Powderhorn

I’ve been watching JD Vance as carefully as anyone can track a snake in the grass, which is to say, with some difficulty. He has seemed uncomfortable with Trump’s grandiose foreign ambitions, especially Trump’s failed war in Iran, but I’ve seen no evidence that JD has spoken out against any of it even inside Trump’s ego-echo chamber.

JD hasn’t carved out a regressive policy specialty for himself, as have some other of Trump’s despicable underlings such as Stephen Miller, Russell Vought, or Harmeet Dhillon.

Nor has JD become much of a spokesperson for Trump. He rarely appears on television or even on social media. Nor has he been visible on Capitol Hill. He hasn’t cinched any deal in Congress.

JD seems to appear when and where a vice president is supposed to, but then disappears again into the daily effluence of Trump.

But there’s one particular area where JD seems to stand out (I was tempted to write “excel” but it’s impossible to excel at something as execrable as JD’s specialty.) He is the regime’s strangest bigot.

A Texas lawyer who helped lead Republican Ken Paxton’s defense during his 2023 impeachment trial is endorsing Democrat James Talarico in the state’s critical Senate race this November.

Dan Cogdell, a Houston-based defense lawyer who represented the Texas attorney general in both the impeachment trial and a long-running securities fraud case, told NOTUS in a statement that his former client “has lost sight of his core mission, which is to represent the people of Texas.”

“And unlike Ken, I believe to my core that James Talarico believes in unity over division and that he knows how to assemble not only Democrats, but Independents and Republicans, and we need that right now,” Cogdell said.

Cogdell has donated a total of $6,500 to Paxton’s campaign last year and then gave $1,000 to Talarico’s campaign in March, according to campaign finance reports. His endorsement of Talarico comes just after the third anniversary of Paxton’s impeachment by the Texas House of Representatives over allegations including bribery.

This is Pelley's first sit-down since his firing. A truncated transcript is available on the NYT site, but as that's paywalled, I figured I'd share the video.

The simplest definition of loneliness is a state of longing for more connection and intimacy than you have. It is not the same as solitude, which can be pleasant and satisfying, and nor does it require total physical isolation. You can be lonely at a party; lonely in a marriage. The sensation is acutely painful, and brings with it profound physical consequences. Loneliness raises blood pressure, accelerates ageing and cognitive decline. It causes insomnia, weakens the immune system and predicts increased morbidity and mortality. To put this in ordinary language, it can prove fatal.

As to whether other people experienced it, I quickly realised that the lonely city was a very populated space indeed. I conducted my investigations by way of visual artists, among them David Wojnarowicz, Andy Warhol and Henry Darger. While we assume loneliness is the result of personal failure, a lack of attractiveness in some way, what I discovered by way of examining their lives is that loneliness is often a consequence of larger social forces of stigma and exclusion, which serve to isolate vulnerable populations of many kinds. Being poor, an immigrant, ill, transgender, a person of colour or of divergent sexuality: these were the drivers of isolation. If The Lonely City had a takeaway message, it was that loneliness is political and should never be a source of shame.

At least some of that shame has fallen away since my book was first published in 2016. Loneliness is no longer a taboo state. It is widely discussed, both as an emotional experience akin to depression or anxiety, and as a social problem, the subject of academic research and government policy. It is even regarded as a global public health concern. The 2024 Health Survey for England reported that 22% of the adult population felt lonely at least some of the time, with 6% – around 4 million people – feeling lonely often or always, while the 2025 World Health Organization report on social connection found that one in six people around the globe are lonely.

One of the most interesting findings of the 2024 Health Survey for England was that loneliness shows a strong correlation with area deprivation. The practical solutions put forward by bodies such as the Red Cross, the Campaign to End Loneliness and the Jo Cox Commission on Loneliness focus not on dating or friendship so much as community assets such as transport, green space, social centres and activities.

These are places where people can experience what sociologists call “weak ties”, a sense of being connected and visible, a person who matters inside a sustaining community. But these spaces and resources – from mother and baby groups, parks and libraries to rural bus routes, youth clubs and surgeries – have been decimated by austerity and years of systematic underfunding.

What I've learned (and I'm not stating an epiphany here) over the past few years is that there are social gatherings all around us. We're simply unaware of them until we are.

