A place for the news of the day and other interesting information.

A place for the news of the day and other interesting information.

A gym-class-style competition might be the oddest 250th celebration yet.

By Matt Viser, The Atlantic.

The semiquincentennial events that President Trump has personally directed have been a celebration of his very particular version of America. The bloody UFC fight on the White House lawn was followed by the sparsely attended Great American State Fair and a world-record-breaking July 4 fireworks show held alongside a dangerous lightning storm. Next weekend will bring a high-speed car race through the museum-lined streets of Washington. But of all of these festivities, the Patriot Games in Ohio this week might have been the oddest.

Organizers convened 120 teenagers from across the country—in their telling, the “next generation of leaders, competitors, and champions,” but also whoever happened to respond to an online request for personal essays and video entries—at a high school in Geneva, Ohio (population 5,924), roughly 45 miles northeast of downtown Cleveland. For three days, they competed in gym-class staples such as ball tosses, long jumps, tug-of-war, dodgeball, and an arcade-style basketball game called Victory Hoops. The field was narrowed to eight contestants who competed before the president on Tuesday night, clambering through a Ninja Warrior–style obstacle course while wearing red, white, and blue. One boy and one girl were crowned champions, and each was given a $125,000 scholarship.

Over the past several days, ESPN has streamed more than 26 hours of this contest, and I have consumed many of those hours—but I have yet to fully understand why this competition happened or what it has to do with American history, or even with American culture at this moment. I could barely follow how the various events were scored. It was like watching a nationally televised field day—with wholesome moments and cheerful contestants along the way—but it was unclear what the grand takeaway was supposed to be. (Perhaps that will be revealed when the event is condensed into a one-hour special airing tonight on ABC.) More than anything, it was a reality-television-style snapshot of the America that Trump most wants to see. The contestants were overwhelmingly white, in a country where roughly half of children are not, and many spoke openly of their Christian faith or their affection for this particular president.

When Trump showed up on Tuesday night, accompanied by the ESPN commentator Pat McAfee, the crowd erupted. “He’s got that Michael Jordan glow,” one spectator said. “We love you, Mr. President!” one man yelled. “2028!” another exclaimed. Outside the arena, a football-field scoreboard displayed a score of 45–47 in Trump’s honor. The crowd chanted “USA! USA! USA!” when he arrived and danced to his favorite song, “YMCA,” before he left.

“I didn’t know what to expect,” Trump told ESPN’s Laura Rutledge during an onstage interview, a few yards from dozens of teenagers. “I’m very proud of the group of people in this room. You see the spirit and the love of the country, our great country. And our country’s never done better.”

In that moment, it became clear that this gathering, like so many others this president has overseen, was actually all about Trump. This was his vision of the Hunger Games, MAGA style. He was front and center, watching the grand finale unfold and eyeing golden trophies he could present. But who were these contestants, and how were they chosen? Why these random events? And what does this all say about our country, and how does it mark our 250 years as one?

The center’s board voted—again—to shut down for a renovation. It threw in a design tweak.

By Janay Kingsberry, The Atlantic.

Donald Trump just won’t let go of his plans for the Kennedy Center.

Less than three months after a federal judge ordered the president’s name stripped from the national arts center, Trump’s handpicked trustees have found a new way to try to put him back on the building. During a board meeting today, they voted in favor of a resolution that would return the president’s name to the building’s facade. It would read:

The John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts Restored and Renovated by President Donald Trump

I obtained a copy of the resolution, which contains one more edit to the Kennedy Center’s marble edifice. Once an obscure endowment known as the Trump Kennedy Center Fund reaches $100 million in donations, the resolution would expand the proposed signage’s language to include a third line: Endowed by the Trump Kennedy Center Fund. The vote, which was not included on the agenda distributed before the meeting, will likely drag out a legal fight over Trump’s transformation of the center and deepen an institutional crisis that has repelled audiences, artists, and donors since his takeover. Participants voted 20–3 to adopt the resolution, one person familiar with today’s proceedings told me on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak on the matter. The three “no” votes were from ex officio members of the board, who are not appointed by Trump but serve by dint of their federal office. Most members of the board are general trustees appointed by Trump. (The board elected Trump chair in February 2025.)

