NEW STUDY: A bold cash transfer experiment in Flint, Michigan is showing extraordinary results for babies’ health.

Giving every pregnant woman $1,500 + $500/mo after birth cut preterm births & NICU stays, saving more in healthcare costs than the program spent! In 2024, 'Rx Kids' began giving every expectant mother unconditional cash during pregnancy & infancy. No means testing, truly universal.

Before Rx Kids, Flint had some of the highest risks in the state:
▪️ 15% of births were preterm
▪️ 16% were low birthweight

Devastating new investigation by Dutch newspaper De Volkskrant: 15 international doctors report at least 114 Palestinian children with single gunshot wounds to head/chest—injuries forensic experts say are consistent with aimed fire.

(Photo: Mira, 4 years old) Two independent forensic pathologists, asked to review images and X-rays, said the injuries were consistent with bullets (not shrapnel) and likely distance shots to head/neck with military ammunition.

The biggest problem in the world isn’t climate change, future pandemics, or democratic collapse.

It’s that far too many of our most brilliant minds are working on *everything but* those problems. 🧵 Millions of talented people end up in careers that don’t make the world better. Some even make it worse.

96 private jets full of corrupt elites and celebs flying into Venice, a city destroyed by tourism, to celebrate the wedding of the world’s most shameless tax dodger: Jeff Bezos.

Well, it's the perfect anecdote for future historians writing about this Second Gilded Age --> 🧵 The location is very fitting. The fall of the Republic of Venice is one of history’s most telling examples of how great civilizations can rot from within—not through external conquest, but through elite decadence and corruption.

Yes, this is fascism.

For years, historians and experts were cautious about using the f-word to describe today's events. But that hesitation is gone now. 🧵 This thread is a summary of this brilliant piece by my former colleague Rosan Smits. It went viral in the Netherlands—and you can read the English translation now -->
decorrespondent.nl/16177/this-is-…

How to stop authoritarian takeovers, 6 simple lessons from history:

1. Build a broad pro-democracy coalition. No purity politics. Learn to work with people who annoy you. You can go back to dunking on them after democracy is safe. 2. Draft a positive, optimistic agenda. So not just: ‘our institutions must hold!’ Successful movements framed democracy as freedom, dignity, equality.

A new analysis of that “One Big Beautiful Bill”: we knew this would happen, but seeing the numbers like out like this...

The con is just so blatant, so obvious, it almost feels like parody. In 2026, the richest 1% would receive $138 billion in tax cuts.

That’s more than the entire bottom 60% of Americans combined — who would receive just $92 billion.

itep.org/house-tax-plan…

A U.S. government plan is being enacted right now to surveil, silence, and deport people who speak out for Palestinian rights.

It’s called Project Esther — and it makes “cancel culture” look like child’s play.

Free speech defenders, where are you? 🧵 Project Esther is the Heritage Foundation’s plan to destroy the pro-Palestinian movement in the U.S.

The same group behind Project 2025 — the authoritarian wishlist for Trump’s second term — is now taking a victory lap.

Because the crackdown has already begun.

Incredibly powerful investigation in Dutch newspaper NRC: Seven of the world’s leading genocide scholars — including renowned Holocaust experts — describe Israel’s actions in Gaza as genocidal.

And according to them, nearly all of their peers agree. These are not activists. They include Holocaust scholars and the heads of major genocide research centers. Scholars from Israel, the U.S., the U.K., Australia and the Netherlands.

And they are not divided. Without exception, they describe Israel’s actions as “genocidal.”

We need wealth redistribution. And we also need talent redistribution.

In fact, the two are intimately connected.

Research by three top economists: higher taxes (for the rich) would get more people to do work that’s actually useful. Since the 1970s, more and more Ivy League graduates have been going into finance, consultancy and corporate law, instead of... preventing the next pandemic, saving democracy, abolishing factory farming etc. etc.

I’m coming to Harvard University on April 29 with an unfiltered message 😄

Every year, thousands of teenagers write passionate application essays about the global problems they aspire to solve—hunger, poverty, pandemics, you name it.

But a few years later... ... nearly half work for corporations like McKinsey, Goldman Sachs, or Kirkland & Ellis.

