The Public Lands Rule Is Gone

What the BLM's Public Lands Rule was, why the Trump administration killed it, and what it means for the 245 million acres we all own.

On Tuesday, the Bureau of Land Management officially rescinded the Conservation and Landscape Health Rule—better known as the Public Lands Rule. The change takes effect June 11. The administration had been signaling this move since last spring, but this week made it final, and it landed alongside a separate proposed rule weakening grazing oversight on 155 million acres of Western land.

I haven’t previously written about the Public Lands Rule, in large part because, frankly, it’s very much an in-the-weeds policy story and tough to make interesting. But that doesn’t mean the rule was not important or that this week’s decision won’t have downstream impacts. The PLR was a sincere attempt to put conservation on equal footing with drilling, mining, and grazing in how the BLM makes decisions about the 245 million acres it manages—roughly one in ten acres in the United States. That the administration moved so aggressively to kill even that modest reset tells you something about where its priorities lie.

Here’s what you need to know.

What was the Public Lands Rule, exactly?

For most of the BLM’s modern history, “multiple use” in practice meant that drilling, grazing, and mining got to sit with the adults when decisions were made, while conservation was relegated to the kids’ table, typically alongside recreation. The Public Lands Rule, finalized in May 2024, was meant to fix that. It directed the BLM to protect the most intact landscapes, restore degraded habitat, and use science and Indigenous knowledge as the foundation for management decisions. Most consequentially, it made conservation an official use of public lands—meaning a tribe, a rancher, or a conservation organization could hold a restoration lease on a piece of ground the same way an oil company leases it for drilling. That’s what was really at stake. Not a land grab, but a seat at the table.

Who made the rule?

The Biden-era BLM, led by director Tracy Stone-Manning, finalized it in May 2024 after a lengthy public process. The comment period generated 215,000 remarks, and the overwhelming majority were in favor. The rule wasn’t a new policy invention so much as a course correction. The Federal Land Policy and Management Act of 1976 already requires the BLM to manage lands for “multiple use and sustained yield” to benefit current and future generations. After decades of drift toward extraction as the default, the Public Lands Rule was the agency trying to follow the law Congress wrote nearly 50 years ago.

What was the case for rescinding it according to the current administration?

Interior Secretary Doug Burgum argued the rule was “unnecessary” and could block access to hundreds of thousands of acres, hurting energy producers, miners, and ranchers. The administration began the rescission process last spring. A 60-day public comment period followed—and the results were striking. Roughly 98% of more than 61,000 commenters opposed rescission, including members of Congress, former BLM officials, Tribal representatives, ranchers, hunters, and local elected leaders. The administration proceeded anyway.

What does the rescission mean in practice?

Picture the Owyhee Canyonlands in southwestern Idaho—one of the most intact desert ecosystems left in North America, home to bighorn sheep, golden eagles, and some of the wildest river country in the lower 48. Under the Public Lands Rule, a conservation organization or Tribal nation could have held a restoration lease there, giving those values a formal foothold in BLM planning. That mechanism is now gone.

More broadly: 81% of BLM lands are open to oil and gas drilling. About 60% are grazed by livestock. Just 14% are designated for lasting conservation. The rule was meant to start bending those numbers toward balance. Instead, the thumb goes back on the extraction side of the scale.

OK, so how big a deal is this?

The Public Lands Rule was only 16 months old when the administration moved to kill it. Its most important provisions—like conservation leasing—hadn’t yet been fully tested. So the rescission prevents future progress more than it reverses present gains. That’s actually a useful way to understand the administration’s broader strategy: move fast enough that the seeds for a different future, one guided by long-term stewardship principles, never get a chance to take root.

The rescission is significant—but it’s also one item in a very long list, and that context matters. Since January 2025, the administration has fired or pushed out thousands of Interior Department and Forest Service employees. It has proposed cutting public lands agency budgets by more than a third. It issued an executive order making mining the "primary land use" across all public lands where legally allowable—ahead of recreation, wildlife, watersheds, cultural sites, everything. It opened sensitive Arctic habitat to drilling, moved to strip mineral protections from the Boundary Waters watershed in Minnesota, and declared a state of “emergency” on nearly 60% of national forest lands to fast-track commercial logging.

The Public Lands Rule rescission is the headline this week. But the pattern is the real story.

by Christopher Keyes, Re:Public | Read more:
Image: Daniel Halseth/Unsplash
[ed. Public lands (and the public's access to them) are under constant assault lately. See also: The Sellout of the Crazies (Re:Public):]

***

"At the end of a dirt road along the northeastern edge of Montana’s Crazy Mountains, a simple sign warns visitors they are now entering private property.

For fifth-generation Montanan Brad Wilson, the notice marks a defeat with implications far beyond the Crazies.

“The fate of our public lands and our rights are in jeopardy right now,” Wilson told Floodlight.

Wilson is a former sheriff’s deputy and lifelong hunter. For most of his life, he has lived in the jagged shadows of the Crazy Mountains—their snow-capped peaks and twisting valleys watched him grow from a boy herding sheep on his grandfather’s ranch to a grey-haired hunter tracking elk herds across their remote slopes.

“The loss of this access means a lot to me and everybody else,” he said beside the gate, looking down and hiding the wet corners of his eyes.

The road beyond the gate next to Wilson leads into what was, for more than a century, one of two historic public trails into the east side of the Crazies. The U.S. Forest Service relinquished the public’s access to the trail early last year as part of a land swap with the Yellowstone Club—an exclusive mountaintop retreat for the megarich located 100 miles away in Big Sky.

“It doesn’t make any sense to me to give this up,” said Wilson.

For many Montanans, the swap has come to symbolize the growing influence of wealthy private interests spreading across America’s public lands and provides a glimpse of what could come under the Trump administration. [...]

Perhaps nowhere in the country is the fight over public lands—and the big-moneyed interests pulling the strings—more on display right now than in Montana’s Crazy Mountains.

“This is a really simple issue,” said Andrew Posewitz, a Montana public lands advocate and the son of a renowned conservationist. “The public had some really good land and some really good access in the Crazy Mountains. Some really rich people decided they liked the Crazy Mountains a lot … And now the public doesn’t have that access.”

Every American—not just Montanans—should care, he warned.

“Because it is very much a harbinger of potentially what could come.”

The Desert Safety Net

Every winter, tens of thousands of Americans migrate to public lands in the Arizona desert. For a growing number, it's not a vacation—it’s the only housing they can afford.

Every autumn across North America, migration begins.

And across the continent’s highways and desert roads, another migration gathers – this one made not of birds or fish, but of humans.

They go by many names: nomads, drifters, snowbirds, boondockers, van dwellers. Some travel in search of warmth, others for freedom and community. And for a growing number, the migration is not simply seasonal but economic.

Among those is 55-year-old Derek Hansler, a chef by trade.

Known to friends as D Rock, he spends the summer in New Hampshire visiting his children and grandchildren, parking his 2003 Van Terra shuttle bus in driveways along the way. He picks up gigs when he needs cash or a place to park, but the season is less work than service, volunteering in the communities he revisits every year.

“New Hampshire tells me when it’s time to roll,” he jokes. He likes to stay until the leaves turn crimson, then leave before they fall. When that moment arrives, he says goodbye to his family and points his bus 3,300 miles (5,310km) to the south-west.

In Seattle, as the rainy maritime chill brings out jackets, Stephanie Scruggs and Gustavo Costo prepare to head south. After three years on the road, they recently decided to move in together – a milestone in their nomadic life that meant trading their two vans for a half-finished bus they named Magpie, a weathered 1999 International Thomas.

It’s been more than five years since Scruggs, then 35, was diagnosed with a rare and aggressive brain cancer known as a grade three anaplastic astrocytoma. After surgery, six weeks of radiation, and a year of chemo, doctors told her she might have two to five years to live.

Retiree Theresa Webster makes a final pass through the Oregon campground where she volunteers each year as a summer host. Fire rings are doused. Bathrooms are scrubbed. Trash is gathered and hauled away.

In return for the work, she has been given what has become increasingly rare: a legal place to park.

With the season over, she packs up Old Yeller, the mustard yellow 1977 Dodge van she bought for $3,000. Her dog, Miles, rides shotgun as she takes the long way south, first turning east toward her son’s driveway in Iowa, folding briefly back into the family rhythms of grandkids and shared meals. When winter presses in, she points Old Yeller down the interstate.

