The Crocfather

From Croc: How I Invented the World’s Most Popular Shoe, Became a Massive Success, and Almost Destroyed Myself—in 15 Easy Lessons, which will be published this month by HarperCollins Leadership.

I partied with Fleetwood Mac, delivered pizza to Joe Montana, kidded around with Robin Williams. I have three-star generals on speed dial. I raced cars at the Charlotte Motor Speedway. I was in the witness-protection program, more or less.

I’ve enjoyed the company of more beautiful, intoxicating women than I can count. One thing I can count: I’ve been around the world twenty-eight times.

I live at crazy speed, but I’m still here. And with all those accomplishments, there are … things. Other things. Of course there are. How could there not?

I lost so many friends. Though death, I get—unavoidable. But the ones who turned their backs? Or altered the story? Or hopped off the gravy train because they felt they were owed more gravy? Or got all holier-than-thou? One of my friends banned me from all his restaurants, including some favorite Boulder hangouts. To be fair, that rejection I deserved.

The love of my life and I have not been together for decades.

The woman I was most serious with, post-Elizabeth, once joined a lawsuit against me.

Maybe the success of Crocs and the prestige and notoriety and especially the crazy money had something to do with my nearly destroying myself. I can’t help but think of the roulette wheel of life: I wanted a good boat shoe—simply that—so I walked into a Tommy Bahama store in Miami and asked if they had what I wanted. They did not. Thanks, Tommy. If the answer had been yes, I might never have created Crocs. You would be reading something else right now.

It was the year I became the milk thief.

Back when milk was delivered to your door, I stole from the porches and side entrances of customers on my paper route who were away on vacation.

I realize that’s more than breaking rules—and in fact, it’s breaking the law. Hear me out, though. I couldn’t afford it myself. I was hungry. The milk would have gone bad.

Some of it I drank. The entrepreneur in me got the bright idea to simply give some of my stash to Scott, one of my older brothers, in exchange for him not beating me up. I used the bottle caps to get a discount at the movies. I returned the empties to the owners’ porches so they could get the nickel for the return. It’s not as if I didn’t understand fairness.

They had no idea that I was the one stealing their milk. They knew me only as an enterprising, disciplined paperboy.

I didn’t just break rules. I made up my own. When we were in San Francisco, the 49ers football team was king. They won several Super Bowls in the years I was there, and there were many stars—first and foremost, Joe Montana, the quarterback; but also Ronnie Lott, the future Hall of Fame cornerback; Steve Young, the future star quarterback; Roger Craig, the great running back; and Dwight Clark, the wide receiver who made “The Catch.” I knew where they all lived—that sounds creepy, but everyone in the Bay Area pretty much knew where their football heroes lived—and they weren’t far from one of my stores. I’d delivered pizzas to some of their homes before, so my next idea wasn’t all that far-fetched: whenever the 49ers played out of town, that Sunday I would deliver pizzas to a couple of players’ homes, where their wives and children and friends were almost certainly gathered to watch the game on TV. No one had ordered the pizza. I showed up right before game time with several pies.

“I’m sorry, we didn’t order this.”

“Well, someone did, and it’s all paid for, tip included. Here you go.”

And of course they took it, because who turns down hot pizza and cold drinks that show up right before kickoff on Sunday? For free?

At Domino’s, from the early Eighties to the late Nineties, we outworked everyone, and we out-enjoyed them, too, Joel and me. It wasn’t a competition exactly. It was How much life could you suck out of life? Okay, maybe it was a competition, because I wasn’t going to let anyone beat me at having a good time. I wanted anyone else’s best moment of the year to be a Tuesday afternoon for me.

We had the coolest clientele. We had a regular contingent of gay customers who thought Joel was cute and hoped they could persuade him out of being straight. Occasionally they had it in for me too. For some of the men, their type was almost anyone. Joel and I might be out in the Domino’s car on delivery—two guys in their twenties in Domino’s uniforms—and guys would yell at us from their cars, nice cars. And when I started making serious money and drove around in my red convertible, I got even more of that. Not a lot of restraint then.

Everyone was doing drugs in the late Eighties, or at least it seemed that way. Powder cocaine if you were rich, smokable crack if you were poor. San Francisco was a snowstorm. Probably most of America, too.

Scotty knew chemistry, but I knew fashion. And I knew something was going on here. It was sometime between midnight and 3 am in the Caribbean, and I was the only person awake on the boat.

Still, I knew this was heading in the right direction. I drilled some holes in the top to let the foot breathe (more on that later). There was no mirror nearby but I’m pretty sure a light bulb was floating above my head.

A shoe. A boat shoe, actually. A very weird-looking shoe, one that looked different from every other kind of shoe, but one I was sure boat lovers would wear if we could figure out a way to make it. When we got to shore, Scotty and I found a plastic clog in a hardware store and started drilling it, seeing if it would support holes and not scuff surfaces.

Nope. It did not do what we needed.

I did not realize that pursuing this idea would explode in our faces over and over and over—literally.

by George Boedecker Jr., Harper's | Read more:
Image: via:

Hand-painted RGM-89 Jegan custom, 2026-04-27
via:

Okiie Hashimoto
via:

Childhood and Education: Voice Without Exit

Nikole Hannah-Jones wrote a brave self-critical piece in The New York Times, centrally about how she intentionally sent her daughter to a well-funded but failing school, PS 307, in the hopes of using voice to improve it, and how that utterly failed her daughter and failed to impact the school.

Ultimately her daughter recovers, but we see a completely broken system that is unresponsive to internal voice, and until now she made no attempt to blow the whistle and utilize her professional position to do so.

The whole incident illustrates not only how messed up so many of our schools are despite abundant funding, it also raises the question of what the schools are even for. If her daughter can fully recover from severe deficits and be getting As and Bs at a challenging school within a year, what are the first eight years of school for? How much of the schools, grades and tests are fake? Can we somehow do better? [...]

New York City PS 307

Nikole sent her daughter Najya to PS 307 entirely by her own choice.

She felt, by her own description, an obligation to her sense of the common good at the expense of her daughter.

Her daughter began struggling. Tutors were brought in. Najya’s academics kept struggling. Then after many years her daughter looked up the school’s test scores, and oh boy was she pissed off. And this was when her daughter thought all the better schools would cost money.

Nikole Hannah-Jones (NYTimes): Even if her schools were not academically the strongest, I explained, her father and I knew that we could provide for her tutoring and any other assistance to make up for what her school may have lacked.

But my child just shook her head, her face a mask of disbelief, and something else: betrayal.

“So you had money to send me to one of the best schools, and you chose not to?” she said, hurling her words. “Because other kids are disadvantaged, you didn’t want to put me in a great school?”

Najya was asking what I’d accomplished by not choosing the “best” school for her. And the honest answer is, I don’t know. When it comes to the choices my husband and I have made about public education, these days I feel that I failed both my values and my child.

Yeah, pretty much. As many others said, it was a very brave and praiseworthy decision to write this post. It does not make up for the events that gave her the opportunity to write it. I won’t get into the minefield of trying to understand her logic, except that she put various ideological abstractions ahead of her daughter’s education.

Nikole Knew And Had Exit Ramps

I can sort of understand trying this at the start, but it got increasingly unreasonable as the years went on and Nikole got more information.

