Like 1897 rumors of Mark Twain's death, an assessment of conservatism's poor health in America was "greatly exaggerated" when in 1950 Lionel Trilling wrote:

In the United States at this time liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition. For it is the plain fact that nowadays there are no conservative or reactionary ideas in general circulation. This does not mean, of course, that there is no impulse to conservatism or to reaction. Such impulses are certainly very strong, perhaps even stronger than most of us know. But the conservative impulse and the reactionary impulse do not, with some isolated and some ecclesiastical exceptions, express themselves in ideas but only in action or in irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas.

Trilling wrote that years prior to Brown v. Board, the Montgomery bus boycott, the March on Washington, the Civil Rights Act, Bloody Sunday, and passage of the Voting Rights Act. Post-war cultural rejection of 100 years of Jim Crow injected a shot of adrenaline into the conservative impulses Trilling considered largely out of circulation mid-century.

Trumpism's primal scream is certainly more reactionary than Trilling could have anticipated, as Andrew O'Hehir writes at Salon:

MAGA envisions undoing nearly all of modern history and returning to some primal, purified state of nature, or rather a meme version thereof: The 1950s and the antebellum South and the American frontier and medieval feudalism and the Neanderthal fireside -- everything, everywhere, all at once.

Trumpism is a movement Trilling would still recognize as one that expresses itself "only in action or in irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas." Memes and AI slop, in current parlance. Or in mass deportations and state-sanctioned street violence and murder. If those "gestures" appear garbled, it is because the "the high priests of MAGA ideology," Stephen Miller and Russ Vought, are not driven not by coherent ideas. What drives them is visceral rage at cultural change that fails to center men as base as themselves. And by the congenital insecurity of Donald Trump himself.

Admittedly, even the most articulate MAGA ideologues -- not that there are many -- haven't gone that far. But that's where the collective brotastic idiocies of Peter Thiel and Jordan Peterson and Curtis Yarvin and Andrew Tate and Pete Hegseth and whomever else all converge: Somewhere in the recent or distant or mythical past, everything totally ruled and "we" (a term of art, I hasten to add) never felt bad about any of it. Guys were guys and women were hot and there was lots of feasting and stuff. There was no wokeness, no political correctness, no gender-neutral bathrooms. Nobody used pronouns or talked about inequality or intersectionality or was gay (except sometimes in the locker room) or tried to make us ashamed for being awesome.

If that sounds like a 1997 frat party elevated to political abstraction, fair enough. MAGA's explicit promise is to reassert white supremacy -- along with its inescapable corollaries, male dominance and mandatory heterosexuality -- while cleansing it of all guilt, all self-doubt, all uncertainty. History's newsreels will run backward such that the crimes of colonialism, imperialism, slavery and so forth either never happened or were never crimes. (Your mileage may vary.)

. . .

This year's Winter Games in Italy is seeing a lot of firsts. It's the first Olympics to have a woman in charge, the first with cauldrons lit in two different cities, the first time ski mountaineering or mixed team skeleton are in the running, and the first the United States is experiencing as a global pariah. Hopefully Donald Trump won't decide the whole thing is rigged and threatens to seize Sardinia or something unless all the gold medals are awarded to hi[m].

The Greatest Show on Earth has never risked being overshadowed by a low-budget Canadian television series before either.

You've probably watched or have at least heard of "Heated Rivalry," the new Crave show based on author Rachel Reid's Game Changers books that ship the idea of a secret romance between NHL leading scorers Sidney Crosby and Alex Ovechkin. I got advance buzz because my buddy Frank teaches an acting class in Vancouver but was skeptical of his guarantee a recent student -- Hudson Williams, who plays Shane Hollander -- was about to become a Very Big Deal. It's hard to imagine a new show about fictional hockey players could possibly be more popular than "Letterkenny" or "Shoresy" and yet star Jared Keeso somehow isn't a household name even in Canada.

It turns out director Jacob Tierney had a heavy hand in both, and three months later this dude is on the hottest show on televison, carrying the Olympic torch through the streets of Italy with American co-star Connor Storrie (Ilya Rozanov), and even dry-humping the prime minister on the red carpet. And "do the leg thing" was at Big Daddy Carney's suggestion.



. . .

In October 2025, I published an article about an email I found in the House Oversight Committee's Epstein document release. The email showed someone coordinating meetings with Kuwaiti royalty and relaying that schedule to Jeffrey Epstein. The subject line contained a name that appeared to have been missed during redaction: Katherine Keating, the daughter of Paul Keating, Australia's 24th Prime Minister.