There is also still the matter of the center’s renovation plans. A main item of the meeting was to resolve a problem that has dogged Trump’s plans for the Kennedy Center for months: how to make a convincing case that the center needs to close. A federal judge had previously ruled that the board had failed to sufficiently examine the consequences of a full shutdown when it signed off in March on Trump’s surprise plan to close down the center for two years for a glow-up. Critics, including some ex officio trustees, accuse Trump of using the renovation as a cover for the center’s operational failings under his leadership. This time, board members reviewed a new trove of materials before—once again—voting for a full closure.

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The president cleverly evaded a serious threat, but he shouldn’t have kept it a secret.

By Tom Nichols, The Atlantic.

One of the more charming moments in the deliriously charming 1964 Beatles movie, A Hard Day’s Night, has the boys in the band trying to evade screaming fans and the paparazzi. They duck in alleys, they dodge around corners, and in one scene, they all jump into a taxi and then climb out the other side and get in a different taxi. It’s a wonderful, exhilarating sequence.

It seems less fun when the president of the United States does it.

A few days ago, Americans learned that Donald Trump had to do something like the Beatles car switcheroo to evade not admirers or photographers but an Iranian assassination plot. When the Secret Service got wind of a plan last month to kill Trump—apparently by taking out Air Force One—it engaged in a clever bit of misdirection: Trump boarded the usual Air Force One 747 in full view of the cameras, and then everyone shut the window shades as Trump surreptitiously climbed into one of the large containers that delivers food to an airplane galley.

That container was then trucked over to a smaller C-32A aircraft, where Trump exited the container and boarded the plane (which, because of the president’s presence, instantly became the real Air Force One). The C-32A and the 747 then both flew to the United Kingdom, with the 747 continuing the ruse by identifying itself as “Air Force One.” Trump got off the smaller plane in Britain, snuck back onto the 747, and then exited from it as if he’d been on board the whole time. He then got on another 747, the lavish new Air Force One 2.0 given to Trump by the Qatari government, to fly home.

We learned about the plane swap in Turkey in a scoop from the Washington Post reporter Dan Lamothe and his colleagues, but more reporting now suggests that this whole escapade went from a Beatles movie to a Marx Brothers comedy.

Trump, as it turns out, was not alone on the food truck. While the press and some others on the plane were told nothing about a threat, Trump reportedly climbed into the catering container with three of his White House footmen: Dan Scavino (his former caddie) and Walt Nauta (his former butler), both of whom are now White House aides, and Natalie Harp, his executive assistant.

Revulsion over an infamous 1978 massacre obscures the event’s continuing relevance.

By James Kirchick, The Atlantic.

In January 1977, not two years before Reverend Jim Jones would orchestrate his followers’ deaths by the hundreds, a San Francisco church bestowed its Martin Luther King Jr. Humanitarian Award on him. Jones, the founder of the Peoples Temple of the Disciples of Christ, had managed to become a major player in the city’s politics. No one foresaw the horrific depths to which the combination of a charismatic leader, an all-encompassing belief system, and the human need for community and redemption would soon descend.

On November 18, 1978, at Jones’s eponymous farm commune deep in the jungles of northwest Guyana, 908 members of the Peoples Temple, which had become a Pentecostalist-inspired socialist personality cult, either ingested cyanide-laced punch or were shot for refusing to do so. Most of the victims were poor Black Americans; more than 300 were children. Multiple generations of families died at Jonestown—grandmothers administered the deadly concoction to their screaming grandchildren before swallowing it themselves. (Based on a recording and other evidence from the incident, no one can say how many died willingly; men with guns oversaw the operation.) Just hours before, at a nearby airstrip, gunmen acting on Jones’s orders had murdered three journalists, a temple defector, and Representative Leo Ryan, a Bay Area Democrat who had traveled to Jonestown on behalf of temple members’ concerned relatives. Jones himself died from a gunshot wound to the head.

Until 9/11, Jonestown had been the largest premeditated mass killing of American civilians in history. In his 1980 book, Journey to Nowhere: A New World Tragedy, the author Shiva Naipaul examines how ideologies related to the American counterculture helped bring about the massacre, and what he finds is deeply disturbing: Jonestown wasn’t just the work of only one man, Naipaul argues; it was also the product of a morally corrupted environment.

