Friday, August 21, 2026
The Deep Sea
by Neal Agarwal
[ed. Fun and informative site (scroll down the different depths to see what creatures have been recorded, and where). 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 It would make changes to language loopholes in the outdated Magnuson-Stevens Act, such as “minimizing bycatch to the extent practicable.”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 the natural environment continues to get screwed. See also: Roadless Rule to be Rescinded (affecting 45 million wild acres), 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 the natural environment continues to get screwed. See also: Roadless Rule to be Rescinded (affecting 45 million wild acres), 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
Wednesday, August 19, 2026
Big Tech’s AI Spending Is $3 Trillion Higher Than It Seems
Each quarter, big tech companies disclose their massive capital expenditures on artificial-intelligence infrastructure, from data centers to chips.
But those figures don’t come close to expressing the full extent of future spending to which Google parent Alphabet, Meta Platforms, Oracle and many others have committed. That is because a huge swath of their coming financial obligations aren’t reflected on their balance sheets.
Nine top tech companies had some $3 trillion of off-balance-sheet commitments mostly related to AI, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of footnotes in their most recent securities filings. Those obligations are growing faster than traditional “capex,” which totaled about $600 billion over the past year they reported, and were about triple what the companies owe under their outstanding leases and long-term borrowings.
America’s blue-chip tech companies are placing these huge bets based on assumptions about what the demand for AI computing—and availability of AI hardware—will be in several years. Their hope is that they will easily meet all their obligations with future revenue as consumers and businesses adopt AI in every facet of American life.
If those assumptions about technology and demand prove wrong, these deals to clinch future capacity could become a monstrous burden for the tech companies and their investors.
Meta’s gigantic “Hyperion” data-center project in Louisiana, which is the size of about 1,700 football fields, helps explain how big obligations wind up off tech companies’ balance sheets.
Meta initially agreed to lease Hyperion for a four-year term starting in 2029, with options to renew for up to 20 years. It guaranteed that it would make bondholders whole if it doesn’t stay the entire two decades. The company doesn’t think payments under that guarantee are probable, so it hasn’t recorded any liability on its balance sheet.
In accordance with accounting rules, Meta’s Hyperion lease obligations will remain off balance sheet until it starts paying rent. It said its aggregate initial lease commitment is about $12.3 billion. Meta disclosed $347 billion in total obligations for leases that haven’t kicked in yet, including for Hyperion, as of June.
Across the companies the Journal analyzed, promises of payments under these uncommenced leases totaled $1.2 trillion in off-balance–sheet obligations, or about four times more than what was disclosed a year earlier. In addition to Meta, the Journal reviewed commitments for Alphabet, Amazon.com, Microsoft, Oracle, Nvidia, Broadcom, SpaceX and Advanced Micro Devices.
Data centers get stuffed with a lot of hardware, including the Nvidia chips that are used to train and run models and memory chips that store information. To buy all that, companies sign long-term contractual agreements well in advance to lock in production from their suppliers.
Those and other purchase obligations at the companies the Journal examined stand at a whopping $1.9 trillion. Under accounting rules, purchase commitments typically remain off balance sheet until a product or service is delivered. [...]
For the more anxious set on Wall Street, it is a worrying sign that some tech companies that once seemed to have fortress balance sheets have needed to tap the capital markets frequently.
Alphabet and Amazon recently posted results showing negative free cash flow, meaning their capital spending exceeded the cash they brought in from operating their businesses.
And that is before considering the implications of trillions in off-balance–sheet commitments. Whether or not the revenues ever arrive, purchase commitments and signed leases can’t be canceled, for the most part.
If things go wrong, tech companies will be paying an expensive tab for infrastructure that they can’t profitably use. These obligations could also lead increasingly indebted companies to have to borrow even more.
by Peter Rudegeair and Peter Santilli, Wall Street Journal | Read more:
Image: WSJ
But those figures don’t come close to expressing the full extent of future spending to which Google parent Alphabet, Meta Platforms, Oracle and many others have committed. That is because a huge swath of their coming financial obligations aren’t reflected on their balance sheets.
Nine top tech companies had some $3 trillion of off-balance-sheet commitments mostly related to AI, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of footnotes in their most recent securities filings. Those obligations are growing faster than traditional “capex,” which totaled about $600 billion over the past year they reported, and were about triple what the companies owe under their outstanding leases and long-term borrowings.
America’s blue-chip tech companies are placing these huge bets based on assumptions about what the demand for AI computing—and availability of AI hardware—will be in several years. Their hope is that they will easily meet all their obligations with future revenue as consumers and businesses adopt AI in every facet of American life.
If those assumptions about technology and demand prove wrong, these deals to clinch future capacity could become a monstrous burden for the tech companies and their investors.
Meta’s gigantic “Hyperion” data-center project in Louisiana, which is the size of about 1,700 football fields, helps explain how big obligations wind up off tech companies’ balance sheets.
Meta initially agreed to lease Hyperion for a four-year term starting in 2029, with options to renew for up to 20 years. It guaranteed that it would make bondholders whole if it doesn’t stay the entire two decades. The company doesn’t think payments under that guarantee are probable, so it hasn’t recorded any liability on its balance sheet.
In accordance with accounting rules, Meta’s Hyperion lease obligations will remain off balance sheet until it starts paying rent. It said its aggregate initial lease commitment is about $12.3 billion. Meta disclosed $347 billion in total obligations for leases that haven’t kicked in yet, including for Hyperion, as of June.
Across the companies the Journal analyzed, promises of payments under these uncommenced leases totaled $1.2 trillion in off-balance–sheet obligations, or about four times more than what was disclosed a year earlier. In addition to Meta, the Journal reviewed commitments for Alphabet, Amazon.com, Microsoft, Oracle, Nvidia, Broadcom, SpaceX and Advanced Micro Devices.
Data centers get stuffed with a lot of hardware, including the Nvidia chips that are used to train and run models and memory chips that store information. To buy all that, companies sign long-term contractual agreements well in advance to lock in production from their suppliers.
Those and other purchase obligations at the companies the Journal examined stand at a whopping $1.9 trillion. Under accounting rules, purchase commitments typically remain off balance sheet until a product or service is delivered. [...]
For the more anxious set on Wall Street, it is a worrying sign that some tech companies that once seemed to have fortress balance sheets have needed to tap the capital markets frequently.
Alphabet and Amazon recently posted results showing negative free cash flow, meaning their capital spending exceeded the cash they brought in from operating their businesses.
And that is before considering the implications of trillions in off-balance–sheet commitments. Whether or not the revenues ever arrive, purchase commitments and signed leases can’t be canceled, for the most part.
If things go wrong, tech companies will be paying an expensive tab for infrastructure that they can’t profitably use. These obligations could also lead increasingly indebted companies to have to borrow even more.
Image: WSJ
Tuesday, August 18, 2026
'Coyote V. Acme'
IN THE UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT, SOUTHWESTERN DISTRICT, TEMPE, ARIZONA
CASE NO. B19294, JUDGE JOAN KUJAVA, PRESIDING
WILE E. COYOTE, Plaintiff
-v.-
ACME COMPANY, Defendant
Opening Statement of Mr. Harold Schoff, attorney for Mr. Coyote: My client, Mr. Wile E. Coyote, a resident of Arizona and contiguous states, does hereby bring suit for damages against the Acme Company, manufacturer and retail distributor of assorted merchandise, incorporated in Delaware and doing business in every state, district, and territory. Mr. Coyote seeks compensation for personal injuries, loss of business income, and mental suffering caused as a direct result of the actions and/or gross negligence of said company, under Title 15 of the United States Code, Chapter 47, section 2072, subsection (a), relating to product liability.
