your regular reminder that the national shoplifting crisis was a manufactured moral panic largely engineered by corporations in order to cover up their own mismanagement — and that wage theft is the largest category of theft in the U.S.

Just completed a ground up redesign and rebuild of our brand identity and website at Civilytics. It is long overdue and feels good that our public face aligns with the work we do. I'd love if you gave it a look. @civilytics.bsky.social is also on Bluesky www.civilytics.com/newsletter/r...

You can't "earn" a billion dollars and none of their examples did. Michael Jordan earned $93m playing basketball. He's worth $3.5b today because of our meticulously-engineered legal, economic, and tax structures that prioritize accumulated capital and property over everything else.

My membership keeps returning more and more value. One of the rare subscriptions that just keeps getting better with every year. Get the news first with @prospect.org

Inhousing is such a crucial strategy for state and local governments right now. I like to refer to the wasteful IT contracts as "big dull tech" and they are holding us back from building better more responsive services. Love to see this.

The theme of public excellence is something Mamdani emphasized in his inauguration address. One big potential he mentions here is inhousing tech talent rather than spending too much on contracts that don't deliver.

I'm excited to be heading to Atlanta to speak at the 2026 Local Budget Equity Convening. I'll be speaking about how local budgets are being shaped by national events and what advocates can do to keep their elected officials and community leaders focused on improving the lives of their residents.

I think this is increasingly something all reform projects need to be thinking about deeply. Having worked closely with grassroots organizations for the past several years I believe it is only by working alongside them does real reform stand a chance. People power means engaging with people!

With news today that South Korea sentenced a former leader for a coup attempt, I wanted to share why I nominated the South Korean people for a Nobel Peace Prize. Their resistance to the coup attempt was known as the "Revolution of Light" - a nationwide movement defending their Constitution.

📢 We’re officially doing this!! 📢 I’ll be out in the community and I’m inviting you to help. We’ll be canvassing for signatures at events, pop-ups & neighborhood stops, with plenty of chances to get involved. Come through, sign, and jump in to help collect signatures. Let’s build this together 💪🏽

UW-Madison had like three MacArthur geniuses this year and Bad Bunny's historian advisor, what are they doing up in Wisconsin man

This piece articulates a feeling I have long had. Every year it gets harder to enjoy sports when I increasingly feel like a mark being taken for every possible dollar at every possible point in the experience. The Prospect continues leaving no corner of society unexamined!

Hang it in the Smithsonian. Captures the last 14 years of politics perfectly.

This looks good to me and aligns with a lot of the work I have done @Civilytics where we use lessons learned from inside the bureaucracy to evaluate and revise policy demands on local government!

The case against Graeberism and for Mamdanism dissentmagazine.org/article/the-...

Muppet’s Christmas Carol is such a stunning piece of work. Just a masterpiece from start to finish.

The problem with this piece, like all the other pieces, is that the missing hed, dek, & lede is that all of this was wildly illegal, unconstitutional, & criminal. This is how you normalize lawless authoritarianism - treat like just another story in our politics. “Transformation” is lazy euphemism.

Look, there’s a simple solution to private equity buying up and enshittifying the software that keeps us safe: a handful of municipal fire/rescue departments should team up, collaboratively build and share better software, and release it into the public domain. This is a common pattern!

Hundreds of thousands of people, dead because of a decision made by the world's richest man

credible modeling from impactcounter.com shows that trump and musk have killed nearly 600,000 people with their illegal cuts to date. nearly 400,000 of them were children.

Hard agree. "Abundance" is apparently just the "Nudge" of the 2020s - get ready for made up job titles, spinoff books, and no challenge to power or inequality and talking past all the structural barriers (inequality, concentration of power) in favor of fixating on their symptoms (regs, rules, etc.)

what if i told you the "Abundance" framing was in part an explicit effort to associate unpopular stuff like AI and crypto with popular (among Dem activists) stuff like green energy and YIMBY

I've been working on a fun, data-centric side project this summer, identifying "statistically improbable restaurants" via big data sets. Want to know where in the US to find Afghan or African food, or understand why that might be interesting? Start here: ethanzuckerman.com/2025/07/03/s...

You hear this a lot on the left but it isn't true. USAID did not "fail to tell its story to Americans," the right targeted the agency with lies and misinformation. Ultimately this narrative turns conservative attacks into even more calls for the left to reform. www.nytimes.com/2025/06/29/o...

There's a debate about if Lander getting arrested was a stunt? Of course it was a stunt, and it was a good one. He's got the race's best photo op, he raised awareness that they will arrest anyone without a warrant, and most importantly he put his body on the line to do good. Nothing wrong there.

DYK that the federal statistical system has a guidebook for how things are supposed to work? The latest edition just dropped. You can read it here: nap.nationalacademies.org/resource/279...

There’s no reason to have a Democratic Party if it won’t go to the mat to save the Department of Education. It’s a fundamental belief that children in America deserve better futures. It’s tremendously simple. You cannot continue funding a government that would close this.

When it fails, in tangible terms, with job losses and spikes in food bank needs and negative growth (as soon as Q1 of this year), they're going to all hide and pretend this wasn't their primary suggestion for fiscal policy for decades. Don't let them get away with it.

I finally got what's bugged me about all these stories on the crippling of the US govt: all of them speak of "cuts" when, in fact, only Congress can 'cut' funding, and it has done nothing of the sort. The story describes illegal & unconstitutional impoundment, BUT SAYS NOT ONE WORD ABOUT IT

This is our public statement at Civilytics about the recent cuts to research spending at the Department of Education: civilytics.substack.com/p/the-headli...

the richest man in the world has decided that your kids don't deserve special education programs

It is a sad week for the many of you I know working to bring evidence into policymaking. We had four contracts for evaluation technical assistance and evidence review work across a variety of important and current education topics terminated as of Monday night.

It's all illegal impoundment, it has been illegal, it continues to be illegal regardless of presumed authority. It violates the constitution, federal statute and Supreme Court precedent, and we are beginning to see it challenged as such. www.citizen.org/wp-content/u...

California DOE fires back against Trump's executive order: "It does nothing" "It is against federal law for the White House to dictate what educators can and cannot teach" Will not comply.

I heartily agree with this - Mr Bates vs the Post Office is a triumph and one of the most important political dramas of our age. Anyone working in public technology needs to see it and aside from the importance of the subject, it is a moving masterpiece. I teared up nearly every 30 minutes! 🥹

Here's another custom Zoom background I like using - an austere late winter tree lined path at Edith Wharton's mansion in the Berkshires taken by me in April of 2021 days after getting my first dose of the COVID-19 vaccine.

Fall is rapidly flying by and my feed is empty so I thought I'd share my current wallpaper/Zoom background, one of my favorite fall images from New England. #foliage #newengland