Great thread 🧵 on how today's information environment structurally deforms our political space, advantaging illiberal forces:

This president remains an unmitigated national disgrace

One day, if we are lucky, the erasure of American history will itself be remembered as a shameful chapter in American history

"ICE has made the classic Nazi mistake. They've invaded a winter people in the winter."

With ~1 in 8 American adults on GLP-1s, passenger weights and appetites are dropping. US airlines expect to save 1.5% on fuel costs. Plus a great anecdote: in 1980s, "American removed a single olive from each passenger’s salad, saving $40,000 per year in food and fuel costs." Gift link:

completely unironically, this is how we'll know

1. “The city smells of death. In all my life, I have never seen snow fall in Tehran and not a single person even smile…everyone is stunned; a whole country is in mourning, a whole country is holding back tears, a whole country has a lump in its throat.”

Name the kid Ofjaydee and we'll be off to the races

Also the perennially brilliantly pithy @billmckibben.bsky.social made this pronouncement: "Really, however, there’s only one truly vital strategic asset in Greenland, one thing that could change the world. And that’s the ice that covers almost all its landmass."

"America had better shape up before losing out to an electric age ushered in by Beijing. Otherwise, it will be stuck with outmoded products at home while China conquers markets through better technology." 🎁:

"Donald Trump now genuinely lives in a different reality, one in which neither grammar nor history nor the normal rules of human interaction now affect him." And this puts the onus on his entourage: the cowardly enablers in Congress and the WH who could stop him but won't will go down in infamy.

There is no strategy www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...

Cory Doctorow not pulling any punches: "AI is the asbestos in the walls of our technological society, stuffed there with wild abandon by a finance sector and tech monopolists run amok. We will be excavating it for a generation or more."

"In some places, the rubble is so deep that people cannot find where their houses once stood.... Sometimes, they cannot even find the street." 📰 Syria, in Ruins: A year after the dictator fell, Syrians are returning to a country with no clear plan for rebuilding.

"I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace"

This is also true for foreign policy. It's very hard for foreign policy analysts to accept there isn't always a strategy; that we're dealing with an extremely personalistic and erratic approach to the world and we should stop trying to normalize it.

Your doomposts do not impress me. They do not make me laugh. They do not make me feel like you are on my side. If you wanna curl up into a ball and die, go do it on your own time, and keep it to yourself. I want to interact with people willing to put in the work to fight.

The key word is "permanently," not least because we've already failed to do it once.

If I were an Iranian protesting this awful regime and found out the diaspora was pushing to reinstate the Shah('s son), I'd feel pretty depressed and a lot less motivated to keep protesting.

Just as Trump cannot understand how tariffs really work, he cannot understand Mercator projections on maps. He thinks Greenland is larger than the Continental U.S.

it's more or less impossible to find issues that poll this badly and he's decided to make it a major, public priority www.cbsnews.com/news/ice-tru...

Deutsche Bank here with the good stuff. Game on.

A lot of people have been very slow on the uptake about what is happening in America (including Americans too, obviously).

AI does what Elon's dismantling of the blue check system did: elevates mediocrity.

ICE and MAGA really did bet the farm on all of Minneapolis’s white people going “oh yes, please take away our disgusting, evil non-white-foreigner neighbors, oh thank you so much.” it’s beautiful that they’ve been proven incredibly wrong about that - may the rest of the country do the same.

Pleased to see European leaders standing up to Trump over Greenland. He won't stop until forced, so imposing costs is the only way.

"Even though they may seem extraordinary to us, individuals that live for thousands of years or longer may be ordinary on Earth. ... They’re showing us new ways for life to conduct its delicate dance with energy and entropy."

I’m moved and enchanted by this poem by Meghan O’Rourke from the latest @newyorker.com which came through the letterbox earlier and which is trying to stop me getting on with my writing. I shouldn’t have opened it!

Imagine the frustration in Abu Dhabi after giving Egypt a $35bn bailout and now watching them join the Saudi coalition.

Just started reading and this part really gets to the heart the issue with AI

As a social movements scholar, I absolutely love the diversity of tactics being developed by each city, reflecting their local flavor Portland kept it weird with inflatable costumes Chicago protected its street vendors by buying up their food each day Charlotte chased ICE agents into the woods

Congress Blocks Congress's Attempt to Reassert Congress's Right to Do Congress's Job

The main bank account holding revenue from the Venezuelan oil sales is located in Qatar. “There is no basis in law for a president to set up an offshore account that he controls so that he can sell assets seized by the American military,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren. www.semafor.com/article/01/1...

🇹🇳 Fifteen years ago today, on January 14, 2011, the Tunisian people toppled then President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali. Though that moment may seem far, may the people of Tunisia one day get to live the vision they protested for and that they inspired the entire region with. 🤍✊🏼

Reminder: ocean heat content is a BETTER metric of global heating than surface temperatures (which are far more prone to fluctuations due to El Nino/La Nina), and unlike surface temperatures, it set a NEW RECORD THIS PAST YEAR:

Kudos to the German govt and to this brave dozen soldiers for standing up to Trump's imperialism

"we can touch you anywhere at any time of our choosing" (known as the "Trumpstein Doctrine")

The United States needs military access to Greenland, which it already has, to defend the Arctic, which it already does, from Russian and Chinese ships, which aren’t actually there, and this is so important we should destroy the Western alliance to get it, do I have that right?

"Things are going to be really different when it does come back online, and be a lot more like China."

“There’s something about revolutions as social experiences, almost independent of the ideologies that they are engaged in, that leaves an imprint on the generation of people who make them.” But, she went on, that early enthusiasm or euphoria “has a shelf life, a time stamp.”

“Trump is resurrecting one of the Iraq war’s biggest myths – that an oil-rich country can pay for its own occupation and reconstruction” — my latest for @theguardian.com

My latest, on Oman’s surprising bounce back from the brink. Gift link: foreignpolicy.com/2026/01/12/h...

In the new @dissentmag.bsky.social issue, out today, @yguichaoua.bsky.social and I diagnose the crisis of conflict studies in a piece that is part intellectual history, part personal experience. What was conflict studies for? And what can its travails tell us about how wars have changed?

The United States has become an economically stagnant police state governed by a senile dictator with a bad personality disorder. But at least now I can use plastic straws again.

For the record: If we invade Greenland to conquer it I am revolutionary defeatist. It's an illegal invasion, a violation of the NATO charter, and a shameful betrayal of a loyal ally.

A strong sign the end is near for Iran's regime: “Security and law enforcement people are facing the same economic issues and high prices, themselves,” said Sahar, the Tehran protester. “They are not fighting back wholeheartedly.” 🎁:

Old Syrian idiom of the day "I hate you like a dirty shirt"

Another image that sums up the protest.