Weekend Reading
What fresh hell is this? #Incompetence #Corruption
“As Elon Musk became one of Donald J. Trump’s closest allies last year, leading raucous rallies and donating about $275 million to help him win the presidency, he was also using drugs far more intensely than previously known, according to people familiar with his activities. Mr. Musk’s drug consumption went well beyond occasional use. He told people he was taking so much ketamine, a powerful anesthetic, that it was affecting his bladder, a known effect of chronic use. He took Ecstasy and psychedelic mushrooms. And he traveled with a daily medication box that held about 20 pills, including ones with the markings of the stimulant Adderall, according to a photo of the box and people who have seen it. It is unclear whether Mr. Musk, 53, was taking drugs when he became a fixture at the White House this year and was handed the power to slash the federal bureaucracy. But he has exhibited erratic behavior, insulting cabinet members, gesturing like a Nazi and garbling his answers in a staged interview. At the same time, Mr. Musk’s family life has grown increasingly tumultuous as he has negotiated overlapping romantic relationships and private legal battles involving his growing brood of children, according to documents and interviews … One of his former partners, Claire Boucher, the musician known as Grimes, has been fighting with Mr. Musk over their 5-year-old son, known as X. Mr. Musk is extremely attached to the boy, taking him to the Oval Office and high-profile gatherings that are broadcast around the world. Ms. Boucher has privately complained that the appearances violate a custody settlement in which she and Mr. Musk agreed to try to keep their children out of the public eye, according to people familiar with her concerns and the provision, which has not been previously reported. She has told people that she worries about the boy’s safety, and that frequent travel and sleep deprivation are harming his health. Another mother, the right-leaning writer Ashley St. Clair, revealed in February that she had a secret relationship with Mr. Musk and had given birth to his 14th known child. Mr. Musk offered her a large settlement to keep his paternity concealed, but she refused.” (Kirsten Grind and Megan Twohey/ NYT)
“Putin has, so far, successfully strung the American president along without any negative impacts. While Trump has acknowledged this might be the case on a couple of occasions, including his comments in Washington DC in the past 48 hours (read the full report on this here), he is yet to actually take any action against Russia. Indeed, in the wake of his last phone call with Putin, which I examined in this article, Trump appeared to give up on trying to negotiate peace in Ukraine and accepted that Putin did not want the war to end. After those comments by Trump last week, Putin may have believed that he had been freed of any obligation to moderate his behaviour to placate Trump. Putin then stepped up his drone and missile attacks on Ukraine. In a devastating three-night blitz against Ukrainian cities, Putin unleashed the largest aerial onslaught against Ukraine since the beginning of the 2022 full-scale invasion.” (Mick Ryan/Futura Doctrina)
“When Abimbola Ogundairo saw a pretty wooden map she thought would be great decor for her walls, she did something most regular buyers wouldn’t think of: She messaged the manufacturers with a simple, yet charged question. ‘Which map projection did you use?’ she asked, referring to the method of representing maps on a flat plane. The sellers never responded, but Ogundairo suspected they used a problematic projection. Discouraged, she refused to place an order. Ogundairo’s obsession with map projections is not random. The 28-year-old is leading an African-led campaign to get more of global institutions and schools to immediately stop using the Mercator Map projection – the most common version of the world map that is generally recognised – because it shrinks Africa, and much of the Global South, while disproportionately enlarging the rich and powerful regions of the world. Greenland, for example, is shown to be relatively the same size as Africa, but, in reality, can fit in the continent 14 times over. Europe, portrayed as bigger than South America, is actually half its size.” (Shola Lowal/Al Jazeera)
