You can read a whole book about it if you like. @sgadarian.bsky.social @saragoodman.bsky.social and I took notes as it was happening, and we tell the story straight. No bullshit, no dissembling. press.princeton.edu/books/hardco...
Teacher, researcher, globalist, republican. tompepinsky.com
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You can read a whole book about it if you like. @sgadarian.bsky.social @saragoodman.bsky.social and I took notes as it was happening, and we tell the story straight. No bullshit, no dissembling. press.princeton.edu/books/hardco...
I’m sorry but facts don’t care about your feelings. If you are blaming Democrats in 2025 for COVID policy in 2020 you have been brainwashed by Trumpism and the death of expertise. The basic point is that Trump associated COVID with his fate in office. That’s it. press.princeton.edu/books/hardco...
Herc: “you’re such a fucking idiot, Carv. How you think you put the Epstein files in a bag like that? These blockheads are just dumping their gear like animals."
Just pause to notice: the core claim, from a well-known anti-Trump Republican, is that the Black Lives Matter protests caused them to lose all faith in American public institutions. BLM was “one of the most poisonous blows to public trust in living memory.” This was during a Trump presidency!
The miserable American opinion-peddlers will always delight to discover that you can buy fresh bread at the store in Moscow, or that Hungary has built chintzy new monuments to their lost territory
It is accelerating. Ordinary guys, people I know, will inform me about how “you can’t even to go England anymore” or blather on about “euro-poors.” (If they say this to *me*, imagine what they think privately) It’s all projection, by broken losers who need to rationalize the misery of the USA rn
The loudest American takes-havers are miserable people who are utterly convinced that every other orderly society is secretly as depraved and heartless as the America that they have built for themselves. Their combination of American provincialism with self-assurance is a national embarrassment.
Reading the way Noah and Tyler write about Europe, it feels like the age of transatlantic friendship is over. Just baseless slander dressed up as economic analysis. Maybe Americans have become so steeped in culture wars they don't even recognize it anymore.
This. It’s fascinating how many people still seem to think that the Nazi pub is some Habermasian paragon of rational argumentation.
“Don’t run us over anymore, sir!” Biggest protests in Indonesia in a long, long time
The current violence in Indonesia is not just the inevitable product of Prabowo’s style of politics and his military background. Its roots go much deeper, back to the early years of Joko Widodo’s administration and his deals with military interests tompepinsky.com/2015/10/29/b...
Protesters have been urged to retreat after blackouts reported at protest areas in Jakarta, Bandung and Surabaya. There are fears of police shooting protesters with rubber bullets or even live rounds
I think most of us are holding back our snark until we get to the False Donald stage
My kids: “bro you’re not even real”
Read this. Millions of Indonesians are in the streets protesting the policies of a corrupt president and his legislative flunkies. 🦅 🇮🇩 Selamat berjuang 🇮🇩 🦅
The anchor was very evenhanded, but you could plainly tell what she thought (she was not sympathetic to the admin)
the local Spectrum news in Central New York ran a story about labor shortages and complaints from farmers tonight. Then they read a prepared statement from the Trump administration, who did respond to requests for comment
Illegal cuts to international and area studies are destroying core competencies at US universities. This one is personal: it features my colleague Kathi, laid off from her Cornell outreach position which brought international studies to community colleges across central NY and the North Country
Ill be on BBC 4 in the UK in about an hour discussing, alongside Frances Lee, whether Covid-era NPIs are responsible for the surrent backlash against public health in the US. Spoiler alert: They’re not.
was that Chat-GPT5 rolling its eyes at YOU??
Habibi, price action in this space isn’t a reflection of productivity — it’s the delta between meme virality and capital inflow velocity
"In the political economy of shitcoins, fundamentals are vibes, governance is Discord mods, and demand is pure FOMO." "What Pepinsky & Copelovitch make explicit—and what we’ve always implicitly modeled—is that shitcoins are less a financial product than a politico-cultural coordination game." 😆
"Minimum Viable Ponzi" is legit, stealing now
Big news from @mcopelov.bsky.social and me. Founders and token bros read on 👇 Investor Update – Strategic Learnings from The Political Economy of Shitcoins tompepinsky.com/2025/08/29/i...
This came to me in a vision
In another diverse presidential democracy, mass protests are telling soldiers to “go back to the barracks.” The sheer joyfulness of Indonesian civil society protests will never cease to warm my heart. Americans should take a lesson.
how much of this is because it is just very hard to distinguish cannabis from nicotine in vape form unless you test it?
Rule of thumb: never, under any circumstances, treat anyone like “the help.” If APSA staff have concluded that you are treating them this way, you should change your ways.
you could get the legislative fractiousness of a Brazil, or the vague partisan soup of an Indonesia. In both cases, even more power to the president.
