I think there's a certain kind of fash-curious (or outright fash, but fash-curious is pertinent for electoral analysis) voter for whom Being Seen To Be Corrupt And Get Away With It denotes strength, its an expression of power that only makes Dear Leader more glorious.

"birthright citizenship is destroying this nation and everyone who benefited from it should be denaturalized and deported except this one guy, temporarily, for sports reasons" about sums up this administration

State of Brand newsletter: "OpenAI pushing its IPO to 2027." Me:

Unhinged: Angry MAGA figures are demanding wholesale bans on pregnant women from entering the country, including pregnancy tests on entry. This has gotten *really* widespread. On the pod, @sarahposner.bsky.social brilliantly takes apart this new Two Minute Hate: newrepublic.com/article/2127...

Heehee

People are similarly reluctant to concede that, perhaps, Ivy League schools that churn out the likes of Zuckerberg and Trump and Musk may not have the right solutions for how to stop perpetuating the harms that they cause.

One of my favorite passages from Eagleton's 'Literary Theory' (p30) "When the Allied troops moved into the concentration camps...to arrest commandants who had whiled away their leisure hours with a volume of Goethe, it appeared that someone had some explaining to do."

Another example of “Trump ruins everything he touches.” There’s no good outcome for USMNT now. If Balogun doesn’t play, Trump and MAGA will lash out, threaten his citizenship. If he plays and they lose, the world will celebrate. If they win, accused of cheating forever. No good outcome.

People are facing felony prosecutions on the thinnest of claims that they vandalized the Reflecting Pool.

I asked a Norwegian fan at the World Cup match how so many of their fans can afford to spend the summer in America going to a bunch of expensive World Cup games, and I shit you not he just goes “Our healthcare and school are free and our work is encouraging us to do so.” Fuck man.

*sharing a screenshot from an article that cites another article quoting one (1) “New York financier” who says his firm prefers humanities grads to STEM* this is because the humanities teaches you critical thinking

McMorrow has been a force in Michigan, and seemed to have real camaraderie with Abdul El-Sayed early on. We’ll see if that extends to now and she joins forces with him to meet Democrats & independents where they are, rather than try to buoy the sinking ship Stevens represents.

Don't want to speak ill of the dead, so getting this Mitch McConnell take out now. He saw Trump with complete clarity, as a danger to America, but protected him anyway. Perhaps more than anyone, he had the power to end Trumpism, but chose party over country. donmoynihan.substack.com/p/jan-6-and-...

awesome!

Wildfire survivors call fire-prediction markets “morally reprehensible” and worry they could increase the risk of arson. www.wired.com/story/predic...

Instead of founding fathers let us aspire to be perennial midwives, helping always to deliver democracy anew. (The last line of Democracy May Not Exist, but We'll Miss It When It's Gone.)

Happy 4th of July!

If you're wondering how many of the Declaration's complaints about King George apply to Donald Trump, the answer is 12

Not a conspiracy. Not pattern matching. Mention a document that makes people look silly, and they will wipe years of documents and paid-for research to save face. Only some forward thinking to save a copy prevents oblvion. Or as the Internet Archive calls it, Friday. Anyway. archive.org/donate

I'll summarize this: Mamdani asked NYers to keep air conditioning at 78 degrees. A wave criticism hit online. A MSNBC broadcast pointed out the US Department of Energy recommends that 78 degree figure. Immediately after, the US Department of Energy deleted 6,000 web pages related to energy saving.

To my understanding, this is an accurate summation of the state of schism:

Palestine is at the core of Egyptian identity — & the Egyptian dictatorships betrayal of both peoples. This is a beautiful gesture that speaks to a long history, and the jubilant footage from Gaza shows the love is mutual. People with people, may all who oppress them be toppled.

Further evidence for this point: the rage and disdain people feel for jargon and complex writing in the humanities but not in STEM is reflective of the assumption that feminine pursuits should be accessible -- secret/out-of-reach feminine things are scary not impressive

Outlets like the Epoch Times serve a very specific purpose. They are testbeds for claims that may be weaponized further up the food chain. Because they aren’t serious outlets and don’t even pretend to be, they can push limits on what is publishable in a newspaper-like setting.

