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President Trump’s supporters have begun to rail against the Supreme Court’s birthright citizenship ruling, a significant blow to their mass deportation dreams.

The court ruled 6–3 on Tuesday to strike down Trump’s executive order and uphold the constitutional principle that guarantees virtually anyone born on U.S. soil is an American citizen, regardless of their parents’ immigration status. Republicans weren’t pleased about this safeguarding of the Fourteenth Amendment.

“The Supreme Court’s birthright citizenship decision is wrong, dangerous, and disastrous for American sovereignty and the American people,” wrote GOP Senator Eric Schmitt. “If we can’t fix it with ordinary legislation, then we must do what the Constitution commands in moments of national crisis: We must amend the Constitution and restore American citizenship. We must again put ‘We the People’ first.… This ruling is the final alarm bell.”

Heritage Foundation president and Project 2025’s lead architect Kevin Roberts was equally upset. “The Supreme Court’s ruling on birthright citizenship is a tremendous betrayal of the republic. The Justices in the majority have inflamed the all-out assault on our sovereignty and cheapened the sacred value of American citizenship,” he wrote. “Universal birthright citizenship erases any uniquely American birthright—a distortion that was never the meaning or intention of the 14th Amendment. It is time for a constitutional amendment to correct this gross injustice.”

“We are supposed to be a country, not an orphanage. You can’t jump our fence, give birth, cheat the system, and expect our taxpayers to raise your baby,” right-wing influencer and Charlie Kirk disciple Brilyn Hollyhand chimed. “We will be a country again one day. Illegals will be deported and birthright citizenship will end. If you’re a legal immigrant and won’t assimilate you will be denaturalized. If we want to last another 250 years we can’t be trampled on anymore.”

Strangely, the president himself has remained silent, even as he celebrated two other Supreme Court rulings upholding state bans on transgender athletes and loosening campaign finance laws.

Justices Amy Coney Barrett and Brett Kavanaugh—both Trump appointees—sided with the liberal justices in their decision to project birthright citizenship. Kavanaugh did argue that the law could eventually be changed by Congress, not via executive order, leaving the door open for a future attack on one of the most basic tenets of the American experiment.

The Texas Senate race between Attorney General Ken Paxton and James Talarico looks to be in a tie, according to several voter polls published in the past month.

A Tuesday survey by the New York Times and Siena University has the two candidates both locked at 47 percent of likely voters. A win for Talarico, a Democratic state legislator, would represent the first statewide election win for the party in Texas since 1994. 

The New York Times/Siena poll was conducted among 656 likely voters from June 19 to June 27, with a sampling error of 4.5 percentage points.

Polling suggests that Talarico’s numbers are largely down to a majority of likely voters seeing the Democrat as having good character—he is a former public school teacher and is currently training to become a minister—as opposed to Paxton, who was indicted for securities fraud and impeached as state attorney general by the Republican-dominated Texas state House (although the Republican-majority state Senate acquitted all 16 articles of impeachment against him). Paxton is also a Trump loyalist, and may be associated with President Trump’s mishandling of the economy amid a widespread struggle with affordability.

My colleague Tim Murphy, who has covered the Senate race extensively, noted that many Senate Republicans favored incumbent John Cornyn but Trump endorsed Paxton late in the primary race. And on Talarico, Tim wrote in March that Talarico is “unsullied by doings in Washington” and his “faith-based populism impressed Joe Rogan and Barack Obama and showed strength in the places the [Democratic] party has been hemorrhaging support.” 

Given that Democrats need to flip four Republican seats while defending all of their seats to win a Senate majority this November, Paxton vs. Talarico is definitely a race to watch.

This November, California voters will weigh what could become America’s first-ever tax on net worth. The Billionaire Tax Act, a ballot initiative put forth by health workers after President Donald Trump blew holes in the state Medicaid budget, would impose a one-time tax of 5 percent on personal wealth exceeding $1 billion. With polls indicating majority support, tech oligarchs have threatened an exodus and crafted competing measures, bankrolling them to the tune of at least $118 million—of which $82 million came from Google’s Sergey Brin, according to the Associated Press.

On the other side is University of ­California, Berkeley, law professor Brian Galle, who helped write the initiative, along with several other, federal, efforts to tax the obscenely rich. These bills seldom go anywhere, even though ordinary Americans would very much like their government to do just that, as a 2024 report from the amusingly named ­Excessive Wealth Disorder Institute made clear.

The nonprofit examined 56 national and state polls on specific redistributive proposals and found majority support for most. People favored surtaxes on incomes over a million bucks, and for the rich to pay at least the rate on their investment gains as workers pay on their wages. They also wanted Congress to kill intergenerational dynasty trusts that grow, untaxed, in perpetuity, and they favored a dramatic reduction in the gift and estate tax exemption—now $30 million—which is the amount of money a superwealthy couple can pass along to their heirs without paying a dime.

Direct wealth taxes were the most popular: Roughly two-thirds of respondents, including 51 percent of Republicans, favored the Ultra-Millionaire Tax Act first introduced in 2021 by Sen. ­Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and again this year by Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.). That bill places a 2 percent annual tax on net household assets exceeding $50 million and 3 percent on those over $1 billion. Similar bipartisan support went to proposals from Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), Rep. Steve Cohen (D-Tenn.), and others that would tax unrealized gains on billionaires’ unsold assets, paper profits the IRS currently won’t touch.

Nobody has managed to pass a federal tax on wealth, or on the unrealized gains that represent the majority of income for the very rich.

That these bills have not come close to passing hasn’t stopped new proposals like the Oligarch Act, reintroduced in 2025 by Rep. Summer Lee (D-Pa.), which puts a 2 percent tax on wealth exceeding 1,000 times the national household median, rising to 8 percent on assets over a million times the median. (Only five families qualify, its author assured me.) In March, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) introduced the Make Billionaires Pay Their Fair Share Act, a 5 percent annual tax on net household assets exceeding $1 billion.

The challenge with any federal wealth tax, as Galle explains to me over chocolate-infused green tea at an Oakland cafe, is not just overcoming well-heeled opposition, but passing constitutional muster. Even the income tax as we know it wasn’t allowed until the 1913 ratification of the 16th Amendment. Before then, it was—as any federal tax on wealth would almost certainly be deemed by the Supreme Court—a “direct tax,” which the Constitution says is subject to “apportionment.”

To impose a direct tax, in other words, lawmakers would first have to decide how much money they wanted to collect, and then direct each state to raise its share of the total according to its share of the nation’s population—not its billionaire population. It was unworkable even in the 1800s. As Galle put it: “A direct tax at the national level has to ride in on a unicorn.”

But no unicorn is needed at the state level, where the Constitution’s direct tax rule does not apply. In fact, every state already taxes wealth by way of property taxes, though even those favor the rich: Most of a middle-class homeowner’s assets tend to be tied up in their primary residence, whereas a very rich family’s home usually accounts for a small fraction.

DC and seven states have passed so-called millionaire taxes, the latest being Washington, which enacted a law that will charge zero tax on incomes up to $1 million, but 9.9 percent on each additional penny. Rep. Don Beyer (D-Va.) and Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) introduced a federal version in March.

Alas, such taxes don’t touch unrealized investment income—an exemption that enables America’s richest to dodge income tax almost entirely via an infuriating tactic known as “buy, borrow, die.” Rather than sell stock for money to live on, ultrawealthy investors simply take out low-interest loans against their assets. When they die, thanks to a legal abomination called the “step-up in basis” rule, their princelings inherit the unsold assets at market value—thus avoiding the 23.8 percent capital gains tax their parents have now deferred to the grave. “We don’t tax wealth, we tax income,” explains Harvey Dale, a New York University tax law professor who advises billionaire clients. “For people who have a huge amount of property and are ultrawealthy, they can avoid having very much income.”

“The people who really hate, hate, hate taxes? Most of them have already left [California].”

Unrealized gains are, essentially, ­income—just ask the bankers who accept them as collateral. But Congress has never touched them. If it did, the Roberts court has signaled it wouldn’t play along. “We all thought that there’s no way the Supreme Court’s going to say that income only gets measured at sale,” says Galle, who had helped craft one of Cohen’s efforts to tax unrealized gains. But the court’s 2024 ruling in Moore v. United States made clear that it would do just that. The takeaway is that a federal tax on either wealth or paper gains will require another constitutional amendment, the likelihood of which, Dale says, “seems to be something slightly below zero.”

