If I think about it too hard I get afraid I’ll open a wormhole and zap back to April 2020: an infant on my lap who’s losing weight, a lactation consultant on Zoom who can’t help, family who can’t come, and the walls of an apartment closing in. Six years later and I’m still digging out of that hole.

Make the old iPods again but make them synch wirelessly and charge via UPC. I want to give my kid access to his music without giving Boy my old crappy iPhone and thereby populating my iTunes with his playlists such as “Poop Pee Throwup”

8% of Japan’s oil imports come from Kuwait, so 8% of what Japan is expecting will not show up. Were this a war based on a clear and present danger, this critical American ally may be more pain tolerant. As it stands, it’s another pointless kick in the teeth that will come back to haunt us.

"The problem is not that regulation hampers innovation. The problem is that innovation without purpose is a dead end. " This is spot on, and exactly why I wrote my piece comparing AI to plastics last month. www.newsweek.com/stop-asking-...

This thread is a masterclass of informed critique. “Verification gets reduced to selective fact-display. Deliberation runs as theatre while the questions that matter are ruled out of order. Accountability gets pointed at critics while leadership is left untouched. This is VDA as simulation.”

From the Revolution to Korea, my grandfathers wore the uniform; not wearing it too is my one true regret. And I probably should have been braver, but the Academies then didn’t seem like a …constructively stressful place for a 17 y/o female so I didn’t go for it. I think about that decision a lot.

Most times the internet is awful. Other times you find out that a direct-line ancestor, who'd fought under Gen. Washington in the Revolutionary War, was MURDERED in the riverside tavern his son owned and that the killer ESCAPED by SWIMMING DOWN THE MONONGAHELA. Such a coin toss, the internet.

Just so we’re tracking — Pharisees were Jews; the Bible says Jesus criticized in Matthew 23:13 - “But woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you shut up the kingdom of heaven against men.” The Pharisee Press is not a typo.

“Mine threat in parts of Hormuz was not fully understood; Trump can’t easily conclude this war that few believed was good. Now our Navy’s stuck inside the Strait with sailors eating wood. Our foibles stumble on.”

Incidentally, you can sing this headline to the Battle Hymn of the Republic if you insert the missing “was,” which I’m sure will please @rpg-volley.bsky.social as much as me.

Congrats on “opening” a strait that was open six weeks ago, and all it cost was at least 13 dead service members, thousands of dead Iranian civilians, tens of billions in taxpayer dollars, our loss in global standing, and the Iranian regime’s increase in power. Phenomenal work.

Very niche question -- does anyone have a website recommendation for making a challenge coin?

“US to delay delivery of weapons to several European countries - including the Nordics and the Baltics, because of Iran war.” But next week the White House will be outraged again when Europe attempts to strengthen its own production base, rather than buy US weapons. www.reuters.com/world/middle...

When Secretary Austin made people his first priority, it wasn’t for some sort of namby-pamby normative good. It was because people win wars. People man ships. People manage blockades. If people can’t do that, the blockades, ships, and wars fail. We lose.

Stone-cold accurate.

Having just concluded a TV interview (my first!) after two weeks of 12hr days and feeling like an absolute wreck, I can confirm the fighter pilot’s prayer soothes the nerves: “Dear Lord, please don’t let me f*** up.”

Any excuse to post my third-favorite graphic of all time.

I can't think of a single other example where a company pivoted between two vastly different things. It's like if Boeing went from making airplanes to making perfume. The siren song of AI is just boggling. www.cnbc.com/2026/04/15/a...

Son: “What’s the baddest disease you’ve ever gotten?” Me: “Hmmm…. Probably pneumonia?” Son: “Was that during the Black Death?” 😐

4/13/1891 — b. Vesta Stoudt, American inventor. Inventor of duct tape. Sent FDR a ltr (1943), identified a problem + offered her tested idea as a solution to seal boxes w/ a tearable waterproof cloth tape. The #War Production Board approved her idea #womenshistory #WomenInSTEM #InventorSky #gov #IP

Until some genius finally cracks the physics challenges and builds land trains, this could be a real winner. yaleclimateconnections.org/2026/04/coul...

Having monitored elections in MENA a million years ago, the thing about Orban's defeat that sticks with me the most is not that he lost but that he agreed that he lost. That's the most heartening sign of a healthy democracy. It doesn't matter if the challenger wins if the incumbent never leaves.

Scene: I’m standing in line at Ace Hardware. An employee starts to move a standing display on top of which is a box of Pokémon toys. I grab it right before it falls; two still drop. Employee: “Nice grab! You must’ve played ball!” Me: “You bet! Tho I did not, in fact, catch them all.”

One of the foundational tenets of strategic readiness is the idea that choices to deploy forces incur costs to future decision space. E.g.: the USS Abraham Lincoln and her carrier strike group, had been part of PACFLEET. Will locking her in a blockade be worth the price of her absence elsewhere?

