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Today:
The Wisdom of Uncertainty
NEWS | 20 September 2026
How comfortable are you with saying, “I don’t know”? We accumulate knowledge until, we hope, the uncertainty disappears. But what if uncertainty never fully goes away? Today’s newsletter explores the value of leaving room for uncertainty. You don’t know yourself as well as you think you do .

Top Stories:
College Sports Are Great
NEWS | 20 September 2026
Our college athletes are hardly dumb jocks. These facts are enough to make one wonder what the college half of college sports even means. Ian Bogost: College is coming apartAs a faculty member, I’m fine with most of this, but with many reservations. He was in his mid-to-late 20s and didn’t pay tuition, and the university paid for his spring breaks in Havana. The value of big-time college sports is real—for players, for fans, for professors—although you do have to work harder than ever to see it.

World:
Trump Is Betting on the Wrong Europe
NEWS | 20 September 2026
Donald Trump says he wants a Europe that is more capable of defending itself. But the nationalist-populist movements he is championing there will not advance this agenda and may put Europe at odds with the United States over China. Such a withdrawal would hardly help the Trump administration shift the burden of NATO’s defense to Europe. Or maybe Trump doesn’t care about Europe’s defense, doesn’t see it as a U.S. interest, and doesn’t believe that Europe has any contribution to make to America’s security. Trump and Vance seem to be laying the foundation for a more divided Europe that is incapable of deterring Russia, ever more dependent on China, and at odds with itself.

Current Events:
The Data-Center Debate Is Divorced From the Facts
NEWS | 20 September 2026
As the build-out of AI data centers has accelerated, the public has tended to focus on every possible downside of these industrial projects. Perhaps the most pernicious misunderstanding of the facts involves the claim that data centers don’t pay taxes. Then there are the conspiracy theories, such as the idea that data centers emit harmful, inaudible low-frequency sounds, known as infrasounds. No data center is a harmless boon for locals, but the real question is whether their downsides outweigh their benefits. In Loudon, and in other jurisdictions around the country, many voters seem, on balance, to prefer the data centers.

News Flash:
The Greenland Fiasco Stumbles to an End
NEWS | 20 September 2026
It was obvious that he was talking about President Trump, who has long coveted Greenland, a semiautonomous territory of Denmark. Trump has claimed that the United States needs the island for national security, at times declining to rule out using force to acquire it. It builds on a Cold War agreement between the U.S. and Denmark and includes no transfer of territory to the United States. The United States once stationed thousands of soldiers across multiple bases and radar sites, but it shrank its presence in the decades after the Cold War. “This deal permanently and completely addresses our national security concerns in Greenland,” he said in a statement.

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Remote Monitoring App
SPONSORED | 20 September 2026
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Latest:
Can the Never-Trump Coalition Last?
NEWS | 20 September 2026
(Rove didn’t couch his remarks as a commentary on Trump, but the president correctly understood it as pushback on Trumpism, and attacked Rove.) Others, however, have remained firm—those now known as “never-Trumpers.” Five years ago, my colleague David Frum quoted a common dismissal: “Never Trump is not a political party. Kristol now sometimes takes positions bolder than and to the left of Democratic Party leaders’, and has embraced “Woke Bill Kristol” memes. The prominence of avowedly left-wing candidates also puts pressure on the coalition. (Consider Democratic Party leaders’ struggles to maintain unity.)

Breaking:
Researchers Say They’ve Found the Truth About Thomas Jefferson
NEWS | 20 September 2026
Her African American father told his freckled daughter at an early age that she was a direct descendant of Jefferson through Madison Hemings. Since Thomas Jefferson was the greatest gentleman of his period, he could not have done so either. Monticello’s storage areas yielded several samples of Jefferson’s hair encased in gold lockets, glass ampules, and the packet assembled by Nicholas Trist. The group has long refused to allow Hemings’s descendants to join the association, much less be buried alongside their white relations. “They are invested in this idea of Thomas Jefferson on a pedestal,” Arthur Westerinen said.

