“LATINO VOTERS FLOCKED TO DONALD TRUMP in surprisingly large numbers last November to help him retake the White House. But a year later, the same cohort has soured on his presidency, with many saying they regret their vote. That’s the main takeaway from a new focus group of Latino Trump voters conducted by The Bulwark on September 10. The seven participants were selected for having cast their ballots for Trump in 2024 but now looking unfavorably at his job performance … The participants said they were angry over the state of the economy and frustrated by Trump’s handling of immigration and deportations. Asked to give the president a letter grade for his term thus far, six gave him D’s and one gave an F. Asked later about her grade, one participant who gave a D said she was just trying to be nice. There were no A’s for America First. The focus group included voters from swing state Nevada, blue state California, and red state Florida, as well as states, including New Jersey, that have traditionally been heavily Democratic but moved toward Republicans in the Trump era. New Jersey is one of two states with gubernatorial elections this November. A participant from the other state picking a governor this fall, Kimberly from Virginia, was asked what direction the country is going in. ‘I would say negative,’ she said. ‘Grocery prices, we have the tariffs, we have the immigration going on, and also using the National Guard instead of police to fight crime.’” (Adrian Carrasquillo/The Bulwark)
“The world’s attention this week has been fixated on Donald Trump’s official visit to Britain, with castles and carriages and all the pageantry that delights a leader who views his own presidency as the apotheosis of reality TV. Less noticed, but just as telling, has been a simultaneous visit to Washington by Beatrix von Storch. Beatrix who? You’re forgiven for asking. Von Storch is a far-right German parliamentarian and second-row leader of the Alternative for Germany (AfD). I met her in Berlin in 2013, when she and the then-newly founded AfD seemed zany but harmless — destined, as other far-right parties in postwar Germany had been, for petty infighting and eventual irrelevance. That assessment turned out to be dead wrong, though not immediately. For two more years, the AfD followed the old pattern, and by the summer of 2015 was down in the polls and close to collapse, with the original founders — conservative economics professors whose single issue was abolishing the euro — distancing themselves from the far-right nationalists whose following increasingly included neo-Nazis. Then the refugee crisis began. Suddenly the AfD, like populist parties across Europe, found its raison d’etre: a rejection of alien-looking migrants at first, then of everything and anything that seemed elitist or, in the current parlance (even in German), ‘woke.’ Austria, right next door, had pioneered this right-wing shift decades earlier. France, Scandinavia and others were well along the way. Hungary, one country over, had already gone all the way, with Viktor Orban ensconced as an authoritarian strongman. So had Turkey and India, where Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Narendra Modi were already in power. In 2016 the dam broke, first with Brexit, then with Trump’s first electoral victory. A year later, the AfD entered Germany’s federal parliament for the first time, and von Storch left the European parliament to sit in the Bundestag. In the following years, right-wing populists chalked up successes far and wide, from Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil to Georgia Meloni in Italy and Robert Fico in Slovakia. They felt and cultivated an affinity. Trump and other aspiring strongmen studied Orban in particular for pointers about co-opting the judiciary, academia, press, business and ‘deep state.’ Personal contacts deepened. While in office, Bolsonaro enthusiastically hosted von Storch, for example. (The Trump administration is now berating Brazil for convicting Bolsonaro of attempting — in 2023, after losing an election — a coup that looked remarkably like something that Trump supporters had tried two years earlier.)The first Trump administration already committed grave diplomatic faux pas, such as sending a firebrand ambassador, Richard Grenell, to Germany to proselytize for far-right parties across Europe. The second Trump administration then burst all remaining taboos. In February, Vice President JD Vance harangued a gobsmacked European audience at the Munich Security Conference, telling them that the enemy is not Russia but ‘the threat from within.’” (Andreas Klust/Bloomberg Opinion)
