Dispatches from the Empire

I Can Explain Why the Nazi Salute Is Back

But it’s too easy to say that these people are simply trolling and leave it at that. A good troll—and as someone who has done quite a bit of trolling myself, I have a deep appreciation for the art form—makes an underlying point, stimulates thought, provokes serious discussion and, best-case scenario, is open to interpretation. Worst-case scenario, it confuses the weaponization of taboos for the taboos themselves, and instead of resisting their weaponization, winds up denying their original purpose.

Nazi salutes are therefore deeply offensive to me on two levels. I abhor the underlying ideology such gestures represent. But also I think they’re incredibly lazy—the cheapest imaginable way to get a rise out of people.

That said, even the crudest trolls have a message. With the recent spate of stiff-armed salutes, what we are observing is, in most cases, not sincere Nazism but an oppositional culture that, like a rebel band that keeps wearing fatigues after victory, has failed to realize it’s no longer in the opposition.

She’s a Foot Soldier in America’s Losing War With Chronic Disease

About half of the county’s 22,000 residents were obese, a quarter of them smoked cigarettes and almost 20 percent were diabetic — numbers that had become increasingly typical in rural America, where working-age adults were dying at higher rates than they were 20 years earlier, according to data from the C.D.C. People in the country’s poorest places were now almost twice as likely to develop chronic disease as those who lived in wealthy, urban centers on the coasts, helping to create a political climate of resentment. Mingo County had been solidly Democratic for much of its history, but more than 85 percent of voters supported Donald J. Trump in the 2024 presidential election.

When we have billion-dollar corporations focused solely on generating profit, each advertising directly to the people, what did we expect would happen?

When Google and Facebook — advertising companies, not social media companies — have direct control over the algorithms that show us what they want us to see, all in the service of giving Mars and Pepsi and ConAgra and Monsanto and every other enormously wealthy corporation the ability to advertise to us right on the computer in we keep in our pocket, what did we expect would happen?

In a society organized around the accumulation of money and wealth above all else — above morality, above compassion, above human life, above happiness — what did we expect would happen?

This crisis we Americans find ourselves in — can we agree we're in a crisis? — has been a long time coming. When Reagan deregulated in the 1980s and Republicans cheered "trickle-down economics," when Bush 1 negotiated NAFTA and Clinton signed it, what did we expect would happen? 

We Americans have prioritized access to cheap goods over the health of our economy and our citizenry.  Saving money is the only thing we care about, and in the process we sold out our rural towns and factory cities, we sold out our fellow citizens who might not have the ability to control their impulses. Perversely, this doesn't affect those of us who can, and certainly not most of us fortunate enough to have an education. (And thus tend to skew to the Left.) 

This country is grounded in a delusion that we are each in control of our lives. We call it individualism, and it's right there in the foundational document of America, the Declaration of Independence: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. We tell ourselves this story that we're all equal to one another and thus we're all equally able to control our impulses, nevermind the science that says otherwise. 

We unleash these million- and billion-dollar profit-seeking corporations on the most vulnerable populations, all under the guise of 'liberty.' Let them buy whichever sugary drink they want! Let them pick which fast food restaurant they can afford for dinner! And if they don't buy healthy food, let's blame them for it — after all, we choose to (and can afford to) eat our vegetables, so they must just be stupid (or lazy).

We Americans are so thoroughly convinced of the delusion of individual liberty (ignoring neurology, genetics, and environmental circumstance) that we use it to blame the poor, uneducated, and unhealthy for their poverty, ignorance, and sickness.

It is unspeakably cruel.

The $100 Trillion Disruption: The Unforeseen Economic Earthquake

GLP-1 drugs are our air conditioner moment.

We're not just talking about weight loss. We're discussing the first medication that effectively regulates human impulse control. Think about that.

Our economy is built on impulses. These include midnight snacks, impulse purchases, extra drinks, and the "treat yourself" mentality driving trillion-dollar industries.

What happens when a weekly injection regulates those impulses?

What Are Microplastics and What Are They Doing to Our Bodies

Earlier this month, six years after that pivot, Campen published an alarming paper that made headlines around the world. The adult human brain, his research found, today contains about a disposable spoon’s worth of plastic — roughly 50 percent more than eight years ago. The rate of accumulation mirrors the rate that plastic is increasing in prevalence in our environment. “It’s frighteningly correlated,” he said when he announced his results. To illustrate his findings, Campen, who is sandy-haired with a youthful face and a wry sense of humor, held a disposable spoon next to his head. “My prop,” he called it. “I certainly don’t feel comfortable with this much plastic in my brain,” he said, “and I don’t need to wait around 30 more years to find out what happens if the concentrations quadruple.”

Goddamn.

Other studies have looked at the way the chemical compounds in these particles might harm the body. Some of the most common additives in plastics, like bisphenols and phthalates — which make products more flexible, durable, or flame resistant — have been extensively studied for decades. These additives are known to be endocrine disrupters, meaning they can wreak havoc on our hormones; this can be particularly dangerous for the developing bodies of infants and children. Once lodged in our tissues, microplastics may leach these chemical compounds continually into our bodies. They are “what we call sustained-release vehicles,” Don Ingber, a professor at Harvard’s medical and engineering schools, told the Harvard Gazette. “They’re just sitting there, and every day they’re releasing a little bit for the rest of the lifetime of those cells in your gut or other organs.”

I think microplastics will turn out to be the cause of many of our modern ailments: autism, dementia, many of the neurological disorders we're discovering in older generations, low fertility rates, etc. They're everywhere, and there's nothing we as individuals can do to avoid them. It's terrifying, yet feels so obvious in hindsight, no? Of course plastics do this to us… 

What was that famous DuPont slogan? "Better Living…through Chemistry." 

It’s still worth blogging in the age of AI

…what’s the point in blogging if people are using ChatGPT, Claude and DeepSeek to spoon-feed them answers? Who, apart from the AIs, will read what you write?

I was asking myself the same question when I started blogging semi-regularly again last year, and this post is an attempt to summarise why I decided that it was worthwhile. The TL;DR: blogging isn’t just about being read – it’s about learning and thinking, and having a durable proof that you can do both.

I've been sitting in this tiny cottage in central Idaho, sick as hell, for the last four days. I was hit with some kind of virus unlike anything I've experienced as an adult — extremely elevated heart rate, nausea, diarrhea, heart palpitations, an inability to feel warm (of which I was reminded is actually my body's response to an elevated temperature — which according to my watch, topped out at 104 degrees). It was the most unnerving feeling I've had as an adult — the complete loss of control of my body. No amount of controlled breathing could bring down my heart rate, no amount of focus would prevent my heart from skipping beats. I was convinced, very early that first morning, that I might not make it through the night.

All this at the conclusion of a day that was otherwise sublime. I ran errands that morning, tried out a new restaurant for lunch (perhaps it was food poisoning?), and drove to a hot springs in the mountains that night (or maybe a norovirus I picked up from the water?) where I sat in solitude for hours, reading Alan Watts' The Wisdom of Insecurity. I remember thinking there in the water that if I were to die there & then, I would die at some kind of peace.

Shitting my brains out on the toilet twelve hours later, I couldn't have felt any less at peace with death — certainly not in such an undignified way. In a hot spring in the mountains, alone? Yes. On the toilet in an Airbnb in a remote mountain town, surrounded by other people in houses just a few feet away, yet still alone? Absolutely not.

Funny how we carry around these precious little delusions. We invent these elaborate constructions about the way we think the world works, the stories we tell ourselves of who we are and what we mean to one another. None of it is real, of course, none of it grounded in anything external to ourselves. All these narratives we conjure are subjective — they exist only in our heads.

I have a few things on my mind that I have been wanting to work out on the page. A few topics where I feel I've been wrong or merely where my thinking has evolved over the time I've been writing here. Politics, artificial intelligence, death, my personal relationships. Yet I've been reticent to do this — why?

In the two years I've maintained Dispatches, it's been curious to watch the way my writing has brought some people closer, including a few folks I've never had the pleasure of meeting in person. More interesting is how my writing has pushed others away, particularly when I write about politics. Last summer, when faced with what felt like (and by all practical accounts was) a binary choice between Biden or Trump, I supported RFK. Friends I've known for years reacted with anger, derision, condescension, disbelief, their noses turning up and away. Eight months later, a few still refuse to speak to me.

