Tuesday, October 20, 2026

Why Trump is in Love with Putin - Max Boot in the WaPost

Donald Trump’s second-term relationship with Volodymyr Zelensky got off to a disastrous start. On Feb. 19, 2025, the U.S. president blasted the courageous Ukrainian leader as a “modestly successful comedian” and a “Dictator without Elections” who “has done a terrible job.” Nine days later, Trump berated Zelensky in the Oval Office for not ending the war that Russian autocrat Vladimir Putin had started. “You don’t have the cards,” Trump told him before temporarily suspending U.S. military aid to Ukraine.

European leaders rushed to repair the breach. Zelensky signed a dealgiving the United States a stake in Ukraine’s mineral rights and agreed to an immediate ceasefire if Russia reciprocated. Those efforts seemed to bear fruit. At the July NATO summit in Turkey, Trump said Zelensky had “done an amazing job” and had been “very effective.” As recently as Sept. 22, they had a friendly meeting in New York, with Trump saying he had approved Ukraine’s request to manufacture its own Patriot missiles.

This month, however, everything went haywire — again. On Oct. 9, Trump had a phone call with Putin, after which he announced the U.S. would buy roughly 36 million barrels of Russian diesel. That will have little effect on soaring prices, but it will pour hundreds of millions of dollars into Russia’s economy. So much for the recently passed Lindsey O. Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act, which authorizes the president to toughen sanctions on Russia and to impose tariffs on countries that import its oil and gas. On Friday, Trump announced he was waiving the law’s provisions on Moscow, thereby flouting the will of a large bipartisan congressional majority.

Not for the first time, it seems the wily Putin has manipulated a credulous Trump. The U.S. president is now blaming Ukrainian strikes on Russian refineries for the soaring oil prices that are exacerbating his political woes. Never mind that his war in Iran is the actual culprit. If Republicans lose the midterms, Trump has a ready-made scapegoat.

Zelensky reacted with understandable anger to the U.S. decision to subsidize the Russian war machine, which is slaughtering Ukrainian civilians every day. (Note that Trump condemns Houthi attacks on Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, but not Russian attacks on Kyiv.) “It is certainly not how partners should act,” Zelensky told reporters. “And, in my view, it is a weak decision ... made by strong partners.” Trump replied by suggesting it’s “time for Ukraine to get a new president.” When asked if Russia needs one, too, he changed the subject.

Trump on Thursday told Newsmax that Zelensky is “not a good guy for us to deal with” and “more difficult” than Putin. He vastly exaggerated the amount of aid the U.S. has given to Ukraine. It is roughly $195 billion, not $350 billion, and much of the money has gone to U.S. defense contractors. Trump also claimed that the U.S. had provided “massive amounts” of Tomahawks to Ukraine, depleting the military’s arsenal. The Pentagon has provided no such cruise missiles.

Ukrainian officials told reporters that U.S. officials were threatening to cut off intelligence sharing and weapons sales if they didn’t stop hitting Russian oil refineries. The speed of Starlink and Starshield, Elon Musk’s satellite WiFi services, was degraded last week, making it difficult for Ukrainian forces to stop Russian terror attacks on schools, hospitals and apartment buildings. It’s still not clear exactly what happened, but the Telegraph reported that Musk proposed the move to Trump, who agreed. Zelensky said Sunday that intelligence sharing had resumed but that internet restrictions were still in effect.

Monday, October 19, 2026

On Cruelty

Only since Donald Trump got to the White House have Americans realized how much they took for granted the sobriety and politeness of Ronald Reagan or Barack Obama. Trumpism’s assault on liberal democracy isn’t only a matter of laws and policies. From the beginning, it has been about legitimizing cruelty. When Trump mockingly imitated a disabled reporter, or said police officers shouldn’t be “too nice” when putting suspects into police cars, or pardoned an American soldier convicted by a court martial of murdering civilians, he was sending the message that he approves of cruelty, and will support those who commit it.

The federal government and the Republican Party resisted that message in his first term; in his second, they have mostly stopped resisting. We are still a long way from the Europe of Shklar’s childhood. America has been a liberal democracy for a long time, and the majority of Americans are not ready to embrace a politics of cruelty. But that prospect feels a lot less theoretical than it did when “The Liberalism of Fear” was written. In the essay, Shklar says that government terror and cruelty weren’t things of the past, but could be seen in “the foreign news in the New York Times.” Now it’s not just the foreign news that reminds us how much we have to be afraid of—and how much we need the values and institutions of liberalism, no matter how unfashionable they’ve become.

-Adam Kirsch in The Atlantic

Saturday, October 17, 2026

The Blog Post That Set the AI World on Fire

An incendiary post from a prominent researcher suggests that AI is actually more predictable than we thought.

