Twitter turned into hell, so he got off of that. He actually has a lot of substack subscribers (50k maybe?). That's not as much as Heather Cox Richardson, but a fair number. Not everybody who subscribes to the NYT read him. I think Krugman has been pretty clear about wanting to influence political types and people who are smart but maybe not economists. A lot of those people are on Bluesky (scientists and medical folks). For him it's quality rather than quantity.

He's been pretty clear about the need to fight Trump and wants the freedom to do it.

But I disagree with Nick. He said, there was a lot of "pressure for false equivalence". I think that means they tried to silence him.

Annoyed that his latest thing is an interview with Noah Smith, who has been getting increasingly fascism-friendly.

I'll miss his NYT column, he definitely had a lot longer reach there but if they were fucking with his columns then I understand. I just hope Bouie can hang on.

To some extent this seems like it's probably a personal thing: he wasn't a good fit with the editor and as someone who's been in the job for a long time he's frustrated by things changing. That's all very normal and it's understandable that he left, but I'm not sure how much one can learn about bigger picture stuff from this.

He actually has a lot of substack subscribers (50k maybe?)

He's been adding subscribers quickly (which makes sense, since he just started writing on substack). He just said he was at 119K.

Annoyed that his latest thing is an interview with Noah Smith, who has been getting increasingly fascism-friendly.

Agreed with the first part (and interesting that the Times asked Noah Smith if he was interested in having a column and he turned them down). I too have been annoyed at Noah Smith (for example), but I don't know that "fascism-friendly" is the best description. But it does feel like he's spending a lot more time arguing, "people on the left should do fewer of the things that annoy me personally."

To some extent this seems like it's probably a personal thing: he wasn't a good fit with the editor and as someone who's been in the job for a long time he's frustrated by things changing. That's all very normal and it's understandable that he left, but I'm not sure how much one can learn about bigger picture stuff from this.

I suspect there are big-picture stuff going on but, as I argued in the OP, I find it refreshing that he mostly frames it as a normal and understandable poor fit.

Healy's response is infuriating. I read "He never complained in writing specifically that I was consistently a dick"

5, 8: I read the interaction as Krugman saying there was a substantial amount of pressure to ideologically soften his columns, and the editor denying that he had issued clear orders that Krugman write anything he didn't agree with.

And it kind of struck me as funny: the Times and the media generally are doing so much "complying in advance" and I'm sure so much of it internally is soft pressure. An understanding that you shouldn't write anything that is going to cause trouble unless you really have to, and editing to tone everything down. But of course trying to exert soft pressure on a Nobel laureate economist is going to be ludicrously difficult -- Krugman is about as institutionally empowered as anyone could possibly be to say "Fuck you, I write what I want." The kind of gentle hinting that's enough to seriously affect the tone of a reporter employed by the Times would probably have no effect at all -- to make him actually change anything you'd probably have to hit him with a baseball bat.

The other thing that cracks me up, albeit in a laughing til I cry kind of way, is that Krugman isn't even a leftist! He's a mainstream neo-liberal! I think he's great, but that Paul goddamnit Krugman is out to the left of the scope of acceptable discourse in the Times is insane.

Did Krugman ever weigh in on the price of eggs? Just to keep the threads topically consistent

Where Smith is these days. Not logged in, I can't see if it was in a thread, so possibly he framed it as some sort of clever nine-dimensional satire, but that post is so egregious that to me the Rule of Goats applies.

"I approached Mondays and Thursdays with dread," Krugman continued, "and often spent the afternoon in a rage. Patrick often--not always--rewrote crucial passages; I would then do a rewrite of his rewrite to restore the original sense, and felt that I was putting more work--certainly more emotional energy--into repairing the damage from his editing than I put into writing the original draft. It's true that nothing was published without my approval; but the back-and-forth, to my eye, both made my life hell and left the columns flat and colorless."