I'm interested in those responses and what it says about our culture at this present moment. I think I've been fairly magnanimous with my opinions on the rest of the political spectrum (though not at the expense of humor). You're welcome to disagree. Yet as I've watched the first month of the second Trump presidency unfurl, I'm astounded by the reactions of those on the Right and the Left. It's like I'm witness to two entirely different realities, and I've begun to feel as though I might occupy a unique position in our culture — an interlocutor. 

I was in the shower the other day, before the virus, when a question came to me: who is my intended audience? When I'm writing here on Dispatches, who am I writing this to? 

Thinking on it, the most likely answer, however broad, was 'urban liberals.' 

I spent my younger life living in cities, but about ten years ago, I realized they no longer made me happy (and perhaps never did). As expressed before, I felt the creeping gnaw of groupthink descend on liberals everywhere once Obama was elected, and though I couldn't have expressed it so clearly then, it was profoundly unsettling. Attending grad school in Portland was a hell of an experience — one I would not trade — but I started to notice how smug and certain many people around me were of the way they saw the world. There was a right and wrong way to live, and they were convinced they were living the right way. 

At the time, I wasn't sophisticated enough to articulate my unease, but I was nonetheless compelled to leave. I feel no comfort surrounded by people that think as I do, and if I'm honest, I fear for those who aren't themselves bothered by orthodoxy. Yet there's something that compels most humans to feel secure in their worldview, to surround themselves with a community where they feel safe and protected. Inevitably, this invites groupthink. It's largely why a city like Portland exists (and needs to exist): a lot of people who live in these liberal enclaves have felt driven from their homes elsewhere — small, rural, conservative, often religious places where the intolerance of difference was rampant, repressive, and toxic. I grew up in one of those towns. I was gay, though not yet out, and the hatred, bigotry, intolerance I felt from my "community" was palpable. 

No wonder people left and moved to cities. No one wants to feel hated or judged for what they are, and let's not mince words: for a long, long time, the provenance for that bigotry was conservatism. Mainly, though not exclusively, religious conservatism. It's right there in the name…conservative. 

But things in this country have changed over the last twenty years. The culture is far more tolerant than it once was. I see this first-hand, living most of my adult life in small, rural towns across the Mountain West. Plainly, my sexuality no longer seems to be a point of contention. Sure, there are (and will always be) times when it comes up. Every time I walk into an auto parts store, I have to fight the instinct to deepen my voice and slow my gait a beat or two. I know how I look and sound — I'm thin, wear clothes that fit my body, and have a voice that once you hear it, can't be unheard as 'gay voice' — and in order to get the guys (always men) behind the counter to really listen to my questions, I can't help but code switch. But largely, my need to do this has faded with time. Some of this has come with age and with feeling secure in who I am, but some of it is the culture having changed. I rarely feel threatened over my sexuality like I once did.

But my point is this: I was subconsciously writing for urban liberals because they were the bubble from which I was escaping.

Or maybe I was writing to them because I blame them for the broken systems in which I live. Each time I hear a liberal react to something Trump does with horror or disbelief, a bit of rage flares. Where the hell have you been, I wonder. They aren't living where I am, that's for sure. Everywhere I go, in every small town across this country (aside from those clustered near moneyed enclaves), there's been strong support for what Trump is attempting to do — gut the federal government — for years. Years! So how can so many liberals be so shocked that Trump is following through on it?

It all comes down to trust. For years, I've watched friends and family — all well-meaning, thoughtful, loving people — put their faith in certain institutions. Often the same institutions I have some measure of faith in, too. Old-fashioned shoe-leather journalism: newspapers, cable news, etc. Education: many people in my life have at least a bachelors, and many of them have gone on to get a masters degree, too. And let's not forget government. Three foundational institutions in our culture that have served many of the people I know.

But most of my friends and family are not living in poverty. Most of my friends and family did not grow up in poverty. Most of my family and friends grew up with two loving parents that have remained married. And while most of my friends cannot afford a home, almost all have them have careers that might allow them to one day.

The people in my life are not a representative cross section of America. 

But I would argue I live amongst a very representative cross section of America. My town, as well as the other small towns I've lived in over the years, are husks of what they once were. The husks of old lumber or paper mills dot these towns, empty buildings line the streets. Abandoned railroad rights-of-way hash the landscapes I love. It's obvious that better days are in the past, not the future.

