This week on my podcast, I read Post-political, a recent essay from my Pluralistic newsletter, about the material, irreconcilable differences between leftism and other political beliefs.

But when it comes to a “post-politics that is neither right nor left,” the definition I turn to most often comes from science fiction writer Steven Brust, who once told me:

“Left” and “right” have had the same meaning since the French Revolution. If you want to know if someone is on the left or the right, ask them, “What is more important: human rights or property rights?” If they say “Property rights are a human right,” then they are on the right.

That’s it. That’s the crux. If you think that property rights are a tool for achieving human rights, then you’re on the left. You might support the right of farmers to block attempts to expropriate them via eminent domain in order to build a data center, or the right of people to not have their homes or devices searched by cops, or a library’s right to own and archive digital books, even if the publishers insist that ebooks are never “sold,” merely “licensed.”

MP3

Last week, House Democrats voted on an amendment that would have cut $3.3 billion in annual US military aid to Israel from a State Department funding bill. The amendment was brought to the floor by Rep. Thomas Massie, an outgoing Republican from Kentucky. It failed 314-104, but 103 Democrats — nearly half of the House Democratic caucus — supported it, signaling a significant shift in the party’s longstanding support for aid to Israel.

In 2024, a similar vote came up in the House to cut military aid to Israel. Then, just 37 House Democrats voted for the measure. Now, two years later, 103 House Democrats voted to cut funding. That shift in support was accelerated after the October 7 Hamas attacks and Israel’s subsequent military campaign in Gaza, which has killed large numbers of Palestinian civilians. The debate is also playing out in Democratic primaries across the country. In New York and Colorado, Democratic socialist candidates who have sharply criticized Israel and opposed continued US military aid recently won House primaries.

Historically, Jewish Americans have overwhelmingly identified with and voted for the Democratic Party, while Democratic lawmakers have generally supported Israel and US military assistance to the country. In 2016, the Obama administration signed a 10-year memorandum of understanding (MOU) with Israel, committing the US to seek $38 billion in military assistance for fiscal years 2019 through 2028. Congress must vote to approve this funding, so the shift in Democratic support of Israel could have real consequences.

There is still a very strong support for Israel among many House Democrats, but the shifting views are notable. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries opposed the Massie amendment, arguing that it was overly broad and could jeopardize humanitarian assistance. But in a letter addressed to his House colleagues he also called for a “major reset” in US policy toward what he described as Israel’s “far-right Netanyahu government.”

Today, Explained host Sean Rameswaram spoke with Democratic Rep. Brad Schneider, who represents Illinois’s 10th Congressional District, and remains a strong supporter of Israel.

Below is an excerpt of the conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify. 

Can you walk us through last week’s vote? You voted against the measure to cut aid to Israel, and a lot of your colleagues obviously did not. How did that play out for you?

Growing up in the ’60s, ’70s, and for the last 65 years, I fundamentally believe that the US-Israel relationship is important. I also believe that the aspiration for peace in the Middle East, not just between Israelis and Palestinians, but broadly throughout the region, is something that is in the United States’s interest and the interest of the people in the region. So this is not a new issue to me, and it’s something I thought long and hard about. 

Tom Massie doesn’t believe any of that. His intentions with this amendment were anything but pure. It was hastily crafted and poorly written. And one of the biggest issues with it is not only does it [not] address this 10-year memorandum of understanding, something negotiated by President Obama eight years ago, but there are also two years left on the MOU. 

It was a messaging bill and nothing more, and it was a negative message. I voted no because I think if we’re going to move toward peace, we need to do so in a constructive way. A lot of my colleagues were saying we need to send a message to the Netanyahu government.

“I have to hold onto that optimism for the prospects of peace because the alternative is too dark.”

I’ve been extremely critical of this government, their failure to address the settler violence in the West Bank, the failure to plan for a day-after in Gaza following what was a horrific war. If we’re going to move towards peace, if we’re going to find a path where Israelis and Palestinians can live side by side and the region can have the peace they deserve. Because we’re not just talking about Israelis and Palestinians; there’s progress being made between Lebanon and Israel in giving Lebanon, the people of Lebanon, the liberty and freedom they all deserve. 

Can I ask you if you still take money from AIPAC? And if so, how much?

I appreciate the support I get from people who care about the issues that I advocate for. So people who are pro-Israel, pro-US-Israel relationship are likely to support me because I’m pro-US-Israel, pro-US-Israel relationship. I’m also pro-addressing gun safety and reducing gun violence in this country. So I get the support of those groups. The support I get doesn’t determine my positions. I think my positions determine who supports me. 

Has your position on Israel shifted at all since October 7th, or at any point in your political career? And if so, can you tell us how?

So my position hasn’t changed because I’ve always been committed to promoting peace between Israelis and Palestinians and finding a path where both can live together, which I believe ultimately is two states: a Jewish democratic state of Israel, and a Palestinian state living side by side. My frustration with the current Israeli government has grown and continues to grow. Every conversation I have with them, whether it’s the US ambassador to Israel, whom I’ve had the privilege of working with many times, or my meetings with Prime Minister Netanyahu. I’ve had an engagement with the prime minister going back now for almost 30 years. But in the last several years, every single conversation I have with them talks about the need to address settler violence, the need to get humanitarian aid.

One of the things that I am proud of and will say loudly and proudly is that immediately after October 7th, as the war began, my team and I worked hard to push for humanitarian aid into Gaza to do everything we could to make sure that the civilians who were always caught in the middle of any war wouldn’t suffer more than they did. And the suffering was horrific. And I did challenge Israel when they made what I’ll call ill-conceived, ill-advised, in some cases illegal decisions to deprive humanitarian relief from entering Gaza. We pushed hard, and we worked with the Egyptians to get the Rafah crossing open. We pushed the Israelis to open the Karam Shalom crossing. And to not just get aid to those crossings, but get aid into and across the territories within Gaza.

Why are you so optimistic about the situation? 

I am always going to be optimistic. I have to hold onto that optimism for the prospects of peace because the alternative is too dark. And let’s separate the issue for folks living in the region and the folks living here. And for the Israelis and Palestinians, these are two peoples who are totally traumatized — traumatized not just over the last couple of years, but for decades. So I recognize the trauma that Israelis have and are experiencing, and I recognize the trauma that the Palestinians have and are experiencing. And that’s part of what I feel is my obligation: to hold onto that optimism and speak to a better future and work to try to find ways to bring the parties on both sides of the issue together to make the hard choices and take the risk to get to a path to peace.

