On the morning of July 18, 2019, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) delivered an impassioned speech on the floor of the U.S. Senate in defense of Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN). The previous night, at a rally in Greenville, North Carolina, President Donald Trump had sent thousands of his supporters into a fascist frenzy when he called on Omar to “leave” America, reupping a call he’d made earlier that week for the congresswoman to “go back” where she came from. The white nationalist subtext of Trump’s speech was clear: Omar, one of the president’s most outspoken opponents, a Black and Muslim woman who became a naturalized U.S. citizen after her family fled war-torn Somalia, wasn’t really American.
PARIS — The French government failed Monday to convince students to end their protests.
On the sidelines of meetings with Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu and education and university ministers Édouard Geffray and Philippe Baptiste, representatives of high school and university students made it clear they were not yet satisfied with the government’s proposals and vowed to keep protesting.
“Not all our demands have been satisfied, and we will see this through to the end,” Louis Letoublon, vice-president of the organization “Les Lycéens!” said after the meeting, calling on high school students to continue protests on Oct. 31 and Nov. 5.
Students have demanded up to 250,000 extra places in higher education and universities, better conditions in educational institutions, more teachers and a major overhaul of the selection process for university entry.
On Monday, the government told students it would look into reforming France’s university admissions platform, Parcoursup, which student groups consider opaque and a source of inequality, starting in 2028. It also promised more money to renovate schools, an extra 15,000 places in higher education in industry, health and technical education, and a maximum of 28 students per classroom in the first year of high school.
Those measures, widely reported by French media and confirmed by student representatives who attended the meetings, will be detailed at a press conference later this evening.
But university students are not impressed.
“Once again, the government is missing the point. If the government’s strategy is to show contempt for our demands, then we will remain mobilized in the streets and on university campuses, and we won’t back down,” university union UNEF said earlier in the afternoon, when news of the government’s proposals began to circulate.
Student demonstrations and blockades in schools and universities earlier this month were among the first expressions of broader social unrest, which later turned into protests over the cost of living and spiraled into riots two weeks ago.
As David Kurtz has been chronicling for TPM in his daily newsletter, the Trump administration has started to undertake what much of America long expected: it is trying to intervene in the midterms to help Republicans retain control of Congress.
The Department of Justice sued Alaska on Friday, demanding that the state delay certification until an investigation can “determine whether votes cast for Daniel J. Sullivan” — a Republican on the ballot with the same name as the incumbent GOP senator — “were meant to be cast for Senator Sullivan.” Trump said he asked the DOJ to initiate the suit. Experts see the case as weak.
In California, the DOJ demanded that Los Angeles — and then every other county in the state — segregate ballots from a list of names it provided, claiming those people were noncitizens likely to cast ballots.
The lists appear to have considerable problems, as have previous administration effort to identify noncitizen voters. One county’s list had only two alleged noncitizen voters, and the county clerk told the New York Times it appears neither had ever voted. Another county clerk told the Times that she had been sent the wrong list, with names only of people from a different county.
On Sunday, federal appeals court judges appeared skeptical of the Los Angeles effort, suggesting both that it was premature for the court to order the county to do as the DOJ wished, and that, even if the court had jurisdiction, the DOJ did not have a case on the merits.
This campaign has clear echoes of 2020 and early 2021, when the administration and allied lawyers went to court dozens of times seeking to throw out votes from various swing states. They used arguments that ranged from complaints about new, COVID-era election administration procedures to hare-brained conspiracy theories. Over and over, they lost.
But the legal campaign and the headlines it generated — along with a steady flow of ever-more out there conspiracy theories and incendiary rhetoric from the administration — created the appearance that, well, something must be off. Otherwise, how did all of these cases wind up in court? What’s everyone talking about? Regular Americans don’t have time to get to the bottom of it. The hubbub inspires doubt and creates chaos, which, for Trump, opens doors.
As TPM has chronicled through close examination of Trump allies’ texts and legal memos from the period immediately after the 2020 election — many of which we published for the first time — this strategy was part of a carefully calculated campaign.
As January 6 approached, the goal was no longer for victory in lower-level federal courts, but for a kind of deus ex machina — for either Congress to throw out the votes from certain states and seat Trump’s alternate slate of electors, or for the Supreme Court to step in and somehow invalidate the election without getting too deep into the specifics. Trump’s lawyers planned for a congressional stalemate over the results of the election to begin, but not end, on January 6. All of the lawsuits ahead of Jan. 6, regardless of outcome, would “force serious review in Congress of election fraud in various states,” one Trump lawyer wrote in December 2020, imagining an election that was still unresolved by January 20, 2021 — Inauguration Day.
The lawsuits initiated last week lay the groundwork to run this campaign again, this time with the full force of the federal government behind it. Even if the DOJ loses repeatedly in court — as looks likely, at least with these first two efforts — the appearance of still-unresolved questions tees up the argument that its premature to seat any new Democratic majority.
This is not to say this plan is likely to succeed. But its worth being clear-eyed about the road we’re heading down.
A Defeat for the Right in Brazil Inevitably Leads To Election Denial
SAO PAULO, BRAZIL – OCTOBER 25: Supporters of Presidential candidate and incumbent president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva of Brazil celebrate with a hand gestures of an ‘L’ in honor of him after the results of the general election day on October 25, 2026 in Sao Paulo, Brazil. (Photo by Alexandre Schneider/Getty Images)
Brazil’s incumbent President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva won reelection Sunday with 51.76% of the vote. Sen. Flávio Bolsonaro, the son of the former president who attempted a Jan. 6-like autocoup, recieved 48.24%.
Immediately, Bolsonaro said he would not accept defeat. A Lula-appointed Supreme Court justice extended voting hours after bad weather and, Lula alleged, meddling by local officials prevented some voters from being able to reach the polls. Both candidates requested the extended hours, but Bolsonaro’s team later described it as a “judicial coup.” “It is impossible to recognize the election results, given the circumstances under which things unfolded,” Bolsonaro told journalists, saying he would seek to get the election annulled.
The fact that Lula won by 4 million votes means Bolsonaro is unlikely to succeed.
The U.S. State Department pushed hard for Bolsonaro to return to power, Reuters reports. In the months before election campaigning began, two top State Department officials “instructed US diplomats in Brazil that it was US policy to restore former President Jair Bolsonaro as Brazil’s leader – even though he had been disqualified from office for plotting a coup in 2022, when he lost the presidential election to Lula,” Reuters reports.
Tabs
The right-wing strongman leader of Serbia, Aleksandar Vucic — often compared to Hungary’s now-ousted leader Viktor Orbán — has conceded defeat in a parliamentary election that followed years of student-led protests against his reign.
“Companies with ties to President Donald Trump and his family are staffing up with lawyers and lobbyists, as Democrats threaten sweeping probes if they flip either chamber of Congress in the midterm elections,” Bloomberg Businessweek reports. That includes prediction market companies and crypto firms.
Woman of the Hour
Former U.S. Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security Kristi Noem attends a Shield of the Americas meeting in conjunction with the 81st session of the United Nations (U.N.) General Assembly at U.N. Headquarters on September 22, 2026 in New York City. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
It’s Kristi Noem, who, on October 16, put out what appears to be a fake press release, on fake letterhead to make it appear as if she was still involved in the Trump administration. “The Special Envoy to the Shield of the Americas role was always a six-month appointment,” it read. “Secretary Noem remains at the State Department as a Senior Advisor.” State Department sources told Politico and CBS the press release was not real, nor was the letterhead it was published on.
Copper prices are at record highs, but for TikTok creators, the real money may be in teaching others how to strip wire—and selling them the tools to do it.
A specter is haunting Europe, and plenty of other places too. Nobody knows quite what to call it. It isn’t the specter of communism this time around, or at least not under that name — although something approaching class warfare, redefined in 21st-century terms, is on the agenda for the first time in decades.
Student protests that began at secondary schools in the northern suburbs of Paris about a month ago have sparked a wave of demonstrations and street battles— occasionally tipping over into rioting, looting, and organized property destruction — that has now spread to at least six or seven countries, with new outbreaks happening nearly every day. But there is no single unifying issue that has brought students, labor unions, left-wing activists, anarchist rebels and hundreds of thousands of ordinary people into the streets of Paris, Lisbon, Madrid, Brussels, Milan, Belgrade, Athens and Tirana, among many other cities.
While the protests in Belgium and Italy are direct outgrowths of the French student movement, the proximate causes of unrest are local and distinct in every case. Protests in Spain and Portugal reflect years of simmering discontent over the soaring cost of living, especially a housing crisis made worse by the explosion of Airbnb-style tourist rentals. In Greece the protests were initially about workplace safety and public sector wages. In Albania and Serbia, where protest movements were well underway before the French students made headlines, the main issues involve deeply entrenched government corruption.
Thousands of miles away in the world’s largest self-described democracy, India’s youth-driven Cockroach Janta Party (“Voice of the Lazy & Unemployed”) isn’t connected to the French protests at all, except by the kind of historical coincidence that isn’t really a coincidence. The CJP was launched earlier this year, about halfway between political satire and social media experiment, and by midsummer became a mass movement that has shaken the autocratic Hindu nationalist government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi to its foundations.
