On Sunday, CBS’s flagship newsmagazine, 60 Minutes, opened as usual with the tick-tick-tick of its title sequence, a sound with Pavlovian resonance for millions of Boomers who have watched the show for most of their adult lives. This time the tick-tick-tick might as well have been a time bomb. Hours before the show aired, CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss pulled a story about the Trump administration’s deportation of hundreds of immigrants to CECOT, a notoriously harsh prison in El Salvador.

When I rode the escalator into the lobby of the Phoenix Convention Center on Thursday, one of the first things I saw was a two-story-tall picture of Charlie Kirk with his arm reaching out to the sky. The late co-founder of Turning Point USA was an inescapable presence at AmericaFest, the organization’s annual gathering. In the VIP area, a large screen played clips of Kirk on repeat.

Imagine the CEO of a car company telling his engineers and designers that he wants them to make a new line of automobiles. He knows nothing about cars and has no interest in how they’re produced, but he knows one thing for certain: The line will be named after himself. Everyone claps—because of course they do—but no one really knows what comes next, except that the line needs to look sexy and sporty.

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This past Friday was the legal deadline for releasing files related to the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, and the Justice Department blew right through it.
In an interview Friday morning, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche acknowledged that not everything would be ready by the deadline.

Waymo’s self-driving robotaxis can successfully nail a tricky left turn, weave through lanes to drop you off at the airport, and safely pass a U-Haul that’s idling in the middle of the street. But during a blackout, they apparently turn into four-wheel bricks.
On Saturday, when a major power outage in San Francisco knocked out traffic signals, many Waymo vehicles didn’t pull over to the side of the road or seek out a parking space.