Ceasefire Working

Plus: Letitia James' legal trouble, everything's TV (and that's bad), millionaire explosion, and more...

Israeli troops retreating: The ceasefire came into effect at noon local time in Gaza, and Israeli forces stopped their advances, repositioning themselves according to the demarcated lines. Israel's cabinet convened and signed off on the deal early this morning, which starts the 72-hour clock for Hamas to release all hostages. Per the deal, 250 Palestinian prisoners will be released from Israeli jails in exchange.

The U.S. will reportedly send 200 troops to the Middle East—possibly not directly into Gaza, but adjacent to it—to monitor the ceasefire's implementation; soldiers from Egypt, Qatar, Turkey, and the United Arab Emirates will also be involved in monitoring the situation.

Meanwhile, "Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has publicly implied for the first time that not all the deceased hostages held captive in Gaza will return," reports CNN. "In a televised address, Netanyahu said that Israel will work to locate all of the dead hostages in Gaza 'as soon as possible,' underscoring previous assessments that Hamas may not be able to find and return all of their remains." Twenty-eight hostages are believed to be dead, while 20 are still living; Netanyahu has long conditioned the ceasefire on the total return of all hostages. "We will bring the deceased hostages to burial in Israel," Netanyahu reminded the Israeli people. "We will work to locate all of them as soon as possible, and we will fulfill this as a sacred duty of mutual responsibility."

Disarmament is still being negotiated, and there's still the disheartening possibility that further negotiations will be snarled. But so far, early news from the region is very promising.

Letitia James indicted in mortgage fraud case: New York Attorney General Letitia James was indicted by the Department of Justice, seemingly directed specifically to pursue this case by President Donald Trump, on charges that she committed one count of bank fraud and one count of making false statements to a financial institution when buying a home in Norfolk, Virginia. "The indictment accuses Ms. James of violating a mortgage agreement on a Virginia house she purchased in 2020 by using it as a rental property," reports The New York Times, but James' lawyer says his client "flatly and forcefully denies these charges" and that the case is instead "driven by President Trump's desire for revenge." Some evidence has emerged that James did, in fact, receive favorable terms on her loan that let her save just under $20,000 over the full life of the loan. (It's not clear that James does rent the property out: Someone familiar with her situation told The New York Times that the property is just occupied by family members who have no lease.)

You're not mistaken in thinking this is evocative of the civil fraud case James brought against Trump, and also of the accusations levied against Federal Reserve Board Chair Lisa Cook. This is the predictable outcome of lawfare: races to the bottom, to dig up as much dirt as possible on one's enemies, and to waste as much time and money as possible litigating it all instead of doing more valuable law-enforcement work. (This applies whether it's this case against James or her civil fraud case against Trump, to be clear.)

Everything's TV: "A spooky convergence is happening in media," writes Derek Thompson on his Substack. "Everything that is not already television is turning into television."

Nowadays, "only a small share of time spent on its social-networking platforms is truly 'social' networking—that is, time spent checking in with friends and family. More than 80 percent of time spent on Facebook and more than 90 percent of time spent on Instagram is spent watching videos, the company reported. Most of that time is spent watching content from creators whom the user does not know." Ditto for podcasts—formerly basically radio—shifting to YouTube; everything's TV now. Same with Sora and Vibes, new artificial intelligence tools from OpenAI and Meta, respectively; everything's TV.

So why is this a problem? TV isn't inherently bad, per se. "Television speaks to us in a particular dialect, [Neil] Postman argued," continues Thompson. "When everything turns into television, every form of communication starts to adopt television's values: immediacy, emotion, spectacle, brevity."

This extends to, and warps, our politics: "The right-wing president is a reality-TV star. The most exciting new voice on the left is a straight-to-camera savant. Mastering the grammar of television—especially short-form television—does not feel secondary to political success in America; it is political success in America."

