there’s no coming back from this. you just gotta start over as a new country called south canada or whatever.

maybe we should amend the Constitution to repeal Article 2, and leave it to the legislature to establish executive agencies.

I might be writing a thing about a composer soon. What's the best book you've ever read about a composer?

this is the kind of stuff they should teach in economics classes instead of deadweight loss and pareto efficiency

the next banking crisis is on the way

china should do this and make countries buy solar panels instead of oil

very good overview

Personnel is policy is politics: the skills needed to become a senior Democrat, and the life experiences associated with being one, furnish neither the tools to respond to an authoritarian takeover nor a sufficiently visceral understanding of the stakes. via @jmberger.com

(the skill is sucking up to rich people)

the problem is this aspirational baloney appeals mainly to people who are rich or got good grades in school. everyone else hears “try harder next time, loser”

@jemgilbert.bsky.social if you’re taking requests, please do a culture power politics episode about the your party situation

Great comparative research from @joshgoddard98.bsky.social . Highly intuitive from a UK pov, too:

“healthy young men should be working on building sites rather than running over pedestrians in city centres”

this is why I keep an “interesting” playlist separate from liked songs

look we’ve all been there

the test will be if they can resist burning people out with fundraising appeals

the best bit is at the end

ok but knope was incredibly corrupt and cared more about promoting friends than achieving political goals

it would be interesting if mamdani and his team used his volunteer list for continued volunteer activity and resisted the urge to ask people for cash constantly until they unsubscribe and regret ever signing up in the first place

I truly think this is an underappreciated point that much of the "rising far right" polisci literature has missed. We have n->inf findings that bad stuff leads to far right voting. But why _doesn't_ bad stuff lead to far left (or center left) voting? One big answer: A failure of political supply.

World Liberty Financial, the president's crypto scam company, has the name you'd expect from a life annuity scam company

I wonder if mamdani deliberately does things cuomo can’t do (walking the length of manhattan, riding a bike, being normal)

I think I found the weirdest team in the history of american professional sports en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oorang_...

a conscientiousness test or whatever shouldn’t cost $120,000

Why I'm done with Hamilton and Jefferson, and with engaging with mainstream scholarship on them, and am instead writing a romp about Burr: open.substack.com/pub/williamh...

“the ways in which” is the new “in a very real sense”

Fascinating background & insight into the real estate politics of the NYC mayoral race: www.phenomenalworld.org/analysis/sta...

I don’t know if they still do it but murdoch would make up stuff in his uk papers and then have his american media say “the times of london reports …”

wait, a kinship terminology angle in the news? anthropologists, it's your chance to get that public-facing opinion piece out

has any newspaper ever done this? (they should)

Medieval gold-makers: While looking for something else I found myself in Johannes Janssen's _History of the German People_, vol 15. (1910 English translation, looks like the original was late 1890s.) I'd always thought of alchemical synthesis of gold as a quaint, foolish quest. Ha!

shaking my head at all the leftist nimbys using historic preservation as an excuse to not build up #abundance (just kidding)

"try installing solar panels on your roof in the U.S. Americans pay a median price of $28,000 for a 7-kilowatt system. The typical Australian, meanwhile, spends just $4,000, and the German — after filling out a mere two-page application — pays $10,000 per project."

Happy 166th Birthday to America's Philosopher, John Dewey! 🎉🎂

Paths to Power (PtP) is out in @bjpols.bsky.social! It is a database with data on cabinet members' social profile globally from 1966-2021. This is a great team effort with @chknutsen.bsky.social, @peterla.bsky.social, @inalkristiansen.bsky.social. But many more helped us along the way 🙏 A short 🧵

This whole thread describes an ambitious and interesting data source, but this post caught my eye. We’ve known that our deregulated campaign finance system correlates to having fewer working class MCs, but seeing it up against a country with a different system is pretty stark.

From the local newspaper Lister (1899), this gem: Political economy. 12-year-old: “What is political economy, Dad?” Dad: “Never buy more votes than you strictly need.”

sure but recycling talking points without understanding them was a winning strategy for trump

get ready for ai fascism

“[S]ince reflection is the instrumentality of securing freer and more enduring goods, reflection is a unique intrinsic good. Its instrumental efficacy determines it to be a candidate for... (1/3)

Some incredible stats in this article: Investment in AI accounts for 40% share of US GDP growth this year AI companies account for 80% of the gains in US stocks in 2025 The wealthiest 10% of the population own 85% of US stocks The top 10% of earners account for half of consumer spending

An intriguing call for “soft secession.” Consider the Transportation Research Board, to a large degree funded by state DOTs. The TRB bent the knee to Trump, cancelling dozens of research projects on equity & the environment. Should Blue states pull out of TRB & create their own research org?

you can’t blame the left for charlie kirk because we’re not the gun nuts

The whole federal government is in violation of the Hatch Act right now, but it doesn't matter because no one will enforce it; just another example of why we are no longer under the "rule of law"

it’s too hard to restrict the free speech of billionaires so you just have to take their money

ok now block his website

it would be a lot easier to dump jeffries etc than to start a new party but