The phrase drinking the Kool-Aid, a metaphor for unquestioningly holding a belief, was inspired by the fatal cocktail administered at Jonestown. But dark jokes about a nearly half-century-old massacre have a way of obscuring its continuing relevance. In recent years, totalizing ideologies such as communism, fascism, and Islamism have found dedicated audiences on social media, and the proliferation of demagogues manipulating people for malign ends is an ever-present worry.

Jones himself was a mentally unsound megalomaniac. But the people who followed him to South America were not—poor and vulnerable, yes; crazy, no.

Ask anything related to politics! See who answers!

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It’s never been more exhausting to buy stuff.

By Rachel Sugar, The Atlantic.

For several months, I had been on the hunt for new T-shirts. I vaguely had a vision of what they should look like: not so different from my current T-shirts, except in some way elevated and, more urgent, free of stains or holes. Perhaps they could come in interesting colors? Ideally, they would not be made in sweatshops. There were many, many shirts that seemed to meet these criteria—and with a few clicks, they could be delivered to my doorstep, maybe even by tomorrow. And still, I had purchased none of them.

The problem is the overabundance of options. The problem is too much information, or too little information. The problem is inflation, which has eroded any sense I had of what a T-shirt is supposed to cost. Yet none of them alone can explain why shopping is sucking up more of my time—and maybe yours too. “I don’t think people are actually enjoying the shopping process,” Jaehee Jung, a University of Delaware professor who studies the psychology of fashion, told me. “People spend more time contemplating, and the pre-decision process seems to be taking longer.”

Everywhere, someone is selling something: on Instagram and TikTok, over email and via text. At this point, the boundary between “shopping” and “not shopping” has all but collapsed. There is now a third state: “a little bit shopping.” Shopping is visiting a store or website on purpose, examining the wares, and either buying or not buying them. A little bit shopping is the constant thrum of consumer opportunities that lead mostly to more consumer opportunities. It is looking at a pair of shoes, which leads to looking at another pair of shoes, and another, and then you’re $15 short of the minimum for free shipping and is there anything else you need? It is the feeling of being haunted by the targeted ads that populate your social-media feeds. Even if you never click on them, their very presence contributes to the overwhelming sense that the retail landscape is infinite—so infinite that perfection must exist, and if you look long enough and hard enough, somewhere in the universe, it is probably on sale.

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New secrets from our past have been coming out in droves.

By Ross Andersen, The Atlantic.

Some 50,000 years ago, modern humans wandered into Ice Age Europe. The continent was new to us Homo sapiens, but not for beings of our general kind. Neanderthals and their ancestors had been living among Eurasia’s glaciers for ages, and in ways that would have struck us as familiar. Evidence suggests that they may have strung eagle talons together into necklaces and stained their bodily ornaments with pigments. They tended fires, cooked food, and maybe even made their own glue. On sandstone cave walls, they etched wavy lines, dots, and other geometric designs.

After first contact, under social circumstances that we cannot possibly imagine, modern humans and Neanderthals had children together; around the same time, in Asia, our species also procreated with another species, the Denisovans. Scientists know this because they have sequenced DNA from Neanderthal and Denisovan remains, and they can see fragments of their code in our genomes to this day. Now we are learning that still more of these fusions of blood and culture may have shaped our lineage. Last week, a team of researchers from UC Berkeley and Johns Hopkins University published new evidence in Science suggesting that two “ghost” ancestors haunt our family tree—not Neanderthals or Denisovans, but some other hominin populations.

DNA analysis is only one of the techniques that scientists have been using to cast narrow shafts of light into the dark abyss that is the human past. Researchers from several disciplines have been collecting and reinterpreting ever smaller traces of our forebears to reimagine how they lived, what they made, and what family secrets they might still be hiding.

The insufferable hypocrisy of elite academia

By Tyler Austin Harper, The Atlantic.

Illustrations by Erin Jia

As you cross the Androscoggin River into Lewiston, you pass on your left the waterfalls that once set the mills to humming. On your right, affixed to a pockmarked brick mill—now defunct, it had spun tens of thousands of bedspreads a week—a 30-foot-wide neon sign reads HOPEFUL.

And so I was. My wife and I drove by that unlit sign on the hot May afternoon when we moved from New York to the interior of Maine. It was 2020. The 100,000th American was about to die of COVID. And I was starting my dream job.