I'm not here to litigate the economic reasons for this (though I would happily criticize the effects of NAFTA on rural America until I'm blue in the face), but we cannot deny it has happened. And when people in these towns are left without purpose, without a strong community, when their kids move to cities because there are no jobs at home, what do we expect people to do? Be happy with it?

There's this unreasonable expectation liberals have of people in rural America — that if things aren't working out for them economically, "just leave." Worse still, "learn to code." Remember when Hillary told the coal miners of West Virginia the government would put them out of business? What a condescending, tone-deaf thing to say. People of all kinds take pride in their work, however dangerous or outdated it might be, and to tell them we'll put them behind a desk, well, that sounds like hell to me. I'll pass on that promised monotony. Liberals, almost always more educated and better-paid, seem to think everyone wants to live as they do.

It's this condescension that rural people find so distasteful. I find myself recoiling from some things my liberal friends say — things that just slide out of their mouths — about rural people. Because people in rural spaces are more conservative, often more religious, often less racially diverse, they're labeled as 'stupid' or 'backwards.' I've seen this in my own profession — institutions like the New York Times send reporters into the rural areas once every four years to figure out just why on earth they could vote for someone like Trump. And that they have to send reporters out is precisely the issue: they aren't here already. Rural spaces are ignored, forgotten, and left behind. 

What do you think this does to the trust people had in institutions like journalism and media? When you turn on the TV, your life is no longer reflected. Not forty years ago, much of the culture looked and sounded like you. I think it's undoubtedly a good thing to have more diversity in media and culture — white, middle America was for too long the default — but the culture has swung so far in the other direction. Now, rural white people are too often coded as dumb, unintelligent, ignorant, hateful. And while it certainly felt that way back in my home town growing up gay, I can promise you things have changed. Just because someone isn't "educated" doesn't mean they aren't intelligent, and it certainly doesn't mean they're stupid.

A vote for Trump does not mean someone is hateful or ignorant. That's what liberals still cannot seem to grasp.

But let's get back to trust. 

What happens when every institution you once trusted no longer serves your best interest? 

What happens when journalism no longer covers your town, or the issues you care about? What happens when the town newspaper folds, and now the only news organizations left are headquartered in faraway cities? 

What happens when the universities you work tirelessly to send your kids to are full of people that think you are racist and bigoted just for being white? (Lest anyone say this doesn't happen, I can attest to this one personally, and at more than one university.) When they teach queer theory and identity politics and your children no longer share your values? I'm not advocating for or against those values, but just imagine watching younger generations move away for an education and economic opportunity, never to return? What do you think that does to a community?

I'll spare you the guesswork: it breaks the heart — and back — of the community.

And let's not get started on banks or the stock market or the government selling out your jobs to other countries.

And then the liberals talk about you with open condescension and derision. 

Who would you trust?

My country, the United States, is in a mess.

We're in a precarious spot, teetering on the edge of an oligarchic dictatorship. Elon Musk is rampaging through the federal bureaucracy — a bloated, over-stuffed bureaucracy that needs to be audited and thinned, by the way! — with all the grace and magnanimity of an angry middle-schooler. It didn't have to be this way. But for so long, those on the Left insisted that the concerns of so many Americans were unjustified, irrational, unwarranted. The government wasn't too bloated, it was working for you, the economy is strong — just look at the stock market. 

But the uncomfortable truth so many of these aghast liberals can't seem to wrap their minds around is this: the system hasn't been working for other people for a long, long time. The system has benefitted the wealthy, the investors, the corporations, the landowners, the banks we Americans bailed out in 2008. Both the Left and the Right give tax breaks to the already-rich and routinely sell out the poor. This has been happening for decades.

Do I think Trump is going to reverse this trend? Of course not. My family stands to benefit financially from another Trump term, just like we did during his first. I don't think Trump gives a rat's ass about anyone other than himself, and he give power and money to anyone that tickles his fragile ego. Musk, Putin, and every other grifter, despot, or billionaire. Let's not bullshit ourselves — we all know someone like him. Maybe a kid we went to school with, maybe some insecure guy at work. A deeply insecure man with a fragile ego is a dangerous thing to behold, for he will do anything to avoid feeling the ache of his insecurities. Anything.

