I Trusted Jeff Bezos. The Joke’s on Me.; The New York Times, February 14, 2026

 Lydia Polgreen, The New York Times; I Trusted Jeff Bezos. The Joke’s on Me.

"At the end of the century, a journalism scholar published a fascinating comparative study of regional newspapers in the early 1960s and the late 1990s. “Papers of the 1960s seem naïvely trusting of government, shamelessly boosterish, unembarrassedly hokey and obliging,” Carl Sessions Stepp, the researcher, wrote. Newspapers of the ’90s were “better written, better looking, better organized, more responsible, less sensational, less sexist and racist and more informative and public-spirited.”

This sounds, you might think, salutary for the health of democracy. But it may have been precisely this move, away from deferential stenography and toward fearless investigation, that led to declining trust in the news media. Aggressive, probing and accountability-oriented journalism held up a mirror to American society — and many Americans didn’t like what they saw.

“As news grew more negative and more critical, people had more reason to find journalism distasteful,” the media scholar Michael Schudson wrote in a provocative essay on the problem of assessing trust in journalism. “What people do not like about the media is its implicit or explicit criticism of their heroes or their home teams.” No one, famously, likes the bearer of bad news.

Thinking back to that dinner with Bezos, I realized that something similar had happened. He flattered my chosen profession, reassuring me that it was not a cynical undertaking but something much more noble. He told me, in short, what I wanted to hear — and won my trust. In the intervening years, Bezos has apparently decided that his flattery is better aimed at a very different audience: Donald Trump.

During the 2024 presidential campaign, Bezos notoriously demanded that The Post spike its planned endorsement of Kamala Harris, at great cost to the paper. After the election, he donated $1 million to Trump’s inaugural committee and joined the row of plutocrats at the inauguration. Amazon paid $40 million for the rights to a documentary about Melania Trump, spent tens of millions more to market the movie and donated to Trump’s absurd White House mega-ballroom project. It’s certainly one way to win trust.

The Post’s loss is others’ gain. Its best-known journalists have streamed out the door, joining thriving news organizations like The Atlantic, The Wall Street Journal and The Times. These companies’ success, built on aggressive and independent reporting, makes me wonder whether the hand-wringing about trust is misplaced. In this new gilded age, maybe we should set aside trust and — as Bezos himself once urged — embrace skepticism."

The Infrastructure of Jeffrey Epstein’s Power; The New York Times, February 13, 2026

 Ezra Klein,

Produced by Jack McCordick

, The New York Times; The Infrastructure of Jeffrey Epstein’s Power

"At the end of January, President Trump’s Justice Department released what it said was the last tranche of the Jeffrey Epstein files: millions of emails and texts, F.B.I. documents and court records.

It’s a huge dump of information. Journalists, investigators and the public are sifting through them. What’s amazing, though, is how much we still don’t know — or at least don’t know yet.

Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, who was Trump’s personal lawyer before he joined the Justice Department, has said that investigators identified six million “potentially responsive” pages but released only about three and a half million pages to the public. So what’s in the two and a half million pages that haven’t been released?...

What has come into clear view is the infrastructure of Epstein’s power — and maybe through that the infrastructure of elite networks more generally.

Anand Giridharadas is a journalist who has written for The New York Times, The New Yorker and many other outlets. He publishes the great newsletter The.Ink and is the author of, among other books, “Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World,” which he published in 2018, and the forthcoming “Man in the Mirror: Hope, Struggle and Belonging in an American City.”

I often think of his work as a kind of sociology of American elites and power, and that has been the perspective he has brought to his coverage of these files. I think it is revelatory and worth hearing.

Note: This conversation was recorded on Tuesday, Feb. 10. On Thursday, Feb. 12, Kathryn Ruemmler announced she would be resigning from her role as chief legal officer and general counsel at Goldman Sachs."

Trump’s family is embroiled in a $500m UAE scandal. We’ve hardly noticed; The Guardian, February 6, 2026

Mohamad Bazzi, The Guardian ; Trump’s family is embroiled in a $500m UAE scandal. We’ve hardly noticed

"Days before Donald Trump returned to office in January 2025, an investment firm controlled by a senior member of the United Arab Emirates royal family secretly signed a deal to pay $500m to buy almost half of a cryptocurrency startup founded by the Trump family. Under any other president, such an arrangement, which was revealedthis past weekend by the Wall Street Journal, would cause a political earthquake in Washington. There would be demands for an investigation by Congress, televised hearings and months of damage control.

But this latest example of corruption involving Trump and his family business hardly made a blip over the past few days, relegated to a passing headline in a relentless news cycle often dominated by Trump’s actions and statements.

