The post We’ve tracked $80M of spending on almost 170 AI‑generated political ads this year – it’s weird appeared first on Salon.com.

Think about what you’re wearing right now. Did you pick it out? Or was it chosen for you by an algorithm you haven’t even considered? 

You may think it’s the former, but with the state of the fashion industry, it’s likely the latter. There was a time when taste was decided by designers at luxury fashion houses, à la Karl Lagerfeld at Chanel, or Anna Wintour-type magazine editors (think of the famous cerulean sweater monologue from The Devil Wears Prada). Now, in the era of fast fashion, our clothing options are often dictated by computers. 

Amy Odell writes the Back Row newsletter and hosts a podcast with the same name. She told Vox that what’s known as fast fashion has been kicked into hyperdrive by companies like Shein. 

“I’ve also heard it called instant fashion,” she says. “The way it works is that they use algorithms to track trends and what people are interested in, and then they make a few hundred of a very large number of different items and they test demand.” She says this model has allowed companies like Shein to introduce around 4,700 new apparel styles per day. (For comparison, fast-fashion brand Zara produces around 20,000 a year.)

Some are trying to claw back their personal style by hitting the thrift store instead. Traditionally, it’s where people go to find less expensive clothes. But fashion journalist Hannah Marriott says it can be so much more than that. 

“For the last probably a hundred years, [the thrift store] has had lots of moments where it’s been cool within countercultures,” Marriott told Vox. “Whether it’s grunge, or the surrealists in the 1920s, or the Rolling Stones in the 1960s, secondhand clothing was cool because of the stigma.” 

So how did thrifting go from stigmatized to chic? And are thrift stores still thrifty now that they’re more mainstream, especially in an era of ultra-cheap Shein clothing? We find out that and more on the latest episode of Explain It to Me, Vox’s weekly call-in podcast. 

Below is an excerpt of my conversation with Marriott, edited for length and clarity. You can listen to the full episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you’d like to submit a question, send an email to askvox@vox.com or call 1-800-618-8545.

There’s sometimes this stigma that’s attached to buying secondhand clothes. How has its perception changed over time?

Secondhand clothing used to be something that there was a real sense that if you couldn’t buy new, you would buy secondhand. At the same time, it has had lots of moments where it’s been cool within countercultures. 

People within countercultures — whether it’s grunge, or the surrealists in the 1920s, or the Rolling Stones in the 1960s — secondhand clothing was cool because of the stigma. It’s also been a really important resource for people on lower incomes for a long time. 

I think it was a gradual shift by various things that happened in the pandemic, including this absolute influx of apps [like the RealReal and Depop] that got very, very popular during that time, particularly among younger Gen Z consumers. 

Thrifting became a social currency on social media platforms, especially on TikTok. It’s a vast ecosystem at the moment, and all of them have slightly different business models, slightly different fees that they charge, and slightly different audiences that they’re reaching. The stigma has really gone away, and it’s almost reversed.

What does that ecosystem look like?

There are different layers to it. There are consignment places like the RealReal where they take quite a big cut, but they will promote your items for you. I think those sites tend to work best if you’ve actually got designer clothes that have quite a big margin, particularly handbags. 

“I think maybe this is a reaction to 30 years of fast fashion just getting faster and faster and faster.”

Then there are other sites that are a bit more laid-back: eBay maybe skews a bit older, Depop skews a bit younger and trendier. There’s Vinted, which I know from the UK, but is making inroads into the US now. There’s ThreadUp as well. Poshmark. 

It’s an absolutely vast ecosystem at the moment, and all of them have slightly different business models, slightly different fees that they charge, and slightly different audiences that they’re reaching.

One of the biggest secondhand shops here in the US is still Goodwill. Can you walk me through how Goodwill has adapted and changed to the secondhand boom?

Neighborhood thrift stores of that kind are the sort of stores that people on lower incomes do rely on more. It’s less trend-led than something like Depop. And it is somewhere that people have often been going for decades to get clothes that they can afford. 

Goodwill undeniably has put its prices up. Inflation is such an issue for everyone, so I’m sure that there would be an element of prices going up anyway, but a lot of shoppers feel strongly that they’ve gone up a lot — that you can’t find bargains anymore, that the bargains get sent online to either their website or are bought by resellers who sell them for an inflated price online. 

It’s hard to get to the bottom of exactly how true all of that is, especially because Goodwill is run as 150 autonomous [nonprofits], and each of them set their own prices. But what I would say is you are seeing things like the Goodwill branch in Connecticut charging $75 bucks to go on a thrift tour coach to get early access to a Goodwill store, and then you get to go to another store. You used to be able to buy 10 things in Goodwill for $75.

It’s so interesting that thrifting used to be this edgy original thing, but it’s really gone mainstream. Has it sold out? 

I remember when I was much younger, people would say, “Ooh, you got that secondhand.” I just don’t think anyone would ever say that now because that’s kind of how we shop. 

But I still think it is great if you find something original that you love that no one else has, and I still think you’re more likely to find it secondhand or in certain other under-the-radar brands that aren’t fast fashion. 

I think maybe this is a reaction to 30 years of fast fashion just getting faster and faster and faster. I think we’re all feeling a bit tired of that business model, so we’re trying to find other ways to shop and express ourselves.

The biggest scandal in the modern history of professional sports broke wide open across the Atlantic this past week. How much that reflects larger social, cultural and economic pathologies and whether it affects regular people’s lives in any meaningful way is a complicated question. At the very least, I would suggest that the Manchester City scandal, which has driven the already-overheated British media to new heights of hysteria, isn’t really about soccer or sports. 

Man City (often simply called “City”) is by far the most successful team in the English Premier League over the last 15 years and one of the four or five biggest soccer franchises in the world. Last week an independent legal panel delivered a long-anticipated verdict, finding the club guilty on 114 counts of systematic financial fraud, amounting to more than a billion dollars in fake revenues and sham commercial sponsorships. This scathing judgment only covers the years from 2009 to 2018, but no one thinks the actual or alleged fraud suddenly stopped after that.

Effectively, the verdict amounts to a finding that City cheated their way to the top of world football through a dizzying but blatant series of scams and shell games, allowing the team’s petro-state owners to illegally outspend competitors and pump hundreds of millions into inflated salaries for star players like Norwegian thirst-trap Erling Haaland (he of the formerly golden locks), Kevin De Bruyne and Sergio Agüero, and illustrious coaches, first and foremost among them the Catalan genius Pep Guardiola. 

Along with winning numerous championships and tournaments, Man City changed the nature of the world’s favorite sport and transformed the EPL from a medium-size U.K.-based enterprise plagued by hooliganism, erratic attendance and crumbling stadiums into a global merchandising and marketing empire whose broadcasts, “kits” and online fan clubs extend from Indonesia to Arkansas. 

If you belong to the large proportion of humanity inclined to a shrug-emoji reaction — billionaire oligarchs, overpaid athletes, incalculable sums of dirty money; who cares? — the first thing to say is that you’re absolutely right and that’s the only healthy response. But the salient fact that pushes the Man City narrative beyond a sports-business scandal and toward more cultural, political and even philosophical terrain is that virtually everyone who followed soccer and the EPL understood what was happening all along. That sort of willful blindness or collective cynicism is by no means limited to sports or celebrity culture — and it has become a widespread corrosive force in our society.

At any rate, everyone who was paying attention rapidly perceived the pattern after 2008, when Manchester City — a historically mediocre team with a modest fan base, sad-sack local rivals to Manchester United, who dominated the sport in the 1990s — was acquired by the Abu Dhabi United Group, a private equity firm closely aligned, shall we say, with the royal family of a Persian Gulf autocratic state. (Exactly how closely, and whether ADUG can be considered a separate entity from the Abu Dhabi government, is one of the issues at stake in the byzantine Man City case, now heading into an appeal process that could take years.)

It’s worth noting here that City Football Group, the ADUG subsidiary that has poured all that money into Man City, also owns or operates football/soccer clubs and related real estate projects around the world, including New York City FC in Major League Soccer, which at this moment is constructing an expensive new stadium in Queens, to be named — like everything else in the CFG universe — for Etihad Airways, Abu Dhabi’s state-owned carrier. 

Here lies the central conundrum of the Man City scandal, which is, like so much else about this story, a dirty secret that is no secret at all. Abu Dhabi’s petrodollars are deeply embedded in the economies of many Western nations, and any serious effort to punish or exile ADUG’s prize sporting property could have far-reaching ripple effects. That goes a long way toward explaining why U.K. Prime Minister Andy Burnham, who has struck such a forceful posture toward Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu, has issued only vague blandishments about this explosive case on his own home turf, and clearly hopes the whole thing will simply go away.

In his excellent summary of the City scandal, Alex Shephard of the New Republic observes that the “massive accounting sham” behind the team’s spectacular rise under the Abu Dhabi ownership was concealed only in threadbare fashion, and was widely tolerated for a range of interlocking reasons: 

Manchester City committed fraud on a massive scale primarily as a soft power project for an authoritarian nation because it was allowed to do so. The Premier League chose to look away. The team was good and the money was flowing. Questions about its finances — let alone about its ownership — were swept under the rug. As Manchester City became the best team in the Premier League, the Premier League became the most powerful league in Europe and, by extension, the world.

It isn’t easy to translate this tangled affair into American terms, and in any case I’m here to argue that the real significance of the Man City story is not about big-money skulduggery in professional sports. But let’s imagine that the Los Angeles Dodgers or the New York Knicks were found to have broken the rules of their respective leagues to such an extraordinary degree that observers seriously suggested that their recent championships should be stricken from the record books and that the teams themselves should be banished from Major League Baseball and the NBA for years to come, if not forever. (Such outcomes are on the table in the City case; so is a slap on the wrist and a large payoff, or a negotiated compromise somewhere in between.)

Let’s further imagine that we had collectively decided that the Dodgers or Knicks were so entertaining to watch that we’d pretend not to notice that they were owned by Kim Jong-un’s first cousin or Vladimir Putin’s niece. (Which if anything is understating the case: ADUG’s proprietor, Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed, is the brother of Abu Dhabi’s absolute ruler and his regime’s vice president.) Then we’d pretend we were surprised to learn that their entire operation was shamelessly corrupt, when the only genuinely surprising part was that the leagues involved had decided to risk their own survival by exposing the financial misdeeds after all those years of looking the other way.

My point here is that while I’m surprised to find myself writing yet another article in 2026 about soccer — if you presume that betrays some personal interest, you would be correct — this one isn’t really about soccer at all. Whatever ultimate judgment befalls Manchester City after years of legal wrangling is beside the point, although there’s some grim amusement to be found in comments sections on The Athletic, as fans try to “well, actually” or DYOR a verdict that will certainly tarnish the team’s reputation in perpetuity.

This is partly a story, as Shephard says, about sportswashing and the immense soft-power reach of authoritarian regimes like the UAE, Qatar and Saudi Arabia, all of which are heavily invested in professional soccer and other global sporting ventures. (Paris Saint-Germain, the biggest team in France and current European champions, was once owned by its fans but is now a property of the Qatari state.) Beyond that, it’s a story about questions almost too large to describe clearly.

It’s a story about a world that pretends to value democracy but is increasingly defined by massive inequality, oligarchy and, for that matter, monarchy. It’s about a world where the billionaire ex-president of the United States had to run for re-election in order to stay out of prison — and it worked. A world where the two most respected organizations in American broadcast journalism, CNN and CBS News, could come under the control of one man, who transparently aims to turn them into propaganda outlets supporting one faction of one political party. 

It’s a story, in other words, about how much we will put up with. Or rather about how much we have convinced ourselves we must accept, given the unimaginable imbalance between the tech billionaires and fossil-fuel despots on one side and the other 99.9% of us on the other, whose only feasible role is to be their servants, their worker drones or their captive audience, or else to be deemed expendable. 

It would be ridiculous to cast the English Premier League as a hero in that larger narrative, as if its current stance had anything to do with standing up against autocratic sportswashing or defending democracy and the rule of law. Man City may even have a point, on the level of libertarian economic theory, that the EPL’s financial rules were unfairly structured to prevent upstart teams from competing with long-established franchises like Liverpool, Arsenal and Manchester United, and that owners should be allowed to spend as much as they want to put a competitive team on the field. (That is, in fact, exactly how Major League Baseball operates, although its moment of reckoning is right around the corner.)

But there may also be a crude lesson under this dunderheaded clash of the titans that pertains to democracy, and can be seen reflected in the verdict on the Trump regime that we all see coming in this year’s American midterm elections, or in the surge of popular opposition to data centers and to the unrestricted development of AI. To paraphrase the maxim falsely attributed to Lincoln, you can fool a whole bunch of the people for a hell of a long time, but you can’t fool all of them forever. 

