Weekend Reading
What fresh hell is this? #Incompetence #Corruption
“As a person who covered Ghislaine Maxwell's criminal trial, and who has read through pretty much every single Jeffrey Epstein lawsuit, I find the current discourse to be in bizarro land. Of course I want answers. I have written to Maxwell in the hopes that she'd talk to me (no luck). But the idea of subpoenaing Ghislaine Maxwell for her testimony, or interviewing her in jail — how does that work? She has a live criminal appeal. It doesn't make sense that she'd jeopardize it unless she gets some kind of immunity. And if she does, how can you trust her? She has every incentive in the world to get out of her 20-year sentence. You can try to corroborate or rebut what she says based on the vast universe of evidence collected in the criminal and civil cases involving Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell. But Pam Bondi ousted half of the prosecution team. You're telling me that Todd Blanche, or the people on the House oversight committee, have familiarized themselves with all the details of her 10-year legal saga in the past week and are ready to talk to her? I don't buy it. Epstein's many victims aren't even in the loop! I want answers. But the way it's being handled, I only see it blowing up, sowing more mistrust and confusion, and, frankly, failing to get answers to the most compelling questions of the Epstein story.“ (Jacob Shamsian/X.com)
“More than half of all the photos of Epstein in the Getty archive between 1987 and 2004 seem to be with Trump or at Mar-a-Lago. People thought they were best friends. They are linked by women, or groups of women, some of whom have accused Trump and Epstein of sexual abuse. In April 2000, for example, the Mail on Sunday quoted a neighbor of Epstein’s: ‘I often see Donald Trump and there are loads of models coming and going, mostly at night.’ In late 1997, according to one report in the Daily Mirror, Trump dated and even housed a young woman introduced to him by Ghislaine Maxwell, who later went on to tell NBC that she’d been raped by and trafficked by Epstein for several years prior. Around the same time, Prince Andrew and Ghislaine Maxwell flew on Trump’s plane from London to Florida, where Randy Andy was consorting with a Boca Raton ‘sexologist’ and spotted at what the Mirror called ‘a club frequented by gays.’ Now Bondi is racing down to a Florida prison to meet personally with Epstein’s convicted procuress. The U.S. House is adjourning early to avoid further discussion of the Trump-Epstein connection. The President of the United States is calling people who believed him when he said he would reveal all of the Epstein story ‘fools.’ To borrow a phrase from one of the great Republican Masters of Disaster, there are many Unknown Unknowns in the Trump-Epstein story. This week’s Freakshow is a compilation of the Known Knowns of the 20-year friendship between Donald and Jeffrey.” (Nina Burleigh/American Freakshow)
“After Epstein’s arrest in 2019, a media narrative coalesced around the question of his strange place in the global elite: Epstein the master salesman, a man who had skillfully conned his way into the world’s most powerful circles, fooling everyone in the process. But after my travels through the book, after hearing more of the petty gossip and childish drama of the people who rule our world, I realized this was obviously incorrect. Built into the premise of Epstein the mastermind scammer is the notion that some kind of legitimate path to a legitimate global aristocracy exists. To call Epstein a grifter is to assume he circumvented some genuine meritocratic world order, where the ‘real’ virtuosos dutifully climb the ‘real’ ranks into the oligarchy, powered by nothing but their native talents. The truth is that the elite world that Epstein ascended into, the one I tapped into by way of the black book, is populated with hordes of loathsome, boring, untalented people living their bumbling, idiotic lives while just so happening to wield some share of the preposterous global bounty that he and the rest were after. For all the mystery surrounding Epstein’s fortune, its existence is hardly more inscrutable than the wealth of any of his other billionaire peers. He earned it the same way they all did, which is to say precisely not at all. This wasn’t some masterful hack into the global aristocracy. It’s what everyone does. It’s what the whole thing is. There is no scam here. It’s grifters grifting grifters all the way down.” (Leland Nally/Mother Jones, 2020)
