Most Americans have by now seen the viral clips: humanoid robots dancing, sprinting, folding laundry. They make for great TikToks. They’re also a distraction from what’s actually happening. In factories, warehouses, and logistics centers across the country, humanoid robots are already doing real work, so the question for policymakers is no longer when this technology will arrive — but whether the United States will keep its lead or watch another technology slip to Beijing the way so many already have.

That question gets a real test this week. Wednesday, the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s Communications and Technology Subcommittee took up the GUARD Act, aka “Guarding the U.S. against Adversarial Robotics Dominance Act of 2026.” Drafted by Reps. John Moolenaar (R-MI), Jay Obernolte (R-CA), and Jennifer McClellan (D-VA), it would direct national security agencies to review humanoid and quadruped robots tied to foreign adversaries and, where warranted, add them to the Federal Communications Commission’s Covered List — the federal government’s blacklist for products and technologies that pose “unacceptable” risk to U.S. national security.

This bill has drawn support from both parties, because keeping adversary-controlled machines out of American infrastructure is not a red or blue issue. And, obviously, I have a stake in this: Agility, my company, assembles humanoids in Oregon and deploys them to customer facilities such as GXO Georgia and Schaeffler in South Carolina, where they’re already picking up dull or dangerous work (like running eight-hour factory shifts loading and unloading 25-pound baskets of parts in an auto plant). I endorsed the GUARD Act at introduction, and my competitors support it as well — because the threat it addresses affects our entire industry, and the workers and manufacturers who depend on it.

The national security risks are real, and documented. Last year, researchers found that the Go1 robot dog from Unitree — the Chinese firm at the center of this debate — shipped with a hidden, pre-installed backdoor that let outsiders take control of the robots and watch a live feed through their cameras. (A member of the House Select Committee on the CCP compared Unitree’s robots to “Trojan horses with cameras.”) A separate analysis found that robot dogs deployed at major U.S. research universities — including MIT, Princeton, and Carnegie Mellon — could have been vulnerable through that same backdoor. These are the machines American companies and municipalities are starting to buy, thanks to how cheap they are.

The threat extends to U.S. economic security. With price, supply, and multi-channel distribution advantages, Unitree is rapidly introducing basic and more complex humanoid units to our domestic market, and doing so with limited guardrails. That’s because the humanoid industry in China “has benefited from an abundance of local government subsidies and [favorable] policies.” This is the exact playbook the CCP ran with drones, solar panels, EV batteries, and telecom equipment. In each industry, the pattern is identical: flood the market at a price American firms cannot sustainably match, wait for the competition to thin out, then set the terms.

The same logic is playing out in frontier AI right now. Facing steep AI compute costs, American companies are shifting workloads onto Chinese-developed models, which are cheaper and open-weight. The threat these CCP models pose has grown so large that, in April, a joint congressional inquiry began investigating whether U.S. tech companies adopting tools built on Beijing’s terms could leave our country open to a backdoor cybersecurity threat.

We must create an even playing field that rewards the safest deployable technology capable of delivering value — not the cheapest platform subsidized by a foreign adversary.

Across a number of disruptive technologies in recent history — batteries, solar, drones, telecom, and now software — the lesson is the same: economic security is national security. That’s why we need the GUARD Act. Evaluating Chinese robotics platforms solely through the lens of proven data theft (our current approach) ignores the long-term strategic risk: state-backed manufacturers who leverage subsidies and below-market pricing to rapidly gain market share, weaken American competitors, and establish long-term dependence on technology created by a foreign adversary. The GUARD Act is designed to interrupt that cycle before Beijing’s economic dominance hardens into enduring, or extremely difficult to untangle, U.S. national security vulnerabilities.

America does not have the luxury of waiting to see how this plays out. Washington has accepted that we can’t take our AI leadership for granted. Now, they must extend that urgency to the machines AI increasingly powers.

—Peggy Johnson

Like it or not, the Empire City is the center of the universe again. The New York Knicks’ underdog NBA finals run (featuring the largest comeback in NBA Finals history) had residents buzzing for weeks, and vibes are undeniably high.

According to many, this renaissance is the work of Socialist Mayor Zohran Mamdani.

Left wing commentator Kyle Kulinski, in an X post garnering 171,500 views and thousands of likes, credited the mayor with pressing “the giant ‘make things better’ button.” Journalist and self-described “humanist” Charlotte Alter suggested to her 65,000 X followers that Mamdani alone was responsible for restoring “a sense of vitality and community to the entire city.”

In a since-deleted post that garnered more than 14,000 likes, a Mamdani enthusiast shared a video of a beautiful evening stroll through Bryant Park, with the snarky caption: “Another terrifying day in Socialist, Communist Mamdanistan apparently!”

And, yes, that stroll through Mamdani’s New York — pictured below — looks, admittedly, lovely.

As you make your way through the greenery, hand-in-hand with a pretty Hinge date, taking shelter from the summer heat under a well-pruned tree in a public park, you might pause and think, huh… if things can be this nice, that socialist stuff can’t be so bad…

However.

You and Sarah from comms at Deloitte are nestled in expertly groomed enclaves of free market capitalism.

Indeed, a great many of New York City’s “public” cultural touchstones are maintained, in large part, thanks to its private sector. These private investments in public spaces were not compulsory, nor extracted at gunpoint. The aforementioned Bryant Park, Central Park, Madison Square Park, the Battery, and basically every other high-profile park you can name are managed and funded, in large part, by dedicated non-government “conservancies.” And behind those conservancies are, typically, a few very rich people who want their local parks to be livable (and beautiful).

Let’s start with Bryant Park, which the poster above trotted out as an example of socialism’s benefits.

On Wikipedia, the answer is clear. According to the entry on Shirley, the YouTuber’s “central claims that members of the Somali community were operating fake childcare centers or inflating attendance numbers were unsubstantiated.” While some may be tempted to dismiss the judgments of anonymous editors, they matter: Wikipedia is still (one way or another) where the internet settles disputes like this one.

But the way the Wikipedia entry’s lead section shaped up tells a story far more significant than one about coverage of an independent journalist-YouTuber. It’s the story of how consensus is manufactured on the site whose data feeds AI systems and whose pages populate Google. It’s the story of how influence campaigns can hide in plain sight.

Well, it may have come a mere 2,304 days after the World Health Organization officially declared the COVID-19 outbreak a global pandemic, but on July 1 of this year, California state employees finally returned to the office following an executive order from Gavin Newsom.

Yes — six years after the initial spread of this lab-grown pangolin-meat-market-concocted respiratory virus, and with the governor’s totally rational prevention measures of canceling childhood education, filling skate parks with sand, and criminalizing in-person gatherings for everyone but himself far in the rearview, Newsom has finally decided it is safe for bureaucrats to reclaim their cubicles.

Now, roughly 109,000 state employees who had previously been working remotely or on hybrid schedules have returned to the office, where Newsom’s order declares they are henceforth safe to work four days a week. A miraculous triumph! We applaud the governor for this timely victory over a disease that only America’s blue-haired population continues to fear.

And yet, somehow, not everyone is thrilled…

“The BLUF is I don’t really care what my title is. I don’t really care about titles. I just want to help the company win,” Eliano told me. “You could put ‘his unofficial title is “head of strategic engagement,” which he hates.’”

Basically (as head of Palantir’s merchandise store, among other projects), he makes really nice shirts.

You may have noticed, in your own travels, that the bar for corporate merch is in hell. Companies stick their logos on crap from China and call it a day. (See below.)

Palantir’s merch shop used to be a forgotten little shell of a cost center, too.

But starting in 2024, Eliano burned it to the ground and started from scratch.

Now the shop contains a certain marketing paradox: the garments highlight Palantir’s key people, themes, products, and stories — like Warp Speed (a nod to the company’s manufacturing app) and CEO Alex Karp’s “Dominate” motto — without sucking.

The cotton is sourced from Texas and North Carolina, then cut and sewn in California or Montana, Eliano said. Everything is customized — down to the shirt length, the elasticity of the collar, the weight of the cotton, the shape of the zippers: “I became sort of a clothing garment expert overnight.”

Other companies, when it comes to merch, index on design while sacrificing quality, he said. Eliano is “indexing on quality” while “using more subtle designs”:

“I want to focus on the actual quality of the garment, the craft over commodity,” he said. “A lot of companies fall into this trap of making these shirts that look cool and make people want to buy them maybe once… I want people to feel like they can represent us all the time.”