In driveways, campgrounds, and borrowed corners of parking lots, autumn departures like these unfold across North America. Soon these migrants will spill on to back roads, highways and interstates, license plates tracing faint lines south from Alaska, Quebec, Maine and everywhere in between, navigating by a kind of winter constellation – an invisible beacon in the American southwest that most maps barely notice, a place they return to year after year.

A small desert outpost called Quartzsite, Arizona.

*****

For many road trippers speeding along Interstate 10, Quartzsite, or “Q-town” as it is affectionately known, appears little more than a gas station and fast-food stopover halfway between Los Angeles and Phoenix. It sits in the northern reaches of the Sonoran Desert, 20 miles east of the Colorado River.

Summertime temperatures hover in the triple digits, sending the valley’s human residents indoors to air-conditioned rooms and its wild inhabitants – including desert tortoises, cottontails and kangaroo rats – into underground lairs.

According to the 2020 census, the population is 2,413.

But as winter approaches and temperatures fall to something more forgiving, the great migration of motorhomes, RVs, buses, trailers, vans, cars and trucks begins to pour into Quartzsite – and more precisely, into the vast stretches of open desert that surround it.

But not everyone keeps moving.

Tens of thousands instead gather inside BLM-designated long-term visitor areas, or LTVAs, seasonal enclaves established in 1983 to accommodate the growing number of people wintering in the desert. Seven LTVAs stretch across Arizona and California. But the largest of these and the center of gravity is La Posa – Spanish for “the resting place” – an 11,400-acre stretch of land on the outskirts of Quartzsite.

Each winter, a vibrant social world takes hold. Clubs form and dissolve – singles groups, quilters, metal-detecting hobbyists – while daily gatherings emerge at sunrise and continue late into the night. Around them, infrastructure hums into being: laundromats that double as showers, RVs converted into hair salons, swap meets, mail-forwarding counters for lives without fixed addresses, mechanics coaxing life from failing engines.

Theresa remembers arriving in Old Yeller for the first time in 2018. She had kept her apartment in Oregon just in case van life didn’t work out. But as the desert opened around her, the contingency plan dissolved.

“This is it,” she remembers thinking. “This is the life.” She had grown tired of paying rent and bills and having nothing left over – a treadmill she could never step off. Out here, there were no landlords to answer to. Eight years later, the desert around Quartzsite still carries that weight for her. “It has a magical feeling,” she said.

Community and infrastructure move in tandem here, creating a seasonal metropolis layered on to the existing town. But what allows it to function year after year is something more fundamental: affordability.

For $180, a permit allows camping from 15 September through 15 April. At La Posa, that price includes trash collection, vault toilets and a dump station. It’s worth pausing on the math. For less than the cost of a single night in many American hotels, a person can legally live on public lands in the desert for seven months.

Many LTVA visitors are traditional snowbirds: retirees who maintain homes elsewhere and migrate seasonally for warmth. But for a growing number of others, the permit functions differently: as a legal foothold in a housing system that has increasingly shut them out. [...]

Dr Graham Pruss, executive director of the National Vehicle Residency Coalition – a network that advocates for the rights of people living in vehicles – spends part of each winter moving between desert camps as he connects with vehicle residents across the country. He sees many of them as part of what he calls an “economic refugee class.” They are people displaced not by conflict or famine, he said, but by rents, wages and the shrinking availability of stable housing.

He describes what he calls “settlement bias” – our tendency to treat familiar forms of dwelling as legitimate and unfamiliar ones as suspect.

“If you park an RV on to a private space and you pay for rent, that’s called a mobile home park,” he said. “But if you move that RV 100 feet onto the street, we call that homelessness.

“These are people who are using their private property to solve a housing crisis that we all see around us,” he added. “That adaptive strategy is innovative. It creates solutions where they don’t exist.”

For many vehicle residents, public lands have become one of the few legal geographies where long-term habitation remains possible.

“Public lands are the lifeline for a lot of us,” said Mary Feuer, a longtime public land resident. “When the money runs out, they literally support us.”

by Joshua Jackson, Re:Public |  Read more:

Image: Joshua Jackson

Consider the Sister

Amy Wallace has spent two decades guarding the human her brother was—against a world that prefers David Foster Wallace as a puzzle.

Early on Saturday mornings, Amy Wallace would be yanked out of bed by her big brother, David. He was determined not to miss the start of the cartoons. At their home in Urbana, Illinois, the siblings situated themselves in front of the television and waited for the color bars to turn to The Road Runner Show, David eager, impatient, full of energy. Eventually, he would splay out on the carpet and Amy would sit behind him on the couch. More than 50 years later, Amy is still haunted by the sensory experience of that couch. It was pea-green and scratchy, yet she dutifully—and gladly—sat there as part of their sibling ritual.

 

Their mother, Sally Foster, described the scene this way: Amy spent her mornings watching David watch TV. But that’s not quite right.

“Watching television with David was an interactive experience,” Amy says. The two children weren’t content with what was on offer. Often, they would invent new dialogue for the characters extemporaneously.

“That was one of our hobbies,” Amy says. “We just thought, whoever’s writing this, it could be so much more interesting.”

David identified as the Road Runner and told Amy she was his Wile E. Coyote. He had the speed, the tools—and the upper hand. She was left with only her wits to try to keep up with him, but of course she never could. The lot of Wile E. Coyote was to follow the Road Runner hopelessly, never to catch up.

It was hard work being David Foster Wallace’s little sister. It still is. The job of preserving the memory of her brother as a complex, vibrant, often joyful person has fallen to her. It’s been nearly 20 years since his death by suicide, and while the legend of DFW the writer has grown, the story of the human has been flattened to the stereotype of a tortured artist who came to a tragic end.

Amy, who lives in Arizona, is now the only living member of the nuclear Foster Wallace family. James (a philosophy professor) and Sally (an English professor) moved from Urbana to Arizona in 2012. James died in July 2019, and Sally died just over a year later in July 2020.

The grief over the deaths of her brother and then her parents is a constant companion.

“Nearly every morning of my life, as a fully grown adult woman living a full adult life, I wake up and I’m back in my childhood bed,” she says. “My mom is making breakfast and David’s in his bedroom and it’s so vivid. Then I open my eyes and it’s like nope, that’s all gone.”

Amy’s own children are adults now. She says her eldest is now a writer as well. (Amy asked me not to describe them, to preserve their privacy.) They were old enough to have strong memories of their uncle, and they bear a strong physical resemblance to him. David’s death was a very public wound for a mostly private family.

In 2001, David published a piece of fiction about a man grappling with suicidal ideation. He wrote, in part: “I apologized for whatever pain my suicide and the fraudulence and/or inability to love that had precipitated it might cause” his family. To some extent, he foresaw the shadow he would cast.

Years after David’s death, their father asked Amy to write a book about him from her perspective. He asked her to make sure the people who raised him got a say in his memory, too.

Amy decided a book would be too invasive—but she came to understand that she had a responsibility to talk about her brother beyond the legend that was partly of his own fashioning. She has given radio interviews, appeared at a conference dedicated to David’s work, and has spoken to me at length about the person who teased her, protected her, alienated and embraced her, and eventually broke her heart.

“I do feel that it's kind of incumbent on me to let the world know what a very normal person he was,” Amy says. “And that he was mostly happy, generous—and extremely funny.”

*****

Amy has a knack for making you feel, very quickly, like you too knew this brotherly version of David, knew the sincerity of his often oddly shaped affection.

My own connection with Amy came as the result of my insecurity around David’s work, not the sort of deep, life-defining fanaticism that one often encounters in the cult of DFW. Generally, I have viewed his work the way I have at times felt about Salvador Dalí—we’re all humans with the same general set of blood, guts, and brains. How could these people pull so much more out of themselves than the rest of us?

In many ways, this envy has stood in the way of my own appreciation of David’s writing. It’s great, profound, and will never be repeated. But how did he know so many words? What’s the deal with that syntax? Why do I write in plain, gray English while his work hits my eyes like Technicolor?

In April 2025, I emailed Amy out of the blue. Here is what I said:

“I'm hoping that you might be willing to be interviewed about your mother and let me learn more about her life and work. I have always had a hard time getting past my envy of your brother's vocabulary, and I felt a little bit better about it when I read a bit about Sally.

“So, naturally, my curiosity turned to her and her life. I'd love to write a real feature piece about Sally.”

