The idea, in tonight's order, that it's the district court irresponsibly intervening to change maps on the eve of an election is laughable

Real cool that Scotus can just ignore a 79 page opinion written by a 3 judge panel (including 2 Trump apointees) finding that the Alabama map violated even the standard set by Callais by simply saying..."nope" (gift link) www.nytimes.com/2026/06/02/u...

This is a good piece in today's times countering the Bezos/Booker/Porter "cut everyone's taxes mantra: What if we all pay a bit more in taxes so that we can play less for everything else: www.nytimes.com/2026/06/02/o...

I would happily sacrifice ChatGPT if it meant more trains and buses in my city.

Having taught Smith in a variety of settings, including Enlightenment surveys and a “great books” course designed by Vietnam War-era US academic exiles for a liberal arts program in Canada, my considered view is that nobody assigning him for present-day ideological reasons has read his work closely

Ugh. Fed 39 sure, Gettysburg Address yes, Emancipation Proclamation, fine (but not really needed for political science when the reconstruction amendments are required) but Smith is just 🤡

For a movement that talks so much about civilizational decline, they really seem to be speed-running the last days of the Roman Republic

I think Democrats like Cory Booker should take a hard look in the mirror and consider why Jeff Bezos loves their tax cut proposals so much. Billionaires would love to see a weak state with a gutted fiscal capacity.

Rasmus Dahlin on losing in OT and the season ending this way: “It fucking sucks.”

The single time Article V has been involved is after September 11, 2001 in response to acts of terrorism against the US.

It's very revealing that, in a country of over 340M people, two current Supreme Court justices not only clerked for the same previous justice but also went to the same prep school.

Good on Pew, but this is actually terrifying.

very much of the view that a democratic congress should wield the guarantee clause against ad hoc, mid-decade redistricting, a practice which is an end run against representative government itself

In Louisiana and likely Alabama, actual, cast votes are going to be tossed out as officials speed ahead with new (or previously enjoined) maps. This is such an extreme use case for the Purcell principle that the court ignoring it here signifies that it was always a made-up toy, not law.

So the VA application for emergency relief is making the same argument as...the RNC about the meaning of election day in Watson v. RNC. I get the strategy - if the Court is going to say election day means only the exact day in Watson, then it should mean the same in this case, but...

I dunno, changing the rules for elections to stack the deck for one party is pretty clearly in the "competitive authoritarianism" territory. Maybe framing it like that, rather than a "Structural advantage" is important. This isn't a neutral quirk of geography, but an intentional rigging of the game.

What in the literal fuck are we doing? A profession ostensibly trained on the ins and outs of information management … and so many are turning over their job to idiot boxes that hallucinate constantly and at best play MadLib probability games

Even if we grant the premise, imagine thinking that the law is not political...

People find politicians' speech alienating but it's not because it's overly caveated, precise, and syntactically complex; it's because it's vague, platitudinous pablum that fails to condemn injustice, fails to chart a path towards a brighter future, and is unaccompanied by concrete action.

This is like catnip for me, but I'm on the wrong side of the country.

So in the AP US Gov exam, Citizens United is a required case that students have to know, but I've long argued that Buckley v. Valeo is the more appropriate case to require.

No you will not bait me into reading the Florida US History curriculum. Life is too short.

Tbh, EK finding Rawls too difficult explains a lot.

Reminder that Florida voters passed a Constitutional amendment in 2010 banning gerrymandering with 62% of the vote and the Florida GOP just stole the courts and ignored it. By contrast retaliatory gerrymanders in CA and VA passed with the approval of voters. Yet media portrays them as equivalent.

This Teacher Appreciation Week remember, your kids' teacher can never have enough mugs with cliches about teaching on them.

Preordering this now. Congrats Arturo!

Millions of 18-year-olds are signing up every year for a lifetime of debt so that ChatGPT can get a college education.

Now that the worst has come and Section 2 of the VRA is gutted, Dem trifectas in safe blue states need to start fighting back and push these maps immediately

Cursed predictions

This: we have this view of the Supreme Court as the good guys because of the Warren Court (and I would argue a civics curriculum that prioritizes the Court's "good" rulings), when the mid 20th century Court is truly an outlier in constitutional history.

This is @themountaingoats.bsky.social erasure www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

If you hate designing ways to assess student learning and evaluating student learning, you might just hate teaching.

So a couple of weeks ago, Clarence Thomas said that progressivism was a threat to the American republic and contributed to Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and Mussolini. I wonder if anyone is asking him to tone down his rhetoric?

Young Americans are very low trust, sometimes bordering on nihilism. It’s up to us to build institutions that make them want to act with social trust—to make an effort at school, to vote, to have normal social interactions in public spaces, to date, to not shoplift or evade fares, etc

Yeah there is a tradition of just war theory. Read some Aquinas:

Maybe students of US History just become significantly more adept between 2023 and 2024, or maybe - just maybe - they changed the essay rubric to make it easier to score more points. Definitely impossible to tell.

People are always like "How is your early modern history class relevant today?" and well my 9th graders have learned about the Strait of Hormuz and the Avignon Papacy this year, so they're pretty set to understand current events it seems.

I'm not saying that congressional Dems should emulate the Iranian government in every respect, but it does seem that if you openly and defiantly stand up to Trump, he'll back down, agree to your terms, and call it a win.

The man who coined the term genocide, Raphael Lemkin, defined it as a greater atrocity than mass murder explicitly because it involves the intentional killing of a civilization.

I'm fairly confident this meets the definition of genocide under the genocide convention

I can think of few things more blasphemous than calling for wanton violence and destruction against civilian targets (and invoking God to do so) on Christianity's holiest day of the year - a celebration of the victory of life and love over sin and death.

What if we defined AI proficiency to mean not the ability effectively prompt a chatbot, but a thorough and deep understanding of what generative AI is, what the human, economic, and ecological infrastructure that supports these systems consists in,...

So I believe the move to standardization had good intentions - equity across teachers and more accessibility for these classes - but it has its real drawbacks. It also exposes the contradictory goals of CB: provide a college level classes for advanced HS students and make those classes universal.

It's so...beautiful

Just to be clear: this Court has just said (including 2 of its liberal justices) that a health professional dispensing medically discredited information has more free speech protections than most teachers would if they were discussing peer reviewed scholarship on race, gender, or democratic decline.

Just the sheer oddity that the section of the commentariat (and electorate!) most obsessed with American strength also voted for the very obvious Imperial Suicide option, I think basically because Gender convinced them of the dumbest possible theory of what would constitute and project strength.

one of my related hot takes is that we should ban news networks from real-time updates of results. they can report results when the votes are counted.

Nothing says restoring faith in elections like fundamentally re-writing state election rules less than 9 months before a general election for obviously partisan purposes. www.nytimes.com/live/2026/03...

shout it from the rooftops