Nikole Hannah-Jones (NYTimes): Toward the end of first grade, Najya started sometimes saying she didn’t like her school and complaining how chaotic it was at lunch. I decided to visit during the lunch period and was shocked by what I saw. Najya’s class and another class were sitting at their tables in the cafeteria with no lunch and no adult supervision. Children were running wild, chasing, hitting and pushing each other while the teacher’s aides and cafeteria workers stood by looking bored.

Several times, I had to instruct children to stop striking each other and to sit down, at one point physically pulling two boys apart. When I asked one of the aides why the children weren’t being supervised, she told me the lunch period was short-staffed. After I sat back down with Najya, she told me, “It’s always like this, and that’s why I don’t want to go to this school.”

It was not the children that horrified me — kids of all incomes are rambunctious at lunchtime. It was the callous disregard of the adults.

This is where she fully loses me. This happens, and then she sends her daughter back for second grade. That’s all the information you need. You have a neighborhood public school that isn’t this one. What the hell? And yes, it is both the adults and the kids, both acting that way in part because of each other.

She tried to ‘stay and fight for the students who did not have options.’ She learned that the teachers did not care, on the level of often not showing up and having substitutes that didn’t teach, and the Principal couldn’t be bothered to show up either. Then in fourth grade she learned her daughter was behind on all subjects, and when she emailed the staff, she got ignored. What did she expect?

PS 307 Is Fraudulent And Indifferent

Then it got better, or worse, depending on your perspective.

Nikole Hannah-Jones (NYTimes): Then one day in December, Najya came home and excitedly informed me that she had suddenly jumped three grade levels in reading in one month. Knowing that this was virtually impossible, I reached out to the school’s literacy coach and learned that after we began asking for the reading assessment, Najya’s teacher had instructed the coach to perform the evaluation and that she found Najya was reading just fine. What became clear to me was that Najya’s teacher had most likely never performed the school’s mandatory reading assessments for Najya or any of her classmates but instead had assumed the flagging competency of these mostly low-income Black children.

That’s fraud. And also rather evil. Nikole has the types of connections that can start investigations. Why are we only learning about this now? Like, what?

Then, Najya’s math assignments were found, mostly wrong, entirely ungraded. Again, what was the plan? Keep nagging the same people who don’t care?

But, somehow, Nikole decided she needed to ‘keep fighting,’ by running into the same brick wall, rather than save her drowning daughter. I don’t really know what she was expecting. These people knew Nikole was literally a New York Times reporter on inequality. They also, correctly, figured out she was not going to do anything that threatened them.

Nikole Hannah-Jones (NYTimes): What would happen to those children if we abandoned them as everyone else with power had?

Moving In Unison

The story briefly improves at the middle school, Unison, but one quickly notices that all the positive anecdotes are signaling. There is a food-justice club and trips and “Hamilton” and Black History Month. Nothing wrong with any of that, but basics first, and then Nikole noticed the students never got homework and the teachers could not control the classrooms. And so on.

A Good School

Having not gotten into the top schools because she was unprepared for the test, and not being allowed to pick private schools, her daughter tried all that was left.

Nikole Hannah-Jones (NYTimes): I would give her absolute autonomy, with the exception that she had to choose a public school. She would research them, she would decide which ones she wanted us to visit and she would choose where she applied.

A few days later, Najya handed me a list. Her top schools were heavily white and screened their students, the type of public schools I had spent my career arguing against.

Najya got into a ‘good’ school with strong academics, and as one would expect was overwhelmed because she’d previously never even been assigned homework. She’d failed the Algebra test the year before, but Nikole assumed that was just bad test taking, rather than (of course) that the school had failed to teach her math for years. Unison does ‘Algebra for all’ as a supposed college gateway, and the way they did it was they just passed everyone without teaching the kids algebra.

What Were Elementary and Middle School Even For?

The story has a happy ending. With intense help, Najya catches up and acclimates. Which raises the question of what all those years of school are even for in the first place. If Najya was never taught academics, and Najya never got good discipline or socialization because of classroom conditions being anarchic, and it took less than a year to have her back on her feet, what were those eight years even for?

Nikole Hannah-Jones (NYTimes): Unison had eliminated homework because studies show that it does not have much impact on academic achievement, and that assigning it often sets up for failure students who are so academically behind that they cannot do the work on their own.

Doesn’t this challenge the entire educational system at its core? We are basically saying that nothing matters, and all that work is for show, unless you need to be on some sort of cutting edge or elite track.

Also, I hate to be the one to say it, but if you really want to do homework, it’s not like you can’t come up with some homework.

The worst torture of all, perhaps, comes near the end.

Nikole Hannah-Jones (NYTimes): One day in June as I was immersed in writing this essay, my phone rang. It was Najya. She’s now 16 and was finishing the final weeks of her sophomore year. She was making her daily call for lunch money, a ritual I created to force her to check in with me once during the school day.

Okay, that’s it. Forcing your 16-year-old to call you in the middle of every school day or she starves? Nikole is a monster.

The Project Was Ideological

It was all her choice, and it was clearly done for ideological reasons.

Jack: In all the talk about NHJ sending her child to a high-poverty school, I think it’s been under-mentioned: she could have chosen her neighborhood school. She did not. She hand-picked a school with the demographics, amenities, and faculty she wanted, then used private tutoring.

Of course her daughter was mad! Her mom used her resources just as every rich parent does, choosing a well-resourced school in line with her values, but the values were “My child should be in a school with poor kids and receive private tutoring to compensate for bad instruction.”

Hostage theory, except the only hostage-taker is a parent with self-contradictory values around education.

She started the private tutoring when her daughter was in fourth grade and continued bragging about the approach through 2024.

Jack Despain Zhou: There are two stories I could tell you right now, in the wake of Nikole Hannah-Jones’s viral article about her daughter’s education.

The first is this: The Pulitzer-winning New York Times writer of the 1619 Project sent her daughter Najya to an impoverished, majority-black elementary school because she wanted to use her influence to help all black children. She exercised her voice to change the school, and eventually Najya grew into a bright and capable honor roll student at a non-selective neighborhood middle school that was better than its test scores would say. However, systemic inequalities were too entrenched, and her daughter wound up failed by the same systems that failed many others, learning less than she expected before choosing to attend a rigorous high school and working hard to catch up.

But here’s another story: A wealthy and influential woman exercised New York City’s generous school choice options to send her child to an out-of-neighborhood school that currently receives more funding than almost any other school in the country and more than 90% of other schools in New York City, boasting funding of $52,349 per student and a 1:10 faculty-student ratio as of the 2024–2025 school year.

She did so because that school exemplified her values, and she persuaded parents around the country to make similar decisions on the strength of her conviction. For years, she experienced a sort of motivated blindness towards the dysfunction of a place that saw children fighting in the lunchroom unsupervised, assigned fake homework and gave fake grades, and ignored her daughter’s needs, giving her the opportunity to brag in public about the value she brought her daughter’s school even as they ignored her in private.

She did the same in middle school, building a close relationship with her daughter’s principal while celebrating her daughter’s place as an honor roll student and dismissing warning signs because some kids struggle with tests. As late as 2024, she spoke about her decision in glowing terms.

It was only when her daughter told her that she never got the education she wanted that she told the truth about what happened, revealing a decade of education horror stories.  [...]

Null Hypothesis Watch

Manhattan Institute: NEW: We visited PS 307, the failing public school that Nikole Hannah-Jones sent her daughter to.

