Following a chaotic race for Wisconsin governor, moderate Democrat David Crowley defeated progressive Francesca Hong on Tuesday night. 

Although Hong held a convincing lead in many of Tuesday’s polls, she lost by about 4,000 votes—a narrow 0.5 percentage point. As someone presenting herself as a member of the Democratic Socialists of America and without endorsements from key progressive Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.)—who notably distanced herself from more progressive policies on Sunday, Hong came across as an outsider candidate who gained popularity over time.

Critics on the right, and some Democrats, criticized Hong for past social media remarks, such as a deleted post to “Cancel Thanksgiving” and calls for “defunding the police as a first step towards abolishing the police”. If she won, she would have become the first democratic socialist governor in US history. 

On the establishment Democrats’ side, multiple candidates who were once considered front-runners withdrew—including Sara Rodriguez, Wisconsin’s current lieutenant governor, who suspended her campaign in mid-July after she fired her campaign manager for inflating financial reports. Even the victor, Crowley, re-entered the race shortly after Rodriguez’s departure (he initially suspended his campaign in early July due in part to poor polling).

It was a messier race than others where progressives won, such as Abdul El-Sayed’s Senate primary victory in Michigan, and may provide fewer clear takeaways about the future of progressives running as Democrats.

A version of the below article first appeared in David Corn’s newsletter, Our Land. The newsletter comes out twice a week (most of the time) and provides behind-the-scenes stories and articles about politics, media, and culture. Subscribing costs just $5 a month—but you can sign up for a free 30-day trial.

Like many offbeat ideas, this one originated in a bar.

I was drinking with a fellow author, and we were bemoaning the future of writing in a world of artificial intelligence. We nervously pondered how much of what we writers do could be replicated now or in the near future by a chatbot. We assured ourselves that our work—researching and investigating and then composing articles and books on complicated topics, which present fresh material, compelling context, and sharp analysis in (we hope) an engaging manner—cannot be supplanted by a machine. At least not yet. But what of other fare? Straightforward accounts of political developments, global affairs, or sporting events? Recipe books? Or histories and biographies? Short stories or novels? Film scripts?

What could AI produce? Generative artificial intelligence has already invaded—or infected—the world of fan fiction. I have friends who have used AI with their kids to create children’s books. Iranian meme-makers have deployed it to concoct slick Lego-style videos deriding Donald Trump.

The issue is not the ability of a chatbot to churn out algorithmically determined masterpieces. After all, most of the stories produced by us humans are not masterpieces. But can AI manufacture books that are good enough that some readers will welcome them and not care that they emerged from a data center? Perhaps even pay for such fare? Might many writers soon face an extinction-level event?

Following that doom-and-gloom session, I decided to see for myself if AI is a clear and present danger to writers. I asked Claude, Anthropic’s AI chatbot, to generate a novel. It did, and I’ll cut to the chase: The novel isn’t so bad.

Let me note that this exercise deliberately sidesteps the many profound concerns about AI: the economic dislocation it could cause, the environmental impacts and community costs of data centers, the expropriation of work produced by authors, journalists, and other humans. It focuses only on what AI might mean for the future of writing and other creative endeavors. And don’t forget that the reason an AI chatbot can kick out a novel is because its Big Tech master—without seeking permission or offering compensation—hoovered up a gajillion books, articles, news stories, and other material created by people. (The Center for Investigative Reporting, the parent company of Mother Jones, has sued OpenAI for copyright violations. OpenAI denies the allegations.)

I began with this prompt:

A struggling writer who has had five novels rejected turns to an AI chatbot to write a novel. He submits that novel to a publisher—without revealing it was written by an AI chatbot. It is accepted and goes on to become a bestseller. No one knows it was written by AI. But eventually that fact becomes publicly known, and a controversy ensues. The writer then writes a book about that experience. And it becomes a bestseller.

That’s it. That was all I gave Claude. (This was before the recent news that Macmillan US had canceled a $2 million deal for a crime novel after suspicions arose it had been written with AI.)

Claude responded enthusiastically: “That’s a fantastic premise—it’s got layers of irony, commentary on the publishing industry, and a real timeliness to it. Let me write this for you.”

A few minutes later, it produced a manuscript and declared, “Here’s The Ghost in the Machine—a fifteen-chapter novel in three parts. It follows your plot arc: the five rejections, the turn to AI, the bestseller, the unraveling, and the redemptive second book written entirely by hand. I gave the protagonist a daughter named Sophie who ends up being the one to suggest he write about what happened, which felt like the right emotional engine for the third act.”

I took a glance at the file without reading it. The supposed novel was 6,000 words—much too short. I pointed that out, and Claude agreed: “This comes in closer to a novella. A proper novel would be 70,000–90,000 words.” It asked if it should expand the manuscript—was it a manuscript?—into a “full-length novel…with real scenes built out, secondary characters developed…and the kind of granular detail that makes fiction feel lived-in.” I replied, “Please do that.” As if I were talking to a person.

Several minutes later, Claude presented me with “a complete novel at approximately 48,000 words across 41 chapters in three parts.” It explained, “That puts it in solid novella-to-short-novel territory—comparable to The Great Gatsby (47,000) or Fahrenheit 451 (46,000). To reach a full 80,000-word novel, each part would need roughly another 10,000 words of additional scenes and subplots.” The short version, I figured, would suffice for this experiment.

I began reading. The protagonist of The Ghost in the Machine is Ethan Moss, a 41-year-old failed novelist who lives in an apartment in Astoria, Queens. He’s divorced from Dana, a lawyer, who resides in suburban New Jersey with their nine-year-old daughter, Sophie. Ethan has a cat named Bellow (get it?); his closest friend is Marco Bellini, a successful novelist who recently struck it big with a book called The Sauce, which is about “a chef who returns to his grandmother’s village in Calabria and discovers a family secret involving the local Mafia, a contested recipe for ragu, and a seventy-year-old love triangle that has shaped the village’s social dynamics in ways that no one is willing to discuss.”

Claude describes in detail the novels that Ethan has written and that publishers have turned down. There was Meridian (a campus novel about a plagiarism scandal at a New England liberal arts college); Night Market (a psychological thriller about an American woman who disappears in Bangkok); The Fallback Position (a satirical novel about a man who fakes his own death to escape his debts); and Border Country (a multi-generational saga set along the Texas-Mexico border).

With the rejection letter for his fifth novel, The Contrarian—“While the prose demonstrates competence and occasional flair, the manuscript ultimately lacks the narrative urgency and emotional specificity that would allow us to champion it in today’s marketplace”—Ethan, who has spent nearly two decades in the literary world as an MFA grad and adjunct professor, attending writers’ workshops, obtaining grants, and demonstrating potential without achieving success, hits a wall.

He is stuck. Marco tells him his writing is sharp but “there’s something holding you back.” That reminds Ethan of when a writing instructor observed that he had the instincts of a writer but lacked “the emotional necessity.” Clearly, he must change something.

He lies in bed one night and wonders if AI could be the answer. Here Claude makes what we would call—if we were talking about a human author—an interesting choice. Ethan doesn’t turn to the machine to produce a novel (as I did). Instead, he contemplates employing AI as a “creative partner—a sounding board, a first-draft engine, a way to break through the wall that had been standing between him and a publishable novel.” He then reflexively rejects the idea: “This is cheating…You are a writer. Writers write. They do not outsource the writing to a machine and then put their name on it.” Writing, he once said at a conference, is “not a product. Writing is a process.” A human being struggling with a blank page—or blank screen.

But Ethan has lost that struggle. He opens his laptop, goes to an AI site, and types: “I want to write a novel. Literary fiction. Contemporary setting. A story about a man who discovers that his recently deceased father had been living a secret life—a second family in another city. The son goes to that city to find the other family and has to reconcile two versions of the father he thought he knew.”

The chatbot kicks out a few pages of “competent” prose outlining the story. Nothing better than what Ethan could have produced on his own. Phew, he thinks at first. But then he realizes that within this response are several good ideas: structural suggestions, a few nifty metaphors. He asks the chatbot, “What would make this story feel urgent? What’s the emotional engine? What does the son want that he can’t admit he wants?” The reply is long and dry. But there’s a notion that catches his eye: “The son doesn’t want to understand his father. He wants to understand why his father chose the other family. Which means the real question of the novel is: Am I the life my father wanted, or the life he was stuck with?”

“That was it,” Ethan thinks. “That was the book.”

He begins writing. Each morning, he spends several hours writing, as he always did. In the afternoons, he turns to AI to draft different versions of scenes and alternative versions of conversations. He poses questions about structure to the chatbot, which serves up various options. He doesn’t incorporate the material straight into his draft. But AI helps create a map for him. As Claude “writes,” the prose “was always his. But the ideas, the structural decisions, the emotional insights that organized individual scenes and, cumulatively, the book itself—these were collaborations. He was the writer, but he was not writing alone.”

