Michael Pollak

www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...

The City Council passed COPA

The item on the origin of the Yellow Kid and Yellow Journalism was entirely new to me and great. It's the first item after the initial poem (which is pretty good too) www.writersalmanac.org/index.html%3...

recalling that the actual quote from Max Weber about "slow boring" is 180 degrees away from limp dishrag centrism. he explicitly says you have to be a hero who reaches for the impossible

I published my first story in 1988, when I was 17 years old. Today, at 55, I've published more than 30 books, with three more coming in the next year or so. In the intervening years, I've spent a lot of time thinking and talking about publishing.

My brain cannot process this level of corruption. She was being paid $50 million to engineer a pardon from Trump *while working at the Justice Department* as a "Special Government Employee." And it worked. He got the pardon, and she got the money. www.nytimes.com/2026/10/20/u...

thei paved the ynternet and put up a slopping shop

One of the many things I love about El-Sayed is that he's willing to engage with someone hostile if it gets them to admit the premises behind that hostility, to the extent that it becomes impossible to avoid the underlying bigotry. You want to go there, fine, but he's gonna make you own it.

Sounds plausible. www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

For the first time, NYC is making an investment with public shares embedded. This is exactly what we mean when we say economic justice and economic growth go hand in hand.

1. Credit is not scarce. 2. The only plausible form of crowding out is of scarce physical inputs. 3. This shows up (in part) as inflation. 4. It is translated into higher interest rates only be deliberate central bank action, or financial market expectation of same.

A New York drama ripped from today's headlines!

NEW: Mass politics elected Zohran Mamdani. Institutions are governing with him. The fight over Jessica Tisch is teaching his movement a hard lesson: electing a mayor, and moving one, are different kinds of power. open.substack.com/pub/michaell...

A deep essay and clear essay by @jwmason.bsky.social jwmason.org/slackwire/in...

Here is a question for Jason and other believers in crowding out: If the AI bubble bursts and data center investment collapses, do you think that construction spending in other sectors will go up or down? I think it will go down.

I feel like you could make kind of a productive analogy between AI agents where they save the user time by wasting everybody else's time and the American approach to vehicle safety where occupant safety is prioritized at the expense of everybody else's. Prosocial? Never heard of her.

The NYC DOT and MTA are finally going to start a pilot to use authority that the state has granted for years to use bus-mounted cameras to issue tickets to cars blocking bike lanes nyc.streetsblog.org/2026/10/07/c...

Vitol chief warns of tanker shortage and risk of $200-a-barrel oil ft.trib.al/zntHqhv

Trump has systematically dismantled the data collection capacity of the government, and its cost is the slow disabling of democratic accountability itself. Great piece from Kevin Schultz and Jason Oh. prospect.org/2026/10/05/a...

One clear difference between left and right yimbyism thethornnyc.substack.com/p/interview-...

It would be unbelievably great if Zohran could untie the civil service knot in agreement with public sector unions. Like he said, taking the big shots.

As Brazil heads to the polls on Sunday to decide between Lula da Silva and Flavio Bolsonaro, former president Javier Bolsonaro’s son, Equator asked Rodrigo Nunes about his assessment of Lula’s third term, the origins of Bolsonarismo and what Brazil reveals about the global far right.

This article by @ericblanc.bsky.social is about labor organizing. There’s a lot more to this than I remembered at first. It’s encouraging to look at it this way.

www.wsj.com/us-news/immi...

Amazing chart from Adam Tooze's daily links newsletter

You would not guess it from the news coverage, but given stable growth and inflation and in the absence of a significant further rise in bond yields, current deficits of around 6% imply a *declining* path of debt relative to GDP.

I have blamed The agents That hacked Your website And which You probably Reasonably thought I controlled Forgive me I am rich And unaccustomed To taking responsibility

www.wsj.com/economy/the-...

Digital rights activists have long railed at the use of the term "IP," criticizing it for being deceptively imprecise and also rhetorically dishonest. I get where these objections are coming from, but I think they're misguided.

The latest official figure is that 60,000 rent-controlled apartments are being warehoused citylimits.org/opinion-most...

This is a really wonderful debunking of the Huggingface AI stuff. It’s 25 minutes but I was riveted and now I feel liberated & smug again & it feels great youtu.be/jxM35ij5VGg?...

A fact that astonished me when I learned it a few years ago, is that until the mid-1980s much of Manhattan had no waste treatment plants - untreated sewage was just piped straight into the Hudson. www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2026/09/fact...

worth tying this into the political economy of the slave south as well. from roughly the 1820s onwards, slavery became enormously lucrative in ways that had never been seen before. slave traders became millionaires. large planters had tremendous purchasing power. just huge amounts of wealth.

The transformation into David Irving is now complete.

Song of the summer:

Capitalists seem pre-feudal when it comes to making people work in ovens. As things get hotter, they are trying to pass laws against passing laws. Phoenix workers have had some great local victories using politics, but the heat exploitation is jaw-dropping.