So the reason I’m holding onto optimism — and it’s not 24/7; I have my moments when I am down and where I feel like the hill we’re climbing is just too steep — is you take a deep breath and you dig deep, and you say, I can’t give up on hoping and working towards peace because otherwise peace is never going to happen. And I want to find people who are like-minded.

And that is not just on the Israeli side of the equation. We have to find people on the Palestinian side, and for those on the Palestinian side, we have to find Israelis. And I meet, and I spend time with them on a regular basis. They come to my office. When I’m in the region, I talk to them. We have to strengthen and empower those voices who believe that peace will only come when the Israelis see the Palestinians as a people worthy of engagement and a shared future, and the Palestinians see the Israeli as a people worthy of engagement and a shared future, and recognize that until they get there, there’s no future for either side. We’ve got to have a path where both are pointing in the same direction.

Fermented food is the hottest new trend in the halls of the White House. Members of President Donald Trump’s Cabinet are reportedly walking about with jars of sauerkraut in the hopes that it will give them glowing skin and tiny waists. 

Wall Street Journal’s Liz Essley Whyte told Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram that “Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnik, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, and Vice President JD Vance are all on this eat-a-lot-of-steak-and-sauerkraut diet.”

So, should we all be eating jars of sauerkraut? Or are ferments just the new Florsheims?

Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get your podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

Is there a name for this diet?

Kennedy calls it the carnivore diet. I think people mean different things when they say that, but for him, it includes a lot of yogurt, a lot of kimchi or sauerkraut, a lot of steak, a lot of eggs. Kennedy now travels with sauerkraut. His wife has said that he has asked her to carry it in her purse for him, and she has said, “I actually cannot,” which is an amazing phrase. It seems they all think their skin is glowing, and people online have commented that JD Vance is looking good.

Are we sure it’s not Wegovy?

We don’t have any public knowledge of that, but we do know that he is eating eggs, sauerkraut, pickles, blackberries, and raspberries for lunch pretty often — and beef and lamb with sauerkraut for dinner. Then, when he’s on Air Force Two, he snacks on beef jerky and maybe eats a hamburger with cheese, no bun, and a side of fermented vegetables.

Now that you’re mentioning the full spectrum of JD Vance’s diet, it’s kind of reminding me of their new food pyramid. Is this part of that?

Earlier this year, Kennedy and the other health officials like to say they flipped the food pyramid. They recommended a lot more fruits and vegetables, red meat — which was controversial — and whole grains, and whole milk, that kind of thing. They also, and for the first time in the nation’s dietary guidelines, recommended fermented foods, which was something that was actually agreed upon by a lot of people, and they thought that was a good part of this, even if they had qualms about the red meat recommendations, because those can introduce more cardiac risk and risk of bad cholesterol.

How widespread is this in the White House? Does it go up all the way to the top, to the president?

Given what we have seen of his recent public dieting, I don’t think so. At the Knicks game, he was eating pizza and french fries, and, you know, he still has his Diet Coke button on his desk where he just pushes it and a Diet Coke comes. Kennedy said, once said on a podcast about him, “I don’t know how he’s alive.” 

Does the science back this up, or is this some kind of quackery that ferments can make your skin healthier and help you lose weight?

I don’t think there are a lot of good studies that show exactly that sauerkraut can help you lose weight, but there have been a number of studies that have shown health benefits. Researchers have generally agreed that sauerkraut and other fermented foods can help with digestion and inflammation. There was a 2025 study from UC Davis that suggested fermented cabbage could protect your gut and protect against illness. Basically, they found that the intestinal cells do better with sauerkraut. They help maintain the integrity of those intestinal cells. And, in general, that has a lot of other good health effects. Mainstream scientists, dieticians, are pro-fermented veggies. This is not something that is hotly debated.

Most people in the scientific community are realizing there’s a lot of good fresh science out there about how important your gut really is in your overall health. The part of the diet that is a little more controversial is the focus on red meat. Obviously, that comes with some cardiac risk and some cholesterol risk. That is why when the new dietary guidelines came out and recommended more of that for Americans, that part, in particular, made some dietitians a little upset.

Do you think fermented foods could help people with this parasite that gives you explosive diarrhea?

I personally have not seen any studies on whether fermented foods help with explosive diarrhea, but let me know if you find one.

On  a recent episode of Today, Explained, I explored Donald Trump’s ongoing succession wars, and whether the president that’s upended the Republican Party is taking an active role in deciding who might replace him. 

The short version: The race to inherit MAGA, already underway, runs through Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and Trump has every incentive to keep everyone guessing about how it ends. 

As a guest host of Today, Explained, I talked to my former colleague, New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman, who has covered Trump for years, and recently released a new book, Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump, which she co-wrote with Times reporter Jonathan Swan. 

Here are three things that stuck out: 

1. It’s Vance’s to lose — but it’s not a given

“Vance is the presumptive frontrunner right now, and it’s hard for me to see who else that could be,” Haberman said. Rubio, Donald Trump Jr., and the Turning Point network have all signaled they’re lining up behind the vice president as Trump’s heir. Rubio has gone as far as telling Vanity Fair that if Vance runs, “he’s going to be our nominee, and I’ll be one of the first people to support him.” 

But being the frontrunner isn’t the same as having been anointed. Regime Change lays out real fault lines between Trump and his vice president; over the Iran strikes and the Epstein files, Vance repeatedly landed on the opposite side of the president. On the decision to go to war, Haberman reported, Vance “was the only one who really argued forcefully with the president,” and “it cost him with Trump.” 

That offense could be remembered when the next Republican primary arrives. 

2. Trump plans to stick around

The biggest obstacle to a clean handoff may be that Trump doesn’t want one. “Trump doesn’t want to cede the stage to anybody,” Haberman said. “The second that he anoints somebody or backs somebody or whatever, the clock starts ticking on his own relevance.”

And there’s nothing in his history, she added, to suggest he’ll ride quietly into retirement: “There is nothing in his history that suggests that he’s just going to go off and do paintings like George W. Bush.” Whoever wins the Republican nomination in 2028 should expect Trump to still be standing next to them — and still expecting credit.

3. Trump still dangles Rubio over Vance

Even with the field seemingly settled, Trump keeps reminding Vance that it isn’t. The most vivid scene in Regime Change comes from an October dinner in the White House Blue Room, with Rupert Murdoch and News Corp. executives at the table alongside the Vances and Rubio. Trump turned to Murdoch and asked what he thought of JD. “JD has the potential to be great,” Murdoch offered — a pointed answer from a man who had tried to talk Trump out of picking Vance in the first place. “Thanks a lot, Rupert,” Vance said.

Then Trump asked, “Well, what about Marco?” Murdoch’s reply, according to Haberman: “Marco is brilliant.” After that, Haberman says, the table got “uncomfortable.”