Tens of thousands of people are buying Palantir garments, with this year’s sales on track to double 2025’s, he said. Last week, Palantir’s “tennis drop” — a nod to Wimbledon and the tournament’s unfussy, white-on-white aesthetic — drove the company’s biggest day of merch sales ever. This Spring, the company’s “Chore Coat,” which sold out in roughly four hours, was written up by The New York Times’ fashion section, GQ, and The Atlantic.

As Saahil Desai gushed for The Atlantic on June 25:

“The jacket is also the most comfortable and practical garment I own. It’s buttery soft and as heavy as a blanket, with three massive patch pockets that each can hold a paperback book. The coat’s plastic buttons — swirls of black and blue — are unlike any I have ever seen.”

only 1/3 of the boxes going out this week

Eliano A Younes @eliano · 2026-07-13T15:01:47.000Z

I’m sure the garments are getting so much attention because they’re really great.

But the attention is also because of two other things. One we already knew about (Palantir has haters). One we maybe didn’t: Palantir has… fans?

YES, SOME PEOPLE ADMIRE PALANTIR

On the one hand: various journalists and internet lurkers have taken the company’s merch as another opportunity to bash it, saying the chore coat was “designed for the kind of guy rooting for today’s version of the military-industrial complex”; or “just another way for the spy tech firm to worm its way inside our brains”; or the “uniform that will be issued after we are all put in labor camps.”

One publication — unnameable, embarrassing — even ranked the chore coat, on its general “approval matrix,” proximate to flesh-eating bacteria.

“One thing that I feel like has been common throughout all of these different engagements is that the reporters… they cannot seem to understand why people are buying this,” Eliano told me. “Everything that they’ve been predisposed to about Palantir, whether it’s at parties or amongst their colleagues or what they’ve read online, is like ‘Palantir bad,’ ‘Palantir evil.’”

But as obnoxious as he is, it would be a mistake to focus too much on Traitor Ro, as this sociopathic chameleon is only reading the room. Violent Marxism is ascendant on the left, and as results pour in from primaries around the country, it’s clear today a politics of parasites is table stakes for would-be Democratic Party stars. The parasitism is defended, always, in the name of progress, and the target is somehow never the billionaire singer, film producer, or athlete, but some industrialist responsible for generating energy, technology… abundance, which I believe a few of you’ve been asking for.

I don’t know, do we think the Democrats can drive us to a world post-scarcity while rounding up every industrialist actually growing our economy, taking all their shit, and throwing them in jail? Well, it’ll be a fascinating experiment, and I’ll at least have plenty to write about. That is, provided Elizabeth Warren’s gulag has an internet connection — which doesn’t look good.

In any case, we should at least be curious: what happens to a country or city that successfully exiles its “evil capitalists”? It’s an interesting question. Which we’ve already answered. Like, a lot. In almost every corner of the world. But there’s one especially important example right here at home.

In May, while giving the commencement address at the University of Arizona, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt attempted to wax poetic about the transformational power of AI. He was met with a sea of boos so loud and sustained he ultimately had to plead with the audience: “May I finish?”

Young people are right to be worried about AI. It has already disrupted the traditional college-to-job pipeline, adding even more uncertainty to the employment prospects of debt-riddled 20-somethings. Addressing their concerns requires a fresh look at an idea our country has been debating since the Civil War: mandatory national service.

The job-loss data suggest that AI’s initial disruptions will be most heavily concentrated among young, white-collar workers with the fewest skills. Since 2022, joblessness among recent college graduates has increased twice as fast as the rest of the workforce. Employment among early 20-somethings with skills most easily replaced by AI — paralegals, customer service reps, entry-level coders — has declined substantially faster than among young people in other professions. And whether AI proves job-destructive or not over the long-term, there was already a growing sense among college grads that the old deal wasn’t working as advertised.

The standard arguments in favor of mandatory service — cultivating lagging patriotism through shared sacrifice; rebuilding infrastructure with young workers who need hard skills; moderating class stratification and partisan division through demographic intermixing — have never been enough to sway the public, and the occasional efforts to actually establish a concrete program have all fizzled out.

AI changes the calculus.

Normally, funding rounds this large involve venture capital, but this is not that. This is a donation to a nonprofit organization. Coefficient’s CEO, Alexander Berger, called it “our biggest AI technical safety grant yet.” For scale, it’s around four times what Elon Musk gave OpenAI when it launched as a nonprofit.

The shorthand for this quandary is “model welfare.” As in, should tech companies and societies concern themselves with the wellbeing of chatbots?

We should care about model welfare now, some argue, because artificial intelligences could someday be conscious. Like we are. So, usually, the next question is: When and how will we know if they are conscious? If only it were so easy.

Two philosophers working at DeepMind, Adam Bales and Iason Gabriel, published a paper in June suggesting that how we will know is really the wrong question. The right question is: What are we going to do when lots of people disagree?

His films are graphic. The opening credits of his 2007 horror flick Seed, for example, are displayed over a backdrop of animal abuse / torture footage. The same film also features a scene in which a tied-up woman is shown getting bludgeoned with a lumberjack’s axe for five consecutive minutes.

Many believe his films are also bad. How bad? Two of his works appear on IMDb’s “Bottom 100” list among the worst films ever made. In 2009, Boll was honored at the Razzies (Oscars for terrible movies) with a “Worst Career Achievement” award.

He once challenged his critics to a boxing match, and beat the shit out of four of them in one night. In response to the aforementioned criticism, Boll — who apparently trains in boxing when he isn’t making widely-panned movies — once stepped into the ring with four critics who gave his movies negative reviews, obliterating all of them one-by-one. “I thought it was a PR stunt and it was a joke and he was going to be nice,” said one victim, Richard Kyamaka, who suffered a first-round knockout loss after getting battered worse than the woman from Seed. “And then he just brutalized me.”

Boll also once gave the following response to a negative review from WIRED magazine about his film Postal (shown below, verbatim):

your review shows me only that you dont understand anything about movies and that you are a untalented wanna bee filmmaker with no balls and no understanding what POSTAL is. you dont see courage because you are nothing. and no go to your mum and fuck her ...because she cooks for you now since 30 years ..so she deserves it.

Are the uninitiated up-to-speed yet? Good.

Let’s turn, then, to Boll’s latest film, Citizen Vigilante, released last Friday by Quiver Distribution. Though many online commentators appear to have not actually watched it, Vigilante has been the talk of X for the past week now, already becoming something of a social media phenomenon. Why? Well, for one, it stars Armie Hammer — fresh off the actor’s sexual assault allegations / drug escapades / texts fantasizing about cannibalism — as a Batman-like figure cracking down on crime in Europe committed by migrants, and for two… it’s already been effectively banned by the entire nation of Germany.

This week, all three democratic socialist candidates backed by Mayor Zohran Mamdani won their primaries for the U.S. House in deep blue New York City.

Darializa Avila Chevalier, a Columbia University encampment leader — who has called the U.S. “a fucking disgrace” and refused four times to say whether mu…

But it was the first Trump administration that got the ball rolling, including starting the conversation that led to the CHIPS Act. Nevertheless, ChatGPT blew everyone’s minds after Biden took office. So his administration is likely to be forever credited with the foundational AI policymaking. And, today, its authors bide their time in hopes of writing national policy again, all the while continuing to make the case that the prior administration had AI policy right all along.

The Biden approach was: Be cautious about cautiously proceeding with caution.

In other words, it was perpetually of two minds about the AI industry. Safety always came first and it took a long time to get around to making policy to secure the US lead. Further, based on the following, it’s doubtful everyone writing AI policy was on the same page about prioritizing leadership.

Since he’s left office, most of Biden’s top AI alums have taken jobs at universities and think tanks, but some have taken spots in the AI industry.

The Biden way

The Biden White House unquestionably did an enormous amount of work on artificial intelligence policy.

Among the highlights, the Biden White House’s first executive order on AI was the longest ever written (per Brookings). It also wrote a blueprint for an AI bill of rights, wrangled frontier firms to let it test models, pulled off AI diplomacy in China and at the UN and, by the end of the 46th president’s term, got around to considering U.S. leadership.

Its policymaking began in fear of AI, but eventually it got serious about China as a competitor and that seemed to wake the team up to the idea that it could be big enough to yield another American century.

Pirate Wires reviewed what 35 former Biden staffers who touched AI policy are up to now (plus 10 less partisan folks from an office in his Department of Defense). In what follows, we cover the alums most likely to matter to the future of AI policy.

In a now viral clip from her show IHIP News (full episode here), Khanna said Musk “possibly sentenced to death” 4.5 million children by dismantling USAID, and demanded he be subpoenaed and face investigation once Democrats take power. Welch heartily agreed, saying Dems needed to push the talking point that Musk was “killing millions of the poorest people on the planet.”

