After abducting Venezuela President Nicolás Maduro, U.S. President Donald Trump declared that America would “run” Venezuela. When asked in January who was leading Venezuela, Trump said, “We’re in charge.”
Yet after back-to-back earthquakes rocked multiple Venezuelan cities on Wednesday, toppling scores of buildings and killing at least 188 people and injuring at least 1,520, Trump merely offered assistance.
“The U.S.A. stands ready, willing, and able to help! I have instructed all agencies of our government to get ready to move quickly,” he wrote in a Truth Social post. “We will be there for our new and great friends.”
One U.S. government official told The Intercept that Trump’s offer doesn’t go far enough since Venezuela is now a U.S. “vassal state.” “Don’t we run that country?” the official asked, speaking on background and referencing Trump’s comments. “That’s an obligation that exceeds friendship.”
At the same time, Venezuelan American organizations and progressive foreign policy groups are about to circulate a letter calling on the Trump administration to provide massive, unconditional humanitarian aid to Venezuela in the wake of the 7.2 foreshock and 7.5-magnitude quake, as well as long-term economic damage from U.S. sanctions, according to details of the letter shared exclusively with The Intercept by Just Foreign Policy, one of the groups that drafted the letter. The organizations argue that the United States bears a unique obligation to Venezuela and that U.S. aid “must match the scale of the harm the United States has played a role in creating.”
This all comes after Trump seemed to suggest earlier this week that the U.S. has reaped billions of dollars of Venezuelan oil wealth in the last six months.
After ousting Maduro, Trump’s installed a puppet government run by former Maduro ally Delcy Rodriguez. She has carried out day-to-day governance under the threat of a looming U.S. criminal indictment alleging corruption and money laundering charges. Trump also warned that the U.S. might attack again if Rodriguez did not comply with his demands.
“Should the U.S. be responsible for rebuilding? Any word from Trump on that?”
The costs of Absolute Resolve — the military operation and abduction of Maduro — topped $206 million, according to an analysis by Brown University’s Costs of War Project. Since then, the Trump administration has seized control of Venezuela’s oil industry and claims to be exploiting it for massive returns. This week, Trump said that the U.S. has recovered its war costs 28 times over through oil extraction; this equates to roughly $5.7 billion.
“The people are happy in the country. They have smiles,” Trump said of Venezuelans on Tuesday, prior to the earthquakes. He claimed Venezuela has shared in the economic rewards.
But the letter being drafted by the Venezuelan American and progressive groups cites a recent economic analysis by Venezuelan economist Francisco Rodríguez showing that U.S. policy has failed to produce the economic recovery Trump has claimed. The letter notes that sanctions have left Venezuela operating at a “diminished capacity,” that “the buildings that collapsed were not maintained,” and “the hospitals that must now treat nearly a thousand injured were not adequately supplied” as a direct result.
In the port city of La Guaira, for example, more than 100 buildings were destroyed in the twin earthquakes. “Should the U.S. be responsible for rebuilding?” the U.S. government official mused. “Any word from Trump on that?”
The White House did not respond to a request for comment on whether the U.S. would ease sanctions or help to rebuild Venezuela.
U.S. Southern Command, which spearheaded the war on Venezuela earlier this year said on Thursday that it was “working with the Department of State to support U.S. government relief operations in Venezuela.” The command added that it “has established an operational planning team that includes experienced subject matter experts from the Bureau for Humanitarian Assistance, who are advising staff and leadership responsible for disaster relief planning and mission-related decisions.”
But disaster aid is inadequate, according to Just Foreign Policy and the other groups. “Emergency relief alone will not be enough. Venezuela’s recovery will require access to its own financial resources and the ability to import the equipment, construction materials, medicine, fuel, spare parts and other goods needed to rebuild homes, hospitals, schools, roads, ports and critical infrastructure,” they wrote.
Even before the earthquakes, almost 8 million people in Venezuela were in need of humanitarian aid, according to the United Nations. The letter from Just Foreign Policy and others calls on the Trump administration to “provide immediate, massive humanitarian assistance with no political conditions attached,” to release Venezuelan oil revenues currently held in U.S.-controlled accounts, and to suspend remaining sanctions impeding disaster response and reconstruction.
All three congressional candidates that New York City Mayor Zohran Mamadani endorsed won their primaries on Tuesday. The races were widely viewed as a test of just how much influence the left would have in charting the next chapter for the Democratic Party — and a referendum on Mamdani’s power.
“Mamdani is the one variable that truly matters,” Michael Lange, political writer and elections analyst of The Narrative Wars Substack, tells The Intercept Briefing as he breaks down the wins of Claire Valdez, Brad Lander, and Darializa Avila Chevalier by district. “You pair that type of broad cultural political figure with the block-by-block organizing of New York City DSA — it’s a very powerful thing.”
“You had a candidate who said ‘Fuck Kamala Harris’ win the historic capital of Black America,” says Lange, of Avila Chevalier’s win over five-term incumbent Rep. Adriano Espaillat. “If that is not a distillation of the ‘Democratic tea party,’ I don’t quite know what is.”
This week on the podcast, host Akela Lacy speaks to Lange and Intercept managing editor Maia Hibbett about the strategic mistakes of the traditionally progressive Working Families Party, the growing influence of the Democratic Socialists of America on the Democratic Party, and how the DSA is upending electoral politics from the left.
“Here in New York, a lot of the momentum is being driven by the DSA, of course, but there are these progressive and insurgent candidates across the country who are trying to change the course of the Democratic Party,” says Hibbett, “and excite voters who might not have been into the Democratic establishment in past cycles.”
Lange notes how demographic changes and pressures on the Democratic Party base are impacting voters’ priorities. “The party’s becoming younger, more educated, and increasingly squeezed financially,” says Lange. “There’s just this broad alienation of people who have not really been able to get ahead, not for their own fault, and I think it’s like downstream of our economy, and that’s why the affordability zeitgeist is so potent.” He adds, “You spin the wheels up in two years, what could this look like in a Democratic presidential primary?”
For more, listen to the full conversation of The Intercept Briefing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube or wherever you listen.
Transcript
Akela Lacy: Welcome to the Intercept Briefing. I’m Akela Lacy, senior politics reporter at The Intercept.
Maia Hibbett: And I’m Maia Hibbett, managing editor of The Intercept.
AL: Maia, did you see what House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries had delivered to his House office on Wednesday morning?
MH: Yes, they were beautiful.
AL: The Republicans’ House campaign arm delivered flowers and a card offering their condolences to Jeffries after candidates that he endorsed lost to socialists on Tuesday night in primaries in New York.
This is what the card said. “Three losses in one night is tough. We wanted so-called ‘Leader,’” — in quotes — “Jeffries to know our thoughts are with him, his candidates, and whatever remains of his influence in the Democratic Party.” Maia, let’s get your thoughts on this.
MH: On one hand, Jeffries probably felt a little bit of relief that no one did end up challenging him, so he wasn’t one of the people facing that challenge. But it was a really bad night for establishment Democrats. Ally of Jeffries and lots of other Democratic old guard, Rep.Greg Meeks in Queens, was also mad, and he was giving comments on Wednesday morning implying that New York City was going to suffer, it wasn’t going to get as much resources from the federal government because it was losing one of its really powerful incumbents.
You’ve covered the race that toppled Espaillat pretty closely. It represents a different kind of power coming into play in New York and in Democratic politics.
AL: One of the candidates most considered a long shot prior to Tuesday is Darializa Avila Chevalier, who ousted the powerful chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, Rep. Adriano Espaillat. Avila Chevalier was notably an organizer of the Columbia pro-Palestine protest alongside Mahmoud Khalil. She cited Espaillat’s refusal to help Khalil in the aftermath of his arrest as one of the main reasons that she even decided to challenge him in the first place. And she came on the national stage after writing an op-ed in support of [Khalil] and being recruited by Justice Democrats.
MH: That result was really striking, especially because if you think back to a little over a year ago, before Zohran Mamdani won the primary for New York City mayor, you were covering the arrests of these student protesters in solidarity with Palestine, and that storyline has changed so dramatically.
It seemed at the time like their power was going to fade, or that these protests were getting crushed — and now one of them is going to become a member of Congress.
AL: This was definitely not on Democrats’ bingo card, particularly Espaillat, who was a large recipient of money from the pro-Israel lobby and faced a lot of criticism for how little he did to support those students at the time.
While Avila Chevalier’s win on Tuesday was one of the biggest surprises, both liberal and conservative critics of the Democratic Socialists of America, of which she is a member, framed her success as part of this narrative that we’re seeing come out from some reactions — that Ivy League transplants are taking over the Democratic Party and don’t actually reflect the working-class interests they’re claiming to represent.
MH: That was a huge criticism in another race on Tuesday night in New York, which was the competition between Claire Valdez and Antonio Reynoso for Nydia Velázquez’s seat. Velázquez was retiring, and she had chosen Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso as her successor. Velázquez was considered a progressive.
She was early to support Zohran Mamdani’s campaign. And in some ways, the DSA’s choice to run someone against her chosen successor was being presented as this betrayal and this attempt to usurp the progressive power base that had begun to grow in New York City.
AL: And then, of course, in the middle of all this, there’s Brad Lander, who many of our listeners may recall ran against Mamdani for mayor and then formed a coalition with him.
He ousted incumbent Rep. Dan Goldman in lower Manhattan and parts of Brooklyn less than 10 minutes after the polls closed. That was less of a shock, as Goldman had lagged behind in the polls for some months, but I think with the quickness that they called the results was another twist of the knife for Democrats in the establishment who had stood by Goldman.
MH: Yeah, and it’s funny because not that long ago, I think Goldman was considered a pretty powerful and a pretty popular politician. People talked before the 2025 mayoral race about the possibility that he could run for mayor of New York City. Maybe now he will because he’s free to do stuff.
Here in New York, a lot of the momentum is being driven by the DSA, of course, but there are these progressive and insurgent candidates across the country who are trying to change the course of the Democratic Party and excite voters who might not have been into the Democratic establishment in past cycles.
Next week in Colorado, there’s a race that you’ve been covering really since it started, which is an insurgent candidate named Melat Kiros, who is endorsed by Justice Democrats and is also a DSA member backed by the national DSA. She’s running to take out longtime incumbent Rep. Diana DeGette in Denver.
There’s also Graham Platner in Maine. There’s Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan, both candidates we’ve covered a lot, running for Senate. Another DSA candidate is Francesca Hong, who’s running for governor of Wisconsin. In some of these races, the DSA is a huge driving force behind these insurgent candidates, and in other cases, they’re not actually DSA candidates, but they’re adopting this similar populist working-class-focused politics that has been elevating politicians in these races across the country.
It does seem like the story of the Trump era is that people want change. There’s the pearl-clutching version of this that’s, “Oh, God, there’s populism. There will be a Trump of the left.” But perhaps there needs to be, and populism is just governance by the people.
