Du Bois told us all we need to know about this type of guy 106 years ago

This is very good

My latest review for @bookforum.bsky.social is also out now. In it, I think alongside Namwali Serpell’s resplendently rigorous new book on Toni Morrison about the last greatest living writer’s legacy and how we’re meant to read her.

“I don’t understand why so many people have conceded that the university is a left space. Can someone show me a Marxist university president?”

My comment on Tom Arnold-Forster's excellent new intellectual biography of Walter Lippmann is up today on the @susih.bsky.social blog, focusing on its implications for the history of American international thought. s-usih.org/2026/02/sam-...

"Forms of labor that conserve, fix, make and care for others once had a place in the mythos of America, not to mention on the mantle of the Old Left." Extraordinary essay about what the last year has been like in DC by Noelle Bodick in @thepointmag.bsky.social thepointmag.com/politics/rig...

Tucker Carlson: "Saudi Arabia [...] is kind of a weirdly free place.” Hillary Clinton: "The example that the kingdom is setting for the right kind of development [...] that is a very strong model for other parts of the world" Quotes from a real estate conference in Riyadh

This incredibly annoying article mentions in passing that the history of emotions is actually not a new field at all, then brushes past that fact to ignore all previous scholarship and set up its protagonist as a Silicon Valley-style "disruptor" of our understanding of what it means to be human

When the AI slop summer reading list dropped last year I knew I had to write about making book lists. Thanks to @thebaffler.com for letting me go long with bewildered nostalgia & regret on 20 years of Internet book culture & how we made the slop book list inevitable. thebaffler.com/after-the-fa...

Yesterday was the one-year anniversary of the publication of my book, The Internal Colony: Race and the American Politics of Global Decolonization. Many thanks to anyone who has read or taught it 🙏

Am I crazy or is “woman murdered by state secret police served on school board, which was looking for ways to protect children from state secret police” not convincing as an antifa super soldier backstory meant to incriminate the dead

what stage of capitalism is this

Imagine writing to the subject of your research, someone who shaped some of the most consequential events of the 20th century, and mentioning that you earned a varsity letter in tennis in high school. God this rules so hard; no one does it like Anders Stephanson newleftreview.org/issues/ii156...

“there are only 7 full-time book critics left in the US: three at NYT ( Jacobs, Garner, Szalai), 2 at WaPo(Rothfeld, Charles), 1 each at WSJ (Sacks), NY mag (Chu), Slate (Miller) more people have walked on the moon than write book reviews for a living” worldliteraturetoday.org/2025/septemb...

“You still think you can control them?”

A lot of people are not being honest about how some of the most successful historians of our day use research assistants, or about how much they truly read, and that’s all I’ll be saying on the matter.

“Consuming media today is so easy, it’s like resting on a royal pillow, being fanned by ostrich feathers while someone brings you grapes. It’s nice to be comfortable, but make sure you’re leaving the palace gates to look around once in a while.” Via @mattdpearce.com.

This is delightful www.nytimes.com/2025/12/19/t...

Democrats were so worked up about young people seeing the genocide happening in Gaza that they paved the road for TikTok becoming owned by Trump family members and cronies. Also, the Supreme Court allowed Trump to break the law repeatedly with no redress www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/dig...

Yesterday I finally saw a much-discussed film boxd.it/c5PRJr

Congratulations! macmillan.yale.edu/stories/yale...

2/2 🧵 ✨ The entire Frantz Fanon special issue is available to read and download for free — the perfect festive deep dive 🎄🔥 👉 buff.ly/6ZACRRN 💡 You can also suscribe to support #ROAPE as an fully open-access journal. #Fanon100 #AfricanLiberation #Decolonisation

My book _I Have Avenged America: Jean-Jacques Dessalines and Haiti’s Fight for Freedom_ (@yalepress.bsky.social) has been out for 6 months! I’m thrilled that in 2026, it will be available as an audiobook (March) and a paperback (July)! yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300...

Since it's the season for year-end list-making, here are my favorite books I read this year (books by friends not eligible) Fiction: Charles Portis, The Dog of the South Non-fiction (work-related): Richard Beck, Homeland Non-fiction: (non-work-related): Iman Mersal, Traces of Enayat

HARD BOILED DETECTIVE: another cruel sunrise over the city of the damned. another corpse. another widow. another cup of black coffee to drag my sorry ass back to life- *sputtering* ME: do you like it? it's an ethiopian washed process single origin DETECTIVE: ME: are you getting apricot notes

When I teach the War on Terror I emphasize how “WMD” always was a strange and unstable concept, encompassing both battlefield chemical weapons and nuclear weapons developed explicitly to cause maximum civilian harm. It never made any sense as a category and now it has fully jumped the shark

In Michael Denning's Culture in the Age of Three Worlds -- a marvelous book that I sadly lost my copy of in a move a few years ago & have still failed to replace -- there's an incredible list of left intellectuals and activists born between c. 1925 and c. 1935 (1/2)

I have two new poems in @thedriftmag.com today 🫶 www.thedriftmag.com/domme-song-5/

Spanish Prisoner, Wag the Dog, Ronin, and Heist are all good-to-great movies with great scripts. I think with Mamet we’re dealing with a post-9/11 (and post-Second Intifada) derangement situation

This -- a model bill to effectively decimate non-STEM research by requiring 3-3 teaching loads outside of "STEM or Americanism and western civilization" -- seems...extremely bad but also quite plausible.

Fairly remarkable article here: ICE's acting director is publicly demanding that a parish in Massachusetts remove its nativity scene because it offends the administration. www.masslive.com/news/2025/12...

Leaders of a Catholic church in Massachusetts kept a Nativity display with an anti-ICE message in place on Monday, defying an order from the Catholic Archdiocese of Boston to remove it. The display shows Mary, Joseph and baby Jesus missing, replaced by a sign reading “ICE WAS HERE.” trib.al/adPW46y

Tascha didn’t just build a volunteer team of more than 100,000 people, she built a community across our city. And there’s no one better suited to tell you how she did it than her. thedigradio.com/podcast/thre...

Ironic. Having opened the door to making everything unregulated gambling, crypto seems to be getting left behind as it becomes easier to bet on just about anything (prediction markets) and to get less regulated exposure to traditional assets (tokenization). finance.yahoo.com/news/crypto-...

Very honored that my essay, "Who's Afraid of Frantz Fanon?" was selected as a notable essay in the Best American Essays 2025!

Staff at Alice Deal Middle School made the decision this year to remove all full-length novels from the 8th grade curriculum. It's a mistake, current parent @aaronweso.bsky.social writes, arguing that "reading full novels has real and important benefits for middle school-age children and in life."

Extraordinary text by Honora Spicer, situating context & origins of horrors of contemporary migrant detention at Fort Bliss in El Paso ("Camp East Montana"), exemplifying systematic abuses of Trump 2.0's campaign of persecution & terror vs migrant communities www.bostonreview.net/articles/pro...

New at PB: @kirstenweld.bsky.social on why, 50 years after Franco's death, Latin America will never forget the Spanish Civil War.

Great culture can save lives. Literally. Amazing letter in today’s @thetimes.com about Tom Stoppard

Coincidentally, "strong floor, no ceiling" was also the scouting report on me as a point guard in 8th grade

Oof. He was truly a master, from Rosenkrantz & Guildenstern to Arcadia to Leopoldstadt—just a lifetime of tremendous, thought-provoking, hilarious work. RIP. www.bbc.com/news/article...

On major questions of university governance, a 99.3% majority vote of the faculty means nothing to the people who are actually in charge. This is a fact all of us need to take much more seriously.

Cannot believe I just saw a reputable museum (of African American History, no less!) posting a reel of its “Frederick Douglass AI” on Instagram. Cursed.

Sam’s book (and lots of other Chicago books) is/are really damn good!

My book and all other @uchicagopress.bsky.social titles are 30% off through December 3rd with the code HOLIDAY25. Get yourself and your friends a copy or twelve! press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/bo...

I hope you're having a happy Thanksgiving. Here's a great piece from @kaliholloway.bsky.social on how Turkey Day was long opposed by white evangelicals as a holiday for woke Yankees www.thenation.com/article/soci...

Sometimes I watch movies and write little things about them letterboxd.com/samklug/film...

I have an unusually strong memory of reading Ryan Lizza's profile of Michele Bachmann while sitting at my makeshift desk as an intern at CAP. I remember thinking, this is so vapid, but this is what everyone here thinks is important, so I probably shouldn't work at a place like this.