“Archaeologists believe they have found one of the oldest burial sites in the world at a cave in Israel, where the well-preserved remains of early humans dating back some 100,000 years were carefully arranged in pits. The findings at Tinshemet Cave in central Israel, published in an academic journal earlier this year, build on previous discoveries in northern Israel and add to a growing understanding of the origins of human burial … ‘This is an amazing revolutionary innovation for our species,’ said Yossi Zaidner, one of the directors of the Tinshemet excavation and a professor of archaeology at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. ‘It’s actually the first time we are starting to use this behavior.’ …. The skeletons were discovered in pits and carefully arranged in a fetal position, which is known as a burial position, said Zaidner. Many were found with objects, such as basalt pebbles, animal remains or fragments of ochre, a reddish pigment made from iron-rich rocks. These objects, some sourced from hundreds of kilometers (miles) away, had no known practical use for daily life, so experts believe they were part of rituals meant to honor the dead … In ancient times, Israel was a bridge between Neanderthals from Europe and Homo sapiens from Africa. Archaeologists have identified other subgroups of early humans in the area, and believe the groups interacted and may have interbred. Experts have been studying the two full skeletons brought from Tinshemet for years, but it’s still unclear if they were Neanderthals, Homo sapiens, a hybrid population or another group altogether. The mix of subgroups created opportunities for different groups of early humans to exchange knowledge or express identity, said Zaidner. It’s around this time that archaeologists first see examples of early jewelry or body painting, which could be ways early humans started outwardly belonging to a certain group, drawing boundaries between ‘us’ and ‘them,’ he said. Israel Hershkovitz, a physical anthropologist at Tel Aviv University and the co-director of the Tinshemet site, said the concept of cemeteries in prehistoric life is important because it symbolizes ‘a kind of a territory.’” (Melanie Lidman/APNews)
“The Hubble Space Telescope has snapped some spooky looking photos of our solar system's newest interstellar invader on the run. The object, dubbed 3I/ATLAS, was first spotted careening through the outer limits of the Sun's domain earlier this month, and appears to be a comet. Upon closer inspection, its speed was found to be so incredible that there could be no doubt of its extrasolar origins, making it only the third detected interstellar object in history. Tantalizingly, it's hurtling straight towards our system's center, giving astronomers ample time to study this cosmic interloper which may have come from the center of our galaxy — and thus, may be older than our entire solar system.” (News Items)
“You gotta give it to Jennifer Lopez — the woman wants to work… but the question remains: does anyone want to see her work? Lopez, who had to cancel her North American tour last year due to lack of ticket sales and general interest, is now on a bizarre tour of third-tier music venues in places like Turkey, Kazakhstan, Albania, Abu Dhabi and an assorted array of hotels in Egypt. She is also trying to drum up interest in her ‘residency’ in Las Vegas — which is really a series of three shows over New Year’s, and six dates in March, as opposed to a Bruno Mars or Adele type residency where the artist performs so much he or she lives in Vegas during the run of their show.” (Paula Froelich/NewsNation)
“Amanda Darrach: I was fascinated by the symbiosis you describe between (Conde Nast publishing heir, Si) Newhouse and a young Donald Trump. Michael Grynbaum: There’s this hidden history to that. Si Newhouse actually came up with the idea for The Art of the Deal, which was the book that catapulted Trump to national fame. Newhouse was inspired by a cover story of GQ magazine in 1984, a profile of Trump that sold very well on the newsstand. At the time, Newhouse also controlled Random House, and he persuaded Trump to sign a book deal. There are these amazing photographs of the book party at Trump Tower, where Newhouse is proudly standing beside Trump with the waterfall behind them. Condé Nast was the ultimate expression of the Manhattan elite that Trump always yearned to join. He yearned for their approval. Trump appeared often in the pages of Vogue. He proposed to Melania on the red carpet at the Met Gala one year. After he was elected president in 2016, there were only two media organizations that Trump deigned to visit in person. All the rest came to Trump Tower, but Trump agreed to go to the New York Times and Condé Nast. It tells you a lot. Amanda Darrach: So how well did Condé Nast adapt when wealth