TLP Weekend Edition (October 25-26, 2025)

What we're reading and checking out.

The World Series between the Dodgers and the Blue Jays concludes a highly entertaining MLB postseason. Game Two starts tonight at 8PM from the Rogers Centre in Toronto. (Getty Images)

📰 “The Partisans Are Wrong: Moving to the Center Is the Way to Win,” by the New York Times Editorial Board. Looks like someone has been reading TLP! The Times editorial board this week examined election data from 2024 and laid out how moderate candidates are much stronger electorally than more ideological ones—in both parties.

American politics today can seem to be dominated by extremes. President Trump is carrying out far-right policies, while some of the country’s highest-profile Democrats identify as democratic socialists. Moderation sometimes feels outdated.

It is not. Candidates closer to the political center, from both parties, continue to fare better in most elections than those farther to the right or left. This pattern may be the strongest one in electoral politics today, but it is one that many partisans try to obscure and many voters do not fully grasp…

Left-wing Democrats and right-wing Republicans have spent years trying to tell a different story. They claim that reaching out to swing voters is overrated and that the better strategy involves turning out the base by running pure, ideological campaigns. They are wrong, but their argument does contain an element of truth: As the country has become more polarized and many voters cannot fathom crossing over to the other party, persuasion has become harder. It is not impossible, though—and it remains far more effective than pursuing the fantasy that America has a latent left-wing or right-wing majority waiting to be inspired to turn out…

Rather than locating itself midway between the two parties, this new centrism promises sweeping change while criticizing the two parties as out of touch.

⚡️ “The fallout from the AI-fueled dash for gas. A supply crunch in giant turbines for gas-powered plants threatens environmental and geopolitical consequences,” by Harry Dempsey and Malcolm Moore. One of the FT Big Reads this past week takes a fascinating look at the resurgence of giant gas-powered turbines and how the U.S. in particular is dominating the market:

The renaissance of gas is being driven by hunger for electricity from the data centers that are powering the boom in artificial intelligence. In 2024, the U.S. Department of Energy forecast that data centers would consume 6.7 to 12 per cent of U.S. electricity by 2028, up from 4.4 per cent in 2023.

The computing capacity required to scale up AI requires reliable, round-the-clock power, causing the U.S, to rapidly become the global epicenter of new gas-fired power plant construction. U.S. energy company Entergy, for example, is building three new gas-fired power plants in Louisiana tied to Meta’s colossal Hyperion data centre campus.

“There’s so much demand right now that we can’t meet it all,” says Yasuhiro Fujita, a 39-year veteran of MHI, stepping out of the assembly plant. “I feel this boom is a big one because it’s worldwide. But right now, there’s a lot of demand out of North America.”

The supply crunch means customers are now having to wait at least three years if they want to procure a turbine from the oligopoly. The trio are increasing production, but not fast enough to meet burgeoning demand.

The geopolitical angle on gas turbines is equally interesting, with Asian countries facing serious hurdles to buying these products.

☭ Reds: The Tragedy of American Communism, by Maurice Isserman. This is easily the best one-volume history of the American Communist Party. The rise and fall of the CP is a chapter of American radical history that still deserves reading and reflection. Isserman’s book is a worthy guide to that chapter.

In Reds, historian Maurice Isserman focuses on the deeply contradictory nature of the history of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA), a movement that attracted egalitarian idealists and bred authoritarian zealots. Founded in 1919, the CPUSA fought for a just society in America: members organized powerful industrial unions, protested racism, and moved the nation left. At the same time, Communists maintained unwavering faith in the USSR’s claims to be a democratic workers’ state and came to be regarded as agents of a hostile foreign power. Following Nikita Khrushchev’s revelation of Joseph Stalin’s crimes, however, doubt in Soviet leadership erupted within the CPUSA, leading to the organization’s decline into political irrelevance.

⚾️ The World Series, Game Two in Toronto. Shohei Ohtani’s insane final outing to put the Dodgers into a second consecutive World Series was one for the record books—ten strikeouts, six scoreless innings, and three home runs! But Toronto also showed a ton of grit in clawing back the AL pennant from Seattle after being down two games from the start with a huge three-run homer by George Springer in Game Seven. TLP has no skin in the game on this one with multiple reasons not to root for either team, so we’ll go patriotic and give the Americans the nod over the Canadians.

The Jays won last night’s Game One after another stunning comeback with nine runs in the sixth and tonight’s game starts at 8PM EDT. All games will air on Fox.

🎸 Twilight Override, by Jeff Tweedy. Most musicians don’t put out more, and arguably more interesting, music as they get older, but Wilco frontman Jeff Tweedy is not like most musicians. The guy turns out incredible songs seemingly at will and has just released an ace three-record solo album, Twilight Override, backed by his sons and their friends. The album is a perfect way to unplug from the world for two hours and just “Feel Free.”

TLP is psyched to see Tweedy and his band at the Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden in Richmond, VA, for what should be a pleasant night under the stars on Saturday (with WS score checking in between songs).

Here’s a fun track from the new record called “Lou Reed Was My Babysitter.”