Amy and I spoke at length over the following weeks. She suggested I buy a copy of her mother’s textbook Practically Painless English. I read it on the subway and felt immediate clarity upon reading just the first few pages.

In a section about verbs, Sally laid out an exercise:

1. Please circle each verb you find in these sentences.
2. The fox moaned and groaned when the chicken escaped.
3. I baked a cake for Mongo, but he turned bright green after he ate some.
4.George is upset because his father thinks he lied about the cherry tree.
5. Florence sneaked out of her room, tiptoed down the stairs, and dynamited the refrigerator.
6. The big fish kept out of trouble because he shut his mouth and stayed in school.

Practically Painless English isn’t just a textbook for people who want to learn to speak proper English. It’s a guide to using language with personality. If Strunk and White offer a guide to frictionless diction, Practically Painless English demonstrates how to stand out within a traditional framework. I probably would have been a much more interesting writer if I’d been raised by a parent who felt so strongly that storytelling should contain detail, whimsy, and flair. Then I realized that Amy was raised by just such a parent, too.

Eventually, months after our first conversation, I reached out to Amy again. This time my curiosity turned to her and her life. I asked her if I could write a real feature piece about her.

In the course of subjecting Amy to many, many hours of conversations about herself, her brother, and my own writing life and hangups about it, I found someone who is as entertaining as she is earnest. Scrutiny around David’s upbringing is inevitably scrutiny of her own upbringing, though hardly any of those critics care to understand her experience—or even know she exists.

She carries that family trait of delighting in absurdity. She hasn’t deified or demonized her brother despite the persistent desire in the literary community to do one or the other. One afternoon, as she was detailing how David watched television, she described just how long she had to sit with him on Saturday mornings before the start of their cartoons.

“Well, no one ever accused your brother of brevity,” I responded, anxiously. I wondered where the line was between respecting the memory of someone and treating them like they were a real person whose peculiarities were worthy of note.

“Or patience,” she said, upping the ante and putting me at ease. “He bounced off the walls in those days.”

One of the ways that Amy protects her brother’s humanity is by showing how his anxieties seemed to travel through a prism and shoot out at unexpected angles. The gloomier results are well known, but there could be humor, too, in the fears provoked not just by his anxiety but by his own ethic of deep care.

She recalls David had an obsession with sharks—which she believes stems from a book called Shark Attack that lived in the bathroom they shared for a portion of their childhood.

Many years later, Amy went to study abroad in Australia. The water was warm there, and she was enjoying herself at the beach regularly after spending her childhood in the landlocked Midwest. Back in the United States, though, David kept thinking about the sharks. He sent letters reminding his sister how to spot them in open water. There was money, too, because he was distraught at the idea that she might wind up short on resources while out on her own. Amy was fine, but David was determined to protect her, in his own way.

“He’d sign off his letters to me with a picture of a shark fin,” Amy says. “Then there’d be a little stick figure. Oh my god, it was great.”

Amy says the last time she and her family spent significant time with David was on a vacation to Stinson Beach.

“When any of us were in the water, he'd be standing on the deck with binoculars scanning for fins,” she recalls. “He was so terrified of sharks and he didn't stick a toe in the water.”

Before he was the most revered and studied contemporary American author, DFW was just someone’s older brother. Amy didn’t see him as DFW, the public character. But she can talk at length about the person she grew up with.

by Lindsey Adler, The Small Bow | Read more:
Image: Road Runner Show/dreamstime

I Get By From a Little Help From My Friends

In January, on a flight to his Florida club Mar-a-Lago, President Donald Trump mused about his $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS. “I’m supposed to work out a settlement with myself,” he said.

Trump is a tough negotiator, and, looking in the mirror, he faced an equally tenacious adversary. But the president managed to work out a deal with himself Monday, one as novel and brazen as the process that spawned it.

He dropped his lawsuit, extracting from his own government a promise to create a $1.8 billion fund to dole out to his political allies. A day later, in a curious addendum, Todd Blanche, Trump’s former lawyer and the acting attorney general, purported to immunize him from lawsuits arising from a great many things, not least his tax liabilities.

The government of the United States, Blanche wrote, is “forever barred and precluded” from pursuing claims against Trump involving “lawfare and/or weaponization” or tax returns.

The whole enterprise was a jarring shock to the conventional understanding of the constitutional system, raising what legal experts said were profound questions about presidential power. If the arrangement is allowed to stand, they said, Trump will have managed simultaneously to thwart Congress’ power of the purse and the ability of the courts to police the separation of powers.

Indeed, Tuesday’s addendum flirted with a grave question with no settled answer: Can the president pardon himself?

In 1974, shortly before President Richard Nixon resigned in disgrace for lawless conduct, Mary C. Lawton, the acting head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, wrote in a brief legal opinion that “it would seem” that Nixon could not pardon himself “under the fundamental rule that no one may be a judge in his own case.”

That opinion has not been withdrawn or tested.

Trump seems determined to challenge that proposition. While the mechanism was more complicated than a formal self-pardon, the addendum being deemed lawful would have a strikingly similar effect, a declaration from the government that Trump would not be liable for his private actions.

Legal experts struggled to make sense of this week’s developments, saying tentatively that it was unlikely anyone could sue to stop the moves.

“It is really difficult to think about how to frame a judicial challenge to what the president has done here,” said Samuel R. Bagenstos, a law professor at the University of Michigan. “That doesn’t mean people aren’t trying, and that doesn’t mean something might not succeed.” [...]

While Congress has ceded power to the executive branch, it could also reclaim it. Indeed, Sen. John Thune, R-S.D. and the majority leader, said Tuesday that he expected lawmakers to scrutinize how the president’s lawsuit had been ended.

Trump, along with his eldest sons and one of his businesses, filed suit in January against the Treasury Department, along with the IRS, an executive agency within the department. But the Treasury secretary “is and must be the president’s alter ego in the matters of that department,” the Supreme Court said in 1926. The president was suing himself. [...]

An appeals court allowed the payment to be made. In a dissent, Judge Janice Rogers Brown of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit said the majority had taken perverse pleasure in letting the administration do as it wished.

“Perhaps one day, I will possess my colleagues’ schadenfreude toward the executive branch raiding hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars out of the Treasury, putting them into a slush fund disguised as a settlement, and then doling the money out to whatever constituency the executive wants bankrolled,” she wrote. “But, that day is not today.”

by Adam Liptak, NY Times/Seattle Times |  Read more:

Image: Kenny Holston/The New York Times
[ed. But... but... what about Hilary's emails?! And Hunter Biden doing something or other... maybe playing too much golf with Obama? Idiots. Rather than have his Justice Department just give him $10 billion free and clear (which would be awkward in the least), he's now proposing to drop the suit entirely if all tax and criminal liability (and that of his entire family) is waived basically forever- no matter what they do. What a deal. See also: May 19, 2026 (LfaA:)

***

"But, in fact, administration officials have talked about paying off the January 6 rioters since at least December 2024, and in June 2025 the Justice Department paid close to $5 million to the family of Ashli Babbitt, killed by police as she tried to break into the House of Representatives.

Apparently based on those signals, Florida’s Andrew Paul Johnson, a January 6 rioter pardoned by Trump, was convicted earlier this year of sexually abusing two twelve-year-olds and trying to buy their silence by saying he would share some of the millions of dollars in restitution money he expected the Trump administration would pay him for his January 6 case. Van Hollen went on to read a series of news stories reporting that January 6 rioters expected payments.

Since Trump’s blanket pardon of nearly 1,600 of those convicted of crimes related to the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, many of them have been rearrested for crimes. At the time of Johnson’s sentencing, Representative Jamie Raskin (D-MD) noted that Trump’s support has made the January 6 rioters “think they’re untouchable.”

Then, today, the plot got even thicker.

A document—this time signed by Blanche himself—amended the previous agreement to add: “The United States RELEASES, WAIVES, ACQUITS, and FOREVER DISCHARGES” Trump, his sons, and the Trump Organization, “and is hereby FOREVER BARRED and PRECLUDED from prosecuting or pursuing, any and all claims” that, as of yesterday, “have been or could have been asserted” by the IRS against them or “related or affiliated individuals” or companies. In other words, Blanche is asserting a blanket promise to stop all IRS audits of Trump’s taxes and not to prosecute any crimes Trump, his family, his businesses, or his associates might have committed that crossed the IRS.

