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• Greenland isn’t for sale. If it were, the US would be a keen bidder
• Lightning strikes make caterpillar fungus-hunting a deadly pursuit
• Pet vaccine hesitancy is bad for dogs, cats and humans, too

Lead story

On Aug. 3, 1789, President George Washington dispatched a letter with the names of 139 nominees for “Collectors, Naval Officers and Surveyors for the Ports” to the Senate for confirmation. Included among them were Eppes Sergeant and Samuel Whittemore, Washington’s choices, respectively, for the posts of District & Port Collector and Surveyor in Gloucester, the Massachusetts fishing port where I live.

“Washington, the first president of the United States, operated from the assumption that the president and the Senate should be actively involved in approving even the lowest-level officials,” writes Washington University in St. Louis historian Peter Kastor. “After early nominations for the likes of Thomas Jefferson, the first secretary of state, and Alexander Hamilton, the first secretary of the Treasury, Washington personally nominated hundreds of customs collectors, low-ranking officers in the military and territorial officials.”

Kastor has spent almost 20 years studying the federal appointment process. As confirmation hearings begin in the Senate today for Donald Trump’s high-level appointees, Kastor’s look at how the confirmation process evolved collaboratively over almost 250 years provides a revealing window into the much more contested process now.

We’re providing this story along with more than a dozen – and counting – profiles of top administration positions. We’re not profiling Trump’s choices – you can find those stories elsewhere. Our stories describe the job of the secretary of the interior, or the director of national intelligence, attorney general or head of the FBI. You can then evaluate the Trump pick’s qualifications for the job.

Naomi Schalit, Senior Editor, Politics + Democracy

Politics + Society

When presidents would send handwritten lists of their nominees to the Senate, things were a lot different

Peter Kastor, Washington University in St. Louis

The US now faces the likelihood of a bruising and raucous set of confirmation hearings − a clear break from the cooperative system the founders established.

Science + Technology

Environment + Energy

• LA fires: Why fast wildfires and those started by human activities are more destructive and harder to contain

  Virginia Iglesias, University of Colorado Boulder

  The causes of the wind-driven fires that burned thousands of homes in the Los Angeles area are under investigation, but there were no lightning strikes reported at the time.

• Firefighting planes are dumping ocean water on the Los Angeles fires − why using saltwater is typically a last resort

  Patrick Megonigal, Smithsonian Institution

  In emergencies, dumping ocean water on fires may be the best option. But seawater can have long-term effects on equipment and ecosystems, as a novel coastal experiment shows.

International

• 4 reasons why the US might want to buy Greenland – if it were for sale, which it isn’t

  Scott L. Montgomery, University of Washington

  The Danish-controlled island is coveted by some external actors who see the vast territory as a vector for precious minerals and great-power politics.

Economy + Business

• We study aging family business incumbents who refuse to let go − here’s why the 2024 race felt familiar

  Nancy Forster-Holt, University of Rhode Island; Cassidy Creech, Utah State University; James Davis, Utah State University

  Donald Trump is acting like the classic patriarch of a family business − and he’s not the only politician to do so.

• What’s an H-1B visa? A brief history of the controversial program for skilled foreign workers

  Gabrielle Clark, California State University, Los Angeles

  The struggle has yielded both compromises and new strips of red tape for more than 100 years.

Arts + Culture

Trending on site

Today, a group of former Twitter users who are fed up by the platform’s decline under billionaire control, are launching a new campaign to transform social media into a public good, free from profit-driven incentives, venture capital pressure, and politically-motivated censorship.

The project is called “FreeOurFeeds,” and it has launched with the support of big names including actor Mark Ruffalo, writer Cory Doctorow, businessman Roger McNamee, director Alex Winter, and others.

FreeOurFeeds aims to build a new social media ecosystem on top of the AT Protocol, an open, decentralized framework designed to enable interoperable social media platforms, giving users greater control over their data, algorithms, and online experience (it’s what Bluesky runs on). They want to leverage this tech to create a social media ecosystem focused on individual control, creativity, community well-being, and free expression.

1. TikTok will sell.

That being said, the “people’s bid” led by Frank McCourt’s Project Liberty offers a new way to imagine TikTok.The Decentralized Social Networking Protocol (DSNP) empowers users with full ownership of their data, prioritizing privacy, transparency, and interoperability across platforms by eliminating central control and adopting fair monetization models.

Today Kevin O’Leary, known to millions as Shark Tank’s “Mr. Wonderful,” joined forces with the “people’s bid.” O’Leary’s crowdfunding effort for individuals to register interest at WonderfulTikTok.com will now be folded into the “people’s bid,” which will help ensure individuals and small businesses have a stake in the future of TikTok. This makes the McCourt effort a growing force for change.

