It’s irrefutable now: Trump is nakedly following the playbook of autocrats like Vladimir Putin and Viktor Orban. As his poll numbers fall, he is rushing to lock in permanent power by punishing his opponents and intimidating everyone else into submission. Craven congressional Republicans and a complicit Supreme Court have abetted Trump’s destruction of our democratic safeguards and norms.

      Yet Trump has asignificant problem that neither Putin nor Orban faced. When Putin and Orban were consolidating their autocratics, they were genuinely popular. They were perceived by the public as effective and competent leaders. Just nine months into his presidency, Trump, by contrast, is deeply unpopular. He is increasingly seen as chaotic and inept.

(We try to avoid from running excerpts from New York Times-exile Paul Krugman’s Substack because we assume many of our readers will already have read his crucial takes. But optimism has been in such short lately that we can’t resist this excerpt.)

When you’re Younger

•       Grab an old backpack, stuff a couple of t-shirts in there and an extra pair of socks, find your Lonely Planet guide, jam it into the back pocket of your jeans, get moving

  When you’re older

•       Buy travel insurance, mainly for the medevac option.

•       Ask your doctor if it would be wise to hike Mount Etna.

•       Carefully plot out the itinerary. Leave enough time — say, six to eight hours — between connecting flights, just to be sure.

•       Send your itinerary to your kids and your neighbors so they can reach you in an emergency, either yours or theirs.

•       If you are traveling internationally, register with the State Department, so if there is civil unrest where you are going you can get an email reminder that there is civil unrest where you are going. . . .

       . . . Could Bobby's days be numbered because of his continuing and very public skepticism of vaccines, including the Covid vaccine, that he once described as “the deadliest vaccine ever made”?

      Who knows? Bobby, Jr.’s presence gives Donald Trump a prominent Democrat to wave over his head like a prized toy on Christmas morning. But it also has let Bobby Kennedy—deranged, conspiratorial, vengeful and wrong—become even more of a threat to the nation’s health than his clownish, junk food-eating boss.

       What is beyond debate is the havoc Bobby Jr. has wrought in just the past few months—and what further havoc may yet come . . . .

      A desturbing “end of days” scenario has been much discussed in recent years—most recently because it is fleshed out in a new book by Eliezer Yudkowsky, written with Nate Soares, If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: Why Superhuman AI Would Kill Us All. 

      Perhaps, therefore, this would be a good time to remind ourselves that human beings seem to have been discussing the imminence of doom more or less since the arrival of language.

      I’m talking wipe-out-all-humanity-level doom: the whole world getting flooded, not just a run of unsuccessful hunts.

      Doom today wouldn’t just be some murderous fires in LA or another big tsunami. A tyrant taking over the oldest continuing democracy and most powerful country on earth probably does not even qualify.

      This would be the Big One: all humanity—even vegans, including Elon Musk’s entire gene pool—deep-sixed. Gone. . . .

      Got off Twitter when Elon Musk took it over. Didn’t want to be associated with him and found the new environment toxic. Canceled the Washington Post subscription when Jeff Bezos pulled the Kamala Harris presidential endorsement. Didn’t want to give him my money. Stopped going to Target when it caved over its DEI policies. Matter of principle, I guess. But also thought, maybe, what if many of us would do this? Obviously never would fly Avelo Airlines because of its role in deportation flights. Frankly, easy enough to do.

      But I do occasionally look at Facebook, sometimes to my regret. And we have Apple phones and iPads, even though the head of Apple recently obsequiously presented Trump with a tacky gold plaque. . . .

. . . .In many ways, Charlie Kirk built his following by exercising his own free speech, and he stood up for the First Amendment. He wrote on X in 2024, according to politicalwire.com, that “There’s ugly speech. There’s gross speech. There’s evil speech. And ALL of it is protected by the First Amendment.”

