- Salon is shutting down, after 31 years;
- Elon Musk has deleted his posts supporting Republicans;
- Paul Davies on three great origin mysteries, and how maybe people just don’t “frame the questions” correctly;
- Scientific American about the Earth’s “Great Unconformity”;
- A book by David Treuer about the history of violence;
- And political items, briefly noted: Trump, Stephen Miller, the Christian left, Christian nationalism, and calls from the right for violence;
- Another map of political alliances in the US, scaling states proportionally.
One more round. But I need to begin wrapping this thread up.
Before the politics round:
Salon is shutting down!
Salon, 5 Nov 2026: Goodbye from Salon, subtitled “It has been an extraordinary privilege.”
Today, after 31 years, we are saddened to announce that Salon is ceasing publication.
It’s difficult to find the right words for the end of something that has meant so much to so many people. Salon was never just a website. It was an idea about what journalism could be, born at a moment when the internet was still a largely unexplored frontier.
When Salon launched in November 1995, the web was a very different place. A small group of journalists set out to create something original: a publication with a strong voice, a curiosity about the world and a belief that the internet could bring journalism and readers together in new ways. They helped pioneer a form of journalism that would come to define an entirely new era of publishing.
And so on. NYT notes it here:
NY Times, 5 Nov 2026: Salon, a Pioneer of Digital Journalism, Shuts Down, subtitled “The progressive website, founded in 1995, said its business was ‘no longer sustainable.'”
Salon was started in 1995 by the journalist David Talbot as a digital magazine covering books, culture and ideas at a time before blogging and online news had taken off. It was financially backed by Apple, Adobe and the now-defunct bookstore chain Borders.
Over the years, it became known for its politically progressive views and expanded to cover politics and tech. It employed a number of well-known journalists, including Glenn Greenwald, Joan Walsh and Michelle Goldberg. Steve Kornacki, the beloved data nerd at NBC News, was at one point Salon’s politics editor, while CNN’s Jake Tapper also worked for the site as a Washington correspondent early in his career.
This is all very sad, but then media is changing and magazines are being affected too. A concern I had right away was, what would happen to the accumulated site archives at Salon? (Since I’ve posted links to many articles on site for decades.) Would they all vanish, as has happened with some website that go out of business? NYT ends:
A spokesperson for Salon said in an email that the company was still exploring options, “but there are no plans to take the archive down at this time.”
(I’ve already noticed that some image links to Salon articles expire, or rather change, which is why my links to them now don’t display the images. But that’s probably a different issue.)
\\\
Meanwhile, there’s some weird irony here.
JMG, 5 Nov 2026: Elon Musk Is Mass-Deleting His Tweets About Election
This is a perfect example of Orwellian authoritarian behavior: change the record to deny you ever supported the losers.
\\\
On a fundamental theme: on many basic issues, maybe humans are just asking the wrong questions. (Recall Weinberg’s book.) We think the universe works in the same way mundane, parochial human life works, even though we already know it doesn’t, at different scales.
Big Think, (6 Nov 2026): The laws of the universe are unable to explain these origin mysteries, subtitled “Physicist Paul Davies explores how chemistry first learned to write its own code, and what that reveals about the origin of life.”
(Despite the locked content warning, the full transcript is available.)
I have several of his books. Let me quote just the core of his theme here.
There are really three origin mysteries. I like to say there’s the origin of the universe, the origin of life, and the origin of consciousness. Now most of my career I’ve been working cosmology. And I would say that we actually understand the origin of the universe pretty well. The origin of consciousness is a really tough one because we don’t even know how to frame the questions. We don’t know the right conceptual structure to apply when it comes to the nature of consciousness. I think it’s still deeply mysterious. The origin of life is a tough one, but we’re sort of on the case and I can imagine that within a few decades we might have a pretty good understanding.
How to “frame the questions.” We’re probably just thinking about them in the wrong way. It’s not that there aren’t some kind of ‘explanations,’ because these things exist, and must be consistent with each other.
