If two New Hampshire men aren't a match for the Devil, we might as well give the country back to the Indians. -Stephen Vincent Benet (1898-1943)
US: World’s largest electric aircraft takes to the skies with over 1MW of power (Georgina Jedikovska, Aug 13, 2026, Interesting Engineering)
Forslund said that they designed the X1 to show that electric propulsion can work in an aircraft that is large enough for commercial airline operations. The plane is a demonstrator representative of Heart’s ES-30 production aircraft, that is currently being developed.
America Suspended the Jones Act. Americans Were the Winners.: In under five months, waiving the protectionist law opened up whole trade routes and sent fuel to areas that needed it. Why go back? (Veronique de Rugy | 8.13.2026, reason)
Since March, America has been running an accidental experiment and glimpsing what the country might look like without one of its dumbest statutes. The results are in, and they embarrass a century’s worth of U.S. lawmakers and defenders. […]The numbers speak for themselves. The Cato Institute’s Colin Grabow documented that in under five months, Puerto Rico took in more mainland fuel than in any full year since 2015. Shipments to the West Coast, Alaska, and Hawaii hit nearly 14 million barrels, about 170 percent of the recent annual average. Whole trade routes quickly appeared: Gulf Coast fuel to Hawaii, New Jersey jet fuel to California, propane to Puerto Rico.
America’s government-protected fleet seldom served these locales. Remove a prohibition and the market pours resources where they are needed. As Grabow noted, “That’s strong evidence for the longstanding critique that the Jones Act suppresses domestic commerce by preventing economically viable trade between Americans.”
Why MAGA Is So Obsessed With Fauci: In the aftermath of pandemics, people either try to forget them or find others to blame for them. (Peter Wehner, 8/12/26, The Atlantic)
[T]he scientific evidence favors a natural origin. This includes epidemiological evidence showing that the first COVID-19 cases clustered around one corner of Wuhan’s Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, where wild animals were being butchered. Environmental samples taken from that same area of the market contain, in the same swab, the SARS-CoV-2 sequence and DNA from potential intermediate hosts such as the raccoon dog.
The accusation that Fauci lied to Congress rests on his denial, in a 2021 exchange with Paul, that NIH had ever funded gain-of-function research at the Wuhan lab. The point of such research is to learn what a virus would need to jump into humans before it does, so that vaccines and treatments can be ready.
The trouble is the term gain of function. In biology, it means research that gives an organism a new capability—engineering a bacterium to digest an oil spill is gain-of-function research. In politics, it has come to mean something narrower and more alarming: deliberately making a dangerous virus more dangerous. Federal rules use a third definition, narrower still. The federal framework adopted in 2017, after years of public debate, covers work to enhance a pathogen that is “likely highly transmissible and likely capable of wide and uncontrollable spread in human populations” and “likely highly virulent and likely to cause significant morbidity and/or mortality in humans.” It also excludes viruses, however dangerous, as they exist in nature. (The policy was revised in 2024.)
The gap between those definitions is the whole dispute, and it is why the perjury charge fails twice over.
Dispatching Humphrey’s Executor (Christopher James Wolfe, 8/12/26, Law & Liberty)
Thach fully recounts all of that in his book, but he would perhaps add three additional points to the chief justice’s account.
First, Thach would add to the discussion of the Articles of Confederation period. In chapter 3, he describes the Continental Congress’ attempts to execute the laws without an executive branch:
Having reached a decision, [the Continental Congress] entrusted its execution to whatever agency seemed at the moment most convenient, perhaps a committee of its own membership, perhaps a state council or convention, perhaps individuals without official status. Such agencies, having carried out the order in question, immediately lapsed. There was neither plan nor organization.
These committees for execution ate up Congress’ time, created turf wars, and were ineffective—leading to calls for a national executive branch of some sort. The plural executive model was failing both at the national and state levels, therefore. How to fix the national executive branch, making it both energetic and democratically accountable, was a question left open even in Madison’s Virginia Plan presented at the beginning of the convention.
Second, in chapter 4, Thach points out that the key model for the presidency cited during the convention was the New York governorship of George Clinton. That was the one state where a truly unitary model had been tried, and it had worked well, so well that Clinton rival Alexander Hamilton felt compelled to cite him as a paradigm in Federalist #70. It is true that the New York Constitution did not spell out appointment and removal powers for the executive branch, but “[Governor] Clinton’s control of nominations had given him control of the patronage, as was well known to all conversant with New York politics,” writes Thach. Here is another important point: after the convention, arguments made by various participants at the convention are repeated by the defenders of the Constitution, no matter who made them in the summer of 1787.
