Senator Cory Booker is holding the floor of the Senate and says he “will speak for as long as I’m physically able to lift the voices of Americans who are being harmed and not being heard in this moment of crisis”.
Advertise here with Carbon Ads
This site is made possible by member support. 💞
Big thanks to Arcustech for hosting the site and offering amazing tech support.
When you buy through links on kottke.org, I may earn an affiliate commission. Thanks for supporting the site!
kottke.org. home of fine hypertext products since 1998.
Beloved by 86.47% of the web.
Entries for March 2025
The United States Disappeared Tracker is “tracking persons politically arrested, detained, or disappeared by the Trump regime since March 9, 2025”.
The view from Europe, courtesy of Zeit Online: Thanks America, That’ll Be All. “Now that lunacy has installed itself in Washington for the next four years, the time has finally come for Europe to once again try its hand at hosting the spirit of the age.”
What Will America Look Like in 10 Years?
With the election of Donald Trump in 2016 and, especially, again in 2024, the adjacent possible of American society has shifted dramatically. For the Washington Post, Philip Bump asked a number of people who study systems of government and the erosion of democracy the following question: “Given the country’s trajectory and what’s unfolded in other countries, what can we expect the United States to look like in five or 10 years’ time?”
Steven Levitsky, co-author of How Democracies Die (Bookshop) and Tyranny of the Minority: Why American Democracy Reached the Breaking Point (Bookshop):
I think the most likely scenario is a kind of careening between pretty dysfunctional democracy and an unconsolidated authoritarianism. A kind of back and forth in which the relative good guys win once in a while, they don’t perform well, they don’t last long and the bad guys win power occasionally and also don’t perform well and don’t last long.
But also (emphasis mine):
I think it’s possible the flurry of abuses and attacks, first of all, and secondly, the incredibly weak response by civil society, suggests that the Trump administration can get away with much more than I think almost any of us anticipated. I would have thought it highly unlikely that the Trump administration could really seriously tilt the playing field in terms of media access and resource access, given the wealth and the diversity of the private sector in this country. A Hungary-like tilting of the playing field seemed really unlikely. Now, I think it’s possible.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat, author of Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present (Bookshop):
Domestically, you don’t need to abolish opposition parties today. You just engineer the electoral system to keep Democrats out of power.
Thomas Zimmer, author of Democracy Americana:
A little over two months after Trump returned to power, it seems undeniable that even critical observers underestimated the speed and scope of the Trumpist assault and overestimated democratic resilience in both the political system as well as civil society. In mere weeks, Trumpists have managed to push America into that space somewhere between (no longer) democracy and full-scale autocracy. That means we must recalibrate our expectations. “They are not going to go *that* far” has been proved wrong over and over again. The idea that “they won’t be able to do this” seems similarly unfounded. Let’s finally discard whatever notion of “it cannot happen here” that is still floating around.
God, the “it cannot happen here” argument was so stupid even back in 2016 when people were debating whether Trump was a fascist. If nothing else, it was clarifying to be able to stick anyone who was chastising others for worrying too much into the “I’m highly skeptical of anything you write now” box.
Anyway, the whole piece is worth a read.
White House Correspondents’ Dinner Scraps Host In Favor Of Terrified Silence. “While we respect the legacy of a presidential roast, if you so much as cough, you will be forcibly removed.” Please enjoy each autocratic shift equally.
A thread from Berkeley political science professor Omar Wasow about how protests are effective actually. Cites research about the Women’s March, BLM protests, the Muslim ban protests, etc.
The End of College Life?
I have one kid entering college this fall and one a few years away, so I’ve been thinking (with fury and sadness) about the effect that Trump’s authoritarian regime is having on American colleges and universities. They’re pulling funding from schools; schools are cancelling programs, freezing hiring, and cutting back on admissions; and NIH and NSF funding is being curtailed and withdrawn. College students are being snatched off the streets by ICE & DHS and schools either can’t or won’t do anything to stop it. If these actions persist, US colleges & universities could look quite different in a year or two.
In a piece called The End of College Life, Ian Bogost calls the potential effect of these changes a “calamity” and says “the damage to our educational system could be worse than the public comprehends”.
