April 20, 2026
Humor; Governance; A way with words; Artificial intelligence; Inequality; Leadership; Democracy; Potpourri
Humor
Governance
A way with words
Artificial intelligence
Inequality
Leadership
Democracy
Potpourri
Humor
https://open.substack.com/pub/borowitzreport/p/obama-offers-to-help-trump-craft
Obama Offers to Help Trump Craft Nuclear Deal with Iran
Although Obama thought he could be of assistance in crafting a nuclear deal with Iran, he added, “I don’t know how you’ll get them to stop blocking the Strait of Hormuz. It was totally open when I was president.”
The 10 Things the Bezoses Are Almost Certainly Grateful for Each Morning
A thing I didn’t know about myself until I had this much money was how charming I was, how good all my ideas were, and how everything I had to say was interesting. And … I’m grateful for that.
Early access to the Melania documentary! Some things money can’t buy, but … that is not one of them.
https://www.newyorker.com/cartoon/a61793
Will you be using my story as a foil to reveal one of the doctor’s flaws, or is this a regular E.R.?
https://bsky.app/profile/nytpitchbot.bsky.social/post/3mjjynua6ns2x
Instead of squabbling with the Catholic Church, President Trump must focus on what they have in common, such as a legacy of protecting pedophiles.
https://bsky.app/profile/nytpitchbot.bsky.social/post/3mjjynleems2x
The Republican president is a lying, grifting, bribe-taking rapist who let drug traffickers out of prison, defunded my wife’s cancer trial, and started a nonsensical war in Iran. But the Democratic mayor of a nearby city is black. I have never felt more politically homeless.
https://bsky.app/profile/nytpitchbot.bsky.social/post/3mjfisw26mc2t
Trump’s Erratic Behavior and Extreme Comments Revive Biden Mental Health Debate
Recall Initiated for Officials Behind Fair-Minded Solution to Societal Problem
Irate citizens say public servants must pay ultimate price
Governance
https://www.vox.com/today-explained-newsletter/485875/iran-negotiations-mistakes
Trump’s bungled Iran negotiations didn’t have to go this way
Wendy Sherman helped Obama reach a deal with Iran. She sees [five] areas where Trump is going wrong.
Problem No. 1: They sent the B team to negotiate.
Problem No. 2: They pursued a strategy that benefited Russia.
Problem No. 3: They badly damaged the world economy.
Problem No. 4: They did not, in fact, have the Iranians’ “backs.”
Problem No. 5: They actually made the nuclear problem worse.
https://cei.org/opeds_articles/drug-approvals-and-deadly-delays/
Those injured by an incorrectly approved drug will often know that they are victims of FDA mistakes. Their stories make riveting news, and their testimony, or that of their surviving families, is dynamite. But for victims of incorrect FDA delays or denials, who are prevented from using drugs that could have helped them, the situation is far different. All they know is that their doctors told them that nothing more could be done to help them. Only a fraction of these people will understand the reason for this—namely, that a useful drug was bottled up at FDA.
A way with words
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/05/best-free-restaurant-bread-america/686582/
My primary means of determining the best free restaurant bread in America is to demand answers from people—my father and friends, yes, but also anyone else I can think of. Strangers encountered on errands. Everyone who sends me an email during the month of October. “What is the best free restaurant bread in America?” I amass several hundred answers.
In harvesting this knowledge, I am exposed to countless novel methods through which humans might delight, disappoint, irritate, and surprise one another. Some people invent their own question on the spot and answer that instead: Asked to identify the best free restaurant bread in America, they tell of a great bakery where bread can be purchased for money, or the worst free restaurant bread in America. Others imagine that the question contains some hidden constraint, which they undertake to expose—“It can’t be a chain restaurant,” they declare, or “It has to be a chain restaurant.” The fixins’-dazzled deliver monologues about butter and olive oil, forgetting that bread exists. One smug stranger in a hot tub tells me that she cannot answer, because she makes her own bread. (Does she bring it to restaurants?) A number decline to consider the question, because they no longer eat gluten. (I don’t require anyone to eat the bread they mention.) (Unrelated warning—not a threat: Gluten-free bread is unable to transubstantiate into the body of Christ, according to Catholic law.) Some folks itch to argue with me about what I mean by bread, daring me to reject their votes for pitas, sopaipillas, corn tortilla chips, or hush puppies. They are disgruntled to learn that I let each person define bread as he or she wishes, desiring only that it incorporate a non-raw staple starch. …
William Rubel’s profoundest anxiety about my article, I learn, is that I will inadvertently denigrate another culture’s bread—by suggesting that a yeasted roll is inherently superior to, say, chapati. He fears this more than the possibility that I might assert in print that Red Lobster Cheddar Bay Biscuits taste better than the bread served at Chez Panisse. (“I guess I need to eat it,” he says, catching himself declaring, with no firsthand knowledge, that the table bread at Red Lobster could not possibly be superior. I will extend this same grace to the bread at Chez Panisse.) “You’ll need to find some way to clarify that you aren’t saying these are the best breads in the world,” he tells me. “These are what people you talked to in America at this time considered the best.”