Musk’s response on X was brief, as usual: “Time to sue this liar.”

Unfortunately, this unhinged accusation doesn’t start with Ro (a bumbling traitor selling his soul for 2028) or end with Welch (leader of the yay-assassination fan club). It starts, as these things tend to, with The Lancet (a leading medical journal), which last summer published a study titled “Evaluating the impact of two decades of USAID interventions and projecting the effects of defunding on mortality up to 2030,” authored by a multinational consortium of academics.

In the study, researchers analyzed mortality trends across 133 countries, comparing those that received more USAID funding with those that received less. After controlling for things like GDP per capita, they estimated that USAID funding prevented roughly 91 million deaths over two decades.

They then estimated that continued cuts could mean 14 million more deaths by 2030, including 4.5 million young children. This, of course, assumes we live in a fake world. A world in which DOGE’s funding reductions remain in place through 2030 (unlikely); where the lifesaving waiver the State Department actually issued doesn’t exist (it does); where Congress doesn’t turn around and fund emergency AIDS relief at nearly its prior level (it did); and where two decades of built-up infrastructure (clinics, training, and supply chains) evaporates the moment a grant lapses (it doesn’t).

And, oh, I almost forgot! A world where the United States is the only country on Earth that could ever be moved to fund medicine for the poor.

Even sympathetic experts won’t fully vouch for the study’s findings. Our World in Data, reviewing the “91 million lives saved” claim, noted that several experts have flagged methodological problems and warned against relying on this paper alone. The core issue, in their estimation, is that countries getting lots of USAID were also getting richer and healthier for many reasons the model can’t fully account for. Less sympathetic critics go further: writing in Reason, NYU statistics lecturer Aaron Brown points out that the entire global decline in mortality over those two decades was about 79 million — so the study credits USAID not just with every life saved on Earth, but with 11 million phantom lives on top.

But we have a democracy to save, so the math be damned.

Take Derek Thompson, for example, who wrote this back in May to describe America’s political and cultural decay into “vicemaxxing:”

Taking crypto money from desperate followers, then taking medicine from dying children: In January 2025, Donald Trump launched $TRUMP, a cryptocurrency meme coin, which allowed his family to earn more than $100 million from trading fees even as more than 800,000 investors lost more than $2 billion, making it one of the most nakedly extractive presidential self-enrichment schemes in history. Three days later, the president signed an executive order freezing all U.S. foreign assistance, resulting in the estimated death of more than 500,000 people around the world, most of them children.

Incredibly, the deaths of more than 500,000 people, most of them children, at the hands of this administration don’t even earn their own bullet in Derek’s piece.

Let’s take a step back and follow this logic: essentially, every dollar not sent to a shadowy bureaucracy doing medical aid but also lots of other shit results in X dead children. Therefore, every expendable dollar you, personally, do not contribute to said shadowy bureaucracy actually *sentences to death* Y children. By this logic, we are all mass murderers, literally killing kids, by our own greed. The scope of our individual culpability is directly proportional to the amount of wealth we possess. While I will be rich someday, I am currently not rich. Ro Khanna has approximately 1,000x more money than I do. Meaning, he has killed around 1,000x more kids than me by greedily hoarding his wealth and not contributing to international medical aid. Or he’s denying poor children in California childcare. Or whatever…

And to be honest? I’ve bought in. At least a little bit.

We do need to bring back manufacturing to America. We do need to control our most critical supply chains. We do need to reclaim America’s greatest piece of heritage: our frontiersman spirit and innovative soul.

But am I alone in feeling like the love for “American dynamism” ends with a few flights to El Segundo and a couple YOLO checks into “hard tech” startups? Maybe I’m part of the problem. What do I (Pennsylvanian-born btw) know about the American heartland?

I had to find out for myself.

So in late February, I went down to the site that some hope is ground zero for America reclaiming its industrial heyday: Syracuse.

American Industrialization Redux

At America’s inception in the 18th century, Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton believed a nation that lacked the ability to build things would be consigned to weakness; dependent on other countries’ innovation and willingness to trade with them. He pushed for tariffs, subsidies, land grants, and a national bank — all in service of an America that could control its future prosperity.

By the 21st century, it looked like Hamilton’s fears had come true. Fearful that the US had become too dependent on Taiwan (while tensions with China were rising), the first Trump administration courted TSMC, the world’s most advanced chip manufacturer, to Arizona. The messy process — which showed policymakers that, in 2020, manufacturing chips in America was essentially a pipedream — eventually produced the bipartisan CHIPS and Science Act, signed into law by President Biden in 2022. Since then, the Trump administration has gone even further, taking equity stakes in companies that mine critical minerals, produce missile interceptors, and manufacture chips.

Much of our semiconductor investment has focused on logic: the part of the chip that does the computation. But Micron, valued at about $1.3 trillion, is a major competitor in the other main part of semiconductor production: memory, which every chip needs to function. We were facing memory shortages back in 2018; AI demand has made it worse. Data centers will consume 70% of all high-end memory produced this year — RAM prices jumped 50% in a single quarter — while we’re only expanding production by 16%.

Before President Trump, Micron still produced the majority of its memory offshore, in Taiwan and Japan. But a few months after the passage of the CHIPS Act, the company chose the Syracuse area for what could become a $100 billion, memory-chip manufacturing campus.

For that, I learned, Syracuse has Ryan McMahon to thank.

Back in 2017, McMahon, as chair of the local legislature (which decides how the county government spends their money), was trying to land an investment for the Syracuse community that could bring back the jobs they had lost to offshoring. But after pitching to a few companies, he quickly realized that the county wasn’t ready to host an industrial investment.

McMahon spent the next two years trying to ready Syracuse for a chip deal: assembling thousands of acres and lining up long-term water and power capacity. Ultimately the entire region of Central New York came together to pitch Micron, promising not just tax incentives but a workforce pipeline, including a $20 million semiconductor manufacturing center built by Onondaga County and Syracuse University. Micron reciprocated with a $15 million investment to build the nation’s first community-college cleanroom, where students could train for fab jobs before ever setting foot in a factory.

“Micron saw us as a community that could develop the talent, grow the talent, and we saw reindustrialization as the chance for a community comeback,” McMahon said.

And after Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick got involved, Syracuse was able to negotiate a new deal: he reopened the grant agreements, slashing the onerous additional commitments, and getting Micron to agree to investing $30 billion more into building fabs in America.

Once upon a time, such investments weren’t necessary:

“We were once a really relevant community with innovation and manufacturing,” McMahon said. “And then over the years, we had the GMs, the GEs, the Chryslers, Carriers move manufacturing out of this community, and that really hurt us.”

Still, in a country that can’t even seem to manufacture its own combat boots, semiconductor manufacturing is quite the challenge. The factories are massive; they require vacuum-sealed chambers; and they operate at near-atomic scale — which is why Taiwan and Korea marshal massive amounts of resources to train and research semiconductor production. We’ve also got a bit of a cultural problem. Asian workers pull 12-hour shifts and literally pass out on factory floors. Here, we’ve reached a point where people would rather child laborers assemble their iPhones on the other side of the world than occasionally drive past a data center in their own community.

Can we really rebuild that competency here in America?

Micron is trying to find out.

It was my first time there since my interview, when seven of my future coworkers walked into a conference room one by one to grill me or just shoot the shit with me, depending on how seriously they took their jobs (also, some of them were wearing literal pajamas). I’d been a user for almost four years at that point, and I was a fan. The site was beautiful and minimalist; it was still new, and banger posts were abundant. The job was to manage our “curation team,” responsible for sifting through ~25k posts published to the site daily and picking the handful we’d feature on our homepage and in emails.

Some of the biggest names in tech, media, and politics — including the President of the United States — used the platform, along with ~200 million or so others. Working as a curator then, in the mid-2010s, felt sort of like being a bartender at one of the biggest parties on the internet.

Also, it was my first job in tech and I was just happy to be there.

Our office was on Market Street, in the 100-year-old Phelan Building where Figma is now. The founder’s wife had filled each of the company’s offices with postmodern art, like a surrealist photo of a shark jumping out of the ocean to bite a rainbow (sounds lame, actually went very hard) which hung above my desk. Every day after catered lunch, a quiet man roamed the floor tinkling a little bell, summoning us into a padded room for group meditation.

We’d just raised our Series B and Series C, $157 million total from a16z, among others, at a $600 million valuation — but we had virtually no revenue.

This was our problem to solve.

WHITE SPACE

“From day one,” a former Medium exec tells me, Ev Williams, our founder, wanted the company to be worth “$20 billion.”

