Good & bad news re LA homelessness.
Good news: Bold governance reforms provide a promising new platform for action.
Bad news: Trump budget cuts could produce a homelessness tsunami.
A trial by fire is coming. Will the reforms be up to the task ahead?
workingwiththegrain.com/2025/10/01/h...

Occam's Razor always rules. Always.

Some role reversal here, Filipe - feeling especially bleak this morning, I find the solace of some optimism in your post 😢😎😇

this is not how the ICJ works, but the sentiment is admirable.

Wow, this is great.

Once again, the "real America," or what we hope is real, poking up its head.

h/t bsky.app/profile/oisi...

Happily, because in times like these "hope" matters a great deal, these are BIG "ONLY"'s ...........

Filipe: even more than I feared a few months ago, we certainly are living under a government that acts with impunity, ignores all guardrails, and has repressive intent. But having lived for decades in a repressive, authoritarian (apartheid) state, this is not (yet) that. For now 11/26 matters.

This is the number that keeps me up at night

I've lived through this before. Forced removals in Cape Town set in motion decades of protest, repression & dehumanization, & destroyed the city's soul. In vibrant, diverse LA, the consequences of forced removals will be devastating. How to avoid catastrophe? workingwiththegrain.com/2025/06/20/u...

Fantastic

I’m saddened to learn of Stanley Fischer’s passing. He is known as a top economist of course. But I was lucky to observe him, long time ago, also as a diplomat and peacemaker getting Israelis and Palestinians to work together. His talents will be much missed.

A thought: Instead of an ongoing flood of annoying, thinly-disguised fundraising text messages, might it perhaps be helpful to the Democratic Party to send text messages that connected credibly with the substance and concrete organizing tasks of our current moment? One can dream......

And here's a link to the earlier piece, written in February. workingwiththegrain.com/2025/02/13/p...

Here is an 'update' I wrote yesterday to an earlier piece on Trump's rule through a South African lens. It points to a more accelerated trajectory to authoritarianism than I'd anticipated. workingwiththegrain.com/2025/04/28/1...

A suggested edit: ".......under a .... [wannabe]..... authoritarian regime......"
Even for the competitive authoritarian' variant, it isn't yet 'game over'........

This quote from @adamprz.bsky.social hit home: The idea that "Hitler's crimes were inconceivable... applies above all to his contemporaries. They could at most feel what the Führer & his men were capable of. It is probably in the nature of a breakdown of civilization to be difficult to imagine it"

The tide in academia has turned. Harvard’s unequivocal stand has brought others along. The process of finding a spine is interesting - but now equivocators have a lot more to lose by being spineless than by rediscovering their principles.

Decades of good intentions gone wrong helped fuel Los Angeles' twin homelessness & affordable housing crises. Recent reform initiatives offer hope that progressive approaches to governance can become part of the solution. Introducing my new research project. workingwiththegrain.com/2025/04/16/f...

www.nytimes.com/2025/04/05/b... This is an outrageous article, with the main point buried at the end: combining regressive tariffs and the scaling back of progressive taxation is the “ideal” way of redistributing from the poor/middle to the rich, under the cover of economic nationalism

The former ambassador to Denmark for the United States, Rufus Gifford, posted this video on his Facebook account:

Ht: @hpsc24.bsky.social

Thanks, Duncan. Useful, but….The challenge in the USA right now is not to push back against “a” bad thing, but a zone flooded with dozens (hundreds) of bad things. A different problem for which we also urgently need ideas…..

I cannot bring myself to read volumes 2 and 3 of Richard Evan’s magnum opus on the Third Reich, though I have just purchased volume 2.

Therefore…..????

He, & many others, are learning fast. A month ago, I'd hoped that there'd be enough missteps, & enough sand could be thrown under the wheels, to muddle through to the midterms. See below. Now it feels as if a resistance-galvanizing moment is just weeks away. workingwiththegrain.com/2025/02/13/p...