Aug
9
2026

Oh, To Be a Fly on the Wall at This Meeting

It turns out that ex-Celtic Enes Kanter Freedom has officially declared himself a WNBA "prospect" for their draft next year. Here's the Facebook Reel of his announcement.

Back in 2021, I endorsed Enes for President. I stand by that.

(OK, so he is technically ineligible, having been born in Switzerland.)

Also of note:

  • With an earth-shattering kaboom. Noah Smith points out one little problem with an increasingly popular policy stance: Banning data centers would blow up the U.S. economy.

    So far, there has been no strong move toward a federal data center pause, and the bills that have been introduced in Congress are pretty mild stuff. That’s why as long as the movement to stop data centers stayed confined to blue states, it didn’t really matter much. It was just another instance of a very traditional story that we’ve all come to expect — states like New York basically ban new physical industries, so those industries go to places like Texas. The red states get the economic activity they want, the blue states get the stasis they want, and everyone is happy.

    Nor would a few state-level bans affect the progress of AI. AI is a creature of bits and bytes; it lives in the cloud, and it doesn’t care about the physical location of the data centers that represent the lobes of its vast, alien brain. Data centers in Texas would sustain AI progress and AI applications just as well as data centers in New York.

    Except now Texas is pausing data centers too. If almost all states ban data centers — or if the federal government gets involved in a major way — there could be major consequences for the U.S. economy. In the long run, I think limiting the physical resources devoted to AI would be a good thing; in the short run, it will simply clobber the already-wobbly U.S. economy. A movement against data centers has the seeds of something good and useful, but it has huge risks that most Americans seem not to realize yet.

    Noah actually thinks "data center limitations make sense in the long run". Unfortunately, his paywall kicks in before he describes where the line between "limitations" and "banning" should be drawn.

  • They got worse. Greg Lukianoff describes What happened to the AAUP — and why viewpoint diversity matters.

    On July 30, the American Association of University Professors did something it has never done in its 111-year history: It endorsed a candidate for political office.

    And this was not a general-election endorsement against some uniquely terrible enemy of academic freedom. No, the national AAUP waded into a contested Democratic primary for Michigan’s U.S. Senate seat and backed Abdul El-Sayed, the unmistakable candidate of the party’s left. He had the backing of Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, ran on Medicare for All, rejected corporate PAC money, and called for ending U.S. military aid to Israel.

    He was also the more controversial choice, especially because of his position that Israel’s war in Gaza constitutes genocide and his appearances with Hasan Piker. Academic freedom, by contrast, was not a defining issue of his campaign, although El-Sayed had been an AAUP member and was strongly backed by organized labor. The AAUP proudly advertised the decision as its “First-Ever National Political Endorsement.” Todd Wolfson, the AAUP’s president, said roughly 80 percent of the Michigan members who voted supported making an endorsement and 97 percent favored El-Sayed.

    Greg is pretty convincing that this is a bad look for the AAUP. It's easy to be disgusted, but Pun Salad tries to follow the Costello Guidance and search for amusement. Greg provides Todd Wolfson's "now-deleted tweet" responding to his critics:

    Did Prof Tod delete this because it was too ill-tempered, or was he embarrassed by misspelling "Chamberlain"?

  • Yum! River Page tried it so you don't have to: I Made RFK Jr.’s Salmon Cakes. They Were Bad.

    Wednesday, 3 p.m. I was wandering aimlessly around a dingy South Bronx grocery store, desperately trying to find “nutritional yeast,” whatever that is. I looked down at the YouTube video that had been playing on my phone since I got here.

    “And there had been a war on saturated fats for almost 70 years,” Health and Human Services (HHS) secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. croaked through my AirPods. “The government had been lying to us and telling us that protein caused heart attacks.”

    Emblazoned onto Kennedy’s apron—and the apron of the man awkwardly standing beside him, celebrity chef Andrew Gruel—was the title of our government’s new cooking series, The Real Food Show. This was the inaugural episode, which came out last week.

    The aim of The Real Food Show, according to the HHS website, is “to make healthy eating practical, approachable, and affordable.” Every recipe is based on the new Dietary Guidelines for Americans, which were released last year, turning the food pyramid upside down. HHS says these recipes are meant to be “easy,” and “budget friendly” at less than $5 per serving “whenever possible.”

    The debut recipe? Crispy salmon cakes with an apple, white bean, and greens salad. All that for less than $5 a serving? In this economy?

    River wound up spending $98 for the ingredients. There are a lot of ingredients: not only that nutritional yeast, but avocado mayo, thyme, panko breadcrumbs, … (Recipe here)

    And the result: "It looked like cat vomit."

  • Weekly Feature. Your TGIF excerpt from Nellie Bowles:

    → He’s gilding everything: The aging and patinated statues of D.C. are getting regilded. This pair of statues hadn’t been touched since the 1970s, and now they glow, which my Gen-Z translators tell me means shine. Seeing the results here, I’m actually surprised this wasn’t a term-one priority for Trump. By the time the man leaves office the Lincoln Memorial is going to be bedazzled. He is President Liberace, the first gay leader of this nation.

    And in the scam of the week, we have the team at Truth Social selling early access to market-moving White House announcements, calling it Truth API. See, Trump often makes presidential announcements on Truth Social, his social media platform, and now you can buy government announcements a tiny bit early to trade on it. If this sounds at all sketchy, then you probably don’t get what an API is, and that’s fine. This is what real men do for work, and you shouldn’t worry your little head about it, kitten.

    The statement from Trump Media and Technology Group interim CEO Kevin McGurn: “Markets already move on Truth Social posts. Truth API delivers a direct, licensed, real-time feed of the platform’s most market-moving Truths while advancing our strategy to monetize proprietary assets through a high-margin, recurring revenue stream.” The idea is to give algorithmic trading tools a few milliseconds of advantage to trade on whatever the latest Trump announcement is. And they’re spelling that out! Martha Stewart went to jail for a minor trade based on some tidbit her broker had allegedly gleaned (the original James Comey villain story), but anyway. Here we are. Explicitly selling presidential trading tips. Major banks are hesitant to subscribe right now, which means a new type of man is about to get really rich. Men who aren’t scared of a little political crime. I think they’ll have ponytails.

    "Market-moving Truths"! What a concept!