“I was working at the magazine as a fact-checker and my parents no longer considered me a failure, not because they read or admired it, but because when they said its name to friends and relatives it sparkled on their tongues. I still wasn’t a doctor or engineer, but the publication cast a flattering light on them, revealing them to be open minded enough to let me pursue a non-traditional field, yet strict enough to propel me to its most rarefied strata. I liked to name-drop where I worked, too, especially when meeting someone for the first time, though I made a point of not bringing it up until I was asked. For almost two years, things went smoothly. I had insurance and I was making more money than ever before. At work, I checked a lot of the ‘back of the book’ pieces, which often involved going to the movies or reading novels on company time … I would then spend the rest of the afternoon sitting in an armchair by the windows, watching the sunlight arpeggiate the water in the 9/11 Memorial fountains. The magazine was full of loveable weirdos who knew inordinate amounts about cuneiform or animal husbandry and were prone to causing collisions in the hallway because their faces were buried in paper proofs. Many of my colleagues reeked of money: hyphenated names, signet rings, private schools, Prada frames. My family had money, too, though I don’t think I got the job because of my pedigree, but because I spoke Arabic and English without an obvious accent. Fact checking rewards the kinds of neuroses that can make me intolerable to friends and family. At work, I could chat without embarrassment about why I preferred Mahler’s tenth symphony to his ninth, or about the origins of the fascist accents on the columns at Grand Army Plaza. Still, I knew that certain things fell outside the protection granted by eccentricity, so I pretended my ambient anti-Americanism was ironic, the product of reading too much critical theory in college. The magazine’s politics were what passes for center-left in the United States. The editor-in-chief once told us that the geographic distribution of our subscribers was nearly identical to Obama’s 2008 electoral map.” (Ismail Ibrahim/ House Arab)
“Scientists have discovered prehistoric insects preserved in amber for the first time in South America, providing a fresh glimpse into life on Earth at a time when flowering plants were just beginning to diversify and spread around the world. Many of the specimens found at a sandstone quarry in Ecuador date to 112 million years ago, said Fabiany Herrera, curator of fossil plants at the Field Museum in Chicago and co-author of the study published Thursday in the journal Communications Earth and Environment. Almost all known amber deposits from the past 130 million years have been in the Northern Hemisphere, and it’s long been ‘an enigma’ that scientists have found few in southern regions that once comprised the supercontinent Gondwana, said David Grimaldi, an entomologist at the American Museum of Natural History who was not involved in the discovery. This marks the first time researchers have identified ancient beetles, flies, ants and wasps in fossilized tree resin in South America, said Ricardo Pérez-de la Fuente, a paleoentomologist at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History, who also was not involved in the new study. ‘Amber pieces are little windows into the past,’ Pérez-de la Fuente said, adding that the discovery will help researchers understand the evolving interactions between flowering plants and insects that lived during the era of the dinosaurs. The researchers uncovered hundreds of fragments of amber, some containing ancient insects, pollen and tree leaves, at a sandstone quarry in Ecuador that’s on the edge of what is today the Amazon basin. But today’s rainforest is much different from what dinosaurs roamed through, Herrera said. Based on an analysis of fossils in the amber, the ancient rainforest contained species of ferns and conifers, including the unusual Monkey Puzzle Tree, that no longer grow in Amazonia.” (Christina Larson/AP)
“The Democratic Party establishment isn’t having a great year. Democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani pummeled Andrew Cuomo in the New York City mayoral primary and is cruising to another landslide victory in November. If a Senate primary were held today, Chuck Schumer would lose to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez by double digits. And the party’s traditional pro-Israel consensus has become deeply unpopular, with three-quarters of Democrats supporting an arms embargo and agreeing that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. It’s undeniable that rank-and-file Democratic voters are fed up with the party’s leadership and ready for change. According to Quinnipiac, congressional Democrats have hit all-time low approval ratings three separate times this year. Not only are they 53 points underwater with registered voters, but they’re also a stunning 13 points down among Democrats themselves, with the downward trend showing no signs of slowing.” (Aaron Narraff Fernando/The Nation)
“The success of DeepSeek’s powerful artificial intelligence (AI) model R1 — that made the US stock market plummet when it was released in January — did not hinge on being trained on the output of its rivals, researchers at the Chinese firm have said. The statement came in documents released alongside a peer-reviewed version of the R1 model, published today in Nature. R1 is designed to excel at ‘reasoning’ tasks such as mathematics and coding, and is a cheaper rival to tools developed by US technology firms. As an ‘open weight’ model, it is available for anyone to download and is the most popular such model on the AI community platform Hugging Face to date, having been downloaded 10.9 million times. The paper updates a preprint released in January, which describes how DeepSeek augmented a standard large language model (LLM) to tackle reasoning tasks. Its supplementary material reveals for the first time how much R1 cost to train: the equivalent of just US$294,000. This comes on top of the $6 million or so that the company, based in Hangzhou, spent to make the base LLM that R1 is built on, but the total amount is still substantially less than the tens of millions of dollars that rival models are thought to have cost. DeepSeek says R1 was trained mainly on Nvidia’s H800 chips, which in 2023 became forbidden from being sold to China under US export controls.” (Elizabeth Gibney via Nature via Yahoo!News)