      Yet after the murder, Attorney General Pam Bondi warned on a podcast that the Trump Administration would “absolutely target” what she called “hate speech” in the wake of Kirk’s assassination. “There is free speech and there is hate speech and there is no place [for hate speech], especially now,” she said.

      Pushback was quick from legal experts and even some conservative pundits.

      “There is no unprotected category of speech in the Constitution or in the case law called ‘hate speech,’” Northwestern University law professor Heidi Kitrosser told The Guardian. “By being so vague and by talking about speech that doesn’t fit into any legal category, she is basically opening the door for taking action against anyone who engages in speech that the president or the Department of Justice or Stephen Miller doesn’t like.” . . .

      Yes, I do have a Robert Redford story.

When I was working at MLB, Major League Baseball, in the late '70s, the office was at 75 Rockefeller Plaza—the Warner Communication building, near the skating rink.

      One fine day I got in the elevator to go to (I think) the 10th floor, and who gets in the elevator—alone with just me—Redford. So, I have about 15 seconds to say SOMETHING, ANYTHING . . . and I nod and say "Hello, Mr. Redford . . . . did you know that the Major League Baseball offices are in this building? That's where I work."

      And HE says, "I played baseball at the University of Colorado  . . . . and I have an office here."

      There was one other thing I had to say to him. "Mr. Redford, we have a secretary here with a floor- to-ceiling poster of you in her office. Any way you could pause and come with me to surprise her and shock her?" . . .

(Image by ChatGPT)

. . .about every terrible thing

     Nearly every politics-adjacent Substack I subscribe to has had some extended comment on Charlie Kirk’s assassination, as have the podcasts I listen to, and so forth. But I have to be honest: the batting average for these stories has not been super high. In some instances, they’ve left me with a lower opinion of the author than I came in with. Many are just a little too self-conscious about defining the author's place in the moral and political pecking order, at triangulating precisely whose side one is on. . . .

True, not covering a story is sometimes a sign that you think it deserves less attention. But there are other valid reasons for restraint, most importantly that you’re still processing the news or that you don’t have much to add at the moment beyond saying that what happened was terrible. Part of the value in not immediately commenting on every story is that you don’t establish a precedent where it becomes conspicuous when you sit one out. . . .

(This is an excerpt from Nate Silver’s Substack. We recommend that you read the whole piece.)

      We have a record player, an actual turntable that plays actual vinyl albums. We have lots of actual vinyl albums. We even have a number of 45s, although I’m not sure I could find the spindle that would allow us to play them on our actual turntable.

      We also have two or three Walkmen, although I’m not sure any of them still works or walks. In my desk are three different tape recorders, including one that only uses micro cassettes. The other two use regular-size cassettes, and we have lots of that size, and a number of the micro cassettes as well. . . .

     Why? Well, first, of course, my wife and I have difficulty getting rid of anything. We have too many books, an abundance of flower vases, a plethora of coffee mugs. Over time, we have been fortunate enough to accumulate lots of stuff and we are reluctant to disembarrass ourselves of much of it.

      But I think it’s more complicated than that.

      It’s complicated because, over the last few decades, there simply has been so much new tech. . . .

Age of course imposes a number of penalties upon us: We lose muscle tone. Our reflexes slow. We require reading glasses. Our hair thins. We lose an appreciation for the profundity of rock lyrics. The question -- a crucial question for those of us who value our wit as much as our abs -- is whether a decline in intelligence belongs on this dispiriting list.

The best evidence that it does has always been the effect aging has upon those who depend most on high-intensity mental gymnastics: chess masters, for example, or lyric poets, or inventors, or mathematicians, or, to choose the classic example, physicists. . . .

An excerpt from the Doomsday Scenario newsletter by historian Garrett M. Graff.

The most worrisome aspect of the quick militarization and turbo-charging of ICE is how American law enforcement across the board — and much of the government beyond — is being subsumed by ICE’s mission and lowering themselves, from hiring to behavior to tactics, down to ICE’s standards.