There’s no evidence Rubio is actually running — “quite the opposite,” Haberman said. But Trump has always pitted rivals against each other, and by Haberman’s account, he simply has better personal chemistry with Rubio than with Vance — a striking turn given the “Little Marco” cruelty of 2016.

So will Vance get the endorsement he needs? “I think anybody who is counting on Donald Trump’s anything often ends up pretty disappointed,” she said. 

There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

In 2024 the United Kingdom’s Labour Party, led by Sir Keir Starmer, won back the prime minister’s office after more than a decade out of power.

He told a jubilant crowd: “Change begins right here!”

Starmer was right that British voters wanted change; unfortunately for him, they pretty quickly wanted him out too. Starmer is stepping down on Monday — making him Britain’s sixth prime minister in less than a decade. 

“We’re just not used to this,” Tom McTague, editor of the New Statesman magazine, told Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram. “We sort of prided ourselves on being this island of stability in a crazy world…and now we have become Italy only with bad weather and worse food.”

McTague talked to Rameswaram about why Starmer flamed out so fast, the far-right candidate angling to take the top job, and why the incoming prime minister, nicknamed “the King of the North,” might be Labour’s best shot at turning things around.

Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

Why is Britain on its way to a seventh prime minister in a decade?

We are living through very, very weird times here in Britain. We’re just not used to this. We sort of prided ourselves on being this island of stability in a crazy world — we could smugly look out on countries like Italy or Australia as they churned through their prime ministers, and we just held steady with Margaret Thatcher for 10 years or Tony Blair for 10 years. Now we have become Italy, only with bad weather and worse food.

I think, big picture, we’re actually not that different to the rest of the Western world in this regard, in that all of the same reasons that cause disquiet in the United States or in France or in Germany are the same kind of reasons that are causing political disquiet here. Immigration, poor economic growth, living standards not improving as quickly as we’re used to, inflation post-pandemic — all of that comes together and it creates similar forces that you see in the US. So we have electoral coalitions, the rise of people who can communicate super well on social media in the new age who grab hold of attention.

It’s just that what is happening here is happening in our parliamentary context rather than a presidential context, where you elect a president and they are there for a full term whether they’re unpopular or not. Here, if you lose the confidence of the public or the confidence of members of parliament, then suddenly you can be out on your ear within weeks or months.

Let’s talk about the last time there was a major shift. It was in 2024 when voters had become wary of the Conservative Party in the UK, and that’s when they elected the Labour Party and its leader Keir Starmer into office?

They elected them with a landslide — an astonishing majority in the House of Commons, enough to basically do whatever they wanted. But I think once he’d got into power, he didn’t really know how he wanted to change the country. He stood on a manifesto of “change,” in quotes — it was a kind of hopey-changey thing, without much substance to it.

In one sense, he was quite a small-c conservative man. He wanted to just get this thing working again, and he thought you could do that through sensible, incremental, rational, technocratic change. And I think that analysis has proven fundamentally flawed.

What follows Keir Starmer? Does the Labour Party retain control of parliament?

Yes. So the Labour Party fundamentally has kicked out its own prime minister. It’s based on the fact that he was deeply, deeply unpopular in the country, and they thought if they hung around with this guy any longer that they were all screwed, basically, and that they would all lose their jobs. That’s the reason why he’s been removed from power. He lost the support of his members of parliament and his cabinet, who eventually turned on him and looked to the man who’s going to replace him — a guy called Andy Burnham, who is the mayor of Greater Manchester.

Tell us a bit about him. I mean, they call him the King of the North?

Yeah, like the Game of Thrones stuff — he’s going to sort of come down with his, I don’t even know what they’re called, White Walkers, is it, or something?

The North of England is, I guess, the equivalent of the Rust Belt Midwest kind of vibe. It’s seen as a place that is a bit more down to earth, a bit more post-industrial. It’s got more economic problems — it’s a place which used to be rock-solid Labour but has moved to the right. And so I think there is an opportunity here for Andy Burnham to win the next election and stick around for a bit longer.

You talk about leaders in the UK thus far having lacked a mandate or perhaps a broad vision for the country. I wonder if the person who has those things right now is Nigel Farage. Could you tell our audience a bit about him?

Nigel Farage was the man that was introduced to America by Donald Trump as “Mr. Brexit.” He is the figure on the populist right of British politics who has stood outside of the Conservative Party — the traditional party of the right here — and challenged it for not being conservative enough, for not being patriotic enough, for not being tough enough on borders and immigration.

All of the things that happened to the Republican Party from the Tea Party or from Donald Trump — it’s just that he did that from outside of the Conservative Party. And he is a kind of charismatic figure, a very good public speaker, very hard to pin down, speaks kind of fluently and off the cuff.

He was finally elected to the House of Commons at the last election for his insurgent populist party called Reform UK. And from that position, he has taken the party into the lead in the polls. But something else is going on now, where because he is a prospective future prime minister, he is facing a level of scrutiny that he hasn’t faced before.

So all sorts of stuff is going on in British politics, which sounds completely wild.

People are looking at this situation — this run of prime ministers, this ascendancy of Nigel Farage — and they say the UK has become ungovernable. What would you argue the situation is, Tom?

Look, I would argue that it’s parliamentary democracy at its messy kind of fundamentals. Britain is a country, like many countries in Western Europe, which is struggling to work out how it’s going to make its way in the world in the 21st century, in a world where so many of the assumptions which we have come to take for granted no longer appear to be holding.

A United States that is a trusted ally — that is changing. Free market economics, global free trade appears to be ending. And you add into that social media, the AI revolution, all of this. It feels like the turmoil in British politics is just a reflection of a kind of turmoil in the world and in the global economy. You can see the same sorts of questions going on in Canada and in Australia and France and Germany. And I don’t think anyone really has the answers yet, and Britain certainly doesn’t.

Pope Leo XIV is dealing with his first schism. 

A small, conservative sect of Catholics were excommunicated from the church earlier this month after it ordained a group of bishops without the pope’s approval. The drastic move from the first American Pope is the latest way he’s cementing his tenure at the helm of the church, just months after his call to “disarm AI.”

But David Gibson thinks the Pope’s strategy of dealing with this radical group of followers tells us something bigger about how we deal with our stateside politics. Gibson is the director of the Center on Religion and Culture at Fordham University.

Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram spoke with Gibson about the Catholic drama, what this schism represents, and why it might be a losing battle to go up against the pope. 

Below is an excerpt of the conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

Pope Leo XIV did something dramatic. Tell us what happened. 