Given this diversity and the tangential connections between all these events, it’s almost easier to say what the protest wave of 2026 is not about than to define it precisely. No dramatic world-historical event has catalyzed all this, and for the most part these protests are happening in relatively prosperous, relatively peaceful and nominally democratic nations. We’re not on the cusp of global financial or economic crisis, at least not yet, although there are troubling warning signs. There is no immediate threat of military conflict or civil warfare in any of these countries, although Russia’s war in Ukraine, Israel’s murderous war in Gaza and the spectacularly mismanaged U.S. war with Iran have all fueled the rising sense of collective outrage.
To use one of this decade’s most overused words, the outrage seems existential. It’s about everything everywhere all at once or, to more cynical observers, about nothing in particular. It’s about underfunded schools, crumbling infrastructure and soaring rents, and also about Gaza, climate change and the enforced spread of AI, data centers and government surveillance.
To use one of this decade’s most overused words, the outrage seems existential. It’s about everything everywhere all at once: underfunded schools, crumbling infrastructure and soaring rents; also Gaza, climate change, data centers and government surveillance.
Ironically enough given its origins, the outrage is also being driven by a highly literate and globally connected generation, one that is sufficiently well educated to perceive the underlying conditions that have made those things happen. They see paralyzed centrist governments held captive by bankers and tech billionaires; they see an economy built on worsening inequality, systematic insecurity and what sociologists call “elite overproduction” (e.g., university graduates working as baristas); they see the climate crisis addressed only with bland rhetoric or regulatory fiddling as one deadly heat wave follows another.
What the protests of 2026 are not about, to any measurable degree, is skin color or religion. Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Benjamin Netanyahu and far too many of their fellow travelers have seized on the disorder in Europe as evidence of the pernicious effects of “open borders” and Islamic immigration. It’s a losing proposition to quote stuff that the president of the United States says on social media and then feign outrage, as if we were actually surprised. But we are where we are: France is being “conquered, looted and burned to the ground by migrants, jihadists and communists who hate Christianity,” Trump informed us via Truth Social last week.
That fantastical framing tells us a lot more about him and his supporters, needless to say, than about the remarkably diverse crowds in the streets of Europe’s major cities. But the tempting prospect of blaming immigrants for the protests or the acts of violence — maybe not as the primary cause and way below the Trump level, in an effort to fend off critics on the right — has created a kind of acid test or moral hazard for political leaders and media commentators. The pass/fail ratio is both depressing and mildly surprising.
Embattled German Chancellor Friedrich Merz and the newly-installed Hungarian Prime Minister Péter Magyar, for instance, have failed the test, both suggesting that “high rates of migration and a failure to integrate the foreign-born are partly behind the sudden, violent upheaval,” to quote this week’s leading editorial in the Economist. So did New York Times opinion columnist Frank Bruni, an alleged liberal who began his breezy Oct. 22 discussion with right-winger Bret Stephens by stating the unquestioned premise that “a velocity of religious, racial and ethnic diversification over the past quarter century that has exceeded what many longtime residents could easily make sense of and comfortably adapt to” had somehow led to angry high school students and window-smashing anarchists in French cities.
As for French President Emmanuel Macron, bête noire of the protest movement, perhaps he has decided to go down fighting in the last six months of his largely disastrous decade in power. For all his arrogance and hubris, Macron is no racist and has decried the “stupid comments” by foreign leaders he declines to name, who claim that France has been “invaded by hordes of migrants and Islamists, which is completely false.”
But the most forceful rejection of current racist narratives about the European protests, and perhaps the best single summary of why they are happening in the first place, comes, improbably enough, in the above-quoted leading editorial in the Economist:
Even if some young protesters in France wear Algerian football shirts or chant pro-Palestinian slogans, the upheaval in Europe today is not about race or religion. Over 500,000 people marched in France on Saturday [Oct. 17] and they were largely unmasked and white. They were fired up, as in other countries, by the cost of living and poor public services. They want more fuel subsidies, more spending on schools, more handouts.
Leaving aside the buzzword “handouts,” which is meant to signal the innate laziness of the non-wealthy, that’s some straight-up gospel preaching. As the editorial confesses, once upon a time the Economist enthusiastically backed Macron as the golden boy of neoliberal reform, but now he and other “head-in-the-sand centrists” seem to be “out of ideas.” Strikingly, the editorial has no new ideas to offer.
In a Foreign Policy essay last week, former Estonian president Kersti Kaljulaid defines the central problem in Europe, plausibly but rather too vaguely, as “intergenerational hopelessness” and a downward spiral of economic expectation. Once again, the Economist — which can fairly be described as the house organ of global capital — goes at the issue far more directly. Demonstrators on Europe’s streets, its editorial proposes, are “consumed by rage”:
Rage at the failure of the state and against the floundering centrist politicians who govern. Rage at high prices and economic dysfunction. And for some, rage against the idea of centrist politics at all.
Go on with your bad self! It’s not irrelevant or accidental that the call, as they say in horror movies, is coming from inside the house. No one can credibly accuse the Economist of being soft on Marxism or unfaithful to free-market dogma (that same editorial mocks leftist French presidential candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon, not inaccurately, as an “aging rabble-rouser and onetime Trotskyist”). That gives it the freedom to state plain facts that so-called moderates like Merz and Bruni would rather avoid: Yes, “centrist politics” have visibly failed, not just in France but across the Western democracies. Indeed the entire system or basket of principles known as “liberal democracy” is in big trouble, and on the verge of systemic failure.
Yes, “centrist politics” have visibly failed, not just in France but across the Western democracies. Indeed, the entire system or basket of principles known as “liberal democracy” is on the verge of systemic failure.
“Liberalism” in that context is not an ideological label in the contemporary American sense but a term from old-school political economy, used to describe the forced marriage in Western nations between market capitalism, parliamentary democracy, and a varying list of civil rights and civil liberties. Liberalism in that sense has dominated most of the world since the Cold War, and until recently it encompassed both major political parties in the U.S. I hardly need to convince you that is no longer the case, or that proudly illiberal parties and leaders have emerged and spread throughout the Western-style democracies, like an unpleasant but unkillable fungus. (As this article was published, it appears that Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Brazil’s leftist president, has defeated Flávio Bolsonaro — the son of imprisoned former president Jair Bolsonaro — ending a string of six consecutive right-wing victories across Latin America. True to form, Bolsonaro called for the results to be annulled.)
Liberal democracy was a roaring economic success for most of the 20th century, at least in broad strokes and with some well-known caveats. Oddly enough, those bygone glory days are pretty much what Trump keeps promising to bring back, to no visible effect. But the current crisis of liberalism is nothing new. It began to unfold decades ago, well before Francis Fukuyama proclaimed the “end of history.” Today’s enraged French students — and their parents, teachers and neighbors, for that matter — have inherited a world of false promises and diminished expectations.
Real wages have steadily declined in most Western countries (including our own) since the 1970s, allowing for a brief uptick during the technology boom of the 1990s. Across the liberal democratic zone, social services have been slashed in one “austerity” budget after another while government debt has soared. Rapidly aging population has made large-scale immigration a necessity, while right-wing demagogues have seized on the new arrivals as the main cause of the economic problems that immigrants can ameliorate. The result almost everywhere has been an accelerating vicious cycle of political dysfunction and public disillusionment, fueling the rise of what the Economist calls “charismatic figures from the extremes,” meaning Mélenchon and Marine Le Pen in France, and no doubt Zohran Mamdani and You Know Who over here.
As a leading Marxist scholar told me decades ago, every radical who confidently predicts the collapse of capitalism is always wrong. If and when that ever happens, no one will have expected it. The same is likely true of liberal democracy today, which has survived worse crises than this and still retains broader popular legitimacy than is visible at this moment. Students in Milan and Marseille and Mumbai may well return to school and be reconciled to their lives, at least for now. But they have shown us something: There are dark passages ahead and enormous changes coming, and none of us can accurately identify the specter who blocks the path forward.
Dataminers have revealed the next 24 Pokémon reportedly coming to Pokémon Pokopia. According to a recent leak, the cozy Switch 2 title will be getting a handful of new characters for players to add to their islands in future DLC.
24 New Pokémon Coming to Pokémon Pokopia DLC
Screenshot: The Pokémon Company
A recent Pokémon Pokopia datamine has revealed 24 new Pokémon reportedly being added to the game. According to a leak that surfaced on X, upcoming DLC will be adding fan favorites such as Gen 1’s Butterfree and the Alcremie line from Pokémon Sword and Shield.
According to dataminers, the upcoming Pokémon will be a part of future Pokémon Pokopia DLC. However, they haven’t stated which part of the Pokopia expansion pass will include the new batch of characters.
