Lydia Polgreen
@polgreen.bsky.social
New York Times Opinion Columnist. The world, especially the global south, migration, inequality, the human future, queer stuff. Reachable via email or on Signal @lpolgreen.39
Another example of the lunacy of thinking discrimination against a marginalized group won't affect you if you're not part of that group bsky.app/profile/gbbr...
Gillian Branstetter@gbbranstetter.bsky.social · 2d agoAn initiative on the ballot in Washington state in November would require all athletes seeking to play girl's sports from kindergarten to high school to undergo "genetic screening, a testosterone-levels test, or an examination of their reproductive anatomy" before they can play
‘In the American South or in the country at all, you cannot decouple partisanship from race. The reasons for that are real and they have historic precedent.’ @maragay.bsky.social on voter suppression, on the podcast. podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/t...
The long history of Black voter suppression in the US
Podcast Episode · The LRB Podcast · 31 July · 1hr 2min
podcasts.apple.com
One of the great People’s Scholars, and writer of the definitive book on the Young Lords. Her class on race and empire (offered for free with a radical bookstore) introduced me to thinkers who changed how I saw the world. What a devastating loss
jentrification@jentrification.com · 4d ago"Dr. Johanna Fernández, the Dominican American historian, prison abolitionist, and movement scholar, died on July 30, 2026, after a years-long struggle with non-small cell lung cancer. She was 55."
In @nytopinion.nytimes.com “We’ve been living under the penumbra of Trump for so long that it can feel as if we will never escape it,” our columnist Lydia Polgreen writes. “But the battle over who will succeed Trump as the Republican nominee in 2028 is well underway.”
Opinion | Vivek Ramaswamy Wants to Be the Future. First He Has to Win.
Vivek Ramaswamy’s brand of post-Trump fusionism faces a test in Ohio.
nyti.ms
So CBS and others invested in a pro trump audience that won’t arrive, alienating their actual audience, and trump propagandists are losing audience bc people are souring on Trump. Also helps explain the increased racist shrieking as they try to farm engagement www.nytimes.com/2026/07/31/u...
How the Pro-Trump Media Ecosystem Is Splintering Ahead of the Midterms
Once united in support of President Trump, right-wing influencers are embroiled in feuds and losing viewers, creating a problem for Republicans in the midterm elections.
nytimes.com
Vivek Ramaswamy tells a crowd of young Libertarians in Ohio "The truth of the matter is, people in my generation have already made it. We're gonna be fine." He is then booed off of the stage
Vivek Ramaswamy wants to be the future of the Republican party. But first, he's gotta win in Ohio. I went there to see how it is going. www.nytimes.com/2026/07/31/o...
Opinion | Vivek Ramaswamy Wants to Be the Future. First He Has to Win. (Gift Article)
His brand of post-Trump fusionism faces a test in Ohio.
nytimes.com
99% of the time, when someone accuses you of selective outrage, it’s a way of politically demobilizing you and shutting you up “Why are you angry about data centers instead of fast fashion” isn’t about making you care about fast fashion. It’s about shutting you up about data centers And visa versa
Trump absolutely cratering by many metrics in new CNN poll: 66% say he puts himself over country 61% disapprove of ballroom, arch, etc 57% say lacks sharpness to serve (!) 73% say he's out of touch w/regular people (!!) His personalist project is over. New piece: newrepublic.com/article/2137...
We’ve Officially Entered the Twilight of Late-Stage Trumpism
It’s all there in a new CNN poll, and it’s heartening to see: Large majorities are sick of Donald Trump’s vanity, venality, and megalomania.
newrepublic.com
So, the real proof of not being a leftist is being a sex pest, according to Republicans?
Buttadeus@thewanderingjew.bsky.social · 7d agoJust sort of digging into this a bit - here's how Republicans view these figures (left/far-left vs. centerleft-Center) Sanders: 75-10 AOC: 70-5 Mamdani: 61-3 Harris: 83-7 Biden: 81-9 Obama: 82-9
Fauci may not have covered himself in glory, but I suspect there is almost zero mileage left in Covid for the right. I was just in Ohio, where the Dem nominee for governor is the former state Covid czar and she is currently tied in the polls, despite GOP efforts to smear her over it.
"Also among those detained was a Ugandan woman in a wheelchair who has sickle cell anemia and an active asylum application, according to her lawyer." “It’s not people with criminal records” being targeted, Mr. Shamieh said. “You are talking about people with legitimate pending applications.”
Yonette Joseph@sugarcane99.bsky.social · last wk.ICE agents have begun arresting foreign citizens with expired U.S. visas as they travel through airports, including spouses of Americans, according to documents obtained by The NYT and interviews with immigration lawyers — opening up a new pool of possible deportees www.nytimes.com/2026/07/28/u...
I love the people who are like "there's gonna be a robust, seedy black market for meat purchased from Zohran's Communist grocery stores." These people have never been aggressively pitched stolen steak out of the back of a Honda Civic before? Non-desperate people don't buy random sidewalk meat.
It’s back. And while you’re there for the viral essay, scroll down to read @lucasamin.bsky.social and @petergeoghegan.bsky.social 's Palantir investigation if you haven't yet. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...
Peter Geoghegan and Lucas Amin · ‘This looks absolutely rubbish’: Palantir and the NHS
A decade ago Palantir was largely unknown in the UK. It now holds public contracts worth hundreds of millions of pounds...
lrb.co.uk
Lydia Polgreen@polgreen.bsky.social · last wk.Uh, did Emily Wilson's Odyssey takedown crash the @lrb.co.uk website?
