Well what can I say Bari Weiss did get me to watch some CBS News content

60 minutes CECOT segment. Recorded through my browser. HD quality. Not phone. Spread it around. If you're press, it's yours. Go nuts. It's streaming on a Canadian website, but there is no telling for how long. www.filemail.com/d/wkcdttnacp...

This Yglesias piece in the NYT is horrifically bad. Almost every "fact" it cites is provably false. At best it is cocktail party banter from a pundit who knows nothing of energy. At worst, it was cut/paste from oil industry talking points. So, a rebuttal: www.nytimes.com/2025/12/18/o...

Legal bans on affirmative action mean that universities can realistically only diversify slightly and in places where there could be a focus on studying identity. So it's reasonable that there are effects in some areas. But they're small, locally concentrated, and not offsetting overall distribution

Got some figures from the @lachlanmcnamee.bsky.social Salma Mousa & @kylepeyton.bsky.social DEI analysis from 4.67 million employment records at US public universities (1993-2024) Compact article gets it backwards. Unis diversified *leadership* not faculty.

So just like most of the other releases then

I’m not a degrowther but I became one while watching this video

Terrifying headline if you don’t realize they are sports teams.

I believe this in my soul; there is no such thing as "deserve" in academia and if you are lucky enough to have a TT academic job all you can do is to try to live up to it - this is not to take anything away from the terrific people working hard who have those jobs, but we're all on a knife's edge

I’m very reluctant to weigh in on the discussion about the academic job market and race. I was on the market from 2011 to 2017 (the last two years with a job, so more selectively and calmly). I made it to a lot of campus interviews and came in second many times, including for my first job

and yet somehow being a dick seemingly costs you nothing at all

Can’t believe their closing argument is “Venezuelans stole the oil in Venezuela” (I can believe it actually)

This is also true if you want to write for a magazine: you should read that magazine

If this is true, it's just the most comprehensive failure imaginable. Everyone failed. The terrible people are terrible and they failed. The better people are better and they also failed

Cold facts

Man, I was such a fan of Chomsky when I was 20 years old and he felt like a rare voice against the war in Iraq; I read almost everything he wrote and as I read I started to notice habits like selective quotation and oversimplification that really started to gnaw at me

My new book, THE MOST AWFUL RESPONSIBILITY goes on sale TODAY! It is a NEW argument about TRUMAN AND THE ATOMIC BOMB, from Hiroshima through the Korean War, from HarperCollins. alexwellerstein.com/writing/book...

Really smart piece from @cgmaisano.bsky.social getting beyond the popularism debates to argue that what Mamdani's victory shows the rest of the country isn't necessarily about ideology, but it is about organization dissentmagazine.org/online_artic...

*historian side-eye intensifies*

Right, but also, and I say this with all possible contempt, what Weiss wants to do is not ~~news~~

People keep talking about this happening to Mexico City within a couple of decades and it’s the sort of thing that you hear and think, no, that won’t happen, people will take action before it does. But what if they don’t?

Among the million insulting things about this is that every time over the years in which Republicans said they were working on their health care plan to improve Obamacare or whatever they were just straight up lying, it was totally obvious they were always lying, and there were no consequences

The scale and depth of the attack on our institutions means that there is no simple way for a pro-democracy coalition to flip the lights back on after Trump. We need transformative thinking. dissentmagazine.org/article/the-...

Read Thomas, read the thread

The funniest possible ending to all of this is Trump's unpopularity destroying the Republican Party as a vehicle for MAGA and into the smoking crater step the never-Trump neocons to reclaim it, then the cycle is repeated every twenty years forever

My History through Satire class at the University of Wisconsin (syllabus here: patrickiber.org/2025/08/26/s...) is getting to the end, and we're finishing up by looking through the archives of @theonion.com, including from its early days as a Madison paper

Part of the joke of this brilliant song by The Coup from ~~1994~~ is that even the other rich people find Trump detestable. 1994!!!!!!! youtu.be/z6Homo_amHQ?...

Fact-Checking Claims About Zohran Mamdani https://theonion.com/fact-checking-claims-about-zohran-mamdani/

This is what I keep saying: democratic socialism, agree with it or not, is a normal part of politics. It’s the effort to excise it that is extremist

can we all please agree that every trillionaire is a policy failure ok thx

A family friend was telling us about what her husband shared about his experience in Broadview before he was deported back to Mexico. She's been sharing to friends and family because she's just in disbelief & horror what her husband told her. She wasn't able to talk to him until he was in Mexico.

New online: Nikhil Pal Singh on Zohran Mamdani. www.dissentmagazine.org/online_artic...

Democratic socialism / social democracy is a normal part of politics and reflects the views of a not insignificant number of people in this country and if the Democratic Party is worried about its effect on national competitiveness they have two options

This is probably going to get lost because there's a lot going on today but it's important

To add to this, I would say that insofar as there has been a debate about whether Bush or Trump is “worse,” it should be replaced with an understanding of all the things Bush did that make it possible for Trump to be worse

I will stop quoting sections of GANGSTERS OF CAPITALISM when they stop being relevant. us.macmillan.com/books/9781250135599/gangstersofcapitalism/

checking in on the principled restrainers over at Tucker HQ

There was plenty of good stuff in Lepore’s These Truths but there was a really bad paragraph about the perniciousness of the “alt left”. I wonder what experiences she had to lead her to these conclusions that few seem to share

My personal version of “men think that they could have a fistfight with a bear and win” is that I think I would come across OK in a Chotiner interview

@maxgranger.info interviews the Salvadoran journalist Julia Gavarette about the state of the country and Bukele's methods of control www.newglobalpolitics.org/el-salvador/

I agree with this thread and this point

As long as Elon Musk is making us talk about Tolkien again here is @gerrycanavan.bsky.social's sharp piece about the challenges and joys of reading and enjoying Tolkien from the left www.dissentmagazine.org/article/tolk...

The spookiest thing about Spirit Halloween is that it does haunt the husks of dead retail space

This kind of thing is precisely why it was the CIA that sponsored modern art for US diplomatic purposes during the Cold War, the conservatives of that era complained in the same way if it was done overtly

Normal building history, then a bunch of racist, transphobic trolling by awful people

From the article referenced below: tldr esp. in authoritarian systems, mediocrities and worse tend to go into the secret police b/c those with better performance have better opportunities elsewhere, so secret police gets the dregs who are extra-dependable because the thing they can offer is loyalty

Dissent is looking for a Senior Editor - please let me know if you have any questions about this position www.dissentmagazine.org/about-dissen...

welcome to earth! can I interest you in a redevelopment opportunity

I think the thing that is hitting me most about the destruction of the East Wing of the White House is that it is the most physical manifestation of the fact that nobody who could stop him is stopping Trump from indulging his autocratic whims