On the record · Updated October 1, 2026
62 things Matthew Yglesias said, verbatim, from July 24, 2026 to October 1, 2026, each linked to where it ran. Grouped by the story each one belongs to.
More on the record
Posted it themselves
“The other thing is that I think Israelis (and American Jews) tend to interpret this disproportionate interest as anti-semitic when the more obvious interpretation is that there is widespread religious interest in the Holy Land that predates the State of Israel by 1,000 years.”
Posted it themselves
“Islamist militias are vibecoding missile guidance systems”
Posted it themselves
“Defending American democracy by getting Trump to do this insanely unpopular war”
Posted it themselves
“I wrote after the election that it was hard to know what Trump would do in office but that early staffing pointed toward war with Iran as one potential area of overreach. https:// slowboring.com/p/how-donald-t rump-could-succeed …”[post continues]
Posted it themselves
“I did a student exchange thing in Nizhny Novgorod and have to say this particular city is way above the world average in bleakness — during the Soviet era Sakharov and some other dissidents were forced to live there as punishment.”
on Nizhny Novgorod's bleakness and its history as a place of Soviet exile for dissidents
Posted it themselves
“I feel like fear of nuclear war and superbugs continues to be extremely valid. We fixed the ozone hole and Y2K because people raised the concern!”
on fears of nuclear war and superbugs as valid concerns humanity has addressed before
Posted it themselves
“Offsetting the damage done to the world economy by Trump’s Iran war with a diesel export ban that introduces new distortions is going to end up backfiring.”
Posted it themselves
“The country is at least a little bit an "economic zone"”
Posted it themselves
“J-shaped economy? Income grew fastest for the top 1%, bottom 20% was second, 21-99th percentiles were weaker.”
Posted it themselves
“Yeah, I think this is a case where the debunking *was* true ten years ago but no longer is — labor share has fallen less than the most superficial read would say but it has really fallen.”
Posted it themselves
“Pre-Trump, the pattern was that you get better economic performance under Democrats largely because Republicans have a bad habit of generating energy crises through bad foreign policy. Some things haven’t changed! https:// slowboring.com/p/republican-w ar-mongering-is-their …”
Posted it themselves
“It’s really very impressive what they’ve achieved in Baltimore and there’s a decent chance it will spark an upward spiral of investment in the city.”
on Baltimore's economic prospects following recent achievements
Posted it themselves
“It seems like there is a good permitting bill that both the Trump administration and Sen Whitehouse (!) have agreed to but it’s unclear if it will actually come up for a vote for reasons that are unclear and mostly involve various parties assuring me it’s someone else’s fault.”
Posted it themselves
“The ironclad Trump-Vance commitment is that your job will be taken by a robot whose owner pays no taxes.”
on automation replacing jobs and tax policy under Trump and Vance
Posted it themselves
“You look at the ROAD to Housing — the biggest legislative achievement of her career — and there’s no “villain,” it’s just bipartisan compromise around a set of mostly good ideas that will make most people better off.”
Posted it themselves
“Understanding the fiscal impact of immigration is important but I always thought this was one of Friedman’s weirder lines … you can make the immigrants ineligible for benefits and then the taxes they pay turn them into net contributors.”
Posted it themselves
“Now Krugman in his restrictionist days used to say that the presence of large numbers of immigrants undermined political support for the welfare state, but that doesn’t seem like something that would bother Friedman.”
Posted it themselves
“Thanks to cricketgate, I looked it up and Planned Parenthood is refusing to endorse Mary Peltola against an incumbent senator who wants to ban abortion. I won’t use any colorful language to describe the decision-making here but it’s not good.”
Posted it themselves
“One thing I think people are getting wrong about the NHJ story is overestimating the actual quality of instruction — as opposed to selection effects + parental supplementation — in the “good” schools families clamor to move to.”
Posted it themselves
“Well my dad didn't need any student loans to drop out of high school and sell a novel.”
Posted it themselves
“There is just a ton of institutional resistance in ed schools and teacher training programs to telling teachers they should give kids explicit instruction. We’re rolling the bad ideas back on phonics but they’ve moved on to math and it’s grim.”
Posted it themselves
“This is a paper that truly changed my son’s life. Parents worry way too much about totally superficial indicators of school quality.”
