Here in Woodstock, VT, residents and visitors have been protesting Trumpist authoritarianism every day for more than a year. Here's what appeared yesterday-- and stay to the end to see the glorious Leslie Leslie's sign! Thanks to stellar videographer Marion Abrams of madmotion!

OPINION | Even by Trump’s standards, his latest letter is so dangerous and so delusional that there is no longer any question that the president is mentally “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office,” as laid out in the 25th Amendment.

Insanity. Trump throws a tantrum over not winning the Nobel Peace Prize, which he deserves about as much as Pol Pot, threatens to turn the last of our allies into enemies, and Repubs say "Sure, that makes sense." Is there not an ounce of courage in the GOP? www.washingtonpost.com/world/2026/0...

Krugman: The Stupidest Trump Move So Far open.substack.com/pub/paulkrug...

Here's my latest, about the inadvertent weakness built into the Endangered Species Act and the way that the Trump administration is poised to bulldoze the Act. dornsife.usc.edu/icw/2026/01/...

Maduro’s Ouster Plays Right Into Putin’s Hands www.nytimes.com/2026/01/04/o...

The rate of global mean sea level rise has increased from ~2.1 mm/year in 1993 to ~4.5 mm/year in 2023. www.nature.com/articles/s43...

If there's one thing that works better than colonial rule, it's certainly remote colonial rule.

This is obviously more bad news re: the AI bubble and coming bailouts, stated or unstated. The more personally invested Trump is in the hype cycle, the more he will use public money to delay truth time. But for now he has a notional technology saving his failed media company. Good times!

My latest L.A. Times op-ed: the triumph of salmon vs. Trump's sabotage. www.latimes.com/opinion/stor...

Release of the complete Epstein file is to Trump what going to prison is for Netanyahu. Both prospects are so intensely resisted that making sure those things don't happen becomes the foundation of their policies. N. comes up with endless war; T. embraces a passel of harebrained schemes.

This prison is the ultimate embodiment of Trump's (and Bukele's) sadism, ineptitude, and ruthlessness. www.theatlantic.com/internationa...

A piece about the Yurok tribe's lawyer that was a pleasure to write. He's a graduate of Boston College Law School; thus the story in the BC Law School Magazine. With brilliant photography by Jordan Gale. lawmagazine.bc.edu/2025/07/the-...

Fascinating, revealing conversation about the mostly unacknowledged conflict between agriculture of all kinds and a healthy climate and environment. We obviously need food to survive, but the way ag is conducted now won't work much longer.

Here's my latest, a story about the Klamath River basin that, for a change, is upbeat. e360.yale.edu/features/kla...

The extraordinary elite propaganda effort on behalf of nuclear power has worked: public support for nuclear power is at record highs. This took place during a period in which the only nuclear plant built in the US is 10s of billions over budget. Pretty impressive.

Please let us not try to overthrow the Iran regime, however odious it is. The U.S. might succeed in pulling off a coup, but it would lose the aftermath. Most people don't like having foreigners pick their governments for them. Whatever govt. emerges would be stained by its association with the U.S.

"Our stadiums are monuments to the poverty of our civic ambitions and our inability to summon the collective will to use the land we have for the things we need. They are distractions from our inability to build anything else." www.nytimes.com/2025/05/28/o...

The Trump admin is gambling that its laughably ill-suited but creepily telegenic cabinet members will not deliver up a catastrophe such as an epidemic fueled by lack of vaccinnation, an undetected hurricane, a gruesome plane crash... Not a bet I would take. www.nytimes.com/2025/05/31/o...

The #Trump admin's assault on Harvest is meant to show that if it can destroy Harvard, it can take down any other university. Leaders of other fields, particularly those Trump considers insufficiently supportive, such as, say, The New York Times, would be wise to get prepared.

"Half of Yemen’s children under 5 are malnourished — 'a statistic that is almost unparalleled across the world,' UNICEF says." www.nytimes.com/2025/05/17/o...

The indispensable Naomi Klein passes on some insights about our global predicament. www.rollingstone.com/politics/pol...

The U.S. is now on the Civicus monitor watchlist of repressive regimes for "unprecedented executive orders designed to unravel democratic institutions, rule of law, and global cooperation." monitor.civicus.org/watchlist-ma...

Here's my latest L.A. Times op-ed, out today, on how the Trump administration's funding freezes and personnel layoffs have replaced hope and optimism in the Klamath basin with fear, uncertainty, and anger. www.latimes.com/opinion/stor...

#Trump will insist over and over that his tariffs are permanent right up until the moment when he decides they aren't. The current situation is so volatile that tariffs aren't likely to stay in place-- too many forces will align against Trump, including, I can even imagine, some elected Republicans.

