Draft bill would authorize president to kill anyone he deems as "narco-terrorists," in what Harvard law prof Jack Goldsmith describes as an executive power grab and “an open-ended war authorization against an untold number of countries, organizations and persons...” www.nytimes.com/2025/09/19/u...

This was quite the read...

The first public media station to go dark thanks to Trump’s cutoff of federal funding to public media is a 70 year old station in Pennsylvania. https://loom.ly/IjOHdzI

NEW: Internal report reveals DHS intelligence portal was accidentally opened to tens of thousands of users for months, exposing sensitive intel about Americans. @brennancenter.org obtained the docs. @wired.com has the story. 🧵 www.wired.com/story/a-dhs-...

“I wept and screamed.” Man whose wife and newborn died after they tried to go to a clinic shuttered due to USAID cuts.

I was honored to be invited to contribute a piece to the newly published @shafrhistorians.bsky.social Passport Roundtable paying tribute to the Cold War International History Project, formerly at @wilsoncenter.org. CWIHP will thrive elsewhere. www.shafr.org/assets/docs/...

The elimination of the CPB and funding has devastated rural and tribal stations and with those cuts "the question confronting much of the country, where airwaves are dominated by the chain stations of Sinclair Broadcasting and iHeartRadio, will be how any news can compete with the political right."

well I'm sure American media is ready for complex semiotic analysis of online videogame fan culture right? right?

It is incredibly simple to acknowledge that violence in any form is awful and erodes society.

These people genuinely know nothing of the history—white conservative state & vigilante violence has been arguably *the defining feature* of U.S. history. They apparently also know very little of the present, in which, again, the very opposite is the case.

The idea that an instructor can and *should* be fired for daring to teach something not explicitly mentioned in course catalog is the pinnacle of the "students as customers" idiocy that's been steadily destroying American universities for decades now. You're taking a class, not buying a product.

New from me: On Kara Walker's radical transformation of a toppled Confederate memorial — the Stonewall Jackson statue from Charlottesville, Va. Her piece goes on view next month, part of the big MONUMENTS show at The Brick and MOCA in Los Angeles. [Gift link] www.nytimes.com/2025/09/08/a...

This is the same court that just said you can't use race at all in college admissions. It was always about white supremacy.

It's seeming likelier and likelier that AI really could eliminate a lot of jobs very soon. Just not in the way boosters have suggested. www.theatlantic.com/economy/arch...

This story is WILD. Trump sent Seal Team 6 into North Korea to plant a listening device. The entire thing went sideways within minutes of landing when they noticed a fishing boat near the beach. They killed everyone on board, sunk the bodies to cover their tracks, and fled. Congress was never told.

A suspected Ebola outbreak is occurring in DRC. This is bad at any time! But it’s particularly worrisome now when US capacity to detect and respond to deadly biothreats has been purposefully dismantled. www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archiv...

Here we go. <Elimination> of all IFLE funding. No FLAS fellowships or NRC area studies centers nationwide. Might be nice of even a single university president was willing to speak up about this disaster for R1 universities & their students. democrats-appropriations.house.gov/sites/evo-su...

Cuts to our national parks have led to staffing shortages, hindering the ability of remaining staff to maintain trails & facilities, monitor disease causing insects, prevent injuries/rescue the injured, run educational and volunteer programs, and even collect the fees that keep the parks running.

*Entangled Alliances* is available for PRE-ORDER from @cornellupress.bsky.social 📚 www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9781501...

This conversation between Krugman and Eichengreen is very much worth the read...particularly on the implications of current serious threats to the Fed's independence as well as to the safe haven status of the dollar ("the real danger is not that something replaces the dollar, but that nothing does")

I will never get over how a handful of tech bros set billions of dollars on fire to build a plagiarism machine that doesn't work and will destroy human society when they could have used a fraction of that money to fund a new golden age of creativity and knowledge.

If someone tells you they use an LLM that doesn't hallucinate, what they are *actually* telling you is that they don't understand the tool they are using.

"Civility" has and will always be a weapon the powerful wield against the powerless.

I will never understand how American elites managed to convince themselves that uncivil debate — not fascism, not impunity and not widespread indifference to facts — is the defining problem of our time. www.nytimes.com/2025/08/26/o...

Dr. Matias Spektor on Brazil and India's strategic hedging in the face of U.S. tariffs and the implications for the United States: "For American policymakers, the signals should be sobering. Mr. Trump’s tariffs won’t restore American dominance; they’re speeding up its decline."

Japan Post just announced they will no longer deliver mail to the United States, joining Germany, Austria, Denmark, Italy, France, and Sweden.

This CFP looks so good. The program committee includes @pastpunditry.bsky.social @gauthamrao.bsky.social @rachelshelden.bsky.social & other luminaries. Via @legalhistoryblog.bsky.social legalhistoryblog.blogspot.com/2025/08/cfp-...

