“…notice how Mets fans, more than any other team, are drawn to the breakdowns, neurosis, weirdness, and humor of the game…The Mets are a team bursting with all the desperation, psychosis, pain, chaos, and cruel optimism for a better future that persists through civilization’s sunset.”

🚨ATTN: Labor People 🚨 we’ve got a nice debate going at @cunyslu.bsky.social’s New Labor Forum on the UAW’s recent efforts to scale up new worker organizing. First up is @chactivist.bsky.social with his take on organizing in higher ed and Southern auto (1/2) newlaborforum.cuny.edu/2026/01/15/s...

Just finished this excellent book on Kwame Nkrumah and the largely forgotten global impact of pan-Africanism. Ranges from Ghana, to the US and West Indies, to Congo and Tanzania, making a convincing case for Nkrumah’s central place in the era of decolonization. Loved it. wwnorton.com/books/978132...

Many thanks to @drodrik.bsky.social for joining me on the @cunyslu.bsky.social podcast Reinventing Solidarity to talk about his new book and how to deal with climate change, global poverty, and creating good jobs for workers in a services-based economy. soundcloud.com/cunyslu/epis...

Worth a read for anyone who want to makes sense of the rapidly shifting contours of UK politics. Also relevant to similar debates and discussions regarding Democratic Party electoral strategies in the US.

I learned a lot from @philiprathgeb.bsky.social’s excellent book on how the radical right in the USA and Europe uses economic policy to advance its cultural and ideological goals, so I spoke to him for @cunyslu.bsky.social’s Reinventing Solidarity podcast. soundcloud.com/cunyslu/epis...

Heaven help me, I am a Podcaster now. I recently talked to @katharinapistor.bsky.social about capitalist law and its discontents (with a particular eye toward the law’s impact on labor and worker organizing) for @cunyslu.bsky.social’s Reinventing Solidarity podcast: soundcloud.com/cunyslu/epis...

What a loss. To me, Werckmeister Harmonies is arguably the greatest film yet made in the 2000s, a beautiful, terrifying, too-prescient film. Precisely the sort of art we need in a world of brain-dead, heartless “content.” RIP.

Very nice appreciation of Rosi’s incredible run of films from Salvatore Giuliano throughb Illustrious Corpses. Too hard on Christ Stopped at Eboli, though, which is a remarkable book and film adaptation.

I’m not sure if the current practice of fusion voting in NY bears out the argument for expanding it further. But totally agreed that the pundits’ debate over the electoral value of issue/ideological moderation (driven primarily by advocates of moderation) is tedious and largely beside the point.

This is the America I believe in. The neo-Confederates will never, ever win.

My family has been here for less than a century, all four of my grandparents and my dad were born abroad. The GOP's embrace of Blut-und-Boden ideology is an attack on the actually existing USA, an embrace of neo-Confederatism and the most reactionary strands of European-style nationalism too.

It’s a trip to see “Andrew Cuomo (I)” complaining about the Democratic Party on a Fox News chryon. It’s like watching realignment happening in real time.

Some bleak worldviews on display here. Apparently our choices are production for industrial and military warfare or “an economy centered around McKinsey and DoorDash,” as if there were no other possibilities available to us. www.nytimes.com/2025/07/20/u...

“A pal is a wonderful thing. Happy Birthday - and may every day be another wonderful secret.”

What if it’s not “the groups” or progressive activists who are the big problem but uninspiring centrists who don’t have a credible economic program and triangulate on social questions base voters really care about?

This is Josh Hawley’s whole routine, encapsulated. He’s a run of the mill Republican with a fake “populist” shtick that way too many people fall for.

This study was conducted in 6 European countries, and I'd love to see this kind of research reproduced in the US, but I think this conclusion would hold here as well. There's no necessary tradeoff between economics and culture so long as the economic program has a credible working class appeal.

Trump’s big ugly bill perfectly crystallizes Melinda Cooper’s conception of the neoliberal counterrevolution. Fiscal extravagance for the rich (and the repressive state apparatus), punishing austerity for everyone else. press.princeton.edu/books/hardco...

I think this piece I wrote a couple years ago holds up pretty well in light of @zohrankmamdani.bsky.social’s historic performance among under-45 voters. Our collective experiences have perfectly primed us for the kind of politics he represents. jacobin.com/2023/10/the-...

The Republican Party, in a single image. This is what Democratic leaders in Congress should spend their time talking about and rallying people to oppose, not spreading lies and innuendo about @zohrankmamdani.bsky.social for things he never said and doesn’t think.

Three months ago today, plain-clothes ICE agents abducted Mahmoud Khalil in his apartment building lobby after they'd followed him home. Free Mahmoud.

Wow. So you’re telling me this guy constantly lies about everything. I’m hearing about this for the first time.

Canada seems to have effectively imported America's polarized, two-party presidential system despite having a parliamentary system. It's a big reason why third, fourth, fifth, etc. parties have so much trouble catching on in the US, a dynamic the Electoral College strengthens and reinforces.

