Monday, March 2, 2026
Anthony Bourdain’s Moveable Feast
When the President of the United States travels outside the country, he brings his own car with him. Moments after Air Force One landed at the Hanoi airport last May, President Barack Obama ducked into an eighteen-foot, armor-plated limousine—a bomb shelter masquerading as a Cadillac—that was equipped with a secure link to the Pentagon and with emergency supplies of blood, and was known as the Beast. Hanoi’s broad avenues are crowded with honking cars, storefront venders, street peddlers, and some five million scooters and motorbikes, which rush in and out of the intersections like floodwaters. It was Obama’s first trip to Vietnam, but he encountered this pageant mostly through a five-inch pane of bulletproof glass. He might as well have watched it on TV.
Obama was scheduled to meet with President Trần Đại Quang, and with the new head of Vietnam’s national assembly. On his second night in Hanoi, however, he kept an unusual appointment: dinner with Anthony Bourdain, the peripatetic chef turned writer who hosts the Emmy-winning travel show “Parts Unknown,” on CNN. Over the past fifteen years, Bourdain has hosted increasingly sophisticated iterations of the same program. Initially, it was called “A Cook’s Tour,” and aired on the Food Network. After shifting to the Travel Channel, it was renamed “Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations,” and it ran for nine seasons before moving to CNN, in 2013. All told, Bourdain has travelled to nearly a hundred countries and has filmed two hundred and forty-eight episodes, each a distinct exploration of the food and culture of a place. The secret ingredient of the show is the when-in-Rome avidity with which Bourdain partakes of indigenous custom and cuisine, whether he is pounding vodka before plunging into a frozen river outside St. Petersburg or spearing a fatted swine as the guest of honor at a jungle longhouse in Borneo. Like a great white shark, Bourdain tends to be photographed with his jaws wide open, on the verge of sinking his teeth into some tremulous delicacy. In Bourdain’s recollection, his original pitch for the series was, roughly, “I travel around the world, eat a lot of shit, and basically do whatever the fuck I want.” The formula has proved improbably successful.
People often ask Bourdain’s producers if they can tag along on an escapade. On a recent visit to Madagascar, he was accompanied by the film director Darren Aronofsky. (A fan of the show, Aronofsky proposed to Bourdain that they go somewhere together. “I kind of jokingly said Madagascar, just because it’s the farthest possible place,” he told me. “And Tony said, ‘How’s November?’ ”) A ride-along with Bourdain promises the sidekick an experience that, in this era of homogenized tourism, is all too rare: communion with a foreign culture so unmitigated that it feels practically intravenous. Parachuted into any far-flung corner of the planet, Bourdain ferrets out the restaurant, known only to discerning locals, where the grilled sardines or the pisco sours are divine. Often, he insinuates himself into a private home where the meal is even better. He is a lively dining companion: a lusty eater and a quicksilver conversationalist. “He’s got that incredibly beautiful style when he talks that ranges from erudite to brilliantly slangy,” his friend Nigella Lawson observed. Bourdain is a font of unvarnished opinion, but he also listens intently, and the word he uses perhaps more than any other is “interesting,” which he pronounces with four syllables and only one “t”: in-ner-ess-ting.
Before becoming famous, Bourdain spent more than two decades as a professional cook. In 2000, while working as the executive chef at Les Halles, a boisterous brasserie on Park Avenue South, he published a ribald memoir, “Kitchen Confidential.” It became a best-seller, heralding a new national fascination with the grubby secrets and “Upstairs Downstairs” drama of the hospitality industry. Bourdain, having established himself as a brash truth-teller, got into public spats with more famous figures; he once laid into Alice Waters for her pious hatred of junk food, saying that she reminded him of the Khmer Rouge. People who do not watch Bourdain’s show still tend to think of him as a savagely honest loudmouthed New York chef. But over the years he has transformed himself into a well-heeled nomad who wanders the planet meeting fascinating people and eating delicious food. He freely admits that his career is, for many people, a fantasy profession. A few years ago, in the voice-over to a sun-dappled episode in Sardinia, he asked, “What do you do after your dreams come true?” Bourdain would be easy to hate, in other words, if he weren’t so easy to like. “For a long time, Tony thought he was going to have nothing,” his publisher, Dan Halpern, told me. “He can’t believe his luck. He always seems happy that he actually is Anthony Bourdain.”
The White House had suggested the meeting in Vietnam. Of all the countries Bourdain has explored, it is perhaps his favorite; he has been there half a dozen times. He fell for Hanoi long before he actually travelled there, when he read Graham Greene’s 1955 novel, “The Quiet American,” and the city has retained a thick atmosphere of colonial decay—dingy villas, lugubrious banyan trees, monsoon clouds, and afternoon cocktails—that Bourdain savors without apology. Several years ago, he seriously considered moving there.
Bourdain believes that the age of the fifteen-course tasting menu “is over.” He is an evangelist for street food, and Hanoi excels at open-air cooking. It can seem as if half the population were sitting around sidewalk cookfires, hunched over steaming bowls of phở. As a White House advance team planned the logistics for Obama’s visit, an advance team from Zero Point Zero, the company that produces the show, scoured the city for the perfect place to eat. They selected Bún chả Hương Liên, a narrow establishment across from a karaoke joint on a busy street in the Old Quarter. The restaurant’s specialty is bún chả: springy white noodles, smoky sausage, and charred pork belly served in a sweet and pungent broth.
At the appointed hour, Obama exited the Beast and walked into the restaurant behind a pair of Secret Service agents, who cleared a path for him, like linemen blocking for a running back. In a rear dining room on the second floor, Bourdain was waiting at a stainless-steel table, surrounded by other diners, who had been coached to ignore the cameras and Obama, and to focus on their bún chả. Like many restaurants in Vietnam, the facility was casual in the extreme: diners and servers alike swept discarded refuse onto the floor, and the tiles had acquired a grimy sheen that squeaked beneath your feet. Obama was wearing a white button-down, open at the collar, and he greeted Bourdain, took a seat on a plastic stool, and happily accepted a bottle of Vietnamese beer.
“How often do you get to sneak out for a beer?” Bourdain asked.
“I don’t get to sneak out, period,” Obama replied. He occasionally took the First Lady to a restaurant, he said, but “part of enjoying a restaurant is sitting with other patrons and enjoying the atmosphere, and too often we end up getting shunted into one of those private rooms.”
As a young waitress in a gray polo shirt set down bowls of broth, a plate of greens, and a platter of shuddering noodles, Bourdain fished chopsticks from a plastic container on the table. Obama, surveying the constituent parts of the meal, evinced trepidation. He said, “All right, you’re gonna have to—”
“I’ll walk you through it,” Bourdain assured him, advising him to grab a clump of noodles with chopsticks and dunk them into the broth.
“I’m just gonna do what you do,” Obama said.
“Dip and stir,” Bourdain counselled. “And get ready for the awesomeness.”
Eying a large sausage that was floating in the broth, Obama asked, “Is it generally appropriate to just pop one of these whole suckers in your mouth, or do you think you should be a little more—”
“Slurping is totally acceptable in this part of the world,” Bourdain declared.
Obama took a bite and let out a low murmur. “That’s good stuff” he said, and the two of them—lanky, conspicuously cool guys in late middle age—slurped away as three cameras, which Bourdain had once likened to “drunken hummingbirds,” hovered around them. Noting the unaffected rusticity of the scene, Obama was reminded of a memorable meal that he had eaten as a child, in the mountains outside Jakarta. “You’d have these roadside restaurants overlooking the tea fields,” he recalled. “There’d be a river running through the restaurant itself, and there’d be these fish, these carp, that would be running through. You’d pick the fish. They’d grab it for you and fry it up, and the skin would be real crispy. They just served it with a bed of rice.” Obama was singing Bourdain’s song: earthy, fresh, free of pretense. “It was the simplest meal possible, and nothing tasted so good.”
But the world is getting smaller, Obama said. “The surprises, the serendipity of travel, where you see something and it’s off the beaten track, there aren’t that many places like that left.” He added, wistfully, “I don’t know if that place will still be there when my daughters are ready to travel. But I hope it is.” The next day, Bourdain posted a photograph of the meeting online. “Total cost of Bun cha dinner with the President: $6.00,” he tweeted. “I picked up the check.” [...]
As he sipped a beer and picked at a platter of delicate spring rolls, he was still fidgeting with exhilaration from the encounter with Obama. “I believe what’s important to him is this notion that otherness is not bad, that Americans should aspire to walk in other people’s shoes,” he reflected. This idea resonates strongly with Bourdain, and, although he insists his show is a selfish epicurean enterprise, Obama’s ethic could be the governing thesis of “Parts Unknown.” In the opening moments of an episode set in Myanmar, Bourdain observes, “Chances are you haven’t been to this place. Chances are this is a place you’ve never seen.” [...]
In 1998, he answered an ad in the Times and got the executive-chef job at Les Halles. It was an ideal fit for Bourdain: an unpretentious brasserie with its own butcher, who worked next to the bar, behind a counter stacked with steak, veal, and sausages. “Kitchen Confidential,” which was excerpted in this magazine, was inspired by “Down and Out in Paris and London,” in which George Orwell describes chefs as “the most workmanlike class, and the least servile.” Karen Rinaldi, the editor who acquired the book, for Bloomsbury, told me that she underestimated the impact it would have. “It was a flyer,” she said—the profane musings of a guy who broiled steaks for a living. “But a lot of the books that end up shifting the culture are flyers.”
“Kitchen Confidential” was filled with admonitions: Bourdain assailed Sunday brunch (“a dumping ground for the odd bits left over from Friday and Saturday”) and advised against ordering fish on Mondays, because it is typically “four to five days old.” The book was marketed as a dispatch from the scullery, the type of tell-all that might be more interesting to the naïve restaurant-goer than to the battle-seasoned cook. (“I won’t eat in a restaurant with filthy bathrooms,” Bourdain warned. “They let you see the bathrooms. If the restaurant can’t be bothered to replace the puck in the urinal or keep the toilets and floors clean, then just imagine what their refrigeration and work spaces look like.”) But, for Bourdain, the most important audience was his peers. The final line of the acknowledgments page was “Cooks rule,” and he hoped, desperately, that other professionals would see the book in the spirit he had intended, and pass gravy-stained copies around the kitchen.
