Noah Nathan

Merriam Webster out here fighting for its life

Thanks to @voxdev.bsky.social for chatting with me about the findings of my new book, The Co-opted State. For those who teach on corruption and governance, I hope this podcast might be useful for students.

This is amazing! Well done @npr.org! apps.npr.org/west-africa-...

The American Political Science Assoc has recognized @kathleenthelen.bsky.social, Erik Lin-Greenberg, @arielrwhite.bsky.social, Andrea Campbell, Jerik Cruz,@gskulski.bsky.social,Angie Jo & Ye Zhang for outstanding books, articles, & papers.@mit-cis.bsky.social @ssp-mit.bsky.social polisci.mit.edu

Newly released in paperback, @michaelbrownstein.bsky.social, @madva.bsky.social, and @dryan149.bsky.social's “Somebody Should Do Something” provides a novel approach to creating transformative social change—and the ways that each of us can help make a difference: mitpress.mit.edu/978026204978...

The US Administration just restricted the duration of student visas. What's the problem? Now political appointees have full discretion to block most international students from staying after graduation. They've promised to use their new power to do just that. My new @piie.com post explains—>

Working on this paper was so fun! Excited that it's now out in the world and I hope you can check it out. It builds on broader agendas on the built environment and how space structures social contact from both Paige and I, w/ more info here: paigebollen.com and nlnathan.mit.edu

Working on this paper was so fun! Excited that it's now out in the world and I hope you can check it out. It builds on broader agendas on the built environment and how space structures social contact from both Paige and I, w/ more info here: paigebollen.com and nlnathan.mit.edu

Ghana’s 14 arrests in 16 months linked to false news have raised concerns about free speech.

🙏 www.youtube.com/watch?v=9YND...

Having gone through adjustment of status, I can tell you that this is just absolutely insane. It is yet another attempt to leave ordinary Americans worse off for no reason other than making life harder for (legal, not that it should matter) immigrants. Yet another national shame and disgrace.

MIT has lost 500 international grad students relative to last year. Caused directly by the White House. Closing America's doors to the very best, most brilliant people on the planet is like dropping a bomb directly on America's capacity to innovate. On the prosperity of our children's future.

"AIDS Creeps Back in Parts of Zambia, a Year After U.S. Cuts to H.I.V. Assistance" "A once-robust H.I.V. treatment and prevention system, credited with saving hundreds of thousands of lives, has begun to crumble."

This would have been useful to for anyone who imagined that a bombing campaign would result the spontaneous collapse of the Iranian regime to read

People need to understand how bad, how devastating, how unjustified Israel’s bombardment of Beirut is — it’s not just yet another of the strikes that have become routinized. Catastrophic civilian harm and human suffering that simply must not be shrugged off as normal and forgotten. Stop the madness.

everything we are seeing now is the consequence of having a political environment in which indifference to the deaths and suffering of other people - even by the state whose supposed responsibility is to safeguard their welfare - is a superpower rather than a political liability

All of this was very foreseeable but lots of people spent the election prosecuting their precious factional disputes rather than rallying to prevent a fascist from taking office and so here we are.

something strange and horrible and somehow fitting that we should have a very real threat of madman civilizational destruction at the very moment when we also have humans on the dark side of the moon taking pictures that show how small, precious, and beautiful our world and existence is

Today, April 7, is Kwibuka32, the commemoration of the 32d anniversary of the first full day of the 1994 genocide against the Tutsis in Rwanda. Past US presidents marked the date with stock statements of “never again.” Today the president instead echoed the language & threats of the perpetrators.

Impeach Trump.

“A whole civilization will die tonight” The president is openly threatening genocide. I don’t think it’s a stretch to wonder if he’s depraved enough to order a nuclear strike. The consequences of that would be existential, for everyone on the planet. www.nytimes.com/live/2026/04...

From our FirstView articles: A Precolonial Paradox? Rethinking Political Centralization and Its Legacies by MARTHA WILFAHRT. doi.org/10.1017/S000...

Deadline for submission to the Boston/New England Area Working Group in African Political Economy (BWGAPE) at Harvard is March 27. Please apply! @nlnathan.bsky.social @evlieb.bsky.social @piaraffler.bsky.social @scrosenzweig.bsky.social @chinemeluokafor.bsky.social Link: forms.gle/7R9PkFWEZTc6...

Horrific. www.nytimes.com/2026/03/16/h...

Listening to Bobi Wine on BBC speaking about fleeing Uganda, it strikes me how much the recent attack on international human rights led by Trump has empowered dictators like Museveni to act with impunity. Wine was attacked and intimidated before, but now they feel free to try to kill him,

The quiet part being illuminated: there have been very few new awards from NIH this fiscal year, for some very specific reasons 🆘 www.science.org/content/arti...

That's about half of what it cost for USAID for a whole year www.nytimes.com/live/2026/03...

Who knows if AI will replace us. But I'm feeling pretty confident its about to overwhelm us in an absolute tsunami of crap research...

going to keep saying: to keep functioning, a society must discourage baldfaced lying, especially by authorities

Demanding Idi Amin-level sychophany will destroy our military and bureaucratic capacity for generations to come.

The United States has just begun a massive, open-ended war — and nobody knows why

If you still believe a word that comes out of this man’s mouth I have a plot of land on Jupiter I would like to sell you that could be great for onion farming.

Have had this same thought for months. The Thom Tillises of the world, who clearly seem to think poorly of a lot of Trump's most extreme behaviors, can go out quietly, retire into complete anonymity, and be lost permanently to America's historical memory by February 1 2027. Or...

Have had this same thought for months now. The Thom Tillises of the world, who clearly seem to think poorly of a lot of Trump's most extreme behaviors, can go out quietly, retire into complete anonymity, and be lost permanently to America's historical memory by February 1 2027. Or...

This is also true of the universities, law firms, and media orgs that settled with Trump. They gave away their integrity and their rights—and got what in return? www.nytimes.com/2026/02/22/b...

Civil rights activist Medgar Evers was shot in the back by a Klansman in 1963. The National Park Service has removed visitor brochures from Evers' museum and reportedly plans to remove references that call his murderer a “racist"

Imagine how much they’d be lying about what happened without all the videos showing it from multiple angles.

People still somehow naively laugh off Trump's claims as bluster. But the Miller CNN interview is as clear as can be. They've backed themselves into a corner where they'll probably now think they can't not attack Greenland, to avoid looking like capitulating to their critics. It's completely insane.

So important. Peace Is Unraveling www.nytimes.com/2026/01/06/o...

I know it was funny for people to laugh about "TACO" a few months ago... but we actually really *do* want him to chicken out on most of this stuff. Sheesh. In a government where all policy is ego and preening and performative dominance displays, giving him an off ramp to chicken out is a good thing.

As I can recall, the "policy planning process" is a) in first term, Trump makes stray offhand, uninformed remark about Greenland; b) people laugh at him about; c) defensive to the slights, he post hoc decides he meant it; d) sycophants race to tell him its genius; e) now its policy... ... RIP NATO??