ryan cooper
LightNews LightNews
banner
ryanlcooper.com
ryan cooper
@ryanlcooper.com
110K followers 1.2K following 23K posts
Senior editor at The American Prospect, cohost and producer of the @leftanchor.bsky.social podcast https://www.patreon.com/leftanchor

Newsletter: https://www.ryanlcooper.com/
Posts Replies Media Videos
ryanlcooper.com
here at the Paper of Record, when an open white supremacist leaks someone's college application in an attempt to imply he got unfair race-based special treatment, even though he was rejected, we know what to do: publish it immediately prospect.org/2025/07/09/2...
Much more interesting than the story was its source: Jordan Lasker, who got the Columbia data from a hacker. The Times initially identified him only as “Crémieux,” his Twitter handle, describing him as “an academic and an opponent of affirmative action” and even linking to his (incredibly racist) Substack. But not only had Lasker’s name already been published by The Guardian in an article about a “natalism” conference full of racists (sensing a theme here), one of his few published articles—another piece of “scientific” racism—was also so atrocious it got his co-author, Bryan Pesta, then a tenured professor at Cleveland State University, fired. The Chronicle of Higher Education reported the story back in 2022. Pesta published the article, “Global Ancestry and Cognitive Ability,” he co-wrote with Lasker in the first issue of a new journal of which he was the editor in chief. The entire issue was nothing but racist pseudoscience, but worse, it turned out that Pesta had gotten the data for his article by lying to the National Institutes of Health about what he intended to do. That got him canned, and deservedly so. There’s a reason why race “science” is on the fringes of academia: It’s complete nonsense, the province of freaks, liars, and failures. None of this was in the Times article. Either the authors and editors knew about it and chose to whitewash a racist troll, or they did no investigation whatsoever of their only source—perhaps because they were worried about being scooped by Chris Rufo. Their only concession was a stealth edit adding that Lasker “writes often about I.Q. and race.” Oh really? What, pray tell, does he write exactly?
November 13, 2025 at 7:54 PM
ryanlcooper.com
I wonder how many units you could cram into the stub end if you tore it down
November 13, 2025 at 7:01 PM
ryanlcooper.com
I kind of enjoyed this goofy ass hate mail tbh. shades of 2013 #tcot, a better time
Ryan, There is no such thing as islamaphobia. They hate each other more than they hate…you…and, me! Were you actually born a “zMohron”…or, do you only identify as one? Seriously…Ryan…what’s your reference point? Let me know, Tim PS.Did you actually vote for Kookoola Harris…and, zMohron! Kookoola didn’t even have a brain…and because of that you are a total and complete “twit-idiot”!!! PSS. The [z] is silent…you zMORON !!!
November 13, 2025 at 5:57 PM
ryanlcooper.com
I didn't even repeat the canard! clown shit, ain't got time for it
November 13, 2025 at 4:55 PM
ryanlcooper.com
apparently the contrarian take about bones here is not even true, smh. mean femur length plummeted in the 5th century acoup.blog/2022/02/11/c...
November 13, 2025 at 4:43 PM
ryanlcooper.com
really key point. polls, particularly issue polls, are a WILDLY unrealistic way to measure how people actually interact with political messaging these days
RCTs, like surveys, occur “in channel.” People are recruited to respond (usually through online solicitations), made to pay attention (with financial incentives or simply due to how testing platforms are configured), and register their preferences knowing they’re being observed. Once upon a time, when Americans were captive viewers of limited network television channels, forced to sit through commercials without even a remote control for ready escape, these experiments more closely mirrored real-world conditions. Today, however, political messages reach Americans as they are scrolling or cooking or breaking up skirmishes between their kids. Indeed, they’re mostly doing their best to avoid ads altogether. In-channel testing gauges the response to a single exposure of a message and pronounces these to be the message’s effect. But messages aren’t single-use plastics. Many don’t work until they are repeated frequently. Some are more rebuttable than others. Some could work if spoken by messengers other than those in the materials tested. Vote choice tends to be the gold standard in electoral RCTs. Treatments that produce higher numbers of respondents saying they’d vote for the Democratic candidate are considered to have bested the game. While this may seem like the obvious metric — the task come election day is to net more votes — this simplifies how one reaches that goal. You cannot mistake winning a trial heat for winning an election. Often, what you need to measure is what would make the story that favors your side seem credible, what punctures the key strength of your opponent, or what — only upon unrelenting repetition — reframes the electoral stakes to your advantage. Tellingly, when consumer juggernauts use RCTs, their most critical metric is often belief in key attributes such as trust in the brand rather than would you buy this product.
November 13, 2025 at 3:48 PM
ryanlcooper.com
maybe people grew bigger because they had more to eat because the population of Europe fell by on the order of 30-40 percent sourcebooks.fordham.edu/source/pop-i...
