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Today:
How Kristi Noem Lost Her Job
NEWS | 06 March 2026
“It was not a pleasant job,” she recounts, “but it had to be done.”After Noem’s latest public-relations fiasco, a shambolic session before Congress this week, President Trump found himself facing a similarly difficult choice. As homeland-security secretary, Noem personally generated more scandals over the past year than a normal presidency would muster in four. One contract went to a firm that has ties to Noem, and the company’s CEO is married to Noem’s former spokesperson. Her statement reportedly annoyed the president so deeply that he contradicted it in public and began calling Republicans to discuss firing Noem. There is no better choice than Noem for the distinction of being the first Cabinet member to be removed from this administration.

Top Stories:
The McDonald’s CEO’s Big Burger-Eating Mistake
NEWS | 06 March 2026
The burger was the Big Arch, the company’s newest offering. The Big Arch video was discomfiting because it broke the rules of the internet-based marketing economy that Kempczinski belongs to (whether he wants to or not). His most recent Instagram post before the disastrous Big Arch reel featured him in a long-sleeve polo shirt sharing tips for traveling internationally. But Kempczinski exists in a decidedly new-school marketing environment, one where CEOs are celebrities and celebrities are CEOs. It’s also why, presumably, Kempczinski filmed the Big Arch video in the first place.

World:
A Technology for a Low-Trust Society
NEWS | 06 March 2026
(The bet paid out $400,000 and led Representative Ritchie Torres to introduce a bill that would ban federal workers from using prediction markets.) In this way, prediction markets are the perfect technology for a low-trust society, simultaneously exploiting and reifying an environment in which believing the motives behind any person or action becomes harder. Read: Your phone is a slot machine“We share the concerns about war markets, death markets, and insider trading. A zero-trust society is one where the prediction markets’ dubious “wisdom of crowds” marketing seems extra appealing. The prediction markets have done what any savvy trader or firm might—they’ve hedged their bets.

Current Events:
Why Dinner Never Gets Easier
NEWS | 06 March 2026
Of the many problems modern life has promised to solve, dinner remains a stubborn nuisance. “The machine age has come upon us, transforming the home no less surely than the factory,” Keller wrote. Dinner, in theory, should have been easier than ever. No matter how many meal kits and fast dinner solutions were being peddled to consumers, the structure of American life had shifted in ways that made a traditional dinner routine harder to sustain. It is this: dinner dinner dinner dinner,” Rachel Sugar wrote last January.

News Flash:
U.S. Capabilities Are Showing Signs of Rot
NEWS | 06 March 2026
On multiple occasions after President Trump launched a massive air campaign against Iran this past weekend, retaliatory attacks by simply constructed Iranian drones have penetrated American defenses with serious results. Brynn Tannehill: The dangerous mismatch between American missiles and Iranian dronesWhen a complex system starts to decay, the first signs are usually subtle. In the third century, after the Roman empire had reached its geographic maximum, literacy began to decline across Roman society. The capabilities of the U.S. military are still far superior to Iran’s. Americans and Europeans might still refer to each other as “allies,” but the signs of rot are obvious.

Sponsored:
SmartSync Data Sync App
SPONSORED | 06 March 2026
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Latest:
The Trump Administration Is Trying to Have Its Vaccine Policy Both Ways
NEWS | 06 March 2026
Shared decision making would be the preferred approach for these immunizations as well. The difficulty is that in medicine, shared decision making is not simply a synonym for allowing a patient to ask questions and decide for themselves. Shared decision making, in contrast, is a somewhat nebulous term reserved for clinical borderlands: scenarios in which the trade-offs are nuanced or the best course of action is unclear. Perhaps the most notable example of shared decision making in my area of medical practice is prostate-cancer screening. Shrouding established immunizations in the confusion of shared decision making does not add nuance; it introduces only ambiguity.

Breaking:
‘The Most Dangerous Man in the World’
NEWS | 06 March 2026
Iran still has not formally announced the identity of its new supreme leader. So far, the name that has been mentioned most often is that of Mojtaba Khamenei, the 56-year-old son of Ali Khamenei, who was assassinated in a joint U.S.-Israeli operation on Saturday after ruling Iran since 1989. Last month, before the outbreak of war, one acquaintance of Mojtaba’s told me that he was “the most dangerous man in the world” and considerably more violent and ideological than his father. Quinta Jurecic: Trump’s unauthorized warOther candidates for the job of supreme leader include the interim supreme leader, Ayatollah Alireza Arafi. Whether the current war will change Iran’s regime is still unclear.