Healy denied he had done anything to muffle Krugman's voice. "He never called or emailed me saying I was changing his meaning or censoring his views, and he never lodged an objection to me that I overrode," Healy wrote in his email to CJR.

This is what they call a "non-denial denial". Did you rewrite his columns to introduce false equivalence? Yes. Did he then rewrite them again to restore his original meaning? Yes. Did you keep doing this again and again? Yes.

But, no, he never lodged an objection to me that I overrode. And no, he never specifically said I was censoring him.

Where Smith is these days. Not logged in, I can't see if it was in a thread

The post it's replying to is Musk saying he doesn't want to reform H1B visas.

"The reason I'm in America along with so many critical people who built SpaceX, Tesla and hundreds of other companies that made America strong is because of H1B.

Take a big step back and FUCK YOURSELF in the face. I will go to war on this issue the likes of which you cannot possibly comprehend"

That context does not help.

I guess Musk really likes H1B visas the way they are, and Noah Smith really likes H1B visas the way they are too.

I will go to war on this issue the likes of which you cannot possibly comprehend

It's over, he'll cave. Incoherent bluster is usually the tell, right?

Where Smith is these days.

This makes me glad that I'm not reading him on twitter.

It's over, he'll cave. Incoherent bluster is usually the tell, right?

No, he won that fight -- https://www.reuters.com/world/us/elon-musk-vows-war-over-h-1b-visa-program-amid-rift-with-some-trump-supporters-2024-12-28/

(Which prompted a bunch of discussion about the question of how much power Musk had over policy debates).

13 exactly

I will follow him into battle

One pictures Noah immediately clicking his heels and throwing up a, uh, high salute, just like his leader did.

18: Ah okay, thank you, my eyes just slide right off those stories and I was foolish to take the decomposing bait above.

It looks like there may also have been debate about removing the country caps for the H1B visa program, with Musk in favor of that too. I don't know enough to say whether they should be removed entirely, but I've known working families who were screwed over by the quotas, so I'm pretty cool towards them overall.

Co-sign 9 and 13 completely. Also, Healy is not a trustworthy narrator in other contexts, so I wouldn't believe him absent supporting evidence.

Smith has been on my "totally ignore" list for quite a while now. I can't remember what specifically tipped the balance, but he was so resoundingly bad on some issue that I decided he had poisoned the well for me to ever believe him in the future.

Re: H1Bs, the important thing here is not what anyone tweets, but what Stephen Miller does. To that end, it's very likely to be death by a thousand cuts on a level that is too picayune for virtually anyone who is not an immigration lawyer to follow. They aren't going to kill the H1B program because the US Chamber and other big business like it too much. But they sure as heck will make it more miserable for the people in it.

My GUESS (no data to back this up yet) is that the misery will continue a trend of tipping the balance of power toward employers and away from workers. E.g. if you make it even more impossible for people to move off of H1B into green-card (permanent resident) status, you'll have more workers lingering in precarious status where they can more easily be exploited.

21.1 Who is Healy? What's his deal? I don't feel like I've ever heard of the guy before, so I'm missing some context here.

Healy is not a trustworthy narrator in other contexts, so I wouldn't believe him absent supporting evidence.

Healy does have a track record. He's the one who came up with "The Cackle" For HRC's laugh during the 2008 campaign. A shit all around.

I know Krugman had mentioned on Twitter/Bluesky (not sure when he joined the latter) that he was getting pushback on his takes on the economy during the campaign. but as I recall he mentioned either "colleagues" or others at the Times and not the editor in particular. I do think he felt like he needed to serve as a bit of a corrective to the general NYT polling-driven stance on the economy. (Last spring the rancid editor Joseph Kahn sort of gave the game away when in an interview he that they were not going to shy away from topics that were hurtful to Biden like the economy.)

22: He has a long track record of being the classic savvy NYT reporter now editor who wrote the kind of stupid framing stories on the Kerry's (his wife was kooky) and the Clinton's marriage (how often they did not spend the night at the same place). A lot of i tinged with misogyny.