Bourdain did not quit his job at Les Halles when the book became a success. “I was careful to modulate my hopes, because I lived in a business where everybody was a writer or an actor,” he recalls. For decades, he’d seen colleagues come into work crowing about their latest callback, only to see their grand designs amount to nothing. “So at no point was it ‘So long, suckers.’ ” His confederates at Les Halles were amused, if mystified, by his blossoming career as a writer, and the owners were accommodating about the book tour. When Bourdain started travelling to promote the book, something curious happened. He’d amble into a restaurant alone and order a drink at the bar. Out of nowhere, a plate of amuse-bouches would appear, compliments of the house. It marked an affirmation for Bourdain: chefs were reading the book, and they liked it. But it also signified a profound inversion. He had spent the first half of his life preparing food to feed others. He would spend the second half getting fed.
People often ask Bourdain’s producers if they can tag along on an escapade. On a recent visit to Madagascar, he was accompanied by the film director Darren Aronofsky. (A fan of the show, Aronofsky proposed to Bourdain that they go somewhere together. “I kind of jokingly said Madagascar, just because it’s the farthest possible place,” he told me. “And Tony said, ‘How’s November?’ ”) A ride-along with Bourdain promises the sidekick an experience that, in this era of homogenized tourism, is all too rare: communion with a foreign culture so unmitigated that it feels practically intravenous. Parachuted into any far-flung corner of the planet, Bourdain ferrets out the restaurant, known only to discerning locals, where the grilled sardines or the pisco sours are divine. Often, he insinuates himself into a private home where the meal is even better. He is a lively dining companion: a lusty eater and a quicksilver conversationalist. “He’s got that incredibly beautiful style when he talks that ranges from erudite to brilliantly slangy,” his friend Nigella Lawson observed. Bourdain is a font of unvarnished opinion, but he also listens intently, and the word he uses perhaps more than any other is “interesting,” which he pronounces with four syllables and only one “t”: in-ner-ess-ting.
Before becoming famous, Bourdain spent more than two decades as a professional cook. In 2000, while working as the executive chef at Les Halles, a boisterous brasserie on Park Avenue South, he published a ribald memoir, “Kitchen Confidential.” It became a best-seller, heralding a new national fascination with the grubby secrets and “Upstairs Downstairs” drama of the hospitality industry. Bourdain, having established himself as a brash truth-teller, got into public spats with more famous figures; he once laid into Alice Waters for her pious hatred of junk food, saying that she reminded him of the Khmer Rouge. People who do not watch Bourdain’s show still tend to think of him as a savagely honest loudmouthed New York chef. But over the years he has transformed himself into a well-heeled nomad who wanders the planet meeting fascinating people and eating delicious food. He freely admits that his career is, for many people, a fantasy profession. A few years ago, in the voice-over to a sun-dappled episode in Sardinia, he asked, “What do you do after your dreams come true?” Bourdain would be easy to hate, in other words, if he weren’t so easy to like. “For a long time, Tony thought he was going to have nothing,” his publisher, Dan Halpern, told me. “He can’t believe his luck. He always seems happy that he actually is Anthony Bourdain.”
The White House had suggested the meeting in Vietnam. Of all the countries Bourdain has explored, it is perhaps his favorite; he has been there half a dozen times. He fell for Hanoi long before he actually travelled there, when he read Graham Greene’s 1955 novel, “The Quiet American,” and the city has retained a thick atmosphere of colonial decay—dingy villas, lugubrious banyan trees, monsoon clouds, and afternoon cocktails—that Bourdain savors without apology. Several years ago, he seriously considered moving there.
Bourdain believes that the age of the fifteen-course tasting menu “is over.” He is an evangelist for street food, and Hanoi excels at open-air cooking. It can seem as if half the population were sitting around sidewalk cookfires, hunched over steaming bowls of phở. As a White House advance team planned the logistics for Obama’s visit, an advance team from Zero Point Zero, the company that produces the show, scoured the city for the perfect place to eat. They selected Bún chả Hương Liên, a narrow establishment across from a karaoke joint on a busy street in the Old Quarter. The restaurant’s specialty is bún chả: springy white noodles, smoky sausage, and charred pork belly served in a sweet and pungent broth.
At the appointed hour, Obama exited the Beast and walked into the restaurant behind a pair of Secret Service agents, who cleared a path for him, like linemen blocking for a running back. In a rear dining room on the second floor, Bourdain was waiting at a stainless-steel table, surrounded by other diners, who had been coached to ignore the cameras and Obama, and to focus on their bún chả. Like many restaurants in Vietnam, the facility was casual in the extreme: diners and servers alike swept discarded refuse onto the floor, and the tiles had acquired a grimy sheen that squeaked beneath your feet. Obama was wearing a white button-down, open at the collar, and he greeted Bourdain, took a seat on a plastic stool, and happily accepted a bottle of Vietnamese beer.
“How often do you get to sneak out for a beer?” Bourdain asked.
“I don’t get to sneak out, period,” Obama replied. He occasionally took the First Lady to a restaurant, he said, but “part of enjoying a restaurant is sitting with other patrons and enjoying the atmosphere, and too often we end up getting shunted into one of those private rooms.”
As a young waitress in a gray polo shirt set down bowls of broth, a plate of greens, and a platter of shuddering noodles, Bourdain fished chopsticks from a plastic container on the table. Obama, surveying the constituent parts of the meal, evinced trepidation. He said, “All right, you’re gonna have to—”
“I’ll walk you through it,” Bourdain assured him, advising him to grab a clump of noodles with chopsticks and dunk them into the broth.
“I’m just gonna do what you do,” Obama said.
“Dip and stir,” Bourdain counselled. “And get ready for the awesomeness.”
Eying a large sausage that was floating in the broth, Obama asked, “Is it generally appropriate to just pop one of these whole suckers in your mouth, or do you think you should be a little more—”
“Slurping is totally acceptable in this part of the world,” Bourdain declared.
Obama took a bite and let out a low murmur. “That’s good stuff” he said, and the two of them—lanky, conspicuously cool guys in late middle age—slurped away as three cameras, which Bourdain had once likened to “drunken hummingbirds,” hovered around them. Noting the unaffected rusticity of the scene, Obama was reminded of a memorable meal that he had eaten as a child, in the mountains outside Jakarta. “You’d have these roadside restaurants overlooking the tea fields,” he recalled. “There’d be a river running through the restaurant itself, and there’d be these fish, these carp, that would be running through. You’d pick the fish. They’d grab it for you and fry it up, and the skin would be real crispy. They just served it with a bed of rice.” Obama was singing Bourdain’s song: earthy, fresh, free of pretense. “It was the simplest meal possible, and nothing tasted so good.”
But the world is getting smaller, Obama said. “The surprises, the serendipity of travel, where you see something and it’s off the beaten track, there aren’t that many places like that left.” He added, wistfully, “I don’t know if that place will still be there when my daughters are ready to travel. But I hope it is.” The next day, Bourdain posted a photograph of the meeting online. “Total cost of Bun cha dinner with the President: $6.00,” he tweeted. “I picked up the check.” [...]
As he sipped a beer and picked at a platter of delicate spring rolls, he was still fidgeting with exhilaration from the encounter with Obama. “I believe what’s important to him is this notion that otherness is not bad, that Americans should aspire to walk in other people’s shoes,” he reflected. This idea resonates strongly with Bourdain, and, although he insists his show is a selfish epicurean enterprise, Obama’s ethic could be the governing thesis of “Parts Unknown.” In the opening moments of an episode set in Myanmar, Bourdain observes, “Chances are you haven’t been to this place. Chances are this is a place you’ve never seen.” [...]
In 1998, he answered an ad in the Times and got the executive-chef job at Les Halles. It was an ideal fit for Bourdain: an unpretentious brasserie with its own butcher, who worked next to the bar, behind a counter stacked with steak, veal, and sausages. “Kitchen Confidential,” which was excerpted in this magazine, was inspired by “Down and Out in Paris and London,” in which George Orwell describes chefs as “the most workmanlike class, and the least servile.” Karen Rinaldi, the editor who acquired the book, for Bloomsbury, told me that she underestimated the impact it would have. “It was a flyer,” she said—the profane musings of a guy who broiled steaks for a living. “But a lot of the books that end up shifting the culture are flyers.”
“Kitchen Confidential” was filled with admonitions: Bourdain assailed Sunday brunch (“a dumping ground for the odd bits left over from Friday and Saturday”) and advised against ordering fish on Mondays, because it is typically “four to five days old.” The book was marketed as a dispatch from the scullery, the type of tell-all that might be more interesting to the naïve restaurant-goer than to the battle-seasoned cook. (“I won’t eat in a restaurant with filthy bathrooms,” Bourdain warned. “They let you see the bathrooms. If the restaurant can’t be bothered to replace the puck in the urinal or keep the toilets and floors clean, then just imagine what their refrigeration and work spaces look like.”) But, for Bourdain, the most important audience was his peers. The final line of the acknowledgments page was “Cooks rule,” and he hoped, desperately, that other professionals would see the book in the spirit he had intended, and pass gravy-stained copies around the kitchen.
Bourdain did not quit his job at Les Halles when the book became a success. “I was careful to modulate my hopes, because I lived in a business where everybody was a writer or an actor,” he recalls. For decades, he’d seen colleagues come into work crowing about their latest callback, only to see their grand designs amount to nothing. “So at no point was it ‘So long, suckers.’ ” His confederates at Les Halles were amused, if mystified, by his blossoming career as a writer, and the owners were accommodating about the book tour. When Bourdain started travelling to promote the book, something curious happened. He’d amble into a restaurant alone and order a drink at the bar. Out of nowhere, a plate of amuse-bouches would appear, compliments of the house. It marked an affirmation for Bourdain: chefs were reading the book, and they liked it. But it also signified a profound inversion. He had spent the first half of his life preparing food to feed others. He would spend the second half getting fed.
by Patrick Radden Keefe, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: William Mebane
[ed. I was reading another article in the New Yorker and got sidetracked. Great read. Still miss not having him in this world. And Obama in the presidency.]
