Weekend Reading
“Keep passing the open windows,” The Hotel New Hampshire #Incompetence #Corruption
“From the Oval Office, Trump says, before TV cameras, ‘I have the right to do anything I want. I am the president of the United States.’ It barely registers in the news. This is just from the week we are still living through. But who, this week, has set an example of standing up? What follows are some illustrations, pointing to lessons that can give hope, guidance, and courage to the rest of us. They come from four institutions that are vital to our democracy, and in which people are fighting for that democracy’s survival. They are: The Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve, indispensable to the US role at the center of the world economy. The professional leadership of the Centers for Disease Control, doing their best to avert a public-health catastrophe. The 800-plus members of the federal judiciary who serve as judges in district courts or appeals courts, and who have nearly all stood solidly for Constitutional values. And governors of many states, doing their best to defend their people and their values.” (James Fallows/Breaking The News)
“Before Donald Trump, the idea of a diplomatic spat between Denmark and the United States would have sounded outlandish. Even more than many of its European peers, Denmark has historically placed a premium on its alliance with the United States. During the George W. Bush administration, for instance, it was one of only five West European countries to sign up for the ‘coalition of the willing’ supporting the Iraq war (along with the United Kingdom, Spain, the Netherlands, and Italy). Of those five, only Denmark and the United Kingdom actually made a military contribution that was more than symbolic. Given this history, it’s a singular achievement of Trump’s foreign policy that he’s managed the previously unthinkable: making the Danes mad. On Wednesday, the Danish foreign minister summoned Mark Stroh, the top US diplomat in Denmark, demanding answers about reports that three associates of Trump had been caught trying to foment a secessionist movement in the Danish territory of Greenland. Trump, of course,has repeatedly called for the annexation of Greenland by the United States and refuses to rule out a military invasion. But this was the first inkling that these plans were something more than bluster.” (Jeet Heer/The Nation)
“‘A.I. is starting to get better than humans at almost all intellectual tasks,’ (Dario) Amodei recently told Anderson Cooper. In an interview with Axios, he predicted that half of entry-level white-collar jobs might be ‘wiped out’ in the next one to five years. This summer, both Altman and Mark Zuckerberg, of Meta, claimed that their companies were close to developing superintelligence. Then, last week, OpenAI finally released GPT-5, which many had hoped would usher in the next significant leap in A.I. capabilities. Early reviewers found some features to like. When a popular tech YouTuber, Mrwhosetheboss, asked it to create a chess game that used Pokémon as pieces, he got a significantly better result than when he used GPT-o4-mini-high, an industry-leading coding model; he also discovered that GPT-5 could write a more effective script for his YouTube channel than GPT-4o. Mrwhosetheboss was particularly enthusiastic that GPT-5 will automatically route queries to a model suited for the task, instead of requiring users to manually pick the model they want to try. Yet he also learned that GPT-4o was clearly more successful at generating a YouTube thumbnail and a birthday-party invitation—and he had no trouble inducing GPT-5 to make up fake facts. Within hours, users began expressing disappointment with the new model on the r/ChatGPT subreddit. One post called it the ‘biggest piece of garbage even as a paid user.’ In an Ask Me Anything (A.M.A.) session, Altman and other OpenAI engineers found themselves on the defensive, addressing complaints. Marcus summarized the release as ‘overdue, overhyped and underwhelming.’ In the aftermath of GPT-5’s launch, it has become more difficult to take bombastic predictions about A.I. at face value, and the views of critics like (Gary) Marcus seem increasingly moderate.” (Cal Newport/TNY)
“The rate of informal employment in Africa is high, and basically hasn’t budged over the last 20 years. The dearth of formal sector jobs presents an existential crisis for African countries. Over 10m young Africans enter the labor force each year, but the region only creates 3m formal sector jobs. Most workers get absorbed into the informal non-agricultural sector. Fewer every year settle for farming, while many try to migrate outside of the Continent in search of jobs … One of the drivers of the recent rise in protests is young African’s deep frustration with being jobless or underemployed and trapped in stagnant economies managed by thoroughly complacent elites. If nothing changes, we should expect to see more of the same. Importantly, not all states will withstand the likely higher levels of political instability in the region due to more frequent protests (including rising populism and extra-constitutional changes of government). The claim that youth under/unemployment presents an existential crisis isn’t hyperbole. It’s the one thing that should occupy the minds of African economic policymakers all the time. How are African policymakers responding to the joblessness crisis? Besides their resignation to generalized informality, in the recent past many have emphasized both a return to agriculture and labor migration as potential fixes to Africa’s jobs problem. However, there are serious limits to this strategy. Urban areas are simply a much stronger pull for a more educated African labor force than rural farming. Consequently, the average age of African farmers is going up, while the average level of education attainment is declining.” (Ken Opalo/The Africanist Perspective)
