Henry Farrell
LightNews LightNews
banner
himself.bsky.social
Henry Farrell
@himself.bsky.social
35K followers 600 following 5.4K posts
Professor of democracy and international affairs. http://www.henryfarrell.net and newsletter at http://www.programmablemutter.com. Underground Empire: How America Weaponized the World Economy (Holt, Penguin). https://www.publishersweekly.com/9781250840554.
Posts Replies Media Videos
himself.bsky.social
Playing around with a notion of Cosma's regarding LLMs and The Singer of Tales, it is notable that GPT5 still has no grasp of meter, while Claude Opus not only groks iambic pentameter, but produces some genuinely striking lines. (prompt: Schelling's deterrence theory in sonnet+iambics)
November 9, 2025 at 5:56 PM
himself.bsky.social
November 4, 2025 at 12:49 PM
himself.bsky.social
November 3, 2025 at 4:37 PM
himself.bsky.social
Took this a few nights ago on my phone
A view of the White House at night with the Washington Monument in the background, and an American flag partly obscured by a mechanical digger.
November 1, 2025 at 2:57 PM
himself.bsky.social
ec.europa.eu/commission/p... #WeaponizedInterdependence, as they say, it is happening.
This sense of realism and urgency is also driven by an underlying and fundamental reshaping of the world economy. We are in the middle of a systemic shift in how countries work with each other – and against each other. Every day, we see how the tools of traditional statecraft are being used to weaponize interdependencies and leverage alliances. To create chokeholds on countries and industries. To exert control and impose coercion on others.
October 25, 2025 at 12:51 PM
himself.bsky.social
www.bloomberg.com/opinion/news...
Do … you … feel comfortable with Elon Musk getting a trillion dollars to build a robot army? Like, what sort of checks should there be on the world’s richest man building a robot army? I appreciate his concession that it should be possible to fire him if he goes insane, but. But. I submit to you that if you hop on a call with investors to say “hey guys just to interject here, you need to give me a trillion dollars to build a robot army that I can command unless I go insane,” some people might … think … you know what, never mind, it’s great, robot army. Robot army! I feel like the previous richest people in the world have had plans for their wealth along the lines of “buy yachts” or “endow philanthropies.” And many, many 10-year-old boys have had the thought “if I was the richest person in the world of course I would build a robot army.” But the motive and the opportunity have never coincided until now.
October 23, 2025 at 6:39 PM
himself.bsky.social
all in all i'd prefer not to know.
October 20, 2025 at 2:09 PM
himself.bsky.social
Nice to see an Irish flag in the middle of all of it.
October 18, 2025 at 6:59 PM
himself.bsky.social
October 18, 2025 at 5:32 PM
himself.bsky.social
October 18, 2025 at 5:02 PM
himself.bsky.social
DC Metro surprisingly crowded for some reason
October 18, 2025 at 4:07 PM
himself.bsky.social
Silicon Valley is speedrunning Bioshock.
www.bloomberg.com/news/feature...
a huge statue of Prometheus, projected for Alcatraz
October 18, 2025 at 3:12 PM
himself.bsky.social
Apropos of not much, this Steven Pinker story is much less well known than it deserves to be. www.vulture.com/2013/11/dani...
October 17, 2025 at 3:53 PM
himself.bsky.social
from the DC show
October 5, 2025 at 3:01 AM
himself.bsky.social
noted without comment
October 4, 2025 at 5:47 PM
himself.bsky.social
so it turns out unsurprisingly that some 'whatever it takes' statements are more credible than others www.ft.com/content/6333...
October 1, 2025 at 10:27 PM
himself.bsky.social
Spotted in DC a couple of evenings ago. Tesla's brand is become the bougie version of WeBuyUglyHouses.com
September 30, 2025 at 12:20 PM
himself.bsky.social
will they have legs?
September 30, 2025 at 12:27 AM
himself.bsky.social
September 29, 2025 at 3:22 AM
himself.bsky.social
Here I don't agree. I see Ezra as making a version of Adam Przeworski's point here. We need a different approach to growing the coalition than the one we have, which is losing ground not gaining it. If folks don't like Ezra's proposed approach they should say/show what they think would be better.
September 29, 2025 at 3:11 AM
himself.bsky.social
September 29, 2025 at 2:58 AM
himself.bsky.social
This ain't no party
September 29, 2025 at 2:07 AM
himself.bsky.social
I've already been blocked by one mutual follow ( @moiradonegan.bsky.social ) Here's what I said to her (since it is now otherwise inaccessible), which I'm leaving as my general statement of what I think, and not engaging further for a while.
September 28, 2025 at 2:40 PM
himself.bsky.social
How it started. How it's going. www.nytimes.com/2025/09/26/b...
September 26, 2025 at 7:37 PM
himself.bsky.social
From The Wealth of Nations one learns that the interest of each is, in the end, the good of all; if one observed President Robbins one saw that the good of all is, in the beginning, the interest of each. We have read, in the Gospels, that the children of darkness are wiser in their generation than the children of light; but both, when they choose between God and the world, are stupider than the men who know that we do not need to choose. President Robbins had no complaints about this Paradise, the world. The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil is the Tree of Life, he knew; and President Robbins lay sleeping in its branches, his parted lips smelling pleasantly of apples. About anything, anything at all, Dwight Robbins believed what Reason and Virtue and Tolerance and a Comprehensive Organic Synthesis of Values would have him believe. And about anything, anything at all, he believed what it was expedient for the President of Benton College to believe. You looked at the two beliefs and lo! the two were one. (Do you remember, as a child without much time, turning to the back of the arithmetic book, getting the answer to a problem, and then writing down the summary hypothetical operations by which the answer had been, so to speak, arrived at? It is the only method of problem-solving that always gives correct answers—that gives, even, the typographical errors in the back of the book.) President Robbins was so well adjusted to his environment that sometimes you could not tell which was the environment and which was President Robbins.
September 23, 2025 at 5:18 PM