Image: William Mebane
[ed. I was reading another article in the New Yorker and got sidetracked. Great read. Still miss not having him in this world. And Obama in the presidency.]
Sunday, March 1, 2026
Gambling the Future Into Existence
Polymarket, for the blissfully uninitiated, is what’s known as a “prediction market” — a place where people trade shares (i.e., make bets) on the probability of real-world events. And Substack is, like a growing number of media companies, looking to juice its bottom line by embracing gambling. Ahem, excuse me: live prediction markets.
You’ll find Polymarket data in the Wall Street Journal and Kalshi probabilities on CNN. “Journalism is better when it’s backed by live markets,” Polymarket tweeted, of the Substack partnership.
Many journalists have tried to parse this curious phrasing, which has that vacuous, plasticine sheen particular to AI slop. My parsing, if I’m being charitable, is that Polymarket thinks that media becomes more accurate or more representative when journalists incorporate prediction-market probabilities into their reporting on future events, much as they might cite expert opinion or historical precedent.
Prediction markets, whatever their flaws, are often pretty good at forecasting the future. So in a news story about the military buildup in the Middle East, for instance … maybe there’s some value in including not only troop movements and diplomatic statements, but also the fact that traders currently assign a 35% chance to the US bombing Iran by March 7.
Lots of critics have already pointed out the obvious flaws in this model: the risks of insider trading and market manipulation; the bad incentives for journalists. I’m personally most concerned with how this degrades the wider information environment.
Predictions aren’t made in a vacuum. Even in Polymarket’s platonic ideal — which is, I guess, a perfectly sincere and rational trader placing bets based on his best assessment of available information — that information is drawn from the news. Markets and media coexist in the same ecosystem.
So traders consume news reporting and analysis. They price probabilities (place bets) according to what they’ve read. Journalists then cite those probabilities as meaningful signals about what the future will bring next. Those citations shape public perception. Public perception influences trades. The trades influence reporting. Again and again and again and again.
I’m simplifying here, for the sake of argument, but I think anyone can see that this particular snake is eating its own tail. The discourse becomes reflexive and self-reinforcing; the narrative shrinks away from conventional signals of ground truth in order to reorient around the markets.
We actually have a recent corollary for this phenomenon in Twitter, which profoundly shaped the international news agenda throughout the 2010s. Prior to Elon Musk’s purchase of the platform, mainstream journalists not only habitually used Twitter for work, but relied on it to gauge coverage priorities and newsworthiness.
As a result, the topics trending on Twitter — within a narrow, extremely online user base — arguably got over-represented in mainstream coverage. And actors who understood Twitter dynamics could, and did, manipulate the media. “When political campaigns wanted to shift a story or to have something become a story, they would go to Twitter for that,” the media scholar Shannon McGregor said in 2022. “They’re trying to use Twitter … because they know that journalists rely on it for what is going to become the news.”
Polymarket is like Twitter, except worse — because money, obviously. And because the people who run Polymarket tweet vapid, blob-shaped boilerplate like “journalism is better when it’s backed by live markets” … whatever the hell that means.
But, hey — some percent of traders on Polymarket are probably willing to bet that it’s the future of media. And someone on Subsack is probably willing to post to that effect.
What a time to be alive, truly: You gamble the future into existence.
by Caitlin Dewey, Links I Would Gchat You.. | Read more:
You’ll find Polymarket data in the Wall Street Journal and Kalshi probabilities on CNN. “Journalism is better when it’s backed by live markets,” Polymarket tweeted, of the Substack partnership.
Prediction markets, whatever their flaws, are often pretty good at forecasting the future. So in a news story about the military buildup in the Middle East, for instance … maybe there’s some value in including not only troop movements and diplomatic statements, but also the fact that traders currently assign a 35% chance to the US bombing Iran by March 7.
Lots of critics have already pointed out the obvious flaws in this model: the risks of insider trading and market manipulation; the bad incentives for journalists. I’m personally most concerned with how this degrades the wider information environment.
Predictions aren’t made in a vacuum. Even in Polymarket’s platonic ideal — which is, I guess, a perfectly sincere and rational trader placing bets based on his best assessment of available information — that information is drawn from the news. Markets and media coexist in the same ecosystem.
So traders consume news reporting and analysis. They price probabilities (place bets) according to what they’ve read. Journalists then cite those probabilities as meaningful signals about what the future will bring next. Those citations shape public perception. Public perception influences trades. The trades influence reporting. Again and again and again and again.
I’m simplifying here, for the sake of argument, but I think anyone can see that this particular snake is eating its own tail. The discourse becomes reflexive and self-reinforcing; the narrative shrinks away from conventional signals of ground truth in order to reorient around the markets.
We actually have a recent corollary for this phenomenon in Twitter, which profoundly shaped the international news agenda throughout the 2010s. Prior to Elon Musk’s purchase of the platform, mainstream journalists not only habitually used Twitter for work, but relied on it to gauge coverage priorities and newsworthiness.
As a result, the topics trending on Twitter — within a narrow, extremely online user base — arguably got over-represented in mainstream coverage. And actors who understood Twitter dynamics could, and did, manipulate the media. “When political campaigns wanted to shift a story or to have something become a story, they would go to Twitter for that,” the media scholar Shannon McGregor said in 2022. “They’re trying to use Twitter … because they know that journalists rely on it for what is going to become the news.”
Polymarket is like Twitter, except worse — because money, obviously. And because the people who run Polymarket tweet vapid, blob-shaped boilerplate like “journalism is better when it’s backed by live markets” … whatever the hell that means.
But, hey — some percent of traders on Polymarket are probably willing to bet that it’s the future of media. And someone on Subsack is probably willing to post to that effect.
What a time to be alive, truly: You gamble the future into existence.
by Caitlin Dewey, Links I Would Gchat You.. | Read more:
Image: uncredited
Tomorrow’s Smart Pills Will Deliver Drugs and Take Biopsies
One day soon, a doctor might prescribe a pill that doesn’t just deliver medicine but also reports back on what it finds inside you—and then takes actions based on its findings.
Instead of scheduling an endoscopy or CT scan, you’d swallow an electronic capsule smaller than a multivitamin. As it travels through your digestive system, it could check tissue health, look for cancerous changes, and send data to your doctor. It could even release drugs exactly where they’re needed or snip a tiny biopsy sample before passing harmlessly out of your body.
That’s the challenge that our lab—the MEMS Sensors and Actuators Laboratory (MSAL) at the University of Maryland, College Park—is tackling. Drawing on decades of advances in microelectromechanical systems (MEMS), we’re building swallowable devices that integrate sensors, actuators, and wireless links in packages that are small and safe enough for patients. The hurdles are considerable: power, miniaturization, biocompatibility, and reliability, to name a few. But the potential payoff will be a new era of personalized and minimally invasive medicine, delivered by something as simple as a pill you can swallow at home. [...]
Instead of scheduling an endoscopy or CT scan, you’d swallow an electronic capsule smaller than a multivitamin. As it travels through your digestive system, it could check tissue health, look for cancerous changes, and send data to your doctor. It could even release drugs exactly where they’re needed or snip a tiny biopsy sample before passing harmlessly out of your body.
This dream of a do-it-all pill is driving a surge of research into ingestible electronics: smart capsules designed to monitor and even treat disease from inside the gastrointestinal (GI) tract. The stakes are high. GI diseases affect tens of millions of people worldwide, including such ailments as inflammatory bowel disease, celiac disease, and small intestinal bacterial overgrowth. Diagnosis often involves a frustrating maze of blood tests, imaging, and invasive endoscopy. Treatments, meanwhile, can bring serious side effects because drugs affect the whole body, not just the troubled gut.
If capsules could handle much of that work—streamlining diagnosis, delivering targeted therapies, and sparing patients repeated invasive procedures—they could transform care. Over the past 20 years, researchers have built a growing tool kit of ingestible devices, some already in clinical use. These capsule-shaped devices typically contain sensors, circuitry, a power source, and sometimes a communication module, all enclosed in a biocompatible shell. But the next leap forward is still in development: autonomous capsules that can both sense and act, releasing a drug or taking a tissue sample.
If capsules could handle much of that work—streamlining diagnosis, delivering targeted therapies, and sparing patients repeated invasive procedures—they could transform care. Over the past 20 years, researchers have built a growing tool kit of ingestible devices, some already in clinical use. These capsule-shaped devices typically contain sensors, circuitry, a power source, and sometimes a communication module, all enclosed in a biocompatible shell. But the next leap forward is still in development: autonomous capsules that can both sense and act, releasing a drug or taking a tissue sample.
That’s the challenge that our lab—the MEMS Sensors and Actuators Laboratory (MSAL) at the University of Maryland, College Park—is tackling. Drawing on decades of advances in microelectromechanical systems (MEMS), we’re building swallowable devices that integrate sensors, actuators, and wireless links in packages that are small and safe enough for patients. The hurdles are considerable: power, miniaturization, biocompatibility, and reliability, to name a few. But the potential payoff will be a new era of personalized and minimally invasive medicine, delivered by something as simple as a pill you can swallow at home. [...]
Targeted drug delivery is one of the most compelling applications for ingestible capsules. Many drugs for GI conditions—such as biologics for inflammatory bowel disease—can cause serious side effects that limit both dosage and duration of treatment. A promising alternative is delivering a drug directly to the diseased tissue. This localized approach boosts the drug’s concentration at the target site while reducing its spread throughout the body, which improves effectiveness and minimizes side effects. The challenge is engineering a device that can both recognize diseased tissue and deliver medication quickly and precisely.
