Diet Coke

Speaking to Ezra Klein, Massachusetts congressman Jake Auchincloss on why Democrats shouldn’t be learning towards populism to win back voters:

[M]y view on that is that voters who ordered a Coca-Cola don’t want a Diet Coke. There are two different parties. We have to start by understanding who our voters are not and then understanding who our voters could be — and go and try to win them over. If you’re walking to the polls and your No. 1 issue is guns, immigration or trans participation in sports, you’re probably not going to be a Democratic voter. That’s OK. There are two parties.

But if you are a voter who went Obama, Trump, Biden, Trump, and you’re walking to the polls and your No. 1 issue is cost of living — boy, we’d better win you back.

"The question remains: Why do journalists keep legitimizing a space where they are increasingly treated as targets rather than truth-tellers?"

— Oliver Darcy on journalists still using X despite Musk’s intensifying attacks on press freedom.

"In messages to newsroom staff, the company announced that it’s opening up AI training to the newsroom, and debuting a new internal AI tool called Echo to staff, Semafor has learned. The Times also shared documents and videos laying out editorial do’s and don’t for using AI, and shared a suite of AI products that staff could now use to develop web products and editorial ideas."

— Max Tani for Semafor: New York Times goes all-in on internal AI tools

“As a global news agency that disseminates news around the world, the AP must ensure that place names and geography are easily recognizable to all audiences."

— Associated Press executive editor Julie Pace in a letter to White House chief of staff, Susie Wiles. The AP is in a stand-off with the Trump administration over its decision to continue to refer to the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of Mexico.

The Guardian: AP excoriates White House barring of reporters as ‘alarming precedent’

In the New York Times:

For years, officials in the Czech Republic had pushed a dam project to protect a river south of Prague, and the critically endangered species living in it. But the project, hamstrung by land negotiations, stalled.

In the meantime, a group of chisel-toothed mammals — renowned for their engineering skills and work ethic, and unencumbered by bureaucracy — decided to take on the task. The beavers of Prague simply built dams themselves.

"[A]uthoritarianism does not require the destruction of the constitutional order. What lies ahead is not fascist or single-party dictatorship but competitive authoritarianism—a system in which parties compete in elections but the incumbent’s abuse of power tilts the playing field against the opposition."

— Steven Levitsky and Lucan A. Way in Foreign Affairs: The Path to American Authoritarianism

"What they rarely considered was whether something else might be responsible for the disconnect — whether, for instance, government statistics were fundamentally flawed. What if the numbers supporting the case for broad-based prosperity were themselves misrepresentations? What if, in fact, darker assessments of the economy were more authentically tethered to reality?"

— Eugene Ludwig, Politico: How Democrats Were Tricked Into Believing the Economy Was Strong

“Our only job is to sit in a rocking chair and cradle a stranger’s infant to the left side of our chest — the heart side — to share with the tiny being the mammalian soundtrack of that beating: I am here. You are here. Just that, nothing more."

— Denise DiIanni, a “baby cuddler”: When Your Only Job Is to Cuddle

"He has two unerring goals. The first is to recreate the imperial presidency that was buried in the mid-1970s after Richard Nixon’s resignation. Post-Watergate Washington passed a flurry of reforms that tied the hands of the executive branch, notably the CIA, the Department of Justice and the FBI. Trump is dissolving those restraints. The second is to make money for himself and his family."

— Edward Luce: Trump’s imperial emporium

"We’re not done. Our reporters are getting hundreds of new tips every day and are publishing their latest reporting on WIRED.com at a breakneck pace. To say this moment is unpredictable would be an understatement, but trust me—we’ll continue to do our jobs with utmost vigor, and we’ll work to bring you the most authoritative, trustworthy coverage of tech’s all-out invasion of the American government.”

— Wired editor Katie Drummond on the magazine’s agenda-setting reporting on DOGE

"[T]he political scientist Elizabeth David-Barrett lays out three general mechanisms of state capture. They now sound familiar: shaping the rules of the game through law and policy; influencing administrative decisions by capturing the budget, appointments, government contracts and regulatory decisions; and disabling checks on power by dismantling accountability structures like the judiciary, law enforcement and prosecution, and audit institutions like the inspectors general and the media."

—

Tyler McBrien, managing editor of Lawfare: What Is ‘State Capture’? A Warning for Americans

"But a voice is not just a sound. And I’d like to think that no matter how much an A.I. version of Moe or Snake or Chief Wiggum will sound like my voice, something will still be missing — the humanness. There’s so much of who I am that goes into creating a voice. How can the computer conjure all that?"

— voice artist Hank Azaria in the New York Times: Can Characters Come Alive Without People?

"The oligarchs are not conservative. They’re certainly not on the right. Everything they’re doing — crawling on their bellies, to try to get into and pollute this movement — is because they see the raw political power of this movement. I find it disgusting and revolting."

— Steve Bannon, speaking to the New York Times’ Ross Douthat