2025-08-15 22:20:00
Depending on who you listen to, President Donald Trump’s decision to seize control over law enforcement in Washington, DC, is either an authoritarian menace or a farce.
The authoritarian menace case is straightforward: Trump is (again) asserting the power to deploy the National Guard to a major US city, while adding the new wrinkle of federalizing the local police force based on a wholly made-up emergency. He is, political scientist Barbara Walter warns, “building the machinery of repression before it’s needed,” getting the tools to violently shut down big protests “in place before the next election.”
The farce case focuses less on these broad fears and more on the actual way it has played out. Instead of nabbing DC residents who oppose the president, federal agents appear to be aimlessly strolling the streets in safe touristy areas like Georgetown or the National Mall. During a pointless Sunday night deployment to the U Street corridor, a popular nightlife area, they faced down the terrifying threat of a drunk man throwing a sandwich.
“This ostensible show of strength is more like an admission of weakness,” The Atlantic’s Quinta Jurecic writes. “It is the behavior of a bully: very bad for the people it touches, but not a likely prelude to full authoritarian takeover.”
So who’s right? In a sense, both of them. Trump’s show of force in DC is both cartoonish and ominous, farcical and dangerous.
It serves to normalize abuses of power that could very well be expanded — in fact, that Trump himself is openly promising to try it out in other cities. However, both the DC deployment and Trump’s prior National Guard misadventure in Los Angeles show that it’s actually quite hard to create effective tools of domestic repression. Executing on his threats requires a level of legal and tactical acumen that it’s not obvious the Trump administration possesses.
Or, put differently: The power they’re claiming is scary in the abstract, but the way they’re currently wielding it is too incompetent to do meaningful damage to democracy. The key question going forward — not just for DC, but the nation — is whether they get better with practice.
Carl Schmitt, a reactionary German legal theorist who would later become a Nazi jurist, famously claimed that emergency powers create an insuperable problem for the liberal-democratic ideal of the rule of law. In theory, the law can limit how and when a person in government can wield emergency powers. But in practice, it all comes down to who has the power to give those words meaning.
Who says what an emergency is, and when it ends? That person, and not the legal text or its underlying intent, is what determines what the law means — and thus has the real power.
Schmitt expressed this idea in a famous dictum: “Sovereign is he who decides on the exception.” And while Trump has surely never heard of Schmitt, let alone read him, this is basically the way his administration has operated. On issues ranging from trade to federalizing DC law enforcement, Trump has decided that ordinary problems — job losses from trade, crime — are emergencies that justify him invoking powers designed for times of war, natural disaster, or rebellion. And so far, he’s mostly gotten away with it.
His federalization of DC will test the limits of Trump’s Schmittian approach. By law, Trump’s emergency power only allows him to federalize control over city police — the Metropolitan Police Department, or MPD — for 30 days. And federal agents, be they National Guard or the DEA or Homeland Security, have circumscribed legal responsibilities and personnel limitations that prevent them from fully replacing MPD as ultimate authority in the capital city.
This is the first thing to watch in DC: Will Trump go full Schmitt, and simply declare that these constraints on his power are moot? And if so, who — if anyone — will try and stop him?
It’s important to emphasize that we don’t know the answers to these questions. While Trump has claimed the power to maintain federal control over MPD beyond the 30-day limit, Trump is constantly claiming all sorts of things that aren’t true. It is entirely possible that, next month, MPD reverts to local control with basically no long-term ill effects.
But even if Trump does defy a court order to release the MPD back to DC, or otherwise maintain some kind of long-term federal presence on the streets of DC, there’s a question of what exactly he is accomplishing.
Here, we have to separate damage to democracy from other concrete harms. Trump’s crackdown may already be producing unjust arrests of many unhoused people in DC. That is bad and worthy of condemnation.
Such arrests do not, however, help Trump consolidate the kind of controls a would-be dictator wants from law enforcement: the ability to suppress critical speech and opposition political activity through force of arms. The mere fact that federal troops are on the street, or that MPD is technically under federal control, does not mean that they’re arresting Democrats or raiding the Washington Post or opening fire on protesters.
Of course, the fact that something isn’t yet happening doesn’t mean it won’t. But the current deployments, for all their fascist aesthetics, are quite far from that — in fact, they appear to be doing a lot of impotent, haphazard traffic stops. In the U Street area, home to mixed populations of longtime residents and more recent gentrifiers, locals have confronted the cops and jeered at them — with no reports of serious retaliatory injury. Trump is doing something that has an authoritarian intent and appearance that galvanizes resistance, without any kind of plan for turning it into an effective repressive tool.
One could tell a similar story about the National Guard deployment to LA. Back then, Trump sent in the troops with a big show, claiming they were necessary to get (overhyped) riots under control. In reality, they showed up and went on a few drug and immigration raids, and then almost all of them quietly slinked off without scaring the LA population into political submission. Courts are currently hearing arguments on the deployment’s legality.
None of this is to say that Trump’s deployments are harmless. As Walter points out, he is creating legal and political precedents that could — at least in theory — be used toward repressive ends if they so desire. If Trump does something to mess with the fairness of the midterm elections, and large cities erupt with protest, he’s already somewhat normalized a militarized response.
From a health-of-democracy standpoint, then, what’s worrying about recent events in DC is not the developments on the ground. It’s the precedent they set — the powers that Trump is claiming that could be all too easily abused. The question is whether such abuse will occur.
So far, there is very little evidence that the Trump administration has anything like a systematic plan for suborning American democracy. He isn’t doing what someone like Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán did in 2010 — come in with a blueprint for destroying the political opposition and executing on it as efficiently as possible.
Rather, he’s simply asserting powers whenever it’s convenient to do what he wants to do at the moment. Can’t get Congress to raise tariffs? Use emergency powers to impose them. Want to impose an unconstitutional export tax on Nvidia? Just make an extortionate “deal” with its CEO. Want to stop seeing images of protesters with Mexican flags in LA? Send in the National Guard.
To be clear: This ad hoc authoritarianism is still dangerous. It’s just comparatively less effective than its deliberate cousin. Trump hasn’t silenced the Democratic opposition or the American press or shuttered civil rights groups. He’s taken steps in all of those directions, but they fit the ad hoc pattern: each troubling, but not (yet!) systematic or successful enough to fundamentally compromise the fairness of elections or Americans’ rights to dissent and free speech.
Where we’re at, in short, is a place where the building blocks for constructing an authoritarian state are all in a row. The question is whether Trump has the will and the vision to put them together in a way that could durably compromise the viability of American democracy.
This context helps us understand why the DC deployment is both absurd and dangerous.
It is absurd in the sense that it does nothing, on its own, to advance an authoritarian agenda — and, if anything, compromises it by creating images of uniformed thugs on American streets that galvanize his opponents. It is dangerous in that it could normalize abuses of power that, down the line, could be wielded as part of an actually serious campaign of repression.
And at this point, I don’t know which scenario is more likely: that Trump’s ad hoc efforts to seize control founder and ultimately amount to little, or that he follows his Schmittian logic to its dictatorial terminus.
2025-08-15 19:30:00
Just a few years ago, the movement for Washington, DC, statehood was gaining steam. In 2020 and 2021, Democrats in the House passed bills to make DC the 51st state, re-energizing the fight to grant residents of the nation’s capital representation in Congress.
Those bills were ultimately doomed because of strong Republican opposition. But now, statehood for Washington, DC, seems even more far-fetched. Earlier this week, President Donald Trump took the extraordinary step of ordering a federal takeover of DC’s local police department. He also mobilized the DC National Guard, deploying troops in the city to allegedly fight crime.
This didn’t necessarily come as a surprise. For some time, Trump has fantasized about taking over DC altogether, saying that the federal government would do a much better job running the city than its current mayor, Muriel Bowser.
So, how did DC go from building a growing movement for statehood to a hostile federal takeover in just a few short years?
The simple answer is that Republicans are now in power, and they’d like to make an example out of DC. But even without Republican control of the White House or Congress, statehood and full self-governance have always been an uphill battle, because there’s also a deeper history of the federal government’s paternalistic relationship with the nation’s capital.
Washington, DC, was specifically established to serve as the nation’s capital. The US Constitution gave Congress the power to create a small federal district that doesn’t exceed 10 square miles to serve as the seat of the federal government. In 1790, Congress passed the Residence Act, which paved the way to build a new capital along the Potomac River. And so, DC was established by carving out land from Maryland and Virginia (which later took its portion back) and was under Congress’s jurisdiction. That meant there would be no democratically elected mayor or local government.
But DC grew into a full city, with residents living there on a permanent basis — not just to serve the federal government. And, for most of the city’s history, those residents were entirely disenfranchised — unable to get representation in Congress or even vote for president. That changed during the civil rights era, when DC’s voting rights (or lack thereof) garnered more attention, in no small part because of the city’s large Black population, which, by 1960, had become the majority. As a result, the constitution was officially amended in 1961 to grant DC residents the right to vote for president, but the amendment stopped short of granting them representation in Congress.
Even then, DC didn’t have a democratically elected local government. So, in 1974, Congress passed the DC Home Rule Act, which allowed residents to elect their own mayor and council. That finally gave the nation’s capital some form of self-governance, but Congress ultimately retained its power to overrule local laws and budgets if it so pleased.
