running list of links on Dylan W. Groves

Editorial: How to end Sudan's brutal, forgotten conflict

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 16:18:43 -0400

News: Tucker Carlson Releases 10-Point Manifesto for America

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 16:18:24 -0400

Article: An African vision of artificial intelligence

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 16:18:05 -0400

Blog Post: OSF Will Stop Accepting Your Research Files, You Can Use ResearchBox Instead

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 16:14:23 -0400

Book Review: What Happened to Liberal Democracy? by Daron Acemoglu

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 14:14:27 -0400

News: Major Republican fundraiser winning contracts from Trump administration, emails reveal

Thu, 06 Aug 2026 17:19:58 -0400

Photography: 2026 Pure Street Photography Awards

Thu, 06 Aug 2026 17:13:44 -0400

Podcast: Julia Ioffe on Feminism in Russia

Thu, 06 Aug 2026 14:32:00 -0400

News Story: An Israeli professor lost a prestigious US job offer after speaking out on Gaza. Now the university is paying him $250,000

Thu, 06 Aug 2026 12:29:41 -0400

Book: The Fate of the Animals

Thu, 06 Aug 2026 11:01:34 -0400

The second of Morgan Meis’ Three Paintings Trilogy, on Franz Marc.

See previously: Drunken Silenus

Movie Review: How to Feed a Dictator

Thu, 06 Aug 2026 09:19:22 -0400

Blog Post: Whose words should make American Jews feel safer? Joseph Biden's or Abdul El-Sayed's?

Thu, 06 Aug 2026 09:13:11 -0400

Article: The Racial Crossroads

Wed, 05 Aug 2026 12:52:23 -0400

Article: The DC lobbyists helping African leaders survive Donald Trump

Wed, 05 Aug 2026 12:09:24 -0400

Article: The UAE's imperial push into Africa

Wed, 05 Aug 2026 12:09:06 -0400

Blog Post: Vertical Tabs in Chrome

Wed, 05 Aug 2026 12:06:27 -0400

This was why I moved to Edge, maybe time to go back to Chrome

Video: Mary Beard Ranks The Ancients

Wed, 05 Aug 2026 09:47:07 -0400

Opinion: The World's Largest Democracy Gets a Second Chance

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 09:29:56 -0400

Insight: What do we learn from bestseller regressions?

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 08:40:51 -0400

Blog Post: How Much Ice for Your Drink?

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 08:27:38 -0400

I always new the amount of ice Starbucks serves is bogus

Guide: An opinionated guide to which AI to use to do stuff

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 08:23:43 -0400

Post: The MAGA Media Machine Is Fracturing

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 08:09:01 -0400

Angelo Carusone, president of Media Matters for America, on Candace Owens: “She can create a story line and then push it.”

Article: Bullshit Jobs and Chickenshit Jobs

Wed, 29 Jul 2026 10:34:21 -0400

George Scialabba: “These people deserve chickenshit jobs.”

Paper: Alcohol and Self-Control: A Field Experiment in India

Wed, 29 Jul 2026 09:01:20 -0400

Randomly receiving sobriety incentives significantly reduced daytime drinking while leaving overall drinking unchanged.

Article: West Africa has become a huge cocaine-trading hub

Tue, 28 Jul 2026 15:50:46 -0400

Article: The UAE's Bold Gambit on Iran

Tue, 28 Jul 2026 07:48:20 -0400

Blog Post: Italy is changing its electoral system (again)

Tue, 28 Jul 2026 07:43:11 -0400

In a more long-term perspective, the reform is unlikely to put an end to Italy’s endless tinkering with electoral laws: passed as ordinary legislation, it could be easily amended by simple majority by any future government (simple majorities that the system itself all but guarantees). Moreover, questions around constitutional validity hang over the text. Italy’s two previous experiments with majority bonuses in the 2005 and 2015 reforms did not end well: the Constitutional Court struck down key provisions of both laws in 2014 and 2017 (although in the latter case, the Court also allowed that majority bonuses are admissible within limits). Critics also add that pre-designating a Prime Minister smuggles in a fundamental change to the parliamentary form of government (which would require a constitutional amendment) and that the national-level majority bonus in the Senate runs afoul of the constitutional requirement that senators be elected on a regional basis.

