Monday, November 17, 2025

Trump Folds

I don’t know what’s in the Epstein Files, or whether anyone will suffer politically outside of the de-Duked Andrew, but I guess we’re finally going to find out.

The opposition to Trump’s stonewalling led by the remarkably transformed Margery Taylor Greene looks to have prevailed in this matter.

But watch out Venezuela. Nothing tempts a would-be-king more than a foreign conquest when things start going badly at home.

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Sunday, November 16, 2025

The Base Cracks

Late Saturday night, I discovered that country singer Zach Bryan has a new song called “No Kings” in circulation and it is exactly what its title indicates it would be — a repudiation of Trump and his authoritarian moves.

Bryan, you might recall, generated controversy recently with another song called “Bad News,” That one criticized ICE raids, and drew a shocked and confused reaction from Trump’s MAGA base.

I could be wrong about this, but the decision by young progressive country music stars like Bryan and Kacey Musgravesto speak out against Trump is an indication that all is not well in MAGA-land.

And that brings us to Marjorie Taylor Greene. Her split with Trump over health insurance and inflation has now widened to include the Epstein Files.

Unlike Trump’s break-up with Elon Musk earlier this year, the Greene rebellion may be opening a politically significant division between Trump’s billionaire class friends and those struggling to keep up with the rising costs of housing, groceries, health care and raising children.

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Saturday, November 15, 2025

Weir(d) News

Parkinson’s disease is linked to vivid, frequent, and often distressing dreams, a condition known as REM Behavior Disorder (RBD), where people physically act out their dreams. This occurs because the normal paralysis that accompanies REM sleep is impaired in people with Parkinson’s. Medications can sometimes worsen these symptoms, but the disease process itself is a major factor. — Google

***

Okay here goes. I had another weirdly vivid dream last night, the most recent in a long string of such dreams, but this one was a happy one. It started out with the arrival of two young women who were to sleep next to me in my room.

Don’t get too excited, this dream was strictly platonic.

And the origin of this part of the dream is clear. Just before going to bed last night, I watched the charming 2018 TV film, No Sleep ‘Til Christmas, starring Odette Annable.

These young women, who in my dream were sparkly, figured later on in the story. First we woke up and got ready for work. I took them with me to a large office downtown with hundreds of people, few of whom I knew but all of whom seemed to know me.

It was a media company, not unlike The Morning Show on Apple TV, but more like two places I actually worked, Excite@Home and Wired News. For some reason the girls had to sit under desks at the front of the office, so I left them there and went to the back, where my group sat.

When I located my cubicle, there was no chair and no phone. Somehow I knew my super power was speaking loudly, which in the dream I proceeded to do.

Soon, a guy appeared, carrying a large office chair upside down on his head. Someone else brought a phone in his pocket.

I looked around at my employees and saw they were all young men who simply didn’t know what to do; some had clearly been playing video games but the others seemed earnest but clueless.

So I began speaking loudly again and like magic stuff started to happen. Stories materialized, good stories. A guy with a list showed up. I pronounced that henceforth we would be producing one big weird story each day and that again, henceforth, we would be rebranding ourselves as Weird News.

I also said we would be diversifying. This is where the two young women I’d been sleeping next to came back into play. I thought about how to introduce them to my all-male news team.

I couldn’t say “These are my girls,” because that made it seem like they were my daughters. I couldn’t say “These are my women,” because first off they weren’t mine and secondly, that might make me sound like a sick Jeffrey-Epstein-type character.

Then I remembered that the young women sparkled, so I announced “I’m bringing some Sparkles into the newsroom!

Everyone cheered and we rebranded ourselves Sparkle News. And with that, I woke up.

Though somewhat exhausted from expending so much effort in my dream, I also was happy that it had been so much better a dream than the night before.

In that dream, I’d been responsible for a six-month-old baby and I was carrying it on a bus when it suddenly disappeared. I looked everywhere in all the nooks and crannies of the city but no luck. It was a missing persons case so I used my investigative skills to trace the baby back to the bus, to the back of the bus specifically and a group of women from Central America.

Once I realized this I ran and ran but by the time I got to the back of the bus, they’d all been deported.