As I've said before, we are all now at the mercy of his fragile ego. But the blame for this rests solely on the backs of over-educated liberals, on backs of the people who conflated their education with intelligence. Their entire ideology was supposedly grounded in the principles of Enlightenment — reason, empowerment of the individual, the goddamn social contract. Yet the beckon call of neoliberalism — the profound allude of money and comfort and (a false sense of) certainty — proved to be too strong, and they sold out their fellow citizen. Worse still, they continue to blame him for his failure.

I don't have a tidy conclusion to this musing, but I can say this much: I'm tired of subconsciously writing to an audience of people that seem to have no sense of curiosity, to people too afraid to venture out of their enclaves and ideological bubbles, to people who turn their nose up at an article or a podcast just because it doesn't fit their already-determined ideological and political worldview. I'm tired of translating for people who themselves express so little compassion for their fellow citizens, despite making so much noise to the contrary.

This profound incuriosity isn't confined to the Left, of course. But there's an unbearable hypocrisy to anyone loudly proclaiming to care about others, yet so obviously not giving a single shit about those who don't think as they do.

Maybe some day soon I'll have more sympathy for liberals, but not today.

Requiem For The West

Those three words — “the free world” — mean nothing to Trump and never have. And he has now fatefully told the entire world, including our former allies, that this is America’s position now as well. He has updated Reagan with these words: “We were with you then. We see no reason to be with you now. In fact, we’re siding with a dictator who threatens you.”

This is a Rubicon, I’m afraid, that cannot be fully uncrossed. But I have a feeling that the American people, including many who voted for Trump, will see this new alliance with Putin against a beleaguered, little democracy with the same disgust and nausea that I do.

This is who Trump is. But it isn’t who Americans really are. I have faith that the West, now mortally wounded, can yet survive Trump and Putin, and re-emerge at some point. But it may be a dark, dark few years before the dawn’s early light breaks out again.

There is something pleasingly pure about having a task to be accomplished and then accomplishing it. It is the exact opposite of writing, and pretty close to the opposite of teaching.

— Pam Houston

Apple Photos phones home on iOS 18 and macOS 15

Of course, this user never requested that my on-device experiences be "enriched" by phoning home to Cupertino. This choice was made by Apple, silently, without my consent.

From my own perspective, computing privacy is simple: if something happens entirely on my computer, then it's private, whereas if my computer sends data to the manufacturer of the computer, then it's not private, or at least not entirely private. Thus, the only way to guarantee computing privacy is to not send data off the device.

Turn off Enhanced Visual Search (in the Settings app > Apps > Photos) on every device. 

Journalism Requires Owners Committed to the Cause

There are many types of businesses a wealthy person can own as a mere hobby, in which the business can thrive under such ownership, simply by the owner allowing talented dedicated professionals to run the operation. A wealthy dilettante owner can help many such businesses, by providing the capital to hire great talent. Journalism is not one of those businesses. Profits are important because profits maintain independence and pay for talent. Investigative reporting is expensive. But independence is more important than anything, and there can be no true independence for a publication when the owner is not committed to the cause.

How UnitedHealth Grew Larger Than The Biggest U.S. Bank

The Hidden Autopilot Data That Reveals Why Teslas Crash

What the Murder of the UnitedHealthcare C.E.O. Means to America

Of course, the solution, in the end, can’t be indifference—not indifference to the death of the C.E.O., and not the celebration of it, either. But who’s going to drop their indifference first? At this point, it’s not going to be the people, who have a lifetime of evidence that health-insurance C.E.O.s do not care about their well-being. Can the C.E.O. class drop its indifference to the suffering and death of ordinary people? Is it possible to do so while achieving record quarterly profits for your stakeholders, in perpetuity?

