Cowboy Who?

Joe Biden was about to become president, and the Alito household was in distress.

On May 16, the New York Times reported that, during the tense period between the January 6 insurrection and Biden’s inauguration, Justice Samuel Alito’s family displayed an upside-down American flag outside their home. An upside-down flag is a distress signal — a way that soldiers or ships at sea show that they are in extraordinary danger. 

Taken in isolation, it’s hard to draw sweeping conclusions from this flag. The Times reports that many supporters of the “Stop the Steal” campaign — former President Donald Trump’s failed effort to overthrow the 2020 presidential election — embraced an inverted American flag to signal their belief that the United States was in grave danger. Alito claims that the flag was raised by his wife “in response to a neighbor’s use of objectionable and personally insulting language on yard signs.”

But this flag is hardly an isolated incident. On the bench, Alito is the Supreme Court’s most unrelenting Republican partisan — a reliable vote for whatever outcome is preferred by the GOP’s right wing, regardless of whether there is any legal support for that position. Alito isn’t simply a bad judge; he is the negation of law, frequently embracing claims that even intellectual leaders within the conservative movement find risible.

The morning before the Times published its flag scoop, for example, Alito published a dissenting opinion claiming that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the brainchild of Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren, was unconstitutional. The opinion was so poorly reasoned that Justice Clarence Thomas, ordinarily an ally of far-right causes, mocked Alito’s opinion for “winding its way through English, Colonial, and early American history” without ever connecting that history to anything that’s actually in the Constitution.

Off the bench, meanwhile, Alito has a long history of making partisan statements that are just ambiguous enough that he can deny he was bemoaning a Republican defeat in a recent election. A little more than a week after Democratic President Barack Obama won his 2012 reelection race, Alito spoke to the conservative Federalist Society, where, quoting from one of his least favorite law professors, he warned that America is caught in a “moment of utmost sterility, darkest night, most extreme peril.”

Alito has long been the justice most skeptical of free speech arguments — he was the sole dissenter in two Obama-era decisions establishing that even extraordinarily offensive speech is protected by the First Amendment — but this skepticism evaporates the minute a Republican claims that they are being censored. Among other things, Alito voted to let Texas’s Republican legislature seize control over content moderation at sites like Twitter and YouTube, then tried to prohibit the Biden administration from asking those same sites to voluntarily remove content from anti-vaxxers and election deniers.

Alito frequently mocks his colleagues, even fellow Republicans, when they attribute government policies to anti-Black racism. After Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote in a 2020 opinion that the states of Louisiana and Oregon allowed non-unanimous juries to convict felony defendants more than a century ago to dilute the influence of Black jurors, Alito was livid, ranting in dissent: “To add insult to injury, the Court tars Louisiana and Oregon with the charge of racism.” 

Yet while Alito denies that racism might have motivated Louisiana’s Jim Crow lawmakers in the late 19th century, he brims with empathy for white plaintiffs who claim to be victims of racism. When a white firefighter alleged that he was denied a promotion because of his race, Alito was quick to tie this decision to the local mayor’s fear that he “would incur the wrath of … influential leaders of New Haven’s African-American community” if the city didn’t promote more non-white firefighters.

Empirical data shows that Alito is the most pro-prosecution justice on the Supreme Court, voting in favor of criminal defendants only 20 percent of the time. But he’s tripped over himself to protect one criminal defendant in particular: Donald Trump. An empirical analysis of the Court’s “standing” decisions — cases asking whether the federal courts have jurisdiction over a particular dispute — found that Alito rules in favor of conservative litigants 100 percent of the time, and against liberal litigants in every single case.

Though Alito, who turned 74 last month, is probably in the twilight of his career, his unapologetically partisan approach to judging could very well be the judiciary’s future, at least if Trump secures another term in the White House. 

Today’s headlines are peppered with names like Aileen Cannon, the judge overseeing Trump’s stolen documents trial who has also behaved like a member of Trump’s defense team, or Matthew Kacsmaryk, the former Christian right litigator who’s been willing to rubber stamp virtually any request for a court order filed by a Republican. The United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, the powerful federal court that oversees appeals out of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas, is now a bastion of Alito-like partisans who treat laws and precedents that undermine the GOP’s policy goals as mere inconveniences to be struck down or ignored.

These are the sorts of judicial appointees who would likely appeal to a second-term Trump, as the instigator of the January 6 insurrection looks to fill the bench with judges who will not interfere with his ambitions in the same way that many judges did in his first term.

Alito — a judge with no theory of the Constitution, and no insight into how judges should read ambiguous laws, beyond his driving belief that his team should always win — is the perfect fit, in other words, for what the Republican Party has become in the age of Trump.

Samuel Alito, by the numbers

It’s probably possible to go through any long-serving judge’s record and find opinions that aren’t especially persuasive. So, rather than rely on anecdotal evidence of Alito’s partisanship, let’s start with two empirical analyses of his behavior on the Supreme Court.

Political scientist Lee Epstein examined how often each current justice votes for a defendant’s position in criminal cases. Her data, which was first reported by NBC News, shows a fairly clear partisan divide. All three of the Court’s Democrats voted with criminal defendants in over half of the cases they heard, with former public defender Ketanji Brown Jackson favoring defendants in nearly 4 out of 5 cases. All six of the Court’s Republicans, meanwhile, vote with criminal defendants less than half the time.

But there is also a great deal of variation among the Republicans. Justice Neil Gorsuch, the most libertarian of the Court’s Republican appointees, voted with criminal defendants in 45 percent of cases. Alito, who once served as the top federal prosecutor in the state of New Jersey, is the most pro-prosecution justice, voting with criminal defendants only 20 percent of the time.

Yet Alito’s distrust for criminal defense lawyers seemed to evaporate the minute the leader of his political party became a criminal defendant. At oral arguments in Trump v. United States, the case asking whether Trump is immune from prosecution for his attempt to steal the 2020 election, Alito offered a dizzying argument for why his Court should give presidents broad immunity from criminal consequences.

If an incumbent president who “loses a very close, hotly contested election” knows that they could face prosecution, Alito claimed, “will that not lead us into a cycle that destabilizes the functioning of our country as a democracy?” Alito’s supposed concern was that a losing candidate will not “leave office peacefully” if they could be prosecuted by the incoming administration.

The problem with this argument, of course, is that Trump is a case about a president who refused to leave office peacefully. Trump even incited an insurrection at the US Capitol after he lost his reelection bid.

Similarly, in Fischer v. United States, a case asking whether January 6 insurrectionists can be charged under a statute making it a crime to obstruct an official proceeding, Alito peppered Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar with concerns that, if the January 6 defendants can be convicted under this law, that could someday lead to overly aggressive prosecutions of political protesters. At one point, Alito even took the side of a hypothetical heckler who starts screaming in the middle of a Supreme Court argument and is later charged with obstructing the proceeding.

Alito can also set aside his pro-prosecution instincts in cases involving right-wing causes such as gun rights. At oral arguments in United States v. Rahimi, for example, Alito was one of the only justices who appeared open to a lower court’s ruling that people subject to domestic violence restraining orders have a Second Amendment right to own a gun. Indeed, many of Alito’s questions echoed so-called men’s rights advocates, who complain that judges unthinkingly issue these restraining orders without investigating the facts of a particular case.

Consider, as well, a case analysis by Adam Unikowsky, a Supreme Court litigator who previously clerked for conservative Justice Antonin Scalia.

In order to bring a federal lawsuit, a plaintiff must show that they were injured in some way by the defendant they wish to sue — a requirement known as “standing.” Unikowsky looked at 10 years’ worth of Supreme Court standing cases, first classifying each case as one where a “conservative” litigant brought a lawsuit, or as one where a “progressive” litigant filed suit. He then looked at how every current justice voted.

Nearly every justice sometimes voted against their political views — Thomas, for example, voted four times that a conservative litigant lacked standing and twice voted in favor of a progressive litigant. Alito, however, was the exception. In all six cases brought by a conservative, Alito voted for the suit to move forward. Meanwhile, in all 10 cases brought by a progressive, Alito voted to deny standing.