Many smart and well-meaning people: we need proportional representation to break the two-party system and increase government effectiveness and responsiveness Other presidential democracies with proportional representation
This is absolutely catastrophic for U.S. higher education, and for U.S. global leadership. Just the latest in a series of senseless acts of self-sabotage by a malevolent administration bent on making the United States weak and poor.
a measure of how crazy the current moment is, you probably didn’t even try to make sense of this. Just a cabinet secretary saying “overburdened with mitochondrial challenges” as if that is not impossibly unhinged and nonsensical.
Despite what some Democratic consultants suggest, the pro-democracy party’s first question shouldn’t be, “Does stopping fascism poll well?”
even more new useful vocabulary from the new era of mad kings: mitläufer, sorta like rank-and-file quislings
We’re on the same side, describing the same terrible thing that we both oppose. You can read the paper if you want to know the answer.
Obviously this is democratic backsliding, but it is so much more than that. Yarvin is an integralist who believes in a caste/estate-based social order.
the textbooks in 2500 will have a paragraph like "in the early 21st century, a small number of powerful virgins invented masturbation machines. Their rapid spread led to social dislocation; millenarian movements in the American West declared that these machines possessed superhuman intelligence"
Slurpsack.
Agree. I shall add it to my quiver of other delightful expressions that date from the era of mad kings. The catchfarts’ argle-bargle and the lickspittles’ jiggery-pokery
new 2025 vocab word just dropped: “catchfart” (cf. “lickspittle")
I just received my first copy of the book!
this is quite honestly a very good way to legitimize military deployment in peacetime, through what Indonesians would call its “sociopolitical role” (cc @darinself.com)
although I agree that this will not hit well among young MAGA head-knockers, I predict it will hit very well among regular Americans. They will ask themselves three questions: 1. why is there so much trash lying around? 2. Is it bad? 3. Is the military fixing this problem?
One thing to remember is that every good comparativist is also an area specialist. And if you’re a comparativist, almost certainty the U.S. is *not* your area
In 20 years, the U.S. will be looking for the next Stanley Fischer, hoping that we get a Berkeley Mafia rather than a Chicago Boys en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanley... en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago... en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkele...
I never really believed that Fed independence was real. Money is politics, after all. That said, the common belief that Fed independence is real—that is a very good equilibrium. The bad equilibrium is BAD. Money is politics.
It is, without a doubt, a grim and frightening time. But even today, even with everything happening, the majority of Americans do not feel repression. We wake up, we go to work, we eat our lunch. We just…. we know. And that is what is so devastating.
The Great Khan of the. Northern Steps is a benevolent protector, known far and wide for respecting the lessons of the ancients, and celebrated as he-who-brings-prosperity. But he is also a Great Khan
The wars he has stopped number not in the millions, “It’s more!” he still cries, “it’s now in the zillions!”
No one wanted to hear this years ago when @tompepinsky.com said it. Maybe now.
Never forget. Helping build the Illinois Holocaust Museum was one of the most meaningful experiences of my life. The lessons we can learn from survivors like Sam are too relevant today — and why the Satellite Campus we're opening is a reminder of our responsibility to speak up.
All these working people around him listened glumly to the news reports, then dispersed from the loud-speakers with the same kind of silent suffering. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, “We Never Make Mistakes"
I really want to believe that American public opinion still matters. It makes me feel better that most Americans don’t support these policies. But other non-democracies demonstrate that once institutions have been politically weaponized, public opinion matters significantly less.
Many years ago, I tried to define neoliberalism. Could not have imagined a better illustration: the relentless insistence that the only thing that should matter is prices and market order tompepinsky.com/2013/12/04/d...
The “pivot to tariffs and the economy” nonsense is a perfect encapsulation of neoliberalism. Destroy homo politicus, man as a political being, and reduce him to homo oeconomicus, man as an economic being. The only thing that matters is the economy, stupid. If the economy is good, fascism good too.
