Now at this last we must take a hard road, a road unforeseen. There lies our hope, if hope it be.

Tolkien JRR. The Fellowship of the Ring (The Lord of the Rings, Book 1). HarperCollins UK

The trailer for Wake Up Dead Man, the new Knives Out movie.

Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig) returns for his most dangerous case yet in the third and darkest chapter of Rian Johnson’s murder mystery opus. Starring Daniel Craig, Josh O’Connor, Glenn Close, Josh Brolin, Mila Kunis, Jeremy Renner, Kerry Washington, Andrew Scott, Cailee Spaeny, Daryl McCormack, and Thomas Haden Church.

The trailer for Wake Up Dead Man, the new Knives Out movie.

Alexandra Petri reporting in The Atlantic on Florida’s elimination of vaccine mandates:

Florida is the first state to take the courageous step toward decluttering itself of excess children, but under the inexpert guidance of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., other states may follow. If we lose herd immunity, we will bring back diseases that had formerly been eliminated, and some children who would otherwise have been protected will perish. But no price is too high to pay in this pointless war against decades of lifesaving science. Confusingly, this effort is being taken up at the same time that people are very concerned about dropping birth rates, but it makes sense when you understand that they don’t like the children we currently have. They want us to make other ones instead.

Bernie Sanders, in a NYT op-ed:

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the secretary of health and human services, is endangering the health of the American people now and into the future. He must resign.

Mr. Kennedy and the rest of the Trump administration tell us, over and over, that they want to Make America Healthy Again. That’s a great slogan. I agree with it. The problem is that since coming into office President Trump and Mr. Kennedy have done exactly the opposite.

Powerful and to the point. Sanders, unlike the nine former CDC directors whose joint op-ed ran the next day, doesn’t pull punches. But there’s no point demanding Kennedy resign, because he won’t. Sanders, and the rest of us, should call on Trump to fire him. The buck stops with Trump. Trump fires his appointees all the time. Almost no one lasted long in the Trump 1.0 administration, and it’s unlikely anyone will last long in the Trump 2.0 administration. (Including, perhaps, Trump himself, who is clearly unwell.) Kennedy ought to be the first to go.

Trump smells it too, hence this “both sides” post on his blog this morning. Public opinion is strongly against this abject vaccine quackery.

The New York Times video features a number of scientists who were working on stuff like HIV treatments and life-saving cancer research but whose work has been shut down or curtailed by the Trump regime cutting their funding.

Annie Lowrey for The Atlantic:

In the end, the top 400 Americans paid an estimated 23.8 percent of their income to Uncle Sam from 2018 to 2020—down from roughly 30 percent before the passage of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, in 2017. They paid 1.3 percent of their total wealth to the IRS in those years, down from 2.7 percent from 2010 to 2013. Their tax rates were lower than the average paid by all American households.

The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, Trump’s signature first-term domestic-policy package, helped these billionaires keep more of their money. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, passed this summer, extends the TCJA’s tax cuts, creates new business loopholes, and lowers taxes on estates. To help offset the revenue losses, the Trump administration is stripping health coverage from millions of low-income Americans and shrinking the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. The rich, including Trump, will keep getting richer. The poor will pay for it.

And yet the poor proudly support Trump and his administration. Truly mind boggling.

In the aftermath of the 2016 election, British American artist Jo Hay began a series of engaging portraits called Persisters “that depict contemporary, trailblazing women in pursuit of civil rights and justice”. Pictured above are her paintings of Letitia James, Elizabeth Warren, Greta Thunberg, Christine Blasey Ford, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Marie Yovanovitch.

The ultrawealthy are threating to leave if Zohran Mamdani institutes 2% tax hike on New York’s millionaire class. Go ahead - leave. As Nia Law and Lindsay Owens states in a Rolling Stones commentary:

The evidence for millionaire tax flight is scant. If high earners were truly fleeing high taxes, low-tax states would be swarming with millionaires. Instead, the highest concentrations of millionaires are found in high-tax states like Connecticut, Maryland, and New Jersey. And in these states, taxes levied on the highest earners have been broadly successful, with ​​Massachusetts’ millionaire tax generating an additional $2 billion in revenue than expected in the last year alone.

Wealth has a way of clustering. The wealthy tend to settle in places that reflect their status while offering exclusivity, cultural depth, and financial stability.

What draws them in?

• Global financial hubs that merge business opportunities with luxury lifestyles
• Cultural capitals rich with art, theater, and prestige
• Exclusive lifestyle enclaves known for security and refinement
• Thriving luxury markets that cater to high-end tastes

At the end of the day, affluent individuals are drawn to cities that deliver safety, exclusivity, opportunity, and cultural prestige — places where wealth feels “at home” among peers.

And in the U.S., no city embodies all of those qualities more completely than New York City.

