The insurance industry seems to be giving up on managing climate risk. on.ft.com/3KiCRbQ

The 13-year old's project this summer was to build a rock-climbing wall in our garage. And he did it -- planned, designed and assembled the whole thing, with almost no help from me or anyone else.

elite centrist/lib transphobia is one of those classic contrarian things where they’ve built up a huge pile of facially convincing “evidence” that collapses immediately if you put it under serious scrutiny

A classic updated. youtu.be/6uMe8P0YPpI?...

Is there going to be a new federal holiday for Charlie Kirk? Honestly, I'm surprised they haven't already declared one.

The history of the development of the CPI and other government compiled price indexes suggests that this will lead to even more contestation and litigation over contractually mandated wage hikes, adjustments to government benefits, and more. An expensive, unnecessary mess, one we outgrew.

Deeply puzzled by this bad-tempered ungenerous review of Greg Grandin’s America, América in Dissent. The objection seems to be to the very idea of writing a history of ideas, or looking for positive models in history. www.dissentmagazine.org/online_artic...

I've always wanted to do this.

This is 180° opposite of what TrumpCo is planning. Instead they want to give crypto holders real American dollars that they can actually buy yachts, mansions, and congresscritters with, in exchange for their worthless crypto. The popping champagne bottles will be very real.

Is hostility to immigration something that people develop spontaneously based on their own experiences, or is it deliberately cultivated by politicians and the press? The authors of this FT don’t say so, but it’s hard not to see this figure as evidence for the latter. www.ft.com/content/43da...

I think the whole abundance-Klein project makes more sense if you think of the problem they’re trying to solve as: How do we, as political professionals with a center-left brand, find something we can still sell to the billionaires now that the offer from the other side has gotten so much sweeter?

Biking the seven year old around from home in Brooklyn to school and music class, with stopoffs at Tompkins Square and the Strand, on this perfect fall day: one of those times I stop and think, I live in New York. In New York City! How did I ever get so lucky?

At the delegates meeting for PSC, the CUNY faculty union, the secretary is not present … because she’s still in jail after being arrested at an ICE facility earlier today.

After last year’s US election, people liked to point out that almost every OECD country saw the party in power during the post-covid inflation lose office in the next election. With one big exception: Mexico. There may be a reason for that. www.dissentmagazine.org/article/the-...

It's worth stressing how at odds Adams is here with established policy in New York. Students use whatever bathrooms and other facilities that are consistent with their expressed gender identity. This has been true for years and it's fine, honestly I'm not sure it's even controversial at this point.

I will be on www.kpfa.org again half an hour from now (10:30 ET), talking about the Fed's rate cut.

There's a tremendous amount of insight in this post from @himself.bsky.social on power as coordination. As he notes, absolute power is a contradiction in terms, because someone who's absolutely unconstrained can make no commitments and so can't give orders. www.programmablemutter.com/p/repost-abs...

It's a really weird moment for Fed watching, because the political gradient seems to have been flipped - the doves are on the Right now. But as Doug notes, not all Republicans have gotten the message.

firings for criticizing kirk would not be happening without the firings of people who criticized israel. the anti-trump movement would be more robust and militant if the campus movement hadn’t been crushed. when you destroy your soul by siding with genocide, there are other consequences too.

This is so incredibly clear to some and i think perhaps still obscure to others. It's not an abstract thought or a gotcha. It's a sinking, gut feeling re: a causal pattern you recognize playing out on a much greater scale. Exactly how it felt in fall 2023 in the first place.

Honestly, this is pretty strong. What's striking about it, to me, is that he specifically describes what Kirk's ideas were. That may be a low bar, but an awful lot of people have failed to clear it.

A corollary of this is that you should judge policies based on whether they are likely to make people’s lives noticeably better when adopted, as opposed to how they sound to focus groups in the abstract.

My goal in life is to get the word "shkrelling" into circulation. It means talking about something in a way that is ostensibly about how evil and terrible it is, but is really marketing for it.

