A significant inaccuracy in In Covid's Wake, the political-science book about the pandemic. Thread:

Former head of trust and safety at Twitter, Yoel Roth, demonstrating the intellectual dishonesty of “In Covid’s Wake” by showing how they distorted his own words to make them say the opposite of what he was arguing.

“Like Prime, but with human beings.”

We sent a bunch of effete, Ivy League scientists into the desert and they returned with a portable sun.

“I’m 84 years old. Threats against my life expectancy are kind of hollow. I don’t have much time anyway. I’m more concerned that our democracy is at risk because of the trends against the rule of law.” www.nbcnews.com/politics/pol...

One answer: next yea’s primaries. With all 435 House seats and 30-some Senate seats up in 2026, it would be good to come up with a candidate questionnaire for Democratic candidates. Use it to identify which ones will free their party of the problems Sarah Kendzior has identified.

Really enjoyed this interview with Theda Skocpol, one of the founders of the American Political Development research I do. Here she talks about being interdisciplinary and the challenges of keeping the big picture in view while also drilling down on nuance and details. Whole thing was a great read.

One answer: next yea’s primaries. With all 435 House seats and 30-some Senate seats up in 2026, it would be good to come up with a candidate questionnaire for Democratic candidates. Use it to identify which ones will free their party of the problems Sarah Kendzior has identified.

It's not the end of the world, but it's certainly the end of the Dem grift being hidden in any way. If the current admin wasn't a fascist cult and could actually be trusted (which they of course cannot), I'd say they should investigate Dem finances; that was an MLM scheme dressed up as a campaign.

Deep dive on mafia state enabler Merrick Garland here. Written in 2023: sarahkendzior.substack.com/p/servants-o...

Everyone involved in the publication and promotion of this book should be embarrassed. It's not a "harsh truth" that COVID mitigation was a mistake, it's ghoulish and false.

The Biden DOJ had a perfectly legal avenue to release this to the public—a response to a FOIA request. They may have even been legally obligated to produce it in response to the FOIA request. And they decided not to, to protect Donald Trump’s reputation? What?

Key media hack: All you have to do to kill an unfavorable story is refuse to talk to the reporter. Clip'n'save

I love this essay unreservedly.

These declines are MASSIVE. And the comparative silence in media coverage is absolutely DAMNING. “Why are ppl always so afraid of crime?” THIS is why. When crime goes up, media trips over itself to report it. Falls to pre-war (!!) levels? Just CRICKETS.

Key media hack: All you have to do to kill an unfavorable story is refuse to talk to the reporter. Clip'n'save

Evidence that @akalhan.bsky.social via social media changed the world for the better Tired: Law as a tool for social change. Wired: Social media as a tool for legal change.

The Case for a Public Social Media Platform. “What if the United States government decided to, overnight, nationalize Facebook and make it a digital division of the post office. What would that look like?” [daily.jstor.org]

This is totally underreported. Trump is not just going after "illegals." He's going after people who were here legally, by changing their status. These are people who entered the US the right way, and never broke a law. Now they are subject to Trump's whim, his ICE goons, and inhuman detention.

Congestion pricing for all

It is. You can actually search visible text on the redacted documents and the completely UNredacted document appears in the results 😭

🤢🤮

Everyone in the government that was involved in sending American people to the CECOT concentration camp must go to prison. Prison. There must be consequences. Starting with Kristi Noem.

Among the newly-released Epstein files. This Justice Dept email from Jan 2020 'I wanted to let you know that the flight records we received yesterday reflect that Donald Trump traveled on Epstein's private jet many more times than previously has been reported"

Bill Clinton releasing a statement saying 'release the Epstein files, you cowards' was not on my bingo list.

60 Minutes segment on CECOT torture prisons. Watch, download, and share.

This is only 13 minutes. Here’s two links to the whole thing: www.icloud.com/photos/#/icl... mega.nz/file/1QNnADq...

Watch it (and download) while you can.

iCloud, Mega, and as a torrent. Archivists have uploaded the 60 Minutes episode Bari Weiss spiked.

"Pulling the Supreme Court back from the cliff is something progressives should view as far preferable to the alternative—where it may not just be the Court that gets pushed over the edge and into oblivion, but our entire constitutional (and democratic) order." Me in today's issue of "One First":

Here is something to help your quality of search experience slightly: When typing your query, add "-ar" to the end. This suppresses the useless AI slop.

Here is something to help your quality of search experience slightly: When typing your query, add "-ar" to the end. This suppresses the useless AI slop.

I think this is an another data point concerning where things are going, nothing more. but, it’s worth a read. reason.com/volokh/2025/...

Seems worth noting at this point that Weiss's internal critics at the Times were correct and her many apologists among elite pundits were wrong

Thread:

Per NY Times’s Michael Grynbaum on X, this is Sharyn Alfonsi’s email to her “60 Minutes” colleagues in full:

Few things sum up our current national mood more than "This was meant to be an optimistic outlook and now I’m speculating on mass-death scenarios."

What historians (and other scholars do) is create knowledge. We should use that phrase more and talk about what it means. I think we don't, and it's part of why AI enthusiasts are confused when we don't readily agree that our work can be replicated/replaced by their products.

Yeah so when you read a summary of an overview of an area you don’t become a subject matter expert. You’re just a guy who read a Wikipedia article.

Your time would be better served ruminating on what we are saying, admitting AI is a profound mistake, and figuring out how to atone for it going forward in your "work." Your Plagiarism Button has made our jobs infinitely harder and we are disgusted with everything your industry has foisted on us.

You absolutely will not convince a bunch of historians and sociologists and whoever else is in this thread that you know more than we do about this and we should use it. I wish you AI enthusiasts would stop wading into our conversations. You have nothing helpful to contribute and are snarky.

"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." This piece on AI by Cory Doctorow is spectactular. pluralistic.net/2025/12/05/p...

Reporters Working on Epstein Documents: Please refer to FILE NAMES. If there are 4 or 24, "paintings depicting nude women" isn't sufficient. Unique identifiers, not narrative, are required to disambiguate among thousands of items. Esp. if some disappear. File names are in the lower right corner. ⤵️

Trump's new executive order will ban, over the next three years, more than 140,000 spouses, fiancés, and minor children of US citizens and legal permanent residents. Nearly 100,000 nuclear family of US citizens. Unconscionable

House member WAR is a reasonable guide to how much slack you should cut red district Dems but it is not a terribly good basis for shittalking sitting reps. as Brian Scalabrine once said “I’m closer to LeBron than you are to me.”

He at some point tried to advocate for change. But around 2017 he saw that half of Dems in Congress want to roll over and play dead, and he gave up on them. And then he went fully over into saying things that the powerful liked. If you believed there was no fixing the US, would you do it too?

On the Yglesias debate today: I disagree with a lot of the takes about him. First, he is smart and works hard and his blog can be good. So, the problems? He’s become nihilistic about politics so he is now self-serving, he butters up the wealthy and powerful, and he uses social media to troll.

i really think there is legit political space for running on "we are going to dismantle ICE"

When I'm feeling particularly hopeless about the future of professoring as a profession, I try to remind myself: That's what they want. They want us to not want to be professors anymore.