“When Javier Selgas, the CEO of Freight Technologies, Inc., or Fr8Tech, a publicly traded trucking logistics firm, was thinking about how he might influence policy in President Donald Trump’s second administration, he landed on a novel mechanism: buying $20 million worth of $TRUMP tokens, the cryptocurrency meme coin (colloquially known as a ‘shitcoin’) Trump had released the day before inauguration weekend. ‘We believe that the addition of the Official Trump tokens are an excellent way to diversify our crypto treasury, and also an effective way to advocate for fair, balanced, and free trade between Mexico and the US,’ said Selgas in a press release. The company also disclosed the purchase in Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filings, noting that it took out $20 million in debt to buy the tokens, whose value can fluctuate wildly. (In a stricter economic sense, meme coins like $TRUMP are considered to have no inherent value, their price propped up by hype, the hopeful delusions of speculators, and market manipulation. So in that sense, Fr8Tech was borrowing $20 million for the financial equivalent of air.) But the motives of using corporate treasuries and borrowing capacity for a shitcoin were perfectly clear. Twenty million dollars may be enough to vault Selgas to the top of the leaderboard of owners of $TRUMP, which would land him an audience with the president, who recently announced that the top 220 on the leaderboard would be invited to a presidential dinner.” (Jacob Silverman/TAP)
“Trump himself, as is often the case, was embarrassingly direct about why he had sold out Musk. ‘We have to get a lot of votes, we can’t be cutting—we need to get a lot of support,’ he told reporters in the White House on Wednesday when asked specifically about the comment from Musk. Revealingly, Trump never even mentioned Musk’s name. Watching Trump casually brush off the sidekick who stuck to him like glue for most of the Administration’s first few months, I couldn’t help but think of Reince Priebus, the first-term White House chief of staff, who was dumped via tweet while deboarding Air Force One and left on the tarmac of Joint Base Andrews as Trump’s motorcade roared off without him. The truth is that Trump can hardly afford one of those messy divorces at which both he and Musk excel; he still needs Musk, who has talked of spending another hundred million dollars of his fortune to help pro-Trump groups before next year’s midterm elections. The oligarch may have left the building, but it’s not clear the President can afford to live without him. I was in Madison Square Garden last October when Musk, during an election rally for Trump, claimed that he would slash an incredible two trillion dollars, at least, from the U.S. budget—a remarkable bit of bravado that got less attention than the rally’s headline-making racism and its Trump-as-Dear-Leader vibe. Later, Musk dialled his ambitions back to cutting a cool trillion dollars. Of course, that was never going to happen, either, as anyone who’d ever spent a minute in Washington could have told Musk, had he cared to listen. For all of Musk’s breathless early claims of ‘revolution,’ the final tally of his efforts appears to have been somewhere around a hundred and fifty billion dollars. And even that is unlikely to stand.” (Susan Glasser/TNY)
“On hallowed military ground, Stars and Stripes whipping in the upstate New York breeze, an old man in a red hat toddled on stage and shared some wisdom. ‘He ended up getting a divorce, found a new wife. Could you say a trophy wife? I guess we can say a trophy wife,’ El Presidente said, referring, non sequitur, to the late New York real estate developer Bill Levitt. ‘But that doesn’t work out too well, I must tell you, a lot of trophy wives, it doesn’t work.’ Trump emitted this ramble to a West Point student body that is about 21 percent female. Would “trophy wife” be on their list of career goals yet? Maybe! God only knows what they think their job prospects are in a military currently presided over by an accused roofie rapist, who is on record speaking against women in the military, and an administration that sacked top female military leaders as its first order of trolling-the-libs business. The West Point trophy wife riff was a tangent off another tangent – about the U.S. military’s job being not to ‘host drag shows,’ but to ‘dominate any foe, anytime, anyplace.’ There is a certain logic to Trump’s tangents sometimes. Trophy wife. Goals. For both MAGA genders. The transactional relationship ascendant. Everyone has a price. Sugardaddies.com. Young beauty attached to the arm of a rich, powerful old man, pampered in exchange for being value-added in business and politics, submitting occasionally to the desiccated paw.” (Nina Burleigh/American Freakshow)