AL: Next, we’re going to go deeper on all of this and more with political writer and analyst Michael Lange. He writes about politics in New York City on his Substack “The Narrative Wars” and is the author of a recent piece called “The (Not So) Civil War for the Commie Corridor.” We’ll discuss the growing influence of DSA and how the group is upending electoral politics from the left.
Michael, welcome to The Intercept Briefing.
Michael Lange: Oh, it’s so great to be here. Thank you for having me.
AL: Michael, we are speaking on Wednesday afternoon. I know you’ve had a busy day talking about the results from Tuesday night’s primaries in New York. Leftists are ecstatic right now. The primaries on Tuesday night were widely viewed as a test of just how much influence the left would have on charting the next chapter of the Democratic Party and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s abilities as kingmaker.
I want to go through some of these results with you, some of which were absolutely stunning. We have former New York City Comptroller Brad Lander, who beat Rep. Dan Goldman, which was somewhat expected. But two socialists came out on top in congressional races that were far less predictable.
ML: Certainly the scale of it, yes. There was always a world in which — let’s start with New York 7 — where Antonio Reynoso, the candidate that Claire Valdez was facing, he’s more of an institutional progressive supported by the Working Families Party, Brooklyn borough president, was in the City Council.
There was a scenario in which his support fell off to a certain degree with younger voters, and younger voters, Claire Valdez-friendly, came to the polls en masse and broke the outcome for that way. But I was still surprised because there is a part of this district, in addition to a lot of the institutional and labor support that someone like Antonio Reynoso has, and he does also have a genuinely progressive record, and he was running on a very left-wing policy plank.
AL: Virtually indistinguishable from Valdez’s.
ML: 100 percent right. The contrast between the candidates was very coalitional and institutional and also cultural, to a certain degree. So he kinda had these bona fides, and I thought that in some places, he can at least dent her margins.
And then the big kind of wild card is that this district is also home to a very large Orthodox Jewish community, the Satmar of South Williamsburg. Interestingly, even though they’re Orthodox Jews, they’re religious anti-Zionists. But they’ve known Reynoso for a very long time, and those folks were turning out in quite large numbers. They block vote in accordance with the whims of the rabbinical leaders there.
So Reynoso had 10 percent of the electorate that was basically giving him close to 100 percent of the vote. So he started off with 10, and she started off with zero. And I was like, well, to claw back from that, it won’t be entirely easy. And there were public and private polls that showed this race within 2 or 3 points. So maybe I paid a little bit too much attention to that.
But Claire Valdez had a very strong close and was able to engineer a lot of young voter turnout, especially proportionally to the amount of people turning out in this lower turnout congressional primary.
And she really ran away with it. Voters under 50 of all races, I think, supported her pretty substantially. There were some neighborhoods in this district where she was getting the same margins that Zohran Mamdani was getting versus Andrew Cuomo. Although instead of Cuomo being this fossil of the Democratic establishment, she was getting them against someone who’s lived his entire life in the district and does have other progressive and institutional validators.
I’m a little less surprised, actually, by Darializa’s win because I’ve been covering that race pretty closely and I had talked at length about how this was a prime opportunity district. Adriano Espaillat was, to some degree, in my estimation, a paper tiger and also that he was someone who was operating with a pretty hard ceiling. However they seemed to — and by they, I mean the political establishment, Hakeem Jeffries, a lot of labor unions, a lot of outside spending — seemed to really realize that there was quite a lot of vulnerability to him with one month left. Then of course, Mayor Mamdani endorsed Darializa, and that really raised the salience of the race, and then all of a sudden she’s getting attacked a lot.
There was a deleted Twitter account where they found her tweets. She said a bunch of different things, ranging from like, F Kamala Harris, to she attended an October 8 rally in New York. I thought to a certain extent that might hurt her with older voters who, again, white and Black who may not have much love for Adriano Espaillat, but I thought when you project that amount of money and negative spending onto a relatively unknown candidate, it can, in certain instances, have very drastic implications.
But she was able to really weather that, and also he was someone who had spent much of his career appealing to building Dominican American political power in Upper Manhattan. That was a stronger strategy 10 years ago when the Dominican electorate was half or even a little more than half of what this district is.
“He was very focused on a third of the electorate, and it left him very vulnerable.”
But it has been redrawn. It has experienced demographic change to a certain extent, and now it’s basically one-third Hispanic, one-third white, one-third Black. And so he was very focused on a third of the electorate, and it left him very, very vulnerable. Darializa was able to — again, for someone who had not held office before — against a 10-year Democratic incumbent, she did quite well with Black voters, and she did very well with white voters as well, of all ages and also religions.
This district has a lot of, I would say, progressive, older Jewish voters. A lot of this spending was geared at getting them to flip toward Adriano Espaillat or at least sit the race out. But they didn’t, and they backed her by considerable margins, and she paired that with real inroads with the white, Black, and Hispanic renter class, and that was enough for her to win by 3 points.
So it’s an incredible accomplishment.
AL: Yeah, I’m really glad you brought up the money piece because this was one of the most expensive congressional cycles in the history of New York, with more than $50 million spent. And obviously, not every seat, every congressional seat in New York was up for election. We’re talking about the handful that were up.
Also down the ballot, super PACs spent almost five times what they spent on state legislative races in 2024, according to a report on Wednesday from New York Focus. A total of $9.6 million — including more than $2.5 million spent against DSA candidates alone, almost every single one of whom won their races.
What is the upshot here? We also saw some of the biggest national investments ever from pro-Palestine groups spending to support progressives in these races. How has all of that money changed how elections work in New York, both for the establishment and for this insurgent class?
ML: The value that this spending has is clearly diminishing. But I also think it’s worth highlighting American Priorities and Justice Democrats and some of the money that they used to support Darializa. Darializa was spent, I think, 3 or 4 to 1. Which is not great, but it’s not a margin that I guess can truly make or break a campaign.
She was not getting out-spent 10 to 1, 20 to 1, things like that. So I think, again, stabilized some of the potential bleeding that could have come with a really hefty independent expenditure advantage one way or the other. There was, as you mentioned, tremendous super PAC spending in these downballot races. But those largely flopped.
One of the things that New York City DSA and also Mayor Mamdani did quite well this cycle is there was a lot of emphasis — and, some of this was happenstance in the way that incumbents retired and things like that, and what came available. But for Claire Valdez running in the 7th Congressional District, there was one DSA-endorsed state Senate candidate farther down the ballot, and then there were, I believe, three competitive or open incumbent challenges, Assembly races that overlapped with the 7th District.
Basically, Claire’s race really helped raise spend, engagement, turnout in a lot of these crucial districts down the ballot. And then Claire, of course, blows it out of the water. I don’t want to say that she carried all these other folks to victory, but the dynamics of her race, campaign, and blowout certainly helped folks at the bottom of the ballot get turnout.
AL: I find it interesting that the national discourse around getting out of money in politics, which is still very strong and a big part of these candidates’ campaigns, but they’re also recognizing and being very candid about the fact that they do need money to combat some of the spending.
And obviously it’s not going to be equivalent, but you had Valdez and Reynoso trading barbs about dark money or super PAC money in the race. And she said something to the effect of, and you hear this argument all the time, “We’re not going to fight this fight with one hand tied behind our back.” I think that’s an interesting tension that’s come out in the aftermath of this.
[Break]
AL: Another big discourse talking point, if you will, is about whether this marks the end of the relevance of traditional progressives, many of whom voters see as beholden to the Democratic establishment.
We see this nationally with the declining relevance of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, despite the election of more and more progressives to Congress. Most people might think of the left flank of the national Democratic Party as strictly progressive. Think Kamala Harris versus Bernie Sanders. But it’s a little bit more nuanced than that, especially in New York.
You wrote recently, “It isThe Socialists vs. The Progressives: NYC-DSA, the volunteer army that went from study hall to City Hall in a decade; versus the Working Families Party [WFP], the progressive third party that dominated the anti-establishment lane of New York politics for twenty years before the socialists arrived on the scene.”
For our listeners who might not be as familiar with the nuances of how this works in New York, can you break down those lanes on the left? Who is in each camp, where do they diverge, and how are they pushing Democrats to the left?
ML: I think some of the biggest differences between DSA and WFP is ideological. It is an outgrowth of that Sanders versus Warren 2020 presidential primary, but I think it’s also in structure of the organization.
I don’t think it’s unfair to say that DSA is just a more democratic, member-driven organization. The way the Working Families Party does their endorsements and things like that, it is a little more top-down. As a rank-and-file member of DSA, you have a lot more input on the direction of the organization. Some of that manifests in terms of the number of people who actively participate, the number of people who are dues-paying members, who volunteer, things like that.
DSA — they push a very class-focused politics. Not that the Working Families Party does not. Also DSA’s led quite significantly on Palestine and those issues, especially after October 7.
Not to say that the Working Families Party doesn’t talk about class. I mean, it’s literally in their name, but there is a bit more of an identitarian bent to that. Even today, the leader of the Working Families Party, Jasmine Gripper, was talking about, well, Antonio built a multiracial coalition. She was saying things like that — whereas if DSA just lost a race of that magnitude, they wouldn’t say, well, we built a multiracial coalition. That type of thing. Never mind that Claire Valdez won Hispanic voters by a very large amount.
“Especially in this Trump 2.0 world, people are hungry for a different type of politics.”
Anyhoo, I do think that it was a very difficult evening for the more traditional progressive wing of the party. And again, we saw this in the mayoral race last year with the rise of Zohran Mamdani and the stagnation of Brad Lander — who, of course, was just elected to Congress. And then especially in this Trump 2.0 world, people are hungry for a different type of politics. I foregrounded this race, the 7th District, as a battle to see who leads to left in New York. It’s very clear that after last night, DSA is the one leading the left. And I think that will have wider repercussions as well.
AL: This is a great segue because I do want to ask you about this piece that you wrote on the 7th District, where I am a resident.
ML: Oh, there you go.
AL: And in talking about that, talk a little bit about how progressives whose candidates lost last night are reacting to the results. You already mentioned Jasmine Gripper, state director for the New York Working Families Party. But you dubbed this race a “civil war in the commie corridor.”
The “commie corridor” branding has really taken off in the past couple of months. I just wanted to tip my hat to you.
ML: It has, for sure. Thank you.
AL: But what’s going on here, and how did this race in particular become such a referendum on Mamdani’s power?
ML: Very early on, Mamdani and a lot of New York City DSA leadership and rank and file wanted to support Claire Valdez.
I’m a DSA member. I’ve known Claire Valdez for years before anyone cared that I said the “commie corridor” or I wrote books or anything like that. She has a lot of goodwill in the organization with just normal members. She’s a union organizer. People really just like her.
So when Congresswoman Nydia Velázquez — who, I should also say I used to work for her when I first graduated college — when she retired, there were a lot of people who went to Claire, a reluctant candidate, and said, “Oh, I think you would be really great.” And clearly the mayor shared that sentiment. A lot of people close to the mayor did as well.