This scandal deserves our attention: a half-billion-dollar transaction with a foreign government official, executed in the shadow of Trump’s inauguration, which directly enriched the president and his family. The deal to acquire a 49% stake in World Liberty Financial, the crypto companyfounded by the Trump family and several allies in the fall of 2024 during Trump’s presidential campaign, was backed by Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, one of the most powerful officials in the UAE. Known as the “spy sheikh”, Tahnoon is the brother of the UAE’s president and serves as national security adviser. He also oversees one of the largest investment empires in the world, serving as chair of two Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth funds, which have $1.5tn in assets, and G42, a firm focused on artificial intelligence.

It’s dizzying to keep up with the ways that Trump has monetized the presidency and used it for personal profit in his second term. The Trump Organization, run by the president’s sons, has negotiated foreign real estate deals worth billions of dollars, some of which involve private companies backed by governments of the three wealthiest Arab petrostates: Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the UAE. In May, as Trump prepared to visit the Middle East, Qatar’s government donated a $400m luxury Boeing jet, which is being refitted by the US military so Trump can use it as Air Force One. It was probably the most expensive gift from a foreign government in US history – and Trump has said the plane will be transferred to his presidential library when his term ends in 2029, meaning he could still use it after he leaves the White House."

'Spy Sheikh’ Bought Secret Stake in Trump Company; Wall Street Journal, January 31, 2026

Sam Kessler,  Rebecca Ballhaus, Eliot Brown, and Angus Berwick, Wall Street Journal; 'Spy Sheikh’ Bought Secret Stake in Trump Company

"Four days before Donald Trump’s inauguration last year, lieutenants to an Abu Dhabi royal secretly signed a deal with the Trump family to purchase a 49% stake in their fledgling cryptocurrency venture for half a billion dollars, according to company documents and people familiar with the matter. The buyers would pay half up front, steering $187 million to Trump family entities."

How the Supreme Court Secretly Made Itself Even More Secretive; The New York Times, February 2, 2026

Jodi Kantor, The New York Times ; How the Supreme Court Secretly Made Itself Even More Secretive

Amid calls to increase transparency and revelations about the court’s inner workings, the chief justice imposed nondisclosure agreements on clerks and employees.

"n November of 2024, two weeks after voters returned President Donald Trump to office, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. summoned employees of the U.S. Supreme Court for an unusual announcement. Facing them in a grand conference room beneath ornate chandeliers, he requested they each sign a nondisclosure agreement promising to keep the court’s inner workings secret.

The chief justice acted after a series of unusual leaks of internal court documents, most notably of the decision overturning the right to abortion, and news reports about ethical lapses by the justices. Trust in the institution was languishing at a historic low. Debate was intensifying over whether the black box institution should be more transparent.

Instead, the chief justice tightened the court’s hold on information.Its employees have long been expected to stay silent about what they witness behind the scenes. But starting that autumn, in a move that has not been previously reported, the chief justice converted what was once a norm into a formal contract, according to five people familiar with the shift."

‘What Happened?’ When Ethics Erode; The Signal, Santa Clarita Valley, January 25, 2026

David Hegg , The Signal, Santa Clarita Valley ; ‘What Happened?’ When Ethics Erode

"“How did that happen?” I find myself asking that question far too often these days. How did a good guy get involved in illegal activity? How did a great company forget its moorings and slide into unethical behavior? How did an honored university get carried away from its foundations by the current of culture? And how did incivility, vile insults and threats, and outright lies become such a staple in our national discourse?   

To find an answer, I started thinking about the times in my own life when I ended up being and doing things I never intended, making assertions and behaving in ways I knew, down deep, weren’t best or even right. Here’s what I found...

As we look at our own lives and those on the national scene, it is evident that America needs an ethical revolution. We must demand better of ourselves and our leaders. We need to fight a two-front war on ethical erosion with the weapons of truth, civility, and love of neighbor. We must oppose the notion that truth is relative, and everyone gets to decide what is true for themselves. We must reject incivility in all its forms, and remind ourselves that listening is a virtue, tolerance is essential, and robust discourse, including civil disagreement, is required if a pluralistic society is to remain both free and united."

Can James Talarico Reclaim Christianity for the Left?; The New York Times, The Ezra Klein Show, January 13, 2026

Ezra Klein

Produced by Marie Cascione,

The New York Times, The Ezra Klein Show; Can James Talarico Reclaim Christianity for the Left?

"One of my obsessions over the last few years has been the role of attention in modern American politics: the way attention is a fundamental currency, the way it works differently than it did at other times when it was controlled by newspaper editorial boards. So I’ve been particularly interested in politicians who seem native to this attentional era, who seem to have figured something out.

We’ve talked a lot about how the Trump administration uses attention, how Zohran Mamdani uses attention. But somebody who has been breaking through over the past year in a very interesting way is James Talarico, a state representative from Texas.

Talarico is a little bit unusual for a Democrat. He’s a very forthright Christian politician. He roots his politics very fundamentally in a way you don’t often hear from Democrats in his faith.

Archival clip of James Talarico: Because there is no love of God without love of neighbor.

But Talarico began emerging as somebody who was breaking through on TikTok, Instagram and viral videos where he would talk about whether or not the Ten Commandments should be posted in schools, as a bill had proposed:

Archival clip of Talarico: This bill, to me, is not only unconstitutional, it’s not only un-American, I think it is also deeply un-Christian.

And the ways in which the Bible’s emphasis on helping the poor and the needy had been perverted by those who wanted to use religion as a tool of power and even greed:

Archival clip of Talarico: Jesus liberates, Christian nationalism controls. Jesus saves, Christian nationalism kills.

What was really surprising to many people is that he ended up on Joe Rogan’s podcast — the first significant Democrat that Rogan seemed interested in, in a very long time.

Archival clip of Joe Rogan: You need to run for president. [Laughter]. Because we need someone who’s actually a good person.

Now Talarico is running for Senate in Texas. He’s running in a primary with Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett for what will be one of the most important Senate elections in the country.

So I wanted to have Talarico on the show to talk to him about his faith, his politics and the way those two have come together in this attentional moment to allow him to say things in a language and within a framework that people seem to really want to hear, that people seem hungry for: a language of morality, and even of faith, at a time of incredible cruelty. And at a time when the radicalism of faith seems to have been perverted by the corruption of politics...

I think as somebody who is outside Christianity, and as such, is always a little bit astonished by the radicalism of the text and the strangeness of it — God incarnated in a human being, that human being is tortured and murdered and rises again as a lesson in mercy and forgiveness and transcendence. There’s all manner of violence I’m doing to the story there. And the structure of the New Testament, to me, is: Jesus goes to one outcast member of society after another.

Then I look up into this administration, in particular, and I see people who are incredibly loud in their Christianity and also incredibly cruel in their politics. Put aside the question of what borders you think a nation must have — you can enforce that border in all manner of ways without treating people who are coming here to escape violence or to better their family’s life cruelly.

You can do it without the memes we see them make on social media of a cartoon immigrant weeping as she’s being deported. Of the A.S.M.R. video of migrants shackled to one another, dragging their chains, with the implication being that the sound of that should soothe you.

It is the ability to insist on your allegiance to such a radical religion, and then treat other human beings with such, genuinely, to me, unmitigated cruelty that I actually find hard, at a soul level, to reconcile.

Scripture says you can’t love God and hate other people. That’s in John 1. You can’t love God and abuse the immigrant. You can’t love God and oppress the poor. You can’t love God and bully the outcast. We spend so much time looking for God out there that we miss God in the person sitting right next to us, in that neighbor who bears the divine image. In the face of a neighbor, we glimpse the face of God.

The Commandment to love God and love thy neighbor is not from Christianity — it is from Judaism. And all Jesus is clarifying, as a kind of radical rabbi, is that your neighbor is the person you love the least.

The parable of the good Samaritan may be the most famous of Jesus’ parables. I think we forget in our modern context how shocking it was. Because today, being a good Samaritan just means helping people to the side of the road — which is good, you should do that. But for listeners in the first century, the Samaritans were not just a different religious group. The Samaritans were their sworn enemies.

And so he is pushing the boundaries on how we define “neighbor” and who we’re supposed to love.

Loving our enemies? Again, it has become trite in a culture dominated by Christianity, but none of us actually do that. None of us actually loves our enemies, even if we say we try to. So yes, I share the same revulsion: that Christians in the halls of power are blatantly violating the teachings of Christianity on a daily basis and hurting our neighbors in the process."

How Machado Lost Her Chance to Lead Venezuela; The New York Times, January 8, 2026

Francisco Rodríguez, The New York Times; How Machado Lost Her Chance to Lead Venezuela

[Kip Currier: The excerpt below, from this trenchant New York Times piece on Trump's intentions for Venezuela, uncovers the Mafia-esque corruption and transactional foreign policy that epitomizes Trump 2.0.]

[Excerpt]

"When the Trump administration made the decision to carry out a surgical operation to extract Mr. Maduro instead of occupying the country, it also chose, at least in the short term, to work with a state structure designed and run by supporters of Mr. Maduro and his predecessor Hugo Chávez. Ms. Machado, who describes that structure as a mafia, is simply not a figure who can coexist with those institutions."