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Friday, November 14, 2025

Surviving This


Statisticians often use the term “return to the mean” to describe how extreme outcomes are likely to be followed by more typical ones over time. 

The phrase pops up in sports when a baseball player who normally hits 15 home runs a season suddenly explodes for 40 one year before returning to his usual level the following season.

You’ll also encounter the phrase in discussions about the weather or the stock market but less often when it comes to politics.

That’s why it caught my attention during a recent webinar when Patrick Ball, Director of Research for the Human Rights Data Analysis Group (HRDAG) used the concept in regards to the rise of authoritarianism in countries with a background of democracy and democratic values.

He said that such societies tend to turn away from authoritarian leaders ultimately and return to their democratic roots.

Ball knows what he is talking about. He’s been closely analyzing the human rights abuses in societies around the world for 35 years. He and his fellow data scientists at HRDAG are currently focusing on such abuses here in the U.S.

The group recently issued a public statement, “In the Face of Tyranny: Taking a Stand as Data Scientists.”

Ball’s analysis gave me something rare these days — a sense of hope that we, as Americans, will get through this dark period in our political history one way or another.

And hope is what we need.

Note: You can check out HRDAG’s “Structural Zero” here on Substack. Working with HRDAG these past few years has been especially rewarding.

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Thursday, November 13, 2025

The Last Penny

The very last penny was minted Wednesday in Philadelphia and the U.S. Treasury declared the coin dead.

Pennies lasted for 232 years, and many of them had stories, told and untold. What follows is one penny’s story from an essay I first published in 2007.

The other day I found a penny. It had been sitting on the sidewalk near my house for a few days. Many people had passed it by but none had thought it worth their time to pick it up.

I did. It was marked with the date 1971.

***

1971 — What a year that was! I returned from the Peace Corps in Afghanistan, only later to quit my job as a pizza deliveryman for Cottage Inn Pizza in Ann Arbor and drive an old white Chevy van with “Ft. Myers, Fla.” stenciled on the side all the way across America.

Exiting the freeway in San Francisco, we chugged up Fell Street, turned right onto Fillmore Street, and drove until just before Pine Street, arriving at our destination: the world headquarters of Running Dog Inc., publisher of the forthcoming SunDance magazine.

The building was nestled into a space next to a blues club called Minnie’s Can-Do.

We were a very small start-up team and before we could publish the new magazine, we had to build out the office by sheet-rocking the walls, painting them, refinishing and shellacking the floor.

As a flourish of sorts, we sealed a penny into that newly shiny hardwood just before we finished preparing the space that would see an amazing menagerie of the famous (John Lennon, Yoko Ono, Jerry Rubin, etc.) and the crazy (too many to list) and the talented (everybody) walk through its front door over the next two years.

The experience of helping produce that magazine helped shape my career, leading directly to Rolling Stone, the Center for Investigative Reporting and all the rest.

***

Many years later, when SunDance was a distant memory, I happened to be back in what was by then known as the Upper Fillmore District. There were no blues clubs left in the area but plenty of upscale shops. After a brief search, I located the building at 1913 and stepped inside for the first time since the magazine had died three decades earlier.


The space was now a boutique and my hair was now gray. I feigned interest in the women’s clothes on the racks. What I was actually seeking was pretty vague — some wisp or ghost of a memory, something that would confirm what had once happened here. The sheetrock had long since been dismantled, the walls had been repainted many times, and the track lighting overhead was a major upgrade from our day. All the evidence of our time there seemed to have vanished.

I suddenly felt very old, maybe for the first time. It was disorienting. But then, near the back of the store, I spotted something that stopped me dead in my tracks. There was the penny we’d imbedded in the hardwood floor, still frozen in time with its date, 1971. It hadn’t aged a bit.

Think about it. Every coin has its story but very few get told.

This one’s did.

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Wednesday, November 12, 2025

On Leadership



“The strength of a society is measured not by the wealth of its most affluent members, but by how well its most vulnerable citizens are able to cope.” — Sanna Marin

When at the age of 34 Sanna Marin became prime minister of Finland in 2019, she was the youngest person to ever head up the government of a major country.

Once in office, she showed great skill in managing a five-party coalition and leading Finland’s strong opposition to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine; also, in managing the Covid-19 pandemic and leading Finland into NATO — a move of historical significance. 

