Nick Weininger

looked at in longer perspective, it's striking how much this resembles the premodern system of exclusion, rents, and personalist connections, which was--and this part's important--radically worse than the modern system of impersonal rules and general taxation

A 2025 Nobel Prize winner in chemistry, Omar Yaghi is the son of Palestinian refugees who grew up in Jordan. He just left the US to move to China after raising concerns about rising anti-immigrant sentiment, like the kind shown here. donmoynihan.substack.com/p/china-than...

The polynomial hierarchy walks into a bar. On sitting down it launches into an extended kvetch about all the layers of its woeful life. One patron asks another, "Wow, does that guy ever stop?" The answer: "I don't know-- kinda think he might just keep going forever-- he sure has a LOT of problems."

BREAKING: Another immigrant has died in ICE custody, the 28th death in ICE detention in 2026.

I talked to Sakariye Abdi Mohamed, a Somali asylum seeker who was arrested at work, while he was imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay. I called him again once he was deported to Mogadishu. Here's what he had to say.

I know there's a lot going on but I feel it should probably be more of an above-the-fold story that members of Congress released a thoroughly documented report directly accusing the president of the United States of being a serial rapist.

I also think it is important here to distinguish between a sports-esque 'rooting interest' and a recognition that populist authoritarian leaders and movements tend to understand themselves as allies of each other. Orban and Putin spent a lot of money promoting authoritarianism abroad.

It is both very unlikely Trump will personally succeed at establishing a full-blown dictatorship before he's gone, and also the case that Trump's tenure in American politics has massively increased the chance this country will have a full-blown dictatorship at some point in the next 30 or 40 years.

True, but many successful authoritarians (as in established a consolidated regime) follow in the wake of a less competent, less successful predecessor destabilizing the system, setting the precedents, evading punishment and repudiation. The next guy learns and adapts, they don't start from zero.

Could this be the most @jacobtlevy.bsky.social SMBC ever? www.smbc-comics.com/comic/order-3

My pal Danielle Koenig shared that her father Walter Koenig passed away last night at age 90. A performer whose kindness and warmth shone through the screen. He will be well remembered.

House Democrats looked into it and it really feels like they were just tripping over allegations against Trump - including allegations no one had heard before! - everywhere they looked. It's bizarre that this remains such a low-burn scandal. democrats-judiciary.house.gov/media-center...

Because the rents that poor people can afford are too low to pay off the cost of building new homes for them, these requirements act as a stealth tax on new housing. Taxing new homes means that only the highest-end projects get built and each subsidized unit costs tenants $800,000 in excess rent.

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.

Prison is just temporary incapacitation. Putschists require permanent incapacitation.

He's trying anyway, which is why they really shouldn't give him a prison sentence.

Hungarian PM Péter Magyar: "I have just spoken by phone with the leaders of the Students List, who won the elections in Serbia, to congratulate them... I assured them of Hungary’s support. I was delighted to hear how much strength our victory in April had given them during this difficult struggle."

Despite orders for polls to remain open for an extra two hours, results are already coming in, including from states with the strongest evidence of voter suppression, like Bahia. This will be a long night. What is happening is an unprecedented crime against democracy in Brazil.

NEW BRIGHT SPOTS: Even on 100% gas power, heat pumps cut emissions by ~48% and EVs by about half. The authors of an “electrification doesn’t cut emissions” paper made a series of compounding mistakes and used misleading assumptions. Here's why. janrosenow.substack.com/p/heat-pumps...

You can read the full story here (w/ @propublica.org + @nytmag.bsky.social) www.nytimes.com/2026/10/25/m...

A prayer for election days. To be inserted before the חתימה of ברכת המשפט, or שומע תפילה if that's too radical for you הַנּוֹתֵן מֶמְשָׁלָה לְמוֹשְׁלִים וְשִׁלְטוֹן לְשׇׁלְטָנִים May the One who grants governance to governance and rule to rulers,

Rest assured, this will be the eighty-ninth time the Fifth Republic has dealt with an inchoate mass protest movement until it peters out after a few weeks, and we have become exceedingly efficient at it.

If this is your view, it is not too late to Do Your Bit (tm) to make it otherwise. There are a ton of Indivisible + DCCC phonebank sessions in the next 10 days. I'm doing (checks calendar) four. It's tedious but not difficult. Might work, might not. Either way, won't you feel better having tried?