The federal government’s resistance to giving DC autonomy is ultimately rooted in racism. Known as Chocolate City, DC was the epicenter of Black arts, culture, and politics. And since it gained the right to vote for local officials, DC has only ever elected Black mayors. As a result, opposition to DC statehood has often leaned on the paternalistic and racist notion that Black people can’t be trusted to govern themselves — that the city’s residents simply don’t know what’s best for them. That’s why conservative lawmakers have pointed to issues like crime or corruption as evidence that DC can’t be trusted to be a state.
In 2021, for example, Steve Scalise, the Republican House majority leader, wrote, “Why should the District of Columbia be granted statehood when it can’t even perform basic governmental duties like protecting its residents from criminals?” Scalise also said that the city was simply too corrupt to be a state. These kinds of arguments have been repeated by people on the right for decades, despite the fact that states, including Scalise’s own Louisiana, are well-known for their corruption and crime. So even if those issues were a legitimate concern (they shouldn’t be), then why should the residents of DC be treated any differently than other Americans?
Part of the reason in recent years has less to do with explicit racism and more to do with partisan politics. If DC were to get full representation in Congress, it would undoubtedly benefit Democrats, since the city is overwhelmingly Democratic. (Trump, for example, only got 6.5 percent of the vote in DC in 2024.) That explains why Democrats are on board with DC statehood while Republicans are fiercely opposed.
But this is the natural extension of the overt racism that has long defined opposition for DC self-governance. Before the Home Rule Act, President Lyndon B. Johnson reorganized how the district was governed and appointed Walter Washington to serve as the mayor-commissioner of DC. When Washington, who was Black, submitted his first budget to Congress, the response was astonishingly racist; John McMillan, a Democrat from South Carolina who chaired the House Committee on the District of Columbia, sent Washington a truckload of watermelons.
Now, Republicans might not play the same tactics, but the degree to which they ignore Black Washingtonians and their rights is unmistakable. “Yes, Wyoming is smaller than Washington by population, but it has three times as many workers in mining, logging, and construction, and ten times as many workers in manufacturing,” Tom Cotton, the Republican senator from Arkansas, said in 2021 in a speech opposing DC statehood. “In other words, Wyoming is a well-rounded working-class state.”
But, as I noted then, roughly 140,000 people in DC’s labor force were considered working class in 2016, according to the Center for American Progress, while about 220,000 workers in Wyoming were considered working class. The most notable difference in those two populations is that the vast majority of DC’s working class was made up of people of color, while 84 percent of Wyoming’s working class was white.
Federal intervention in DC’s affairs has often poorly served residents, and not just because they have, through the years, been denied voting rights, self-governance, and representation in Congress. Congress’s meddling in local laws has ultimately served the interests of lawmakers from other states and not the interests of the people living in the city.
One of the most notable examples of this was during the AIDS epidemic. In the 1990s, DC spent money on needle exchange programs, which research has shown is critical in preventing the spread of infectious diseases, including HIV/AIDS. But, Congress banned the city from using its own funds on needle exchange programs — a ban that lasted nine years. During that time, the city saw a surge in infections and had the highest rate of HIV per capita in the country, even exceeding rates in developing countries. And, because DC was a majority Black city, the policy disproportionately affected Black people.
Trump’s plan to federalize the local police force follows those exact footsteps — placing his own interests above those of DC residents and their elected officials. The move is a blatantly political one. Trump is using DC as a warning to other cities: If you pass progressive criminal justice laws, then he will try his best to intervene.
It’s a paternalistic instinct, one that is anti-democratic at its core, taking local control away from the hands of voters. And what’s unfortunate for DC is that Trump’s move is not entirely unprecedented. It falls in line with how the federal government has long viewed DC’s self-governance: at best an inconvenience, and at worst, a threat.
2025-08-15 18:45:00
Whatever else can be said about the second Trump administration, it is always teaching me about parts of the Constitution I had forgotten were even in there.
Case in point: Article I, Section 9, Clause 5 states that “No Tax or Duty shall be laid on Articles exported from any State.” This is known as the export clause, not to be confused with the import-export clause (Article I, Section 10, Clause 2). The Supreme Court has repeatedly held, most recently in 1996’s US v. IBM, that this clause bans Congress and the states from imposing taxes on goods exported from one state to another or from the US to foreign countries.
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I found myself reading US v. IBM after President Donald Trump announced an innovative new deal with chipmakers Nvidia and AMD. They can now export certain previously restricted chips to China but have to pay a 15 percent tax to the federal government on the proceeds. Now, I’m not a lawyer, but several people who are lawyers, like former National Security Council official Peter Harrell, immediately interpreted this as a clearly unconstitutional export tax (and as illegal under the 2018 Export Control Reform Act, to boot).
At this point, there’s something kind of sad and impotent about complaining that something Trump is doing is illegal and unconstitutional. It feels like yelling at the refs that the Harlem Globetrotters aren’t playing fair; of course they aren’t, no one cares. The refs are unlikely to step in here, either. The parties with the standing to sue and block the export taxes are Nvidia and AMD, and they’ve already agreed to go along with it.
