Friday, October 16, 2026
Monopoly Roundup: AI Cockroaches Scurry Out from Under Nvidia
Before we get to the Good and the Bad news, after the jump for paid subscribers only, I want to highlight an important but little-noticed story that has implications for the AI bubble, and particularly, for the most valuable company in the world, Nvidia. Nvidia is the center of the AI revolution, with its software layer CUDA and its AI chips dominating training and inference for models. It is worth $6 trillion, and its CEO, Jensen Huang, is now a global superstar who regularly sits down with national leaders and puts Donald Trump on speakerphone at major conferences.
Nvidia, despite its immense profits and prestige, is known for doing something a bit scuzzy, called “circular financing.” That is, it invests in its own customers so they can buy its chips. Sometimes it goes through multiple layers, like investing in OpenAI, which buys from Oracle, which buys from Nvidia. But there are a host of smaller AI companies in which Nvidia, as well as hedge funds and banks, have put a lot of money. And one of them, a little noticed AI data center company called Firmus, tried to sell shares to on the stock market this week. Yet investors revolted, and the company had to scrap its initial public offering.
Aside from Nvidia, Firmus was backed by blue chip financial firms Jane Street and Blackstone, and it was set to become Australia’s biggest IPO ever, at $30 billion in valuation. So this failure is a big deal, and it raised eyebrows all over Wall Street.
What happened? It turns out, Firmus executives got a little too greedy. In a normal initial public offering, companies restrict insiders from selling their shares for a time period. There are a few reasons to do so. First, restricting insiders sales is a vote of confidence in the new firm, a statement from executives and early investors that “hey yeah we want your money investors, but we have skin in the game in the form of owning our own stock.” Second, it’s a statement that the stock won’t be met with a lot of immediate selling pressure in the markets, since insiders can’t dump their shares.
This time, however, Firmus set up terms to let them sell immediately, meaning those who were most in-the-know wanted to cash out ASAP. That looks bad, a clear indication that insiders don’t think the company is a valuable going concern but see it as a temporary vehicle for self-enrichment. On a practical level, huge selling pressure would have flooded the market and crushed investors. So money managers, after being harmed with Paramount bonds, SpaceX, and a number of others, refused to bid, and the banks behind Firmus had to pull the offering. It’s one of the biggest flops in recent capital markets history.
What matters here are three things. First, the Firmus IPO was backed by the most prestigious companies in AI. Second, there are many companies like Firmus. And third, the company’s co-founder, Oliver Curtis, has a criminal background in stock manipulation, and yet the banks still went ahead with the offering. Yes, you read that right:
What makes this situation more than a run of the mill scam is the involvement of Nvidia in Firmus and its criminal co-founder. Why would Nvidia get in bed with a crook? Well, Firmus is in an important industry segment that generates demand for Nvidia chips. Firmus is a “neocloud,” which are basically racks of servers funded by venture capitalists and Nvidia to buy chips and rent out computing power. Think of a neocloud as a way to keep debt off the books of the big AI firms. Neoclouds are a corporate shell containing real estate, chips, and financing. Often there are multiple layers of investors, phantom contracts or insider self-dealing, all wrapped in a narrative that they are engaged in “advanced AI” deployment.
This move has tended to work because of the involvement of the most prestigious players in AI. When Nvidia (or Google or Anthropic) backstops or does business with a neocloud, investors think there must be something there. So the neocloud’s valuation goes up a lot. Then that neocloud raises more money at a high valuation, announces more data centers, and orders more chips. That’s more profits for Nvidia, more investments, and so on and so forth.
These investments take place in the private market, with hedge funds and insiders thinking they are getting in at a low valuation. They often don’t even care if there’s a good business model here, since they think someone else will be left holding the bag. The business model never really made much sense, with Firmus starting as a bitcoin miner, before pivoting to AI. But it didn’t matter, because Firmus was about to sell shares to the last set of investors out there - you and me in the public markets. Fortunately, it looks like the public market participants have wisened up, at least in this case.
Firmus, however, is not the only scam in the AI space. Many such neoclouds started as bitcoin miners before jumping to the AI boom, often funded by a prestigious AI firm like Nvidia. And that suggests there’s something systemic going on.
Here are a few other neocloud or adjacent plays: There’s TeraWulf, which has big leasing deals with Anthropic and Google, and whose backers have been allegedly caught engaged in market manipulation. Google bankrolled the company’s shift from bitcoin mining to AI data center. Here’s Grizzly Research:
There’s Applied Digital. According to the Bear Cave, this company started by providing staff to production companies, pivoted to plasma technology, then processing potatoes, then to blockchain, and finally to AI with financing from Nvidia in 2024. However, here it gets creepier, since Nvidia sold its stake in 2026, after Applied Digital had bought its chips with billions in borrowed money.
There are so many of these dodgy firms with no obvious business model and billions or tens of billions of valuation. Nscale. Celsius Mining. Coreweave. Nebius. Crusoe. SB Energy. Hut 8. Lancium. Iren. Bitdeer. And so on and so forth. With lots of stories like this.
How did I hear of this situation? Well there’s a document floating around Wall Street that describes this set of companies. Short-sellers, and there aren’t that many left, know the best way to understand where the scammers are isn’t to look at a particular industry sector, but to follow the scammers from industry to industry. As a contact put it, “This is like the SPAC craze of 2021. Whatever the hot thing of the day is, that is what the grifters will gravitate to. Shell companies did reverse takeovers with Chinese firms, the biotech bubble, shale, and others. Stock promoters will promote.” In other words, the same people just move from scam to scam, since unethical stock promotion itself is their business.
This whole scene is reminiscent of a specific part of the global financial crisis in 2008, which had a similar dynamic. Subprime lenders like Ameriquest were fly-by-night operations that somehow suddenly grew into multi-billion dollar lenders from 2003 onward. These guys weren’t particularly good at credit analysis, they were simply promoters willing to break the law. As Joe Nocera and Bethany McLean wrote in All the Devils Are Here, some salesmen were using meth or cocaine to lend more money to bad credit risks.
Now, at some level, this situation made no sense. Lending out money that was sure not to be paid back is a bad business. However, there is one way in which losing money deliberately can be quite profitable. If you are charging fees on your loans, and the money you are losing is not yours, then it works out great, at least for the scammer. But how did these operators get access to huge amounts of capital?
Here’s where the analogy to Nvidia comes in. The actual prestigious actors losing other people’s money were companies like Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank, Morgan Stanley, and so forth, who were backstopping these subprime lenders with warehouse lines of credit. This loan was a special kind of facility that let the subprime lenders keep lending, and then send the mortgages they were creating to Wall Street, where they would be processed into mortgage-backed securities.
These securities were then sold to pension funds, who bore losses. Sometimes, as Naked Capitalism noted, Goldman was even shorting these securities, so they wanted bad credit risks. At any rate, the prestige of Wall Street banks masked the obvious graft going on, and the credit tripwires that ordinarily would have slowed a credit cycle. Michael Lewis wrote up a fake version of this story in The Big Short, portraying Wall Street bankers as foolish instead of on the take.
Since we never fixed anything in our credit markets, we keep having such scams, whether the fracking guys, the China reverse mergers, WeWork, crypto and Sam Bankman-Fried, and now, the AI neoclouds. But the scamming isn’t just a result of grifters who want to steal, those kinds of people are always around. It’s that Nvidia, with its immense prestige on Wall Street and access to power in DC, is playing the role of Goldman in 2005. And with the important exception of Elizabeth Warren, there’s not a lot of interest in reimposing any controls on capital.
That’s not good. It’s also not surprising.
All that said, the residual memory of scams and crises and bailouts among the public is real, and impossible to ignore. And in a few weeks, voters may decide they’d like to have Elizabeth Warren holding the gavel running the Senate Banking Committee.
Aside from Nvidia, Firmus was backed by blue chip financial firms Jane Street and Blackstone, and it was set to become Australia’s biggest IPO ever, at $30 billion in valuation. So this failure is a big deal, and it raised eyebrows all over Wall Street.
What happened? It turns out, Firmus executives got a little too greedy. In a normal initial public offering, companies restrict insiders from selling their shares for a time period. There are a few reasons to do so. First, restricting insiders sales is a vote of confidence in the new firm, a statement from executives and early investors that “hey yeah we want your money investors, but we have skin in the game in the form of owning our own stock.” Second, it’s a statement that the stock won’t be met with a lot of immediate selling pressure in the markets, since insiders can’t dump their shares.
This time, however, Firmus set up terms to let them sell immediately, meaning those who were most in-the-know wanted to cash out ASAP. That looks bad, a clear indication that insiders don’t think the company is a valuable going concern but see it as a temporary vehicle for self-enrichment. On a practical level, huge selling pressure would have flooded the market and crushed investors. So money managers, after being harmed with Paramount bonds, SpaceX, and a number of others, refused to bid, and the banks behind Firmus had to pull the offering. It’s one of the biggest flops in recent capital markets history.
What matters here are three things. First, the Firmus IPO was backed by the most prestigious companies in AI. Second, there are many companies like Firmus. And third, the company’s co-founder, Oliver Curtis, has a criminal background in stock manipulation, and yet the banks still went ahead with the offering. Yes, you read that right:
A decade ago, Oliver Curtis was at the lowest point in his life as he was sent to prison for pocketing $1.4 million in insider trading. Now, he is one of the richest people in Australia and preparing for a $6 billion move he sees as his redemption.There’s another co-founder of Firmus, Tim Rosenfeld. He’s not a criminal, but he’s a cousin of Curtis, and his background was running a loss-making lingerie company called Steadmark.
What makes this situation more than a run of the mill scam is the involvement of Nvidia in Firmus and its criminal co-founder. Why would Nvidia get in bed with a crook? Well, Firmus is in an important industry segment that generates demand for Nvidia chips. Firmus is a “neocloud,” which are basically racks of servers funded by venture capitalists and Nvidia to buy chips and rent out computing power. Think of a neocloud as a way to keep debt off the books of the big AI firms. Neoclouds are a corporate shell containing real estate, chips, and financing. Often there are multiple layers of investors, phantom contracts or insider self-dealing, all wrapped in a narrative that they are engaged in “advanced AI” deployment.
This move has tended to work because of the involvement of the most prestigious players in AI. When Nvidia (or Google or Anthropic) backstops or does business with a neocloud, investors think there must be something there. So the neocloud’s valuation goes up a lot. Then that neocloud raises more money at a high valuation, announces more data centers, and orders more chips. That’s more profits for Nvidia, more investments, and so on and so forth.
These investments take place in the private market, with hedge funds and insiders thinking they are getting in at a low valuation. They often don’t even care if there’s a good business model here, since they think someone else will be left holding the bag. The business model never really made much sense, with Firmus starting as a bitcoin miner, before pivoting to AI. But it didn’t matter, because Firmus was about to sell shares to the last set of investors out there - you and me in the public markets. Fortunately, it looks like the public market participants have wisened up, at least in this case.
Firmus, however, is not the only scam in the AI space. Many such neoclouds started as bitcoin miners before jumping to the AI boom, often funded by a prestigious AI firm like Nvidia. And that suggests there’s something systemic going on.
Here are a few other neocloud or adjacent plays: There’s TeraWulf, which has big leasing deals with Anthropic and Google, and whose backers have been allegedly caught engaged in market manipulation. Google bankrolled the company’s shift from bitcoin mining to AI data center. Here’s Grizzly Research:
Our research uncovers that TeraWulf’s third-largest shareholder is an entity controlled by the wife of John O’Rourke, the disgraced CEO of Riot Blockchain, who was charged for his part of a $27 million “Lucrative Market Manipulation Schemes” by the SEC.There’s Sharon AI, a competitor to Firmus, which also has deals with Nvidia and is backed by Oaktree Capital management. Here’s Sharon AI’s owner, who was involved in a mysterious fire [...]
There’s Applied Digital. According to the Bear Cave, this company started by providing staff to production companies, pivoted to plasma technology, then processing potatoes, then to blockchain, and finally to AI with financing from Nvidia in 2024. However, here it gets creepier, since Nvidia sold its stake in 2026, after Applied Digital had bought its chips with billions in borrowed money.
There are so many of these dodgy firms with no obvious business model and billions or tens of billions of valuation. Nscale. Celsius Mining. Coreweave. Nebius. Crusoe. SB Energy. Hut 8. Lancium. Iren. Bitdeer. And so on and so forth. With lots of stories like this.
