Linkage

My partner and I found a lovely city park with a picnic area and gazebo to eat breakfast in after camping on National Forest land nearby. After a mug of coffee, I visited the public restroom. I didn’t expect a stranger to yell at me through the flimsy stall door.

“Hello? Are you a male or female?”

I was the only person using the restroom — the kids who had been in there a minute ago had left. I felt this man’s eyes on my sneakers and blue hiking pants under the stall. I was scared this harassment could escalate if I didn’t say something to diffuse the situation. I gulped and called back, “Hello?”

“Oh, you’re a female. My bad.” He sounded reassured by my quavering voice. I heard his footsteps leaving the room. My heart raced as I fumbled with toilet paper, fingers shaking. I felt nauseated.

My voice had immediately identified me as the “female” I didn’t feel myself to be — and all it took was two syllables. But my “female” voice had also saved me from further harassment. Would that man have dragged me out of the stall if I sounded “like a man” or remained quiet? Would he have looked under the stall? Would he have tried to check what was between my legs while my pants were down? Did he have any idea how much of a violation these real and imagined threats were to me?

And why was a man even in the women’s room, questioning me? Did a kid’s mother report me to her husband for looking too much like a man in the women’s room? Perhaps they were alarmed that I, with my short hair, had been in the restroom with their young kids. I felt physically ill at the troubling thought that someone would assume I would do anything harmful to children. I hadn’t said anything, made eye contact with anyone or done anything other than sit quietly in the stall in the room that matches my assigned sex at birth.

I felt bad for looking masculine to make myself more comfortable, because I didn’t want to make anyone else uncomfortable. Some part of me longed to return to my habit of looking more like a woman, but I also felt sick from not feeling right in my body. 

I can empathize with these strangers viewing me and my body as a threat because I have also viewed my body as a threat. I have been unhappy with the shape of my body, my appearance in the mirror and the tone of my voice. And to have that thrown back in my face in such a vulnerable moment — pants down, defenseless, forced by my body’s very personal needs to be in this gendered room — hit close to home.

Twenty-five years ago, trans women (those transitioning from male to female) outnumbered trans men (transitioning from female to male) two to one. Today, those seeking hormonal treatment for gender dysphoria are trending younger and are primarily trans men.

Yet, Trump’s first executive order was titled “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government.” The text of the order repeatedly states its intent is to protect women from “men (who) self-identify as women and gain access to intimate single-sex spaces and activities designed for women … (which) attack women by depriving them of their dignity, safety and well-being.”

If the majority of those seeking treatment for gender dysphoria today are primarily trans men (females transitioning to males), then why do women’s spaces need protecting? Nowhere in the executive order or in any of the various state legislative efforts claiming to protect women has there been any concern expressed for protecting men’s spaces from the trans men who will be entering them.

That’s because the language around protecting women is really about asserting dominance over the bodies of individuals classified as female at birth — whether they are cisgender or transgender. It’s about keeping the female body pure, normalizing bodily oppression and perpetuating rape culture.

The language used is also rooted in racism.

There is a reason those who study the rise of Christian nationalism in America emphasize its connection with white supremacy. The language around protecting women from predatory men has an unsavory history in the United States. It isn’t that long ago that Black men in America were lynched regularly, and far too often the reason given was to protect some white woman’s body.

Each financial crisis — Savings & Loan in the 1980s, the subprime mortgage crisis in 2008 — led to even greater centralization of housing finance, as short-term fixes reinforced the dominance of national lenders and government-sponsored entities. The repeated cycle of risk, collapse and bailout has made housing a primary vehicle for financial speculation rather than a stable, accessible market for homebuyers.

Today, the product isn’t a home; it’s the promise to pay contained in the mortgage note. The buyer isn’t an individual or a family; it’s a financial institution acquiring that mortgage note and the decades of promised payments.

The innovations and efficiencies of scale we see in the housing market today are innovations in finance, not in home construction. These financial innovations have not been good for homebuyers or for affordability.

[…]

Ironically, the one-dimensional efficiency of financialization has created a massive gap in the real market for homes. Large financial institutions are eager to fund single-family homes in bulk or large apartment complexes that fit their investment models, but they have no interest in small-scale, entry-level housing. A so-called "efficient" housing finance system has, in reality, left little to no capital available for small, incremental projects — like converting single-family homes into duplexes, adding backyard cottages, or financing small starter homes. This is despite the overwhelming demand for entry-level housing.

On Friday, President Donald Trump signed an executive order drastically limiting public service workers’ ability to obtain student loan forgiveness. Under the Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF) program, workers at government agencies and 501(c)(3) nonprofits are eligible for loan forgiveness after 10 years of service. But Trump's order threatens to strip that benefit—specifically targeting employees at organizations that support transgender rights or diversity initiatives. If enforced, the order could have sweeping consequences, cutting off loan relief for workers at countless nonprofits, civil rights organizations, hospitals, and schools across the country.