Maybe the best we can do is understand why this happened and what it means for the future of AI.
While AMD is included in the deal, for all practical purposes, the AI chips in question are being made by Nvidia — and the main one in question is the H20.
As I explained last month, the H20 is entirely the product of US export controls meant to limit export of excessively powerful chips to China. Nvidia took its flagship H100 chip, widely used for AI training, and dialed its processing power (as measured in floating point operations per second) way down, thus satisfying rules restricting advanced chips that the Biden administration put in place and Trump has maintained.
At the same time, it dialed up the memory bandwidth (or the rate at which data moves between the chip and system memory) past even H100’s levels. That makes the H20 better than the H100 at answering queries to AI models in action, even if it’s worse at training those models to start with.
Critics saw this all as an attempt to obey the letter of the export controls while violating their spirit. It still meant Nvidia was exporting very useful, powerful chips to Chinese AI firms, which could use those to catch up with or leap ahead of US firms — precisely what the Biden administration was trying to prevent. In April, the Trump administration seemed to agree when it sent Nvidia a letter informing it that it would not receive export licenses for shipping H20s to China.
Then, in July, reportedly after both some bargaining with China over rare earth metals and a personal entreaty from Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang, Trump flip-flopped; the chips could go to China after all. The only thing new this month is that he wants to get a cut of the proceeds.
That, of course, is an important new element, not least because it seems bad that the president is asserting the power to unilaterally impose new taxes without Congress. (At least with tariffs, Trump has some laws Congress passed he can cite theoretically granting the authority.) But the big question about H20s remains the same: Does this help Chinese companies like DeepSeek catch up with US companies like OpenAI? And how bad is that, if it happens?
The concerns here are such that maybe the best way to understand them is to imagine a debate between a pro-export and anti-export advocate. I’m taking some poetic license here, in part because people in the sector are often averse to plainly saying what they mean on the record. But I think it’s a fair reflection of the debate as I’ve heard it.
Anti-Export Guy: Trump says he wants the US to have “global dominance” in AI, and here he is, just letting China have very powerful chips. This obviously hurts the US’s edge.
Pro-Export Guy: Does it? Again, the H20 is powerful, but it’s no H100. In any case, Chinese firms are totally allowed to rent out advanced AI chips in US-based cloud servers. DeepSeek could even rent time on an H100 that way. So, why are we freaking out about exporting a weaker chip?
Anti-Export: You act like the cloud option is a loophole — it’s a feature! That way, they’re dependent on US servers and companies. If Chinese AI firms ever start making dangerous systems, the US can shut off their access, and they’ll be out of luck.
Pro-Export: Again, will they be out of luck? There’s a third option after Nvidia exports and US servers. Huawei is making its own AI-optimized chips. Chinese firms don’t want to depend on foreign servers forever, and if we deny them Nvidia chips, they’ll run right over to Huawei chips.
Anti-Export: Saying you don’t need Nvidia chips when you have Huawei chips is like if you told someone 20 years ago that they don’t need an iPod because they have a Zune. Yes, Huawei chips exist, but they’re so much worse. They’re lower bandwidth than H20s, Huawei’s software libraries are full of bugs, and the chips sometimes dangerously overheat.
Pro-Export: You’re exaggerating. By some metrics, Huawei’s latest systems (not just the chips, but the surrounding servers) outperform Nvidia’s top-end model — even though that model uses B200s that are faster than H100s and lightyears faster than you’d ever be allowed to export to China. Yes, programmers will have to learn Huawei’s libraries, and transitioning from Nvidia’s will take time, but it’s doable. Google, Anthropic, and OpenAI have all recently moved away from Nvidia chips toward things like Google’s own TPUs or Amazon’s Trainiums. That took effort, but they did it.
Anti-Export: Sure, but those companies still use Nvidia’s too. OpenAI wants 100,000 chips in one Norwegian facility alone. And while US companies may be trying out the competition, Chinese companies still vastly prefer Nvidia to Huawei. DeepSeek reportedly had to delay its latest model because it tried to train it on Huawei chips but couldn’t. Even if Huawei chips were popular, Huawei lacks the production capacity to meet demand. It relies on smuggled components to make its top-end chips and can make at most 200,000 this year, compared to the roughly 10 million Nvidia chips shipped annually. There’s no substitute for Nvidias.
I suppose we’ll see, in the next few months and in the rollout of new chips from competitors like Huawei, who got the better of that argument. China is reportedly discouraging firms from using Nvidia chips in the wake of the export tax deal, largely to encourage them to use domestic chips like Huawei, though they are clearly not banning the firms from using Nvidias if they prove necessary. It’s also investigating whether the US is including spyware in them.
The bigger question this debate raises for me, and one I certainly can’t answer adequately here, is: To what degree is “beating China” on AI important for making the future of AI go well?
The answer for most US policymakers, and most people I know in the AI safety world, has been “very.” The Financial Times reports that some Trump officials are considering resigning in protest over allowing China to get H20s. As Leopold Aschenbrenner, the AI analyst turned hedge funder, put it bluntly in his influential 2024 essay “Situational Awareness”: “Superintelligence will give those who wield it the power to crush opposition, dissent, and lock in their grand plan for humanity.” If China “wins,” then, the result for humanity is permanent authoritarian repression.
No doubt, the Beijing regime is brutal, and I have no faith that they will use AI wisely. I’m very confident they’ll wield it to oppress Chinese citizens. But it feels as though “staying ahead of China” has become the sine qua non of US AI policy.
I worry less that this focus on China is directionally wrong and more that it is exaggerated. The bigger danger is that no one can control these systems, rather than that China can, and that the focus on staying ahead of China will cause the US to speed deployment of automated weapons systems that could prove deeply destabilizing and dangerous.
As with most aspects of AI, I feel like there’s a small island of things we’re all sure of and a vast ocean of unknowns. I think offering China H20s probably hurts AI safety a bit. I think.
2025-08-15 18:00:00
The richest person in the world is obsessed with creating a city on Mars.
Elon Musk would like to see a million people living in a self-sufficient Martian settlement by 2050, both as a plan B for Earth and because it gives us something cool to get excited about.
Traveling to Mars has been a recurring theme of spacefaring fantasies for decades, from the German rocket innovator Wernher von Braun to science fiction writers Ray Bradbury and Kim Stanley Robinson. Human exploits on Mars have also been the subject of countless movies, TV shows, and comic books.
There are many good reasons to explore Mars. The discovery of water deep below the surface and ice at its poles suggests that the conditions to sustain life may have existed on the Red Planet, and perhaps still do. Studying Mars could teach us about how life emerged on Earth. While rovers have made great strides in uncovering the planet’s secrets, human explorers could accelerate the pace of discovery.
Living on Mars would bring many challenges for humans, among them cosmic and solar radiation exposure, an asphyxiating atmosphere, lower-than-Earth gravity, extreme temperatures, toxic soil, and no ready supply of food, drinkable water, or breathable air.
But our cultural and scientific fascination with Mars lives on. And if Musk’s SpaceX or a competitor lands humans on Mars in the coming years, it will be the realization of an ancient dream. To think that it all started with an optical illusion that tricked some astronomers into believing that Mars was riven with canals flanked with vegetation and carved by wise, peace-loving extraterrestrials.
Today, Explained co-host Sean Ramewaram spoke with David Baron, author of The Martians: The True Story of An Alien Craze that Captured Turn-of-the-Century America, about the belief in intelligent Martian life and the fixation on Mars that has gripped generations of scientists, science fiction writers, and tech billionaires.
Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.
Why do we all care about Mars?
As a culture, Mars has seeped into our collective psyche. There’s this sense of mystery and romance. A little more than a century ago, the public believed that Mars was inhabited by intelligent beings. Before Martians were staples of science fiction, they were believed to be a scientific fact.
You could open the New York Times in 1906 and read in all seriousness about the civilization on Mars, what the Martians might be like, how we might communicate with them, and what we might learn from them. In 1907, the Wall Street Journal said the biggest news of the year was proof of intelligent life on Mars.
Where did the fact that there were Martians come from?
It all started in 1877. In the 19th century, all we knew about Mars was what we could see through earthbound telescopes. But in 1877, when Mars came especially close to Earth, an Italian astronomer named Giovanni Schiaparelli decided he was going to make a detailed map of Mars. And so, night after night, he studied the planet and saw what he thought were oceans and continents. But he also saw this network of thin, exceptionally straight lines that he imagined were waterways.
He called them “canali,” which in Italian means channels, but when it was translated into English, it was mistranslated as canals. And so, as soon as 1877, people were joking about these canals on Mars and wondering what they were, but people didn’t think they were artificially constructed.
In 1894, Percival Lowell, an American astronomer, came along and said, yes, these were irrigation canals that Martians were using to survive on a planet that was running out of water. All of Mars’s moisture was locked up in the polar ice caps at the north and south poles, and for the Martians to survive, they had created this global network of irrigation canals. That’s what these lines supposedly were. They would come and go with the seasons. They tended to appear in the spring and summer, and they would fade in the fall and winter.
Lowell theorized that vegetation along the irrigation canals would appear in the spring and summer, and fade in the fall and winter when the leaves presumably died off.
