🙏 Thank you to all our new paid Substack subscribers! They and our sponsors help us do more. Prefer Patreon? You can chip in $2 or as much as you like to support all our online shenanigans: this newsletter, the Sunday NYT Readalong, the 30-group WhatsApp Community I run (specialized groups on AI, hip hop, baseball) and more! Here’s our Patreon link.
💪 My Pre-diabetic Life: How I’m using some AI, some planning, some advice, and some luck to reverse a worrisome diagnosis. Powered by AROGYA WORLD, one of the most innovative health nonprofits in the world. Join our WhatsApp group and learn with me.
* * *
THE FACTS ARE CLEAR. This is the most corrupt government in modern history, there is rank incompetence across the State and Defense Departments, and those charged with ensuring public health are actively working against it.
Those are the toplines. There is so much more. It’s August, and the dog days of summer are upon us earlier than ever. So, here are some things to work through, read-up on, and, perhaps, get a bit angry about.
The (further) disaster about to be unleashed at the Department of Justice under soon-to-be Attorney General Todd Blanche, should scare everyone. The arguments against him are voluminous. He views the DOJ as Trump’s law office-slash-enforcement arm, full stop. If he isn’t the most dangerous AG nominee we’ve ever had, I don’t know who is. In June, 101 former judges asked the New York Bar Association to investigate Blanche for, among many other things, his atrocious behavior with Epstein survivors.
It cannot be said enough—ICE is a scourge. Trump’s arrests, deportations, and general cruelty towards people he perceives as immigrants know no bounds, not even court-ordered ones. The administration’s stated goal is 2,000 arrests per day. ICE agents are stressed out, undertrained, and should not be doing what they’re doing anyway. They killed two people in traffic stops in one week—Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston and Joan Sebastian Durán Guerrero in Maine. They are force-feeding and doing who-knows-what-else to detainees. This is wrong, and it has been from the beginning.
I’ve started a virtual salon series to help people (along with me) learn things from some of the fascinating people I know (and am getting to know). Nominate an expert—including yourself!—to join us. Let’s help everyone learn a bit more about… everything. Thanks to our paid subscribers for helping us put this together!
Donald Trump has declared some sort of end to the war against Iran a dozen-plus times over the past months. With any other President in any other time, this would be a complete political disaster—with Trump, it’s still somehow just another day. This war was a disastrous idea manifested into an even worse reality. Gas prices have soared globally, costing the U.S. hundreds of billions of dollars and the military is going through expensive stockpiles of munitions at alarming rates. There is no win left here, no matter how many times Trump says there is.
Measles cases in the U.S. are at a 35-year high, there is a cyclosporiasis outbreak spreading across the U.S., and GOP senators refuse to let go of COVID-19 conspiracy theories. Federal funding for scientific research is drying up, and the conditions for available funds are onerous to the point of being ridiculous. Our health care system is a disaster and has been for decades, but America’s research capabilities—long the envy of the world, and a huge factor in the country’s economic power—are in peril. As Evan Osnos writes in The New Yorker, the future is being made in China right now, and that includes medical breakthroughs. The U.S. continues to flail under the thump of Trump and his acolytes.
Partner message
Tina Brown has called the Jaipur Literature Festival “the greatest literary show on Earth,” and I agree. JLF USA has now expanded to 7 cities, including L.A. and Toronto. This year, nearly 70 million Americans happen to live within a two-hour drive of a JLF site and I encouraging you to take advantage and broaden your horizons.
If you’re a journalist/blogger/photographer/creator and would like to get on our media lists (including for our virtual press previews), please fill in this form. Questions and comments direct to jlfusa@digimentors.group.
There are nearly 1,000 wildfires burning across North American forests. Wildfires in Spain and France have forced the evacuation of more than 250,000 people, and Europeans are suffering through the hottest summer on record—a drought that is wreaking havoc on agriculture, shipping, and life in general. The Colorado River system—a watershed that provides freshwater for several states across the Western U.S.—is running dry and will require immense sacrifice to save. Trump’s answer so far has been to strip protections from federal lands at every turn.
I worry about the midterms in November. It is jaw-dropping that, given all they have wrought in the name of placating Trump’s ego, Republicans stand any sort of chance this fall. I simply do not understand how anyone can take even a quick look at the last two years and say, “Yes, I’d like more of this.” [What I wrote in March holds up pretty well today: The midterms look promising, but I have full confidence the Dems can screw this up. So I wrote out some advice for the party.]
So, I encourage you to have those conversations, often difficult, with your friends, neighbors, family members, and whoever else will listen—Democrats may not offer the answer, but anything is better than this, and we absolutely need a check of some sort on the final two years of this administration. I am doing what I can and I hope you will too.
60% of 2026 is already over. What will you do with the remaining 40% of the year? LMK and I’ll see you made it all the way down here.
OUR MOST RECENT ESSAYS:
Have an idea for anything we’re up to? Let’s collaborate! sree.sreenivasan1@gmail.com
Comments
Nothing yet. Say the first thing.
Sign in to join the conversation.