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Henry Farrell

@himself.bsky.social

35K followers 600 following 5.6K posts

Professor of democracy and international affairs. http://www.henryfarrell.net and newsletter at http://www.programmablemutter.com. Underground Empire: How America Weaponized the World Economy (Holt, Penguin). https://www.publishersweekly.com/9781250840554.

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Henry Farrell

@himself.bsky.social

www.nytimes.com/2026/01/15/u...

Since then, Ms. Sinema has been involved in the psychedelic science industry, and has discussed undergoing ibogaine treatment with the aim of preventing dementia. She also joined a law firm, Hogan Lovells, where she works on issues like cryptocurrency and artificial intelligence.

January 16, 2026 at 12:27 PM

Henry Farrell

@himself.bsky.social

From December 23, 2024. This was all predictable. www.foreignaffairs.com/reviews/rise...

Indeed, everyone—businesses, allied governments, and adversaries—will be trying to figure out what is happening within a chaotic administration, and, if possible, to shape it. Allies will strive to protect themselves from an unpredictable great power that is no longer as capable of exercising control as it believes. Foreign and domestic businesses and crypto capitalists will rewire the infrastructure of the world economy to make more money, just as their forebears did in the early days of the U.S. empire, when the state was underdeveloped. Some may capture parts of the Trump administration, turning U.S. power to their own advantage. Adversaries will look to capitalize on America’s weaknesses, leading to even greater disorganization.

Once, and not too long ago, it was possible for U.S. elites to believe that technocrats could order the world in their interests, making it secure and predictable for them. They held out hope that Trump’s first term was a temporary aberration. Now, it is clear that it was no such thing.

January 6, 2026 at 2:04 AM

Henry Farrell

@himself.bsky.social

Belatedly seeing this, there was also a weird Tolkien subculture in the Italian autonomist left. From a speech by Olivier Turquet.

January 1, 2026 at 2:00 PM

Henry Farrell

@himself.bsky.social

Happy Christmas from Ireland and the world's most rotund Christmas tree.

December 25, 2025 at 10:51 AM

Henry Farrell

@himself.bsky.social

December 23, 2025 at 12:19 AM

Henry Farrell

@himself.bsky.social

there's a dissertation to be written on Comrade French's profound intellectual influence on Comrade Lenin.

December 21, 2025 at 10:23 AM

Henry Farrell

@himself.bsky.social

The word "game" is doing a whole lot of work in this post marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevo...

Google’s Deep Mind Lab is going to build a materials science lab in the UK, manned by robots and humans:

To help turbocharge scientific discovery, we will establish Google DeepMind’s first automated laboratory in the UK in 2026, specifically focused on materials science research. A multidisciplinary team of researchers will oversee research in the lab, which will be built from the ground up to be fully integrated with Gemini. By directing world-class robotics to synthesize and characterize hundreds of materials per day, the team intends to significantly shorten the timeline for identifying transformative new materials.

This is a very big deal. Gemini won’t just read papers. It will design the experiments, run the experiments, learn from the successes and failures and then recursively improve. It’s an attempt to learn the game of material science in the same way AlphaGo learned the game of Go.

December 16, 2025 at 2:05 PM

Henry Farrell

@himself.bsky.social

Thanks! I had not thought about the implications of backward- not-forward at all - should have been obvious. Attached is the Claude poem (a sonnet on Schelling's theory of deterrence) which rises to the level of competent doggerel and has imo one genuinely good line ("Not force itself ...)

December 3, 2025 at 6:21 AM

Henry Farrell

@himself.bsky.social

It's a crime that @unlikelyworlds.bsky.social Cowboy Angels isn't available in the US. A 70s-style paranoid sf thriller set in an alternative America that builds mirror gates to alternative universe versions of itself and begins to "liberate" them unlikelyworlds.blogspot.com/2025/11/seem...

Stone remembered streets empty of traffic except for the armoured limos of bosses and apparatus men, and the personnel carriers and light tanks of the FBI. He remembered long lines of scarecrow people waiting to receive a daily ration of two ounces of mystery meat and a loaf of black bread that had the texture of ground glass bound by wallpaper paste. The show trials on TV, mass hangings of traitors and saboteurs. The hopeless gazes of starving children begging on the streets while posters everywhere boasted of record harvests. The military parades in Times Square, columns of soldiers saluting the Dear Leader and his trio of psychotic sons in their armoured-glass podium, missile carriers and tanks creeping between monumental buildings under a blizzard of ticker tape, accompanied by military bands and phalanxes of blonde, blue-eyed cheerleaders. He remembered the slave farms, and the vast death camp he and Tom Waverly had found in South Dakota: a discovery that had been instrumental in convincing President Davis, at the beginning of his first term, to approve LOOKING GLASS, the covert action that had led to the revolution.

December 1, 2025 at 12:39 AM

Henry Farrell

@himself.bsky.social

LLMs make it much more difficult than in the past to distinguish sincere hard effort from automated boilerplate, so that it is harder to tell a sincere boss committed to helping you work better from one who is lazy and couldn't care less about you. There are similar dynamics for other situations.

November 25, 2025 at 11:18 PM

Henry Farrell

@himself.bsky.social

By coincidence, was just reading this bit in Keith Lowe's Naples 1944 yesterday. It would appear that Actual Proper Fascism is a category that excludes Benito Mussolini's regime at the height of its power.

Unrest also simmered just beneath the surface. Even at the height of Fascist power, all the repressive organs of the state could not prevent Communists from handing out anti-Fascist leaflets, and students raising banners in public spaces proclaiming ‘Death to Mussolini’.

November 16, 2025 at 6:24 PM

Henry Farrell

@himself.bsky.social

Currently reading Naples 1944 on @maxread.info recommendation.

November 16, 2025 at 6:19 PM

Henry Farrell

@himself.bsky.social

Playing around with a notion of Cosma's regarding LLMs and The Singer of Tales, it is notable that GPT5 still has no grasp of meter, while Claude Opus not only groks iambic pentameter, but produces some genuinely striking lines. (prompt: Schelling's deterrence theory in sonnet+iambics)