Paul @glastris.bsky.social Glastris

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This is a MUST read article by @smeslami & Zeynab Malakouti! It reveals how Tehran's calculations re the Straits have changed. Rather than use this leverage to negotiate an end to the war, Tehran is looking to establish a permanent transit fee mechanism and use its leverage to reestablish economic relations with countries who - due to US sanctions - have more or less ended their ties with Iran. responsiblestatecraft.org/strait-of-horm…

Unlike Virginia, in Maryland it was Republicans who introduced grid utilization and Democrats agreed. New op-ed from @IanMagruder and Molly Knoll on the MD breakthrough this week: marylandreporter.com/2026/04/04/a-b…

A good write-up of a recent interview w/@RudawEnglish where I talk about how easy it is for Iran to continue to threaten the SoH @MiddleEastInst rudaw.net/english/interv…

Being a lifelong White Sox fan has prepared him well for this.

As usual, rock-solid, spot-on & incredibly useful analysis from @MaloneySuzanne nytimes.com/2026/04/03/opi…

Trump voter regret is clearly registering now. A few recent polls detail it. cnn.com/2026/04/04/pol…

There’s a mom at our school drop-off. Messy bun, always three minutes late, kids usually eating dry cereal out of a Ziploc. The "Pinterest moms" always whispered about her. I honestly felt a little bad for her. Then one day at the playground, my neurodivergent son had a massive, violent sensory meltdown. I’m sitting in the dirt, crying, totally paralyzed. The "perfect" moms just stared and pulled their kids away. Suddenly, she’s there. The messy mom. She drops her giant bag, sits right in the dirt next to us, pulls a heavy sensory toy out of her purse, and calmly shields my son from the crowd. No panic. No judgment. He regulated in three minutes. I was speechless. We had coffee after. She told me her house is a disaster and she has severe ADHD, but she knows exactly what a nervous system collapse looks like. I asked her how she deals with the judgmental stares from the other moms. She took a sip of her cold coffee and said: "Perfect moms know how to bake organic muffins. Chaotic moms know how to survive the trenches." Every time I see her running late now, I just smile. Girls, be like the messy mom. Stop apologizing for your chaos.

What’s the name of the disease that inflicts people on vacation where after an amazing 48 hours they are already looking at real estate listings and mentally restructuring their entire lives to move to the vacation spot?

Brilliant album

In 2001 they’d throw an 18 year old kid in prison for years for sharing computer games online. In 2026 the computers gobble up the humans art and homogenize it while making the computer people into untouchable mob bosses. We are entering the age of the voiceless artist. No one will fight this and win. Blow the whistle you’re dead. The only way to fight it is to render its voice worthless. That’s a tall task. But fuck am I all in on it.

There is massive inventory bifurcation in the U.S. Housing Market right now. Former boomtowns like Denver, Austin, Nashville, and Tampa are now overflowing with surplus listings. Prices are now dropping in these markets due to high inventory (+15 to 50% above 2019) combined with lower demand and overbuilding. On the contrary, in America's Northeast/Midwest Rust Belt, inventory is still in a massive shortage. With listings down 50-70% in Chicago, Albany, and Hartford. There are still bidding wars in these areas, and prices are still going up. Know the truth about where your housing market is heading on reventure.app.

NEW: Trump reaches negative net approval with working class white voters for first time ever. -CNN

BOMBSHELL: CNN's Christiane Amanpour confirms Washington had a real chance for peace, but threw it away to adopt Israel's psychotic "mowing the lawn" strategy. The Trump Administration intentionally chose endless bombing over diplomacy.

Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell today: “There is effectively zero net job creation in the private sector.” Zero.

If Jesus had focused more on kitchen table issues and less on unpopular outcasts like lepers and prostitutes, he might have won more support from white working-class Judeans.

ABSOLUTE BOMBSHELL on CNN: Donald Trump now has the worst net approval rating among independents of ANY president ever. He is literally polling 10 points worse than Richard Nixon right before he resigned. The American public has abandoned him entirely!

Christina Koch was a firefighter at the South Pole at -111°F before she ever applied to be an astronaut. That was maybe the fourth most interesting line on her resume. She grew up in North Carolina, got three degrees from NC State, and her first real job was building deep-space instruments at NASA. Then she left for Antarctica. Spent three and a half years bouncing between the Arctic and Antarctic as a research scientist, including a full winter at the South Pole base. That means going months without sunlight or fresh food, with a crew of about 50 people and no way out until flights resume. While she was down there, she also joined the glacier search-and-rescue team. After coming back, she went to Johns Hopkins and built instruments for two NASA missions (one of them is still orbiting Jupiter right now). She figured out how to start a tiny vacuum pump that NASA designed for a future Mars rover. Johns Hopkins nominated it for their Invention of the Year in 2009. Then she went back to the field. More time in Antarctica and a stretch up in Greenland. A government research station in northern Alaska, near the top of the world. Then she ran another one in American Samoa, near the equator. In 2013, NASA selected her from 6,300 applicants. Eight people got in. Her first space mission was supposed to be a normal rotation on the International Space Station, but NASA extended it. She ended up staying 328 straight days and orbiting Earth 5,248 times, covering about 139 million miles (roughly 291 round trips to the Moon). Up there, she ran over 210 experiments, including tests of cancer drugs in zero gravity and 3D printers that can build structures close to human tissue. Six spacewalks, 42 hours floating outside the station. She learned Russian for the training. She flies supersonic jets. Right now, Koch is on Artemis II, heading for a flyby behind the far side of the Moon. The crew launched on April 1 and is on track to travel about 252,000 miles from Earth, which would break the all-time human distance record of 248,655 miles set by Apollo 13 in 1970. That record has stood for 56 years, and it was set during a disaster that nearly killed the crew. Fred Haise, one of the Apollo 13 astronauts, is 92 now. He told Koch: "I heard you're going to break our record." Nobody had left Earth's neighborhood since December 1972. Koch and her three crewmates are the first in 53 years, and they are coming home at about 25,000 mph. That is faster than any crewed spacecraft has ever come back through the atmosphere.

“The Birthright Citizenship Arguments Are a Reminder that the Independent Judiciary Is a Good Thing” My latest for @monthly washingtonmonthly.com/2026/04/03/the…

Over the past year the US economy has added 680,000 healthcare and social assistance jobs and lost 420,000 jobs in all other industries.

This album is one of my favorite albums of all time. Might be in my top 10. Cut at Woodland Studios in East Nashville (back when East Nashville was a little more on the dangerous side—my favorite time), I probably listened to this album 100 times the year it came out. “Big Dipper” taught me how to be a sour pessimist when I had way too much positive energy in my life. “I Hate My Generation” could not have been more spot on for me an my generation even though I wouldn’t know it for 20 years. “How Can I Live Without You” still is a song I reference all the time during production… This album (and @davidclowery ‘s sardonic take on life within it) is kinda like a “drunk intellectual bitter uncle in a box” for any sheltered suburb kid from the 90’s…