Which helps explain why voters and lawmakers are exploring local options like New York City’s pied-à-terre tax (which passed) and San Francisco’s “Overpaid CEO” ballot measure (which didn’t). Every such move begets a flurry of op-eds warning that the “golden geese” will fly off to another city, state, or even country, as some of Dale’s clients have. History suggests few actually will. As an analysis from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities notes, California already has the nation’s highest marginal tax rate, but boasts the second-lowest rate of out-migration among households earning more than $200,000. Then again, we’re talking about billionaires.

Allen Prohofsky, who spent 15 years as the chief economist at California’s Franchise Tax Board, told me he suspects the fear of billionaire flight is overhyped when it comes to the tax initiative, but he isn’t certain. “If anybody tells you they’re sure they know what’s going to happen,” he says, they’re either lying or “delusional.” He adds: “The people who really hate, hate, hate taxes? Most of them have already left.”

Brin, up in arms over the proposed billionaire tax, now says he spends just enough time across the border in Nevada to qualify as a resident—the Franchise Tax Board has a special enforcement unit that may ask him to prove it, Prohofsky notes. David Sacks, Mark Zuckerberg, and Peter Thiel, too, have made moves toward the door. But for most wealthy people with families and important business and social connections in the state, Prohofsky explains, there’s “a host of variables” that keep them around. Dale agrees. Leaving one’s state or country is “a very complicated and ultimately personal decision, but it doesn’t blend down easily into something simple,” he says.

It’s too late, anyway, to flee this tax, which is set to apply to any billionaire who was a California resident on January 1, 2026. Proponents calculate that the state will gain about $100 billion. Foes at the conservative Hoover Institution claim departures will ultimately cost California $25 billion. (Galle helped write a thoughtful takedown of the Hoover analysis, but emailed me a more succinct response: “LOL.”) Op-eds opposing the tax have pointed out that ­California’s richest 1 percent account for nearly 40 percent of income tax revenues, which, if true, is meaningless: The billionaires targeted by this proposal are but a tiny sliver of that 1 percent. An analysis by Galle, UC Berkeley economist Emmanuel Saez, and two colleagues estimates California’s roughly 200 billionaires account for only about 1 percent of state tax revenue.

Brian Galle’s “fair tax” proposal doesn’t touch wealth, but it does have the potential to eliminate “buy, borrow, die.”

Galle’s latest idea: taxing unrealized gains constitutionally through a “fair share tax,” a strategy he helped mastermind and that is on track to be introduced as a House bill this summer. The tax would apply only to households with more than $15 million in lifetime investment gains, targeting—and yes, this sounds weird—their realized unrealized gains.

Normally, when a rich family holds stock or another asset for years, they pay a 23.8 percent tax on the profits when they eventually sell—or pass the assets to their kids at death and pay zero. Under Galle’s proposal, the tab would be substantially higher, calculated as though the unsold stock’s appreciation were taxed every year—with interest tied to the annual increase. This would wipe out the advantage of holding stocks forever. It also deals with the “step-up” rule, because the tax burden moves with the asset, not the person. An heir can sell inherited stock or not, but either way, someone eventually has to pay up—with interest.

Because the tax is imposed only after the income is realized, Galle is convinced his approach will satisfy the Supreme Court. To be fully effective, though, it would need to apply to assets held in complex trusts. After all, an “inevitable part of the tax planning game,” Dale says, is that every new rule prompts an army of $3,000-an-hour lawyers to scurry for loopholes.

The Fair Tax isn’t an actual wealth tax, but something like Galle’s approach has the potential to kill “buy, borrow, die,” and to begin to tame a democracy-distorting gap between rich and poor in a nation where billionaires now flex their political power openly and shamelessly. Passing it would be quite the feat—if only our elected officials can somehow, miraculously, summon the fortitude.

The Supreme Court may have upended the White House’s attempt to rewrite the Fourteenth Amendment, but at least one justice pointed Republican lawmakers in a different direction to unravel the birthright citizenship clause.

Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who was appointed by Donald Trump to the bench in 2018, wrote a dissenting opinion in Trump v. Barbara, despite ruling alongside the majority.

His rationale: Trump’s plan to strip American-born second-generation immigrants of their citizenship could work if it were enacted through Congress.

“In my view, the Executive Order does not violate the Fourteenth Amendment. But the Order does contravene a federal statute,” Kavanaugh wrote, referring to the law specifying birthright parameters. “Congress could—consistent with the Fourteenth Amendment—amend [this law] or otherwise enact new legislation establishing exceptions to birthright citizenship for children born to foreign citizens unlawfully or temporarily in the country. But Congress has not yet done so.”

Kavanaugh argued that while Trump’s executive order violated federal law, it did not actually run afoul of the Constitution, even though the federal law echoed the same language employed in the Constitution.

The justice noted that Congress had considered numerous amendments to the law over the last 30 years but never actually enacted any of them.

Trump has tried and failed multiple times over the last year and a half to strip the constitutionally enshrined right. Mere hours after he was sworn into office, Trump signed an executive order stating that children born to immigrants on temporary visas or who are in the country illegally are not entitled to birthright status. That order was blocked by several judges in different court circuits over the last year.

The company may finally be ready to try to deliver on Elon Musk's years-long promise of launching a robotaxi network of its own.

Now not only can you run Linux from within Windows without third-party tools, but can do so within containers. Microsoft has continued the trend of the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) being one of the company's more interesting developer technologies with the arrival of a public preview of WSL containers. According to Microsoft, the update adds a pair of new features to WSL: "A built in Linux container CLI and an API for Windows applications to run Linux containers as part of their app logic." Microsoft senior project manager Craig Loewen said, "this CLI tool has a familiar format and capabilities," and indeed it does. If Docker is something you know, the wslc.exe syntax (wslc.exe is the new binary) will be very familiar. There's also a built-in alias for container.exe for users who prefer to type container instead of wslc. "Containers," said Loewen, "have become a foundational part of modern development – from cloud-native applications and AI workloads to testing and deployment pipelines. "WSL containers simplify this experience by providing a built-in, enterprise-ready way to create, run, and manage Linux containers on Windows, without requiring additional third-party tooling." WSL has always been a handy way to run Linux workloads from Windows, and is particularly convenient for Linux developers who must comply with corporate edicts to use a Windows device. The CLI for end-to-end container workflows furthers this. Microsoft stated, "WSL containers make it easier for developers and organizations to build, test, and run containerized workloads while benefiting from the security, manageability, and integration of the Windows platform." Alternatively, you could run your preferred Linux distribution natively, but that might not be an option, particularly if an organization is keen on the "security, manageability, and integration of the Windows platform." And this is an important point. WSL's existing Microsoft Defender for Endpoint (MDE) has been updated (in private preview) to be aware of Linux container events, and there are settings in Intune for managing WSL containers. Support is also in a pre-release version of VS Code, where the Docker path in the dev container settings can be changed to wslc. There is also a new default file system for WSL container that Microsoft claims makes Windows file access twice the speed. So, going from terribly slow to just slow? We'll wait until general availability is reached before passing judgment. There's a new default networking mode to improve compatibility and better memory reclaim techniques. However, none of these tweaks will be enabled by default in WSL. Microsoft wrote, "Since these changes touch mission critical paths like file system access and network, for now they are enabled just in WSL container." The company is also at pains to point out that this is currently in public preview, although things seemed quite solid in the version we downloaded to try. That said, relying on this for any serious work would be foolhardy in the extreme, but it is certainly worth trying out ahead of general availability later this year. ®

X has launched a hosted MCP server, making it easier for developers to connect AI applications with the company’s API.

Everyone needs to hear the sound House Speaker Mike Johnson made when he heard the Supreme Court’s decision to uphold birthright citizenship.

The Supreme Court ruled Tuesday that children born in the United States to parents who were undocumented or temporarily in the county are citizens at birth under the Fourteenth Amendment’s citizenship clause.

Johnson was in the midst of reciting his reasons for opposing birthright citizenship, when the ruling was read to him by a member of the press. The Louisiana Republican looked crestfallen.

“What’s your reaction to that?” one reporter asked, as other members of the press struggled to suppress their laughter.

