The COVID-19 pandemic shut down offices around the world. Ever since, employers have pushed for workers to return to the office—with varying degrees of success. In a piece on return-to-office mandates for The Walrus, Toronto writer Kathy Chow writes about modern office design, worker productivity, and employer control; and also reflects on her own lackadaisical office experiences early in her career.

Employers are so terrified at the prospect of their employees not working or thinking about work that they would risk cutting into their profit margins. Perhaps they are right to be afraid. If people weren’t locked up in offices for eight to ten hours a day, they might have time to take care of themselves. They might have time to reflect on whether their jobs actually bring them happiness or contribute meaningfully to the world. They might have time to discover other ways of experiencing pleasure beyond the fleeting dopamine hits occasioned by retail therapy. Instead of buying things to fill the voids in their lives, they might make art, they might experiment sexually, they might organize a protest, they might read a book, or they might spend time caramelizing onions for a leisurely dinner with their friends—and God, what a frightful world that would be.

Billionaire Toby Neugebauer laughed when the Amarillo City Council asked him how he planned to handle the waste his planned datacenter would produce. 

“I’m not laughing in disrespect to your question,” Neugebauer said. He explained that he’d just met with Texas Governor Greg Abbott, who had made it clear that any nuclear waste Neugebauer’s datacenter generated needed to go to Nevada, a state that’s not taking nuclear waste at the moment. “The answer is we don't have a great long term solution for how we’re doing nuclear waste.

The meeting happened on October 28, 2025 and was one of a series of appearances Neugebauer has put in before Amarillo’s leaders as he attempts to realize Project Matador: a massive 5,769 acre datacenter being built in the Texas Panhandle and constructed by Fermi America, a company he founded with former Secretary of Energy Rick Perry.

If built, Project Matador would be one of the largest datacenters in the world at around 18 million square feet. “What we’re talking about is creating the epicenter for artificial intelligence in the United States,” Neugebauer told the council. According to Neugebauer, the United States is in an existential race to build AI infrastructure. He sees it as a national security issue.

“You’re blessed to sit on the best place to develop AI compute in America,” he told Amarillo. “I just finished with Palantir, which is our nation’s tip of the spear in the AI war. They know that this is the place that we must do this. They’ve looked at every site on the planet. I was at the Department of War yesterday. So anyone who thinks this is some casual conversation about the mission critical aspect of this is just not being truthful.”

But it’s unclear if Palantir wants any part of Project Matador. One unnamed client—rumored to be Amazon—dropped out of the project in December and cancelled a $150 million contract with Fermi America. The news hit the company’s stock hard, sending its value into a tailspin and triggering a class action lawsuit from investors.

Yet construction continues. The plan says it’ll take 11 years to build out the massive datacenter, which will first be powered by a series of natural gas generators before the planned nuclear reactors come online.

Amarillo residents aren’t exactly thrilled at the prospect. A group called 806 Data Center Resistance has formed in opposition to the project’s construction. Kendra Kay, a tattoo artist in the area and a member of 806, told 404 Media that construction was already noisy and spiking electricity bills for locals.

“When we found out how big it was, none of us could really comprehend it,” she said. “We went out to the site and we were like, ‘Oh my god, this thing is huge.’ There’s already construction underway of one of four water tanks that hold three million gallons of water.”

For Kay and others, water is the core issue. It’s a scarce resource in the panhandle and Amarillo and other cities in the area already fight for every drop. “The water is the scariest part,” she said. “They’re asking for 2.5 million gallons per day. They said that they would come back, probably in six months, to ask for five million gallons per day. And then, after that, by 2027 they would come back and ask for 10 million gallons per day.”

During an October 15 city council meeting, Neugebauer told the city that Fermi would get its water “with or without” an agreement from the city. “The only difference is whether Amarillo benefits.” To many people it sounded like a threat, but Neugebauer got his deal and the city agreed to sell water to Fermi America for double the going rate.

“It wasn’t a threat,” Neugebauer said during another meeting on October 28. “I know people took my answer…as a threat. I think it’s a win-win. I know there are other water projects we can do…we fully got that the water was going to be issue 1, 2, and 3.”

“We can pay more for water than the consumer can. Which allows you all capital to be able to re-invest in other water projects,” he said. “I think what you’re gonna find is having a customer who can pay way more than what you wanna burden your constituents with will actually enhance your water availability issues.”

According to Neugebauer and plans filed with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the datacenter would generate and consume 11 gigawatts of power. The bulk of that, eventually, would be generated by four nuclear reactors. But nuclear reactors are complicated and expensive to make and everyone who has attempted to build one in the past few decades has gone over budget and they weren’t trying to build nuclear power plants in the desert.

