Reading List
The most recent articles from a list of feeds I subscribe to.
Why the Ukraine war is so hard to end
At the height of the Iraq war, bloggers coined the term “Friedman unit” in reference to the New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman’s habit of claiming that the next six months would be critical in determining the outcome of the conflict. Everything has sped up quite a bit in our post-Twitter era, so perhaps it’s […]
Vox’s new membership program, explained
Since our founding in 2014, you’ve supported Vox in our mission: to help everyone understand our complicated world so that we can all help shape a better one. We think of you — our audience — as being at the heart of everything we do. With every story, podcast, and video we create, we ask […]
The right debates just how weird their authoritarianism should be
What happens when you put four of the Trump right’s leading intellectuals together in a room? You see what it looks like when a political movement gets high on its own supply. The conversation in question is a recently published two-hour video roundtable hosted by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, an organization dedicated to educating and […]
The 65-year-old theory that helps explain why the Democrats keep losing
Democratic strategists think the party has a messaging problem. Post-election autopsies overflowed with countless cross-tabs of how Democrats “underperformed” with demographic after demographic. There are endless debates about which words poll better (should Democrats stop using “microaggression”?) — as if anybody were even listening. Third Way’s “Signal Project” exemplifies this paralysis. The center-left think tank […]
Are America’s four main adversaries really in cahoots?
Editor’s note, September 2, 12:10 pm ET: This week, the leaders of Iran, North Korea, and Russia, along with around two dozen other heads of state, are in China for a military parade marking the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II, which doubles as an advertisement for China’s bid for global leadership. In […]