“you’re too confident!” packer is essentially saying, “you must understand that the people do not like us and we must genuflect to them before making our case.” this misses, however, the fact that whatever contempt voters have for liberals flows from a sense that their representatives are cowards

How Not to Fix American Democracy A new book argues for making the U.S. a “true” democracy, but fails at the essential strategy of persuasion.

i think packer gives away the actual motivation for this review when he spends the opening paragraph complaining that @ositanwanevu.com has been mean to him and his friends online www.theatlantic.com/books/archiv...

Still , proponents of a possible deal have faced fierce resistance on Harvard's campus in Cambridge, Mass. There, faculty members and students have warned that an agreement with the White House would amount to capitulation and that Mr. Trump could not be trusted to honor any arrangement over the long term. Given those concerns, Harvard's negotiators have pressed the administration in recent weeks, insisting that any resolution of their fight be structured as a legal settlement. A legal settlement would make it more difficult for the administration and Mr. Trump to change the terms after the fact.

Trump’s attacks on Harvard are flagrantly illegal. If he’s so willing to defy the restrictions of federal law, it’s beyond me why he’d respect the restrictions of a “legal settlement.”

www.nytimes.com/2025/08/11/u...

Palestinian Journalists must be protected and allowed to do their jobs, and International journalists must be allowed into Gaza – the world must know the truth. (3/3)
(3/3)

Last night, the Israeli army targeted and killed 6 Palestinian journalists as they sat in their tent, among them Al Jazeera correspondent Anas Al-Sharif and his entire team.
(2/3)

Crimes punishable by death in Gaza:
* Being a Journalist
* Being an aid worker
* Being a doctor
* Being a teacher
* Being a father
* Being a mother
* Being a child
* Being…

(1/3)

I feel much safer this morning, knowing that all those sign-wielding Quakers and nuns are behind bars where they belong.

Haaretz article with the headline "'Yes! Sanction Israel!' | Leftist MK Ofer Cassif Calls to Sanction Israel to Save Palestinians, Hostages and Israeli Society" and the subheading "The Hadash-Ta'al lawmaker, who had already been suspended from the Knesset four times since the war began over comments accusing Israel of genocide, said that 'no state or government should be above natural justice and international law'"

Ofer Cassif, Jewish member of Israel's parliament, calls for international sanctions against Israel and continues to remind us that those who stay silent are actively deciding to be complicit in the genocide.

"Israel is committing war crimes. In order to remedy this, Hamas needs to just cut it out and give up already, it's making this genocide harder for everyone. Just get it over with already."

Can’t believe shooting yourself in the foot doesn’t make shoes fit better

The Blue-State Hospitals Carrying Out Trump’s Anti-Trans Agenda In states where gender-affirming care remains legal, some hospitals have nonetheless stopped providing it. What gives?

Contrary to Trump’s grotesque, self-congratulatory press releases, he has not ended gender-affirming care for young people; rather, as the health care workers I spoke to this week made clear, hospital management, boards, and their legal advisers have ended it for him. My new story:

A shitty map created by ChatGPT5. it purports to be US States with an R in their name, but it's wrong and dumb and worthless just like LLMs.

My goto is to ask LLMs how many states have R in their name. They always fail. GPT 5 included Indiana, Illinois, and Texas in its list. It then asked me if I wanted an alphabetical highlighted map. Sure, why not.

“Nobody came”: Hill Country flooding survivors recount anguish, neglect during emotional hearing Residents told state lawmakers about what they’ve lost and the hardships they’re experiencing almost a month after the July 4 disaster devastated the region.

the republican party's model for response to a natural disaster is katrina www.texastribune.org/2025/07/31/t...

continue to think that one of pritzker’s
political assets is that he is a bit paulie walnuts coded

Today we learned Andrew Cuomo is directly coordinating with Donald Trump, even as this President sends masked agents to rip our neighbors off the streets and guts the social services so many New Yorkers rely on.

It’s disqualifying and a betrayal of our city.

Mark Penn, the former Clinton-era Dem pollster now helping Cuomo, has advised Trump on how to beat Mamdani.

And Trump has also talked to Cuomo directly: www.nytimes.com/2025/08/06/n...

stanford's student paper is enormously ballsy and brought down the college president a couple of years ago

Trump talked to Andrew Cuomo about the mayor's race. Completely disqualifying that Cuomo would even take the call, even worse that his allies want Trump involved www.nytimes.com/2025/08/06/n...

Andrew Cuomo couldn’t allow his first, tepid recognition of reality — that the Israeli government, with the full support of the Trump administration, is starving the people of Gaza — last more than a few hours without walking it back.

This is someone who believes in nothing.

this is so funny to me. MARK PENN, TRUMP AND CUOMO TOGETHER!

The full list of all 18,500 children killed in Gaza, in video form.

www.washingtonpost.com/world/intera...

popular anti-fascism as taxpayer revolt...might have some legs

i have been thinking a lot about how the entire concept of “the deal” is antithetical to transparency, fair play and rule of law, as larry notes. the deal is necessarily nonstandard, ad hoc and dependent on the whims of the dealmaker

Trump’s Deal-Making With Other Elite Schools Scrambles Harvard Negotiations

It is not “deal-making.” It is extortion built on Christopher Rufo’s idea of “taking down” one or more elite university.
www.nytimes.com/2025/08/04/u...

The “New York Times” discovers that not every Jewish person agrees with each other.

The primary reason for a Democrat with national ambitions to avoid endorsing Mamdani it is to maintain relationships with pro-Israel donors like AIPAC that hate him. But a Dem with national ambitions should also realize that AIPAC will likely be politically toxic among Dem voters in 3 years.

Eitan Fischberger was an IDF sergeant.

I hope everyone (but especially white people) can see how easy it is to erase entire genocides with huge sums of money so maybe they'll start to understand how much they've been lied to about what their ancestors did to Native Peoples and Black people.

The rest of the students should sue the this narrow charge of “antisemitism” is libelous, and the court should give them a fat payout and make that punk who showed his laptop with the ChatGPT assignments he did on graduation jumbotron pay out his ass forever.