Nate Schenkkan

Wild detail in this @lukewgoldstein.bsky.social story on the incursion of private equity into youth sports: one company is not allowing parents to film their kid's hockey games so they can push their own recording/streaming service instead. Happened to a US Senator www.levernews.com/wall-street-...

Has China’s Power Peaked in Asia? Beijing finds itself in a precarious geopolitical position.

This is quite a good long essay in @foreignpolicy.com
about China, Asia, and the question of what China's "peak" looks like in the region where it has the greatest influence and interest: foreignpolicy.com/2025/11/14/k...

Would also note that at this stage the EU/European capitals are heavily invested and investing ever-more heavily in the war, and you do have to bring them along if you want to end it.

F.B.I. Trainee Sues After Being Abruptly Fired Over Display of Gay Pride Flag He described his dismissal as the latest move by senior F.B.I. officials to play politics, damaging morale and hindering the bureau’s ability to carry out its public safety mission.

An FBI agent-in-training filed a lawsuit after he was handed a letter signed by the bureau’s director, Kash Patel, saying that he was being “summarily dismissed” because of “political signage.” The only thing that could be, he quickly realized, was a rainbow pride flag that had hung near his desk.

I encourage everyone who has a job that is not "to win elections" to think more about the first here than the second

The root of a lot of bad discourse is people conflating "this is good policy" and "this will help us win elections". They're separate questions! And frankly everyone should have a lower degree of certainty about the second one than they do.

This is what you get when you only bring one party in the conflict to the table and call it a negotiation

"Officials in Kyiv briefed on the plan said it closely aligned with the Kremlin’s maximalist demands and said it would be a non-starter for Ukraine without significant changes."

Yesterday, Trump defended the Saudi Crown Prince in the Oval Office.

He said he had “nothing” to do with the murder of Jamal Khashoggi.

But I reviewed a call while serving on Trump’s NSC that I believe would be of interest to the Khashoggi family and the American people.

Release the transcript.

New: I can confirm hasty US-Russia proposal being pushed to Ukrainians via Dmitriev-Witkoff to Umerov. It would amount to Ukraine’s capitulation, with people familiar saying it’s Kremlin’s maximalist demands.
-Ukraine army cut 1/2
-Give up certain weapons
-Give up Donbas
-Zelensky displeased
More tk

Pairs well with this new @cepa.org report I'm reading cepa.org/comprehensiv...

In what sense then is this an indictment...?

Beside the point but I may print this sentence and put it somewhere I can see, to help with the book-writing:

"Arriving at genuine knowledge always involves the friction of encountering complicating evidence and countervailing interpretations held by different humans you can’t control or ignore."

I’d like to read more about how this filters out into the larger economy, which is pointed to at the end but isn’t the focus of this article

A huge cause of this drop in asylum grant rates is the rise of “pretermission”; judges denying applications without ever having a hearing. This used to be incredibly rare and now it’s become normal, with the Trump admin strongly pushing judges to deny on minor technical faults and red tape issues.

So much of that stuff is already out there in the open market; export control in that area is very weak and there are offers from non-US companies all the time. But it’s an interesting angle

Right. Azerbaijan has some cash if they wanted to spend it on this instead of drones and missiles; Armenia very much does not. I also genuinely don’t know how many chips you get if you don’t spend like a Gulf states on it, ie tens or hundreds of billions.

Or are we talking about access to chips so each country can build their own data centers and proprietary models (which I think is what the Gulf states are doing?)? Is there an advantage for the states to doing this?

Count the bodies at the end of

To elaborate as far as I can imagine: any state can buy access to commercial AI services right? Cost is declining and product is getting better. Is there something more boutique or custom they could get if they had access to whatever the US is selling?

Someone talk to me like I’m stupid: what does this even mean in practice? What would be sold and why would countries like Armenia or Azerbaijan care?

Biggest congratulations to @bilgeyesil.bsky.social for this well-deserved honor!

rfk jr moaning in olivia nuzzi's ear

(As noted in the BBC story, this was reported in Newsweek in 2018)

A Chinese firm bought an insurer for CIA agents - part of Beijing's trillion dollar spending spree When an insurer for FBI and CIA agents was sold to a Chinese entity, it led the US to tighten investment laws.

I only learned about this scandal today and feel like an idiot for not knowing about it before: www.bbc.com/news/article...

Anyway, this is a hell of a report that's kind of a combination of investigative journalism, data analysis, and think tank wonkery. Must read PDF!

Aha! They kind of do this on pages 162-163, with charts on the change 2018-2023 as percentage of GDP. Notably in those charts the US doesn't even appear, because as a fraction of GDP the enormous absolute sum invested in the US is negligible

One quibble I wish some of the analysis had presented numbers relative to the size of the economies where the investment was taking place, since $200B of investment in the US is not the same as $172B of investment in Russia

Extremely informative and well done new report on Chinese international loans and grants by AidData, with a lot of surprising findings regarding where loans are going (much higher proportion to wealthier countries than assumed) and the diminishing relevance of BRI: docs.aiddata.org/reports/chas...

I think it’s important here to look past the framing and go to the thrust of the argument, which is Wright pitching to a future Democratic candidate/president a way of talking about alliances that preserves liberal internationalism under the guise of competition