Source: Persuasion
by Quico Toro

“I could feel the panic attack set in the second the suggestion was made. ‘Would you go cover the No Kings protests on the 18th?’ my editor asked, reasonably enough. My heart started pounding, my palms sweating. ‘I’d rather slit my wrists,’ I wrote back. Because in my head, 25 years had vanished. I was back in Caracas, in 2000, planning to go to the very first pro-democracy, anti-Chávez protests, and things were about to go very wrong indeed. It wasn’t quite the first time. Reading American news these days, everything feels like a flashback. Or a callback.” (10/18/25)

https://www.persuasion.community/p/no-kings-and-the-echo-of-venezuela

Source: The Daily Economy
by Michael Munger

“Government shutdowns might look irrational, but they follow a familiar script. When political types gain more from the standoff than the solution, collisions become routine.” (10/17/25)

https://thedailyeconomy.org/article/playing-chicken-with-the-federal-budget-the-rational-stupidity-of-shutdowns/

Source: Christian Science Monitor
by staff

“Now nine months into his second term, President Donald Trump may be setting a new norm in law enforcement. Under his watch, prosecutors in the U.S. Justice Department have indicted three people who Mr. Trump believes have done him wrong: former FBI Director James Comey, current New York Attorney General Letitia James, and, on Thursday, his former national security adviser, John Bolton. The courts may yet declare all three to be not guilty of charges against them. Yet the possibility of prosecutorial misconduct, such as for vindictiveness, has supercharged efforts to reset the norms of integrity (that is, pursuing justice over ‘winning’) that most prosecutors have honored for decades. For now, much of that norm-resetting is at the state level, where millions of felonies and misdemeanors are handled each year by more than 2,300 prosecutor’s offices.” (10/17/25)

https://www.csmonitor.com/Commentary/the-monitors-view/2025/1017/Reviving-the-integrity-of-prosecutors

Source: David Friedman’s Substack
by David Friedman

“An old post by Steve Landsburg offered three examples of actions by one person that another objected to but that did no physical damage. He asked whether the psychic cost to the objector should be considered relevant to public policy, whether the answer was the same for all three and, if not, why not. The first of the three was someone reading pornography and someone else being upset by the knowledge that pornography was being read. The third was someone raping an unconscious victim in a way that did no physical harm. Why, Steve asked, do we have different reactions to those cases and is the difference justified? Discussing reactions to the post with my daughter, I commented that the people who were angry about it, mostly online, struck me as either stupid or evil.” (10/17/25)

https://daviddfriedman.substack.com/p/frightening-ideas-913

Source: Foreign Policy
by Christian Caryl

“Remember the kids of Generation Z? You know — that notorious cohort of entitled, lazy, and apathetic people that Boomers so love to mock? Over the past two years, members of Gen Z across Asia, Africa, and Latin America have been taking to the streets, covertly organizing revolutions and dethroning entrenched rulers. Quite a few of those involved in the uprisings have paid with their lives — another indicator that these events are worth taking seriously. … Some observers might dismiss this new wave of activism as irrelevant to the future of established democracies. But such complacency might be ill-advised. If this new revolutionary movement has demonstrated anything, it’s that no one should underestimate its infectiousness.” (10/17/25)

https://archive.is/3qbI1