#23: An Abundance of Policy Failures
Also this week in culture/progressive politics/media: Supreme Court decisions, Fall Out Boy's new house, NYT's The Most Stylish People of 2025, and The Ultimatum: Queer Love.
A recent piece by Asad Ramzanali and Benjamin Dinovelli for The Atlantic argues that the abundance agenda argument that bureaucratic red tape is the reason America can’t build is misunderstanding the real problem: The government has lost the will to build infrastructure itself.
A century ago, when America faced the issue of rural electrification — an issue of course clearly mirrored by the modern-day need for rural broadband access — New Dealers organized communities to build their own government-funded electricity-distribution systems; created public options (most famously the Tennessee Valley Authority); and classified private-sector electricity providers as public utilities, both subject to price regulation and required to expand services to cover their existing and adjacent service areas.
Why can’t we do this now? Because in the 2000s, internet service providers lobbied lawmakers to restrict public broadband options. Today, sixteen different states restrict public broadband options. Likewise, the FCC never used its legal authority to require ISPs to expand service in adjacent service areas or at affordable prices; a conservative court has now closed off this option.
So basically, we’ve lost the same powers that made the New Deal so effective. I’m not entirely sure what to do to fix this, but this is an issue I was only half-aware of, and I want to make sure others are too.
Cricket is off this week; any mistakes are my own!
While I endorse supporting as much journalism as you’re able to, if you’re unable to read a specific link, try using 12ft.io.
The Most Stylish People of 2025, So Far: The New York Times listed 33 people/characters/things that have defined style in 2025. Highlights include Doechii, Smoke and Stack from Sinners, Victoria Ratliff in ‘The White Lotus’, Gabby Windey, and Kendrick Lamar in those bell bottoms. I cannot agree with the inclusion of nepo baby Romy Mars or the sexy spacesuits (really).
The Diddy Trial: Sean Combs was acquitted of sex trafficking and racketeering charges. Music critic Jon Caramanica wrote for the Times that Combs may have largely escaped the consequences that have only occasionally manifested in the #MeToo era:
Had he been convicted across the board, he likely would have faced a full reputational shattering like Harvey Weinstein, once the most powerful man in film, who has been imprisoned on federal sex crimes since 2020. Or R. Kelly, once R&B’s most formidable and popular star, who has been in prison since 2022 on sex-trafficking and racketeering charges. Combs would have been a villain who once was famous, not the other way around. Instead, it’s possible that these charges and this trial might end up being viewed as a blemish on his résumé, another tragedy that registered only as a speed bump.
The Ultimatum, Queer Love: Oh god, this absolutely abhorrent show, how I’ve missed you. Maddy Court wrote a recap of the first two episodes for those who missed them; the Netflix descriptions of the couples are also worth your time.
My group watch originally thought that:
AJ and Britney came on here at least in part for internet clout while already planning to get engaged, though AJ is having a bit too much fun with the dating part;
Mel and Marie came on here for their food truck business at Mel’s suggestion, but Mel is taking it more seriously than she framed it to Marie and we do not love her vibes;
We love Pilar and feel bad for her, though we also like Haley; couples counseling could be the answer to this, but regardless we hope they both get a happy ending;
Dayna is evil for giving an ultimatum after a year and a half to someone who’s worried about losing their parents because of that marriage, and Magan, who we generally like, needs to get out of there;
Marita is just not that into Ashley, but after a bit further into the show, we’re not sure we can blame her;
And we generally like Kyle and Bridget as a couple, though we did all briefly consider them simply having a threesome with Pilar.
What Makes a Person Cool?: A new study published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology finds that cool people have six universal traits: extroverted, hedonistic, powerful, adventurous, open and autonomous. Personally, I think I’m doing very well on extroverted, powerful, open, and autonomous, and will clearly need to put more work into being openly hedonistic and adventurous.
Childcare, Again: According to 19th Newsroom, in 41 states, the average cost of child care for a baby now exceeds in-state college tuition — surging to over $13,000 annually on average. Voters are very much united on wanting to fix this affordability issue. 72% of Republicans, 70% of Independents, and 90% of Democrats say increasing federal funding for child care is an important priority and a good use of tax dollars.