“In the heart of Damascus — a city that has withstood siege, sorrow, darkness, and time itself — I met with Syria’s newly elected president, Ahmed al-Sharaa. Our conversation unfolded in the grandeur of Assad’s former palace, now renamed the People’s Palace — a striking contrast to the modest buildings around it. Damascus is the oldest living city, where history whispers from every wall. It was a fitting setting for a dialogue not about power, but about rebuilding, reconciliation, and the burden of leading a nation long broken. ‘We are not starting from zero,’ he told me. ‘We are starting from the depths.’ President Sharaa, who assumed office following the fall of Bashar al-Assad, carries himself with quiet conviction. He is soft-spoken, but every word lands with deliberation. There is no triumph in his voice — only urgency. ‘We have inherited more than ruins,’ he said. ‘We’ve inherited trauma, mistrust, and fatigue. But we have also inherited hope. Fragile, yes — but real.’ For decades, Syria was ruled by a regime that confused loyalty with silence, coexistence with hate, and stability with suppression. The Assad dynasty — first Hafez and then Bashar — ruled with an iron grip, using fear and executions to cement control, while the country’s institutions withered and dissent turned deadly. Sharaa is clear-eyed about the legacy he inherits. ‘It would be dishonest to speak of a clean slate,’ he said. ‘The past is present — in the eyes of every person, on every street, in every family. But our duty now is not to repeat it. Not even as a softer version. We must create something entirely new.’ Sharaa’s early moves have been cautious, yet deeply symbolic.” (Jonathan Bass/Jewish journal)
“The biggest failure of the last administration — and arguably the primary reason that voters ‘threw the bums out’ and put Trump in office — was the cost of housing. The price of a house jumped by about 50% during Biden’s term, and spiking interest rates meant that the effective cost of buying a home more than doubled. Rents skyrocketed as well, jumping more than 26% over those four years. Since owning a home is an iconic part of what it means to be an American, the fact that this milestone has become woefully out of reach to the current generation of Americans has had a massively disillusioning effect on our society. Against this background, it’s not surprising that, since the collapse of the Democratic Party in the 2024 elections, a bitter fight has broken out among Democratic insiders about — you guessed it — housing policy. New York Times podcaster Ezra Klein and The Atlantic writer Derek Thompson have led the debate, making a series of claims about housing policy in their new book Abundance and during its release tour this past Spring. They observed that construction in Texas is cheaper than in California, and that several blue states have particularly bad housing shortages. Based on that, they concluded that interest-group liberalism must inherently cause housing production (and the building of things generally) to sputter and stagnate. Government bureaucracy, labor and environmental constraints, local zoning and other rules supported by homeowners, they posit, are what is fettering the housing supply and raising housing costs in America — fueling the social and economic malaise we’re living in. But is this argument correct?? (Basel Muharash/The Big Newsletter)
“Defense Secretary and erstwhile Fox News personality Pete Hegseth has been putting the screws to mainstream media almost from the day he took over. So, for example, the department held only one formal press briefing in the first hundred days of this Trump term. Meanwhile, news organizations like Politico, the New York Times, and NPR have been ordered to give up Pentagon office space to make room for sycophantic outlets like One America News and Breitbart. Last week, Hegseth prohibited reporters from walking freely through most parts of the Pentagon without an approved escort. So perhaps it wasn’t that much of a surprise when the Pentagon apparently sought to block CNN’s Haley Britzky from serving as the TV pool reporter for Hegseth’s Singapore trip this week. No reasons were provided, though she had recently stirred the ire of a top Hegseth ally by tweeting out her Signal contact information after the Defense Department tried to crack down on leaks. But there was a surprise waiting for us—and it’s in how Britzky’s fellow Pentagon reporters responded. According to media scoopmeister Oliver Darcy, those journalists told the Defense Department that they’d skip the trip if Britzky wasn’t restored to her pool role. ‘The Pentagon relented,’ Darcy noted. ‘Britzky will travel with Hegseth as originally planned.’” (Bill Grueskin/CJR)
