Like a game show host, Trump announced a series of tariff rates on many of America’s major trading partners.
How did he come up with the rates?
It seems by a crude formula: A given nation’s trade deficit with the U.S. divided by that nation’s exports to the U.S.
Trump calls these “reciprocal tariffs,” and the claim is that we are taxing foreign nations at only half the rate they are taxing our imports. The numbers are illusory, however, some of them apparently made up (Brazil at only ten percent?) and others counting a VAT as a net tax on American imports, which it is not.
What timeline are we living in?
This is perhaps the worst economic own goal I have seen in my lifetime. I cannot think of any credentialed economist colleague—Democrat, Republican, or independent—who would endorse it. And I haven’t even mentioned the risk that some foreign nations will retaliate against American exporters, damaging our economy all the more.
The last two months have felt like all the chickens of the last 40 years have come home to roost. Since I became politically aware, I’ve had the lingering suspicion that we would be the ones to bring about our own decline, all because we prioritize money above all else. Americans wanted cheap stuff so badly that we outsourced our own jobs to other countries. Think about that.
Plainly, China is ascendent and America will not be great again. The country of my grandparents’ mythologizing — the country I want to believe in — is gone.
For years, we’ve been hearing breathless warnings about a “campus free speech crisis” from self-proclaimed free speech warriors. Their evidence? College students doing what college students have done for generations: protesting speakers they disagree with, challenging institutional policies, and yes, sometimes attempting to create heckler’s vetoes.
This kind of campus activism — while occasionally messy and uncomfortable — has been a feature of American higher education since the 1960s. It’s how young people learn to engage with ideas and exercise their own speech rights. Sometimes that activism is silly and sometimes it’s righteous. Often it’s somewhere in between, but it’s kind of a part of being a college student, and learning what you believe in.
But now we face an actual free speech crisis on campus that goes beyond just speech. It’s an attack on personal freedoms, due process, and liberty. The federal government isn’t just pressuring universities over speech — it’s literally disappearing students for their political expression. If you support actual free speech, now is the time to speak up.
The latest example of this authoritarian overreach is particularly chilling: Rumeysa Ozturk, a Turkish PhD student at Tufts who was here legally on a student visa, was abducted by masked agents in broad daylight. She was disappeared without due process or explanation — only later did we learn she had been renditioned to a detention center in Louisiana.
Her supposed crime? A year ago, she co-authored an op-ed in The Tufts Daily criticizing her university administration’s stance on the Israel-Palestine conflict. Not advocating violence. Not supporting terrorism. Not even criticizing the U.S. government. Just exercising core First Amendment rights by publishing criticism of her own university’s policies in a student newspaper.
When does America cross the Rubicon?
When is this country no longer a democracy?
When does it become something else?
I’ve been asking these questions of people for a few months now, and there’s no consensus answer. When a president runs for a third term? When an administration ignores the rulings of the Supreme Court? (Trumpets will say Biden already did this.) When the president jails people, citizens or not, that oppose him, First Amendment be damned?
The research for State of Surveillance showed that you can’t drive anywhere without going through a town, city or county that’s using public surveillance of some kind, mostly license plate reading cameras. I wondered how often I might be captured on camera just driving around to meet my reporters. Would the data over time display patterns that would make my behavior predictable to anyone looking at it?
So I took a daylong drive across Cardinal Country and asked 15 law enforcement agencies, using Freedom of Information Act requests, to provide me with the Flock LPR footage of my vehicle. My journey took me over 300 miles through slices of the communities those agencies serve, including the nearly 50 cameras they employ.
Racism is still a blight on American life. But wokeness is not how we heal; it has simply redefined the problem to the benefit of educated elites. By focusing on immutable characteristics like race, the woke moral panic has allowed economic elites to evade responsibility for their regressive view that elites should not only exist but rule. And in presenting race rather than class and income as America’s deep and worsening divide, the purveyors of wokeness have ended up comforting white, liberal elites, even as they have called them white supremacists.