Well, basically the pope excommunicated a bunch of traditionalist, super right-wing, Latin mass, types. Actually he would say they excommunicated themselves. It’s this group called The Society of Saint Pius the X (SSPX). They ordained four bishops. 

The Catholic church is an apostolic church. It’s all about chain of custody. You can’t break the chain. You need bishops to ordain priests. You need to keep bishops going. The pope is the one who ordains bishops. He says you can ordain a bishop. You can’t go ordain a bishop on your own. That’s like starting your own church. That’s a total red line.

They said, “No, we need this,” July 1st in Écône, Switzerland. They gathered SSPX and they ordained these four bishops. That was a schism.

It’s really a tiny, tiny group. They’re located in the West. It’s all about restoring christendom, restoring the glories of old European, white Catholicism. Basically, this group wants a special carve out, a special bubble where the Pope says, “It’s okay and I’ll give you your own bishops.” The Pope is saying, “No, you can’t do that. You can’t go off and have your own special little church.” So essentially they’re saying, “Okay, we are more Catholic than the pope.”

You mentioned that this group, the Society of St. Peter the X that has now at least partly been excommunicated by Pope Leo wanted to keep the church to some degree European. This is in the wake of what people thought could have been the first Asian Pope, the first African Pope. Is this group a little kind of white racist?

They’re certainly culturally chauvinistic to put it mildly. I’ve traveled around the world with popes. I’ve seen popes celebrate mass in a dusty refugee camp in Africa. I’ve seen mass celebrated in St. Peter’s Basilica with the incense and the whole deal. It’s beautiful. It’s the mass wherever you are. It’s diversity. These folks don’t like that. 

It’s very much this kind of cultural, ethnic, and some would say racial chauvinism that our culture, our people, is the same dynamic in the church. It makes no sense from a Catholic perspective. You’re baptized Catholic, you’re raised Catholic, you are Catholic. Anybody is Catholic, whether you’re in Indonesia or Indiana. But these folks don’t see it that way. That’s what they’re about.

They have influence and they have money. So that’s really why it’s a big story. They also have an amen corner.

An amen corner?

So to speak. The Vatican for decades has bent over backwards to try to accommodate these folks. Because it’s kind of a “no enemies to the right” dynamic within the Catholic Church. Here are these folks who’ve been given everything and they still went and split. They would never have given to people on the left wing, on the progressive wing, but they’re giving them to people on the right wing, on the far right wing and that they still thumb their nose at the Pope is what makes this so important.

So this small but powerful sect of the Catholic church thumbs its nose at Pope Leo. Why pick a fight with the pope?

Well, there are two reasons. One is to go down the liturgical rabbit hole of all this arcana about the mass and the Latin mass and can you change it and can you not?

They want to revisit the Vatican II council where the Church modernized like 60 years ago?

Yes, exactly. In the 1960s, they did things like lifting the anathemas of Protestantism, engaging in endorsing religious freedom, accepting a division between church and state, and lifting the teachings of contempt against Jews. 

It also gets to what is really going on. It’s not about the Latin mass. They love to argue about that stuff. The bigger dynamics that I wanted to get to in a New York Times op-ed I wrote about this are that these really channel the same dynamics we’re seeing in the secular world, where it’s this sort of civilizational fight to retain the privilege and position mainly of white European folks who see America, “the glories of empire,” of the past, being “taken away what is rightfully ours.” That kind of resentment is what they are using as a wedge issue. That’s really their platform of grievance against what they perceive as a loss of status.

Is it a losing battle?

If you’re looking at the global church, these folks are already outliers. They’ve already lost. When Pope Leo was elected, they lost in a global sense. In the smaller kind of Western sense, the jury is still out because they are much larger. This kind of conservative oppositional mentality is much wider in the United States. And will that triumph? Will they try to make peace with Leo, the first American pope? Will they recognize that he could be around for 20 years and we better take a step back? Or will they just persist here in the United States as kind of right-wing Catholicism? 

JD Vance, who wouldn’t know a Latin mass from anything, he’s the guy who tells the pope to stay in his lane on theology. It’s that kind of mentality that we’re really talking about, which is why the stakes really are high. The issue is whether this conservative Catholicism remains ascendant and essentially isolates the American church even further in the global church. That would be a tragedy.

This week on my podcast, I read my latest Locus Magazine column, Hell Is Other People, about the solipsistic fantasy underpinning the AI bubble.

Sartre was (arguably) an optimist. It’s not that other people are unpleasant: quite the contrary! There’s nothing that makes the day (or, pointedly, the night) sweeter than agree­able human companionship. And of course, for those tasks that exceed what you – or anyone – could do alone, other people are a necessity. Without other people, your aspirations could never exceed the things you would personally make happen, and if you’re honest, you’ll have to admit that this is a short list of things.

Other people, then, are a thing that you can’t live without – and yet other people stubbornly insist on organizing their lives around their needs, their preferences, their desires, without any consideration for how nice it would be (for you) if everyone would just do whatever you tell them to do.

Thus it is that our species has invented all kinds of technologies, like “language” and “persuasion” and “bureaucracy” and “ethics” and “religion” and “government” and “coercion” and “slavery” and “wage labor” and “guilt” and “duty” and “conscription” and “commerce” and “meetings” and “chore wheels” and “corporations” and “teams” that can be used to get (some) other people to (sometimes) act in ways that make your life better. After all, we have neocortices; the most recently evolved structures in our brains, that seem to specialize in understanding other people’s motives to aid in this endeavor.

MP3

This weekend marks the season finale of Love Island USA. The show is more popular than ever: Its eighth season generated 2.3 billion viewing minutes in its first two weeks and ranked as the No. 1 streaming series in the United States, according to preliminary Nielsen data.

The premise of Love Island is straightforward(-ish): The show brings together 12 attractive 20-somethings — six men and six women — in a villa in Fiji. They compete in risqué challenges, form romantic couples, and try to win over viewers at home, all for a chance to split a $100,000 prize. Along the way, new contestants, also known as “bombshells” in the show’s parlance, come in to try to break up existing couples. Viewers at home get to vote on which couples make it to the end. 

But some longtime viewers say that the show has changed. What was once a slow burn built around flirtation and romantic tension has become increasingly vulgar, filled with hypersexualized challenges. 

To help us sort through the drama and explain how the show has evolved over its eight-season run, Today Explained guest host Jonquilyn Hill spoke with Brooke LaMantia, a staff writer at The Cut. LaMantia recently asked: Is this the least sexy season of Love Island ever?

Below is an excerpt of the conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify. 

For those who have never taken a trip to the villa, what is Love Island? 

