Michael Caley
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michaelcaley.bsky.social
Michael Caley
@michaelcaley.bsky.social
14K followers 620 following 13K posts
I write the Expecting Goals newsletter (expectinggoals.com) and I'm gonna try to bring soccer analytics to bluesky. Let's see if it works. He/him.
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michaelcaley.bsky.social
January 16, 2026 at 8:22 PM
michaelcaley.bsky.social
the quote everyone's pulled out is definitely unhinged, like, yeah, don't say that, that's weird

but the sparking incident is he gave a paper in Brussels criticizing the Biden admin and Biden's trade representative gave an unhinged response in-person and he's been perseverating on it since
January 16, 2026 at 7:48 PM
michaelcaley.bsky.social
like having Perry Anderson write in the NLR that your ideas are bad and they're bad because you, personally, are bad

that would fuck me up too

then you have to keep getting asked about it and maybe you get defensive once or twice and then that goes in the newspaper
By the end of the essay, however, that latter judgment has expanded well beyond the content of Tooze’s books into a sneering indictment of his whole public existence. The breadth of interests, audiences and sympathies that for so many of Tooze’s admirers mark his signal virtue stood for Anderson as proof of his political unreliability. “Tooze spreads himself widely, and his accents and formulations vary from place to place,” Anderson wrote. “That’s often the price of a growing reputation [and] shouldn’t be taken too seriously. To criticisms of inconsistency, he can in any case reply quite reasonably that nothing he has written falls outside the parameters of a basic commitment to liberalism as it has developed in the west from the time of Wilson and Lloyd George to that of Geithner and Macron.” (In the context of the New Left Review, these points of comparison could hardly be more damning.) Anderson’s implication that Tooze is essentially keeping two sets of books – one set of accounts for his lefty graduate students, another for his discussion partners at Davos – becomes the basis for his essay’s bitter final judgment: “In today’s world, the question can be asked: how far does that differ from running with the hare and hunting with the hounds – indignant sympathy for the hare, awed admiration for the hounds?” Tooze does not hide the devastation he felt on reading Anderson’s essay, or the fact that he still thinks about it often. He told me that his disorientation had much to do with his longstanding admiration for his antagonist. Tooze has subscribed to the NLR since his 20s, has written for it several times, and says he always read Anderson’s essays “religiously”. Perhaps predictably, Tooze rejects much of Anderson’s critique. He is also plainly offended that his attempt to be honest about who he is, and where he’s coming from, was taken by Anderson as a kind of shiftiness, or even hypocrisy. Over the past decade or so, Tooze’s politics have shifted notably leftward. Yet Tooze still feels it imperative to acknowledge “how deeply I am the product of the circumstances I was raised in”. As he put it to me at his office, last April, “I take that more seriously than the average academic leftist. Because I don’t imagine that by virtue of thinking a bunch of radical thoughts, I can get more than a little bit of the way towards escaping my professional upper-middle class identity. I’m a senior professor at an immensely rich private university. Where do I get off kidding myself about this?” In another conversation, in October, Tooze noted that he had done “a lot of activism around green politics and central banking and naming and shaming the IMF economists”. His voice rose to an exasperated pitch as he imagined a conversation with Anderson: “It’s like, ‘Show me your cards. Where the fuck have you been on any of these issues? What’s your position on climate? Where were you with the Green New Deal? Where have you been on Gaza?’”
January 16, 2026 at 7:42 PM
michaelcaley.bsky.social
this is my favorite part, tho, because it's barely even about ideology at all

everyone at UATX was so focused on their complaints about the humanities that they forgot to hire anyone in math or science
Classes weren’t as innovative as most students expected. “Year one was exceptionally boring,” the student said. “They did great books, they just didn’t do it in a great way,” said another student, who lamented the amount of memorization required. “I thought we were going to be intensely debating,” he said. Several students shared course syllabi with me. Most are easy enough to imagine being offered on any campus — with the notable exception of math and science. “The math classes go over algebra you learned in ninth grade,” a student told me. “There was just nothing there.” He described the offering as “schizophrenic” and described a class he’d taken at University of Texas at Austin as “exponentially more important.” Indeed, the syllabus I reviewed for a class called “Intellectual Foundations of Science II” covered a range of topics unusual for a science class including “The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief.” A student who’d taken the course shared a slide with me on “ensoulment” — the principally religious question of when a soul enters the human body — and said that the class had been told that IVF but not abortion could be consistent with the Catholic belief about ensoulment.
January 16, 2026 at 5:35 PM
michaelcaley.bsky.social
January 16, 2026 at 12:26 PM
michaelcaley.bsky.social
this is in the lede

