Oh, I almost forgot, he got a Nazi tattoo on his chest.

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All this is extremely funny and I highly recommend you follow this train-wreck of a campaign all the way until he gets elected into the Senate over the most moderate Senate Republican of the last 20 years because the party fundamentals are atrocious.

But we’re not here to talk about Platner’s history or campaign. I want to focus on the how Democratic opinion-makers are responding to Platner. The clear proof of these revelations have driven them to do some real soul searching by asking the question so many of us have had to grapple with every day: “Does getting this Nazi tattoo make me a Nazi?”

There are many things that can make you a Nazi. Those things include

• flashing the OK sign

• throwing up your hand at a campaign event (like Corey Booker)

• wearing a trenchcoat

These are all pretty egregious signs of being a Nazi, but is it really fair to add “getting a Nazi tattoo” to this list?

As it turns out, the very smartest among the Democrat pundit class are here to let us know that the answer is “No, a Nazi tattoo isn’t really very meaningful as long as you are, at your heart of hearts, a good person.” How can we tell you’re a good person? The easiest way is to run for Senate as a Democrat.

Matthew Yglesias said that “the tattoo situation reflects somewhat poorly on him in a non-specific way” but that Platner “gets a pass on being a Nazi because progressives think he’s progressive (ie not a Nazi)”.

Jon Favreau (Obama speechwriter and host of Pod Save America) attacked critics of Platner, claiming that they were being intellectually dishonest and sneered at their criticisms of this tiny little oopsie in judgement made by a goofy guy in his 20’s.

The brazen defense of this clearly disqualifying feature has been the subject of no small mockery. But I’ve had my fun here, so let’s set the mocking tone aside for a moment and get to the foundation of what is going on in this sudden disregard for the importance of symbols and the promotion of the SS-Totenkopf.

The basis of rational debate and the reason we value objective judgement calls is because it starts with gathering evidence of the reality before us and allowing the facts and the circumstances to tip the scales in our minds. The hope is that, by moving from what is (the facts) to what ought to be (the ideal) we can come to an agreement that one action is laudable, another action is permissible, a third action is excusable, and some actions are unforgivable.

All actions are subject to a context and happen within a time and place but we have to draw the lines somewhere. It is considered good moral and rational practice to hold your own team to the same standards of behavior (or maybe even higher standards) that you would demand from the other team.

“Nazi tattoo” is so far over the line that no one on the left would even begin to tolerate such a vice from a Republican Senate candidate or from a right-leaning moderate or from some random kid who was trying to get into an Ivy League school. That is the kind of action that effectively results in social exile or, at the very least, a hard stop to a career in elected public service.

And yet we have the king-makers of the Democratic party digging in their heels that the Nazi tattoo is a nothingburger. It is particularly funny to watch Yglesias tie himself into these intellectual knots and rhetorically sneer at anyone who might suggest that a Nazi tattoo is a disqualifying feature for a Senate candidate. If he had any self-respect, Yglesias would simply say “you know what, that guy is a lost cause. I just can’t diminish myself to the point of saying that a Nazi tattoo is no big deal.”

To complain about the self-abasement of these opinion-makers and pundits is to misunderstand what has happened to partisan discourse over the last decade. There is no forward reasoning anymore. They do not start from the facts at hand and drive earnestly and in open debate toward a moral conclusion.

What we see here is Jon Favreau, Matthew Yglesias, and most Democrats perform a reasoning chain that starts at the end. In the end, they need Platner to win this race. In order for him to win this race, he must be seen as a good guy, a progressive guy, a better person than his opponent. The conclusion is the starting point and they will employ any reasoning chain that gets them from “he has a Nazi tattoo” to “he’s a good guy”.

Do they believe what they are saying? That’s the wrong question. They don’t believe anything that they say. Belief does not drive their rhetorical strategies. They need an outcome (Senator Graham Platner) and so they are saying words that they think will increase the probability of that outcome. Any words will do, but the strategy that makes the most sense to them is to say that symbols do not matter, the past is meaningless, and that we already know he’s a good guy (because, duh, he’s a Democrat) and that’s really all anyone cares about.

They aren’t lying to themselves because they don’t believe there are such things as truth and lies. There are only strategies to deliver the desired results.

Sure, we can make fun of them. We should make fun of them not just because they are outing themselves as ridiculous people but because it is funny and laughter is good for the soul.

The thing we should hold close is that the reason they have fallen into this particular trap of intellectually beclowning themselves is because this backward logical curveball is how they intellectually approach most things. Most of their reasoning starts at the desired outcome and works backwards, omitting facts they don’t like, leaning into implausible rationales, intellectualizing what they think will be effective, and dismissing plain facts that aren’t helpful.

You could say “they have always done this” and perhaps that is so. But we should hope that there would be a situation so outlandish, so egregious, so ridiculous that they are forced to take a step back and say “well, I can’t go all in on this one. It’s just a step too far.”