“When I was helping produce a three part series about Ghislaine Maxwell in 2021, our team put in many hours discussing how and why she became the woman dozens of witnesses accused of heinous acts including underage solicitation, grooming, and trafficking. What kind of woman would serve up teen “nubiles” to a man who supposedly needed new girls on the daily? Why would she participate in an industrial scale sex trafficking operation? Was she pathologically inclined to assault? Was she groomed herself from childhood into the perfect tool for powerful men? We hunted down and pored over clues to her psyche. We spoke with dozens of people who knew her in New York and in the U.K. where she grew up the tenth child in a wealthy family. We studied her father, media baron Robert Maxwell, a cruel, damaged oaf and one of the most mysterious figures in Cold War intrigue, associated with Israeli, and probably American, and maybe even Russian intelligence. What we didn’t do – what no one then could do - was hear from the woman herself. Now she has spoken. In the released transcripts and audio from two days in a closed room with a Trump lawyer at a Tallahassee courthouse, she participated in a brazen feint at ‘transparency’ for the Epstein conspiracy diehards threatening the MAGA coalition. It’s a fascinating charade and some enterprising theater director could turn the transcript verbatim into an excellent off-Broadway play. Todd Blanche (one of the Epsteingate plumbers we covered here) threw softballs, and often answered Maxwell’s questions for her, while she suffered memory lapses, trashed victims, and demonstrably lied about her role and relationship with Epstein.” (Nina Burleigh/American Freakshow)
“Ethel Kennedy’s death in October at 96 was the end of a trying few years. Her health had been in decline, and she had confined herself to living full time in Hyannis, the longtime family compound on Cape Cod. In the summer of 2024, her immune system was so compromised that she couldn’t attend the wedding of her granddaughter Mariah Kennedy Cuomo, even though it was being held at her home. ‘Normally, Ethel would be a part of everything,’ one attendee said. ‘But all she could do was sit on this enclosed balcony and wave at people.’ Ethel’s son Bobby was there, too, although many of the other wedding guests weren’t in a mood to talk to him. Ethel’s relationship with her third child, named for her beloved husband, had always been tempestuous. When Bobby was a young man, she regularly threw him out of the house for drug use and other chaotic behavior; when he was 13, a coatimundi he kept as a pet attacked Ethel and sent her into premature labor with his brother Douglas. In high school, after Ethel excoriated him for getting arrested for marijuana possession in Hyannis, he packed up and drove west without telling anyone in his family where he was going, eventually selling his car and hopping freight trains. Bobby seemed to relish the chance to break away from his family and ride the rails with the other vagabonds. ‘I could be one of them,’ he said later. ‘And not be a Kennedy.’” (Reeves Weidemann/NYmag)
“The most pressing question surrounding higher education is not what school a student will attend, it’s how a family will pay for it. The average annual tuition at a private four-year college is around $40,000, and some schools, like Vanderbilt University, now cost some students a total of $100,000 per year. With the amount of student debt in the U.S. inching close to $2 trillion, the anxiety surrounding the college unaffordability crisis for both students and parents is at record levels. Turning to adult entertainment to help pay for college isn’t a new thing; Duke University student Belle Knox became a national phenomenon in 2014 for doing porn as a way to avoid student loans. But thanks to the internet, the mechanisms for capturing this type of income are changing. Whereas many students still prefer to scrounge spending money by putting in hours at the library, babysitting for a local family, or picking up shifts at a nearby restaurant, the democratization of DIY online-only porn has made adult entertainment more palatable. For Loren and some students like her, OnlyFans has become a 21st-century gold rush, a get-rich-quick scheme in the internet age that can provide relief from college’s skyrocketing cost. ‘And it’s not just school. It’s books, a computer, room and board—all those other things you need,’ says Maya Morena, who is pursuing a healthcare degree on the East Coast. ‘I pay for all of it from doing OnlyFans.’” (Ian Frisch/TownandCountry)
