I guess I am taking kind of a hard edge on this whole thing because the only way out is through. Consternating and sitting around admiring the crisis is a waste of emotional resources and energy in a time when they should be conserved

This is actually a weirdly boring time to specialize in International Relations because there's no actual intellectual substance to any of this. Like, yeah, man. Shit's fucked. Fucker's nutso. That sort of insight is why I'm a fancy-pants political scientist you should all respect and consult.

Once, in Paducah, Kentucky, I visited a tourist office and overheard a heated conversation between an employee and someone who was asking for information about how to get around. She was from the east side of Paducah and had never been to the west side. Absolute god’s own truth.

There are people that haven't even walked the nice walks in the town they live/grow up in Exploring takes a certain mindset, and large numbers of people just... Don't (I look forward to being able to pilot a drone down a chinese gorge because my vertigo won't let me visit the 3 Parallel Rivers)

The first time the Justice Department sued Donald Trump was closer in time to the end of World War I than to today.

hi everyone, it's me, the king of social science. the only tool you can use anymore is OLS. this is for your own good, really

I found this by @danhon.com flattering (to me) and very smart where he goes beyond me newsletter.danhon.com/archive/s21e...

Sent an email last night to the members of my department encouraging them to contact our Congressional representatives with a simple ask: use 2024 multi year funding levels, NOT 2025 multi year funding levels, in the 2026 NIH funding bill

A Bradbury reference, even in dark times, warms my heart on a cold day. Prof. Musgrave has returned.

gmail offered a summary of a 1-line email that said "you have mail" that I get from my post box location when, you know, I get mail or a package.

it took me two minutes to paste a copied address into an email on my phone yesterday because the stupid AI prompt kept getting in the way. active degradation of the user experience is becoming a Google norm

Yesterday, I bought 12 sets of colored pencils and seven rulers. Today, I used them in an exercise to teach data analysis. In a world gone high tech, sometimes you need to go low.

At some point recently I had opened up a PDF and Adobe Acrobat was chock full of all the little AI icons asking me if I wanted to summarize the document I was reading. I was looking at the menu for Perkins family restaurant.

I see Bluesky hasn’t changed! Fun addition to your blocklists

Gmail is now asking if I’d like to have two sentence emails summarized

At this rate, Greenland will be a state before DC

Trump should give a big speech in the Senate … maybe in seven or eight weeks … March 15

Just got back from my time traveling dinosaur safari and you won’t believe how many butterflies I stepped on! Now to take a big sip of water and check on President Harris’s trip to Davos

Trump turns Davos into DARVO

This piece is, unfortunately, extremely worth your time. (Because the conclusion sucks and is true, not for any other reason)

LLM won’t take your job, someone who believes your job can be done by LLMs will take your job

Far too many .edu employees are eager to show that their jobs are LLMable

If you kids don’t behave I’m going to turn this plane around

If I just post harder, my adversaries will abandon their fundamental convictions

just my opinion here, but based on my few conversations with european officials, I think too many outside observers are mistaking over-the-top attempts at civility in those messages with obsequiousness it's not kowtowing, it's trying to conjure up off-ramps with politeness. you've all done this

Travel and living in another country is broadening, but it also teaches you that some things are exactly the same. For instance, aside from the Arabic, this could be a tire shop in central Pennsylvania

I thought the bus thread was a reference to a metaphor, not to a divinely provided metaphor

Alarmists say the emperor is building a “Death Star”. Even if he wanted to, I’m sure he’d be stopped by the Imperial Senate.

I have genuinely thought to myself multiple times over the last year that Stephen Miller et al. found themselves in Omelas they'd be looking for more kids to torture to see if that would make things even better.

I’m from downtown. I’m from Mitch and Murray.

damn, he's back for a few hours and he's already just casually dropping new classics

The ones who annex Omelas for the rare earths

There are non-democratic governments—many of them—that are more concerned with legitimacy and public opinion than the Trump administration currently is.

The political physics of the moment—this moment, right now—defy ordinary reflexive discourses. When it comes to, say, Greenland, the very wealthy Americans and impoverished single moms have the same class interests in opposing Trump’s stated and serious policy. The threat to order is that great.

I make part of my living arguing that people should care about what the public thinks about foreign policy, but at the moment it is hard to make the argument that the public *influences* US foreign policy. Indeed, it is hard to argue that interest groups, in a recognizable sense, do so either.

It is not normal for a president to be pushing for a net -80 policy. That Trump apparently does not care about the public opinion on Greenland (or maybe he doesn't know about the polls) is a sign of how far we have drifted from normal democratic government

Imagine if a loved one were posting and behaving like the president of the United States. You would be in tears, or afraid, but you would be contacting the authorities. I am not being coy, or cute. A real person you knew who behaved like this would be a danger to themselves and others.

Updates: 1. I live in Doha now 2. The rest is details

the current american self-sabotage project makes brexit look like sensible statecraft in comparison

The present moment is, and this is cringe, a good reminder to focus on the values and relationships that matter most.

Yes

Unironically accurate

Paul's back and he nails it here

“The unipolar world, what was left of it, has died—of suicide, not murder.”

This all feels very much like the beginnings of @greatdismal.bsky.social's Jackpot in his Peripheral series (which I highly recommend).

Paul Musgrave on the end of unipolarity: short, eloquent, and devastating. open.substack.com/pub/musgrave...

It is even worse than it looks