FBI director guides the agency in confronting complex international threats, investigating federal crimes and running 55 field offices

Javed Ali, University of Michigan

The FBI investigates everything from terrorist threats to cybercrime to public corruption. What does the presidentially nominated, Senate-confirmed head of the sprawling agency actually do?

Marco Rubio is no friend of Havana − but does Trump’s pick for secretary of state mean Cuba policy is set?

Joseph J. Gonzalez, Appalachian State University

Trump reversed the Cuba ‘thaw’ initiated by President Barack Obama. But second-guessing the incoming president’s policy on the island isn’t straightforward.

How cities are reinventing the public-private partnership − 4 lessons from around the globe

Debra Lam, Georgia Institute of Technology

A new form of public-private partnership is reshaping urban landscapes: Community-centered, public-private partnerships, or CP3s.

Twins were the norm for our ancient primate ancestors − one baby at a time had evolutionary advantages

Tesla Monson, Western Washington University; Jack McBride, Yale University

Twins are pretty rare, accounting for just 3% of births in the US these days. But new research shows that for primates 60 million years ago, giving birth to twins was the norm.

Webpage for December 16, 2024 articles

Polio Ravaged My Family. Forget Its Horror at Your Peril
Jana Kozlowski, The Free Press

“Those are your two brothers,” she said. “They died of polio.”

On October 21, 1945, two and a half years before my mom was born, her brother—my uncle, Ronald Winard—died of polio at the age of three. Four days later, his older brother, Howard, died at the age of seven.

“Are they in heaven?” my mother remembers asking. She never forgot the answer that came back: “No, they are in the ground.”

The Most Alarming Development Yet
ABC’s decision to settle a defamation suit with Trump represents a truly ominous moment.
William Kristol and Jim Swift
There’s been plenty to be alarmed about in the six weeks since Donald Trump’s election. But nothing has been more alarming than the announcement Saturday of ABC’s settlement of Trump’s defamation lawsuit. This was a true fire bell in the Trumpist night, an awful herald of so much that may lie ahead

The German Model is Failing
The country is in its deepest crisis since World War II. Neither Angela Merkel nor her successors have any idea how to fix it.
Yascha Mounk

I came away from reading Merkel’s memoir fully convinced that she is as decent as she is dogged. But when Merkel starts to discuss the key turning points of her time in office, a feeling of tragedy descends. Although she always strived to do the right thing, she ultimately got nearly everything wrong—a lesson she refuses to learn to this day. “If it helps someone to say, ‘It was Merkel’s fault,’ then let them do that,” she sullenly suggested at the official presentation of her book in Berlin. “I just don’t think that’s going to help the country.”

Taiwan and the Lessons from Ukraine
My latest piece for the Lowy Institute explores just some of the lessons that the government of Taiwan is learning from its observations of the war in Ukraine.
Mick Ryan, Futura Doctrina

A key lesson for Taiwan in the past three years has been the maintenance of national will. This has political, military and societal elements. Significant effort has been invested to improve military and civil defence capacity, while expanding the interaction between the two. As Taiwan’s representative in Australia, Douglas Hsu, told me in a recent interview, the Taiwanese government has “strengthened civil defence capabilities, including mobilisation, human resource deployment, training, and emergency preparedness. This aims to ensure prompt response to emergencies or dynamic changes in disasters, enhancing civilians’ self-defence and self-rescue capabilities to maintain social safety and order.”

The Rich, The Powerful, The Cowardly
We are witnessing media companies, journalists and billionaires bowing down to Trump and his hostile takeover—seeking access, favors and security. They are doing us a favor.
Steven Beschloss, America, America

On Tyranny author Timothy Snyder warned us. “Do not obey in advance,” he wrote, explaining that those who do are teaching authoritarians what they can get away with. But not everyone who should have gotten the message has heard him. Here are just a few examples:

• ABC News journalist George Stephanopoulos said in May, “I am not going to be cowed out of doing my job because of a threat by Donald Trump,” and Stephen Colbert’s late night audience gave him a rousing ovation. Yet on Saturday, Stephanopoulos and his employer ABC News settled Trump’s defamation lawsuit with an agreement to donate $15 million to a Trump presidential library (seriously), pay $1 million to cover Trump’s attorneys’ fees and publish a statement regretting that he used the word rape even though—as he noted in May—”a judge said that’s in fact what did happen.”

