Falling on Def Ears

Hegseth's Defense, Breaking up Google

The official motto of the US Army is "This We'll Defend." After three months of chaotic, dangerous, and at times deeply embarrassing leadership by Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, much of Washington is asking Trump why This is what he continues to defend. The only new weapon Hegseth has added to the Pentagon’s arsenal is the political bombshell. But, despite multiple accounts of sharing war plans with unauthorized chat group members on Signal and what the NYT (Gift Article) describes as "a run of chaos that is unmatched in the recent history of the Defense Department," the president continues to turn a blind eye to his Def Sec's shortcomings.

+ Jonathan Lemire in The Atlantic (Gift Article): Why Trump Is Standing by Hegseth, for Now. "Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth shared sensitive attack plans in a Signal group chat. No, not that one—a different one. Some of his top Pentagon aides have been ousted, but few in the building are sure what they were ousted for, or even by whom. And the talk in Washington revolves around who might be on the short list to replace him, even as President Donald Trump delivered a firm defense of Hegseth today while standing a few feet away from a giant bunny. That surreal sight—at the White House Easter Egg Roll this morning—seemed oddly fitting on a day when the world’s largest military was enveloped in a level of dysfunction that bordered on the comical, except for the hundreds of billions of dollars of fighter jets and tanks involved."

+ Hegseth may eventually be ousted, but it's worth noting a few things. One, Trump is in his authoritarian mindset and doesn't want to acquiesce to outside (or inside) pressures like he did during his first term. Two, during that first term, most of those who left the administration had pretty terrible things to say about the administration. Three, it's hard not to see that a goal of this administration has been to weaken American institutions and prowess while fixating on DEI, book banning, and attacks on political opponents. By those standards, Hegseth, with a heavy dose of media razzle dazzle, seems to be following his marching orders to a T(rump).

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Under the Influencer

Parents are more worried about the impact of social media use on their teens' mental health than teens themselves are. And teens are more worried about the impact of social media on the mental health of their peers than the impact on them personally. For today's teens, social media is so fully integrated into their broader social lives, a teen's ability to suss out its effects as a separate line item in a survey seems a little sus. Here's the latest from Pew on Teens, Social Media and Mental Health.

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Sub Optimal

"Deep inside a subway station in Brooklyn, in a cramped, industrial room, Dyanesha Pryor pushes in a metal lever on a hulking machine that was installed nearly a century ago. A few hundred feet away, a signal light flashes red and a train that had been rumbling down the local tracks slides to a stop. Ms. Pryor, a transit worker, pulls another lever and a section of rail shifts into place, allowing the local train to merge onto a shared track in front of a waiting express train. She then restores the signal to green and the local rolls into the station." For anyone with deep fears that AI is taking over everything, the way the NYC Subway is operated may come as a relief. Some of that relief may be thrown off track when you learn that vast swaths of the subway still rely on signal equipment from the Great Depression. From the NYT (Gift Article), a really cool, Inside Look at the Subway’s Archaic Signal System. (I still haven't gotten over the fact that they stopped using tokens.)

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Cobra Chai

"Tiger Schulmann’s martial-arts empire is vast. He has fifty-four schools across the Northeast, where his senseis turn ninety-eight-pound weaklings into warriors for a few thousand dollars a pop. The franchise grosses more than $35 million a year, and Schulmann himself has made a fortune. At sixty-two, he’s still got that intimidating aura, flinty stare—and the eight-pack too ... But behind the pressed white uniforms and kids’ birthday parties, Tiger Schulmann’s Karate was once a Wild West of broken bones and bruised egos, fortunes made and reputations squandered, where many of the hits were below the black belt. Schulmann invited the wrath of prosecutors and police, aggrieved former senseis, and keyboard ninjas who called him a 'scumbag' and 'scam artist.'" David Gauvey Herbert waxes on about a karate empire in Esquire: Bad Dojo: Tiger Schulmann Didn’t Get to Be America’s No. 1 Karate Kingpin Without Busting a Few Faces. "The origin story is legend, told to prospective students, printed in karate magazines, plastered on the wall of the franchise’s New Jersey headquarters: One day in 1972, Schulmann’s older brother Ben crawled home from the bus stop after anti-Semitic bullies broke his leg."

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Extra, Extra

Breaking Up is Hard to Do: In normal times, the fact that Google may be on the brink of a breakup would be a lot bigger news. There's more than a little irony to the fact that Google's dominance over search and advertising is being addressed at a moment when the whole way we interact with the internet is being upended by AI.

+ Empire Strikes Back: Harvard sues Trump administration to stop a freeze of more than $2 billion in grants. I'm sure a lot of folks hear about federal grants to Harvard and wonder why the country's richest university needs government money at all. But it's not quite that simple. In The New Yorker: Atul Gawande follows the money (all the way to your internal organs). The Cost of Defunding Harvard.

+ All That Glitters is Gold: IMF cuts growth forecasts for most countries in wake of century-high US tariffs. And Trump's not the only one with an obsession for the color gold. Gold is surging and it's freaking out the markets. "Big moves in gold have historically signaled deeper instability just beneath the surface. The price of gold often rallies as confidence falters — be it during the inflation crisis of the 1970s, the global meltdown of 2008, or the pandemic panic of 2020."

+ Disappearing, Inc: "In late January, Ricardo Prada Vásquez, a Venezuelan immigrant working in a delivery job in Detroit, picked up an order at a McDonald’s. He was heading to the address when he erroneously turned onto the Ambassador Bridge, which leads to Canada. It is a common mistake even for those who live in the Michigan border city. But for Mr. Prada, 32, it proved fateful." NYT (Gift Article): An Immigrant Held in U.S. Custody ‘Has Simply Disappeared.'

+ Driven Beyond the Brink: "The California Department of Motor Vehicles routinely allows drivers like these — with horrifying histories of dangerous driving, including DUIs, crashes and numerous tickets — to continue to operate on our roadways, a CalMatters investigation has found. Too often they go on to kill. Many keep driving even after they kill. Some go on to kill again." Cal Matters: License to Kill.

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Bottom of the News

"In one small step for robot-kind — thousands of them, really — humanoid robots ran alongside actual humans in a half-marathon in the Chinese capital on Saturday ... As a precaution, a divider separated the parallel courses used by the robots and people."

+ Please Enjoy These Images Of The 2025 Corgi Derby.

+ And for any fellow SF Giants fans out there, I'm pretty sure I've created the perfect T-shirt/Hoodie for this season

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