Yes, @emilyrcwilson.bsky.social filed a review with τῇ καλλίστῃ jotted as a title and nobody thought about the consequences. (Fortunately you can access the living oral tradition on the podcast feed.)
Lydia Polgreen@polgreen.bsky.social · last wk.Uh, did Emily Wilson's Odyssey takedown crash the @lrb.co.uk website?
Short answer: yes. Our tech team are working on it and we hope to be back to normal soon. Emily Wilson is on the LRB Podcast in the meantime: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/n...
Nolan v. Homer
Podcast Episode · The LRB Podcast · July 26 · 52m
podcasts.apple.com
Tapper finally getting his absolutely open Islamophobia thrown back in his face is so immensely satisfying holy shit.
ownfeed@ownfeed.bsky.social · 2w agoCNN's Jake Tapper pressed Michigan U.S. Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed on comments he made about Ayatollah Khamenei, reportedly telling staff there were "a lot of people in Dearborn who are SAD today" following the Supreme Leader's death.
The last FDA inspections of Taylor Farms were in 2011 and 2019. The FDA has been hit hard by staff cuts ordered by DOGE and RFK Jr. Foreign food inspections plummeted last year, and the agency was already struggling to inspect foreign facilities before the cuts. www.nytimes.com/2026/07/17/h...
Cyclospora Investigation Turns to Farms in Mexico (Gift Article)
The F.D.A. is planning to inspect farms and a lettuce shredding facility to determine how lettuce supplied by the produce company Taylor Farms to Taco Bell became contaminated and where it was shipped...
nytimes.com
My Odyssey and Iliad translations are available as audiobooks, read/ performed by very talented real people: Claire Danes and Audra MacDonald. They do a much better job than the robots! www.audible.com/pd/The-Iliad...
The Odyssey
Check out this great listen on Audible.com. Acclaimed actress Claire Danes burnishes an epic story of heroes, gods, and monsters in a groundbreaking translation of The Odyssey, the first great adventure story in the Western literary tradition. When the wily warrior-king Odysseus sets off for home ...
audible.com
This is a politician who understands that this is not an indulgence, it's an investment. Every public space where you can have fun and not spend any money is probably more of a crimebuster than 100 cops.
Mayor Zohran Kwame Mamdani@mayor.nyc.gov · 3w agoThis summer, we kept the lights on all night, every night, at five soccer fields across New York City. This was the scene at Calvert Vaux Park in Gravesend, Brooklyn Tuesday night.
I wrote about Kerri Greenidge because the vague-accusation-to-career-ending-punishment math isn’t mathing. Show us the work. substack.com/home/post/p-...
The Scandal and the Scale
I was bleary-eyed on a delayed flight when I spotted a New York Times article about Kerri Greenidge, a historian of Black political life and memory.
substack.com
There has been a great deal of false and speculative information about @pressfreedom.bsky.social in the past few days. Today, the board voted to affirm our definition of who is a journalist. The mission and the work remain unchanged: protecting journalists everywhere. cpj.org/2026/07/boar...
Board votes to affirm CPJ’s existing definition of who is a journalist - Committee to Protect Journalists
The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) board of directors voted on Wednesday to affirm the organization’s existing definition of who is a journalist and rejected claims it planned to change its de...
cpj.org
really cannot be emphasized enough that the drafters of the birthright clause very much considered cases analogous to undocumented immigrants and *included them too*
Adam Serwer@adamserwer.bsky.social · last mo.That's right.
![During the ratification debates, Senator Cowan took aim
at the Roma people too, characterizing them as undeserving
of birthright citizenship because they “wander[ed] in
gangs,” “infest[ed] society,” and “impos[ed] upon the simple
and weak everywhere.”49 And again, Senator Conness dismissed Senator Cowan’s prejudices: “The only invasion of
Pennsylvania within my recollection was an invasion very
much worse and more disastrous to the State, and more to
be feared and more feared, than that of Gypsies. It was an
invasion of rebels [at Gettysburg].](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:lzlqyldh7nfc34pfffvd24ko/bafkreihrli2ghfantwmdgc4pk4rr4ddt4ajq4xgnggxhs4qv4hojeppmpi)
As I write here, it's totally incoherent to immunize the president from prosecution on the theory that he can be held accountable through the political process — and then to suppress the information that might allow Congress and the public to actually hold him accountable.
Jameel Jaffer@jameeljaffer.bsky.social · last mo.Trump has never had to account to the public for his hoarding of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago. Maybe a federal appeals court in Miami can do something about it. New from me about the outrageous suppression of the special counsel’s report. (Gift link.) www.nytimes.com/2026/06/29/o...
this is a great illustration of one of the fundamental insights of democracy — that there is no such thing as "the people" and that majorities are elusive and ever shifting. no election, no decision, is final and treating an election as a final decision is profoundly undemocratic.
Mark Chadbourn@chadbourn.bsky.social · last mo.A fifth of Leave voters have died.
In an age of megalooting by the most powerful, why are we so obsessed with small time shoplifting? I wrote about the movie of the summer, "I Love Boosters," a delightfully unhinged heist movie perfectly tuned to our times. www.nytimes.com/2026/06/24/o...
Opinion | I Love Heist Films. This One Is Special.
nytimes.com
I wrote about WIDOW'S BAY, where the past keeps coming at you even after you kill it with buckshot and fire [giftie] www.nytimes.com/2026/06/10/a...
In ‘Widow’s Bay,’ History Is Hard to Kill
nytimes.com
