FT: “.. Wherever you look in financial markets, you see signs that global investors are going out of their way to avoid Donald Trump’s America.” @financialtimes.com @scottlincicome.bsky.social www.ft.com/content/cfdc...

You're getting pictures of my garden on this dark winter night because your feed deserves better.

Read @zackbeauchamp.bsky.social's important piece and include his writings on your syllabi, if you teach courses on authoritarianism, democracy, constitutionalism, protest movements, etc. My students and I have learned a lot from his work.

This is a sanctions evasion story; but it should also be read as a story about a sophisted mafia state that the current regime in Washington would very much like to emulate. www.nytimes.com/2026/02/23/t...

I rather like this! It forces delusional faculty who think AI is just a tool to either go on the record as not caring about learning at all, or embrace analogue methods of instruction.

For the past five months, I've been doing a research fellowship studying how democracies beat elected authoritarians like Trump. I found a deceptively simple answer: if you want to save democracy, you have to *actually talk about democracy*. www.vox.com/politics/479...

Trump, July 19: "All three nuclear sites in Iran were completely destroyed and/or OBLITERATED. It would take years to bring them back into service." Witkoff, Sunday: "They're probably a week away from having industrial-grade bomb-making material."

He will ‘help’ as long as you can still pay for his services. Exhibit A 👇🏽 giftarticle.ft.com/giftarticle/...

Unlike X and Twitter before it, this site isn’t designed to snowball posts towards virality. Thus it’s more welcome for slow thinkers like the kind @beijingpalmer.bsky.social names and less useful as a one-stop shop for Today’s Zeitgeist—which has become an indispensable crutch for journalists.

This is super interesting. The last one I can read fluently is 1600. I can then still read it and figure out (almost) every word, with some puzzling, but then lose it almost completely at 1200. www.deadlanguagesociety.com/p/how-far-ba...

An underappreciated argument

Cast yourself as a free speech warrior to win power and then surveil speech to decide who can be a citizen.

This is going to hurt for four years 😢

I’ve aged during this gold medal match.

👇🏽 Indeed. It’s hard to read/take seriously any analysis that doesn’t treat Trump as an independent variable.

Thomas Schelling rolling in his grave…

Americans should understand that Trump has forward deployed a substantial fraction of US land-based aircraft out in the open within missile range of Iran. This is a war of choice that could wipe out combat power the US might wish it had husbanded for other scenarios. www.nytimes.com/2026/02/20/u...

Remember that time the Pentagon's National Defense Strategy declared that the US had "obliterated Iran's nuclear program"? That was **checks notes** January 23, less than 30 days ago.

Iranian leaders are stuck in the Saddam trap at the moment: i.e. the facts of the case have nothing to do with what’s being demanded of them.

Trump dismissed Europe and NATO for having ever done anything for the US. But the “armada” he’s assembling to strike Iran couldn’t operate without the direct support of Europe. open.substack.com/pub/ivodaald...

Terrific as always by Ali Ansari open.substack.com/pub/iranshah...

They don't care how it looks to anyone except to themselves. The manufacture of a new political class beholden to this principle is the sum of his imprint on this country and the world.

Ah, the return of the Bloody Nose strategy, abandoned by the first Trump administration as unworkable in North Korea.

This is spot on 👇🏽 “Betting on war is dangerous and Iran’s rulers may be badly misreading the situation. But a regime that has its back to the wall is most prone to taking perilous risks.” giftarticle.ft.com/giftarticle/...

And the choice of one man made up/driven almost entirely by the contempt he feels for his two predecessors.

‘Last June, after striking three Iranian nuclear sites, Mr. Trump declared that Iran’s nuclear program had been “obliterated.” But now he is considering sending U.S. military back to continue the job.’ www.nytimes.com/2026/02/18/u...

The other batsh*t insane thing is that we *had* an informal confederation built around "western civilization," one made through the defeat of Nazism and the containment of Marxist-Leninism. It worked! What made it durable was the liberal internationalist ideas and institutions, *not* the racism.

This is all good and not terribly revelatory. Left out of this analysis is the news diet of the Obamaworld, which is safe to assume consisted mostly of articles like this written by similarly insular courtly analysts like Baker. www.nytimes.com/2026/02/17/u...

I've been thinking about this recently, given reports that major European leaders are talking about bypassing Washington to deal with Russia. These bozos really haven't thought through what strategic autonomy means for the United States.

Hegseth disqualified per his own list?

This is about one thing to them: Liberal democracy = “civilizational erasure” Also, what is this but a cheaper version of Huntington’s later writings? It’s clear as day the Heritage brains got lured in by the clash thesis and then found total inner peace in his anti-immigration manifesto.

She didn’t appoint herself though…

It’s finally done. Absolutely thrilled to have submitted THE SHAH'S GREAT TOUR – my global microhistory of the epic royal journeys of Persia's monarchs to Imperial Europe – for production. May it reshape our understanding of monarchy and the world order in the imperial age.

Second installment: open.substack.com/pub/hedgeofs...

2023-2024 American politics being repeated in the UK before our very eyes. www.theguardian.com/politics/liv...

What a small, impoverished, and sad soul.

The world certainly doesn’t need another current affairs substack, but perhaps there is room for one that tries to interpret the wilderness through gardens and landscape design? I’m tending the soil at ‘Hedge of State’. open.substack.com/pub/hedgeofs...

UK Labour look like Biden Democrats... sleepwalking ever sedately into disaster and collective ruin.

Put differently: If anger over elite impunity==>populism, & anger over Epstein cover-up==>release of docs, why isn't evidence of elite wrongdoing in the financial crisis, a major event in elite impunity timeline, driving outrage? Too easy to say "elite impunity" when docs released b/c of 2025 anger.

As always with Ganesh, this is too clever by half. The “public elite” are also just facts and numbers to the private elite. giftarticle.ft.com/giftarticle/...

Lee Hamilton was/is a monument to integrity in public service and d dictation to the common good. A true honor to have known him and been so warmly welcomed by him and the late Dick Lugar at the institution that aims to model their approach to the world. www.nytimes.com/2026/02/04/u...

👇🏽 And most of them more diligent in covering their tracks and scrubbing evidence.

May I suggest a companion read: www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archiv...

Not even the Guardian bothers to point out the irony of Trump boasting about impending talks over a program that just 7 month ago he was claiming he had completely destroyed.

How different the world would look today if Bill Clinton and top Democratic donors also weren’t in the illicit Epstein orbit? It’s hard to imagine Trump surviving a basic opposition research check in 2016, but Hillary likely had to stay away from all that given the close proximity to Bill and D 💵💵💵.

Talked to Deutsche Welle about the US military buildup against Iran in the region www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZr7...

Just a reminder, the greatest living American historian filmmaker, Ken Burns, released a 720 min exploration of every facet of the American revolution using zero generative AI and paying for all of its assets instead of cobbling it from stolen data, then he gave it away for free on PBS this year.

I cannot tell you how much doubt was consistently directed at the Gaza Health Ministry’s casualty numbers and how much pressure was put on news organizations to couch those numbers as unreliable. Biden himself said they were fabricated! www.haaretz.com/israel-news/...

He murders you and drags your corpse through the mud. Fintan O’Toole on the “crime” of witness. www.nybooks.com/online/2026/...

The Trump team, top-to-bottom, lie with such ease to save face, especially when talking to friendly media. nationalpost.com/news/politic...