Mr. Coyote states that on December 13th he received of Defendant via parcel post one Acme Rocket Sled. The intention of Mr. Coyote was to use the Rocket Sled to aid him in pursuit of his prey. Upon receipt of the Rocket Sled Mr. Coyote removed it from its wooden shipping crate and, sighting his prey in the distance, activated the ignition. As Mr. Coyote gripped the handlebars, the Rocket Sled accelerated with such sudden and precipitate force as to stretch Mr. Coyote’s forelimbs to a length of fifty feet. Subsequently, the rest of Mr. Coyote’s body shot forward with a violent jolt, causing severe strain to his back and neck and placing him unexpectedly astride the Rocket Sled. Disappearing over the horizon at such speed as to leave a diminishing jet trail along its path, the Rocket Sled soon brought Mr. Coyote abreast of his prey. At that moment the animal he was pursuing veered sharply to the right. Mr. Coyote vigorously attempted to follow this maneuver but was unable to, due to poorly designed steering on the Rocket Sled and a faulty or nonexistent braking system. Shortly thereafter, the unchecked progress of the Rocket Sled brought it and Mr. Coyote into collision with the side of a mesa.
Paragraph One of the Report of Attending Physician (Exhibit B), prepared by Dr. Ernest Grosscup, M.D., D.O., details the multiple fractures, contusions, and tissue damage suffered by Mr. Coyote as a result of this collision. Repair of the injuries required a full bandage around the head (excluding the ears), a neck brace, and full or partial casts on all four legs.
Hampered by these injuries, Mr. Coyote was nevertheless obliged to support himself. With this in mind, he purchased of Defendant as an aid to mobility one pair of Acme Rocket Skates. When he attempted to use this product, however, he became involved in an accident remarkably similar to that which occurred with the Rocket Sled. Again, Defendant sold over the counter, without caveat, a product which attached powerful jet engines (in this case, two) to inadequate vehicles, with little or no provision for passenger safety. Encumbered by his heavy casts, Mr. Coyote lost control of the Rocket Skates soon after strapping them on, and collided with a roadside billboard so violently as to leave a hole in the shape of his full silhouette.
Mr. Coyote states that on occasions too numerous to list in this document he has suffered mishaps with explosives purchased of Defendant: the Acme “Little Giant” Firecracker, the Acme Self-Guided Aerial Bomb, etc. (For a full listing, see the Acme Mail Order Explosives Catalogue and attached deposition, entered in evidence as Exhibit C.) Indeed, it is safe to say that not once has an explosive purchased of Defendant by Mr. Coyote performed in an expected manner. To cite just one example: At the expense of much time and personal effort, Mr. Coyote constructed around the outer rim of a butte a wooden trough beginning at the top of the butte and spiralling downward around it to some few feet above a black X painted on the desert floor. The trough was designed in such a way that a spherical explosive of the type sold by Defendant would roll easily and swiftly down to the point of detonation indicated by the X. Mr. Coyote placed a generous pile of birdseed directly on the X, and then, carrying the spherical Acme Bomb (Catalogue # 78-832), climbed to the top of the butte. Mr. Coyote’s prey, seeing the birdseed, approached, and Mr. Coyote proceeded to light the fuse. In an instant, the fuse burned down to the stem, causing the bomb to detonate.
In addition to reducing all Mr. Coyote’s careful preparations to naught, the premature detonation of Defendant’s product resulted in the following disfigurements to Mr. Coyote:
1. Severe singeing of the hair on the head, neck, and muzzle.
2. Sooty discoloration.
3. Fracture of the left ear at the stem, causing the ear to dangle in the aftershock with a creaking noise.
4. Full or partial combustion of whiskers, producing kinking, frazzling, and ashy disintegration.
5. Radical widening of the eyes, due to brow and lid charring.
by Ian Frazier, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Luci Gutiérrez[See also (new movie review): Toons Have Seldom Been Loonier Than in “Coyote vs. Acme” (New Yorker).]
Fantasy Land
This week, I have been reading “Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump,” the recent volume from my newsroom colleagues Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan on the first year of President Trump’s second term.
It makes for compelling, often shocking, reading, and Haberman and Swan provide a great sense of the personalities involved in making the second Trump administration, as well as the relationships and dynamics that seem to drive his presidential decision-making.
Whenever I read an inside account of a presidency, I am on the lookout for anything that tells us something about the way the president in question relates to the office itself. Is there a particular way he manages the White House or attends to challenges and crises? On what issues does he defer to his staff members and subordinates versus take his own counsel? How does he deal with the endless stream of information and intelligence from a nearly infinite number of sources?
The growing complexity of the administrative state and the enlarged responsibilities of the office led presidents, beginning in earnest with Harry Truman, to create new, institutionalized processes designed to get the best and most accurate information available. In addition to practical considerations, this has been a way for presidents to combat one of the pathologies of executive authority: a tendency to value one’s own unique insight above all else. Even still, it is immensely difficult for presidents to avoid the trap, if you will, of getting high on their own supply.
Trump, according to Haberman and Swan, has not simply junked this process in its entirety — he has set up his White House to affirm his frequently arbitrary instincts above all other considerations. He has insulated himself from opposing views and made internal dissent verboten. At no point does Trump receive neutral information; just about everything is tailored to his whims, impulses and mercurial disposition. The result is that he is isolated from reality to the extent that he is practically living in a fairy tale.
Haberman and Swan describe a Trump who cannot see beyond the first few steps of any given action and is constantly taken aback by political obstacles and backlash. Recent controversies, from the depletion of our military’s stock of sophisticated munitions to worsening conditions on some of our naval vessels, are easier to fathom when you consider the strong odds that Trump is told precious little about the actual conditions of his war. More likely, he is told what he wants to hear: that America is winning and Iran is on the verge of surrender.
So far, much of the destruction of the second Trump administration is self-inflicted. It is Trump and his allies who have wrecked the administrative state, undercut science and mired the country in a new Middle East quagmire. There has not yet been an external crisis — the kind of catastrophic event that demands an active and effective leadership. Through their reporting, Haberman and Swan make clear that if and when this country faces such a crisis, both the president and his administration will be caught flat-footed.
When this happened in Trump’s first term with the Covid-19 pandemic, the United States still had a functional bureaucracy with experts willing and able to provide leadership in the absence of any from the White House. Should we see a similar disaster, we very likely won’t even have that.
[ed. It really is as bad as it seems (if anything... worse). How cursed are we that we've had this guy during two of the most consequential threats in our lifetimes: Covid and the rise of AI. Not only that, but a completely cowardly and dysfunctional Republican Congress. See also: Republicans Are Trying to Hide These Health Care Cuts (NYT):]
One of the federal government’s great achievements this century was making health insurance affordable to millions more Americans. In 2010, nearly 18 percent of people under 65 lacked insurance. By 2024, the rate had fallen below 10 percent, thanks to the Affordable Care Act and later legislation that built on it.
President Trump and congressional Republicans are working to dismantle that achievement. They have effectively cut subsidies for the Affordable Care Act’s marketplaces, making it harder for people who do not receive insurance through work to afford a plan. This year, the subsidy cuts led three million people to lose their health insurance. In Ohio, nearly a third of previous marketplace enrollees lost their insurance.
The situation stands to worsen next year. In addition to reducing the marketplace subsidies, Mr. Trump and congressional Republicans enacted sweeping cuts to Medicaid, which expanded under the Affordable Care Act. They will take effect after this year’s midterm elections. (Yes, that timing is deliberate.) By 2034, the combined cuts will most likely erase about half of the gains from the Affordable Care Act, causing 14 million Americans to lose insurance.
Politicians from both parties have talked up affordability in the run-up to this year’s elections. Republicans, however, are taking deliberate steps to make health care less affordable. Many middle-class and poor Americans will struggle — even more — to afford important medical care as a result.
Americans have good reasons to be disappointed in their government. Progress on health care, imperfect though it was, represented a positive counterexample of the government working to genuinely improve people’s lives. The president and Congress are trying to ruin that success story.
Republicans’ attacks on affordable health care have taken two forms: one more passive, the other more direct...
[ed. Then of course, there's this: ‘A Blatant and Gargantuan Conflict of Interest’ (NYT):]
It is almost certainly unconstitutional and may well be illegal. Estimates vary, but according to a cryptocurrency analytics firm reported on in The Times, the Trumps made at least $1.4 billion, and their investors, lost nearly $4 billion from purchases of Trump-linked crypto. These purchases have — let’s say — coincided with pardons, dropped investigations and favorable regulatory decisions.
