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…

Joan Westenberg –

Fuck it man. Just put on some Grateful Dead. Put on some Aretha. Print some kind of zine. Paint a sign. Start a band. Write a manifesto. Bootleg a t-shirt. Hand out stickers. Throw a party. Keep it weird.

Have you checked out Poker Face on Peacock? It’s a really fun show that came out last year. Natasha Lyonne plays Charlie Cale, a casino waitress who can tell when people are lying. She gets into all sorts of trouble when she goes on the run from a mob boss. Of course, she’s solving crimes while on the lam. The writing is superb, the guest stars are fantastic, and Lyonne nails it in every scene.

The whole show is set up exactly like Columbo. The audience knows what happened, but watching Charlie figure it out is the fun part. The mystery usually has a good twist, too. I thought the first season was excellent with a 70s, but modern vibe.

The good news is that season two is coming in May, and they have just released a teaser trailer. It’s our first look at all the high-end guest stars and showrunner Rian Johnson teases minor league baseball, big box retail, funeral homes to alligator farms and even a grade school talent show as settings for the next go-around.

I just added it to my list of streaming shows I must watch. The list keeps growing.

Jason Fried –

One of the great lessons of nature: Randomness is the most beautiful thing.

Every forest, every field, every place untouched by humans is full of randomness. Nothing lines up, a million different shapes, sprouting seeds burst where the winds — or birds — randomly drop them.

Stones strewn by water, ice, gravity, and wind, all acting on their own in their own ways. Things that just stop and stay. Until they move somehow, another day.

The way the light falls, the dapples that hit the dirt. The shades of shades of shades of green and gold that work no matter what’s behind it.

The way the wind carries whatever’s light enough for liftoff.

The negative space between the leaves.

Colliding clouds.

The random wave that catches light from the predictable sun. The water’s surface like a shuffled blanket.

Collect the undergrowth in your hand. Lift it up. Drop it on the ground. It’s always beautiful.

However it comes together, or however it stays apart, you never look at it and say that doesn’t line up or those colors don’t work or there’s simply too much stuff or I don’t know where to look.

Nature’s out of line. Just right. You too.

Rick Beato sits down with Willow Smith, the boundary-pushing musician, creative visionary, and daughter of Will and Jada Smith. He explores her evolution as an artist, the inspirations that fuel her unique sound, and how she balances self-discovery with making music that resonates.

Her Tiny Desk concert is entertaining, but that’s more due to her talented band than her performance.

Sue Halpern, writing for The New Yorker, has the story regarding what I think is the most important thing that’s likely to happen between now and the next election—If there’s even going to be one.

So far, it’s a tossup which of the Trump Administration’s wrecking balls will prove most destructive: the one that accelerates global warming, the one that abandons our allies, the one that torches the economy, or the one that compromises public health. Yet all of these are distractions from the President’s long-standing pet project: decimating free and fair elections. It may be that we have become so accustomed to hearing Donald Trump’s false claims about rigged elections and corrupt election officials that we have become inured to them, but in the past seven weeks he has pursued a renewed multilateral program to suppress the vote, curtail the franchise, undermine election security, eliminate protections from foreign interference, and neuter the independent oversight of election administration. And, as with the rest of Trump’s calamitous agenda, he is doing it in full view of the American people.

Democracy is a complex machine. Trump, Musk, and his Cabinet are systematically dismantling its core components.

First, they are targeting election security. For years, they’ve been chipping away at voter verification processes, compromising ballot handling procedures, and undermining the integrity of voting systems.

I expect 2026 will be a trial balloon to see how much they can get away with at the Federal level. What they learn will be crucial to 2028. The goal is to make future elections either impossible or irrelevant. Trump, if he’s still alive, will undoubtedly run in 2028 and it won’t matter who he runs against.

He will hold all the cards and there won’t be a trusted authority to turn to or established process to fall back on when questions inevitably come up about the results. This might even happen if it’s Vance or some other Republican running.

This is how democracy dies – not through outright revolution, but through a calculated dismantling of its foundations.

Patrick Rhone answered the question, “How much do you need to know?”

There was a coup. It was successful. It is ongoing and escalating. Elon Musk retains more or less total control over a huge amount of the federal government’s apparatus and its spending. Protests are building. Congress largely hasn’t reacted. The Democratic Party shows few signs of behaving like an opposition party. Some of the purges are being walked back, piecemeal. The judiciary is weighing in, slowly. There’s talk of cracks in the conservative coalition. We’re in a weird sort of stasis where each day’s events are both extremely significant and also just more of the same.

When I saw these new “Overlap” hats, I couldn’t wait to make fun of them from a pure design/branding perspective. Then, I learned there was a real problem. A really hilarious problem.

From the ESPN News Source (there’s not even a byline):

A hat has been pulled from the Texas Rangers and Major League Baseball online stores after it was discovered that a mashup of the team’s cap and jersey logos created the appearance of a vulgar word in Spanish.

The hat, which is part of New Era’s Overlap 5950 collection, has the Rangers' block “T” that appears on the team’s caps superimposed over the middle “X” in the block “Texas” logo that usually appears on the front of the team’s jerseys.

By doing so, the mashup of the logos created a visual of a vulgar Spanish word used for women’s breasts.

These are so, so bad. Anyone lucky enough to snag a TETAS hat should keep it safe, as it will undoubtedly become a monster collector’s item. I’m also rather partial to the Houston ASHOS and the Anaheim ANAELS.

Mark Manson –

Here’s how to stop fearing the unknown and do something with your life.

1️⃣ Get good at feeling bad. Uncertainty is an uncomfortable feeling. And the only way to make yourself more resilient towards discomfort is by sitting with discomfort. Let the uncertainty be there, it won’t hurt you.

2️⃣ Build habits and routines into your life because dealing with the uncertainty of the unknown is a lot easier when you exert agency over the parts of your life that you can control.

3️⃣ Get creative. This might seem strange but being more tolerant of uncertainty is actually linked with being more creative. It’s not clear if tolerating uncertainty makes you more creative or if being creative makes you tolerate more uncertainty, but I would guess it’s almost certainly a two-way street. Go on, take that origami class you’ve always been too scared to.

So, are you now willing to choose action in the face of uncertainty? Well, if not, that’s a problem.

Tapbots, the company behind the late and loved Tweetbot app, plans to release a new app for the Bluesky social network this summer called Phoenix.

After Twitter/X stopped supporting third-party platforms like Tweetbot, Tapbots pivoted to Ivory, an ‌iPhone‌ and Mac app designed for posting on the Mastodon social network. Both Mastodon and Bluesky are popular alternatives to Twitter/X.

For half a second, I used Ivory, but then I realized I did not particularly like Mastodon and deleted it from my phone. Tweetbot was one of my most used apps, and I mourned when it stopped working. Of course, Twitter pretty much turned into dogshit soon after, and I’m only still on because I’ve curated it to perfection, and there are still accounts I follow that have yet to migrate to Bluesky.

While I have not done much on Bluesky, I will likely purchase Phoenix. I will also look for that public alpha email to get in on the action as early as possible.

Maybe, just maybe, I’ll take the time to curate my follows on Bluesky the way I have with Twitter/X. I don’t know. I still might just walk away.