Team America

@AJentleson Haley will win the primary and the general. No one ever out Michigan’d Stabenow. And no one will ever out Michigan Haley. She looks, sounds and acts pure Michigan. And we love her for it.

The Haley Stevens campaign seems to be a bunch of staff berating everyone on Twitter while the candidate steps on every rake in sight. I’m a big electability guy but the data on Stevens is unpersuasive at best. At some point you gotta show not tell (or yell).

Let’s be clear. Hasan Piker = Nick Fuentes. Two sides of the same coin. Don’t campaign with either.

@emmma_camp_ Station 11 isn’t about Covid per se but it’s set in a post pandemic world and I read it in 2020 and so I associate it with Covid. Brilliant read.

Question for the group: has there been any great art about Covid? Any incredible literary novels or films? I can't think of anything off the top of my head but my cultural knowledge is not limitless.

30 years ago today, Troy McClure starred in the musical “Stop the Planet of the Apes (I Want to Get Off)”. #TheSimpsons episode “A Fish Called Selma” first aired March 24, 1996.

@OpenSourceZone Do we not teach history or civics any longer?

Should the U.S be the dominant power in the western hemisphere 🟢 Yes: 51% 🔴 No: 28% By party: Republicans: (🟢 Yes 74/8) Democrats: (🔴 No 26/49) Economist/YouGov poll | 3/20-3/23

@conor64 @SherwoodStrauss Fun question. Here’s my cut at Michigan’s: Chris Weber Jalen Rose Juwan Howard Trey Burke Jamal Crawford

A March Madness question: if the NCAA had a 16 team alumni b-ball tournament, open to any alumni, but excluding currently active NBA players, who'd make the final four, who'd win, and who'd be the oldest person to play? Cc @SherwoodStrauss

@AlecStapp @wilhelmscreamin The Rest is History History of Rock & Roll in 500 songs EconTalk Making Sense

@wilhelmscreamin think it's like 6: - dwarkesh pod - statecraft by santi - conversations with tyler - cheeky pint with john collison - interesting times with ross douthat - 80k

i don't understand why people think there are too many podcasts. there are like 3-4 good podcasts in the world. i would love there to be more good podcasts

The Iowa-Nebraska Sweet 16 game will need security like a soccer derby in the Balkans.

Every transit nerd — the urbanist who tell us over and over how much they love public transportation— has to realize until you stop this sort of crap, and make stopping it your number one goal, you and all your train love are doing nothing but annoying everyone else.

The court artist painted a masterpiece and doesn't even know it. #afroman

@SethDavisHoops NIL. It’s now pro basketball with no salary cap. NCAA hoops is now MLB.

Tourney is feeling increasingly top heavy

@slmandel @JoshKraushaar NIL killed mid majors. Talent gets raided.

Well, this is not an encouraging trend for Cinderellas. ... The NCAA tournament went to 64 teams in 1985. Only 7 times have the 13-14-15 seeds all gone winless in the first round. It's now happened two years in a row (for the first time).

BRACKETS (2026) @outttoforderrr

@clairlemon I’m admittedly late to the Rest is History party but it is absolutely phenomenal. I’m mad for it. Hilarious, educational and endlessly entertaining.

There are some notable exceptions, though. If you haven't listened to The Rest is History, you really are missing out. x.com/avidseries/sta…

