Trump is reported close to a "deal" with himself under which US taxpayers would pay him $10 billion. I served in multiple communist and authoritarian dictatorships, but I never witnessed corruption on this scale or this blatant.

The stupidest take you ever saw. Comparing a twitch streamer to a genocidal war criminal... Both these things are the same. I am Very Smart. 🧠🧠

this is very much not a new phenomenon, nor does it have much of anything to do with 'modern dating'

A federal judge in Illinois today ruled that the Trump administration improperly coerced Facebook and Apple to remove ICE-tracking apps in violation of the First Amendment. storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

We're far enough from 9/11 that the Ivy league weasels who joined the military or intelligence services for a resume line (Vance, Hegseth, Buttigieg, Gallego, DeSantis, Slotkin, many others) are now at the top of the pyramid and it sucks so bad.

ICYMI: I first reported last night on the arrival of a third-country removal ICE flight to the DRC. Story is now updated with new info on the passengers and comment from @yaelschacher.bsky.social at @refugeesinternational.org. gillianbrockell.com/breaking-ice...

this morning, mamdani’s team got in touch with me to float a new tax proposal: if your net worth exceeds $5 million and you dress badly, you’ll be hit with a 10% annual levy for “visual pollution.” i would be in charge of deciding if the outfits are bad.

Build-a-voter is back! @fransham.bsky.social's creation is now updated for 2026 with data from More in Common. www.economist.com/interactive/... My profile is predictably Labour-leaning...

Breaking news: Tufts University graduate Rümeysa Öztürk, who was arrested by masked immigration agents last year, has returned to her home country of Turkey, citing the "state-imposed violence and hostility" she said she experienced in the United States. trib.al/7GKyEiz

US Border agents harassed 20 Chinese scholars with valid visas who flew into Seattle for an academic conference. It's a race to the bottom! share.google/EU4cIRtyEnY7...

It is one of my most strongly held beliefs that any indulgence in romanticism is not only fatal to any project on the left but will ultimately lead to the road to fascism. It makes me ruthlessly suspicious of all kinds of thinkers on the purported left. No I will not be taking any questions lol.

They're calling it the best democracy ever. www.ft.com/content/7529...

Dream positions: 3 (!!) PhD placements at the Prize Papers with emphasis on finding students with the following language skills: French, Spanish, Dutch, and Scandinavian languages. (Of course, I emphasize the Dutch language!) www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/professional...

Indian constitution 1 Hindutva cheating bastards 0. Best news from the motherland in a while.

If you've been inundated lately with job ads for a company called Mercor, my colleagues at @bloomberg.com Businessweek have a story on the company, whose 20-something founders are paying white-collar workers to train AI models they say will take their jobs. Gift: www.bloomberg.com/news/feature...

A new analysis published by UN Women shows that more than 38,000 women and girls—including over 22,000 women and 16,000 girls—were killed in Gaza between October 2023 and December 2025, representing an average of at least 47 women and girls killed per day. www.unwomen.org/en/news-stor...

“A county probate judge overseeing [her late husband’s] estate said that one of his sons — a retired Alabama state trooper now working at a federal courthouse in Anniston — was responsible for her arrest.”

Earlier today I was reminded of one of the most metaphysical government documents that exists.

Orban made grand appeals to “Christianity” and “Western Civilization,” but his “illiberal democracy” was just a scam, a way to make him and his buddies rich while subjecting Hungarians to stagnation and robbing them of their freedom. Sound familiar? (Gift link) www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...

Put yourself in shoes of someone in a oil & gas importing country Its triage: which hospitals get fuel, which industries shut, which crops get fertilizers? Those who don't have deep pockets in a bidding war pay in increased hunger, lost wages and shrinking economies. tinyurl.com/PolycrisisWesleyan

As a supplement to the piece in The Times Literary Supplement (@thetls.bsky.social), www.the-tls.com/regular-feat..., here’s a (rather long!) thread on Shakespeare’s house in the Blackfriars, what we knew, and what we now know, with some links to key documents. (1/20)

'Scientists warn that no adaptation measure can sustain Venice as rising sea levels threaten to swallow the city' The enormous cost of doing nothing: share.google/5RAPDWU5q57E...

When I attended, the Geneseo History Department prepared students to succeed in doctoral programs at Georgetown, Maryland, William and Mary, and NYU. Its cost is roughly the same as it was twenty years ago.

They also disenfranchised 11% of my state, half of that number in a Muslim majority area. The bastards can no longer win elections even in the competitive authoritarian model so now they are just cheating.

Ask the average non-fascist Indian about Chief Justice Gogoi and Watch them slip into a coma.

For everyone asking “why aren’t the students protesting Trump?” perhaps ask instead “What’d the universities teach students would happen if you protest?” More from BU @aaup.org documenting pre-Trump censorship at Boston University. dailyfreepress.com/04/16/21/219...

I also think we need to keep hammering home that you don’t go to college to “debate.” You go to learn, which is not the same thing.

I'm pleased to announce I'm a founding co-editor of the new @manchesterup.bsky.social book series, Radical Histories. Do let me know if you have a proposal for a book that fits our inclusive remit on radical histories. manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/series/radic...

Hands down one of the happiest things to happen in these bleak times.

Every quarter, a small team of journalists covers a subcontinent and this one was no different. Join our Patron program to support our work : https://www.himalmag.com/support-himal

Broke: brother Woke: bro Bespoke: bruh Baroque: Nom: bruḥ/brū/bravaḥ Voc: bro/brū/bravaḥ Acc: brum/brū/brūn Inst: brunā/brubhyām/brubhiḥ Dat: brave/brubhyām/brubhyaḥ Abl: broḥ/brubhyām/brubhyaḥ Gen: broḥ/brubhyām/brūnām Loc: brau/br̥voḥ/bruṣu

This diagram shows the incentive structure of a world built to engineer its own destruction

The U.S. House on Thursday passed a measure that would extend Temporary Protected Status for Haiti for three years, in a rare rebuke by the GOP-led Congress to President Donald Trump’s mass deportation campaign, reports Shauneen Miranda.

NPR announces it has secured philanthropic gifts totaling more than $110 million -- including the largest by a living donor in NPR's history -- as a strategic investment in its future. This comes after Congress chose to eliminate federal funding for all public media. https://loom.ly/B71nWB8

With a final tally of 213-214, the war powers resolution to disengage US forces from the war on Iran failed by a single vote. Representative Jared Golden of Maine was the sole Democratic lawmaker to vote against the measure. Had he voted for it, it would have passed, handing Trump an historic loss.

“Os senhores da guerra fingem não saber que basta um instante para destruir. No entanto, muitas vezes uma vida inteira não é suficiente para reconstruir” — Papa Leão XIV

As a donor who is at present endeavoring to fund and set up a scholarship with the university's Hutchins Center, may I say that if "viewpoint diversity" -- politicized shitspeak for protecting weaker ideas from better ones -- encompasses any part of my effort, I'm suing to get the money back.

Title of my last conference paper: “Immigrant Exceptionalism: South Asian Conservativism’s FAFO moment.” h/t @thejainguy.bsky.social shorturl.at/LnCBZ

Some Brazilians are flocking to Paraguay in search of "the right-wing dream", saying that they're "oppressed in Brazil." www.bbc.com/portuguese/a...

Very excited about this event in NYC on May 1. Here's the link to register: events.columbia.edu/go/labormarket

Zohran Mamdani getting Kathy Hochul to agree to a pied-a-terre tax breaks the stone wall against taxing the rich that Hochul had been building since Mamdani's election. It's a critical moment, writes @whitneycwimbish.bsky.social. prospect.org/2026/04/16/m...

There’s so much wrong here, but in particular it’s noted in the article that the creator of this project met with a bunch of stakeholders who told him the idea was shit, and he did it anyway.

For the cost of one Harvard Professor of the Constitution Only Applies to White People, you could endow 10 professorships of any less commonly taught language at any university in the USA

Cover for the much, much waited new English translation of Grande Sertão: Veredas by Alison Entrekin. Out January 2027.

New QJE paper measures spending flows between 1000s of small groups of consumers and producers, government, rest of the world. Most consumer spending stays domestic, esp in rural, older, less-educated areas->higher fiscal multipliers; targeting "left-behind" groups boosts economy

⚠️La República de Cuba está amenazada por la geopolítica del shock de Donald Trump. Para hablar de la situación a ras de suelo conectamos con La Habana de la mano de la periodista Mariana Camejo y con el historiador Fabio Fernández Batista.

It’s amazing just how many topics Pinker doesn’t know anything about and yet confidently spews nonsense publicly about. It’s just embarrassing. Ooo ooo ask any historian about his views on the Enlightenment and prepare to be regaled for several hours on how wrong he is 🤣

The most vicious part of the assault on US higher ed in general and international students in particular is that it is an all out assault on one of the most world historically effective systems of producing knowledge outside and beyond strictly policed social hierarchies, both local and global.

This is why I love teaching. We were discussing the game of scales and why the distance between colonial exploitation and imperial benevolence has to be carefully managed to maintain empire. A veteran who served in the Gulf goes, “huh! So that’s why they made us “volunteer” at animal shelters.”