Thompson’s death resurfaced some unsavory details about his industry. We learned, for instance, that Thompson was one of several UnitedHealth executives under investigation by the D.O.J. for accusations of insider trading. (He had sold more than fifteen million dollars’ worth of company stock in February, shortly before it became public that the Department of Justice was investigating the company for antitrust violations, which caused the stock price to drop.) A new policy from Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield also went viral: the company had announced that, in certain states, starting in 2025, it would no longer pay for anesthesia if a surgery passed a pre-allotted time limit. The cost of the “extra” anesthesia would be passed from Anthem—whose year-over-year net income was reported, in June, to have increased by more than twenty-four per cent, to $2.3 billion—to the patient. On Thursday, the company withdrew the change in response to the public outrage, if only in Connecticut, for now. It’s hard not to be curious about what, if anything, might happen to UnitedHealthcare’s claim-denial rates. I was at a show in midtown Manhattan on Thursday night, and when the comedians onstage cracked a joke about the shooter the entire place erupted in cheers.

Brian Thompson Was Never Content With the Status Quo

Andrew Witty, CEO of UnitedHealth, parent company of UnitedHealthcare:

We know the health system does not work as well as it should, and we understand people’s frustrations with it. No one would design a system like the one we have. And no one did. It’s a patchwork built over decades. Our mission is to help make it work better. We are willing to partner with anyone, as we always have — health care providers, employers, patients, pharmaceutical companies, governments and others — to find ways to deliver high-quality care and lower costs.

(Emphasis mine.) Bullshit. Your one and only mandate is to extract as much value for your stakeholders as possible, health and human life be damned.

Health care is both intensely personal and very complicated, and the reasons behind coverage decisions are not well understood. We share some of the responsibility for that. Together with employers, governments and others who pay for care, we need to improve how we explain what insurance covers and how decisions are made. Behind each decision lies a comprehensive and continually updated body of clinical evidence focused on achieving the best health outcomes and ensuring patient safety.

You've conveniently left out the mandate for profit generation, Andrew.

While the health system is not perfect, every corner of it is filled with people who try to do their best for those they serve.

Brian was one of those people. He was raised in the same Iowa farmhouse as his mom. His dad spent more than 40 years unloading trucks at grain elevators. B.T., as we knew him, worked farm jobs as a kid and fished at a gravel pit with his brother. He never forgot where he came from, because it was the needs of people who live in places like Jewell, Iowa, that he considered first in finding ways to improve care.

Pandering to middle America, ✔ 

The ideas he advocated were aimed at making health care more affordable, more transparent, more intuitive, more compassionate — and more human.

Fuck you, Andrew Witty.

I've said this before, but corporations are money-making machines. That's the sole reason for their existence: to generate profit for the stakeholders and shareholders. That's it. Dont ever fool yourself into thinking that any corporation has your best interest at heart — ever. 

Suspect in UnitedHealthcare CEO’s Killing Went Silent for Months. Where Was He?

Friends and family members have been left bewildered by the jarring transformation of a young man who had seemed destined for a life of achievement. He was the valedictorian at his elite prep school in Maryland and a computer science graduate of the University of Pennsylvania’s acclaimed engineering program, with wide-ranging social connections and significant ambition.

How could a person “destined for a life of achievement” possibly come to the conclusion that health insurance companies are immoral, unjust, and beyond the reach of the law? 😱

Google’s AI-powered smart glasses are a little closer to being real

Google is working on a lot of AI stuff — like, a lot of AI stuff — but if you want to really understand the company’s vision for virtual assistants, take a look at Project Astra. Google first showed a demo of its all-encompassing, multimodal virtual assistant at Google I/O this spring and clearly imagines Astra as an always-on helper in your life. In reality, the tech is somewhere between “neat concept video” and “early prototype,” but it represents the most ambitious version of Google’s AI work.

Watch this video and enjoy being mildly horrified, both by how thoughtless this technology will make us if we needn't be bothered to remember our friends' taste in books and also by just how much data Google will be hoovering up about every single thing we do.

These types of interactions with AI will become anodyne in short order, especially in younger generations, but imagine the implications of a network outage on an entire generation of people who will have have needed to remember or learn anything. (I say this as a stan of the Reminders app. I use it all the time, for everything, adding reminders via Siri on every connected device I own, but yes, it's been somewhat detrimental to my ability to remember certain things. And yeah, I'd be rightly fucked if every Apple device I had went dark all at once. But boy, is it useful.)

Have you ever wondered how many people asked AI which candidate to vote for in the last election? Do you think that number isn't going to grow dramatically over time? 