“Editor: How did you first come into contact with Hannah Arendt? Renata Adler: I was fairly new at the New Yorker. In fact, I was very new at the New Yorker. The pieces on Eichmann’s trial had just come out in the magazine … Editor: Did you disagree about the substance of them? Adler: No, I trusted her completely. Editor: Then what was wrong with them? Adler: There was perhaps an element of snobbery to them, which I think she never was quite aware of. An edge of contempt. I loved her dearly, I admired her enormously. But I think the ‘banality of evil’ – although I can understand why she used the phrase – it isn’t right. It isn’t right. ‘Banality’ is a strange word to use. It’s an intellectually strange word to use, no? It really trivializes something. There could have been another way to express it, I’m sure. Editor: Even if ‘banality’ is pejorative, it might have had a different inflection in her ears, no? It was a word that she would have learned in a German gymnasium. The ‘Banausos’ – from which ‘banality’ derives – were the manual laborers of Ancient Greece. Couldn’t it have had a more clinical meaning for her? Adler: But it’s trivializing and dismissive in English. In the way people used to use the word ‘middle class’. But I think I can understand why she used it. Because she was also writing against the glamorization of evil. There’s a long history of romanticizing evil. No matter whose devil it is, no matter where evil is depicted: there’s something quite elegant about it. You don’t get a devil who’s a pudgy fat boy. So in another way Hannah’s choice of words is exactly right. Exactly what she wanted to do was deglamorize evil. Even now, even again, the devil is not a glamorous character. It’s not something with a wonderful tail.” (Renata Adler/GRANTA)
“For years, members of the Russian cybercrime cartel Trickbot unleashed a relentless hacking spree on the world. The group attacked thousands of victims, including businesses, schools, and hospitals. ‘Fuck clinics in the usa this week,’ one member wrote in internal Trickbot messages in 2020 about a list of 428 hospitals to target. Orchestrated by an enigmatic leader using the online moniker ‘Stern,’ the group of around 100 cybercriminals stole hundreds of millions of dollars over the course of roughly six years. Despite a wave of law enforcement disruptions and a damaging leak of more than 60,000 internal chat messages from Trickbot and the closely associated counterpart group Conti, the identity of Stern has remained a mystery. Last week, though, Germany’s federal police agency, the Bundeskriminalamt or BKA, and local prosecutors alleged that Stern’s real-world name is Vitaly Nikolaevich Kovalev, a 36-year-old, 5’11” Russian man who cops believe is in his home country and thus shielded from potential extradition. A recently issued Interpol red notice says that Kovalev is wanted by Germany for allegedly being the ‘ringleader’ of a ‘criminal organisation.’ ‘Stern’s naming is a significant event that bridges gaps in our understanding of Trickbot—one of the most notorious transnational cybercriminal groups to ever exist,’ says Alexander Leslie, a threat intelligence analyst at the security firm Recorded Future. ‘As Trickbot's ‘big boss’ and one of the most noteworthy figures in the Russian cybercriminal underground, Stern remained an elusive character, and his real name was taboo for years.’ Stern has notably seemed to be absent from multiple rounds of Western sanctions and indictments in recent years calling out alleged Trickbot and Conti members. Leslie and other researchers have long speculated to WIRED that global law enforcement may have strategically withheld Stern’s alleged identity as part of ongoing investigations.” (Matt Burgess and Lily Hay Newman/WIRED)
“Detroit’s population grew in 2024 for the second year in a row. This is a remarkable comeback after decades of population decline in the Motor City. What explains the turnaround? One factor may be Detroit’s efforts to attract and settle immigrants. These efforts continue despite a dramatic national shift in tone toward new arrivals. This includes executive orders from the second Trump administration targeting immigrant communities, international students and their universities, and cities in which immigrants live. We study urban geography and immigrant integration. Despite these federal policy shifts, our own research and that of others has found that local leaders in cities across the U.S. are actively working to bring immigrants in and help them become part of local communities, generally for economic reasons. Our recent publications on immigrant integration and immigrant community engagement show how and why cities adapt to changes in their population and economies. Detroit and other former immigrant gateway metro areas such as Buffalo, New York; Cleveland, Ohio; Milwaukee, Wisconsin; Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; and St. Louis, Missouri experienced significant immigration in the early 20th century. These population booms were followed by a period of decline in immigration numbers.” (Paul N. McDaniel and Darlene Xiomara Rodriguez/The Conversation)