• James Rebanks, An English Sheep Farmer’s View of Rural America
• Tim Egan, A Great New Accidental Renaissance
• Justin Miller, The Subtle Force of Tom Perez
• Dean Baker and Sarah Rawlins, Severance Pay: An Alternative to Donald Trump Carrier Shows
• Eli Rabett, Temperature
• Elizabeth Stoker Bruening, City of Rod
• Interview with Martin Shaw, The Mythos We Live By: Uncolonising Our Imagination

• Ian Bogost, Why Nothing Works Anymore. (Technology has its own purposes.)
• Barbara Ehrenreich, Divisions of Labor
• Scott Beauchamp, Old School
• Scott Beauchamp, Why Are Women in Combat?
• Andrew Bacevich, The Duty of General McMaster
• Daniel Larison, ‘American Exceptionalism’ and Our Warped Foreign Policy ‘Idealists’
• Paul Kingsnorth, What if it’s not a war?

• WBUR,  Historian Argues President Trump Creates Shock Event Through Immigration Order [Ed.:  Interview with BC History Prof. Heather Cox Richardson]
• Chris Dillow, How Lies Work
• Andrew deGrandpre and Shawn Snow, The U.S. military’s stats on deadly airstrikes are wrong. Thousands have gone unreported
• Jeff Stein, Hundreds chant “do your job!” at House Republican in charge of investigating Trump
• Sam Levin, Army veterans return to Standing Rock to form a human shield against police
• Paul Kingsnorth, The World-Ending Fire [Ed.: “The World-Ending Fire” is a collection of Wendell Berry’s essays which Kingsnorth selected and wrote the intro.]
• Melissa Davie, Humans causing climate to change 170 times faster than natural forces
• March for Science
• People’s Climate March
• Mike the Mad Biologist, The Democratic Party Is Failing To Demobilize Its Base. This Is Good.

• Andrew Bacevich, Conservatism After Trump
• Addison Del Mastro, Too Good a Problem
• Hiroko Tabuchi, In America’s Heartland, Discussing Climate Change Without Saying ‘Climate Change’
• MIT News, Explained:  Greenhouse Gases
• Hugh O’Shaughnessy, Chilean coup: 40 years ago I watched Pinochet crush a democratic dream
• Mr. Fish, Frank Advice:

• Jason Wilson, Burst your bubble: five conservative articles to read during Trump’s first week
• Tyler Cowen, Why Trump’s Staff is Lying
• BBC, Trump puts Bannon on Security Council
• Will Worley, China military official says war with US under Donald Trump ‘becoming practical reality’  [Ed.:  Bluster or for real?  Dunno, but plausible enough to be disturbing.  If it is real then I’m confident that having belligerent fools representing our side increases the likelihood that things will turn out badly.]
• Brad Evans and Richard Bernstein, The Intellectual Life of Violence
• Rhett Jones, Twitter Releases FBI’s Potentially Unconstitutional Requests
• Daron Acemoglu, We Are the Last Defense Against Trump
• Charlie Pierce, This Was Bigger Than All of Us (A long, beautiful Saturday at the Women’s March on Washington.)
• Corey Robin, The Opposition Is Born

Continue reading →

• Jonathan Kirshner, America, America
• Nicole Puglise, Bane of our existence: Trump speech has uncanny echo of Batman villain
• Julia Ioffe, The Real Meaning of Putin’s Press Conference
• NPR, ‘The Atlantic’ Writer [Shadi Hamid] Argues Obama Confronted Pitfalls Of Fact-Based Foreign Policy:

I think one thing that I’ve learned over the past eight years is facts are necessary, but they’re not sufficient. In other words, you can have smart people who know all the facts about a specific conflict or country, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that they have good judgment or bold vision.

• Robert Kuttner, Q&A [with Howard Dean]:  A New 50-State Strategy
• Mr. Fish, Time to Grow a Pair:

From the past few weeks:

• Corey Robin, Trump and the Intelligence Agencies: On the Slow Collapse of Imperial Republics
• Chris Smaje, 2016: A sheep’s vigil
• Robert Leonard (NYT), Why Rural America Voted for Trump [Ed.:  I find Leonard’s piece depressing in that I see no basis for common ground.  As an aside, the reality of taxes.  ADDENDA:  Dean Baker with some observations which suggests it’s not as straightforward as many – including Krugman and myself – might initially think.  FAIR points out some right-wing mythology.]
  
• Joe Allen, When George Wallace Came to Town
• Matthew Sitman, Leaving Conservatism Behind
• Robert Mitchum, Dust Bowl would devastate today’s crops, study finds [Ed.: It’s all fun and games until climate change breaks agriculture.]
• Rae Ellen Bichell, A Really Big Crack In An Antarctic Ice Shelf Just Got Bigger
• Roger Harrabin, Donald Trump makes top Republican fear environmental future
• Robinson Meyer, Are Climate Scientists Ready for Trump?
• Kate Aronoff, The Republicans Who Want Trump to Fight Climate Change
• Lamar Alexander and Sheldon Whitehouse (NYT), To Slow Global Warming, We Need Nuclear Power
• Stanford scientist unveils 50-state plan to transform U.S. to renewable energy
• Michael Forsythe (NYT), China Aims to Spend at Least $360 Billion on Renewable Energy by 2020
• Joe Romm, Trump to cede millions of high-wage jobs to China
• Robert Pollin, Heidi Garrett-Peltier, James Heintz, and Bracken Hendricks, Green Growth:  A U.S. Program for Controlling Climate Change and Expanding Job Opportunities
• Nathaniel Stinnett,  Why Don’t Environmentalists Vote?
• Chad Orzel, What Should You Expect From Low-Energy Physics In 2017? It’s Hard To Say  [Ed.:  I left the field 20+ years ago but I have the same technical background as Orzel.   Coincidence or not, I think our outlooks on the world as scientists have a lot in common.]