While American families are expected to pay more for goods this holiday season due to Donald Trump’s tariffs, small-business owners are facing an existential crisis, Annie Lowrey reports:

Merry Chrysler! Peace on Earth, goodwill toward all (or most) 🅷🅰🅿🅿🆈 🅷🅾🅻🅸🅳🅰🆈🆂 ➋⓿➋➎ #Christmas #NewYear #HappyHolidays2025 ✺ ﹏ ⁑ ﹌ ﹡＊꙳ 📷 |⃓ 𝖵𝖺𝖼𝗅𝖺𝗏 𝖲𝖾𝗂𝖿𝖾𝗋𝗍

When you have Mitt Romney saying it’s time to #taxtherich, you know this moment in history goes beyond #politics —even if he got there a bit late to the party www.nytimes.com/2025/12/19/o... From 2014: www.wsj.com/articles/BL-...

Millennial optimism is the perfect lens to understand the origin of the phrase #latecapitalism, and its counterpart: hypernormalization, my Christmas movie this year www.theatlantic.com/business/arc... www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archiv...

My contribution to the millennial optimism trend. I have definitely posted some #music from that era trying to revive the individualist, freewheeling spirit of those times, a reflection of American freedom These days I feel this vibe: youtu.be/v3MSH9yhYzQ

Waymo says the San Francisco power outage overwhelmed its robotaxis at scale, creating a backlog that led to response delays.

What do #design and #latecapitalism have in common? It’s mostly a numbers game youtu.be/2xAJVri2a1U

The “60 Minutes” scandal neatly encapsulates the triumph of the past decade’s free-speech hypocrisy, @adamserwer.bsky.social argues.

Breaking News: The Supreme Court refused to immediately allow President Trump to deploy the National Guard in Chicago, casting doubt on deployments elsewhere.

Putting a ton of housing—including many affordable units—on top of a grocery store in a transit rich corridor is exactly what we should be doing and if NIMBYs hadn’t been so recalcitrant over the years they would have more bargaining power now but oh well www.sfchronicle.com/realestate/a...

The “fall of Europe” that Trump wants in his latest national security assessment is about to be precipitated by the #billionaire takeover of social #media — And traditional media may be about to follow in the U.S. if Paramount gets its way

The "60 Minutes" segment pulled from air by CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss did not include new comments from Trump administration officials, according to a copy of the segment viewed by Axios.

“We have effectively handed [the Trump administration] a ‘kill switch’ for any reporting they find inconvenient.” CBS News’ editor-in-chief, Bari Weiss, pulled a 60 Minutes segment featuring the accounts of Venezuelan men sent by the Trump administration to a maximum security prison in El Salvador.

I grew up in the suburbs and got out as quickly as I could. While I appreciated being near nature, I did not appreciate driving 7 miles to do basic errands #urbanism is about transportation choice, i.e. greater convenience www.fastcompany.com/91460628/zon...

“Zero-sum politics.” “Binary thinking.” “The #affordability crisis.” The #housingcrisis. Layoffs. AI Anxiety The #socialcontract is what all these have in common, fueled by the #inequalitycrisis and the insatiable greed of #billionaires www.ft.com/content/30a4... www.instagram.com/p/DSf6tdjk4WL

Steven Levitsky, @lucanway.bsky.social, and @dziblatt.bsky.social discuss the United States’ descent into competitive authoritarianism—and argue that it is not too late to reverse the country’s democratic decline.

The #dumbening of America is in full swing #socialcontract www.instagram.com/p/DSi0PWYgZ1F

A sobering assessment of the #socialcontract under #latecapitalism

Gee, I wonder why this @wired.com story got zero play in my algorithm this weekend 😅 www.wired.com/story/epstei...

“People were human beings to him. To you, they’re cattle.” George Bailey’s words to Mr. Potter still ring painfully true with today's oligarchs. This week’s Closer Look reflects on It’s a Wonderful Life and the billionaire economy we live in today. patrioticmillionaires.org/perspectives...

“We are in the midst of, to put it bluntly, destroying every valuable part of the U.S. economic engine.” Listen to the latest episode of “The Foreign Affairs Interview,” featuring a conversation with Daron Acemoglu: https://fam.ag/49ivR90

For a more market-based example, there is Nvidia’s CEO, who puts it this way, short and sweet, to the point: “If you take care of people, everything else takes care of itself” #socialcontract fortune.com/2025/07/28/n... www.entrepreneur.com/business-new...