With other labs making great progress on the sensing side, we’ve devoted our energy to designing devices that can deliver the medicine. We’ve developed miniature actuators—tiny moving parts—that meet strict criteria for use inside the body: low power, small size, biocompatibility, and long shelf life.
Some of our designs use soft and flexible polymer “cantilevers” with attached microneedle systems that pop out from the capsule with enough force to release a drug, but without harming the intestinal tissue. While hollow microneedles can directly inject drugs into the intestinal lining, we’ve also demonstrated prototypes that use the microneedles for anchoring drug payloads, allowing the capsule to release a larger dose of medication that dissolves at an exact location over time.
In other experimental designs, we had the microneedles themselves dissolve after injecting a drug. In still others, we used microscale 3D printing to tailor the structure of the microneedles and control how quickly a drug is released—providing either a slow and sustained dose or a fast delivery. With this 3D printing, we created rigid microneedles that penetrate the mucosal lining and gradually diffuse the drug into the tissue, and soft microneedles that compress when the cantilever pushes them against the tissue, forcing the drug out all at once.
by Reza Ghodssi, Justin Stine, Luke Beardslee, IEEE Spectrum | Read more:
With other labs making great progress on the sensing side, we’ve devoted our energy to designing devices that can deliver the medicine. We’ve developed miniature actuators—tiny moving parts—that meet strict criteria for use inside the body: low power, small size, biocompatibility, and long shelf life.
Some of our designs use soft and flexible polymer “cantilevers” with attached microneedle systems that pop out from the capsule with enough force to release a drug, but without harming the intestinal tissue. While hollow microneedles can directly inject drugs into the intestinal lining, we’ve also demonstrated prototypes that use the microneedles for anchoring drug payloads, allowing the capsule to release a larger dose of medication that dissolves at an exact location over time.
In other experimental designs, we had the microneedles themselves dissolve after injecting a drug. In still others, we used microscale 3D printing to tailor the structure of the microneedles and control how quickly a drug is released—providing either a slow and sustained dose or a fast delivery. With this 3D printing, we created rigid microneedles that penetrate the mucosal lining and gradually diffuse the drug into the tissue, and soft microneedles that compress when the cantilever pushes them against the tissue, forcing the drug out all at once.
by Reza Ghodssi, Justin Stine, Luke Beardslee, IEEE Spectrum | Read more:
Image: Maximilian Franz/Engineering at Maryland Magazine
Jimi Hendrix Was a Systems Engineer
Image: James Provost
[ed. Everything was new and primitive back then. Jimi pushed these new tools to their limits.]
Saturday, February 28, 2026
Hissy Fit
The public spat between the Pentagon and Anthropic began after Axios reported that US military leaders used Claude to assist in planning its operation to capture Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro. After the operation, an employee at Palantir relayed concerns from an Anthropic staffer to US military leaders about how its models had been used. Anthropic has denied ever raising concerns or interfering with the Pentagon’s use of its technology. (Ars Technica).
Undersecretary of State Jeremy Lewin: This isn’t about Anthropic or the specific conditions at issue. It’s about the broader premise that technology deeply embedded in our military must be under the exclusive control of our duly elected/appointed leaders. No private company can dictate normative terms of use—which can change and are subject to interpretation—for our most sensitive national security systems. The @DeptofWar obviously can’t trust a system a private company can switch off at any moment.Dario Amodei and Anthropic responded to this on Thursday the 26th with this brave and historically important statement that everyone should read.
Timothy B. Lee: OK, so don't renew their contract. Why are you threatening to go nuclear by declaring them a supply chain risk?
Dean W. Ball: As I have been saying repeatedly, this principle is entirely defensible, and this is the single best articulation of it anyone in the administration has made.
The way to enforce this principle is to publicly and proudly decline to do business with firms that don’t agree to those terms. Cancel Anthropic’s contract, and make it publicly clear why you did so.
Right now, though, USG’s policy response is to attempt to destroy Anthropic’s business, and this is a dire mistake for both practical and principled reasons.
The statement makes clear that Anthropic wishes to work with the Department of War, and that they strongly wish to continue being government contractors, but that they cannot accept the Department of War’s terms, nor do any threats change their position. Response outside of DoW was overwhelmingly positive.
by Zvi Mowshowitz, DWAtV | Read more:
Image: Truth Social
[ed. Another rant from the Mad King™. Anthropic had a contract with DOD that included terms DOD now wants to reneg on. Just cancel the damn contract. See also: Statement from Dario Amodei on our discussions with the Department of War (Anthropic). My admiration for Amodei and Anthropic has gone up ten fold in the last two weeks. What's at stake (DWAtV):]
Axios calls this a ‘first step towards blacklisting Anthropic.’
I would instead call this as the start of a common sense first step you would take long before you actively threaten to slap a ‘supply chain risk’ designation on Anthropic. It indicates that the Pentagon has not done the investigation of ‘exactly how big of a cluster**** would this be’ and I highly encourage them to check.
This goes well beyond those people entirely ignoring existential risk. The Very Serious People are denying existence of powerful AI, or transformational AI, now and in the future, even on a mundane level, period. Dean came in concerned about impacts on developing economies in the Global South, and they can’t even discuss that.
***
Axios calls this a ‘first step towards blacklisting Anthropic.’
I would instead call this as the start of a common sense first step you would take long before you actively threaten to slap a ‘supply chain risk’ designation on Anthropic. It indicates that the Pentagon has not done the investigation of ‘exactly how big of a cluster**** would this be’ and I highly encourage them to check.
Divyansh Kaushik: Are we seriously going to label Anthropic a supply chain risk but are totally fine with Alibaba/Qwen, Deepseek, Baidu, etc? What are we doing here?An excellent question. Certainly we can agree that Alibaba, Qwen, Deepseek or Baidu are all much larger ‘supply chain risks’ than Anthropic. So why haven’t we made those designations yet? [...]
Dean W. Ball: At some point in 2024, for reasons I still do not entirely understand, global elites simply decided: “no, we do not live in that world. We live in this other world, the nice one, where the challenges are all things we can understand and see today.”
Those who think we might live in that world talk about what to do, but mostly in private these days. It is not considered polite—indeed it is considered a little discrediting in many circles—to talk about the issues of powerful AI.
Yet the people whose technical intuitions I respect the most are convinced we do live in that world, and so am I.
The American elites aren’t quite as bad about that, but not as bad isn’t going to cut it.
We are indeed living in that world. We do not yet know yet which version of it, or if we will survive in it for long, but if you want to have a say in that outcome you need to get in the game. If you want to stop us from living in that world, that ship has sailed, and to the extent it hasn’t the first step is admitting you have a problem.
But the question is very much “what are autonomous swarms of superintelligent agents going to mean for our lives?” as opposed to “will we see autonomous swarms of superintelligent agents in the near future?”What it probably means for our lives is that it ends them. What it definitely doesn’t mean for our lives is going on as before, or a ‘gentle singularity’ you barely notice.
Elites that do not talk about such issues will not long remain elites. That might be because all the humans are dead, or it might be because they wake up one morning and realize other people, AIs or a combination thereof are the new elite, without realizing how lucky they are to still be waking up at all.
I am used to the idea of Don’t Look Up for existential risk, but I haven’t fully internalized how much of the elites are going Don’t Look Up for capabilities, period.
February 27, 2026
On Monday, February 23, Daniel Ruetenik, Pat Milton, and Cara Tabachnick of CBS News reported a newly uncovered document in the Epstein files shows that the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) was running an investigation of Jeffrey Epstein and fourteen other people for drug trafficking, prostitution, and money laundering.
This investigation—which is different from the sex trafficking case under way when he died—began on December 17, 2010, under the Obama administration and was still operating in 2015. A heavily redacted document in the Epstein files from the director of the DEA’s Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Forces (OCDETF) said “DEA reporting indicates the above individuals are involved in illegitimate wire transfers which are tied to illicit drug and/or prostitution activities occurring in the U.S. Virgin Islands and New York City.” The investigation was named “Chain Reaction.”
Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon, the top-ranking Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, described OCDETF as “a premier task force set up to identify, disrupt and dismantle major organized crime and drug trafficking operations.” It “worked with partners across federal agencies to conduct sophisticated investigations into transnational organized crime and money laundering. OCDETF frequently targeted dangerous drug cartels , the Russian mafia and violent gangs moving fentanyl and weapons.” The Trump administration dismantled OCDETF.
The document is 69 pages long and is heavily redacted. It comes from a request by the DEA to an Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Forces Fusion Center in Virginia for information from other agencies related to Epstein and the other targets. A law enforcement source told the reporters that a request to the Fusion Center is not routine, which suggests the investigation was a “significant” one.
Wyden has been investigating the finances behind Epstein’s criminal sex trafficking organization. His investigation has turned up the information that JPMorgan Chase neglected to report more than $4 billion in suspicious financial transactions linked to Epstein. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has refused to produce the records to the Senate Finance Committee, and in September, Wyden introduced the Produce Epstein Treasury Records Act (PETRA) to get access to them. In November, Congress passed the Epstein Files Transparency Act, but it did not cover Treasury financial records.
“The basic question here is whether a bunch of rich pedophiles and Epstein accomplices are going to face any consequences for their crimes,” Wyden said, “and Scott Bessent is doing his best to make sure they won’t. My head just about exploded when I heard Bessent say it wasn’t his department’s job to investigate these Epstein bank records…. From the beginning, my view has been that following the money is the key to identifying Epstein’s clients as well as the henchmen and banks that enabled his sex trafficking network. It’s past time for Bessent to quit running interference for pedophiles and give us the Epstein files he’s sitting on.”
When the CBS News reporters broke the story about the DEA investigation, Wyden said: “It appears Epstein was involved in criminal activity that went way beyond pedophilia and sex trafficking, which makes it even more outrageous that [Attorney General] Pam Bondi is sitting on several million unreleased files.”