Nuclear reactors, like datacenters, consume a lot of water. Because of that, most nuclear reactors are constructed near massive bodies of water and often near the ocean. “The viewpoint that nuclear reactors can only be built by streams and oceans is actually the opposite,” Neugebauer told the Amarillo city council in the meeting on October 28.

As evidence he pointed to the Palo Verde nuclear plant in Arizona. The massive Palo Verde plant is the only nuclear plant in the world not constructed near a ready source of water. It gets the water it needs by taking on the waste and sewage water of every city and town nearby.

That’s not the plan with Project Matador, which will use water sold to it by Amarillo and pulled from the nearby Ogallala Aquifer. “I am concerned that we’re going to run out of water and that this is going to change it from us having 30 years worth of water for agriculture to much less very quickly,” Kay told 404 Media.

The Ogallala Aquifer runs under parts of Colorado, Kansas, Nebraska, New Mexico, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Texas, and Wyoming. It’s the primary source of water for the Texas panhandle and it’s drying out. 

“They don’t know how much faster because, despite how quickly this thing is moving, we don’t have any idea how much water they’re realistically going to use or need, so we don’t even know how to calculate the difference,” Kay said. “Below Lubbock, they’ve been running out of water for a while. The priority of this seems really stupid.”

According to Kay, communities near the datacenter feel trapped as they watch the construction grind on. “They’ve all lived here for several generations…they’re being told that this is inevitable. Fermi is going up to them and telling them ‘this is going to happen whether you like it or not so you might as well just sell me your property.’”

Kay said she and other activists have been showing up to city council meetings to voice their concerns and tell leaders not to approve permits for the datacenter and nuclear plants. Other communities across the country have successfully pushed datacenter builders out of their community. “But Texas is this other beast,” Kay said.

Jacinta Gonzalez, the head of programs for MediaJustice and her team have helped 806 Data Center Resistance get up and running and teaching it tactics they’ve seen pay off in other states. “In Tucson, Arizona we were able to see the city council vote ‘no’ to offer water to Project Blue, which was a huge proposed Amazon datacenter happening there,” she said. “If you look around, everywhere from Missouri to Indiana to places in Georgia, we’re seeing communities pass moratoriums, we’re seeing different projects withdraw their proposals because communities find out about it and are able to mobilize and organize against this.”

“The community in Amarillo is still figuring out what that’s going to look like for them,” she said. “These are really big interests. Rick Perry. Palantir. These are not folks who are used to hearing ‘no’ or respecting community wishes. So the community will have to be really nimble and up for a fight. We don’t know what will happen if we organize, but we definitely know what will happen if we don’t.”

The Stranger's morning news roundup. by Vivian McCall

I’ll start with the basics, as outlined by 404 Media, which wrote the most straightforward account I’ve read. During a blitz of 2,000 federal immigration agents in Minneapolis, a silver Nissan Titan was driving up a snow-covered city street, but stopped when it encountered a maroon Honda blocking its way. Two agents exited the Nissan and walked toward the car. Someone shouted “get out of the fucking car,” and one of the agents rattled the Honda’s handle. The rest from 404 Media:

“The driver of the Honda reverses and turns, getting straighter with the road. The driver then slowly accelerates and starts to turn to the right, leveling the car out with its front pointing away from the two officers.

A third officer, who has been standing on the other side of the road, pulls out a firearm while the car is turning away from him and fires into the car three times. The officer fires two of the shots when the vehicle is already well past him. He is not in front of the car, but to the side. The officer calmly holsters his weapon.

The Honda, now straight on the road and its driver shot, rolls up the street and collides with a vehicle and electricity pole. The woman driver died. The driver's airbag is covered in blood.”

I’ve watched videos from three different angles. 404 Media’s description is accurate. As The Washington Post wrote this morning, “ICE agent was not in the vehicle’s path when he fired at driver, video shows.” The New York Times also has this video analysis disproving the government’s claim that the agent was hit. The videos are here, here, and here. 

After the shooting, the woman’s sobbing wife cried: “They killed my wife. I don’t know what to do. We stopped to videotape, and they shot her in the head.” Photos of the inside of the vehicle showed a bloody airbag, and a glovebox overflowing with a child’s stuffed animals. A witness, 39-year-old Emily Heller, told NBC News that watching the woman die would change her life forever. “They were on foot when they got through, and they carried her body out, just like by her limbs, they didn’t even have a stretcher," said Heller, who estimated that EMS took about 15 minutes to arrive. "She was carried out like a sack of potatoes." 