So when it comes to taxing the rich? So when the wealthy threaten to leave? Let’s be honest — they’re not going anywhere.

Nell Greenfieldboyce reporting on All Things Considered podcast that Light pollution has lengthened birds’ days:

Their day is almost an hour longer. They start vocalizing about 20 minutes earlier in the morning and they stop vocalizing about 30 minutes later in the evening.

Ozzy Osbourne - the Prince of Darkness has died at 76. Kory Grow writing for Rolling Stone:

Ozzy Osbourne, the singular metal legend whose Black Sabbath virtually invented heavy metal and in later years became a reality TV pioneer, has died. He was 76.

Osbourne’s family confirmed his death in a statement shared with The Guardian. “It is with more sadness than mere words can convey that we have to report that our beloved Ozzy Osbourne has passed away this morning,” they said. “He was with his family and surrounded by love. We ask everyone to respect our family privacy at this time.

RIP. Cue Iron Man up to 11 today.

In a move that defies both logic and morality, the Trump administration ordered nearly 500 metric tons of emergency food aid to be incinerated—enough to feed approximately 1.5 million children for an entire week. Instead of delivering this life-saving nourishment to vulnerable populations abroad, the food will soon be reduced to ash. The food, originally intended for children in crisis zones like Afghanistan and Pakistan, is set to expire—and rather than expedite its delivery, the administration has chosen destruction.

Hana Kiros writing for The Atlantic:

Nearly 500 metric tons of emergency food—enough to feed about 1.5 million children for a week—are set to expire tomorrow, according to current and former government employees with direct knowledge of the rations. Within weeks, two of those sources told me, the food, meant for children in Afghanistan and Pakistan, will be ash.

And it gets worse.

Despite the administration’s repeated promises to continue food aid, and Rubio’s testimony that he would not allow existing food to go to waste, even more food could soon expire. Hundreds of thousands of boxes of emergency food pastes, also already purchased, are currently collecting dust in American warehouses. According to USAID inventory lists from January, more than 60,000 metric tons of food—much of it grown in America, and all already purchased by the U.S. government—were then sitting in warehouses across the world. That included 36,000 pounds of peas, oil, and cereal, which were stored in Djibouti and intended for distribution in Sudan and other countries in the Horn of Africa. A former senior official at USAID’s Bureau for Humanitarian Assistance told me that, by the time she’d left her job earlier this month, very little of the food seemed to have moved; one of the current USAID employees I spoke with confirmed her impression, though he noted that, in recent weeks, small shipments have begun leaving the Djibouti warehouse.

The food was ready. The need is desperate. The infrastructure existed. But the will to help? Gone.

This isn’t just about policy. It’s about who we are as a country. Are we the kind of people who let food rot — or worse, burn it — while children starve? Every box of food destroyed is a child who could have eaten. Every ration torched is a symbol of just how far we’ve strayed.

Elle Griffin on when Silicon Valley got rich:

As tech companies proliferated throughout Silicon Valley in the 1970s and 80s, so did their stock plans. Reagan-era tax policies further incentivized employee equity, allowing shareholders to defer tax payments until stocks were sold and reducing the taxes paid when they were. As more employees were paid in equity, more of them got rich. When Apple went public in 1980, it created 300 millionaires. When Microsoft did in 1986, 3,000 employees became millionaires. After Google’s IPO in 2004, 1,000 employees held stock worth more than $5 million. By 2007, even employees who had been at Google for a year owned about $276,000 in stock value on average.

As entrepreneurs and executives grew rich from their exits, they founded even more companies or funded them as investors. When PayPal sold in 2002, it famously made megamillionaires out of its executives and launched a new era of Silicon Valley: Peter Thiel used his riches to found Palantir and invest in Facebook, Elon Musk founded Tesla and SpaceX, Reid Hoffman founded LinkedIn, three engineers founded YouTube, and two others founded Yelp.

Employee equity programs created a new entrepreneurial class and fostered a generation of employee-owned companies.

They also led to rampant inequality.

Great Art Explained is one of my top YouTube channels and now there is a book coming out this fall.

Art can be thrilling, and resonate on a deep personal level. It is how you view the work, place it in context and understand its history that makes an artwork truly come alive.

A fresh approach to a classic subject, James Payne’s no-nonsense analysis sheds new light on 30 masterpieces from around the globe and reveals what makes them truly timeless works of art.

Each chapter delves into not only the art itself but also the artist’s life, as well as the work’s place in their wider oeuvre; in other words, what makes it “great.”

You can preorder Great Art Explained from Amazon.

Hi, I’m Wes Anderson. I have made, apparently, 12 films and I’m now going to walk us through every one of them in some way.

Listening to thoughtful, creative people talking earnestly about their work is almost always worth the time, and frequently rare these days.

