Woohoo, here's my essay with my fav co-author on 30,000 fellowship wins across the Guggenheim, Stanford CASBS, NAEd, National Humanities Center, RSF visiting scholar, and Harvard Radcliffe.
Spoiler: it's the people working at prestigious universities
www.publicbooks.org/who-gets-gug...
It is hard to capture what a sweeping strategic defeat the war in Iran has been for the United States. I’m going to thread here some of the posts today that try to capture those effects. Here’s the first:
A sticker with the red white and blue United States flag and the words “I voted” underneath rests on a table.
DID YOU KNOW that Wisconsin has election-day registration? You can go to your polling place, register, and cast a ballot TODAY. It’s a great way to participate in the democratic process, even if you’re really busy or have forgotten to register.
I think often of a New York Times photo of a little Iraqi girl tending to her parakeets in a bombed house, probably from 20 years ago now. I will think of this man and his sweet dog often now too. People just want to love what they love, care for their little beings, and instead we do this to them
![An IRS employee said:
I’ll be honest, [at the] political level, I have minimal confidence that if we reported anything, any misbehavior, that it would be taken care of. In fact, quite honestly, I would fear retribution if we reported an ethical violation of a political level person in the IRS. I would do it anonymously. I’d probably do it through the union. I would not do it through the normal channels.](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:2rrp7amblhg3xoly5n5huiqv/bafkreie3ejt4qv4hd4vvhblw4egikdqgy3lriehpyhjzo7z4b5vv6rrf4a)
An IRS employee said: I’ll be honest, [at the] political level, I have minimal confidence that if we reported anything, any misbehavior, that it would be taken care of. In fact, quite honestly, I would fear retribution if we reported an ethical violation of a political level person in the IRS. I would do it anonymously. I’d probably do it through the union. I would not do it through the normal channels.
Only about 1 in 5 employees say they think they could engage in calling out wrongdoing without retribution. A scared workforce is bad for accountability.
donmoynihan.substack.com/p/federal-em...
New, from me: The federal government is required to track job satisfaction among its employees.
The Trump admin stopped collecting the data, so a nonprofit stepped in.
The results show that a collapse in morale and zero trust in Trump agency leaders. 🧵
donmoynihan.substack.com/p/federal-em...
The officer declined treatment in the ambulance!
I wonder, with the benefits of hindsight, if anyone has any regrets about this?
With the war justifications flying around, I often think about the 2010 Time Magazine cover with the article title "What Happens If We Leave Afghanistan" and the image of an Afghan woman whose nose had been cut off by the Taliban.
“For every dollar donated by billionaires and their immediate families to a candidate or committee associated with Democrats, five dollars went to Republicans.” Gift link: www.nytimes.com/2026/03/09/u...
“The Times analysis found 300 billionaires and their families donated more than $3 billion—19% of all contributions—in federal elections in 2024. The billionaire families gave an average total of $10 million each in 2024, roughly equal to what 100,000 typical political donors gave, combined.“ Gift:
The killing of Iranian children during an illegal war is an impeachable offense (not to mention a grave crime) and Congress should really act like it.
15 Republicans in the Senate could end this nightmare before it somehow gets even worse.
During the Syria crisis, CIA Director Petraeus brought President Obama a plan to arm Syrian rebels, supported by SecDef Panetta and SecState Clinton.
Obama asked whether such plans had worked before. The CIA conducted a review and found that they failed with one exception, the mujahedeen.
C.I.A. Study of Covert Aid Fueled Skepticism About Helping Syrian Rebels www.nytimes.com/2014/10/15/u...
so the goal is regime chiang?
Great use of alt text here
that's a dinosaur! it scares me!
@posters-madness.bsky.social
A screenshot from Paul F. Tompkins' bluesky post, which has a video of a bird that looks like a wide-beaked pelican-duck on flamingo legs. Mr. Tompkins suggests the bird is unintelligent and asks whether such a bird is even necessary.
Classify this bird? @audrelawdamercy.blacksky.app
Cover of The Lancet:
@thelancet.com
www.thelancet.com/journals/lan...
🧵 of 🧵s. My views on this are clear, longstanding, & tiresome to many I'm sure. But I'll never stop being deeply angry that Larry Summers dominated the entire National Conversation™️ on the economy during Joe Biden's presidency & was lauded for being so epically wrong & repeatedly ignoring the data.
Interesting post about the coordinated anti-AOC smear campaign. It's 2016 again! Fake local news outlets on Facebook getting picked up until eventually it winds up in the Washington Post.
"We know that this can be done, because it has been done. In his famous Madison Garden speech..FDR declared war on 'Government by organized money,' and he won that war...To say that a comparable project is impossible today is to say that democracy can’t be saved. And I’m not willing to accept that."
If you are not interested enough to have found the arguably #1 liberal news podcast, I am skeptical that you are interested enough to attend a political conference.
Who is the 'opposition' in that sentence?
I don’t really know what I expect in posting this, but maybe some people see it and can learn from it.
I’ll call it “lessons from an unwilling immigration attorney.”
1/
Every department needs an enforcer to protect their endowed chairs
My article is currently open-access... Click away...
We map out the creative ways people nonviolently use phones to protect themselves in war zones...
Americans have now adopted some of these approaches too
academic.oup.com/ia/article/101/3/1043/8106131
happening this morning in Minneapolis -- ICE agents drawing guns on observers. I reiterate again that it is only a matter of time before DHS kills more innocent people in Minnesota. Congress needs to shut this shit down right now.
