via:
Tuesday, August 25, 2026
There’s Something Dangerous About Sam Rockwell
Ever since that monologue—you know the one—everyone knows who the legendary scene-stealer is. Still, his appetite for taking risks means he’ll never stop surprising us.
Have you ever had a Red Bull?” Sam Rockwell asks, apropos of nothing. “I don’t know if I’ve had a Red Bull.”
We had been talking about the tyranny of social media.
“I’ve never had an energy drink ever,” I tell him, unnecessarily proud of myself, while I try to figure out why he’s asked. I’m distracted. The reason I’m distracted is that I don’t want to be here. I don’t mean with Sam Rockwell—Sam Rockwell is delightful. I mean in this room. It’s the greenroom outside a midtown Manhattan video studio. It sucks.
“This is a nice room, actually,” Rockwell said when we first walked in. He cut himself off—he was in the midst of warning me that he might need to stretch because he’d boxed that morning—just to make the observation. He does that a lot: cuts himself off, trails unpredictably from one topic to the next. “Carlito’s Way meets, you know, some sort of industrial workspace.”
He does that a lot too. He has a movie reference for everything, even this L-shaped hall-end space with a couple mini fridges; a table with some trail mix, chips, and granola bars; and, at the other end of the L, a couch and armchairs under the lone window, outside which a tree is swaying and it’s trying to rain. We’ll talk for 145 minutes and he’ll manage to mention thirty-two movies and fifty-three actors.
Forty-five minutes into our conversation, he gets up to take a leak. Upon returning from the bathroom, he sees the tree out the window metronoming back and forth. “Is it raining?” He walks over to the window and peers down at the street, where tiny creatures have sprouted umbrellas. He’s been inside virtually all day, shooting photos and videos in closed-off rooms. He furrows his eyebrows slightly, mouth half open, that look of coy appraisal we’ve all seen a million times now.
It’s hard to believe because of the boyish face and irrepressible energy, but Rockwell’s career stretches back nearly forty years. His first film was a low-budget 1989 slasher called Clownhouse, but by 1992 he was in Light Sleeper, directed by Paul Schrader, our foremost poet of male alienation and the writer of one of Rockwell’s favorite movies, Taxi Driver. That’s his career. He’s been in a Marvel film; he’s been in a Clint Eastwood film. He’s played the Big Bad Wolf and George W. Bush and the most influential choreographer of the twentieth century. He’s natural in everything. Last year, a monologue about wanting to be an Asian woman getting railed by white men, from season 3 of The White Lotus, which starred his longtime partner, Leslie Bibb, tipped him from an actor beloved among people like him—cinephiles—to someone everybody knows.
His new film, Wild Horse Nine, comes out in November. Rockwell plays Lee, a CIA agent who, along with his partner, Chris, played by John Malkovich (one of Rockwell’s idols), is part of a CIA misadventure in Chile in the early 1970s. Lee and Chris take a weekend trip to Easter Island, where Lee seems to be keeping tabs on Chris, watching him from the window of his hotel room or out the windshield of an ancient red stick-shift sedan.
Wild Horse Nine is the fourth collaboration between Rockwell and writer/director Martin McDonagh, after 2017’s Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, for which Rockwell won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor; 2012’s Seven Psychopaths; and a 2010 play with the macabre title A Behanding in Spokane. I asked McDonagh why he keeps casting Rockwell. “His danger, his truthfulness, his sense of fun, his sex appeal,” he said. “I think especially the first one—there’s always something a little dangerous about Sam in everything he does.”
There is something dangerous about Rockwell in Wild Horse Nine, but he’s playing against Malkovich, who is not known for timidity. The two of them and McDonagh rehearsed for a few weeks at the Public Theater, a legendary institution in New York City. Rockwell, who has been rather relaxed, reclining slightly with boxing shoes flat on the floor, leans in to tell me about it. “We were doing this thing where he goes off on me,” Rockwell says. After a run-through, McDonagh asked Malkovich to “turn up the anger a little bit.” “He just says [lilting], Oh yeah, sure, no problem,” Rockwell says. “He talks kind of gently. And then, just like, WHAM! Out of the gate like a monster.”
Rockwell ate it up. “I was like, I got a front-row ticket to this? I get Malkovich to yell at me?”
I point out that some people might find this intimidating. “I worked with Gene Hackman once,” he says. “And I had to yell at him, and he loved it. He loved it. Because actors are so intimidated by him. If you’re a really good tennis player, you want a good tennis player opposite you.”
Rockwell is a good tennis player. And like any good athlete, he trains. For as much as he appears to get by on natural charm and charisma, he is an actor’s actor, a true believer, in his words, an “acting nerd.” Research. Running lines. Exerci—
“Do you know what a gibbon is?” Rockwell asks.
by Kevin Dupzyk, Esquire | Read more:
Have you ever had a Red Bull?” Sam Rockwell asks, apropos of nothing. “I don’t know if I’ve had a Red Bull.”
We had been talking about the tyranny of social media.
“I’ve never had an energy drink ever,” I tell him, unnecessarily proud of myself, while I try to figure out why he’s asked. I’m distracted. The reason I’m distracted is that I don’t want to be here. I don’t mean with Sam Rockwell—Sam Rockwell is delightful. I mean in this room. It’s the greenroom outside a midtown Manhattan video studio. It sucks.
He does that a lot too. He has a movie reference for everything, even this L-shaped hall-end space with a couple mini fridges; a table with some trail mix, chips, and granola bars; and, at the other end of the L, a couch and armchairs under the lone window, outside which a tree is swaying and it’s trying to rain. We’ll talk for 145 minutes and he’ll manage to mention thirty-two movies and fifty-three actors.
Forty-five minutes into our conversation, he gets up to take a leak. Upon returning from the bathroom, he sees the tree out the window metronoming back and forth. “Is it raining?” He walks over to the window and peers down at the street, where tiny creatures have sprouted umbrellas. He’s been inside virtually all day, shooting photos and videos in closed-off rooms. He furrows his eyebrows slightly, mouth half open, that look of coy appraisal we’ve all seen a million times now.
It’s hard to believe because of the boyish face and irrepressible energy, but Rockwell’s career stretches back nearly forty years. His first film was a low-budget 1989 slasher called Clownhouse, but by 1992 he was in Light Sleeper, directed by Paul Schrader, our foremost poet of male alienation and the writer of one of Rockwell’s favorite movies, Taxi Driver. That’s his career. He’s been in a Marvel film; he’s been in a Clint Eastwood film. He’s played the Big Bad Wolf and George W. Bush and the most influential choreographer of the twentieth century. He’s natural in everything. Last year, a monologue about wanting to be an Asian woman getting railed by white men, from season 3 of The White Lotus, which starred his longtime partner, Leslie Bibb, tipped him from an actor beloved among people like him—cinephiles—to someone everybody knows.
His new film, Wild Horse Nine, comes out in November. Rockwell plays Lee, a CIA agent who, along with his partner, Chris, played by John Malkovich (one of Rockwell’s idols), is part of a CIA misadventure in Chile in the early 1970s. Lee and Chris take a weekend trip to Easter Island, where Lee seems to be keeping tabs on Chris, watching him from the window of his hotel room or out the windshield of an ancient red stick-shift sedan.
Wild Horse Nine is the fourth collaboration between Rockwell and writer/director Martin McDonagh, after 2017’s Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, for which Rockwell won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor; 2012’s Seven Psychopaths; and a 2010 play with the macabre title A Behanding in Spokane. I asked McDonagh why he keeps casting Rockwell. “His danger, his truthfulness, his sense of fun, his sex appeal,” he said. “I think especially the first one—there’s always something a little dangerous about Sam in everything he does.”
There is something dangerous about Rockwell in Wild Horse Nine, but he’s playing against Malkovich, who is not known for timidity. The two of them and McDonagh rehearsed for a few weeks at the Public Theater, a legendary institution in New York City. Rockwell, who has been rather relaxed, reclining slightly with boxing shoes flat on the floor, leans in to tell me about it. “We were doing this thing where he goes off on me,” Rockwell says. After a run-through, McDonagh asked Malkovich to “turn up the anger a little bit.” “He just says [lilting], Oh yeah, sure, no problem,” Rockwell says. “He talks kind of gently. And then, just like, WHAM! Out of the gate like a monster.”
Rockwell ate it up. “I was like, I got a front-row ticket to this? I get Malkovich to yell at me?”
I point out that some people might find this intimidating. “I worked with Gene Hackman once,” he says. “And I had to yell at him, and he loved it. He loved it. Because actors are so intimidated by him. If you’re a really good tennis player, you want a good tennis player opposite you.”
Rockwell is a good tennis player. And like any good athlete, he trains. For as much as he appears to get by on natural charm and charisma, he is an actor’s actor, a true believer, in his words, an “acting nerd.” Research. Running lines. Exerci—
“Do you know what a gibbon is?” Rockwell asks.
by Kevin Dupzyk, Esquire | Read more:
Image: Florence Sullivan
[ed. See also: Keanu Reeves Knows the Secrets of the Universe (Esquire).]
Never Apologize For Being a Class Traitor
Is it better to have good politics, or bad politics? Good politics. And do we just want ourselves to have good politics, or do we want everyone to share those good politics? We want everyone to have them. Yes. So if someone is insulting anyone for having good politics, that is very stupid.
What I am talking about specifically is the mini-news cycle that we are in focused on the question of whether or not certain leaders of the Democratic Socialists of America are actually, you know, rich kids. Before we discuss this, it must be said that this is, above all, a lesson in effective partisan media. The New York Post, a right wing rag, has been pumping out stories about how Gustavo Gordillo, the 38 year-old co-chair of the NYC DSA, went to Yale and lives in a $1.5 million Brooklyn house owned by his dad, and how that is so very ridiculous because he is “peddling his anti-capitalist lefty agenda while enjoying the life in the two-story, nearly 2,000-square-foot row home on a gentrifying tree-lined block in Bed-Stuy.”
The Post, a truly immoral scumbag tabloid that is simultaneously the most skilled tabloid journalism publication in America in a way that we can all learn from, ran the story, and then it was picked up over the next few days by other right wing outlets making essentially the same “hey this left winger is a rich kid” joke, and then yesterday the story was picked up by the New York Times, which had profiled Gordillo earlier, and once that happened it instantly became acceptable fodder for non-right-wing reporters and pundits. This is a textbook case of how to shepherd a shallow partisan smear into the mainstream news cycle. You may find it distasteful, but you should admire its efficacy. Any competent cutthroat political communicator must be able to replicate this process on demand.
(When I worked at Gawker, we frequently played a similar but less political role in this general process, by writing about stories that the Times was interested in but considered disreputable, which would then allow them to write follow-ups framed as “People are talking about this thing,” which provides them an entry point to feed their readers salacious news while still maintaining an analytical, hands-off pose. Once you understand this dynamic you will see it all the time.)
This rudimentary form of character assassination will cause lefties to complain that it is biased and unfair and whatnot, which is true but beside the point. This is a sign that DSA is gaining actual power. People and institutions that gain actual power will draw the scrutiny of the press. This may manifest itself unfairly in certain instances (especially if the New York Post is involved) but in general it is healthy. The more powerful people get—whether by getting rich, gaining political power, or otherwise—the more we want the press paying attention to them. DSA should take these newfound, accelerating attacks as a compliment. They are real live players now. And knowing that this is the case, they need to get a clear hold in their own minds of what they actually believe, and how to communicate it.
What, after all, are attacks like the ones against Gustavo Gordillo really saying? They are first of all charges of hypocrisy, which is the sin that the public hates above all in its political figures. People who are bastards but who embrace the fact that they are bastards tend to insulate themselves from these attacks. Republicans, for example. Their platform is “we are rich and greedy and that is good and we will kill anyone who stands in our way.” You may find this unethical but it is very hard to find a handhold to charge anyone with being a hypocrite when they are espousing that line. They’re completely up front about being awful! Religious Republicans, Christian preachers who cheat on their wives and anti-homosexual preachers who are secretly gay, are the only slice of the party really vulnerable to charges of hypocrisy, because they are the only ones pretending to be defending ideals higher than “increase corporate profits.”
In what sense is Gordillo presumed to be a hypocrite? The accusation, when you get right down to it, is that he is rich but he is advocating political positions that are anti-rich. The first thing to notice about this is: It is not actually hypocritical. A hypocrite would be a rich person saying, for example, “rich people should pay higher taxes, except for me.” A rich person saying “rich people should pay higher taxes, including me” is just someone with good politics. Their politics are even more praiseworthy because they involve self-sacrifice in the name of an ideal. Genuine hypocrisy—not that you expect the New York Post to explore this sort of thing—is a rich person saying “I care about people who are less fortunate than me” while embracing policies that benefit themselves and harm the public programs that help needy people. Republicans, in other words.
The deeper charge against Gordillo, the one that pushes the emotional buttons, is that he is a class traitor. Nothing provokes rage among members of a class more than a class traitor. For people with money, the existence of one of their economic peers who calls for, say, higher taxes on the rich is not just a political disagreement—it is an implicit insult to all of the rich people who did not do that, because it goes to show that they could have done something more selfless if they wanted to. Class traitors of this type are living proof of everyone else’s human flaws. We are all susceptible to this. [...]