In 2024, Russ Buettner and Paul Kiel reported in the New York Times that Trump had been double-dipping his tax breaks for years. In her Civil Discourse, legal analyst Joyce White Vance called the document from the Department of Justice “a pardon on steroids.”

Vance commented that “[t]he optics of this are so bad that it’s hard to believe Trump would expose himself to their consequences unless he really needed this deal.” It’s probably worth remembering that, after years of pursuing the gangster Al Capone, the government finally managed to convict him of tax evasion. It appears Blanche and Trump’s loyalists are trying to make sure that can’t happen again, declaring any such investigations the “weaponization” of the Justice Department.

Holly Baxter of The Independent reported today that in the midst of all the chaos—including his war on Iran and rising fuel and food prices—Trump called a sudden, urgent press conference today as Blanche was testifying. But what was on his mind was not Iran, or prices, or his corrupt agreement with the Department of Justice. He wanted to talk about his ballroom.

Your Backpack Got Worse On Purpose

VF Corporation started as Vanity Fair Mills. Bras and underwear. They paid $762 million for a company called Blue Bell and picked up JanSport in the deal. That acquisition made them the largest publicly traded clothing company in the world.

Then they went shopping.

In 2000, they bought The North Face. Same year, they bought Eastpak. In 2004, Kipling. In 2007, Eagle Creek. By the time they were done, VF Corporation controlled an estimated 55% of the US backpack market.

More than half. One company.

Every time you stood in a store in the 2010s and compared a JanSport to a North Face to an Eastpak, you were comparing three labels owned by the same parent corporation. Same earnings call. Same margin targets. Same quarterly pressure. The sense that you were choosing between competitors was a fiction that VF Corp had no incentive to correct.

Competition is what kept these brands honest when they were independent. If JanSport built a shitty bag in 1985, you walked across the aisle and bought an Eastpak instead. That threat disciplined every material choice, every stitch count, every zipper spec. Once they all report to the same parent, the discipline evaporates. Nobody needs to outbuild anybody. The only pressure left is the one coming from above: hit the margin target.

The easiest way to hit a margin target is to make everything a little worse, across the board, all at once.

What they changed

Denier count is the most measurable indicator of fabric durability. It measures fiber thickness. A bag made with 1000-denier Cordura nylon can survive years of daily use. Drop that to 600-denier polyester and you have a bag that looks identical on the shelf and lasts half as long.

Denier counts dropped across VF Corp's backpack lines.

YKK makes the best zippers on earth. They're Japanese, they cost more per unit, and brands that care about longevity use them because a zipper failure kills a bag faster than fabric wear. On VF Corp's lower-tier models, YKK hardware got swapped for generic alternatives. A few cents saved per unit across millions of bags.

Stitching density went down. More stitches per inch means stronger seams. Fewer stitches means faster production. When you're running millions of units through factories in Vietnam, Bangladesh, and Cambodia, shaving seconds off each seam saves serious money. It also creates failure points at every spot where the bag takes stress. Strap junctions. Zipper terminations. The bottom panel.

None of this shows up on the shelf. The colors are right. The logos are crisp. The product photography is excellent. You discover what you actually bought three months in, when the stitching pulls apart at every stress point.

Someone in the industry pushed back on an earlier version of this piece with a fair point: VF Corp's brands still operate with their own design teams and their own headquarters. The brands aren't literally merged. And the premium tiers within North Face and JanSport still use quality materials. The Summit Series from TNF still has Cordura. You can still find a JanSport with YKK zippers if you know where to look.

All of that is true. But it actually makes the argument worse, not better.

The fact that VF Corp kept the premium tiers intact while degrading the entry-level and mid-range products means this was a deliberate segmentation strategy. They still make the good version. They just also sell a garbage version under the same trusted name, in the same stores, to the people who don't know the difference. The brand reputation built by decades of quality products is now being used to move cheap products to buyers who trust the logo.

Walmart's JanSport and REI's JanSport are not the same bag. But they carry the same name, and that's the point. The name is doing the selling. The product doesn't have to.

The warranty is doing the same thing

JanSport still advertises a lifetime warranty. It sounds like a company that stands behind its product.

Go try to use it.

You ship the bag back at your own expense. That runs $12 to $25 depending on size and where you live. You wait three to six weeks. That's the current turnaround per JanSport's own warranty page. Then they evaluate the damage.

"Normal wear and tear" isn't covered. Only "defects in materials and workmanship." Think about what that means for a bag engineered to last two years. When it starts falling apart at eighteen months, that failure can be classified as the product reaching its expected lifetime, not as a defect. The warranty language is structurally designed to exclude the exact type of failure the product is now built to have.

People who do get warranty replacements report receiving bags that are worse than the one they sent in. Thinner fabric. Cheaper hardware. You mailed back a 2016 JanSport and got a 2025 JanSport, and those are fundamentally different products.

The warranty used to be legendary. JanSport used to be the brand people cited when they talked about companies that actually stood behind their stuff. That reputation still exists in people's memories. The warranty now runs on that leftover trust.

One person told me they called about getting a zipper replaced on a JanSport from the late 90s. They were told it was normal wear and tear. They tried tailors, got quoted $50 to $100 for a new zipper. They looked at buying a new JanSport and saw how far the quality had fallen. They ended up buying a used backpack at a thrift store for four dollars.

Ten to twenty used bags for the price of one new one that'll fall apart. That's where we're at.

by Keyana Sapp, Worse on Purpose | Read more:
Image: via
[ed. See also: Your Dinner Got Worse On Purpose (WoP):]

***

A truck pulls into the alley behind two restaurants. Same truck, same hand cart, same flats of frozen jalapeño poppers walking through two different kitchen doors that share a back wall. Two different menus, two different price-points… the exact same food supplies.

The truck is Sysco. They deliver to more than 400,000 of the ~749,000 restaurants in America. Roughly one in every two. The steak and eggs at a diner in the Texas Panhandle and the steak and eggs at a breakfast joint in northern Maine taste functionally identical because they came off the same pallet at the same distribution center, processed against the same private-label spec, on the same line, by people who never knew which restaurant the boxes were headed to.

This is what the system was built to produce. The same dinner, served to 400,000 different rooms, by people who think they are running their own restaurants.

The truck stops everywhere

Sysco does not just feed independent restaurants. They feed hospitals, federal prisons, military bases, public schools, and the food service companies that supply the cafeterias of the United States Capitol. Fiscal year 2025 closed at $81.4 billion in net sales. The customer count sits at roughly 730,000 across 10 countries, with 337 distribution centers and around 1,719 employed drivers.

The thing people should understand is what those numbers do at the supplier layer. When Sysco moves a spec on a chicken breast, the spec moves on the plate of a restaurant-goer, a public school kid and a federal prisoner in the same week. When Sysco strikes a single supplier deal for frozen seafood, the cafeteria at the United States Congress and the chow line at the Bureau of Prisons end up with the same case from the same boat. [...]

The clam chowder in a New England diner and the clam chowder in a Florida diner come out of the same Sysco can. The biscuits at a Tennessee breakfast joint and the biscuits at a Wisconsin one come from the same frozen case. Regional cuisine, the kind that used to be the reason people drove to a particular restaurant in a particular town, requires regional ingredients and regional suppliers and a chef with the leverage to source both. As Frerick put it, “every independent diner becomes an off-brand Denny's."

Among line cooks, the saying is simpler. “When a Sysco truck pulls up to the loading dock, the kitchen has stopped trying.”

Worried About War’s Impact, Bond Investors Push Rates to Highest Level Since 2007

Bond markets convulsed on Tuesday, pushing the rates on U.S. Treasuries to levels not seen since the global financial crisis nearly 20 years ago, as investors grew increasingly anxious about rising inflation because of the war in Iran.

The yield on the 30-year Treasury note rose to 5.18 percent on Tuesday, on course to close at its highest level since 2007. Bond yields move inversely to prices.

The rising rates, which are pushing up borrowing costs for governments, homeowners and businesses, could be a critical pressure point for the Trump administration as it continues to pursue its campaign against Iran, which has pushed up oil prices worldwide.

The last time President Trump faced such turmoil in the Treasury market was after he announced in April last year that he would raise tariffs on nearly every U.S. trading partner. The steepening rates were cited as a primary reason that Mr. Trump later backed down from many of his most draconian proposals.

