"Damascus is courting investors with conferences, decrees, and billion-dollar memoranda. Reconstruction has become a public relations exercise in legitimacy and confidence-building. But most projects remain notional, shaped more by politics than economics. What’s missing is a plan."

"The proposed projects reflect the stated desire of the Syrian authorities to rely on private investment as the engine of economic development and reconstruction." @naderatassi.bsky.social on opaque megaproject deals Syria has signed with mainly Gulf investors. www.arab-reform.net/publication/...

Health insurance is fraud -- that's the super secret plan Republicans have to finally repeal and replace Obamacare.

The administration went all the way to the Supreme Court on Friday night to halt food-stamp funding. 🤡

Not that he didn’t already know, but now Trump knows for sure he can roll the Dems every time and there’s no need to negotiate for anything

By caving, Senate Democrats are sending the message that they have absolutely no feeling for the national mood — despite how people voted less than a week ago. Maybe they’ll have a better idea when the primaries kick off in a few months.

"The city’s highest-paid workers — New Yorkers making $312,000 a year or more — saw their hourly wages rise by almost 35 percent between 2019 and 2024. That was more than triple the hourly wage growth experienced by upper-middle-class employees." www.nytimes.com/2025/11/07/n...

"When I began filing for Western news desks, the shift was immediate. The story didn’t need to be true; it had to be acceptable. Each edit taught me what kind of suffering was legible, what kind of death was allowed to matter." Don't miss this essay by Adam Makary themarkaz.org/the-grammar-...

“We Are Still Here,” a new poem in Hidden Cities by Vaheed Ramazani. hiddencities.substack.com/p/we-are-sti...

“We Are Still Here,” a new poem in Hidden Cities by Vaheed Ramazani. hiddencities.substack.com/p/we-are-sti...

The natural move after declaring: “We just lost an election, they said, based on affordability. It’s a con job by the Democrats.”

Is your home still a home when your house has been demolished? Is your neighborhood still a neighborhood when your neighbors are dead or gone? “We Are Still Here,” a new poem in Hidden Cities by Vaheed Ramazani hiddencities.substack.com/p/we-are-sti...

“The base sits at the gateway to parts of southern Syria that are expected to make up a demilitarised zone as part of a non-aggression pact between Israel and Syria. That deal is being mediated by U.S. President Donald Trump's administration.” www.reuters.com/world/middle...

Yea but what about “clean, beautiful coal”

A world the Trump administration is trying to prevent.

The New York Times is instituting Sharia law, not Mamdani.

“One former employee has said that everyone knows the project won’t work; it is now just a matter of letting MBS down gently.” “In true Neom fashion, there’s a mountain at the end of the runway that had to be blown up,” said a senior architect.

NEW: The End of the Line: the centrepiece of Saudi Arabia’s Neom gigaproject - a 500m tall, 170km long wall-like building intended ultimately to house 9 million people - can’t get out of the ground, say more than 20 former Neom architects, engineers and senior executives. ig.ft.com/saudi-neom-l...

The New York Times is desperate to cover Mamdani’s mayoralty more aggressively than the New York Post.

It was, in fact, just about a sandwich. www.nbcnews.com/politics/jus...

"The results, then, are a marked contrast to the accommodation, capitulation and outright surrender of prominent individuals and institutions in the face of Trump’s demands." www.nytimes.com/2025/11/05/o...

i closed out my column this week with this preemptive jab at basically every commentator currently looking for ways to say that last night didn’t count

I wonder now long the Times will keep banging the Andrew Cuomo drum.

I knew that Mamdani had it; he had the people and did the work, and has been the clearest and most lucid in rejecting the untenable current state of things. But the vile, bigoted shit against him was so constant, and I am conditioned to that working better than I want. This feels like an exorcism.

Looks like the Dems will pick up 12 seats in the VA House of Delegates, which will go from 51-49 to 63-37 D-R. That's an honestly shocking result.

Gregory Bovino, the jackbooted Border Patrol official leading Trump's federal invasion of Chicago, thinks he and his shock troops can arrest protesters for speech clearly protected by the First Amendment.

A thing you're not seeing if you haven't checked Twitter in the last week is all the political betting markets (Polymarket, Kalshi) are actively caping for Cuomo and spreading Zohran conspiracies on there. Usually this would be a cause for some sort of regulatory oversight but that no longer exists.

Fourteen years later, I *still* think one of the best ways for us to repudiate Cheney's legacy of torture would be to recognize and honor the courageous soldiers and public servants who exposed the torture policies and tried to end them. www.nytimes.com/2011/04/28/o...

Border Patrol agent Lairmore testifies that he was not injured by the sandwich, but he felt the impact through his ballistic vest. The sandwich came apart and "kind of exploded" on his chest upon impact, he says. "I could smell the onions and mustard."

$150 million might seem like a lot of money to pay for a niche subscription website, but the Ellisons knew that the ROI would be tremendous, and Donald Trump ratified that for them tonight.

Just in: Eleventh Circuit gives Judge Aileen Cannon 60 days to rule on @knightcolumbia.org petition for access to Jack Smith's report about Trump's absconding to Mar-a-Lago with classified docs.

There's a long way to go and American government itself is under threat, but between this, letting SNAP run out, threatening to ground planes because of the shutdown, etc, I can't help but think Trump is ultimately headed for George W Bush-level approvals. Just wait until he invades Venezuela!

"she’s shuttled around in a caravan of SUVs, much like the president and vice president." CBS under Weiss is, first and foremost, going to be a disaster for American journalism. But it will also be a very costly train wreck for Larry Ellison and his large adult son, with Page Six detailing it all.

Just look at all these wealthy New Yorkers preparing to flee the city if Mamdani is mayor. www.wsj.com/economy/cons...

I see that CBS chose not to air this part. It probably explains much of what they did decide to air.

So the autopen pardoned him?

After gleefully and illegally plowing over every statute and regulation they don't like—such as by destroying USAID, refusing to enforce CFPB regs, and withholding SNAP funding—the Trump admin has decided 88 FR 8255 is ironclad law that must be ruthlessly enforced to ensure more people go hungry.

The only response to this is what Doc Rivers said: “We’re talking about kids not getting food.”

“Maintaining international outrage is difficult, especially when there are financial and professional incentives to engage. And there were always those who felt engagement with Saudi Arabia in supporting its social opening was the right thing to do.” www.ft.com/content/8b04...

"It is a disorienting thing, to keep a ledger of atrocity, to write the ugliness of each day as it happens... Maybe this is the truly weightless time, after the front page loses interest but before the history books arrive." Omar El Akkad in Hidden Cities hiddencities.substack.com/p/omar-el-ak...

"It is a disorienting thing, to keep a ledger of atrocity, to write the ugliness of each day as it happens... Maybe this is the truly weightless time, after the front page loses interest but before the history books arrive." Omar El Akkad in Hidden Cities hiddencities.substack.com/p/omar-el-ak...

Unveiling a marble-clad White House bathroom renovation just before you let SNAP funding run out — MAGA is a working-class movement.

“As we stepped off the plane, it began to rain, soft and steady. The rain felt like a quiet welcome. The pitter-patter of raindrops sounded like safety. Ireland did not welcome me with ceremonies or flags; it welcomed me with gentle rain, and people who cared.” -Yahya Al Masri in Hidden Cities

“a CBS News producer who was fired as part of the network-wide cuts took to social media Wednesday to suggest that executives were engaging in ‘race-based layoffs,’ claiming every producer from his team who was laid off is a person of color while his white colleagues were relocated to other jobs.”