DL Open Thread Sunday Magazine: September 7, 2025
Has Elon Musk Gotten Bored With Making Cars?:
Elon Musk still makes some of America’s best electric cars. Earlier this summer, I rented a brand-new, updated Tesla Model Y, the first refresh to the electric SUV since it debuted, in 2020. Compared with even just two years ago, when the Model Y became the world’s best-selling car, many companies make great EVs now. Some of them have the Model Y beat in certain areas, but for the price, the Tesla is still the total package.
Now, imagine how good Teslas could be if Musk apparently wasn’t so bored with making them. With the exception of the struggling Cybertruck, Tesla hasn’t released an entirely new electric car in five years. Musk has indicated that he wants Tesla to primarily focus on building robotaxis and robots. Autonomous-vehicle technology “is the product that makes Tesla a ten-trillion company,” he told his biographer, Walter Isaacson. “People will be talking about this moment in a hundred years.” All the while, Tesla has continued to make almost all of its money from selling cars.
But now it’s clearer than ever that Tesla’s future is not in selling cars. The company’s latest “Master Plan IV,” which was released earlier this week, makes no mention of any new electric cars in the works. It is instead a technocratic fever dream, predicting a future in which humanoid robots made by Tesla free us from mundane tasks and create a utopia of “sustainable abundance.” To the extent that cars are mentioned at all, it’s in the context of robotaxis, or the batteries that power them. In other words, Tesla, the biggest EV company in the country, wants out of the car business.
Granted, Musk is onto something here. Many in the auto industry believe that technologies such as electric power and autonomous driving will converge over time, which is why they’re bullish on EVs in the long term.
But by betting everything on AI, Tesla is sacrificing the very thing that the company knows how to make so well: cars.
Tesla could be financing its self-driving-technology dreams by making that affordable EV or a more conventional pickup truck, but Musk seems to see that as some kind of distraction. If his master plan doesn’t pan out, there won’t be much left of Tesla. The company’s sales have collapsed across the world, in part because of Musk’s politics and in part because Tesla is getting hammered by EV newcomers from China. The master plan doesn’t outline any way forward.
“The Fort Bragg Cartel”. Hmm, think I’m gonna read this one:
In his engrossing new book,The Fort Bragg Cartel, investigative journalist Seth Harp argues persuasively that Bragg serves as a perfect living memorial for the forever wars, not simply because it trained and housed the men most caught up in the wars’ crux but also because the base and its environs exemplify the bone-deep domestic damage that the conflict spawned.
Harp chronicles some of the more troubling goings-on in this haunted region and the secretive, self-destructive warrior culture that has defined it for decades. He sums up this atmosphere through certain conventional characters and accoutrements—namely troops with souped-up trucks, dysfunctional relationships, and damaging drinking habits—but also with truly shocking details that eerily echo the conflicts’ corrupt dynamics abroad. Specifically, Harp digs into the region’s thrumming undercut of plunder and violence, tracing a bloody trail that includes bullet-riddled bodies, sexual assault, a suspicious drowning, and a severed head. In July 2022, one man even fell from the sky.
At the center of this activity is a sea of narcotics. As Harp reports, many troops who fought in Iraq and Afghanistan and then returned home to Bragg came to view drugs as a virtual panacea: a convenient accelerant for their battlefield aggression, an effective salve for their battlefield pain, and a lucrative revenue source for peacetime. One paratrooper he speaks with from Bragg’s 82nd Airborne Division neatly divides the operator culture into two camps: “You have the teetotalers, the guys who are … super Christian, warriors for God. No drugs, no alcohol, super goody-goody, by the book. Then you have the guys who are just complete fucking derelicts, constantly doing nefarious shit.”
I did not know this. I want to learn more. You can learn more by reading this lengthy and informative article.
Spanish authorities have issued a warning to mariners off the coast of Galicia after Iberian orcas rammed two vessels in quick succession on August 30, causing damage that required officials to rescue stranded crews.
The recent encounters are the latest of hundreds of similar incidents that have occurred since 2020, when this same pod, which contains about 40 orcas, first started to ram boats, focusing in particular on destroying rudders.
There are no reports of injuries from these encounters, though the pod has sunk several vessels and disabled countless others. A variety of theories have been floated about the orcas’ motivation for ramming boats, but many scientists think it is most likely a learned cultural behavior that is simply fun for the animals.
“These are not attacks; it is almost certainly a game,” says Naomi Rose, senior scientist of marine mammal biology at the Animal Welfare Institute. “The goal is to break the rudder. It’s not to sink the boat. It’s not to hurt anybody. It’s not revenge. Believe me: if they wanted to sink the boats, they’d be sinking the boat. They are really smart.”
Can This Re-Energize The Climate Movement?:
Few climate activists have participated in more eras of the environmental movement than Bill McKibben. In 1989, at age 27, he published “The End of Nature,” often described as the first book on global warming for lay readers, which became an international best seller. Then he turned to activism, eventually shifting his focus from combating the “greenhouse effect” to organizing pipeline protests and fossil fuel divestment campaigns. Over the decades, he has evolved from a concerned observer to an elder statesman of the climate movement.
On Sept. 21, McKibben will spearhead a national “day of action” called Sun Day, for which activists across the country are organizing local events to hype up solar power and energy-efficient innovations. There will be electric-car shows, open houses at all-electric solar homes and solar installation tours. In August, McKibben also published a book on solar and wind power called “Here Comes the Sun.” He wants to convince Americans that renewable energy is not a pricey, boutique alternative, but the accessible, abundant, cost-effective future of electrified life — no longer the Whole Foods of energy, as he put it, but the Costco.
But Sun Day also feels like a tactical swerve for McKibben. Climate activism over the past decade has been defined by global protests against fossil fuels, by Greta Thunberg’s student strikes, by the emergence of the Sunrise Movement. McKibben has been among the strongest exponents of that era’s climate-activism strategy — confrontational, morally stark, bent on shutting down economic activity that endangered humanity in the long-term even if it meant reducing corporate profits and curtailing Americans’ lifestyle options in the short term.
Now McKibben is taking a different tack, one that seems to share a message with a more moderate, adaptationist wing of the climate world while also harking back to the innocence and idealism of Earth Day. “This is clearly the thing that we can work on at the moment that stands a chance of making a difference,” he told me. His own shift in strategy comes as many activists are asking themselves some difficult questions: What has climate activism really given us? And where should it go from here?
We’ll have Soundgarden sing us out. Why? Because virtually all the other songs about the sun are too sunny:
