The world feels pretty broken right now, but it’s still worth having some hope and determination to make it a better place. Here’s another song I like along those lines: I Sit up in My Window by Jem.
I Sit up in My Window (JEM)
Author: Scott Boehmer
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Society’s Kind of Like a Video Essay
I thought this was a well-crafted message about the focus on efficiency, not just in government, but as a goal for society as a whole. Is efficiency really what we should be aiming for?
A Video Essay About Efficiency (Pillar of Garbage)
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Climate Reanalyzer
Climate Reanalyzer is a site by the Climate Change Institute and the University of Maine that provides visualizations for weather forecasts and climate trends. For climate change, it makes it easy to check historical data on air and sea temperatures as well as sea ice at the poles.
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Let’s Play Fair?
This is a good metaphor for why programs and policies to support groups that have long suffered under bigotry are important. The bigots have been cheating the system for years, so just putting an end to the cheating doesn’t suddenly make the whole game fair. And of course, many people making anti-woke and anti-DEI arguments aren’t actually interested in playing fair at all.
Whites: 140
Blacks: 3
10 Seconds to GoA lot of people, most of them white, call affirmative action ”reverse discrimination” and wonder why black people shouldn’t be satisfied with a simple repudiation of discrimination of any kind. With its ruling striking down minority set-asides in city construction contracts, the Supreme Court seems to have decided that affirmative action programs in general violate white people’s right to equal protection.
But in case a majority of their honors might still have an open mind on the subject, I offer a little metaphor in affirmative action’s defense. It comes in the form of a football metaphor because I have a feeling that the conservative majority on the Rehnquist Court might appreciate a football metaphor. So here goes:
The White Team and the Black Team are playing the last football game of the season. The White Team owns the stadium, owns the referees and has been allowed to field nine times as many players. For almost four quarters, the White Team has cheated on every play and, as a consequence, the score is White Team 140, Black Team 3. Only 10 seconds remain in the game, but as the White quarterback huddles with his team before the final play, a light suddenly shines from his eyes.
”So how about it, boys?” he asks his men. ”What do you say from here on we play fair?”
Andrew WardThe DEI Argument is Stupid. But Here’s How to Win It. (The Rip Current)
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A Purge of the Military
Trump announced he was dismissing Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Charles Q. Brown and replacing him with Air Force Lt. Gen. John Dan “Razin” Caine – an extraordinary move since Caine is retired, according to an Air Force official, and is not a four-star general.
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Minutes later, Hegseth released a statement announcing he’d fired Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the chief of the Navy.
The removal of the second Black man to serve as America’s most senior general and the first woman to serve on the Joint Chiefs of Staff appears to send a strong signal from an administration that has outlawed diversity and inclusion efforts across the military and wider government.
Hegseth called Franchetti a “DEI hire” in his 2024 book, in which he wrote: “If naval operations suffer, at least we can hold our heads high. Because at least we have another first! The first female member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff — hooray.”
Oren Liebermann and Haley BritzkyObservers point out how the purging of an independent, rules-based military in favor of a military loyal to a single leader is a crystal clear step toward authoritarianism. They note that Trump expressed frustration with military leaders during his first term when they resisted illegal orders, saying, as then-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley did, that in America “[w]e don’t take an oath to a king, or a queen, or to a tyrant or dictator, and we don’t take an oath to a wannabe dictator…. We don’t take an oath to an individual. We take an oath to the Constitution, and we take an oath to the idea that is America, and we’re willing to die to protect it.”
Heather Cox RichardsonFebruary 22, 2025 (Letters from an American)
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Firefox Focus
As a result of having worked on it at Microsoft, I’ve been using Microsoft Edge as my browser for years. Recently though, I’ve been looking for alternatives due to the amount that Microsoft has been adding bloated features that I don’t want to the browser so that each overview of new features after an update was a list of things I wanted to turn off rather than anything that excited me. More broadly, the company’s shoving of generative AI into every nook and cranny has pushed me to look for alternatives to pretty much every Microsoft product that I use.
On the browser front, I’ve switched to Firefox with DuckDuckGo as my search engine. Both of those still seem to be investing in AI, but it was easy to opt out.
On my phone, I installed both the standard Firefox browser and Firefox Focus. Since doing that, I’m surprised at how much I’m enjoying Firefox Focus.
It is a simple, privacy-focused browser. It is essentially always in private mode and deletes your cookies and history each time you close it or at the convenient press of a button in its toolbar, and then it also has built-in ad and tracking blockers. On the other hand, it intentionally lacks a bunch of features that I’d normally like in a browser: roaming favorites, password management, tabs, cross-device history, etc.
Despite that lack of features though, it turns out it feels pretty perfect for navigating a web that is hostile to users. Obnoxious ads are a problem all over the internet, so I recommend everyone use an ad-blocker no matter what browser you’re running. Then a lot of sites use cookies to track activity and interfere with users. For example, news sites often record the number of articles you view and then at some point stop letting you read without a subscription. It turns out defaulting to private mode where cookies are regularly deleted makes those sites feel a lot more user friendly.
