Historian, Teacher, General Nerd
Neoliberalism has eaten everything except the bet. The current American economic landscape is defined by a pervasive, systemic shift toward speculation. This shift manifests in two seemingly disparate ways: the gambling scandals involving college athletes and the astronomical, often detached valuations of private aerospace firms like SpaceX. Both cases illustrate a core rot in the [ ]
Articles I liked from June 9 to June 30 2026 Each week I share the articles and essays that I found most interesting, annoying, challenging, or important. Hope that you check them out too. AI: A God we can’t trust by George Scialabba in UnHerd Read here Unnerving Inflation and Remembering Alan Greenspan by [ ]
Articles I liked from May 17 to June 8, 2026 Each week I share the articles and essays that I found most interesting, annoying, challenging, or important. Hope that you check them out too. The Dead Economy Theory by Owen McGrann in The Palimpsest Read here Mark Carney’s Economic Diplomacy and the Battle for [ ]
It seems everywhere I look it’s AI money and AI “progress” and not-so-clever way to pump up investment in AI. It seems the push to get ordinary retail investors, that is the retirement savings of ordinary middle-class folks, into expected IPOs for OpenAI and others is going ahead full-bore. All of this at the same [ ]
Articles I liked from 2026-04-21 to 2026-05-17 Each week I share the articles and essays that I found most interesting, annoying, challenging, or important. Hope that you check them out too. Why plutocrats love Trump’s war The base bleeds; the top feasts by Yanis Varoufakis in UnHerd Read here Microsoft is trying to stay [ ]
I have found myself taking way too long to write posts, so I am editing less and going faster. Hopefully, quality and coherence don’t suffer too much. I have been fortunate enough to have worked in tech earlier in my career. Most of the projects and companies I worked in weren’t successful. We often built [ ]
Articles I liked from March 29 to April 20, 2026 Each week I share the articles and essays that I found most interesting, annoying, challenging, or important. Hope that you check them out too. Back to the Dumb Phone by Magazine Non Grata in Magazine Non Grata Read here Yale Report Finds Colleges Deserve [ ]
Vibe Coding and the Humanities: I Told You So A while back, I wrote a post arguing that the AI-pocalypse everyone keeps predicting isn t going to destroy the humanities — it might actually save them. I called it The Coming Humanities Gap. The core argument was simple: AI needs good prompts more than it needs [ ]
This week Articles from 2026-02-24 to 2026-03-29 Each week I share the articles and essays that I found most interesting, annoying, challenging, or important. Hope that you check them out too. Analysis: A new oil shock is building. The next few weeks of war will be decisive for the economy. by Matt Peterson in [ ]
Living and working in the United States over the last few years has not been easy. I say that not as a partisan, but as a Canadian historian of American populism who now teaches and works in the U.S. — in solidly Republican Nebraska, no less. From north of the border, America can look like [ ]