Third Way's latest memo has weak advice and a hidden agenda

Vance's boss, President Trump, is the oldest person to be sworn in as president of the United States.

On the same day Susan Monarez was fired, four of the agency’s top leaders quit.

Indiana House candidate Kellie Moore faces a battery charge after authorities accused her of striking a Warrick County deputy. She denies doing so.

Google once declared OAN too toxic for its platform—now Sundar Pichai and Neal Mohan are breathing new life into the conspiracy network as they negotiate a high-stakes agreement with Rupert Murdoch's Fox Corporation.

A group of chimpanzees in Zambia have been very busy putting grass in their ears and sticks up their bum for fashion purposes. Scientists studying the behaviour think that one influential chimp started the trend and, instead of the rest of the gang going, “mate, you look like an idiot”, they all just followed suit. Clearly we haven’t evolved from apes that much because a similar phenomenon is at play with the billionaire and Make America Great Again (Maga) set, who are spending enormous sums of money acquiring identical plastic faces.

An initiative aimed at boosting Democrats online offers influencers up to $8,000 a month to push the party line. All they have to do is keep it secret—and agree to restrictions on their content.

Denmark has summoned the US head of mission in Copenhagen over alleged covert US influence efforts in Greenland. US President Donald Trump had said he wanted the island — and even hinted at using force.

It’s the final week of marketing and promotion for The Toxic Avenger, and the teams here at Cineverse and Bloody Disgusting have decided to do something a little different. Rather than spending the rest of our marketing budget on a stunt or campaign, we’ve decided instead to join forces with the non-profit Undue Medical Debt for a much more important cause. When director Macon Blair’s The Toxic Avenger storms into theaters this weekend, he won’t just be melting faces on screen — he’ll also be melting medical debt in real life. In the fresh new take on Troma’s cult classic, arriving in theaters August 29, Toxie has his life upended by unexpected medical debt. It’s for that reason that we’re working with Undue Medical Debt to quite literally erase medical debt for real people here in the real world. At least $5 million in medical debt gets erased no matter what. And for every million bucks the movie makes at the box office, another million in debt will go up in toxic smoke.

Okie ex-pat JP Brammer goes long on Legends Tower, a fishy nonprofit, and whether or not Oklahoma is for dreamers.

The fired Fed governor has filed suit against Trump—and the discovery process may allow her celebrated lawyer to find out if the White House ordered a Trump loyalist to move against her.

