This week: Washington D.C. is in a recession, partly driven by DOGE and exacerbated by local policies that make it excessively costly to do business. Local elected officials want to copy the Mamdani playbook, but New York enjoys unique economic advantages other cities can’t rely on. We consider the diverging tracks of these two cities, and the lessons lawmakers can learn around the country.

During cocktail hour: we consider New York magazine’s cover story that alleges, with some justification, that chocolate is getting worse, and we discuss l’affaire Clarkson — singer Kelly Clarkson’s feud with a curiosity shop in Brooklyn, and the social media consumers around the world who increasingly can’t mind their own business when confronted with disputes between strangers.

This week: is it “depraved” to worry about whether AIs can feel pain? A lot of people in Silicon Valley really buy into the idea that they might be building the machine god, and they think this might even be a good idea, even if they also think we might end up enslaving the machine god and/or that the machine god might kill us all. Mike Solana, founder of Pirate Wires, joins us to help understand these influential weirdos and the influential weirdos they disagree with. We also, necessarily, talk some about what consciousness even is.

In cocktail hour this week for paying subscribers:

* SlutCon, an annual conference in San Francisco with lanyards and PowerPoints and what-not that is organized by an honest-to-god prostitute and which for some reason is popular among the AI safety crowd.

* The Cornell Seven case — which, rather like Silicon Valley, is an object lesson in why straight people shouldn’t be allowed to do ketamine.

* The bizarre conspiracy theory that James Talarico was in an mental institution, and how Republicans have mis-learned the lesson of the successful “they/them” ad.

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This week: Sarah Longwell, publisher of The Bulwark and host of the The Focus Group, joins us to discuss persuadable voters and the extensive conversations she has with them (the topic of her new book How to Eat an Elephant: One Voter at a Time). We talk about what drove these voters away from Democrats (high prices), what’s driving them back to Democrats (high prices), and what politicians should say and do in an economic environment where the government has limited ability to deliver relief from high prices. And since this is Central Air, we talk about the bond market, and why it’s very important to these voters, even if they don’t realize it.

That’s for all listeners this week. Paying subscribers get to stick around for cocktail hour, when we discuss:

The immigration trap facing the next Democratic president.

The president’s odd choice to go nuclear on Tom Cotton over Daylight Saving Time, and

In the wake of the drama at Last Ditch Bar, are lesbians okay?

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