Friday, January 30, 2026

Dry Run(s)

(I wrote the following a year ago today. Since then, there have been multiple dry runs.)

1/30/25

One of the ways to interpret the Trump administration’s flurry of early moves is that they are part of a dry run, a test of how much chaos each pronouncement causes.

Yesterday’s sudden announcement rescinding the previous day’s freeze on all federal aid payments is a case in point. Since there was a great deal of chaos, the White House backed down — for now.

But in so doing the Trump team gained some valuable intel about how easily they can freak out the population, elected officials and the media. So now they can file those insights away for use at a future time when the specific goal may be to deliberately create chaos as part of a larger strategy involving the centralization of executive power.

Trump is set on gaining absolute power. He doesn’t care how much fear and panic his moves cause others, in fact he intends to use that fear and panic in his drive to establish himself as an autocrat. To quote Joe Biden, this is not hyperbole.

If I am reading Trump’s behavior correctly, and I believe I am, we are witnessing a dry run for how to suspend the constitution during an upcoming, unspecified national “emergency.” Trump is probing for weak spots in the government bureaucracy and testing the various levers at his disposal to see which option will best help accomplish his ultimate objective.

So that’s why it is my opinion that what we’ve seen to date is a dry run.

***

To develop an effective strategy to counteract Trump’s drive for absolute power, pro-democracy Americans need to get out in front of the firestorms he is constantly creating that are diverting public attention from his ultimate goal.

The difficulty of fighting multiple wildfires simultaneously is indeed an appropriate metaphor for what faces Democrats or anyone else in the opposition at the moment. As we saw in L.A. recently, officials could not make much progress toward containment until they could establish burn lines at the perimeters of the multiple fires and pull together huge amounts of resources from all over the place to finish the job.

What complicates this metaphor when we apply it to Trump is that he is the one setting the fires.

HEADLINES:

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Thursday, January 29, 2026

Caffeinated

There is so much we cannot control in these times that our only sensible choice is to continue (or reinstate) the small daily rituals that bring us comfort. One of these for me is drinking coffee. On certain days, I grind whole beans, filtering the grounds, and drinking the coffee black.

As I do so, I remember passing the piles of coffee beans on the side of the road in Central America and Southeast Asia. At the time I traveled there, I was gathering follow-on research from Circle of Poison, the book I wrote with Mark Schapiro.

Part of that research indicated an ugly fact: The pesticides we were researching could work their way systemically inside the coffee plant and end up as deposits in the beans -- the two flat sides of each pair nestled like a peanut inside the purplish-reddish shell.

None of the scientists we interviewed believed the tiny residues that ended up in our cups, after shelling, grinding, filtering and boiling, represented a significant health threat to coffee drinkers.

So, almost counter-intuitively, I found myself arguing in media interviews that there was no danger from drinking coffee. In fact, it had never been my intention to focus on American consumer safety. My motivation was to highlight the dangers to Third World farmworkers who sprayed those pesticides on the coffee plantations.

As a former Peace Corps Volunteer, and a journalistic world traveler, I'd seen many examples of these dangers, including from overhead crop dusters. On several occasions I was coated by clouds of pesticides like paraquat and malathion while doing my research; in fact I was hit by malathion so often I knew its smell.

But the unwanted chemical showers I received was nothing of consequence when stacked against the daily experience of farmworkers and their children. I was a visitor who could choose to be there and get sprayed or not.

They did not have that choice.

Over the years, there has been some progress around the world in curtailing the use of dangerous pesticides, but the syndrome we wrote about remains.

So it goes. Now I am resuming my coffee ritual, As the coffee tastes good but the memories are bittersweet.

(I first published a version of this during the pandemic.)

HEADLINES:

  • After town hall attack, Ilhan Omar condemns ‘terrorizing’ immigration push and criticism from GOP (CNN)

  • Two agents who shot Minnesota man on leave as Trump says he will ‘de-escalate’ (Guardian)

  • Greg Bovino, CPB commander who led immigration crackdown in Minneapolis, is set to leave city. Who is he, and what led to his departure? (Yahoo)

  • 2nd Amendment backlash follows portrayal of Alex Pretti by some Trump administration officials (ABC)

  • Trump tells Minneapolis mayor he’s ‘playing with fire’ if federal immigration law isn’t enforced (CNN)

  • Republicans turn on Noem, demand resignation (Axios)

  • How a low-profile Border Patrol chief became the face of Trump’s immigration policy (WP)

  • The Cruel Conditions of ICE’s Mojave Desert Detention Center (New Yorker)

  • US Fed holds interest rates despite White House pressure (BBC)