Trump Is Getting Weaker, and the Resistance Is Getting Stronger; The New York Times, December 26, 2025

MICHELLE GOLDBERG, The New York Times; Trump Is Getting Weaker, and the Resistance Is Getting Stronger

"It has been a gruesome year for those who see Donald Trump’s kakistocracy clearly. He returned to office newly emboldened, surrounded by obsequious tech barons, seemingly in command of not just the country but also the zeitgeist. Since then, it’s been a parade of nightmares — armed men in balaclavas on the streets, migrants sent to a torture prison in El Salvador, corruption on a scale undreamed of by even the gaudiest third-world dictators and the shocking capitulation by many leaders in business, law, media and academia. Trying to wrap one’s mind around the scale of civic destruction wrought in just 11 months stretches the limits of the imagination, like conceptualizing light-years or black holes.

And yet, as 2025 limps toward its end, there are reasons to be hopeful...

While Trump “has been able to do extraordinary damage that will have generational effects, he has not successfully consolidated power,” said Leah Greenberg, a founder of the resistance group Indivisible. “That has been staved off, and it has been staved off not, frankly, due to the efforts of pretty much anyone in elite institutions or political leadership but due to the efforts of regular people declining to go along with fascism.”"

‘Your Country Will Ultimately Get This Right’: Rachel Maddow on How the U.S. Will Move On From the Trump Era; Time, December 1, 2025

Philip Elliott, Time ; ‘Your Country Will Ultimately Get This Right’: Rachel Maddow on How the U.S. Will Move On From the Trump Era

"TIME spoke by phone last week with Maddow from her home in Western Massachusetts about her latest project, the MSNBC reboot, and how history can inform—but not save—the Resistance...

Doing the right thing doesn't always pay off in the short run, but your country will ultimately get this right. The good guys will be rewarded and the bad guys will be punished or forgotten. Having faith in those kinds of moral outcomes is really a nice guiding light to have in dark times like these...

How has your thinking about your specific role in the media environment changed since Trump 1.0? Has it changed? 

I was waving a lot of warning flags in Trump 1.0 about what could be going on and how we should see the risk of the kind of government Trump was trying to impose. 

Now, we're there. There's no use in warning anymore. We've got masked, totally unaccountable secret police grabbing women out of daycares and building prison camps everywhere. In less than a year, the President has stuffed multiple billions of dollars into his own pockets, into those of his family. He has literally torn down the White House. We're no longer at the point where we need to be warned about what's coming. We're now at a point where what we need is understanding what's going on, knowing what our options are in terms of how to preserve our democracy, to make sure that we're not going to be the generation that lost the republic."

The Ex-President Whom Trump Plans to Pardon Flooded America With Cocaine; The New York Times, November 29, 2025

Santul NerkarAnnie Correal and Colin Moynihan , The New York Times; The Ex-President Whom Trump Plans to Pardon Flooded America With Cocaine

[Kip Currier: For any wondering how and why this individual could or would be pardoned by Donald Trump right now, read the full New York Times article and especially the excerpts below...

Corruption, Conspiracy Theories, and Self-Projection.]

[Excerpt]

"He once boasted that he would “stuff the drugs up the gringos’ noses.” He accepted a $1 million bribe from El Chapo to allow cocaine shipments to pass through Honduras. A man was killed in prison to protect him.

At the federal trial of Juan Orlando Hernández in New York, testimony and evidence showed how the former president maintained Honduras as a bastion of the global drug trade. He orchestrated a vast trafficking conspiracy that prosecutors said raked in millions for cartels while keeping Honduras one of Central America’s poorest, most violent and most corrupt countries.

Last year, Mr. Hernández was convicted on drug trafficking and weapons charges and sentenced to 45 years in prison. It was one of the most sweeping drug-trafficking cases to come before a U.S. court since the trial of the Panamanian strongman Gen. Manuel Noriega three decades before.

But on Friday, President Trump announced that he would pardonMr. Hernandez, 57, who he said was a victim of political persecution, though Mr. Trump offered no evidence to support that claim. It would be a head-spinning resolution to a case that for prosecutors was a pinnacle, striking at the heart of a narcostate...

When he was sentenced in 2024, Mr. Hernández spoke for almost an hour in court, airing conspiracy theories and grievances as he portrayed himself as the victim of “political persecution.” In a lengthy letter, Mr. Hernández quoted Edmund Burke, Martin Luther King Jr. and the Bible...

For many Hondurans, his conviction was a rare taste of justice. A woman in a crowd outside the courthouse celebrating his punishment had held a sign that read “No clemency for narcopolitics.”