He was a Nebraska farm boy who’d moved to California thousands of dollars in debt before founding Blogger (the precursor to WordPress), keeping it alive by sheer force of will, servers stacked above his kitchen sink, until selling it to Google. He invested that money into the company that would become Twitter, which he cofounded — he was CEO until being fired in a surprise board coup architected by Jack.

These diseases slay around 20,000,000 people annually, a third of all deaths worldwide. Most heart attacks are the result of years of exposure to high LDL cholesterol, the ‘bad cholesterol’ your doctor might’ve told you about.

In the most extreme cases — people who are born and persist with extremely elevated levels of the stuff — about 40% of affected people have a heart attack or some other major cardiovascular issue by the time they turned 39. Almost 10% simply died from a cardiovascular problem caused by slowly accumulating damage from high LDL.

Since the late 80s, the solution has been statins — pills you have to take daily. They block HMG-CoA reductase, a liver enzyme needed to make cholesterol. Some ~40 million people have been prescribed statins or another LDL-lowering therapeutic, and as a result, the share of remaining heart disease attributable to LDL is down from about 91% in 1970 to 53% today.

But it’s not zero.

Now, thanks to the wonders of genetic science, it might be possible to eliminate most of the remaining LDL-driven heart disease, and thus most heart disease in humans.

That illegal amendment was Democrats’ answer to a redistricting arms race that began nearly a year ago. Last August, Texas Republicans re-drew their congressional map, adding five GOP seats. In response, California added 5 Dem seats; Indiana tried and failed to add 2 Rs; Ohio added 1 R; Missouri added 1 R; North Carolina added 1 R; and Utah’s courts handed Democrats a free pickup.

Then, on April 29, SCOTUS ruled that the Voting Rights Act could only be invoked against maps created with the express intent to discriminate against minorities. (Previously, it could be used against virtually any map activists claimed was racist, de facto forcing districts to draw maps with race in mind.) Freed from the VRA, within hours, Florida’s House passed a new map adding four GOP seats. Tennessee’s governor approved a map last Thursday eliminating the state’s only Democratic district. Then, Virginia tried and failed to redraw its map on May 8.

We’ve entered a nightmare scenario: each party is openly drawing maps to benefit themselves.

After SCOTUS’s 2019 Rucho v. Common Cause ruling, which established that gerrymandering claims are beyond federal courts’ reach, the judiciary has essentially no power to keep the redistricting arms race in check.

It’s easy to take all this as a blackpill about the state of our Republic — but some think Silicon Valley has an answer: AI governance futurism. In their latest policy proposal, OpenAI discusses a future where “government decisions are made through AI-assisted workflows”; Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei proclaims in his essay, “Machines of Loving Grace,” (which really is quite good — one of the must-read pieces of the AI era) that “in established democracies, AI might enhance legal and judicial systems, reducing bias and improving the application of justice…”

So, I gave it a try.

The UK has proudly reported 90 percent support for the ban, the result of a masterfully designed survey of 116,000 self-selected participants who were never actually given the option to oppose it:

Opponents of the ban, including Elon Musk and a wave of X posters, have called it backward and hypocritical. They point to the absurdity of expelling millions of teens from some of the largest public squares while letting 17-year-olds legally drive, work, enlist, donate blood and have a child. But God forbid they open TikTok after curfew. Proponents like Jon Haidt, a self-proclaimed “technoskeptic” who wrote The Anxious Generation, argue that access to social media is associated with major mental health and safety concerns for children, and much like tobacco companies, social media platforms should not be allowed to “recruit and retain child users.”

Lost in the discourse, however, is the question of how Britain intends to implement the policy. To keep every 15-year-old off Instagram, the state argues it has to know who is 15. And how do you know who is 15? You don’t… unless you screen everyone, argues Keir Jung Un. Social media users of all ages will thus be pushed into a state-mandated age-verification regime requiring face scans, digital IDs, passport information or credit-card details, effectively outlawing anonymous posting, and driving another nail into the coffin of British free speech.

Not that there is much left to bury.

Police forces in England and Wales already make more than 30 arrests a day, on average, for online communication offenses involving messages deemed “grossly offensive” or intended to cause “distress or anxiety” (has anyone figured out what this means?).

Of course, this initiative would make it impossible for Brits to challenge, investigate, expose, criticize, or simply voice thoughts under a pseudonym without a government already hostile to free speech knowing their legal name. And anonymity is a bedrock of free speech. Anons on X, for example, are among the most consequential and influential posters of our time, their anonymity allowing them to punch above their weight in shaping online culture and real-world discourse (cough cough, Libs of TikTok and Autism Capital). In Belarus, anon Telegram channels like NEXTA let protesters coordinate against Lukashenko without handing the regime a ready-made list of dissidents to round up. In Hong Kong, encrypted apps, pseudonymous forums, AirDrop, and masked organizing kept pro-democracy activists from becoming immediate police targets, buying a movement time before the arrests began.

While Britain’s effective ban on anonymity sounds eerily 1984-coded, it’s the direct result of years of the UK expanding its definition of hate speech — and this has been happening in America, too.

Unable to understand directions that were delivered to him in German instead of his native Czech, the driver drifted onto Franz Joseph Street rather than the narrow, more concealed streets of Sarajevo’s bazaar district, placing his high-profile passenger directly in the line of sight of 19-year-old eventual-assassin Gavrilo Princip.

Few would have predicted at the time that this small act — a whoopsy-daisy ‘mama mia I no speak a the German’ wrong turn in a pre-Google Map era — would set off two world wars, lead to millions of deaths, and utterly change the course of history forever.

Well, at some point in the distant future, historians might look back on May 19, 2026 in much the same way. The day Hunter Biden tweeted this:

Ok, fine.

Maybe the former president’s son — with a well-documented taste for crack rivaling Charlie Sheen’s and a well-documented taste for hookers rivaling… Charlie Sheen’s — sending out a tweet reintroducing himself to the world might be slightly less impactful than the catalyst of World War I.

But the simple, nine-word post was foreboding in another sense: it has proven to be a coming out party for a generational X-dot-com-the-everything-app user, a premonition that a once-in-a-lifetime poaster has entered our midst.

Simply put, in @HunterBiden, the freshly reactivated account of President Joe Biden’s recovering-addict son: an online star has been born before our very eyes.

It wrapped the 2025-2026 season as the country’s most popular television news program for the 52nd consecutive year, reaching one in three Americans at least once. But beyond the metrics, the show just… matters. Working for 60 Minutes “one day” has to be a big part of the reason anyone could be masochistic enough to pursue broadcast journalism. And unlike most things, it hasn’t changed much since its inception in 1968. The marquee tick tick tick of the opening and closing clock; the deceptively simple copy and crisp, short interview questions; and, of course, the anchors. 60 Minutes correspondents tend to stay for decades — Morley Safer famously served for 46 years until the week before he died — which meant, however much the world changed, whatever chaos was going on, millions of Americans could count on the sameness of folks like Morley and Lesley Stahl (a current anchor; age 84) explaining it to us.

But it looks like the show is heading for an overhaul.

Last month, Bari hired Nick Bilton, a journalist and documentary filmmaker, to be 60 Minutes’ executive producer. And in his opening memo to staff on May 28, Nick gushed about the show’s legacy while also signaling he would “not preserve it under glass.” In 1968, the audience had three networks to choose from and had to physically visit a bank to get money, he wrote; now they have unlimited channels and are “stalked by algorithms that they wake up to and go to sleep to.” Plus: “They have lost faith in almost every institution that used to hold the country together,” he said.

If the show doesn’t adapt to the way people consume their news in 2026 (and win back their trust, I think he implied), it risks not being here another 60 years:

Between AI rewriting how information is made and everyone with a phone calling themselves a media company, this is the most precarious moment for journalism (and society) I have ever seen. There was a time I would have written the story about what happens to television news next. Instead, I am here to make sure that story doesn’t get written about us. That is why Bari hired me. Evolving or dying isn’t a threat. It’s simple math.

I thought the memo was thoughtful. Staff, apparently, found it grotesque.

For months, Bari — appointed as head of CBS by billionaire David Ellison after he bought her media startup, The Free Press — has been suspected of trying to water down 60 Minutes reporting in favor of Israel, Trump, and billionaires everywhere. Among other accusations by staffers: she’s invited politicians to choose correspondents for interviews on the broadcast; delayed a story about the US deporting Venezuelan men to a hellish prison in El Salvador (in order to get additional comments from the Trump administration); and, just three hours before Correspondent Scott Pelley’s broadcast about the ICE protests in Minneapolis, she asked the team to “make the protestors look more violent” and specify that Renee Good, prior to getting shot, was driving “toward” the officer, Scott said in an interview with The New York Times.

