Apparently, it's national cat day. Here's Willow and Nova, stealing my chair just seconds after I made the mistake of getting up.

An early memory of mine is asking my parents to explain the (utterly deranged) Bircher political messages on this sign as a kid. It gives me a small amount of pleasure to learn it is now owned by the Confederated Tribes of the Chehalis reservation.

4) But I also worry/wonder (3) reflects a lack of imagination on my part
5) If it has any chance of working we'd need to demonstrate contempt and a willingness to attack/punish corruption on our own side, or in other words the opposite of whatever Jeffries is doing here.

I don't know what to make of the degree to which the fangraphs model is so bullish on the Mariners. Beyond the WS question, 60/40 to win the division when the H2H games are in Houston?

Investors buying homes isn't bad per se (bad on the margin for home buyers, but good on the margin for renters, who count too even though the NIMBYs don't think they should), but if you don't like it you should not engage in the behavior that motivates this investment strategy.

"Zoning reform, but with poison pills to ensure the new capacity won't be used"

At the insistence of reviewer #2 I am reading Hirschman's Rhetoric of Reaction. This strikes me as an underappreciated and important sociological observation about the practice of social science.

Chilling after a long day of ineffectual bug-hunting.

The larger these kittens get, the more troublesome and dangerous their habit of using my lap as their primary fight venue is become.

View of my lap. Two weeks with these girls and this is their snuggliest day so far. They've been doing 5-10 minute lap sits, but this is their first time settling in for a nice long nap.

Action shot from the epic kitten battle unfolding in my lap.

Beau (2008-2025). He was an incredibly demanding cat, which makes his absence more acutely felt. Who's going to stomp all over my keyboard and head-butt me while I'm trying to write now?

I walked by this bench nearly every day in grad school and many times after and I somehow never noticed this until now. (Outside the economics dept building; Tiebout taught at UW)

This could easily be dismissed as a desperate attempt to find a silver lining, but I do wonder if cities shifting R at higher rates than the general electorate might make aspiring presidential candidates inclined to take them for granted a little less than usual.

In addition to this book I also have in mind Alex Gourevitch on late 19th c labor republicanism and @prorogers.bsky.social on black republicanism here.

Today's mail. I've been looking forward to this one for a while, congrats @brunoleipold.bsky.social!

It's curious that "Republicanism vanished in the 19th century" ever became conventional wisdom in the first place, but it has produced some excellent scholarship debunking it.