This time, investors across the world are becoming increasingly concerned about the fallout from the monthslong conflict in the Middle East, where, despite a cease-fire between the United States and Iran, efforts to find a lasting peace deal have stalled. [...]

Bond investors around the world are focused on the continued blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, the vital shipping lane that before the war had funneled roughly a fifth of the world’s oil supply, predominantly to Asia and some parts of Europe.

In the United States, the impact of higher oil prices was reflected in a series of inflation reports last week showing consumer and producer prices both rising at their fastest pace in several years.

Another factor weighing on the Treasury market is last weekend’s summit between Mr. Trump and China’s leader, Xi Jinping. Investors’ hopes that the much anticipated meeting would result in China’s help with ending the war in Iran were dashed.

“I think there is just a lot of fear out there right now and a collective hesitancy to step in front of the sell-off,” said Vail Hartman, a U.S. rates strategist at BMO Capital Markets, noting concerns that yields could continue to move higher.

Unlike during last year’s tariff turmoil, Mr. Trump appears less willing to back down over Iran, analysts say. The economy is otherwise in good shape, underpinned by the growth of artificial intelligence and blockbuster corporate profits. The stock market has risen for seven consecutive weeks, hitting record highs along the way.

But the climbing Treasury yields could complicate Mr. Trump’s other economic priorities, like jump-starting the stalled housing market.

The 10-year Treasury yield, which underpins borrowing costs for mortgages, has also surged higher since the start of the war with Iran.

That yield has risen roughly three-quarters of a percentage point since the war began, to 4.67 percent, its highest level since the start of 2025. The average 30-year mortgage rate has risen to 6.36 percent from below 6 percent before the war, according to data from the housing agency Freddie Mac.

Some of the increasing Treasury yields are driven by anticipation that the Fed will potentially need to raise the short-dated interest rates it controls to try to slow inflation. These expectation are increasing even with the appointment of the new Fed chair, Kevin Warsh, whom Mr. Trump picked with hopes of lowering rates.

Before the war began, investors had expected the Fed to cut rates at least half a percentage point by January. Now, they have lowered those expectations to a quarter-point rise, based on prices in interest rate futures markets.

“There is a feeling that this is going to get worse before it gets better,” said Joseph Purtell, a portfolio manager at Neuberger Berman, adding that the market is “pricing in some kind of premium for that uncertainty.”

by Joe Rennison, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Getty via

[ed. The bond market might be cautious but don't see that in equities.]

The eruption of Mount St. Helens on May 18, 1980.

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Bridge Rapid Replacement System

Concrete is a technology... Ultra-high-performance concrete — UHPC — runs eighteen to thirty-five thousand psi, ten times the strength of the mix in American bridges today, tensile strength twice normal, chloride permeability under ten percent, freeze-thaw shrug. Machine-made sand concrete replaces river sand with precision-crushed aggregate engineered at the grain level and saved one Chinese province $3.19 billion on a single bridge program. Concrete-filled steel tubular arch systems — CFST — now span six hundred meters across Chinese canyons. Prefabricated modular bridge spans are stockpiled in fields next to the bridges they will one day replace, ready to be craned in when the live span is hit. Six bridges in seventy-two hours. The Iranians did this last week. The Chinese can do it at greater span than anyone has ever done it. 

Go ahead. Name an American cement company. The sentence doesn’t end. That’s the sentence-ending sentence. The country that cannot pour its own concrete is the United States of America. Meanwhile six Iranian railway bridges went down and came back up in seventy-two hours. The method is called the Bridge Rapid Replacement System. In 2019 somebody sat in Tehran and said what if they bomb the bridges, and somebody else said we should put another bridge next to every bridge, and somebody else said yes, and they did it. Six times. In concrete... 

Meanwhile in Guizhou there is a canyon and a bridge across the canyon, six hundred twenty-five meters of concrete, lifted into place with a hoisting system that did not exist fifteen years ago. The Chinese hold every world record for arch bridge span. Every single one. The seminary cannot pour a sidewalk in Baltimore that doesn’t crack in four years. The seminary had a harbor bridge in Baltimore and a ship bumped it and the bridge fell in the water. The seminary watched the ship coming for an hour.

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Besties
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Günther Blau, German, 1922-2007, Dandelion II, 1978
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Utagawa Kuniyosh, Toranosuke Capturing A Kappa In The Tamura River, 1835
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Gen Z Is Pioneering a New Understanding of Truth

Previous generations inherited relatively stable systems for determining what was real: newspapers, universities, scientific institutions, courts, and professional journalism. Those systems were imperfect and often exclusionary, but they provided shared reference points. Gen Z has inherited something fundamentally different: an information ecosystem where truth is increasingly shaped socially, emotionally, algorithmically, and now synthetically through AI.

As journalist Maria Ressa warned in her Nobel Prize acceptance speech, "Without facts, you can't have truth. Without truth, you can't have trust. Without trust, we have no shared reality, no democracy."

But Gen Z may already be building something to replace what's been lost. Not institutions. Not gatekeepers. A distributed, socially negotiated sense of who earns the right to be believed. They're not abandoning truth. They're auditing who gets to deliver it.

That verdict, built by millions of young people navigating this system together, is already in.

by Steven Rosenbaum, Wired |  Read more:

Image: Darrell Jackson; Getty Images

Original skateboard deck featuring a skeleton ribcage motif by internationally recognized street artist Lonac (Croatia). 
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via:

[ed. French rocker.]

Something Big Is Happening on Campus

I get to visit about two dozen campuses every year, and I meet at least a few teachers like Montás at each of them. I can generally spot the ones with the pure disease, the ones with that raw teacher-fire. Usually, they had some experience early in life when they fell in love with learning. This love then became a ruling passion, and now they fervently seek to share it with their students in the classroom. You can find them at Ivies and at community colleges, at big state schools and small liberal-arts colleges. They are a part of what’s going right in American higher education, the part that critics (like me) don’t write about enough.

These teachers talk of their vocation in lofty terms. They are not there merely to download information into students’ brains, or to steer them toward that job at McKinsey. True humanistic study, they believe, has the power to change lives. They want to walk with students through the biggest questions: Who am I? What might I become? What is this world I find myself in? If you don’t ask yourself these questions, these teachers say, you risk wasting your life on trivial pursuits, following the conventional path, doing what others want you to do instead of what is truly in your nature. If society doesn’t offer this kind of deep humanistic education, where people learn to seek truth and cultivate a capacity for citizenship, then democracy begins to crumble. “What I’m giving the students is tools for a life of freedom,” Montás says.

These great teachers are the latest inheritors of the humanist tradition. Humanism is a worldview based on an accurate conception of human nature—that we are both deeply broken and wonderfully made. At our worst, humans are capable of cruelty, fascism, and barbarism that no other mammal can match. On the other hand, deep inside of us we possess fundamental longings for beauty, justice, love, and truth, which, when cultivated, can produce spiritual values and human accomplishments breathtaking in their scope.

Life is essentially a battle between our noblest aspirations and our natural egotism. Humanistic education prepares people for this struggle. Yes, schooling also has a practical purpose—to help students make a living and contribute to the economy. But that practical training works best when it is enmeshed within the larger process of forming a fully functioning grown-up—a person armed with knowledge, strength of judgment, force of character, and a thorough familiarity with the spiritual heritage of our civilization. Preprofessional education treats people solely as economic animals; humanistic education also treats them as social and moral animals.

Humanistic teachers do this by ushering students into the Great Conversation—the debate, stretching back centuries, that constitutes the best of what wise people have thought and expressed. These teachers help students encounter real human beings facing the vital challenges of life: Socrates confronting death, Sun Tzu on how to manage conflict, Dante in love, Zadie Smith on living in the boundary between different identities. The Great Conversation represents each generation’s attempt to navigate the dialectics of life, the tension between autonomy and belonging, freedom and order, intimacy and solitude, diversity and cohesion, achievement and equality. The Great Conversation never ends, because there are no final answers to these tensions, just a temporary balance that works for a particular person or culture in a particular context.

By introducing students to rival traditions of thought—Stoicism, Catholic social teaching, conservatism, critical race theory—colleges help students cultivate the beliefs, worldviews, and philosophies that will help them answer the elemental question of adulthood: What should I do next? By introducing them to history and literature, colleges arm students with wisdom about how humans operate, which is handy knowledge to have. They offer them not only life options but also, more importantly, the ability to choose among them. “Any serious human problem is a hard problem,” Andrew Delbanco, who teaches at Columbia, told me. “The fundamental obligation of a humanities teacher is to try to develop in students an allergy to ideology and certainty. To acknowledge self-doubt.”