But of course, Congresswoman Velázquez, I think there was some appetite on her part to support another DSA candidate, one that she was more familiar with. But then she did not want to support Claire, so then she really went all-in on Antonio Reynoso. Those two are very close. Antonio was born and raised in the South Side of Williamsburg, which is a historically Puerto Rican area. And credit to Nydia and Antonio: They were waging fights against the machines of old in that part of town prior to 2016, prior to 2018, before DSA really asserted themselves politically.
But then, I think, she was upset that the mayor wanted to go a different route than her. She made some comments to The New York Times. It got bitter. It felt like both sides were waging a lot of capital on this outcome. There was a lot of media sparring and things like that. Obviously with hindsight, potentially the Working Families Party and the Reynoso camp, they might have raised the stakes of this race too much. Now, they probably didn’t know what was going to happen but I think probably they’re sitting here on Wednesday regretting it.
“Obviously — with hindsight — potentially the Working Families Party and the Reynoso camp, they might have raised the stakes of this race too much.”
But I think that the most important thing is that Mamdani is the one variable that truly matters. And New York City DSA, for all of the local nonprofits and relationships that Antonio Reynoso had, New York City DSA out organized them.
They knocked over 300,000 doors. They knocked the entire district, and you really felt those results on Tuesday night. To pick that district to have a very high-stakes proxy war was a strategic mistake on the part of the Reynoso–Working Families Party world, because this was not like a fight in Park Slope or Carroll Gardens.
Not that it would’ve gone differently, but those are a little more progressive, granola, Brad Lander-coded areas. They were really having this fight on some of these blocks where 93 percent of voters are under the age of 50, and where Mamdani is not just a political giant, but a cultural figure.
You walk around Greenpoint or Bushwick with him, and there are women just tumbling over themselves, running out of the bar to get a picture with him. He did a selfie line at McCarren Park. And ironically, someone I went to college with who also reports on this stuff, he was saying that everyone he spoke to who said they were voting for Clara Valdez was like, “I’m doing it because of Mamdani.”
And you pair that type of broad cultural political figure with the block-by-block organizing of New York City DSA — it’s a very powerful thing. It’s how they were able to basically create a very favorable electorate even without the big highly salient mayoral race, the wall-to-wall media coverage, things like that.
I won’t get the voting data for probably a couple days or a week or so, but I have a hunch that the voting base this year in the 7th District was even younger than it was last year. Were the same amount of young voters, like raw, going to turn out? Not necessarily, but proportion-wise, it was pretty robust and it really cascaded on election day.
AL: You mentioned DSA sort of outorganizing the Working Families. I also want to mention that New York DSA co-chair Gustavo Gordillo told Hasan Piker at a watch party last night that his phone bank for Darializa Avila Chevalier could have identified 2,000 voters, which was the margin by which she won. A pretty spectacular effect.
ML: Yeah, it’s funny, I thought they were going to make fun of me because I was like, “Oh, I think Adriano might eke it out.” But they were like, “Actually, we saw that you said that and we were like, all right, we gotta go into overdrive.”
AL: There you go, data-driven.
ML: I obviously wanted Darializa to win. I quite literally voted for her. I owe it to the people who read and trust what I say to share that.
And I do think that there was a broad sentiment, like, “Oh, she’s probably like pretty close, but will she get across the finish line?” That type of push that they were able to engineer, it’s just no other mass-member organization that I can really think of could do that. They called through every Democrat who had voted in Upper Manhattan in the last six years. I think the first list they did, they burned through it in 12 minutes. Really remarkable organizing that is exactly the type of thing that decides a race at the margins like this.
“They called through every Democrat who had voted in Upper Manhattan in the last six years.”
AL: The other big question coming out of last night is and really, this is in response to the way that both Democratic Party leaders and Republicans are spinning this, which is that Hakeem Jeffries has lost control of the party and that there’s a communist takeover of the Democratic Party that is out of step with the vast majority of voters outside of the coasts.
But is this something that can work outside of New York City? There are several races with progressives and socialists on the ballot coming up. Midterms are not over, I’m sorry to our listeners. Next week in Denver, Melat Kiros is challenging Rep. Diana DeGette. Kiros is a DSA member endorsed by the Denver DSA chapter and the national DSA.
Later this summer, Assembly Member Francesca Hong is running for Wisconsin governor. She’s a member of the Assembly Socialist Caucus and a DSA member. On the nonsocialist but progressive populist side, there’s also Graham Platner’s Senate race against Republican Susan Collins in Maine.
Is this a coastal formula? Why or why not?
ML: It’s funny. This is the question that’s at the heart of my forthcoming Mamdani book.
AL: Oh, wonderful.
ML: But it won’t be out for a bit because we’re living through his effect on the Democratic Party. I do think the party’s becoming younger, more educated, and increasingly squeezed financially.
There’s this growing precarious middle class that’s really not getting ahead, really disillusioned with — it’s funny talking about this, it’s like I sound like Morris Katz because he says similar stuff.
AL: Morris Katz is a Mamdani adviser who’s also working with other progressive candidates, including Graham Platner. But Michael, continue.
ML: But yeah, you have this youngerish, but also middle-aged, we’ve even seen races where progressives and leftists have won Gen X suburbanites because even these mortgaged homeowners are really feeling squeezed by affordability. But it’s also a broader cultural alienation. It’s downstream from the loss of community, the rise of oligarchy. I think technology as well, like the tech oligarchs, it’s all intertwined. Two years from now, artificial intelligence and that type of stuff could be the number one, the number two, or the number three issue.
But I think there’s just this broad alienation of people who have not really been able to get ahead, not for their own fault, and I think it’s like downstream of our economy, and that’s why the affordability zeitgeist is so potent. And so yes, does the “commie corridor” like literally travel to Michigan? Not exactly. But also the Democratic Party is pretty urbanized. It’s getting even more urbanized, especially in a primary setting.
What you’re asking is what a lot of us are asking right now? Is like, OK, you spin the wheels up in two years, what could this look like in a Democratic presidential primary?
“ Ironically, the rest of the Democratic Party is copying Mamdani’s message with respect to affordability, almost verbatim.”
What was very interesting about New York 7 and New York 13 is that ironically, the rest of the Democratic Party is copying Mamdani’s message with respect to affordability, almost verbatim. But in 7 and 13, Claire Valdez and Darializa, and I was thinking like, oh, if maybe they underperform or maybe one of them doesn’t win, this is a tweak to make in the future cycles. They weren’t going super hard on affordability. There was a lot of talk about Palestine and AIPAC, things of that sort. Darializa also leaned into Adriano’s voting for omnibus bills that increase ICE funding, things like that.
So my thesis was like undoubtedly those were motivating issues to Mamdani doing so well in those areas, but particularly in Upper Manhattan, that’s the heart of the multiracial working class. And I was like, a huge part of it was affordability. But what was really fascinating is that, it’s one thing to win in Ridgewood with that, but in Upper Manhattan — more tenants than any other district in the country. And Darializa won by talking a lot about Palestine and a lot about ICE. If she didn’t win, it would’ve been maybe we should’ve talked more about affordability. But she did win — in spite of all the spending. That’s like quite a, I don’t want to say a narrative buster, but it’s a very interesting, data point.
AL: It flies in the face of the claims by centrist strategists that those things are not popular with the base that they need, particularly that working-class base where they’re saying that those issues are not the bread-and-butter issues that working people come home and think about at night.
But I do think you’re touching on a key point here, which is that those issues tie into the broader frustration with not even just the positions that they’re taking, but the shutting down of discourse or the lack of teeth, particularly on the ICE thing, the lack of a response to really differentiate themselves from Republicans in the longer term.
You did mention a socialist presidential candidate.
ML: Oh, boy.
AL: That is the perfect segue to my final question for you which is, again, echoing a big question that came out of last night, which was where was Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez?
ML: To her credit, she did support four state—
AL: Assembly members, yes.
ML: Who were all challenging incumbents, and they all did win.
AL: Yes. And so this is the strategy. So the criticism here, for our listeners, was that Mamdani did the work in the congressional races, and AOC did the work in the state legislature races. Both of them supported all DSA candidates in the respective races that they did endorse in.
But many people were taking shots at AOC saying that she should regret that she didn’t endorse Valdez or Avila Chevalier.
I find the argument that they were splitting their clout in a race where the left had limited resources to be a compelling one. I also find the argument that AOC is looking at building bridges with the people who will help her potentially run either for the Senate or for the presidency one day, and that it wasn’t worth her while to step into these races where Mamdani was already clearly carrying a lot of the weight.
What did you make of that strategy?
ML: Yeah. I think it’s just downstream of the nature of the relationships and the institutions that both of them have. Mayor Mamdani not endorsing any insurgent challengers in the state legislature in an effort to, not piss off, for lack of a better word, Carl Heastie, who’s the Assembly speaker.
“Darializa’s thing — that was big to take on the chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus.”
The inverse, though, pushing a lot of chips in with respect to Congress. I mean, Claire — it’s an open seat. Everyone needs to be adults about it. But the Darializa’s thing — that was big to take on the chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus.
With the congresswoman, it’s probably just the inverse of that. There’s also a special Nydia Velázquez connection there.
But plenty of people running had either the mayor or they had AOC. And then I think a lot of them also had Bernie Sanders as well, and New York City DSA. So it was like, you had almost everybody with one or two or three really famous folks on their lit, and the institutional heft.
Regrettably, Conrad Blackburn was running for an Assembly seat in Harlem. He was the only candidate to lose last night.
AL: The only DSA candidate to lose.
ML: It was partially because he was the only one who did not have a Mamdani or an AOC endorsement.
It was a tricky race. I think just to zoom in and out, there was a lot of money spent against him at the beginning. When he was in Florida and a law student, he had that two-month internship in the Florida attorney general’s office, but the Florida attorney general was Pam Bondi. That, I think, hurt him considerably. But after months, I think he was able to claw back.
I think also Darializa being on the top of the ballot was able to help him. But the Darializa versus Conrad thing is a very interesting dynamic in how their spending was treated. Whereas with Darializa, they opened the floodgates late with all these attacks, and with Conrad, they started earlier. I’m sure if they could do it over again with Darializa, they would’ve taken her much more seriously, because now, of course, Adriano Espaillat, someone who is, I don’t want to contribute to a myth here, but he is someone who built a Dominican political machine, while I don’t really agree with the politics of it, over the course of 30 years. It was a 30-year-old machine being defeated by a 32-year-old Columbia graduate student who had never run for office before.
“It was a 30-year-old machine being defeated by a 32-year-old Columbia graduate student who had never run for office before.”
AL: Who said, “Fuck Kamala Harris.”
ML: Well, yeah, if I can curse. You had a candidate who said “Fuck Kamala Harris” win the historic capital of Black America. If that is not a distillation of the “Democratic tea party,” I don’t quite know what is. For as much anti-incumbent sentiment as there just is broadly now, there has been that with Adriano Espaillat, particularly in the southern parts of his district for a while, which was another reason that he was vulnerable and he played it poorly, and I think she ran a gutsy race.