Whoever this writer is - he nails the Trump voter perfectly:

If written language survives the next six weeks, we’ll be writing about Donald Trump for a thousand years. But whatever else there is to say, the most important thing about Donald Trump, the thing that is obvious from watching him speak for just 14 seconds, is that he is profoundly stupid. Whatever it is that he might be talking about or doing at any given moment, it’s clear that while he has a reptilian instinct for reading and stoking conflict, he has no real idea what’s going on and he doesn’t really care to. Stupid is what he is and where he comes from. It is his mind and his soul. Catholic was what JFK was. Gay was what Harvey Milk was. Stupid is who Donald Trump is.

And that’s what they love most, the Stupid-American voters.

Remember that sentence you heard at the beginning of all this in 2016? “He’s just saying what everybody is thinking.”

But see, not everybody was thinking that Hillary Clinton was an alien, that global warming was a Chinese hoax and that what America needed most of all was a plywood wall stretching from Texas to California. Only the stupid people were. And suddenly, in an instant, the most powerful man on earth was thinking just like them. With his clueless smirk and unstoppable rise, he turned people whose stupidity made them feel like nobody into people who felt like everybody.

That’s why he’ll never lose them. Because it was never about what he did or didn’t do. All that stuff is very confusing and the Stupid-American community isn’t interested in the details. They love him for who he is, which is one of them, and because he shows them every day that Stupid-Americans can reach the social mountaintop.

You can blame the internet as a whole, but it’s social media that’s doing the heavy lifting — sorting us faster and more efficiently than any government ever could.

Denis Villeneuve is set to direct the next James Bond film for Amazon MGM Studios. Great choice - his work on Dune was amazing.

An excellent video explanation from Jamelle Bouie of what Jim Crow was, how it developed, and how it continues to reverberate in American today.

If you are an American watching this, and you had a standard social studies or history class in high school, you may think of Jim Crow as more or less simply being separate institutions, separate bathrooms, separate water fountains — various kinds of public disrespect. And those certainly were the symbols of Jim Crow, symbols of outward public disrespect. But that’s not what the system was.

Jim Crow the system was something we would recognize today, and describe as today, as authoritarian. And specifically, it was an authoritarian system of labor control and political control. The Jim Crow states sharply limited political participation by large parts of their population — most of them black, but not a small number of them white as well — and the Jim Crow states themselves were largely vehicles for the interest of powerful owners of capital and property: land owners, factory owners — people who had a vested interest in direct control of labor. The social separation, the extreme and atavistic violence, the theft, the plunder — all of these things were downstream of this effort to control political behavior and control labor. They were the mechanisms of that control, the way to keep people in line or keep them bought into the system if they were on the white side of the color line.

A dry look into an under covered era of our history - but well worth watching.

Lawrence O’Donnell kicked off his Wednesday night broadcast of “The Last Word” with a question: “If Donald Trump gets dementia, how will we know?”

Citing numerous confusing remarks that the president has made in recent days about everything from Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell to the Declaration of Independence.

Donald Trump’s mental decline, which is more and more obvious, started from such a low level of mental processing power that it’s hard to track his decline. It’s from low to lower.

O’Donnell went on to mock Trump for seemingly implying during a recent Oval Office press conference that the Declaration of Independence was written during the American Civil War.

We’ve always known that Donald Trump could not possibly pass a high school AP History course. We’ve always known that Donald Trump couldn’t pass any test in any high school history course. But now we know that he couldn’t possibly have passed a history test in my third grade at Saint Brendan’s Elementary School in Boston.

[…]

The psychiatrists promised us in the first year of the first Trump presidency that there was only one direction that his mental health could go. Every day, Donald Trump proves them right.

A sad faced Donny ‘Two Dolls’ Trump’s at birthday spectacle:

The contrast couldn’t be clearer: a $45 million taxpayer-funded military parade with rows of empty bleachers, versus tens of thousands rallying across the country under the banner of “No Kings Day”. One event was staged pageantry meant to project dominance; the other arose organically from a public deeply concerned about democracy’s erosion. It was the grassroots protests — not the tanks — that captured the national mood.

Here’s a side-by-side breakdown:

True democratic strength isn’t measured by military flyovers or choreographed displays — it’s measured by how many people feel compelled to take a stand when no one tells them they have to.

While tanks squeaked past quiet crowds in D.C., at more than 2,000 communities across the U.S. thousands filled streets and parks with signs, chants, and resolve. The silence of the parade was deafening. The voice of the protests? Unmistakable.

“No Kings Day” struck a nerve because it wasn’t just about Trump — it was about drawing a line. About saying that democracy can’t be reduced to spectacle, nor freedom to a slogan. In that contrast, a truth emerged:

The power is with the people.