The cadre of elite disease detectives at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is expected to be left in ruin today as the Trump administration continues to slash the federal workforce.
Many members of the CDC's Epidemic Intelligence Service, EIS—a globally revered public health training program—were informed earlier Friday that they were about to be fired, according to reporting from Stat News. Multiple sources told CBS News that half of EIS officers are among the ongoing cuts.
The Trump administration is ousting thousands of probationary federal workers in a wide-scale effort to dramatically slim agencies.
James Howells, the IT pro who lost about 8,000 bitcoins in a landfill more than a decade ago, thinks he has one last chance to dig up his buried treasure before it's lost forever.
He wants to buy the landfill.
In January, Howells lost a court battle with Newport City Council in Wales, which many expected would be his last shot at excavating the dump. But soon after, the Newport council revealed that it would be closing the landfill, arousing in Howells a new hope that the bitcoins—today worth nearly $800 million—might still be found.
The finding may not seem surprising, given the sweeping and ongoing outbreak of H5N1 among dairy farms in the US, which has reached 968 herds in 16 states and led to infections in 41 dairy workers. However, it is notable that none of the three veterinarians were aware of being infected, and none of them worked with cows that were known or suspected to be infected with H5N1. In fact, one of them only worked in Georgia and South Carolina, two states where H5N1 infections in dairy cows and humans have never been reported.
The findings suggest that the virus may be moving in animals and people silently, and that our surveillance systems are missing infections—both long-held fears among health experts.
Updated: make sure you read the update at the end of this story.
Here’s a fun thing about corruption investigations: Usually when prosecutors uncover one quid pro quo, they don’t resolve it by offering an even bigger quid pro quo. And yet, that appears to be exactly what’s happening with NYC Mayor Eric Adams, who was indicted last fall for allegedly trading favors with Turkish officials, and is now watching those charges evaporate in exchange for helping the Trump administration with its immigration agenda.
The twist — and there’s always a twist — is that the people most effectively pointing out this corruption aren’t the usual suspects. Instead, it’s coming from a bunch of dyed-in-the-wool conservative prosecutors at SDNY who are resigning en masse rather than participate in what they see as a perversion of justice. When the Federalist Society crowd starts quitting over corruption, you know something interesting is happening.
The apparent corruption here isn’t just brazen — it’s documented in black and white. The Justice Department’s order to drop the case doesn’t even pretend to assess the merits of the charges. Instead, Acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove explicitly tied the dismissal to Adams’ willingness to assist with federal deportation efforts — a textbook example of weaponizing prosecutorial discretion for political ends.
Even more disturbing is the mechanism: the dismissal is “without prejudice,” meaning charges could be refiled at any time. This isn’t just prosecutorial discretion — it’s prosecutorial extortion. The Trump administration has effectively created a sword of Damocles to hang over Adams’ head, ensuring his continued compliance with their immigration agenda. The message is clear: step out of line, and those charges might suddenly become relevant again. It’s the kind of institutional corruption that would make a banana republic blush.
It means that Adams’ personal freedom now outweighs the best interests of the people of New York City.
The system’s response to this corruption has been revealing. For several days after the initial order, an unusual silence descended over the Southern District office — a silence that spoke volumes about the internal struggle taking place. Then came something remarkable: a scathing letter from Acting US Attorney Danielle Sassoon to Attorney General Pam Bondi. Sassoon — a Federalist Society stalwart and former Scalia clerk who’s about as far from a “progressive prosecutor” as you can get — laid bare the rot at the core of this decision in a document that reads like a conservative legal scholar’s manifesto against institutional corruption.
Because the law does not support a dismissal, and because I am confident that Adams has committed the crimes with which he is charged, I cannot agree to seek a dismissal driven by improper considerations. As Justice Robert Jackson explained, “the prosecutor at his best is one of the most beneficent forces in our society, when he acts from malice or other base motives, he is one of the worst.” The Federal Prosecutor, 24 J. Am. Jud. Soc’y 18 (“This authority has been granted by people who really wanted the right thing done—wanted crime eliminated— but also wanted the best in our American traditions preserved. “). I understand my duty as a prosecutor to mean enforcing the law impartially, and that includes prosecuting a validly returned indictment regardless whether its dismissal would be politically advantageous, to the defendant or to those who appointed me. A federal prosecutor “is the representative not of an ordinary party to a controversy, but of a sovereignty whose obligation to govern impartially is as compelling as its obligation to govern at all.” Berger v. United States, 295 U.S. 78, 88 (1935).
For the reasons explained above, I do not believe there are reasonable arguments in support of a Rule 48(a) motion to dismiss a case that is well supported by the evidence and the law. I understand that Mr. Bove disagrees, and I am mindful of your recent order reiterating prosecutors’ duty to make good-faith arguments in support of the Executive Branch’s positions. See Feb. 5, 2025 Mem. “General Policy Regarding Zealous Advocacy on Behalf of the United States.” But because I do not see any good-faith basis for the proposed position, I cannot make such arguments consistent with my duty of candor. N.Y.R.P.C.3.3; id. cmt. 2 (“A lawyer acting as an advocate in an adjudicative proceeding has an obligation to present the client’s case with persuasive force. Performance of that duty while maintaining confidences of the client, however, is qualified by the advocate’s duty of candor to the tribunal. ” ).
