Donald Trump recently announced that he’d ordered the Pentagon to resume nuclear weapons testing after three decades. As @emmaclairefoley.bsky.social explained last year, Americans we sit closer to nuclear annihilation than we like to imagine.

New York's social-democratic foyer

Like Reagan, Cheney seemed to function as a constant god in the machine of American decline; I can think of a dozen moments when, trying to understand why some legally established process for was functionally impossible, it came down to Cheney having personally made it so

Okay but if you can pronounce noted non-threatening English word "thumbtack" (or, if you play nyt games hoping to put off cognitive decline), you're in a great position to correctly pronounce this without going out of your way to make it sound scary, foreign, and unreasonable

What do we think, is this truck transporting things people need through the busy streets of Manhattan or is it empty, using up precious limited resources while accomplishing nothing of value

A better world is possible if we work for it internationalpolicy.org/publications...

I know the news is good when I gain 20 new followers without posting anything

An optimistic read of the news that Trump wants to restart nuclear testing is that he's responding to Russia's Burevestnik test and isn't clear on the difference between a nuclear-armed and nuclear-powered missile, which is understandable and fine if you're not the president of the United States

the email-writing AI has ordered a drone strike on my home for using a comma in a subject line

The most having-a-Master's thing you can possibly do is habitually claim that you don't know how to read

Civility discourse is a war on thinking and writing clearly. None of this is in defense of nuance. What civility pundits want is to be absolved of responsibility for the content of what they say, provided it's expressed in a particular way. Their fight is against judgement itself.

I habitually argue that people who make and influence policy for a living need massively more exposure to normal conditions of life in the United States, but for this man specifically the opposite is true

cat behavior. get the laser pointer

shamefacedly passing out little gift bags with earplugs to my immediate neighbors when I need to do an alanis morissette singalong in my apartment like I'm taking an infant on a plane

Starting a consulting company where I'm the bog spirit you call when a friend is tempted to start a nonprofit

Credit to @emmaclairefoley.bsky.social for calling labubu "American collapse era Cheburashka"

only paid enough on Amtrak to ride in the car full of youth referring to the 90s as the 20th century

I'm speaking in DC Thursday w/Ro Khanna, Hassan El-Tayyab, Hanieh Jodat, and other progressive leaders about what we can do to strengthen the anti-war movement at an incredibly important moment. I would love to see you there!! RSVP here or message me for info: secure.actblue.com/donate/power...

I've been in LA for less than three days and I keep hearing myself use the word "ideate"

We can't have nice things: a lede for people who base their sense of personal virtue on having read at least 1-3 novels as a teen

“Trump is antiwar” is a lie that he and his allies promoted because it was useful to them in the elections. His Democratic opponents made it easier to sell that lie by running on bankrupt defenses of the status quo, but that didn’t magically make Trump a real opponent of foreign wars.

The logic of neoliberalism is a logic of childlessness, part eleventy

My Beat

Switching, productively, between news about the war and a 35-pg interview transcript I'm editing where a filmmaker discusses the play of light in intense and deeply felt detail

Trump's knowledge of Israel's attacks on Iran means, on some level, they play a role in the US' overall strategy toward Iran. It's amazing how policymakers continue to see military action as a knowable tool that can be controlled, rather than fundamentally transformative to the political landscape

Sen. Bernie Moreno, R-Ohio, endorses cutting Medicare waste/fraud in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. Specifically, he wants to look at Medicare Advantage, where the government pays private insurers to provide benefits. “Medicare Advantage is a scam," Moreno tells me. His full comments:

The phrase "criminal illegals" should be the "weapons of mass destruction" of the 2020s. You said there were millions of them — where are they? Why are you deporting moms and dads, these hard-working people I know in my neighborhood?

Missile defense doesn't work, but at least it's stupidly expensive, has no appreciable spillover into other research, and in fact the pursuit of it actively makes nuclear war more likely.

This is what Golden Dome's *supporters* are saying it will cost the public!

Learned what a ploughshare was from the BBC historical farm series the other day and I gotta tell you. The "swords into ploughshares" proverb makes a lot more sense when you know what a ploughshare is

lacunae beach

for the NYC-adjacent, I'm doing a reading next Thursday:

Twitter has settled on a dumb/evil vibe, bluesky is for the smart & virtuous, but where can I go to read quips from clever degenerates????

"The vicar of Christ should be more tolerant of greed of exploitation," said the clever pundit.

It's less about persuasion, more about testing how far authoritarian gestures, restricting others' options, and making big demands can take you. In both cases, it seems to have taken a tiny step forward in strategy by trying to present a slight easing of those overwhelming demands as an incentive

It's interesting to think about the admin's approach to diplomacy and its weird pronatalist gestures alongside each other as two areas where it's trying to figure out how to do something that requires real buy-in from people outside of it

A surprisingly direct address of U.S. obligations under Article VI of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, even if it is taking credit for things that happened like 40 years ago lol reachingcriticalwill.org/images/docum...

"Adding these other demands to the mix makes no sense if the administration were genuinely interested in securing an agreement. Trump says he wants a deal, but his administration’s actions say that they want a pretext for conflict." daniellarison.substack.com/p/rubios-abs...

The incel stuff and Marx-y adjustments to third-wave feminism mired in the grinding individual consequences of a total lack of state support for children and their parents seem to have met in a sad middle ground where there's almost no space to speak in public about non-transactional love anymore

Haha remember 32 days ago when Sen Sullivan said "it's gonna cost at least $20 B" and Marshall Billingslea that same day quipped that those costs are "probably inflated" by ideological opponents? $24,700,000,000, for the first year, just to begin development, and huge strategic risks on success.

Are scare tactics the best way to raise public consciousness about the dangers of nukes? Maybe not. @emmaclairefoley.bsky.social joins the pod to discuss that and a lot more! youtu.be/HpgD-uXsA2g?...

A few thoughts on nuclear weapons and the new administration, up today at @thebaffler.com thebaffler.com/latest/proba...

this is obviously an extreme and ugly example, but it's amazing how much of public discourse is just "fantasizing about the law"

Major funders of nuclear weapons-related research have immense political power within that field. I hope this new wave of funding comes with a commitment to long-term follow-through www.axios.com/2025/04/22/c...

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A few thoughts on nuclear weapons and the new administration, up today at @thebaffler.com thebaffler.com/latest/proba...

It's one of the days where I teach about the 90s this year and I forgot that Fukuyama blames Marxism for nuclear arms racing

First, make an extreme demand that the other side won't ever accept. Then wonder why they don't want to talk to you. That's Trump's Iran policy in a nutshell:

This is a fire hazard (at a station that already has two guards employed to guard this door). @mta.info

the very Thursday feeling of watching your weekend commitments curdle into something borderline unmanageable