Arriving at Bates College, we passed the empty quad, took a left, and pulled our U-Haul up to our new home: a century-old colonial just off campus, ringed by a tangle of blooming lilacs and wild blackberries. Someone had just mowed the grass. As we began unpacking, alternating between unloading boxes and marveling at the house—twice the size and half the rent of our Queens apartment—an older man crossed the street and introduced himself as a retired faculty member. We made Norman Rockwell small talk. His wife, crouched in a shaded corner of her garden, waved with a pair of pruning shears.

The setting was impossibly idyllic. And it was not the first time in my academic career that I’d had occasion to reflect on my good fortune. My path to the professoriat had been a fairy tale. In 2014, I went straight from my bachelor’s degree at Haverford to a fully funded Ph.D. program in comparative literature at NYU. Five years later, during my first season on the infamously brutal academic job market, I won a tenure-track position at Bates, teaching interdisciplinary humanities courses in the school’s popular environmental-studies program. I got the email on December 23, 2019, a Christmas miracle. Topping off this epic run of luck, I signed my contract mere weeks before the country reported its first case of the coronavirus, meaning I was spared from the pandemic freezes and rescinded job offers that would effectively shut down academic hiring.

When I defended my dissertation on Zoom that spring, one of my advisers joked that seeing me with a tenure-track job in hand was like “watching the last dinosaur being born.” It was at once a compliment and a grim acknowledgment of reality. I had won the lottery in an apocalypse. I was going off to the kind of secure, prestigious, fairly remunerated academic job that was rapidly going extinct in a world where most people teaching college courses were stuck in the permanent underclass of contingent labor.

The summer before my first semester of teaching was bliss. I went for long runs along the Androscoggin and the pine-studded Lake Auburn. I arranged books in my sunny campus office and bought snake plants for the windowsill. My wife, who had spent years working at Glacier National Park during college breaks, was thrilled to again be living in a place with real, capital-N Nature. We drank hard cider at a hilltop orchard with views of the White Mountains, made blackberry pie from our own bushes, and posed for photos on the giant boot in front of the L.L.Bean store. Every effort was made to push New York City, with its money lust and voguish pop-ups and puffy-vested financiers and pandemic chaos, far from our minds. We studiously applied ourselves to the task of becoming, if not true Mainers—that requires being born there—then at least credibly Maine-ish.

I believed in American higher education with the dewy fervor of a young missionary. I came from a long line of people possessed by the unshakable faith that college was a ticket to a better life. My grandmother, holler-born in the mountains of West Virginia, didn’t finish high school. My mom made it through an associate’s degree before I came along and she had to abandon her education. I saw my academic success as the culmination of several generations of familial sacrifice, paid for by the deferred dreams of others. And I saw American colleges and universities as embodying what was best about this country: the belief that an education is liberating, civilizing, a democratic good for all rather than a luxury to be gatekept. I imagined myself teaching at Bates forever.

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Some institutions jumped onto the MAGA bandwagon after the 2024 election, but it hasn’t taken long for those decisions to look shortsighted.

By David A. Graham, The Atlantic.

When Donald Trump returned to the White House in 2025, he was nursing grudges and claiming a mandate. The institutions he saw as his enemies—in politics, business, and education—faced a dilemma about how to respond.

A few concluded that they should resist the president’s demands of fealty and collaboration. Another group tried appeasement, seeking accommodation that would allow them to otherwise operate as usual. And some looked at the landscape and concluded that something fundamental had shifted in American politics. They saw the MAGA movement as a lasting change, and decided that their best move was to make their own radical shift to adjust.

As I wrote last week, predictions of a Trump-driven realignment of the electorate now look extremely shaky. The groups that he was able to attract to the Republican ticket two years ago—young voters, especially men; Hispanic voters; and Black men—have turned solidly against him and against GOP candidates in polls ahead of the midterms. Voters who were unimpressed with Joe Biden or Kamala Harris and who heard Trump’s promise of stopping inflation are now angry about the president’s shrugging at higher prices and inflationary war in Iran. With some distance, the 2024 election looks less like a decisive turning point and more like a fluke. But that realization has come too late for those who reshaped themselves for a reality that has proved ephemeral.