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. See In re Christoff, 690 N.E.2d 1135 (Ind. 1997) (disciplining prosecutor for threatening to renew a dormant criminal investigation against a potential candidate for public office in order to dissuade the candidate from running); Bruce A. Green & Rebecca Roiphe, Who Should Police Politicization of the DOJ?, 35 Notre Dame J.L. Ethics & Pub. Pol’y 671, 681 (2021) (noting that the Arizona Supreme Court disbarred the elected chief prosecutor of Maricopa County, Arizona, and his deputy, in part, for misusing their power to advance the chief prosecutor’s partisan political interests) . Finally, given the highly generalized accusations of weaponization, weighed against the strength of the evidence against Adams, a court will likely question whether that basis is pretextual. See, e.g. , United States v. Greater Blouse, Skirt & Neckwear Contractors, 228 F. Supp. 483, 487 (S.D.N.Y. 1964)(courts “ should be satisfied that the reasons advanced for the proposed dismissal are substantial and the real grounds upon which the application is based”)
I remain baffled by the rushed and superficial process by which this decision was reached, in seeming collaboration with Adams’s counsel and without my direct input on the ultimate stated rationales for dismissal. Mr. Bove admonished me to be mindful of my obligation to zealously defend the interests of the United States and to advance good-faith arguments on behalf of the Administration. I hope you share my view that soliciting and considering the concerns of the U.S. Attorney overseeing the case serves rather than hinders that goal, and that we can find time to meet.
But wait, it gets better! There’s a footnote in Sassoon’s letter that tells you everything you need to know about how modern corruption works. The old-school way was to have your shady meetings in smoke-filled back rooms. The new way, apparently, is to have them in official conference rooms while actively preventing anyone from taking notes:
I attended a meeting on January 31, 2025, with Mr. Bove, Adams’s counsel, and members of my office. Adams’s attorneys repeatedly urged what amounted to a quid pro quo, indicating that Adams would be in a position to assist with the Department’s enforcement priorities only if the indictment were dismissed. Mr. Bove admonished a member of my team who took notes during that meeting and directed the collection of those notes at the meeting’s conclusion
Nothing quite says you know you’re engaging in some shady ass shit like demanding you collect the notes of anyone in attendance.
What makes this story particularly significant is who’s blowing the whistle. Sassoon isn’t some “woke prosecutor” that the MAGA world can easily dismiss. She’s a card-carrying member of the conservative legal establishment who, until this week, was seen as a rising star in those circles. Her willingness to sacrifice her standing in that world to uphold basic constitutional principles reveals just how far the corruption has spread — and perhaps offers a glimmer of hope that some institutional guardrails still hold.
Sassoon’s stand has triggered a cascade of resignations within SDNY, with seven prosecutors (and counting) choosing to walk away rather than participate in this corruption of justice. The latest resignation letter, a scorching indictment from lead prosecutor Hagan Scotten, is particularly noteworthy. Scotten — who clerked for both Justices Roberts and Kavanaugh and explicitly states his support for the Trump administration — makes it clear that this isn’t about politics; it’s about fundamental principles of justice being trampled for political gain.
There is a tradition in public service of resigning in a last-ditch effort to head off a serious mistake. Some will view the mistake you are committing here in the light of their generally negative views of the new Administration. I do not share those views. I can even understand how a Chief Executive whose background is in business and politics might see the contemplated dismissal-with-leverage as a good, if distasteful, deal. But any assistant U.S. attorney would know that our laws and traditions do not allow using the prosecutorial power to influence other citizens, much less elected officials, in this way.If no lawyer within earshot of the President is willing to give him that advice, then I expect you will eventually find someone who is enough of a fool, or enough of a coward, to file your motion. But it was never going to be me.
Scotten’s prediction proved grimly prophetic. As reported just hours ago, Bove and Bondi found their willing executioner — though the circumstances reveal yet another layer of institutional corruption:
The prosecutor acquiesced to file the motion in an attempt to spare other career staff from potentially being fired by Emil Bove, the acting US deputy attorney general and former personal lawyer to Trump, sources briefed on the matter told Reuters. The news agency named the lawyer as Ed Sullivan, a veteran career prosecutor, who agreed to alleviate pressure on his colleagues in the department’s public integrity section of 30 attorneys, two sources said, after his team was given an hour by Bove to decide between them who would file the motion.
“This is not a capitulation – this is a coercion,” one of the people briefed on the meeting later told Reuters. “That person, in my mind, is a hero.” The whole section had reportedly discussed resigning en masse.
The cruel irony of forcing the Public Integrity Section to compromise its own integrity isn’t lost on anyone. This is how institutions die — not with a bang, but with an ultimatum.
There’s a special kind of institutional poetry here: The Public Integrity Section was given an hour to decide who would compromise their integrity. And someone did, not out of cowardice or foolishness, but to protect their colleagues. “A hero,” his colleague called him, and maybe that’s right. But it’s the kind of heroism that only exists in broken systems.
The NY Times has revealed even more disturbing details about the behind-the-scenes machinations. In what reads like a playbook for corrupting justice, Bove apparently coached Adams’ legal team (including Alex Spiro, better known as Elon Musk’s go-to counsel) in a wink-wink-nudge-nudge fashion on exactly what political commitments would make the charges disappear.
During the meeting, Mr. Bove signaled that the decision about whether to dismiss the case had nothing to do with its legal merits.
Instead, Mr. Bove said he was interested in whether the case was hindering Mr. Adams’s leadership, particularly with regard to the city’s ability to cooperate with the federal government on Mr. Trump’s crackdown on illegal immigration.
Mr. Bove also said he was interested in whether the case, brought by the former U.S. attorney, Damian Williams, was a politically motivated prosecution meant to hurt Mr. Adams’s re-election prospects.
In her letter to Ms. Bondi, Ms. Sassoon said that she was “baffled by the rushed and superficial process by which this decision was reached, in seeming collaboration with Adams’s counsel and without my direct input on the ultimate stated rationales for dismissal.”
There’s something almost elegant about it, in a horrifying sort of way. The Justice Department has managed to transform a corruption prosecution into what amounts to a compliance manual for corruption. It’s like they’ve created a template: “Here’s how to trade criminal charges for political favors while maintaining plausible deniability.” And the really wild part? This is all happening after years of the MAGA world screaming about supposed “lawfare” against conservatives. Turns out they weren’t complaining about weaponized justice — they were planning how to do it themselves.
