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

It hasn't been a good few weeks for Klein. He's put up a set of really weak arguments in defense of liberal values that I think do more to confuse and distance liberalism's critics than the opposite. In fact, he's confirmed many of the biases against him by engaging in half-baked persuasion /1

'“Citizens will be on their best behavior, because we’re constantly recording and reporting everything that is going on,” Ellison said in an hour-long Q&A during Oracle’s Financial Analyst Meeting last week.'

So the rapture DID happen and IS STILL going. As always, it’s in the form of $$$$$$ departing gullible evangelical wallets and ascending onto financial/crypto clouds.

There’s a lot that’s old school about him

💯 this. Yes, gerrymandering accounts for some of the hopelessness in red states, but the biggest issue by far for Dems - speaking as a 10-yr resident in INDIANA - is really weak pools of candidates and underinvestment in recruiting by the DNC in those states.

This would be a good time for the @billgates.bsky.social @gatesfoundation.bsky.social to step in and actually fund some vital local institutions

A great human.

www.nytimes.com/2025/09/16/m...