I wrote about the timing of those meetings during Kuwait's largest political corruption scandal in modern history. I wrote about what it might mean if a former Prime Minister's daughter was coordinating her diplomatic schedule through Epstein's office. I asked questions about the pattern of access the documents appeared to show.

Nearly two months later, on December 12, 2025, I received an email from an Australian law firm called Giles George. The letter was marked "URGENT" and "STRICTLY PRIVATE, CONFIDENTIAL AND NOT FOR PUBLICATION."

Journalists who cover the Epstein case know what happens when you publish something that makes powerful people uncomfortable. You receive legal threats demanding you remove articles, and most of the time those threats work because independent journalists cannot afford to fight lawsuits from people with unlimited resources. The article comes down, the questions stop getting asked, and the silence continues.

. . .

A growing body of research continues to show that older workers are generally more productive than younger employees.

Annie Coleman, founder of consultancy RealiseLongevity, analyzed the data and highlighted a 2025 study finding peak performance occurs between the ages of 55-60.

Writing in the Stanford Center on Longevity blog, she cited research examining 16 cognitive markers that confirm that although processing speed declines after early adulthood, other dimensions improve, and overall cognition peaks near retirement age.

Studies from the past 15 years show that some qualities like vigilance may worsen with age alongside processing speed, but others improve, including the ability to avoid distractions and accumulated knowledge.

. . .

A 2022 meta-analysis concluded that professional teams tend to function better when they have company veterans among them, as did Bank of America's findings [PDF] two years later.

. . .

Russia's full-scale of invasion began four years ago. It began in winter, and so this winter is the fifth. And, for civilians, the worst.

The Russian war effort is struggling in the field. Territorial gains are minimal and come at huge cost. What Russia can do is launch ballistic missiles and drones at Ukraine's energy infrastructure in order to force Ukrainians to endure the freezing cold. Russia also simply targets Ukrainian workers at their factories and Ukrainians generally in their homes.

. . .

The major policy of the Trump administration has been to use the word "peace." Peace comes when an aggressor ceases to aggress and the country that is attacked can rebuild. But Trump has been unable to muster a policy that would change Russia's incentives. He has difficulty even presenting the war as a war, rather than as a misunderstanding about real estate; his administration issues official statements that praise Russia for its desire for peace, even as the offensives continue missiles fall. Trump has put pressure on Ukrainians, who, unlike the Russians, have to fight. For Russia, this is an ego war, a war by a dictator for his own legacy. For Ukraine, this is a war of national sovereignty and physical survival.

Fortunately, there is something that we as individuals can do. There are non-governmental organizations, in Ukraine and abroad, that support Ukrainian soldiers and civilians. There is a Ukrainian government platform, United24, that enables donations to specific areas of need. I will share a few ways that you can help. I hope that many of you will do so, thinking of this fifth winter of the war, and of the people who have no choice but to fight and to endure.

. . .

Last weekend, WSJ had a blockbuster story describing that, days before Trump's inauguration, the Emirates' spy chief bought almost half of Trump's cryptocurrency bribery machine, World Liberty Financial. Then, last year, Trump approved the sale of Nvidia chips to UAE, in spite of concerns that they would, in turn, share the technology with China.

Four days before Donald Trump's inauguration last year, lieutenants to an Abu Dhabi royal secretly signed a deal with the Trump family to purchase a 49% stake in their fledgling cryptocurrency venture for half a billion dollars, according to company documents and people familiar with the matter. The buyers would pay half up front, steering $187 million to Trump family entities.

The deal with World Liberty Financial, which hasn't previously been reported, was signed by Eric Trump, the president's son. At least $31 million was also slated to flow to entities affiliated with the family of Steve Witkoff, a World Liberty co-founder who weeks earlier had been named U.S. envoy to the Middle East, the documents said.

The investment was backed by Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, an Abu Dhabi royal who has been pushing the U.S. for access to tightly guarded artificial intelligence chips, according to people familiar with the matter. Tahnoon--sometimes referred to as the "spy sheikh"--is brother to the United Arab Emirates' president, the government's national security adviser, as well as the leader of the oil-rich country's largest wealth fund. He oversees a more than $1.3 trillion empire funded by his personal fortune and state money that spans from fish farms to AI to surveillance, making him one of the most powerful single investors in the world.

The deal marked something unprecedented in American politics: a foreign government official taking a major ownership stake in an incoming U.S. president's company.

Under the Biden administration, Tahnoon's efforts to get AI hardware had been largely stymied over fears that the sensitive technology could be diverted to China. Of particular concern was one of Tahnoon's own companies, the AI firm G42, which had stoked alarm among intelligence officials and lawmakers over its close ties to the sanctioned tech giant Huawei and other Chinese firms. The company said it severed ties with China in late 2023, but concerns persisted.