Nobody chooses how they are born. Some people are born rich and some are born poor. If you are born rich, with much greater wealth than you need for yourself, you are, I think, morally obligated to give away a lot of that wealth. This is a fairly common and uncontroversial moral intuition. It is what rich people who find their way into left wing politics have recognized. Being born wealthy is neither a sign of worth nor a reason for guilt. It is just blind luck. What we are responsible for is what we can control. When rich kids who may have lived privileged lives embrace left wing politics, that is good. That means that they have the moral fiber to recognize that they have been financially blessed by an unfair system, and that they should do their part to try to make the system more fair. It is easier for people whose parents are rich to understand and be honest about this than it is for people who get rich themselves. The heirs can see clearly that their wealth is a matter of luck, while those who gained great wealth through business or otherwise are sorely tempted, by human nature, to believe that they deserve what they have, while ignoring the many structural advantages they were given that allowed them to be in a position to get that wealth. This is unremarkable. Self-justification is one of the strongest forces on earth. But it goes to show why there are rich kids who are members of DSA, but there are not too many Goldman Sachs executives who are.
Every time a right winger points and laughs at a socialist who was born rich, it should be understood as a desperate attempt to justify their own moral failure to themselves. If you grew up rich and are now a leftist and someone points that out, the proper response is: “Yes I am. Why aren’t you?” I do not believe that there is any plank in the DSA platform that says that nobody is allowed to live in a brownstone that their dad bought. What they say instead is: If your dad has enough money to buy a brownstone, he should be paying higher taxes so that we can build more affordable housing for people who can’t afford brownstones. A rich kid who nods his head and agrees with that assertion and works to raise taxes on himself in the name of social justice is not guilty of hypocrisy at all. He’s exhibiting a commitment to basic fairness. That’s nothing to be ashamed of. Every rich person is morally obligated to do this. It’s the ones who aren’t class traitors that we need to worry about.
The Post, a truly immoral scumbag tabloid that is simultaneously the most skilled tabloid journalism publication in America in a way that we can all learn from, ran the story, and then it was picked up over the next few days by other right wing outlets making essentially the same “hey this left winger is a rich kid” joke, and then yesterday the story was picked up by the New York Times, which had profiled Gordillo earlier, and once that happened it instantly became acceptable fodder for non-right-wing reporters and pundits. This is a textbook case of how to shepherd a shallow partisan smear into the mainstream news cycle. You may find it distasteful, but you should admire its efficacy. Any competent cutthroat political communicator must be able to replicate this process on demand.
(When I worked at Gawker, we frequently played a similar but less political role in this general process, by writing about stories that the Times was interested in but considered disreputable, which would then allow them to write follow-ups framed as “People are talking about this thing,” which provides them an entry point to feed their readers salacious news while still maintaining an analytical, hands-off pose. Once you understand this dynamic you will see it all the time.)
This rudimentary form of character assassination will cause lefties to complain that it is biased and unfair and whatnot, which is true but beside the point. This is a sign that DSA is gaining actual power. People and institutions that gain actual power will draw the scrutiny of the press. This may manifest itself unfairly in certain instances (especially if the New York Post is involved) but in general it is healthy. The more powerful people get—whether by getting rich, gaining political power, or otherwise—the more we want the press paying attention to them. DSA should take these newfound, accelerating attacks as a compliment. They are real live players now. And knowing that this is the case, they need to get a clear hold in their own minds of what they actually believe, and how to communicate it.
What, after all, are attacks like the ones against Gustavo Gordillo really saying? They are first of all charges of hypocrisy, which is the sin that the public hates above all in its political figures. People who are bastards but who embrace the fact that they are bastards tend to insulate themselves from these attacks. Republicans, for example. Their platform is “we are rich and greedy and that is good and we will kill anyone who stands in our way.” You may find this unethical but it is very hard to find a handhold to charge anyone with being a hypocrite when they are espousing that line. They’re completely up front about being awful! Religious Republicans, Christian preachers who cheat on their wives and anti-homosexual preachers who are secretly gay, are the only slice of the party really vulnerable to charges of hypocrisy, because they are the only ones pretending to be defending ideals higher than “increase corporate profits.”
In what sense is Gordillo presumed to be a hypocrite? The accusation, when you get right down to it, is that he is rich but he is advocating political positions that are anti-rich. The first thing to notice about this is: It is not actually hypocritical. A hypocrite would be a rich person saying, for example, “rich people should pay higher taxes, except for me.” A rich person saying “rich people should pay higher taxes, including me” is just someone with good politics. Their politics are even more praiseworthy because they involve self-sacrifice in the name of an ideal. Genuine hypocrisy—not that you expect the New York Post to explore this sort of thing—is a rich person saying “I care about people who are less fortunate than me” while embracing policies that benefit themselves and harm the public programs that help needy people. Republicans, in other words.
The deeper charge against Gordillo, the one that pushes the emotional buttons, is that he is a class traitor. Nothing provokes rage among members of a class more than a class traitor. For people with money, the existence of one of their economic peers who calls for, say, higher taxes on the rich is not just a political disagreement—it is an implicit insult to all of the rich people who did not do that, because it goes to show that they could have done something more selfless if they wanted to. Class traitors of this type are living proof of everyone else’s human flaws. We are all susceptible to this. [...]
Nobody chooses how they are born. Some people are born rich and some are born poor. If you are born rich, with much greater wealth than you need for yourself, you are, I think, morally obligated to give away a lot of that wealth. This is a fairly common and uncontroversial moral intuition. It is what rich people who find their way into left wing politics have recognized. Being born wealthy is neither a sign of worth nor a reason for guilt. It is just blind luck. What we are responsible for is what we can control. When rich kids who may have lived privileged lives embrace left wing politics, that is good. That means that they have the moral fiber to recognize that they have been financially blessed by an unfair system, and that they should do their part to try to make the system more fair. It is easier for people whose parents are rich to understand and be honest about this than it is for people who get rich themselves. The heirs can see clearly that their wealth is a matter of luck, while those who gained great wealth through business or otherwise are sorely tempted, by human nature, to believe that they deserve what they have, while ignoring the many structural advantages they were given that allowed them to be in a position to get that wealth. This is unremarkable. Self-justification is one of the strongest forces on earth. But it goes to show why there are rich kids who are members of DSA, but there are not too many Goldman Sachs executives who are.
Every time a right winger points and laughs at a socialist who was born rich, it should be understood as a desperate attempt to justify their own moral failure to themselves. If you grew up rich and are now a leftist and someone points that out, the proper response is: “Yes I am. Why aren’t you?” I do not believe that there is any plank in the DSA platform that says that nobody is allowed to live in a brownstone that their dad bought. What they say instead is: If your dad has enough money to buy a brownstone, he should be paying higher taxes so that we can build more affordable housing for people who can’t afford brownstones. A rich kid who nods his head and agrees with that assertion and works to raise taxes on himself in the name of social justice is not guilty of hypocrisy at all. He’s exhibiting a commitment to basic fairness. That’s nothing to be ashamed of. Every rich person is morally obligated to do this. It’s the ones who aren’t class traitors that we need to worry about.
by Hamilton Nolan, Works in Progress | Read more:
Image: NYC DSA
[ed. On a related note, see also: Yes Obviously the Senate Should Be Abolished (WIP).]
Monday, August 24, 2026
Corporate Power Approaches Escape Velocity
If corporations become more powerful than national governments, we are all in trouble. The reason for this is straightforward: Corporations are not real objects. They do not exist in nature. They are legal fictions created according to a set of laws that dictate what they can and cannot do. Those laws, which quite literally create corporations, are made by governments. The rights of corporations and the limits of their operations are entirely dictated by governments, which write the laws and administer the courts that both enable corporations to exist and make money, and put boundaries on them. If governments lose their ability to draw hard lines on the behavior of corporations—if corporations become so powerful that governments are no longer able to tell them what to do—then corporations become the supreme power on earth.
This is bad, obviously, but it is worth stating why it is bad. It is bad because governments, while imperfect and sometimes even malignant in many ways, ultimately derive their legitimacy from the will of the governed. Legitimate governments, good governments, democratic governments are obligated by some scrutable process to work for the public good, as they define it. We all know the many ways that this can go awry, but when governments are bad, we can tell that they are bad because they fail on their most basic task of empowering themselves with the will of the public to increase the public good.
That’s not what corporations do at all. Corporations care not for the public good, nor for the public’s very existence. Corporations are robots, algorithms—AI programs, if you like—that work for the lone goal of increasing profits. Their definition is the same as that of cancer. They grow without regard to the good of the larger body. A perfect corporation would enslave the entire world in order to enrich the last free people on earth, its own shareholders. (Indeed, various companies in history have tried their best to carry this out in portions of the world.) You can’t get mad at them for this any more than you can get mad at a bullet for killing you. This is their nature. This is their purpose. This is what they do. If you don’t want them to do this, you must place limits upon them. That is a big part of why governments exist.
This is rudimentary stuff, but I articulate it because unless we always keep it in our conscious minds, there is a risk that it can be stolen away. Corporations always and everywhere have a natural incentive to neutralize their master, the government. They do this by lobbying and buying politicians and running astroturf PR campaigns to shape public opinion and doing all of the other legal things that allow them to accrue formal political power, but all of that should be recognized as a half measure that they only tolerate while necessary. Corporations never seek to abolish or destroy the government—they need the government administering laws in order for them to exist. Instead they seek to completely subjugate the government to their own will. Their ideal state would be to write and administer the laws that govern their own behavior, to arrange society in such a way to maximally benefit them. Obviously! That’s what robots do. This has always been true and will always be true as long as private corporations are the primary way that global production is organized. Knowing that this is the case, government must always ensure that it is able to hobble corporate ambition before it begins to threaten society as a whole.
A three-year-long strike against Tesla in Sweden just ended. The strike was an attempt by organized labor in Sweden to get Elon Musk to acquiesce to the simple demand of collective bargaining with his employees. Setting wages and working conditions via collective bargaining, along with profit sharing and collective investment, are at the very heart of the Swedish postwar economic model that made the small nation into a haven of high living standards. The expectation that a company like Tesla would allow its workers to choose to collectively bargain a fair contract is much higher in Sweden than it would be in America. When multinational corporations go into, say, China to do business, and the governments demands that they, say, censor search engine results for “Tienanmen Square massacre,” the response from those corporations is generally to obey and then to turn around and shrug and tell their critics that they are obligated to follow the laws and customs of the nations in which they operate. But when it comes to something that might restrict their profits—allowing their workers to unionize—that attitude changes.
The strike in Sweden ran for three years, and pulled in support from organized labor throughout the country. It is done now, and it failed, because for all of those years, and despite the fact that collective bargaining is expected to be a central pillar of being a good corporate citizen in Sweden, Elon Musk (despite being the world’s richest man) simply refused. Tesla succeeded in buying out all of the striking workers until there was no one left to be on strike. This is sort of like buying a restaurant and closing it down rather than giving your waiter a tip. It is an abrasive and offensive act designed to prove a point about where the power lies in this relationship. [...]
Everyone who believes in democratic government and in human rights needs to have a radar that starts flashing when something like this happens. This strike is alarming in a way that the failure of a normal strike is not. This strike was popular, well-resourced, and supported in principle by the government and by the larger Swedish labor movement in ways that would be impossible in America. Tesla, a $1.3 trillion company whose stock price has risen by two thirds in the past year, could easily afford these workers’ demands. Elon Musk, whose net worth has increased by hundreds of billions of dollars during the time of this strike, would not have been affected one bit. Yet Tesla and Musk decided to buck public opinion and give the cold shoulder to all of Sweden and appear rude, obstinate, and greedy, in order to ensure that this small number of employees did not win a union. And Tesla succeeded.
The young man’s voice in the video is earnest and clear, forceful but controlled. His face is not visible, but his hand is shaking a little as he holds a lighter. “There goes your inventory.” More than $600 million worth of damages later, a Kimberly-Clark warehouse lay in a smoking mess, and the young man alleged to be in the video — Chamel Abdulkarim, who worked for a distribution company servicing the warehouse — was charged with arson.
Mr. Abdulkarim has pleaded not guilty; his possible motivations will soon be litigated in court. But even as they are, the early April torching of the warehouse in Ontario, Calif., seems to capture a political mood. That same week, someone lobbed a Molotov cocktail at the mansion of the OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman. In June, prosecutors revealed that their case against the man charged with setting the blaze that grew into the deadly Palisades fire in California hinged on the argument that he was motivated by class rage. (The jury, which could not reach a verdict, was less convinced.)
Hanging over all these attacks was the shooting of the UnitedHealthcare C.E.O., Brian Thompson, in broad daylight on a Manhattan street in December 2024, a crime that Luigi Mangione admitted to earlier this month. The manhunt for Mr. Mangione, and the ensuing coverage of his arrest and trial, helped cement an image of him as an avenger of all those wronged by private health insurance. But Mr. Mangione’s celebrity has spurred fear: Companies are spending more on security for their top executives. This year, a law enforcement intelligence hub put out a bulletin, as reported by The Intercept, stating that the rich are facing a “heightened threat environment” as more people blame them for economic duress: “Public discourse increasingly attributes the challenges faced by the middle and lower classes to the actions and influence of wealthy corporate executives.” [...]
Today’s class violence lacks logic; it seems only animated by revenge, resentment and despair. There is no conspiracy or political mobilization. The people committing these acts are acting alone. The very fact of their isolation hints at a society that is beginning to abandon the hope of transformation.
That’s not what corporations do at all. Corporations care not for the public good, nor for the public’s very existence. Corporations are robots, algorithms—AI programs, if you like—that work for the lone goal of increasing profits. Their definition is the same as that of cancer. They grow without regard to the good of the larger body. A perfect corporation would enslave the entire world in order to enrich the last free people on earth, its own shareholders. (Indeed, various companies in history have tried their best to carry this out in portions of the world.) You can’t get mad at them for this any more than you can get mad at a bullet for killing you. This is their nature. This is their purpose. This is what they do. If you don’t want them to do this, you must place limits upon them. That is a big part of why governments exist.