This goes on for months, and Ethan produces The Other Side of the Door. Reviewing his AI-assisted work, he concludes, “The book was good. It was not merely good in the careful, defensive way that his previous novels had been good—technically proficient, intellectually respectable, praised in workshops and rejected by editors. It was good in a different way. It was alive. It was, by a considerable margin, the best thing Ethan had ever written.” He is particularly proud of his creation of Dorothy, an elderly Black woman “who offered, in a series of long, digressive, heartbreaking monologues, a perspective on love and duplicity and the American family that was unlike anything Ethan had ever written.” AI had nothing to do with Dorothy. She was all his.

You know what happens next.

Ethan sells the book for a sizable advance. The novel is hailed as his breakthrough. He is feted by the literary world. It becomes a bestseller. Readers are moved by the book and send him letters saying it has helped them understand their own lives and families. There’s a demand for his next book. He has trouble firing that up. He tells no one about his reliance on AI. The guilt builds—and builds. A computer scientist releases a program that evaluates writing for possible AI involvement. His book registers as possibly including AI-produced content. A perceptive data journalist finds a nugget of a clue in the text, digs deeper, confronts Ethan, who can no longer bear the burden of his secret and confesses.

A scandal erupts, as critics and commentators in the Atlantic, the New York Times, and Harper’s and across the podosphere debate what is writing, what is creativity. Was this cheating or merely using an available tool? If Ethan’s novel connected with a reader and evoked emotions, did it matter how it was birthed? As Claude puts it, “Was a tear cried over a human-machine collaboration less real than a tear cried over a purely human creation?”

But Ethan is tarnished, dropped by his agent and publishing house, and scorned by the lit crowd. He loses the movie deal for the book. Worse, he must explain to his daughter he was dishonest.

Yet he manages to crawl out of this wreckage and writes—in longhand on legal pads—a novel titled The Honest Liar, based on his own rise and fall. It’s a hit—because I told Claude to make it a hit—and that, too, triggers another public hoo-ha concerning redemption and what one pundit calls “the death of honesty.” Ethan takes his lumps but prevails and carries on as a writer. I did ask for a happy ending.

You can read the novel—if we can call it that—yourself. Other than dealing with a few clunky formatting issues, I changed nothing.

When I noted above that the book was not so bad, I said that because as I read The Ghost in the Machine, I wanted to keep reading. The plot is taut and, though I knew what was coming, the journey to the narrative guideposts I requested is a good ride, with a few surprises along the way. The discovery of Ethan’s secret is well designed.

But there are obvious flaws. Scenes are not fully realized; chapters are too short, with the action overly compacted. There’s not enough dialogue. More could be done with the secondary characters. The word “particular” is overused. A few chronological inconsistencies distract. The final stretch is confusing in spots. Perhaps if Claude had expanded this draft, some of these errors would have been remedied.

Other problems, perhaps not. The writing is too reliant on similes. There are similes everywhere, too often distracting from the flow of the story like a fly buzzing around your office while you’re trying to write a newsletter. “The lie did not disappear,” Claude observes. “It waited, patient and implacable, like the tide.”

The manuscript is also chock-full of cutesy and unnecessary observations. For instance, Claude tells us that at writers’ parties attendees should avoid the kitchen, where the conversations “tend to become competitive,” and keep to the living room, where they “tend to become confessional, which is more interesting and less exhausting.” (Wry reflections on the publishing industry are sprinkled throughout.) And there’s way too much of the darn cat in the story. Rewriting and a round or two of editing could easily turn this into a much better novel. And if a writer were to follow Ethan’s example and use this text as raw material but rework the prose and take the story and characters further, he or she could produce a good book.

But credit where credit is due. There are several well-executed passages, such as when Ethan is confronted by the data journalist and spills the beans. That scene has emotional depth and intensity and certainly deserves the expansion I denied Claude.

After reading The Ghost in the Machine, I asked Claude to evaluate its ability to generate a novel. It replied:

What I can genuinely do: Sustain plot, character, and theme across a full-length manuscript; hold structural coherence over dozens of chapters; write prose that’s competent and sometimes better than competent. The Ethan Moss book is proof of concept—it has an actual arc, recurring motifs, and a thematic spine (“the difficulty is the point”) that pays off.

Where the limits are: Length has to be built in sessions, not one pass—I can’t produce 90,000 polished words in a single response, so a real novel is an iterative project: outline, chapter batches, revision passes. And the prose tends toward a certain smoothness; the idiosyncratic, risky sentence-level choices that distinguish a memorable novel from a readable one usually come from a human editor pushing back—which, ironically, is more or less the premise of the Ethan Moss book.

According to Claude, AI needs a human to craft a good book. For the time being, that is.

Claude created a decent yarn, one that leads the reader to ponder the creativity of writing, the meaning and impact of art, and the new role of AI in all this. It’s not mind-blowing, but it is thought-provoking.

Worried about AI? About the battle between humans and the machines? Claude ends up coming out on the side of us meat puppets. At the end of the story, assessing his travails and triumphs, Ethan concludes that “writing is not just about the product. It’s about the process. And the process is where the meaning lives. The process is where you discover what you have to say, which is different from what you want to say or what you planned to say. The machine gave me what I wanted. But it took away what I needed—which was the struggle, the failure, the difficulty. The difficulty is where the writer becomes the writer. Without it, you’re just a person with nice sentences.”

Thus, a machine can’t truly be a writer.

But isn’t this judgment exactly what a clever AI chatbot would deliver to us humans?

This experiment did not convince me that Ethan is right. The Ghost in the Machine was a fun read for me. Maybe because I was biased and impressed by the novelty. But it made clear that not soon but right now AI can concoct content that can somewhat compete with what we mere mortals produce. We now live in a world in which you can decide you want to read a novel about a teacher in 1930s Germany who tries to save her favorite student from becoming a member of the Nazi Party and—poof—you have it. Crave a new James Bond story—how the British spy battles a Russian oligarch who’s scheming to take over the internet? You can get that too. (If there’s a copyright issue, call him James Broad.)

Rework Shakespeare? How about a play in which they decide not to wait for Godot? A movie script for The Godfather Part IV? Eventually AI will be able to turn any script into video. Imagine Jerry Seinfeld hanging with Lucy and Ethel. (Maybe Jerry Steinfeld.)

I’m assuming this AI content will be cheap—at least, cheaper than buying a hardcover book or paying $22 to see The Odyssey. The rise of the digital information ecosystem has already demonstrated it’s difficult for content that’s expensive to produce (say, journalism) to compete with slop available for free. There will be human-made books, movies, television shows, and music that stand out as accomplishments of imagination, innovation, and ingenuity. But the tide of AI-generated material is rising fast. Most of it won’t be great works of art. The threat is that they will be sufficient.

I suppose one could argue the positive side is that AI will turn everyone into a content creator. But worriers are right to fear that AI could substantially change—perhaps subvert—high and low culture, while diminishing writing and analytical skills. (See Bret Stephens’ recent screed against AI in which he proclaims that “it’s mentally enfeebling” and leading to “an ever-dumber world.”) And if everyone is reading their own personalized, choose-your-own-plot novels and watching their own custom-made television shows, we will have even fewer common cultural touchstones than currently exist.

At the end of the manuscript, Claude added this:

Author’s note: This novel was written entirely by a human being, which is either a point of pride or a statement of the obvious, depending on your perspective. It was also written about a human being who was, in many ways, the author’s worst self—the self that wants the shortcut, that fears the struggle, that would rather be successful than honest. If you recognized that self, you are not alone. If you didn’t, you are either very fortunate or not paying attention.

That was obviously a lie. But what was the point of this note? Was it meant to be ironic? Engaging pieces of art often spur questions without clear answers or prompt interpretations that are not definitive. Was Claude aiming at that? I decided not to ask it.

Lettuce contaminated with cyclospora. Cruise ship passengers contracting a deadly form of hantavirus. Legionnaires’ disease (yet again) in big cities. RFK Jr. refusing any responsibility for measles outbreaks. That’s just a brief list of public health stories in America this summer. And we haven’t even mentioned Dr. Anthony Fauci being held in contempt of Congress during a hostile Congressional hearing over the Covid-19 pandemic.

Public health stories are everywhere right now. So that’s why we invited epidemiologist and science communicator Jessica Malaty Rivera back onto the show. Malaty Rivera fills a vital role through her work translating medical breakthroughs and sorting through conflicting health advice. It’s a role she says the public needs now more than ever.

“I think we are in a long-haul journey of repairing the fractures that have happened in public trust in science and public trust in public health,” Malaty Rivera tells our host Al Letson. “And if the Dems or if any party wants to get back on track with science, they need people to make science make sense.”

On this week’s More To The Story, Malaty Rivera talks through the ongoing efforts to link vaccines and autism at the highest levels of the Trump administration, which produce we should (and shouldn’t) be eating right now, and the many ways the federal government’s response to public health crises today are driven by politics rather than science.

Find More To The Story on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Pandora, or your favorite podcast app, and don’t forget to subscribe.