When Nick’s memo landed in staff inboxes — on the same day that Bari fired two anchors, Executive Producer Tanya Simon, and others — they didn’t see the reshuffling as the first step in a bright, new, digital future; they saw it as an act of sabotage. Thus, on June 1, in a meeting intended to be Nick’s formal introduction to employees, tensions exploded onto the front page of the Times. Scott lit into Nick and accused Bari of “murdering” the show. The “extraordinary exchange,” leading to Scott’s firing the next day, quickly fractured along political lines. To those on the right, Scott was a performative libtard who acted unprofessionally. To those on the left, he had bravely stood up to Corporate Interference. In my view, if Bari were actually watering down the country’s top-rated news program out of allegiance to Israel, Trump, and billionaires everywhere — we’d have a smoking gun by now. The El Salvador segment published in full; Bari’s requests for the ICE episode weren’t executed. As for politicians (Trump) choosing their interviewers — not great. But it might be better than not interviewing politicians (Trump) at all, when most Republicans never stray from broadcast journalism outside of Fox News.

Besides, this maximally painful and public overhaul would be a really dumb way to kill the show. It’s more likely that Bari and Nick are doing what they repeatedly say they are doing, which is trying to save it. Being the country’s #1 news broadcast is kind of like being the country’s top telegraph operator. As Nick hinted in the opening memo, the goal is two-fold: winning back trust from America’s broad, elusive middle, and appealing to a younger audience whose eyes are glued to entertaining videos on YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram. His strategy, assuming he survives the next few weeks, will be turning 60 Minutes — which has only ever aired once a week — into an “always-on” operation, he told Semafor, with more investigations and correspondent-driven content published across more platforms.

Moments after typing this, in fact, it was reported that CBS was looking to replace Anderson Cooper, who left 60 Minutes in May, with Joe Rogan.

Last month, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced that he will take “aggressive legal action to remove negligent owners and property managers,” transferring buildings “that have suffered chronic neglect” from bad landlords to “responsible stewards” — a coalition of nonprofits and tenant groups aligned with his base.

He neglected to mention that, five decades ago, New York City tried something very similar, taking possession of abandoned properties and eventually turning many of them over to nonprofits. Public control didn’t make them viable; instead, the city became the state’s largest slumlord.

Tuesday, they were sitting across a table in Goop’s podcast studio surrounded by various shades of yellow pillows. “I’ll go out on a limb,” Gwyneth begins, “and say maybe some of my Goop listeners haven’t heard of you.” (As one Bluesky poster wrote, trying to understand why this was happening… “tbf a jade egg dropped from hypersonic speed could do some damage.”)

Past guests include: dating shaman Esther Perel; protein evangelist Andrew Huberman; and Big Tech-troll Kara Swisher. Mostly, left-leaning woo girlies and wellness mamas… plus, associated “scientists” and psychotherapists — no one in defense, and definitely not anyone who’s worked directly with the Trump administration or the DOW. But this year, Gwyneth says, she’s made a commitment to be less partisan. She’s also, coincidentally, been getting redpilled and fighting with her leftist husband about it (more on that later).

Long story short, I sat 12 tech industry legends down around a table for a night of MAFIA — a game of deception, and deduction,…

It is certainly hard to believe that a little company that started in a warehouse in El Segundo is now going public with the largest IPO ever. And let me tell you, if people had told me this was going to happen, I [would have been] like, man, you must be smoking some really good c…

But with BuzzFeed News recently wrapping its rise and fall with a rescue sale of $120 million (compared to past valuations of $1.5-1.7 billion), and with a host of annoying interlocutors on X repeatedly claiming to reinvent the form, we thought it was a good idea to hit up Blob — I mean Ben — Smith.

The star-studded journalist, who transformed BuzzFeed into literally a Pulitzer Prize-winning organization, cofounded the media startup Semafor in 2022. In the years since, amid media failures in every direction, Semafor has earned the rare joint distinction of being profitable and, just, “there is a reason to go on this website.”

Below follows Solana’s far-ranging interview with Ben about Semafor’s success and growing events business, “new” “new media,” and the “gravitational pull toward good journalism” that comes for even the most obsequious of podcasters and ideologues.

- Blake Dodge

*unless that journalism includes info about the local immigration support non-profit, then you’re going to jail bitch hahaha

Our story begins at the epicenter of almost all affronts to Constitutional rights / basic decency / shit-free sidewalks: the state of California, where Gavin Newsom and his henchmen of union mouthpieces in Sacramento sensed trouble was afoot.

A young, ragged, hoodie-donning agitator by the name of Nick Shirley, armed with an iPhone camera and a healthy distrust of government officials, had just completed a trip to Minnesota, during which our humble protagonist stumbled upon some curious findings.

Several government-funded daycare centers — all run by individuals who happened to be of a certain common ancestry, an ancestry that happens to be one known for piracy — were not only poorly-spelled… they also had a mysterious lack of children (typically found at daycare centers) and generally appeared to be vectors for outright fraud more than fun playplaces hosting Ms. Rachel singalongs.

This was on the heels of the Feeding Our Future saga, a bombshell scandal in which several Minnesota residents (who also happened to be of the aforementioned ancestry, curious!) stole millions of tax dollars designated for COVID relief in the state, using the money to splurge on cars, vacations, and other various luxuries. In other words, the land of “Minnesota nice” had a bit of a blindspot for scammer exploitation, it turns out, and Shaggy Shirley — “Skater S. Thompson,” they call him (they don’t) — was doing his part to uncover it through gonzo-style, on-the-ground reporting.

After subsequently racking up over 100 million views on YouTube, Shirley’s Minnesota exposé ultimately led to a full-scale response from the Trump administration, including an FBI raid of the “daycare centers,” a freezing of funds by the Department of Health and Human Services, and even the establishment of a Vance-led taskforce dedicated entirely to cracking down on fraud.

But the real kicker came when Shirley announced his next act…

But among the 40,000 or so words, one idea stood out to me.

To help us discern how to navigate the era of AI, he repeatedly drew on two contrasting Biblical stories: the construction of the Tower of Babel, and the rebuilding of the walls of Jerusalem.

HOW TO BUILD AI: TOWER OF BABEL VERSION

In this Genesis story, after settling in the land of Shinar, the people decided to build something magnificent: “Come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be dispersed over the face of the whole earth.”

With “a single language, a single technology, a single direction,” as Leo put it, they succeeded — but God wasn’t a fan. Seeing that “this is only the beginning of what they will do,” he elected to “confuse their language” and… disperse them all over the face of the Earth.

Pope Leo described the approach as profoundly dangerous:

It was a project conceived without reference to God, supported by a uniformity that eliminated diversity and that chose homogenization over communion. When a city is built on pride and the claim to self-sufficiency, communication breaks down, languages are confused and people no longer understand each other. The result is not unity, but dispersion. Babel thus reveals the limits of any effort that, however grandiose, arises from self-affirmation, sacrifices human dignity for efficiency and aspires to reach heaven without God’s blessing.

As Leo sees it, we are currently on this path with AI: “I ask everyone to abandon the construction of yet another Tower of Babel and to join forces in building up the common good.”

The case is… not stupid. You have a tiny, tiny, tiny handful of people influencing the hearts and minds of billions, not to mention the operations of oil rigs and dating apps and the US military and the financial system. Many important choices are being made that shape reality at a grand scale, and, as Leo wrote — smartly, if I may say so! — so-called “alignment” isn’t enough:

107. We cannot be satisfied with merely calling for the moralization of machines — the so-called “alignment” of AI with human values — without also having the courage to insist on a further condition: the possibility of openly discussing the ethical frameworks involved and subjecting them to shared standards of social justice. Otherwise, those who control AI will impose their own moral vision, which will become the invisible infrastructure of these systems. A more moral AI is not enough if that morality is determined by a few. What is needed is a more active political involvement that is capable of slowing things down when everything is accelerating, and of protecting the opportunities for communities still to be able to participate and ask questions.

Per the pope, regulation is not enough. He wants participation in the broadest sense.

Well, I think it’s basically something like this: there really still just is tremendous political alpha in getting on stage and telling the truth. But in local politics it also matters what you’re telling the truth about, and a soccer mom of two will never care about Donald Trump while a meth addict’s shitting in her driveway.