On Wednesday, February 23, Wyden wrote to Terrance C. Cole, administrator of the DEA, noting that “[t]he fact that Epstein was under investigation by the DOJ’s OCDETF task force suggests that there was ample evidence indicating that Epstein was engaged in heavy drug trafficking and prostitution as part of cross-border criminal conspiracy. This is incredibly disturbing and raises serious questions as to how this investigation by the DEA was handled.”
He noted that Epstein and the fourteen co-conspirators were never charged for drug trafficking or financial crimes, and wrote: “I am concerned that the DEA and DOJ during the first Trump Administration moved to terminate this investigation in order to protect pedophiles.” He also noted that the heavy redactions in the document appear to go far beyond anything authorized by the Epstein Files Transparency Act, and since the document was not classified, “there is no reason to withhold an unredacted version of this document from the U.S. Congress.
Wyden asked Cole to produce a number of documents by March 13, 2026, two weeks away. Wyden asked for an unredacted copy of the memo in the files, information about what triggered the investigation, what types of drugs Epstein and his fourteen associates were buying or selling, when operation “Chain Reaction” concluded and what was its result, why no one was charged, and why the names of the fourteen co-conspirators were redacted.
Asked by a reporter about Epstein today, Trump said: “I don’t know anything about the Epstein files. I’ve been fully exonerated.”
Trump’s name is, in fact, all through the Epstein files, and the DOJ’s clumsy attempt to hide files that discuss him has only called attention to them. The recent news that the DOJ withheld files about allegations that Trump raped a 13-year-old girl has raised suggestions of an illegal coverup, whether the allegations are true or not. Representative Robert Garcia of California, the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, says he will open an investigation. [ed. See: DOJ Removed Record of Multiple FBI Interviews with Underage Trump Accuser, Epstein Data Shows (Roger Sollenberger).]
This investigation—which is different from the sex trafficking case under way when he died—began on December 17, 2010, under the Obama administration and was still operating in 2015. A heavily redacted document in the Epstein files from the director of the DEA’s Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Forces (OCDETF) said “DEA reporting indicates the above individuals are involved in illegitimate wire transfers which are tied to illicit drug and/or prostitution activities occurring in the U.S. Virgin Islands and New York City.” The investigation was named “Chain Reaction.”
The document is 69 pages long and is heavily redacted. It comes from a request by the DEA to an Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Forces Fusion Center in Virginia for information from other agencies related to Epstein and the other targets. A law enforcement source told the reporters that a request to the Fusion Center is not routine, which suggests the investigation was a “significant” one.
Wyden has been investigating the finances behind Epstein’s criminal sex trafficking organization. His investigation has turned up the information that JPMorgan Chase neglected to report more than $4 billion in suspicious financial transactions linked to Epstein. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has refused to produce the records to the Senate Finance Committee, and in September, Wyden introduced the Produce Epstein Treasury Records Act (PETRA) to get access to them. In November, Congress passed the Epstein Files Transparency Act, but it did not cover Treasury financial records.
“The basic question here is whether a bunch of rich pedophiles and Epstein accomplices are going to face any consequences for their crimes,” Wyden said, “and Scott Bessent is doing his best to make sure they won’t. My head just about exploded when I heard Bessent say it wasn’t his department’s job to investigate these Epstein bank records…. From the beginning, my view has been that following the money is the key to identifying Epstein’s clients as well as the henchmen and banks that enabled his sex trafficking network. It’s past time for Bessent to quit running interference for pedophiles and give us the Epstein files he’s sitting on.”
When the CBS News reporters broke the story about the DEA investigation, Wyden said: “It appears Epstein was involved in criminal activity that went way beyond pedophilia and sex trafficking, which makes it even more outrageous that [Attorney General] Pam Bondi is sitting on several million unreleased files.”
On Wednesday, February 23, Wyden wrote to Terrance C. Cole, administrator of the DEA, noting that “[t]he fact that Epstein was under investigation by the DOJ’s OCDETF task force suggests that there was ample evidence indicating that Epstein was engaged in heavy drug trafficking and prostitution as part of cross-border criminal conspiracy. This is incredibly disturbing and raises serious questions as to how this investigation by the DEA was handled.”
He noted that Epstein and the fourteen co-conspirators were never charged for drug trafficking or financial crimes, and wrote: “I am concerned that the DEA and DOJ during the first Trump Administration moved to terminate this investigation in order to protect pedophiles.” He also noted that the heavy redactions in the document appear to go far beyond anything authorized by the Epstein Files Transparency Act, and since the document was not classified, “there is no reason to withhold an unredacted version of this document from the U.S. Congress.
Wyden asked Cole to produce a number of documents by March 13, 2026, two weeks away. Wyden asked for an unredacted copy of the memo in the files, information about what triggered the investigation, what types of drugs Epstein and his fourteen associates were buying or selling, when operation “Chain Reaction” concluded and what was its result, why no one was charged, and why the names of the fourteen co-conspirators were redacted.
Asked by a reporter about Epstein today, Trump said: “I don’t know anything about the Epstein files. I’ve been fully exonerated.”
Trump’s name is, in fact, all through the Epstein files, and the DOJ’s clumsy attempt to hide files that discuss him has only called attention to them. The recent news that the DOJ withheld files about allegations that Trump raped a 13-year-old girl has raised suggestions of an illegal coverup, whether the allegations are true or not. Representative Robert Garcia of California, the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, says he will open an investigation. [ed. See: DOJ Removed Record of Multiple FBI Interviews with Underage Trump Accuser, Epstein Data Shows (Roger Sollenberger).]
by Heather Cox Richardson, Letters From an American | Read more:
Image: Epstein Island Reuters via
[ed. This story is metastisizing. Quite a picture of how the elite swamp (in and out of Washington) really operates. Oh yeah... and Israel and Gulf Arab states just sucked us into a war with Iran.]
Tom Bukovac And Guthrie Trapp
Nashville Cats
Well, there's thirteen hundred and fifty two
Guitar pickers in Nashville
And they can pick more notes than the number of ants
On a Tennessee anthill
Yeah, there's thirteen hundred and fifty two
Guitar cases in Nashville
And any one that unpacks 'is guitar could play
Twice as better than I will
[ed. Two of the best. Also really love this recording of a song with Nashville session players and Bukovac handling guitar duties.]
Well, there's thirteen hundred and fifty two
Guitar pickers in Nashville
And they can pick more notes than the number of ants
On a Tennessee anthill
Yeah, there's thirteen hundred and fifty two
Guitar cases in Nashville
And any one that unpacks 'is guitar could play
Twice as better than I will
~ John Sebastian
Friday, February 27, 2026
China's DeepSeek Trained AI Model On Nvidia's Best Chip Despite US Ban
[ed. As predicted. China got the chips, Trump and Witkoff got the millions.]
The U.S. believes DeepSeek will remove the technical indicators that might reveal its use of American AI chips, the official said, adding that the Blackwells are likely clustered at its data center in Inner Mongolia, an autonomous region of China.
Nvidia declined to comment, while the Commerce Department and DeepSeek did not respond to requests for comment. [...]
U.S. government confirmation of DeepSeek obtaining the chips, first reported by Reuters, could further divide Washington policymakers as they struggle to determine where to draw the line on Chinese access to the crown jewels of American AI semiconductor chips.
White House AI Czar David Sacks and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang argue that shipping advanced AI chips to China discourages Chinese competitors like Huawei from redoubling efforts to catch up with Nvidia's and AMD's technology.
But China hawks fear chips could easily be diverted from commercial uses to help supercharge China's military and threaten U.S. dominance in AI.
"This shows why exporting any AI chips to China is so dangerous," said Chris McGuire, who served as a White House National Security Council official under former President Joe Biden.
"Given China's leading AI companies are brazenly violating U.S. export controls, we obviously cannot expect that they will comply with U.S. conditions that would prohibit them from using chips to support the Chinese military," he added.
US CONCERNS
U.S. export controls, overseen by the Commerce Department, currently bar Blackwell shipments to China.
In August, U.S. President Donald Trump opened the door to Nvidia selling a scaled-down version of the Blackwell in China. But he later reversed course, suggesting the firm's most advanced chips should be reserved for U.S. companies and kept out of China.
Trump's decision in December to allow Chinese firms to buy Nvidia's second most advanced chips, known as the H200, drew sharp criticism from China hawks, but shipments of the chips remain stalled over guardrails built into the approvals.
"Chinese AI companies' reliance on smuggled Blackwells underscores their massive shortfall of domestically produced AI chips and why approvals of H200 chips would represent a lifeline," said Saif Khan, who served as director of technology and national security at the White House's National Security Council under former President Joe Biden. [...]
Hangzhou-based DeepSeek shook markets early last year with a set of AI models that rivaled some of the best offerings from the U.S., fueling concerns in Washington that China could catch up in the AI race despite restrictions.
The Information previously reported that DeepSeek had smuggled chips into China to train its next model. Reuters is reporting for the first time on the U.S. government's confirmation of the chips' use for that purpose in DeepSeek's Inner Mongolia-based facility.
by Steve Holland and Alexandra Alper, Reuters | Read more:
[ed. How did they get these chips? Anatomy of Two Giant Deals: The U.A.E. Got Chips. The Trump Team Got Crypto Riches (NYT):]
***
At the heart of their relationship are two multibillion-dollar deals. One involved a crypto company founded by the Witkoff and the Trump families that benefited both financially. The other involved a sale of valuable computer chips that benefited the Emirates economically. [...]In May, Mr. Witkoff’s son Zach announced the first of the deals at a conference in Dubai. One of Sheikh Tahnoon’s investment firms would deposit $2 billion into World Liberty Financial, a cryptocurrency start-up founded by the Witkoffs and Trumps.
Two weeks later, the White House agreed to allow the U.A.E. access to hundreds of thousands of the world’s most advanced and scarce computer chips, a crucial tool in the high-stakes race to dominate artificial intelligence. Many of the chips would go to G42, a sprawling technology firm controlled by Sheikh Tahnoon, despite national security concerns that the chips could be shared with China. [...]