Right now, I think the three most powerful NYT editors are Kahn, Healy, and Carolyn Ryan (who was at one point removed from Washington desk I think?) because she was too anti-HRC even for the NYT.

I forget the details or exactly where the characterization came from, but wasn't it Krugman who was accused of being "shrill" during George W times?

I think Krugman's on really big public screwup was in being very strident about an impending economic/stock market collapse after Trump was elected. He wrote several mea culpas. I think he was guilty of being like many (me sort of) of thinking business wanted stability and steadiness rather than advantage over consumers and workers.

I think Healy was one of the people in the hottest people in DC contest we rigged, like, twenty years ago. Sweetest things turn sourest by their deeds, Patrick!

No, he won that fight

Trump sort of backed down by praising immigrants who he seemed to consider basically servants at his businesses and properties, but that was all when Biden was still president. I haven't heard cutting H1B as a big part of their early moves but I have a hard time believing it's over.

FWIW, Krugman has just posted some additional details: https://contrarian.substack.com/p/departing-the-new-york-times

During my first 24 years at the Times, from 2000 to 2024, I faced very few editorial constraints on how and what I wrote. For most of that period my draft would go straight to a copy editor, who would sometimes suggest that I make some changes -- for example, softening an assertion that arguably went beyond provable facts, or redrafting a passage the editor didn't quite understand, and which readers probably wouldn't either. But the editing was very light; over the years several copy editors jokingly complained that I wasn't giving them anything to do, because I came in at length, with clean writing and with back-up for all factual assertions.

This light-touch editing prevailed even when I took positions that made Times leadership very nervous. My early and repeated criticisms of Bush's push to invade Iraq led to several tense meetings with management. In those meetings, I was urged to tone it down. Yet the columns themselves were published as I wrote them. And in the end, I believe the Times -- which eventually apologized for its role in promoting the war -- was glad that I had taken an anti-invasion stand. I believe that it was my finest hour.

So I was dismayed to find out this past year, when the current Times editors and I began to discuss our differences, that current management and top editors appear to have been completely unaware of this important bit of the paper's history and my role in it.

...

For a while I tried to make up for the loss of the blog with threads on Twitter. But even before Elon Musk Nazified the site, tweet threads were an awkward, inferior substitute for blog posts. So in 2021 I opened a Substack account, as a place to put technical material I couldn't publish in the Times. Times management became very upset. When I explained to them that I really, really needed an outlet where I could publish more analytical writing with charts etc., they agreed to allow me to have a Times newsletter (twice a week), where I could publish the kind of work I had previously posted on my blog.

In September 2024 my newsletter was suddenly suspended by the Times. The only reason I was given was "a problem of cadence": according to the Times, I was writing too often. I don't know why this was considered a problem, since my newsletter was never intended to be published as part of the regular paper. Moreover, it had proved to be popular with a number of readers.

Also in 2024, the editing of my regular columns went from light touch to extremely intrusive. I went from one level of editing to three, with an immediate editor and his superior both weighing in on the column, and sometimes doing substantial rewrites before it went to copy. These rewrites almost invariably involved toning down, introducing unnecessary qualifiers, and, as I saw it, false equivalence. I would rewrite the rewrites to restore the essence of my original argument. But as I told Charles Kaiser, I began to feel that I was putting more effort--especially emotional energy--into fixing editorial damage than I was into writing the original articles. And the end result of the back and forth often felt flat and colorless.

wasn't it Krugman who was accused of being "shrill" during George W times

yes

I am meanly pleased at the image of the frustrated Times editors wondering why he just wasn't getting the point as to what they wanted.

"Reporters usually stop making trouble after we slap them down a couple of times. What's with this guy?"

Krugman just posted a sub stack about this an hour ago.

I have been ruminating about this McArdle column for a week,* and now I have an excuse to drop it in a thread about what it takes to be a prestigious columnist. I think she may have genuinely found a new low. She has laid out an epistemic approach that seems capable of justifying absolutely anything.

