Sam Hooper

“We bear some responsibility for faith in the media being at such lows. I say this because acknowledging errors builds trust, and being defensive about them further erodes it. We should have done better.” My thoughts at the WHCA dinner on covering Biden.

.@AlexThomp: "President Biden's decline and its coverup by the people around him is a reminder that every White House regardless of party is capable of deception...We, myself included, missed a lot of this story and some people trust us less because of it." #whcd #nerdprom

My dad's had a long and distinguished career as an author and politics writer, and over the years has acquired enough books to fill a small lorry. Under protest, he's had orders from Mum to thin out some of his collection, and I've volunteered to dispose of some of them. Some have gone to the charity shop, while most will find their way to specialist book shops, and others, sadly, will have to just go in the bin. Not everything deserves the space it takes up, especially not health and safety regulations from 1990 and 1980's books on kitchen inspection and food safety - much of which is completely obsolete. To find homes for everything would be a full time job and a nightmare of an admin chore. It's easy to see why people end up hoarding books though. Disposing of any of them feels like euthanising a perfectly healthy unwanted cat. What's particularly sad is how so much that seemed of critical importance twenty or thirty years ago, is now just a historical footnote. In the collection there are volumes of books on European politics, European integration and euroscepticism, written by some of the titans of the time, many of whom are now dead, who'd be completely unheard of by the modern political wonk. Among them are biographies of people who would at one time been pivotal people in European affairs, who aren't even known to me. It's all so transient, and so rapidly forgotten by history. In many ways, Brexit was the end of an era in British political publishing and think-tankery. Our membership of the EU is fast becoming a faded era - of interest only to politics academics, historians and remainer dinosaurs. It's also interesting how entire genres of books are made completely redundant by the internet. What need do I have for a heavyweight French dictionary in the age of realtime translation? Though I am certainly keeping the Latin phrasebook just to add an extra dimension to my pretentiousness. These days, there just isn't the call for a lot of books. Especially when space in the home is at a premium and houses are getting smaller. I'm having to clear out a lot of my own. Over the years I've acquired countless books on aviation and accounts by wartime aviators, but even the air museums don't want them. They are drowning in dead people's tat, and they probably already have copies of any books. With so much data available to us in the palm of our hands, who wants to be drowning in dead trees? I should still think myself lucky though. I remember the home of the late Helen Szamuely, another prominent eurosceptic. You literally couldn't move for books in her Shepherd's Bush home. If memory serves, even the coffee table was a pile of books and books lined the staircase. We'd go out around town and she would still find a bookshop and buy more books. I can't imagine what her daughter did with them all. I expect many found their way back to the places they were bought from. In many ways, a person's book collection is almost a DIY kit of the person themselves. We are very much the sum of our knowledge. The books we leave behind tell others who we were... our interests, obsessions and ideas. And yet, when we're gone, what of it still carries meaning without the biological brain to hold it all together? But it seems now we are changing as a species. At one time we would read and retain knowledge obtained from books, but now we only remember pathways to knowledge through our digital devices. We've become cyborgs, and all we'll leave behind is a little black glass rectangle with a browser history and digital bookmarks. There's something even sadder about that. After we're gone, who will really know us?

(quietly) The reason Hamilton was so great is partly b/c it gave upper-middle-class liberals permission to be patriotic

The chairman of the Munich Security Conference literally broke down in tears today over JD Vance’s speech on Friday criticising European leaders. Europe is currently being governed by extremely unstable and unserious people.

JD Vance’s speech at Munich is worth watching in full. It’s a much more nuanced and broadly reasonable argument than I think Europeans are used to hearing from the American right.

It is time to restart Europe’s innovation engine. We have the Compass. We have the political will. Now, what matters is speed and unity. Because the world is not waiting for us ↓ xitter.cf/i/broadcasts/1mnxeAgpv…

News: I have resigned (been fired) from my job taking money for years from someone I now claim it is immoral to take money from. I'm starting a media company exactly like several other media companies. Our value add is that we think Trump is bad. Subscribe to The Derangement

Me on the battle to become the next Speaker of the Texas House, and how the uncertainty makes it difficult for organizations hoping to see the legislature address their policy priorities in the coming session! #texas #txlege #speaker #texaspolitics

Calling all housing advocates! 📢 Join me 3-4PM ET / 2-3PM CT for a fast-paced @IJ webinar showcasing legislative solutions to the housing crisis! Featuring expert guest speakers @salimfurth and @IJSanders. Registration link below ⬇️ #housingcrisis #zoning #txlege

Who comes up with the ideas for / first drafts of the bills that get debated & voted on in your state legislature? Elected reps can’t be experts in every issue, so often they look to advocacy organizations like @IJ, or lobbyists for various groups. #legislation #policy #txlege

Say it with me: Dumbass forms of identity politics didn't come from the Bernie wing of the Democratic Party, they came from the establishment's cynical attempts to beat down that wing.

Euthanasia may be with us for a while but the kind of politics that's giving us euthanasia - a limp secularism, half-despairing while still claiming Progress's mantle, half-abandoning Christianity while clinging to rhetoric of "compassion" - is unlikely to survive the century.