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That opinion has not been withdrawn or tested.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.

via:

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.

via:

Besties
via:

Günther Blau, German, 1922-2007, Dandelion II, 1978
via:

Utagawa Kuniyosh, Toranosuke Capturing A Kappa In The Tamura River, 1835
via:

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). 
via:

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.]

Why the Future of College Could Look Like OnlyFans

Last week, I asked whether, as a forty-six-year-old father of two, I should keep contributing to my children’s college funds, or if perhaps some combination of anti-establishment fervor, A.I., and a shifting economy could save me some money. I don’t have a particularly good answer yet, at least not one good enough to inspire the purchase of a midlife-crisis car, my son’s and daughter’s futures be damned. But, after wrestling with that query in Part 1 of what will be a series of articles, I think there may be a better one to ask. The question is not, I think, “How will A.I. change higher education?” but rather “What irreversible changes have already taken place, and how will colleges and universities respond to them?”

I wanted to talk with someone who stood outside the polite consensus which holds that college as we know it will survive, if only because, as I wrote last week, humans will always want to differentiate their children from other people’s children. Hollis Robbins, a professor of English and a special adviser in the humanities at the University of Utah, and the former dean of arts and humanities at Sonoma State University, has been writing about A.I. and higher education for years on her Substack, “Anecdotal Value.” Through her writing on the subject, her own experiments with A.I., and her experience at both élite private and regional public universities, she has hashed out a theory of sorts. In Robbins’s opinion, an excessively bureaucratic, increasingly generic, and poorly taught version of higher education has taken hold around the country, and that has made the modern university seriously vulnerable to an A.I. takeover.

What can academics do about this? College, Robbins believes, should be more bespoke; schools should cultivate their own character based on the charisma of professors, the novelty of their inquiries, and the quality of their instruction. Today, thanks in part to the Common Application and to the always increasing pressure for students to go simply to the most prestigious college they can, even élite schools are becoming interchangeable. Brown and the University of Chicago have roughly the same pool of students as, say, Vanderbilt, or Georgia Tech. And, once the unique essence of a school has been lost, and the curricula have been standardized for maximum friendliness to students, who are treated as customer kings, A.I. may come to seem like a plausible alternative. In this view, rampant A.I.-assisted cheating, rapidly declining faith in the value of a college education, and general agita on the part of the nation’s faculty are all symptoms of a larger sickness: an academy that has been stripped of everything that once made it special. [...]

In a widely discussed Substack post from last year, titled “It’s Later Than You Think,” Robbins argued that artificial general intelligence would require a culling of sixty to seventy per cent of the country’s professors, and that every professor who wanted to keep their job should write a memo answering the question “What specific knowledge do I possess that AGI does not?” Faculty members who could not produce a compelling memo “with concrete defensible answers,” she wrote, “have no place in the institution.” The university in the age of A.I. will be leaner, odder, and more differentiated from its peers, she maintains, because “students cannot be expected to continue paying for information transfer that AGI provides freely.” Instead, they will “pay to learn from faculty whose expertise surpasses AI, offering mentorship, inspiration, and meaningful access to AGI-era careers and networks.” Any institution that does not adapt will die. “This isn’t a mere transformation but a brutal winnowing,” Robbins writes. “Most institutions will fail, and those that remain will be unrecognizable by today’s standards.”

I recently asked Robbins about how she came to this conclusion, and what, exactly, those surviving institutions might look like. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

You’ve written a lot about how the modern university has primed itself for an A.I. takeover. How did that happen?

... The first two years of a college education are now more or less the same, regardless of where you go to school. Courses now need to be equivalent to one another, so that a student at one school will be learning something similar to a student at a different school. What that has done over time is created a system where it doesn’t really matter who is teaching the classes. We tell the student, “You’re special,” and we tell the faculty, “You’re not special.” This is the tension and the problem that is plaguing higher education and what’s made it so vulnerable to A.I. Everything else—whether Trump, the enrollment cliff, or whatever—is secondary to this tension. [...]

I’m not a car person, but I have friends who have fancy BMWs, and they have to go to their fancy BMW place to fix their car, because BMW parts are often very specific to BMWs. So what does it mean for higher ed when all the parts are interchangeable? Almost forty per cent of students transfer at least once from institution to institution, and that places additional pressure to make everything the same. What happens is that colleges make it easier for their students to transfer, because parents want to have some backup plan. The high number of transfers leads to more fungibility and commodification.

In a Substack post from last year, you suggested that sixty to seventy per cent of faculty will ultimately lose their jobs once generative A.I. starts to hit the classroom, and that those who survive will need to explain why they’re still needed. How do you think they should be proving their worthiness?

Higher education and professors can differentiate themselves from all this sameness by teaching at the edges of knowledge. My expertise, for example, is in the African American sonnet tradition. There are probably three people on the entire planet who know as much as I do about this tiny little thing, and so I’ve spent a lot of my time experimenting with these large language models to just see what they know about my field, and where the edges are. Specialists are going to be key to selling education as something the A.I. can’t do. When your daughter is going to go to school, in eight years, you are not going to want, for any money, to have her learn standard educational product that A.I. knows—and A.I. will know so much, right?

