W. A. Finnegan, who used to help write Federal policies, wrote in his newsletter, The Long Memo, that because of Trump’s incompetence, every student loan is now “forgiven.”

Trump announced that the Small Business Association will take on student loans immediately as he attempts to dismantle the Department of Education. Of course, that really can’t happen, and if it does…

You agree to repay the loan under specific conditions. In exchange, the Department of Education agrees to disburse the funds, maintain servicing standards, and follow the law under the Higher Education Act of 1965.

Those terms are not flexible. They’re not vague. They’re not “up for reassignment” to whichever federal agency a rogue president feels like tossing them to this week.

The MPN allows your loan to be transferred between servicers—companies like MOHELA, Nelnet, Aidvantage—but those are just contracted agents of the Department of Education, not owners. You can’t be assigned to a totally different federal agency that has no statutory authority under the Higher Education Act. That would be like your mortgage getting transferred to the Parks Department.

If you suddenly find your loan managed by an agency not named in your contract, not authorized by Congress, and not subject to the same legal compliance regime, guess what?

That’s a breach. A big one.

And in contract law, a breach that goes to the heart of the agreement—like changing the party responsible for enforcement or management—is what courts call a material breach. That means the contract is no longer valid. And if it’s not valid, they can’t enforce it.

So yes, if Trump goes through with this, we’re talking about millions of legally unenforceable loans. Essentially, “loan forgiveness” for every student who ever signed the MPN, now, today, yesterday, and in the future. The government would lose its legal standing to collect. Servicers would be stuck in limbo. Every borrower would have a legitimate argument that the contract they signed is no longer binding—because the government breached first. And abrogation of responsibilities of a loan originator typically gives rise to making the entire debt unenforceable.

This isn’t just bad policy. It’s contractual suicide.

And that’s the funny part. Trump may have just accidentally forgiven the entire student loan system. Not through legislation. Not through executive mercy. But through everything, the Orangutan does, pure incompetence.

I’m sure this will get fixed, but maybe not.

Mark Mullenberg of Automattic wrote a blog post about company culture and he came around to this bit about the Automattic Creed.

There’s the story about how, if you have an ethics statement above where you sign the test or something, people cheat less. So I thought, well, what’s our equivalent of that? We have the Automattic Creed. It’s an important part of our culture. So we put the creed in, it says:

I will never stop learning. I won’t just work on things that are assigned to me. I know there’s no such thing as a status quo. I will build our business sustainably through passionate and loyal customers. I will never pass up an opportunity to help out a colleague, and I’ll remember the days before I knew everything. I am more motivated by impact than money, and I know that Open Source is one of the most powerful ideas of our generation. I will communicate as much as possible, because it’s the oxygen of a distributed company. I am in a marathon, not a sprint, and no matter how far away the goal is, the only way to get there is by putting one foot in front of another every day. Given time, there is no problem that’s insurmountable.

It’s not legally binding, but it’s written in the first person, you read it and you kind of identify with it and then you sign below that. We want people who work at the company who identify with our core values and our core values really are in the creed.

This is amazing. I’d love to replicate that somehow.

Matthew McConaughey has a newsletter called Lyrics for Livin’. He waxes philosophically about a variety of topics. I liked his latest article about happiness versus joy.

Happiness: an emotional response to an outcome. That’s what happiness is, and we all want more of it. It is a noble pursuit. Hey, if I win, I’m going to be happy. If I get that promotion, I’m going to be happy. If she says yes, I’m going to be happy. If I finally fit into that dress, I’m going to be happy. If my kid gets into that Ivy League school, I’m going to be happy. Yeah, it’s an if, then cause and effect, quid pro quo. There’s nothing wrong with that, but I think it’s the wrong pursuit, because it’s an unsustainable standard that we immediately raise the bar for every time we attain it. See, it is result reliant. Happiness is a short-term dopamine hit that is set up to fail. Joy. Joy is a different thing.

