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Yoni Appelbaum Profile picture
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23 Nov, 4 tweets, 3 min read
1. Biden has named Jake Sullivan his national-security adviser. In 2019, Sullivan laid out a vision for reviving American foreign policy in @TheAtlantic theatlantic.com/magazine/archi…
@TheAtlantic 2. More recently, Biden’s newly named national-security adviser has been working on a Carnegie project, aimed at reorienting foreign policy around the middle class. What does that mean, in practical terms? Former Deputy SecState Bill Burns lays it out here theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/…
3. Biden’s orbit contains two competing visions of foreign policy, argues @thomaswright08—with the restorationist and reformist impulses battling against each other: theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/…
4. These picks, writes @gcaw, are the "exact people you would choose if you wanted to reassure everyone, at the risk of boring them, that the incoming administration will resemble the one that left in 2017, with a modest generational upgrade.” theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/…

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More from @YAppelbaum

Yoni Appelbaum Profile picture
22 Oct
1. If Texas turns blue this cycle—and that’s a huge and somewhat improbable “if”!—what’s happening right now in Harris County could be incredibly consequential for voting rights across the country.
2. The county has been aggressive about expanding access to voting, and turnout has surged. The partisan valence of that remains unclear. (A good breakdown here: houstonpublicmedia.org/articles/news/…) But by week’s end, there could be 1 million ballots cast—against 1.3m in all of 2016.
3. There’s an interesting set of incentives baked in here—if a particular metro area can boost turnout by liberalizing access, other areas will have to keep pace or risk losing relative clout in future elections.
Read 6 tweets
Yoni Appelbaum Profile picture
22 Oct
1. For five years, Donald Trump has survived politically by embracing a simple truth. The damaging scandals are those politicians seek to conceal; any revelation, no matter how damning, can be overcome if they insist they are actually proud of it.
2. The best illustration of this principle was the president’s phone call with Ukraine. Hiding it on a secret server betrayed cognizance of guilt, and provoked impeachment. Then the president insisted it was “perfect,” and the GOP Senate lined up to support him.
3. Today’s episode is the president’s 60 Minutes interview. By any objective standard, it’s a train-wreck. But rather than allow the network to define the story, the president insists it shows him in a favorable light, and posts it online.
Read 4 tweets
Yoni Appelbaum Profile picture
13 Sep
1. The actual question here is “What news source do you turn to most often for political and election news?”

Pew also asked who *gets* political news from these outlets, and those numbers are very different.
2. For the NYT, the GOP/Dem split as the *primary* source is 7/91. For everyone who *gets* political news from the NYT, it’s 23/77. For MSNBC, 30/70. For Fox News, it’s 72/28.

And that doesn’t even include readers who use these outlets for news on other topics.
3. Or, to use a different and perhaps more relevant measure, 23% of Democrats and leaners are getting some political news from Fox; among GOPers and leaners, 14% get political news from MSNBC, and 24% from CNN. There is real, meaningful overlap in audiences.
Read 4 tweets
Yoni Appelbaum Profile picture
14 Aug
1. New York City once had a system of pneumatic tubes beneath is streets, whisking up to 6 million pieces of mail at 30mph around the city each day. The postal workers who staffed the system were known as rocketeers. about.usps.com/who-we-are/pos… Image
2. From the beginning, the pneumatic tube service was controversial. It was fast, allowing multiple messages to be exchanged between correspondents in a single day—and thus, a boon for business. It was also the most expensive way to move letters from one point to another.
3. It’s an old debate: Is the Post Office a service, facilitating public good at public expense? Or should it be run more like a business, looking for efficiencies and forcing customers to pay the cost of what they receive?

Trucks were slower—but much cheaper. Image
Read 5 tweets
Yoni Appelbaum Profile picture
10 Aug
1. For Trump, if Gettysburg holds special meaning, it is characteristically personal—it’s where he delivered a speech on Oct. 22, 2016 conceived as his closing case, in a then-faltering bid. And what a speech it was: theatlantic.com/politics/archi…
2. As I wrote at the time, there’s a long history of presidential addresses at Gettysburg. They stress the fragility of democracy, and the potential for the people working together to lift themselves up.

Trump’s speech was mostly about his own resentments.
3. FDR came to Gettysburg to warn against "those who seek to stir up political animosity or to build political advantage by the distortion of facts; those who, by declining to follow the rules of the game, seek to gain an unfair advantage."
Read 5 tweets
Yoni Appelbaum Profile picture
9 Aug
1. A short thread on the executive actions the president signed while I was offline today. I think they’re a very big deal, for reasons that extend beyond their specifics—they expose a weakness in our constitutional system.
2. in the runup to the Revolution, many blamed Parliament for its tyranny, but also the king for his inaction. That diagnosis spurred the convention to give its new executive powers no King of England had even dreamed of exercising in more than a hundred years.
3. When we talk about “checks and balances,” this is what we mean. But presidential systems have a flaw, too—they account for the danger of legislative overreach, but not for the threat of legislative gridlock. And when they collapse, they tend to follow a common pattern.
Read 6 tweets

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