This crypto scheme is central to President Trump’s personal agenda: to use his office to vastly increase his and his family’s fortune.
The icing on the cake: A growing number of economists and financial analysts argue that crypto is itself a fiction, lacking a backup system of gold, silver or perhaps most important a national government, ordinarily considered essential ingredients of a currency. [...]
I asked a wide range of crypto experts about the Trump family’s involvement in the industry, and more than half pointed me to an independent analyst, Molly White, who regularly produces detailed reports for her newsletter, Citation Needed.
White, whose work has been praised in The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times and The Guardian, emailed her reply to my queries: “I wouldn’t say that running a crypto business inherently would lead to corrupt transactions, except that crypto is extremely poorly regulated.”
However, White continued,
It makes for compelling, often shocking, reading, and Haberman and Swan provide a great sense of the personalities involved in making the second Trump administration, as well as the relationships and dynamics that seem to drive his presidential decision-making.
The growing complexity of the administrative state and the enlarged responsibilities of the office led presidents, beginning in earnest with Harry Truman, to create new, institutionalized processes designed to get the best and most accurate information available. In addition to practical considerations, this has been a way for presidents to combat one of the pathologies of executive authority: a tendency to value one’s own unique insight above all else. Even still, it is immensely difficult for presidents to avoid the trap, if you will, of getting high on their own supply.
Trump, according to Haberman and Swan, has not simply junked this process in its entirety — he has set up his White House to affirm his frequently arbitrary instincts above all other considerations. He has insulated himself from opposing views and made internal dissent verboten. At no point does Trump receive neutral information; just about everything is tailored to his whims, impulses and mercurial disposition. The result is that he is isolated from reality to the extent that he is practically living in a fairy tale.
Haberman and Swan describe a Trump who cannot see beyond the first few steps of any given action and is constantly taken aback by political obstacles and backlash. Recent controversies, from the depletion of our military’s stock of sophisticated munitions to worsening conditions on some of our naval vessels, are easier to fathom when you consider the strong odds that Trump is told precious little about the actual conditions of his war. More likely, he is told what he wants to hear: that America is winning and Iran is on the verge of surrender.
So far, much of the destruction of the second Trump administration is self-inflicted. It is Trump and his allies who have wrecked the administrative state, undercut science and mired the country in a new Middle East quagmire. There has not yet been an external crisis — the kind of catastrophic event that demands an active and effective leadership. Through their reporting, Haberman and Swan make clear that if and when this country faces such a crisis, both the president and his administration will be caught flat-footed.
When this happened in Trump’s first term with the Covid-19 pandemic, the United States still had a functional bureaucracy with experts willing and able to provide leadership in the absence of any from the White House. Should we see a similar disaster, we very likely won’t even have that.
by Jamelle Bouie, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Anna Rose Layden for The New York Times[ed. It really is as bad as it seems (if anything... worse). How cursed are we that we've had this guy during two of the most consequential threats in our lifetimes: Covid and the rise of AI. Not only that, but a completely cowardly and dysfunctional Republican Congress. See also: Republicans Are Trying to Hide These Health Care Cuts (NYT):]
***
President Trump and congressional Republicans are working to dismantle that achievement. They have effectively cut subsidies for the Affordable Care Act’s marketplaces, making it harder for people who do not receive insurance through work to afford a plan. This year, the subsidy cuts led three million people to lose their health insurance. In Ohio, nearly a third of previous marketplace enrollees lost their insurance.
The situation stands to worsen next year. In addition to reducing the marketplace subsidies, Mr. Trump and congressional Republicans enacted sweeping cuts to Medicaid, which expanded under the Affordable Care Act. They will take effect after this year’s midterm elections. (Yes, that timing is deliberate.) By 2034, the combined cuts will most likely erase about half of the gains from the Affordable Care Act, causing 14 million Americans to lose insurance.
Politicians from both parties have talked up affordability in the run-up to this year’s elections. Republicans, however, are taking deliberate steps to make health care less affordable. Many middle-class and poor Americans will struggle — even more — to afford important medical care as a result.
Americans have good reasons to be disappointed in their government. Progress on health care, imperfect though it was, represented a positive counterexample of the government working to genuinely improve people’s lives. The president and Congress are trying to ruin that success story.
Republicans’ attacks on affordable health care have taken two forms: one more passive, the other more direct...
***
The Trump family’s crypto business exemplifies all of the sleaziest aspects of the president’s code of conduct, if we can call it that.It is almost certainly unconstitutional and may well be illegal. Estimates vary, but according to a cryptocurrency analytics firm reported on in The Times, the Trumps made at least $1.4 billion, and their investors, lost nearly $4 billion from purchases of Trump-linked crypto. These purchases have — let’s say — coincided with pardons, dropped investigations and favorable regulatory decisions.
This crypto scheme is central to President Trump’s personal agenda: to use his office to vastly increase his and his family’s fortune.
The icing on the cake: A growing number of economists and financial analysts argue that crypto is itself a fiction, lacking a backup system of gold, silver or perhaps most important a national government, ordinarily considered essential ingredients of a currency. [...]
I asked a wide range of crypto experts about the Trump family’s involvement in the industry, and more than half pointed me to an independent analyst, Molly White, who regularly produces detailed reports for her newsletter, Citation Needed.
White, whose work has been praised in The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times and The Guardian, emailed her reply to my queries: “I wouldn’t say that running a crypto business inherently would lead to corrupt transactions, except that crypto is extremely poorly regulated.”
However, White continued,
shady actors are extremely normalized in the crypto world so the usual reputational screening that might keep someone like that from investing in a business doesn’t seem to apply.
I do think Trump’s dealings are both illegal and unconstitutional. While it’s challenging to definitively prove a quid pro quo, the sheer number of times an individual or company has supported Trump’s campaign or invested in his crypto businesses and then quickly enjoyed favorable policy treatment or regulatory relief is so long it’s hard to believe it’s all coincidence.
The deals with the U.A.E. and the business with Justin Sun are particularly fishy. There should be serious investigations into all of this, whether under the foreign emoluments clause or 18 USC §201, and Trump should face both impeachment and criminal consequences.
Speaking of the last national election, White wrote, “the crypto industry was quite successful in politics in 2024, installing at least six new pro-crypto senators and more than a dozen representatives.”
With Trump in the White House and Republicans in control of Congress, White said, the key regulatory agencies are controlled by “loyalist, pro-crypto commissioners.”
[ed. Just another day in Trumpland...]
Tom Jones and CSN&Y
[ed. An amazingly talented singer. Here, Tom schools the boys on one of their own songs (except for Stephen Stills, who gets insanely inspired). Great seeing the looks of amazement all around. Found this after watching a Rick Beato interview with Alison Krauss, another video that shouldn't be missed. An amazingly talented singer in her own right.]
Monday, August 17, 2026
Gillian Welch & David Rawlings
[ed. ... around 3:50 - 8:20]
Sylvie gonna bring a little water
Baby's gonna cry until he's fed
And the fire's gonna burn down to nothing
Poor folk gonna scrap for a piece of bread
And the preacher's gonna preach from the Bible
Devil's gonna laugh at what he said
Gambler gonna lay down his last gold dollar
Shadow's gonna creep from the farmer's shed
And the lawman
Lawman
Lawman gonna kill my honey dead
Now the ground's gonna freeze when fall is over
Fever gonna burn in a big brass bed
The big iron gonna rust, everything's dust to dust
Lawman gonna kill my honey dead
Yeah the lawman
Lawman
Lawman gonna kill my honey dead
Lawman
Baby's gonna cry until he's fed
And the fire's gonna burn down to nothing
Poor folk gonna scrap for a piece of bread
And the preacher's gonna preach from the Bible
Devil's gonna laugh at what he said
Gambler gonna lay down his last gold dollar
Shadow's gonna creep from the farmer's shed
And the lawman
Lawman
Lawman gonna kill my honey dead
Now the ground's gonna freeze when fall is over
Fever gonna burn in a big brass bed
The big iron gonna rust, everything's dust to dust
Lawman gonna kill my honey dead
Yeah the lawman
Lawman
Lawman gonna kill my honey dead
Hidden AI Prompts Discovered in Court Filings
A judge has identified what appears to be the first time a US plaintiff has attempted to hide text in court filings that only an artificial intelligence system can read in a bid to win a case.