Take human height, which archaeologists often turn to as a biophysical indicator of general health. “We can look at things like did they have cavities in their teeth, did they have bone lesions,” Kemp explained. “Skeletal remains are a good indicator of how much exercise people were getting, how good their diet was, whether there was lots of disease.” “Societal collapse, though invariably catastrophic for elites, has often proved to be a boon for the population at large.” Facebook Twitter Email Prior to the rise of Rome, for example, average heights in regions that would subsequently fall under its yoke were increasing. As the empire expanded, those gains stalled. By the end of the Western Empire, people were eight centimeters shorter than they would have been if the preceding trends had continued. “The old trope of the muscle-bound Germanic barbarian is somewhat true. To an Italian soldier, they would have seemed very large,” Kemp said. People in the Mediterranean only started to get taller again following Rome’s decline. (In a striking parenthesis, Kemp points out that the average male height today remains two centimeters shorter than that of our Paleolithic forebears.) Population Estimates (in millions) at specified times 500-1450 AREA 500 650 1000 1340 1450 Greece/Balkans 5 3 5 6 4.5 Italy 4 2.5 5 10 7.3 Spain/Portugal 4 3.5 7 9 7 Total - South 13 9 17 25 19 France/Low countries 5 3 6 19 12 British Isles 0.5 0.5 2 5 3 Germany/Scandinavia 3.5 2 4 11.5 7.3 Total - West/Central 9 5.5 12 35.5 22.5 Slavia. 5 3 ---Russia 6 8 6 ---Poland/Lithuania 2 3 2 Hungary 0.5 0.5 1.5 2 1.5 Total -East 5.5 3.5 9.5 13 9.3
November 13, 2025 at 3:34 PM
ryanlcooper.com
in particular, escalating the popular contrarian "there was no such thing as the Dark Ages!!" take to "the collapse of the Roman Empire was Actually Good" is ridiculous
As Kemp dug into the data in more detail, his research substantiated another startling paradox. Societal collapse, though invariably catastrophic for elites, has often proved to be a boon for the population at large. Here again, Kemp found that the historiography is subject to pervasive and fallacious simplifications. In his book, he repudiates the 14th-century Tuscan scholar Petrarch, who promulgated the notion that the fall of classical Rome and Greece ushered in a “dark age” of cultural atrophy and barbarism. His was a reiteration of sentiments found in many earlier examples of “lamentation literature,” left behind on engraved tablets and sheaves of papyrus, which have depicted collapse as a Gomorran hellscape. One of Kemp’s favorites is the “Admonitions of Ipuwer,” which portrays the decline of Egypt’s Old Kingdom as a time of social breakdown, civil war and cannibalism. “But it actually spends a lot more time fretting about poor people becoming richer,” he said. In reality, Kemp contends, Petrarch’s “rise-and-fall vision of history is spectacularly wrong.” For if collapse often engulfed ancient polities “like a brushfire,” the scorched earth left behind was often surprisingly fertile. Again, osteoarcheology, the study of ancient bones, gives the lie to the idea that moments of societal disintegration always spelled misery for the population at large.
November 13, 2025 at 3:31 PM
ryanlcooper.com
amusing chart. it turns out New York City built more housing units in the 1920s than in the 1970s, 80s, 90s, 2000s, and 2010s put together www.nyc.gov/content/plan...
November 12, 2025 at 3:25 PM
ryanlcooper.com
lolllll
“Young right-wing men who gamble” is not a hugely sympathetic group of people, granted, and lord knows their continuing existence allows anyone with fairly basic reading comprehension skills to earn some easy money. (Full disclosure: I’ll walk away from Tuesday’s elections about $500 up.)
November 7, 2025 at 6:10 PM
ryanlcooper.com
a really key point here. Cuomo's attempt at gutter Islamophobic race baiting failed because Dem voter opinion on Israel-Palestine has shifted more than 70 points since 2023, and he somehow didn't notice prospect.org/2025/11/04/a...
That in turn indicates the astounding incompetence of Cuomo’s billionaire backers. For one thing, again, Cuomo was a terrible candidate—the fact that he managed to lose to a nobody state assemblyman from a 32-point head start is proof enough of that. For another, the campaign was shockingly tin-eared. He and his allies attempted to make the entire contest about Israel, constantly grilling Mamdani about why he doesn’t respect Israel enough, why he wouldn’t visit there, and all but calling him a terrorist. On the merits, this was an absurd argument. There is no reason why the mayor of New York City should be particularly concerned with Israel or any other foreign country. And while 20 or even 10 years ago such a cynical, racist smear campaign might have worked, two years of genocide has obliterated Israel’s reputation among Democrats—a recent CNN poll found that the fraction who sympathize more with Palestinians or Israelis has shifted to the former by more than 70 percentage points since October 7th. Cuomo’s ultra-Zionism doesn’t seem to be that popular among New Yorkers—indeed, one recent poll had Mamdani only slightly behind among New York Jews. It’s as if John McCain ran in 2008 loudly complaining that Barack Obama was going to make health care more affordable.