AL: Michael, we’re going to leave it there. Thank you so much for helping us make sense of the wild ride that was Tuesday night. I look forward to reading your book when it comes out and looking forward to more of your — I don’t know if you’ll beat “commie corridor,” but we’re excited for whatever comes next.
ML: I appreciate that a lot. It was great to be here. Thanks for having me.
AL: We want to know what issues you are following in this exciting midterm cycle, send us an email at podcasts@theintercept.com or leave us a voice mail at 530-POD-CAST that’s 530-763-2278
That does it for this episode of The Intercept Briefing.
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After rattling some observers by staying out of a slew of competitive congressional primaries in her home state this week, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., endorsed a candidate in Tennessee on Thursday.
Ocasio-Cortez is backing Tennessee state Rep. Justin J. Pearson in the 9th Congressional District, which will be a tough win for Democrats after Republicans scrambled to gerrymander it earlier this year thanks to the Supreme Court’s gutting of a key portion of the Voting Rights Act. The district covering parts of Memphis and its suburbs is one of more than a dozen that Republicans have redrawn at President Donald Trump’s demand to ward off what many in the GOP see as the increasingly likely prospect that they lose both congressional chambers to Democrats in November.
An endorsement from democratic socialist Ocasio-Cortez is a coveted stamp of approval for progressive insurgents looking to challenge incumbents or capture open congressional seats. She has endorsed several Democratic primary candidates running for open seats in other states this cycle including Chris Rabb, who won his primary in Pennsylvania; Analilia Mejia, who won in New Jersey; and Junaid Ahmed, who lost his primary in Illinois. But critics raised eyebrows at her decision to stay out of key congressional primaries in New York; she opted instead to endorse a slate of democratic socialist candidates in the state Assembly.
The endorsement is a major boost to Pearson, who is also backed by Justice Democrats, the progressive group that first backed Ocasio-Cortez in 2018 against longtime incumbent Rep. Joe Crowley, and Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt. Pearson originally launched his campaign with the intention of ousting two-decade incumbent Rep. Steve Cohen, the last remaining Democrat in Tennessee’s congressional delegation. Cohen dropped out of the race in May after state lawmakers split up his district into three neighboring districts, saying it was “drawn to beat” him.
Observers theorized that Ocasio-Cortez’s absence from New York’s congressional primaries reflected a desire not to butt heads with Democratic Party leaders who endorsed against leftist challengers, potentially signaling her plans to run for higher office in a future cycle. Others argued that she stayed out to split her efforts with New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani to maximize the left’s political currency in a cycle with historic outside spending against their candidates. Mamdani emerged as a kingmaker in Tuesday’s elections, backing three congressional candidates who won their primaries on Tuesday: socialists Clare Valdez and Darializa Avila Chevalier, and progressive Brad Lander, and several — but not all — of the New York City DSA’s endorsed candidates.
On Wednesday, Ocasio-Cortez said the left’s wins in New York’s House primaries were part of both “a moment” and “a movement” of voters demanding more from the Democratic Party after major losses in 2024.
Endorsing in the races would have pitted Ocasio-Cortez against her congressional colleagues whose support she might need in a run for higher office, including House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, poised to become House speaker if the Democrats retake the chamber in November. She’s made most of her other endorsements this cycle in open seats with no incumbent, including Rabb, Mejia, Ahmed, Adelita Grijalva in Arizona, Adam Hamawy in New Jersey, and Sam Forstag in Montana. She endorsed Democratic candidate Randy Villegas against the incumbent Republican, Rep. David Valadao, in California. Her former chief of staff, Saikat Chakrabarti, said her decision not to endorse him likely contributed to his loss in an open California primary to replace retiring Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., by fueling attacks from his opponents.
In New York City, Avila Chevalier and Lander ousted incumbents backed by Jeffries and Democratic leaders: Congressional Hispanic Caucus Chair Adriano Espaillat and Rep. Dan Goldman. Valdez won her primary in an open seat where retiring Rep. Nydia Velázquez had endorsed her preferred successor, Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso. Velázquez bemoaned Mamdani’s endorsement of Valdez against her pick in the months leading up to the race. And even after their candidates lost on Tuesday, Jeffries and other party leaders aired their disappointment in Mamdani’s decision to go against them.
But in Tennessee, Pearson emerged as the frontrunner when the incumbent dropped out. He’s hoping to tap into voters’ frustrations with both parties by campaigning on economic change for the working class — a message that boosted both Ocasio-Cortez and Sanders.
A law enforcement intelligence hub in New Jersey fretted that the growing class divide in the U.S. could drive a wave of lone-wolf attacks on high-flying corporate executives, according to a report obtained by The Intercept.
The New Jersey Regional Operations and Intelligence Center, one of the so-called fusion centers that serve as intelligence clearinghouses for cops, warned in a bulletin earlier this year that disaffected Americans were increasingly blaming society’s ills on rich people and corporate bigwigs.
The report specifically cited the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in December 2024 — allegedly by Luigi Mangione — as an expression of anti-fat-cat rhetoric. To the analysts at the New Jersey fusion center, Thompson’s killing hinted at a larger trend.
“Public discourse increasingly attributes the challenges faced by the middle and lower classes to the actions and influence of wealthy corporate executives,” the fusion center memo says.
By warning corporate security outfits of the danger posed by average Americans who blame their problems on the actions of corporate executives, the report effectively dedicates public resources to securing a private system that has made the few extremely wealthy at the expense of the many.
“The report seems to be putting forth the view that that is an extremist viewpoint, rather than something that the state has some responsibility in correcting.”
Michael German, a former FBI agent specializing in domestic terrorism and longtime critic of fusion centers, said that by warning CEOs of threats, the bulletin was effectively taking the side of the rich and powerful over ordinary people who are critical of inequality — a typical dynamic at fusion centers.
“The way it’s written, the report seems to be putting forth the view that that is an extremist viewpoint, rather than something that the state has some responsibility in correcting,” German said. “All the resources of the national network of fusion centers, which includes federal resources along with state and local resources, are devoted toward providing security information to private entities.”
Brian Thompson Murder
The “Quarterly Executive Threat Watch” bulletin warned corporate bodyguards to switch up the daily routines of execs, limit information on public engagements, and remove bosses’ personal information from the web. The report says bosses should “remain vigilant of lone offenders with personal grievances.”
“Following the fatal shooting of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson and the current political climate, there is a heightened threat environment surrounding corporate executives,” the report says. “Online glorification of the murder of Brian Thompson and calls for violence are still apparent and further create a risk for a lone offender attack.”
A spokesperson for New Jersey’s Office of Homeland Security and Preparedness, the agency that oversees the fusion center, did not respond to a request for comment.
The report went on to cite a list of seemingly disparate incidents to highlight a possible surge in threats to the wealthy, including a satirical Christmas wishlist that called for sabotaging CEOs; a handful of 4chan posts calling for violence against executives at Netflix and elsewhere; a “far-left forum” calling for a campaign against people tied to a mining project in Michigan; and an act of vandalism by pro-Palestine activists at the home of a New York Times executive.
Another incident that made the list was the federal case against the so-called Turtle Island Liberation Front, a group of left-wing activists arrested last year whose alleged bomb plot appears to have been largely driven by a member of their group who was a longtime paid FBI informant.
“The problem with a lot of these fusion center reports is that they take a handful of incidents, not necessarily related to one another, and use them to justify and amplify these threats without any kind of analysis,” said German. “Rather than actually looking at data, their performance is measured by the number of reports they produce.”
Fusion Centers
Fusion centers, which bring together state and federal law enforcement agencies to share intelligence on potential terror threats, rose to prominence in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. The centers operate under state authority, often with grants from federal agencies like the Department of Homeland Security.
New Jersey’s only fusion center, officially known as the New Jersey Regional Operations and Intelligence Center, has been criticized for operating outside the typical oversight to which most state agencies are subject.
A 2023 report by Rutgers Law School’s Center for Security, Race, and Rights warns of the potential for abuse in the New Jersey fusion center. The report cited the fusion center’s practice of drafting dossiers on “known troublemakers” and its reliance on so-called “intelligence-led policing,” a practice of surveilling and data collection that the American Civil Liberties Union has cited as a potential violation of the right to due process.
The Quarterly Executive Threat Watch, the bulletin that included the warning for CEOs, appears to be internally categorized as terrorism-related intelligence and was later disseminated by a U.S. Customs and Border Protection officer to recipients across the country. (CBP did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)
Then there is the issue of the center’s shadowy public-private partnership. The New Jersey fusion center does not make public which private agencies or organizations it partners with, or to whom it disseminates reports.
“It’s very ambiguous who is actually in charge and who is responsible.”
The January report drew heavily on the work of SITE Intelligence, a for-profit firm that has come in for criticism because of its labeling Islamic charities as terror fronts and mistakenly identifying video game footage as terror propaganda.
Like its counterparts across the country, the New Jersey fusion center feeds its reports into a national network of public and private agencies dedicated to the gathering and dissemination of information about potential threats — a practice that frequently crosses the line into surveillance of political speech, according to German and other critics of fusion centers.
“There is a lack of public accountability here,” German said. “Because they’re joint enterprises, it’s very ambiguous who is actually in charge and who is responsible for ensuring that the participants within these centers are acting in accordance with the law.”
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries joins Speaker Mike Johnson and colleagues to unveil the Semiquincentennial Congressional Time Capsule at the U.S. Capitol on June 24, 2026, the day after democratic socialists swept elections in New York. Photo: Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images
When Hakeem Jeffries, who’s positioning himself to be House speaker if the Democrats retake the chamber come November, was shown on the screen at an election party full of socialists in Brooklyn Tuesday night, the crowd chanted, “You’re next! You’re next!” Before polls closed on the night that would see the Jeffries-endorsed candidates fall and Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s candidates win, the New York congressman told reporters that he and the mayor have “agreed to strongly disagree” and that “a handful of primaries that go in one direction or the other in a given state or two aren’t going to reshape who we are as House Democrats.”
He may be right in the short term; it will take many nights like Tuesday to remake the face of the party. But what’s underway is nothing less than an existential threat to the version of the party that has made Jeffries its standard-bearer. If middle-of-the-road Democrats fail to reckon with this escalating reality and shift to the left, they risk making themselves irrelevant forever — and ceding even more ground to the Republicans as they cut off their nose to spite their face.
After all three congressional candidates that earned Mamdani’s endorsement — Darializa Avila Chevalier, Brad Lander, and Claire Valdez — won handily, as did nearly all of the Democratic Socialists of America’s down-ballot slate in New York, Jeffries and his ilk were quick to discount Mamdani’s political project as one that could never take root beyond the New York City meeting halls of Williamsburg and Bushwick. But as other primary races this cycle have shown us, that’s simply not true.
In Maine, Graham Platner delivered a crushing defeat in the Democratic Senate primary to Gov. Janet Mills, whom Chuck Schumer reportedly “aggressively recruited” to enter the race at all (and as we’vecovered, her campaign never really got off the ground or found anything approximating grassroots support). Platner’s victory — amid a spate of scandals over his online posts and alleged mistreatment of women — is now exposing the lie of one of his party’s favorite refrains for disciplining the left: that for all our differences, we must “vote blue no matter who.”