TPM is interested in learning more about this coin and other similar tokens. If you have information about challenge coins please do not hesitate to get in touch with us on Signal: hunter.07 talkingpointsmemo.com/news/staff-a...

There are a lot of people having arguments about what is and isn’t the collar vs the front porch right now and I know this because I am in one

Four brave Americans learned a whole bunch of math and science and physics so they could blast hundred of miles above earth, do more science, and come down through fire to tell us what they learned. All for humanity’s benefit. If that doesn’t make you sob I don’t understand how you operate.

I am watching fellow humans coming back to earth and it is the best antidote to this week. Cheers for science and bravery and humanity, flaws and all.

Thanks to all who joined us last week for this phenomenal discussion - and mark your calendars for June when we’ll apply what we covered in this panel to the PME classroom. This will be the first debate and it promises to be a good one.

"Military members are citing myriad reasons for wanting to leave, but the U.S.-Israeli war against Iran has been a powerful motivator. In March alone, Galvin's center took on more than 80 new clients — almost twice as many as it takes on in an average year." www.npr.org/2026/04/10/n...

There is no McTry.

Idle thought as I make a(nother) pot of coffee: As we watch how this ceasefire holds and evolves, let's not forget that it 22 days after the fall of Baghdad on this day in 2003 was the declaration of "Mission Accomplished," and we all kinda knew already not "Accomplished" things actually were.

Oil companies w/ a market cap close to the US defense budget citing int'l law to protest the WH peace agreement b/c paying for transit is illegal and even they can't afford it forever. Unstoppable force (need to end the war) meets immovable object (Iran's lack of incentive to bend on Hormuz). Wild.

Our PhD student Kennedy Orwa, who studies applications of AI to health care, was hastily deported today to Kenya along with his 13-year-old son without opportunity to speak to legal counsel. King 5 reports that he held a valid visa that was rescinded without explanation.

Over the course of this pointless war, the $28 billion we've spent has simply proven that conventional force can't overmatch asymmetric denial. So tell me again how a $1.5T defense budget buys us the capabilities that our $850B one didn't. www.justsecurity.org/135899/strai...

Medievalist and erstwhile medieval history major Caroline is softly screaming “THIS IS WHAT I HAVE TRAINED FOR”

If you’re like me - i.e. cool and fun at parties - then you probably have a favorite international treaty. It may even be (again like me) the UN Law of the Sea. So it thrills me to speculate that, if the US makes it out of this pointless crisis, we may ratify UNCLOS. www.nytimes.com/2026/04/07/c...

Two weeks of breathing room, for now.

"He is the president, and his words have meaning, and he has publicly committed the United States to the extermination of an entire nation. If Trump gives that order, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff should lay his stars down in front of Trump." www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...

If, after we wake up and read that the US did not drop a bomb of any size or type on Iran, our relief is the thing that lingers in our minds, God help the Republic. There is no relief here. There is only the generational work of affirming that statement was an aberration. We can't uncross this line.

If anyone in a position of power or influence has been thinking to themselves "well, if it ever gets really nuts I'll [insert the thing you've been holding in reserve]," now's your big moment.

Two April 7ths in history: 1776: after breaking the siege of Boston, Gen. Washington pushes his army to New York, anticipating a British attack. 2026: during a war of choice unauthorized by Congress, the 47th US president locks the escalation ladder saying "a whole civilization will die tonight."

Don't think I've ever been as terrified in all the Trump security crises. As @pkrugman.bsky.social said, "It’s the most astonishing, awful thing that I’ve ever seen, and we’ve all seen a lot of awful things." Mainly as cope, and to teach it, I keep asking why. 1/ open.substack.com/pub/paulkrug...

Science is so awesome.

I didn't know anything about the Artemis II astronauts a week ago and now I would fight my way into Hell for any of them.

Energy security, especially renewable energy, has been the US' biggest blind spot viz China. "As the Strait of Hormuz...remains largely shut off, China has so far proved more resilient than much of the rest of the world." www.nytimes.com/2026/04/06/b...

When I served in DoD, I wasn’t prepared for the number of people who assumed I was “pro war.” It didn’t seem to compute that I was there to be on the side of the volunteers who signed up, to be the voice in the room making damn sure the finite resource of their service was supported and protected.

NASA just dropped this image of Artemis II astronaut Christina Koch looking back at us. The first woman to ever see our planet in its entirety. I’m not crying you’re crying 🥹🔭🧪 📸: NASA

“Chinese firms — some with links to the People’s Liberation Army — marrying artificial intelligence with open-source data to market information they claim can “expose” the movements of U.S. forces.” AI as battlefield surveillance tool. www.washingtonpost.com/national-sec...