How did I hear of this situation? Well there’s a document floating around Wall Street that describes this set of companies. Short-sellers, and there aren’t that many left, know the best way to understand where the scammers are isn’t to look at a particular industry sector, but to follow the scammers from industry to industry. As a contact put it, “This is like the SPAC craze of 2021. Whatever the hot thing of the day is, that is what the grifters will gravitate to. Shell companies did reverse takeovers with Chinese firms, the biotech bubble, shale, and others. Stock promoters will promote.” In other words, the same people just move from scam to scam, since unethical stock promotion itself is their business.
This whole scene is reminiscent of a specific part of the global financial crisis in 2008, which had a similar dynamic. Subprime lenders like Ameriquest were fly-by-night operations that somehow suddenly grew into multi-billion dollar lenders from 2003 onward. These guys weren’t particularly good at credit analysis, they were simply promoters willing to break the law. As Joe Nocera and Bethany McLean wrote in All the Devils Are Here, some salesmen were using meth or cocaine to lend more money to bad credit risks.
Now, at some level, this situation made no sense. Lending out money that was sure not to be paid back is a bad business. However, there is one way in which losing money deliberately can be quite profitable. If you are charging fees on your loans, and the money you are losing is not yours, then it works out great, at least for the scammer. But how did these operators get access to huge amounts of capital?
Here’s where the analogy to Nvidia comes in. The actual prestigious actors losing other people’s money were companies like Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank, Morgan Stanley, and so forth, who were backstopping these subprime lenders with warehouse lines of credit. This loan was a special kind of facility that let the subprime lenders keep lending, and then send the mortgages they were creating to Wall Street, where they would be processed into mortgage-backed securities.
These securities were then sold to pension funds, who bore losses. Sometimes, as Naked Capitalism noted, Goldman was even shorting these securities, so they wanted bad credit risks. At any rate, the prestige of Wall Street banks masked the obvious graft going on, and the credit tripwires that ordinarily would have slowed a credit cycle. Michael Lewis wrote up a fake version of this story in The Big Short, portraying Wall Street bankers as foolish instead of on the take.
Since we never fixed anything in our credit markets, we keep having such scams, whether the fracking guys, the China reverse mergers, WeWork, crypto and Sam Bankman-Fried, and now, the AI neoclouds. But the scamming isn’t just a result of grifters who want to steal, those kinds of people are always around. It’s that Nvidia, with its immense prestige on Wall Street and access to power in DC, is playing the role of Goldman in 2005. And with the important exception of Elizabeth Warren, there’s not a lot of interest in reimposing any controls on capital.
That’s not good. It’s also not surprising.
All that said, the residual memory of scams and crises and bailouts among the public is real, and impossible to ignore. And in a few weeks, voters may decide they’d like to have Elizabeth Warren holding the gavel running the Senate Banking Committee.
by Matt Stollar, BIG | Read more:
Images: uncredited
[ed. So much graft. No enforcement in sight. See also: How Expedia Rigs Travel Markets and Raises Your Hotel Prices (BIG).]
UnitedHealth Group’s Corporate Empire Grows
The Center for Health & Democracy has released the latest edition of its Sunlight Report on UnitedHealth Group, revealing 2,807 entities that make up the world’s largest health care conglomerate, including 376 additional entities identified since the report’s initial release in July 2025.
The Sunlight Report is a first-of-its-kind project that uses publicly available regulatory filings and other records to document UnitedHealth’s sprawling and often opaque corporate structure, shedding light on the company’s growing influence over American health care.
The October 2026 update finds that UnitedHealth’s rapid acquisition growth has slowed considerably, although its vast network of insurance companies, physician practices, surgery centers, pharmacies and other health care businesses remains largely intact.
The report highlights UnitedHealth’s $3 billion acquisition of Alegeus Technologies, which administers health savings accounts, flexible spending accounts and other health benefit accounts for more than 26 million people. The deal gives UnitedHealth a greater role in managing patients’ own health care dollars, in addition to the insurance premiums it already collects. All at a time, mind you, when HSAs and other “savings vehicles” are being considered by Republicans in Washington as part of a potential health care plan.
by Wendell Potter, Joey Rettino, and Seth Glickman, Healthcare Un-covered | Read more:
Image: uncredited
[ed. Remember those "death panels" Sarah Palin whined about during debate over Obamacare? Well, they're here, and they're real. What does it mean? Well, definitely no antitrust/monopoly investigations from this administration. But, practically? From the comments:]
*****
The number that stops me isn't 2,807 — it's 26 million. The Alegeus acquisition means the same conglomerate that already collects the premiums, owns the PBM, the pharmacies and the physician practices now also administers the health savings accounts patients are supposed to use to pay their own way. From the pharmacy counter, that completes a circle worth naming: one corporate structure decides what your plan covers, what your pharmacy gets reimbursed, what shows up in your doctor's office, and now how your own health savings dollars flow. I see the seams of that arrangement every day — the prior auth arriving from the same company that owns the prescriber, the reimbursement pressure on the independent pharmacy across the street, the patient who thinks they're choosing when the choices were already made upstream. Consolidation doesn't just reduce competition; it moves the point of accountability so far inward that it's invisible. Reports like this matter precisely because they make the structure visible. Who else has felt the consolidation from the patient's side of the counter?
Thursday, October 15, 2026
Don’t Trust People Who Talk Like This
A few days ago, David Ellison took control of Warner Bros for $111 billion—and is now merging it into Paramount (which he acquired back in 2024). But he needed some help from Dad to make this happen. Tech titan Larry Ellison gave personal guarantees to the tune of $40 billion in order to seal the deal.
As a result, this son of a Silicon Valley CEO is now the most powerful person in Hollywood. So I watched with interest when David Ellison appeared on CNBC to talk about his plans for the future.
The phrase in question is: the X of it all. We have to talk, somebody might say, about the renovating-the-Kennedy-Center of it all, or the Dolly Parton’s nephew of it all, or the Greta Gerwig of it all. The “X” can be replaced with any noun or noun phrase you like: This is the kind of plug-and-play template that’s often called a snowclone, like “X is the new Y” or “the mother of all X’s.” “The X of it all” is the whole gestalt of that thing, all its baggage and implications, in the present context. [...]
This would hardly be the first bit of language to hit the entertainment industry and then spread — partly through that industry’s public mockery of its own smarmy, jargon-spewing suits — to everyone else... This is an industry whose language revolves around story, producing narrative shorthand so familiar that young people on TikTok sometimes describe their own lives in terms of seasons, casts, canon events, lore. Its “executive-ese” may seem gauche, reductive or laughable at first — but if it’s efficient shorthand, it will probably reach you eventually.
As a result, this son of a Silicon Valley CEO is now the most powerful person in Hollywood. So I watched with interest when David Ellison appeared on CNBC to talk about his plans for the future.
I’m still in a state of shock—because he speaks a language that, a few years ago, nobody in the creative community would even have understood.
You might think that Ellison would talk about making great movies or bringing audiences back to theaters—or, at a minimum, creating entertainment for the masses, if not something more artistic.
But that’s not what he has in mind.
Instead Ellison boasts: “We are positioned to win in every single vertical that we operate in….We have the greatest content engine with marquee intellectual properties. You’re immediately getting to scale in streaming” he adds; and then there’s his “incredibly profitable linear portfolio.”
Of course, it wasn’t easy to get to this point. Ellison recalled his previous visit to CNBC. “We launched the hostile on your show,” he tells the host, “so coming full circle today is quite remarkable.”
Have people in the creative world ever talked like this? Did Picasso win in every vertical? Did Shakespeare brag about his “content engine”? Did Beethoven ever achieve a “profitable linear portfolio”?
But those saps were losers by today’s standards. Maybe they should have launched a hostile, instead of wasting so much time on their craft.
I still remember the first time I heard someone describe different vocations and livelihoods as verticals. That was right before the dotcom bubble burst, and I’d been called in to help a web business that, a few weeks later, went broke. The people who spoke in such a cavalier way were soon unemployed.
I felt sorry for them. But I viewed that obfuscating way of speech as a contributor to the problems that brought them down. I still feel that way. I just can’t trust people who talk like this. It’s like they just took a Voight-Kampff test, and failed miserably. I fear I’m talking to replicants, not human beings.
Judging by the news stories out of Hollywood, there are a lot of replicants in the film business nowadays.
On the other hand, I’ve talked to hundreds (or maybe thousands) of artistic people over the years. Against long odds, they somehow manage to make a living in creative pursuits. That is their vertical, so to speak. Sometimes they don’t even want to talk about how creativity happens—it seems almost magical, and the process is very fragile, even for the greatest artists. [...]
You might think that Ellison would talk about making great movies or bringing audiences back to theaters—or, at a minimum, creating entertainment for the masses, if not something more artistic.
But that’s not what he has in mind.
Instead Ellison boasts: “We are positioned to win in every single vertical that we operate in….We have the greatest content engine with marquee intellectual properties. You’re immediately getting to scale in streaming” he adds; and then there’s his “incredibly profitable linear portfolio.”
Of course, it wasn’t easy to get to this point. Ellison recalled his previous visit to CNBC. “We launched the hostile on your show,” he tells the host, “so coming full circle today is quite remarkable.”
Have people in the creative world ever talked like this? Did Picasso win in every vertical? Did Shakespeare brag about his “content engine”? Did Beethoven ever achieve a “profitable linear portfolio”?
But those saps were losers by today’s standards. Maybe they should have launched a hostile, instead of wasting so much time on their craft.
I still remember the first time I heard someone describe different vocations and livelihoods as verticals. That was right before the dotcom bubble burst, and I’d been called in to help a web business that, a few weeks later, went broke. The people who spoke in such a cavalier way were soon unemployed.
I felt sorry for them. But I viewed that obfuscating way of speech as a contributor to the problems that brought them down. I still feel that way. I just can’t trust people who talk like this. It’s like they just took a Voight-Kampff test, and failed miserably. I fear I’m talking to replicants, not human beings.
Judging by the news stories out of Hollywood, there are a lot of replicants in the film business nowadays.
On the other hand, I’ve talked to hundreds (or maybe thousands) of artistic people over the years. Against long odds, they somehow manage to make a living in creative pursuits. That is their vertical, so to speak. Sometimes they don’t even want to talk about how creativity happens—it seems almost magical, and the process is very fragile, even for the greatest artists. [...]
But I can’t just blame David Ellison, because he’s not alone. Business and finance jargon is now the only language spoken among the people who make the final decisions on almost every aesthetic or artistic matter.
So when the head of Warner Bros music gets asked about AI, he describes it as “an incredible value creation opportunity.” Say what? But at least that’s better than the CEO who praised AI’s ability to “eliminate lower-value human capital.”
The brutal reality is that we have reached the stage where artistry can be discussed without any consideration of the artist—who is now an inconvenience in the value chain.
And that value chain is all that matters anymore. [...]
Nowadays the decision-makers have other priorities. They have verticals to dominate. If they could, they would do it with bots instead of artists.
We deserve better stewards for our creative culture.
It’s not clear that we will get them. I’ve predicted that tech will eventually swallow up almost the entire creative economy—and I shudder to see how rapidly that forecast is coming true. It’s gotten so bad that I’ve called for creators and fans to support alternative channels.
We need to create our own parallel ecosystem—and as fast as possible. We’re fortunate that some people and organizations are already working on it.
So when the head of Warner Bros music gets asked about AI, he describes it as “an incredible value creation opportunity.” Say what? But at least that’s better than the CEO who praised AI’s ability to “eliminate lower-value human capital.”
The brutal reality is that we have reached the stage where artistry can be discussed without any consideration of the artist—who is now an inconvenience in the value chain.
And that value chain is all that matters anymore. [...]
Nowadays the decision-makers have other priorities. They have verticals to dominate. If they could, they would do it with bots instead of artists.
We deserve better stewards for our creative culture.
It’s not clear that we will get them. I’ve predicted that tech will eventually swallow up almost the entire creative economy—and I shudder to see how rapidly that forecast is coming true. It’s gotten so bad that I’ve called for creators and fans to support alternative channels.