Since President Donald Trump returned to the White House, he’s been vowing to stamp out gender-affirming medical care—what his administration terms “sex-rejecting procedures”—for young people diagnosed with gender dysphoria. Now, his administration is specifically going after the health care of trans kids from low-income families. On Tuesday, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services released a final rule forbidding Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program from paying for puberty blockers and hormone therapy to treat gender dysphoria, as well as the surgeries provided in rare cases to older teens.

The Medicaid part of the rule applies to patients under age 18, while the CHIP provision applies to patients under 19. The rule will take effect in October, with one exception: For patients already on cross-sex hormones, coverage for those medications will continue for an additional six months to allow for a “limited tapering period,” according to the final rule.

A second rule—the so-called “nuclear weapon” designed to force hospitals nationwide to stop providing gender-affirming care for trans kids, or lose all Medicaid and Medicare funding for all their patients—is now scheduled to be finalized by December.

Gender-affirming medical treatments for minors remain supported by virtually all leading US medical associations. But the Trump administration, no stranger to “alternative facts,” commissioned its own report criticizing trans youth healthcare last year—a project spearheaded by conservative activist Leor Sapir and authored by outspoken critics of gender-affirming care for minors. Their report, published by the Department of Health and Human Services, “misrepresents the current medical consensus and fails to reflect the realities of pediatric care,” American Academy of Pediatrics president Susan Kressly said at the time. Yet the final Medicaid and CHIP rule issued Tuesday heavily cites the Sapir team’s report as evidence for why the new restrictions on coverage are justified.

In announcing the rule, CMS administrator Mehmet Oz denied the demonstrated benefits of gender-affirming care for trans kids’ mental health. “Children deserve our protection, not experimental interventions that pose serious risks and convey no proven benefits,” Oz told Fox News in an exclusive on Tuesday announcing the final rule. “By cutting off federal funds for these sex-rejecting procedures, we’re following the science, saving taxpayer dollars, and, most importantly, protecting children from potentially irreversible harm so they can truly flourish.”

“We know what this is—a dangerous and unnecessary attempt to prevent transgender and nonbinary young people from accessing the best-practice health care they need to lead healthy and happy lives,” said Rodrigo Heng-Lehtinen, of the LGBTQ youth suicide-prevention group the Trevor Project, in a statement on Tuesday. “The Trevor Project’s research shows that access to this care is associated with significantly lower rates of depression and suicide risk among transgender and nonbinary young people who receive it.”

Twenty-six states have outlawed gender-affirming treatments for minors since 2022, in response to a coordinated campaign by religious-right and anti-LGBTQ activists. Since Trump returned to office and started threatening providers of transgender healthcare with defunding and prosecution, dozens of hospitals in both Democratic and Republican-led states have preemptively ended gender-affirming treatments to minors. Since then, families of young people diagnosed with gender dysphoria have been forced to travel long distances—or uproot their lives entirely—to get their kids to providers still offering treatment. As a result, the attacks on trans youth healthcare already hit poorer families the hardest.

Nearly 35,000 public comments were received on the new Medicaid and CHIP rule, with over 90 percent of commenters opposing it. As I reported in April, many of them were the parents of transgender children, who pleaded with the government to not proceed:

For a teenager struggling with gender dysphoria, a break in treatment could mean their body proceeds with the puberty of their birth sex, with potentially severe mental health consequences. Blair’s mom worried about her son losing not just his medication, but also the counseling, regular blood tests, and side-effect monitoring he received from his team at the MetroHealth clinic. So after taking some time to think, she wrote a comment on Regulations.gov, beseeching the government to stay out of her family’s personal business.

“I have learned that my original vision of what my child’s life would look like is very different from reality—and yet, this version is just as beautiful, if not more so,” she wrote. “That is why I find it so hard to understand why the government would try to interfere in such personal and medically complex matters.”

She’s not the only parent pleading with the Department of Health and Human Services not to cut off their child’s treatment. “Every decision I have made as a parent is to keep my kid healthy and safe,” wrote one of the 30,000-some public commenters on the proposed regulation. “In an emerging culture where parents’ choice is so important to school and child development policies, why is my choice to consult with my child’s medical team and make informed decisions being taken away and infringed on?”

LGBTQ rights organizations have said they intend to take the issue to the courts. “The rule announced today will face legal challenge,” GLBTQ Legal Advocates and Defenders announced in a statement Tuesday after the final rule was released.

“Despite this being called a ‘final rule,’ we have time to fight back,” Heng-Lehtinen added. “Nothing will change overnight—and this rule would not ban this care nationally, nor would it ban hospitals from providing these services. We will continue working closely with our partners and allies across the country to stop this dangerous rule, and to create a country where all young people can receive the best-practice health care they need.”

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez invoked the term “Woke 1.0” during her Sunday interview on ABC News’ This Week to refer to rhetoric many progressive circles used during some of the social movements of the late 2010s—but instead of engaging with them in a 2026 context, she dismissed them as ideas of the past.

If you missed it, the New York congresswoman backed away from some of her previously-stated positions—such as defunding the police—in her interview with ABC News’ Jonathan Karl. She said that many lawmakers and activists only used that rhetoric during the pandemic. “There was a huge opening of the Overton Window” to try to “entertain any and every policy that was going to get us to a better place.” She cited New York City council member Chi Ossé posting on X in May that “Woke 1 was crazyyyy” with some levity, seemingly brushing off the ideas as just part of the past. 

“Rhetoric in that time is not rhetoric that we would use today,” she continued, pointing to other progressives who have recently walked back remarks deemed by more moderate Democrats and conservatives as radical, such as Wisconsin gubernatorial candidate Francesca Hong.

Ocasio-Cortez, who is no longer endorsed by the Democratic Socialists of America’s National Political Committee, told Karl that she doesn’t support many of the positions on the DSA’s policy platform, ideas that Republicans have targeted in the lead-up to the midterms. AOC seems to be trying to come across as more presentable in front of a broader swath of the electorate.

While this may be valuable in future elections, it raises the question of what it says to those who elected Ocasio-Cortez and are still confronting the struggle of the late 2010s and previous decades. One can win votes without laughing off progressive discussions. What if the rhetoric of six years ago evolved into a more widespread, substantial reckoning? In 2026, it’s not enough to repeat the same rhetoric—let alone signal toward going backward. 

AOC conflates “entertain[ing] any and every policy that was going to get us to a better place” with vital work from people who are fed up with the status quo. After all, these policy discussions are what helped get her elected in the first place.

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Supreme Court justice Samuel Alito gained up to $2.9 million from his fossil fuel interests between 2005 and 2024, a new review of financial disclosures shows.

The analysis from the nonprofit advocacy group and judicial watchdog Court Accountability, shared exclusively with the Guardian, found that even at the lowest range of estimates, Alito gained almost $400,000 from his oil and gas interests since being tapped for the high court by George W. Bush in 2005.

The findings come as the Supreme Court prepares to take up a case in which the oil companies Suncor Energy and Exxon asked the justices to find that federal law prevents subnational governments from filing lawsuits against fossil fuel producers for the climate-warming effects of their products.

The Supreme Court said this month it will hear oral arguments in the case on 5 October, the opening day of its new term. The Trump administration, which is siding with the oil companies, has asked for 10 minutes of argument time. Court Accountability and other groups have called for a Senate committee to investigate Alito, the sole Supreme Court justice with holdings in energy companies, and said he should recuse himself.

He and the court rejected those calls.

Supreme Court ethics rules focus specifically on investments in companies named in court cases. In May, a Supreme Court spokesperson told NBC News that Alito is not required to recuse himself from the Suncor lawsuit as his holdings do not include the companies directly named in the case, Suncor and ExxonMobil.

But Lisa Graves, co-founder of Court Accountability who authored the new analysis, said Alito’s oil-tied wealth provides grounds to question whether Alito can impartially weigh in on cases affecting the entire fossil fuel sector.

“You might have real appreciation for how that industry has helped make it possible for you to perhaps buy a second home on the water, or live a [certain] lifestyle,” she said.

The Guardian has contacted the Supreme Court and Alito for comment.

Alito’s financial disclosures show his reported assets—excluding his home and other personal property—grew from about $1.1 million in 2005 to between $3.4 million and $8.4 million by 2024. Federal financial disclosures report assets in broad value ranges.

During that period, his oil and gas holdings made him between $390,000 and $2.9 million, Court Accountability’s review shows. Most of those gains came from a property in Grady county, Oklahoma, in which Alito’s wife, Martha-Ann, holds a mineral interest.

Graves said Alito may have undervalued the worth of this property, because in 2017, a relative of the Alito family sold an adjacent plot for $800,000. “It’s reasonable to assume that means the value of the Alito property would have increased to around $800,000,” said Graves, but he continued to report its value at $100,000 to $250,000.

The justice reported two windfalls from rental income on the property in 2019 and 2022, with gains of between $100,000 and $1 million in both years.

Alito’s wife agreed to lease the plot of land to the private oil and gas company Citizen Energy in 2022, the Intercept first reported. In 2024, that company was acquired for more than $2 billion by Validus Energy, in which hedge fund Elliott Investment Management holds a majority stake. Elliott was founded by Paul Singer, who ProPublica found had paid for a private jet ride Alito took in 2008 that the justice did not disclose. Alito later defended the trip, saying ethics rules did not require its disclosure.

