House passes a bill that will force the sale of TikTok within a year. Given how this Ukraine bill is being managed, seems very likely to be enacted as law.

A lot can change in 15 months!

Joe Biden trails Donald Trump in head-to-head polls. His approval rating is very low.

Biden pitches this election as an existential contest between democracy and autocracy. But the Dems have no Plan B. Our cover story this week.
economist.com/briefing/2024/…

BREAKING: The Colorado Supreme Court holds that Trump is disqualified from holding the presidency. courts.state.co.us/userfiles/file…

Every day I am thankful that I get to work with James Bennet. But I only get to do that because of a sad and incorrect decision the New York Times made in throwing him over in 2020. His account of what happened and why is essential reading.

economist.com/1843/2023/12/1…

Penn’s president has now resigned

Those math scores.
Brutal.

'The 2022 math score was not only lower than it was in 2012 but it was 'among the lowest ever measured by PISA in mathematics' for the U.S.'

Via Axios - U.S. students' math scores plunge in global education assessment axios.com/2023/12/05/us-…

Interesting story by Lydia DePillis. The age splits here are wild

In this week's Drum Tower podcast, Alice Su 蘇奕安 and I report on a Chinese TV series imagining long talks between Karl Marx and Confucius. We look past the strange sets and clunky dialogue, and explain what party ideologues are up to economist.com/podcasts/2023/…

Working-class voters of all ethnicities have shifted markedly towards the Republican Party. Two new books try to make sense of this realignment--from the perspective of the left and the right.
economist.com/culture/2023/1…

New Bloomberg / Morning Consult poll finds Biden behind in all swing states except Michigan, where he would be tied. In line with the NYT / Siena results published over the weekend:

Excellent chart from Politico. Abortion is a winning issue for Democrats even in deeply hostile territory for the presidential election, as we saw this week.
politico.com/news/2023/11/0…

How much aid is actually going into Gaza?

'The shipments work out to just 76 grams of food and 29ml of water per person a day.'
economist.com/middle-east-an…

Looks like Beshear would have won 2 of KY’s 6 Congressional districts.

He crushed the entirely Jefferson Co KY-03 and still won KY-06 by more than he lost anywhere else. Only lost the VERY Republican KY-01 by 12 pts.