Evening Roundup, May 30
Featuring: Tom Malinowski & Jen Rubin; Sage Warner; Austin Sarat; Owen Pence; The Democracy Index; Meredith Blake; Emily Beyda; Ruben Bolling; RJ Matson; Marissa Rothkopf; and our Pet(s) of the Week!
Tom Malinowski on Trump's incoherent foreign policy strategy
Jen is joined by Tom Malinowski to discuss the global effects of Trump’s TACO tariffs, U.S. relations in the Middle East, and how we can protect human rights and democracy in world without American leadership.
The voices congressional Republicans want to ignore
By Sage Warner
Innovative storytelling can elevate the voices of Americans most affected by cuts in the GOP budget bill.
Trump’s extraordinary pardon binge MAGAifies the clemency power
Throughout history, clemency and corruption have gone hand in hand. From the 11th century, when the Catholic Church began granting indulgences, which promised to reduce or eliminate punishment for sin, to former President Joe Biden’s pardoning of his son and other family members...
Angel Reese deserves her flowers for the women’s basketball boom
By Owen Pence
Reese is one of the WNBA’s primary targets of misogynoir, a reality that unfairly diminishes her role in the growth of the game, her excellence, and the joy she spreads.
The Democracy Index
Otto von Bismarck, the political genius who unified and ruled Germany for decades in the late 19th century, famously said that politics is the art of the possible, indeed the “art of the next best.” This is a lesson the novice Elon Musk learned in calamitous fashion over the past few months.
Culture recs: A timely tech satire from Succession creator Jesse Armstrong, plus... quilts!
In Mountainhead, four Silicon Valley bros congratulate themselves while the world burns...plus more weekend recs. from our culture corner
Tom the Dancing Bug
Follow Ruben Bolling on Substack here; Join Tom the Dancing Bug’s Inner Hive here; and here is the Tom the Dancing Bug website, with information about the new book, “It’s the Great Storm, Tom the Dancing Bug!"
At the precipice
RJ draws several editorial cartoons each week for his substack, e pluribus cartoonum, and for Roll Call, the newspaper of Congress and Capitol Hill. His work is widely syndicated to print newspapers by Cagle Cartoons.
Dense bean salad
The world might be in a state of chaos, but with a good dense bean salad in your fridge, you’ve got your corner of it handled.
Chewy and crunchy oatmeal cookies
Greetings from the rainy, cold Pacific Northwest. Gosh, no, I mean New Jersey, where it’s been cold and rainy for what feels like weeks or, at least according to my one-inch-tall cucumber plants, a lifetime. So, damn the rock-hard nectarines on the counter that I was going to work into a recipe for a summery fruit buckle or the lush, creamy Eton mess la…
When are people going to stop talking about deep cuts in services when we should be talking about scaling back the tax cuts so social service cuts are not necessary. It seems such a simple concept but I have not seen anything like that in the press
Stop monies that subsidize Big Oil and Pharm.