It pains me to agree with her because I really dislike her appearances on Real Time, but I bought this book to learn about opinions I don’t necessarily agree with.
A press that is so solidly on the side of that powerful few, so solidly of it, that afflicts the afflicted and comforts the comfort-able, will hasten our demise. And that should terrify us all.
She loses me here. The press, or at least every journalist I know, is not on the side of the elite.
They’re noble, fiercely curious people who insist on interrogating the powerful.
But that’s not to say they didn’t lose the plot in the last decade. I think a lot of journalists, because they’re largely all from an educated class, were imbued with certain ideals. Ideals that, as a gay man, benefit me personally.
But perhaps those ideals didn’t reflect those of the larger populace.
That’s a tough thing to realize. I am of the generation of journalists that grew up in this era, and I want to believe that what I knew was good and just and true.
But I can’t continue to live in a world that’s so painfully incongruent with this one I’m currently living in.
In other words, I was wrong.
There’s a lifetime of heartbreak in that admission.
Teen Vogue: Isaacson described your politics as “radical Marxism” in the book. Do you consider yourself a Marxist?
Vivian Wilson: I’m a leftist, not a Marxist. I describe myself by the things that I personally believe in and the things that I feel are pretty common sense, if you think about it for more than two seconds. I believe in [universal basic income]. I believe in free health care. I believe food, shelter, and water are human rights. I believe that wealth inequality is one of the biggest problems of the United States right now, especially of our generation. I feel like workers should be fairly compensated for the work that they do, and I don’t feel like wealth should be hoarded by these mega-billionaires who are the top 1%, who only have their own interests at heart. I’ve met some of these billionaires — they’re not very good people. I don’t think any of them are.
TV: Have your parents’ politics changed? Was Elon always… like this?
VW: I’m going to not answer that. I’m sorry. But [his views are] not because of me.
It’s such a convenient narrative, that the reason he turned right is because I’m a f**king tr*nny, and that’s just not the case. That’s not what that does to people. Him going further on the right, and I’m going to use the word “further” — make sure you put “further” in there — is not because of me. That’s insane.
Someone’s Twitter profile is not who they are in reality. Your perception of someone is a very small glance of what they’re choosing to let you into. To judge everything a person says or someone says online as what they really believe is dumb.
I graduated (barely) from UCLA with a 2.27 GPA. I did, however, go on campus almost every day. Specifically, I left my fraternity to venture on campus as UCLA in the eighties was like a Cinemax film set in Brentwood. I would hang at North Campus with friends and, to be blunt, hope to meet someone I might (note: “might” is doing a lot of work) have sex and establish a relationship with. If I’d had on-demand porn on my phone and computer, I’m not sure I would have graduated, as I would have lost some of the incentive to venture on campus. I just read the previous sentence, and it sounds crass and shallow — but it’s also accurate. And that’s the rub, so to speak. Porn can reduce your ambition to take risks, become a better person, and build a better life. The best thing in my life is raising two men with a competent, loving partner. The catalyst for me risking humiliation, approaching her at the Raleigh Hotel pool, and introducing myself wasn’t a desire to someday qualify for lower car insurance rates, but the desire / hope to have sex.
Scott can be obnoxious at times, but I admire his candidness.
You can’t stop the flow of time. But you can count the costs. And I think a lot of people, for reasons I can’t quite make out, are threatened by the idea of counting the costs when it comes to change. That’s what I’m asking you to do today: count the costs. Count the costs with me.
I can put my finger on two things that have meaningfully changed in the last 25 years: my age and the internet.
I was thirteen at the turn of the millennium. I came of age in the 90s, and I too have this romantic nostalgia for that time. Issues of Star Wars: Insider delivered to the mailbox, music on CDs from record stores, the nascent internet and action figures and trips to DQ and Memorial Day spent at the family cemetery. Things felt slower then, and they were. The speed at which things change, at which culture is grown and shaped and discoursed and discarded, at which information flows, was so much slower then.
Now things feel fraught. Now things feel fragile. Now things feel on edge and tense and anxious and uncertain. And maybe they aren't — maybe they just feel that way. But why would they feel that way? What's changed?
My age and the internet. The latter changed everything, and not for the better. Sure, things might seem better — things might objectively even be better. But things don't feel better.
Yet so long as he is not talking about vaccines, Mr. Kennedy’s ideas are winning cautious support in some surprising places. Dr. Willett said he agrees with Mr. Kennedy that the National Institutes of Health should rebalance its research portfolio to spend more studying ways to prevent disease. Dr. Nestle praised him for taking on the food industry.
“When President Trump announced on Twitter that he was appointing R.F.K. Jr., he used the words industrial food complex,” she said. “I couldn’t believe that. It sounded just like me, and R.F.K. sounds just like me.”
Let me put on my editor hat and quarrel with the language around the vaccine issue: the term "vaccine skeptic" is patently condescending. People, by and large, should be skeptical of what they put in their bodies. If anything, Americans are not skeptical enough of what they put in their bodies — corn syrup, food dyes, seed oils, sugar, et cetera.
But in vast swaths of the American Left and major media outlets, the term "vaccine skeptic" is shorthand for someone too stupid to understand what's good for them. No matter how you feel about vaccines, you have to recognize that calling someone stupid is the least effective way to get them to change their behavior, yeah?
Just what is vaccine skepticism? It's skepticism of something you're putting in your body, of something you're being told by the government to put in your body.
To all my friends on the political Left that can't possibly imagine why anyone wouldn't take a vaccine, how do you feel now that the government in many states can tell a woman what to do with her body? Do you trust the government to make the best decision for your body?
Do you trust the government?
That is the question at the heart of the vaccine issue. And on both sides of the political spectrum, I think there's good reason not to.
I've long been a liberal (but not a Democrat!) that trusts government. I largely trust in the vast swaths of bureaucrats that wake up every day and do arcane, mundane jobs that make my life better. They study how to increase the yield of a corn crop, research the efficacy of mRNA vaccines, study weather patterns across the Great Plains. These little things add up in a hundred thousand little ways that make my life better. I can largely trust that the food I'm buying at the store is safe to consume and matches the nutritional label on the packaging, saving me from the need to research and test my own food before I consume it — something I as an individual could never do. The government helps us in so many ways — it subsidizes the production of gasoline so that I might drive long distances across the country, it regulates radio frequencies so that I can receive stream music on my iPhone, it maintains roads I travel on every single day.
But has the government kept us healthy? Obesity rates are through the roof and chronic disease has never been more prevalent. Rates of autism and cancer and a slew of neurological diseases have never been higher. So I'll ask again: has the government kept us healthy?
Has the government protected us from the corporations that stand to profit off of our sickness? Health insurance companies, big food science companies, chemical and plastics companies — does the government prevent them from denying you coverage or from injecting dangerous chemicals into your food? How much plastic is accumulating in your brain?
Are we better off now than we were fifty years ago? By some metrics, yes, but by others, no. We're fatter and sicker than we've ever been, we die from preventable diseases, we're beholden to corporations that pump unspeakable amounts of money into our political system in order to influence our elections. We the people have such little control over our system of governance — as I've said before, do you think a vote for Kamala would have changed the role of corporate money in our politics any more than a vote for Trump? Democrats, Republicans…it makes no difference. They're each beholden to corporate money.
So why should anyone trust the government?
A few days ago, I was driving across Wyoming and listening to the latest episode of Club Random, an interivew with Andrew Schulz.
Though I've never quite been a fan of Schulz's particular brand of bro comedy, I respect his insistence of having conversations with people from across the political spectrum. In this interview, Bill asks Andrew, in the context of his opinion on Israel, would he be willing to live anywhere in the Islamic world and, well, just watch for two minutes.
Andrew: "If you don't agree with me, you're dumb" is why Trump is elected. And this is what Democrats do...