This was also a time when people were looking for hope in outer space. In the late 19th century, at least in the West, there were a lot of reasons for despair. There was anarchism in Europe. There were heads of state being assassinated. President William McKinley was assassinated in the United States early in the 20th century. There was a feeling that society was running down. There were wars, including the Spanish-American War in the late 19th century.
The idea was that the Martians were these advanced beings who were what we hopefully would become in the future. The fact that they had this global network of irrigation canals meant that they had pulled together as a planet and evolved beyond war and divisive politics.
Because it looked like they were cooperating across a planet.
Exactly. So there was a real desire to believe in the Martians.
Was there anyone out there saying, “Guys, just because we see some canals, it doesn’t mean there are Martians”?
Absolutely. In fact, the astronomical community divided into the canalists and the anti-canalists. Lowell was a self-made astronomer. He was an extraordinarily wealthy and articulate human being from a very prominent family in Massachusetts. And so he was able to write articles for the Atlantic Monthly promoting his ideas. He was out there giving lectures about the Martians. And so he was able to convince the public, even if there were a lot of astronomers he couldn’t convince.
When was peak obsession with Mars in this era?
That was 1908 and 1909. By 1908, the idea was so widespread, you had pastors in church sermonizing about the Martians and expressing to their congregations that we should emulate the Martians and look to our neighboring planet for the kind of society that we should be.
Alexander Graham Bell, who of course invented the telephone, was convinced that the Martians were real. He saw no question that Mars was inhabited by intelligent beings.
Nikola Tesla, a great inventor who came up with our modern system of generating and distributing electrical power, was convinced that he picked up radio signals from Mars. And when he announced that to the world at the beginning of 1901, it set off an absolute craze.
Martians invaded popular culture. They showed up on the vaudeville and Broadway stages. There was a popular show called “A Yankee Circus on Mars.” You had a Martian that became a comic character in the newspapers. They showed up in Tin Pan Alley songs. In fact, I have an original wax cylinder recording of a song called “A Signal From Mars” from back then. The Martians were just everywhere in popular culture.
How did it fall apart?
Astronomers by the 1910s had pretty well convinced themselves that this whole canal theory was bunk. But the idea had so taken hold in the brains of the public that the idea of canals on Mars persisted until the 1950s and 60s.
In 1938, there was the famous “War of the Worlds” radio broadcast by Orson Welles. And there were people who actually believed, listening to the radio, that the Martians were invading. I actually found a letter to Orson Welles that was written by one of those listeners who was fooled, who was angry about it. And what she wrote was, well, haven’t astronomers found canals on Mars? Don’t we know that there are Martians there?
The idea persisted well into the 1960s when NASA sent its first Mariner spacecraft flying by Mars to take the first close-up pictures of the surface. And there was not only no sign of a civilization, there was no sign of straight lines. It just looked like a dead world.
Thinking back to what you said earlier, when people were first enchanted by this idea of Martians in the early 20th century, it was this idea that we could all work together that really captured imaginations. And it’s still a nice idea. Do you think there’s still a chance that we could get together as a human race to unite in an effort to get to Mars? It doesn’t look that likely.
I think what will inspire the United States to get to Mars more than anything is competition, because the Chinese want to get there. But there is still this dream of Mars as this techno-utopia that will be better than Earth, that will be more egalitarian, where we can start over again.
I think there are two lessons from the Mars craze. On the one hand, it’s a cautionary tale. We tend to project onto Mars what we hope is there, not what’s really there. A hundred years ago, we believed in Martians because we wanted to believe that there was a better world next door. Today, I think a lot of the talk about Mars is that we’re going to create this utopia next door. That’s going to be so difficult: technically difficult, and, as you said, getting humans together to make this possible, Lord knows if that’s ever going to happen.
On the other hand, a lot of good came out of that craziness of a hundred years ago. It was the excitement about Mars and the imagination that spurred the next generations to say, well, maybe we can actually go there, and how would we do it? And they built the rockets, and they had the enthusiasm. And I think the same is true today. And if we’re going to get there, we might as well start now.
2025-08-15 09:35:00
And just like that, Carrie Bradshaw is single again.
For the last three seasons, fans have watched TV’s greatest anti-heroine begin an entire new set of adventures. After HBO original Sex and the City ended in 2004 (followed by the fun 2008 film of the same name and its not-so-fun 2010 sequel), And Just Like That picked up in 2021 with Carrie’s happily ever after. The most fabulous woman in Manhattan seemed to have everything she’s ever wanted: a loving marriage to her Mr. Big (Chris Noth), a condo on Fifth Avenue, financial security beyond her wildest dreams, and a truly gigantic closet.
But no one is immune to late life’s indignities, apparently not even Carrie Bradshaw (Sarah Jessica Parker).
