Tuesday, May 26, 2026
Monday, May 25, 2026
Is TikTok Art?
Short-form content gets a bad rap these days. TikTok, Instagram reels, YouTube Shorts — all of it nothing but brainrot and digital dopamine, a modern “hypodermic needle,” in the words of Stanford psychiatrist Anna Lembke.
This is a moment of legal accountability for Big Social Media.
But this should also be a moment of cultural reckoning and artistic recognition. These companies have built their modern empires on an astronomical volume of short-form video content, mind-boggling in its multiplicity and universal popularity.
Kids don’t just spend time on social media because they are screen junkies who can’t read. That would be too easy. They spend time on social media, in large part, because social media has become brilliantly, absurdly, unprecedentedly, entertaining.
Even if you wish it weren’t, vertical 30-second video is the creative medium of our time. Taking seriously the merits of any new formal paradigm is in the spirit of how we have met every technological rupture in art history.
So here are several broad categories of short-form content that I think are worth appreciating on their own creative terms, beyond the addictive infrastructure and AI-generated slop they are embedded in.
1) The vocation vlogger
Why do any of us consume art? One reason (arguably the main reason) is the desire to escape into the lifeworlds of others. These worlds can be fictional, as in the case of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, or based in fact, like the hit reality series The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives.
Vlogging taps into a similar vein of curiosity. Take the TikTok videos posted by flight attendant Maisha Prather. She documents her life working for Swiss International Airlines, like in this video of her long-haul flight from Zurich to Hong Kong, captioned “Work a night flight with me.”
Or this post by an ER nurse who brings viewers along for a 13-hour shift, featuring details about tracheostomy care and catheter placement. Or lawyer Carrie Jernigan, who has amassed over 1 million followers by sharing footage of her daily life as an attorney in Arkansas. I call these creators “vocation vloggers.”
Social media is often accused of promoting unrealistic lifestyle standards and glorifying the Kardashians of the world. But by sheer volume, even if not by algorithmic amplification, the normy masses make up a vast slice of today’s creator base, posting down-to-earth footage of the many forms that 21st-century existence can take.
This content is not valueless. The vibe of the vocation vlogger is a reality check, a window into the tough financial or emotional realities of professions that most of us will never work. The genre scratches the same itch as any good-old workplace drama, like The Pitt or The Bear or The West Wing, all TV shows that revolve around specific occupational settings.
As patients, customers, or passengers, we see only the public-facing performance. As content consumers, we are invited backstage. And following people into rooms we normally don’t have access to — crew sleep compartments or the Oval Office — is endlessly intriguing.
What is art?
New media always falls under scrutiny. There is no formal rupture in art history that has not been challenged by existing institutional voices.
When photography emerged in the 19th century, many were skeptical — particularly painters and illustrators, who feared the technology would put them out of business. Poet and art critic Charles Baudelaire was also an outspoken opponent, in 1862 deriding the French public’s reception of photography in a letter: “And then they said to themselves: ‘Since photography provides us with every desirable guarantee of exactitude’ (they believe that, poor madmen!) ‘art is photography.’”
In the early 20th century, it was cinema’s turn, looked down upon as a lowbrow fairground attraction, not serious art like theater or literature. And this was well before the dawn of lightweight sitcoms, reality television, or music videos, which famously killed the radio star and marked an end to audio-only music.
Every formal rupture in art history is usually met by critique that accuses the new medium of being easier to produce and easier to consume, and thus less refined, less intellectual, and less valuable.
But the best TikToks are usually not easy to make. To make a single engaging video, one that actually is likely to go viral, requires an involved production process: scripting, lighting, editing, visual effects, and audio. And then do that enough times to actually build a following.
Content creator Zach King’s 15-second optical illusion videos take him and his staff about two weeks to make. That production time-to-runtime ratio easily surpasses the average Hollywood feature film. TikTok star Nara Smith has revealed that a single one of her from-scratch cooking videos takes up to seven hours.
The question of consumption poses a more serious challenge. This content rarely prompts profound introspection or moral grappling. And yet, brain friction is a disputed metric by which to delineate what is and is not art.
In his Critique of Judgement, Kant argued that aesthetic experience occupies a unique category irreducible to cognition, which engages the mind without producing knowledge. Leo Tolstoy, in What is Art?, defended the “activity of art” as simply the transmission of feeling, a definition capacious enough to include “jokes,” “home decorations,” and “church services” — and, I would argue, many short-form videos.
The image of the slack-jawed social media addict, desensitized and detached, does not actually capture a more complicated truth, which is that this content often evokes strong emotional responses: amusement, joy, sorrow — certainly as much as the last Rothko painting I saw.
by Maibritt Henkel, The Argument | Read more:
Image: Miguel Medina/AFP via Getty Images
[ed. Lots of links. If you want something a little longer with a lovely Chinese woman and beautiful scenery (and crazy skills), see Liziqui (YouTube). Channel here.]
This is a moment of legal accountability for Big Social Media.
But this should also be a moment of cultural reckoning and artistic recognition. These companies have built their modern empires on an astronomical volume of short-form video content, mind-boggling in its multiplicity and universal popularity.
Even if you wish it weren’t, vertical 30-second video is the creative medium of our time. Taking seriously the merits of any new formal paradigm is in the spirit of how we have met every technological rupture in art history.
So here are several broad categories of short-form content that I think are worth appreciating on their own creative terms, beyond the addictive infrastructure and AI-generated slop they are embedded in.
1) The vocation vlogger
Why do any of us consume art? One reason (arguably the main reason) is the desire to escape into the lifeworlds of others. These worlds can be fictional, as in the case of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, or based in fact, like the hit reality series The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives.
Vlogging taps into a similar vein of curiosity. Take the TikTok videos posted by flight attendant Maisha Prather. She documents her life working for Swiss International Airlines, like in this video of her long-haul flight from Zurich to Hong Kong, captioned “Work a night flight with me.”
Or this post by an ER nurse who brings viewers along for a 13-hour shift, featuring details about tracheostomy care and catheter placement. Or lawyer Carrie Jernigan, who has amassed over 1 million followers by sharing footage of her daily life as an attorney in Arkansas. I call these creators “vocation vloggers.”
Social media is often accused of promoting unrealistic lifestyle standards and glorifying the Kardashians of the world. But by sheer volume, even if not by algorithmic amplification, the normy masses make up a vast slice of today’s creator base, posting down-to-earth footage of the many forms that 21st-century existence can take.
This content is not valueless. The vibe of the vocation vlogger is a reality check, a window into the tough financial or emotional realities of professions that most of us will never work. The genre scratches the same itch as any good-old workplace drama, like The Pitt or The Bear or The West Wing, all TV shows that revolve around specific occupational settings.
As patients, customers, or passengers, we see only the public-facing performance. As content consumers, we are invited backstage. And following people into rooms we normally don’t have access to — crew sleep compartments or the Oval Office — is endlessly intriguing.
2) The craftsman
A close cousin of the vocational vlogger is the craftsman. This genre is all about watching people do things they are very good at. It complicates the straightforward depiction of social media content being nothing but a race to rock-bottom degeneracy. On this side of social media, it is competency and perfection that drive views.
Take, for instance, Jungle Builder. The account posts videos of men building luxury constructions by hand in rural Cambodia. This video, captioned “You Won’t Believe How This 3-Story Bamboo Home Was Built” has over 4.6 million views on TikTok. The footage is disorienting. No further context about what purpose these elaborate structures serve is ever provided. (Aerial drone footage suggests that they actually serve absolutely none). But negative production externalities aside, the mass consumption of this content, however absurd, seems primarily to satisfy a fascination with human skill.
The popularity of Nonna Netta, a New Jersey-based grandmother who produces vast quantities of spaghetti and baked goods in her snug kitchen, points to this same appetite for skilled execution. Here she made 41 loaves of Crescia for Easter, seemingly without a recipe.
Also in this world of craftsmanship are accounts dedicated solely to meticulous pottery wheeling or immaculately detailed painting, like artist Werner Bronkhorst’s miniature illustrations.
Evaluating the artistic value of this content is complicated. The final physical product is typically impressive on its own — so much so that it is often tempting to skip to the end just to marvel at the end result.
And yet, I would argue that there is something more going on. I’m not sure I like Bronkhorst’s paintings all that much or actually find Nonna Netta’s meatballs that appetizing, but I do know that I find their TikToks entertaining to watch.
The skill that has won these accounts huge followings is only secondarily the skill being recorded on video. First and foremost, it is the skill of being a short-form video artist.
A close cousin of the vocational vlogger is the craftsman. This genre is all about watching people do things they are very good at. It complicates the straightforward depiction of social media content being nothing but a race to rock-bottom degeneracy. On this side of social media, it is competency and perfection that drive views.
Take, for instance, Jungle Builder. The account posts videos of men building luxury constructions by hand in rural Cambodia. This video, captioned “You Won’t Believe How This 3-Story Bamboo Home Was Built” has over 4.6 million views on TikTok. The footage is disorienting. No further context about what purpose these elaborate structures serve is ever provided. (Aerial drone footage suggests that they actually serve absolutely none). But negative production externalities aside, the mass consumption of this content, however absurd, seems primarily to satisfy a fascination with human skill.
The popularity of Nonna Netta, a New Jersey-based grandmother who produces vast quantities of spaghetti and baked goods in her snug kitchen, points to this same appetite for skilled execution. Here she made 41 loaves of Crescia for Easter, seemingly without a recipe.
Also in this world of craftsmanship are accounts dedicated solely to meticulous pottery wheeling or immaculately detailed painting, like artist Werner Bronkhorst’s miniature illustrations.
Evaluating the artistic value of this content is complicated. The final physical product is typically impressive on its own — so much so that it is often tempting to skip to the end just to marvel at the end result.
And yet, I would argue that there is something more going on. I’m not sure I like Bronkhorst’s paintings all that much or actually find Nonna Netta’s meatballs that appetizing, but I do know that I find their TikToks entertaining to watch.
The skill that has won these accounts huge followings is only secondarily the skill being recorded on video. First and foremost, it is the skill of being a short-form video artist.
3) The comedian
A more straightforward example of people mastering the specific art of short-form video is skit comedy. This content ranges from the universally funny, like Senegalese Khabane Lame’s silent reaction videos, which have garnered him over 160 million followers, to highly select cultural references catering to niche audiences.
Last week, my teenage brother sent me an obscure Instagram Reel of an elderly German woman giving names to Lord of the Rings characters. Gandalf becomes Otto, Legolas becomes Eberhard, Lady Galadriel becomes Rotraud.
How to convey the comedic value of this strange little video? Both my brother and I have a particular fondness for the franchise, so that helps. We also have a German grandmother, which makes the whole set-up particularly comical. Whatever the reason, the reel felt as entertaining as any other form of conventional entertainment, say a stand-up set or an episode of South Park.
The true thrill of this humoristic content often comes down to relatability, to seemingly idiosyncratic experiences being revealed as much more ubiquitous.
As I was writing this piece, a friend of mine from Pune, India, sent me a video captioned “That one rich girl from Bombay.” For me to find it funny, he had to explain some references: like that “SoBo” stood for South Bombay and that “Cathedral” refers to a prestigious private school in the region.
It is an exciting thing to be allowed entry into a fictional world; it is even more exciting to be allowed entry into the real world of someone you care about. Often that happens by way of shared art or entertainment.
Critics of entertainment-driven social media have pointed out that there is nothing very social about these platforms anymore. Where once users logged onto Instagram to see pictures of their friends, they now consume Reels by content creators. A pro-social byproduct of this trend, however, has been the mass sharing of content between users.
I am not saying that sending videos back and forth is a replacement for genuine in-person socializing. Yet, it may be a meaningful complement. And it is certainly different from the kind of isolated online experience that tends to dominate public outrage about social media.
A more straightforward example of people mastering the specific art of short-form video is skit comedy. This content ranges from the universally funny, like Senegalese Khabane Lame’s silent reaction videos, which have garnered him over 160 million followers, to highly select cultural references catering to niche audiences.
Last week, my teenage brother sent me an obscure Instagram Reel of an elderly German woman giving names to Lord of the Rings characters. Gandalf becomes Otto, Legolas becomes Eberhard, Lady Galadriel becomes Rotraud.
How to convey the comedic value of this strange little video? Both my brother and I have a particular fondness for the franchise, so that helps. We also have a German grandmother, which makes the whole set-up particularly comical. Whatever the reason, the reel felt as entertaining as any other form of conventional entertainment, say a stand-up set or an episode of South Park.
The true thrill of this humoristic content often comes down to relatability, to seemingly idiosyncratic experiences being revealed as much more ubiquitous.
As I was writing this piece, a friend of mine from Pune, India, sent me a video captioned “That one rich girl from Bombay.” For me to find it funny, he had to explain some references: like that “SoBo” stood for South Bombay and that “Cathedral” refers to a prestigious private school in the region.
It is an exciting thing to be allowed entry into a fictional world; it is even more exciting to be allowed entry into the real world of someone you care about. Often that happens by way of shared art or entertainment.
