Republicans loved gerrymandering as long as their opponents were committed to fair maps. Now that Dems are responding in kind, conservatives aren’t having as much fun. But the only thing worse than constitutional hardball is unilateral constitutional hardball. (🎁) www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...
"Different" really is doing a lot of work in that sentence.
Margo Martin @MargoMartin47 X.com Congratulations, Georgia Women's Tennis! The photo shows Trump and five white dudes in red ties standing in front of and completely blocking 10 young women
Priceless post from the official White House social media
@joelhs.bsky.social writes, "Jewish students are not the constituency this campaign is designed to serve. They have been made instruments of a broader ideological battle against the liberal values that gain purchase when people are educated in environments that reward independent thought."
Put another way, I think the Jewishness of the army and the state is basically incidental. This is simply what happens when you have a racial supremacist state and a racial supremacist army and a racial supremacist law. The soldiers, regardless of the particulars, will act as if they are supreme.
People develop a theory of mind for this stuff that essentially is nonsense. It has nothing to do with these soldiers being Jewish and therefore they do bad things. They do bad things because the state and the army is Jewish *supremacist* and Jews who commit crimes are not prosecuted.
A few thoughts:
1. These London attackers are clearly coordinating with HAYI, which usually breaks the news first or has exclusive footage of the attacks. This isn't the Shiite equivalent of "ISIS-*inspired* terrorism", it's more official than that.
Even as rich countries’ governments spend money to spare their citizens from the fuel shock caused by the Gulf war, they have the means to pay for food assistance in the poor world. But they are in a selfish mood
“It’s a couple of things that work beautifully in concert. First: no music. Audiences are so sophisticated, but what they’re not accustomed to is not being told how to feel,” Wyle says. “You take all that out and it forces a level of engagement where you’re now looking for clues within the frame of the screen, which forces you to look up from your phone. And I think that is extremely engaging, especially to young viewers who aren’t accustomed to being asked to participate in a nonpassive way in the viewing experience.
![“Second point, shooting it with almost exclusively 50-millimeter or 65-millimeter lenses, which is the most comparable to the human eye—and only shooting from the point of view of a human being that’s present in this space. There are no cameras on gurney wheels going in the hallway. There’s no cameras on the ceiling looking down from a God point of view. You are limited to the perspective of a participant. You can look away, but you can’t leave, and it becomes an endurance test for you to stay on your feet as long as we’re on our feet. Which [brings me to my] third point: real time. Real time has an aggregate sense of tension that you don’t get in any other form of storytelling. What happened before is happening now, and these two things are going to add up to the next thing. And if we throw more ingredients into this cooker and keep ratcheting it up, it’s going to pop.”](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:guthikarwozoldkzhueivkl6/bafkreihklvhtymho7wpemo5mj2f7xaiq6ulvfvcwnzo6hjstg3wixzgesy)
“Second point, shooting it with almost exclusively 50-millimeter or 65-millimeter lenses, which is the most comparable to the human eye—and only shooting from the point of view of a human being that’s present in this space. There are no cameras on gurney wheels going in the hallway. There’s no cameras on the ceiling looking down from a God point of view. You are limited to the perspective of a participant. You can look away, but you can’t leave, and it becomes an endurance test for you to stay on your feet as long as we’re on our feet. Which [brings me to my] third point: real time. Real time has an aggregate sense of tension that you don’t get in any other form of storytelling. What happened before is happening now, and these two things are going to add up to the next thing. And if we throw more ingredients into this cooker and keep ratcheting it up, it’s going to pop.”
