My productivity hack is Blade Runner-inspired music from Focus Soundscapes (like this one), my phone on a charger in landscape mode and notifications turned off. Headphones are in, volume is up, and Word is ready.

Let’s jam.

Joan Westenberg –

If you had told me a decade ago that a former president would waltz back into the White House, torch the global economy, slap double-digit tariffs on damn near everything, spook the markets into evaporating over three trillion dollars in a single day, and call it a “booming economy” with a straight face—I would’ve thought it a particularly cruel and poorly conceived joke.

But here we are.

…

The damage is real. And it will get worse. We are not even close to the bottom yet.

Because this doesn’t just shake the market. It shakes the Fed. It delays rate cuts. It raises prices. It hits consumer goods, healthcare, tech, food, and oil. It fractures alliances and emboldens adversaries. It hands China a propaganda win. It weakens labor. It punishes exporters. It shrinks small business margins. It craters consumer confidence.

This is the cost of delusion. This happens when the most powerful country on Earth decides that the laws of economics don’t apply if you yell loud enough, when your government becomes a theater troupe and your president a professional grievance artist.

“Professional grievance artist” is awfully polite.

After months of bluster, spin, and head fakes, President Trump finally committed to punishing global tariffs during a high-profile “Liberation Day” event at the White House yesterday. The policy invokes emergency authority to impose a 10% baseline tariff on all imports, a 25% fee on imported cars, and dubious “reciprocal tariffs” on everywhere from China and the EU to key strategic suppliers to remote uninhabited penguin reserves (not Russia, though ). Trump’s tariff obsession dates back decades and cites William McKinley’s Gilded Age protectionist policies as an inspiration. Economists warn these measures will disrupt global trade, spike inflation, and destabilize the dollar’s reserve currency status. Markets fell sharply this morning, as DOGE-driven cuts are projected to cause over 275,000 layoffs. Meanwhile, nationwide “Hands Off!” protests against executive overreach are planned for this Saturday, April 5th.

The Economist: Ruination Day: Donald Trump announced the biggest break in America’s trade policy in over a century—and committed the most profound, harmful and unnecessary economic error in the modern era.

Bloomberg: The US stock market is down almost 10% since President Donald Trump’s inauguration, marking the worst 10-week start under a new president since George W. Bush in 2001 during the height of the dot-com selloff Reuters: South Korea, China, Japan agree to promote regional trade as Trump tariffs loom

Onion owner Ben Collins:

I’m watching CNBC. These anchors are so angry. They really didn’t believe he’d do it. They’re actually just now, 10 years into this shit, realizing he’s a maniac hellbent on revenge and there’s no grand plan for the markets. Better late than never but holy shit. It’s great TV watching these CNBC analysts realize there is no “theory” on TV in real time and they can’t even invent one. One just said “They’re burning down the house to cook a steak.” There’s a phone ringing off the hook in the background no one’s picking up. It’s chaos, I recommend it.

The Onion: FBI Uncovers Al-Qaeda Plot To Just Sit Back And Enjoy Collapse Of United States “What a perfect day for Newsmax to ring the opening bell on the stock exchange."

WSJ: Senators Move to Rein In Trump’s Power on Tariffs

Under the Cantwell–Grassley Trade Review Act of 2025, any tariffs imposed by the president would expire after 60 days unless Congress voted to approve them. Congress also would have the power to terminate tariffs at any time by voting to pass a resolution of disapproval. The president also would be required to notify Congress within 48 hours of putting in place or raising any tariffs.

Ian Dunt in The i Paper:

”This might be the single stupidest thing any of us will ever see. It is stupid in every way: presentationally, intellectually, politically, methodologically, morally and of course economically. The word stupid doesn’t really suffice for the full level of idiocy we’ve now reached. It’s as if we’ve attained a new state of human mindlessness, a kind of species milestone.”

Alan Beattie in The Financial Times:

”There can be no logic-washing of Donald Trump’s tariffs. This isn’t part of a carefully-designed industrial policy or a cunning strategy to induce compliance among trading partners or a choreographed appearance of chaos to scare other governments into obedience. It’s wildly destructive stupidity, and the generations of American, and particularly Republican politicians, who allowed things to slide to this point are collectively to blame."