Isn't this literally the world described in Harrison Bergeron? The TV always on, the mental-handicap radio zapping the father's head so he can't complete a thought. pic.twitter.com/W9HQS9cved

— Liz Wolfe (@LizWolfeReason) October 10, 2025

I'll level with you: I don't like the great convergence, in which many forms of media become TV. I don't like the hit to our attention spans. I don't like people's inability to sit with their own thoughts. I don't like the fact that proportionality is lost when everything is portrayed as urgent and important. I don't like the algorithm-driven attempts to jockey for my attention via ALL-CAPS in headlines and obnoxiously expressive thumbnails and a constant stream of emotive language. And, mostly, I'm worried about what habits will be developed by generations who are raised on TV slop, whose attention spans are not safeguarded, and whose critical thinking skills were never given a chance to form.

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Scenes from New York: The Kennedy-flavored chaser to my writeup yesterday:

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QUICK HITS

• "At the height of the Gilded Age, there were 4,047 millionaires in the US, according to an 18-month investigation by the long-gone New-York Tribune, which listed each by name in a special edition published in 1892," reports Bloomberg. "Today the number of millionaire households is more than 24 million, or almost one in five US households, according to a Bloomberg analysis of government survey data through 2023. Fully a third of those modern millionaires have been minted since 2017, as home values and the stock market surged. That doesn't mean they're walking around flush with cash. Instead, more and more of millionaires' wealth is locked up in assets that can't be accessed quickly or easily, like home equity or, increasingly, age-restricted retirement assets like 401(k) and IRA accounts. Add in the effects of inflation and higher interest rates, and financial advisers say $1 million no longer assures a secure retirement, much less a golden ticket to the plutocracy."
• Meanwhile in New York: "The number of New York households with three or more children has dropped by nearly 17 percent over the past decade, according to an analysis of census data by the Center for an Urban Future, a think tank," reports The New York Times. "The number of one-child households grew slightly, while two-child households held steady during the same period, indicating that large families are driving the decline." Reading the piece, there appears to be two almost entirely separate issues: New Yorkers' unreasonable expectations (one mom bemoans how she hosts birthday parties with homemade cakes at the local playground, contrasting that with lavish vacations taken by other parents in the neighborhood) and the fact that there are real cost-of-living issues, primarily of the real estate variety ("43 percent of units with three or more bedrooms have been occupied by the same tenants for more than 10 years" with median asking price of $1.8 million for three-bedroom and three-bedroom-plus homes). These are two totally separate problems that too frequently get bundled together.
• A worthy recipient:

BREAKING NEWS
The Norwegian Nobel Committee has decided to award the 2025 #NobelPeacePrize to Maria Corina Machado for her tireless work promoting democratic rights for the people of Venezuela and for her struggle to achieve a just and peaceful transition from dictatorship to… pic.twitter.com/Zgth8KNJk9

— The Nobel Prize (@NobelPrize) October 10, 2025

• A ridiculous country:

It's even more insane than you think - the median pensioner in France has higher income than the median working age adult https://t.co/4kvYrLCGb9 pic.twitter.com/eImB3jNEpJ

— Simon Sarris (@simonsarris) October 9, 2025

• How…exactly…has Trump studied autism among the circumcised…for a long time? What could that possibly mean? This man fascinates me.

RFK Jr: Children who are circumcised early have double the rate of autism, and it's highly likely because they're given Tylenol.

Trump: There's a tremendous amount of of proof or evidence. I would say as a non-doctor, but I've studied this a long time pic.twitter.com/9g8U6oWIiL

— FactPost (@factpostnews) October 9, 2025

• "Democrats are largely standing by their nominee for Virginia attorney general after revelations that he once mused about killing a GOP lawmaker," reports The Washington Post, "worrying some in the party who want to draw a hard line against political violence and drawing accusations of hypocrisy from Republicans." (The actual texts in question indicated that he would want to kill the Republican speaker of the Virginia House of Delegates over…Pol Pot and Adolf Hitler, which is just straight-up insane.) But this is the land in which blackface scandals appear to be a prerequisite for running for office, totally sinking entire lines of succession, so I'm hardly surprised that the standards are on the floor.
• Lol:

Thank goodness that Hillary Clinton, Tony Blinken, and Mike Pompeo finally get to have a say about the Middle East. https://t.co/ZN1vfSrqvO

— Zaid Jilani (@ZaidJilani) October 9, 2025