Cover of Mother Jones with an image of fingers pointing at John Roberts and the coverline "Blame John Roberts for Everything"
The NYT big expose on SCOTUS today pairs well with @ariberman.bsky.social and @pemalevy.bsky.social's cover story on how ~everything wrong with this country today can be laid at the feet of John Roberts: www.motherjones.com/politics/202...
Remarkable SCOTUS reporting in the NYTimes, which pretty much confirms what observers have always assumed, but still astonishes. (Gift link)
www.nytimes.com/2026/04/18/u...
Peace, but only during trading hours
This
Agree and its nice to be spared the ghastly SpaceX boosterism
If it follows the normal pattern, economists will claim to have 'discovered' status anxiety in about 5 years
All hegemons rely on smoke & mirrors to project power universally when it can be applied only specifically. The British managed it with alliances & British & Indian forces distributed by the RN & EIC navies. Trump has just single-handedly destroyed the illusion of US hegemony.
Impossible to disagree with a single word that Ben Rhodes (Obama era NSC official) is saying here:
Financial markets on repeat
In what world is any of this a victory for Trump?! This is completely the wrong sentiment.
By the time I finished reading the article, the title had been changed but not the thumbnail.
Starmer should immediately & unequivocally ban access to British airspace to US warplanes. The UK should not be accomplice to a US President who is threatening more war crimes. Period.
Indeed. Also, those who are counting on the US military to save democracy in America are going to be sorely disappointed.
Killed in an illegal war of aggression, driven by the “warrior” posturing of an incompetent drunk and a demented narcissist.
The. Rise. Of. Cognitive. Surrender.
Study finds that people who use GenAI chatbots rely on them 80% of the time, and develop almost no capacity to recognize when a chatbot is feeding them faulty information.
papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....
The gulf between Bluesky and LinkedIn is at least as great as that between Bluesky and X. The complete taboo on any negativity on LinkedIn produces a disorientating atmosphere, in which it becomes very hard to establish what anyone actually thinks or believes.
Everyone pointing out that US law doesn't allow leaving NATO without Congressional approval is correct.
It's also beside the point. Congress can't make a president deploy the military and order troops into battle, which means the US won't defend an ally, even if the US technically remains in NATO.
SCHLAPP: Who wants to see impeachment hearings?
CPAC CROWD: *cheers*
SCHLAPP: No. That was the wrong answer.
Royal Match ad where some sort of King is trying to hold rocks from falling on him and you need to solve some matching puzzle to prevent it happening.
I have no interest in this man’s problems
Every time another AI app or platform dies, are people making sure to drive a stake through its heart and bury it in an unmarked grave? We might want to salt the earth as well. We should celebrate it as well obviously. But not until those fucking things are in the ground.
Here is my new piece about public opinion and the Iran War. Decades of political science research has examined what factors generate and maintain public support for military action. In the case of Iran, the U.S. lacks all of them.
theconversation.com/iran-war-lac...
Tempted to set this as an essay question next year.
At #ISA2026 Brent Steele is being honored as the distinguished scholar of the ISA-Ethics section. His first paper on ontological security was published in RIS 20 years ago!
www.cambridge.org/core/journal...
This will be that 4 Dimensional Chess Thinking I've heard so much about
It is interesting how desperate markets are to believe him.
Yep. In fact, the real failing of students was when we stopped requiring them to regularly search a library catalogue for their reading and instead produced lists with hyperlinks that students simply had to click. As soon as they have to go off list, they’re lost.
Over the last 30 years or so, one of the topics in the IR literature that has received an incredible amount of attention is the idea of "audience costs": that the domestic political costs of backing down in international conflict are sufficiently bad that leaders favor staying in/escalation.
Ahhh, the old secret plan to fight inflation!
What a paragraph.
www.bloomberg.com/news/article...
From The Times last Saturday. Starmer's ministry provides empirical proof of the fact that (contrary to what the Labour leadership has believed for many years) you can't govern without an ideology: something organising your outlook and mobilising people to action.
www.thetimes.com/article/2cb4...