“MmmmMmmm,” Johnson moaned, like he had a bad taste in his mouth.

an unhappy Mike Johnson growls when informed in real time by a reporter that the Supreme Court ruled to uphold birthright citizenship pic.twitter.com/VYMw0krto6

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 30, 2026

“Well, uh, I need to read the opinion, OK? But uh, obviously that’s, I mean you could say that’s a textualist and originalist view,” Johnson stammered. “But, however, I do think that this has been grossly abused in recent years, and that is the case that’s being made by the plaintiffs of the case, and we’re very sympathetic to that because it’s a serious problem.”

The House speaker then suggested that the conclusion from this ruling would be to push for an amendment to the U.S. Constitution, but he noted the significant obstacles to ratifying such a measure.

“I will say I’m very disappointed in that outcome,” Johnson added.

⚡ Quick Take

• The Vampire Lestat’s Sam Reid and Jennifer Ehle talk about Gabriella and Lestat’s relationship.
• Ehle reveals that Gabriella has had an agenda for Lestat since she first came to him.
• Reid notes that Gabriella tries to fit Lestat into the mold she wants him to fit, but it doesn’t always feel right to Lestat.

In The Vampire Lestat/Interview with the Vampire, murmurs of the Great Conversion have existed since the series’ earliest season. But up until The Vampire Lestat, none of our main vampires appear to have given it too much thought. Louis idly discussed the Great Conversion as a disorganized movement, Armand never really brought it up, and Lestat seemed to disdain the thought of it… Or at least he did. Only Talamasca agent Raglan James seemed truly concerned by the proposition. And now, it seems like that concern has merit. Because we finally have a vampire who is interested in the Great Conversion, and she’s a dangerous one. The Vampire Lestat‘s Gabriella has been bringing up the Great Conversion every chance she gets this season. And in episode four of The Vampire Lestat, Gabriella finally makes a play to convince Lestat to really fuel the vampiric movement. She wants him to offer communion to the lost vampires out there. But where will this desire for the Great Conversion lead Gabriella, Lestat, Louis, and the rest of the vampires out there? Here’s what Jennifer Ehle and Sam Reid had to say about it.

AMC

Jennifer Ehle reveals that the Great Conversion was always on Gabriella’s mind in The Vampire Lestat. “I think in this season, when she comes for Lestat this time, from the end of episode one, when he’s called her, and she arrives, I think she definitely has an agenda.” Ehle shares of Gabriella from the very beginning. “She wants to realize what she has wanted for a couple of hundred years, which is to sort of flip the power on earth and erase all morality and mortality, really.”

And we see, as Ehle suggests, that indeed Gabriella’s hunger for “the devils to rule” stretches all the way back to her time alive in the 1800s. But at that time, Lestat seems to feel her vision of a decimated world is just an idle fantasy, a whimsy of where their lives may go. But Gabriella, instead, abandons him for many years after expressing her wish.

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Now, though, things are different. Gabriella comes to Lestat at the end of The Vampire Lestat episode four, just when he’s ready to give up on his band and music, and suggests, “You’ve been hearing them. You’ve been reaching them. They are lost, and angry, and tired of enduring. Your music speaks to them. They long for communion.” Clearly, she’s not ready for Lestat to stop consolidating the vampiric collective with his songs. And Lestat appears to bend to her cajoling, returning to make more music that speaks directly to the vampire soul at the end of the episode.

But, as Sam Reid shares, “Sometimes the suit that Gabriella puts in him in does… He sort of outgrows and doesn’t really fit anymore, and Lestat keeps returning to it, because that is, unfortunately, a very safe space for him, because he’s looking for that maternal acceptance and love. So, actually, the actor, the rockstar, the Brat Prince, the leader, all of these things, that is the kind of vicarious life that Gabriella’s built for him, so she can kind of use that as a conduit to experience it himself.”

And Jennifer Ehle agrees with this assessment: that, largely, Gabriella is thinking first of herself and is keenly aware that her hold on Lestat is not as absolute as she hopes it could be. She notes, “She wants to use him very much. She needs him very much to realize her dream of vampires living in the light.” But that could all fall apart if someone who sees Lestat better than she can, namely, Louis, interjects.

About Louis and Lestat’s relationship, Ehle notes, “I think she’s threatened by it. She’s threatened by it as somebody who loves him and who wants to be the primary relationship in his life, wants to be the most important person to him in any room, but there is somebody else. And Louis having Lestat’s ears can really just sap her power.”

For now, Lestat and Louis aren’t speaking on The Vampire Lestat, and Gabriella is back in control of Lestat, aiming him toward the Great Conversion. But will she succeed? And what are the ultimate consequences if she does? We’ll have to wait and see.

The Vampire Lestat airs Sundays at 9 pm ET/PT on AMC and 12am PT on AMC+. You can also read The Vampire Lestat by Anne Rice today as you wait for the next episode of the series to air.

Rotem Rusak is Editor-in-Chief of Nerdist. She is in awe of the beautiful season of TV that is The Vampire Lestat.

This post has affiliate links, which means we may earn advertising money if you buy something. This doesn’t cost you anything extra, we just have to give you the heads up for legal reasons. Click away!

The post Jennifer Ehle and Sam Reid on Gabriella, Lestat, and The Great Conversion in THE VAMPIRE LESTAT appeared first on Nerdist.

Stealthy startup Arcturus uses lasers to infuse carbon nanomaterials into copper, dramatically improving its ability to conduct electricity.

Let’s get this out of the way: There is no world where you can square the Supreme Court’s inherently contradictory Monday decisions in Trump v. Slaughter and Trump v. Cook. On the one hand, President Donald Trump now has the power to fire the principal officers—think commissioners and chairs—of independent agencies, without even the remotest cause, further gutting the administrative state and…

Source

President Trump wants a master list of every foreign intelligence target, including potential recruits and people that U.S. agencies suspect are spies.

The New York Times reports that the White House, through the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, has asked federal intelligence agencies to turn over these names, alarming officials who fear that it would compromise operations or be misused. So far, senior counterintelligence staff at the CIA and FBI have resisted the demands, according to the Times.

Intel officials also can’t agree on how to create, maintain, and secure the list. Trump’s new acting director, Bill Pulte, has no intelligence experience, causing FBI and CIA staff to worry about how he’d handle such a document. And the relationship between the ODNI, FBI, and CIA has gotten worse thanks to former Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, who pushed Trump’s false claims of election fraud and cut the office’s staff.

Even creating such a list could jeopardize operation security, as it would put sensitive information that is normally compartmentalized into one place. It could also compromise long-term investigations and operations. Some of the targets on these lists are carefully protected even within federal agencies, with many staff not having access to their identities.

An official from Pulte’s office told the Times that it was only trying to follow National Security Presidential Memorandum 7, the administration’s national security strategy targeting supposed anti-American activity on the left. That official said compiling a list of intelligence assets and targets would help with collaboration and information sharing.

As a Trump loyalist, Pulte is likely to closely follow the president’s orders. Under Gabbard, Trump used the ODNI, which is supposed to focus on foreign intelligence, to investigate nonexistent fraud from the 2020 presidential election and other elections where Trump didn’t like the results. What does he want with a full list of intelligence targets? Does he think there could be some foreign connection to elections, or does he have some misguided or odious foreign policy plans?

Users will be able use AI to create newsletters based on their recordings.

Engineers on the new team will embed within companies to deploy purpose-built agents, focusing on fast deployments and customer self-sufficiency.