History rhymes: While mass resignations of principled lawyers helped topple Nixon’s presidency, in Trump’s second term they’ve become just another item in the daily digest of institutional erosion. The difference this time? It’s not the usual suspects sounding the alarm. Instead, it’s career conservatives — products of the Federalist Society pipeline — who are putting their careers on the line to preserve what’s left of prosecutorial independence.
As we’ve previously discussed, any path through this constitutional crisis requires principled conservatives to find their voice. The fact that it’s taking career prosecutors to do what elected Republicans won’t speaks volumes about where the real courage in conservative circles resides.
The question now isn’t just whether our institutions can survive this assault, but whether these acts of principled resistance can inspire others before the machinery of justice is fully converted into a tool of political control. The American experiment has survived previous challenges through the courage of individuals willing to place principle above party. We’re about to find out if enough of those individuals still exist.
Update: Incredibly, that report that a prosecutor had agreed to file the dismissal turned out to not be accurate. Many hours later, after no such filing was actually made a few very bizarre things happened. First, Emil Bove filed a notice of appearance in the case. That is… not normal.
Finally, the “nolle prosequi” (a notice saying “we no longer want to prosecute”) was filed. But even the way it was filed is weird and somewhat unprecedented. Two lawyers, including Ed Sullivan (who was mentioned above as effectively agreeing to be the fool to protect his coworkers) signed most of the document, but they did not sign the final statement. Instead, there was a further “order” from the DOJ, signed by Bove alone, telling the Court to effectively dismiss the case:
Even the language here is bizarre. The prosecutors don’t get to “direct” the Court to do anything. That’s likely why Bacon and Sullivan signed the part about “respectfully requests” that the Court issue an order. But Bove leaps in, acting like he gets to order around the judge, and separately signs that part.
Kinda shocking.
What will be interesting now, is to see what Judge Dale Ho does.
If you want to write something on the U.S. government’s official DOGE website, apparently you can just… do that. Not in the usual way of submitting comments through a form, mind you, but by directly injecting content into their database. This seems suboptimal.
The story here is that DOGE — Elon Musk’s collection of supposed coding “geniuses” brought in to “disrupt” government inefficiency — finally launched their official website. And what they delivered is a masterclass in how not to build government infrastructure. One possibility is that they’re brilliant disruptors breaking all the rules to make things better. Another possibility is that they have no idea what they’re doing.
The latter seems a lot more likely.
Last week, it was reported that the proud racist 25-year-old Marko Elez had been given admin access and was pushing untested code to the US government’s $6 trillion/year payment system. While the Treasury Department initially claimed (including in court filings!) that Elez had “read-only” access, others reported he had write access. After those reports came out, the Treasury Dept. “corrected” itself and said Elez had been “accidentally” given write privileges for the payments database, but only for the data, not the code. Still, they admitted that while they had put in place some security protections, it’s possible that Elez did copy some private data which “may have occasionally included screenshots of payment systems data or records.”
Yikes?
Now, you might think that having a racist twenty-something with admin access to trillion-dollar payment systems would concern people. But Musk’s defenders had a compelling counterargument: he must be a genius! Because… well, because Musk hired him, and Musk only hires geniuses. Or so we’re told.
The DOGE team’s actual coding prowess is turning out to be quite something. First, they decided that government transparency meant hiding everything from FOIA requests. When questioned about this interesting interpretation of “transparency,” Musk explained that actually DOGE was being super transparent by putting everything on their website and ExTwitter account.
There was just one small problem with this explanation. At the time he said it, the DOGE website looked like this:
That was it. That was the whole website.
On Thursday, they finally launched a real website. Sort of. If by “real website” you mean “a collection of already-public information presented in misleading ways by people who don’t seem to understand what they’re looking at.” But that’s not even the interesting part.
These supposed technical geniuses managed to build what might be the least secure government website in history. Let’s start with something basic: where does the website actually live? According to Wired, the source code actually tells search engines that ExTwitter, not DOGE.gov, is the real home of this government information:
A WIRED review of the page’s source code shows that the promotion of Musk’s own platform went deeper than replicating the posts on the homepage. The source code shows that the site’scanonical tagsdirect search engines tox.comrather thanDOGE.gov.
A canonical tag is a snippet of code that tells search engines what the authoritative version of a website is. It is typically used by sites with multiple pages as a search engine optimization tactic, to avoid their search ranking being diluted.
In DOGE’s case, however, the code is informing search engines that when people search for content found onDOGE.gov, they should not show those pages in search results, but should instead display the posts on X.
“It is promoting the X account as the main source, with the website secondary,” Declan Chidlow,a web developer, tells WIRED. “This isn’t usually how things are handled, and it indicates that the X account is taking priority over the actual website itself.”
If you’re not a web developer, here’s what that means: When you build a website, you can tell search engines “hey, if you find copies of this content elsewhere, this version here is the real one.” It’s like telling Google “if someone copied my site, mine is the original.”
But DOGE did the opposite. They told search engines “actually, ExTwitter has the real version of this government information. Our government website is just a copy.” Which is… an interesting choice for a federal agency? It’s a bit like the Treasury Department saying “don’t look at our official reports, just check Elon’s tweets.”
You might think that a government agency directing people away from its official website and toward the private company of its leader would raise some conflict-of-interest concerns. And you’d be right!
But wait, it gets better. Or worse. Actually, yeah, it’s worse.
Who built this government website? Through some sloppy coding, security researcher Sam Curry figured out it was DOGE employee Kyle Shutt. The same Kyle Shutt who, according to Drop Site News, has admin access to the FEMA payments system. The same Kyle Shutt who used the exact same Cloudflare ID to build Musk’s America PAC Trump campaign website. Because why maintain separate secure credentials for government systems and political campaigns when you can just… not do that?
But the real cherry on top came Thursday when people discovered something amazing about the DOGE site database: anyone can write to it. Not “anyone with proper credentials.” Not “anyone who passes security checks.” Just… anyone. As 404 Media reported, if you know basic database operations, you too can be a government website administrator:
The doge.gov website that was spun up to track Elon Musk’s cuts to the federal government is insecure and pulls from a database that can be edited by anyone, according to two separate people who found the vulnerability and shared it with 404 Media. One coder added at least two database entries that are visible on the live site and say “this is a joke of a .gov site” and “THESE ‘EXPERTS’ LEFT THEIR DATABASE OPEN -roro.”
While I imagine those will be taken down shortly, for now, the insertions are absolutely visible:
Look, there’s a reason we called this whole thing a cyberattack. When someone takes over your computer systems and leaves them wide open to anyone who wants to mess with them, we usually don’t call that “disruption” or “innovation.” We call it a cybersecurity breach.
“Feels like it was completely slapped together,” they added. “Tons of errors and details leaked in the page source code.”
Both sources said that the way the site is set up suggests that it is not running on government servers.
“Basically,doge.govhas its codebase, probably through GitHub or something,” the other developer who noticed the insecurity said. “They’re deploying the website on Cloudflare Pages from their codebase, anddoge.govis a custom domain that theirpages.devURL is set to. So rather than having a physical server or even something like Amazon Web Services, they’re deploying using Cloudflare Pages which supports custom domains.”
Here’s the thing about government computer systems: They’re under constant attack from foreign adversaries. Yes, they can be inefficient. Yes, they can be bloated. But you know what else they usually are? Not completely exposed to the entire internet. It turns out that some of that inefficient “bureaucracy” involves basic things like “security” and “not letting random people write whatever they want in federal databases.”
This isn’t some startup where “move fast and break things” is a viable strategy. This is the United States government. And it’s been handed over to people whose main qualification appears to be “posts spicy memes on 4chan.” The implications go far beyond embarrassing database injections — this level of technical negligence in federal systems creates genuine national security concerns. When your “disruption” involves ignoring decades of hard-learned lessons about government systems security, you’re not innovating — you’re inviting disaster.
Igloo is recalling more than 1 million of its coolers following reports that a handle issue led to serious injuries, including fingertip amputations and bone fractures. What do you think?
“Not sure why they assumed they could touch the handle.”
Liz Pavlika, Systems Analyst
“I don’t care if you lost a finger, I said grab me a beer.”
Ryan Yeats, Lid Loosener
“That’s not even the best way to hurt someone with it.”
Despite stereotypes that unpartnered people are lonely or unhappy, being single doesn’t have to be a burden. The Onion shares tips for embracing single life.
Take yourself on a date! There’s no reason you can’t have fun being visibly, utterly alone in public.
Delight in the bacchanal of carnal pleasures that is the Omaha hookup scene.
Pretend you’ve been stood up at restaurants to get loads of free bread.
Realize that your ex was actually holding you back from things you really value, like not cleaning, not cooking, and not bathing.
Develop a non-romantic identity like “dog mom” or “incoherent wino.”
Most suicide hotline operators will listen to you talk about your day if you pepper in some threats.
Explore new interests to immediately abandon at the first sign of a relationship.
Use the solitude to reflect on you and just how you managed to fuck up this badly.
Tell everyone your family was brutally murdered, so you seem less pathetic.
One of the reactions to my discussion of why Windows 95 setup used three operating systems (and oh there were many) was my explanation that an MS-DOS based setup program would be text-mode. But c’mon, MS-DOS could do graphics! Are you just a bunch of morons?
Yes, MS-DOS could do graphics, in the sense that it didn’t actively prevent you from doing graphics. You were still responsible for everything yourself, though. There were no graphics primitives aside from a BIOS call to plot a single pixel. Everything else was on you, and you didn’t want to use the BIOS call to plot pixels anyway because it was slow. If you wanted any modicum of performance, you had to access the frame buffer directly.
Okay, so now you have to write a graphics library for drawing things fancier than a single pixel. Fortunately, Windows 95 required a VGA video card at a minimum, so didn’t have to worry about CGA or EGA. Mind you, the VGA adapter required you to deal with planar modes, so that was annoying. Fortunately, you have a team of folks expert in VGA planar modes sitting down the hall working on Windows video drivers who can help you out.
But the setup program needs more than just pixels. It also wants dialog boxes, so you’ll have to write a window manager to sit on top of your graphics library so you can show dialog boxes with a standard GUI dialog interface, which includes keyboard support for tabbing between elements and assigning hotkeys to fields.
You’ll also have to add support for typing characters in non-alphabetic languages like Japanese. Fortunately, you have a team of folks expert in Japanese input sitting in the Tokyo office working on Windows input methods who can help you out, though the time zone difference between Tokyo and Redmond is going to slow you down.
You also want to take advantage of those fancy new controls that the UI team has been making, so maybe you can walk down the hall and ask them if they could port their controls library to your custom UI framework.
The setup program also wants to do simple animations, so you’ll need a scheduler that can trigger events based on the system hardware timer.
So now you’re going to write all this code for your setup program, none of which is actually involved in setting up Windows 95, but is just the infrastructure needed to run the setup program at all! There’s a lot of stuff here, and you probably won’t be able to cram all of it into 640KB of memory. So now you need to write a protected mode manager (also known as an MS-DOS extender) so you can take advantage of the larger address space afforded by protected mode.
Now take a step back and look at what you’re doing. You’re writing an operating system. (Or, if you are being uncharitable, you’re writing an MS-DOS shell.)