For a year, I was parked an eight-minute walk from the burner warehouse without knowing it existed. It took a friend inviting me, and integration without him around at future events was slow going.

It took a year and a half to shed impostor syndrome at the weekly gatherings, but I persevered, and this group has been key to much of my progress in that time.

Thinking back to college, meeting new people was easy. Keeping in touch past the quarter, less so, as there was a constant churn of people coming in and out of life.

I think there's a misapprehension about the speed at which weak ties should become strong ties, and a tendency to forget how much work (and time) that transition usually takes, choosing instead to just remember it as "a close friend suddenly appeared."

Joining a social circle with the explicit intent of hitting it off with someone is a fast-track to disappointment. Entering new environments with zero expectations does a fabulous job of obviating this pitfall.

Chatting online does not. I have a handful of people I consider friends who I've never met in real life, and I appreciate what they add to my existence, but they can't really make up for a sense of group belonging by bonding over activities and coming together again the next week.

Since lockdown started, I've found myself looking online more often than not. It passed the time but did little else. It wasn't until online conversation turned into meatspace meetups that I realized I'd been chasing the wrong goals.

It baffles me that societal breakdown would lead lonely people into the arms of the far right. These are the fucksticks who tore down the social contract and don't want you to have housing, food or healthcare, and -- above all else -- feel any shred of happiness or meaning.

Anger is the fuel.

And as to incels specifically, I don't even get the situation. The whole thing seems to be cart-before-horse, assuming that women inherently hate all men before testing that hypothesis for oneself. If you're a misogynistic asshole, there's your problem.

Chatting with a bunch of other ne'er-do-wells accomplishes the square root of nothing. Righteous indignation over one's own shortcomings is neither attractive (to anyone) nor a way out of the situation.

Expecting the world to change because of your desires will fail.

‘One of the stupidest things in an earnest but stupid school of culinary thought is that each of the three daily meals should be ‘balanced’.” So argues American food writer MFK Fisher in her 1942 book How to Cook a Wolf. She goes on: “In the first place not all people need or want three meals each day. Many of them feel better with two or one and one-half, or five.”

Fisher wrote her book ostensibly as a guide on how to feed yourself pleasurably and nourishingly during a period of food shortages caused by war, but there is much in her insightful advice to inspire and provoke us today. More than 80 years later, threats to the sacred breakfast-lunch-dinner mode of eating can still make the news: “A nation of snackers: Britons no longer eat three meals a day”, gasped one recent headline in the Times. Deviations from the “standard” model are the subject of research by academics and health professionals, and food retailers commission studies in an attempt to understand (and shape?) when and how customers consume their food.

The idea that we should sit down for three meals at roughly the same time every day has become such an essential part of how we organise our lives – even when we’re failing to do it – that we forget it isn’t the natural order of things. Instead, it is a regime that was created not to serve the needs of our bodies or to give us pleasure, however much we may have managed to adapt it for these purposes – but to fit in with a day of labour. Like many of the ways that we live now, it has its roots in the Industrial Revolution: that was when breakfast became a brief meal eaten before the working morning, lunch something light but fortifying to be wolfed down quickly in the days before breaks were paid, and dinner a final sitting when everybody had finished in the evening. Before this people had of course eaten meals but they were made up of different foods and historically slipped around in terms of timing.

The last time I ate three meals a day, I was still in high school. This has caused relationship issues over the years, given that "I only eat when I'm hungry" seems nonsensical to many. I generally like to eat a decent meal sometime in midafternoon to evening and otherwise snack as needed.

Earlier this year Nieman Lab broke the story that major news publishers, including The New York Times, The Guardian, and USA Today Co., had started blocking the Internet Archive for fear that AI companies might scrape the nonprofit’s repositories for training data. As one of the last bastions of archival history, that is, in case you’re not aware, not very good for the public interest.

Four months later and Nieman Lab now notes that the number of news outlets blocking the archive has soared to around 340 organizations:

“Our new analysis shows that more than 340 local news sites across the United States are now limiting the Internet Archive’s ability to access and preserve their stories. Many sites in our sample are owned by five of the seven largest local news publishers in the country: USA Today Co., McClatchy, Advance Local, MediaNews Group, and Tribune Publishing. The latter two are both subsidiaries of the “vulture hedge fund” Alden Global Capital.”