“On Monday, more than 190 current and former FEMA employees signed onto a public letter criticizing the agency. While most employees signed anonymously, 35 of them signed with their names attached … The letter comes after a summer of disastrous flooding across the US, which critics say has been handled poorly as the administration slow-walks responses to requests for aid from certain states. FEMA employees tell WIRED that staff attrition and policies clogging up contract approvals are weakening the agency, which is facing a hard deadline to get contracts out the door by the end of the fiscal year; these policies have already created scrutiny for the agency over its response to flooding in Texas this summer, arguably the most high-profile disaster this year. Now, as the nation heads into the most intense months of the Atlantic hurricane season, employees worry that the agency is not prepared to face another catastrophe. Jennifer Forester, a FEMA report analyst based in Texas, says that she decided to sign her name to the letter to send a signal to the agency. ‘Signing it anonymously would not have made the same point—that this is a situation dire enough to warrant risking a career, because human lives are at stake in what can, at first glance, just look like a political scuffle over political appointments and jobs,’ she tells WIRED. Forester says that she checked her email in the evening on Tuesday, half an hour before she was scheduled to leave work, and saw a ‘terse’ memo from the chief of staff of the office of the administrator putting her on paid administrative leave.” (Molly Taft/WIRED)
“In 2024, Donald Trump became the first Republican to win the national popular vote for president in 20 years. His 1.5-point victory over Kamala Harris was a percentage point smaller than George W. Bush’s 2004 victory against John Kerry. Despite performing a bit worse than Bush did 20 years ago nationally, Trump performed notably better in the Midwest—a previously purple political region that acquired a reddish tint in presidential results in the Trump years. The Midwest has long been a key region, perhaps the key region, in presidential politics. Following the Civil War, American presidential politics resembled the battle lines of that war, with a Democratic South and Republican North. Battleground states tended to be ones that were partially Southern and partially Northern in character, with Midwestern states such as Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio at the center of presidential politics. As the 20th century dawned, the Midwest’s position of importance endured. Since 1896, there have been 33 presidential elections. Each election has a ‘tipping point’ state—if one ordered all of the states from best to worst for the winner, the tipping point is the one that provides the winner with his decisive electoral vote. In 16 of the 33 elections, that state was in the Midwest. Wisconsin was the tipping point in both 2016 and 2020, while it was Pennsylvania in 2024 (this is the third time Pennsylvania, which is Midwest-adjacent, has been the tipping point since 1896).” (Kyle Kondik/Center for Politics)
“Sudan’s paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) has constructed a network of earth walls around el-Fasher to prevent anyone from escaping the city, which has now been under siege for more than 500 days. In a report published on Thursday, the Yale School of Public Health’s Humanitarian Research Lab (HRL) identified over 31km of berms that have steadily walled in the capital of North Darfur, which the RSF has had encircled since May 2024. While hundreds of thousands of civilians have escaped el-Fasher since this siege began, Fikra, a Sudanese public policy organisation, estimates that there are still about 750,000 civilians trapped in the city itself. Meanwhile, according to the United Nations, around 260,000 civilians - including 130,000 children - have no way out of Abu Shouk, the area’s main camp for internally displaced people.’We have been watching civilian patterns of life in specific areas of el-Fasher for weeks now and the signals of civilian movement are growing less and less,’ Nathaniel Raymond, executive director of the University of Yale’s Humanitarian Research Lab, told Middle East Eye.” (Oscar Rickett/Middle East Eye)
