Scott MacEachern

Eichmann in Ingram. “Whether they disappeared or were allowed to stay was up to him.”

Nine ago at Bowdoin - Arthur Bruni and Frank Brooks interview Jean Yarborough. Indistinguishable politics. Bruni place the same role with Bret Stephens in the NYT now, cosplaying as someone on the left while he eagerly agrees with everything the right-winger says. www.bowdoin.edu/news/2017/10...

Great - and very measured - article by Agustín Fuentes on the Henrich report. www.chronicle.com/article/how-...

This is nuts. But in character.

Attentat suprémaciste à Trappes Pensées pour les victimes

Apparently The New York Times couldn’t find any Democrats or any non-white voters to include in their Iowa focus group. www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

This is really terrible. I would look very badly indeed on a vendor who was telling students that they could ignore our university’s AI policy.

Incredible report from @aaup.org & @amnesty-usa.bsky.social on the vast bipartisan repression of campus speech on Palestine by administrators and the police: www.aclu.org/publications...

Interesting interview in general, but the NYT editorial rules - what needs to be edited out and what can be left in - are really fascinating: “We can say ‘retard’ and ‘[expletive]’ without the fear of getting cancelled. It’s a new dawn.” www.nytimes.com/2026/10/20/o...

“Frats appear to have the power to take men and turn them into rapists.” @katemanne.bsky.social www.nytimes.com/2026/10/20/o...

Prominent American yet again spits on the contributions that NATO allies made in Afghanistan. Nothing new there. Let’s make sure that doesn’t happen again. www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...

Words to live by, from Neil Price’s new book on the Vikings. “While ideologically contaminated scholarship of this kind is an unavoidable part of research history in Viking studies – we cannot just ignore its existence – the majority of this material can be left to rot in the past.”

Washington Post reporter is attacked by a troop of baboons in the West Bank. youtube.com/shorts/k_4xp...

“One is almost tempted to measure the degree of totalitarian infection by the extent to which the concerned governments use their sovereign right of denationalization.” www.nytimes.com/2026/10/16/o...

This is really amazing research on Neanderthal wood-working. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Always nice to see how that sophisticated balance of the powers the Founders conceived of actually works out. What geniuses they were.

A new documentary on the archaeology of Great Zimbabwe airs tonight on PBS. I interviewed the lead archaeologist, Shadreck Chirikure, and if you click through, you can watch an exclusive clip showing the team's discovery of Longquan celadon from eastern China. 🧪🏺

Incredible how money to hire in the humanities suddenly seems to appear when you make sure you aren‘t hiring anyone who works on race, gender, class, power etc.

Excerpts from Michael Lewis on DOGE (Guardian article). 1. Gavin Kliger, white nationalist, refused to shake hands with the Black IRS staffer who briefed him on privacy issues. Or pay attention. Kliger now has a defense start-up valued at 1.4B thanks to DOGE. www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...

NEW | On disappearing stories… MICHAEL GOVE, LOLA SALEM, AND A SUDDEN SILENCE Why did a series of newspaper stories vanish and why are right-wing organisations involved in a coordinated campaign to forget about one particular contributor? brokenbottleboy.substack.com/p/michael-go...

Andrew Higgins writes a canonical NYT China Is An Awful Place article, includes a dismissive aside on Chinese officials’ complaints about anti-China articles. He’s like Li Yuan, except that he actually went to China. www.nytimes.com/2026/10/11/w...

One salient question is why, if the research protocol is so solid, couldn’t this research be done on babies in southern Denmark where the researchers work, instead of babies in Guinea-Bissau? But of course we all know the answer to that: it’s because African babies are seen as expendable.

Once again: The ICE Air Operations Handbook allows children as young as 13 to be shackled on ICE flights. All adults are shackled except pregnant and postpartum women (up to two weeks) and, on removal flights only, single parents with young children. That’s according to their own policy.

Horrific story on surveillance and torture in Uganda… torture apparently facilitated by Canadian company @magnetforensics.bsky.social - which also seems to be quite active on Bluesky. www.nytimes.com/2026/10/08/o...

The Keynote Speaker at the Annual National Catholic Prayer Breakfast in March, folks.

On the @chronicle.com website today, the following editorials follow one other: ‘Anthropology has a truth problem’ ‘The social sciences have a politics problem’ ‘The humanities need to do more to reach non-majors’ Thank God the STEM fields are perfected, so CHE doesn’t have to cover them

I wrote for @thecut.com about the Cornell case and what it says that, at my institution and many others like it, protesters are often punished more harshly than sexual assailants www.thecut.com/article/what...

Interesting interview. Like him or dislike him, Carney is on top of a lot of things. www.nytimes.com/2026/09/27/w...

This is a particularly British enquiry: I don’t know of any other country that has investigated the targeting of left-wing groups like this. But my assumption is that the security services in every Western country did this, so that there is a long list of similar atrocities waiting to be found.

So I think maybe I just figured out why @timeshighered.bsky.social has not reported anything negative about James Orr. I could very well be wrong, but here we go: In 2024, THE signed an agreement with Hungary's Culture and Innovation Ministry which oversees Hungarian higher education..

Not sure how prevalent this is, but in the rural Atlantic Canada communities I grew up in, there is always a bedroom on the ground floor for older family members to die in. Because those stairs will kill you. It’s also weird inheriting that bedroom after a grandparent has died.

“…we can build a legal framework that is more than a cynical tool with which to punish one’s enemies and also better than what preceded it — something capacious enough to protect all minorities, principled enough to command legitimacy and resilient enough to resist political manipulation.”

The United States has become some weird parody of itself. It would be funny, if it wasn’t for the damage this fool is doing.

The UCLA Chancellor is apparently very much against antisemitism, but quite OK with torture. dailybruin.com/2026/09/12/j...

www.nytimes.com/2026/09/14/o...

Spencer Cox when he’s at home. The democracy deficit at the state level in the USA is really extraordinary. www.nytimes.com/2026/09/13/u...

A campaign for *MSF* to be banned as a terrorist group (on the paper thin basis of claims about 2 past employees) is the product of the UK Govt being willing to divorce any meaningful conception of societal threat from its use of proscription powers. Govt needs to wake up to the madness of this:

”About 60 percent (59.4) of respondents would not recommend their state as a desirable place to work for colleagues or graduate students“

That’s not particularly subtle.

How bad can it be? Oh.

Here is my letter to the MacDonald Laurier Institute on the subject of their appalling research. Use as you will. I recommend sending something of your own, though. And if you know anyone associated with MLI - and Board directors, say - send it to them, too.

NEW FROM ME: On a hellish third-country removal flight last month, passengers say ICE-contracted guards got drunk, teased and beat them, tied them up, refused to let them use the lavatory. One says he witnessed an ICE agent admit to illegal chain refoulement. prospect.org/2026/08/31/w...