This looks great. Haters be damned.

Jaime Thingelsted on blogging.

I would encourage bloggers to not think about the individual post. Instead, think about the collection of writing, over weeks and years, as a body of work. It is a body of work that you are constantly adding to. Growing and improving. The individual post is but one breath. It comes and goes. But over the course of time this adds up. It is the cumulative action that creates something truly great.

But who is your audience? Who is this for? You. Yourself. Your family. Your friends. Your friend’s friends. Your neighborhood. And they can have it whenever they want. As a gift. A gift from you to them. Not a gift to be measured in engagement, but instead as a body of work. A gift to the web, which is a gift to people.

Bruce Springsteen is set to release over 80 new songs this summer with his newly announced “Tracks II: The Lost Albums” collection. Planned for release on June 27, the seven full-length albums will include songs by The Boss that have never been heard. The songs span Springsteen’s decades-long career and were written between 1983 and 2018.

The first single is: Rain in the River

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds is returning for its third season on Paramount+. I’m looking forward to catching up with Captain Pike and the crew of the U.S.S. Enterprise following last season’s brush with the Gorn. There’s lots of new life and civilizations ripe for exploration, but also a new enemy who will push the limits of this formidable crew (is that Trelane?). However, there will be some fun again this season, with a murder mystery and a documentary-style episode coming. Of course, it looks like we’re getting a thrilling conclusion to last season’s Gorn-based cliffhanger and some kind of Star Trek-aping retro-futuristic aesthetic episode?

Wait, that can’t be a holodeck?

The new teaser trailer for season three gives us a taste of this new trek to the stars. Hopefully, it drops this summer.

Hit it.

New Jersey Senator Cory Booker broke a record and made history. His speech will be remembered more fondly than the guy he beat, Strom Thurmond’s filibuster against the civil rights bill in 1957.

Without bathroom breaks but with occasional pauses for encouraging questions from his fellow Democrats, Mr. Booker read from a binder of notes and waved a small copy of the U.S. Constitution. He gesticulated and roared. At times, he draped himself over his lectern. His voice grew hoarse. But it remained strong … ‘My voice is inadequate,’ Mr. Booker said more than 19 hours into the speech. ‘My efforts today are inadequate to stop what they’re trying to do. But we the people are powerful.'

Did the speech change a thing about what Trump is trying to do or the political leverage held by the GOP? Not one bit. Booker only achieved one thing.

Attention.

It’s not enough, but it’s something

Matthew McConaughey, writing in his Lyrics for Livin’ newsletter, has a bit that struck a nerve with me.

I’m not sure why “consequences” has become a fait-accompli bad word in our society. We tell our kids, “There are gonna be consequences” and they never go “yayyyy!” But let’s admit it, when we make good CHOICES we receive good consequences. Consequences are simply outcomes, results, the product of our CHOICES, joyful and painful, good and bad.

Life is all about choices, and every choice has consequences.

Val Kilmer, the Hollywood star of Heat, Tombstone, The Doors, Batman Forever, and my personal favorite Real Genius, is dead at 65. He had been battling throat cancer for several years.

I highly recommend watching the documentary on his life, Val. His son provided the actor’s voice. The film utilized hundreds of hours of video he had recorded over the years, revealing the sets he worked on and showing the actor as an introspective thinker with an artist’s soul.

Jason Snell, writing on his site Six Colors, had a revelation while doing a simple experiment.

While the ads played on, I began creating a thought experiment: There’s a $10 difference between the ad and ad-free plans. If Mr. Netflix (he wears a top hat) came to my house and said, “Jason, I’ve got a great deal for you. I’m going to pay you $120 a year, and all you have to do is watch ads while you watch Netflix,” what would I do? When I started thinking about it, I thought it might be an interesting intellectual question. What would I accept in exchange for having Mean Mr. Netflix beam ads into every show I watch?

It turns out that whatever my price is, it’s a whole lot more than $120 a year. The next day, I upgraded back to the $18 ad-free plan.

Yup. I can’t handle ads on streaming. At. All.

This is amazing.

Jeff Passan, writing for ESPN, explains the next big thing in the Big Leagues.