For your convenience, here is the full list of new rumored Pokémon reportedly being added to Pokémon Pokopia in future DLC:
Pokémon
Generation
#10: Caterpie
Gen 1
#11: Metapod
Gen 1
#12: Butterfree
Gen 1
#84: Doduo
Gen 1
#85: Dodrio
Gen 1
#209: Snubbull
Gen 2
#210: Granbull
Gen 2
#225: Delibird
Gen 2
#300: Skitty
Gen 3
#301: Delcatty
Gen 3
#387: Turtwig
Gen 4
#388: Grotle
Gen 4
#389: Torterra
Gen 4
#488: Cresselia
Gen 4
#548: Petilil
Gen 5
#549: Lilligant
Gen 5
#653: Fennekin
Gen 6
#654: Braixen
Gen 6
#655: Delphox
Gen 6
#684: Swirlix
Gen 6
#685: Slurpuff
Gen 6
#868: Milcery
Gen 8
#869: Alcremie
Gen 8
#1011: Dipplin
Gen 9
When Are the New Pokémon Coming to Pokémon Pokopia?
Screenshot: The Pokémon Company
To be clear, none of the above Pokémon have been officially confirmed as coming to Pokémon Pokopia by Game Freak. While dataminers have uncovered the list, we still need an official announcement to confirm when these characters will arrive.
That said, the new Pokémon could be featured in the “Accessories & More Pokémon” DLC, which has a “late 2026” release window. However, there is also Pokopia DLC scheduled for 2027. So the Pokémon on the leaked list could be coming to the game very soon or sometime next year.
Rostige Tanker transportieren russisches Öl durch die Ostsee, doch die Bundesregierung schaut trotz harter Ankündigungen tatenlos zu. Warum Innenminister Alexander Dobrindt vor der Verantwortung zurückschreckt, analysiert Rixa Fürsen.
Im 200-Sekunden-Interview dazu: Anton Hofreiter von den Grünen. Er fordert, es brauche gegebenenfalls einen Bundestagsbeschluss, um die illegale Schattenflotte zu stoppen.
Zehntausend Kilometer entfernt sucht der Kanzler in Asien nach strategischen Partnern für die Wirtschaft der Zukunft. Auf seiner Reise geht es um die wirtschaftliche Abnabelung von China- POLITICO-Experte Hans von der Burchard ordnet diese diplomatische Doppelstrategie ein.
In Berlin entbrennt ein Machtkampf um das höchste Staatsamt. Eigentlich galt die CSU-Politikerin Ilse Aigner als Favoritin für die Nachfolge des Bundespräsidenten, aber Friedrich Merz blockiert, zumindest indirekt. Rasmus Buchsteiner erklärt, warum Merz die Schwesterpartei ausbremst und welche Namen nun auch im Rennen sind.
Das Berlin Playbook als Podcast gibt es jeden Morgen ab 5 Uhr. Rixa Fürsen, Maximilian Stascheit und das POLITICO-Team liefern Politik zum Hören – kompakt, international, hintergründig.
Für alle Hauptstadt-Profis: Der Berlin Playbook-Newsletter bietet jeden Morgen die wichtigsten Themen und Einordnungen. Jetzt kostenlos abonnieren.
POLITICO Deutschland – ein Angebot der Axel Springer Deutschland GmbH Axel-Springer-Straße 65, 10888 Berlin Tel: +49 (30) 2591 0 information@axelspringer.de Sitz: Amtsgericht Berlin-Charlottenburg, HRB 196159 B USt-IdNr: DE 214 852 390 Geschäftsführer: Christoph Eck-Schmidt, Carolin Hulshoff Pol, Mathias Sanchez Luna
**(Anzeige) Eine Nachricht von YouTube: Ein verlässlicher Partner für die Medienbranche: Dass YouTube als digitale Infrastruktur ein wichtiger Motor für Medienhäuser ist und Redaktionen nachhaltig stärkt, belegt eine Studie von Oxford Economics im Auftrag von YouTube: Das kreative Ökosystem von YouTube unterstützte 2025 in Deutschland über 29.000 Arbeitsplätze (Vollzeitäquivalent). Hier klicken und mehr erfahren zum Beitrag von YouTube zur Medienindustrie.**
Before he decided to only make movies with the word “Avatar” in the title, James Cameron was planning to shoot a documentary in space. The filmmaker initially approached the Russians, who agreed to let him visit the Mir space station, but he eventually set his sights on the ISS instead. As Cameron explained to NASA administrator Daniel Goldin, who was overseeing the assembly of the ISS at the time, he saw Mars as the future, and getting there would require a lengthy flight. For that reason, Cameron wanted to observe what it was like for people who were already living in space.
Goldin considered Cameron’s proposal, but ultimately felt it would be too difficult to pull off. Alternatively, Goldwin offered Cameron the opportunity to take a shuttle flight. That way, he’d at least get to see space for himself and view the Earth from above. After thinking it over, Cameron declined to go on the flight, sticking to his guns about traveling to space on his own terms, even if it never came to be.
How James Cameron Narrowly Avoided One of NASA’s Deadliest Disasters
Cameron’s rejection made Goldin realize how determined the director was to make the project happen, and he finally gave him the green light to venture to the ISS. Cameron then flew to Houston to train for his trip, and started mapping out the logistics of the shoot. “And they were going to fly me,” Cameron told GQin 2022, “and then Columbia was lost.” For context, the Space Shuttle Columbia disintegrated while reentering the Earth’s atmosphere in 2003, killing all seven people on board.
The eerie part of all this is the Columbia flight was actually the one Cameron had turned down. “I f—king saved my own life by choosing the higher path!” Cameron recalled. When asked if he had any regrets about not going to space, Cameron said, “Zero,” adding, “The stuff I did instead was equally cool. Yeah, it would’ve been great and I think if I had really, really put my mind to it, I could have remanifested that a few years later with a better camera system and a better plan.”
There’s this old joke about a guy’s first day in hell. He’s being given the orientation: Here’s where we keep the pitchforks. Here’s where we make the printers. Then the time comes to pick his eternal punishment. The first room is fire and brimstone, eternal agony. “That’s not for me,” the man says. The second is full of people being eaten by animals. “Pass,” he says. In the third room, he finds people sipping coffee while waist deep in excrement. “I think I can handle that,” he says. The door closes behind him as a demon yells, “Coffee break’s over! Back on your heads!”
I’m not naive enough to think that Jesse Walters came to Fox News during a proverbial break in their typical wallowing. He came on as a production assistant to former host Bill O’Reilly during the boom years of George W. Bush’s first term. Watters made a name as an liberal-needler, confronting progressive targets in the halls of congressional office buildings and peppering them with bad faith questions, and he’s since parlayed his willingness to be irritating into a decades-long career. Now nearing 50, there are signs that Watters is tiring of playing the enfant terrible, that he’s over standing on his head and then coming up to flash the requisite grin.
Take, for example, his subtle distancing from Mike Rogers and Ken Paxton, the Republican Senate nominees from Michigan and Texas. On his afternoon panel show “The Five” earlier this month, Watters refused to wholeheartedly join in on bashing James Talarico, Paxton’s Democratic opponent in the Lone Star State. While his co-hosts jeered at Talarico for being weak — and possibly even vegan — Watters admitted that Paxton’s past fraud allegations and general demeanor marked him as a bit of a creep.
“[Talarico is] running against Paxton, and Paxton has a lazy eye and this whiff of corruption around him,” Watters said. “There’s just something off-putting about him.”
Likewise, while covering the Michigan Senate race, Watters has been remarkably friendly toward the Democratic nominee, Dr. Abdul El-Sayed. While the progressive rabble-rouser represents the exact opposite of nearly everything Fox News stands for, he still seems to pass the “would like to have a beer with him” test. After a contentious interview with the candidate on Aug. 25, Watters admitted that El-Sayed was “not your typical stiff,” even though he thought his policy goals were the work of a “lunatic.”
“I actually like Abdul,” Watters said. “I probably shouldn’t like him, but I do.”
It’s not the first time that Watters has been slightly out-of-step with his network. Attorney General Todd Blanche dropped by “Jesse Watters Primetime” on his first day on the job, almost certainly expecting a friendly interview. Watters grilled Blanche about the Justice Department’s handling of the Epstein files and accused him of not understanding why Americans felt stiffed by their slow-walked release.
Lately, Watters has been openly grousing about Fox News’ coverage of the upcoming midterms. The polling does not look good for Republicans, with reliable states like Texas and Alaska seemingly turning into coin tosses. While the Senate projections are narrower, most prognosticators expect Democrats to take back the House and narrowly win the upper chamber. Watters noted that the only path to avoid a congressional bloodbath for Republicans was amping up the “fear porn.”
“You have to say, ‘These people are going to take your healthcare, they’re going to let in the Third World, they’re going to jack up your taxes,’ and that’s what’s going to get people to come out to vote,” he said on Oct. 15. “You have to say, these people are scary and dangerous.”
But Watters seems to be growing weary of flimsy culture war fights. Earlier this week, the host rejected a planned segment on the WNBA and the trans panic surrounding the league — in which no trans athletes play — that his network has played an integral role in fostering.
“I hate the story,” he said on “The Five.” “I hate the WNBA. I don’t watch it. No one watches it. The only time we talk about it is like, they fouled the white star too hard or someone wore a t-shirt . . . I don’t want to push this story anymore! I want to leave this story alone! I am no longer talking about the WNBA. As of now, I boycott this segment.”
Watters has seen the polling. In his “fear porn” hot tip, he noted that the MAGA base will come out and vote, but that the rest of the GOP coalition is unmotivated. In fleeing from the talking points of a Trump administration gloating over an unpopular war, Watters appears to be distancing himself from election results that are, at best, likely to be deeply embarrassing.
