Jacques Leslie

It has reached the point that any work of journalism, no matter the subject, that doesn't take climate change and the threat of authoritarianism into account is contributing to the delusion that these things will go away.

This is a really important piece. Whether the 2026 elections will take place, and, if they do, whether the results will be accepted, is a much bigger question than most people realize. nytimes.com/2026/05/05/opi…

In 2020, a small city in Wisconsin told its residents they could stop mowing for a month. 435 households joined in. The bees came back the same spring. Appleton was the first US city to adopt No Mow May. The city council suspended its weed ordinance for the month so residents wouldn't get cited for tall grass. Around 40 acres of lawn across the city went uncut. Researchers from Lawrence University sampled the unmowed lawns and nearby mowed city parks in the same week. The unmowed lawns had 5 times as many bees and 3 times as many bee species as the mowed parks. Wisconsin is home to nearly 500 native bee species. Most people have never seen them because they don't live in honeybee hives. They're solitary bees, ground nesters, small black or metallic green insects that fit on a fingernail. Appleton's unmowed yards gave them food and shelter in the hungry early-spring window when almost nothing else is blooming. The experiment cost the city nothing. It saved residents fuel and labor. It produced measurable ecological results within 30 days. Dozens of US cities have adopted the practice since. Has yours?

New: Covid-19 vaccines roughly halved the chances a US adult would need to visit the ER or be hospitalized with their infections last fall and winter, according to two sources familiar with the findings of a new study. But you won’t hear about it from the agency that led the research: the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The current head of the CDC, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, who’s also director of the US National Institutes of Health, blocked the publication of those findings in the CDC’s flagship journal, the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, according to the sources. cnn.com/2026/04/22/hea…

We're on the cusp of huge water scarcity issues.insideclimatenews.org/news/23042026/…

The level of sadistic thuggery here is breathtaking. And I will repeat: why would anybody want to work alongside the United States?

Fabulous piece. "It really makes those midnight chats with the love bot sort of bittersweet to know that the orgasms are measured in metric tons of melted glacier." nytimes.com/2026/04/15/opi…

This is an actual post. This is not funny. This is beyond desperate. This is a deeply unwell man who doesn’t belong anywhere near the levers of power. Every member of his cabinet and Congress is complicit in not demanding his removal now.

"Hawaii dam at ‘imminent failure’; evacuation orders in Oahu." sfchronicle.com/weather/articl…

Incredible reporting by the team at WSJ. The government is covering up its crackdown on political opposition with bogus charges and claims of assaults. They are defaming hundreds of people and erasing the first amendment

"In my life, I have watched John Kennedy talk on television about missiles in Cuba. I saw Lyndon Johnson look Richard Russell squarely in the eye and and say, "And we shall overcome." I saw Richard Nixon resign and Gerald Ford tell the Congress that our long national nightmare was over. I saw Jimmy Carter talk about malaise and Ronald Reagan talk about a shining city on a hill. I saw George H.W. Bush deliver the eulogy for the Soviet bloc, and Bill Clinton comfort the survivors of Timothy McVeigh's madness in Oklahoma City. I saw George W. Bush struggle to make sense of it all on September 11, 2001, and I saw Barack Obama sing 'Amazing Grace' in the wounded sanctuary of Mother Emanuel Church in Charleston, South Carolina. "These were the presidents of my lifetime. These were not perfect men. They were not perfect presidents, god knows. Not one of them was that. But they approached the job, and they took to the podium, with all the gravitas they could muster as appropriate to the job. They tried, at least, to reach for something in the presidency that was beyond their grasp as ordinary human beings. They were not all ennobled by the attempt, but they tried nonetheless. "And comes now this hopeless, vicious buffoon, and the audience of equally hopeless and vicious buffoons who laughed and cheered when he made sport of a woman whose lasting memory of the trauma she suffered is the laughter of the perpetrators. Now he comes, a man swathed in scandal, with no interest beyond what he can put in his pocket and what he can put over on a universe of suckers, and he does something like this while occupying an office that we gave him, and while endowed with a public trust that he dishonors every day he wakes up in the White House. "The scion of a multigenerational criminal enterprise, the parameters of which we are only now beginning to comprehend. A vessel for all the worst elements of the American condition. And a cheap, soulless bully besides. We never have had such a cheap counterfeit of a president* as currently occupies the office. We never have had a president* so completely deserving of scorn and yet so small in the office that it almost seems a waste of time and energy to summon up the requisite contempt. "Watch how a republic dies in the empty eyes of an empty man who feels nothing but his own imaginary greatness, and who cannot find in himself the decency simply to shut up even when it is in his best interest to do so. Presidents don't have to be heroes to be good presidents. They just have to realize that their humanity is our common humanity, and that their political commonwealth is our political commonwealth, too. Watch him behind the seal of the President of the United States. Isn't he a funny man? Isn't what happened to that lady hilarious? Watch the assembled morons cheer. This is the only story now." - Charles Pierce

Short, useful essays on the many scenarios that end in an Iranian government that won't please Trump. "At this moment, any regime or leader who reaches power with the endorsement of the U.S. and Israel would find it exceedingly difficult to govern." nytimes.com/interactive/20…

One thing about lethal weapons, particularly highly expensive ones, is that once built, they tend to get used.

We're moving into the blithering hubris phase, taken there by people who have no sense of how vulnerable they (and, sadly, we) are. Is the US ready for a cyber-attack or relentless drone swarms? If not, Trump's presidential caper will end just as all his businesses did, in ashes.

A smart description of the hole that the lunatic-in-chief has dug for himself. "The United States has extended its post-9/11 forever war into Iran, an act that will reverberate across the Middle East for years to come." nytimes.com/2026/03/02/opi…

Trump "strategy": first we'll go to war, then maybe we'll figure out the objectives.

Lake Powell's water level is projected to drop so low that hydropower generation at Glen Canyon Dam will no longer be feasible beginning between August and December this year. coloradosun.com/2026/02/18/lak… via @coloradosun

... their use of personal documents to frame and extort, their incapacity to acknowledge error, their pleasure in destroying much of what is best about this country. In many ways protesters in Iran and the U.S. are fighting the same fight. /3

One thing that struck me as I read this powerful, enlightening story (bravo, NYT) was the similarity of some of the observations by Iranian medical personnel and the thoughts and fears of U.S. citizens protesting another corrupt regime, in Wash. D.C. /1 nytimes.com/interactive/20…

... We Americans have not faced mass massacre, but we've seen in our current leaders the mindset that makes massacre possible. We're familiar with their shameless, conscience-free disposition, their ability to tell blatantly absurd lies with a straight face,... /2

‘It Is One of the Worst Mass Killings in Contemporary World History’ nytimes.com/interactive/20…