We need to create our own parallel ecosystem—and as fast as possible. We’re fortunate that some people and organizations are already working on it.
by Ted Gioia, Honest Broker | Read more:
Image: Picasso, Three Musicians[ed. See also: When Did Everyone Start Talking Like a Hollywood Windbag? (NYT):]
***
There’s a little phrase that has been creeping further into American speech over the past decade. That’s how it seems, anyway, based on the ever-growing number of complaints about its use. Online, people grumble that it’s all over podcasts, movie podcasts in particular...The phrase in question is: the X of it all. We have to talk, somebody might say, about the renovating-the-Kennedy-Center of it all, or the Dolly Parton’s nephew of it all, or the Greta Gerwig of it all. The “X” can be replaced with any noun or noun phrase you like: This is the kind of plug-and-play template that’s often called a snowclone, like “X is the new Y” or “the mother of all X’s.” “The X of it all” is the whole gestalt of that thing, all its baggage and implications, in the present context. [...]
This would hardly be the first bit of language to hit the entertainment industry and then spread — partly through that industry’s public mockery of its own smarmy, jargon-spewing suits — to everyone else... This is an industry whose language revolves around story, producing narrative shorthand so familiar that young people on TikTok sometimes describe their own lives in terms of seasons, casts, canon events, lore. Its “executive-ese” may seem gauche, reductive or laughable at first — but if it’s efficient shorthand, it will probably reach you eventually.
via:
[ed. Hard to tell from the backward angle. One of my all-time favorite courses.]
Wednesday, October 14, 2026
What if Political Polarization Is Not the Disease but the Cure?
With President Trump in the White House, rising authoritarianism has prompted a battle royal within academia over polarization, pitting those who argue that it undermines democracy against those who see it as a tool to motivate defenders of democracy.
This debate in the rarefied atmosphere of elite academia is virtually certain to have real-world consequences three weeks from now, as Democrats are heavy favorites to take control of the House and have something like a 50-50 shot of turning the Senate. In power, they will have to decide how tough and how aggressive to be in pushing back against the Trump administration.
Lilliana Mason, a political scientist at Johns Hopkins University and the author of the groundbreaking 2018 book “Uncivil Agreement,” is a prime exemplar of this shift.
In the book, Mason described how in recent decades, on both the American right and left, voters’ multiple social identities — race, religion, ideology, cultural outlook and party affiliation — increasingly aligned. The result: Elections became matters of political life-or-death struggles as the parties turned into antagonistic social groups.
In an article published in The Journal of Democracy this month, “Polarization Is Not the Problem,” Mason wrote:
In a paper published in July, “It’s Not Polarization; It’s the Radicalization of the Political Right,” Petter Törnberg, associate professor of computational social science at the University of Amsterdam, argued:
These controversies over polarization are infused with high levels of a kind of moral charge — is this good or bad? — that Grossmann argues grow out of the “widespread concern among scholars about democratic backsliding in the United States. There is also perennial concern about the tendency to treat it as an outcome of polarization, or colloquially, to ‘both sides’ the discussion of that backsliding when Donald Trump is central instigator.”
To be more concrete, Grossmann continued, “We have just lived through the consequences of the Democratic reaction to the first Trump administration, which included moving leftward on immigration and racial injustice in response to Trump’s overreach. But the policy and rhetorical countertrends on these issues under Biden — however morally justified — contributed to Trump’s return.”
Marc Hetherington, a political scientist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, has adopted an approach akin to — although certainly different from — Mason’s, arguing that well before Trump took command of the Republican Party,
Much of academia’s polarization narrative creates a false picture of American society, Zimmer argued:
While Zimmer points the finger of blame at the rising strength of the radical right, Gregory Conti, a political scientist at Princeton, looks in the opposite direction.
In an Oct. 6 essay, “How ‘Woke 1’ Radicalized the GOP,” Conti and Aaron Sibarium, a staff writer at The Washington Free Beacon, an online conservative news site, wrote:
The Republican Party is dominated by a president beneath contempt who reigns over a collection of spineless sycophants.
In the face of this opposition, the Democratic Party has repeatedly failed to stand tall, all too willing to succumb to left-wing orthodoxies that alienate the average voter.
This debate in the rarefied atmosphere of elite academia is virtually certain to have real-world consequences three weeks from now, as Democrats are heavy favorites to take control of the House and have something like a 50-50 shot of turning the Senate. In power, they will have to decide how tough and how aggressive to be in pushing back against the Trump administration.
In the book, Mason described how in recent decades, on both the American right and left, voters’ multiple social identities — race, religion, ideology, cultural outlook and party affiliation — increasingly aligned. The result: Elections became matters of political life-or-death struggles as the parties turned into antagonistic social groups.
In an article published in The Journal of Democracy this month, “Polarization Is Not the Problem,” Mason wrote:
Partisan polarization is not the greatest threat to U.S. democracy, but a symptom of a deeper struggle over who belongs and deserves equal rights.
Rapid gains by racial minorities, women and L.G.B.T.Q. citizens have produced an ethnonationalist backlash whose adherents now wield disproportionate power through the Republican Party. This conflict has intensified partisan animosity and moral disengagement, but a “both sides” diagnosis obscures the asymmetry between a faction seeking to reverse social progress and those resisting it.
“Polarization,” Mason then contended, with an artful turn of phrase,
is therefore less the disease than democracy’s immune response to an unpopular, antidemocratic movement.
Suppressing that response in the name of civility would only strengthen the movement and imperil pluralistic self-government. The United States can still become its most inclusive democracy, but only if leaders defend equal rights and voters hold accountable those who will not.
Mason is not alone in her assessment.
In a paper published in July, “It’s Not Polarization; It’s the Radicalization of the Political Right,” Petter Törnberg, associate professor of computational social science at the University of Amsterdam, argued:
Neutrality is not borne out by the empirical evidence. Across advanced democracies, crisis is resulting not from mutual divergence but from the one-sided transformation of the political right: the mainstreaming of authoritarian rhetoric, the normalization of conspiracy and hate as political strategies, and the systematic dismantling of institutional guardrails.
Törnberg makes the case that claims of objectivity and neutrality are themselves problematic. “Conceptual choices are not politically neutral,” he wrote. “Casting authoritarian threats as mutual breaches of etiquette is not simply a misdiagnosis: It is an abdication of responsibility.” [...]
The ivory tower debate over polarization is soon likely to become front-page news. Matt Grossmann, a political scientist at Michigan State, wrote by email: “Democrats are likely to regain power in Congress and states. If they confuse the current thermostatic liberal trends in public opinion as an opportunity for extreme governance, they are likely to face another backlash.”
These controversies over polarization are infused with high levels of a kind of moral charge — is this good or bad? — that Grossmann argues grow out of the “widespread concern among scholars about democratic backsliding in the United States. There is also perennial concern about the tendency to treat it as an outcome of polarization, or colloquially, to ‘both sides’ the discussion of that backsliding when Donald Trump is central instigator.”
To be more concrete, Grossmann continued, “We have just lived through the consequences of the Democratic reaction to the first Trump administration, which included moving leftward on immigration and racial injustice in response to Trump’s overreach. But the policy and rhetorical countertrends on these issues under Biden — however morally justified — contributed to Trump’s return.”
Marc Hetherington, a political scientist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, has adopted an approach akin to — although certainly different from — Mason’s, arguing that well before Trump took command of the Republican Party,
polarization resulted from the dominant disagreement between Democrats and Republicans shifting from the anodyne “how much should government do” to the visceral “how much racial, social and cultural change should the U.S. engage in.”
It results from disagreements about the rights revolutions — for African Americans, women, L.G.B.T.Q. folks — taking center stage in the conflict between parties. [...]
Thomas Zimmer, a historian at Georgetown, is an outspoken supporter of Mason’s thesis. “I am fully aligned with Lilliana Mason on this,” he said. “In fact, I have been offering a similar critique of what I would call the ‘polarization narrative’ for years.”
“Once polarization is adopted as an overarching diagnosis, as a governing historical and political paradigm,” Zimmer wrote by email, “it obscures not only what the key challenge to achieving a pluralistic democracy is — the anti-democratic radicalization of the right — but also transports a misleading idea of America’s recent past and how we got to where we are now.”
“Once polarization is adopted as an overarching diagnosis, as a governing historical and political paradigm,” Zimmer wrote by email, “it obscures not only what the key challenge to achieving a pluralistic democracy is — the anti-democratic radicalization of the right — but also transports a misleading idea of America’s recent past and how we got to where we are now.”
Much of academia’s polarization narrative creates a false picture of American society, Zimmer argued:
We tend to tell a story of the American polity in decline, almost always casting the “consensus” of the postwar era in a problematically favorable light, mythologizing it as a moment of unity and order.
And such a declinist tale often comes with a hefty dose of nostalgia for that long-lost ”consensus,” something the right has successfully weaponized. But political consensus, to the extent it ever existed, was usually confined to white male elites and based on a cross-partisan accord to leave a discriminatory social order intact and deny marginalized groups equal representation and civil rights.
Put differently, he continued, “it wasn’t a coincidence that polarization started when one party broke with the white elite consensus and supported — albeit reluctantly — the civil rights revolution of the 1960s. In many ways, polarization is the price U.S. society has had to pay for real progress toward multiracial pluralism.”
While Zimmer points the finger of blame at the rising strength of the radical right, Gregory Conti, a political scientist at Princeton, looks in the opposite direction.
In an Oct. 6 essay, “How ‘Woke 1’ Radicalized the GOP,” Conti and Aaron Sibarium, a staff writer at The Washington Free Beacon, an online conservative news site, wrote:
The radicalism of Trump II is better understood as a response to Peak Woke than as a continuation of a coherent ideology already in place during Trump’s rise. Despite his unorthodox and boundary-pushing rhetoric, in his first term Trump largely respected the cultural consensus of the Obama years, poking at its edges but leaving the most important assumptions intact.
It was wokeness, not Trump, that dissolved that consensus. If liberals had clamped down on their woke flank, many of their preferred policies would likely still be in place, and Trump’s second term (on the assumption that there was one) would have been more moderate in many respects.
Fortunately for my career as an analyst, the onslaught of these scholarly conflicts is unrelenting. [...]
So does your vaunted analyst have a take? I think they are all right.
The Republican Party is dominated by a president beneath contempt who reigns over a collection of spineless sycophants.
In the face of this opposition, the Democratic Party has repeatedly failed to stand tall, all too willing to succumb to left-wing orthodoxies that alienate the average voter.
by Thomas B. Edsall, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Aleksey Kondratyev for The New York Times
Tuesday, October 13, 2026
How a 'Hardwired Pause' on AI Development Might Work
If the world’s government and AI leaders ever agree to pause frontier AI training, is an international pact really feasible? How would it be implemented, coordinated and monitored?
In a first-of-its-kind academic study released today (Friday, Oct. 9), a multidisciplinary team of 26 researchers maps out a path toward an international, mutually verified pause of frontier AI training of at least 10 years. The team — which includes professors Barry Eichengreen and Stuart Russell from UC Berkeley and faculty from other top institutions, including Princeton, Stanford, Harvard and Oxford — combines expertise in computer science, economics, history, international relations, and Chinese and American politics with practical experience in diplomacy and government.
The researchers focus primarily on a plan that halts the production of AI training chips and replaces them over time with specialized “inference-only” chips, which serve fast, efficient inference on existing AI models but are not practically useful for training new models. Such a plan would permit the continued use of currently available AI products, while preventing new AI models from overwhelming states with social or economic disruption or threats to their national security. They also suggest verification measures that would allow world leaders to assure nervous rivals that they are upholding the pause agreement.
“We consider a scenario in which world leaders want to pause if they can be confident that others are pausing or that defections would be detected quickly enough,” writes co-organizer Wesley Holliday, a UC Berkeley philosophy professor, in the study.
Frontier AI training refers to the development of ever more powerful AI models. In a hardwired pause of such training, societies could control how powerful these models are allowed to get. If they judge that certain models can offer economic and scientific benefits, a hardwired pause could give them a way to reap the benefits before they become powerful enough to pose catastrophic risks, thus avoiding the dangers of an uncontrolled AI race.
The rapid progress of frontier AI systems, combined with leading AI companies’ recent struggles to prevent their models from escaping containment and committing cybercrimes, has prompted widespread calls for a global pause until these systems can be built safely and controllably. For strategic reasons, however, a long-term pause could be difficult to arrange even if parties agree that it would be in their interests: without effective verification measures, rival companies or nations may fear that others will defect and thereby put them at a commercial or geopolitical disadvantage.
But the Working Group on AI Pause Feasibility’s detailed, 200-page report addresses such roadblocks with a framework for mutual verification.