“Researchers were already expecting a gradual enrollment slowdown before the onset of COVID-19. Public school enrollment edged up only 2% between 2012 and 2019, holding near 50 million students, while the U.S. total fertility rate had slipped to 1.71 births per woman—well below the replacement level—foreshadowing a smaller school-age cohort. The pandemic turned that slow decline into a sudden shock. Studies document steep post-2020 losses in Massachusetts, Virginia, Michigan, and California. Research at the national level shows similar trends in urban and high-poverty districts, and a surge in both homeschooling and private-schooling that still leaves millions of children ‘missing’ from any formal roll. In addition to concerns around student progress, shrinking headcounts also create immediate fiscal stress because most state and federal aid flows on a per-pupil basis. District leaders have already considered adjusting school capacity, redistricting, or even closing campuses to balance budgets— steps that are often politically sensitive but considered in response to fiscal pressures. Recent evidence confirms that steeper enrollment losses measurably raise the odds of permanent closure. Enrollment shifts have not fallen evenly across student groups. Recent evidence shows that kindergarten enrollment fell most sharply for black and low-income children, whereas the smaller declines observed in later grades were concentrated among white and higher-income students already enrolled in public schools. Such patterns may heighten long-standing worries about potential re-segregation and resource inequality.” (Dylan Council,Sofoklis Goulas, and Faidra Monachou/Brookings)
“Trump’s version of mobster state capitalism also means pressuring companies into reflecting his values and those of his MAGA movement. While he has no legal authority to force companies to shutter their DEI offices and make sure they never again speak a positive word about diversity, he and his administration have simply acted as though he does, issuing statements demanding that companies comply with executive orders that have no force of law, especially over the private sector. For instance, Federal Communications Commission chair Brendan Carr — whose devotion to Trump is so idolatrous he wears a gold bust of the president on his lapel — sent letters to companies the FCC regulates demanding that they end their perfectly legal DEI policies. Verizon did so — and just hours later, got its purchase of Frontier Communications approved by the FCC. That may have been less floridly corrupt than the shakedown of Paramount, which consented to a $16 million payoff to Trump’s future ‘library’ (which we can assume will be nothing but a slush fund for him to use after he leaves office) in the hopes of securing approval for its merger with Skydance. But the result in the two cases is the same: Mergers will be approved not on the basis of antitrust law or what might be good for consumers or the economy, but on which companies have displeased or mollified Trump.” (Paul Waldman/Public Notice)
“To publish a book with Trump was definitely (Si) Newhouse’s idea. And as a recently hired senior editor at the Random House Trade Books imprint, I was designated to join Si and the imprint’s newly named publisher, Howard Kaminsky, at a meeting in Trump’s office in 1985. I thought of wrapping an epic Russian novel, Vasily Aksyonov’s ‘Generations of Winter,’ in shiny black paper with Trump’s name in gold lettering to show him how his book would look. In an hour or so, the deal was made: a $500,000 advance payment, with Schwartz receiving half. No lawyer or agent was involved. As the project progressed, Newhouse never again asked me about it. The book sold a million copies in a matter of months and was a number-one bestseller in the U.S. and in the U.K. as well. Si did join me on the receiving line at the lavish book party in December 1987 at Trump Tower. Kaminsky had been fired, so I stood next to Trump, welcoming guests. Newhouse’s only other role was to personally offer Trump $2.5 million, over lunch on Trump’s yacht anchored in the East River, for a sequel published in 1990 called ‘Surviving at the Top’. ‘The Art of the Deal’ had had returns of fewer than 10 percent of unsold copies. The return rate on the sequel, as I recall, was closer to 90 percent, a flop. So, no praise. And no regrets from Newhouse, ever.” (Peter Osnos)
“Federal and humanitarian workers have scrambled to run a mass closeout before their own termination or their project’s bankruptcy, with little guidance from leadership at USAID or the State Department. The result is that millions of dollars’ worth of equipment that the United States has already purchased is being auctioned off, likely at an extreme loss, or simply abandoned. Some USAID workers and local partners have managed to follow Plan A—that is, donating goods where they can be most useful—despite the fact that there are no longer any USAID-funded projects to hand equipment off to. (The State Department has assumed responsibility for the roughly 20 percent of USAID’s original projects that will continue.) After publication of this story, following requests for comment that went unreturned, I received an emailed statement from someone who used a State Department press inbox and repeatedly refused to identify themselves as anything other than a State Department spokesperson. This person told me that most of USAID’s grantees off-loaded property to local governments or NGOs. A worker at one NGO that operates in Myanmar told me that her colleagues donated bed nets and medical equipment to the country’s collapsed health system after the U.S. government terminated a malaria project. (She, like many other current and former USAID workers I spoke with for this article, requested anonymity out of fear of professional reprisal).” (Hana Kiros/The Atlantic)