[ed. See also: California Sober (feat. Willie Nelson).]
Friday, October 24, 2025
Stanley Cup Madness: The Great Silent Majority of American Basicness
I first noticed the prevalence of the Stanley Quencher H2.0 FlowState™ tumbler last April when I wrote about #WaterTok. I’m still unclear what to make of #WaterTok, but I eventually settled on the idea that it’s several subcultures overlapping — weight-loss communities, Mormons, and those people who don’t like the “taste” of water. But in the majority of the #WaterTok videos I watched, people were using Stanley’s Quencher to carry around their liquid Jolly Ranchers. And the ubiquity of the cup has sort of haunted me ever since.
I grew up in the suburbs, but I don’t live there anymore. So every time the great silent majority of American basicness summons a new totem to gather around, I can’t help but try and make sense of it. Was this a car thing? A college football tailgate thing? An EDM thing? Cruise ships? Barstool Sports was of no help here, so I filed it away until this Christmas when it exploded across the web and forced me to finally figure out what the heck was going on. And it turns out, the Stanley cup’s transformation into a must-have last year is actually, in many ways, the story of everything now.
CNBC put together a great explainer on this. Stanley, a manly hundred-year-old brand primarily aimed at hikers and blue-collar workers, was rediscovered in 2019 by the bloggers behind a women’s lifestyle and shopping site called The Buy Guide. They told CNBC that even though the Quencher model of the cup was hard to find, no other cup on the market had what they were looking for. Which is a bizarrely passionate stance to take on a water bottle, but from their post about the cup, those attributes were: “Large enough to keep up with our busy days, a handle to carry it wherever we go, dishwasher safe, fits into our car cupholders, keeps ice cold for 12+ hours, and a straw.”
The Buy Guide team then sent a Quencher to Emily Maynard Johnson from The Bachelor after she had a baby because “there is no thirst like nursing mom thirst!” Johnson posted about it on Instagram and it started to gain some traction. The Buy Guide then connected with an employee at Stanley, bought 5,000 Quenchers from the company directly, set up a Shopify site, and sold them to their readers. According to The Buy Guide, they sold out in five days. All of these things are very normal things to do when you discover a cool bottle.
After mom internet started buzzing about the tumbler — a corner of the web that is to dropshipping what dads are to Amazon original streaming shows — Stanley hired Terence Reilly, the marketer credited for reinventing Crocs. Reading between the lines of what Reilly has said about his work at Stanley, it seems like his main strategy for both Crocs and the Quencher was capitalizing on internet buzz and growing it into otaku product worship. Or as Inc. phrased it in their feature on him, he uses a “scarcity model” to whip up interest. Cut to three years later, now we’re seeing mini-riots over limited edition Stanleys at Target.
My reference point for this kind of marketing is the Myspace era of music and fashion, when record companies and stores like Hot Topic and Spencer’s Gifts were using early social media to identify niche fandoms and convert them into mainstream hits. In this allegory, Target has become the Hot Topic of white women with disposable income. And their fingerless gloves and zipper pants are fun water bottles and that one perfume everyone in Manhattan is wearing right now.
I’m always a little wary about giving someone like Reilly credit for single-handedly jumpstarting a craze like this — and I am extremely aware that he is a male executive getting credit for something that was, and still is, actually driven by women content creators — but this is the second time he’s pulled this off. Which, to me, says he’s at least semi-aware of how to pick the right fandoms. He may not be actively involved in the horse race, but he clearly has an eye for betting on them. And, yes, the Stanley craze is very real.
It’s turned into a reported $750 million in revenue for Stanley and both Google Trends and TikTok’s Creative Center show massive growth in interest around the bottle between 2019 and now. With a lot of that growth happening this year. On TikTok, the hashtag #Stanley has been viewed a billion times since 2020 and more than half of that traffic happened in the last 120 days.
And with all viral phenomenon involving things women do, there are, of course, a lot of men on sites like Reddit and X adding to the discourse about the Quenchers with posts that essentially say, “why women like cups?” And if you’re curious how that content ecosystem operates, you can check out my video about it here. But I’m, personally, more interested in what the Stanley fandom says about how short-form video is evolving.
Over the last three years, most major video sites have attempted to beat TikTok at its own game. All this has done, however, is give more places for TikToks to get posted. And so, the primarily engine of TikTok engagement — participation, rather than sharing — has spread to places like Instagram, YouTube, and X. If the 2010s were all about sharing content, it seems undeniable that the 2020s are all about making content in tandem with others. An internet-wide flashmob of Ice Bucket Challenge videos that are all, increasingly, focused on selling products. Which isn’t an accident.
TikTok has spent years trying to bring Chinese-style social e-commerce to the US. In September, the app finally launched a tool to sell products directly. If you’re curious what all this looks like when you put it together, here’s one of the most unhinged Stanley cup videos I’ve seen so far. And, yes, before you ask, there are affiliates links on the user’s Amazon page for all of these. [ed. non-downloadable - read more]
by Ryan Broderick, Garbage Day | Read more:
Image: Stanley/via
CNBC put together a great explainer on this. Stanley, a manly hundred-year-old brand primarily aimed at hikers and blue-collar workers, was rediscovered in 2019 by the bloggers behind a women’s lifestyle and shopping site called The Buy Guide. They told CNBC that even though the Quencher model of the cup was hard to find, no other cup on the market had what they were looking for. Which is a bizarrely passionate stance to take on a water bottle, but from their post about the cup, those attributes were: “Large enough to keep up with our busy days, a handle to carry it wherever we go, dishwasher safe, fits into our car cupholders, keeps ice cold for 12+ hours, and a straw.”
The Buy Guide team then sent a Quencher to Emily Maynard Johnson from The Bachelor after she had a baby because “there is no thirst like nursing mom thirst!” Johnson posted about it on Instagram and it started to gain some traction. The Buy Guide then connected with an employee at Stanley, bought 5,000 Quenchers from the company directly, set up a Shopify site, and sold them to their readers. According to The Buy Guide, they sold out in five days. All of these things are very normal things to do when you discover a cool bottle.
After mom internet started buzzing about the tumbler — a corner of the web that is to dropshipping what dads are to Amazon original streaming shows — Stanley hired Terence Reilly, the marketer credited for reinventing Crocs. Reading between the lines of what Reilly has said about his work at Stanley, it seems like his main strategy for both Crocs and the Quencher was capitalizing on internet buzz and growing it into otaku product worship. Or as Inc. phrased it in their feature on him, he uses a “scarcity model” to whip up interest. Cut to three years later, now we’re seeing mini-riots over limited edition Stanleys at Target.
My reference point for this kind of marketing is the Myspace era of music and fashion, when record companies and stores like Hot Topic and Spencer’s Gifts were using early social media to identify niche fandoms and convert them into mainstream hits. In this allegory, Target has become the Hot Topic of white women with disposable income. And their fingerless gloves and zipper pants are fun water bottles and that one perfume everyone in Manhattan is wearing right now.
I’m always a little wary about giving someone like Reilly credit for single-handedly jumpstarting a craze like this — and I am extremely aware that he is a male executive getting credit for something that was, and still is, actually driven by women content creators — but this is the second time he’s pulled this off. Which, to me, says he’s at least semi-aware of how to pick the right fandoms. He may not be actively involved in the horse race, but he clearly has an eye for betting on them. And, yes, the Stanley craze is very real.
It’s turned into a reported $750 million in revenue for Stanley and both Google Trends and TikTok’s Creative Center show massive growth in interest around the bottle between 2019 and now. With a lot of that growth happening this year. On TikTok, the hashtag #Stanley has been viewed a billion times since 2020 and more than half of that traffic happened in the last 120 days.
And with all viral phenomenon involving things women do, there are, of course, a lot of men on sites like Reddit and X adding to the discourse about the Quenchers with posts that essentially say, “why women like cups?” And if you’re curious how that content ecosystem operates, you can check out my video about it here. But I’m, personally, more interested in what the Stanley fandom says about how short-form video is evolving.
Over the last three years, most major video sites have attempted to beat TikTok at its own game. All this has done, however, is give more places for TikToks to get posted. And so, the primarily engine of TikTok engagement — participation, rather than sharing — has spread to places like Instagram, YouTube, and X. If the 2010s were all about sharing content, it seems undeniable that the 2020s are all about making content in tandem with others. An internet-wide flashmob of Ice Bucket Challenge videos that are all, increasingly, focused on selling products. Which isn’t an accident.
TikTok has spent years trying to bring Chinese-style social e-commerce to the US. In September, the app finally launched a tool to sell products directly. If you’re curious what all this looks like when you put it together, here’s one of the most unhinged Stanley cup videos I’ve seen so far. And, yes, before you ask, there are affiliates links on the user’s Amazon page for all of these. [ed. non-downloadable - read more]
by Ryan Broderick, Garbage Day | Read more:
Image: Stanley/via
[ed. Obviously old news by now (10 months!) but still something I wondered about at the time (and quickly forgot). How do these things go so viral? It'd be like L.L. Bean suddenly being on red carpets and fashion runways. There must be some hidden money-making scheme/agenda at work, right? Well, partly. See also: Dead Internet Theory (BGR).]
Silicon Valley’s Reading List Reveals Its Political Ambitions
In 2008, Paul Graham mused about the cultural differences between great US cities. Three years earlier, Graham had co-founded Y Combinator, a “startup accelerator” that would come to epitomize Silicon Valley — and would move there in 2009. But at the time Graham was based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which, as he saw it, sent a different message to its inhabitants than did Palo Alto.
Cambridge’s message was, “You should be smarter. You really should get around to reading all those books you’ve been meaning to.” Silicon Valley respected smarts, Graham wrote, but its message was different: “You should be more powerful.”
He wasn’t alone in this assessment. My late friend Aaron Swartz, a member of Y Combinator’s first class, fled San Francisco in late 2006 for several reasons. He told me later that one of them was how few people in the Bay Area seemed interested in books.
Today, however, it feels as though people there want to talk about nothing but. Tech luminaries seem to opine endlessly about books and ideas, debating the merits and defects of different flavors of rationalism, of basic economic principles and of the strengths and weaknesses of democracy and corporate rule.
This fervor has yielded a recognizable “Silicon Valley canon.” And as Elon Musk and his shock troops descend on Washington with intentions of reengineering the government, it’s worth paying attention to the books the tech world reads — as well as the ones they don’t. Viewed through the canon, DOGE’s grand effort to cut government down to size is the latest manifestation of a longstanding Silicon Valley dream: to remake politics in its image.
