Matt Glassman

I’m going to write in much more detail about this over August recess, but in my view people are overthinking the political dynamics of Congress right now. It boils down to five things: Narrow majorities in both chambers, but particularly the House. A POUTS unusually disinterested in protecting the House moderates. No Senate majority to abolish the filibuster. Partisan polarization between the parties. Small factions willing to exploit their numerical control of the balance of power. To wit:…

I’m headed home to Upstate NY today, to meet some of my high school and college friends for our annual reunion in Saratoga. This year marks the 27th time in the last 28 years we’ve done it, 2020 being our only miss. Thanks a lot, COVID. Here’s my old Substack post on the majesty of Saratoga. It’s a very strange feeling being on Caroline Street at night now that I’m in my late 40s. Saratoga is very timeless place. The details change, but the basic contours and rhythms of the town really are no…

Watching the Todd Blanche confirmation hearing in the Senate Judiciary Committee for his nomination to Attorney General, we are seeing some unusually explicit examples of one of my favorite reasons to hold a confirmation hearing: to get nominees to promise you things in public. You don’t hold hearings to gather information. If you want information, you can get it much easier via phone call and private meetings. If you can’t get it through them, you aren’t getting it via a public hearing. The…

Lindsey Graham has died. Whatever else you might say about him, he's the author of this quote: “When I was first elected to the House,” he recalled, “I looked for the they. They who run things. They who know how things really work. They who know what they are doing. But I couldn’t find the they.” After that, he went on, “I went to the Senate. But there was still no they. And then I started to get invited to the White House, and to closed-door briefings, and to meetings with top officials. No…

A lot (probably too much) has been written about Graham Platner's faux working class credentials. Takes galore. Here's some scattered orthogonal thoughts. The whole episode is a specific example of amore general phenomenon, and that is the political presentation of self. Every politician inherently constructs a public identity and persona; this can be more or less intentional, and it can be more or less correlative with their private identity/persona, but it's always going to exist. I think…

If you were alive in the 1970s or 1980s, you probably saw this bumper sticker more times than you can count. You still see it occasionally today, and you still see the sentiment expressed all the time on social media. As a policy matter, there's was never anything wrong with the bumper sticker, then or now. It's absolutely fine to be in favor or more education spending and less defense spending. In fact, I currently hold that view. The problem was that the bumper sticker also implied that we…

Back in November, I wrote a substack post describing various dimension of political moderation. You can go read the longer details, but here’s the abridged list: You have a middle-ground position on a policy issue(s). The classic definition. Maybe You have a mushy centrist position on abortion or slavery. You buck your party on important issues. You are a pro-gun Democrat or pro-choice Republican. The positions themselves aren’t middle ground, you just aren’t with the the party you identify…

People keeping asking me variations of "what do you think about what is going on in Maine" and so I'm just going to write it down. I never liked Platner as a person, and was wary of him from the get-go. He has always reminded me of every New England prep school fuckup I met in college.1 After all these scandals, he reminds me of them even more. I'm glad he's likely done. Of course, that's easy for me to say because I also think it was supremely stupid to nominate a progressive warrior in a…

President Trump's political style is classic populist strongman. As such, he is going to explain politics as a set of illegitimate institutions setup by corrupt elites, which require nothing more than a strong leader with the will to rein-in the institutions, throw out the elites, and replace it all with obvious, virtuous policies. Such a leader isn't common but, luckily, he alone can do it. He can never deviate from the maximal power sales pitch; to do so would be to admit the impossible, and…

A speculative theory: Current politics is making people increasingly miserable because at a participatory level it has become for many people, on the margin, a more national, more electoral, and more passive activity. All three of these trends are bad for your political happiness return-on-investment. The first dimension above is scope. All else equal, people get more satisfaction engaging in local politics, where they have more investment in the community, have personal relationships with…