Many of these localities are already effectively news deserts, where most real local journalism was hollowed out and replaced by a smattering of local right wing broadcasters (like Sinclair Broadcasting) or a hedge fund run “local newspaper” that doesn’t do much in the way of actual local reporting. That’s generally also been terrible for informed consensus or shedding a light on local corruption.

Most of the work I've published has been removed from the web. Archival services help us retain history in an era where the physical local paper is not archived by libraries.

I'm back in the van for now, so I'm not updating my profile yet, but I returned from Temple this afternoon after a week in the room I'll be renting.

To call this a stepping stone to the idea of the eventual commune hits the nail on the head. It's a multigenerational home where if something needs to be done, people just do it. And cook.

In fact, we were talking about placement for planned raised beds this afternoon (against the fence, but which part?) after the grandmother mentioned wanting to get a really nice picnic table.

I'm aware that I'm going to start tying myself into knots if I don't set the stage with characters:

• R - the woman I met through the burner community with whom I started interacting more because she commissioned me to write the copy for a GoFundMe for a queer activist who'd suffered a stroke and two brain hemorrhages. She's an elder, I suppose, in the Temple Pride organization.

• S - her husband. Generally speaking, when you meet someone, you expect roughly the same intellectual level, and R is not dumb by any stretch (she just has different interests and activities), but not ... oh, shit, how did one cigarette turn into an hour and a half covering current monetary policy, philosophy and the Late Bronze Age Collapse? He is an anarchist, which he describes by two tenets: Don't tell me what to do, and don't hurt anyone. He's cool with anyone who can actually live by that. He's also really funny and pulls all sort of obscure references that I generally get. We watch a lot of the same YouTube channels.

• K - R's mom. She's the cool grandma who tiptoes up to the line of swearing but never crosses it, even when she spills a full cup of coffee into a Rubbermaid tote with a vented lid (the tote was full of empty coffee cans upon inspection, and we were all racing to make the obvious "guess it wanted to go home" joke first).

• O and N - R and S' kids. For obvious reasons, I'm not going to say anything about them.

The plan was this: R and S, having hosted me a couple of times when I was working on Mike's story, had a room available they'd be willing to rent to me. I suggested I Lyft up and back and spend a week there so everyone could test the waters before we jump into something more permanent.

It's not that there were any red flags; I've just been living alone since 2019 and haven't had kids in my living space since 2016, so I wanted as much for me as for them to know this would work as a housemate situation where the only data points were "let's entertain a friend for the weekend."

The first couple of days, I was honestly spent. It took until day three for me to have the energy to take a shower. After months of warmer-than-average temperatures, my body just said "lie down and shut up" when faced with adequate climate control.

I spent most of the time in my room, with a somewhat erratic sleep schedule. I'd come downstairs from time to time, and engage if one or both were there (or when it was just K), but my energy level just wasn't there.

And so it was Day 4 that when I walked into the garage where S was smoking a cigarette that he said, "Hey, I want to talk with you" in a friendly tone.

"I've noticed you don't come out of your room much. Are you uncomfortable?"

"Nah, I just ... well, you know, you have your life, your family ... I don't want to be in the way. I've never gone from 'hey, we're friends' to 'I'm trialling being your tenant.'"

He laughed.

"Dude. If we need to talk about something and don't want you around, we're not going to do it in the kitchen. Your presence is not intrusive."

Things softened tremendously from here. I think S told R that I was worried about overstepping, because she starting texting me when she was making food so I could join them.

Yesterday, I went to visit in the garage, and he was like, "so, R says the plan was for you to leave tomorrow. I don't care if you stay another couple of days. What's your take?"

I stumbled over myself a bit because, well, after so many failures over the past year and a half, this felt so ideal that I didn't really want to say anything to fuck it up.

So I said, "well, I feel really comfortable here. Y'all are the sorts of people I feel like myself around."

He didn't say anything like "so, it's settled." Just "yeah, we like your [vibe]*."

Because of the unusual funding schedule I get, I asked if I could break rent into the first and 15th. R handles the funds, and she was fine with that. "Let's just say it's free until the 15th, then, whenever you get back."

