“The realisation of our planetary condition may insult our narcissistic self-regard, but it also yields a positive possibility: that human flourishing is possible only in the context of multispecies flourishing on a habitable planet.” aeon.co/essays/why-pla…

I'm always interested in how controversial historians and political scientists (on the left and right) selectively wield the concept of agency. The easiest way to revise history is to assume highest agency for your villain and lowest agency for your anti-villain. So you get -

An old 🇪🇺 joke: In European heaven, the 🇫🇷 are the cooks, the 🇮🇹 the lovers, the 🇩🇪 the intellectuals, the 🇨🇭 the bankers, and the 🇬🇧 the police; in European hell, the 🇬🇧 are the cooks, the 🇮🇹 the bankers, the 🇫🇷 the intellectuals, the 🇨🇭 the lovers, and the 🇩🇪 the police

E = mc^2 was discovered closer to the French Revolution than to the present day.

Were dank memes always already a dank meme? (Asking for a friend.)

In other words, land reform was “an engine, not a camera” for enabling Arthur Lewis’s landmark 1954 two-sector model of economic development.

The funniest part about these guys slinking back to Silicon Valley after crowing that San Francisco was dead and Miami the future is that these guys love styling themselves either as the best prognosticators of the future and/or the creators of the future.

Automating inception theatlantic.com/technology/arc…

My deep hostility to incumbent privilege makes me "progressive" on certain issues * Anti-legacy admissions * YIMBY * Pro-immigration * Pro-confiscatory inheritance taxes But "conservative" on others * Anti-rent control * Pro-gentrification * Leery of 'settler colonialism' concept

More people want to live in California than in any other state. spectator.org/a-harris-admin…

The EU is piloting a permanent "people's assembly" that would complement the powers-that-be in Brussels, with the goal of reducing the EU's “democratic deficit” by giving a direct voice to those who regard the EU as an overbearing, out-of-touch technocracy noemamag.com/a-standing-peo…

"The climate issue is central to the global crisis of liberalism—more central than a lot of people realize," says Matthew Yglesias. Full discussion via The UnPopulist w/ Nils Gilman, Jonathan H. Adler, and Joseph Majkut. buff.ly/3ASW6Ek

This is really remarkable and worthy of historic note. In the Long Land War I wrote about the participatory experiments with self-governance that evolved in postcolonial nations struggling with land reform; now those experiments are coming home to Europe!

I love the comments on lists like this

“A disorderly war for disorderly times…. Sudan may be a harbinger of future conflicts in an anarchic, multipolar world.” The future is already here, it’s just unevenly distributed, QED. economist.com/briefing/2024/…

“We have met the Interagency, and it is us.”

A standard way to frame 1990s IR debates about the future of the post-Cold War international system is Fukuyama's "End of History" vs Huntington's "Clash of Civilizations"; but I've always felt that Kaplan's "Coming Anarchy" should be included as the third side of that debate.

I have repeated this like a mantra for years: If one believes that preventing the end of democracy requires that one's own side win all future elections, one has ALREADY lost one's democracy theatlantic.com/podcasts/archi…

The 34th meridian from north to south cuts through the Donbas in Ukraine, Gaza in Palestine, the Sennar region in Sudan, and western Oromia in Ethiopia — each of which is presently a site of utter humanitarian heinousness.

A cornerstone of #PlanetaryThinking