Third, Thach offers a highly nuanced account of the different sides in the Decision of 1789. He points out that eighteen Congressmen involved in the Decision of 1789 had been at the Constitutional Convention themselves—it was virtually the same “political environment.” During the debate, there were four camps, but one can tell by reading the debates that the presidential removal argument won the day—and got the final vote that mattered. Six of the House members present at the convention voted for the bill (Madison, Clymer, Baldwin, Carroll, Fitzsimons, and Gilman), while just two voted against (Sherman and Gerry, a “Grumbletonian”). The fact that several Congressmen were members of the convention is a significant point that Chief Justice Roberts leaves out; the Decision of 1789 gives us insight into the original meaning of Article II. It is not just one Congressional interpretation that could be erased by a later Congress, as it tried to during the Tenure of Office years after Reconstruction. As Chief Justice Taft said in Myers v. US, the Decision of 1789 is “contemporaneous legislative exposition” (272 US 175). And what is especially definitive about the Decision of 1789 is that the Senate renounced the power of removals. Thach writes: “The significance of the [Senate] vote is the greater when it is remembered that instances where a political body voluntarily deprives itself of power are very few in all the history of government.”
The great silence: why haven’t we found any aliens yet? (Adam Kirsch, 11 Aug 2026, The Guardian)
During a visit to the Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1950, Enrico Fermi, one of the architects of the Manhattan Project, was having lunch with other physicists when the conversation turned to flying saucers. At one point during the discussion, Fermi blurted out: “Where is everybody?” – or, as another participant remembered it, “Don’t you ever wonder where everybody is?” If aliens exist, in other words, why have we never encountered them?The episode has become famous, marking the moment when extraterrestrial life went from a theme for philosophical speculation to a serious scientific problem. For centuries, people had wondered whether life exists on the moon or Mars, but they accepted that we would never know for certain, since making contact with another planet was impossible. By the 1950s, those limits no longer seemed so fixed. In addition to space flight, researchers were developing tools to detect the radio signals that reach us from stars many light years away. These developments were still in their infancy, but it was already clear that humanity was no longer bound to Earth the way it always had been.
This expansion of human horizons raised an awkward question. Since the 16th century, when Copernicus showed that Earth is not the centre of the cosmos, modern science had learned to embrace the idea that there is nothing unique about our planet. And if Earth is statistically average, there is no reason why it should be the only home of intelligent life. Given the age of the universe – about 13.8bn years, according to current estimates – it should be full of species with technology far more advanced than what we have come up with in a few thousand years of civilisation. Yet we can’t find any trace of them.
That was the case in 1950, and it is still the case today, despite well-publicised claims to the contrary. Since 2017, when the New York Times reported that the US military possessed video recordings of pilots’ encounters with UFOs, aliens have gone mainstream. The House of Representatives even held hearings on what are now called unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP) as a potential national security threat. But the blurry and inconclusive “Pentagon UFO videos” have not been followed by any clear images of nonhuman craft, just as earlier waves of UFO sightings never produced any unambiguous evidence.
For most scientists, the real mystery about aliens isn’t their presence but their stubborn absence.
Elusive Longer-Run Impacts of Head Start: Replications Within and Across Cohorts
(Remy J.-C. Pages, Dylan J. Lukes, Drew H. Bailey, Greg J. Duncan, Arxiv)
Using an additional decade of CNLSY data, this study replicated and extended Deming’s (2009) evaluation of Head Start’s life-cycle skill formation impacts in three ways. Extending the measurement interval for Deming’s adulthood outcomes, we found no statistically significant impacts on earnings and mixed evidence of impacts on other adult outcomes. Applying Deming’s sibling comparison framework to more recent birth cohorts born to CNLSY mothers revealed mostly negative Head Start impacts. Combining all cohorts shows generally null impacts on school-age and early adulthood outcomes.
Can the West Outgrow Its Enemies? (Claire Berlinski, Aug 11, 2026, The Cosmopolitan Globalist)
Our economic statecraft, argues Dalibor Roháč, is not strengthening us. To the contrary, on both sides of the Atlantic, the West is preparing for great-power competition by steadily weakening the qualities that once made it formidable: its open markets, technological dynamism, attractiveness to talent, scientific excellence, and its ability to build almost anything at tolerable cost. It is responding to the threat by becoming more like the closed, dirigiste systems it is trying to defeat—protectionist, suspicious of foreigners, preoccupied with national self-sufficiency, and increasingly willing to subordinate markets and institutions to executive power.