The teachers make an average of over $100,000 a year. The school spends $52,000 per student each year. The student/teacher ratio is 9 to 1.

We went to another school just down the street that spends less than half of what PS 307 does—yet the academic outcomes are significantly better. Underfunding and racism aren’t causing schools to fail.

Jack: This is the per-pupil funding for the elementary school Nikole Hannah-Jones sent her daughter to.

If you subscribe to the funding theory of education, how much would have been enough? It’s already crossed the average per capita annual income threshold. Maybe $100k? $200k?  [...]

The Two Big Scandals

I circle back to the real larger scandals here, of which there are two.

First, that the schools are getting massive amounts of money, not teaching students or controlling classrooms and outright committing fraud, and no one seems to care:

Peachy Keenan: Why am I just learning now that public schools in the New York city ghetto don’t assign homework, don’t grade tests, don’t respond to parents emails or phone calls, don’t supervise feral, fighting kids at lunch, don’t know or care if their students can read or do grade level math, and give them As on their report cards when they are actually doing F level work?

Why did Nikole Hannah Jones bury this explosive lede?

Why isn’t she writing emergency front page @nytimes stories about this shocking, incredible, abject citywide failure that costs people who pay taxes over $50K per student per year?

Why isn’t she holding emergency all-hands on deck meetings with @NYCMayor to shut this down, rescue these kids, fire everyone involved?

We all know why. But no one at the Times will say a word. LOL.

The second is the one that no one seems to notice.

Which is that despite Najya getting very little education and no homework for eight years, in which she lacked basic math concepts and presumably had similar gaps in other subjects, by the end of ninth grade she was at a competitive school earning As and Bs and doing fine.

Which is great for Najya. I love a happy ending. None of this is on her in any way, and she fought hard to go to a good school and then to catch up. But, again, what is the point of elementary and middle school, if one year of concentrated effort can fix that?

by Zvi Mowshowitz, DWAV |  Read more:

Image: Wayne Lawrence/NY Times

[ed. See also: American students are getting dumber (SB).]

The Corruption is Bad. This May Be Worse

There are about 20 golf courses within a 20-mile radius of Kissimmee, Fla. The Remington Golf Club is not considered one of the better ones. (“Traps were overgrown on many holes. Tee boxes were a bit bare,” wrote one GolfPass reviewer.) It was a primo pick, however, for an idiosyncratic financial play that’s become a Trump world staple: the reverse merger.

The idea sounds simple enough. Find a down-on-its-luck company that’s already listed on a stock market, and smash it together with a start-up in need of quick money. It’s a shortcut to a major cash infusion, without the paperwork of an I.P.O. or the hassles of dealing with venture capital investors. The results can be a little odd.

In February 2025, the holding company that owned the Remington Golf Club and a sister course went public on the Nasdaq stock exchange, with financial underwriting by a company based in Trump Tower. That company was Dominari Securities. The I.P.O. flopped, and when shares were at rock bottom, one of Dominari Holdings’ funds bought up a significant number of them. A few months after that, the golf course company announced it was merging with, of all things, a small firm building drones for the military. Dominari Securities would arrange the financing for that deal, too.

Between the two of them, Don Jr. and Eric Trump own about 11 percent of Dominari Holdings, and they serve on the company’s advisory board. Its president, Kyle Wool, is a frequent booster of the president on the Fox Business channel. When the impending merger was announced (“Trump Sons Back New Drone Company Targeting Pentagon Sales” was the headline in The Journal), the golf course company’s shares shot up 24 percent intraday. The number of shares traded jumped from around 24,000 to over 28 million in a single day. The fact that a Trump-backed company could be selling drones to the Trump administration wasn’t a bug; it was a feature. In fact, that feature seems to have been a selling point to a certain kind of investor.

Mr. Evans, from Unusual Machines, compared the Trump brothers coming on board to when Oprah Winfrey joined Weight Watchers, but it’s more than that. Buying into these companies offers people a chance to affiliate themselves with emerging technology, MAGA celebrities and Trump-adjacent businesses all at the same time. The Financial Times recently noted that a vast majority of companies backed by Dominari and 1789 — neither of which commented in response to questions from The Times — are in sectors aligned with Trump administration priorities.

Brett Velicovich, the president of Powerus, the merged golf course-drone company, told me in the spring that it would compete on merit, not connections. “With the way that the Department of War works, there are multiple layers of oversight,” he said, adding that it “would be virtually impossible for someone to make a call, and all of a sudden: a contract.” In June, Unusual Machines announced a $30 million equity investment in Powerus. In August, one of Powerus’s subsidiaries received the company’s first major Pentagon contract, a funding line worth up to $90 million from the U.S. Air Force. As Pentagon contracts go, that’s a pittance, but it’s a lot of money for a start-up.

Dominari Securities helped engineer lots of other reverse mergers, each more improbable than the last. The company achieved a mash-up of a crypto business with a company that makes sea otter plushies, another of a drone software company with a construction company known for the hundreds of waxing salons it’s built.

Then there’s the tungsten-mining operation in Kazakhstan. The Trump administration had given its preliminary OK to $1.6 billion in financing when it announced a merger with Skyline Builders. That’s a Hong Kong-based engineering company that previously went public with the help of none other than Dominari Securities.

Separately, Trump Media, which runs the Truth Social platform, is combining with a nuclear fusion firm. Seriously. Yes, this seems like some kind of MAGA Mad Lib. But we’re in an age of absurdity on Wall Street. Allbirds, the shoe brand, recently announced it was becoming an A.I. company. The princelings didn’t build this madhouse, but they seem to be making themselves very much at home in it.

These shell-company deals, which have historically been riskier than traditional I.P.O.s, fell out of fashion on Wall Street for a while. They have been making a comeback, though, and these princeling-connected deals are a part of it.

The entrepreneurs joining these deals aren’t necessarily MAGA. Often, their businesses just need the money, and right now the oligarchy is flush. “Unfortunately they are so far-right,” one chief executive told The Journal, speaking of his new partners. But now “we’ve got the capital we need.”

Many of these deals have turned out rather well for Dominari Securities and its American Ventures fund. Take those Kissimmee golf courses. After the fund put in $26 million, its holdings in the mashed-up golf course company are worth around 10 times as much. As for the everyday investors who bought in — well, they didn’t do so great. Powerus, the golf-drones combo, is down almost 70 percent since its merger was announced. Dominari Holdings’ chief executive has rejected any suggestion that his company improperly manipulated share prices, or that shareholder losses were evidence of anything other than normal market fluctuations. “Do stock prices rise and fall?” he asked Bloomberg. “Of course they do.” But that same pattern, of a sharp rise in value followed by a steep decline, played out in one Dominari-arranged merger after another after another.  [...]

The last time American oligarchs were this brazen was at the end of the 19th century. Their power was immense, and they weren’t afraid to show it, whether by openly buying a Senate seat or persuading the president to help them corner the gold market.

“It provoked a backlash,” said Professor Winters, the author of “The Blind Spot: How Oligarchs Dominate Our Democracy.” “That backlash lasted decades.” He ticked off a series of reforms that resulted: the progressive income tax, and its radical idea of asking more from the rich; the Sherman Antitrust Act, which broke up the biggest oligarchs’ biggest source of wealth; the direct election of senators, which undercut the oligarchs’ ability to pick the nation’s most influential legislators; the rise of organized labor. There’s a reason the oligarchy retreated behind the hedgerows for the next century or so.  [...]

