....and throw away the key - Walter Olson
Five months into Trump II, roughly a third of Americans have come to favor deportation policies that would have seemed unthinkably harsh not long ago.| walterolson.substack.com
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… as long as they are healthy, well fed and well educated| Crooked Timber
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A cursory glance at the Jeffrey Epstein’s biography (1953 – 2019) shows it can be treated as a modern adaptation (and so adjustment) of Horatio Alger Jr.’s framework: Epstein’s life moves from (lower) middle-class respectability to incredible wealth and luxury (and associated criminal sordidness). Epstein was an immensely successful social climber, who didn’t just manage the wealth of the ultra-wealthy, but also used his own wealth and his access to the very wealthy to position...| Crooked Timber
As President Trump continues to amass authoritarian power, we should consider the shocking role of the Supreme Court in facilitating his power grab. Trump v. United States declared the President immune from prosecution for breaking any criminal law as long as he uses his Presidential powers to commit his crimes. It allowed Trump to get away with gross violations of the Constitution’s foreign emoluments clause. It foreclosed all feasible paths for enforcing the 14th Amendment’s Insurrectio...| Crooked Timber
by Chris Bertram on July 20, 2025| Crooked Timber
One of my foundational theoretical commitments is that the technology of reading and writing is neither natural nor innocuous. Media theorists McLuhan, Postman, Ong and Flusser all agree on this point: the technology of writing is a necessary condition for the emerge of liberal/democratic/Enlightenment/rationalist culture; mass literacy and the proliferation of cheap books/newspapers is necessary for this culture to spread beyond the elite to the whole of society.| Crooked Timber
Sunday photoblogging: Street art at the Puces St Ouen| Crooked Timber
There’s a great anecdote about Roman Jakobson, the structuralist theorist of language, in Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan’s book, Code: From Information Theory to French Theory. For Jakobson, and for other early structuralist and post-structuralist thinkers, language, cybernetic theories of information, and economists’ efforts to understand how the economy worked all went together :| Crooked Timber
Now that the Trump government is relentlessly attacking higher education and abusing its power at the border to arbitrarily refuse entry to scholars, many academics wonder whether it’s still possible to travel to the US for conferences or other research purposes, especially if they have publicly criticized the Trump government or its allies. But where you can travel, under what conditions, for your academic work, has long been an issue for scholars who come from countries with “weak passp...| Crooked Timber
I’ve owned this mug for twenty-five years now. Bought in the gift shop of the Metropolitan Opera in New York on my first ever trip to America, which I doubt I shall ever visit again. The mug, in art nouveau style, celebrates Pucchini’s La Bohème, which we might have seen there. I forget what we saw from the cheap seats, high up. The colours are badly faded after a quarter-century of machine washing, which suggests that its manufacture was cheap, though it has served me well through diffe...| Crooked Timber
Have they changed, or just become their worst selves| Crooked Timber
Five months into Trump II, roughly a third of Americans have come to favor deportation policies that would have seemed unthinkably harsh not long ago.| walterolson.substack.com
Why our workplaces are authoritarian private governments—and why we can't see it| press.princeton.edu
This doesn't have anything to do with Wordle...or does it| kevinmunger.substack.com
