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James Surowiecki Profile picture
James Surowiecki
@JamesSurowiecki
Author of The Wisdom of Crowds. Contributing writer for Fast Company. Editor at The Yale Review. I wrote The Financial Page for The New Yorker.
eDo Profile picture Leslie Jaszczak (Eserafina@nerdculture.de) Profile picture sally paddles Profile picture Joe Lang Profile picture Aviva Gabriel Profile picture 14 subscribed
Aug 13, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
If you want to know why Republican primary voters keep nominating guaranteed losers like Doug Mastriano and Don Bolduc in potentially winnable races, it's in part because they think their crazy views are shared by a large majority of Americans. Image If Republican base voters had an even vaguely accurate view of public opinion, they would never have nominated so many hard-right MAGA candidates in winnable swing-state races in 2022. But they have an incredibly inaccurate view of public opinion.
Aug 10, 2023 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
1. One thing that's crucial to remember about Trump's attempt to pressure Brad Raffensperger to "find 11,780 votes" is when that call happened. It did not happen, as many ppl seem to think, while Georgia was still counting or even re-counting votes.
alternet.org/more-than-a-do… 2. Instead, Trump's call to Raffensperger (during which he threatened him with criminal prosecution) happened on January 2. At that point, Georgia had already re-counted and hand-recounted all its votes, certified the election results, and its electoral votes had been cast.
Jun 25, 2023 • 11 tweets • 1 min read
Pro-appeasement politicians are scrambling to salvage their position, so they've decided to lie about what ppl were saying about Prigozhin. Exactly no one was calling him "a liberal reformer." Other than maybe Ted Cruz, JD Vance is the most cynical demagogue in American politics.
May 24, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Lying through it. I will never understand why DeSantis didn't hold a big kickoff rally in a Florida football stadium. It would have been covered live by cable news, and would have sent the message, "I'm a normal guy who likes the same things you do," which is a message DeSantis needs to send.
May 23, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Reading "Trust the Plan," Will Sommer's book about QAnon. It makes clear how absurd it is to argue that YouTube, Twitter, etc. should be obliged to publish the kind of conspiratorial, defamatory, harassing content (often aimed at non-famous ppl) that Q supporters specialized in. American law is ill-equipped to deal adequately with online defamation and conspiracy nonsense targeting individuals. The notion that on top of this, social-media platforms should be required to publish this kind of content is absolutely bonkers.
May 23, 2023 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
This is just objectively false. It has absolutely not been proven that work requirements lift people out of poverty. In fact, the best studies show work requirements do not increase labor-force participation. Their real impact is to throw eligible ppl off SNAP and Medicaid. Work requirements sound appealing to lots of people. But here's my recent piece for The Atlantic on why they don't work the way Kevin McCarthy says they do.
theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/…
May 11, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
This Trump thing is even worse than expected (and I have a high tolerance for Trump's antics). I mean, setting all else aside, why is the audience packed with Trump supporters in ill-fitting suits?
May 10, 2023 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
This story shows how tortured the GOP's claims are with regard to Joe Biden. It says there's something suspicious about Biden meeting with Romania's president and praising his anti-corruption efforts while Hunter was shilling for a Romanian who was being accused of bribery. But surely if the Romanian, Gabriel Popoviciu, had bought influence, Joe Biden should have attacked Romania's anti-corruption efforts rather than praising them, or in some way tried to get Romania to lay off Popoviciu. He did neither, and Popoviciu was convicted in 2016.
May 10, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
There's no acceptable constitutional justification for a public school to prohibit a book simply because it features a character with two dads if it's allowing books that have characters with a mom and a dad. It doesn't matter if some parents are offended. A book featuring the child of an interracial marriage would once have offended lots of parents (and probably still offends some). It would still have been discriminatory to prohibit the teaching of such a book.
Apr 26, 2023 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
It's been odd that Disney hadn't sued Ron DeSantis for violating its free-speech rights by retaliating against them for publicly opposing the "Don't Say Gay" bill. Now Disney has sued, and it will be fascinating to see what possible defense he'll mount.
reason.com/2023/04/26/dis… DeSantis unquestionably used the govt to punish Disney for exercising its 1st Amendment rights. Law professor Jonathan Turley, no fan of Disney, wrote last week that DeSantis' moves against the company showed his willingness to "wield state power in bringing them to heel."