The Silicon Valley Canon
Last August, Tanner Greer, a conservative writer with a large Silicon Valley readership, asked on X what the contents of the “vague tech canon” might be. He’d been provoked when the writer and technologist Jasmine Sun asked why James Scott’s Seeing Like a State, an anarchist denunciation of grand structures of government, had become a “Silicon Valley bookshelf fixture.” The prompt led Patrick Collison, co-founder of Stripe and a leading thinker within Silicon Valley, to suggest a list of 43 sources, which he stressed were not those he thought “one ought to read” but those that “roughly cover[ed] the major ideas that are influential here.”
In a later response, Greer argued that the canon tied together a cohesive community, providing Silicon Valley leaders with a shared understanding of power and a definition of greatness. Greer, like Graham, spoke of the differences between cities. He described Washington, DC as an intellectually stultified warren of specialists without soul, arid technocrats who knew their own narrow area of policy but did not read outside of it. In contrast, Silicon Valley was a place of doers, who looked to books not for technical information, but for inspiration and advice. The Silicon Valley canon provided guideposts for how to change the world.
Said canon is not directly political. It includes websites, like LessWrong, the home of the rationalist movement, and Slate Star Codex/Astral Codex Ten, for members of the “grey tribe” who see themselves as neither conservative nor properly liberal. Graham’s many essays are included, as are science fiction novels like Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age. Much of the canon is business advice on topics such as how to build a startup.
But such advice can have a political edge. Peter Thiel’s Zero to One, co-authored with his former student and failed Republican Senate candidate Blake Masters, not only tells startups that they need to aspire to monopoly power or be crushed, but describes Thiel’s early ambitions (along with other members of the so-called PayPal mafia) to create a global private currency that would crush the US dollar.
Then there are the Carlylian histories of “great men” (most of the subjects and authors were male) who sought to change the world. Older biographies described men like Robert Moses and Theodore Roosevelt, with grand flaws and grander ambitions, who broke with convention and overcame opposition to remake society.
Such stories, in Greer’s description, provided Silicon Valley’s leaders and aspiring leaders with “models of honor,” and examples of “the sort of deeds that brought glory or shame to the doer simply by being done.” The newer histories both explained Silicon Valley to itself, and tacitly wove its founders and small teams into this epic history of great deeds, suggesting that modern entrepreneurs like Elon Musk — whose biography was on the list — were the latest in a grand lineage that had remade America’s role in the world.
Putting Musk alongside Teddy Roosevelt didn’t simply reinforce Silicon Valley’s own mythologized self-image as the modern center of creative destruction. It implicitly welded it to politics, contrasting the politically creative energies of the technology industry, set on remaking the world for the better, to the Washington regulators who frustrated and thwarted entrepreneurial change. Mightn’t everything be better if visionary engineers had their way, replacing all the messy, squalid compromises of politics with radical innovation and purpose-engineered efficient systems?
One book on the list argues this and more. James Davidson and William Rees-Mogg’s The Sovereign Individual cheered on the dynamic, wealth-creating individuals who would use cyberspace to exit corrupt democracies, with their “constituencies of losers,” and create their own political order. When the book, originally published in 1997, was reissued in 2020, Thiel wrote the preface.
Under this simplifying grand narrative, the federal state was at best another inefficient industry that was ripe for disruption. At worst, national government and representative democracy were impediments that needed to be swept away, as Davidson and Rees-Mogg had argued. From there, it’s only a hop, skip and a jump to even more extreme ideas that, while not formally in the canon, have come to define the tech right. (...)
We don’t know which parts of the canon Musk has read, or which ones influenced the young techies he’s hired into DOGE. But it’s not hard to imagine how his current gambit looks filtered through these ideas. From this vantage, DOGE’s grand effort to cut government down to size is the newest iteration of an epic narrative of change...
What the Silicon Valley Canon is Missing
From another perspective, hubris is about to get clobbered by nemesis. Jasmine Sun’s question about why so many people in tech read Seeing Like a State hints at the misunderstandings that trouble the Silicon Valley canon. Many tech elites read the book as a denunciation of government overreach. But Scott was an excoriating critic of the drive to efficiency that they themselves embody. (...)
Musk epitomizes that bulldozing turn of mind. Like the Renaissance engineers who wanted to raze squalid and inefficient cities to start anew, DOGE proposes to flense away the complexities of government in a leap of faith that AI will do it all better. If the engineers were not thoroughly ignorant of the structures they are demolishing, they might hesitate and lose momentum.
Seeing Like a State, properly understood, is a warning not just to bureaucrats but to social engineers writ large. From Scott’s broader perspective, AI is not a solution, but a swift way to make the problem worse. It will replace the gross simplifications of bureaucracy with incomprehensible abstractions that have been filtered through the “hidden layers” of artificial neurons that allow it to work. DOGE’s artificial-intelligence-fueled vision of government is a vision from Franz Kafka, not Friedrich Hayek.
Cambridge’s message was, “You should be smarter. You really should get around to reading all those books you’ve been meaning to.” Silicon Valley respected smarts, Graham wrote, but its message was different: “You should be more powerful.”
Today, however, it feels as though people there want to talk about nothing but. Tech luminaries seem to opine endlessly about books and ideas, debating the merits and defects of different flavors of rationalism, of basic economic principles and of the strengths and weaknesses of democracy and corporate rule.
This fervor has yielded a recognizable “Silicon Valley canon.” And as Elon Musk and his shock troops descend on Washington with intentions of reengineering the government, it’s worth paying attention to the books the tech world reads — as well as the ones they don’t. Viewed through the canon, DOGE’s grand effort to cut government down to size is the latest manifestation of a longstanding Silicon Valley dream: to remake politics in its image.
The Silicon Valley Canon
Last August, Tanner Greer, a conservative writer with a large Silicon Valley readership, asked on X what the contents of the “vague tech canon” might be. He’d been provoked when the writer and technologist Jasmine Sun asked why James Scott’s Seeing Like a State, an anarchist denunciation of grand structures of government, had become a “Silicon Valley bookshelf fixture.” The prompt led Patrick Collison, co-founder of Stripe and a leading thinker within Silicon Valley, to suggest a list of 43 sources, which he stressed were not those he thought “one ought to read” but those that “roughly cover[ed] the major ideas that are influential here.”
In a later response, Greer argued that the canon tied together a cohesive community, providing Silicon Valley leaders with a shared understanding of power and a definition of greatness. Greer, like Graham, spoke of the differences between cities. He described Washington, DC as an intellectually stultified warren of specialists without soul, arid technocrats who knew their own narrow area of policy but did not read outside of it. In contrast, Silicon Valley was a place of doers, who looked to books not for technical information, but for inspiration and advice. The Silicon Valley canon provided guideposts for how to change the world.
Said canon is not directly political. It includes websites, like LessWrong, the home of the rationalist movement, and Slate Star Codex/Astral Codex Ten, for members of the “grey tribe” who see themselves as neither conservative nor properly liberal. Graham’s many essays are included, as are science fiction novels like Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age. Much of the canon is business advice on topics such as how to build a startup.
But such advice can have a political edge. Peter Thiel’s Zero to One, co-authored with his former student and failed Republican Senate candidate Blake Masters, not only tells startups that they need to aspire to monopoly power or be crushed, but describes Thiel’s early ambitions (along with other members of the so-called PayPal mafia) to create a global private currency that would crush the US dollar.
Then there are the Carlylian histories of “great men” (most of the subjects and authors were male) who sought to change the world. Older biographies described men like Robert Moses and Theodore Roosevelt, with grand flaws and grander ambitions, who broke with convention and overcame opposition to remake society.
Such stories, in Greer’s description, provided Silicon Valley’s leaders and aspiring leaders with “models of honor,” and examples of “the sort of deeds that brought glory or shame to the doer simply by being done.” The newer histories both explained Silicon Valley to itself, and tacitly wove its founders and small teams into this epic history of great deeds, suggesting that modern entrepreneurs like Elon Musk — whose biography was on the list — were the latest in a grand lineage that had remade America’s role in the world.
Putting Musk alongside Teddy Roosevelt didn’t simply reinforce Silicon Valley’s own mythologized self-image as the modern center of creative destruction. It implicitly welded it to politics, contrasting the politically creative energies of the technology industry, set on remaking the world for the better, to the Washington regulators who frustrated and thwarted entrepreneurial change. Mightn’t everything be better if visionary engineers had their way, replacing all the messy, squalid compromises of politics with radical innovation and purpose-engineered efficient systems?
One book on the list argues this and more. James Davidson and William Rees-Mogg’s The Sovereign Individual cheered on the dynamic, wealth-creating individuals who would use cyberspace to exit corrupt democracies, with their “constituencies of losers,” and create their own political order. When the book, originally published in 1997, was reissued in 2020, Thiel wrote the preface.
Under this simplifying grand narrative, the federal state was at best another inefficient industry that was ripe for disruption. At worst, national government and representative democracy were impediments that needed to be swept away, as Davidson and Rees-Mogg had argued. From there, it’s only a hop, skip and a jump to even more extreme ideas that, while not formally in the canon, have come to define the tech right. (...)
We don’t know which parts of the canon Musk has read, or which ones influenced the young techies he’s hired into DOGE. But it’s not hard to imagine how his current gambit looks filtered through these ideas. From this vantage, DOGE’s grand effort to cut government down to size is the newest iteration of an epic narrative of change...
One DOGE recruiter framed the challenge as “a historic opportunity to build an efficient government, and to cut the federal budget by 1/3.” When a small team remakes government wholesale, the outcome will surely be simpler, cheaper and more effective. That, after all, fits with the story that Silicon Valley disruptors tell themselves.
What the Silicon Valley Canon is Missing
From another perspective, hubris is about to get clobbered by nemesis. Jasmine Sun’s question about why so many people in tech read Seeing Like a State hints at the misunderstandings that trouble the Silicon Valley canon. Many tech elites read the book as a denunciation of government overreach. But Scott was an excoriating critic of the drive to efficiency that they themselves embody. (...)
Musk epitomizes that bulldozing turn of mind. Like the Renaissance engineers who wanted to raze squalid and inefficient cities to start anew, DOGE proposes to flense away the complexities of government in a leap of faith that AI will do it all better. If the engineers were not thoroughly ignorant of the structures they are demolishing, they might hesitate and lose momentum.
