In their last episode before the 2026 midterms, Karpf asks listeners to do their civic duty by watching the Elizabeth Holmes documentary while Loge monitors the peace prize business. They discuss why being bad TV gets you fired from the White House and how Abdul El Sayed turned a bad faith attack into a lesson in framing. Karpf and Loge also share their midterms predictions and discuss the intra-party dynamics they're watching after the polls close.

Links

• Kimberly Guilfoyle Broke Trump’s Most Important Rule | The Atlantic
• Five Fabulous Days of Katie Zacharia | The Atlantic
• FIFA Peace Prize could be scrapped a year on from Donald Trump win | The Athletic NYT
• 'Tommy' from viral El-Sayed video is former Sen. Hawley staffer with Christian nationalist ties | The Handbasket
• Gerrymandering May Not Have Done Republicans Much Good After All | Intelligencer
  

Why do elephants inspire more trust than engineers, and what do chicken carcasses have to do with safer airplanes? We discuss Dave Karpf and Nina Hall’s piece on Turning Point USA and MoveOn, make the case against the Paramount merger, and ask when Peter Loge last read a book.

• How Test Engineers Decide What Counts as Good Enough | New Yorker
• Why Charlie Kirk Didn’t Build a ‘MoveOn of the Right’ | Stanford Social Innovation Review
• The MoveOn Effect | Dave Karpf

• Your political message does not matter if your target audience cannot hear it. | The Future, Now and Then
• Flying Toaster Screensaver
• Preorder: Vaporware, Inc. How Silicon Valley Sells the Future to Control the Present | Dave Karpf
• Office Hours is now on Bluesky! Give us a follow.

On this week's episode of Office Hours, Loge is somehow still talking about bat ecologist certifications and Karpf is too busy marathon training to play D&D. They break down how Trump's $5,000 pledge to voters went viral on prediction markets and discuss the difference between moderate politics as a rhetorical style versus an actionable ideology. Also, Karpf and Loge read the pod's first AI-generated listener email!

Links:

• Trump's $5,000 checks get chilly Senate GOP reception | Axios
• The AI Tipping Point | Time
• Sex and Death in the World of Rational Defense Intellectuals | JStor
• Who Should Pace the Frontier? Not Dario Amodei | Tech Policy Press

• Preorder: Vaporware, Inc. How Silicon Valley Sells the Future to Control the Present | Dave Karpf
• Office Hours is now on Bluesky! Give us a follow.