Critics of entertainment-driven social media have pointed out that there is nothing very social about these platforms anymore. Where once users logged onto Instagram to see pictures of their friends, they now consume Reels by content creators. A pro-social byproduct of this trend, however, has been the mass sharing of content between users.
I am not saying that sending videos back and forth is a replacement for genuine in-person socializing. Yet, it may be a meaningful complement. And it is certainly different from the kind of isolated online experience that tends to dominate public outrage about social media.
4) The aestheticist
Perhaps most mysterious, and most distinct from art that has come before, are the videos that draw you in for no reason other than downright wackiness. Some of this is really weird slop, like mass-produced videos of AI cats.
But some of it is very much a product of spunky human ingenuity. Adrian Patterson and RJ Chumbley, known on TikTok as TheGoddessBoys, are a content creator duo that make theatrical mixology videos. Glammed out in bangles and immaculate manicures, the two perform a kind of chaotic choreography that culminates in an extravagant creamy beverage. They have their routine perfected down to a T.
Similarly inexplicable is the pull of someone like Remygumbs, whose main schtick is high-energy content of her 12 guinea pigs. She calls them “the piggies” and hosts dance parties that involve her in a bathrobe and huge piles of lettuce.
The aestheticist is not trying to offer the world anything but wacky, visually appealing entertainment. Watching TheGoddessBoys mix a “lemon lime sweet and sour green grape rock sugar yuzu foam soda” is not like reading a novel, but, then again, neither is strolling through MOMA.
Perhaps most mysterious, and most distinct from art that has come before, are the videos that draw you in for no reason other than downright wackiness. Some of this is really weird slop, like mass-produced videos of AI cats.
But some of it is very much a product of spunky human ingenuity. Adrian Patterson and RJ Chumbley, known on TikTok as TheGoddessBoys, are a content creator duo that make theatrical mixology videos. Glammed out in bangles and immaculate manicures, the two perform a kind of chaotic choreography that culminates in an extravagant creamy beverage. They have their routine perfected down to a T.
Similarly inexplicable is the pull of someone like Remygumbs, whose main schtick is high-energy content of her 12 guinea pigs. She calls them “the piggies” and hosts dance parties that involve her in a bathrobe and huge piles of lettuce.
The aestheticist is not trying to offer the world anything but wacky, visually appealing entertainment. Watching TheGoddessBoys mix a “lemon lime sweet and sour green grape rock sugar yuzu foam soda” is not like reading a novel, but, then again, neither is strolling through MOMA.
What is art?
New media always falls under scrutiny. There is no formal rupture in art history that has not been challenged by existing institutional voices.
When photography emerged in the 19th century, many were skeptical — particularly painters and illustrators, who feared the technology would put them out of business. Poet and art critic Charles Baudelaire was also an outspoken opponent, in 1862 deriding the French public’s reception of photography in a letter: “And then they said to themselves: ‘Since photography provides us with every desirable guarantee of exactitude’ (they believe that, poor madmen!) ‘art is photography.’”
In the early 20th century, it was cinema’s turn, looked down upon as a lowbrow fairground attraction, not serious art like theater or literature. And this was well before the dawn of lightweight sitcoms, reality television, or music videos, which famously killed the radio star and marked an end to audio-only music.
Every formal rupture in art history is usually met by critique that accuses the new medium of being easier to produce and easier to consume, and thus less refined, less intellectual, and less valuable.
But the best TikToks are usually not easy to make. To make a single engaging video, one that actually is likely to go viral, requires an involved production process: scripting, lighting, editing, visual effects, and audio. And then do that enough times to actually build a following.
Content creator Zach King’s 15-second optical illusion videos take him and his staff about two weeks to make. That production time-to-runtime ratio easily surpasses the average Hollywood feature film. TikTok star Nara Smith has revealed that a single one of her from-scratch cooking videos takes up to seven hours.
The question of consumption poses a more serious challenge. This content rarely prompts profound introspection or moral grappling. And yet, brain friction is a disputed metric by which to delineate what is and is not art.
In his Critique of Judgement, Kant argued that aesthetic experience occupies a unique category irreducible to cognition, which engages the mind without producing knowledge. Leo Tolstoy, in What is Art?, defended the “activity of art” as simply the transmission of feeling, a definition capacious enough to include “jokes,” “home decorations,” and “church services” — and, I would argue, many short-form videos.
The image of the slack-jawed social media addict, desensitized and detached, does not actually capture a more complicated truth, which is that this content often evokes strong emotional responses: amusement, joy, sorrow — certainly as much as the last Rothko painting I saw.
by Maibritt Henkel, The Argument | Read more:
Image: Miguel Medina/AFP via Getty Images
[ed. Lots of links. If you want something a little longer with a lovely Chinese woman and beautiful scenery (and crazy skills), see Liziqui (YouTube). Channel here.]
Shane Mauss | Trips: Second Dose
Psychedelic experiences are famously hard to describe. So comedian Shane Mauss didn’t just describe them—he built a way to show them.
In TRIPS: Second Dose, Shane dives into ayahuasca, DMT, and ketamine, translating hyperspace, out-of-body experiences, and cosmic rodeos into big laughs and bigger perspective. Filmed inside the 360° immersive madness of Meow Wolf Denver, the visuals are mixed and synced live by Michael Strauss, fusing 25 years of concert/festival visuals with work from 20+ visionary artists curated by Shane.
[ed. Pretty funny and great graphics. I've always wondered why more comedians haven't followed the Cheech and Chong formula from decades ago.]
Doctors, This Is Why Our Patients Are Using ChatGPT
Several months ago, I got the results back from some routine blood tests, and let’s just say several numbers were a tad too high. My doctor advised “continued diet and exercise” and signed off on the results.
For the past couple of years, though, my numbers had been inching up, and I was frustrated that I couldn’t seem to do much about them. I requested a phone call from my doctor — surely, she had better advice than what she wrote — but she messaged back that if I wanted to discuss my results, I had to set up another appointment.
So, I did what everyone does in this day and age: I turned to artificial intelligence. With low expectations, I typed my lab results into ChatGPT.
As both a physician and a patient, I found the experience startling. Not because ChatGPT dazzled me with its scientific knowledge, but because it behaved the way I wish modern medicine, and its practitioners, still would.
I had always assumed the “human side” of medicine was the part A.I. couldn’t touch. Sure, I know doctors are turning to A.I. to help them break bad news, since patients seem to find messages crafted by bots more empathetic than those written by doctors. But, in practice, what I thought really mattered was that a person was delivering that care.
The chatbot didn’t just spit back generic advice. It asked questions about my daily life and figured out what I could realistically change. It suggested a short walk immediately after eating, something I’d never taken seriously. When I inquired about doing a longer activity, it told me that would likely offer only marginal benefit. Its recommendations were manageable and easy to follow. [...]
As a doctor, I was a little embarrassed to be using ChatGPT. But every interaction with, say, OpenEvidence, a professional medical A.I. tool, felt cold and sterile. It referred to me as if I were a case report, not a person with preferences and habits. I realized what was winning me over about ChatGPT wasn’t its ability to sift through the latest studies, or diagnose my ailments; but its unwavering messages of empathy and encouragement, and its endless willingness to listen and its patience. It’s not human, but it can model some traits we value most in human interaction.
I followed ChatGPT’s advice, and when my blood work improved, ChatGPT affirmed my progress and urged me to keep going. I doubt I would have made those changes — much less stuck with them — without that sustained back-and-forth. I certainly hadn’t before.
It’s a grim fact of American medicine today that doctors can’t come close to a chatbot’s availability. And when the health care system can’t reliably offer time, attentiveness and compassion, patients will go searching for them somewhere else, even from a machine we assumed could never feel human. A.I. may not replace doctors, but it will change what patients expect from us. Doctors need to adapt.
Before I used a chatbot for my own health concerns, the thought of telling a patient to “ask ChatGPT” was inconceivable — or at least something I considered terrible care. Now I’m not so sure. In certain situations, A.I. offers something patients clearly need and medicine has trouble fulfilling.
The reality is, many patients are already consulting A.I. Doctors can keep fearing or condemning those interactions, or they can figure out how to support people using A.I. tools for their health care — cautiously, with clear guardrails. I would never tell patients to ask ChatGPT or Claude for a diagnosis, but perhaps I would suggest they use it to make sense of a new condition or keep up with routine screenings — or translate “diet and exercise” into steps that actually fit into their lives, as I did. At the same time, we need safeguards built into these systems to protect people from real harm from dangerous advice.
My experience with the chatbot has already shifted how I interact with patients in the E.R., with only minutes to piece together fragments of their circumstances. When a patient asks the same question repeatedly, I try to listen for what’s behind it. Maybe she’s not after more medical facts.
by Dr. Helen Ouyang, NY Times | Read more:
Image: María Medem
[ed. I had this exact experience a month or so ago. Asked for a full blood workup to see if there were any problems. Called back two weeks later for results. No answer. Waited another week and went to the clinic in person to make sure my first request hadn't somehow gotten lost in the bureaucracy (which happens, frequently). Except, this time I was smart enough to ask for a print-out of my lab results. Again, after receiving no response from my doctor, I took a picture of the results, uploaded them to Anthropic's Claude and asked it to interpret them. At first I got the standard disclaimer that it doesn't do diagnoses, but then I asked it to just interpret the results so I'd know what all the coding meant, the various ranges of acceptability etc., and it gave me a detailed response. Much better than I'd ever gotten from doctors before, who'd mostly just say (if they responded at all) "oh yeah, everything looks ok, some things look a little high, others ok". And that's it. No explanation or guidance on anything. Like follow-ups were a burden (that couldn't be billed for an office visit). I'll always use AI from now on to evaluate my results. Doctors (and hospitals) have brought this upon themselves.]
For the past couple of years, though, my numbers had been inching up, and I was frustrated that I couldn’t seem to do much about them. I requested a phone call from my doctor — surely, she had better advice than what she wrote — but she messaged back that if I wanted to discuss my results, I had to set up another appointment.
As both a physician and a patient, I found the experience startling. Not because ChatGPT dazzled me with its scientific knowledge, but because it behaved the way I wish modern medicine, and its practitioners, still would.
I had always assumed the “human side” of medicine was the part A.I. couldn’t touch. Sure, I know doctors are turning to A.I. to help them break bad news, since patients seem to find messages crafted by bots more empathetic than those written by doctors. But, in practice, what I thought really mattered was that a person was delivering that care.
The chatbot didn’t just spit back generic advice. It asked questions about my daily life and figured out what I could realistically change. It suggested a short walk immediately after eating, something I’d never taken seriously. When I inquired about doing a longer activity, it told me that would likely offer only marginal benefit. Its recommendations were manageable and easy to follow. [...]
As a doctor, I was a little embarrassed to be using ChatGPT. But every interaction with, say, OpenEvidence, a professional medical A.I. tool, felt cold and sterile. It referred to me as if I were a case report, not a person with preferences and habits. I realized what was winning me over about ChatGPT wasn’t its ability to sift through the latest studies, or diagnose my ailments; but its unwavering messages of empathy and encouragement, and its endless willingness to listen and its patience. It’s not human, but it can model some traits we value most in human interaction.
I followed ChatGPT’s advice, and when my blood work improved, ChatGPT affirmed my progress and urged me to keep going. I doubt I would have made those changes — much less stuck with them — without that sustained back-and-forth. I certainly hadn’t before.
It’s a grim fact of American medicine today that doctors can’t come close to a chatbot’s availability. And when the health care system can’t reliably offer time, attentiveness and compassion, patients will go searching for them somewhere else, even from a machine we assumed could never feel human. A.I. may not replace doctors, but it will change what patients expect from us. Doctors need to adapt.
Before I used a chatbot for my own health concerns, the thought of telling a patient to “ask ChatGPT” was inconceivable — or at least something I considered terrible care. Now I’m not so sure. In certain situations, A.I. offers something patients clearly need and medicine has trouble fulfilling.
The reality is, many patients are already consulting A.I. Doctors can keep fearing or condemning those interactions, or they can figure out how to support people using A.I. tools for their health care — cautiously, with clear guardrails. I would never tell patients to ask ChatGPT or Claude for a diagnosis, but perhaps I would suggest they use it to make sense of a new condition or keep up with routine screenings — or translate “diet and exercise” into steps that actually fit into their lives, as I did. At the same time, we need safeguards built into these systems to protect people from real harm from dangerous advice.
My experience with the chatbot has already shifted how I interact with patients in the E.R., with only minutes to piece together fragments of their circumstances. When a patient asks the same question repeatedly, I try to listen for what’s behind it. Maybe she’s not after more medical facts.
by Dr. Helen Ouyang, NY Times | Read more:
Image: María Medem
[ed. I had this exact experience a month or so ago. Asked for a full blood workup to see if there were any problems. Called back two weeks later for results. No answer. Waited another week and went to the clinic in person to make sure my first request hadn't somehow gotten lost in the bureaucracy (which happens, frequently). Except, this time I was smart enough to ask for a print-out of my lab results. Again, after receiving no response from my doctor, I took a picture of the results, uploaded them to Anthropic's Claude and asked it to interpret them. At first I got the standard disclaimer that it doesn't do diagnoses, but then I asked it to just interpret the results so I'd know what all the coding meant, the various ranges of acceptability etc., and it gave me a detailed response. Much better than I'd ever gotten from doctors before, who'd mostly just say (if they responded at all) "oh yeah, everything looks ok, some things look a little high, others ok". And that's it. No explanation or guidance on anything. Like follow-ups were a burden (that couldn't be billed for an office visit). I'll always use AI from now on to evaluate my results. Doctors (and hospitals) have brought this upon themselves.]
Price's Law
Spotify has about 11 million artists, but 50% of all streams are generated by only 3,300 artists. That’s insane.
Oh and this isn’t just a Spotify problem or even a music industry problem.
This is a pattern that shows up everywhere once you know what to look for
What Is Price’s Law?
In 1963, a physicist named Derek J. de Solla Price was studying scientific publications, trying to understand why some researchers dominated their fields while others published and got zero attention.
He noticed something strange: the distribution of productivity wasn’t a bell curve as you’d expect… it wasn’t even close.
It followed a completely different mathematical pattern.
Price’s Law states that the square root of the number of people in a domain does 50% of the work.
Here’s what that looks like in practice:
The formula is simple: √n = your high performers, where n is the total population.
Oh, and it wasn’t exclusive to research papers—this pattern showed up everywhere he looked.
Once you see it, you can’t unsee it.
In corporate America, Price’s Law shows up with eerie precision. Of the 30 million businesses in the United States, about 5,500 (the square root) generate half the total economic output.
Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, and a few thousand other companies produce as much as the other 29,994,500 combined.
In astrophysics, the square root of stars in a galaxy produce half the light. The Milky Way has roughly 100 billion stars, but 316,000 of them (0.0003%) generate half the luminosity. Most stars are dim, unremarkable red dwarfs.
A handful of blue giants blaze so bright they illuminate entire stellar neighborhoods. (Scientifically known as a Power Law distribution)
In creative fields like YouTube, very few channels account for the vast majority of both views and ad revenue.
The list goes on and on. River systems, sales teams, Wikipedia editors, wealth distribution, anywhere you look, the square root does half the work.
And this is not a coincidence or rigged systems or unfair advantages (though those exist too).
This is just how complex systems work when skill, consistency, opportunity, and luck all compound over time.
And if you’re building a personal brand or a one-person business, understanding this law might literally save you.
by Kaguura Gichuru, The Write Path | Read more:
Oh and this isn’t just a Spotify problem or even a music industry problem.
This is a pattern that shows up everywhere once you know what to look for
What Is Price’s Law?
In 1963, a physicist named Derek J. de Solla Price was studying scientific publications, trying to understand why some researchers dominated their fields while others published and got zero attention.
It followed a completely different mathematical pattern.
Price’s Law states that the square root of the number of people in a domain does 50% of the work.
Here’s what that looks like in practice:
- In a company with 100 employees, 10 people produce half the output
- In a field with 10,000 scientists, 100 produce half the meaningful research
- On a team of 25, 5 people carry the entire operation
The formula is simple: √n = your high performers, where n is the total population.
Oh, and it wasn’t exclusive to research papers—this pattern showed up everywhere he looked.
Once you see it, you can’t unsee it.
In corporate America, Price’s Law shows up with eerie precision. Of the 30 million businesses in the United States, about 5,500 (the square root) generate half the total economic output.
Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, and a few thousand other companies produce as much as the other 29,994,500 combined.
In astrophysics, the square root of stars in a galaxy produce half the light. The Milky Way has roughly 100 billion stars, but 316,000 of them (0.0003%) generate half the luminosity. Most stars are dim, unremarkable red dwarfs.
A handful of blue giants blaze so bright they illuminate entire stellar neighborhoods. (Scientifically known as a Power Law distribution)
In creative fields like YouTube, very few channels account for the vast majority of both views and ad revenue.
The list goes on and on. River systems, sales teams, Wikipedia editors, wealth distribution, anywhere you look, the square root does half the work.
And this is not a coincidence or rigged systems or unfair advantages (though those exist too).
This is just how complex systems work when skill, consistency, opportunity, and luck all compound over time.
And if you’re building a personal brand or a one-person business, understanding this law might literally save you.
by Kaguura Gichuru, The Write Path | Read more:
Image: via
Childhood And Education: Letting Kids Be Kids
I cannot emphasize enough the need to let kids be kids. In Childhood and Education #16: Letting Kids be Kids, I went over exactly how insane we have gotten about destroying the lives of children and along with them the lives of parents and others forced to devote endless hours to actively destructive supervision.
I’ll go over a refresher of that, some related new anecdotes, and then some other related questions.
People Don’t Let Kids Do Things
As a refresher, here are some quotes and statistics from last time, because I really do think exposure to this type of thing needs to involve spaced repetition to sink in:
When I asked what constitutes supervision, she said that I had to be visible to my neighbors when the kids were outside, regardless of whether or not I could see the children. I asked where that was found in the Virginia law. She replied that it isn’t in the Virginia law, but that Social Services has its own set of rules.
Bethany: I just sent my 12 year old in to go get a dozen donuts while I waited in the car.
“Mom they will wonder why I’m alone.”
Polimath: My kids used to love walking to Target until the local Target changed their policy to “no unaccompanied kids under 18”
There are 72,000,000 kids in America and about 100 non-governmental kidnappings by strangers a year. If you left your child unattended, the original claim is that they would get kidnapped once every 750,000 years.
Maxwell Tabarrok: 37% of all American children are investigated by CPS. 2 million investigations, 530k substantiated cases, and 200k family separations every year. [...]
And by shouldn’t, some of them say (I hope she means only if they actually do it, not because they simply think it was okay in theory, but I’m not sure):
I’ll go over a refresher of that, some related new anecdotes, and then some other related questions.
People Don’t Let Kids Do Things
As a refresher, here are some quotes and statistics from last time, because I really do think exposure to this type of thing needs to involve spaced repetition to sink in:
1. A third of people, both parents and non-parents, responded in a survey that it is not appropriate to leave a 13 year old at home for an hour or two, as opposed to when we used to be 11 year olds babysitting for other neighborhood kids.
2. A third of people said in that same survey that if a 10-year-old is allowed to play alone in the park, there needs to be an investigation by CPS.Harris Poll: More than half of the kids surveyed have not experienced many real-life experiences on their own. According to the kids surveyed aged 8 to 12 years old:
- 45% have not walked in a different aisle than their parents at a store
- 56% have not talked with a neighbor without their parents
- 61% have not made plans with friends without adults helping them
- 62% have not walked/biked somewhere (a store, park, school) without an adult
- 63% have not built a structure outside (for example, a fort or treehouse)
- 67% have not done work that they’ve been paid for (e.g., mowing lawns, shoveling snow, babysitting)
- 71% have not used a sharp knife
When I asked what constitutes supervision, she said that I had to be visible to my neighbors when the kids were outside, regardless of whether or not I could see the children. I asked where that was found in the Virginia law. She replied that it isn’t in the Virginia law, but that Social Services has its own set of rules.
Bethany: I just sent my 12 year old in to go get a dozen donuts while I waited in the car.
“Mom they will wonder why I’m alone.”
Polimath: My kids used to love walking to Target until the local Target changed their policy to “no unaccompanied kids under 18”
There are 72,000,000 kids in America and about 100 non-governmental kidnappings by strangers a year. If you left your child unattended, the original claim is that they would get kidnapped once every 750,000 years.
Maxwell Tabarrok: 37% of all American children are investigated by CPS. 2 million investigations, 530k substantiated cases, and 200k family separations every year. [...]
Let Your Children Play
Yes, it is actively good for children to learn to entertain themselves, at the earliest age possible. As a bonus, it is also excellent for you the parent, but it’s great for them too.
We used to know this. Now we need to be reminded. Last time I emphasized the general argument, here I will follow up with an example of the paranoia we instill about how this might somehow be bad, actually.
And yet, somehow, even with direct observation many people think you shouldn’t be able to go two doors down.
Yes, it is actively good for children to learn to entertain themselves, at the earliest age possible. As a bonus, it is also excellent for you the parent, but it’s great for them too.
We used to know this. Now we need to be reminded. Last time I emphasized the general argument, here I will follow up with an example of the paranoia we instill about how this might somehow be bad, actually.
Girl about something: Is it ACTUALLY true that it’s good for me to let my baby entertain himself, or is it just selfishness because I can be doing something else while he plays? Tell the truth.Don’t Fear The CPS
Based Sipper Wife | Mrs. Tomasone | Already sipped: It’s good for him! You know how people suffer from short attention spans and always needing to be entertained? Every time you let him play uninterrupted, you’re holding off that problem and helping him sustain focus
shiloh.: it’s so good, please teach your baby to play independently. if he were unhappy or lonely he’d cry & come to you. development of independent play is SO good for them (or course balanced with showing / talking / engaging)
is for baby whisperer: actually, seriously, a fantastic gift you can offer your child.
The problem, of course, is not any threat other than CPS.
And yet, somehow, even with direct observation many people think you shouldn’t be able to go two doors down.
And by shouldn’t, some of them say (I hope she means only if they actually do it, not because they simply think it was okay in theory, but I’m not sure):
MNBonnie: Over 54% of you need a visit from CPS. Holy shit.
Romy: wow yeah the logical conclusion here is that over half of all parents should have their kids taken away.
This behavior is obviously fine except insofar as someone might call CPS, but even if it wasn’t fine, it’s crazy to think about what that call implies.
Kelsey Piper: I don’t think that it’s a good idea to take peoples’ children away because they do a completely safe thing that is slightly different than the completely safe thing you do.
It is a bad outcome when CPS conducts an inspection of a family that is doing a great job raising kids in a lovely home but doing something slightly unusual. It is a way to terrorize those parents into compliance with standards that would never be the law and make no sense.
… I have had friends who have had their homes inspected because of stuff on the scale of ‘toddler fell at the playground and got a bruise’, yes. It was super stressful and probably made them inclined to be more safetyist and terrified of normal childhood falls!
Andrew Rettek: Yep. It sucks.
Romy: the number of people invoking cps every time they hear about a parenting choice that they wouldn’t make is really disturbing.
do you understand what claim you’re making when you say someone should have cps called on them? you’re saying that you believe their child would be better off ripped from the only home they’ve ever known and put in the care of strangers. moreover, you’re saying you believe the median foster parent is a better parent than their current parents.
you’re also saying you think we should dedicate state resources to carrying out this process. social workers already have caseloads too big to manage dealing with kids in homes with serious drug addiction, abuse, neglect and often fail to successfully intervene when it’s desperately needed.
you want these same social workers to spend time taking kids away from parents who leave them in a locked and air conditioned car for 2 minutes while they run into the store, or who watch them on the baby monitor while they catch up with the neighbors? really? if you were in charge of society this is what you’d do?
yep, in every case i’ve ever seen this raised for on twitter it would be infinitely worse than the home the kid is already in, even without accounting for the trauma of the kid being taken from their parents.
Mason: We also don’t actually want a society of traumatized and cowed parents
One function of CPS is to serve as a “wake up call” for bad parents. But you do not want a huge % of good parents making all of their parenting decisions under some abject terror that they may look negligent.
One problem with allowing any idiot to use the state as their cudgel is that a lot of people lack the imagination to anticipate the immediate consequences of their actions for other people, asking them to consider second-order effects is a total lost cause.
This is why a lot of older story arcs involve a “nosy neighbor” character who comes to embody something like the banality of evil or malicious ignorance. There used to be very strong norms against even *suggesting* that you might report people to the state for minor infractions.
Romy: the vast majority of babies ever born were raised by parents who would consider live video monitoring of a sleeping baby so excessive they’d be confused by the concept.
having a baby is hard in a bunch of ways, but a whole lot of parents are making it much harder than it needs to be. they’re doing their best to shame everyone else into having a harder time than necessary too.
by Zvi Mowshowitz, Don't Worry About the Vase | Read more:
Image: X
Sunday, May 24, 2026
Ry Cooder
Ranked Choice Voting Delivered What Alaskans Wanted
Takeaways
Some Republicans, including Peltola’s challengers Nick Begich and former Governor Sarah Palin, cried foul. The late US Representative Don Young, a Republican, had held the seat for half a century. Ranked choice voting, they fumed, must have been a ploy to elect Democrats.
Results from across the country indicate otherwise. Ranked choice voting doesn’t help members of one party or another; it elevates candidates with broad popular support among voters.
Sightline’s analysis of ballot data from the Alaska Division of Elections spells out a similar narrative: one of a Democrat with cross-partisan appeal in 2022, and of a Republican who captured a majority of hearts and minds during a conservative surge in 2024.
The August 2022 Special Election: Mary Peltola’s landmark win
A somber development gave Alaskans an early taste of the top-four primaries and ranked choice voting they adopted in 2020. Don Young, Alaska’s long-time US representative, passed away in March of 2022. His absence teed up a heated contest: in the first test of Alaska’s top-four primary, 48 hopefuls appeared on the June special primary ballot to serve the rest of Rep. Young’s term.