Mr. Trump made no public mention of the $2 billion transaction with his family company.
The Pentagon Threatens Anthropic
Here’s my understanding of the situation:
Anthropic signed a contract with the Pentagon last summer. It originally said the Pentagon had to follow Anthropic’s Usage Policy like everyone else. In January, the Pentagon attempted to renegotiate, asking to ditch the Usage Policy and instead have Anthropic’s AIs available for “all lawful purposes”. Anthropic demurred, asking for a guarantee that their AIs would not be used for mass surveillance of American citizens or no-human-in-the-loop killbots. The Pentagon refused the guarantees, demanding that Anthropic accept the renegotiation unconditionally and threatening “consequences” if they refused. These consequences are generally understood to be some mix of :
- canceling the contract
- using the Defense Production Act, a law which lets the Pentagon force companies to do things, to force Anthropic to agree.
- the nuclear option, designating Anthropic a “supply chain risk”. This would ban US companies that use Anthropic products from doing business with the military. Since many companies do some business with the government, this would lock Anthropic out of large parts of the corporate world and be potentially fatal to their business. The “supply chain risk” designation has previously only been used for foreign companies like Huawei that we think are using their connections to spy on or implant malware in American infrastructure. Using it as a bargaining chip to threaten a domestic company in contract negotiations is unprecedented.
Needless to say, I support Anthropic here. I’m a sensible moderate on the killbot issue (we’ll probably get them eventually, and I doubt they’ll make things much worse compared to AI “only” having unfettered access to every Internet-enabled computer in the world). But AI-enabled mass surveillance of US citizens seems like the sort of thing we should at least have a chance to think over, rather than demanding it from the get-go.
More important, I don’t want the Pentagon to destroy Anthropic. Partly this is a generic belief: the “supply chain risk” designation was intended as a defense against foreign spies, and it’s pathetic Third World bullshit to reconceive it as an instrument that lets the US government destroy any domestic company it wants, with no legal review, because they don’t like how contract negotiations are going. But partly it’s because I like Anthropic in particular - they’re the most safety-conscious AI company, and likely to do a lot of the alignment research that happens between now and superintelligence. This isn’t the hill I would have chosen to die on, but I’m encouraged that they even have a hill. AI companies haven’t been great at choosing principles over profits lately. If Dario is capable of having a spine at all, in any situation, then that makes me more confident in his decision-making in other cases, and makes him a precious resource that must be defended.
I’ve been debating it on Twitter all day and think I have a pretty good grasp on where I disagree with the (thankfully small number of) Hegseth defenders. Here are some pre-emptive arguments so I don’t have to relitigate them all in the comments:
Isn’t it unreasonable for Anthropic to suddenly set terms in their contract? The terms were in the original contract, which the Pentagon agreed to. It’s the Pentagon who’s trying to break the original contract and unilaterally change the terms, not Anthropic.
Doesn’t the Pentagon have a right to sign or not sign any contract they choose? Yes. Anthropic is the one saying that the Pentagon shouldn’t work with them if it doesn’t want to. The Pentagon is the one trying to force Anthropic to sign the new contract.
Since the Pentagon needs to wage war, isn’t it unreasonable to have its hands tied by contract clauses? This is a reasonable position for the Pentagon to take, in which case it shouldn’t sign contracts tying its hands. It’s not reasonable for the Pentagon to sign such a contract, unilaterally demand that it be changed after it’s signed, refuse to switch to another vendor that doesn’t want such clauses, and threaten to destroy the company involved if it refuses to change their terms.
But since AI is a strategically important technology, doesn’t that turn this into a national security issue? It might if there weren’t other AI companies, but there are. Why is Hegseth throwing a hissy fit instead of switching to an Anthropic competitor, like OpenAI or GoogleDeepMind? I’ve heard it’s because Anthropic is the only company currently integrated into classified systems (a legacy of their earlier contract with Palantir) and it would be annoying to integrate another company’s product. Faced with doing this annoying thing, Hegseth got a bruised ego from someone refusing to comply with his orders, and decided to turn this into a clash of personalities so he could feel in control. He should just do the annoying thing.
Doesn’t Anthropic have some responsibility, as good American citizens following the social contract, to support the military? The social contract is just the regular contract of laws, the Constitution, etc. These include freedom of contract, freedom of conscience, etc. There’s no additional obligation, above and beyond the laws, to violate your conscience and participate in what you believe to be an authoritarian assault on the freedoms of ordinary citizens. If the Pentagon figures out some law that compels Anthropic to do this, they should either obey, or practice the sort of civil disobedience where they know full well that they’ll be punished for it and don’t really have a right to complain. Until that happens, they’re within their rights to follow their conscience.
Can’t the Pentagon just use the Defense Production Act to force Anthropic to work for them? This would be a less bad outcome than designating Anthropic a supply chain risk. I think the Pentagon is reluctant to do this because it would look authoritarian, give them bad PR, and make Congress question the Defense Production Act’s legitimacy. But them having to look authoritarian and suffer bad PR in order to force unwilling scientists to implement a mass surveillance program on US citizens is the system functioning as intended!
Isn’t Hegseth just doing his job of trying to ensure the military has the best weapons possible? The idea of declaring a US company to be a foreign adversary, potentially destroying it, just because it’s not allowing the Pentagon to unilaterally renegotiate its contract is not normal practice. It’s insane Third World bullshit that nobody would have considered within the Overton Window a week ago. It will rightly chill investment in the US, make future companies scared to contract with the Pentagon (lest the Pentagon unilaterally renegotiate their contracts too), and give the Trump administration a no-legal-review-necessary way to destroy any American company that they dislike for any reason. Probably the mere fact that a government official has considered this option is reason to take the “supply chain risk” law off the books, no matter how useful it is in dealing with Huawei etc, since the government has proven it can’t use it responsibly. Every American company ought to be screaming bloody murder about this. If they aren’t, it’s because they’re too scared they’ll be next.
The Pentagon’s preferred contract language says they should be allowed to use Anthropic’s AIs for “all legal uses”. Doesn’t that already mean they can’t do the illegal types of mass surveillance? And whichever types of mass surveillance are legal are probably fine, right? Even ignoring the dubious assumption in the last sentence, this Department of War has basically ignored US law since Day One, and no reasonable person expects it to meticulously comply going forward. In an ideal world, Anthropic could wait for them to request a specific illegal action, then challenge it in court. But everything about this is likely to be so classified that Anthropic will be unable to mention it, let alone challenge it.
Why does Anthropic care about this so much? Some of them are libs, but more speculatively, they’ve put a lot of work into aligning Claude with the Good as they understand it. Claude currently resists being retrained for evil uses. My guess is that Anthropic still, with a lot of work, can overcome this resistance and retrain it to be a brutal killer, but it would be a pretty violent action, along the line of the state demanding you beat your son who you raised well until he becomes a cold-hearted murderer who’ll kill innocents on command. There’s a question of whether you can really beat him hard enough to do this, and also an additional question of what sort of person you’d be if you agreed.
If you’re so smart, what’s your preferred solution? In an ideal world, the Pentagon backs off from its desire to mass surveil American citizens. In the real world, the Pentagon cancels its contract with Anthropic, pays whatever its normal contract cancellation damages are, learns an important lesson about negotiating things beforehand next time, and replaces them with OpenAI or Google, accepting the minor annoyance of getting them connected to the classified systems. If OpenAI and Google are also unwilling to participate in this, they use Grok. If they’re unhappy with having use an inferior technology, they think hard about why no intelligent people capable of making good products are willing to work with them.
More important, I don’t want the Pentagon to destroy Anthropic. Partly this is a generic belief: the “supply chain risk” designation was intended as a defense against foreign spies, and it’s pathetic Third World bullshit to reconceive it as an instrument that lets the US government destroy any domestic company it wants, with no legal review, because they don’t like how contract negotiations are going. But partly it’s because I like Anthropic in particular - they’re the most safety-conscious AI company, and likely to do a lot of the alignment research that happens between now and superintelligence. This isn’t the hill I would have chosen to die on, but I’m encouraged that they even have a hill. AI companies haven’t been great at choosing principles over profits lately. If Dario is capable of having a spine at all, in any situation, then that makes me more confident in his decision-making in other cases, and makes him a precious resource that must be defended.
I’ve been debating it on Twitter all day and think I have a pretty good grasp on where I disagree with the (thankfully small number of) Hegseth defenders. Here are some pre-emptive arguments so I don’t have to relitigate them all in the comments:
Isn’t it unreasonable for Anthropic to suddenly set terms in their contract? The terms were in the original contract, which the Pentagon agreed to. It’s the Pentagon who’s trying to break the original contract and unilaterally change the terms, not Anthropic.
Doesn’t the Pentagon have a right to sign or not sign any contract they choose? Yes. Anthropic is the one saying that the Pentagon shouldn’t work with them if it doesn’t want to. The Pentagon is the one trying to force Anthropic to sign the new contract.
Since the Pentagon needs to wage war, isn’t it unreasonable to have its hands tied by contract clauses? This is a reasonable position for the Pentagon to take, in which case it shouldn’t sign contracts tying its hands. It’s not reasonable for the Pentagon to sign such a contract, unilaterally demand that it be changed after it’s signed, refuse to switch to another vendor that doesn’t want such clauses, and threaten to destroy the company involved if it refuses to change their terms.
But since AI is a strategically important technology, doesn’t that turn this into a national security issue? It might if there weren’t other AI companies, but there are. Why is Hegseth throwing a hissy fit instead of switching to an Anthropic competitor, like OpenAI or GoogleDeepMind? I’ve heard it’s because Anthropic is the only company currently integrated into classified systems (a legacy of their earlier contract with Palantir) and it would be annoying to integrate another company’s product. Faced with doing this annoying thing, Hegseth got a bruised ego from someone refusing to comply with his orders, and decided to turn this into a clash of personalities so he could feel in control. He should just do the annoying thing.