My friend @s_vanteutem, Oxford-graduate, calls it the ‘Bermuda Triangle of Talent’: consultancy, finance, and corporate law – a black hole that devours many promising young minds.

No, you're not fine just the way you are.

The first excerpt from my new book MORAL AMBITION is published today in The Guardian!

Of all the things we waste in this throwaway world, the greatest is wasted talent. I wrote Moral Ambition for the millions of talented people stuck in not-very-impactful jobs.

For the dreamers who’ve settled. For the idealists who gave up. For those who want to make their one life count.

You’ve only got about 2,000 workweeks in your career. How you spend that time is one of the most important moral decisions of your life. You can spend those hours making people click ads, writing reports nobody reads, or managing people who don’t need managing.

Or… you can do something that really matters.

That’s the core idea of Moral Ambition: using your talent to take on the biggest challenges of our time—climate change, corruption, inequality, future pandemics. To make the world a wildly better place.
Most of us fall into one of three categories:

1) Not that ambitious, not that idealistic

2) Ambitious, but not idealistic

3) Idealistic, but not ambitious

What we need is a fourth kind of person.

It’s that time of year again—the World Economic Forum in Davos kicks off today. Once again, global elites will gather to discuss everything, except their own tax avoidance and evasion.

🧵 Thread --> 2019 was the one and only time I attended the conference. For some reason, they never invited me back.

Was it something I said…? 🤔 /2

How Americans responded in 1955 when the invention of the polio vaccine was announced.
(From my forthcoming book)

Oh and this is what happened next:

When Trump won in 2016, we devoted countless hours to analyzing the chasm between our values and those of vast swathes of America. If only we'd 'listen' and feel 'empathy' for Trump voters, we might find a path to heal the world.

Can we please not do that again?
🧵


Can we please look in the mirror instead?

Because here’s the thing: playtime is over. Autocracy and fascism (yes, that’s what it’s called) are on the rise around the world. This is not a Disney movie. These are f*cking serious times. /2

🥁🥁🥁 ... and here it is!! After three years of work, my new book is now available for pre-order! I’m so, so excited about it. Because this time it's not just a book, but also a movement we’re launching – and everyone is invited to join. Moral ambition is the combination of two things: the idealism of an activist and the ambition of an entrepreneur. It’s about devoting your career to the greatest challenges of our time, and making the world a wildly better place.

--> rutgerbregman.com/books/moral-am…

Powerful piece, with some uncomfortable observations.

'... proponents of income redistribution were less likely to give blood. “If everyone in the population gave at the same rate as government aid advocates, the supply would drop by about 30 percent."'

A short 🧵-->

/1vox.com/culture/368201… During the 2010s, many progressives and leftists came to believe that improving the world does *not* start with the individual. Instead, we should strive for ‘systemic change’. /2

I've got some big news to share today! 1) I’m moving to New York City 🇺🇲 2) We’re looking for a CEO for The School for Moral Ambition 🚀 /1 For those who don’t know me: I’ve spent ten years in what I like to call the ‘awareness-business’: writing articles and books, giving talks and sending lots of tweets about the many problems in this world. /2

People who follow the news are more likely to agree with statements such as ‘Most people care only about themselves.’ They more often believe that we as individuals are helpless to better the world. They are more likely to be stressed and depressed. /1 First to open up this field of research, back in the 1990s, was George Gerbner (1919–2005). He also coined a term to describe the phenomenon he found: 'mean world syndrome' (), whose clinical symptoms are cynicism, misanthropy and pessimism. /2lnkd.in/eMMxzWy5

For the first time in history, billionaires have a lower effective tax rate than working-class Americans. It’s time to tax those billionaires. And no, that’s not communism, that’s common sense. Check out the plummeting tax rates of the super rich in the US (from this great piece by @gabriel_zucman: ). It's no different for billionaires in other countries. nytimes.com/interactive/20…

Some disasters don't make the news, because they happen every single day. We've become accustomed to these catastrophes, even though they're often (much) worse than even the worst news on the front pages.

Case in point: the tobacco industry. /1 Imagine reading the following news item: 'Jumbo Jet crashes on runway, no survivors'. And imagine that half an hour later the same news item appears - 'Another Boeing 747 crashes, again no survivors' - and thirty minutes later again. /2