Republicans Sarah Palin and Nick Begich, independent Al Gross, and Democrat Mary Peltola secured the top four spots; but when Gross dropped out of the running, Alaska’s first ranked-choice contest came down to two Republicans and one Democrat.
Mary Peltola led the field with 40 percent of first-choice votes. Palin followed with 31 percent of the vote. Begich was a close third with 28 percent. No one candidate won a majority of votes, so election officials eliminated Begich, the lowest-performing—and allocated his votes to voters’ second-place rankings. Overall, Peltola had more support than Palin.
Immediately, some Republicans lashed out at ranked choice voting. Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton, for one, scoffed at the notion that an election in which 60 percent of voters picked Republican candidates first could produce a Democrat. Sarah Palin shared the same sentiment: “It’s effectively disenfranchised 60 percent of Alaska voters.”
Cotton and Palin ignored the core tenet of ranked choice voting: it gives voters a chance to express nuanced political opinions. And Alaskans did.
Begich voters were not necessarily hardcore Republicans
In short, Begich voters liked Begich; not all of them liked Palin.
Only half of Begich voters ranked Palin second on their ballots. Nearly a third of Begich voters—29 percent—cast bipartisan ballots with Peltola second, enough to put the Democrat over the threshold. Some 21 percent of voters had no second-choice preference, so their votes did not transfer.
Begich voters supporting Peltola wasn’t a fluke. The cast vote record, an anonymized data set showing how voters filled out their ballots, revealed that 27 percent of his supporters cast ballots for non-Republicans in the gubernatorial primary as well. Peltola, a low-profile and moderate Democrat, had a similar degree of cross-partisan appeal for some Alaskans who liked Begich.
But what about those 21 percent of Begich voters who had no second-place preference? If every one of those voters had picked Palin, she would have prevailed over Peltola, but if they had picked their second choices in the same proportions as the other Begich voters, Peltola still would have won.
More to the point, not ranking anyone second is a legitimate choice for voters. After all, Alaskans for Better Elections found that 85 percent of August voters thought ranked choice voting was “simple.” Begich-only voters could have ranked if they chose to do so, but they decided against expressing a preference between Peltola or Palin.
Begich and Palin turned against each other, and some voters followed suit
Palin’s withered support among Begich voters may have had roots in a venomous campaign. Begich called Palin a “quitter” and “intellectually deleterious.” Palin told her supporters that Begich was “full of bull.” Trading insults throughout the campaign didn’t exactly endear their bases to one another. Voters aren’t inclined to dole those rankings out to candidates they’ve come to hate.
In fairness, the Republicans were simply following an outdated campaign playbook. Attacking and undermining other candidates had long been a winning strategy in Alaska’s often divided pick-one, plurality winner elections prior to reform. But ranked choice voting encourages candidates to build bridges rather than burn them. If candidates can’t be a voter’s first choice, they can still appeal to be their second.
While Begich and Palin were snapping at each other, Peltola was snapping selfies with them. Her “Fish, Family, Freedom” slogan was upbeat and nonpartisan. She maintained a respectful tone when discussing her opponents, and they reciprocated—Palin even called her a “sweetheart.”
Perhaps if the Republicans had followed Peltola’s friendly lead and encouraged their supporters to rank one another, they could have drummed up enough support to keep the seat in Republican hands. Instead, they salted the earth.
by Al Vanderklipp and Jay Lee, Sightline Institute | Read more:
Image: Loren Holmes/Anchorage Daily News via ZUMA Press Wire
- Ranked choice ballots allow voters to express nuanced political opinions across party lines. Voters can back their favorite candidate without spoiling an election for their second-favorite.
- In Alaska’s first ranked choice elections in 2022, Democrat Mary Peltola won and held the state’s US House seat with cross-partisan support from Nick Begich voters. In a 2024 rematch, Begich (a Republican) won a majority with support across parties.
- Alaska’s top-four ranked choice system doesn’t favor one party over another—but it does encourage candidates to consider how their campaign might win broad support.
***
In 2022, former Alaska State Representative Mary Peltola made history: she became the first woman to represent Alaska in the US House, the first Democrat to hold the seat in half a century, and the first Alaska Native ever to serve in the chamber. Importantly, she was also the first person to win a statewide ranked choice election in Alaska.Some Republicans, including Peltola’s challengers Nick Begich and former Governor Sarah Palin, cried foul. The late US Representative Don Young, a Republican, had held the seat for half a century. Ranked choice voting, they fumed, must have been a ploy to elect Democrats.
Results from across the country indicate otherwise. Ranked choice voting doesn’t help members of one party or another; it elevates candidates with broad popular support among voters.
Sightline’s analysis of ballot data from the Alaska Division of Elections spells out a similar narrative: one of a Democrat with cross-partisan appeal in 2022, and of a Republican who captured a majority of hearts and minds during a conservative surge in 2024.
The August 2022 Special Election: Mary Peltola’s landmark win
A somber development gave Alaskans an early taste of the top-four primaries and ranked choice voting they adopted in 2020. Don Young, Alaska’s long-time US representative, passed away in March of 2022. His absence teed up a heated contest: in the first test of Alaska’s top-four primary, 48 hopefuls appeared on the June special primary ballot to serve the rest of Rep. Young’s term.
Republicans Sarah Palin and Nick Begich, independent Al Gross, and Democrat Mary Peltola secured the top four spots; but when Gross dropped out of the running, Alaska’s first ranked-choice contest came down to two Republicans and one Democrat.
Mary Peltola led the field with 40 percent of first-choice votes. Palin followed with 31 percent of the vote. Begich was a close third with 28 percent. No one candidate won a majority of votes, so election officials eliminated Begich, the lowest-performing—and allocated his votes to voters’ second-place rankings. Overall, Peltola had more support than Palin.
Immediately, some Republicans lashed out at ranked choice voting. Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton, for one, scoffed at the notion that an election in which 60 percent of voters picked Republican candidates first could produce a Democrat. Sarah Palin shared the same sentiment: “It’s effectively disenfranchised 60 percent of Alaska voters.”
Cotton and Palin ignored the core tenet of ranked choice voting: it gives voters a chance to express nuanced political opinions. And Alaskans did.
Begich voters were not necessarily hardcore Republicans
In short, Begich voters liked Begich; not all of them liked Palin.
Animated chart by Sightline Institute using official results from the Alaska Division of Elections.
Begich voters supporting Peltola wasn’t a fluke. The cast vote record, an anonymized data set showing how voters filled out their ballots, revealed that 27 percent of his supporters cast ballots for non-Republicans in the gubernatorial primary as well. Peltola, a low-profile and moderate Democrat, had a similar degree of cross-partisan appeal for some Alaskans who liked Begich.
But what about those 21 percent of Begich voters who had no second-place preference? If every one of those voters had picked Palin, she would have prevailed over Peltola, but if they had picked their second choices in the same proportions as the other Begich voters, Peltola still would have won.
More to the point, not ranking anyone second is a legitimate choice for voters. After all, Alaskans for Better Elections found that 85 percent of August voters thought ranked choice voting was “simple.” Begich-only voters could have ranked if they chose to do so, but they decided against expressing a preference between Peltola or Palin.
Begich and Palin turned against each other, and some voters followed suit
Palin’s withered support among Begich voters may have had roots in a venomous campaign. Begich called Palin a “quitter” and “intellectually deleterious.” Palin told her supporters that Begich was “full of bull.” Trading insults throughout the campaign didn’t exactly endear their bases to one another. Voters aren’t inclined to dole those rankings out to candidates they’ve come to hate.
In fairness, the Republicans were simply following an outdated campaign playbook. Attacking and undermining other candidates had long been a winning strategy in Alaska’s often divided pick-one, plurality winner elections prior to reform. But ranked choice voting encourages candidates to build bridges rather than burn them. If candidates can’t be a voter’s first choice, they can still appeal to be their second.
While Begich and Palin were snapping at each other, Peltola was snapping selfies with them. Her “Fish, Family, Freedom” slogan was upbeat and nonpartisan. She maintained a respectful tone when discussing her opponents, and they reciprocated—Palin even called her a “sweetheart.”
Perhaps if the Republicans had followed Peltola’s friendly lead and encouraged their supporters to rank one another, they could have drummed up enough support to keep the seat in Republican hands. Instead, they salted the earth.
by Al Vanderklipp and Jay Lee, Sightline Institute | Read more:
Image: Loren Holmes/Anchorage Daily News via ZUMA Press Wire
[ed. Ranked choice voting works (even if Begich eventually slimed his way into Congress on Trump's coattails in 2024). Mary's running again, this time to oust another Trump yes-man, Dan Sullivan in the Senate. I don't support all of her policies, but at least they're well reasoned and not just rubber stamps for whatever Trump dictates. Please contribute to her campaign if you value independent thinking. See also: Five Ways Election Reform Has Revamped Alaska Politics (Sightline).]
Samurai vs. Squatters: Reclaiming California Property Owners' Stolen Homes
Across the Golden State, uninvited occupants have taken over countless residential properties and then refused to vacate. Homes undergoing renovations, vacant rental units, and even whole apartment buildings have fallen prey to squatters. Once they move in squatters are very difficult to dislodge. The legal process to remove them is expensive and can take months or years.
In their desperation, owners are increasingly turning to a rising crop of private rights enforcers to solve the problem. That includes Jacobs and his company, ASAP Squatter Removal.
Jacobs claims to have developed a long list of tools and tactics that enable him to remove squatters far faster than the court system, all while staying within the bounds of the law. Chief among them is a weapon he carries on every job: a katana, a curved Japanese sword that's more synonymous with samurai warriors than clearing squatters.
"In most industries, swords just don't make any damn sense," Jacobs says. "In this particular one, it actually does." The lightly regulated katana, he explains, is an ideal weapon for indoor self-defense and intimidation.
It's also an ingenious marketing ploy in the competitive world of squatter removal services. Jacobs' company has received a healthy amount of media attention from local and international outlets that never fail to mention his sword in the headline.
According to Jacobs, his company has had a near-perfect success rate of removing squatters.
If they were Jacobs' only adversary, his katana might be the only weapon he needs. But ASAP Squatter Removal is engaged in a two-front war. His main competition comes from law enforcement agencies that are none too keen on ceding their monopoly on the use of force to people like Jacobs.
Every job that ASAP Squatter Removal performs requires it to dodge criminal charges. The company has had only mixed success on the latter front. In January, Jacobs and two associates were charged with a long list of felonies stemming from one of their jobs.
The legal and physical risks inherent in anti-squatter work are why California's landlords have called for more systemic reforms that would make Jacobs' business obsolete.
But with reforms stalled in the state legislature, many property owners feel they have no choice but to turn to gray market services and the unique set of characters, with a very particular set of skills, willing to take on this dangerous work.
On the streets, it's samurai versus squatters.
Why Won't California Police Remove Squatters? 'It's a Civil Matter.'
Though aggregate numbers are hard to come by, squatting appears to be on the rise in California. The state's housing cost crisis has helped produce the nation's largest population of homeless and housing-insecure people—many of whom are willing to take on the risks of squatting.
High home prices and an arduous eviction system have also helped make squatting a lucrative scam. Owners will often pay squatters exorbitant sums in "cash-for-keys" agreements to reclaim their valuable real estate.
Meanwhile, property owners who call the police about a squatting situation will receive a near-universal response from law enforcement: "It's a civil matter," meaning, "It's not our problem."
Responding officers often feel they lack the competence to tell on the spot whether someone is an illegal squatter or a lawful occupant. They are thus eager to avoid the legal liability that would come from charging a lawful occupant with a misdemeanor trespassing offense.
Police "have been told in training: If somebody says, 'I live here,' leave them alone. Why risk the lawsuit of removing somebody from a house that they may lawfully occupy?" says Sidharda Lakireddy, who manages a few hundred units in the Bay Area and has dealt with multiple squatting situations.
Even in seemingly clear-cut cases, the first instinct of many police officers is to avoid getting involved.
Devlin Creighton tells the story of a squatter who moved into a rental unit he owns in San Jose just a few hours after he managed to convince the previous squatting occupant to leave in a cash-for-keys arrangement.
When the police showed up at the property, they initially told Creighton he'd have to follow the months-long civil eviction process to get his squatter out.
"I'm like, 'She's not going to live here for three months for free. She got here today!'" Creighton recalls telling the officers. "The police, these new guys, were like, 'Well, you know, it's not our job. We're crime. This is civil.'"
Fortunately for Creighton, a more seasoned police sergeant soon arrived who was more willing to hear his side of the story. Creighton's new squatter couldn't answer the sergeant's basic questions, such as "What is your address?" and "When's trash day?" So he forced her to leave. But if the sergeant hadn't been willing to hear Creighton out, the property owner would have had no choice but to go to civil court.
Having to go through a court process to remove a squatter isn't inherently unreasonable. Most states treat squatting as a civil matter to be handled by the courts. California's civil courts move slowly, however. The civil eviction process also enables squatters to claim a long list of procedural rights granted to legal tenants (which they are not) that can stretch a case out for months or longer.