I’ll move on to the government’s lies. On X, child pornography website formerly known as Twitter, DHS said the driver was a “violent rioter” who “weaponized her vehicle,” attempting to run over our law enforcement officers in an attempt to kill them—an act of domestic terrorism.” There were no violent rioters, and that DHS called the incident “domestic terrorism” before any investigation had taken place. The statement continued: “An ICE officer, fearing for his life, the lives of his fellow law enforcement and the safety of the public, fired defensive shots. He used his training and saved his own life and that of his fellow officers. The alleged perpetrator was hit and is deceased. Thankfully, the ICE officers who were hurt are expected to make full recoveries.”

At a press conference, Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem also called the incident an “act of domestic terrorism.”  “A woman attacked them and those surrounding them and attempted to run them over and ram them with her vehicle. An officer of ours acted quickly and defensively shot to protect himself and the people around him.” Again, no real investigation had taken place at the time she made this claim.

On Truth Social, President Donald Trump wrote “the woman driving the car was very disorderly, obstructing and resisting, who then violently, willfully, and viciously ran over the ICE Officer, who seems to have shot her in self defense. Based on the attached clip, it is hard to believe he is alive, but is now recovering in the hospital.” It is not hard to believe the officer is alive, because he was not run over. On video, he’s seen walking away from the shooting.

Who was this woman? According to her mother, Donna Ganger, speaking to the Minnesota Star Tribune, the driver was 37-year-old Renee Nicole Good. Ganger said her daughter lived in the Twin Cities with her wife. According to Good’s instagram, she was a “poet and writer and mom and shitty guitar strummer from Colorado.” She had a 6-year-old son, whose father died in 2023, and two children, 15 and 12, from a previous marriage, according to the AP. According to her family, she was not an activist, or involved in the protest movement. 

Who was this agent? We don’t know yet. But the BBC reported that he’d been hit by a car on the job in June. 

At a news conference, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey told ICE to “get the fuck out of Minneapolis.” He continued: “They are already trying to spin this as an action of self-defense. Having seen the video myself, I wanna tell everybody directly, that is bullshit.” In a joint statement, 11 of the city’s 13 city councilmembers demanded that ICE leave Minneapolis.

Gov. Tim Walz issued a “warning order” to the Minneapolis National Guard, which is now preparing to deploy, according to the agency’s Joint Staff Director Simon Schaefer. “From here on, I have a very simple message: We do not need any further help from the federal government,” Walz said. “To Donald Trump and [Homeland Security Secretary] Kristi Noem, you’ve done enough.” Noem said that ICE isn’t leaving Minneapolis, and lied again: "People need to stop using their vehicles as weapons ... it's clear that it's being coordinated. People are being trained.” Rich, considering that cars became a deadly anti-protest weapon in 2020, and Republicans passed bills to absolve motorists who hit them.

Illinois Congresswoman Robin Kelly intends to impeach Noem: “I am impeaching Secretary Kristi Noem, who is an incompetent leader and a disgrace to our democracy,” she wrote on Bluesky. “She wreaked havoc in the Chicagoland area and has brought her reign of terror to Minneapolis. One of her rogue ICE agents shot and killed an innocent woman today. It must come to an end.”

In a video posted on Bluesky, Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara told a civilian that he’d “of course” abide by a warrant for the agent’s arrest if one is issued. Whatever bullshit the Trump administration spouts about these agents being immune to prosecution, Minnesota can absolutely prosecute this agent. As Bryna Godar writes in Slate, states have long prosecuted federal agents who allegedly use excessive force.

 

Outside I ran into Minneapolis Chief of Police Brian O’Hara who says he will abide by an arrest warrant should it be issued.

[image or embed]

— Eli Sherman (@elitalksmpls.bsky.social) January 7, 2026 at 1:38 PM

 

These lies from DHS, Noem, and the President remind me of Marimar Martinez. In October, she was shot by a US Customs and Border Patrol Agent several times for allegedly ramming her car into theirs while armed with a gun during an immigration enforcement blitz in Chicago, and indicted on federal charges. The case was extraordinarily weak. Martinez’s lawyer alleged that it was the agent who sideswiped her, and that her gun was securely in her purse when she was shot. Texts showed that the agent had apparently bragged about the shooting. A judge dismissed the charges.

And as my former colleague Shannon Heffernan noted on Bluesky yesterday:

 

One thing that was really notable to me during Operation Midway Blitz (similar to what is now happening in Minneapolis), was how often officers pointed guns at civilians. A few examples that stood out to me...

— Shannon Heffernan (@shannonheffernan.bsky.social) January 7, 2026 at 10:49 AM

 

Good and Martinez are hardly the first people shot by ICE. The Trace has identified 28 incidents in which federal agents shot someone or held them at gunpoint during an immigration raid. Agents have killed at least four people, and injured five more.