Seeing Like a State, properly understood, is a warning not just to bureaucrats but to social engineers writ large. From Scott’s broader perspective, AI is not a solution, but a swift way to make the problem worse. It will replace the gross simplifications of bureaucracy with incomprehensible abstractions that have been filtered through the “hidden layers” of artificial neurons that allow it to work. DOGE’s artificial-intelligence-fueled vision of government is a vision from Franz Kafka, not Friedrich Hayek.
by Henry Farrell, Programmable Mutter | Read more:
Image: Foreshortening of a Library by Carlo Galli Bibiena
[ed. Well, we all know how that turned out: hubris did indeed get clobbered by nemesis; but also by a public that was ignored, and a petutulant narcissicist in the White House. It's been well documented how we live in a hustle culture these days - from Silicon Valley to Wall Street, Taskrabbit to Uber, Ebay to YouTube, ad infinitum. And if you fall behind... well, tough luck, your fault. Not surprisingly, the people advocating for this kind of zero sum thinking are the self-described, self-serving winners (and wannabes) profiled here. What is surprising is that they've convinced half the country that this is a good thing. Money, money, money (and power) are the only metrics worth living for. Here's a good example of where this kind of thinking leads: This may be the most bonkers tech job listing I’ve ever seen (ArsTechnica).
[ed. Well, we all know how that turned out: hubris did indeed get clobbered by nemesis; but also by a public that was ignored, and a petutulant narcissicist in the White House. It's been well documented how we live in a hustle culture these days - from Silicon Valley to Wall Street, Taskrabbit to Uber, Ebay to YouTube, ad infinitum. And if you fall behind... well, tough luck, your fault. Not surprisingly, the people advocating for this kind of zero sum thinking are the self-described, self-serving winners (and wannabes) profiled here. What is surprising is that they've convinced half the country that this is a good thing. Money, money, money (and power) are the only metrics worth living for. Here's a good example of where this kind of thinking leads: This may be the most bonkers tech job listing I’ve ever seen (ArsTechnica).
----
Here’s a job pitch you don’t see often.
What if, instead of “work-life balance,” you had no balance at all—your life was your work… and work happened seven days a week?
Did I say days? I actually meant days and nights, because the job I’m talking about wants you to know that you will also work weekends and evenings, and that “it’s ok to send messages at 3am.”
Also, I hope you aren’t some kind of pajama-wearing wuss who wants to work remotely; your butt had better be in a chair in a New York City office on Madison Avenue, where you need enough energy to “run through walls to get things done” and respond to requests “in minutes (or seconds) instead of hours.”
To sweeten this already sweet deal, the job comes with a host of intangible benefits, such as incredible colleagues. The kind of colleagues who are not afraid to be “extremely annoying if it means winning.” The kind of colleagues who will “check-in on things 10x daily” and “double (or quadruple) text if someone hasn’t responded”—and then call that person too. The kind of colleagues who have “a massive chip on the shoulder and/or a neurodivergent brain.”
That’s right, I’m talking about “A-players.” There are no “B-players” here, because we all know that B-players suck. But if, by some accident, the company does onboard someone who “isn’t an A-player,” there’s a way to fix it: “Fast firing.”
“Please be okay with this,” potential employees are told. (...)
If you live for this kind of grindcore life, you can join a firm that has “Tier 1” engineers, a “Tier 1” origin story, “Tier 1” VC investors, “Tier 1” clients, and a “Tier 1” domain name for which the CEO splashed out $12 million.
Best of all, you’ll be working for a boss who “slept through most of my classes” until he turned 18 and then “worked 100-hour weeks until I became a 100x engineer.” He also dropped out of college, failed as a “solo founder,” and has “a massive chip on my shoulder.” Now, he wants to make his firm “the greatest company of all time” and is driven to win “so bad that I’m sacrificing my life working 7 days a week for it.”
He will also “eat dog poop if it means winning”—which is a phrase you do not often see in official corporate bios. (I emailed to ask if he would actually eat dog poop if it would help his company grow. He did not reply.)
Fortunately, this opportunity to blow your one precious shot at life is at least in service of something truly important: AI-powered advertising. (Icon)
What if, instead of “work-life balance,” you had no balance at all—your life was your work… and work happened seven days a week?
Did I say days? I actually meant days and nights, because the job I’m talking about wants you to know that you will also work weekends and evenings, and that “it’s ok to send messages at 3am.”
Also, I hope you aren’t some kind of pajama-wearing wuss who wants to work remotely; your butt had better be in a chair in a New York City office on Madison Avenue, where you need enough energy to “run through walls to get things done” and respond to requests “in minutes (or seconds) instead of hours.”
To sweeten this already sweet deal, the job comes with a host of intangible benefits, such as incredible colleagues. The kind of colleagues who are not afraid to be “extremely annoying if it means winning.” The kind of colleagues who will “check-in on things 10x daily” and “double (or quadruple) text if someone hasn’t responded”—and then call that person too. The kind of colleagues who have “a massive chip on the shoulder and/or a neurodivergent brain.”
That’s right, I’m talking about “A-players.” There are no “B-players” here, because we all know that B-players suck. But if, by some accident, the company does onboard someone who “isn’t an A-player,” there’s a way to fix it: “Fast firing.”
“Please be okay with this,” potential employees are told. (...)
If you live for this kind of grindcore life, you can join a firm that has “Tier 1” engineers, a “Tier 1” origin story, “Tier 1” VC investors, “Tier 1” clients, and a “Tier 1” domain name for which the CEO splashed out $12 million.
Best of all, you’ll be working for a boss who “slept through most of my classes” until he turned 18 and then “worked 100-hour weeks until I became a 100x engineer.” He also dropped out of college, failed as a “solo founder,” and has “a massive chip on my shoulder.” Now, he wants to make his firm “the greatest company of all time” and is driven to win “so bad that I’m sacrificing my life working 7 days a week for it.”
He will also “eat dog poop if it means winning”—which is a phrase you do not often see in official corporate bios. (I emailed to ask if he would actually eat dog poop if it would help his company grow. He did not reply.)
Fortunately, this opportunity to blow your one precious shot at life is at least in service of something truly important: AI-powered advertising. (Icon)
---
[ed. See also: The China Tech Canon (Concurrent).]
Thursday, October 23, 2025
Soybean Socialism
They’re Small, Yellow and Round — and Show How Trump’s Tariffs Don’t Work
Once again, President Trump says he’s preparing an emergency bailout for struggling farmers. And once again, it’s because of an emergency he created.
China has stopped buying U.S. soybeans to protest Mr. Trump’s tariffs on imports. In response, Mr. Trump plans to send billions of dollars of tariff revenue to U.S. soybean farmers who no longer have buyers for their crops. At the same time, Argentina has taken advantage of Mr. Trump’s tariffs to sell more of its own soybeans to China — yet Mr. Trump is planning to bail out Argentina, too.
This may seem nonsensical, especially since Mr. Trump already shoveled at least $28 billion to farmers hurt by his first trade war in 2018. But it actually makes perfect sense. It’s what happens when Mr. Trump’s zero-sum philosophy of trade — which is that there are always winners and losers, and he should get to choose the winners — collides with Washington’s sycophantic approach to agriculture, which ensures that farmers always win and taxpayers always lose. In the end, Mr. Trump’s allies, including President Javier Milei of Argentina and the politically influential agricultural community, will get paid, and you will pay. (...)
In theory, Mr. Trump’s tariffs on foreign products ranging from toys to cars to furniture are supposed to encourage manufacturers to move operations from abroad to the United States. They haven’t had that effect, because the tariffs have jacked up the price of steel and other raw materials that U.S. manufacturers still need to import, triggered retaliatory tariffs from China and other countries and created a volatile trade environment that makes investing in America risky. At the same time, higher tariffs mean higher prices for U.S. consumers, even though Mr. Trump insists that only foreigners absorb the costs. (...)
Of course, farmers have been among Mr. Trump’s most loyal supporters, and these days they’re distraught that rather than make agriculture great again, the president has chased away their biggest soybean buyer. They’re especially irate that Mr. Trump pledged to rescue Argentina the same day Mr. Milei suspended its export tax on soybeans, making it more attractive for China to leave U.S. farmers in the lurch. Mr. Trump even admitted that the $20 billion Argentine bailout won’t help America much, that it’s a favor for an embattled political ally who’s “MAGA all the way.”
But American farmers were distraught about his last trade war, too, until he regained their trust with truckloads of cash. They say that this time they don’t want handouts, just open markets and a level playing field, but in the end they’ll accept the handouts while less powerful business owners victimized by tariffs will get nothing. Mr. Trump initially promised to use his tariff revenue to pay down the national debt to benefit all Americans, but he’ll take care of farmers first.
In fact, “Farmers First” is the motto of Mr. Trump’s Department of Agriculture, and the upcoming bailout won’t be even his first effort this year to redirect money from taxpayers to soybean growers. His Environmental Protection Agency has proposed to mandate two billion additional gallons of biodiesel, a huge giveaway to soy growers. His “big, beautiful bill” also included lucrative subsidies for soy-based biodiesel, which drives deforestation abroad and makes food more expensive but could provide a convenient market for unwanted grain.
Democrats have been airing ads blaming Mr. Trump’s tariffs for the pain in soybean country, and they’ve started attacking the Argentina bailout as well. But most of them aren’t complaining about his imminent farm bailout, and his recent biofuel boondoggles have bipartisan support. Mr. Trump’s incessant pandering to the farmer-industrial complex is one of the most conventional Beltway instincts he has. And it has worked for him politically; even now that crop prices are plunging and soybeans have nowhere to go, rural America remains the heart of his base.
I’ve argued that Democrats can’t out-agri-pander Mr. Trump in rural America, and now that the president has posted a meme of himself dumping on urban America, there’s never been a better time to stop trying. Mr. Trump has committed to a destructive mix of tariffs, bailouts, biofuels mandates and immigration crackdowns that will make consumers pay more for food and saddle taxpayers with more debt. It’s a bizarre combination of crony capitalism and agricultural socialism. It’s all the worst elements of big government.