Some lawyers openly sell themselves to potential clients based on their ability to stretch out the eviction process in court. "When it comes to you, the landlord is not stepping on a cockroach; he is stepping on a landmine," reads one eviction defense attorney's website which claims that fighting an eviction in court can prolong one's occupancy for years. "All during the [civil eviction process], you are paying no rent," it says.
The experience some landlords have removing squatters shows this landmine claim is not a bluff.
How Long Does It Take to Remove a Squatter in California?
Zachary, a landlord who owns seven units in the Los Angeles area and who asked only to be referred to by his first name because he fears retaliation from squatters, learned just how lengthy and expensive the civil court process can be when a longtime tenant died in January 2025.
When Zachary went to reclaim the unit, he found four strangers already inside.
"They definitely looked disheveled," he says. "They were people who lived out of suitcases. Their clothes weren't well-kept."
The men showed Zachary a letter claiming they were subtenants of the deceased. They claimed they had a legal right to take over the unit after that person's death.
Zachary's lease with his deceased tenant explicitly forbade subletting, making this claim a legal nonstarter. But when the squatters refused to leave and police refused to eject them, Zachary was forced to file for an eviction in Superior Court of Los Angeles County in February 2025.
Zachary describes the following months as a nightmare. In response to his eviction filing, the new occupants of his home countersued him. They produced phony documents purporting to show they were legal tenants being harassed after they raised habitability issues with the unit. While Zachary waited for a court hearing on the case, his squatters also allegedly moved in several more occupants who proceeded to trash his units, do drugs on the property, and menace his legitimate tenants—some of whom moved out.
The squatters also demanded $50,000 in compensation for the emotional and financial toll that Zachary's "illegal" eviction efforts had caused them.
When a hearing on Zachary's eviction complaint and his squatters' counterclaims was finally held in late March 2025, the judge ruled in his favor in a matter of minutes. Through appeals and hardship claims, however, the squatters managed to delay their actual eviction for another two months.
When Zachary finally reclaimed the apartment in late May, "It was really in disarray. They had left needles and rotting food. They had a cat that had made a mess in there. It was really a terrible scene."
After they'd left, Zachary found out more about who his squatters were. In the papers of his deceased tenant, there was a request for a restraining order against the squatters. That request described how his former tenant had met the squatters on a dating app and agreed to let them stay in his spare bedroom for a week when they claimed to have nowhere else to go.
When his former tenant finally asked them to leave, the document said, they blackmailed him: The squatters said they'd accuse him of rape if he called the cops to kick them out.
Per the restraining order statement, Zachary's former tenant did eventually call the cops on the squatters. The police did not believe their claims of being raped, but they also told Zachary's former tenant that they couldn't remove the squatters without a court order. An officer encouraged the former tenant to file for a restraining order instead.
California's tenants' rights advocates, who uniformly oppose any efforts to expedite the removal of squatters, would describe Zachary's experience as an example of the system working as intended: A property dispute was raised, and after a few months of process, the legal owner was able to reclaim his unit.
But during the time it took for that process to play out, the squatters were able to exploit procedural protections designed to safeguard tenants' rights to menace actual tenants and destroy Zachary's property.
Zachary estimates he spent $14,000 on fees to lawyers and to Squatter Squad, a Los Angeles–based outfit that handled direct negotiations with the squatters, served them legal documents, and helped secure the unit when it was finally vacated. He had to pay another $43,000 to fix the damage the squatters had done to the unit. He also lost rent on both the squatter-occupied unit and on those neighboring units that were vacated because of the squatters' disruption.
Given the costs and ordeal, it's unsurprising other property owners in desperate situations would turn to solutions outside of the court system, such as katana-wielding men in black leather coats.
by Christian Britschgi, Reason | Read more:
In their desperation, owners are increasingly turning to a rising crop of private rights enforcers to solve the problem. That includes Jacobs and his company, ASAP Squatter Removal.
"In most industries, swords just don't make any damn sense," Jacobs says. "In this particular one, it actually does." The lightly regulated katana, he explains, is an ideal weapon for indoor self-defense and intimidation.
It's also an ingenious marketing ploy in the competitive world of squatter removal services. Jacobs' company has received a healthy amount of media attention from local and international outlets that never fail to mention his sword in the headline.
According to Jacobs, his company has had a near-perfect success rate of removing squatters.
If they were Jacobs' only adversary, his katana might be the only weapon he needs. But ASAP Squatter Removal is engaged in a two-front war. His main competition comes from law enforcement agencies that are none too keen on ceding their monopoly on the use of force to people like Jacobs.
Every job that ASAP Squatter Removal performs requires it to dodge criminal charges. The company has had only mixed success on the latter front. In January, Jacobs and two associates were charged with a long list of felonies stemming from one of their jobs.
The legal and physical risks inherent in anti-squatter work are why California's landlords have called for more systemic reforms that would make Jacobs' business obsolete.
But with reforms stalled in the state legislature, many property owners feel they have no choice but to turn to gray market services and the unique set of characters, with a very particular set of skills, willing to take on this dangerous work.
On the streets, it's samurai versus squatters.
Why Won't California Police Remove Squatters? 'It's a Civil Matter.'
Though aggregate numbers are hard to come by, squatting appears to be on the rise in California. The state's housing cost crisis has helped produce the nation's largest population of homeless and housing-insecure people—many of whom are willing to take on the risks of squatting.
High home prices and an arduous eviction system have also helped make squatting a lucrative scam. Owners will often pay squatters exorbitant sums in "cash-for-keys" agreements to reclaim their valuable real estate.
Meanwhile, property owners who call the police about a squatting situation will receive a near-universal response from law enforcement: "It's a civil matter," meaning, "It's not our problem."
Responding officers often feel they lack the competence to tell on the spot whether someone is an illegal squatter or a lawful occupant. They are thus eager to avoid the legal liability that would come from charging a lawful occupant with a misdemeanor trespassing offense.
Police "have been told in training: If somebody says, 'I live here,' leave them alone. Why risk the lawsuit of removing somebody from a house that they may lawfully occupy?" says Sidharda Lakireddy, who manages a few hundred units in the Bay Area and has dealt with multiple squatting situations.
Even in seemingly clear-cut cases, the first instinct of many police officers is to avoid getting involved.
Devlin Creighton tells the story of a squatter who moved into a rental unit he owns in San Jose just a few hours after he managed to convince the previous squatting occupant to leave in a cash-for-keys arrangement.
When the police showed up at the property, they initially told Creighton he'd have to follow the months-long civil eviction process to get his squatter out.
"I'm like, 'She's not going to live here for three months for free. She got here today!'" Creighton recalls telling the officers. "The police, these new guys, were like, 'Well, you know, it's not our job. We're crime. This is civil.'"
Fortunately for Creighton, a more seasoned police sergeant soon arrived who was more willing to hear his side of the story. Creighton's new squatter couldn't answer the sergeant's basic questions, such as "What is your address?" and "When's trash day?" So he forced her to leave. But if the sergeant hadn't been willing to hear Creighton out, the property owner would have had no choice but to go to civil court.
Having to go through a court process to remove a squatter isn't inherently unreasonable. Most states treat squatting as a civil matter to be handled by the courts. California's civil courts move slowly, however. The civil eviction process also enables squatters to claim a long list of procedural rights granted to legal tenants (which they are not) that can stretch a case out for months or longer.
Some lawyers openly sell themselves to potential clients based on their ability to stretch out the eviction process in court. "When it comes to you, the landlord is not stepping on a cockroach; he is stepping on a landmine," reads one eviction defense attorney's website which claims that fighting an eviction in court can prolong one's occupancy for years. "All during the [civil eviction process], you are paying no rent," it says.
The experience some landlords have removing squatters shows this landmine claim is not a bluff.
How Long Does It Take to Remove a Squatter in California?
Zachary, a landlord who owns seven units in the Los Angeles area and who asked only to be referred to by his first name because he fears retaliation from squatters, learned just how lengthy and expensive the civil court process can be when a longtime tenant died in January 2025.
When Zachary went to reclaim the unit, he found four strangers already inside.
"They definitely looked disheveled," he says. "They were people who lived out of suitcases. Their clothes weren't well-kept."
The men showed Zachary a letter claiming they were subtenants of the deceased. They claimed they had a legal right to take over the unit after that person's death.
Zachary's lease with his deceased tenant explicitly forbade subletting, making this claim a legal nonstarter. But when the squatters refused to leave and police refused to eject them, Zachary was forced to file for an eviction in Superior Court of Los Angeles County in February 2025.
Zachary describes the following months as a nightmare. In response to his eviction filing, the new occupants of his home countersued him. They produced phony documents purporting to show they were legal tenants being harassed after they raised habitability issues with the unit. While Zachary waited for a court hearing on the case, his squatters also allegedly moved in several more occupants who proceeded to trash his units, do drugs on the property, and menace his legitimate tenants—some of whom moved out.
The squatters also demanded $50,000 in compensation for the emotional and financial toll that Zachary's "illegal" eviction efforts had caused them.
When a hearing on Zachary's eviction complaint and his squatters' counterclaims was finally held in late March 2025, the judge ruled in his favor in a matter of minutes. Through appeals and hardship claims, however, the squatters managed to delay their actual eviction for another two months.
When Zachary finally reclaimed the apartment in late May, "It was really in disarray. They had left needles and rotting food. They had a cat that had made a mess in there. It was really a terrible scene."
After they'd left, Zachary found out more about who his squatters were. In the papers of his deceased tenant, there was a request for a restraining order against the squatters. That request described how his former tenant had met the squatters on a dating app and agreed to let them stay in his spare bedroom for a week when they claimed to have nowhere else to go.
When his former tenant finally asked them to leave, the document said, they blackmailed him: The squatters said they'd accuse him of rape if he called the cops to kick them out.
Per the restraining order statement, Zachary's former tenant did eventually call the cops on the squatters. The police did not believe their claims of being raped, but they also told Zachary's former tenant that they couldn't remove the squatters without a court order. An officer encouraged the former tenant to file for a restraining order instead.
California's tenants' rights advocates, who uniformly oppose any efforts to expedite the removal of squatters, would describe Zachary's experience as an example of the system working as intended: A property dispute was raised, and after a few months of process, the legal owner was able to reclaim his unit.
But during the time it took for that process to play out, the squatters were able to exploit procedural protections designed to safeguard tenants' rights to menace actual tenants and destroy Zachary's property.
Zachary estimates he spent $14,000 on fees to lawyers and to Squatter Squad, a Los Angeles–based outfit that handled direct negotiations with the squatters, served them legal documents, and helped secure the unit when it was finally vacated. He had to pay another $43,000 to fix the damage the squatters had done to the unit. He also lost rent on both the squatter-occupied unit and on those neighboring units that were vacated because of the squatters' disruption.
Given the costs and ordeal, it's unsurprising other property owners in desperate situations would turn to solutions outside of the court system, such as katana-wielding men in black leather coats.
by Christian Britschgi, Reason | Read more:
Image: Christian Britschgi/Midjourney
[ed. California.]
[ed. California.]
Saturday, May 23, 2026
An Ode to Miller Lite
One of the many humiliations that arrive in your 30s is the grudging recognition that a parent was right about something. For some people, their parents were right about a financial decision they recommended, or a romantic relationship they disapproved of. My dad was right about a 96-calorie American lager produced in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
“It’s hard to get in trouble drinking Miller Lite,” was my father’s advice, dispensed repeatedly throughout my young adulthood—usually after he’d spied me carefully tipping an over-hopped beer out of a florid can and into a stupidly shaped glass. For years, I wrote off his wisdom as the curmudgeonly philosophy of a man too stubborn to join the Craft Beer Revolution. Why would anyone still drink mass-produced piss water when you could stock your fridge with $21 four-packs made with love and genius by regional artisans? It was like watching a black-and-white boob tube in the age of 4K flatscreens.
In my 20s, I turned enjoying craft beer—and booze in general—into a minor hobby. I stood in long lines to buy limited releases from various “gypsy brewers.” I nursed recurring obsessions with Monastrell wines from Jumilla. I hunted down vintage bourbon; National Distillers–era Old Grand-Dad was a particular fixation.
In retrospect, I can see that this was something of a defense mechanism. After growing up working-class, I went to college and then graduate school at fancy private institutions, which put me in constant contact with people who had family money, or were simply from hipper places than I am. You may have a trust fund and come from a stock of people who “summer,” I reasoned, but I’ll be damned if you know more about food or alcohol than I do. I viewed drinking decent tipple as part of what it meant to be civilized. To some extent, I still believe that. But now I also believe that most of the time, it’s Miller Time.
The conversion happened slowly. It began with a search for a beer that I could drink while watching Monday Night Football, but that also wouldn’t leave me feeling grimy when I woke up to teach my 8 a.m. class. As I entered my third decade of life, I’d found that microbrews, with their high alcohol content, made me feel a bit suboptimal the next day, even when I consumed only one or two. Before long, my Miller Mondays made me realize that this 4.2 percent ABV “macro-lager” had many applications I had not previously considered: It was a treat for mowing the lawn. It prevented me from getting too drunk at weddings. It could be reliably consumed during a hot-afternoon cookout without requiring me to take a nap. This small pleasure was even cheap! At my local bottle shop, a sixer of tall boys rings out at $7.49.
