Some of my favorite trying to think listening

davekarpf.substack.com/p/every-gene... This by @davekarpf.bsky.social is very, _very_ good. Much traditional media is badly geared to understand movement politics, and often, it helps to actually know stuff!

factcheck: true

To my surprise, I discover that I have both co-created a major TV show _and_ written a novel. Yay for overnight productivity!

"I love genre! I love it so much I like to rub all of the genres over each other all the time. Which I suppose is less to say fuck genre and more that genre fucks."

an underrated part of this turducken of garbage is Elon posting an image of the Odyssey while discussing the Iliad, but it's all so terribly, terribly pathetic

I wrote about what I see as the real lesson of Mamdani's victory: not that Democrats needs to move left (or right, for that matter), but that they should try to build real-world relationships with normal voters. publiccomment.blog/p/mamdani-th...

I am very much looking forward to this book.

The massacre of the ethics/safety teams and the internal reorientation away from anything that hinted at broader purpose (with exception for the more profitable bits of natsec) is a story that has yet to be properly told.

The Council on Foreign Relations online system - which requires you to re-register every month via _phone call_ (no other option available) is truly the most special of all. I suspect it is because (a) age demographic of average member, (b) lack of tech resources to guide confused members through.

Went to repost this and then depressingly saw it was from 8 months ago. This is still true, and I am now convinced it will remain true until there are successful primary challenges nationwide to the "roll over and play dead" Dems.

Well, it's happened. Burning Men is a physical artefact, out in the world. On Saturday I went to John Sandoe Books in Chelsea to see it and get my author copies. Was not prepared for all the FEELINGS If you're in London, pop in and get a free copy with your Christmas haul. It's ... smoking..!

The combination of Cass invoking fortress USMCA as an example of sovereignty prevailing over efficiency & Miran getting excited about $ stablecoin expansion pushing down US rates is a reminder of a (bipartisan) view that US sovereignty requires asymmetric interventions in the sovereignty of others.

Playing around with a notion of Cosma's regarding LLMs and The Singer of Tales, it is notable that GPT5 still has no grasp of meter, while Claude Opus not only groks iambic pentameter, but produces some genuinely striking lines. (prompt: Schelling's deterrence theory in sonnet+iambics)

Refusing to work with Israeli academics means refusing to work with one of the main sources of dissent within Israeli society. To be sure, their views are not uniform, but that is a reason to avoid broad based bans,

OMG. The site is literally called the Dunning Kruger Times.

wrote this a week ago and feel very strongly that there is just going to be a lot of pain any way you slice this. and i feel like the societal backlash might be genuinely surprising

This is really good (and the linked collection is as good a way to spend $3 as you're likely to find - I'd also add shoutouts to "A Spanish Lesson" and "Mengele" as capturing a different aspect of where we are now, but that would be a different piece)

"Any path forward will ultimately rest on public discontent with the president, and beyond that, Democrats are less in need of new messaging than they are in the social and political infrastructure needed to reach voters where they’re at." www.nytimes.com/2025/11/08/o...

www.thebanner.com/community/ho... One of those articles that (a) has clearly been vetted very carefully by lawyers, (b) where a plausible story of what has going on is obvious if you read carefully, and (c) you worry both for people involved and because maybe indicative of _much_ bigger problems.

One underappreciated aspect of the Sicilian mafia is how wildly hard it was for mafiosi to work together and trust each other, especially after the Corleonesi began their takeover bid. The relevant bits from my first book on trust (also the only bits non-specialists might want to read)

criterion 50% off sale at barnes and noble btw

The incredible shrinking attack on U.S. universities continues. Cornell has signed an agreement—but unlike the UVA agreement, instead of pledging to follow the gov't's highly questionable July "guidance" on discrimination, Cornell simply agrees to hand it out to faculty as a "training resource"!

I successfully nerd-sniped myself into making a precinct-level dot-density map of the NYC mayoral election. kieranhealy.org/blog/archive...

This week's mailbag owes a lot to @mschmitt9.bsky.social, who goes unnamed here. www.offmessage.net/p/are-we-hea...

Tonight at Harris School of Public Policy: Why Economic Inequalities Endure. For decades, Sam Bowles has challenged how we think about economics, democracy, and inequality. Ahead of his talk, hear him compare capitalism and democracy on The Inequality Podcast. Listen → bit.ly/43Qi8mz

first as dark comedy and then as farce www.imdb.com/title/tt0717...

us12.campaign-archive.com?u=6a195a173a... this by @johnsides.bsky.social at @goodauth.bsky.social seems exactly right to me.

quite looking forward to this one, based on the short stories.

One of the fundamental geoeconomic issues of the EU is that it is home to a global banking system whose component entities are both more national than pan-European AND AT THE SAME TIME vastly more internationalized than is the Euro. Discuss.

"In a statement, Heritage Chief Advancement Officer Andy Olivastro said Wednesday’s meeting included “our usual spirit of candor.”" www.washingtonpost.com/politics/202...

Nothing beside remains.

After Wednesday’s oral arguments in the Supreme Court about Trump’s tariffs, Jack Goldsmith thinks a majority of the court will be very worried about “giving a president basically unconstrained tariff authority to raise revenue that Congress as a practical matter cannot reverse,” he says.

Seeing Like a Nate.

On the conditions of liberty: "What is civil society, and why should we care?" @himself.bsky.social (with @noahpinion.blog.web.brid.gy) (Plus- Guy Fawkes) In praise of plurality: roughlydaily.com/2025/11/05/n...

When we were writing about libertarian democracy skeptics, Somin's book was the only one that actually engaged seriously with counter-arguments. democracyjournal.org/magazine/68/...

One of the least remarked parts of Mamdani's speech yesterday was its strong implication that he wants his army of 100k volunteers to stick around and do stuff.

As @himself.bsky.social argued last year. Partyism. open.substack.com/pub/programm...

The factional grifters will hate this, but the Mamdani-Spanberger-Sherrill axis actually suggests the outlines of a broad, emerging Dem coalition organized around both anti-Trump *and* affordability politics, not a party bitterly divided against itself.

Gonna be honest, I was worried these were flying under the radar and more vulnerable. This kicks ass.

this is the most successful a CIA officer has been at toppling a government in years.

If the EU wants to avoid being press-ganged into America's beefs because it fears being abandoned by the US, it needs to find a) an autonomous capacity for deterrence & b) a diplomacy that is consistent with the extent of autonomous deterrence it is capable of mustering. www.ft.com/content/8214...

The Stacie Goddard @abenewman.bsky.social synthesis

I've read CONFLUENCE three times. Each time it deepens and grows.

This article is really great bc it's about an org everyone knows but seems so boring we forget about it (Common Crawl) and turns out they're doing something extremely shady, AND the guy in charge keeps saying the most damning things to a reporter www.theatlantic.com/technology/2...

If you are a Kindle person and like hard sf, I can't recommend Something Coming Through and Into Everywhere highly enough. Witty, dark, surprisingly profound. Also the first two books in the Quiet War sequence are amazing value for $5.99 www.amazon.com/Into-Everywh... www.amazon.com/Quiet-War-Om...

Just been at a roundtable absolutely dominated by economic security. This would not have happened 12 months ago. Trump has acted as an accelerator, but the discussion about the implications of global markets has been coming for some time.

German auto parts maker Aumovio said on Tuesday it contacted Beijing to seek exemptions from export constraints for chips made by Nexperia www.tradingview.com/news/reuters...