But the real problem with the U.S.D.A. is that its subsidy programs redistribute well over $20 billion a year from taxpayers to predominantly well-off farmers. Many of those same farmers also benefit from subsidized and guaranteed loans with few strings attached, price supports and import quotas that boost food prices, lavish ad hoc aid packages after weather disasters and market downturns as well as mandates to spur production of unsustainable biofuels. A little reform to this kind of welfare could go a long way toward reassuring skeptics that the administration’s efficiency crusade isn’t only about defunding its opponents and enriching its supporters.
China has stopped buying U.S. soybeans to protest Mr. Trump’s tariffs on imports. In response, Mr. Trump plans to send billions of dollars of tariff revenue to U.S. soybean farmers who no longer have buyers for their crops. At the same time, Argentina has taken advantage of Mr. Trump’s tariffs to sell more of its own soybeans to China — yet Mr. Trump is planning to bail out Argentina, too.
In theory, Mr. Trump’s tariffs on foreign products ranging from toys to cars to furniture are supposed to encourage manufacturers to move operations from abroad to the United States. They haven’t had that effect, because the tariffs have jacked up the price of steel and other raw materials that U.S. manufacturers still need to import, triggered retaliatory tariffs from China and other countries and created a volatile trade environment that makes investing in America risky. At the same time, higher tariffs mean higher prices for U.S. consumers, even though Mr. Trump insists that only foreigners absorb the costs. (...)
Of course, farmers have been among Mr. Trump’s most loyal supporters, and these days they’re distraught that rather than make agriculture great again, the president has chased away their biggest soybean buyer. They’re especially irate that Mr. Trump pledged to rescue Argentina the same day Mr. Milei suspended its export tax on soybeans, making it more attractive for China to leave U.S. farmers in the lurch. Mr. Trump even admitted that the $20 billion Argentine bailout won’t help America much, that it’s a favor for an embattled political ally who’s “MAGA all the way.”
But American farmers were distraught about his last trade war, too, until he regained their trust with truckloads of cash. They say that this time they don’t want handouts, just open markets and a level playing field, but in the end they’ll accept the handouts while less powerful business owners victimized by tariffs will get nothing. Mr. Trump initially promised to use his tariff revenue to pay down the national debt to benefit all Americans, but he’ll take care of farmers first.
In fact, “Farmers First” is the motto of Mr. Trump’s Department of Agriculture, and the upcoming bailout won’t be even his first effort this year to redirect money from taxpayers to soybean growers. His Environmental Protection Agency has proposed to mandate two billion additional gallons of biodiesel, a huge giveaway to soy growers. His “big, beautiful bill” also included lucrative subsidies for soy-based biodiesel, which drives deforestation abroad and makes food more expensive but could provide a convenient market for unwanted grain.
Democrats have been airing ads blaming Mr. Trump’s tariffs for the pain in soybean country, and they’ve started attacking the Argentina bailout as well. But most of them aren’t complaining about his imminent farm bailout, and his recent biofuel boondoggles have bipartisan support. Mr. Trump’s incessant pandering to the farmer-industrial complex is one of the most conventional Beltway instincts he has. And it has worked for him politically; even now that crop prices are plunging and soybeans have nowhere to go, rural America remains the heart of his base.
I’ve argued that Democrats can’t out-agri-pander Mr. Trump in rural America, and now that the president has posted a meme of himself dumping on urban America, there’s never been a better time to stop trying. Mr. Trump has committed to a destructive mix of tariffs, bailouts, biofuels mandates and immigration crackdowns that will make consumers pay more for food and saddle taxpayers with more debt. It’s a bizarre combination of crony capitalism and agricultural socialism. It’s all the worst elements of big government.
by Michael Grunwald, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Antonio Giovanni Pinna
[ed. One of my pet peeves. Almost 40 years of subsidies, with most of the money going to Big Ag (which is busy squeezing and consolidating small farms out of sight). See also: Take a Hard Look at One Agency Truly Wasting Taxpayer Dollars (NYT):]
Image: Antonio Giovanni Pinna
[ed. One of my pet peeves. Almost 40 years of subsidies, with most of the money going to Big Ag (which is busy squeezing and consolidating small farms out of sight). See also: Take a Hard Look at One Agency Truly Wasting Taxpayer Dollars (NYT):]
There’s one bloated federal government agency that routinely hands out money to millionaires, billionaires, insurance companies and even members of Congress. The handouts are supposed to be a safety net for certain rural business owners during tough years, but thousands of them have received the safety-net payments for 39 consecutive years...
Even though only 1 percent of Americans farm, the U.S.D.A. employs five times as many people as the Environmental Protection Agency and occupies nearly four times as many offices as the Social Security Administration. (...)
But the real problem with the U.S.D.A. is that its subsidy programs redistribute well over $20 billion a year from taxpayers to predominantly well-off farmers. Many of those same farmers also benefit from subsidized and guaranteed loans with few strings attached, price supports and import quotas that boost food prices, lavish ad hoc aid packages after weather disasters and market downturns as well as mandates to spur production of unsustainable biofuels. A little reform to this kind of welfare could go a long way toward reassuring skeptics that the administration’s efficiency crusade isn’t only about defunding its opponents and enriching its supporters.
Six-Seven
It originated in a rap song, then featured in South Park, and is now the bane of schoolteachers in the US and UK as pupils shout it out at random. How did it become such a thing?
What does six-seven signify? You know, just six-seven. Six-sevvuhnn!
Is it a code? No, it’s six-seven!
Name: Six-seven.
Age: Less than a year old.
Appearance: Everywhere.
Age: Less than a year old.
Appearance: Everywhere.
Is it a code? No, it’s six-seven!
Is it a cool way to say someone is at sixes and sevens, ie in a state of disorder or confusion? It is definitely not that.
Then what does it mean? It’s just something the young people of today are saying. Or shouting.
You mean it’s fashionable to yell out two consecutive numbers? It’s more than fashionable – it’s a plague. Six-seven has become the bane of school teachers everywhere.
Why? Because it’s maddening. Imagine telling your students to turn to page 67, only for all of them to shout “six-seven!” at you.
No, I mean why are the children doing that? Even they don’t know why.
It must come from somewhere. Yes, but I should preface any explanation by saying: it’s a long story and it doesn’t matter.
I’ll be the judge of that. Fine. The phrase “six-seven”, in its modern sense, appears to originate with the Philadelphia rapper Skrilla’s 2024 track Doot Doot (6 7), in which it’s either a reference to police radio code, or 67th Street, or something else.
I see. But it really went viral when the song was repeatedly used to soundtrack video clips of the NBA basketball star LaMelo Ball, who is, as it happens, 6ft 7in.
OK, I think I get it. Trust me, you don’t. Somewhere along the line the phrase acquired an accompanying hand gesture: two upturned palms alternately rising and falling, like weighing scales.
You mean it’s fashionable to yell out two consecutive numbers? It’s more than fashionable – it’s a plague. Six-seven has become the bane of school teachers everywhere.
Why? Because it’s maddening. Imagine telling your students to turn to page 67, only for all of them to shout “six-seven!” at you.
No, I mean why are the children doing that? Even they don’t know why.
It must come from somewhere. Yes, but I should preface any explanation by saying: it’s a long story and it doesn’t matter.
I’ll be the judge of that. Fine. The phrase “six-seven”, in its modern sense, appears to originate with the Philadelphia rapper Skrilla’s 2024 track Doot Doot (6 7), in which it’s either a reference to police radio code, or 67th Street, or something else.
I see. But it really went viral when the song was repeatedly used to soundtrack video clips of the NBA basketball star LaMelo Ball, who is, as it happens, 6ft 7in.
OK, I think I get it. Trust me, you don’t. Somewhere along the line the phrase acquired an accompanying hand gesture: two upturned palms alternately rising and falling, like weighing scales.
In that case, perhaps it’s a reference to something being nothing special, ie a six or a seven on a scale from one to 10? Nice try, but no. The phrase has become such a phenomenon in the US that it was the basis for last week’s South Park episode, in which it sparks a moral panic.
And it’s now reached the classrooms of the UK? Apparently it has. Thus ends the story of six-seven.
You were right. That was long, and it didn’t matter. Not in the least. It’s a bit of meme slang that refers only to itself, advertising nothing beyond the average 13-year-old’s capacity for being annoying and a corresponding willingness to flog a dead horse.
What can be done about it? Some teachers have banned it, but others have incorporated six-seven into their teaching.
I suppose it will be over soon enough. Adults are talking about it, so it already is.
And it’s now reached the classrooms of the UK? Apparently it has. Thus ends the story of six-seven.
You were right. That was long, and it didn’t matter. Not in the least. It’s a bit of meme slang that refers only to itself, advertising nothing beyond the average 13-year-old’s capacity for being annoying and a corresponding willingness to flog a dead horse.
What can be done about it? Some teachers have banned it, but others have incorporated six-seven into their teaching.
I suppose it will be over soon enough. Adults are talking about it, so it already is.
by Pass Notes, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Alarmy
[ed. I tested it out on my grandkids yesterday (ages 7 and 9) and they were both well aware of it, but as a 'thing', thought it was kind of lame already. But! As one commenter noted, if you multiply six and seven you get 42 - “the Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything” in Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. So there's that.]
Quantum Leap
Designed to accelerate advances in medicine and other fields, the tech giant’s quantum algorithm runs 13,000 times as fast as software written for a traditional supercomputer.
Michel H. Devoret was one of three physicists who won this year’s Nobel Prize in Physics for a series of experiments they conducted more than four decades ago.
As a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, in the mid-1980s, Dr. Devoret helped show that the strange and powerful properties of quantum mechanics — the physics of the subatomic realm — could also be observed in electrical circuits large enough to be seen with the naked eye.
That discovery, which paved the way for cellphones and fiber-optic cables, may have greater implications in the coming years as researchers build quantum computers that could be vastly more powerful than today’s computing systems. That could lead to the discovery of new medicines and vaccines, as well as cracking the encryption techniques that guard the world’s secrets.
On Wednesday, Dr. Devoret and his colleagues at a Google lab near Santa Barbara, Calif., said their quantum computer had successfully run a new algorithm capable of accelerating advances in drug discovery, the design of new building materials and other fields.
Leveraging the counterintuitive powers of quantum mechanics, Google’s machine ran this algorithm 13,000 times as fast as a top supercomputer executing similar code in the realm of classical physics, according to a paper written by the Google researchers in the scientific journal Nature. (...)