This is why I think we have to like, quadruple, the house - much fewer safe seats

Talking about Leonard Cohen made me think about this love letter I wrote to mark his death which came hours before Trump's 1st election. I think the sentiments hold up 10 years on, even if we had no idea what was coming. His work still reminds us to look for beauty & good amidst ugliness and evil.

It took decades and multiple stages before Rome, for example, got to consolidated autocracy. But it was still more or less within a single lifetime, and things move faster now. We can't afford to neglect what the trendline means on that kind of timescale. Most of us will still be around for it.

Frodo wakes. ‘Where am I?’ ‘In the House of Elrond. It is ten o’clock in the morning. The morning of October the twenty-fourth, if you want to know.’ ‘Gandalf!’ ‘Yes, I am here. And you are lucky to be here, too, after all the absurd things you have done since you left home.’

California should do this. Seriously. We have both the fiscal capacity and the local expertise to know what to spend it on.

Mine is 2 via multiple co-worker channels: I served on the SF civil grand jury with his former special assistant and several of my old Google friends were on the healthcare.gov rescue team.

XXVIII 1. The President shall be subject to the Laws of the United States. 2. The President shall be liable and subject to Indictment, Trial, Judgment and Punishment, according to Law. 3. The President shall not have power to grant reprieves and pardons for offenses against the United States.

literally this comic except he apparently lives in Czechia instead of Nebraska

And when they're done prosecuting Pete (and others) for war crimes, hand them over to the ICC for additional war crime prosecutions.

I do not claim that you can pour everything into the gap between Trump on the one hand and Biden/Harris on the other, but into that chasm nevertheless fit a great many lives lost or ruined. It turns out there really was a difference!

Yes and also this sort of 'uniparty' nonsense feels so hollow deployed in the midst of a national stove-touching. It turns out the difference between a 'milquetoast corporate Democrat' and Trump was really big! President Harris would not be driving trans soldiers out of the military!

it's darkly funny that progressives feel weird siding with the founding fathers and MAGA is eager to claim them, because Trump and his minions are the embodiment of everything they despised like everything they hated cohered into a single cancerous blob the final boss of the American Revolution

ICE causes man to wreck while his children are in the car, then tries to pry his kids from his arms. They got the wrong guy. Toward the end of the video, an ICE officer says law requires the person recording to back up 25 feet and threatens with pepper spray. (There is no 25-foot law.)

Please don’t trust the polls, y’all. They have been inaccurate AF way too often. Vote like we are 3% down in every race and we need every single vote to pull out a win. Bc I fear that may be more accurate. Vote like your life + liberty depend on it. Come hell or high water, get to the ballot box.

imagine being the one guy in the russian propaganda office who's assigned to post on bluesky. you can't even post on xwitter because the bossman says you have to be a troll on the site for thirty-five-year-old chart-lovers, non-binary furry artists, and anarchist video essayists.

Holy shit. The Brits do not get to make fun of Americans for overreacting to terrorism anymore

Do they even understand how much they’re pissing people off by doing this. Whatever research that convinces them that spamming everyone is all upside is bullshit. It is like they’d rather have all my contact info to sell to other campaigns forever than receive my donation. It sucks.

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.

A pretty simple reform we should have done long ago is to strip the FCC of all content regulation. It's constitutionally problematic even if SCOTUS has allowed it. It accomplishes nothing worthwhile even when fascists don't control it. Let them handle the technical frequencies stuff but that's it.

You are directly and immediately rewarded for mirroring the group psychology of your audience. You are almost explicitly encouraged to seek out ideas or feelings that are shared by much of the audience and restate them in vivid or evocative ways that will resonate with many of them. That’s the game.

Social media turns social interactions into a game, where you are instantly rewarded with attention, social currency, and often money by saying what people want to hear, with instant feedback about whether or not you’ve succeeded in saying the right thing. Think about the implications of that!

Hanging over all this is the much bigger problem that the presidential veto is way overpowered, though. I'd go after that before worrying too much about bicameralism.

Endorsed. We’ve seen enough. Or give it to a commission of retired judges, maybe.

friend of a friend got a GOP fundraising spam text and it's quite telling. They are advertising Trump as a rage-fulled abuser and his wife as a terrified young woman, to raise money for Trump. This is because "Trump is an abuser, vote Trump" is only a contradiction to those who think abuse is bad