I’m not sure about that, because I do think that there’s value in her learning things that a computer knows. Human beings still play chess, even though a human being hasn’t beaten the best chess computers in twenty years—and I would think there’s still value in her understanding the basic theories and foundations of, say, chemistry. Even if A.I. knows all of that, she should probably know it, too, if she wants to understand what those edges of knowledge are, no?

So, in my ideal vision of the academy, you’re going to be in class with a mentor who isn’t going to have to teach you Chemistry 101 but will want to quickly move to where the edges are, to do something new. Maybe they would decide together to 3-D-print some new material that has never been printed before, or what have you. Whatever they decide together will not be something every university is going to be able to do. It will be what’s particular at this place. [...]

Does that lead to a kind of obscurity? It would seem to encourage the esoteric sort of inquiry that the public sometimes resists.

Well, I won’t use the word “obscurity.” I would say “specialization.”

Let me make a couple of predictions and distinctions. Social science is going to matter so much less when your daughter goes to college. It is already on its way out. A.I. can do it. And here’s an example of the type of inquiry I’m talking about: I have a weird, funny Twitter group about life on Mars. Someone will ask, for instance, if it’s true that you’re going to need kidney dialysis on the way back from Mars. Another person is theorizing about a 3-D printer that’s going to use Mars soil, which will allow people to build on Mars using its materials instead of shipping everything there. These sorts of inquiries are obscure, specialist, niche, at the edge. [...]

Does that mean kids will be coming to college with a different baseline of knowledge because of A.I.? That a lot of the canon in whatever field they choose will already have been transferred to their brains? I can’t help but remember my own experience as a freshman in college, being completely unprepared for an upper-level religion course, much less any edge-of-knowledge inquiry.

They’re going to be coming in with a different baseline. Once upon a time, you walked into class and a hundred per cent of what was delivered to you was through your professor. Now, you go to a class, maybe you’ll do the reading, but you’ll also ask ChatGPT or Claude. And so your course content is already coming from somewhere else. This is a problem that higher ed has not addressed substantially. What does it mean for me to grade you on something where you got all your information from somewhere else and not from my reading list? That is a complicated question. The only thing that works is for us to get to the edge quickly.

There’s a growing idea I’ve seen in some circles that college could be replaced by conversations between an A.I. tutor and a student. When I think about your model, I wonder why college even needs to exist. If I can just seek out a tutor, somebody that I like, and they just charge me a little bit, and we go through these edge-knowledge cases together, what’s the degree for? Couldn’t you, as Hollis Robbins—not only a specialist in African American sonnet traditions but also an idiosyncratic thinker on the subject of A.I. and the future of the academy—just set up your own shop?

I was in Austin, Texas, a couple of times in March with a bunch of twenty-five-year-old billionaires. This is what they’re looking at. Instead of having the credential from the institution, why not have the credential from the professor? If you have a Hollis Robbins education, what would that signal? What would that credential mean as opposed to a degree from a university? There was some conversation about what that would look like, and one guy at the end of the dinner said, “Instead of OnlyFans, it’s like OnlyProfessors.”

Do you think an OnlyProfessors model would be good? That the dissolution of the vast majority of the higher-education infrastructure, with this replacing it, would be a good outcome?

I worry about where the great middle of America is going to go. I do think students are going to have to withdraw enrollment from schools unless things change. And I don’t think institutions are going to change themselves. They’re caught up in this bureaucratic system, this transfer system, these standardization agreements across state lines, so that anybody can move anywhere. The idea of delivering a standard education product is so embedded within the current structure that it will never change unless students say, “This is not what I want from going to college.” So, yes, OnlyProfessors is an alternative. [...]

And the death of our current universities? What does that look like?

I think there’s contraction. The big flagships are going to stay the same, because they have the football players and all the other things. I’m at the University of Utah—I think it’s going to be fine. We’re going to pick up the lifeboats from the places that crumble. But, ultimately, at the very top, presidents and provosts are going to have to understand that expertise is their mission. Yale, even, went back to making their mission statement about knowledge, not about making a better world. We’re not in the making-a-better-world game anymore. We’re in the knowledge game, and that means getting rid of some of the feel-good stuff. [ed. Like humanities, civics, history, philosophy, logic...] 

by Jay Caspian Kang, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: David Rowland/Getty

[ed. Couldn't disagree more. Started writing all the reasons why but then just figured 'eh... what's the use'. This really is a bizarre interview with... whoever this person is. I will say that if having ready information at your fingertips (or some personal estoteric knowledge) were all it took to be educated, Google would've put universities out of business a long time ago. There's a reason (with all the instructional videos on YouTube) that people still go to teachers.]

