Matthew Yglesias

When you don’t pay consistent attention to a given race it’s easy to see what you want to see — or to see what you want to get mad about — on social media depending on how your feed is keyed.

I kind of think normalizing the term “housing” instead of just “houses” or “homes” was a mistake. It makes things sound more mysterious than they are.

25 years ago people hoped that market integration with China would spread liberal political norms but instead China tries to export their lack of free speech www.aljazeera.com/sports/2026/...

Alumni magazine says philosophy is booming

I doubt rightists would want to apply this argument to the United States of America

Have been doing a deep dive into the data (staring at two charts) and I think the Democrats are going to do well on Election Day.

It’s fine to be more left-wing than I am but however terrible you think I am, it’s still the case that I’m a Clinton/Biden/Harris voter who regularly raises money for frontline Democrats and winning a big national majority means getting people who are more right-wing than me to vote blue.

my read of the OP here is a point about how ordinary citizens allocate their scarce attention, not whether what happens abroad matters. if we think it's bad that attention to national politics has crowded out attention to state/local politics, e.g., surely that extends to international politics

Boston’s chief planner is a true believer in the San Francisco model, in which you make it impossible to profitably build apartments by-right so developers are forced into a politicized discretionary negotiation with the city, which relaxes the rules in exchange for below-market units.

TWU be like “Hochul is MAGA because she doesn’t support our MAGA union” in reality, they’re just mad at Hochul because she refused to expand the union’s expensive handouts and make-work jobs funded with taxpayer $$

Even very informed people have little visibility into which networks of analysis and operatives have financial upside from which specific campaigns and how that may distort their takes about resource allocation. www.slowboring.com/p/scammy-fun...

Getting to Golden's right on guns ... interesting

Trumpets placing more value on honesty and respect is hilarious

I don't think there is any reason why giving through a PAC would ever be optimal for small donors and anyone doing online PAC fundraising should be viewed as presumptively suspect. www.slowboring.com/p/scammy-fun...

With the billionaire realignment under way, Democrats edge with small dollar donors is more important than ever and that means party leaders need to be much better stewards of their donors' good faith and good intentions. www.slowboring.com/p/scammy-fun...

Interesting strategy

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

So much for this absurd conspiracy theory (or did Lula somehow resurrect USAID???!!?)

Successful Serbian opposition seems to have run on a pretty narrow critique of Vucic. www.nytimes.com/2026/10/25/w...

Poll of critical GOP-held frontline seats in Pennsylvania shows Dem candidates with advantages on most issues

Iowa early vote was way bluer in 2022 than in 2024 but the final results were almost identical. This data is just not informative about anything.

Low-info swing voters express a lot of baffling and bizarre opinions but the disgruntled Republican who’s considering voting for Rob Sand but wants to investigate claims that he’s secretly very left-wing seems quite comprehensible.

IMO an underrated third option is to unilaterally end American material support for Israel rather than engaging in convoluted and likely to fail efforts at “pressure.” www.nytimes.com/2026/10/23/o...

We need a national conversation about how Costco stopped stocking the cranberry walnut bread my kid likes.

The last thing I’ll say about Matt vs BlueSky on immigration is that when I look at the rhetoric and advertising being used by critical senate candidates in Ohio, Texas, Alaska, Iowa, and most notably Michigan where the left got its preferred guy, I am very happy with where Dems landed.

A lot of good points in this thread about the way commercial incentives distort Democratic campaigns. It's just important to keep in mind that "biasing candidate positions" in favor of donors mostly means biasing the positions *to the left*

I saw this meme and I'm a leftist now

Nerdy but important thing that I was wrong about. Back in 2021-2022, I felt pretty certain that the prime employment-population ratio was gonna get all the way back up to 1999 levels.

Obama was right about Iran and his critics in congress and in Israel and in pro-Israel advocacy groups were totally wrong. www.slowboring.com/p/obamas-for...

Three leftward moves from Obama's second term that I don't think worked out. www.slowboring.com/p/obamas-for...

Enjoyed this paper www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/fsgpf...

The civil rights movement is a great progressive moral and political triumph, but pattern-matching every advocacy campaign to ideas that made sense in those specific circumstances is a recipe for failure. www.slowboring.com/p/your-favor...

To reverse my usual schtick, conservatives who claim to believe getting their way on immigration is an existential issue for the viability of western civilization are weirdly unwilling to pursue that goal by eschewing flagrant corruption or being more moderate on taxes & health care.

Imagine the discourse cycle if this song came out today youtu.be/3FTS2tdmyYM?...

The DW-NOMINATE quantitative analysis here matches up with the intuitive view that this is a real cluster of members but how would we characterize the vertical dimension here and why do they register as middle of the pack on the primary dimension?

the phones, they are bad

If you want people to switch to electricity for home heat and cars (and ultimately, like, steel) then you’re going to need to generate and transmit a lot more electricity and it’s a huge improvement on the status quo whether or not some of that electricity comes from burning methane.

Big issue advantages for Democrats across the board here, though obviously still a very large amount of variation.

Of all Trump’s bullshit I think I am most hung up on the Kennedy Center thing for some reason.