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Ultimately, the Premier League must have concluded that the reputational and economic damage of prosecuting its most successful team for obvious financial crimes — which is likely to be considerable — was preferable to the damage of not doing so. EPL leadership stuck a finger in the wind of public opinion, so to speak, and decided their best chance of not killing the golden goose lay in manning up for the principles they had visibly abandoned, or at least pretending to.

You definitely shouldn’t care what becomes of the EPL or Manchester City; I’d be better off if I didn’t either. Erling Haaland and his teammates will be fine, as will the Abu Dhabi royals, although whatever remains of the club’s pre-2008 Mancunian fanbase is likely to suffer bitterly. But you might care about finding the outer limits of the corrosive social and cultural corruption and cynicism to which we have all been subjected — and in which we have all been complicit — and then finding the courage and resolution to resist.

Will I watch Manchester City’s first post-verdict match on Oct. 11, against their archrivals Liverpool? Um, yeah. It’s a news event! I’m doing my job, or that’s what I’ll tell myself. But I won’t pretend my hands are clean.

The post Manchester City’s cheating scandal isn’t really about soccer appeared first on Salon.com.

We have no business running a private school.

We’re reporters, not teachers. That doesn’t matter. Inexperience has hardly been a barrier for those who want to start their own schools, as we have reported this year. And it didn’t stop us, either. 

Over the last few months, to test the process, reporters from ProPublica partnered with local journalists in three states to establish private schools. None required much effort.

In Arkansas, all it took was a few clicks on the Arkansas secretary of state website, $45 and an American flag to form a bona fide private school with the Arkansas Times.

We established a school with Mountain State Spotlight in West Virginia after filing our new school’s name and location with authorities on a piece of notebook paper, then exchanging a few emails.

And with The Assembly in North Carolina, we filed an online notice of intent to open a private school at Ponysaurus Brewing Co. in Durham, while perched on its metal bar stools, eyeing glasses of a crisp kolsch.

We used our names and news organization email addresses, following each state’s rules for starting private or microschools, a type of private school intended for just a few students. Experience running a school wasn’t needed. No one from any of the states asked us about our backgrounds or qualifications, though West Virginia did ask for proof of a high school diploma. No one questioned what we plan to teach or how we would measure whether students are learning.

And yet we could enroll students in two states right now, if we wanted to. Arkansas even suggested ways our school could accept public money through the state’s voucher-style program.

For the record, we are not enrolling students and have no intention of operating our new schools. We did, however, register a website for our new school ventures, ProPublicaAcademy.com, and even designed some fun pencils to show our school spirit.

This year, a team of ProPublica reporters has been documenting how the American education landscape is shifting dramatically as states use public money to help fund private schools. With few regulations, hundreds of new private and microschools have proliferated.

Our reporting has shown the relative ease with which people — some with questionable backgrounds — founded their own schools in unusual places. They’ve popped up in barns and on farms, in strip malls between an antique shop and an ax-throwing business and in churches, where lighting and sound for worship services is part of the curriculum.

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All of this led to a clear reporting question: If the hurdles to open a private school are so low, could we do it? And what would we learn along the way?

Inside a flag shop in Little Rock, we surveyed our options. There were handheld American flags on skinny sticks, midsize ones to display on a wall and majestic formal flags adorned with silky gold fringe.

State law in Arkansas doesn’t require much to open a private school, nothing about teacher skills or what kids learn. But it does require that all schools display an American flag, and we wanted to follow the rules. So, at the Arkansas Flag and Banner store, we decided on a smallish one that could fit in a circular base atop a newsroom cubicle. We also bought an Arkansas flag — even though only public schools are required to have those. Total cost: $49.45. 

Picking the flags for our new school was the hardest part of an astoundingly easy process.

Early in our reporting in Arkansas, we tried to figure out what steps we’d need to take to make a private school. We couldn’t find all the answers online, so we called the state.

“We don’t have rules for opening a private school,” Kaelin Clay, an Arkansas Department of Education spokesperson, told us earlier this year.

In fact, we didn’t even have to file anything with the Education Department. All it took was a few clicks on the Arkansas secretary of state’s website, where we registered the ProPublica-Arkansas Times Curiosity Academy LLC as a business, listed ourselves as agents and officers, and paid a fee. 

“We picked a name. We paid 45 bucks,” a ProPublica reporter noted after we submitted the application. With that, we had created a private school.

The secretary of state’s office approved our new business the same day. We even got a certificate. 

The Arkansas Department of Education does not regulate private schools once they’re open, and no one from the state inspected the Arkansas Times newsroom, the location we chose for our school. As far as we know, nobody checked our backgrounds, either.

Arkansas adopted a private school funding plan in 2023, and back then there were fewer than 100 private schools on record. With the state in the fourth year of its Education Freedom Accounts program, which provides vouchers that can be spent on private schools, there are now more than 220. 

In addition, 143 microschools, which are a different category in Arkansas, were approved this year to accept tax dollars. That’s up from about 100 last school year.

Establishing the Curiosity Academy was so simple — and, frankly, a bit anticlimactic — that reporters then applied to become eligible to receive public funds. (Again, we applied with our names, work email addresses and a note that this was a journalistic exercise. We had no intention of actually ever taking any public money.) 

We wanted to see how far our curiosity could take us. 

Accessing public funds as a microschool in Arkansas is easier than it is for other types of private schools, even though there is no limit to the number of students one can enroll. Unlike private schools, we didn’t need to seek accreditation or show proof of financial solvency to accept state funding. 

It took about 10 minutes to fill out the required information in early September. Other than our contact information, we had to upload just two documents — one detailing our proposed tuition and fees, and the other with our refund policy. 

We said that — “should we open a school” — our tuition and fees per student would not exceed $7,208 per school year, the exact amount of Education Freedom Account money that each student in Arkansas is eligible for this year. We said tuition “would be collected only if education is delivered, and it would be the policy of the school to refund all tuition payments for educational services that are not provided.”

When more than two weeks passed and we hadn’t heard back, we reached out to the state Education Department. An employee called back that afternoon and explained that the department had decided not to accept any more because the school year was underway.

But he didn’t reject us outright. He looked up our application and invited us to keep pursuing the public money. He said we still could apply to receive public money this school year, but as a vendor providing educational services such as tutoring. He also said we could apply as a microschool next year and even suggested a tweak to the language in our tuition policy should we decide to do that.

After we hung up, he emailed us the vendor application (which we will not pursue) and let us know the microschool application for next school year will open in the spring.

We asked the state Education Department whether it would be OK with us operating a publicly funded microschool. Clay, the spokesperson, said the agency’s role is to decide if schools meet state requirements. Microschool families, she said, “have the freedom to choose the educators and learning environments that best meet their children’s needs.”

Hunched over a desk in the Mountain State Spotlight newsroom in Charleston, West Virginia, pen in hand, we scrawled out official notice of our new school in a spiral-bound notebook. We wrote that we would serve middle school students and listed our first day as TBD.

Leaving the crunchy, ragged edges on the paper, we stuffed our notice of intent into an envelope. We’d seen other new operators file similarly casual ones as they sought to register private schools in West Virginia. 

Then we drove over to the state Education Department to deliver the request. Our group — two reporters, a photographer and a video journalist — went through security and, camera rolling, wound our way through the maze of the midcentury building. We got lost once, and our entourage received several perplexed glances from workers, but otherwise it was smooth sailing. The person we needed to deliver the letter to was out, but a friendly employee agreed to place it on his desk.

Dozens of new private and microschools have set up shop in the state in recent years, fueled by the roughly $5,400 the Hope Scholarship offers each student to pay tuition. New private schools all go through Dustin Lambert, a manager in the Office of Student Enrichment and Support at the West Virginia Department of Education.

We heard back from Lambert the next day. Our notice was received. (Hooray!) He said now we needed a letter from the fire marshal that our school building was safe for children. (Oh no.)

This was a problem. Our school would be housed in the Mountain State Spotlight newsroom, which had not been inspected as a school site. We didn’t want to usurp public resources to undergo a new inspection. It felt like the end of our Mountain State school experiment.

But it wasn’t.

After we followed up to ask whether all schools, including virtual schools, need safety clearance to register with the state, Lambert told us that though all brick-and-mortar private schools do, we “may want to consider the microschool route.” 

In that case, we later learned, the department wouldn’t be involved because state law doesn’t include any mechanism for oversight.  

West Virginia defines microschools as schools that charge tuition and are started by one or more teachers. In practice, there’s no real difference between a microschool and private school — neither has a limit on enrollment. (Yes, a micro can be macro.) He forwarded us the rules for starting a microschool, which involve providing proof of a high school diploma, at least. We notified the local school district of our new microschool venture and sent a college transcript.

The Kanawha County school district, in turn, notified the state of the existence of a new microschool.

And with that — bypassing the building health and safety requirements — we established the ProPublica-Mountain State Spotlight Curiosity Academy. Officials at the Department of Education said they were aware that journalists were establishing a school. But they had to just watch us do so — they have no authority over the state’s microschools.

In an official statement, the department’s spokesperson said it “does not approve or deny the operation of microschools for any reason, including the qualifications of the owner/operator.”

By law, should we open our microschool — and we won’t — we could enroll an unlimited number of students.

On Friday evenings, hundreds of people gather at Ponysaurus Brewing Co., a trendy spot in Durham, North Carolina, to savor its craft beers and cocktails, hardly the place you’d expect a school to open. But why not? 

On a recent Tuesday morning, the brewery was quiet and closed to customers. Behind the bar, yeast busily converted sugars into alcohol inside giant stainless steel fermentation tanks. Two journalists settled onto barstools beneath signs for pilsners and cherry sours. Icy cold glasses of Tell the Truth, a light and lemony ale, sat before them on a high-top table beside a stenographer’s notebook and a laptop. 

The brewery created the craft ale in partnership with The Assembly, which also is ProPublica’s journalistic partner in this private school endeavor, so it all felt very symbiotic. Ponysaurus’s owners had agreed to let us use their building and its fire and sanitation inspections, which are required to open a private school in the Tar Heel State.

Reporters from The Assembly and ProPublica scanned a state of North Carolina website that details how to file a notice of intent to open a private school. 

First, it explained the state’s statutory requirements for opening a private school, things like reporting the school’s name and address. We also would have to administer a standardized test in certain grades, if we were going to open an actual school, and maintain annual records about student attendance and immunizations. 

Then, we watched a four-minute, 39-second video explaining how to file the required notice of intent. 

From there it seemed simple. We created a login, then filled in the address of our school (Ponysaurus’s building), noted its owner and chief administrator (our reporters), and named it the ProPublica-Assembly Academy. We’d hoped to include the word Curiosity in the name, but the field in the form didn’t allow enough characters. In North Carolina, our curiosity would have to be implied.

We filled in a few more fields, including the grades we would serve (high schoolers), whether we would open a religious school (no) and the dates of our academic year. 

Then we needed to upload fire and sanitation inspection reports. This step is what brought us here, to Ponysaurus, filling out the online notice to the tune of a hissing compressor that kept clean air moving through the brewing system.  

“You will need to secure inspections for the building where the school will be housed. You will need a fire inspection from the local fire marshal and a health and sanitation inspection from the local health department,” the video said. 

Just that morning, a City of Durham Fire Department inspector had visited the brewery and provided Ponysaurus with a fresh business occupancy inspection. We uploaded the new report, along with the brewery’s current food establishment inspection (on which it received a 99, an excellent score, we felt, for a school).

The screen flashed a confirmation. “Thank you. We have received your request to open a private school.” If approved, the page said, we should receive a school identification number in three to five business days. 

We hoped to join the at least 169 other new private schools that have opened in North Carolina since the 2021-22 school year, which marked the start of a series of expansions to the state’s publicly funded vouchers for private school tuition.

If we wanted our school to tap the voucher money, we’d have to go through some additional steps such as getting criminal background checks. We weren’t doing that.

The following day, we hit a snag. It came in a brief and garbled email. It said only: “Good morning and thank you for submitting a Notice of Intent to operate a private school. To complete the process we need to fire and sanitation inspections to” and then ended abruptly like that, no explanation or period. We emailed back, asking for clarity and noting we had already uploaded the inspection reports.

An official from the state Division of Non-Public Education then called. The school’s name needs to be on the inspection reports, she said, something we had not seen in any of our research. We also had not found any state statutes or rules that would preclude us — or anyone else — from opening a private school wherever we saw fit, be that a church or a brewery, as long as it passed “reasonable fire, health and safety inspections.” 

In a follow-up call, she clarified that her division checks only to be sure the building has passed inspections specifically for a school. A spokesperson for the agency later added that state statute does not allow them to deny a private school application, but they won’t process an incomplete application — notably one without the proper inspections.