what are we doing here man
January 15, 2026 at 6:51 PM
michaelcaley.bsky.social
the murder of Renee Good has broken through with the public -- more than 75% of people say they've seen footage of it

and, obviously, this has in turn shifted people's opinions about immigration enforcement policy newrepublic.com/article/2052...
“In testing of 15 viral videos about the Minneapolis shooting, raw eyewitness footage and straightforward reporting consistently drove meaningful increases in Trump disapproval,” reads the memo, which I’ve obtained, though it also says some ideologically charged messages were less effective. The testing also found that the killing has “broken through with voters,” the memo says, with 86 percent saying they have heard at least “a little” about it and 76 percent saying they’ve seen footage. And importantly, the testing also finds that Democratic proposals to rein in ICE have broad support. Voters favor requiring warrants for arrests by 29 points, and back a prohibition against masking during arrests by 16 points, though “Abolish ICE” remains a few points underwater.
January 15, 2026 at 2:29 AM
michaelcaley.bsky.social
<wipes away tear> it's so beautiful
January 14, 2026 at 8:28 PM
michaelcaley.bsky.social
afcon heritage right here
January 14, 2026 at 7:00 PM
michaelcaley.bsky.social
also-- it's not on a television channel any of you get

you cannot afcon harder unless this man is there
January 14, 2026 at 6:47 PM
michaelcaley.bsky.social
new york times reporters can post spon now I guess x.com/David_Ornste...
January 14, 2026 at 2:31 PM
michaelcaley.bsky.social
get cooked lol variety.com/2026/tv/news...
January 14, 2026 at 1:04 AM
michaelcaley.bsky.social
January 12, 2026 at 8:18 PM
michaelcaley.bsky.social
tottenham hotspur and passing skill
January 12, 2026 at 7:12 PM
michaelcaley.bsky.social
I'm out

I'm done

see you bitches in a year or two

pitch me on a team to cheer for in the interim www.nytimes.com/athletic/695...
Tottenham Hotspur are closing in on a deal to sign Atletico Madrid midfielder Conor Gallagher. Spurs have made a bid for worth €40million (£34.7m), which is expected to be accepted — while the midfielder is keen on the move. Aston Villa also held a strong interest in Gallagher, however no agreements were reached amid their desire to maintain financial discipline.
January 12, 2026 at 7:05 PM
michaelcaley.bsky.social
January 12, 2026 at 7:01 PM
michaelcaley.bsky.social
So obv tell me if this is wrong but what I've found from academic sources is that pro Pahlavi / monarchist sentiment has heavily tracked to Persian supermajority areas open.substack.com/pub/alikadiv...
January 8, 2026 at 10:27 PM
michaelcaley.bsky.social
I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your souls
January 8, 2026 at 9:56 PM
michaelcaley.bsky.social
the causes of the Iranian protest movement and their core demands are deeply material, grounded in the most basic of issues -- the cost of food