The problem with craft beer is how easily it can make you, as my dad says, “get in trouble.” One double IPA is not enough, but two is one-half too many. Two sours is one-half too few, but three is instant heartburn. Boozy imperial stouts are best consumed in eight-ounce increments, but they tend to come in 22-ounce bombers. The math doesn’t math. Miller Lite, by contrast, is an honest beer. If you find yourself Miller Lite drunk, most likely the issue is not that you shouldn’t have had that last beer; you shouldn’t have had those last four.
Miller Lite is not a great beer. It’s not even an okay beer. Miller Lite is a bad beer but an incredible beverage. It is neither complicated nor offensive, and it derives its magic from this bland alchemy, this delicate equipoise of fizzy nothingness. Miller Lite does not demand your attention. It does not slap you in the face with flavor; in fact, you’d be hard-pressed to identify any flavor at all. Gun to my head, I’d say it vaguely recalls … sandwich bread? Frozen corn? Off-brand Cheerios, maybe? The tasting notes provided by the Miller Brewing Company include such descriptors as “light to medium body,” “clean,” and “crisp,” all of which are not tastes but textures, as if the most flattering thing the manufacturer has to say about its own beer is that “you will notice it in your mouth.” A review on the brew-rating website Beeradvocate notes that Miller “is a beer best observed in bunches”—a beverage whose most favorable quality is quantity.
This is a beer that provides you with absolutely nothing to think about. It offers a break from the quest to find novel gustatory experience that has come to substitute for culture among much of the American professional class. To drink Miller Lite is to declare that you are a well-adjusted adult—that you do not require excitement at every juncture, that you are capable of sitting with your thoughts, that you have the patience and strength of character to build a buzz slowly.
by Tyler Austin Harper, The Atlantic | Read more:
Image: Pinterest via
[ed. 100%. Lite is the archetypal go anywhere beer. Always remembered for bringing the concept of "light" (as in "less calories"), into the public consciousness. Interestingly, where I live, you can only find it in 16oz 12 packs; regular 12oz cans only come in cases (no 6 packs). Not sure of the message there...]
“It’s hard to get in trouble drinking Miller Lite,” was my father’s advice, dispensed repeatedly throughout my young adulthood—usually after he’d spied me carefully tipping an over-hopped beer out of a florid can and into a stupidly shaped glass. For years, I wrote off his wisdom as the curmudgeonly philosophy of a man too stubborn to join the Craft Beer Revolution. Why would anyone still drink mass-produced piss water when you could stock your fridge with $21 four-packs made with love and genius by regional artisans? It was like watching a black-and-white boob tube in the age of 4K flatscreens.
In retrospect, I can see that this was something of a defense mechanism. After growing up working-class, I went to college and then graduate school at fancy private institutions, which put me in constant contact with people who had family money, or were simply from hipper places than I am. You may have a trust fund and come from a stock of people who “summer,” I reasoned, but I’ll be damned if you know more about food or alcohol than I do. I viewed drinking decent tipple as part of what it meant to be civilized. To some extent, I still believe that. But now I also believe that most of the time, it’s Miller Time.
The conversion happened slowly. It began with a search for a beer that I could drink while watching Monday Night Football, but that also wouldn’t leave me feeling grimy when I woke up to teach my 8 a.m. class. As I entered my third decade of life, I’d found that microbrews, with their high alcohol content, made me feel a bit suboptimal the next day, even when I consumed only one or two. Before long, my Miller Mondays made me realize that this 4.2 percent ABV “macro-lager” had many applications I had not previously considered: It was a treat for mowing the lawn. It prevented me from getting too drunk at weddings. It could be reliably consumed during a hot-afternoon cookout without requiring me to take a nap. This small pleasure was even cheap! At my local bottle shop, a sixer of tall boys rings out at $7.49.
The problem with craft beer is how easily it can make you, as my dad says, “get in trouble.” One double IPA is not enough, but two is one-half too many. Two sours is one-half too few, but three is instant heartburn. Boozy imperial stouts are best consumed in eight-ounce increments, but they tend to come in 22-ounce bombers. The math doesn’t math. Miller Lite, by contrast, is an honest beer. If you find yourself Miller Lite drunk, most likely the issue is not that you shouldn’t have had that last beer; you shouldn’t have had those last four.
Miller Lite is not a great beer. It’s not even an okay beer. Miller Lite is a bad beer but an incredible beverage. It is neither complicated nor offensive, and it derives its magic from this bland alchemy, this delicate equipoise of fizzy nothingness. Miller Lite does not demand your attention. It does not slap you in the face with flavor; in fact, you’d be hard-pressed to identify any flavor at all. Gun to my head, I’d say it vaguely recalls … sandwich bread? Frozen corn? Off-brand Cheerios, maybe? The tasting notes provided by the Miller Brewing Company include such descriptors as “light to medium body,” “clean,” and “crisp,” all of which are not tastes but textures, as if the most flattering thing the manufacturer has to say about its own beer is that “you will notice it in your mouth.” A review on the brew-rating website Beeradvocate notes that Miller “is a beer best observed in bunches”—a beverage whose most favorable quality is quantity.
This is a beer that provides you with absolutely nothing to think about. It offers a break from the quest to find novel gustatory experience that has come to substitute for culture among much of the American professional class. To drink Miller Lite is to declare that you are a well-adjusted adult—that you do not require excitement at every juncture, that you are capable of sitting with your thoughts, that you have the patience and strength of character to build a buzz slowly.
by Tyler Austin Harper, The Atlantic | Read more:
Image: Pinterest via
[ed. 100%. Lite is the archetypal go anywhere beer. Always remembered for bringing the concept of "light" (as in "less calories"), into the public consciousness. Interestingly, where I live, you can only find it in 16oz 12 packs; regular 12oz cans only come in cases (no 6 packs). Not sure of the message there...]
Fender Demands Builders Stop Making Stratocaster-Style Guitars
Following on from its legal victory regarding the Stratocaster trademark in March, a law firm claiming to represent Fender Musical Instruments Corporation has reportedly sent cease and desist orders to a variety of guitar makers demanding they stop producing instruments that use the Stratocaster design.
Back in 2009, Fender lost a high-profile US case when the brand attempted to file trademarks for the Stratocaster, Telecaster and P-Bass body shapes. At the time the filing was protested by a group of other guitar makers, who ultimately succeeded in having the trademarks cancelled.
Back in 2009, Fender lost a high-profile US case when the brand attempted to file trademarks for the Stratocaster, Telecaster and P-Bass body shapes. At the time the filing was protested by a group of other guitar makers, who ultimately succeeded in having the trademarks cancelled.
In the years since, it was widely assumed that this defeat – following on from Gibson’s 2005 loss in a lawsuit against PRS in 2005 – gave other builders the freedom to use classic body shapes, provided that they didn’t infringe on things like headstock shape.
However, Gibson’s protracted but ultimately successful battle against Dean Guitars over the Flying V body shape showed that the big brands still have the ability to win these cases in the right circumstances. [...]
The Fender ruling, crucially, was NOT a trademark dispute – Fender and Gibson have both lost trademark cases on their body shapes in the EU in years past – but sought to reframe the Strat’s body shape as an artistic work, subject to copyright, instead.
by Josh Gardner, Guitar.com | Read more:
However, Gibson’s protracted but ultimately successful battle against Dean Guitars over the Flying V body shape showed that the big brands still have the ability to win these cases in the right circumstances. [...]
The Fender ruling, crucially, was NOT a trademark dispute – Fender and Gibson have both lost trademark cases on their body shapes in the EU in years past – but sought to reframe the Strat’s body shape as an artistic work, subject to copyright, instead.
by Josh Gardner, Guitar.com | Read more:
Image: YouTube/uncredited
[ed. Idiots. Destroying decades of history, goodwill, and brand loyalty with one dumb letter. See also: Is this the beginning of the end for the S-style? (Music Radar).]
[ed. Idiots. Destroying decades of history, goodwill, and brand loyalty with one dumb letter. See also: Is this the beginning of the end for the S-style? (Music Radar).]
Friday, May 22, 2026
Trump’s Endgame Is Surrender
The outlines of President Trump’s endgame in the Iran war are now emerging. In a phone call with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu yesterday, Trump reportedly explained that the United States was negotiating a “letter of intent” with Iran that would “formally end the war and launch a 30-day period of negotiations” on Iran’s nuclear program and the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz. The purpose and effect of such an agreement should be clear: The United States is walking away from the crisis. Trump may launch another limited strike to look tough and satisfy the demands of the war’s supporters, but it would be a performative gesture. Endgame in this case is a euphemism for “surrender.”
Trump has blinked many times in the confrontation with Iran—ever since March 18, when Israel attacked the Pars gas field and Iran retaliated with a strike against Qatar’s most important natural-gas-production facility. Trump then called for a halt on U.S. and Israeli targeting of Iran’s energy infrastructure, and the war effectively ended.
Trump’s repeated threats to resume attacks since then have proved to be bluffs. The leaders in Tehran have been calculating for two months that Trump would not launch another attack, and for this reason they have made no concessions despite the damage they suffered from 37 days of relentless strikes. On the contrary, their terms for a settlement are those of a victor: They demand war reparations, no limits on uranium enrichment, recognized control of the strait, and an end to sanctions.
For Trump to respond to this defiance by now calling for another 30 days of cease-fire and talks is a tacit admission of defeat. If he does launch a performative attack in the next few days, the Iranians will understand it for what it is. No one believes that he is going to resume a full-scale war a month from now. Among other reasons, with 30 more days to heal, rearm, and fill its coffers with tolls, Iran will be a more formidable adversary.
In 30 days, moreover, the new Iranian strait regime may already be firmly in place. As the Institute for the Study of War reports, Iran has been using the cease-fire period to “normalize” its control over the strait by “compelling oil-importing countries” to establish transit agreements with Tehran and charging fees on vessels from nations without such deals. According to Iranian officials, the new strait regime will give Iran’s strategic partners, such as Russia and China, priority and allow nations friendly to Iran, such as India and Pakistan, to negotiate their own transit agreements. Vessels associated with nations that Iran regards as an adversary will be denied access to the strait entirely.
Several nations, including South Korea, Turkey, and Iraq, are reportedly already negotiating at least temporary transit agreements. Now that Trump has made clear he has no intention of fighting to reopen the strait, the stampede to get good terms with Tehran will begin. All nations heavily dependent on energy from the Persian Gulf will want to cut their deal quickly to get the oil and gas and other commodities flowing and rescue their battered economy. Those nations currently allied with the United States and friendly to Israel will feel pressure to distance themselves and make their peace with Iran. The international sanctions against Iran will collapse, and even more money will pour into the country’s accounts as its newly central role in the global economy becomes normalized. By the end of 30 days, most of the world will have a stake in the new arrangement and will oppose any resumption of hostilities, even in the unlikely event that Trump wanted to go back to war.
Trump no doubt hopes that he can slip away without Americans noticing the magnitude of this defeat. The financial markets may stabilize if it is clear that oil will eventually start flowing again through a reopened strait, even if under the new Iran-controlled system. A major strategic setback for the United States need not affect Wall Street. The president may also hope that he can change the subject by launching another military operation, this time against the government in Cuba. And the news media have indeed begun writing more about Cuba than about the unfolding disaster in Iran.
According to one U.S. official, Netanyahu’s “hair was on fire” after the call with Trump—for good reason. The Iran war may end up as the single most devastating blow to Israel’s security in its brief history. On the present trajectory, Iran will emerge from the conflict many times stronger and more influential than it was before the war. It will exercise leverage with dozens of the richest nations in the world, all of which will have an acute interest in keeping Iran happy. They will be unlikely to take Israel’s side in any conflict that it has with Tehran or with its proxies in Lebanon and Gaza, because Iran will have the means to punish them if they do. Israel will emerge more isolated than it has been at any time in its history—and not least from its only reliable protector, the United States. When Trump turns his back on Israel, as he must do to implement this policy, MAGA will gladly follow. The bipartisan anti-Israel consensus in the United States will grow and harden.
Will Israel go gentle into this good night? That is the wild card that may disrupt the financial markets’ dreams of a new stability in the Gulf. A stronger, richer, more influential Iran will mean new life for Hamas and Hezbollah. It will mean the end of the Abraham Accords, as the Gulf States will have to make their own peace with Tehran so that their economies can survive. Trump says that Netanyahu “will do whatever I want him to do.” But can Israel stand by while Iran replaces the United States as the arbiter of power in the region?
Trump has blinked many times in the confrontation with Iran—ever since March 18, when Israel attacked the Pars gas field and Iran retaliated with a strike against Qatar’s most important natural-gas-production facility. Trump then called for a halt on U.S. and Israeli targeting of Iran’s energy infrastructure, and the war effectively ended.
For Trump to respond to this defiance by now calling for another 30 days of cease-fire and talks is a tacit admission of defeat. If he does launch a performative attack in the next few days, the Iranians will understand it for what it is. No one believes that he is going to resume a full-scale war a month from now. Among other reasons, with 30 more days to heal, rearm, and fill its coffers with tolls, Iran will be a more formidable adversary.
