writes on cities, labour, and social policy.
Joined March 2011
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Richard Sennett retweeted
Senator @SenBlumenthal, this may be relevant to your work on sanctions and Russia’s war machine.
Ukrainian specialists examined the flight controller of Russia’s Geran-4 strike drone. Of 105 identified electronic components, 80 came from U.S. companies — with @TXInstruments and National Semiconductor accounting for 58.1%.
No Russian-made electronics were found in the controller.
The key question is: how are these U.S.-made components still reaching Russia’s military production at this scale despite export controls?
We believe this deserves attention from Congress, U.S. regulators and the manufacturers themselves.
xitter.cf/InformNapalm/status/21…
Russia calls this “domestic production.”
Yet in the Geran-4 flight controller examined by Ukrainian specialists, no Russian-made electronics were found at all. Of 105 identified components, 80 came from 🇺🇸 U.S. companies — with @TXInstruments, including components from National Semiconductor acquired by TI in 2011, accounting for 58.1%.
#Russia #US #ExportControls
Richard Sennett retweeted
Russia is rapidly upgrading its long-range attack drones, moving from slow, piston-engined models to high-speed jet-powered munitions like the Geran-5.
The drastic increase in speed makes these new models significantly harder for Ukrainian forces to intercept using conventional mobile air defense teams, pushing Ukraine and its defense partners to race to develop new jet-powered interceptors.
Graph: the Kyiv Independent.
Richard Sennett retweeted
BREAKING NEWS: Billionaire Sir Richard Branson launches a SCATHING attack on Trump and his disgusting coziness with Russian dictator Vladimir Putin.
This is EXACTLY the kind of thing that gets under Trump’s skin...
"I never thought I’d have to say this in my lifetime, but it’s 2026, and unfortunately, nothing is the way it used to be," wrote Branson, founder of the Virgin Group, on LinkedIn. "The Trump administration has become an enabler of autocrats and dictators, placing their personal whims ahead of the interests of the American people and the free world. What is it about Putin that makes President Trump fawn over him?"
"How can America’s allies ever trust this administration again, when it is now turning against them in a time of war and suffering?" he asked.
Trump has repeatedly betrayed our Ukrainian allies in recent days. First, he announced a shocking deal with Putin to allow millions of barrels of diesel onto global markets—a move that will inject cash directly into the Russian war machine. Then, he launched a concerted smear campaign against President Zelenskyy, claiming that Putin is "easier to deal with."
The betrayals escalated when Washington failed to provide its customary early warning to Kyiv regarding an imminent Russian ballistic missile attack. Now, it appears the White House has ordered a temporary suspension of Starshield—a military version of Elon Musk’s Starlink, upon which the Ukrainian armed forces rely.
"The throttling of Starlink/Starshield and the inexplicable failure to provide advance warning of Russian missile launches have already led to the needless deaths of Ukrainian civilians," Branson wrote. "How much worse can it get?" "If one thing is clear, it’s that European leaders must move past the initial shock of Trump’s recent actions and step up. This is as much about European freedom as it is about Ukraine’s sovereignty. Both are worth fighting for," he continued. "Every option should now be on the table—from transferring frozen Russian assets to Ukraine, to delivering advanced weapons systems like the German Taurus."
"Why, oh why, is this happening? We cannot allow the free world to be dismantled before our very eyes," Branson concluded.
We couldn’t agree more. Trump is an enemy of Ukraine, an enemy of democracy, and an enemy of the American people. When the Democrats regain power, we will have a major task ahead of us. Every trace of this monstrous man’s legacy must be erased.
Please ❤️ and share if you think Trump is Putin’s puppet!
Richard Sennett retweeted
Putin has turned the screws on Trump.
Whatever he has on him is big enough that the USA is no longer an ally to the west.
By siding with Russia, he's made a choice on behalf of 343 million Americans.
Will nobody take him on? Before America becomes a hostile state to the rest of the world.
"I think it's time for Ukraine to get a new president."
