Alastair Coote

Lot of fear of people lying to polls. We don't have much evidence for it & don't need it to explain error. People uncomfortable sharing their choice are more likely to be in the now ~98% of people who don't respond than to take ~20 min survey to lie. Non-response much bigger deal

Lula Goes HARD

Huge event. Failed Jared Kushner/Trump luxury hotel project planned for Belgrade played a role in starting expanded protests against Vucic.

cool, cool

By my napkin math, total Bell Labs research expenditures from 1930-1980 were on the order of $50 billion in 2026 dollars. AI companies have spent ~$1 trillion so far: The equivalent of ~20 Bell Labs histories. In its history, Bell Labs researchers discovered the transistor, the solar cell, the laser

JUST POSTED: A Russian energy giant has secretly moved to acquire a position in a massive Alaska gas project. Its part of talks between Witkoff/Kushner & Putin. But CEO of US company resigns after learning of Russian money in the project. A wowzer of a story. www.nytimes.com/2026/10/23/u...

Matthew Yglesias continues to say that talking about ICE and excessive force in immigration enforcement helps Republicans. He is obviously wrong about this and refuses to acknowledge the data. Way past time for everyone to update their priors on this.

Theres a million lil details in our investigation on the Louisiana justice of the peace courts, but this one sticks with me. One court, covering 30k renter households, has the 3rd highest eviction rate in the country. And this makes some people a lot of money: www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-i...

It remains astonishing to me that James Dolan was able to stay out of the way *just* long enough for the Knicks to end a 53-year championship drought. Everything he's done from the second the team won seems like he's determined to remind you what a colossal asshole he is.

Lights are reflected off a bulletproof screen as President Trump speaks during a campaign rally in Greenville, North Carolina. More photos of the week: reut.rs/4yGkBNh 📷 Evan Vucci

Once mass spam texts were made legal, younger donors vanished, leaving a grassroots fundraising machine that subsists on squeezing vulnerable seniors, some of whom give hundreds of times a day. It’s a horrific model. Consultants get generationally wealthy, and the party hollows out its future.

“Departures from these practices should never be countenanced because they risk allowing prosecutors to impact national elections.” -Todd Blanche on DOJ’s 60-day rule, September 2024

Skydance of course now owns HBO, which part-produced and is supposed to be airing the Musk documentary. Sure it's all fine though

Ramaswamy’s ad is being condemned from all corners but if you only get your news from Fox on Facebook…

100% this. What's more, Vivek HAS to double down because in chud world nothing could be weaker than yielding to an abuse victim.

Breaking: Elon Musk ordered the Starlink slowdown that blindsided Ukraine on.wsj.com/4sgcxkt

Finally found myself on an elusive express F train! An excuse to shamelessly post the data dive I did years ago showing that it’s not actually a good idea: medium.com/@_alastair/l...

At long last, we have created a way for you to take away Nikki's free will, from the classic horror movie "don't take away Nikki's free will"

The @nytimes.com Fellowship is now accepting applications for its 2027-28 class. The program offers early career journalists the opportunity to work in the newsroom for one year. The deadline to apply is Friday, Nov. 20. www.nytco.com/press/applic...

Huge follow-up reporting to my scoop: The Guardian confirmed America Next—the conservative nonprofit founded by Bobby Jindal that was offering students $ to disrupt El-Sayed events—paid a firm registered to Tommy Teepell’s dad Timmy $250k for “canvassing and influencer marketing” against El-Sayed.

ICE arrested a 56-year old green card holder, i.e. a lawful permanent resident, and detained him in the Rio Grande Processing Center, where he died. www.texastribune.org/2026/10/19/t...

NEW: Lindsay Graham and Jim Clyburn were under FBI investigation for bribery. Then Trump dismantled the DOJ & FBI public corruption units. The investigation died. We unearthed it: www.propublica.org/article/nava...

if you remember none pizza with left beef, it's time to start taking a daily multivitamin

Reyes, before she wraps up golf course hearing, says her family has been texting her, "freaking out" over CNN report about death threats bc of this case. "A federal judge is getting death threats over a golf course. I really don’t think that’s what the founders envisioned."

‘Last night of the pogroms’

"Many elected officials within Reform believe the party is putting on an acceptable face to get elected, and then would install a British ICE, engage in mass deportations, or enact violent reprisals against civil servants, police officers, and others who it felt had betrayed Britain."

when critics of bari weiss say that she is not a journalist, we mean that literally. she does not respect or even appear to understand the values of the profession. everything for her is propaganda. www.semafor.com/article/10/1...

Just checked and of course, the last time there was a Commons vote on this back in 2018, Badenoch voted against the proposals to decant and get on with the restoration of the Palace of Westminster, as the cross-party joint commission had strongly recommended.

Not to pick on Sam here, but this is a useful point to highlight some of the impossibility of trust & safety work. Meta actually used to have a program *exactly* like this, BUT it became a central feature of Frances Haugen's Facebook Files as an example of Meta being evil. I'll explain...

The All-New Child.

Warnock: "I worry that Democrats are missing a real opportunity to invest in a serious & sustained way in the South. If we would just lean in and stay in through the election & after the election, the kind of victory you saw us achieve here in Georgia, it is achievable in a place like Mississippi."

Good point I’ve rarely seen made. Nesta was set up with a £250m endowment (1998 value) to support the arts (as well as science and tech) and it has stopped funding the arts… www.ft.com/content/b7c6...

SCOOP: 'Tommy' from the now-viral exchange with Abdul El-Sayed is Thomas Teepell, a former staffer for Republican Senator Josh Hawley with close ties to Christian Nationalist Sean Feucht. He's the son of a former Bobby Jindal staffer whose consultant work was instrumental in getting Hawley elected.

WAFFLE SALESMAN: The only way we're going to solve the national debt is with waffles

Threads check

Breaking News: Two people, including a child, were killed and multiple others were injured after a truck drove through a soccer game in Wichita, Kansas, the authorities said.

sentient