Earlier this spring, AMD, Broadcom, Meta, Microsoft, NVIDIA, and OpenAI formed the Optical Compute Interconnect Multi-Source Agreement (OCI MSA) to bring coherence to AI infrastructure and establish a specification for co-packaged optics (CPO) scale-up networks. The architecture they aligned on is a slow and wide non-return-to-zero (NRZ) modulation paired with wavelength-division multiplexing. OCI GEN1 supports four wavelengths at 50 Gbps per channel, delivering 200 Gbps per direction per fiber, and the roadmap scales to 1.6 Tbps per fiber per direction. This consortium settled the architectural debate over the direction of networking in AI. The specification defines the first step in the architecture, but leaves the harder question open: How bandwidth continues to scale, and what comes after four wavelengths. The roadmap calls for adding wavelengths on the same fiber infrastructure to grow bandwidth, but does not specify which manufacturing approach will deliver them. The road to more wavelengths is the answer First-movers have already settled this argument. The OCI MSA's founding members endorsed four wavelengths as the GEN1 starting point, Ayar Labs has been on the eight-to-16 wavelength path for years, and NVIDIA's published roadmap, "A Roadmap Toward Sub-1 pJ/b Optical Interconnect," models a 16-wavelength interconnect as the route to the energy targets the MSA aims at. The decision to use slow-and-wide is an energy-per-bit argument. Low symbol rates and simple encoding go together: NRZ carries one bit per symbol, while PAM-4 carries two but requires roughly three times the optical power to hit the same bit-error rate (BER). NRZ holds BER low enough that forward error correction (FEC) stays light, latency remains tight and predictable, and the link stays within its energy budget. On the electrical side, SerDes power per bit at 50 GBaud is roughly one-third that at 100 GBaud. That regime must be preserved as bandwidth scales, or it can be walked back. Wavelength multiplication keeps the link inside the slow-and-wide regime, whereas symbol-rate escalation walks the architecture back out of it. For readers who want the underlying physics, see "Why 'Optics When You Must' is Now." The industry can now treat increasing wavelength count as settled and turn to the next problem: Manufacturing stable precision laser arrays in massive quantities. Three eras of photonic integration Photonic integration has evolved through three manufacturing eras. Each was driven by the same forces that drove every transition in the semiconductor industry: Lower cost, higher reliability, and industrial-volume scale. The first was the discrete optical assembly era. Components were made separately from exotic materials, precisely aligned by hand, and packaged individually. Expanding system capabilities meant more components and more assembly steps, and every fiber attachment was a costly potential failure point. The cost curve was flat by construction, or even negative, as yields fell. The second era was silicon photonics. Components, including modulators, waveguides, and photodetectors, moved onto a single monolithic wafer, so a portion of the photonic stack could achieve the cost curves of the semiconductor process. Instead of scaling with assembly capacity, the silicon portion could scale by running more wafers on a single flow. The breakthrough was real but incomplete, because critical components could not be integrated. The stubborn, non-silicon III-V gain material was the holdout, and the cost curve remained partial: A high-volume foundry process bolted to a discrete-component bottleneck at the most demanding interface. The foundry flow excluded lasers, semiconductor optical amplifiers (SOA), and high-speed modulators. The third era, heterogeneous integration of all photonic materials on a single wafer, has finally arrived. Combining III-V gain material with silicon photonics brings lasers, semiconductor optical amplifiers, and high-speed modulators into a single wafer-level process. The complete photonics signal chain consolidates on the wafer, and the gain material becomes just another step in a wafer process-flow cost curve, with wafer-level cost, scale, and reliability. The trend towards ever-increasing integration is inevitable. It is the manufacturing transition CMOS underwent in electronics: A single, elegant process that absorbed new device types, compounded over generations at massive scale, and became the foundation for the modern semiconductor industry. Photonics is repeating it, just in time for the massive deployment in AI datacenters. The wavelength staircase The OCI GEN1 specification is four wavelengths at 50 Gbps NRZ, delivering 200 Gbps per fiber in each direction, with MSA channel spacing of 400 GHz. It serves as a practical starting point: Sufficient to demonstrate the architecture in production silicon and coordinate the supply chain, but not enough to support the next generation of GPUs, which will require higher bandwidth per fiber. OCI GEN1 sets the first minimum multi-wavelength standard, not the maximum. Each step up the staircase runs slow and wide, so the per-channel electronics do not change. The dense wavelength-division multiplexing (DWDM) step occurs at wavelengths of eight or more, where channel spacing tightens. System-level bandwidth scales with the number of wavelengths: More lanes, more rings, no change in per-channel design effort. Doubling the wavelengths doubles the bandwidth without doubling the design cost. Eight wavelengths deliver 400 Gbps per fiber per direction, and 16 deliver 800. Bidirectional transmission over the same fiber further reduces the fiber count, and none of it requires faster SerDes, deeper FEC, or PAM-4 power and latency penalties. Wavelengths bend the cost curve for per-fiber bandwidth and enable scale-up domains to grow from tens of GPUs today to thousands tomorrow. Multiplexing at the laser source prevents fiber-count growth, so the number of fibers per connector doesn't explode as the wavelength count rises. The bigger payoff is what cluster size unlocks, rather than raw throughput. Larger, flatter, low-latency scale-up domains enlarge working memory, extend the context window, and add transformer layers, which together support deeper reasoning, fewer network stalls, and higher GPU utilization. Today's wavelength-count decision sets the ceiling on which models the resulting cluster can run in 2028 and beyond. That gives system architects a sixth metric alongside energy per bit, latency, per-fiber throughput, and reach: Wavelength-scaling headroom on the same manufacturing flow. The question to ask is whether the supplier's light-source architecture extends to eight, 16, and beyond without re-engineering. Where the answer is no, the redesign is already on the calendar, with a two-year delta baked in. Manufacturing decides the curve The OCI MSA roadmap to 1.6 Tbps per direction per fiber is achievable on paper. The harder question is which manufacturing approach gets the industry there. Discrete-laser supply chains were not built for hyperscale volumes, and the two structural paths hit the same wall by different routes. The shared-laser path combines multiple lasers through a combiner-and-splitter network to feed a multi-wavelength source. Splitting losses scale with channel count: Every additional output tapped off the network costs the laser optical power it has to make up at the input. Each laser pushes harder to maintain budget across more channels, drive currents climb, and reliability margins erode at every wavelength step. The economics that work at four wavelengths do not extend to eight, let alone 16. The dedicated-laser path uses one laser per wavelength, and assembly complexity scales linearly with channel count when multiplexing with discrete optics. A single module supplying 16 wavelengths across eight fibers would result in roughly 128 lasers, 128 fiber alignments, and 128 monitoring photodiodes. Each alignment has to hold to micrometre tolerances across temperature swings, package stress, and years of field life, and failure-rate math compounds at every interface. Volume is the binding constraint. Hyperscale CPO will need millions of laser-source units per month, not tens of thousands, and discrete-laser approaches do not extend to those volumes regardless of which path is taken. This, rather than the architectural debate, is what has held DWDM back as a deployable architecture. The architectural debate was always going to settle here; the supply chain was not. Once the next wavelength is no longer a discrete-component assembly step but becomes another circuit element on the silicon photonics wafer, the cost of adding wavelengths follows a semiconductor learning curve. Heterogeneous integration provides that curve, and the OCI roadmap requires it. The CMOs of photonics Heterogeneous integration is the manufacturing pattern that closes the integration gap silicon photonics has carried since its inception. III-V gain materials, modulators, photodetectors, and waveguides come together in a single wafer-level flow. This is what CMOS did for electronics. CMOS established a single industrial process that absorbed transistor types, then logic, then memory, and eventually larger functional families, all within the same foundry flow. Each new device family inherited the process's cost curve rather than starting its own, and that inheritance is what lets CMOS compound over generations: Every advance in the underlying process improves every device built on it. The free ride came from the manufacturing pattern, not from the transistor. SHIP™, Scintil Heterogeneous Integrated Photonics, is the equivalent pattern for photonic device integration. The claim is pattern equivalence, not scale equivalence: Photonics is repeating CMOS as a manufacturing transition, not as a market size. The pattern is already running. SHIP™ sits on Tower Semiconductor's silicon photonics platform on 200 mm production lines today, the same lines that turn out tens of millions of pluggable optical transceivers. The 300 mm path is next. The platform is already reaching beyond the laser source. At OFC 2026, four architecturally distinct system vendors independently requested SHIP™ extensions, each pursuing a different system goal: Deeper transceiver integration, advanced optical switching, high-speed modulation at scale, and integrated amplification architectures. Each needed the same underlying capability: III-V integration into the silicon photonics flow, for optical amplifiers and high-speed modulators that pure silicon cannot deliver. None of them was solving the same problem, and the common factor was the manufacturing pattern, not the device. What comes after the first generation Two generations from now, the scale-up fabric is a multi-rack signal chain that binds thousands of GPUs into a single coherent compute domain. The fiber plant that carried four wavelengths also carries 16, then the next, without rework. Lasers, modulators, photodetectors, and optical amplifiers are circuit elements on the silicon photonics wafer, not parts assembled into modules. The interconnect ceases to be an assembly problem and becomes a process-node problem. Power per bit decreases as the signal chain no longer crosses fiber interfaces and material boundaries, and bandwidth at the package edge rises with integration density. The teams designing for that architecture today will hold the architectural position when it becomes the default. The teams that defer the manufacturing question will spend two generations rebuilding programs around suppliers who solved it earlier. LEAF Light™ is the production proof: A single-chip DWDM-native light engine, demonstrated in eight- and 16-wavelength configurations compatible with microring-based CPO transceivers and manufactured on established production lines. Scintil's Series B included participation from NVIDIA as part of broader ecosystem alignment. The OCI MSA settled the architecture. The path to ship it runs through heterogeneous integration. Matt Crowley is the CEO of Scintil Photonics. Contributed by OmniScale Media.

