An afternoon in East Berlin became the lens through which today's America suddenly makes terrifying sense... In the winter of 1986 while living in West Germany I visited East Berlin with my oldest daughter, who was still a teenager, and on the far side of Checkpoint Charlie we were picked up by a young man named Torsten who ran a gypsy cab. Before we’d gone more than a block he had the two of us rehearsing a story, that we were his long-lost cousins over from the West, so we’d all say the same thing if the Volkspolizei or Stasi stopped the car. He couldn’t have been much past twenty, and he was kind to two strangers all afternoon (and grateful for the 20 Deutschmarks I gave him), but under all of it he was afraid the entire day, because in the country he lived in a man could be hauled in for the crime of driving people around and not being able to account for himself. That fear, the quiet hum of it running beneath an ordinary afternoon, is exactly what a “papers, please” society feels like from the inside.

Hundreds died in this week's heat wave. But the real killer is a political & economic system that rewards predators, turns citizens into prey, & leaves governments protecting power instead of people… Hundreds of people died yesterday across Europe from the heat; they’re a symptom of a larger problem that governments around the world have failed to address — that goes far beyond simply global warming — and that the Trump regime is making far worse. Its foundation is one of the most troubling aspects of human nature called predation: while most people just want to live their lives, raise their kids, and have a comfortable old age, some small percentage of those among us have simply become, for lack of a better word, predators.

The Best of the Rest of the News. — There’s no longer any mystery about whose side the Supreme Court is on; the only mystery is why it bothers pretending otherwise. — Somebody finally proposed making California’s 250 billionaires chip in, and you should hear them scream. — Senate Democrats noticed that traditional Medicare is the only insurance in America with no limit on what it can cost you, and decided to do something about it. — A federal judge just told Trump’s Justice Department to stop hiding the files on the woman who says Trump sexually assaulted her when she was 13. — Trump’s mentor Vlad may be plotting a poke at NATO, and he’s picked the perfect moment, because the man in the Oval Office treats the alliance like a protection racket he resents paying into. — While Trump was busy feuding with Giorgia Meloni over a photo op, the woman actually positioned to end Meloni’s career was quietly building her case. — The hellscape currently broiling Europe is not weather, it’s a receipt for fifty years of lies from the fossil fuel industry. — Geeky Science Alert! The $300 ring you bought to fix your sleep may be the thing keeping you awake.

Why Americans are embracing policies they were taught to fear, while rejecting a stupid, oligarchic economic model that's failed us all (except the oligarchs)... On Tuesday night, the establishment wing of the Democratic Party got a message it would prefer to pretend it didn’t hear. In New York, Mamdani-backed progressives swept the congressional primaries, ousting two sitting Democratic congressmen and taking an open seat in a single evening. Former city comptroller Brad Lander beat Rep. Dan Goldman by more than thirty points. A 32-year-old democratic socialist named Darializa Avila Chevalier knocked off five-term Rep. Adriano Espaillat, the chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, and state Assembly member Claire Valdez won the seat Nydia Velázquez is vacating. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (a recipient of dark money and AIPAC money) campaigned hard against all three and watched all three win anyway. As Bernie Sanders put it afterward, the message is pretty clear: Americans are sick to death of a rigged economy and of billionaires buying their elections.