We hadn’t expected we would need a school-specific inspection at this point. The video explainer referred to inspections only generally, and the state’s written guidance indicated only that this would need to happen before occupancy. 

Given we had no intention of actually opening a school, we had decided ahead of time that we wouldn’t consume any additional public resources — such as fire or health inspectors’ time — in our journalistic pursuit. 

Perhaps Ponysaurus could pass the school-specific inspections. But the ethical red line would be our stop sign. Our curiosity would have to end in North Carolina.

The post We’re reporters, not teachers. We were able to start private schools anyway appeared first on Salon.com.

Most Democratic voters say that they favor a wealth tax, but a California ballot initiative has plenty of liberal opponents.

This story appeared in The Logoff, a daily newsletter that helps you stay informed about the Trump administration without letting political news take over your life. Subscribe here.

Welcome to The Logoff: Donald Trump is once again selling access to the highest bidder(s). 

What’s happening? On Thursday, the Washington Sun’s Jeff Stein reported that Trump will reprise his 2025 “crypto dinner” later this year, hosting some of the top investors in the $TRUMP memecoin at his Virginia golf club. 

The top 185 holders of $TRUMP will receive an invite to the event, which the website describes as the “Most EXCLUSIVE DINNER IN THE WORLD.” The top 29 $TRUMP holders will also be eligible for a “special VIP reception.” 

What is $TRUMP? As my colleague Adam Clark Estes explained last year, memecoins like $TRUMP are “all but make-believe.” The coin is a crypto token, or “a type of digital asset that’s built on a cryptocurrency’s blockchain, but it is not a full featured cryptocurrency, like bitcoin.” 

In other words, buying it doesn’t get you very much — the value of the coin has collapsed since early last year when Trump took office — but it will get you a chance to have dinner with the president. 

What’s the context? This will be the third major event Trump has hosted for buyers of $TRUMP, following a May 2025 dinner at his Virginia club and a “crypto and business conference” earlier this year at Mar-a-Lago, where Trump gave a keynote speech. 

But it’s just one of the many, many ways that Trump and his family have found to enrich themselves through crypto: There’s also another memecoin, $MELANIA, and his lucrative crypto firm, World Liberty Financial, which received a $500 million investment from a member of the United Arab Emirates royal family last year.

Strictly speaking, as Stein points out, Trump himself does not own the company minting $TRUMP, though he still profits handsomely, to the tune of $636 million last year, from transaction fees and other revenue. And he’s made even more off World Liberty Financial, which he and his sons do own, along with others: $799 million in 2025 alone, according to financial disclosure forms filed earlier this year.

And with that, it’s time to log off…

Don’t miss this story about “junk journaling” from my colleague Rachel Miller, a hobby that she describes as “a great way to cope with digital malaise and existential dread.” (Needed!) You can read it with a gift link here.

Plus: It’s a big day for Denali National Park’s sled dog puppies, of whom I’m a big fan.

Everyone knows how much gasoline prices matter. The recent spike in gas prices triggered by the war with Iran has fueled deep pessimism about the economy and weighed heavily on President Donald Trump’s approval ratings.

But diesel fuel — the lifeblood of shipping, agriculture, and heavy industry — usually flies under the radar. Its price has surged too, and while truckers and farmers are feeling the initial blow, the rest of the country won’t be far behind.

“Most products in America are shipped along the road via trucks,” Nathan Bomey, a business reporter at Axios, told Today, Explained co-host Noel King. Diesel prices “directly affect their cost of doing business, which then eventually trickles down and affects the consumer.”

On the podcast, Bomey discusses what’s driving the price spike, how quickly it’s going to become a problem for everyday consumers, and whether electric semi trucks could offer a way out.

Below is an excerpt of the conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get your podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

What is happening with diesel?

There was one major geopolitical event this year that disrupted the entire energy economy, which is the US and Israel attacking Iran. Iran is at the center of the oil economy in some ways, but primarily you have to look at the closure of the Strait of Hormuz and the jockeying over it that has happened in the months since.

Once they closed the strait, it disrupted the entire global energy economy because it handles a substantial portion of the shipping bringing supplies out of the Middle East. That affected diesel prices, gasoline prices, jet fuel prices, and effectively everything based on crude oil.

Who are the people right now that are profoundly freaked out about the cost of diesel?

First off, truckers are freaked out because their cost of doing business is going much higher. Farmers are also freaked out because they’re already facing real pressures from trade wars and things that are out of control, like climate issues, that have caused their costs to go higher. 

The price of diesel affecting farmers eventually affects the price they charge, which ultimately gets to the consumer because it ends up costing more to pay for things like an ear of corn.

How stark do you think this might be? In a month or two, do you think I could go down to Walmart and see that something I buy all the time is now a dollar more expensive? 

I think the impact is imminent. This flows through very quickly. We’re not talking about months; we’re talking about weeks, if not days, before people will start to notice increases, especially in the grocery aisle. That’s the first place people will notice it because fresh food has to be shipped on a weekly basis. Diesel prices are going to have a big effect on food inflation. This is coming off of several years of food price increases that we experienced in the wake of the pandemic.

We’re also barreling toward the holiday shopping season, which is going to be affected by this as well. If a toy, for example, is made with a resin affected by the cost of crude oil, which also affects the cost of diesel, and then it’s shipped over the road to Walmart in a truck that uses diesel, all of these things add up and will probably lead to higher prices.

We’ve also got an issue with heating oil, which is a fuel used primarily by households in the Northeast to heat their homes. Heating oil, diesel, and all of these oil-based products are caught up in this vortex right now. Ultimately, it is not something the ordinary person can do much about.

Do the industries that rely on diesel have any other options?

There are definitely alternatives to diesel, but in many cases, they cannot be switched to quickly. If you think about the trucking industry, they are invested heavily in big rigs that take products from place A to place B. If you are invested in a truck, yes, you could theoretically switch, but you would be scrapping this huge investment you’ve made. Diesel trucks are not really going anywhere immediately. A lot of times, they’re simply still the best way to get somewhere.

You can switch to rail; railroads are definitely a competitor to trucking, but really only best for certain types of products. There are other types of trucks you can buy. Compressed natural gas or liquid natural gas is an alternative fuel for some trucks, and biodiesel can actually be good. Hydrogen is more of a futuristic thing down the road.

In the short term, there is the possibility of using electric trucks. That is starting to become more realistic. In fact, in recent days, Tesla began major production of the Tesla Semi, an electric semitruck we’ve been waiting for for years. I remember covering this in 2018 when Tesla debuted the semi, and we all thought it was going to be coming out soon.

It has taken nearly a decade for this to finally become a reality in large proportions, but the Tesla Semi is an electric truck that could be an alternative for some. There are other companies making electric trucks too, so that could be viable. But the problem with electric trucks is that the battery is so heavy, making it tough to compete with diesel on shipping heavy items.

It was often joked that when the Tesla Semi first debuted, the very first thing it shipped was a bunch of bags of Cheetos because they were so light and the truck couldn’t handle extra weight. They had a deal with PepsiCo, and it wasn’t ready at the time to ship anything heavy. 

It’s a lot better now, but the issue is still how heavy electric truck batteries are, which will make them somewhat limited in capacity. However, we are seeing some demand for the Tesla Semi that indicates it might become more competitive because of the price of diesel.

So when prices are high, generally somebody somewhere is benefiting. Who is it, in this case?

The people benefiting from diesel prices being so high are the refineries, which a lot of people don’t think about much because they’re the middle person in this entire process. They take the crude oil and turn it into usable diesel for a pickup truck, a semi truck, or farming equipment. 

The refinery business is experiencing high demand right now, and there’s limited capacity to do this because of issues in Russia, Iran, and other places throughout the world. There’s really nowhere else to do this, and therefore they can charge higher prices. That means higher profits for the refineries.

All of this is shaping up to potentially mean a really ugly winter. One thing I think about a lot is that American consumers will accept a lot of pain. We had Covid — the inflation, and shortages of literally everything. Then we had the war in Ukraine, and prices went up again. 

People still keep spending money, even as we predict this one’s going to get bad. People go to the store and spend money, and maybe they gripe, but it’s not like we’re out in the streets. Do you think this coming diesel shock — imminent, in your words — is going to be different?

I’m not an economist, but there is an interesting phenomenon emerging in the economy where consumer sentiment is at rock bottom, but consumer spending is actually really strong. There’s a gap emerging between what people say they feel and what they’re actually doing — in this case, they’re still spending. 

Maybe it’s YOLO spending. They’re thinking they don’t have much going for them, so they’re just going to keep spending. I’ve experienced that a little bit, so I don’t blame anybody.

At the end of the day, the numbers matter a little bit more than what people say they feel. But I do think people are going to hit a breaking point because they simply cannot continue this level of spending if the underlying fundamentals of the economy start to collapse.

If you haven’t heard of “live shopping,” you might soon. Livestream shopping is already a staple of e-commerce in China, where consumers log onto apps like Douyin and Taobao to buy products from a livestreamer — think QVC. Now, a new app is trying to bring it to the United States.

The Whatnot app features rolling live auctions that can last from three seconds to a minute. Users can bid on everything from trading cards to clothes to steaks. With about 550,000 hours of streaming per week, the site moves an extraordinary amount of product. 

Using Whatnot is fast-paced, and essentially frictionless. Users swipe at the bottom of their screens to place the highest bit for an object. If they win, the object is sent to their house, no confirmation screen needed. 

The system isn’t without its drawbacks. Hanna Krueger, a retail reporter for the Wall Street Journal, investigated how Whatnot has become an addiction for some users. She tells Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram that she spoke to a user who spent over $1 million on the app — and lost everything in the process. 

Below is an excerpt of Krueger’s conversation on the podcast, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get your podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

Tell us about this app, Whatnot.

Whatnot is a live shopping app. Imagine the home shopping network had a baby with TikTok and eBay, and it was on your phone and it was running 24 hours a day. 

You open up the app [and] there’s countless numbers of categories. You can get coins. You can get cards. You can get horse tack, plants, goo, lobsters. I mean, the categories are expanding all of the time. And there are sellers live-auctioning off these goods in real time. 

There’s a countdown clock, and it’s counting down and the auctioneer or the seller is hyping up the chat, as they call it. And that chat is commenting like, “Wow, look at this. What a deal.” In the meantime, there’s some music. Sometimes it’s nice mellow music, other times it’s metal or EDM, depending on the personality of the seller. 

The end result is that the last person to swipe at the bottom of the screen, which is how you bid, gets the item. And once you have swiped and you’re the final person to do that, there’s no real confirmation screen. We’re just onto the next product and you only really find out what you got when it shows up at your door.

It started as a marketplace for Funko Pop figurines, which are these niche, squareheaded figurines in the collectible world, but it quickly expanded. I would say the biggest categories are sports cards and trading cards like Pokémon. And then the other one is women’s fashion and beauty products. 

I spoke to multiple people who found themselves just spiraling into holes of addiction and what they liken to gambling because of that “break format.” 

Tell us about the break format.

Break format typically applies to trading cards. That could be sports cards, Pokémon. It can also happen with rare coins, but the idea is that there is a sealed pack of cards and that sealed pack is pretty expensive to buy outright — say it’s $10,000. Before the show starts, they’ll say, “Okay guys, there are 10 slots that apply to this pack. So I need 10 people to buy in at a price of $1,000.” This is a steal, right? You’re getting a piece of the pie of a $10,000 pie for only $1,000.

The reason that they’re willing to do that is that within that pack, there might be cards that are worth $2,000, $3,000, $10,000. So you recoup quite quickly if you only paid a thousand for that. The other side, the flip side that often does happen is that the cards are worth nothing close to what you bought in for.

People will get a card that’s worth $50, $100, and at the end of it, all you have to show is these small-value cards. And those who have described kind of a cycle of problematic behavior say that when you lose, when you don’t make up the value that you paid, you just buy right into the next one until you get out of the hole. 

It’s this feeling of the high, the thrill, the adrenaline rush, the “Oh my God, look what I just did” when you get a card that’s way over what you thought. And there’s the despondency, this despair, the shame, and that feeling of, “Okay, I need to make my money back on that flip side.”

This is where this app really begins to look like gambling, to look like addiction, to look like a drug. As does the story of Sean Harding, with which you open your piece for the journal. Tell us about Sean.

Sean Harding is a 45-year-old finance manager from Denver. Sean found himself on this app and he wasn’t spending too much in the very beginning, maybe $100 a day. And then within 40 days he was spending over $1,000, $5,000 a day. Just swiping whenever he could get a free moment — when he was doing laundry, sitting on the toilet. 

It was only when his wife confronted him about this odd behavior, about some missing pages on his credit report, that he really looked at what he had spent and that number was crazy. It was $1.3 million in four months. He had borrowed money from a friend, he had taken out personal loans. And finally, when all that was depleted, he had used his employer’s credit card.

