My article is now up on #FirstView @APSRjournal. My hope is that it will be of interest to anyone who works with or thinks about The Federalist, the American founding, or the Constitution. Here’s a brief 🧵 on its 3 key arguments: cambridge.org/core/journals/…

This is both obviously inaccurate and, more fundamentally, distorting because the claim retrojects the contemporary distinction between history and political philosophy onto the founders.

It may not look like a book. It may not even sound like a book. But it's definitely book-length.

Political Theory / American / Comparative / Methods

To be fair, most academics agree with Pinker that other academics aren't people.

Academic writing should be addressed neither to the public nor to other academics. It should be addressed to a single interlocutor with whom you have a petty rivalry and whose work you are trying to discredit

My “Don’t Worry, You Aren’t My Exit Liquidity” shirt has people asking a lot of questions already answered by my shirt.

RIP to a real one

I never met Gordon Wood, but I have a story about him. In one of my grad school seminars, we read Wood’s Creation of the American Republic. The sheer erudition and evidentiary depth of the book bowled me over. Back then, before kids and before life accelerated to warp speed, I used to call my mother every Sunday to catch up. Lots of times, we ended up talking about what I was reading that week in my grad seminars or for leisure. Mom had an omnivorous mind, and she was always looking for something else to read. She was a true intellectual—curious about almost everything, always eager to integrate new arguments or ideas into her existing schemas of how the world worked or to have those schemas challenged and changed. When we talked that particular Sunday, I think I tried to describe to her part of Wood’s argument about the relationship between the state constitutions during the Articles of Confederation era and the federal Constitution. Maybe I was tired, maybe I didn’t completely understand her questions, but the end result of the conversation was that Mom had questions about Wood’s argument that I didn’t answer satisfactorily. I told her that she should probably just read the book, and we said goodbye. She did eventually read the book, but the next Sunday, Mom started our conversation by saying, “Well, I had a lovely conversation with Gordon Wood this week.” For a split second, I thought she was joking, but then I remembered who I was dealing with. I started to sweat. “How?” I asked. A whole variety of unlikely scenarios in which the foremost historian of the American Revolution and my mother, who lived in Wichita, Kansas, might have met ran through my mind. “Oh, I just looked up his office phone number on Brown’s website and called, and he picked up!” Mom said. I decided I would have to find another profession. As it ended up, Gordon Wood spent about an hour on the phone with my mother answering her questions about the Constitution. Ever since, I’ve had a soft spot for the man when I imagine him picking up the phone in Providence and finding Becky Elder from Wichita on the other end of the line. His generosity in that moment spoke very well of him. Rest in peace, professor.

Pleased to announce that Eitan Sapiro-Gheiler and I have created the Comprehensive Courts of Appeals Database, which extends the Songer Database to the universe of published Courts of Appeals cases between 1892 and 2025. coadata.org/data/

The Chicago* Bears

Related, per WSJ, I have encouraged economists to have a global pause on their writing and submissions to top journals.

A scarlet token, if you will.