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1 week ago | 
persuasion.community | Sam Kahn
My knowledge of Chinese history is really very limited, but I remember, when the concepts of the Spring and Autumn period and Warring States period were introduced in middle school, being somehow very impressed. The premise seemed to be that history folded neatly into eras, and each era had its own geopolitical conception to it.
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1 week ago | 
open.substack.com | Sam Kahn
My knowledge of Chinese history is really very limited, but I remember, when the concepts of the Spring and Autumn period and Warring States period were introduced in middle school, being somehow very impressed. The premise seemed to be that history folded neatly into eras, and each era had its own geopolitical conception to it.
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2 weeks ago | 
persuasion.community | Sam Kahn
When I worked in documentaries, what my job seemed to be, as much as anything else, was listening to war stories from cameramen. The most gung-ho of those cameramen was, at the same time I was working with him, working on a film about the U.S. military in Afghanistan. The film was made by a hotshot director and it was like “filming with a Kalashnikov,” my cameraman said. He was doing really crazy things.
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1 month ago | 
persuasion.community | Sam Kahn
Do you want analysis that speaks truth to power without fear or favor? That stands up for the values of a free society wherever they are threatened?
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1 month ago | 
unherd.com | Sam Kahn
andrew jacksonBidenDemocrat PartyDemocratsHamiltonCavingPoliticsRepublicansUS The Democratic Party has hit a nadir â perhaps its lowest nadir of my Millennial lifetime. As if Donald Trumpâs crushing re-election last year werenât enough, now comes a new book, Original Sin, by journalists Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson, on the coverup of Joe Bidenâs mental incapacity by a coterie of the 46th presidentâs family members and senior staffers.
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1 month ago | 
samkahn.substack.com | Sam Kahn
Dear Friends, At , we are running pieces on “The Best Thing You Read This Year” — including Antonio Di Benedetto’s The Suicides and Tamara Pearson’s The Eyes of the Earth. Best,SamAGAINST REPORTINGMore often than I should, I get in these running gun battles about the value of Substack as opposed to traditional media. Usually this is with BeccaRothfeld, but sometimes it’s with or . The arguments always play out in the same less-than-fully satisfying way. A skirmish breaks out for some reason.
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2 months ago | 
persuasion.community | Sam Kahn
I first came to Bishkek as a college student trying to learn Russian and returned a few years later to report on an insurrection against the president. I don’t think I ever expected to actually live in Kyrgyzstan, but… life is funny sometimes, and for the past year and a half I’ve been living in Bishkek, teaching journalism and public relations at an international university.
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2 months ago | 
compactmag.com | Sam Kahn
Gavin Newsom’s new podcast might have been the last place I would have looked for wisdom about the future of the Democratic Party. I’ve always thought of the California governor as the prince of smarm. His go-to gesture seems to always be the hearty two-handed handshake, which even his podcast’s title and intro sequence—the booming “This is Gavin Newsom,” followed by the diminuendo subheading, “And this is [insert name of guest]”—evokes.
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2 months ago | 
persuasion.community | Sam Kahn
There’s a certain zen art to dealing with the Trump era. The trick—usually—is to not spend too much time on social media, to not be too sucked in by the latest tweet or the “daily outrage,” to really only respond to something when Trump actually does it. Speaking personally, I very much try to master this art, but, even so, my heart stopped when I saw the repeated assertions by Trump and various of his acolytes that he was interested in a third term.
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Mar 26, 2025 | 
unherd.com | Sam Kahn
aiArtificial intelligenceBig techchatgptCulturediverseFutureGoogleSam AltmanUS I went cheerfully through college listening to music on old file-sharing programmes while everybody around me had switched to iTunes. While the rest of the student body scrolled the web on WiFi, I dorkily plugged in an ethernet cable anytime I wanted to go online.
