The Shining is the scariest film I've seen: ahead even of The Exorcist, Silence of the Lambs, Alien. Barry Lyndon is one ridiculously beautifully composed shot after another. Clockwork Orange enveigles the audience in the evil of Alex, because as you watch it you feel just like Alex in this scene:

Ranking Stanley Kubrick's movies: 1. The Shining 2. Barry Lyndon 3. Full Metal Jacket 4. A Clockwork Orange 5. Dr. Strangelove 6. 2001: A Space Odyssey 7. Paths of Glory 8. Eyes Wide Shut 9. The Killing 10. Spartacus 11. Lolita 12. Killer's Kiss 13. Fear & Desire The top 10 are all incredible.

I interviewed Mathias Larsen on key takeaways of our Hopkins report @phenomenalworld.bsky.social Why is this BRI 2.0 private-sector led? Does Beijing know the scale? What are motivations of firms going out? What are host countries agency & developmentalist plans phenomenalworld.org/interviews/t...

More data that must be abolished www.nytimes.com/2025/09/20/u...

Will Inboden is on target in this piece. I remembering tell Berkeley faculty a decade ago that if they didn’t get the house in order on their own terms, eventually someone who absolutely loathed them would come in and impose it on them by vicious force. www.nationalaffairs.com/publications...

Even if you are not a official target group, far right authoritarianism will come for you for saying anything against the regime, it will take your small business and gift it to a political ally and then send your children to die in a pointless war as the economy collapses.

In his memoir, Vannevar Bush notes how his friend Frank Jewett (president of Bell Labs & the @nationalacademies.org) criticized his postwar proposal for federal funding of science: “He was sure that we were inviting federal control of the colleges and universities, and of industry, for that matter.”

Today in #PlanetarySapience

“They have no idea what the volume is like in the homeland.” thenewcuriosityshop.substack.com/p/notes-when...

When you think about how much Trump has bent the language — with all the libs aping him now — maybe he DOES deserve a Nobel… in Literature

LOL: “The Rock making a film with Benny Safdie is like Taylor Swift making an album with Björk.” Great article: www.nytimes.com/2025/09/21/m...

Democratic leaders should be openly saying that, “Anyone in the military, civilian or uniformed, who participates in anything that has the smell of a Trumpist political purge will face career consequences when democracy is reestablished in the country.” www.politico.com/news/2025/09...

In the commedia nera that is current American political life, impending mass violence is the libretto, comical levels of naked corruption is the score, and Homan is the basso bufo

This is awfully rich coming from this particular messenger, but he’s not wrong on either the specifics or the generalization www.tiktok.com/t/ZTMRNpaa1/

Complexity is to civilizations as leverage is to finance youtu.be/kzHrqzHAxwc?...

Just like discussing racism will be deemed racist

“The newly influential are not simply broadcasters at the top of a different hierarchical order — they determine what content matters in conjunction with active, participating audiences. Legitimacy is now conferred on those who master resonance, immediacy, emotional connection, and authenticity.”

Especially ironic given Lutnick’s explicit justification: “If you’re going to train someone, you’re going to train one of the recent graduates from one of the great universities from across our land” — even as they’re actively destroying those universities. www.instagram.com/reel/DOzwb2k...

It's important to remember when GOP Reps and Sens are yelling about the 'violent left' that they routinely tell reporters and colleagues how theyre afraid to do this or that because their own supporters routinely threaten violence agains them.

The consequence of poorly approximately an ideal that cannot be met is ever-deepening cynicism that eventually curdles into nihilism

“Renewables & electric tech are reconfiguring the global landscape of geopolitical power through a competition to seize economic opportunities, through a need for energy security & autonomy, and through the effort to diversify economies to make them more resilient.” www.noemamag.com/the-new-geop...

Huawei has co-developed a safety-focused version of DeepSeek that it said is "nearly 100% successful" in preventing discussion of politically sensitive topics. www.reuters.com/business/med...

This is true for almost every topic you can think of.

Well that vague Dalio prediction worked out. And it’s gonna change in even more shocking ways in the NEXT five years.

Standing against this will be the Petrostate Axis of Ecological Evil. Given that the latter aren’t liberal democracies either, it’s hard to know at this point why one wouldn’t prefer the Green Entente

The second headline is wrong, as the first headline reveals: Trump isn’t “clamping down” on legal immigration as much as he’s changing the focus from attracting talented people to attracting rich assholes.

A thoughtful and provocative piece. Further thought (provocation?): perhaps the inversion is right-LPE (focus on power, but to ends of inequality/antidemocracy)? And, potentially a clearing of terrain for eventual return/realization of left/OG-LPE?

I build up this idea with the latest intellectual inversion: rightwing Legal Realism and Critical Legal Studies: open.substack.com/pub/nilsgilm...

It wouldn't surprise me if Trump and Putin are scheming up a pact where they carve up the Scandinavian Arctic between them, with Trump taking Greenland at the same time as Putin takes Svalbard. Poland will probably find this sort of "pact" familiar. www.bloomberg.com/features/202...

Vanitas, vanitas, omnia est vanitas www.nytimes.com/2025/09/18/w...

MAGA has essentially weaponized “the theory of legal realism” — namely the (originally post-liberal leftist) idea that the law, in the end, is (just) a political construct. The implication being that law professors are just bullshit artists masking the play of power. FedSoc LOL.

One side believes in the rule OF law, the other believes in rule BY law. And everyone knows perfectly well which side is which.

applying the lens of the hypothesis in this piece (on parties involved in the emerging global great conflict) on thiel’s casting greta as the antichrist, it lines up w the usa having joined the petro axis foreignpolicy.com/2025/09/01/e...

I posted this six weeks BEFORE Charlie Kirk was murdered

I posted this 10 days BEFORE Charlie Kirk was murdered

Both FDR & Churchill were extremely clear-eyed that fascists could not be disposed of using fastidiously liberal methods. When Churchill was asked to justify the “militarily unnecessary” bombing Dresden in February 1945, his alleged reply was simple: “This time the Germans need to KNOW they lost.”

The the “illiberalism trilemma” makes the descent into illiberalism a one-way ratchet: because in order to restore the legitimacy of the impartial rule of law you need to act against the illiberals (a) quickly, (b) effectively, (c) legally — but you can only do two out of three of these.

It's going to be very hard for MAGA to stuff that historiographical toothpaste back in the tube. People have already learned too much—and it's all written down. Changing the plaques in national parks is ugly, but won't change things fundamentally. What's required is savage repression & censorship.

The fundamental animating grievance of contemporary U.S. conservatism is a black man raised by a single mother in an economically disadvantaged situation who lived in the South Side for a bit was intellectually capable of envisioning a scenario where he did not end up ruling a nuclear superpower.

Charlie Kirk’s assassination risks becoming a Harpers Ferry moment: an act recast by rightwing partisans as proof that coexistence with liberals is impossible. We'd do much better to follow the moral lessons of Lincoln. New substack: nilsgilman.substack.com/p/a-second-h...

410 days until Trump is reelected by proclaim for his post-constitutional third term.

LOL: "There’s the second problem: definitions. Is stupidity the same thing as ignorance? As foolishness? As the unwillingness to learn (AKA obtuseness, or what the Greeks called amathia)? As the inability to draw the right conclusions from what you have learned?" www.theguardian.com/books/2025/s...

Two possibilities here. One is that Patel somehow doesn't know about Dylan Roof's racially-motivated mass murder. The other is that he does know, but is playing dumb in order to deny the reality and threat of rightwing violence. As usual with MAGA, the incompetence and malevolence are imbricated.

"The West" as an aligned geopolitical category no longer exists www.foreignaffairs.com/united-state...

I listened to this yesterday, but watching the video just now hit different. I think Ezra Klein is speaking not just an astute observer of politics, but as a husband and a father who's scared to death about the wave of violence that's about to crash over our heads. I don't know what to do either.

US comedians would be advised to retool their craft by learning about what Soviet called "stiob." Here's a serious-minded place to stop: anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

My parents and grandparents lived through Bolivian and Chilean dictatorships, and I am warning you all that what is happening to the United States right now (the erosion of free speech) is the beginning stage of a full fascist autocracy.

I basically think the "Midwest" refers to the old Northwest territory (see map: Cleveland is the East) plus a bit across the Mississippi — maybe everything East of Interstate 35? I put NE, the Dakotas & most of KS & OK in the Plains. Test case: Kansas City is the Midwest but Topeka is the Plains?

We are the asteroid. We are also the dinosaurs.