You spoke to the founder of Whatnot. What does he say when you tell him a story like Sean’s?

[Whatnot CEO and cofounder Grant] LaFontaine said that addiction does not register as a problem to them in their internal data, which they look at often. When we presented a story like Sean’s, they repeated that addiction does not register as a problem. When you breach the topic of gambling or people accusing this app of having gambling features, that’s where Whatnot definitely buttons up. They’re under pretty intense scrutiny surrounding that allegation.

They categorially reject that and they say they can’t comment on pending litigation. But they do say that they created an app that had the best user experience possible and that they’re new and they’re learning and they’re scaling and they’re assessing the marketplace in real time.

Are they implementing any guardrails to maybe prevent someone like Sean from ruining his life and his family’s life?

While they say that addiction doesn’t register as a significant problem, they also have introduced optional spending limits and watch time caps. They said that’s not because of addiction concerns, but because some users said that they spent more than intended. That was the distinction that they made. 

They said there’s other safeguards coming, such as “velocity of spend” alerts for sudden spending spikes. Some have PIN locking for categories, so you have to type in a PIN to go to a certain category. Some of these are self-policed. A watch time cap, you could presumably change that yourself, even though you’re the one that implemented it. 

They’re also saying that they’re going to develop some type of birthday reconfirmation option so they could catch underage users, which is coincidentally how I came to know about Whatnot. One of my colleagues’ daughters had spent over $5,000 in one night on Pokemon cards. And he only realized that when he looked at his credit card and was like, “What is this?” And he went to sell those cards at a card shop after the fact to try to recoup, and he could only get back like $300.

Is this just a Whatnot thing, or are there other ways kids and adults can be gambling their lives away on these live auction-type of platforms?

Live shopping has been one of the most predominant ways that Chinese shoppers shop for a long time, and the wave has crested over there a long time before it has here. It really started to take off and gain traction in America in the kind of post-pandemic world.

While Whatnot is definitely leading the charge, TikTok has their own thing called TikTok Shop that has a similar kind of setup. eBay is trying out stuff like this. And then for the card-collecting hobby specifically, Fanatics Live is a major source to get your cards and experience breaks and all that.

Do all of these different platforms, be it on TikTok or eBay, have the sort of gamified countdown clock to make it more intense, more exciting, and perhaps more addictive?

Whatnot’s found a way to create a really engaging and easy-to-interact-with atmosphere. They’ve also successfully merged the parasocial media aspect. There are relationships between the seller and the buyer, so if you keep going back to the same seller, they’ll remember your name, the people in the chat will remember. There are some folks who were like, ‘I found friends in here.’ 

Sean said that the night that he used his company credit card, he was reached out to by a seller and they were like, “Hey man, you got to join this. This break’s awesome. I have a great slot for you. I’ll give it to you at a discount.” And he’s like, “I don’t have any money.” And that’s when he realized that he had a little money. It just happened to belong to his employer.

That kind of shows that there’s this social atmosphere. Whatnot is definitely leading the charge, but other companies are seeing how successful this is, and I think it’s only time before they kind of merge all these aspects together in an attempt to take their market share from them.

Consumer advocate Lindsay Owen’s new book, Gouged, traces how corporations use software—from ever-changing prices to opaque algorithms—to squeeze every penny from you.

Laredo, cut off from state funding for its Flock cameras, will ask voters for advice on whether to devote $1 million a year to keep 165 of the surveillance devices operating in city limits.

The Laredo City Council voted 7-2 Monday night to set a nonbinding referendum for May — delaying a decision that is coming due for cities, counties and law enforcement agencies that face a financial reckoning after Gov. Greg Abbott blocked state money from being spent on the roadside cameras.

“In my opinion as the head of this local government, with state funding paused, the circumstances have changed,” Laredo Mayor Victor Treviño said before the vote. “If continuing these Flock systems will require the local taxpayer to fund their entire system, I believe that 272,000 residents should have an opportunity to express their opinion.”

At least 14 cities and counties have shut off more than 900 Flock cameras since state funding was rescinded in late August, and more are scheduled to decide their next steps in the coming weeks. Larger cities like Houston and Dallas shuttered grant-funded cameras while leaving much of their networks in operation, while Plano, Robinson and Kendall County were among those that ended their Flock contracts entirely.

Complicating those decisions is a lack of information from the governor’s office about the duration of the funding pause and a desire from local law enforcement to keep the cameras they attribute to reductions in crime. In addition to the funding block, Abbott recently directed the Texas Department of Transportation to pause installation of license plate readers along state roads.

Flock cameras and other AI-enhanced automated license plate readers have come under fire from privacy advocates over their ability to scan all passing vehicles to build a database that can be accessed by law enforcement agencies from across the country. The cameras compile license plate numbers and other identifying information, including make, model, paint color, dents and bumper stickers.

Police say the information provides unprecedented ability to identify suspects, pinpoint stolen vehicles and locate missing persons. Critics fear the creation of a surveillance state and say the databases have been repeatedly abused by police conducting improper searches.

“You can’t afford the number of cops it would take to do what this system is doing,” said Billy Couch, the City of College Station’s police chief, during a tense Thursday night City Council meeting about its two Flock contracts totaling almost $300,000.

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As of late August, there were an estimated 13,000 Flock cameras across Texas, according to DeFlock, an anti-surveillance watchdog that uses verified crowdsourcing to map the locations of Flock cameras.

Abbott’s office did not respond to a request for comment about guidance provided to local governments about how to proceed without state funding.

Schertz Assistant Police Chief Phillip Waller said the lack of information about the freeze is causing “major havoc” in smaller departments as local elected officials mull the long-term implications.

“I mean, depending on how big or how small the government entity is, having tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars of [automated license plate readers] not being reimbursed like we thought they were is a major hit to the budget,” Waller said.

Without information about when or if Abbott’s funding freeze will end, some local leaders have been hesitant to make decisions regarding the cameras while their current contract terms are still active.

In Addison, City Council members on Tuesday debated whether Abbott’s funding freeze was temporary or indefinite as they began weighing the loss of state support on the city’s $260,000 Flock contract. In Laredo, City Council member Tyler King cast doubt on the permanence of the funding block in Monday’s meeting.

“I personally believe it’s political, and I think on Nov. 4, if [Abbott is] reelected, that’ll come back, and the money will start flowing in again,” King said. “So if we make a decision based on that, then we’re going to be back in the same situation come Nov. 4 — the money’s back, what do we do now?”

Abbott withdrew state funds for the cameras in August as The Texas Tribune prepared to publish an investigation exploring how a small state agency had directed at least $30 million to help cities, counties and law enforcement agencies pay for more than 3,200 Flock cameras across Texas.

That support from the Motor Vehicle Crime Prevention Authority had been set to continue into 2027, with $10.9 million earmarked to help local agencies afford subscriptions for more than 2,600 Flock cameras, a Tribune review of approved grants found.

The vehicle authority, overseen by a governor-appointed board that includes Laredo’s police chief, Miguel Rodriguez, had completely covered Laredo’s installation costs for its 165 cameras, according to a police department spokesperson. Rodriguez has been a vocal advocate for placing the cameras across Texas and has commended their use in Laredo and elsewhere for allowing a new approach to detecting crime.

Like Laredo, League City southeast of Houston also will hold a nonbinding referendum on Flock cameras — a decision made mid-August, prior to Abbott’s funding freeze.

In addition to grappling with the loss of state money for Flock cameras, some local officials face a financial hit because vehicle authority grants are given as reimbursements.

Kyle, a small city south of Austin, has not received its 2026 grant for $205,000, $80,000 of which would help pay for 32 Flock cameras. Even so, the City Council voted 6-1 at a Sept. 5 meeting to continue Kyle’s Flock contract.

Mayor Yvonne Flores-Cale said they’ve had no issues with the devices.

“When we’re asked to remove something like Flock, it’s difficult, because what do we use instead of it?” Flores-Cale said. “It can’t just be like, ‘take it away and then we’re going to be a safer city,’ because we’ve never had a problem or a complaint or a misuse in our city.”

Like Kyle, College Station, Conroe and Carrollton have rejected calls to end their partnerships with Flock.

College Station’s City Council voted 4-2 to continue their two Flock contracts for another year after hours of emotional public testimony from supporters and critics. The city was awarded a $300,000 grant from the vehicle authority to cover most of the cost of its cameras in fiscal year 2026, none of which has been reimbursed, according to the agency’s records.

Even in cities and counties that are not immediately shifting their approach to Flock, the governor’s actions and widespread scrutiny have prompted police to provide presentations and explanations for how they use their cameras.

During the Schertz City Council meeting on Sept. 15, council members accepted the city’s latest $309,000 vehicle authority grant, with roughly $100,000 intended to be used for 41 Flock cameras before the funding freeze. Waller, the assistant police chief, also detailed how police were — and weren’t — using their cameras, including clarifying that vehicles, not people, are tracked.

Waller said in an interview after the presentation that misinformation about the cameras is rampant online, and he called automated license plate readers a helpful and natural improvement in policing.

“Technology advances and so does police work, and LPRs are just the next step in that advancement,” he said.

Some conversations prompted by the funding pause are the first time local elected officials have publicly discussed whether the cameras should be used. In 2024, when the Laredo City Council approved its first million-dollar installment for Flock cameras, it did so without public discussion — and did the same in January when it approved a $5 million, five-year contract.

Other cities that canceled their contracts, such as Leander and El Paso, had their police enter Flock agreements without city council involvement. The El Paso City Council responded with an ordinance requiring future contracts for license plate readers to be approved by the council.

Not all of the recent cancellations stemmed from funding concerns.

In Pflugerville and Hutto, political leaders ended Flock agreements after learning the extent to which other agencies could access their camera data. A records request from a Pflugerville resident found that hundreds of agencies across the United States had been using the city’s Flock data.

Several law enforcement agencies have begun cracking down on who can access vehicle data collected by their cameras after audits found that unauthorized departments — sometimes hundreds or thousands of them — had used their data. The Texas Department of Public Safety reined in its access significantly after a Tribune analysis found more than 2,800 agencies had repeatedly tapped into their network of more than 900 cameras without signing agreements the department said were mandatory.

This article first appeared on The Texas Tribune.

The post At least 900 Flock cameras have been unplugged in Texas since state funding was cut appeared first on Salon.com.

This story was originally published by High Country News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk Collaboration.

At a specialized cold lab in Boulder, Colorado, where indoor temperatures hover around minus 4 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 20 degrees Celsius), atmospheric researcher Anthony Bernal Ayala slices hailstones with a band saw, revealing layers of icy growth like the rings of a tree. These frozen rings — clear or cloudy, thick or thin — indicate the conditions in which the hail formed: A clear layer signals the water froze slowly, while a cloudy layer means it happened quickly, trapping air bubbles. Bernal Ayala then analyzes the crystalline structures, particles, and isotopes preserved in these layers.

“All that information can tell you a wonderful story of how the hailstone was growing, but nobody — not until now — was able to tap into that history,” said Bernal Ayala, who works for Atmospheric and Environmental Research, part of the JANUS Research Group.

Bernal Ayala’s research, conducted at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), is part of a historic effort to study one of the costliest weather hazards. Researchers hope their findings will help protect lives and property from the stones that careen to Earth, battering roofs, pummeling crops, and pockmarking cars.

From 2023 to 2025, annual severe thunderstorm losses exceeded $50 billion nationwide, according to the Insurance Institute for Business and Home Safety — more than double the losses seen just a decade earlier. Hail accounted for 60 percent to 80 percent of the damage.

In Colorado, one of the country’s most hail-prone states, hail — not wildfire — is the main factor driving up insurance premiums. And researchers expect larger, more damaging hailstones to become more common with climate change.

“It’s going to just keep getting costlier and costlier,” Bernal Ayala said.

Even basic questions about hail have been notoriously hard to study. But a long-awaited resurgence in research, including the first major US field campaign to study hail in more than 40 years, could help change that. 

ICECHIP — the “In-situ Collaborative Experiment for the Collection of Hail In the Plains” — aims to improve forecasts, make warnings more precise and help communities better prepare. It received $11 million in funding from the National Science Foundation in 2024, just before deep cuts hit the foundation in 2025. 

For six weeks in spring 2025, about 100 scientists and university students chased hailstorms across the Central Plains and Front Range, from the Canadian to the Mexican border, using radar trucks to track storms and drones to take aerial footage. Researchers photographed hail with high-speed cameras, measured its impact with a tool called a disdrometer, recorded hail’s distribution and size based on its imprints on foam pads, captured it in specialized funnels, and crushed it to test its strength. 