In the show’s often-clunky style, Carrie faced a series of dismal realities. She became a widow; she hosted a podcast; she left behind her beloved apartment for a beautiful but strangely empty Gramercy Park brownstone. She wasted a bunch of her (and the audience’s) time on an ill-fated attempt at rekindling her romance with the country Lurch known as Aidan Shaw (John Corbett). Money remained a non-issue for Carrie, but the show often reminded us that not even immense amounts of wealth could insulate you from life’s dishonors.
In the series finale — which showrunner Michael Patrick King abruptly announced at the beginning of August — Carrie finds herself at a place not unlike when we first met her in that pilot episode years ago: single, in heels, living in Manhattan, bolstered by her friends, but wondering if there’s love left in the Greatest City on Earth.
It’s not the fairytale ending. But Carrie’s story ending by herself feels true. Truer, even.
The original show wrapped with true love for all of its heroines, but something felt off. The real point of Sex and the City was always Carrie’s relationships with Miranda (Cynthia Nixon), Charlotte (Kristin Davis), and Samantha (the now-absent Kim Cattrall).
While And Just Like That has been criticized for its tone and poor writing (one secondary character was seemingly killed off twice), it managed to give Carrie Bradshaw an ending that captured the daring admission of the original: that being lucky in love is good, but being lucky in friendship is everything.
From urinating on themselves, to getting roasted on stage by their nonbinary comedian ex, to dying on a Peloton, the characters of And Just Like That seemingly exist only to be humiliated.
In King’s world, life after 40 is nothing but a gauntlet of perverse embarrassments.
The continued indignities of aging — so imaginatively bleak that death starts to seem like a sweet release — have turned And Just Like That into a show that people resent, criticize, and demand 17 more seasons of. One cannot fathom the horrors Carrie, Charlotte, and Miranda will face each week, usually centered on their bodies betraying them or being left behind by a world that deems them too old. Each new mortification feels shocking, sacrilegious to the show’s glamorous predecessor. At the same time, there’s kind of a perverse glee in watching how deranged it all can get.
What do you mean Carrie had hip replacement surgery and, in a temporary state of medicated paralysis, was left to listen helplessly as her coworker passionately throttled Miranda’s lower half like a rotary phone in the other room? Charlotte battling a bout of vertigo and falling into an art installation with fake ejaculate cannot be real, can it? Miranda had sex with a virgin nun played by Rosie O’Donnell? What is a person supposed to say to that… okay???
Unfortunately for Carrie, she endures one final degradation in the series finale: Miranda’s Thanksgiving. In the world of AJLT, a beloved American holiday about remembering the things we’re grateful for unfurls into a nightmare.
Everyone but Carrie has bailed on Miranda’s get-together, staying with their own husbands and families. Since Carrie possesses neither, she has to witness a trainwreck that includes raw turkey, a clogged toilet and brown fecal water, an Italian greyhound emergency at the vet, the future mother of Miranda’s grandchild and her obnoxious friends, and a failed, surprise set-up attempt.
There’s a heavy-handed point to all this misery.
This gathering is a crystallization of Carrie’s future. In this era of her life, Carrie Bradshaw is single, and if she doesn’t want to spend Thanksgiving alone, she might have to endure a few lousy ones at the hands of her friends. It all comes around to the bigger question: What if Carrie’s future does not include one more love? Is that okay?
“I have to quit thinking maybe a man, and start accepting maybe just me,” she tells Charlotte. “And it’s not a tragedy.”
Having survived a holiday radiating such dark, melancholic energy, Carrie taps out. Going home alone isn’t such a hardship, though. She returns to her gorgeous mansion to eat pie in heels. For her, it’s heaven. After all, this is the woman who professed to find true joy in tearing open a sleeve of saltines and smearing a sliver of grape jelly on each one, while reading an entire issue of Vogue standing up.
What Carrie has is actually the furthest thing from tragic, rather, something much more thrilling — something that the original show should have considered.
The most frustrating thing about Sex and the City is how its ending betrayed the show’s heart and soul.
For six seasons, the show touted the revolutionary concept that its heroines — Carrie, Charlotte, Miranda, and Samantha — just needed each other. SATC was unafraid to imagine that female friendship could be more powerful, more enduring, and more satisfying than romantic love.
“Don’t laugh at me,” Charlotte tells her best friends in season four. “But maybe we can be each other’s soulmates.”
The idea of soulmates has largely been framed as romantic good fortune, the notion that the universe has picked out lives meant to be lived together, if only these hopeful lovers can find one another. SATC offered a more optimistic reimagining, a theory that our best friends are the true matches we should be so lucky to find in this world.
Despite the show’s title, sex and love were never really part of the show’s fairytale. Men were often terrible, rarely lasting more than an episode. Sex was rarely sexy, more often skewered than celebrated.
It’s sort of a shame then, at the end of the series, that these four soulmates all end up married to or are exclusively committed to men nowhere near as magical as they are.