Why? Because joy is not a result. It’s a constant. It’s the feeling we have from doing what we are fashioned to do, no matter the outcome. You see, joy is the process, the behavior that we are enjoying while on our way to our destination. Joy is contentment, satisfaction in the doing. Now, personally, as an actor, I started enjoying my work and literally having more joy in my life when I stopped trying to make my work a means to a certain end, when I stopped seeking happiness as a result, approval as the outcome, accolades as proof. For example, oh, I need this film to be a box office success to be happy, or I need the respect of my peers and my performance to be acknowledged to be happy. Those are reasonable aspirations. But the truth is, as soon as the process of the work, the daily making of the movie, the doing of the deed, as soon as that became the reward in itself for me…

Well, guess what?

I got more box office. I got more approval, I got more accolades, more results than I ever had before. You see, Joy is always under construction. It is a constant approach, alive and well in the doing of what we are fashioned to do and enjoying it. When we choose experiences over outcomes, we get more results and enjoy it.

Here’s the trailer for Shopping for Superman, a crowdfunded documentary about the 50-year history of local comic book stores and their shaky future.

The origin story of your friendly neighborhood comic shop. Tracing the 50-year history of the local comic book store’s far-reaching impact, we examine their cultural significance and the numerous threats they face today.

After a 75% industry contraction, floundering sales, superhero fatigue, and online retail competition, can our heroes survive?

I had a fleeting thought about owning and operating a comic book shop when I was much younger. I can’t fathom anything like that now.

Vince Vance and the Valiants should probably give up.

Mariah Carey, accused of copyright infringement in her 1994 Christmas hit “All I Want for Christmas is You,” has won her case. Judge Mónica Ramírez Almadani rejected songwriter Adam Stone’s claim that the song lifted a song he wrote in 1989. Almadani ruled that the two merely shared “Christmas song clichés” already typical of the genre.

His evidence for the lawsuit included the shared title and key lyrics, references to Santa Claus and mistletoe, and the plaintive female vibes, which the court found to be a well-established cliche of Christmas music. Yep.

Vince Vance is Stone’s stage name, and he co-wrote a fantastic song also titled “All I Want for Christmas is You.” He’s the guy with the spiked-up mohawk in the video. Lisa Layne has some powerhouse vocals.

Personally, I like the Vince Vance song better.

Ross Rosenfeld, writing for The New Republic, basically thinks Trump is insane.

Some of you might argue that Trump isn’t mad, but just a psychopath feigning madness for his own ends. Or perhaps his ludicrous assertions began as convenient foils and have morphed into true delusions. After all, he’s had plenty of people telling him he’s right. Perhaps there’s a more accurate Shakespearean comparison, then. King Lear has a deep hole in him that constantly has to be filled: He insists that his three daughters publicly fawn over him to gain his graces and dismisses his most beloved daughter, Cordelia, when she refuses to engage in the practice. He cannot accept the errors of his ways. Yet Lear somehow retains his hold on power even as his hold on reality slips away, until ultimately he meets his demise and causes the death of all who are dear to him.

We are in a Shakespearean moment right now. Journalists are trying to understand Trump’s irrational behavior, and are generally unwilling to consider the possibility that it is not some grand strategy but just a sign of a madman with increasingly diminished mental faculties. Perhaps he’s not quite yet burying steaks to grow meat trees, like George III, but Trump’s delusions cause considerably more damage than that. Are we going to wait until he’s ranting about “drainage” like Daniel Plainview and beating someone to death with a bowling pin? Are we going to continue to bend over backward to pretend that this emperor isn’t naked?

He’s not insane or a madman. He isn’t calculating or cunning either. He just has a lot of money, has never been told no, and is being used by people who are smarter than him to destroy the government. He ran the first time because he was insulted. He ran the second time to stay out of jail. The end.

He’s entirely delusional about everything because he has no concept of reality. The world revolves around him. He has no empathy. I doubt he has the capacity for love. He’s a sociopath and the sooner a majority of people understand his proclivities the better.

Wil Wheaton announced a brand new weekly audiobook podcast called It’s Storytime with Wil Wheaton, in which he narrates speculative fiction stories he loves from places like Lightspeed Magazine, Uncanny Magazine, Clarkesworld Magazine, and On Spec. The podcast launches on March 26.