The Supreme Court on Tuesday upheld a broad conception of birthright citizenship, rejecting President Donald Trump’s executive order declaring that children born to people who are in the United States illegally or temporarily are not American citizens.

The Supreme Court on Tuesday upheld West Virginia and Idaho state laws banning transgender athletes from competing on teams that align with their gender, further restricting trans rights in the U.S.

This is the court’s first ruling on laws regarding trans athletes, and follows last year’s decision in U.S. v. Skrmetti allowing states to ban gender-affirming care for transgender minors.

The ruling contributes to an increasingly bleak legal landscape for trans people in the U.S. Both petitioners argued that the state bans are discriminatory, and violate the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection clause. One argued that the restrictions are also a violation of Title IX, which prohibits discrimination in schools on the basis of sex.

All three liberal justices dissented in the decision, noting that they would have sent the case back for further factual findings on the equal protection claim.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote a partial dissent, joined by Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson and Elena Kagan.

“States do have some room to legislate around issues when there exists significant, and genuine, scientific debate,” Sotomayor wrote. “At this point, however, neither the District Court nor the Fourth Circuit has passed upon any of the available evidence or made the necessary factual findings about the state of the scientific debate.”

“The majority’s opinion ends by reciting the many wonderful ways in which playing sports can be valuable to young people. It can help build resilience, tenacity, leadership, and discipline. It can lead to life-long friendships, community, and a sense of belonging. It can bring joy and the thrill of victory, along with all the lessons one learns from experiencing defeat. The benefits are immense,” Sotomayor continued. “Because of the Court’s decision today, West Virginia, and any other state actor, can deny B. P. J. and others like her these experiences simply because it thinks they have an inherent athletic advantage, even if the facts show that they do not.”

“A transgender woman penalized for being perceived as aggressive has experienced discrimination ‘on the basis of sex’ just as much as a cisgender woman has, no matter that the transgender woman’s behavior matches expectations of her sex assigned at birth,” Justice Jackson wrote in an additional dissent. “Either way, the institution has imposed its gender-based expectations upon her. And either way, the institution may have violated Title IX.”

The majority decision will have national repercussions on transgender athletes competing in youth and college sports, even as the number of participating trans athletes participating is very slim.

Rachel Kahn contributed reporting to this story.

The Supreme Court has tossed out another of President Donald Trump’s efforts to kill birthright citizenship.

In a decision filed Tuesday, the court ruled in favor of the 1868 constitutional clause, which entitles any person born on U.S. soil to an American passport, further safeguarding the protections of the Fourteenth Amendment from the Trump administration.

Trump has tried and failed multiple times over the course of his second term to strip away the constitutionally enshrined right. Mere hours after he was sworn into office in January 2025, Trump signed an executive order stating that children born to immigrants on temporary visas or who are in the country illegally are not entitled to birthright status. That order was blocked by several judges in different court circuits over the last year.

In December, the nation’s highest judiciary agreed to hear another one of the administration’s birthright challenges, this time pertaining to a case out of New Hampshire. The executive branch argued in the case that language included in the Fourteenth Amendment—specifically, “subject to the jurisdiction of”—required applicable children not only to be present in the country at the time of the birth, but also to confer their allegiance to the United States.

The argument appeared thin at best, considering the administration did not clarify how it expected people who had just been born to declare their allegiance.

In legal arguments filed at the time, Solicitor General D. John Sauer wrote that the naturalized citizenship pathway had become “pervasive” with “destructive consequences.”

In May 2025, justices on both ideological sides of the court flamed the Trump administration’s efforts to rewrite birthright citizenship, questioning why the government’s attorneys would even bring the case to the judiciary’s doorstep when “every court has ruled against” the administration on birthright citizenship.

At the time, Justice Brett Kavanaugh pressed Sauer into a corner, forcing the solicitor general to admit that the Trump administration didn’t even know how it would enforce its birthright citizenship order. Sauer managed to appall another Trump appointee—Justice Amy Coney Barrett—by arguing that Trump has the “right” to disregard legal opinions that he doesn’t personally agree with.

This is a developing story.

A Red Hat build engineer has ended his second experimental effort at using a high-end Arm64 desktop computer as his daily driver. His conclusions are instructive. Marcin Juszkiewicz’s series of posts on his tech blog about running a Fedora-powered beast of an Arm desktop computer has been interesting reading for about a year now. Almost exactly a year ago, he built a beast of an Arm workstation. He spent some €1,800 building a machine around an Ampere Altra, which as The Register described in 2020 is a serious bit of kit. And even at €1,800 (£1550, or $2000) quite a bit of it was second-hand, including the CPU and RAM. He described the machine’s capabilities in Arm desktop: 2025 attempt, part one. We were considering a story about the sheer cost of the kit, but his latest update describes The end of the AArch64 desktop experiment. That means it’s now more of a post mortem. To cut to the chase, he has switched back to using his AMD Ryzen 5 3600 system: the six cores of a $199 chip from 2019 outperforms an 80-core Arm64 powerhouse. Juszkiewicz, who also goes by the rather easier to spell hrw, knows his stuff, and he is a man of strong opinions. Indeed, his Mastodon profile gives a clue: “Tired of Seriously Bad Computers (SBC) so moved to Arm servers and virtualization.” SBC, of course, more normally stands for “Single Board Computers” in this industry, and by far the best-selling Arm SBC is the Raspberry Pi. As it happens, we’ve met him: the Reg FOSS desk attended a talk by Mr Juszkiewicz at the 2016 Flock to Fedora conference. We already knew that he wasn’t a fan of the Raspberry Pi devices. Also, for any doubters out there, this Altra box was not his first attempt to build an Arm64 daily-driver machine. That was back in 2015, as he described over three posts. AArch64 desktop: day one talked about the spec, involving a Mustang motherboard – which means an Applied Micro X-Gene X-C1. By day two, he started to cover issues with his distro: "I use Fedora on my machines. And as lot of people know this distribution has strange rules when it comes to multimedia support. Forget about MP3, H264 and few other things." The post talks about needing to build his own codecs and media player applets, the lack of Macromedia Flash support, and more. We note this just in case anyone is tempted to jump to the conclusion that his more recent Arm experiment failed due to a lack of knowledge or skills – he definitely has both in large amounts. After just four days, he wrote AArch64 desktop: last day, discussing the performance issues of an eight-core, circa 2.4 GHz ArmV8 computer: "OK, I can be spoiled by speed of my i7-2600k desktop but situation when Firefox with less than 20 tabs open is unable to display characters I type into textarea fast enough shows that something is wrong (16GB ram machine). And tell me that this is not typical desktop use of web browser…" He spares judging the machine too harshly: "I think that results may be affected by a fact that all I have here is Applied Micro Mustang based on X-Gene 1 cpu. It is one of first ARMv8 processors in Linux world and it is optimized for server use rather than desktop." Well, fast forward to 2025, and he still has no choice but to use a manycore Arm64 chip aimed at servers, rather than the desktop. As The Reg reported earlier this month, they are now a serious force in the server and datacentre market… but aside from Apple Silicon, not on the desktop or in laptops. This time around, in Arm desktop: 2025 attempt, part one, he starts by setting the context: "Almost ten years ago, I tried to use an Applied Micro Mustang as a desktop. And it was painful. " He also starts out with some of the problems. Even a decade on, he still has problems with missing codecs and client apps. The steps needed to work around them have changed, but the situation is not massively better. Last time, for instance, it was a problem that there was no Flash player; now, there’s no Arm Spotify client. In the second installment, Arm desktop: emulation he looks at the problems of using the latest x86-on-Arm emulation tools in trying to run x86 games on even a high-end Arm chip: "Test results were awful: Single core: 459 Multi core: 4110 That’s the level of an Intel Atom CPU from 2021." He concludes: “Let me be honest: without tweaking FEX-Emu config it was unplayable.” The third installment moves on to the issues of this server part: Arm desktop: so many cores, not enough speed. "Having 80 cores sounds nice, doesn’t it? But not so much during actual use… You see, building Fedora packages was flying by. With all cores in use, ccache buffers filling up (in case of rebuilds), and 128 GB of RAM in constant use, etc. "But at the same time, 100 percent load on all cores means you cannot listen to music on Spotify or watch online videos, etc. All that because the CPU cores are occupied by the build processes." His summary is short but not very sweet. The main issue: “The lack of single-thread speed.” And the bottom line: “To use a desktop system you do not need many cores. As long as they are fast.” In the final instalment, The end of the AArch64 desktop experiment, he looks at some of the issues in depth. He built his own custom specially patched kernels; he tried two different GPUs – both an AMD Radeon RX6700XT, a high-end card that was $479 when new in 2021, and then an Nvidia RTX 2060, a card that was $349 in 2019. With both cards, some apps wouldn’t run, due to missing OpenGL libraries, or they ran very badly: “Watching YouTube videos became impossible due to 720 out of 750 frames being dropped, etc.” He hasn’t pensioned off the machine: "The 'wooster' system stays powered on, churning through RISC-V package builds. It may be weak in single-thread, but it flies when it comes to multi-core load. " But this is the end for now: "As for the Ampere Altra, I am not planning to repeat this experiment. Another AArch64 desktop attempt would require a completely new hardware platform. And I have no plans to spend over twenty thousand PLN to buy an Nvidia DGX Spark system." (Twenty thousand Polish złoty was around $5,305, £4,020, or €4,660 at current exchange rates at the time of publication.) Our original plan when “hrw” started this series was to look into the lack of commodity-priced Arm64 hardware. At last year’s Ubuntu Summit, System76 presented its nearly ready COSMIC desktop, but it also demonstrated its 128-core Altra workstation, the formidable Thelio Astra. With half a terabyte of RAM and 40 TB of storage, it’s a snip at just over $6,000 (£4,600). We have to admit, after reading Hrw’s in-depth stories of what went wrong, we no longer covet one. Perhaps paying £168 for an 8 GB Pi 5 isn’t so bad after all. ®