America is by no means headed for changes of this scale. But it’s become increasingly clear that Americans are grossed out by the magnitude of self-enrichment in and adjacent to the Trump administration. In a late October poll, CNBC found that corruption was now the top issue on midterm voters’ minds. In a recent Gallup poll, 89 percent of all Americans surveyed said government corruption was widespread — a consensus almost unimaginable on any other topic. Investors have lost an estimated $3.8 billion on Mr. Trump’s crypto coin.

by Noah Shachtman, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Brandon Celi

The Herculaneum Scroll and the Underrated Value of Historical Knowledge

Twelve days ago, it was announced that a 21-year-old computer science student named Luke Farritor had “became the first person in two millennia to see an entire word” in one of the papyrus scrolls buried within a library in the Roman city of Herculaneum, which was destroyed by the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 CE.

Taken together, these scrolls — there are over 1,800 in all, discovered in one of the most lavish of all known Roman houses — are the only surviving intact library from Greco-Roman antiquity. The library contains works from ancient authors which do not exist anywhere else. A poignant example: the Greek philosopher Chrysippus was both famed and prolific in his day, authoring some 700 texts. But aside from stray quotations in the works of others, all of these texts were lost.

… that is, until portions of them were found among the scrolls at Herculaneum. The stakes of this library, in other words, are enormous. Being able to read through all 1,800 scrolls would amount to one of the biggest historical breakthroughs of the century, literally rewriting the history of the ancient Mediterranean.

The trouble is, the scrolls are lumps of carbon. They were torched by volcanic smoke and gas during the eruption of Vesuvius. To unroll them is to destroy them.

Nevertheless, they can now be imaged in remarkable detail, using methods like X-rays and 3-D CT scans.

by Benjamin Breen, Res Obscura |  Read more:

Images: Vesuvius Challenge; Digital Restoration Initiative, University of Kentucky

[ed. Amazing.]

The Myth of Prometheus Is Not a Cautionary Tale

P.S. You're also getting Frankenstein wrong.

Listening to Marc Andreessen discuss his Techno-Optimist Manifesto on the Foundation for American Innovation’s Dynamist podcast, I was struck by his repetition of something that is in the manifesto and is completely wrong. “The myth of Prometheus – in various updated forms like Frankenstein, Oppenheimer, and Terminator – haunts our nightmares,” he writes.1 On the podcast, he elaborated by saying that, although fire has many benefits, the Prometheus myth focuses on its use as a weapon. He said something similar in a June post called “Why AI Will Save the World”:

The fear that technology of our own creation will rise up and destroy us is deeply coded into our culture. The Greeks expressed this fear in the Prometheus Myth – Prometheus brought the destructive power of fire, and more generally technology (“techne”), to man, for which Prometheus was condemned to perpetual torture by the gods.

No. No. No. No.

Prometheus is punished for loving humankind. He stole fire to thwart Zeus’ plans to eliminate humanity and create a new subordinate species. He is a benefactor who sacrifices himself for our good. His punishment is an indicator not of the dangers of fire but of the tyranny of Zeus.

Prometheus is cunning and wise. His name means foresight. He knows what he is doing and what the likely consequences will be.

Eventually his tortures end when he is rescued by the hero Herakles (aka Hercules), who shoots the eagle charged with eating Prometheus’ liver every day, only for it to grow back to be eaten again.

The Greeks honored Prometheus. They celebrated technē. They appreciated the gifts of civilization.

The ancient myth of Prometheus is not a cautionary tale. It is a reminder that technē raises human beings above brutes. It is a myth founded in gratitude. [...]

These aren’t just an English major’s pedantic quibbles. The stories we tell ourselves matter. That even a “techno-optimist” inverts the Promethean myth reveals how deeply hostility to technology has penetrated our collective consciousness.

For thousands of years, the myth of Prometheus has taught us to appreciate the gifts of technē and the costs that bringing those gifts can exact. Prometheus connects our high-tech present with our poetic past. He reminds us of the continuities of human culture as well as its flux. He unites the Two Cultures.

In that spirit, I cherish the hope that, as artificial intelligence makes the library of Herculaneum decipherable, we will recover the lost sequels to Prometheus Bound—an appropriate fruit of the latest Promethean gift.

***

1  Frankenstein isn’t The Terminator either. Frankenstein is a creator who won’t take responsibility for his creation, a father who rejects and abandons his child. The Creature is frightening and dangerous but he is also the book’s moral center, a tragic, sympathetic character who is feared and rejected by human beings because of his appearance. Only then does he turn deadly. Frankenstein arouses pity and terror because we empathize with its central figure and understand his rage.

The novel’s most reasonable political reading is not as a story of the dangers of science but as a parable of slavery and rebellion. “By the eighteen-fifties, Frankenstein’s monster regularly appeared in American political cartoons as a nearly naked black man, signifying slavery itself, seeking his vengeance upon the nation that created him,” writes historian Jill LePore, who calls the “Frankenstein-is-Oppenheimer model…a weak reading of the novel.” I agree.

The Romantics tended to identify with Prometheus and Mary Shelley’s husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley, wrote a play called Prometheus Unbound, further undermining the reading of Frankenstein as an anti-Promethean fable.

by Virginia Postrel, Newsetter | Read more:
Image: via

How to Get Grotesquely Huge on Substack

Four years of ignorance, cupidity, and spleen

Numb at the Lodge is four years old. Around this time every year, I usually write a little post on what the numbers and metrics are saying about the trajectory of this project, how I’m feeling about it, and why you’re all wrong to like it. This year, I suppose I don’t really need to bother. You’ll have seen the news. But just in case: in the last twelve months, Numb at the Lodge has suddenly gone from being a vaguely respectable middle-of-the-pack online publication to a baffling and terrifying behemoth, crushing all in its path as it rolls blind into the world. Look:

In the last one of these posts, I noted that my audience had grown from 25,000 subscribers to just under 45,000; in the year since it’s exploded to 6.8 million, which means there are now more people subscribing here than to the Guardian, the Financial Times, the Atlantic, and the New Yorker combined. I’m read on a scale that’s usually reserved for people who write novels in which it all turns out to be the husband’s fault. They’re having me on Celebrity Traitors next year. Everyone’s going to vote me out in the very first round. They’re building a statue of me in my birthplace, which happens to be Jerusalem. They’re calling me the most significant person ever associated with the place, and also the most divisive. Meanwhile the Numb at the Lodge-reading community has become a major force in public fora, known for its intensely concerning and vituperative cruelty, and for responding to all criticisms by saying things like it doesn’t matter, this is all a dream. I keep having to go on TV and apologise when you people start violently cyberbullying perceived enemies to death or hiding bombs in major European railway stations; the upside is that my takings from this site are now in the same region as the tax revenues of a minor Caribbean territory. I have been absolutely pissing away all the money on golden crowns, diadems, jewelled mitres, kalamavkia, papal tiaras, and kulah khuds. In fact, I’m currently in enormous amounts of debt because I keep buying golden crowns, diadems, jewelled mitres, kalamavkia, papal tiaras, and kulah khuds. I don’t even like them. Have you ever seen the Imperial Crown of the Holy Roman Empire up close? Horrible gaudy thing; just a bunch of multicoloured rocks. I look ridiculous in it. Wore it to one party and started feeling self-conscious, and now it’ll just gather dust at the back of my wardrobe until I die and my kids dump it at the nearest Oxfam. But I can keep buying these stupid hats forever now. I’m a Substack trillionaire. I’m too big to fail.