“Zero-sum politics.” “Binary thinking.” “The #affordability crisis.” The #housingcrisis. Layoffs. AI Anxiety The #socialcontract is what all these have in common, fueled by the #inequalitycrisis and the insatiable greed of #billionaires www.ft.com/content/30a4... www.instagram.com/p/DSf6tdjk4WL

The city’s long history of poetry continues on a street corner where poet H. Brian McFarland has set up a sidewalk table to sell his literary art.

Is the latest iPhone operating system aesthetically appealing? No. But is it useful? Also no. At least I have company among the disgruntled.

The backward-looking nature of #fascism resembles another extremist ideology. It’s funny: conservative commentators invoked Mao when opposing “woke culture” www.economist.com/internationa... www.instagram.com/p/DSFSNdtjG_V

Full of redactions, the thousands of newly released Epstein files seem unlikely to end any Epstein conspiracy theorizing. Likely, they will do the opposite, @cwarzel.bsky.social argues.

"Under pressure, leaders face a choice: rely on reactive decisions or treat pricing as a strategic capability." f-st.co/iFsfLQn

Solid state batteries marking an early arrival in China as the U.S. and EU pursue protectionist trade policies to slow down the eco revolution in #transportation 530km is about 330 miles

Maybe Elon Musk didn’t know: the USAID food aid he ended was designed to help people participate more in capitalism by reaching from a higher floor It’s worked before in the United States of America, the good ol’ USA (not “America”): www.theatlantic.com/politics/arc... www.vox.com/future-perfe...

The final weekend before Christmas could be the Bay Area’s wettest weekend since November of last year, with San Francisco in line to receive between 1 and 3 inches of rain by Sunday night.

Breaking news: The U.S. Coast Guard deleted language from its new workplace harassment policy that had downgraded the definition of swastikas and nooses from overt hate symbols to “potentially divisive,” reversing course after objections from Congress.

The arts institution will be called the Trump-Kennedy Center. The president's press secretary said it comes after a unanimous vote by the center's board, which Trump took over earlier this year. n.pr/4qhD3bd

“It’s time to revisit the basics of why it’s important to call out lies. They’re more than just words. Lies harm livelihoods and families.” Read why PolitiFact named 2025 the Year of the Lies, from Editor-in-Chief Katie Sanders:

While the extended schedule is designed to accommodate balloon drops, fireworks shows, and last calls at bars, it’s still spare compared to what BART offered before the pandemic.

Back-to-back storms are forecast to dump inches of rain in the region.

Choose your drinks wisely—clearer drinks, such as gin or vodka, are preferable to darker ones such as whisky or red wine. The “congeners” that accompany ethanol in darker spirits can make the after-effects of your tipple much worse

Tesla has 60 days to rename Autopilot, or it could face a sales suspension in its biggest U.S. market.

Trump promises 'economic boom the likes of which the world has never seen' in 2026

U.S. electricity prices rose 7.4% in just one year, and energy policy analysts expect them to keep climbing faster than inflation in 2026. Meanwhile, data centers powering AI could nearly triple their energy use by 2030. buff.ly/KE663ZA

#inequalitycrisis #latecapitalism

It’s a copyright jungle out there #ai #strategy

In this episode of “Uncanny Valley,” we bring you our conversation with Jon M. Chu from WIRED’s Big Interview event, fresh on the heels of directing “Wicked: For Good.” www.wired.com/story/uncann...

The boomers had an expression I don’t hear a lot lately: “rose-colored glasses.” 👓 🌹 As a guard rail against excessive optimism—satirized by Voltaire in “Candide,” also a Bernstein musical—it prevented an exceptional country from becoming space cases (though we actually did go to the moon 🌙)

Around the time of the shooting at Bondi Beach, Ahmed al-Ahmed planned to meet a friend for coffee and was shocked to see men firing their weapons at civilians — then he sprang into action. wapo.st/49cIMt4

An obscure company pivoted, then pivoted again, nearly ran out of money—and built a hit product on.wsj.com/4aPfLET

Apple is now worth $4.1 trillion—but its rise was anything but smooth. But what kept Steve Jobs going, he once told students, was a simple career lesson. trib.al/lqjMfc7