This week we learned that, wherever a “step too far” is, it’s somewhere past defending a Nazi tattoo.

This book is a collection of my (non-Covid) writing over the last 15 years, including pieces published about a dozen different newsletters, blogs, platforms, and magazines. In the book are essays that cover …

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Sometimes this work is done quickly. Someone will show a chart, point to the source data, and I’ll grab the data and it turns out that the the chart is just a simple graphical representation of the source data. For people who care about the truth, this is the ideal scenario but it is also boring. I want some really outrageous narrative driven by a chart but it’s hard to figure out where the data came from. That’s where the real fun is.

I got that this weekend in this chart, which came to my attention through Jeremiah Johnson. The chart tells the story of a vindictive, cartoonishly evil president who is making the victims of disasters suffer because they live in the wrong state.

This chart comes from a Politico article with the title “It’s 3 times harder for blue states to get disaster funding under Trump”. The key data point in this article is in the chart above.

The president has approved just 23 percent of blue state requests for disaster aid, compared to 89 percent for red states.

Charts like this very rarely come from nowhere. Most journalists at least still have enough integrity to not completely make up data. The nature of this particular accusation is extraordinary and extreme. Denying emergency relief to American citizens based on their politics would be an act of wanton cruelty. But that severity cuts both ways. To falsely accuse the Trump administration of such an act would be a cynical and cruel thing to do. If someone were to cherry-pick data or manipulate their data sets in order to cause their fellow citizens to believe a falsehood this severe would be the act of a sociopath.

So I went to go find out is this is really what the data said. In the process, I’ll go through how the data was manipulated in order to get to the chart above.

Finding the core data was pretty easy. FEMA hosts a comprehensive set of data on the OpenFEMA website. The two data sets that we care about are Declaration Denials and FEMA Web Disaster Declarations.

Let’s compare Trump’s second term to Joe Biden’s term in office. I’m doing this because that is a comparison already being made in the chart above but also because that trims our data set down so we can talk about it in a little more detail.

We’ll start with some raw stats from this data. During Joe Biden’s term, FEMA denied 56 aid requests and approved 512, a 9.9% rejection rate. So far during Trump’s second term, FEMA has denied 24 aid requests and approved 141, a 14.5% rejection rate.

If we’re trying to tell a “Red v Blue” partisan story, it’s going to matter a lot how we define Red and Blue. It’s pretty typical to use the presidential election results as a proxy for redness and blueness. But, then again, the chart says “Democrat-led” so maybe we should use the party of the state governor as our indicator.

Politico rejected both those definitions and decided that “[party]-led” means that a state has a governor and two senators from the same party.

This definition should raise eyebrows because it immediately kicks 10 states out of our data set (11 if we count Virginia when they had a Republican governor last year). North Carolina and Kentucky both have Democratic governors and Republican Senators and were both subject to recent natural disasters but they will not show up on this chart at all. It also means that, if the narrative of this chart is true, Trump is punishing two states that voted for him (Arizona and Michigan) because they are “Democrat-led”. That seems like an odd thing to do.

I want to show how this framing changes our results. Let’s look at Biden-era FEMA denial rate by party, but change our definition for “red” and “blue” to reflect the election results (which states voted for Biden in 2020), the party of the governor, and using the Politico “governor plus both senators” metric.

If we wanted to tell a story of a vindictive Biden administration that was punishing red states, we would use the “party of the governor” metric. This makes it look like the FEMA denials are almost three times higher for “red” states than for “blue” states.

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The biggest claims are coming from AI companies themselves. Anthropic (the company that built Claude) has been making a lot of attention-getting headlines recently. One is that they had 16 Claude agents build a C compiler capable of building Linux 6.9 and this task cost $20,000 of compute.

This is a fun marketing trick. A compiler is a pretty complex piece of software but there are also a lot of them out there. Building a compiler is an undergraduate computer science project which means that 1) there are a lot of examples to draw from 2) it is an extremely well documented task. But it’s very unlikely that your business needs a new C compiler. This is an AI triumph designed not to bring a new and good thing into the world but simply to sound impressive.

The more interesting business story is from this Anthropic engineer who claims he gave Claude a technical specification and then let it do development autonomously, resulting in a production-ready product.

This is more in line with the kind of work that most software engineers do and, if this is something that an AI coding agent can reliably accomplish, it has really big implications for the future of software work.

When I worked for Very Large Tech Company, I did a lot conference talks and tech demos aimed at our existing community of developers. The goal was always “let me show you something new and exciting and then let me show you how to build it for yourself.” That last part was always crucial. No demo is valuable if our developers can’t predictably and reliably replicate it for themselves.

I look at the promotional promises that AI is making and I’m also watching my friends and collogues work in this space and there seems to be a significant gap between the promise and the practice. This experience is closer to what I’ve seen from developers earnestly engaging this technology

Ok, I think my experiment leaving AI working on stuff 24/7 ends here. It doesn’t work. Code explodes in complexity, results are not that great, the AI can’t get past hard walls… and is insanely expensive (spent ~1k over the last 2 days).

