Between Wednesday’s euphoric market reaction to the administration’s narrowed focus on a trade war with only China and the Friday’s quiet surrender exempting Chinese-made computers and smartphones from the President’s reciprocal [sic] tariffs, there was a story on Thursday about the astonishing disconnect between Trump’s belligerence and the nation’s vulnerability.

This Wall Street Journal article turns surreal when it describes recent Trump actions that make the nation more vulnerable. It is as if the reporter was at a loss for words; or perhaps afraid.

There was a sad moment last week during the collapse of Frontier Math. Epoch AI had created this new benchmark to assess claims that the latest crop of AI models reason just like mathematicians with Ph.D.s who work on the research frontier.

Over the weekend, I had a chance to get to know Apollo Robbins. If you don’t recognize the name, Apollo came to public attention when he pickpocketed members of Jimmy Carter’s Secret Service detail.

To protect a hard-earned reputation for objectivity, Nobel laureates in economics usually refrain from making public policy recommendations on the basis of personal values or political beliefs. We comment in public only when logic and evidence show that some proposal is unambiguously worse than a feasible alternative. Donald Trump embraces so many harmful policies that there wasn’t space to list them all in the letter that a group of us released today.

In a previous post, I wrote that Anaconda got in my way when I was trying to learn Python. After I wrote that, I tried to recall the specifics. What was it that I started doing with the official Python tools that I didn’t do with Anaconda? Mostly, I broke the rules and made a mess.