“The prior administration abused the PSLF Program through a waiver process, using taxpayer funds to pay off loans for employees still years away from the statutorily required number of payments. Moreover, instead of alleviating worker shortages in necessary occupations, the PSLF Program has misdirected tax dollars into activist organizations that not only fail to serve the public interest, but actually harm our national security and American values, sometimes through criminal means,” says the order.

Organizations that would be barred from the order include what the order calls “subsidization of illegal activities, including illegal immigration, human smuggling, child trafficking, pervasive damage to public property, and disruption of the public order, which threaten the security and stability of the United States.” Further down in the order, this includes organizations that support “child abuse, including the chemical and surgical castration or mutilation of children or the trafficking of children to so-called transgender sanctuary States for purposes of emancipation from their lawful parents, in violation of applicable law” as well as organizations that are “engaging in a pattern of aiding and abetting illegal discrimination.”

Both of these are common administration euphemisms for supporting transgender people and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives.

Amid all of Donald Trump’s power grabs over the past six weeks, one little-noticed executive order may in the long run have the largest impact on the viability of the country’s democratic system of governance.

The February 18 order, misleadingly titled, “Ensuring Accountability For All Agencies,” claims to prevent government agencies from going off on a tear creating policies that stand in conflict to the agenda of the country’s elected leadership. […] The executive order’s text gives the game away:

"It shall be the policy of the executive branch to ensure Presidential supervision and control of the entire executive branch. Moreover, all executive departments and agencies, including so-called independent agencies, shall submit for review all proposed and final significant regulatory actions to the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) within the Executive Office of the President before publication in the Federal Register."

In other words, if Trump opposes a regulation, that regulation goes out the window.

The order states that, “The heads of independent regulatory agencies shall establish a position of White House Liaison in their respective agencies,” and goes on to say: “Independent regulatory agency chairmen shall submit agency strategic plans … to the Director of OMB for clearance prior to finalization.” In other words, independent agencies will no longer be independent but will instead be ruled over by political commissars, their every action now scrutinized to make sure they are ideologically sympatico to the aims of the MAGA movement.

The Director of the Office of Management and Budget, it should be noted, is Russ Vought, arguably the most fervent of the MAGA revolutionaries.

Musk talks about bureaucracy as being more powerful than government officials. He claims that bureaucracy eats revolutions for breakfast, and that DOGE has been the exception to this rule. He is seeking to gut the machinery of government, which he believes has previously restrained people like Trump, and replace it with algorithmic governance. Even as AI technology flounders in the corporate world, Musk clearly believes he is poised to use this technology to overtake the US government and replace human bureaucracy with a monarchistic apparatus. With algorithmic governance, there would be no resistance, no shame, no compassion, and no fear of prosecution to interrupt the execution of oligarchical whims.

This is Musk’s vision, and it’s why he is battling with Open AI to dominate a troubled industry. He wants the United States to be powered by Starlink and xAI. If the richest man in the world owns all of the machinery of the US government, he can fulfill anti-democratic tech blogger Curvis Yarvin’s dream of a state “CEO” — which Yarvin describes as a kind of monarchy.

Given Musk’s current level of power over the federal apparatus, that dream is clearly in the process of being realized.

The removal of human agency and emotion from governance is consistent with Musk’s views on empathy, which he recently shared with Rogan. “We’ve got civilizational suicidal empathy going on,” Musk said. Musk qualified his remarks slightly, noting that he is not wholly opposed to empathy, but nonetheless believes that empathy is destroying Western civilization. “I believe in empathy, I think you should care about people. But you need to have empathy for civilization as a whole, and not commit civilizational suicide,” he said. After repeating multiple falsehoods about immigrants, Musk claimed it was empathy that had allowed immigrants to become a threat to the United States. “The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy. The empathy exploit — they’re exploiting a bug in western civilization, which is the empathy response,” Musk said.

On Thursday, music labels sought to add nearly 500 more sound recordings to a lawsuit accusing the Internet Archive (IA) of mass copyright infringement through its Great 78 Project, which seeks to digitize all 3 million three-minute recordings published on 78 revolutions-per-minute (RPM) records from about 1898 to the 1950s.

If the labels' proposed second amended complaint is accepted by the court, damages sought in the case—which some already feared could financially ruin IA and shut it down for good—could increase to almost $700 million. (Initially, the labels sought about $400 million in damages.)

[…]

The Great 78 lawsuit is clearly focused on sound recordings, with music publishers claiming IA's ambitions to preserve music history are a "smokescreen" to justify alleged infringement. They claimed that IA's project isn't fair use for educational purposes because the Great 78 Project's account on X (formerly Twitter) would announce recordings were available without sharing "historical facts associated with the recordings; it simply advertised that the recordings were freely available to download or stream and encouraged users to go and obtain them."

But David Seubert, who manages sound collections at the University of California, Santa Barbara library, told Ars that he frequently used the project as an archive and not just to listen to the recordings.

