Andrew Varsanyi

andrewvarsanyi.com · American English

Historian, Teacher, General Nerd

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Last post: Aug 23, 2026
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Site title: Andrew Varsanyi – Historian, Teacher, General Nerd
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Articles I liked from July 1 to August 22 2026
Aug 23, 2026 · original
Articles I liked from July 1 to August 22 2026 Each week I share the articles and essays that I found most interesting, annoying, challenging, or important. Hope that you check them out too. Republicans Are About to Repeat the Democrats’ Biggest Mistake by Gregory Conti, Aaron Sibarium in New York Times – Read here Democrats Pull Back From the Edge of Disaster. Again. by E.J. Dionne Jr. in New York Times – Read here Normativity from the Standpoint of Its Victims by Lorna Finlayson in Boston Review – Read here ‘I would be ashamed to have written any part of this’: Odyssey translator Emily Wilson attacks Nolan blockbuster by Andrew Pulver in the Guardian – Read here The Human-Origin Story Is Being Radically Revised by Ross Andersen in The Atlantic – Read here Who Are the Good Guys and the Bad Guys? I’m No Longer Sure. by Ross Douthat in New York Times – Read here The Catholic Church’s New
Neoliberalism has eaten everything except the bet.
Jun 30, 2026 · original
Neoliberalism has eaten everything except the bet. The current American economic landscape is defined by a pervasive, systemic shift toward speculation. This shift manifests in two seemingly disparate ways: the gambling scandals involving college athletes and the astronomical, often detached valuations of private aerospace firms like SpaceX. Both cases illustrate a core rot in the neoliberal order. The system no longer prioritizes the production of tangible value or the stability of the middle class. Instead, it rewards the ability to move numbers on a screen. The Texas Tech quarterback gambling controversy and the SpaceX valuation are not isolated incidents; they are symptoms of a broken capitalist system taken over by speculation in all forms. The recent gambling controversy involving Texas Tech quarterback Brendan Sorsby provides a clear look at the micro-scale of this pathology. When
Articles I liked from June 9 to June 30 2026
Jun 30, 2026 · original
Articles I liked from June 9 to June 30 2026 Each week I share the articles and essays that I found most interesting, annoying, challenging, or important. Hope that you check them out too. AI: A God we can’t trust by George Scialabba in UnHerd – Read here Unnerving Inflation and Remembering Alan Greenspan by Douglas Porter in Policy Magazine – Read here Stop Talking About Mental Health by Ashley Frawley in compactmag.com – Read here The Middle East’s Great Divergence Is Underway by Rabah Arezki & Tarik M. Yousef & Daniel Byman & Steven A. Cook & C. Raja Mohan & Hal Brands & Derek Grossman & Decker Eveleth & Suzanne Nossel & Stephen M. Walt in Foreign Policy – Read here The booming U.S. is for builders and entrepreneurs. Canada is the opposite by Thomas S. Caldwell in Globe and Mail – Read here Trump was popular in the UAE. Then he went to war. by Rachel Chason in The Wall Street Journal
Articles I liked from May 17 to June 8, 2026
Jun 9, 2026 · original
Articles I liked from May 17 to June 8, 2026 Each week I share the articles and essays that I found most interesting, annoying, challenging, or important. Hope that you check them out too. The Dead Economy Theory by Owen McGrann in The Palimpsest – Read here Mark Carney’s Economic Diplomacy and the Battle for Canada by Lisa Van Dusen in Policy Magazine – Read here Tony Blair’s intervention could spark a Labour civil war by George Monaghan in New Statesman – Read here A Left case for the Great Books by Valerie Stivers in UnHerd – Read here The bond market is telling us the free lunch is over by Neil Irwin in Axios – Read here Andy Burnham is a Starmerite by Rachel Cunliffe in New Statesman – Read here The old world of tech is dying and the new cannot be born by Baldur Bjarnason in baldurbjarnason.com – Read here The deregulation agenda is putting Canadians at risk by Bruce Campbell in Can
Maybe this will finally do it… Breaking the neoliberal fever
May 17, 2026 · original
It seems everywhere I look it’s AI money and AI “progress” and not-so-clever way to pump up investment in AI. It seems the push to get ordinary retail investors, that is the retirement savings of ordinary middle-class folks, into expected IPOs for OpenAI and others is going ahead full-bore. All of this at the same time the financial markets, the American ones at least, are completely decoupled from reality. Indeed, the war in Iran, which is effectively still going from and oil supply perspective, has barely stunted the ever-expanding bubble in the stock market caused by AI investment and the promise of a worker-less future. I mean that is what the AI promise really is for investors. It’s a hoped for ideal where ideas can be made into products, whether virtual or physical, without the need for workers—that is the cost of paying workers—to make them. And workers know it. Everywhere you loo