November 5, 2025 at 3:00 AM
ryanlcooper.com
or JK Galbraith in his classic The Great Crash tankona.free.fr/galbraith195...
There seems little question that in 1929, modifying a famous cliché, the economy was fundamentally unsound. This is a circumstance of first-rate importance. Many things were wrong, but five weaknesses seem to have had an especially intimate bearing on the ensuing disaster. They are: 1) The bad distribution of income. In 1929 the rich were indubitably rich. The figures are not entirely satisfactory, but it seems certain that the 5 per cent of the population with the highest incomes in that year received approximately one third of all personal income. The proportion of personal income received in the form of interest, dividends, and rent—the income, broadly speaking, of the well-to-do—was about twice as great as in the years following the Second World War. 10 This highly unequal income distribution meant that the economy was dependent on a high level of investment or a high level of luxury consumer spending or both. The rich cannot buy great quantities of bread. If they are to dispose of what they receive it must be on luxuries or by way of investment in new plants and new projects. Both investment and luxury spending are subject, inevitably, to more erratic influences and to wider fluctuations than the bread and rent outlays of the $25-a-week workman. This high-bracket spending and investment was especially susceptible, one may assume, to the crushing news from the stock market in October of 1929.
November 3, 2025 at 4:12 PM
ryanlcooper.com
as the GOAT Fed Chair Marriner Eccles wrote
As mass production has to be accompanied by mass consumption, mass consumption, in turn, implies a distribution of wealth — not of existing wealth, but of wealth as it is currently produced — to provide men with buying power equal to the amount of goods and services offered by the nations economic machinery. Instead of achieving that kind of distribution, a giant suction pump had by 1929-30 drawn into a few hands an increasing portion of currently produced wealth. This served them as capital accumulations. But by taking purchasing power out of the hands of mass consumers, the savers denied to themselves the kind of effective demand for their products that would justify a reinvestment of their capital accumulations in new plants. In consequence, as in a poker game where the chips were concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, the other fellows could stay in the game only by borrowing. When their credit ran out, the game stopped.
November 3, 2025 at 3:50 PM
ryanlcooper.com
so the point of the piece, as I've been arguing since Trump won, is that all this squabbling over positioning is largely pointless. unless you fix the information environment nobody is going to hear about it
But whatever the case, I’d advise said billionaires to start standing up some media institutions that can combat the far right’s death grip on the American information environment before funding yet another centrist think tank (which could justly be called the Center for Better Things Aren’t Possible). We’ll never get a means-tested tax credit for small-business entrepreneurs if Americans never hear about it. But if they do, they’re sure to love it.
October 29, 2025 at 5:19 PM
ryanlcooper.com
at one point he even pushed back against it himself I think out of some semi-instinctive decency, having Sam consider the side of the Easterlings
October 29, 2025 at 5:10 PM
ryanlcooper.com
it's not the rules so much (solar can be quite dangerous) it's how obnoxious and burdensome it is to comply with them. a whole bunch of complicated ass paperwork you either have to assemble yourself or pay someone $$$ to fill out. and then getting approved takes months
Required Documents for Solar Photovoltaic Systems Permitting Completed Building Permit Application and two (2) copies of the following documents: 1. Location, floor, and site plans. Site plan must show septic system location and all buried utilities. 2. Detailed System Diagram of all the system components, highlighting system grounding and bonding. 3. Basic Line Drawing that shows all the devices on the system including the solar module, DC disconnect, inverter, sub-panels, AC disconnect, main service meter, and wire sizes and connections. Specify manufacturer, model numbers, and ratings. 4. Show specific locations and labels used for compliance with NEC 690 and UL 969. 5. PV Module Label and Listing Specs. 6. Inverter Label and Listing Specs. 7. Rack Label and Listing Specs. 8. Rack Mounting Details and Calcs (Ground Mounted Systems). 9. Battery Storage Location and Venting (if applicable).
October 29, 2025 at 2:21 PM
ryanlcooper.com
lol
The producer’s words were still echoing in my mind a few weeks later when I spoke to a nineteen-year-old gooner called JustDamage. By that point, I was not only weary of Goonworld, but jaded: What was this gooner going to tell me that I didn’t already know? What large-scale scientific gooning surveys had he orchestrated lately? And indeed, the basic outline of the gooning journey that JustDamage walked me through was a familiar one: he hears the term around; stumbles into a Discord server; reorients his life around prolonged quasi-mystical masturbation; starts a side hustle in customized gooncaps and PMVs. His customers may or may not know he’s a teenager, but some would likely be pleased to learn it. When one person sent him child porn to stitch into a PMV, he decided to retire. These days, JustDamage is “still gooning avidly,” mostly to porn edited with voice-overs insisting that you should not be watching the porn you’re trying to watch. What’s new, I thought. Sweet kid, I thought. Universal conscription, I thought. Reeducation camps. We’ll make them fun for the gooners, they won’t have to suffer. I was preparing to wind things down, to thank the gooner for his time, when he began to tell me a story.