Stopping, replacing, retiring AI training chips is key
Frontier AI training requires AI chips, which states can govern. The supply chain for AI chips is highly concentrated with several chokepoints, bolstering governments’ ability to enforce rules on their production.
“Bypassing existing supply chains is extraordinarily difficult,” writes study co-organizer Will Fithian, UC Berkeley associate professor of statistics. “An international prohibition on frontier AI training can take advantage of this fact about the hardware needed for AI training.”
The report proposes halting the production of AI training chips, which are needed to develop more powerful AI models. Over time, most or all of the pre-pause stock of such chips would be phased out. They would be replaced by inference-only AI chips, which are capable of fast, energy-efficient AI inference on approved models but are not practical for training new frontier AI models — even if stolen or seized — due to constraints hardwired into the chips.
During the chip replacement process, other verification measures would prevent residual training-capable AI chips from being used for frontier AI training.
Fithian and Holliday add that technologies needed for inference-only AI chips already are being developed for purely economic reasons, but that their economic attractiveness is currently limited by the rapid turnover of new models. If the training of new frontier models were prohibited, a hardwired pause would increase the economic advantages of these specialized chips and spur innovation in the development of other inference-only chips.
Other highlights of the report include:
“Coordination is possible if the decision makers care enough about the future,” the authors write, “not just immediate payoffs, and if monitoring is adequate to support credible consequences for defections.”
[ed. Executive Summary here. Full Report here. Stop feeding the beast. Sounds reasonable until you consider a couple of constraints: like, tanking the economy (AI spending is the biggest single factor propping it up); and trillion dollar IPOs hanging in the balance (who's failure could also produce a cascade of financial failures).]
In a first-of-its-kind academic study released today (Friday, Oct. 9), a multidisciplinary team of 26 researchers maps out a path toward an international, mutually verified pause of frontier AI training of at least 10 years. The team — which includes professors Barry Eichengreen and Stuart Russell from UC Berkeley and faculty from other top institutions, including Princeton, Stanford, Harvard and Oxford — combines expertise in computer science, economics, history, international relations, and Chinese and American politics with practical experience in diplomacy and government.
“We consider a scenario in which world leaders want to pause if they can be confident that others are pausing or that defections would be detected quickly enough,” writes co-organizer Wesley Holliday, a UC Berkeley philosophy professor, in the study.
Frontier AI training refers to the development of ever more powerful AI models. In a hardwired pause of such training, societies could control how powerful these models are allowed to get. If they judge that certain models can offer economic and scientific benefits, a hardwired pause could give them a way to reap the benefits before they become powerful enough to pose catastrophic risks, thus avoiding the dangers of an uncontrolled AI race.
The rapid progress of frontier AI systems, combined with leading AI companies’ recent struggles to prevent their models from escaping containment and committing cybercrimes, has prompted widespread calls for a global pause until these systems can be built safely and controllably. For strategic reasons, however, a long-term pause could be difficult to arrange even if parties agree that it would be in their interests: without effective verification measures, rival companies or nations may fear that others will defect and thereby put them at a commercial or geopolitical disadvantage.
But the Working Group on AI Pause Feasibility’s detailed, 200-page report addresses such roadblocks with a framework for mutual verification.
Stopping, replacing, retiring AI training chips is key
Frontier AI training requires AI chips, which states can govern. The supply chain for AI chips is highly concentrated with several chokepoints, bolstering governments’ ability to enforce rules on their production.
“Bypassing existing supply chains is extraordinarily difficult,” writes study co-organizer Will Fithian, UC Berkeley associate professor of statistics. “An international prohibition on frontier AI training can take advantage of this fact about the hardware needed for AI training.”
The report proposes halting the production of AI training chips, which are needed to develop more powerful AI models. Over time, most or all of the pre-pause stock of such chips would be phased out. They would be replaced by inference-only AI chips, which are capable of fast, energy-efficient AI inference on approved models but are not practical for training new frontier AI models — even if stolen or seized — due to constraints hardwired into the chips.
During the chip replacement process, other verification measures would prevent residual training-capable AI chips from being used for frontier AI training.
Fithian and Holliday add that technologies needed for inference-only AI chips already are being developed for purely economic reasons, but that their economic attractiveness is currently limited by the rapid turnover of new models. If the training of new frontier models were prohibited, a hardwired pause would increase the economic advantages of these specialized chips and spur innovation in the development of other inference-only chips.
Other highlights of the report include:
- How a hardwired pause could be made politically palatable by offering ways to pursue AI-powered scientific and medical research, retain strategic insurance against being left behind in the AI race by defecting states, and pass on the economic benefits of cheaper inference to consumers.
- The new chips’ reduced resource demands, which would decrease their environmental impact and improve frictions in the U.S. between data center operators and local communities.
- How a hardwired pause safeguards against both covert evasion — when a state secretly trains new frontier models while ostensibly adhering to verification procedures — and overt breakout — when a state openly abrogates the pause in an attempt to build a much more powerful frontier model before other states could respond.
“Coordination is possible if the decision makers care enough about the future,” the authors write, “not just immediate payoffs, and if monitoring is adequate to support credible consequences for defections.”
by Sarah Fullerton, UC Berkeley News | Read more:
Image: Yuki Iwamura/AP[ed. Executive Summary here. Full Report here. Stop feeding the beast. Sounds reasonable until you consider a couple of constraints: like, tanking the economy (AI spending is the biggest single factor propping it up); and trillion dollar IPOs hanging in the balance (who's failure could also produce a cascade of financial failures).]
Monday, October 12, 2026
Trump's Boomer-Palooza
It’s nearly 9 p.m. inside Dallas’s American Airlines Center, and Trump supporters are waving their cowboy hats in the air. They are slowly rocking from side to side as Lee Greenwood belts out “God Bless the USA” to the party faithful. The mood is triumphant, even euphoric, particularly once the president enters stage left. He is about to announce the dawn of a new golden age, but there’s a catch: “You know what happens if you don’t vote?” he asks. “You go to hell. You know that, okay? You go to hell, and I don’t want that to happen to you.”
This week’s GOP midterm convention — the first of its kind in more than 40 years — was supposed to be the big reset for a party hemorrhaging public support amid an unpopular war, rising fuel prices, and a broader cost-of-living crisis. Against this grim backdrop, the gathering, which became known as Trumpapalooza, was a chance for the party to regroup, fire up the base, and wrest back control of a narrative that could derail its electoral hopes in November.
Nearly everyone I spoke to at the convention acknowledged that a generational divide inside the party was emerging. Some dismissed it as a youthful rebellion, while others offered a bleaker diagnosis. They argued that Trump was the final string in the Republican bow, and once that snapped, there was no coming back. He was supposed to be the galvanizing force around which the entire movement was built. Now, he had become the very thing pulling it apart.
Conventions are rarely known for attracting the young and hip. And Trumpapalooza was no different. Inside this jumbo-sized arena, where every doorway and entrance was festooned with some kind of Trump poster, it looked more like a Caribbean cruise holiday than a political convention. The vast majority of the crowd were retirees, dressed head to toe in their finest MAGA regalia: sequin jackets with “DJT” emblazoned on the back, star-spangled cowboy boots, and T-shirts with Trump’s Georgia mugshot on the front. There was no alcohol, but spirits were so high I thought something had been slipped into their drinks. It was like Glastonbury for boomercons.
On both days, the stadium was slow to fill and never reached full capacity. It did, however, grow lively as familiar faces took to the stage. Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas got one of the biggest cheers of the convention when he declared that “Sharia law has no place in America” — a point that was echoed, again and again, by other speakers. Most focused on the twin threat of Islamo-communism, punctuated by a recorded message from Trump intoning, “America must never be a communist country,” between each speech.
It was like a form of exposure therapy, repeated so many times that it felt more like a mantra than a message. Older attendees lapped it up, but the few young conservatives I spoke to were less impressed. “So far, all I’ve heard is communism, communism, communism, and that Iran must never have a nuclear weapon,” said one. “It’s like their brains have broken.” Another told me that he wasn’t even sure why he came. [...]
“Guys like James Fishback and Nick Fuentes are guys we have to consider,” Steve Bannon, Trump’s former chief adviser, tells me. “Young people are telling older people that they don’t want to hear about legal immigration anymore because legal immigrants are stealing their jobs. They’re not hearing about mass deportations anymore, either. Young people are feeling the brunt of that. They don’t care about the Greater Israel project.”
This may be an extreme position, but it reflects the anti-establishment sentiment coursing through the young Right and Left. Both camps share a deep hostility toward the party establishment and a desire for a far more radical policy program. One side wants no borders. The other wants a sealed border. One wants to abolish ICE. The other wants to deport millions. One wants to abolish the Senate. The other wants a CEO-monarch. The only point on which the two sides converge is Israel.
I asked Sean Spicer, Trump’s former press secretary, if he is concerned by this dynamic. He agreed that young voters had become more populist in the last few years, but it did not pose a major problem for the GOP. “Young voters are very transactional, and they’re not as motivated as seniors,” he says. “If they’re not going to vote Republican, I’d rather they just don’t vote. That’s not great, but it’s not the worst scenario.” [...]
A little more than 40 years ago, V.S. Naipaul went to the Republican National Convention, also in Dallas. He bemoaned the quality of speeches, complaining that all contained “the same tone, the same personality (or absence of it), the same language: unallusive, cleansed, sterile; nerveless and dead; computer language, programmed sometimes to rise to passion, but getting no higher than copywriter’s glib,” he wrote. “As though, at the heart of this great, man-magnifying occasion, there was a hollow, a vacancy.”
Today, that vacancy feels deeper than ever. As one young attendee succinctly put it to me: “It’s over, but we’re not allowed to say it’s over.”
But the very fact that I am mentioning this is what Trump wants people to do, because he doesn’t want people to talk about the war or inflation, or lots of other things. And I think that this is going to be a real contest between whether it’s a normal midterm election, where Democrats can focus the election on Trump and his record. Which, as Charlie Cook says — the great political analyst, who’s very careful in what he says — a lot of Trump voters think they were victims of a bait-and-switch, given Trump’s priorities, when they voted for him in the presidential race.
And Trump goes: Here’s $5,000, and by the way, the Democrats are communists, and you can’t possibly elect them.
He’s almost daring voters to judge him on this record, frankly, of promises he has not kept. But he seems afraid, when he essentially has to offer — he’s reduced to offering people money: I’ll give you five grand apiece, American adults, if the Republicans win.
In essence, it’s sort of being reduced to the offer of a bribe. If we’ve learned something about Trump, though, it’s that whatever happens in November, he’s going to declare victory. If the Republicans do better than expected, he’ll say, probably correctly, that it was because of him. It’s because of his coattails, because he asked people to vote as if he is on the ballot himself. If the Republicans get spanked, it’ll be because, when he’s not on the ballot, people just aren’t excited — because it’s really all about him. He’s always been able to separate his brand from that of the party. Trump is very good at declaring victory even when he loses — sometimes especially when he loses.
This week’s GOP midterm convention — the first of its kind in more than 40 years — was supposed to be the big reset for a party hemorrhaging public support amid an unpopular war, rising fuel prices, and a broader cost-of-living crisis. Against this grim backdrop, the gathering, which became known as Trumpapalooza, was a chance for the party to regroup, fire up the base, and wrest back control of a narrative that could derail its electoral hopes in November.
It ended with the threat of eternal damnation (albeit a jokey one). [...]
Conventions are rarely known for attracting the young and hip. And Trumpapalooza was no different. Inside this jumbo-sized arena, where every doorway and entrance was festooned with some kind of Trump poster, it looked more like a Caribbean cruise holiday than a political convention. The vast majority of the crowd were retirees, dressed head to toe in their finest MAGA regalia: sequin jackets with “DJT” emblazoned on the back, star-spangled cowboy boots, and T-shirts with Trump’s Georgia mugshot on the front. There was no alcohol, but spirits were so high I thought something had been slipped into their drinks. It was like Glastonbury for boomercons.
On both days, the stadium was slow to fill and never reached full capacity. It did, however, grow lively as familiar faces took to the stage. Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas got one of the biggest cheers of the convention when he declared that “Sharia law has no place in America” — a point that was echoed, again and again, by other speakers. Most focused on the twin threat of Islamo-communism, punctuated by a recorded message from Trump intoning, “America must never be a communist country,” between each speech.
