Monday’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
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Monday, May 11, 2026
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7 comments
About Steven L. Taylor
Steven L. Taylor is a Professor Emeritus of Political Science and former College of Arts and Sciences Dean. His main areas of expertise include parties, elections, and the institutional design of democracies. His most recent book is the co-authored
A Different Democracy: American Government in a 31-Country Perspective. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Texas and his BA from the University of California, Irvine. He has been blogging since 2003 (originally at the now defunct Poliblog).
Follow Steven on
Twitter and/or
BlueSky.
Odds and links:
NOTUS has some short perspectives from former WaPo journalists. There are several notions, but this one struck me as necessary: treat lies like obscenities.
Sylvia Wrigley on the China Eastern Airlines crash, and what the released flight recorder data indicate.
Short take on the XpaceS IPO.
A conversation about what the “Epstein Class” is, how it works, what it does.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i9hhlpKg4ZY
I just ran across a Veritasium video that talks about Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem. It then mentioned Approval Voting. It seems closely related to PR that Steven advocates. Thoughts?
@Kathy: Your link says about lies,
It gets worse. NYT is fond of a deep dive format: ‘A Clinton Foundation donor asked for a meeting with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’. Then they discuss sources and philosophize about corruption for thirty paragraphs before mentioning he didn’t get the meeting.
George Lakoff proposed the media use a “Truth Sandwich”.
Of course NYT no longer does briefly. They don’t report the news, they publish long essays about the news. But they do claim to be objective with their end of story fact checks, even though they know everyone read only the headline and the first graph or two.
I’ve quoted Toynbee here, “Civilizations die from suicide, not by murder.” I stumbled across Tim Snyder on substack, On Superpower Suicide. Fairly long, but on point throughout. I won’t attempt to excerpt. Also – depressing.
@Kathy:
Having tried and failed to rename the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America, Trump apparently now wants to call it the Gulf of Trump. What say you?
@CSK:
“Nuke the whole thing from orbit.”