There is power in a union
And other Billy Bragg songs we sang on the Guardian’s picket line
Carole Cadwalladr, The Power

The Guardian’s decision to gift a chunk of its news organisation to a rival into which it intends to funnel £5m of readers’ money continues to baffle all onlookers. Yesterday, Oliver Shah, the Sunday Times’s business editor, chimed in with an article in which he compared the Guardian’s management to the disgraced retail magnate, Sir Philip Green and said the deal defied all financial and strategic logic. In an article with many choice lines, this was the standout:

‘Tortoise is a thinly capitalised vanity project in search of a commercial model.’

FBI director guides the agency in confronting complex international threats, investigating federal crimes and running 55 field offices

Javed Ali, University of Michigan

The FBI investigates everything from terrorist threats to cybercrime to public corruption. What does the presidentially nominated, Senate-confirmed head of the sprawling agency actually do?

Marco Rubio is no friend of Havana − but does Trump’s pick for secretary of state mean Cuba policy is set?

Joseph J. Gonzalez, Appalachian State University

Trump reversed the Cuba ‘thaw’ initiated by President Barack Obama. But second-guessing the incoming president’s policy on the island isn’t straightforward.

How cities are reinventing the public-private partnership − 4 lessons from around the globe

Debra Lam, Georgia Institute of Technology

A new form of public-private partnership is reshaping urban landscapes: Community-centered, public-private partnerships, or CP3s.

Twins were the norm for our ancient primate ancestors − one baby at a time had evolutionary advantages

Tesla Monson, Western Washington University; Jack McBride, Yale University

Twins are pretty rare, accounting for just 3% of births in the US these days. But new research shows that for primates 60 million years ago, giving birth to twins was the norm.

Webpage for December 16, 2024 articles

Polio Ravaged My Family. Forget Its Horror at Your Peril
Jana Kozlowski, The Free Press

“Those are your two brothers,” she said. “They died of polio.”

On October 21, 1945, two and a half years before my mom was born, her brother—my uncle, Ronald Winard—died of polio at the age of three. Four days later, his older brother, Howard, died at the age of seven.

“Are they in heaven?” my mother remembers asking. She never forgot the answer that came back: “No, they are in the ground.”

The Most Alarming Development Yet
ABC’s decision to settle a defamation suit with Trump represents a truly ominous moment.
William Kristol and Jim Swift
There’s been plenty to be alarmed about in the six weeks since Donald Trump’s election. But nothing has been more alarming than the announcement Saturday of ABC’s settlement of Trump’s defamation lawsuit. This was a true fire bell in the Trumpist night, an awful herald of so much that may lie ahead

The German Model is Failing
The country is in its deepest crisis since World War II. Neither Angela Merkel nor her successors have any idea how to fix it.
Yascha Mounk

I came away from reading Merkel’s memoir fully convinced that she is as decent as she is dogged. But when Merkel starts to discuss the key turning points of her time in office, a feeling of tragedy descends. Although she always strived to do the right thing, she ultimately got nearly everything wrong—a lesson she refuses to learn to this day. “If it helps someone to say, ‘It was Merkel’s fault,’ then let them do that,” she sullenly suggested at the official presentation of her book in Berlin. “I just don’t think that’s going to help the country.”