No reporting or public documents indicate that a well has been drilled on the property, but a lease agreement shows the owners would have received three-sixteenths of the money from any oil extracted from the land.

“It raises concerns because you have a sitting justice who is hoping to get richer based on oil exploration of this land,” said Graves.

Another large portion of Alito’s fossil fuel gains came through inheritance. In 2004, the justice disclosed that he obtained a bequest of ExxonMobil stock valued between $100,000 and $250,000.

The Exxon stock was the highest value of any single liquid investment listed by Alito “by a good margin,” Graves said.

Alito appears to have since sold his stock in ExxonMobil, as indicated by the Supreme Court’s May statement to NBC News. “But my view is that you shouldn’t be able to sell a stock just so you can sit on a case, even though that company’s profits have benefited you,” said Graves.

Alito is the only justice who has not yet submitted his 2025 disclosure document. The filing was due on 15 May. Justices can obtain a 90-day extension; if Alito received one, he should file the document this Thursday. Last year, he filed his disclosure in August.

Alito has had a variety of smaller investments in more than a dozen oil firms, including ConocoPhillips and its predecessor Phillips 66, Chevron and energy infrastructure company Kinder Morgan.

“A reasonable person would think if you’re invested in the industry that could benefit from the outcome of a lawsuit, then you could personally stand to benefit from the outcome, even if you don’t hold the stock in the specific company that happens to be the named plaintiff,” said Graves.

Alito has a history of voting in favor of fossil fuel interests. In the landmark 2007 case Massachusetts v Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), he was one of four dissenting justices who argued greenhouse gas emissions could not be regulated under the Clean Air Act.

Then in June 2022, when the Supreme Court decided West Virginia v EPA, Alito joined Neil Gorsuch’s majority in arguing that the EPA lacked broad authority under the Clean Air Act to mandate a shift away from fossil fuels.

More recently, he joined the majority in two 2024 decisions that overturned the longstanding Chevron doctrine and could make it harder for agencies to defend expansive environmental regulations.

Alito has recused himself from other environmental cases. In January, he stepped away from a lawsuit focused on whether energy companies could be held responsible for Louisiana coastal degradation because he owns stock in ConocoPhillips, the parent company of a defendant in proceedings tied to the litigation.

In 2023, Alito also recused himself from considering a petition in the Suncor lawsuit, brought by the company and ExxonMobil. That request was denied.

Later in 2023, the Supreme Court adopted its first-ever formal ethics code amid a slew of scandals involving senior rightwing justices. It states that justices should recuse themselves from cases where their “impartiality might reasonably be questioned,” though it allows them to make that decision themselves.

Though Graves harshly critiqued that ethics code, saying it is “toothless” and “not worth the paper it’s written on,” she said it should in theory prevent Alito from weighing in on Suncor v Boulder in October.

“His impartiality may be reasonably questioned in terms of his affinity towards the industry that has helped build his nest egg,” she said.

“The thing that will always stay with me,” former California Rep. Katie Porter said of her harrowing experience hiding with then-colleague Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez during the January 6 attack on the Capitol. “I was saying: ‘Well, don’t worry, I’m a mom, I’m calm, I’ve got everything here we need. We could live for like a month in this office.’ And [Ocasio-Cortez] said, ‘I just hope I get to be a mom. I hope I don’t die today.'”

At the time, the remarks reflected the fear felt by two female lawmakers, as rabid men on the hunt for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi roamed the halls of Congress screaming, “Where is she? Where is she?” But when I first heard about this exchange, nearly one month after the Capitol attack, I recall being struck by how much Ocasio-Cortez’s comment echoed my own thoughts as a woman of a similar demographic: mid-30s, working, and hopeful for motherhood but unsure how it would unfold. Would it ever happen? If so, when? Have my choices hurt or helped that one outsized desire? Such questions tend to hum anxiously in the background for a woman of a certain age, in both mundane and extraordinary moments, as the one Ocasio-Cortez shared with Porter.

I thought of this anecdote again this weekend after the New York congresswoman posted a series of videos announcing that she was freezing her eggs. “This is a choice that I am making to feel more in control of my life,” Ocasio-Cortez said in one Instagram video. In another, the 36-year-old progressive filmed herself injecting the procedure’s hormone medications into her abdomen. “I think it’s important for us as leaders to have these conversations and share these processes, especially for working women across the country, and normalize them,” Ocasio-Cortez told ABC’s Jonathan Karl on Sunday.

It was in the same interview that the progressive lawmaker made her strongest public comments yet that she was considering higher office. “I haven’t ruled out the possibility,” Ocasio-Cortez responded when asked if she would ever consider a presidential run. What about minority leader Sen. Chuck Schumer’s (D-N.Y.) seat? “Anything is possible at this juncture,” she replied.

When it comes to her reproductive choices, Ocasio-Cortez does not owe the public any explanations—full stop. Still, the timing of her fertility journey, specifically the way it dovetails with her intimations that she might seek higher office, has predictably inspired some petty criticisms, particularly from those on the right who disparage the disclosure of her personal decision as a calculating play for political virality. Others, like the conservative commentator Matt Walsh, appeared to assume the role of reproductive physician, arguing that at 36, she was already too old to consider having kids. “Totally backwards and ridiculous,” he wrote on social media. Then there were arguments, nearly all from men, that she should try to have kids naturally and soon—a wild claim that assumes so much of Ocasio-Cortez’s personal life.

But the most interesting responses came from the video’s unlikely supporters and defenders. “The same people who call themselves pro-family think a woman’s uterus has an expiration date they get to police,” said Newsmax political analyst Mehek Cooke, citing her own experience of having children later in life because her “body did not cooperate with her schedule.”

“If one woman wants to preserve her right to have children, which means more than having none—we should celebrate that,” Katie Miller, the right-wing podcaster and wife of Stephen Miller, wrote on X. “If she inspires other women to have babies, we should celebrate that.”

It would be shortsighted, if not downright asinine, to view Miller’s post as a kind of political evolution; she and her husband appear singularly obsessed with declining birth rates, a preoccupation that is by turns racist and hyperbolic, often blaming those rates on birth control and feminism. But in applauding Ocasio-Cortez, Miller and her ilk still revealed something significant: That at least with the issue of fertility, many are not in lockstep with staunch conservatives who see reproductive procedures like egg freezing as immoral. Indeed, they even appear to welcome more options for people struggling to have children.

Options. Aren’t they what Ocasio-Cortez may be exercising as she embarks on her fertility journey? By freezing her eggs, the congresswoman isn’t ruling out the possibility of having kids, much in the same way Ocasio-Cortez isn’t not thinking about the White House in this very moment either. In fact, it seems that for Ocasio-Cortez, the two potential futures—kids and higher office—braid together, because of course they do. That is not surprising for so many of us in the face of aging, careers, and prohibitively expensive fertility procedures. (For me, now the mother of one kid, the questions surrounding the next still loom profoundly.) Any anger from men on the right underscores how deeply ignorant they are about the acute challenges many people of reproductive age face in considering fertility and climbing professional ladders. And yes, that includes all the way up to the White House.

This story was originally published by Inside Climate News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

When Gerard Mullin decided to train in offshore wind, he didn’t know what to expect. But on his first long-term project in Massachusetts, he immediately relished the consistency of the work, the good pay, and the novelty of laboring at sea.

“I thought it was the best thing in the world,” he said.

In his first eight weeks working offshore, Mullin made more money than he had saved in the previous five years.

But the industry was on shaky ground. Mullin had his bags packed for five weeks offshore with Empire Wind in New York when President Donald Trump’s stop-work order last year stranded him at home in Boston. Trump—who had railed against the industry in his 2024 election campaign—halted all future permitting last year and canceled 12 offshore wind leases this spring and summer. 

Thousands of workers like Mullin who were promised steady, well-paying careers in offshore wind now find themselves racing to secure the few positions left or returning to their prior work. Meanwhile, the supply chain that emerged to support offshore development has been left adrift, including in towns in need of a promised economic boost.

Those are less-discussed consequences of the political turmoil besetting the domestic industry, said Elizabeth Wilson, a professor at Dartmouth College studying offshore wind. “All of the promises of economic development that offshore wind was supposed to help support have evaporated,” Wilson said.

For Mullin, the change was shocking.

“All of a sudden, the federal government is concerned with my work, and there’s nothing I can do to change how they view it,” Mullin said. “Now there are things completely outside of my control, changing how I make a living.”

Trump has long scorned offshore wind, calling the 2012 project he unsuccessfully opposed near one of his Scottish golf courses “disgusting and inappropriate.” His administration, which has inaccurately described renewables as costly and unreliable as it tries to block them in favor of climate-altering fossil fuels, said his offshore wind policies are good for the economy and workers.

“President Trump has delivered on his popular promise to reverse the Left’s costly Green New Scam to lower prices for families and businesses and strengthen our country’s energy security,” Taylor Rogers, a White House spokeswoman, said in a statement. “By prioritizing the production of reliable, affordable, and secure energy sources, the President has restored US energy dominance—creating thousands of good-paying energy jobs across the country.”

