Anthony Bourdain had something to say about this exact dynamic in Singapore: youtu.be/e2Wl00dzhhI

One of the things living abroad taught me is that a) it’s very nice to have servants and b) a society which makes it possible for an upper-middle-class person to have servants is deeply unjust and inequitable.

I find it ironic that I've touched off this debate given that I'm actually. . . not a legal historian! At least not by formal doctoral training. My PhD is in the history of science, where it is standard to get methods training in multiple fields, including the philosophy and sociology of science.

I have come to the view that law professors who wish to do historical research as part of their scholarship would, generally, benefit from formal methods training. That means taking classes with trained historians. At a minimum, they should adhere to the standards of the discipline laid out below.

Took @profrrothschild.bsky.social's recent thread as the jumping-off-point for a Substack on the state of legal history. I don't think what we need is methods training. I think we probably need a new democratic scholarly culture that is more focused on sustained contestation.

the point is, censors are usually at war against great art even when it’s nominally consonant with their political project, because great art has independent moral force and the censors hate that

My today's Substack: A different game On football’s extreme commercialization branko2f7.substack.com/p/a-differen...

Keegan’s anger

“… wearing blue against Sweden would be a ‘bad omen’. ‘But Dr Paulo, the head of the delegation, turned it round cleverly’, Pelé wrote. ‘He said blue would be lucky, as it was the colour of our patron saint, Nossa Senhora de Aparecida, and it had served previous teams well.’ And so it proved.”

Borjas coding error

Once I decided to ignore all philosophers without a skill building hobby! then i forgot but maybe I should have

one of the clear cases of pmc class neurosis is this desperation to simultaneously not be a pmc (aesthetically) while remaining a pmc (materially)

one thought in closing. no matter what other lessons we take from the last few weeks and the next, we should all agree on this one: things can always get goofier

Fascinating details of what an utterly corrupted army looks like on the frontline in here, like bribing your way out of assaults.

New York City’s African communities bring life to all five boroughs, each and every day.

Today, I joined the Africa Center for their annual Africa Day celebration. It was a privilege to be surrounded by so much laughter, music, and history — and to honor these New Yorkers.

19th-century Amharic manuscript on medicine with a list of diseases and treatments www.africanhistoryextra.com/p/the-histor...

One of the things that is urgently important for Catholics in America in particular to (re?)develop is a nose for this exact kind of deception. A lot of cons are better at lying than their boss

He has a way of making it seem as though he’s simply saying what’s there, when in fact that’s not what’s going on at all. One of his standard lines is how he’s a champion of Catholic social teaching but he has an awful record of misrepresenting it in ways that convince unless we slow things down.

It’s misleading for +Barron to say, for instance, that the Pope’s new encyclical places the moral legitimacy of private property and the free market alongside the universal destination of goods when it explicitly says they are subordinate to it and to the principle of solidarity.

I’m really pleased this paper is now coming out in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research. Consent and the formation of preferences philarchive.org/rec/PETEOA-7 (Pictured with a cat I met just before hearing the paper has been accepted.)

the lion, the witch, the fucking audacity of this bitch

Buona festa del Madaraka a tutti, e buona festa della Repubblica a tutti che amano l’Italia.

Italian President Sergio Mattarella is holding an event tomorrow evening in front of his residence at the Quirinale to celebrate the 80th Anniversary of the Republic with stars from music, film, theatre, dance and sport. Nobody is deserting it.

Thread

“For the first time in history, East Asian women seized the means of persuasion.”

We get into that a bit here bylinetimes.com/2026/04/17/h...

“There’s something quite wonderful about watching a 7ft 4in athlete sprinting the length of the court and launching himself at an opponent attempting a corner three like a kamikaze Concorde”

Statement on the background to his appointment. Required reading for the people who have gone to bat for this racist ideologue under the banner of "academic freedom"

When I was in grad school in the 90s there was a kind of mini-debate in my field: must a politics of beauty be fascist? Is it possible to have a highly aestheticized politics that is still liberal-democratic? Nobody on any side of that debate thought that the future was tacky, trashy fascism.

Those governed by a party they’re too young to have voted for, of course.

In their crude and repellent way, they’ve seen a true thing their elders will wish they hadn’t. Michael Hannon’s “Against Heterosexuality” was a much better attempt to make a similar case to a distinctive bit of the right

Okay, a PSA, especially to everyone in the business of defending #Europe and #democracy - and to journalists: I thought I knew that the tiniest slip-up may let the bad guys geolocate a picture or a video, but a presentation I saw blew my mind nevertheless. Be VERY careful if #OPSEC is a concern.

Read it here: www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

Catching up on yesterday's reading, this clip from an interview with the veteran economist Charles Goodhart seems rather obvious but can't be since it is largely ignored as an explanation for growth trends in the last thirty years. www.ft.com/content/1701...

I deeply regret reading this piece--but also feel compelled to point out that it contains this absolutely spectacular example of Both Sides-ing it. An NYT all-timer "influencers who are accused of human trafficking and rape" are "functionally equivalent" to feminists

Shocked by the number of people who fall for this one. “Feminists and misogynists are the same because they are both dissatisfied with gender relations.”

Sandbu comes through

Among many other things going on, the US and Europe are in mourning for their hegemony over the international economy, gone as it turned out in 2009 and unlikely to ever return. And now we have to suffer the unfairness that others long complained about.

I can't link easily to @martinsandbu.ft.com piece on Europe's China panic but he is absolutely right about the way it focuses entirely on the wrong things, and in large part that is due to the influence of US voices who have done the same there, Pettis probably the worst of them.

What teacher got on your last nerve in grade school/college, and what did they do that earned a permanent spot in your memory?

i think there is this basic idea that evil done out of delusional sentimentality rather than sneering malice is somehow not evil, but the thing is that as your power grows, the threshold for "normal human failing which nonetheless damns me" drops

being a european on this website and waking up while the americans are still discoursing is what it must have felt like to be a peasant from beyond the limes who'd headed over to the nearest forum to sell some surplus beets and hear everyone going on about how the emperor has made his horse consul

Buongiorno pionieri

Chiaroscuro cat

A crystalline demonstration of the petty power wielded by tech magnates like Meta www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

The History of Oromo Literature and the Oromo script www.patreon.com/posts/159712...

Don't think she's on here but I enjoy Heather Widdows at the University of Warwick on this (www.heatherwiddows.com if you haven't heard of her)

who are some writers and academics doing interesting work around beauty and desirability politics?

And I’ll add, dovetailing with Wemby’s reaction to victory for the other Spurs, it’s so important now for men to show that compassion and sincerity are strength, not weakness.

I’ve talked a lot of shit about Arsenal of course, but sincerely this is one of the most important components and effects of sport: you have to learn to play to win without losing your sense of compassion.