Taiwan and the Lessons from Ukraine
My latest piece for the Lowy Institute explores just some of the lessons that the government of Taiwan is learning from its observations of the war in Ukraine.
Mick Ryan, Futura Doctrina

A key lesson for Taiwan in the past three years has been the maintenance of national will. This has political, military and societal elements. Significant effort has been invested to improve military and civil defence capacity, while expanding the interaction between the two. As Taiwan’s representative in Australia, Douglas Hsu, told me in a recent interview, the Taiwanese government has “strengthened civil defence capabilities, including mobilisation, human resource deployment, training, and emergency preparedness. This aims to ensure prompt response to emergencies or dynamic changes in disasters, enhancing civilians’ self-defence and self-rescue capabilities to maintain social safety and order.”

The Rich, The Powerful, The Cowardly
We are witnessing media companies, journalists and billionaires bowing down to Trump and his hostile takeover—seeking access, favors and security. They are doing us a favor.
Steven Beschloss, America, America

On Tyranny author Timothy Snyder warned us. “Do not obey in advance,” he wrote, explaining that those who do are teaching authoritarians what they can get away with. But not everyone who should have gotten the message has heard him. Here are just a few examples:

• ABC News journalist George Stephanopoulos said in May, “I am not going to be cowed out of doing my job because of a threat by Donald Trump,” and Stephen Colbert’s late night audience gave him a rousing ovation. Yet on Saturday, Stephanopoulos and his employer ABC News settled Trump’s defamation lawsuit with an agreement to donate $15 million to a Trump presidential library (seriously), pay $1 million to cover Trump’s attorneys’ fees and publish a statement regretting that he used the word rape even though—as he noted in May—”a judge said that’s in fact what did happen.”

There is power in a union
And other Billy Bragg songs we sang on the Guardian’s picket line
Carole Cadwalladr, The Power

The Guardian’s decision to gift a chunk of its news organisation to a rival into which it intends to funnel £5m of readers’ money continues to baffle all onlookers. Yesterday, Oliver Shah, the Sunday Times’s business editor, chimed in with an article in which he compared the Guardian’s management to the disgraced retail magnate, Sir Philip Green and said the deal defied all financial and strategic logic. In an article with many choice lines, this was the standout:

‘Tortoise is a thinly capitalised vanity project in search of a commercial model.’

How China could try to strangle Taiwan without firing a shot
The Taiwan invasion everyone fears might never happen. Here’s what could take place instead.

But the way we think about how China would overrun Taiwan may well be wrong. Rather than an all-out invasion, it could attempt to capture the island without firing a single shot through “gray zone” tactics. Such tactics might combine maritime blockades and advanced cyberwarfare capable of cutting off Taiwan from the lines of seaborne trade and the digital access it needs to survive. And Beijing could do so in a way that might be just far enough below the threshold of conflict that would drive Washington and its allies to come to Taiwan’s aid.

My family voted for Trump. How can we talk about politics without ruining the holidays?
You don’t have to shy away from argument and persuasion. Here’s how to do it right.
Sigal Samuel

So, when we’re trying to communicate with people across the political aisle, it’s best not to assume that they’re morally bankrupt — or “completely fine with dramatically increasing human suffering.” Maybe they’re operating on the basis of moral values, just as we are, but the values that are salient for them are not the ones that are most salient for us.

Haidt’s research suggests that we should enter into these conversations with genuine curiosity — what are the moral values behind the opposing political views? — and a recognition that others’ values have worth, too. You may not be a conservative, but I imagine you still feel that there’s some value to loyalty, say, or sanctity. It’s helpful to get in touch with that, because people are much more receptive when they sense that you’re trying to find shared moral ground than when you’re just trying to win an argument.

Are men okay? Our modern masculinity problem, explained.
Why is it so hard to talk about masculinity?
by Sean Illing

Among the many headwinds in this conversation is the reality that men are not the only ones struggling and we’re all accustomed to seeing men in positions of power and privilege, so there isn’t a ton of sympathy out there. But something is clearly happening and there are good reasons why we should all care about it. As Galloway puts it, “the most dangerous person in the world is a man that is broken and alone,” and society appears to be producing far too many of them.
I invited Galloway on The Gray Area to talk about the state of men and where the discourse has gone sideways.

