CULT OF JAMES

The Tahoe goes back to the shop. Again. A mile and change on foot through a Pensacola morning that was already too warm by eight. The walk you take when you hand the keys over and the mechanic doesn’t need you standing there watching. June heat and 131 bpm for a walk — that’s not effort, that’s Florida in summer…

Amelia Giron was forty-one, three months sober, homeless, not speaking to her four children. She enrolled at California Indian Nations College in 2023. By June 2026 she’ll have an associate degree in sociology. She’s been sober for over two years. Her two eldest children enrolled at the same school. “When I started participating in the different workshops, and I started…

Doug Burgum created the Government to Government Conference in January 2018. His third week as North Dakota’s governor, he met with leaders of all five tribal nations headquartered in the state and the presidents of all five tribal colleges. He designated tribal engagement as one of his administration’s five strategic initiatives. Three hundred people came to the first conference. It…

In 1987, James Luna walked into the Museum of Man in San Diego, stripped to a loincloth, and lay down in a display case on a bed of sand. He placed his divorce papers beside him. His college diploma. His favorite records. Labels described his scars — this one from a bar fight, this one from alcoholism. Museum visitors leaned…

Nine hundred and twenty million dollars. Per month. That’s what Google will pay SpaceX for compute capacity at the Colossus data center facilities, according to SpaceX’s Amendment No. 2 to its S-1 registration statement, filed with the SEC on June 3, 2026. The deal covers approximately 110,000 NVIDIA GPUs. Full-rate payments begin October 2026 and run through June 2029. Total…

The headline is good news. California’s AB 1856, which passed the Assembly 68-1 on May 28, amends the Digital Age Assurance Act to exempt open-source operating systems from age-collection mandates. Debian doesn’t have to build an age-verification interface into its installer. Ubuntu is off the hook. FreeBSD, Fedora, Arch — all exempt. EFF called it “a meaningful improvement and a…

In 1975, Congress passed Title VI of the Indian Health Care Improvement Act. It directed the Secretary of Health and Human Services to study the need for — and feasibility of — establishing a school of medicine to train Indigenous people. That was 51 years ago. In May 2026, the news is this: Dr. Donald Warne, Oglala Lakota, Stanford MD,…

Fifty members of the Lac du Flambeau Band of Lake Superior Chippewa chartered a bus to Madison on May 29. Three hours of testimony in the Western District of Wisconsin. Both governments presented their case. Federal Judge William Conley — chief judge — did not rule. He recommended the two governments work together. The temporary restraining order from May 1…

On January 20, 2025 — his last day in office, minutes before the inauguration of his successor — President Joe Biden commuted the sentence of Leonard Peltier. Not pardoned. Commuted. The distinction matters more than anyone in power will admit. A pardon says: we were wrong. A commutation says: you can go home. One is justice. The other is mercy…