Trending:
What the Kennedy Center’s Tax Return Reveals
NEWS | 20 September 2026
For 19 months, Donald Trump has portrayed himself as the Kennedy Center’s savior. (The Kennedy Center and the White House did not immediately respond to questions about the return.) But much of that apparent improvement came from a one-off appropriation rather than the Kennedy Center’s own programming or fundraising efforts. Yesterday, the same federal judge issued another order barring the Kennedy Center’s demolition. It was signed by the Kennedy Center’s chief financial officer, Donna Arduin Kauranen, one of the officials brought in after the transition.

This Just In:
The Rise of Parasite Authors
NEWS | 20 September 2026
One writer reported someone sneaking in a fake edition under the listing of their real book. The identity of the individuals behind these books is a mystery to real authors, and often difficult to track down. (Blakely is a pen name; I agreed to withhold the author's real name to protect her privacy.) “There’s really no other viable option.”Other platforms claim to be taking a proactive approach to tackling their own versions of parasite authors. Keeping an eye on this flood takes up valuable time and effort that authors could have otherwise put toward writing real books.

Today:
The Goal of Contemporary Journalism
NEWS | 20 September 2026
Here’s what you said: “The goal of any quality journalism operation these days is to put as much truth into the universe as possible.” Say more about that, please. I look at it as the advice I got from my very first boss in journalism. And so I think that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Or are they actually in the conversation as well about the importance of a free press and the state of journalism? Nawaz: Can I just say, I’m speaking only on behalf of PBS: Yeah, I think we are.

Top Stories:
Lina Khan on Doomer Panic and Ending AI Exceptionalism
NEWS | 20 September 2026
And so you had the House Progressive Caucus and the House Freedom Caucus, you know, actually working closely on some of this. I mean, there’s a long history here of how regulators do and don’t get captured. I think as we, you know, think about What should we do here? What are companies actually saying that they’re going to be getting in return for their investments? There is a huge information asymmetry between what people working in these companies know and what we, as outsiders or regulators or enforcers, know.

World:
The Books You Should Read About the Bomb
NEWS | 20 September 2026
This is an edition of the Books Briefing, our editors’ weekly guide to the best in books. I happened to be in the city when the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, and I found myself swept up in the procession that honors the prize’s winner every year. Else doesn’t think that ICAN or similar groups hold the answer; he writes that getting rid of nuclear weapons altogether isn’t realistic. In building his argument, Stern references several other books in the rich literature on nuclear development. Why the Bomb Is Bad for DemocracyBy Scott W. SternA famous documentarian’s new book suggests that secrecy is a major impediment to sensible nuclear policy.

Current Events:
The Other Way AI Impairs Our Thinking
NEWS | 20 September 2026
But suddenly, AI has started sapping people’s concentration in a new way, one that feels much harder to combat. In the past week, consulting virtually any major news source—not to mention social media—has meant confronting the prospect of an AI apocalypse. Using AI has already diminished many people’s capacity to focus, work, and think; worrying about AI is making the problem worse. “Jacob is correct here—we really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans!”Anthropic’s Evan Hubinger wrote on X. A week later, 1,386 employees at major AI companies published an open letter pleading with the government to regulate their industry.

News Flash:
City Rats Are Going on Birth Control
NEWS | 20 September 2026
Washington, D.C., has reached that level, and Mayor Muriel Bowser’s answer involves rat birth control. It is not the only city to try the approach: Chicago is having luck with rat birth control in Wicker Park; Boston had mixed results in Jamaica Plain. First, the city is going to try to kill rats by heaving poison directly down their burrows, which will then be filled in. If burrow numbers are down by the new year, no one can say that birth control works—only that the combination of two poisons, ContraPest, hygiene, and other measures works. The quest to control rats is not about winning.