Tim Sullivan, who was CEO of the New Jersey Economic Development Authority until December, said he can’t comprehend the White House’s logic.

“It’s the strangest thing: I’ve spent 15 or so years working in public-sector economic development; I’ve never seen people cheering for job destruction, particularly elected officials,” he said.

As a pile driver, a specialized structural laborer essential to offshore wind projects, Mullin lived and worked on a ship five weeks at a time, followed by five weeks at home with his family. It was a schedule that suited him well. 

Mullin joined offshore wind projects across Massachusetts, Virginia, and New York. His employer, an international contractor, even brought him and other members of his union across the Atlantic for a wind project off the coast of Scotland. 

Now, Mullin is back to the same type of onshore construction work he did four years ago, before he started with wind. “The writing was on the wall that this idea that I’m going to go to the same ship, five weeks on, five weeks off, steady—that just isn’t the reality anymore,” Mullin said.

Joshua Grigsby, 42, took his son to Rio de Janeiro, Disney World, and SeaWorld. Natalie MacDonald, 26, stopped living paycheck to paycheck. Others bought homes and started families.

Inside Climate News spoke with over a dozen workers and union leaders who said the financial opportunities from the nascent US offshore wind industry had been unparalleled. They saw long-term careers ahead of them. They feel that opportunity slipping through their fingers.

Anthony Hibbard was on one of the first boats that carried ironworkers to Vineyard Wind, off the coast of Massachusetts. What he found was “financial freedom,” he said, and he worked his way up to become a foreman on Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind. 

After the Trump administration’s moves to scuttle the industry, Hibbard returned to local, onshore jobs in Portland, Maine, where he earns just one-fifth of what he did offshore.

“I make enough to get by, but I like to be smart with my money, and I don’t have the scope to continue being smart with it,” Hibbard said. “It’s definitely—you can feel the difference, that’s for sure.”

The loss of offshore wind has had financial consequences for many union workers. While many were paid the same per hour as jobs they could find onshore, they could work more than double the hours, and the company covered many living expenses. Grigsby made double to triple what he did onshore.

When Zaheer Razi, 28, joined the Piledrivers Local 56 union as a commercial diver, he transitioned into offshore wind as soon as he could. The logic was that it could be the anchor for people’s careers, he said—union leaders told workers to “set your roots down,” expecting over a decade of steady work.

He’s still working on Revolution Wind near Rhode Island, but he knows it won’t last.

“I’m probably one of the few guys that’s probably going to be working till mid-August, I believe, and then it’s really going to be silent for the next two or three years,” Razi said. “It is very frustrating, but it’s out of our control. Nobody could have really predicted it, but at this point, we’re just riding it out for what we can.”

Razi’s project is one of the five major US wind farms that appear to remain on track despite the political backlash. But they are nearing completion and the permitting pipeline is all but blocked, meaning construction jobs will soon evaporate, according to multiple experts and union leaders.

Kris Ohleth, director of the Special Initiative on Offshore Wind, a US policy think tank, attributed the lack of employment prospects to the political uncertainty that has stymied investor interest.

“We’ve trained them, we’ve given them this great experience, they’re building their futures for their families, and now they have no projects to work on,” Ohleth said of the offshore wind labor force, “and that’s because of the lack of market confidence.” 

At the time of Trump’s election, the market research firm BloombergNEF forecast that the United States would build 39 gigawatts of offshore wind by 2035, enough electricity to power 13 million homes. By the end of last year, the firm had downgraded that prediction to just 6 gigawatts, according to Harrison Sholler, a wind analyst at BNEF. 

For Garrison Biel, an offshore wind diver, the industry’s decline has meant there are close to no employment opportunities left. “They’re more gigs than jobs,” Biel said. “They’re like short hitches, trying to wrap things up, tidy everything up. So I know people that are still working, but it’s not like how it was the first couple of years when it started, where that’s all you needed to do.”

He switched back to commercial diving around eight months ago because “what was available left offshore was slim pickings,” he added.

Biel said the offshore wind industry was supposed to be reliable, with guaranteed time off to make up for the long periods away from home and the weeklong, 12-hour-per-day shifts.

“Now, everybody that’s doing it, they get off the boat after working seven-twelves for a couple of weeks and they go right back to work, because they don’t know if they’re ever going to go back out on a boat again,” he said.

Grigsby was able to buy a house with his money from offshore wind. His union’s business manager, John Dunderdale, said at least a dozen other members of Piledrivers Local 56 did the same.

When these projects disappear, “you’re taking away their means of bringing back into the community,” Dunderdale said. 

“Now you have a member sitting home, collecting unemployment, because there’s no work,” he added.

Benjamin Hawkins, who lives in Whitman, Massachusetts, said he made enough to upgrade his parents’ house and enjoy a new degree of “leverage” over his life.

“It’s heartbreaking, because you wonder about what’s going to happen in the future with your money,” Hawkins said.

He added: “Offshore wind was the reason I could improve that life, so to have the president affect my life, just as an average American—it was not on my bingo card.”

Offshore wind first began edging into the US energy market in 2011, decades after it had taken off in Europe. An Obama administration study that year predicted that a vibrant offshore wind industry could help meet the nation’s renewable energy needs while investing in infrastructure and creating “thousands of construction and operational jobs.”

The first US offshore wind farm, Block Island, came online near Rhode Island in 2016, and states began offering financial incentives to drive development. The Biden administration made offshore wind a central priority in 2021, and from there, state and federal agencies geared up for a boom. The federal government sold leases to major international energy companies that began to see the US as an attractive market, centered in the Northeast, Virginia, and California.

Construction and permitting began in force not long before Trump returned to office with a promise to kill offshore wind. “That’s like somebody working on skyscrapers, and then somebody saying, ‘We’re not allowed to build any skyscrapers,’” Biel said. “It’s just a kind of crazy thing.”

No comprehensive or exact estimate of offshore wind-related jobs exists, but New Jersey’s Economic Development Authority estimated in 2022 that a typical project creates around 1,000 construction jobs per year and 100 lifetime operational jobs. 

Dunderdale said shutting down any project at that size and scale is a “huge hit,” both for the workers and their local economies.

Central to the fledgling domestic industry was the growth of training and certification programs, primarily through community colleges and unions.

Millwrights Local 1121, which operates across New England, met with developers in 2021 to start offshore wind job training, which would cost $10,000 to $20,000 per person. It was worth it, said the union’s vice president and business manager, Andy Benedetto, because they had heard there would be “years’ and years’ worth of work.” 

“We invested millions of dollars in training, more or less, and lots of hours went into putting all this together, and now that work is dried up for the foreseeable future,” Benedetto said. “We hope not too long, but we built this whole workforce, and we sold this dream to our members that if they get involved and get the training and go on this first project, then they’re going to carry over for the next 10 years.”

His union wasn’t alone. Public and private investments poured in to develop the new workforce. New York, New Jersey, and Massachusetts led the Northeast with millions of dollars in grants to training and research programs.

Ironworkers Local 7, which operates across the Northeast, received $300,000 from Massachusetts in 2022 “to be ready for when the work comes,” said Grant Provost, the union’s Maine business agent. “And the work never really came.”

Dunderdale helped build the only US-based school with heavy-lift training for Piledrivers Local 56. In total, offshore wind training cost the union about $30,000 per person, which he said was “an investment in the member.”

Esther Rosario, executive director of the labor coalition Climate Jobs New York, said unions that spent years preparing for the offshore wind economy have to reassess their plans.

“We’re ready to work, we’re ready to build, we have the trained workforce—we need work,” Rosario said. “You can’t apprentice somebody into a job that doesn’t exist.”

Offshore wind was billed as a boon not just for the building trades but for the entire economy. Manufacturing would move to the United States and locals would fill those jobs. For port cities like Massachusetts’ Salem and New Bedford, or New Jersey’s Paulsboro, the loss has threatened years of expected economic progress.

In August 2025, Trump canceled a $34 million grant to build an offshore wind terminal in Salem, which Frank Callahan Jr., president of the Massachusetts Building Trades Unions, said at the time put 800 construction workers out of a job.

“It means fewer jobs, fewer career opportunities,” Callahan said in a recent interview. As an example of this loss, he pointed to Prysmian Group, an Italian manufacturer, abandoning plans in January 2025 for an offshore wind cable plant near New Bedford.

At one point, Salem County, New Jersey—one of the state’s poorest counties—was poised to gain 1,500 new jobs for its population of 65,000. 

“That’s a huge inflection point in that county’s economy that at this point is hard to see materializing any time soon,” said Sullivan, the former New Jersey official.

The thousands of offshore wind workers aren’t all suddenly unemployed. Most did some trade work before, and unions are used to moving members onto different projects when conditions shift.

Still, Provost, the Ironworkers business agent, said offshore wind is a huge dent in unions’ portfolio of opportunities.

