Outrageous oversight by the NYT not to tell us which synagogue Micah Lasher belongs to. How are readers supposed to know whether to vote for him www.nytimes.com/2026/02/09/n...

Almost none of my followers will care about this, and no one comes to my TL for US economic analysis, but I found this Jason Furman dive into whether productivity growth or productivity expectations dominate the inflationary effect very interesting www.ft.com/content/70dc...

“Julie Sharman…of the Canal & River Trust, a charitable organisation in charge of maintaining 3,200km of waterways across England and Wales…’People sometimes think canals are looked after by local authorities or by the government, and they’re not. They’re looked after by us, as a charity’”

St Patrick’s Day parades in the US this year are to have some competing identity-based ideological impulses to deal with.

We should have reported more on the fact that Hungary is currently harboring Poland’s fugitive ex-minister and ex-deputy minister of justice, both wanted in Poland on charges of corruption oko.press/na-zywo/na-z...

Belgian Prime Minister Bart De Wever: “We must integrate our market and use it as a weapon against the great imperial blocs.”

After the charges against Gergely Karacsony for having organised the Budapest Pride, now Géza Buzás-Hábel is charged for having organised the Pécs Pride. He even risks one year imprisonment. Orbán’s crack down on citizens’ rights is reaching a new low every day. helsinki.hu/en/where-ass...

Amsterdam? Hello? economist.com/science-and-... from The Economist

But surely if we explained how macho farmwork is www.nytimes.com/2026/02/09/o...

What is the earliest iconic representation of someone loudly advising people not to panic, thus provoking immediate panic? Must be older than the one “Airplane”

What is the earliest iconic representation of someone loudly advising people not to panic, thus provoking immediate panic? Must be older than the one in “Airplane”

Savage and accurate summary in the FT www.ft.com/content/2002...

How The Irish Became Non-White Again

Identical post structure strongly suggests Dutch populist-right opinion maker Wierd Duk is using bots to post on X. @eliothiggins.bsky.social not sure this rises to your level of significance but looks interesting

Forgot to take a pic but as I’ve said before I felt Biden was in serious trouble when “Fuck Joe Biden” graffiti turned up in Berlin. This weekend I was seeing “Fuck ICE” graffiti in Paris. Could be meaningless, or maybe not.

Once the EU has banned kids from social media it should move on to the equally important task of banning public playing or performances of L Cohen’s “Hallelujah” for a detox period of 10 years www.ft.com/content/cf46...

On a day with so much awfulness just taking a moment to note with admiration a dignified leader

Very interesting argument from @sonykapoor.bsky.social

When an already cinematic story takes a sequel-hook twist at the end

Gotta get myself one of these suits

Public universal health insurance is not a threat to capitalism. Rampant corruption by politicians and oligarchs is. The dominant sentiment in the US business community has generally had this backwards. www.ft.com/content/35ad...

Perhaps not a nickname he would appreciate atm

Fact check: false

Tell me whether you subscribe to the “Oedipus complex” or “Elizabeth I’s legitimacy” reading of Hamlet’s use of “incest” for his mother’s remarriage to his uncle and I will tell you what you think about the 14th Amendment

I don't think Musk realizes that a fight with Pedro Sánchez is absolutely the best thing that could happen to Sánchez. Musk is radioactive here: even the centre-right is staying out of it to avoid being associated with Elon. www.facebook.com/watch/?v=181...

The Trump administration has a lot of awful policies but I’m not sure anything is more idiotic in every possible way than punishing businesses, starving people of power, and shrinking GDP just because you’re obsessed with harming the climate faster to own the libs www.nytimes.com/2026/02/04/c...

Every American high school debate club just threw a box full of index cards in the air

Life in the Netherlands: just sent my handyman a text asking if he can come fix something week and he responded “Can’t, just finishing up 9 weeks in South America, I’m at Iguazu Falls right now”. Attached a movie of an ibis he just saw

There are a lot of tech sectors where Europe is quite dependent on the US but at least in the Netherlands, they could ban Amazon tomorrow and nothing would happen. People would order from Bol or whatever

Here's who the Washington Post just laid off.

There are some countries where alleging immigrants are a drain on public finances is plausible, but the US? The public benefits are nowhere near generous enough.

The US immigrant population generated more in taxes than they received in benefits from all levels of government every year from 1994 to 2023. The Cato study provides the first-ever 30-year analysis of the fiscal effects of immigration on government budgets. https://ow.ly/jy8a50Y8kM3

Bezos has killed the Washington Post's books pages. John Williams is a mensch, and a good and loyal friend, to me, to @backlisted.bsky.social and to anyone who loves literature and reading. Now more than ever, you know where not to buy your books, or anything else for that matter.

Florida Man turns out to be much, much worse than we thought and to be frank it’s not funny

Staat genoteerd

This one weird trick will save you thousands of $ in clothesdryers and electricity expenses

Rep. Becca Balint of Vermont is something of a firecracker

Today, I voted NO on DHS funding. I refuse to give them another dime while Secretary Noem allows Americans to be killed, preschoolers to be used as bait, and our constitutional rights to be trampled. Accountability and change must come first, not money.

It's Elmo's birthday

The thing about Inuit having 20 words for snow may not be true, but the Dutch do have “ijzel”, a single word for “black ice”—the smooth layer of ice that you can’t easily see on the ground

🇩🇪⚖️🇺🇸🇭🇺 Some news from my workplace - @democracyreporting.bsky.social is once again suing Company Formerly Known as Twitter, this time regarding access to data ahead of the Hungarian parliamentary elections.

The other important point illustrated by this photo: pelicans are enormous. Did not realize just how big they are until traveling to the Danube delta in Romania last year. Wingspan up to 3 meters!

Made me think of a wonderful phrase in Dutch, “broekzak-vestzak” (pants pocket-vest pocket): an illusory transaction where people fool themselves or others into thinking they got richer by moving things from one ledger to another. giftarticle.ft.com/giftarticle/...

this is a good one storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

I strongly support the new position of the US Government that the District of Columbia can bar possession of firearms, which contradicts the Supreme Court’s mistaken 2008 ruling establishing that individuals have an absolute 2nd Amendment right to own firearms. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distric...

The "violent criminal illegal alien" that agents were pursuing when they killed Alex Pretti has been in the U.S. for two decades. He had a single misdemeanor conviction for disorderly conduct (domestic assault) eight years ago that was expunged from his record. He did not have a deportation order.

They can’t prosecute you if the stuff you screwed up is so highly classified they’re not even allowed to describe it

I had missed this in the FT from @marietjeschaake.bsky.social, on digital sovereignty, the European digital stack, dependence on US tech—and the example of Solvinity, the cloud company that hosts all Dutch citizens’ digital IDs, acquired by US company Kyndryl last November.

Deense militairen protesteerden dit weekend in Kopenhagen tegen Trumps uitspraken ‘stayed a little back’ (foto: NY Times) 🇩🇰 #nowords