Article: Narendra Modi's party discovers the limits of propaganda

Mon, 27 Jul 2026 10:41:41 -0400

Article: Froth, Fury, and the Rise of the New Right

Mon, 27 Jul 2026 10:33:26 -0400

Blog Post: People sometimes talk about "the Jewish vote," but what's relevant is not really the Jewish vote or Jewish public opinion; it's really about campaign contributions and the news media

Mon, 27 Jul 2026 08:03:14 -0400

Article: Can Renewables Industrialize Africa?

Mon, 27 Jul 2026 06:23:00 -0400

The challenge for African governments is not to replace one form of dependence with another. It must use foreign investment to expand domestic capacity, building up local manufacturing and strengthening regional power networks. Sub-Saharan Africa is already the world’s leading market for pay-as-you-go-solar. If its transition is managed well, it could soon lead the clean energy transition in many more ways than that.

Article: Hyperpolitics in Command?

Mon, 27 Jul 2026 06:17:37 -0400

Background: Luuk van Middelaar

News Story: Supreme Court litigator gets 6 years in prison for tax evasion case after gambling millions on poker

Sun, 26 Jul 2026 09:42:11 -0400

Poem: From Blossoms (Li-Young Lee)

Sun, 26 Jul 2026 07:24:22 -0400

“From blossoms comes / this brown paper bag of peaches”

Academic Paper: Public responses to atrocities depend on partisanship and context, not legal labels

Sun, 26 Jul 2026 06:46:45 -0400

Blog Post: Elite Failure?

Sun, 26 Jul 2026 06:37:35 -0400

Blog Post: Nate Silver discovers the educated poor

Sat, 25 Jul 2026 07:30:58 -0400

Profile: How Jessica Reed Kraus Went from Mommy Blogger to MAHA Maven

Fri, 24 Jul 2026 12:22:26 -0400

Update: ‘Depressive Spiral’: Pro-Trump Influencer Jessica Reed Kraus Blames Vanishing Act on ‘Faltering Mental State’ After Candace Owens Feud

Poem: God's Grandeur (Gerard Manley Hopkins)

Fri, 24 Jul 2026 08:21:10 -0400

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
    It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
    It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
    And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
    And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

Painting: Horses in a Meadow (Degas)

Fri, 24 Jul 2026 07:32:14 -0400

Manifesto: #FreeBazoum: Niger's Coup Must Not Be Normalized

Fri, 24 Jul 2026 07:17:52 -0400

Blog Post: The Mali of the Mind

Fri, 24 Jul 2026 07:16:45 -0400

Background: Theodore Dalrymple

Blog Post: What just happened to TheNumbers.com should worry us all

Thu, 23 Jul 2026 17:32:39 -0400

News Story: Inside the battle that could lead to Sudan's next catastrophe

Thu, 23 Jul 2026 17:28:59 -0400

News Story: Laura Loomer meets Volodymyr Zelenskyy after pro-Ukraine conversion

Thu, 23 Jul 2026 17:22:32 -0400

Book Review: How French Theory Lost Its Cool

Thu, 23 Jul 2026 17:17:40 -0400

See previously: How a Band of Difficult Thinkers Shaped One Author and the World

“Theory’s legacy of vigilant questioning, of scrupulous attentiveness to language’s complexities and contradictions,” Eakin writes, “is not antithetical to the common good.” But how do we define the common good when the sources of a shared culture have been so severely eroded?

Blog Post: Pretty maps of the NY mayoral election vote

Thu, 23 Jul 2026 17:13:28 -0400

Blog Post: The perfectly predictable pattern in partisanship

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 13:44:06 -0400

Evidence Review: Does creatine make you smarter?

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 13:43:37 -0400

Troubling News: An OpenAI Model Escaped Its Sandbox and Hacked Hugging Face

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 13:41:49 -0400

Book Review: How a Band of Difficult Thinkers Shaped One Author and the World

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 09:58:08 -0400

Book Review: “James Joyce: A Political Life” by Terry Eagleton

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 07:16:50 -0400

For nationalism to claim for itself the greatest of Irish anglophone writers won’t be palatable to some of its adversaries. What Callanan’s book shows, simply enough, is that one can hold that nations should be free to determine their own destiny without being either insular or supremacist, and that Joyce’s career is a case in point.

