This is a really important book for this historical moment, and the authors are among the best scholars on the topics related to democratic oversight of militaries. So I’m eager to dig in

From Rasmus Jarlov, chair of Denmark’s Defence Committee:

Borgesian diplomacy for our times.

Trump boasting to the UNGA that he ended the war between Ethiopia and Egypt is in a way a brilliant tactical move, a bit like saying he eradicated The Vapours. He should have similar celebrations of the negotiated end of the Liechtenstein-Bolivia and Canada-Chad wars

It's too bad the Milgram experiment only gets taught as a negative example of research ethics, because its result was extremely informative about the extent of loyalty in post-WWII Americans and I'd like to see it re-run today on current US voters... though they ARE sort of running it in real time

Two traditional end goals of the peace process have been turned into opening bids. First was recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel (and Palestine); US and other countries did this, partly. Second is recognition of a Palestinian state, which is now near-universal, sometimes conditionally.

A guy in Winnipeg made a 45-minute fully produced feature-film version of "Steamed Hams" modelled after Louis Malle's My Dinner With Andre, so don't you go saying Canada is broken www.youtube.com/watch?v=pk-O...

Let me get this straight. They brought an actual murderer over from Venezuela and put him on the streets of America. And they’re taking thousands of non-criminal Venezuelans—less prone to crime than Americans— off the streets of America and deporting them www.nytimes.com/2025/07/24/w...

A few years ago this hateful “theory” — that Jews conspired to replace whites with people of other colours — was so obscure I was easily able to trace where the Christchurch and Pittsburgh synagogue murderers learned it from. Now the US and Israeli leaders celebrate one of its adherents

The next few years are going to be littered with millions of untold stories like this. Mothers watching their babies die of starvation because Musk took a woodchopper to USAID www.cnn.com/2025/09/21/a...

This paper from the Varieties of Democracy Institute is excellent and, yes, we are going to win

The Prime Minister of Israel and leader or the Turkeys-voting-for-Thanksgiving party

That’s one way to deal with food insecurity Trump Administration to Stop Measuring Food Insecurity www.nytimes.com/2025/09/20/u...

An explanation by the man himself of the plastic Chinese gew-gaws. {The art objects may be real gold, or more probably gold-plated. They come from the people's collections in the national museums he is trying to destroy.}

IYNC, Chalet Sauce aka Swiss Chalet Tangy Sauce is chicken gravy flavoured with Earl Gray tea. These chips got a positive review in my household

One of the great paradoxes of authoritarianism is that so-called strongman leaders are always very thin-skinned

This would affect a lot of Canadians. Third largest H1B source country after India and China. Conversely, Canada might want to re-start its program to bring in highly talented H1B holders who suddenly find themselves unable to enter the States… www.nytimes.com/2025/09/19/u...

The first time Trump declared “antifa” a terrorist organization, in 2020, the Justice Department failed to find or charge any such organization despite arresting 14,000 people for protesting. This vagueness makes his crackdown much more terrifying www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/arti...

He has this exactly wrong.

This is precisely the kind of government coercion that the First Amendment was designed to prevent — and media companies need to start standing up rather than capitulating to it.

The first time Trump declared “antifa” a terrorist organization, in 2020, the Justice Department failed to find or charge any such organization despite arresting 14,000 people for protesting. This vagueness makes his crackdown much more terrifying www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/arti...

A free and democratic society cannot silence comedians because the President doesn’t like what they say. This is an attack on free speech and cannot be allowed to stand. All elected officials need to speak up and push back on this undemocratic act.

Reichstag Fire Moment www.nytimes.com/2025/09/17/b...

Pay attention to the extraordinary work of my colleague Hasan Jaber, whose reporting from Gaza has graced our front pages for the past two years. Despite having lost dozens of family and being trapped himself, his work is a beacon of impartial professionalism www.theglobeandmail.com/world/articl...