It was like a form of exposure therapy, repeated so many times that it felt more like a mantra than a message. Older attendees lapped it up, but the few young conservatives I spoke to were less impressed. “So far, all I’ve heard is communism, communism, communism, and that Iran must never have a nuclear weapon,” said one. “It’s like their brains have broken.” Another told me that he wasn’t even sure why he came. [...]
“Guys like James Fishback and Nick Fuentes are guys we have to consider,” Steve Bannon, Trump’s former chief adviser, tells me. “Young people are telling older people that they don’t want to hear about legal immigration anymore because legal immigrants are stealing their jobs. They’re not hearing about mass deportations anymore, either. Young people are feeling the brunt of that. They don’t care about the Greater Israel project.”
This may be an extreme position, but it reflects the anti-establishment sentiment coursing through the young Right and Left. Both camps share a deep hostility toward the party establishment and a desire for a far more radical policy program. One side wants no borders. The other wants a sealed border. One wants to abolish ICE. The other wants to deport millions. One wants to abolish the Senate. The other wants a CEO-monarch. The only point on which the two sides converge is Israel.
I asked Sean Spicer, Trump’s former press secretary, if he is concerned by this dynamic. He agreed that young voters had become more populist in the last few years, but it did not pose a major problem for the GOP. “Young voters are very transactional, and they’re not as motivated as seniors,” he says. “If they’re not going to vote Republican, I’d rather they just don’t vote. That’s not great, but it’s not the worst scenario.” [...]
A little more than 40 years ago, V.S. Naipaul went to the Republican National Convention, also in Dallas. He bemoaned the quality of speeches, complaining that all contained “the same tone, the same personality (or absence of it), the same language: unallusive, cleansed, sterile; nerveless and dead; computer language, programmed sometimes to rise to passion, but getting no higher than copywriter’s glib,” he wrote. “As though, at the heart of this great, man-magnifying occasion, there was a hollow, a vacancy.”
Today, that vacancy feels deeper than ever. As one young attendee succinctly put it to me: “It’s over, but we’re not allowed to say it’s over.”
by James Billout, Unherd | Read more:
Image: Getty
[ed. Having observed Trump for over 60 years, his MO is pretty consistent: he's either lying, projecting, scamming, or suing - frequently all at once. Not to mention the pathological need for self-promotion. How anyone who experienced his first term and said "yeah, we need more of that" is beyond comprehension. Tariffs, DOGE, Greenland, Canada, Venezuela, Iran, fishing boat murders, ICE murders and kidnappings, public and cultural facilities screw-ups, Epstein, Putin, Strait of Hormuz oil, rising inflation, election interference, Big Beautiful tax breaks for the wealthy, new Medicaid and Medicare restrictions, media exiles, crytocurrency scams, convicted felon pardons. And more (a free jet in every pot)? All facilitated by a Cabinet of boot-licking, incompetent sycophants. Do his supporters really want more of this, by a president who only cares about half the country? Guess so. What a poltical philosophy to live by (such as it is). See also: Our Increasingly Insecure President (NYT):]
Image: Getty
[ed. Having observed Trump for over 60 years, his MO is pretty consistent: he's either lying, projecting, scamming, or suing - frequently all at once. Not to mention the pathological need for self-promotion. How anyone who experienced his first term and said "yeah, we need more of that" is beyond comprehension. Tariffs, DOGE, Greenland, Canada, Venezuela, Iran, fishing boat murders, ICE murders and kidnappings, public and cultural facilities screw-ups, Epstein, Putin, Strait of Hormuz oil, rising inflation, election interference, Big Beautiful tax breaks for the wealthy, new Medicaid and Medicare restrictions, media exiles, crytocurrency scams, convicted felon pardons. And more (a free jet in every pot)? All facilitated by a Cabinet of boot-licking, incompetent sycophants. Do his supporters really want more of this, by a president who only cares about half the country? Guess so. What a poltical philosophy to live by (such as it is). See also: Our Increasingly Insecure President (NYT):]
***
At least the old political machines used to give you five bucks if you voted for the machine ticket; Trump is giving voters a $5,000 I.O.U., for this money he says he’s going to give them. And this, of course, from a guy who is famous for not paying his debts.But the very fact that I am mentioning this is what Trump wants people to do, because he doesn’t want people to talk about the war or inflation, or lots of other things. And I think that this is going to be a real contest between whether it’s a normal midterm election, where Democrats can focus the election on Trump and his record. Which, as Charlie Cook says — the great political analyst, who’s very careful in what he says — a lot of Trump voters think they were victims of a bait-and-switch, given Trump’s priorities, when they voted for him in the presidential race.
And Trump goes: Here’s $5,000, and by the way, the Democrats are communists, and you can’t possibly elect them.
He’s almost daring voters to judge him on this record, frankly, of promises he has not kept. But he seems afraid, when he essentially has to offer — he’s reduced to offering people money: I’ll give you five grand apiece, American adults, if the Republicans win.
In essence, it’s sort of being reduced to the offer of a bribe. If we’ve learned something about Trump, though, it’s that whatever happens in November, he’s going to declare victory. If the Republicans do better than expected, he’ll say, probably correctly, that it was because of him. It’s because of his coattails, because he asked people to vote as if he is on the ballot himself. If the Republicans get spanked, it’ll be because, when he’s not on the ballot, people just aren’t excited — because it’s really all about him. He’s always been able to separate his brand from that of the party. Trump is very good at declaring victory even when he loses — sometimes especially when he loses.
Inside Larry Ellison's Wide Web of Power, Money and Politics
PROLOGUE: THE ISLAND
The first sign was the orange Corvette.
In the early days of July, the residents of Lanai started seeing a C8 Stingray the color of a traffic cone tearing along the island’s switchback roads. Then other signals came. The clerk working the cigarette counter at the Pine Isle Market said her nephew, a private chef, had flown in and had been shopping for a big group.
At the Four Seasons down in Manele, the island’s pharmacist Kert Shuster was leaving brunch at Nobu when he saw a security detail he recognized moving through the lobby. It’d been a while, but Shuster knew—he’d just missed Larry Ellison.
A few years had passed, it seemed, since the man who owns all but a sliver of the Hawaiian island nine miles west of Maui had last set foot there. Now Ellison and his extended family were staying in a new compound above Manele’s steep volcanic shoreline. The cluster of houses was built by Japanese carpenters whom Ellison had once brought in and boarded in private barracks up-island.
For Lanai’s 3,000 regular residents, actually seeing Ellison is rare. His presence is more typically sensed—like a change in air pressure.
“I noticed the salad bar was really good that day,” Shuster tells me. “That’s what it’s like when Larry’s back. People step up. Things just get better.”
For the past 40 years, the people of Lanai have lived at the pleasure of one billionaire or another. Before Ellison there was David Murdock, a real estate magnate who took control of the island in 1985, when it was still a pineapple plantation. Murdock was a visible ruler who’d make his rounds in the local stores, attend community meetings, and give employees he had fired 30 minutes’ notice before sending them off in a helicopter. But Lanai had been a money pit for him, and the 2008 crash was the final straw. In 2012, he sold it to Ellison for a reported $300 million.
If Murdock ran the island like the plantation owner he was, Ellison runs it like a distant god. He points, and an amenity appears.
His first move was refurbishing the community pool that Murdock had closed. He answered the housing shortage with the Hokuao development, where the homes are pastel-colored and stamped everywhere with the touch of their benefactor. Each has a Tesla solar roof, a Big Green Egg in the yard, two Japanese Toto toilets, and interiors painted a custom color called Ellison White. (It’s a Benjamin Moore white base with a shot of oxide yellow and a half shot of black, your choice for sheen may vary.) Shuster, who lives in Hokuao, once told Ellison how much he loved the place. “I feel like I moved into your house,” he had said.
“Good,” his host responded. “I wanted to make it like a place that even I could live in.”
Ellison owns Lanai’s only gas station, where a sign reminds customers they’re paying “the Lowest Prices in Hawaii.” And he upgraded the movie theater that today bills itself as being “the crown jewel of theater experiences in Hawai‘i.” In July it was showing Supergirl, which was produced by Warner Bros., the movie studio Ellison, along with his son, will soon control.
“Sigourney Weaver lives here part-time, and she says that this is the most beautiful theater in the world,” Gail Allen, a longtime Lanai resident, tells me. “It serves truffle-oil popcorn,” she adds.
The sense is that life is pretty good on the island since Ellison bought it. Or at least could be worse. “We could have become Molokai,” says Alberta de Jetley, another longtime resident who ran the island’s newspaper, Lanai Today, before selling it to Ellison.
At a picnic table outside Richard’s Market, the other grocery store on Lanai (this one Ellison owns), a handful of residents hold a coffee klatch de Jetley calls the Laugh Group. That morning, beneath overcast skies, the Laugh Group was discussing the island’s recently arrived proprietor.
One member, Mari Lynn Di Lullo, brought up a time she saw a Tesla straddling two stalls in a parking lot. “Jeez, look at the way they parked,” she’d uttered to members of a security detail loitering nearby. “If you didn’t know better, you would think he owned the place.”
Just then the owner of the car—and everything else—appeared, laughing.
“He’s not pretentious,” Di Lullo told her coffee group. “He’s low on the radar.”
The radar. Interesting choice of words about a man who has made a case for a mass AI-enabled surveillance system.
That afternoon a woman came through the grocery checkout line wearing a Sensei Farms sweatshirt. The company is one of Ellison’s island projects: a hydroponic greenhouse concept meant to be the Tesla of agriculture. Eight years in and several hundred million dollars later, Sensei Farms describes itself as “a thought leader in greenhouse-grown produce.” It has an endcap with boxed salad mixes at the island’s grocery stores.
I introduced myself to the woman and asked what she did for the farm. She smiled.
“They said there would be a journalist on the island today,” the employee told me before starting to walk away. “They warned us about you in our morning meeting.”
I hadn’t told anyone at Sensei Farms I was coming.
Ellison’s newest gift to Lanai is at the entrance to the Four Seasons. In a man-made lagoon surrounded by fake lava rock stands a monumental bronze he commissioned from British artist Damien Hirst. It shows a crew of Polynesian voyagers in an outrigger canoe flung skyward on a cresting wave that up close is revealed to be not water but a knot of sea monsters. A shark bursts through the swell, its mouth open wide enough to take the canoe whole. A mo‘o, the lizard spirit of Hawaiian water, coils below the hull. Amidships, a chief in a feathered cape clutches the ankle of another paddler who is facing away. A loose paddle, some cargo, and a few bronze flowers slide down a wave. And above all of it, from something beneath the surface, hang two giant octopus arms with suckers the size of dinner plates, muscular and curled and about to crash down on everyone.
It’s titled Overcoming Adversity.
PART I: THE CEPHALOPOD
Ellison has long been fixated on the octopus. Cephalopod Corp is what he named the corporate entity atop his private investments. He has another company called Octopus Holdings LP, which, with its general partner Tentacle Corp, put up the money behind Lanai. His venture capital firm that over the years has backed Netsuite, Theranos, and Sensei Farms is called Tako Ventures, tako being the Japanese word for octopus. In many of the villas he built on Lanai hang ukiyo-e prints, many with a tako.
For years it was Ellison’s quiet way to talk about himself.
“His joke is he is the octopus,” says a former executive who worked closely with Ellison. This person was one of several dozen sources I spoke to for this story, most under the condition of anonymity to be able to discuss sensitive matters.
“He loves being the éminence grise. He loves the notion that he’s so powerful, there’s nothing he can’t get into.”
The joke has become a fact in full view. At 82, the last of the founding moguls of Silicon Valley who’s still in the game has extended his grasp into a convergence of power that no other fortune could manage. Where Elon Musk built an empire that’s loud and cultish, Ellison—his mentor and close friend—has pieced together something patient, proximate, and structural. The kind whose shape is clear once you see how far it goes.
One arm of the octopus is wrapped around Oracle, the 49-year-old company he is dragging from dull database vendor into one of the essential data center providers of the AI boom. It is a damn-the-torpedoes move into infrastructure that’s risky even for an executive who nearly lost the company once before. He has saddled Oracle with $130 billion in debt, turned its free cash flow negative, and chained its fortunes to a single volatile partner, OpenAI.