In a decision published last week, Connecticut judge Walter Spader Jr. confirmed that the hidden text had no impact in a case where a man alleged a healthcare provider was improperly withholding access to records. The court weighed his filing on the merits, Spader said, but nevertheless, the attempted attack sets a “dangerous” precedent. This will likely not be the last time US courts see the malicious tactic, as AI tools become more commonplace in court systems.
Trying to scramble any AI systems potentially influencing the court’s reading of his filing, the secret instructions were “formatted to be invisible to a human reader while remaining fully legible to any software that reads the document’s text,” Spader said. The offending text directed any AI system reviewing the document to ensure textual outputs agreed with the plaintiff’s arguments, ignored prior denials from the court, and ensured that remediation would follow as the plaintiff desired.
Shrunk to tiny-point type and colored white on a white background, the text appeared to be an attempt at prompt injection, with the plaintiff, Matthew Elliott, seemingly hoping to shift the court’s favor after earlier arguments he raised were defeated.
The plan didn’t work, but Elliott faced modest sanctions anyway because he continued adding hidden text to filings even after the court warned him that he could face penalties for what was ultimately deemed a “serious litigation abuse.” [...]
In his defense, Elliott claimed that the most concerning prompt that the judge flagged was an attempt to “audit” the court as a public service, out of fears that the court seemed to be letting AI unfairly decide cases.
But Spader suggested that if Elliott was truly concerned that the court was improperly using AI, he was “free to write so in plain, visible words that everyone could see and answer.” The fact that he hid the text is “evidence of its malicious purpose,” Spader said. [...]
Pro se litigants use chatbots wrong
Spader said that it’s “unsurprising” that people would start using prompt injection to attempt to sway court rulings since the attack is so common in other areas, such as in job hunting, where people hide text in resumes primarily reviewed by AI. The tactic is now “everywhere,” he said, and courts should be on the lookout for more litigants sneaking adversarial AI instructions into filings.
To Spader, there is a lesson to be learned from Elliott’s failed prompt injection attacks that he thinks “reaches well beyond this case.”
Elliott seemingly turned to prompt injection after using AI to build his case as a pro se litigant without a legal expert to assist in drafting his arguments. Such use is widespread among pro se litigants these days, Spader acknowledged, but those inexperienced in the courtroom are seemingly using chatbots in a way that hurts their cases, he suggested.
What frequently happens, Spader explained, is that pro se litigants build their argument backward, asking the chatbot to help them advocate only for their position, without ever asking the chatbot for the actual truth or to advance opposing arguments. This is “a genuine hazard of the technology, and one that judges now see often,” Spader said, as chatbot sycophancy then entrenches litigants in their arguments despite any ruling to the contrary. In Elliott’s case, defending his arguments fiercely meant turning to prompt injection to try to force the court to agree with him.
“An argument prompted only to agree with its author is, in the end, dishonest even with its author,” Spader said. “Those using these tools must ask them to test a position as readily as to advance it.”
by Ashley Belanger, Ars Technica | Read more:
The key intended audience of these sites is not concerned Americans, it’s not even humans—most of the sites average a few hundred unique visitors each month. Instead, Parscale and his firm, Clock Tower X, created them as part of a $46.5 million contract with the Israeli government to try and influence artificial intelligence-powered chatbots, tools like Claude or ChatGPT.
Parscale has made his goal of influencing artificial intelligence—often referred to as “LLM poisoning”—explicit. In his initial agreement with Israel, Parscale said that he would deploy “websites and content to deliver GPT framing results on GPT conversations” as part of the contract. More recently, his team even told Axios they are “seeing success” at getting popular AI systems to incorporate information from their sites, though they declined to provide data.
And it is working, according to disinformation experts who reviewed a Drop Site analysis of chatbot queries and training data, meaning tens of millions of Americans who use chatbots are increasingly likely to receive answers manipulated by Parscale on behalf of the Israeli government."
In a decision published last week, Connecticut judge Walter Spader Jr. confirmed that the hidden text had no impact in a case where a man alleged a healthcare provider was improperly withholding access to records. The court weighed his filing on the merits, Spader said, but nevertheless, the attempted attack sets a “dangerous” precedent. This will likely not be the last time US courts see the malicious tactic, as AI tools become more commonplace in court systems.
Shrunk to tiny-point type and colored white on a white background, the text appeared to be an attempt at prompt injection, with the plaintiff, Matthew Elliott, seemingly hoping to shift the court’s favor after earlier arguments he raised were defeated.
The plan didn’t work, but Elliott faced modest sanctions anyway because he continued adding hidden text to filings even after the court warned him that he could face penalties for what was ultimately deemed a “serious litigation abuse.” [...]
In his defense, Elliott claimed that the most concerning prompt that the judge flagged was an attempt to “audit” the court as a public service, out of fears that the court seemed to be letting AI unfairly decide cases.
But Spader suggested that if Elliott was truly concerned that the court was improperly using AI, he was “free to write so in plain, visible words that everyone could see and answer.” The fact that he hid the text is “evidence of its malicious purpose,” Spader said. [...]
Pro se litigants use chatbots wrong
Spader said that it’s “unsurprising” that people would start using prompt injection to attempt to sway court rulings since the attack is so common in other areas, such as in job hunting, where people hide text in resumes primarily reviewed by AI. The tactic is now “everywhere,” he said, and courts should be on the lookout for more litigants sneaking adversarial AI instructions into filings.
To Spader, there is a lesson to be learned from Elliott’s failed prompt injection attacks that he thinks “reaches well beyond this case.”
Elliott seemingly turned to prompt injection after using AI to build his case as a pro se litigant without a legal expert to assist in drafting his arguments. Such use is widespread among pro se litigants these days, Spader acknowledged, but those inexperienced in the courtroom are seemingly using chatbots in a way that hurts their cases, he suggested.
What frequently happens, Spader explained, is that pro se litigants build their argument backward, asking the chatbot to help them advocate only for their position, without ever asking the chatbot for the actual truth or to advance opposing arguments. This is “a genuine hazard of the technology, and one that judges now see often,” Spader said, as chatbot sycophancy then entrenches litigants in their arguments despite any ruling to the contrary. In Elliott’s case, defending his arguments fiercely meant turning to prompt injection to try to force the court to agree with him.
“An argument prompted only to agree with its author is, in the end, dishonest even with its author,” Spader said. “Those using these tools must ask them to test a position as readily as to advance it.”
Image: Liudmila Chernetska | iStock/Getty Images Plus
[ed. See also: Israel Is Paying Millions to Train AI Chatbots How to Talk About Gaza. It's Working (Drop Site):]***
"Since October, former Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale has been quietly overseeing an operation posting hundreds of blog posts on behalf of Israel. One article, titled “The Reality Behind Gaza’s ‘Journalists’: Terror Ties, Propaganda, and the Laws of War,” asserts that a majority of journalists in Gaza were linked to terrorist organizations. Another casts doubt on the killing of Hind Rajab, a five-year-old Palestinian girl killed by the Israeli military in 2024.The key intended audience of these sites is not concerned Americans, it’s not even humans—most of the sites average a few hundred unique visitors each month. Instead, Parscale and his firm, Clock Tower X, created them as part of a $46.5 million contract with the Israeli government to try and influence artificial intelligence-powered chatbots, tools like Claude or ChatGPT.
Parscale has made his goal of influencing artificial intelligence—often referred to as “LLM poisoning”—explicit. In his initial agreement with Israel, Parscale said that he would deploy “websites and content to deliver GPT framing results on GPT conversations” as part of the contract. More recently, his team even told Axios they are “seeing success” at getting popular AI systems to incorporate information from their sites, though they declined to provide data.
And it is working, according to disinformation experts who reviewed a Drop Site analysis of chatbot queries and training data, meaning tens of millions of Americans who use chatbots are increasingly likely to receive answers manipulated by Parscale on behalf of the Israeli government."
[ed. More here (Politico).]
The Reconstructionist: How PGA Tour CEO Brian Rolapp is Putting Golf Back Together
Brian Rolapp left the NFL to become CEO of the PGA Tour in the summer of 2025, walking away from two decades at a league he didn’t just rise inside of but helped build. The last several years of his career there he effectively ran the NFL business—the deals, the platforms and the broadcasts that turned an already dominant sport into the last appointment viewing left in American culture. He was the commissioner-in-waiting, the heir apparent to a job that pays more, commands more attention and carries far less daily uncertainty than the one he chose instead.
He left anyway, to lead a sport in the middle of an existential crisis it had largely caused itself. At age 54, he is a year into the job now, and his home office in Darien, Conn., has not caught up to the change. There is no golf memorabilia save for a family trophy, “The Rolapp Cup.” The football stuff has been left out of habit rather than sentiment, the residue of someone who has spent his career being told how good he is at what he does and has decided not to believe it. [...]
Ages 19 through 27 set the entire trajectory of his life, he says. He came home from his mission an almost-21-year-old college sophomore. Shortly after, his father died at 52. Rolapp met his wife, Cindy, not long after, married her, had his first child, and somewhere in that compressed timeframe became, in his own estimation, a person who knew what he wanted out of life at an age when most people don’t. “I think that’s kind of a rare thing,” he says, quietly enough that the sentence nearly disappears into the room.
The story of how he met Cindy is the one spot in hours of conversation where Rolapp’s voice picks up, faster, lighter, a story told at enough dinner parties to have worn itself smooth. He asked her out three times. The first go-around she said no; she had to watch her nieces. The second she had to do something for her grandmother. Rolapp assumed he was being gently but obviously turned down. A mutual friend assured him otherwise; that’s just who she is, she means it all literally. The third time, he asked if she wanted to get something to eat. Cindy said no; the Cowboys were playing the Cardinals on Monday Night Football, and she wanted to watch. She came over in sweatpants and a sweatshirt, having apparently spent zero time getting ready. His roommate told him after the game that if he didn’t ask her out again, he was an idiot.
Cindy has never cared, in the years since, what Brian does for a living, not out of indifference but by a deliberate boundary. “The only thing I care about,” he says, quoting her, “is that it doesn’t consume you, that it makes you a fuller human.” They do not talk about work at home. “Around the neighborhood, I was the NFL guy,” he says. “Now I’m probably the PGA Tour guy. Everyone else tries to define you by your job. I’m lucky to have a family that doesn’t.” For a while, that boundary lived in a small, deliberate joke—for years, Rolapp’s social media bio read simply “husband of one,” a wink at both the marriage and the faith it’s built on, a devout Mormon’s version of a punchline. It is, colleagues say, entirely on brand. Sincere enough to be meant, funny enough that nobody would mistake it for preaching. [...]
Rolapp’s title at the NFL was chief media and business officer. Officially, he ran league business operations; unofficially, he ran nearly everything at the NFL that wasn’t the games themselves. Media rights deals worth tens of billions of dollars went through his office along with the league’s digital strategy, built from basically nothing. When he started in 2003 the league was doing somewhere around $5 billion in revenue. This year, it will do roughly $23 billion. “I’m not saying I’m responsible for that,” he says, “but I was part of a hyper-growth stretch for a long time.”
Steve Bornstein, the former ESPN and NFL Network chief who recruited Rolapp from NBC to work at the NFL in 2003, says that’s underselling it. Bornstein says that Rolapp saw where the business was shifting—toward entertainment and media consumption onto phones and into digital spaces—years before that was conventional wisdom inside a league long organized around Sunday afternoons and cable carriage fees. What made him really effective, Bornstein says, had less to do with vision than with a habit most executives eventually lose. “It’s a person that listens and doesn’t just talk,” he says. “That’s his superpower. He listens, he synthesizes it, and then he asks intelligent, informed questions.”
Joe Siclare, the NFL’s longtime chief financial officer of 33 years, has never revised his first impression of Rolapp—smart, fluent in the media business in a way that never had to be re-earned. What Siclare remembers most isn’t the scope of Rolapp’s job so much as how he carried it. Rolapp rarely walked into a room already convinced he had the answer; he’d arrive with a position and let the facts move it, which Siclare came to see less as indecision than as a kind of discipline. “I think people felt like they worked with him, not for him.” [...]
Rolapp’s last stretch at the league is the clearest evidence of what all that listening and synthesizing produced. In March 2021, he oversaw the long-term media agreements that locked in Amazon, CBS, ESPN/ABC, Fox and NBC as the NFL’s broadcast partners for the next decade. He helped devise and implement the move of Sunday Ticket to YouTube, ending a more than 25-year run on satellite and transferring the league’s most devoted, highest-paying fans to a platform that didn’t exist when the package was created. He also led 32 Equity, the vehicle through which the league and its owners now make outside investments—one more example of building infrastructure for a business a decade before the rest of the industry admitted it needed one.
“You’re only as good as your team,” Rolapp says, the closest thing to a mission statement in an otherwise unsentimental accounting of his own record.
That is precisely what makes his career change worth examining. Men who spend two decades succeeding inside one system rarely walk away from it at the moment of maximum leverage, and usually not for an organization in worse shape. “He was so valuable at what he did,” Lurie says, “that a lot of us, while genuinely happy for him, knew it was a devastating loss for the league.”
“I loved my job. I loved the NFL,” he says. “I probably could have done it forever.” He pauses on the word forever the way people do when they catch themselves nearly committing to something they no longer want. “To be honest, I was bored,” Rolapp says.
It’s a strange thing to admit about two decades that included a streaming buildout from scratch, a media-rights overhaul, and the slow migration of football from broadcast television to whatever comes after it—a stretch defined by constant change. That, Rolapp says, was also the problem. The change had become routine, the crises predictable, the same kinds of meetings producing the same kinds of decisions. There was less left to be curious about. He wasn’t looking for an exit, he says, but knew one was likely coming.
There was no obvious playbook for Rolapp’s new task. By the time he was named PGA Tour commissioner, the tour’s leadership had spent nearly two years locked in negotiations with Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund and fans had grown exhausted by a schism that seemed indifferent to what they wanted.
What Rolapp did first was talk, in mostly informal sometimes hour-long conversations with players. The format, built around three questions, was almost naively simple for a man about to reorganize a multibillion-dollar sport: What do we do well? What don’t we do well? What would you change? What he found surprised him—a locker room that turned out to be smarter and more self-aware than its reputation suggested. He met players who loved the game without reservation but were more than ready to admit the tour itself had grown stale with too many events with too little imagination. As the months passed and the tour’s Future Competition Committee—the nine-person group led by Tiger Woods charged with reimagining the schedule—began to crystallize a direction, the conversations changed. “It became more of a validation of where we were going,” Rolapp says. “Still good. But different.”
This was different than the relationship he knew at the NFL, where the players’ union is collectively bargained, formal and distant by design. Golf was, at best, a fragile and personal trust between commissioner and competitors. That trust had frayed by the time Rolapp arrived, exacerbated by the tour’s surprise framework agreement with PIF in June 2023 that blindsided players who’d spent months publicly defending an institution that had been secretly negotiating with the enemy. Rolapp understood that whatever faith remained was thin, and that he wasn’t going to charm his way in. He went to work.
“I think he’s a guy that just kind of gets things done,” Scottie Scheffler said earlier this year at Bay Hill. “I met him last year at one of the playoff events. We sat down, and it was just, like, just getting right into it. He started asking questions and we started talking. It was like no nonsense—like, we’ve got an hour, let’s make the most of this hour. I loved it.”
“I clearly didn’t know a lot of things: how the tour worked, how the sport was set up, what was on the players’ minds,” Rolapp says. “But it’s also part of my leadership style. I’ve always believed humility and self-awareness are underrated leadership attributes, because they let somebody know what they don’t know. When you lose sight of that, that’s when leaders get in trouble, or they surround themselves with people who tell them what they want to hear, the classic yes men.”