In his new book, Unshackled: How Economic Growth Can Defeat the World’s Dictators, Dalibor argues that this isn’t strategic realism. It’s strategic self-sabotage.
Why I Quit the Tenure Track: The insufferable hypocrisy of elite academia (Tyler Austin Harper, September 2026, The Atlantic)
As I got to know Ava, I was surprised to discover that she viewed central Maine as a Stephen King–esque hell, a place where ancient prejudices and violence lay just beneath the friendly college-town facade. She regaled my wife and me with stories of alleged racial offenses, both major and minor, and generally made it clear that she thought Lewiston—an island of diversity in an otherwise famously homogenous, if not notably reactionary, state—was a hub of white supremacy. One evening, Ava confessed to me that when she drove through town and spied the local “crackers” sitting on their porches (not unlike the very porch we were sitting on), she sometimes thought to herself that these townies would probably like to kill her.
I didn’t know what to make of Ava’s views. I won’t pretend that my sensibilities were inflamed by the word cracker, but the epithet also didn’t seem like one that a college administrator should be using—especially at a school that admits a not-insignificant number of white, working-class Mainers. I also had a difficult time taking seriously the idea that I had moved to a place with would-be Klansmen around every corner. I grew up outside Harrisburg, Pennsylvania—another deindustrialized, permanently revitalizing urban center—and Lewiston felt familiar to me. The people I met were nice, hardworking; they minded their own business. I don’t think it ever occurred to Ava that I could have come from a similar place and similar people.
But although I sometimes found the things she said classist and even offensive, I also genuinely liked Ava. She had a fast wit and a quick laugh. She watered our tomato plants when we traveled to Boston to visit family. We traded texts about the baby fox that scampered through the neighborhood’s yards in the morning and the oversize groundhog that pestered the dogs. I left freshly baked sourdough baguettes on her porch; we commiserated during power outages. Ava struck me as perhaps a touch paranoid, but she was also obviously smart. More important, she was a well-credentialed authority on racism, and I took such people seriously. Why wouldn’t I?
I’d never had great enthusiasm for identity politics; I’d been a socialist since my early 20s, and it had generally been my experience that liberals were as eager to talk about race as they were uneager to talk about class. Yet I also assumed that conservative complaints about “wokeness,” a term just coming into vogue as a pejorative, were essentially Fox News hysteria. Until I got to Bates, I had little reason to suspect that they held any merit.
At Haverford, the campus politics were of the earthy, stoner, peacenik variety—more focused on “late capitalism” and President Obama’s drone warfare than flamboyant identitarianism. At NYU, the students and faculty seemed more interested in enjoying the hedonistic riches of the city than anything that might reasonably be called “woke.” The new political correctness that was spreading on many elite campuses felt mostly like background noise, and seemed harmless besides.
That’s why, when Ava gave me anti-racist reading recommendations that first summer in Maine, I read them with an open mind. And when I found them disquietingly flimsy, politically bizarre, and, in their naked essentializing, even sort of racist, I assumed that I must be the problem. As a light-skinned Black guy who doesn’t speak African American English, I had rarely been subjected to acute prejudice in my life. I thought that perhaps I simply wasn’t Black enough—“authentically” Black enough—to understand the kind of racial pessimism that had become so mainstream.
Ava was hardly the only pessimist among my new co-workers. Around the start of the semester, I attended an informal orientation event for early-career Black faculty, where I assumed we would talk about our research interests or simply get to know one another. Instead, the gathering felt more like a combined therapy session and HR seminar. At one point, someone casually rattled off a series of local establishments to steer clear of, vaguely implying that they were filled with bigots. Alarmed by the notion that race relations were so bad in Lewiston that there were places I should avoid eating, I asked why one restaurant in particular had earned a reputation for intolerance. My colleague said that a student of color had worked there and not liked it very much.
The source of the most intense racial monomania on campus, I came to realize, was senior leadership. In one of my first encounters with the man who was then dean of the faculty, I mentioned how excited I was to be joining one of the few American colleges founded by abolitionists. At this, the dean—a white biologist who was an expert on sponges—frowned, as though my rosy view of the school’s antislavery history physically pained him. He conceded that, sure, it had been founded by the abolitionist minister Oren Burbank Cheney, but he pointed out that Benjamin Bates, the textile tycoon who had funded the college, had processed slave-picked cotton in his mills. I had come into Bates rather smitten with the idea that I was a Black academic joining the ranks of a faculty whose predecessors had agitated for Black freedom, but the dean seemed to feel that this was actually something to be faintly embarrassed of, a history that was best mentioned, if at all, only after layering on an array of caveats.
