Excerpt: As for democracy, Trump was asked whether he would support María Corina Machado, the Nobel Prize-winning leader of Venezuela’s opposition movement, to lead a new government—or even whether he’d spoken with her. Trump answered no to both questions. “It would be very tough for her to be the leader,” he said in a dismissive tone. “She doesn’t have the respect in the country.” Nor did he even mention Edmundo González, who was elected Venezuela’s president in 2024 and fled to safe exile in Spain after Maduro stole the election.

Excerpt: I am an AI hater. This is considered rude, but I do not care, because I am a hater.

To speak politely about AI, you put disclaimers before criticism: of course I’m not against it entirely; perhaps in a few years when; maybe for other purposes, but. You are supposed to debate how and when it should be used. You are supposed to take for granted that it must be useful somewhere, to someone, for something, eventually. People who are rich and smart and respected are saying so, and it would be arrogant to disagree with such people.

But I am a hater, which is a kind of integrity. It means I am willing to disagree with anyone, even if it is rude. “But I only use it to–” “Actually if you just—” “The new models–” “I was making fun–” Stop. You’re embarrassing yourself. I am embarrassed for you…

Excerpt: And these laws don’t just wall off specific content deemed (like a bookstore would); they age-gate access to websites wholesale. This is akin to requiring ID every time a customer walks into a convenience store, regardless of whether they want to buy candy or alcohol.

In offline, in-person scenarios, a customer typically provides their physical ID to a cashier or clerk directly. Oftentimes, customers need only flash their ID for a quick visual check, and no personal information is uploaded to the internet, transferred to a third-party vendor, or stored. Online age-gating, on the other hand, forces users to upload—not just momentarily display—sensitive personal information to a website in order to gain access to age-restricted content.

This creates a cascade of privacy and security problems that don’t exist in the physical world. Once sensitive information like a government-issued ID is uploaded to a website or third-party service, there is no guarantee it will be handled securely. You have no direct control over who receives and stores your personal data, where it is sent, or how it may be accessed, used, or leaked outside the immediate verification process.

Excerpt: In short, the president had ended up getting what he wanted – without a jot of authority to do so. As for Sajet’s supposed partisan position, her adherence to the loathed ideology of diversity and inclusion? Sajet’s mission had been, she told me, to ensure that Americans would be able to see portraits of people like themselves. Gradually, she made sure more women, more minorities, more Black people were represented on its walls. “It was just recognizing that people had been knocked out of the national story, so let’s put them back in,” she said. “It wasn’t terribly revolutionary.”

Excerpt: A few weeks before Christmas, Rey Estrada’s 8-year-old son wrote a letter to Santa. He asked Santa “to tell the bad guys to let my dad come to my house on Christmas,” said Liz Soto, Estrada’s wife. “I don’t have the words to respond.”