What Has Gen Z Killed This Time?: Summer jobs for teenagers. This is actually genuinely sad and not Gen Z or Gen Alpha’s fault; the unemploymwent rate for teenagers has been rising for years, as companies that traditionally hire summer workers are holding off due to economic uncertainty.
Love Island and the Girl’s Girl: Sarah of People’s Princess wrote an excellent post about the girl’s girl concept as a tool used to hobble other women. I wrote recently about the not like other girls, and I think this is another great example of that similar phenomenon: You believe in girls supporting girls, and you're demonstrating that by insulting girls? Something is not clicking.
AI Watch and Longform of the Week: An interesting piece about AI girlfriends and boyfriends from Sam Apple for Wired.
ProPublica Investigates: The weird world of child abuse pediatrics, where child abuse pediatricians (CAPs) often diagnose infants with so-called shaken baby syndrome — head bleeds or bone snaps in babies and toddlers, which can be caused by genetic issues, blood clotting disorders, or (in premature infants) developmental issues — and thus have infants taken away from their parents on the recommendations of single investigators.
While of course abuse allegations should be taken seriously, the consequences of ignoring potential other medical explanations seem huge; one family discussed in the article says their child still refuses to sleep away from his parents due to the trauma of removal, and parents have been put away for murder due to CAP diagnoses. And CAPs seem as if they may be unwilling to question their own diagnoses: One child who developed strange bruises under the care of their parents and two subsequent sets of foster parents took six months to be returned to his own parents, even when his mother produced medical records showing she’d also developed unexplained bruising as a child. The below quote broke my heart:
“Why, after they didn’t find any physical abuse, did the hospital not keep doing exams to see if there was something medically wrong with him?” Guzmán asked. “They robbed us of our child without any real explanation.”
This Week at The Cut: Hannah Pitard wrote for The Cut that erectile dysfunction perscriptions aren’t always what they’re cracked up to be — in relationships where communication is lacking (as it often is around sex!), the pill can end up creating extra pressure for women.
The Big, Beautiful Bill: The Big, Beautiful Bill, which extends $3.8 trillion in tax cuts (primarily to the wealthy), makes $1.1 trillion in cuts to Medicaid and other healthcare programs, and raises funding for border security and the military, passed the Senate and House.
Despite some last-minute improvements, the BBB is still the largest cut to Medicaid thus far; benefits will be harder due to purposefully added paperwork, and the CBO estimates that with its passage, twelve million Americans will lose health insurance by 2034. State Representatives Bryce Edgmon and Cathy Giessel of Alaska wrote that nearly 40,000 Alaskans could lose health care coverage. That’s not all: Thousands of families may lose their SNAP benefits, and a village in rural Alaska might lose its one and only grocery store. I think centrist/both-sided publication The Tangle actually put this very well:
I recognize what this bill is doing in practice: kicking low-income people off their health insurance to save money that gets spent on tax cuts, immigration enforcement and the military.
The bill’s switch away from subsidizing clean energy and towards subsidizing the coal industry is beyond insane even from a climate denial standpoint — as per The Tangle, annual coal-miner deaths from cancer are larger than all the deaths from nuclear radiation exposure ever. The bill does also raise the funding for immigration courts, which, in a better administration, could be excellent news for asylum seekers; our court system’s backlog means recipients eligible for asylum are likely to be shut down very quickly.
About Last Week: Several extremely notable supreme court decisions came down last week. (Highlights of this season are summarized by the New York Times; you can find all of the court’s opinions on their website.)
In Trump v. Casa Inc, the nationwide injuction case, the court sided 6-3 with the Trump administration in limiting a judge’s ability to issue nationwide injuctions. While this specific legal detail is one reasonable legal scholars have disagreed on, the result is a win for conservatives: The Trump admin will now proceed with plans to end birthright citizenship. Though as Politico reporter Kyle Cheney points out, due to some of the many complicated legal nuances, it’s possible nothing has actually changed.
In Medina v. Planned Parenthood, the court sided 6-3 to uphold South Carolina’s restriction on Medicaid recipients’ ability to choose their own doctor. This contradicts a federal statute that explicitly guarantees Medicaid recipients a right to choose from among eligible providers, which includes Planned Parenthood.
