It’s just as awesome as you’d think

Psst development and econ friends, this video is secretly about globalized supply chains, value addition, and global inequality

Haiti!!! 🇭🇹 🇭🇹🇭🇹

A couple months ago, I brought cashews to Sando, a Beninese woman who had farmed cashews for 30 years without ever tasting one. But when I actually gave her the cashews to try, it didn't go exactly as planned... (1/6, or watch the full video here timhirschelburns.substack.com/p/sando-tast...)

Ro Khanna is a savvy politician. He is clearly leaning in to a high-profile fight with Elon Musk. And what does he see as the most favorable terrain for that fight? Elon's destruction of USAID. Reports of aid's political demise are much exaggerated

good to see this. Musk is clearly getting visibly angry at the rising awareness of how many hundreds of thousands of people his DOGE wilding spree has already killed, millions more if this stays in place into the future. Everyone can participate in spreading the word about all the blood on his hands

Musk says not a single person has died due to him axing USAID. Sadly, part of my job involves tracking aid spending. So here’s a thread with just some of the people who lost their lives because of USAID cuts

The Norwegian Viking Row is objectively cool. So is the Dutch orange march. But this type of mass, coordinated fan activity depends on having lots of fans who could get visas and afford exorbitant tickets. Countries like Senegal have fan culture that’s just as good. But we don’t get to see it

I'm a Messi guy and love that he has the record but Mbappe's goals-to-game ratio is absurd. 15 goals in 16 World Cup games!

It would sound like an unhinged claim in another era: the executive branch is tearing up the constitutional separation of powers so that it can withhold money for life-saving health programs www.propublica.org/article/trum...

Today's my birthday, so I get to be obnoxious + ask you to subscribe to my Substack! Take whatever social obligation you have—you know me, you think my tweets are ok, you don't know why the algo showed you this but here we are—and put it into subscribing! timhirschelburns.substack.com

Had never looked at a chart of Iraq’s GDP before but man it’s wild (The cliff is 1990-1991)

Hate to be that guy but the best matches of the World Cup have been the 0-0 draws

from the description in NYT, this looks a lot like transnational repression of a Colombian immigrant by the US on behalf of the far-right Colombian presidential candidate

Like really, defend the homeland from who? The people trying to make our national team good?

The three players in this photo: 1. Nigerian heritage, grew up in England, and is only a citizen thanks to birthright citizenship. 2. Born + raised in Holland, has a dad who immigrated to the US from Suriname. 3. Said he wanted to “make people who look like me proud” while playing on Juneteenth

I don’t think Switzerland should want to cap their population if they’d like to continue to score goals

Hey JD, a good rule of thumb for vice presidents of the United States is that if you notice yourself prefacing your comment with "to put my conspiracy tinfoil hat on," you should stop yourself right there www.nytimes.com/2026/06/18/o...

Breaking: Trump made another deal to pay an offshore wind developer to walk away from all 4 of its leases, this time with Invenergy. More details in Heatmap. heatmap.news/energy/trump...

Late stage Messi is peak inspiration for us are creative attackers who aren’t very good at running and are only getting older

This is why we watch.

A tiny patch of meritocracy in an deeply unequal world. Spain’s education budget is 8x more per student than Cape Verde’s. If a player’s mom can’t get a visa for the World Cup, imagine what it’s like normally. But on the pitch, some little African islands can draw the European champs

God I love the World Cup

I am shocked—shocked!—that the Ecuador match is scoreless

Of Germany’s last five World Cup wins, 40% have finished 7-1

My favorite Curacao fact is that when they qualified for the World Cup both Room and Locadia started despite having not had a club for six months

I thought the US could do well here but what I did not expect was totaalvoetbal level positional fluidity

US dominating and our favorite birthright citizen being at the heart of it is just about as good as this could have gone

Thank you, birthright citizenship, for that goal

Today Elon Musk became the world’s first trillionaire. He’s also directly responsible for millions of deaths. Here are just some of the people who would still be alive if he hadn’t—with no warning or contingency measures—chosen to put USAID through the wood chipper

I wrote an ode to the World Cup that’s also a reflection on nationalism. At least one reader said brought tears to their eyes (he’s a gentle and sensitive man who might tear up more than the average person but that’s not the point). Read it! open.substack.com/pub/timhirsc...

However much Truth Social posts give the illusion that the shock is easing, lots of countries are in flashing red lights territory www.ft.com/content/087d...

Everyone is saying it’s a travesty South Africa squeaked past Benin to qualify for the World Cup

From fracturing your skull to scoring a header in a home World Cup five years later—pretty cool arc!

Getting my bold predictions out there early so I can say I was right if they happen and no one will remember I said it if they don't: Mexico is going to have a great start to the tournament, and Gilberto Mora will emerge as a star

I wrote about how the World Cup is the best kind of nationalism: one that allows pride in the local while connecting us to the universal. To paraphrase Hobsbawm, a global community of billions seems more real as a tournament of 48 nations timhirschelburns.substack.com/p/the-world-...

Infantino the day before the 2022 World Cup: "Today I feel Qatari. Today I feel Arabic. Today I feel African. Today I feel gay. Today I feel disabled. Today I feel like a migrant worker." Infantino the day before the 2026 World Cup: "Chill, relax"

In the last 18 months, Congress has given DHS $240 billion — a quarter of a trillion.

I thought people were kidding, turns out Elon really did axe the screwworm containment program back in March 25. fucking imbecile www.agri-pulse.com/articles/226...

BREAKING: in May 2026, *every single one* of the 599 refugees admitted in the U.S. were white South Africans. In FY 2026, the U.S. has admitted a total of 6,665 white South Africans, three Afghans (back in November 2025), and nobody else. For reference, the U.S. admitted 100,060 refugees in 2024.

Incredible to see how pro-USAID lefties have gotten. I remember having to push back on the idea that USAID was mostly an imperialist regime change apparatus, and now Current Affairs is running laudatory interviews! www.currentaffairs.org/news/how-elo...

When we tried to have my best friend from Benin visit me in the US, he had to wait eight months for an appointment, travel six hours to the embassy and pay an $100+ fee, and then he was rejected in about a minute. Now he’d have to wait even longer and travel even farther

Quite the side-by-sideon the extraordinary growth of Chinese industrial market share from 2005 to 2023. Like them or not, China's strategies really worked www.ft.com/content/42fc...

Me after the match: what a team, what a year, Eze has been a delight to have, where would this team be without Gabriel. Thanks all for the memories

I’m *pretty* sure it will have been worth it if Arsenal pull this out but my god this has been agony

Not discussed enough that many of the biggest recipients of aid were Eastern European countries (many of which then grew impressively). After entering the EU, Estonia got ~$370 per person each year in EU aid. Even before the recent aid cuts, low-income countries got just $73 per person in all aid!

Phenomenal World Issue 1 is here: AMERICAN POWER With writing on ‘declinism,’ the dollar, the Donroe Doctrine, Iran, Cuba, Brazil, Venezuela, China, the Gulf, and more. Now all online— phenomenalworld.org/issue/issue-...

🧵 Here are a few interesting facts I learned yesterday from the latest occasional Pew Research Center poll on Americans's feelings about climate change (also, 🎁🔗 www.bloomberg.com/news/article... )

Also, for the uninitiated, Zohran is referring to this chant here: "What do we think of Tottenham? (Shit!) What do we think of shit? (Tottenham!)"