In fleeing from the talking points of a Trump administration gloating over an unpopular war, Watters appears to be distancing himself from election results that are, at best, likely to be deeply embarrassing.
Watters has weathered enough sea changes over his decades at Fox News that he can chart the tides. He made the turn from gleeful prankster to established host as the nation soured on Bush’s brand of “aw shucks” neoconservatism. He held on through Trump’s various impeachments and election losses thanks to a winking persona that could quickly drop any talking point that didn’t go over. Now that the coffee break is almost over, that the second Trump administration’s brief period of celebratory cruelty is almost certainly coming to an end, Watters isn’t quite ready to get back on his head.
His smug presentation won’t jibe with a hamstrung Trump administration, and there’s no room for outsider outrage while their guy is still in the White House. Look for Watters’ shows to get all the more murky and interesting in the back half of Trump’s term. Expect him to run from issues around gender and immigration, especially once the new Congress is in session and hammering Trump daily on kitchen table issues.
You have to wonder if he’ll lose a bit of the arrogance, if the space between Watters’ segments and the network’s chosen tack will grow even wider. After all, it’s hard to be self-satisfied eating in that third room, and anyway, according to Fox News, that’s supposed to be the Democrats’ job.
President Donald Trump is urging Republicans across the country to vote early and by mail, even as his Justice Department escalates legal challenges to election procedures in multiple states less than two weeks before the midterms.
In a series of nearly identical Truth Social posts promoting Republican turnout, Trump encouraged voters to use virtually every available method of casting a ballot.
“Whether you VOTE early, absentee, by mail, or in-person, Republicans must SWAMP the Radical Left Dumocrats with massive turnout!” he wrote.
The enthusiastic endorsement of mail voting comes from a president who has repeatedly attacked the practice as vulnerable to fraud and previously sought sweeping restrictions on mail ballots.
Meanwhile, federal prosecutors sent letters Friday to election officials in at least 18 California counties, demanding that they identify and set aside ballots suspected of belonging to noncitizens within 48 hours.
“Any election official who knowingly processes the ballot of a noncitizen is opening themselves to legal jeopardy,” First Assistant U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli warned.
The demands follow a Justice Department lawsuit seeking to prevent California from counting ballots associated with roughly 20,000 people the administration considers likely noncitizens. State officials dispute the reliability of the federal government’s data and warn that eligible voters could be disenfranchised.
Federal prosecutors have charged 28 people in California with illegally registering to vote, some of whom also allegedly cast ballots. Research has consistently found noncitizen voting to be extremely rare.
In Alaska, Trump’s Justice Department filed a separate lawsuit seeking to block certification of the Senate race under certain circumstances if Republican incumbent Dan Sullivan loses to Democrat Mary Peltola. The dispute centers on another candidate named Daniel Sullivan, whom Republicans argue could confuse voters.
“I’m the one that said do it,” Trump told reporters Friday, acknowledging that he directed the lawsuit.
The California and Alaska cases involve different legal questions, but together underscore the administration’s aggressive involvement in state election administration. For Republican voters, however, Trump’s message remains straightforward: Use every available voting method to defeat Democrats.
As per the title and image, this post will be a nebulous one because we're not looking at an easily-accessible mass produced product. 🤔The reason is because we're looking at what appears to be a one-of-a-kind device that's not advertised, the company making it doesn't have any web presence with only a handful of posts I can find over the decades referencing the company/person who makes what
Police in France fired tear gas to disperse protesters in multiple cities Saturday, as tougher policing measures aimed at preventing violence and looting appeared to avoid major incidents but drew criticism from unions and left-wing leaders.
According to the Interior Ministry, 410,000 people participated in demonstrations across France, though unions said the figure was twice that. The ministry said Sunday morning that it had been a “calm night,” adding that police made 1,314 arrests on Saturday, compared to 2,025 last weekend.
Authorities said the march in Paris, which drew 110,000 people, remained calm through Saturday afternoon, but tensions flared as demonstrations came to an end in multiple cities.
In Lyon, France’s third-largest city where gatherings were banned in parts of the city, the police used tear gas to disperse protesters. Forty people were arrested in Nice, where the protests were banned, while tear gas was used against protestors in Marseille, French broadcaster BFMTV reported.
Tensions also escalated during the afternoon in Toulouse, Lille, Nantes and Rennes, according to media reports, with protestors throwing projectiles at police and officers using water cannons to disperse them. Authorities in Lille, where about 15,000 people protested according to early estimates, extended their curfews for minors through Monday.
Nuñez, the interior minister, told police forces to be “uncompromising” with potential rioters earlier on Saturday, ahead of a day of protests that is leaving the country on edge.
“Today’s key words will be mobility, responsiveness and adaptability, so we can really act against high-risk groups… We must be absolutely uncompromising and hyper, hyper, hyper-responsive,” he said during a visit Saturday morning to the National Police Academy in Vincennes.
Nuñez was heavily criticized for his handling of last Saturday’s protests, and has been accused of underestimating both the number of protesters and the potential for violent incidents. He announced on Friday that 70,000 police officers would be deployed, 10,000 more than last weekend.
The government has since imposed local curfews and banned public demonstrations in several cities including Lyon and parts of Nice and Lille. Macron also instructed local authorities to ban protests on Saturday except those organized by unions.
The move drew backlash from unions, left-wing parties and human rights groups such as Amnesty International, which called the bans “serious restrictions of the right to protest,” and warned against a “slide toward authoritarian practices.”
Authorities in Paris changed the march’s route late on Friday to redirect protesters away from the capital’s city center in an attempt to protect businesses looted last weekend. Far-left presidential candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon said the move was aimed at discouraging and sowing confusion among protesters.
“Everything is made to trigger an explosion,” said Mélenchon as he marched with protesters in Paris. French President Emmanuel Macron “will realize that this is going to happen every week,” he added.
“We are the country of democracy, the country of human rights, and today this government is trampling on them. And that is very serious,” said Ryad Rani, president of the Union Syndicale Lycéenne, a high school students’ union.
Authorities said that more than 10,000 people took part in an authorized anti-far-right march in Orléans, the Loire Valley city where Marine Le Pen’s National Rally is holding a party conference over the weekend. A banned protest is also expected on Sunday, when the far-right leader is set to formally launch her presidential bid.
“Power prefers to barricade itself behind armored vehicles rather than listen to the legitimate demands of citizens,” said Manon Aubry, an MEP from Mélenchon’s left-wing Unbowed party, in a post on social media. The party supported the school protests in the run-up to last weekend’s riots, but sought to distance itself from the violence.
France was also rocked by a deadly drive-by shooting in Trappes on Friday, which prosecutors are investigating as a terrorist hate crime. A 12-year-old girl was among those injured, according to local authorities.
“This is a turning point because it is the first time there has been a terrorist act planned to kill our fellow citizens, our children, because of their skin color or the religion attributed to them,” Macron said after visiting the scene on Friday evening.
His remarks quickly sparked criticism from several leading political figures, who slammed his description of it as the “first” terrorist act motivated by a person’s skin color or religion.
Cost-of-living demonstrations have swept parts of Europe in recent weeks, with similar grievances bringing people to the streets in Spain, Italy and Albania.
In early August, election workers north of Spokane, Washington, went across the street to the post office to check for late mail-in ballots. It was three days after the primary and they were expecting no more than a few dozen.
Instead, their mailbox was brimming with envelopes — more than 500 of them, each a vote that wouldn’t count. The sight was “jarring,” said Auditor Lori Larsen, a Republican who oversees voting in Stevens County.
Across the region, other election officials were getting similar jolts. In the 11 predominately rural counties in eastern Washington, nearly 2,000 ballots came in late, compared to about 600 in 2022, the previous midterm primary.
But a ProPublica data analysis shows that delays resulting from the U.S. Postal Service’s cost-cutting measures have endangered the validity of ballots cast in rural areas, not only in Washington, but across the country.
Over the past three years, as mail volume continued to plummet and annual deficits ballooned, the Postal Service started consolidating the processing of first-class mail at larger regional plants instead of at smaller hubs closer to local post offices. Then, in a little-noted switch that mostly took effect after the 2024 election, the agency cut the frequency of mail pickups in half at many post offices 50 miles or more from these processing plants, from twice daily to once.
The changes often added a day or more to delivery time and, most importantly for ballots, pushed back postmarking, which doesn’t happen until mail reaches the regional centers.
In this year’s primary, the effects of the cuts were clearest in five states that make detailed data on mail-in ballots available: Washington, California, Ohio, North Carolina and Oregon. All have or recently had grace periods allowing ballots to count if they come in after Election Day as long as they’re postmarked by the deadline.
In these states, the number of ballots rejected for arriving late soared in counties affected by the service changes compared to 2022, ProPublica’s analysis showed.
Rejection rates in counties where services were cut doubled or tripled from what they were four years ago, dwarfing any increases in counties where postal pickups remained as they were, our analysis showed. In urban Spokane, for example, the number of ballots rejected for being late actually dropped this year.