Luigi Mangione Is Everywhere

Indeed, “Deny, Defend, Depose,” which is widely viewed as a pointed critique of the health insurance industry in America, has become a rallying cry online in recent days as the focus moved away from the shooting itself and onto the shooter and his motives.

However, the fictionalized version of the shooter that was created online does not match reality. Mangione, who allegedly had a handwritten manifesto admitting to the killing in his possession when arrested, is a software engineer from a privileged background. He also follows popular right-wing influencers, such as Tucker Carlson, Joe Rogan, and Jordan Peterson—though he has also criticized some of the arguments put forward by these figures.

During a brief court appearance on Monday night, the police did not outline a motive for the shooting, but based on Mangione’s online posts and reading lists, it appears that the pain from an injury suffered while surfing could have played a significant part in his motivation.

I don't understand the pearl-clutching in the wake of the shooting. The CEO of a healthcare company known for some really shady shit is not a moral person, no matter how respectable (read: wealthy, clean-cut, dresses like he's on a golf course) he appears. Brian Thompson decided profit was more important to him than the health of fellow human beings… So what are we mourning the loss of, exactly?

What about the justice system, you might ask? Well, fellow American, do you genuinely believe that the justice system holds people like Brian Thompson to task for their misdeeds? Does the justice system even consider what he did illegal?

Spare me the moralizing.

I'm not happy my culture has been so corrupted that I've come to accept violence as a way to hold some people to account, but what do we expect? To all things come balance, and with wealth (and health) inequality at current rates, balance will find a way. I'm not saying it will be pretty or pleasant or palatable, but it will find a way, which should only incentivize us to usher in some progressive legislation on wealth distribution sooner rather than later. (But be honest with me — do you think that'll happen?)

May we all aspire to be kind, loving, moral people who don't prioritize money over the health and well-being of other humans.

Unlike Brian Thompson.

Trying to scold the entire internet

Thompson’s death been a real shock to the system for America’s ruling class, who seem to be realizing for the first time that the majority of the country will not mourn their deaths. As podcaster and reporter Michael Hobbes wrote a few years ago, “I think we'll look back on the last decade as a time when social media gave previously marginalized groups the ability to speak directly to elites and, as a result, elites lost their minds.” Which is why a whole bunch of tedious hall monitors are suddenly tut-tutting about all the memes in every major newspaper. I, personally, am not going super hard on the pro-assassination memes — as funny as they are — because we just don’t know what the motive was. We live in a time of mass accelerationist violence and I don’t feel like publicly cheerleading a guy who might have a compound full of deranged far-right ramblings. But I’m also not stupid enough to think that scolding the entire internet for how they’re acting is a meaningful use of my time on planet Earth. Maybe if I had a paid column somewhere — or proper health insurance — I’d feel different.

The UnitedHealthcare CEO shooting

Even if you believe Thompson was all the evil things so many people online say he was — a corrupt corporate CEO guilty of insider trading and working as the face of a company that denies life-saving coverage to tens of thousands of Americans a year in the name of profit — he was a corporate cog. He was responsible to a board and to shareholders. And, in short order, he'll be replaced by another CEO. Nothing will change, except that killing someone in the middle of Manhattan whom you deem evil could now become more normal.

I know how a lot of people might react to me writing this, because I've already encountered the refrains. "It's good these people are scared," is one common throughline of the response. In other words: "No, I don't necessarily support killing corporate CEOs in cold blood on the streets, but if CEOs scale back their predatory behavior because they’re scared of reprisal, that’s a net good.” Or, of course, people might react by saying that I am more worried about the killing of one CEO than a system that kills tens or hundreds of thousands of people a year.

I suppose there's something appealing about these kinds of arguments. They are not entirely unlike arguments I've made in the past — like that we should be prosecuting more corrupt presidents and members of Congress, not fewer, stability of the system be damned. The obvious difference, though, is that when I made those arguments they came from a place of demanding accountability — insisting that the system do a better job of rooting out corruption and evil, not cheering extrajudicial violence on the streets.