stopped being as socially acceptable? Michael Grynbaum: The answer is poorly, at least for a while. There’s no question that the rise of the internet and the smartphone were real factors in the decline of print media and the decline of Condé Nast’s power. Cultural attitudes toward the wealthy shifted significantly after the 2008 financial crash. A lot of resentment and suspicion of elites rose up, and this was difficult for a company that had built itself on selling exclusivity. Condé Nast really struggled and continues to, to some degree. They’ve made strides in diversifying their workforce, in elevating people of color and voices that were otherwise excluded. But ultimately, these magazines are still about saying, ‘I know best.’” (Amanda Darrach/CJR)
“President Donald Trump’s approval rating slid further Thursday, hitting a new low during his second term of 37% among U.S. adults, according to Gallup, as he continues losing support from independent voters. Independents rated him most poorly on his handling of the budget, Ukraine and foreign trade. Trump’s standing among partisans hasn’t shifted. Gallup found that his support from Republicans has stayed steady at around 89% and his approval from Democrats remained in the single digits, falling slightly to 2% in July. Trump’s standing among partisans hasn’t shifted. Gallup found that his support from Republicans has stayed steady at around 89% and his approval from Democrats remained in the single digits, falling slightly to 2% in July. Gallup’s pollsters spoke to voters in the two weeks after Trump signed into law his signature spending bill—the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. That law included tax cuts, and increased funds for immigration enforcement, the military and U.S. fossil fuel production. It also included funding cuts to Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. Among independents, Trump’s lowest approvals came in for his handling of the federal budget, at 19%, and the war in Ukraine, at 24%. Twenty seven percent of independents approved of his handling of foreign trade and the conflict between Palestinians and Israelis. His handling of the economy found 29% approval among independents. Trump’s overall approval among independent voters declined to 29% down from 46% when he took office six months ago.” (Brian Bennett/Time)
“Once it might have made waves for a prominent venture capitalist to rant against racial diversity programs in higher education. But in the era of President Donald Trump, anti-affirmative action screeds are common — and so is the sight of a billionaire bemoaning his mistreatment. So the comments made by Marc Andreessen, reported earlier this month by the Washington Post, elicited barely a collective shrug. But Andreessen’s words are worth a closer look because they encapsulate such a core belief of Trump’s political movement — and also reflect its tendency to identify real challenges facing his voters while pointing them toward scapegoats rather than solutions. Andreessen, who conspicuously supported Trump in 2024 after mostly backing centrist Democrats earlier in his career, argued in a series of group chat messages that upward mobility is vanishing for what he called ‘the children of the Trump voter base’ — by which he presumably means native-born, working-class White people … Andreessen is right that it is becoming harder for White kids from families of modest income to rise. Opportunity Insights, an academic consortium that studies upward mobility, found in a massive 2024 study that White children of parents in the lower middle class (at the 25th income percentile) born in 1992 grew up to earn less money on average, in constant dollars, than kids born to equivalent White families in 1978. ‘Declining opportunity is a real thing in the data,’ said John Friedman, co-director of Opportunity Insights and an economics professor at Brown University. Andreessen is also right that access to higher education compounds that problem. Young people who earn college degrees still generally earn much more over a lifetime than those who don’t. But the Pew Research Center has found that kids with two parents who obtained four-year college degrees are more than four times as likely to graduate from college as children of parents who didn’t get a bachelor’s. And in a 2023 paper, the Opportunity Insights group found that children of parents in the top 1% of income were 34% more likely to be admitted to college than students with equivalent test scores and parents of average means. In those ways, higher education now does more to replicate privilege than to overcome it. So Andreessen has identified a real concern. But following Trump’s own classic misdirection, his diagnosis blames racial change for a problem fundamentally driven by economic inequality.” (Ron Brownstein/Bloomberg)
