Over a week ago, in the FT, the *shipping* guys were saying "it's not just insurance. We just don't actually want our ships blown up."

"From city councils to Congress, homeowners have always dominated elected office. But after Mamdani’s victory, a slew of renter candidates want to follow in his footsteps." Excellent @monicapotts.bsky.social piece. newrepublic.com/article/2076...

Oh, did the most dishonest person you've ever encountered in your life betray you?

Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi in the @lrb.co.uk

'The attack on Iran was preceded by a # of unusually large & well-timed bets that made a combined $330k & were placed by 12 suspicious accounts in the days before Saturday’s air strikes. The FT found a similar pattern related to the US capture of Nicolás Maduro in January' www.ft.com/content/2883...

Much more serious things happening in the world, obvi, but if you live in the DFW region, Dallas is taking a vote on March 4 to decide the future of one of the most important pieces of 20th century architecture, IM Pei's city hall building. Contact the city council and urge preservation.

Fuck Iran and find out

(listening to verklärte nacht) what if wagner was good

I really appreciate @dwallacewells.bsky.social's work, but this—green energy supplementing rather than replacing fossil fuels—seems to me the main story, not just a qualification to the story of the "green transition." GHG emissions keep rising—with 2025's projected to reach the highest level ever

(My spouse) @hermionehoby.bsky.social’s brave & searching essay on what it’s like to live with a—intermittent but cruel & mysterious—chronic illness www.theguardian.com/society/2026...

like the proletariat, the task of posting is to abolish itself

When Gavin Newsom says "the Democrats need to be more culturally normal" with "less focus on pronouns" what he's actually saying is "the trannies aren't normal and don't normalize them."

Sentimentality is an underrated fash affect

A new national survey finds 70% of Americans think the Trump administration is too focused on deportations. Immigration enforcement ranks as a top driver of defection among Trump's own 2024 voters. austinkocher.substack.com/p/new-pollin...

'Armed settlers descended on his home and viciously beat him, his wife, his daughter and his granddaughter. When his son and a 14-year-old nephew tried to come to their aid, both were shot and wounded in the ensuing gunfire, which came from both the settlers and Israeli soldiers'

When the govmt loves capitalism so much it refuses to let the owners of a coal plant shutter it

More MAHA glory

Rotterdämmerung

Remarkable piece by @melindacooper.bsky.social for @equatormag.bsky.social www.equator.org/articles/eps...

Syllabus writing for my upcoming @brooklyninstitute.bsky.social course on the theory and practice of dictatorship. A few spots are still available—we start on March 3! (Link below)

love to see it

Anybody in or passing through northern Colorado, please think of coming to Perry Anderson's talk (with Tony Wood) here in Boulder on Thursday, February 19th. The event is free: magicmountaintalks.org/event/perry-...

An excellent, funny, and winningly bleak and nasty short story from Daniel Lefferts, in @yalereview.bsky.social yalereview.org/article/dani...

A great piece of criticism, both as an appreciation and for its genial wickedness about Updike's limitations www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

Reviews like this make writing worth it. lareviewofbooks.org/article/as-h...

Sure, you were sick of reading about Pynchon a few months ago—but now don't you miss it? Me on the new one @thenation.com www.thenation.com/article/cult...

For our winter issue, Granta goes to therapy. Read the issue for free online for the next five days. granta.com/products/gra...

New short story is up at @grantamag.bsky.social and in front if the paywall for the rest of the month granta.com/whatever-cre...

new frontiers in the demand for art to directly gratify and intolerance for representation www.nytimes.com/2025/05/03/a...

Last year, the United States sold more educational services to the rest of the world than it sold in natural gas and coal combined. wapo.st/4luJyph

I don't suppose the SEC might want to look into this?

I wrote about an obscure German contribution to the critique of political economy, for @harpers.bsky.social harpers.org/archive/2025...

difficult to overstate how bad it would be for this effort to succeed

Some day we'll see the headline and people will cheer in the streets

In which our old friend Sebastian Gorka, Senior Director for Counterterrorism, suggests critics of the Trump administration be charged with "aiding and abetting terrorism": “Because aiding and abetting criminals and terrorists is a crime in federal statute.” www.kenklippenstein.com/p/trumps-cou...

Benjamin Kunkel (@kunktation.bsky.social) reviews Paul Reitter’s translation of Capital. “The task of reading Capital naïvely acquires a fresh jolt of plausibility in the case of Paul Reitter’s new translation of volume one,” writes Kunkel. harpers.org/archive/2025...

“The list included a 13-year-old and seven other minors. . . For now the immigrants added are being given supposed dates of death.”

"Trump administration officials have discussed possibly denaturalizing and deporting activists and other individuals whom they label as having committed so-called 'fraud' on their applications for citizenship by subsequently supporting what Team Trump decides are 'pro-terrorist' causes or groups."

fucking monstrous

If you are 1) a federal civil servant/contractor ordered not to release scheduled data or reports, or 2) an academic who has lost access to government data in the past week ...please get in touch. I'm happy to keep our conversations confidential. crampell[@]washpost[dot]com

About 75% of immigrant farm workers did not show up for work this week in Bakersfield, California, as the threat of Trump’s immigration raids looms.

Apollinaire's great poem "The Little Car," about feeling an era end, and another begin, from one day day to the next www.ronnowpoetry.com/contents/apo...

“Expectations of economic losses stemming from the fires have more than doubled since yesterday to closer to $50 billion,” JPMorgan wrote in a note to clients.’ www.ft.com/content/db2c...

Call me sour, but EVERY mention of this "victory" should acknowledge that it's funded entirely by the profits of ongoing fossil-fuel production. Since the IEA said "no more new oil and gas fields if we are to hit net zero by 2050" in 2021, Norway has issued >150 new production licenses.

“The only clue that users seemingly had of Siri's alleged spying was eerily accurate targeted ads that appeared after they had just been talking about specific items like Air Jordans or brands like Olive Garden,” What a colossal gaslight that was.