Alex Turnbull

Screenshot of an excerpt from a Max Tani article for Semafor dated 5 October 2025. TEXT: A high-profile columnist who left The Washington Post amid the paper’s ongoing editorial upheaval is joining a growing anti-Trump digital news startup. Former Washington Post opinion columnist Catherine Rampell is joining The Bulwark, where she will write a weekly economics and policy-focused newsletter while contributing to the company’s podcasts and YouTube channels. In a telephone interview on Friday, Rampell said that although she had spent her career at traditional media institutions like The New York Times and the Post, she was encouraged by The Bulwark’s growth and felt committed to its editorial mission, which emphasizes supporting America’s democratic principles and institutions. “It’s very mission-oriented as an institution, and within that mission, there’s obviously room for a lot of other views,” Rampell said. “All of those things were appealing, and it’s a pretty kickass group of people.” “The Bulwark is a written, video, and audio product. And as we grow, we are looking for people who can excel across all those mediums,” CEO Sarah Longwell said in a statement. “Catherine is not just one of those people — she’s one of the best of those people. She also brings a unique expertise in economics and a mission aligned worldview. We’re beyond thrilled she’s decided to join us.”

My colleagues and I are SUPER excited about this: The amazing @crampell.bsky.social is joining our team at The Bulwark.

www.semafor.com/article/10/0...

exit, voice, loyalty

lol

History repeats.

I think @nosunkcosts.bsky.social has pointed this out but if the bull case on Openai is they are after everybody then you need to assume we go full Snowcrash economy or that the dynamics at this size and scale are a lot more zero sum than currently implied.

YouTube video by WION French President Macron Speaks at German Unity Day Ceremony | WION LIVE

President Macron:
“We were very naive to leave our public space to social media networks controlled by US or Chinese companies that don’t share our interests and not interested in survival of our democracies.”
www.youtube.com/watch?v=MggN...

🔥 In September, 14 SBS regiment hit 19 Russian refineries or energy targets, - Magyar's report

Russia to import gasoline from Asia as nearly 40% of refining capacity shuts down, media reports Russia is considering importing fuel from China, South Korea, and Singapore to stabilize its domestic market, according to Kommersant.

That grinding sound you are hearing is the Ukrainians relentlessly dissecting arguably the most important part of the Russian economy. And they are doing this with almost no help from their partners--indeed the US has tried to stop them from attacking into Russia. kyivindependent.com/russia-to-be...

a trad on here got mad at me for saying this but i have a strong feeling the curia genuinely was like "we need lib JPII to do for America what JPII did for Poland"

ServiceNow - makers of a tool even more hated than Jira - released the open weights of Apriel-1.5-15B-Thinker.

An open-weights multimodal reasoning model that hits frontier-level performance with just a fraction of the compute.

Your Hegseth Insult About Mouth-Breathing I saw a meme on BlueSky where you are quoted calling Pete Hegseth a "mouth- breathing dipshit." Seriously? That's the best you can do? I would have thought that anyone teaching at Princeton would have a better vocabulary, be more creative, and have more intelligence than to use "mouth-breathing" as an insult. That is an ignorant attempt at an insult that has been around for far too long and it needs to stop being used. To begin with, singers, brass and woodwind players breathe through their mouths most of the time because it is most efficient, takes in more breath more quickly, and is part of our technique. In addition many people with sinus and allergy issues often have to breathe through their mouths. Equating mouth breathing with lower intelligence is just flat out stupid and beneath someone of your stature. I guarantee that most professional musicians like myself are probably smarter than most people and we don't use ignorant insults that are inaccurate and stupid! We use more accurate insults. Sometimes we get more creative, but in Hegseth's case, he's not

I love you, Bluesky.

And direct deposition! www.nexwafe.com

By 2050, total greenhouse gas emissions from polysilicon production are projected to exceed those of the entire aluminum industry, underscoring the importance of developing low-carbon solar supply chains.
☀️🔌💡

If you will excuse me for some light public gooning after being pancaked by a comically large piano falling out of a skyscraper for the past month, the past week has started to feel like an inflection point in markets where gravity is finally catching up to some things (after they're +100% lol)

I kinda think this has become the better “second screen” sports posting network. X is so asynchronous that there’s no experience of shared now-ness anymore.

The Traffic Noise Externality: Costs, Incidence and Policy Implications Founded in 1920, the NBER is a private, non-profit, non-partisan organization dedicated to conducting economic research and to disseminating research findings among academics, public policy makers, an...

Double glazing and EVs are good, actually. #EnergySky

And fixed costs get spread over less units

The hell case that is now the base case is operating leverage going backwards for Toyota / VW etc.

Could we have known?

Other people’s money, and the problem with Mileism The US Treasury needs to get Argentina on a better policy path before it blows through the Exchange Stabilization Fund

Top notch post from Brad Setser & Stephen Paduano on Milei and the Trump bailout.

"... there are no atheists in foxholes. And there aren’t many libertarians in a financial crisis."

on.ft.com/3Iq4QpH

“Precious pubes”
“Fluoride”
“Warrior ethos manscaping”

Not going to be hard to have some fun with this.

Sick as hell

Eric Adams is amazing because when he won every media person was leaping over each to go “this is the normal sane leadership that the political left doesn’t understand normal sane Americans crave” and then every day since that Eric Adams has been like “Leprechauns are real and I’m going to cook one”

As someone who has had an ID card for literally the entirety of my life:

You people are extremely weird.

Give Trump beefed-up AUKUS deal, Beazley urges Albanese The former Labor leader and ambassador to the US says Australia’s rich deposits of rare earths should be tied into the submarine pact.

Yeah nah.

The Swiss can manage id cards but somehow in the UK they’ll be the gateway to Stalinism

USD underperformance fixes this

a pithy re-summary for undercurrents in the bay, is that a *significant* causal factor in the sudden right wing turn in VC/tech was—beyond MeToo—the end of ZIRP and transitively the decline of the VC model. Defense contracting was the only viable bastion of similar rent extraction. Being a hawk == $