Across the five states, the delays have had the most substantial effect in areas that voted for Trump in 2024, ProPublica’s analysis shows. In Washington, Secretary of State Steve Hobbs, a Democrat, said he sees the service changes directed by Republican appointees leading the Postal Service as a way to undermine mail-in voting.
“I don’t think they realized how much it was going to affect their voter base,” he said, adding that Washington has “a lot of rural Republican voters.”
Postal Service leaders say such delays are less likely in the Nov. 3 general election because of “extraordinary measures” the agency puts into place for these votes, when there’s typically far more turnout. They have circulated a memo to the nation’s more than 30,000 post offices saying that for the 10 days before the election, managers should separate completed ballots from other first-class mail and deliver those intended for local election offices the day they come in.
At an Oct. 15 news conference, Postal Service leaders emphasized the agency’s longstanding recommendation that voters mail ballots back at least a week before their states’ deadlines, while defending the agency’s ability to fast-track ballots through the system.
“We work to identify and address issues quickly,” said Amber McReynolds, chair of the Postal Service board of governors, “so ballots can continue to move swiftly from election offices to voters and from voters back to election offices.”
Election consultants, researchers and former Postal Service officials told ProPublica that the guidance for the upcoming vote gave more detailed directions on how to expedite ballots. They said they hoped the agency’s special measures would limit delays, but some said mistakes were likely.
“I don’t think we can say with any kind of conviction that there will be no ballots rejected,” said Tammy Patrick, chief programs officer of the National Association of Election Officials. “It isn’t a question of ‘if,’ but a question of ‘how many.’”
A pilot program instituting the delivery changes in 18 regions before the 2024 election ran into problems. An audit by the Postal Service’s inspector general found that agency staff in these areas sometimes didn’t handle ballots correctly, mainly because instructions weren’t clearly communicated. (A Postal Service spokesperson said “learnings from the pilot” have been applied as the program has expanded.)
After this year’s primary, reports by media outlets noted that mail-in ballot rejection rates were higher than in the past, but ProPublica’s analysis shows these increases were directly connected to Postal Service changes. Research published in September by the Brookings Institution also found this connection, projecting that if the pattern held in the general election, tens of thousands of mail-in ballots could be rejected.
At least seven closely contested congressional districts — including Washington’s 3rd, California’s 22nd and North Carolina’s 11th — are in areas that were affected by service changes in the primary, ProPublica found.
Elena Patel, who conducted the Brookings analysis, said service changes may still imperil mail-in votes in the general election.
“I think there remain risks to ballots,” she said, adding that the Postal Service’s plan for the general election “depends on flawless execution.”
Mail-in voting has become more popular over the last decade, with many states broadening access to it during the COVID-19 pandemic.
When Louis DeJoy was appointed postmaster general in spring 2020, he inherited an $81 billion operating deficit and rapidly took steps such as eliminating overtime to reduce costs, under pressure from Trump and others in his administration. (DeJoy did not respond to questions from ProPublica.)
The NAACP sued that August, alleging the measures could affect mail-in votes in that year’s general election. Courts ordered DeJoy to reverse some of the cuts and the Postal Service agreed to implement special procedures to ensure ballots weren’t delayed. The Postal Service has continued following those procedures since.
Still, DeJoy went forward with a 10-year restructuring plan designed to save the agency billions. It ended evening pickups from some post offices, often in rural areas. Trucks serving these places travel long distances and at times were mostly empty. This part of the plan — called regional transportation optimization, or RTO — was projected to eventually save the Postal Service $4 billion a year.
The agency announced the national rollout of the RTO plan in 2024, but DeJoy agreed to pause it leading up to that year’s November election, leaving only about 4,000 ZIP codes in the pilot project affected by the service changes.
In January 2025, the Postal Regulatory Commission, which oversees the Postal Service, warned that moving forward with the plan would be disruptive to rural communities and might not save as much money as expected. The Postal Service rolled out the reductions anyway, extending the changes to almost 20,000 ZIP codes to date. Officials said they expect the system to be fully implemented within two years.
This January, the agency put out a statement saying the transportation cuts would mean it took longer for mail, including ballots, to be postmarked and delivered. But the Postal Service didn’t specify which voters would be affected by the slowdowns and which wouldn’t.
Though the delay from RTO is often only a day, mail can be delayed longer if it’s deposited in a mailbox after the daily pickup time, or just before Sunday or a holiday.
A Postal Service spokesperson said the agency told election officials that RTO would change schedules and reemphasized the need for voters to get their ballots in the mail at least a week ahead of time. Election officials in Washington said the Postal Service wasn’t direct enough about the fact that the changes would lead to delays in delivering and postmarking ballots.
“What they said was, ‘We are going to change the way we do postmarks,’” said Hobbs, Washington’s secretary of state. “That was it.”
Patel, the Brookings analyst and a former Postal Regulatory Commission employee, said that more direct communication to voters could have helped change their behavior. “That’s the part that I think has not been super transparent about the whole process,” she said.
Many of the areas that saw a spike in late ballots were in Western states, which were the earliest and most enthusiastic adopters of expanded mail-in voting.
In 2004, Washington became the second state to start conducting all-mail elections, in which every eligible voter automatically receives a mail-in ballot. Most residents vote by putting their ballots in drop boxes. Still, in 2024, about 33% put them in the mail.
In the 30 mostly rural Washington counties most affected by RTO, the percentage of ballots postmarked late more than tripled compared to the 2022 primary, ProPublica found.
In Garfield County, in southeastern Washington, 19 ballots — nearly 1 in 10 cast — had late postmarks this year. In 2022, only a single ballot was postmarked late. In Pend Oreille County, in northeast Washington along the Idaho panhandle, 6% of ballots were rejected for arriving late, compared to 1% in the 2022 primary.
“It was pretty awful telling people we couldn’t count their votes,” said Marianne Nichols, Pend Oreille’s longtime auditor. “They were quite upset because they felt like, ‘Why? This was in the mailbox on election day, the post office picked it up and had it.’ They felt like it should have counted.”
In Stevens County, the percentage of ballots rejected for having a late postmark jumped to 8%, from 1% in 2022.
Steve Hutkins, a retired professor who analyzes the effect of Postal Service changes on Savethepostoffice.com, also found that places in Washington with RTO had more ballot rejections during local elections earlier this year for school board and other measures. The patterns “set off the alarm bells,” he said.
Stuart Holmes, the state’s director of elections, said he reached out to Postal Service officials to find out what had happened, but got few answers and no specifics on delays related to RTO, which were a “total surprise,” he said.
Election officials in California and Oregon also reported thousands more ballots rejected for arriving late during their primaries. Counties affected by RTO, including Kern County, California, had substantially higher rates of ballots rejected for mail-related reasons, ProPublica found.
Kern County’s assistant registrar of voters, Laura Cantu, said election officials are urging rural voters to use drop boxes to cast their ballots in the general election.
The expansion of RTO had a similar effect in North Carolina and Ohio, where the rates of late ballots were about twice as high in counties affected by the restructuring as rates in counties that weren’t. Since 2022, these states have also eliminated grace periods in which ballots postmarked by Election Day could count even if they arrived later. Voters unused to the tighter deadlines also could have contributed to an increase in late ballots.
ProPublica didn’t find any association between RTO and higher rates of late ballots in Wisconsin, even though clerks reported delays involving mail-in ballots cast in its state election, held this spring. (Other Postal Service changes may have contributed to the delays.)
Wisconsin’s data does not distinguish ballots sent by mail from those cast in drop boxes or in person, making it impossible to definitively measure rejection rates just for ballots returned by mail. Election researchers said Wisconsin’s deadline for mail ballots, which must come into election offices by 8 p.m. on Election Day, also probably had an effect.
“If you know that you don’t have a grace period, it probably affects voter behavior,” said Patel, the Brookings researcher.
Recent Postal Service audits have found that RTO-related changes had saved the agency about $2.8 billion by the end of fiscal year 2025 — less money than expected — and are slowing down all first-class mail, not just ballots. Residents of rural areas are waiting longer for everything from prescriptions to bills, a report published in September by the Postal Service’s inspector general said.
A Postal Service spokesperson still defended the plan, both for financial reasons and to adjust to the changing marketplace. “These savings are both significant and necessary,” he said.
In the lead-up to Nov. 3, the agency’s plan is to route ballots meant for local election offices to a nearby postal facility or directly to their destination. They shouldn’t go to regional plants, which the Postal Service says should minimize delays.
Larsen, the Stevens County auditor, is encouraging Washington voters to deposit their ballots in drop boxes rather than relying on the mail. Since the primary, she’s increased the number of red, white and blue drop boxes that sit outside government buildings from seven to 12. Near each box, there’s a large sign encouraging people to take selfies when they vote and send the photos to Larsen.
In prior years, Larsen said, she avoided telling voters how or when to vote, concerned they might regret choices they made if critical information later emerged about the candidates. That’s no longer uppermost in her mind.
“Now we are more concerned that we get your ballot,” she said.
Through my own writing life, nothing has done more to improve my writing than diligent participation in peer-based workshops; that's where a group of writers, all at about the same stage in their artistic development, gather to read one another's work and offer feedback specifically aimed at improving each other's stories.
This is a deceptively simple exercise, and the reasons it works so well are quite counter-intuitive. The most obvious benefit is the way that a workshop encourages you to write at all. When you're at the start of your writing career, you are almost totally reliant upon your own internal self-discipline to keep producing.