I found this kind of endemic self-flagellation to be eye-roll-worthy. But the charged atmosphere at Bates didn’t feel out of step with that of the country as a whole, at least initially. Yes, the college sponsored overearnest discussions of books such as White Fragility and How to Be an Antiracist. Yes, the president of the college bragged that 67 percent of new faculty hires that fall were “BIPOC-identified,” and, sure, it seemed likely that some racial-discrimination laws had been ignored to get that number so high. Yes, college leadership was constantly adding new letters to the sexuality acronym—LGBTQ became LGBTQAIP2+. And, yes, many of us in academia tacked pronouns onto our email signature with the righteous zeal of Martin Luther hammering his 95 theses to the church door. I certainly did. But none of this seemed all that unusual. Bates was weird in 2020. But America was weird in 2020.
That first year, I kept my head down and let the small oddities I noticed pass by without much reflection. Between teaching, grading, student advising, Zoom faculty meetings, twice-weekly COVID testing, wrangling a hyperactive rescue puppy, and trying to survive the Maine winter, I didn’t have much time to think about the college’s (or the country’s) cultural eccentricities. Ironically, that pandemic year turned out to be the sanest one I would experience at Bates.
The request came a couple of weeks into June 2021: Would I co-chair the task force that organized the college’s annual Martin Luther King Jr. Day celebration?
A.I. Will Affect Your Social Life. Yes, Yours. (Alice Lassman, 8/10/26, NY Times)
Despite speaking to chatbots every day, most of them also maintained full social lives, and in many ways A.I. enriched them. Several interviewees told me that it helped them think about their relationships more clearly and deliberately. But it also began to form the scaffolding of their consequential decision making: encouraging breakups, de-escalating arguments that the chatbot had decided weren’t worth their time. “If I’m more rational and less emotional, I’m doing good,” Lavish Daksh, a 21-year-old in Germany, told me. A.I. had allowed him to make more clearheaded decisions, he said. But he described wanting to strip emotion from his relationships entirely.
Klaatu barada nikto: Robert Wright’s “The God Test” (William Benzon, 8/10.26, 3Quarks)
The standard line about computers, that they only do what they’re programmed to do, doesn’t apply to large language models (LLMs), the particular technology that dominates the current scene. The engineers program a transformer to “examine” (or, if you prefer, ”consume”) a large corpus of texts, and the transformer constructs (“emits”?) a “model” of the language in those texts – Wright discusses this process in “Chapter Two: The Great Inversion.” The inner mechanisms of that model, however, are opaque. The engineers who programmed and ran the transformer can’t see into it to see how it works – something Wright discusses in “Chapter Four: The Evolution of a Large Language Model.”
Subsuming these factors, deeper than any of them, and more elusive is the simple fact that contemporary chatbots and their siblings are deeply STRANGE. They’re not animal, vegetable, or mineral; they’re a new kind of thing that doesn’t fit into pre-existing cultural categories. They’re inanimate things with which we can converse like we would with another human.
In the 19th century the term “iron horse” arose to characterize steam locomotives. Why? Because it moved autonomously over the surface of the earth like a horse, but it was made of iron and therefore inanimate. Consider this passage from Henry David Thoreau’s “Sound” chapter in Walden (1854):
When I meet the engine with its train of cars moving off with planetary motion . . . with its steam cloud like a banner streaming behind in gold and silver wreaths . . . as if this traveling demigod, this cloud-compeller, would ere long take the sunset sky for the livery of his train; when I hear the iron horse make the hills echo with his snort like thunder, shaking the earth with his feet, and breathing fire and smoke from his nostrils, (what kind of winged horse or fiery dragon they will put into the new Mythology I don’t know), it seems as if the earth had got a race now worthy to inhabit it.
There you have it, the iron horse and the fire-breathing dragon. Now we have the electronic brain, as it was known in my youth, the thinking machine.
These factors make any attempt to explain the technology and its implications a bit like trying to describe a Rorschach blot. There’s something real there but characterizing it is difficult. Consequently any account you give has a large element of projection in it. AI thus functions as a cultural Rorschach blot onto which we project our hopes and fears, who we are and what we are, where we want to go.