A second arm has closed on American media. Larry’s son David has transformed the independent production company Skydance into the last great consolidator in Hollywood, largely with Dad’s money. Skydance has gobbled up Paramount and with it CBS News; now it has won Warner Bros. Discovery in a $110 billion deal. Ellison also has the American spin-off of TikTok, which an Oracle-led consortium pried loose from its Chinese owner.
A third appendage winds toward political power. As Silicon Valley staged its noisy migration to Trumpism, Ellison worked quietly to influence the president, establishing an effective if not always close relationship. Outside America, he bankrolls his friend Tony Blair’s nonprofit organization, which pushes governments to adopt new technologies like AI. And he has been a steadfast supporter of Benjamin Netanyahu, hosting the prime minister on Lanai while the Israeli leader faced corruption charges at home.
Ellison has had a reputation as a killer in Silicon Valley for decades. In 2011, Bryan Cantrill—who quit Oracle within a year of its taking over Sun Microsystems—told a roomful of engineers not to “anthropomorphize Larry Ellison.” Instead, said Cantrill, think of him as a lawnmower: It doesn’t hate you, it just mows, and if you put your hand in, it’ll chop it off. Cantrill told me recently he hasn’t changed his mind.
The first sign was the orange Corvette.
In the early days of July, the residents of Lanai started seeing a C8 Stingray the color of a traffic cone tearing along the island’s switchback roads. Then other signals came. The clerk working the cigarette counter at the Pine Isle Market said her nephew, a private chef, had flown in and had been shopping for a big group.
At the Four Seasons down in Manele, the island’s pharmacist Kert Shuster was leaving brunch at Nobu when he saw a security detail he recognized moving through the lobby. It’d been a while, but Shuster knew—he’d just missed Larry Ellison.
For Lanai’s 3,000 regular residents, actually seeing Ellison is rare. His presence is more typically sensed—like a change in air pressure.
“I noticed the salad bar was really good that day,” Shuster tells me. “That’s what it’s like when Larry’s back. People step up. Things just get better.”
For the past 40 years, the people of Lanai have lived at the pleasure of one billionaire or another. Before Ellison there was David Murdock, a real estate magnate who took control of the island in 1985, when it was still a pineapple plantation. Murdock was a visible ruler who’d make his rounds in the local stores, attend community meetings, and give employees he had fired 30 minutes’ notice before sending them off in a helicopter. But Lanai had been a money pit for him, and the 2008 crash was the final straw. In 2012, he sold it to Ellison for a reported $300 million.
If Murdock ran the island like the plantation owner he was, Ellison runs it like a distant god. He points, and an amenity appears.
His first move was refurbishing the community pool that Murdock had closed. He answered the housing shortage with the Hokuao development, where the homes are pastel-colored and stamped everywhere with the touch of their benefactor. Each has a Tesla solar roof, a Big Green Egg in the yard, two Japanese Toto toilets, and interiors painted a custom color called Ellison White. (It’s a Benjamin Moore white base with a shot of oxide yellow and a half shot of black, your choice for sheen may vary.) Shuster, who lives in Hokuao, once told Ellison how much he loved the place. “I feel like I moved into your house,” he had said.
“Good,” his host responded. “I wanted to make it like a place that even I could live in.”
Ellison owns Lanai’s only gas station, where a sign reminds customers they’re paying “the Lowest Prices in Hawaii.” And he upgraded the movie theater that today bills itself as being “the crown jewel of theater experiences in Hawai‘i.” In July it was showing Supergirl, which was produced by Warner Bros., the movie studio Ellison, along with his son, will soon control.
“Sigourney Weaver lives here part-time, and she says that this is the most beautiful theater in the world,” Gail Allen, a longtime Lanai resident, tells me. “It serves truffle-oil popcorn,” she adds.
The sense is that life is pretty good on the island since Ellison bought it. Or at least could be worse. “We could have become Molokai,” says Alberta de Jetley, another longtime resident who ran the island’s newspaper, Lanai Today, before selling it to Ellison.
At a picnic table outside Richard’s Market, the other grocery store on Lanai (this one Ellison owns), a handful of residents hold a coffee klatch de Jetley calls the Laugh Group. That morning, beneath overcast skies, the Laugh Group was discussing the island’s recently arrived proprietor.
One member, Mari Lynn Di Lullo, brought up a time she saw a Tesla straddling two stalls in a parking lot. “Jeez, look at the way they parked,” she’d uttered to members of a security detail loitering nearby. “If you didn’t know better, you would think he owned the place.”
Just then the owner of the car—and everything else—appeared, laughing.
“He’s not pretentious,” Di Lullo told her coffee group. “He’s low on the radar.”
The radar. Interesting choice of words about a man who has made a case for a mass AI-enabled surveillance system.
That afternoon a woman came through the grocery checkout line wearing a Sensei Farms sweatshirt. The company is one of Ellison’s island projects: a hydroponic greenhouse concept meant to be the Tesla of agriculture. Eight years in and several hundred million dollars later, Sensei Farms describes itself as “a thought leader in greenhouse-grown produce.” It has an endcap with boxed salad mixes at the island’s grocery stores.
I introduced myself to the woman and asked what she did for the farm. She smiled.
“They said there would be a journalist on the island today,” the employee told me before starting to walk away. “They warned us about you in our morning meeting.”
I hadn’t told anyone at Sensei Farms I was coming.
It’s titled Overcoming Adversity.
PART I: THE CEPHALOPOD
Ellison has long been fixated on the octopus. Cephalopod Corp is what he named the corporate entity atop his private investments. He has another company called Octopus Holdings LP, which, with its general partner Tentacle Corp, put up the money behind Lanai. His venture capital firm that over the years has backed Netsuite, Theranos, and Sensei Farms is called Tako Ventures, tako being the Japanese word for octopus. In many of the villas he built on Lanai hang ukiyo-e prints, many with a tako.
For years it was Ellison’s quiet way to talk about himself.
“He loves being the éminence grise. He loves the notion that he’s so powerful, there’s nothing he can’t get into.”
The joke has become a fact in full view. At 82, the last of the founding moguls of Silicon Valley who’s still in the game has extended his grasp into a convergence of power that no other fortune could manage. Where Elon Musk built an empire that’s loud and cultish, Ellison—his mentor and close friend—has pieced together something patient, proximate, and structural. The kind whose shape is clear once you see how far it goes.
One arm of the octopus is wrapped around Oracle, the 49-year-old company he is dragging from dull database vendor into one of the essential data center providers of the AI boom. It is a damn-the-torpedoes move into infrastructure that’s risky even for an executive who nearly lost the company once before. He has saddled Oracle with $130 billion in debt, turned its free cash flow negative, and chained its fortunes to a single volatile partner, OpenAI.
A second arm has closed on American media. Larry’s son David has transformed the independent production company Skydance into the last great consolidator in Hollywood, largely with Dad’s money. Skydance has gobbled up Paramount and with it CBS News; now it has won Warner Bros. Discovery in a $110 billion deal. Ellison also has the American spin-off of TikTok, which an Oracle-led consortium pried loose from its Chinese owner.
A third appendage winds toward political power. As Silicon Valley staged its noisy migration to Trumpism, Ellison worked quietly to influence the president, establishing an effective if not always close relationship. Outside America, he bankrolls his friend Tony Blair’s nonprofit organization, which pushes governments to adopt new technologies like AI. And he has been a steadfast supporter of Benjamin Netanyahu, hosting the prime minister on Lanai while the Israeli leader faced corruption charges at home.
Ellison has had a reputation as a killer in Silicon Valley for decades. In 2011, Bryan Cantrill—who quit Oracle within a year of its taking over Sun Microsystems—told a roomful of engineers not to “anthropomorphize Larry Ellison.” Instead, said Cantrill, think of him as a lawnmower: It doesn’t hate you, it just mows, and if you put your hand in, it’ll chop it off. Cantrill told me recently he hasn’t changed his mind.
by Tom Dotan, Vanity Fair | Read more:
Images: Yuko Shimizu; Damien Hurst
[ed. Vicious and evil.]
Mark Zuckerberg Is Trying Something On
When I meet Mark Zuckerberg, currently one of the poster boys for evil tech billionaires, a man whose products are used by about 46 percent of all living people in the world and whose company has a market cap of more than a trillion dollars, he is wearing sky-blue, cable-knit shorts that look an awful lot like bloomers.
That was just over a month ago, before what is turning out to be a style-centric period for Meta. It started this week at Connect, the company’s annual new products reveal, where Zuckerberg took to the stage wearing a T-shirt with the words “Building is my love language.”
He waxed enthusiastic about the future, including the many new styles of smart glasses, and the company’s personal A.I. assistant, Muse, which looks a lot like a customizable stuffed animal in a onesie. This was just after Vogue World kicked off Milan Fashion Week with Meta glasses as a sponsor, and around the same time W magazine produced an entire stand-alone advertorial zine devoted to a new glasses collaboration with the K-pop star Lisa.
Ahead of all of that, I had come to the compound in Lake Tahoe to try to understand the role style has come to play in the Zuckerberg saga, including the very public rebrand of 2024, when he went from robotic coder in a gray hoodie to fashion-conscious bro next door. That the latest version of Zuckerberg coincides with Meta’s push into wearables, as well as with Silicon Valley’s obsession with the idea of taste and how important a role it will play in the future, may explain why he was finally willing to talk about it.
“I want to make sure that we really immerse ourselves in what people care about,” Zuckerberg told me. It turned out he had started with himself, his own preferences, and where they took him.
Zuckerberg knows that what he does reflects on Meta. “I care about that,” he said. “I think the company is an instantiation of my values.” And, he said, he wants to “be intentional about how I program that.”
Meta is fighting on many fronts at once. Though it settled a case for $17.1 billion in August that positioned social media as the Big Tobacco of the 21st century, it is still embroiled in other lawsuits. Then there is the growing backlash against what critics call its “pervert glasses” (they have been used to secretly record video and audio), which have been banned from courts in England and New York, with organizations like the ACLU alleging that they could become a tool of the surveillance state.
And on Oct. 9, “The Social Reckoning” opens as a sequel to the “The Social Network” — the film responsible for cementing Zuckerberg’s reputation as a revenge-hungry nerd — starring Jeremy Strong as an older Zuckerberg, with a Caesar haircut to crown his march toward world domination.
Despite the push into fashion, it doesn’t add up to a great look.
But whatever Zuckerberg’s or his advisers’ agenda, the more he speaks about his life and newfound interest in outfits, the more insight he provides, sometimes inadvertently, into his otherwise highly guarded psyche. How he approaches clothes is how he approaches everything.
“A few years ago, he made this point,” said Andrew Bosworth, Meta’s chief of technology. “He said, ‘I’m willing to not be liked. I just want to be understood.’” [...]
“We have an off-site in Hawaii at Mark’s ranch,” Bosworth said. “I remember getting there, and I was like, ‘Oh my goodness!’” Then his team arrived. “We’re all listening to Mark,” Bosworth said, “and on the back channel we’re all like: ‘Is this his new style? Are we commenting? Are we not commenting? How do we feel about it?’”
How Bosworth feels is, this is the authentic Zuckerberg. “He knows he’s going to be judged no matter what,” he said. So why not?
Fashion-wise, he seems to be experiencing a sort of delayed adolescence. “This is stuff we did in college, or in high school,” said the designer Mike Amiri, who helped Zuckerberg design his first high-fashion T-shirt, in 2024, with “Aut Zuck Aut Nihil” embroidered across the front, Latin for “all Zuck or all nothing.”
“You’re figuring out: ‘Am I a baggy fit guy? Am I a vintage type? Who am I?’” Amiri said. It’s just that Zuckerberg is doing it in his 40s, with unlimited resources.
by Vanessa Friedman, NY Times | Read more:
Images: Godofredo A. Vásquez/Associated Press; Brendan Mcdermid/Reuters
[ed. Pathetic and clueless. See also: Why Does The Times Care About Mark Zuckerberg’s Style? (NYT).]
That was just over a month ago, before what is turning out to be a style-centric period for Meta. It started this week at Connect, the company’s annual new products reveal, where Zuckerberg took to the stage wearing a T-shirt with the words “Building is my love language.”
Ahead of all of that, I had come to the compound in Lake Tahoe to try to understand the role style has come to play in the Zuckerberg saga, including the very public rebrand of 2024, when he went from robotic coder in a gray hoodie to fashion-conscious bro next door. That the latest version of Zuckerberg coincides with Meta’s push into wearables, as well as with Silicon Valley’s obsession with the idea of taste and how important a role it will play in the future, may explain why he was finally willing to talk about it.