An operating system with exactly one application: Windows 95 Setup.
What if I told you that Microsoft already had an operating system that did all the things you are trying to do, and it’s fully debugged, with video drivers, a graphics library, a dialog manager, a scheduler, a protected mode manager, and input methods. And it has a fully staffed support team. And that operating system has withstood years of real-world usage? And Microsoft fully owns the rights to it, so you don’t have to worry about royalties or licensing fees? And it’s a well-known system that even has books written about how to program it, so it’ll be easier to hire new people to join your team, since you don’t have to spend a month teaching them how to code for your new custom Setup UI miniature operating system.
Go and grab a copy of the Windows 3.1 runtime.
Bonus chatter: If you committed to the custom operating system route, you’d have to make sure your miniature operating system could run in a Windows 3.1 MS-DOS session in case somebody wanted to install Windows 95 as an upgrade from Windows 3.1, and in a Windows 95 MS-DOS session in case somebody wants to do a repair install of Windows 95. And then you’d have this weird setup experience where Windows 95 setup is running inside an MS-DOS session.
Bonus bonus chatter: Windows setup still follows this pattern of installing a miniature operating system to bootstrap the setup program. But today, the miniature operating system is Windows PE, the Windows Preinstallation Environment.
As the San Antonio Museum of Art (SAMA) looks toward its future, with a recently-acquired one-acre plot of land added to its riverside property, the 44-year-old museum has selected notable architectural firm Herzog & de Meuron to create a comprehensive campus plan.
San Antonio Museum of Art
Upon her arrival to SAMA in 2022, Executive Director Emily Ballew Neff mentioned the need for more space to house the museum’s collection of more than 30,000 objects, as well as other uses. During her term leading the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art from 2015 to 2021, Ms. Neff engaged Herzog & de Meuron to create a new building in that city’s downtown, also located on riverfront property.
The Basel, Switzerland-based firm won plaudits for its 2000 redesign of the Tate Modern, in particular for respecting the structure of the original power station building while renovating it to house contemporary art. The firm also designed the Tate’s 2016 Switch House addition.
According to a press release, the museum campus plan will “thoughtfully integrate SAMA’s unique location along the San Antonio River and its historic brewery buildings while addressing the evolving needs of the city’s residents and visitors.”
Ms. Neff called the historic 19th-century Lone Star Brewery buildings housing SAMA “fantastic,” but said the complex wasn’t purpose-built for art, which has created challenges for storage and loading, as well as for sightlines and circulation through the galleries. “This really was a test case for adaptive reuse,” Ms. Neff told Glasstire.
The new campus plan will address those issues, Ms. Neff said, as well as the museum’s role “within the broader context of San Antonio,” as “a critical node” along the city’s River Walk linking downtown to the Pearl brewery district, a thriving urban mixed-use development. As stated in the news announcement, Herzog & de Meuron’s aim will be to amplify the charm of the existing buildings and outdoor spaces.
Edward A. Hart, Chair of SAMA’s Board of Trustees, said, “As stewards of the last remaining green space along the Museum Reach” — as the River Walk’s northern expanse is called — “and owners of the largest property adjacent to the river, this master plan will serve as a critical roadmap, enabling us to create a more vibrant, welcoming space for the community to enjoy.”
The initial phase of the project, which includes opportunities for community input, is expected to be completed by the end of June 2025.
“The Trump administration is expected to purchase $400 million worth of armored Tesla vehicles, according to a new State Department document detailing procurement for fiscal year 2025”— NPR
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How lucky are we ordinary Americans to be living in the Age of Trump? Our president is sticking it to the globalist elites by giving the world’s wealthiest man a huge government contract. What a far cry from the days of Democrat corruption. It’s like we were living in darkness, only to emerge into this bright and blinding light where we literally refuse to see what’s in front of our eyes.
I bet those liberal dullards are wondering how we’re going to pay Elon Musk for all those overpriced Cybertrucks at the exact moment when the government is supposed to be cutting back. But that just shows how stupid they are, because there’s all this extra money floating around now that NIH funding has been gutted. Sure, we’re sabotaging medical research and losing a generation of scientists, but it’ll all be worth it once those sweet military vehicles are carrying Don Jr. to his next cocaine duck-hunting crypto party.
What an excellent ROI for Musk after he spent all that money to get Trump elected. It’s lucky he’s slashing so many different budgets, from foreign aid to public housing to transit. And in case anyone is confused by what’s being cut and how it’s going to impact them personally, everything is explained on the DOGE website, which was blank until Wednesday. Now, it’s as transparent and successful as all of Elon’s marriages, with some extra far-right climate denial thrown in.
Does it look bad for Trump to be giving his biggest donor a $400 million government contract? Not when you put it in the context of what the government ordinarily spends on other stuff. For example, SpaceX is getting billions of federal dollars, which makes the Cybertruck money look like small potatoes—the very thing we’ll all be eating exclusively in about a year, thanks to all this great governing.
And don’t forget, even as they cut programs helping the vulnerable and send thousands of federal workers onto the unemployment line, Donald Trump’s family will also be taken care of generously. So what more do we regular Joes need to feel secure? His billionaire cabinet can rest easy as well, and once their fortunes are further bloated, trickle-down economics will definitely send some scraps to the rest of us. That’s what we MAGA voters like to call Trump math, which is so much easier to do now that they’re shutting down the DOE.
Remember, government welfare is evil unless the money goes to the wealthiest man in the world. It’s just upsetting that so many liberals can’t see how much Trump and Musk are helping us common people by buying this fleet of government-subsidized militaristic monster vehicles. And they look so futuristic, especially when they rust after coming in contact with direct sunlight.