Any one of the Trump administration’s attacks on research universities, let alone all of them together, could upend the college experience for millions of Americans. What’s at stake is far from trivial: Forget the frisbees on the quad; think of what it means to go to college in this country. Think of the middle-class ideal that has persisted for most of a century: earning a degree and starting a career, yes, but also moving away from home, testing limits, joining new communities, becoming an adult.
This might all be changing for fancy private schools and giant public universities alike. If you, or your son, or your daughter, are in college now, or are planning to enroll in the years ahead, you should be worried.
I am curious to hear from parents of high school and college students, from college faculty & administrators, and from students themselves: how have the actions of the Trump regime changed your thinking about college? What plans are you making or changing? Let me know in the comments. (If you don’t have a membership but would like to leave a comment, just email me your thoughts and I’ll post it for you.)
DOGE Plans to Rebuild SSA Code Base in Months, Risking Benefits and System Collapse. This will not work — ok, actually it will totally work to achieve the long-time conservative goal of gutting the US social safety net.
Roxane Gay and Debbie Millman are buying The Rumpus. “They are committed to staying true to the magazine’s core mission of publishing both emerging and established risk-taking writers and artists…” Gay was a founding editor of the magazine.
“The federal government isn’t just pressuring universities over speech — it’s literally disappearing students for their political expression. If you support actual free speech, now is the time to speak up.”
From the Center for Third World Organizing, an Organizing 101 bootcamp, “a multi-day day intro to organizing training designed for organizers, activists and community leaders”.
Multi-Player plays a grid of multiple copies of a single YouTube video, each with a slight additional delay. The site requires a bunch of bandwidth, but the effect is trippy when it works.
Conan O’Brien’s Mark Twain Prize Acceptance Speech
This excerpt from Conan O’Brien’s acceptance speech for the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor is quite good.
Twain was suspicious of populism, jingoism, imperialism, the money-obsessed mania of the Gilded Age, and any expression of mindless American might or self-importance. Above all, Twain was a patriot in the best sense of the word. He loved America but knew it was deeply flawed. Twain wrote, “Patriotism is supporting your country all of the time and your government when it deserves it.”
(thx, andy)
Rembrandt to Picasso: Five Ways to Spot a Fake Masterpiece. I’ve always loved this sort of thing, even before I owned a probably-fake Basquiat.
Steve Coogan Plays Four Roles in Dr. Strangelove Stage Adaptation
In a stage production that premiered last year in London, Steve Coogan played four roles (Dr. Strangelove, Captain Mandrake, President Muffley, and Major TJ Kong) in an adaptation of Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove. The play was adapted for the stage by Armando Iannucci and Sean Foley. A filmed version of the play is currently playing in theaters…here are some trailers and clips from that:
The play’s run has ended and I don’t know if it will be restaged elsewhere, but like I said above, a filmed version is showing in theaters and you can look for tickets near you.
P.S. In the original version, Peter Sellers was supposed to play the same four characters as Coogan does in the play but was reluctant to play Major Kong. In the end, Sellers sprained his ankle and couldn’t play Kong in the cramped airplane set, but he still played Mandrake, Muffley, and Strangelove. (via @fritinancy.bsky.social)
March 2025 Anti-Trans National Risk Assessment Map. “The risk level for transgender youth and adults has significantly deteriorated in the latest update. Most notably, the United States has now been designated “Do Not Travel” for foreign citizens.”
Apple has added the Lumon Terminal Pro computer to their devices lineup, right alongside the iMac and Macbook Air.
The Design of the New Swiss Passport
There are so many reasons these days to covet a Swiss passport but let me give you one more: the design kicks ass. First issued in 2022, the document was designed by creative agency RETINAA.
Drawing on cartographic tradition yet modern in its use of 3D modeled landscapes, the design depicts an imaginary journey along watercourses, from the Alpine peaks down to the valleys, through the 26 cantons and to the world beyond. This journey starts on the first page of the document, which features the Pizzo Rotondo, a summit in the Saint-Gotthard Massif at the crossroads of linguistic regions. Under ultraviolet light, contour lines reveal the landscapes’ topography, enhanced with architectural landmarks that showcase the country’s rich cultural heritage and history.