These candidates stand for actual policy, not just mealy-mouthed “messaging.”
In the Senate race in Michigan, polling is strong for Abdul El-Sayed, a former public health official pushing Medicare for All and centering Israel’s genocide of Palestinians while competing with a both-sides-ing progressive and an outright AIPAC Democrat. Philadelphia nominated Chris Rabb, an outspoken anti-genocide democratic socialist, over the party’s political machine-mined candidate in Philadelphia, and Dr. Adam Hamawy, a 9/11 first responder who saved Sen. Tammy Duckworth’s life as an Army medic but was also tarred with Islamophobic attacks that tried to frame him as a supporter of terrorism, won a crowded 12-way primary in New Jersey earlier this month. (The latter three have all appeared on the trail with Hasan Piker, the popular streamer who’s become a potent political force for left-wing Democrats, much to the dismay of centrists who condemn him as “controversial” and worse.)
If you care to pay attention, there’s an obvious through line with all these candidates: They all stand for actual policy, not just mealy-mouthed “messaging,” and they have been unequivocal in their criticism of Israel. Mainstream Democrats have long lacked that moral clarity as America’s ally in the Middle East committed a genocide in Gaza and dragged the U.S. into an instantly unpopular war with Iran, and they’re being handed the losses they so richly deserve by candidates running to the left. For now, they’ve responded by making overtures of progressive change without meaningful or widespread policy shifts.
The idea that the party should respond to the will of its voters has become so foreign to the Democrats that Jeffries’s political operation has sneeringly referred to even the notion of a party challenge from the left as coming from “Team Gentrification.” On no issue is the division between voters and the national party as stark as it is when it comes to Israel.
A party that wants to defeat the rise of the far right in this country should look to bring the left in, especially as it continues to win at the ballot box. But instead, establishment Democrats have continued to bash and attempt to marginalize the growing left consensus. “If you hate the Democratic Party, then please don’t run for our nomination,” former Democratic National Committee chair Jaime Harrison wrote on social media on Tuesday.
But you can only condescend and disregard your party’s supporters for so long until they look for another vision of the future — one that doesn’t include you.
360 degree feedback promises that it will offer truth in all directions. It will illuminate blind spots, reveal the development areas people couldn’t see before and unlock potential they didn’t know they had. It promises, above all, to make honesty safe, offering confidentiality and anonymity for the people with less power, so they can finally tell the truth about the people with more. It is an appealing set of promises, but whether it can keep them is another matter.
The Murky History of 360 Degree Feedback
Let’s just clarify first what we mean by 360 degree feedback. Generally, the term refers to a process of gathering feedback about an individual from the people around them, perhaps their manager, but also peers and direct reports, hence the full circle – 360 degrees. This is ostensibly to support their development, to feed into an appraisal, or both. Responses are typically anonymised, often pooled in groups of three or more so that in theory no single rater can be identified (although that’s rarely watertight in practice).
So where does this popular practice actually come from? Rumours abound. I once heard a version involving a KGB sabotage manual, which I’d love to believe as it would make a great story. Unfortunately, I’ve found no evidence for it. The more likely history, referenced widely online, traces an early version to officer selection in the German Reichswehr around 1930, under a military psychologist named Johann Rieffert. Nobody called it 360 degree feedback, but multiple observers would feed into a single judgement about who should make the cut.
The name “360-degree feedback” was coined in the mid-1980s by an assessment firm called TEAMS Inc, who registered the phrase as a trademark, and then spent years trying to enforce their ownership of it until the company was sold. There has always been money in this, and attempts to trademark concepts and practices should always raise an eyebrow, if not a red flag.
None of which stops 360 degree feedback being treated today as a solid, almost scientific HR default. For a practice this murky in its origins, that’s quite a leap, and as we’ll see, neither the evidence nor people’s experiences of it seem to justify the confidence.
Experiences of 360 Degree Feedback
I’ve worked in organisations running 360 degree feedback processes, and I know the anxiety of waiting on anonymised comments, followed, almost always, by one of two deflations:
You’re handed some critical but cryptic line, spend an unreasonable amount of energy trying to guess who wrote it and have to actively resist the urge to go and just ask them what they mean, or:
You get the other thing entirely: bland, school-report style platitudes about being a great colleague, which are technically positive, but don’t really say anything at all.
Both versions arrive by the same route. The 360 degree feedback process tips into a tick-box exercise, and once it has, it doesn’t just fail to start a constructive, developmental conversation; the anonymity built into it often makes sure that conversation can never happen at all.
None of this is unique to me. I have these conversations regularly with clients, people in mid-sized and large organisations where 360 degree feedback has become so completely entangled with performance management or appraisal that all ideas of feedback get drawn into this dreaded annual cycle. It seems like once an organisation has a formal annual mechanism for feedback, that mechanism exerts a gravitational pull over all other feedback instances. The ordinary, day-to-day, low-stakes, useful versions of feedback – like a quick check in after a meeting or small flagging of a blind spot – start to feel like something to save up rather than say now. People batch it all up for judgement day and the process that’s designed to surface feedback ends up suppressing many more useful, and low-threat, day-to-day exchanges.
And then there are the others, the ones just starting out on their 360 degree feedback ‘journey’, asking important questions before they commit: why are we doing this, and what is it actually going to do to psychological safety here?
The Evidence Gap
It turns out that the case for 360 degree feedback is pretty underwhelming, given how embedded all this is. Despite three decades of near universal corporate enthusiasm, nobody has ever managed to show, convincingly, that it does what it’s supposed to do. The Institute for Employment Studies spent a year interviewing organisations running these schemes and combing through the available research, and concluded that widespread adoption of 360 degree feedback reflects “faith rather than proven validity,” which is, it turns out, a rather generous way of putting it. Evidence of actual impact on individual development or organisational performance was, in their own words, “scant.” Similarly, the most authoritative meta-analysis in the field, pulling together twenty-four longitudinal studies, found that improvement in ratings over time, the entire point of the exercise, was ‘generally small’. As the authors put it, “practitioners should not expect large, widespread performance improvement after employees receive multisource feedback.”
That meta-analysis was published in 2005. Two decades on, the more recent literature isn’t full of fresh studies overturning or confirming it, it’s largely quiet, with prominent practitioners in the field noting a “glaring absence” of new research even as usage of 360 feedback keeps climbing. The honest answer to “does this work?” still sits somewhere closer to “a bit, maybe, for some people, under conditions nobody’s fully pinned down” than anything resembling a “yes!”
None of which has slowed adoption down. Which brings me back to the money. Google “360 degree feedback” (a reasonable start for any investigative dive into the practice!) and the first page is dominated by sponsored placements and paid products, all companies selling their own version of a 360 degree feedback tool. Twenty years ago, the IES were already noting the volume of “spin from external providers” surrounding this practice. If there was a lot of spin then, I suspect there’s a great deal more now.
More Raters, More Bias
All feedback is subjective. I’ve written about why that matters elsewhere, so I won’t revisit the whole argument, except to say that the moment you treat a rating as a fact about a person rather than an impression formed by another person, you’re already in trouble.
What’s worth adding in this context is a particular claim some 360 degree tools lean on, implicitly or explicitly: that gathering feedback from many sources cancels out individual bias and delivers something more objective than a single manager’s view. It’s an appealing idea, but averaging several biased judgements doesn’t remove the bias, it just blends it into something that looks smoother and harder to attribute while carrying the original distortions inside it. Gender and racial bias don’t disappear when you collect more ratings; in fact they may well accumulate while becoming harder to see, hidden behind an aggregate score that feels objective and is anything but.
There’s another issue too: 360 asks how a person is performing, rarely about what pressures and constraints they were facing. The forms have feedback for the individual and rarely for the conditions, so the subject of the feedback ends up holding the weight of the system around them.
The Trouble with Anonymity
Anonymity exists in these practices for an obvious reason: people are supposed to feel safer telling the truth if they can’t be identified for it. Aside from the (very real) risk that this reinforces the idea that it’s actually not safe to speak up unless we’re anonymous, the IES researchers did find this working roughly as intended – raters giving upward feedback anonymously were more critical than those who knew their names would be attached. But they also found the protection failing in two different ways. In some cases, managers asked direct reports to provide them directly with “anonymous” feedback, which of course undermines the anonymity from the start. In other cases, raters who had been promised anonymity colluded with each other, with several colleagues agreeing in advance to write identical negative comments about their manager so that no single person could be singled out and blamed. They didn’t trust the protection the system offered, so they built their own on top of it.
There’s a further risk in anonymous feedback – it can easily mask people over- or under-rating for political reasons, which is most likely when the stakes are high. In some organisations, 360 degree feedback has reportedly been folded into the machinery of ‘rank and yank,’ the practice of ranking people by their performance ratings and firing the bottom 10%, a practice which is (thankfully) effectively unlawful in many parts of the world. But where it, or practices like it, still exist, are you really going to risk rating a colleague higher than yourself?
When the IES researchers looked at places where anonymity was removed instead, some people reported being approached and made to feel uncomfortable for giving honest upward feedback. Yet others preferred it that way, worried that anonymity would let others use the process to settle old scores under cover rather than to give honest feedback. “At least the feedback can be challenged if the names are on it,” as one of them put it, and I see their point. We know feedback is most useful when it’s context-rich – when it can be located in specific incidents and relationships – and when it’s part of a two-way conversation. Anonymised 360 degree feedback removes both the context and the conversation.
So take anonymity away, and people fear retaliation for their honesty. Leave it in place, and people suspect the cover is being used to settle scores or game the system. Either way, the distrust is still there. The problem was arguably never about anonymity at all, but that nobody in the system trusted that honest feedback would be received well, used fairly, or kept safe, regardless of whether names were on it.
Which brings us back to psychological safety. What people need in order to offer honest feedback, is consistent, demonstrated, lived experience that speaking honestly won’t cost them anything. That can only be developed slowly, through what actually happens when people speak up – we can’t shortcut our way to it via an anonymous feedback form.
The Costs of 360 Degree Feedback
There is a financial and relational cost to 360 degree feedback which is easy to overlook when it becomes ‘the norm’. We work with a number of large organisations stuck with a frustrating annual ritual, gathering and inputting reams of data into a system most people resent, kept alive less by conviction that it actually works than by a software licence they’re tied to. These platforms cost a significant amount of money, and the decision to buy one was often made a long way up the organisation. The cost is sunk; the plan is the plan, and questioning it means telling someone senior that their expensive choice isn’t working. It’s often easier, on balance, to just keep doing it.
In another organisation, someone told me their HR team was considering bringing 360 feedback in specifically to deal with one ‘bad manager’. The logic, as it was explained to me, was that this was the only way to get that manager some direct, unfiltered feedback from the people reporting to them. Which might be true. But it also means reaching for an entire organisation-wide measurement system, with all its cost, fatigue and risk, to solve a problem that’s really about one person — a siege engine wheeled up to a door that only needed knocking on.
So where does that leave us?