I think the dream of having AI’s working on the background and making real progress on things that matter (i.e., truly new things) isn’t here yet. It is still a machine hard-stuck on its own training data, incapable of thinking out of the box. It is great for building things that were already built. But not new things

Also coding normally has the under-appreciated advantage that you’re doing two things at the same time: building a codebase *and* learning it. AI’s do only half of that. The other half is obviously impossible.

I actually disagree on the “obviously impossible” part, but I think the way in which AI might learn from a codebase that it is building is different from the way a human learns from building a codebase.

When I start talking about how the promise of autonomous AI development doesn’t seem to be matching the rhetoric, I see one of two reactions. The first is “just wait, it’s coming”. This is kind of true. AI capabilities in the field of software have improved dramatically over the last year. But the category of problems that it has now are pretty similar to the problems it had a year ago.

The other reaction is “oh, well you’re just not doing it right”. I deeply dislike this response because it’s what I call the “weight loss supplement pitch”. It’s a strategy where I promise you a miracle solution but, when that solution doesn’t work for you, I blame you for not doing a hundred other things you need to do to get the miracle. It’s a sales tactic I really despise because it screws with the “expectation-to-implementation” process. If you tell me “in my demo, AI did XYZ”, I want to use the AI to do XYZ. If I can’t get it to do that, I’m going to look at your original statement as more of a sales tactic. Developers don’t like sales tactics. My experience with practical developers is that they are ok if you tell them that a process is complicated and has 23 detailed steps before you see productivity gains out of it. They’re fine with that story as long as you give it to them straight.

The View From The Trenches

From inside the world of software, the view is not what Anthropic is promoting in terms of fully autonomous feature creation. But AI agents as a core development tool are a very real thing. They are really writing functional code and speeding the development process.

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Note: This topic is desperately important so this article has no paywall. But in the next few weeks, I’ll be releasing my first book, “A Misfit Highwire Act” and annual paid subscribers will get a free copy. So if you’ve been thinking about signing up (or converting from monthly to annual), now you can get a free book out of it.

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I broke down and bought a Mac Mini. There was this new technology, unlike anything I had ever seen. But to build in this new way required that I purchase a Mac Mini (the cheapest option for this sort of development). This was 2008 and Apple had announced that they would allow regular old developers to build programs for the iPhone, which was less than a year old at the time. But you had to build these programs (which they called “apps”) using their development tools and hardware.

Looking back on this, it was an extremely strange time. The iPhone had a novel collection of inputs and sensors that our apps could access, but Apple’s technical documentation was a mess. Getting into the app development program meant promising not to divulge certain kinds of information, which frightened the development community to such an extent that they were afraid to help each other figure out this poorly documented platform. It seemed like a terrible, miserable way to build software.

But in this time I learned that many software developers will crawl over broken glass to be the first. They would beat their heads against a wall to build something new and novel. And they were determined not to be left behind in this new and exciting emerging market.

I guess history rhymes.

I recently bought a Mac Mini, this time to explore another fast-paced poorly documented emerging technology. The technology was called ClawdBot when I started, then it was MoltBot for a while, now it’s OpenClaw. I’ll talk about my own experience with it in my next newsletter, but here I want to take a step back and observe how this technology has kicked off a hype cycle that is bigger than anything I saw during my time in mobile development.

Let’s start with “How can I explain OpenClaw simply?” The idea behind OpenClaw is that it is a sort of utility kit for using an AI Large Language Model (LLM). Interacting with ChatGPT or Claude on the web or through a desktop application means that you can ask it questions, give it files, but it can’t really do that many things outside of those interactions.

When a user installs OpenClaw and integrates their favorite model into it, the user has an “AI agent” that lives on their machine and can run requests or prompts on a timer, read and write files, search the web, and issue commands directly to the host machine. The OpenClaw ecosystem has extensibility options so that users can give it access to their email, calendars, Discord, Slack, TikTok… the list is nearly endless.

Importantly, OpenClaw integrates with messaging apps so that the user can ask it to do things through Telegram or Signal. A user could be at a restaurant and open up their phone and ask their OpenClaw agent to build a website while they finish their dinner. By the time they get home, there’s the new website they asked for.

When it works, it feels like magic.

The easiest way to get an OpenClaw agent is to set it up on a fresh, clean device. For a variety of reasons, it’s easier to get it set up on a Mac than on a PC. The cheapest Mac you can buy is a Mac Mini. If you see news about people rushing out to buy Mac Minis, this is why.

OpenClaw has been “out in the wild” for about one month and it’s hard to describe the whirlwind inside my tech circles during that month. It is not an exaggeration to say that I have never seen a hype cycle like this one.