This sounds cool, but I’ll probably pass on adding it to my collection. I have too many podcasts already. Still, it’s only seven episodes, so maybe.

Ezra Klein speaks to Democratic pollster David Shor about what voter data reveals about the 2024 election.

On ethnicity:

Ezra Klein: “Where do we begin?” David Shor: “In 2016, Democrats received 81 percent of the Hispanic moderate vote, while in 2024 they received 58 percent. That’s only 6 percent more than the 52 percent of white moderates that they received in 2024. The main story here is just a continuation of the trends that we saw four years ago. Throughout the entire Trump campaign, we’ve observed this racial depolarization.”

On GOTV:

Klein: “How does that sit with you — the idea that Democrats didn’t lose to Trump, they lost to the couch?” Shor: “It’s just not empirically correct, I would say.”

On gender:

Klein: “I feel like the story you’re implying you believe here is that this polarization among young men and women is driven by young men who were in high school and online during Covid.” Shor: “We’re in the midst of a big cultural change that I think people are really underestimating. […] If you look at zoomers, there are some really interesting ways that they’re very different in the data. They’re much more likely than previous generations to say that making money is extremely important to them. If you look at their psychographic data, they have a lot higher levels of psychometric neuroticism and anxiety than the people before them.”

On messaging:

Klein: “If I’m reading this chart correctly, when Democrats attack Trump for cutting or wanting to cut Medicare and Social Security, his disapproval increases by 2.5 points. If they attack him for letting Elon slash budgets, hurting Americans and putting privacy at risk, that hurts him by 2.2 points. Passing a one-party power grab to cut government services without compromise, that’s 2.1 points. These all look about the same, and none of them creates a very big shift.” Shor: “Can you just think about this scenario for a second: Can you imagine stopping a Trump voter on the street and you say 70 words to them and then there’s a 2.5 percent chance they changed their mind? I think that’s incredible and a big deal.”

You can also read the entire transcript.

Professor and authoritarianism scholar Ruth Ben-Ghiat joins WIRED to answer the internet’s burning questions about dictators and fascism. Why do people support dictators? How do dictators come to power? What’s the difference between a dictatorship, an autocracy, and authoritarianism? What are the most common personality traits found in tyrants and dictators? Is Xi Jinping a dictator? How do dictators amass wealth? Professor Ben-Ghiat answers these questions and many more.

Spend half an hour and learn something.

In his latest Substack newsletter, Paul Krugman dissects the Trump administration’s impact on consumer sentiment, revealing his own surprise at the dramatic loss of confidence.

While much of MAGA is motivated by hatred of an open society — by racism, misogyny and the desire to end all things woke — the swing voters who put Donald Trump over the top thought they were supporting a great manager who would fix the economy, reducing grocery prices and restoring good jobs. It was inevitable that they would eventually feel buyers’ remorse, because Trump never had plans to deliver on his economic promises; on the contrary, almost everything he’s trying to do will make the economy worse.

…

As everyone knows, during the campaign Trump repeatedly promised to bring grocery prices down on Day One of his presidency. As soon as the election was over, however, he declared that “it’s hard to bring things down once they’re up.” He didn’t quite say “Nyah, nyah, fooled you!” but he might as well have. And this reversal was completely predictable.

What has happened since then has been much more surprising. I would have expected Trump officials to wait a while, to start offering excuses for a bad economy only after the economy actually, you know, turned bad. But no, they’re already telling us to expect hard times as the economy goes through a “detox period.”

I think Krugman is more astonished at the incompetence than anything else. Honestly, I don’t know why.

This is what every Democrat was saying was going to happen before the election, but too many people didn’t believe them. Now everyone reaps the bullshit that’s about to be sowed.

Scott Dochterman, writing in The Athletic, has a good story on the Big Ten Conference’s absence from NCAA Men’s Basketball Championship for the last 25 years. He not only writes about last year’s Purdue team running into UCONN, but also Michigan in 2018, Wisconsin in 2015, and others.

I was most intrigued by what he had to say about the 2005 Illinois team and he pulled a quote from Bruce Weber I had never heard before.