Apr 24, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
How is this not a parody? Every single thing about it - down to the voice-over - looks and sounds like an SNL skit. The end of the ad is especially bizarre, since it suggests you use the koozie to cover up the Bud Light logo, which you would only need to do if you were buying Bud Light, which defeats the point of the boycott.
Apr 20, 2023 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
It's far from clear that DeSantis actually is more electable than Trump at this point. Passing actively homophobic legislation and a 6-week ban on abortion, weird war with Disney: are these really winning issues with college-ed voters? DeSantis was never going to do better with the GOP's white working-class base than Trump, and his history of wanting to cut entitlements means he'd likely do worse with those voters than Trump in the general.
Apr 15, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
327 people accounted for almost a third of all shoplifting arrests in NYC last year. Collectively, they were arrested 6,000 times.

It feels like if you've been arrested 20 times for theft in a year (and you did the crimes), you should be in prison.
nytimes.com/2023/04/15/nyr… The NYT article says that these 327 ppl accounted for a disproportionate pct of retail theft in NYC. That may be true, but it's also possible that these people are really bad at stealing, which is why they keep getting caught.
Apr 2, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
FFS - the blue check is not "verification" anymore. Tim SweeneyEpic's blue check doesn't let me know if he actually is the CEO of Epic Games - I just know he's a guy who pays $8 a month and gave Twitter a credit card number (which could be his mom's for all I know). I mean, he has 213k followers, so I'm going to assume he actually is the CEO of Epic Games. But the fact that he's paying for Twitter Blue doesn't make me any more confident in that assumption.
Mar 26, 2023 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
There are many things to worry about wrt AI. But the idea that the arts are a game analogous to chess, in which computers will able to "beat" any human, is not one of them. AI's not going to write better sentences than Hemingway, or be more perceptive about humans than Austen. AI can churn out an infinite number of sentences and stories, so as with the proverbial million monkeys typing, there are going to be many good ones amidst the dross. But given that you're going to have to wade through the dross to find the gems, so what?
Mar 16, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
What is the right word to describe a govt-funded, ideologically-framed document promoting a partisan policy? It's not journalism. It's not just "information." Is it really beyond the pale to call it "propaganda"? The DeSantis press release described the event it was promoting as "exposing the diversity equity and inclusion scam in higher education." That's not a neutral, journalistic description. It's an aggressively ideological description, paid for by the state. What do you call that?
Mar 6, 2023 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
The right-wing ire over Fox calling Arizona for Biden is a fascinating example of the obsession with appearance over reality. The call had no influence at all over the outcome of the election, and yet RWers were (and are) still furious with Fox. nytimes.com/2023/03/04/us/… Even if Fox had been wrong about AZ (which it wasn't), by the time it made its call polls were closed in every state but Hawaii (solidly Democratic) and Alaska (solidly Republican). So the call had no influence on whom people voted for.
Mar 4, 2023 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
Kendrick Perkins' take on Nikola Jokic is so bad that it honestly feels like he's just trolling. He's saying Jokic is "stat padding" by passing the ball to his teammates rather than shooting - making Jokic the rare NBA star to be called selfish for not shooting *more*. Jokic is leading the NBA in true shooting pct. He's leading the league in assist percentage. He's leading the NBA in every major advanced analytics category. He's averaging a triple double, while scoring 24.5 ppg. And his team is 42-19, in first place by 6 games.
Mar 2, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Very odd tweet, given that this was the place to reach "leaders and writers," but since Musk took over it's become the place to reach Catturd's followers. What Musk says was true, and was always Twitter's strongest selling point to advertisers. But if he believes that "leaders and writers" are Twitter's most valuable asset, it's baffling that he's spent so much time alienating them with penny-ante crap like the blue-check stuff.
Feb 26, 2023 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
I still don't understand this conclusion. The Cochrane review included no studies of mask mandates, and the only real studies of masks and Covid were the ones we were already familiar with (Denmark and Bangladesh). Its main conclusion was "We need much better mask studies." The authors' "Key messages" section literally begins "We are uncertain whether wearing masks or N95/P2 respirators helps to slow the spread of respiratory viruses based on the studies we assessed."
cochrane.org/CD006207/ARI_d…
Feb 22, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Star Alabama player Brandon Miller brings his teammate a gun, which the teammate's friend then uses to murder a woman. Alabama coach says Miller was just in the "wrong spot at the wrong time." The thing that's so bad about the story is that the murder happened for absolutely no reason - the guys were hitting on the woman and her boyfriend said she wasn't interested. Absurd to be so indifferent to life that you'd escalate that into murdering someone.