Articles I liked from April 21 to May 16, 2026
May 16, 2026 · original
Articles I liked from 2026-04-21 to 2026-05-17 Each week I share the articles and essays that I found most interesting, annoying, challenging, or important. Hope that you check them out too. Why plutocrats love Trump’s war The base bleeds; the top feasts by Yanis Varoufakis in UnHerd – Read here Microsoft is trying to stay out of Musk v. Altman by Elizabeth Lopatto in The Verge – Read here Meet the Trump Voters Who Believe He Staged the WHCD Shooting by Will Sommer in The Bulwark – Read here Hollow Earth Myths and Nazi UFOs on TikTok are Bringing White Supremacism into the Mainstream by Christopher David in The Conversation – Read here RIP social media. What comes next is messy. by Jennifer Ouellette in Ars Technica – Read here How A.I. Killed Student Writing (and Revived It) by Dana Goldstein, Lauren Lancaster in New York Times – Read here How a weaker dollar is quietly making life more
The economy has been taken hostage.
May 1, 2026 · original
I have found myself taking way too long to write posts, so I am editing less and going faster. Hopefully, quality and coherence don’t suffer too much. I have been fortunate enough to have worked in tech earlier in my career. Most of the projects and companies I worked in weren’t successful. We often built cool software that we were convinced would really help the businesses and customers we were focused on serving, but the problem was that the customers often didn’t sign up and buy what we were selling. Sometimes it was marketing and sometimes it was because we just hadn’t done enough work understanding our target customers. This goes back to a tried-and-tested rule of business failure that Silicon Valley thinks they coined, but didn’t: “if you build it, they will come.” If you don’t have a clear set of customers who are demanding your product or service, you are spending time and capita
Articles I liked from March 29 to April 20, 2026
Apr 20, 2026 · original
Articles I liked from March 29 to April 20, 2026 Each week I share the articles and essays that I found most interesting, annoying, challenging, or important. Hope that you check them out too. Back to the Dumb Phone by Magazine Non Grata in Magazine Non Grata – Read here Yale Report Finds Colleges Deserve Blame for Higher Education’s Problems by Alan Blinder in New York Times – Read here Watching The Pitt at the End of an Era for HBO by newrepublic.com in The New Republic – Read here How red states are killing college by Richard A. Greenwald in UnHerd – Read here “TACO” Trump Is a Dangerous Mirage by Jason Linkins in The New Republic – Read here The enduring influence of Al Sharpton by Jason Beeferman in POLITICO – Read here Anthropic says its latest AI model is too powerful for public release and that it broke containment during testing by Brent D. Griffiths in Business Insider – Read h
The Best Vibe Coders Will Be History Majors
Apr 5, 2026 · original
Vibe Coding and the Humanities: I Told You So A while back, I wrote a post arguing that the AI-pocalypse everyone keeps predicting isn’t going to destroy the humanities — it might actually save them. I called it “The Coming Humanities Gap.” The core argument was simple: AI needs good prompts more than it needs anything else, and the people best positioned to write those prompts are the ones trained to read carefully, think critically, and write clearly. I thought I was right then. The rise of vibe coding is starting to prove it. For those who haven’t encountered the term yet: vibe coding is the practice of building software through natural language. Instead of writing syntax, you describe what you want — in plain English, with as much specificity and detail as you can muster — and an AI model translates those instructions into working code. The quality of what these models produce has im
Articles I liked from February 22 to March 29, 2026
Mar 29, 2026 · original
This week – Articles from 2026-02-24 to 2026-03-29 Each week I share the articles and essays that I found most interesting, annoying, challenging, or important. Hope that you check them out too. Analysis: A new oil shock is building. The next few weeks of war will be decisive for the economy. by Matt Peterson in CNBC – Read here NDP says goodbye to the past, ponders what the future holds by cbc.ca in CBC – Read here The End of the Carter Doctrine by theamericanconservative.com in The American Conservative – Read here Will Mark Carney Make Canada the Sane World Order Superpower? by Lisa Van Dusen in Policy Magazine – Read here The U.K. is just so screwed. The only way out is big change. Finding a way to tax wealth is the way, as always the American Conservative fails to acknowledge that the situation was CAUSED by the very thing they prescribe. The UK’s Fiscal Apocalypse by theamericancon

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