Incidentally, I noticed this while updating an assignment that asks students to estimate how much China's currency would have to appreciate to achieve bilateral trade balance with the United States. The answer used to look a lot crazier than it does now.

I hadn't quite realized how much China's exports to the US have fallen recently. Prior to the pandemic, the US deficit with China was on the order of 2 percent of GDP. Now it's down to half a percent.

Right, people have really lost the plot on this one.

Some New Yorkers may recall that SKDKnickerbocker is the firm cofounded by Micah Lasher, a longtime Dem consultant who is now one of the leading contenders for Jerry Nadler's House seat in Manhattan. Perhaps someone should ask Lasher how he feels about this?

Anybody remember that movie from the 1990s, The Last Supper? Just thinking about it for some reason.

IBX on its own is more transformational for NYC than anything Cuomo did. The new Laguardia is much nicer though.

Interesting question! There are some obvious cases where this is certainly true. Elite universities, for example, have great deal of freedom to vary their price independent of quantity.

Ta-Nehisi Coates's piece on the thing is the best one I've seen. www.vanityfair.com/news/story/c...

I've been to listening to Greg Grandin's America, América as an audiobook. One thing it makes very clear: Trump blowing up random boats in the Caribbean is entirely consistent with the United States' historical treatment of its southern neighbors.

This was a quote of a post by Steven Thrasher making the same point. But his account has now been deleted? Anyone know what the deal is with that?

Politico NY: "Former Gov. Andrew Cuomo held a press conference saying decriminalization [of sex work] would allow prostitutes to proliferate and would be bad for women." Because no one knows better than Andy what's good for women.

Meanwhile, at Jacobin: Charlie Kirk was doing politics the right way. jacobin.com/2025/09/char...

She's not in front, but she gets there in the end. A good sign for their working relationship next year. www.nytimes.com/2025/09/14/o...

It's one thing for a random NY politician to make a quip like this but Jeffries is national leadership. He's the leader my own Rep in the House is supposed to follow. I don't think it's funny, I think Jeffries is undermining the whole party with this insult and by failing to endorse Mamdani.

If I were one of the prominent signers of the "Harper's Letter" about cancel culture and free speech, I would simply make a token condemnation of right wing efforts to actually fire professors and expel students for much more nakedly political and obviously spurious reasons.

Seems noteworthy that OpenAI is now forecasting les revenue from business users and more from consumers. Hard to see why we should believe that this technology is going to replace vast numbers of jobs if even the people selling it don’t seem to anymore.

One thing that puzzles me about tax exemptions for housing construction, like New York’s old 421-a and new 485-x programs: Why are the exemptions so *long*? (40 years in many cases.)

Seems bad: “The rise of unofficial US economic reports.” on.ft.com/4n38BAs

As a rough heuristic, it seems like, so far, about half the cost of tariffs have been passed on to consumers, and about half have been absorbed by lower profit margins for import-using American firms. libertystreeteconomics.newyorkfed.org/2025/06/are-...

One thing I'm expecting, in the next recession, is a bipartisan rush to rescue AI companies and their investors.

A lot of wisdom in @lizafeatherstone.bsky.social 's latest piece on NY governor Kathy Hochul - someone who's hardly been a leader, but who has repeatedly been willing to tack left when that's what the prevailing winds seems to favor. jacobin.com/2025/09/hoch...

About to do an interview with UpFront on KPFA, on the latest employment numbers. www.kpfa.org

"Kirk never laid a finger on anyone" is abject, shameful revisionism. He was in the WH vetting staffers in 2016 and bought buses to ferry people to Jan 6. Every single person ever harmed by Trump's policies were harmed by Kirk being in the exact position to curate the people who enacted them.

This is a confusing, but evocative, headline on first reading.

Sounds like the riots worked, then. on.ft.com/3HPEFZi

This seems pretty big tbh. www.reuters.com/world/us/new...