Syllabus writing for my upcoming @brooklyninstitute.bsky.social course on the theory and practice of dictatorship. A few spots are still available—we start on March 3! (Link below)

Feel pretty hopeful that Gen A countercultural and underground forms of life are going to be organized around analog tech, small scale farming, and the primacy of face to face interaction.

My toddler has picked up all the gesticulations of an intensely speaking adult without almost any of the vocabulary, leading to some hilarious gibberish monologues when upset. This is what happens when both of your parents come from hand talker cultures.

Toddlers are innately anti-capitalist because they have no conception of abstract time or private property.

This may be the best interview I've done about my book. Many thanks to @rafkhach.bsky.social for sharp, insightful questions pressing me to relate normative theory to our big-picture historical situation. (Recorded in February, but no less relevant today.) mitchellcenter.libsyn.com/episode-710-...

Curtis Sliwa looks like he is ready to negotiate the transition to democracy in a southern European country after the generalissimo has died.

Barack hitting the phones between now and November

I had the pleasure of joining @rafkhach.bsky.social for a convo on 20 years of Brazilian politics -- from the Workers’ Party and the Pink Tide, through the 2013 protests and Bolsonaro’s rise, to Lula’s current term and the Left’s contradictions in power. mitchellcenter.libsyn.com/episode-72-b...

Whenever my extended family asks me about @laurabucci.bsky.social

A New Deal for Higher Ed where you and all your academic friends go to work at community colleges.

A year ago, I'd have guessed that widespread AI adoption into white collar work is going to bifurcate the labor force, with only the most prestigious layers still getting meaningful training in reading and writing. Now, looking at the Ivies, I was probably way too optimistic.

It's weird when adults say hi to your baby but not to you. What are you supposed to do? Say hi for them? Say hi for yourself? Smile and keep walking??

One of the lasting insights from postwar scholarship on authoritarian regimes where the rule of law no longer holds up is that they encourage internal radicalization, as mid-tier operatives scramble to outdo each other to impress the leader.

Basically everyone who talks about 🇮🇱/🇵🇸 regularly ends up going insane because it is considered completely unacceptable to acknowledge things like "A country where some people are denied the right to vote based on their ethnicity is not a democracy" that are objectively true statements.

This is it, folks. Far larger than Harvard itself, as large as Harvard is. Every nonprofit from the center leftward is on notice for potential destruction.

If interwar fascism was a modernist phenomenon, turning to myth as a response to the uprooting of metaphysical foundations, its American cousin is thoroughly postmodernist, playfully and consciously embracing the lack of any meaning apart from that measured by capital.

Pulling up to the Capital reading group with this

my hope is that AI can empower the Dumbest, Least talented slobs i know to replace everything i ever loved with One Million Years of Content

Can you please think for a second how this data is about to be used by people without great intentions? You’re playing with fire.

I am once again asking you to join @aaup.bsky.social

I never knew Michelle Trachtenberg, but she went to junior high in my neighborhood (Bay Academy) and we literally had common acquaintances/friends of friends. This, plus growing up a Nickelodeon kid, really does feel like hearing a former classmate died.

750 political scientists in support of democracy* *unless there’s a networking event and you “have to” cross a picket line

Philly, come out to 2000 Market right now and say it loud: hands off our healthcare, hands off our research, hands off our jobs!

another Thing I Will Keep Saying: there is of course an important moral case for internationalism. but the practical case for it can start by simply noticing how internationalist the people robbing you are (however nationalist their rhetoric might be)

Maybe it was a bad idea to combine presidentialism with a FPTP duopoly in which one party, against conventional wisdom, has been colonized by its extreme wing.

Ladies and gentlemen, I'm a snake oil man

Brainstorming poli sci course proposals at a university under the right wing microscope 🫠

At last RFK Jr can reboot the real family business: rum running from Canada

It is 2027. "The cruelty is the point!!" I sob, as I am herded into an AI-run Kyle Rittenhouse Reeducation Center at Hillsdale College-Philadelphia.

My kid is finally realizing they are a sentient human being and is not having it.

Something that's central to (orthodox) economics' claim to be a science in its core domain is its ability to generate predictions based on systematic relationships (laws) of some kind. Yet what it actually has been very good at is translating non-systematic common-sense intuitions into its own terms

There's a historical dialectic where, while US racial politics anticipated European fascism, its course of development insulated from the interwar crisis, only for it to then facilitate the global right during the Cold War, whose neo-fascist descendants are now in turn influencing the US right.

Snyder and Shore have taken jobs in Canada, skipping ahead to the "government in exile" stage of the Resistance.

"USSR attacks leading German political rights group over its defense of Lebensraum"

As Biden is swept into the dustbin, Charlotte E. Rosen wonders: what was the Resistance “Twitterstorian”? Well-paid liberal “attack dogs” of democracy like Heather Cox Richardson proved to be all too willing to turn to Democratic Party apologia—especially on Gaza. proteanmag.com/2025/01/20/t...

MAGAs whole schtick is drug-addled grown ass men getting off on "transgressive" acts that boys find passé by 6th grade.

It would only be fitting if Biden's political career, which began the same year as the Yom Kippur War cemented America's special relationship with Israel, will end by also marking its disintegration.

Harbingers of the end of an empire.

This closeness to tech and finance capital is why I think dismissal of the fascism claim on the grounds of weakness, incoherence, minoritarianism, etc is too premature.

The mirror stage

I replied:

Absolutely insane policy.

Once again, I am asking you to donate to the Palestine Children's Relief Fund before the end of the year: www.pcrf.net

If you've never donated to Wikipedia, now's the time. Elon Musk is attacking it because it's one of the only sources of honest, curated information that he can't control. www.newsweek.com/elon-musk-ta...

Playing with no rhythm or melody whatsoever to introduce my child to atonal music.

The Irishman is a Christmas film.

Everyone should read this detailed report on New College, two years after the "takeover." It's been far more successful at gutting what existed than reconstructing a new, right-wing hegemony. Maybe a microcosm of higher ed, and our national landscape as a whole. inthesetimes.com/article/new-...

I visited my mom yesterday, and she sent me back home with a platter full of gata.