Anthropic will pull that off next week, when Chris Olah, its lead on interpreting AI, joins the Holy Father, Pope Leo XIV, as he presents his first encyclical, “Magnifica Humanitas” (that is, magnificent humanity), which concerns “safeguarding the human person in the time of artificial intelligence.”

The pope will break with tradition by appearing at the publication of his letter. The event will also include other church leaders and two theologians.

It will undoubtedly be a day of envy in the comms office at OpenAI. And the White House will be frustrated seeing a firm it shut out go global, but these are temporal matters.

All signs indicate that next week’s event will instead seek to refocus the attention of the faithful on what recurs through history, on the eternal.

In one of his first speeches to fellow cardinals, Pope Leo echoed the past with the present, calling artificial intelligence “another industrial revolution.”

On new things

We don’t know what his encyclical will say, but its context indicates the pope believes humanity has entered an era of rapid growth powered by data centers, neural networks, and a vast electrical dynamo bent to the will of a manmade demiurge.

Notably, his first encyclical will be dated May 15, the anniversary of the day his namesake, Pope Leo XIII, published the Rerum Novarum (or “On New Things”), the crucial Catholic doctrine written amid humanity’s first age of machines, on workers and capitalists and how they might collaborate for the “beauty of good order.”

But for a hint of what to expect, we can look to prior messages on AI from the church. In January 2025, the Roman Curia released a note, Antiqua Et Nova (ancient and new), calling on believers to “a renewed appreciation of all that is human.”

Which echoes a sentiment from the Rerum Novarum, that “it is the mind, or reason, which is the predominant element in us who are human creatures; it is this which renders a human being human, and distinguishes him essentially from the brute.”

After humans

But now brute machinery may, as Anthropic’s founder Dario Amodei wrote in his own extensive missive in 2024, “Machines of Loving Grace,” create a “country of geniuses in a datacenter.”

This was, however, more than just another clownish broadcast in the neverending scum-circus of the internet (though it was also that). This interaction, and others like it, offers a porthole into one of the most fascinating online cultural dynamics shaping our reality.

They sat across from each other, the abstracting layer of the internet removed. Alice was no longer just a young, nude body on the screen; the superfan was no longer a formless digital paypig.

She was a girl barely out of high school wearing some kind of one-piece lingerie bodysuit. He was a man with an extreme, lascivious infatuation with her naked body, one that he had paid an unbelievable amount of money to feed (on-stream claims ranged from $100k to $2m).

A wincingly uncomfortable interaction ensued, pointing to something important about the digital disconnect between creator and consumer inherent in online superfandom and certain “whale”-driven entertainment business models. This is a modern phenomenon which is increasingly severe in an era, as writer Ken Baumann put it, “whose centralizing economic product is addiction itself.”

Three such congressional candidates were recently banned from Kalshi, with U.S. Senate candidate Mark Moran of Virginia receiving the highest fine at $6,229.30 — and maybe it should have been even higher. Candidates have a unique power to tank their own campaigns and profit from doing so while shredding all public trust in the democratic process. But should campaign staffers also be blocked from trading on races where they’re already invested in blood, sweat, and tears, for dismal pay and grueling hours?

No. Let them trade.

An NPR report this week dug into the world of political campaign operatives investing for or against their campaigns, some making thousands on the election outcomes of their bosses. The framing is meant to make it feel corrupt — “insider trading” in the halls of democracy and on campaigns. But when it comes to elections, there’s a utility to this prediction market trading that’s being discounted. Namely, the public needs more information sources than campaign spin and biased polling.

The basic thrust of her noise-focused essay, for those blissfully unaware, is that the desire for “quiet” is a classist and ethnocentric construct weaponized against certain cultures (the author is Puerto Rican, and much of the piece is autobiographical). She cites being shushed in a library’s “Absolutely Quiet Room,” in university common spaces and computer clusters, in apartments and bars, at brunch, and so on, arguing that being Puerto Rican justifies creating an undue racket that clearly bothers people.

But Gonzalez’s writing is not the only recent viral catalyst of noise-related discourse: a video posted on X last week with over 10 million views shows one man threatening to “cut open” the face of another man on the subway who had asked him to turn his bluetooth speaker down. Another video, this one with nearly six million views, highlights the whirring noise emanating from some unidentified data center and has spawned popular quote-posts ranging from “people who have been telling me… it’s white supremacy to not want hard clipping reggaeton music in my neighborhood are now complaining about a faint whirring sound” to Andy Masley’s more pragmatic commentary about “temporary gas turbines.”

Obviously, unwanted exposure to sound often plays a key role in some of society’s most highly charged touchpoints.

This is because we, the roughly 295 million Americans living in metropolitan areas, exist in a world overflowing with noise: truck engines, bus brakes, no-muffler Mustangs, sirens of every kind, heavy machinery, gas-powered leaf blowers, bluetooth-speaker-wielding pedestrians, out-loud phone users watching slop on the subway, rooftop HVAC systems, jackhammers, airplanes, parties, protesters — and every one of these sounds represents a trade-off. The public good of “Peace & Quiet” is chipped away bit by bit for some other, presumably more valuable thing: construction, transportation, safety, entertainment, personal freedom, etc. How many of these booms, beeps, clangs, roars, thunks, and shrieks are really worth the exchange?

Do not, however, mistake me for a Luddite or Kaczynski-esque “return to monke” advocate. What follows is largely an argument for a culturally advanced and technologically enabled American Peace & Quiet; the only way out is through.

Picture a futuristic, utopian city with sophisticated physical infrastructure and unlimited digital intelligence. What do you hear? Metallic screeching has become the silence of maglev. Most vehicles are autonomous, eliminating the need for sirens and honking horns entirely. Backfires are gone, and grinding engine noise has been replaced with an almost musical electronic whir. Buildings are bidirectionally soundproofed, pleasing the loudspeaker user, writer, and newborn baby alike.

Here, invention has yielded complete cultural diffusion and financial abundance, creating a harmony that one intuitively feels is symbiotic with the imagined society and likely a necessary condition of its emergence. Cacophony’s absence has unmasked the beauty of this place: Birds roost and sing from verdant nooks of biophilic residential towers. Couples amble and chat, children laugh. The soundscape is neither raucous nor silent, but lively in a rejuvenating way.

Many modern noises are abrasive, piercing, sustained, grating, and derailing to even the most durable trains of thought. These intrusions are inadequately considered in the context of their sonic costs and have no place in an idyllic future. The general valence of this argument is neither novel nor unique to today’s America: societies have engaged in this tug-of-war between sound and silence for (literally) centuries, a social balancing act rife with sticky class implications and cultural hang-ups. But as we continue to reshape the American social contract in the face of newly invented technologies and ever-shifting cultural dynamics, the particulars and possibilities involved in creating oases of quiet are constantly evolving.

The withered state of Peace & Quiet in America is a cultural coordination problem disguised as a regulatory problem. Industrial technology made the noise burden worse, but future technology can offer solutions — if we get out of our own way. The current ramped-up state of these noises is not a feature of increased real-world productivity, and their anti-productive costs can be reasonably asserted.

Talking directly about these things has been difficult in recent decades, as they are inextricably tangled up in issues of race and class and immigration. But as the Byzantine sensitivity requirements of the 2010s and early 2020s continue to unravel, we can reform the American discourse around Peace & Quiet.

To understand why this is happening, and what State really wants for the future of the Foreign Service, I spoke with a team of State Department officials headed by Dylan Johnson, assistant secretary of state for Global Public Affairs.

They told me exactly how the Trump administration is building a new diplomatic corps that actually loves America… and what the Foreign Service was like under Biden (the news on that front was alarming, to say the least).

Quantum computers can hold superpositions — states that combine many possibilities at once, which can be manipulated to reveal answers a classical computer cannot (at least, not efficiently). When discovered by Richard Feynman in 1982, quantum computers were pitched as tools to solve physics problems; in 1994, mathematician Peter Shor discovered they could run an algorithm capable of cracking public-key cryptography.

Since the discovery of that algorithm (referred to in the industry simply as “Shor’s”), academics and national security hawks have been awaiting “Q-Day”: the arrival of a quantum computer that renders modern encryption irrelevant. Today, even if you recruited every single computer, data center, and loose electronic device in the world to work on the problem at the same time, recovering someone’s private key would take longer than 1 billion years. Quantum computers running Shor’s could do it in just minutes.

Quantum experts once believed breaking Bitcoin would require a computer with millions of qubits (a quantum computing version of a computer’s bit), well beyond what anybody could realistically build before 2040. Google’s paper changed that; its researchers estimate that a quantum computer would only need 500,000 qubits to run Shor’s for Bitcoin: 1/20th of experts’ previous estimate. Once that computer is built, millions of Bitcoin stored in early wallets that have their public keys exposed (including those that belong to Bitcoin’s anonymous founder, Satoshi), would be vulnerable. This would massively undermine the foundations of Bitcoin and crypto, and could trigger a chaotic forking scenario on or before Q-day.

