'up to their same old tricks'

'Public service isn’t a political weapon'

The 110 Freeway was shut down for hours

'Tripped the silent alarms'

Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman blasted his fellow Democrats for embracing the filibuster to keep the government shuttered indefinitely despite previously campaigning on nixing the procedural tool when they had control of the Senate. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer has led the vast majority of the upper chamber’s Democratic caucus in filibustering a House-passed bipartisan spending […]

Urging Trump to get in the fight

Deputies responded to an attended death

News Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Showrunners Say Seasons 4 and 5 Will Have Fewer One-Off Concept Episodes Thankfully, we’ll still get a puppet episode. By Matthew Byrd | Published on October 21, 2025 Photo: Paramount+ Comment 0 Share New Share Photo: Paramount+ In an interview with Screen Rant, Star Trek: Strange New Worlds co-showrunner Akiva Goldsman said that the series’ final two seasons will focus a bit more on wrapping up the show and less on the kind of one-off concept episodes that have gradually become a bigger part of the story. “We’re making season 5 now, we’re trending towards that, which is probably the center line of Star Trek, right?” Goldsman said. “We’re trending now, and beginning with season 4 and through season 5, to a much more singular sci-fi, action-adventure, emotional storytelling. And you know, the outliers are getting less and less, as we kind of focus on saying goodbye to each other and the fans.” As we have previously discussed, Strange New Worlds’ third season offered significantly more one-off concept episodes to… mixed results. While some (many, one could argue) of those episodes were quite good in their own right, they began to eat into the show’s meager ten-episode seasons. Character arcs and longer plotlines were often shelved during those episodes, which contributed to the previous season’s generally disjointed nature. Yet, you shouldn’t expect Strange New Worlds‘ final seasons to completely abandon such episodes or the creative spirit behind them. We already know that we’re due for a “puppet” episode of the series, and co-showrunner Henry Alonso Myers explains that the crew want to keep the spirit of those one-off adventures alive throughout the series. “The thing I will say about season 4 is, it’s in line with what we have done with the previous seasons, in the sense that we look at this like, ‘this could be our last season.’ So we treat it that way,” said Myers. “What’s something that we want to try to do, that [we] have never done before? What is something we want to try to do a version of, that [past shows] have done before, but never in this way. So that’s what we do in season 4.” The comment about treating the upcoming season like the show’s last season is particularly interesting given that it seemed like there really wasn’t a guarantee that the show would get its final (abbreviated) fifth season. Yet, as Myers says, the showrunners have spiritually been treating the series like it could go away at any moment. That would help explain the “go for broke” nature of the show getting so many ideas out there in such a short period of time. Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 4 is expected to premiere sometime in 2026. [end-mark] The post <i>Star Trek: Strange New Worlds</i> Showrunners Say Seasons 4 and 5 Will Have Fewer One-Off Concept Episodes appeared first on Reactor.

