Top headlines

• Administrative law a barrier to Trump’s regulatory roll-back plan
• People keep moving to the coasts – and into harm’s way
• Pete Hegseth’s deeply conservative faith

‘Administrative law’ sounds dry but likely will be key to success or failure of Trump’s plans for government reform

Sidney Shapiro, Wake Forest University

Changes in how government operates, and adjustments to rules and regulations, must go through an open democratic process whose steps and results can be challenged in the courts.

Assad leaves behind a fragmented nation – stabilizing Syria will be a major challenge for fractured opposition and external backers

Sefa Secen, Nazareth University

Opposition forces marched into Damascus on Dec. 8, seemingly ending the half-century rule of the Assad family. But what happens next?

Abu Mohammed al-Golani may become the face of post-Assad Syria – but who is he and why does he have $10M US bounty on his head?

Sara Harmouch, American University

Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, with origins in the terrorist group Nusra Front, spearheaded the rebel advance that ousted longtime Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

Abu Mohammed al-Golani may become the face of post-Assad Syria – but who is he and why does he have $10M US bounty on his head?

Sara Harmouch, American University

Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, with origins in the terrorist group Nusra Front, spearheaded the rebel advance that ousted longtime Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

Trump’s plans for tougher border enforcement won’t necessarily stop migrants from coming to US − but their journeys could become more costly and dangerous

Katrina Burgess, Tufts University

Fluctuating rates of illegal migration to the US over the past few decades show that the government’s approach of trying to stop migrants with more security has not worked.

1 big thing: The Great Upheaval

Governance, media, business and global geopolitics are all being reordered at breakneck speed — all simultaneously.

The new Trump team believes government needs to be an accelerant, not a deterrent. This means making agencies leaner, at least in decision-making, and more biased toward pro-business action.

• The risk: The shifts benefit the architects more than the general public. Musk, Sacks, the Trumps and many incoming leaders are super-wealthy, and deeply invested in the areas set to take flight.

2. Part 2: Shifting tectonic plates

AI arms race. AI-adjacent surge Space war. Information wars. 

PBS senior correspondent Judy Woodruff has spent two years reporting on how America has come to be so divided — and what it will take to bring us back together. In an exclusive interview with Stacy Palmer, CEO of the Chronicle of Philanthropy, the veteran journalist talked about the origins of polarization and what she’s learned from conversations with Americans in more than two dozen states.

“The sources of our division are deep, and they are complicated, and they go way back,” said Woodruff, whose “America at a Crossroads” series of reports is entering its third year. “They have to do with where people grew up, their world outlook, their life outlook. They have to do with economic circumstances. They have to do with race, they have to do with educational background. They have to do with just about everything in our lives.”

So what I’m going to do today is offer a heterodox take on U.S. tech dominance. Almost everything I read focuses on things like excessive regulation in Europe, a financial culture that is willing to take risks and so on. I’m not saying that none of this is relevant. But one way to think about technology in a global economy is that development of any particular technology tends to concentrate in a handful of geographical clusters, which have to be somewhere — and when it comes to digital technology these clusters, largely for historical reasons, are in the United States. To oversimplify, maybe we’re not really talking about American tech dominance; we’re talking about Silicon Valley dominance.

Now, there are two big further questions here. First, to what extent does high productivity in a few geographical clusters trickle down to the rest of the economy? Second, is there any way Europe can make a dent in these U.S. advantages?

The Vibe Shift I’m talking about is the speaking of previously unspeakable truths, the noticing of previously suppressed facts. I’m talking about the give you feel when the walls of Propaganda and Bureaucracy start to move as you push; the very visible dust kicked up in the air as Experts and Fact Checkers scramble to hold on to decaying institutions; the cautious but electric rush of energy when dictatorial edifices designed to stifle innovation, enterprise, and thought are exposed or toppled.

Fundamentally, the Vibe Shift is a return to—a championing of—Reality, a rejection of the bureaucratic, the cowardly, the guilt-driven; a return to greatness, courage, and joyous ambition.

It is best exemplified by this meme I made in my viral response against Paul Graham’s explanation for why young men are overwhelmingly more conservative and young women overwhelmingly more liberal. When he argued that this trend has a “boringly obvious” explanation (basically “boys and girls don’t spend as much time together anymore”), I took a different approach:

Wray said at a town hall meeting that he would be stepping down “after weeks of careful thought,” roughly three years short of the completion of a 10-year term during which he tried to keep the FBI out of politics even as the bureau found itself entangled in a string of explosive investigations, including two that led to separate indictments of Trump last year as well as inquiries into Biden and his son.

“My goal is to keep the focus on our mission — the indispensable work you’re doing on behalf of the American people every day,” Wray told agency employees. “In my view, this is the best way to avoid dragging the bureau deeper into the fray, while reinforcing the values and principles that are so important to how we do our work.”

So in an act of desperation, Ben pivoted his entire business model into paid subscriptions. Doing so forced him to slow down his publishing schedule and focus on serving his core audience. Slowly but surely, he built up a new revenue base, and this year he passed the threshold of 1,000 paid subscribers.

In a recent interview, Ben explained how he executed on his pivot and why he’s determined to never rely on a single large tech platform ever again.

The FBI operates as part of the Justice Department, and it is known as one of the most independent offices of the executive branch, due to the nature of its work.  Its powers are limited by federal law and its agents can “serve warrants and subpoenas issued under the authority of the United States and make arrests without warrant for any offense against the United States committed in their presence, or for any felony cognizable under the laws of the United States if they have reasonable grounds to believe that the person to be arrested has committed or is committing such felony.”

Under the Constitution, the FBI Director is an executive branch official and can be removed if needed. But only in one instance since 1908, after the FBI and its predecessor agency were formed, has a President removed an FBI Director from office.

Will decentralized training break compute thresholds for good?

I’ve been skeptical of regulation based on “compute thresholds” since the idea first entered mainstream policy discussion. The threshold-based approach taken by the Biden Administration in its Executive Order on AI struck me as a plausible first draft, particularly given that the basic intention behind it was “make sure OpenAI, DeepMind, Anthropic, and Meta talk to the federal government about their AI development and safety plans.” Compute thresholds are fine for that contingent and transitory need. But for anything more robust, and especially for any regulation that imposes actual or potential costs on model developers, I concluded long ago that compute thresholds would probably be ineffective.

A few weeks ago, I wrote that OpenAI’s new o1 models challenge compute thresholds with the inference-based scaling paradigm (if you don’t understand this, I’ll explain more below). But there’s yet another new paradigm in AI development that could complicate compute thresholds as a governance mechanism: decentralized training. Let’s take a look.

Preliminary CDC data on the 12-month period ending in June showed that overdoses dropped about 15 percentage points from the previous period. There were still roughly 94,000 overdose deaths, signaling that the public health crisis is far from over, though a positive change could be on the horizon.

Explanation 1: The drug supply is changing

Explanation 2: Drugs are being used more safely

Explanation 3: The crisis has already taken the most vulnerable lives