2. Gen Z will pioneer new digital spaces.The exodus from mainstream social media will accelerate in 2025 as Gen Z abandons algorithm-driven platforms for more authentic digital spaces. Rejecting the passive consumption model of traditional social networks, young users will gravitate toward intimate communities built around shared values and active participation. Five distinct types of platforms will emerge to serve this shift: Truth-Seeking Communities where transparent communication and fact-checking reign supreme; Ethical Digital Communes organized around sustainability and social justice; Mobilization Networks enabling rapid organization around causes; Value-Based Commerce Spaces that blend conscious consumption with community building; and Dialog-Driven Platforms fostering genuine discussion over viral content. These emerging spaces will fundamentally challenge current social paradigms by prioritizing genuine connection over engagement metrics and community impact over individual influence.

Key Predictions:

• Small-group platforms limiting communities to 100-200 members will see rapid adoption.
• At least three major niche platforms will reach 10 million monthly active users by focusing on authentic connection over scale.
• Real-time, ephemeral content will replace algorithmic feeds as the primary form of communication.
• User-owned communities will emerge, with governance and moderation controlled by members.
• Traditional influencer marketing will decline as peer-to-peer recommendations become the dominant form of social commerce.

Meta says it will stop fact checking, but this shouldn’t be confused with content moderation. Almost all content that is removed—millions of items per day—is reviewed by armies of content moderators (Meta says 40,000 of them) and related AI systems, not fact checkers.

While moderation does target some politically contentious items such as hate speech and health misinformation, mostly it removes fraud, spam, harassment, sexual material, graphic violence, and so on. Zuckerberg said that certain content moderation rules will be relaxed and the teams involved will move to Texas, but the massive operation appears otherwise unchanged. The update to moderation rules may turn out to be the most impactful change by far.

Benedict Evans, in his weekly newsletter about technology recommended this article last year by Vitalik Buterin (co-founder of Etherium). “Vitalik Buterin’s thoughts on Twitter’s Community Notes, a collective voting system that’s exactly the kind of thing that Web3 people want to build.”

Community Notes is a fact-checking tool that sometimes attaches context notes, like the one on Elon’s tweet above, to tweets as a fact-checking and anti-misinformation tool. It was originally called Birdwatch, and was first rolled out as a pilot project in January 2021. Since then, it has expanded in stages, with the most rapid phase of its expansion coinciding with Twitter’s takeover by Elon last year. Today, Community Notes appear frequently on tweets that get a very large audience on Twitter, including those on contentious political topics. And both in my view, and in the view of many people across the political spectrum I talk to, the notes, when they appear, are informative and valuable.

But what interests me most about Community Notes is how, despite not being a “crypto project”, it might be the closest thing to an instantiation of “crypto values” that we have seen in the mainstream world. Community Notes are not written or curated by some centrally selected set of experts; rather, they can be written and voted on by anyone, and which notes are shown or not shown is decided entirely by an open source algorithm. The Twitter site has a detailed and extensive guide describing how the algorithm works, and you can download the data containing which notes and votes have been published, run the algorithm locally, and verify that the output matches what is visible on the Twitter site. It’s not perfect, but it’s surprisingly close to satisfying the ideal of credible neutrality, all while being impressively useful, even under contentious conditions, at the same time.

It’s a fact that our overlords would prefer we forget: all power comes from the people

All power comes from the people. If it were not for human cooperation there would be no wealth. The masses working together is the fundamental power that has led to humankind’s dominance in the world. Crucially, such shared intentionality has allowed many of us to rise above mere survival considerations and, as such, we all have a vested interest in its continuation.

Trump has said he wants to use active duty U.S. troops to quell protests and round up immigrants. Will the military comply?

“There was real sensitivity about keeping federal troops away from the front lines,” said Ollivant, who was ordered in by President George H.W. Bush as rioters in central-south LA set fire to buildings, assaulted police and bystanders, pelted cars with rocks and smashed store windows in the aftermath of the videotaped police beating of Rodney King, a Black motorist. “They tried to keep us in support roles, backing up the police.”

By the end of six days of rioting, 63 people were dead and 2,383 injured — though reportedly none at the hands of the military.

But some in the U.S. military fear next time could be different. According to nearly a dozen retired officers and current military lawyers, as well as scholars who teach at West Point and Annapolis, an intense if quiet debate is underway inside the U.S. military community about what orders it would be obliged to obey if President-elect Donald Trump decides to follow through on his previous warnings that he might deploy troops against what he deems domestic threats, including political enemies, dissenters and immigrants.

Before I get there: Yes, California has problems, some of them big. There are pockets of social disorder, although the fact that so many luxury homes are burning tells us that many people who could live anywhere find greater Los Angeles a highly desirable place to be. More important, California suffers terribly from NIMBYism, which has led to grossly inadequate home construction, crippling housing costs and a lot of homelessness.

