curated news excerpts & citations
… trying to ‘unbury the lede’

Mark Leonard @ Foreign Affairs:
Learning to Live in a Post-American World

Five years ago, the Chinese housing market crashed, leaving thousands of apartment buildings unfinished across the country. A generation of Chinese citizens who had bet all their savings on indefinite expansion suddenly found themselves homeless. Over time, however, some intrepid people moved into the ruins of these edifices, setting up tents on the concrete floors, using bed sheets as walls, cooking on makeshift stoves. The Chinese call these abandoned structures lanwei lou, a phrase that literally means “rotten-tail buildings,” signifying a project gone awry, a plan in suspension. The inhabitants of rotten-tail buildings repurpose the old and improvise to find a way of surviving an economic storm.

The state of the Chinese housing market is a good metaphor for the U.S.-led rules-based international order. After decades of expansion, it, too, is being abandoned. Never fully accepted by China and Russia and resented by newly assertive middle powers, its main financial backers—the American people—have lost interest in underwriting its further development. And as in the case of China’s failed housing projects, no alternative provider is stepping in to take over.

A rotten-tail world is emerging, one in which states will have to adapt cunningly, improvise new uses for elements of the old order that remain valuable, and adjust swiftly to the dramatic decay of others. But too many leaders still act as if the old order can somehow be salvaged or even perfected. …

… For some time, the world will be without any order at all—swept by fragmentation, contagion, and strangulation or the temptation to weaponize a wide variety of geographic, economic, and technological chokepoints. Rather than constructing a grand strategy, states will need to develop far more flexible and artisanal responses.
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Marcy Wheeler:
Iran Destroyed the US Base in Bahrain

…
Military Times had this op-ed last week.

Extensive damage to one of our most significant forward bases in the Middle East is likely to have profound tactical and strategic repercussions that are only now coming into focus.

The idea that this broad functioning hub, built over decades, was significantly degraded in the space of a few days by a regional player is unimaginable.
…

That NSA Bahrain is now virtually uninhabitable, with families left in limbo, as described in recent reporting, is difficult to grasp.

The potential loss of NSA Bahrain is effectively the equivalent of losing an aircraft carrier. It could not have come as a surprise that Iran would attack it in retaliation, yet it — and those living and working there — were left exposed and the facilities inadequately protected from Tehran’s ballistic missiles.

(Marcy Wheeler   more…)

Jay Kuo:
Problems at the Pentagon go far beyond the operational issues with the war in Iran. And Pete Hegseth’s leadership is to blame.

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Mitch Jackson:
The Pentagon Is Paying People to Amplify Hegseth and Attack His Critics

Four accounts. Two million followers. Not one of them told you who signs the checks.

DISCLAIMER: Everything here comes from public reporting published in the last 48 hours, and this story is still moving, which means details will shift and some of what you read may look different in a week. Do your own due diligence, because I want you informed, not simply fired up.

For most of the summer, one of the loudest MAGA influencers and political voices on X has been a Special Government Employee at the Department of Defense who was drawing a government check and telling you nothing about it. Her name is Jennica Pounds. She posts as DataRepublican to nearly a million followers, and through July and August she went after the people Pete Hegseth, the Secretary of Defense, happens to dislike.

All of it landing on your screen looking like the honest work of a private citizen with a laptop and an opinion she came to on her own. She started working for the Pentagon in July. Her Pentagon press badge had expired in June.

The department confirmed her employment just a few days ago on August 24. It came out by accident, after she publicly accused a State Department official of setting her up, and a rival account dropped the fact that she was on the payroll. Nobody in government volunteered it.
(Mitch Jackson   more…)

Heather Cox Richardson:
Letters from an American – August 31, 2026

Alex Horton and Tara Copp of the Washington Post reported on Sunday, August 30, that military leaders are warning Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth that a plan to continue large-scale operations in Iran is unsustainable and is weakening their ability to protect U.S. interests in other places, including at home.
…

Tonight Michael R. Gordon and Marcus Weisgerber of the Wall Street Journal reported that Army Secretary Dan Driscoll has submitted his resignation after struggling with Hegseth for months over Hegseth’s firing of senior Army officers and over the direction of the military.

