Tuesday, March 24, 2026

CIR's First Home

When we opened up the Center for Investigative Reporting in 1977, our office suite was on the top floor of the magnificent old Broadway Building in downtown Oakland.

There was a definite 1930s feel to the place, as if we were private detectives from a bygone era. Early visitors fed that impression, including a woman who wanted us to follow her husband because she suspected he was cheating.

(We politely declined.)

Instead, we did long stories about corporate crime, environmental degradation, political corruption and other journalistic topics.

When I recently posted about CIR’s origin — “49 Years Ago: CIR is Born” — I didn’t have a photo of the headquarters building. I also made a math error in that post, originally labeling it 50 years, which I rapidly corrected on Substack. That math error is a first for me and this newsletter.

One of my co-founders, Dan Noyes, kindly sent me this old photo, so this gives me the chance to update that post and correct the record on both counts.

Now on to the news...

HEADLINES:

 

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Monday, March 23, 2026

Wisdom and Games

The weather out here got too hot for a few days but has since retreated into a more pleasant spring season. That may seem to be a mundane observation to start a conversation with, but one thing I noticed years ago that was the best topic to open with was the weather.

Like millions of others, I’ve been watching the college basketball tournaments and rooting, naturally, for my alma mater teams from Michigan. So far, both the men’s and the women’s teams have advanced to the sweet-16-round, which are accomplishments of note.

The men’s team is big, strong, fast and skilled and the women’s team is young, connected, talented and aggressive, and both squads have mowed down their early opponents in impressive fashion.

People all over have their own favorites, of course, which is as it should be. Although I’m a fan, I’m not a partisan. By that I mean I don’t hate the players on the opposing teams; I just hope Michigan wins.

Too often in sports, starting at the level of games between little kids, parents, fans and partisans take their fandom too seriously, denigrating opponents, shouting epithets at them, and cheering their demise.

I get it — these loyalties run deep — including in me, but the older I get I just believe in showing a measure of respect for your opponent and grace in victory or defeat.

After all, when two teams clash, only one can win. Losing feels bad, and for that, we all need to remember to have compassion.

(Except, of course, for Ohio State. Go blue!)

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Sunday, March 22, 2026

Trump's War on Everybody

(Note: I wrote this a year ago. It holds.)

The math is made up, the perceived grievances are just that — perceived — but just like everything he does, Trump’s global trade war makes sense according to the twisted logic that guides him.

He believes this will convince people the world over that he is the most powerful man on the planet.

How much actual power he will end up with remains to be seen, but he at least has proved that he is the world’s biggest bully. (Step aside, Vladimir Putin.)

The problem with Trump’s tariffs is they are predicated on the notion that the U.S. economy is a separate entity when in fact it is completely enmeshed in a globalized supply chain of trade deals that makes every country dependent on every other country.

But Trump is right that the U.S. is by far the biggest kid on the block economically, so the pain will be felt disproportionally depending where in the world you live. While U.S. consumers will pay more for stuff, people in the poorest countries will starve.

And with USAID disbanded, the U.S. under Trump will no longer be there to help alleviate the pain.

With one massive blow, Trump has just reversed 75 years of progress, albeit inadequate, to establish a more equitable distribution of resources worldwide. Although they remain far poorer than the rich countries, Third World nations have for the most part been making progress against the pervasive poverty that holds them back.

Meanwhile, Trump doesn’t care about that or anything else outside of his crazed quest for complete power over everyone and everything.

He won’t achieve that goal, but he will cause a lot of pain all over the world in the process.

HEADLINES:

  • Striking Down Pentagon Press Limits, Judge Vindicates Independent Journalism (NYT)

  • Hegseth has repeatedly said the US is upping the frequency of its Iran strikes. The data tells a different story (CNN)

  • Hegseth Invokes Divine Purpose to Justify Military Might (NYT)

  • Iran vows to ‘irreversibly’ destroy infrastructure after Trump ultimatum on Strait of Hormuz (CNN)

  • US lifts sanctions on some Iranian oil as energy prices soar (BBC)

  • Trump says he doesn’t want Iran war ceasefire, but is considering ‘winding down’ military ops (CNBC)

  • Iran Targeted Diego Garcia Base With Ballistic Missiles (BBC)

  • A Look at the Escalating Battle for the Strait of Hormuz (NYT)

  • Immigration agents deploying to airports under border czar as TSA staffing falls short (CNN)

  • The war in Iran is affecting families across the globe (Reveal)