Posted it themselves
“I wrote recently about how I think you should understand Mayor Scott’s implementation of focused deterrence, why it seems to be working, and what other cities can learn — crucially the need to start small, measure things, and really do it right.”
on using focused-deterrence crime reduction in other cities
Posted it themselves
“This is silly, any deal that passes in 2027 would still need to be bipartisan to be enacted. The deal in hand is good, will make it easier for a Dem administration in 2029 to hit the ground running, and if the new congress has new energy ideas they can always do another bill.”
on whether to pass an energy deal now or wait for a 2027 Congress
Posted it themselves
“I am getting very concerned that green groups are going to try to kill a permitting deal that makes it harder to do pretextual Clean Water Act litigation to block natural gas pipelines without even bothering to estimate the emissions impact of the change they are mad about.”
Posted it themselves
“Keep in mind that given the ongoing use of oil for electricity and home heat in the northeast, to say nothing of the importance of cheap electricity to spurring adoption of EVs and heat pumps it’s unclear what the *sign* on the pipelines is not just the magnitude.”
on whether new pipelines help or hurt emissions given northeast oil and gas use
Posted it themselves
“I would not underrate humanity's ability to solve problems — the climate change outlook has meaningfully improved thanks to people bothering to care and work on the issue from both a technical and a policy standpoint.”
Posted it themselves
“Unironically, yes, DC should zig while the rest of the country zags and facilitate some data center construction to shore up the tax base”
Posted it themselves
“The best work in this field heavily relies on using AI to make the AI-monitoring tractable, which I think raises some fairly obvious issues.”
on using AI to monitor AI and the problems that creates
Posted it themselves
“I think the points @glukianoff makes here all point in the direction of preferring generic restraint on model capability — "pacing the frontier" as they say — to the current course of racing forward on capability and hoping superintelligence can be controlled.”
on pacing AI capability growth instead of racing toward superintelligence
Posted it themselves
“Free idea for politicians looking for some populist chum: There’s an unexploited angle around diesel prices and the use of diesel backup generators for AI data centers.”
Posted it themselves
“This was a year ago, but Sundar Pinchai said he thought the underlying technical risk for AI is high but he "had a lot of faith" that humanity would mobilize to avert the risk. I'm curious how he thinks the past 12 months have gone. https:// lexfridman.com/sundar-pichai- transcript#pdoom …”[post continues]
on Sundar Pichai's past comments on AI risk and humanity's ability to avert it
Posted it themselves
“Guy who’s so patriotic he’s hell-bent in making sure the model that destroys the world is trained in the USA.”
on a developer prioritizing building a dangerous AI model in the US
Posted it themselves
“I think philosophical commitment to longtermism as an ethical concept drove a lot of interest which led some EAs to AI safety as a concept, but it turns out literally nothing about AI policy hinges on the social discount rate. It's an intellectual history curiosity.”
on longtermism's role in drawing effective altruists toward AI safety work
Posted it themselves
“I wrote about this four years ago, but the movement toward "longtermism" actually ended up identifying a couple of short-term risks.”
on longtermism ending up identifying short-term risks rather than long-term ones
Posted it themselves
“The belief that AI would eventually herald the end of humanity doesn’t date back to the 1990s either! I believe the earliest AI x-risk take is Samuel Butler’s 1863 essay “Darwin Among The Machines.” That’s who the Butlerian Jihad is named after.”
on the historical origins of fears that AI could threaten humanity's existence
Posted it themselves
“George Eliot in her 1879 novel “Impressions of Theophrastus Such” also discusses the idea that a self-replicating, recursively self-improving machine would displace humanity through an evolutionary process.”
Posted it themselves
“The public hates Trump's performance on AI, but there's also a large bloc of people who don't yet realize how much he's embraced accelerationism so he'll probably get less popular if people learn more.”
Posted it themselves
“This headline doesn’t really seem to match the reporting, which is just that people spanning the entire Cuellar to Jayapal spectrum are rightly nervous about Leading The Future’s money.”
Posted it themselves
“I keep saying this but if you work at OpenAI and have concerns about AI risk you need to understand that your company’s superpac is one of the major proximate barriers to doing anything.”
Posted it themselves
“A lot of loose talk lately about the dangers of building a race of alien super-intelligences comes from people affiliated with the obscure ideology of Effective Altruism. Be on the lookout for these characters who pose a threat to critical goals like maximizing NVIDIA earnings.”
Posted it themselves
“We need to find someone who has never done anything altruistic in his life (or at least ensure that if he tried to it didn’t work) to make a purely selfish case for AI safety. Record a video while torturing some shrimp just for fun. Whatever it takes.”
on making a self-interested rather than altruistic case for AI safety
Posted it themselves
“Do these people listen to themselves? Bernie Sanders … decided to hand America over to tech oligarchs … by slowing the reckless race to superintelligence?”
Posted it themselves
“Guys, sure, there are lots of "laws on the books" that apply to AI companies. But there is no such law preventing the creation of a model capable of rapid recursive self-improvement and if we get out-of-control superintelligence we can't just sue it after the fact!”
Posted it themselves
“None of these people even know how to use the concept of regulatory capture properly.”
Posted it themselves
“I think it’s fine to say companies act in their self-interest but averting human extinction is very much in the financial self-interest of the companies we’re talking about so you do have to address the object-level debate.”
Posted it themselves
“Nobody would be surprised by the idea of a billionaire willing to spend huge sums of money to avoid dying personally, right? You can feel free to view the professed to desire to avoid everyone else’s death as purely pretextual and you end up in the same place.”
on skepticism toward AI companies' stated motives for safety spending
Posted it themselves
“This is where I'm at ... Dems are clearly in good shape for the midterms but the midwestern polling is probably fake.”
Posted it themselves
“The practical of having “digital” teams that are siloed and distinct from “comms” seems unwise.”
Posted it themselves
“IMO defeating Trumpism would be pretty good, especially if we could really humiliate it by scoring wins in some red states.”
Posted it themselves
“If you want to fight back against this effort to bail out Trump’s failed presidency, these are my recommendations of the most strategic places to contribute. https:// slowboring.com/p/the-midterm- candidates-who-deserve …”[post continues]
on where to donate to oppose Trump in the midterms
Posted it themselves
“I can’t get over the fact that a Russian oligarch paying for Don Jr’s wedding is like a total non-story.”
Posted it themselves
“The crypto people could have gotten what they’d wanted if Republicans were willing to give Democrats a little cover on Trump’s personal corruption but even with the Dear Leader’s approval rating in the toilet they won’t risk his wrath so they couldn’t get to yes.”
on Republicans blocking crypto legislation to shield Trump from scrutiny
Posted it themselves
“As the text makes clear, contrary to the headline this “sale” is in fact a gift.”
Posted it themselves
“You can see Smith on camera at the game in Maryland, I think Schmitt should really consider apologizing for accusing him of perjury with no basis rather than continuing down this road.”
on Schmitt's accusation of perjury against Smith, who appears on camera at a Maryland game
Posted it themselves
“We are lucky at this time in history to have a president who is unusually thoughtful and well-informed, uniquely capable of bringing people together across partisan and cultural divides.”
on describing the current president as thoughtful and able to unite people
Posted it themselves
“Anti-Indian racists in America really are the top-tier of racists. Today they're mad at them for raising kids who get into good colleges and become football fans?”
Posted it themselves
“"We need meritocratic college admissions!" [Asian applicants are the primary beneficiaries] "No, not like that!!!"”
on backlash against Asian applicants benefiting from meritocratic college admissions
Posted it themselves
“Something lost in the internationalization of the discourse is that American Muslims are a very positive-selected group of immigrants and their descendants, much better educated than the general population. https:// pewresearch.org/short-reads/20 25/06/18/how-us-muslims-compare-with-other-americans-religiously-and-demographically/ …”[post continues]
on American Muslims being a well-educated, positively selected immigrant group
Posted it themselves
“You won’t hear the free speech hypocrites at FIRE talking about what Trump is doing here”
on FIRE staying silent about Trump's actions against free speech
Posted it themselves
“After all the shit Serbian nationalism has put the world through, I would expect better attendance at a home game for their soccer team.”
on low attendance at Serbia's national soccer team's home game
Posted it themselves
““Primetime” is masterful craftsmanship but the moral vision of the filmmakers is weird and unconvincing.”
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In their own words
Matthew Yglesias · 2020
Yglesias argues the United States should grow its population to one billion through immigration and higher birth rates to keep its global economic and strategic standing.
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