Jake Anbinder

9 Dec 2024

Thrilled to announce that my book NIMBY NATION: The War on Growth That Created Our Housing Crisis and Remade American Politics, is under contract with Bloomsbury and slated for publication in fall 2027. Please spread the news to anyone and everyone!

Nothing has made me suddenly feel ancient as a parent than my four year old becoming completely blasé about getting shots* *with promise of a subsequent visit to the Target toy section, but still...

Idea: tunnel at Dulles with Orson Welles AI voice saying "Pentagon Federal Credit Union will offer no rate that is not great."

Part of this story is there’s so much more choice in mid-premium chocolate now that it sort of makes sense that Reese’s etc. would pivot to value. Reese’s doesn’t need to be good in a world with Justin’s and Unreal. Same thing in fast food—McD’s doesn’t go after people who can afford Shake Shack

New York Magazine@nymag.com

Many people in writer Rachel Handler’s life felt that something was amiss, that commercial chocolate didn’t taste the way it used to. For our Cover Story, Handler spends several months tumbling down a chocolate vortex to find out why. www.grubstreet.com/article/choc...

I think it’s hard to convey to people born in this century just how ubiquitous McDonald’s was 30 years ago, not in the “they have lots of restaurants” sense which is still true but in the “a much bigger and more heterogenous swath of Americans all ate at McDonald’s“ sense

Pat McAfee, the punter?

90% of the determinant of a doughnut’s quality is “is it hot?” and 10% is everything else

poll.qu.eduGeneric Ballot For Control Of U.S. House: Dems 51%, GOP 39%, Dem Party Ahead On Key Issues, Boosted By Independents, Quinnipiac University National Poll Finds; 71% Prefer Candidates Who Support St..."A warning light flashing red for the GOP scrambling to stay in power. From the economy to international conflicts to AI, independent voters are siding with Democrats, even though a vast majority of t...

"Data centers, not long ago just the vague description for a network of massive structures needed for an emerging industry, are now the subject of the 'NIMBY' rallying cry." poll.qu.edu/poll-release...

Delighted to announce I have started a new role as @acls1919.bsky.social Leading Edge Fellow and Manager of Academic Engagement and Impact at the Washington Center for Equitable Growth

I am excited to return to the think tank world, particularly through this one-of-a-kind ACLS program which creates opportunities for recent PhDs in the social sciences and humanities to work for nonprofit organizations. Learn more about it here: www.acls.org/programs/lea...

On the academic front, I'm now a visiting scholar at Cornell, so I will be keeping one foot in the history department here. And of course, NIMBY NATION: The War on Growth That Created Our Housing Crisis and Remade American Politics is still due out from Bloomsbury in 2027

Did you know: cities used to have balloons that would just follow children to school, until General Motors bought all the balloons and scrapped them

Curry truly a Bay Area type of guy: moved there after college and under no circumstances will he ever leave

Cindy aka Mrs. Celtics ☘️@mrsceltics.bsky.social

It's amazing to see a player stay with a team for their entire career and we may rarely if not ever see this again for all we know. Curry could've gone ring chasing and the Warriors could've offered far less to rebuild. Opposite LeBron who is chasing rings then partnered with Kalshi to compensate.

"San Antonio? I don't think there's a Cheeseboard Pizza there."

Richard Scarry predicted this

Maciek Hamela@maciekhamela.bsky.social

With the Strait of Hormuz closed, Iraq has resorted to moving its oil across the desert to Syria in hundreds of tanker trucks, in true Mad Max style. From there, it will be shipped to worldwide markets.

something you realize if you spend any time in online comment sections is a substantial number of people are completely unable to conceptualize historical changes in purchasing power

"look, back then a car only cost $2,000!" "yes but you see measured by labor-hours that was actually quite a bit m—" "yes, but $2,000! that's a really small number. today it's a bigger number."

“No I said ‘Union Bomber.’ Union. U-N-I—yes I know I know.”

thedriven.ioElectric cars are more durable than petrol equivalents, and last longer - major report findsA study of millions of vehicles reveals that EVs are much less likely to fail compared to petrol equivalents, and will last a lot longer.

can't believe the car that runs on millions of tiny explosions transmitting energy through a complex series of oily metal parts doesn't last as long as the one that's four wheels attached to a battery

Peter Gardner@peterdgardner.bsky.social

Electric cars are more durable than petrol equivalents, and last longer - major report finds thedriven.io/2026/09/24/e...

