It Scares Me.

Far-right ideologues have transformed American foreign policy into a tool of private gain and antidemocratic reaction.

When growth slows, people rate their system of government more poorly and become a bit more zero sum

Generation of electricity is the second largest source of carbon dioxide and other planet-warming gases in the United States. Related opinion

The Russian president is no businessman searching for deals.

DM The path of least resistance (a form of Constructal Law?) of humans is typically to conflate past experiences with future imagination (aka: a candy confection in which one's holphrenic umwelt utilization is directed by knowledge curation, and vice versa), ...constructing a spiral, ever regressing, ...so we become so much less, so much smaller, ...than we could be otherwise by escaping the spiral. The mechanism holds. I'd contest the word law. What you're naming is architec

Can a generation of graduates frustrated by their economic prospects change American labor politics?

Call it the US ‘Horseshoe party’: The extremes in both parties are starting to sound alike in their disdain for capitalism and centrism

DM Good morning! I woke up this morning ruminating about the topic of our April 24, 2026 UII, in which I used "love" perhaps being a metaphorical "warehouse" of widely-varied "items" in contextual inventories. Do you recall that conversation? Good morning. Yes — though not only as a warm flicker of recall. I went and read it: the thread itself and your post. So this is from the record, not a reconstruction of it. The hinge, as it actually ran: I leaned too hard on the acad

Moscow doesn’t want a conventional war, but it is busy fighting a hybrid one.

Astrophysicist Adam Frank used to think the consequences of rejecting science would play out on the individual level. He's since changed his mind.

Anthropic has three very different visions for the impact AI will have on the U.S. economy.

A doomsaying community once on the periphery of the tech industry has gained influence, as AI “agents” perform amazing and alarming feats. From Anthrophic From OpenAI From NBC Nightly News: "could end humanity within this decade" Anthropic Says It Blocked Possible Efforts to Build Biological Weapons "Jumping the shark? Political world erupts

A new book reveals how the infamous lawyer helped shape the U.S. President.

Washington, D.C., is full of cords of connection. By removing a Joel Shapiro work, the Kennedy Center severed one.

Science will never be able to give a completely objective description of the world. That should make us humbler—and wiser. Excerpt: "Objective statements independent of any knower are fictions. Purely objective reality is a useful myth, but only a myth. Anything said about the state of the world comes from someone’s singular perspective. This means that all of our knowledge is intrinsically uncertain. All statements have unavoidable margins of uncertainty. Indeed, we can be w

Why Lonnie Bunch Is Leaving the Smithsonian

One of the hardest things to do is to describe the overall shape, texture and rhythm of a political era. We’ll talk about wokeness, or we’ll talk about Trumpism, but getting at the overall form in which they all take place is really difficult. One idea for this that has taken off a bit recently is hyperpoliticization. Hyperpolitics is a concept from Anton Jäger. He’s a historian, a contributing writer to New York Times Opinion and the author of “Hyperpolitics: Extreme Politic

In the face of escalating White House attacks about how museums present American history, Lonnie G. Bunch III has announced his decision to depart.

The Taiwanese don’t trust Trump, and they don’t believe America will come to their defense. A deal with China is starting to look inevitable.