Bill: Yeah, but sometimes dumb is dumb.
Andrew: Yeah, but people are dumb! So deal with that shit. You know what I mean? Stop acting like everybody's smart. Like, this is the problem, you have all these people that go to Ivy League schools and they're like "we know better than everyone else and we'll just tell you what to do and you guys are all stupid and I know you feel like you want this, but you don't really want this and if you disagree with me you're an idiot." And then all of a sudden, [people] go "fuck you guys, I'm voting for [Trump]. And it's very simple.
Bill: Yeah, that's true, too.
Andrew: So we can't speak down to people if we know they're going to react emotionally.
This might not strike you as particularly insightful, but it hit me like a bolt of lightning.
I'm guilty of that very thing. When someone presents me with information that is objectively wrong, my first instinct is to correct them. I'm more interested in the facts than I am in that person's experience and feelings.
And is this not the root of so many of our problems? Instead of trying to correct people when they are wrong, why don't we try to understand why they feel the way that they do?
I'm reminded of a foundational principle of Buddhism, Taoism, and other eastern philosophies: the more we try to control, the less control we have. Or to quote Princess Leia on the bridge of the Death Star, "the more you tighten your grip, Tarkin, the more star systems will slip through your fingers."
I hate to frame the issue of vaccines (or any other issue) as one of "educated vs. uneducated" since the latter has such an undue, unfair, and elitist stigma attached to it, but that's exactly what this is: a significant portion of the citizenry is simply not educated on how vaccines work, and the portion that is educated is far too pompous, condescending, and certain about what they know — so certain that they become unwilling or unable to admit when they're wrong.
Let me be pointedly clear: education does not make someone better than anyone else, and neither does intelligence. (Intelligence and education are two very different things, despite what educated people will insist.) Education does not equate worth.
One more time for good measure: education does not equate worth.
People simply cannot be blamed for what they don't know, just as they can't be blamed if they weren't born with a capacity for intelligence. (That statement feels obvious, though I will no doubt be pilloried by some for writing it.)
As I've said before, not only is it cruel to blame people for things beyond their control, it's also not an effective political tactic. (My god, Democrats, why is that so hard to understand?) If anything, it is a failure of the education system in this country that basic biology (and virology) are not commonly-understood topics. But here we are, and it does no good to blame the people that don't know what they don't know. Ya know?
OpenAI says the US will lose the AI race if it’s unable to scrape copyrighted materials — and its favorite bogeyman, China, will take the crown instead.
As Ars Technica reports, the Sam Altman-led company is begging president Donald Trump to instate federal regulations defining “fair use,” the thorny standard at the heart of the copyright lawsuits lobbed against OpenAI by The New York Times and other companies.
Everything we’re going through as modern humans — it feels fated, no?
We’re caught in this Herculean struggle between our animal selves — our neurology, our inability to look away from distraction — and the thing we want most.
We want peace in the face of death and freedom from the fear of it. We want to be held and comforted and told we’ll be okay, told that we needn’t spend our entire waking lives worrying about what’s coming. We want so desperately to be loved.
There’s nothing else that matters, is there? Nothing more important to us than that assurance, and we’d do anything for it.
But we can’t look away from our screens long enough to experience it. We can’t look away from the technology that’s captured our minds by hijacking our neurology. We’re prisoners — waking prisoners — in this life, hostage to the algorithms we’ve created.
Our thoughts are shaped by how information moves. Think of how information moves in the era of the internet, and why. Think of how our brains now have access to world events almost as soon as they happen. Think of all the information, the news of the day, all the entertainment created each day by each member of our species, all of it accessible at your fingertips.
It’s too much for the human brain to resist. It’s an impossible task to expect one person, let alone an entire generation of them, to turn off their phones. I hate to be so certain when I say it, but that will never, ever happen.
It’s horrible to watch, terrifying to know, and scarier still to find yourself in with the inmates, both prisoner and witness.