Michel H. Devoret was one of three physicists who won this year’s Nobel Prize in Physics for a series of experiments they conducted more than four decades ago.
As a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, in the mid-1980s, Dr. Devoret helped show that the strange and powerful properties of quantum mechanics — the physics of the subatomic realm — could also be observed in electrical circuits large enough to be seen with the naked eye.
On Wednesday, Dr. Devoret and his colleagues at a Google lab near Santa Barbara, Calif., said their quantum computer had successfully run a new algorithm capable of accelerating advances in drug discovery, the design of new building materials and other fields.
Leveraging the counterintuitive powers of quantum mechanics, Google’s machine ran this algorithm 13,000 times as fast as a top supercomputer executing similar code in the realm of classical physics, according to a paper written by the Google researchers in the scientific journal Nature. (...)
Inside a classical computer like a laptop or a smartphone, silicon chips store numbers as “bits” of information. Each bit holds either a 1 or a 0. The chips then perform calculations by manipulating these bits — adding them, multiplying them and so on.
A quantum computer, by contrast, performs calculations in ways that defy common sense.
According to the laws of quantum mechanics — the physics of very small things — a single object can behave like two separate objects at the same time. By exploiting this strange phenomenon, scientists can build quantum bits, or “qubits,” that hold a combination of 1 and 0 at the same time.
This means that as the number of qubits grows, a quantum computer becomes exponentially more powerful. (...)
Google announced last year that it had built a quantum computer that needed less than five minutes to perform a particularly complex mathematical calculation in a test designed to gauge the progress of the technology. One of the world’s most powerful non-quantum supercomputers would not have been able to complete it in 10 septillion years, a length of time that exceeds the age of the known universe by billions of trillions of years.
A quantum computer, by contrast, performs calculations in ways that defy common sense.
According to the laws of quantum mechanics — the physics of very small things — a single object can behave like two separate objects at the same time. By exploiting this strange phenomenon, scientists can build quantum bits, or “qubits,” that hold a combination of 1 and 0 at the same time.
This means that as the number of qubits grows, a quantum computer becomes exponentially more powerful. (...)
Google announced last year that it had built a quantum computer that needed less than five minutes to perform a particularly complex mathematical calculation in a test designed to gauge the progress of the technology. One of the world’s most powerful non-quantum supercomputers would not have been able to complete it in 10 septillion years, a length of time that exceeds the age of the known universe by billions of trillions of years.
by Cade Metz, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Adam Amengual
Wednesday, October 22, 2025
Norman Greenbaum
Norman Greenbaum, singer, guitarist, songwriter
Soon after that, I was playing the Troubadour club in LA when the Lovin’ Spoonful’s producer Erik Jacobsen walked in. He said he had a production deal with Warner Brothers and was interested in signing me. When we recorded Spirit in the Sky for my debut album, the finished mix sent shivers up my spine. Initially, Warner said a four-minute single containing lyrics about Jesus would never get played on pop radio, but eventually they relented. In 1969, it sold two million copies. But I couldn’t recreate the success.
In 1986, I was working as a cook when Dr and the Medics took it back to No 1 in the UK. Then Gareth Gates’s 2003 version meant it was No 1 in three different decades. It’s been in countless movies, including Apollo 13, Oceans 11 and Guardians of the Galaxy. I’m 82. A few years ago, I was a passenger in a car crash and spent three weeks in a coma. I feel like I was granted another life. So now every day, I pray and give thanks to the spirit in the sky.
Erik Jacobsen, producer
I saw Norman at a hootenanny at the Troubadour singing one song, School for Sweet Talk, but he said: “I’ve got a million songs I’d love to play for ya.” It turned out he’d had a minor hit called The Eggplant That Ate Chicago with a group called Dr West’s Medicine Show and Junk Band and had a whole raft of crazy songs about goats, chickens or a Chinese guy who ate some acid. I said: “Let’s make some records that somebody might like.”
I put him together with Norman Mayell, the drummer from San Francisco psychedelic group Sopwith Camel, and Doug Killmer, a bassist, who’d played a lot of black music. The Spirit in the Sky riff originated in an old John Lee Hooker tune called Boogie Chillen’ and set the tone for where the song went, but the rhythm track sounded too loose. I got Norman to bring his acoustic guitar in and we recorded two performances – each slightly different – and made it stereo. Then we brought in gospel singers the Stovall Singers and their church-type clapping became a key part of the groove. A guitarist called Russell DaShiell played a hell of a solo. By now, the track was sounding immense, but when I heard Norman’s little vocal, my heart sank. It just wasn’t heavy enough, so once again I recorded two performances and combined the two together. I thought: “Thank God!” It sounded amazing. (...)
The funny thing is that when we went in to record it, my engineer was sick but we went ahead anyway with just a handful of little mics, no headphones and no sound baffling. Every sound was coming in on every mic, but it sounded great. For years people asked: “How in the world did you get that sound?” I said: “I just pointed the amps right at the drums. I had no idea what I was doing.”
[ed. I think Norman (Iron Butterfly and Jimi) did more to invent the term "heavy" back in the late-60s than anybody else - along with this new thing called a fuzz box. See also: The Uncool by Cameron Crowe - Inside Rock's Wildest Decade (Guardian).]
Spirit in the Sky started as an old blues riff I’d been playing since my college days in Boston, but I didn’t know what to do with it. After I moved to LA, a guy I knew came up with a way of putting a fuzzbox inside my Fender Telecaster, which created the distinctive sound on Spirit in the Sky.
I’d come across a greeting card with a picture of some Native Americans praying to the “spirit in the sky”. The phrase stuck in my head. One night I was watching country music on TV and the singer Porter Wagoner sang a gospel song, which gave me the idea to write religious lyrics. Although I came from a semi-religious Jewish family, I wasn’t religious, but found myself writing Christian lyrics such as “When I die and they lay me to rest, I’m going to the place that’s the best” and “Gotta have a friend in Jesus”. It came together very quickly. I survived a car crash and now give thanks to the spirit every day
I’d come across a greeting card with a picture of some Native Americans praying to the “spirit in the sky”. The phrase stuck in my head. One night I was watching country music on TV and the singer Porter Wagoner sang a gospel song, which gave me the idea to write religious lyrics. Although I came from a semi-religious Jewish family, I wasn’t religious, but found myself writing Christian lyrics such as “When I die and they lay me to rest, I’m going to the place that’s the best” and “Gotta have a friend in Jesus”. It came together very quickly. I survived a car crash and now give thanks to the spirit every day
In 1986, I was working as a cook when Dr and the Medics took it back to No 1 in the UK. Then Gareth Gates’s 2003 version meant it was No 1 in three different decades. It’s been in countless movies, including Apollo 13, Oceans 11 and Guardians of the Galaxy. I’m 82. A few years ago, I was a passenger in a car crash and spent three weeks in a coma. I feel like I was granted another life. So now every day, I pray and give thanks to the spirit in the sky.
Erik Jacobsen, producer
I saw Norman at a hootenanny at the Troubadour singing one song, School for Sweet Talk, but he said: “I’ve got a million songs I’d love to play for ya.” It turned out he’d had a minor hit called The Eggplant That Ate Chicago with a group called Dr West’s Medicine Show and Junk Band and had a whole raft of crazy songs about goats, chickens or a Chinese guy who ate some acid. I said: “Let’s make some records that somebody might like.”
I put him together with Norman Mayell, the drummer from San Francisco psychedelic group Sopwith Camel, and Doug Killmer, a bassist, who’d played a lot of black music. The Spirit in the Sky riff originated in an old John Lee Hooker tune called Boogie Chillen’ and set the tone for where the song went, but the rhythm track sounded too loose. I got Norman to bring his acoustic guitar in and we recorded two performances – each slightly different – and made it stereo. Then we brought in gospel singers the Stovall Singers and their church-type clapping became a key part of the groove. A guitarist called Russell DaShiell played a hell of a solo. By now, the track was sounding immense, but when I heard Norman’s little vocal, my heart sank. It just wasn’t heavy enough, so once again I recorded two performances and combined the two together. I thought: “Thank God!” It sounded amazing. (...)
The funny thing is that when we went in to record it, my engineer was sick but we went ahead anyway with just a handful of little mics, no headphones and no sound baffling. Every sound was coming in on every mic, but it sounded great. For years people asked: “How in the world did you get that sound?” I said: “I just pointed the amps right at the drums. I had no idea what I was doing.”
by Dave Simpson, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Henry Diltz/Corbis/Getty Images[ed. I think Norman (Iron Butterfly and Jimi) did more to invent the term "heavy" back in the late-60s than anybody else - along with this new thing called a fuzz box. See also: The Uncool by Cameron Crowe - Inside Rock's Wildest Decade (Guardian).]
Tuesday, October 21, 2025
The Shadow President
On the afternoon of Feb. 12, Russell Vought, the director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, summoned a small group of career staffers to the Eisenhower Executive Office Building for a meeting about foreign aid. A storm had dumped nearly 6 inches of snow on Washington, D.C. The rest of the federal government was running on a two-hour delay, but Vought had offered his team no such reprieve. As they filed into a second-floor conference room decorated with photos of past OMB directors, Vought took his seat at the center of a worn wooden table and laid his briefing materials out before him.
Vought, a bookish technocrat with an encyclopedic knowledge of the inner workings of the U.S. government, cuts an unusual figure in Trump’s inner circle of Fox News hosts and right-wing influencers. He speaks in a flat, nasally monotone and, with his tortoiseshell glasses, standard-issue blue suits and corona of close-cropped hair, most resembles what he claims to despise: a federal bureaucrat. The Office of Management and Budget, like Vought himself, is little known outside the Beltway and poorly understood even among political insiders. What it lacks in cachet, however, it makes up for in the vast influence it wields across the government. Samuel Bagenstos, an OMB general counsel during the Biden administration, told me, “Every goddam thing in the executive branch goes through OMB.”
The OMB reviews all significant regulations proposed by individual agencies. It vets executive orders before the president signs them. It issues workforce policies for more than 2 million federal employees. Most notably, every penny appropriated by Congress is dispensed by the OMB, making the agency a potential choke point in a federal bureaucracy that currently spends about $7 trillion a year. Shalanda Young, Vought’s predecessor, told me, “If you’re OK with your name not being in the spotlight and just getting stuff done,” then directing the OMB “can be one of the most powerful jobs in D.C.”
