Alexander Livingston

Way to out me

“If Columbia or another university confronts the administration on its own, it will lose. If America’s nearly 6,000 universities and colleges launch a campaign in defense of higher education, odds are that Trump will lose.”

A diary of year 1: “I have read several reactions by Germans to the rise of Nazism and I was struck by their difficulty to understand where the daily events they lived through could or would lead. In retrospect, we will know, analyze, and make sense.”

“What does it mean to issue dire warnings about the death of democracy, only to go quiet when those warnings seem to be coming true?”

MLK’s family fear new batch of assassination files will have FBI ‘smears’ Family of Martin Luther King Jr says Trump mandate could revive J Edgar Hoover’s efforts to discredit revered activist

As someone who works in King archives it’s safe to say the EO release will be almost entirely FBI dirt of questionable provenance and veracity, whose sole effect will be to continue the FBIs long legacy of slandering King www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

Didn’t see that one coming

In 2003, an army of unqualified finance bros just out of college were sent to “reconstruct” the Iraqi state. Twenty years later, the imperial boomerang comes flying home to destroy the US state this time by way of Silicon Valley.

Probably for the best

Yup

Whereupon my brilliant colleague Begüm Adalet publishes TWO single-author articles in a single volume of the APSR

The February 2025 issue of the APSR is now available online!

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/american-political-science-review/latest-issue

What no dancing dragons?

From our new issue: "An Incomplete Recognition: An Analysis of Political Science Department Statements after the Murder of George Floyd" by Nadia Brown, Fernando Tormos-Aponte, Janelle Wong. #ASPRNewIssue https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/american-political-science-review/article/an-incomplet…

Hey Boston friends: am in town all week doing archive research and talks on the MLK book project. Hit me up for a coffee if you’re around.

Blood Ties - Boston Review The real story of pain in America.

www.bostonreview.net/articles/blo... “In our contemporary moment… the impulse to unsee the connections between the past and the present, health care and fentanyl, primacy and the border, could not be more tempting.” Essential reading from @morefius.bsky.social

Materials on Queer Civil Disobedience When faced with questions about the history of civil disobedience, most political theorists today turn to the same threefold genealogy, to which besides Henry David Thoreau, civil disobedience's “foun...

read.dukeupress.edu/glq/article-...

Email me and I’ll shoot you over a copy of the syllabus from the civil disobedience class I’ve been developing for about a decade now. It’s all there.

Last day of the American political thought class. From the new right to the new new right: Goldwater, Rothbard, Ellmers, Vermeule. The only vein of genuine radicalism on the American political scene today. Be careful what you ask for…..

🎉🍾🎉🍾🎉

Fair

Right there with you. I evidently spent 2156 minutes listening to Charlie XCX in 2024. No regrets

"I did not become someone different
That I did not want to be
But I'm new here
Will you show me around?"