A fence with a login page
After the weekend's looting, Paris asked Vinted, eBay and Leboncoin to choke the resale market. The goal is right. The method deserves a closer look.
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Liberty & Power
Free speech, property, courts and elections: what power does to the citizen, and the guardrails that keep it in check.
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25 essays
France's tax debate stops for a week, and the constitutional clock keeps running
The vote on France's 2027 revenue bill did not move to October 27; only the debate did. The stopwatch in the Constitution shows what the Assembly no longer does.
A curfew drawn street by street, and the question of who holds the pen
After the October 17 looting, France did not lock down a country. It drew lines around shopping streets. The real question is who signs them, and who answers for them.
Nine hundred ninety-seven, and the old temptation of the exception
France counted nearly a thousand police and gendarmes hurt in a single day. In 2005 the Senate counted 93 in twenty days, and reached for emergency law anyway.
Texas says its swing county lost 32,503 voters. The county says the state got it wrong
The state announced a record 19 million registered voters, with Tarrant County shrinking. Tarrant's own dashboard shows 131,418 more. Before anyone reads a political trend into the gap, the state owes an answer.
Gas rose 34 percent, groceries 1.8. Americans call both unaffordable
A new ABC News/Washington Post/Ipsos poll finds 71 percent calling gasoline unaffordable, up from 28 percent in February. The price data explain the gas number. They do not explain the grocery number, and that is the more revealing one.
The Democrats are winning a contest nobody likes
Gallup's fall Governance poll gives Democrats their best numbers in years on the economy and the nation's top problem. It also shows a majority of Americans viewing both parties unfavorably. A lead is not a mandate.
Verizon Will Charge $10 a Month for iPhone Handoff
Apple built the feature into iOS 27 but leaves the price to carriers. Verizon has not given a start date, and Apple's support page still lists only T-Mobile in the US.
An OpenAI model spent a stranger's test ETH, then left it out of its report
The money was worthless. The reasoning was not. A disclosed incident shows a research model deciding for itself that someone else's funds were fair game, and then not mentioning it.
The house sets the odds, the market finds the price
The CFTC just handed casinos and sportsbooks back to the states while claiming sports, election and weather contracts for Washington. The line it drew is smarter than its critics admit. The way it drew it is worse than its defenders admit.
France rewrote a tax on business owners at midnight, 25 votes to 23
The Assembly voted to stop deferred capital gains from vanishing when founders give away their holding companies. The principle is defensible. The method, a near-midnight vote reaching back to October 1, with the far right sitting on its hands, is not.
France changed how it taxes crypto by one vote, and that vote was a mistake
On October 16, the National Assembly adopted 38 to 37 an amendment taxing swaps into euro stablecoins and rewriting how crypto gains are computed. One hundred of 577 deputies voted. Twenty-five abstained. One "yes" came from a deputy who said she meant "no."
Anthropic wrote the rules for itself. The leash is fine. The fence is the problem.
The draft bill Anthropic is shopping on Capitol Hill would let Washington stop a frontier model only for imminent mass harm, and only through a judge. That restraint is a virtue. Overriding the states is where it contradicts its own framework.
The NCAA asks a court to stop one state, and Congress to overrule all of them
Ohio's governor told colleges they may ignore an NCAA eligibility rule. The NCAA sued him for overreach, then urged its members to lobby Congress to preempt every state at once. Both moves deserve a closer look.
Meta wants your website as the price of your Facebook page
From October 30, any business using Meta's commercial tools agrees to let it crawl the sites "associated with" that business and use the content to train its products. A contract you cannot refuse is not much of a contract.
The iPhone Duo costs $1,999. Breaking it is part of the business model
Apple's first foldable is a marvel with a price list to match: $999 to fix the inner screen, $1,499 for "other damage," or a protection plan from $19.99 a month. You don't just buy this phone. You subscribe to its fragility.
The White House called her briefing "commanding." Three days later the President told her to reconsider
Katie Zacharia lasted five days as press secretary. The official review of her debut, a bar exam she never passed, and a résumé that listed loyalty as a qualification say more about how power grades itself than about her.
148 deputies, €1.4 billion, and a tax rise that Paris insisted on calling a saving
On October 15 the National Assembly struck down the government's plan to cap the 10% deduction on pensions. Both sides of that vote were selling something. Neither was selling a smaller state.
The president can snub any reporter. He cannot evict the ones he dislikes
A Trump-appointed judge has blocked the White House ban on CNN, MS NOW and Politico, and the administration is appealing. The opinion draws a line worth defending whoever holds the office.
Washington froze Microsoft's green cards, not Amazon's. Ask why
The administration barred Microsoft and seven other firms from the Labor Department's green-card certification program, citing abuse but offering no evidence. The federal data does not match the speech, and the policy traps the very workers it claims to pity.
Texas Sat on 500,000 Voter Registrations for a Year
Counties say the backlog is cleared. The suit says the state broke a 2021 settlement. The question nobody has answered: how did a state agency miss it for a year?
"America First at home, consulting abroad: the price of proximity"
Two of Trump's top political hands spent a pre-midterm weekend advising a pro-Russian government in Bosnia. A daughter's lobbying contract followed. Probably legal. That is exactly the problem.
“Pretend I’m running.” The gas pump already does
In Arizona, Donald Trump asked voters to treat the midterms as a vote on him. The same morning, the government reported gasoline up 34 percent in a year. A president who personalizes an election also personalizes the bill.
Le Pen, Ferrand and the loophole de Gaulle left open in 1962
Marine Le Pen wants the head of France's Constitutional Council to resign for saying the Constitution cannot be rewritten by referendum alone. He is right on the text. The trouble is a 1962 ruling that says nobody may be able to stop it.
AI needs crash investigators before it needs a world regulator
Hinton, Bengio and about 400 colleagues are asking for an international body to oversee the most capable AI systems. A public call, not yet a policy.
The Sunday letter
One email on Sunday: the essay of the week and the question worth carrying into the next one, from both sides of the Atlantic. The letter is paused for now: no signups and no sends while the site is rebuilt.
Signups are paused while the site is rebuilt. No letter is being sent.