In 30 days, moreover, the new Iranian strait regime may already be firmly in place. As the Institute for the Study of War reports, Iran has been using the cease-fire period to “normalize” its control over the strait by “compelling oil-importing countries” to establish transit agreements with Tehran and charging fees on vessels from nations without such deals. According to Iranian officials, the new strait regime will give Iran’s strategic partners, such as Russia and China, priority and allow nations friendly to Iran, such as India and Pakistan, to negotiate their own transit agreements. Vessels associated with nations that Iran regards as an adversary will be denied access to the strait entirely.
Several nations, including South Korea, Turkey, and Iraq, are reportedly already negotiating at least temporary transit agreements. Now that Trump has made clear he has no intention of fighting to reopen the strait, the stampede to get good terms with Tehran will begin. All nations heavily dependent on energy from the Persian Gulf will want to cut their deal quickly to get the oil and gas and other commodities flowing and rescue their battered economy. Those nations currently allied with the United States and friendly to Israel will feel pressure to distance themselves and make their peace with Iran. The international sanctions against Iran will collapse, and even more money will pour into the country’s accounts as its newly central role in the global economy becomes normalized. By the end of 30 days, most of the world will have a stake in the new arrangement and will oppose any resumption of hostilities, even in the unlikely event that Trump wanted to go back to war.
Trump no doubt hopes that he can slip away without Americans noticing the magnitude of this defeat. The financial markets may stabilize if it is clear that oil will eventually start flowing again through a reopened strait, even if under the new Iran-controlled system. A major strategic setback for the United States need not affect Wall Street. The president may also hope that he can change the subject by launching another military operation, this time against the government in Cuba. And the news media have indeed begun writing more about Cuba than about the unfolding disaster in Iran.
According to one U.S. official, Netanyahu’s “hair was on fire” after the call with Trump—for good reason. The Iran war may end up as the single most devastating blow to Israel’s security in its brief history. On the present trajectory, Iran will emerge from the conflict many times stronger and more influential than it was before the war. It will exercise leverage with dozens of the richest nations in the world, all of which will have an acute interest in keeping Iran happy. They will be unlikely to take Israel’s side in any conflict that it has with Tehran or with its proxies in Lebanon and Gaza, because Iran will have the means to punish them if they do. Israel will emerge more isolated than it has been at any time in its history—and not least from its only reliable protector, the United States. When Trump turns his back on Israel, as he must do to implement this policy, MAGA will gladly follow. The bipartisan anti-Israel consensus in the United States will grow and harden.
Will Israel go gentle into this good night? That is the wild card that may disrupt the financial markets’ dreams of a new stability in the Gulf. A stronger, richer, more influential Iran will mean new life for Hamas and Hezbollah. It will mean the end of the Abraham Accords, as the Gulf States will have to make their own peace with Tehran so that their economies can survive. Trump says that Netanyahu “will do whatever I want him to do.” But can Israel stand by while Iran replaces the United States as the arbiter of power in the region?
by Robert Kagan, The Atlantic | Read more:
Image: Chip Somodevilla/Getty
Thursday, May 21, 2026
The Public Lands Rule Is Gone
What the BLM's Public Lands Rule was, why the Trump administration killed it, and what it means for the 245 million acres we all own.
On Tuesday, the Bureau of Land Management officially rescinded the Conservation and Landscape Health Rule—better known as the Public Lands Rule. The change takes effect June 11. The administration had been signaling this move since last spring, but this week made it final, and it landed alongside a separate proposed rule weakening grazing oversight on 155 million acres of Western land.
I haven’t previously written about the Public Lands Rule, in large part because, frankly, it’s very much an in-the-weeds policy story and tough to make interesting. But that doesn’t mean the rule was not important or that this week’s decision won’t have downstream impacts. The PLR was a sincere attempt to put conservation on equal footing with drilling, mining, and grazing in how the BLM makes decisions about the 245 million acres it manages—roughly one in ten acres in the United States. That the administration moved so aggressively to kill even that modest reset tells you something about where its priorities lie.
Here’s what you need to know.
What was the Public Lands Rule, exactly?
For most of the BLM’s modern history, “multiple use” in practice meant that drilling, grazing, and mining got to sit with the adults when decisions were made, while conservation was relegated to the kids’ table, typically alongside recreation. The Public Lands Rule, finalized in May 2024, was meant to fix that. It directed the BLM to protect the most intact landscapes, restore degraded habitat, and use science and Indigenous knowledge as the foundation for management decisions. Most consequentially, it made conservation an official use of public lands—meaning a tribe, a rancher, or a conservation organization could hold a restoration lease on a piece of ground the same way an oil company leases it for drilling. That’s what was really at stake. Not a land grab, but a seat at the table.
Who made the rule?
The Biden-era BLM, led by director Tracy Stone-Manning, finalized it in May 2024 after a lengthy public process. The comment period generated 215,000 remarks, and the overwhelming majority were in favor. The rule wasn’t a new policy invention so much as a course correction. The Federal Land Policy and Management Act of 1976 already requires the BLM to manage lands for “multiple use and sustained yield” to benefit current and future generations. After decades of drift toward extraction as the default, the Public Lands Rule was the agency trying to follow the law Congress wrote nearly 50 years ago.
What was the case for rescinding it according to the current administration?
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum argued the rule was “unnecessary” and could block access to hundreds of thousands of acres, hurting energy producers, miners, and ranchers. The administration began the rescission process last spring. A 60-day public comment period followed—and the results were striking. Roughly 98% of more than 61,000 commenters opposed rescission, including members of Congress, former BLM officials, Tribal representatives, ranchers, hunters, and local elected leaders. The administration proceeded anyway.
What does the rescission mean in practice?
Picture the Owyhee Canyonlands in southwestern Idaho—one of the most intact desert ecosystems left in North America, home to bighorn sheep, golden eagles, and some of the wildest river country in the lower 48. Under the Public Lands Rule, a conservation organization or Tribal nation could have held a restoration lease there, giving those values a formal foothold in BLM planning. That mechanism is now gone.
More broadly: 81% of BLM lands are open to oil and gas drilling. About 60% are grazed by livestock. Just 14% are designated for lasting conservation. The rule was meant to start bending those numbers toward balance. Instead, the thumb goes back on the extraction side of the scale.
OK, so how big a deal is this?
The Public Lands Rule was only 16 months old when the administration moved to kill it. Its most important provisions—like conservation leasing—hadn’t yet been fully tested. So the rescission prevents future progress more than it reverses present gains. That’s actually a useful way to understand the administration’s broader strategy: move fast enough that the seeds for a different future, one guided by long-term stewardship principles, never get a chance to take root.
The rescission is significant—but it’s also one item in a very long list, and that context matters. Since January 2025, the administration has fired or pushed out thousands of Interior Department and Forest Service employees. It has proposed cutting public lands agency budgets by more than a third. It issued an executive order making mining the "primary land use" across all public lands where legally allowable—ahead of recreation, wildlife, watersheds, cultural sites, everything. It opened sensitive Arctic habitat to drilling, moved to strip mineral protections from the Boundary Waters watershed in Minnesota, and declared a state of “emergency” on nearly 60% of national forest lands to fast-track commercial logging.
The Public Lands Rule rescission is the headline this week. But the pattern is the real story.
by Christopher Keyes, Re:Public | Read more:
Image: Daniel Halseth/Unsplash
[ed. Public lands (and the public's access to them) are under assault in this administration. See also: The Sellout of the Crazies (Re:Public):]
For fifth-generation Montanan Brad Wilson, the notice marks a defeat with implications far beyond the Crazies.
“The fate of our public lands and our rights are in jeopardy right now,” Wilson told Floodlight.
Wilson is a former sheriff’s deputy and lifelong hunter. For most of his life, he has lived in the jagged shadows of the Crazy Mountains—their snow-capped peaks and twisting valleys watched him grow from a boy herding sheep on his grandfather’s ranch to a grey-haired hunter tracking elk herds across their remote slopes.
“The loss of this access means a lot to me and everybody else,” he said beside the gate, looking down and hiding the wet corners of his eyes.
The road beyond the gate next to Wilson leads into what was, for more than a century, one of two historic public trails into the east side of the Crazies. The U.S. Forest Service relinquished the public’s access to the trail early last year as part of a land swap with the Yellowstone Club—an exclusive mountaintop retreat for the megarich located 100 miles away in Big Sky.
“It doesn’t make any sense to me to give this up,” said Wilson.
For many Montanans, the swap has come to symbolize the growing influence of wealthy private interests spreading across America’s public lands and provides a glimpse of what could come under the Trump administration. [...]
Perhaps nowhere in the country is the fight over public lands—and the big-moneyed interests pulling the strings—more on display right now than in Montana’s Crazy Mountains.
“This is a really simple issue,” said Andrew Posewitz, a Montana public lands advocate and the son of a renowned conservationist. “The public had some really good land and some really good access in the Crazy Mountains. Some really rich people decided they liked the Crazy Mountains a lot … And now the public doesn’t have that access.”
Every American—not just Montanans—should care, he warned.
“Because it is very much a harbinger of potentially what could come.”
On Tuesday, the Bureau of Land Management officially rescinded the Conservation and Landscape Health Rule—better known as the Public Lands Rule. The change takes effect June 11. The administration had been signaling this move since last spring, but this week made it final, and it landed alongside a separate proposed rule weakening grazing oversight on 155 million acres of Western land.
I haven’t previously written about the Public Lands Rule, in large part because, frankly, it’s very much an in-the-weeds policy story and tough to make interesting. But that doesn’t mean the rule was not important or that this week’s decision won’t have downstream impacts. The PLR was a sincere attempt to put conservation on equal footing with drilling, mining, and grazing in how the BLM makes decisions about the 245 million acres it manages—roughly one in ten acres in the United States. That the administration moved so aggressively to kill even that modest reset tells you something about where its priorities lie.
Here’s what you need to know.
What was the Public Lands Rule, exactly?
Who made the rule?
The Biden-era BLM, led by director Tracy Stone-Manning, finalized it in May 2024 after a lengthy public process. The comment period generated 215,000 remarks, and the overwhelming majority were in favor. The rule wasn’t a new policy invention so much as a course correction. The Federal Land Policy and Management Act of 1976 already requires the BLM to manage lands for “multiple use and sustained yield” to benefit current and future generations. After decades of drift toward extraction as the default, the Public Lands Rule was the agency trying to follow the law Congress wrote nearly 50 years ago.
What was the case for rescinding it according to the current administration?
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum argued the rule was “unnecessary” and could block access to hundreds of thousands of acres, hurting energy producers, miners, and ranchers. The administration began the rescission process last spring. A 60-day public comment period followed—and the results were striking. Roughly 98% of more than 61,000 commenters opposed rescission, including members of Congress, former BLM officials, Tribal representatives, ranchers, hunters, and local elected leaders. The administration proceeded anyway.
What does the rescission mean in practice?
Picture the Owyhee Canyonlands in southwestern Idaho—one of the most intact desert ecosystems left in North America, home to bighorn sheep, golden eagles, and some of the wildest river country in the lower 48. Under the Public Lands Rule, a conservation organization or Tribal nation could have held a restoration lease there, giving those values a formal foothold in BLM planning. That mechanism is now gone.
More broadly: 81% of BLM lands are open to oil and gas drilling. About 60% are grazed by livestock. Just 14% are designated for lasting conservation. The rule was meant to start bending those numbers toward balance. Instead, the thumb goes back on the extraction side of the scale.
OK, so how big a deal is this?
The Public Lands Rule was only 16 months old when the administration moved to kill it. Its most important provisions—like conservation leasing—hadn’t yet been fully tested. So the rescission prevents future progress more than it reverses present gains. That’s actually a useful way to understand the administration’s broader strategy: move fast enough that the seeds for a different future, one guided by long-term stewardship principles, never get a chance to take root.
The rescission is significant—but it’s also one item in a very long list, and that context matters. Since January 2025, the administration has fired or pushed out thousands of Interior Department and Forest Service employees. It has proposed cutting public lands agency budgets by more than a third. It issued an executive order making mining the "primary land use" across all public lands where legally allowable—ahead of recreation, wildlife, watersheds, cultural sites, everything. It opened sensitive Arctic habitat to drilling, moved to strip mineral protections from the Boundary Waters watershed in Minnesota, and declared a state of “emergency” on nearly 60% of national forest lands to fast-track commercial logging.
The Public Lands Rule rescission is the headline this week. But the pattern is the real story.
by Christopher Keyes, Re:Public | Read more:
Image: Daniel Halseth/Unsplash
[ed. Public lands (and the public's access to them) are under assault in this administration. See also: The Sellout of the Crazies (Re:Public):]
***
"At the end of a dirt road along the northeastern edge of Montana’s Crazy Mountains, a simple sign warns visitors they are now entering private property. For fifth-generation Montanan Brad Wilson, the notice marks a defeat with implications far beyond the Crazies.