Early in the 2023 season, Aaron Leanhardt started asking New York Yankees hitters what they needed to perform better…

…

An MIT-educated physics professor at the University of Michigan for seven years, Leanhardt left academia for athletics specifically to solve these sorts of problems. And as he spoke with more players, the framework of a solution began to reveal itself. With strikeouts at an all-time high, hitters wanted to counter that by making more contact. And the easiest way to do so, Leanhardt surmised, was to increase the size of the barrel on their bat.

…

The bat had its big debut over the weekend, as the Yankees tied a major league record with 15 home runs over their first three games.

I predict by the time the All Star Break rolls around, every MLB team will have players using these bats.

Jay Springett, uses a term that sounds incredibly important for the future.

We must cultivate context literacy and we must maintain a distinction between the infrastructure and the experience, between machine and meaning.

We are living through a moment that future historians may describe as a cultural rupture. A context war. How this plays out will shape new definitions of truth, authorship, creativity, and trust, perhaps for centuries to come.

I have never heard of “Context Literacy,” but it is so good. Read his whole piece.

Kyle Raymond Fitzpatrick, writing at his Substack newsletter The Trend Report, has put together a horrifying conclusion: We now know what a Millennial president looks like.

My brain has become infected with an upsetting fact that I am going to infect your brain with: the most powerful Millennial in the world — and perhaps ever — is JD Vance.

This is obvious but it has to be said as such. I realized this a few weeks ago, angry about some stupid Trump thing as I picked out clothes for the following day, thinking about how great it would be to have Millennial leaders, to have AOC or Ilhan Omar in the White House. Then, lightning struck: we already have that. Not them, no, but we have a Millennial: JD Vance. We complain and complain and long and long for younger leadership and, yet, somehow the world is living under the rule of a literal forty year old. This means we’ve entered the era of a Millennial presidency, as big theatrical speeches in Greenland suggest who is really in charge. Paired with Zuckerberg, we’re seeing what Millennial power looks like in real time as Trump himself reduces to figurehead, to mascot and plaything, instead of brain. That means Vance and his very public persona (versus the “quiet” and invisible VP of modern times) is perhaps the real president. We may be looking at our situation quite wrong, dogging on other generations for not pulling their weight when Millennials hold a smoking gun.

He went on to unpack this realization.

He’s not a “traditional” Millennial on the surface, no, in that he supports the worst ideologies on the planet. But: he’s in an interracial relationship. He’s a working class success story. He worked in — and is shaped by — tech. He had a blogging era! He had (successful) Hollywood dreams! He literally has a LinkedIn! He eats fish tacos with fried avocado! He has a fucking BEARD!!!!!!!!! He is the ultimate Millennial “Just asking questions!” older brother pig man, the outsider who isn’t actually on the outside, wielding a Libertarian chaos unique to Millennial male malaise.

That’s the Millennial context of this moment, representing an evolution of our story. This is what it looks like when an embittered Millennial runs shit like an embittered Millennial would: organized, quiet, chaotic, yet somehow “effective” in using old and new media as cudgels to dominate all conversation, to be the thing that everyone hates — which is the long running Millennial story. He has channeled that Millennial rage into an outlet he could mold, joining someone like Stephen Miller to revamp an old brand in his image: a lost Republican party. “I wasn’t as critical of my party in 2016,” he told Financial Times in 2018. “But when I look at tax reform, when I look at healthcare reform, I see Trump as the least worrisome part of the Republican party’s problem, which is that we are basically living in the 1980s. We are constantly trying to resurrect domestic policies from the 1980s.” Again: the smoking gun. None of this is “about Trump” but instead about Trojan horsing agendas, which happens to be the radical Project 2025. What’s more Millennial than working around systems to upgrade an old system to a new one? He is private equity’ing in less than a decade, proof that anyone can ascend with the right help, which also means: you, like Kat Abughazaleh, like Gabriel Boric, should do something.