I put in 25 years. It would be 26 but I haven't worked yet this year and I'm not sure I'll ever work in entertainment again. The writing has been on the wall for quite some time. But it's a sad thing--especially since the collapse of Hollywood is (mostly) self inflicted. Outsiders like to blame the unions and burdensome regulations. That's not exactly wrong, but the big reason is that Hollywood stopped making a product that people wanted to consume. Film is a funny thing. On one hand it's art. But on the other it's a mass consumer product--like a car, or a soft drink. But unlike a typical consumer product, it was something we consumed together. We went to a special place, and sat with strangers, and watched stories. And those stories infected us. They entered our minds and our souls and they implanted things. Deep things. Ancient things. Timeless things. Things like heroism and beauty and love and fear and sex and death and adventure and tragedy and pain and injustice and all the things that make up our dreams. There's a thing we call "cinematic language". It's how we tell a story with images. (And BTW if you want to learn more about the language of visual media, read Scott McCloud's excellent book Understanding Comics.) An odd thing about cinematic language is that it's the same language as dreams. There's a scene in Christopher Nolan's Inception where Leonardo DiCaprio is explains to (the tragic) Ellen Page how dreams work. But what he's really describing is cinematic language. Inception is really a movie about movies BTW. While it's far from my favorite film, I think it's the perfect film. Because the suspension of disbelief is perfect. You believe the plot about dreams because you're familiar with how movies work--maybe not consciously--but you know. Everyone knows. Maybe not everyone has seen a movie, but everyone has dreams. Another odd thing about film: you don't "watch" a movie, you look into it. And you put yourself inside it. Now you're in the dream. And you're hypnotized. Because movies do that too. The motion--the moving images--they hack your brain. We're programed to pay attention to moving things. Even when the things aren't real. Even when they're just light reflected off a screen. So we'd go to these special places--these movie theaters--these temples--and we'd sit, and we'd "watch" and we'd enter the dream. And we did it together. And after the movie was over--and the lights came on, and we'd file out over the sound of popcorn crunching under our feet--we were different. We had become transformed. Sometimes we were changed in minor ways. But sometimes not. Sometimes we were changed in profound ways. And we did it together. Before the movie we were a room full of strangers. But after--on the way out the door--we all had something in common. Because we shared an experience. We'd shared the dream. And we'd all become transformed. And then tech got involved... Streaming turned movies from a communal experience to a personal experience. And that's an issue, but they did something else too. They started developing movies as if they were tech products. But you can't apply a KPI to a dream. At least, not successfully anyway. Because dreams don't work like that--nor does any sort of art. And that's a funny thing about making movies. You try to make the best film you can, but at the end of the day you have no idea if it's good or if it's going to be successful. You just have to hope the audience likes it. Now, you can design a movie that will appeal to a preexisting audience. Marvel movies are like this. There's a large group of fanboy nerds that will see every single one. You can count on them every time. Just like you can count on the Gay Oscar Bait crowd (for example). But those movies are slop. But Hollywood became specialists in slop. Because slop is safe. Because you could apply KPI style metrics to slop. As a result they lost the audience. And the audience is probably never coming back. I wrote a book in 2024 (that was published in 2025). While writing, I thought of it as my farewell to the industry. But looking back, what I was actually writing was a eulogy for Hollywood--the place where dreams were made. And so it goes...

🚨EV ALERT🚨 Instead of betting on the Iowa State Cyclones to win the National Championship at +1600, bet on the winning mascot to be "Weather/Nature" at +4000. As a bonus, you also get St. John's Red Storm and Miami Hurricanes.

Islamic terrorist attacks are just blowback from America’s GWOT, which was just blowback from 9/11, which was just blowback from America supporting Israel, which was just blowback from the Ottomans fighting against America and Britain in WW1, which was just blowback from Britain seizing Egypt and supporting Greek freedom from the Ottomans, which was just blowback from the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople and hundreds of years of oppression, which was just blowback from the Crusades, which were just blowback from the Seljuk conquest of Anatolia, which was just blowback from the Byzantine Empire’s expansion into Syria under the Macedonian dynasty, which was just blowback from the Arab conquest of Byzantine Syria and Egypt and North Africa and repeated siege attempts against Constantinople, which was just blowback from the Byzantines no longer paying Arab tribes to defend the frontier against Persia, which was just blowback from an extended Persian invasion of the Byzantine Empire, which was just blowback from 700 years of warfare between Rome and Persia, which was just blowback from Alexander the Great’s conquest of Persia, which was just blowback from Darius and Xerxes’ invasions of Greece, which was just blowback from Athens supporting the Ionian revolts against the Persian Empire, which was just blowback from Cyrus the Great conquering the Ionian Greeks of Anatolia, but before that everybody in history probably got along.

@EconTalker Huge accomplishment. Congratulations.

The 20th anniversary episode of EconTalk lands in a few hours.

I am leaving the Washington Post to join a new journalistic venture backed by Politico founder Robert Allbritton that will be both the hometown publication the D.C. region sorely needs and a scrappy and fearless national news organization. I hope you'll join us.