There are all kinds of beautiful security features that show up only under UV light:
What I love most about the Swiss passport is the idea that things can be official & beautiful, secure & beautiful, utilitarian & beautiful, meaningful & beautiful. From an interview with one of the designers:
With the design, we wanted to redefine what a Swiss document looks like in the 21st century. The design of passports often looks outdated, even though the technologies used to produce these documents are extremely innovative.
Instead, we wanted to create a contemporary design around a visual narrative. It allowed us to incorporate security features that are not only difficult to counterfeit, but also play a role in the narrative. Ultimately, the passport should be a document that holders can trust, identify with and be proud of over the next 15 years!
Finally got around to reading Craig Mod’s “rules” for running his membership program. Two that particularly resonated: “The program exists for the goals, not the members” and “Fundamentally, you are building a community”.
The Atlantic handled ‘Signalgate’ with good judgment. “The journalists’ actions ‘could be a college journalism class in careful, ethical handling of sensitive information’, said David Boardman, dean of Temple University’s media school.”
Scaling Laws and the Speed of Animals
A recent paper found that the time it takes for an animal to move the length of its own body is largely independent of mass. This appears to hold from tiny bacteria on up to whales — that’s more than 20 orders of magnitude of mass. The paper’s argument as to why this happens relies on scaling laws. Alex Klotz explains.
A well-known example is the Square-Cube Law, dating back to Galileo and described quite well in the Haldane essay, On Being the Right Size. The Square-Cube Law essentially states that if something, be it a chair or a person or whatever, were made twice as tall, twice as wide, and twice as deep, its volume and mass would increase by a factor of eight, but its ability to support that mass, its cross sectional area, would only increase by a factor of four. This means as things get bigger, their own weight becomes more significant compared to their strength (ants can carry 50 times their own weight, squirrels can run up trees, and humans can do pullups).
Another example is terminal velocity: the drag force depends on the cross-sectional area, which (assuming a spherical cow) goes as the square of radius (or the two-thirds power of mass), while the weight depends on the volume, proportional to the cube of radius or the first power of mass. As Haldane graphically puts it
“You can drop a mouse down a thousand-yard mine shaft; and, on arriving at the bottom, it gets a slight shock and walks away, provided that the ground is fairly soft. A rat is killed, a man is broken, a horse splashes.”
Scaling laws also come into play in determining the limits of the size of animals: The Biology of B-Movie Monsters.
When the Incredible Shrinking Man stops shrinking, he is about an inch tall, down by a factor of about 70 in linear dimensions. Thus, the surface area of his body, through which he loses heat, has decreased by a factor of 70 x 70 or about 5,000 times, but the mass of his body, which generates the heat, has decreased by 70 x 70 x 70 or 350,000 times. He’s clearly going to have a hard time maintaining his body temperature (even though his clothes are now conveniently shrinking with him) unless his metabolic rate increases drastically.
Luckily, his lung area has only decreased by 5,000-fold, so he can get the relatively larger supply of oxygen he needs, but he’s going to have to supply his body with much more fuel; like a shrew, he’ll probably have to eat his own weight daily just to stay alive. He’ll also have to give up sleeping and eat 24 hours a day or risk starving before he wakes up in the morning (unless he can learn the trick used by hummingbirds of lowering their body temperatures while they sleep).
Two prominent American scholars on fascism & authoritarianism, Timothy Snyder & Jason Stanley, have recently moved from Yale to the University of Toronto. Stanley: “the primary reason was the deteriorating political situation in the United States”.
For his 8th book, What the Dead Can Say, Philip Graham limited it to a print run of 1000 and distribution was entirely through stashing them in Little Free Libraries around the entire country.
Want to build your own synthesizer? The DIY Synths Database is a “curated collection of 68 DIY-friendly hardware synthesizers and related standalone musical equipment”.
From 2017, Ron Rosenbaum on the newspaper that fought Hitler. “The paper went down fighting a lie, fighting Nazi murderers, refusing to normalize the Hitler regime.”
Wired surveyed 730 coders and developers about how they use AI chatbots & tools. “Freelance coders seem to like AI more than full-time coders.”