Love Island is a reality TV show that started in the UK around 2015. It came to the US in 2019. And it’s basically a dating show where a bunch of hot young people go to a villa. They’re cut off from the world. It’s as live as you can get, so they’re there right now. These people that we’re watching are in Fiji as we’re speaking and they try to find love.

What makes this show work as real and “I’m here to find love,” versus some of the other dating reality shows we have out there?

In the past, it actually has been quite genuine because it’s a lot of people coming into one space, and all you’re thinking about is like, do I like my connection? Do I like this person? And so you can talk to everyone. The Bachelor, for example, it’s one boy and 30 girls. That’s crazy. That’s never going to work. 

Love Island is equal to boys and girls. You’re thinking about who you’re attracted to and then who you have good conversations with and who you want to share a bed with. There are all these different layers that make it more real when it comes to dating, as real as you can get. And I think that has led to success. There are people who are married and have babies and that’s pretty good to me. 

What changed this season?

Everyone’s still in bikinis. Everyone’s still hot. That hasn’t changed. But I think the way that they’ve engaged with sex and with kissing and with anything physical has really, really changed from old seasons. And it’s not as fun to watch. 

It’s often actually kind of gross to watch and it’s like, I don’t need to see everyone kiss every single day because they’re being forced to in a challenge. There’s no genuine and natural romantic and sexual tension left in the villa. And that is where I think it’s lost the plot and it’s not as sexy as it has been.

For those who don’t know, “challenges” are what they call, essentially, games that they have the Islanders play. Usually they are set up like a competition with boys against girls or the couples against each other. Can you say a bit more about how the challenges were different this season? 

The show has always been very couple-forward. You couple up with a partner, you guys share a bed. And so it’s always very, like, what’s going to happen in bed? Are we going to cuddle? And there’s a very clear thing that the couples will put the covers up over their heads and that means they’re kissing and doing stuff. 

But more and more, and especially this season, they have all involved extremely heavy making out right away. Imagine you enter a villa, you’re half naked, you don’t know these people. And then you’re like, I’m just going to stick my tongue down everyone’s throat and see what happens. It’s strange. It’s not a normal way to say hello. 

It used to be every challenge would be like, okay, maybe kiss an Islander that you’re interested in. And it would be like a cheeky little, let me do a slight little peck of this different Islander that’s not my couple that maybe I’m intrigued by. And it was sexy and low-key and kind of flirty, but not like ass-grabbing, tongues everywhere, porno vibes. And yeah, it commodifies everyone’s bodies in a weird way that makes it uncomfortable to watch and not as fun.

I think it’s so interesting because on one hand, the show is a little more sexed up than it has been in past seasons, but Gen Z, which is the generation that’s primarily on the show, is having less sex than ever. I wonder how you square those two things.

I think that’s always a sentiment that’s interesting to me, because I’m technically Gen Z. We get this rep that we are not having sex, but I think it’s because then we get on shows and we do stuff like this and it’s like you grab an ass like you’ve never even seen an ass before. And it’s like, have you seen an ass before? We need to think about these things. It’s not a shame. 

I will say, I think it’s hard criticizing this show because there’s a world where it was really like, women weren’t allowed to be sluts, men weren’t allowed to be sluts. And I think it’s really great that people are embracing sexiness and sluttiness and it feels like you can kind of do what you want. I think that’s amazing and I think people should live their truth in that way. But it’s like performance art in a way. 

I think of myself at 22, yikes. 

Also, it’s like, if I was in the show and producers were like, okay, now make out with everyone — I’m going to do that. But it’s like, I’m 21 years old. Give me some more time to think about how I want to show up in this world. Because everyone’s watching. They’re going to have a lot of influence, and it does impact young people and how they see dating. 

You’re watching your peers. And so it’s almost like you’re seeing how my friends would respond. And I would hope that people would watch this show and be like, “Okay, Love Island is a reality show and maybe this is not how I should act,” but you never know. And I think having the show lack official and verbal consent, especially when it comes to all the sexual things happening, is a little bit jarring and a little scary for our future.

We need to realize that that is not how the world actually works. And I think because we’re so invested and because we feel so parasocial, this feels like an extension of our world. But there needs to be very clear boundaries between what is TV, what is entertainment, and what is real life and real dating.

There’s a new kind of influencer making the rounds on TikTok and Instagram: the loneliness influencer. Most of these influencers are young women, and “loneliness” might be a slight misnomer. They claim they aren’t lonely, simply alone — no friends, no family, no kids. And they prefer it that way.

“I really wanted to convey a normal life of somebody that doesn’t have this big, great, fun social life,” one influencer, Lana Isa, told Vox. “Like, what does a life look like as someone that doesn’t really have this great big social life, is not really interested in dating and generally prefers nights in? If you were to watch a Friday night in my life, you’d essentially just watch a girl enjoying her peace.”

Isa, and influencers like her, are just one representation of a larger trend, though. The Atlantic’s Faith Hill, who recently wrote a story titled “The Strange Appeal of the Solitude Influencer,” told Today, Explained co-host Noel King that, even though you mostly hear about young men facing a loneliness epidemic, women are having a hard time, too.

“If you actually look at some of these statistics, young women are struggling a lot on a lot of these measures, and, in some cases, more than young men,” Hill said.

Hill spoke with Noel about what’s going on with young women, how their crisis looks different from men’s, and why they’re covered differently.

Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get your podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

In the first half of the show, we talked to a young woman who has made a name for herself as a loneliness influencer. What do you think is going on here?

My first impulse when I heard about this genre of video that people are watching is that there’s a lot of people spending a ton of time alone.

We’ve heard a lot of people talk about the loneliness epidemic, so I thought people were getting social connection through these videos from a safe distance, rather than spending time in person with people. Maybe there’s some of that going on. But, I also realized, as I was looking through these videos and reading all the comments, that a lot of the people commenting seemed to have a lot going on in their lives socially, so much so that they were busy, and exhausted, and burned out.

For some people, the appeal was actually in the fantasy of it, in the way that some people would look at influencers posting about these fabulous, exotic vacations they can’t afford to take. People have a very complicated relationship to solitude. People are working long hours. A lot of people [are] taking care of family members without much help. Many people are sort of torn between these needs for social connection and solitude.

Does that mean that this is, perhaps, not as sad as it appears on its face?

I don’t think it’s all sad. My heart goes out to people who are needing more solitude, as well as more social connection. Most people probably don’t have the perfect balance, and I can relate to that myself. I feel like I either have too many plans or not enough.

It’s not necessarily all happy, but it doesn’t mean that there are just so many people out there who are only getting social connection through these videos. I think there’s something a little more complicated going on.