it's not so surprising that a protest movement launched from bottom-up material concerns lacks ideological coherence. who knows how that plays out.
As I write this post, Iran is experiencing its twelfth day of protests. This present cycle of unrest was ignited on December 28, 2025, by a group of merchants in Tehran expressing their dissatisfaction with the plummeting value of the country’s currency. As a point of reference, Iran’s currency was trading at 32,000 rials to the dollar in 2015, and today it’s hovering around 1,470,000 per dollar. That’s a 4,494-percent increase in a decade. This sharp plunge has put particular pressure on traders who import goods from abroad, and in turn, consumers who have to contend with rising costs. As I described in a previous piece, in addition to domestic mismanagement and wrongheaded policy moves by Iranian officials, international sanctions have had devastating consequences for Iran’s economy, contributing to rising inflation and the devaluation of the local currency. According to Iran’s Statistics Center, the inflation rate in December rose to 42.2 percent compared to the same period last year. Food prices rose 72 percent, and medical items were up 50 percent year-over-year.
January 8, 2026 at 8:52 PM
michaelcaley.bsky.social
really good piece by Reza Akbari on the current protest movement in Iran, its sources and how it appears to be a truly bottom-up movement with all the dynamism and incoherence that implies and what that means both for understanding the protests and how the regime may respond
As described in a piece by sociologist Ali Kadivar, the demands of protestors span a wide range of issues and at times even appear to be contradictory. While in some areas slogans have been chanted in support of the return of the Pahlavi monarchy, in other areas, particularly universities, demonstrators have rejected both the idea of a monarchy and the current theocratic system. Likewise, despite ongoing protests and state repression in the country’s western provinces, predominantly inhabited by Kurdish and Azeri populations, these regions show no unified support for one political camp over another. Verisheh Moradi, a Kurdish political prisoner, issued a statement from prison saying “no to religious authoritarianism” and “monarchy.” During a volleyball game in Urmia, the capital of Iran’s West Azerbaijan province, fans shouted anti-Pahlavi slogans. Without a clear political leader or a unified organizational structure, it is difficult, if not impossible, for the crowd to coalesce around a limited set of shared demands and merge to constitute a force capable of posing an existential threat to the regime. External threats from Israel and the United States certainly complicate the regime’s calculations. But, as of yet, aside from shuffling around administrators and minor policy adjustments such as replacing the Governor of the Central Bank and proposing direct subsidies to families, there have been few indicators that Iran’s political elite are willing to alter their broader governing approach.
January 8, 2026 at 8:48 PM
michaelcaley.bsky.social
yup NY13 is composed primarily of a combination of Cluster 2 and Cluster 3, with some relatively favorable parts of Cluster 11

if you're gonna swing for it those the voters
January 8, 2026 at 7:36 PM
michaelcaley.bsky.social
the @lioneltrolling.bsky.social newsletter today described precisely the feeling of watch JD Vance's news conference before it happened www.unpopularfront.news/p/living-in-...
The paper describes resistance in a situation where there is no political sphere, no civil society, and where it is impossible to organize or speak publicly without incurring the weight of state oppression. In other words, it is a situation unlike our own. However distorted or damaged they may be, we retain our political freedoms. But one line at the end stuck with me, “Kołakowski wrote in The Eclipse of Ideology, ‘It is perhaps the most oppressive part of life under communism. Not terror, not exploitation, but the all-pervading lie, felt by everybody, known to everybody. It is something which makes life intolerable.’” I don’t know about you, but I find the endless lies and lying often to be the most infuriating and demoralizing part of the present situation. In the wake of this terrible killing in Minneapolis, my first thought, after the initial shock, anger, and sadness, was the knowledge that the next few days, months, weeks, and years would be filled with endless lying about what happened on the part of the regime and its stooges. This filled me, if not quite with despair, then at least with a strong sense of depression. I suppose it has something to do with my vocation as a historian, where I can accept tragedy and even evil as unavoidable parts of the human experience, so long as witness can be borne and the truth eventually discovered.
January 8, 2026 at 7:11 PM
michaelcaley.bsky.social
really appreciated this from @lioneltrolling.bsky.social on the importance of voluntary associations, even if for no purpose greater than making life livable in a time of increasing nightmares and a shrinking public square www.unpopularfront.news/p/living-in-...
January 8, 2026 at 1:54 PM
michaelcaley.bsky.social
can't really read this as anything but Cristian Romero calling out Spurs executives and ownership for leaving the players and the manager as the only people out dealing with the displeasure of fans and media
January 8, 2026 at 1:33 AM
michaelcaley.bsky.social
begging Democrats to look up the wisdom of the ancients www.presidentialrhetoric.com/campaign/spe...
January 7, 2026 at 4:20 PM