Suzanne Vega releases “Luka” 39 years ago this weekend. She said she once received a fan letter about it: “Dear Suzanne, Luka is the most compelling piece of music I’ve heard in a long time. There are no words 2 tell U all the things I feel when I hear it. I thank God 4 U, Prince”

This is great. Genuine step forward

No government since at least 1987 has passed 30 or more laws without a select committee vet – until the coalition last month. newsroom.co.nz/2026/04/16/g...

Let’s hope

We saw that press conference with Trump, JD and Zelenskyy. We know their negotiation style. It’s a masterclass in treating ppl like sh*t.

People hear "judge" and they assume judicial independence. But the Trump administration has hacked away at immigration judges independence to the point that they can expect to be fired if they don't do the Trump administration's bidding. And the Supreme Court has blessed this loss of autonomy.

Still one of my all time favs on the Tiny Desk. If you haven’t seen it, check it out youtu.be/dzgEjZyN9ec?...

Love this: a "universal basic neighborhood."

To be honest, this is a big f*cking flaw in the US constitution. But it’s not that the constitution lacks mechanisms to remove illegal actors from power. The flaw is that it empowers partisans to be the judge and jury.

I'd strongly argue that a similar study conducted in New Zealand would result in comparable observations. | Foreign disinformation: “the new warfare and open liberal democracies are sitting ducks” committees.parliament.uk/committee/78...

And people wonder why billionaires buy up loss-making media orgs

I'm telling you, the first time some blonde white woman whose also a major sports star gets disqualified for being intersex, all hell is going to break loose.

104 urgent bills for this government. The fuel supply is not a circumstance needing urgency.

The war in Iran could trigger a global food shock • More than 1.1mn tonnes of fertiliser and fertiliser inputs is currently stuck in the Gulf • Shortages are starting during northern hemisphere’s planting season, raising the risk of lower harvests for staples like rice www.ft.com/content/1054...

One measure of an authoritarian state is that people with ties to the regime use their connections to get personal enemies or troublesome family members disappeared, because the rule of law now depends on political connections. www.nytimes.com/2026/03/20/u...

“Guillo-teen” was right there.

Most of the media reflects neither reality nor public opinion. It reflects the views and demands of those who own it: the Oligarch Class. They employ editors and journalists to channel their demands and sell their fictions. Hence the endless attacks on net zero. www.theguardian.com/environment/...

People like me who study democracy overwhelmingly come to think first-past-the-post is bad and that proportional representation (vote for the party you like best and they get seats in parliament proportionate to their vote share) is a superior system. So George is on point here

Just wanted you all to know that there are humans out there that can do this ... youtube.com/shorts/54H8k...

My obituary for Habermas in @jacobinmag.bsky.social jacobin.com/2026/03/habe...

Here is my best Habermas story. I am grad student waiting in LONG line for Habermas talk. There is a tall man waiting in front of me. Line moves so we are eventually visible to organizers, a woman looks over & makes horrified face. Runs out: "Prof Habermas! You don't have to wait in line!"

I came late to Habermas, but his work has deeply shaped my philosophical outlook. I’m grateful for his intellectual curiosity and honesty. His is a unique and enduring contribution to the intellectual world we live in.

Jürgen Habermas ist heute im Alter von 96 Jahren in Starnberg verstorben.

Hard agree with this

I saw this and at first thought "no, there's no way 'we definitely had alternative leadership in mind for Iran but I blew them up alongside the schoolgirls using AI' is what the White House is actually saying, that's too clueless and evil to be real"

a sombre morning for british columnists as they move their "The electorate has spoken, we must listen" articles to the recycling bin and upload their "the greens victory shows just how far the west has fallen" articles instead

The richest man owns X. The second and third richest men control Google. The fourth richest man owns Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. The fifth richest man owns The Washington Post. And now the sixth richest could soon take over both Paramount and Warner Bros. See the problem here?

Lots of Americans in my timeline looking on very jealously at the UK right now

Hi Auckland friends, I'll be in town and giving a couple of seminars this coming Thursday. Details below.

My review of two new books on Habermas for @liberalcurrents.com www.liberalcurrents.com/also-a-revie...

Even as elites abandon any pretense of giving a shit ... climate change is accelerating.

New Zealand’s score in the @anticorruption.bsky.social Corruption Perceptions Index has dropped yet again. Over the last decade we’ve slipped 10 points, and gone from equal first to equal fourth. Greens & Labour must take integrity issues seriously and act. www.transparency.org.nz/blog/falling...

Assaulting people while they pray peacefully in public is a new low for the Australian police. Shame on them. #Herzog #Gaza

Nothing winds me up more than Luxon and assorted other suits saying we need to be wealthier before we can afford doctors, nurses, water we can swim in etc. Meanwhile wealthier kiwi households have stacked up huge piles of savings (cash, shares, equity etc). The economy works for the few. [🧵 1/n]

This is excellent & draws out something the rest of the media is ignoring: among other things, the Epstein files have made it super, super clear that the entire "anti-woke" cultural hysteria was engineered by powerful men averse to accountability.

Siouxsie is a hero. Useful summary of recent events here for anyone unaware

How many pillars of the US media system will be broken during this Presidential term? Such rapid decline. (That’s not to say these institutions are models of socially valuable independent journalism. But they have the resources to do journalistic work at scale, and will be hard to rebuild)

The next step in the autocratization of the US… following the playbook

This shit hits like a sledgehammer right now. It's not even remotely an exaggeration.

💯

Chef’s kiss

I keep thinking again, in light of the latest Epstein files dump, about how MeToo “went too far.”

"We are on the brink of an irreversible climate disaster. This is a global emergency beyond any doubt. Much of the very fabric of life on Earth is imperiled." That's from a group of more than a dozen prominent climate scientists. Probably nothing.

DOJ has since killed this link. This is what was there:

"as a tool of authoritarian conflict management, the Board of Peace arguably upholds three basic principles: Might is right, ethnic cleansing is an appropriate tool of conflict resolution, and war is an opportunity for real estate development." read @danaelkurd.bsky.social

I was a sensitive kid. I loved cats. I had OCD, undiagnosed. When I was 9, a fraternity brother tortured a cat to death in my hometown. The details even now are beyond imagination. archive.is/xdmUL I was traumatized for years from reading the news story. The torturer? Now the head of the NRA.

This isn't just near Independence Hall. It's where Washington stayed while president, kept slaves, posted bounty ads for runaways, and rotated them back and forth to VA to evade PA's manumission law. This is what it's known for, this specific location's primary historical significance is slavery.

This is embarrassing and we are fucking doomed.

I imagine this how monarchs communicated to each other in the 16th century. Petty, self-absorbed, and petulant, and ready to use force as an extension of personal ego