…left Deadline after Mr. Penske’s purchase of Variety amid reports that she preferred that he remain focused on Deadline, rather than attempt to revive a competitor. She started a new blog and used it to refer to him as “Little Lord Fauntleroy.”

…when he got arrested in Nantucket. According to a Nantucket Police Department report, Mr. Penske and his brother Mark were urinating in a parking lot outside the Nantucket Yacht Club late at night when a woman approached. “Jay turned and continued to urinate on her boots,” the report said. After the woman alerted the police, the brothers apparently tried “to flee.”

Dialog assigns people grades before they join. Of the 192 dossiers examined by WIRED, 130 are tagged as members. The rest are prospects with files bearing markings like “First Time Dialoger” or “Warm.” Everyone—members and prospective invitees alike—is assigned a grade of A, B, or C. The “C” grade appears reserved for the most famous and influential; only one in seven received it. Most people—141 of 192—received a “B.” The final tier, “A,” appears primarily assigned to older, established members whom the graders consider less notable.

…Leaked staff notes attached to around 50 dossiers provide additional insight into what the group’s scores and grades measure. Wealth is one of the most common justifications found in the data, with one investor summed up by the money he oversees—$30 billion in assets under management—while another is marked down with a two-word verdict: “Small AUM.” Fame is a close second. In one note, a staffer assigned a member a grade “so she doesn't get seated with grade Cs” indicating that they wanted to avoid this member sitting with VIP attendees.

Marc Benioff, the chief executive of Salesforce, the enterprise software company, said his company planned to spend hundreds of millions on A.I. this year but now tracked “agentic work units” instead of tokens.

Dumb old bullies all grandiose and soft from golf and infidelity; illiterate real-estate types with detailed opinions on The Differences Between The Races; the luridly unemployable adult children of car-dealership guys; anhedonic beneficiaries of a good investment or two who have, through sheer restless indolence and various dull biases, backed into some truly berserk and totally bespoke authoritarian worldviews. Aging phone addicts who think the country "needs a pharaoh." Ruddy tax evaders who fear cities and are insecure about their boats.

Empires typically do not collapse because of external aggression. They collapse because of some form of suicide. Going back to the discussion of elites, Trump is an extreme example of a cadre beginning to think about its own personal wealth at the expense of the big picture. But to what extent is the effort to create an inflection point purely a product of Trump? These efforts clearly predate him, as do the contradictions that led to his electoral victory. Trump did not cause the inflection point, but his actions will direct its outcomes.

Is this the end of everything? What is the end of everything? What’s a disaster, for instance? Since the 1950s, in the aftermath of WW2, we’ve thought of catastrophe as bounded: disaster as a single event which plays through and has a beginning and an end. Essentially, as an invitation to repair the damage and go back to the ground state. I suddenly thought to myself, “This is not how disasters actually happen.” We’re in the middle of two or three now. They’re running concurrently, and they will probably never end. It seems to me that in reality what you do with a disaster is to get used to it.

Putting aside the merits of this war, do you think people such as yourself and the Prime Minister misjudged Donald Trump? I know you said a joyful prayer on the air when he was elected in 2024. You must have had some sense of who this guy is—that he isn’t loyal to anyone, that he had no real core values—

Listen, I was really happy when he was elected. I admit it. I think it was good for Israel. And, in the beginning, it was. But today I don’t know what to think. I am really in shock.

It’s hard to fathom.

I don’t have a lot of moments like this. I don’t remember someone in modern history who would go with you and do wonderful things, and then suddenly disappear and go against you. So now I am the bad guy? I supported you! I was the good guy! How did I become the bad guy, and the Ayatollah is the good guy?

This is why I was wondering whether you had ever observed Donald Trump.

I don’t know what motivated him. You know he is a Gemini? Geminis are not really ones to say the same things a lot. They change their minds. You know Geminis?

Yeah, I’m a Gemini, so don’t be too mean.

I’m a Gemini, too. But not like this.