Article: South Africa’s anti-migrant unrest

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 07:13:42 -0400

Article: As Sudan’s war crosses borders and millions are made refugees, could Ethiopia’s plan solve ‘humanity’s migration issue’?

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 07:11:10 -0400

Article: How Vandy Bested the Ivies

Tue, 21 Jul 2026 17:00:47 -0400

Article: When a president stops pretending that voters count, disaster beckons

Tue, 21 Jul 2026 14:31:19 -0400

News: Police detain Indian opposition leader Gandhi as protests continue to grow

Tue, 21 Jul 2026 14:26:47 -0400

Blog Post: Fandom and Social Connection

Tue, 21 Jul 2026 14:17:14 -0400

Quotation: Madison in Federalist No. 51

Fri, 17 Jul 2026 08:29:27 -0400

In Federalist no. 51, James Madison, himself an avid student of politics, observed that, “in framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.”

James Madison, Federalist No. 51

Wikipedia Entry: Alessandro Cagliostro

Fri, 17 Jul 2026 08:04:29 -0400

Blog Post: Open source models are having a moment

Thu, 16 Jul 2026 07:23:41 -0400

Quotation: Ellsberg on secrecy

Wed, 15 Jul 2026 15:27:18 -0400

“Henry, there’s something I would like to tell you, for what it’s worth, something I wish I had been told years ago. You’ve been a consultant for a long time, and you’ve dealt a great deal with top secret information. But you’re about to receive a whole slew of special clearances, maybe fifteen or twenty of them, that are higher than top secret.

“I’ve had a number of these myself, and I’ve known other people who have just acquired them, and I have a pretty good sense of what the effects of receiving these clearances are on a person who didn’t previously know they even existed. And the effects of reading the information that they will make available to you.

Movie Review: The Odyssey

Wed, 15 Jul 2026 13:20:46 -0400

Blog Post: Ranked Choice in the Wake of Plattner's Exit

Wed, 15 Jul 2026 12:14:12 -0400

Article: Can Africa take the Asian path to growth?

Wed, 15 Jul 2026 08:21:41 -0400

If that proves true, the lessons from Asia would need to be revised. There, farmers responded to rising population density by working their land more intensively. But African farmers are cutting their hours most rapidly in congested places, especially near cities. That might be because African economies are relatively integrated into global markets, so city-dwellers’ growing demand for food is partly met by imports. If local food prices do not rise, farmers have less reason to intensify.

Blog Post: Twitter Thoughts For You

Tue, 14 Jul 2026 19:31:33 -0400

Magnificent Corner of the Internet: 3 Quarks Daily

Tue, 14 Jul 2026 15:46:49 -0400

Etiquette Guide: The Guardian's Tips for Summer

Tue, 14 Jul 2026 11:20:26 -0400

Review: John Adams

Tue, 14 Jul 2026 10:55:12 -0400

I strongly disagree with their critique of Paul Giamatti.

Editorial: The genocide in Sudan

Mon, 13 Jul 2026 22:19:06 -0400

Election Prediction: Who would win the midterms if they were held today?

Mon, 13 Jul 2026 21:19:16 -0400

Interview: Is Anthropology Hopelessly Politicized?

Mon, 13 Jul 2026 21:08:35 -0400

Blog Post: Reviews of Sol

Mon, 13 Jul 2026 20:24:36 -0400

Article: Built for a Church That No Longer Exists

Mon, 13 Jul 2026 12:41:04 -0400

Article: Are Jewish Americans really leaving the Democratic Party?