Acquiring that self-discipline is infinitely valuable, but it's also incredibly hard. Being part of a group of writers who expect you to regularly turn in new work adds a very useful bit of external motivation that augments your still nascent self-discipline. Knowing you have to turn in a story for the group by Friday can get you in gear when you feel discouraged or blocked.
Before you're getting published regularly (or at all), your critiquing circle might be the only source of validation you get for your work, so the knowledge that you're in for that validation if you get that story in on time is a great motivator. But this is where the counter-intuitive part comes in: as great as it feels to be the center of your peers' attention and to get close feedback on the work you sweated over, that's not the real value you get from a writing workshop, at least not at the start of your career.
Your peers' critiques can help you fix weaknesses in your story, and even teach you a little about how to avoid those weaknesses in future work. You might get feedback that turns an unpublishable story into a published one. But the point of a writing workshop isn't merely to make your stories better – it's to make you better at writing stories.
That's where critiquing other writers' stories comes in. The process of reading and re-reading someone else's imperfect work and devoting real mental energy to figuring out what's not working in it and how to fix it is how you develop the creative instincts that allow you to automatically and unconsciously avoid pitfalls and make breakthroughs in your own work.
Even if none of the feedback you offer is ever incorporated into the story you're critiquing, the act of preparing and delivering that critique is the most reliable fast-track to becoming a better writer yourself. There's something very valuable in the combination of thinking critically, being exposed to other workshop members' ideas about the story under discussion, and working with source material that you can look at with more objectivity because it didn't come out of your own head.
I bring all this up because I've now heard from a few beginning writers who tell me that they're finding LLMs to be good editorial feedback generators. They value the editorial suggestions they get from a chatbot after they finish their work, and use it to help them with a new draft. Without commenting on whether I think LLM feedback is editorially useful (I certainly wouldn't ever ask a chatbot for that kind of feedback), I want to point out that when it comes to improving your writing, getting editorial notes on your work is distinctly inferior to offering criticism of other writers' work.
The reality is that when you're starting out as a writer, the vast majority of work you produce will be artistically unsalvageable. The much-vaunted "million words of crap" you write on the way to becoming a publishable writer are about learning to marry technique to artistic vision and to sharpen both. Getting editorial feedback that helps you shore up the weakest spots in a story that is ultimately never published and constitutes a learning exercise has value, but it has far less value than applying the things you've learned from making and fixing those mistakes to your next story.
With vanishingly few exceptions, a commercially and artistically successful writer isn't someone who writes one great story or novel: a writing career is defined by a body of work, which means that you have to do more than rewrite. You have to write the next thing, and the next thing, and the next.
Having an editor-on-demand of highly variable (and often dubious) quality might help you improve your writing, but it's no substitute for participating in a peer workshop. The idea that an LLM might be able to stand in for a workshop is grounded in the fallacy that the point of a workshop is to have people tell you how to fix your story, rather than analyzing other people's writing in order to develop your own critical skills.
Look: it's a cliche to say "every writer is different," but I really believe that every writer is different, and that's down to the legibility of the writing process to other writers. If you're a painter or sculptor or other visual artist, you've likely spent many hours in a studio with many other practitioners while all of you work from the same life model or still life. If you're a musician, you've almost certainly played music with other musicians. If you're a dancer, you've definitely danced with other dancers.
But writers get precious little exposure to other writers' process. At best we might look at each other's drafts. A musician can listen to every note another musician produces while riffing or composing a new work or interpreting a work. Writers don't get to watch words emerge from each other's fingertips. Being observed that closely while you write would be ghastly and paralyzingly invasive.
I've taught a lot of writers over the years and I've had many discussions with my peers about their writing process, and I'm here to tell you that pretty much every writer finds every other writer's process baffling. We each of us invent an idiosyncratic process for ourselves that will never fully work for anyone else.
So if you value editorial feedback from a chatbot (ideally, a local one running on your computer and not one of the "foundation models" that are torching the planet and elevating the worst people on earth to positions of political, technical and commercial prominence), that's fine, you do you.
But even if that's the case, I still want you to know that whatever you're getting out of the chatbot is fundamentally different, and (I believe) much less useful than participating in a peer workshop.
That's what I wanted to say today, but I predict that an appreciable number of readers are about to email me to ask how these "peer workshops" work. There's a ton of variability in how these are conducted, but the basic shape of them is that in advance of each session, one or more writers submits a finished work to the other writers, who then read through the manuscript at least twice, making notes that include both minor copyedits and broader, thematic notes. They may write a brief editorial response as well, ranging from a paragraph to a couple of pages.
Then the workshop convenes. Each writer briefly expresses their views about the story under consideration, focusing on those thematic and structural notes on what worked and didn't work in the story, with suggestions for improving the latter. You don't need to point out every typo – they're noted on the manuscript. Critiquers don't need to repeat one another. If another workshop member says the thing you were planning to say, you can just say "Ditto what so-and-so said about whatever." If you have nothing to add when your turn comes about, it's fine to pass.
Those are pretty much universal characteristics of a peer workshop. Here are some variations that I am dogmatically committed to, but which other workshoppers might disagree with:
Every writer should submit regularly to the workshop. There is a serious risk that attending a workshop can become a substitute for actually writing. It is no kindness to your workshopmates to let them stay in the circle if it leads them to stop writing.
The subject of each session must not speak during the critiques, except to answer direct questions that are not related to the writing itself (e.g., "I couldn't figure out what word this was supposed to be – can you clarify?"). The subject can speak after all the other writers have spoken.
Each person in the critiquing circle speaks once, in turn, without being interrupted. No cross-talk allowed. It is useful to set a time-limit for critiques.
No partial manuscripts. It's not really possible to critique a story unless you have the complete tale. Novels can be workshopped as three chapters and an outline.
Stories should be distributed in advance and read in advance. Don't have writers read their work aloud for critique, as this can lead to critiquing the delivery rather than the material.
Critique the story, not the writer. It's fine to be offended by something in the story, but not OK to accuse your workshopmates of being bad people for having offended you.
Discourage resubmission of revised stories. Workshopping produces sharply diminishing returns. If you really want feedback on a rewrite, approach people individually and ask if they'll read the new draft.
Any group of three or more writers can start a workshop. You'll need to locate writers who are at about the same stage in their artistic and professional lives as you, and find a physical place (or a videoconference service) where you can meet. Library meeting rooms are a favorite, and so is rotating between workshop members' homes. Set a regular schedule – weekly, fortnightly, monthly, possibly quarterly – and stick to it.
If you write genre fiction and you are interested in attending a peer workshop that also has an instructor to guide the sessions, lecture, set exercises, etc, I can recommend the three workshops I've taught:
Clarion (UC San Diego, six weeks):
https://clarion.ucsd.edu/ (I'm also a 1992 Clarion grad)
"Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com.
"Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com
“Once Is Enemy Action,” a science fiction novel about the origins of modern technofascism. Today's words: 550 (28730 total).
"The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Fourth draft completed. Submitted to editor.
A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING
This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.
Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.
"When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla
READ CAREFULLY: By reading this, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer.
Local Wikipedia shows you Wikipedia articles about things that are a half-hour or less walk from the address you enter in the search field.
I entered Golden, Colorado, where I lived in my early years, and read an article about the Rocky Mountain Quilt Museum, which "contains over 800 quilts dating back to the 19th century." — Read the rest
A complaint I hear a lot from my millennial peers is that our parents didn’t teach us enough about money. I can say that personal finance wasn’t dinner table conversation in my house, and even as I went off to college and started fending for myself, it was almost a taboo subject. When it came to money, people either had it or they didn’t, and you definitely didn’t talk about it.
Maybe this is why the average American isn’t exactly fluent in personal finance, and the situation is getting worse. Americans can only answer about 50 percent of basic questions about borrowing, savings, and risk on a financial literacy survey, according to a 2026 study by TIAA, a retirement services company. About a third of those surveyed said they have a hard time making ends meet and are debt-constrained. These figures have remained relatively unchanged for nearly a decade, but dropped to their lowest level in this year’s study.
It makes sense: It’s hard to learn about money when it’s not taught in schools, and it’s such an intensely private topic. It’s also hard to make good financial decisions when you’re one of the growing number of American households struggling to pay bills, repay debts, and save for the future — and feeling very stressed about it.
In a perfect world, each of us could sit down with a financial adviser to get help — but most of us can’t afford that. Instead, average Americans tend to find personal finance tips on TikTok, in Reddit threads, by watching Suze Orman on YouTube or How to Get Rich on Netflix, or by Googling their questions.
Now we have AI tools, too.
With access to an internet’s worth of information and financial advice, ChatGPT, Claude, and other AI chatbots can answer any question you ask. They can help you put together a basic budget or, armed with your bank statements and the details of your student loans and your retirement accounts, tailor solutions to your specific situation. Or, at least, that’s the promise.
Key takeaways
More people are turning to AI for financial advice:One in five Americans have used AI to help manage their money, and some experts think chatbots could be better than the status quo.
AI works best if you know what questions to ask: Those with basic financial literacy will be able to make the most of these tools, while those without it — who might need help the most — could be led astray.