The officiating in the Illinois-North Carolina title game in 2005 was perhaps even more controversial. In what was considered an even matchup in the post between future NBA Draft picks, Illinois center James Augustine fouled out in nine minutes of action without scoring a point. His counterpart Sean May scored 26 points, grabbed 10 rebounds and earned the Final Four’s most outstanding player award.

“I still walk through O’Hare or Midway (airports) every week, and when somebody asks me about the game, most of it’s about the officials,” Weber said. “Our backup center (Jack Ingram) played the most minutes of his career in the national championship game and took an engineering exam during the day because his engineering professor didn’t care that it was the national championship. He was given the test in St. Louis.”

Rashad McCants took “bogus classes designed to keep athletes academically eligible” at North Carolina while Jack Ingram had to take an engineering exam on the day of the National Championship game. Unreal.

Joan Westenberg —

There’s no aisle to reach across anymore. The modern right isn’t a governing party; it’s a collection of fanatics, con artists, and cowards, completely uninterested in policy, entirely committed to culture war nonsense and minority rule. They don’t respect compromise. They don’t respect good faith. They only respect power.

And yet, here come the Democentrists, once again convinced that the real problem is that they haven’t been accommodating enough. If they just tweak the messaging a little and show a little more deference to conservative anxieties, they’ll unlock some hidden reservoir of support. It’s the same delusional thinking that gave us a decade of failed centrist candidates, the same pathetic impulse that tells liberals to self-police while the right plays for keeps.

They don’t get it. The people voting for Trumpism aren’t doing it because they crave reasonable Democrats. They’re doing it because they want blood. They want revenge. They want someone to punish the people they’ve been told to hate, and they don’t care if it comes at their own expense.

No Democrat is winning them over by going soft. No Democrat is winning them over by pandering to their grievances.

They’re not looking for a compromise. They want a rumble. And that’s what Democrats should be giving them. Not because the left should sink to their level but because leadership means standing for something. It means knowing where you draw the line and refusing to budge. It means taking the fight to the people who have been lying to the working class for decades, the people who have convinced millions of Americans to cheer for their own exploitation.

Stephan Kunze, in his newsletter zensounds, writes about the joy is not putting in your headphones 24/7.

These days, I am walking through the city, surrounded by traffic noise, overhearing snippets of phone calls, eavesdropping on random conversations between people who are unknown to me.

I am walking through the woods, hearing my footsteps cutting through birdsong and leaves rustling in the wind. Suddenly, my dog and I are both looking up to a pair of cranes, moving through the sky. Then we look at each other and move on, having shared this moment.

The composer John Cage told us to “not discriminate against sounds.”

I find myself doing this more and more too. Mostly in the car when music or podcasts add to the cacophony. Sometimes I need to let my brain rest and not be in a constant state of active listening.

Dan Sinker –

Focus feels impossible right now. There is so much happening—so much awful news breaking at an unrelenting pace, so many warning signs and red flags being hoisted—that it feels like you can’t look away. At least, it feels like that to me. Which means that you’re looking at a cascade of horrors instead of the things you’re actually supposed to be doing.

This is something far beyond simple doomscrolling, this is full-on doom living. And it’s completely untenable. And yet most of the time it feels impossible to shake.

Friday, when the Democrats caved on the spending bill, I was fully locked into the doom. I had a list of things that I needed to be doing but I couldn’t do any of them. I had to keep refreshing the feed, keep reloading the page, keep checking for… something. Honestly, it was awful. It felt like I was trapped by my own brain.

And then I broke out of it.

I told myself I had to stop and do one thing.

Good advice.

The articles you should read with your morning coffee: Wired has a story that takes a look Inside Elon Musk’s ‘Digital Coup’. We also get an inside look at Amazon’s 007 Takeover via The Hollywood Reporter. Paul Krugman: Everybody Hates Elon. David Brooks: America’s Whole Reputation is Shot. From The Ringer: The 100 Best Sports Moments of the Quarter Century. Lastly, in honor of our five years ago nightmare: How COVID remade America.

Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t want you to read this book. What book, you say? Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism. It’s a memoir from Meta whistleblower Sarah Wynn-Williams that details the company’s attempts to enter China and how desperately weird its C-suite is. An arbitrator gave Meta a favorable ruling against the author from promoting the book. The ruling says that Wynn-Williams can no longer promote the book and must halt its publication as best she can.

As you might imagine, Careless People, which you can buy from Amazon right here with the click of a button, is full of salacious details about the company’s execs. Want more? Here’s The New York Times article all about it and the Wired article.

Firefly’s Blue Ghost witnessed Earth blocking out the Sun from its point of view on the Moon, while we experienced a lunar eclipse on Earth. In totality, Blue Ghost captured a glowing ring of sunlight above the Moon’s horizon appearing as a diamond ring shining against the dark backdrop of space.

Cool.

Sam Seder, host of the progressive internet radio show and podcast The Majority Report, did Surrounded, a YouTube series that pits a lone representative of a belief or a system — a Democrat, an atheist, or a pro-lifer — against twenty individuals who hold the opposing position.

I don’t recommend watching the whole thing. If you are like me, these young Trump supporters were so mind-numbingly stupid, willfully ignorant, and downright racist that I worry about the future of the country.

The high-octane racing film, F1, from Top Gun: Maverick director Joseph Kosinski, is barreling into theaters this summer. F1 is no normal race car movie. Much of the film was made and acted in real F1 cars going at top speed. And a lot of the footage was captured during actual F1 races because you just can’t fake the energy of that crowd.

And now the first trailer has arrived. I’m quietly looking forward to this.

SFGATE columnist Drew Magary goes nuclear on the Democratic Party. It is glorious. He opens with this:

The sky is falling. The United States federal government is being illegally dissolved before your very eyes. The workers you rely on to ensure that you don’t eat ground beef tainted with paint chips are being laid off en masse. Immigration and Customs Enforcement raided your office last week and asked for your papers, even though you were born in Fremont. A fire tornado is due to touch down in your backyard next Tuesday. Your parents are terrified to board an airplane. Your gay nephew is terrified to go to school. Your 401(k) is in the toilet. MEASLES. Measles have returned and want to eat your baby. Every day you look at the news, and you’re told that the president would like to bring back cockfighting. You and I need reassurance. You and I need to know that someone out there is trying to put an end to all this madness.

He then calls out Biden, Harris, Fetterman, Newsom, Schiff, Pelosi, and Schumer for their ineptitude. Finally he pleads for some sort of backbone to be grown.

I don’t expect you geniuses in charge of my party to listen to my plea, but I’ve been shouting into the wind for decades now so I may as well do it one final time. Democrats need to give voters like me a reason to care. Our current president is an asshole, but he sure knows how to get people to care one way or the other. Part of that success has been from brute force political messaging. Part of it is from the voraciousness of capitalism mutating this country into a place where everyone is told they’re equal but no one WANTS to be equal. When Donald Trump runs on a platform that boils down to F—K OTHER PEOPLE, tens of millions of Americans eat it up because they’ve been conditioned to hate other people: their boss, their movie stars, that guy that cut them off on the drive to work, everyone.

I don’t know how we solve this problem, but actually WANTING to solve it is a good first step. I see little evidence right now that Democrats — especially you, Gavin — have that desire. I’ll still vote in every election out of obligation, but how many others will just stop doing it entirely now that you’ve failed them so consistently? I have a hard time trusting a bunch of people who couldn’t even think to start up an ASSHOLE chant on the House floor during Trump’s speech last week. I’m wagering that younger generations are even more disaffected. Those people will be lost forever unless you f—kers finally understand what’s happening outside your office window.

And if you don’t get your s—t together now, I’ll know it’s because you don’t want to. I’ll know that you never cared about democracy. That you never cared about fixing the Constitution that’s currently sitting at the bottom of Sam Alito’s toilet. That you never cared about women or gay and trans folk or the poor or Muslim Americans or even Jewish people. I’ll know that you only care about yourselves, same as the president does. If you careerist scum want to prove me and every other voter wrong, you’d better get started right now. The clock is ticking.

Tick Tock Tick Tock…