Vasily Kandinsky (1866–1944), Dominant Curve (Courbe dominante), April 1936. Oil on canvas

via:

Roy Lichtenstein, Sinking Sun, 1964

via:

May 14, 2026

Vice President J.D. Vance was in Maine today to tout what the Trump administration claims is its push to combat fraud in public services. Vance blamed Democrats for fraud in Medicaid programs and vowed that the Trump administration would stop such fraud by refusing to distribute funds to states that were not cooperating with the federal government’s anti-fraud efforts. He announced yesterday the administration intends to withhold $1.3 billion in Medicaid payments from California.

This alleged push against fraud is part of an old playbook the Republicans have used since at least 2000 in which they accuse the Democrats of their own weak points and misdeeds.

This play was often associated with Republican strategist Karl Rove, but in 2024, Caroline Wazer of Snopes noted that it is most usually associated with Nazi propaganda in the 1930s. Accusing opponents of what you, yourself, are doing, muddies the waters and makes it hard for real accusations against you for the same thing to stick.

Experts say fraud in federal programs is a real problem but that it is carried out primarily by transnational criminal organizations, not by individual recipients. Republican rhetoric claims a high rate of “improper payments,” but the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services itself stresses that “improper payment measurement is not a measure of fraud.” Rather, that term identifies payments where the paperwork provided by the state or provider was incomplete. Those numbers have been high recently because the government allowed states greater flexibility during the Covid-19 public health emergency.

According to the nonpartisan Maine Center for Economic Policy, MaineCare is overseen by both state and federal agencies, and the most recent federal review found that only about 0.1% of total program spending was in incorrect payments. Indeed, last month, Reed Shaw of Just Security noted that the administration’s claim to be rooting out fraud appears simply to be a new way to punish perceived political enemies that might have a better chance of getting through the courts than the administration’s previous attempts did.

Accusing Democrats of fraud will also accomplish the political goal of muddying the waters to make it harder for voters to see that the Trump administration is the most corrupt U.S. administration in history. And concern about voters’ perceptions of corruption must be uppermost in the minds of administration advisors right now, since new Hungarian prime minister Péter Magyar’s landslide victory over Trump ally Viktor Orbán was driven in large part by voters’ fury at Orbán’s corruption.

Muddying the waters for voters is the best the Trump administration can hope for because, for all the administration’s claims to be fighting fraud, Trump’s corruption is mind-boggling.

He has fired or demoted twenty inspectors general—the people key to oversight—and in 2024 alone the people he has since fired or sidelined identified more than $50 billion in waste and abuse. Matthew Purdy and Luke Broadwater of the New York Times noted in March that in both terms as of March 2026, Trump has also pardoned or commuted the sentences of more than 70 donors or allies who were convicted of fraud. One, Philip Esformes, was convicted of stealing $1.3 billion from Medicare.

Steven Greenhouse of The Guardian reminded readers today that in January, David D. Kirkpatrick of the New Yorker reported that the Trumps have pocketed about $4 billion, primarily through cryptocurrency enterprises. Greenhouse notes that Trump’s sons Eric and Don Jr. have invested in a drone manufacturer that is trying to sell weapons to Gulf countries currently at risk from the war their father started in Iran, and that the Pentagon recently awarded a $24 million contract to a robotics startup for which Eric is the “chief strategy advisor.”

Even as Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner is acting as a chief negotiator for the U.S. in the Middle East, he has been trying to raise $5 billion from investors there for his investment firm. Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, a sovereign wealth fund overseen by Saudi Crown prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS), has already invested $2 billion with Kushner.

And then there are Trump’s vanity projects to remake the national capital. As Greenhouse notes, corporations and billionaires have dropped millions of dollars in donations for Trump’s ballroom where the East Wing used to be and his proposed presidential library in Miami. In December 2025, Karen Yourish, Kenneth P. Vogel, and Charlie Smart of the New York Times estimated that Trump had raked in more than $2 billion for his projects or causes, more than half a billion of it from 346 people who each gave at least $250,000. Some of those people have received presidential pardons, others have been given jobs, and all have received access to the president.

On May 11, Jonathan Allen, Peter Nicholas, Matt Dixon, Henry J. Gomez, and Allan Smith of NBC News reported that Trump is using the planned Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) event to be held on his birthday on the White House lawn as a new way for donors to funnel money to him. Although the UFC is paying for the event—and expects to lose as much as $30 million on it—and although tickets are technically free, Trump is picking who gets most of the tickets.

Sponsorship packages that include ringside seats have been selling for $1 million or more. Neither the White House nor the UFC would comment on where the money is going. A Republican lobbyist told the NBC News journalists: “It’s basically been added to the list of approved entities to give undisclosed money to and get credit with Trump. They are raising a sh*t ton of money and have used it as another unofficial vehicle for corporate donors to give and gain favor with Trump.”

And now Trump is in China on a state visit on which he took along seventeen CEOs of companies—many of which do business in China—including billionaires Elon Musk and Tim Cook of Apple. Together, the members of the delegation are worth more than a trillion dollars. Trump also took his son Eric, who runs the family business. As economist Paul Krugman said today, “He might as well have been walking around Beijing with a sign that says—in block capitals, of course, this is Trump—BRIBE ME.”

by Heather Cox Ricardson, Letters from an American |  Read more: