Hi there , and welcome to Two to the Fifth, the ten-minute news show for people who suspect the news may have started before breakfast.
If you feel like History is being curated by a guy from Fiverr trying to land a 747 with the owner’s manual from a ’74 Pontiac Bonneville, you’ve come to the right place. We try to make sense of what’s out there, and place it in context.
We look at five timeframes: the last 24 hours, the last week, the last month, the last year and the last decade. Two minutes each. Five pours. One country. No chaser.
This week: job security, drone proofing, presidential no-thanksing, the moon gets hammered, cancer as a chronic condition, and what 50 million ballots can tell us about why so many of us can look like totally different people when we’re voting on national or local priorities.
Surprising or not? Decide for yourself, but first gimme 10 minutes.
This is Two to the Fifth.
THE LAST 24 HOURS
The Economy Is Good. The Economy Is Bad.
New unemployment claims are hovering near their lowest level in almost 57 years. Companies just aren’t laying off very many people. Business activity remains strong. New-home sales got a lift last month too.
So the economy’s good, right? Except mortgage rates remain painfully high. Inflation is still bothering the Fed. And pocketbooks. Housing and affordability can’t be in the same room. Borrowing money costs a hell of a lot more than it did five years ago. So the economy’s bad?
Depends on your personal situation. Jobs? Pretty good. Housing? Pretty rough. Your 401(k)? Strong. Groceries, gas, and credit card interest? Ouch.
We’re constantly asked whether the economy is good or bad, as though 340 million people share one gigantic checking account. Maybe the more useful question is: Which part of the economy? And for whom? And if you’re a candidate or a referendum, how much good am I doing my supporters?
Hold that thought.
Your Electrical Substation Would Like Some Body Armor
Lithuania is building a major electrical substation near Russia. Normally this would rank somewhere between sewer replacement and municipal bond refinancing on the international excitement scale. Except they’re designing this one to survive a war.
Heavy fencing. Tunnel-detection equipment. Redundant systems. And reinforced concrete structures around critical equipment to protect it against exploding drones. Not long ago, grid resilience meant preparing for ice storms and falling trees. Increasingly, it includes preparing for explosives.
Yay?
THE LAST WEEK
Republicans Start Ordering Trump À La Carte
Republican Senate candidates Mike Rogers in Michigan and Ashley Hinson in Iowa have been supporters of President Trump. They would also now like the Iran war to end. Soon. And they’re being vocal about it.
As we record this, Trump has rejected an Iranian proposal to reopen the Strait of Hormuz and end the fighting, while talks are expected to continue. Oil jumped more than 3 percent Monday morning.
This is not Republicans abandoning Trump. His support among core Republican voters remains strong. But Trump’s base and the coalition needed to win a close election are not necessarily the same thing. Which creates an interesting problem for candidates. They may want Trump’s immigration policies. His voters. His endorsement. Maybe his tax policies. They may be considerably less enthusiastic about a seven-month war that appears stuck.
Midterm elections normally deliver a simple answer: Are you with the president or against him? Some Republican candidates appear to be answering: um, depends. Can I see the menu?
Meanwhile, Something Big Hit the Moon
A previously unnoticed asteroid or comet fragment slammed into the moon in 2024 and left behind a crater roughly 728 feet wide and 141 feet deep. Scientists looking at images from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter just found it. It’s the largest fresh lunar crater detected in modern observations, and the impact disturbed soil more than 60 miles away. Apparently even the moon can walk into the garage and wonder where that dent came from.
There is a point here. If humans are eventually going to build permanent infrastructure on the moon, where there’s no atmosphere to do that convenient “burn it up” thing for us, we’re going to have to design for that Allstate Mayhem guy occasionally falling out of the sky at 15,000 miles an hour.
I’m not sure Jake from State Farm is ready for that one.
THE LAST MONTH
Fifty Million Ballots Tell Us Something About Ourselves
Researchers from Harvard, Columbia, Yale and UCLA recently did something pretty cool. They looked at more than 50 million actual anonymous ballots from the 2020 election. Not polling. Not asking people what they remember doing. The actual ballots.
They compared how the same people voted for president and Congress with how they voted in more than 5,700 state and local races and ballot questions. The result is kind of astonishing.
In partisan state and local elections, national party identity explained more than 80 percent of the variation in how people voted, in other words, as expected. In nonpartisan local elections and local ballot measures? Less than 10 percent.
Republicans who voted straight Republican for federal office, where a desire to cut both taxes and spending are pretty much assumed, still said yes to local tax increases, local spending measures and local bonds more than half the time.
Put an R or D next to the choice, and we become remarkably predictable on things like taxing and spending. Ask us whether we’re willing to pay to fix the school roof, and suddenly we start thinking for ourselves.
I’m wondering how our national political discourse might improve if our politicians got clearer with us about connecting what we get with what we pay on a national level.