  • F.B.I. Search in Georgia Tied to Criminal Investigation Over 2020 Election (NYT)

  • Repeated government lying, warned Hannah Arendt, makes it impossible for citizens to think and to judge (The Conversation)

  • What Should Americans Do Now? (Atlantic)

  • Trump warns Iran ‘time is running out’ for nuclear deal as US military builds up in Gulf (BBC)

  • Rubio defends Trump on Venezuela while trying to allay fears about Greenland and NATO (AP)

  • Ease of Destruction (Atlantic)

  • Amazon says it is laying off 16,000 employees (TechCrunch)

  • UPS Says It Is Cutting Up to 30,000 Jobs (NYT)

  • America is leaving the WHO. It’s an act of self-sabotage. (WP)

  • HHS Wasn’t Worried About South Carolina’s Measles Outbreak. It’s Now Enormous. (Mother Jones)

  • Parkinson’s disease symptoms can show up decades before a diagnosis. (WP)

  • The WaPo Extinction Event (Puck)

  • Astronomers used AI to find 1,400 ‘anomalous objects’ from Hubble archives (Verge)

  • Replacing Factory Workers With AI Robots May Not be Cost Effective (ET)

  • The Math on AI Agents Doesn’t Add Up (Wired)

  • Clawdbot has officially changed its name for very predictable reasons (Mashable)

  • What Went Wrong With OpenAI’s Year of Agents? (The Information)

  • ICE Agent Stuffs Sock Under Mask To Give Himself Chin (Onion)

 

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Wednesday, January 28, 2026

Encounter(s)

The headlines these days are dominated by encounters, many of them unwanted, violent and deadly. While most of us watch them on screens, as opposed to in person, they still apparently provoke a similar physiological effect as they would if we were there at the scene. 

As a result, there are those who believe we are suffering from a “national trauma,” and they may be right. Not to avoid that ugly reality, but perhaps seeking a way to cope with it, I’m seeking other types of encounters these days of a more nourishing variety.

***

Yearning for balance as well as a respite from the news and the sheer weight of it all, I find comfort in walking outside, connecting with friends and gardening. Also, by reading books and long feature articles in the New Yorker.

But lately, even those options haven’t done the trick. Being retired and having too much time on my hands, I’ve somewhat guiltily turned to bingeing on melodramatic series on Netflix, like “The Diplomat,” “Virgin Spring,” and, most recently, the 2018 Korean romantic drama, “Encounter.”

I realize this may not be a genre that appeals to everybody, but what is compelling to me about “Encounter” is the sincerity and the excruciatingly slow pace of the developing love affair between a divorced hotel magnate (Song Hye-kyo) and her much younger colleague (Park Bo-gum). The characters first encounter one another by chance as strangers in a foreign land (Cuba).

In real life, Song is 12 years older than Park, but in appearance, at least by Western standards, they both could be teenagers who would probably get carded at a bar. Song has long been considered one of the most beautiful women in Korea and Park has a boyish beauty to complement hers.

Ignore the schmaltz and the soft but melodramatic soundtrack and some things lost in translation. Because both actors are superb, especially Song, whose character is layered with complexity. The pace at which the two of them get together may be glacial by Western standards, but the key to this story’s appeal is that we share this extended state of anticipation. And of course, anticipation of the romantic kind is one the most powerful emotional states we will ever experience in real life, so there’s that.

I’m guessing that the same experts I mentioned above would say that we may undergo a similar physiological response when watching such an encounter as if we were experiencing it ourselves.

In any case, even though it was vicariously, I found myself hanging on every twist and turn during this particular Encounter.

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Tuesday, January 27, 2026

The Stories to Come

One chilly morning a friend picked me up and we made our way into the city to an office where I used to work, just a couple blocks from a house where I used to live.

And although I may have felt a touch of nostalgia, this trip was not about the past but the future. Our purpose was to meet with a small group of young people just launching their new careers as journalists.

As is expected from an old guy, I told a few war stories, but we focused much more on their stories, especially the ones yet to be written. In this meeting, we were joined by other veterans of the news business, citing experiences from between ten and twenty years each.

I hesitated to bring up that I broke into journalism 60 years ago this month, so as not to appear to give my length of time more weight than it deserves.

After all, regardless of how long you do this, or how many thousands of stories you write, your entire career may well boil down to a few moments and a set of circumstances beyond your control.

And it’s how you apply the knowledge you gain from those few moments that can make all the difference.

HEADLINES:

 

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Monday, January 26, 2026

Turning Point

The confrontation between state officials and the Trump administration has reached the breaking point. The two sides have put forth two opposing narratives of what happened last week when ICE agents surrounded, pushed to the ground, disarmed and then executed Alex Pretti.

The video evidence is not ambiguous.

From the Times:

  • Brian O’Hara, the Minneapolis police chief, said on CBS that Pretti appeared to be “exercising his First Amendment rights to record law enforcement activity, and also exercising his Second Amendment rights to lawfully be armed in a public space in the city.” He described the city and his department as being at a breaking point. “People have had enough,” he said.

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Sunday, January 25, 2026

The Killers in Our Streets

Many, many American citizens do not agree with the Trump administration’s roundup of migrants for deportation. We have heard the propaganda — that those being chased down are dangerous criminals — and we’re not buying it.

Because we know it is a lie.

The crimes allegedly committed by the migrants targeted by federal officials in Minneapolis include possession of cocaine, prostitution and driving without a valid license.

Meanwhile, we know that the vast majority of these people are innocent of any crime and are our neighbors, our colleagues, our friends. So in some of our communities, when Trump send in his ICE agents, brave citizens come out to stand witness, blow whistles, and record video of the arrests.

For this, two citizens have been killed by ICE this month in Minneapolis, a 37-year-old woman and a 37-year-old man.

This is unacceptable. From my work over the years with the Human Rights Data Analysis Group, I’ve learned that obtaining justice and accountability in cases like these can take many years of painstaking work.

If this is still America, the truth shall prevail eventually and the perpetrators will be brought to justice. 

But the key word in that sentence is “if”.

(What follows is a detailed analysis of yesterday’s killing by ICE, courtesy of the New York Times.)

TOP STORY:

  • Timeline: A Moment by Moment Look at the Shooting of Alex Pretti (NYT)

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Saturday, January 24, 2026

Industrial Clock

Since humans ran out of new kinds of animals and foods to domesticate thousands of years ago, we can study almost any edible plant or farm animal as a microcosm of human history.

This leads me to the term “industrial clock,” which refers to how we cannot escape the rhythms of the 40-hour week even after we retire.

And that brings me to the origin of the coffee break, which was developed by industrialist managers as a way to squeeze more productivity out of workers. I first encountered this curiosity when I was reviewing a book on the history of sugar many years ago.

Like many other crops, sugar started out as a luxury for the rich and powerful but then gradually filtered down until it became one of the many excessive burdens of the poor and powerless.

Over 100,000 people die of diabetes in the U.S. each year, and they are disproportionately from minority and poor communities.

Taking sugar with coffee or tea became habitual for workers during the industrial revolution. By now, virtually everyone goes through at least some phase of sugar addiction, it’s endemic.

And of course there are other risk factors for diabetes — smoking and obesity among them.

But wars have been fought and empires built on control of sugar or tea or coffee or bananas and every other foodstuff; that much is indisputable.

Meanwhile, I’m over six years into retirement and still living on the “industrial clock.” 

(This is a rewrite of an essay from 2022.)

HEADLINES:

  • Winter Storm With 'Catastrophic' South Ice, Heavy Snow From Texas To Northeast To Affect Over 230 Million (Weather.com)

  • Zelensky says he hopes first Ukraine, Russia and US talks are ‘step towards ending war’ (BBC)

  • Territorial issue is key obstacle to Ukraine peace, Kremlin tells Trump envoys (AP)

  • Outrage as Trump undermines NATO role in Afghanistan war (DW)

  • UK’s Starmer slams Trump remarks on non-US NATO troops in Afghanistan as ‘insulting’ and ‘appalling’ (AP)

  • Signs of Wavering (Atlantic)

  • Businesses in Minneapolis close Friday to protest ICE (NBC)

  • D.H.S. Cited Foreign Students’ Writings and Protests Before Their Arrests (NYT)

  • Defund Science, Distort Culture, Mock Education (Atlantic)

  • Denmark offered to trade Greenland to the U.S. in 1910—and America thought it was crazy (Fortune)

  • Inside the effort to shield Stars and Stripes from Pentagon control (WP)

  • Stephen Colbert Ruthlessly Taunts His CBS Bosses With A Biting Trump Reminder (HuffPost)

  • Kimmel And Colbert Say FCC ‘Equal Time’ Rule Is A Bid To ‘Stifle’ Them (Forbes)

  • TikTok finalizes a deal to form a new American entity (AP)

  • Well, That Is One Way for J.D. and Usha Vance to Respond to the Erika Kirk Divorce Rumors (Slate)

  • Todoist’s app now lets you add tasks to your to-do list by speaking to its AI (TechCrunch)

  • How Meta Is Reshaping Its Organization for an AI Computing Blitz (The Information)

  • Trump Boys Put Nobel Peace Prize In Microwave (Onion)

 

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