(Unikowsky also found that Justice Jackson, the Court’s newest member, has not yet crossed over in a standing case, but the data includes only one case, where she joined a 6–3 decision by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, a Trump appointee.)

Some of Alito’s standing opinions are genuinely embarrassing. The worst is his dissent in California v. Texas (2021), one of the four cases where Thomas voted to deny standing to a conservative litigant.

Texas was the third of three Supreme Court cases attempting to destroy the Affordable Care Act, President Obama’s signature legislative accomplishment. But even many high-profile Republicans found this lawsuit humiliating. The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board labeled this case the “Texas Obamacare Blunder.” Conservative policy wonk Yuval Levin wrote in the National Review that Texas “doesn’t even merit being called silly. It’s ridiculous.”

As originally drafted, Obamacare required most Americans to pay higher taxes if they did not obtain health insurance. In 2017, however, Congress eliminated this tax by zeroing it out. The Texas plaintiffs claimed that this zero-dollar tax was unconstitutional, and that the proper remedy was that the Affordable Care Act must be repealed in its entirety.

No one is allowed to bring a federal lawsuit unless they can show that they’ve been injured in some way. A zero-dollar tax obviously injures no one, because it doesn’t require anyone to pay anything. And so seven justices concluded that the Texas lawsuit must be tossed out.

Alito dissented. While it is difficult to summarize his convoluted reasoning concisely, he essentially argued that, even if the zero-dollar tax did not injure these plaintiffs, they were injured by various other provisions of Obamacare and thus had standing.

This is simply not how standing works — a litigant cannot manufacture standing to challenge one provision of federal law by claiming they are injured by another, completely different provision of federal law. As Jonathan Adler, one of the architects of a different Supreme Court suit attacking Obamacare, wrote of Alito’s opinion, “standing simply cannot work the way that Justice Alito wants it to” because, if it did, “it would become child’s play to challenge every provision of every major federal law so long as some constitutional infirmity could be located somewhere within the statute’s text.”

Alito’s Texas opinion, in other words, would allow virtually anyone to challenge any major federal law, eviscerating the requirement that someone must actually be injured by a law before they can file a federal lawsuit against it. Needless to say, Alito does not take such a blasé attitude toward standing when left-leaning litigants appear in his Court. But, when handed a lawsuit that could sabotage Obama’s legacy, Alito was willing to waive one of the most well-established checks on judicial power so that he could invalidate the keystone of that legacy.

Alito’s jurisprudence of white racial innocence

In a 2005 speech explaining why he opposed Chief Justice John Roberts’s confirmation to the Supreme Court, then-Sen. Obama explained how he thinks judges actually decide difficult cases. While “95 percent” of cases can be resolved solely by looking at neutral legal principles, Obama said, “adherence to precedent and rules of construction and interpretation will only get you through the 25th mile of the marathon” in the especially challenging cases that come before the Supreme Court.

In those hardest cases, Obama argued, “that last mile can only be determined on the basis of one’s deepest values, one’s core concerns, one’s broader perspectives on how the world works, and the depth and breadth of one’s empathy.”

One might think that empathy, which means the capacity to understand the thoughts, feelings, and experiences of another person, would be an essential quality in anyone tasked with judging other people. But Republicans later latched onto Obama’s statement as evidence that his judicial appointees would decide cases based on feelings and vibes, instead of law. As Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) said in 2016, “the President’s idea of what’s appropriate for justices to consider is totally at odds with our constitutional system. We are a government of laws and not a government of judges.”

Alito’s jurisprudence, however, displays neither the universal empathy touted by Obama nor the kind of mechanical application of legal principles imagined by Grassley. Instead, Alito engages in selective empathy, often mocking the concerns of left-leaning litigants while simultaneously being extraordinarily protective of conservatives. And this selective empathy is most obvious in Alito’s decisions involving race.

Alito lashes out at his colleagues when they accuse white lawmakers — even, in one case, white lawmakers in the Jim Crow South — of racism. Yet he showed tremendous empathy for the firefighter who claimed to be a victim of anti-white discrimination.

Indeed, one of the unifying themes in Alito’s race cases is his desire to write a presumption of white racial innocence into the law — and especially into American voting rights law.

Consider, for example, Alito’s majority opinion in Abbott v. Perez (2018), where the Court’s Republican majority rejected a claim that Texas’s GOP-friendly congressional maps were an illegal racial gerrymander.

In 2011, the Texas legislature drew maps that never took effect, and that were eventually declared an illegal gerrymander by a federal court. Because of the legal challenges to these maps, the state legislature drew alternative maps in 2012 that were supposed to be used only in that year’s election. Though much of these interim 2012 maps closely resembled the illegal 2011 maps, a court allowed Texas to use them in the 2012 election because otherwise the state would not have been able to conduct the election at all.

Then, in 2013, the Texas legislature passed a new law converting the 2012 stopgap maps into permanent maps, meaning that they would be used until the next census in 2020. The state legislature did so, moreover, despite the fact that many of the districts in these new maps were still being challenged as unlawful racial gerrymanders.

Alito’s opinion in Perez, however, cut most of these challenges off. He reasoned that “the 2013 Legislature’s intent was legitimate” because the decision to convert the interim maps into permanent maps was not driven by racism. Rather, it was driven by a desire to “bring the litigation about the State’s districting plans to an end as expeditiously as possible.”

Alito’s argument, in other words, was that the 2013 maps were permissible because they were enacted to shut down a lawsuit challenging a racial gerrymander. It’s as if the school districts that were declared unlawfully segregated in Brown v. Board of Education (1954) had simply passed a new law re-creating the same racially segregated schools that existed before Brown was decided, and then argued that the new law should be upheld because it was enacted to end a lawsuit challenging segregation.

Consider, as well, Alito’s majority opinion in Brnovich v. DNC (2021), a case asking whether two Arizona election laws that allegedly had a disproportionate negative impact on nonwhite voters violated a 1982 amendment to the Voting Rights Act.

In rejecting this claim, Alito simply made up a bunch of new limits on the Voting Rights Act that appear nowhere in the law’s text. He declared, for example, that state laws which purport to fight voter fraud are presumptively legal. He also applied a strong presumption that any voting restriction that was commonplace in 1982 does not violate the 1982 amendment to the Voting Rights Act.

This later presumption is completely ridiculous. The only reason why Congress enacts any law is because it wants to change the status quo. If Congress enacted a new voting rights law in 1982, that means that Congress was unsatisfied with the state of voting rights in 1982 and wanted to change it — not to preserve restrictions that were commonplace at the time.

As Justice Elena Kagan wrote in her Brnovich dissent, Alito’s opinion “mostly inhabits a law-free zone.”

Alito’s selective concern about the First Amendment

Earlier this month, Alito delivered the commencement address at Franciscan University, a Catholic school in Ohio. Much of his speech echoed the sort of anti-“cancel culture” rhetoric that can be heard on any given episode of Sean Hannity’s Fox News show.

“Troubled waters are slamming against some of our most fundamental principles,” Alito told the graduates, echoing similar rhetoric that he used to describe the reelection of President Obama in 2012. “Support for freedom of speech,” Alito claimed, “is declining dangerously, especially where it should find broadest and widest acceptance.”

Alito’s concern about free speech is a little jarring, because he’s long been the justice least likely to back free speech claims by civil rights plaintiffs. In 2010 and 2011, for example, Alito was the sole dissenter in two important free speech cases reiterating the Court’s well-established view that speech is protected by the First Amendment even if it is likely to offend most people.

The justice’s more recent free speech decisions, meanwhile, largely turn on whether the party that wishes to shape public discourse is a Democrat or a Republican.

In 2021, for example, Texas’s Republican legislature enacted a law that effectively seizes control over all content moderation at major social media platforms like YouTube, Twitter, or Facebook. The law was an explicit effort to force these platforms to host right-wing content that they would prefer not to publish. “It is now law that conservative viewpoints in Texas cannot be banned on social media,” Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) said when he signed the law.

The law is also comically unconstitutional. The Court held in Rumsfeld v. Forum for Academic and Institutional Rights (2006), that “freedom of speech prohibits the government from telling people what they must say.” And it held in Miami Herald v. Tornillo (1974), a publication’s choice to publish or not publish certain content is subject only to the outlet’s “editorial control and judgment,” and “it has yet to be demonstrated how governmental regulation of this crucial process can be exercised consistent with First Amendment guarantees of a free press.”

Yet, when a majority of his colleagues voted to temporarily block this Texas law, Alito dissented, suggesting that Texas’s Republican lawmakers should have more leeway to address “the power of dominant social media corporations to shape public discussion of the important issues of the day.”

Not long after Alito wrote this dissent, however, the Court heard another case, known as Murthy v. Missouri, which involved an unusual order handed down by the far-right United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. That order effectively forbade the Biden administration from asking social media companies to voluntarily remove harmful content, such as videos seeking to recruit terrorists or tweets that promote false and potentially dangerous medical advice.

Once again, a majority of Alito’s colleagues voted to block this lower court order. Once again, Alito dissented.

It should be obvious that the First Amendment cannot simultaneously empower a Republican government to force media outlets to change their editorial policies, while also forbidding a Democratic government from asking a media outlet to change what it publishes — unless, of course, you believe that there is one First Amendment for Democrats and a different one for Republicans.

Later in his address to Francisan’s graduating class, Alito had a revealing line about why he believes that freedom of religion is threatened in the United States. “Religious liberty is also threatened,” Alito claimed. Then he warned the graduates that “when you venture out into the world, you may well find yourself in a job, or community or a social setting when you will be pressured to endorse ideas you don’t believe, or to abandon core beliefs.”

This warning blurs an important line between the kind of pressure that can plausibly violate “religious liberty,” and the kind of pressure that is just an ordinary part of living in a pluralistic society.

Alito is correct that, under some circumstances, a worker who is pressured because of their religious beliefs at work may have a viable religious liberty claim. That’s because federal law requires employers to accommodate their employee’s religious beliefs unless doing so would impose an “undue hardship on the conduct of the employer’s business.” So, for example, if a worker’s boss pressured a conservative Catholic employee to sign a statement endorsing the right to an abortion, such pressure would likely violate this worker’s civil rights.

But there is no right to be free from pressure, or even social ostracization, because people in your community or social circles find your religious beliefs abhorrent. If freedom of religion means anything, it must include both the right of a conservative evangelical to believe that gay people are sinful, and the right of everyone else to turn up their nose in disgust at anyone who expresses such a viewpoint. 

Yet Alito hasn’t simply argued that conservative Christians have a right not to be shunned for their views, he’s argued that the rights of gay Americans must be diminished in order to protect the feelings of people who oppose those rights. Hence Alito’s argument that Obergefell v. Hodges (2015), the Court’s landmark marriage equality decision, was wrongly decided because “it will be used to vilify Americans who are unwilling to assent to the new orthodoxy.”

Thus, in Samuel Alito’s America, Republicans have the power to control media, while Democrats can’t even ask media outlets to change what they publish. Meanwhile, the rights of historically marginalized groups must be diminished to prevent anyone from speaking ill of those who would marginalize them.

Can Alito be defended?

A 2023 essay by attorney Adam White tries to find a larger intellectual project behind Alito’s jurisprudence, beyond an overarching command that the Republican Party should always win. Alito, White claims, is a “Burkean conservative,” a reference to the 18th-century English conservative Edmund Burke, who is wary of the “dangers of concentrating too much power [in] the hands of elites or elite institutions.”

White argues that Alito seeks to preserve traditional ways of organizing society, and to diminish the power of institutions that can cause the United States to depart from such traditions. As White writes, “when government action — especially the swift and sweeping work of agencies, executives, and courts, rather than legislatures — threatens longstanding traditions or the institutions and communities that keep and transmit them, Justice Alito’s instinct has been to begin with a presumption in favor of defending tradition.”

Alito, for what it’s worth, appears to think of himself very much as White describes him. In his Franciscan speech, for example, Alito argued that the Constitution “guards against improvident change,” both because the document itself is almost impossible to amend, and because it makes it very difficult for the federal government to make law. The framers of the Constitution, Alito claims, “knew that times would inevitably come when people would be tempted to make hurried and unwise changes,” and they believed that the “country’s well-being depended on the ability to resist these temptations.” 

Thus, at Franciscan, Alito presented himself as that most conservative of guardians — a judge who “stands athwart history, yelling Stop.”

But if Alito imagines a country that is slow to change its laws, and one where Congress — and not swifter-moving institutions like the courts or executive branch agencies — are the drivers of policy, this vision appears to wax and wane depending on who is in the White House, and whether a new policy benefits liberals or conservatives.

Consider two cases, both of which involve court decisions that sought to shape US policy. 

In Department of Homeland Security v. Regents of the University of California (2020), a majority of Alito’s colleagues concluded that the Trump administration failed to complete the appropriate paperwork when it tried to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. DACA, which had been in effect for eight years when the Court ruled, allows hundreds of thousands of immigrants who came to the United States as children to live and work in this country.

When a Republican administration sought to end a program created by Democrats, Alito behaved exactly as White describes him — warning about concentrating too much power in the judiciary. Shortly after Trump officials tried to end DACA, Alito wrote in dissent, “one of the nearly 700 federal district court judges blocked this rescission, and since then, this issue has been mired in litigation.” He complained that “the federal judiciary” had effectively prevented Trump from implementing one of his policy goals “during an entire presidential term.”

Three years later, however, one of the nearly 700 federal district court judges blocked a different federal policy. Kacsmaryk, the crusader for the religious right that Trump put on the bench, attempted to ban the abortion drug mifepristone nearly a quarter century after the FDA authorized doctors to prescribe it in the United States. Even on Alito’s very conservative, anti-abortion Court, he was one of only two justices who went along with this attempt to remove a widely available medication from the market by judicial decree.

Or consider Alito’s vote in Trump v. Hawaii (2018), the challenge to Trump’s decision to ban citizens of several Muslim-majority nations from entering the United States. Trump did so, moreover, after bragging on the campaign trail about his plan to enact an unconstitutional ban on Muslims entering the United States if elected president.

Before Trump took office, Alito was often the Court’s most outspoken proponent of an expansive concept of religious freedom, especially in cases involving conservative Christians. But Alito abandoned this concern for religious liberty, as well as any concerns about the executive branch setting policy, in the Hawaii case. Instead, Alito joined an opinion claiming that federal law “exudes deference” to President Trump.

Under President Biden, by contrast, Alito’s been one of the Court’s strongest proponents of the so-called major questions doctrine, a judicially created doctrine that’s been used almost exclusively to strike down policies created by Democratic administrations, and that has no basis in either the Constitution’s text or in any statute. Indeed, Alito’s even wielded this doctrine to strike down Biden administration policies that were unambiguously authorized by federal law.

So let’s dispel this fiction that Alito takes a principled, Burkean approach to the law and the Constitution. Alito does often use the sort of rhetoric that is associated with traditionalist forms of conservatism, but that rhetoric only drives his actual decisions when it leads to the outcome he prefers.

Samuel Alito is one of the worst judges of his generation. He rejects the very basic idea that courts must decide cases based on the law, and not based on their partisan views. He routinely embarrasses himself in oral arguments, and in his published opinions, with legal reasoning that no sensible lawyer can take seriously. And he even tries to distort public debate and silence critics.

But most of all, Alito is one of the most uninteresting thinkers in the country. Here he is, in one of the most powerful and intellectually rigorous jobs on the planet — a philosopher king, presiding over the mightiest nation that has ever existed — and his only big idea is “Republicans should win.”

In 2023, Mozilla released a report noting that modern cars had the worst security and privacy standards of any major technology industry the organization tracks. That was followed by a NYT report earlier this year showing how automakers routinely hoover up oodles of consumer driving and phone info, then sell access to that data to auto insurance companies looking to justify rate hikes.

The very least the auto industry can do is make these transactions clear to car owners, but most of the time they can’t even do that.

Now it looks like the FTC might be considering legal action against the auto industry for lax privacy standards. An FTC blog post indicates that the “connected car” industry has been on the agency’s “radar for years,” and hinted at potential future actions:

“Car manufacturers—and all businesses—should take note that the FTC will take action to protect consumers against the illegal collection, use, and disclosure of their personal data.”

The FTC is being prodded into action by the concerns of Senator Ron Wyden, whose office launched an investigation finding that automakers routinely collect not only driver behavior data but data from connected phones, sell access to a myriad of often dodgy third parties and data brokers, and routinely fail to make any of those transactions meaningfully clear to car owners.

Usually customer acceptance for such monetization of data isn’t buried in your car paperwork; it’s buried in the user agreement connected to automakers’ car apps or road-side assistant apps. This is, it should be noted, the same industry that’s fighting tooth and nail against “right to repair” reforms under the pretense that it just cares a whole lot about consumer privacy and security.

Of course the FTC lacks the resources, staff, and authority (quite by lobbying design) to meaningfully police U.S. tech privacy violations at the scale they’re happening. And even should the FTC take action, any fines would likely comprise a tiny fraction of the money made from non-transparently and haphazardly monetizing drivers’ every fart for the better part of the last two decades.

And whatever fines that do get levied are often reduced further (or eliminated entirely) thanks to multi-year legal fights within an increasingly corrupt court system.

Still, it’s important to try to have standards. It’s what separates us from potatoes.

As Wyden’s office has made clear, the stakes for our corrupt failure to pass baseline privacy laws or regulate data brokers continue to rise. Demonstrated pretty clearly by his office’s recent discovery that a data broker had been selling abortion clinic location data to right wing activists, who then took to targeting vulnerable women with health care disinformation.

But between regulators that have been steadily boxed in by thirty-years of lobbying and corrupt court rulings, and a Congress that’s too corrupt to function, it seems like we’ll be waiting a long time to see meaningful reform on this front. And that reform is only likely to come courtesy of a privacy scandal whose scope and impact we probably can’t imagine.

It should come as no shock to anyone when I say that DC Comics and Marvel both behave in a very aggressive manner when it comes to all things intellectual property. These two companies have engaged in all kinds of draconian behavior when it comes to everything from copyright to trademark. But one thing that somehow escaped my attention all the years I’ve been writing for Techdirt is that those two companies also jointly hold a trademark, granted by the USPTO, for the term “Super Hero,” as well as several variants. You can visit that Wikipedia link to get some of the backstory as to how this all came to be, but, suffice it to say, that the term “super hero,” at this point in history, is obviously generic. Hell, it refers to an entire genre of movies, if nothing else.

Well, one comic artist in London is attempting to challenge that trademark with the USPTO, seeking to have it and its variants canceled entirely.

Scott Richold’s Superbabies Ltd told a USPTO tribunal, opens new tab that “Super Hero” is a generic term that is not entitled to trademark protection, according to a copy of the petition provided by Superbabies’ law firm Reichman Jorgensen Lehman & Feldberg.

Representatives for DC and Marvel did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

“By challenging these trademarks, we seek to ensure that superheroes remain a source of inspiration for all, rather than a trademarked commodity controlled by two corporate giants,” Superbabies’ attorney Adam Adler said in a statement.

Now, this is all coming about because DC Comics accused Superbabies Ltd. of trademark infringement when it caught whiff of the company’s own attempt to trademark its comic book name. But the idea that the term “Superbabies” or “Super Hero” could be monopolized for any market at all via trademark law is, at this point, absurd. And yet both DC and Marvel have wielded their trademarks many times in the past.

“DC and Marvel claim that no one can use the term Super Hero (or superhero, super-hero, or any other version of the term) without their permission,” the petition said. “DC and Marvel are wrong. Trademark law does not permit companies to claim ownership over an entire genre.”

I would argue that the term wasn’t particularly unique as an identifier back when it was first granted over 100 years ago and certainly isn’t now. When you hear the term, you might think of certain super heroes from either Marvel or DC. Or you might think about the many, many super hero characters out there that are not owned by those companies. The point is that the term is ubiquitous at this point.

Will the USPTO give serious consideration to canceling DC and Marvel’s joint trademark? I’m not sure, but it certainly should.

I spend a lot of time talking about how to expand public transit in North America so that we might someday have transit and passenger railways that can approach the same magnitude of extensiveness of those in Europe and Asia. However, it is worth reflecting on the fact that we are less far behind in sheer scope than people often realize.

North America is naturally going to have less intercity rail than Europe or Asia owing to the low population densities we see. Sure, there’s no reason the Northeast Corridor, or California, or Quebec City-Windsor should not have dramatically better rail (I would note, dramatically better rail is some way shape or form is happening in all of these places), but frequent or high-speed rail would not exist from Vancouver to Calgary, or from Salt Lake City to San Francisco if they were in Europe or Asia! There would probably be a daily, or maybe twice daily train. The reality of this continent is that while we do have big cities and city clusters — they are often legitimately very far apart.

Now yes, it is possible that this train would be electric, and yes, neither of the city pairs I just mentioned are close to living up to the standard of rail service you might see in other parts of the world, but the gap is smaller than people appreciate.

I think too often in North America we think that are problem is not having enough transit, and to be clear — that is part of the problem without a doubt. But cities like Toronto, Seattle, and New York have plenty of transit and still don’t stand up that well to those overseas, and that’s because we have a quality issue that is almost as big as our quantity issue. Even transit agencies like the TTC that are objectively good at running and maintaining transit service by North American standards seem to be totally unaware of things like global wayfinding best practices or even modern business best practices. Transit agencies across the continent build projects for far more than international (and domestic) comparators and seem to spend little time reflecting on this.

There str a lot of places where we can and should spend energy on expanding our transit systems, but it makes me very sad when I see crisis going from city to city — Chicago, Toronto, Washington DC, and Boston have all seen major regressions in service levels and quality on their existing metro systems: systems that are actually pretty large! The entire culture of the continent’s transit industry needs to shift to put greater focus on actually showing up and providing frequent, reliable, everyday service. While we do need to level up and expand at the same time — adding new lines, re-signalling, and improving safety (screen doors or gates) and accessibility (elevators and escalators) on old lines — we also clearly need to put more energy on not regressing.

And to be clear, it’s not all regression. I love when I see a transit system in North America implement nice digital wayfinding, as an example. But if we want great transit, we shouldn’t settle for something less than what would be best-in-class in Europe. One of the only advantages in being so slow to technical innovations and transit system improvements should be that we can just copy the best, and because we are too unfamiliar of what the best is and what it looks like we don’t. That needs to change.

In brief: Today’s post talks about the arrival of summer-like weather in Houston, and breaks down the four phases of summer. We also discuss a new offering from the National Weather Service called “HeatRisk.” Finally, we look ahead to a hot and sunny Memorial Day Weekend.

We’re starting to see 90-degree days on the regular which, in my mind, signals the start of summer in Houston. Long-time readers will know that I like to break summer down into four phases. Why? Because “summer” season lasts so long, nearly five months. This is contrast to meteorological summer, which runs from June through August, and “solstice” summer, which runs from June 20 through September 22 this year. For me, Houston’s summer typically runs from about mid-May through mid-October. Here are the four phases:

• Early summer: When we first start to see 90-degree temperatures with regularity, but some nights in the 60s are still possible, and there’s still the thinnest hope of a weak front
• Mid summer: When highs run from 90 to 95 degrees, and nights are sultry, but you know it could still get worse
• High summer: Somewhere between late July and early September there’s a period where temperatures reach the upper 90s to mid-100s and you realize, “Ok, this really is the worst.”
• Late summer: This is the period in September and early October when days grow shorter and we usually see the first front or two of the season. But most of the time it’s still hot.

Early summer began this week in Houston, and we have a chance to bump into Mid summer early next week before we drop back into early summer. You may think it’s crazy to have gradations of heat during summer, as Houston is invariably hot and humid during the summer months. But as we found out last year, there is heat and there is heat. Last summer we used the “wet bulb globe temperature”to measure how hot it really felt outside, and we’ll continue to use this tool. However there’s now another way to assess the heat.

This year the National Weather Service is introducing a “HeatRisk” color-based scale that takes into account the following factors to provide guidance for outdoor activities:

• How unusual the heat is for the time of the year
• The duration of the heat, including both daytime and nighttime temperatures
• If those temperatures pose an elevated risk of heat-related impacts

The scale ranges from green (little or no risk) to magenta (extreme). If we look at the risk for Memorial Day we can already see a few areas of Houston reaching an ‘extreme’ level of risk. This is due to temperatures likely in the mid- to upper-90s and the time of year, late May, as we’ve not re-accustomed ourselves to the heat yet.

In any case, feel free to use this planning tool as we go through the summer.

Tuesday

We’ll see a few more clouds today than we saw on Monday, and this should help hold temperatures to about 90 degrees. Winds will be from the south, at 10 mph or so, with gusts up to 20 mph. Aside from that it’s going to be another humid day, with a warm night in the mid- to upper-70s.

Wednesday

Skies should be partly to mostly cloudy on Wednesday, and this should allow some parts of Houston to stay in the upper 80s. However, if we get a bit of sunshine during the afternoon hours, highs in the low 90s are possible. Still warm. Still humid.

Thursday and Friday

These days will probably bring mostly sunny skies, so temperatures from 90 to the low 90s are likely. Nights remain warm.

Saturday, Sunday, and Monday

Hot and mostly sunny. Highs this weekend are likely to reach the mid-90s, with upper-90s possible on Memorial Day. By Monday it looks like a weak front will approach the area, bringing a chance of rain with it. However I don’t believe this front will arrive in time to modify conditions during the daytime on Monday.

Next week

The front should arrive on Monday night or Tuesday, and at this point it does appear as though the boundary will indeed push all the way to the coast. Don’t expect miracles in late May, but we might see some slightly drier air and highs in the upper 80s, with modestly cooler nights. It isn’t much, but it’s the best we can reasonably hope for at least the next three months, and probably longer.

NEW YORK—Responding to widespread pro-Palestinian demonstrations taking place at colleges across the country, CEO Ron Burgess issued a warning Tuesday that no student involved in the protests would ever be hired at Genocide Inc. “Given the lack of decency they have shown, Genocide Inc. has decided it will not be…

Read more...

LOS ANGELES—Emphasizing that you would be “doing him a real solid,” local man Josh Gurney, your friend on the opposite side of town, told you Tuesday that he needed you to move his car three times a day for the next six weeks. “Hey, if it’s not too much trouble, would you be available to move my car once every…

Read more...

NEW YORK—Seeing the two men’s gazes lock for a split second before one quickly lowered his head, sources confirmed Tuesday that Donald Trump quietly avoided eye contact with Rudy Giuliani on the steps of the courthouse where his disgraced former personal attorney and campaign lawyer was begging for change. “Spare a…

Read more...

INDIANAPOLIS—Whipping his head around in a double take, local man Dean Wilson was reportedly starstruck Tuesday after spotting Caitlin Clark with her Indiana Fever teammates at the Greyhound bus station. “Wow, it’s a good thing I snapped a photo of her at the vending machine, or else no one would have believed me,”…

Read more...

SAN DIEGO—Expressing frustration that her feelings of anger and hurt were not being validated, local woman Rory Schaffer confirmed Tuesday that she did not appreciate being told by a reggae song to chill out. “This music keeps saying I should simmer down and that every little thing’s gonna be all right, but that’s not…

Read more...

Ted called. Asked why you don’t work from home anymore.

This post was written by Alison Green and published on Ask a Manager.

Last week we talked about coworker arguments and grudges. Here are 15 of the most ridiculous stories you shared.

1. The cheesecake

I worked for a government agency a few years back and for whatever reason right off the bat, an older coworker took a dislike to me. I have legitimately no idea why. She was clearly resentful of the possibility of having to train anyone, as I heard her talk several times about how she didn’t sign up to train people and she wasn’t going to.

Anyway, her normal M.O. was just general bitterness but she seemed to take it a step further. We had a potluck and I brought mini cheesecakes. I’m not sure what she brought, but she took ISSUE with these cheesecakes. She moved them to a different table out of the way so people didn’t know they were there. She walked around the entire day telling people about her cheesecake and how she made it totally from scratch. She didn’t even bring cheesecake that day, and also, mine were homemade too so I have no idea what she was on about.

2. The couch

I had a library coworker once with a years-long grudge against … a couch.

The Friends of the Library had used some of their funds to buy decent furniture for the break room, which most of us appreciated. She felt very strongly that any money the Friends raised should have been used to add to the collection, which we already had a pretty good budget for from other sources. She retaliated by refusing to sit on that couch, ever, for years. Unclear whether she succeeded in hurting the couch’s feelings.

3. The software admin

I worked at a small company where a department was run by an awful woman. She hired her entire old team from her last company and they immediately took over and started going on a power trip. They lied, refused to actually do their jobs and pushed it onto other departments, and made up unnecessary rules that had no basis in what our business needed.

They steamrolled over everyone else and I ended up being dumped with a lot of work they were supposed to be doing. And then they made up a ton of unnecessary requirements, and when I pushed back demanding they point to the ISO line they claim was required, they couldn’t and had to give up. So they hated me and decided to freeze me out and refused to talk to me.

It just so happened I was the admin of the software tool they had to use (the previous admin left and they never hired a replacement so I was just assigned this), and I was so petty that every time they pissed me off, I reset their passwords. They would keep trying to enter their password (when it was blank) and once they got frozen out, they’d have to come to me and ask for me to unfreeze their account and reset their password. I only did it because the software didn’t log things like admin resetting password. Also they logged in so infrequently (because they didn’t do their real job) they chalked it up to them forgetting the password each time and the strict password requirements that had to be changed every few months with no repeats.

Deeply petty and I probably shouldn’t be trusted with power because I took great pleasure in abusing it until I finally left.

4. The cat photo

I once had a coworker (Clara) who was inexplicably upset by the most benign things. Years ago, another colleague (Helen) gifted her a lovely photo of her cat, which Clara pinned up in her cubicle. Every time Clara felt Helen had done something to slight her (which was often), she would take down the photo. When they made up, the photo went back on the wall. The two of them controlled the energy in the office, so everyone could tell just by glancing at the wall whether it was going be a pleasant day or a miserable one.

5. The donut grievance

My first job after graduating as an engineer was in an automotive plant. I was a process engineer working on the floor. There was a steep learning curve to the job and some of the mechanics were really helpful when I had questions about the machinery. They were very helpful and kind and in order to thank them, I brought donuts to a meeting we were having.

Other employees who were not invited to the meeting (because it had nothing to do with their work) were incensed and made a complaint to the union. They launched a grievance complaining that some, but not all, employees were given donuts. When the union rep found out that I bought the donuts with my own money the grievance went away, but the other employees continued to give me nasty looks for months and complain that they hadn’t gotten a donut.

6. The long-running grudge

I once worked as an admin at a pretty big corporate employer in New Orleans. I had a coworker, N, who initially was really nice and sweet. We talked all the time and bonded over our love of animals.

One day about three months after I joined the company, I walked into work and saw N in the corridor. I said, “Hi, N!” and she actually turned her head so she couldn’t see me and kept walking. I shrugged it off at first, but it kept happening. I’d say hi, she’d ignore me. There would be food left from one of her meetings and she’d whisper to the other admins so that they could get the leftovers, but excluded me. She was my backup and was supposed to answer my managers’ phones when I was at lunch, but she decided she didn’t want to do that anymore so stopped doing it. My managers noticed and asked me to fix the issue, but N wouldn’t even discuss it with me. She just said she wasn’t going to answer my phones anymore.

I went to our big boss and he said that in his experience women admins always ended up in feuds and as far as he was concerned we had to handle it on our own and not to bother him anymore. So I stopped answering her managers’ phones. This made one of her managers so angry she stormed over to my desk and said, “Look, my phone is ringing. You answer it since N isn’t here.” I said, “Oh, N won’t answer my phones anymore, so I’m no longer answering hers.” She screamed, “I’m a lawyer and I’m telling you to answer that phone!” I smiled and said, “I’m an admin and I’m telling you I’m not.” She went running to N’s other manager but nothing changed.

It was the custom for admins to buy birthday cards and circulate them around for their managers. So when one of N’s managers had a birthday, she circulated the card. When it hit my desk, I told my coworker who put it there that I’d better not because N wouldn’t like it. She said, “Don’t let her intimidate you. Sign the card.” So I signed it and put it back on N’s desk which was in the cube next to mine. When she came back from lunch, she saw the card and I heard her yell, “OH, NO SHE DID NOT!” and then ripping sounds. She tore up the card and threw it away because I signed it. Then she sent out an email to the whole floor saying she was buying her manager a card, but if we wanted to send a card, we had to buy it ourselves.

This went on for months and months. A new admin started and was initially nice and then she started ignoring me and I asked her why. She said, “Oh, N told me that you are a slacker and don’t pull your weight here so I shouldn’t associate with you so I can stay in good standing with my bosses.”

N had more seniority than me and her manager was more important than mine. I was called into a meeting with mine and told that N was out to get me fired and if I were smart, I should start looking for a new job. I asked them if they could help me because obviously she was bullying me, but they said their hands were tied. So I luckily found another job in the same company, just a different department. On my first day HR sent out email to my old department and my new department announcing my new job and congratulating me and wishing me luck as was the custom. N responded with REPLY ALL in 57 RED font, “OH, HAPPY DAYS! HAPPY DAYS! SHE’S GONE!” Did she get in trouble? Nope. Just got a little talking to from her boss. I was happy in my new job where no one bullied me.

About two years later, I heard that N got fired because she refused to help another admin and her boss said, “Well, either you help her or you’re out” and N packed up her things and left.

Years later I went out to lunch with the coworker who’d encouraged me to sign N’s manager’s birthday card. We were both not with the company anymore and had other jobs. We started talking about our old jobs and she said, “Okay, I’m going to confide in you now. I know why N hated you.” Well, the reason was that I brought in a Witch’s Almanac calendar one day and hung it up in my cube. It was New Orleans and the vibe there is really eccentric and pretty much anything goes, so I didn’t even think it would be an issue. The calendar did not have explicit pictures or anything. It was arty more than anything. Crows, cauldrons, stuff like that. So N thought I was Wiccan and since she was such a good Christian, she made it her mission to destroy me professionally.

7. The promotion

I was hired into an org by a department head, Sansa, to be her assistant. She was clear in her hiring of me that part of my job duty was to do all the interfacing with other departments and clients, because she didn’t enjoy it. She hated making phone calls and was generally aloof, sullen, quiet, and didn’t identify as a “people person.” Perfect, because I came from a background of client relations, and I also enjoy people and making everyone feel valued and welcome, whether that person is a client or a colleague. So I did my job, and did all the interfacing for her. I made all the phone calls to clients. I talked to the other departments. Sansa adored me for taking all that off her plate.

After a few years of rarely speaking to a client or a colleague, she realized that I had become the universally-liked face of her department. Instead of taking a page out of my book, she decided that I should become more like her and start being more sullen and aloof. She demanded I stop being so friendly to everyone, because it was making her look bad. She told literally told me I should make my tone more flat and stop “being so warm” on phone calls, and that I shouldn’t go out to lunch with coworkers when I was invited, but eat at my desk alone, the way she did. I did not.

So she called a meeting with the CEO and head of HR and demanded that they fire me for being too friendly, and explained to them that she didn’t even need me, because she was doing all the work, and I was just making phone calls and eating lunch with other departments. Instead of firing me, they promoted me to be the head of a different department, away from Sansa. When Sansa wanted to hire a new assistant, they refused, because she can make her own phone calls, as she so kindly explained to them, and she didn’t actually need an assistant.

That was a few years ago, and she hasn’t spoken to me since. I’ve also gotten another promotion since then, and now work directly with the CEO. When we pass in the hallways I still give her the warm, “Good morning!” I give everyone, and she will not respond to me. So yeah, I have someone who hates my guts for being too nice.

8. The mugs of retribution

I used to teach full-time. One of the TAs was a good-looking younger guy, let’s call him Brad as in Pitt, who was the crush object of many students and a fair few staff. “Janet” from another department particularly thought of him as Hers, although he’d never shown any return interest (she was a good 20 years older than him for starters). This was fine, if rather odd, until one of my colleagues went on maternity and Brad started covering for her. His subject knowledge was okay but he didn’t know the nuances of the topic to teach to students, so I worked with him to fill the gaps, usually after school.

Now, I liked Brad in a “he’s a good laugh and never once tried to mansplain” way but didn’t fancy him in the slightest. The students referred to me as “goth teacher,” my taste in men ran accordingly. Janet, however, was Not Amused by us spending time together, and when it turned out Brad lived on my way home so could get a lift with me instead of her, she concluded I was out to steal her man. This middle-aged woman went full scorned teenage girl. It started with filthy looks at me and betrayed-puppy eyes at him. Blanking me when I talked to her, etc. Then Janet decided that the rest of the man-stealing harlot’s time at that school would go un-caffeinated. Personal mugs would occasionally go walkabout from the staff room cupboard but they’d return the next day. Mine stayed gone. I brought in a new one. Two days later, it vanished. Then another. And another.

I was mystified until I covered a lesson in Janet’s usual classroom and discovered ALL of my missing mugs stashed in the back of the storage cupboard.

9. The summer camp cook

At one summer camp, we had a cook who made terrible food, leading to a steadily building animosity between him and the rest of the staff. It finally exploded in a screaming fight (thankfully with no campers present) when someone asked him if he needed to be reminded how to use things other than the microwave, and he replied that you “shouldn’t f*** with someone who could poison you all.” He was ultimately fired for theft but not before deliberately serving us sandwiches made with spoiled lunch meat.

10. The desk gaslighter

My toxic, bullying boss would constantly move stuff out of line of sight (and I was pretty tidy – we’re talking about moving my notebook to an enclosed cabinet next to my desk, or pushing a small potted plant into the very dark corner of the desk behind my monitor). This boss was absolutely wild in how she behaved and this was just one of the many, many things she did. Of course, she denied ever doing anything and blamed the cleaning crew (!!!). Finally, I very obviously started taking photos of my desk before I would leave and made sure she would see me doing this. That stopped her desk-related shenanigans.

It’s been over a decade now but I still have the photos in my phone and every year between January and March I puzzle at why I am seeing photos of my old desk at this old job in my Google memories LOL!

11. The sun glare

During a standard interdepartmental spat over window blinds, one of the other managers became so offended by our manager’s love of sunlight that she locked him in the building during a fire drill. Claimed the glare of the sun confused her eyes so she “accidentally” put the key in the lock. They never spoke again, communicating through runners in a “X told me to tell you” system for fire years until she was encouraged to leave after locking him in a storage cupboard.

12. The speakerphone war

We had a speakerphone war at an old job. This was back in the old days when we all used hard-wired desktop phones, just for reference. Office Manager would come in in the morning, crank up her phone as loud as it would go, and listen to her voicemail. At best there’d be 1-2 voicemails, and it was usually over pretty quickly. Other Employee, however, simply could not deal with this. Other Employee would immediately start playing back her voicemails on speaker, as loudly as it would go. They also each figured out ways to amplify the sound so it was even louder than normal. This eventually got to where they were going back and forth with it all day long. It stopped only when Other Employee was able to move to a desk in another part of the building so they couldn’t hear each other.