Trump and Elon are Making America Great Again. There is no better way to symbolize our nation’s current greatness than these ludicrous, excessive, and utterly pointless Tesla Cybertrucks. At $82,000 a pop, they have already been recalled because of defective accelerator pedals. What could possibly go wrong?
Our love is like the USS Scorpion… The initial construction was reasonable, but regular maintenance was refused until negligence distilled an inescapable nightmare.
Our love is like the Titan submersible… It was constructed upon premises that we were warned repeatedly would not go the distance, prompting concern from both professionals and those closest to us.
Our love is like the narco-submarines built deep in the jungle… No one can know about us, baby. We have to stay under the radar. We were never designed to ascend to great depths but instead to remain superficial. This vessel is not built for comfort; it is a vehicle of misery. Also, I’m doing cocaine.
Our love is like the K-141 Kursk… Our enemies were so curious that they expended great effort to dig up and examine the wreckage, hoping to find something they could use against us.
Our love is like the submarines of the Cold War… We intended to harm one another, but ultimately, we only succeeded in destroying ourselves and finding previously undisclosed horrors lurking in the depths of our own oceans.
Our love is like the initial concept of submarines… Scorned by intelligent people who believed the actualization of such a thing would only serve to showcase the worst traits of humankind.
Our love is like the fallout of the submarine industry… Leaving empty hulls like dinosaur bones, so deep and indestructible that even if civilization should perish and another species should arise eons later, the possibility exists that they will eventually stumble upon the haunting and disastrous evidence.
Every artist expresses persona. For performers, the public face is inside the art. The work of Charlie Chaplin, Billie Holiday, Ana Mendieta, or Jimi Hendrix cannot be separated from the undeniable power of persona.
For artists who send their work into the world, persona may be less apparent. Writers, painters, and composers will have little relationship to an exterior self unless they actively choose to engage it. Such private-minded artists may find the very subject of persona to be taboo, distasteful, and cringeworthy. They might bristle and scoff at the possibility that they, too, have constructed and worn masks for many years.
In such cases, persona becomes a hideous relative, ignored, avoided, or acknowledged only when absolutely necessary, in a huff of obligation. Negligence may lead someone to believe that persona has been extinguished, but it has not.
If an artist releases art into the world, they have already created immortal persona. When we expose ourselves and ask for the world’s attention, we give birth to strange new forms of self, shadowy doppelgängers who will live on even after our death.
Punk, hip-hop, Fluxus, surrealism, goth, transcendentalism, the Beats—many of the most potent artistic movements are defined as much by the artists as by the work itself. Any exhibition of art is also an exhibition of its creator. Denial is futile.
I was once a persona hater—which, at times, could be a form of persona in itself. To me, dealing in public facades was, in the best cases, an irritating distraction. In the worst cases, it was an inauthentic scheme, at direct odds with the mission of artists: to seek and present truth.
To define some terms: persona is constructed, while personality tends to be a more passive phenomenon, shaped by genetics and the vicissitudes of life. Persona is an invented, enhanced, and performed version of personality, which, I came to understand, makes it a natural material for artists, for whom invention, enhancement, and performance are the primary means of working. Why would a creative person not be a creative person?
“Untitled #654.” 2023 by Cindy Sherman. Gelatin, silver print, and chromogenic color print. 40 28 in. Courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth.
The term persona was coined by Carl Jung as “a complicated system of relations between individual consciousness and society.” Jung says the mask is essential to human interaction, and without it, we suffer. But we can also find trouble if we overly identify with it. For Jung, integration is the only path forward.
In the century since Jung invented the concept, the word has developed a stench of pettiness, as if persona were only for the swindlers and fakes. It is often associated with the kind of superficial traits that rarely support meaningful human exchange: seductive charisma, affected coolness, self-absorbed confidence. These qualities look best from afar, on camera, or through the rose-colored lens of history. Up close, they refuse intimacy.
I am bored by the contemporary persona archetypes: the narcissist, the scenester, the “on brand” celebrity, the campaigning politician—all of whom are trying to transform themselves into perfect icons. Encounters with such forms of persona are often repulsive. Like a wax figure, they stand still, uncanny, dead.
Artistic persona, the subject of this text, encourages the contradictions of our changing selves. Instead of a fixed image, consider persona as a field of infinite expression, as unresolved and irreducible as human perception—“a complicated system,” as Jung says. For this reason, I avoid the traditional grammatical usage of a persona, and consider it as a fluid substance, forming and re-forming to the manipulations of the artist.
Artistic persona does not require self-obsession, only an acceptance of the true nature of artistic exchange, in which evidence of the self is always present, even if hidden or ignored. The line between self-expression and selfishness is razor thin, but persona, when worked thoughtfully, is a tool for profound connection. Bob Marley’s physical energy amplified his music. Gertrude Stein was an extraordinary writer but is still best known for the effects of her magnetic social presence in 1920s Paris. Like a sonata or a painting, the presentation of self can be a window into consciousness and a generous display of vulnerability.
For me, communication is the fundamental pleasure of art. While I enjoy fetishizing a sculpture for its sensual thingness, I ultimately want to feel a relationship to the vitality that produced the object. This is true even in my relationship to the natural world: a mountain stirs up awe not just because of its material presence, but because of the universal forces that lifted it into being.
OTTAWA – Television viewers across the country have been wowed by a 30 second curling commercial that contains nearly 2.5 seconds of intense curling action. “I always thought curling was just an excuse to get plastered,” said 43-year-old Simon Podolski. “But the way that stone nudged that other stone… and it was spinning a little […]
ARLINGTON, VA—Expressing unease with his customer’s obvious level of inebriation, local bartender Benny Waller confirmed Friday that he had been forced to take away Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s security clearance. “Look, buddy, you’re in no condition to be getting behind a desk at the Defense Department right now,” the proprietor of local dive bar the Anchor reportedly told a stumbling, belligerent Hegseth while reaching into the Cabinet member’s pocket, pulling out his security credentials, and placing them in a locked box behind the counter. “It’ll be safer for everyone if you go home and sober up before accessing any national security secrets or entering restricted areas of the Pentagon. I’m sorry, but in your current state, it would be irresponsible of me to let you operate a department with an $850 billion budget and a nuclear arsenal.” At press time, witnesses confirmed Hegseth had staggered out of the establishment while shouting that he would be back with some buddies the next night to declare war on the whole bar.
