Music: Bremer/McCoy — ‘Sophia’
The deepening radicalization of Donald J. Trump
The Washington Post reports: In the immediate aftermath of Jan. 6, 2021, President Donald Trump stayed mostly silent, and when he finally delivered his farewell address to the nation, he disavowed the attack on the U.S. Capitol as something that “all Americans were horrified by” and “can never be tolerated.” Now, as Trump seeks to return to the White House, he speaks of Jan. 6 as “a beautiful day.” He says there was no reason for police to shoot the…
Why aren’t we talking more about Trump’s business with the Saudis?
Philip Bump writes: The Republican-led House Oversight Committee has spent most of the past five months hard at work trying to link “the Biden family” (read: relatives of President Biden but not Biden himself) to millions of dollars proffered by foreign business interests before Biden became president. With the 2024 presidential campaign already at the top of the political conversation, the idea that some revelation might prove to be politically damaging to the incumbent is obviously a central motivation. It…
There’s a clear model for how the Supreme Court could solve its ethics problem
Norm Ornstein writes: The crisis in legitimacy in American political institutions is palpable. Radical partisan and racial gerrymandering have undermined confidence in legislatures across the country—and contributed to outrages like the expulsion of Black lawmakers in Tennessee. Radical district judges in Texas have abused their authority in order to attempt to force nationwide bans on an abortion medication and on critical parts of the Affordable Care Act. But nowhere is the challenge greater than in the United States Supreme Court. Over the past couple of months, astonishing…
Prigozhin says war in Ukraine has backfired, warns of Russian revolution
The Washington Post reports: Fresh off his claim of victory in capturing the Ukrainian city of Bakhmut, Russian mercenary boss Yevgeniy Prigozhin warned that Moscow’s brutal war could plunge Russia into turmoil similar to the 1917 revolution unless its detached, wealthy elite become more directly committed to the conflict. In a lengthy interview with Konstantin Dolgov, a political operative and pro-war blogger, Prigozhin, the founder and leader of the Wagner mercenary group, also asserted that the war had backfired spectacularly…
How Twitter became a haven for climate misinformation
Aaron Rupar and Thor Benson write: On World Meteorological Day in March, the UN Climate Change Twitter account posted an anodyne tweet reminding people that “every bit of additional global warming worsens climate impacts.” But thanks to Elon Musk’s new paid blue checkmark system, the most prominent replies to it are flooded with nonsense like “these commies are doubling down” and calls to “stop globalist fake alarmism.” This is just one way in which Twitter is rapidly becoming a hellscape for climate scientists who…
How to mourn a forest. A lesson from West Papua
Sophie Chao writes: One torrid afternoon, I journeyed with an Indigenous Marind woman and her family to a patch of razed forest at the edge of the plantation frontier, where workers had cleared the way for oil palm trees. Her name was Circia*. A mother of three in her late 50s, Circia was imposing, but her footsteps were gentle, almost silent when she led us across the wet soils of Merauke, a district in the Indonesian-controlled western half of New…
Scientists observe a surge of activity correlated with consciousness in the dying brain
PsyPost reports: A recent study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences has presented preliminary findings suggesting there can be a surge of brain activity linked to consciousness during the dying process. The new study aimed to investigate the brain activity of patients during the dying process, particularly focusing on whether there are any neural correlates of consciousness. Near-death experiences (NDEs) have been reported by some cardiac arrest survivors and are described as highly vivid and real-like…
Music: Bremer/McCoy — ‘Lyse Nætter’
Twitter is a far-right social network
Charlie Warzel writes: Twitter has long been described, even by its most ardent users, as a hellsite. But under Elon Musk, Twitter has evolved into a platform that is indistinguishable from the wastelands of alternative social-media sites such as Truth Social and Parler. It is now a right-wing social network. In December, I argued that if we are to judge Musk strictly by his actions as Twitter’s owner, it is accurate to call him a far-right activist. As a public…
Republicans are trying to seize control over voting in Texas’ largest Democratic county
Mother Jones reports: The Texas legislature passed a series of bills on Monday that amounted to a sweeping power grab giving Republicans more control over how elections are run and administered in the state’s most populous Democratic county, which includes the city of Houston and is home to nearly 5 million people. One bill would allow the secretary of state, who is appointed by the state’s Republican governor, Greg Abbott, to remove local election officials for “good cause” based on…
You cannot hear these 13 women’s stories and believe the anti-abortion narrative
Michelle Goldberg writes: It’s increasingly clear that it’s not safe to be pregnant in states with total abortion bans. Since the end of Roe v. Wade, there has been a barrage of gutting stories about women in prohibition states denied care for miscarriages or forced to continue nonviable pregnancies. Though some in the anti-abortion movement publicly justify this sort of treatment, others have responded with a combination of denial, deflection and conspiracy theorizing. Some activists have blamed the pro-choice movement…
Harlan Crow: Investigating my gifts to Clarence Thomas is unconstitutional
Mark Joseph Stern writes: Congress has regulated the Supreme Court for as long as the two institutions have existed. For more than a century, Congress compelled justices to travel around the country to serve as appellate judges, often on horseback. It forced the court to hear certain cases and denied it the ability to hear others. It added and subtracted seats, increased and decreased its budget, and postponed a term to avoid an adverse decision. According to attorneys for billionaire and GOP mega-donor Harlan Crow, however, there is one thing…
The man in charge of knowing when the U.S. runs out of money
The Washington Post reports: At the beginning of every workday, from his second-floor office in the U.S. Treasury Department, Dave Lebryk starts his morning looking at a color-coded dashboard tracking the most critical operations of the largest payment system in the world. More than $6 trillion flows out of the Treasury every year in payments, salaries and purchase orders, and more than $5 trillion flows in, mostly through tax collections and fees. Lebryk’s job is to make sure that these…
How Russia’s FSB recruits former ISIS fighters — and tries to plant them in Ukrainian battalions
Lilia Yapparova and Vera Mironova report: In January 2014, when Baurzhan Kultanov first joined the Islamic State, he wasn’t surprised by almost anything he encountered in Syria and Iraq’s occupied territories. While recounting his experiences there, he compared Raqqa, ISIS’s then-capital, to Istanbul, where he had met his recruiters, as well as to his hometown of Astrakhan, Russia. “People live their lives there, just like anywhere,” Kultanov told Meduza. “The women sit at home, they go to the bazaar —…
Some neural networks learn language like humans
Steve Nadis writes: How do brains learn? It’s a mystery, one that applies both to the spongy organs in our skulls and to their digital counterparts in our machines. Even though artificial neural networks (ANNs) are built from elaborate webs of artificial neurons, ostensibly mimicking the way our brains process information, we don’t know if they process input in similar ways. “There’s been a long-standing debate as to whether neural networks learn in the same way that humans do,” said…