And oh, the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension has “reluctantly withdrawn” from the investigation after the FBI abruptly cut its access to interviews and evidence.

In Minneapolis, school is cancelled for the rest of the week after federal agents showed up at a high school during dismissal Wednesday. Last night, hundreds gathered for a vigil to memorialize Good. This morning, protesters gathered outside the city’s federal building. 

About 200 protesters also gathered at the federal building in Seattle last night, unfurling a large banner that read “ABOLISH I.C.E.” More on that later from Micah.

On Monday, Pavel Kolchick, who spent 18 years of his life in state-run psych hospitals, was found dead by construction workers at Western State Hospital. After disappearing during an authorized grounds walk Sunday morning, Kolchick had apparently climbed a construction crane before either jumping or falling to his death. Kolchick’s attorneys say three months ago, the hospital stopped his trauma therapy despite recommendations from hospital staff to continue his treatment, according to King 5.

During his arraignment in King County Superior Court Wednesday, Kamario Washington Onaki, 17, pleaded not guilty to allegedly beating, trafficking and killing 15-year-old Azjanae Brooks, a Bellevue High School freshman found dead in June. Prosecutors accused Onaki of beating Brooks and another 15-year-old girl between May and June, and shooting Brooks in the face after attempting to force her into sex work.

That fenced-off park Nathalie and I wrote about last year, Seven Hills Park in Capitol Hill, is still fenced off. The closure began on August 28, and was supposed to end around Halloween, but it’s been extended past Valentine’s Day. Capitol Hill Seattle Blog has more.

As a poet once wrote, “It's just one of those days when you don't wanna wake up/Everything is fucked, everybody sucks.” And fuck ICE.

The promise of AI-powered workplace tools that sort emails, take meeting notes, and file expense reports is finally delivering meaningful productivity gains -- one software startup reported a 20% boost around mid-2025 -- but companies are discovering an unexpected tradeoff: employees are burning out from the relentless pace of high-level cognitive work. Roger Kirkness, CEO of 14-person software startup Convictional, noticed that after AI took the scut work off his team's plates, their days became consumed by intensive thinking, and they were mentally exhausted and unproductive by Friday. The company transitioned to a four-day workweek; the same amount of work gets done, Kirkness says. The underlying problem, according to Boston College economist and sociologist Juliet Schor, is that businesses tend to simply reallocate the time AI saves. Workers who once mentally downshifted for tasks like data entry are now expected to maintain intense focus through longer stretches of data analysis. "If you just make people work at a high-intensity pace with no breaks, you risk crowding out creativity," Schor says.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Busiest Air Routes of 2025

I’ll spare you all the “best travel destinations of the year” and “where to go in 2026” slop that you’ve probably seen all over. Here’s a listicle based on real data: the busiest air routes of the past year. One glance at this list will make it obvious that the supposedly busy flight paths in North America have nothing on Asia. New York to London barely cracked the top 10 and that route had 3.97 million seats sold compared to 6.83 million for #1 Hong Kong to Taipei. Seoul had 2 of the top 5 (to Tokyo and Osaka) and there were 5.57 million seats sold for the short hop from Kualu Lumpur to Singapore. I’m guessing that Allah is responsible for the #2 route in the world: Cairo to Jeddah.

World’s Best Headphones

It’s hard for any normal person to judge “the best” over-ear headphones since few of us ever have the chance to compare a bunch of them side by side with the same music. Wired magazine did that though, with real audiophiles, and compared their blind test answers. Third place went to the most expensive (Apple Airpods Max) and second to the Nothing Headphones, but the one that came out on top had the lowest price of the six. That would be the Soundcore Space One Pro, currently going for just $149 on Amazon.

Better Guarantees From Vrbo

If you know a lot of people who book through Airbnb, you have likely heard at least a few horror stories about late cancellations by hosts, bad communication, or misrepresentations of listings. It might be worth taking a new look at Vrbo because they recently revamped their policies to become much more renter-friendly. Changes include active help when a hosts cancels (90 days out even) and stricter “Premier Host” qualifications to highlight rentals without complaints. See the full story here.

TSA Pre-check at the Office Store

Don’t want to make a trip to the airport to get approved for TSA Pre-check? Well it turns out you can do it while shopping for Sharpies and ink cartridges: Staples has an arrangement with the government to approve you for the expedited TSA security lines in the USA. You might want to check with your credit card if reimbursement for this is one of its perks (and it’s included in Global Entry), but see the details here.

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A weekly newsletter with four quick bites, edited by Tim Leffel, author of A Better Life for Half the Price and The World’s Cheapest Destinations. See past editions here, where your like-minded friends can subscribe and join you.