Miranda marries Steve (David Eigenberg), and opens up their home to his mother. Charlotte converts to Judaism, marries Harry (Evan Handler), and they adopt a baby from China. Samantha beats cancer and asks for a monogamous relationship with Smith Jerrod (Jason Lewis). Carrie leaves her callous Russian boyfriend (Mikhail Baryshnikov) for Big, and returns to New York with the man she’s been chasing all these years.
We’re meant to see these as happy, fulfilled endings — even though our main characters were all essentially separated from one another. The relationships they nurtured through some of their worst moments — Carrie’s heartbreaks, Miranda’s mother dying, Samantha’s cancer, Charlotte’s divorce — were pushed aside to accommodate men. The show told us over and over that these friends could have a fulfilled life with just each other, but it didn’t seem to truly believe its own revolutionary message.
As clumsy as AJLT was at times, it had a better sense of what the original show meant.
Carrie finally stumbled upon the realization that her life never needed marriage, romantic love, or maybe even sex, to be fabulously beautiful. Surely, these things don’t hurt, but they were never the heart of the matter.
Decades later, but never too late, Carrie finally got the ending she and her friends told us to believe in.
2025-08-15 04:00:00
The Supreme Court handed down a very brief order on Thursday, which allows a Mississippi law restricting children’s access to social media to remain in place — for now.
It is far from clear, however, whether the Mississippi law at issue in Netchoice v. Fitch will remain in place for very long. Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who is ideologically at the center of this very conservative Supreme Court, wrote a concurring opinion explaining that he thinks the law “would likely violate [social media companies’] First Amendment rights under this Court’s precedents.”
But he joined the Court’s decision nonetheless because the plaintiff in this case, a trade group that represents internet companies, “has not sufficiently demonstrated that the balance of harms and equities favors it at this time.”
Kavanaugh’s reference to “the balance of harms and equities” refers to the rule the Supreme Court used to apply in its “shadow docket” cases, a mix of emergency motions and other matters that the justices decide on an expedited basis. Typically, when the Court grants shadow docket relief, it issues a temporary order that blocks a lower court decision until the case is fully litigated in federal appeals courts and, in some cases, the Supreme Court.
In Nken v. Holder (2009), the Court held that, when a litigant asks an appellate court to block a lower court’s decision while the case is still ongoing, it is not enough for that litigant to show they are likely to prevail on appeal. To receive shadow docket relief, the litigant must also show that they “will be irreparably injured absent a stay.” Often, appeals courts must also ask whether blocking the lower court’s decision would “substantially injure” any third parties, or otherwise harm “the public interest.”
Kavanaugh is probably right that the Mississippi law at issue in Netchoice does not irreparably injure anyone. Though the law purports to prevent minors from signing up for social media accounts without their parents’ permission, it is fairly toothless. And it is far from clear whether any actual child or teenager has not been able to use a social media site because of the law. (If you want to read more about the law and why it violates the First Amendment, I wrote that piece here.)
Kavanaugh’s decision to apply Nken to the Netchoice case is odd, because the Court appears to have abandoned Nken in many of its shadow docket cases. As Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson explained in a pair of dissenting opinions earlier this year, when President Donald Trump seeks a shadow docket order, the Court typically ignores Nken and rules in favor of Trump, regardless of whether he or his administration would be irreparably injured.
In Social Security Administration v. AFSCME (2025), for example, the Republican justices ruled that DOGE, the White House office once led by billionaire Elon Musk, may have immediate access to sensitive information kept by the Social Security Administration.
Notably, however, when a judge asked one of Trump’s lawyers what harm the government would experience if DOGE’s access to this information were delayed, the lawyer did not name any such harm — saying instead that the Trump administration would “stand on the record in its current form.” In the Trump administration’s brief to the justices in AFSCME, Trump’s lawyers did not even attempt to argue that the administration faced irreparable injury without shadow docket relief. That brief devoted only one paragraph to the question of irreparable harm, and it did not identify any injury to the government that could not be unraveled by a future court order. Instead, it complained that the lower court order blocking DOGE’s access “impinges on the President’s broad authority.”
Kavanaugh’s Fitch opinion is clarifying for two reasons. Last June, the Supreme Court slightly rolled back First Amendment rights, holding that states may require pornographic websites to verify that their users are over age 18. It was unclear after that decision, known as Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton, whether the Court planned to further weaken the First Amendment, or whether Free Speech Coalition was a one-off decision applying solely to porn.
Kavanaugh’s Fitch concurrence suggests that the First Amendment is safe. To his credit, Kavanaugh has generally voted in favor of free speech, including in cases where Republican lawmakers sought to restrict it.
Additionally, Kavanaugh’s Fitch opinion also seems to clarify that, for most litigants, Nken remains good law. Only Donald Trump appears to enjoy the special exemption that the Court applied in cases like AFSCME.