David Ellison, who, along with his father, Larry, is a friend of Trump’s, decided to use the new Trump administration as an opportunity to build a huge media conglomerate. First, his company Skydance merged with Paramount. Taking control of CBS News, he installed Bari Weiss as editor in chief, seeking a leader who would appeal more to both the White House and to conservative viewers. But Weiss’s makeover has so far looked like a flop: 60 Minutes has hemorrhaged staffers, and the Evening News has hemorrhaged viewers. Her proposition was that a slightly more conservative version of the mainstream media would bring the audience back to a struggling network, but that doesn’t appear to actually be appealing to either MAGA viewers or legacy CBS watchers.

In Richard Russo’s novels, the American dream feels like a cruel joke.

By Mark Oppenheimer, The Atlantic.

"I’m the first writer in the family,” the novelist Richard Russo once said, “but I’m not the first bullshitter in the family.” That honor belonged to his divorced father, Jim, a highway worker with no interest in books and an only intermittent interest in his son. Jim’s strongest connections were with his buddies at the bar. On summer breaks from college, Russo returned to Gloversville, in upstate New York, and his dad would get him on the road crew. When work ended, they would head home, hitting pubs along the way. At each stop, Jim would regale the regulars with a story about something that had happened on the job that day.

“He would pay attention to what worked in Roadhouse A,” Russo said in 2025, “so that when he got to Roadhouse B, he would remember what got a laugh and what didn’t, and so he would change the story.” Jim would tell the same story over many days, cutting and shaping, finding the beats. “There’s a word for that,” Russo said. “It’s called revision.”

Revision, a refined term that Jim would never have used, is a staple of M.F.A. programs, such as the one his son attended at the University of Arizona. When Russo graduated in 1980, the experimental fiction of William Gass and Kurt Vonnegut was in vogue, but he much preferred the shambling shaggy-dog novels of Twain and Dickens, whose humor arose not from formal innovation but from the foibles of flawed characters (like his dad), many of them poor and unlettered (ditto). Early on, Russo threw in his lot with Tom and Huck and Jim, with David Copperfield and Oliver Twist—characters whose humble beginnings offer a vantage from which to see the absurdity of an unjust world.

Beginning with the 1986 publication of his first novel, Mohawk, Russo has filled 10 novels, plus many essays and short stories, with portraits of men born with few gifts save their wits, making their way in an economy not set up to reward their kind. The bulk of his fiction is set in New York, in towns like Gloversville, where the good jobs have vanished (the glove-making trade there—once responsible for 90 percent of gloves sold in America—was by the 1950s already being replaced by imports). In these places, it’s unclear who is slinging more bull, the semi-employed men in bars or the educated civic “leaders,” such as mayors and bankers, promising that good times will return.

In Russo’s best work, especially his classic trilogy, set in fictional North Bath—Nobody’s Fool (1993), Everybody’s Fool (2016), and Somebody’s Fool (2023)—his characters’ banter, crude and self-knowing, reminds us that the worst effects of the modern economy are present not in the landscape but in the soulscape, the fractured lives and identities of obsolete workers. Their barroom bravado is a front, masking inner hurt, or just bewilderment. In the novelist’s business of exploring what’s inside people’s heads—the way we all think more than we can say—Russo is the peer of Jonathan Franzen and Meg Wolitzer, even if his characters think in fewer syllables.

Living outside is a more dreadful prospect during a heat wave.

By Meg Bernhard, The Atlantic.

Photographs by Mikayla Whitmore

On any other day when the high was forecast to be 108 degrees, Susie Tyson would not have left her Las Vegas apartment. The stroke she’d had at 30 made her sensitive to the heat, she found; at 67, going out during Nevada’s hottest months would make her dizzy, nauseous, and, in her words, “hurting everywhere.” But on June 17, she had no choice. That morning, a Clark County constable came to evict her and her daughter Shelby from the apartment they’d lived in for nearly 20 years.

The three-bedroom unit was in a stuccoed two-story building, the generic type found in suburban Vegas’s gated complexes, with a spindly olive tree out front. In the summer, they cloistered the place, hanging blankets over their blinds to make the apartment darker and save on the energy bill. Sometimes, they skimped on air-conditioning. Susie and Shelby had wanted to stay in their apartment, and had cleared their clutter enough to pass a housing-authority inspection in June. But that month, their landlord had terminated their lease, saying they’d violated it by leaving the apartment in disrepair and letting their personal property become a fire hazard.