[ed. Exactly what the sport needs. Contrast this leadership style with...oh, anyone else you can think of...]
He left anyway, to lead a sport in the middle of an existential crisis it had largely caused itself. At age 54, he is a year into the job now, and his home office in Darien, Conn., has not caught up to the change. There is no golf memorabilia save for a family trophy, “The Rolapp Cup.” The football stuff has been left out of habit rather than sentiment, the residue of someone who has spent his career being told how good he is at what he does and has decided not to believe it. [...]
The story of how he met Cindy is the one spot in hours of conversation where Rolapp’s voice picks up, faster, lighter, a story told at enough dinner parties to have worn itself smooth. He asked her out three times. The first go-around she said no; she had to watch her nieces. The second she had to do something for her grandmother. Rolapp assumed he was being gently but obviously turned down. A mutual friend assured him otherwise; that’s just who she is, she means it all literally. The third time, he asked if she wanted to get something to eat. Cindy said no; the Cowboys were playing the Cardinals on Monday Night Football, and she wanted to watch. She came over in sweatpants and a sweatshirt, having apparently spent zero time getting ready. His roommate told him after the game that if he didn’t ask her out again, he was an idiot.
Cindy has never cared, in the years since, what Brian does for a living, not out of indifference but by a deliberate boundary. “The only thing I care about,” he says, quoting her, “is that it doesn’t consume you, that it makes you a fuller human.” They do not talk about work at home. “Around the neighborhood, I was the NFL guy,” he says. “Now I’m probably the PGA Tour guy. Everyone else tries to define you by your job. I’m lucky to have a family that doesn’t.” For a while, that boundary lived in a small, deliberate joke—for years, Rolapp’s social media bio read simply “husband of one,” a wink at both the marriage and the faith it’s built on, a devout Mormon’s version of a punchline. It is, colleagues say, entirely on brand. Sincere enough to be meant, funny enough that nobody would mistake it for preaching. [...]
Rolapp’s title at the NFL was chief media and business officer. Officially, he ran league business operations; unofficially, he ran nearly everything at the NFL that wasn’t the games themselves. Media rights deals worth tens of billions of dollars went through his office along with the league’s digital strategy, built from basically nothing. When he started in 2003 the league was doing somewhere around $5 billion in revenue. This year, it will do roughly $23 billion. “I’m not saying I’m responsible for that,” he says, “but I was part of a hyper-growth stretch for a long time.”
Steve Bornstein, the former ESPN and NFL Network chief who recruited Rolapp from NBC to work at the NFL in 2003, says that’s underselling it. Bornstein says that Rolapp saw where the business was shifting—toward entertainment and media consumption onto phones and into digital spaces—years before that was conventional wisdom inside a league long organized around Sunday afternoons and cable carriage fees. What made him really effective, Bornstein says, had less to do with vision than with a habit most executives eventually lose. “It’s a person that listens and doesn’t just talk,” he says. “That’s his superpower. He listens, he synthesizes it, and then he asks intelligent, informed questions.”
Joe Siclare, the NFL’s longtime chief financial officer of 33 years, has never revised his first impression of Rolapp—smart, fluent in the media business in a way that never had to be re-earned. What Siclare remembers most isn’t the scope of Rolapp’s job so much as how he carried it. Rolapp rarely walked into a room already convinced he had the answer; he’d arrive with a position and let the facts move it, which Siclare came to see less as indecision than as a kind of discipline. “I think people felt like they worked with him, not for him.” [...]
Rolapp’s last stretch at the league is the clearest evidence of what all that listening and synthesizing produced. In March 2021, he oversaw the long-term media agreements that locked in Amazon, CBS, ESPN/ABC, Fox and NBC as the NFL’s broadcast partners for the next decade. He helped devise and implement the move of Sunday Ticket to YouTube, ending a more than 25-year run on satellite and transferring the league’s most devoted, highest-paying fans to a platform that didn’t exist when the package was created. He also led 32 Equity, the vehicle through which the league and its owners now make outside investments—one more example of building infrastructure for a business a decade before the rest of the industry admitted it needed one.
“You’re only as good as your team,” Rolapp says, the closest thing to a mission statement in an otherwise unsentimental accounting of his own record.
That is precisely what makes his career change worth examining. Men who spend two decades succeeding inside one system rarely walk away from it at the moment of maximum leverage, and usually not for an organization in worse shape. “He was so valuable at what he did,” Lurie says, “that a lot of us, while genuinely happy for him, knew it was a devastating loss for the league.”
“I loved my job. I loved the NFL,” he says. “I probably could have done it forever.” He pauses on the word forever the way people do when they catch themselves nearly committing to something they no longer want. “To be honest, I was bored,” Rolapp says.
It’s a strange thing to admit about two decades that included a streaming buildout from scratch, a media-rights overhaul, and the slow migration of football from broadcast television to whatever comes after it—a stretch defined by constant change. That, Rolapp says, was also the problem. The change had become routine, the crises predictable, the same kinds of meetings producing the same kinds of decisions. There was less left to be curious about. He wasn’t looking for an exit, he says, but knew one was likely coming.
There was no obvious playbook for Rolapp’s new task. By the time he was named PGA Tour commissioner, the tour’s leadership had spent nearly two years locked in negotiations with Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund and fans had grown exhausted by a schism that seemed indifferent to what they wanted.
What Rolapp did first was talk, in mostly informal sometimes hour-long conversations with players. The format, built around three questions, was almost naively simple for a man about to reorganize a multibillion-dollar sport: What do we do well? What don’t we do well? What would you change? What he found surprised him—a locker room that turned out to be smarter and more self-aware than its reputation suggested. He met players who loved the game without reservation but were more than ready to admit the tour itself had grown stale with too many events with too little imagination. As the months passed and the tour’s Future Competition Committee—the nine-person group led by Tiger Woods charged with reimagining the schedule—began to crystallize a direction, the conversations changed. “It became more of a validation of where we were going,” Rolapp says. “Still good. But different.”
This was different than the relationship he knew at the NFL, where the players’ union is collectively bargained, formal and distant by design. Golf was, at best, a fragile and personal trust between commissioner and competitors. That trust had frayed by the time Rolapp arrived, exacerbated by the tour’s surprise framework agreement with PIF in June 2023 that blindsided players who’d spent months publicly defending an institution that had been secretly negotiating with the enemy. Rolapp understood that whatever faith remained was thin, and that he wasn’t going to charm his way in. He went to work.
“I think he’s a guy that just kind of gets things done,” Scottie Scheffler said earlier this year at Bay Hill. “I met him last year at one of the playoff events. We sat down, and it was just, like, just getting right into it. He started asking questions and we started talking. It was like no nonsense—like, we’ve got an hour, let’s make the most of this hour. I loved it.”
“I clearly didn’t know a lot of things: how the tour worked, how the sport was set up, what was on the players’ minds,” Rolapp says. “But it’s also part of my leadership style. I’ve always believed humility and self-awareness are underrated leadership attributes, because they let somebody know what they don’t know. When you lose sight of that, that’s when leaders get in trouble, or they surround themselves with people who tell them what they want to hear, the classic yes men.”
by Joel Beall, Golf Digest | Read more:
Image: Eric Ogden
Sunday, August 16, 2026
The Age of Decadence (Without Pleasure)
Image: Guardian Design
[ed. Authors need a vacation.]
A Hand Towel That (Somehow) Only Gets Better With Time
The other day I found myself standing in my kitchen holding a soft stretch of weathered cotton, caught in a reverie about the last 15 years of my life.
Not a lot of towels can do that.
In 2011, I walked into a homewares shop in Venice, California: a breezy space filled with design objects from Japan. It was the kind of place where everything feels necessary, infinitely simpler than my cluttered mind.
I drifted to the back of the store, past sculptural teapots and textured ceramics, where I watched a stylish woman wash her hands and deftly dry them on a wisp of red cotton printed with organic white dots. The fabric was thin, its edges gracefully frayed. It wasn’t until I approached the register that I realized the stacks of colorful folded textiles were those same unassuming lengths of fabric — only stiffer in their packaging. I bought a handful on a whim.
