Are we cool with a Democratic presidential frontrunner raising money from billionaires to oppose a billionaire wealth tax in a transparent effort to show loyalty and make connections ahead of his 2028 campaign? www.nytimes.com/2025/12/26/t...

Got a new one from @matthewccook5.bsky.social and our friends at @exposedbycmd.bsky.social on the rather credulous reporting pushing the Minnesota benefit fraud scandals, and the blanket statements associating all Somalians with this thievery. prospect.org/2025/12/29/c...

Keir Starmer was the model for centrists and popularists who insisted that moving right on issues, especially immigration, is how you win at politics. Wonder if there will ever be any self-reflection here! Ah well nevertheless

Another week of Best of at @prospect.org: First, I choose my best stories from a wild year. 217 articles from me in 2025! prospect.org/2025/12/29/h...

Get used to the fact that there will be no cable television in five years.

AI sloppers (is that a term?) crying that their prompts are being stolen is more beautiful than anything AI could produce

THE FACT THAT ONE OF THE POP-TARTS CHOSE TO LIVE MAKES THE WHOLE THING WORSE SOMEHOW

Literally planned my schedule today to get home in time for the mascot ritual sacrifice at the Pop-Tarts Bowl

Our Best of 2025 roundup at @prospect.org continues. Here's Bob Kuttner's personal favorite stories he wrote this year, inside an essay about Trump, the Supreme Court, Chuck Schumer, Larry Summers, and much more. prospect.org/2025/12/26/g...

Ah this is sad news. Howie wasn't only a great blogger, he really brought our community together in LA in ways that haven't been replicated. He was whip-smart and never held back. RIP

We probably have some real misfires in the back issues of @prospect.org but I'm confident that we have nothing like this. (Our bachelors of the month were mostly economists and policymakers, I presume): www.nytimes.com/2025/12/16/m...

Also we couldn't finish 2025 without a parting shot from @ryanlcooper.com: "Weiss does have one true talent: ingratiating herself with right-wing billionaire men. And to tech oligarchs like the Ellison family... a dimwitted hack who will tell you what you want to hear sounds like just the ticket."

It's our annual Best Of week at @prospect.org, where each staff writer offers their best stories of the year. First we have Harold Meyerson, who highlights stories about wages, consumer product safety, and Trump: prospect.org/2025/12/24/t...

The reason building a domestic electric car manufacturing network made sense is because it could nurture a technology cluster and give battery producers a built-in local market. Destroying it has implications for everything else that uses batteries. www.nytimes.com/2025/12/23/c...

Check out the Kavanaugh FN 4; I think it's pretty clear that the Kavanaugh Stop thing has gotten to him:

Got a special bonus episode of Organized Money. I did an event with Cory Doctorow for his amazing book Enshittification and we taped it for our Xmas week show: www.organizedmoney.fm/p/the-enshit...

Across the government, Trump officials and big-dollar donors are raking in all kinds of money or favors. But Democratic leadership has prioritized protecting their own corrupt incumbents and the party’s personal insider trading opportunities. From our friends at @revolvingdoordc.bsky.social:

lol www.thecrimson.com/article/2025...

Retired 27-year FBI agent Brian Carroll, who specialized in managing exactly the type of cases like the Brown University shooting, explains all the ways in which Kash Patel just ain't it. Really great inside analysis: prospect.org/2025/12/23/k...

We've got 1 more Moe Tkacik banger in us before the end of the year. It's about Marco Rubio, his scheme to appoint drug cartel bosses & their cronies atop the governments of every Latin American country in the name of fighting drug cartels, & his high school summer job working for a drug trafficker.

But did he give the White House a chance to respond!?!? I can give the judge Stephen Miller's email address-

CBS News' legal department spending their entire holiday season issuing takedown notices

You might question her methods, but credit to Bari Weiss: her leadership has pushed 60 Minutes into new formats and attracted a bunch of new viewership outside the normal broadcast audience.

boltsmag.org/donate prospect.org/donate

watching the CECOT 60 Minutes segment that CBS suppressed, it’s striking that Weiss specifically called out as unnecessary some of the most rigorous investigative work in the segment, including an explanation of how it was done (by human rights researchers)

OK I've watched it. One key piece that hasn't been discussed: DHS didn't just decline to comment, they explicitly referred all questions to El Salvador.

lmao

Everyone resigned to Paramount taking control of Warner Bros. Discovery and therefore CNN should be contacting their state attorney general to tell them to right now give their intentions to block any illegal merger that consolidates entertainment studios and reduces competition.

