The Ivy League-educated vice president of the United States talking about the "elites" always reminds me of that Soviet joke where Brezhnev shows his mom his cars and his estate and his summer dacha and she goes "It's beautiful, but if the Communists knew you had this they'd be so angry!"

Wrote a long thing about the shallow roots of the "Thucydides Trap" concept: emmaclairefoley.substack.com/p/the-thucyd...

There's an easy, restful dunk available here: Trump almost certainly has no idea who Thucydides is but this ignores the deeper, more necessary dunk on the "Thucydides trap" concept itself, which attempts to universalize Cold War dynamics through thousands of years of history

It's no mystery why Rudy Giuliani, who's disgraced, bankrupt, & looking for government help with his medical bills, would want the @nytimes.com to print a story about how he once helped a former mayor in need. What I'm curious about is why the Times went along with this PR scheme.

Some thoughts on how AI as an industry is mostly writing its own history (at least for now): emmaclairefoley.substack.com/p/ais-histor...

I'm like a single-issue "less nuclear dust" voter at this point

The NYT should bring back eldritch illustrations of relatively mundane articles

Legally Blonde but for a spunky and indefatigable student of the philosophy of history: The Battle of Jenna

I wrote up some very quick, very sketchy thoughts on the possibility of the U.S. using nuclear weapons in Iran: emmaclairefoley.substack.com/p/quick-thou...

Briskly clicking back and forth between my "Iran nuclear" tab and the tab where I type "in solidarity" at the end of emails over and over

I'm trying to read more popular opining on AI, and it really does feel like decades of genteel punch-pulling have trained real human writers out of the critical thinking and writing skills that might help them interpret what's going on here www.nytimes.com/2026/03/29/o...

desperate lying and fear-mongering, to be sure, but jd's right about one thing: "we don't want the worst people in the world to have a nuclear weapon". 🧐

Not my title, but: I tried to draw some connections between the role of Iran's nuclear program in justifying the attacks on Iran and how France and Europe are talking about new French nukes and "forward deterrence" jacobin.com/2026/03/iran...

Someone should invent a technology where I can subscribe to a single, omnibus substack that pays all the authors I read for their work

Democratic members of Congress need to attack this war as a crime, because that’s what it is. “The president did not plan out his war of aggression as well as he could have” is a foolish and self-defeating position to take.

destroying Iran's what? (they don't have a nuclear weapons program)

I'm not going to make this about me

Broadly: the danger of nuclear risk and escalation with AI is not concentrated in giving presidents a bad machine advisor urging escalation. Instead, that risk is in automating any Stanislav Petrovs out of the chain of launch, as you need *restrain* to respond to sensor error indicating odd launch.

It's 9am somewhere

You're telling me that word association tools trained on internet comments don't know how to deescalate? www.newscientist.com/article/2516...

20 years of GWOT has left a sense that uncontested air power is how wars work. But it's not war. These are all launchers. It's bombardment for bombardment's sake. We're getting ready to bomb the hell out of a country, but there's no war plan, no real goals.

I do strongly empathize with the experience of being a few hours late on your response to New START expiration www.axios.com/2026/02/05/n...

I've said this before, but it's worth repeating: the Biden nuclear policy team bears a huge amount of responsibility for normalizing this nonsense. What was once a fringe right wing position became the settled wisdom of Vipin Narang and Jake Sullivan, and now here we are.

We are descending ever faster into a period of violence & epistemic collapse from which we may never emerge, but on the other hand I've got plenty of material for the course on modern misinterpretations of ancient & Classical history I teach in the spring: www.nytimes.com/2026/01/07/u...

Definitely having a ghost of Christmas future-type reaction to 2026 as a number

The hype around new nuclear tech, & the well-publicized shift toward a more tech-industry model for military production, along with the crippling effects of haphazard cuts to federal gov't capacity has made me worry the Trump admin might reduce nuclear safety standards w/ long-term consequences

Clocking in for my server shift at the restaurant of success

Doing a career pivot to become the guy the public library sends around to make sure you're actually listening to the audiobook you checked out

What are we doing here folks

I finally watched House of Dynamite, and it was okay! I enjoyed it. It didn't do much with its structural conceit--maybe it would have it it were more interested in the human characters who animate the lumbering national security state, the closest thing it has to a main character with a personality

Ending my Keynes lecture before I refer to him as a noted bisexual

For @jacobinmag.bsky.social, I addressed a recent article in @foreignaffairs.com arguing that the U.S. should give nuclear weapons to Germany, Japan, and Canada: jacobin.com/2025/11/nucl...

Good @emmaclairefoley.bsky.social piece pushing back against a recent Foreign Affairs article: "Below the confidence in America’s power to shape the global status quo seems to lurk a quiet admission that the American empire is fracturing" jacobin.com/2025/11/nucl...

Did I miss hottest country discourse?? When did this happen???

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