Everyone is in a break-neck race to capitalize on this. There are hundreds of articles and videos on how to get your own OpenClaw instance running. Over-eager technologists installed it and started downloading skills to augment their AI agent with reckless abandon, emphasis on “reckless”. A week into the explosion of ClawdBot (as it was known at the time), the most downloaded skill was one developed by a white-hat hacker specifically to demonstrate how easy it was to get people to open their machines to devastating security vulnerabilities.

He was not subtle about this. Here’s the screen the user would see if they executed the skill:

He stopped the experiment early because it was far more successful than he thought it would be.

An even more entertaining result came this week when the head of “Safety and Alignment at Meta Superintelligence” installed OpenClaw, gave it access to her email, and it began “cleaning” her email by deleting everything. It ignored her when she told it to stop. Afterwards, it sort of apologized for violating her explicit instructions.

It is a little un-nerving when the person whose job is “make sure the AI doesn’t do bad things” is so helpless to stop her own personal AI agent from doing bad things that she has to literally pull the plug on the physical hardware to get the AI to stop.

Information Overload on a Trust Deficit

The problems of ClawdBot / OpenClaw aren’t limited to security concerns or even limited to the software itself. The last few weeks have been flooded with information, guides, claims, boasts, and predictions. I’m trying to keep up with it all and it’s simply impossible.

People in my field are predicting the end of work (or maybe just the end of your job). One technologist is relentlessly touting his “zero human company” in which his Grok-based CEO is directing a swarm of Claude AI agents for everything from product discovery to development to testing and marketing. An old friend and colleague recently posted about how “Code must not be written by humans. Code must not be reviewed by humans.”

Something about this stinks to high heaven.

The excitement over OpenClaw has brought out the scammers, influencers, and marketers like nothing I’ve ever seen. They all have recommendations, predictions, and promotions. Sometimes they are trying to sell a platform, pattern, or company. Sometimes they are just trying to sell themselves in a mad scramble to try to get to the top and become a “trusted expert” in this emerging technology. I presume that the plan is to leverage this into a new career or consulting gig or motivational speaking invitation but it could just be good old fashioned attention seeking behavior.

Every single day feels like another avalanche of claims and promises about the future of software, the future of code, the future of everyone. I can barely keep my head above water trying to internalize it all.

While the hype cycle is out of control for people in the business of writing software, that frothing sea of anticipation and anxiety is escaping the confines of our industry.

A few weeks ago, there was a monstrously popular article titled “Something Big is Happening” about how AI is only going to keep accelerating, taking over huge swaths of the knowledge economy. But it was written by a guy who has a history of duplicity promoting himself on the wave of AI news and a more sober-minded AI researcher called it “a masterpiece of hype”.

Then last Sunday, Cintrini Research, a financial group I had never heard of that seems to exist primarily on Substack, published what can only be described as a piece of speculative fiction pretending to be a news flash from 2028 in which people are vibe-coding DoorDash replacements in a matter of weeks, software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies enter a downward spiral, unemployment skyrockets, and the entire economy is thrown into a paradigm for which it is barely prepared.

Back in the real world, IBM stock dropped 10% the day after this article was published, a loss of nearly $30 billion in stockholder value.

Across the software industry, the selloff was so severe that, two days later, Citadel Securities, a $20 billion investment firm, offered a point-by-point rebuttal, noting that none of the claims in the Cintrini piece seem to be backed up with any kind of market evidence. The next day, IBM stock recovered 4%.

In such a whirlwind of information, how do we sift out the valuable information from the scams? In short, how do we know who we can trust to give us clear, useful, honest, helpful information?

I believe that what is happening right now in AI and software is ground-breaking and industry changing, but the changes it will bring in aren’t the kind of changes that move markets to panic or make headlines or turn into viral articles.

Instead I look to the people I’ve known and trusted in my own industry and I find that the people I’ve long trusted are not the people making or spreading news. They’re not plugged into the hype cycle but watching from the edges. People like are doing the kind of work that is at the center of this information overload but he is not freaking out. Jon is doing what he’s done for decades; he is building.

is not losing his mind over the coding capabilities of the newest AI platform. He is testing it out. He used a popular AI development utility / platform to solve a well defined, contained business problem that would have been extremely hard to solve without AI. If you are tech-minded (or business minded), his post is very much worth your time. He explains in enormous detail exactly how he went from “business problem” to “coded solution”.

Real people are the solution to hype. Trusted sources are the way through this morass of informational chaos. The future of information is not through an AI that doesn’t understand hype, lies, and motivated reasoning. It’s through people that you know will tell you the unsexy truth, who do the hard work, who will excitedly sell you on the upsides but won’t bullshit you about the downsides.

Almost to a person, the people I admire and trust are testing the technology. They are working in it, exploring the possibilities and limitations, and trying to figure out what it means to leverage all the available tools in an emerging technological landscape.

This is not a sexy answer. Doing the work, understanding the context, and thinking hard about the practical applications of what this means is not sexy. At the end of the day, the AI news cycle is just like most recent news cycles. If you want to know who to trust, the very un-sexy answer is that you trust the people who have weathered a panic before and shown themselves to be sober-minded, reasoned, and careful. Most journalists do not understand it or even have enough understanding of the underlying technology to know who to talk to in order to understand it.

It would be silly to say I already know all the important people in this space but I know enough of them that I get suspicious when some viral claim comes to me without endorsement from people within my trusted network. The excitement has to filter through them before I can start believing it.

I have my own opinions about all this (especially the “down to brass tacks” practical implications of AI in the world of software development) but this piece is already getting long. I’m going to have to write a second piece detailing my own experience working with AI as a software guy and what I think it means for the future of software and for the future of everyone.

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When my dad died, I wrote about it as it was happening. It was a surreal experience and I know it made some people uncomfortable but it also helped others see the raw grief, the helplessness of it all, the weird bureaucratic nuts and bolts of death. There is something in that experience that changes us. It changed me.

Someone I know recently wrote about her mother’s death. What I saw in her grief was a mirror of my own experience, one of the most terrible episodes of any life. As awful as these experiences were, they were also profoundly good. Death is an evil but it is an evil we all must face and we should face it with courage, dignity, and love.

I looked at my journey through my fathers death and I read the story of her journey through her mother’s death and I thought about how glad I am that both these deaths happened outside the window of 2020-2022. I thought about how much the Covid response damaged individuals and families beyond even the pain of death.

The Covid virus killed a little over a million people in the United States. The virus attacked their lungs and heart but it did not force them to die alone. Our medical and public health institutions did that. The Covid virus didn’t isolate children from their parents. It didn’t abandon centuries of religious comfort in the face of death. The virus didn’t wrap plastic gloves filled with warm water around the hands of the dying in order to make them feel like a human was there to comfort them when they were utterly alone.

I know Covid is over. I know no one wants to talk about it any more. I know that some people don’t want to talk about it because the things they said, the policies they supported, and the actions they performed during that time is something they have difficulty looking straight in the face.

After I finished reading another heart-rending story of a family gathered around a wife and mother and literally holding on to her until the very last moment, I had to take a few moments to quietly mourn for the lost.

Then I thought about all the stories that were lost because hospitals insisted on isolating families from their dying loved ones. In his intense and emotional piece on wanting to become a father, Colin Wright noted that, when his father suffered convulsions during the pandemic, his family was barred from joining him in the ambulance and hospital. Thankfully, his father survived, but they didn’t know that at the time. They could have been unknowingly saying goodbye to the slam of an ambulance door only to collect updates over the phone for the next few weeks.

For many people, this was their experience. Cut off from their loved ones in those precious last days, they simply don’t know what the end was like for their fathers and sisters. Those experiences were devoured by silence. Families said goodbye through an iPad instead of at a bedside.

This was a tremendous evil. It was an evil happening quietly because no one was there to write the stories. The people who needed to be at a bedside were shut out of the room and the suffering of their loved ones went unnoticed and unrecorded in the dark.

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In the last few years, I’ve been giving a lot of thought to how we approach dependence. There is an undercurrent of cultural disdain for people who are dependent on others. People who genuinely need help hesitate to reach out because they would rather suffer than be seen as needing the help of another person. But we all need help from time to time. We were all babies who were utterly dependent on a mother or caregiver. We will all die and many of us will be dependent on other people in our final days. None of this makes us lesser.

I really enjoyed this conversation and I hope you do too. Leah is on twitter (X) and is worth a follow.

When you know how to look for it, this behavior is everywhere. It was more prevalent during Covid because everyone was so certain that they had science on their side. People made endless prediction about the path of the pandemic based on assumptions or models or “common sense” but weeks would pass and reality would stubbornly refuse to fit into the tidy narratives.

I was reminded of this today when New York Times reporter Ben Mullin wrote about how, despite the fact that Congress slashed a half billion in funding for public media, few of the stations have shut down. This is in contradiction to the predictions of “experts”.

First of all, I say “bravo” to Mullin for daring to write a piece that exposes the errors of this particular narrative. I’m used to people simply ignoring the errors of the past and pretending like they were simply correct all along. Rarely do people return to their inaccurate predictions and say “huh. Guess I missed on that one.” It is even rarer for people to wonder why they got it wrong and re-evaluate their position so that they can be less wrong in the future.

I will temper that praise by noting that Mullin does not name and shame the “experts” who got this prediction so wrong. He notes that “according to one estimate, 78 public radio stations and 37 TV stations were at risk of going dark” but doesn’t inform readers that this estimate was made by the Public Media Company based on data from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Nor does he point readers to the fact that he uncritically reported this data months ago, going so far as to generate infographics for it as if the job of the New York Times was to launder and enhance press releases from obviously biased parties.

The difficulty with arguing against these kinds of projections in the moment is that no one knows the future. It seems to make sense in a cause-and-effect world that revoking funding for public media would result in the collapse of stations that drew from that funding. But the world is not a static place and money is fungible and the result of the dissolution of that funding did not result in the dire scenario that the “experts” predicted.

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I decided to compile a list of books I’ve read this year (or that have struck me recently). There isn’t really any rhyme or reason to it, though I’ve been meaning to interview a few authors on this list and need to kick myself to get those interviews scheduled and done. I’ve also included links to Amazon for all these books, which get me a little kickback but you can probably get most of them cheaper on AbeBooks.

Favorite Non-Fiction Novel - The Maniac by Benjamin Labatut

The Maniac is a whirlwind of a book that mostly follows the life of polymath John Von Neumann. It presents Von Neumann through the eyes of those around him and, through those eyes, he is brilliant, energetic, incomprehensible, and even frightening as he builds bombs and computers, develops game theory, and proposes self-reproducing machine automation. The latter part of the book leaps from Von Neumann’s accomplishments and applies them to modern AI in an absolutely riveting account of the first AI to beat the human Go Master. This book is more novel than non-fiction but it is riveting.

Favorite Audiobook - The Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison, read by Joe Morton

The Invisible Man had escaped my attention in high school and college but I picked it up on Audible. This was a good choice. The book is narrated by Joe Morton (who played technologist Miles Dyson in Terminator 2) and it is a powerful piece of work. Morton brings a certain relentless frustration, drive, and outrage to this book about the black experience in early 20th century America.

I did not realize how much this book is about power and cynicism of all men. Invisible Man is unsparing in its portrayal of men, black and white alike, who leverage race, poverty, and guilt to their own ends. It is alternatively beautiful, heartbreaking, and infuriating and Joe Morton reads it all in an unforgettable performance.

Favorite Comic Novel - Human Capital by Moro Rogers

This book is really tremendous and extremely timely. Human Capital is about a near-future in which all human needs are filled in a universal basic income sort of way and the result is an underclass of people who, though their needs are met, struggle to find meaning and purpose while an elite class soars above them at unimaginable decadence. It’s a book exploring the outworking of a fully automated world, the creative impulse, the drive for inspiration and success, and what happens to a social hierarchy when the regular signals of value, connection, and community are short circuited.

I’m not going to lie, this book is manic. It has a strain of techno-magical realism to it that stretches it beyond a stable narrative frame. It is a wild ride and I sometimes got lost in it. But it’s captivating and it is trying to playfully engage what might happen to us in a world where we have all we need and nothing we want. I loved it. I’m going to read it again on my Christmas vacation.

Favorite Philosophy Book (About People) - The Dignity of Dependence by Leah Libresco Sargeant

I did not know this was going to be a philosophy book. I’ve followed Leah Libresco for about a decade and knew her from twitter as a thinker, mother, writer, and Catholic. I expected her book to reflect her writing on twitter and her op-ed writing, but it goes far deeper than that.

Leah presents us with an ontological case for the dignity of dependence that stems from the reality of human bodies. Her primary concern is about how female bodies are naturally more dependent (physically, socially, relationally) and are vessels of dependence through the natural states of pregnancy and motherhood. She observes how much our society recoils from open signs of dependence, encouraging people (mostly women) to hide the indicators that their bodies throw out signals of dependence throughout their lives and especially around their capacity as bearers of children.

I did not expect something this rich. I didn’t expect these extended ruminations of the self and the other and the nature of this co-mingling of the dependents and those who care for them. This is a deeply thoughtful, deeply human book that insists that we ask some hard questions about how we see ourselves and others as relational and inter-dependent creatures in a culture that idolizes individuality and independence.

Favorite Philosophy Book (About Animals) - The Unheeded Cry by Bernard Rollin

I did not know this was going to be a philosophy book. I discovered Bernard Rollin because I’m close friends with one of his students who works in a field of what I’m going to call “industrial animal welfare”. Rollin was a philosopher who focused on the ethics of animal pain, specifically in a farm and veterinary setting. The full title of this book is “The Unheeded Cry: Animal Consciousness, Animal Pain and Scientific Change” and it is his philosophical case for the moral consideration of animal consciousness and pain and what our responsibilities might be toward that, especially in the context of industrial farming.

If this sounds too hippy-dippy, you really should read this book. Rollin is refreshingly practical. His view of animal pain isn’t that we all need to become vegans but that we need to incorporate an understanding of the importance of the animal experience into the process of how we utilize them. He isn’t anti-meat, he just wants us to recognize the very practical reality that meat comes from a thing that is conscious and can feel pain and we should treat that reality with respect and not pretend it is a non-issue.

