jpedmd2026-04-21T19:47:13-05:00April 21st, 2026|

Every American should listen to Ezra Klein’s Our Tax System Should Make You Furious episode on his eponymous podcast with Boston College Law Professor and guest Ray Madoff.  It’s a superb indictment of our ridiculously convoluted and unfair tax system. Transcript is here.  Podcast is here.

jpedmd2026-04-03T14:04:14-05:00April 3rd, 2026|

On Good Friday, Sam Sifton writes in his NYT The Morning newsletter on a story by C.J. Chivers on how Russia weaponized the cold this past winter in their attacks against Ukraine:

“His reporting comes from a residential neighborhood at the northeastern edge of Kyiv called Troieshchyna. Most of the buildings you’ll see there are classic late-Soviet apartment blocks — giant stacks of prefabricated reinforced concrete panels, some rising 15 stories or more above the street. Few have boilers to provide heat. Instead, the Soviet government built centralized thermal plants to supply hot water and heat to dozens, even hundreds, of buildings at a time.

This winter, one of the coldest in Ukraine in close to 20 years, Russian forces used long-range strikes to target those plants, rendering huge swaths of Troieshchyna virtually uninhabitable.

Here’s Chivers:

The attacks of early January severed more than 400,000 households from electricity, city officials said, and left 6,000 buildings without heat. Problems compounded from there. Once buildings become cold enough, pipes freeze and residents lose running water. In this way, a measure of cruelty from long-range attacks can be distributed to an entire population in their homes without hitting the homes at all. Call it sanctuary denial on the cheap or, in the words of Oleksandr Kharchenko, director of the Energy Industry Research Center in Kyiv, a premeditated assault “on the life-support system of a modern city.”

Ukrainians called what followed the “kholodomor,” a sort of portmanteau of the Ukrainian words for “cold” and “plague.” More than 600,000 residents fled the city in search of warmth and safety as Russian drones continued to strike.”

Chivers’s story is here.  Don’t be like Russia; stand with Ukraine.

• Caveat emptor. From Matt Levine’s excellent Money Stuff, on Polymarket bots:

“Anyway Bloomberg’s Carolyn Silverman, Nathaniel Popper and Marie Patino report:

Over 100,000 accounts lost at least $1,000 on Polymarket, one of the largest prediction markets, according to a Bloomberg News analysis of every wallet active since the beginning of 2025. That is almost twice the number that made at least that much.

Among the winners, a majority of the profits were raked in by a tiny slice of what look to be automated bots, based on the Polymarket trade records compiled by the data firm Dune. Everyone else, in aggregate, lost $131 million. …

While prediction markets have been described as peer-to-peer, the Polymarket records suggest the role of the sportsbook is now largely being played by the sort of automated, high-frequency traders that have long dominated other financial markets. The most active accounts on the site were a small proportion of wallets, but accounted for most of the trading volume.“

• Thomas Edsall has it right in his NYT guest essay: titled “Easily the Worst President in U.S. History”:
“The damage President Trump has inflicted on the United States and the world is so enormous and wide-ranging that it is hard to grasp.” Worth the read.

• A nice essay from Charlie Warzel, writing in The Atlantic – “An Incredibly Weird Time to Be Alive.”  A snippet: “The world witnessed the best and worst of humanity in a single week.”