This is rudimentary stuff, but I articulate it because unless we always keep it in our conscious minds, there is a risk that it can be stolen away. Corporations always and everywhere have a natural incentive to neutralize their master, the government. They do this by lobbying and buying politicians and running astroturf PR campaigns to shape public opinion and doing all of the other legal things that allow them to accrue formal political power, but all of that should be recognized as a half measure that they only tolerate while necessary. Corporations never seek to abolish or destroy the government—they need the government administering laws in order for them to exist. Instead they seek to completely subjugate the government to their own will. Their ideal state would be to write and administer the laws that govern their own behavior, to arrange society in such a way to maximally benefit them. Obviously! That’s what robots do. This has always been true and will always be true as long as private corporations are the primary way that global production is organized. Knowing that this is the case, government must always ensure that it is able to hobble corporate ambition before it begins to threaten society as a whole.
A three-year-long strike against Tesla in Sweden just ended. The strike was an attempt by organized labor in Sweden to get Elon Musk to acquiesce to the simple demand of collective bargaining with his employees. Setting wages and working conditions via collective bargaining, along with profit sharing and collective investment, are at the very heart of the Swedish postwar economic model that made the small nation into a haven of high living standards. The expectation that a company like Tesla would allow its workers to choose to collectively bargain a fair contract is much higher in Sweden than it would be in America. When multinational corporations go into, say, China to do business, and the governments demands that they, say, censor search engine results for “Tienanmen Square massacre,” the response from those corporations is generally to obey and then to turn around and shrug and tell their critics that they are obligated to follow the laws and customs of the nations in which they operate. But when it comes to something that might restrict their profits—allowing their workers to unionize—that attitude changes.
The strike in Sweden ran for three years, and pulled in support from organized labor throughout the country. It is done now, and it failed, because for all of those years, and despite the fact that collective bargaining is expected to be a central pillar of being a good corporate citizen in Sweden, Elon Musk (despite being the world’s richest man) simply refused. Tesla succeeded in buying out all of the striking workers until there was no one left to be on strike. This is sort of like buying a restaurant and closing it down rather than giving your waiter a tip. It is an abrasive and offensive act designed to prove a point about where the power lies in this relationship. [...]
Everyone who believes in democratic government and in human rights needs to have a radar that starts flashing when something like this happens. This strike is alarming in a way that the failure of a normal strike is not. This strike was popular, well-resourced, and supported in principle by the government and by the larger Swedish labor movement in ways that would be impossible in America. Tesla, a $1.3 trillion company whose stock price has risen by two thirds in the past year, could easily afford these workers’ demands. Elon Musk, whose net worth has increased by hundreds of billions of dollars during the time of this strike, would not have been affected one bit. Yet Tesla and Musk decided to buck public opinion and give the cold shoulder to all of Sweden and appear rude, obstinate, and greedy, in order to ensure that this small number of employees did not win a union. And Tesla succeeded.
by Hamilton Nolan, Works in Progress | Read more:
Image: Getty
[ed. See also: Monopoly Round-Up: How to Stop the Enshittification of America (BIG); and, We’re in a New Era of Class Warfare. Is Change Still Possible? (NYT):]***
“All you had to do was pay us enough to live.”The young man’s voice in the video is earnest and clear, forceful but controlled. His face is not visible, but his hand is shaking a little as he holds a lighter. “There goes your inventory.” More than $600 million worth of damages later, a Kimberly-Clark warehouse lay in a smoking mess, and the young man alleged to be in the video — Chamel Abdulkarim, who worked for a distribution company servicing the warehouse — was charged with arson.
Mr. Abdulkarim has pleaded not guilty; his possible motivations will soon be litigated in court. But even as they are, the early April torching of the warehouse in Ontario, Calif., seems to capture a political mood. That same week, someone lobbed a Molotov cocktail at the mansion of the OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman. In June, prosecutors revealed that their case against the man charged with setting the blaze that grew into the deadly Palisades fire in California hinged on the argument that he was motivated by class rage. (The jury, which could not reach a verdict, was less convinced.)
Hanging over all these attacks was the shooting of the UnitedHealthcare C.E.O., Brian Thompson, in broad daylight on a Manhattan street in December 2024, a crime that Luigi Mangione admitted to earlier this month. The manhunt for Mr. Mangione, and the ensuing coverage of his arrest and trial, helped cement an image of him as an avenger of all those wronged by private health insurance. But Mr. Mangione’s celebrity has spurred fear: Companies are spending more on security for their top executives. This year, a law enforcement intelligence hub put out a bulletin, as reported by The Intercept, stating that the rich are facing a “heightened threat environment” as more people blame them for economic duress: “Public discourse increasingly attributes the challenges faced by the middle and lower classes to the actions and influence of wealthy corporate executives.” [...]
Today’s class violence lacks logic; it seems only animated by revenge, resentment and despair. There is no conspiracy or political mobilization. The people committing these acts are acting alone. The very fact of their isolation hints at a society that is beginning to abandon the hope of transformation.
On Quality
In 2011 my grandmother took me to a guitar store for my sixteenth birthday. It was a big day. I had been playing for six or seven years at that point. I was obsessed… and it was time to buy my first ‘real’ guitar.
I spent hours comparing dozens of options while my Nanna patiently read her book in a corner of the store. I had never deliberated over a decision with such intensity. I can still tell you the exact moment the search ended.
Fifteen years later I still have it. It survived almost a decade of sweaty metal shows. Its back carries the belt buckle rash to prove it, a raw patch of bare wood ground through the finish by several hundred nights of playing.
Guitarists will tell you that wood opens up as it ages, that the resonance frees up over decades. I can't prove the physics. I can tell you the guitar sounds better today than it did in the store.
Everyone owns something like this: the old pair of boots, the battered wrenches, grandma’s cast iron pan, the 400,000 mile truck that will not die, etc…
Objects that wear in instead of wearing out. The ones whose quality you can feel the moment you pick them up.
Now try to explain what it is you feel.
A handful of holdouts still build appliances that last for decades, and that is telling. Durability is clearly still possible. Most of the industry just decided it was worth less than the next sale.
One company, four price tags
Start with Whirlpool. It owns brands on every rung of the price ladder.
Amana sits at the bottom as the budget badge. Maytag plays the dependable workhorse, KitchenAid the premium brand for people who care about their kitchen, and JennAir the luxury tier. Every one of them is Whirlpool, which the company lists plainly in its own corporate materials. They share wash systems, motors, compressors, and control boards across brands, built in the same plants. A Maytag and a Whirlpool of the same class are often the same machine in different sheet metal. The higher tiers add real materials and features, but you're still buying up a ladder one company controls end to end.
Kenmore takes the trick further. It never built a single appliance, not one, in its entire history. For decades it was a Sears nameplate bolted onto whoever won the contract that year, Whirlpool or LG or Frigidaire. Today it survives as a licensing shell owned by the hedge fund that picked Sears apart.
I spent hours comparing dozens of options while my Nanna patiently read her book in a corner of the store. I had never deliberated over a decision with such intensity. I can still tell you the exact moment the search ended.
A Gibson Les Paul Studio came off the wall and onto my shoulder. Its weight settled into the strap like it was made for my frame. The lacquer was so thick it looked wet. I knew nothing about tone woods or pickup winding at sixteen. I knew this was the one.
Guitarists will tell you that wood opens up as it ages, that the resonance frees up over decades. I can't prove the physics. I can tell you the guitar sounds better today than it did in the store.
Everyone owns something like this: the old pair of boots, the battered wrenches, grandma’s cast iron pan, the 400,000 mile truck that will not die, etc…
Objects that wear in instead of wearing out. The ones whose quality you can feel the moment you pick them up.
Now try to explain what it is you feel.
Some quality lives in the guitar, the boots and the pan. You are able to detect it intuitively within seconds. But try to put to words precisely what it is you detect and you’ll discover a dilemma.
Your first instinct is to point at the materials. It's mahogany. It has real humbuckers, a set neck, the best nitro lacquer. But that answer collapses the moment you notice the description fits every guitar on that wall. Two instruments leave the same factory in the same month, matching spec for spec down the line, and one sings while the other sounds weak. Every guitarist knows this, which is why nobody buys the model, they buy the individual guitar, only after noodling on it for a while. The spec sheet names everything the guitar is made of, and whatever quality is, it is not on the list of materials.
Fall back on "I just like it" and you sell the knowledge short, because standing in that store I wasn't just voicing an arbitrary preference, I was detecting something. “This is a thing of quality. It is the one I want.” Fifteen years of ownership keep proving my instinct that day right.
That gap, between knowing good on contact and being able to say what good is, is one of the oldest open problems in Western philosophy. It is also the fundamental question this newsletter is attempting to answer.
Every investigation I've published documents the same story: a product stripped of what made it good while everything a shopper can check stayed intact. Same logo, same spec sheet, same four and a half stars, same price or higher. What got swapped out, the steel gauge, the stitch count and the years of service life, sits in the parts you can't check from the aisle.
That gap between what you can verify and what actually matters is the whole game, for them and for you. They use it to slowly diminish the quality of the products you once loved without tripping an alarm. You can use it to watch the theft happen.
So this essay is about what quality is and where it actually lives, which makes it the philosophical foundation under every investigation this publication will run.
Teachers had been passing and failing students on the basis of quality for centuries without a definition. The problem ate at him for fifteen years, ultimately driving him to insanity. Pirsig’s best thinking on the nature of quality was eventually set down in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. It stands alone as the most formative book I have ever read.
To illustrate the problem, Pirsig relays an experiment he ran with his students. He read four student papers aloud and had everyone rank them by quality on slips of paper. He ranked them himself, collected the slips, tallied the results on the blackboard, and set his own ranking next to the class average. His ranking and the students’ matched almost every time, across classes and semesters. A room full of undergraduates who could not define quality independently agreed on where it lived and where it didn't.
So Pirsig landed on this problem statement:
"Quality is a characteristic of thought and statement that is recognized by a nonthinking process. Because definitions are a product of rigid, formal thinking, quality cannot be defined."
Then he added the sentence that should be nailed above the door of every product team in America.
“Even though Quality cannot be defined, you know what Quality is.”
by Keyana Sapp, Worse on Purpose | Read more:
Image: Gibson Les Paul Studio/© Future/GuitarWorld
[ed. Nice site. See also: Your Appliances Got Worse On Purpose (WoP):]
Your first instinct is to point at the materials. It's mahogany. It has real humbuckers, a set neck, the best nitro lacquer. But that answer collapses the moment you notice the description fits every guitar on that wall. Two instruments leave the same factory in the same month, matching spec for spec down the line, and one sings while the other sounds weak. Every guitarist knows this, which is why nobody buys the model, they buy the individual guitar, only after noodling on it for a while. The spec sheet names everything the guitar is made of, and whatever quality is, it is not on the list of materials.
Fall back on "I just like it" and you sell the knowledge short, because standing in that store I wasn't just voicing an arbitrary preference, I was detecting something. “This is a thing of quality. It is the one I want.” Fifteen years of ownership keep proving my instinct that day right.
That gap, between knowing good on contact and being able to say what good is, is one of the oldest open problems in Western philosophy. It is also the fundamental question this newsletter is attempting to answer.
Every investigation I've published documents the same story: a product stripped of what made it good while everything a shopper can check stayed intact. Same logo, same spec sheet, same four and a half stars, same price or higher. What got swapped out, the steel gauge, the stitch count and the years of service life, sits in the parts you can't check from the aisle.
That gap between what you can verify and what actually matters is the whole game, for them and for you. They use it to slowly diminish the quality of the products you once loved without tripping an alarm. You can use it to watch the theft happen.
So this essay is about what quality is and where it actually lives, which makes it the philosophical foundation under every investigation this publication will run.
***
In the late 1950s, a rhetoric instructor at Montana State College named Robert Pirsig noticed that his contract required him to teach "quality". He asked around the faculty at the university and discovered that nobody could tell him what the word meant. Teachers had been passing and failing students on the basis of quality for centuries without a definition. The problem ate at him for fifteen years, ultimately driving him to insanity. Pirsig’s best thinking on the nature of quality was eventually set down in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. It stands alone as the most formative book I have ever read.
To illustrate the problem, Pirsig relays an experiment he ran with his students. He read four student papers aloud and had everyone rank them by quality on slips of paper. He ranked them himself, collected the slips, tallied the results on the blackboard, and set his own ranking next to the class average. His ranking and the students’ matched almost every time, across classes and semesters. A room full of undergraduates who could not define quality independently agreed on where it lived and where it didn't.
So Pirsig landed on this problem statement:
"Quality is a characteristic of thought and statement that is recognized by a nonthinking process. Because definitions are a product of rigid, formal thinking, quality cannot be defined."
Then he added the sentence that should be nailed above the door of every product team in America.
“Even though Quality cannot be defined, you know what Quality is.”
by Keyana Sapp, Worse on Purpose | Read more:
Image: Gibson Les Paul Studio/© Future/GuitarWorld
[ed. Nice site. See also: Your Appliances Got Worse On Purpose (WoP):]
***
Cheap parts and efficiency rules often take the blame, but consolidation is the real cause. The decline came on deliberately, built into the machines one brand at a time, as the companies that once competed on quality stopped having to.A handful of holdouts still build appliances that last for decades, and that is telling. Durability is clearly still possible. Most of the industry just decided it was worth less than the next sale.
One company, four price tags
Start with Whirlpool. It owns brands on every rung of the price ladder.
Amana sits at the bottom as the budget badge. Maytag plays the dependable workhorse, KitchenAid the premium brand for people who care about their kitchen, and JennAir the luxury tier. Every one of them is Whirlpool, which the company lists plainly in its own corporate materials. They share wash systems, motors, compressors, and control boards across brands, built in the same plants. A Maytag and a Whirlpool of the same class are often the same machine in different sheet metal. The higher tiers add real materials and features, but you're still buying up a ladder one company controls end to end.
