Super informative article on the state of Mexico under the Sheinbaum administration one year in. newleftreview.org/sidecar/post...

This gets to the heart of it.

Remarkable how little coverage this is getting. www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/12...

My sister-in-law is a biology PhD with a senior research job at a biotech company. At a family event recently, I asked her if she used AI for work. "Oh, all the time," she said. "Really? For what kinds of things?" "Well, being a manager now, I have so much mindless paperwork. AI helps with that."

Language I now include in every syllabus.

The key point on Abundance - the politically consequential opponents of building stuff are almost entirely on the right.

This stuff really happened! And it really crushed workers. It's so odd see a kind of whig economic history re-emerge in the last few years

This post is generating a lot of confusion - which is my fault of course, I’m the one who posted it. But to clarify, the point I am trying to get at here hinges on the fact that buildings *last a very long time.* This makes housing services different from most other commodities.

So here’s a question: what do we think apartments in a 50 or 100 year old building ought to rent for, relative to the building’s operating and maintenance costs?

I am sympathetic to where this piece is coming from. But it’s a real case study in confusing net and gross. open.substack.com/pub/kyla/p/h...

This is really heartening. We can, in fact, make collective decisions about how or whether we will allow new technologies to be incorporated into the things that we care about. It's not just a fact that we have to deal with.

A while back I did an interview with something called Breaking Points on free buses. I never saw it, and thought they hadn't used it. But it turns out, it exists on YouTube. The whole segment is quite well done. www.youtube.com/watch?v=P275...

A thing that I think could be quite clarifying for a number of questions is a long series of a survey asking people what they think the inflation rate currently is. Some casual googling doesn't turn up anything, but perhaps something like this exists?

Tempted to use this with undergrads to remind them that no, percentages do not work this way. Altho I’m worried that the lesson they’ll take is lol nothing matters, instead.

I think we need to get beyond level vs rate here and think in terms of a continuum of time scales. People are comparing current prices to some point in the past. That point may be more than a year ago, which looks like “wanting prices to fall”; but it isn’t infinitely far in the past.

This is probably in the top 3 important things that have happened in global balance of payments dynamics since the early 1970s and yet most people don’t know about it.

That is certainly one way of looking at it. giftarticle.ft.com/giftarticle/...

Reading some old Andrew Gelman posts got me thinking: What fraction of regressions published in social science journals each year contain any actual information about the world? The fraction is obviously wry small, but is it greater than zero?

When your "not a resentful mediocre white man" shirt is raising a lot of questions already answered by the shirt.

I just listened to this, and the Susannah Glickman segment, just, wow. This is a person I will be paying a lot of attention to in the future.

This is heading in the right direction. The next step would be to replace “allies” with “principals”. Trump is just a vehicle. open.substack.com/pub/paulkrug...

Like others who came to left politics in the 1980s and 90s, Noam Chomsky was a formative influence for me. Among my small group of radicals at the University of Chicago, he was the one person everyone had read. So, obviously, it's distressing to find him in the Epstein files.

This sort of thing is the reason I no longer write for Jacobin.

Aimé Césaire the goat of this theory files.libcom.org/files/zz_aim...

Striking from @brankomilan.bsky.social: Hitlerism as a continuation of the established practices of "the West" toward the rest of the humanity. I think this has some important resonance for our own time. brankomilanovic.substack.com/p/the-last-c...

Reading this my first year of college was a life-changing experience. Was just the other day gushing about it to my students, 35 years later now.

At some point, other public officials will have to admit that what the Supreme Court is engaged in is not law, and that no one is obliged to obey them. I don't expect that New York enforcing its gun control laws despite whatever Clarence Thomas thinks will be that point. But it would be a good one.

yeah! might want to jump to the third section “The role of security of tenure” okayfail.com/2018/rent-co...

I mean, I already have a 3-3 teaching load? It's not that unusual.

imo the main opposition to new housing comes from (1) people who are scared that they will be priced out (which rent control covers) and (2) people who just don't want more density near them because it will bring property values down we should focus on winning (1) over

This is an argument I have made for a while - if you want to allow more new housing development, you'll face a lot less opposition if you protect existing tenants with rent regulation. Nice to have some more evidence to back that up.

I actually despise how much people in the Anglosphere go on about wanting to be like Singapore and yet cannot conceptualise doing the actual key plank of Singapore's housing policy, which is that the government literally buys some bricks and literally hires some builders.

Some people will laugh, but I think that there's something admirable and valuable here, that should be preserved, and extended to more areas of life.

I'd really love to take this course. Even though (or because?) I sometimes teach classes in this sort of thing myself.

Josh also has a book out soon, which I have been lucky enough to see an advanced copy of and it's great

“If you trace back many important decisions of the last few decades, you will regularly come up against the uncomfortable sensation that the unacknowledged legislators are … junior civil servants who put placeholder numbers in spreadsheets, which were later adopted as fundamental constraints.”

"the public sector ought to have, and in practice generally does have, a much lower discount rate than the private sector. This used to be a big part of debates on the economics of climate change. But it’s also relevant to housing." (see also CA Prop 13) an excellent post by @jwmason.bsky.social

I just put up a long post on my blog, digging into what kind of new housing is being built in New York City, and who lives in it. jwmason.org/slackwire/wh...

Useful thread. You will almost certainly learn something from reading it.

The attack on professional expertise of all kinds is one of the through lines of contemporary right-wing politics.

I think this piece is fundamentally off-base. It’s laser focused on liberals and leftists’ potential to “go fascist”, downplaying the more important story of the sheer stability of Trump’s base. Virtually all American fascists were fash ten years ago and will still be fash ten years from now

There’s a strand of opinion whose only objection to Trump’s lawless violence is that it is not directed against the right kind of people.

Assigned some chapters of Tooze's Crashed for a class; rereading it, was reminded of what an extraordinarily good book it is. An especially nice thing about it, for teaching purposes, is how largely self-contained each chapter is; you really can read just a selected few of them.

This was quite good

Yep. You will never convince someone who went to an Ivy or equivalent that they went through college on easy mode. But in a lot of ways, they did.

“For their part, left-wing opponents of wokeness may have painted themselves into a corner. With an officially anti-woke administration in power, that idea is now associated with all the ugly repression being meted out against those deemed representative of the “enemy within”…”

I'm reading student's poetry imitations & notes on poetry collections. They went deep with Elizabeth Bishop, Kevin Young, Pablo Neruda. CC students in a required class. They are doing good, deep, real work, but if you just look at the "page count" & "number of sources" it doesn't look "rigorous"