US President Donald Trump hits out at Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, criticising him for targeting Russian refineries and saying he should be replaced.
Latest: trib.al/ZC7IsDl
📺 Sky 501 and Virgin 602
Richard Sennett retweeted
What an absolute mess, @NateSibley.
When Trump instructed @SecScottBessent to greenlight Russian diesel imports without the authority to do so, he put @USTreasury and @CBP in an impossible legal bind.
An @OFAC license cannot override a federal statute, because Congress took that power away from Treasury in this case. PL 117-109 enacted a blanket statutory ban on all Russian HTS Chapter 27 energy imports (including diesel) with zero administrative waiver authority.
And you're spot on about CAATSA. Even if Treasury claims it can (somehow) license around it, any move significantly altering Russia policy requires a mandatory 30-day notice to Congress and a statutory freeze before taking effect.
The end result? If a Russian tanker soon arrives at a U.S. port, CBP is legally barred from clearing the cargo.
As a few experts have helpfully pointed out, this law incorporates implementation requirements via an executive order that itself permits licenses. Fair enough. But I find it unusually ambiguous—and likely not what Congress intended.
In any case it doesn’t relieve Treasury of the 30 day notice required by CAATSA, as this license clearly “significantly alters” U.S.-Russia policy.
Richard Sennett retweeted
Other countries might be defined by blood, territory or language. America has always been creedal, an ideal of liberty turned into a state.
Its critics back-handedly recognise as much. The reason that anti-Americanism is a force in world affairs (unlike anti-Algerianism or anti-Armenianism or anti-Albanianism) is that America’s enemies acknowledge that it stands for something. That something is the package represented by personal autonomy, limited government, constitutional rule, regular elections and private enterprise – in a word, freedom.
A bias towards freedom has, until now, characterised US foreign policy. A people habituated to liberty immediately saw what was wrong with Nazism and Communism.
Which is why current US foreign policy is so shocking to pro-Americans.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is one of those rare occasions when we can clearly identify the aggressor. Vladimir Putin sought to annex a neighbour that offered him no threat – a neighbour that had given up its nuclear weapons in return for a promise that its sovereignty would be respected within its existing borders. Who guaranteed that promise? Britain, the United States and (never forget) Russia.
Donald Trump is backing a belligerent dictatorship against a beleaguered democracy. Putin is the one leader he never disparages. He threatens annexation against Denmark, muses about handing away British territory, wages economic war on Canada. But not Russia. Never Russia.
Now Trump is buying diesel from Russia, potash from Belarus, minerals from China – all because he doesn’t want to buy them from Canada, which has stood at America’s side in war after war.
American friends, can you not see what this is doing, not just to America’s standing, but to the free world which your fathers have built since 1941? Trump is bringing down the international system from which the US has been the chief beneficiary. And for what? To drink liberal tears? God help us.
Richard Sennett retweeted
I, Kevin Rowland (the son of Irish immigrants) and the main songwriter of ‘Come On Eileen,’ am disgusted to learn that Nigel Farage has used our song to make his entrance for his party conference. Myself, and all of Dexys are passionately against Farage’s politics.
@ByDonkeys .
Richard Sennett retweeted
Today in The Times I’ve spoken about something deeply personal.
In 2018 my brother Tariq took his own life. He never told anyone, not his closest family and friends, what he was going through. Looking back, we believe stigma was a large part of it.
He isn’t alone. More than 7,000 people die by suicide every year in the UK, and over 70% were not in contact with the mental health services that might have saved them. It remains one of the biggest killers of young people.
I’m supporting this campaign because of Philip Pirie, who lost his son Tom in 2020 and has since rallied experts and politicians around the country to push for change. When he approached me, I was very happy to join forces with him.
Together we’re calling – alongside psychiatrists, charities and MPs from across the political spectrum – for a national public health campaign to reduce the stigma around suicidal thoughts and encourage more people to reach out for help.
Public health campaigns work: we’ve seen it with drink-driving and HIV/AIDS. And the evidence suggests this one would more than pay for itself. Every life saved spares a family unimaginable grief and the country real cost.