And Speaking of Seeing Things More Clearly
Researchers are testing a new MRI contrast agent that did something remarkable in animal studies. It detected lung tumors as small as one millimeter. The agent targets collagen associated with aggressive cancers, potentially helping doctors see not just whether a tumor is there, but something about how aggressive that tumor may be.
To be clear: Animal study. Experimental. Not tomorrow’s MRI appointment. But medical progress doesn’t usually happen in a sweeping announcement like cancer has been cured. More often, it’s time and pressure making diamonds: See it earlier. Understand it better. Treat it sooner. Then do that again.
THE LAST YEAR
Maybe The Deciding Trump Voters Weren’t Trump Voters
Donald Trump won in 2024 partly because people voted for him who hadn’t four years earlier. Pew Research went back and matched survey respondents against actual voting records. Nearly a quarter of eligible Americans did something different in 2024 than they did in 2020: switched candidates, stopped voting, or entered or returned to the electorate.
Five percent of Biden’s 2020 voters switched to Trump. And Trump also won more of the new and returning voters than Harris did. Which raises a question we don’t usually ask. What did a Trump vote actually mean?
Did all of those people become Trump Republicans? Or did some of them just want tougher immigration enforcement? Lower prices? A rejection of progressive cultural politics? Or simply “not what we have now”?
The same thing can happen the other way. A voter can be generally conservative and decide abortion restrictions go too far. Own guns and want restrictions on some weapons. Be deeply religious, but think those texts don’t belong in public schools.
Maybe some people didn’t become Trump voters. Maybe they just became 2024 Trump voters. One checkbox can hide an awful lot of reasons.
Cancer Changes the Definition of Winning
For most of our lives, the language around cancer has been war. Fight cancer. Beat cancer. Kill cancer. And obviously, curing it remains the goal whenever possible. But something quieter has been happening.
For a growing number of patients with some advanced and metastatic cancers, medicine can increasingly keep the disease controlled for years – essentially treating it as a chronic condition to manage rather than having to eliminate it. The National Cancer Institute now explicitly discusses people living long-term with advanced cancer - sometimes staying on treatment, sometimes moving on and off different treatments as the disease changes.
That doesn’t mean cancer has become harmless. Far from it. But for an increasing number of people, winning no longer necessarily means eliminating the enemy. Sometimes it means managing the enemy so you can live your life around it. That’s progress too.
THE LAST DECADE
The Ballot Gives You Two Choices. You Probably Have Three Columns.
A few weeks ago we looked at the primaries and asked: What exactly are voters trying to change? There was plenty of dissatisfaction. Much less agreement about what should replace it. Maybe we were asking too large a question.
American politics increasingly asks us to buy packages. Republican. Democrat. Conservative. Progressive. Pick one and we’ll throw in 47 policy positions at no additional charge.
But most actual people don’t really work that way. Someone can want tougher immigration enforcement and legal abortion. They own a gun and support restrictions on some weapons. Really want stronger climate policy and really dislike progressive or “woke” cultural language. Support cheaper public transportation and prefer capitalism. Are deeply religious and want government to stay out of religion.
That doesn’t make them confused voters, but it probably makes them frustrated voters. They’re being offered two toolboxes – take it or leave it - when what they really want are three tools from one box and four from the other.
If that sounds like you, here’s an idea. Forget your party for ten minutes. Take a piece of paper. Make three columns.
· What do I actually want government to do?
· What do I disagree with but I can live with it?
· What are my real deal-breakers?
Then look at the people actually running, regardless of their party. Mayor. Governor. Congress. School committee. Senator. Whatever’s on your ballot.
Not what their party supposedly believes. What they say they’ll do, or won’t do. Pick the ones that align best with your three columns.
You may discover you’re exactly where you thought you were. You may discover you’re less partisan than you thought. And I think there’s a high likelihood you discover something more frustrating: Nobody is selling the combination you want.
Try it. See how it comes out for you. Then write me, or leave a comment under this episode. Did you find candidates who fit? Was the information even easy to find? Or did the choices force you right back into buying an entire toolbox because that was the only way to get the hammer you most care about?
Maybe we’ll all learn something. Maybe we’ll end up casting a vote here and there that surprises us. Either way, we’ll hopefully have a better idea of what we actually voted for.
OUTRO
So that’s this week’s Two to the Fifth.
The economy can be good and bad at the same time. You can support a president without wanting every policy. A Republican can vote for the school bond. A Democrat can vote for stronger law enforcement.
And apparently the moon can get hit by something the size of a bad day without anybody noticing for a year.
Reality has a stubborn habit of resisting our categories. Maybe we should stop asking it to fit all of them. I’m not saying we shouldn’t ask more of our elected officials, but maybe we should ask more of each other.
Thanks for joining us. Now get out of here. Drink responsibly. Read your candidates guide – for both sides. Break open the toolbox. And let me know what you find.
And remember: The news is not what happened today. The news is what today proves is still happening.