" The top two was inevitably going to produce one of two evils: elected officials who don’t match the will of the people, or a fiercely top-down selection that robs voters of an opinion. Neither is desirable, making the jungle primary not just dangerous but intolerable." prospect.org/2026/02/09/c...

I'm in a tiny cluster outside and just between "Progressive American Democrats" and "Danish journalists and public figures"? suspect this is another win for Danish Marxism

for those of you horrified by the Ring ad I have a book for you. there's a reason the original subtitle was "From Bentham to Bezos" www.versobooks.com/products/312...

If you want a vision of the future, imagine the Mr. Beast Salesforce AI ad stomping on a human face - forever

What's the most you ever lost on a coin toss? Anton Chigurh here for FanDuel,

I am told we begin printing TOMORROW! still can't believe it's happening

will gently remind everyone that while we have plenty to learn from the Luddites, they failed. the most impactful workers of the early 19th century were those who recognized the terrain of struggle had changed and organized in new ways

forget close reading it's time for practicing distant reading. squinting at the book from across the room. asking someone else to read it and summarize it to you in a language I only half understand. waiting to analyze it until it's been long enough that you forgot most of the details

I still think it’s a bit of a scandal that this isn’t the game that gaming historians talk about all the time. It’s the single most interesting historical game I know. Maybe apart from Pentiment.

from successfully finishing book 1 and getting stuck revising book 2 I have learned that my writing process is a sprint to construct something faster than I can deconstruct it

Thanks to Eileen Boris for this report on the erasure of labor history at Lowell National Historic Park.

had no idea how hard it was to get the college bookstore to do only print books for a course. at this point I swear I'm gonna have to bribe somebody at barnes and noble or something

" The theory is not that abuse did not occur, but that the Constitution requires the state to tolerate it." newrepublic.com/article/2059...

Very important; RN Buckley's work on this subject is essential and must be acknowledged by @theguardian.com

WSJ: SpaceX trying to push the bag onto index investors ASAP. Can’t describe how predatory this is and if index providers carve out an exception for them or other large IPOs it’ll be a huge hit to their credibility IMO.

looking over Continental Navy accounting paperwork and between the multiple overlapping currencies, communication delays, supply shortages, and labor disputes it's remarkable they managed to get even a single ship on the water

My working theory of Trumpism is that he is (among other things) the cutting edge of the bosses' campaign to reassert control over their white-collar workforce. The loss of control provided by the physical office during/after the pandemic would then. be part of what they're pushing back against.

my first book is apparently now being translated into a third language by yet another publisher? genuinely humbled there is this much interest in what I have to say

Crazy story: A bank analyst published a report showing Kalshi users lose money even faster than sports gamblers, so Kalshi first tried to pressure the data provider to change their data and then accused them and the analyst of conspiring to extort them when that doesn’t work.

🚨History Job: Assistant Professor in Early Modern British History (Permanent) 🗃️ Come work with us at Warwick! You will join a group of excellent early-modernists and one of the nicest bunches of historians around! 👇👇👇 @uni-of-warwick.bsky.social warwick-careers.tal.net/vx/lang-en-G...

I'm a huge fan of Claudio Saunt's project on land claims and treaties and cessions that is so revelatory in its scope-- pic 1 is 1776, pic 2 is 1876. Blue is Indian homelands, gray is unceded territory, red is reservations. usg.maps.arcgis.com/apps/webappv...

Some fun "vibe shift" headlines here IMO.

if everything that's bad is the same you cannot do any other analysis of any of it. it is important not to erase distinctions or interfaces in the process of connecting things

It's nice that these people are at least finally admitting that what they want and have always wanted was to try Iraq again

it's fascinating how we haven't been able to move past these dynamics

This is absolutely insane: DHS claims the right to subpoena your emails and to send investigators to your house. In this case, because a retiree sent the mildest possible criticism to a prosecutor. No judges involved. www.washingtonpost.com/investigatio...

The Perseverance rover collected a core sample of what might be definitive evidence of previous organic life on Mars. That sample might never make it back to Earth because the 1,000-person mission to retrieve the sample, run of out the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, was killed by trump.

if I'm ever telling people restaurants are more expensive than cooking please someone either hit me over the head with my own book and demand I never write about the economy again, or take my credit card and keep me from buying new appliances every time I cook

This judge temporarily preserving TPS for Haitians has no patience for Kristi Noem's nonsense!! DAMN!!!!! 🔥 #Haiti #TPS

This is Noam Chomsky talking about Cambodian refugees accurately describing the horrors of the Khmer Rouge that they’d escaped from. This line in particular is why I’ve hated Chomsky for so long.

the reactionary centrist "the mob is wrong" reflex should be understood not as pro-free speech but as an affirmative opposition to democracy and the public. or simply to accountability of any kind

This is really not a comment on anything contemporary, but -having been immersed in various late 19c economic policy debates recently, found myself wondering: what exactly do people pay for when they pay for "housing"? (A major cost in any estimation of household budgets)

about a year ago someone in an organizing space I'm in (being vague because the point here isn't an individual call-out) was like "this year we will bury liberalism!" personally while I was and am hoping we can than it I quite liked liberalism over what's happening now, actually

I wrote about Plato, Huxley, and Dewey— thepointmag.com/examined-lif...

"zero interest rates were too high" so we need "return to tribalism" -i did not know monetary policy was a topic that could fill me with such hatred -perhaps we've gone from c20 "military keynesianism" to "mercantile keynesianism"

my god, forget 19th-century colonialism, this is 17th-century colonialism. it's hard to shock me these days but "using genocide and the resulting famine to secure a royal colonial monopoly on trucking" is really something www.theguardian.com/world/2026/f...

lot of confusion about what a general strike is as opposed to a boycott — in a general strike, usually one sector refuses to go to work, and every other job sector follows — you don't actually need huge union density to achieve this, but it helps jacobin.com/2021/07/st-l...

Latest YouGov/Economist poll shows that the total number of Democratic voters who want aid to Israel to increase is 4%. 4%.

Sure, everyone wants to talk about how General Motors popularized consumer financing as an industrial growth strategy, but nobody wants to talk about the uh "topography" they put in the background of their sales pamphlets

It's uncharitable, but "the people with prominent parents are on this beside of the argument" is a hell of a heuristic.

checking in on this again bsky.app/profile/henr...

“Epstein plausibly responsible for /pol” is too much for me

tag yourself i’m I AM MANOEUVRING WITH DIFFICULTY

thinking about this subject again. I would would phrase some of the claims about what AI can currently do differently, but I think the argument holds up: anything that is close to "conscious" will pursue its own ends, and normative and positive agency aren't severable buttondown.com/anotherway/a...

"News outlets across the political spectrum need to loudly defend [independent journalists Don] Lemon’s and [Georgia] Fort’s rights. Journalists are not making themselves the story, Trump is.” Full Freedom of the Press Foundation statement below.

A thrilling intellectual and economic history of workplace control from the birth of capitalism to the modern tech giants. Now available for preorder - Control Science: How Management Made the Modern World by Henry Snow

Very cool new work on congestion pricing - exciting both for the results and the methodology.