👌🏾 Every word in this newsletter was written by a human being. We use AI for research help, but not text generation. See tips from my 24-day, 5-country AI training tour of Asia. And read my 20+ essays on AI.

🗞️ Every Sunday, from 8:30-9:30 am ET, Neil Parekh and I host the NYT Readalong. Join us live or later on my social feeds or at Digimentors.group/nytreadalong. Now also a podcast on Apple & Spotify. Today, you can download an exclusive PDF version of NYT special section on the World Cup.

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DONALD TRUMP’S APPROVAL RATINGS ARE TANKING. Some Republicans are turning against him (ever so slowly), independents are over it, and everyone else is left wondering what took all of these people so long.

[Before you cheer too loudly, here’s what I wrote in March: The midterms are looking good, but I have full faith in the Dems to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.]

We have hit the MAGA vs. The World stage of Trump II, and it is as ugly as it is dangerous—and it is plenty dangerous. CNN’s poll averages have Trump’s disapproval rating at a shocking 63%. That is active disapproval from nearly 2/3 of the country. Given the current trendline, it’s not hard to see a world where this number gets to 70% or higher.

We don’t need any sort of deep analysis to understand why, it’s all right in front of us—or, those of us who allow ourselves to see the true depth of moral rot at the heart of this administration.

There are many, many headline issues. Here are three that, to me, embody the worst of Trump’s impulses-turned-policies:

Iran

The catastrophic war with Iran has driven prices up in every corner of the global economy. Now, Trump says he wants peace and a return to the status quo (in a war he’s claimed to have won multiple times). In 2018, Trump unilaterally pulled the U.S. out of the Obama-negotiated JCPOA with Iran—an agreement that had effectively curtailed Iran’s nuclear program. Now, the hope is to reach even a markedly worse version of that, and even that seems impossible in the near-term. Here’s a real exchange from June 2 between Trump and CNBC reporter Eamon Javers:

Javers: Do you think the negotiations are over now, or is this a bluff?

Trump: I don’t care if they’re over, honestly. I really don’t care. I couldn’t care less. If they’re over, they’re over. If they’re not, you know, I think they took too much time. Frankly, I thought they started to get very boring.

“Boring.”

ICE Unleashed

The horrors that ICE inflicted, and continues to inflict, on Minnesota, Illinois, New Jersey, New York and several other states is truly vile. It has also served as a calling that has galvanized communities across the country. Support networks, legal help, activism, support—as happens so often, we saw the best of America in its worst times.

It will continue. ICE is remarkably unpopular. A January Marist poll had 65% of Americans saying ICE “had gone too far.” Again, the only support for these things are from the most hardcore MAGA people on Earth. From the Marist poll:

91% of Democrats and 68% of independents say ICE's action are making Americans somewhat less or much less safe.

In March, Navigator Research released a comprehensive set of polling data on immigration and ICE under the headline, “Americans are fed up with cruel immigration policies”—the data more than supports the headline.

This is a Russian nesting doll of a minority of the electorate.

January 6th Insurrectionists

The attack on the U.S. Capitol was MAGA vs. The World come to life. Trump pardoned 1,500 of the insurrectionists, calling them “political prisoners.” According to Katherine Pompilio’s reporting for Lawfare, almost 100 of them have gone on to commit more crimes, some quite severe:

One Jan. 6 pardonee was convicted in February 2026 of child molestation and sentenced to life in prison. Another was convicted in 2025 of reckless homicide.

At least 14, meanwhile, have been charged with sex crimes or crimes related to child sexual abuse material (CSAM), and at least six have faced domestic violence charges. Others have faced charges for physical assaults, illegal firearms possession, or other violent crimes. At least 20 have been charged with driving under the influence (DUI) of alcohol or drugs or public intoxication.

One of the pardoned rioters, Elias Irizarry, was hired at the Pentagon for a sensitive counterterrorism role. When he was a 19-year-old cadet at the Citadel military academy in Charleston, South Carolina, he stormed the Capitol building wearing a MAGA hat.

A New Wave of Loyalists

As evidenced by the polling data, literally no one wants any of this aside from the most ardent of MAGAists. We are being governed by a group with support from hardcore GOP primary voters—everyone else is out on Trump. This is from a poll released on June 3 by Marquette University:

Trump’s influence within the Republican electorate is also seen in his job approval. Among the 72% of Republicans favorable to MAGA, 93% approve of the job Trump is doing as president, while among the 28% of Republicans not favorable to MAGA, Trump’s approval falls to 36%.

Trump’s answer has been predictable: Consolidate and double down. We have entered even more dangerous territory now.

Attorney General nominee Todd Blanche is at the top of the list. It was hard to stomach Pam Bondi in the role, but Blanche makes her look almost tolerable. He used to be Trump’s lead defense attorney, a role he seems to porting over to the Dept. of Justice.

Trump’s new acting Director of National Intelligence, Bill Pulte, has used his seat as the head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency to launch investigations into Trump’s political enemies—which are now being investigated by the Government Accountability Office. He has no intelligence or military background to speak of, but Trump likes him, and he thinks Pulte can use the vast U.S. intelligence apparatus to “figure out” how Trump lost to Biden—he said it himself.

The Corruption

It’s blatant, it’s everywhere, and it’s wrong. The president’s entire near-orbit is benefitting handsomely from this go-round.

• Here’s Senator Jon Ossoff talking about mining deals with Kazakhstan for the president’s adult sons

• Here’s Perfect Union reporting on the profiteers of the private prison industry who are seeing a boon with ICE contracts

• Here’s the PBS Newshour on Trump’s active stock trading during his presidency. Trump’s personal wealth has grown to more than $6 billion—he has added nearly $4 billion to that number since 2024. This is not coincidence, it’s self-dealing at a scale unseen in American politics.

These are just a few items from a list that spans from D.C. to Mar-a-lago. Trump allies (see: donors) are benefitting from his gutting of environmental protections for federal lands, oil and gas, and so so much more. It’s all happening in plain sight.

MAGA vs. The World, indeed.

— Sree / Twitter | IG | LinkedIn | FB | YouTube | Spread | TikTok

43% of 2026 is already over. What will you do with the remaining 57%? LMK and I’ll see you made it all the way down here.

One of the Best Things I’ve Ever Read #7

We’re aiming to create the best reading/viewing/listening list possible. It’s quite simple—we are crowdsourcing the writing that has stuck with you, that one thing you read last month, last year, or 20 years ago, that has stuck in your brain. This week, it’s an excellent addition from Matthew Quint.

Title: “Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff”

By Christopher Moore

From Matthew:

Effectively tackling religious content from a fictional perspective is always difficult, and Moore pulls it off remarkably in "Lamb."

Although, I am sure some would view it as sacrilegious, the book blends faith, history, and secularism in an unforgettably humorous and heartfelt way.

Matthew Quint works on brand strategy, emerging tech, events and thought leadership content. Personally, he’s a man hanging on by a thread to his youthful hope for a world full of listening and understanding.

If you have a story to share, please do!

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Have an idea for anything we’re up to? Let’s collaborate! sree.sreenivasan1@gmail.com

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My full interview with CJ Farley:

FEW PEOPLE KNOW MORE about the entertainment industry than CJ Farley. He is a prolific author and writer; has worked as TIME’s music critic; has been a senior editor/executive at WSJ, PBS and Audible; and he is a wealth of insight on humanity, the arts, AI, and so much more. Our discussion last month is educational for people of various ages.

The new “Michael” film, about Michael Jackson’s life was our natural jumping-off point—Jackson is the elemental form of the “separate the art from the artist” discussion. It’s made more than $830 million globally, behind only “Oppenheimer” ($977 million; 2023) and “Bohemian Rhapsody” ($911 million; 2018) as the biggest biopic of all time.

In 2023, I went to see “MJ: The Musical” on Broadway, whose book writer/librettist (the playwright responsible for the show's story, character development, and spoken dialogue) is two-time Pulitzer winner, Lynn Nottage. In the opening minutes, MJ is asked a question by an MTV reporter who has secured rare access to interview Jackson during his 1992 rehearsals for the Dangerous world tour. “Can you separate the singer from the music?” Back in 1992, the query was about his “Wacko Jackson” persona (changing his appearance, hanging out with a chimpanzee, sleeping in an oxygen chamber, etc, etc, etc) and not about the first public charges of child abuse that would come the following year).

Jackson was the most famous person on Earth for a long time, and his artistic library stands up well. But the question remains: “Can you separate the art from the artist.”

CJ captured this so well in our discussion, and really shone a critic’s light on the film’s great omissions—all of the many things we don’t know, all of the stories that haven’t been told. This is a brilliant couple of minutes:

CJ would know a thing or ten about the things “Michael” leaves out—he produced an in-depth, documentary-style podcast on Michael Jackson in 2023. I am on episode 10 right now of “Think Twice” (a reference to the immortal line from “Billie Jean”: Just remember to always think twice) and I don’t want it to end.

The list of tremendously-talented-yet-problematic artists stretches for miles—Kanye West, J.K. Rowling, Kevin Spacey, to name a few contemporary examples.

But the King of Pop is the one who really captures my imagination. This is, of course, a generational thing—it is for CJ, too—but the world was different then. Screen time was finite, an artist’s ability to capture the airwaves was limited by the lack of airwaves as we think of them now. As CJ noted, Jackson’s public persona and mythos is so fascinating to reflect on, and the new film does absolutely no service to it.

Jackson produced hits for decades. He was able to create a public legend so powerful that it stood up to what were seen as credible accusations of child abuse. Everything in the new movie is just stuff we already know, and that’s too bad.

In July 2009, Noam Cohen wrote in the NYT about my unusual experience in dealing with the news of the death of Jackson (gift link).

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CJ’s latest novel was labeled “the first great AI novel” (not by AI, about AI), by Walter Isaacson. “Who Knows You by Heart” deals with fundamental questions updated to fit our current societal perils and opportunities in waiting. Here’s a quick synopsis:

The review from The New York Times [gift link] was a positive one—read this passage and understand the relevance of a work of fiction like this:

“Who Knows You by Heart” is a very entertaining and ambitious mash-up of genres: thriller, science fiction and romance. The story moves at a fast pace, propelled by its suspenseful plot, with reflections throughout about Black music, the undiscussed Black origins of much of the technology we use and more. While occasionally clunky, these digressions are not without thematic meaning — they serve as a reminder of the invisible Black labor that has built our modern social infrastructure. The novel is funny too, though, with running bits about the abbreviation D.E.I., a side character’s obsession with Luddites, and jabs about the cringe-inducing behaviors of tech culture.

We can’t talk about a technology like AI without talking about labor, bias, and the people who have built the foundations of it all. AI’s future is far from decided, and it’s up to us to both understand the technology, and the ramifications of its existence.

As I noted in the clip above, I was shocked to learn firsthand how China is deploying AI versus the American consumer-first version I see at home—the two are almost polar opposites in many ways (my thoughts on a five-country, 24-day AI training tour of Asia).

CJ and I spoke the week of Stephen Colbert’s final episode (a clip about that is at the top of my essay, “On Colbert’s Exit, The Church, and Solidarity.

A couple of last thoughts about “separating the art from the artist.” I have been torn about what to do about some excellent movies I want my kids to watch someday, including the classics directed by Woody Allen (🤢) and “Shakespeare in Love,” which was produced by Harvey Weinstein (🤮). A thoughtful 24yo I know offered this compelling framing: “If the person is dead and unable to benefit personally from their art, maybe it’s OK to consume it?” What do you think?

— Sree / Twitter | IG | LinkedIn | FB | YouTube | Spread | TikTok

42% of 2026 is already over. What will you do with the remaining 58%? LMK and I’ll see you made it all the way down here.

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From our entertainment vertical

👌🏾 Every word in this newsletter was written by a human being. We use AI for research help, but not text generation. See tips from my 24-day, 5-country AI training tour of Asia.

🗞️ Every Sunday, from 8:30-9:30 am ET, Neil Parekh and I host the NYT Readalong. Join us live or later on my social feeds or at Digimentors.group/nytreadalong. Now also a podcast on Apple & Spotify

✍️ Submissions are open for the India Philanthropy Alliance’s Youth Essay Competition! [Partner message]

🙏 Thank you to all our new paid subscribers! They and our sponsors help us do more. Here’s how you can support Sree’s Sunday Note, even if you can’t afford to pay.

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I HAD MISSED THE NEWS. The new Homeland Security Secretary, Markwayne Mullin, is trying to talk himself into making it impossible to enter the country via some of the busiest international transit hubs in the world. Yes, just in time for the World Cup, Mullin is mulling withdrawing Customs and Border Protection officers from airports based in sanctuary cities. That means no international travel to airports like JFK, LAX, SFO, ORD, etc, etc, etc.

After his comments, an anonymous White House official told CNN that the policy wasn’t something Trump was interested in doing. But, with comments like this from the White House—about what could only be called a completely radical policy idea—should serve to remind you that Trump is not interested in doing something right up until he actually does it.

From CNN:

The push is seen internally as more of a personal desire of Mullin’s than one coming from inside the West Wing. One of the officials said Mullin has been “obsessed” with the idea since being sworn in as Homeland Security secretary in March to replace his ousted predecessor, Kristi Noem, bringing it up unprompted during meetings at the White House.

“The President loves having a team that is constantly coming up with new ideas but ultimately any policy decisions will be up to him,” a White House official said.

While Mullin has been widely viewed as a stabilizing force atop DHS after a chaotic year under Noem’s control, and has built up a lot of goodwill with the president, his airport plan could have significant and wide-ranging consequences.

Can you imagine if we suddenly refused to process international passengers and cargo at airports in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, and New York/New Jersey? The economic shock at these locations alone would be enormous. The five airports in these locations alone process an average of nearly two million international travelers per week. That means Americans coming and going and international travelers doing the same. JFK, LAX, Chicago O’Hare—by themselves—process roughly six million metric tons of cargo annually.

There are 18 sanctuary cities in America. Combined, they represent something like 30% of U.S. GDP—they are the economic engines of the country. They are also a constant target for MAGA folks on all sides. The resentment is key, and it is real. A cabinet-level secretary even floating this idea is completely wild, and we should take it as such.

A few days ago, something close to a million people waiting on their green card decision while in the U.S. found out they will have to leave, go wherever they need to, and complete the process through U.S. Consulates abroad. Then, a couple of days later, DHS walked it back… sorta:

[P]eople who present applications that provide an economic benefit or otherwise are in the national interest will likely be able to continue on their current path while others may be asked to apply abroad depending on individualized circumstances.

The cruelty and inconvenience, for the sake of seemingly nothing more than gratuitous nativism, literally drips off the page. Read the full policy memo for yourself. This is how it reported on at the time, from NBC:

“From now on, an alien who is in the U.S. temporarily and wants a Green Card must return to their home country to apply, except in extraordinary circumstances,” U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services spokesperson Zach Kahler said in a statement. “When aliens apply from their home country, it reduces the need to find and remove those who decide to slip into the shadows and remain in the U.S. illegally after being denied residency.”

It’s all in flux, all the time. The fate of millions left to the whims of a president detached.

Immigrants are parents, caregivers, students, teachers, high-skill tech workers, and so much more. They are members of their community. They also happen to be “foreign,” and that seems to be enough for the Trump administration. The facts, yet again, tell a much different story. The CATO Institute, a libertarian think tank (yes, that CATO Institute), recently published some of the most comprehensive data on immigrants and the economy in America ever published. It is unequivocal: immigrants are crucial to this country.

Also, people travel, and travel industry groups had a collective shock when Mullin dropped his idea into the ether. They spend money when they do it. They travel for business, they do business, they grow businesses. It’s all just another own goal from an administration that seems laser-focused on fully destroying America’s standing in the world on every single front.

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More practically, blue state economic activity funds what little social safety net we still have in America. This is a fact. It’s not “my view” or a “liberal position”—it’s just the position. Here’s a map that show which states pay for the others. You can find the interactive version at Newsweek.

Here’s the thing, that’s what being a country is all about! I am more than happy that my federal tax dollars can help someone afford food in Arkansas, or get clean drinking water in Missouri. These are good things. Immigrants are putting more in than anyone else.

Need more? Here’s more from the CATO Institute:

Illegal immigrants reduce crime rates by committing fewer crimes. More than a dozen studies have found that immigration, including illegal immigration, is associated with less crime. Illegal immigrants were half as likely to have committed an offense serious enough for them to be incarcerated in the United States in 2023.

Maybe you are a self-styled right-leaning voter who is concerned about the national debt and and deficits. Guess what! Immigrants are a net positive on that front too!

Again, from CATO:

Immigrant taxes exceeded the cost of immigrant expenditures, such that removing immigrants would have increased US debt. But as noted earlier, removing the US immigrant population would not only deprive the government of tax revenue, it would also deprive the country of workers and shrink the US economy. This is not a trivial matter. Immigrants’ share of total earned income grew from 8 percent to 17 percent from 1994 to 2023.

Moreover, immigrants’ contribution to the economy is disproportionate to their share of the population, meaning that losing them would shrink the economy even more than losing a random group of Americans. GDP would shrink drastically without immigrants—by at least $4.8 trillion in 2023—so the negative effect on government finances from fewer immigrants is manifested in more debt and a much smaller economy.

Watching ICE and CBP actions in Chicago and Minneapolis, and the protests over conditions in Delaney Hall, in New Jersey, it is all galvanizing. I think the old red-blue dichotomy of American politics is evolving into a MAGA vs. everyone else environment.

This is a country. Federal officials, elected or appointed, work for all of us. We simply cannot forget this. The fundamental erosion of the most basic concept of representative democracy is really the core of the rot that Trump has nurtured, expanded, and made routine. It’s coming for our immigrant brothers, sisters, aunties and uncles.

— Sree / Twitter | IG | LinkedIn | FB | YouTube | Spread | TikTok

41% of 2026 is already over. What will you do with the remaining 39%? LMK and I’ll see you made it all the way down here.

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One of the Best Things I’ve Ever Read #6

We’re aiming to create the best reading/viewing/listening list possible. It’s quite simple—we are crowdsourcing the writing that has stuck with you, that one piece you read last month, last year, or 20 years ago, that has stuck in your brain. This week, it’s an excellent addition from my friend and former Met Museum colleague Christopher Gorman.

Title: “What Were Bob Dylan and John Lennon Really Saying in the Back of That Limo?” [gift link]

By: Jim Windolf, The New York Times (April 5, 2026)

From Christopher:

The article traces how Bob Dylan and The Beatles pushed each other to evolve throughout their mid-1960s rivalry. Although there was clear mutual respect between Dylan and the band, there were also moments of awkward confrontation — including, as the story notes, an infamous conversation between John Lennon and Dylan in the back seat of a limousine.

Songs from this period that may reflect their influence on one another include “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” “Norwegian Wood,” “I’m a Loser,” “Fourth Time Around,” and “You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away.”

Christopher Gorman is a New Yorker, museum professional, husband, father, son, brother, friend, and colleague.

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📺 WATCH: A clip of my discussion with CJ Farley on Colbert’s CBS exit. More from my chat with him coming soon.

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I FIRST MET STEPHEN COLBERT one night in 1999 on the NYC subway, long before he had achieved anything close to his current fame. When I see someone reading Rumi, I feel compelled to at least say “hi”—that’s what he was doing, and that’s what I did.

At the time, he was one of a cadre of correspondents on The Daily Show—a cast that played a huge role is reshaping the news. We started talking about Rumi, and he invited me backstage at a future taping. Starting in 1998, I had been sending about 30-50 Columbia J-school students a month to attend tapings. The show had reached out under the original host, Craig Kilborn, to put journalistic butts in the seats, a practice that continued when Jon Stewart took over.

So when I told Stephen that I send students anyway, he insisted I call him (few people texted in those days). I went along one time, he came out, we chatted, and I introduced him to the students with me. It was a better time: No selfies, no cameras, just a human connection. I later then invited him to come speak at the J-school, as quoted here in Newsweek:

Sreenath Sreenivasan, a journalism professor at Columbia University, has invited “Daily Show” correspondent Stephen Colbert to lecture, because he thinks the witty take on dumb conventions of broadcasting serves as a primer on what not to do.

“It should be mandatory watching for anyone who produces journalism,” says Sreenivasan. Consider one hilarious sendup 24 hours after the New Hampshire primary: correspondents Nancy Walls and Vance DeGeneres whooped it up with McCain backers while Mo Rocca shivered pointlessly outside in the cold.

For Colbert, the ensuing 27 years saw him rise to TV comedy royalty. Now, his 11-year run at the helm of The Late Show has ended. In fact, the entire show—started by comedy legend David Letterman—has been relegated to the dustbin of TV history. We can debate the viability of late-night comedy on linear TV but that’s not the discussion to have about Colbert’s CBS exit.

None other than Paul McCartney saw Colbert off. An incredible few minutes of television:

This is the final 4 minutes and 34 seconds of the show, with McCartney performing and the show’s staff dancing their way onto the stage:

The reason he’s out is Donald Trump. More precisely, Colbert is out because major American media companies (and non-media companies, alike) are helmed by feckless people who can’t help but bend the knee to Trump’s bullying and extortion. Don’t take my word for it. As Bruce Springsteen himself told Colbert during his performance on his penultimate show: “You’re the first guy in America who has lost his show because we have a president who can’t take a joke.” And then he specifically called out Larry and David Ellison (who now own CBS, Paramount Skydance, etc, etc, etc):

On July 15, 2025, Colbert opened his monologue with a stinging indictment of CBS parent company Paramount’s $16-million “settlement” with Trump over what Trump claimed was a misleadingly edited interview with then-presidential candidate Kamala Harris. Three days later, he announced that CBS was cancelling the show.

Colbert’s exit, and the end of The Late Show, is emblematic of so much about our modern era it’s impossible to know where to start. In Colbert’s case, he’s proven beyond the shadow of a doubt that he is a man of the utmost character and integrity.

Beyond his jokes and storytelling abilities, what made him so compelling to me is his faith and how he lives it. Colbert does not shy away from talking about his faith; he’s a practicing Catholic. One of my favorite clips is when Dua Lipa asked him about how his faith overlaps with his comedy—elite comedy, from a true professional of the craft. It’s a great question, and his response is just beautiful.

Colbert understands that the core tenets of most religions would be almost socialistic if examined closely: Welcoming the stranger, sacrificing for your neighbor, feeding the hungry, helping those in need of it most.

It’s such a pivotal time for Catholicism in America. Chicagoan Pope Leo XIV is proving to be as advertised: A sharp mind whose view of what The Church should be is rooted in his many (many) years in Peru. He’s still the Pope, so I grant that “liberal Pope” is a misnomer in and of itself. I wish Colbert had landed him for the final show—he’s called interviewing the Pope his “white whale”. [I have not yet read the Pope’s AI Encyclical, but here’s my friend Jamie Metzl, author of “The AI Ten Commandments” co-authored by GPT-5(!).]

Having a mainstream TV host like Colbert gives me faith in people of faith. The vast majority of people of faith that I’ve met living in seven countries around the world live genuinely giving, thoughtful lives that are driven by that faith. They are kind to others, they help when they can (and often when they can’t), they simply want to live a life of consequence, regardless of the reach of that consequence. It’s admirable, and, in most cases, it is the very fabric of community.

It is not an instrument of hate, racism, inequality, and the rest of the world’s ills—it’s people trying to erase those very things based on their religious beliefs. When people see Colbert talking about his faith, and acting on it with his extensive philanthropic and charity work, they see the best of the faith-based life. They also are probably reminded of the many times they saw such things in their own community.

Take that step back, look at how you want to interact with world around you. Look at the people advocating for those without advocates. Houses of faith are doing the work at the local level, and often having those initiatives desecrated by so many of their wayward brothers and sisters in positions of immense power and influence.

You know the Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk business exploits, but the Ellisons have built an empire, and they are expanding it by seemingly by the week. This piece from February 2026, by John Koblin and Brooks Barnes, for The New York Times, has a great rundown of the family portfolio. Last week, James Murdoch (I think you recognize the name), paid $300 million for half of Vox Media. Something like a dozen people control essentially everything you see on TV.

It makes bending the knee all that much easier, when your empire is so large it has its own gravitational pull. Now, Colbert is out at CBS because it’s cheaper to take him off the air than it is to have Trump post on Truth Social against you.

Springsteen, as he often does, has the right words. Here he is, from “Badlands” in 1981:

“Poor man wanna be rich”
“Rich man wanna be king”
“And a king ain’t satisfied ‘til he rules everything”

— Sree / Twitter | IG | LinkedIn | FB | YouTube | Spread | TikTok

40% of 2026 is already over. What will you do with the remaining 60%? LMK and I’ll see you made it all the way down here.

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One of the Best Things I’ve Ever Read #5

We’re aiming to create the best reading/viewing/listening list possible. It’s quite simple—we are crowdsourcing the writing that has stuck with you, that one piece you read last month, last year, or 20 years ago, that has stuck in your brain. This week, it’s an excellent addition from my friend and colleague Jennifer Lazarus.

Title: “How Far Would You Go for a Breast?” [Internet Archive link]

By: Melissa Dahl, New York Magazine (October 2025)

From Jennifer:

This is a topic that has not been covered before in such depth, and with clinical research to back up the claims. The average breast cancer lifetime risk for a woman in the U.S. is about 1 in 8, with over 4 million women currently living with breast cancer in the U.S.

Add the 200k-300k BRCA 1+2 carriers, and a very large percentage of the female population that is facing, or dealing with, post-mastectomies reconstructive surgery. It can be a debilitating, painful years-long process for many women, some of whom never get the results they are seeking, and breast reconstructive surgeons do not adequately prepare women for this journey.

Jennifer Lazarus is a Columbia Journalism School-trained content strategist with 20+ years of experience building digital ecosystems for lifestyle, health, and mission-driven brands.

If you have a story to share, please do!

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Have an idea for anything we’re up to? Let’s collaborate! sree.sreenivasan1@gmail.com

More Springsteen from my newsletter:

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WE’RE LAUNCHING A NEW PROJECT that could help you or someone you love navigate the world of diabetes. Over the coming months, “My Pre-diabetic Life” will dive into my experience with pre-diabetes and how I am learning to live with it.

I am working on this in partnership with Arogya World, a global health nonprofit working to prevent non-communicable diseases (NCDs)—diabetes, heart disease, cancer and chronic lung diseases—through health education and lifestyle change. They have reached 30 million people and are just getting started. I will be emceeing this year’s Arogya World gala in Silicon Valley, with celebrity chefs and more on Saturday, May 30 (seats still available) Earlier that day, I will be attending and learning at Arogya World’s Scientific Symposium: The Next Frontier in Diabetes Care. In the course of the weeks and months ahead, you will hear from experts, including Arogya World’s dynamic founder, Nalini Saligram. “Arogya” in Sanskrit means to live a life without disease.

The idea is to use this space as a sort of living journal. I will detail how I use a combination of AI, planning, advice, and a little bit of luck to try to reverse one of the only reversible diagnoses a middle-aged man can get.

My pre-pre-diabetes journey began two years ago. I was visiting my dad in Thiruvananthapuram, the capital of Kerala state, and we were going to sit down to a breakfast common to any upper middle-class Kerala home: dosa, sambar, coconut chutney, fruits and more.

That's when I saw my then-80-year-old dad jab himself in the stomach with his pre-meal treatment. A man who skipped dessert for 75 years was diabetic. That means watching everything you eat, testing yourself regularly, and, yes, those jabs three times a day (and finding ways to keep the insulin refrigerated during travels).

I realized then that diabetes was in my future, and not just because I have a mighty sweet tooth and haven’t skipped dessert my entire life. It’s also because we are Keralites, and a combination of genetics, bad eating, and lack of exercise has resulted in the state having rates of diabetes that are among the highest in India—the national average in India is 11.4%. In Kerala, it’s 23.9%.

I’m trying to use data to track everything, so here’s where things stand now:

In the next issue, I will show you how AI changed my life. My pre-diabetic life.

Thank you for being on this journey with me. I want to hear your tips, ideas and stories. Let’s do this together!

— Sree / Twitter | IG | LinkedIn | FB | YouTube | Spread | TikTok

38% of 2026 is already over. What will you do with the remaining 62%?
LMK and I’ll see you made it all the way down here.

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One of the Best Things I’ve Ever Read/Watched #4

We’re aiming to create the best reading/viewing/listening list possible. It’s quite simple—we are crowdsourcing the writing that has stuck with you, that one piece you read last month, last year, or 20 years ago, that has stuck in your brain. This week, it’s an excellent addition from Cristina DiGiacomo.

Title: “Companion” (2025)

Starring: Sophie Thatcher and Jack Quaid

Directed by: Drew Hancock

From Cristina:

It has been long understood among horror fans that the genre is a stand-in for our real-life fears. Horror has explored our fears of losing supremacy to AI technology since the 70’s. But none of them are more fun, more colorful, more insightful than the film “Companion”.

A horror comedy that explores issues of feminism in robotics, AI companion relationships, and what happens when our greedy natures bump up against unforeseen circumstances. It’s stellar cast treats the issues with a wink and never let the film become.

Cristina DiGiacomo is an AI Philosopher, Founder & CEO of 10P1, and creator of the 10+1 Code™. Watch our discussion on AI here.

If you have a story to share, please do!

Submit Your Selection!

Have an idea for anything we’re up to? Let’s collaborate! sree.sreenivasan1@gmail.com

My most recent essays:

Hop in the way-back machine and watch this interview with Andrew Jenks from 13 years ago…reality TV is just different now…

Last month, The New York Times published a piece called “Reality TV Confronts a Harsh TV Reality” and I clicked on it because I had to.

The numbers are bad. Like, really bad. The number of unscripted series in the U.S. has dropped by a third since 2022. HGTV went from 78 shows to 35 (which hurt); MTV just axed Jersey Shore Family Vacation AND Catfish (which hurt extra bad); and, Food Network has cut its output in half.

An era is quietly vanishing, the Times says.

And I’m sitting here like...yeah. I know. I left years ago.

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I Used to Be a Reality TV Person

Not casually. I was IN it. I had opinions. I had group chats dedicated to episode breakdowns. I knew elimination orders before they aired because I was on the spoiler subreddits like a deranged little gremlin.

I grew up in the original Bachelor and Bachelorette era, back when the contestants seemed like actual people who wandered onto a TV set actually looking for love, not aspiring influencers who showed up with a content strategy and a character arc we could anticipate within the first interview.

I watched Love Island when it was still just a UK thing. When they let people smoke cigarettes on the terrace. When the drama was messy, chaotic, human, and unhinged in a way that made you go “oh no” out loud to your television.

Back when The Real World was seven strangers in a house and that was genuinely the whole premise. Back when Survivor felt dangerous and Richard Hatch winning naked felt like a national event we all had to process together. Back when Big Brother was a weird social experiment and not a game theory seminar for people who’ve memorized every previous season. Back when Jersey Shore was three seasons of Snooki getting arrested and nobody had a skincare line yet.

Back when confessionals were actual confessions, not scripted monologues where you could literally hear the producer coaxing the question in the background. You felt the human in it because you had been there one way or another. Maybe not Snooki getting arrested on the Jersey Shore, but the sheer human candor in what she was doing and a camera just happened to catch it.

That’s what made it work. Not the drama itself, but the recognition of it.

The sorority girl watching in her dorm room recognized herself in the petty arguments and the crying in bathrooms. The housewife folding laundry at 10pm recognized herself in the exhaustion and the sharp comments that came out wrong. The husband who said he wasn’t interested but somehow migrated from the kitchen to the couch and stayed for five episodes, he found genuine interest in it, even if he wouldn’t admit it.

Because we were watching versions of ourselves, unfiltered and unpolished and messy in all the ways we are when we think nobody’s paying attention. Reality TV held up a mirror. And for a while, we actually wanted to look.

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So What Happened?

I mean, personally? I got older. I stopped wanting to watch utter chaos at the end of a day of my own sort of chaos.

But more importantly, and I think we all know this even if we don’t want to say it out loud, the shows got fake.

Like, really fake. Unwatchably fake.

At some point, everyone on screen figured out they were on a show and could land sponsorships and influencer deals after. And once that happened, the whole thing collapsed. Now everyone’s playing a character. Everyone’s angling for the edit. Everyone has a publicist and a podcast deal waiting and they’re not here to find love, they’re here to pivot to hosting gigs. They have coaches training them before they go on. Nothing is authentic anymore.

Along the way reality television became scripted.

And I didn’t sign up to watch a soap opera with worse acting and lower stakes. I signed up for the chaos of watching real humans make unhinged decisions on camera. Watching someone fall in love, or have a complete meltdown at a rose ceremony, and knowing that was a reaction only a human being could muster up.

Now? I can see the seams. I can feel the producer in the room. I recognize the villain they’re trying to create before it’s been established. I can practically hear someone whispering “say that again but angrier” off-camera.

Once you see it, you can’t unsee it. And then you’re just watching bad improv.

The mirror stopped reflecting anything real. So I stopped looking.

The Money Thing

The Times gets into the economics: cable is cratering, budgets are slashed, every company has been bought and sold and bought again until nobody knows who owns what anymore.

One producer quoted in the piece said “Everything’s contracting, and there are no new shows right now” which is both extremely bleak and also like... yeah. We can tell.

So let’s talk numbers, because they paint the story for us. In the 2009-10 TV season, reality shows made up about a third of all viewership among the top 50 programs. By 2022-23, that number had dropped to 12 percent. American Idol peaked in Season 5 with 30.6 million average viewers per episode. The Season 2 finale—Ruben versus Clay, a genuine cultural event—drew 38.1 million people. Today the show averages around 7 million. That’s a 75 percent decline from its peak.

I’m not naive. I was a network news producer. I am well aware nothing is ever fully as it seems. There were always story editors and frankenbites and producers stirring the pot. But there used to be room for real moments to happen. Now the budgets are so tight and the pressure for viral clips is so intense that everything has to be a MOMENT. Every episode needs a TikTok-ready meltdown. There’s no space for slow burns or weird tangents or anything that can’t be turned into a 30-second clip with subtitles.

So every show starts to feel the same. Same beats. Same confessional cadence. Same “shocking twist” you saw coming three episodes ago because they’ve been foreshadowing it like it’s a Marvel movie.

What’s Even Left?

The Times mentions the survivors: The Traitors, Love Island USA, Survivor, the Housewives extended universe that will outlive us all.

And fine. The Traitors is actually great. It’s got real stakes and Alan Cumming doing whatever Alan Cumming is doing in that castle. My group chat is still gushing about the show and truthfully, we’d all watch Alan Cumming do anything. Survivor somehow still works after 47 seasons, which genuinely feels like it should be studied by scientists.

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But these are the exceptions. The mid-tier shows, the weird cable experiments, the stuff you’d stumble onto at 2am and get inexplicably invested in, that’s all disappearing. And what’s replacing it? YouTube. TikTok. Influencers cutting out the middleman entirely.

The Times mentions Yolanda Hadid is doing a home design show on YouTube now instead of HGTV and I’m sure it’ll be fine but it’s not the same. It’s not the unhinged energy of seven strangers in a house who didn’t know what they were signing up for.

It’s just content now. We’re all just making content.

(I say, writing content about content. The irony is not lost on me.)

The Real World Walked So MrBeast Could Run

But here’s the argument that still matters: reality TV didn’t die. It migrated.

The format, ordinary people, competitions, eliminations, confessionals, the voyeuristic thrill of watching strangers do strange things, that’s all still here. It just moved platforms. The Real World and Road Rules Challenge walked so MrBeast could run.

MrBeast has 475 million YouTube subscribers and growing. A single video can pull 150 million views in its first week. His “Squid Game in Real Life” video has been watched 750 million times—more views than the actual Squid Game on Netflix. When he launched Beast Games on Amazon Prime, it hit 50 million viewers in 25 days and became their most-watched unscripted series ever.

The same impulse that made us watch seven strangers in a house in 1992 now makes us watch 1,000 contestants compete for $5 million in a warehouse. The difference is who controls the pipeline. No network executives. No advertisers to please. No middle-aged men in suits deciding what the narrative should be. (Sorry not sorry.) Just the creator and the algorithm.

That’s the trade-off we made. We wanted authenticity, so we fled to platforms where anyone could post anything. But “anyone can post anything” doesn’t mean it’s real. It just means we traded one kind of produced content for another, except now the production is invisible because the creator IS the network.

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I don’t think YouTube killed reality TV. I think reality TV taught an entire generation how to perform for cameras, and then gave them the tools to cut out the middleman. And we clicked. We watched. We validated.

I Miss When It Was Messy

But if you choose to read anything in this article, let it be this.

I know reality TV was never really real. We all know that.

But it used to FEEL real. There was something raw about it. Even when it was clearly edited to within an inch of its life, there were moments that felt genuinely human. Genuinely surprising. Moments where you turned to your friend in your high school living room, wide eyes and mouth gaping, and said “did that just really happen?” because you believed it. I look back at those moments fondly. And yes, time has changed but my high school friends and I still reminisce on Season 18 of The Bachelor, when Juan Pablo broke our brains as the most unhinged Bachelor to ever exist.

Because that’s what we lost. The belief. The trust that what we were seeing had some kernel of truth in it. The sense that these were people, not characters. That their joy was real and their heartbreak was real and their bad decisions at 2am were the same bad decisions we’d made or almost made or secretly wanted to make.

I don’t believe any of it anymore. I watch five minutes and I can feel the inauthenticity. I can feel the content strategy. I can feel seventeen people in a room deciding what the narrative is before anyone even starts talking.

I’m not saying the old stuff was perfect. Some of those early shows were exploitative as f***. The genre has grown up in some ways that matter.

But it lost something too. The chaos. The surprise. The feeling that you were watching actual humans being actual disasters.

Because we’ve all been disasters, whether we like it or not. Real recognizes real.

Now I know exactly what’s going to happen. And I’d rather just not.

The Verdict

Reality TV isn’t dead. The Housewives will be filming until the sun explodes and Bravo will find a way to monetize the apocalypse.

But the version I grew up with? The version that felt like you were peeking behind a curtain into something you weren’t supposed to see, something you understood because you’d been there?

That’s been gone for a while.

The ratings are just finally catching up.

— Tara

Tara Ruff is an Emmy-winning journalist and founder of Purpose Public Relations. She writes stories for a living—and about them for fun. Ok, TV is part of the Sree’s Sunday Note family of newsletters.

🔔 Sree is emceeing this year’s Arogya World gala in Silicon Valley, with celebrity chefs and more on May 30 — tell your friends!

✍🏽 Narratively Academy’s Socratic AI writing course kicks off on May 18—get your spot now!

🚨 Submissions are open for the India Philanthropy Alliance’s Youth Essay Competition!

👌🏾 Every word in this newsletter was written by a human being. We use Gemini for research, but not text generation. See tips from my 24-day, 5-country AI training tour of Asia.

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IT’S MOTHER’S DAY IN THE USA (my dad’s old joke: There’s no Mother’s Day in India because every day is mother’s day there. And there’s no Children’s Day in America because every day is children’s day here).

Today, I am sharing notes from my discussion with Reshma Saujani, founder of Girls Who Code and Moms First, and executive producer of the forthcoming film, “No Country For Mothers.” It’s a crucial piece of work at a crucial moment.

But first: Happy Mother’s Day to all of the mothers, motherly figures, mentors, and everyone else doing what only mothers can do.

Three years ago, I lost my mother when I was 53 and she was 73. My longtime newsletter partner, Zach Peterson, lost his mother when he was 18 and she was 39. We wrote about this shortly after the death of my mother—it’s one of our most-read newsletters ever, and it’s among our favorites as well.

Zach’s thoughts for today:

Not having my own mother around to see the mothers in my life is the great pain of this day. Losing one’s mother has this sort of impossibility about it. When you go on to have kids of your own, and those kids have an engaged, loving mother, it creates this revolving door of emotions—a stew of love, nostalgia, longing, missing out, appreciation, complete and utter sadness, and pure joy. It’s a mix that my mind has yet to figure out. The one person you want to share that one moment with just…isn’t there.

I do not understand how we, as Americans, continue to tolerate the way we treat families in this country. The fact is that it is becoming financially impossible for broad swathes of the population to raise a child in America. I was lucky enough to talk to Reshma Saujani about her forthcoming deep dive into exactly how, and why, we continue to cast mothers aside in America. Here’s the trailer for “Now Country For Mothers”:

The film counts a record 2,500+ mothers, caregivers, and advocates who signed on as associate producers. As Reshma describes it, “Motherhood in America is completely broken, and that’s by design.” The film is ground-level investigation into the how’s and the why’s of it all, and she, with Director Raeshem Nijhon, of Emmy-nominated Culture House Media, and Executive Producer Tan France, gets to the heart of it.

As Reshma puts it: “It’s never been more dangerous to be a woman in America. We’ve pitted women against each other for decades, and it needs to end. That’s what the film is all about.”

According to the Minneapolis Federal Reserve Bank, American mothers take an average of 7.2 weeks of leave after childbirth. Fathers take roughly three days. This is an abomination anyway you cut it. Reshma used the phrase “vomit-inducing” when we discussed parental leave in America versus pretty much anywhere else. In the Czech Republic, mothers can take three years of paid maternity leave. Across Europe, comprehensive support for families is essentially a given.

“Why is the richest country in the world unable to provide any real support for its families?” Reshma asks, on behalf of what I would say is nearly every parent in America.

It’s not all bad news, though. I asked Reshma about the things that make her optimistic. Basically, can things get better, generally, for mothers in America any time soon?

“There has been significant progress in states like Vermont, New Mexico, and New York,” she tells us. “But, with parenting costs essentially doubling over the last 20 years, wages not keeping up, and a culture that preaches hustle over love, we are in a precarious spot.”

“Every time women make advances, there seems to be a new culture war that springs up to derail that progress,” Reshma says. “Tradwife vs. Girlboss screaming matches in toxic Instagram comment sections are not meer distractions—they are much more than that, and it’s very actively harming women.”

And it’s women harming women in so many ways. Mothers cutting down mothers in public for all to see. The fact is that the cultural shift must come before the policy shift, and Reshma sees that cultural shift happening, even if there is severe regression at the upper echelons of our political and private sector leadership. In many ways, a movement like Moms First is the logical response to this extreme swing.

“The anti-ICE movement in Minnesota was driven by angry mothers,” Reshma notes. She’s right. That’s what was so inspiring amid all of the—still ongoing—ICE terror exacted on Minnesota. Parents organized and support networks spawned out of almost thin air. But, it was really the countless videos of the most normal-looking white moms you’ve ever seen hurling a Samuel L. Jackson-esque soliloquy of verbal abuse at heavily-armed deportation agents that sealed the strength of the movement. It hasn’t won the battle yet, but wow, what an effort so far.

This Mother’s Day, be with the mothers around you however you can be with them—in-person, via a phone call, a text message, anything.

When you’re doing that, think about Reshma’s message and what you can do to build the movement that will bring some normalcy and accessibility to parenting in America. Women’s rights are under threat in a way that is very fundamental and very real.

Today, let’s make a firm commitment to something more like Mother’s Year, or even Mother’s decade. It’s all possible, and it will only strengthen our communities and our country.

— Sree / Twitter | IG | LinkedIn | FB | YouTube | Spread | TikTok

35% of 2026 is already over. What will you do with the remaining 65%? LMK and I’ll see you made it all the way down here.

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Jay Dixit and I go way back, and I love the way he thinks about AI, creativity, and writing. When I heard he was teaching a Socratic AI class for writers, I knew I wanted to help.

Jay was a writing professor at Yale, then OpenAI’s first Head of Community for Writers. His Socratic AI Intensive is a six-week live program where he teaches writers how to use AI as a sounding board and thinking partner to talk out ideas. It’s also an accountability coach that helps you set goals, track your progress, and keep you on task — so you actually finish the thing. By the end of six weeks, you learn his system and finish a complete draft.

Book Proposal | Business Plan | Essay or Memoir | Screenplay | White Paper | Novel | something else

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One of the Best Things I’ve Ever Read #3

We’re aiming to create the the best reading list possible. It’s quite simple—we are crowdsourcing the writing that has stuck with you, that one piece you read last month, last year, or 20 years ago, that has stuck in your brain. This week, it’s an excellent addition from friend of the newsletter, Jonathan Hoffmann.

Title: “A Murder Foretold” (Internet Archive link here)

By: David Grann, The New Yorker (2011)

From Jonathan:

I’m a sucker for quality long-form journalism, but there’s not another piece that I find myself recommending more than “A Murder Foretold,” by David Grann, for The New Yorker. Originally published 15 years ago, it’s completely evergreen. I read this for the first time on a flight and definitely disrupted the person next to me with my cartoonish gasps as I worked my way through it.

Though set in a country I’m largely unfamiliar with, and featuring protagonists I’d never heard of, Grann masterfully unfurls this incredible story. Now, my favorite part is sharing it with friends who haven’t yet had the pleasure of reading it and waiting for the incredulous replies once they finish it.

***
Jonathan Hoffmann is an American living in Prague who’s spent the last two decades working as a senior executive in international media and corporate communications.

If you have a story share, please do!

Submit Your Selection!

Have an idea for anything we’re up to? Let’s collaborate! sree.sreenivasan1@gmail.com

🔔 Sree is emceeing this year’s Arogya World gala in Silicon Valley, with celebrity chefs and more on May 30 — tell your friends!

✍🏽 Narratively Academy’s Socratic AI writing course kicks off on May 18—get your spot now!

🚨 Submissions are open for the India Philanthropy Alliance’s Youth Essay Competition!

👌🏾 Every word in this newsletter was written by a human being. We use Gemini for research, but not text generation. See tips from my 24-day, 5-country AI training tour of Asia.

🙏 Thank you to all our new paid subscribers! They and our sponsors help us do more! Here’s how you can support Sree’s Sunday Note, even if you can’t afford to pay.

🚨 Submissions are open for the India Philanthropy Alliance’s Youth Essay Competition!

✍🏽 Narratively Academy’s Socratic AI writing course kicks off on May 18—get your spot now!

👌🏾 Every word in this newsletter was written by a human being. We use Gemini for research, but not text generation. See tips from my 24-day, 5-country AI training tour of Asia.

🙏 Thank you to all our new paid subscribers! They and our sponsors help us do more! Here’s how you can support Sree’s Sunday Note, even if you can’t afford to pay.

How you can help

IT IS BECOMING IMPOSSIBLE to overstate how badly the war on Iran has gone so far. More than two months have passed since the U.S. and Israel launched surprise attacks on Iran in late February. That’s two months of war, blockades, failed negotiations, human rights violations, and so much more. Gas prices are at record highs, the cost of anything that needs to be transported (see: pretty much everything) will start to increase as oil prices climb, and your life will be impacted.

It’s been a series of own-goals by Trump and Pete Hegseth—who seem to be the only two people working on the war in the administration. J.D. Vance leaked his grievances, failed to reach a deal with Iran in Pakistan, and then got completely sidelined. Secretary of State, National Security Advisor, and Head of USAID Marco Rubio, is hardly visible. It’s all Hegseth and Trump, and it shows. [My March essay, The Tragedy of Unserious People in Serious Jobs].

Even if we leave aside the economic toll of this (more on that below), if the goal was to stop Iran’s nuclear program—as Trump, Hegseth, and others have repeatedly said—it’s failed. This piece by Blacki Migliozzi and William J. Broad for The New York Times lays it out in plain terms. The 2015 JCPOA deal effectively neutralized Iran’s uranium enrichment program. Hours after Trump was elected in 2024, Iran started enriching again.

Now, Trump is mired in failure. Despite Israel’s targeting of Iran’s leadership structures, a Khamenei is still Iran’s Supreme Leader, the powerful Revolutionary Guards remains largely intact, the internal oppression continues apace, there is no shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, and Iran has more enriched uranium than it has had in a decade.

The economic chaos Trump unleashed speaks for itself in many ways. The Pentagon told lawmakers the war effort has cost $25 billion, a number that experts far-and-wide say is low-balled and then some. So, on the low end, the out-the-door cost is about a billion dollars per day.

It does not take any sort of expertise to see how that number—a HUGE number on its own—does not reflect anything approaching the real costs of this war.

Partner Message

Jay Dixit and I go way back, and I love the way he thinks about AI, creativity, and writing. When I heard he was teaching a Socratic AI class for writers, I knew I wanted to help.

Jay was a writing professor at Yale, then OpenAI’s first Head of Community for Writers. His Socratic AI Intensive is a six-week live program where he teaches writers how to use AI as a sounding board and thinking partner to talk out ideas. It’s also an accountability coach that helps you set goals, track your progress, and keep you on task — so you actually finish the thing. By the end of six weeks, you learn his system and finish a complete draft.

Book Proposal | Business Plan | Essay or Memoir | Screenplay | White Paper | Novel | something else

Jay is offering 15% off his six-week class for the Digimentors community—plus 15% off all Narratively Academy writing and storytelling courses for the next 3 months.

Use code DIGIMENTORS at checkout. Space is limited. Your project has waited long enough. It’s time to finish it.

Learn more & enroll

Harvard Kennedy School’s Linda Blimes thinks the real costs of the war will approach $1 trillion before it’s all said and done. Congressman Ro Khanna says the war is going to cost each American household an extra $5,000 this year, money very few can afford.

Then there are the costs to U.S. readiness and military installations in the Middle East. If you watch one thing this week, make it this CNN investigation on the real damage to U.S. bases in the region.

The cost to the U.S. military is, as of now, incalculable. It’s also largely being hidden from public view by the Trump administration.

Hegseth and other Pentagon officials testified in Congressional hearings last week, and the results went about as expected—Hegseth lashed out, lied repeatedly, and offered little in the way of strategy or off ramps. We should demand better from our public officials across the board in the best of times. With the global economy on the brink, global security flailing, and an entrenched Iranian regime, we deserve answers. The highlights (or, lowlights, as it were) are worth watching, but I want to highlight Senator Mark Kelly’s questions for Hegseth. They were to-the-point, but the Secretary of War simply cannot answer in anything but a Fox News soundbite. It’s all just the figment of a tweet that could potentially land—in printed form—on Trump’s desk.

These are not “gotcha” questions. This is a U.S. Senator asking very fundamental questions of a $1 trillion-per-year government agency that is prosecuting a war that is affecting the lives of billions around the world.

In fact, very few of the questions during Hegseth’s hearings were “gotcha” questions. His reactions portended a man personally affronted, but that’s his default response as it is, and we should all take note. These are your dollars being spent, your dollars funding global energy chaos, your dollars building the bombs killing thousands of civilians—as I keep saying, this is all being done in our name, and we deserve more in terms of leadership, answers, and accountability.

The easiest chart to read is gas prices in the U.S. in the past year. Again, the U.S. attacked Iran—while in the middle of negotiating with Iran—on February 28. Notice the chart’s trajectory since the beginning of March:

In Europe it’s a similar story, especially for diesel fuel. Across Asia and the Asia-Pacific, countries that import most or all of their petroleum products are either in, or on the verge of, a full-blown fuel crisis.

We deserve better. The world deserves better.

— Sree / Twitter | IG | LinkedIn | FB | YouTube | Spread | TikTok

33.33% of 2026 is already over. What will you do with the remaining 66.66%? LMK and I’ll see you made it all the way down here

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This Week in Voter Suppression

Trump II will go down as a presidency that tried (and, I hope, failed) to dismantle the institutions built to sustain American democracy. Last weekend, I wrote about just a few of the many threats to freedom of speech Trump represents, none more vital than our right to representation in government. After SCOTUS further eviscerated the Voting Rights Act, Trump and his allies got to work on their attempts to gerrymander their way to not losing the House to Democrats in the midterms. Think that’s alarmist? Here’s Trump, in his own words:

Folks, this is happening.

Partner Message

The India Philanthropy Alliance is now accepting submissions for the 7th Annual Youth Essay Competition. The contest invites middle and high school students to identify the biggest developmental issue in India and use their critical thinking skills to submit a well-researched personal essay that identifies solutions. This year’s theme is #YouthWithPurpose. Submit your essay and learn more here.

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Iran War Coverage:

👓 Scroll down to read our new tiny project: “One of The Best Things I’ve Ever Read” — and send in your own fave piece of writing.

🚨 Submissions are open for the India Philanthropy Alliance’s Youth Essay Competition!

✍🏽 Narratively Academy’s Socratic AI writing course kicks off on May 18

👌🏾 Every word in this newsletter was written by a human being. We use Gemini for research, but not text generation. See tips from my 24-day, 5-country AI training tour of Asia.

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FREEDOM OF SPEECH HAS A NICE RING TO IT, unfortunately, it is becoming a luxury more than a right.

The self-styled free speech warriors of the right are anything but—they never have been, and never will be. The MAGA definition of free speech is more like a plea to listen to ideas that have already been struck down in the market of public opinion. Notably, this is exactly what freedom of speech actually means. You can say, write, protest and support pretty much whatever you want. In doing so, the implicit agreement is that you will bear the consequences of that speech.

The text of the First Amendment is short, to the point, and unambiguous:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Freedom of speech, religion, assembly, and petition combine to go well beyond letting us say mean things on the internet. To me, none of this really needs to be expounded on, although there is a metric ton of case law that does just that.

We’ve seen the right to assemble wielded en masse with the No Kings rallies, anti-ICE marches in Minnesota, the Occupy Wall Street movement, and other causes that I care about. That, again, is the point. Go out and march for whatever your cause may be, just understand that in doing so, you agree to face the consequences, good, bad, or otherwise.

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The India Philanthropy Alliance is now accepting submissions for the 7th Annual Youth Essay Competition. The contest invites middle and high school students to identify the biggest developmental issue in India and use their critical thinking skills to submit a well-researched personal essay that identifies solutions. This year’s theme is #YouthWithPurpose. Submit your essay and learn more here.

More on the YEC

Of course, freedom of speech also pertains to money and political spending, so sayeth the Supreme Court. The now-infamous Citizens United decision in 2010 unleashed the beast of dark money that has done more to corrupt modern American politics than any single other event. Now, the John Roberts court is at it again. 16 years ago, the court said money is speech, regardless of where the money comes from. Now, the court has gutted the landmark Voting Rights Act, which will disenfranchise millions of voters, and ensure that millions more will have to fight for proper representation.

Here’s how Richard L. Hasen puts it in Slate:

The Supreme Court itself has shown itself to be the enemy of democracy. If and when Democrats retake control of the political branches, it will be incumbent on them not only to write new voting legislation protecting minority voters and all voters in the ability to participate fairly in elections that reflect the will of all the people; they will also have to consider reform of the Supreme Court itself, a conclusion I had been resisting until the court made this unavoidable.

Hasen is hardly some fire-breathing liberal. His legal analysis has been straight as an arrow for as long as I’ve been reading his work, and for him to call the decision in Louisiana v. Callais the high court’s “worst ruling in a century” is really something. Seemingly within minutes of the ruling coming down, Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry suspended congressional primaries that were already open to early voting. That’s right, they are coming for elections.

The fact is that voting, and the representation that is the product of it, is the highest form of free speech. The conservative activist class has been working to restrict that right for decades, and the Roberts court has proven to be fertile ground for the worst inclinations of conservative jurisprudence.

This is another cog in the MAGA machine, another lever by which Trump II and its cohorts can destroy American institutions.

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Then there’s the speech aspect of free speech. Somehow, Jimmy Kimmel has become the avatar for what free speech is, and what Trump says it isn’t. In September of 2025, Kimmel was pulled off the air after pressure from Trump and his information attack dog, FCC Chairman Brendan Carr. ABC/Disney caved, local affiliates refused to air the show, and Kimmel’s studio was dark for a few days. This time, ABC/Disney is holding firm (for now). Carr is among the most dangerous of the Trump lackey class, and there’s no reason to think that will change. He is trying to put the screws to ABC again, this time with Kimmel. He will try again. And again. And again.

This is not about Kimmel and satire; it’s about the government working overtime to stifle you. Here’s my message to all the would-be suck-ups: It will never be enough. Need proof? Look at the companies that tried to satiate Trump’s need for tribute.

— Sree / Twitter | IG | LinkedIn | FB | YouTube | Spread | TikTok

33.33% of 2026 is already over. What will you do with the remaining 66.66%? LMK and I’ll see you made it all the way down here

One of the Best Things I’ve Ever Read #2

We’re aiming to create the the best reading list possible. It’s quite simple—we are crowdsourcing the writing that has stuck with you, that one piece you read last month, last year, or 20 years ago, that has stuck in your brain. This week, it’s me, taking liberty with my space.

Title: “The Falling Man”

By: Tom Junod, Esquire (2003)

From me:

Since 9/11, I’ve consumed countless pieces of content about the attacks in all formats—newspaper stories, books, TV shows (I reviewed four of them for the NYT) and, of course, magazine essays. By far the most memorable item is this 2003 piece in Esquire. Junod transforms a split-second photograph of a 9/11 victim into a deep, philosophical exploration of human dignity at the end of the world. On the 20th anniversary of the attacks, the writer was on one of my favorite podcasts, discussing the piece and its legacy.

If you have a story share, please do!

Submit Your Selection!

Have an idea for anything we’re up to? Let’s collaborate! sree.sreenivasan1@gmail.com

🎥 Above: Watch my entire discussion with Cristina DiGiacomo on the philosopher’s approach to human-AI coexistence.

👓 Scroll down to read our new tiny project: “One of The Best Things I’ve Ever Read” — and send in your own fave piece of writing.

🚨 Submissions are open for the India Philanthropy Alliance’s Youth Essay Competition!

👌🏾 Every word in this newsletter was written by a human being. We used Gemini for research, but not text generation. See tips from my 24-day, 5-country AI training tour of Asia.

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***
OUR SHARED HUMANITY HAS NEVER BEEN UNDER THREAT like it is right now. LLMs are generating (often misleading) content, being used as therapists and doctors, replacing teachers, starting to gut the entry-level job market, and so much more. AI is already hyper-present in our lives, and we seem to be at the beginning of the beginning.

The problem, of course, is that we have no idea where this is all going, and the people leading us into it are hellbent on forcing us into it anyway, consequences be damned. What’s worse is that the men (almost all white men, again) atop the tech oligarchy appear both unable and unwilling to engage with even the slightest skepticism.

I discussed this and more with Cristina DiGiacomo, philosopher and founder of 10P1 (consulting around ethical infrastructure & decision systems for AI leadership). Cristina’s goal is to promote a moral and ethical code for how people design, deploy, and live with AI. It’s a crucial space in a crucial moment.

I encourage you to watch the entire hour—it could have gone much longer, and I wish it had. If you are going to watch just one clip, make it this one:

It’s all about us. AI cannot destroy us. Humans will destroy ourselves with AI. As such, we can really improve prospects with AI, too. Every output you’ve ever seen from an LLM—every single one of them—is based on a corpus of human-built input. It all comes from us.

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The India Philanthropy Alliance is now accepting submissions for the 7th Annual Youth Essay Competition. The contest invites middle and high school students to identify the biggest developmental issue in India and use their critical thinking skills to submit a well-researched personal essay that identifies solutions. This year’s theme is #YouthWithPurpose. Submit your essay and learn more here.

More on the YEC

Now, we are suddenly awash in manifestos from Big Tech. Predictably, every one of them is vacuous, and at least two of them are downright frightening.

So, go ahead and read what Anthropic, OpenAI, and Palantir purport to “think”—they are companies, not people—and apply your own critical thinking to them.

Cristina sums them up nicely on her Substack:

All three are written from inside the machine. All three define the problem technically and solve it technically. Safety is an alignment problem. Equity is an access problem. Power is a capability problem. The questions are engineering questions. The answers are engineering answers.

All three assume, without examination, that the people writing the manifesto are the right people to be writing it. There is no moment in any of these documents where the authors ask: what would it mean if we’re wrong? Not wrong about a detail. Wrong about the whole thing. Wrong about who should be deciding.

And none of them ask who they are accountable to. Not in the way that question demands to be answered. Accountable to users is a product answer. Accountable to democracy is a policy answer. Neither is a moral answer. The moral answer requires a framework none of these documents possesses.

Accountability begins with intellectual accountability. I know we are in the “LOL, nothing matters” era, but I simply refuse to accept that. I also refuse to accept the purposeless, because-we-can, nihilistic attitudes of the men leading the charge.

Silicon Valley super investor Marc Andreesen is the king of know-nothingness masking as intellectualism. His worldview is toxic on a good day, and it’s also so badly misinformed that I doubt he can help it.

Watch this clip where he says he does no introspection (if you can stomach nearly two hours of Silicon Valley grind mentality talk, watch the whole thing).

The specific quote:

If you go back 400 years ago it never would've occurred to anybody to be introspective. All of the modern conceptions around introspection and therapy, and all the things that kind of result from that are, a kind of a manufacture of the 1910s, 1920s.

Roughly 2,400 years ago, Aristotle, a person we still talk about a lot, posited that self-reflection was the beginning of wisdom. For centuries, his musings on the topic have been debated, discussed, taught, and more… and here I am talking about them still. I have my doubts that anyone will be talking positively about anything Andreesen did in 50 years, let alone 2,400 (if we make it to either number). Imagine writing something called The Techno-Optimist Manifesto and unironically including an enemies list like this:

Our enemy is the ivory tower, the know-it-all credentialed expert worldview, indulging in abstract theories, luxury beliefs, social engineering, disconnected from the real world, delusional, unelected, and unaccountable — playing God with everyone else’s lives, with total insulation from the consequences.

What Andreesen, Elon Musk, Sam Altman, et al, have done is “playing God with everyone else’s lives, with total insulation from the consequences.” Like with everything else MAGA and MAGA-aligned, they’re projecting.

I’ve never seen a better case for self-reflection made by someone who refuses to acknowledge the existence of self-reflection.

On the topic of memorable for all the wrong reasons, Palantir, the company harvesting and collating your data for untold government spyware and surveillance projects, has adopted the world view of its CEO Alex Karp as its own. We should all be afraid.

As Cristina notes, the Palantir item is probably the most honest of the manifestos. That in and of itself is not good. Read it for yourself, but I’ll focus on this little racist nugget:

We must resist the shallow temptation of a vacant and hollow pluralism. We, in America and more broadly the West, have for the past half century resisted defining national cultures in the name of inclusivity. But inclusion into what?”

In short, the “white genocide” crowd is selling incredibly powerful technology to the police. Make of that what you will, but understand that this is a technology made by people, deployed by people, built to harm people. Even if you can excuse the technology as “important” or otherwise worth having, the company selling it is openly supporting an ethos meant to sow fear, terror, and general authoritarianism.

All of this requires action, of course, but to get to action we need to understand the why and how of it all. To do so, the teachings of Aristotle, Plato, Kant and Descartes (to name just a few) are foundational works.

If you want this in a more practical, digestible version, watch TV writer extraordinaire Michael Schur (The Office, The Good Place) talk about ethics. And, watch The Good Place! It may be a goofy little comedy, but it’s also a fantastic intellectual work on the fundamental teachings of ethics and moral philosophy. [And, yes, fans of “The Office” will know I’m recommending we listen to the man who played Mose Schrute, Dwight’s strange, neck-bearded cousin.]

— Sree / Twitter | IG | LinkedIn | FB | YouTube | Spread | TikTok

32% of 2026 is already over. What will you do with the remaining 68%? LMK and I’ll see you made it all the way down here.

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One of the Best Things I’ve Ever Read #1

We’re starting a new tiny project with the goal of creating the the best reading list possible. It’s quite simple—we are crowdsourcing the writing that has stuck with you, that one piece you read last month, last year, or 20 years ago, that has stuck in your brain. This week, it’s Zach Peterson kicking things off with what he says is the thing to read if you are interested in the wonders of the animal kingdom. Enjoy—and submit your own selection below!

Title: “Do Elephants Have Souls?”

By: Caitrin Nicol Keiper, The New Atlantis (2013)

From Zach:

This is easily one of the best things I’ve ever read, and definitely the article I’ve shared the most with the most people, and it’s not close. It’s so moving, and so informative, and will affect how you look at animals across the spectrum, not just elephants. If you already hold elephants in high regard, this piece will show you that they are probably even more remarkable than you think they are. I just read it again after sharing it with someone, and it still gets to me. I remember the first time I read it, I started crying… and I was on public transit!

Zach Peterson, a writer and editor based in Prague, is a longtime Sree collaborator.

Submit Your Selection!

Have an idea for anything we’re up to? Let’s collaborate! sree.sreenivasan1@gmail.com

🚨 Submissions are open for the India Philanthropy Alliance’s Youth Essay Competition!

👌🏾 Every word in this newsletter was written by a human being. All of the photos in this edition are originals from Zach Peterson and his family. We used Gemini for research, but not text generation. See tips from my 24-day, 5-country AI training tour of Asia.

🙏 Paid subscriptions and sponsorships help us do more! Here’s how you can support Sree’s Sunday Note. Paid subscribers make it possible to launch new verticals, like our new entertainment newsletter Ok, TV (have you watched Something Very Bad is Going Happen? We did!)

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TRUMP’S FLOOD-THE-ZONE IDEA OF EVERYTHING is setting in motion untold environmental destruction. Last year, the administration cut the National Park Service; earlier this month, it completely reshaped the U.S. Forest Service; earlier this week, the Senate voted to lift the federal mining ban protecting the Boundary Waters Wilderness in northern Minnesota.

These are but the latest salvos in Trump’s unprecedented war against public lands. “Public lands” does not mean “the government” owns them; it means we do. They are ours. We are the public. These lands provide more than just beautiful vistas; they protect fresh water, and the vast tracts of forest clean our air and cool the Earth.

Last July, Ally J. Levine, Soumya Karwa, and Travis Hartman published an incredible piece for Reuters on how Trump II was gunning for a public land sell-off, and how voters of every persuasion are largely against it.

First, the scale. The U.S. is absolutely enormous, and the cumulative size of our public lands is unthinkably large. There are about 640 million acres of federally managed land in the United States, or nearly 30% of the country. That is almost the combined area of Alaska, California and Texas.

Trump’s complete abdication of responsibility for these lands is an abomination—an abomination that will make your life measurably worse, even if you’ve never visited a single American national park or forest or wilderness. This is something that pretty much everyone agrees on.

Going full tree-hugger with regard to America’s still-vast wilderness is like asking a fish to swim—just look at it all. Millions upon millions of acres of prairies, mountains, forests of all shapes and sizes, untold amounts of wildlife, fresh water… It’s all there. The motivation behind the concept of public land is that these things are worth protecting.

Here is a not-even-remotely exhaustive list of things Trump and his MAGA allies in Congress and the Supreme Court have done, or tried to do:

• On day 1 of Trump II, he withdrew the U.S. from several international agreements and governing bodies on climate and the environment, including the Paris Agreement, for the second time.

• A full accounting (from September 2025) of all the public land Trump is trying to weaken protections for

• The headline says it all: “Supreme Court Sides With Oil Companies in Luoisiana Coastal Lawsuits”

• The U.S. Forest Service will cut 57 of its 77 research stations. We will know less about fires, drought, fresh water, endangered plants and animals, and more.

• GOP Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) tried to legislatively force the sale of 3.2 million acres of public land. Trump’s team publicly said they didn’t like the idea, but they actually helped craft the talking points for it in private

Beyond majestic landscapes, there is real utility in having and caring for vast tracts of resource-rich land. There is also real utility in abiding by—and even leading—international environmental standards for industries as well. Global climate change mitigation agreements are good things. We simply have to stop laying waste to the Earth. Trump is only exacerbating humanity’s worst tendencies—a common refrain, of course—but the environment is the one place where the vast tentacles of his unique awfulness come together to form a truly global problem.

Partner Message

The India Philanthropy Alliance is now accepting submissions for the 7th Annual Youth Essay Competition. The contest invites middle and high school students to identify the biggest developmental issue in India and use their critical thinking skills to submit a well-researched personal essay that identifies solutions. This year’s theme is #YouthWithPurpose. Submit your essay and learn more here.

More on the YEC

I went to a talk hosted by Columbia’s Climate School at Scandinavia House last week on the issue of sea-level change. Note that it’s no longer sea level rise, because that’s only part of the story. It was an absolutely fascinating presentation from Lamont Professor Jacky Austermann and Columbia Climate School Dean Alexis Abramson. Please watch the whole thing:

As has been the case for far too long, the thing we seem to be talking about the least is the environment. Maybe it’s because we all agree on the basics.

Public opinion on climate change and environmental issues has been consistent for decades—people of all political persuasions agree that the environment is deteriorating. Like so many other issues, we all generally agree that there is a problem, there are solutions, and governments state and local have a role to play. But, Big Industry has never had a more favorable U.S. government to its interests.

Gallup just released new polling on Americans’ views of the environment, and it is not good—and we’re right, by the way.

Trump’s second term may really push us past the point of no return. This comes in many forms—loosening or outright cancellation of emissions standards, the opening of vast swathes of public lands for extraction by mining and logging companies, and the general sense that the meaning of the word “public” as a descriptor has little weight with anyone in this administration.

Americans of any and all political persuasions roundly agree that the government absolutely has a role in protecting the environment. The actual officials in charge of the stewardship of our most sacred of resources are, unsurprisingly, not even remotely interested in anything of the sort. As a people, we are not optimistic about the whole thing:

These views are steeped in experience, all anyone needs to do is look around. Bad drinking water, increasingly severe natural events, extreme heat waves, corporate takeovers in agriculture… This list is almost endless.

Globally, the American example still means something. We are setting the worst example imaginable at the moment and there is no reason to think that current trends will do anything but accelerate. Naysayers always go big on the “unenforceable” aspects of broad international agreements like the Paris Accords, but that’s not the point. The point is setting benchmarks for progress and having something to measure against. At this point, I applaud really any effort at all on environmental protections and action on climate change.

As I wrote about back in 2025, there are already millions of climate refugees globally, including in the U.S. It turns out that more intense hurricanes, more severe flooding, extended and severe wild fires, and extreme heat are not really liveable for a broad cross-section of society. If we don’t reverse course, it’s only going to get worse.

— Sree / Twitter | IG | LinkedIn | FB | YouTube | Spread | TikTok

ICYMI, last Sunday’s essay:

30% of 2026 is already over. What will you do with the remaining 70%? LMK and I’ll see you made it all the way down here.

Have an idea for anything we’re up to? Let’s collaborate! sree.sreenivasan1@gmail.com

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📺 Ok, TV is part of the Sree’s Sunday Note family of newsletters. Written and produced by Tara Ruff and Zach Peterson. And is supported by folks like YOU.

***

IT’S THE SHOW you’ve been waiting for. The Duffer Brothers are so back. Both of these things may be true, but Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen is not prestige TV. If it is, our cultural definition of what constitutes prestige TV is shifting.

We are both pretty convinced that’s what’s happening, and we think that it kinda sucks.

The new Netflix’s new horror series from creator Haley Z. Boston, executive produced by the Duffer Brothers of Stranger Things fame. Eight episodes. One very cursed wedding. More blood than I was emotionally prepared for on a Saturday night.

It’s been at or near the top of the Netflix charts for a while now, which means you’re either already watching it or you’re about to be peer pressured into it by the algorithm. So let’s talk about it.

The Setup

Rachel (Camila Morrone) and Nicky (Adam DiMarco) are engaged. They’re driving to meet his family at their remote cabin compound before the wedding. Everything is fine. Everything is definitely fine.

Except Rachel keeps getting this gut feeling that…wait for it…something very bad is going to happen. And then she finds a note on her wedding invitation that says “Don’t marry him.” And then Nicky’s family turns out to be... a lot.

The Cunninghams are giving “we have secrets and none of them are good.” The mom Victoria (Jennifer Jason Leigh) is skulking around like a Victorian ghost. Jennifer Jason Leigh was born to play women who look like they’re about to deliver terrible news at an inappropriate time. The dad Boris (Ted Levine) is doing taxidermy in the basement. The older brother Jules saw something traumatic as a child and never recovered. The younger sister Portia is... we’ll get to Portia.

The vibe is basically dark Wes Anderson—just more of an Addams Family-type of darker, not the depressing type of darker.

In short, Rachel stays because Rachel always stays. It’s kind of her whole thing.

For the first few episodes, Rachel thinks the family might be planning to sacrifice her in some kind of satanic ritual, and, TBH, that tracked. This is also something that actually hurts the show the more you watch. Our chief criticism of the show is that it did not lean into the curse/supernatural stuff nearly enough—it just doesn’t commit until the last three episodes.

The Curse (Spoilers, Obviously)

Rachel is cursed, and it’s a bad one. Her family has been carrying a curse for 200 years: if you marry someone who isn’t truly your soulmate, you bleed out and die when the sun sets on your wedding day.

Fun premise for a destination wedding at the Cunningham’s ridiculous “cabin”.

Rachel’s mother (played by our queen - Victoria Pedretti from the Haunting of Hill House franchise) died this way. Her father cut baby Rachel out of the womb while repeating “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry”—which is why young Jules (Nicky’s older brother, played EXCELLENTLY by Jeff Wilbusch), who witnessed the whole thing while hiding under a bed as a kid, turned it into the “Sorry Man” legend that haunts the family.

So Rachel was born into her mother’s blood on her mother’s wedding day. Super casual stuff.

The Witness

Throughout the series there’s this creepy old man (Zlatko Burić) who keeps showing up. In bar bathrooms. At the edges of the property. Just watching.

Turns out he’s The Witness. He’s been alive for nearly 200 years. His job is to watch every wedding in the cursed bloodline and wait to see who bleeds.

His deal: 200 years ago, he was supposed to marry his soulmate. He got scared and left her at the altar. The curse passed to her family, and Death punished him with immortality, forced to witness every wedding in her bloodline forever. Rachel’s family descended from that woman. Real dick move, honestly.

Now he’s been lurking around Harkin weddings for two centuries, watching brides and grooms hemorrhage, unable to do anything but observe. And truthfully he doesn’t seem phased. He’s almost smug about it.

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He also has all the information Rachel needs to survive and chooses to deliver it in cryptic fragments over several days instead of just telling her upfront. People are actively dying and this man is speaking in riddles like he’s auditioning for a fantasy novel. We found him stressful and irritating.

The Characters

Rachel is our leading lady and she’s a mess about it. She’s the kind of person who hates herself but also knows exactly who she is: confident and self-loathing in equal measure, which is a very specific type of exhausting. She’s never enough. Not for her dead mother, not for Nicky’s family, not for herself. But that’s the whole antihero arc. She spends the entire series trying to save everyone while also kind of believing she doesn’t deserve to be saved. It’s a lot to carry and Morrone carries it.

Nicky’s sister Portia should be insufferable but somehow works nearly perfectly. Baby-voiced perfectionist energy. Wedding planner from hell. Gus Birney plays her like she’s one inconvenience away from a full breakdown at all times, and she really is. Enter the scene she gets possessed by Rachels ancestor after a seance. We couldn’t make that sentence up. She also secretly had a Vegas wedding to some guy who definitely wasn’t her soulmate, which becomes relevant later. She is a lot but it works well. Hers is also a character that suffered from the show’s lack of lean-in on the supernatural elements. She’s key to it all in some ways—she literally has a picture book of spells—but it all seems too quick with her on that front.

Jules and his soon-to-be-but-maybe-not-ex-wife Nell (Carla Krome) are somehow the beating heart of the show, and it comes out of nowhere. Jules starts off as the weird black sheep older brother making unsettling jokes and giving off vague murderer energy. But, as the show goes on, you realize he’s just deeply traumatized from watching Rachel’s mom bleed out when he was seven, and he’s actually been trying to protect everyone this whole time. As these shows do best and almost too expectedly, everything is connected all at once. Jeff Wilbusch is also German, and his American accent is charmingly and clearly not American.

The twist is that he and his wife Nell, who fight constantly and seem like they’re about to announce their divorce at any moment, are actually soulmates? Loved it. The messy honest relationships are the real ones. The people who fight and stay are more soulmates than the couples performing perfection. Throughout Rachel’s ordeal, they are the only ones who believe her, believe their own eyes, and guide you through it all. It’s really good, and they are actually the heart of the show.

Nicky is weak. Intentionally so, we assume. He has no spine. No convictions. No personality outside of being Rachel’s fiancé. When it matters, he folds. More on this shortly. The show absolutely turns on him in the final act, and it’s impossible to like him.

The parents made choices we didn’t understand. Victoria is dying of a brain tumor and the family is keeping it secret from Nicky. Fine. But Boris decides to tell Nicky the night before the wedding that their entire marriage was built on lies. That his mom had an affair. That everything Nicky believed about love and commitment was a lie.

The night before. While his fiancée is potentially about to die from a blood curse.

Boris looked at the situation and thought “yes, now is the time for this conversation.” We don’t know what to tell you about Boris but the guy wasn’t helping anyone.

The Blood

There’s a lot of it.

This is a horror series, but it’s tough to ready yourself for the sheer amount of blood. Name an orifice and there’s blood streaming out of it. Eyes. Nose. Mouth. Ears. Multiple people at once. The finale looks like a crime scene in a slaughterhouse.

Haley Z. Boston said in an interview she kept telling the crew “more blood, more blood” and you can tell. It’s effective. This was...wet.

What This Show Wasted

Here’s our chief criticism: Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen doesn’t lean into the curse nearly enough. The supernatural elements are genuinely good when they show up. But the show doesn’t commit until the last three episodes. You’ve got a 200-year-old blood curse, an immortal Witness lurking around the property, and characters who are READY to go full weird and the show spends six episodes slow-rolling when it should be going full throttle.

Portia is the clearest example. This woman gets possessed by Rachel’s ancestor post seance. We couldn’t make that sentence up if we tried. She has a literal picture book of spells, basically a coloring book for an unhinged woman who wants to be a shaman. She was tailor-made to be the vehicle for the supernatural elements of this show and they wasted her consistently. And the seance wasn’t enough! Never thought those would be words we'd type on Substack but here we are. Give us more! The supernatural stuff was the most riveting part of the show and they kept it in a box until the final act!

Portia led that seance. She was ready. She "obviously knows how to summon the dead" based on the supernatural book in her room—those are Nell's words, not ours. And then after she channels a dead ancestor and delivers the cryptic potion recipe, the show just... sidelines her? Rachel turns to Jules and Nell for the bone-sawing and ingredient-gathering. Which, fine, we understand, they're great. But Portia was RIGHT THERE, already neck-deep in the supernatural, and the show benched her. Let the unhinged spell-book girl cook!

Now, Jules and Nell are proof that when this show commits, it works. They’re the only ones who believe Rachel. When she needs ingredients for a potion that might turn her into Nicky’s soul mate, including a bone taken from her body, Jules picks up the knife and Nell holds her steady. Horror yes, but belief in Rachel. Just "okay, tooth or toe? Toe? Great." Get you friends who will saw off a body part for you without needing a PowerPoint presentation on why! Or maybe don't... but this scenario called for belief and they were the realest part of the show.

Why didn’t Portia share more scenes with Jules and Nell? Why was everyone so compartmentalized? These are all good characters. Let them interact. Let them be weird together. Let them lean into the curse.

This fricken show…

The Ending

Rachel says her vows. She means them. She put her faith in Nicky.

Nicky says no. At the altar. In front of everyone. Because his dad told him about his mom’s affair the night before and now he’s decided marriage is “poison.”

The thing is, he never actually believed in the curse. He thought Rachel was being dramatic. This man watched her spiral for days, heard her explain a 200-year-old blood curse, saw the immortal Witness lurking around, and still thought she was exaggerating.

Weak. Pathetic. Impressionable to extreme faults. He never understood her. He never believed her.

The curse spreads. People start bleeding. Victoria dies. Portia dies. The family drags Rachel back to the altar. Nicky finally says “I do”—but only because his family is dying around him, not because he chose her. Because he was scared.

Rachel bleeds out in the snow. Wakes up the next morning as the new immortal Witness. Tells Nicky’s seven-year-old nephew Jude to “choose wisely” when he gets married someday.

That kid is never getting married. Honestly, reasonable response.

Rachel puts on the OG Witness’s suit (why??????) and peaces out.

Tara’s Take

I found Haley Z. Boston’s take on soulmates beautiful and deeply flawed.

The show isn’t really about some otherworldly mystical connection: two souls destined to find each other across time and space, written in the stars. It’s simpler and harder than that.

It’s about certainty.

Do you believe, with complete sureness, that the person you’re with was meant for you?

That's what saves Jules and Nell. They fight constantly. They scream at each other. They were literally about to announce their divorce at this wedding. But when it mattered, Jules believed. He says he's loved her since he was young. And that belief kept him alive.

But here’s where I land, and maybe where the show’s thesis gets complicated for me:

I think the bigger act of love is knowing the person isn’t your soulmate and choosing them anyway.

We’re given choice in this world for a reason. The idea that love is something that happens to you, that destiny drops the right person in your lap and you don’t have to do anything, feels like a cop-out. Real love is a decision. It’s waking up every day and choosing the same person even when it’s hard. Even when you’re not sure. Even when the cosmic math doesn’t add up.

That feels more like love than any curse ever could.

Rachel and Nicky didn’t work because Nicky never chose her. Not really. He wanted the story of her. The meet-cute. The idea of being in love. But when things got hard, when belief actually mattered, he didn’t show up. He didn’t believe in her and when his fragmented idea of a perfect marriage was fractured, he didn’t believe in them.

That’s not love.

The show had the bones to say something real about this. Jules and Nell were right there, doing the work, showing what it looks like to fight for someone. Portia had the tools and the willingness to go full supernatural. But the show kept everyone in their separate corners until it was almost too late. When it finally committed, it was good, it just took too long to get there.

Zach’s Take

Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen is pretty much a good show. It strings you along, is creepy and weird, has enviable production value, and the acting is genuinely good throughout by every main character.

As with any blood-soaked supernatural Duffer Brothers production, I watched this with my 11-year-old-daughter. She’s got a good eye, and she liked the show too. But we both had the nagging feeling that the slow rolling first…six episodes…was too much of a slow roll. I get it, you’re building tension, but the supernatural stuff in the show was good.

When Rachel and Nell do their little breaking-and-entering family tree investigation, it totally centers the story. But the show gives this bit like 8 minutes or so, and it’s pretty much the most important thing anyone does.

The bigger thing, though, is what Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen signifies about the shifting standards of what we’re calling prestige TV. I would totally watch a second season of the show following Rachel’s life as The Witness—this is a cool plotline! But, I doubt we’ll get it. If we do, it will be Glass Onion-ed and done as a new story with new people.

As a standalone one-off, I just don’t think Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen makes the cut as prestige TV in the biblical sense. This isn’t even Mare of Easttown, let alone The Sopranos. Relatively speaking, however, Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen probably is prestige TV, and that’s kind of a bummer for all of us.

Here’s the official explanation of the ending

The Verdict

Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen is artsy. It’s atmospheric. It’s got that slow-burn Mike Flanagan DNA even though the Duffer Brothers have their names on it. The performances are strong, especially Morrone, who carries the whole thing on her increasingly blood-soaked shoulders.

It’s a solid binge. The episodes fly by. And underneath all the horror and hemorrhaging, there’s something real being said about what it means to love someone. To choose them, to fight for them.

Just maybe don’t watch it right before your own wedding. Or with someone you’re already having doubts about. The creator said multiple people broke up with their partners after reading the finale script.

Fair warning.

Here’s how it’s fairing on Rotten Tomatoes:

Title: Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen

Where to Watch: Netflix

Episodes: 8

Vibe: The Haunting of Hill House meets couples therapy gone wrong

Rating: 8/10 hemorrhaging family members 🩸

Tara Ruff is an Emmy-winning journalist, founder of Purpose Public Relations. She writes stories for a living — and about them for fun. Zach Peterson is Sree’s long-time newsletter partner.

Like you, we’re just out here watching our little shows . We talk about them, text about them, deny watching them…all of it. You can help us keep doing it!

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🎭 WATCH: I got seven minutes to interview Aneil Karia, who directed Riz Ahmed in the new Hamlet. In 2021, the duo won an Oscar for Best Live Action Short for Long Goodbye, about an album by Ahmed of the same name.

👌🏾 This newsletter was written by humans. We use Gemini for research only, unless otherwise specified. See tips from my 24-day, 5-country AI training tour of Asia.

🙏 Paid subscriptions and sponsorships help us do more! Here’s how you can support Sree’s Sunday Note. Paid subscribers make it possible to launch new verticals, like our new entertainment newsletter Ok, TV.

* * *

Great news (and huge loss for Putin, Trump & Vance) just before I hit publish on this newsletter: Viktor Orban has conceded defeat in Hungary after 16 years as polls show dramatic swing to opposition party. I write below:

If Orban loses the election, that will be a good thing for the world; that he lost after Vance showed up to interfere in a foreign election would be a bonus.

Please note that Peter Magyar is not some Obama-like liberal savior guy. He’s more like Liz Cheney or something like that. He’s definitely right-of-center, especially by European standards. But, at this point, I’d take Liz Cheney as President. Wouldn’t you?

* * *

TWO YEARS AGO, I wrote the following:

Now with six years of thinking about JD Vance, I have some updated thoughts for you (hope you will go back and read that post, too, which explains why you shouldn’t be impressed by Hillbilly Elegy or anything else about his mythology).

Donald Trump should not be in office for a minute longer. But if he’s removed from office via the 25th Amendment, or by some other means, we should be very reticent to breathe anything like a sigh of relief.

Vance is a vacuous shape-shifter of a politician. He’s absolutely craven, deeply tied to Peter Thiel and other right-wing Silicon Valley tech nihilists, and he has no real beliefs about anything. His ideology is opportunism, and his constituency is whatever the worst elements of high society happen to be at any given moment.

His more ardent critics say Vance is dumb, but I don’t believe that. We should assume he is cold, calculating, and politically ruthless until we see evidence to the contrary. He was a Marine, he has a J.D. from Yale Law School, and he is a Senator-turned-Vice President—stupidity doesn’t get you that far, malleability does. The malleability counts because he is one of the least charismatic politicians I’ve ever seen.

Vance projects a gutter-dwelling belief of white male Christian domination that pervades everything he says and does. I’ll get to his more high-profile (and often cringe-worthy) awfulness, but this short clip perfectly encapsulates Vance’s worldview:

The message here may be subtle, but it’s undeniable. If I declare something “mine”, then it is mine and I have dominion over it. It could be a country, it could be an agency, it could be my wife—it doesn’t matter what it is, it matters that I say it’s mine and it must capitulate to me when I say it must.

As I write this, Vance’s team is on its way back from failed negotiations with his Iranian counterparts in Pakistan. I expected little from these talks going in, mainly because Trump and his cadre of hangers-on-cum-financiers would need a lane to personally profit, and a deal where he could do so with Iran is a long shot.

That is the only outcome Trump will abide, and Vance is the last person who will be able to convince him otherwise. Trump is clearly heavily invested in the talks, as shown by his attendance at the UFC fight in Miami with his Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Vanilla Ice, U.S. Ambassador to India Sergio Gor, and Joe Rogan. These are serious times and the President and his top diplomat want you to know that (for more on this theme, read my March post, “The Tragedy of Unserious People in Serious Jobs”).

Vance’s pit stop in Budapest on the way to Pakistan is also notable. Viktor Orban, Hungary’s wanna-be dictator and Vladimir Putin’s chief errand boy within the EU, is the model of the sort of administrative authoritarianism that the architects of Trump II have praised and are trying to emulate. If Orban loses the election, that will be a good thing for the world; that he lost after Vance showed up to interfere in a foreign election would be a bonus. Worth noting as writer Mary C. Curtis reminded me on this morning’s NYT Readalong with Neil Parekh: If Orban survives by underhanded methods, Trump & co will use similar tactics to ruin the midterms.

Contrast this administration’s treatment of Hungary and Ukraine and you’ll get the perfect encapsulation of what we’re facing in America. If you’re interested in going a bit deeper on Orban and how he has hollowed out Hungary’s economy and turned it into a pariah in Europe, read Anne Applebaum:

In actual reality, the news for Viktor Orbán, the Hungarian prime minister, is not good. After 16 years in office, plus an earlier three-year term, Orbán has made his country the most corrupt in the European Union, one of the poorest, and certainly the least free. His political party, Fidesz, now controls most universities, the civil service, the high courts, and, through a network of oligarchs, almost all newspapers and broadcasters, as well as about a fifth of the economy, according to independent economists. General paranoia about Fidesz spies means that Budapest, once again, has become a city where people lower their voices when talking about politics in public.

Vance is trying to bolster his foreign policy bona fides, and Trump is putting him front-and-center to give him a shot at doing just that. And he’s doing it in the place where his vision of a crony network of tech oligarchs, replete with their version of nihilistic libertarianism, has been tried. For a few people in Hungary, it’s worked out incredibly well. For many many more people, it has not. This is the Vance camp’s vision of America. Take heed.

This is also where the fundamental differences between Trump and Vance really emerge. Trump is chaotic, treacherous, and declining, but his goal is always the same—personal gain in front of as many eyeballs as possible. He is an empty vessel on the ideological side, more than willing to agree with whomever about whatever if he can “win” from it. What happens in-between is typically awful, but he is laser-focused and personal gain for a public audience.

Vance is not this. And he cannot gain power the way Trump did based on cult-of-personality—he doesn’t have one. His way forward is far more sinister. It’s a return to the sort of backroom-ification of the electioneering that Trump does blatantly in public whenever he can. Vance owes his political life and personal wealth to Thiel, whose Palantir will become a trillion-dollar company before long, mostly on the back of hundreds of billions of dollars in federal contracts—all of which are in support of harvesting, collating, and standardizing every piece of data about everyone. I wrote about how Thiel has hurt America here, here and here.

There is no doubt in my mind that Vance would weaponize his connections in the tech world to tip the scales in his favor and to his whims. Trump openly cares about what people think of him, Vance does too, but Vance happens to have the charisma of cardboard cutout of JD Vance.

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This is where Thiel comes in. It should be said that Thiel is not the only man—they are all white men, all of them—who operates as a Vance lever-puller, but he is certainly the most important one. In July 2025, Luke Munn, a Research Fellow at the University of Queensland, wrote a comprehensive, but very accessible, essay on Thiel’s ever-expanding role of GOP king-maker. It sort of kicks into gear with Thiel’s $15 million contribution to put Vance in the Senate, and his influence is only growing.

Thiel is rich, powerful, and he has his man, his former employee, a burgers-and-diet-Coke diet heartbeat from the Oval Office. The man is a techno-fascist by any measure, and his latest and easily most profitable investment to date has been the one he made in Vance. It was Thiel who brokered the first in-person meeting between Vance and Trump, a meeting that ultimately led to Vance becoming Trump’s running mate in 2024 (despite Vance calling Trump “America’s Hitler.”)

Here’s Thiel in his own words, from his essay “The Education of a Libertarian” in 2009:

I stand against confiscatory taxes, totalitarian collectives, and the ideology of the inevitability of the death of every individual. For all these reasons, I still call myself “libertarian.”

But I must confess that over the last two decades, I have changed radically on the question of how to achieve these goals. Most importantly, I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.

He continues:

The 1920s were the last decade in American history during which one could be genuinely optimistic about politics. Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women — two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians — have rendered the notion of “capitalist democracy” into an oxymoron.

In the face of these realities, one would despair if one limited one’s horizon to the world of politics. I do not despair because I no longer believe that politics encompasses all possible futures of our world. In our time, the great task for libertarians is to find an escape from politics in all its forms — from the totalitarian and fundamentalist catastrophes to the unthinking demos that guides so-called “social democracy.”

These are the core beliefs of the man to whom the sitting Vice President owes his entire political and professional life.

Trump does his corruption in broad daylight most of the time, pretty much with impunity, and look how bad that is. With Vance, it will be dark, it will be behind closed doors, and it will make your life worse.

— Sree / Twitter | IG | LinkedIn | FB | YouTube | Spread | TikTok

FYI: 28% of 2026 is already over. What will you do with the remaining 72%? LMK and I’ll see you made it all the way down here.

Have an idea for anything we’re up to? Let’s collaborate! sree.sreenivasan1@gmail.com

🎭 WATCH: I got seven minutes to interview Aneil Karia, who directed Riz Ahmed in the new Hamlet opening in US theaters April 10. In 2021, the duo won an Oscar for Best Live Action Short for Long Goodbye, about an album by Ahmed of the same name.

👌🏾 This newsletter was written by humans. We use Gemini for research only, unless otherwise specified. See tips from my 24-day, 5-country AI training tour of Asia.

🙏 Paid subscriptions and sponsorships help us do more! Here’s how you can support Sree’s Sunday Note. Paid subscribers make it possible to launch new verticals, like our new entertainment newsletter Ok, TV. And this mid-week bonus newsletter, with more to come.

***

FOUR CENTURIES AFTER Shakespeare’s remarkable life of letters, a boy in a foreign land fell in love with those plays and sonnets written in England. He grew up with the same level of technology as Will: A house with mud walls, no electricity, no indoor plumbing.

That boy grew up to be a Shakespearean scholar before he became an diplomat for his country. Envoys and ambassadors do appear in the plays, mostly to advance the story as temporary narrators. In Hamlet, the English ambassador arrives at the end to find the royal family dead, stating, “The sight is dismal; And our affairs from England come too late.”

That boy was my dad, T.P. Sreenivasan, whose love for the bard never diminished. He continued to read and study the canon; watch plays in multiple countries and even acted in amateur plays of all kinds when he could. His autobiography, the first of 11 books (and counting), was entitled Word Words Words: Adventures in Diplomacy (free download; the first part of the title is a line by Hamlet, as you can see below). And his book on Narendra Modi’s first five years as India’s PM: Modiplomacy through a Shakespearean Prism.

And he instilled that love in me, through bedtime retellings and a magical trip when I was nine to Stratford-Upon-Avon. We saw all the sights, including the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust. There he bought me a copy Tales from Shakespeare by Charles and Mary Lamb, which had abridged, accessible versions of the greatest hits.

Years later, I had the opportunity to work with the Birthplace Trust, workshopping ideas around digital. I even have a hashtag, #sreekespeare, to tag my posts about the topic. But the biggest Shakespeare project I’ve understaken was to help create Salute to Stratford: A Celebration of Startford on Shakespeare’s 456th Birthday. When I learned the pandemic had shut down the programming for April 23, 2020, I contacted Tim Cooke (with an E), the Birthplace Trust CEO and he assemebled an all-star cast of participants for a livestream show Neil Parekh and I produced with Digimentors.

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Among the speakers: the mayor of the town Shakespeare was born in; the headmaster of the school he studied in; the vicar of the church he’s buried in; the head of the Royal Shakespeare Company and so many more. Watch just a few minutes and you know Will would have appreciated this medium for storytelling:

A few weeks later, we hosted an episode of my live, daily global Covid show (250 episodes starting day one of the NYC lockdown) about Shakespeare & Pandemics, featuring, Prof. Emma Smith, Shakespeare Studies, Oxford; Prof. Carol Rutter, Shakespeare Studies, Univ of Warwick; Linda Bernstein, social media consultant and teacher:

That brings us to this week and my short Zoom interview with Aneil Karia, a British director who won a 2021 Oscar for Best Short Live Action Film when he last collaborated with Riz Ahmed. This time Riz plays Hamlet in a new imagining set in modern-day South Asian London, but with the bard’s own word. We talked about the art of putting Shakespeare on film, what he learned along the way, and if Riz (who’s currently getting worldwide attention with Bait on Prime) has a shot at being the next James Bond. The video is at the top of this essay as well as here.

BTW, I got an advance screener and watched the riveting performances by the four actors I recognized: Riz; Art Malik (Claudius, his uncle); Timothy Spall (Polonius, Claudius’s adviser) and Sheeba Chaddha (Gertrude, Hamlet’s mom) while trying to follow along with the play on my laptop. It’s a powerful and gripping reimagining of the play and Riz owns every scene he is in.

I saw the movie by myself in my living room; I wish I had seen it in a theater with others so I could take in their reactions along with mine. Decision made: I shall go and see it again in the theater. Who wants to come with me?

Don’t take my word for it. NYT movie critic Nicolas Rapold loved it:

…Karia and [screenewriter ]Lesslie have revamped “Hamlet” in a dynamic cinematic idiom, with a streamlined text and cast and mobile camerawork. Where some adaptations can bear traces of theatrical address, we feel cheek by jowl with Hamlet in his struggles to recover from grief, avenge his father, and come to terms with living — whether he’s stalking his father’s ghost through London streets, or hogging the mike at the party for his mother and uncle’s wedding.

This is the official trailer:

And he’s hosting SNL UK this Saturday (had no idea there was such a show on Sky TV).

— Sree / Twitter | IG | LinkedIn | FB | YouTube | Spread | TikTok

FYI: 26.8% of 2026 is already over. What will you do with the remaining 74.2%? LMK and I’ll see you made it all the way down here.

Have an idea for anything we’re up to? Let’s collaborate! sree.sreenivasan1@gmail.com

Here’s Gemini’s summary of the interview:

In this interview, Oscar-winning director Aneil Karia and host Sree Sreenivasan discuss the upcoming U.S. premiere of the bold, modern adaptation of Hamlet starring Riz Ahmed.

Key Highlights of the Adaptation

• A Modernized Vision: Set within London’s elite South Asian community, the film aims to strip away the “stiffness” often associated with Shakespeare. Karia focused on making the language feel “lived-in,” human, and conversational 03:54 Opens in a new window .

• Bold Narrative Shifts: To make the film more cinematic and focused, the team made the radical decision to remove scenes where Hamlet is not present. If Hamlet isn’t experiencing it, the audience doesn’t see it 05:09 Opens in a new window .

• Streamlined Cast: Several classic characters, including Horatio, Rosencrantz, and Guildenstern, were cut to emphasize Hamlet’s isolation 05:30 Opens in a new window .

• Cultural Significance: Karia addresses the “conditioning” that Shakespeare is only for the elite, expressing his thrill that a film with such specific cultural specificity is receiving a wide U.S. release through distributors like Vertical 00:45 Opens in a new window .

Production Insights

• Collaborating with Riz Ahmed: Karia notes how influential the cast was, specifically mentioning the legendary Art Malik, whom Riz Ahmed credits as a primary reason for his own career path 06:15 Opens in a new window .

• The Script: The adaptation was written by Michael Lesslie, who Karia credits with having the deep understanding of the play necessary to “repurpose and redistribute” the original text effectively 05:48 Opens in a new window .

• The “Long Play” Challenge: Karia admits that filming a 4-hour play on an indie budget wasn’t feasible, leading to the creative “cuts” that keep the film focused and contemporary 04:29 Opens in a new window .

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DIPLOMACY HAS A REAL MARKET OPPORTUNITY RIGHT NOW. Unfortunately, the U.S. is on the diplomatic outside looking in.

There will be books written about the self-inflicted wounds of the Trump era to America’s role and standing in the world. The war in Iran, now well into its second month, shows little in the way of winding down. Trump refuses to even consider any off-ramps, his designated deal-seeking duo of Steve Witkoff and son-in-law Jared Kushner continue to come up empty, and the Strait of Hormuz remains closed. The current military objective for a war Trump has claimed to have already won multiple times: Reopen the strait, which was happily open on Feb 27!

We’ve never needed a diplomatic solution like we do now, and we’ve never had less capacity to achieve one. What’s more—and sort of a constant in modern global affairs—diplomacy is continuing apace. 35 countries are meeting about the Iran war and Israel’s actions in Lebanon, and the U.S. is nowhere to be found.

What’s more, there is no U.S. ambassador in Brazil, Egypt, Germany, Indonesia, Iraq, Pakistan, Qatar, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Korea and the United Arab Emirates.

I grew up in a diplomatic family. My dad, T.P. Sreenivasan, retired as India’s ambassador to Austria and the International Atomic Energy Agency (he played golf regularly with IAEA chief and future Nobel laureate Mohamed ElBaradei, who warned against war against Iraq and is warning us again — see below); my late mother Lekha Sreenivasan was an unofficial diplomat herself (and wrote a memoir called “Better Half of Diplomacy”); my dad’s brother, T.P. Seetharam, retired as India’s ambassador to the UAE. I asked my dad for his thoughts on the quality of American diplomats of yore. He wrote, via WhatsApp (of course):

US diplomats are true professionals, reflecting their global power and influence. As for India, I have seen them at their best when Clinton decided to cultivate India in 1997 and at their worst in 1998 when we tested our nuclear weapon. A few of them became close friends. Ironically, we used to vote with the Soviet Union, but hung out with the Americans at the UN bar, which was called the Seventh Committee! (a reference here is to six committees of the General Assembly and the seventh is the place where real work is done).

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has had quite a month on the diplomatic side as well. His persistence is another example of diplomacy being the long game. There may not be a leader anywhere in the world who understands this better than him. He continues to make his very compelling case, and continues to be convincing enough—that is the essence of diplomacy. I wrote about politicking and deal-making back in 2023, and my argument stands: Democracy requires the space for deal-making, and deal-making is typically better than the alternative.

This piece from David Cortright in the The International Policy Journal paints a dire picture for U.S. diplomacy:

Trump has poisoned the well once again, this time at the cost of more than a thousand Iranian lives and the deaths of the regime’s top leaders. It’s unlikely that the surviving leaders will rush to return to the bargaining table with Washington or accept a climb-down in their security objectives without countervailing US concessions.

Leaving aside the complete dereliction of duty we’re seeing from the entire federal government, imagine scrapping a negotiated deal that was, by all accounts, working, having no plan to replace it, initiating talks to basically make the same deal that you tore up, and then attacking a country and killing its leadership in missile strikes.

Listening to Marco Rubio, America’s chief “diplomat,” speak, it’s not hard to see why other countries simply refuse to engage with the U.S. in any meaningful way. That he can stand in front of a camera and scold “the world” about the imperative of keeping shipping lanes open after the fighting ends with a straight face is actually incredible.

There should be a plan, indeed.

But, diplomats have been re-assigned, let go, shunned, and otherwise ignored. The war on expertise persists, and has found fertile ground in this White House.

Enter, Witkoff and Kushner. Witkoff is clearly unfit for the role of U.S. Special Envoy to [insert country here], but it the utter illegitimacy of Jared Kushner in all of this that should make your hair stand up on end.

Again, from Cortright’s piece:

At one point, Witkoff expressed surprise that Iran was producing centrifuges, which it has done for decades. He and Kushner wrongly described the use of 20% enriched uranium at the Tehran Research Reactor (TRR) as a bomb threat. The facility, well known to nuclear scientists and nonproliferation experts, was built by the United States and has been used for civilian research for nearly six decades.

Kushner is, first and foremost, not an employee of the U.S. government in any way. He is in the room, negotiating with Israel and Hamas, Russia and Ukraine, intermediaries and Iran, and he has absolutely no accountability to any branch of the government aside from the Signal chat he has with his father-in-law.

Kushner is also deeply compromised financially throughout the Middle East and beyond. There is so much more, but this paragraph Mohammed Bazzi in The Guardian from October 2025 is really all you need to know:

Six months after the end of the first Trump administration, Kushner’s newly created company secured a $2bn investment from Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund. It was an unusually large stake, considering that Kushner and his firm had little experience or track record in private equity. In fact, the kingdom’s crown prince and de facto ruler, Mohammed bin Salman, overruled a group of advisers who had objected to investing in Kushner’s new project. The advisers warned that due diligence conducted on behalf of the Saudi Public Investment Fund had found the firm’s early operations “unsatisfactory in all aspects”. But leaked internal documents published by the New York Times showed that Prince Mohammed dismissed those concerns, and he was more focused on using the infusion of Saudi cash to cultivate a “strategic relationship” with Kushner.

The younger Kushner is, at best, an illegitimate diplomat, his father Charles Kushner is an incompetent one. The elder Kushner, the U.S. Ambassador to France, “stunned” the French government with his lack of understanding of what it means to be America’s representative abroad. This CNN writeup by Melissa Bell paints a picture of Charles Kushner’s incompetence (bordering on malfeasance) from America’s senior diplomatic core in Europe that is nothing short of astounding. Like so much this administration has ruined only to need it more, it is now directing U.S. missions abroad to fight information wars that it both helped sow, and it is scrambling to catch up in an information fight that it has dismissed for years.

The truth of diplomacy is that everything is diplomacy, especially for a country like the U.S. that has loomed so large in global affairs for the last century. ICE actions in Minnesota are diplomacy. Destroying the East Wing of the White House is diplomacy. Being all over the Epstein files is diplomacy. Firing most of your military leadership in the midst of a disastrous kinetic campaign is diplomacy.

Trashing the country’s main allies is not the best idea either:

The most important thing for all of us to understand, is that diplomacy is our representation abroad, whether we like it or not. If you are an American living anywhere but America, this administration is what you have to deal with. And this administration is representing you in everything it does.

By all expert accounts, the people running point on the issues that are making our lives objectively worse are completely out of their depth. Expertise, experience, and personal connections are the grease in the diplomatic wheel, and Trump and Rubio are doing everything they can to undermine the entire enterprise.

Despite it all, diplomacy will continue, with or without the U.S. at the table.

I’ll let Mark Twain take us home. Read “Diplomatic Pay and Clothes”—it holds true today. I’ll take a few expensive dinners over a war that throws the global economy into utter chaos any day of the week.

A foreign representative, to be valuable to his country, must be on good terms with the officials of the capital and with the rest of the influential folk. He must mingle with this society; he cannot sit at home--it is not business, it butters no commercial parsnips. He must attend the dinners, banquets, suppers, balls, receptions, and must return these hospitalities. He should return as good as he gets, too, for the sake of the dignity of his country, and for the sake of Business. Have we ever had a minister or an ambassador who could do this on his salary? No--not once, from Franklin's time to ours. Other countries understand the commercial value of properly lining the pockets of their representatives; but apparently our Government has not learned it.

Politics is the absence of war, and we could really use more politics these days.

— Sree / Twitter | IG | LinkedIn | FB | YouTube | Spread | TikTok

FYI: 26.8% of 2026 is already over. What will you do with the remaining 73.2%? LMK and I’ll see you made it all the way down here.

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Go Deeper

As I said above, everything we do as a country is diplomacy. So, here are some recent not-so-shining examples of how America is conducting itself at home and abroad.

• Attorney General Pam Bondi is out. Her legacy, above all else, will be her unwavering commitment to protecting Trump and his allies in the Epstein Files. So many other countries are holding people accountable for their Epstein ties. In America, the government is actively protecting these people, including the president.

• About a year ago, Elon Musk proudly tweeted that USAID had been “fed to the wood chipper.” Since then, Dr. Brooke Nichols and Eric Moakley have been tracking the fallout—the consequences (still ongoing) have been dire. They estimate that nearly 800,000 people have died as a direct result of USAID cuts, more than 500,000 of those deaths are children.

Everything we do is diplomacy, and America has become an embarrassment, a remarkably dangerous embarrassment.

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We’re back. I binged the last five episodes. And by binge I mean watched it over the span of a week because there was too much going on for my brain to fully comprehend in just one sitting. And I have to tell you: the subplots multiplied like rabbits, the twists came at me so fast I got whiplash, and somehow this show managed to be both completely predictable AND shocking at the same time.

If you read Part 1, you know the drill: escaped serial killers, a team that’s way too small for this job, and Bex (Melissa Roxburgh) going in alone with murderers like it’s her cardio routine.

Let’s finish this.

A Quick Subplot Update Before We Begin

Remember how I said everyone in this show is connected? It got worse. SO much worse.

By the end of this season:

• Shane is NOT actually Dr. Dulles’ son ✓

• But he was meeting with Dr. Dulles for years thinking he was his therapist ✓

• Shane’s REAL mother is Col. Lazarus—Odell’s mysterious military contact ✓

• The AG is shady and involved with everything ✓

• There are SIX more secret prisons ✓

• A pharmaceutical company called Whitmore Sciences funded the whole thing ✓

• It was never about rehabilitation, it was about MONEY and PATENTS ✓

• Oh and Hassani’s wife has been dead for two years and nobody told us until the finale ✓

I was groaning by Episode 9.

Episode 6: Arlo Brandt

We open on a classic horror movie setup: a man has spike strips on the road next to his creepy isolated farmhouse. Anyone who drives by gets a flat tire and has to knock on his door for help.

The house is clearly creepy. There are clearly signs this person is not ok. And yet our victim walks right in.

Meet Arlo Brandt, played by David Ramsey (yes, Diggle from Arrow, now playing a serial killer, give us range!). Seemingly nice. Funny. Friendly. A little TOO friendly. Which, as we all know, is creepy as fuck.

He calls a “tow truck.” The victim comes inside to talk to the “tow truck guy” on the phone even though every instinct should be screaming no. And lo and behold—the phone’s unplugged. We’ve found our next killer. Arlo Brandt.

Arlo’s therapy at The Pit: Material Detachment Therapy. They denied him possessions to control his need to hoard. “If he could control his need to possess, he can control his need to kill.”

Please. Who writes these lines.

But here’s where it gets disturbing: we see videos of Arlo actually trying. He wanted growth. He was admitting how sick he was. In the creepiest way possible, it felt like he was changing for the better amidst horrifying abuse.

Cut to: him dragging a undressed, clearly tortured man into a basement.

He’s recreating The Pit. He wants to “help people unclutter their lives, unclutter their minds.” By kidnapping and torturing them. Cool cool cool.

Also: Shane’s dad (Dr. Dulles) is in a senior living home with Alzheimer’s. He called it a “prison” on a FaceTime call. A PRISON. As in, the place where he tortured and experimented on killers. The irony is real.

ALSO ALSO: A woman shows up claiming to be Dr. Dulles’ daughter. Says he doesn’t have a son. So... who is Shane???

Episode 6 verdict: One of the better acted killers. The “everyone is connected” web just got messier. And the question of whether people can change is getting uncomfortable.

Episode 7: Mark Marsden, The Widower

We open on a couple’s wedding day in Hawaii. Sooooo romantic? No. The bride drinks champagne, starts choking—clearly poisoned. The husband did it.

Then he DROWNS her. As if the poison wasn’t enough.

My guy has levels of murder here.

Mark Marsden: “The Widower.” Fear of abandonment so severe that he’d rather kill the women he loves than risk them leaving him. Girlfriend dumped him at 15? He killed her two weeks later. And it never stopped. Three wives. All dead.

Men will literally murder three wives instead of going to therapy.

His therapy at The Pit: They had a woman—an admin worker named Carol Miller who needed extra cash—marry him. Over and over. More than a hundred times. “Exposure therapy” so he’d stop feeling the need to kill wives.

Reader, she fell in love with him.

Bex has to explain hybristophilia to the team—an intense attraction to criminals. Look at the Manson girls. It happens. Carol’s husband had died six months before she started working with Mark. She was grieving, vulnerable, and heard words of love and adoration on repeat until she believed them.

So Carol runs away with Mark. She’s the Bonnie to his Clyde now. Picking out wedding dresses. Planning their new life together. Convinced she’s different.

They eventually get Carol to see the truth. They send her recordings of all his previous wedding ceremonies—he uses the same exact script every time. At the altar, he starts reciting those same lines to her, and she finally realizes. She can’t go through with it.

Mark pulls a gun. Bex shoots him through the door.

But lets talk about something here. Carol is the victim in the end. We forget that a lot. Why didn’t she leave? Why didn’t she say something? Because in this society, we’re conditioned to believe if someone loves us, everything else should fall by the wayside. And our life situations make it worse—the circumstances many women are born into that make us feel so worthless that love in any form, even at a cost, feels worth it.

I got deep. Moving on.

ALSO: The episode ends with Bex, Hassani, and Odell finally going to Silo 12. What they find? Not a break-in. A massacre. Bullet holes. Blood stains. An execution chair behind two-way glass. Someone came in and killed everyone.

Episode 7 verdict: This episode made me angry in a visceral, personal way. The depiction of how men like this prey on women like Carol was... too real.

Episode 8: Denise Glenn

We open on a dead body strung up like a ballerina. A professor is lecturing about art. Police walk in. Arrest her. Under arrest for the murder of six people.

Woof. If I was a student in that room.

Meet Denise Glenn. Professor. Artist. “The Muse Murderer.” She killed six people as offerings to the nine Greek muses—Clio, Euterpe, Thalia, Melpomene, Terpsichore, Erato, Polymnia, Urania, and Calliope. Each victim was a gifted high achiever at the top of their field, staged into grotesque “art pieces” after death. She thinks she’s immortalizing them. “No one can forget them now, thanks to me!”

But wait: Denise was pulled from The Pit’s rubble hours after the explosion. She’s already in custody. So who’s out there finishing her work?

A copycat. Her apprentice: Craig Martin.

The Pit had inmates with severe attachment disorders and anger issues toward women watch Denise sculpt through two-way glass—”fixation displacement therapy,” they called it. One of them became obsessed. Craig started killing women on dating apps before The Pit. Now he’s devoted to finishing Denise’s masterpiece.

Men with mommy issues, I’m telling you. Some of the most dangerous in the world.

How they catch him: Bex photoshops Craig’s signature onto one of Denise’s kills. Takes credit for HER project. No better way to stress out a narcissistic serial killer than stealing credit for her murders.

She gives him up immediately. We are all defined by our egos at the end of the day.

His final target? The head of the department who took credit for Denise’s lectures when she was a professor. He’s planted a bomb at her former university. They defuse it just in time.

ALSO: Denise gets her throat slit at the end of the episode by a mysterious woman in a car. Whitmore Sciences is cleaning up loose ends. The conspiracy deepens.

Episode 8 verdict: The ego play was clever. The murder art was genuinely creepy. And the conspiracy just swallowed another person.

Episode 9: Tom Beecher

I have to warn you: this is the creepiest episode yet.

We open in 2016. A young woman struggles, tied to a chair. She’s suffocated—right in front of another woman tied to an adjacent chair. This is Tom Beecher’s MO, and it’s pure psychological horror.

He targets women in their early to mid-20s. Kidnaps one. Terrorizes her family. Then kidnaps a second. Forces the second to watch as he tortures and suffocates the first with a plastic bag. Calls the parents during it to describe in detail what he’s doing.

I have actual goosebumps typing this.

So naturally, Tom has escaped and is back to his old and disturbing antics.

Bex tells the parents of the kidnapped girl: “He’s going to call. You need to answer. Keep him on the phone. He’ll tell you all the ways he’s going to torture your daughter. Stay on the phone.”

MY. GOD.

His therapy at The Pit: This one’s different. Tom wasn’t part of the regular “therapy” programs. He was Dr. Dulles’ personal project. The doctor gave him brain surgery. Wiped his short-term memory every time he sleeps. Long-term memory intact. Short-term? Gone.

Why would Dulles do this? Because Dulles has Alzheimer’s. He wanted to understand the disease coming for him. By experimenting on a serial killer.

The problem: Tom genuinely can’t remember where he put his victim, Lily Jacobs. He WANTS them to suffer, so he’s not helping. And every time he sleeps, the information resets. But the catch? Dulles also taught him a coding system that works with muscle memory. Even without conscious recall, Beecher can encode and decode messages to himself using patterns burned deep enough to survive the memory wipe. Post-It notes. Recorded voices. A cipher only he understands.

The plan: They sedate Tom, wipe his memories AGAIN, reset the motel room exactly as they found it—creepy Post-It notes and all—and put Morales in the bathtub as a fake second victim. Then they let him wake up and follow his routine, hoping he leads them to Lily.

Suuuuuper creepy.

But here’s where Morales finally gets her moment. She’s been behind the desk all season. This time she volunteers to go undercover as Tom’s victim. Because Lily is from her hometown. Because this case is personal. Because she’s tired of watching from the sidelines.

She’s terrifying and brave and I wanted to scream the entire time.

Of course, Tom figures it out. They left soot on his steering wheel. He knows he’s being followed. Goes off-script.

And kills himself. Rather than let them find Lily.

But he was humming something—Moonlight Sonata. That’s the code. Morales cracks it: the first letter of every word Tom made Lily say in his recording (because now he records his victims to remember the torture) spells out the location. They find her alive.

ALSO: The episode ends with a bombshell. Dr. Dulles’ daughter has been watching all his old therapy tapes. In one of them, young Shane is getting a Rorschach test. And on the other side of the two-way glass? A woman. Shane’s mother.

Episode 9 verdict: Most disturbing killer yet. The memory-wipe plan was insane. Morales finally got to shine. And Shane’s family tree just became a crime scene.

Episode 10: Jenna Wells

Finale time. Let’s see how many plot threads they can tie up in 42 minutes.

(Spoiler: not all of them.)

We finally get the truth about Whitmore Sciences: it was never about funding the Pit to treat killers. It was about a drug called GWB45—an “empathy modulator.” Increase or decrease empathy. The scientists wanted to rehabilitate killers. The military wanted to create soldiers with zero empathy—no PTSD, no hesitation.

Woof.

Whitmore lost control of his project. Flew into a rage. Sent a tactical team to Silo 12 to reclaim “his” inmates. C4 in the explosion rubble.

“It was never about science, it was always about money!” Bex says.

Like, ya babe. Yeahh.

The killer: Jenna Wells, played by Eliza Coupe (Happy Endings, playing VERY against type here). Pharmacist. Poisoned her customers’ prescriptions. Zero empathy. Killed out of simple jealousy—if someone had something she didn’t have, they died. At least 24 victims.

Her therapy at The Pit: They gave her the HIGHEST dose of GWB45. Gave a psychopath pure empathy. And now she doesn’t just kill people—she becomes them. Takes their identity. Lives their life. Genuinely believes she IS them.

She kills a pharmacist who looks like her. Then a caterer named Anna Thomas. Stores their bodies in freezers with cyanide patches on their necks. Then poses as Anna to infiltrate a Whitmore Sciences gala.

And poisons everyone in the room. We’re talking the sort of mass murder that would be international news.

Whitmore himself goes down—she’d already slapped a patch on his neck. Shootout ensues. Hassani gets shot.

The AG shuts down the whole operation. Says she needs a team that “understands discretion.” Meanwhile, Jenna escapes in the chaos. Like guys, come onnnn.

At the hospital, Bex tries to call Hassani’s wife to update her. Morales drops a bomb: his wife died. Two years ago. That’s why he’s been stateside.

THEY JUST DROPPED THAT LIKE IT WAS NOTHING.

Back at their now-decommissioned base, Jenna—cosplaying as Bex now, soft waves and all—has Odell at gunpoint. She wants him to delete all records of her existence.

Shane gets a call: Dr. Dulles is awake. If he wants to know who his mother is, he has to go NOW. He chooses the team. Rushes to base. Takes down Jenna.

But.

She already poisoned Odell. Cyanide patch on the neck. His nose starts bleeding. He collapses.

“The hunting party is over.”

Meanwhile: Morales runs voice recognition on the tape of Shane’s mother. Dr. Dulles wakes up just long enough to confirm it.

Shane’s mother is Colonel Lazarus. The military contact. The one who’s been feeding Odell information all season.

The season ends with Odell dying in Bex’s arms. We don’t know if he makes it.

Episode 10 verdict: They crammed approximately seven episodes worth of plot into one finale. Odell’s fate is technically a cliffhanger. And I have questions. But honestly?

The Final Verdict

Look. This show was all over the place. There were more subplots than my neighbor has Amazon packages. The psychological jargon was delivered like someone reading from a textbook. And the ending came at me so fast I’m still processing.

The killers were creepy. The twists landed more often than not. And the question at the center—can people change? can torture rehabilitate? who are the real monsters here?—actually made me think.

Critics still hate it (18% on Rotten Tomatoes). Audiences still love it (82%). And I’m somewhere in the middle, exhausted but... entertained? I think?

Questions I Still Have:

• Is Odell actually dead???

• What happens to Col. Lazarus now that we know she’s Shane’s mom???

• Will the AG face any consequences??? (lol)

• Are there really SIX more secret prisons???

• Why did they cram so many subplots into ten episodes???

• HOW DID THESE KILLERS KEEP GETTING CARS???

The Rating

Title: The Hunting Party (Season 1, Episodes 6-10)
Where to Watch: Netflix (Season 1) / Peacock (Season 2 currently airing)
Rating: 5/10 subplots I lost track of 📋

Overall Season 1 Verdict

The Hunting Party is cable TV procedural comfort food with a conspiracy thriller chaser. It’s not prestige TV and I don’t think it’s trying to be.

Should you watch it? If you liked Criminal Minds, The Blacklist, or any show where attractive people chase serial killers while hiding secrets from each other—yes. It’s a solid binge.

Will I watch Season 2? Honestly... probably not. The show was fun, but by the finale I was getting tired and frankly, confused as holy hell, by the subplots, and the big cliffhanger didn’t exactly keep me up at night. Sorry Odell—I like you, but not enough to sit through another season of “wait, who’s related to who now?”

If you’re still invested, godspeed. I’ll be over here watching something with fewer conspiracy boards.

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— Tara

Tara Ruff is an Emmy-winning journalist and founder of Purpose Public Relations. She writes stories for a living — and about them for fun. Ok, TV is part of the Sree’s Sunday Note family of newsletters.

🙏 Paid subscriptions and sponsorships help us do more! Here’s how you can support Sree’s Sunday Note. Paid subscribers make it possible to launch new verticals, like our new entertainment newsletter Ok, TV. Thank YOU!

🚨 News 12 is hiring a Director of Digital Strategy—full job description here.

TODAY’S NEWSLETTER IS filled with tips and thoughts about AI, but allow me two quick political comments.

1. President Donald Trump is attending Wednesday’s Supreme Court hearing on birthright citizenship, making him the first sitting president to attend oral arguments at the nation’s highest court. You know why he’s there: To put pressure on the six conservative justices to vote his way. In Jan. 2025, my newsletter featured a look at why birthright citizenship matters, via two sharp observers of the American scene: Geetika Rudra (on why the American idea of birthright citizenship was “a defining moment of world history) and Jaykumar Menon (on the moral case for opposing the end of birthright citizenship).

2. The No Kings marches were massive this past weekend and my daughter, Durga Sreenivasan and I were right in the middle of the joy and real community spirit that spread through the day. The turnout in NYC was nothing short of inspiring, as you can see from the live stream I did on IG. As much as this was a protest against Trump and all he represents, I think we should focus on the “all he represents” part the most.

TAKE A LOOK at the two videos below. Both take place at the Blue Mosque in Istanbul, but one is AI-generated via ChatGPT’s recently shuttered Sora app.

One of the core skills of the 21st century will be the ability to tell fake content from real. Looking side by side, it might seem easy, but when I showed folks these separately, many thought the fake was real, and the real was fake (video template by Luke Peterson, a 14-year-old[!] who does nice drone work, too).

The rise of synthetic content was just one of the topics of my AI training tour of Asia, an exhilarating and exhausting five-country, 24-day tour that started with a bang on the tarmac at Newark Airport. It ended with my emceeing the Indiaspora Global AI Summit in Bangalore, a #LifeHighlight, a gathering of pioneers, startups, VCs, researchers, experts and students (⁠40+ world-class speakers, from India and abroad; 5 plenary sessions, 6 breakouts; 700+ attendees from India and abroad; and the launch of two major reports: Top 100 Startups in India list & “WeAreCity” report, Bangalore vs Hyderabad). Read a news story by about the summit by T. Vishnudatta Jayaraman in South Asian Herald.

In between Newark and Bangalore were 11 workshops + assorted meetings, briefings and more in Singapore, Hong Kong, Colombo and Istanbul. The hunger to learn, to discover, to share, to teach was similar everywhere.

Common themes/topics/questions we addressed:

• Skills needed to thrive, not just survive, the next decade

• What children should be learning in the AI age.

• China’s swift rise and dominance of practical AI.

• The future of jobs, with 100s of millions at risk of becoming unemployed.

• How to assess and value actual human creativity.

• AI’s role in misinformation and disinformation.

• Turmoil in Middle East means opportunity for places like Hong Kong, Singapore, Australia, India and others.

• BONUS: Did you know that every single iPhone 17 in the world, including the one Tim Cook uses, is made in India?

Learn more: Hire me to do an AI workshop, give a talk, moderate a panel. Here’s a brochure. sree.sreenivasan1@gmail.com

Talkin’ AI w/ Sree & Digimentors: Join my low-volume, highly useful, global AI WhatsApp group. Lurk and leave anytime you like.

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Consumer, Commercial, and Imposed Usage

Back in 2023, I wrote a piece called “The Public as a Laboratory” as a meditation on how these world-changing technologies are just released to the public and the prevailing idea is to let the chips fall where they may. Said like that, it sounds like an absolutely crazy thing to do. Little has changed in the three years since I wrote that piece, and public opinion polling on AI shows a skeptical public that sees utility in AI, but is well-aware that there are huge risks, trade-offs, and environmental questions around it.

It’s a level of nuance that is rare in polling around major issues, and I am very happy to see it. How, if at all, policy makers and the AI industrial powers-that-be react to that nuanced skepticism is anyone’s guess. To date, it’s been a pretty hard and fast push to flood the zone. Now, there is growing resistance to that approach, and it is having real effects.

According to Gallup polling from Q4 2025, the public sector is slightly ahead of the private sector in AI uptake.

In Q4 2025, 43% of public-sector employees report using AI at least a few times a year, including 21% who use it daily or multiple times per week. That figure is up from 17% in Q2 2023 and 28% in Q2 2024.

A similar rate of 41% of private-sector employees report using AI in Q4 2025. Private-sector use is more concentrated among frequent users: 25% use AI frequently and 16% use it occasionally. In the public sector, occasional use is more common at 22%.

And more and more of us are using it every day.

We use it, and we have it used on us, largely without our explicit consent; we have it imposed on us at work; and we absolutely don’t trust it:

Over the last year, more people say they have lost trust AI than say they trust it more:

When asked how their trust in AI has changed over the past year, only one in five (21%) say it has increased. More (25%) say it has decreased while about half of all respondents (47%) say they trust AI about the same as they did a year ago.

On top of this skepticism, a full 77% of Americans polled are concerned that AI could threaten humanity, and more than half of them are “very concerned” about it. There is also galvanization of public opinion around the data centers needed to power all of this:

This chart perfectly represents the debate around so many of our economic decisions—what are we willing to trade for the political-industrial promise of job creation and tax revenue? The answer to that seems to be in some sort of perpetual limbo, but with AI, the public mood is pretty clear, and largely mirrors my own. Democrats and Republicans even completely agree that neither political party has the chops to deal with AI at the policy level:

It may be a stretch, but AI might be the one thing that Americans pretty much agree on.

Like anything else, there are doomers and boosters of equal intensity of the AI discussion, but this is not a discussion being had at extremes. It’s a discussion being had within companies and organizations of all sizes and households alike by people who are using these tools—both by choice, and by mandate.

It all comes down to trust, and trust comes from accountability. The latter has been sorely lacking so far, and we are trying to figure out what accountability with AI even means. Crucially, we are doing this on-the-fly during AI’s exponential expansion phase—not ideal timing to be sure. But, we are having this discussion, we are using these tools and even finding utility in them, and most Americans are on the same page when it comes to questioning what it is we are being signed up for.

We are a skeptical public when it comes to AI, and I hope it stays that way. We should be as pressing as ever on our public officials, but it’s crucial to put the private companies building these tools under public scrutiny as well.

— Sree / Twitter | IG | LinkedIn | FB | YouTube | Spread | TikTok

FYI: 24.6% of 2026 is already over. What will you do with the remaining 77.4%? LMK and I’ll see you made it all the way down here.

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From the AI Group Chat

I host a lively, low-volume WhatsApp group to discuss all matters AI, from practical application to high-minded existential questions. It’s an experienced community of real practitioners, many of them who work at major firms and directly on and with AI. Here are a couple of highlights from the group.

• Claude Cowork Might Be the Most Consequential Piece of Software You’re Not Using

• Reading list from Reuters Institute’s AI and the Future of News 2026

• Horror Novel ‘Shy Girl’ Canceled Over Suspected A.I. Use

• The Human Skill That Eludes AI

Want to join the group? Here’s the link.

Have an idea for anything we’re up to? Let’s collaborate! sree.sreenivasan1@gmail.com and please connect w/ me: Twitter | IG | LinkedIn | FB | YouTube | Spread | TikTok

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PARTNER MESSAGE

Are You News 12’s Next Director of Digital Strategy?

It’s an exciting time for hyperlocal news, and News 12 is growing. Audrey Latman Gruber (a former student of Sree’s at Columbia Journalism School) and her team are looking for a Director of Digital Strategy to advance News 12’s digital-first operations across every newsroom. This is a crucial role at News 12. The new Director will have a broad portfolio, a lot of opportunity to advance, and near-endless space to innovate across News 12’s Emmy award-winning newsrooms.

Join News 12 and help them serve communities across Long Island, the Bronx, Brooklyn, Westchester, Hudson Valley, Connecticut and New Jersey, with news they can’t find anywhere else.

Apply here