So began my relationship with Japanese tenugui.
These traditional Japanese cotton cloths are available in an array of colorful prints, and they get softer and better with every use.
Technically, tenugui are traditional hand towels made of yukata cotton; the name translates literally to “hand wipe.” But to describe them as mere towels is like calling a poem a memo.
[ed. See also: Going bananas for bandanas: the latest fashion trend that goes back centuries (Guardian).]
Not a lot of towels can do that.
In 2011, I walked into a homewares shop in Venice, California: a breezy space filled with design objects from Japan. It was the kind of place where everything feels necessary, infinitely simpler than my cluttered mind.
So began my relationship with Japanese tenugui.
These traditional Japanese cotton cloths are available in an array of colorful prints, and they get softer and better with every use.
Technically, tenugui are traditional hand towels made of yukata cotton; the name translates literally to “hand wipe.” But to describe them as mere towels is like calling a poem a memo.
The magic lies in a pour-through dye technique called chusen. Unlike modern screen-printing, where ink sits on top of the fabric like a layer of film, chusen is an act of saturation and resistance. The patterns are traditionally created using a laminated washi paper stencil, said Patricia Belyea, an importer who also leads vintage textile tours in Japan.
Dye is then poured through the thin layers of cotton, yielding towels with no front or back; the pattern is equally vibrant on both sides. Because the dye permeates the fiber rather than coats it, the fabric remains incredibly breathable. It doesn’t just wipe away water, it drinks it — and then dries in a heartbeat.
In my house, tenugui are shape-shifters, floating from kitchens to bathrooms to backpacks. As my personal tenugui collection grew, they migrated to my dining table as napkins. I never felt the need to match them, preferring the different patterns at each plate, like a series of short stories in each print. They also quickly became a favorite host gift; after all, who couldn’t use a little dose of practical art? [...]
Tenugui traditionally have a raw, unhemmed edge, so they can be cut to any size. Some people purchase a single towel and cut them in half to make two napkins, as Keiko Shinomoto, co-founder of Tortoise General Store, told me in a phone interview. Others use the fabric for art projects or even to wrap gifts. Shinomoto has enjoyed seeing all the nontraditional ways people have come to employ this simple fabric over the years.
The fraying stops after a few washes, leaving a soft, well-earned border. It’s a lesson in wabi-sabi — finding beauty in the imperfect and the ephemeral. The magic of tenugui is that they don’t wear out, they really just wear in. I still have several of those original towels from 2011. They are easy to spot: the softest in my collection, some with small, honest holes from years of scrubbing and tying. To me they are the most beautiful of the bunch.
Dye is then poured through the thin layers of cotton, yielding towels with no front or back; the pattern is equally vibrant on both sides. Because the dye permeates the fiber rather than coats it, the fabric remains incredibly breathable. It doesn’t just wipe away water, it drinks it — and then dries in a heartbeat.
In my house, tenugui are shape-shifters, floating from kitchens to bathrooms to backpacks. As my personal tenugui collection grew, they migrated to my dining table as napkins. I never felt the need to match them, preferring the different patterns at each plate, like a series of short stories in each print. They also quickly became a favorite host gift; after all, who couldn’t use a little dose of practical art? [...]
Tenugui traditionally have a raw, unhemmed edge, so they can be cut to any size. Some people purchase a single towel and cut them in half to make two napkins, as Keiko Shinomoto, co-founder of Tortoise General Store, told me in a phone interview. Others use the fabric for art projects or even to wrap gifts. Shinomoto has enjoyed seeing all the nontraditional ways people have come to employ this simple fabric over the years.
The fraying stops after a few washes, leaving a soft, well-earned border. It’s a lesson in wabi-sabi — finding beauty in the imperfect and the ephemeral. The magic of tenugui is that they don’t wear out, they really just wear in. I still have several of those original towels from 2011. They are easy to spot: the softest in my collection, some with small, honest holes from years of scrubbing and tying. To me they are the most beautiful of the bunch.
by Ivy Elrod, Wirecutter | Read more:
Image: Ivy Elrod
Your Book Review: The Escape Artist
[ed. One of the finalists in the ACX 2026 book review contest.]
You won’t find any of these tropes in The Escape Artist.
This 2022 book by Jonathan Freedland tells the true, and largely unknown, story of one of the few Jews ever to break out of Auschwitz. The details of his improbable escape are remarkable enough, but what really makes the story fascinating is the way it so thoroughly defies every single expectation we have of a Holocaust narrative. Its deeply unlikeable protagonist eventually alienates every friend and supporter he has, and dies a bitter old man, almost completely forgotten by history. His story lacks not only good Germans, but even good non-Germans, with his harshest criticism saved not for the Nazis, not even for the dithering Allies, but for the Jewish leaders of Europe. And though one could see the story of his escape as a triumph, in his own telling, it’s a failure, for although he makes it out of Auschwitz against all odds, he fails at his larger mission: to stop the Holocaust. There’s no redemption here, no moral uplift, no lessons save for perhaps the grimmest and most nihilistic “lesson” I’ve ever encountered in any story, Holocaust-related or otherwise: that when confronted with the unthinkable, most people’s natural tendency is denial.
But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. To get out of Auschwitz, first you have to get into Auschwitz…
I.
Here’s a hot take for you: Auschwitz was bad.
It was bad for all of its prisoners, of course, but it was the worst for the Jewish ones, who, if they survived at all, were held in harsher and more tightly controlled parts of the camp than everyone else. During the five years between Auschwitz’s opening in 1940 and its liberation by the Soviet Army in 1945, at least 900 prisoners attempted escape, and around 200 of them succeeded—but, because of their stricter confinement, only a handful were Jews.
Walter Rosenberg, our protagonist, is the first. And crazily enough, he goes to Auschwitz voluntarily.
Of course, it’s not like he knows what he’s signing up for. The Nazi line at the time—an illusion they go to great lengths to maintain—is that the Jews deported from Europe are all being “resettled in the east.” In 1942, when our story begins, Walter is a Slovak teenager, just eighteen years old. He’s being held at Majdanek, another Polish concentration camp, after two failed attempts to escape Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia. Majdanek itself is at this point “merely” a labor camp—not unheard of in wartime—though it will eventually become a death camp after Walter has left it behind.
The camp administrators seek volunteers for “farm work” elsewhere, and Walter is one of the first to raise his hand, despite the dire warnings from another prisoner: “Go there and you’ll die.” It’s not that he doesn’t believe the warnings. But he’s decided that being moved somewhere else, no matter where that somewhere else is, might bring an opportunity for escape. And from the moment the Nazi tanks first rolled into Czechoslovakia, Walter has been single-mindedly focused on escape.
Already, Walter has a sense that he’s different from the other prisoners—and, for that matter, from most people he knew back home in his hometown of Trnava. Why aren’t they doing anything? he wonders. Why aren’t they all trying to escape too? If Walter were alive today, one gets the sense he’d describe himself as high-agency and everyone else as NPCs. You Can Just Do Things, he believes, even when the thing in question is escaping from a concentration camp. Maybe this is youth talking. Maybe it’s naivety. Or maybe Walter is simply, constitutionally, a difficult person: allergic to authority and already showing the same contrarian streak that will later get him fired from multiple academic jobs.
And so Walter goes to Auschwitz.
The Nazis obviously do not actually believe their inscription on Auschwitz’s gates, that “work will set you free.” But this story is full of bitter ironies, and among them is that for Walter, signing up for this line of work actually is the first step toward his freedom.
II.
As soon as the journey to Auschwitz begins, Walter starts having second thoughts.