She also implemented reforms addressing climate change, social justice and equality. Within the European Union she emerged as a strong pro-democracy, anti-authoritarian voice.

Yet critics dogged her during her entire time in office. 

There were a series of “scandals” involving her, including looking too good in a photo shoot for a fashion magazine, going out with celebrities during the Covid-19 pandemic, and in the one that went viral globally — dancing wildly at a party with friends. 

Her main crime, it seemed, was being young and female. After three-and-a-half years in office, she resigned in 2023.

Now she has a frank new memoir, Hope in Action: A Memoir About the Courage to Lead. Rather than becoming embittered by her experience as prime minister, she seems to have become more determined than ever to speak out on the need for more women in leadership positions. In recent interviews, she comes off as one of the more inspiring political figures in Europe today. 

And I suspect that the world might be a better and happier place if we had more people like her in leadership positions around the world. 

HEADLINES:

  • How women feel about Trump’s presidency (WP)

  • Finland’s former prime minister Sanna Marin has a new memoir (LeMonde)

  • The Prime Minister Who Tried to Have a Life Outside the Office (New Yorker)

  • Sanna Marin - Finland’s Former PM Shares Leadership Lessons in “Hope in Action” (The Daily Show)

  • How Pete Hegseth Is Forcing Women Out of Active Military Duty (TNR)

  • House Democrats release new Epstein emails referencing Trump (ABC)

  • Trump Loyalists Push ‘Grand Conspiracy’ as New Subpoenas Land (NYT)

  • Speaker Johnson shuttered the House and amassed quiet power with Trump (AP)

  • Trump floats tariff ‘dividends’ even while plan shows major flaws (NPR)

  • How the Supreme Court Exposed the Most Obvious Hidden Truth About Trump’s Tariffs (Slate)

  • Flight disruptions will persist even after shutdown ends, airlines warn (WP)

  • Why the Democrats Finally Folded (Atlantic)

  • A Utah judge rejected a new congressional map drawn by Republican lawmakers, adopting an alternate proposal creating a Democrat-leaning district ahead of the 2026 midterm elections. The ruling throws a curveball for the GOP in a state where the party expected a clean sweep. [AP]

  • What happened to turn Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) from one of Congress’ looniest firebrands into one of the few willing to stand up to her own party? Nobody knows, including President Donald Trump, by his own admission. [HuffPost]

  • A suicide bomber killed at least 12 people and wounded 27 outside a court building in Pakistan’s capital Islamabad, Interior Minister Mohsin Naqvi said.The attack took place hours after a suicide bomber killed three people and militants stormed a military school in the country’s northwest. (Reuters)

  • Pakistan says ‘India proxies’ behind Islamabad bombing: What we know so far (Al Jazeera)

  • A de facto partition of Gaza between an area controlled by Israel and another ruled by Hamas is increasingly likely, multiple sources said, with efforts to advance Trump’s plan to end the war beyond a ceasefire faltering. (Reuters)

  • A human-rights researcher on why she pushed back when China bullied her university (Economist)

  • The Hidden Math of Ocean Waves (Wired)

  • Has the Media Reached the End of Its DEI Era? (CJR)

  • Why the BBC Is Facing Its Gravest Crisis in Decades (NYT)

  • Google, the sleeping AI giant, awakens (Axios)

  • AI adoption in US adds ~900,000 tons of CO₂ annually, study finds (TechXplore)

  • ChatGPT violated copyright law by ‘learning’ from song lyrics, German court rules (Guardian)

  • It’s Not Just An AI Bubble. Here’s Everything At Risk (Forbes)

  • ‘The global data centre and AI build-out will be an extraordinary and sustained capital markets event’ (FT)

  • Woman Trying To Find Nonpolitical Way To Say Her Cleaner Was Deported (Onion)

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Tuesday, November 11, 2025

Friends of the People


Trump has long been fond of inciting his base against the news media. He called us “enemies of the people” in his first term. These days, he just dismisses any story he doesn’t like as “fake news.”

I’ve been a journalist for a long time; it will be 60 years this coming January. These days most of my colleagues from the 1970s and I are somewhat limited in what we can do by age, health and retirement.

But we can still exercise our rights under the First Amendment. So we will.

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