The Sterling Report

The Sterling Report

by Art Sterling

Society & Culture

The Red Bandana | Wednesday, September 9, 2026 | Sterling Report

His father was a fireman, and when the boy was small his father gave him a red bandana to carry in his pocket. Somebody asked him once why he kept it. Also: ships crossing a strait with their transponders switched off, and forty billion dollars of oil that officially never sailed. The frozen ground inside Mont Blanc that has held the rock together for thousands of years, and what this summer did to it. Brussels gets into the housing business. Peat burning under the forests of Borneo. A hundred and sixteen degrees in Death Valley on the ninth of September. What the recorders show about Miami. Twenty five years to hand somebody a shovel. A machine that did in eighty eight hours what men could not do in ninety years. A flag waving out of a storm drain in Louisiana. And the day this country stopped calling itself the United Colonies. Wednesday, September 9th, 2026. The Sterling Report. News and comment.

The Wagon Train | Tuesday, September 8, 2026 | Sterling Report

A man had a television show he could not sell. The networks did not want science fiction. So he stopped calling it science fiction and told them it was a Western. They bought it. Then they cancelled it. Also: a drought shuts a national park, and the leopards get it to themselves. Four paintings out a window in the south of France, and two of them nobody alive can buy. A volcano called the Child, and what its parent did in 1883. An island in the dark with ninety one percent of the lights out. Bears down among the houses. A driveway in Malibu that went into the sea. A seventy nine year old on a mountain, and the Black Hawk that came for him. And a boat that turned toward the fire instead of away from it. Tuesday, September 8th, 2026. The Sterling Report. News and comment.

The Shift | Monday, September 7, 2026 | Sterling Report

Sixty years ago a young man in New Jersey signed up to run toward other people's worst nights. Nobody ever paid him a dime for it. Last week his town thanked him. Which is usually how these things end. Also: a general who handed out chocolate to children, buried this morning with a crowd in the street. A promise the Germans call the firewall. Twenty one miles of water that a fifth of the world's oil has to pass through. A hurricane that has made its turn, and the anniversary falling on Friday. A voice out over Elliott Bay before daylight. A man on the Passaic River aboard something that belongs in a bedroom. And a mountain near Antarctica with something in its crater that has never once gone cold. Monday, September 7th, 2026. The Sterling Report. News and comment.

Furthur | Friday, September 4, 2026 | Sterling Report

They painted a school bus every color there was and put a sign on the front with where they were going. Somebody spelled it wrong. Nobody ever fixed it. Sixty years later it comes back to San Francisco. Also: nine days underground, and two men come up through a hole in the mud. A drone found lying inside an airport fence, and what it was lying next to. Wool on a dying glacier. A hurricane whose trouble is not where it is. Something floating in the medicine on a hospital crash cart. A fine paid eight months ago and a lesson apparently unlearned. Nineteen hundred Chicagoans doing to themselves what they usually save for company. And a ring under a rock, twenty eight years gone. Friday, September 4th, 2026. The Sterling Report. News and comment.

The Decagon | Wednesday, September 2, 2026 | Sterling Report

They looked for thirty six years. Cassini flew around that planet for thirteen of them and never saw a thing. Then Saturn turned back toward us, and there it was. Also: a boy of seventeen climbs a fence, and taking him turns out to be the mistake. A president flies to Cairo and tells the room who ought to be in charge of it. A storm that will not move. A company firing people while the money comes in. A town fifteen minutes down the road that dug its own wells. A woman whose mother taught her to play three weeks ago. And a burglar at the top of the stairs, growling. Plus a correction we owed you. Wednesday, September 2nd, 2026. The Sterling Report. News and comment.

The Island | Tuesday, September 1, 2026 | Sterling Report

Boaters kept calling it in. Trees on it. Grown trees. Drifting. The man at the power company looked at the pictures and figured somebody had made them on a computer. Also: a court sits down to define a word that nobody had to define four years ago. A king swears an oath four days after a funeral. Two governments using the same word to mean opposite things. A storm that could not make up its mind. A shot given on the first day of a life, and who is not getting it now. Somebody telling stories about electricity. A scalpel that met something it could not cut. A company that changed hands with nobody clapping. And a farm in Kentucky that a man never left. Tuesday, September 1st, 2026. The Sterling Report. News and comment.

He Rang the Bell | Monday, August 31, 2026 | Sterling Report

Three people came to him with a warning that morning. Not one of them could say what was coming. So he rang the bell. A ferry that should not have sailed. A valley that flooded twice. A rain that fell on the wrong ground. A man who looked out his front window and went outside. And six thousand young trees given a disease on purpose. Monday, August 31st, 2026. The Sterling Report. News and comment.

Who Took In the Boy Who Would Be King? | Friday, August 28, 2026 | Sterling Report

King Harald of Norway has died at eighty-nine. As a boy he fled an invasion, and an American president took his family in. As a young man he told his father what he would surrender rather than give up the woman he loved. The Nepal-Tibet toll climbs past five hundred and seventy-nine, with ninety Americans unaccounted for and two new lakes hanging above the valley. Japan spends ninety-six billion dollars propping up the yen, and the result is worth hearing. The Fed chairman says nothing at Jackson Hole and the bond market answers anyway. Money waiting for Kroger pharmacy customers who act before December. And a mailbox test that changed the odds for three hundred seventy-six thousand people. A New Hampshire man whose house was on fire made a decision at five in the morning. A line drawn through Arizona tribal land in 1853 comes back around. And in Oklahoma, the hundred and fiftieth year of a dance that has never once been missed. A king crowned at three. A foal born where none has been born in two centuries. And a speech with a different title. Art Sterling. The news, straight down the middle.

What Did the Instruments Actually Record? | Thursday, August 27, 2026 | Sterling Report

What the instruments recorded on the Nepal-Tibet border was not what anyone first believed, and the correction changes the whole story. The toll has multiplied since yesterday. A glacier in far northern Greenland lets go of an island of ice the size of Manhattan. Nvidia posts ninety-six billion dollars in a quarter and gets squeezed by something ordinary. The makers of ChatGPT build a chip in nine months, and how they designed it is the part worth hearing. Meta pays seventeen billion over harm to children, and the market reacts in a way you might not expect. A jobless figure that refuses to move. A dresser recalled in May before anyone was hurt, then sold anyway through four companies in four states. An Alaska ballot with the same name on it twice. And a man in 1859 they called Crazy Drake, a roundabout in England where the graves were supposed to be gone, and a moon that slides into the earth's shadow and stops just short. Art Sterling. The news, straight down the middle.

What Warning Did That Valley Have? | Wednesday, August 26, 2026 | Sterling Report

A small quake in the Himalayas shook loose something much bigger, and the valley below had only minutes. South Korea, the country the world called a cautionary tale, released a figure this morning that has now held for two full years. Canada matches our tariffs dollar for dollar, and its prime minister admits a cost most leaders wouldn't say aloud. In China, an earthquake alert told millions of people one thing before the machine changed its mind. Inflation is stuck, but a second number in the same report says more about how Americans feel. Bill Gates, after forty years of optimism, asks for something nobody expected. A sprout outbreak with an unusual twist. A hundred and fifty million dollars finished off the Oregon coast, still missing one thing. Nebraska farmers and the Sierra Club in the same firehouse. Fairfax County's crossing guards, two days into the school year. Sixty-five Michigan districts buying something together. And a song Dolly Parton sealed in a box in 2015, not to be opened until 2045 — along with the one practical thing she put in there beside it. Art Sterling. The news, straight down the middle.

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