Kenmore takes the trick further. It never built a single appliance, not one, in its entire history. For decades it was a Sears nameplate bolted onto whoever won the contract that year, Whirlpool or LG or Frigidaire. Today it survives as a licensing shell owned by the hedge fund that picked Sears apart.
***
[ed. And there's this: Monopoly Round-Up: Living in an Age of Cheating Means Having Your Time Stolen Constantly (BIG).]
Sunday, August 23, 2026
Chilling in Money-Market Funds is the Hot Retail Strategy Now
The stock market keeps setting records. Bitcoin has minted millionaires. Gold has peaked at new levels. Yet one of the most popular trades is to sit in cash or, more precisely, money-market funds. These plain‑vanilla vehicles, which invest in short‑term debt, have become the default parking spot for everyone from retail savers to corporate treasurers.
The US money-market industry now holds a record $8.29 trillion — almost twice the size of Japan’s economy — after inflows topped $1 trillion last year, according to Crane Data LLC, which tracks the industry. The strategy’s popularity has been accompanied by a Wall Street catchphrase, “T-bill and chill,” which has come to signify investors’ preference for the short-term Treasuries these funds often hold.
“Convenience is king with cash,” says Peter Crane, president of Crane Data. “It’s the ultimate hedge when other assets like Bitcoin and gold have done more going up and going down.”
[ed. See also: What the Bond Market Swings Mean for Your Money (Bloomberg); and, America Is About to Get More Expensive (NYT).]
The US money-market industry now holds a record $8.29 trillion — almost twice the size of Japan’s economy — after inflows topped $1 trillion last year, according to Crane Data LLC, which tracks the industry. The strategy’s popularity has been accompanied by a Wall Street catchphrase, “T-bill and chill,” which has come to signify investors’ preference for the short-term Treasuries these funds often hold.
“Convenience is king with cash,” says Peter Crane, president of Crane Data. “It’s the ultimate hedge when other assets like Bitcoin and gold have done more going up and going down.”
Stability in finance has been rare over the past decade as the Covid-19 pandemic, geopolitical conflicts and the rise of artificial intelligence unleashed uncertainty across global markets. The volatility has pushed safety-minded investors toward money-market funds, where the appeal is the combination of stability and returns. Yields on the 100 largest funds were near 3.5% at the end of April, according to a Crane Data index.
With long‑dated bonds still sensitive to shifts in interest-rate expectations, many savers have gravitated toward short‑term vehicles instead. Money‑market funds invest in very short‑dated government securities (though some can also hold high-quality short-term corporate debt), aim to maintain a stable $1 share price and adjust to changes in rates more quickly than bank deposits. That combination has made them a popular place to park cash, especially for households and businesses with balances above the $250,000 federal insurance cap.
Jessica Perrone, who’s spent 16 years as a financial professional and teaches personal finance, says two kinds of savers are moving toward cash. High‑net‑worth households — the type juggling summer spending, second homes and market highs — are reacting to climbing oil prices and corporate margins that look vulnerable. But she’s also noticing a shift among everyday workers in her financial‑wellness workshops, as conflicting headlines and market volatility push people to “start taking their chips off the table” by parking their money in more predictable assets.
Investors are calculating that they can get a decent yield with no risk “or maybe 5.5% to 6% elsewhere with the possibility of losses,” says Jeff Judge, a managing partner at Chesapeake Financial Planners, who’s observed similar trends among his clients. “For some, that’s an easy decision.”
To Amrita Bhasin, a 25-year-old tech worker in California, money-market funds feel easier to manage than, say, certificates of deposit, where cash is locked up for a specific period and subject to penalties. “With money-market funds, I feel like I have more visibility and control over what’s happening with my money,” she says. “I want to understand where my money is, what yield I’m getting and how it’s changing.”
The interest appears to extend to other age groups. Judge has seen higher demand for cashlike instruments among younger investors such as Bhasin, while Laurie Brignac, chief investment officer at asset manager Invesco Ltd., says the preference is also strong among American baby boomers. While they’re not necessarily disinvesting from risk assets, she says, “their investments are kicking off more cash,” and the gains get redirected to safer holdings. Overall, money-market funds made up almost 4.5% of total wealth at the end of 2025, according to Federal Reserve data, compared with about 3% prior to the hiking cycle that began a decade earlier.
Even incoming Fed Chairman Kevin Warsh says he plans to keep much of his own wealth in such vehicles as he steps into one of the most scrutinized jobs in global finance. In his case, the uncontroversial nature of cashlike instruments is appealing. He recently disclosed assets with his wife, Jane Lauder, that total at least $192 million, and he’ll have to comply with personal investing rules that were significantly tightened in 2022 after a series of embarrassing revelations of trading by Fed officials.
Businesses, meanwhile, are piling into the trend to safeguard flexibility for investment and strategic moves. Nonfinancial companies had amassed almost $6.2 trillion in cash and short-term instruments at the end of 2025, according to institutional brokerage SMBC Nikko Securities America Inc., up 4% on the year. Joseph Abate, head of the firm’s US rates strategy, estimates businesses are holding cash at about 20% of their total liabilities, with a portion in money-market funds. He expects levels to remain elevated as long as the funds yield more than 3%.
by Alex Harris and Carter Johnson, Bloomberg | Read more:
Image:Sarah Anne Ward for Bloomberg Markets
Jessica Perrone, who’s spent 16 years as a financial professional and teaches personal finance, says two kinds of savers are moving toward cash. High‑net‑worth households — the type juggling summer spending, second homes and market highs — are reacting to climbing oil prices and corporate margins that look vulnerable. But she’s also noticing a shift among everyday workers in her financial‑wellness workshops, as conflicting headlines and market volatility push people to “start taking their chips off the table” by parking their money in more predictable assets.
Investors are calculating that they can get a decent yield with no risk “or maybe 5.5% to 6% elsewhere with the possibility of losses,” says Jeff Judge, a managing partner at Chesapeake Financial Planners, who’s observed similar trends among his clients. “For some, that’s an easy decision.”
To Amrita Bhasin, a 25-year-old tech worker in California, money-market funds feel easier to manage than, say, certificates of deposit, where cash is locked up for a specific period and subject to penalties. “With money-market funds, I feel like I have more visibility and control over what’s happening with my money,” she says. “I want to understand where my money is, what yield I’m getting and how it’s changing.”
The interest appears to extend to other age groups. Judge has seen higher demand for cashlike instruments among younger investors such as Bhasin, while Laurie Brignac, chief investment officer at asset manager Invesco Ltd., says the preference is also strong among American baby boomers. While they’re not necessarily disinvesting from risk assets, she says, “their investments are kicking off more cash,” and the gains get redirected to safer holdings. Overall, money-market funds made up almost 4.5% of total wealth at the end of 2025, according to Federal Reserve data, compared with about 3% prior to the hiking cycle that began a decade earlier.
Even incoming Fed Chairman Kevin Warsh says he plans to keep much of his own wealth in such vehicles as he steps into one of the most scrutinized jobs in global finance. In his case, the uncontroversial nature of cashlike instruments is appealing. He recently disclosed assets with his wife, Jane Lauder, that total at least $192 million, and he’ll have to comply with personal investing rules that were significantly tightened in 2022 after a series of embarrassing revelations of trading by Fed officials.
Businesses, meanwhile, are piling into the trend to safeguard flexibility for investment and strategic moves. Nonfinancial companies had amassed almost $6.2 trillion in cash and short-term instruments at the end of 2025, according to institutional brokerage SMBC Nikko Securities America Inc., up 4% on the year. Joseph Abate, head of the firm’s US rates strategy, estimates businesses are holding cash at about 20% of their total liabilities, with a portion in money-market funds. He expects levels to remain elevated as long as the funds yield more than 3%.
by Alex Harris and Carter Johnson, Bloomberg | Read more:
Image:Sarah Anne Ward for Bloomberg Markets
Resort to Boulder
Sundance means big business for Park City. Last year, the festival’s 85,000 visitors brought almost $200 million into the town’s economy, and major sponsors like Chase, Acura, United Airlines, and Adobe took over entire restaurants and event spaces up and down Main Street. In March 2025, however, the Sundance Institute — the nonprofit that operates the festival — announced that Sundance would be moving to Boulder. Sundance officials had spoken for years about the possibility of moving the festival out of Park City. In 2022, the institute lost millions of dollars after being forced to shut down in-person screenings in response to that winter’s omicron outbreak. Now Colorado was offering more than $34 million in state tax credits to incentivize the move. The 2026 Sundance Film Festival would be the last to take place in its original home, as well as the first not overseen by Sundance’s talismanic founder, Robert Redford, who died at 89 in September 2025. [...]
Park City, it should be said, is neither a park nor a city. As a location for a festival it is, and always has been, a giant pain in the ass. Getting to Park City is pricey, and driving and parking are impossible. There are only a handful of hotels in town, and all of them jack up their usual prices by criminal orders of magnitude. Most people end up sharing cramped rooms in condos that still cost thousands of dollars. Eating and drinking are equally outrageous. Utah state law requires restaurant patrons to buy food to order a drink, and liquor-based drinks may contain only 1.5 ounces of any primary spirit, measured through a calibrated dispensing device called the Berg. This is a serious problem for bored, overworked critics who must sit through dozens of the nation’s least ambitious films every year.
Then there are the lines. Lines to corporate-sponsored events that snake up Main Street; lines to parties that take hours even when your name is on the list; lines to press screenings longer than the film’s runtime. In 2026, a single ticket to one of these films cost $35; a package of ten tickets, with the ability to reserve screenings in advance, was $920. For filmmakers it’s even worse. Sundance sometimes provides a small stipend to productions to help offset the costs of participating in the festival. This year, the payment was around $1,000, hardly enough money to fly in a director, let alone a cast and crew, to spend several days posing for photos in front of step and repeats, participating in interviews, and attending Q&As — standard but punishing procedures for selling a film at Sundance. Add in the price of hiring a publicist and throwing a party for the film’s premiere — as well as meals, hotels, and transportation — and launching a low-budget film at Sundance can quickly run up tens of thousands of dollars in expenses.
Robert Redford was an unlikely champion of independent film. As the face of polished 1970s studio filmmaking and the decade’s biggest box office star, he was the ultimate Hollywood insider. His name was listed in dictionaries under words like glamour and idol, and he was too good-looking to be anything but a leading man — a point the actor famously learned early in his career after auditioning for the lead in Mike Nichols’s The Graduate. “I said, ‘You can’t play it. You can never play a loser,’” Nichols later told Vanity Fair. “And Redford said, ‘What do you mean? Of course I can play a loser.’ And I said, ‘OK, have you ever struck out with a girl?’ and he said, ‘What do you mean?’”
But Redford was always ambivalent about his success. He disliked the trappings and never-ending demands of celebrity, and mistrusted the studio executives and yes-men around him. By the early 1980s, the major Hollywood studios had shut out most of the successful creative filmmakers of the previous decade and pivoted to family-friendly, cash-fueled spectacles like Star Wars, Superman, and E.T. Redford saw Sundance as the solution. The next generation of pathbreaking auteurs would come to the actor’s compound, which included a ski resort near Mount Timpanogos, to receive artistic guidance and mentorship far from the corrupting influence of the Barry Dillers and Jerry Bruckheimers of the world.
by Will Travlin, N+1 | Read more:
Image: Chason Matthams, Untitled (Technica 3D rig, yellow). 2024
Saturday, August 22, 2026
How Dachshunds Took Over the Dog World
The barking starts before customers even reach the door.
Then comes the rapid tippy-tap of paws as dozens of dachshunds race across the floor, noses first, eager to sniff new arrivals and dole out sloppy kisses. Charlotte, Cherleen, Kingston, Khaleesi and the rest of the pack are the main attraction at Bornz Too, a cafe in a Bangkok suburb where customers pay 300 baht ($9) to spend an hour and a half with more than 30 sausage dogs. “Coffee is secondary here,” says owner Phatthira Koosrivong.
The dachshund breeder and importer opened the cafe in June after being inundated with requests from people wanting to meet and play with the breed before buying one. Customers crouch on the floor to rub bellies, pose for photos and laugh as dachshunds climb into their laps. By the time they leave, they know Charlotte from Cherleen and Kingston from Khaleesi.
When Phatthira started importing dachshunds about five years ago, she sold 10 to 20 puppies a year. Today, she places close to 100. “We don’t have to do any hard selling,” she says.
Her booming business reflects a broader surge in the short-legged breed’s popularity. From Bangkok to London to New York, demand has climbed as social media and celebrity owners amplify the breed’s appeal, while changes in how people live, work and build families reshape what they want in a pet. In 2025 dachshunds overtook poodles to become the American Kennel Club’s fifth-most-popular breed, after a decade-long climb from 13th place. In the UK, they were the Royal Kennel Club’s third-most-registered breed last year when all sizes and coat variations are tallied, behind only Labrador retrievers and cocker spaniels, with registrations doubling from a decade earlier.
Few dogs are better suited to the moment. Dachshunds are compact enough for urban life, distinctive enough for Instagram or TikTok and packed with personality. The breed comes in standard, miniature and rabbit sizes and three coat types — smooth-, long- and wire-haired — as well as dozens of color and pattern combinations. [...]
As cities grow denser, apartments shrink and homeownership drifts further out of reach for many young adults, the dachshund is becoming an ideal pet — small, adaptable and perfectly suited to urban living. Kisnica sees the same pattern in Bangkok that she did in Spain. “It’s definitely the breed that’s become very, very popular, especially among millennials without children,” she says. “They’re easy to have in an apartment or in a city.”
