Cure-alls and Remedies
A legislative supremacist's case: why the American constitutional order keeps tilting toward one-person rule, and why the repair has to happen in Congress, not the presidency.
The United States is in the grip of a charismatic strongman. Ten years ago, that sentence got you dismissed as alarmist. People like Masha Gessen and Sarah Kendzior were saying it in 2016; most of the political establishment, myself included, thought the institutions would hold. By 2018, Levitsky and Ziblatt s How Democracies Die made the comparison respectable [ ]
If there were a single concept from economics I'd like to see more widely understood, it would be adverse selection: the tendency for markets to sort participants into worse and worse pools when one side of a transaction knows more than the other. The idea originates in a 1970 paper by George Akerlof, "The Market...
We think about our moral lives in a framework held over from medieval Christianity, and if we reject those assumptions then we need a new framework.
I tested whether AI could approximate a developmental editor, built a tool called Apodictic, and learned surprising lessons about writing craft, reader contract, and the real limits of large language models.
My friend Peter Levine wrote recently about how much of the public unease about AI consciousness comes from something surprisingly mundane: the interface says “I.” When Google’s Gemini delivers information in the third person, it’s just a tool; when ChatGPT says “I can help you,” some users start composing rescue missions for the trapped digital...
Apparently context is scarce. Here's some: "Democratic party politics is urban machine politics, scaled up" from Noah Smith A variety of activists and special interests — collectively known as “The Groups” — can basically persuade Democratic staffers and politicians of their ideas in the proverbial smoke-filled rooms, well out of the public eye. Democrats’ focus...
After getting the same Vera Institute of Justice messaging presentation twice on Friday, I've been thinking about what messaging consultants are actually trying to do.The average messaging summit is a triangulation between three things:* What the consultants' funders want* What their pollsters tell them voters like* What the audience of candidates, staffers, and pundits needs...
Most people know the story: Tom and Joe are fishing on a boat in the middle of the river, when they spot a baby floating past. Joe tosses his pole and jumps into the water to save the child, and Tom helps him back into the boat, checking on the infant. They’re rowing back to...
It'd be nice if the folks who don't believe in global warming weren't polluting the same world as the folks who do, but the tragedy of existence is that we must share one world. No one sane and good is ever a relativist or a pragmatist about criminal guilt or ignorance, about child abuse and the Satanic panic, or about vaccines. Relativism is always reserved for some other stuff that’s off to the…