David Turnbull

“Land for peace” sounds nice, but the president of Russia isn’t fighting for land. Putin is fighting not to conquer Pokrovsk but to destroy Ukraine as a nation. He wants to show his own people that Ukraine’s democratic aspirations are hopeless. He wants to prove that a whole host of international laws and norms, including the United Nations Charter... See more

If Nike announced that they were opening a hotel, you'd have a pretty good guess about what it would be like. But if Hyatt announced that they were going to start making shoes, you would have NO IDEA WHATSOEVER what those shoes would be like. That's because Nike owns a brand and Hyatt simply owns real estate.

Reporters and columnists have ingested the taboo on criticising voters and now sound more and more like a party communication department.

This twists the morality of the situation until it goes into reverse. The voter behaviour must be blameless so the party they voted for must therefore be blameless too. Cruelty is validated by voters which means i... See more

As my colleague Charlie Warzel recently noted, the effect of this disinformation is not necessarily to deceive people, but rather to help this small subset of people stay anchored in their alternate reality.

Tim Walz says, “You don't get elected to bank political capital to get elected again. You get elected to burn that capital to improve lives.”

The Democratic coalition really is tetchy and hard to manage. I’ve watched a number of Arab-American writers who disapprove of Biden’s approach to Israel but agree that Trump’s would be worse spend the final month of the campaign driving up the salience of an issue that they know is bad for Harris and being relentlessly negative about her approach ... See more

Given the global trend, it’s really Republicans who should be hand-wringing and asking why it’s even close, and the answer is obviously that Trump is a scumbag.

The question of why all post-Covid electorates are grumpy and miserable is more interesting and hasn’t been the subject of as much work as it deserves.

Per polling out of Michigan State University, Trump voters in this cycle, at least in Michigan, are much more likely to say that the country is “changing too fast, undermining traditional values” than they were in 2016, when researchers first found a strong correlation between aversion to social change and a vote for Trump.

That dividing line is gro... See more