26 Feb 2025 9 min read

January February reading

I keep seeing these end of year posts from people cataloging all the books they've read this year, highlighting their favorites, etc. and I started to feel a little jealous and lazy. Of course I read books and listen to audio books, but I am terrible about tracking this stuff. In an attempt to be better, and to have a record of things that I've read that I enjoyed and found helpful, I've decided to try to track my monthly reading, but for journalism, not fiction or nonfiction books. This is the first attempt.

#Authoritarianism

Interesting piece by David Dayen that argues Trump, having failed to totally overwhelm the system quickly and efficiently enough, has essentially failed to dramatically transform our government and electoral system, and that his sinking approval ratings and rising anger among voters will confine his project to essentially a pro-billionaire deregulation regime on steroids, but leave our democracy mostly intact. I am cautiously optimistic about this as well.

What Felt Impossible Became Possible | dansinker.com

dansinker.com

The KKK made a massive resurgence in the 1920s, becoming one of the predominant political and cultural organizations in America, and taking over whole towns and state governments. This is the story of George Dale, an Indiana newspaper man who hated the Klan and aggressively resisted them and paid dearly for it, but ultimately won, outlasting them and ending up as Mayor of the town he'd had to flee for his life on numerous occasions. Presented as an allegory for this current moment of fascist resurgence. I loved this story so much. Side note-the author mentions that this history was not taught in schools and I would suspect it's largely true but I do specifically remember discussing this Klan resurgence in our late middle school history classes.

You might assume that Trump has been planning and plotting his takeover for so long that everything is lined up and ready to go now that he's in power and that all these guys are aligned in their goals and motives. You would be wrong. The recent conflicting responses to agency heads to Elon Musk's "respond to this email or you're fired" missive over the weekend of February 22-23rd belie that notion, as does this piece that dives into FBI director Kash Patel's podcast archives to reveal deep mistrust of Musk and his motives. I've also seen rumblings that one reason Steve Bannon seems to be on the outs (again) is that he is deeply skeptical of the role of tech oligarchs in Trump's orbit and views them as an obstacle to building a lasting working class majority (Steve Bannon is weird and gross but very smart).

I saw people dunking on this quite a bit before I read it, and I'm somewhat familiar with the author, so I guess I had a sense of what to expect: a centrist/contrarian take on Elon Musk's skill or intelligence. I don't think he really made a persuasive argument. The main point seems to be that because Elon Musk built successful, powerful companies, that he's a genius and he shouldn't be underestimated. I think people have been reacting to Musk's behavior lately and the way he seems to believe every conspiracy he sees and this was a problem for the author who I really only know by their social media handle, I've never really read much of their work. I guess I can buy the "he's not an idiot he built Tesla and Starlink and SpaceX" argument. But the problem is that version of Elon Musk is not really what we're dealing with. The eccentric guy who makes big pronouncements (that don't every pan out and in retrospect seem pretty clearly designed to pump stock or scare off potential rival municipal projects) doesn't really jive with the frantic, incoherent, always-posting, conspiracy-brained version of Musk we are seeing right now. And that is the version that really matters because that is the one who has been given an unreal amount of real power and almost no accountability. We are 5 weeks or so into the administration, and the project to analyze and eliminate waste is chaotic, inefficient, mistake-prone, haphazard, illegal, and ultimately not really producing much actual evidence of actual waste.

Adam Serwer is essential reading for understanding Trump and Trumpism. This piece, about the lone exception to Trump's "no refugees" policies, white Afrikaners, lays out the background of this push, its deep connections to the far right, and why the claims these people make about their persecution are sketchy at best. An interesting note that doesn't appear in the piece: Emmanuel Baptist shooter Dylan Roof posed with Rhodesian and South African flags before his attack. This is deep racist lore.

Horrifying story of a man who, although eligible for assistance, kept getting rejected by the AI algorithm used by the government agency he had been applying to. A glimpse of the nightmare in store for everyone if the tech billionaires get their way.

#AI

It’s Easy To Save Billions In Taxpayer Funds When Everything Is Made Up

Here’s a neat trick for saving taxpayers billions of dollars: just make stuff up! I mean, sure, you could do all the hard work of actually finding government waste and fixing inefficient proc…

TechdirtMike Masnick

Straightforward piece about Musk is making up almost all the "savings" he claims to have found in his 1 month tear through the government's books so far. Everything from counting errors, to counting Biden cuts as Trump cuts, to misunderstanding the data in front of him, to just outright bullshit.

Horrifying video of the Trump White House making an "ASMR" video of a migrant being shackled and boarding a deportation plane. I will never in my life understand the glee that these people derive from wanton cruelty towards others. I can't tell if it's that they have no actual sense of humor and think these things are funny, or if they've been so pickled that they think the people they're hurting are not real, or if it's just performative for their crowd because that's the coin of the realm in supporting the MAGA movement. It doesn't really matter, it's all disgusting.

https://buttondown.com/thehypothesis/archive/the-man-who-discovered-media-codes-and-how-to/

Fascinating story about a professor in media studies who revolutionized the way we think about the relationship between media messages and the consumers of those messages. Contains a very useful tool for media analysis.

David Roth is a legend. The most clear-eyed, inventive, and hilarious writer about all things Trump. The yin to Adam Serwer's yang. If Hunter Thompson were alive and in his prime this is what he would write. Can't miss.

This one hits pretty close to home. I've been experiencing the struggles of students using AI to write for awhile. I've worked on developing detection methods for it, created lessons for my students on why it's bad for them to use, and ultimately tried to get them to understand that the biggest problem with AI is that it short-circuits the most important aspect of the writing process: the critical thinking practice necessary to craft a good piece of writing. By cheating themselves of this work, they are cheating themselves of the ability to develop strong critical thinking skills, and will ultimately leave themselves vulnerable later in life to scams, poor decision-making, and a narrow view of the world that will limit their experiences and opportunities. And here comes this article that proves everything I've been saying!

#AI

Fun read about shoots of resistance to Trump and the Republicans' wrecking of the government. Hopefully this kind of thing greatly expands.

https://www.axios.com/2025/02/20/ai-agi-timeline-promises-openai-anthropic-deepmind

Putting these two together because Ed Zitron has become my go-to read for understanding the con of AI and the economics behind its continued existence in our lives despite it's lack of a concrete use case. One of his frustrations is how the media doesn't really report how obvious the flaws are with AI and that it's essentially a huge bubble waiting to burst all over our tech sector and consequently our economy. Always read Ed Zitron.

#AI

Short but interesting piece about a listener of the podcast "The Daily" who wrote in to blast them for their feckless coverage of the early Trump moves that focused on Democratic Party drama and didn't much bother to explore the shocking assault Trump had already been unleashing on government agencies and the judicial system in open defiance of the law. I've always hated The Daily and I thoroughly enjoyed the lashing this reader, who was extremely intelligent, well-read, and informed about the issues, gave them.

Well, that's about it. There are a few others that really weren't that notable. A lot of more timely pieces that I'm not going to bother to catalogue because by the time anyone ever reads this (lol) they'll be quite stale. Hoping to keep this up because I enjoyed reviewing a couple of them and the process of writing this out helped me refine my thinking about them a bit.