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1 week 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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2 weeks 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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3 weeks 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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1 month 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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1 month 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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2 months ago | 
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.
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2 months ago | 
persuasion.community | Sam Kahn
Recently, like some sort of half-drunk, half-mad amnesiac historian, I’ve taken to asking any interlocutor I can find—family, colleagues, whomever—if they can think of any historical parallels to what the two-man wrecking crew of Trump and Musk is doing. The usual answer is that nobody can come up with anything. A great deal of what’s going on is brand new.
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Feb 17, 2025 | 
persuasion.community | Sam Kahn
I’m confused. There was to be a major trade war with Mexico and Canada. Then the next day there wasn’t. The United States was to put “America First” and stay out of the world—except for maybe conquering Greenland... or the Canal Zone... or turning Gaza into the Riviera. There’s not much point in looking for logic here because there is none. Trump is doing whatever seems politically opportune at the moment, or maybe just amusing himself, and ideological consistency is a long way from his world view.
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Jan 31, 2025 | 
persuasion.community | Sam Kahn
From as far back as I can remember, my plan had been to be a kind of low-intensity alcoholic. I hoped that it wouldn’t make me beat my family or wet myself at work, and that it wouldn’t lead to organ failure in the end—always the question, isn’t it?—but it seemed a gamble worth taking. The social life of the West is built almost entirely around the copious consumption of alcohol, with its professional life closely adjacent to that.