Mon, 13 Jul 2026 11:10:31 -0400

Statement: We Must Act Now on AI

Mon, 13 Jul 2026 11:05:06 -0400

Article: Audrey Gelman's murder-mystery venture

Mon, 13 Jul 2026 10:54:52 -0400

There is a book to be written (or maybe has been written and I need to read it) about the relationship between NYT Styles Section journalists, who make fun of people like Audrey Gelman in a way that isn’t directly mean but lets the readers chuckle judgementally, and people like Audrey Gelman, who knows she is being made fun of but uses it for publicity of her latest venture anyway.

Music: Dagna, by Bembeya Jazz National

Mon, 13 Jul 2026 09:27:01 -0400

Guinea's legendary dance band, Bembeya Jazz, are a pillar of modern West African history. Begun in 1961 in the flush of Guinea's independence and Sekou Toure's maverick presidency, the band played under the inspired leadership of guitar giant Sekou "Bembeya" Diabate.

Afropop: The Story of Bembeya Jazz

Quotation: Being Wrong

Mon, 13 Jul 2026 09:11:54 -0400

“The ability to be wrong is one of the most important virtues, and it is extremely difficult. It should be emphasized in families and schools alongside standard virtues like honesty, sharing, and kindness, starting as young as possible.”

– Alan Levinovitz

Article: The Case for Debt Relief in Senegal

Mon, 13 Jul 2026 09:06:16 -0400

It does not make sense to me that after all of this Macky Sall is in the running for UN Secretary General.

Website: Fruit stickers from all over the world

Mon, 13 Jul 2026 07:55:09 -0400

Photography: Ryan McGinley

Mon, 13 Jul 2026 07:53:13 -0400

Article: China's Manosphere

Mon, 13 Jul 2026 07:52:01 -0400

Blog Post: Why Reading Matters

Mon, 13 Jul 2026 07:46:43 -0400

News: Texas Surpasses California as Top State for Utility-Scale Solar Power

Sun, 12 Jul 2026 21:30:39 -0400

Open Letter: To the President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria

Sun, 12 Jul 2026 20:44:36 -0400

Movie: Last of the Mohicans

Sat, 11 Jul 2026 23:21:39 -0400

Article: Anthropic makes 2,800 crawl requests for every referral

Fri, 10 Jul 2026 09:31:51 -0400

Music: I Remember Billy by The Jazz Epistles

Fri, 10 Jul 2026 09:17:36 -0400

Article: How to Win the Defense Innovation Contest

Fri, 10 Jul 2026 07:23:34 -0400

The real momentum for effective and durable cooperation among U.S. allies and partners lies among the private companies and research institutions in which many of the technological innovations that yield cutting-edge military capabilities occur. To maximize the benefits of defense and technological collaboration, the U.S. government and its partners must pair national efforts with transnational ones: pooling allied capital, technical know-how, production capacity, and supply chains through networks of firms, universities, investors, and governments. Building these networks will not only make it possible to innovate more quickly and produce at scale. It will also reinforce the United States’ increasingly uneasy alliances and partnerships, providing durable connections that can withstand a transactional and turbulent world.

Slides: Chad Jones on AI and our economic future

Fri, 10 Jul 2026 07:20:49 -0400

Podcast: Joel Mokyr on two paths to prosperity for China and Europe

Fri, 10 Jul 2026 07:04:23 -0400

Link: Notes on Trollope's Barsetshire

Thu, 09 Jul 2026 14:55:42 -0400

Paper: The Unintended Impacts of an Intimate Partner Violence Prevention Program: Experimental Evidence from Rwanda

Thu, 09 Jul 2026 14:40:54 -0400

Interesting result: couples counselling leads to more IPV in Rwanda.

Music: Home at Last by Mseleku

Thu, 09 Jul 2026 12:35:16 -0400

Podcast: Was Jane Jacobs the first NIMBY?

Thu, 09 Jul 2026 12:08:38 -0400

Podcast: Jerusalem Demsas and Matt Yglesias’ critical take on “Life and Death of Great American Cities”.

Book: Drunken Silenus

Thu, 09 Jul 2026 10:46:10 -0400

The first of Morgan Meis’ Three Paintings Trilogy. Based on this recommendation.

Article: From Rolling Mill to Drone Factory: The Sight of Work

Thu, 09 Jul 2026 10:33:27 -0400

T.J. Clark on representations of labor under capitalism.