But humanistic education is no mere intellectual enterprise. Its primary purpose is not to produce learned people but good people. When teachers do their job, they arouse in their students not only a passion for learning but also a passion to lead a life of generosity and purpose. “The correct analogy for the mind is not a vessel that needs filling, but wood that needs igniting—no more—and then it motivates one towards originality and instills the desire for truth,” Plutarch observed many centuries ago.

Teachers do this by making excellence attractive to the young—excellent lives, excellent ideas, excellent works of art, commerce, and science, and, above all, excellent ideals. The students who are captivated by these ideals find some cause to advance, some social problem to address, some business to start. When confronted by inspiring ideals, many students say: I care intensely about this, I want to orient my life around this. It’s not only their minds that have been refined but also their desires and ambitions. In a true humanistic education, the French philosopher Jacques Maritain wrote, “the shaping of the will is thoroughly more important to man than the shaping of the intellect.”

Preprofessional education is individualistic and selfish. Such students learn to ask: How can I outcompete my peers and beat them up the ladder to success? In a humanistic program, by contrast, groups of people gather to form communities of truth, to reason together, to explore life together, to pool their desires and seek the common good.

I find that students flock to humanistic teachers who radiate a sense of urgency. They tell students: We are doing something important here. College is not just frat parties and internships; it’s potentially the most important four years of your life. You can emerge either an anesthetized drone or a person fully curious, fully committed, and fully alive.

I know this kind of education can have this effect because it is the education I got decades ago at the University of Chicago. I knew I could never be as learned as the professors I encountered, but their passion for large topics and great books seemed so impressive to me. I yearned with all my soul to understand the world as best I could, to embark on a lifelong journey of growth. Whatever my ample failings, that yearning, kindled in those classrooms with those books and those teachers, has never gone away. I stumbled unknowingly into a humanistic education, because it was the only college I got into, but I can tell you, it totally worked on me.

Today, the teachers I’m talking about tend to feel like dissidents within the academy, like they are doing something countercultural. That’s because at most schools, humanistic education has been pushed into the remote corners of academic life. It’s not that people woke up one morning and decided to renounce the humanistic ideal, it’s just that other goals popped up. It was easier to fundraise for them, easier to sell them to tuition-paying parents. The idea of forming students into the best version of themselves sort of got left behind. [...]

Mark Edmundson also grew up in a working-class family, in Medford, Massachusetts. He got into college, something no one else in his family had done, and told his father that he might study prelaw, because you could make a decent living as a lawyer. His father, who had barely graduated high school, “detonated,” Edmundson later recalled. You only go to college once, his father roared, you better study what genuinely interests you. The rich kids get to study what they want, and you are just as good as any rich kids.

Edmundson soon encountered Sigmund Freud and Ralph Waldo Emerson. “They gave words to thoughts and feelings that I had never been able to render myself,” he wrote in his book, Why Teach? “They shone a light onto the world, and what they saw, suddenly I saw, too.” Edmundson now teaches poetry and literature at the University of Virginia.

“To get an education, you’re probably going to have to fight against the institution you find yourself in—no matter how prestigious it might be,” Edmundson once told an audience of students. “In fact, the more prestigious the school, the more you’ll probably have to push.”

The forces arrayed against humanistic learning are many:

by David Brooks, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Image: The Atlantic: Source: Laurie Michaels/Bridgeman Images
[ed. Contrast this with someone (below), who believes that colleges should be modeled after OnlyFans, and that hyper-specialization ("edge" degrees where AI will supposedly be less adept) are the future. I know which curriculum I'd choose.]

Ben Sasse's Warning

When Ben Sasse walked onto the Senate floor in November 2015 to deliver his first speech as a member of the upper chamber, he did something unusual: He had waited a full year to speak. It’s part of a Senate tradition known as the “maiden speech.” A historian by training and a management consulting associate by early vocation, he had spent his first year in the chamber interviewing colleagues, studying how the institution functioned, and developing a diagnosis before offering it publicly. When he finally spoke, the speech landed with enough force that Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) distributed the text to every Republican senator, a gesture the Senate GOP leader at the time rarely made.

“No one in this body thinks the Senate is laser-focused on the most pressing issues facing the nation,” Sasse told his colleagues. “No one.”

The indictment was bipartisan, surgical, and delivered with the calm of a man who had considered it carefully before speaking. The Senate, he argued, had surrendered its institutional identity to the rhythms of the 24-hour news cycle, to the demand for sound bites, and to the incentive to grandstand for a narrow base and raise money rather than legislate for a country. “The people despise us all,” he said. “And why is this? Because we’re not doing our job.”

It served as a warning that went unheeded, and 11 years later, we’re watching more dysfunction in government than ever before. Sasse, now dying of Stage 4 pancreatic cancer at 54, is still saying the same thing. The diagnosis has not changed the message. It has sharpened it.

Whether Sasse was a “good” or “effective” senator is debatable. Whether Washington currently has enough senators like him is not a close question.

The criticism that followed him throughout his eight-year tenure is almost entirely subjective. His critics on the Left saw a man willing to deplore Trumpism in public while voting with President Donald Trump‘s agenda in practice. His critics on the Right, particularly as the party realigned, saw a posturing institutionalist more interested in making points and serving as a pundit than in getting on board fully with the president’s policies. The most durable version of this critique runs something like: He gave great speeches and passed no significant legislation.

Yuval Levin, founding editor of National Affairs and director of Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies at the American Enterprise Institute, largely rejects both sets of criticisms. On the Trump question specifically, Levin is direct: “The notion that there was much more he could have done to hold Trump to account is misdirected and mistaken. He took on Trump when he disagreed with him, and when he thought Trump had exceeded his authority or violated his oath. And unlike most Senate Republican critics of Trump, he ran for reelection and won after doing that.”

The objection to the lack of signature legislation mistakes the Senate’s function for a body it was never designed to be. In the framework Sasse spent years articulating, the Senate is not primarily a factory for producing legislation. It is a deliberative institution meant to apply friction to democratic impulses in the House of Representatives, to slow things down when people want to move too fast, and to force the executive and judiciary to operate within appropriate constitutional limits. By that standard, which is closer to the Founders’ intent than the one applied by Sasse’s critics, he understood and performed his role better than most of his colleagues.

The “pundit” critique oversimplifies his actual record. Sasse served on the Senate Intelligence Committee throughout his tenure, and his work on China there was substantive and largely ahead of the political mainstream. When it was still unfashionable for a Republican to identify Beijing as a generational geopolitical threat rather than an irritating trade partner, Sasse was making that case in the committee rooms that mattered. He had genuine expertise in China’s intelligence operations and, accordingly, used his position, spending considerable time in secure facilities at times when most of his colleagues were busier developing a social media strategy.

Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA), who worked alongside him on the intelligence committee, offered perhaps the most precise characterization of what made Sasse different, telling Scott Pelley on 60 Minutes in April that Sasse “never really thought about things as conservative, liberal. He thought much more about issues, such as the future and the past.” Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) said Sasse had a “concern not just for today, but for tomorrow and the future” and that he “wasn’t distracted by all the noise that goes around us on a daily basis.” [...]

Levin, who watched Sasse’s tenure closely, offers a candid accounting of his legislative limitations. “It’s true that Ben was not an active legislator, advancing proposals, sponsoring and co-sponsoring legislation, and building coalitions,” he said. “He was active in some key committees, especially the Intelligence Committee, where it seemed to him that active engagement could make a difference. But I think he concluded this was not the case in some of his other committees and that he might be more useful as a critic and observer of the institution. No individual senator gets a lot done right now, and of course, that’s part of the frustration he had.”

But the moments that defined Sasse as a senator were the ones that did not produce legislation, and those are the moments worth examining without the usual condescension.

On the first day of Justice Brett Kavanaugh‘s Supreme Court confirmation hearings in September 2018, the chamber descended almost immediately into the theater that had by then become customary. Protesters disrupted proceedings from the gallery. Democratic senators jockeyed for camera time. The atmosphere was more performance than inquiry. Into this circus, Sasse delivered a 12-minute statement that went viral because it said plainly what almost no one in that room was willing to say: The hysteria around confirmation hearings is a symptom, not the disease. Congress had spent decades delegating its legislative authority to executive agencies and now blamed the courts for filling the vacuum.

