CULT OF JAMES

Kalshi is not a sportsbook. Kalshi is a “designated contract market” regulated by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. It offers “event contracts” — financial derivatives that happen to resolve based on the outcomes of NFL games, NBA games, college football games, and boxing matches. Ninety percent of its $178 billion in annualized trading volume comes from these contracts. It raised…

The melody: “fiscal responsibility.” Reducing spending. Eliminating redundancy. The language of budgets, which is the language of reasonable men making difficult choices. The lyric: In 1978, Congress passed the Tribally Controlled Community College Assistance Act. The federal government would fund tribal colleges the way states fund state universities — not as charity, but as trust responsibility. The legal relationship between…

The verse they teach goes like this: the largest lithium deposit in the Western Hemisphere is in northern Nevada. When it’s operational, it will produce 40,000 metric tons of battery-grade lithium carbonate per year — enough for 800,000 electric vehicles. General Motors owns 38% of the joint venture. The U.S. Department of Energy backed it with a $2.26 billion federal…

Sixty-seven minutes with two lightsabers and a heart rate that never dipped below “actually working.” Beat Saber doesn’t look like exercise from the outside. From the outside it looks like someone flailing in a headset while neon blocks fly at their face. From the inside it’s a full-body rhythm game that doesn’t care what you weigh, doesn’t care about your…

Two states. Two governor’s races. Same question nobody wants to answer directly. In Maine, the Wabanaki nations — Penobscot, Passamaquoddy, Maliseet, Mi’kmaq — are the only federally recognized tribes in America still treated like municipalities. The Maine Indian Claims Settlement Act of 1980 gave them $81.5 million. It took their sovereignty. Forty-six years later, they can’t regulate clean air on…

“Where would I be deported to? Because I’m a U.S. citizen, and this is all I’ve known.” That’s Leticia Jacobo, Salt River Pima-Maricopa. Booked into Polk County Jail in Des Moines for a suspended license. Scheduled for release November 11, 2025. Held longer because jail staff flagged her with an ICE detainer. Her sister asked what everyone should have asked:…

Article I of the Outer Space Treaty, 1967: “The exploration and use of outer space, including the Moon and other celestial bodies, shall be carried out for the benefit and in the interests of all countries, irrespective of their degree of economic or scientific development, and shall be the province of all mankind.” That’s the verse they teach. Here are…

In February 2026, more than sixty Indigenous leaders from Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru gathered in the Peruvian Amazon city of Pucallpa. They came to map what was already killing them. Criminal networks now affect 67% of Amazonian municipalities. Thirty-two percent of Indigenous territories are under dispute between armed actors. The crimes are interconnected: illegal gold mining, drug trafficking, logging,…

Last year, Canada introduced Bill C-2. It would have forced digital services to retain metadata for a year, allowed the Minister of Public Safety to secretly order companies to build backdoors into encrypted systems, and prohibited those companies from telling anyone about it. Over 300 civil society organizations and 10,000 citizens said no. The bill died before it reached committee….