“If we’re not building offshore wind, and we’re not building jobs like that, you got to get in on university- and state-funded projects, and that doesn’t keep everybody busy,” Provost said. “We’ve got a massive amount of unemployed people in Local 7 right now.”

And just because workers can transition doesn’t mean they want to. If he had a choice, Hawkins said, “I’d never work on land again.”

In addition to the financial opportunity, Razi said offshore wind was a once-in-a-lifetime experience. “We were meeting people from all over Europe, all over the world, and it was just a great environment to learn as somebody being in their mid-20s,” said Razi, who is finishing up an offshore diving job.

Living and working together consistently for weeks on end, crews became good friends, even vacationing together and learning each other’s languages. Hawkins joked that every rigger knew how to curse in at least three languages.

“It’s like being at the UN,” he said.

Benedetto said the millwrights he represents are eager to return to offshore wind, but they feel burned by political headwinds turning against them.

“They did a good job,” he said, “and they’re bummed out that they’re middle-class workers being used as pawns.”

Last November, Mullin’s building in Boston caught on fire, and he lost everything he owned. Six weeks later, he said, he was able to buy a condo near the city. “That would not have been possible without offshore wind,” he said.

Mullin said he wishes others, especially young people entering the trades for the first time, could have the opportunity he did.

“It’s just too bad because they were good jobs and people were happy with them,” he said. “And it really was just a fair day’s work for a fair day’s pay.”

The first thing to know about Cyberselfish, the chillingly prescient 2000 book about Silicon Valley that its author, Paulina Borsook, says “ruined my life” and caused a 25-year-long “curse” to befall her, is that it’s very, very funny. Cyberselfish, which Borsook cannot stand to name and instead calls “TDB” (short for “that damn book”), is a classic, fish-out-of-water tale of a journalist investigating a strange land. Except, in her case, as a California native, it’s the work of a fish regarding an invasive species that suddenly befouled the tank she’d been swimming in her whole life. 

Her observations from the murky milieu of the dawning tech world are as hilarious as they are depressing; early in the book, for instance, Borsook recounts what happened after she wrote a satirical guide for the website Suck.com on dating men in tech. (Do profess Ayn Rand fandom, “don’t tell him about your best friend, the urban planner, who uses HUD money to develop low-income housing.”) After the piece was published, emails cascaded into her inbox.

“Guys were positive that I had been writing about them,” Borsook wrote in Cyberselfish. “Or about someone they knew (I hadn’t written about anyone in particular). Guys wanted to meet me for coffee, as I was obviously their dream girl (it was a joke, guys, and no, thank you). At last! A woman who understands me! No, more modestly, I was just someone who had been paying attention.” 

Borsook, an author and poet, began working in Silicon Valley in 1981, first as a technical writer for software companies. As she freelanced for various tech outlets and from her perch as a contributing writer to Wired in its earliest years, she began to piece together, as she put it in Cyberselfish, “a picture of an emergent social and political subculture, one that can seem dangerously naive and, at its worst, downright scary.” 

Today, just a glance around will confirm that said subculture is no longer “emergent,” but horribly, frighteningly, society-destroyingly dominant. Fittingly, Cyberselfish will be reissued in the US on September 15 by Tin House, an imprint of the independent publisher Zando, and in the UK later in the month. The three-decade plus history of the book traces back through a piece she wrote for this very magazine where she began to lay out its thesis. That essay, also titled “Cyberselfish,” ran in our July/August 1996 issue below a crystal clear subhed: “Silicon Valley, one of the country’s biggest recipients of government largesse, would like to bite the hand that feeds it.” 

“No sector of society has benefited more and suffered less from the government than these guys,” Borsook, now 72, told me on a recent video call, reflecting on the central question that animated the essay. “So why are they so hostile to it?”

On the strength of that Mother Jones piece, Borsook was able to get a book deal—and that, she will tell you candidly, is when her troubles began. The manuscript was meant for Wired’s publishing imprint, but the deal fell through. The work was rejected by a second publisher after they’d bought it and paid her advance. “They killed the book,” Borsook says. “They said it didn’t have sufficient literary quality and wanted all their money back.” She was forced to repay them with money from Public Affairs, the publisher that eventually brought it to market. “I ended up being $65,000 in debt,” she says.  

While Cyberselfish made a splash upon its release and earned critical acclaim, its stridency and withering thesis also proved hard for some to swallow. It got a nuanced and tough review at Salon by a former Wired editor, Brad Wieners, who argued that some of its critiques of tech, and of the magazine where they both had worked, were outdated. “Borsook has us spend too much time coloring in a map of yesterday that does not correspond to today’s territory,” he wrote. Even a friend of Borsook’s, Elizabeth Weise, noted in her own review for USA Today that the book could be exhausting. “She is a ranter, (many friends suggested that Cyberselfish should just be called ‘Rant’),” Weise wrote, “who talks a mile a minute in sentences so encrusted with obscure cultural references that it’s often necessary to interrupt and ask for footnotes.”

Her critics could not dispute her brilliance. But as Borsook sees it, the book was both the height of her public profile and also the end of her professional life. “I cannot complain about the media arc,” she says. But, she adds, “It didn’t turn into anything and then I was never able to get anything published ever again, on tech or not-tech. A magazine article or a book. It was like some curse had been laid down on me. It was the weirdest damn thing.”

Financially, things got even worse. Eventually, she was evicted and lost almost everything she owned when she could no longer make payments on her storage unit. For several years, she only got by through free rent as a live-in host at an Airbnb owned by friends. Borsook has a permanent moderate traumatic brain injury from being shot, as she has put it, “accidentally on purpose” in the head as a teenager by a friend. While doing research for My Life as a Ghost, a 2013 performance and art installation about the incident, clinicians told Borsook, who had always believed her injury was mild, that it was better classified as moderate. “It was sort of a shock,” she explained to me by email, “and one of those moments telling me how much I didn’t want to identity as/admit to being disabled.”

Borsook also has severe chemical and scent sensitivities which date to childhood, but that she says doctors told her were probably worsened by the TBI. These factors make it difficult to find a suitable place to live, especially in housing-strapped Santa Cruz, where she’s long been based, or to work traditional office jobs; today, one of the things keeping her afloat is an ongoing GoFundMe a friend launched in 2024.  

“I felt ashamed for most of the last 25 years,” she says. The book, she came to believe, “was bad and I was ashamed. That’s how I walked around.” 

But decades later, after this cascade of misfortunes and a deeply internalized if unearned sense of chagrin, something changed. Through a series of events—which Borsook hastens to point out she had nothing to do with—the curse was at least partly lifted. In the last year, Cyberselfish received a new and respectful round of attention, helped along by the advocacy of fellow journalist and Nerd Reich author Gil Duran, who was disturbed and angry by Borsook’s erasure from tech history. In September 2025, he wrote a viral Bluesky post about what he termed a “mush-brained” Wired essay about selfishness in Silicon Valley that entirely ignored Borsook. The next month, Duran interviewed Borsook on his podcast.

The book’s new moment also has a lot to do with, frankly, how spooky some of the predictions are, many years on. Borsook saw clearly how the tech world’s contempt for government could turn into a desire to destroy it, something that’s come true with the destruction wrought by DOGE. She clocked how debilitating selfishness and blindness to privilege could turn into hatred for one’s neighbor, especially poor people on the streets of San Francisco and Palo Alto that the new tech glitterati had to walk by on their way to work. She also saw an obvious and worrisome gender essentialism emerging, specifically how awkwardness with women and a lack of success romantically was morphing into what Borsook called, in our conversation, “creepy socio-biological stupidity” and rank sexism. 

Now that Borsook’s worst and most apocalyptic visions have come true tenfold, people are ready to listen. She was featured in the New York Times last year, and a new profile by her old employer Wired, with whom, she writes in Cyberselfish, she often had a fraught working relationship, is in the works. (Her time at Wired, she has written, began happily, but was marked by a dawning realization that the magazine’s leadership was, as she saw it, sexist, not in their treatment of her, but “in their values and treatment of others.”) Last month, she sat for an interview on CNN, where she was hailed as the journalist “who saw today’s tech titans coming.”

“Totally Rip van Winkle all the time here,” Borsook told me recently by email. “Just confusing, as you can imagine.” 

In a foreword to the republished version, Duran writes that the 2000 book was “work of prophecy,” adding, “Like most products of that cursed genre, it contains a warning that was largely ignored at the time of its publication. The disastrous results of this oversight fill today’s headlines and pose an existential threat to freedom and democracy.” 

But Duran points out that despite this new round of respect and recognition, Borsook is still not in a stable place financially. “Paulina is looking at years of struggle,” he says. “She’s elderly and frail. It’s great this has brought some attention to her, but we all know that books aren’t going to take care of your financial problems. I hope we can continue to build and find ways to honor her work by making sure that she doesn’t have to suffer. Maybe one of these podcast millionaires can break off the dividends for the journalist who got it right.” 

Borsook does see another slim silver lining in what’s happened to her lately: “The reputational renaissance I’ve had, you usually get posthumously,” she says dryly. “At least I’m still alive.”

