Thinking about...

Dear thinkers: Timothy Snyder joined fellow historian and teacher Sharon McMahon for a sweeping conversation about the state of American democracy, the evolving nature of fascism, and the growing influence of technology and wealth on politics. Below are some thematic highlights and select quotes from Tim during the conversation. I encourage you to watch the conversation in full, as always. I think...

I am sure many of you will share my enthusiasm for Nicole Fleetwood’s “Between the River and the Railword Tracks,” which is a remarkable micro-history of a beautifully and tragically intense neighborhood, the Second Ward of Hamilton, Ohio, the historically segregated African-American district where Nicole grew up. I came to Nicole’s scholarship through her book on art and mass incarceration, Marki...

We as Americans are being invited by the Secretary of Defense to view an execution by firing squad over the internet. This is wrong in at least four ways. In the video I explain, and here I summarize. It is wrong psychologically. It looks like revenge. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has chosen and lost a war against Iran. Given the extraordinary degree of self-promoting bombast by which he desc...

Dear thinkers, Tim recently joined Rep. Jake Auchincloss (D-MA) for a Thinking Live conversation. The biggest question during the conversation: where do Democrats go after the midterms? They planned nothing in advance, and the conversation covered a lot. Here are the big themes. Watch the entire conversation above! 1. Win, then act Tim stressed what happens after a win: “My greatest fear is that D...

At night last month in Kharkiv, Ukraine, I was moved to record a cycle of thoughts. This is the final one: on basic political wisdom. By that I mean nothing more than a few answers to questions that I get asked a lot, on issues where historical examples, consensus in political science, and experience of recent elections give me some confidence in the answers. This is the video that is most directl...

I had an excellent visit to Kharkiv last month, during which I found myself with some free time by myself at night. With the war in the background, or rather in the foreground, I used the opportunity to record the thoughts that arose in that special setting. In this recording, the next to last, the topic is the harm done to us and our future by our dependence on oil and gas. In a war where the agg...

Last month I had some time at night in Kharkiv to record a few thoughts. One of the prompts was the regularity of Russian attacks; the other was a certain logic that led from one topic to the next. This one is about our capacities as speakers of languages. It follows naturally from earlier meditations on words and from the previous one on AI. I was also staying in the apartment of a very accomplis...

A great novel is here and I had the pleasure of speaking to its author. Please have a listen, and please read the book: American Hagwon. It brings the great themes of the last fin-de-siècle, astonishingly lively and plausible characters, and an exemplary combination of moral sensitivity and wordly realism. My enthusiasm will come through in the conversation, as will some of Min’s humor and wisdom....

Dear Thinkers, Tim recently sat down with Fox News commentator and pollster Jessica Tarlov for a nearly hour-long conversation, split between the state of the midterms and Jessica’s new book, I Disagree: Winning Arguments Without Losing Friends . Below are just some of the topics they touched on: Are we headed for free and fair elections? Jessica opened by naming her worry directly: after Trump ai...

Dear Thinkers, Tim just finished speaking with Robert Reich as a guest on his Substack for a wide-ranging conversation about power, corruption, and what history can tell us about where America goes from here. Below are just some of the things they touched on (watch the full video above for event more): * Superpower suicide. Bob opened by asking Tim to define the term he coined at the Council on Fo...

Dear Thinkers, We live in trying and testing times, with a lot of noise and information being hurled, which is why there is no better time than a clarifying and thoughtful conversation with historian and journalist Anne Applebaum ( Anne Applebaum ), built around her September 14 Atlantic article, “ MAGA Is Making the World Safe for Corruption. ” Tim and Anne had an extremely enlightening conversat...

Given the air raids and such, I had some time at night in Kharkiv to do some thinking out loud. This is the seventh of ten videos that I recorded. There is a logical progression to these ten short meditations; by this point I was thinking about AI, which I suppose was slightly prompted by the tech in jet-propelled Russian drones and other Russian arms, but more generally appropriate after meditati...

While in Kharkiv I found myself meditation on some basic issues at night; the prompts came from the war itself, but the time awake lent itself to the effort of connecting daily experience to bigger political concepts. Fascism, the topic of this recording, came to mind at night in Kharkiv for obvious reasons, not least the geographical proximity to fascist Russia, and the wild violence of Russia’s...