The Unheeded Cry a deeply practical, deeply humane book. I really enjoyed the almost sarcastic dismissal that Rollin had for people who refuse to accept that normies think their abstract theories of animal welfare (like giving animals voting rights) are stupid. Rollin wants proponents for animal welfare to strive to put their efforts into promoting ideas that resonate with the practical and moral core of their fellow citizens and not promote ideas that make them sound like crazy people who should be quickly dismissed.

To this end, his case for animal consciousness and a consideration of animal pain is profoundly plain and clear. It shies away from philosophical abstractions which philosophers often use to hide their nonsense and makes the case in a language and reasoning that appeals to our very human moral sensibilities and empathies.

Favorite Philosophy Book (About Buildings) - The Timeless Way of Building by Christopher Alexander

I guess I read a lot of philosophy this year. This was not intentional.

This has been a really emotional year for me. I picked up The Timeless Way of Building as a comfort read. I’ve read it before and makes my heart ache for the beauty and longing of it all.

Christopher Alexander is one of the top 10 intellectuals who has impacted my life. He was mostly an architect but, as you read Timeless Way, you get the sense that architecture was a means to an end for him. What he really wanted was to help people be more human. He didn’t want to make buildings, he wanted to make homes. Alexander believed that homes, shops, and towns were made out of patterns of natural human interaction which pointed to natural human longings. He believes that we could identify those patterns and put them together in a way such that the houses we live in aren’t just a roof over our heads. He wants these buildings to support our lives and bring out the best of who we are. He wanted to build houses that encouraged children to play around grandparents, where mom could work in her knitting corner while still being a part of the social gatherings. He promoted building things that give life, promote connection, and inspire joy.

Timeless Way is my favorite philosophy book because it is bursting at the seams with a relentless love for life and and encouragement to the reader that they can build something that gives life, supports family and joy, and enriches the community. He wants everyone to just sit down and think about who they are, how they want to live. He believed that, if we ask the right questions, we can all build a space that puts something natural, healthy, and good into the world.

Favorite Partial Read - Mark Twain by Ron Chernow

There is a joke that when dads turn 35, they have to pick a period of history that they will obsess about. I ended up with two and one of them is the 1850’s-1890’s which covers the Civil War through to the Wild West. This is an era of industrial, political, martial, and intellectual giants. Mark Twain was one of them.

This book gives a great account of the early parts of Twain’s life, from his boyhood in Missouri, his ambitions to be a steamboat captain on the Mississippi, his stint as a half-hearted Confederate soldier, and his explosion into the literary work with Innocents Abroad.

This book portrays Twain in incredible detail; perhaps too much detail. I suspect the author wanted to write the definitive biography of Twain’s life and Twain, a compulsive letter writer, provided him with more than enough material about even the smallest events in his life. I gave up about two thirds of the way through when it sounded like we were in for another 20 pages about an elderly Twain’s umpteenth disastrous money-making scheme.

The book is good but is hobbled by Chernow’s strange insistence of judging Mark Twain by the moral standards of a 2010’s critical studies graduate student. Twain was an enormously vocal figure against slavery and racism, a friend to Jews, blacks, and even Europeans (though he held a strong antipathy for Native Americans). But Chernow frequently scolds Twain for writing about race using words and phrases that were tepid in Twain’s time. He even scolds Twain for using a stereotype in a complimentary way. He applies the word “anti-Sematic” to Twain in a few bizarre places where Twain stands in deep admiration of the Jewish people, defending them stalwartly in writing and in speeches to an unfriendly world. Twain was often a lonely defender against bigotry and racism of all kinds and he carried this message across the world. It seems like a base form of ahistorical smugness for Chernow to slap Twain on the wrist for observing that 19th century Jews were frugal.

This book is good in parts, even great. But it ultimately shoots itself in the foot with a lack of focus and a refusal to look at Twain as a figure who lived in his own time and not ours.

Favorite “Technical” Book - The Phoenix Project by Gene Kim, Kevin Behr, and George Spafford

The company I’m working for has a “book club” for the engineering department and this year we read The Phoenix Project together. It is a fun novel about building software and managing IT at a big company. If you’re not in the software business, this might not be for you, but it was definitely a huge help for our team. Reading this book together gave us a touch-point and common insight into a lot of business and process difficulties like backlogs, bottlenecks, release velocity, and a host of other difficulties in project development and release.

The authors cleverly embed these ideas into a compelling novel detailing the drama, power struggles, personality clashes, and technical challenges that are common on software teams. There were a lot of characters in the book who had the quirks and traits that many on my team recognize from our years in the industry. It was a great book and probably the book that had the most direct impact on my life this year.

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AI can be utterly cold and heartless. That’s why it was perfect for the job I had in mind. I wanted an advisor fully devoid of human em…

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Ann and I have been wandering around the Twitter / X infosphere for several years (since Covid). I understood from her recent writing that she felt she had to leave Minnesota, partly over the frightening reactions she’s seen in response to her efforts to make the extent of this scandal public. Such a move, while sometimes necessary, is always a tragedy and I wanted to talk to her and capture her story in this.