Driscoll’s departure, the journalists note, leaves the Army without any Senate-confirmed civilian or military leaders.
(Heather Cox Richardson   more…)
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Timothy Snyder:
Our Trade War Against Ourselves

Treating Canada as an Enemy Leaves us Weaker in Every Way

Dean Blundell:
Canada Just Robbed Harvard, MIT and the NIH in Broad Daylight

Here’s a number Donald Trump will never say out loud: 48. That’s how many of America’s top researchers quietly walked out of Harvard, MIT, Yale, Carnegie Mellon, UCSF, the University of Michigan and the National Institutes of Health this summer, and walked into Canadian universities with a cheque from Ottawa in their hand and a look on their face like someone who just got out of a bad marriage.

On Thursday, Mélanie Joly stood up at UBC in Vancouver and announced the first 64 Eddie Goldenberg Research Chairs of Canada. Three quarters of them came from the United States. All four of the top-tier, highest-paid distinguished chairs came from the US. The federal government is putting $504 million behind them over eight years, plus another $37 million to recruit 63 younger researchers over the next year, all of it under a $1.7 billion talent program Carney’s government launched in December while everybody was watching the tariff fight.

The announcement was already in the works. It just happened to land less than a week after trade talks with Washington collapsed and Canada got shoved into a full-blown trade war with a country that used to be our friend. So yes, the timing was a gift, and Joly took the gift. She called it a hinge moment in Canadian history and said Canada is doubling down on science while other countries walk away from it.
(Dean Blundell   more…)
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Broad Daylight News:
When making poverty disappear from view becomes easier than making poverty disappear

Joe Lonsdale is worth roughly $3.5 billion. He co-founded Palantir, built several other tech companies, runs the venture firm 8VC, and moves through a world of senators, cabinet officials and fellow billionaires like it’s his living room. A few years back, according to a Washington Post investigation, his wife came home shaken after she and their toddler were confronted by homeless people while walking through downtown San Francisco. Lonsdale was already furious about California before that happened. He hated the homelessness. He hated the politics. He complained that his own household staff had to commute over an hour just to reach his estate in Woodside because zoning had made housing too expensive nearby. So he left for Texas.

But he did something bigger than change his address. He built a machine to change public policy nationwide.

The Cicero Institute, the think tank Lonsdale founded, has spent years writing model legislation and lobbying states to fundamentally rethink how America treats homelessness. The prescription is simple to describe: ban unauthorized street camping, pull money away from permanent supportive housing, expand temporary shelters and sanctioned encampments, make involuntary psychiatric commitment easier, and use police and the threat of jail to push people off the sidewalk and into shelter or treatment. Cicero calls this compassionate, and the argument deserves to be taken seriously rather than dismissed outright. Nobody should romanticize tent encampments. People living outside face violence, exploitation, overdose, untreated psychosis and premature death, and residents and business owners have a legitimate claim to safe sidewalks and parks too. For some people whose mental illness has become severe enough, handing them a phone number for voluntary treatment genuinely isn’t adequate.

But before letting one billionaire’s preferred fix become the law of the land, it’s worth asking what we’re actually buying, and not just in dollars. Police time. Courtrooms. Jail beds. Psychiatric beds. Emergency rooms. Lost belongings. Criminal records. And then the harder question: who actually benefits from the purchase?
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Qasim Rashid, Esq.:
Today Is the Anniversary of Emmett Till’s Murder

Jennifer Rubin:
Still fighting Jim Crow 63 years after the March on Washington.

…
Hosted by the Rev. Al Sharpton’s National Action Network, the event today reiterates three goals:

• We march to defend the vote …
• We march to defend civil rights …
• We march for economic justice …

Thirteen years ago, President Barack Obama reminded us at the 50^th commemoration that the very significance of political/legal victories achieved following the 1963 March may have “obscured” the march’s economic agenda. The original attendees, Obama recalled, “were not there in search of some abstract ideal. They were there seeking jobs as well as justice — not just the absence of oppression but the presence of economic opportunity.”

Real Time 1960s:
Aug. 28, 1966 | National Guard Called to Milwaukee Suburb for Civil Rights March

Heather Cox Richardson:
Letters from an American – August 28, 2026

…
In 1968, former vice president Richard M. Nixon won the presidency after promising that he would not continue to use the federal government to protect Black rights in the South. With that promise, racists made a permanent move from the Democrats to the Republicans, joining forces with businessmen who wanted an end to regulation and to taxes and the social welfare programs they funded. The race to tear apart the postwar government that helped all Americans by appealing to racism was on.

Now, in 2026, the contours of that bargain are extreme and unmistakable.
…

Yesterday the Department of Homeland Security posted on social media: “Haiti TPS has been TERMINATED. Those with TPS are in our nation illegally. They have two options: LEAVE IMMEDIATELY or be DEPORTED.” Attached was a video of chained Black men and women being moved through the rain toward a waiting plane.