A Nazi salute, offered unapologetically and followed by insults to those who were offended, should be assumed to be an innocent gesture. Aggressively embracing a racist political party in Germany isn't indicative of anything sinister.

As a general principle, when there is a plausible innocent explanation, I err on the side of believing it. This will strike many readers as willfully naive or perhaps a sign of my own Nazi tendencies.

Which is exactly what's wrong with our politics today.

Yes, this is the problem. We have too many people objecting to fascism and fascist apologetics.

*Sorry for the ragebait.

From Bluesky: Why Krugman left (paraphrased because I already lost the original) "The New York Times wanted Donald Trump Elected. Paul Krugman didn't want Trump elected."

McMoron is stupid but clever, sort of like Trump. Too vapid and dumb to recognize that her "argument" is idiotic, but shrewd enough to identify a topic where her stupidity gets lost in the shuffle. She is 110% "never click on this link to her column" because it's all bad faith mouth noises filtered through a decent education.

If there is one thing that makes any effort I ever put into political blogging back in the day feel wasted, it's that McMegan has had a successful career.

She reminds me of myself in middle school at CTY debate activity.

I also have a "there but for the grace of God go I" reaction to McMegan. I'm not clicking, though.

Huh, we just got a check in the mail for $17.04 around some class action lawsuit against the perfidious NYT. No idea.

They've never given me a dime.

Apparently their subscription auto-renewal practices violated California law. Bite the bear, Healy!

Reading more, it seems like the Times wasn't trying to silence him, more like Colmes him while they Hannity.

If blogs were still a thing, and I had the time and/or expertise for this undertaking, I might do a daily "excuses for the Nazis" blog, dredging up the editorial pages of yesteryear. Same sophistry, same bankruptcy, not remotely all "in the original German" but in many original languages. I wonder how long one could keep it going.

43: That's even worse.

I wouldn't willingly click on a McArdle column if you beat me bloody with a two by four

34: It's well known that friends don't let friends read David Brooks, but even your enemies won't let you read McMegan.

Anyway, Die Zeit got it right when their headline read, "Ein Hitlergruß ist ein Hitlergruß ist ein Hitlergruß."

Unreliable American columnist: Who can say what kind of gesture that was?
Classical Liberal German newspaper: It was a Hitler salute. (The full article is paywalled, but I wouldn't be surprised if they added that he could have been arrested if he had done it in Germany.)

It's not worth considering that the guy who openly backs white supremacy might have accidentally looked like a Hitler supporter.

Nobody should click on that link. I am filled with remorse for having provided it. But it really struck me as crossing a line. I found it frightening.

44: If the source material is the only limit, you could keep it going for a very long time indeed.

I think an "excuses for the Nazis" would be too depressing an exercise for me. I'm a middle-aged white guy who grew up in the Deep South, so I see all of the old excuses posted as comments on friends' and relatives' social media postings. Same shit, different decade. ("I think the J6 guys were political prisoners and hostages. I said what I said. i don't care if I don't have any Democrat friends.")

But I think that over on other social media I might talk a lot more about the German resistance. It wasn't ever enough and it wasn't all as dramatic as the White Rose, but it was there, under conditions that were a lot harsher than we have (so far).

49: Yeah, it's like what do you have to do, if you're rightist at the Post or the Times, to get a column spiked? Let alone get canned, as you should be.

As if we needed a reminder that, while those two institutions might from time to time publish something useful, they are not remotely on our side.

Fortunately, we've moved on from people arguing that a Nazi salute wasn't Nazi to arguing that US Congress's budget bills don't become laws once they're passed into ... uh, uh, something, uh, statute, I guess. "Appears to violated federal statute" seems to be the new euphemism.

51.1: I did notice that Pamela Paul* parted ways with the NYT. Not sure what that was about, as Mr. Pamela Paul (Bedbug) is still there.