“It is predictable now that every confirmation hearing is going to be an overblown, politicized circus,” he said. “And it’s because we’ve accepted a bad new theory about how our three branches of government should work.” The corrective he offered was simple: Congress should pass laws and stand before voters. The executive should enforce those laws. Judges should apply them, not write them. Naturally, no one disagreed out loud.

He delivered a version of the same argument at Justice Amy Coney Barrett‘s hearing in 2020. Neither speech moved the institution. Both captured something true and important about why the institution was failing, and both were widely shared by people who had largely stopped expecting a sitting senator to say anything worth sharing. The Kavanaugh statement was described in this publication at the time as the civics lesson Washington desperately needed. That it needed to be given by a freshman senator to the full Senate Judiciary Committee was Sasse’s real point.

He also understood, more clearly than most of his colleagues, that the Senate’s dysfunction was not incidental but structural. The cameras, he argued, were a bad incentive. The constant travel and time spent fundraising corroded the relationships that make effective governing possible. Most tellingly, he believed that senators had come to treat their office as the purpose of their lives rather than a temporary form of service to something larger. When Pelley noted on 60 Minutes that many senators he knew “would not be able to breathe without that job,” Sasse replied that he feared that was true and that it represented “a much, much deeper problem.” The best title a person could hold, he said, was dad, mom, neighbor, friend. Senator was “a great way to serve. It should be your 11th calling or maybe sixth, but never top.”

When he resigned from the Senate in January 2023 with four years remaining in his term to become president of the University of Florida, many observers treated it as confirmation of the pundit critique: He could not stay the course. The more honest reading is that he had concluded the institution was, as he told Pelley, “very, very unproductive” and that there were better things for him to do. “We didn’t do real things,” he said. “And it felt like the opportunity cost was really high.” He moved to Florida, then stepped down from that post roughly a year and a half later when his wife, Melissa, was diagnosed with epilepsy and required full-time care. The man who had argued that being a senator should rank no higher than sixth on a person’s list of priorities was living accordingly.

Then, on Dec. 23, 2025, he posted the news to X. “Last week I was diagnosed with metastasized, stage-four pancreatic cancer, and am gonna die.” He was 53. Doctors at MD Anderson Cancer Center had cataloged the full spread: lymphoma, vascular cancer, lung cancer, liver cancer, and pancreatic cancer, the point of origin. He had been given three to four months to live. He called it what it was: “Advanced pancreatic is nasty stuff; it’s a death sentence.”

What followed was unexpected, at least to anyone who had expected Sasse to retreat from public life. He launched a podcast called Not Dead Yet. He sat down for a conversation with New York Times columnist Ross Douthat on the latter’s Interesting Times podcast in April, which was released just days after the interview aired and subsequently circulated widely. He appeared on 60 Minutes with Pelley on April 26, his face visibly marked by his medication, a drug called daraxonrasib from Revolution Medicines that had shrunk his tumors by 76% and extended his life by months that were not supposed to exist. He credited the extra time to “providence, prayer, and a miracle drug.”

The Douthat interview was the more intimate of the two conversations and the more remarkable. Douthat asked Sasse at the close whether he felt ready to die. Sasse said he did not feel ready but that he had hope, grounded in his Reformed Christian faith, that he would be with God. The response moved Douthat visibly to tears, something Sasse responded to with his characteristic dry humor. Earlier in the conversation, Sasse reflected on what the disease had given him alongside what it had taken. “I hate pancreatic cancer,” he told Douthat. “I would never wish it on anyone, but I would never want to go back to a time in my life where I didn’t know the prayer of pancreatic cancer. I can’t keep the planets in orbit. I can’t even grow skin on my face.”

The “prayer of pancreatic cancer,” as Sasse uses the phrase, is something like the acknowledgment of dependence that most people spend their healthiest years avoiding. He is not unusual among the terminally ill in arriving at that acknowledgment. He is unusual in the way he has extended it outward, into public argument, into the same institutional critique he was making in November 2015. On 60 Minutes, he was asked what Congress was missing, and he named the artificial intelligence revolution, the future of work, and the complete absence of 2030 or 2050 thinking in either party. Then, without prompting, he returned to the frame he had always used. “The Senate needs to be less like Instagram. The Senate needs to be more deliberative, and that means less smack-down nonsense,” he told Pelley, adding, “The Senate should be plodding, and steady, and boring, and trustworthy.”

by Jay Caruso, Washington Examiner |  Read more:

Image: uncredited via

[ed. I knew very little about Ben Sasse before reading an article about daraxonrasib, the new breakthrough drug given to him in his treatment for aggressive pancreatic cancer. It goes without saying that Congress would be an entirely different place if there were more people like him. See also: Pancreatic cancer just met its match (Works in Progress):]

***

"For most of the last half-century, a diagnosis of metastatic pancreatic cancer was a death sentence. In December 2025, former Nebraska Senator Ben Sasse announced he had been diagnosed with stage four pancreatic cancer that had spread to his lungs, liver and other organs, and was given three to four months to live from the time of diagnosis. With little to lose, he enrolled in a clinical trial for an experimental drug. Four months later, he reported a 76 percent reduction in tumor volume, describing the drug, daraxonrasib, as a ‘miracle’. His face, ravaged by a severe skin rash from the treatment, told a more complicated story. Yet he was alive and grateful to be able to talk to his family.

A few days after Sasse’s interview, in April 2026, Revolution Medicines announced Phase 3 trial results for daraxonrasib showing the drug had roughly doubled survival in patients with metastatic pancreatic cancer compared to standard chemotherapy. For a disease where median survival has long been measured in months and where little had changed for decades, that result represents a genuine turning point.

But the significance extends beyond pancreatic cancer. Daraxonrasib is among the first drugs in an emerging generation designed to target RAS, a protein implicated in roughly a quarter of all human cancers and long considered beyond reach, in all its mutant forms. And it belongs to a broader class of medicines, molecular glues, that are beginning to show what becomes possible when drugs no longer depend on finding a ready-made pocket in their target. Several compounds in this class are now in clinical development, each probing a different protein that previous generations of drugs could not touch."

The Specials

Thank You For Your Service

Dear Acting Attorney General Blanche: 

It has come to our attention that you have used your office to improperly shower government cash on Donald Trump’s political operatives and sycophants, beginning with corrupt seven-figure “settlements” for disgraced Trump officials Michael Flynn and Carter Page who had already lost their initial cases against the government in court. You have now proceeded behind closed doors to order the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to pay millions of dollars to former FBI agents who were suspended, fired, and had their clearances revoked for criminal activity, major breaches of national security, or violations of the standards of conduct and professionalism required of law enforcement agents. All of these handouts constitute an astounding and lawless abuse of government office and taxpayer dollars. 

The Committee on the Judiciary has learned from multiple sources that over the last several months, your office ordered the FBI to pay massive settlements to nearly a dozen FBI employees who were disciplined and suspended for gross violations of FBI policy and federal law. In one instance, an employee had his security clearance revoked and was fired from the FBI after he refused to investigate a violent white nationalist group. He later admitted to accepting commercial sex while on an official assignment overseas, yet under Director Kash Patel, the FBI reinstated him, reinstated his clearance and, amazingly after all this misconduct, paid him several hundred thousand dollars. In another case, an FBI employee participated in the violent mob that attacked the Capitol on January 6, 2021, and subsequently lied to the FBI’s Security Division about his actions on that day. He had his security clearance revoked for this blatant misconduct and then left the Bureau. But under your leadership, the Department of Justice (DOJ) agreed to pay him a lump sum payment and backpay of several hundred thousand dollars at the expense of the FBI.

Two threads seem to unify these astonishingly corrupt “settlements,” which are, of course, not actual settlements because the beneficiaries have generally already lost, or in many cases, not even filed their cases. These checks are just political handouts and payoffs.

by Congressman Jamie Raskin, Ranking Member, House Judiciary Committee |  Read more (pdf):]

[ed. Hear this on the nightly news? No?]

How American Camouflage Conquered the World

At the Brooklyn Navy Yard—once famous for building aircraft carriers, now better known for creative studios—a company called Crye Precision is one of the biggest tenants. Its footprint in the building is 100,000 square feet. Inside its gigantic warehouse space, rows of whirring sewing machines are stitching together garments made out of the most popular, renowned, and confusing textile of our time: MultiCam.