Tavares Strachan
I like these collage-like artworks by Tavares Strachan. One of the figures depicted above in the third piece, just above the queen, is polar explorer Matthew Henson, who was the first person (maybe?) to reach the geographic North Pole in 1909 as part of Robert Peary’s expedition.
Watch All of the Commercials That David Lynch Has Directed: A Big 30-Minute Compilation. “The New York Department of Sanitation engaged Lynch’s services to imbue their anti-littering campaign with his signature high-contrast ominousness…”
Jess Piper on speaking to people in conservative areas of America about Trumpism. “You are going to have to tell them the truth. You know the truth. We have to be in the streets.”
What Did Hubble See on Your Birthday?
The Hubble Space Telescope “has observed some fascinating cosmic wonder every day of the year, including on your birthday”. Just enter your month and day of birth to find out what it saw. My birthday image is of the Egg Nebula (shown above):
Where is the center of the Egg Nebula? Like a baby chick pecking its way out of an egg, the star in the center of the Egg Nebula is casting away shells of gas and dust as it slowly transforms itself into a white dwarf star.
The Egg Nebula is a rapidly evolving pre-planetary nebula spanning about one light year toward the constellation of Cygnus. Thick dust blocks the center star from view, while the dust shells further out reflect light from this star. Light vibrating in the plane defined by each dust grain, the central star and the observer is preferentially reflected, causing an effect known as polarization. Measuring the orientation of the polarized light for the Egg Nebula gives clues as to location of the hidden source. The above image taken by the Advanced Camera for Surveys on the Hubble Space Telescope is false-color coded to highlight the orientation of polarization.
Cool! I like my birthday nebula. (via the morning news)
Waldo Jaquith on why he works in the open (blogging, open sourcing software, etc.): “I’ve long worked in the open, overwhelmingly for one reason: it increases enormously the surface area for success.”
The Haunting of Verdant Valley is a photo book about Silicon Valley. “Anonymous office parks, pristine corporate campuses, and fading remnants of past industries tell the story of a region built on extraction — of resources, labor, and attention.”
Russian hackers find ways to snoop on Ukrainian Signal accounts. (Hmm, 18 people in the Yemen bombing chat, some w/ ties to the Kremlin — what are the odds Russia has ongoing, realtime access to US national security comms via Signal linked devices?)
McSweeney’s is documenting the “cruelties, collusions, corruptions, and crimes” of the 2nd Trump administration. This is a great resource.
World Athletics, the international governing body for athletics (track & field, etc.), is introducing “mandatory testing for anyone entering female competitions to verify their biological sex”.
The Harriet Tubman $20 Stamp
Frustrated that the US Treasury Department is walking back plans to replace Andrew Jackson on the front of the $20 bill with Harriet Tubman, Dano Wall created a 3D-printed stamp that can be used to transform Jacksons into Tubmans on the twenties in your pocketbook.
Here’s a video of the stamp in action. Wall told The Awesome Foundation a little bit about the genesis of the project:
I was inspired by the news that Harriet Tubman would replace Andrew Jackson on the $20 bill, and subsequently saddened by the news that the Trump administration was walking back that plan. So I created a stamp to convert Jacksons into Tubmans myself. I have been stamping $20 bills and entering them into circulation for the last year, and gifting stamps to friends to do the same.
If you have access to a 3D printer (perhaps at your local library or you can also use a online 3D printing service), you can download the print files at Thingiverse and make your own stamp for use at home.
Wall also posted a link to some neat prior art: suffragettes in Britain modifying coins with a “VOTES FOR WOMEN” slogan in the early 20th century.
Update: Several men on Twitter are helpfully pointing out that, in their inexpert legal opinion, defacing bills in this way is illegal. Here’s what the law says (emphasis mine):
Defacement of currency is a violation of Title 18, Section 333 of the United States Code. Under this provision, currency defacement is generally defined as follows: Whoever mutilates, cuts, disfigures, perforates, unites or cements together, or does any other thing to any bank bill, draft, note, or other evidence of debt issued by any national banking association, Federal Reserve Bank, or Federal Reserve System, with intent to render such item(s) unfit to be reissued, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than six months, or both.
