Extra, Extra
Fork Yourself: “The OPM email, with the subject line ‘Fork in the Road,’ was reminiscent of one that Musk sent Twitter employees after buying the social media platform in 2022. He fired many of the company’s employees; others quit in droves.” Trump invites nearly all federal workers to quit now, get paid through September. (Can he even make that offer without Congress? An evergreen question…) Wired: Elon Musk Is Running the Twitter Playbook on the Federal Government.
+ Gitmo Baywatch: At signing of Laken Riley Act, Trump says he plans to send migrants in US illegally to Guantanamo.
+ Joint Beefs: “The Pentagon is pulling the security clearance and detail of Gen. Mark Milley, the retired chairman of the Joint Chiefs and the latest longstanding enemy of President Donald Trump to suffer retribution in his new presidential term.” (And with that, the Pete Hegseth era begins…)
+ AI Yai Yai: “Russia’s breakthrough in the ’60s Space Race did not signal the end of spending big dollars on space research. And DeepSeek’s success doesn’t mean spending billions of dollars on AI infrastructure, such as GPUs, is useless or will stop any time soon. The US DeepSeek freakout is, instead, our greatest mass hallucination since… well… the drone fantasy in New Jersey a few weeks earlier.” The real DeepSeek revelation: The market doesn’t understand AI. (If only there were some tool we could use to learn about it…) Meanwhile, Alibaba says it has an AI model even better than DeepSeek.
+ Fait accompli(ce): “The Justice Department on Wednesday moved to dismiss former special counsel Jack Smith’s case against Walt Nauta and Carlos De Oliveira, President Trump’s former co-defendants in his classified documents case.”
+ Goalposts Moved: Chiefs-Bills AFC title game delivers record audience of 57.4M viewers. (I think we can stop asking the question: Are you ready for some football?)
+ Sign Language: “Parents and their children, or people who know each other well, often share some expression that is unique to them — a phrase or gesture that began by happenstance but gradually acquired a meaning that only they know. The same is true of Beryl, a chimpanzee living in Kibale National Park, in Uganda, and her young daughter, Lindsay.” NYT (Gift Article): Mother Chimp and Daughter Share a Special Sign.
+ I Must Be in the Front Rodent: “If you have been following the beast on your socials, you might know that capybaras get hiccups; that they carry large oranges and yuzu on their heads; that they allow birds to eat the schmutz out of their fur, which brings them almost orgiastic levels of delight; that they try to help injured corgis escape from their protective cones; that they cuddle with monkeys and lick baby kangaroos; that a group of them adopted a cat named Oyen into their social group at a Japanese zoo.” Gary Shteyngart in The New Yorker: How the Capybara Won My Heart—and Almost Everyone Else’s.