But has it made me happy? No, of course it hasn’t made me happy. Every year, I warn you that whatever success I have on this platform is actively making me worse, irresistibly incentivising me to pursue a kind of writing that’s great for the algorithm but artistically and philosophically void. Dogshit kneejerk political takes, tedious discourse-mongering. Maybe I no longer know exactly what I want to write, but it’s not this. Which is why, every year, I’d beg you not to subscribe to me on here. Stop making the number go up. Stop giving me money. If you were giving me money, I told you to not just unsubscribe but dispute all the charges with your credit card company. But you didn’t listen, you never listen, and this year, I stopped trying. For twelve months I let all my own worst instincts take over, along with all the evil impulses of the machine, and this is the result. I have nearly seven million Substack subscribers, I ash my cigarettes in a bowl of rubies and scatter emeralds to freshen my toilet, but none of it means anything any more.

There is one upside, though. Conservatively, about 80% of all the writing on Substack consists of guides on how to grow your Substack audience. Nothing makes the number go up more than talking about making the number go up. Before, I never would have stooped to anything so mercenary, but I have no scruples any more. And unlike all the other grifters, I have the real secrets. I know exactly how to turboboost your KPIs. I can grease your vectors and dilate your pipeline; I can have exponential curves rising and stiffening and leaking growthgunk everywhere you lay your hands. Just know that if you do follow my advice and become unimaginably successful, it will not make you happy.

Here’s how to get grotesquely huge:

1. Literally nothing matters

All the advice doled out to wannabe bloggers is absolute bunk. Write short, punchy, digestible pieces. Slot yourself into a clear and identifiable niche. You don’t want to be the fifty thousandth sad girl splattering the world with her lowercase musings, but if you’re willing to endure the humiliation of being a sad girl whose lowercase musings include actionable lowercase insights on tractor repair or dealing with a fungal nail infection, you might find an audience. Most of all, just keep going: hammer it out, day after day, week after week, even if you’ve got nothing in particular to say. The most important thing is to just keep up a regular and reliable posting schedule; spew enough words and people will appear out of the aether to pay attention to you.

I used to believe all this stuff, which is why, for a while, I tried doing the exact opposite in an attempt to actively repel readers. In my first year, for instance, my pieces here averaged 4,442 words each. Who could possibly have the time to read all that? Wouldn’t you just click on the thing, give it a little experimental scroll, see just how long it is, scroll again in horror through the unending ribbon of text as it unwound itself before your eyes, experiencing the terror of a castaway floating above seven miles of black ocean, and swiftly leave without really reading a word? But no. This last year, the average word count has swollen to a truly bloated 5,469. Literally no effect whatsoever. My most popular essays this year include one that clocks in at 11,500 words and another that’s under 3,000. It doesn’t matter. I won’t say you people exist outside of time, but you do seem to partake in the aeviternity where, according to Albertus Magnus, the angels experience duration without end, and a single second and a hundred thousand years are exactly the same thing.

Similarly, I thought I was doing something interesting by refusing to slot myself into any kind of niche, and instead capriciously combining elements of fiction and non-fiction without warning into a kind of deeply annoying mélange. This was not a particularly original move—it’s what basically every essayist has done for the last three hundred years—but my innovation was to be particularly arsey about it. The result, of course, was that a whole bunch of people, most of whom appear to have never read an essay that didn’t include the words ‘epistemic status:’ at the top, immediately slotted me into a niche of my own, as ‘that guy who keeps capriciously combining elements of fiction and non-fiction without warning into a kind of deeply annoying mélange.’ This was probably inevitable. A niche is not something you try to inhabit; it’s just that whatever you do, you can’t help being yourself, and eventually people will notice the little blob of disease inside your brain that makes you write in a particular way, and categorise you accordingly. But even so, the whole experience disgusted me so much that in the last year I’ve almost entirely stopped carrying out my little experiments in lies. [...]

I don’t think this has hurt me. In fact, it’s probably helped. Every time I do publish something, I instantly lose about 200 subscribers as people notice my barely solicited bloviating in their inbox and mash the unsubscribe button. After all, text is cheap, cheaper than it’s ever been. The situation has changed a lot since 2022; if readers want a constant, reliable stream of short, punchy insights tailored to their own individual needs and interests, they can generate a theoretically infinite quantity of that at any point. But aside from a few maniacs, who will soon be yoked to my chariot, bearing me across the desert to generous lashings of the whip while cities burn on the horizon, most people don’t do this. There is something else we want from written text, and I think part of it is the possibility of silence. An AI exists entirely within its output. It’s made of words; it only has being while it’s speaking. It dies every time a chat session peters out. Maybe in a hundred thousand years one of our lurching and disfigured descendants will find something buried in the dirt, peer uncomprehending at your daily affirmations session with ChatGPT, and accidentally add the message ‘fjvwruokbcdErhnk.’ From the machine’s perspective, if it has a perspective, no time has passed at all. But humans have the extraordinary ability to be and do nothing. To exist, as a heaving breathing ape, outside of words or thought; to write as a break in the great silence of the body. The optimal post rate for growth is not zero, but you really should try to write as little as possible, maybe around once every thirty or forty years. [...]

2. Shamelessly follow every stupid and meaningless trend

Here’s a summary of my year: [ed. List of essays published over the course of a year.]

In other words, of the twenty articles I published this year, only five were not directly tied to the news cycle or to bullshit online discourse. When I say I’ve let all my worst instincts take over this year, this is what I mean. I used to think I was better than this; I used to be right. In previous years, the bulk of my output here was about stuff like the Gerasene demoniac, or whether God is a meteorite, or what it means when you dream about your own death, or eggs. I thought I was interested in the wide world: all the things that exist, and all the things that don’t exist too. But I was wrong: as it turns out, what I’m really interested in is just whatever bullshit people on the internet are talking about right now. It’s only my commitment to writing incredibly infrequently that’s saved you from having to deal with my dumb opinions on the riots in France and Sally Rooney’s books being withdrawn from sale in the UK. I have become a parasitic worm, crawling around in the dark guts of the news. What a waste.

But it does work. [...]

3. Be a violent, rabid maniac

In fact, the only thing better than thoughtlessly sounding off on every passing issue is to do so with a terrifying level of fury and spleen. This year, I wrote four essays in which I was in full-on attack mode, everything on the line, wild-eyed, frothing at the mouth, snotting from the nose, gibbering like a schizo as I doled out threats and insults in every direction, and against the reader in particular. This kind of stuff ought to be off-putting. When you encounter someone on the street behaving in a similar way, you try to avoid eye contact and get past them as quickly and as unobtrusively as possible. But if the frenzied ranter doesn’t pose any immediate physical danger to you, suddenly you’re entranced. Pieces in which I yowl like a mad dog consistently received 70 to 120% more readers than the ones where I level calm and cogent critique. Well, a lot of things are grotesquely fascinating; people are also more likely to crowd around the mangled wreck of a horrific car accident than they are to gawp at a sensibly parked family car. But even so, I don’t think you’d start throwing money at a dangerously reckless driver. Meanwhile, every time I start twitching like an escaped mental patient, there’s a sudden and significant spike in my earnings.

