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No longer bothering to hide its agenda, the administration is making blatant appeals to the Old South. Read more.

When I was 16 years old, I knew exactly two things: I was not going to die in the desert at the behest of some Yalie, and I would gladly lay down my life for John Frusciante. 

By 2006, the Red Hot Chili Peppers had been a going concern for nearly a quarter-century. They’d successfully cemented themselves as radio kingpins by alternating between half-literate funk jams and dorm-room, puddle-deep ballads for jocks who cry sometimes. To most serious music critics, they were a joke. To a teen whose sound system was worth more than his car, they were gods. With three too many passengers in my sedan, I’d spend hours speeding past cabbage fields on roads named for churches as Anthony Kiedis howled about foreign concepts like police helicopters and heroin. They couldn’t have asked for a better audience for their double album, “Stadium Arcadium”, which hit U.S. shelves 20 years ago this week. 

On that occasion, Kiedis’ fullback poetry wasn’t even up to the level of previous hits like “Scar Tissue.” Rick Rubin’s dry, expensive production style made nods toward RHCP’s groove-punk past like “So Much I” or “Hump de Bump” sound like half-remembered P-Funk songs blaring in an operating theater. But nothing’s a cliché to a person who doesn’t know anything yet. Since I hadn’t been around for “Sandinista” by the Clash, or Guns N’ Roses’ two-part “Use Your Illusion,” I couldn’t recognize the multi-hour release for what it was — the bloated and self-serious sound of a megawatt rock band entering terminal decline.  

Mind you, the album has genuine highs. Frusciante’s guitar has rarely sounded prettier than the trilling, endlessly repeating riff of “Snow (Hey Oh)” and Kiedis’ vocal on “Tell Me Baby” is genuinely gorgeous. But those highlights are far outweighed by indulgent snoozers (“Hard to Concentrate”) and creepouts (“She’s Only 18”). The album’s 122-minute runtime makes it about the same length as Sidney Lumet’s “Dog Day Afternoon,” and it leaves the listener feeling just as trapped in a situation that has spiraled out of control. There’s a decent album in there somewhere, if only the band had had someone around to tell them “no.”

Trudging toward the halfway mark of Donald Trump’s second term, you can’t help but miss the steady hands and red lines of his first-term handlers. Fully unmoored from any need or desire to limit the damage to public opinion or the future of the federal government, the Trump administration has gone all in on half-baked schemes and GOP pipe dreams.

The neoconservatives finally got their direct war with Iran, only to find out that nobody actually wanted it (and it’s hell on anybody who’s trying to make money). Team Trump has released (parts of) the FBI’s Epstein files, only to find their own backers complicit. They launched a war on urban immigrants, only to find an unending supply of newly invigorated counterprotesters spurred into action by images of their neighbors getting arrested. No longer young and hungry, Trump’s second administration has reveled in excess at a moment when many Americans are struggling to make do. 

We’ve seen how this story ends on episode after episode of VH1’s “Behind the Music.” The band burns out and fades away. The fans scatter and scratch their heads, wondering why they were ever so devoted to something so uncool. It remains to be seen if MAGA will ever realize that Trump’s big, beautiful agenda was the beginning of the end, and whether they day will come when they look back at their unreasoning fandom and cringe.

What do you think? Will MAGA ever be embarrassed about their loyalty to Trump? Sound off in the comments.

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I loathe billionaires. But the former hedge fund manager could be a class traitor in the mold of FDR. Read more.

Last Tuesday, marketing asked Viktor to write the weekly campaign recap, pull performance from Google Ads and Meta, and format it as a PDF for the exec team. Done in four minutes.

That same afternoon, engineering asked Viktor to review three open pull requests on GitHub, cross-reference with the Linear sprint board, and flag anything blocking the release. Posted to private channel before standup.

At 9pm, ops asked Viktor to draft a vendor contract summary from three Notion docs and send it to the team. It was in #ops by morning.

None of them knew the others were using it.

Same colleague. Three departments. That's what changes when your AI coworker lives in Slack, where your whole company already works. It's not a tool one person logs into. It's a teammate everyone messages.

5,700+ teams. SOC 2 certified. Your data never trains models.

"Viktor is now an integral team member, and after weeks of use we still feel we haven't uncovered the full potential." - Patrick O'Doherty, Director, Yarra Web

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