Something I’ve been thinking about quite a bit is how the structure of the public sphere sort of disintegrated in the past decade. One thing I think liberals haven’t figured out is the way authoritarians set up “laboratories of misinformation” to test, and then spread, viral memes. 1/

Climate damages to agriculture are non-linear, so it's not that each degree changes X%- it's that beyond a certain threshold you get massive losses

hand-writing!

one of the big shifts of Vatican II - and one of the few unambiguously good things John Paul II did IMO - was a massive push to begin repairing uhhhhhhhhh MANY CENTURIES of damage in the church's relationship with Jewish communities. SSPX being schism levels of mad about that really says it all!

Why is Fox News shilling for the DSA

A really unpleasant professional anxiety that I’ve just realized I have is that I don‘t know how to think about collaborations now that I’m so mismatched with peers on acceptable AI use. I expected this problem with students but I’m shocked at how everyone in their 40s/50s is just casually using it

I don't much interest in becoming a blogger/substacker. But I was unlikely to land an oped in a mass media outlet based on the interviews I had been called for, then cancelled last minute. Some of these outlets believed that the danger had passed. With a 5-4 vote for an obvious question?

As an American history professor, I regularly read new books, articles, and dissertations, and also evaluate unpublished manuscripts for journals and book publishers. I would not categorize the recent and emerging historiography in the binary way that Ezra Klein does.

A strange article in Nature, which appears to lay the blame for falling trust in science at the feet of ... scientists. Without a mention of the years-long assault on expertise by the media and politicians.

Fugitive slaves were literally not accused of a crime, this was a rather important point in the 1850s.

Fun fact: the vast majority of all carbon re-captured by CCS is used to dislodge more oil from nearly-depleted oil fields thepoint.com.au/off-the-char...

Just saw this op-ed page from the Detroit Free Press and my first thought was @olufemiotaiwo.bsky.social’s aphorism: “I do not regret to inform you that we are going to win.”

Rage, rage against the willful heating of our shared home

it is draining to constantly learn the extent meritocracy is a lie

Genuinely shocking how quickly we ran out of numbers on the Climate Shift Index scale. Northwestern Europe is slowly emerging from its massive heat event, while the Northeastern US is entering one. CSI Level 5 = 5x more likely with climate change compared without.

What it's like to exist as a politically and historically informed person.

Very thankful for this letter to Becky Pepper-Jackson (the 16 year-old trans girl SCOTUS ruled against yesterday) from James Dale, a gay man whose expulsion from the Boy Scouts was upheld by the Supreme Court in 2000.

first thing I saw was it’s supposed to be 110 today in DC. second is this:

That, so far as I can tell, where 2000s computational methods lent themselves more to supporting historians in telling big stories, the more recent suite of methods seem to lend themselves better to telling small ones.

I spent a good decade developing computational methods to study history with a wide angle lens. I even co-wrote a book about it called The Historian's Macroscope. LLMs are weird. They're actually much more useful for microhistories.

Headlines like this make my blood boil. The highest emissions scenario (8.5) wasn’t “wrong.” It was plausible for decades. But we bent the path with renewables and efficiency. Now it’s very unlikely, but that could still change again - with the comeback for coal envisioned by Trump and his allies.

Two years ago, my colleagues and I were sued by Stephen Miller's America First Legal. The Hines v Stamos case — built atop a number of false allegations — was a central element of the "censorship industrial complex" myth. Today, that case was dismissed (by a Trump judge in LA). We won.

On Sociology's uptake of LLMs for writing: "estimated LLM modification rose from near zero before late 2022 to 24.3 percent of abstract sentences in July–December 2025" journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....

Huh. The e-commerce share of retail sales is only about 17%. I would have guessed more. fred.stlouisfed.org/series/ECOMP...