      We have different federal law enforcement agencies for a reason, and moreover, as citizens, we as a country need and want federal law enforcement. The FBI, DEA, ATF, Secret Service and the U.S. Marshals all have their own lanes, authorities and responsibilities, but right now we’ve watching the Trump administration turn all of federal law enforcement across both the Justice Department and Department of Homeland Security into a faceless quasi-ICE auxiliary, blending all these agencies and agent into some amorphous anonymous blob of masked, brown tactical-vest-wearing federal law enforcement. I wrote recently about how this precisely is what authoritarian regime looks like — armed, masked, anonymous agents of the state jumping from unmarked vehicles and whisking people away. . . .  

      My phone is missing.

      I’m in the car, getting ready to meet someone for lunch and do some errands, and I had had the phone, just a moment ago, and now I can’t find it. It was right there in my right-side front pocket, where it always is, and now it’s gone. And I have no idea where it’s gone to.  

      I get out of the car, go back in the house, and go into the kitchen, where I had just been before getting out of the house and into the car. The phone isn’t there. I go upstairs to the bedroom, where I had been before I had been in the kitchen, and the phone isn’t there either.

      It isn’t anywhere.  

      I’m getting late for my lunch so I give up, for the moment, really frustrated, and get back in the car. The phone, of course, is there, on the seat, where I have absolutely no memory of having placed it.

      It’s not the first time something like that has happened to me. And I’m sure it won’t be the last.

      Of all the annoying but probably inconsequential memory issues that come with aging—not being able to think of the name of that movie we just saw or that book we just read or can’t quite be able to come up with the precise word we are searching for—losing things might be the most exasperating. . . .

I haven’t used ChatGPT. Nor do I plan on it.

     At 76, I have a hard enough time printing pictures from my phone or sending contact information to somebody else. But my reasoning goes beyond my aversion to technology. It relates to some degree to Mitch Stephens’ essay on this site, ”So You Think You’ve Seen AI?”

      He in essence warns those who’ve fully embraced AI that technology takes a long time to evolve, so we don’t really know what we’re in love with yet. “Most of us in the early years—the early decades—on the internet did not have a clue what the internet would be.”

      Now we know better that some aspects of the internet are good, as I wrote a week or two ago, noting that Facebook has helped me find long-lost friends. Other aspects of the internet are awful, such as the bullying and trolling that goes on hourly on social media, the state of electronic bombardment we live under daily, and our obsession with and addiction to our phones.

      Now AI is everywhere. These days, I can’t start a Google search without first getting pasted with AI information about whatever I’m looking up. I’ve learned quickly that sometimes that information is wrong—really wrong. Let me give you one example from a couple of weeks ago. . . . .

[Illustration is, of course, created by AI]

    . . . . This past weekend Ezra Klein helped lug another awkward idea into the Overton Window. He called on Democrats to borrow a trick from Republicans and refuse to do what is necessary to fund Trump’s government. Mon Dieu! Democrats are supposed to be the reasonable ones. Shutting down the government is for the crazies. . . .

     I don’t want to exaggerate the power a journalist can wield. And Ezra Klein was not the only one calling for Democrats to allow the government to shut down.

But maybe Ezra has sensed that Democrats are tired of playing nice.

      And Ezra Klein may currently matter more than any other journalist on the center-left. . . .

      Many years ago, the man in his mid-50s my wife used to work for would close his office door sometime in the afternoon, lay down on the floor and take a 20-minute power nap. Afterwards, he was full of energy.

      I thought, frankly, it was just a bit nuts. Well, the laying down on the floor part, sure. But I really meant the whole idea of napping. Why waste time in the middle of the day? Sleep at night, do stuff when it’s daytime!

      I have now changed my mind, mainly because I am at the napping age.

      And, I know, I am not alone.

      According to research, up to 60 percent of adults aged 65 and older regularly take daytime naps . . . .

