Crypt Keepers & Supermoons

Pelosi bows out, Cheney dies, the courts inch right, markets whisper caution — and the moon reminds us to breathe.

Good morning! Today the ballots are open in dozens of places big and small, and every last one matters, not because the political class wants you to obsess over turnout percentages, but because real change almost never rains down from some benevolent summit. It springs from the roots: city halls, county boards, state legislatures, school boards and mayor’s offices. If you want different policy, different priorities, different people in power, you don’t wait for a miracle at the top. You show up where everyday governance actually happens.

So: vote. Bring a friend. Bring patience. Bring snacks for the line if you plan to make your civic duty a performance piece. This is not performative advice. It’s tactical.

Some obituary housekeeping before breakfast: Dick Cheney, 84, is gone. He leaves a résumé that reads like a primer on how to make power permanent. Cheney spent a lifetime turning institutional levers into personal tools, architect of the post-9/11 national-security state, unapologetic cheerleader for the 2003 invasion of Iraq, chief proponent of the unitary-executive idea and the legal contortions that produced “enhanced interrogation.” The hunting accident and Scooter Libby’s conviction are the tittle-tattle; the consequential legacy is a set of precedents: secrecy normalized, executive power expanded, restraint downgraded. For defenders he “made the job count.” For critics he engineered a durable, corrosive strain of statecraft. Either way, the nation will argue over him for a long time.

And for anyone still wistful about term limits by attrition: Nancy Pelosi has announced she will not seek reelection. If you’ve been muttering that too much of Congress looks like crypt-keepers tending the vaults, you may allow yourself a small, private cheer. Pelosi’s exit is a generational punctuation mark, not an instant fix, but a reminder that institutions can and do change hands, and when they do the ground-level fights suddenly become even more consequential.

Senator Adam Schiff’s video chat this week is the practical how-to on why local machinery matters. He called the administration’s insistence that “no American citizen” had been detained in ICE raids a “provable, palpable lie,” and then read the human toll: a veteran tear-gassed and held for days, a 79-year-old car-wash owner body-slammed and left with broken ribs and a traumatic brain injury, people with learning disabilities jailed for days after insisting they were citizens, and women slammed to the floor and arrested even after producing proof. ProPublica reported, roughly 170 U.S. citizens have been swept into these operations, and warned that the Supreme Court’s willingness to let the raids continue while litigation plays out sets a precedent that will not stop with today’s victims. This is local violence and local discretion dressed up as federal policy; it is why who runs local law enforcement, who sits on county commissions, who appoints judges matters immensely.

Which brings us, neatly and painfully, to the actual point of today: local elections. The Democrats are pitching bread-and-butter fixes, housing, taxes, schools, public safety, because that’s what voters actually live with. Zohran Mamdani in New York City, Mikie Sherrill in New Jersey and Abigail Spanberger in Virginia aren’t auditioning for think-tank panels. They’re testing whether a party that got its teeth kicked in last year can rebuild trust with people anxious about rent, commute times and whether their kids will be safe at school. California’s Proposition 50 is the sort of high-drama, all-or-nothing gambit that proves the point: change the rules at the map-drawing stage and you change the game for a decade. A “yes” would temporarily hand the mapmaker’s pen back to partisan hands; a “no” would keep a measure of insulation. Either way, tonight’s down-ballot winners and losers will tell you more about the political terrain for the next two years than a hundred cable-news takeaways.

While you’re deciding whether to invest your civic energy in a school board or a mayoral contest, the markets are whispering their own warnings. Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway sitting on a mountain of cash and selling stock is not trivia; it’s the market’s canary. When the world’s most famous buyer prefers cash to buying more of the parade of AI and chip winners, professional and retail investors take note. Layer on a mania for AI, semiconductors and gargantuan, energy-gulping data centers, projects that create big construction jobs and tiny long-term payrolls, and you’ve got a recipe for concentrated risk. Those data-center booms turn small towns into gated campus economies with big fences, non-tax payment deals and glitzy PowerPoint promises, but not the broad-based, wage-driven prosperity that fuels Main Street. If the economy’s growth is increasingly delivered by a handful of high-expectation firms while consumers get squeezed, the whole model looks precarious.

Elon Musk provides the market’s soap-opera sub-plot: trillion-dollar pay packages, geopolitical frictions over China and a reminder that celebrity capitalism turns governance and markets into reality TV. Toss in geopolitically fraught chip export decisions and a handful of companies carrying index returns, and you have a market that’s part prophecy and part performance art. Betting the future on a narrow constellation of names, chips, cloud providers, charismatic founders, is not diversification. It’s a hope.

So here’s the through line: power concentrates when we let local offices atrophy and pretend the levers of change live only in Washington or on Wall Street. In practice, the opposite is true: the levers that remake people’s lives live close to home. Which means the simplest, loudest, least glamorous act left to us is still the same: show up. Vote. Pay attention to the consequences of concentrated power, whether it wears a suit in the boardroom, a uniform on the street, or robes on the bench. If anyone asks why today feels so acute, you can give them one sentence: defensive politics are happening in real time, and tonight’s returns will tell us whether the defenses hold.

And because even the angriest newsletter needs a soft landing: tonight the sky offers the kind of spectacle that costs nothing and makes petty politics feel a little smaller.

One last thing before you close your laptop and go vote: the cosmos will not RSVP to our squabbles. Tonight and tomorrow a theatrically large Beaver Moon, the November supermoon, will hang over whatever precinct lines you’re arguing about, swinging in at roughly 221,817 miles and looking about 30% brighter and up to 14% larger than a typical full moon. Its formal peak is 8:19 a.m. ET on Wednesday, Nov. 5, which for the East Coast comes after sunrise, but it will be gloriously full and photogenic the nights of Nov. 4 and 5. Clouds notwithstanding, step outside and let the moon do its work: it has no stake in our hacks and horse-trading, only in being magnificent. Alas, rain is forecast for the rest of the week on the Southern Oregon Coast.

If you need even more perspective, astronomers have just reminded us that the universe is capable of behaving in a way that makes human drama look deliciously small. Researchers reported the biggest black-hole flare ever recorded, an outburst detected from 10 billion light-years away that at its peak shone with the light of 10 trillion suns. Matthew Graham of Caltech called it “really a one-in-a-million object.” The numbers are grotesquely humbling: the doomed star was perhaps 30 times the mass of the sun; the black hole it encountered is roughly 500 million solar masses; the flare has been burning for more than seven years and is about 30 times more luminous than any flare researchers had seen before. Discovered in a 2018 sky survey, mostly forgotten, then re-examined in 2023, the event was published this week in Nature Astronomy, a cosmic surprise that looks a lot like the universe reminding us that its scale, tempo and indifference are the ultimate corrective to our exquisite self-importance.

So here’s the tidy moral for today: the universe doesn’t care who wins the threadbare culture war or which party controls a legislature. It’s lavish, strange and indifferent in a way that makes our arguments feel urgent and tiny at the same time, which is useful. As the supermoon climbs, you’ll find people everywhere marking it: Earth-based religions gathering for rituals of prosperity and healing, communities holding quiet vigils, neighbors simply stepping outside to breathe. If you want change that actually changes people’s lives, it will probably come from town halls and ballot boxes and school board meetings, not from the sky. But after you’ve done the least glamorous, most consequential thing, shown up and voted, treat yourself to a small ritual of humility: step outside, look up at the supermoon, and remember that somewhere out there a black hole just ate a giant star and kept the lights on for a decade. Vote, then look up. The heavens don’t keep score, but they will help you keep perspective.