The Weekly Sift

This morning I am reminded of Lloyd Bridges’ running gag in the movie Airplane: “It looks like I picked the wrong week to …“

I took the last two Mondays off (and had a very restful trip to the Azores). But it looks like a lot of things happened while I was gone. This week I’ll try to catch up.

Shortly after my last blog posts, Charlie Kirk was murdered. Then Jimmy Kimmel was canceled. Then (in some order) a sniper shot at an ICE facility in Dallas, we found out about Tom Homan’s $50K bribe, Jim Comey got indicted, Trump and RFK Jr. declared definitively (and without any scientific evidence) that Tylenol causes autism, Trump made a bonkers speech to the UN, Kimmel came back, Trump announced an invasion of Portland, a guy sitting in my airplane aisle had a personal story to tell about the H1-B visa fiasco, all our generals and admirals have been called to a meeting in Virginia tomorrow, and I probably forgot something.

Looks like I picked the wrong week to take a vacation.

The short version of the last few weeks is that Trump’s bid for dictatorial power seems to be coming to a head. There’s a race against time to seize as much power as he can as his popularity plunges.

Anyway, I have choices to make about which stories to spin off into their own posts. I’m going to write about Kirk simply because much of what I read about him isn’t that good. He wasn’t a saint and he was more than just a collection of bigoted quotes. The Kimmel saga will get its own post, because it raises the question of a turning point. I’m not sure yet what else.

Anyway, the Kimmel post will come out first, maybe around 10. We’ll see what happens from there.

As RFK Jr. dismantles American medical research and tries to reassemble it behind his crank ideas about vaccines and other hobby horses, I’ve been surprised that one historical comparison rarely comes up: Trofim Lysenko, who gained power over Soviet biological research during the Stalin years and ruthlessly pushed his own crank notions of LeMarckian evolution. Researchers who refused to abandon the scientific consensus around Mendel’s genetic theory might find themselves in labor camps or awaiting execution. Lysenkoism was not only a disaster for Soviet science, it contributed to famines and other public catastrophes.

Asking around, it turns out that few Americans know who Lysenko was or what he did. Maybe that’s why we’re so complacent about RFK Jr.’s destruction of American science. This week’s featured post “Lysenkoism Comes to America” is my attempt to fix that. It should be out by 10 EDT.

The weekly summary has a lot to report about Trump’s push towards authoritarianism and various attempts to push back. Chicago looks unlikely to submit meekly to the kind of military occupation Washington is experiencing, and Democrats in general seem to be finding their voices on this issue, putting aside their perpetual fears of seeming “soft on crime”.

An appeals court backed two other courts in declaring Trump’s tariffs illegal, teeing up yet another test of the Supreme Court’s partisanship. Trump tried out a new way to usurp Congress’ power of the purse: a pocket rescission. He’s also testing his ability to fire governors of the Federal Reserve. Alligator Alcatraz is closing after spending large amounts of money and abusing numerous detainees in such a short time.

I am admittedly light on non-Trump news this week, but I think that’s justified: A number of struggles seem to be coming to a head. I’ll try to get the weekly summary out by noon.

Over the last few months, I’ve been feeling dissatisfied with this blog, so I’ve begun making some changes. Last week I branched out and started reposting on Substack. This week I’m changing the format of the weekly summaries.

Here’s why: Ever since Trump took office for his second term, there has really only been one political story worth telling: How Trump is trying to pervert American democracy into an autocracy, what resistance (if any) he’s been running into, and what the American people can do about it.

So, in essence, I’ve been writing the same story every week, but making it current by dressing it up in the details of that week’s particular news developments. This has been boring in some ways and frustrating in others. What I’m trying to communicate hasn’t seemed to match the format I’ve been writing in.

Thinking that through led me into a long meditation on the nature of news, which is the featured post this week.

In our culture, news has a particular timescale. News is what has changed since the last time we talked. When you meet an old buddy at a high school reunion, “I had a kid two years ago” is news. But when you take a coffee break with your officemate at work, it isn’t. If you want to talk about that in the office, you have to dress it up with a more current event, like “Bobby had his second birthday Tuesday.”

For the last seven months, then, I’ve been dressing up the Trump-wants-to-be-Putin story in the form of what happens each week. It’s a strange dance, in that you probably see what I’m doing, but I don’t actually tell you in so many words.

The point of the reformat is to make all that clear, so that the Sift will be more direct and honest. Each weekly summary will start with a “Significant Ongoing Stories” section, which will list the forest-level things I’m paying attention to, and how they connect to the trees in this week’s news. Then I’ll have a “This Week’s Developments” section, which will basically be what the old weekly summary was.

The featured post “The Timescale of News” should be out between 10 and 11 EDT. The revamped weekly summary I’ll try to get out by noon.

Consider this all a work in progress, so comment freely.

This week Trump’s autocratic tendencies reached an almost comical level, evoking a “He did what?” reaction even from people otherwise inclined support him: He responded to bad news in the June jobs report by firing the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Don’t like the numbers? Fire the number-crunchers! That’ll fix it.

That firing resembled the moment in his first term when he suggested that the way to deal with accelerating rates of Covid infection was to stop testing. Fewer tests, fewer positive results — problem solved! Such out-of-the-box thinking is what makes Trump a stable genius.

So anyway, the entire federal data-gathering bureaucracy is now on notice that doing your job honestly can get you fired. We’ll see how the bureaucrats respond.

In the meantime, the jobs report actually is bad, and points to the possibility of stagflation, a combination of increasing unemployment and increasing inflation that was widely believed to be impossible until it started happening in the 1970s.

There’s been a lot else going on: The Smithsonian was caught dropping Trump’s impeachments down the memory hole. The Gaza horror continued. Trump encouraged Texas to help him cheat in the 2026 midterms.

But what caught my eye this week was a column in the NYT: “Thinking is Becoming a Luxury Good”. It raised the possibility that what we’ve been seeing lately is just the beginning of a trend: Maybe our culture is producing people fundamentally incapable of self-rule. What happens to democracy in that situation? That led to this week’s featured post “Shaping Ourselves”. That should be out shortly.

The weekly summary, which covers the aforementioned stories plus a few others, should be out by noon EDT.

Everything is going to run late today because I’m on vacation near Denver, two hours behind my usual eastern time zone.

The featured post today is “Yes, he does think you’re stupid”, which outlines how I think Democrats should respond to the continuing strife in MAGA World concerning Jeffrey Epstein. That should be out shortly, maybe by 10 EDT (8 Mountain Daylight).

The weekly summary will then cover Congress’ vote to defund $9 billion of money it had already appropriated, focused on cutting public broadcasting and foreign aid; the cancellation of Stephen Colbert’s late-night TV show; the poet Andrea Gibson, who I had never been aware of before her death this week; Trump’s attempt to rescue a fellow autocrat wannabee, Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil, from his well-deserved legal jeopardy; the harm anti-abortion laws have done to women’s health; and a few other things, culminating in your moment of schadenfreude, the CEO who got caught on the kisscam at a Coldplay concert. That should appear by 11 EDT, or 9 Mountain.