The World Series of Poker Main Event begins today. The Main Event is unquestionably the focal point of the entire World Series of Poker, which now consists of 100 separate tournaments over 7 weeks. It costs $10,000 to enter—same as it did in 19701—and somewhere around 10,000 people will give it a spin. Meaning the prize pool will be in the $93 million range after the 7% rake. First place was $10 million last year. It’s no longer the most expensive buy-in—there are now 13 “high roller” events…

I’ve had a couple of people ask, so here’s one solution that will do it: Copy this RSS url for my feed: https://blog.mattglassman.net/feed/ Paste it into the “feed url” box on this website. Add your email address, and then confirm when they email you. Thank you to the reader who suggested this method.

I just spent a week in London, my first time there and my first time to Europe. Thank you to the 50+ people who provided advice, so much of it was valuable and led directly to us doing things we would not otherwise have known about. I do not believe you can make sense of a place in one visit, much less have a firm understanding of it; it took me years of regular visits to wrap my head around New York City and as many times as I've been to Vegas, I still don't think I actually feel like I know…

Here's Byrne Hobart at The Diff, writing about the existence of a trillionaire: It was inevitable that this would happen. 2% real GDP growth, 3% inflation, a 5% or so equity risk premium, some dispersion among equities, and—critically—being a species with five rather than six or seven fingers on each hand meant that some time this decade or next we'd cross the threshold where a single person is, on a mark-to-market basis, worth a trillion dollars. There's been a lot of discussion about this,…

Here's one: The point of the story ... is not that uniforms are a magical performance-enhancing catch-all. It’s that they’re objective correlatives for a broader sense of excellence and camaraderie and devotion that eroded substantially as the bureaucracy expanded, as it shifted away from subject-specific competency and towards functional ‘expertise’. And so those of us in the state capacity conversation, those of us who are thinking about things like procurement timelines and waterfall builds…

I’m going to London next week with my wife and three teenage daughters (ages 18, 16, 13)! I have never been to Europe.1 In fact, the only foreign countries I’ve visited are Canada and The Bahamas.2 I’m very excited. So we’re looking for your best London advice. Sights. Neighborhoods. Food. Whatever. But especially stuff that I can’t get from Google or Claude. We’re going out to Oxford one day. We will hit the major tourist attractions. We like walking neighborhoods. But beyond that, we are wide…

Here's Senator Tillis yesterday, discussing the frayed Senate-administration relations amid the endless blindsiding Hill Republicans are getting from the White House these days: “At some point, we’ve got to return ourselves to being a board of directors versus like a manufacturing facility that just creates whatever product the White House wants.” I have long thought that this analogy—Congress as a board of directors—is one of the best ways to think about the legislature, writ large, within our…

If we had to come up with a list of generic things legislators hate, getting blindsided by important new information would probably be right near the top. Some examples of information you might prefer to find out about ahead of time, rather than via news reports or in real-time during the legislative process, include: an agency you oversee having a major problem; an interest in your coalition coming out against your initiative; another legislator offering a major amendment to your bill; a…

One axiom of good cardplay is this: every decision is a new opportunity to make the optimal play. No matter how bad your previous decisions were and how bad of a spot they landed you in, you still need to make the best choice given the options available to you. Example: you and your partner have a bidding disaster in bridge, because your partner does something dumb during the auction. Instead of landing in a contract of 4 spades, you are now the declarer in a contract of 3 Notrump. Had you…

In Congress, and in government generally, one basic problem is enforcement of law. Although sometimes people on the Hill act like you solve a problem as soon as you pass a law, the reality is that almost every legislative act requires some amount of executive implementation and/or enforcement. We often think about this as an elite-level problem. How will the White House prioritize where to put their energy and political resources? How well will the political appointees govern the agencies and…