We’ve all heard about the male loneliness crisis. You wrote a very interesting piece that basically said, actually, women are in crisis, as well.

I’ve just been hearing so much about men, and especially young men, being in crisis. I think there’s a lot of reasons we should take that seriously, and I do. But I felt like in those conversations, young women were kind of being flattened into a comparison point where, instead of people talking about how on some measures young men are struggling more than they used to, it got twisted into “young men are struggling more than women.”

There’s this image of the thriving girlboss, the one who is going to college, graduating college, entering the workforce on these conventional measures of success, doing so well. But if you actually look at some of these statistics, young women are struggling a lot on a lot of these measures, and in some cases, more than young men. And so, I don’t think it needs to be a suffering competition, but I did think part of the story was not coming through.

In what ways are women struggling?

Women have, for a long time, reported depression and anxiety at higher rates than men. That is getting worse. It seems like mental health on a lot of different measures — different kinds of stress and distress and suicidality — young women are reporting that at higher and higher rates. It turns out that women actually attempt suicide at higher rates than men do, on average. And the reason that more men die of suicide is that they’re more likely to use lethal means such as firearms.

A lot of times this conversation really revolves around college attendance rates, and women are attending and graduating college at higher rates than men. But a woman with a bachelor’s degree still makes less than a man with a bachelor’s degree on average, even within the same field of study.

When I talk to people for this story, researchers and therapists, I heard that a lot of young women are in for a rude awakening when they graduate from school. They’ve been in this bubble where they did feel like they could grow and thrive and they were taken seriously. And then, you go out into the real world, where sexism is still very real, and a lot of women are working in workplaces where they realize they’re not taken as seriously, or the people around them who are in positions of power are all men. That’s a difficult realization.

Why, if women and men are both in crisis, did men pull focus?

Women, as an overall population, tend to be a fairly high-functioning one in this narrative. I talked to someone who had trained as a medical sociologist, and she told me a saying that they used to use in this field was, ‘Men die quicker, but women are sicker.’

Women are more likely to endure a lot of chronic illnesses and to sort of soldier on with their pain unnoticed. And we might not be taking that as seriously, because the idea that women are struggling isn’t necessarily a new one or a super surprising one to a lot of people. I think men having a hard time is more of a news story, and we have become, perhaps, kind of inert to women’s distress in this way.

I wonder, as you found yourself covering this, where do you find the hope here?

I am heartened that we’re talking about [young adults] a lot. There’s been a lot of concern lately about Gen Z, and a lot of what we’re talking about when we talk about young men struggling also applies to young women, so we’re onto some of the right things.

I wrote another piece about young adulthood a while back that was really about the idea that young adulthood actually is a really hard developmental phase. And when I published that article, I think for a lot of readers, it seemed to be somewhat of a surprise that young adults are struggling, too. Even just since I’ve written that, people have talked more about young adults struggling. So I do think people are starting to take that seriously and understand that this is an age group that might need help.

The Democratic Socialists of America have notched some impressive primary wins over the past couple of weeks. In New York, two DSA members beat Democratic establishment candidates — including the sitting chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus — in House primaries. In Colorado, Melat Kiros beat out a 30-year incumbent in another House primary. All of that is on top of the ascendancy of New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who’s looking like a Democratic kingmaker after his endorsed candidates triumphed last month. 

It’s been a long journey for the DSA, which began its current rise a decade ago with Sen. Bernie Sanders’ 2016 presidential campaign. Since then, the party has slowly amassed popularity with the left wing of the Democratic Party, building a brand as “fighters” with a populist economic message. 

Megan Romer is a national co-chair of the Democratic Socialists of America. She joined Today, Explained co-host Noel King to break down what the DSA stands for and how it got here — plus, some of the controversies surrounding its candidates. 

Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get your podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

The DSA has had big primary wins in New York; in Colorado; in the mayoral race in Washington, DC. Why do you think DSA candidates are doing so well in elections right now?

I think there’s the kind of rage that people have about seeing any remnants of our social safety net be dismantled. I think they see their wages stagnating while inflation continues to go up and cost of living continues to go up, and I think that has people really on edge. 

I also think that they’re looking for answers, and for solutions, and for things that are actually going to change their lives for the better. When we talk about expanding child care for all, or Medicare for all — child care debt, and medical debt, those are very real issues to real people. So I think they’re excited to see someone not just saying, “Well, the other [option is] worse,” but really saying, “Look, we’re going to rethink some of these things and come up with solutions together.”

Your economic message seems to have caught fire for Americans who really do feel like life is too expensive, but the DSA’s positions on some domestic issues like borders, like policing, open you up to claims that the DSA is just too extreme for regular Americans. I know that you’re aware of this charge. How do you respond to that?

A lot of the charges come from documents or, sometimes, panels where they’re clipping people talking about this long-term view, because we’re not just trying to fix little problems. We’re trying to really get to the root of these societal problems and think about what life could look like and what society could look like if we change them. 

Things like abolishing the carceral state as we know it — people say, “So you’re just going to fire all the police?” Well, no, the goal is free child care, free health care, free college, these sort of things that will actually make there be less crime. We know crime is inextricably linked to poverty. We’re not saying, “Yes, let murderers run free in the streets.” We’re saying, “If we have eliminated, in this long-term vision, a lot of these crimes of poverty, crimes of desperation, what can the system look like?” And it will have to be different. 

Even in a much better world, people will still murder other people. This is an unfortunate fact. And voters hear “abolish the carceral state,” whether it’s next week or 50 years from now, and they sense that you are not where they are.

Working class voters in the last election moved toward President Donald Trump, in part because, as we understand it from polling, many people felt like the Democrats had gotten too pie-in-the-sky. Right? They were too extreme on cultural issues. And so, I wonder whether the DSA considers that while the economic platform is very appealing, abolishing the carceral state simply isn’t. 

We think it’s important to connect those two things. The reason you do something matters too. [If] they say, “Well, you want to abolish the police,” it’s like, well, we are not doing that right now, but we have invested in “Care not Cops” programs, because the long-term goal is to stop prosecuting people for crimes of poverty. It’s not to make you less safe; it’s to make you more safe. Because, right now, the system as it works does not make us more safe.

There are real concerns about some candidates who are affiliated with the DSA. Darializa Avila Chevalier just won a big election in New York City. She said in posts on X at one point that she wiped her dirty hands on an American flag, because she didn’t have napkins. She suggested that white people shouldn’t be in interracial relationships. There’s a lot more. She has apologized and, independently, she deleted her X account. She told my colleague Astead Herndon that she finds it better to not spend too much time online. 