I still have the key to my room, and my dirty laundry is there if they care to air it. S told me R would likely go into the room to see if all was well (it was not with the prior tenant) in my absence, and as I'm not paying rent yet, I see no reason that's unreasonable.

It helps that I pretty much sat on a bed for a week and precious little else.

Actually, that's not true. Yesterday, R got home and walked into the garage where S and I were chatting about something ... maybe that was the conversation about an Assyrian library that was torched to destroy it, but as they were still using clay tablets, all the aggrieved managed to do was make a makeshift kiln and preserve the tablets for millennia.

She asked S whether he could help unload "a shitload" of wood from her SUV. He's had some back issues, and it wasn't a good day. So I volunteered.

Now, I have some back issues, and a heavy piece of pecan -- with bark -- hit my Achilles. I had to nope out pretty quickly after the shock wore off.

I'm not going to break down the exact amounts, but given that I can discontinue my internet account and no longer need to retain auto insurance once I get where I'm going some 60 miles away and my food will be covered unless I want to buy something special for myself, this actually looks like a net positive in terms of cashflow.

I was headed to the washroom that's in a alcove between my room and K's as she stepped out. I told her she was welcome to take the washroom first, and she told me she was headed downstairs to start on a chicken, broccoli and artichoke fettucine alfredo.

"Do you have a minute, or is it urgent?" she asked.

"I've got a minute."

"Well, I just wanted to tell you how much we all like how you fit in here. This is what we've been hoping for for a while. There'll be plenty of food in an hour or so."

It kinda sounds cultish, but like, these are my people. And we're able to be honest with each other about such things.

I was already timing my Lyft, so I thanked her and said I'll look forward to it the next time she makes it.

R was already off for a Pride event, so I said goodbye to S and K, knowing I was getting in the car to drive to Austin for the last time as a resident, 11 years and 9 days after arriving.

I thought my time here would provide more opportunities for my family under the status quo corporate bullshit. It turns out, the plan was total demolition and rebuilding.

Perhaps coincidentally, I was born in Phoenix.

• it wasn't this word, but I don't remember what it was

Bumblebees can use tools to solve a problem, according to experiments that demonstrate their remarkably advanced cognitive abilities.

The bees were given an adapted version of an experiment that, 100 years ago, first demonstrated chimpanzees could work out how to retrieve an out-of-reach banana by stacking boxes. Since then, various other primates, elephants and crows have joined an elite cohort of species known to be capable of this level of insight and spontaneous problem solving.

In the latest research, bees were shown to be able to roll a polystyrene ball to a specific location and climb on to it in order to access an artificial flower on a low ceiling. The findings challenge the longstanding assumption that insects operate purely on instinct and mindless trial-and-error learning.

“Most people think insects are reflex-based machines,” said Dr Olli Loukola, a behavioural ecologist at the University of Oulu, Finland, and senior author. “That they can’t have any emotional states or feel pain. Some people don’t even realise that they have brains. I hope that these results change the worldview about that.”

When staff answer the call of nature at the European Space Agency’s headquarters in Paris, their urine is not simply flushed away – it is turned into something much more useful. While urine-diverting toilets are often associated with smelly festival loos, there is nothing bohemian about recycling nutrients from human pee, said David de Chambrier, the chief executive of VunaNexus.

The process isn’t so different from recovering minerals in used electronics.

“Urine is a very concentrated resource. This is not a hippy thing to do; we are recycling minerals,” he said. Similarly to batteries, which should not be thrown in the bin to be recycled, “separating the urine at the source makes its treatment way easier”.

Special toilets that look like normal facilities send the separated liquid, without diluting it with water, down a piping system into a small treatment plant in the basement of the building.

There, the urine goes through a series of tanks that remove micropollutants, such as antibiotics, and concentrate valuable nutrients such as nitrogen and phosphorus that are essential for plant growth. The liquid is then pasteurised at 90C, killing any potential viruses and other pathogens. The distilled water is separated and reinjected into the flushing system before a liquid fertiliser called Aurin comes out on the other side.

By now, you’ve probably noticed the trend: every celebrity and influencer appears to be chasing the same prize. We’re deep in the era of the celebrity beverage.