🚨🚨 "Keir Starmer is betting everything on an America that doesn’t exist any more". Great column by @rafaelbehr.bsky.social on the gamble of British foreign policy

Of course, even if the New York Times WERE an organ of the Democratic Party working in lockstep to undermine the president, there would be no grounds whatsoever for a defamation suit. But the actual contents of Trump's latest soon-to-be-dismissed suit are wilder than that www.ft.com/content/57da...

It was really a tossup as to whether Trump was going to make friends with Venezuelan dictator Maduro and enable him with friendly deals, or enrage him by conducting extrajudicial killings of his smugglers. So far it's the latter, although there's nothing to rule out both at once

One of the weirder usage changes of recent years is replacing “committed suicide” with “died by suicide.” Someone must have decided the original phrase implied a crime, which it’s not. But the problem isn’t “committed,” a neutral word meaning “did.” It’s “suicide,” which literally means self-murder.

Definitely the best Iran headline of the year

Why?????

Good analogy. I'd cut the "possibly." But this place, while oring-bay on the iscourse-dey, also has the advantage of being the place of repose for scholars and experts, so the quality of actual knowledge to be gained is much higher

The notion of 3,000 fake podcasts per week generated by AI must sound awful to people who devote time and creative energy to creating podcasts, and somewhat worse than the status quo to those of us who spend our days searching for the "transcript" button

Oh good lord. The RFK jr “MAHA Report” has entire sections on the health harms of “electromagnetic radiation,” among other narratives that are often considered diagnostic indicators of psychiatric delusion rather than materially existing things

By "cosplaying Nigel Farage" to court a dwindling share of angry white voters, Keir Starmer is blowing an opportunity to be the party of normal reasonable people while the two opposition parties chase each other far to the right of the cultural mainstream www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/arti...

This is much easier once you know what a petard is and what hoist implies in this context (which happens after your 20th Hamlet performance)

The other day in Senate chair I saw a book that wasn’t there It wasn’t there again today I wish that book would go away

Assembled a Roman-emperor torture device and of course the dinner-jacket dude was all for it

Historic selfie. Ukraine’s government leadership always visit the sites of Russia’s drone and missile attacks. Today Prime Minister Yulia Svyrydenko just had to walk down the hall. This is the cabinet of ministers building in central Kyiv after the biggest Russian drone attack of the war.

We spent the morning watching salmon try to leap up waterfalls on the Humber river. When one made it up, everyone would applaud. Highly recommended, even if you’re not a bear

Weirdly, that’s also my slogan

So, the United States cabinet official responsible for health believes, and has argued in a book, that *GERM THEORY* is a hoax. A theory that by approximately 1857 had ceased to be a theory because by then we could actually see the germs

This is “we’re a republic not a democracy” logic

Superb reporting from @saramojtehedz.bsky.social on the disturbing humanitarian consequences of the Safe Third Country Agreement under the Trump regime‘s cruelty www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/artic...

Ok, Elon really IS following the Putin/Xi model www.theguardian.com/world/2025/s...

This development is an indication of what appears to be taking shape: a pseudo-federal "counter-America" state apparatus comprised of those states and cities that are never going to elect authoritarians. It doesn't exist formally, but the infrastructure is emerging www.nytimes.com/2025/09/03/u...

The “We accept Bitcoin” LED sign on a corner shop is not an indication that it’s one of those fancy elite high-tech corner shops. It’s an indication that the shop also sells bootleg cigarettes from China under the counter.

Nice instance of the great New York Times verbless headline

This is a pretty amazing story. Imagine all political and trade relations between two enormous powers with ideologically aligned leaders falling apart permanently over the pettiest of side-eyes in a single phone call www.nytimes.com/2025/08/30/u...

A Gadhafi minister once explained to me that "Great Man-Made River" was meant to be read not as "A great river that's man-made" but as "a river made by the Great Man" Likewise when the UNSC(-1) calls the famine a "man-made crisis," we all know who the man is www.theglobeandmail.com/world/articl...