AOC: "It is unconscionable that what we are debating right now is legislation that will give 8 senators over $1 million a piece & we're robbing people of their food assistance & healthcare to pay for it. How can we vote to enrich ourselves by stealing from the American people?"

Kyle Kingsbury is not a journalist. He is not an op-ed writer. He is a computer safety researcher. And he has written one of the most compelling, comprehensive accounts of the ongoing hell in Chicago that you could possibly imagine. In under 1600 words. aphyr.com/posts/397-i-...

By this time next week, the estimated deaths due to the illegal destruction of USAID and the shuttering of its aid efforts will breach 400,000. More than 260,000 will be children. Source: www.bu.edu/sph/news/art...

Trump didn’t just take billions of taxpayer dollars and give it to Argentina with no legal process to help a politician he likes avoid losses in domestic elections and hook up a billionaire he knows who made a bad bet on Argentina. He gave away billions of Americans’ money and it didn’t even work.

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Folks demanding political / ideological purity fail to see that this is no longer a movement belonging to the left / liberals. This is an opposition against fascism. By definition it must be big tent. Failure to grasp this: see divided oppositions in Eastern Europe as your failed examples.

Someone in the crowd: “Go Cubs!” Pope Leo XIV: “Han perdido! They lost!”

I'm teaching a seminar on 'Economic Security' this semester. Here's the syllabus: tinyurl.com/bdd6e4jd. Let me know anything I should add ~ Features @sarahbauerled.bsky.social @dandrezner.bsky.social @mevers90.bsky.social @himself.bsky.social @abenewman.bsky.social @kazutosuzuki.bsky.social et al.

Dr. Jane Goodall filmed an interview with Netflix in March 2025 that she understood would only be released after her death.

For those keeping score of tech billionaire information control: -The world's richest man owns X. -The 2nd richest man now owns TikTok/Paramount/CBS News. -The 3rd richest man owns FB/IG/WhatsApp. -The 4th richest man owns the Washington Post/Twitch. -The 5th/6th richest men own Google/YouTube.

i stg one of the problems with the modern pundit-pocalypse is their sheer *incuriousity*. everything is based off their first impressions, their gut instincts, their thinking from first principle. they gotta get that take out before they do any reading. what hath the Blog Era wrought, man

“You should smile more.” www.nytimes.com/2025/09/18/o...

It might seem fanciful to talk about rebuilding now, but the reason the second Trump administration has been able to achieve their goals was via advance planning and personnel. Can't want until election season to be ready for Day 1. H/t @sbagen.bsky.social donmoynihan.substack.com/p/how-social...

Far more dangerous than Trump, I think, is how quickly the last eight months have pulled back the curtain on America's elites and shown everyone how venal, how cowardly and how utterly mediocre the foundation of our society has been.

generally speaking, and with the glaring exception of november 2024, the more directly democratic an institution has been, the better it has checked Trump (eg grand and petit juries); the more elite and insular, the less effective (the Senate, the Supreme Court, big business)

To some extent, what’s happening isn’t unusual when you consider decades of extreme inequality + elitism. The “norms” were never sturdy—just brittle stalks dressed up as strength. Now we’re just seeing the cracks out loud.

WTF is this? Normalizing authoritarianism repression as an electoral strategy www.wsj.com/politics/pol...

“Severance" actor Tramell Tillman has won the Emmy for outstanding supporting actor in a drama series. He is the first Black man ever to win the award #Emmys

We are told that Charlie Kirk was "doing politics the right way" by going to universities to speak his mind. We are told that universities do not allow people with Charlie Kirk's views to speak their minds. It is odd to be told both those things.

As @mcopelov.bsky.social often reminds, institutions are not self-enforcing. They are constituted by people, who can decide to enforce them, change them, ignore them, or as @himself.bsky.social suggests, resist them.

Ukraine needs to name its military bases after Vladimir Putin and his generals. by Pete Hegseth

It's called fascism. Fascist regimes, like Mussolini's Italy, directly nationalized some businesses. American journalists need reminding that this isn't necessarily a 'socialist' thing. Articles like this don't help the public interpret what's happening in the US. www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/...