On the rare sites where I actually want to sign-in, I’m easily able to switch over to the full Firefox on my phone with a menu option in Firefox Focus. Then I can benefit from all the roamed information from my desktop browser.
If you’re not happy with your mobile browsing experience, then I recommend giving Firefox Focus a try. Oh, and also change the settings in every single app that tries to open links in anything other than your default browser to stop doing that.
Firefox Focus (Mozilla)
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On the Side of Autocrats and Fascists
It seems that we now live in an America that is more likely to throw its support behind autocrats and fascists than to align with our long-term democratic allies.
European leaders should end the isolation of far-right parties across the Continent, US vice-president JD Vance has said.
The comments mark an extraordinary embrace of a once-fringe political movement with which the Trump administration shares a common approach on migration, identity and internet speech.
The address stunned and silenced hundreds of attendees at the Munich Security Conference, a forum where top-level politicians, diplomats and analysts had gathered expecting to hear US president Donald Trump’s plans for ending the war in Ukraine and Europe’s defence against a rising Russian threat.
Mr Vance singled out his German hosts, telling them to drop their objections to working with a party that has often revelled in banned Nazi slogans and has been shunned from government as a result.
Jim Takersley, Steven Erlanger, and David E. SangerEuropean leaders left in stunned silence as JD Vance harangues them over approach to far right (The Irish Times)
Mr. Trump’s remarks late on Tuesday, when he sided fully with Russia’s narrative blaming Ukraine for the war, have now fortified the impression that the United States is prepared to abandon its role as a European ally and switch sides to embrace President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.
It was a complete reversal of historic alliances that left many in Europe stunned and fearful.
Catherine Porter and Andrew HigginsMeeting Again in Paris, European Leaders Try to Recalibrate After Trump Sides With Russia (The New York Times)
Make no mistake. The Trump-Vance-Musk regime is not only undermining democracy in the United States. It is also laying the foundation for undermining democracies around the world.
Since the end of World War II, liberal democracies have stuck together — led by America. On the opposite side have been authoritarian states, led mainly by the Soviet Union, followed, after the demise of the Soviet Union, by Russia and China.
But all this is rapidly changing. Both Russia and China have morphed into oligarchies, run by small groups of extraordinarily wealthy people.
America has also been moving from a democracy to an oligarchy — and is doing so at lightning speed under Trump, Vance, Musk, and their billionaire buddies.
The new poles of international power are coming to be global democracies versus a global oligarchy. The United States is emerging on the side of global oligarchy.
Robert ReichThe Trump-Vance-Musk-Putin plan (Robert Reich)
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The Hardest Working Font in Manhattan
In 2007, on my first trip to New York City, I grabbed a brand-new DSLR camera and photographed all the fonts I was supposed to love. I admired American Typewriter in all of the I ❤ NYC logos, watched Akzidenz Grotesk and Helvetica fighting over the subway signs, and even caught an occasional appearance of the flawlessly-named Gotham, still a year before it skyrocketed in popularity via Barack Obama’s first campaign.
But there was one font I didn’t even notice, even though it was everywhere around me.
Last year in New York, I walked over 100 miles and took thousands of photos of one and one font only.
The font’s name is Gorton.
Marcin WicharyThe hardest working font in Manhattan (Aresluna)
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When a President Bribes a Mayor
In particular, the rationale given by Mr. Bove—an exchange between a criminal defendant and the Department of Justice akin to the Bout exchange with Russia—is, as explained above, a bargain that a prosecutor should not make. Moreover, dismissing without prejudice and with the express option of again indicting Adams in the future creates obvious ethical problems, by implicitly threatening future prosecution if Adams’s cooperation with enforcing the immigration laws proves unsatisfactory to the Department.
Danielle SassoonActing US Attorney Danielle Sassoon’s resignation letter (DocumentCloud)
Even as the Justice Department lets Adams skate—for now—the incident has provided a vivid illustration of precisely why government corruption is so dangerous. A public official who engages in alleged illegal behavior makes themselves susceptible to outside forces that might seek to influence their decision making and subvert the will of their constituents. Usually, that’s a private party or a foreign government. In this case, the person squeezing Adams just happens to be the president of the United States.
David A. GrahamThe Public Humiliation of Eric Adams (The Atlantic)
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Profiles in Courage
Sometimes it takes a crisis to reveal one’s true character. This is especially true of people who occupy positions of leadership, both in the private and public sectors. Are they courageous, or are they cowards? Worse yet, are they complicit in doing grave harm?
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But today I’d like to honor unsung heroes whose courage in the face of the Trump-Musk takeover of America deserves our profound thanks. They are public servants who have chosen to fight rather than submit to Trump’s treachery, contesting his blatantly illegal attempts to fire them.
Robert ReichProfiles in Courage (Robert Reich)
Scott Boehmer 