“His 2nd album in 2016 inaugurated a collab that has endured: Inflo, Danger Mouse, who founded Gnarls Barkley & has worked with Norah Jones, Black Keys, Adele & U2. Inflo & Danger Mouse helped Kiwanuka create even more spacious tracks, w/ subtle details & extended dramatic arcs.”

@michaelkiwanuka has his own vision of success as a songwriter. “The highest compliment is if I walked down in the tube & someone was busking a song of mine. If someone was busking ‘Small Changes’ & it was moving pple—that’s the hardest thing to achieve. That’s utopia for me.”

“I didn’t see myself in the music of the day, so I went elsewhere. I started off being the Ugandan making music in London, who was being influenced by American music. It was like a blank canvas. There was no one to look at and watch and say, ‘That’s me, I’m going to do that.’”

@michaelkiwanuka: “It was everything. Guitars & bands, that’s the place where the misfits go. If you don’t fit in, or you’re not developing in a certain way, or you don’t have a girlfriend, you have this—it’s cool. It’s like a big coat that covers you.”

“Much higher tariffs cld meet with opposition from Trump’s high-tech backers & donors. Unlike most GOP initiatives, tariffs work by imposing short-term costs in prices in order to achieve long-term gains in jobs. It’s another round of inflation that might endanger GOP coalition.”

“Stepping into the WH & governing is a very different. What DJT is promising for 2nd term, the actual choices he makes about policy & the makeup of that coalition do not appear to be the building blocks of a durable majority coalition. They have great potential for a crackup.”

@JamesFallows: “Is this boosterism? Of course. But it is also an important constant in the American story, and California’s. I’d bet on it again.”

@GavinNewsom: “The best minds in the world call CA home bc they’re liberated from the constraints of conformity & tradition. CA has figured out a way to make it work time & time again, decade after decade.”

First term @GovWesMoore, now in his first term as governor, has launched a new program for volunteer service. “I don’t think we would have been able to do it at this scale if not for the work of California, and other states.”

@JoshFryday on @CalVolunteers: “$10k is a very intentional number, a way to have a debt-free path to an education. It makes the difference between working in a coffee shop to raise the money or serving the community.” @GavinNewsom: “Absolutely, our ambition is to export this.”

@PeteButtigieg: “I’m firmly convinced the first time the 1st customer buys a 1st ticket for the 1st true high-speed rail trip on US soil, there will be no going back. People will expect and demand it everywhere.”

@YousefBaig: “If you listen to CA’s political class, the high-speed rail project sounds like a textbook boondoggle. Yet in communities across CA’s farm belt, ...it’s a symbol of transformation for a region that’s already bursting with activity.”

“Test trains should be running in 3-4 years. And what hasn’t sunk in is that this will be among the very fastest mainline high-speed rail systems running anywhere on Earth. (At 220 mph, it would beat the 200-mph range for European trains & the famed Shinkansen in Japan.”

“That’s where CA is with high-speed rail. The project received full “environmental clearance” for the entire 463 miles from downtown LA to downtown SF, with clearance for a further 31 miles from LA to Anaheim expected next year. Nearly all land parcels have been secured.”

@JamesFallows on hi-speed rail: “I’ve been following the back-&-forth for more than a decade, & I’ve started to see CA’s high-speed rail project with a new clarity. In the aviation world, pilots are trained to recognize the “point of no return,” when you only lose by going back.”

“That goes for huge cultural & demographic shifts...& solutions—the kind that can redirect the momentum of American life, and life around the world.”

@JamesFallows: “I’ve often been struck by the ways declinist alarmism about my home state can feel like a displaced version of declinist alarmism about my home country as a whole.” Manual Pastor: “California is America, but sooner.”

“It’s the birthplace of an disproportionate share of the world’s most familiar and valuable brand names. The overwhelming sense is that the California miracle is over, its reservoirs of dynamism as tapped out as the Central Valley’s aquifers during recent years of drought.”

#ThreeStacks: “I had great training ground. All of #DungeonFamily were older than me & @BigBoi, so I saw what it’s like to be free & dream. And in #ATL, that helped carve your own thing out.” “We had to find our own thing. Forces you to do something new.”

A few thoughts from the conversations I’ve been having and hearing over the last week: The hard question isn’t the 2 points that would’ve decided the election. It’s how to build a Democratic Party that isn’t always 2 points away from losing to Donald Trump — or worse. The