Wyle makes eye contact for his next point, delivering it with a Robby-esque matter-of-factness. “Fourth point: The election went the other way,” he says with a shrug. “We could have been a really good show with a lot of nice things to say in a perfectly normal Kamala Harris universe. And instead we became almost a beacon of hope and humanity in an alternative universe. But in the midst of that, fifth point—this is essentially competence porn. You’re watching really smart, dedicated people do what only they know how to do at a level that you don’t know how to do it, and you’re so fucking glad that they’re there doing it, and compartmentalizing their own stuff to put your broken pieces back together. You’re so reassured by knowing that there are people out there that laugh and joke and have the ability to lock in like that.”
this is fucking unreal stuff from Noah Wyle on the magic of The Pitt. www.gq.com/story/noah-w...
I am proud to publish this essay by Huda Fakhreddine about her family's home in southern Lebanon; first destroyed by Israeli rockets in 2024 and now under threat again in light of Israel's full-scale attack on her homeland
www.thekeymagazine.com/p/huda-fakhr...
NEW: Andrew Ferguson, a law professor, wrote a new book on digital surveillance and policing — & how the police track & exploit your personal data.
He's agreed to answer questions on this sent by Bolts readers.
Check out more info below, & you can drop a question in the form!
In 12 months’ time French voters will elect a successor to Emmanuel Macron. Polls consistently show the RN ahead in first-round voting. But a poll lead a year before the vote does not always lead to victory.
Why the 🇫🇷 election may be more open than it appears
economist.com/europe/2026/...
This is a great idea
In an interview with The Economist, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency explains why he believes a negotiated settlement is the only solution for Iran’s nuclear programme
Over four consecutive terms, Viktor Orban transformed Hungary from a democracy into a form of electoral autocracy. Register for free to learn how he was finally defeated
The nonprofit that runs the successful, Pulitzer-winning Baltimore Banner is going to take over the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
Of all the possible outcomes here, this is likely the best we could have hoped for.
apnews.com/article/pitt...
The claim "the fact that the incumbent party was successfully defeated in an election shows that there was never anything to worry about and democracy was fine all along" in the Hungarian case— with explicit or implicit analogy to the US— is maddening to begin with, bc it's a well-known fact
1/
Again: for any big liberal donor who wants to funnel millions into fixing this country's politics, the ROI on buying any struggling paper and simply tasking it with doing real reporting on local news is vastly higher than the same $$ given to some group that does mass ad buys every election year.
“The Constitution does not invoke Jesus. It does not establish prayer. It protects conscience. The republic they built was not a Christian nation. It was something rarer and harder…”
open.substack.com/pub/micyoung...
Breaking:
WASHINGTON (AP) - Justice Department moves to vacate seditious conspiracy convictions of Oath Keepers and Proud Boys in major Jan. 6 cases.
Instead of asking chatgpt, why not ask a librarian? You'll get real answers and they won't tell you to kill yourself.
After Ukraine, France is the European country most targeted by foreign disinformation ops
• Many campaigns come from Russia, which finds fertile ground in France for such ops
• Pro-Russian (/anti-US) sentiment is more widespread in France relative to other EU states
www.economist.com/europe/2026/...
This is what I think of as the most important chart in British politics. It shows the amount people spend on retail sales and the amount they get. Compared to Feb 2022 people are spending about 16% more but consuming 4% less.
*SWALWELL RESIGNS FROM CONGRESS
I am once again asking
‘I wished for death’: Sexual violence in Israel’s prisons is an ‘organised state policy’ Palestinian testimonies reveal how sexual violence, including rape using objects and dogs, is approved by 'highest levels' of Israeli leadership
The testimony here about sexual violence by Israel against Palestinian prisoners is so beyond the pale everyone must see it.
It is so bad I can’t in good conscience share a quote other than the headline, which somehow manages to understate the horror within.
www.middleeasteye.net/news/i-wishe...
This is a similar dynamic to the "if you want universal health-care, you're a socialist" shtick that the right used, which helped drive up DSA membership and visibility.
Post from Dale Partridge claiming nobody wants to live in diverse neighborhoods
I quite happily live in a neighborhood where most people do not share my religion, where multiple languages are represented, and where people have come from a lot of different countries.
Bigoted assholes always assume everyone else actually shares their bigotries.