The U.S. Coast Guard has been searching for tar balls that began showing up on South Florida beaches, but so far the source of the black muck remains a mystery. What do you think?
“Pretty mild as far as harbingers go.”
Ella Bowers, Food Stager
“Fish need to take better care of the water.”
Brandon Keough, Macaroni Artisan
“Someone must be heartbroken about their tar ball collection.”
CHICAGO—Noting that early humans’ aversion to confrontation played a critical role in their evolution, a new study published Friday in the American Journal Of Archaeology concluded that written language was first developed to avoid breaking up in person. “According to our findings, early Mesopotamians created the first cuneiform tablets in 3200 BCE because they couldn’t bear the idea of looking their partner in the eye and ending things face-to-face,” said the study’s author, Professor Jason Greene, who added that once humans learned how effective a breakup note transcribed on papyrus, clay, or animal skin could be, they began developing a variety of symbols to quickly and effectively call a relationship off. “Some of the earliest pictographs, like a broken heart, a withered rose, or crossed out stick figures standing side by side, were seemingly quite effective for avoiding an in-person argument. But based on our evidence, our ancestors eventually developed a phonetic alphabet to convey more complex ideas, like that it might be best for them to open their relationship, or to take a short break and try seeing other people.” Greene added that early humans also developed hunting spears as a way to avoid going through the trouble of divorce.
- Christa Davis Acampora, “On Sovereignty and Overhumanity,” in International Studies in Philosophy - Liv Agar, “A Brief Definition of Wokeness” - Liv Agar, “J.D. Vance Being Weird and the Male Loneliness Epidemic” - Pierre Andre-Taguieff, “The Traditional Paradigm - Horror of Modernity and Antiliberalism: Nietzsche in Reactionary Rhetoric,” in Why We Are Not Nietzscheans - Frithjof Bergmann, “Nietzsche’s Critique of Morality,” in Reading Nietzsche - Debrah Bergoffen, “Oedipal Dramas,” in Why Nietzsche Still? - Wendy Brown, “Nietzsche For Politics,” in Why Nietzsche Still - Katelyn Burns, “The Republican Retreat from Governance” - Judith Butler, “Circuits of Bad Conscience,” in Why Nietzsche Still? - André Comte-Sponville, “The Brute, the Sophist, and the Aesthete: “Art in the Service of Illusion,”” in Why We Are Not Nietzscheans - Arthur Danto, “Some Remarks on The Genealogy of Morals,” in Reading Nietzsche - Liza Featherstone, “Liberals Are Giving Up on America,” in Jacobin - Nolan Gertz, Nihilism - Robert Houlb, Nietzsche’s Jewish Problem - Bernd Magnus, “The Use and Abuse of “The Will To Power”,” in Reading Nietzsche - Salar Mohandesi, “Faith, or the Stories We Tell” - Jeffrey Nealon, “Performing Resentment,” in Why Nietzsche Still? - Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals - David Owen and Aaron Ridley, “Dramatis Personae,” in Why Nietzsche Still? - David Owen, Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morality - Alan Schrift, “Introduction,” in Why Nietzsche Still? - Alan Schrift, “Nietzsche's Contest,” in Why Nietzsche Still? - Rebecca Stringer, “A Nietzschean Breed,” in Why Nietzsche Still? - Robert Solomon, “Introduction,” in Reading Nietzsche - Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins, “Wendy Brown: A Conversation on Our “Nihilistic” Age,” in The Nation
Ladies, are you ready for your man to commit to you with the same diligence and enthusiasm he pours into his intermittent fasting regimen? Then optimize your relationship this Valentine’s Day with the only Huberman-approved date-night guide.
This list has something for everybody—long-term lovers, a new fling, and sunscreen-truthers alike.
Morning coffee date. Why wait till dark to get the romantic juices flowing? Gaze deep into your lover’s eyes as he gazes over your shoulder at the low-angle morning sun. The photons flooding his retinas may help regulate his circadian rhythm. But if the conversation is optimized, you’ll be up all night long.
Kitchen kisses. Your enzymes won’t have trouble breaking down the macronutrients in those seed-oil-free turkey meatballs. But your sister might need a minute to digest that “I think he might be the one” voice note.
Hit the dance floor. The two-step, the rumba—it doesn’t matter how you do it. Research shows that dancing promotes activity in the neural circuit connecting your motor cortex to your adrenal glands, activating receptors on your vagus nerve that in turn excite brain areas that release norepinephrine, creating a brain-to-body-to-brain “arousal loop” that can improve energy and alertness. TLDR: If the boogie doesn’t turn him on, nothing will.
Lavish him with gifts. Move over, Russell Stover. This year, ditch the chocolates and spoil your sweetheart with a six-month supply of omega-3 fatty acids. Don’t forget the heart-shaped pill case.
Visit a cozy cocktail bar. Go ahead, pick your poison. Then whip out your notepad because he’s about to spend the next 90 to 120 minutes explaining how alcohol increases cortisol in the adrenal glands, negatively impacts gut health, and is, technically speaking, a poison.
Sweat it out. Maximize your longevity and love connection with a steamy hot yoga session or spin class. Feeling strong? Level up with kickboxing. It’s a perfect way to let out some pent-up frustration—just shut your eyes and imagine him whispering in your ear, “Actually, it’s data are.” Boom, knockout!
Ask him some questions. The quickest way to your man’s heart is through the right ventricle by way of his tricuspid valve, as he explained (with diagrams) on your first date. The second quickest? Ask him whether microplastics disrupt the body’s fragile hormonal balance. (A budget-friendly pick.)
Deliberate cold exposure. Picture this: You, your beau, and an oversized tin trough filled with enough ice to sink an early twentieth-century sea vessel. Can you imagine anything hotter? And yes, your body might go numb. But you’ll still feel all sorts of butterflies.
Testosterone Replacement Therapy (TRT). Is that Cupid’s arrow or a 160-milligram injectable dose of testosterone cypionate? If your ears start ringing, immediately dial 9-1-1. Then call your mom—those might just be wedding bells.
Couples therapy. Are you and your partner struggling to connect? A couples therapy session might help facilitate better communication, deepen your relationship, and SAVE. That’s right, visit betterhelp.com/huberman for 15 percent off your first counseling session. That’s B-E-T-T-E-R-H-E-L-P dot com slash Huberman. Don’t wait!
Leave him alone. Who are you kidding? SoulCycle? TRT? Give your man what he really wants: a quiet night alone. Set out the ashwagandha, fix him a hot cup of magnesium tea, and throw Huberman on the Sonos. The best part? You get a night to yourself too.
Under President Trump’s bold leadership, his administration is ushering in a new era of financial transparency in government. I’ve long wondered where my tax dollars are going but haven’t bothered to do the five minutes of research it would take to learn that all that information is already meticulously documented and tracked in numerous publiclyavailablereports and websites.
Trump has taken decisive, possibly illegal action to fund a billionaire and his tech bro protégés to uncover information that is already available for free to anyone who wants to see it at any time. Now, information about nearly every dollar the government spends will be publicly available to every American citizen, as it has been for decades.
It used to be that if you wanted to know how much the US Agency for International Development (USAID) spent on which projects, you had to google it and wait .00043 seconds for the results to show you links to the websites of USAID, the government’s foreign assistance dashboard, and various nongovernmental watchdog organizations, where all of this information has always been accessible to all.
Thankfully, that straightforward accountability is ending, as the new administration is taking down the USAID and other government websites. Instead, they are posting snippets of decontextualized, often purposely mischaracterized information about a few of the thousands of government-funded efforts, which are intended to turn Americans against their own government and stage a hostile takeover—the best use of my tax dollars.
And I’m just as excited that, in addition to paying large salaries to engineers and programmers to google things, my taxes fund an effort to finally audit government agencies, like they are already statutorily required to be at legislatively mandated intervals. It is a travesty that the IRS, for example, has not been audited since their annual mandatory audit last year, which is done every year by the Government Accountability Office, which then issues a public report that, along with all other government agency audit reports, anyone can read and assess.
Another audit might sound duplicative, but I don’t trust a government agency to audit another agency, because even though the information is available for all to review, they might be biased. Instead, I want someone who has already made an explicit, politically motivated claim that all government agencies and their workers are maliciously carrying out illegal acts and should be immediately abolished and imprisoned to do an objective audit. It’s just common sense, like asking a fox to guard a henhouse or Donald Trump to guard a dressing room.
The government has been misusing taxpayer money for too long, and I am more than ready for it to use taxpayer money to redundantly undertake the expensive process of reviewing every piece of paper, saved document, and financial transaction across the entire federal government and continuously pretending that it has “discovered” legal, congressionally appropriated public expenditures.
And as they do all this, I know they will use my tax dollars responsibly because they’re already bypassing commonly held legal definitions of government waste, fraud, and abuse, and efficiently redefining it as “what one billionaire and a dozen current or former Hitler youth unilaterally decide to cancel because it might get in the way of their government takeover.”
Finally, I can rest assured that I don’t have to worry about whether something the government does actually wastes my tax dollars and should be investigated or simply gets in the way of the wealthiest man in the world staging a coup, because there will be no way for me to know anymore.
The announcement of layoffs at Chevron— the second largest oil producing company in the United States— comes shortly after the company announced it would move its corporate headquarters from San Ramon, California to Houston.
SPARTA, OH—Setting itself apart as a uniquely innocuous object, a wooden spoon is the only thing in local man Patrick Davies’ life that is not currently giving him cancer, sources confirmed Thursday. Unlike every other physical item Davies encounters in his day-to-day existence, the bamboo utensil is reportedly not leaching toxic chemicals into his body that will have long-term health effects. The wooden spoon, which Davies uses interchangeably with a highly carcinogenic plastic one to prepare meals, is said to be stored above a cabinet full of mutagen-rich cleaning products that are actively metastasizing in Davies’ body. At press time, sources confirmed moisture within the wooden spoon had caused Davies to contract a drug-resistant and potentially fatal fungal infection.
BOSTON—Saying he was more than willing to go along with the request to avoid conflict, local internet user Dan Filmeyer reportedly clicked a box to allow all cookies Thursday so the website he was browsing wouldn’t be mad at him. “Ah, man, I don’t want SnackWorks.com to think I’m uptight—accepting these cookies seems like a good olive branch to show this site that we’re all friends here,” Filmeyer said as he readily accepted more cookies than were necessary for basic website functionality, adding that he wouldn’t want to come off “like a dick” by clicking through to the privacy policy to learn more about how the cookies were being used. “I really can’t afford to have another falling out like the one I had with PetSuppliesPlus.com, so sure, this website can access my location too. They can do whatever they want! Hell, I’d have let them run Flash if I still could. I’m an open book to this website. Camera, microphone, it’s all yours. Just please, don’t hate me!” At press time, reports confirmed Filmeyer was searching for a way to give the website his Social Security number just to make sure there were no hard feelings.