*When she moved over to the Opinion section I was shocked to see the values of the person who had been running the NYT book stuff.

Haven't seen this paragraph from Krugman's write-up of his departure highlighted yet:

One more thing: I faced attempts from others to dictate what I could (and could not) write about, usually in the form, "You've already written about that," as if it never takes more than one column to effectively cover a subject. If that had been the rule during my earlier tenure, I never would have been able to press the case for Obamacare, or against Social Security privatization, and--most alarmingly--against the Iraq invasion. Moreover, all Times opinion writers were banned from engaging in any kind of media criticism.

Interesting he ascribes these dictate attempts to "others". In context, I think he means not his editors, as in the paragraph above he talks about getting three rounds of editing from an editor and that editor's superior. So someone higher than either of those? Sulzy?

Also I see his own account was published, not in his substack, but the one founded by Jennifer Rubin when she left the Post, and Norman Eisen. How the hell was "contrarian.substack.com" not dibsed through January 2025?

50.2 I don't actually think I myself could do it, unless it was part of a separate project and I just shared the highlights. Maybe for a week?

I'd read about the German Resistance. I've wanted to know for a while if Michael Ende really has the bona fides. There's no source on English wikipedia and the German only links to his author website. It would disappoint me greatly if it's embellished.

Hm, I interpreted "others" to generically mean other staff at the NYT, including but not limited to his editors.

I agree with fa that this is a particularly notable line:

Moreover, all Times opinion writers were banned from engaging in any kind of media criticism.

I get that they don't want to be constantly mediating their employees' food fights with other journalists, but that kind of bright-line rule really does illuminate how damned thin-skinned they are.

||
https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2025-ecuador-power-sinkhole/
|>

So it's obviously executive order hell week, but does anyone get the sense that Trump doesn't have anyone competent left working for him? The orders sound like warmed over Truth Social posts and I can't see even how he's going to claim an easy victory by restoring something he cut when he doesn't get to cut it due to the courts.

It is truly notable that many of the EOs don't include even a fig leaf of legal justification or citation for many of their claims. And that various of the documents that have been released didn't even have their metadata cleaned up.

I look forward to the constitutional convention where we vote on adding "Title II".

I'm not saying that this is what happened here, but ..... it wouldn't be surprising if somebody like Krugman, as part of leaving, was induced to sign a non-disparagement agreement as part of getting whatever separation benefits he got. I know that such things are pretty common for big companies to inflict on their soon-to-be former employees.

That might explain why he's so .... careful in his wording, sticking to stuff that can be easily interpreted as merely workplace differences, and not "these fuckers are working towards the Fuhrer!"

||
Att. esp. Doug:
https://inmoscowsshadows.buzzsprout.com/1026985/episodes/16503665-in-moscow-s-shadows-185-the-one-with-all-the-stuff
|>

So it's obviously executive order hell week, but does anyone get the sense that Trump doesn't have anyone competent left working for him?

The OMB memos on the grant freeze are an absolute shitshow. The first one is very obviously and facially unconstitutional, and the follow-ups are mutually inconsistent and just generally a mess. Whoever is writing these clearly has no idea what they're doing. And this is affecting billions of dollars in federal assistance! Maybe trillions!

Like, this is actual real money even on the unimaginably vast scale of the US economy as a whole. And it affects individual Americans personally in all sorts of ways.

||

"It is disheartening to note that the armed civilians could chase a police officer in uniform, fully armed with a rifle, beat him up and chop off his hand with a machete," Mr Moses Lemein, a trader said.

Someone made the comparison to what I suppose one could call the 1 Vendemiare of Liz Truss...
(train of thought lurches violently)
(holy shit, long-time republican Liz Truss actually did announce her ludicrously destructive budget on the first day of the French Republican calendar, ie the anniversary of the abolition of the monarchy and the proclamation of the First Republic!)

...OK back on track, sorry...

... but at least Truss did the damage indirectly, as it were, by scaring the money markets. She didn't roll straight in and announce she was abolishing the NHS or something.

