While looking for photographs of John Brehm the other day, I came across a contact sheet with some pictures of Pete Seeger. Here are a few. I took these photos back in 2002, when Ken and I interviewed Seeger at his home in Beacon, NY, for 1913 Massacre. Pete had a fire going when we arrived. Toshi made pumpkin soup for lunch.

The poet John Brehm passed away on Monday, in Portland, Oregon. John and I were friends, close friends when he lived just down the block from me, on Berkeley Place, here in Brooklyn. We'd listen to Brad Mehldau and McCoy Tyner at his place, eat lentil soup at a now-defunct Middle Eastern joint on 6th Avenue, and tomcat around town.

Last week, a Government Information Specialist at the State Department emailed to ask if I would still be interested in records I requested in 2021 under the Freedom of Information Act. “The Department is undertaking a comprehensive review of its backlog of FOIA requests,” she wrote, and if (after failing to respond to my request for five years) she did not hear from me within thirty days, “the Department will conclude you are no longer interested in pursuing this request, and your request will be administratively closed.”

Lobbying activity for the Twin Metals copper and nickel mine on the edge of the Boundary Waters increased dramatically in the second quarter of 2026. The new lobbying disclosure is here. In Q1 2026, the Bernhardt Group reported Twin Metals income of $120,000; in Q2, $220,000. Bernhardt lobbied both houses of Congress and multiple executive branch agencies on “mine leasing issues” on behalf of the Chilean company that owns Twin Metals.

The Wall Street Journal last week reported on "Trump's trading surges around major policy decisions," most notably around his Liberation Day tariffs and the pause on tariffs he announced one week later. It was, essentially, a bear raid conducted across the board and under cover of US trade policy. The Intel trades I’ve been looking at work in roughly the same way, clustering around closed-door discussions with Intel and major, market-moving announcements. 

The financial disclosure filed with the Office of Government Ethics on Monday affords another look at Trump's Intel trades. The trades were made from eight accounts controlled by the president. For now, I've listed them on this schedule, which runs chronologically from January 2025 to March 2026. There is lots to digest here, and lots of agita to go along with it, but for the moment I want to call out just one date on the schedule: 18 August, 2025.

Right around the time Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick was taking a 10 percent equity stake in Intel for the US government, Cantor Fitzgerald —the firm Lutnick ran for 34 years, and which is now run by his sons — was building an enormous position in the chipmaker. That much is clear from the SEC filings I discussed in a previous post…

These photographs are from several rolls of black and white 35mm film I shot on the San Francisco streets in the late 1980s. (I think they were shot with the Pentax I owned back then. Someone stole it from a rental car in the mid-90s). I moved these rolls of film around the country, from San Francisco to Boston, Boston to New York City, New York City to San Francisco, then back to New York City.

Trump bought Intel shares on six separate occasions in March of 2026, just before Intel’s market-moving announcement on 1 April that it had repurchased Apollo Global’s 49 percent share in an Irish joint venture, known as the Ireland SCIP. This much is clear from the timeline of Trump’s Intel trades I put together earlier this week. (Read that post for background.) In the short space of a month, Trump's March trades nearly tripled in value.

Here's a timeline that plots Trump's Intel trades against Intel's stock price. I've included a few major policy changes and announcements. It's a rough sketch that tries to put the Intel trades in context. Maybe others will find it useful. Trump boasted in January of this year that he had made "tens of billions of dollars for the American people" in the four months after he converted Intel's Biden CHIPS Act grant to an equity stake.

There's a new poll out today showing that "Trump's war in Iran" -- and it is his war, let's make no mistake about that -- "is as unpopular among Americans as the Iraq War during the year of peak violence in 2006 and the Vietnam War in the early 1970s." I am not much of a poll tracker. But the Washington Post story about this new polling caught my eye, not only because I've been watching Emile de Antonio's excellent 1968 Vietnam War film…

In my most recent post about the Senate vote to overturn the Rainy River Watershed Mineral Withdrawal, I made the simple point (for what seems the umpteenth time, forgive me) that this latest bid to hand over the Boundary Waters to a foreign mining company is part of a coordinated political project, one that stretches back to Trump's first term and with connections to Project 2025.

Two days before the Senate voted last week to overturn the 20-year Rainy River Watershed Withdrawal, I sent this letter to the Globe and Mail: Nathan Vanderklippe’s reporting on the effort to undo …

No one should be surprised by the Joint Status Report just filed in the Boundary Waters litigation before the DC District Court of Appeals. Twin Metals, joined by the federal government, has asked for yet another 180-day abeyance. The mining company clearly sees that it has little chance of succeeding at law, so it has joined forces with the federal government, the putative defendant in this case, to keep the Twin Metals project on…

You can be anti-Trump but still pro-war. Among Trump’s political opponents are those who criticize his execution of the Iran war, but don’t oppose waging war against Iran per se, or those who disapprove of the way he went about things in Venezuela, “but,” or those who decry his belligerence over Greenland, not because it is a belligerent resource-grab but on the grounds that it alienates NATO allies.

A reasonable person would conclude, after looking at this Sony FX3A page on the Atomos site and reading the word "Yes," that the "Touch to Focus" function on the Shinobi II monitor works with the Sony FX3A camera. And a reasonable person might then rely on that "Yes," that affirmation, that assurance by the manufacturer, to make a decision. A reasonable person might decide, say, to purchase a Shinobi II monitor in order to take advantage of its Touch to Focus feature.

Kalorama Sewer_ 2025115942Download Law professor and ethics watchdog Richard Painter put it bluntly back in 2019: Jared and Ivanka’s landlord — a billionaire from Chile who rents them their mansion…

Kalorama Sewer_ 2025115942Download Law professor and ethics watchdog Richard Painter put it bluntly back in 2019: Jared and Ivanka’s landlord — a billionaire from Chile who rents them their mansion in D.C. — will use the Boundary Waters as his toilet. Pro-sulfide mining politicians in Minnesota and Washington are handing him the washroom key. Seven years later, the key to the billionaire’s commode is now turning in the lock.

This scene from director Mervyn LeRoy's 1934 Heat Lightning brings me back to the observation that American women in the 1920s and 30s pioneered and popularized the practice of hitchhiking. Women like Doris Poggendee and Nettie Matthews, Barbara Starke, Nancy Youse, Betty Simpson, the McManus Sisters, or Allen Ginsburg’s mother Naomi – all could have been models from which these two characters were drawn. 

Forbes Magazine has excerpted and posted the same moment from the Rules Committee hearing on House Joint Resolution 140 that I did the other day: Pete Stauber's embarrassing concession that he brings HJR 140 on behalf of a Chilean conglomerate, a foreign company that will ship Minnesota's ore to China for processing. This was just minutes after the congressman gravely warned that "China, our adversary," has “stranglehold” over critical and rare earth minerals.

It’s a little hard to sit through the video of yesterday’s Rules Committee hearing on House Joint Resolution 140, but it's worth it just to see Representative Teresa Leger Fernandez coax Pete Stauber to acknowledge that any copper Antofagasta pulls out of the ground in northern Minnesota is going to end up “on a boat, in China.” So I excerpted that moment, above.