Wherever I am, I try to write in the morning; staying in Kharkiv, visiting friends and soldiers during the day, I found it most convenient to instead record a few things at night. The setting was an evocative one: a city that functions despite war and war crimes; the apartment of an interesting Ukrainian intellectual; the timely stimulus of the air raid siren. This is the fifth of ten video medita...

This is the fourth of the ten video meditations I recorded at night in Kharkiv, in northeastern Ukraine, near the border with Russia. This one is about a very simple idea; to believe in only one thing is to come very close to believing in nothing. It is an idea prompted by an essay written by George Shevelov about faith in communism; but it has much larger implications than that. Belief in only on...

This is the third of the ten video meditations I recorded in Kharkiv, in northeastern Ukraine, close to the Russian border. The first couple were about courage and cowardice, which led me to the importance of moral categories in general. Is there anything more objective about terms like “interests” and “calculations” than there is about, say, “greed” and “sadism”? Or are we perhaps hiding reality...

This is the second of the ten video meditations I recorded at night not long ago in Kharkiv, Ukraine. They are thoughts that came to mind in a place which has been under constant attack by missiles and drones for more than four years. The topic this time is small acts of courage, and idea which came to me from observation of people who are effective during war and in resistance. It’s a phrase that...

This is the first of ten video meditations I recorded at night in Kharkiv, a frontline city in northeastern Ukraine. They concern matters that came to mind during the general setting of a long and terrible war; they were inspired though by the particularities of daily life in Kharkiv, which is less than a minute away from Russia by missile. The topic of this first one is “cowardice,” in particular...

Dear Thinkers, Hard as it is to believe, today marks 164 days since President Trump dragged the United States into war with Iran — a war that has produced devastating and deeply humiliating consequences. To make sense of where we are, Tim recently sat down with former U.S. Ambassador and Domestic Policy Advisor Susan E. Rice ( Ambassador Susan E. Rice ) for a wide-ranging thirty-minute conversatio...

Dear readers: Hope you have a cup of coffee in hand for this one. Tim joined Joyce Vance, former U.S. Attorney during the Obama Administration and host of Civil Discourse with Joyce Vance on Substack, to talk about what language to describe our moment, democracy, and civic participation look like today. Tim and Joyce started off by talking about how “sugarcoating” political realities can become a...

Dear thinkers: Earlier today, Tim talked with Jake Sullivan and Jon Finer , two former senior national security aides to President Biden on their new show, “The Long Game.: They began with Iran — and, specifically, the power the United States has effectively surrendered through this war. As Tim put it during the conversation: “We’ve lost this war, and we lost it a long time ago.” The deeper questi...

Dear Thinkers, This afternoon, Tim sat down with Ruth Ben-Ghiat for a conversation I think many of you will want to watch with a notebook in hand. Ruth is one of the foremost scholars of strongmen and authoritarianism — she teaches at NYU and has spent her career studying exactly the kind of moment we find ourselves in now. Together, she and Tim covered a lot of ground, from strongmen to oligarchs...

In this video, I say the obvious about Trump’s proposal to increase the military budget by nearly 50%: it’s a bribe to officers and soldiers so that they will side with him when he tries to overthrow the Constitution and stay in power indefinitely. This is where all the evidence points. If there is any consensus about Trump, it is that he is “transactional.” There is zero evidence that he has a no...

The United States and Russia are both losing wars. And they are losing wars that make no sense, in an uncanny folie à deux, to the benefit of China. This video, which I filmed after dozens of meetings and public discussions in Europe this month, supplies an explanatory concept: the superloser . A superloser is a leader of a great power, or (onetime) superpower, whose disastrous choices lead to a c...

If you are American, there is no particular reason you would have heard of Zbigniew Ziobro. He was one of the authors of the attempt to transform Poland into an authoritarian regime. When this was halted by the Polish elections of 2023, he fled to Hungary. At that time Hungary was ruled by Viktor Orbán, who was building what seemed like an unstoppable authoritarian order. Ziobro, wanted in Poland...