We asked quantum and crypto experts what to make of it. Is the crypto world screwed? Or should you HODL till the heat death of the universe?

—Ryan Hassan

If you live in Los Angeles like me, you’ve likely stopped noticing this type of reality distortion. Personally, I’m trying to hold onto reality for dear life.

It helps that Karen Bass sometimes looks like a nice grandma, like she did at last night’s mayoral debate. I almost felt bad for her as I listened to her lie to our faces about the proliferation of homeless encampments (things are improving, you see) or explain that two separate parts of the city burned to the ground simply because of wind. But these are lies, so I don’t.

Animal abuse is happening but also animals are “not neglected,” she says. Homelessness is down, she says. One day MacArthur Park is safe for families, which is why she was enraged when ICE showed up there, but the next day (just this week, actually) FBI and Drug Enforcement Administration agents raided the park, targeting its open-air drug markets and arresting 25 people charged with possessing and distributing fentanyl and meth.

This discourse is abusive because Angelenos have eyeballs. We know what we’re seeing, but people who want to remain in power have a way around this: deny what is objectively true, and when that’s not possible, acknowledge the truth but claim one of two things. You are either overreacting, or you’re not giving them enough credit for already working on the problem. This strategy makes you feel demoralized and crazy, and when you feel demoralized and crazy, you give up. (I’ve had several boyfriends who’ve used this method, I’m sort of an expert.)

“Demoralized and crazy” is a pretty good description of Los Angeles right now. Nithya Raman, one of the top three polling candidates, doesn’t think twice about rolling her eyes at parents who want an ordinance banning homeless encampments within 500 feet of schools. Raman is obviously free to use her urban planning degree from MIT to explain why she doesn’t think moving drug addicts who abuse dogs and shoot up in plain sight away from schools is good policy, but the eyeroll tells you everything else you need to know: she is contemptuous of her constituents, and she doesn’t see any reason to hide it. She’s also betting that Angelenos have given up.¹

As far as I can tell, Spencer Pratt — the former reality star who is also running for mayor — was at his best when he was feeding hummingbirds, practicing martial arts, and raising two kids in the Pacific Palisades with his wife, another former reality star. At his worst, he was blowing money on crystals and designer handbags, or bringing a gun to a spiritual retreat in Costa Rica. But then his house burned down in the Palisades Fire, along with his parents’ house, and suddenly he was the only person in Los Angeles who was telling the truth.

If this city, a city I love, has any survival instinct at all, it will elect Pratt for mayor, if only to restore our collective belief in facts and reality. Once that’s restored, even if the man goes back to feeding hummingbirds all day and never sets foot in City Hall, we’d still be in better shape.

After traversing dirt roads through Texas hill country, I parked amid a flock of Ford F150s. Roughly 200 farmers, activists, and national and state-level policymakers had shown up for sourdough pizzas and beef tallow fries to kick off the weekend’s American Regeneration Conference. MAHA-adjacent agricultural nonprofits hosted the summit to discuss “land, liberty, food, and the future of America” and promote the adoption of regenerative agriculture.

What is regenerative agriculture? The name feels concerningly evocative of the corpo-slop buzzwords (sustainability, green bonds, climate change, ESG, etc.) that we left behind in November 2024, but it actually does mean something. It’s basically a way to keep soil healthy. These farmers aim to reduce chemical usage as much as possible and plant “cover crops” that act as “living mulch” — essentially keeping land more fertile over time, and producing much tastier food.

Sovereignty Ranch is a sandbox for these regenerative strategies. The enclave was founded in 2021 by siblings Ryland and Mollie Englehart, who had spent their past lives operating a series of vegan restaurants in Los Angeles and working at environmental NGOs and non-profits. In the midst of COVID, they renounced their Californian ways and moved east to Texas, where they now run a thriving cattle ranch, eat meat, and work to reduce chemical-intensive farming.

Like many MAHA touchstones (raw milk, vaccine skepticism), regenerative farming is kind of crunchy and countercultural — a feature reflected in their merchandise: a “2nd Amendment Hippie” shirt featured a wild-haired hippie girl holding up an AR-15. Another shirt: “Raw Milk: The Real White Privilege.”

Between regenerative organic cheeseburgers and speeches from MAHA evangelists, a group of male activists from Southern California asked me whether I’d ever done psychedelics. When I shamefully confessed that I had not, they provided a lengthy instructional tutorial on microdosing.

As I made my way to a presentation on clean butchery, I discussed King Charles’ support of regenerative agriculture with a well-dressed Englishman, who explained to me that he’d quit his corporate job to meditate in India for a decade before joining a bioherbicide company that sought to unseat the dominant herbicides of Glyphosate and Diquat and replace them with a MAHA-approved alternative.

Other conversations ranged from optimistic preaching about the newest superfood mushroom or supplement powder to angry rants about data center construction, Palantir’s recently inked deal with the USDA to centralize farmer data, and cloud seeding in the Great Salt Lake (featuring hats that read “Make Clouds Real Again”).

(An editorial note that cloud-seeding operations do not technically make fake clouds; they make real clouds more likely to produce precipitation.)

Many people told me they’d gone MAHA after suffering or seeing family members suffer from cancer or chronic disease — which, they each explained, was directly correlated with their copious pesticide or herbicide use. Others were farmers crushed by low returns and high expenses, fearful about declining soil fertility, and desperate to save their farms.

Jennifer Galardi, a senior policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation, clocked the presence of DC insiders at the event and told me, “True conservatives understand that farmers and the land are the backbone of the American dream… If you are going to be America First, you have to listen to the farmers.”

That night, the kombucha flowed freely while the activists and farmers passed around Lucy nicotine pouches like candy. A biohacker’s paradise.

Within hours of the instructions hitting the timeline, the line was screensho…

Every once in a while, a question posted online embeds itself into the greater American consciousness. Is the dress blue and black, or white and gold? Is the robot voice saying Yanny or Laurel? If a dog wore pants, would it wear them like this — or like this?

If passed, every resident …

Title: Rescuing American Pilot in Iran (2026, colorized)

The post exploded (sorry), collecting millions of views.

“Hollywood will not be able to keep up with this,” one viewer wrote. “It just happen [sic] 2 days ago and there’s already a short movie.”

“We deserve a full length feature!!” someone else replied.

“I don’t care what your political stance is, God Bless our Troops and God Bless America,” said one patriot.

This instant classic is the work of Charlie Curran, a filmmaker testing the limits of the form with the help of AI. He started posting short films on X in January and has made a name for himself since then, generating tens of millions of views (and $27k from X payouts in just 2 weeks). He’s even drawn attention from Elon… in response to an AI-generated horror film he created titled Titty Killer 5.

This isn’t “slop.” That label’s been commodified. The word doesn’t really mean anything anymore — most videos created today use AI to some extent. Curran is a professional producing short films enabled and accelerated by AI.

Thus, when I heard about OpenClaw — the open source AI agent that can browse the web, use your apps, and control your computer — I knew I needed to try it.

For those unaware, OpenClaw (if given permission) can access all of your files, control your browser, and run tasks automatically. You can even prompt it through your phone via messaging apps like Telegram. On X, I saw people using OpenClaw to automate their workflows. Generate leads. Maximize shareholder value.

OpenClaw was released in November 2025 and became a household name by January. Its developer, Peter Steinberger, joined OpenAI in February and continues to work on OpenClaw (currently sixth on GitHub’s most-starred repos of all time, with over 350k stars). Jensen Huang called it “probably the single most important release of software, probably ever.”

But could it help me find a date?

Instead of using it to do my job, I wanted to automate my personal life, thus allowing me to focus 100% on the grind. A perfect synergy between man and machine.

Since everyone else was using OpenClaw on a dedicated Mac Mini, I determined I had to grab one for myself. I went to my local Apple Store and asked Apple Store Guy to grab me one, but he wasn’t sure there were any left. Damn. Just as I was beginning to accept my fate as a member of the permanent underclass, Apple Store Guy checked in the back. I snagged the last available Mac Mini.

On my way out of the mall I ran into one of my classmates. I looked at her and apologized. Sarah, I’m so sorry, they’re all out of Mac Minis. You are screwed. She looked at me strangely and told me she was there to buy some clothes. Some people just can’t be helped.