57.2: The story as told on Ende's website is at least plausible. Draft orders for his cohort were issued (according to Wiki and the linked sources) in March 1945, so Ende only had to avoid the draft for two months. And there was plenty of chaos in Munich during that time. His website also says that he was visiting an uncle in Hamburg when that city was firebombed. I remember the account of that in Hans Massaquoi's book Destined to Witness; he was basically a working-class kid whose father was Liberian, possibly the only mixed-race person in his whole Hamburg district at the time. He later emigrated to the US and became managing editor of Ebony. Anyway, resistance.

64: Thanks, Mossy! I haven't really made room in my life for podcasts, but there's an occasional exception. This looks interesting.

53.2: Yeah, I was pretty shocked to learn about that too. Especially given how hyperinfluential the Times and especially its Book Review are within publishing. I mean, that editorship is a position that makes and breaks careers and livelihoods, and look what a stupid goon had been perched there for years. I guess that was well known to people working within publishing, but jeez. The Times' dominant position is not healthy for American publishing or culture, and also every publicist/agent wants their authors to become NYT bestsellers.

Again, a reminder that the NYT is not, internally, a newspaper in the way that pretty much any non-NYT journalist would recognise it. A normal newspaper (and by that I mean everything from the "Weston-super-Mare Advertiser" to the "Tropical Fish Breeders' Quarterly") has news meetings in which journalists suggest (or "pitch") stories to the editor, and the editor provides guidance and makes decisions about which ones to follow up and how. The journalists provide information about the outside world, and the editor provides judgement. Spike that story. Explore this angle. Get a reaction from these guys. Go back and ask her some more questions. That kind of thing.

The New York Times does not work like this, as multiple NYT writers have explained. In a New York Times news meeting the editor tells the journalists what is happening in the outside world, and directs the journalists to write stories about it.

In mechanical terms it's a lot closer to the scriptwriters' conference for a TV series. The editor is the showrunner. He starts the meeting by saying "OK. Episode 8. Now, according to my synopsis for this season, in this one we have to tell the audience what Mike and Sally saw in the tunnel. We have to introduce Brian's mother and father, because we need them to be established, including their relationships to Brian and Pierre, by the time of the big conflict in Episode 8. And we need to show Miguel leaving the village and meeting Ellie." And then the writers go away and work together to turn that skeleton into a full script that can be filmed.

It's a proven way of telling a story really well, but it isn't really journalism.

70: And I find it concerning that some of that story is shaped by their issue polling operation, which polls are now almost entirely gamed by partisanship especially on the economy* (asymmetrically so, but seemingly less so now as Ds get in the act).

One of several foundational moments for me in my journey to becoming a crank about the press was sometime in the early '80s when The NYT had a poll that showed the biggest issue in the country was Communism in El Salvador (before it shifted to the Sandinistas). The result was just so out there for me, Really? That's what people are concerned about?. Of course the Administration was harping on it, but there was a steady drumbeat of coverage in the media. I believe I was a subscriber to The Nation at the time and their coverage helped spur my pondering.

*I do think this was one of the things that led to Krugman repetitively digging in last year to counter the constant drumbeat of negative slant on the economy.

I am attempting to curb my useless litany of press outrages* but this one from today's Times just really got me. The new press secretary stood up and told a number of bald-faced and demonstrable lies yesterday and the Times covers it with: White House Press Secretary Makes Steely and Unflinching Debut. Article is as crap as the headline (and it is by one of those former Maureen Dowd assistants), just pure theater criticism (Similar to what Huckabee Sanders got), nothing on the substance.

*I actually started a website for it on election Day but have not been able to face it.

72: We have begun reading The Guardian* more for actual news and I was pleased to see their equivalent:

Trump's press chief shows she's more than capable of going full North Korea
Karoline Leavitt's debut press briefing was standing room only - and she was slick, pugnacious and fiercely loyal to her boss

*My wife has mostly switched to mostly newsletters, but that is leading to her finding her inbox becoming a daunting thing of terror.