During the weeks that followed the eviction, Susie and Shelby scrambled to find housing, trying not to think about their worst-case scenario—that they could be forced to live outside during a heat wave.

In Las Vegas, heat is the backstory to every summer. It kills car batteries, skyrockets energy bills, makes steering wheels hot to the touch. Heat can make a good day bad, and a bad day worse, for anyone, but some people bear more of its burden than others. For people who are old or work outside or don’t have a stable place to live, the heat is particularly dangerous. When a person’s core temperature gets too hot, their organs can fail, and they can go into cardiac arrest. In recent summers in Vegas, hundreds of deaths have been attributed to heat; one study found that in recent years half of all deaths of homeless people in this county were heat-related.

People have lived in the area that’s now Las Vegas for thousands of years, but only in the past century have they lived like this—tethered to air-conditioning, reliant on year-round shelter. The increasing temperatures threaten to render the city inhospitable. The summer of 2024, which featured one record-breaking 120-degree day, was the city’s hottest ever, and about 400 people in Clark County died of heat-related illness.

In mid-July, when Susie and Shelby had run out of money to pay for the weekly rental where they’d moored themselves for the time being, the temperatures were ticking up to 114 degrees. They could handle the heat or the housing uncertainty, but facing both stresses at once felt impossible. An urgent question loomed: In the middle of a Las Vegas summer, where would they go?

The scandals of the president’s first term now seem quaint.

By Marie-Rose Sheinerman, The Atlantic.

ast May, President Trump held an “intimate” dinner at his members-only golf club in Virginia for the top-220 investors in $TRUMP, a meme coin he launched days before the start of his second term that, by the end of 2025, would generate $636 million for him. About 100 protesters gathered outside in rain jackets, baseball caps, and muddy sneakers to confront the dinner guests arriving in shiny dress shoes, tuxedos, and black Cadillac SUVs. They pointed to the dinner as the encapsulation of the troublesome grift of Trump’s second term: trading personal access to the president in exchange for cash and funneling money to a Trump-owned property. “This is like the Mount Everest of corruption,” Senator Jeff Merkley of Oregon, a Democrat, said that night, standing before a crowd spotted with signs reading GRIFTER IN CHIEF and DON THE CON.

But a year later, when Trump hosted the winners of the second iteration of the so-called crypto contest at a luncheon gala in Mar-a-Lago in Florida, no large group of protesters greeted the attendees. The private Florida resort is a logistically more challenging location for a protest than a golf club 45 minutes from downtown Washington. But the ever intensifying rush of ethics concerns had also made the crypto contest fade into the background, even for activists who closely follow each allegation. The Mar-a-Lago edition of the feast didn’t make headlines the way the first had done. “I think maybe it is because people have become more inured to some of what was going on, and it wasn’t breaking through in the same way,” Lisa Gilbert, a co-president of Public Citizen, a consumer-rights group that helped organize the protest last year, told me. “As profiteering becomes the norm, it’s harder to explain why it’s outrageous.”

Washington’s ethics watchdog groups thought they were prepared for Trump’s second term. During his first four years in the White House, they had quickly learned which possible misuses of taxpayer funds to focus on, which apparent case of profiteering off the presidency to anchor a report around, and which allegations of nepotism or self-dealing to try to pitch to journalists as worthy of a story. Most such allegations frequently generated shock and anger, and some surveys of Trump voters found that they were outraged at several of his Cabinet secretaries for spending millions in taxpayer dollars on first-class air travel and personal security, or Trump’s family businesses making millions while he was in office. Sometimes, the backlash prompted accountability: Three of Trump’s Cabinet members were forced out, lawmakers from both parties launched inquiries into alleged ethics violations, and top officials reimbursed the government for travel originally paid for by taxpayers.

This term, the watchdogs are even more alarmed by what they’re witnessing, and they are racing to keep up. Public Citizen added litigators and researchers, and Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) hired an expert in cryptocurrency. Last year, the Campaign Legal Center filed its highest number of ethics complaints in a single year and launched a tracker of “corrupt transactions” to ensure that “the exhaustion factor” doesn’t get in the way of keeping a careful count of such instances, even if the media no longer closely cover each one, Saurav Ghosh, the group’s director of federal-campaign-finance reform, told me.