Another great hire for @zohrankmamdani.bsky.social: Sam Levine, Lina Khan's head of consumer protection at the FTC, will head the NYC Department of Consumer and Worker Protection.

After I got laid off before the holidays last year, I wasn’t sure if I’d ever work in journalism again. I was so shocked and thrilled when @ddayen.bsky.social called with an offer that I yelled REALLY?! into the phone and scared the cat. I was so psyched. I'm still psyched!

It's funny: when the Trump administration gets truly desperate, when they are flailing to meet their promises to lower prices, they just announce a bunch of old Lina Khan initiatives. The keyword there is "announce." They're parroting economic justice concepts without the follow-through. From me:

2025's oligarchical ascension has spurred a backlash from Mitt Romney, let alone those to his left. As Harold Meyerson writes, "Democrats will either go full progressive populist, or they won’t go anywhere at all." prospect.org/2025/12/22/h...

One of the more interesting storylines as we close this year is the rising anger with data center development. @gurleygg.bsky.social runs down the calls for moratoria, multiple incidents of local rejections, and the impact it's already having on data center financing: prospect.org/2025/12/22/d...

We've heard from these Venezuelan CECOT survivors multiple times, in human rights reports and written testimony. The NYTimes version of it got a WH quote. This is the useless kind of thing Bari needed? www.propublica.org/article/vene... www.hrw.org/report/2025/... www.nytimes.com/2025/11/08/w...

It's hard to ignore that this happened just as Paramount's hostile bid for Warner Bros. was slipping away, with Kushner pulling out of the financing and Trump bad-mouthing CBS. Time to please the king again

An artist was deeded a decommissioned Stonewall Jackson statue from Charlottesville, took it apart, and reconstituted it as art. On display in Los Angeles.

A little more on this: The union issue is with the IATSE crew, but the film has a SAG/AFTRA contract for actors. Didn't stop them from advertising for non-union actors last year. (Possible the ad was from before the contract was locked in, but SAG actors had joined the film prior to the date shown)

Lol @ericswalwell.bsky.social is the executive producer of a film where most of the crew walked off the set because they can't get a union contract www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/bus...

In a major reversal, Gov Hochul yielded to the legislature and signed the RAISE act, the AI safety law, which sets a new and strong standard. There are some negotiated changes from the original but it's still a significant bill. Hochul tried to gut and weaken it last week.

This is part of the Trump administration’s Epstein Files release — 119 pages of Grand Jury testimony, fully redacted. This is not transparency. This is a cover-up. Follow the law and release ALL of the damn files.

Confirmed: House Democratic leaders have decided to use a stock trading ban bill as a campaign issue rather than actually pass something that had the GOP support to advance. Jeffries' team is actively discouraging participation in the bipartisan bill and warning outside groups too.

There's always a kind of landing spot for post-presidential advisors, and usually among Democrats it's along the lines of "high-level corporate consultancies" or just "Uber." Interesting that for some of Bidenworld it's just the Mamdani administration.

Really appreciate the justified anger in this piece by @ryanlcooper.com. The GOP's narrative about trans people "is and always has been a lie. What these people actually have is a seething, obsessive hatred of trans people. They want them either back in the closet or dead."

Santiago Montag reports from Syria, where 16 million people—70% of the population—are dependent on humanitarian aid, and are increasingly desperate after USAID cuts: "We’ve reduced our meals to just one plate a day" "People only get water once every ten days" prospect.org/2025/12/19/u...

From me: If they wanted to tank their majority, Republicans couldn't do much worse than dragging out a debate on their worst issue (health care) into an election year, after affirmatively causing a severe rise in the cost of living for tens of millions. prospect.org/2025/12/19/r...

Important story from @bharatramamurti.bsky.social. The "no taxes under $400,000" one-way ratchet has waved in so many Trump/Bush tax cuts that there's not enough revenue available to pursue much of an agenda. bharatramamurti.substack.com/p/the-tickin...

Running for office on the single issue that sick people shouldn't have to pay for parking at the hospital

Zohran Mamdani explains that thousands and thousands of New Yorkers are already eligible for free and reduce public transportation, but because of the bureaucratic hurdles they never get enrolled in the program. That's why he wants to just make the bus free.

It's quaint to talk about inflation reports and surprising softness on the margins when in 13 days the out-of-pocket cost of health insurance is going to rise for 26 million households by an average of 75%

This is just really sad. UAW tried to throw up a lot of smoke about Neil Barofsky but he had the receipts. Shawn Fain's chief of staff and comms director conspired to fire Secretary-Treasurer Margaret Mock. Now she's being reinstated and the chief of staff is resigning. www.msn.com/en-us/money/...