Officials at DHS chose to publish a video of Black people in chains that evoked the slave coffles of the Old South.
(Heather Cox Richardson   more…)
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Mary Geddry:
In Nepal, a glacier collapsed, a mountain moved, and the climate crisis crossed from warning into structural failure.

… A few days ago, this newsletter argued that climate change doesn’t announce itself as a single event. It accumulates in places no one is watching, and then it fails all at once, the way Hemingway’s bankrupt man described going broke: gradually, then suddenly. We used the Rhine to make that point, and the Danube, and a wildfire outside Reno that went from nothing to uncontained in about a day and a half.

The Himalayas just offered a cleaner version of the same argument, and a far more brutal one. On Wednesday morning, Nepalese authorities initially assumed an earthquake had struck the border with Tibet. Not an unreasonable guess given this is one of the most seismically active regions on the planet. The U.S. Geological Survey’s own seismic reading indicated, instead, a 5.2-magnitude glacial collapse, not a fault rupture. A chunk of ice, thousands of feet up, let go of the mountain it had been part of for longer than anyone had been measuring it. It fell, picked up mud and rock and whatever water was already loose, and arrived in the valley below as a wave eight to ten meters high, moving with a force scientists have compared to liquid concrete.

The death toll, as of Thursday morning, stands at more than 360 dead and more than 1,400 missing.

What failed was the mountain itself, its structural integrity, built up and eroded over a timescale that has nothing to do with news cycles, finally giving way in the time it takes to read this sentence. If “Gradually, Then Suddenly” was about systems reaching their breaking point, a river too shallow to cool a reactor, an insurance market too strained to underwrite a coastline, Rasuwa district is what happens when the system is the mountain, and the villages built beneath it never had a say.

Climate change happens gradually. Structural failure happens all at once. Nepal is the second half of that sentence.
(Mary Geddry   more…)

Lili Pike, Lou Del Bello, Laura Millan @ Bloomberg:
The new era of glacier catastrophes

(more…)

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Timothy Snyder:
How was Mass Killing Possible?

At the center of the history of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union were their policies of mass killing. The Soviets began first with terror during and after the revolution, the construction of a huge system of concentration camps, and then mass starvation. An organized political terror followed in the late 1930s. The Germans, after Hitler came to power in 1933, were most able to repress and then murder people defined as enemies, Jews above all, after they destroyed the states around them. Their greatest crime was the Holocaust, the deliberate murder of almost six million Jews; they also starved about three million Soviet prisoners of war to death, killed around a million people in “anti-partisan” operations, and murdered hundreds of thousands of Sinti and Roma and perhaps a quarter of a million people deemed to be disabled. These crimes were committed by human beings, often at very close range, so they raise questions about the political conditions that are necessary for mass atrocity, but also about how people did and can react to those conditions.
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[with tears in eyes, songs on lips: “Back through the years I go wandering once again…”]

Rebecca Solnit:
In Praise of Dolly Parton, 1946-2026, Our Goddess of Kindness

[I never saw Dolly live. The first time we visited Hawaii and stayed at “The Pink Hotel,” when the three of us arrived at the front desk, after a very long day of traveling, they discovered they had mis-handled our reservation and didn’t have a standard room for us. Perhaps because we had a young child, perhaps because of our IBM connection, perhaps for some other reason, they decided they needed to put us in Suite #5, where Dolly had stayed the week before!]

Dolly Parton’s Hawaii Story Was Bigger Than Life

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Chris Geidner:
What Monday’s Supreme Court election order ruling is and is not

The Republican majority gave Trump a temporary win. It could be short-lived — or it could “foment chaos,” as Justice Jackson wrote, calling out the majority in unusually direct terms.

Marc Elias:
Cremated remains, fake explosives and your ballot

… a rule released by the U.S. Postal Service on Friday night: “Although ballot mail does not present precisely the same operational issues as cremated remains or replica explosives, it is unquestionably sensitive mail that raises unique operational considerations.”

A mail-in ballot does not pose a health risk. It will not cause panic if exposed to the public. It’s a piece of paper marked with a pen that is only dangerous to authoritarians wishing to rule rather than govern with the consent of their citizens.

Joyce Vance:
The Supreme Court Weighs In

… two caveats before we go any further:

1. This is not a decision that Trump’s EO is lawful.
2. Judge Talwani also issued a separate, nationwide injunction in the League of Women Voters case. That injunction stays in place, at least for now.

Steve Vladeck:
Making Sense of the Mail-in Ballots Ruling

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