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.
What song the siren sang; what name Achilles assumed among the women; what exactly Sir Gregory Parsloe Parsloe had to do with prawns.
G. Willow WilsonWhat's your personal great white whale of an unsolved mystery? The thing you desperately hope is solved before you die because you need to know the answer? Mine is the Isabella Stewart Gardener Museum heist. Where the hell are the Rembrandts. I need the full story
People shouldn't be sleeping on the absolute banger that resulted the last time Patti Smith was at the Vatican www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZmc...
Patti Smith: O Holy Night - [Live ...YouTube video by Leonardo D'Angelowww.youtube.comSeth CotlarThe Pope of Greenwich Village
I remember seeing someone (very reasonably) complaining here a few days ago that there seems to be next to no visible thinking on left and center about how to join the dots on administration and democracy. This is the beginnings of an answer to that complaint donmoynihan.substack.com/p/rebuilding...
Rebuilding Democracy Requires Rebalancing PowerWhat does a power-shifting agenda look like?donmoynihan.substack.comWhen I read that piece last night, my first thought was that "Nostradamus" is a decidedly double-edged compliment.
Soumaya KeynesHow the "Nostradamus of AI" fell from grace. Great reporting from my FT colleagues www.ft.com/content/620b...
Randall Jarrell - "I had thought a good motto for critics might be what the Persians taught their children: to shoot the bow and speak the truth; but perhaps a better one would be Cordelia's love and be silent." (nb I quite liked the movie)
Jennifer Szalai100 percent agree. I also think that what a lot of people appreciated about her honest opinion was that in a criticism-starved culture, someone in her position will too often hold her tongue. There‘s something thrilling about seeing someone exercise such critical freedom.
ambientehotel.wordpress.com/2026/07/28/t... Mike Harrison is on the Booker longlist.
there’s thisVisit the post for more.ambientehotel.wordpress.comI had not known about Wilson pere and fille. It's a lively heritage indeed.
Sam FreedmanRe the Emily Wilson discourse - her Dad (A N Wilson) was the king of literary feuds. A good family tradition. Best one was his feud with Bevis Hillier who hoaxed him into including a fake letter in his biography of Bejteman where the first letter of each sentence spelt "AN Wilson is a shit".
One gloss is that this theorizing provides a pseudo-cybernetic gloss (see @quinnslobodian.com and @bentarnoff.com book Muskism) for the proposition that you are more likely to be creative, brilliant and right when the world agrees you are a fucking idiot. They're all just reading the script.
Vatnik SoupElon seems a bit salty after the Economist interview.
As @prisonculture.bsky.social noted in a different context a few days ago, this is basically the research agenda of @hahrie.bsky.social over the last two decades.
Omar WasowWhy has DSA grown? One argument from this research: not just ideology, but organization. Strong membership plus ongoing and continuous participation in social movements creates credibility, committed volunteers, political skills, and durable electoral capacity. www.niskanencenter.org/inside-the-d...
On first read through, amidst the expected nods towards xenophobia and antiwoke, there is a surprisingly large amount of useful thinking in the Trump administration report on remaking scientific research Science-A-New-Golden-Age.pdf www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/u...
www.whitehouse.govwww.dw.com/en/germany-c... other countries have bizarre culture war politics too
Germany: CDU's Jens Spahn resigns amid surrogacy controversySurrogacy is not permitted in Germany and the conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) opposes its legalization. Spahn and his husband had their child through a surrogate mother in the US.www.dw.com