YEAR ONE MAHA: 1. Measles returns to America 2. Pertussis returns to America 3. Chronic hepatitis liver cancer returns 4. Pandemic preparedness gone 5. Swung & missed on autism 6. CDC disassembled 7. Biotech industry shutting down 8. Brain drain underway

Happy New Year friends!

Ansel Adams's photograph of Golden Gate, California, before bridge building began there today 1933:

If Trump hadn’t raided Venezuela, tonight our media would be talking about Jan. 6, the rising cost of healthcare premiums, the Epstein files, the affordability crisis and Trump‘s tariffs exacerbating it, Trump’s falling approval, and the MAGA civil war. If you’re asking why he

“Let me ask. What’s the strangest thing about this country? […] Listen and I’ll tell you. I’m afraid of my own country. I’m afraid of the United States of America. It’s ridiculous, isn’t it?” (DeLillo, End Zone)

"Reading is a form of prayer, a guided meditation that briefly makes us believe we're someone else, disrupting the delusion that we're permanent and at the center of the universe". - George Saunders

"Poetry might be defined as the clear expression of mixed feelings." W.H. Auden / New Year Letter 📷Katia Chausheva

'The enigma of Hamlet is that so many are moved to identify with him, and he does not want or need such identification. Yet he urges Horatio to stay alive to retell the play's story lest the prince bear a wounded name forever. Why does Hamlet still care? Why do any of us care

Only two people have ever accepted a second-hand Nobel Prize as a gift. One of them was Joseph Goebbels.

Remember the MAHA movement is a system of pseudoscience/grifting to finance wellness influencers. To push their various snake oils: supplements, unnecessary vitamins, ivermectin, or whatever they can buy in bulk to jack up the price, it’s essential to denigrate actual experts

Thucydides does not offer the line, "The strong do what they can," as a neutral analysis of how international affairs operate. He offers it as an expression of the reckless arrogance that brought about the destruction of the Athenian Empire.

Gupta: He’s the president, so let’s hope he’s getting the care that he needs. He does have a family history, importantly, of age-related dementia. His father had age-related cognitive decline… There’s a symmetry between some of these earlier signs in his case and what his

Andre 3k got in the booth, heard that wonderful Hey Ya! beat, and said let me remind people about the fleeting nature of love and the unhappiness of relationships that have ended even when the people are still together

The US government is jailing witnesses to murder to prevent justice.

So all of it started because they decided to push the woman, and when the dude stepped in to stop them from assaulting her, they killed him. Insane.

“Get it all on record now — get the films — get the witnesses — because somewhere down the road of history some bastard will get up and say that this never happened.” Dwight D. Eisenhower, after visiting liberated concentration camps in April 1945

Never in the history of Western democratic politics has a single government contained so many proven and brazen liars who lie so often and so effortlessly and so demonstrably.

Part of what strikes me about Trump, Noem, Bovino, Miller, et al and their willingness to lie in the face of overwhelming video evidence, is their absolute certainty in the tribal stupidity and cynicism of their supporters—especially on here—who will blindly repeat their lies.

Twice since the start of the year, federal officers have gunned down protesters in Minneapolis with cellphone cameras rolling and twice Trump and his lieutenants have essentially told the American people: Don’t believe what you see with your own eyes. nytimes.com/2026/01/25/us/…

Bari is about to to do to CBS News what Bezos did to the Washington Post: alienating your slightly left-of-center audience in search of a right-wing audience that either does not exist (for written media) or won’t watch you (for video media) because it prefers insane slopaganda