  • DOGE Goes Nuclear: How Trump Invited Silicon Valley Into America’s Nuclear Power Regulator (ProPublica)

  • A massive border wall expansion is underway (WP)

  • When health insurance costs $2,500 per month, families make tough choices (NPR)

  • Donald Trump Throws Another Big Tariff Tanty (Nation)

  • Denmark Was Ready to Blow Up Airfields to Stop a U.S. Invasion of Greenland (NYT)

  • These people used AI to help find their lost pets (WP)

  • Blocking the Internet Archive Won’t Stop AI, But It Will Erase the Web’s Historical Record (EFF)

  • ABC Cancels Mormonism (Onion)

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Saturday, March 21, 2026

Starting Up

On an October day in 1971, I drove an old Chevy van up Fell Street to the Fillmore in San Francisco, on the final leg of a cross-county trek, and restarted my post-college journalism career after a two year hiatus in the Peace Corps.

A small group of us started a magazine called SunDance at 1913 Fillmore Street. It was a large-format magazine, with big graphics and long articles on the intersection of post-Sixties politics and culture.

Actually, it was pure-Sixties in its sensibility; we just didn’t know yet that that era was finished. SunDance had an eclectic list of writers and artists, none more famous than John Lennon and Yoko Ono, who also gave us some money. When they came to visit the office and share stimulants with us, we knew we’d been blessed by the gods. 

Alas, none of us knew what a business plan was, and SunDance lasted all of three issues, though glorious issues they were.

A few years later, I landed across town at Rolling Stone, at 625 Third Street, where celebrities of every stripe poured through the office, and the stimulation never ended. Not being a music writer, I rarely hung out with musicians, but a small group of us formed an ad-hoc investigative unit on staff there, and we did some good work until the founder, Jann Wenner, decided to move the operation to New York.

That same year, 1977, Lowell Bergman, Dan Noyes and I started a non-profit, the Center for Investigative Reporting, and our first office was in the Broadway Building in downtown Oakland. Financing ourselves by a combination of foundation grants and contracts with media outlets, we produced newspaper and magazine articles at first, with books, television and radio documentaries coming later on.

In my mind, the Center would be a place where reporters who worked hard could see their journalistic dreams come true. And for quite a few of us, they did.

(This is an excerpt from a piece I first published in 2006.)

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Friday, March 20, 2026

The Warrior King

Watching the parade of foreign leaders visit Trump on his gilded throne, I’m reminded of some of the great and terrible warriors of the past, like Genghiz Khan, Kublai Khan, Tamerlane or Alexander the Great.

When I lived in Afghanistan, people talked about these Eurasian conquerers in the present tense, as if they were still there. And, in many ways, their awful deeds were still very much part of the fabric of Afghan life.

They came, they conquered and moved on, leaving destruction in their wake. Much as Trump is doing now. He is shredding our democracy and wrecking the alliances with allies that have kept us safe since World War II.

Trump aspires to attain and may somehow actually attain the status of a great historical warrior, as John B. Judis argues in his provocative piece in NOTUS:

“(T)hose leaders — often propelled by megalomania — also overreached, then found themselves bedeviled by forces beyond their control. What Hegel described as “the cunning of reason” invariably caught up with them, making a mess of their ultimate ambitions. Alexander the Great swept through Egypt and the Middle East, but when he tried to conquer India, his troops revolted. Napoleon suffered a major defeat when he tried to expand his empire into Russia. He spent his final years in exile. And instead of solidifying the dominance of France, he bolstered Britain’s power and put Prussia on a path to becoming the continent’s preeminent military force.

“Does the pattern sound familiar? Trump has pushed us into a new stage of history. But it is a stage in which, because of his overreach, America may find itself diminished and disempowered. Whoever wins the White House in 2028 will inherit a fragmented international economy, ruptured alliances and emboldened adversaries, not to mention a divided and angry electorate. That president, and presidents for many years to come, will be operating in a difficult and perilous world — a world Trump remade.”

***
The main point of this piece is even if the Democrats can regain control of our government eventually, it may be too late to undue the damage Trump has done.

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Thursday, March 19, 2026

What Boomers Can Share

One experience common for Baby Boomers when we were kids was air raid drills at school, where we were taught to dive under our desks and shield our heads in the case of a nuclear attack.

If this was supposed to instill confidence about our future prospects, well, Bob Dylan had something to say about that in Talkin’ World War III Blues.

Martin Scorsese’s “No Direction Home” recognized those drills as a decisive influence in the poet’s formative years, and used footage from them to drive the point home. Dylan confirmed it in interviews.