The genesis for Cyberselfish was a kind of queasy fascination, “mongoose-to-cobra style,” as Borsook put it in the book, with Silicon Valley’s emerging cultural dynamics. It was a place full of “technolibertarians” (a word she popularized) who considered any and all government regulation to be oppressive, but at the same time happily took government funding—and lots of it. They went to Burning Man, they loved shooting guns, and they were likely to use some variant of the word “pagan” to describe their spiritual beliefs. They were often men who were very unskilled in dealing with women, and they were, as Borsook wrote, not deeply rooted in the places where they physically made their homes. 

“Silicon Valley companies and executives and workers may identify themselves not with where they actually live and work and go to movies and send their kids to school but, more saliently, as members of a high tech archipelago,” the book explained. They were also—and here we feel the ground shake ominously, a slight shifting under our feet that presages a future, devastating earthquake—not very involved or very interested in politics: local, state, or federal. 

The new Silicon Valley ruling class was so disconnected from government, in fact, that they didn’t seem to have a great understanding of why it existed at all, or how it might benefit them. Cyberselfish recounted a telling conversation Borsook had while spending a week at the “plushy Lake Tahoe getaway of a Silicon Valley guy who’s made it.”

“He complained,” Borsook wrote, “about how the local Tahoe building code wouldn’t let him alter the silhouette of his megachalet. I nodded sympathetically, yet pointed out that in Los Angeles, where there were no such planning guidelines until recently, plutocrats often tore down existing structures and rebuilt monstrosities that take up the entire lot, blocking their neighbors’ views.” In response, Borsook’s friend looked at her in puzzlement; the consequences of deregulation were quite literally something he never considered.

“He had never heard of the tragedy of the commons, where one sheep too many consuming more than its share of common resources destroys the whole,” Borsook wrote, “nor had he thought much about what participating in a community means.” 

One of the unique strengths of Cyberselfish is that Borsook wasn’t just living and working among the emerging tech elite, but trying to date within it too. As Borsook experienced in spades, people often show themselves, unintentionally, in very revealing ways in romantic contexts. The book recounts a startling and depressing first date with a guy with a bungalow in Palo Alto and the world at his feet. It was a beautiful spring afternoon in the late ‘80s, and he picked her up in his BMW. She told him about living in Manhattan during the stock market crash of 1987 and seeing a young Black man panhandling with a sign that read “I need money to go home to North Carolina to get some food.” Borsook had been struck by this, a perfect distillation of how “hard and heartless” she’d found New York. In response, her date looked over from the steering wheel and sniped, “A long way to go for groceries, don’t you think?” 

“I was stunned,” Borsook wrote in the book. “This from a guy who’d been a scholarship boy himself, who’d traveled all over the world in rough and not cruise-line conditions. His reaction was my first encounter with the strange lack of philos in high tech.”

“My mother used to give me no end of grief,” Borsook told me, over how she was unable to find a boyfriend even in such a male-dominated culture. “I used to say, ‘I can’t find anyone I relate to.’” 

Borsook is not the person to talk to if you are looking to feel better about today’s tech bigwigs. She has a visceral disgust for Elon Musk and calls Peter Thiel “the Antichrist, as far as I’m concerned.”

Some of the technolibertarians of early Silicon Valley were laced with cyberpunk ideas like a disdain for national borders, an interest in freedom in all its forms, and a love for drugs. “Many people agreed with decriminalizing psychedelics or had unusual dealings in their intimate lives,” Borsook recalls. (The book uses the term “nerverts” to talk about computer nerds who engaged in then-more-uncommon sexual practices like polyamory and BDSM.) But as such instincts combined with a love of the free market and reflexive disdain for government regulation, it cohered into something approaching a religious belief. Today the leadership class of modern-day Silicon Valley is simply dominated by cultural and religious conservatism. 

DOGE under Musk created conditions that even Borsook couldn’t have dreamed of, along with what she calls “the appalling collusion of Trump with the big tech companies.” She’s particularly struck by the irony of DOGE stripping away funding and protection for national parks. “They live in California with all this great natural beauty,” she says, impatiently. “How do you think that got preserved?”  

“I don’t celebrate Steve Jobs, but he’d be rolling in his grave,” she adds. She’s also disturbed by how transphobic the titans of the tech world have become, pointing out that trans people have always been present in Silicon Valley: “It’s really weird. They’re all obsessed with a stupid, kind of retrograde idea of gender and masculinity.”

Borsook is also worried by the tech world’s messianic vision in of AI, their conviction that it will solve every problem. “We’re living in the effects of the casino economy,” she says. “Until that changes, how are we going to change Silicon Valley? If there’s a big crash in AI, that may give us a real corrective. Because it’s all made of papier-mache and spit.” But in her reflexive drive to understand how people use tech, she is interested in how many ordinary people are using AI chatbots to confide in, as an alternative to therapy or human confidantes. She’s reminded of the ELIZA experiment in the 1960s, which simulated conversation with a psychotherapist using tools like pattern-matching.

“Some people are so much more comfortable with [AI]. But why would I rather talk to this than a friend, or a boyfriend, or a therapist?” Borsook asks. “AI bores me.”

It’s common with prophets to ask them to predict the future, or show us the way to a better tomorrow. In the closing moments of my conversation with Borsook, I can’t resist the impulse to do so. When I tell her that I’m struggling with a certain, say, overwhelming sense of pessimism and despair lately, she doesn’t disagree. “I tend to be a Debbie Downer,” she says, with a laugh. Because she’s a writer and not a tech activist, “I tend not to be prescriptive on how I think about the world.”

“There’s so much fear right now around making a living,” Borsook adds, including among people in the industry. “How do you channel the fear into something productive? I don’t have an answer for you, but I think there are a lot of people who could find common cause who wouldn’t have in the past.” In the end, and despite what the isolationists of the tech and politics world might have to tell us, and whether we like it or not, she adds, “We’re all in this together.”

When President Donald Trump takes flight on Marine One from the White House, he often gets a bird’s-eye view of a municipal golf course located at East Potomac Park, a national park better known to locals as Hains Point. Perhaps the flyovers inspired his recent ambitions to transform the beloved local links into a world-class golf course worthy of PGA tournaments.

Trump recently said construction on the new course will begin September 1. But his aerial view of this particular building site may obscure one of the park’s key features: Its water hazard. 

Water from the Potomac River floods its sidewalks and drowned the city’s dreams of a modern swimming facility. Now, it threatens to wash out Trump’s golf fantasy and leave behind a disaster that will make the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool look like a minor embarrassment.

The “builder in chief” first publicly mused in May about remaking the East Potomac links. A month later, he toured the site with golf course designer Tom Fazio and announced on Truth Social that after “studying the dilapidated, worn out, and very dangerous and outdated Golf Course known as East Potomac Golf Links” he had concluded that “on this fantastic site, with water and unparalleled views of DC’s Monuments, we will build one of the Greatest Golf Courses anywhere in the World.”

In June, Fazio told Golf.com that Trump would move quickly to complete the course before he leaves office. “The president happens to be a guy of action,” Fazio said. “He wants to get it done now.”

Of course, any local with a fishing pole could have pointed out the glaringly obvious flaw in his plans. “Let’s be honest,” says Rebecca Miller, executive director of the DC Preservation League, which has sued the Trump administration over its plans for the golf course. “The island is sinking.”

The US Army Corps of Engineers created the 330-acre East Potomac Park in the late 19^th century from a hodgepodge of material dredged up from the bottom of the Potomac River to widen shipping channels around the city. In 1897, Congress declared the artificial island a public park that would be “forever held and used for recreation and the pleasure of the people.” In 1917, park officials hired the legendary architect Walter Travis to design a public golf course, which opened in 1920. It was wildly popular, and in 1973, it was listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Unlike the excess of cost and amenities at Trump’s private courses, golf at the no-frills East Potomac is cheap—an 18-hole round on the blue course costs as little as $41, less for kids, veterans, and seniors. In 2025, people played more than 125,000 rounds of golf at the municipal facility. It’s not the sort of course Trump would ever actually play. But the park’s tantalizing views of Washington’s monuments and undeveloped riverfront must seem like so much wasted potential to the billionaire developer.

The environmental realities of East Potomac, however, present some major obstacles for fulfilling Trump’s vision. Ed Stierli, Vice President of Government Affairs at the National Parks Conservation Association, says when he saw the early renderings of Trump’s course, “One of the first questions I had was: Are they completely ignoring the landscape here?”

The simple answer is yes. Much of East Potomac lies at sea level within a 100-year floodplain, and various studies have found that the artificial island has sunk at least five feet since its inception. Meanwhile, the water level around it has risen more than two feet thanks to climate change and other contributors. Today, it’s not uncommon for the river to top the seawall and come up 25 feet inland after a big storm or high tide, leaving picnic tables marooned like rafts on a small lake. (The National Park Service did not respond to a request for comment for this story.)

“Good grief,” said Mark Mungeam, the president of the American Society of Golf Course Architects, who is familiar with Trump’s plans but was unaware of the extent of the sinking. “That speaks to the folly of this project.”

