Republicans really seem unable to understand you cannot debase yourself enough for this man.

Yes—since people (correctly) regard honesty as a trait, one hella-easily debunked lie undermines all the rest of your lies! No one tell the Texas GOP that.

Watched The Big Lebowski with the 16-y.o. last night and he loved it. He even Googled the Port Huron Statement and explained it to me. That kid has his head on straight.

Get ready, because it’s going to be extremely irritating in a few years when all the MAGA sycophants claim to have always had their doubts about Trump and to have just wanted to limit the blast radius and to be just so sad that he became such a train wreck. Consider this hypothesis PREREGISTERED.

@nycsanitation.bsky.social I’d like to report a sweep

Please send @jasmineclarkforga.bsky.social to Congress. We desperately need more scientists in the halls of power. To oppose the current crop of anti-science grifters. #ScienceSky 🧪

in this respect, there is a lot of truth to the ‘Trump is like The Mule from Asimov’s Foundation novels’ analogy, in that he has a mutant set of characteristics that have granted him a mode of success that has been hard to model/predict but also unlikely to be repeated in any direct way

I still find myself puzzling over this. How can anyone living in this era of kleptocratic kakistocracy find people's "ambient political or social pessimism“ mysterious? To me, this sentiment is about the most understandable thing imaginable. @whstancil.bsky.social, am I missing something?

Please watch this. It’s amazing & brilliant on so many levels.

Mystery? Folks are behaving like sentient beings. The “sentiment” in “consumer sentiment” tracks more than macroeconomics. Not only is inflation on the rise (etc.)—public corruption is off the charts, and our leaders clearly don’t give a damn about 99% of us. Pessimism is appropriate to the moment.

You have to figure people confuse this with the racism Crash movie and sit there on the couch silently for awhile before telling their loved one that they really tackled that in an unexpected way

There is no reason to have billionaires. Tax them mercilessly and use the money for parks, health care, libraries, affordable housing, and transportation. Fund research. Build some bullet trains. Take the money they use to soothe their broken souls and put it to good use. Just, um, a suggestion.

Once in a while, I like to pop over to X to see what’s going down in that mess. I can report that nothing—not a single thing!—has changed. Here’s one of the more venerable grifters misattributing the right’s lack of ideological constraint (Converse, 1964) to open-mindedness.

Robots f*cking up is hands down my favorite video genre.

With Thomas Massie losing his seat, let's revisit this 2017 quote from him giving us a look into the mind of the GOP voter: web.archive.org/web/20170315...

Yesss Make no mistake, this is disastrous for Republicans. www.nytimes.com/2026/05/19/u...

I find it reassuring that a mere 38.4% of my fellow Americans are in a cult.

Every time Trump destroys an insufficiently obsequious Republican congressperson, it further cements the GOP’s status as a fascist personality cult and delays its return to being a political party. That’s okay with me.

In bonobo communities, females achieve high status by forming coalitions against males. Sounds like solid, actionable advice.

The more I listen to this, the more I like it. open.spotify.com/album/0eeXb2...

The Cohen brothers are ruining Homer's legacy. Odysseus never records a hit song. This is an assault on western culture. I am very smart.

Like I'm always saying: Geen poppenspelers

this nation’s saving grace at the moment is that Trump is so unpopular (and so likely to become even more unpopular) that GOP vote-rigging probably won’t change they ultimate result, potentially leaving Dems with more time (and perhaps power) to take countermeasures before ‘28

compare and contrast: when IDF soldiers were caught on tape raping a Palestinian captive at Sde Teiman prison and prosecuted, Israeli civilians rioted outside the court and all charges were eventually dropped

Not a likely scenario, but it would be so funny if the Democrats lose the House but win the Senate.

The political influencer landscape is so gross. So many of them are being paid by campaigns and don't disclose it. They present themselves as journalist-adjacent, but don't bother with ethics.

Turns out, schools are way cheaper than ballrooms...

Some thoughts on social class prompted by critiques of Graham Platner's working-class bona fides: To me, these critiques miss the fact that social class is multifaceted — the proverbial "bundle of sticks." 1/ www.nytimes.com/2026/05/15/u...

i sang in the same choir juniper was in when i was an undergraduate. it was a wonderful community. i know they’re just devastated to lose her, just like everyone else who knew her. im so sorry juniper

Okay Widow's Bay is kind of ridiculously good.

NYU students aren't thrilled about Jon Haidt as their commencement speaker. Although this'll surely be grist for the Higher-Ed-Woke-Capture story generator, the letter reads mainly as "Hold up. You got us Taylor Swift. Now it's the guy monitoring our screen time?" drive.google.com/file/d/13p3h...

Of the many perks to being off Twitter, the best is not having to hear people call Eisenhower-era top marginal tax rates “communism.”

When we took office, NYC had a $12B deficit. Today it’s zero. And we didn’t close that gap on the backs of working people. We closed it while funding parks, libraries, safer streets, & public housing. Call it Pothole Politics or Democratic Socialism: We are government that delivers for the people.

[ chef’s kiss ]

Really makes you think.

Big fan of @aric.bsky.social's video analyses for the Times. Upshot here is that Iran has hit at least 18 U.S. assets in the region, causing billions of dollars in damage. Cheap drones have destroyed Black Hawks, radar domes, and other infrastructure. www.nytimes.com/video/world/...

I'll just note that critical race theory predicts quite a lot about the current racial retrenchment and for being *correct* it was pilloried in the press and by some academics.

TBF this is exactly what someone with nothing to hide would do

It's great that our refugee policy is based on a white supremacist conspiracy theory sourced from racist message boards that might cost you a job if you visited them on a work computer.

Calling the review of a book one hasn’t read “excellent” strikes me as epistemically probelamtic

On fashion’s big night out, we turned the lens onto the garment, retail, warehouse, and delivery workers who make the fashion industry possible. Read the full piece: bsky.app/profile/mayo...

We’re seeing more and more cognitive dissonance from centrists sympathetic to the anti-woke push as they realize that there’s no end in sight because it was always, at bottom, a revanchist movement intent on clawing back power from historically subordinated groups. Hence this dickishness.

The trend is incredibly important and encouraging. Since 2009, approval of labor unions has risen from 48% to 68%. That's a massive swing over just 16 years, and the increase is almost perfectly linear. This shows why the Democratic Party needs to embrace anti-neoliberal left-populism.

An excellent piece by @juliaazari.bsky.social on how a focus on polarization and an insistence on treating racial strife as a conflict between individuals work together very effectively to avoid the actual problems open.substack.com/pub/goodpoli...

an essential part of the remedy for this problem is going to have to involve stripping the Supreme Court of jurisdiction w/r/t legislation aimed at enforcing the reconstruction amendments

oren helped us understand the specifics of how settlers and IDF are repeatedly displacing Palestinians with the goal of eventually having them concentrated in bantustans in the cities

Last night, I stood with the Sikh Officers Association to observe Vaisakhi and Khalsa Sajna Divas — the birth of the Khalsa, rooted in justice, courage, and selfless service. I am humbled by the Sikh officers who carry these values into our streets every day. Happy Vaisakhi to all.

Saw Donnie Darko for the first time last night and really enjoyed it. Wondering whether I should see the director’s cut. Thoughts on the merits?

Alternative framing: Democratic administrations distribute disaster aid fairly, while Republican administrations are biased against blue states.