“At noon on Friday, just hours after Congress revoked more than 1.1 billion dollars in funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, more than a hundred and fifty member stations joined a closed-door Zoom call with NPR leadership. The federal funding they had spent months trying to save was gone. What remained was a shared sense of loss, exhaustion, and the daunting task of reevaluating their mission and programming. In an emotional hour-long call, station leaders grappled with fallback plans and infrastructure gaps. Some large stations offered to share resources with smaller ones. Others voiced gratitude for NPR’s efforts in Washington. But no one believed the damage could be undone quickly—if at all. ‘It was, in some ways, a postmortem,’ said one person who listened to the call. The passage of the Rescissions Act of 2025 marked the most sweeping rollback of public media funding in nearly six decades, gutting the infrastructure that supports more than fifteen hundred local radio and television stations. The consequences will fall hardest on rural and tribal stations, many of which rely on CPB for more than half their annual budgets.” (Andrew Mercein/CJR)
“A few years ago, my mom’s brother in South Korea, the oldest son, announced that he would be getting rid of their parents’ graves. My grandparents had been buried separately, in far-flung cemeteries, and this uncle and his wife were their keepers. They made several annual visits to the burial mounds (endless gridlock) and prepared Buddhist ceremonies at home (endless cooking and cleaning). Now that they were in their mid-sixties and their grown children were unlikely to carry on any of these rituals, they wanted out. They set a date to exhume my grandparents’ bodies, cremate their remains, and say goodbye again in an elaborate service run by our family friend, the head monk at a temple east of Seoul. My mom wasn’t happy about this. When her father died, the family only had money for a basic burial. By the time her mother died, Mom was working in the US and could afford an elevated plot with a view, in keeping with the principles of pungsu, or Korean feng shui. Mom hoped to combine their graves, not eliminate them, but my aunt didn’t think that a man should have to move to where his wife was. In any case, my mom had no real say. She’d surrendered her rights when she left the country. We started early in the morning, at my grandmother’s burial mound. My mom, dad, brother, and I, plus my uncle and his wife, other uncle, surviving aunt, and cousins walked up a terraced hillside in a lush private cemetery. It was cool and sunny. The land was manicured; green, red, and brown. We bowed at the gravestone and made offerings of fruit, dried fish, and alcohol. Three diggers did their work, first by machine, then by hand, as they got closer to the constellation of bones. The coffin had long since decomposed.” (E Tammy Kim/N Plus One)
“Certainly, it is the case that the Democratic Party elite in the last decade has not reacted to two crushing losses to Donald Trump in presidential elections with the spirit of candid self-criticism. Rather, party leaders have preferred to indulge in self-exculpation and find scapegoats for their own failures … Instead of focusing on decisions made by Harris, Biden, and their key advisers, the report is preparing to make a scapegoat of Future Forward, a Super PAC that spent $560 million on the election. The indictment is that Future Forward focused excessively on TV ads, didn’t coordinate messaging with the Harris campaign, and didn’t do enough attacks on Trump. This litany of complaints against Future Forward is a familiar one, having already been made last October in leaks from the Harris campaign that were clearly designed to preemptively win the blame game. The problem with this narrative is that even if one stipulates for the sake of argument that every accusation against Future Forward is true, it doesn’t really explain the scale of the 2024 defeat. After the January 6 botched coup attempt, Donald Trump was a disgraced figure with an approval rating of 34 percent (which, combined with a disapproval rating of 62 percent gave him the lowest net popularity of any modern president). From this low point, Trump went on to not just recapture the White House but to win on a startling scale: He became the first Republican to win the popular vote since 2004—in fact, indeed the first Republican to win the popular vote without the advantage of incumbency since 1988. Trump won all the swing states and made massive gain among groups that are Democratic Party mainstays such as young people and people of color. The extent of the Democratic Party’s loss can’t be chalked up to a bad advertising campaign. It was a historic repudiation of the party—all the worse because Trump himself remained personally unpopular and distrusted by the electorate.” (Jeet Heer/The Nation)