The only thing I’ll say about the Globe story is you encounter a lot of businesses in Ithaca that don’t seem particularly interested in making money and more often than not they convince you that the profit motive is not the worst thing in the world

“How can I best align my business with the interests of the people who would pay money to see my business continue to exist” is not a bad heuristic in terms of getting rid of people who just want to harass you

TIL the NYU Department of Politics is endowed by the Wilf family who are best known for owning the Minnesota Vikings, which leads me to conclude the Wilfs just like giving money to purple things?

One of the weirder internet myths is that the Oklahoma panhandle exists because Texas ceded it in order to keep slavery legal, and it's weird because it requires knowing several different things about the sectional crisis but kind of mashing them together incorrectly

I think it comes from a desire to explain why Oklahoma has a weird panhandle, but of course no one in 1850 knew that it would be a panhandle one day

Notably neither of the footnotes on this paragraph says this

I have the same esteem for Zojirushi as a brand that our parents' generation once had for General Electric

My mom bought a GE fridge last year and I had to break the news that it's just a logo, nothing about the fridge has anything to do with the company that in her mind is GE, which just makes jet engines now.

you just don't get it. transplants are bad, unless they are immigrants in which case they are good, unless they work for tech in which case they are bad, unless their work involves content creation in which case they are good, unless the content creation involves AI in which case they are bad

Mamdani obviously a skilled politician but it certainly helps re. his relationship with Trump that their pools of potential voters have little overlap. Mamdani lost independents. Mayor is basically the highest level of office where that can be the case and you can still win.

thedartmouth.comOp-eds, academic articles by Provost Santiago Schnell flagged as ‘AI-written’ by ‘near-zero error’ AI detector PangramSchnell said he used artificial intelligence for “making writing processes more efficient,” but that AI was not a “substitute” for his own “intellectual judgment or authorship.”

This was a virtually certain outcome of the 2023-2024 discourse that revealed substantial differences among disciplines on whether borrowing text that other people wrote still counts as original scholarship

Jeff Sharlet@jeffsharlet.bsky.social

The provost of Dartmouth, at which I teach, has been using AI to write both academic papers & national op-eds, according to brave reporting by @thedartmouth.bsky.social. Many students are already bitter about AI. This leaves us as faculty no ground to stand on. www.thedartmouth.com/article/2026...

"it's ok if the writing's not my own because it was my idea to assemble or direct other people/bots to assemble the writing in the way that I wanted" is a pretty widely held view in academia (not in my field though)

Not to harp on this but can you imagine the reaction from Mamdani’s base if, say, a New York Times editorial said this

It turns out the left/liberal divide was never the message, just the messenger

20 Sept

"criterion collection"...don't you just mean criteria?

19 Sept

“it just means more”

19 Sept

Surprised no state has decided to borrow from Brunei and use the nickname Abode of Peace. Would look sick on a license plate.

18 Sept

I identify intrinsically with Josh Allen as someone who lived in Laramie, Wyoming, yearning for something more and that something turned out to be upstate New York

18 Sept

"Marcy Kaptur did something I don't like" ah you sweet summer child, I see you are new to knowing who Marcy Kaptur is

18 Sept

Marcy Kaptur? The Ohio politician?

17 Sept

Imagine telling someone in 2016 that a decade in the future of Brady, Belichick, and Kraft it would be Brady who enjoyed by far the best public reputation

I like the implication that the second charity supports mediocre tennis players

if your Bo be Nix, he be throwing some picks if your Bo be French, he be emitting a stench

@profschleich.bsky.social

People are saying Canada will join with the EU for the political ties, but it's clearly because of the EU's lucrative TV contracts and historical reputation with the bowl selection committee

Jake Anbinder reposted

David Schleicher

papers.ssrn.comThe Great American Property Tax Freak OutThere has been a lot of news over the last two years, so it is understandable that neither the mass media nor the legal academy has focused on what is happening

❗New Article❗ The Great American Property Tax Freakout! Since 2024, many states have radically reshaped their property tax systems.The changes are an example of a national trend of carving out influential groups from taxation, in this case a majority group: homeowners papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

14 Sept

It's absolutely true and much of it is downstream of changes in the way politicians interact with the press

Chris Hayes@chrislhayes.bsky.social

This is going to make me sound old and maybe a little nostalgic but it’s really striking how in the Trump era, no one even pretends to debate about policy anymore.

14 Sept

But also, secondarily, changes in what exactly is the glue that holds together political coalitions