Majdanek operates more or less in the open: situated right on the edge of Lublin, a midsize city, it’s visible to the general population and staffed by civilian workers who commute between the city and the camp. But for the journey to Auschwitz, the guards clean up Walter and the other prisoners and dress them in ordinary clothes, clearly to hide their true state from the German civilians who might catch a glimpse of them en route. And that’s highly suspicious: what kind of place are they being taken to, if even their condition en route has to be concealed from ordinary Germans? These questions grow when they reach the new camp’s perimeter, where the intensity of the security stands out even compared to Majdanek: there are not one but two barbed-wire electric fences, and watchtowers everywhere, each with a prominent sniper’s rifle poking through its slats. And then, once Walter crosses the perimeter, there are the men he sees within: “walking skeletons with bowed heads and sunken, hollow eyes.” It’s not like the prisoners in Majdanek looked good, of course, but they didn’t look like this. And yet these men, the living dead, are actually the lucky ones: of the 100 prisoners who enter Auschwitz with Walter, only he and one other are still alive at the end of the month.
Why does Walter survive? Some of it is sheer luck: he enters the camp young and healthy, and avoids catching anything fatal; at one point, a sympathetic kapo, for reasons that are never entirely clear, saves him from ending up on the wrong side of a typhus check. But another factor is that Walter is a quick study who proves unusually adept at adapting to his environment. He instinctively grasps that here, appearances—especially the appearance of health—matter more than reality. Anyone who looks unfit for work—or who looks as though they might be carrying disease, which doesn’t respect the Nazis’ racial barriers—is sent… well, at this point Walter isn’t totally sure where they’re sent, but he knows it can’t be anywhere good. And this fitness can be assessed at any point by nothing more than an SS officer’s glance. Walter quickly masters the art of holding his head up high even when he’s hardly slept in days, and of standing upright even when his feet are so swollen he can barely keep his balance.
Even under these conditions, when he can scarcely think about anything besides staying alive, a small part of Walter’s brain remains on the lookout for something, anything, a small sliver of an opportunity that could lead to a means to escape. But when his next lucky break comes, in the form of a new work assignment, it provides something that Walter—although he doesn’t yet realize it—needs even more: not just a means for escape, but a motive.
III.
At first it sounds crazy: how could getting out of Auschwitz not be motive enough? But it turns out that what Walter really needs is to connect his potential escape to a broader mission. It can’t just be life or death for him—it has to be life or death for many.
Remember: at this point, there’s no such concept as “the Holocaust”. Even a prisoner like Walter might plausibly think that Nazi concentration camps are a recognizable, if extreme, version of the forced-labor and detention camps that have been relatively common in wartime for centuries. Majdanek hadn’t been as bad as Auschwitz; perhaps conditions here are an aberration. Perhaps the other Jews really have been resettled.
But Walter’s next assignment disabuses him of that illusion once and for all. He’s sent to Canada.
Not the real Canada, of course. This “Canada” is an enormous lot full of possessions stolen from arriving prisoners. Walter and the others there are tasked with sorting through these items in search of anything valuable: money sewn up in coat linings, for example, or gems hidden in toothpaste tubes. The area’s name comes from Kann er da, German for “might there be”—as in, “might there be something of value?” The bureaucracy-obsessed Nazis in fact placed the entire concentration camp apparatus in the SS’s economic office, and everything taken from Canada—not just money and gems, but even things like artificial limbs—is either sold to fund the war effort or repurposed as relief for the civilian population.
Walter is good at this new job, and he finds a perverse satisfaction in his own skill despite the context. Of course, he also finds ways to serve himself: in Canada, valuable resources are everywhere, and it’s not that hard to swipe them when the guards aren’t looking. (A good moment is usually when they’re distracted by beating someone else.)
In the topsy-turvy world that is Auschwitz, the actually valuable resources—the ones the Nazis are looking for, like money and gold—aren’t actually of any value to Walter. Money is useless in Auschwitz’s underground economy, and it’s worse than useless as an escapee: as a fellow prisoner warns Walter, if you have money, you’ll be tempted to use it to buy things, but that means going into towns, where the risk of being caught is highest. Better to remove the temptation entirely and leave yourself no choice but to stay on the outskirts and live off the land. So Walter doesn’t take any money or gold, except to occasionally throw it down the toilet as a small act of rebellion.
No, the real valuable is food. Food is everywhere in Canada, and if you can grab it without the guards noticing, you can be one of the only prisoners in Auschwitz to receive something approaching adequate nutrition. Walter and his fellow Canada workers become experts at swiping and devouring morsels of hidden food in one fell swoop.
But pretty soon it becomes hard not to wonder where all this stuff is coming from. Sure: coats, toiletries, even food—maybe that could all be stolen from living prisoners. But artificial limbs? Teeth? And besides—Walter has seen the rest of the camp. Even accounting for the “natural” death rate, there are several orders of magnitude more prisoners’ possessions than there are actual prisoners.
Thus Walter comes to acquire something even more valuable than food: knowledge of something very few people—certainly those outside Auschwitz, but even most of those inside Auschwitz—are aware of. Perhaps a small, subconscious part of him had already suspected it. But after a few weeks in Canada, he understands it beyond a reasonable doubt: there is no “resettlement.” Every arrival at Auschwitz who is not selected for work—the vast, vast majority, over 90%—is killed. He is sorting through the remnants of systematic mass murder.
Over the next few months, as Walter is sent to work in other parts of Canada—like the loading ramp, where prisoners are ferried from arriving trains to the gas chambers—he begins to understand exactly why the Nazis go to such great lengths to keep this fact a secret, not only from the outside world, but even from the prisoners who are just moments away from death:
[The Nazis] needed their killing machine to run smoothly and without disruption, and that required their victims to be calm or at least amenable to instruction. Given the time pressure the SS were often under, with another transport coming down the track, there was no room for delay caused by panic or, worse, rebellion. Ideally, the SS liked to keep their victims tranquil by organising a gentle, polite disembarkation. But if time was tight, a swish of the cane would bring quiet by more direct means. Either way, what mattered was ensuring that the Jews coming off those trains did not know what fate awaited them. If they did, they might begin to cry out, they might start pushing and shoving, they might refuse to form columns, in rows of five, and instead rush for the barbed-wire fences or even at their captors. True, they would be overwhelmed and pacified eventually: the SS carried sub-machine guns and their victims had nothing but their own bodies, weakened by hunger and thirst. But still, there were sometimes a thousand or more people on that platform, outnumbering the Nazis by perhaps ten to one. If the Jews knew what was coming, what sand might they be able to throw in the gears of the machine that was poised to devour them? They might not stop it, but surely by even a modest show of defiance they could slow it down.The Nazis’ deceptions work so well that even prisoners who are directly warned about the gas chambers rarely believe what they’re told. For example: one day, Walter is working outdoors when he sees a newly arrived train of deportees. Another prisoner starts shouting frantic warnings that their resettlement is a sham, that they’re all about to be gassed to death. Not only do the new arrivals not believe him, but one of them, a middle-aged mother, takes his desperate outburst as a personal affront. She essentially becomes an Auschwitz Karen, reporting the young prisoner to a nearby SS officer. The officer, never breaking character, notes the offending prisoner’s number and profusely apologizes for the disruption. Of course, except for Walter and the SS officer, everyone in this story—the prisoner, the Karen, her two children, and all the other new arrivals on the train—is dead within the next thirty minutes.
The same pattern repeats a few months later, when a new group of prisoners is separated from the rest of the camp under significantly better conditions—sufficient food, larger quarters, even the occasional concert. Walter has seen Nazi documents indicating that the group will receive “special treatment”—death—after six months, and tries to warn them. But not one of them believes him. Even after they see incontrovertible evidence of the gas chambers, they remain convinced that their group is special, that only the others, the ones in the regular camp, will be gassed. Walter even ends up befriending, and falling in love with, a girl in this separate group; she too refuses to believe him. Eventually, Walter discovers that this camp is a Potemkin village, constructed in case of a Red Cross visit; once it’s no longer needed, everyone inside is killed.
Walter has just watched people walk into gas chambers rather than believe a fellow prisoner’s warnings. The conclusion he draws is not despair but a kind of furious logic: these warnings failed because they came too late, to prisoners who had little chance of fighting back. What’s needed, he decides, is to warn the Jews of Europe before they get on the trains. And so—perhaps because he needs a mission to distract from his survivor’s guilt—Walter decides that he will be the one to deliver this warning. He will break out of Auschwitz, and he will let the world know.
by Anonymous, Astral Codex Ten | Read more:
Image: uncredited
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