Jeff Landry claims he's proud of his deals with SpaceX and Meta. So why is the Louisiana governor hiding so much behind NDAs?

We'll never know the art of Jeff Landry's Meta, SpaceX deals

The MAGA Louisiana governor has buried his deals with Meta and SpaceX under a mountain of NDAs

salon.com

Nikole Hannah-Jones' New York Times Magazine essay about her daughter's schooling has generated lots of discussion. The big question: Are progressive parents hypocrites for wanting the best for their kids? @alexwgalbraith.bsky.social argues the debate misses the point.

Wanting the best school for your kid doesn't make you a hypocrite

Nikole Hannah-Jones' controversial essay asks if you can fight for a better world while accepting the one you have

salon.com

@alexwgalbraith.bsky.social Private equity is a cancer on our economic system. It needs to be stopped. Any time I read about a well-known company going downhill , I always check to see if they were bought by private equity, & the majority of times they have been. www.salon.com/2026/09/25/t...

The private equity backlash could start at the drive-thru

The places Americans once loved for being cheap are a lesson in what buyouts do

salon.com

Ed Sheeran deserves all the hate he's getting right now. I'll add more to it when my story goes live later today. But I won't stand for saying he's a bad artist. You all just have no respect for schmaltz. He's great at exceedingly tender and overwhelmingly corny music. It's not easy to make!

I CANNOT AGREE STRONGLY ENOUGH IT DRIVES ME ABSOLUTELY OUT OF MY MIND THAT PEOPLE LEFT-OF-CENTER CITE THIS MOVIE SO CASUALLY BUT IT IS A TIME-SAVER TO HAVE SHORTHAND FOR “OH I SEE I AGREE WITH YOU BUT HATE YOUR GUTS”.

Amanda Marcotte@amandamarcotte.bsky.social · last mo.

My colleague @alexwgalbraith.bsky.social is getting grief for this piece, but he's right. I hate to say, but Mike Judge may have got right wing-curious around this time. He was buddies with Alex Jones. I think he's come back around, but the movie is reactionary. www.salon.com/2026/09/06/i...

My colleague @alexwgalbraith.bsky.social is getting grief for this piece, but he's right. I hate to say, but Mike Judge may have got right wing-curious around this time. He was buddies with Alex Jones. I think he's come back around, but the movie is reactionary. www.salon.com/2026/09/06/i...

"Idiocracy" is still a worthless artifact 20 years later

The film's smirking, know-it-all pose was tired when it released. It’s useless now

salon.com

"Idiocracy" turned 20 this month, and like a lot of mean-spirited mid-'00s culture, it's not worth remembering. A rewatch does Mike Judge's nastiest film no favors.

Seeing George Santos' name back in the news, I can't help but feel like my commentary from this weekend holds. Nobody fades away in an era where sustaining attention has never been easier. For @salon.com:

Why don't celebrities go away anymore?

From Donald Trump to Taylor Swift, the same names still run culture and politics

salon.com

Dolly Parton was one-of-one in music history. You've read about that by now, if you didn't know it already. But Parton's apolitical politics also can't be replicated www.salon.com/2026/08/27/d...

Dolly Parton blazed a path that modern country stars can’t follow

Parton's outwardly apolitical, quietly radical balancing act can't be repeated in the social media age

salon.com

BrooklynVegan hadn't had its rowdy comments section for a decade, but its demise got me thinking about websites where people used to gather. We're losing the last of the spots that people swung by everyday to take the temperature of their fellow online enthusiasts.

The internet is losing its third places

Does anyone know where to hang out online anymore?

salon.com

James Carville is going to spend the months leading up to the mid-terms left-punching in his old, familiar way. We don't have to listen to him.

Time for James Carville to sit down and shut up

The strategist and other Third Way advocates think they have the answers for Trump. But they got us into this mess

salon.com

The trans panic in professional sports is so imaginary that conservatives had to create their own threats to the integrity of women's competition. Despite what Sophie Cunningham might think, the biggest threat to her league is people like Enes Kanter Freedom.

Conservatives find their fighter in Sophie Cunningham

The anti-trans movement in sports needed a face. It found one in the WNBA player

salon.com

Gillian Welch's "Time (The Revelator)" just turned 25. The standout track "Everything Is Free" worried about a world in which people expect to be entertained for nothing. We've lived in that world for decades. It's worse than she thought.