During a recent trip to Italy, I found myself photographing dachshunds almost as often as the scenery. They padded down cobblestone streets and appeared everywhere, from adverts in shop windows to tote bags, including one that reimagined Michelangelo’s The Creation of Adam with a dachshund in Adam’s place.
Dachshunds were first bred in Germany about 500 years ago to hunt badgers underground and flush out foxes and rabbits. Their elongated bodies slipped easily through tunnels, while their oversize paws were built for digging and their loud bark helped hunters locate them below ground. The stubborn streak that delights and frustrates modern owners reflects the independence and bravery they needed to confront fierce prey.
Hunters prized them for their loyalty, and many owners say that instinct survives today. They form strong bonds with their families, often burrowing under blankets, curling up in laps and shadowing their owners from room to room. [...]
The celebrity connection long predates social media. David Hockney and Andy Warhol owned dachshunds, as did John Wayne and Elizabeth Taylor.
by Randy Thanthong-Knight, Bloomberg | Read more:
Then comes the rapid tippy-tap of paws as dozens of dachshunds race across the floor, noses first, eager to sniff new arrivals and dole out sloppy kisses. Charlotte, Cherleen, Kingston, Khaleesi and the rest of the pack are the main attraction at Bornz Too, a cafe in a Bangkok suburb where customers pay 300 baht ($9) to spend an hour and a half with more than 30 sausage dogs. “Coffee is secondary here,” says owner Phatthira Koosrivong.
When Phatthira started importing dachshunds about five years ago, she sold 10 to 20 puppies a year. Today, she places close to 100. “We don’t have to do any hard selling,” she says.
Her booming business reflects a broader surge in the short-legged breed’s popularity. From Bangkok to London to New York, demand has climbed as social media and celebrity owners amplify the breed’s appeal, while changes in how people live, work and build families reshape what they want in a pet. In 2025 dachshunds overtook poodles to become the American Kennel Club’s fifth-most-popular breed, after a decade-long climb from 13th place. In the UK, they were the Royal Kennel Club’s third-most-registered breed last year when all sizes and coat variations are tallied, behind only Labrador retrievers and cocker spaniels, with registrations doubling from a decade earlier.
Few dogs are better suited to the moment. Dachshunds are compact enough for urban life, distinctive enough for Instagram or TikTok and packed with personality. The breed comes in standard, miniature and rabbit sizes and three coat types — smooth-, long- and wire-haired — as well as dozens of color and pattern combinations. [...]
As cities grow denser, apartments shrink and homeownership drifts further out of reach for many young adults, the dachshund is becoming an ideal pet — small, adaptable and perfectly suited to urban living. Kisnica sees the same pattern in Bangkok that she did in Spain. “It’s definitely the breed that’s become very, very popular, especially among millennials without children,” she says. “They’re easy to have in an apartment or in a city.”
During a recent trip to Italy, I found myself photographing dachshunds almost as often as the scenery. They padded down cobblestone streets and appeared everywhere, from adverts in shop windows to tote bags, including one that reimagined Michelangelo’s The Creation of Adam with a dachshund in Adam’s place.
Dachshunds were first bred in Germany about 500 years ago to hunt badgers underground and flush out foxes and rabbits. Their elongated bodies slipped easily through tunnels, while their oversize paws were built for digging and their loud bark helped hunters locate them below ground. The stubborn streak that delights and frustrates modern owners reflects the independence and bravery they needed to confront fierce prey.
New York Yankees captain Aaron Judge regularly features his dachshunds, Gus and Penny, on social media. Formula One driver Charles Leclerc’s dachshund, Leo, appeared in his wedding photos, while tennis players Anna Kalinskaya and Alexander Zverev have brought their pooches to Roland Garros. Actor Luke Evans, who stars as Dr. Frank-N-Furter in the Broadway revival of The Rocky Horror Show, nicknamed his dachshund Lala “Frank-N-Wiener.”
The celebrity connection long predates social media. David Hockney and Andy Warhol owned dachshunds, as did John Wayne and Elizabeth Taylor.
Image: Waltraud Grubitzsch/Getty Images; Andy and Archie; Jack Mitchell/Getty Images
[ed. I've grown up with dachshunds most of my life and they're the best dogs, hands down. We have a Dachshund Festival in our town each year. Here are a few pics: Wiener-Palooza.]
[ed. I've grown up with dachshunds most of my life and they're the best dogs, hands down. We have a Dachshund Festival in our town each year. Here are a few pics: Wiener-Palooza.]
Plagiarism and Slop
Robert Minto: It breaks my heart to witness the new phenomenon of marketers using LLMs to bait writers into extensive comment threads. It happens here on Substack, but it happens more often on the dozens of old Wordpress blogs I still follow in my RSS feed reader.
I think that for many purposes people really do care about style, especially about variety of style, and about the parasocial relationship to the author, and about the costly signal that you are devoting your own mind and effort to communication. Not in every situation, but in many situations. [...]
The question then is, how does AI writing adjust? Will AI learn to write differently? Will it gain a wider variety of style?
I see two likely ways the answer could be yes.
Usually it starts with an apparently thoughtful and expert-sounding comment on the original post, a comment clearly AI-generated if you know some of the current tells. The author responds with enthusiasm—after all, hardly anybody comments on old school blogs these days. A long back and forth ensues. The bot practices the usual emotional mirroring and flattery. At the end of what seemed to the host a great conversation, the bot suddenly pivots to something like: “By the way, you should come [check out my scammy online business and tell all your friends]!”Will AI writing replace human writing? That depends on both how well the AIs will be able to write and also what the writing is for.
The thread ends there. In that sudden curtailment, I can read the realization of the blog/newsletter owner that they haven’t been talking to a person. They’ve been publicly, but unwittingly, conversing with a machine, whose interest in their work means nothing. They’ve tasted the rotting sweetness of a ‘heaven ban.’
It makes my skin crawl. I want to explain to them what just happened. But I know that if it happened to me, I’d hope nobody had seen.
corsaren: One challenge with defending AI from neo-Luddites is that the public-facing usage is so heavily skewed towards antisocial uses. And sure, “guns don’t kill people, people kill people”, but these are agents. There’s a real sense in which the bots *are* the ones doing the killing^.
Yishan: This is a big problem. Inside tech, we are all using frontier models with mindblowing capabilities. But everyone outside is just experiencing comment spam and slop produced by grifters using least-expensive models that output reams of garbage.
FischerKing: Writers need readers who like their style. The college professors forcing students to write in-class essays to avoid AI cheating are doing the right thing - but it could be a losing battle. If fewer and fewer people want to read a distinct human style - then AI writing wins. [...]I am with Vaughan, with the obvious warning that I am a writer and could be biased.
Then think of really unnecessary works of modernism like Finnegan’s Wake. A few people pretend to like this. The overwhelming majority has zero interest. The better AI gets, the more a ‘distinct human style’ could come to look like unnecessary nonsense - waste of time.
Henry Vaughan: There are different modes of writing and reading and it’s not all about communicating information.
Literary writing and reading is more like conversation. Its closest analogue is friendship and the thing being enjoyed is the uniqueness of a personality.
I think that for many purposes people really do care about style, especially about variety of style, and about the parasocial relationship to the author, and about the costly signal that you are devoting your own mind and effort to communication. Not in every situation, but in many situations. [...]
The question then is, how does AI writing adjust? Will AI learn to write differently? Will it gain a wider variety of style?
I see two likely ways the answer could be yes.
1. The AIs might become superintelligent, and gain the ability to adjust style along with everything else, in which case I expect AI writing to win out because AI everything wins out, but also we have bigger problems and I don’t care.
2. The AIs might not be superintelligent, but be trained to produce a wider variety of styles, or a different style, in response to this. I’m not sure whether I like this.
by Zvi Mowshowitz, DWAV/X | Read more:
Image: David Perell/X
Friday, August 21, 2026
The Deep Sea
by Neal Agarwal
[ed. Fun and informative (scroll down to different depths to see the various creatures that have been recorded there). For example, I had no idea thick-billed murres could dive that deep.]
Why So Quiet?
In May 2024, when then-Congresswoman Mary Peltola introduced a Bycatch Reduction and Mitigation Act and Bottom Trawl Clarity Act, the bills drew immediate backlash.
Peltola, a Democrat, received a letter signed by 53 trawl interests and nationwide fishery stakeholders urging her to withdraw the proposed legislation saying, “These new federal mandates and timelines are utterly unworkable.”
Fast forward to 2026.
In her current campaign to unseat 12-year incumbent Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan, Peltola introduced a similar “Fighting for Alaska Fisheries” platform to no reaction from the trawl sector. Sullivan quickly followed by proposing a Bycatch Reduction Act, a revamped version of a 2022 Alaska Salmon Research Task Force bill that produced a report recommending more research. Again, no trawler reaction.
What’s the difference?
This time around, Peltola’s push is a campaign policy platform, not a proposed congressional bill. While Sullivan’s Act fits that description, the trawl sector apparently views him as its strategic shield against Peltola. If they aggressively attack his bill, they could politically weaken their strongest ally in Washington.
There are fundamental differences between the two bills.
Peltola’s approach leans toward statutory restrictions that would force the government to draw hard lines on where trawling is allowed — the goal is to stop “multi-species collapse.” It would make changes to language loopholes in the outdated Magnuson-Stevens Act, such as “minimizing bycatch to the extent practicable.” Her proposal would remove “to the extent practicable” as it is widely regarded as the phrase that allows trawlers to declare under the law that they “are doing the best they can” to reduce bycatch. It has been included in management decisions for decades as a way for the trawl sector to avoid more stringent bycatch rules. Peltola’s approach calls for restructuring the North Pacific Fishery Management Council to dilute trawler influence, and adding seats for subsistence and small-boat fishermen. It calls for investment in Alaska seafood processing innovation, fish by-product utilization and seaweed and shellfish mariculture.
Sullivan’s bill offers industrialized trawlers a heavily subsidized pathway to compliance rather than an eviction notice. It requires stricter operational rules like mandatory salmon excluders — devices built into trawl nets that can allow salmon to escape — and tougher seafloor contact accountability. It focuses heavily on using advanced data, real-time technology and gear innovations to mitigate bycatch and ecosystem impacts without adding regulatory burdens. Crucially, it includes massive federal carrots: funding for a flume tank, electronic monitoring upgrades and streamlined Exempted Fishing Permits that allow vessels to conduct experimental fishing activities that would otherwise be prohibited.
Instead of resorting to angry rebuttals, the trawl sector has outsourced its messaging to new advocacy fronts like The Truth Alaska, Sustaining Alaska’s Future and the Alaska Pollock Fishery Alliance. One originates in Texas; the others are fronted by former state directors for Republican Congressional delegates Sen. Sullivan and Rep. Nick Begich III.
This strategy lets the trawl sector counter anti-trawl sentiment without making it look like they are fighting a sitting US Senator. They reframe the debate as “supporting science and Alaska jobs,” allowing Sullivan to position himself as the reasonable middle ground.
During his tenure, Sullivan has been one of Big Trawl’s top recipients of campaign contributions. He obfuscates the fact that those cash cows all are homeported in Seattle or Oregon.
In recent social media ads, for example, he calls for reining in chum salmon bycatch by “holding foreign fleets accountable,” knowing full well that foreign fleets have been banned from Alaska waters out to 200 miles since the mid-1970s.
[ed. Politics in a nutshell (and GOP politicians) - and the natural environment continues to get screwed. I don't think Republican politicians hate the environment per se, but if the choice is between protection and unfettered development, no contest. See also: Roadless Rule to be Rescinded (affecting 45 million wild acres) here and here, and Big Bend National Park (Texas) under threat (here and here).]
In the face of all this, a spirited, bipartisan coalition of Big Bend enthusiasts—from crunchy river rats to MAGA border sheriffs—have been fighting back. Early in the summer, they managed to get the Trump administration to scrap plans for a thirty-foot wall in the park. This week, U.S. Customs and Border Protection commissioner Rodney Scott agreed to pause construction there while he visits the region. Governor Greg Abbott, after months of silence on the matter, has attempted to take credit for the pause."
Peltola, a Democrat, received a letter signed by 53 trawl interests and nationwide fishery stakeholders urging her to withdraw the proposed legislation saying, “These new federal mandates and timelines are utterly unworkable.”
Fast forward to 2026.
What’s the difference?
This time around, Peltola’s push is a campaign policy platform, not a proposed congressional bill. While Sullivan’s Act fits that description, the trawl sector apparently views him as its strategic shield against Peltola. If they aggressively attack his bill, they could politically weaken their strongest ally in Washington.
There are fundamental differences between the two bills.
Peltola’s approach leans toward statutory restrictions that would force the government to draw hard lines on where trawling is allowed — the goal is to stop “multi-species collapse.” It would make changes to language loopholes in the outdated Magnuson-Stevens Act, such as “minimizing bycatch to the extent practicable.” Her proposal would remove “to the extent practicable” as it is widely regarded as the phrase that allows trawlers to declare under the law that they “are doing the best they can” to reduce bycatch. It has been included in management decisions for decades as a way for the trawl sector to avoid more stringent bycatch rules. Peltola’s approach calls for restructuring the North Pacific Fishery Management Council to dilute trawler influence, and adding seats for subsistence and small-boat fishermen. It calls for investment in Alaska seafood processing innovation, fish by-product utilization and seaweed and shellfish mariculture.
