Sarang Shah

We have a website! Which means... I'm thrilled to share that I will be joining the Center for Law and the Economy at Columbia Law School as a Fellow in Public Economic Law later this summer! Hope to connect further with scholars and others at Columbia and the NYC metro area over the coming years.

It's a shame that as a zillionaire he is surrounded by nothing but sycophants who won't let him get the mental health help he needs. We desperately need to tax away all that toxic wealth so we can help him.

in this interview, @pastpunditry.bsky.social says possibly the smartest thing i've heard about gender and the 2024 election (and by extension 2016 also), which is that having Harris as an opponent gave Trump leverage to make certain kinds of gendered appeals

I very much think writing social science and law review articles is a creative exercise. But is it an artistic one?

I would just like to live in a world where, ten years from now, we are insanely embarrassed, trying to explain to our kids how we let the people in the administration actually keep power. Because the alternative is this becoming normal.

what's weird is that the chessecake factory is so liberal coastal california coded to me

If they lose power, expect Republicans in several states to strip powers from incoming Democrats, pass voting restrictions, and new gerrymanders. They did it after losing governors races in NC in 2016 and 2024, MI and WI in 2018, and KY in 2019. They preemptively did it ahead of losing IA this year

What's oddly encouraging is that the right and various media handmaidens seem to be running out of ideas and organizational capacity to execute them. This all feels old hat, like retorting "Where' the beef?" to people born in 2008.

Kiah Stokes is the unlikely star of these grueling WNBA Finals: defector.com/kiah-stokes-...

691 words about Cheesecake. 434 words about rape.

It's a great day for a publication. @povertyscholar.bsky.social and I were part of a great project with great scholars to discuss neighborhoods. We took on the task of contributing to research on what neighborhood power looks like for marginalized communities. www.e-elgar.com/shop/gbp/a-r...

1. Not sure when a new, on-the-record rape allegation against a sitting president isn’t considered news — especially considering Trump was found liable by a jury in a similar case — but it was ignored by most mainstream media outlets

Well played

Gonna venture a controversial claim: dance and music lessons for candidates would be the most cost effective campaign spend imaginable

Politico wrote up Zohran playing basketball with the uncovering-a-big-scandal tone the same day the NYTimes wrote up "credible allegation that The President of the United States raped a woman" as a political strategy story. Broken media in a nutshell

A single billionaire megadonor is propping up the Republican effort to stop Dems from flipping Pennsylvania’s Senate and gaining full control of government—to a much greater degree than Elon Musk is doing it at the federal level

I am reminded of what happened after election day to the judgment pending against Donald Trump after his conviction on 34 counts of felony

I confused the Carolinas yet again, happens to the best of us (I say as self-consolation)

I'd be interested in the Cooper-Graham voters. More generally split ticket voters of statewide races in 2026 must be fascinating people

It feels like realignment is happening, but with the most catastrophic imbalance between the two parties I can think of. The number of Dems realigning to Repubs seems so much less than the other way around

I think the lesson from Lula is not never talk about the opposition; it's articulate a positive vision that's basically, We Can Just Do Things. That's why Mamdani-ism is so popular - voters have an intrinsic sense that their electeds have agency they're not using

I keep on saying: we are in the middle of a constitutional crisis: our government is going to fail at basic things in the 120th Congress unless you impeach Russell Vought on Day One.

I'm going to try to do this cleanly. Today's right wing governments are networked to each other. Those networks are well-documented. You can read about them in books. Following the elections in one node of that network is good practice for understanding the U.S. node.

NEW: The group behind Cornel West's 2024 ballot push was wholly funded through Elon Musk's dark money network, according to Sludge's review of tax documents. readsludge.com/2026/10/26/m...

I've casually surveyed my consumption, and I've been surprised by how much more foreign made stuff, whether it's chocolate or entertainment, I've consumed as the years have gone by. Not American companies outsourcing but stuff for which the production is totally organized abroad

But the fact is that modern liberal, center-left, and left political movements are *insufficiently* transnationalized — especially when compared to the transnational right. We are *behind* the curve. Our leaders are behind the curve.

We build on the scaffolding provided by a lot of other scholars, but my own "breakthrough" on the subject came out of my dissertation, where I tried to understand the international power-political dimensions of the Protestant Reformation.

Great thread with a fantastic reading list. If anything, borders themselves are endogenous to boundaryless politics and political processes.

Here's your weekly helping of Beau & Tell Scholarship with references to @katejackson.bsky.social @mtokson.bsky.social and others! I highly recommend Kate's new substack and Matt's tremendous (albeit bleak) new paper on "Near-Total Law Enforcement".

Well, given a globalized world and cross national impacts of domestic politics, you get a move toward a planetary politics. CC: @nilsgilman.bsky.social

the biggest presidential scandal in history but the political media largely acts as if it's not happening. hasan piker has received more mainstream political media coverage over the last 6 months than trump's connections with epstein has

I'm genuinely curious how much of the financial sector still believes in the efficient market hypothesis and the normative aim of cultivating a rational equities market. Or is it all capture and short-term extraction all the way down

I have no idea if this is any good but hell yes, normalize these sorts of articles. Looking at you, @nytimes.com

Nothing beats working on an idea for weeks, maybe even months or years, thinking it's shit, then finally arriving at a breakthrough that pulls enough of it together that it's good and cool again.

In my own idiosyncratic, purely selfish preference ordering, this may nearly outrank the election results in Serbia and Brazil in things I wanted.

hunter s thompson sure did ruin a lot of male writers huh

"People who believe their choices don't matter choose poorly." Indeed.

Our tax code is part of the problem. Since the Reagan era, we've slashed the number of income tax brackets, even as incomes at the very top have skyrocketed. New Roosevelt research from @samarthgupta.bsky.social shows why it's time to bring back more brackets and higher top rates.

Wealth inequality isn't inevitable. It's the result of policy choices, and Washington is still making it worse. As @salon.com reports, new @itep.org EP analysis finds Trump's policies have raised costs for everyone except the richest 1%.

In Brazil, it appears that voters who opted for eliminated first-round candidates roughly broke even in the runoff (even if the candidates leaned right). But the big difference was: Millions of voters who cast 'null' or 'blank' ballots in the first round then voted for Lula.

More educated municipalities moved towards Lula, less educated towards Bolsonaro, compared with 2022