By Matteo Wong

Illustration by Akshita Chandra / The Atlantic

OCTOBER 16, 2026, 5:33 PM ET

For the past 24 hours, Silicon Valley has been obsessed with a 26,000-word blog post by the AI researcher Nick Cammarata. The document has been called the “the most important essay,” “the most important result,” and “the single best piece of news” of the year, or in the history of AI research—or, perhaps, ever. Even OpenAI CEO Sam Altman lauded it. Cammarata makes a series of bold, almost astonishing claims about the nature of AI that, if true, would upend some of his industry’s basic assumptions about the very thing it is building. And after months of AI-hacking sprees and mounting public backlash against the industry, many people see Cammarata as offering a glimmer of hope when it comes to not just understanding but also controlling the technology being unleashed on the world.

Boiled down, Cammarata’s main contention is that generative-AI models are not actually black boxes, contrary to the common perception that these systems are so big and labyrinthine as to be nearly impenetrable. In fact, Cammarata argues, there is a relatively clear path toward understanding them. If that’s the case, the material significance could be tremendous: It would provide a way to map AI models’ inner workings and, in turn, perhaps prevent them from wreaking all sorts of harm—autonomously hacking companies and sovereign nations, encouraging users’ delusions, appearing to deceive AI researchers themselves. There is an entire field of research, called “mechanistic interpretability,” devoted to the study of just this.

The argument is just as important as the person making it. Cammarata, a former OpenAI employee, is a respected figure in his field. Years ago, he played a key role in establishing the opposite claim, which is now common wisdom: that neural networks, the software architecture that generative AI is built on, are impossible, or at least very difficult, to understand. In this new essay, Cammarata, who now works at the AI-research company Goodfire, essentially says that he and his entire field have been wrong ever since. “The claims here are viscerally shocking,” one observer wrote. Or, as another wroteon X, they are “big big big big.”

Read: Imagine every AI agent on Earth buying the same cheap paper towels

Neural networks, inspired by the human brain, consist of layered connections among individual nodes, or “neurons,” that activate and send information to one another when responding to a query. Earlier research, including Cammarata’s, established that individual machine neurons can activate in response to many different, unrelated topics—for instance, one neuron can correspond to images of cat faces, cat legs, and the front of cars. Nobody was sure why this happened, but one explanation was that, because AI models contain far more information than they have neurons, they have to repurpose these nodes. Regardless, the basic units of an AI model having seemingly arbitrary, multitudinous functions would make it very difficult to understand what is going on under the hood.

Wednesday, September 30, 2026

Four weeks ago, I dropped off my younger daughter to start her freshman year at college. Parents of incoming freshmen at every school get versions of the same emails: about scheduling your kid’s move-in time and filling out forms for the health center and making sure to buy the extra-long sheets.

Parents of daughters get an extra assignment. It isn’t written down, but we all know what it is. In between buying shower caddies and LED lights, we have to give our girls a refresher course on Rape Prevention 101. Don’t leave your drink unattended at a party. Don’t walk home late at night by yourself. Make sure someone knows where you are. Watch out for your friends.

On move-in day, student volunteers wearing T-shirts in the school colors helpfully whisked my daughter’s suitcases, the single stuffed animal she brought to keep her company and her straining-at-the-seams IKEA bags up to her dorm room. Her father and I made her bed, unboxed her fan, helped her put her clothes in the drawers. We all went to lunch. She went to a meeting with her resident adviser group. Then it was time to say goodbye.

“Make good choices!” I called. I drove home, a little sad, mostly proud, thinking: My work here is done. I knew it wasn’t really true — she’ll still come home on breaks, and she’ll still need me — but it was a milestone. My kind, smart, big-hearted daughter was ready to spread her wings, ready to meet all the people and do all the things.

-Jennifer Weiner in the NY Times

INTERVIEW

The gospel according to Andy Beshear

Kentucky's governor on his new book, the Good Samaritan and why he hasn't ruled out 2028

By JASON KYLE HOWARD

Senior Ideas Editor

PUBLISHED SEPTEMBER 30, 2026 6:45AM (EDT)

Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear attends the 2026 Concordia Annual Summit in New York on Sept. 21, 2026. ( John Nacion/Getty Images)

Andy Beshear has a favorite song: “Universal Sound” by Tyler Childers, the Grammy-winning country artist with a special place in the Kentucky governor’s heart. That title is something of a metaphor, about connecting to a deep, abiding spirituality accessible to us all. It’s meant to be an ecumenical message — just like the one Beshear hopes to deliver.

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“Universal Sound” carried him through a “nasty” reelection campaign in 2023, which ended with a comfortable victory over his GOP opponent, state Attorney General Daniel Cameron, who had been hand-picked for the race by Sen. Mitch McConnell. Amid mounting speculation that Beshear could become a leading contender in the 2028 Democratic presidential primary, “Universal Sound” may well become familiar to more voters.

Beshear’s newly published book, which is de rigueur for potential candidates seeking to raise their political profile and lay out a vision, is also stoking talk of 2028. With its title taken from the biblical parable of the Good Samaritan, “Go and Do Likewise: How We Heal a Broken Country” explores how President Donald Trump and his administration have, in Beshear’s words, “hijacked” Christianity, and how the governor’s brand of inclusive faith underpins his political life, offering readers a blueprint for governing with compassion.

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