Wilson is a former sheriff’s deputy and lifelong hunter. For most of his life, he has lived in the jagged shadows of the Crazy Mountains—their snow-capped peaks and twisting valleys watched him grow from a boy herding sheep on his grandfather’s ranch to a grey-haired hunter tracking elk herds across their remote slopes.
“The loss of this access means a lot to me and everybody else,” he said beside the gate, looking down and hiding the wet corners of his eyes.
The road beyond the gate next to Wilson leads into what was, for more than a century, one of two historic public trails into the east side of the Crazies. The U.S. Forest Service relinquished the public’s access to the trail early last year as part of a land swap with the Yellowstone Club—an exclusive mountaintop retreat for the megarich located 100 miles away in Big Sky.
“It doesn’t make any sense to me to give this up,” said Wilson.
For many Montanans, the swap has come to symbolize the growing influence of wealthy private interests spreading across America’s public lands and provides a glimpse of what could come under the Trump administration. [...]
Perhaps nowhere in the country is the fight over public lands—and the big-moneyed interests pulling the strings—more on display right now than in Montana’s Crazy Mountains.
“This is a really simple issue,” said Andrew Posewitz, a Montana public lands advocate and the son of a renowned conservationist. “The public had some really good land and some really good access in the Crazy Mountains. Some really rich people decided they liked the Crazy Mountains a lot … And now the public doesn’t have that access.”
Every American—not just Montanans—should care, he warned.
“Because it is very much a harbinger of potentially what could come.”
The Desert Safety Net
Every winter, tens of thousands of Americans migrate to public lands in the Arizona desert. For a growing number, it's not a vacation—it’s the only housing they can afford.
Every autumn across North America, migration begins.
And across the continent’s highways and desert roads, another migration gathers – this one made not of birds or fish, but of humans.
They go by many names: nomads, drifters, snowbirds, boondockers, van dwellers. Some travel in search of warmth, others for freedom and community. And for a growing number, the migration is not simply seasonal but economic.
Among those is 55-year-old Derek Hansler, a chef by trade.
Known to friends as D Rock, he spends the summer in New Hampshire visiting his children and grandchildren, parking his 2003 Van Terra shuttle bus in driveways along the way. He picks up gigs when he needs cash or a place to park, but the season is less work than service, volunteering in the communities he revisits every year.
“New Hampshire tells me when it’s time to roll,” he jokes. He likes to stay until the leaves turn crimson, then leave before they fall. When that moment arrives, he says goodbye to his family and points his bus 3,300 miles (5,310km) to the south-west.
In Seattle, as the rainy maritime chill brings out jackets, Stephanie Scruggs and Gustavo Costo prepare to head south. After three years on the road, they recently decided to move in together – a milestone in their nomadic life that meant trading their two vans for a half-finished bus they named Magpie, a weathered 1999 International Thomas.
It’s been more than five years since Scruggs, then 35, was diagnosed with a rare and aggressive brain cancer known as a grade three anaplastic astrocytoma. After surgery, six weeks of radiation, and a year of chemo, doctors told her she might have two to five years to live.
Retiree Theresa Webster makes a final pass through the Oregon campground where she volunteers each year as a summer host. Fire rings are doused. Bathrooms are scrubbed. Trash is gathered and hauled away.
In return for the work, she has been given what has become increasingly rare: a legal place to park.
With the season over, she packs up Old Yeller, the mustard yellow 1977 Dodge van she bought for $3,000. Her dog, Miles, rides shotgun as she takes the long way south, first turning east toward her son’s driveway in Iowa, folding briefly back into the family rhythms of grandkids and shared meals. When winter presses in, she points Old Yeller down the interstate.
In driveways, campgrounds, and borrowed corners of parking lots, autumn departures like these unfold across North America. Soon these migrants will spill on to back roads, highways and interstates, license plates tracing faint lines south from Alaska, Quebec, Maine and everywhere in between, navigating by a kind of winter constellation – an invisible beacon in the American southwest that most maps barely notice, a place they return to year after year.
A small desert outpost called Quartzsite, Arizona.
For many road trippers speeding along Interstate 10, Quartzsite, or “Q-town” as it is affectionately known, appears little more than a gas station and fast-food stopover halfway between Los Angeles and Phoenix. It sits in the northern reaches of the Sonoran Desert, 20 miles east of the Colorado River.
Summertime temperatures hover in the triple digits, sending the valley’s human residents indoors to air-conditioned rooms and its wild inhabitants – including desert tortoises, cottontails and kangaroo rats – into underground lairs.
According to the 2020 census, the population is 2,413.
But as winter approaches and temperatures fall to something more forgiving, the great migration of motorhomes, RVs, buses, trailers, vans, cars and trucks begins to pour into Quartzsite – and more precisely, into the vast stretches of open desert that surround it.
But not everyone keeps moving.
Tens of thousands instead gather inside BLM-designated long-term visitor areas, or LTVAs, seasonal enclaves established in 1983 to accommodate the growing number of people wintering in the desert. Seven LTVAs stretch across Arizona and California. But the largest of these and the center of gravity is La Posa – Spanish for “the resting place” – an 11,400-acre stretch of land on the outskirts of Quartzsite.
Each winter, a vibrant social world takes hold. Clubs form and dissolve – singles groups, quilters, metal-detecting hobbyists – while daily gatherings emerge at sunrise and continue late into the night. Around them, infrastructure hums into being: laundromats that double as showers, RVs converted into hair salons, swap meets, mail-forwarding counters for lives without fixed addresses, mechanics coaxing life from failing engines.
Theresa remembers arriving in Old Yeller for the first time in 2018. She had kept her apartment in Oregon just in case van life didn’t work out. But as the desert opened around her, the contingency plan dissolved.
“This is it,” she remembers thinking. “This is the life.” She had grown tired of paying rent and bills and having nothing left over – a treadmill she could never step off. Out here, there were no landlords to answer to. Eight years later, the desert around Quartzsite still carries that weight for her. “It has a magical feeling,” she said.
Community and infrastructure move in tandem here, creating a seasonal metropolis layered on to the existing town. But what allows it to function year after year is something more fundamental: affordability.
For $180, a permit allows camping from 15 September through 15 April. At La Posa, that price includes trash collection, vault toilets and a dump station. It’s worth pausing on the math. For less than the cost of a single night in many American hotels, a person can legally live on public lands in the desert for seven months.
Many LTVA visitors are traditional snowbirds: retirees who maintain homes elsewhere and migrate seasonally for warmth. But for a growing number of others, the permit functions differently: as a legal foothold in a housing system that has increasingly shut them out. [...]
Dr Graham Pruss, executive director of the National Vehicle Residency Coalition – a network that advocates for the rights of people living in vehicles – spends part of each winter moving between desert camps as he connects with vehicle residents across the country. He sees many of them as part of what he calls an “economic refugee class.” They are people displaced not by conflict or famine, he said, but by rents, wages and the shrinking availability of stable housing.
He describes what he calls “settlement bias” – our tendency to treat familiar forms of dwelling as legitimate and unfamiliar ones as suspect.
“If you park an RV on to a private space and you pay for rent, that’s called a mobile home park,” he said. “But if you move that RV 100 feet onto the street, we call that homelessness.
“These are people who are using their private property to solve a housing crisis that we all see around us,” he added. “That adaptive strategy is innovative. It creates solutions where they don’t exist.”
For many vehicle residents, public lands have become one of the few legal geographies where long-term habitation remains possible.
“Public lands are the lifeline for a lot of us,” said Mary Feuer, a longtime public land resident. “When the money runs out, they literally support us.”
by Joshua Jackson, Re:Public | Read more:
And across the continent’s highways and desert roads, another migration gathers – this one made not of birds or fish, but of humans.
They go by many names: nomads, drifters, snowbirds, boondockers, van dwellers. Some travel in search of warmth, others for freedom and community. And for a growing number, the migration is not simply seasonal but economic.
Known to friends as D Rock, he spends the summer in New Hampshire visiting his children and grandchildren, parking his 2003 Van Terra shuttle bus in driveways along the way. He picks up gigs when he needs cash or a place to park, but the season is less work than service, volunteering in the communities he revisits every year.
“New Hampshire tells me when it’s time to roll,” he jokes. He likes to stay until the leaves turn crimson, then leave before they fall. When that moment arrives, he says goodbye to his family and points his bus 3,300 miles (5,310km) to the south-west.
In Seattle, as the rainy maritime chill brings out jackets, Stephanie Scruggs and Gustavo Costo prepare to head south. After three years on the road, they recently decided to move in together – a milestone in their nomadic life that meant trading their two vans for a half-finished bus they named Magpie, a weathered 1999 International Thomas.
It’s been more than five years since Scruggs, then 35, was diagnosed with a rare and aggressive brain cancer known as a grade three anaplastic astrocytoma. After surgery, six weeks of radiation, and a year of chemo, doctors told her she might have two to five years to live.
Retiree Theresa Webster makes a final pass through the Oregon campground where she volunteers each year as a summer host. Fire rings are doused. Bathrooms are scrubbed. Trash is gathered and hauled away.
In return for the work, she has been given what has become increasingly rare: a legal place to park.
With the season over, she packs up Old Yeller, the mustard yellow 1977 Dodge van she bought for $3,000. Her dog, Miles, rides shotgun as she takes the long way south, first turning east toward her son’s driveway in Iowa, folding briefly back into the family rhythms of grandkids and shared meals. When winter presses in, she points Old Yeller down the interstate.
In driveways, campgrounds, and borrowed corners of parking lots, autumn departures like these unfold across North America. Soon these migrants will spill on to back roads, highways and interstates, license plates tracing faint lines south from Alaska, Quebec, Maine and everywhere in between, navigating by a kind of winter constellation – an invisible beacon in the American southwest that most maps barely notice, a place they return to year after year.
A small desert outpost called Quartzsite, Arizona.
*****
Summertime temperatures hover in the triple digits, sending the valley’s human residents indoors to air-conditioned rooms and its wild inhabitants – including desert tortoises, cottontails and kangaroo rats – into underground lairs.
According to the 2020 census, the population is 2,413.
But as winter approaches and temperatures fall to something more forgiving, the great migration of motorhomes, RVs, buses, trailers, vans, cars and trucks begins to pour into Quartzsite – and more precisely, into the vast stretches of open desert that surround it.
But not everyone keeps moving.
Tens of thousands instead gather inside BLM-designated long-term visitor areas, or LTVAs, seasonal enclaves established in 1983 to accommodate the growing number of people wintering in the desert. Seven LTVAs stretch across Arizona and California. But the largest of these and the center of gravity is La Posa – Spanish for “the resting place” – an 11,400-acre stretch of land on the outskirts of Quartzsite.
Each winter, a vibrant social world takes hold. Clubs form and dissolve – singles groups, quilters, metal-detecting hobbyists – while daily gatherings emerge at sunrise and continue late into the night. Around them, infrastructure hums into being: laundromats that double as showers, RVs converted into hair salons, swap meets, mail-forwarding counters for lives without fixed addresses, mechanics coaxing life from failing engines.
Theresa remembers arriving in Old Yeller for the first time in 2018. She had kept her apartment in Oregon just in case van life didn’t work out. But as the desert opened around her, the contingency plan dissolved.
“This is it,” she remembers thinking. “This is the life.” She had grown tired of paying rent and bills and having nothing left over – a treadmill she could never step off. Out here, there were no landlords to answer to. Eight years later, the desert around Quartzsite still carries that weight for her. “It has a magical feeling,” she said.
Community and infrastructure move in tandem here, creating a seasonal metropolis layered on to the existing town. But what allows it to function year after year is something more fundamental: affordability.
For $180, a permit allows camping from 15 September through 15 April. At La Posa, that price includes trash collection, vault toilets and a dump station. It’s worth pausing on the math. For less than the cost of a single night in many American hotels, a person can legally live on public lands in the desert for seven months.
Many LTVA visitors are traditional snowbirds: retirees who maintain homes elsewhere and migrate seasonally for warmth. But for a growing number of others, the permit functions differently: as a legal foothold in a housing system that has increasingly shut them out. [...]
Dr Graham Pruss, executive director of the National Vehicle Residency Coalition – a network that advocates for the rights of people living in vehicles – spends part of each winter moving between desert camps as he connects with vehicle residents across the country. He sees many of them as part of what he calls an “economic refugee class.” They are people displaced not by conflict or famine, he said, but by rents, wages and the shrinking availability of stable housing.
He describes what he calls “settlement bias” – our tendency to treat familiar forms of dwelling as legitimate and unfamiliar ones as suspect.
“If you park an RV on to a private space and you pay for rent, that’s called a mobile home park,” he said. “But if you move that RV 100 feet onto the street, we call that homelessness.
“These are people who are using their private property to solve a housing crisis that we all see around us,” he added. “That adaptive strategy is innovative. It creates solutions where they don’t exist.”
For many vehicle residents, public lands have become one of the few legal geographies where long-term habitation remains possible.
“Public lands are the lifeline for a lot of us,” said Mary Feuer, a longtime public land resident. “When the money runs out, they literally support us.”
by Joshua Jackson, Re:Public | Read more:
Image: Joshua Jackson
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