Books Seeds of Story Wengrow and Graeber’s The Dawn of Everything Isn’t Always Right, But Is Always Interesting Problematic, controversial, and full of amazing worldbuilding and story ideas… By Ruthanna Emrys | Published on October 21, 2025 Comment 0 Share New Share Welcome to Seeds of Story, where I explore the non-fiction that inspires—or should inspire—speculative fiction. Every couple weeks, we’ll dive into a book, article, or other source of ideas that are sparking current stories, or that have untapped potential to do so. Each article will include an overview of the source(s), a review of its readability and plausibility, and highlights of the best two or three “seeds” found there. This week, I cover David Wengrow and David Graeber’s The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, a progressive exploration of political variation in human history and pre-history. It doesn’t pretend to be objective, it’s wildly controversial, and it’s full of shiny worldbuilding ideas. What It’s About This book is part of the same project that drives many futurists and science fiction authors: to expand our ability to imagine futures that are different from, and better than, what we have now. Wengrow (an archaeologist) and Graeber (an anthropologist) use the tools of history and anthropology to question received claims about long-term patterns of political organization. They depict the received claims as, approximately: “Humans lived for a long time in unconsidered egalitarian tribes. Eventually agriculture began to require specialization and hierarchy, and many groups gradually traded freedom for social organization. This went on until the Enlightenment, when European societies (learning from Indigenous choices) began to take freedom seriously in a more conscious way.” In contrast, they share evidence for dramatic variation in how prehistoric societies organized themselves. In some cases they describe evidence for forms that no longer exist; in others they simply point out alternate interpretations of the evidence normally used to support more common views. One key point is that many early societies found midpoints between full settled agriculture and pure hunting and gathering. They cultivated some crops while gathering others; they found techniques to select for easier-to-gather food along traditional travel routes; they changed practices based on the climate. Going back to Mann’s work, this is now relatively uncontroversial for Indigenous Americans, but understudied and perhaps under-detected around the world. Many societies, furthermore, seem to have changed their choices over time, undermining the narrative of one-way Edenic falls into full agriculture. The Davids also describe diverse choices in how groups governed themselves. “Egalitarian” is not either universal or homogenous. There are many ways to organize an egalitarian group. There are many ways to separate specialties, castes, and elites. There are many reasons why groups might sometimes allow the rise of a charismatic leader—and reasons why they might later grow tired of submitting themselves to another’s will. When humanity was divided into small tribes rather than large nations, the authors suggest, these dynamics led to many options and often to rapid changes. Imagining political alternatives comes naturally to our species, and the willingness to try out those alternatives likewise. Facilitating this change, travel for most of prehistory was slow, but also more free than anything we now take for granted. For most people, it was possible to simply walk away from one’s community and seek another. While this obviously came with serious costs in loss of social connection and familiar traditions, and the risk of encountering groups unfriendly to outsiders, the Davids believe it was also supported socially. Cross-group cultural exchanges, hospitality agreements, and commonly-accepted scripts for long-distance wandering all contributed to a set-up where options were widely known and voting with one’s feet widely practiced. Political variation might also take place cyclically within the same group. One of the coolest sections of this book is the discussion of seasonal societies. Groups might gather temporarily under a hierarchy for the creation of large-scale structures, rituals, or projects. They might also accept greater organization for winter survival, while returning to egalitarian flexibility in the summer when resources were more plentiful. Rulers might channel divine power, and yet be constrained in where, when, or how they could use it. Examples can be seen in modern societies like the early 20th-century Inuit, where turn-of-the-century anthropologist Marcel Mauss documented hierarchical small-group summer hunting and communal, egalitarian winter practices. Vestiges of this dynamism also survive in reversal festivals like Halloween and Mardi Gras, where rules are ritually changed and “kings for a day” feted. The Davids argue, however, that most modern nations have become “stuck” in a hierarchical mode, and that a central question for change movements is how that happened—and how we can unstick ourselves again. Buy the Book The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity David Wengrow and David Graeber Buy Book The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity David Wengrow and David Graeber Buy this book from: AmazonBarnes and NobleiBooksIndieBoundTarget When I covered Entangled Life, I mentioned how consistently experts praise Sheldrake’s work. The same is not true for Dawn of Everything. Graeber was criticized throughout his career for his methods (sometimes more opinionated than rigorous), his politics (anarchist and activist), and his conclusions (often based as much on the latter as the former). Sample review titles include “Three Problems With The Dawn of Everything”, “A False Dawn,” and “Wrong About (Almost) Everything.” I usually find Graeber to be generatively problematic, and my own notes range from enthusiastic brainstorming to exasperation with his misunderstanding of working memory limits. Happily, I am not here to try and untangle whether he’s right about the relationship between Indigenous thought and European philosophy, or about the reasons why specific societies abandoned agricultural projects. Those are all important, and you can get a sense of the issues in the linked reviews; I’m here to talk about genre inspiration. And even where it’s wrong, this is a book that sparks imagination—in both a political and creative sense. I say this cautiously, because I generally do think that basing a fun story on dubious or error-ful science is a good way to make a mess, turn off readers, and warp your intended conclusions. (I’m still mad about that book where sunspots stimulate the brain region associated with religious revelation, thus proving to everyone that religion is nonsense—when in fact the areas in question are so specific, and the entire species getting them stimulated by a natural phenomenon so unlikely, that this would pretty much prove the existence of a deity.) Trying to write plain historical fiction based on The Dawn of Everything might give you a 21st-century Clan of the Cave Bear, but I do think it’s accurate in some important broad strokes: We tend to retroactively create just-so stories in which modern social forms are inevitable. Prehistoric humanity was just as smart, imaginative, and weird as modern humanity, and is likely to have tried lots of different solutions to survival. Ambiguous evidence tends to be interpreted based on confirmation bias, and it’s useful to point out other plausible interpretations. Future social organization may not only be as different from what we have now as current structures are from the divine right of kings, it may be as different as current structures are from pre-agricultural tribal life. And we shouldn’t understate the degree of that difference. These points are antidotes to common failures of political imagination. Science fiction is so much better at this than it was in the days of Year 3000 nuclear families centered around cigar-smoking male bread-earners. But we can still do better in thinking about the infinity of different plausible ways that humans organize ourselves (or fail to do so), and there are some excellent prods to be found here. The Best Seeds for Speculative Stories The Ritual That Changes Everything. In many cases, the Davids suggest, early hierarchy was temporary and sacred. It might be used to coordinate people for a hunt or a harvest, but it might also raise monuments. In a time before cities were at all common, the experience of building large structures might well be awe-inspiring. You do what the high priest tells you, and the people around you do the same, and the world changes—magic! At the same time, there must inevitably be drama and personal friction, and high priests can be awfully bossy. It seems like the perfect setting for all sorts of stories. I have definitely thought about a Dyson sphere or starship as this kind of cathedral project. Why not come together to worship—and gather all possible energy from—the sun king? Seasonal Governance. The idea of a society that shifts organization from season to season has stuck with me ever since I read this book. It’s so different from what we do in modern nation-states, and yet so archetypally compelling. It’s the Seelie and Unseelie Courts switching dominance at the solstice, and the instinctive urge to do more to mark the changing weather. Maybe that’s just me, and the way the cool of autumn makes me want to bake chestnuts in everything. But, much like the Roman Empire’s regular practice of having multiple semi-cooperating emperors at once, it’s something I’d love to see more of in SF. You could have space station cultures that move between the outer parts of a structure (better view, better research, more radiation) and the inner (safer, more confined), changing governance as they change locations. Societies that use transhuman technologies in the summer and demand simpler, more embodied focus on the world in the winter. Conflicts between planets with similar seasonal shifts but different seasonal timing—maybe a war over whose solstice to use for coordination? The possibilities are as endless as the types of seasons that exoplanets can produce. New Growth: What Else to Read I adore, and actively seek out, books about weird forms of future governance. Cameron Reed’s What We Are Seeking, which unfortunately most of you can’t read until next April, has seasonal ship captains. Ada Palmer’s Terra Ignota series lets people switch hive membership—and the laws that govern their lives—on a whim. Malka Older’s Infomocracy posits a world where groups of 100,000 can pick what government they’ll be part of every ten years—but all subservient to a powerful global fact-checking organization. Monica Byrne’s The Actual Star imagines a fully-nomadic future, where technologies allow (and norms require) constant movement and shifting of social bonds. I also work on, and follow, projects directly focused on real-world political imagination, and on making the future more free. Mushon Zer-Aviv is doing remarkable future-building work in and around Gaza. Bruce Schneier and Nathan E. Sanders have a book coming later this month, which I’ve been looking forward to eagerly, on Rewiring Democracy. A big part of political imagination is economic imagination, for which one of my favorites is Charles Eisenstein’s Sacred Economics: Money, Gift & Society in the Age of Transition. David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5000 Years is also interestingly provoking, with many of the same caveats I’ve given for The Dawn of Everything. What are your favorite fictional government forms? And do you have a complaint about Graeber’s research that you absolutely can’t keep to yourself? Share in the comments![end-mark] The post Wengrow and Graeber’s <i>The Dawn of Everything</i> Isn’t Always Right, But Is Always Interesting appeared first on Reactor.