Not, unfortunately, with a tidy verdict. I’m not here to tell you 360 degree feedback never works, or that everyone running it should stop tomorrow. The honest position is that we don’t really know what it does, the evidence has been thin for twenty years and a great many organisations are running these processes at real cost to time, money and trust without properly questioning whether they’re helping or harming.
If there’s a structural point underneath all of this, it’s that candid feedback isn’t a system we install. The IES researchers, after all their interviews and analysis, landed somewhere strikingly modest: that organisations might do better simply reminding people to give honest, regular feedback as a matter of ordinary practice, rather than building elaborate machinery to extract it once a year.
I don’t think the story of 360 degree feedback is over. The tools are still being sold, the licences still being signed, the annual cycles still grinding on in organisations full of people wondering what they’re for. I suspect I’ll be having these conversations with clients for a long time yet. But maybe we can at least take a step back and ask what problem this process is actually meant to solve, and whether this is a good way to solve it.
If this leaves you wondering what good feedback actually looks like, the more personal, everyday kind that doesn’t need an annual cycle or an anonymous form, that’s exactly what we cover in our Delivering Effective Feedback workshop. Full details are here.
Tenerife, the power gradient, and the calculus of voice
On 27 March 1977, two Boeing 747s collided on a runway in the Canary Islands, and 583 people died. It is still the worst disaster in the history of civil aviation, and it happened on the ground, in fog, between two aircraft that weren’t actually supposed to be there.
Neither flight was scheduled to land at Los Rodeos. They were bound for Gran Canaria, until a separatist group detonated a bomb in the terminal there and a warning of a second one closed the airport. All flights headed to Gran Canaria were diverted, and many of them were sent to Los Rodeos on Tenerife: a small airport on a saddle between two mountains, with a single runway, a handful of taxiways, one apron, and a local reputation for being foggy. By the afternoon the apron was full of diverted widebodies, and the taxiways were blocked by the aircraft parked on them. When the all-clear finally came, the planes that wanted to leave could not taxi around to the runway in the ordinary way, because there was no room. They had to taxi down the active runway itself, turn around at the far end, and take off back the way they had come.
By Mtcv for Dutch wikipedia. CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1091580
Speaking up on the flight deck
The KLM 747 was piloted by Captain Jacob van Zanten, with First Officer Klaas Meurs beside him and Flight Engineer Willem Schreuder behind. Van Zanten taxied the length of the runway, turned the aircraft 180 degrees, and got ready to depart. Behind them, the Pan Am 747 was still taxiing down the same runway, under instruction to turn off at the third exit.
Van Zanten advanced the throttles. Meurs, somewhat surprised, told him they did not yet have ATC (air traffic control) clearance. Van Zanten brought the power back and, by the report’s account, told him to go ahead and ask for it. Meurs did speak up, and van Zanten did respond.
The ATC tower then passed KLM a route clearance, the instructions for after departure, and it contained the word “takeoff” without actually being a clearance to take off. Meurs read it back and tailed off with the words “we are now at takeoff.” Van Zanten, already releasing the brakes, said two words over the top of him: “We’re going.” The controller, who could not see the runway, answered “OK,” and then, after a pause, “stand by for takeoff, I will call you.” At that exact moment the Pan Am crew keyed their microphone to say they were still on the runway. The two radio transmissions collided, producing a squeal that meant neither were audible. The only word that reached the KLM cockpit cleanly was “OK.”
The tower then told the Pan Am to report when it was clear of the runway, and Pan Am acknowledged. This much was audible in the KLM cockpit, and Schreuder heard it. He then asked the question that should have prevented disaster: “Is he not clear, that Pan American?” Van Zanten answered, emphatically, “Oh, yes.” Schreuder asked again. He was answered again, with the same certainty, and Van Zanten increased the throttle, accelerating the 747 along the runway.
And then both Schreuder and Meurs were quiet. For the ten or fifteen seconds that remained they said nothing, until the fog ahead cleared, at about 160 miles an hour, showing the Pan Am 747 directly in their path, pointing straight at them. Both crews tried to take evasive action. The Pan Am hauled left toward the grass verge beside the runway; whilst van Zanten pulled back hard enough to drag the tail along the tarmac, trying to take off straight up and over the Pan Am. However, Van Zanten had decided to refuel during the long wait, sensibly enough, and combined with the full complement of passengers and luggage, it meant the KLM was heavy, and they didn’t quite make it. The wheels and one engine of the KLM ripped into the Pan Am, and the KLM aircraft hit the ground at speed. The collision killed everyone aboard the KLM and most of those aboard the Pan Am. 583 people died as a result.
Wreckage on the runway of Los Rodeos after the Tenerife airport disaster of March 27, 1977
“But if it really matters, won’t people speak up?”
If we take one thing from this, it is this: people do not speak up with their concerns, and they especially do not speak up again once they have spoken up and been dismissed, even when their own lives and the lives of others are at stake. The interpersonal costs and risks of speaking up loom so large that they outweigh the benefits of doing so.
Willem Schreuder was not junior or inexperienced. He had more flying hours than either of the men in cockpit with him. He had seen the problem and named it, twice. And then, having watched his certainty bounce off the captain’s certainty, he stopped, in an aircraft accelerating along a runway he had good reason to think was occupied by another plane. This is not cowardice or stupidity. It is what the interpersonal cost of voice does to all of us.
Consider the tacit calculus of voice, combined with Prospect Theory: we weigh the almost certain cost of speaking up against a merely possible benefit. The cost of pressing the captain a third time is immediate, social, and certain. You will be the person who second-guessed the chief instructor, out loud, on the basis of a feeling, and if the runway turns out to be clear you will have aborted his takeoff for nothing. The benefit is probabilistic and invisible if it works: a collision that does not happen leaves no trace and earns no credit. We all tend to over-estimate the immediate costs of speaking up, especially against someone senior, so the calculus tips towards the negative and we remain silent. This is all very human.
And notice the form the doubt took. Schreuder did not say “there is an aircraft on that runway, stop.” He asked whether the Pan Am was clear. This isn’t incidental: crews, and especially the less senior, tend to raise concerns in mitigated forms, as hints and questions rather than statements and commands, and the softer the form, the easier it is to wave away (Fischer and Orasanu, 1999). The same calculus that pushes us toward silence also shapes how we say something.
Here’s the really uncomfortable bit though – if the calculus still tips toward silence when the downside is death, in an aircraft, with your own life in the balance, then we should not be remotely surprised that it tips toward silence in a marketing meeting, an ideation session, or a finance catch-up. In most of the meetings and conversations we have, nobody is about to die. The high stakes that might justify the risk of speaking are not even close to this example, which means the silence makes even more sense. Tenerife is not a rare case at the edge of human behaviour. It’s an ordinary case, but with a tragic outcome.
The Power Gradient
The second thing this disaster surfaced, along with the others that the human-factors investigators were studying around the same time, was the gap in power between the most powerful person in the space, and the least. The aviation safety literature of the period called it various things, the authority gradient, the cockpit gradient, the trans-cockpit authority gradient, the power gradient. They are all pointing at the same structural feature: the steeper the difference in power between the person at the top and the person who has something to say, the harder it is to say it. This isn’t only intuitive: it shows up in the data on how status differences shape cockpit communication and coordination (Milanovich et al., 1998). The steeper the gradient, the more that voice is suppressed – it’s much harder to speak up against someone with greater power – power over your future, your reputation, your job, or your status. This is in fact, one of the most important things, perhaps the most important thing, governing whether people speak up.
“Power” is a large and ambiguous word though, so it helps to break it down. Drawing on French and Raven, but trying to make it usable rather than academic, we can talk about four kinds of power.
Formal power (positional power) is the obvious kind, the kind that is described and written down. Role, rank, title, seniority; where we sit in the org chart, how many people report to us, who we report to, which rules and structures are ours to invoke. It is the most legible form of power, and being legible, it is also the easiest to see and to navigate around.
Informal power is much harder to see, because it is almost never written down. It lives in social standing, reputation, popularity, the size and shape of our networks, our reputation, how many people we know and how well. It does its work invisibly, which makes it harder to name and harder to navigate.
Demographic power is mostly the power we did nothing to earn and cannot hand back: height, race, age, gender, sexuality, class, accent. It endows, or otherwise, different degrees of power in different contexts.
Expert power is what we know: our qualifications, our experience, our demonstrated competence in this domain. It is sharply contextual. A brain surgeon in a cockpit has very little of it (probably, maybe they’re also a qualified pilot). An experienced surgeon in an operating theatre has a lot of it.
The Four Types of Power
The point of separating these out is that they do not behave as one thing. They can pull against each other, they can compensate for each other’s absence, and, dangerously, they can stack up.
In van Zanten they all stacked up. His informal power was enormous: he was the face of KLM’s advertising, the man in the in-flight magazine, photographed under the line about the people who made punctuality possible. He was, at least in the world of the airline, a minor celebrity. His demographic power was high as a tall, tanned, silver-haired Dutchman in a captain’s uniform. His expert power was as high as it goes: he was KLM’s chief instructor on the 747, the man who taught other pilots how to fly the aircraft, the airline’s recognised authority on the type. And his formal power matched it, the seniority and standing of the chief of flight training, the man KLM would later try to reach to help investigate the crash, before they realised that he had been at the controls. He had also, only weeks earlier, conducted Meurs’s qualification check on the 747. The first officer beside him owed his certification on the aircraft to the man he was trying to challenge.
Set that out and the gradient in that cockpit is incredibly steep, along every axis.
It is worth being careful here, because the easy version of this story makes van Zanten a powerful tyrant, and the evidence doesn’t support it; in fact rather the opposite. Colleagues who knew him, including Jan Bartelski, a fellow KLM captain and later president of the international pilots’ federation, dispute that portrait flatly. By their account he was studious and introverted but warm, a believer in partnership who insisted his first officers call him “Jaap” rather than “Captain.” This doesn’t weaken the argument; in fact it reinforces it. The power gradient did its silencing work in the cockpit of a man who, by temperament and by stated belief, was trying to flatten it. The gradient is not mainly a matter of personality. It forms between people, out of their positions relative to one another: rank, reputation, expertise, and how readily the room defers. None of that dissolves because the person at the top is, personally, a good sort. We might work to mitigate the gradient, and we should; but the gradient remains.
None of which is to say it was his fault, or that having power is something to feel guilty about. We may possess a great deal of power and that is fine; most of us will, in some room at some time, be the most powerful person in it. What we are obliged to do is recognise and acknowledge it, because the gradient forms whether or not we want it to, and it has effects whether or not we intend them. And the gradient acts on the powerful, too. A reputation built entirely on being on time every time is a reputation with a downside, and a man already badly delayed, watching the duty clock run down, was under a pressure of his own making to go. The punctuality that sold his reputation was pressing on the throttle in his hand on the runway.
