Keep in mind this is Trump reversing his position that he has held for many months because House Republicans were going to vote to release the files. Now he’s going to make it his idea.

Trump: "House Republicans should vote to release the Epstein files, because we have nothing to hide."

Remember: The concentration of wealth in the hands of a few isn't just bad for our economy. It's corrosive to our democracy. When the wealthy and well-connected control our political system, regular people don't have a voice. The result? The demagoguery and corruption we're seeing now.

Great shout out to Frankfurt School‘s Leo Lowenthal by John Ganz on Ezra’s pod when recommending books (@lioneltrolling.bsky.social). Fun fact: Lowenthal was thesis advisor to Dr Elihu Katz and while a professor at Annenberg, Katz often invoked his ideas and writings in class.

I understand the cynicism in people’s responses to this, but if she keeps her word here, this is a positive development for American politics more broadly.

The piece in its entirety is far less offensive than the title (and that one intro paragraph), but imagine how it might be differently framed -throughout- if written by a woman.

I can reassure the New York Times that networks of mutual protection, and misogynist retaliation efforts that benefit abusive men at the expense of the young women they prey upon, are very much still intact post-Me Too.

This is nauseating: “As the emails stretch through the years, they show how that protected realm vanished into the mists of time, pulled under by the rising forces of the internet and the #MeToo movement.” A “Gone With the Wind” framing for sexual abuse and harassment.

I’ve defended that newspaper on here plenty of times but “lost New York”?!?!?!

The Founders were so concerned about bribery that the Constitution forbids it three separate times. Two emoluments clauses ban officials—unambiguously including the president—from accepting things of value, plus bribery is the only named impeachable offense besides treason. Unprecedentedly corrupt.

Look what @dandrezner.bsky.social started over at the hellsite?

Did women ruin polling again?

Malcolm Nance said these sound like the titles of porn movies.

I hope our 15 year old daughter looks back and realizes she was so lucky to have a Dad who not only watched all her favorite anime with her but also read The Great Gatsby aloud with her to help her review for her English assignments. He’s pretty great.

THREAD. A collection of photographs of excellent cattle I have met on walks. You will find the captions to each photo in the alt text.

Me: “We seethe over the betrayal by a supposedly democratic society that quickly averts its collective eyes and allows predators, mostly men, to get away with it and reinvent themselves right in front of our eyes as we’re punished if we speak out about our basic rights to survival and safety.”

I write a lot #onhere about my late husband Mike Young. November 11 was the 20 year anniversary of the first (and biggest) of 13 brain surgeries he'd have in 2005 & 2006. He didn't stabilize for weeks after, then wrote to our friends about it. I'm sharing some of that here so you can hear his voice.

This is a remarkable read of authoritarian extortion and it demonstrates how it was shamefully aided at UVA, as it has been at other places, by people willing to leverage the extortionary power of the government to achieve their own ideological goals.

Silicon Valley, 1990s: Free and open access to all the world’s knowledge will usher a new utopian age of information! Silicon Valley, 2025:

If you read my stuff, you know I regularly go on about the Far Right being an interconnected, global threat that transcends borders.

Can't wait til we get similar reports about college athletes.

lol funny thing is all these frictionless parents who flirted with this (saving kids from stress and pain) ended up paying for huge therapy bills so those kids could finally build “distress tolerance” because they NEVER got to experience HOW MUCH LIFE SUCKS… a LOT. and OFTEN.

When I chose to study politics for a living I had no idea that politics would get this dumb.

Oh wow @reuters.com got the photo here:

whatsup November 14?

Piece from me and @adambonica.bsky.social in @thenewrepublic.bsky.social today about Gen Z They have bad taste in music but quite progressive political attitudes (even the men) newrepublic.com/article/2030...

As I tell my undergrads, employers will soon integrate methods to push back against this AI fueled mediocrity-machine: On-your-feet questioning. Assessing task performance in real time. Questioning designed to gauge cognitive integrative complexity. Too much $ is at stake for them not to.

Is AI making job recruitment less meritocratic? We're getting some v interesting research studies on this question now, and the news is... not good. @jburnmurdoch.ft.com & I dive in, in the latest edition of our newsletter The AI Shift www.ft.com/content/e5b7...

Have you ever met one of these people that is not very online? Dude. They are such happy people. So fucking happy.

🙌 Come for some hilariously delicious lines and stay for smart invocation of @zephoria.bsky.social and @alicetiara.bsky.social ’s concept of “context collapse”

Today’s sophomores were 9 years old when Trump ran for office the first time, descending that escalator and calling Mexicans criminals & rapists. So the only politics they have known are broken ones. And when we talk about how politics “typically work” they feel like it’s a distant history lesson.

Good statement from the US conference of Catholic Bishops

I have a theory as to why this is

Catholic bishops collectively taking to Tik Tok to decry the war on immigrants is very notable: www.tiktok.com/@usbishops/v...

I'm glad this captured this slide!

NEW: @propublica.org investigated the Chicago apartment raid where kids were zip-tied and citizens detained for hours. They find: - NONE of the arrested were criminally charged - NO evidence the building was "filled with TdA terrorists." - ZERO legitimate reason for DHS to rappel from a Blackhawk.

God-tier timing

A+ Skeet🙌🙌🙌

Lord give me the strength to never become a rich and famous and deeply vapid and venal person.

genuinely very few things more satisfying than reading the kinds of emails rich and famous people send each other

Please check in on your ideologically confused mentally ill friends who get the majority of their information from podcasts. They’re having a tough time right now

Ok ok I finally get it. Conspiracy theories ARE AMAZING, actually! They impose a narrative structure on top of all kinds of disparate chaotic things, so that they all make sense! And … sometimes… just sometimes… they turn out to be true! We shall see…

The emails all read like (Michael Jordan): “Hi Jeffrey, was wondering if you could take a look at this video of my jump shot. Would love to get your feedback before my meeting with the president of India.” And Epstein is like: “yor elbow move l eft an work on ur folowthrough.” (MJ): “delightful”

Catholic bishops nationwide recently announced “You Are Not Alone,” a program that lays out ways for Catholics across the country to provide direct aid and solidarity to immigrants in the U.S.

Here's a github repo with the code + how you can do this yourself if you'd like: github.com/paulgp/epste...

that is a Blues Brother Father Blues Brother

In light of current reminders about how powerful rich men exploit and assault young women under the safety and guise of various forms of “employment,“ just wanna give a shout out to NYT for this gem last week where we learned about how #metoo *actually* ended harming the workplace. 🙄

Can you produce an edgelist (sender-receiver) for each communication from the corpus? I'm interested in visualizing the aggregate as a network.

A lot of AI and surveillance tech falls into the same bucket. They think they own everyone's data and intellectual property the same way they think they can play merry hell with out bodies, minds, and livelihoods.