Scientists from the Australian Bureau of Meteorology also used balloons to release golf ball-sized sensors into storms. Once aloft, each hail-like probe collected data on how fast it was traveling and whether ice was growing on it; a microphone even recorded water droplets and hailstones hitting it.

“This has really been the first time where we’ve been able to do a real comprehensive look at hail on the ground, hail aloft, the storm itself, the environment around the storm — just everything all at once,” said Becky Adams-Selin, ICECHIP’s lead investigator and a principal scientist at Atmospheric and Environmental Research, JANUS Research Group. 

ICECHIP’s samples were packed into 26 cooler-sized boxes and brought to NCAR. This internationally renowned hub for weather and climate research has been used to study hail for decades. In one of its last major campaigns, in the 1970s, the US investigated Soviet claims that it could suppress hail. 

Researchers say there’s no other US lab like it; the backup plan to store ICECHIP’s samples involved using a walk-in freezer from a fast-food restaurant.

Now NCAR’s own future is uncertain: In late 2025, the Trump administration said it would dissolve the center and transfer its work out of state. The University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR), which manages NCAR, sued the administration in March, alleging that it’s targeting NCAR to punish Colorado for retaining its mail-in voting system and because Gov. Jared Polis initially refused to release former Mesa County clerk Tina Peters, a 2020 election denier imprisoned for breaching election security and undermining election integrity.

In June, a federal judge temporarily blocked the White House from dismantling NCAR. The government has until Sept. 30 to respond to the lawsuit.

“I can’t even quantify the impact that it would have to our community if we lost NCAR,” Victor Gensini, professor of meteorology at Northern Illinois University, told HCN. “They are the beating heart.”

Previous research has predicted climate change’s effects on hail, noting that warmer temperatures could melt smaller hailstones before they land but also fuel stronger updrafts, keeping hailstones airborne longer and allowing them to grow bigger, enabling the most damaging hail to become more common. 

A record-setting stone recovered in Yuma County, Colorado, in 2023 measured more than 5 inches across. That year, the state logged 176 reports of hail 2 inches or greater, surpassing the previous record of 91 reports in 2018, according to the Colorado Climate Center.

Scientists say it’s difficult to know how much of the rise in damage is due to the increase in large hail versus the increased development in hail hotspots. The connection between a rapidly growing human footprint and higher insured losses has been dubbed the “expanding bull’s-eye effect.”

Gensini, a principal ICECHIP investigator, cites the development boom east of the Front Range, along Colorado’s Interstate 25 corridor, which has grown explosively in recent decades. The population of the Fort Collins metro area alone has doubled since 1990 to around 375,000 residents, according to the US Census Bureau.

This is happening across the Western US, as previously rural or open areas become densely populated, increasingly expensive targets for hail.

“Colorado is the poster child for what I expect the next 25 years to look like for hail,” Gensini said.

In 2019, Fort Collins became one of the first cities to adopt hail-specific roofing requirements for new builds and remodels. Marcus Coldiron, the city’s chief building official, said it was partly in response to all the shingles and roofing materials taken to the landfill after a catastrophic hailstorm in 2018.

It’s still unclear how well the requirements are working: Coldiron said fewer permits were being issued for roof replacements and fewer shingles were going to the dump. However, Fort Collins also hasn’t experienced a hailstorm as devastating as the one that hit in 2018.

A growing number of Front Range communities now require impact-resistant shingles in their building codes, and Colorado legislators recently passed a law offering grants to residents who install more resilient roofing.

ICECHIP’s researchers are also investigating how they can improve building materials as billion-dollar losses from single storms become more common.

“The dollars are simply piling up so fast,” said Ian Giammanco, a lead research meteorologist at the Insurance Institute for Business and Home Safety, one of ICECHIP’s key partners. “We’re still trying to understand how do we get the best materials onto roofs, onto people’s homes, onto businesses to actually start shaving off these losses.”   

When Tim Tebow announced Friday that he was pausing his relationship with Christian wealth-building company Life Surge, the former football star said he had been caught off guard by allegations that the organization used predatory sales tactics to push Christians into expensive financial education programs.

But for some Life Surge customers, Tebow’s relationship with the company was part of the reason they trusted it in the first place.

“I am so devastated that Christians like Tim Tebow made me trust in something that has taken so much money from me,” one customer wrote in a complaint to the Federal Trade Commission obtained by Mother Jones and journalist Pablo Torre.

That trust is at the center of a controversy that has quickly spread beyond allegations about Life Surge’s business practices to questions about what happens when a celebrity known as much for his faith as his fame lends his name to a company.

Tebow, a Heisman Trophy winner and former NFL quarterback, has spent nearly two decades as one of America’s most recognizable Christian athletes. His public persona has remained closely intertwined with his evangelical faith, from the Bible verses he famously wore beneath his eyes at the University of Florida to the Christian ministry and humanitarian work of the Tim Tebow Foundation.

Tebow was hardly the only famous face lending his name and credibility to Life Surge.

The organization’s sprawling roster of speakers and performers has included prominent Christian leaders and musicians such as Priscilla Shirer and Chris Tomlin, Hollywood actors including Kelsey Grammer and Dennis Quaid, athletes including David Ortiz and Russell Wilson, business personalities and political figures including former White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany and former Housing Secretary Dr. Ben Carson. Life Surge currently promotes its roster as “influential voices in faith & finance alongside leading worship artists.”

Investigators have also looked beyond Tebow. Journalist Pablo Torre said his team sought comment from 14 sports figures who had been paid to speak at or promote Life Surge.

But Tebow’s relationship was unusually extensive. He was reportedly scheduled to appear at more than 20 Life Surge events this year, earning between $50,000 and $100,000 for each appearance. Life Surge’s own website shows him appearing at an event in Portland as recently as Sept. 19, less than a week before the investigation was published.

There is no evidence that Tebow knew about the sales practices alleged by former customers, and the presence of other celebrities at Life Surge events does not establish that they knew about or endorsed the company’s financial programs.

But the sheer breadth of Life Surge’s celebrity roster raises a larger question than whether one famous Christian athlete adequately vetted a speaking engagement: What happens when an organization can borrow credibility from dozens of people its audience already trusts?

The company holds Christian events combining worship, motivational speakers and financial education under a mission it calls “Kingdom Impact.” Attendees can pay relatively little to see celebrity speakers before being offered a $97 three-day financial course. From there, according to the Mother Jones investigation, customers can be offered programs costing tens of thousands of dollars.

Former customers told the outlet they were encouraged to take on significant debt to participate in the programs, including through credit cards and home equity. Mother Jones and Torre also obtained 49 complaints filed with the FTC about Life Surge.

Those complaints are allegations, not findings of wrongdoing by the agency.

Life Surge has strongly disputed the characterization of its business as predatory. The company says it does not encourage customers to assume debt they cannot afford, provides disclosures explaining the risks of investing and has spent millions of dollars on compliance efforts.

It has also rejected comparisons to the prosperity gospel, the Christian theological movement that connects faith with material or financial rewards. Life Surge says its teachings instead focus on biblical stewardship and using financial success to make a greater impact through Christian ministry.

Life Surge says headline speakers such as Tebow are not hired to sell its financial programs. Tebow said Friday that his purpose at the events was to share his faith and encourage attendees.

But the Mother Jones investigation found that Tebow’s role wasn’t entirely disconnected from Life Surge’s programs. In audio from a 2023 event, Tebow encouraged people who had signed up for additional classes to follow through with the commitment.

The Securities and Exchange Commission has long warned about “affinity fraud,” in which scammers exploit trust within religious, ethnic or other close-knit communities. Regulators warn that respected community or religious figures can sometimes lend legitimacy to financial opportunities without realizing they are doing so.

There is no finding that Life Surge is operating an affinity fraud, and the company denies wrongdoing. But the SEC’s warnings illustrate why the identity of the person standing onstage can matter so much.

Tebow’s decision to pause his relationship with Life Surge therefore does more than remove another celebrity from the company’s roster of speakers. It removes one of the most recognizable symbols of Christian credibility from its stage.

Tebow said his representatives are now investigating the allegations before he reaches his own conclusions about Life Surge.

“I’m not here to judge or condemn,” Tebow said Friday. “I want to seek the truth.”

For the people who trusted Life Surge in part because they trusted him, what Tebow discovers may matter nearly as much as what regulators do.

The post Why Tim Tebow is at the center of the Life Surge controversy appeared first on Salon.com.

A new political ad airing this week features clips of President Donald Trump pledging to defeat “communism, socialism and Marxism in America,” and promising “America will never be a communist country.” It cuts to flashing text reading the “largest tax cuts in history” and “reigniting American manufacturing” while a choir repeatedly sings “love me” in the background. The sample is from JMSN’s song “Love Me,” who said on X that he did not authorize license of the song. The UFC’s Dana White chimes in, saying Trump “is the toughest, most resilient person that I’ve ever met, and nothing was going to stop him from fighting so hard for the country he loves.”

The 30-second spot seems like any other campaign ad, designed to use emotion to sway voters, but it turns out that taxpayers actually paid for the whole thing, which may not be legal. That’s sparked considerable controversy on Capitol Hill, with both Republicans and Democrats criticizing the ads. The cost of the ad is $430,000 and is running across multiple network TV channels across the country, though the Associated Press reports “The actual amount spent could be significantly more, depending on whether networks classified the ad as a political ad.”

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Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., who is not running for reelection, called the ad “inappropriate” and compared it to messaging from former right-wing Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban.

“This may be felony criminal theft and conversion of government property for political campaign purposes,” Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., said on X. “It is a Hatch Act violation for any government employees who worked on it or used government resources to make it. It is blatantly unethical under numerous federal ethics provisions proscribing the use of government resources for political campaigns.”

As a result, Public Citizen, a consumer rights advocacy group, filed a complaint with the Government Accountability Office and Office of Special Counsel, alleging “The TV ad boosting the image and character of Donald Trump as well as reiterating Trump’s campaign rhetoric, paid for by taxpayer dollars, and produced and distributed by Trump’s White House staff, appears to be a clear violation of the laws prohibiting the use of taxpayer dollars for propaganda purpose as well as a violation of the Hatch Act.” Public Citizen also noted that they have filed a dozen Hatch Act complaints with OSC over the past year, all of which have been ignored by the agency.

The White House defended the ad and said it is “educational and unapologetically patriotic,” according to AP.

The White House is currently airing this video as an ad during commercial breaks on Fox News.

It looks and sounds like a political spot and includes a disclaimer stating that it is paid for by the U.S. government.

The soundtrack: as images of Trump flash across the screen,… pic.twitter.com/TloS7I9O55

— Yashar Ali 🐘 (@yashar) September 24, 2026

The post Pro-Trump “love me” ads paid for by taxpayers appeared first on Salon.com.

Elizabeth Warren’s job doesn’t need to be this hard.

The Democratic senator from Massachusetts is leading a cadre of largely left-of-center lawmakers in reviving the Stop Wall Street Looting Act, legislation that would curtail the worst tendencies of private equity firms. These investment firms frequently buy struggling companies in leveraged buyouts, foisting the debt of the purchase back onto the business being bought. The firms downsize staff and sell off parts of the purchased company to create dividends, all while charging the purchased corporation management fees for their trouble. When the companies frequently fail to service all this new debt, they are forced into bankruptcies that allow the private equity ownership group to walk away. 

Warren has been fighting for a while to hold private equity firms responsible for the well-being of the companies they own. In fact, this is her third attempt at pushing the legislation, which she first introduced in 2019. The act would close loopholes that shield these investment companies from the debts of the newspapers, hospitals and department stores they purchase, and would also limit the amount that could be extracted from a private equity-owned company. 

“Private equity takeovers are legal looting that make a handful of Wall Street executives very rich while costing thousands of people their jobs, putting valuable companies out of ­business, and in the case of health care, is literally a matter of life and death,” Warren said in a statement of an earlier version of the bill. 

Facing one of the most money-friendly presidencies in history and Republican control of the White House and Congress, the bill starts to look like a hard sell. Add in the public’s aversion to barring businesses from doing anything, along with the fond feelings many Americans have for the words “private” and “equity,” and it’s easy to feel hopeless. 

But there is a way to shape public opinion on this issue: Warren and her allies in Congress could simply point Americans toward an iconic redhead with pigtails. In recent years, Wendy’s has taken heat for an alleged decline in food quality. The flood of negative reviews of the fast-food chain, coupled with widespread closures of its restaurants, led Slate to ask in April “What the Hell Happened to Wendy’s?”

The logic behind connecting fast food to private equity takeovers is straightforward. Citizens who aren’t likely to notice when their local newspaper becomes a bit more bare-bones, or that the already byzantine healthcare system becomes slightly harder to navigate, will definitely notice when their lunch gets worse — and could well inspire widespread pushback against murky financial operators.