Not satisfied with effectively buying a co-president role in Donald Trump’s administration, Elon Musk has turned his attention — and money — towards a key race in the swing state of Wisconsin. The billionaire’s America PAC is claiming to give $100 to registered voters who sign a petition against “activist judges.”
It’s not the first time Musk has promised money in exchange for signatures on petitions: he did the same thing leading up to the presidential election in November. It’s illegal to pay someone to vote or to register to vote, but Musk’s approach is meant to intentionally toe the line. Some election law experts say the tactic is legal because the offer doesn’t require a person actually vote; others say that requiring signatories be registered voters is what violates the law.
Fuck Elon and fuck billionaires meddling in our politics.
China has practiced co-ordinated satellite maneuvers in space that resemble aerial combat, according to a US Space Force General.
Speaking on Tuesday at the McAleese Defense Programs Conference in Washington, the vice chief of space operations General Michael Guetlein said the US is preparing to develop capabilities for off-planet warfare. Space Force needs to guarantee “space superiority,” over China, Russia, and other nations, he opined.
That status is necessary because China has already launched a refuelling station in geosynchronous equatorial orbit to service its growing satellite fleet.
Now it’s used some of its orbiting assets in what look like offensive drills.
“We observed five objects in space moving in and out and around each other in synchrony and in control,” Guetlein said. “That’s what we call dogfighting in space - they are practicing tactics, techniques and procedures to do in-orbit space operations from one satellite to another.”
This is not the future I wanted to live in, but here we are.
Migicovsky says that it was difficult to design for iPhones when he was working on the original Pebble watch, and in the last eight years, "things have actually gotten worse." He said that his company will "build a good app for iOS," but that it is impossible for a third-party smartwatch to replicate the functions of the Apple Watch. He shared an extensive list of the limitations:
There's no option for sending text messages or iMessages.
There's no option for replying to notifications or taking actions like marking something as done.
There is little inter-app communication, which makes it difficult for Pebble to work with other iOS apps.
If the iOS app is closed, the watch can't access the app or the internet.
The watch cannot detect if you're using your phone, so it will buzz and display a notification regardless.
There's no easy option to allow developers to create watch faces and apps for Pebble that would be available through the Pebble iOS app.
This is Apple using the power of its integrated ecosystem to snuff out competition, plain and simple.
There might be some very good security reasons iMessage and FaceTime are not available on third-party devices, but otherwise I can't think of any good reasons Apple can't build public APIs to integrate third-party watches with iPhone and iOS. It's just Apple protecting their bottom line. This behavior needs to be regulated.
Big tech companies have constructed computer data centers all over the world for two decades. The centers have been packed with computers to handle the online traffic flooding into the companies’ internet services, including search engines, email applications and e-commerce sites.
But those facilities were lightweights compared with what’s coming. Back in 2006, Google opened its first data center in The Dalles, Ore., spending an estimated $600 million to complete the facility. In January, OpenAI and several partners announced a plan to spend roughly $100 billion on new data centers, beginning with a campus in Texas. They plan to eventually pump an additional $400 billion into this and other facilities across the United States.
The change in computing is reshaping not just technology but also finance, energy and communities. Private equity firms are plowing money into data center companies. Electricians are flocking to areas where the facilities are being erected. And in some places, locals are pushing back against the projects, worried that they will bring more harm than good.
A pretty good beginner's guide to AI computing. Worth a read.
What can Google track of you across the web? The results may astound you with the ways that Google can follow you around the web. It is such pervasive surveillance network, that it is almost easier to ask, where they can’t’ track you than it is to ask where they can track you. As far as we can see from the outside-looking-in, there is no other entity even remotely close to being able to track you so extensively.
A satanic disciple had stowed away on a flight to Florida, as one passenger saw it, and something had to be done.
Less than a minute after an American Airlines flight took off from Savannah, Ga., for Miami on Monday night, a passenger began yelling and shaking. Flight attendants initially thought he was having a seizure.
