Notes from TR-US game: Ed Norton is still in character, note how *HE* grabs the beer 😜 www.youtube.com/watch?v=EnK7...

Here we go: www.ft.com/content/c11d...

I am very happy and honored to have been elected to the Executive Council, and look forward to supporting @sasemeeting.bsky.social alongside this wonderful team of colleagues.

"“There’s not a single story of the way that private credit is transforming American capitalism,” says Ellias, co-author of “The Credit Markets Go Dark,” published in the Yale Law Journal last year." hls.harvard.edu/today/tradit...

The visual language, the soundtrack, and the storyline of the movie...all out of the 1990s. Jurassic Park algorithm projected on Disclosure Day.

Also, may I kindly point out that there is an unresolved space toilet problem, and that no one would like to go to a hotel without toilets, even though the view from the Moon may look great?

Basically, they say that SpaceX has been losing money, the IPO share price is absurd, and it would take a miracle to deliver what the company promises--and Musk's track record is not a stellar one at that: www.nytimes.com/2026/06/11/i...

FOMO investing as a global sport, exhibit 430342678:

That remains to be seen--so far, their application for accelerated inclusion into S&P500 has been declined, see here: arstechnica.com/tech-policy/...

A piece of good news in the middle of the darkness we live in: "SpaceX will not gain accelerated access to potentially billions more dollars through passive investment funds that automatically purchase shares of S&P 500 companies." arstechnica.com/tech-policy/...

thanks @benbraun.eurosky.social @realbrianjudge.bsky.social @mkblyth.bsky.social for letting me talk about macrofinancial life of sovereign bonds for 1.5h. judging by this week's OECD conference, next summer school should be for Ministers of Finance (and Gillian Tett)

“A Danish pension fund has blacklisted SpaceX, calling it grossly overvalued with catastrophic governance” The S1 indicates potential problems. @maxkennerly.bsky.social has identified some in his prior threads. thenextweb.com/news/danish-...

This first issue of Phenomenal World looks super interesting: phenomenalworld.org/analysis/int...

Counter-revolution par excellence.

Private investors want to cash out with max returns asap, and then the rest will be holding the bag, probably.

Erin Brokovich is back: www.brockovichdatacenter.com

In case you missed it, here’s Craig Coben’s big post on the SpaceX IPO from early March, which is still worth reading. www.ft.com/content/5bf1...

An agent for automating STEM research gets the recent headline in Nature. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Matthias’s talk yesterday, at the European Centre for Minority Issues (ECMI), was a great success! We are grateful to everyone who attended, and look forward to reading further research on this topic. #AcademicSky

"With AI shrinking the runway for entry-level coders, ambitious students are...gravitating toward fields tied to engineering, manufacturing, infrastructure, and finance and imagining a decade where growth comes from building physical things..." www.reveliolabs.com/news/social/...

High expectations after BBT--but judging by the trailer, I don't know what they were on when writing this script. www.youtube.com/watch?v=gnmc...

"Higher education was not equipped for the A.I. revolution." www.nytimes.com/2026/05/17/o...

"Since the early 2000s, a majority of recovered space debris contains either carbon fiber-reinforced plastic sections or metal components wrapped with carbon fiber. The carbon fiber can act as an unintentional heat shield for heavier, more harmful debris" theconversation.com/falling-spac...

Humanity will regret this. www.ft.com/content/0038...

Really like this article. I am less optimistic re: the likelihood of the proposed dialogue in the end, as the two streams rarely engage with each other, and any mention of dependencia is a reason for disengagement for some colleagues on the other end. But nice to see this in print. shorturl.at/QXgKX

To define what is uniquely human, especially at a time when we are being flooded by AI-based products, we probably need to turn more to studies in political theory/philosophy. This one looks interesting.

Re-reading this chapter and the prescience of some of the points Harvey makes is incredible. www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edi...

Naturally, everyone's doing a hantavirus thing. I did last week for @thenewworldmag.bsky.social, belated posting here now. As several folks have said already, it's not the start of a new pandemic - but it's very nasty. www.thenewworld.co.uk/philip-ball-...

The most immediate risk would be through the US-based payment systems. Email and social media would be the easiest to replace, but Visa-Mastercard is another issue.

We start with a shocking statistic: rich countries cut development aid by around 25% last year. and the remaining is increasingly, explicitly tied to their own economic interests, designed to benefit their companies.

Especially this part is spot-on.

This is so, so, accurate. But also: most individuals do not have power/resources necessary to initiate meaningful change. There is a collective action problem, but what exacerbates it is the academic inequality problem.

now thats an anecdote with a punch, from Gillian Tett www.ft.com/content/c0ae...

This essay is great. USPS is also a key infrastructure in facilitating payments through the delivery of checks. All the utility bills, rents, paychecks... On-time delivery of these alone is a major public value that no pro-privatization wonk calculates. www.phenomenalworld.org/analysis/uns...

The comments below this post...😂

I went on the Race Matters podcast to discuss Karl Marx in America. Fun comversation, check it out! youtu.be/b5V8ONwzoio?...

New article out in International Political Sociology, "Making Finance Legible: Speculative Fiction & the Sociology of Futures". It explores how finance builds invisible systems - debt, derivatives, algorithms - that shape the future, & how speculative fiction makes them visible. Link + thread below.

Solving university entrance exam prep tests in TR.

The parallels between what's happening in US science and 1930s Germany are indeed chilling, and McNutt's remarks (mentioned in The Nation piece) are an example of this. I had never expected, or hoped, that the book would become quite this relevant.

Happy May 1st!

❗ UPDATE ❗ Please read the latest news regarding the changes described above 👇 link.europa.eu/TBqRQJ

"Deep state" is originally a Turkish concept. So is the experience of living with one for decades. This week @ekoshy.bsky.social & I talk to @mertcanbayar.bsky.social about conspiracy theories and what Turkey's history tells us about Trump's America itallhappenedbefore.substack.com/p/episode-7-...

...well, when you for example read Braithwaite and Drahos's part on ITU and find out an ex-Motorola head telling how they drafted mobile phone standards in-house and then promptly made them international through ITU, I think there might be some hints at the source of all this.

Rather than ITU allocation rules--which is of course relevant-- one needs to look at what the national regulators do, beginning with FCC. Stay tuned for a forthcoming piece on this.