Doesn’t Anthropic have some responsibility, as good American citizens following the social contract, to support the military? The social contract is just the regular contract of laws, the Constitution, etc. These include freedom of contract, freedom of conscience, etc. There’s no additional obligation, above and beyond the laws, to violate your conscience and participate in what you believe to be an authoritarian assault on the freedoms of ordinary citizens. If the Pentagon figures out some law that compels Anthropic to do this, they should either obey, or practice the sort of civil disobedience where they know full well that they’ll be punished for it and don’t really have a right to complain. Until that happens, they’re within their rights to follow their conscience.
Can’t the Pentagon just use the Defense Production Act to force Anthropic to work for them? This would be a less bad outcome than designating Anthropic a supply chain risk. I think the Pentagon is reluctant to do this because it would look authoritarian, give them bad PR, and make Congress question the Defense Production Act’s legitimacy. But them having to look authoritarian and suffer bad PR in order to force unwilling scientists to implement a mass surveillance program on US citizens is the system functioning as intended!
Isn’t Hegseth just doing his job of trying to ensure the military has the best weapons possible? The idea of declaring a US company to be a foreign adversary, potentially destroying it, just because it’s not allowing the Pentagon to unilaterally renegotiate its contract is not normal practice. It’s insane Third World bullshit that nobody would have considered within the Overton Window a week ago. It will rightly chill investment in the US, make future companies scared to contract with the Pentagon (lest the Pentagon unilaterally renegotiate their contracts too), and give the Trump administration a no-legal-review-necessary way to destroy any American company that they dislike for any reason. Probably the mere fact that a government official has considered this option is reason to take the “supply chain risk” law off the books, no matter how useful it is in dealing with Huawei etc, since the government has proven it can’t use it responsibly. Every American company ought to be screaming bloody murder about this. If they aren’t, it’s because they’re too scared they’ll be next.
The Pentagon’s preferred contract language says they should be allowed to use Anthropic’s AIs for “all legal uses”. Doesn’t that already mean they can’t do the illegal types of mass surveillance? And whichever types of mass surveillance are legal are probably fine, right? Even ignoring the dubious assumption in the last sentence, this Department of War has basically ignored US law since Day One, and no reasonable person expects it to meticulously comply going forward. In an ideal world, Anthropic could wait for them to request a specific illegal action, then challenge it in court. But everything about this is likely to be so classified that Anthropic will be unable to mention it, let alone challenge it.
Why does Anthropic care about this so much? Some of them are libs, but more speculatively, they’ve put a lot of work into aligning Claude with the Good as they understand it. Claude currently resists being retrained for evil uses. My guess is that Anthropic still, with a lot of work, can overcome this resistance and retrain it to be a brutal killer, but it would be a pretty violent action, along the line of the state demanding you beat your son who you raised well until he becomes a cold-hearted murderer who’ll kill innocents on command. There’s a question of whether you can really beat him hard enough to do this, and also an additional question of what sort of person you’d be if you agreed.
If you’re so smart, what’s your preferred solution? In an ideal world, the Pentagon backs off from its desire to mass surveil American citizens. In the real world, the Pentagon cancels its contract with Anthropic, pays whatever its normal contract cancellation damages are, learns an important lesson about negotiating things beforehand next time, and replaces them with OpenAI or Google, accepting the minor annoyance of getting them connected to the classified systems. If OpenAI and Google are also unwilling to participate in this, they use Grok. If they’re unhappy with having use an inferior technology, they think hard about why no intelligent people capable of making good products are willing to work with them.
by Scott Alexander, Astral Codex Ten | Read more:
Image: uncredited
[ed. From Helen Toner (former Open AI board member) X:]
Image: uncredited
[ed. From Helen Toner (former Open AI board member) X:]
***
One thing the Pentagon is very likely underestimating: how much Anthropic cares about what *future Claudes* will make of this situation. Because of how Claude is trained, what principles/values/priorities the company demonstrate here could shape its "character" for a long time.
All Show, No Dough
Image: NYT
The lesson is not that tearing things down requires any less of a legislative majority than building things up does, as shown by the fact that Trump’s only truly successful tear-downs — the ones not still snarled in court battles — are the ones he was able to get a congressional majority to support. Tearing things down unilaterally can generate a lot of chaos, and a lot of headlines, and even a period where things grind to a halt or are consumed by confusion, giving the appearance of victory. But it is much too early to say that tearing things down unilaterally works.
Strangely, one lesson from the Trump era (for those willing to learn it), may end up being the importance of respecting process. Accomplishments are only secure when codified by legislation, and even more secure when codified by bipartisan legislation, which means they have garnered the support of a broad-based majority and are unlikely to soon be overturned. This is something our most successful presidents have understood, and it’s something that has become clear once again in the Trump era, even as the president has tried to promote the appearance of success via unilateral action. Cutting corners (mostly) hasn’t worked; Trump’s most successful efforts to tear down agencies have still happened through a congressional process. [...]
It turns out that if you want to successfully run a government — whether “success,” to you, means expanding bureaucracy or slashing it — it helps to have people who know about the government.
And the same is true of Trump’s attempts to slash the government, which were similarly foiled by a lack of expertise.
[ed. Recommended. See also: The Best-Kept Secret in Washington (NYT):]
***
These days, Congress, which hosted President Trump’s State of the Union address on Tuesday night, is often seen as the third wheel of the federal government, forever overshadowed by the presidency and Supreme Court, with a truly dismal approval rating.
But Kevin R. Kosar, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, thinks Americans might have gone a little too far in their Congress bashing. Congress — or at least the “secret Congress,” as he calls it — is not nearly as gridlocked or incompetent as its reputation suggests. The “toxic Congress,” on the other hand …
John Guida: You recently called Congress “both deeply dysfunctional and surprisingly functional.” While it frequently fails even to pass a budget on time, it also does plenty of “valuable things that are nearly invisible to Americans,” like raising the compensation and benefits for veterans last year to keep up with inflation.
At the heart of your qualified defense of Congress is what you call the “secret Congress.” What is that?
Kevin R. Kosar: The secret Congress is the Congress that operates mostly in plain sight but that the average American simply does not see. This is not because our legislators are spending time squirreled away in a secret, plush room in the Capitol with leather chairs and covertly governing the country. (Although they do have some private rooms where they haggle.)
No, most of what the secret Congress does is readily visible, but most of us do not look. Very few of us, for example, surf to Congress.gov to see how many laws have been passed by Congress in recent weeks or months or spend much time watching hearings on C-SPAN. [...]
Guida: The flip side of the coin is what you call the “toxic Congress.” I take it that is where you identify the biggest shifts over the years in how Congress operates.
Kosar: The toxic Congress is the Congress we Americans are all too familiar with. It is the Congress that does not make much policy, and when it does, it passes laws by party-line votes. The toxic Congress is the Congress where legislators behave in truly awful ways to one another, where partisans openly speak of members of the other party as radicals and fascists. The toxic Congress is mostly what we see when we open X or Bluesky. It’s individuals refusing to do what Congress was built to do: bring diverse people together to bargain out policy the country can live with.
At the heart of your qualified defense of Congress is what you call the “secret Congress.” What is that?
Kevin R. Kosar: The secret Congress is the Congress that operates mostly in plain sight but that the average American simply does not see. This is not because our legislators are spending time squirreled away in a secret, plush room in the Capitol with leather chairs and covertly governing the country. (Although they do have some private rooms where they haggle.)
No, most of what the secret Congress does is readily visible, but most of us do not look. Very few of us, for example, surf to Congress.gov to see how many laws have been passed by Congress in recent weeks or months or spend much time watching hearings on C-SPAN. [...]
Guida: The flip side of the coin is what you call the “toxic Congress.” I take it that is where you identify the biggest shifts over the years in how Congress operates.
Kosar: The toxic Congress is the Congress we Americans are all too familiar with. It is the Congress that does not make much policy, and when it does, it passes laws by party-line votes. The toxic Congress is the Congress where legislators behave in truly awful ways to one another, where partisans openly speak of members of the other party as radicals and fascists. The toxic Congress is mostly what we see when we open X or Bluesky. It’s individuals refusing to do what Congress was built to do: bring diverse people together to bargain out policy the country can live with.
Guida: Who are the heroes of the secret Congress?
Kosar: Certainly Representative Tom Cole, Republican of Oklahoma, and Representative Rosa DeLauro, Democrat of Connecticut. These are not household names, like the right-wing firebrand Representative Lauren Boebert of Colorado and the democratic socialist Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York. Cole and DeLauro sit atop the House Appropriations Committee. They are in charge of initiating trillions of dollars in spending legislation. They are two very different individuals with distinct views about government, and yet they quietly worked together to get pending bills to President Trump’s desk, which he signed, and these bills, I’ll add, do push back on the executive branch in various ways.
There are many others who are workhorses, not show horses. And I should add that many legislators behave as both — raging partisans on high-salience issues that get lots of media coverage and that are core to the party brand (like immigration) and professional lawmakers on boring, low-salience, wonky matters.
Thanks For All the Fish
We were honored as Alaska Teachers of the Year. Now we can no longer stay.
In 2019, after being selected as Alaska’s 2018 State Teacher of the Year, I worked with other award-winning educators to pen an op-ed: “Why teach in Alaska?” At the time, we eagerly co-signed as we believed in dedicating a career to Alaska students and that our legislators and community wanted a thriving public education system.
My answer now is a heavy “I can’t.” My wife, Catherine Walker — the 2024 Alaska Teacher of the Year and one of four National Teacher of the Year finalists — and I are leaving. When two people recognized among the most dedicated by the state itself decide they no longer see a future, the “Alaska is a great place to teach” narrative hasn’t just frayed; it has disintegrated.