This Shor-style polling-based approach to leadership is actually well-known — thanks to political scientists, notably — to be a terrible way to run a campaign or a party. Especially against an opponent who is not running on the issues. Even Chat-GPT knows it
becoming a rabid anti-semitic extreme consumerist, but from the left
Democrat quant strategists are shitting the bed with this mess. They are either completely unaware of the political environment around them, or uninterested in victory. Notice how nothing works? You cannot defeat this government by A/B testing talking points. Stop wasting your time with this
To quote @mcopelov.bsky.social, the case for more, not less liberal arts education has never been stronger
My grandparents were proud of curb stomping two fascist regimes across two oceans. Miss me with this betrayal of our heroes and erasure of their victories
Yale Man fails Intro to Western Civilization
I used to listen to Mitch Hedberg. I still do, but I used to, too
I watched Sublime sing “April 26, 1992” and “the Ballad of Johnny Butt” to a crowd of 11,000 in rural central New York last night, and it made me oddly confident that the single most American value is telling people with authority to shut up
any list of "words that you shouldn’t say" is actually a list of “ideas that you shouldn’t think"
Stylized fact, through the 1990s and 2000s the “data guys” were decidedly further to the center (so, to the right) than nearly everyone else in their PhD cohorts. “Data guys’” main targets were other centrist pundits, their most vocal critics were left structuralists and movement theorists
MAC as company seems completely adamant that they’ll never acknowledge the “mac the knife” reference, never ever
I don’t know how much you *should* spend on a chef's knife, but dollar for dollar I have never been happier with a kitchen purchase than I am with my 9.5” MAC knife, which I’ve used every day of the week for a decade and for just about any purpose
Left-liberal-materialists will need to grapple with this for a long time
Big Tallow, or Biglari Holdings. Who is in the pocket of whom? en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biglari...
Today I learned that you can shop the Steak ’n Shake Corporate Website for beef tallow. Or you can just go to steaknshakebeeftallow.store/shop/
I have heard the Rudolphs’ names bandied about too. But the lore around this is, quite literally, legendary!
ROBERT STACK
Now is the time for offensive liberalism.
I mean no disrespect to any participants, and especially not to anyone who happened to have their name included in that original email, but I still have the same reaction to that email that I had the first time I read it: Whoever wrote this sounds like an elitist asshole
Panel, you are going to get attended. Old heads, join me to see if Mr. Perestroika is finally unmasked! Southeast Asia hobbyists, get ready to reflect on the raucous rebellion in political science that started with an email that opens like this!
BREAKING: liberal globalist college professor DESTROYS “manly” Trump loyalist in pull-up competition
Un-American. No authority can demand the ID of every person walking down the street for no reason at all
working on a recipe for grilled robot tentacle with lemon and garlic
I proudly designed my own major in the place that sucks so much I dropped out of it
how is this timeline real
In this morning's newsletter, I wrote about an under-appreciated problem for liberalism — its total failure to cultivate young talent www.vox.com/on-the-right...
China: transitions away from fossil fuels US:
really fails at the "unit of account" feature of money
cc @mcopelov.bsky.social
"We accumulated a large amount of dollars so that you can use something other than a dollar to do what a dollar does, and we promise you it’s worth a dollar. Guaranteed." It’s the Political Economy of Shitcoins! papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....
Whatever happened to the America Party? Wasn’t that like a month ago?
Leo Frank revisionism — you know, like what the Pentagon press secretary used to spout — is high-test antisemitism, refined to meet incredible standards of quality. You only come across antisemitism this undiluted on rare occasion.
American chattel slavery was like, one of the worst things humanity has ever invented There's a reason Lincoln said that there was basically no limit on how much punishment a just and righteous god might inflict for it
Imagine telling the ancients, “in the 20th century we figured out a way to convince sand and metal to do mathematical computations that no human could ever complete. In the 21st century, we decided to give up on math, and convinced sand and metal to cast pretend spells instead."
The fact that the thing we're calling artificial intelligence *can't do math* and yet we're jamming it into programs that successfully *have done math* for decades, then warning people against using the AI to do math, seems like an excellent summary of where we are.
Entire dissertations are yet to be written about the cult that developed around AI in the period after LLMs became publicly available. And media studies is still a desert in the absence of McLuhan; the existence of Vonn, the Nelk Boys, etc. needs substantive study. Many doctoral studies there, too.
Sam Altman: at this point, the best guess is that AI will produce a working model of an Alcubierre drive by early 2029 Theo Von: Exactly Altman: Question is whether OpenAI takes all of humanity to the stars, or only founders. It’s a question of resources Von: Indeed
Outstanding summary of the moment. It is truly strange to drive through SF and the Valley in 2025, seeing endless billboards hyping AI solutions for founders. This magical world without people in it, just over the horizon, relentlessly being sold to the 0.1%
5,000 word journal articles from tenured academics? Sure, it also won’t be won by the bald King of France, nor by unicorns or fairies
I have never identified with a head of state more than I do with Zelenskyy keeping the receipts on who insulted his suit months ago. He even properly displays the scolding Pepinsky finger
The goal of a broad anti-fascist alliance isn’t to agree on everything. It is to defeat fascism, so that liberals, neocons, progressives, and nationalists can disagree bitterly about everything else