“I want to make sure that we really immerse ourselves in what people care about,” Zuckerberg told me. It turned out he had started with himself, his own preferences, and where they took him.
Zuckerberg knows that what he does reflects on Meta. “I care about that,” he said. “I think the company is an instantiation of my values.” And, he said, he wants to “be intentional about how I program that.”
Meta is fighting on many fronts at once. Though it settled a case for $17.1 billion in August that positioned social media as the Big Tobacco of the 21st century, it is still embroiled in other lawsuits. Then there is the growing backlash against what critics call its “pervert glasses” (they have been used to secretly record video and audio), which have been banned from courts in England and New York, with organizations like the ACLU alleging that they could become a tool of the surveillance state.
And on Oct. 9, “The Social Reckoning” opens as a sequel to the “The Social Network” — the film responsible for cementing Zuckerberg’s reputation as a revenge-hungry nerd — starring Jeremy Strong as an older Zuckerberg, with a Caesar haircut to crown his march toward world domination.
Despite the push into fashion, it doesn’t add up to a great look.
But whatever Zuckerberg’s or his advisers’ agenda, the more he speaks about his life and newfound interest in outfits, the more insight he provides, sometimes inadvertently, into his otherwise highly guarded psyche. How he approaches clothes is how he approaches everything.
“A few years ago, he made this point,” said Andrew Bosworth, Meta’s chief of technology. “He said, ‘I’m willing to not be liked. I just want to be understood.’” [...]
“We have an off-site in Hawaii at Mark’s ranch,” Bosworth said. “I remember getting there, and I was like, ‘Oh my goodness!’” Then his team arrived. “We’re all listening to Mark,” Bosworth said, “and on the back channel we’re all like: ‘Is this his new style? Are we commenting? Are we not commenting? How do we feel about it?’”
How Bosworth feels is, this is the authentic Zuckerberg. “He knows he’s going to be judged no matter what,” he said. So why not?
In this version of the story, Zuckerberg has been freed from the fetters of his self-imposed gray T-shirt prison. A less charitable view, however, is that his fashion glow-up has been so fortuitously timed that most people assumed it was a marketing choice created by a stylist. Rumor had it Karla Welch, who works with Tracee Ellis Ross and Sarah Paulson, was involved. This turned out to be false, though Welch sometimes works with Chan. Zuckerberg said he mostly styles himself. The multiprint Loewe shorts he wore during the Sun Valley conference? Totally his idea.
Fashion-wise, he seems to be experiencing a sort of delayed adolescence. “This is stuff we did in college, or in high school,” said the designer Mike Amiri, who helped Zuckerberg design his first high-fashion T-shirt, in 2024, with “Aut Zuck Aut Nihil” embroidered across the front, Latin for “all Zuck or all nothing.”
“You’re figuring out: ‘Am I a baggy fit guy? Am I a vintage type? Who am I?’” Amiri said. It’s just that Zuckerberg is doing it in his 40s, with unlimited resources.
by Vanessa Friedman, NY Times | Read more:
Images: Godofredo A. Vásquez/Associated Press; Brendan Mcdermid/Reuters
[ed. Pathetic and clueless. See also: Why Does The Times Care About Mark Zuckerberg’s Style? (NYT).]
Sunday, October 11, 2026
The Commenters
I’ve been a journalist for long enough to be familiar with most of the job’s occupational hazards. I’ve angered powerful people without a legal canopy to protect me. My cursor has hesitated over the Send buttons of emails containing invasive questions. I know what it’s like to be chewed out, to have your confidence flattened, to junk entire drafts and start over from scratch. And yet, for most of my career, I never did attract a personal troll.
In this line of work, having a troll is the opposite of having a fan. It’s someone out there—across the astral span of the internet—who has decided to keep tabs on what you publish with the singular intent of mocking everything you write. Since I never had one, I wondered if people like this had gone extinct alongside the rest of the web I used to know. After all, digital media, and its trademark pugnacious tone, is basically defunct. The linear rapport necessary for a blogger to become someone’s nemesis simply no longer applies; the written word is on life support. At least, that’s what I thought—until I discovered the Slate comments section. At last, I had finally found my haters.
Slate’s comments section is not prominently advertised on the homepage, and when I was hired as a staff writer in the spring of 2023, I didn’t know it existed. But, sure enough, all of the articles on the website are studded with a button shaped like a speech bubble. Click on it, and a discussion thread quietly materializes at the bottom of the screen, revealing one of the last few remaining active commenting communities hosted by a magazine. The section possesses a distinctly Web 1.0 architecture: There are no reaction GIFs or YouTube embeds, and posters tend to distinguish themselves with multisyllabic usernames. Trawling through the comments feels a little bit like exploring the sediment of cyberspace. As such, the core clientele—about 200 strong—is composed of people who have been visiting Slate for a very, very long time. They are some of our most dedicated readers. They’ve also despised pretty much everything I’ve ever written.
Comments sections are, by nature, snarky. The format was devised to be a digital version of the newspaper’s good old-fashioned Letters to the Editor page—itself a receptacle for readers to loudly hector the opinion columnists they found annoying. Once considered default features, many of those sections disappeared as digital media matured, mostly because editors determined them to be hotbeds of inanity and harassment. (Recently they’ve made something of a comeback—earlier this year, the Atlantic reintroduced a comments board after abolishing it in 2018.) But Slate’s comments section has survived, and it has retained its characteristically adversarial register to this day. The threads bloom with treatise-length complaints, exasperating grammatical pedantry, and the usual flame-war material. Anyone who has ever written professionally has contended with some version of this, but what surprised me about Slate’s community was just how closely read the taunts in the comments section tended to be—particularly when they were channeled in my direction. Sure, I’ve been hit with plenty of run-of-the-mill drive-bys—“I really hope my Slate Plus dollars aren’t paying this guy,” reads one comment to my 2024 story about men wearing chains—but other insults reveal a profound metatextual fluency in my entire oeuvre. It’s as if the commenters are reading my work voraciously with the specific intention of obliterating me.
In the autumn of 2023, as part of Slate’s long-running Human Guinea Pig column, I was tasked with donning a Mario costume and busking for change in Manhattan. I think the story turned out pretty well, but the incident has been cited, derisively, in the comments section of dozens of articles I’ve written since. “You’ve never forgiven him for putting on that Super Mario costume in Times Square,” read one, left by user Muffin the Mule, about a story published almost three years after the Mario adventure. When I checked the comments on a story I wrote in the spring about Tucker Carlson’s gonzo ballcaps, one read, “Do you think Winkie wears the hat with his gold chain?” In another, about plastic surgery, I wrote that I left the house dressed in a chambray shirt and salmon shorts. This fairly normal outfit offended one user so much that he has made sardonic references to it on multiple occasions in the comment box.
You get the idea. It is not just that I get roasted relentlessly—it is that the roasts are meticulously tailored, leading one to believe that making fun of Slate writers is, for the commenters, among the prime incentives for visiting the website. And I am far from the only person here to get that treatment. Slate contributors far and wide have endured their own bespoke wisecracks, and that has nurtured a, let’s say, complicated relationship with the magazine’s comment box among the staff. One colleague told me that her mother has occasionally taken up in the comments herself, slinging zingers back at the trolls on behalf of her daughter. (My mom has done this too—I imagine it’s among the main reasons she pays for a Slate Plus subscription.) Another co-worker told me that she ventures into the comments on extremely rare occasions, often as a self-loathing exercise. (“The last time I checked on them was two years ago when I wrote a piece I was convinced was terrible,” she said. “I knew someone in there would agree.”) But the person on staff who possesses, by far, the most comments-related trauma is Slate Jurisprudence editor Jeremy Stahl. In his early days at the magazine, Stahl was made a community moderator of the Fray—the venerated message board that Slate operated in the 2000s. Even in those days, Stahl remembers, the tenor of the comments was largely the same as it is now.
“It was, for a while, a very hostile, troll-y commenting community,” Stahl said. “They said some of the meanest things anyone has ever said to me. It was a bummer.”
This all brings me back to my personal troll. Unlike some of my fellow Slatesters, I’ve never felt especially victimized by the comments section. I have thick skin, and I’ll happily admit that I have a perverse fondness for the backlash that results from an incendiary blog. (I’m also white and male, which excludes me from some of the gnarlier flavors of trolldom.) But if I’m being honest, there is one user who has a unique talent for vexing me. He posts under the username Flexo, and he is the person who has picked on me the most during my time at the magazine. I’ve gotten to know his rancorous countenance well over the months and years, as my byline has become flush with essays. In fact, when I take my ambling scrolls into the comments section, my eyes instinctively seek out his name. I think I’m morbidly curious to see if I’ve finally won Flexo over. The answer—eternally—is no.
“This guy is far and away the worst writer I’ve ever read. I feel like I need to have a lime bath to disinfect myself after using the word ‘writer,’ ” wrote Flexo beneath the aforementioned Tucker Carlson piece.
“Don’t post here, it only encourages him,” he commented on a story I wrote about a viral dieting trend. “Winkie is a blight on what still passes for journalism,” he added.
“Never heard of him. Winkie is the worst.” This is Flexo one more time, offering his assessment on a profile I wrote about the right-wing comedian Tony Hinchcliffe. Someone responded to him saying that I “like the obscure” in my writing subjects and enjoy “being on the edge of a movement.” To which Flexo countered: “A bowel movement?”
It goes without saying that Flexo and I have not met, nor have we ever spoken to each other. This is how it always is between a writer and their commenters, and as such, I’ve never been quite sure how to interpret the flavor of his smarm. Is my dear Flexo just an ordinary jerk? Is he trying to offer me some tough love? Did one thing gradually transform into the other? Really, all of those questions led me to another question: How much does Flexo hate me, really? The only thing I knew for sure is that, for better or worse, the people at the bottom of my articles—the ones responsible for the thousands of comments tapering off into an infinite scroll—are, beyond a shadow of a doubt, the most dedicated readers I’ve ever had, in a moment in media history when “having readers” is harder than ever. Despite all the negativity, a clear kinship exists between us. With Slate’s 30th anniversary around the corner, I wanted to get a better sense of their relationship with me—and the magazine as a whole.
That meant I needed to give Flexo a call.
“Our commenters are really funny, and really smart. Some of the meanness is more like their love language,” he told me. “Our community is made up of lovable, crotchety grumps. God bless them.”
And so, armed with my dossier, I fanned out dozens of emails to the denizens of the Slate comments section. This presented another challenge: Was I crossing some sacred line? Especially when the commenters in question have said so many nasty things about your work? I worried that seeing my name pop up in the commenters’ inboxes might come off a little intrusive, or perhaps even narclike—a fracturing of a trust. And seriously, I wasn’t here to settle scores. Instead, I told these commenters that I was working on a story about Slate’s longevity, and that I wanted to know what has kept them around the magazine across so many different eras. That was basically true, as far as I was concerned.
Flexo replied in less than 15 minutes.
“You sometimes drive me crazy, but I do love our community, and none of it would be possible without the writers,” wrote Flexo, striking a much more conciliatory tone than I had grown accustomed to. “We have a great community and it’s nice you recognize that. This was a very nice email to send.”
One week later, I jumped on the phone with him. After years orbiting around the exterior of the comment box—peering inside with macabre curiosity to witness the ways I’ve annoyed the regulars most recently—it felt a bit like making first contact.
Flexo, as it turns out, is a 62-year-old guy named Ron who lives in the Pacific Northwest. I learned that he holds a degree in physics from the University of Oregon, and that he worked as a professional musician for decades. He told me that he loves jazz, and onetime Slate staff writer Jamelle Bouie, and that he hated my longform feature about the Creed cruise. (It wasn’t about the writing, Flexo told me. He just can’t stand the band’s music.) Most importantly, I learned that he isn’t active on any forms of social media. Facebook bores him, and he doesn’t have accounts on Twitter or Bluesky. No, the only place that Flexo posts is the Slate comments, which he visits almost every day.