During Donald Trump’s first term, Vought (whose name is pronounced “vote”) did more than perhaps anyone else to turn the president’s demands and personal grievances into government action. In 2019, after Congress refused to fund Trump’s border wall, Vought, then the acting director of the OMB, redirected billions of dollars in Department of Defense money to build it. Later that year, after the Trump White House pressured Ukraine’s government to investigate Joe Biden, who was running for president, Vought froze $214 million in security assistance for Ukraine. “The president loved Russ because he could count on him,” Mark Paoletta, who has served as the OMB general counsel in both Trump administrations, said at a conservative policy summit in 2022, according to a recording I obtained. “He wasn’t a showboat, and he was committed to doing what the president wanted to do.”
After the pro-Trump riots at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, many Republicans, including top administration officials, disavowed the president. Vought remained loyal. He echoed Trump’s baseless claims about election fraud and publicly defended people who were arrested for their participation in the melee. During the Biden years, Vought labored to translate the lessons of Trump’s tumultuous first term into a more effective second presidency. He chaired the transition portion of Project 2025, a joint effort by a coalition of conservative groups to develop a road map for the next Republican administration, helping to draft some 350 executive orders, regulations and other plans to more fully empower the president. “Despite his best thinking and the aggressive things they tried in Trump One, nothing really stuck,” a former OMB branch chief who served under Vought during the first Trump administration told me. “Most administrations don’t get a four-year pause or have the chance to think about ‘Why isn’t this working?’” The former branch chief added, “Now he gets to come back and steamroll everyone.”
At the meeting in February, according to people familiar with the events, Vought’s directive was simple: slash foreign assistance to the greatest extent possible. The U.S. government shouldn’t support overseas anti-malaria initiatives, he argued, because buying mosquito nets doesn’t make Americans safer or more prosperous. He questioned why the U.S. funded an international vaccine alliance, given the anti-vaccine views of Trump’s nominee for secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. The conversation turned to the United States Institute of Peace, a government-funded nonprofit created under Ronald Reagan, which worked to prevent conflicts overseas; Vought asked what options existed to eliminate it. When he was told that the USIP was funded by Congress and legally independent, he replied, “We’ll see what we can do.” (A few days later, Trump signed an executive order that directed the OMB to dismantle the organization.)
The OMB staffers had tried to anticipate Vought’s desired outcome for more than $7 billion that the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development spent each year on humanitarian assistance, including disaster relief and support for refugees and conflict victims. During the campaign, Trump had vowed to defund agencies that give money to people “who have no respect for us at all,” and Project 2025 had accused USAID of pursuing a “divisive political and cultural agenda.” The staffers proposed a cut of 50%.
Vought was unsatisfied. What would be the consequences, he asked, of a much larger reduction? A career official answered: Less humanitarian aid would mean more people would die. “You could say that about any of these cuts,” Vought replied. A person familiar with the meeting described his reaction as “blasé.” Vought reiterated that he wanted spending on foreign aid to be as close to zero as possible, on the fastest timeline possible. Several analysts left the meeting rattled. Word of what had happened spread quickly among the OMB staff. Another person familiar with the meeting later told me, “It was the day that broke me.”
What Vought has done in the nine months since Trump took office goes much further than slashing foreign aid. Relying on an expansive theory of presidential power and a willingness to test the rule of law, he has frozen vast sums of federal spending, terminated tens of thousands of federal workers and, in a few cases, brought entire agencies to a standstill. In early October, after Senate Democrats refused to vote for a budget resolution without additional health care protections, effectively shutting down the government, Vought became the face of the White House’s response. On the second day of the closure, Trump shared an AI-generated video that depicted his budget director — who, by then, had threatened mass firings across the federal workforce and paused or canceled $26 billion in funding for infrastructure and clean-energy projects in blue states — as the Grim Reaper of Washington, D.C. “We work for the president of the United States,” a senior agency official who regularly deals with the OMB told me. But right now “it feels like we work for Russ Vought. He has centralized decision-making power to an extent that he is the commander in chief.”
[ed. It wasn't as if Republicans in Congress had any illusions about Vought and his agenda when they confirmed him for the OMB job. Except one: miscalculating how quickly they'd become roadkill themselves. See also: What You Should Know About Russ Vought, Trump’s Shadow President.]
Vought, a bookish technocrat with an encyclopedic knowledge of the inner workings of the U.S. government, cuts an unusual figure in Trump’s inner circle of Fox News hosts and right-wing influencers. He speaks in a flat, nasally monotone and, with his tortoiseshell glasses, standard-issue blue suits and corona of close-cropped hair, most resembles what he claims to despise: a federal bureaucrat. The Office of Management and Budget, like Vought himself, is little known outside the Beltway and poorly understood even among political insiders. What it lacks in cachet, however, it makes up for in the vast influence it wields across the government. Samuel Bagenstos, an OMB general counsel during the Biden administration, told me, “Every goddam thing in the executive branch goes through OMB.”
During Donald Trump’s first term, Vought (whose name is pronounced “vote”) did more than perhaps anyone else to turn the president’s demands and personal grievances into government action. In 2019, after Congress refused to fund Trump’s border wall, Vought, then the acting director of the OMB, redirected billions of dollars in Department of Defense money to build it. Later that year, after the Trump White House pressured Ukraine’s government to investigate Joe Biden, who was running for president, Vought froze $214 million in security assistance for Ukraine. “The president loved Russ because he could count on him,” Mark Paoletta, who has served as the OMB general counsel in both Trump administrations, said at a conservative policy summit in 2022, according to a recording I obtained. “He wasn’t a showboat, and he was committed to doing what the president wanted to do.”
After the pro-Trump riots at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, many Republicans, including top administration officials, disavowed the president. Vought remained loyal. He echoed Trump’s baseless claims about election fraud and publicly defended people who were arrested for their participation in the melee. During the Biden years, Vought labored to translate the lessons of Trump’s tumultuous first term into a more effective second presidency. He chaired the transition portion of Project 2025, a joint effort by a coalition of conservative groups to develop a road map for the next Republican administration, helping to draft some 350 executive orders, regulations and other plans to more fully empower the president. “Despite his best thinking and the aggressive things they tried in Trump One, nothing really stuck,” a former OMB branch chief who served under Vought during the first Trump administration told me. “Most administrations don’t get a four-year pause or have the chance to think about ‘Why isn’t this working?’” The former branch chief added, “Now he gets to come back and steamroll everyone.”
At the meeting in February, according to people familiar with the events, Vought’s directive was simple: slash foreign assistance to the greatest extent possible. The U.S. government shouldn’t support overseas anti-malaria initiatives, he argued, because buying mosquito nets doesn’t make Americans safer or more prosperous. He questioned why the U.S. funded an international vaccine alliance, given the anti-vaccine views of Trump’s nominee for secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. The conversation turned to the United States Institute of Peace, a government-funded nonprofit created under Ronald Reagan, which worked to prevent conflicts overseas; Vought asked what options existed to eliminate it. When he was told that the USIP was funded by Congress and legally independent, he replied, “We’ll see what we can do.” (A few days later, Trump signed an executive order that directed the OMB to dismantle the organization.)
The OMB staffers had tried to anticipate Vought’s desired outcome for more than $7 billion that the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development spent each year on humanitarian assistance, including disaster relief and support for refugees and conflict victims. During the campaign, Trump had vowed to defund agencies that give money to people “who have no respect for us at all,” and Project 2025 had accused USAID of pursuing a “divisive political and cultural agenda.” The staffers proposed a cut of 50%.
Vought was unsatisfied. What would be the consequences, he asked, of a much larger reduction? A career official answered: Less humanitarian aid would mean more people would die. “You could say that about any of these cuts,” Vought replied. A person familiar with the meeting described his reaction as “blasé.” Vought reiterated that he wanted spending on foreign aid to be as close to zero as possible, on the fastest timeline possible. Several analysts left the meeting rattled. Word of what had happened spread quickly among the OMB staff. Another person familiar with the meeting later told me, “It was the day that broke me.”
What Vought has done in the nine months since Trump took office goes much further than slashing foreign aid. Relying on an expansive theory of presidential power and a willingness to test the rule of law, he has frozen vast sums of federal spending, terminated tens of thousands of federal workers and, in a few cases, brought entire agencies to a standstill. In early October, after Senate Democrats refused to vote for a budget resolution without additional health care protections, effectively shutting down the government, Vought became the face of the White House’s response. On the second day of the closure, Trump shared an AI-generated video that depicted his budget director — who, by then, had threatened mass firings across the federal workforce and paused or canceled $26 billion in funding for infrastructure and clean-energy projects in blue states — as the Grim Reaper of Washington, D.C. “We work for the president of the United States,” a senior agency official who regularly deals with the OMB told me. But right now “it feels like we work for Russ Vought. He has centralized decision-making power to an extent that he is the commander in chief.”
by Andy Kroll, Pro Publica | Read more:
Image: Evan Vucci/AP[ed. It wasn't as if Republicans in Congress had any illusions about Vought and his agenda when they confirmed him for the OMB job. Except one: miscalculating how quickly they'd become roadkill themselves. See also: What You Should Know About Russ Vought, Trump’s Shadow President.]
China Has Overtaken America
In retrospect those fears were overblown. When Communism fell, we learned that the Soviet economy was far less advanced than many had believed. Still, the effects of the “Sputnik moment” were salutary: America poured resources into science and higher education, helping to lay the foundations for enduring leadership.
Today American leadership is once again being challenged by an authoritarian regime. And in terms of economic might, China is a much more serious rival than the Soviet Union ever was. Some readers were skeptical when I pointed out Monday that China’s economy is, in real terms, already substantially larger than ours. The truth is that GDP at purchasing power parity is a very useful measure, but if it seems too technical, how about just looking at electricity generation, which is strongly correlated with economic development? As the chart at the top of this post shows, China now generates well over twice as much electricity as we do.
Yet, rather than having another Sputnik moment, we are now trapped in a reverse Sputnik moment. Rather than acknowledging that the US is in danger of being permanently overtaken by China’s technological and economic prowess, the Trump administration is slashing support for scientific research and attacking education. In the name of defeating the bogeymen of “wokeness” and the “deep state”, this administration is actively opposing progress in critical sectors while giving grifters like the crypto industry everything that they want.