Trending:
A Western That Goes Where Cormac McCarthy Wouldn’t
NEWS | 06 March 2026
Read: A new history of the Western hemisphereThe resulting novel about this vanished country, Apachería, is slightly unclassifiable; I’d start by describing it as a darkly comic, revisionist Western for the age of autofiction. Just as compelling are the ways that he freshly revises the Western, a genre that’s already been well turned over. Now I Surrender is set in roughly the same time and place as Cormac McCarthy’s 1985 novel, Blood Meridian. Blood Meridian throws out the Western trope of good versus evil in favor of a nihilist view of a world consumed by violence. Read: The death of the pioneer mythThe author gives his version of the Western a distinctly Mexican cast.

This Just In:
Trump’s Unauthorized War
NEWS | 06 March 2026
A president does not have the constitutional authority to send the country to war on his own. Adam Serwer: The American king goes to warYet during the days after Trump’s initial air strikes, Congress has been largely absent. That same year, in response to the catastrophe of the Vietnam War and revelations about Richard Nixon’s secret bombing of Cambodia, Congress passed the War Powers Resolution. When Congress passed the War Powers Resolution, it established a means by which the legislature could instruct the president to halt war-making. Reserving for Congress the authority to declare war does not mean that Congress will always use its power wisely.

Today:
Don’t Call It ‘Intelligence’
NEWS | 06 March 2026
Those who are the most bullish on machine learning argue that artificial general intelligence, or AGI—artificial intelligence models that match or surpass human cognitive capabilities on any task—is imminent, just two or three years away. What I do want to do is ask a question: How can we create intelligence when we don’t fully understand—can’t even really define—what intelligence is? I don’t believe so. Maybe we have to let go of preconceptions and embrace the idea that machine intelligence can—and perhaps must—be radically different from human intelligence. A couple of outliers aside, even the most enthusiastic proponents of AGI don’t believe that the frontier AI models are capable of feeling.

Top Stories:
The Humiliation of J. D. Vance
NEWS | 06 March 2026
If J. D. Vance promised one thing during the 2024 presidential campaign, it was that America would not enter into a war with Iran of the kind that is currently raging. The vice president was not at Mar-a-Lago with Trump as he oversaw the attack. Yet Iran is just the latest example of a noticeable trend: Within the Trump administration, Vance’s opinions seem to matter less and less. But far from taking up such proposals, the Trump administration is instead priming the National Labor Relations Board for rollbacks of prior decisions. In some sense, Vance is suffering the typical fate of the vice president, who is forever on display but seldom listened to.

World:
A War Begun on Instinct
NEWS | 06 March 2026
President [Donald] Trump, after all, took the U.S. to war without Congress’s approval, barely notifying them. It sounds like you don’t necessarily think Israel had as great a role as people are saying today. So now we’re in this war, so I wanna talk more about the role Congress could play now: the vote on the War Powers Resolution. Would it be about the future of the war, how the war unfolds, or do you think of this as a symbolically important vote? That is not consistent American foreign policy that benefits the national security of Americans and makes us safer.

Current Events:
Things Are About to Get Ugly in Texas
NEWS | 06 March 2026
Democrats in last night’s Texas Senate primary decisively chose their fighter for November: James Talarico, a 36-year-old state lawmaker who looks—and sounds—like a youth pastor. It’s “open season,” Vinny Minchillo, a Republican consultant in Texas who is not affiliated with either candidate, told me. It is Talarico’s job now to earn their votes; he’ll have to if he wants to win statewide in Texas. A pro-Cornyn ad refers to Paxton as a “wife-cheater and fraud.” “Judgment Day is coming to Ken Paxton,” Cornyn said menacingly during a press conference last night. In Texas, Democrats and Republicans are weighing the same uncertainties ahead of the November election.

News Flash:
Trump Has Lost the Plot in Iran
NEWS | 06 March 2026
Like many of his predecessors over the past five decades, Donald Trump risks having his presidency hijacked by Iran. Trump may have envisioned a second term spent striking deals to resolve wars, but Iran has now sucked him in, too. Now the United States is approaching a quagmire as news reports suggest that the CIA is arming Kurdish groups inside Iran. Read: The real reason Trump went to warThe post-Khamenei landscape in Iran lacks any such singular, empowered interlocutor. Given the pace of Israeli political assassinations inside Iran, the architecture of power in the Islamic Republic is constantly changing.