There is a long history of people, adrift in the frigid expanses of cyberspace, finding close fellowship in unexpected places—be it a niche subreddit, or a lonely Discord outpost, or the stately vestibules of World of Warcraft. The saga of Flexo, and the underbelly of Slate as a whole, is proof that the same dynamic can be replicated in a venue that exists primarily for readers to gripe about Dear Prudence letters. That makes it a testament to the tenacity of digital communion. For instance: Flexo has an Instagram account, but it is set to private, and he follows only 13 people—all of whom are fellow Slate commenters. They hang out sometimes, offline. (“I’m friends with several regulars,” he said.) Together, they work around the limited social features of our commenting interface—no direct messaging—by ferreting over burner emails to each other. (“It’s like a Slate-only email address,” Flexo said.) Failing that, Flexo is happy to treat Slate the same way you or I might treat Nextdoor. A few months ago, Flexo offered up a characteristically off-topic comment on a random Slate story complaining that one of his amps was on the fritz. Another user, who lived in Flexo’s area and had some mechanical know-how, replied, right there in the comments, offering his help.
“He wrote, ‘Swing the amp by my house, I can fix it,’ ” Flexo said. “I’m like, ‘Are you serious?’ ” He was, and he took care of it.
All of this is to say that Flexo is not some nihilistic troll. His participation in Slate’s discourse isn’t driven by the arbitrary destructiveness of, say, the average Twitter shitposter. Flexo has an investment in Slate, mostly because without Slate, its comments section would cease to exist. This is the symbiosis that defines the community, and it’s also why former Slate staff writer Dan Kois always thought that the comments section might as well exist in a “different universe” from Slate proper. I get what he means: While the community relies on Slate’s infrastructure and is fluent in the magazine’s tone, the section also possesses its own hermetic culture—one replete with idiosyncratic norms and insulated memes, like a Petri dish embedded in the HTML of one of the few publications to survive the wipeout of digital media. As for why these folks have stuck around despite their occasionally acrimonious attitude toward Slate itself, Kois just thinks that’s an immutable reality of the internet. If you build it—if you provide a blinking text box and the chance to pester an author—they will come.
“It’s like that scene in Jurassic Park with Jeff Goldblum,” Kois said. “Life finds a way. Wherever there’s a little crack, they will flourish.”
In this line of work, having a troll is the opposite of having a fan. It’s someone out there—across the astral span of the internet—who has decided to keep tabs on what you publish with the singular intent of mocking everything you write. Since I never had one, I wondered if people like this had gone extinct alongside the rest of the web I used to know. After all, digital media, and its trademark pugnacious tone, is basically defunct. The linear rapport necessary for a blogger to become someone’s nemesis simply no longer applies; the written word is on life support. At least, that’s what I thought—until I discovered the Slate comments section. At last, I had finally found my haters.
Comments sections are, by nature, snarky. The format was devised to be a digital version of the newspaper’s good old-fashioned Letters to the Editor page—itself a receptacle for readers to loudly hector the opinion columnists they found annoying. Once considered default features, many of those sections disappeared as digital media matured, mostly because editors determined them to be hotbeds of inanity and harassment. (Recently they’ve made something of a comeback—earlier this year, the Atlantic reintroduced a comments board after abolishing it in 2018.) But Slate’s comments section has survived, and it has retained its characteristically adversarial register to this day. The threads bloom with treatise-length complaints, exasperating grammatical pedantry, and the usual flame-war material. Anyone who has ever written professionally has contended with some version of this, but what surprised me about Slate’s community was just how closely read the taunts in the comments section tended to be—particularly when they were channeled in my direction. Sure, I’ve been hit with plenty of run-of-the-mill drive-bys—“I really hope my Slate Plus dollars aren’t paying this guy,” reads one comment to my 2024 story about men wearing chains—but other insults reveal a profound metatextual fluency in my entire oeuvre. It’s as if the commenters are reading my work voraciously with the specific intention of obliterating me.
In the autumn of 2023, as part of Slate’s long-running Human Guinea Pig column, I was tasked with donning a Mario costume and busking for change in Manhattan. I think the story turned out pretty well, but the incident has been cited, derisively, in the comments section of dozens of articles I’ve written since. “You’ve never forgiven him for putting on that Super Mario costume in Times Square,” read one, left by user Muffin the Mule, about a story published almost three years after the Mario adventure. When I checked the comments on a story I wrote in the spring about Tucker Carlson’s gonzo ballcaps, one read, “Do you think Winkie wears the hat with his gold chain?” In another, about plastic surgery, I wrote that I left the house dressed in a chambray shirt and salmon shorts. This fairly normal outfit offended one user so much that he has made sardonic references to it on multiple occasions in the comment box.
You get the idea. It is not just that I get roasted relentlessly—it is that the roasts are meticulously tailored, leading one to believe that making fun of Slate writers is, for the commenters, among the prime incentives for visiting the website. And I am far from the only person here to get that treatment. Slate contributors far and wide have endured their own bespoke wisecracks, and that has nurtured a, let’s say, complicated relationship with the magazine’s comment box among the staff. One colleague told me that her mother has occasionally taken up in the comments herself, slinging zingers back at the trolls on behalf of her daughter. (My mom has done this too—I imagine it’s among the main reasons she pays for a Slate Plus subscription.) Another co-worker told me that she ventures into the comments on extremely rare occasions, often as a self-loathing exercise. (“The last time I checked on them was two years ago when I wrote a piece I was convinced was terrible,” she said. “I knew someone in there would agree.”) But the person on staff who possesses, by far, the most comments-related trauma is Slate Jurisprudence editor Jeremy Stahl. In his early days at the magazine, Stahl was made a community moderator of the Fray—the venerated message board that Slate operated in the 2000s. Even in those days, Stahl remembers, the tenor of the comments was largely the same as it is now.
“It was, for a while, a very hostile, troll-y commenting community,” Stahl said. “They said some of the meanest things anyone has ever said to me. It was a bummer.”
This all brings me back to my personal troll. Unlike some of my fellow Slatesters, I’ve never felt especially victimized by the comments section. I have thick skin, and I’ll happily admit that I have a perverse fondness for the backlash that results from an incendiary blog. (I’m also white and male, which excludes me from some of the gnarlier flavors of trolldom.) But if I’m being honest, there is one user who has a unique talent for vexing me. He posts under the username Flexo, and he is the person who has picked on me the most during my time at the magazine. I’ve gotten to know his rancorous countenance well over the months and years, as my byline has become flush with essays. In fact, when I take my ambling scrolls into the comments section, my eyes instinctively seek out his name. I think I’m morbidly curious to see if I’ve finally won Flexo over. The answer—eternally—is no.
“This guy is far and away the worst writer I’ve ever read. I feel like I need to have a lime bath to disinfect myself after using the word ‘writer,’ ” wrote Flexo beneath the aforementioned Tucker Carlson piece.
“Don’t post here, it only encourages him,” he commented on a story I wrote about a viral dieting trend. “Winkie is a blight on what still passes for journalism,” he added.
“Never heard of him. Winkie is the worst.” This is Flexo one more time, offering his assessment on a profile I wrote about the right-wing comedian Tony Hinchcliffe. Someone responded to him saying that I “like the obscure” in my writing subjects and enjoy “being on the edge of a movement.” To which Flexo countered: “A bowel movement?”
It goes without saying that Flexo and I have not met, nor have we ever spoken to each other. This is how it always is between a writer and their commenters, and as such, I’ve never been quite sure how to interpret the flavor of his smarm. Is my dear Flexo just an ordinary jerk? Is he trying to offer me some tough love? Did one thing gradually transform into the other? Really, all of those questions led me to another question: How much does Flexo hate me, really? The only thing I knew for sure is that, for better or worse, the people at the bottom of my articles—the ones responsible for the thousands of comments tapering off into an infinite scroll—are, beyond a shadow of a doubt, the most dedicated readers I’ve ever had, in a moment in media history when “having readers” is harder than ever. Despite all the negativity, a clear kinship exists between us. With Slate’s 30th anniversary around the corner, I wanted to get a better sense of their relationship with me—and the magazine as a whole.
That meant I needed to give Flexo a call.
*****
In order for this project to work, I needed to create a dossier of my biggest haters. Evan Urquhart, Slate’s veteran community manager, agreed to help. I gave him 30 usernames to help me track down. Urquhart seemed to do this out of love for the community he has helped steward for more than a decade. He struck a considerably different tone than Stahl did. I think he knew what I was up to.“Our commenters are really funny, and really smart. Some of the meanness is more like their love language,” he told me. “Our community is made up of lovable, crotchety grumps. God bless them.”
And so, armed with my dossier, I fanned out dozens of emails to the denizens of the Slate comments section. This presented another challenge: Was I crossing some sacred line? Especially when the commenters in question have said so many nasty things about your work? I worried that seeing my name pop up in the commenters’ inboxes might come off a little intrusive, or perhaps even narclike—a fracturing of a trust. And seriously, I wasn’t here to settle scores. Instead, I told these commenters that I was working on a story about Slate’s longevity, and that I wanted to know what has kept them around the magazine across so many different eras. That was basically true, as far as I was concerned.
Flexo replied in less than 15 minutes.
“You sometimes drive me crazy, but I do love our community, and none of it would be possible without the writers,” wrote Flexo, striking a much more conciliatory tone than I had grown accustomed to. “We have a great community and it’s nice you recognize that. This was a very nice email to send.”
One week later, I jumped on the phone with him. After years orbiting around the exterior of the comment box—peering inside with macabre curiosity to witness the ways I’ve annoyed the regulars most recently—it felt a bit like making first contact.
Flexo, as it turns out, is a 62-year-old guy named Ron who lives in the Pacific Northwest. I learned that he holds a degree in physics from the University of Oregon, and that he worked as a professional musician for decades. He told me that he loves jazz, and onetime Slate staff writer Jamelle Bouie, and that he hated my longform feature about the Creed cruise. (It wasn’t about the writing, Flexo told me. He just can’t stand the band’s music.) Most importantly, I learned that he isn’t active on any forms of social media. Facebook bores him, and he doesn’t have accounts on Twitter or Bluesky. No, the only place that Flexo posts is the Slate comments, which he visits almost every day.
There is a long history of people, adrift in the frigid expanses of cyberspace, finding close fellowship in unexpected places—be it a niche subreddit, or a lonely Discord outpost, or the stately vestibules of World of Warcraft. The saga of Flexo, and the underbelly of Slate as a whole, is proof that the same dynamic can be replicated in a venue that exists primarily for readers to gripe about Dear Prudence letters. That makes it a testament to the tenacity of digital communion. For instance: Flexo has an Instagram account, but it is set to private, and he follows only 13 people—all of whom are fellow Slate commenters. They hang out sometimes, offline. (“I’m friends with several regulars,” he said.) Together, they work around the limited social features of our commenting interface—no direct messaging—by ferreting over burner emails to each other. (“It’s like a Slate-only email address,” Flexo said.) Failing that, Flexo is happy to treat Slate the same way you or I might treat Nextdoor. A few months ago, Flexo offered up a characteristically off-topic comment on a random Slate story complaining that one of his amps was on the fritz. Another user, who lived in Flexo’s area and had some mechanical know-how, replied, right there in the comments, offering his help.
“He wrote, ‘Swing the amp by my house, I can fix it,’ ” Flexo said. “I’m like, ‘Are you serious?’ ” He was, and he took care of it.
All of this is to say that Flexo is not some nihilistic troll. His participation in Slate’s discourse isn’t driven by the arbitrary destructiveness of, say, the average Twitter shitposter. Flexo has an investment in Slate, mostly because without Slate, its comments section would cease to exist. This is the symbiosis that defines the community, and it’s also why former Slate staff writer Dan Kois always thought that the comments section might as well exist in a “different universe” from Slate proper. I get what he means: While the community relies on Slate’s infrastructure and is fluent in the magazine’s tone, the section also possesses its own hermetic culture—one replete with idiosyncratic norms and insulated memes, like a Petri dish embedded in the HTML of one of the few publications to survive the wipeout of digital media. As for why these folks have stuck around despite their occasionally acrimonious attitude toward Slate itself, Kois just thinks that’s an immutable reality of the internet. If you build it—if you provide a blinking text box and the chance to pester an author—they will come.
“It’s like that scene in Jurassic Park with Jeff Goldblum,” Kois said. “Life finds a way. Wherever there’s a little crack, they will flourish.”
by Luke Winkie, Slate | Read more:
Image: Mark Alan Stamaty
[ed. I've often wondered about Comment Section personalities. What do they hope to accomplish? Maybe in this case just the name Winkie sets them off.]
[ed. I've often wondered about Comment Section personalities. What do they hope to accomplish? Maybe in this case just the name Winkie sets them off.]
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)