Texas Universities are now like police departments who would prefer to pay out the inevitable lawsuits rather than stop breaking the law

You’d really be forgiven if you had a hard time conceiving of a success on this scale. “So I’ve got this idea for an environmental and public health project, we’re gonna reduce pollution by a fifth. No no it doesn’t cost anything. Actually it’s gonna net half a billion dollars.” What!

The New York Times investigated 346 people who donated at least $250,000 to Trump and found that more than half of them (197) have received pardons, jobs, government contracts, special treatment, or favors.

Did you know that the US hasn’t had an ambassador in Moscow in 6 months? Or that our chief envoy to Russia won’t take briefings from the CIA? But wait, there’s more. Much more in this 6-byline WSJ piece on the Witkoff-Putin axis. Free link www.wsj.com/world/putin-...

edition.cnn.com/2022/04/12/u... The Kremlin Kids, Russian Hypocrisy is well known and won’t change. The West is bad, but not that bad………….’ Peskov – reportedly made $173,000 in 2020

Such a shortsighted decision at a moment of international turbulence. These centers are needed now more than ever.

College costs are soaring! www.brookings.edu/articles/wha...

Come work with us. A two-year postdoctoral fellowship in Ukrainian Studies and another for an open position at the Harriman Institute. Deadline January 5. harriman.columbia.edu/postdoctoral...

Hard agree with Kotkin here www.foreignaffairs.com/china/weakne... and if you want more detail on the Russia case, See my book, Weak Strongman: The Limits of Power in Putin's Russia www.amazon.com/Weak-Strongm...

Longer thread on relevant research: bsky.app/profile/prof...

Not that you really need it in this case, but research says no. Political appointee diplomats underperform career diplomats onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

A ray of hope on an otherwise bleak weekend.

We recently published a special issue societal resilience in Ukraine with a focus on local and regional governance. Take a look. www.tandfonline.com/toc/rpsa20/4...

The world is a less interesting place with the passing of Kimuli Kasara. She was brilliant, funny, and caring. And was loved by many. She was a great friend and confidante. We will all miss her terribly. Rest in peace. fas.columbia.edu/news/memoria...

wild that this happened within 24 hours of bolsanaro going to prison. will be a timeless textbook example of what works to save a democracy and what doesn’t

yes it is clever.

Man, 2025 has been rough.

Looking forward to this event today. Better in person but a recording will also be made available. sofheyman.org/events/celeb...

Proud to serve on the Advisory Council of the new Kennan Institute which launched yesterday. www.nytimes.com/2025/11/10/u...

Look forward to hosting this event tomorrow with Alexis Lerner at the Harriman Institute. Register today to attend. harriman.columbia.edu/event/book-t...

Looking forward to discussing our new book with John Huber, Jessica Pisano @awhf.bsky.social @pagefortna.bsky.social on Friday, Nov. 14th at 12:15. The event is both in person and on zoom. Hope you can make it. harriman.columbia.edu/event/celebr...

Tyler Glasnow and the oompah loompahs have the same barber.

This graph never fails to be shocking: "The US has experienced the earliest and greatest slowdown in life expectancy improvements among higher-income countries, reported Eileen Crimmins. “We have horrible life expectancy—and it’s getting worse and worse”" www.prb.org/resources/se...

As signing bonuses decline; regions will likely increase coercion to meet draft quotas and this too will be unpopular.

Sarkozy is going to jail but he’s not the first one. In our new dataset we track modern leaders who have been prosecuted by their own states. There are 215 of them. Turns out leader prosecution is a common & healthy practice in democracies. Full access link: foreignpolicy.com/2025/10/28/d...

New article on Russian foreign policy and international law and order from Joakim Bratvoll. www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Interesting take here from Mikhail Troitskiy on elite politics in Russia prior to the full scale invasion of Ukraine. www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Looking forward to hosting this talk on Thursday at noon. Interesting work from Masaaki Higashijima. Register at this link. harriman.columbia.edu/event/electe...

Dutch intelligence suspends sharing arrangements with the US after concluding that high level intel was routinely being shared by the White House with their friends in the Kremlin. www.volkskrant.nl/binnenland/n...

this rocks. when indiana edu killed the student newspaper, Purdue stepped up, printed the forbidden issue, drove it to Bloomington and stocked the boxes.

I thought I'd put the administration's proposed "compact" with universities in context, so I wrote the blog post below. It's especially for journalists covering this story! Many details about how the compact itself works and why the administration has retreated to this strategy.

University leaders need to keep pushing back on the "everyone hates higher ed" fallacy. www.insidehighered.com/news/quick-t...

So many echoes from this article for US politics....

Looking forward to commenting on this paper.

It is a very nice paper that I assign in my classes

Today at 5:00 on zoom and in person. Tune in if you can. harriman.columbia.edu/event/10-yea...

New Economist/YouGov poll: – 39% approval/57% disapproval. Both are the worst of Trump's second term – 35/57 approval on the economy. – Net approval of -18% is "the second-lowest net approval Trump has received in any Economist / YouGov poll" while president (today.yougov.com/politics/art...)

Are the espn tennis announcers paid by the word?

Agreed. Last night I tried to come up with a list of players that would make me root for Djokovic and it was a struggle.

This is what the University of Chicago correctly saw coming down the pike. They had built a world-leading cluster of language and area studies work on funding that is just going to... stop.

This is absolutely catastrophic for U.S. higher education, and for U.S. global leadership. Just the latest in a series of senseless acts of self-sabotage by a malevolent administration bent on making the United States weak and poor.

Americans broadly hate all of this, and we all gotta remember that when it feels like things are spinning out of control

Few charts show our current American weakness like this one. The minute Trump came into office, Putin knew he had the green light to do whatever he wanted and kill as many innocent civilians as he wanted.

These are not concessions. They are objectives that have not been met being framed as concessions. Like me saying it is a concession when I shoot a layup rather than dunking a basketball.

"Uneasy Mix?" Seriously NYT? This is lawfare in a particularly pure form and straight from the autocratic playbook.

Hugely important. Thanks to our broken discourse over immigration stats people falsely imagined that all of Obama's removals ("deportations") were long-term residents, when that was actually a small %. What's happening now is so much more different than the # of removals ("deportations") suggests.

lol NYT www.nytimes.com/2025/08/21/n...

Look forward to reading and - more importantly for you - to assigning it to my large lecture class on autocracy and democracy in the spring. Congratulations.

A hugely important point is that international students pay full tuition, so they actually make it CHEAPER for US students to attend college, by allowing for more money for scholarships. Across the board, the reality is we need MORE international students.