his concluding paragraph:

…one ought to recognize that the present political chaos is connected with the decay of language, and that one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end. If you simplify your English, you are freed from the worst follies of orthodoxy. You cannot speak any of the necessary dialects, and when you make a stupid remark its stupidity will be obvious, even to yourself. Political language — and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists — is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. One cannot change this all in a moment, but one can at least change one’s own habits…

You can read Orwell’s whole essay here.

I don’t always succeed, but I try really hard to use precise, concrete language in my writing. As Attiah urges, we should want and expect our media to do the same — anything less is an abdication of their duty to their readers to tell them the truth.


McSweeney’s: Here at DOGE, We’ve Streamlined Every Aspect of America’s Collapse. “I am proud to say that in just weeks, we have used the Tesla, SpaceX, and X playbook to make America’s collapse much more efficient.”

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A huge list of trans Girl Scouts who are selling Girl Scout Cookies. “Please consider choosing a trans girl scout to get your cookies from this year — the kids are under attack this year more than ever, so lets give them some joy.”


Unsurprisingly, it would be bad if Elon Musk breaks into the computer systems of the National Nuclear Security Administration. “It has all manner of sensitive information on hand, including nuclear-weapon designs and the blueprints for reactors…”


Palate cleanser: Cabel Sasser’s review of all of the weird new snacks and cereals he found at the grocery store in 2024. There are some truly unhinged things in here, including IHOP pancake-flavor potato chips and s’mores Cup Noodle.

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From Scientific American, Avoiding Outrage Fatigue While Staying Informed. “We can take care of ourselves in an onslaught of overwhelming news.”


Timothy Snyder: Of Course It’s a Coup

Historian Timothy Snyder, author of On Tyranny, is urging people and the media to understand and acknowledge that what’s happening right now is definitely a coup.

Imagine if it had gone like this.

Ten Tesla cybertrucks, painted in camouflage colors with a giant X on each roof, drive noisily through Washington DC. Tires screech. Out jump a couple of dozen young men, dressed in red and black Devil’s Champion armored costumes. After giving Nazi salutes, they grab guns and run to one government departmental after another, calling out slogans like “all power to Supreme Leader Skibidi Hitler.”

Historically, that is what coups looked like. The center of power was a physical place. Occupying it, and driving out the people who held office, was to claim control. So if a cohort of armed men with odd symbols had stormed government buildings, Americans would have recognized that as a coup attempt.

And that sort of coup attempt would have failed.

Now imagine that, instead, the scene goes like this.

A couple dozen young men go from government office to government office, dressed in civilian clothes and armed only with zip drives. Using technical jargon and vague references to orders from on high, they gain access to the basic computer systems of the federal government. Having done so, they proceed to grant their Supreme Leader access to information and the power to start and stop all government payments.

That coup is, in fact, happening. And if we do not recognize it for what it is, it could succeed.

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Lots of people asking what they can do about the coup. Here’s a start: an updated guide from Indivisible, “a set of strategies and practical first steps” for “anyone who lives in America and is upset, scared, and determined”.

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Federal software contractor Dan Hon (who’s worked with HHS, Head Start, Medicaid/Medicare, DOD) has a great & informative thread about Musk’s seizure of the government’s computing systems.

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“Musk’s Impossible Power Grab And America’s Crisis”

This long post by Mike Brock at Techdirt does a great job in laying out the many reasons why we should be concerned about Elon Musk’s power grab. Here’s just part of the section about all of the federal laws he is breaking:

When Congress passed 18 U.S.C. § 208, they were imagining scenarios where federal officials might have access to some information that could affect their private interests. But Musk’s situation goes far beyond anything the drafters likely contemplated—he has gained access to the actual machinery of government while simultaneously running multiple companies directly affected by that machinery.

Consider what this means in practice: Through DOGE, he has access to sensitive Treasury data while running public companies whose stock prices could be affected by that information. He can see classified materials while controlling SpaceX, which competes for national security contracts. He has visibility into federal agency operations while owning a social media platform that shapes public discourse about those agencies.

The Ethics in Government Act and STOCK Act were designed to prevent federal officials from using nonpublic information for private gain. But Musk isn’t just getting occasional access to sensitive information — he’s gained unprecedented access to core government systems while maintaining control of companies worth hundreds of billions of dollars. The potential for using this access to benefit his private interests isn’t incidental — it’s systematic and structural.


Since NYC began congestion pricing, subway ridership is up, subway crime is way down, traffic fatalities are down. Also, trip times for drivers and buses are faster and bus ridership is up.

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Incredible: Nearly 96% of new cars registered in Norway in January 2025 were all-electric.

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Members of Musk’s team have tried to gain access to servers at the NOAA. Project 2025 says the agency is “‘harmful to US prosperity’ for its role in climate science”. Their data collection and capabilities would be a massive loss.

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The End of the Liberal Consensus

I really appreciate Heather Cox Richardson’s daily newsletter for providing historical context to what’s happening right now. In this morning’s letter, after summarizing the Musk/Trump attacks on our government (most of which I linked to yesterday), Richardson talks about the history of the liberal consensus, the post-WWII agreement about how government should be deployed and how that consensus is coming to an end (gradually, then suddenly).

Musk’s takeover of the U.S. government to override Congress and dictate what programs he considers worthwhile is a logical outcome of forty years of Republican rhetoric. After World War II, members of both political parties agreed that the government should regulate business, provide a basic social safety net, promote infrastructure, and protect civil rights. The idea was to use tax dollars to create national wealth. The government would hold the economic playing field level by protecting every American’s access to education, healthcare, transportation and communication, employment, and resources so that anyone could work hard and rise to prosperity.

Businessmen who opposed regulation and taxes tried to convince voters to abandon this system but had no luck. The liberal consensus—”liberal” because it used the government to protect individual freedom, and “consensus” because it enjoyed wide support—won the votes of members of both major political parties.

But those opposed to the liberal consensus gained traction after the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, decision declared segregation in the public schools unconstitutional. Three years later, in 1957, President Dwight D. Eisenhower, a Republican, sent troops to help desegregate Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. Those trying to tear apart the liberal consensus used the crisis to warn voters that the programs in place to help all Americans build the nation as they rose to prosperity were really an attempt to redistribute cash from white taxpayers to undeserving racial minorities, especially Black Americans. Such programs were, opponents insisted, a form of socialism, or even communism.

That argument worked to undermine white support for the liberal consensus. Over the years, Republican voters increasingly abandoned the idea of using tax money to help Americans build wealth.