But, I wonder: If you are working with anti-establishment candidates, there is a level of vetting that it just isn’t going to be the same as with establishment candidates. Do you think you’re going to have difficulty finding candidates who are strong on your economic message, but don’t have to issue these embarrassing apologies?

That is an interesting spot we’re in. We’re not forming our candidates in a lab, right? We’re not raising perfect Model UN children and sending them to—

Oh, come on. Perfect model UN children? White people shouldn’t be in interracial relationships? 

No, I agree. No, that is way out there. What I’m saying is: We are dealing with imperfect, messy people, for sure. And I don’t know why she tweeted that. I am imagining she had a bad breakup and was just tweeting too close to the sun or some terrible thing. 

That’s a bad tweet. She apologized for it. Trump did bad tweets this morning, right? That is going to be the reality of running candidates who did not come into adult life thinking they were ever going to be a candidate.

I want to ask you about an issue that’s become very sensitive over the past few years. The DSA’s focus on Israel strikes some people as obsessive, possibly even tipping into antisemitic. 

Let me give you a couple of examples that I see cited frequently. On October 7, after Hamas attacked Israel, the DSA released a statement expressing solidarity with Palestine. It did condemn the killing of all civilians, but it added, “This was not unprovoked.” Mayor Mamdani recently set some Jewish leaders on edge when he referred to AIPAC as “monsters.” He said he was quoting the philosopher Antonio Gramsci. A DSA candidate in Colorado who had a big win last night, Melat Kiros, was recently asked by a reporter whether a firebombing attack on a peaceful Jewish gathering in Boulder was an act of antisemitism. And she said, “I don’t know what’s in the perpetrator’s heart.” 

Now, there’s an argument that these types of things taken together illustrate that there is antisemitism within the DSA. There’s also a more nuanced argument that says the DSA isn’t antisemitic, but you’re fostering a culture that allows your members to talk in ways that are. What do you say to American Jews who think the way that DSA-affiliated politicians talk about Israel goes beyond taking issue with foreign policy and into something darker?

That is something that we think a lot about, but what we see is that Israel is perpetrating a genocide. People are mad and should be mad. It’s a genocide. We don’t equivocate on that definition or on that understanding of the events. We see an apartheid state. We see people being in an open-air concentration camp, essentially, in the Gaza Strip. 

People are mad. And sometimes, yeah, people are mad and they’re going to not nuance their words as much as they should. I do think it’s very important, obviously, that we stand against antisemitism in all its forms, but I do not see the state of Israel as something that we should be defending on any grounds. It’s a genocidal apartheid state, and I am not apologizing for that.

In 2024, the DSA rescinded an endorsement of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — a fierce critic of Israel — after she attended a panel with Jewish leaders on antisemitism. A lot of people looked at that and said, you have a fierce critic of Israel who votes as a fierce critic of Israel, who attended a panel on antisemitism, and the DSA rescinded their endorsement of her. You can see the math here. You can sort of see where the brain goes from here. Why did the DSA rescind its endorsement of AOC?

That was actually a complicated process. We didn’t actually rescind our endorsement of AOC in that way. What we did was we made an endorsement that came with some strings attached, which was the first time we’d ever done that. 

We said, we want you to pledge to not fund Israeli military anything — not defense, not offense, no weapons for Israel. We want you to not sign on to any of that. I think she voted present on the Iron Dome. We want her in the same voting line as Rashida Tlaib, who is one of the most fearless defenders of Palestine and the Palestinian people in Congress. So AOC had voted present on some, and she had equivocated on some. And so we said, okay, you can’t do that anymore. AOC has since pledged to vote no on all funding of any kind for the Israeli military.

So ultimately, she came around to your point of view? The pressure worked?

Yeah, yeah.

The DSA, we are told, and you can confirm it, wants to run a presidential primary candidate in 2028. Tell me what that means about your ambitions.

The Bernie Sanders campaign changed the face of the American left a bit. He was the first person who went out there on stage and said, “I am a democratic socialist.” And it felt like it gave a lot of people permission to say it out loud. It broke the dam a little bit on using that big scary S-word. So if we run a presidential candidate, we can at least make sure that there was a voice in the primary holding people to account. 

When Bernie was in the primary, standing strong for Medicare For All, got a bunch of the other candidates to sign a Medicare For All pledge — those things are good. And so, we would love to win the presidency. We would also, at the very least, love to move the needle by having an actual democratic socialist voice in the debates — fighting for working families, fighting for labor unions, fighting for healthcare for everybody, and fighting against the military-industrial complex.

This week on my podcast, I read Zuckerberg’s increasingly bizarre war on whistleblowers, about Mark Zuckerberg’s campaign of terror against the whistleblower Sarah Wynn-Williams.

More than a decade ago, a group of young, internet-connected Belarusian dissidents launched a series of increasingly high-stakes, increasingly surreal confrontations with the corrupt, authoritarian government of Alexander Lukashenka, a man who is often called “the last Soviet dictator.”

Lukashenka’s secret police – still called the KGB – routinely terrorize and kidnap pro-democracy activists, and all forms of protest are banned. It was against the backdrop of this unrelenting oppression that the activists launched a series of whimsical “flash mobs” that challenged the Lukashenka regime’s willingness to crack down on even the most innocuous behavior.

One of these flash mobs was an ice cream social: activists converged on a public square to eat ice cream cones. Lukashenka’s thugs beat them and dragged them away.

MP3

This week on my podcast, audio from Sunday’s launch in Menlo Park for The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI at Kepler’s Books with Angie Coiro. Catch me next tonight in Toronto at Osler Records, tomorrow in NYC with Jonathan Coulton at The Strand, Thursday in Philly with David Williams and Friday in Chicago with Rick Perlstein!

MP3

This week on my podcast, I read a recent post from my Pluralistic newsletter, “The World Has Moved On,” which analogizes Stephen King’s Dark Tower series to the Enshittification hypothesis.

In the Dark Tower novels, we crisscross a fallen world in which decay is all around us. The buildings are rotten, the machines have stopped working and no one knows how to fix them, babies and livestock alike are frequently born with deadly congenital defects. Much of the world has fallen into wasteland, cracked and barren. An army of wreckers, led by the demagogue John Farson (who styles himself “The Good Man”) are slowly but surely conquering the land, laying waste to those few remaining outposts of civilization and conscripting the young men in the conquered lands to march on their neighbors.

It wasn’t always this way. There was a time when the world was defined by hope and virtue and light, when the machines were fixed and the crops were harvested. Life wasn’t golden – there were still squabbles and sorrows and even wars – but life was good.

And then the world moved on.