The most obvious example of Trump’s war on a critical sector, and the most consequential for the next decade, is his vendetta against renewable energy. Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill rolled back Biden’s tax incentives for renewable energy. The administration is currently trying to kill a huge, nearly completed offshore wind farm that could power hundreds of thousands of homes, as well as cancel $7 billion in grants for residential solar panels. It appears to have succeeded in killing a huge solar energy project that would have powered almost 2 million homes. It has canceled $8 billion in clean energy grants, mostly in Democratic states, and is reportedly planning to cancel tens of billions more. (...)
In his rambling speech at the United Nations, Donald Trump insisted that China isn’t making use of wind power: “They use coal, they use gas, they use almost anything, but they don’t like wind.” I don’t know where Trump gets his misinformation — maybe the same sources telling him that Portland is in flames. But here’s the reality:
Chris Wright, Trump’s energy secretary, says that solar power is unreliable: “You have to have power when the sun goes behind a cloud and when the sun sets, which it does almost every night.” So the energy secretary of the most technologically advanced nation on earth is unaware of the energy revolution being propelled by dramatic technological progress in batteries. And the revolution is happening now in the U.S., in places like California. Here’s what electricity supply looked like during an average day in California back in June:
Special interests and Trump’s pettiness aside, my sense is that there’s something more visceral going on. A powerful faction in America has become deeply hostile to science and to expertise in general. As evidence, consider the extraordinary collapse in Republican support for higher education over the past decade:
Yet the truth is that hostility to science and expertise have always been part of the American tradition. Remember your history lesson on the Scopes Monkey Trial? It took a Supreme Court ruling, as recently as 2007, to stop politicians from forcing public schools to teach creationism. And with the current Supreme Court, who can be sure creationism won’t return?
Anti-scientism is a widespread attitude on the religious right, which forms a key component of MAGA. In past decades, however, the forces of humanism and scientific inquiry were able to prevail against anti-scientism. In part this was due to the recognition that American science was essential for national security as well as national prosperity. But now we have an administration that claims to be protecting national security by imposing tariffs on kitchen cabinets and bathroom vanities, while gutting the CDC and the EPA.
Does this mean that the U.S. is losing the race with China for global leadership? No, I think that race is essentially over. Even if Trump and his team of saboteurs lose power in 2028, everything I see says that by then America will have fallen so far behind that it’s unlikely that we will ever catch up.
Anti-scientism is a widespread attitude on the religious right, which forms a key component of MAGA. In past decades, however, the forces of humanism and scientific inquiry were able to prevail against anti-scientism. In part this was due to the recognition that American science was essential for national security as well as national prosperity. But now we have an administration that claims to be protecting national security by imposing tariffs on kitchen cabinets and bathroom vanities, while gutting the CDC and the EPA.
Does this mean that the U.S. is losing the race with China for global leadership? No, I think that race is essentially over. Even if Trump and his team of saboteurs lose power in 2028, everything I see says that by then America will have fallen so far behind that it’s unlikely that we will ever catch up.
by Paul Krugman | Read more:
Images: OurWorldInData/FT
[ed. See also: Losing Touch With Reality; Civil Resistance Confronts the Autocracy; and, An Autocracy of Dunces (Krugman).]
Microplastics Are Everywhere
You can do one simple thing to avoid them.
If you are concerned about microplastics, the world starts to look like a minefield. The tiny particles can slough off polyester clothing and swirl around in the air inside your home; they can scrape off of food packaging into your take-out food.
But as scientists zero in on the sources of microplastics — and how they get into human bodies — one factor stands out.
Microplastics, studies increasingly show, are released from exposure to heat.
“Heat probably plays the most crucial role in generating these micro- and nanoplastics,” said Kazi Albab Hussain, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln.
Pour coffee into a plastic foam cup, and pieces of the cup will leach out into the coffee itself. Brew tea, and millions of microplastics and even tinier nanoplastics will spill from the tea bag into your cup. Wash your polyester clothing on high heat, and the textiles can start to break apart, sending microplastics spinning through the water supply.
In one recent study by researchers at the University of Birmingham in England, scientists analyzed 31 beverages for sale on the British market — from fruit juices and sodas to coffee and tea. They looked at particles bigger than 10 micrometers in diameter, or roughly one-fifth the width of a human hair. While all the drinks had at least a dozen microplastic particles in them on average, by far the highest numbers were in hot drinks. Hot tea, for example, had an average of 60 particles per liter, while iced tea had 31 particles. Hot coffee had 43 particles per liter, while iced coffee had closer to 37.
These particles, according to Mohamed Abdallah, a professor of geography and emerging contaminants at the university and one of the authors of the study, are coming from a range of sources — the plastic lid on a to-go cup of coffee, the small bits of plastic lining a tea bag. But when hot water is added to the mix, the rate of microplastic release increases.
“Heat makes it easier for microplastics to leach out from packaging materials,” Abdallah said.
The effect was even stronger in plastics that are older and degraded. Hot coffee prepared in an eight-year-old home coffee machine with plastic components had twice as many microplastics as coffee prepared in a machine that was only six months old.
Other research has found the same results with even smaller nanoplastics, defined as plastic particles less than one micrometer in diameter.
Scientists at the University of Nebraska, including Hussain, analyzed small plastic jars and tubs used for storing baby food and found that the containers could release more than 2 billion nanoplastics per square centimeter when heated in the microwave — significantly more than when stored at room temperature or in a refrigerator.
The same effect has been shown in studies looking at how laundry produces microplastics: Higher washing temperatures, scientists have found, lead to more tiny plastics released from synthetic clothing.
Heat, Hussain explained, is simply bad for plastic, especially plastic used to store food and drinks.
by Shannon Osaka, Washington Post | Read more:
But as scientists zero in on the sources of microplastics — and how they get into human bodies — one factor stands out.
Microplastics, studies increasingly show, are released from exposure to heat.
Pour coffee into a plastic foam cup, and pieces of the cup will leach out into the coffee itself. Brew tea, and millions of microplastics and even tinier nanoplastics will spill from the tea bag into your cup. Wash your polyester clothing on high heat, and the textiles can start to break apart, sending microplastics spinning through the water supply.
In one recent study by researchers at the University of Birmingham in England, scientists analyzed 31 beverages for sale on the British market — from fruit juices and sodas to coffee and tea. They looked at particles bigger than 10 micrometers in diameter, or roughly one-fifth the width of a human hair. While all the drinks had at least a dozen microplastic particles in them on average, by far the highest numbers were in hot drinks. Hot tea, for example, had an average of 60 particles per liter, while iced tea had 31 particles. Hot coffee had 43 particles per liter, while iced coffee had closer to 37.
These particles, according to Mohamed Abdallah, a professor of geography and emerging contaminants at the university and one of the authors of the study, are coming from a range of sources — the plastic lid on a to-go cup of coffee, the small bits of plastic lining a tea bag. But when hot water is added to the mix, the rate of microplastic release increases.
“Heat makes it easier for microplastics to leach out from packaging materials,” Abdallah said.
The effect was even stronger in plastics that are older and degraded. Hot coffee prepared in an eight-year-old home coffee machine with plastic components had twice as many microplastics as coffee prepared in a machine that was only six months old.
Other research has found the same results with even smaller nanoplastics, defined as plastic particles less than one micrometer in diameter.
Scientists at the University of Nebraska, including Hussain, analyzed small plastic jars and tubs used for storing baby food and found that the containers could release more than 2 billion nanoplastics per square centimeter when heated in the microwave — significantly more than when stored at room temperature or in a refrigerator.
The same effect has been shown in studies looking at how laundry produces microplastics: Higher washing temperatures, scientists have found, lead to more tiny plastics released from synthetic clothing.
Heat, Hussain explained, is simply bad for plastic, especially plastic used to store food and drinks.
by Shannon Osaka, Washington Post | Read more:
Image: Yaroslav Litun/iStock
Monday, October 20, 2025
The Team That Makes Mariners Games More Fun
Inside the Mariners control room at T-Mobile Park on Friday afternoon, more than a dozen staff members operating cameras, video screens and soundboards were united by a single mission: Craft a unique, rallying gameday experience with the M’s backed against a wall.
The Mariners and their fans needed a comeback. After losing Games 3 and 4 of the American League Championship Series in Seattle this week, the chance to clinch a first-ever World Series berth at T-Mobile Park had slipped away. Now, headed into Game 5 against the Toronto Blue Jays, the control room was preparing for the last guaranteed baseball game in the Emerald City this season.
(The ALCS heads back to Ontario to finish out the series on Sunday for Game 6 and Monday for a winner-take-all Game 7, if necessary.) [ed. Necessary. Tonight's the night!]
[ed. See also: Words (and Stats) Struggle to Capture Shohei Ohtani’s GOAT Game (Ringer).]
For one night, we marveled anew at perhaps the most impressive player in baseball history, as he produced perhaps the most impressive postseason game in baseball history. And for one night, Ohtani seemed less like a means to the Dodgers’ success than the Dodgers seemed like a means to Ohtani’s.
The Mariners and their fans needed a comeback. After losing Games 3 and 4 of the American League Championship Series in Seattle this week, the chance to clinch a first-ever World Series berth at T-Mobile Park had slipped away. Now, headed into Game 5 against the Toronto Blue Jays, the control room was preparing for the last guaranteed baseball game in the Emerald City this season.
So how do you get a sellout crowd of M’s fans onto their feet and cheering like there’s no tomorrow? And how do you keep folks excited and smiling for nine innings (or more) when the games can be so stressful that smartwatches send out cardio warnings?
“Ultimately it’s just knowing the fans, knowing the team and knowing your content,” said Nicholas Sybouts, coordinator of game entertainment for the Mariners.
Three hours before first pitch on Friday, Sybouts and Tyler Thompson, the Mariners’ director of game entertainment and experiential marketing, were poring over a thick stack of papers that detailed the schedule for the game. Not the baseball itself, mind you. Each minute of the game off the field is carefully orchestrated, from the ceremonial first pitch to the team’s famous salmon run and late-game rally videos.
Thompson said well-timed rally videos — featuring everything from breathing exercises to sea shanties and the fan-favorite Windows desktop crash screen — have been winning strategies for reviving the crowd this season at T-Mobile Park. A good idea can come from anywhere, Sybouts said. He and Thompson create a storyboard for each video before sending it to a team of motion graphic animators to bring the idea to life.