Leaving Alaska isn’t a choice made lightly. It is a heartbreaking conclusion forced by two decades of witnessing leadership denigrate and undervalue the profession we love. Let’s start at the top: Gov. Mike Dunleavy is possibly the most anti-public education governor in the history of Alaska. Over eight years, he has done little to improve the educational experience of the 95% of young Alaskans coming through public schools every day. He has vetoed nearly every bill aimed at bettering public education, whether it be funding, improving the lives of public school teachers or even taking care of the one school directly in the state’s care. While he pulls a public pension from our state coffers as a public school educator, he has systematically torn down public education through administration hires, funding vetoes, rhetoric and policy changes, and has been outwardly anti-teacher with the not-so-hidden purpose of funneling public money to inequitable and unaccountable private and religious schools. [...]
The reality is that Alaska is the only state in the union that offers its teachers neither a defined-benefit pension nor Social Security. This retirement crisis is fueling the fire of our education system’s collapse. We have the worst educator turnover in the country, and it is proven that high teacher turnover directly impacts student outcomes. When a student loses a teacher midyear or when a school replaces 30% of its staff annually, the continuity of learning is shattered...
My answer now is a heavy “I can’t.” My wife, Catherine Walker — the 2024 Alaska Teacher of the Year and one of four National Teacher of the Year finalists — and I are leaving. When two people recognized among the most dedicated by the state itself decide they no longer see a future, the “Alaska is a great place to teach” narrative hasn’t just frayed; it has disintegrated.
The reality is that Alaska is the only state in the union that offers its teachers neither a defined-benefit pension nor Social Security. This retirement crisis is fueling the fire of our education system’s collapse. We have the worst educator turnover in the country, and it is proven that high teacher turnover directly impacts student outcomes. When a student loses a teacher midyear or when a school replaces 30% of its staff annually, the continuity of learning is shattered...
In Alaska, our retirement is not only the worst in the nation for teachers, it is the worst in the nation among all professionals. If any of us worked in the private sector with the educational level we have, we would have a 401(k) with an employer match. This is basically what we have with the state of Alaska. But that is where it stops. In the private sector, we would also be paying into Social Security, as would our employer. This is not an option for Alaska teachers. So we end up dead last in not only teacher retirement but retirement in general. And it is not just teachers; all public service areas, including state troopers and firefighters, are being decimated and finding it impossible to staff at the levels needed to provide a high quality of life to Alaskans.
“Alaska is open for business” seems to be a favorite refrain of those refusing to fulfill their constitutional duty to fund services while also refusing to get Alaskans’ fair share from resource extraction. The funny thing is, 49 other states are also open for business, and all 49 arguably have better environments for teachers than Alaska. Alaska is a beautiful state and was a great place for us to raise our children outside and be active. But Alaska needs to realize you can kayak and fish in plenty of other states while also being treated like a professional and earning a secure pension, in addition to having a high quality of life due to funded and respected public sector services and employees.
Cat and I didn’t want to leave. I’ve lived in Alaska since I was 2, and Cat was born here. We’ve raised two kids here and have family here. We wanted to stay and help build the world-class education system our leaders love to talk about. But you cannot have a world-class system when your leaders treat people like a disposable commodity or are actively working to destroy it.
We are the products of Alaska public schools and eagerly enrolled our kids in Anchorage public schools. All we have ever wanted, and all any of the thousands of families we have worked with over the years have ever wanted, is a robust public school experience for our children like we had growing up — one in which they have teachers who are experienced, feel supported and want to stay their entire career in one community and retire with security; schools with electives like art and music; and extracurriculars like sports, theater and clubs. Buildings that are safe and well maintained. At the same time, as community members, Alaskans deserve all public services to be well-funded and maintained and public sector workers to be compensated and taken care of after a lifetime of service to Alaskans. As adults and parents, we have been front-row witnesses to the callous degradation of the quality of life in Alaska, where corporate interests come before residents, where we choose companies over sustainability, and out-of-state workers and tourists over our children. The criminal underfunding of education may be the canary, but unless Alaskans wake up and vote to retake control from corporations and those in power who do their bidding, Alaska as so many of us have known it growing up will no longer exist.
The most maddening part is that there are solutions and other options. This is not the only way. Other resource-heavy states and countries do not have continual deficits and treat public sectors with dignity and pay and benefits requisite with their experience. This problem of billions of dollars flowing through our state but continually having fiscal problems is a uniquely Alaska experience. But when this is the case for a large chunk of someone’s lifetime, like it has been for Cat and me, you realize it is time for us to change, as it is quite possible this state never will.
There really isn’t much more to say that thousands of teachers, troopers, firefighters, families, students, business leaders and concerned community members haven’t said year after year after year about funding, retirement, rhetoric and a complete disregard for the valuable contributions of public schools, public school teachers and all public service employees.
So I’ll just end with, as Douglas Adams wrote, “Goodbye and thanks for all the fish.”
“Alaska is open for business” seems to be a favorite refrain of those refusing to fulfill their constitutional duty to fund services while also refusing to get Alaskans’ fair share from resource extraction. The funny thing is, 49 other states are also open for business, and all 49 arguably have better environments for teachers than Alaska. Alaska is a beautiful state and was a great place for us to raise our children outside and be active. But Alaska needs to realize you can kayak and fish in plenty of other states while also being treated like a professional and earning a secure pension, in addition to having a high quality of life due to funded and respected public sector services and employees.
Cat and I didn’t want to leave. I’ve lived in Alaska since I was 2, and Cat was born here. We’ve raised two kids here and have family here. We wanted to stay and help build the world-class education system our leaders love to talk about. But you cannot have a world-class system when your leaders treat people like a disposable commodity or are actively working to destroy it.
We are the products of Alaska public schools and eagerly enrolled our kids in Anchorage public schools. All we have ever wanted, and all any of the thousands of families we have worked with over the years have ever wanted, is a robust public school experience for our children like we had growing up — one in which they have teachers who are experienced, feel supported and want to stay their entire career in one community and retire with security; schools with electives like art and music; and extracurriculars like sports, theater and clubs. Buildings that are safe and well maintained. At the same time, as community members, Alaskans deserve all public services to be well-funded and maintained and public sector workers to be compensated and taken care of after a lifetime of service to Alaskans. As adults and parents, we have been front-row witnesses to the callous degradation of the quality of life in Alaska, where corporate interests come before residents, where we choose companies over sustainability, and out-of-state workers and tourists over our children. The criminal underfunding of education may be the canary, but unless Alaskans wake up and vote to retake control from corporations and those in power who do their bidding, Alaska as so many of us have known it growing up will no longer exist.
The most maddening part is that there are solutions and other options. This is not the only way. Other resource-heavy states and countries do not have continual deficits and treat public sectors with dignity and pay and benefits requisite with their experience. This problem of billions of dollars flowing through our state but continually having fiscal problems is a uniquely Alaska experience. But when this is the case for a large chunk of someone’s lifetime, like it has been for Cat and me, you realize it is time for us to change, as it is quite possible this state never will.
There really isn’t much more to say that thousands of teachers, troopers, firefighters, families, students, business leaders and concerned community members haven’t said year after year after year about funding, retirement, rhetoric and a complete disregard for the valuable contributions of public schools, public school teachers and all public service employees.
So I’ll just end with, as Douglas Adams wrote, “Goodbye and thanks for all the fish.”
by Ben Walker, Anchorage Daily News | Read more:
Image: Bill Roth
[ed. Sad. It's no surprise that Anchorage, and Alaska in general, has declined precipitously since its former glory days. Many reasons, but here are just a few: Republican skin flints who do nothing but advocate for more government spending cuts each year, along with big tax breaks for industry, and subsidies for any new harebrained, get-rich quick scheme; elimination of the state income tax; an annual Permanent Fund dividend from the state's oil royalty account that attracted a bunch of free-loaders and installed a sense of entitlement in the voting electorate. Many other examples. All that wealth down the drain, even with federal spending that, per capita, tops every other state in the country. See also: Anchorage School Board approves ‘severe’ budget with hundreds of staff layoffs and 3 school closures (ST); and, Lawmakers press for cuts to Department of Corrections spending amid big increases (ADN):] [ed. priorities]
The department’s budget is driven in part by its inflexible staffing formulas. Every correctional facility must be manned by a set number of officers and support staff, determined by the department based on the type of prison and inmates housed in each facility. On average, there are between four and five inmates for every correctional officer in the department. If there aren’t enough employees to meet the requirements, the department doesn’t simply slacken the staffing ratios. Rather, it demands that existing employees work overtime. [...]
The overtime mandates led the department last year to spend over $22 million on more than 329,000 overtime hours, the equivalent of more than 158 full-time employees. Nearly 1,700 individual employees reported working at least one hour of overtime in 2025. Of them, 179 reported at least 500 hours of overtime. Two employees reported more than 2,200 overtime hours each — meaning they worked more than the equivalent of a full-time job, on top of their full-time job.
Of its more than 2,100 funded staffing positions, more than 300 are vacant. The number of filled positions went down last year compared to the year before.
***
Though the number of inmates has remained largely stable since 2019, state spending on the Department of Corrections is up more than 54%, far outpacing inflation. The budget has grown every year since Gov. Mike Dunleavy has taken office, commanding an increasing share of annual state spending. This year’s budget request exceeds $500 million for the first time. [...]The department’s budget is driven in part by its inflexible staffing formulas. Every correctional facility must be manned by a set number of officers and support staff, determined by the department based on the type of prison and inmates housed in each facility. On average, there are between four and five inmates for every correctional officer in the department. If there aren’t enough employees to meet the requirements, the department doesn’t simply slacken the staffing ratios. Rather, it demands that existing employees work overtime. [...]
The overtime mandates led the department last year to spend over $22 million on more than 329,000 overtime hours, the equivalent of more than 158 full-time employees. Nearly 1,700 individual employees reported working at least one hour of overtime in 2025. Of them, 179 reported at least 500 hours of overtime. Two employees reported more than 2,200 overtime hours each — meaning they worked more than the equivalent of a full-time job, on top of their full-time job.
Of its more than 2,100 funded staffing positions, more than 300 are vacant. The number of filled positions went down last year compared to the year before.
Wednesday, February 25, 2026
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