\
Two other science items.
Scientific American, today: Scientists finally solve the mystery of Earth’s ‘Great Unconformity’, subtitled “The ‘Great Unconformity’ has puzzled scientists since its discovery in the 1870s”
It seems the geological record has gaps of hundreds of millions of years, and new research suggests an answer: “deep processes inside Earth lifted some continents high above the sea, where their surfaces were scoured down by the grinding movement of enormous sheets of ice.”
\
Review of a new book: THE SAVAGE MIND: An American Legacy, by David Treuer.
NY Times, Michael Thomas, today: How Frontier Violence Defined the American Mind, subtitled “David Treuer’s new book is a letter to his children about the savage history of our national character.”
Though it reads by turns like a polemic, a manifesto, a history and a meditation, “The Savage Mind” is a letter that Treuer, a member of the Ojibwe tribe, wrote to his children after George Floyd’s murder and the Jan. 6 Capitol siege, in an attempt to hold his family together as the nation seemed to be falling apart.
The book is a study of the American frontier and the violence that has always been its defining feature. The frontier no longer exists as a physical space, Treuer asserts, but endures nonetheless as “the idea, the impulse, the culture” of what once lay outside civilized life. The frontier has migrated inside us, and it has become our cultural practice to see violence as the only response to fear.
Mind you, this is not about ancient history, but about relatively contemporary American history. And it goes to the bifurcation of human nature often discussed here. And it’s about a truth of human nature that modern conservatives, as with so much else, would prefer to ignore or deny.
\\\\
And now some political items from the past two days, as briefly as possible.
- Slate, Ian Prasad Philbrick, yesterday: Did Trump Learn Anything From the Midterms? We Already Have Our Answer., subtitled “A rage-driven president has picked an even angrier chief of staff.” | Answer: no; he’s doubling down.
- Also, yesterday: The Atlantic, A Chief of Staff Who ‘Will Crack Skulls’, subtitled “The president has no interest in being reined in. His new chief of staff is perfect for him.”
- And this. They say it out loud. JMG, today: Watters: “Based” Miller Will Bring Back “White Vote”.
- Vox, Christian Paz, 4 Nov 2026: The Christian left is here, subtitled “With James Talarico and Adam Hamilton’s victories in Texas and Kansas, a movement to reclaim religion from the right has its first big wins.” | I keep seeing this as an argument between OT and NT (not including Paul).
- Hemant Mehta considers the big picture. Friendly Atheist, yesterday: The blue tsunami was a blow to Christian Nationalism, subtitled “Throughout the country, voters rejected politicians who wanted to put conservative Christianity into law”
- In response, they threaten violence. Right Wing Watch, Kyle Mantyla, 5 Nov 2026: MAGA Pastor Lorenzo Sewell Calls For ‘Another January 6’ After Democrats Win Midterms
- More Sadz from JMG: Randy Fine Has The Midterms Sadz: “The Barbarians Will Serve In Congress, Bad Things Are On Horizon”
\\\
Another useful map. The standard political maps of America that show states colored red or blue is deeply misleading — precisely because of the way our electoral college works.
This is from the UK paper The Guardian, via several Facebook posts today. Comment on Fb: “Instead of showing the massive but empty red geography, it shows the state’s size based on the number of House seats. I like that. (Update: The districts inside each state are shown as equal in size, so they fit as best as possible.)”
There’s another map, which I may already have posted, that shows the US with red and blue population circles, with big blue circles around the major cities, and relatively tiny red bubbles throughout most of the middle of the country. The point of both of these of maps is that more people live in big cities, and presumably vote Democratic, than live in small towns in mid-America, who vote Republican.
But then how do Republicans win so often? Because– back to the electoral college (and the senate), that gives every small-population state the same weight as all the huge-population states. Someone calls this “the tyranny of the minority.” This is the state of modern American politics. It is dragging us down.