13. The mini-fridge

In my public library, we had a very unpopular director. He was a micro-managing mansplainer, in an environment that was 90% female. Literally everyone on staff hated him, and he either didn’t notice or didn’t care.

At some point, he decided our breakroom – upstairs from where the staff worked and steps from his office – was underutilized. To be fair, no one used it because the odds of bumping into him or another administrator was high, and nobody wanted to deal with that during lunch. His solution was to remove all the refrigerators and microwaves from the downstairs work rooms to force people to eat upstairs.

There was a mini-fridge/freezer in our youth workroom that had been there for as long as anyone could remember. Unpopular Director said it had to go, but don’t send it to be auctioned, he could use it in his office to keep water cool for VIPs. We had a Youth Librarian who had real anger issues, and a hot burning hatred for Director.

Without defrosting the refrigerator or cleaning it out, she unplugged it and left it in his office on a Thursday evening, when Director planned to be out Thursday-Monday. Over the weekend it defrosted, ruined the carpet in Director’s office and set up a lovely mildew-y smell. As far as I know, the Youth Librarian faced no consequences (Director was a little scared of her). Within three months, the downstairs fridge and microwave had been replaced.

When Youth Librarian retired, she handed out buttons to staff with a picture of the mini-fridge on it.

14. The chain email

When working for the federal government, our admin once sent out an email to the entire office that was a chain email claiming you would get a free computer if you forwarded it to X number of people. I was so annoyed! It was 2012, not 1994, so this was absurd. Several more people then did the same thing! I got so fed up with these emails that I replied all to one with a snip of the employee handbook that specifically forbade chain emails.

For the rest of my time there (two years), the admin gave me the full silent treatment. She would shut doors in my face, turn away from me if I tried to ask her a question, refuse to respond to any email I sent her, etc. Luckily, she was pretty useless at her job so I didn’t need her help with very much.

15. The Pythagorean theorem

Years ago, I worked in a math-adjacent field. One of my closest collaborators mispronounced “Pythagorean theorem” painfully and frequently. For some reason, this caused me to completely lose my head each and every time. Was this a sensible trigger? No. Could I let it lie? Heck no! I proceeded to bring in evidence that his pronunciation was not one of the accepted pronunciations in any English-speaking country. There were dictionaries. There were subject experts. My colleague insisted that he was correct and I was wrong … but as the bigger person, he would not nag me about MY misguided pronunciation.

Finally, I dragged him to our manager’s office to declare, like a petulant child, “Manager, coworker is pronouncing ‘Pythagorean theorem’ wrong!” She stared us down for a solid minute, scowled, and, in a tone of utter disgust, said, “Get out.” We left. I never won the argument, but I’m still right.

ORLANDO, FL—Calling the campaign a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity that would leave customers satisfied and “go easy on their wallets,” bankrupt restaurant chain Red Lobster launched a $19.99 all-you-can-grab copper wiring promotion Monday at all of its locations. “Today, we’re rolling out an incredible deal for anyone…

Read more...

Iran's ultraconservative president, killed in a helicopter crash, oversaw a crackdown on women's protests and was linked to extrajudicial killings in the 1980s.

The seafood chain is in hot water after a series of bad choices by a parade of executives. Almost 580 restaurants will stay open, after dozens closed abruptly last week.

(Image credit: Alina Selyukh)

In brief: Houston will remain warm and humid through next weekend, with partly to mostly sunny days and highs generally in the low 90s. Rain chances are low throughout the period. Today’s post also addresses some lingering questions from last week’s storms, including why the event was not particularly well predicted.

Over the weekend, the greater Houston region continued to recover from damaging winds last Thursday. On Sunday evening, CenterPoint said that it had restored electricity to more than 700,000 people who lost power, with about 240,000 customers still without. The transmission company said it remains on track to be “substantially complete” with power restoration by Wednesday evening. Before jumping into the forecast here are some additional thoughts about the very strong storms that arrived last week.

Why wasn’t this well predicted?

This is a great question. The answer is that we have seen these kinds of setups before in which there is an atmosphere primed with moisture and instability, and with a potential trigger for supercell storms to form many times before. However, even hours before their development just west of Houston on Thursday, there was no ready data to indicate the true severity of the blow-the-doors-off storm that was coming.

It’s the kind of thing where there maybe is a 1-in-50 or a 1-in-100 chance that something so severe, a supercell event with very strong straight-line winds directly over the city’s urban core, could develop. If we had messaged that an “extremely dangerous and destructive event” was coming the previous 10 times there was such an atmospheric setup, and nothing of any real significance happened, who would believe us on the 11th time? There is a boy-who-cried-wolf problem here. The only real solution here is that we try harder to find that bit of data that gives us more confidence in a rare event like this one. I’m confident that Thursday’s storms will be studied in depth to identify such clues.

I was lying in bed on Sunday morning thinking about all of this—yes, I lose sleep worrying about this kind of stuff—and of all things a 2002 Houston Texans football game popped into mind. It was December 8, the team’s first season, and being an expansion franchise the Texans were not great. That week the Texans had to go to Pittsburgh and play the Steelers in near-freezing temperatures for a meaningless game. The Steelers were a decent football team, nothing fantastic, but were expected to blow the Texans out. The line was Steelers -14. The Steelers outgained the Texans 442 yards to 47. They won the time of possession with 40 minutes to 20 minutes. Texans quarterback David Carr was 3-of-10 passing, for 33 yards. That was in line with expectations.

But the Texans won 24 to 6. They returned three turnovers for touchdowns, and kicked a field goal after a short drive. The Steelers had many more penalties. Their two long drives ended in field goals rather than touchdowns. It was just an odd day. While the final score was within the bound of possibilities, on any given Sunday anything can happen when two teams meet, it was the lowest probability event. That’s kind of like what happened Thursday. A super-storm was within the realms of possibility, but was like an expansion team playing terribly, but still blowing out the Pittsburgh Steelers on the road in very cold conditions.

Why weren’t there more real-time warnings?

This is something Matt and I are taking away from the storms. I feel like we do a good job of forecasting the weather here, but where we struggle is in real-time coverage. Some readers have asked why we did not send out warnings for tornadoes on Thursday. That is because this is the express function of the National Weather Service, which has a large staff and the technology to send out real time warnings for tornadoes and other life-threatening weather events. Here’s more information about the agency’s wireless emergency alerts program. They are the experts at that, and we defer to them.

Matt and I were both tracking Thursday’s storm in real time. We were on top of things. And there was perhaps a 30 to 60-minute window between 5:30 and 6:30 p.m. when we could have provided some actionable information. However, in the time it would take to write and disseminate a post about that in real-time, the dynamic event might have already passed for most people. One possible solution is that we are likely to start sending (albeit very rarely) “urgent notifications” through our app. It is available for free here for Apple ioS, and here for Android. Regardless, we recognize this as a weakness and will address it here at Space City Weather. For one thing, we are changing the frequency of updates on days when severe weather is possible.

Monday

Our overall warm, but not extremely hot pattern will continue as we inch toward the end of May. With high pressure largely in control we’ll see this pattern largely persist through the holiday weekend, with the only really noticeable change in the strength of southerly winds, or a few more clouds on some days. For today, we’ll see highs generally in the low 90s, with only coastal areas unlikely to reach 90 degrees. Skies will be mostly sunny. Winds will blow from the southeast at 5 to 10 mph. Overnight lows will be warmer than we’ve seen, dropping only into the upper 70s.

Tuesday and Wednesday

In response to low pressure over the central United States, we’ll see an uptick in southerly winds with gusts up to 25 mph. Both days will see partly to sunny skies, with highs around 90 degrees. Nights remain quite warm.