But on Saturday, Mr. Trump said in a statement to The New York Times that “many friends” had asked him to pardon Mr. Hernández: “They gave him 45 years because he was the President of the Country — you could do this to any President.”"

Ukraine’s inspiring democratic resilience; The Washington Post, November 28, 2025

Editorial Board, The Washington Post; Ukraine’s inspiring democratic resilience

"Democracy and martial law make strange bedfellows. In Russia, where President Vladimir Putin’s hierarchical power is never contested, authoritarianism is entrenched. Repressive measures imposed for the sake of the war are unlikely to ever be lifted.

In Ukraine, however, the democratic spirit never bridled under wartime restrictions. Most Ukrainians understand that emergency measures have been necessary but remain skeptical of permanent centralized rule.

Isolationists in Washington may try to use Yermak’s resignation as an excuse to ditch Ukraine, citing it as evidence of endemic corruption. In truth, his ouster is evidence of resiliency and maturity that should hearten the Trump administration. Friday’s news shows Zelensky’s willingness to sideline even his closest aide to do what’s best for his country in its fight for national survival."

‘They decided to kill us with cold’: Ukrainians struggle against Russian assault on power network; The Guardian, November 22, 2025

Luke Harding in Chernihiv. Photographs by Alessio Mamo, The Guardian ; ‘They decided to kill us with cold’: Ukrainians struggle against Russian assault on power network

"Ukraine is now facing its coldest and most difficult winter since 2022. Blackouts have become a part of everyday life, not just in far-flung hamlets but in the capital, Kyiv, as well. In an interview this month between the Guardian and Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the lights failed in the president’s palace. Cafes, restaurants and shops function as best as they can, against a noisy hum from pavement generators.

Chernihiv is the worst-affected region, together with Sumy and Kharkiv, which also border Russia. “We are without power for 14 hours a day. Today it went off at 5.30am, came back at 10.30am and disappeared at 13.30. Some districts have no power at all,” Ivanivna said. During blackouts the lift in her nine-storey apartment building doesn’t work. Nor does the electric pump that supplies water. “There’s [no water] above the fourth floor,” she said.

She and her friend Liudmyla Mykolayivna are regular visitors to an “invincibility point” – a warm tent located in a shopping centre car park. It offers power sockets, Starlink internet and tea and coffee...

Two weeks ago, the Russians destroyed one of Chernihiv oblast’s last generation units...

“The Russians are trying to make a total blackout for the civilian population. There’s nothing military here. It’s deliberate genocide against peaceful people,” Serhii Pereverz, the firm’s deputy director, said...

Public anger over the lack of electricity has grown amid a major government corruption scandal. Earlier this month, detectives arrived at the Kyiv apartment of Zelenskyy’s friend and former business partner Timur Mindich. Mindich had left hours earlier, escaping to Poland, amid claims that he organised a large-scale bribery scheme featuring the state nuclear agency Energoatom. Other alleged beneficiaries included ministers – two of whom have resigned – and senior officials.

Andriy Podverbnyi, a Chernihiv journalist, said local residents were angry at the revelations. “Corruption has always been a problem in post-Soviet countries. Even so, the news was an unpleasant surprise. For the guys on the frontline and for those living with no or little power, it’s like a knife in the back,” he said. He added: “The scheme was primitive. The people involved were clearly confident they wouldn’t get caught.”...

Kulieva said her family did not intend to leave, despite the war and the fact the Russians next door – once regarded as “brothers” – had betrayed Ukraine. “People here are amazing. There’s incredible unity. The more time you spend in this community, the more you value people around you,” she said. She added: “I believe we will overcome our economic and political problems. The most important thing is to stay human. And to carry on raising our children in this spirit.

“It’s not hard to live without a light in your home. It’s hard to live without a light in your heart.”"

Trump Family’s Business Ties to Saudi Arabia Raise Ethics Worries; The New York Times, November 18, 2025

 Vivian Nereim, The New York Times; Trump Family’s Business Ties to Saudi Arabia Raise Ethics Worries

"The leveraging of political relationships for personal profit is ordinary in the Persian Gulf, where hereditary ruling families hold near-total power and the term “conflict of interest” carries little weight.

But the mixing of politics and profitmaking during President Trump’s second term has shattered American norms, shocking scholars who study ethics and corruption. On Tuesday, Mr. Trump will meet with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia, engaging in sensitive national security talks with a foreign leader who also oversees a major construction project, known as Diriyah, that is in talks over a potential deal with the Trump family business.

Even if that deal never comes to fruition, the Trump family’s real estate and other business interests in Saudi Arabia have flourished during his second term."