Vox website:  vox.com/

1 big thing: Trump’s creators & destroyers

Think of President-elect Trump’s top Cabinet and West Wing officials in two big buckets, Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen write in a “Behind the Curtain” column:

The Creators are charged with stoking a booming, AI-enabled economy, including a low jobless rate — the “golden age of America” that Trump promised after he won.
The Destroyers are the more controversial picks — wired to disrupt existing institutions, and acting on smoldering grievances against the organizations they’ve been picked to lead.

Part 2: Trump feeling “unassailable”
3. ? Mitch’s preemptive strike
4. ? Eric Schmidt’s AI warning
5. ? Scoop: Trump’s bipartisan push
6. ?? Ambassador Rahm Emanuel’s curtain call
7. ? House hunting gets political

Axios Webpage for 12.16.24
Mike Allen, edited by Bryan McBournie.

Ex-Google CEO warns there’s a time to consider “unplugging” AI systems
Avery Lotz, Axios

Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt warned that when a computer system reaches a point where it can self-improve, “we seriously need to think about unplugging it.”

Why it matters: The multi-faceted artificial intelligence race is far from the finish line — but in just a few short years, the boundaries of the field have been pushed exponentially, sparking both awe and concern.

Google’s Agentic Era – Sync #497
Plus: Sora is out; OpenAI vs Musk drama continues; GM closes Cruise; Amazon opens AGI lab; Devin is out; a humanoid robot with artificial muscles; NASA’s new Martian helicopter; and more!
Conrad Gray, Humanity Redefined

A year ago, Google unveiled Gemini, its family of natively multimodal large language models in three sizes: Nano, Pro, and Ultra. A couple of months later, in February 2024, Google released Gemini 1.5, which introduced improvements in performance and a larger context window, enabling these models to process more input data than before. In May 2024, the Gemini family expanded with Gemini 1.5 Flash—a lightweight model designed for greater speed and efficiency.

Last week, Google launched the next generation of Gemini models—Gemini 2.0—and outlined its vision for the agentic era.

Understanding Prompt Engineering: From Math to Magic
A Visual Journey Through How Language Models Think
DiamantAI

This guide delves into the mechanics of prompt engineering, using clear explanations and examples to make the complex intuitive.

By mastering these prompt engineering techniques, you can unlock the full potential of language models, guiding them to deliver precise, creative, and contextually rich outputs. Experiment with these methods to discover what works best for your specific needs.

Emerging Architectures in AI
Liquid AI, Inference, Memory, Application layers updates, semiconductor potential. Super Datacenters.
Michael Spencer, AI Supremacy

There’s something to be said for finding emergent architectures or new ways of doing things. Take Groq’s Language Processing Unit (LPU) a specialized AI accelerator designed to optimize the performance of artificial intelligence workloads, particularly in inference tasks. Or Sandbox AQ’s Large Quantitative Models, LQMs.

Or take Sakana AI’s Neural Attention Memory Models (NAMMs) that they say are a new kind of neural memory system for Transformers that not only boost their performance and efficiency but are also transferable to other foundation models, without any additional training.

The tech bros who helped put Trump back in power expect many favors in return; one of the more interesting is their demand that the government intervene to guarantee crypto players the right to a checking account, stopping the “debanking” they claim has hit many of their friends.

The hypocrisy here is thick enough to cut with a knife. If you go back to the 2008 white paper by the pseudonymous Satoshi Nakamoto that gave rise to Bitcoin, its main argument was that we needed to replace checking accounts with blockchain-based payments because you can’t trust banks; crypto promoters also tend to preach libertarianism, touting crypto as a way to escape government tyranny. Now we have crypto boosters demanding that the evil government force the evil banks to let them have conventional checking accounts.