Then: the whole Signalgate situation, a conversation where Vance was focused on larger messaging and communication while using proper sentence casing but not punctuation (or emojis, which Gen X Michael Walz employed). But the fact that this all took place on Signal is another Millennial smoking gun, proof of the “shitpost-based government.” That’s why we have an unusually sharp, disgusting social-media-as-fascism White House: AI Ghibli depictions of immigrant deportations; a Valentine’s meme about deportations; incorporating killer dogs into the agenda. Vance may not run these accounts, no, but it’s clear that things like this “come from him” or his world given his smart entry into the JD Vance meme discourse — which all came from the right to begin with. His pushing for AI, his techifying the White House, his quiet-but-aggressive imperialism: like any good Millennial, he is doing his job with little credit as he awaits the moment to seize the throne.

This, as I’ve said before, is why JD Vance is the real horror show of these times: he’s playing by all the rules so that he can eventually have it both ways, pushing himself as a working class “progressive” Republican in 2028, to easily sweep the seat only to further advance this nightmare. Yeah, yeah, Gen Z are punitive and conservative and, yeah, yeah, old people are too — but the Millennial version has it both ways. That is why Vance is so scary: he can code switch like no one else. As is the story of a generation, we await our power era but, unfortunately, it’s already here — and the title holder, like the other title holders, aren’t someone we’d want to claim.

The articles you should read with your morning coffee: From back in July 2024, Scott Young’s Twelve Foundations for a Good Life. A couple of articles from The New York Times: The ‘Manosphere’? It’s Planet Earth. talking about this masculinity thing that is everywhere right now and Hilary Clinton asking the question, How Much Dumber Will This Get? One more political piece, an interview with Tim Walz outlining why the Democrats lost. A couple of baseball stories to round out the week: Will Leitch writes about Baseball’s Invisible Superstar and a question I had not thought of yet… Is This the Last Season Baseball Umpires Really Matter? (Man, I hope so…)

Seth Godin –

Busy people in important organizations waste a lot of time naming things.

It could be that once a name is good enough, you’re done. That’s certainly true for the logo.

Nike is hard to pronounce. Starbucks is named after an obscure character in a mostly unreadable book. Apple is named after a fruit, Google is spelled wrong.

These are good names, not perfect ones.

It’s worth noting that when asked to name a great logo or a great brand name, almost everyone picks a brand they like and trust. The name is simply a symptom of that, not a cause.

I know why you’re so focused on the name. It’s your brand’s personality. It’s under your control. It is something everyone on the committee is an expert on, because no one is.

Once it does the job, you’re done.

Pick a good one and get back to work.

[My take is that ChatGPT is a terrible name. It has too many syllables, it has needless requirements for capitalization, and most of all, it’s not an empty vessel ready to contain our story about the brand. Claude is better. Not perfect, but good.]

I love how Seth glosses over the whole “Pick a good one and get back to work…” thing. I’ve named so many “things” in my career, and rarely is picking a good one easy. However, he’s not wrong about “Once it does the job, you’re done.”

Paul Robert Lloyd —

I’m bored of it.

The pervasive, all encompassing nature of it.

The inevitable, dehumanising consequence of it.

That there’s a ‘there’ there to it.

Rubbish in and rubbish out of it.

Nobody asked for it, and nobody wants it.

The best minds of my generation thinking about how to make people use it.

That you should just accept it.

A thousand no’s, but ‘yes’ when shareholders start clamouring for it.

Policy-makers pandering to it.

A decommissioned nuclear power station required to power it.

Not to mention millions of gallons of water required to cool it.

Every article glorifying it.

Every article vilifying it.

Every pub conversation winding up talking about it.

People incessantly telling you how they use it.

I feel dirty using it.

You know what I’m talking about, even though I’ve not mentioned it.

And that’s why I’m bored of it.

YouTuber Matt D’Avella has an interesting video outlining why he and his wife left the United States for Australia. I love that it’s about the community he created rather than simply trying to escape the general craziness of the current United States. It certainly helps that his wife is an Australian citizen, and they have a built-in community, but it was also about him learning how to drive, understand, and come to grips with the things he’s going to miss and how others viewed the decision.

The part where he praises universal healthcare is spot on, and his lack of worry in crowds is refreshing. Life is about making the choices that align with what matters to you, and D’Avella explains exactly why they made this permanent move. He also says, “Life is more like a road trip than a train track,” and that’s some good insight.

I want more videos like this from Matt. Vulnerable. Personal. Professional. Great stuff.