Sullivan’s bill offers industrialized trawlers a heavily subsidized pathway to compliance rather than an eviction notice. It requires stricter operational rules like mandatory salmon excluders — devices built into trawl nets that can allow salmon to escape — and tougher seafloor contact accountability. It focuses heavily on using advanced data, real-time technology and gear innovations to mitigate bycatch and ecosystem impacts without adding regulatory burdens. Crucially, it includes massive federal carrots: funding for a flume tank, electronic monitoring upgrades and streamlined Exempted Fishing Permits that allow vessels to conduct experimental fishing activities that would otherwise be prohibited.
Instead of resorting to angry rebuttals, the trawl sector has outsourced its messaging to new advocacy fronts like The Truth Alaska, Sustaining Alaska’s Future and the Alaska Pollock Fishery Alliance. One originates in Texas; the others are fronted by former state directors for Republican Congressional delegates Sen. Sullivan and Rep. Nick Begich III.
This strategy lets the trawl sector counter anti-trawl sentiment without making it look like they are fighting a sitting US Senator. They reframe the debate as “supporting science and Alaska jobs,” allowing Sullivan to position himself as the reasonable middle ground.
During his tenure, Sullivan has been one of Big Trawl’s top recipients of campaign contributions. He obfuscates the fact that those cash cows all are homeported in Seattle or Oregon.
In recent social media ads, for example, he calls for reining in chum salmon bycatch by “holding foreign fleets accountable,” knowing full well that foreign fleets have been banned from Alaska waters out to 200 miles since the mid-1970s.
by Laine Welch, Alaska Beacon | Read more:
Image: David Csepp/National Marine Fisheries Service[ed. Politics in a nutshell (and GOP politicians) - and the natural environment continues to get screwed. I don't think Republican politicians hate the environment per se, but if the choice is between protection and unfettered development, no contest. See also: Roadless Rule to be Rescinded (affecting 45 million wild acres) here and here, and Big Bend National Park (Texas) under threat (here and here).]
***
"Donald Trump once bragged that he could shoot someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue and not lose his supporters’ faith. In the Big Bend region, the Trump administration has been figuratively shooting Texans in the face while the state’s leaders do virtually nothing. In recent weeks, bulldozers began ripping up Texas’s last, best wilderness—the one place that still honors the state’s mythology of wide-open spaces and endless frontier. Even with the federal boot heel (for now) off the neck of Big Bend National Park, it’s preparing to press down on the rest of the vast region with a mix of thirty-foot border walls, vehicle barriers, and new patrol roads. Hundreds of private landowners between El Paso and Del Rio may soon face eminent domain, their land seized by the feds for a project that few in the region think will do anything to secure a part of the border that sees vanishingly few illegal crossings. In the face of all this, a spirited, bipartisan coalition of Big Bend enthusiasts—from crunchy river rats to MAGA border sheriffs—have been fighting back. Early in the summer, they managed to get the Trump administration to scrap plans for a thirty-foot wall in the park. This week, U.S. Customs and Border Protection commissioner Rodney Scott agreed to pause construction there while he visits the region. Governor Greg Abbott, after months of silence on the matter, has attempted to take credit for the pause."
"The Strongman Presidency"
On today’s episode, we’re continuing a conversation about presidential power that we broached a couple of weeks ago on Statecraft, in an essay titled, “What Trump Can Learn From Nixon.” It was about the attempts, in Richard Nixon‘s 1.5 presidential terms, to build what observers called the “administrative presidency” — a presidency that actually, fully controlled the administrative state.
My guests today have thought very deeply about presidential attempts to control the administrative state. William Howell and Terry Moe are co-authors of a book called, Trajectory of Power: The Rise of the Strongman Presidency. They’re both political scientists. Terry is a professor of political science at Stanford, and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. Will is the Dean of the School of Government and Policy at Johns Hopkins University. There’s a fair amount of disagreement in this conversation, and I hope the result is pretty entertaining, and hopefully enlightening. [...]
My guests today have thought very deeply about presidential attempts to control the administrative state. William Howell and Terry Moe are co-authors of a book called, Trajectory of Power: The Rise of the Strongman Presidency. They’re both political scientists. Terry is a professor of political science at Stanford, and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. Will is the Dean of the School of Government and Policy at Johns Hopkins University. There’s a fair amount of disagreement in this conversation, and I hope the result is pretty entertaining, and hopefully enlightening. [...]
Will you briefly articulate how you are defining democracy in the context of this book, and the threat you think Trump poses?
Howell: In some ways, our definition is quite conventional. It recognizes the importance of free and fair elections, and checks and balances. There are two dimensions we also want to bring into view, that offer a thicker understanding about what democracy requires. One is the rule of law. It’s hard to imagine a flourishing democracy without it — so violations of the rule of law are violations of democracy. Another important piece is that you have institutions that can effectively govern — translating the broad ambitions and intent written into legislation into action. Democracies are not just debating societies. They also attend to wishes expressed by a polity. That depends upon well-functioning governing institutions. When you lay siege to such institutions, you imperil democracy itself.
We’ve been very interested on Statecraft in well-functioning institutions that deliver on their commitments. But I’ve never combined that in my view of democracy. Is a democracy that has lower state capacity less of a democracy?
Howell: If you have a government that is routinely incapable of solving problems the public wants to see solved, you are vulnerable to the entreaties of a demagogue who will step in and say, “The state, the parties, these small-d democratic institutions have failed you. I will be the one that delivers for you.” Persistent failure opens up space for a populist strongman to step in. This was the dominant theme of the second book Terry and I wrote, Presidents, Populism, and the Crisis of Democracy, wherein we talk about how ineffective government is vulnerable to the entreaties of a populist strongman that will not just challenge democracy, but transgress it.
Moe: If a democracy is going to be meaningful, it has to have a democratic policymaking process, and an administrative state that can carry out those policies. If you have a government that is tearing down the administrative state and undermining its capacity for effectiveness, you are undermining the meaning and effectiveness of democracy.
How should we picture the powers of the president before the Progressive Era?
Moe: To a large extent, we had congressional government. The parties were extremely strong from Andrew Jackson on, at all levels of government. Politicians were captives — products of those machines. Presidents weren’t above all that. It was a system that had almost no executive branch. The idea that the president would ride herd over all these agencies — that had programs, experts, and authority presidents could use to gain power — those things weren’t there.
What was not in existence in this period?
Moe: The government wasn’t doing all that much. Most of the employees of the federal government were mailmen. All the agencies you associate with the administrative state weren’t there, except for the Post Office, and a few things like that. The massive social upheaval at the end of the 1800s — industrialization, urbanization, immigration — transformed and disrupted American society, and led to demands for a government that worked and would do something — because all sorts of problems were being generated by an industrialized society.
People wanted solutions. How could you get that? You needed to have, “good government.” How could you get that? That’s where the Progressive movement came from. It was an effort to create a positive government that would address these pressing social problems. That’s how we got a presidency that was much more powerful. Teddy Roosevelt is the classic progressive president, then Woodrow Wilson.
Congress had been a cesspool of interest group influence and corruption. What they wanted was a bureaucracy that could carry out policies, be staffed with experts, and behave in a nonpartisan way — to do the scientifically objective thing and administer policy. Some of this was idealized, but that’s what modern government is about — having an administrative state filled with experts, hired on the basis of merit, who are capable of carrying out public policies, led by a president who has actual power. Not all power, but more power than in the past.
Howell: There’s a direct way in which this proliferation of agencies with all kinds of capacity, expertise, and personnel expands presidential power, because suddenly the presidency has access to capacity. When you look at the ambition behind a law — now we might be able to do something. From the word go, this administrative state is sitting within the second branch, and the president sits atop it.
Additionally, presidents can’t count on bureaucrats to do their bidding. Just because you have this expertise within these administrative agencies — how do you know they’re going to do the things that the president wants? From Franklin D. Roosevelt, even to Ronald Reagan, you see efforts by presidents from both parties to build out instruments of control, and strategies that will increase the odds that actions within all those far-flung agencies are aligned with the interests of the president. [...]
What are the tools that presidents in this period build to try and get control?
Howell: The two big categories are centralization and politicization. Centralization involves the effort to bring decision-making into closer proximity to the White House. You see the rise of the Executive Office of the President (EOP), and things like policy czars — so that the president can keep an eye on what’s being decided, and ensure it aligns with his policy preferences.
The other move is to appoint people whose policy preferences align with your own to oversee those agencies. You could see a tension between politicization and the expertise that justifies the rise of the modern administrative state. But the politicization is in the service of expanding presidential control.
Moe: The first thing that was created was the Executive Office of the President, under Roosevelt. That became the house to hold agencies created for the president to control the bureaucracy.
Before the Executive Office of the President — which is now 1,700 staff in the Eisenhower Building and the West Wing — who is making sure that what the president wants is happening?
Moe: This was all new. The progressives didn’t build much of an administrative state. It was the New Deal that exploded it. The EOP was created in 1939, right in the middle of this thing. It’s chaos. They’re creating this gigantic thing, filled with all these new agencies. How do you even think about controlling it? That was what they were up against.
What they eventually arrived at was: “We’re going to construct an Executive Office of the President, and we’re going to put stuff in there that allows the president to use little units to control the bureaucracy.” The first one they moved in was the Bureau of the Budget, which is now called the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). It used to be in the Treasury Department, created in 1921. It became a purely presidential agency. In addition, there’s now:
All these units are mechanisms of presidential control. You have the administrative state, but then you have the president with his own bureaucracy that works for him to control everything else.
Howell: In some ways, our definition is quite conventional. It recognizes the importance of free and fair elections, and checks and balances. There are two dimensions we also want to bring into view, that offer a thicker understanding about what democracy requires. One is the rule of law. It’s hard to imagine a flourishing democracy without it — so violations of the rule of law are violations of democracy. Another important piece is that you have institutions that can effectively govern — translating the broad ambitions and intent written into legislation into action. Democracies are not just debating societies. They also attend to wishes expressed by a polity. That depends upon well-functioning governing institutions. When you lay siege to such institutions, you imperil democracy itself.
We’ve been very interested on Statecraft in well-functioning institutions that deliver on their commitments. But I’ve never combined that in my view of democracy. Is a democracy that has lower state capacity less of a democracy?
Howell: If you have a government that is routinely incapable of solving problems the public wants to see solved, you are vulnerable to the entreaties of a demagogue who will step in and say, “The state, the parties, these small-d democratic institutions have failed you. I will be the one that delivers for you.” Persistent failure opens up space for a populist strongman to step in. This was the dominant theme of the second book Terry and I wrote, Presidents, Populism, and the Crisis of Democracy, wherein we talk about how ineffective government is vulnerable to the entreaties of a populist strongman that will not just challenge democracy, but transgress it.
Moe: If a democracy is going to be meaningful, it has to have a democratic policymaking process, and an administrative state that can carry out those policies. If you have a government that is tearing down the administrative state and undermining its capacity for effectiveness, you are undermining the meaning and effectiveness of democracy.
How should we picture the powers of the president before the Progressive Era?
Moe: To a large extent, we had congressional government. The parties were extremely strong from Andrew Jackson on, at all levels of government. Politicians were captives — products of those machines. Presidents weren’t above all that. It was a system that had almost no executive branch. The idea that the president would ride herd over all these agencies — that had programs, experts, and authority presidents could use to gain power — those things weren’t there.
What was not in existence in this period?
Moe: The government wasn’t doing all that much. Most of the employees of the federal government were mailmen. All the agencies you associate with the administrative state weren’t there, except for the Post Office, and a few things like that. The massive social upheaval at the end of the 1800s — industrialization, urbanization, immigration — transformed and disrupted American society, and led to demands for a government that worked and would do something — because all sorts of problems were being generated by an industrialized society.
People wanted solutions. How could you get that? You needed to have, “good government.” How could you get that? That’s where the Progressive movement came from. It was an effort to create a positive government that would address these pressing social problems. That’s how we got a presidency that was much more powerful. Teddy Roosevelt is the classic progressive president, then Woodrow Wilson.
Congress had been a cesspool of interest group influence and corruption. What they wanted was a bureaucracy that could carry out policies, be staffed with experts, and behave in a nonpartisan way — to do the scientifically objective thing and administer policy. Some of this was idealized, but that’s what modern government is about — having an administrative state filled with experts, hired on the basis of merit, who are capable of carrying out public policies, led by a president who has actual power. Not all power, but more power than in the past.
Howell: There’s a direct way in which this proliferation of agencies with all kinds of capacity, expertise, and personnel expands presidential power, because suddenly the presidency has access to capacity. When you look at the ambition behind a law — now we might be able to do something. From the word go, this administrative state is sitting within the second branch, and the president sits atop it.
Additionally, presidents can’t count on bureaucrats to do their bidding. Just because you have this expertise within these administrative agencies — how do you know they’re going to do the things that the president wants? From Franklin D. Roosevelt, even to Ronald Reagan, you see efforts by presidents from both parties to build out instruments of control, and strategies that will increase the odds that actions within all those far-flung agencies are aligned with the interests of the president. [...]
What are the tools that presidents in this period build to try and get control?
Howell: The two big categories are centralization and politicization. Centralization involves the effort to bring decision-making into closer proximity to the White House. You see the rise of the Executive Office of the President (EOP), and things like policy czars — so that the president can keep an eye on what’s being decided, and ensure it aligns with his policy preferences.
The other move is to appoint people whose policy preferences align with your own to oversee those agencies. You could see a tension between politicization and the expertise that justifies the rise of the modern administrative state. But the politicization is in the service of expanding presidential control.
Moe: The first thing that was created was the Executive Office of the President, under Roosevelt. That became the house to hold agencies created for the president to control the bureaucracy.
Before the Executive Office of the President — which is now 1,700 staff in the Eisenhower Building and the West Wing — who is making sure that what the president wants is happening?