“In 2022, Florida weathered a bad outbreak of meningococcal disease, a type of fast-moving bacterial infection that can become fatal after entering the bloodstream or the lining of the brain and spinal cord. As the number of ill people climbed into the dozens, public-health officials scrambled to address clusters of cases, including one among college and university students. Campuses are primed for outbreaks: The bacteria spread through the kind of intimate or prolonged contact that’s rampant on campuses, where people are ‘kissing and sharing drinks, being in close quarters in dorm rooms and parties,’ Sarah Nosal, the president-elect of the American Academy of Family Physicians, told me. College attendance is considered its own risk factor for infection, and many states—including Florida—require the meningococcal vaccine for students living on campus. Soon, though, Florida’s policy may change. Earlier this month, the state’s surgeon general, Joseph Ladapo, announced his intention to end all vaccine mandates: ‘Every last one of them is wrong,’ he said. Some vaccine rules—including the one applying to the meningococcal vaccine—are written into the state’s laws, but Ladapo has said his office will partner with Governor Ron DeSantis’s to push for necessary changes. A canceled mandate alone may do little to change the risk of meningococcal outbreaks on Florida’s college campuses. The CDC still recommends these vaccines for preteens and teenagers, and currently almost all American kids in that age group get at least one dose. But Florida’s rebellion against vaccine mandates is part of a larger erosion of the immunization status quo, as childhood-vaccination rates in the United States decline, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Department of Health and Human Services chips away at long-standing vaccine policy, and more families seek exemptions from state requirements. These changes won’t affect only young children, who are supposed to get numerous shots in their first 15 months of life. If vaccination rates fall—due to changing federal recommendations, states eliminating mandates, increasing anti-vaccine sentiment, or some combination of all of the above—middle schools, high schools, and college campuses may also become particular breeding grounds for once-controlled illnesses.” (Jamie Duchamp/The Atlantic)
“There are books that don’t leave you once you have finished reading them but remain with you, some for the rest of your life. To me Tarjei Vesaas’s two masterpieces, The Birds and The Ice Palace, are such books. This is not just because they are good—the world is full of good books—but also because they did something to me, changed something in me … The Birds was published in 1957, when Vesaas was sixty, and The Ice Palace followed in 1963. These novels are the high point not merely of Tarjei Vesaas’s oeuvre, but also of twentieth-century Norwegian literature as a whole. Had they been written in English, there is no doubt in my mind that they would have been part of the Anglo-American canon, right up there next to the novels of Virginia Woolf, for example, with which they have much in common, in the sense that both represent an answer to the same question: how to wrest literary expression out of the grip of the narrative, how to make it pass beneath the arch of the epic, the arch of history, and get to where human beings really live, think and act, in other words, to the moment, where reality is not a given but something that comes into being? Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse are two of Woolf’s attempts to answer that question, while The Birds and The Ice Palace are two of Vesaas’s.” (The Paris Review)
“Charles Kenny, Vijaya Ramachandran and Guido Núñez-Mujica of the Center for Global Development have a nice piece documenting the World Bank’s climate-related financing. About a third of total financing outlays by the Bank in 2023-2024 went to projects tagged as having some climate component. To be blunt, the data suggests that the World Bank continues to use its financial and advisory leverage to mislead low-income countries into incurring debts to disproportionately finance mitigation projects, rather than climate adaptation and investments in reliable and affordable energy access … Of course some of this is just climate theatre, motivated by the need to please a section of the Bank’s leadership and board by tagging every small project as climate-related. But even accounting for that, it should worry everyone that the Bank’s staff feel the need to pander to their superiors in this manner. The tendency to lazily load all manner of issues onto project designs results in unwieldy projects that are unfocused and more about checking boxes and shoveling money out the door than actual impacts on the ground. So what exactly explains the variance between African policymakers’ stated development priorities and the World Bank projects they actually sign up for?” (Ken Opalo/The Africanist Perspective)
