Yoon and Prince Andrew wishing they had a friend like John Roberts.

The Vanity Fair photographer with a lot more courage than many titans industry and brokers of power

Every legal story now is either

Ancient Circuit Judge Delivers Crystal Clear 100 Page Rebuke To Trumpist Overreach

or

In Unsigned Shadow Docket Decision, 6-3 Majority Declares Trump Can Hunt People For Sport

Olivia Nuzzi is An Embarrassment to Journalism, But Is Also the Monster It Created Everyone in this story is a nightmare person.

Absolute banger by @ceilidhann.bsky.social on Nuzzi, Lizza, and...everything.

It captures the primal scream I want to let out every time I read more about it.

pajiba.substack.com/p/olivia-nuz...

This is why the Epstein files story does matter, beyond just Trump's involvement. This is why so many Silicon Valley billionaires went fascist. #MeToo instilled this fear that rich men may have to lose their boys club where women are objects for trade, instead of people.

I just googled this man like 'ew who tf is this Tom Barrack guy' and the answer is the sitting, Donald Trump-appointed U.S. Ambassador to Turkey

All the Epstein emails are powerful elites saying shit like “Hello my friend the pedophile, i need your advice as a pedophile, what do you think about this other pedophile? Pedophilic Regards, your Friend ;)” and instead of swinging from a gibbet most of them are still writing op-eds against leftism

One of the defining feelings in American life, for decades now, is elites doing plainly criminal shit and nothing at all happening as a result. It is deranging in a way that virtually nothing else is. Media fixates on perceived street lawlessness but shit like this matters much more in my opinion.

Important to understand the Epstein stuff and the fascism and the corruption are, in a lot of ways, really all the same story from different angles: powerful men who can and do abuse vulnerable people around them because they can, and because systems of elite accountability catastrophically failed

Wasn’t expecting the Epstein scandal to blow up the New York Times but sure, why not

We’ve built two justice systems in the US—one that bends over backward to shield the wealthy and powerful, and another that comes down hard and fast on the poor and marginalized. Trump and Epstein show that it’s easier to squeeze a rich man through the eye of a needle than to see one sent to prison.

I've said it many times before and Andrew Cuomo is making me say it again: we don't have a cancellation problem. We have never had a cancellation problem. To the contrary, we have a problem that "disgrace" is a very temporary embarrassment— an brief entr'acte more than an intermission.

Why am I not surprised to see this exchange between Epstein and Deepak Chopra? And also not surprised that Deepak feels a "kinship" with Woody Allen?

You know a country by its values. By what a country values. And it turns out that what a country values can change over time. Sometimes, though, there’s a sort of cognitive delay between the country you think you are in, and the country you’ve actually become. For example, you can keep selling yourself, to foreigners, as the country of William Shakespeare and Jane Austen, and luring busloads of tourists to Stratford-upon-Avon and Bath, and put a statue of George Orwell in front of the BBC, and imagine yourself a cultured and literate nation, which the rest of the world admires for its devotion to the written word – but if you then chronically underfund your cultural institutions, and treat your cultural workers with contempt, many people will suspect you of being full of it. And as the decades pass – and fewer and fewer Shakespeares and Austens and Orwells emerge from your little island – even more people will begin to suspect that in truth you do not value culture at all, and are in fact running a giant heritage museum in which the only cultural workers you respect are the dead ones.

Great piece by Zadie Smith. When the right talks about classics or "Western" culture, these works are only important to the extent that it demonstrates their superiority, they have no interest in art in and of itself beyond that www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

China’s CO2 emissions have been flat or falling for past 18 months, analysis finds World’s biggest polluter on track to hit peak emissions target early but miss goal for cutting carbon intensity

This a big deal: "China’s carbon dioxide emissions have been flat or falling for 18 months"

China's economy has grown by ~5% in the last year, so this comprehensively debunks the idea (again) that emissions are tied to growth. So yes, faster progress needed, but this is how you turn the corner.

No it’s important to listen to this. Because then you understand that many of them will do ANYTHING to keep power. Remember Musk got involved in the 2024 election after saying to Tucker “if she wins” I am definitely going to prison.

So we need to move knowing that nothing is off the table for them.

“I’m in the ‘Hitler sucks’ wing of the Republican Party,” Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, said over the weekend at the R.J.C. event. “Here’s what I do know: You can sit in a basement with weird people and say weird things. It’s a free country.”

Cool. What would you call the other wing then? www.nytimes.com/2025/11/03/u...

I always feel like I'm losing my mind when I see a clip like this and find the man...almost likable?

The Anti-Oligarchy Constitution Reconstructing the Economic Foundations of American Democracy

I definitely did not get into this in the op ed but in my view that may involve specific, targeted jurisdiction-stripping or jurisdiction-delaying (i.e. SCOTUS can't hear challenges to the constitutionality of the national independent redistricting requirement until long after it goes into effect.)

Wow it turns out the entire country is not permanently reactionary because Trump won an election by 1.5%

(Optional: Because doing so would not have led to the desired result.)

I wish someone, anyone, had the spine to own the argument in Court if they made it in the brief.

Alito: I mean, so you’re saying the founding father of textualism doesn’t understand textualism.

Chang: I'm saying he didn't apply it in Boyle.

Zohran is stone cold man. Putting out an ad in Arabic after all the Islamophobic shit that’s been thrown his way? Pure swag.

Dems don’t need to copy his politics or even necessarily his campaign strategy, they need to learn how to grow a fucking spine.

I was with you till that last line. Now I'm ready to fight dragons in defense of my 90s shoes.

People really underestimate how many things come down to being able to tell a story.

i don’t think you can maximin vote share with polls and spreadsheets, and i think it is a problem that the most prominent and influential political commentators right now are more devotees of data than experts in narrative

Nah...the lows have always been there. Always.

👇🎯💯 The entire GOP pitch in 2025 was “We will destroy the Kitchen Table, burn down The House, & imprison Your Neighbors,” & it worked. Every one of these Democrats Must Do Kitchen Table Issues Takes™️ crashes on that rocky shore. And the rocky shore of Harris & the Dems’ platform actually existing.

If they're done pretending they're not racist, xenophobic, and bigoted, there's absolutely zero reason for those who report on these people to continue pretending otherwise. Certainly not because it's "civil."

It's cowardly, dishonest, and insulting to keep propping up this transparent ruse.

These are not serious people.