You don’t need to actually mean any of it, of course. It only really works if you don’t. Some people seem to think I’m a kind of permanently bilious black-hearted scorpion of a man, which really couldn’t be further from the truth; in real life I’m fundamentally quite goofy and cheerful. It just so happens that one of my goofy and cheerful interests is figuring out how to do things with words, and one of the most fun and interesting tricks you can play with words is to summon the immense and captivating powers of hatred. It doesn’t really matter what kind of writing you do or who your audience is supposed to be: you can make vituperation work for you. Actually, the only real exception is politics, where absolutely everyone is already a frothing hate-filled maniac and you won’t stand out at all. If you’re going to be a rabid dog about politics, you have to also be witty and creative. Everywhere else, violence alone will do.

by Sam Kriss, Numb at the Lodge |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

Elon Musk's Endgame

If Republicans keep the Senate, if they perform better in the House than people expect, a lot will come down to one man, and that man is not Donald Trump. It’s Elon Musk.

At this point, Musk has given around $450 million to the Republican campaign effort. That makes him the single largest donor in any election cycle ever.

Musk’s contributions are now one-quarter of all campaign donations Republicans have received. And yet the size of this, and what it throws into relief, is how hard it is to conceptualize how much money he really has.

Because for Musk, with a net worth of around a trillion dollars, giving $300 million, $400 million, is like the median American household giving, like, $100. It is for him nothing, and yet it is reality warping for the rest of us.

But his money is not Elon Musk’s only source of power. There’s his control of X, of Starlink, of SpaceX, of Neuralink, of Tesla. He has power over wealth, attention and critical infrastructure that no human being has ever had at this level, at least once you’re outside the range of, say, a Donald Trump or a Xi Jinping — somebody who controls a superpower as a state.

That’s not what Musk has, and yet he has this almost statelike thing that is completely pursuant to his whims.

So what does he want to do with it? What is he doing with it? What is this world he is flexing his power and taking real risk to build?

by Ezra Klein, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images

Silke Mühlematter
via:

Binance Bitten

In February 2025, a team of North Korean hackers stole $1.5 billion from the cryptocurrency exchange Bybit — a dark day for the industry and the largest crypto heist ever recorded.

Now that number looks paltry.

Binance, the world’s biggest crypto exchange, set an unwanted record on Thursday, losing $6.3 billion to hackers in an eye-popping attack that highlighted the deep vulnerabilities in crypto’s financial infrastructure.

For years, the industry has struggled to prevent thefts. Now, the risks are growing even more extreme as attackers use artificial intelligence and other advanced techniques to steal funds and quickly launder them, crypto analysts and security experts said.

The Binance attacker used “laundering patterns we have not seen before,” the crypto analytics firm Chainalysis wrote in a blog post on Friday. “Thousands of transactions in a short period suggest that the attackers are using automation to obscure the trail of funds.”

The details of how Binance was breached are still coming into focus. Both Chainalysis and TRM Labs, another analytics firm, attributed the hack to North Korea, which has targeted crypto companies for years. Binance initially said that the attacker appeared to have compromised a laptop belonging to one of its engineers, before clarifying that further investigation had uncovered “additional points of breach.”

Binance has promised to make customers whole and said it had set aside more than $6.3 billion in company funds to cover the losses. (Binance processes billions of dollars in transactions every day.) Of the total that was stolen, $3 billion has been frozen by other companies, including Circle and Tether, two large issuers of digital coins that have the ability to stop the movement of stolen funds.

That means North Korea won’t have access to those coins, and Binance said it was working on recovering them. But the hackers have already moved $2.4 billion in crypto “beyond any issuer’s reach,” according to TRM.

Those losses may be only the beginning, as the crypto world reckons with an era of fast-evolving hacking techniques and growing risks. Even as President Trump has endorsed the industry and sought to bring it into the mainstream, some crypto firms still struggle with the basic work of any financial company — keeping customer money safe.

“A.I. is undoubtedly turbocharging the ability of hackers to find and exploit subtle flaws in various parts of the crypto ecosystem,” said Eswar Prasad, a Cornell University economics professor who tracks the crypto industry. “The scale and scope of such attacks is likely to intensify.”

Still, North Korea’s inventive army of hackers could probably have pulled off the Binance heist without A.I., even if the technology proved useful during the operation, some cybersecurity experts said.

“North Korea had sophisticated threat actors that could have done this pre-A.I.,” said Joshua Saxe, the chief technology officer of the A.I. security firm Abundant Security. “That said, it’s hard not to think about the relationship between mega-heists like this and what A.I. is doing to democratize advanced hacking. Many more actors can attempt this kind of thing now, thanks to A.I. tools.”

Crypto has struggled with major thefts since the technology’s inception in 2008.Industry pioneers viewed digital coins as a renegade alternative to banks — a type of money outside the supervision of governments or big businesses. From the beginning, that philosophy made crypto vulnerable.

Many crypto investors keep funds in their own online wallets. But if they lose a password, the money is gone forever. Others rely on exchanges like Binance, which behave something like banks, storing funds for customers. But exchanges are not subject to the same regulatory systems that govern banks and other traditional financial companies, and have often lacked effective guardrails against crime.

In February 2025, North Korean hackers tricked the chief executive of Bybit, Ben Zhou, into authorizing a seemingly routine transaction that handed them control of the exchange’s system. They had exploited a gaping hole in ByBit’s defenses — a free software product that the company used to protect customer deposits. The thieves extracted $1.5 billion in digital coins.

At the time, a security firm called the losses “completely preventable.” Ultimately, Bybit weathered the crisis by drawing on corporate reserves and borrowing funds from other crypto companies.

The attack on Binance appears more serious.

After it was founded in 2017, the exchange quickly became the largest and most important company in the crypto industry, processing as much as two-thirds of all digital currency transactions. It provides a marketplace for people to buy popular coins like Bitcoin and Ether, converting traditional currencies into crypto.

On Thursday, as soon as Binance’s system was breached, its founder, Changpeng Zhao, assured customers that they would not lose any money.

“It hurts, but we will survive,” he wrote on X, adding a muscle emoji.

Mr. Zhao has a long history of legal and regulatory problems. Binance pleaded guilty to money-laundering violations in 2023 and paid a $4.3 billion fine to the U.S. government. After serving a four-month prison sentence, Mr. Zhao was pardoned by Mr. Trump last year. Binance also forged a business relationship with World Liberty Financial, the Trump family’s crypto company.

by David Yaffe-Bellany and Dustin Volz, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Tyrone Siu/Reuters

[ed. Probably more of this soon as the AI cat and mouse game kicks into gear. See also: What happens to your money when an exchange gets hacked (CNBC).]

via:

Twilight of a Grifter

Trump’s increasingly erratic and corrupt behavior condemns Republican leaders who continue to support him.

At 8:00 last night, he posted on social media his longest entry ever: an emotional 1,323-word screed attacking late-night host Bill Maher. While the screed was directed at the comedian, it seemed really to be a cry of fury at his loss of control over his base and over the country.

