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Drop Dead City

https://coreyrobin.com/2025/04/26/drop-dead-city/

Published: April 27, 2025 02:53

My wife and I saw “Drop Dead City” tonight at the IFC in Manhattan. It’s a riveting documentary about the New York City Fiscal Crisis of 1975. I know that statement sounds like a parody of a lecture in a poli sci class, but it happens to be true. The…

Off to Wisconsin

https://coreyrobin.com/2025/04/23/off-to-wisconsin/

Published: April 23, 2025 21:05

If you’re in Madison, Wisconsin tomorrow (April 24), I’ll be delivering the Phi Beta Kappa Lecture at the University of Wisconsin, at 5 pm, on “Clarence Thomas’s Radical Race Politics and the Future of the Supreme Court.” It will be at the Elvehjem…

Department of Perversity

https://coreyrobin.com/2025/04/21/department-of-perversity/

Published: April 21, 2025 20:17

In The Rhetoric of Reaction, Albert Hirschman argues that reactionaries make three kinds of claims. One of those claims Hirschman calls the “perversity” thesis. Arguing from perversity, the reactionary claims that whatever it is that progressives are…

Where did the Framers go wrong?

https://coreyrobin.com/2025/04/17/where-did-the-framers-go-wrong/

Published: April 18, 2025 00:41

One of the continuing puzzles I come back to is the separation of powers: Where did the Framers go wrong? Political scientists often claim that it is norms that undergird the Constitution, but this is not at all the view of the Framers. If anything, the…

The very right-wing judge taking on Trump

https://coreyrobin.com/2025/04/17/the-very-right-wing-judge-taking-on-trump/

Published: April 17, 2025 21:33

The 4th Circuit Court of Appeals just issued a blistering attack on Trump’s decision not to do anything about Abrego Garcia, who’s stuck in a hellhole in El Salvador that Trump sent him to. This is not why this decision is interesting, but listen to the…

It’s not what is new, but what is old, that’s so depressing in the current moment

https://coreyrobin.com/2025/04/17/its-not-what-is-new-but-what-is-old-thats-so-depressing-in-the-current-moment/

Published: April 17, 2025 19:46

One of the elements of the current moment that has made me most depressed is not its novelty but its familiarity, its recursion to a kind of politics I thought we were moving past. For many of us on the left—and I’m being ecumenical in my usage here,…

On Teaching Adam Smith in Ohio

https://coreyrobin.com/2025/04/16/on-teaching-adam-smith-in-ohio/

Published: April 17, 2025 02:58

Last month, the Republican-controlled Ohio state legislature passed a bill requiring all institutions of higher education to institute a mandatory course in “American civic literacy.” The bill specifies that this course: I can’t tell if the Republicans are…

Yale faculty defend academic freedom—sort of

https://coreyrobin.com/2025/04/15/yale-faculty-defend-academic-freedom-sort-of/

Published: April 15, 2025 16:51

According to the Yale Daily News, nearly 900 faculty at Yale have signed a letter calling on the president and provost to protect academic freedom at Yale. It’s a strong letter, organized by the faculty senate and a local chapter of the AAUP, but I…

To prove a strike

https://coreyrobin.com/2025/04/14/to-prove-a-strike/

Published: April 15, 2025 00:33

There’s a moment in chapter 12 of Capital where Marx describes a critical phase of glassmaking in a manufacturing workshop. Five workers gather at “the hole” of the furnace, each focused on an individual task that, taken together, will produce a bottle.…

What does Chad Gadya mean this Passover?

https://coreyrobin.com/2025/04/13/what-does-chad-gadya-mean-this-passover/

Published: April 13, 2025 17:11

At Passover, we sing Chad Gadya, a silly but spooky song that children at the seder love. It starts with a verse about a father buying a goat for two zuzim. As a kid, I loved thinking about those two zuzim, which, for some reason, I thought was the…