politics is about storytelling, and there's just a very different valence between "I am visibly going to do everything possible to get us to the promised land" and "I will pick one reasonable little project, don't get your hopes up too much for more, big stuff will have to wait"

I think there's actually a useful difference we can draw here. Namely: there is incrementalism that comes from pushing wherever possible (and with whatever levels possible) to make progress toward a maximalist demand, versus incrementalism that's positioned as an excuse for setting minor goals

Carnegie Endowment is hiring carnegieendowment.applicantpro.com/jobs/4129694?

I understand the excitement about technology “rediscovering lost texts.” I do, & I get the media hype. But I wish people knew that there are hundreds of thousands of “lost” texts just sitting in manuscripts in libraries, which have never been published outside of those single manuscripts. 1/n

Friends, Romans, fellow late antiquity fans! The first issue of Essays in Long Late Antiquity, a new journal published fully in open access by Liverpool University Press is out! We have a stunning volume for you to read with amazing contributions. 1/ liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/toc/ella/cur...

My hand was probably too heavy with the bitters but this was very nice. I like how they use creme de cacao for the sweetener in an Old Fashioned-style recipe. www.diffordsguide.com/cocktails/re...

$672 million...of an $80 *billion* supplemental funding request www.foxnews.com/politics/tru...

I will grant that it's *more likely* that existing defenses could take out DPRK missiles - but this sounds a lot more definitive than the reality, which is that the system has flaws, can be spoofed or overcome, and hasn't been tested under realistic conditions www.newsweek.com/golden-dome-...

Good clear post from @pkrugman.bsky.social about why people hate AI---and why this is not just the usual popular resistance to new technology. People hate the message, they hate the means, and they hate the messengers. paulkrugman.substack.com/p/why-does-e...

"Trump, the source said, was furious about the Senate’s vote yesterday to limit his war powers" www.cnn.com/2026/06/24/p...

Freeze movement always my inspiring accompaniment as I go on. Also one of my earliest memories was going on a freeze march in a stroller, in winter, in Minnesota

AC is good but trust me you do not want a society organized around air conditioning. That's how you end up with Florida.

currently reading a whole bunch of petitions and editorials from black americans of the revolutionary era and it is so striking (and frankly inspiring) to see how the ink wasn't even dry on the declaration before black americans were demanding that the patriots live up to their stated ideals

As others have noted, this applies broadly - a narrow success/failure binary is one of the worst ways to assess the impact of social movements bsky.app/profile/katt...

One of the findings of my dissertation research is that BLM changed crime news norms in the white press without ever explicitly aiming to do so. This claim has encountered a really surprising (to me) amount of scholarly resistance…

People also love to say defund the police was a failure because every city in the country did not immediately cut police budgets. Social movement outcomes have a long time horizon and may not always show up in the exact demands the movement made

When you're very concerned about nuclear risks www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/white-h...

"In a CBS News/YouGov poll June 17-19, an overwhelming 57%-21% said the conflict had "created more problems than it had solved." www.usatoday.com/story/news/p...

Super weird term - there really were “working families” in history, but that’s because child labor was legal

“A blameless life is not the whole of virtue, and inflexible rectitude may prove a menace to the Commonwealth.” - Ronald Syme

"Tuesday’s vote marked the first time since the enactment of the War Powers Resolution of 1973 that both chambers of Congress have approved a concurrent resolution directing a president to end a military conflict." www.nytimes.com/2026/06/23/u...

NEW: Last week, a Chilean judge convicted three former secret police agents for the murder of IPS colleague Ronni Karpen Moffitt fifty years ago, killed alongside Orlando Letelier on orders of Chilean dictator Pinochet. This is a huge step toward justice.

Nearly 70% of Americans say war with Iran wasn't worth the costs www.cbsnews.com/news/opinion...

"The reality is that the region in the aftermath of this conflict will be much more insecure" www.nytimes.com/2026/06/21/u...

“Theon to his father Theon, greeting (χαίρειν). It was a fine thing of you not to take me with you to the city! If you won't take me with you to Alexandria I won't write you a letter or speak to you or say bye to you” — a Romano-Egyptian son in Oxyrhynchos (P.Oxy. 1 119). papyri.info/ddbdp/p.oxy;...

“The tragedies of history do not arise from the conflict of conventional right and wrong. They are more august and more complex. Caesar and Brutus each had right on his side.” - Ronald Syme

Stayed up late reading this article that argues Agathias was a crypto pagan www.jstor.org/stable/44172...

You can’t read fascism very far back into history because it’s a fundamentally modern phenomenon - 19th century at the earliest in my opinion.

Feel like it’s an insane fact of History that Crash Test Dummies’ “Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm” was a pop hit

good afternoon

historians are divided on whether trump was actually a real person, or the stories of a large series of petty tyrants over a period of perhaps 100 years whose stories got merged and blended together back when AI was unsophisticated and new

Me reading your posts

“it will be impossible to hide that the outcome of this war is an American defeat of historic proportions”

“Any further comparison of the two agreements would be like comparing a fully constructed house with the concept of a new building.”

"As an oligarchy is not a figment of political theory, a specious fraud, or a mere term of abuse, but very precisely a collection of individuals, its shape and character, so far from fading away on close scrutiny, at once stands out, solid and manifest." - Ronald Syme

Speculating a bit, but I think you can see Trump's rambling about the possibility of a depression as evidence that the MOU happened because they knew things were looking real bad economically. Iran's closure of the strait had them over a barrel and they caved. www.politico.com/news/2026/06...

"Lee asked Trump to lead efforts to resolve the North ​Korea issue peacefully, as he had done with the war in the Middle East" I know dialogue with the DPRK requires US involvement but come on now www.reuters.com/business/aer...

This dynamic with Vance, in which an admin member associated with restraint (rightly or wrongly) becomes the scapegoat for hawkish actions that predictably failed, strikes me as a political wrinkle of recent foreign policy debates that hadn't really been foreseen.

"This thing is an environmental nightmare" - @armscontrolwonk.bsky.social on Burevestnik www.npr.org/2026/06/18/n...

I get why people are comparing the MOU and JCPOA, but it doesn’t really make sense since they’re so qualitatively different. The JCPOA was a substantive agreement reached after long and complex negotiations. The MOU is, at best, an agreement to talk and maybe reach something like that in the future.

Just finished Prokopios’ History of the Wars, which I’m counting as eight books

We knew this already, but the nuclear aspects of the MOU are extremely vague - especially when it comes to enrichment. www.nytimes.com/2026/06/17/u...

Finnish legislators vote to lift the country's ban on nuclear weapons: "The measure clears the way for Finland to receive, transport and otherwise facilitate the movement of nuclear weapons on its territory as part of allied defense operations" www.politico.eu/article/finl...

KIRO/CBS commercials, 2/8/1993 : 301s

Very good piece from @julianborger.bsky.social www.theguardian.com/world/2026/j...

They can't release the MOU because it's a Lovecraftian forbidden text that drives readers insane

These headlines!