"Hydro‑Québec’s main transmission line into New England stopped exporting any meaningful amount of power two days after President Donald Trump’s tariff on Canadian imports went into effect." www.canarymedia.com/articles/hyd...

If you ever wondered how the KGB manipulated foreigners and got them to repeat Soviet propaganda, spend some time listening to Steve Witkoff talk about his wonderful conversations with Vladimir Putin.

You want to know how bad Canadian-US relations have become? There's a serious discussion in Canada about developing nuclear weapons. This is one of the US's longest, closest, and best ally. And in one month, Trump has destroyed that relationship. Insane and reprehensible.

This is shameful.

If it isn't obvious, you aren't safe in this Trump Administration. Dictators come after anyone and everyone deemed a threat, including their former allies and loyalists. Your white skin, American accent, Christian background, Rust Belt zip code, and/or GOP voting record won't save you.

What an ugly, disagreeable, disreputable country we've become. www.nytimes.com/2025/03/18/u...

Here's my latest, an 1,800-word piece for the New York Times' opinion section about the consequences of the world's largest dam removal project in the #Klamath basin and the calamity that the #Trump administration has abruptly and unnecessarily caused there. www.nytimes.com/2025/03/13/o...

Elon Musk told Joe Rogan, “The fundamental weakness of Western Civilization is empathy.” All you need to know-- this guy should be kept a million miles from government.

Interesting statement on Russia and Ukraine from leadership at the George W Bush Presidential Center. www.bushcenter.org/publications...

The abrupt dismembering of USAID is beyond appalling, as Gawande explains in this grim, powerful interview. The Trumpies who've perpetrated this should be aware that they will be remembered for their cravenness, their blatant disregard for human life. insidemedicine.substack.com/p/usaid-upda...

Donald Trump hallucinating and babbling complete nonsense at the National Prayer Breakfast. There is zero water coming from Canada to California, and nothing he's said or done changes that. He's "opened up" nothing. He must think because Canada is north of the US that it's "uphill."

Murphy: "We need to act like a real opposition party in the middle of a constitutional and democracy crisis. That means we should not be moving forward nominees or legislation in the Senate. Ds should not be giving votes to nominee or legislation in the Senate until Rs get serious about this crisis"

This 2-year-old piece gets at an underlying cause of the Trumpian maelstrom: we are paying now for the disappearance of civics and govt from schools over the last generation in the susceptibility of Americans to scams, conmen, and harebrained ideas. www.lockhaven.com/opinion/colu...

Trump's "flood the zone" strategy will fail, because it creates chaos, not success. Read Ezra Klein for some good reasons for hope. www.nytimes.com/2025/02/02/o...

For a photo op & a bragging media post, Trump minions at the USACoE have thrown away millions of gals of #water farmers were relying on for later this year. This water will not be captured, will not be useful for cities or farms or firefighting. It is now lost. www.latimes.com/environment/...

🧵 THREAD: Trump and Rubio have arrested the international humanitarian aid system and forced lifesaving aid programs to completely halt operations — despite an announcement earlier in the week claiming they had changed course. 1/

This should be 25th amendment level conduct. The president ordered water to be released from a random dam in California nowhere near the wildfires and then claimed it would help. That’s literally Mad King behavior.

I do not recall a 24 hour or one week news cycle with more disturbing news about the state of the presidency and the US government in it than those of today and the past seven days. January 6 was nothing compared to this. But make no mistake, this too is the gov't being torn apart by a mob of thugs.

"Dumping water doesn’t just pose a flood risk to downstream communities, like the town of Porterville, which nearly flooded in 2023. It also reduces the amount of irrigation water available to farmers during the driest months of the year." politi.co/4hEDLuF via @politico

The Washington Post editorial this morning essentially equating Biden's questionable pardons with Trump's outrageous Jan. 6 pardons was unconscionable. The newspaper I've been part of for 48 years has utterly lost its soul.

"As [the tech billionaires at the Inauguration] dance, spin, pander, and debase themselves, we can all see the shallowness of their convictions and the depth of their greed." open.substack.com/pub/elliotki...

The release of 1,500 Jan. 6 rioters is a pivot point, among other reasons because it obliterates the rule of law and frees a little army of insurrectionists. On the path to full-blown dictatorship, it is not Kristallnacht, but it is a step in that direction.

"Asked at a press conference about his famous rapport with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, Trump commented, “'I think he has tremendous condo capabilities. He's got a lot of shoreline.' As for Gaza, “phenomenal location… on the sea, the best weather.'" open.substack.com/pub/tinabrow...

Nathanael West's Day of the Locust (1939) is looking awfully prescient right now.

Here's my latest, on how the World Bank has once more reversed course on big hydro, now supporting some of the world's largest hydroelectric dams. e360.yale.edu/features/wor...