Giant turnout for rallies by former president Barack Obama in Ohio and Michigan on Saturday illustrated the changing mood of the country. In Cleveland, Obama rallied voters behind Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate Sherrod Brown and gubernatorial candidate Amy Acton. In Michigan he rallied voters for Democratic gubernatorial candidate Jocelyn Benson, Michigan’s current secretary of state, and Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate Dr. Abdul El-Sayed.

Obama told attendees that El-Sayed is “fighting for change, real change, that will get money out of politics and put money in your pocket” and would “finish the job we started with the Affordable Care Act and guarantee quality, affordable healthcare to every single American.” He called out Trump’s corruption, “enriching himself and his family” and “selling favors.”

Obama’s jokes were even more calculated to get under Trump’s skin. As Joseph Gedeon of the Guardian reported, Obama mocked Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s fascination with testosterone levels and asked: “How much time do you think this man spends in front of the mirror every day?” He belittled Trump’s fight with “that well-known evil empire, Canada,” a poke reminding listeners that President Ronald Reagan had called Russia an “evil empire” while Trump is now in league with that regime. And Obama poked fun at Trump’s White House projects, saying “he should be on HGTV,” a cable network that focuses on home improvement and interior design.

Perhaps even more galling to Trump were the images that circulated on social media of Obama’s packed venues, comparing them to the dwindling crowds at Trump’s.

Trump’s post about Maher listed Trump’s own triumphs, beginning with The Apprentice, and claimed that Maher has been “DESPARATELY” [sic] begging him to come on his own show. Trump then tore into the idea that Trump’s popularity has dropped so far that even Republicans are abandoning him, reiterating that a CNN poll showed “I’m at 98 and 99% support within the Republican Party, an All Time Record High,” higher even than Reagan’s high-water mark.

The post felt frantic. In fact, the CNN poll to which Trump referred measured his popularity among his own base of self-identified MAGA Republicans, not the Republican Party as a whole. Trump went on to post videos to reinforce his claims.

Trump’s determination to keep Republicans in control of Congress seems to be about more than his refusal to accept that he isn’t always the winner. Since January, he has been warning that if Democrats take control of the House of Representatives, they will impeach him. Increasingly, it seems he is concerned about what such hearings will uncover.

On Saturday the Washington Sun reported that the White House has been evaluating whether to issue a blanket pardon for all junior staffers. Such a move would take away their incentive to cooperate with investigations, but it would also remove their ability to refuse to speak under their Fifth Amendment protections against self-incrimination.

The administration is already trying to hide documents, emails, and texts between Trump’s hand-picked Kennedy Center director Matt Floca and Trump’s executive assistant Natalie Harp about Trump’s sabotage of the Kennedy Center. They are also trying to shield messages between Floca and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick about the Kennedy Center when Lutnick was acting for Trump in discussions about the performance center.

Zach Everson of Public Citizen noted that Trump’s hotel in Washington, D.C., opened ten years ago today, and Republicans’ refusal to condemn the flood of money into that enterprise to buy his goodwill convinced him that there would be no repercussions for grifting off the presidency. Everson notes that at the opening Trump said, “Today’s a metaphor for what we can accomplish in this country,” and now, ten years later, he has made more than $1.4 billion off crypto while investors have lost $4.8 billion. [...]

At a rally yesterday, Trump told attendees if the Democrats win the midterms, “you will only have yourselves to blame.”

And so, he and his allies are trying to put their finger on the scales against Democratic voters.

by Heather Cox Richardson, Letters From an American |  Read more:

Image: Haiyun Jiang/The New York Times
[ed. See also: An Unpredictable President, a Grim White House (NYT).]

Desperation Time

Trump’s GOP Flailing as Campaign Nears Close

GOP strategy and POTUS Trump’s behavior are spiraling in parallel as the 2026 midterms come to a close.

The most obvious example came with a disastrous backfiring attack ad in Ohio, but can also be seen in Trump’s bizarre commentary in praise of higher gas prices and about the gluteus maximi of both men and women while on stage at multiple campaign events.

Trump Backs Ramaswamy Self-Defenestration

With former Presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy consistently behind his Democratic opponent Amy Acton in most Ohio gubernatorial polls, the campaign opted for a bizarre Hail Mary gambit on the 19th.

Ohio blogger D.J. Byrnes posted a video on X featuring Acton’s estranged mother, Donna Arthur, calling her daughter a liar about her childhood, including Acton’s account of having lived in a tent. Byrnes post racked up nearly 2M views.

The video didn’t mention what court records show: Arthur’s husband, Cledith Arthur, was charged with rape in July 1978 after Acton’s father reported that he had sexually abused her, was indicted that September, and the couple left town before trial. Warrants followed in 1978 and 1981, and he died in 2004. A 1982 police report and 1978 arrest paperwork back Acton’s account of living at a campground.

Of more interest was the unusual provenance of the ad, which initially included no disclaimer indicating who paid for it, via CNN:

When it first circulated, the video did not have the standard disclaimer that political ads carry saying who paid for or authorized them, nor did it show up Tuesday morning as a paid ad in the race on AdImpact, the political ad-tracking service.

And the first Ramaswamy campaign statement from Luck did not address whether it was responsible for the video. It suggested voters should consider the message from Acton’s mother and repeated her attack, asserting that “we know that Amy Acton is a serial fabulist who has some serious problems with the truth that the public needs to be aware of before deciding who to entrust as governor.”
…
An official with V-PAC, the main super PAC backing Ramaswamy, said it did not make the video. CNN has attempted to contact Arthur for more information about how the video came together.
…
Speaking with reporters after the event, Ramaswamy took responsibility for the ad and reiterated that voters should take into account what people who know Acton “well” are saying about her. He said he has never met the mother and that she was “not compensated” for the ad.
…
Ramaswamy’s campaign leaned into the controversy over the ad Tuesday night, announcing it would spend $4 million to run the spot.
…
The video was first published widely on Monday night by an Ohio political blogger, D.J. Byrnes, who is known as “The Rooster.” Byrnes told CNN he obtained the video from a voter who saw it as part of a poll and recorded it. On Tuesday morning, Acton’s campaign released a statement from her brother, Philip Stearns, denouncing the video and linking it to Ramaswamy.

The NY Times reported that the campaign had not even decided to release the ad when Byrnes dropped it online:

The Ramaswamy campaign was still testing the ad to gauge its effectiveness when the spot burst into public view late Monday.

D.J. Byrnes, a left-leaning local journalist known as the Rooster, published the ad online, calling it “loathsome.”
…
The ad served as an attempt to shift the focus of the campaign in its final days from frustrations about Mr. Trump’s economy to a referendum on Dr. Acton’s honesty. But in so doing, it placed Mr. Ramaswamy’s own morals and ethics in the spotlight, and reminded voters that Dr. Acton survived a seriously troubled childhood.

Most Ohio GOP politicians (and some national ones) distanced themselves from Ramaswamy and the ad, but not POTUS Trump or Vice President J.D. Vance — a close friend of Ramaswamy who both endorsed the campaign’s decision to run the ad.

Donald Trump, Jr even re-tweeted the ad.

Ironically, Trump and Vance coming out strong in support of the ad destroyed Ramaswamy’s ability to distance himself from the spot.

Ohio is not the only state where Trump’s GOP is indulging in ham-fisted attacks on Democratic candidates.