What’s going on here? Elon Musk, Marc Andreesen and others claim that there’s a deep state conspiracy to undermine crypto, because of course they do. But the real reason banks don’t want to be financially connected to crypto is that they believe, with good reason, that to the extent that cryptocurrencies are used for anything besides speculation, much of that activity is criminal — and they don’t want to be accused of acting as accessories.

The billionaires rushing to get on board with Trump, and contributing millions for his inauguration, may have missed this key detail: Enhancing the power of a leader—to bend the rules and undermine the rule of law—is often very bad for business. Meanwhile, Team Trump is distracting the media and the public with the firehose of nominations. Plus, election laws v TikTok and Elon, how brutal regimes can quickly die, and the impact of Israel’s campaigns on international law during wartime.

A viral Bluesky thread introduced tens of thousands around the world to a first glimpse of a forthcoming biography of Elon Musk. Here—in a single essay—is some of what the world just learned.

Elon Musk may be an unelected plutocrat, but in six weeks he’ll become co-President of the United States. Unfortunately, many people around the world are only just now beginning to research who Musk really is—not the mythos he spent decades carefully weaving about himself like a cloak, but the hard realities that define the actual man.

Most of what people think they know about Elon Musk is manifestly false. This essay, written by an Elon Musk biographer and based on OSINT research, reveals the truth—or at least a significant part of it. Rest assured that none of what remains is any better.

I’ve been a Musk biographer for two years now. In that time I’ve published hundreds and hundreds of pages of professionally researched content about the man—well over a book’s worth—here at Proof, an independent media outlet at Substack that ranks as a Top 25 U.S. Politics substack worldwide.

And no, I’m not inventing this diagnosis ex post. Almost 30 years ago Shiller, after a careful survey, found that “People do not tend to see inflation as a process that naturally tends to affect wages and salaries as well as goods prices.” Stantcheva has confirmed that result. They attribute wage gains to their own efforts, and don’t see any connection with price increases.

Of course, post-election Trump is, on this issue at least, telling the truth. Cutting prices — as opposed to reducing the rate at which prices are rising — is very hard. Partly this is because employers are very reluctant to cut wages, because they fear the effects on employee morale (a phenomenon closely linked to the perception that wages are earned, while prices are someone else’s fault.)

Security, Freedom, Democracy, Courage, Pluralism, Perseverance, Generosity

Americans (and many others) owe Ukrainians a huge debt of gratitude for their resistance to Russian aggression. For some mixture of reasons, we have difficulty acknowledging this. To do so, we have to find the words. Seven that might help are: security, freedom, democracy, courage, pluralism, perseverance, and generosity.

Perhaps the most important and the most unacknowledged debt is security. Ukrainian resistance to Russia has vastly reduced the chances of major armed conflict elsewhere, and thus significantly reduced the chances of a nuclear war.

It is hard to overlook what Ukrainians have done to defend the idea of democracy. In a basic sense, this is what the war is about. Vladimir Putin represents the twenty-first century practice of managed or fake democracy, in which an oligarchy preserves some appearances and rhetoric of democracy, because it has no alternative to propose, while hoarding wealth and power and making any meaningful political participation impossible. The Russian system relies on a televisual spectacle that assures Russians that everyone else is just as corrupt, and so they should love their own Russian corruption because it is Russian.

Abandoning X; Drone world; Asian voters’ rightward shift; China and the Global South; Polycrisis; Illegal immigration’s fiscal impact; Iranian power

In recent weeks I’ve started trying to determine a “theme” for each of these roundup posts. Tying them all together somehow is a fun challenge! The last one was a bunch of nerdy econ papers. Today’s items have more to do with public opinion.

But first, podcasts. I recently went on the Bulwark’s podcast, Beg to Differ. I talked about a lot of stuff, but the headline ended up being about why Tulsi Gabbard is scary:

The most striking finding here is that two of the big dominant platforms of the 2010s — Facebook and X (Twitter) — have become much less popular among teens.