But California is nonetheless an economic and technological powerhouse; without it America would be a lot poorer and weaker than it is.

Most narrowly, at a time when Donald Trump is making nonsensical claims that America is subsidizing Canada via our bilateral trade deficit, California is literally subsidizing the rest of the United States, red states in particular, through the federal budget.

As Trump’s big-tent GOP returns to power, Bannon and Musk have served as a prime example of the infighting already underway.

Bannon, a former chief strategist for Trump and host of the “War Room” podcast, told POLITICO White House bureau chief Dasha Burns that Musk has had some influence over Cabinet picks and policy discussions but that he doesn’t “have the ability to actually make decisions and inform those decisions and drive those decisions.”

As Trump’s big-tent GOP returns to power, Bannon and Musk have served as a prime example of the infighting already underway — and the challenges it will pose to the incoming president. Allies argue that it offers an early reminder of the incoming president’s governing style, a way for Trump to retain his decision making power, while ensuring no one faction gains too much control.

OpenAI has expanded its policy footprint significantly over the past year, publishing a “blueprint” for AI infrastructure development in November and setting up shop in capitals across Europe.

This morning the company published another such “blueprint,” this time focusing on competition with China and domestic safety concerns. It’s one more example of the biggest AI developers trying to shape the policy conversation around everything from energy to defense and national security, as their technologies inch toward the center of it — and a hawkish second Trump administration is set to take office.

OpenAI has been a major proponent of the idea that AI is a civilizationally game-changing technology (approaching “artificial general intelligence,” in industry parlance). Initially, its CEO Sam Altman loudly stumped in Washington for regulation of the biggest and most powerful systems; more recently the company has been pushing an expansionist line. Now Elon Musk, one of the company’s co-founders (who has his own AI company and has become arguably OpenAI’s most bitter foe), is poised to wield major influence in the second Trump White House, raising questions about what kind of powerful frenemy he might be.

President-elect Trump has said he wants to slap aggressive tariffs on all sorts of U.S. imports as soon as Day 1 of his administration. But taking shock-and-awe action would come with meaningful economic, political and legal risks.

Why it matters: Trump will have to decide whether to turn to the tried-and-true tools to implement tariffs he used when he was last in office — which are powerful, but take time and care to enact — or rip up the playbook.

What to watch: Speedier tariffs could also mean speedier retaliation from major allies that might take a huge toll on domestic producers

Flashback: Trump 1.0 relied on legal authorities that required months-long investigations and comment periods before the administration could impose double-digit tariffs on imports from China and elsewhere.

Heterodoxy deserves to be a thriving part of our intellectual culture. Here’s what that requires.

There are very many ways to parse the 2024 election, but one of its features is that it was the first election in which “heterodoxy” played a prominent role.

Actually, it could be argued that it was the heterodox election. Most of the figures associated with heterodoxy—Bari Weiss, Matt Taibbi, Michael Shellenberger, etc.—have fairly niche audiences that are unlikely to have reached low-information undecided voters in swing states, but that’s the not the case for Joe Rogan, the Emperor of Heterodoxy. And, in post-election analysis, it’s Harris’ decision to skip out on an interview with Rogan—in large part because her staffers and the Democratic Party in general seemed to have trouble understanding Rogan’s appeal or influence—that emerges as the single greatest miscue of her campaign.

That should make you trust official statistics more

Data get revised for good reasons, and the US does it the right way

Lots of principal economic indicators get revised in the months (and sometimes years) after their initial release. Most revisions are an attempt to square timeliness and accuracy: Initial data are based on what’s known or available quickly, and revisions incorporate additional inputs or information that take more time to collect or calculate. Here are three reasons for data revisions:

Yes, but not for the reasons Marxists think.

Should economists all be required to read, “work through”, and understand Adam Smith and Karl Marx? Is the discipline “fake” because most haven’t done this?

First of all, it’s important to point out that studying history of thought isn’t always useful. Just as doctors usually don’t study the works of Galen, and physicists usually don’t read Isaac Newton, economists don’t really have to read the original works of Alfred Marshall to understand supply and demand, or read John Nash’s original papers to understand game theory. The most useful concepts in science stand alone, divorced from the thought process of their originators. This is why they’re so powerful — anyone can just pick up Newton’s Laws or Nash Equilibrium and just use them to solve real-world problems, without knowing where those tools came from.

Some of Donald Trump’s most controversial Cabinet picks will be trying to win over the Senate next week. It comes as Trump threatens allies and friends from Denmark to Panama, giving new meaning to “America First.” Join moderator Jeffrey Goldberg, Laura Barrón-López of PBS News Hour, Carl Hulse of The New York Times, Tom Nichols of The Atlantic, and Vivian Salama of The Wall Street Journal to discuss this and more.