While sexism played some role in the decline of Hite’s career, it was hardly the only factor. Her first book was a wonder of perfect timing, arriving at just the moment when the world was ripe to receive it. Her follow-ups—Women and Love and a book on male sexuality—lack the revelatory quality of the original The Hite Report, and she didn’t have the institutional affiliation and support to continue research in other, less mediagenic areas, perhaps with more statistical rigor. Fatally, Hite made the mistake of believing that being covered is the same thing as being loved and admired.
But, despite these setbacks, Hite ultimately succeeded. The key point of The Hite Report—that the clitoris is the central organ of female sexual response and pleasure—is common knowledge today. Hardly anyone now remembers the time when women berated themselves for their “abnormality” because they couldn’t reach orgasm from penetrative vaginal intercourse alone. Even if many people under 40 have apparently not heard of it, The Hite Report never truly disappeared. Because now, it’s everywhere.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/20/opinion/movies-runtime-long.html
Movies at this point spend most of their lives on streaming services rather than in actual theaters, and those services want to command viewers’ attention for as long as possible. That desire is reflected primarily in limited series that sprawl to eight or 10 parts when four would do the trick. But it’s also a disincentive for movie directors to make tough decisions and trim.
Succinctness, understatement, subtlety — those belong to a lost world, before Netflix and Apple TV+ and Amazon Prime Video, whose effect on them was not unlike an asteroid’s on brontosaurs. More is more is the new less is more, and more than that is even better. I feel bullied by the bloat.
Artificial intelligence
https://www.newyorker.com/books/under-review/how-project-maven-put-ai-into-the-kill-chain
How Project Maven Put A.I. Into the Kill Chain
Kevin Baker writes, … “Clausewitz observed that most intelligence is false, that reports contradict each other. The commander who has worked through this learns to see the way an eye adjusts to darkness, not by getting better light but by staying long enough to use what light there is.” He continues, “This ‘staying’ is what takes time. Compress the time and the friction does not disappear. You just stop noticing it.” Humans are in the loop for a reason.We are there to slow things down.
Inequality
The American Experiment Has Been Infected by Oligarchs
How our tax system guarantees extreme wealth concentration.
Leadership
Zelenskyy honored with prestigious International Four Freedoms Award for Ukraine’s resilience
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/04/pete-hegseth-unholy-war-iran/686789/
Hegseth’s Unholy War
The defense secretary seems less interested in being on the side of God than on insisting that God is on his side.
“The devil,” William Shakespeare wrote in The Merchant of Venice, “can cite Scripture for his purpose.” As we’ve seen in recent weeks, so can Pete Hegseth. …
Hegseth, Trump, and many of their fundamentalist and evangelical followers seem less interested in textual interpretation than in seeking scriptural validation for their bloodlust. They seem determined to find texts within the Bible to justify their dark passions, their emotional and psychological predilections. They believe what they believe quite apart from the Bible; its utility is to affirm what they already intend to do. Hegseth and his merry band of holy warriors aren’t interested in being on the side of God so much as they are insistent that God is on their side. …
The latest debate about holy war is a reminder that moral dispositions and discernment are among the most important interpretive tools Christians have. The apostle Paul seemed to hint at this when he said, in 1 Corinthians 13, that you can have all knowledge, you can fathom all mysteries, you can have faith that moves mountains, but without love, you are nothing.
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/2026/04/kash-patel-fbi-director-drinking-absences/686839/
The FBI Director Is MIA
Kash Patel has alarmed colleagues with episodes of excessive drinking and unexplained absences.
Democracy
https://x.com/MikeLevin/status/2044633509122502778
It should be a much bigger story that JD Vance flew to Hungary, stood on a campaign stage, and told voters to return a head of government widely documented for human rights abuses and democratic backsliding.
Then, after his candidate lost, Vance said what had happened during the Hungarian campaign was “one of the worst examples of foreign election interference that I’ve ever seen or ever even read about.”
Extra points for honesty.
With the entry of Virginia into the [National Popular Vote Interstate Compact], the signatories now carry 222. Maine, Minnesota and Colorado also joined since 2020.
As Notre Dame law professor Derek Muller notes, this puts 270 plausibly within reach for the first time. “If Michigan (15), Pennsylvania (19), Wisconsin (10), and Nevada (6) all tip toward Democratic trifectas” — meaning Democratic control of the governorship and both houses of the legislature — “that’s 50 EVs,” he observes. If each of those states ratified the NPVIC, it would control an Electoral College majority — 272 votes out of 538 — and the compact, by its own terms, would go into effect. ...
But even if the conditions to activate the NPVIC were met, it’s an open question whether it could actually be implemented in a close presidential election without a constitutional crisis.
For one thing, the Constitution limits the ability of states to enter into binding agreements with other states without congressional approval. For another, governors who have to certify electoral votes after the election is over could try — with constitutional justification — to renege on the compact. They could insist on awarding their state’s electoral votes to the candidate who won their state, rather than the popular vote winner, if doing otherwise would hand the White House to the opposing party. Imagine the court challenges leading up to inauguration.
Potpourri
https://www.thebulwark.com/p/the-department-of-war-vs-the-pope
A big part of Trumpism is Christian nationalism. Christian nationalism is not primarily a flavor of Christianity. It is a sub-brand of nationalism.
After the Cesar Chavez revelations, it’s time for tributes to transcend the “great-man theory” of history.