House Majority Leader Steve Scalise put Sen. Jon Ossoff on blast at a press conference Tuesday, accusing him and fellow Senate Democrats of refusing to reopen the government as a campaign fundraising tool and out of fear of their base of support. “It truly is fear, fear of their own party’s base that has driven the Democrats, especially in the Senate, to shut down the government,” Scalise, R-La., told reporters. “It’s a calculated decision, and the continued votes, including yesterday, to keep the government shut down, has been a direct result of the fear Democrats continue to have of their own party’s base.” Scalise read from an article from The Hill, which quotes a “Democratic insider” who says Ossoff, D-Ga., is considering the question of, “Do I vote to open the government up and get crushed and can’t raise a single dollar of low-dollar money or do I vote to shut the government down and get $3 million [from online fundraising]?” Ossoff has voted against every Republican-backed bill to fund the government, including a Department of Defense funding bill, which would pay troops. Georgia is home to 13 military bases and is headquarters of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Ossoff is seeking re-election in 2026 in the Peach State and says he has raised over $21 million in the race so far. Sen. Jon Ossoff, D-Ga. (Jemal Countess/Getty Images/Breakthrough T1D) Scalise excoriated Ossoff for this alleged political ploy. “That’s disgusting,” said Scalise. “Sen. Ossoff is more concerned about getting low dollar donations from maybe some donor in California who’s going to click on an email and give him $100 for his reelection, and so he’s causing suffering on tens of thousands of people in his home state of Georgia.“ He continued, “Sen. Ossoff ought to send that tainted, dirty money back if he’s raised $3 million off of the shutdown, off of the suffering he’s caused just so that he can get some more money from radicals around the country.” Scalise argued that Democrats have hardened their stance due to political pressure. “They’re scared to death of their base, because they want to keep getting low dollar donations from the most radical members of the Democrat party,” said Scalise. “What is there to offer to a party who’s so morally corrupt and bankrupt that they’re willing to sell out the American people because they’re either scared of their base or they want to just keep getting low dollar donations from donors around the country who are rooting for chaos for America?” Georgia Democratic Party communications advisor Devon Cruz, who responded to The Daily Signal’s request for comment from the Ossoff campaign, said in response to Scalise’s remarks: “Reps. Buddy Carter and Mike Collins would rather keep the government shutdown and skip out on work for the fourth week in a row than extend critical ACA tax credits and protect the affordable health care of 1.4 million Georgians who are already seeing how high their premiums would skyrocket under Carter and Collins’ harmful agenda.” Carter and Collins are both Republican members of the House of Representatives, which has already passed the funding extension. The two are competing in the Georgia Republican Senate primary for the chance to challenge Ossoff in 2026. The Daily Signal has reached out to both congressmen for comment. The post Scalise Accuses Dem Sen. Ossoff of Using Shutdown to Fundraise appeared first on The Daily Signal.