the president, who tried to appoint another pedophile to be his attorney general, is trying to cover up his relationship with the world's most famous sex trafficker. his defenders have suggested that this may only be because the trafficker arranged payments to him from Russian oligarchs.

There's something so... disturbing about MAHA using incredibly low, low rates of adverse reaction to justify putting what are obviously harm reducing medications from people

trying to start a moral panic and the stories are all like “the ADHD meds really helped but didn’t solve everything”

Can’t believe the whole country has to suffer through the return of Dickensian childhood diseases because the worst, most ignorant attention-demanders decided other people’s expertise makes them feel bad

Reminder that it is much easier to tweak a social media recommendation algorithm to produce the results you want than it is to tweak an LLM to do the same. If you are on Twitter you are on a platform that shows you what Elon wants you to see (and buries your posts if they aren't)

Fun Fact, the Guillotine became such a powerful symbol of bourgeois terror that the Paris Commune banned it

eyes emoji

Any time capsule summaries come up, I think of the best capsule summary of a TV episode I ever saw. It was for the Squidbillies episode "Giant Foam Dickhat Trouble" and read, "Early's party hat enrages God."

No offense to people who go to ivies, but when I hear about them now it’s mostly in the context of extremely wrong and/or evil people having gone to them. You know what institution has never bowed to Trump or employed Larry Summers? My alma mater, The Evergreen State College. Geoduck pride, yall

Married historian life: When you watch the new Ken Burns Am Rev doc together with the remote between you so you can pause every 3.5 mins and debate. Or yell. Or praise.

Over on Threads there's discourse about some 28 year-old unschooled woman not knowing that Anne Frank died because her mother left the upsetting parts out of history when teaching her, and that would be an excellent example of why unschooling is frequently a fancy word for educational neglect.

when I was young, i used to wonder how people like this would fare in life, as they didn't seem suited for gainful employment. it turns out, the internet allowed them to accumulate a massive audience of similar idiots, enriching them and turning them into a presidential advisor

Seek him that made the Pleiades and Orion

"We have a 2000s housing bubble level of financial engineering on top of a 1920s level of private unregulated lending on top of something bigger than a 1990s internet (or 1870s railroad) level of technology and infrastructure build-out." prospect.org/2025/11/19/a...

desperately wish i had come up with it

holy shit

Returning to fossil fuels is not a "pragmatic" decision. It is a delusional one.

NEW: In 2024, Tierra Walker was sick and getting sicker. She was also pregnant. She knew abortion was illegal in Texas, but thought there was an exception for women like her, whose health was at risk. Doctors told her there was no emergency. Then she died. www.propublica.org/article/texa...

Warnock‘s speech was my favorite at the DNC last year and I totally agree he has the juice.

one thing about this is that in the wake of all of this kirk is basically forgotten. he was barely cold in the ground before his allies — before his *wife* — started scheming over what they could take for themselves. a real life parable.

It’s worth making explicit (which Jamelle Bouie knows and has said) that this is because personalism requires corruption! You either are ruled by laws and the people or you divy out favors and fiefdoms to cronies in exchange for support.

I think "never again to us" vs. "never again to anybody" has been a mostly-unspoken divide in the Jewish community that's only now becoming obvious.

There is no easier ethical test in the world than "should MBS's money buy him international respect."

These two are like bullshit pickleball.

wrote about the president’s flagrant and destructive corruption in a column that references street fighter, the simpsons, machiavelli, and a host of revolutionary-era americans (gift link)

one thing i think is true is that republicans assumed that democrats would not respond in kind and that the forceful pushback spooked them (a lesson to learn here, perhaps)

Few things bug me more than higher ed leaders saying that we lost our mission and lost the trust of the public, when we have actually been the target of a decades-long smear campaign by the right wing that worked. The moment we’re losing our mission is right now, in capitulation.

OPINION: At this polarizing moment, anything that promises to bring Americans together warrants our attention. But as a historian of religion, I feel obliged to recount how popular interpretations of Thanksgiving also have pulled us apart. religionnews.com/2025/11/17/h...

The “canceled people” database listing victims of cancel culture, which includes oft-repeated cases such as Bret Weinstein (Evergreen State College) and James Damore (Google), has a little over 200 entries across 18 years. canceledpeople.org

Marjorie Taylor Greene has been disliked by the left for years and years and had never had to fear for her life. She's been disliked by the right for 1 day and now has to hire security.

I don't know why the "Piggy" thing is bothering me so much. It's one more unforgivable thing in a list of 20,000 unforgivable things, but I've been mad about it for like 12 straight hours.

One of the weird elephants in the room that no one wants to quite talk about head on is that the entire conceit of the neoliberal political economy is that elected leaders can't control the price level! So no wonder everyone is going run right into a brick wall.

I mean it's not this simple but a handful of policy elites really did drastically reengineer our urban fabric in ways that were popular in the immediate term and created massive social dysfunction beyond that.

Send this man to Congress

Noah Smith is doing Judeo-Bolshevism but about Muslims and Arabs

This is the hardest I have seen any member of Congress work to try and address transphobia in Congress, and her ability to get nearly all Democratic lawmakers to sign onto this letter is something any first would applaud

Few if any mainstream/center-left parties are as good on trans rights as Democrats, and we don't do ourselves any favors by pretending otherwise.

the first trans member of congress got nearly the entire house democratic caucus to sign onto a letter saying misgendering trans people is not only wrong but violates the rules of that chamber of congress you don’t see that happen in most countries tbh

So Harvard is keeping this guy, but Claudine Gay had to step down over ginned up plagiarism accusations and bad-faith accusations of anti-Semitism. Got it.

As I understand it wolves in the wild mostly resolve conflicts by splitting the pack. Which, relatable.

Am I a hypocrite for wanting this after giving a hard no to muppet knives out

pretty much beyond question that Larry Summers led the charge against Claudine Gay because he is personally a vitriolic misogynist and racist www.thecrimson.com/article/2024...

welcome to the club, wolves

i will kind of accept this from some random person who barely pays attention. ben shapiro though? he's just lying

“We are in the middle of a scandal of elites palling around with one of the most infamous child sex traffickers in the world, and this is our political press? No wonder Epstein got away with it all so long: many of the men tasked with being the watchdogs were almost as gross as he was with women.”

You know what I deleted that I don’t need to dunk on a 19 year old.

elderly tariff otaku president having a meltdown tantrum day after delivering one of his most incoherent speeches yet yesterday, looking great as ever, things are fine, everything’s fine

conceding to far right ideas about the structure of society is conceding to a zero sum vision of the world, and more importantly giving voters a choice between two zero sum visions, where one is half hearted and the other is full throated. is it really a surprise then they choose the latter?

to be clear, i also do not think it is necessarily true that adopting a laundry list of progressive positions is an instant win either. i think you have to do the work of discovering what it is that voters want in a direct and engaged way. and i think that voters want moral leadership.