“Look around the world and there are remarkably few countries without a territorial dispute … Which is why policy analysts are scratching their heads about what exactly lies behind the escalating border clashes between Thailand and Cambodia. On Thursday, fighting erupted again near the disputed Ta Moan Thom Temple, located in a border area in northwestern Cambodia’s Oddar Meanchey province, resulting in the deaths of at least 13 civilians and a soldier in Thailand, which dispatched a F-16 to bomb Cambodian targets in response. As fighting spread to at least six areas along the arcane frontier, Thailand’s military closed crossings between the countries. The fighting spurred at least 40,000 civilians from more than 80 villages near the border to flee to makeshift bomb shelters of sandbags and car tires … But what makes the current flare-up most bamboozling is that it pits two of Southeast Asia’s most formidable and, until recently, closest aligned families against each other.“ (Charlie Campbell/Time)
“Imagine for a moment a tech tycoon whose business empire relies on a cozy relationship with the federal government. Once a major Republican donor, he has gotten fed up with the two-party system and launched his own third-party political operation. His big concern is massive budget deficits, and he pledges to clean up government fraud, waste and abuse and sweep away bureaucratic red tape — applying the know-how of a systems engineer to tame the federal behemoth. He has adoring fans who see in him an almost superhuman capacity to save the country, though he also has many detractors who see an erratic, paranoid and authoritarian personality, a megalomaniac in waiting. Opponents suspect the billionaire of offering political donations for lucrative government contracts. He promotes wild conspiracy theories involving high government officials. He wants to replace Congress and possibly the Constitution itself with government by electronic plebiscite where the public will instantly weigh in on the issues. And he routinely proposes grandiose plans only to get frustrated with media scrutiny, lose interest and sulk away. Then, all of a sudden, he announces a dramatic return to political life. I think you all know who I’m talking about: H. Ross Perot, the eccentric Texan founder of Electronic Data Systems and two-time presidential candidate. But you get the conceit: I could just as easily be talking about Elon Musk. Musk might even see Perot as his intentional model. On a February episode of the Joe Rogan Experience, the podcast host admiringly brought up Perot’s strong challenge to the Republican-Democrat ‘uniparty’ system in his 1992 presidential bid, and Musk replied, ‘I think most of what he was saying was true.’.” (John Ganz/Politico)
“The dominance of neoclassical economics in our university curricula has created a world where we are told there is no alternative — only technical adjustments to a system that is fundamentally fair, rational and efficient. But this is fiction. Economics today resembles Catholic theology in medieval Europe: a rigid doctrine guarded by a modern priesthood who claim to possess the sole truth. Dissenters are shunned. Non-economists are told to ‘think like an economist’ or not think at all. This is not education. It’s indoctrination. When we allow only one school of thought to dominate, we all suffer the consequences. I look at economic theory as a buffet rather than a set menu and believe that fusion always creates better flavour than monoculture. Such monoculture wasn’t always the norm. Until the 1980s, economics was a vibrant, pluralist field, home to Marxist, Keynesian, Austrian, developmentalist and institutionalist schools. Since then, that diversity has evaporated. Neoclassical economics has become the Aeroflot of ideas. A friend recalls that after asking for a vegetarian meal on a flight with the Soviet airline in the 1980s, he was told: ‘No, you cannot. Everybody’s equal on Aeroflot. It’s a socialist airline. There’s no special treatment.’ The same logic applies in today’s economics departments: you’re free to choose — as long as it’s neoclassical chicken. But real life is not one-size-fits-all. The complex challenges of our time require imaginative solutions, not endless variations on the failed theme of efficient markets.” (Ha-Joon Chang/FT)