Better advice comes with greater risks: Sharing your financial information with a chatbot helps personalize its recommendations. This raises privacy concerns, so you might want to delete your data when you’re done.
Think of AI as a financially savvy friend:Chatbots can answer money questions you might be embarrassed to ask someone else and use that context to help build your budget.
AI could create a more utopian, more equitable future, where reliable, hyper-personalized advice is just a prompt or two away for people who can’t afford to meet with an expert in real life. But machines are built by people, and there’s good reason to be concerned that these machines will simply replicate the biases and disparities built into our current system.
Here’s what experts say about how to make the most of these tools — and how to think about all of the inherent risks of uploading a lot of personal financial information to a chatbot or, worse, giving an AI agent the keys to your bank account.
The steep rise, risks, and rewards of AI financial advisers
Nearly 20 percent of Americans have used AI tools like ChatGPT for financial advice, and close to 25 percent for Gen Z adults and millennials have tried it, according to an August Gallup poll. These numbers could tick up too: In October, OpenAI started rolling out a dedicated personal finance tool to its ChatGPT Free and Go users in the United States, which effectively means anyone can try it. ChatGPT Finances lets you securely connect your bank account to the tool using a platform called Plaid, and then you can basically have a conversation with the chatbot about your real-time finances down to the penny. It’s like an AI-powered Mint (RIP) that you can talk to directly.
Regardless of where you encounter a chatbot or how much data you give it, experts say these tools could genuinely help improve financial literacy. You can talk to them about money problems you’re too embarrassed to discuss with friends and family, or ask questions and receive actionable, personalized information. There are real upsides to using AI this way.
Taha Choukhmane, an associate professor of finance at the MIT Sloan School of Management, has been studying outcomes when people turn to chatbots for financial advice. In general, these AI tools give pretty good advice, and that advice gets better as people become more practiced in asking the right question, according to research he published earlier this year.
“We were actually quite surprised that relative to the status quo, the average American would be better off if they were to follow the advice,” Choukhmane told me. But he added a caveat: “Just following the advice without understanding the advice puts you at risk of not fully understanding the risk.”
But you shouldn’t trust everything a chatbot tells you and should verify everything before making any decisions.
Chatbot advice has some significant limitations. First, it’s not impartial. The finance industry has a vested interest in steering you toward certain ways of managing your money, and that typically means selling you products, like loans. If you’ve ever searched for personal finance tips on Google, you’ve probably noticed that a lot of the top results come from banks and other financial institutions. This is by design, according to John Campbell, an economics professor at Harvard. But because AI is aggregating all of that advice, the specific influences and possible bias is less obvious.
“AI is very promising for providing low-cost financial advice in plain English that will arguably be better than what many people would be able to do on their own,” said Campbell, who’s also the co-author of Fixed: Why Personal Finance Is Broken and How to Make It Work for Everyone. “One caveat is that chatbot advice is quite likely — unless a model has been carefully trained — to reflect the average of whatever’s being posted on the internet, and that may or may not be first-rate advice.”
An example Campbell gives is the question of when to start taking Social Security benefits. While you’re eligible at age 62, many economists agree that you should delay your benefits, which, based on the way the government calculates your monthly payouts, will allow you to enjoy much higher benefits later in life. But paid financial advisers can recommend starting as early as possible, since waiting longer reduces the amount of money that needs to be managed, which reduces the adviser’s fees. That means there’s a lot of conflicting advice online, much of it supplied by the finance industry. And that’s the information used to train AI models.
“The advice is much more mixed,” Campbell said. “And so if a chatbot is learning from that, it may not actually give the best advice.”
It can be hard to recognize bad advice anywhere in life, but especially when you’re talking to a machine that’s programmed to please you. A chatbot could encourage you to consider a balance transfer, to lean in on credit card rewards, or to refinance your mortgage — all decisions with upsides and downsides for you, but definite upsides for banks — without you realizing how much of its training data comes from the finance industry selling these products. What’s worse is that if you do end up taking bad advice, it might be years before you realize it. You won’t know that you refinanced a mortgage at a bad time until a better time comes along.
That leads me to the other major issue with using chatbots for money advice: People who lack financial literacy are the most likely to fall for bad advice, because they simply don’t recognize it as such. They also tend to be less wealthy, which means they can’t afford big mistakes.
One way to mitigate risk, oddly enough, is to give the AI chatbot more personal information. The more details about your situation it has to consider, the more it can offer personalized advice. More context also means better advice, according to Choukhmane.
“There’s a trade-off there,” Choukhmane said. “There’s real risk around privacy, and so I think everyone needs to find their level of control.”
Don’t assume your data is safe
Any time you’re talking to a chatbot, you’re putting a lot of trust in tech companies to take care of the personal details you’re sharing. Sending sensitive financial data is an especially risky proposition. While tech companies, including OpenAI, promise to keep your data secure, there’s already a long list of breaches, leaks, and privacy violations that serve as cautionary tales.
It’s also impossible to know what tech companies might do with your data in the future. Most of them will use it to train their models, unless you tell them not to. Some of them will use the data to serve you personalized ads.
Then there’s the risk of bad actors getting into your ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini account. If you’ve been using a chatbot for financial advice and uploading your bank statements, a hacker could gain access to a stunning amount of information that could enable them to do all kinds of terrible things to your life.
“They could steal your identity and open accounts and then quickly bankrupt a person,” said Delicia Reynolds Hand, a senior director at Consumer Reports. “It’s not even so much the primary underlying accounts that could be at risk, it’s more just access to this information.”
The steady march of AI progress is making this situation even more complicated. The previous era of chatbots offering financial advice is quickly bleeding into a new phase of AI agents logging into bank accounts on users’ behalf. If you’re using a tool like Claude Cowork or even an AI assistant like Muse, you can give an agent the login credentials to your bank account, and because the agent is operating its own computer, it can actually make transfers, apply for loans, or really do anything in your account. This is reportedly driving major banks wild, since they don’t know which logins are coming from humans and which are agents. And because we know that AI agents are unpredictable, it’s hard to know how that access might go wrong.
Beyond data security and privacy, you should also be aware of the simple fact that nobody’s really at fault if you end up losing money using these tools. Chatbots are not regulated in the way that human financial advisers, who have a fiduciary duty to act in your best interest, are.
“If I get bad tax advice from H&R Block or a tax adviser, there are a clear set of rules and guardrails in place to manage what I can expect in that relationship and where the service they use has liability and where that liability ends,” Hand said. “Currently, that’s not the case for these tools.”
Trust but verify — and then delete your data
In the final years of the Cold War, Ronald Reagan popularized an old Russian proverb: Trust, but verify. The phrase is somewhat nonsensical, since trusting someone implies that you don’t need to verify what they’re saying, and verifying what’s said implies you didn’t trust them in the first place. But if you are willing to shoulder a bit of risk, consider approaching AI this way, especially when your life savings are on the line. I’d also suggest adding a coda to the phrase: And then delete your data.
Chatbots are not stand-ins for licensed financial advisers, he said, and you shouldn’t let them make decisions for you.
The great paradox with tools like ChatGPT and Claude is that they’re very good at generating truthy text. It sounds authoritative and looks correct — and usually is. Except when it isn’t. AI is famously unpredictable and prone to hallucinations. You can ask the same question twice and get two different answers. That doesn’t mean these tools are useless. It just means you have to approach them with caution. You have to interrogate these chatbots, challenge whatever advice they give you, and then crosscheck that with other, more reputable, sources.
“If you’ve never used these tools, I would not encourage you to just change all your financial plans based on your first conversation,” Choukhmane said. “You want to be quite careful. Start using these tools, start understanding, ask a lot of follow-up questions.”
When it comes to mitigating risk, consider giving ballpark figures for your income or spending when you’re talking to a chatbot about your finances. Uploading financial documents, even if they’re redacted, is inevitably filling a tech company’s vault with your sensitive information without necessarily knowing what will happen to it next. You should also dig into your privacy and security settings to make sure you’ve turned on multi-factor authentication and that your personal data is not being used to train AI models and gets deleted after 30 days.
Ethan Bloch, the product lead for ChatGPT for Financial Services, made a similar set of recommendations when I talked to him recently. Chatbots are not stand-ins for licensed financial advisers, he said, and you shouldn’t let them make decisions for you. They’re designed to inform and help you think through complex topics.
“You should liken it to just talking to a friend who has some very informed opinions about finance,” Bloch told me. “But if you’re actually making some large financial decision — your portfolio or retirement — you still need to seek out the help.”
Regardless of how experienced you are with chatbots or how much data you’re prepared to hand over, remember what Campbell, the Harvard professor, said. If your financial literacy isn’t great, AI chatbots can be trouble. And if you’re like most Americans, you could probably stand to learn a little bit more about things like mortgages and interest rates.
Yes, Chatbots can be a good way to brush up on financial literacy. You can ask them the money questions you’re too embarrassed to discuss with friends and family. But you can also learn about money the old-fashioned way: Reading books and websites written by reputable, independent sources. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. has a portal of financial education resources, including games and quizzes. Khan Academy has a course that covers everything from credit scores to college savings. There’s a personal finance subreddit that I joined years ago and read almost daily. There are budgeting apps, like YNAB which has its own huge Reddit presence.