I had a professor of Jewish Studies at UChicago who made the administration very angry because every year he made a proposal for the university to create an on-campus memorial to the worldwide victims of the UChicago economics department.

D.C. has more residents than two U.S. states. They pay more per capita in federal taxes than any other state. But they don’t get a serious seat at the table to decide how they’re governed. D.C. statehood now.

watching TOP GUN MAVERICK on 4K. god this movie is so fucking good.

I say this extremely seriously: one of the main skills children have to learn to be adults is to do things they *don't* find interesting. This is both because many necessary things in life are boring and because sometimes interesting things take time and effort first.

The team @intsecurity.bsky.social has graciously made our article “Social Cohesion and Community Displacement in Armed Conflict” - w @danielarnon.bsky.social @rickmcalexander.bsky.social - free for this week only! Access it here: direct.mit.edu/isec/article...

I cannot emphasize how much nothing has happened

The thing about the occupation of DC that you're probably not hearing about as much as the checkpoints and the troops on the streets: our evenings are full of helicopters circling. It's 10:25pm, and the police copter has been circling for half an hour. It's like this every night now. It sucks.

I live in DC. You know what crime scared me in the last decade? The Jan 6 insurrection. And Trump pardoned those perpetrators. Anyone who doesn't include that context for Trump's "crackdown on DC crime" pieces isn't a journalist.

I feel like “cost of living crisis” is way too broad. It’s *housing*. It’s all housing. Everything else is at the margins. And no one is seriously proposing solutions for housing, talking about the price of meat or whatever just isn’t serious

I've been watching music related movies/documentaries recently. I had never seen Stop Making Sense. Totally struck me as the LCD Soundsystem of their day.

Genocidal intent:

There is something particularly unhinged about the university making a big push for "writing measurable learning objectives" even as AI is massively corroding writing, measuring, and learning. Interesting times.

Political commissars are being assigned to the media and academia.

What’s striking is that he is pointing to Republican approval of the President as if it were public opinion more broadly. It’s a quiet reminder of whose support he sees as legitimate, and whose voices he’s willing to ignore.

If you enjoyed today's World in 30 Minutes episode with Henry Farrell @himself.bsky.social, then catch-up on last weekend's Annual Council Meeting where Henry spoke as part of the panel on protecting European democracies 🔗Full panel recording: buff.ly/wK3OeDP

Washington, D.C., has a population roughly equivalent to Alaska's. And it has zero senators. If D.C. had senators, the GOP megablil bill would have failed today. Instead, Murkowski got carve-outs and money for Alaska, and then voted to subject DC to the bill

Help me Robert Putnam, you’re my only hope.

People spent years trying to rationalize Trump foreign policy in terms of “realpolitik, “great-power competition,” & “great-power concerts.” This is, as we say in social science, bullshit. He’s a kleptocratic authoritarian. His foreign policy is about accumulating personal wealth & status [1/2]

This parallels the frustration with detente in the 1970s. Arms control agreements control arms. That's it. They don't constrain the rest of an adversary's foreign policy. And that's ok. One tool can't fix everything. People need to be realistic.

This all shows the perils of politicizing the military - Americans are desperate to see it as their co-partisan - and how all sorts of narratives can easily take root about the military when you don’t really know it at all. Fin/

But if a few people in masks start lighting stuff on fire? Then you have news. This creates an *enormous* attentional advantage towards the most violent and chaotic kind of protest.

Shot: danieldrezner.substack.com/p/the-bullys... Chaser: 👇👇👇

We will not cower, even in the face of Trump’s militarized escalation. On Saturday, we are going to rise up all across the country in defiance of this administration’s authoritarian agenda. Join the nationwide peaceful protests for No Kings Day: www.nokings.org?SQF_SOURCE=i...

Everything sucks, but I was awarded this year’s APSA Foreign Policy Book Award for my coauthored book The Price of Empire! a.co/d/8U4Hjqv