This is a lightly edited transcript of the June 29 edition of Right Now With Perry Bacon. You can watch the video here or by following this show on YouTube or Substack.

Perry Bacon: Welcome, everybody. This is Right Now on The New Republic. I’m your host, Perry Bacon. I’ve done a lot of episodes on this show about the media, but most of them have often been very critical—bemoaning layoffs, the decline of local news to some extent, news organizations trying to placate Trump in ways that worry me. The mergers have been troublesome.

But I’m excited today, because we have a positive story about the news and a positive story about journalism. So I have Steve Sachs. He’s the managing director of The Guardian US. You probably have heard of The Guardian—it’s a well-known British paper, but they actually have a very strong US-focused edition and website that has great news about what’s happening in Washington, what’s happening in the country. So I want to talk about what The Guardian is doing here and what maybe other places can learn from it. Steve, welcome.

Steve Sachs: Thank you, Perry. Great to be here.

Bacon: So let me start from the beginning here, to tell people about the history. The Guardian started having a US operation a couple of decades ago. So talk about how that started and what the goal was initially.

Sachs: Yeah. At The Guardian, we’ve always had an editorial team here. But we started about a little more than 15 years ago saying, “Let’s expand into having an audience here and a business here.” And that was part of a strategy at The Guardian, really especially over the last 10 years, where we expanded in two key ways.

One was expanding outside the UK, and the second is expanding committing to being no-paywall, and then asking our audience to support us. Those were important strategic decisions, and expanding in the US was part of that overall strategy.

Bacon: And so let’s talk about pre-Trump—pre-Trump one, even. So as The Guardian opens in the US, you have staffers in New York and in DC and a little bit elsewhere. How big was the initial operation?

Sachs: We started with a team here. New York, DC, and California were our three main places originally. We were first in northern California. We then moved the bureau to southern California, to LA.

And honestly, Perry, in the first few years—first, say, five or six years—it was tough going. We lost a lot of money. We tried to figure out what our unique value is here, and it took us a while to figure out. And it wasn’t a straight line up. The news here—there’s lots of great players. It’s a crowded market.

And so for The Guardian to come in and figure out what is our value overall—what’s our, in business speak, what’s our unique value proposition—it took us a little while to figure out. And our business model took us a little while to figure out as well.

So we started there, but then really over the past, say, six or seven years, we really started to focus and understand what our opportunity is here. And as a result of that, we have grown significantly. We are now, typically in any given month, between 40 and 50 million uniques on our website and in our app, in total. That makes us bigger than the Wall Street Journal in the US.

And over the past five months, for the first time, we now have more page views and more unique visitors in the US than the Washington Post does. We have grown significantly as a result of the work that we’ve done. I could talk a little bit more about what exactly we did, but—

Bacon: We’ll come back to that.

Sachs: The headline is that we’re doing well, and more and more Americans are coming to us as their first choice for all kinds of news and journalism.

Bacon: Let me jump back. The initial goal—why did The Guardian decide to have more staff in the US? What was the initial impetus to start a US edition, or really focus on the US in the first place? Was it part of a worldwide expansion, or was there a specific need you all felt back in 2007?

Sachs: Yeah. So what happened was, 10 years ago—a little bit more than 10 years ago—we were losing a lot of money at The Guardian globally.

And people forget, with the great success of The New York Times—and I have so much respect for what they’ve done—people forget also that 15 years ago, The New York Times was really financially not on strong footing overall. They had to take a loan from a Mexican billionaire, a high-interest loan, in order to really help them shore up their financials.

The Guardian was similar. We were losing about £100 million a year. So that’s about, in today’s dollars, about $135 million. And we only had £700 million in an endowment. So that means we basically had seven years to live.

So what did we do? We decided that—at the time, we were the seventh-largest newspaper in the UK. And we decided that in order to change our economics and to also focus on a broader mission, we would target becoming one of the largest news organizations globally. And the US expansion was an important part of that.

The headline on that is that we are now, in 2026, the fifth-largest news organization globally by audience.

Bacon: CNN, New York Times, Guardian.

Sachs: So we have achieved our goal. New York Times, CNN, BBC, Guardian. So we’ve grown from the seventh-largest news organization in the UK to the fifth-largest news organization globally by audience.

We’ve also changed our economics. So 10 years ago, only 8 percent of our revenue was from outside the UK. Now it’s over 40 percent—it’s 41 percent of our revenue from outside the UK. And so just in 10 years, we successfully changed that. We are also now operating very well financially. And so that big loss that we had, we’ve changed as well.

Bacon: So I’m a journalist—I want to talk about journalism and the stories themselves for a little bit right now. What I found was, in 2017, during that first Trump period, the reason I started reading The Guardian more was, one, I liked the perspective that was international. It wasn’t so grounded in the US, and it helped me see the world a little bit broader, the way you all covered it.

And two, I felt like there was a little more directness about what Trump was doing. Sometimes I worried that NPR, The Times, The Post would do what I think of as a sort of both sides, and not honestly say what he was actually doing and the alarming radicalism. But how do you see that? What was the—how did the Trump era affect what you all did when he was first in office?

Sachs: It’s really interesting to hear what you found valuable for us back in 2017. I would summarize what you said as: we have more of a global perspective.

Whereas many news organizations in the US have more of an American filter. And also what you said was, we can report as is—so that’s really more of an independent view. And that’s exactly right.

A few years ago—when Betsy Reed, our editor, and I started, we both started three and a half years ago, within about a month of each other—one of the first things we did is we wanted to understand what our value proposition is in the US. And there was a lot of debate at the time about what it might be.

So we commissioned research. We did very sophisticated quantitative research with over 3,000 people in the US. They all took a 45-minute in-depth survey. And we did it—those 3,000 people represent that there are about 200 million people in the US who come to digital news every month.

And we wanted to understand what was The Guardian’s value proposition to those 200 million people, and clarify it for us and for the team overall. And the answer is—you got two of the three right. You figured it out in 2017. We didn’t figure it out until 2024.

The answer is that people come to us for the combination of global perspective, independent, and the other important one is no paywall.

Global, independent, and free is what’s unique about us. No one else in the US is doing that. So we are focused on that overall, and that helps us—whether it is what’s happening in DC, or what’s happening in climate, or what’s happening in soccer. Soccer—the World Cup, which is going on right now, or as my colleagues in the UK would call it, football.

There are all kinds of stories that you want to be able to report for an audience that’s looking for a broader global perspective, and independent—not held to, not having the conflicts of a corporate structure that has many different goals, or a billionaire owner that may have personal interests. And we make it all available on our site without any cost.

We then ask people to support us, which we’re very successful in doing. But that’s what we did back then, and even more, that’s what we do now: global perspective that’s independent, without cost, that’s free.

Bacon: Let me probe with all three of those ideas. Let me start with the paywall. The news industry—it was probably a mistake to give everything away for free at the beginning of the internet.

But that said, now when I do my stories and try to look for links and look for facts, I can’t read anything, because everything is behind a paywall now. I really love journalism. I can’t subscribe to every newspaper in every state, and the paywalls are very intense right now. My worry is a lot of the best-quality news—Wall Street Journal, Reuters, Bloomberg—is all behind a paywall.

So tell me—I understand the virtue in having a paywall, but how does that work economically for you all? How do you make money? Just the core question. Everyone wants to have more access, but how do we make that work financially?

Sachs: Yeah. You’re exactly right that, especially even more so over the past couple of years—

When CNN has started a paywall. The BBC has started a paywall in the US. Others have tightened their paywall and made it—you get less for free before you hit the paywall.

Part of it is our mission. So let me tell you a little bit about it, and then I’ll circle back to the exact part of what you were talking about—how we make the economics work. But part of it is our mission, and it’s a mission that comes from the way we are owned and operated.

So The Guardian is owned by a trust in the UK, and the trust has only one mandate, which is to secure the financial and editorial independence of The Guardian in perpetuity. Effectively—

Bacon: And the trust is not run by one person or one family?

Sachs: No, it’s not.

Bacon: OK, that’s important to say.

Sachs: It’s not. It is effectively a nonprofit. We are effectively a nonprofit organization. If we were headquartered in the US, we would reincorporate as a 501(c)(3). There’s no such thing as a 501(c)(3), of course, in the UK, but that’s effectively what we are. They operate us for mission. They operate us for longevity. We have a very large endowment, like a nonprofit news organization or a nonprofit here would have. It’s actually—we have a billion and we have almost a two-billion-pound—sorry, two-billion-dollar—one-and-a-half-billion-pound, two-billion-dollar, approximately, endowment.

And what it does is, that allows us to do the things that we’ve talked about. It allows us to operate independently, because we are—the board, just like ProPublica here has a board. We are like ProPublica, where we have a board that then operates us, governs us in a way that we are reporting and building and being sustainable for the long term. And it does not get involved in journalistic decisions overall.

So the fact that we don’t have a paywall is part of our overall mission to make high-quality journalism, like the other news organizations that you named. The Guardian also has over 1,000 journalists globally now. So we have actually grown. We’re one of the only news organizations that has grown our newsroom over the past few years. In fact, in the US, when I started, we had about 75 journalists. In the US right now, we have 150.

So we’ve doubled in the last three years. So we’re one of the few news organizations in the US that’s actually growing our newsroom too. And the reason why we can do it is, we don’t have to report earnings quarterly. We don’t even report them—we report them voluntarily, publicly.

We can draw down a small amount off of our endowment like a nonprofit would here. But we use that to invest for the future. So all the investment that we’ve done in the US is as a result of being able to draw down a couple of percent off of our endowment every year. And that endowment is still growing, because we’re so conservatively drawing down on it.

So the big picture on it is that The Guardian is different and has an advantage in serving an audience because of the way we’re set up, and because of the way we’re now funded and we’re in a strong financial position.

So then what does that translate into? If we’re going to make all our information available for free on our website, how do we actually make money then? And the answer is that 10 years ago, we started what we call a reader revenue program. It actually—we should really rename it now, because we’re much more than reading. It’s really an audience revenue or supporter revenue program. And when people come, we ask them to support us, in much the same way that, say, NPR asks people to support. We’ve become very good at it.

And in the US, about two-thirds of our revenue—so last year we broke $80 million of revenue in the US. About two-thirds of that comes from voluntary contributions that people don’t have to make, but they do. So that’s $58 million last year. Over 700,000 people in the US and Canada combined made a contribution. About 500,000 of those are actually on a recurring basis, either every month or every year, automatically on a credit card.

And two-thirds of our revenue in the US—$58 million last year and growing, that was up 35 percent, actually, the real revenue was up 35 percent last year versus the year before, so we’re growing—is as a result of people coming to our site or our app and really appreciating what’s there and saying, You know what? This is a different perspective, and I really appreciate it, and it’s made available for free, and I’m going to support it.

Bacon: Make sure I’m understanding this right. So half a million people are contributing to The Guardian in the US, even though they could get it for free. That’s an important statistic.

Sachs: It’s even more than that. It’s 700,000. And the way we look at it is US and Canada—we call it North America, so US and Canada, correctly. But the vast majority is US. Over 700,000 people did that. Of that, 500,000 are on a recurring basis—effectively a subscription.

The other 200,000 made a one-time contribution. And so we’ve got 700,000 people in the US and Canada, North America, that are contributing even though they don’t have to, because they really appreciate what it is that we do and find it really valuable.

Bacon: And I would say, as a person in that group, part of what I find valuable is other people can read the stories. I can send the story to someone, and they can read it without me having to do a bunch of gymnastics and passwords.

Sachs: That’s right. That’s a very important thing. And so there’s that benefit. We do a lot of research to understand, why is it? Why do people support us? And really interestingly, more than half the people that support us aren’t coming regularly. We track how often somebody comes to our site or our app.

Do they come every day? Do they come a couple times a week? Do they come once every 30 days? Have we not seen them in the past 30 days? What’s really interesting is, of the 700,000 people in the US that made a contribution in the last year, over half of them come less than once a month. So you would say, Why are they making a contribution then? They’re not actually coming.

And the answer is—we do a lot of research on this—the answer is that, as there are fewer and fewer news organizations that can report independently, that have the kind of global perspective we have and make the information available for free, they appreciate that and want to support that, even if they’re not coming.

Because it’s not just that they can share with others, it’s also they feel it’s important to have independent journalism in the US that is well-funded, and they’re willing to kick in 50 bucks, or 15 dollars a month, or whatever it is they can afford, in order to have The Guardian exist and be strong and growing.

So it’s really counterintuitive that somebody would give us 15 dollars a month when they don’t come to our site or they don’t come to our app, but they do.

Bacon: That’s amazing. I didn’t realize that.

Sachs: They do that because of the value that we have overall and the importance of that that people feel, for America and the world.

Bacon: Let me drill in on independent. So that’s a tricky word, in that everybody who works at The Guardian says, “We’re independent.” And I perceive you all as being more liberal—not in a high-taxes way, but in a sort of for-freedom, for-equality way. There are some values. So how do you see your values?

My guess is a lot of those 700,000 people, most of them voted for Harris—I don’t know if you want to say that or not. But when you say independent, you mean not owned by a billionaire. So what are the values of The Guardian? Let me put it that way, in terms of journalism. What are the values of The Guardian?

Sachs: Yeah. Independent is a really important one. And what we mean by independent is, in our news report, we are reporting the facts.

And there’s not—as you mentioned—there’s not a both-sides to it that comes into our report. Our opinion—we do opinion, of course. Our opinion is left of center, for sure. We’ve got great opinion writers—Robert Reich and Margaret Sullivan and others, Betty Hassan, who contribute. And our opinion’s left of center, but our news report is independent and is reporting facts without a bias to it.

Bacon: And you want Republicans reading—you want everybody to read it.

Sachs: Not only do we want—we look, sometimes we look at Democrat versus Republican, but what we find more helpful is asking people how they define themselves on a liberal-versus-conservative scale.

And so when we look at our audience and ask them to define themselves as either very liberal, moderate, conservative, or very conservative—when we look at that, only about 40 percent of people define themselves as either liberal or very liberal.

Another 35 percent define themselves as moderate. And 25 percent define themselves as conservative or very conservative.

Bacon: I would not have guessed it. That’s interesting. I’m glad you told me that. That’s good to know.

Sachs: So that, by the way, is different in the US than it is in other parts of the world. Because people didn’t grow up with The Guardian here. In the UK, people grew up with it and have a very clear view of what it is. Here, people are still discovering it. And so they come and they see our news report, and they see us being global, independent, and free.