The team creates so many ideas, in fact, that they have filled up an entire binder that’s divided into subgroups that reflect the tone of the game.
“You don’t want to play a cute otter video when the team is down,” Sybouts said.
Half of the entries are highlighted green, which means they were added for the postseason. Control room operators Edward Cunningham and Zachary McHugh are in charge of queuing up each video onto the ballpark’s enormous video board.
“We’ve been rolling out some new ones,” Cunningham said. One of them, dubbed the “horror rally,” quotes a sound bite from the Texas Rangers broadcast booth, which called T-Mobile Park “a nightmare” for opposing teams.
Running the scoreboard is no walk in the park. The team reacts in real time and efficiently communicates with each other to line up videos that fit the tone of any given moment in a game.
“In baseball, anything can happen,” Cunningham said. “So, it kind of keeps us on our toes a lot.”
Throughout a season, about 2.5 million fans come through the ballpark, Sybouts said. Being able to serve sold-out crowds during the postseason has been special, said Sybouts, who was born in Yakima and is a lifelong Mariners fan.
“People are doing so much to be here,” he said. “They’re finding tickets, they’re taking time off work. So many people’s lives are invested in Mariners baseball right now, and it means the world that we could help create unforgettable experiences for them.”
by Nicole Pasia, Seattle Times | Read more:
Images: Ivy Ceballo
“Ultimately it’s just knowing the fans, knowing the team and knowing your content,” said Nicholas Sybouts, coordinator of game entertainment for the Mariners.
Three hours before first pitch on Friday, Sybouts and Tyler Thompson, the Mariners’ director of game entertainment and experiential marketing, were poring over a thick stack of papers that detailed the schedule for the game. Not the baseball itself, mind you. Each minute of the game off the field is carefully orchestrated, from the ceremonial first pitch to the team’s famous salmon run and late-game rally videos.
Thompson said well-timed rally videos — featuring everything from breathing exercises to sea shanties and the fan-favorite Windows desktop crash screen — have been winning strategies for reviving the crowd this season at T-Mobile Park. A good idea can come from anywhere, Sybouts said. He and Thompson create a storyboard for each video before sending it to a team of motion graphic animators to bring the idea to life.
The team creates so many ideas, in fact, that they have filled up an entire binder that’s divided into subgroups that reflect the tone of the game.
“You don’t want to play a cute otter video when the team is down,” Sybouts said.
Half of the entries are highlighted green, which means they were added for the postseason. Control room operators Edward Cunningham and Zachary McHugh are in charge of queuing up each video onto the ballpark’s enormous video board.
“We’ve been rolling out some new ones,” Cunningham said. One of them, dubbed the “horror rally,” quotes a sound bite from the Texas Rangers broadcast booth, which called T-Mobile Park “a nightmare” for opposing teams.
Running the scoreboard is no walk in the park. The team reacts in real time and efficiently communicates with each other to line up videos that fit the tone of any given moment in a game.
“In baseball, anything can happen,” Cunningham said. “So, it kind of keeps us on our toes a lot.”
Throughout a season, about 2.5 million fans come through the ballpark, Sybouts said. Being able to serve sold-out crowds during the postseason has been special, said Sybouts, who was born in Yakima and is a lifelong Mariners fan.
“People are doing so much to be here,” he said. “They’re finding tickets, they’re taking time off work. So many people’s lives are invested in Mariners baseball right now, and it means the world that we could help create unforgettable experiences for them.”
by Nicole Pasia, Seattle Times | Read more:
Images: Ivy Ceballo
[ed. Historic night tonight. Go Ms! Update: Not to be, unfortunately... oh well, still a great, great season, just two runs short. Toronto now gets to face this guy: Shohei Ohtani just played the greatest game in baseball history (WSJ):]
This is Beethoven at a piano. This is Shakespeare with a quill. This is Michael Jordan in the Finals. This is Tiger Woods in Sunday red.
This is too good to be true with no reason to doubt it. This is the beginning of every baseball conversation and the end of the debate: Shohei Ohtani is the best baseball player who has ever played the game, the most talented hitter and pitcher of an era in which data and nutrition have made an everyman’s sport a game for superhumans. And Friday night, when he helped his Los Angeles Dodgers win the pennant with a 5-1 victory over the Milwaukee Brewers in Game 4 of the National League Championship Series, was his Mona Lisa.
This is Beethoven at a piano. This is Shakespeare with a quill. This is Michael Jordan in the Finals. This is Tiger Woods in Sunday red.
This is too good to be true with no reason to doubt it. This is the beginning of every baseball conversation and the end of the debate: Shohei Ohtani is the best baseball player who has ever played the game, the most talented hitter and pitcher of an era in which data and nutrition have made an everyman’s sport a game for superhumans. And Friday night, when he helped his Los Angeles Dodgers win the pennant with a 5-1 victory over the Milwaukee Brewers in Game 4 of the National League Championship Series, was his Mona Lisa.
[ed. See also: Words (and Stats) Struggle to Capture Shohei Ohtani’s GOAT Game (Ringer).]
For one night, we marveled anew at perhaps the most impressive player in baseball history, as he produced perhaps the most impressive postseason game in baseball history. And for one night, Ohtani seemed less like a means to the Dodgers’ success than the Dodgers seemed like a means to Ohtani’s.
My Last Day as an Accomplice of the Republican Party
Since Donald Trump descended that golden escalator in 2015, the Republican party has devolved into a cult of personality that mirrors the worst authoritarian regimes of the last one hundred years.
For ten years, the GOP has waged an unrelenting war on our civic institutions, the separation of powers, the foundation of the rule of law, and the very nature of truth itself. While Trump and his supporters in Congress have been the driving force behind the right’s descent into despotism, it would not have been possible without the thousands of consultants, aides, and politicos working behind the scenes to fully execute their systematic dismantling of American democratic norms.
That’s why I’m publishing this letter today.
For over twelve years, I worked inside the Republican ecosystem, helping the party advance its goals in several fields, ranging from grassroots voter outreach to digital fundraising. I worked inside GOP circles through Trump’s takeover of the party, his initial downfall, and his resurgence in 2023–2024. At every step along the way, I rationalized, compartmentalized, and found excuses to stay tethered to the party, even as I grew to believe it was undermining the foundations of our constitutional republic. But over the last few months, the compartmentalization and coping stopped working to silence my conscience.
And now, after more than a decade, I have decided I have finally had enough.
I quit. I quit the Republican party and my job as an accomplice to the party in the throes of an authoritarian cult. Today, I resigned from my career as a senior fundraising strategist for one of the leading Republican digital fundraising firms in Washington, D.C.
I’m not the first to take this path. A lot of ink has been spilled by former Republican politicians and staffers about why they left the Republican party. Tim Miller’s Why We Did It provides a valuable perspective from the vantage point of a political strategist at the Senate and presidential level. My journey has been through the lower tiers of the Republican party, in state-level campaigns and as a mid-level manager in a GOP-affiliated consulting firm. Mine wasn’t as high a vantage point. But when it comes to understanding the MAGA takeover, it was no less critical. It was at this level that I saw firsthand how Trumpism, as both a cultural and political force, took hold at the grassroots level, driving local politicians to make the thousands of decisions and compromises that in turn enabled Trump and GOP leadership to wedge the MAGA movement even deeper into American life.
Don’t get me wrong: My ego is not so large that I believe I played a significant role in putting Trump into office. What I mean is that it took the collective action of thousands of people in similar positions, working nine-to-five jobs, figuring out how they were going to pay for their kid’s daycare or fund their retirement, to get us where we are today. I was a part of that—until I decided I could no longer be.
My goal in quitting the party and writing this piece is twofold: first, to shed light on why someone would continue to work for an increasingly corrupt and authoritarian political party despite their divergent ethical and political beliefs; second, to convince any number of consultants, staffers, and former colleagues to follow their consciences and leave with their integrity still intact.
To do that, I should start by explaining how I arrived at working for the Republican party.
[ed. Probably relevant for others in similar positions unless they figure out how to make serious amends (and a living going forward). They've cast their lots with MAGA, Trump, far-right Nazis, and every other wingnut group in this toxic coalition. Now they have no where else to go outside of the Republican ecosystem. Their words and actions will follow them forever (especially with women who might otherwise have given them a chance). Personally, I'd like to see a Lysistrata rebellion.]
For ten years, the GOP has waged an unrelenting war on our civic institutions, the separation of powers, the foundation of the rule of law, and the very nature of truth itself. While Trump and his supporters in Congress have been the driving force behind the right’s descent into despotism, it would not have been possible without the thousands of consultants, aides, and politicos working behind the scenes to fully execute their systematic dismantling of American democratic norms.
That’s why I’m publishing this letter today.
And now, after more than a decade, I have decided I have finally had enough.
I quit. I quit the Republican party and my job as an accomplice to the party in the throes of an authoritarian cult. Today, I resigned from my career as a senior fundraising strategist for one of the leading Republican digital fundraising firms in Washington, D.C.
I’m not the first to take this path. A lot of ink has been spilled by former Republican politicians and staffers about why they left the Republican party. Tim Miller’s Why We Did It provides a valuable perspective from the vantage point of a political strategist at the Senate and presidential level. My journey has been through the lower tiers of the Republican party, in state-level campaigns and as a mid-level manager in a GOP-affiliated consulting firm. Mine wasn’t as high a vantage point. But when it comes to understanding the MAGA takeover, it was no less critical. It was at this level that I saw firsthand how Trumpism, as both a cultural and political force, took hold at the grassroots level, driving local politicians to make the thousands of decisions and compromises that in turn enabled Trump and GOP leadership to wedge the MAGA movement even deeper into American life.
Don’t get me wrong: My ego is not so large that I believe I played a significant role in putting Trump into office. What I mean is that it took the collective action of thousands of people in similar positions, working nine-to-five jobs, figuring out how they were going to pay for their kid’s daycare or fund their retirement, to get us where we are today. I was a part of that—until I decided I could no longer be.
My goal in quitting the party and writing this piece is twofold: first, to shed light on why someone would continue to work for an increasingly corrupt and authoritarian political party despite their divergent ethical and political beliefs; second, to convince any number of consultants, staffers, and former colleagues to follow their consciences and leave with their integrity still intact.
To do that, I should start by explaining how I arrived at working for the Republican party.
by Miles Bruner, The Bulwark | Read more:
Image: Carl Maynar
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