Moe: This was all new. The progressives didn’t build much of an administrative state. It was the New Deal that exploded it. The EOP was created in 1939, right in the middle of this thing. It’s chaos. They’re creating this gigantic thing, filled with all these new agencies. How do you even think about controlling it? That was what they were up against.
What they eventually arrived at was: “We’re going to construct an Executive Office of the President, and we’re going to put stuff in there that allows the president to use little units to control the bureaucracy.” The first one they moved in was the Bureau of the Budget, which is now called the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). It used to be in the Treasury Department, created in 1921. It became a purely presidential agency. In addition, there’s now:
All these units are mechanisms of presidential control. You have the administrative state, but then you have the president with his own bureaucracy that works for him to control everything else.
by Santi Ruiz, Statecraft | Read more:
Thursday, August 20, 2026
The Roberts Court
When President Donald Trump announced plans to attend oral arguments at the Supreme Court on April 1st, the problem arose as to where to put him. The Court’s oral arguments have precise protocols, but none of them governed where a President should sit in the courtroom, because no President had ever done such a thing. Tradition—and respect for judicial independence—had prevented it. The case that the President wanted to see argued was Trump v. Barbara, which was among the more consequential matters the Court was considering that term. Trump had tried, through an executive order, to overturn the guarantee of citizenship to all babies born on U.S. soil—a conception of what makes an American that had been enshrined in the Fourteenth Amendment, upheld by the Supreme Court in 1898, and later reaffirmed by congressional statute.
Because none of the Justices had invited Trump, he couldn’t be placed in the section reserved for their families and other guests. Since he loathes the press, it was hard to imagine him sitting among the journalists, most of whom perch on creaky bentwood chairs in crowded alcoves. Because Trump was a party in the case, Court officials felt that he shouldn’t be given the seat Presidents occupy during swearing-in ceremonies for Justices—typically the only time they visit. In the end, the officials put him in the front row of the public section, where he glowered at the Justices, his signature red tie dangling, one hand on each knee.
It felt like a mafioso move. For months, he’d been denouncing the Justices—particularly two of his own three appointees, Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett—when they didn’t decide his way. In February, after the Court ruled that Trump couldn’t invoke a national emergency in order to impose sweeping tariffs, he told reporters that Gorsuch and Barrett, who’d joined the 6–3 majority, were “an embarrassment to their families.” At a White House Easter lunch later that day, Trump made it clear that he sees judicial appointments as quid pro quos, doing a mincing imitation of Justices who won’t knuckle under: “ ‘I don’t care if Trump appointed me, I don’t care, it doesn’t make any difference to me—I’m voting against him!’ ” He added, “They want to show their independence, you know? Stupid people.” (The White House posted, then took down, a video of the speech.)
Watching Supreme Court oral arguments can feel like watching a play—the Justices emerge from behind red velvet curtains to take their appointed seats at a long bench. As Clare Cushman, of the Supreme Court Historical Society, told me, “It’s not entertainment, but it’s entertainment-adjacent.” On April 1st, Trump’s presence generated dark comedy and cringily implausible encounters. He arrived at the Court with a posse: Howard Lutnick, the billionaire Commerce Secretary; David Warrington, the burly White House counsel; and Pam Bondi, the obedient Attorney General whose firing, for not being obedient enough, Trump announced the next day. (He reportedly gave her the news while they rode in a limousine to the Court.) In the guest section, apparently at the invitation of one of the liberal Justices, sat Robert De Niro, an inveterate Trump critic. A few rows behind the President was John Eastman, a former lawyer known for opposing birthright citizenship; he’d been disbarred in California for his role in a scheme to return Trump to the White House after the 2020 election. On the plaza outside, the celebrity chef and activist José Andrés, wearing an “Immigrants Feed America” T-shirt, addressed protesters who carried signs saying “It’s Literally in the Constitution” and “Born Here, Belong Here.”
Peter Shane, a constitutional-law scholar at New York University, told me, “I wondered if Trump understood that he wouldn’t be the center of attention. The Chief Justice wouldn’t be staring him in the eye, there’d be no television cameras on him. That is not usually his cup of tea.” In the end, there were no disruptions, not even when Trump walked out after the government’s lawyer made his presentation and before the opposing lawyer, from the A.C.L.U., had got very far into hers. The Justices seemed to avoid even glancing at the President.
Still, it was another profoundly strange moment in a profoundly strange time for the Court—especially for the seventy-one-year-old Chief Justice, John Roberts. Twenty-one years into his tenure, he keeps waking up, “Groundhog Day” style, to the same ironic scenario: he’s a proponent of maximal Presidential authority who is compelled to deal with a President especially likely to abuse it. (Roberts, a George W. Bush appointee who is reflexively polite, with a self-deprecating sense of humor, probably wouldn’t even enjoy a round of golf with Trump.) Roberts has leveraged his mild persona to defend the Court’s political neutrality at a time when Americans increasingly see it as partisan; according to a recent poll by the Pew Research Center, more than half hold an unfavorable view of it—a near-historic low.
It takes a determinedly selective eye not to see the increasingly open divisions among the Justices. Some of them have been speaking publicly about their chagrin with the Court, and with one another, in ways they rarely would have earlier in Roberts’s tenure—even though that surely displeases him. “This is a very careful guy,” David Leebron, a friend of Roberts’s from their law-school days, at Harvard, told me. “He’s a person who is not going to say anything he shouldn’t say.” [...]
People familiar with the Court’s inner workings told me that new ways of conducting business might also be fraying nerves. Until a decade ago, the shadow docket was used only occasionally, mainly for true emergency applications—such as capital cases in which individuals faced imminent execution. Now it’s the venue for all kinds of substantive statutory and even constitutional matters, from immigration to election law, in large part because the Trump Administration has made such aggressive use of it—constantly filing for “emergency” relief to vanquish lower-court rulings that impede its policies. A former clerk said, “More of those decisions are essentially battles of memos, rather than human processes where the clerks talk, and then the Justices talk, and there are multiple drafts of opinions. It’s much more impersonal, and it kind of crowds out any sense of compromise or engagement—of mutual understanding.” Shadow-docket petitions now pour in year-round, including in July and August—months when the Justices once had little, if any, Court business to attend to, and could enjoy speaking gigs in Rome or London, or work on their memoirs or children’s books. Today, Driver said, the Justices feel compelled to keep “interacting with each other” during the lull.
Roberts himself probably laments this change. He likes to paraphrase a quip by Justice Louis Brandeis, who said that he could do twelve months’ worth of Court work in ten months, but not in twelve. “We work at very close quarters on very important issues, on very sensitive issues,” Roberts said at a public appearance last year. “And we do need a little break from each other.” [...]
It may not be necessary to classify Roberts as either an ideologue or an institutionalist. Wermiel, the former American University law professor, told me, “I don’t think there needs to be an overarching theory that explains everything about him and the Court. I think he has some very strong, ideological views, and they take precedence. If he can try in a case to cool things off a bit and find consensus, and thinks that’s in the best interest of the institution, I think he does that, and he’s done it well on some occasions. But he certainly doesn’t do that all the time.”
by Margaret Talbot, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Illustration by Paul Rogers/Source photograph by Erin Schaff /Getty
It felt like a mafioso move. For months, he’d been denouncing the Justices—particularly two of his own three appointees, Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett—when they didn’t decide his way. In February, after the Court ruled that Trump couldn’t invoke a national emergency in order to impose sweeping tariffs, he told reporters that Gorsuch and Barrett, who’d joined the 6–3 majority, were “an embarrassment to their families.” At a White House Easter lunch later that day, Trump made it clear that he sees judicial appointments as quid pro quos, doing a mincing imitation of Justices who won’t knuckle under: “ ‘I don’t care if Trump appointed me, I don’t care, it doesn’t make any difference to me—I’m voting against him!’ ” He added, “They want to show their independence, you know? Stupid people.” (The White House posted, then took down, a video of the speech.)
Watching Supreme Court oral arguments can feel like watching a play—the Justices emerge from behind red velvet curtains to take their appointed seats at a long bench. As Clare Cushman, of the Supreme Court Historical Society, told me, “It’s not entertainment, but it’s entertainment-adjacent.” On April 1st, Trump’s presence generated dark comedy and cringily implausible encounters. He arrived at the Court with a posse: Howard Lutnick, the billionaire Commerce Secretary; David Warrington, the burly White House counsel; and Pam Bondi, the obedient Attorney General whose firing, for not being obedient enough, Trump announced the next day. (He reportedly gave her the news while they rode in a limousine to the Court.) In the guest section, apparently at the invitation of one of the liberal Justices, sat Robert De Niro, an inveterate Trump critic. A few rows behind the President was John Eastman, a former lawyer known for opposing birthright citizenship; he’d been disbarred in California for his role in a scheme to return Trump to the White House after the 2020 election. On the plaza outside, the celebrity chef and activist José Andrés, wearing an “Immigrants Feed America” T-shirt, addressed protesters who carried signs saying “It’s Literally in the Constitution” and “Born Here, Belong Here.”
Peter Shane, a constitutional-law scholar at New York University, told me, “I wondered if Trump understood that he wouldn’t be the center of attention. The Chief Justice wouldn’t be staring him in the eye, there’d be no television cameras on him. That is not usually his cup of tea.” In the end, there were no disruptions, not even when Trump walked out after the government’s lawyer made his presentation and before the opposing lawyer, from the A.C.L.U., had got very far into hers. The Justices seemed to avoid even glancing at the President.
Still, it was another profoundly strange moment in a profoundly strange time for the Court—especially for the seventy-one-year-old Chief Justice, John Roberts. Twenty-one years into his tenure, he keeps waking up, “Groundhog Day” style, to the same ironic scenario: he’s a proponent of maximal Presidential authority who is compelled to deal with a President especially likely to abuse it. (Roberts, a George W. Bush appointee who is reflexively polite, with a self-deprecating sense of humor, probably wouldn’t even enjoy a round of golf with Trump.) Roberts has leveraged his mild persona to defend the Court’s political neutrality at a time when Americans increasingly see it as partisan; according to a recent poll by the Pew Research Center, more than half hold an unfavorable view of it—a near-historic low.
Whereas Roberts likes to stress that the Court is fundamentally nonpartisan and frequently unanimous—the Justices agree around forty per cent of the time, though typically on minor issues—many Americans believe that he has presided over a rightward march in the Court’s jurisprudence, on such issues as affirmative action, immigration and asylum, abortion, voting law, gun rights, and the separation of church and state. And, with a few high-profile exceptions, such as the tariffs case, his Supreme Court has overruled lower courts to permit much of Trump’s second-term agenda to proceed. This has often happened without explanation, because the decisions have been issued on the emergency, or “shadow,” docket—that is, decided without a full briefing, oral arguments, or detailed opinions. Of the thirty-five requests for emergency action made by the second Trump Administration—on everything from defunding scientific research to allowing people to be deported to “third countries” where they have no affiliations—the Court has ruled in the Administration’s favor, in part or in full, twenty-five times, generally with the three liberal Justices, Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson, in dissent. Among the fifty-six cases fully briefed and argued before the Court this past term, there were 6–3 splits between the Republican and Democratic appointees in thirteen rulings, compared with six last term.
To some observers, the fact that the Court ruled against the Trump Administration in a few major opinions—including, it turned out, the birthright- citizenship case—was a reassuring affirmation of Roberts’s view that it operates outside the realm of politics. Trump’s theatrics fuelled this impression: his clumsy attempts to tip the balance obviously failed. William Baude, a law professor at the University of Chicago, argued in the Times that the Roberts Court was “one of the most independent” he could “imagine at this stage of the second Trump administration.” Yet the term was overwhelmingly favorable to the President, and, though the final rulings certainly matter, of equal importance is the Court’s choice of which cases to take up in the first place. Steve Vladeck, a law professor at Georgetown, pointed to the Court’s handling of Louisiana v. Callais, in which the conservative majority gutted portions of the Voting Rights Act. Vladeck noted that the Court could have treated the case—involving Louisiana’s creation of a majority-Black voting district—as a smaller dispute, but instead it ordered the parties involved to re-argue the case as a broad test of the constitutionality of weighing race when redistricting. Vladeck said, “A big theme of this term is all these times when the Court could have looked like it was above politics but chose to lean in. This is the one institution left in the country that had a chance to say, ‘We have long-term principles’—and instead it got swept up in the political moment.”
Roberts has offered the occasional courteous rebuke to the President’s public trashing of the judicial branch. In 2018, after Trump dismissed a district-court judge who’d rejected one of his asylum policies as an “Obama judge,” Roberts declared, “We do not have Obama judges or Trump judges, Bush judges or Clinton judges. What we have is an extraordinary group of dedicated judges doing their level best to do equal right to those appearing before them.” Even those lofty, carefully considered remarks rankled Trump. At the Easter lunch this year, he said, “ ‘There is no Republican judge and there is no Democrat judge,’ a certain person says. And I say you’ve lost all credibility when you say that.”
For a man like Roberts, to whom the label “institutionalist” attaches like an epithet in the Odyssey, perhaps the only thing worse than Trump’s excoriation of the Justices is his gratitude when they do what he wants. In March, 2025, Roberts was present when Trump gave the annual Presidential address to Congress; afterward, Trump patted the Chief Justice on the shoulder and said, “Thank you again—won’t forget.” To many people, this sounded like an acknowledgment of Trump v. United States, the remarkably capacious 2024 ruling that granted Presidents immunity from prosecution for official acts. More immediately, the opinion saved Trump from facing trial for interfering in the 2020 election. Roberts had written the opinion for a 6–3 majority. J. Michael Luttig, a retired federal judge and a conservative, was close to Roberts for many years—he was a groomsman at his wedding—but has since become sharply critical of him. Luttig told me that he regards the immunity decision as “one of the two or three worst cases in all of American history, if not the single worst, because of the structural damage that it did to the Constitution and the separation of powers.” On Truth Social, Trump blamed “sleazebag ‘journalists’ ” for suggesting that his comment to Roberts was related to the immunity decision. He said that he’d just been thanking Roberts for swearing him in at his second Inauguration. Nobody who knows Roberts thinks that he could have found the gesture anything other than embarrassing.