“This summer, Steve Witkoff, President Trump’s Middle East envoy, paid a visit to the coast of Sardinia, a stretch of the Mediterranean Sea crowded with super yachts. On one of those extravagant vessels, Mr. Witkoff sat down with a member of the ultrarich ruling family of the United Arab Emirates. He was meeting Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, a trim figure in dark glasses who controls $1.5 trillion of the Emiratis’ sovereign wealth. It was the latest engagement in a consequential alliance. Over the past few months, Mr. Witkoff and Sheikh Tahnoon had become both diplomatic allies and business partners, testing the limits of ethics rules while enriching the president, his family and his inner circle, according to an investigation by The New York Times. At the heart of their relationship are two multibillion-dollar deals. One involved a crypto company founded by the Witkoff and the Trump families that benefited both financially. The other involved a sale of valuable computer chips that benefited the Emirates economically. While there is no evidence that one deal was explicitly offered in return for the other, the confluence of the two agreements is itself extraordinary. Taken together, they blurred the lines between personal and government business and raised questions about whether U.S. interests were served. In May, Mr. Witkoff’s son Zach announced the first of the deals at a conference in Dubai. One of Sheikh Tahnoon’s investment firms would deposit $2 billion into World Liberty Financial, a cryptocurrency start-up founded by the Witkoffs and Trumps. Two weeks later, the White House agreed to allow the U.A.E. access to hundreds of thousands of the world’s most advanced and scarce computer chips, a crucial tool in the high-stakes race to dominate artificial intelligence. Many of the chips would go to G42, a sprawling technology firm controlled by Sheikh Tahnoon, despite national security concerns that the chips could be shared with China.” (Eric Lipton, David Yaffe-Bellany, Bradley Hope, Tripp Mickle and Paul Mozur/NYT)
“In 1922, Interior Secretary Albert Fall collected about $400,000 from two very rich oilmen, Harry Sinclair and Edward Doheny, and granted them government leases to pump $100 million worth of petroleum from Navy reserves in Elk Hills and Buena Vista, California, and in Teapot Dome, Wyoming. It was a family affair, with Fall’s son-in-law M.T. Everhart collecting from Sinclair and Fall himself collecting from Doheny’s son Ned. The Teapot Dome scandal, which occurred during an oligarchic period not unlike our own, followed a recognizable trajectory. The Wall Street Journal broke the story, Congress investigated, and Fall and Sinclair ended up doing prison time. Everhart received immunity from prosecution and turned state’s evidence against Fall. Ned Doheny, who received no immunity, died during his father’s trial in an apparent murder-suicide with a fellow conspirator (who was also presumed to be Ned’s gay lover). Perhaps out of sympathy, the jury let Edward Doheny walk free. Now a century has passed and America is once again an oligarchy. But I don’t expect the World Liberty Financial scandal, which bears many similarities to Teapot Dome—and which The New York Times exposed in a superb investigative piece Monday—to follow a recognizable trajectory. That’s because nothing since January has followed a recognizable trajectory. In the world I know, the Times story would initiate a Justice Department investigation and an impeachment inquiry, and Trump’s Mideast envoy Steve Witkoff could be counted on to resign by week’s end. In the mystifying world we inhabit today, none of these things appears likely to happen.” (Timothy Noah/TAP)
“Archaeologists investigating a site in the West Kazakhstan Region identified an array of mysterious and intriguing burial mounds that is considered to be one of the country’s most significant archaeological discoveries in recent years, Azernews reports. The team located approximately 150 tombs unlike any found before in the area, which may offer new insights into Kazakhstan’s early civilizations. While circular kurgans, or burial mounds, are common throughout the region, the recently discovered monuments took a variety of forms, including rectangular mounds and some formed by two interconnected rings—a rare configuration in Eurasian steppe archaeology. The largest one, which is surrounded by a moat-like ditch measuring over 450 feet in diameter, likely houses the remains of a local leader or someone of high political and social status. Preliminary analysis suggests that the tombs date to the early Iron Age, although experts are still uncertain who built them. The report notes that the steppe lands were once part of vast trade routes and served as the cradle of many nomadic civilizations, including the early Scythians and Saka tribes.” (Archaeology)