Nick Fleisher

I first encountered this guy when he covered the LSA Pinker letter for the NYT and he's somehow only gotten worse

Pete Hegseth getting dogwalked in by far the most consequential thing he has ever done

Just learned that Yascha Mounk is speaking at the Menard Center at UW-Eau Claire tonight in case anybody needs to wash their hair

Scalar modifier semantics rekt

A text that begins "Bradley Whitford here. I'm going to skip the pleasantries and get straight to it." Siri has labeled it "Maybe: Elizabeth Warren"

Siri, you don't have to go home but you can't stay here

Doug Feith still not beating the "dumbest fucking guy on the planet" allegations in today's WaPo piece

And Ziegler owes her current 10-year term to the fact that she ran unopposed in spring 2017, at the height of the initial Trump 1 backlash, when literally any opponent would have won by double digits

A running theme of this administration is that usually the reason no one has done X in the past is because X is a genuinely hard problem, and/or there are extraordinarily good reasons not to do X, all of which becomes apparent on even cursory inspection

The consequences of this war for Americans will be bleak and take decades to unfold, but it will impoverish and provincialize them in ways that would have been unimaginable ten years ago

We're running out of sky If Saudi or Azerbaijan airspace shuts, Europe will be cut off from Asia

We're running out of sky.

If Saudi or Azerbaijan airspace shuts, Europe will be cut off from Asia.

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A SINGLE EVENT CAN HAVE INFINITELY MANY INTERPRETATIONS

One thing I have learned from years of talking with and reporting on truckers is that times like these always wipe out small shipping companies and owner operators. It’s brutal and it sucks, for them and for everyone who depends on them (ie all of us)

This reminds me of that line I saw someone say once (which rang true) that something that makes Trump uniquely able to connect with low-information voters is that he is a low-information voter.

Feels like 1930s France

Crate&Barrel’s marketing team really didn’t think this one thru huh

He messed up the talking point that we've been at war with Iran for 47 years (since 1979). Which is also very dumb.

On top of that, what distinguishes honorable countries from the likes of Putin’s war-crimes-regime is to investigate, take responsibility, and apologize for serious mistakes, not blatantly lie about them.

"Armchair linguistics" is a term of (light) abuse and obviously not without its problems, but one virtue of it is its relative imperviousness to being faked by an LLM. The whole thing is a real person developing a real argument, more or less from scratch, and providing real insight.

On further reflection "Huge iff True" would also work

feels telling about American foreign policy punditry that while many decry the aimlessness of Trump’s monstrously wrong Iran war there were far more outraged columns over the harm done to US power and influence and standing and interests and example when Biden rightly withdrew from Afghanistan.

This conveniently doubles as a challenge for those who are very confident that rocks and stones aren't conscious

This is also just bad prose. The hedging "may" is meant to shoehorn a de dicto reading of "a US strike," to allow for uncertainty about the source. But instead it makes it sound as if there is doubt—where none is—whether the school was destroyed and the children killed.

this rhetorical trick has made a lot of very stupid people think they’re society’s most important intellectuals

Having been one of those very green 20-somethings who ran the Berkeley Linguistics Society conference back before it switched to an actual peer review system, the thought of a field's entire publishing output working this way is some combination of hilarious and appalling

With Texas and Florida taking up the lion's share of attention, I think people might be sleeping on just how oppressive the situation for public higher education is in Indiana right now

This is just a splendid piece of writing

Fretting Chris Thile shocks and awes in Berkeley as a new war dawns in Iran.

having too much to say about going to see Chris Thile on the night the new forever war begins again www.oaklandreviewofbooks.org/fretting/

Notably they don't say "walks a straight line"

Reposting my student’s book, A Social History of Modern Tehran: Space, Power, and the City, in case of interest.

The opportunities for graft at DHS have got to be absolutely insane rn