This morning the NRSC, the GOP Senate campaign committee, sent out an urgent email soliciting funds for Herschel Walker to contest the Georgia runoff election. No surprise there. Warnock and Democratic committees are doing the same. Let’s look at the details.

Here is what you see when you click through to donate.

Oliver Sacks on the dehumanizing effects of iPhones and internet culture, published in The New Yorker in 2019, four years after his death.

Maricopa County Chairman Bill Gates, a Republican, moved to an undisclosed location with a sheriff’s protective detail in response to threats tied to the 2022 midterm. Maricopa County is governed by a five-member board of supervisors. As chairman, Gates is the chief executive authority in the county. Gates has been an outspoken defender of the integrity of the county’s voting system.

Newly elected Arizona Republican state representative announces she will not vote in the state house until the 2022 election is redone. Rep. Liz Harris’s decision would reduce the GOP’s effective majority to a margin of 30 to 29.

This article on “Galactica,” a Meta (i.e., Facebook) AI engine that was supposed to organize and synthesize 48 million scientific papers, is a new addition to a growing list of such reports which make me think that both the transformative and dystopic versions of the AI future are further in the distance than we are often led to believe.

Five died and eighteen were wounded overnight in a mass shooting at a LGBTQ nightclub in Colorado Springs. Initial reports suggest that the gunman was initially subdued by club attendees rather than police, perhaps reducing the death toll. We should treat all the initial reports as tentative. The shooter was apparently also injured and is in custody receiving medical treatment. (In the summer of 2021 the alleged shooter threatened violence against his mother with “a homemade bomb, multiple weapons, and ammunition.” A SWAT team negotiations unit was able to get Anderson Lee Aldrich to come out of the home voluntarily and he was taken into custody.)

I see we’re back to the question of whether Donald Trump should be allowed back on Twitter, whether Elon Musk will allow him back, what it will mean? All I can add to this debate is that getting hung up on this question is undignified and unwise. Put simply, it makes the supporters of civic democracy and Americanism sound weak, helpless, lacking the courage of their convictions and beliefs, afraid. (As I was writing this post, I heard that Elon Musk had announced he was reinstating Trump on the platform.) Much of this stems from the really wrongheaded idea that Trump leapfrogged to the commanding heights of American politics in 2015 because he got so much TV coverage or because people engaged with his tweets on Twitter. That was never true. All sorts of bad conclusions flow from that misapprehension.

Many of you are asking me what I make of Merrick Garland’s decision to appoint Jack Smith to serve as a special prosecutor to oversee the investigation into Jan 6th (he won’t take over current cases) and the Mar-a-Lago investigation. I think it’s fine. I strongly suspect, though here I’m talking more hunch, that it’s also bad news for Donald Trump and probably various associates.

A quick rundown on the newly appointed special counsel Jack Smith, with whom I wasn’t familiar prior to today’s announcement: