Good Evening:
The estimable
sent me this video of this morning, showing what Kyiv sounds like this morning after last night’s ballistics strikes. The roaring noise you hear is the sound of generators, which are on because of electrical outages.Just so you know. The Russian strikes continue this evening.
Rescued from oblivion, we have Monday’s #DogShirtTV, in which the estimable
brought on the estimable Ari Ali, director of the film Ben Between Africa, to talk about missionary kids and intergenerational trauma.Yesterday on #DogShirtTV, the estimable Lauren Buitta of Girl Security returned, along with the estimable Greek Chorus member Lad Decker. Turns out that Dog Shirt TV has led to very cool new project:
The Situation
In yesterday’s The Situation column, I wrote about the necessity of slowness:
I have found that when The Situation speeds up, it is important for me to slow down. At the outset of The Situation, I offered readers the following advice: “you do not need to respond to every outrage [and] you do not need to respond in real time.” I have to remind myself of this often: that I cannot control the pace at which Halligan issues meritless indictments at Trump’s direction but that I do have the ability to comment on motions at a pace consistent with my own intellectual metabolism.
The world does not need my instant reaction to Trump’s desire to loot the federal till. It doesn’t need my howl of rage at the physical destruction of part of the White House. And if it does, it can have this quotation from King Lear: “Howl, Howl, Howl, Howl”
There is value to slowness in the face of speed. Slowness deprives The Situation of the ability to control my mind. The Situation wants me to have racing thoughts and to feel compelled to react instantly to the latest vileness. Forcing myself to wait, to play some chess, to study one of the languages I am learning, to read books not directly on the subject of The Situation, is an assertion of control over my own thoughts. It is an assertion of control not just of the content of those thoughts but their pace—which may be more important than their contents. It is an antidote to efforts to “flood the zone with shit.”
The Situation seeks to dominate me, and speed is part of its strategy of domination. Speed is disorienting. Speed is bewildering. I can make decisions and judgments quickly if I have to, but I can make better decisions and better judgments if I take the time to respect the questions I am asking. The Situation tries to take that away from me. Slowness is a means of defiance.
Yesterday on Lawfare
Compiled by the estimable Isabel Arroyo.
Escape From the Polar Owl: Russia’s Mafia Convict Soldiers in Ukraine
Emily Hoge breaks down why Russia’s deployment of mafia convicts to Ukraine strains the relationship between the Russian state and Russia’s organized criminals. Hoge explains how Russia’s mostly stable state-mafia dynamic first emerged from the lawlessness of the 1990s and considers whether the pressures of war will usher in a new age of organized crime.
These understandings that developed between the state and organized crime in 2000 were based on a kind of shared delusion: an agreement to pretend that the Russian state was capable of stopping the mafia. It was a delusion that most people, tired of the extreme of violence of the 1990s, wanted to sign onto. If the shared delusion of state power breaks, the cycle of violence could return again. Today, the state increasingly looks like a junior partner in its relationship with organized crime, as it loses the ability to bring down the hammer or set the terms of the relationship.
As Russia’s invasion of Ukraine drags on, the state has repeatedly favored pursuing the war effort over protecting the compromises that make the Russian state appear strong and capable. As a result, the war has slowly begun to erode the fragile stability of the Russian underworld. Nobody wants to find out what would happen if these arrangements were to actually fall apart—except, perhaps, the prisoners of the Polar Owl.
Governing Frontier AI: California’s SB 53
Lam Tran examines the contents of California Senate Bill 53, the first state law to regulate advanced AI systems. Tran explains how SB 53 differs from an earlier California bill also aimed at reducing catastrophic AI risks and analyzes SB 53’s viability as a blueprint for AI governance nationwide.
The core focus of SB 53 is to bring visibility, accountability, and public oversight to frontier AI models, which have so far been developed largely behind closed doors by a handful of private labs. The law aims to mitigate catastrophic risks from these frontier AI models—systems trained with vast computational resources that could, in some domains, operate autonomously at or beyond human capability. SB 53 defines “catastrophic risk” as a foreseeable and physical danger that a frontier model could materially contribute to mass harm, such as causing more than 50 deaths or over $1 billion in damage, by enabling weapons of mass destruction, conducting serious crimes or cyberattacks without sufficient human oversight, or evading its developer’s control. By limiting its application only to the most significant industry players—those with gross annual revenues of more than $500 million—this legislation ensures that the regulatory responsibility falls on those with the most powerful and potentially highest risk systems. The legislation requires companies training large-scale AI models (frontier developers) to publish basic information of the model even before generating revenue, while the majority of reporting obligations outlined in SB 53 apply only once a company’s annual revenue exceeds $500 million (large frontier developers). In doing so, the law ensures that the heaviest regulatory burdens fall on the most powerful and potentially highest-risk players.
Podcasts
On Lawfare Daily, Anastasiia Lapatina sits down with Eric Ciaramella and Mykhailo Soldatenko to discuss the latest meeting between President Trump and President Zelenskyy, the prospect of armed neutrality for Ukraine, and how Ukraine can nudge ongoing peace negotiations in its favor.
On Scaling Laws, California State Senator Scott Wiener joins Kevin Frazier and Alan Rozenshtein to discuss SB 53, which Senator Wiener authored. The three discuss the contents of SB 53, the bill’s significance for AI governance, and the lessons Senator Wiener learned from an earlier battle over SB 1047.
Documents
Anna Hickey shares former FBI Director James Comey’s motion to dismiss the indictment against him, alleging vindictive and selective prosecution.
Announcements
Lawfare is now accepting applications for our Winter 2026 internship. Applications will be accepted on a rolling basis until Nov. 10, 2025. Interested candidates can find additional information and application instructions here.
#YourMusicOfTheDay: Operation Brahms
Today’s Brahms offering is a remarkable little piece I had never heard—or even heard of—before: the Begräbnisgesang (funeral song), Op. 13, performed here by the Collegium Vocale Gent, conducted by Philippe Herreweghe—whom I know mostly for his conducting of Bach cantatas.
This piece caught me completely off guard. It is short. It is hauntingly powerful. And it is weirdly orchestrated, for chorus and wind instruments—apparently because Brahms was working as a choral master when he wrote it. It has shades of much older choral music; the choral writing harkens back to Bach, in some ways. But it is strikingly modern in other ways.
I confess, I rather love it. Spend eight minutes listening to it. The worst that will happen is that you might not agree with me:
Today’s #BeastOfTheDay is the bush thick-knee, seen here having an urgent tete-a-tete:
Tell Me Something Interesting
You know that trick archery shot you see in movies, where the archer throws an apple in the air, shoots, and pins the apple to the bullseye? As it turns out, the thing that makes that trick impossible isn’t a lack of supernatural skill; it’s that the apple tends to explode.
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