The ruling also creates a potentially alarming precedent, as argued by Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s dissent: The court’s new reinterpretation of the Civil Rights Act of 1871, which narrows citizen’s ability to sue the state for civil rights violations; lawsuit are only permitted if there exists clear “rights-creating language” in the original statute. And what does that mean? Who knows.
In Kennedy v. Braidwood Management, Inc., the court united 6-3, with Roberts, Kavanaugh, and Barrett joining the liberal bloc, to reject a challenge to the Affordable Care Act and uphold preventative care protections.
In Mahmoud v. Taylor, the court ruled 6-3 that public schools in Maryland must allow parents to withdraw their children from classes where books with gay and transgender fictional characters are discussed.
In Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton, the court ruled 6-3 that Texas can continue to enforce a law requiring age verification to access pornography. I think this ruling will fly under the radar, but while 80% of the public actually believes states should be able to require age verification, I have pretty serious concerns about this ruling.
In FCC v. Consumer’s Research, the court upheld the constitutionality of a multibillion-dollar fund used to expand telephone and broadband services. This is a huge win for broadband access in the US; as a new employee of a broadband advocacy organization I’m very excited by this one.
For the last three cases decided last week: In Gutierrez v. Saenz, the court allowed a challenge to the constitutionality of a state rule disallowing a death row inmate from getting potentially excalpatory DNA testing. Hewitt v. United States and Riley v. Bondi were the last two cases.
International News You Missed: Rwanda and the DRC, at long last, have signed a peace treaty over Rwanda’s historical sponsorship of the M23 gang’s repeated incursions into the DRC. In Togo, thousands of citizens are protesting against the regime, which has ruled for 58 years; President Faure Gnassingbé and his administration are cracking down. And Graeme Wood wrote for The Atlantic about the complicated racial politics and violence issues in South Africa.
International Aid: The cancellation of foreign aid is impacting the planned rollout of a breakthrough drug, Lenacapavir, a twice-yearly injection that offers total protection from HIV. A rapid rollout of this drug was widely seen as the best chances the world has had yet to eliminate HIV and AIDS. The United States will also stop funding the international vaccine agency Gavi, which buys vaccines for children in poor countries.
It’s the Economy, Stupid: The S&P 500 has rebounded back to a record high after February’s deep deep dip.
Environment: The administration is removing protections for 58 million acres of national forests, allowing road building and development to increase logging. Meanwhile, the Trump administration is ending its crackdown on forever chemicals. No, that’s cool, man, I guess I’ll just get sick forever.
Medical: Late last week, vaccine advisers appointed by Health Secretary RFK Jr. voted to stop recommending flu vaccines containing thimerosal, a harmless mercury-based preservative, to children and pregnant women.
Journalism in Decline: CBS owner Paramount has formally agreed to settle for $16 million with Donald Trump’s presidential library over CBS’s minor cuts to an interview with Kamala Harris.
The Continued Fallout of the Mamdani Win: Mamdani officially won the NYC mayoral primary this week by twelve points. The centrist Democrats have started panicking, but to be honest, I don’t quite understand why. While I of course think this is a victory for progressives, I don’t think a victory for progressives needs to be framed so directly as a loss for moderate Dems. A populist economic campaign won; the centrist Dems have been saying for a few years we need to focus on economic issues, and Mamdani did so. And notably, Mamdani was up against a horrifically unappealing candidate. I really keep thinking about this paragraph from Politico a week ago:
Of course, one other lesson centrist Dems might like to take away is that choosing dismally flawed establishment candidates to run against outsider populist opponents — whether on the left or the right — really isn’t working out too well for them. (If they need another reminder, the anniversary of that CNN debate is this coming weekend.)
How To Spread the Word: Tricia Romano wrote for Rolling Stone about the TikTok account of Aaron Parnas, who uses his platform to summarize news stories in an accessible and down-to-earth manner — but from a progressive point of view. Romano refers to him not as a young progressive’s Joe Rogan, but as their Walter Cronkite.
I Wonder Why That Is: As per Gallup polling, only 58% of Americans are now very or extremely proud to be an American, which is apparently an all-time low.
Political Gossip of the Week: A horrifying piece about Brent Efron’s experience with Project Veritas. Dog shooter Kristi Noem has been secretly taking cuts of her own political donations. And I regret to be the one to inform you of this, but Politico: Playbook did in fact refer to Donald Trump as ‘daddy’ this week. If I had to see this, so do you.
My current media update is that I am in the middle of V.E. Schwab’s Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil, and yes I am loving it. I promise to post a review if I read enough books this month to justify posting a book wrapup. Please someone help me manifest this.
Music News: The drummer for Fall Out Boy and his wife, a vocalist for the Millionaires, has a really cool house.
Movie News: Aaron Sorkin is working on a part two to The Social Network (2010), which made it onto last week’s 100 Best Movies of 2000 On So Far.
Where Are We Writing Now?: Vulture wrote about the new power of Substack in our cultural discourse.
AI Wars: A group of high-profile authors, including Kai Bird and Jia Tolentino, filed a lawsuit against Microsoft over its piracy of 200,000 pirated books to create its Megatron AI without payment towards any authors. A few days ago, a California federal judge ruled that LLM Anthropic made fair use of authors’ material to train AI systems, but may still be legally liable for its illegal piracy of seven million books. Yikes.
Art of the Week: A wonderful interactive piece from the New York Times about viewing Cezanne.
SciFi Fantasy News: The British Fantasy Awards announced their finalists. Meanwhile, the Arthur C. Clarke award announced its 2025 winner as Sierra Greer’s Annie Bot.
Fun New Releases in SciFi Fantasy:
The Bewitching by Silvia Moreno-Garcia, horror/historical fiction
Infinite Archive by Mur Lafferty, scifi/murder mystery [part of a series of novels all set in the same world]
Book Culture: The Guardian wrote about the rise in annotation as a trend. Personally, I love annotating a book for a friend. Elle wrote for her Substack Breakfast for Dinner about why it’s easiest to give up reading. Also, Natasha Joukovsky wrote for her Substack Quite Useless about the linguistic and model analogies between literary authors and corporations.
Fun Publisher’s Weekly Finds: Recently, I’ve been going through the daily Publisher’s Weekly bulletin and finding book blurbs that look interesting. My highlights:
Audrey Goldberg Ruoff’s Vengefully Matched, a sapphic rivals-to-lovers romance about two witches fake dating to uncover who’s sabotaging one’s witchery council initiatives and framing the other in the process, set to be published fall 2026;
Araminta Hall’s Unreliable Narrator, a thriller about a former apprentice to an up-and-coming writer coming to terms with what happened that summer in order to get her revenge; and
Our Wives Under the Sea author Julia Armfield’s Up To the Light, following two climbers in the aftermath of an Italian Alps expedition gone wrong — as they consider whether something more sinister than bad weather may have caused the tragedy.
Horizon: Scientists at the Vera C. Rubin observatory are discovering new space objects, including small bodies found between the orbits of Jupiter and Neptune known as Centaurs and the Kuiper belt of icy debris beyond Neptune. Scientists are also potentially looking for Planet Nine, a hypothesized large gravitational mass that would explain the elliptical orbits of several objects beyond the Kuiper belt.
Also, we (probably) have a new comet! 3I/ATLAS is the third known object scientists have detected to have come from outside our solar system. She will pass 160 million miles away from Earth in December, but that’s the closest she’ll get; no danger here. A friend.
New Knowledge for You: I spent a long time a few weeks ago on Wikipedia’s List of Common Misconceptions, and have been staggering my favorite fun facts ever since. Here are five facts I learned on the page that I wanted to share:
Bats are not blind. While about 70% of bat species, mainly in the microbat family, use echolocation to navigate, all bat species have eyes and are capable of sight.
Despite their cultural depictions as "swimming dinosaurs", mosasaurs, ichthyosaurs, plesiosaurs, and other aquatic Mesozoic diapsids are lizards, not dinosaurs.
The Yellowstone Caldera is not overdue for a supervolcano eruption. There is also no evidence that it will erupt in the near future.
Reading in dim light causes eye strain rather than permanent damage to the eye.
Water-induced wrinkles are not caused by the skin absorbing water and swelling. They are caused by the autonomic nervous system, which triggers localized vasoconstriction in response to wet skin, yielding a wrinkled appearance.
WMATA Update: As of the end of last week, WMATA’s new bus system is in place. Washingtonian wrote up a great guide. So far, the bus routes are serving my area very well, though friends and I are of course noticing increased delays in the early days — and I’ve heard from some in less populated areas that their bus stops are being eliminated.