Excellent new piece in the @nytimes.com on how inequality happened in a small Wyoming town with obvious lessons more broadly for the republic.

JOB Assistant Professor of Political Theory University of Cambridge @thecambridgeschool.bsky.social www.cam.ac.uk/jobs/univers...

"He [Trump] is losing control of the decision to escalate... He can cut his losses now, pay a political price, try to stop the war, even though it would be a failure. Or he play for the long run and become Lyndon Johnson in the Vietnam War and face a more disastrous political outcome." - Robert Pape

"No stupid rules of engagement" We just bombed a school and killed dozens of children.

That's right. Worse than Pointless www.nytimes.com/2026/02/23/o...

The strikes on Iran are blatantly illegal. I explained in June why the strikes on Iran's nuclear facilities were unlawful under US and international law. Everything I wrote then is true today, but this is a far larger assault with far graver consequences. www.nytimes.com/2025/06/23/o...

I taught mid-career military at the Kennedy School. They were great to have in class, not least because the other students learned so much from them. For Hegseth to suggest these impressive men and women are at risk of being "indoctrinated" is demeaning and insulting to them.

Indeed. New grants are not getting funded, already funded grants are not getting paid, and non-competitive renewals are being held up. Focusing on the top line budget, instead of looking at what is really happening on “the ground” is deeply misguided.

oooo excited to read this

In my talk for The Royal Institute of Philosophy this evening - Social Equality: Then and Now - I compared the views of RH Tawney, GDH Cole, Harold Laski and Arthur Lewis with positions in debates about equality in recent decades. Available online March 9th.

The Kansas driver's license law is purely about bigotry, stigmatization, and criminalization of difference. It serves no rational or legitimate purpose. A 🧵1/

Hillary Clinton is a complicated figure, to say the least, but one thing's for sure: she can run rhetorical, political, and intellectual circles around James Comer without breaking a sweat.

The first set of postdocs for our ERC project on popular government have just been advertised. These 3 postdocs will be based at UC Louvain with my co-PI Pierre-Etienne Vandamme and focus on contemporary democratic theory. Apply! jobs.uclouvain.be/Personnelsci...

Liberal socialist Property-owning democracy enthusiast Public reason enjoyer Law of Peoples weirdo

This is good; it would be better if it prompted reflection about who had the correct judgment about Summers' presidency 20+ years ago, and whom we should listen to now.

I spoke with Laura Schenkman at The Transmitter about my candidacy for the House! Going from the lab to public life is a huge transition. From a lifetime of research to biotech to democracy to running for office, here’s the story of one scientist: www.thetransmitter.org/policy/is-th...

I stumbled across this talk by Jennifer Pitts on the French translation of Cugoano's Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil of Slavery. She argues that Condorcet, likely with the help of Sophie de Grouchy, did the translation. Interesting bc Cugoano was a far more radical abolitionist than Condorcet.

In theory, we know this is true. But "struck down" doesn't quite capture it. These tariffs were obviously and transparently illegal. They were knowingly illegal. It is a stain on the Court that something so obviously illegal was allowed to stand for a year. talkingpointsmemo.com/news/scotus-...

The Roberts Court era

News agencies often only cite Gaza’s health ministry when stating the number of deaths, and these numbers are then refuted by those who don’t trust the ministry because it’s run by Hamas. Now news agencies can cite the Lancet - I hope they do. www.thelancet.com/journals/lan...

New job at GW! Ad coming to ejobs soon: Open subfield (theory friendly), full time, non-TT, 3 year renewable contract to direct our Politics & Values program + equivalent of a 3-3 teaching load. I'm on the committee, so feel free to ask me your questions! Details: www.gwu.jobs/postings/124...

Policy debaters know that somewhere, Mikhail Budyko is smiling.

“The trustees' complete refusal to honestly negotiate, to admit wrongdoing, or to even be open about their process is ruining public trust in the institution, and for good reason. Who would willingly send their child to a school that protects billionaires credibly accused of pedophilia?”

A must read. Both for the call to the media and for the brutal details and links gathered in this Froomkin post.

Rawlsian political liberals responding to this post:

"An inclusive representative claim would not be antipluralist; it would make equality and difference compatible. In other words, what makes us a people is not our homogeneity; we can be equal and different."

I wrote a story in 8th grade about a guy who wanted to create a business on the moon. He got to the moon, but got trapped in a cave and died. I called it "Another Paradise Lost" and his last thoughts were about how Earth was the REAL paradise the whole time 🤯. This all happened in three pages.

Seems about right. www.wosu.org/politics-gov...

Call for papers! www.law.uchicago.edu/form/uchicag...

What an incredible framing in this article. 1. People didn't think about the race track. 2. Lots of people went to the race track or knew people who did (presumably thinking about it). 3. White people didn't go to the race track. What is claim #1 doing? www.nytimes.com/2026/02/09/u...

When I worked for Reason magazine during Trump's rise to power in 2016, I was explicitly forbidden by the editor in chief from writing about Trump's racism, or the violence and racism at his rallies. It was a "sideshow," I was told.

Powerful and important reporting.

This is what we’re doing to people. We are the bad guys.

Grateful to Sam Darnold for getting the Jets mentioned on the Super Bowl broadcast 🙏

This is not "how men behave." This is Gelernter's version of Trump saying "locker room talk"— a projection of his own pathologies onto a whole gender in order to buff up his own manly-man credentials in his mind.

I can say without any fear of contradiction that I know as much or more than anyone in modern American journalism about the absolute, no excuses necessity of operating in the black. In many cases much more since if you’re a big player there are lots of creative ways to operate ….

Characteristically excellent stuff from @laywilliams.bsky.social on objections to inequality. (Also observes @betteridgeslaw.bsky.social.)

My wife and I once did a thing where we hosted Thanksgiving for students who couldn't/didn't want to go home for the holiday. We had some lovely Chinese students come over, and one explained that she liked Chicago because it was a "small city."

News from central Jersey: I'm running to represent New Jersey's 12th Congressional District. By entering the fray, I hope to bring ideas of repairing our frayed republic. Not only to defend it in 2026, but to build something stronger, for generations to come! samwang.substack.com/p/entering-t...

I just re-read, for the first time for years, the memoir I wrote for the British Academy for Jerry Cohen, shortly after his sudden, shocking, death in 2009. Here it is a Word file for those who don't have access to the British Academy volume. www.homepages.ucl.ac.uk/~uctyjow/CPB...

Remember the incident where DHS claimed officers shot a guy because he attacked them with a snow shovel? Yeah. It didn't happen. They shot him through the door of his own home. And then arrested him. And then lied about it. Again. And they almost shot some kids in the process.

Tear gas is banned in international warfare, yet classified as a “riot control agent” that law enforcement can use for crowd control. “It just doesn’t work well, and it hits the weakest people the most, and causes the most complications in them,” an anesthesiology professor at Duke University said.

After Border Patrol shot two people in Portland, DHS claimed they were "vicious gang members" tied to a past shooting. But records I obtained reveal a US prosecutor has since directly contradicted DHS, saying, "We're not suggesting he is a gang member." My dive into how DHS' claims have collapsed:

Happy North-American-rodent-themed Imbolc!

University of Illinois college republicans advocate for executing protesters as “traitors” with art that takes a disturbing killing and makes it even more extreme. dailyillini.com/news-stories...

4 federal agents pull over an elderly US citizen for the suspected crime of being brown, break her car window, throw her to the ground, then drive off after they find her US Passport in her purse. The Salem Police, when called, say there’s nothing they can do. www.salemreporter.com/2026/01/31/u...

Kirstie McClure was a wonderful theorist, APSR editor, and person. Happy to see this.

Finally got around to a bit of research I'd been meaning to explore, and: There is no documented instance of an ICE officer being identified and assaulted while off duty because he wasn't masked. www.pbump.net/o/ices-excus...

Working on my review article on Relational Egalitarianism last year, I came across a rare (for a mostly contemporary theorist) archival challenge. Here's a story of a possibly lost piece by the great egalitarian theorist Elizabeth Anderson.

So you're telling me he was even more courageous and civically virtuous than I already thought. Thanks!