The Weekly Sift

The worst news this week is personal: My wife Deb died unexpectedly during the night between Thursday and Friday. She had survived three different cancers over the past 28 years, but they were all undetectable at this point, and her death seems to have had little to do with any of them. For a few days she had complained of intestinal discomfort, but none of her symptoms seemed out of the ordinary or hinted at being life-threatening, so she was taking a wait-and-see approach before involving her doctor. Friday morning I decided to let her sleep in, and when I finally went to wake her, I couldn’t.

I can anticipate the thought in most of your minds: “Why are you putting out a Sift this week at all?” It’s a really good question. My only answer is that it feels right; sometimes keeping going is easier than stopping. I want to assure you that I am paying attention to my emotions, and that a group of loyal friends are watching me like hawks. I am being well taken care of, and if I need a break in the future, I’ll take one.

If you have a personal connection to me or Deb and are reading the news here for the first time, I apologize for not reaching out to you in some less public way. There’s nothing that you need to be attending this week. I expect to hold an event to celebrate her life sometime after the holidays.

Meanwhile, the world has kept on turning. The weekly summary will discuss the fall of the Assad regime, the murder of a health-insurance CEO, martial law in South Korea, reactions to the Hunter Biden pardon, Pete Hegseth’s promise that he will stop drinking if we give him one of the world’s highest-stress jobs, and a few other things. As usual, I’m going to try to get that out around noon EST.

The featured post is another in my series of meditations on what went wrong in the 2024 election. This time I’m looking at pre-existing narratives in the public mind, and how they can protect misinformation against debunking. After reading even the most thorough debunking, too many voters are left with the impression that while this particular event may not have happened, this kind of thing happens all the time (even if it doesn’t). It’s hard to guess when I’ll get that posted, but probably not before 10.

My thinking continues to be dominated by the Trump transition and trying to learn the lessons of the election. This week’s featured post examines one of the lessons I hope Democrats don’t draw from the election: that we need to disassociate ourselves from unpopular victims of discrimination. “Should Democrats Abandon the Trans Community?” should be out before 10 EST.

In last week’s comments I took criticism for not picking out misogyny as the reason Harris lost. It’s true I’m resisting that conclusion, but not because I’m blind to misogyny. If we conclude that Harris lost because she’s a woman, then the obvious lesson to draw going forward is: Never nominate a woman again. I really don’t want to go there.

The weekly summary has three long notes that I could have hived off as separate posts:

• conclusions to draw from the failure of the Matt Gaetz nomination,
• a fascinating discussion David Roberts and Dan Savage had about Democrats claiming their identity as an urban party rather than running from it,
• preparing for all the disinformation we’re about to get from Elon Musk and his minions about the federal government.

In other news, there’s the ICC’s indictment of Netanyahu, Brazil’s indictment of Bolsonaro, the UK’s economic underperformance, and a few other things. Expect the weekly summary to post around noon.

After Tuesday’s disaster, I’ve mainly been focused on recovery. It’s hard for me to focus on anything but the election and what it means.

So the featured post will be a wide-ranging election reaction, starting with my personal response, followed by an examination of what happened and possible explanations of why. I’m going to discourage one kind of reaction: Don’t jump on some I-was-right-all-along interpretation. It’s easy to do, and it can provide some short-term comfort, but it guarantees that you won’t learn anything from this event. And I think there are things to learn, but I don’t quite have a handle on them yet.

Anyway, that post is almost done and should be out shortly.

Beyond that, I once again will not do justice to the rest of the world. It’s going to take at least another week to regain my curiosity about events unrelated to the election and the new administration. So the weekly summary will probably be short and appear before noon.

Take care of yourselves out there. Some of you need to reach out to friends, while others need to be alone for a while. Do what you need to do.

Maybe more important than what I’m writing about today is what I’m not writing about: I’m not analyzing polls and trying to predict who will win the election.

One thing I often warn against on this blog is speculation: It can eat up all your time and drive you nuts. And since no one actually knows what’s going to happen, speculating about it usually serves no purpose beyond entertainment. So if you enjoy trying to forecast things in a who’s-going-to-win-the-World-Series way, feel free. It’s harmless. But it’s also unproductive. One way or another, the election will happen and we’ll find out then who wins.

Personally, I find that I’m not enjoying whatever time I spend on speculation. Predictions, good and bad alike, just raise my anxiety. So I’m trying to avoid them.

Speculation also has an addictive quality. Anxiety about the future just leads to looking for more speculation to find reassurance, which usually just raises more anxiety. A better way to assuage your anxiety is to do something. Vote early. Write a check. Encourage your apathetic friends to vote. Volunteer.

So anyway, what am I covering this week. First, because the election isn’t the only thing happening in the world, I read the 199-page lawsuit three red states filed to roll back the FDA’s approval of the abortion drug mifepristone. I know, you thought that lawsuit got dismissed. But that was on a technicality, which this lawsuit tries to fix. And it mostly does fix the technical problem, but it also introduces some truly creepy arguments that aren’t getting nearly enough attention. Like this: Missouri, Kansas, and Idaho are complaining that their teen pregnancy rates aren’t high enough.

So anyway, that reading led to the article “Mifepristone, round 2”, which is done and should post shortly.

My second featured post this week looks at how Trump seems to be coming apart the closer the election gets. That’s “Trump’s Weird Week”, and it should appear between 10 and 11 EDT. The weekly summary ten has a lot of odds and ends, and should post around noon.

This week Kamala Harris sat for an interview with MSNBC’s Stephanie Ruhle and released an 82-page report on her economic proposals. Neither of these moves satisfied the Harris-needs-to-answer-questions chorus in the media, which routinely lets Trump get away with “answers” that consist mostly of insults, lies, and long rambles about sharks.

This week I decided to stop just complaining about mainstream coverage of this campaign and offer something constructive. My proposal is that if you think Harris needs to answer more questions, you should tell us what those questions are, rather than save them for some “hard-hitting interview” you imagine doing someday. Let Harris decide for herself how she wants to provide that information to voters.

I demonstrate that approach in this week’s featured post by listing questions I think Donald Trump still needs to answer — a topic the NYT et al generally ignore. I have done my best to ask questions I think voters might actually be curious about, and to frame my questions as fairly as possible. For example, here’s a question about Trump’s plan for mass deportations: “If we deport millions of workers, how will the US economy replace them? In particular, won’t deporting low-wage workers increase inflation?”

This topic — questions not yet answered by presidential candidates — is the one big exception to the NYT’s tendency to frame every issue in a both-sides way. Only Harris, not Trump, needs to answer more questions.

That article is just about done and should appear shortly. The weekly summary covers the hurricane, Mayor Adams’ indictment, Israel’s attack on Lebanon, Trump’s race to squeeze as much money as he can out of his sheep before the election, and a few other things, before closing with a collection of memorable lines the late Maggie Smith delivered as Downton Abbey’s dowager countess. That should be out around noon.