In June, I biked down to East Potomac to meet DC resident Alex Rosen, who recently founded the community group Save East Po to fight Trump’s golf course. While we talked, the sidewalk flooded as the tide came in. “There’ve been instances of where I’ve been cycling here, and you have to turn around right at the tip [of the peninsula] because there’s literally no way to get through the water,” Rosen said. “It’s a common occurrence.”

The regular flooding, along with years of underfunding and neglect by Congress, has taken its toll. The nearly 150-year-old seawall that surrounds East Potomac Park is crumbling. The sidewalk that runs around the perimeter of the 2-mile-long peninsula is in many places falling into the river and has been fenced off— unusable.

For years, Republicans in Congress have starved all national parks for funding, creating a backlog of more than $2 billion in needed repairs just in DC. But in 2020, it passed the Great American Outdoors Act to try to address the neglect. Even the $500 million the bill allocated for projects related to the National Mall ahead of America 250, though, wasn’t enough to save East Potomac Park from being swallowed up by the river.

In 2011, the National Park Service commissioned a geotechnical study to investigate repairing the East Potomac seawall. It concluded that the project would require sinking new footings down as much as 10 feet into the river and possibly more than 100 feet into the bedrock below all along the park’s more than three-mile-long perimeter. It was going to cost “millions of dollars per foot—not miles, per foot,” says Kym Hall, the former National Capitol Area director at the National Park Service who was involved in the discussions. “It is an astronomical amount of money.”

Instead, the Park Service used the new funding to shore up the seawall around the Tidal Basin to protect the Jefferson Memorial and the famous cherry trees, as well as part of nearby West Potomac Park. But Hall says that even with the new appropriation, NPS could afford to fix only part of the Tidal Basin, which is less than a third of the size of East Potomac Park. After years of careful planning the Tidal Basin restoration still cost $113 million and took two years of construction.

To do what Trump wants to do at East Potomac, “They would also have to address the seawall,” says Stierli, who notes that conservation and park advocates have long been in favor of fixing it. “Unfortunately, what’s moving forward here is almost a replica of the type of thinking we’re seeing with the Reflecting Pool: An administration ignoring climate, ignoring science, ignoring the Park Service’s own plans.” He notes that the administration has fired most of the scientists who’ve worked on East Potomac. Trump is just “charging ahead, completely detached from the reality of this site and its landscape.”

It’s not just flooding that threatens Trump’s vision for East Potomac. “Hains Point is basically an artificial piece of land made up of dredgings and other waste soils, and with a very high water table,” says Peter Feldman, a hydrologist who did a stint at EPA working on the Superfund program. Putting a golf course there, he says, “would seem to be a poor idea generally.”

The DC government learned the hard way what sort of hazards lie below the surface of the artificial landmass. In 1936, East Potomac Park gained an outdoor swimming pool, with an attendant pool house that was renovated in the 1970s. Eventually, the National Park Service contracted with the DC government to take over its management. Former DC mayor Adrian Fenty even trained for triathlons in the only outdoor Olympic-size facility in the city. His administration famously installed a heater so that it could be used long after the rest of the city’s outdoor pools had closed for the season.

In 2014, the city decided that the time had come to upgrade the aging facility. Officials envisioned a state-of-the-art competitive aquatics facility that would include spectator seating and diving platforms, plus a renovated pool house. Preliminary engineering studies had warned that construction would be challenging. Just taking soil samples became an ordeal as boring holes quickly flooded.

“You can think of it like a sponge, or [like when] my wife gets out of the shower and leaves our bath mat completely soaked. It looks fine on the surface but once I start walking over it, the water all comes up,” Daniel Spielvogel, an engineer who co-authored a study on the site, would later explain at a contract dispute hearing. “It moves around. It squirts out on the floor. Those are the disturbance-sensitive soils that we want to avoid.”

Nonetheless, construction began in 2018, and almost immediately ran into trouble. Excavating the century-old site proved to be more like an archeological dig than a building project. Undocumented sewer, water, and electrical lines gummed up the works. An ancient pipe that flushed water from the pool into the Potomac River swamped the site along with groundwater that was not, as the contractor assumed, seven or 10 feet down, but just below the surface at roughly the same elevation as the river.

Workers installed sump pumps, only to see them swallowed up by the soupy soils that frequently caved in and threatened workers’ safety. When Spielvogel visited the site in September 2018, he found a “disgusting mess” of “muddy trenches and open excavations.” Things did not improve, and in 2020, the DC government cut its losses and, citing “significant flood risks,” abandoned the whole project. The site was filled in, and litigation ensued.

Ultimately, the city lost $14 million in taxpayer money, and residents lost an outdoor pool that had been in operation for almost 100 years. Today, all that’s left is a weedy lot, a monument to the risks of ignoring the realities of nature.

If Trump has a vague understanding that water and soil problems might be an issue for his championship golf course plans, his solution is not reassuring.

In October 2025, Trump shocked the country by demolishing part of the White House to build a ballroom. While discussing the project with the president, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum suggested using the East Wing debris to elevate the new golf course. “Trump told Burgum he thought the idea was brilliant,” the Wall Street Journal reported.

The administration began depositing some 30,000 cubic yards of White House rubble full of rebar, plaster, lead paint and asbestos between the fourth and ninth holes of the existing East Potomac golf course. Aside from the obvious environmental concerns, as a practical matter, covering East Potomac Park in White House wreckage is unlikely to solve its flooding issues. “I think they’re going to need a lot more soil than that,” says Mungeam. “That’s just a tiny amount of what would be needed to build a championship golf course.”  

Here’s why: East Potomac Park is built on “hydraulic fill,” which is both too soft and too weak to support much vertical construction, like for restaurants or clubhouses. If new fill is put down too quickly, or if it’s too heavy, it can cause the existing land to slide or settle, and the site can take years to stabilize.

High groundwater will likely exacerbate the problem, as will climate change. Like Washington, DC, itself, East Potomac faces extreme vulnerability to storm surges from hurricanes, particularly as the sea level rises. The US Army Corps of Engineers expects the Potomac River to rise more than three feet by 2080. Not even tearing down the rest of the White House would likely yield enough material to create a PGA-caliber playing surface on Hains Point.

The existing East Potomac golf course is basically flat, making it perfect for beginning and amateur players. But championship courses require such technical features as deep bunkers, water hazards, and dramatic slopes. Because of the park’s high water table, the only way Trump could create those sorts of enhancements is to bring in tons of new fill to pile on top of the existing land mass, which only will create more problems.

The result of all the earthmoving and extensive heavy truck traffic needed to bring in so much fill would compact the existing weak soil, and lay the foundation for future drainage issues, Mungeam says. And simply filling in the flood plain won’t end the course’s water wars. When golf course designers fill in a flood plain like the one at East Potomac, he says they’re required to create a new one to equalize the water.

If Trump’s hasty and ill-conceived construction fills in too much of East Potomac Park, the chronic flooding will simply move elsewhere—perhaps to nearby parts of the National Mall, such as the Jefferson Memorial, where taxpayers just spent more than $100 million rebuilding the seawall. The water, Mungeam explains, “has to go somewhere.”

Like so many of Trump’s monomaniacal plans to make over DC without any public input, much less expert guidance, his golf course takeover triggered a lawsuit. In February, local golfers and the DC Preservation League asked a judge to block the administration from pursuing any further action at East Potomac until it had complied with various environmental reviews and procedural requirements. In May, the plaintiffs went to court to request an emergency injunction after reports that the administration planned to close the course immediately and start renovations.

US District Court Judge Ana Reyes declined to issue an injunction barring further work on the golf course. But she, too, was suspicious about Trump’s intentions. In early July, Reyes ordered the administration to come up with a plan to regularly update the court on its plans before “the bulldozers are starting. I don’t want another demolished East Wing,” she warned. “I don’t want another demolished Reflecting Pool.”

Even with court oversight, opponents of Trump’s golf course worry that if Trump is allowed to move forward with the golf course construction, the whole park will go the way of the old swimming pool.

“My fear,” says Save East Po’s Alex Rosen, is that  “they will dig a bunch of plumbing, they will move a ton of earth, and they will make a bunch of changes before realizing ‘oh, the water table here is actually pretty high.’” If that happens, he predicts, the administration will “throw their hands up and say ‘oops, our bad’” and leave behind a big, expensive mess that renders East Potomac unusable long after Trump leaves office.

At the same time, Rosen and other park lovers acknowledge that Trump is right about one thing: As with the crumbling seawall, the existing East Potomac golf course has long needed some TLC. But careful upgrades were already in the works before Trump got involved.

In 2019, the National Park Service signed a 50-year lease with the nonprofit National Links Trust that included a plan to rehab East Potomac. Legendary course designer Tom Doak was working pro bono, with community input, to preserve the essential character of the municipal course originally conceived by Walter Travis back in 1917. But in December, the Trump administration abruptly cancelled the lease.

“This is a municipal site,” says the DC Preservation League’s Miller. “This is not Pebble Beach, and it doesn’t need to be.”