The Secret to Great Sex

And important Assyrian family drama

Good Morning:

I tend to doubt it.

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Tuesday on #DogShirtTV, the estimable Holly Berkley Fletcher brought on the estimable Deece Eckstein (aka DeeceX) to talk to us about the political situation in Texas:

Yesterday on #DogShirtTV, the estimable Quinta Jurecic came on to tell us about Trump’s head of the Civil Rights Division at the Justice Department:

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Recently On Lawfare

Compiled by the estimable Marissa Wang

One Emergency After Another

Ben Diamond examines how President Trump has more frequently and broadly invoked the International Emergency Economic Powers Act compared to previous administrations. Diamond argues that the judiciary is best positioned to constrain presidential abuse of emergency powers.

President Trump is not the first president to invoke emergency powers for less-than-crisis-level policy matters. But the sheer scale, pace, and breadth of emergency powers deployed by this administration presents an opportunity for courts to reject this behavior and rein in executive overreach. The tariffs case is a step in the right direction. Courts should continue to heed Justice Jackson’s prescient warnings and prevent this administration—and all future ones—from eroding the separation of powers under the guise of emergency.

The Justice Department’s Bid to Avoid Accountability

Bruce A. Green and Rebecca Roiphe unpack the Department of Justice’s proposed regulation directing state disciplinary authorities to delay investigations into allegations of misconduct by federal government lawyers until the Justice Department conducts its own review.

During her tenure as attorney general, Pam Bondi proposed a regulation that would require state disciplinary authorities to delay investigations and proceedings against federal government lawyers until the Department of Justice has conducted its own inquiry. While the new regulation is a misguided and likely unenforceable effort to insulate government lawyers from discipline, it also exposes real faults in the current regulatory system.

Did Trump Already Pardon the Alleged Jan. 5, 2021, Pipe Bomber?

Eric Columbus explains how the Trump administration’s poor drafting and shifting application of the Jan. 6 pardons are now critical pieces for the defense in the case of Brian Cole Jr., who is being prosecuted for allegedly planting pipe bombs in front of the Democratic and Republican National Committee headquarters in 2021.

After nearly five years, the FBI finally arrested someone in December 2025 for planting pipe bombs in front of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and the Republican National Committee (RNC) headquarters the evening before Jan. 6, 2021. The evidence against Brian Cole Jr. seems considerable: According to prosecutors, his cell phone interacted with nearby cell towers at relevant times, his credit cards were used to purchase a wide variety of pipe bomb materials between 2018 and 2020, and he confessed to FBI agents in a video-recorded interrogation following his arrest.

But in a recent filing, Cole’s lawyers tried to play a literal get-out-of-jail-free card, filing a motion to dismiss his indictment on the ground that President Trump had actually pardoned Cole under the blanket pardon he issued for Jan. 6-related offenses on his first day in office. Cole argues that his alleged actions were “related to” Jan. 6 and that he is thus covered by the pardon. Is he right?

AI Verification: Infrastructure for Prosperity, Governance, and Peace

Ben Harack argues that privacy-preserving data verification techniques could transform how policymakers approach artificial intelligence (AI) governance, encouraging countries and AI firms to partake in mutual inspections—without the risk of sharing sensitive information with a competitor.

Whether you’re checking that a child has brushed their teeth or that your nuclear-armed foe is abiding by an arms control agreement, much of civilization revolves around our ability to determine whether others are following rules. While governments needed to build many tools to control nuclear arms, parents needed nothing similar for monitoring tooth-brushing. Why? Primarily because it’s (usually) fairly obvious whether a child is or was brushing their teeth (no matter how hard they try to fool their parents). But unlike with children, information about the behavior of a nuclear-armed state might be incomplete, sensitive, and deliberately obfuscated.

Unfortunately, verifying the governance of artificial intelligence (AI) appears to be on the more difficult end of this spectrum. Policymakers and users alike might want AI governance for myriad reasons, but the scale of the industry, the complexity of AI technologies, and geopolitics all increase the difficulty of creating serious AI agreements and then verifying that they are being followed. Building on the findings of a report on international AI verification, I contend that verifying behavior in the domain of artificial intelligence is possible, but it is not trivial. The problem of AI verification generally looks less like overseeing a child’s dental care and more like arms control.

Podcasts

On Tuesday’s Lawfare Daily, Kate Klonick sits down with Ronan Farrow and Andrew Marantz to discuss the pair’s recent article on Sam Altman and the path he is forging as CEO of OpenAI.

On Scaling Laws, Miles Brundage joins Alan Z. Rozenshtein to unpack the weaknesses of current state AI regulations, the limitations of safety benchmarks in AI testing, and market-based mechanisms that are driving the adoption of audit processes.

On Wednesday’s Lawfare Daily, Michael Feinberg sits down with Frank Dikötter to discuss the latter’s new book, “Red Dawn Over China: How Communism Conquered a Quarter of Humanity,” and unpack the early years of the Chinese communist movement, the American reaction to its successes, and how the current understanding of the era differs from prior assumptions.

On Lawfare No Bull, Marissa Wang shares the audio from the oral arguments at the Supreme Court in the case of Trump v. Barbara, which centered on a 14th Amendment challenge to the president’s executive order attempting to end birthright citizenship.

Announcements

On May 7, Lawfare will co-present a screening of Deportation Inc. in New York with e-flux, The Architectural League of New York, and SITU Research. Deportation Inc. is an ongoing investigative video series by SITU and Lawfare that examines how U.S. immigration enforcement has evolved into a multi-billion dollar industry. Learn more about the event and get tickets here.

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Today’s #BeastOfTheDay is the ground-nesting bee, recently found to be ground-nesting in extraordinary density. Scientific American reports:

A New York State cemetery may be home to nearly 5.6 million ground-nesting bees, according to a new study. The colony is one of the largest ever recorded and likely one of the oldest, the researchers note…

Scientist have known that one species of these bees, Andrena regularis, has been at the East Lawn Cemetery in Ithaca, N.Y., since at least 1935. (The cemetery dates back to 1878.) But no one knew exactly how many bees lived there.

Over about a month and a half in 2023, researchers at Cornell University collected bees at various sites at around the cemetery and estimated how many members of A. regularis were living underground… the group estimated that 5.56 million bees “emerged”—ventured out to forage and mate—in the spring of 2023 across an area of about 6,500 square meters…

“I was completely floored when we did the calculations,” Danforth says. “I have seen published estimates of bee aggregations in the hundreds of thousands. But I never really imagined that it would be 5.56 million bees.

In honor of today’s Beast, here’s a very dumb joke that popped into my head:

What do Mary Shelley and 5.56 million bees have in common? Both ventured out to a cemetery to mate.

Graveyards, not separate beds, are the secret to great sex.

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Tell Me Something Interesting

I—EJ Wittes—am always in the market for historical evidence of the universality of certain human experiences, and I have found an unusually excellent example. Specifically, I have found what I believe to be the earliest textual evidence of a teenager telling their guardian, “You’re not my real dad.”