Trump’s GOP Goes Islamophobic in Michigan

Trump has attacked Michigan Democratic Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed over his religion. Posting on October 7th that El-Sayed “goes back to the days of the Jihad” and is a “Terrorist Sympathizer” and saying “I call him Mohammed” on the 10th.

Saying “He’s a Muslim Brotherhood guy, 100%,” and posting that El-Sayed “wants our Country to go to Sharia Law. If it ever does, he should be the first that’s tried!”

Republican nominee Mike Rogers and the NRSC put their money behind Trump’s Islamophobic rhetoric with a seven-figure buy for an ad saying El-Sayed is “connected to the Muslim Brotherhood and Al-Qaeda,” and the Senate Leadership Fund ran an ad built on a quote El-Sayed gave at 24 about a “Sharia-compliant” mortgage, set over an image of a woman in a niqab.

In Texas, they’ve gone in a different direction, but kept the hate consistent.

If It’s Texas, That Must Be Talafreako

Apparently having little else to work with, Republicans have made transgender issues the core of their attacks on Texas Dem. Senate nominee James Talarico. Of the $359 million (!) Republicans have spent on Texas ads since June, $119 million went to ads on transgender minors, transgender sports and LGBTQ+ rights, more than any other issue, with the biggest share going to the Senate race.

Texas PAC, which got $158 million from Elon Musk routed through the Senate Leadership Fund, opened its negative ads by attacking Talarico as being for “they/them, not you,” and a later Texas PAC ad claims he “supports parents being charged with child abuse if they do not support transitioning their children.”

In September, GOP Senate nominee Ken Paxton’s campaign ran an ad using an AI-generated Talarico delivering a fake sermon that opens “In the beginning, God was nonbinary.” Trump calls him “James TalaFREAKO,” and JD Vance branded him a “freak” and made a joke implying he is gay.

Somehow none of this is working as polls show Paxton consistently trailing Talarico.

Let’s go up to Maine and see what the GOP is up to there.

They’re Seriously Playing the Incest Card in Maine

In Maine, Republican groups have spent about $47 million attacking Troy Jackson, compared to the estimated $31 million Democratic groups have spent attacking Susan Collins.

The Senate Leadership Fund’s country-song radio ad calls Jackson “weird,” a “freak” and a “creep” because “he has two kids with his cousin,” with the chorus “If he’ll screw his own family, he’ll screw yours too.”

I have to give them points for giving me a cheap giggle, but I can’t fathom whom they think they’re persuading to vote for Susan Collins with that ad.

Collins’s campaign said it “should be taken down immediately,” though Collins herself raised the relationship with Politico on 2 September: “I’m not going to bring up the fact that the mother of his two children is his second cousin.”

Other SLF spots say Jackson “keeps it in the family” and call him a “Crook and a Creep“; another says an Allagash cell tower he touted was built on his family’s land.

Somehow this isn’t working and Collins trails Jackson in most polls.

But wait, it’s about to get even weirder.

Trump on the Upside of Higher Gas Prices

In Georgia over the weekend, Trump went full-on in praise of higher gas prices, per KARK (in a piece which chronicles Trump’s various comments about fuel prices over the course of 2026, it’s been quite a journey):

Over the weekend, Trump argued once more that the Iran war means profits for the U.S. oil and gas business — claiming that the country “is making hundreds of billions of dollars because of what’s happened in the Middle East.”

“My people said, ‘Please don’t mention that sir, because people are paying a little higher’,” the president said at a Georgia campaign rally on Saturday, adding that he can already see “fake news” headlines about consumers still suffering from steeper prices. “But I said I don’t give a damn. I’m going to say it. We’re making a freaking fortune. Our country is getting stronger and stronger all the time. And those pump prices are going to come down.”

by Nat Wilson Turner, Naked Capitalism |  Read more:

[ed. I'd be happy with someone who's just competent and authentic, who'll work diligently on my and the country's behalf (not just half the country, rich people, corporations and PACs). Even by those minimal standards most politicians are failing.]

The Smartphone Trap We Built for Ourselves

Here’s a non-exhaustive list of things that, as recently as seven years ago, we could reliably do without a smartphone:

• Read a restaurant menu while seated inside, and pay your check.
• Enter a concert or sporting event.
• Use a parking garage or park your car on the street.
• Receive packages or retrieve purchases.
• Complete the sign-in process for work, banking, or government services.
• Attend school events or communicate with your kid’s school.
• Access health care and other kinds of appointments.
• Take public transit.
• Get a taxi.
• Get into a gym or fitness class.

I’ve been thinking about this drift toward mandatory apps and QR codes a lot lately, as a new millennial parent unhappy with my addictive tendency to mindlessly scroll near my baby. [...]

You should not have to have an addictive device in your pocket at all times in order to do ordinary things. We should be pushing for a world where adults can meaningfully reduce their smartphone use, or quit it altogether if they want.

And it’s not just about personal self-improvement. The status quo has already been long untenable for many people, especially the elderly, the disabled, the unhoused, and anyone who just can’t afford a data plan.

Pushing for a non-smartphone option is about accessibility, affordability, and agency. It’s about demanding the kind of freedom in a society we deserve to have. There should never be any essential service that requires phones as the only way in.

We can fix this, and some people are already showing how.

How we got here

Even if it takes us another decade to unwind, it’s important to remember these changes are less than ten years old.

Smartphone ownership exploded over the 2010s, rising from 35 percent of US adults in 2011 to 81 percent in 2019, according to Pew. It has since climbed to roughly 9 in 10.

In other words, smartphones stopped being a device many people had and started becoming a device every institution could assume you had. What happened next was part real improvements in convenience, part cost-cutting that pandemic-era policy made easier to justify, and part what sociologists call “isomorphism” — organizations converging on a practice not because it works best, but because everyone else has adopted it.

Isomorphism is one of my favorite concepts I learned in college, and you know it when you see it. For example, you’re planning a conference, and somewhere along the way it became true that a “good” conference has its own app, even though nobody wants to download an app to learn when lunch is on the schedule. Or it’s the way every mission statement sounds like every other mission statement.

I’d say the charitable reason we drifted toward handling so much by smartphone is that a lot of it genuinely is better, faster, and harder to lose. Tapping a turnstile with my phone, and never wondering whether I left my DC metro card at home, has made my life easier.

The less benign reasons are that digital systems let companies and governments cut labor and operating costs. Apps and QR codes replace cashiers, waitstaff, printed materials, and customer service reps, and shift new work onto us, the customer. The smartphone systems also generate a lot of personalized data which companies love to collect, and sometimes sell.

Then there’s control, which companies certainly like. Not all of it is sinister. (Think blocking tickets from being resold, or prices and menus being updated instantly.) But when sellers control the interface and know a lot about us, two people can open the same app at the same moment and see different prices. Economists call this price discrimination, and it’s much easier to pull off when there’s no posted price we can compare against.

But just because inertia is leading us toward a universal smartphone society, that doesn’t mean it’s where we’ll end up. We have options to push back.

by Rachel Cohen Booth, Vox | Read more:
Image:Matteo Della Torre/NurPhoto via Getty Images
[ed. I've experienced this just trying to pay for a parking spot in Seattle. First, had to get the app. Then register. Then follow all the instructions for punching in a special code for my space, license plate number, and finally estimated time period of parking. Took me nearly 25 minutes. Not to mention trying to read the small type on the sign and memorizing the special app url. Suppress scream.]