For Seubert, the videos that IA records of the 78 RPM albums capture more than audio of a certain era. Researchers like him want to look at the label, check out the copyright information, and note the catalogue numbers, he said.

"It has all this information there," Seubert said. "I don't even necessarily need to hear it," he continued, adding, "just seeing the physicality of it, it's like, 'Okay, now I know more about this record.'"

Some killer stuff in here:

The Linguistic Society of America (LSA) strongly opposes the White House Executive Order of March 1, 2025 “Designating English as the Official Language of The United States.” Below we list four of the justifications given in the Executive Order in support of Official English, and explain why they are not valid—and in many cases, even undermine the order's stated goals. 

[…]

When this Executive Order is viewed in conjunction with other recent Executive Orders, including the January 20, 2025 Executive Order, “Protecting the American People Against Invasion,” it appears designed in service of broader anti-immigrant goals, including the erasure of the history and culture of millions of people in the United States who are not monolingual English speakers. Previous attempts to create a single official language for the United States have all been rejected. We ask: if the United States has not needed an official tongue for more than 200 years, why would we need one now?

The LSA and its members stand firmly against the March 1 Executive Order, and we call on anyone concerned about the fallacies and exclusionary rhetoric found in the March 1 Executive Order to continue to support, protect, and promote multilingualism and linguistic diversity in the United States. 

Giant White Houses are white, with jet-black accents: the shutters, the gutters, the rooves. They are giant—Hulk houses—swollen to the very limits of the legally allowed property setback, and unnaturally tall. They feature a mishmash of architectural features, combining, say, the peaked roof of a farmhouse with squared-off sections reminiscent of city townhomes. They mix horizontal siding, vertical paneling, and painted brick willy-nilly.

Like the giant White House just down the road from us in Washington, D.C., the Giant White House may be occupied by a Republican or a Democrat, but whoever they are, they are rich. Once the house next door was finished, it went on the market for $2.5 million. The house has five bedrooms and six baths and is 5,600 square feet.

[…]

Kate Wagner of McMansion Hell argued that this architectural incoherence stems, in fact, from the modern homebuyer’s saturation in Zillow and Redfin. “Design magazines, HGTV, even Instagram—those are really media empires of the past,” she said. “Overwhelmingly, by sheer monthly users, the way people interact with architecture now is through real estate listings. We’re always Zillow browsing.”

And what do you see on Zillow? If you’re one of the lucky Americans who can afford to buy your first home, and you want to live in a neighborhood like our part of Arlington, you may find that the “starter house,” as you once knew it, is awfully hard to find. Because land is worth so much and old houses, comparatively, are worth so little, when families sell small houses here, they sell them to developers, not to other families. And those developers, driven by fear and money, knock the small houses down to build GWHs. The more GWHs they build, the more the neighborhood is made up of GWHs. The more you scan Zillow, the more it starts to make sense: Like nearly a million Americans a year, you’re better off just buying a brand-new house, too.

After all, in an era when a home purchase is likely the most secure, lucrative investment you will ever make, a house really no longer is a house. It is no longer simply the place where you live. It is your future in building form. It is the way you’ll pay for college, the way you might afford retirement. “I don’t think we think of the dream home anymore,” Wagner said. “We now see houses primarily as vehicles for investment. The best way to do that is if everything looks the same.”

Peter is co-host of the If Books Could Kill podcast, which I highly recommend.

 The percentage of Republican men who believe that women should return to their traditional roles in society has jumped from 28 to 48%. Among Republican women, the increase is from 23 to 37%. This has happened in the span of two years. As alarming as this is, it’s important to ask yourself: what do you think happened here? Do you think that Republican voters, organically and of their own volition, drastically shifted their fundamental perceptions of women’s role in society? Of course not. They are being influenced by messaging from conservative elites, who themselves are radicalizing on issues of race and gender.

This dynamic is often obvious. YouGov polling shows Republican support for higher tariffs at 51%, with just 5% supporting lower tariffs. A year ago those numbers were 38 and 20%, respectively. Again, what happened? Did they all read the same economics textbook? Or did they follow the lead of Donald Trump, who made higher tariffs a central campaign issue?

Democrats tend to miss this. When Kamala Harris lost, several prominent Democrats said the party had strayed too far from the public on trans issues. Gavin Newsom, speaking on his new podcast to his guest Charlie Kirk (Jesus Christ) repeated the talking point just this week. But just a few years ago the savvy political wisdom was that Republican anti-trans efforts had overstepped, alienating voters. Republicans, though, weren’t cowed by public opinion. Rather than retreat, they went on the offensive, seeking to reshape the public debate. And they did, leveraging inflection points like women’s sports to galvanize their base and push liberals into a defensive posture.

If you’re a political party, your goal is not just to know where voters stand, but to know how to move them. Instead, Democratic operatives seem content to reduce their platform to a focus-grouped ephemera, drifting whichever way the political winds blow it.