For reasons that no one truly understands, the normal push/pull of decay and renewal turned into a one-way, irreversible process in which everything that crumbled or snapped or burned up couldn’t be repaired or replaced or recovered. Our mysterious ability to beat back the Second Law of Thermodynamics – an absurdity we probably should have always treated as an aberration – has collapsed. The world has moved on.

MP3

This week on my podcast, I read my latest Locus Magazine column, “The Age of Vapor,” about the role science fiction imaginaires plays in fueling high-tech investment bubbles.

It’s one thing to make everything about imaginary technology when you’re writing SF. The point of those imaginative exercises is to illumi­nate: To provoke reflection on our present moment, to inspire or warn about the future.

But spinning narratives about imaginary technology as investment advice is a very different matter. The point here is to obscure: to con­vince investors that a company with a 90% market share will somehow continue to grow, to stave off the day when Stein’s Law (“If something cannot go on forever, it will stop”) asserts itself.

MP3

This week on my podcast, I read AI and a world without migrants, a recent essay from my Pluralistic blog, which psychoanalyzes the sociopathic fantasies that are driving the AI investment bubble.

I don’t care who you are, there will always be times when hell is other people. Not because other people are horrible – quite the opposite! Other people are wonderful, but boy are they ever stubborn.

From boardgames to romance, team sports to movement politics, business ideas to construction projects, there’s so much important, enjoyable and essential stuff you can’t do alone. But other people insist on having their own priorities and goals, and they mulishly refuse to organize their lives to suit your priorities.

Our species has put a lot of work into resolving this conundrum. Not only did we evolve a whole brain structure – the neocortex – that helps us understand others’ perspectives, but we also evolved many social structures (like laws and teams and governments and families and committees and bureaucracies) to help us coordinate with others to do superhuman things (that is, things that exceed the capacity of a single human).

These structures are imperfect, but they’re better than the alternative: coercion. Persuading others is not without its pitfalls, but compared to forcing others to bend to your will, “persuasion” is the hands-down favorite.

MP3

This week on my podcast, I present an hour-long excerpt from the audiobook for The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI, which is currently on pre-order through my latest Kickstarter campaign:

A short, provocative guide to what’s good, bad, and stupid about AI and the discourse around AI, by the author of Enshittification.

In modern tech parlance, a centaur is a person who is able to use technology to be a better, more productive version of themself. A reverse centaur is a person who is forced by technology to work at an inhuman pace—a driver made to deliver all day long, nonstop; a warehouse worker made to work without food or bathroom breaks; a programmer made to crank out impossible amounts of code.

The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI is not another anti-AI screed. Cory Doctorow uses AI in his work every day. As a creative person, he has no moral or dogmatic issue with AI—he thinks the technology is useful, even exciting, and full of potential. And yet.

AI has arrived surrounded by unprecedented hype driven by a tech industry desperate to maintain its unprecedented valuation based on its own promises of endless financial growth. Despite the fact that almost all of AI’s real-world implementations have proved underwhelming, AI is projected to be worth more than $16 trillion—a number that only makes sense if AI replaces vast swathes of the wage-earning human workforce. To justify that level of “value,” every story about AI must be presented as inevitable, world-changing disruption. Even the tales of the robot apocalypse are a calculated attempt to bolster the fearsome power of AI.

For Doctorow, it is imperative to see through that hype to the real story, to understand the technology not just for what it does, but for who it does it to and who it does it for. From that point of view, the story of AI is indeed dramatic and unprecedented, having generated an investment bubble so big that it endangers the entire world economy. In The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI—as he so successfully did in Enshittification—Doctorow recounts both how we found ourselves in this dire situation and how we can get through it, to a life “after” AI in which the tools work for us, not the other way around.

MP3

This week on my podcast, I read Comrade Trump, a recent column from my Pluralistic newsletter, which will be syndicated in The Nerve.

All of which means that my experience of the Trump years is decidedly weird. On the one hand, I exist in a near-perpetual state of anxious misery, as Trump and his chud army of Christian nationalists and degenerate gamblers pursue a program of gleeful genocide. But at the very same time, I’m living in a world in which Trump is (inadvertently) dismantling many of the worst aspects of the old order in favor of something decidedly better.

Take Trump’s tariff policy. Back during Trump I, he decided that Americans couldn’t buy Chinese solar anymore, which had the double benefit of allowing him to pursue the twin goals of throwing red meat to Sinophobic Cold War 2.0 freaks and delivering a giant gift to the planet-wrecking oil companies that had helped him buy his way into office.

MP3

This week on my podcast, I read Not Normal, my latest Locus Magazine column, about the surreal and terrible world we’ve been eased into thanks to anti-circumvention laws.

If you were paying attention in 1998, you could see what was coming. Computers were getting much cheaper, and much smaller. From cars to toast­ers, from speakers to TVs, we were shoveling them into our devices. and an it doesn’t take a lot of expense or engineering to add an “access control” to any of those computers.

That meant that DMCA 1201 was about to metastasize. Once you put a computer into a thermostat or a bassinet or a stovetop or a hearing aid, you can add an access control and make it a felony to use it in ways the manufac­turer disprefers. You can make it illegal to use cheap batteries, or a different app store. You can add little chips to parts – everything from a fuel pump to a touchscreen – and make it illegal to manufacture a working generic part, because the generic part has to bypass the “access control” in the device that checks to see whether it’s the manufacturer’s own part.

MP3

This week on my podcast, I read All laws are local a recent post from my Pluralistic.net blog, about the ephemerality of our seeming eternal verities.

In other words, things that seem eternal and innate to the human condition to you are apt to have been invented ten minutes before you started to notice the world around you and might seem utterly alien to your children. As Douglas Adams put it:

Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things.

MP3

This week on my podcast, I read “Threads’ margin is the Eurostack’s opportunity,” a recent post from my Pluralistic.net blog, about the tactics that digital sovereignty advocates can deploy to counter Meta’s (further) enshittification of Threads.

The funny thing is, the OG App creators were just following the Facebook playbook. When Facebook opened up to the general public in 2006, it had the problem that everyone who wanted social media already had an account on Myspace, and all of Facebook’s improvements on Myspace (Zuck made a promise never to spy on his users!) didn’t matter, because Myspace had something Facebook could not match: Myspace had all your friends.

Facebook came up with an ingenious solution to this problem: they offered Myspace users a bot. You gave that bot your Myspace login credentials (just as OG App did with your Insta credentials) and the bot impersonated you to Myspace (just as OG App did with Insta), and it grabbed everything queued up for you on Myspace (just as OG App did with Insta), and then flowed those messages into your Facebook feed (just as OG App did with Insta).

MP3