What we learned from the wreckage
The lasting answer to Tenerife, and to the accidents around it, was Crew Resource Management. It came out of a NASA workshop on human factors in 1979, which itself was catalysed by the Tenerife disaster, along with others, and was first adopted comprehensively by United Airlines in the early 1980s, and was taken up by nearly every airline in the world within a remarkably short time. It is, with some justification, often called the most successful safety programme humanity has ever created. It is a large part of the reason that getting into an aeroplane is now one of the safest things you can do.
CRM emerged in aviation specifically to reduce catastrophic errors by changing cockpit culture: communication norms, authority gradients, briefing practices, and coordination under pressure. It was quickly adopted in medicine, especially in emergency response and (surprise) surgical teams. It trains people to speak up when something looks wrong, to challenge respectfully, to cross-check decisions, and to share situational awareness. In doing so, it creates a structured environment in which speaking up becomes expected and legitimate (Weller, Boyd and Cumin, 2014). The sense that it is safe to raise a concern is not a mysterious precondition that must somehow appear in advance. It is the result of concrete practices, training, and norms that make voice a normal part of the work.
It began life as Cockpit Resource Management and became Crew Resource Management, as a result of further disaster and our learning from them. Accidents like Kegworth, where cabin crew outside the cockpit could see things the pilots could not and the information never made the journey forward – due to a steep power gradient between cockpit crew and cabin crew, taught the industry that it is not enough to train only the people at the controls. Cabin crew, ground crew, air traffic control, operations staff: everyone in the system needs to be able to speak up to power at the moment it matters, and everyone needs the people above them to listen when they do. The safest crews are the ones where leadership is, in effect, shared: cabin and cockpit prompting and correcting one another rather than information travelling in one direction (Bienefeld and Grote, 2014).
CRM works on the problem from both ends. It scaffolds the act of speaking up against a gradient, giving people recognised, legitimate ways to push information upwards. And it works on the gradients themselves, building in practices that share power and distribute authority so that the slope is shallower before anyone has to climb it. Both are necessary. We cannot only teach the person at the bottom to be braver; we also have to lower the wall. None of this is a switch we flip once. Safety silence persists even in trained crews wherever the local culture quietly licenses it, which is why CRM has to be lived rather than merely delivered (Perkins et al., 2022).
Walking ourselves up the ladder
One of the practices that came out of this world is PACE, a graded assertiveness tool, and it is worth walking through because it is a scaffold built precisely for the moment Schreuder found himself in.
We begin with a Probe: a low-threat question that surfaces the concern without confronting anyone. “Is that red light meant to be on?”, “That Pan Am, is he clear yet?” Schreuder’s question was, in effect, a probe. If the probe does not get traction, if it doesn’t draw attention to the thing we are actually concerned about, we escalate to an Alert, which names the hazard clearly. “Oxygen is at 90% and falling.” or “We don’t have ATC clearance for takeoff.” Meurs’s first objection was an alert. If the alert doesn’t land either, we go to Challenge: stating the problem and proposing a different course of action, which is much harder, because now we‘re not just raising a worry, we’re asking the powerful person to do something other than what they have decided. “I don’t think it’s safe to take off yet. There may be an aircraft on the runway. Let’s hold and check.” And if even that fails, we reach Emergency, an unambiguous command: “Stop. This is unsafe.” This is very interpersonally challenging and risky, but is less so if we’ve walked ourselves up the PACE steps already – and hopefully we don’t need to get to Emergency anyway.
At Tenerife, nobody got past Alert. Two experienced professionals raised the hazard, had it dismissed, and stopped where the ladder becomes more interpersonally expensive.
We see the same pattern far outside aviation. Elaine Bromiley died in 2005 during what should have been a routine operation, when her anaesthetists became fixated on an airway they could not secure and lost track of the time she had spent without oxygen. The nurses in the room could see what was happening. One of them had fetched the kit for an emergency surgical airway and had it ready. They did not speak up and directly challenge the anaesthetists however, because the gradient between nurse and consultant in that theatre was every bit as steep as the one in the KLM cockpit, and the calculus of voice tipped the same way it always does (Harmer, 2005). Her husband Martin, an airline pilot, went on to found the Clinical Human Factors Group, and has spent the years since bringing aviation’s hard-won human-factors lessons into healthcare.
The reason the ladder helps is not that the top rung becomes comfortable. Issuing an unambiguous command to someone who holds your future in their hands is never going to feel safe, and it is not supposed to. The point is that you very rarely have to start there. By beginning with a probe and escalating only as far as you need, you walk yourself up the slope one manageable step at a time, and most of the time the problem is resolved long before you reach the top. The ladder turns one impossible act into a sequence of difficult but possible ones. And it gives the people around you, the ones with the power, a recognised signal that something is wrong before it becomes a fight.
What Tenerife taught us
We have learned an enormous amount from this disaster, as we have from many others. The conditions that produced the silence in that cockpit are not rare or unique to aviation. A steep gradient, a respected expert who has just expressed certainty, a team under time pressure, a concern that gets raised and dismissed once: this isn’t just a description of a 1977 runway. It is a description of an ordinary Tuesday in a finance team, a weekly planning meeting with the boss, or any number of other, comparatively mundane, contexts (with the merciful difference that the stakes are usually lower). The silence itself is not a quirk of individuals but a collective condition, one that organisations produce and reproduce in themselves (Morrison and Milliken, 2000).
That difference is also the danger. Because the stakes are lower, the silence is cheaper, and the scaffolding that aviation was forced to build under the pressure of mass fatalities is scaffolding the rest of us never get round to building at all. If two skilled people would not press a third time with their own lives on the line, we cannot reasonably expect anyone to press in a meeting where the worst case is mild embarrassment, unless we have deliberately made the conditions possible.
Jan Hagen’s Confronting Mistakesis a great book to read alongside this, because it works through the disasters of these decades and asks, of each one, why it happened, what might have prevented it, and what we learned from it. For the fullest blow-by-blow reconstruction of the accident itself, Admiral Cloudberg’s account is the best there is (Cloudberg, 2022). Underneath nearly all of them sits the same thing the human-factors investigators surfaced at Tenerife, decades before psychological safety became a term anyone outside a few corners of academia would recognise. They weren’t using the term psychological safety (because it wasn’t yet in mainstream use), but they were describing the exact same thing. The gradient suppresses voice; the silence risks disaster; and the work is to build the conditions, structural as well as interpersonal, in which the least powerful person in the room can say the thing that needs saying while there is still time to act on it.
Van Zanten’s last two words on the matter were “We’re going.” Everyone else acquiesced.
References
Bienefeld, N. and Grote, G. (2014) ‘Shared leadership in multiteam systems: How cockpit and cabin crews lead each other to safety’, Human Factors, 56(2), pp. 270–286.
Fischer, U. and Orasanu, J. (1999) ‘Cultural diversity and crew communication’. Paper presented at the 50th International Astronautical Congress, Amsterdam, October 1999.
Milanovich, D.M., Driskell, J.E., Stout, R.J. and Salas, E. (1998) ‘Status and cockpit dynamics: A review and empirical study’, Group Dynamics: Theory, Research, and Practice, 2(3), pp. 155–167.
Morrison, E.W. and Milliken, F.J. (2000) ‘Organizational silence: A barrier to change and development in a pluralistic world’, Academy of Management Review, 25(4), pp. 706–725.
Perkins, K., Ghosh, S., Vera, J., Aragon, C. and Hyland, A. (2022) ‘The persistence of safety silence: How flight deck microcultures influence the efficacy of crew resource management’, International Journal of Aviation, Aeronautics, and Aerospace, 9(3).
Weller, J., Boyd, M. and Cumin, D. (2014) ‘Teams, tribes and patient safety: Overcoming barriers to effective teamwork in healthcare’, Postgraduate Medical Journal, 90(1061), pp. 149–154.
Artificial intelligence is rapidly becoming part of content moderation and account enforcement across major online platforms. While AI can help identify spam, scams, and harmful content at internet scale, what happens when the system gets it wrong?A recently published Medium article examines this question through the experience of a Facebook account suspension that was reportedly initiated by an automated system, followed by an automated appeal denial and no meaningful path to human review.The article argues that the issue isn't AI itself—it's allowing AI to become investigator, decision-maker, and appeals process without effective human oversight.The broader concern is that platforms like Meta have evolved into critical pieces of modern infrastructure. They host community groups, school communications, local government announcements, business pages, political discussions, and years of personal history. Their ecosystems also span multiple interconnected services, meaning a single enforcement action can affect Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, Threads, and Meta hardware tied to the same account.This concern extends beyond a single user's experience. A growing advocacy effort at People Over Platforms documents thousands of reports from users who say they were wrongfully locked out of their accounts and calls for stronger transparency, meaningful appeals, and human oversight.The movement originated with a Change.org petition that has gathered more than 63,000 supporters before transitioning to an independent nonprofit focused on digital rights and platform accountability.Media outlets in multiple countries have also reported on users who say they were wrongly disabled by Meta's automated enforcement systems, with some accounts later restored after additional review.Rather than asking whether AI should be used for moderation, the article asks a different question:If AI is empowered to make decisions that can revoke a person's digital identity, communications, communities, and purchased ecosystem, should there always be a meaningful human appeal available?Medium article:https://medium.com/@vtadorsett...People Over Platforms:https://www.peopleoverplatform...Original Change.org petition:https://www.change.org/p/hold-...
Polestar is now winding down its car sales in the United States, following the decision of the U.S. Department of CommerceThe Connected Vehicle Rule is a regulation that restricts the import and sale of vehicles equipped with Vehicle Connectivity Systems (VCS) and Automated Driving Systems (ADS) tied to foreign adversaries, primarily from China and Russia.Polestar is owned by Chinese auto giant Geely, which has also been the parent company of Swedish brand Volvo since 2010. However, Volvo has recently been granted authorization to sell connected vehicles in the United States.
Microsoft has extended the consumer ESU support for Windows 10 for another year. It will now run until Oct 2027.
Both the ESU page (https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/extended-security-updates#cw) and a Blog Post (https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2025/06/24/stay-secure-with-windows-11-copilot-pcs-and-windows-365-before-support-ends-for-windows-10/) from Microsoft reflect the change.
Consumer ESU is either free (sometimes with strings attached) or low cost (~30 U$D) compared to Enterprise ESU. The details are in the ESU page.
Enterprise ESU remains unchanged, and runs until Oct 2028.
For people still using Win10 as their main OS, either because their HW does not support Win11, or because they like Win10 better, or people (like me) Dualbooting another OS as the main one, with a Win10 partition for other uses, these are excellent news.
On Monday, June 22, the European Union Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) issued an Emergency Airworthiness Directive targeting 16 Airbus A380 aircraft after the agency determined cracks found on certain aircraft could "reduce the structural integrity of the wing." The impacted aircraft include 15 Emirates planes and one Qantas aircraft
The A380, the world's largest passenger plane, has faced similar emergency inspections over past wing cracks
[T]he payment company Stripe, founded by brothers Patrick and John Collison, says it will fund a new $500 million nonprofit whose goal is preventing both the common cold and the flu. Its eventual aim is to get rid of respiratory viruses altogether. The new organization, called Intercept, will use grants and investments to back prevention approaches, including vaccines, as well as large-scale air-cleaning systems for schools, offices, and other public spaces. In addition to Stripe, other funders include Anthropic, Flu Lab, and the OpenAI Foundation, as well as Bill Gates and several traders at the quantitative investing fund Jane Street Capital, according to an Intercept spokesperson.