October 27, 2025 at 5:01 PM
ryanlcooper.com
we're all trying to find out who in the media is spreading all this misinformation
lorenz: Look at the difference between COVID coverage under Trump versus Biden: the media basically stopped covering COVID as a pandemic after Biden took office. It was appalling. Most people don’t know that more people died from COVID under Biden than under Trump, because Biden essentially came in and said, “COVID’s over. Everybody get back to work.” After all the moralizing from the media in the early days of COVID, under Biden everything was suddenly fine. “Actually, ignore everything that we just told you last year.” The mainstream media was, in my view, actively pushing dangerous misinformation, misleading people into believing COVID had disappeared, even though doctors treating patients warned that we were still in a raging pandemic with fewer available treatments. I think that broke a lot of people. The media should have held Biden more accountable—it’s too soft on the Democrats.
October 27, 2025 at 2:40 PM
ryanlcooper.com
lol
Why Doesn’t Anyone Trust the Media? Anatomy of a credibility crisis by Jelani Cobb, Taylor Lorenz, Jack Shafer, Max Tani
October 27, 2025 at 2:38 PM
ryanlcooper.com
Janet Mills is also underwater 55-43. simply awesome stuff
October 23, 2025 at 2:23 PM
ryanlcooper.com
Paul LePage is leading Jared Golden 49-44 lol. what is with Mainers man
October 23, 2025 at 2:22 PM
ryanlcooper.com
not too shabby. ICE here I come baby
1.5 miles in 12:23
October 22, 2025 at 1:09 PM
ryanlcooper.com
really hard to overstate how horrendous the oil industry has been for every aspect of human society--the biggest source of industrial pollution and also the biggest funder of reactionary politics
The oil magnates were the first to perceive the prize that could be extracted from the wide distribution of the motorcar. If people could be induced to travel in cars, they could be sold the fuel necessary to move them. For the first time in history, people would become dependent for their locomotion on a commercial source of energy. There would be as many customers for the oil industry as there were motorists—and since there would be as many motorists as there were families, the entire population would become the oil merchants’ customers. The dream of every capitalist was about to come true. Everyone was going to depend for their daily needs on a commodity that a single industry held as a monopoly.
October 21, 2025 at 2:37 PM
ryanlcooper.com
oops as usual Steve has actually written this up and I forgot about it (and/or thought it was my own idea) drafts.interfluidity.com/2024/03/20/a...
The behavior that drives this — valuation independent "investment" into "diversified equities" as a black-box asset class — enjoys a great deal of elite-intellectual and policy support. It is what good upstanding prosperous professionals are told they are supposed to do with their savings. Once upon a time, equity investing was understood to be a high information, potentially quite dangerous activity that a relatively small fraction of the public would engage in. Now, among prosperous professionals, failing to be long equities is a mark of laziness, stupidity, or some form of financial dissidence. Being invested in equities "blindly" — by which I mean without picking stocks or using valuation to time exposure — is what conventional, smart, politically enfranchised people do. Inevitably, a policy apparatus evolves to stabilize whatever conventional, smart, politically enfranchised people do. Post-crisis, the Obama administration openly gauged the quality of the plans it would have Tim Geithner announce by the reaction of the stock market in the days following. Trump crowed about his stock market and autographed ascending charts that he thought he could take credit for. There has long been perceived to be a "Fed put". Economists like Roger Farmer have made stabilizing an ascending equity price path ever more acceptable in policy circles
October 20, 2025 at 6:16 PM
ryanlcooper.com
cousin to @interfluidity.com's attack on saving observer.com/2010/07/the-...
Do you see how despicable you are, you savers? You put money in banks or bonds that guarantee future returns. You pay no attention to how those funds are invested, whether bankers and politicians find growth-enhancing opportunities, or distribute cash to friends, or skim fees from bad loans (which are easier to make than good loans). When you learn that these people you have failed to supervise have squandered the wealth in their care, you accept no responsibility. You demand that the state make you whole. And some of you have the nerve to blame “deadbeat borrowers” for loans your flunkies designed to be fraudulent so that they’d have patsies when their schemes came apart. Capitalism wasn’t supposed to work like this. Savers were supposed to be investors who monitored how the wealth they put aside was used to generate future wealth. They were supposed to take responsibility for their choices, however the cookie crumbled. That risk ensured that investment decisions were made with care, and that the costs of poorly chosen investments were borne first by the careless.
October 20, 2025 at 6:05 PM