Today I learned that Valentina Tereshkova, first woman in space, is still alive! (she was only 26 when she went into space, which I didn't know) and is an MP in Russia. Her main political achievements have included:

- introducing a constitutional amendment that changed term limits and allowed Putin to run for election again
- asking Russia's weirdo 40k-style State Ethno-War Arch-Cleric, Patriarch Kirill, to declare that Volodymyr Zelenskyy is officially the Antichrist

72: I guess White House Press Secretary Lies Her Ass Off would have been objectionable to the NYT, not for "Ass" but for "Lies."

I'm finding the Guardian decent but tiresome, and they expect me to care about certain things that I really just don't care about. Part of that is that they're obviously much more devoted to UK politics than I ever could be, and part of it is just agenda-setting that I'm not on board with.

Part of it is also my idiosyncratic but increasing aversion to the unmarked "we." So from today's international version of their website: "Is creen use really sapping our ability to focus and lowering our IQs?" "What can a new OJ Simpson docuseries teach us?" (Skipping sports because I don't care much at all about pro soccer, and less about English pro soccer, and even less about cricket of any sort, and still less about Forumla 1.) "should we all be more like Severance's Christopher Walken?" "how Trump mastered our new attention age" Who is this "we", Guardian? Sloppy thinking. There are several more stories on the front page where the "we" is better defined -- all visitors to the Louvre, Slovaks in general -- but still overly broad. There's a loosey-goosey, we're-all-the-same ethos here, and it's annoying enough to reduce my reading by a lot. Not that they could possibly care.

74: Staatstreu, then and now.

asking Russia's weirdo 40k-style State Ethno-War Arch-Cleric, Patriarch Kirill, to declare that Volodymyr Zelenskyy is officially the Antichrist

We've inspected the sky inside and out. No gods or angels were found.

I guess that was then.

Part of it is also my idiosyncratic but increasing aversion to the unmarked "we."

The current editor is a features writer rather than a reporter, and it tends to make the whole paper into an extension of the style page.

59
Also I see his own account was published, not in his substack, but the one founded by Jennifer Rubin when she left the Post, and Norman Eisen. How the hell was "contrarian.substack.com" not dibsed through January 2025?

Hey, I was wondering about asking about Rubenstein, and I guess she's on-topic now, thanks. I was gifted a link to her substack and have hesitated to claim it, partly because it would involve installing some app, partly because I remember she was one of the bad ones 10+ years ago. But now she's one of the good ones. Scary.

Gifted a subscription, I mean.

IYKWIM.

77: I am not exaggerating here. Look up their Cathedral of the Armed Forces. It has metal floors made from melted-down German tanks and a mosaic of former Black Sea Fleet commander Admiral St. Fyodor Ushakov. (Or would it be St. Admiral Fyodor Ushakov?)

Hey, I was wondering about asking about Rubenstein

Is this some portmanteau, or a thinko?

"Tereshkova asks Kirill to recognize Zelensky as the Antichrist"

https://x.com/irgarner/status/1884528073040671102

Back in early 2023, but still.

We've inspected the sky inside and out. No gods or angels were found.

Only daemons.

Paul Krugman and Noah Smith have the problem of being educated as economists. There's mainstream and non-mainstream economics, orthodox and heterodox. These are not quite the same.

Smith often expressed skepticism about what he was being taught, but seemed to expect that when he could not learn, say, Post Keynesianism, in an email exchange or one blogpost, there was nothing there.

Krugman seems to be conscious of what he can say or not say. He drew on Kalecki and Minsky in some of his columns after 2008. He wrote some columns in such a way that some readers would joke about him not fighting with David Brooks.

I am not sure that this maps into (Neo)liberalism and something further left. Emerson had some thoughts.

Paul Krugman is unhappy: https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/the-end-of-north-america

Tariffs against Canada announced at the end of the day.