The “with intent” bit is important, I think. The FAQ for a similar project has a good summary of the issues involved.
But we are putting political messages on the bills, not commercial advertisements. Because we all want these bills to stay in circulation and we’re stamping to send a message about an issue that’s important to us, it’s legal!
I’m not a lawyer, but as long as your intent isn’t to render these bills “unfit to be reissued”, you’re in the clear. Besides, if civil disobedience doesn’t stray into the gray areas of the law, is it really disobedience? (via @patrick_reames)
Update: Adafruit did an extensive investigation into the legality of this project. Their conclusion? “The production of the instructional video and the stamping of currency are both well within the law.”
A judge chastised vandals of a Paddington Bear statue: “His famous label attached to his duffle coat says ‘please look after this bear’. On the night of the 2nd of March 2025, your actions were the antithesis of everything Paddington stands for.”
Long waits, waves of calls, website crashes: Social Security is breaking down. A deep-dive into the Trump administration’s gutting of Social Security (a long-time conservative goal).
The Bully Lie
In this episode of This American Life from a few weeks ago, Masha Gessen read an excerpt from their book Surviving Autocracy about the particular kind of lie used by autocrats like Putin and Trump.
Lies can serve a number of functions. People lie to deflect, to avoid embarrassment or evade punishment by creating doubt, to escape confrontation or lighten the blow, to make themselves appear better, to get others to do or give something, and even to entertain.
However unskilled a person may be at lying, they usually hope that the lie will be convincing. Executives want shareholders to think that they have devised a foolproof path to profits. Defendants want juries to believe that there is a chance that someone else committed the crime.
People in relationships want their partners to think that they have never even considered cheating. Guests want the host to think that they like their fish overcooked. These lies can be annoying or amusing, but they are surmountable. They collapse in the face of facts.
The Trumpian lie is different. It is the power lie or the bully lie. It is the lie of the bigger kid who took your hat and is wearing it while denying that he took it. There is no defense against this lie because the point of the lie is to assert power, to show I can say what I want, when I want to.
The power lie conjures a different reality that demands that you choose between your experience and the bully’s demands. Are you going to insist that you’re wet from the rain or give in and say that the sun is shining?
I believe the bully lie fits into the same general category as fascists seeing hypocrisy as a virtue — it only really makes sense when you think about it in terms of domination or power. (thx, caroline)
What the Press Got Wrong About Hitler. This “comical figure” was regularly ridiculed in the German & international press right up until he became chancellor. It did very little to sway his supporters’ fervor.
Oscar-winning Palestinian director Hamdan Ballal (No Man’s Land) was attacked by a group of 15 armed Israeli settlers and then arrested by the Israeli army. “They let the settlers attack him and then the army abducted him.”
The expanding size of American cars over the past few decades is increasing congestion by reducing the vehicle capacity of roadways. SUVs are longer, require more braking distance, and drivers behind them need to leave more space to see around them.
A recent study found that Black Lives Matter protests had a “significant and decisive impact” on the 2020 election. “This represents one of the most consequential impacts of a social movement on electoral politics in recent history.”
Free Warner Bros Movies on YouTube
For some reason, Warner Bros. has uploaded 41 of its movies to YouTube that are free to watch. Among them, Waiting for Guffman, The Accidental Tourist, The Bonfire of the Vanities, Richard Linklater’s SubUrbia, The 11th Hour (Leonardo DiCaprio’s climate change movie), The Science of Sleep, The Avengers (the 1998 non-Marvel spy flick with Ralph Fiennes & Uma Thurman), and Mr. Nice Guy (w/ Jackie Chan — this has the highest number of views on the list by an order of magnitude).
(via tedium)
Bad Law: Ten Popular Laws That Are Ruining America by Elie Mystal “reimagines what our legal system, and society at large, could look like if we could move past legislation plagued by racism, misogyny, and corruption”.
The Trump Administration Accidentally Texted Me Its War Plans. “I had very strong doubts that this text group was real, because I could not believe that the national-security leadership of the United States would communicate on Signal about imminent war plans…”
Socials & More