Your average GOP voter had no idea what Critical Race Theory or DEI or "gender ideology" was before their propaganda apparatus started talking about it nonstop. Maybe Slotkin and other centrist Democrats don't want people talking about oligarchy because they don't actually have a problem with it.

Our mayor is telling New Yorkers that if you happen to be kidnapped and sent to an overseas gulag, too bad! You're on your own, and you're probably a gang member anyway. This man's political career can't end fast enough. gothamist.com/news/mayor-a...

Excellent piece by @abenanav.bsky.social making the case for public investment and redistribution, not AI or natalism or fantasies of mass manufacturing employment, in a low growth world: www.nytimes.com/2025/04/21/o...

BREAKING: Over 50,000 New Yorkers shut down Madison Ave to demand “Hands Off Migrants, Hands Off the Planet”, in the lead up to Earth Day. Free Mahmoud, Free Kilmar, Free Mohsen, Free Rumeysa, free them all! #HandsOffMigrants #HandsoffthePlanet

@jamellebouie.net if it’s possible to share this mutual aid request it would really help - a working-class community leader in the Bronx lost everything in a fire and needs support to help get her family back on their feet. More details and donation link here: www.gofundme.com/f/help-drum-...

With the Supreme Court set to take up a birthright citizenship case, this article I wrote a couple of years ago has, very unfortunately, become timely once again.

Which party turned out more in 2024? Official turnout records show registered Republicans had higher turnout rates than Democrats everywhere but DC (avg gap R+7 pts). That’s hard to square with the narrative that Democrats now benefit when fewer people vote.

Remarkable quotes here from a soybean farmer who says the industry is "still reeling" the first Trump trade war, "lost nearly 10 percent of market share to China that we never regained," and "certainly not thrilled about an extended" second one, but is a 3-time Trump voter anyway. on.ft.com/42nAAkY

Social democratic parties losing their voters to the far right really is the zombie theory of contemporary European politics. It didn't happen to Labour. It didn't happen to the SPD. It didn't happen to the PvdA. We know it's false. We communicate this non-stop. And yet, it somehow survives.

Finally watched WERCKMEISTER HARMONIES by Béla Tarr and Ágnes Hranitzky on Criterion 4K. It's hard to think of a film that speaks more directly to this moment in time, with such unsettling beauty. There are just so many astonishing images and sequences in it, it's hard to do it justice with words.

If the Dems have a persistent turnout problem, it stands to reason that shifting GOP-ward on key issues will make the problem worse and offset potential gains among GOP-leaning voters. Let's craft a consistently progressive program and invest in base-building organizing in places we need it most.

This whole thing really does smack of gender

Really great interview with @quinnslobodian.com - makes clear how the radical right isn't opposed to neoliberalism so much as it's a dissident strain within it. Also underlines why not to give in to the temptation to triangulate on questions like immigration. Can't wait to read the book!

Hold on a sec - I was assured that liberals and progressives and city slickers were the out of touch ones. Living in a bubble, even!

Unless I am missing something here, Sen. Murphy simultaneously complains that the Democratic left drives voters away with a "dozen different litmus tests" on social and cultural questions, while recommending precisely the left's approach to pairing progressive social-cultural and economic programs.

Yes, Trumpism shouldn't be cast as a foreign aberration in US history. But comparing or analogizing with European fascism doesn't necessarily entail this. Nazi race law learned from Jim Crow and Manifest Destiny was an antecedent of lebensraum. There are illuminating historical affinities here.

The idea of using tariffs to bring back labor-intensive manufacturing as a source of mass employment is a fantasy, primarily because of automation. Let's find other ways to make good jobs for people who don't go to college, like new versions of the WPA or the CCC. on.ft.com/4hKSQL4

Just got invited to the next National Security Council meeting via Partiful text

we all know his fundraising has been great, but @zohrankmamdani.bsky.social knocked out of the park even more this filing. plurality of individual donors up from 101 last filing to 121 of 178 total this filing, about 68% of all zip codes in the city had zohran as the candidate most given to.

Interest in reindustrialization on the left is, I think, driven in part by a desire to reverse transformations of the occupational structure to make (one conception of) class politics possible again. But manufacturing has changed too, it probably can't be a source of mass employment anymore.

The acting leader of the political opposition 🫡

It’s a beautiful morning to tell @schumer.senate.gov to Vote No or Go! People are positively vibrating with anger out here - Chuck Schumer is simply not cut out for this moment.

Men will literally trash the planet instead of paying taxes

This also shows the false equivalence of the US polarization narrative. Supporters of the Democrats are very similar to their European counterparts. Yet, there has been a deluge of stories from European journalists about how the woke and extreme left is threatening the US.

David Leonhardt's piece on the Danish Social Democrats' hard right turn on immigration policy isn't very good, but it provides a prime example of how the crudest conceptions of "class dealignment" can lead you astray both analytically and politically. 🧵