Thirty-two years ago tonight. So much of June 1994 has come flooding back to me this week as the Knicks battled to the title. As I've previously written, this was the happiest I ever saw my dad: We were fans of the old-school New York sports teams—Yankees, Knicks, Football Giants, and Rangers. Dad had grown up in the city, and even though we lived way Upstate—easier to get to Montreal than Madison Square Garden—the rhythms of New York sports ran our lives. We listened to WFAN. Dad got the NY…

The New York Knicks took a 3-1 lead in the NBA Finals last night by completing the greatest comeback in playoff history. Just an incredible game, and so much fun to watch a game in real-time that you know you will be talking about in 20 years. Eleven slightly-related thoughts: As discussed previously, there's nothing quite like a Knicks playoff run to light NYC on fire. The corollary to that is there's nothing quite like a Knicks playoff run to remind you how lame DC is as a sports town, both…

Fairfax County Public Schools (FCPS) has a calendar problem. We’ve bloated up the school year with holidays, extended breaks, teacher work days, elementary school half-days, and confusing “religious and cultural observance days”, where school is in session but classroom activities are limited in various ways. The sum total of all this is an absurdly small number of five-days school weeks, and an even smaller number of actual five-days-of-learning weeks, all despite a school year that runs from…

Just an incredible podcast/video episode. The Rewatchables is a great podcast to begin with. Great idea, great execution. Especially if you grew up in the GenX era of 80s and 90s film. Or if you enjoy Bill Simmons’ GenX style of social criticism. And definitely if both things apply. If you’ve never seen it, give it a shot with a movie you love. The rotating movie nerds that Bill has as co-hosts—Sean Fennessey, Chris Ryan, Mallory Rubin, Van Lathan, etc.— are all great compliments and really…

Bill Pulte, Senate-confirmed Director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency and Chairman of Fannie Mae / Freddie Mac, has been appointed by President Trump as Acting Director of National Intelligence. This is stupid. Pulte has no experience in intelligence, will not give up his other roles, and is widely-seen as a Trump loyalist and/or hatchet man. Not surprisingly, this is going over like a lead zeppelin among Democrats in the Senate, and has gotten a cool reception from Senate Republicans.…

The most inexplicable thing about president Trump is how much political control he has over the Republican Party, and how poorly he has used that leverage for policy gain. He has a massive influence in Republican primaries, and has used that to purge the party of various Members over the last decade. There isn't an organized anti-Trump GOP faction on the Hill anymore, and that's largely of Trump's making. Almost all the members who voted to impeach or convict him are gone. We could bicker over…

Many social critics, notably Chuck Klosterman, have written a lot about the disappearance of the 20th century monoculture. The basic thesis is simple: in the 20th century, limited mass media and television created a more focused, common national pop culture. TV shows had fixed times and huge audiences, which in turn created common watercooler conversations. News came from limited elite outlets which, for better or worse, created a shared mass understanding of politics. Ditto for youth culture…

I have continued my practice of walking every day, without music or podcasts. It's great. I'm now going 5 miles/day, and I continue to find I do my best thinking and mental organizing during that hour. I continue to see this is completely separate from exercising. This piece by Astral Codex Ten on using AI to examine election candidates is very good. My intuition lately is that too many people are parroting a "don't use AI in stupid ways, you have to learn advanced prompting/coding techniques,"…

Today is Memorial Day. For most Americans, it's the kickoff to summer. For a subset of Americans, it's a marker of the worst thing that ever happened to their family. That's a sobering dichotomy. The unambiguously good development of fewer war deaths and fewer American combat veterans has shifted the dynamics between the two groups; in 1955, a lot more Americans had a family member or personal friend who died in combat than today. The entire cultural shadow of WWII is just obviously way less…

Mary Peltola represented Alaska in the House from August 2022 until January 2025. She also happened to have been born in Alaska. This is notable because she was the first person to ever represent Alaska in the House who was born there. That even includes the period of time (1906-1959) when Alaska was a territory and had a non-voting delegate instead of an actual representative. Eight delegates and five Representatives preceded here, none of whom were born in the state.1 That's certainly…