Source: The Atlantic
by Jonathan Lemire

“President donald trump’s administration has been embroiled in scandal and sloppiness. His own party has defied his political pressure. His senior staff has been beset by infighting. He has sparred with reporters and offered over-the-top praise to an authoritarian with a dire human-rights record. A signature hard-line immigration policy has polled poorly. And Republicans have begun to brace themselves for a disastrous midterm election. That was 2017. But it’s also 2025.
Ten months into the president’s second term, Trump 2.0 is for the first time starting to resemble the chaotic original. And that new sense of political weakness in the president has not just emboldened Democrats who have been despondent for much of the past year. It’s also begun to give Republicans a permission structure for pushing back against Trump and jockeying for power with an eye to the elections ahead. This was not the plan.” (11/19/25)

https://archive.is/CluLy

Source: The New Republic
by Brynn Tannehill

“When the shutdown ended, Arizona Democratic Representative Adelita Grijalva was finally sworn in, 50 days after she was elected. She promptly signed the discharge petition to release the full Epstein files, getting it past 218 signatures and forcing a vote in the House. Democrats were jubilant in the expectation that this would finally expose Trump and bring us to a point where Republicans are perhaps forced to remove him from office — or at least forced to reckon with his moral deficiencies. The problem is, even assuming the best case for Democrats (and the worst for Trump), and even though every House Republican but one hopped on the ‘release the files’ bandwagon, neither of these things are likely to ever happen.” (11/19/25)

https://newrepublic.com/article/203379/trump-escape-justice-epstein-files

Source: The American Prospect
by David Dayen

“[A] bipartisan Senate coalition led by Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Tim Sheehy (R-MT) managed to add the commonsense notion that the military should be allowed to repair the equipment it buys, building off a mandate instituted by the secretary of the Army. Needing someone to fly in every time a tank or aircraft carrier breaks wastes time and money, and serves as a second bite at the apple for lucrative military contractors. But because Congress is often just a pass-through for corporate America, the contractors’ lobbyists are blitzing Capitol Hill to secure their position as the military’s high-priced mechanics.” (11/20/25)

https://prospect.org/2025/11/20/big-tech-poised-to-win-immunity-shield-from-state-ai-regulation/

Source: Astral Codex Ten
by Scott Alexander

“Most discourse on AI is low-quality. Most discourse on consciousness is super-abysmal-double-low quality. Multiply these — or maybe raise one to the exponent of the other, or something — and you get the quality of discourse on AI consciousness. It’s not great. … But a rare bright spot has appeared: a seminal paper published earlier this month in Trends In Cognitive Science, Identifying Indicators Of Consciousness In AI Systems.” (11/19/25)

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-new-ai-consciousness-paper

Source: Expression
by Chapin Lenthall-Cleary

“I recently wrote about the significant gender tolerance gap. That naturally raises another question: are there controllable factors that actually help make people better or worse on this front? One obvious candidate is political involvement. Maybe political participation broadens people’s exposure to clashing viewpoints and forces them to wrestle with ideas they’d otherwise ignore. Maybe it teaches civic virtues like freedom of expression. Or maybe it simply funnels them into ideological echo chambers where bad habits grow and tempers get sharp. Turns out both stories might be true — just not for the same genders …” (11/19/25)

https://expression.fire.org/p/voting-is-tied-to-more-tolerance