Since his exit from the White House and spectacular fallout with Donald Trump, Elon Musk has been posting a lot less about far-right politics and conspiracy theories. Instead, the world’s richest man has seemingly turned at least some of his scattered attention back to his many businesses, including Tesla, SpaceX, and xAI. His newly founded “America Party,” meant to challenge both Democrats and Republicans, remains inactive. All this no doubt comes as a relief to board members at those companies who worried that Washington drama and Musk’s exploits as the head of the so-called Department of Government Security put his tech empire at unnecessary risk. But Musk’s return to full-time brand promotion has not been without its questionable moments. He is particularly committed to pushing xAI’s chatbot Grok as a superior alternative to rivals such as OpenAI‘s ChatGPT, despite the product being perhaps best known for briefly identifying itself as “MechaHitler” while it spouted Nazi views. On Monday, xAI even went so far as suing Apple and OpenAI, with a filing that accused the corporations of an anticompetitive scheme to suppress Grok in the App Store while favoring ChatGPT. (Apple and OpenAI have entered into a partnership that allows the computer and smartphone giant to integrate the bot into its products.) In the meantime, Musk has been left to make the case himself that Grok is a most advanced model available. He is prone to ambiguous, sweeping, impressive-sounding statements about the technology, claiming that the current version, Grok 4, may “discover new technologies” by the end of 2025 (there have been no reports of such) and is “the smartest AI in the world” (the data tells a different story). When he isn’t hyping the bot in those terms, however, he mostly touts how users can leverage Grok to create moving images of attractive women, dictating elements of their appearance including skin, eye, and hair color, as well as what clothes they wear and what sort of environments they inhabit. In recent weeks, Musk has been especially eager to show off “Ani” on his X account. One of several “companions” that you can interact with through Grok, she is a scantily clad female anime character who can undress and is designed to respond to flirtatious conversation with increasingly intimate responses. Now, Musk also frequently reposts similarly sexualized cartoon characters generated with Grok’s text-to-video feature, “Imagine.” It’s gotten to the point where many have openly wondered if he fetishizes these virtual women. Over the weekend, for example, Musk reposted an animation made by one of his reply guys of an evidently topless woman whose face, neck, and shoulders are bejeweled by blinking stars and swirling galaxies. He shared an animation from another paid blue-check X user who explained he had prompted Grok to show him a “stunning Colombian woman” with a “golden tan” and “flawless smooth complexion” in a revealing tribal-style leather getup, standing next to a large robotic dinosaur. He also marveled at a sort of music video for Simple Minds’ “Don’t You (Forget About Me)” made with Grok, which featured a series of shots of a dark-haired, anime-like character in different skintight spacesuits (and one bathing suit). “Wow,” Musk wrote. “And this is just Grok Imagine beta v0.1! Not even Imagine version 1.” The billionaire’s affinity for titillating cartoon characters has not gone unnoticed on X. The comments on that music video included one critic replying: “Don’t post AI soft porn for at least one day challenge.” Others made jokes about Musk using Grok as a masturbation aid, expressed their disappointment in what a supposedly innovative genius was spending his time on, and predicted that such content would have a negative effect on society. “This is just more gooner slop,” complained one detractor. (“Gooning” is internet slang that describes exaggerated and excessively long sessions of self-pleasuring.) In other recent posts, Musk urged followers to try the sometimes-pornographic companion Ani. Last week, he announced that new skimpy outfits had been added to her wardrobe and commented “Nice” when a user modeled her in one. He evidently crossed a line, though, when he posted an animation of Ani dancing in her underwear; even his right-wing fans were disgusted, telling him it was “time to stop” and that Ani looked like a “13 year old in lingerie.” Musk, likely observing the severe backlash, deleted the offending post. Yet he continued to annoy his supporters by engaging with Ani. When he replied to a video of the character in a short skirt and a see-through top with a “good morning” message and an emoji of a smiling face encircled by hearts, a fed-up X user wrote, “BRO STOP GOONING TO AI ANIME AND TAKE US TO MARS.” Musk’s infatuation with Ani and similar anime pin-ups has led some fans to seek his attention by catering to his tastes. A Tesla owner for instance, tagged him in a post where a cartoon woman in a bikini holds a sign inquiring about a future update to their car’s automated driver assistance system. “Smart, Elon will definitely see this,” theorized a Tesla influencer who shared a different question about the Cybertruck, presented in the same bikini-babe-with-a-sign format. “Let’s use this format for all questions to Elon going forward,” they suggested. Musk eventually did acknowledge one of these images with his favorite emoji — the laugh-crying face. He also directly answered a SpaceX enthusiast who last week shared a clip of Ani in lingerie carrying a sign that asked when he expected a technical update to the company’s Starship rocket. “Sunday,” Musk replied. Will his ongoing emphasis on Grok’s erotic capabilities turn it into the leading chatbot of its time, or just endear it to a limited demographic of lonely, like-minded men while alienating much of the public? Maybe that’s a question for AI. But in the absence of more impressive output, Musk is more or less stuck trying impress people with digital smut. Don’t be surprised if it gets raunchier still from here.

A whistleblower says that a former senior DOGE official now at the Social Security Administration copied the Social Security numbers, names and birthdays of over 300 million Americans to a private section of the agency's cloud. That private cloud environment is accessible by other former DOGE employees at the SSA and is lacking adequate security, the whistleblower claims, potentially putting an enormous amount of private information at risk to being revealed and possibly used by identity thieves. In a written complaint filed through the nonprofit Government Accountability Project, Charles Borges, the chief data officer at the Social Security Administration, claims that senior Trump appointees at the SSA who were recently part of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) team made the copy in a way that "constitute[s] violations of laws, rules, and regulations, abuse of authority, gross mismanagement, and creation of a substantial and specific threat to public health and safety." Borges says that career cybersecurity officials within the SSA described the decision to copy the data as "very high risk" and even discussed the possibility of having to reissue Social Security numbers to millions of Americans in the event the cloud server was breached.

Swamps typically bring to mind an array of mushy greens and murky browns, but in Virginia, they do things differently.

It's the sentience of AI's creators that really matters

Google says it’s no different than checking IDs at the airport.

I've been following with interest an argument between John Ganz and Eric Levitz, both of whom are writers I admire, on the role of polling in American politics. (See Ganz, Levitz, Ganz.) I'm on Ganz's side of the argument. I don't begrudge individual candidates who use private polling to help shape at the margin how they compete. But using polling at a systemic level, having a political party that defines and redefines itself in dialogue with public polling (and private donors) is corrosive to the project of electoral democracy.

Democrats’ favorite research firm told Democrats to avoid discussing Trump’s “rising authoritarianism” and focus on tariffs instead.

A wind project off Rhode Island is more than 80 percent completed. Trump just stopped it in its tracks.

Under the guise of fighting antisemitism, the Trump administration has turned to groups like Canary Mission and Betar.