But it turned out he was struggling because he believed a demonic spirit had invaded the cabin — and, at some point during the flight, began swallowing rosary beads to ward that spirit off.
The award for the best headline of 2025 (so far) goes to…
I have absolutely no time for campus protests that go over the line into intimidation of other students. If crimes have been committed, I have no problem prosecuting. But offensive speech? It’s allowed in America. Handing out fliers? It’s how America began! A campus can (and should) discipline its students; but the federal government intervening to seize a legal resident and trying to deport him for speech — along with a dragnet for finding others to throw out — is an outrage in a free country.
Very few American citizens have read the Constitution. Most treat it as they do their holy books: they cherry-pick the rules they like, have no problem judging others by those particular rules, yet seem to know hardly anything about the rest of the document.
Or worse, they know nothing of the Constitution — not a single article or amendment. They just speak with confidence about what it does or does not contain, the document itself be damned.
This ignorance feels particularly galling when coming from the Right, which it so often does, because those that so fervently support Trump and his ilk seem to fetishize the Constitution, always going on (and on) about their love of America and the "rule of law” while wearing at least one piece of clothing brandishing Old Glory. So you'd think they'd care a bit more about America's founding document, about the Emoluments Clause or the Twenty-second Amendment or, hell, the most famous amendment of them all.
But let's not bullshit each other: this isn't about the rule of law.
This is about hate.
This is about hating someone so much that you openly choose to ignore the rules laid out in the document you claim to love so much. You'll do anything to punish people that disagree with you because — and let's not stop being honest now! — your ego is so fragile, your skin so thin, that you can't stand even the smallest criticism.
You can almost hear the rage-sputtering from the Trumpets. "But! BUT!! BIDEN!!" To that, I respond, "Yeah, Biden. And Bush and Clinton and FDR and Eisenhower." What does it matter who the current president is? It's the power of the presidency I find so dangerous, hence the need to keep it in check. But going on about Biden seems to be less about Biden than Trump, more about airing of grievances as a smokescreen for the guy you support being able to do whatever he wants.
And to my friends on the Right, yes, I'm aware Biden did some very-likely-illegal shit. He certainly made some moral decisions I disagree with, and I've grown deeply suspicious of his extended family and the privileges they’ve enjoyed since he became vice-president. Put another way, the Right has raised some good points about Biden’s moral failings — and the corruption of the Democratic Party.
But to criticize Trump is not an endorsement of Biden, just as criticizing Biden is not an endorsement of Trump.
What does it say about us that we can't seem to really understand that? The level of vitriol I experience from Liberals and Conservatives alike who seem to assume I'm endorsing the "opposing team" when I criticize theirs is, well, I think you'd be shocked at what people feel entitled to say to my face, all because I don't tow their party line.
We've all somehow lost our ability to be rational in the face of hating the "other team."
Wokesters? Trumpets? I'm looking at you both.
You need to knock it off.
You need to learn that your hatred of the people you disagree with has been engineered and cultivated. It's what keeps you watching your videos, and thus what sells ads on those videos. It's a cruel irony that rage is what keeps our brains engaged, keeps us clicking and scrolling. There's an evolutionary reason for this, but we live in a very different world than the one in which our species evolved. (We have computers, for fuck's sake.)
Seriously, if we deserve to keep this country — and if we’re still being honest, maybe we don't — we have to stop hating each other. Pay attention to your thoughts — if you experience a flash of hatred for someone because they're a Democrat or Republican, you're sick. You've been infected with a toxin and you need to seek treatment.
Admitting you're unwell is the first step. Being around people who don't think like you is important, too. Having conversations with people who don't think like you is even better. You'll realize that not every Wokester hates personal liberty and not every Trumpet is a bigot.
This is not some grand epiphany, I know, but I'm going to keep writing it: we need to stop hating each other. I don't care how you manage to do it, but the United States will not survive if you don't.
Yes, you.
Mark my words: we lose this republic if our hatreds control us.