      Suddenly I’m hearing it even from my sometimes tech-challenged buddies:

      “I really like AI,” says a fellow septuagenarian.

      “I use it all the time to look up all sorts of things,” announces another. “I love it!”

       A sexagenarian—who still has, of all things, a job—gushes: “AI is the best thing that has happened to the internet.” . . .

      Don’t get me wrong. I’m no tech wiz myself at this point. And I’m proud of my fellow oldsters. They are staying up to date. They can handle a new technology. . .

      However, it is also the case that my alert, tech-savvy oldster friends, gushing about the capabilities of GPT 4 or 5—and plenty of alert tech-savvy, similarly gushing young’uns—have little sense of how sweeping the transformations unleashed by artificial intelligence might be. . .

      For the point of artificial intelligence is not just supposed to be doing what humans do only quicker and better. The point of artificial intelligence is supposed to be to think new thoughts, to conjure up new things: new cures for diseases, new inventions, new ways of organizing societies, new opportunities for humanity . . .

      Let’s accept the Wikipedia definition of a cover song as “a new performance or recording by a musician other than the original performer or composer of the song.”  

      We might all agree that in our generation the worst covers of pop music hits were by Pat Boone, the insipid vocalist from the 1950s and ‘60s who first made his reputation by blandly singing songs by immortal R&B stars like Little Richard’s “Tutti Frutti” and Fats Domino’s “Ain’t That A Shame.”

      Here instead are my dozen favorite cover songs in the post-1950 period (see note below for the ground rules guiding my choices). I encourage readers to send in their own favorites:

      The Beatles and “Twist and Shout”: Written in 1961 by Phil Medley and Bert Berns and first recorded by the Top Notes, this terrific dance tune became a strong hit for the Isley Brothers in 1962. But the Beatles’ slightly faster version, included on the Fab Four’s first British album in 1963, featured exuberant musicianship and an incredibly passionate, raspy vocal by John Lennon that brought it to the level of greatness. . . .

       Think of all Trump’s moves—whether controlling the Fed, or occupying American cities, or unleashing ICE on immigrants, or imposing import taxes (tariffs) on American consumers, or attacking American universities and museums, or shaking down CEOs, or punishing his “enemies”—as motivated by an unquenchable thirst to accumulate bargaining power over every other actor and institution in the world.

      The more bargaining power he has, the more he can extort from them the things he most cares about: money and subservience.

      We are dealing with a sociopath who is continuously seeking new ways to force others to reward him with personal wealth and total domination.

      Money is not enough. He relishes the submission of others. . . .

(An excerpt from Robert Reich’s Substack)

      Bobby Richardson, the New York Yankees all-star second baseman of the 1960s and a perennial World Series hero, turned 90 on Aug. 19.

      I had become a fan club member of his when I was 11, and when I joined the Yankees public relations staff in 1968 (he was two years retired by then), we reconnected and have remained adult friends all these years.

     He has long invited me to visit him in Sumter, South Carolina, but I never did.  Then a few months ago I had a “what am I waiting for?” moment and decided to go there from New York for the milestone birthday. . . .

      I’ve lived here long enough to remember when Washington, DC often was described as a sleepy southern town. Now it’s starting to resemble a banana republic capital after a military coup.

       Armed masked thugs working for ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) are arresting mostly black and brown people with impunity on city streets in broad daylight. Screw reading your rights, fuck due process. It’s a disgusting show of political theater that is supposed to combat what our pustule of a president calls the unfettered crime wave in the “hellhole” nation’s capital.

       In addition, Trump has taken over the DC police force (we’re the federal city, remember) and ordered in National Guard troops to protect us all from rampaging mobs of undocumented criminal Latinos and bloodthirsty homegrown Blacks. (Never mind that before all this, overall crime in DC was the lowest it had been in decades.)

       Mind, the political theater is playing only in selected locations. .