Giving people permission to speak saves lives.
If you’re struggling, or worried about someone who is, the Samaritans are there free, day or night, on 116 123.
thetimes.com/article/11bef78…
Richard Sennett retweeted
Excellent piece by Dr. Lisa Mckenzie defending sociology. I particularly appreciated her call to action for her fellow academic sociologists:
“I also make a plea to my fellow academics: stop allowing this to happen. Stop allowing academic institutions to make appointments and pursue policies that denigrate everything we do. We need to go back to first principles. We need to forget the identity politics, the DEI quotas and the tick-boxes, and support and fund what we do best – deepening knowledge of what is really happening in society and arguing why that matters.”
In my view, anthropologists need to do the same. If we don’t, we’ll find our departments and our discipline even worse off with respect to faculty positions, student enrollments, grant funding, and public support. The situation is already bad. If we’re not careful, instead of there being just a few jobs for our PhD students and postdocs to apply for each year, there’ll be virtually none.
My sense is that sociologists and anthropologists need something akin to the discipline-wide reform process that medical researchers initiated in the early 1990s and which has become known as the evidence-based medicine movement. We need to begin pushing for an ‘evidence-based sociology’ and an ‘evidence-based anthropology’. We could do this together as closely related disciplines, perhaps with colleagues elsewhere in the social sciences, thereby creating the evidence-based social sciences movement.
The lowest hanging fruit in such a reform process would be for us, when we’re acting as reviewers, to agree not to approve any paper or book for publication that makes claims based solely on autoethnography. Autoethnography should be regarded as a means of generating hypotheses and research questions, not as a research method. Reconceptualising autoethnography this way would immediately improve the rigour and reliability of sociological and anthropological research. Multiple reforms are needed but this is the most obvious and easiest place to start, I reckon.
@drianpace, @redrumlisa, @HamesRaymond
I'm a Sociologist and we need to defend Sociology the Arday affair has caused so much damage.
In defence of sociology - spiked share.google/dEEpj71OLsLTkFq…
Richard Sennett retweeted
People of Clacton, @ByDonkeys have absolutely lifted the lid here.
You pay Farage £94k to be your MP. He’s hardly ever there.
Meanwhile his 12 other jobs have paid him £1,182,498 since the election, Mayfair gold dealers, tax-avoidance passport hustlers, US anti-abortion outfits, thousands of Cameo videos, the lot.
He who pays the piper dictates the tone.
When the bigger cheques come from multimillionaires and foreign interests, what makes you think he’s representing you?
Richard Sennett retweeted
Watch & Learn from The Queen, my incredible mother, Lynn Nesbit, as she is interviewed by one of the best editors in all of publishing, Bob Weil, at the Columbia Publishing Course this June!
c-span.org/program/book-tv/l…
Richard Sennett retweeted
When the Bin is sharper and smarter than the grifter he is about to replace. Clacton could not go wrong voting for @CountBinface he is a vast improvement in terms of credibility and honesty than Farage.
Richard Sennett retweeted
Excellent, moving, brilliantly argued speech from the Tory MP Edward Leigh. I find it profoundly disturbing when even papers like the Guardian attempt to frame disgust about what Israel is doing in Gaza as ‘left wing.’ It is as coldly cynical as calling it ‘anti-Semitic.’
Richard Sennett retweeted
Studies now present a striking picture of what happens when private equity firms acquire hospitals and nursing homes: predictable increases in harm and deaths. One landmark study shows: patient deaths up about 11% after such acquisitions.
Richard Sennett retweeted
Seeing some of the embarrassingly hateful reactions to Starmer's resignation today, I thought it was worth resharing this.
The level of personal hostility directed at Keir Starmer deserves scrutiny in its own right. Not because he should be immune from criticism, but because the tone and intensity of the attacks tell us something unhealthy about the state of democratic politics.
