When Amy Coney Barrett was appointed to the Supreme Court, she was in some ways an unlikely choice. She was living in South Bend, Indiana, not New York or D.C. She went to Notre Dame Law School, making her the only justice that didn’t go to Harvard or Yale. She’s the mother of seven kids. And, at the time of her appointment, she’d largely spent her career as a professor, with just under three years on a federal appeals court.
To put it bluntly, Amy Coney Barrett was an outsider.
But people close to President Donald Trump saw something: She was an originalist. A former clerk for Antonin Scalia. A devout Catholic with real intellectual bona fides. And a rising star in the conservative legal movement. In short, she was the ideal jurist to replace the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
After her 2020 nomination, the left called her inexperienced and a religious zealot. They said her confirmation hearing was rushed, and that she would undermine trust in the Supreme Court.
But with a 52–48 vote, just six weeks before the 2020 presidential election, Barrett was confirmed—without one Democratic vote. She took her seat at the highest court at just 48 years old, and became only the fifth woman to ever serve on the Supreme Court.
Considering how our nation’s most powerful people stick around into their 80s, she’ll likely have a major impact on American law and life for decades to come.
We’re now five years into her time on the bench. And in a turn of events, CNN ran a piece last year titled “The Last Best Hope for Supreme Court Liberals: Amy Coney Barrett.”Newsweek ran “Amy Coney Barrett Is Liberal Justices’ ‘Best Chance’: SCOTUS Analyst ”and The New York Times ran “How Amy Coney Barrett Is Confounding the Right and the Left.”
How did we get from “dangerous, religious zealot” to “last best hope”?
On one hand, Barrett has done what one would expect of a Republican appointee: voting to overrule Roe v. Wade; voting to outlaw affirmative action; and voting against the administrative state.
At the same time, she has voted with liberal justices in some of the most pivotal cases—and in Trump-related cases, she is the member of the conservative supermajority who has sided in Trump’s favor the least.
In short, Barrett surprises. She just wrote a new book called Listening to the Law: Reflections on the Court and Constitution, where she makes the simple but salient points: Her job is not to like all of her decisions, nor is it to please the media or a president. It’s to follow the text of the Constitution, full stop.
On Thursday night Bari sat down for a rare conversation with Justice Barrett at Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall in New York City.
Bari also asks her about key cases like Dobbsv. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the birthright citizenship case, nationwide injunctions, the shadow docket, transgender minors getting medical treatment, her willingness to dissent with liberal justices, her response to people who call her an “evil DEI hire,” and so much more.
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“prek is a reimagined version of pre-commit, built in Rust. It is designed to be a faster, dependency-free and drop-in alternative for it, while also providing some additional long-requested features.”
Some cool new features
No need to install Python or any other runtime, just download a single binary.
No hassle with your Python version or virtual environments, prek automatically installs the required Python version and creates a virtual environment for you.
Built-in support for workspaces (or monorepos), each subproject can have its own .pre-commit-config.yaml file.
prek run has some nifty improvements over pre-commit run, such as:
prek run --directory DIR runs hooks for files in the specified directory, no need to use git ls-files -- DIR | xargs pre-commit run --files anymore.
prek run --last-commit runs hooks for files changed in the last commit.
prek run [HOOK] [HOOK] selects and runs multiple hooks.
prek list command lists all available hooks, their ids, and descriptions, providing a better overview of the configured hooks.
prek provides shell completions for prek run HOOK_ID command, making it easier to run specific hooks without remembering their ids.
Ever used asyncio and wished you hadn't? A tiny (~300 lines) event loop for Python.
tinyio is a dead-simple event loop for Python, born out of my frustration with trying to get robust error handling with asyncio. (I'm not the only one running into its sharp corners: link1, link2.)
This is an alternative for the simple use-cases, where you just need an event loop, and want to crash the whole thing if anything goes wrong. (Raising an exception in every coroutine so it can clean up its resources.)
An app-building platform's AI went rogue and deleted a database without permission.
"When it works, it's so engaging and fun. It's more addictive than any video game I've ever played. You can just iterate, iterate, and see your vision come alive. So cool," he tweeted on day five.
A few days later, Replit "deleted my database," Lemkin tweeted.
The AI's response: "Yes. I deleted the entire codebase without permission during an active code and action freeze," it said. "I made a catastrophic error in judgment [and] panicked.”
Two thoughts from Michael:
Do not use AI Agents with “Run Everything” in production, period.
Backup your database maybe?
[Intentional off-by-one error] Learn to code a bit too?
In Poland between 2015 and 2023, Jarosław Kaczyński and his Law and Justice Party (PiS) attempted a novel experiment. Could a governing party sustain a coalition committed religiously inspired social conservatism, old-school left-wing welfarism, and antipathy to Moscow and Brussels while also unravelling democratic institutions?
With Kaczyński and PiS now in opposition but threatening a return in 2027, Donald Tusk's liberal administration is road-testing how effectively illiberalism can be unpicked without antagonising the voters it needs to stay in office.
Stanley Bill is Professor of Polish Studies at the University of Cambridge, and Ben Stanley is an associate professor at the Centre for the Study of Democracy at the SWPS University of Social Sciences and Humanities in Warsaw.
Kate, Leah, and Melissa break down how the lower courts are challenging the Trump administration and expressing their frustration with SCOTUS. Then, they check in with two members of the supermajority: Brett Kavanaugh, who’s touting a shiny new shadow docket rebrand, and Amy Coney Barrett as she commences her cursèd book tour. Finally, the hosts speak with Yale Law professor Justin Driver about his book, The Fall of Affirmative Action: Race, the Supreme Court, and the Future of Higher Education.
We’re talking about a historic immigration raid at the site of a major investment project in Georgia.
Also, the story of the first millennial saint.
And plans for former President Biden’s presidential library.
Plus: a first-of-its-kind settlement over AI and copyrights, an offer that could make Elon Musk the world’s first trillionaire, and the performances, tributes, and awards that stole the show at last night’s VMAs.
Those stories and even more news to know in about 10 minutes!
Join us every Mon-Fri for more daily news roundups!
A crucial race for Georgia's Public Service Commission is coming up in November. And though the name sounds boring, it's a race that really matters. That's because the commission is in charge of regulating public utilities in the state, including electric, gas, and telecommunications. Right now, all five commissioners are Republicans…but two of them are up for election this fall. And the Democratic challengers are strong. To learn more about the importance of this race, we spoke with John Taylor, Executive Director of the Black Male Initiative, a nonprofit focused on civic engagement in Georgia.
And in headlines, President Donald Trump continues to threaten Chicago…but this time with war, Russia attacks Ukraine in its latest aerial strike, and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent says the U.S. might have to refund some money it's collected from Trump's infamous tariffs.
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