Tonight in 1991, President George H.W. Bush ordered the unilateral elimination of all land-based US nuclear weapons in Europe and South Korea, all nonstrategic naval nuclear weapons, the end of ground alert for all strategic bombers, and the immediate de-alerting of all 450 Minuteman II ICBMs.

After so many broken-down negotiations and Israeli insistence on "total victory", it's hard to believe that we are there this time. The outline, including no annexation of Gaza and the release of all hostages, sounds promising, though. www.haaretz.com/israel-news/...

I’m about to wahoo a waa so big

I'm telling you, people, for all the bleakness of the world right now, the GOP has no idea of what to do when Trump is over. And the very logic of Trump's hegemony means that they will only address that problem once he has exited the stage.

She has a point. And if she were president, not only would students like Rumeysa Ozturk & Mahmoud Khalil have stayed free, but Netanyahu would not be on the brink of formally annexing part of the West Bank. Things are never so bad they can’t get worse. And we’re living “worse.”

I get that the news cycle is packed right now, but I just heard from a colleague at the Smithsonian that this is fully a GIANT SQUID BEING EATEN BY A SPERM WHALE and it’s possibly the first ever confirmed video according to a friend at NOAA 10 YEAR OLD ME IS LOSING HER MIND (a thread 🧵)

Wherein Cass Sunstein embarrasses himself

Happy Aja Day to all of the Dan Heads. Be sure to listen to it in Walt & Don's preferred pristine sonic media format.

This is the story of Greek & Latin Christianity since the fourth century

✒️ Ottoman Calligraphic Wall Panel, Poem, 1897 "Be rich in heart and content with little, Even if you die, do not seek a livelihood from the lowly, Do not let your heart be wounded in order to sustain your life, Indeed, provision comes from God."

Got to read an advance copy and found "McNamara at War" to be a brilliant and thoughtful reexamination of one of the most fascinating, and tortured, figures ever to serve in Washington. It comes out Tuesday and can be pre-ordered: politics-prose.com/book/9781324... www.amazon.com/McNamara-at-...

on a music walking tour in Manchester and regret to inform that this is roughly where the stage was when Dylan was called Judas

Admittedly, I never read the WaPost opinion section for their ed board, which like all editorial boards is pretty inevitably stupid (b/c no one is there b/c of their distinct individual merit, but just because they had some legacy with the paper or its owner), but this is really going above & beyond

Conducting tasks while receiving e-mails and phone calls reduces a worker’s IQ by about ten points relative to working in uninterrupted quiet. That is equivalent to losing a night’s sleep, and twice as debilitating as using marijuana.

Ross Douthat: The Trump Administration Is Violating the First Amendment The Right Way

More than that. "The FBI ***recorded*** Tom Homan taking the money "after indicating he could help the agents — who were posing as business executives — win government contracts in a second Trump administration."

it was literally in a bag www.nytimes.com/2025/09/20/u...

“What is therefore worth stressing is the myriad ways in which the Trump administration has been unable to autocrat its way out of a paper bag.”

entire press has gotten bullied into treating charlie kirk as if he was one of the most important americans alive and not a modestly popular podcaster

I just spoke to NYC Comptroller Brad Lander as he left police custody following his arrest at immigration court. Here’s what he said:

FYI. Democrats will keep the pressure on until election day. 

So many cowards and cynics on display right now. When the pendulum does swing back--and it will--don't forget where these sad and pathetic people stood in the hour of democracy's greatest need.

Respectfully disagree: 1) in fact it is unusual for a democracy w/ this level of GDP to turn authoritarian & so quickly; 2) the weakness of both institutions (congress & courts) and individuals (Schumer etc) is shocking. Would take less than 10 people in congress or 2 SC justices to stop all this.

holy shit -- Kash Patel repeatedly calls Durbin "disgraceful" and refuses to answer questions about his firing decisions

According to the “Global Terrorism Database (GTD)—arguably the most widely-used dataset in the study of political violence—anti-abortion activists constitute the single most common perpetrators of terrorist attacks in the United States.” Source: jkertzer.sites.fas.harvard.edu/Research_fil...