Whatever you do to learn more about personal finance, simply doing something is progress. Talking about personal finance isn’t the taboo it once was in the US, and it’s even a required course in the vast majority of American high schools now. And while AI won’t magically solve your money problems, it can help get you started. Just be careful. Your livelihood could be on the line.
A drone has hit a commercial ship off the coast of Romania, killing at least one crew member with three more still missing, Romanian President Nicușor Dan said Friday.
“This morning we experienced a security incident: A vessel was struck by a drone approximately 13 nautical miles from the coast, just beyond Romania’s territorial waters,” Dan said, praising the coast guard for saving nine sailors as part of the rescue operation. “Unfortunately, one sailor has died and three others are still being searched for,” he added.
The Khoryv ship, flying under the flag of Comoros, suffered significant damage, capsized and partially sank, according to Romania’s Interior Ministry.
The incident is the latest in a string of drone attacks on commercial shipping in the Black Sea. Dan told POLITICO last week that Russia’s intention was clearly to weaken Romania’s support for Ukraine in the war but vowed not to back down.
NATO allies met Tuesday to discuss the threat to Black Sea shipping and Dan said Romania would receive “additional capabilities” to help defend the area.
“Evidently, this is an incident within the broader process of escalation that Russia is pursuing in the context of its war in Ukraine,” the Romanian president said.
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said she was “deeply alarmed” by “yet another Russian escalation in the Black Sea.” The ship was carrying Ukrainian and Azerbaijani crew, she said.
“These reckless attacks target innocent lives and openly defy international law. My thoughts are with the family and loved ones of the sailor that was killed. And with the families of the three crew members still missing.”
Over the last month, drones have hit several cargo ships and chemical tankers close to Romania and Bulgaria — both NATO members — killing more than 20 people in total.
Reuters reported that the ships hit by drones in recent weeks had been near or heading towards the Sulina Canal, linking the Danube River and the Black Sea. This has become a key export route for Ukrainian grain and food oil after Russia attacked Ukraine’s own Black Sea ports.
Earlier this month, during a campaign rally in Nebraska, Donald Trump said that losing Los Angeles in a potential attack from Iran would be “a small price to pay.” To many Californians, the idea that a president would write off a city of millions sounded unthinkable. To the Tongva, the indigenous people of the Los Angeles Basin, it sounded familiar.
Tongva displacement began with Spanish settlement in the 1770s, and was codified in the 1840s and 50s when the U.S. acquired California and failed to ratify 18 different treaties that promised reservation lands, livestock and education. But if California Indian treaties were rendered purposeless, Trump’s words aren’t so random. “There is debate on what Trump meant when he said Iran can take out Los Angeles and San Diego and as in all his . . . speeches, it becomes the listeners’ responsibility to decipher truth from lies,” Tongva tribal elder Tina Calderon told Salon. “But I believe calling out two cities that he heavily targeted with ICE and who are against his attacks on [the] environment and Peoples was quite intentional.”
Calderon’s words are striking. They also name a pattern. Trump didn’t select two cities arbitrarily; he picked the places that denied his fascist will outright. Deciding whose homelands are sacrificed has always been a political choice, and Native Californians have been on the butt end of it for a long time.
What happened to Native Californians was also a harbinger, not a footnote. Their land and water — under Spain, Mexico and the United States — became a small price to pay for the state’s growth.
What happened to Native Californians was also a harbinger, not a footnote. Their land and water — under Spain, Mexico and the United States — became a small price to pay for the state’s growth. That habit isn’t restricted to Trump’s party. California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, condemned the president’s remark, but he has vetoed bills that would have protected tribes’ sacred sites and given them a say over the state’s water.
However dangerous to the nation, Trump is undeniably talented at getting his many grudges to materialize one way or another. His threats have a way of actually becoming policy. When he pontificated about calling Canada the 51st state, tariffs followed. Los Angeles had already learned this lesson firsthand. In June 2025, after Angelenos protested Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids, Trump sent federalized National Guard forces into the city. So when he names L.A. as expendable, Calderon is right to not simply treat it as a slip of the tongue.
For Native Californians, being a nominal sacrifice for the state is a part of history. “It’s a small price to pay, but the price has already been paid there, and Native people are still there, feeling the impacts of that,” Jolie Varela, Nüümü Huupi and Yokuts tribal member and founder of Indigenous Women Hike, told Salon.
Varela lives in Payahuunadü, the Owens Valley, in the Eastern Sierra, more than 200 miles north of Los Angeles. In 1913, the city began draining the valley’s water through the newly built L.A. Aqueduct. When she drives through the desert to reach her hikes, Varela is reminded each time by the landscape that her homeland was not always so arid, and that this historic transgression benefits Los Angeles to this day. “When you turn on your water, and when you wash your hair in the shower, you can thank a Paiute for that water,” she said.
“Los Angeles could not exist the way that it does without stolen water,” AnMarie Mendoza, a Tongva citizen and University of California, Los Angeles doctoral researcher, told Salon. Her response to Trump’s insertion of L.A. and San Diego into the Iran war was trenchant: “It aligns with the settler colonial realities of thinking that all of the homelands in this country are expendable.”
That is the through-line: a city, a state and a country that objectify Native homelands, treating them as expendable and raw material. Trump’s remark only extended that logic to include everyone else in Los Angeles.
The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power’s (LADWP) desiccation of Owens Valley has had long-term symbolic and physical impacts. The valley’s original name was Payahuunadü, which means “the place where water flows,” Varela said. “It makes me think of, specifically here in Payahuunadü, my elder who had to breathe in the dust that was created from the LADWP draining Patsiata, and the reservations here.” She noted that LADWP controls over 95% of the valley floor, leaving almost no land available for the Paiute, who’ve called it home for over 15,000 years, in the past 300 years. “Theft is still ongoing,” says Varela.
L.A. didn’t just take water a century ago. It still holds the land, the water rights and the future of the Nüümü community, and it raises the question: Why aren’t Angelinos asking where they get their water?
Ignorance about California water is nonpartisan. Agriculture uses most of the state’s developed water, and wealthy growers like the Resnicks are in control of much larger water rights than any tribe. Yet during the 2025 fires, a Fox News host blamed Native Americans for the region’s wildfires in 2025. The scapegoating wasn’t just happening on the right: A former L.A. resident who is Iranian-American and a Democrat told Salon that during the 2025 fires, friends reposted claims blaming Native communities for water shortages. “Well-meaning liberals are so quick to punch down on Natives,” he said. He shares concern over the ill-informed framing of Native people as responsible for extreme water use in the state. “It’s so untrue and also racist to blame lack of water on Indigenous people . . . No one was talking about the Resnicks and their water rights for all their agricultural land, or all the data centers.”
The Iranian-American diaspora in L.A. has lauded Trump’s attacks on Iran. Salon’s source in the community attributes this to a nostalgia among former Persian oligarchs residing in Beverly Hills, which is known colloquially as Tehrangeles. “Funny how quickly a foreign place can feel like home to immigrants . . . but obviously all that comes at a cost that typically other people have to bear.”
Asked how the Iranian community in L.A. might view the Native response to Trump’s remarks, he said: “It’s not their L.A. It’s the other L.A.”
In Sylmar, a suburban neighborhood in north Los Angeles that borders the Angeles and San Gabriel National Forests, Varela walked with Mendoza along the L.A. aqueduct. She recalled something others see as banal but that, to her, means something else: “I saw water flowing down into the street, and [thought] ‘That’s our water, and we can’t water on certain days, and we have limitations here, but yet I’m here in a wealthy neighborhood in Tovaangar, hundreds of miles away, and our water is flowing into the streets.’” The image is a mise en abyme, a scene within a scene; water that should sustain Nüümü community is flagrantly wasted on a lawn in a city that has never had to think about where it comes from.
Mendoza echoed Varela, saying Paiute (Nüümü) people were “my first water teachers” and “water is a living relative.”
This is a lesson that politicians like Newsom, whose 2019 apology for California Native genocide was followed by abject inaction, have still failed to grasp. Earlier this month, he killed a water bill that would have given Native tribes a larger role in the state’s water policies. Although there have been small, token land returns, California Native nations still hold less than 1% of the state’s land. “Newsom is a hypocrite,” Varela said.
Native peoples carry a long collective memory, and Newsom’s quickly growing record of attacks on California Native tribal sovereignty could become an albatross that won’t be forgotten if he decides to run for president in 2028, as is widely expected. At an estimated national population of 9.7 million, Native Americans represent roughly 3% of the country and could swing key states like Arizona and New Mexico in a competitive primary and general election.
Mendoza, though, sees no partisan refuge: “Whether it be red or blue, they all know how to discriminate against Native people.”
That’s really what makes Trump’s remark so revealing. He said out loud what Sacramento has practiced surreptitiously for generations: that some Californians, and their land and water, are a fair price for everyone else. The difference is that for once, the people being written off were everyone else.
Californians should be upset by Trump’s comments. But they should not be confused by what it obscures. This is a chance to ask who’s already been written off in a Los Angeles the president considers expendable — and to learn from California Native tribes how they survived it.
Login