And so they don’t read into it, Yeah, this is X. This is either very conservative, very liberal, whatever it is. And so we get a broader audience because of that. And that is something that we’re really thrilled about, because there’s so much polarization in the US when it comes to media, and so we would like to be able to reach a broader audience overall. It’s just part of our mission.

Bacon: Are the readers you’re getting people who also read the Times and NPR or CNN? Are they people who don’t? Are you a lot of people’s second read, or their first—maybe they also have a second read? I’m not trying to diminish you. But is it people who read a lot of media, or people who just read one thing? That’s what I’m asking.

Sachs: It’s a great question. The same research I was just referring to, where we figured out our value proposition, and we also asked about how people self-define, liberal versus conservative—we asked about this question because we always had this question of second read versus first read. And it turns out that it’s really interesting.

The whole idea of a first read and second read is actually an outdated idea. It’s from an idea of when a newspaper was thrown up on your driveway, and then you would go out and get it, or dropped off if you’re in an apartment in New York, dropped off at your front door or the front desk.

People now read—or watch or listen—really broadly, because they come to your podcast, and they come to The Guardian, and they go to The New York Times, and they might go to Axios, et cetera. And so when you look at what The Guardian is, we are part of the mix, in the same way that others are as well.

Most people—even when you look at something like CNN or The New York Times—most people would say, Oh, that could be a first, the first thing they turn to. It turns out that, based off of our research, less than 20 percent of the people that, say, go to the New York Times consider it their primary read or view of the world.

Because you’re discovering in your social feed, or you’re getting a newsletter or whatever, so you’re pretty broad here, and we’re now part of that mix as well—which is part of the advantage that we’ve had here, and why it is that we’ve been able to grow our audience while others are not growing their audience. A lot of news organizations have really had their audiences shrink in the last five years. And so it actually is an advantage that people are sampling so much, because they might discover us on Apple News.

And they may not have known about us before that. And then they discover us through that.

Bacon: Global is the third word you use. I think you might be using the word “global” meaning you all are based in Britain, you cover the world a lot. The other reason I think of you all as global being different is that—and I’m not trying to throw shade—when I read a story in the Journal, The New York Times, Axios about politics, it often reflects a DC-centric view of how politics works. And I read you all’s stories, and it’s, Oh, the broader picture. Sometimes the stories are like, sources close to say this.

And you all’s stories tend to be more, Here’s where this issue works, here’s how this thing is working. It’s written so my mom, my brother, and everybody else I know can read the story without having to need a translator. And I think that’s helpful—the domestic stories are written for everybody as opposed to written for the inside-DC crowd. That’s what I perceive. And I think that comes from also not being based in the US.

Sachs: It’s a really—you’re exactly right about that. So when I talk about global, what our audience says, and what we have adopted as part of our value proposition, is global perspective.

Bacon: Global perspective. OK.

Sachs: So what does global perspective mean? It means two things. Number one, it means that we do cover the world, because we now have over 1,000 journalists globally, of which a couple hundred—by the end of this year, a couple hundred—will be in the US. It means more than 800 in other parts of the world. That means that we just have really great coverage of what’s happening all over the world in ways that other news organizations don’t.

And so that is part of what people come to us for. About half of the stories that Americans read or listen to at The Guardian, about half in any given day or month, are created outside the US.

But the part that you’re focused on is exactly right, which is the other side of global perspective—and that is, when we’re covering the US, we cover it with what people call an outside perspective. And that is valuable, because what it means is two things. Number one, when we cover a story that others do also, we cover it with a different view. And number two, we frequently cover stories that others don’t.

So let me give you an example on the first one. Last month we published a series called The Slow Lane, which looks at how Americans’ love of cars caused our public transportation system to fall way behind other global cities or other countries. So if you look at Sydney or Barcelona or Hong Kong—we cover public transportation here with an outside view, more of a global view, while covering what’s happening in the US. That’s an example of something that’s different as well.

When we cover gun violence, or our broken healthcare system, or the death penalty, we cover them not as impossible-to-solve problems—because they’re not—but rather as issues that could be addressed if Americans look beyond their borders at how other countries have tackled them better. And I think that’s part of what you’re talking about, the unique value that you get from The Guardian, and that’s what our audience does too.

Bacon: So last question, just because of who I am and where I’ve come from. I worked at The Washington Post until about a year ago. Jeff Bezos wanted the opinion section to move to the right, and so it ended up making more sense to work at The New Republic now, and I’ve had a great opportunity here.

But I wanted to ask you—did the Washington Post and the LA Times decisions to cancel endorsements and signal a different kind of direction, and maybe even CBS—have some of those changes at other places... I know you all have had a big audience growth. Is some of that driven from those other places maybe making mistakes, or is that more organic? Talk about how the other media’s moves have affected what you all are doing.

Sachs: Yeah. I don’t want to comment on specific companies or people, but I can say that more and more people are discovering The Guardian as they’re looking for other alternatives.

And The Post does some great journalism.

Bacon: I agree. Oh, yes.

Sachs: They do some fantastic journalism. They have a much smaller team than they used to.

But I have a lot of respect for the journalism they do. And others as well. The news audience is very tuned in.

And as decisions are made, they say, I really want to look at other options. And over the past few years, more people have looked around, and we’ve benefited as a result. We’ve seen our audience grow. So for example, as I said, the Washington Post—a year ago we were smaller than The Washington Post in audience, in uniques and in page views on the site. Now we’re bigger.

And that’s because we’ve grown. They’ve shrunk as well. And they do great journalism, but people are making choices.

One thing that’s interesting about The Guardian also, and this points to opportunity in the US, is that we think there’s a lot more opportunity to grow here. So we’re at 40 to 50 million uniques a month now. But also, in our research, only about 59 percent of people in the US who use digital news have ever heard of The Guardian. That number in the UK is 85 percent.

Bacon: And I’m sure The Washington Post number’s up in the 80s or something like this—much higher.

Sachs: Exactly.

Bacon: Yeah, you would assume.

Sachs: And so there’s another 20-plus points of people in the US that still have never heard of us. That will help us as they continue to look around, as we continue to grow what we do. We’ve recently launched new kinds of coverage. We’ve invested heavily in soccer and covering soccer in the US for the World Cup, and so we’ve had huge audiences for that over the past few weeks.

We’ve increased our DC team. We used to do mostly breaking news. We now do enterprise and investigations out of DC also. As we have more for people to discover, and as people look around, I think The Guardian will continue to do well in the US. And others do great work also. I think the audience is frequently now kind of saying, Let me see what else is out there.

Bacon: Last question. I worry about this Trump bump, because you saw from 2017 to 2020, news organizations had a big audience, then it declined. How are you going to make sure you sustain this audience and this growth? Because Trump’s not going to be president anymore after two years or so, obviously. So how do you make sure you keep this audience and keep the growth and keep the momentum going after that?

Sachs: Yeah. There’s no doubt that we’ve had some wind in our sails over the past 18 months. People are coming to us for much more than Trump. So people are coming to us for—we’re among the best in the world in covering climate, one of the most important, maybe the defining issue of our time. People come for health-related, health-equity-related issues.

But what we’re doing is, we are investing heavily outside of hard news, so that when people come, and when the news cycle is less intense than what it is, people know and come to us for other areas. So for example, I mentioned soccer. We now have one of the largest teams in the US covering soccer, plus all the people we have in the UK covering soccer. And soccer has become much more popular in the US, and so even after the World Cup’s over, people are going to be wanting to come to that. They’ll come to The Guardian for that.

We started a heavily researched reviews site called The Filter—our version of consumer journalism, doing reviews like, say, Wirecutter does, or Strategist, or others. We started that a year ago. That’s doing really well. We launched wellness coverage a couple of years ago, with what we call, which is a realistic view on wellness. So much of wellness is really about perfection. That’s not about us at all.

So we’re investing heavily outside of hard news, so that both when people come, there’s more to go to, and also when the news cycle is less frenetic, people will continue to come to us for other reasons.

Bacon: And with that, Steve Sachs—I love the idea of global, independent, and free. Those are three great words to use. Steve Sachs is the managing director for The Guardian US. I highly recommend The Guardian US as a product. If you’re reading the Times and the Post, CNN—you should definitely add The Guardian to your reading list if you haven’t already. Obviously, read The New Republic too, but The Guardian is doing some really great work. So Steve, congrats on that, and thank you for joining me.

Sachs: Perry, thanks so much. I really enjoyed it.

Bacon: Good to see you. Bye-bye.