Kirsten Gillibrand

Reputations are built to travel ahead of you, clearing the path. The problem is they don't stop at the door—they walk all the way in and sit down at the table. This is a bad week to have been on the record about anything.

Jay Clayton ⬇

President Donald Trump's nominee for director of national intelligence had more bipartisan support than virtually any other in recent memory—Democrats praised him, Republicans were ready to confirm him, and Senator Tom Cotton had a hearing scheduled for Wednesday morning. Then Trump posted on Truth Social at 3 a.m. ET and told him not to show up. Nothing on Capitol Hill matters more than Trump's late-night thumbs typing.

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JD Vance ⬇

At the G7 meeting in France, the president reprised a joke he first made in April: if the Iran deal works, he's taking the credit; if it falls apart, "I'm blaming JD." Afterward, Vance gamely told reporters, "I think the president was joking as he often does." The first time may have been a punchline; but the second time starts to sound like a job description.

Kirsten Gillibrand ⬇

The New York senator made her national name in 2017 by leading the charge to push Al Franken out with the career-defining slogan "I believe them." She's now chair of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, backing Graham Platner for a Maine Senate seat despite domestic abuse allegations, a sexting scandal, and a Nazi-linked tattoo. Some slogans come with a price tag.

Keiko Fujimori ⬆

The Peruvian politician appeared poised to win the presidency on her fourth attempt, by less than one percentage point—in an election the right should have won going away. She joins Javier Milei and José Antonio Kast in a hard-right wave sweeping Latin America but arrives with baggage none of them carry: her father Alberto, whose governing legacy she has openly embraced, was a convicted autocrat who served time for human rights abuses before he died in 2024. The continent is lurching right, and Peru may have just picked the candidate who makes even the wave nervous.

Keisha Lance Bottoms ⬆

The Democratic former Atlanta mayor gets to run for Georgia governor against a self-funded health care billionaire instead of the formidable Republican Lieutenant Governor Burt Jones, who had the backing of both Donald Trump and Governor Brian Kemp before the GOP runoff blew up in everyone's face. She didn't out-maneuver anyone. Republicans just handed her a better race.

Dario Amodei ⬇

The Anthropic CEO spent years warning that his own models were so dangerous that governments "should have the power to block" them and is now surprised that the Trump administration took him at his word and did just that, pulling Anthropic's latest, most advanced models. He cried wolf so often he forgot the wolves were listening.

Originally a staple of Newsweek's print edition, Conventional Wisdom used arrows to track whose stock was rising or falling in the political circus. We're reviving it in the digital age because the problem it lampooned—hyperbole and partisan certainty masquerading as insight—has only intensified.

CW assigns arrows—up, down, or sideways—to the figures and forces shaping current events. The arrows don't predict the future or claim special insight. They capture the prevailing winds of the moment, uncluttered by tribal howling. In an era when partisan media reinforces rather than questions assumptions, CW operates from the center—skeptical of left and right alike, committed to puncturing inflated reputations and recognizing overlooked truths.