Trump's election reopened the door for him. In the months that followed, Tahnoon met multiple times with Trump, Witkoff and other U.S. officials, including in a March visit to the White House where the sheikh told officials he was eager to work with the U.S. on AI and other issues, according to people familiar with the matter.

I recommend reading the story in conjunction with this superb visualization NYT did late last year, which covered some of the same relationships.



As the NYT visualization makes clear, this massive scandal interlocks with a bunch of other ones (for example, the roles of Howard Lutnick and David Sacks in it; other parts of this visualization include Justin Sun's role in initially funding the bribery machine).

But the story is all the more breathtaking when you contextualize the past history.

. . .

Measles is now extending beyond families with young children, with outbreaks reported on college campuses and communities across the country.

At least 12 people have tested positive for measles at Ave Maria University in Florida, near Naples, since Jan. 29, according to local officials. Three people were taken to the hospital.

A student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison also tested positive after traveling overseas.

Earlier this year, Clemson University in South Carolina confirmed a measles case linked to someone with ties to the school.

It takes only three cases of measles for health officials to declare an outbreak.

. . .

We've all heard the best approach to solve a problem is to "sleep on it." It turns out there may be more truth to this adage than previously thought. While stories abound of eureka moments surfacing from dreams, scientific evidence has remained elusive, due to the challenge of systematically manipulating dreams.

A new study by neuroscientists at Northwestern University validates the possibility of influencing dreams and offers a crucial step to support the theory that dreams in REM sleep--the rapid eye movement phase of sleep in which lucid dreaming can occur--may be especially conducive to helping individuals come up with creative solutions to a problem.

The study has been published in the journal Neuroscience of Consciousness.

By presenting sounds during sleep that reminded study participants of a prior experience of trying to solve a specific puzzle, a method known as targeted memory reactivation (TMR), the scientists were able to encourage participants to have more dreams about randomly selected unsolved puzzles. Importantly, experimenters presented sounds only with concurrent electrophysiological verification that participants were asleep.

They found that 75% of their participants experienced dreams that included fragments or ideas from the unsolved puzzles. Further, puzzles incorporated into dreams were solved more often than puzzles that were not (42% vs. 17%).

. . .

Almost exactly one year ago, Attorney General Pam Bondi set up within the Department of Justice something called the Weaponization Working Group, the purpose of which was to investigate everyone who investigated the crimes committed by the Emperor of Our Sun and All the Stars in the Heavens Donald Trump over the last decade. This, in MAGA's cuckoo Bizarro world, was illegal "weaponization" of the government, particularly by Joe Biden's administration.

To run this group, Bondi brought on Ed Martin, a man so dumb he won't use revolving doors because he can never find the knob. Martin was fresh off losing out on the job of US Attorney for Washington DC because he was so terrible that not even Republican Senators, who at the time would confirm a pile of dogshit with an American flag sticking out of it for a Cabinet position if Trump nominated such a pile, would vote to confirm him.

. . .

Martin was given the Weaponization Working Group as a consolation prize. His job was to climb into the colons of Trump's enemies in a thorough and sweaty attempt to find any small little thing that could be turned into a criminal investigation. For a minute there, this actually seemed like a worse deal for the country. As an acting US Attorney, Martin had been an annoying little pain as he pursued sitting congressmen for the crime of calling Elon Musk a dick. But that was a high-profile, public-facing job. The Weaponization Working Group would be much more secretive and unobservable. Martin could do some serious damage to people's lives and not be even remotely accountable for it.

How is that going? Well, after a year Martin has failed to make any of his ginned-up charges stick to anyone because they are such obvious horse-hockey. Federal prosecutors are questioning whether he used "inappropriate tactics" to launch probes of Trump's enemies. So now, he's been removed as head of the group and may be on his way out of the DOJ altogether.

. . .

The Illinois governor, JB Pritzker, has announced that his state will join the World Health Organization's Global Outbreak Alert and Response Network (GOARN), following Donald Trump's decision to withdraw the US from the global body in 2025.

Pritzker, a Democrat, made the announcement on Tuesday, confirming that Illinois will become part of the coordinated international network dedicated to monitoring and responding to global disease outbreaks.

"By withdrawing from the World Health Organization, Donald Trump has undermined science and weakened our nation's ability to detect and respond to global health threats. I refuse to sit idly by and let that happen," Pritzker said.

He added: "By joining the World Health Organization's coordinated network, GOARN, we are ensuring that our public health leaders - and the public - have the information, expertise and partnerships they need to protect the people of our state. Across our state and alongside valued partners around the world, Illinois will continue to put science, preparedness and people first."

. . .