David A. Graham

@dgraham.bsky.social

Journalist, nouvelle-lettrist, and unionist at The Atlantic. Rubber City -> Bull City. dgraham@theatlantic.com NYT bestseller THE PROJECT out now: https://smarturl.it/GHz99R

A couple of months ago, I got a call from a party operative who pitched a story on the Democrats’ effort to “win back the manosphere.” The operative ran through a list of a half dozen candidates in key House districts who “are engaging culturally in male spaces”—a bit of gobbledygook that I took to mean “manly men,” or perhaps “guy’s guys,” but that also reflects the sort of anthropological distance that points to the depth of the party’s problem. After all, an ironworker probably wouldn’t describe himself as “engaging culturally in male spaces.”

Then after going through a comically long maze of barriers, I was stopped at the State Fair entrance for carrying a pad and pen, tools of my trade. (I had requested a media credential online as instructed by Fair organizers days earlier, but never heard back, so I went through the regular gate.) Gatekeepers apparently were instructed that the pen is as deadly as the sword. The pad could stay, I was told, but not the pen. I pointed out that the official prohibited items list made no mention of writing implements. The guard said my pen fit under the "Any other items determined to be potential safety hazards" category.

I asked how a pen was hazardous and he immediately brought a co-worker over and fake stabbed him in the neck repeatedly with my pen. "Right in the jugular!" he said, completely not joking. I was in awe at the ludicrousness. So I entered with my Notes app and a bad attitude.

Riding a blend of country, pop and rock, with a gravelly voice that could match Rod Stewart or Kim Carnes pebble for pebble, Ms. Tyler emerged from the Welsh pub-rock scene in the mid-1970s.

Even by his usual standards, Trump has been incoherent in Ankara, Turkey, where he’s attending a NATO summit. Over the course of 24 hours, he has renewed his demands for the United States to own Greenland; confused Iran with Japan; and confused Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky with Russian President Vladimir Putin. He also noted that his videos are popular on “Tic Tac.” He meant “TikTok.”

Courses will be required at University of Iowa Center for Intellectual Freedom
Gov. Reynolds signed a law requiring students to take courses at the new center pushed by conservatives

"It's amazing what happened," Trump continued, either still speaking in the voice of an extremely impressed King of Saudi Arabia or in his own. Honestly, they're both right, and it means the same thing either way. To some extent this is just Trump oafishly trying to manifest fantasy into reality by saying it over and over. Mostly, though, it is just what it looks like, which is him asserting his belief that the country is humiliated and ridiculous and ruined whenever and wherever he is not absolutely in charge of it

WSJ headline:

How a $45 Million Donation Brought Larry Ellison Deeper Into Trump’s Circle
The billionaire’s private friendship with the president has helped Oracle’s business and his son’s media conglomerate

$It’s worth pausing here to examine the fundamental premise of Special as DOGE for the private sector. You might have a few questions, including but not limited to: Wait, I thought DOGE was supposed to be about taking private-sector business acumen and bringing it to the bloated public sector? Isn’t the private sector already run like the private sector? How is Special going to run the DOGE playbook inside these companies? Isn’t this essentially just what a consulting firm does? Or private equity? And then, of course: Wasn’t DOGE a deeply unpopular, failed experiment that saved a small fraction of its claimed savings while cutting more than 10,000 government contracts, including lifesaving international aid?$