I know I know it's a well worn point but still. Plenty of people who would self-describe as Christians, for whom that is a very important identity, watch Fox News. I genuinely can think of very few messages as laser-targeted to be anti-Christian as "kill the homeless". Designed in a lab by Satan.

I actually believe that the data suggests the GOP is panicking, which is no consolation at the moment but it may suggest some hope for the medium term. If we survive till then

Very good. “We can mourn Kirk. We can send prayers to his friends and family. We can take stock of the gravity of this event. We can — and should — do all of this and more without pretending he was something, as a public figure, that he was not.”

None of the young male mass shooters and now political assassins I've written about in recent years had stayed in higher education and pursued a bachelor's degree. Crazy enough, it's almost like college is a positive socializing force, not a radicalizing one

He has the attention span of a squirrel

Q: My condolences on the loss of your friend Charlie Kirk. How are you holding up? TRUMP: I think very good. And by the way, right there you see all the trucks. They just started construction of the new ballroom for the White House, which is something they've been trying to get for about 150 years.

Some good news for you today. We need it. (and "Our world in Data" is terrific.). ourworldindata.org/data-insight...

While the current moment might fit with Albert O. Hirschman's embrace of eclecticism, it lacks an essential Hirschmanesque ingredient: optimism about what can be achieved, Daniel Drezner writes.

There are places on earth where the rule of law still applies. Given the history, these are sometimes surprising places, but we should still take a moment to appreciate them.

Many years ago, I got into a nasty fight with the late David Graeber over a post I wrote, "The World Economy Is Not a Tribute System." Trump has been doing everything he can to make the argument for Team Graeber stick.

No elected official Democratic party will be as cruel about Kirk's death as Mike Lee was about the death of Melissa Hortman. wisconsinexaminer.com/2025/06/17/s...

I appreciate that the Journal also did a “no, really, it’s him” accompaniment.

New from me: On Kara Walker's radical transformation of a toppled Confederate memorial — the Stonewall Jackson statue from Charlottesville, Va. Her piece goes on view next month, part of the big MONUMENTS show at The Brick and MOCA in Los Angeles. [Gift link] www.nytimes.com/2025/09/08/a...

Doomerism is thick today, so let me note that Trump just sustained *three* big losses in court: Harvard, tariffs, Alien Enemies Act. Yes, SCOTUS could corruptly undo all this. But as @leahlitman.bsky.social explains well on the pod this is heartening, for now anyway: newrepublic.com/article/2001...

Khanna: I think VP Vance, should be asked to retract what he said, defaming the Wall Street Journal reporter, he said it was fake. Now we have the letter.

The world faces many crises, def at the top the crisis of Trump; but it helps not at all that the European states face a # of interrelated strains. Five gov'ts in two years; this is getting to be like the Third Republic

Really gotta do something with “chipocalypse now”

I think Drezner's always worth reading, this is helpful. www.worldpoliticsreview.com/liberal-inte...?

But what if--what if--most of the movies, esp the nth chapter of those hideous superhero movies, just suck right now and we're waiting for a whole new set of people to make good movies again? It's happened before

Kind of a not entirely unfair parody of universities over the last 10 years

Worst thing is, if that turned out to be true, Trump's people would probably count that as a win

AOC: If anybody says “this isn’t fair, I'm gonna have to divest all my stocks if I run for congress” maybe you should stay home.

A huge moment -- Melvyn Bragg steps down from In Our Time after over a quarter of a century. What a programme and what a legacy! Just a model for how to make great, clever, engaging radio, and a twenty-seven-year experiment that proves there's a huge global audience for smart, scholarly programming.

Excellent reporting from the journalists at USA Today!