Starmer is a conventional political figure. Cautious, legalistic, incremental. He frustrates people precisely because he is managerial rather than messianic. Yet the reaction to him often goes far beyond disagreement, tipping into visceral hatred more commonly reserved for authoritarians or demagogues.
Much of this hostility is disconnected from concrete policy. It is not about specific votes, proposals or outcomes, but about projection. A belief that Starmer embodies betrayal, bad faith or hidden malice. That kind of politics runs on suspicion rather than evidence.
This matters because democracy depends on the assumption of good faith among opponents. You can think a leader is wrong, timid, or misguided without believing they are fundamentally illegitimate. Once politics becomes moralised to the point of demonisation, compromise is reframed as treachery and pluralism as weakness.
The pattern is familiar. In fragmented, polarised systems, anger concentrates not on extremists, whose intentions are clear, but on moderates, who disappoint maximalists on all sides. The centre becomes the lightning rod precisely because it resists totalising narratives.
There is also a media and online dynamic at work. Incentives reward outrage, not proportionality. Algorithms favour contempt over analysis. Over time, this creates a political culture in which relentless personal attack feels normal, even virtuous, rather than disgusting.
None of this is a defence of Starmer’s decisions, instincts or record. Those should be argued over robustly as you do in a democracy. The problem is the substitution of critique with hostility and the quiet erosion of democratic norms that follows when political opponents are treated as enemies rather than rivals.
A democracy cannot function if every election is framed as an existential struggle against internal evil. At some point, the target may change, but the damage to trust, restraint and culture remains.
Richard Sennett retweeted
Hezbollah and Israel agreed to a 5th ceasefire at 4pm local time.
At 4:12 local time, Israel bombed Nabatieh.
12 minutes was all it took.
Richard Sennett retweeted
There is a claim that keeps circulating, presented as sophisticated analysis: antisemitic violence is caused by Israel’s actions. If Israel behaved differently, Jewish communities around the world would somehow be safer. This argument is not analysis. It is a moral inversion. And it collapses the moment you apply it consistently.
When China imprisons Uyghurs, does anyone warn Muslim communities in Paris to expect attacks? When Russia invaded Ukraine, did anyone tell Russian restaurants to brace for violence? No. Never. The causal chain between a government’s actions and violence against a diaspora is only ever constructed for Jews. Every other minority is extended the basic moral courtesy of being treated as individuals rather than proxies.
Now look at what the data actually shows. The SPCJ, which tracks antisemitic incidents in France in coordination with the Interior Ministry, has documented a consistent and damning pattern: it is antisemitic violence that inspires more antisemitic violence, not Israeli policy. After Mohamed Merah murdered Jewish children at point-blank range at the Ozar Hatorah school in Toulouse in 2012, antisemitic acts surged by 200%. There was no Gaza operation. No Israeli military action. The massacre of Jews in France produced more attacks on Jews in France.
The same logic held after the Hypercacher attack in January 2015: antisemitic acts increased by nearly 300%. Massacres of Jews do not shock antisemites into restraint. They embolden them. They signal impunity. They normalize hatred. And everyone in a position of responsibility knows it.
Which brings us to October 7. From the day of the Hamas attack, antisemitic acts in France increased by over 1,000%. A daily average of approximately 25 antisemitic acts was recorded in the 30 days that followed, reaching nearly 40 on some days. In the three months after the attack, the number of antisemitic acts equaled those recorded over the previous three years combined.
And here is another detail that makes the “Israel causes antisemitism” argument impossible to sustain: the spike began on October 7 itself, the very day of the attack. Israel had not yet responded. Not a single soldier had entered Gaza. Interior Minister Darmanin sent an urgent message to prefects that same day asking them to immediately reinforce protection of Jewish community sites. Synagogues. Schools. Community centers. By October 10, 10,000 police officers had been deployed to protect 500 Jewish sites across the country.
Before any Israeli response existed, the French government already knew that Jewish communities needed protecting. Not because of what Israel was about to do. Because of what had just been done to Jews.
Antisemitic violence has one cause. Antisemitism.