At least that’s what Stavros Halkias believes. The comedian and actor who made his name on an unprintable dirtbag-left-adjacent podcast made the case for tying private equity to bad sandwiches during a recent interview with sports journalist Pablo Torre.

“I think it’s clear that what’s f**king us up is private equity . . . taking over products that are awesome,” he said. “The one that I’ve actually latched onto recently . . . is fast food.”

Halkias pointed to the fast food chain’s recent adoption of shredded lettuce on its chicken sandwiches as a cost-slashing maneuver typical of private equity-owned restaurants.

“Everybody understands that Wendy’s has gotten s**ttier,” he said. “The spicy chicken sandwich now uses shredded lettuce. Right there, that is private equity. That is someone saying ‘We don’t want a fresh head of lettuce that costs more money. So, we’re going to give you bagged sh**ty lettuce. I know in the grand scheme of things it’s not a big deal, but people will notice.”

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Wendy’s is not fully owned by a private equity fund, but Trian Fund Management and its CEO, Nelson Peltz, own nearly a quarter of the chain restaurant’s stock. Peltz has launched multiple bids to take over the chain, most recently in February and August, before deciding he would wait to see if Wendy’s newest CEO, Bob Wright, could turn the flagging operation around. Still, with a buyout looming over the company’s head and its largest investor grumbling, it’s hard to see cost-cutting measures as entirely free from the influence of private equity firms.

Another fast-food chain, Jersey Mike’s, offers a more straightforward example. After the sandwich company was purchased by Blackstone in January 2025, customer complaints about declining quality and rising prices have dogged it ever since. 

“Some f**khead who’s never spread mayo in his life decided instead of a sandwich this is now a commodity,” Halkias said. “By turning the consumer experience shittier, some d**khead who’s never made a sandwich gets a billion extra dollars.”

Halkias sees fast food and professional sports as the two arenas most likely to turn opinion against private equity and investment firms more generally. “I do think if one of these billionaires ruins a franchise, you might have goombah football fans reading Karl Marx,” he said. “If they destroy the Lakers, guys with Kobe back tattoos are going to start the proletariat revolution. I think that the closest we’re getting to class consciousness is fast food and sports teams.”

Halkias gets paid to be funny, and his stand-up career was boosted by a YouTube algorithm that appreciated his talent for crowd work. While Warren and the bill’s co-sponsors shouldn’t lean too hard on an extemporaneous riff from a podcaster, the germ of a promising strategy is there. 

Private equity is abstract by design; the role of these firms is hard to figure for anyone outside of the C-suite. To draw the line between funds with boring names and the everyday services that have been eviscerated by bean-counters, Warren and the supporters of the Stop Wall Street Looting Act will first have to first meet people where they are. And where they are is eating lunch in their cars.

The post The private equity backlash could start at the drive-thru appeared first on Salon.com.

Welcome to The Midterms, Actually. Every week I’ll be writing about two things: one big idea or trend I see forming across the 2026 primaries, and one thing I’m hearing from a voice on the ground. Let’s get into it. You can sign up here to get it in your inbox every week. Let’s get into it.

One big idea: Latinos didn’t come home. They’re just in motion.

In the last presidential election, President Donald Trump’s strong support with Latino voters ended up one of the biggest stories of the night. After years of Democrats telling themselves that the growing number of Hispanic Americans would help lead to a permanent liberal majority, their dreams were first dashed in 2016 (when many of those voters stayed home) and then buried in 2024 (when they, and other nonwhite voters, swung toward Trump).

But just as Democrats have at times been too confident that minority voters would fall in line, it now seems Republicans have replicated their mistake. Poll after poll shows a historic reversal among Latino voters in Trump’s second term, and these days even Republican members of Congress are beginning to call Trump out on his deportation efforts. 

Why? It comes back to the numbers.

As Nate Cohn observed in the New York Times this week, Democrats now lead Republicans among Hispanic likely voters by 35 percentage points on the generic congressional ballot, 64-29 — a 28-point swing from 2024, when Kamala Harris carried Hispanic voters by just 7 points. The shift is a big reason the polling has Democrats in “blue wave” territory this November.

Last week on America, Actually I explored this shift in detail — by talking to Stephanie Valencia, co-founder and president of Equis, the research firm that has spent a decade digging into the Latino electorate. And the first thing she wanted us all to know: Get rid of the idea that Latinos will ever be permanently Democratic or permanently Republican. Part of the electoral power is that a larger section of the electorate defines itself more independently.

“Latinos often get given the title, the sleeping giant, which I just want to rid that out of everybody’s vocabulary. We should be called the swinging giant based on how much shift we have seen election to election. A third of Latinos consider themselves kind of independent or apolitical nonpartisan, and that’s that swinging middle that really is deciding every single election.”

Here are three more trends Valencia pointed out, which help explain why this all-important voting group has done such a drastic 180 on Trump in his second term.

1. It’s the economy (again)

As with all things in Trump’s second term, it starts with the fundamental problem of his second term: He has not delivered on lower prices. Equis found that Trump’s net approval with Latinos on cost of living sits at -52 — and his number on the economy (-45) is worse than his overall approval with the group (-31). Both are dramatically worse than where he sits with non-Latinos, who put him at -39 on cost of living and -25 on the economy. Among Latino men 18 to 39, cost of living hits a stunning -63.

Here’s what Valencia said:

“Latinos make up more of the wage workforce than any other racial subgroup. And so what that means is when wages are down and inflation is high, Latinos feel it more. We have less savings. We have less rates of home ownership. So the kind of safety nets that other people might have, we just don’t have.”

She also pointed this out:

“In Trump 1.0, his approval on the economy and the cost of living was actually better than his everyday approval… And he has been underwater with Latinos almost this entire term so far on the cost of living and the economy. It’s almost been a complete and total reversal.”

One of the arguments Trump made to Hispanic communities (and other groups also) was that he’d economically empower them, and that this was more important than prioritizing social causes that didn’t have a material benefit. That’s also been his fundamental flaw. From tariffs to rising gas prices, he has not only not delivered — people also feel worse off than before.

2. The immigration backlash

Valencia’s data was undeniable: More and more Latinos turned on Trump as he broadened his deportation efforts, which were broadly unpopular. But what I didn’t understand is why it took until Trump’s second term for people to realize those threats were legitimate, considering they were so front and center during his campaign. (They held up “Mass Deportation Now!” signs at the Republican National Convention!)

Here’s what Valencia said:

“I think this is really important for us as avid news consumers to understand what it is that the average voter, and especially that voter who’s coming in and out of elections, the kind of news they’re consuming. What they were seeing on mainstream media, perhaps even Fox News at the time, was a focus on Trump surrogates who said he’s gonna focus on serious criminals, securing the border, and violent criminals. And so that’s what people bought.”

“Fast-forward to 2026, the people who feel most regretful who voted for Trump in 2024 are most regretful because of immigration. They feel like there was a broken promise there. Like, they were told he was gonna focus on the border, which everybody agreed was chaos, and he was gonna focus on violent criminals and serious threats, and at the end of the day, he has not complied with that.”

There’s also an element of disbelief. When Trump said he would deport “bad people,” a lot of people thought he was only talking about people in other communities — or immigrants with criminal legal histories — not the more far-reaching immigration sweeps we’ve seen since he’s been in office. A striking ad from Rep. María Elvira Salazar (R-FL) this week where she directly criticizes Trump’s immigration policy explicitly made this distinction. 

The Equis numbers track that shift almost perfectly. In December 2024, 65 percent of Latino Trump voters believed he would target only criminals and recent arrivals. Today, 62 percent of Latinos overall say he’s going after undocumented immigrants broadly — and among his own Latino voters, the share who say that has jumped from 26 percent to 37 percent. That perception is the whole ballgame: Latino Trump voters who still believe he’s targeting only criminals give him +84 net approval. Among those who’ve concluded he’s targeting everyone, it collapses to +31.

The backlash isn’t about the border. It’s about what’s happening in the interior — the raids, the family separations, the citizens and legal residents swept up. 

Equis finds 68 percent of Latinos say Republicans promised to deport criminals and deported hardworking people instead — and 67 percent say Democrats promise immigration reform and never deliver. Forty-two percent say both parties broke their promises.

“I think it is a huge mistake for Democrats to assume or to rest on their laurels and think that because of what people are feeling around Trump and Republicans and the sense of disappointment and broken promises, that that is automatically going to translate to them as a party and as a brand. Right now, the Democratic brand has suffered a repeated set of blows among Latino voters. 20 years of comprehensive immigration reform that hasn’t been delivered. It’s a thing that comes up in almost every focus group.”

3. Meeting voters where they are

The third trend isn’t about persuasion at all. It’s about the fact that a lot of campaigns are still bad at the mechanics of reaching this electorate — and Valencia’s examples were almost comically basic.

Their testing found that more than 70 percent of Latinos who see an ad in Spanish come away thinking that candidate or party cares more about Latinos. That’s not a persuasion effect. That’s a respect effect, and it’s enormous for the price of one ad buy.

So how do campaigns blow it? Some examples, according to Valencia: translating English ads directly into Spanish, rather than tailoring them to the language and culture; and assuming English speakers and Spanish speakers are separate categories when voters often shift between media in both languages. 

The deeper error is the monolith problem — the group is still treated as a voting bloc that moves in unison, rather than a diverse set of people from varying countries of origin and contexts. And the fastest-moving division isn’t the country of origin at all. It’s age — an electorate replenishing itself faster than either party’s model of it.

“There are a million Latinos who turn 18 every single year, and an 18-year-old who turns 18 this year and will vote in this year’s election was born the year Barack Obama was elected president. … The era of politics for an 18-year-old today is chaos, Covid, and corruption. They do not remember the hopium of Obama and the beautiful coalition that we built. That is all ancient history to them.”

A million new voters a year, completely up for grabs. Nobody is inheriting these voters. Neither party owns them. Because as Valencia put it: Demographics have proven not to be destiny — effort and intention matter more.

What I’m hearing

This week I called Matthew Eadie, a reporter at Evanston Now, who has been covering an ICE stop in Evanston, Illinois that has since attracted national attention. On the morning of Sunday, September 20, federal agents stopped a man walking on Howard Street. He turned out to be a US citizen, and not the person they were looking for. Agents reportedly left him on the ground with injuries to his head, neck, and teeth. DHS says he “refused to identify himself. Now the community is demanding answers.”

What’s the community reaction been?

People are really furious. If you remember the fall here — Operation Midway Blitz, the heightened Border Patrol enforcement across the Chicago area, Gregory Bovino parading around the streets with camera crews, the protests at the Broadview processing center — people here were very aware of how impactful it was. It was also happening around the elections, so it was prominent news everywhere and everybody was talking about it.

Over the summer it really died down, and I don’t think people have paid much attention since. ICE has been around all year, but they haven’t been as flashy about it, which has been talked about nationally too. This was a flare-up, and it’s a reminder that it’s still going on even after Bovino left. There have been protests at Broadview this week unrelated to the Evanston incident. So either people are starting to pay more attention as the election gets closer, or the incidents are actually picking up again.

What are the unanswered questions you’re still chasing?

Who were they looking for? Were they actually looking for somebody? That’s been their story — a specific individual — and a lot of people I’ve talked to are really skeptical that’s the case. One witness at the scene told me he felt like they just picked him and drove up on him. Essentially what’s been called a “Kavanaugh stop” — if they’re suspicious of you, they can pretty much find a reason to detain you. And then they dropped it once they realized either that he was a US citizen, which he says he is, or that there were too many people around taking videos for it to be worth their time.

So: What happened in the lead-up, and who specifically were they looking for? 

Afterward, the agents talked to Evanston police — that’s an Evanston police policy; they’re supposed to try to get information from ICE officers. I’ve FOIAed all the body cam footage. I want to see what those conversations were like, and what exactly the agents told police officers when they talked privately.

Part of what we’re trying to do is see the issues that play out from the bottom up rather than the way they get framed nationally. Beyond immigration, is there anything in your coverage that’s shaping local politics more than the national conversation reflects?

The national issues matter to everybody, but they hit communities in completely different ways. Evanston is affluent — college town, Northwestern, wealthier than most suburbs. Affordability is a buzzword that comes up everywhere, but people here talk about it differently.

This is an overwhelmingly progressive Democratic city. Some people in Evanston certainly need it to be more affordable for themselves. But you also have progressive voters saying we want to make Evanston more affordable and more inclusive for other people. Sometimes the affordability conversation gets framed as “life is too expensive for me and we need to make it cheaper for me,” which is true in a lot of places. In somewhere like Evanston, where there are a lot of affluent people who are also very progressive voters, it’s more: If we actually want to say we’re a progressive community, we have to show it. And showing it maybe means building affordable housing.