A fabulous @warontherocks.bsky.social piece by James Graham Wilson about the release of new FRUS volume National Security Policy, 1985–1988. As he notes, the declassified docs empower readers to interpret the Reagan administration's Strategic Defense Initiative & modernization of strategic forces 🗃️

Guatemala’s Historical Archive of the National Police, "long associated with the struggle for transitional justice and historical memory" has become "a casualty of intense government hostility," suffering from drastically reduced funding & restrictions on public access, per @nsarchive.bsky.social 🗃️

I wrote an essay a few years ago about a U.S. soldier during the Civil War who visited the plantation where Solomon Northup (of 12 Years A Slave fame) was enslaved. The soldier wrote in his diary that the horror of slavery was even worse than what Northup had written. web.archive.org/web/20140120...

Saving children with severe acute malnutrition is simple and inexpensive: A complete six-week treatment for a severely malnourished child runs to less than $45. The dismantling of USAID has left thousands of malnourished children at risk of dying. nyti.ms/3Jn6SqA

Thread:

The point of journalism is to tell people the truth! If the population and political leaders are panicking about something that isn't happening, your job as a reporter is to loudly debunk it — not plead with the other party to join the panic.

A little research exercise: go find out what the Nazis did to museums they took over, for example in Strasbourg. Once you’ve recovered, report back.

Please share: by Sept 1, we solicit nominations for @isanet.bsky.social Karl Deutsch Award to recognize 𝘀𝗰𝗵𝗼𝗹𝗮𝗿𝘀 𝘂𝗻𝗱𝗲𝗿 𝟰𝟱, 𝗼𝗿 ≤𝟭𝟱 𝘆𝗲𝗮𝗿𝘀 𝗼𝗳 𝗱𝗲𝗳𝗲𝗻𝗱𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝘁𝗵𝗲𝗶𝗿 𝗱𝗶𝘀𝘀𝗲𝗿𝘁𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 who have made significant contribution to the study of #𝗜𝗻𝘁𝗲𝗿𝗻𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝗮𝗹𝗥𝗲𝗹𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝘀 & #𝗣𝗲𝗮𝗰𝗲𝗥𝗲𝘀𝗲𝗮𝗿𝗰𝗵 🔗 www.isanet.org/Programs/Awa... #IR

Pleased with my recent cheap auction purchase of William H. Taft campaign items, including the very delightful "Billy Possum" coat button (Billy Possum was Taft's take on TR's Teddy bear). Now to find one of the stuffed Billy Possums pictured in this article... www.smithsonianmag.com/history/how-...

A fabulous short interview with @shafrhistorians.bsky.social member Simon Miles on Superpowers and Serendipity that gives great insight into the work that historians do. 🗃️

Today in "You can't unplug 1/4 of the budget of research universities & do the same things, & there doesn't seem to be any backup plan other than to cancel things, & WHERE ARE THE UNIVERSITY PRESIDENTS SPEAKING OUT LOUDLY & COLLECTIVELY ABOUT THIS EXISTENTIAL CRISIS?" bsky.app/profile/mcop...

Things are rough out there, but here is an excellent historic photograph of a cat eating corn on the cob with butter from a special holder jury-rigged just for him, in 1951.

More women have nearly bled to death during miscarriage under Texas’ abortion ban. Experts say the trend paints a troubling picture of the harms of unnecessary delays in care. “This is striking,” one doctor said. “The trend is very clear.”

Hi, former Foreign Service Officer here The Secretary of State might be interested to learn that visa requirements and terms are generally reciprocal. We do it to them, they do it to us.

The Mothership Vortex: An Investigation Into the Firm at the Heart of the Democratic Spam Machine data4democracy.substack.com/p/the-mother...

It's important to note here that we're not just talking about faculty & university staff. 100s of U.S. colleges are in towns or small cities where they form the major industry & lifeblood of the community. Loss of students -> loss of rent $, restaurant $, bars, bookstores, gaming stores...

the voting rights act is, in its entirety, obviously constitutional under the 15th amendment, which gives congress broad and proactive authority to stop racial discrimination in voting. and you know it is obviously constitutional because roberts has had to invent entire new doctrines to gut it.

Firing the BLS Commissioner — the wonk in charge of the statisticians who track economic reality — is an authoritarian four alarm fire. It will also backfire: You can't bend economic reality, but you can break the trust of markets. And biased data yields worse policy.

An extremely sad day...sad and senseless.

AI can't eliminate historians because fun it can't create new knowledge, go to archives (where most sources are) or analyze sources. It can repeat what other historians have already written. History isn't "fact" it understanding the past to understand humanity+ #skystorians

Delighted with this very cheeky late 19th/early 20th century button I picked up recently!

NEW— "A lot of children have passed the point of no return...The gut lining has started to auto-digest & will no longer [absorb] water or nutrition. Death is imminent for 1000s" An American doctor who just returned from Gaza on where US-Israeli policy is taking us: www.huffpost.com/entry/gaza-s...