Kim Kardashian has Update energy drinks. John and Hank Green have the Awesome Coffee Club. Blake Lively sells sparkling grapefruit juice. Even Danny DeVito, somehow perfectly cast for the role, is the face of a limoncello.

Why are beverages so endorsable? Maybe we’re not willing to trust Hulk Hogan with our dinner plans, but for a quick boost during a long workday? Sure – why not slam a can of Hogan Energy. Drinks tend to be profitable, relatively low-risk, and especially ripe for celebrity endorsements. So it’s become one of the easiest, most popular markets for influencers and celebrities to dip into.

Now, another mega-celeb has entered the beverage game. Or rather, beverage companies have enlisted him in an effort to spread the good word about their product.

Jesus, it turns out, has a branding problem – at least according to the makers of these drinks. Too many people simply haven’t heard the message. “God put it on our hearts to specifically preach the gospel through an energy drink,” the creator of Yahweh says in an Instagram video defending the company against accusations that it exists mainly to turn a profit.

Scott Pelley, one of the most well-known and respected journalists in broadcast journalism, has been fired by CBS News after clashing with network brass over last week’s severe round of cuts at 60 Minutes, the show he has worked on since 2004, the Guardian confirmed.

While changes were long expected at 60 Minutes, CBS News management shocked staffers last week by firing the network’s executive producer, executive editor and two correspondents, Cecilia Vega and Sharyn Alfonsi, without giving a specific reason for their terminations.

During an extremely heated meeting on Monday morning with the show’s newly appointed executive editor Nick Bilton, along with another CBS News executive, Pelley rebuked Bari Weiss, the longtime opinion commentator who joined the network in October as editor-in-chief.

“She’s murdering 60 Minutes,” Pelley said, as first reported by the Guardian. “She does not love this place. She was brought in to kill it and is doing exactly that.”

A source close to the network said that executives had attempted to meet with Pelley after the terminations on Thursday, to no avail.

Ultimately, Pelley met with Weiss and fellow executives on Tuesday, and she conveyed that his behavior was inappropriate. Pelley then told members of the show’s staff that he expected to be terminated, sources said.

Hey, I wish I could have been fired for having a spine instead of finally tucking tail after watching journalism fall apart in print six years ago (when things were still better compared with today, but that's a low fucking bar).

CBS literally fired a widely recognized, longstanding pillar of the network for speaking truth to power internally. It speaks volumes about how much of that they'll tolerate both inside and outside of the newsroom going forward.

This is no longer a news organization (hope you were sitting down); it is agitprop for a lawless junta. All journalists can see this, but some would prefer a paycheck over integrity, which is a moral failing.

Pelley has integrity. For this, he was fired.

Key Democratic leaders appeared to continue their support for embattled Maine Senate candidate Graham Platner on Tuesday after meetings in Washington DC.

Platner is contending with yet another revelation – this time about sexually explicit texts with women outside of his marriage – threatening his campaign, which is at the center of his party’s hopes of regaining control of Congress.

“I met with Graham Platner today. We’re going to beat Susan Collins and take back the Senate,” the Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer said on Tuesday.

Platner exchanged sexually explicit texts with other women during his marriage, according to information his wife shared with his campaign last year, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal reported, and which the Guardian has confirmed.

Journalists learned of the texts from the campaign’s former political director Genevieve McDonald, who obtained them from Amy Gertner, Platner’s wife, in the common process of proactive opposition research. The Platner campaign released a statement from Gertner, in which she said she had been “deeply hurt” by McDonald’s action.

“I confided deeply personal details about my marriage to someone I considered a friend,” she said. “I trusted this person with the most private chapter of our lives – the early days of our marriage before any campaign was on our mind.”

The incident, however, built on other findings of past indiscretions.

There is a bit of a leap here being made. Note specifically that nowhere in this coverage (nor any other I've seen) does Gertner say she was upset with Platner about said sexting.

I have no way of knowing what sort of relationship they have, but jumping straight to infidelity is framing. My ex-wife sexted with other guys and women, and I sexted with other women. We didn't get into fights over it; we'd show each other and usually laugh (lots of people are terrible at sexting). I also shot highly explicit photos of her with the intention of posting in a decently sized online community.

She's an exhibitionist.

The act itself is not indicative of internal meaning for the relationship.