It’s also a city that passed reparations, which the federal government is challenging right now. That’s going to be a federal court case through the end of this year and probably into next year — the feds challenging the city’s reparations program. That’s something the city prides itself on. Those are big issues here that come out of the national conversation but sound different than how we hear them in national media.

Apple may pay out up to $95 for each eligible iPhone purchased by someone who felt misled about Siri’s release. You have until December 21 to submit a claim.

The other afternoon, I was trying to take a nap.

I had worked late the night before, and dinner was still several hours away, and I had achieved that particular state of adult exhaustion in which closing your eyes for 20 minutes begins to seem less like a luxury than a medically indicated procedure. Unfortunately, the universe had other plans.

First came the whippet who lives down the hall, galloping outside my apartment and then, as he often does, failing to account for the slickness of the linoleum. There was a skid, followed by the unmistakable sound of dog meeting trash cans: bowling ball, pins. Then two neighbors began, ironically, shouting outside my window about which of them was less considerate about the amount of noise they made. Then I remembered that the ceiling fan has one speed at which it rattles faintly but insistently, so I got out of bed, yanked the chain and sent the blades spinning faster.

Finally, I lay back down. The apartment quieted. My breathing slowed. I had just begun to lilt toward sleep when my phone buzzed.

“We miss you! You deserve something sweet…”

It was an ice cream chain in a city where I no longer live.

There is something uniquely irritating about being emotionally pursued by a corporation that has also failed to notice you moved away. I lay flat on my back and began rage-unsubscribing from every company that had recently texted me in the voice of a human being. We miss you. STOP. Treat yourself. STOP. Your favorites are waiting. STOP. I continued until my phone was quiet and, eventually, so was my brain.

A few days later, rifling through my wallet, I passed a small red-and-gold card decorated with lucky cats and a rising sun. Across the top, in chunky yellow letters, it reads “Phodega.” On the back are ten little boxes. Collect ten stamps, get a free entree.

I have three.

Phodega is an Asian-American noodle and snack shop in Chicago’s West Town, a few blocks from a house where my partner and I stay when we’re house-sitting for family — a little borrowed-neighborhood life we slip into for a couple of weeks at a time, usually twice a year. Inside, a neon sign reading SEND NOODS hangs above a pyramid of Café Bustelo cans. Over the counter, another sign cheekily warns: “Don’t Try It. You Won’t Like It.” The menu includes salt-and-pepper chicken skins with sweet-and-sour sauce and something called the Viet Dip, a sandwich served with a little cup of pho jus.

The punch card is almost comically unsophisticated. It cannot send a push notification. It does not know where I live, what time I usually eat lunch or whether I have recently been searching for sandwiches. If I neglect it for six months, it will not announce that it misses me.

And yet it works.

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Every so often, while looking for a credit or business card, I flip past it and think about Phodega Fries — ribeye, cilantro, onion, jalapeños and gravy piled over seasoned fries — and decide that perhaps it is time to acquire punch number four.

During those house-sitting stretches in the neighborhood, I started feeling, embarrassingly quickly, like something of a local. The third time I walked into Phodega in about two weeks, the woman behind the counter looked up, smiled broadly and asked whether I wanted what I’d gotten last time (the Viet Dip) or wanted to try something new.

Something new, I decided. I ordered the Hainan-style chicken rice.

This is, of course, exactly the sort of interaction that restaurant apps are forever attempting to imitate. They remember what we ordered. They remind us of our favorites. They greet us by name. They offer suggestions based on what we liked last time. But there was a crucial difference in that question from behind the counter: The same thing, or something new?

She remembered me without assuming that remembering me meant she knew what I wanted.

“We know your favorites”

I like being known in restaurants. I like going to the coffee shop where the barista remembers that I take my mint tea iced and unsweetened, and I remember that she has a puppet showcase coming up. I like the brunch place where a waiter knows I want blackberry jam with my Texas toast, and I know what his nieces have been reading lately. This kind of familiarity is one of the pleasures of becoming a regular somewhere: over time, without really deciding to, two people accumulate small pieces of information about each other.

The information goes both ways.

This, increasingly, is what feels strange about the language of food apps. They borrow the vocabulary of that relationship — we remember you; we know your favorites; we missed you — while removing the reciprocal part entirely. They may know precisely what I ordered at 9:43 p.m. on a Wednesday six months ago, but there is nobody on the other side for me to know in return.

And increasingly, there is an app for almost every place we eat. The fast-food standards have them, of course, but so do regional chains and neighborhood coffee shops: download this, order ahead, skip the line, collect points, save your usual. The bargain is convenience, and often it genuinely is convenient. But increasingly, buying a sandwich or a cup of coffee also means initiating an ongoing relationship — one in which the restaurant gets a permanent little doorway into your attention long after the transaction is over.

And lately, simply remembering what we bought is beginning to look almost quaint. The next frontier is not merely knowing what we have wanted before.

It is trying to decide what we are going to want next.

A few weeks ago, I opened GoPuff, a grocery delivery app, and noticed a button I hadn’t seen before: a black square with a blue-and-white “go” glowing in the center. I tapped it.

CURATED FOR YOU.

“Pulled your late-night comfort picks,” it explained, “the usual craving fix when you order after dark.”

The screen looked almost like a cheerful kitchen-table flat-lay: products arranged over a wood-grain background, hovering around a GoPuff bag as though someone had just come home and emptied the evening’s provisions onto the table. Some were plausible: grape Uncrustables, chocolate-covered raspberries. Then came paper towels, Method cleaner, dish soap, lime sparkling water and grapefruit-scented antibacterial wipes. Apparently my 2 a.m. self is part snack-seeking raccoon, part conscientious housekeeper.

Only then did I realize this wasn’t simply a recommendation screen. GoPuff had already put every item in my cart.

The price wasn’t displayed there. I had to navigate into the cart to discover the total: $50.30.

There was an “undo auto-add” option, but it appeared in smaller, considerably less enthusiastic type. The phrase itself got me. Auto-add. The assumption was built into the feature: We have already begun shopping for you. Correct us if necessary.

I removed everything one item at a time and haven’t used the app since. I was already in the process of thinning out my reliance on delivery apps, mostly because I’ve been thinking more carefully about the cost of all that frictionless convenience — not only in money, but in how quickly every minor want can become immediately fulfillable. I haven’t sworn off delivery, nor do I particularly want to. But GoPuff made another part of the bargain newly explicit: convenience was beginning to include having my wants interpreted for me.

If a company is going to behave like a friend, eventually the friend can become presumptuous.

That is the distinction I keep returning to.

I don’t mind recommendations. Sometimes I want help deciding. But “Would you like help?” is different from “We went ahead and decided.”

Perhaps I’m protective of that difference because, of course, companies have always tried to stoke and steer desire. What feels different now is how easily they can follow us while doing it, often in the faux-friendly voice of someone who knows us — popping up on the little televisions in the backs of taxi cabs, slipping into the social media feeds in our pockets, texting us that they miss us while we’re trying to take a nap. The sales pitch has become harder to escape precisely as it has become more intimate.

Appetite, though, is not always something we know in advance.

Recently, I went to the grocery store intending, more or less, to buy ingredients for spaghetti with a weeknight Bolognese. I had already picked up a white onion, although an onion is hardly a binding commitment; so many good dinners begin that way.

Then I saw a jar of sun-dried tomatoes I’d never noticed before, packed with dark, jewel-like fruit. A pile of particularly good-looking spinach caught my eye. One decision tugged at another, and by the time I checked out, dinner had become rigatoni with chicken, spinach and sun-dried tomato sauce.

This is not an earth-shattering example of the mysterious contours of human desire. Dinner simply changed. But food is full of these tiny departures: the dish ordered on a whim that becomes the thing you return for; the ingredient you taste for the first time and immediately begin imagining in everything; the afternoon when what sounded good yesterday suddenly sounds terrible today.

That is one of the pleasures of appetite. Sometimes you enter the store with an idea and let yourself be talked out of it by a vegetable. Sometimes you only discover what you want as you go.

Food companies are increasingly interested in that interval, too. As Cris Tolomia reported this week at Quartz, Nestlé is piloting AI-powered simulations designed to model how shoppers might react to new products before they launch, while a separate AI system scans social media for shifts in what consumers want. The tools are part of a broader push into AI-assisted product development, including Nestlé’s work on foods for people taking GLP-1 drugs.

That is obviously several steps removed from GoPuff loading antibacterial wipes into my late-night cart. Nestlé is looking for signals across markets, not deciding what one particular shopper should eat at 2 a.m. But both illustrate how valuable it has become for food companies to arrive earlier — to understand appetite not merely after a preference has been expressed, but while it is still taking shape.

Which makes the moment when we still have to ask ourselves what sounds good feel increasingly precious: a little unoptimized space before something has been recommended, queued or dropped into a cart for us.

Maybe that is why I like that little Phodega card so much. It will wait in my wallet until I decide I want another sandwich, and when I do, someone will punch another square.

It rewards the wanting after it happens. It leaves the wanting itself to me.

 

 

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My grandmother’s baked spaghetti came in slabs, which was part of its charm. Hot from the oven, they sagged dramatically over the edge of a spatula, held together mainly by a web of browned mozzarella; cold from the refrigerator the next day, they cut much more cleanly and were arguably better. Underneath the cheese were snapped spaghetti, ground chuck and a generous pour of Ragu, and as the casserole disappeared over the course of a weekend, red sauce and rendered beef fat collected in iridescent pools at the exposed corners of the dish.

This was one of two dinners I could reliably expect when we visited her in West Virginia. My grandmother, the daughter of a coal miner and a master of the frugal feast, made either baked spaghetti or steak and gravy with mashed potatoes, green beans and biscuits with blackberry jam; stay long enough and you got leftovers of both. She passed the spaghetti recipe to my mother early in my parents’ marriage, and Mom changed almost nothing. The noodles were still snapped. The beef was still beef. The mozzarella still went on with a heavy hand.

What changed, slowly enough that nobody announced it, was the jar.

First there was Ragu. Then Bertolli. And then there was Rao’s.

I remember the first time my mother took me to The Fresh Market. It was fall, and the entryway smelled aggressively of cinnamon brooms. Just inside was a coffee station — “Complimentary,” an employee in a green apron told us — where I, a preteen with no particular business drinking coffee, poured myself something hazelnut-flavored and carried it solemnly through the aisles. Classical music played overhead. My mother remarked, approvingly, that the lighting didn’t give her a migraine.

Looking back, I suspect my father had recently begun making a little more money, because that afternoon we bought two things I distinctly remember never having had before: Kerrygold butter and a jar of Rao’s.

That night, Mom used the Rao’s in my grandmother’s baked spaghetti. On the side were little wheat rolls from The Fresh Market bakery, spread with pats of Kerrygold — a small but perceptible upgrade from the Bunny Bread and Country Crock of a few years earlier. Nothing about the occasion had changed. It was still spaghetti night. But I remember that dinner in my bones for how special it felt.

By the time I was in college, Rao’s had undergone another transformation. It started appearing in my parents’ pantry in Costco two-packs, usually beside gigantic cases of bottled water, enough paper towels to absorb a malfunctioning sprinkler system and gallon-sized jugs of olive oil. At $12.99 for two jars, it had stopped being the sauce from the fancy grocery store and become simply the sauce my mother bought. She has never gone back.

This past January, deep in winter pasta mode, I realized the supermarket had followed her. There were suddenly what looked like two additional feet of shelf space devoted to sauces with labels I would happily frame and ingredient lists apparently designed to seduce me personally: no added sugar, good olive oil, whole tomatoes, actual garlic. The average supermarket now has top-shelf pasta sauce in both senses of the phrase.

I should disclose that I am helpless in the face of good food packaging. Give me an embossed jar with a hand-drawn garlic bulb, a wobbly little restaurant façade and typography that looks like it was commissioned by someone who owns several linen aprons, and I go full Tex Avery wolf: eyes out, tongue unspooled, all higher reasoning suspended.

Some of them, annoyingly, are also very good.

My first step beyond Rao’s was Carbone’s vodka sauce, which asks for a splash of fresh cream — a sentence that has probably already caused several restaurant acolytes to sit bolt upright and announce that IT IS NOT THE SAME AS CARBONE. Fine. Nobody said it was. But the jar that really got me was Sauz’s lemon-pepper pesto. I tossed it with store-bought ravioli and shredded rotisserie chicken warmed in olive oil, put peas on the side, and waited for the part where I needed to fix something. It never came.

Nothing.

Yet it was surprisingly complex: bright with lemon juice and fresh peel, nutty with almonds and Parmigiano Reggiano, savory with garlic and olive oil. It was the sort of flavor I could reproduce if sufficiently motivated. On a Tuesday, I was not.