“I think we treat respiratory infections as a minor nuisance, but have really underweighted the burden that they impose on society,” says Nan Ransohoff, the Stripe executive leading the initiative along with Charlie Petty, a venture capitalist who joined Stripe this year. On average, people spend 5% of their lifetime fighting a cold or the flu, according to Ransohoff. Despite that, drug companies put relatively little effort into preventing colds. Part of the problem is that the sniffles are caused by more than 200 different viruses, according to the American Lung Association, with rhinoviruses being the most common culprits. There are so many that it typically doesn’t pay to try to stop any one of them with a vaccine. “When pharma companies look at it, it’s not as attractive as other things they could work on,” says Ransohoff. “So it hasn’t attracted the resources.”
[...] The project takes inspiration from efforts to fight the covid-19 virus, where Veesler’s group was among those involved in the speedy development of vaccines, antiviral drugs, and antibodies. According to Ransohoff, Intercept’s advisors will include Peter Marks, a former top FDA official, as well as Moncef Slaoui, the pharmaceutical executive who led the US coronavirus vaccine effort, Operation Warp Speed. A key challenge for Intercept will be coming up with ways to counter many viruses at one time. That accounts for the interest in air-cleaning technology, such as using strong ultraviolet light to inactivate viruses. The idea, the group says, is to remove them from the air in the same way municipalities remove impurities from the water supply before it’s piped to people’s homes.
This week I had the pleasure of giving a talk at Smashing’s “Meets Sustainability” event, alongside fellow speakers Chris Adams and Ines Akrap. Videos of all talks and the Q&A are available to watch online, but in this article, I want to provide a written version of my talk, One Small Step for Web Kind.
My hope for this article is to communicate the key message of my talk, which is this:
No matter how small you feel in the face of global challenges, you can make a difference. And every little thing that you do matters.
The title of my talk echoes Neil Armstrong’s famous words when stepping onto the surface of the moon, and it felt fitting for a talk given at a time when the scale of the digital sustainability problem has apparently transcended Earth. With Elon Musk talking about putting data centers in space, and even on the moon itself.
I never thought I’d see a day when humans actually say they plan to put data centers on the moon!
It would be easy to throw our hands in the air and say “I give up,” but I hope to inspire you to believe that our hope and actions matter now more than ever. To explain why, let me travel back in time to the beginning of my own journey in web sustainability.
From small beginnings
When I started Wholegrain with my wife Vineeta in 2007, we had a mission to use our business for good and we put sustainability at the heart of everything that we did, from the way that we worked, to the supplies that we purchased, to how we traveled, and to the types of clients that we worked with, but despite our best intentions, that wasn’t actually everything.
It was only in 2016 when we were preparing to certify as a B Corp that I realised that we had a huge blind spot. The B Corp assessment asked us how we measure the environmental impact of the products that we make, and furthermore, how we reduce that impact. Having previously specialised in the eco-design of physical products, I knew exactly what this question meant, as I had done exactly this type of assessment and design in the past, but I had always assumed that digital products didn’t have an environmental impact. They were “virtual” and living in a “cloud.” Weren’t they?
When I read these questions in the B Corp assessment, it quickly dawned on me how ignorant I had been, and to be honest, I was really embarrassed. Of all people, I had the experience to know better.
This realisation kick-started a mission that has since been at the center of Wholegrain, to understand the impact of the web, and to figure out what we can do about it. At that early time, searching online, the number of people who I found talking about this topic could be counted on one hand, such as Tim Frick, Mike Gifford, and James Christie. True pioneers out there in the wilderness.
I also found a lone academic paper on the subject, reporting the total emissions of the internet to be 2% of all global emissions, equivalent to the aviation industry. This was a startling statistic. There was very little information, and very few people talking about it, but it was a start, and it inspired me to go further.
That starting point led me to develop the first methodology for calculating the emissions of a single website, so that we could benchmark our work and find ways to improve. It led our team to then look at their own work in a new light and begin to evolve their approaches to design, development, content, and hosting, and we began to share what we were learning through talks, tools like WebsiteCarbon.com, collaborations like the Sustainable Web Manifesto, and content such as blog posts, our Curiously Green newsletter, and in 2021 my first book, Sustainable Web Design.
I introduced the idea of sustainable web design to the WordPress community at WordCamp Europe in Paris in 2017
At first, most people were skeptical, believing that the digital world doesn’t impact the physical world. But slowly, slowly, people began to engage with the topic. And those people who engaged with the topic went on to make changes in their own work, speak to their colleagues, write their own articles, give talks, develop new tools, and even write books.
Skip forward to today and while the AI race may have made some people feel that the digital sustainability challenge is now too big to solve, we should stop and look at how far we have come. In an industry that claims to be forward thinking, digital sustainability was not on the agenda 10 years ago, apart from those few pioneers speaking into the seemingly endless void. Now, in 2026 there is a significant level of awareness of the impacts of digital technology, not just in the industry, but even in the general public. There are a growing number of events, podcasts, blogs, and tools, not to mention that a global standard for web sustainability is well on its way to fruition thanks to this ever-growing community of passionate people. On top of that, every day that I log into LinkedIn, I see someone with “digital sustainability” or “sustainable web design” in their profile or their company description. The culture has changed radically in 10 years, and this is thanks to every single person who stopped to take notice and cared enough to do something, however small.
It all matters, and every small action does matter, however imperfect it might be. If you optimise your email newsletter or switch to EcoSend, that one action scales to thousands of emails every time you send a message. If you optimise your website, that impact scales over thousands or perhaps hundreds of thousands of visitors, and if you slow down your use of AI, you slow down the AI race just a little bit. Furthermore, when we talk about the things that matter, sharing knowledge and ideas, we multiply our impact further, having a ripple effect that extends out to horizons that we will never see, but will likely be greater than the direct impact that we can see.
Seth Godin says that culture is simply the phenomenon that “people like us do things like this,” and I believe that in this spirit we can change the culture simply by daring to do things differently in line with our own values. We may face resistance at first, but gradually we disrupt the flow of the status quo to the point that the culture in our teams, in our organisations, in our industries, and society at large, begins to change.
My friend Nick Whitnell often likes to quote Buckminster Fuller, who loved to illustrate this with the analogy of a ship. Huge ships have immense momentum and are almost impossible to turn. The forces resisting them from turning are so great that it’s almost impossible to even turn the rudder, let alone the ship itself. To overcome this problem, ships have a tiny extra rudder attached to their main rudder, called a trim tab. This trim tab is small enough that it can be moved in the water, and when it does so, it creates a small pocket of low pressure that slowly moves the big rudder. And as the big rudder then moves, gradually the whole ship changes direction.
We are all trim tabs. The question is, will we dare to turn?
We may feel small and insignificant, but we are all the trim tabs of our society, quietly creating pressure to turn the seemingly unstoppable ship that we are all on, if we choose to. We just need to dare to stick our little oar out into the oncoming flow of water and trust that in time we are helping to steer the ship.
So with that, I hope that I’ve inspired you to believe that we all do matter, that the future hasn’t been written yet, and that we should get up each day and do our best to represent a version of the world that we want to live in, knowing that how we show up today shapes the world that we step into tomorrow.
If you enjoyed this article, check out Tom’s new book, Overton’s Garden, which will take you on an unexpected journey outside the window of acceptable thought, to reignite your creative hope and empower you to help create a better world.
New GTK4/libadwaita app Whisp is positioning itself as the note-taking app for people fed up with note-taking apps (the best one is always the next one, right?). Scratch that; Whisp pitches itself as “the anti-note for GNOME”, a riff on Antinote, a macOS app with a similar look and feature set. Developer Tanay Bhomia describes it as “a fluid, gesture-driven scratchpad designed for absolute speed”. The website takes shots at the complexity of Obsidian and Notion, but Whisp isn’t out to compete with either. It’s a foil to notes relying on databases, hierarchies and corkboard-and-red-string organisational complexity. Me? I am a disorganised savage. […]
Microsoft ended official support for Windows 10 in 2025, but the company may have a harder time than expected putting the operating system out to pasture. After promising a year of optional extended update support, Microsoft has changed its policy, tacking on another year to its Extended Security Updates (ESU) program. If you are still clinging to Windows 10, you don't have to do anything but enjoy that extra year.
The last regular updates rolled out to Windows 10 in October of last year, but the Internet can be a dangerous place for unpatched Windows machines. That was a problem for Microsoft, as Windows 11 usage had only barely surpassed Windows 10 when support ended. Microsoft's solution was to give everyone on the old OS a free year of extended updates.
That program was set to end on October 12, 2026, but Microsoft has updated its policy with hardly a whisper, pushing back the end of extended updates to October 12, 2027. The ESU support page was updated with that date, and Microsoft's blog post on the program has a new editor's note confirming the change.
The Federal Communications Commission was roundly criticized today for proposing to scale back or eliminate E-Rate, a $2 billion-a-year Universal Service program that provides discounts for telecom services and equipment in schools and libraries.
FCC Chairman Brendan Carr said E-Rate should be changed because students are getting too much screen time. He led a 2-1 vote to issue a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) that proposes changes and asks the public to comment on them.
"Over the last decade, school districts across the country experimented with a massive increase in screen time for students," Carr said at today's meeting.
In February 2024, Notion bought Skiff, an encrypted email and productivity software startup. Within a year, Notion shut down Skiff’s email service (taking @skiff.com email addresses with it). And in April 2025, the San Francisco-based company released Notion Mail, a Gmail client primarily built by people who joined Notion through the Skiff acquisition. Today, Notion announced that it’s shutting down Notion Mail, effectively killing what little remained of Skiff email.
In an X post (first spotted by 9to5Mac) today, Notion said that it will shutter the Notion Mail “inbox across web, desktop, and iOS on September 22.”
The post claimed that most Notion users don’t use email clients anyway and instead rely on AI agents to handle their electronic correspondence. It reads:
Google Finance is not a new product—it has been around for 20 years, long enough that it initially relied on Flash to display charts and graphs. The website has gotten a few major updates over the years, but it has never had a mobile app until now. Google has released the first standalone app for Google Finance, which is currently exclusive to Android, with iOS planned for later this year.
The app is available globally in the Play Store, but that's not the only update to Google's financial tracker. The AI-powered makeover for the Finance website is also leaving beta, making Google's chatbot a core part of the experience. Naturally, the mobile app includes a heaping helping of generative AI that aims to make sense of irrational financial markets.
If you've checked out the new Finance web experience, you'll see a lot of familiar features in the app. You can create watchlists, monitor real-time market data, and keep up with financial news in one place. While perusing graphs of stock performance, Finance will use AI to generate "key moments" that can explain why the numbers changed. This feature initially launched in the Finance web interface in May.
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