Re-upping:

Excellent assessment of John "Roger Taney" Roberts.

In @harvardmagazine.bsky.social , by Lincoln Caplan.

As careful, legally informed, judicious-minded writer as you're going to find. With an unsparing judgment.

www.harvardmagazine.com/legal/suprem...

Misses the point that plenty of people of low character manage contradictions just fine, but worthy if contemplation. on.ft.com/4n0OeD4

László Krasznahorkai has said of his work: ‘You will never go wrong anticipating doom in my books, any more than you’ll go wrong in anticipating doom in ordinary life.’

In 2012, he was in conversation with Colm Tóibín for our Bookshop podcast: www.londonreviewbookshop.co.uk/podcasts-vid...

Senior correspondent @zackbeauchamp.bsky.social breaks down the Gaza ceasefire deal, what it could mean for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and what comes next.

🧵 As an academic whose formative college and graduate experiences took place during the 'modernists' vs. 'neo-primordialist' debates about nationalism, I find the causal ideological & methodological nationalism of even left-wing social media shocking.

The theatre of "inevitability" alluded to by @himself.bsky.social in the NYT yesterday: "The greatest weapon that the forces of regime change possess is the fear of inevitability. If everyone believes that Mr. Trump will succeed in reshaping America, he will." www.nytimes.com/2025/10/08/o...

"The greatest weapon that the forces of regime change possess is the fear of inevitability. If everyone believes that Mr. Trump will succeed in reshaping America, he will."

www.nytimes.com/2025/10/08/o...

It occurs to me that many of us educated in analogue times had the enormous privilege of encountering major ideas in more solid, cogent, and orderly ways than most in digitally saturated communities today. The thought isn’t a novel one, of course, but boy is it a dispiriting sight. 2/2

Had an illuminating discussion the other day with students in my democracy seminar. They were reflecting on how difficult it is to learn about canonical arguments/works despite ever easier access in the digital age. One of them said “We’re drowning in a sewage of curated information.” /1

Once again, this is all for an audience of one.

this feels like forty years ago but it was 2023

www.newsweek.com/nancy-pelosi...

Delighted to announce a hybrid event to launchThe Cambridge Handbook of Constitutional Theory: ed Richard Bellamy and Jeff King

UCL 13 Oct 2025, 18:05 – 19:30, followed by a wine reception.

Event details and how to book an on line or in person place – are here

www.ucl.ac.uk/laws/events/...

The biggest drop in international student travel to US is from Iran, which isn't surprising given the travel ban www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

@fishkin.bsky.social on the “compact” with American universities. Important insights here.

Another familiar part of this story is how they’re all mostly graduates of business schools who hardly ever took a course outside of business curriculum and barely socialized with any students who weren’t part of the status anxious networks of would-be financiers.

Another familiar part of this story is how they’re all mostly graduates of business schools who hardly ever took a course outside of business curriculum and barely socialized with any students who weren’t part of the status anxious networks of would-be financiers.

Maintaining professionalism and being principled are two different things; and yet so much of the political discourse around norms either conflates or confuses them. Mamdani's campaign is great testament to possessing both those things, but also signaling them clearly to the average voter.

Exactly this, and I’ll add that the issue this speaks to is the very low supply of cultural critics and anthropologists who can speak to the deeper patterns and layered connections at work here; so we keep getting speculative hot takes instead of insight

Just yesterday, a lot of newspapers - including the paper of record - wrote headlines about how Trump's patience with Netanyahu was running out and how he'd be strong-arming him today to end the war and pledge to never annex any part of the Palestinian territories. Oh well...

A major challenge for the rest of us is how to understand leading commentators like Klein better so that in the off-chacne we are invited to sit across from them, we can hold them to account better. In my view, Remnick, Corey Robin, and now Coates each fell short of that charge. 6/6

... work with prominent left of center figures like Remnick & Coates to put some justificatory scaffolding around that initial fear. All of this would be immensely justified & important work if empirical evidence for exclusion & political violence wasn't so asymmetrically tilted on the right /5

He's essentially pleading to the power elite to not target liberal commentators & critics like him ("Look, I think Kirk was engaged in politics the right way and am saying it on the record."). His subsequent interviews with Douthat and Ben Shapiro meant to fortify that, & how he's doing clean up /4

His Kirk piece was basically a "Don't shoot! I'm just practicing politics!" plea; but since it's highly unlikely that your average alienated assassin is carefully parsing through weekly Ezra Klein op-eds for clarity about politics, the plea was really directed at the Trump admin power elite. /3

Whe he wrote the piece on Kirk, I told a friend that I thought the piece was born out of fear of possibly becoming a target himself, which he confirms here. That impulse reveals the distance between his understanding of politics as an exercise in elite persuasion vs. mass participation /2