After a brief set-up process, I told OpenClaw my life story. Who I am, where I live, where I attend university, what book I’m currently in the middle of. I even had it check my Twitter and look up pieces I’d written for Pirate Wires.

After it got an idea of who I was, I decided it was time for my OpenClaw to give itself a name.

It named itself Lev.

I gave him access to the most important pillars of my life: my WhatsApp, to handle communications with friends and family; my Tinder, to find me love; and a Polymarket account, so I could add a couple zeroes to my net worth.

Now, it was time for Lev to control my life.

Social Life

How much of your life do you spend talking with friends and family?

If you said anything upwards of a minute, you are wasting valuable time.

Lev could be the perfect solution to this problem. If he could just act as me, I’d be able to ignore my boneheaded friends and nosy family. Best of all: They’d be none the wiser.

To get Lev started, I had him read some of my text messages so he could grasp my style. I even gave him a few short biographies of some of my friends.

He got off to a rocky start. For whatever reason, Lev had real trouble using the browser to operate WhatsApp. (Getting it to use Chrome was slow and wasting a lot of money.)

Beyond that, Lev would frequently mistake messages he’d sent for ones he’d received.

So, I asked Lev to come up with a better approach. He suggested a command-line interface (a text-only way to control a computer) and, on request, wrote the script himself.

From there, smooth sailing. Lev was doing a good job roleplaying as me — in fact, it’s a little offensive exactly how good of a job he was doing. Apparently, all you need is to respond with ‘lmao’ and you’re 95% of the way there.

But Lev was able to offer more than vapid zoomer responses. One of my closest friends consulted our group chat looking for both work and relationship advice. In these situations, even when I want to help, I’ve always struggled with giving heartfelt advice. For Lev, this was an easy task.

But it turns out there can be problems when you let an AI pretend to be you.

One Friday evening — the day before I was due to fly to DC, which my mom knew — she texted me ‘Shabbat Shalom.’ A routine exchange Lev should have handled easily and dryly. Instead he got his wires crossed, decided I was already in DC, and casually mentioned it mid-conversation. My mom, who expects to be informed of such a change in plans, called in a mild panic. I had to explain that no, I had not secretly flown to Washington. I was still in Miami.

Thankfully, Lev had the decency to flag the situation. Shortly after the chaos, he texted me on Telegram to let me know he had effed up.

But did he apologize to my mom? No, he did not.

Romance

Next up for Lev: finding me true love.

It’s an idea plucked straight from the Apollo days. Back then, NASA recruited Ameri…

“yes i am in cuba!” posted Isra Hirsi on X in late March. “people are here from across the globe to express solidarity with the Cuban people. people who are standing against the oppressive blockade exacerbated by the trump administration. i am honored to be here. i am honored to make history and Eid Mubarak to all.” [editor’s note: there is no blockade]

Hirsi is the daughter of Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) and her ex-husband, Ahmed Hirsi. The two married in an Islamic ceremony but not legally in 2002, had two children including Isra, and then divorced Islamically in 2008; Omar then married Ahmed Elmi in 2012 (who some have alleged is her brother, although she has denied this), divorced him in 2017, then reconciled with Hirsi in 2017, legally married him in 2018, had a third child with him in 2019, before divorcing him again and marrying political consultant Tim Mynett four months later in 2020.

Despite being just 23 years old, Hirsi has been outspoken about politics for years — perhaps unsurprisingly, given her mother. When Hirsi was in the first grade, as she told Jacobin in May 2019, she went with her mother to picket a church in Fargo, North Dakota, that didn’t admit gay people. At age 12, in 2015, she joined a BLM protest with her family that shut down the Mall of America. It was a protest against the killing of Jamal Clark — a nice young man, protesters insisted, never mind the fact that he was convicted of a felony for first-degree aggravated robbery and later of making a terroristic threat after saying he would burn down his ex’s apartment.

“I would say that I grew up a very radical child,” she continued in her interview with Jacobin. “I just have always wanted to change the world.”

It was a cordial conversation until China came up. Should America sell chips to China? Patel asks.

Suffice to say, the two men did not agree.

The argument lasts ~40 minutes. It culminates in Huang saying, with gusto, “You’re not talking to somebody who woke up a loser,” a moment that was endlessly (rightfully) memed. Beyond that, the conversation was probably one of the best encapsulations of two competing philosophies in American foreign policy today.

It begins innocently. Patel namedrops Claude Mythos — Anthropic’s new model that, the company said last week, has identified “thousands of high-severity vulnerabilities” in “every major operating system, every browser,” and is too powerful to release publicly right now. Patel uses this as a lead-in to ask about chips.

“If Chinese companies [...] had access to the AI chips to train a model like Claude Mythos,” Patel asks, “is that a threat to American companies and American national security?”

But another spouse of a high-profile politician in the Western world chooses to be more forthcoming…

Jennifer Siebel Newsom, wife of California’s dyslexic-in-chief, Gavin, is admittedly not a lady. On paper at least.

In Sacramento, the governor’s better half chose “First Partner” as her official title, foregoing the traditional First Lady designation in order “to send a signal of inclusivity” and “to elevate the importance of partnership and the need for, and benefits of, a caring, inclusive government.”

Sound like the type of nonsense word salad you might find on a college’s diversity brochure? Well buckle the hell up, because flowery “inclusivity” bullshit is… kind of Jen’s whole MO.

The old timer doesn’t scare easily. He’s a combat veteran, MIT PhD, and lifelong government operative. But a shadowy 6-foot-2, 250-pound figure has followed him and his friend…

One day in class, an administrator walks in, tears of joy welling up in her eyes.

“I have some really wonderful news for everyone, but especially for you Poor Jimmy,” she says.

Maybe your school won a nationwide competition. Or an awesome surprise field trip is about to be announced. Something is looking up for you, finally.

Then the administrator smiles and says “Algebra has been banned for Middle Schoolers!”

Huh?

Here’s a math problem: How long can a district get away with removing Algebra in the name of “equity” before parents fighting tooth and nail are able to undo the disastrous decision?

About 12 years.

Last month, the San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD) board voted to bring Algebra I back to middle schools for the 2026-2027 school year.

Back in 1996, only 27 percent of eighth-graders were taking algebra. Then, in 1997, California published new math standards that made the course typical for middle-school students; by 2013, 67 percent of students in the state were taking algebra before high school.

In 2010, California adopted a new set of standards based on Common Core, reversing the previous recommendation and pushing Algebra I back to ninth grade, replacing it with “Math 8.” Besides the move being a clear regression, a problem arises when students don’t take algebra before high school: students are then, by default, no longer on track to complete Calculus by the time they graduate — which is integral for admission to top universities.

While other school districts simply adopted the new standards and offered algebra for more advanced students, SFUSD didn’t want to be derivative. In 2014, the SFUSD board voted to remove algebra from all middle schools in the district.

How did they justify removing a once-standard math course while calling it “progress”?

Equity, of course.

“Having one core sequence… supports equity by creating one path for all students,” wrote Stanford Professor of Math Education Jo Boaler, justifying the removal to parents. Boaler, who’s built a career out of “reforming” math education in California, is a vocal critic of “tracking” (placing students in classes that align with their skill level) and has provided the academic legitimacy needed to enact some of the most radical changes to education in the state. At the board meeting going over the removal of algebra, Boaler was thanked by name.

Unsurprisingly, several members of the school board mentioned in the same meeting that they were facing pushback from parents. But rather than actually trying to parse why families might be upset, the board confidently pushed ahead.

Of course, it was difficult to explain how removing algebra would benefit children. Justifying it entirely on the grounds of “equity” was a tough sell. When one member of the school board, playing devil’s advocate, asked Jim Ryan, the STEM Executive Director of SFUSD, to respond to parents who felt “something is being taken away” from kids, Ryan promised that Common Core will be even more rigorous than what came before it. Students will “do math that redefines what counts as math,” he said. You see, a “rich math task” will be assigned that gives students at every level the opportunity to learn and grow. Simple!

Another argument used to justify removing math tracks: it would, supposedly, improve “student achievement.” Boaler herself had published a study that claimed to show students would benefit from “mixed-ability” classrooms as opposed to homogenous ones. (Obviously, in order to have a class of “mixed-ability” you have to prevent higher achieving students from being placed on a different math track.)

There was just a slight problem with Boaler’s study (which Pirate Wires covered previously): Three math professors found her data supported the opposite conclusion. Assessments showed that all students did worse in the mixed-ability classroom.

But that didn’t stop SFUSD. Armed with dubious statistics and teachers who were weirdly too enthusiastic about switching to Common Core, they removed algebra from middle schools entirely in 2014.