Thursday and Friday

These will be partly to mostly sunny days, with winds perhaps slackening a bit. Highs in the low 90s. There is perhaps a 10 percent chance of rain showers each afternoon.

Saturday, Sunday, and Monday

Memorial Day weekend looks warm and sunny. Expect highs in the low 90s, with warm nights. Rain chances remain near nil. Plan your outdoor activities with confidence.

Next week

There are some hints of a pattern change by Tuesday or Wednesday of next week, with possibly a weak front sneaking into the area at the end of the month, and bringing with it a smattering of rain chances. This is far enough into the forecast, however, that my overall confidence is quite low. We shall see.

Read more...

MEDFORD, MA—In an effort to glean valuable knowledge about opportunities after graduating, Tufts University sophomore Connor Gilman reportedly emailed 32-year-old Peter Neilan on Monday to ask about his experience being a total loser who has accomplished nothing in life. “Dear Mr. Neilan, I retrieved your contact…

Read more...

Read more...

One continuous hallway stretching on forever. No doors. You cannot escape, but you also cannot die. $350,000. Bad credit—okay!!!

Read more...

Read more...

Mai Tran began catsitting in 2021 while Tran was on pandemic unemployment, often staying overnight in people’s homes. Tran has now cared for twenty-two cats and traveled to ten apartments all over New York City, observing the interior lives of cat owners and appeasing their neuroses. From home vet visits to black eyes to refugee cats, Chronicles of a Catsitter documents the most memorable days on the job.

In late 2021, I pick up another gig through the cat rescue Facebook group. The couple I work for lives only a few blocks away, so I arrange to drop in twice a day to hang out and feed the cats rather than stay overnight. The couple keeps four long-haired cats in a one-bedroom apartment. They send me photos of each pet along with detailed bios. The cats’ names, slightly altered for anonymity but the same in essence, are King Fluff, Ding Dong, Pilaf, and Freddy.

My roommate tags along when I pick up the keys. We have a talkative GF / taciturn BF dynamic, and the couple also has a black cat / golden retriever thing going on, so everyone balances out. The wife works on her computer while the husband shows us how to get the cats to stand on their hind legs by holding treats above their heads. When a cat tries to walk away, the husband drags it back and flips it onto its stomach or over his shoulder. The cats don’t seem to mind, but my roommate and I widen our eyes at each other. We debrief on the walk back.

I catsit for the couple several times, and my roommate sometimes accompanies me. We bring our meals, laptops, and books. They sit in the living room while I clear the two litter boxes and refill the drinking fountain and food bowls. I send the couple photos of the cats crawling over our laps. My roommate’s favorite is Freddy because he is soft and cuddly and will let you hold him for minutes on end. I like Pilaf, who has a huge forehead that makes him look like a goldfish. Pilaf and I trip over each other because he is constantly underfoot, latched onto my ankles with no regard for either of our safety.

Sometimes, my roommate and I arrive to find a cat has thrown up or knocked something over, but overall, if the couple isn’t gone for more than a week, the apartment is manageable. They didn’t show us where the cleaning supplies were, so we pick clumps of fur off the couch with our hands and use their lint roller on everything else. There are no windows to open and air out the apartment because they live on the first floor. There’s only a door to a backyard, which we aren’t allowed to crack in case the cats run out and we can’t get them back in.

After about six months of catsitting for the couple, I start a day job and pass the gig over to my roommate. A few months later, my roommate tells me the couple is receiving two foster cats who are refugees from the Russian invasion of Ukraine. They found the cats through an agency and will be taking care of them indefinitely until their owners can make it to the States.

I stop by the apartment to meet the new cats, Amber and Karl, who are also long-haired. When I arrive, I can see cat fur flying through beams of sunlight. Karl has settled in with the other four, but Amber seems to hate all of them and secludes herself in the bathroom or wedges herself into small cardboard boxes with her back turned against the entrance. The couple has upgraded to four litter boxes, three in their bedroom and one in the shower. After a few minutes, I start sneezing and put on a mask. My roommate peels open can after can of wet food, spreading them around the living room so the cats don’t stampede a singular bowl.

The cats now deplete their water fountain in a day. One cat repeatedly throws up on the bed, and my roommate has suspicions about who it is. I hate him, they keep messaging me. I hate him I hate him I hate him. They stock up on cat photos and send them to the couple periodically over two hours, wiping the time stamps so it looks like we were in the apartment longer than the fifteen minutes it took to meet the cats’ basic survival needs. How do they live like this? we whispered, and then the couple later mention that they regularly hire a person to clean.

Another year passes, and Amber and Karl are reunited with their owners. It’s my roommate’s and my third year in the neighborhood, which we moved into during the pandemic when rent prices had dropped. At the end of our second year, our building changed landlords, and now that our lease was ending, they were pricing us out. Another friend in the neighborhood also left shortly after us. Not even a quarter through her year-long lease, a note was slipped under her door. NYU had purchased her building, presumably as housing for their hospital nearby, and gave her a month to vacate.

In the months leading up to our move, my roommate prepares by passing the catsitting gig to a college student they know. The couple invites us over to play with the cats in their backyard, and to show the new catsitter around. While my roommate and the husband do their yapping thing, the wife takes me aside because I had previously shared that I was looking for top surgery supplies. She gives me a pillow and some other recovery items from when she had gotten a breast reduction. I assume it’s pretty similar, she said, and she wasn’t technically wrong. “Cosmetic” surgeries for cis people and “gender-affirming” surgeries for trans people are both usually done by a plastics department, and the delineation between “cis” and “trans” plastic surgeries, aside from knowledge and style, was mostly a matter of access and how they were criminalized.

I grow tired before my roommate does and am excited to leave. After dropping off the surgery supplies at our apartment, I take a long, rambling walk around the neighborhood. Before I was a runner, I took walks often, but never ran into the couple. It always surprises me how big or small the city can be. I’ll meet dozens of neighbors once, then never see them again, but, of course, on a random train, I’ll run into a hookup with whom things didn’t end well and be forced to sit together for fifteen minutes because I already made eye contact and it’s too late to pretend like I didn’t, and I’m neither quick nor smooth enough to just say hi and keep it moving.

The couple maintains a friendly rapport with my roommate and me before it naturally fizzles out. They send photos when they adopt a small dachshund, who they dress in costumes and take to restaurants. The cats love him, they say, although the new catsitter reports that they all hide in the other room when the dog is around. Sometimes I think about hiding too, and I fear I identify the most with Amber. I tell myself that my dream is to fall off the face of the earth and do nothing but write picture books and run, yet people keep calling me back.

Ever heard of a beauty quark? How about a glueball? Physics is full of weird particles that leave many of us scratching our heads. But these tiny particles make up everything in the quantum world and in us and are the basis of the fundamental scientific theory called The Standard Model. But it doesn’t explain everything. It can’t account for dark matter or dark energy, for example. We find out whether new physics experiments might force us to rewrite the Standard Model. Plus, we discuss a NASA proposal to fly spacecraft close to the sun in search of new physics.

Guests:

Phil Plait – Aka the Bad Astronomer, former astronomer on Hubble, teacher, lecturer and debunker of conspiracy theories. He is also the author of a new book “Under Alien Skies: A Sightseer’s Guide to the Universe.”

Harry Cliff – Particle physicist at the University of Cambridge who works on the LHCb experiment at the largest particle physics laboratory in the world, CERN. He is the author of: “Space Oddities, The Mysterious Anomalies Challenging Our Understanding of the Universe.”

Slava Turyshev – Research scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Featuring music by Dewey Dellay and Jun Miyake

You can get early access to ad-free versions of every episode by joining us on Patreon. Thanks for your support!

Big Picture Science is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Please contact advertising@airwavemedia.com to inquire about advertising on Big Picture Science.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The ultimatum by war cabinet member Benny Gantz reflects discontent among Israel's leadership about Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's handling of the Gaza war and his far-right political partners.

(Image credit: Alex Wong)