Roberts, with his country-club equanimity, can seem like a man out of time—maddeningly or reassuringly, depending on your perspective. Even as a septuagenarian who peers at lawyers over reading glasses, he projects boyishness. He has the same modest swoop of a forelock that he’s had since his confirmation hearings. (A longtime Supreme Court sketch artist told me that Roberts’s bland good looks and buttoned-down comportment make him challenging to draw.) Roberts has called himself a “dinosaur” when it comes to A.I., and he’s never stopped writing opinions by hand. He still likes to boast about how collegial the Court is, though lately he’s had to temper those claims: in a speech at Rice University this past March, the best he could muster was “We’re not as much at each other’s throats as you might think.” Back in the nineties, both Democrats and Republicans loved to praise the unlikely friendship of the (liberal, feminist) Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and the (conservative, originalist) Justice Antonin Scalia. If such a friendship exists on the Court today, there’s no evidence of it.
In oral arguments, Roberts is generally unruffled. He takes up less airtime than most other Justices and seems less aggravated and indignant than the most aggravated and indignant among them—Samuel Alito for the conservatives, Jackson for the liberals. (An analysis by The Hill found that Jackson had the highest spoken-word count this past term, at more than seventy-five thousand, whereas Roberts was at about twenty thousand, ahead only of Clarence Thomas, who until recent years barely spoke from the bench.) Robert’s harshest interjections—and they aren’t that harsh—come when he reminds a colleague not to interrupt a lawyer or another Justice. [...]
His workplace is trickier than it used to be, though. Although his conservative flank has a lock on power, Roberts himself has less sway than ever over an increasingly fractious Court. Notably, the Chief Justice has less room for the cagey maneuvering, including narrowing the scope of decisions, that he’s often used to build consensus, as with a 2012 opinion that brokered a compromise on the Affordable Care Act by characterizing its insurance mandate as a mere tax. In 2018, Roberts told an audience at the University of Minnesota that “you can try to get as many people on board as you can” by keeping decisions narrow, and by only deciding “what is absolutely necessary to be decided.” But today’s Court often divides along stark ideological lines, and the liberals often sound truly distraught in their dissents. Jackson, describing the majority’s decision in the Presidential-immunity case, invoked “a five-alarm fire that threatens to consume democratic self-governance.” Kagan wrote an impassioned dissent to the Court’s 6–3 decision in the Louisiana-redistricting case. Opting to read passages of her opinion aloud from the bench, for impact, Kagan repeated “I dissent” like a chant as Roberts and Alito—whom Roberts had chosen to write the opinion—stared straight ahead. Kagan spoke of “the majority’s now completed demolition of the Voting Rights Act,” a law “born of the literal blood of Union soldiers and civil-rights marchers.” [...]
Vladeck, the Georgetown law professor, said that the two-year period before Barrett replaced Ginsburg, firmly tipping the Court’s balance, was the high point of Roberts’s ability to work out compromises: “He will never be in more control than he was between 2018 and 2020, when he was the median on everything.” Ironically, the firmly conservative majority has watered down Roberts’s power. This became especially clear in 2022, when Roberts tried to find a middle way in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, which overturned the constitutional right to abortion. When the Justices met for a final vote on whether they’d take the case, Roberts, Barrett, and the three liberals voted to turn it away, according to reporting by Adam Liptak and Jodi Kantor, of the Times. But the Court requires only four Justices to grant a case, and Brett Kavanaugh, who Roberts had hoped would back his strategy of prudent avoidance, wouldn’t go along. Roberts ended up writing a concurrence, arguing for a “more measured course” in which the Court would uphold a Mississippi ban on abortions after fifteen weeks and toss out the long-standing rule that abortion was legal until a fetus was viable, but stop short of discarding Roe v. Wade altogether. He was following, he wrote, “a simple yet fundamental principle of judicial restraint: If it is not necessary to decide more to dispose of a case, then it is necessary not to decide more.” But the liberals were having none of it, and the conservatives wanted to end abortion immediately. “In the aftermath of Dobbs, he was the proverbial man without a country,” Luttig said. [...]
To some observers, the fact that the Court ruled against the Trump Administration in a few major opinions—including, it turned out, the birthright- citizenship case—was a reassuring affirmation of Roberts’s view that it operates outside the realm of politics. Trump’s theatrics fuelled this impression: his clumsy attempts to tip the balance obviously failed. William Baude, a law professor at the University of Chicago, argued in the Times that the Roberts Court was “one of the most independent” he could “imagine at this stage of the second Trump administration.” Yet the term was overwhelmingly favorable to the President, and, though the final rulings certainly matter, of equal importance is the Court’s choice of which cases to take up in the first place. Steve Vladeck, a law professor at Georgetown, pointed to the Court’s handling of Louisiana v. Callais, in which the conservative majority gutted portions of the Voting Rights Act. Vladeck noted that the Court could have treated the case—involving Louisiana’s creation of a majority-Black voting district—as a smaller dispute, but instead it ordered the parties involved to re-argue the case as a broad test of the constitutionality of weighing race when redistricting. Vladeck said, “A big theme of this term is all these times when the Court could have looked like it was above politics but chose to lean in. This is the one institution left in the country that had a chance to say, ‘We have long-term principles’—and instead it got swept up in the political moment.”
Roberts has offered the occasional courteous rebuke to the President’s public trashing of the judicial branch. In 2018, after Trump dismissed a district-court judge who’d rejected one of his asylum policies as an “Obama judge,” Roberts declared, “We do not have Obama judges or Trump judges, Bush judges or Clinton judges. What we have is an extraordinary group of dedicated judges doing their level best to do equal right to those appearing before them.” Even those lofty, carefully considered remarks rankled Trump. At the Easter lunch this year, he said, “ ‘There is no Republican judge and there is no Democrat judge,’ a certain person says. And I say you’ve lost all credibility when you say that.”
For a man like Roberts, to whom the label “institutionalist” attaches like an epithet in the Odyssey, perhaps the only thing worse than Trump’s excoriation of the Justices is his gratitude when they do what he wants. In March, 2025, Roberts was present when Trump gave the annual Presidential address to Congress; afterward, Trump patted the Chief Justice on the shoulder and said, “Thank you again—won’t forget.” To many people, this sounded like an acknowledgment of Trump v. United States, the remarkably capacious 2024 ruling that granted Presidents immunity from prosecution for official acts. More immediately, the opinion saved Trump from facing trial for interfering in the 2020 election. Roberts had written the opinion for a 6–3 majority. J. Michael Luttig, a retired federal judge and a conservative, was close to Roberts for many years—he was a groomsman at his wedding—but has since become sharply critical of him. Luttig told me that he regards the immunity decision as “one of the two or three worst cases in all of American history, if not the single worst, because of the structural damage that it did to the Constitution and the separation of powers.” On Truth Social, Trump blamed “sleazebag ‘journalists’ ” for suggesting that his comment to Roberts was related to the immunity decision. He said that he’d just been thanking Roberts for swearing him in at his second Inauguration. Nobody who knows Roberts thinks that he could have found the gesture anything other than embarrassing.
Roberts, with his country-club equanimity, can seem like a man out of time—maddeningly or reassuringly, depending on your perspective. Even as a septuagenarian who peers at lawyers over reading glasses, he projects boyishness. He has the same modest swoop of a forelock that he’s had since his confirmation hearings. (A longtime Supreme Court sketch artist told me that Roberts’s bland good looks and buttoned-down comportment make him challenging to draw.) Roberts has called himself a “dinosaur” when it comes to A.I., and he’s never stopped writing opinions by hand. He still likes to boast about how collegial the Court is, though lately he’s had to temper those claims: in a speech at Rice University this past March, the best he could muster was “We’re not as much at each other’s throats as you might think.” Back in the nineties, both Democrats and Republicans loved to praise the unlikely friendship of the (liberal, feminist) Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and the (conservative, originalist) Justice Antonin Scalia. If such a friendship exists on the Court today, there’s no evidence of it.
In oral arguments, Roberts is generally unruffled. He takes up less airtime than most other Justices and seems less aggravated and indignant than the most aggravated and indignant among them—Samuel Alito for the conservatives, Jackson for the liberals. (An analysis by The Hill found that Jackson had the highest spoken-word count this past term, at more than seventy-five thousand, whereas Roberts was at about twenty thousand, ahead only of Clarence Thomas, who until recent years barely spoke from the bench.) Robert’s harshest interjections—and they aren’t that harsh—come when he reminds a colleague not to interrupt a lawyer or another Justice. [...]
His workplace is trickier than it used to be, though. Although his conservative flank has a lock on power, Roberts himself has less sway than ever over an increasingly fractious Court. Notably, the Chief Justice has less room for the cagey maneuvering, including narrowing the scope of decisions, that he’s often used to build consensus, as with a 2012 opinion that brokered a compromise on the Affordable Care Act by characterizing its insurance mandate as a mere tax. In 2018, Roberts told an audience at the University of Minnesota that “you can try to get as many people on board as you can” by keeping decisions narrow, and by only deciding “what is absolutely necessary to be decided.” But today’s Court often divides along stark ideological lines, and the liberals often sound truly distraught in their dissents. Jackson, describing the majority’s decision in the Presidential-immunity case, invoked “a five-alarm fire that threatens to consume democratic self-governance.” Kagan wrote an impassioned dissent to the Court’s 6–3 decision in the Louisiana-redistricting case. Opting to read passages of her opinion aloud from the bench, for impact, Kagan repeated “I dissent” like a chant as Roberts and Alito—whom Roberts had chosen to write the opinion—stared straight ahead. Kagan spoke of “the majority’s now completed demolition of the Voting Rights Act,” a law “born of the literal blood of Union soldiers and civil-rights marchers.” [...]
Vladeck, the Georgetown law professor, said that the two-year period before Barrett replaced Ginsburg, firmly tipping the Court’s balance, was the high point of Roberts’s ability to work out compromises: “He will never be in more control than he was between 2018 and 2020, when he was the median on everything.” Ironically, the firmly conservative majority has watered down Roberts’s power. This became especially clear in 2022, when Roberts tried to find a middle way in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, which overturned the constitutional right to abortion. When the Justices met for a final vote on whether they’d take the case, Roberts, Barrett, and the three liberals voted to turn it away, according to reporting by Adam Liptak and Jodi Kantor, of the Times. But the Court requires only four Justices to grant a case, and Brett Kavanaugh, who Roberts had hoped would back his strategy of prudent avoidance, wouldn’t go along. Roberts ended up writing a concurrence, arguing for a “more measured course” in which the Court would uphold a Mississippi ban on abortions after fifteen weeks and toss out the long-standing rule that abortion was legal until a fetus was viable, but stop short of discarding Roe v. Wade altogether. He was following, he wrote, “a simple yet fundamental principle of judicial restraint: If it is not necessary to decide more to dispose of a case, then it is necessary not to decide more.” But the liberals were having none of it, and the conservatives wanted to end abortion immediately. “In the aftermath of Dobbs, he was the proverbial man without a country,” Luttig said. [...]
It takes a determinedly selective eye not to see the increasingly open divisions among the Justices. Some of them have been speaking publicly about their chagrin with the Court, and with one another, in ways they rarely would have earlier in Roberts’s tenure—even though that surely displeases him. “This is a very careful guy,” David Leebron, a friend of Roberts’s from their law-school days, at Harvard, told me. “He’s a person who is not going to say anything he shouldn’t say.” [...]
People familiar with the Court’s inner workings told me that new ways of conducting business might also be fraying nerves. Until a decade ago, the shadow docket was used only occasionally, mainly for true emergency applications—such as capital cases in which individuals faced imminent execution. Now it’s the venue for all kinds of substantive statutory and even constitutional matters, from immigration to election law, in large part because the Trump Administration has made such aggressive use of it—constantly filing for “emergency” relief to vanquish lower-court rulings that impede its policies. A former clerk said, “More of those decisions are essentially battles of memos, rather than human processes where the clerks talk, and then the Justices talk, and there are multiple drafts of opinions. It’s much more impersonal, and it kind of crowds out any sense of compromise or engagement—of mutual understanding.” Shadow-docket petitions now pour in year-round, including in July and August—months when the Justices once had little, if any, Court business to attend to, and could enjoy speaking gigs in Rome or London, or work on their memoirs or children’s books. Today, Driver said, the Justices feel compelled to keep “interacting with each other” during the lull.
Roberts himself probably laments this change. He likes to paraphrase a quip by Justice Louis Brandeis, who said that he could do twelve months’ worth of Court work in ten months, but not in twelve. “We work at very close quarters on very important issues, on very sensitive issues,” Roberts said at a public appearance last year. “And we do need a little break from each other.” [...]
It may not be necessary to classify Roberts as either an ideologue or an institutionalist. Wermiel, the former American University law professor, told me, “I don’t think there needs to be an overarching theory that explains everything about him and the Court. I think he has some very strong, ideological views, and they take precedence. If he can try in a case to cool things off a bit and find consensus, and thinks that’s in the best interest of the institution, I think he does that, and he’s done it well on some occasions. But he certainly doesn’t do that all the time.”
Image: Illustration by Paul Rogers/Source photograph by Erin Schaff /Getty
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