Gillian Welch's “Everything Is Free” warned us all along

Her 2001 song on piracy predicted who'd get rich — and who'd be left behind

salon.com

If the last few days have proved anything, it's that politicians need to hang it up much sooner. Lindsey Graham's death may have been sudden, but it can hardly be called a surprise when a septuagenarian dies. For Crash Course from @salon.com, I wrote about our congressional age crisis.

McConnell health truthers are missing the point

It’s not the cover-up, it’s the crime.

salon-crashcourse.beehiiv.com

Maybe it was the looming promise of fireworks and day drinking, but Crash Course for @salon.com was uncharacteristically cheerful last week. Inadvertently, my daily essays kept circling the praiseworthy bits of MAGA media and Trumpworld.

I need all progressives fretting over Donald Trump intervening on behalf of the USMNT to consider "it's cool when my guys do it" thought. It's been the Republican worldview for at least a decade. Free yourself.

Why couldn't Elon Musk have put his abilities toward something useful, like German Suplexes and Tables, Ladders and Chairs matches?

The most electrifying trillionaire in sports entertainment

If Silicon Valley is going to ask us to believe in an obvious fiction, could they at least make it fun?

salon-crashcourse.beehiiv.com

I was the first person in my family (on either side) to graduate college, but no amount of book learning can fully bleach the North Florida from my bones. That’s my excuse, in any case, for dedicating part of my politics newsletter to the joys of Limp Bizkit’s “Break Stuff.”

It's fun to watch a D-tier talent like JD Vance get clowned on the world stage, but even a skilled negotiator would have trouble getting a win out of the Iran negotiations. salon-crashcourse.beehiiv.com/p/this-is-wh...

This is what losing looks like

The United States should probably get used to bad deals.

salon-crashcourse.beehiiv.com

"We’d count ourselves lucky if most of Trump’s screwups could be remedied with a bit of bleach," writes @alexwgalbraith.bsky.social in Crash Course, @salon.com's free morning newsletter (not a Substack!) that you can and should sign up for here: salon-crashcourse.beehiiv.com/p/trump-s-pe...

Trump’s peroxide presidency

The president has spent much of his second term cleaning up his own messes.

salon-crashcourse.beehiiv.com

In which I open Crash Course to read about the Iran ceasefire and learn @alexwgalbraith.bsky.social is a crafter. "I took trash and turned it into something I could use." salon-crashcourse.beehiiv.com/p/iran-cease...

Iran ceasefire is worth doing poorly

Trump’s deal will likely be worse than what was in place before. That doesn’t matter.

salon-crashcourse.beehiiv.com

This idea that AI is here forever and we have to come to grips with it drives me insane. Generative AI needs an incomprehensible amount of resources to work and produces nothing but garbage. Cut the money off and watch it die!

Richard Grusin@rgrusin.bsky.social · 4mo ago

Marty! Say it ain't so. www.nytimes.com/2026/06/02/b...

@hamiltonnolan.bsky.social is spot on here. As a fellow Florida ex-pat, it's genuinely heartbreaking to see what eight years of GOP dominance can do to a state.

They Want to Get Rid of Your Property Taxes Because They Think You Are Morons

The Republican plan to defund everything.

hamiltonnolan.com

The chorus to this song feels like it takes 700 years to get through. What an unlikely hit and an awful slog

Tame Impala, JENNIE - Dracula (JENNIE Remix - Official Lyric Video)

YouTube video by tameimpalaVEVO

youtube.com

I love Wemby so much.

I’m gonna lose it when the NBA Finals goes to break over a montage of Wemby dunks and blocks set to this classic youtu.be/VAI1aMEurSM?...

(Hey Baby) Que Paso

YouTube video by Texas Tornados - Topic

youtu.be

Huh, must have been the wind

Spent yesterday thinking about the Enhanced Games and how our bar for what constitutes a scandal have been immeasurably lifted by the constant outrages of the Trump years. For my @salon.com newsletter, Crash Course, I framed our new inability to get upset through the career of Barry Bonds.

A lot of people have already commented on this ruling out of Delaware, allowing corporations to vote in some elections there, and it is pretty troubling. I, however, have a completely different point I'd like to discuss below, and yesm it is about Star Wars 🧵

I spent yesterday on here gathering together all my previous thoughts on AI and dignity. [Big Freedia voice] You already know [/BFV] I was working on something about the pope's first encyclical. Check it out below. If you like it, sign up for my @salon.com newsletter!

Pope Leo is hard on AI, soft on Gandalf

The church leader quoted “Lord of the Rings” in a letter calling for the “disarming” of AI.

salon-crashcourse.beehiiv.com