We may have been kids, but we knew it was absurd. Just like Disney’s “Our Friend the Atom,” a pro-nuclear-power episode shown to us twice in 1957. 

Almost as soon as he arrived in Greenwich Village and started singing in nightclubs, Dylan was mixing his recurrent nightmares about World War III into his songs.

These were the early days of the anti-war movement, which — though focused on the Vietnam War — always reflected elements of anti-nuke sentiment as well.

As youngsters, we intuited but were never actually told by our government how close we had repeatedly come to nuclear war until the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. But based on declassified documents, my historian son, who just happens to be named Dylan, documented that Eisenhower threatened to drop the bomb on China on more than one occasion in the fifties.

Meanwhile, in Bob Dylan’s main song on the topic the key generational line is “I’ll let you be in my dreams if I can be in yours.” 

While older people tagged us as the“Me Generation,” I always have preferred the “We Generation,” because we know we are all in this together. 

Let’s hope that during this awful season of Trumpism, that is at least one insight we cam pass on to our heirs.

Recommended by Bruce Koon:: 

“NOTUS Perspectives: Trump as Alexander the Great — A Theory That Explains Iran (And Everything Else)” (NOTUS) 

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Wednesday, March 18, 2026

Going It Alone

After being rebuffed by most of our traditional allies, Trump has suddenly reversed course, saying the U.S. can handle the crisis at the Strait of Hormuz alone.

As far as the larger war with Iran is concerned, Trump can still count on Israel, and lukewarm support elsewhere.

But Trump’s behavior on the global stage is an embarrassment. He threatens, he bullies, he postures, but in the end he’s a paper tiger.

A dangerous paper tiger willing to continue his aggressive actions regardless of the consequences.

We have to hope that cooler heads prevail. Then again, who are those cooler heads?

HEADLINES:

  • America, Alone (NYT)

  • What’s Behind Trump’s New World Disorder? (New Yorker)

  • Trump Is Learning That His Bullying Has Consequences (Atlantic)

  • How America’s War on Iran Backfired (Foreign Affairs)

  • U.S. intelligence says Iran’s regime is consolidating power (WP)

  • Israel says it killed Iran’s security chief Ali Larijani in overnight airstrike (Politico)

  • “No imminent threat”: U.S. Counterterrorism Center head resigns over Iran war (Axios)

  • ‘This Is Not Our War’: Europe and U.K. Push Back Against Trump’s Demands (NYT)

  • UK security adviser attended US-Iran talks and judged deal was within reach (Guardian)

  • Iran war pushes countries into energy triage as they conserve power and curb soaring prices (AP)

  • Naval escorts will not guarantee safe passage through Strait of Hormuz, says IMO chief (FT)

  • The TACO trade meets the fog of war (Silver Bulletin)

  • Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei has rejected proposals for reducing tensions or for a ceasefirewith ‌the US that were conveyed to Tehran by two intermediary countries, a senior Iranian official said. (Reuters)

  • Trump Says He Will Have the ‘Honor’ of ‘Taking Cuba’ (NYT)

  • Poll: Confidence in the Supreme Court drops to a record low (NBC)

  • How Trump’s Homeland Security Pick, a Prolific Investor, Got a Lot Wealthier in Congress (NYT)

  • J. D. Vance Learns What Mike Pence Already Knows (Atlantic)

  • Pakistan air strike kills at least 100 at Kabul drug rehab centre (BBC)

  • ‘Lobstergate’ shows just how far our media have sunk (The Hill)

  • Malaysia Becomes First Country To Declare US Trade Deal ‘Null And Void’ After Supreme Court Tariff Ruling (Yahoo)

  • Trump team applying pressure to media: Tell the war’s story the way we see it (AP)

  • A journalist reported a missile strike. Then came the death threats. (WP)

  • The unionized staff of CBS News' streaming site plan to stage a one-day walk out after negotiations with management over their new contract fell apart last week. [HuffPost]

  • Cesar Chavez, a Civil Rights Icon, Is Accused of Abusing Girls for Years (NYT)

  • Oldest known whale recording could unlock mysteries of the ocean (AP)

  • Nvidia’s race to outpace physics (Axios)

  • Nurturing agentic AI beyond the toddler stage (Technology Review)

  • Meta could be winning the AI race, just not in the way you’d expect (BI)

  • How Trump Drove a Wedge Between Florida Republicans Over A.I. (NYT)

  • Unemployed Man Considers Going Back To School To Become AI (Onion)

 

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