MultiCam is so ubiquitous that you can buy a camping chair or baby carrier in the camouflage pattern. Arc’teryx and Outdoor Research make jackets in MultiCam. Perhaps most importantly, you may see this iteration of camo on police officers, SWAT teams, ICE agents, or your average January 6 rioter.

For its influence, the pattern has earned a place in MoMA’s permanent collection, a thrill to the Cooper Union art students who created it. “They gave us a lifetime membership, which is cool,” says Gregg Thompson, who was still in graduate school in 1999 when a Cooper Union alumnus, Caleb Crye, reached out to him about a collaboration. “We always had an interest in all things military,” says Thompson. “It’s boy stuff—monster trucks and that kind of thing.”

In 2001, Crye Precision (then known as Crye Associates) got its first military assignment: to make a prototype of a new kind of helmet. While the company was making it, 9/11 happened. With the announcement of the so-called War on Terror, Crye Precision took on a new challenge: camouflage. In all their exploratory research conversations with soldiers, Crye and Thompson learned that the US camouflage situation didn’t work. Soldiers were frequently wearing mismatched camo, which made them stand out on the battlefield as opposed to blending in. “When guys deploy, they’re wearing desert uniforms with woodland body armor,” Thompson explains. What if, they thought, there was one camouflage pattern that could work almost anywhere? It could be a “75 percent solution to environments in general,” Thompson says.

There are a few ways to make a camouflage pattern work in multiple environments. One is to make sure it has the right number of colors. “Three would not be enough; 12 would be too many, because they would just get lost,” Thompson says. He thinks seven is the sweet spot. These colors—greens and browns and beiges—all need to have warm overtones. “Most things in nature have some level of warmth in them,” he says. “Even a building—it came from stone and likely grew a little bit of green stuff on it. Very few things remain cold.” Also very important for a camo pattern is that it should have a lot of highlights, lowlights, gradients, and fades; no two outfits should be identical. As Thompson notes: “If you have all of your guys kind of looking the same, then as soon as you spot one guy, you can very easily pick out the rest, right?”

The design students didn’t start out in the field or on a hunting range. “You start in your Adobe suite, right?” Thompson says. “ Go right in digitally, create it, print it, make uniforms out of it. Tweak, tweak, tweak, tweak, tweak.” It was a lot of guesswork. There wasn’t really a reliable measurement for testing the effectiveness of camo. “ The human eye and the user and the guy in the field know what’s good or bad, but to make that be a test that you could replicate across different forces would be very, very hard,” Thompson says.

And yet, Crye Precision was pretty sure it had found something special. In the early 2000s, they presented their concept for multi-environment camo to the United States military. Crye made it clear that they intended to patent this pattern, an early design of which was called Scorpion. In 2004 they did, and christened it MultiCam. Around that same time, when the military had an open call for submissions for a new Army camo, Crye proposed MultiCam. It was rejected.

Instead, the US Army announced that it had designed its own version of an all-purpose camouflage pattern that could blend in with most environments. It was called Universal Camouflage Pattern (UCP)—a digital, pixelated pattern that looked as if someone had uploaded an image of camouflage in really low resolution. When UCP was widely adopted throughout the Army in 2005, it became, in the words of costume historian and journalist Charles McFarlane, “one of the most dunked-on camo patterns of all time.” Kit Parker, a Harvard professor and Army reservist who served in Afghanistan in 2009, was wearing UCP. “We were getting shot at by these Chechen snipers from a long way away,” he told journalist Ilya Marritz. “It was like I had a road flare duct-taped on my forehead.”

The only soldiers who could essentially opt out of wearing UCP were members of the US Special Operations Forces. Elite teams like Delta Force, SEAL Team Six, and the Green Berets get a little more wiggle room when it comes to their clothing. “Every unit, whether conventional or special, has what’s called a tactical standard operating procedure, or blue book,” a paratrooper in the 82nd Airborne tells me. The blue book will outline the “third-party items you’re allowed to wear.” For Special Forces, “they’re usually pretty lenient.” He says he has a buddy in special ops who wears sneakers, and he has heard of someone who wears Vans high-tops.

As such, Special Forces were the perfect audience for MultiCam. This cutting-edge camo started being worn by some of the most elite soldiers in the United States military, many of whom had met Thompson and Crye during the duo’s many trips to Fort Benning. “Those are the people who have the ability to make their own decisions,” says Thompson, “and are also maybe a little more open to some of the crazy stuff.” Crye started to produce runs of their camo, selling their own MultiCam products in the early days of e-commerce and also licensing the pattern.

Around this time, the culture of the Special Forces started to change. Before the War on Terror, elite teams were small and secretive; very few members of the military knew what they were doing. “Look at photos of the first Special Forces units going into Afghanistan in 2001,” says McFarlane. “They look like a suburban dad on a fishing trip.” As the number of special operators grew, the whole Army could see them fast-roping down from helicopters, breaking down doors, storming houses of suspected terrorists—often in MultiCam. Same with the popular video game Call of Duty and movies like Zero Dark 30, American Sniper, and Act of Valor (which featured active-duty Navy SEALs). In a confusing and unpopular war, stories of Special Operators offered rare victories the United States military could claim.

Special Forces started to develop a new image in the popular imagination, says McFarlane: “Dudes with huge beards and long hair and just totally ripped and just wearing lots of technical gear.” Because Special Forces were so admired and idolized, regular infantry soldiers would buy MultiCam backpacks or accessories to emulate them. Everyone wanted to wear MultiCam—not only to cosplay but also to get away from the ugly digital UCP pattern. Including, eventually, the US Army itself.

Although UCP was deployed to American troops all over the world, it became increasingly associated with Iraq: a hated, unsuccessful pattern for a hated, unsuccessful war. In 2010, when the Obama administration was trying to distance itself from Iraq, the military was instructed to get rid of the UCP pattern. And so, to quickly supply a troop surge in Afghanistan, it turned to the most readily available replacement camo: MultiCam.

Even though the US military called its pattern OEFCP (Operation Enduring Freedom Camouflage Pattern), it was MultiCam from Crye Precision, bought in bulk when roughly 100,000 members of the conventional forces were deployed to Afghanistan. Then, in 2014, the Army announced that its in-house camo team had finally developed a new pattern: Operational Camouflage Pattern, or OCP. As McFarlane believes: OCP is “basically MultiCam without the branding.” If you view two swaths side by side, you can see that OCP is ever so slightly more brown. There’s a reason they look so similar: Both are inspired by Scorpion, the original pattern that Crye presented to the US government.

In a few niche corners of the internet, debate still simmers over whether Crye had the right to trademark MultiCam or whether the Army had the right to make its own version. Truly, it doesn’t matter. What matters is that, because of this whole saga, some version of MultiCam or OCP or Scorpion is everywhere. The militaries of Australia, Georgia, Denmark, Belgium, Portugal, Argentina, Chile, Malta, and France all wear variants of MultiCam uniforms—some specifically customized by Crye Precision. Soldiers fighting for both Russia and Ukraine do, too; they don colored armbands to tell who is on what side. Even the Taliban wear MultiCam. In January 2026, the Minnesota National Guard wore bright yellow vests over their camouflage in part “to help distinguish them from other agencies in similar uniforms.”

MultiCam has trickled down from Special Forces to all kinds of law enforcement: American SWAT teams, municipal police, teams within the FBI, US Marshals, Drug Enforcement, and Border Patrol all dress like Bradley Cooper in American Sniper. ICE also wears a mixture of civilian clothes and MultiCam, and in January, Crye Precision was awarded a nearly $40,000 contract to provide cold-weather gear for Border Patrol in Maine. Although there have been a number of camo companies attempting to rival MultiCam’s ubiquity (notably the impressionist looking A-Tacs and the animalistic Kryptek), none of them seem to hold a candle. “ I think the fact of the matter is, there’s been no other pattern that’s proven,” Thompson says proudly. [...]

It’s easy to lampoon these trend followers, who it’s assumed (perhaps falsely) have never gone hunting and don't even know a member of the armed forces. What right do they have to MultiCam? The truth is, they might have the most authentic claim: It was made in Brooklyn by art school grads, after all.

by Avery Trufelman, Wired |  Read more:

Image: Kyle Berger

[ed. Operation Enduring Freedom Camouflage Pattern. Seriously. Lol.]