Cartoons Thursday!

Plus music from men of a certain age: Simon, Earle, Crowell, and Mick & Keith.

May 14, 2026

Yes, it’s still free to subscribe to this nearly daily newsletter! Greg Mitchell is the author of fourteen books and director of five films for PBS since 2022. In a previous life, he was a longtime editor at the legendary Crawdaddy.

Billions and trillions from Stephen one week from his show’s demise.

Headline of the Day: Trump Taps Don Jr.’s 38-Year-Old Turkey-Hunting Pal to Lead FDA. Kyle Diamantas is a lawyer, not a doctor, who will oversee products making up a quarter of the U.S. economy.

Paul Krugman:

The Department of Defense is using bogus national security concerns to block essentially all development of wind power in the United States – at a time when many Americans are facing significant jumps in energy bills due to data center energy consumption.
In Congressional testimony yesterday Doug Burgum, the Secretary of the Interior, insisted that solar farms are useless because “when the sun goes down, they produce zero electricity.” Rep. Jared Huffman responded, “Mr. Chairman, I request unanimous consent to enter in the record this amazing new technology that apparently the secretary is unaware of: It’s a battery. China’s figured it out. That’s why they’re cleaning our clock on clean energy.”
The Chinese are indeed cleaning our clock on clean energy. Last year solar and wind power accounted for the vast majority of the growth in Chinese electricity generatio.

New 30-second teaser for my PBS film on Woody Guthrie narrated by Rosanne Cash, coming July 1.

Music Picks

Beautiful new tribute to Leonard Cohen released last night by Rodney Crowell.

And from Rodney’s old pal: Not a new song but a new video for Steve Earle’s “City of Immigrants” directed by Steve Buscemi. Earle said he was watching Bruce and Morello go to Minneapolis while he was “sitting on my ass” so he re-did this:

Inspiration as I ponder retirement from Paul Simon (who has all the money in the world with no need for income from touring) this week at Royal Albert Hall in London still delivering “The Boxer.”