And now we have arrived at Alison Roman selling “A Very Good Sauce,” including a jar inspired by the caramelized-shallot-and-anchovy pasta that once briefly seemed to occupy half the internet. A generous three-pack runs $30, or $10 a jar. 

I made that pasta when everyone else did, and kept making it after everyone stopped posting about it. For years I’ve had deli containers of the gorgeous, sticky umami tangle rotating in and out of my refrigerator. So the ability to simply buy a jar descended from it feels like an almost comically specific luxury: somebody else has already done the sticky part.

For a dedicated home cook, this is part of the appeal. Eventually you discover that certain chefs and recipe developers simply share your tastes: their pantry looks like your pantry, their idea of enough acid is your idea of enough acid. Their recipes acquire a little micro-mythology in your kitchen. By the time they put something in a jar, you aren’t exactly starting from scratch. The product arrives pre-endorsed by your own past dinners.

Chef Scott Conant is playing in the same sandbox: his Martone Street sauces run about $10 a jar, or just under $40 for a four-pack, which is less “generic red sauce” than “Scott Conant would like to handle this part of dinner for you.”

There are, meanwhile, levels to this.

Bio Orto makes an organic butternut-squash cream sauce that I bought at Eataly for $18.49 and desperately wanted to find merely fine. It was not merely fine. Eataly itself sells a $25.99 Alfredo that, unlike so many jarred Alfredo sauces, does not taste as though someone dissolved Parmesan into wallpaper paste. There is also a $29.99 mushroom pasta sauce with white truffle flavoring.

Twenty-nine dollars and ninety-nine cents. For sauce.

I can hear the objections from here.

The problem is that these, too, are very good.

Of course, there is another possible ending for a beloved sauce: it gets very, very big. Campbell’s acquired Rao’s, and there are armies of people online who remain convinced that something must have changed, despite Rao’s FAQ explicitly assuring worried customers that the company won’t “touch the sauce.” I haven’t eaten enough Rao’s lately to join the prosecution. What interests me is the anxiety itself. Once people love a jar rather than merely use it, corporate ownership can start to feel less like a business transaction than someone acquiring custody of a family recipe.

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Then again, sometimes an expensive jar is simply an expensive jar. The $18.49 Bio Orto remains, emphatically, an $18.49 jar of pasta sauce. I am not here to argue that this constitutes thrift.

But lately the comparison I make in my head is less often fancy sauce versus Ragu than grocery-store splurge versus going out. Dinner for two at a neighborhood trattoria recently ran us $86 with appetizers, one cocktail and no dessert. Delivery can wander toward $60 before tip with insulting ease. Against that backdrop, an $18 sauce, seven dollars’ worth of Italian sausage, a two-dollar pound of pasta, a Caesar salad kit and some good bakery focaccia occupy a strange but useful category: not a cheap dinner, exactly, but a comparatively inexpensive special one.

Sometimes what I’m buying is 20 minutes of my own attention.

If the sauce needs nothing from me, I can spend that energy making dessert, mixing a cocktail for guests, warming bread — or simply deciding which sparkling water sounds good. I can also happily spend another night softening onions in butter and doctoring $2.62 Ragu Kettle Cooked Tomato Basil (one of the best of the budget sauces) with garlic powder, onion powder, red-pepper flakes and whatever umami booster is closest: anchovy, miso, soy.

Sometimes I want to futz. It is simply nice not to have to.

Which is why I have trouble getting particularly worked up about the expensive-sauce aisle. Sure, sometimes the beautiful jar is bought by someone who simply enjoys beautiful jars. But it might also be dinner for an exhausted parent who wants twenty minutes back and misses what the inside of a restaurant tastes like. Or it might be the thing that gets a couple through a no-takeout month while they save for their wedding without making every Wednesday night feel like financial punishment.

Convenience food has always existed to solve problems. We’ve simply gotten more specific about which problems we would like it to solve.

As for that $18.49 squash sauce, I browned some Italian sausage, boiled pasta, warmed the sauce and put a Caesar salad and good focaccia on the table. I had not roasted a squash. I had not grated cheese into a saucepan. I had not dirtied anything requiring an overnight soak. Dinner tasted rich and savory and faintly sweet, the sort of thing I would have been delighted to order at a neighborhood restaurant.

By the end, I was dragging pieces of focaccia through the last orange streaks left in the pan.

It was, after all that, just dinner at home.

Which was kind of the luxury.

The post How jarred pasta sauce became a luxury pantry essential appeared first on Salon.com.

America and Israel’s ongoing war against Iran has sunk the global economy so deeply in the mire that economists are now seemingly throwing down their pencils in frustration. On Thursday, for the first time since the start of the conflict, analysts at JPMorgan said they don’t have a baseline view of oil markets. 

“We simply don’t know how to model the endgame,” Natasha Kaneva, head of the company’s global commodities strategy, said in a note. According to CNBC, analysts at JPMorgan assumed there were some economic red lines the U.S. simply would not cross in the conflict, and that President Donald Trump would eventually be forced to reach a deal with Iran. But close to seven months after the war began, most of those red lines — including oil hitting more than $100 a barrel, gasoline nearing $5 a gallon at the pump or 10-year Treasury yields rising above 5% — have already been crossed, and “the exit strategy is less clear, not more,” in Kaneva’s words.

Earlier this month, diesel prices climbed above $6 per gallon in the U.S. for the first time ever, and continues to climb. Costs are expected to rise as winter approaches, a season of peak demand for the fuel. Meanwhile, oil stockpiles continue dropping toward record lows, as highlighted by a new analysis from the S&P Global Energy Fuels and Refining team, which warned “winter is coming for diesel markets.”

Karim Fawaz, executive director at S&P Global Energy, warned in the analysis that “Inventories are low, spare refining capacity is scarce, and seasonal demand is about to strengthen at exactly the wrong moment.” 

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Maybe it’s bad news when even the economists have quit pretending that everything will be fine. The Iran war continues to be a disaster, yet Trump has refused to stop bombing the Islamic Republic. On Thursday he indicated he might even double down, telling Axios, “I have a big decision coming up. Do I want to go in and annihilate them [the Iranian regime] or do I not? It’s a big decision. Anything could happen with me.”  

Anything but peace, I imagine. The previous day, the president recycled an old line, claiming that the Iranians “want to make a deal.” Given how many times we’ve heard that one before, I’m just not convinced. Economic forecasts for the coming months continue to be grim as fighting in the Middle East intensifies. A drone attack that heavily damaged one of Saudi Arabia’s pipelines is expected to cause crude oil exports to fall by 400,000 barrels per day this month alone. That’s just one of countless reasons why energy prices are predicted to keep spiking. Although more war clearly isn’t helping, Trump is now promising to sell 48 F-35 fighter jets to Saudi Arabia. Just what everyone needs.

Earlier this week, the Pentagon told Congress that the cost of the war has climbed to $42 billion, a bit over the most recent estimates of $38 billion from the Congressional Budget Office. Some experts have estimated the cost to be even higher, such as Linda J. Bilmes, the Daniel Patrick Moynihan senior lecturer in public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, who told The Hill it could be as much as $100 billion — and that was back in July.

But honestly, who cares about gas prices and grocery bills? The most severe cost in war is always human, and Trump’s aggression in the Middle East has resulted in an estimated 1,800 to 3,800 civilian deaths. The Washington Post reported Friday that the Pentagon is also not disclosing the true number of U.S. soldiers who have died in the war. The Pentagon’s public database cites 18 servicemember deaths, but officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the figures, said the true number could be as high as 23, plus three U.S. contractors based in the region have died since Feb. 28. Meanwhile, Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthi rebels have attracted significant attention for their attacks along the Red Sea coast, threatening Saudi Arabia’s oil exports, but less attention is being paid to the more than 100,000 people who have fled the renewed fighting.

On Thursday, the U.N.’s top human rights body reported “reasonable grounds” to believe that the U.S. has committed war crimes in Iran, citing two strikes, including one on a school in the southern city of Minab that killed 150 people, including 120 children. A White House spokesperson responded that the human rights body has “accomplished nothing for human rights while spouting unserious nonsense for decades.” While the focus on bottom lines and costs at the pump is understandable, I don’t need baffled economists to know that Trump’s war is born of absolute insanity.

The post Trump’s Iran war has economists aghast appeared first on Salon.com.

If there is one thing Democratic politicians can agree on right now it’s this: Rich people should pay more in taxes.

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani has made it a centerpiece of his agenda. Texas Senate candidate James Talarico is bringing it up on the stump. And Georgia Sen. Jon Ossoff’s riff on the “Epstein class” of rich guys staffing the Trump administration is one of his signature applause lines.

But only in California is a billionaire tax actually on the ballot.

This November, voters in the Golden State will decide whether to levy a first-of-its-kind, onetime tax on the roughly 250 billionaires who live in the state, equal to 5 percent of their total assets. Many of the state’s billionaires are furious — and a few have already moved away.

The tax is supported by labor unions and some populist lawmakers like Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA), but it’s less popular with moderate Democrats.

Some experts, like Cornell University sociology professor Cristobal Young, are leery too. 

“It’s a onetime tax, but this is not a onetime problem,” Young, who also wrote the 2017 book The Myth of Millionaire Tax Flight: How Place Still Matters for the Rich, told Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram. “So why are we talking about a onetime sort of Band-Aid over this?”

Sean spoke with Young about what Young’s research shows about whether the wealthy move away from higher taxes, why this tax proposal may be different, and the right way to tax the very rich.

Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full episode, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get your podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

Are you open to taxing the billionaires?

Yeah, certainly. There’s a fundamental loophole in the tax system. Every paycheck, I’m paying taxes straight out of that, and so are all your listeners. But if you make your money from holding corporate stock that’s appreciating in value dramatically over time, you don’t pay any tax on that until you sell it. That leads to a situation where people are accumulating vast fortunes essentially without paying any tax on it at all. It’s a huge inequality in the tax system and it’s especially apparent at the very top. I think it’s just a question of what we are going to do about it.

“This is an ongoing problem, year in and year out. Why are we talking about a onetime Band-Aid?”

I’ve been studying the policies currently in place. There are states today that have taxes on millionaire incomes and we have a really good sense of the impacts of that. They raise a lot of revenue, and they don’t have very much effect on migration. Maybe a few people move, but generally not. My research contribution to this is tracking where millionaires live before and after these tax increases. I found between no to very little tax migration in response.

One of the biggest arguments against this billionaire tax in California is that you’re going to chase all the billionaires away. Sergey Brin has already left, but you’re saying the research doesn’t show that effect?

That’s right. But the important point I want to make is that none of these previous tax proposals have suggested that a small number of people would get tax bills up to $10, $12, or $13 billion. We’ve been talking about significantly smaller tax policies. 

I’ve always been cautious and clear about what the research has shown to date: Our experience with taxing millionaires at the state level has been very successful. Many states over the years have adopted it after watching their neighbors to see how it plays out. How it plays out is you get extra revenue and people aren’t really moving away.

But this tax proposal is a completely different tax instrument. Firstly, it’s a onetime tax, but this is not a onetime problem. This is an ongoing problem, year in and year out. Why are we talking about a onetime Band-Aid? 

There are good proposals for an ongoing solution that wouldn’t be this large. For the people that are affected, this is going to be an unprecedented tax bill. I don’t want to say “poor them, they can’t pay it,” but we’re talking about enormous amounts of money.

I believe you have a different proposal on how to [institute a wealth tax], and it has to do with unrealized capital gains. Can you help people who don’t have unrealized capital gains understand what those are?

For sure. Say you hold stock in Google, and over the years, the value of that stock has appreciated enormously, such that you’re now one of the richest people in the world. But none of that was ever paid out as a paycheck. It’s essentially sitting in a capital account and therefore it doesn’t trigger a tax bill unless it gets sold. It rarely gets sold, so effectively it just goes untaxed, potentially forever.

In the meantime, it’s not like these folks are living in a monastery somewhere. They’re living like they’re the richest people in the world. They do this by borrowing against their assets. Borrowing doesn’t trigger a tax liability because borrowing is not income in the tax code.

There are existing proposals at the federal level, which have been worked out in great detail, like the Billionaires Income Tax Act. It’s not a tax on all billionaire wealth; it’s a tax on year-to-year increments in billionaire fortunes. 

If you have $200 billion in Google stock and the next year it’s worth $220 billion, you owe taxes on the $20 billion, not the $220 billion. It’s just on the increment year-to-year and not everything that’s ever happened in the past. That switches it from being a wealth tax to being an income tax. A lot of things count as income, and increases in billionaire fortunes should be treated and taxed as income.

California’s billionaire wealth tax proposal is flawed in many ways, but it is raising a very important conversation about how we are going to address deep loopholes in our tax system. This is a conversation we need to be having.