To put it differently: If you are hoping for our rich corporate overlords to live in fear of expedited, unanswerable and unexpected punishment, then you are necessarily hoping for us common folk to start delivering that punishment. Which requires us to be the arbiters of who is good and who is evil. The left might consider how long it'll be until abortion-providing doctors or trans activists or Democratic politicians start regularly being mowed down in the street in the name of striking fear into evildoers. If that's the world you want to live in, I strongly suggest signing off the internet and going to spend some time outside.

An Assassin Showed Just How Angry America Really Is

While I really dislike a lot of these people, none of us should want to live in a country where assassination becomes a method of political expression. It’s hard to see democracy surviving if elected leaders and corporate leaders feel they might be shot at any point. And that’s why we have to actually get our laws working again. I hope that men like Carl Nichols and Fortune 500 CEOs start to wake up, and see that there is deep rage outside their clubby environs that can’t be fixed with security measures but must be addressed by some measure of social obligation to the people who live here.

After all, societies that give citizens no way to control their own lives, but put the fate of their people in the hands of distant masters with no concern at all for their wellbeing, invite disaster. We’ve always known that. It’s one of the main reasons for the passage of our antitrust laws. So I hope we can get some control over our society again, before we truly do spin out of control.

Torrent of Hate for Health Insurance Industry Follows C.E.O.’s Killing

The fatal shooting on Wednesday of a top UnitedHealthcare executive, Brian Thompson, on a Manhattan sidewalk has unleashed a torrent of morbid glee from patients and others who say they have had negative experiences with health insurance companies at some of the hardest times of their lives.

”Thoughts and deductibles to the family,” read one comment underneath a video of the shooting posted online by CNN. “Unfortunately my condolences are out-of-network.”

On TikTok, one user wrote, “I’m an ER nurse and the things I’ve seen dying patients get denied for by insurance makes me physically sick. I just can’t feel sympathy for him because of all of those patients and their families.”

🍿🍿

Citi Bikes leave ‘digital exhaust’ that could help track a killer

An electric Citi Bike like the one reportedly used as a getaway vehicle after the murder of United HealthCare C.E.O. Brian Thompson creates “digital exhaust,” streams of data that can be used to track the rider, said David Shmoys, a computer scientist at Cornell University who helped design the system.

Between the creation of a Citi Bike account, connecting it to a credit card, undocking it, riding it around the city and docking it at a new location, every user creates many “streams of digital breadcrumbs” that can help Lyft, the company that operates Citi Bike, track the user’s location, and possibly their identity, Mr. Shmoys said.

Combined with the user’s phone data and location shared with cell towers, “It is amazing how much information is conveyed,” Mr. Shmoys said.

Never ride one of these.

UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson Is Fatally Shot in New York City

We know it’s not antifa because they’ve never been this effective.

When our cities are no longer safe for extraordinarily wealthy insurance CEOs, what’s our country coming to?

Health care industry executives, like those in the insurance and defense industries, face increased risks “because of the services that are being provided and the emotion that comes along with some of those services,” Mr. Komendat said.

That’s an actual quote in the New York Times.

“Because of the services that are being provided and the emotion that comes along with those services.”

Wow.

What an obtuse way to say “these industries kill a lot of people.”

U.S. officials urge Americans to use encrypted apps amid cyberattack

Amid an unprecedented cyberattack on telecommunications companies such as AT&T and Verizon, U.S. officials have recommended that Americans use encrypted messaging apps to ensure their communications stay hidden from foreign hackers.

The hacking campaign, nicknamed Salt Typhoon by Microsoft, is one of the largest intelligence compromises in U.S. history, and it has not yet been fully remediated. Officials on a news call Tuesday refused to set a timetable for declaring the country’s telecommunications systems free of interlopers. Officials had told NBC News that China hacked AT&T, Verizon and Lumen Technologies to spy on customers.

iMessage and FaceTime Audio, always. If you need to communicate with an Android user, Signal.

John Gruber on this developing story.

The Land That Allowed Ken Burns to ‘Raise the Dead’

In a move that seemed rash then and remains unconventional now, he rented the white colonial, then heated by a wood-burning stove, and bought it a few years later for $94,000.

The decampment to the small town — a pinprick of a village a 3½-hour drive from Manhattan that then had a population just over 3,000 — allowed Mr. Burns to explore, gave him peace and shut him out from the rest of world so he could see it more clearly.

Yeah, this is exactly what I’m looking for.