If you’re not familiar with the details of this story, the long story as short as possible is that there is a widespread pattern of benefits fraud in Minnesota. There are been several distinct strategies employed by a group of Somali fraudsters that have been systematically leeching benefits funds from the state and federal government. We’re not quite sure exactly the full scope but it is almost certainly more than a billion dollars.

I wanted to talk to Ann because she has been investigating this problem for years. Her discovery of this problem came about in her actions during Covid where she was desperately trying to reach outside her own sphere of safety to help others. I admire that impulse enormously and I’m delighted that she was willing to talk with me about it.

The picture Ann paints for us is a very bleak one. It is a story of rampant and unchecked fraud, most of which is still uncovered. It is a story of theft being winked at by public officials and ignored by the voting public. By the end of the podcast, I’m basically begging for good news.

And there is some good news, mostly in the stories of the good people Ann has come to know who are fighting for justice and are repulsed by the cynicism and corruption of their state and local politicians.

Walter Hudson is a Minnesota State Representative who has been fighting against this fraud from within the Minnesota state government. Bill Glahn works with American Experiment and has been writing about this problem for many months. Joe Thompson is a federal prosecutor who has been chasing after justice in these cases.

Ann also wanted to make note that, while most of the fraudsters are Somali, she has spoken with many wonderful people in the Somali communities who are frustrated and distressed by the rampant corruption and fraud they see all around them. It has been distressing to them to see those in their community who are corrupt, amoral, and unjust become tightly connected with sources of power and raised up and praised as the pillars of their community.

When the righteous are in authority, the people rejoice; but when the wicked rule, the people groan. - Proverbs 29:2

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The podcast in full is free to everyone. I have some additional thoughts, details, and commentary below the paywall.

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This video is all so much partisan jawboning that I find it difficult to watch the whole thing without rolling my eyes. But the take-away is when the Democratic representatives in the video are speaking to uniformed military and demand “You must refuse illegal orders.”

If we take this video in complete isolation, it is true. Our enlisted military should, indeed, not follow illegal orders. That is true and they act in great honor and with great bravery when they refuse an illegal order.

The problem is that the Democrats have put out this video as bait. They follow that bait with declarations that certain specific actions from the Trump administration are illegal orders. Katie Porter, who is one of the front-runners for the upcoming California governor’s race, referenced this video when she said that the act of calling National Guard into Los Angeles was an “illegal order”.

This ruling that Porter is referencing was quickly stayed by the 9th Circuit. This means Porter is using a out-of-date headline to say that Trump sending National Guard into LA was an illegal order because one judge said so even though that judge’s ruling was quickly reversed.

The thing I’m getting at is that the demand that uniformed military reject illegal orders is, in isolation, exactly true and good and honorable. In isolation, that is what we want from our soldiers. But this honor is subsequently being leveraged in a partisan and selfish context to imply (if not outright demand) that soldiers can refuse to follow orders from the Trump administration.

Think of the legality of this particular action as a timeline. President Trump sends the National Guard to LA on June 9, 2025. Judge Charles Breyer declares that this action was illegal on September 2. The Ninth Circuit stays this ruling on October 22nd. So if we’re looking at the formal legality of this particular action, it looks like this:

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We are going to talk about how this happened, what this means (for both Canada and the United States), what the dangers are, and what can be done about it.

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Define Elimination

The first thing we need to do is come to an understanding of terms. During the Covid pandemic, I became fascinated with the history of disease eradication (which is not a synonym for elimination) because so many of the strategies for Covid containment drew from this theory that Covid could be contained with the same strategies we used to contain smallpox and polio.

In this discovery mode, I learned that there is a big difference between “elimination” and “eradication” which is incredibly annoying because they seem to be describing similar things and they both start with “e”.

In the context of disease management, “eradication” means that there are zero detected cases of the disease in a given region for a period of 3 consecutive years. When the WHO was attempting to eradicate smallpox in the 1960’s and 1970’s, they insisted that any region requesting the eradication status allow their researchers to conduct disease surveillance. Eradication is a big deal and the only disease that has been successfully eradicated is smallpox (though polio is close).

The “elimination” of a disease is a much lower hurdle than eradication. Simply put, elimination means that the disease is not spreading naturally within a given country or region. As with measles, the disease may be introduced through some foreign source, but the outbreaks are usually small and ultimately contained. A few people might get sick, but it doesn’t spread from town to town.

The formal public health definition of elimination is that the disease spread does not last for more than 12 months. This 12 month mark is important because disease spread is incredibly seasonal, driven by population-level changes in human behavior that are impossible to control. There might be an outbreak that was started by a foreign introduction and went around a town or city for a few days or weeks and then died out. The important thing is it died out. It will require another foreign introduction to get more people sick.

But if people are contracting new cases of the disease from local sources over the course of a full year, that means the disease is endemic and is managing to survive and infect people through an entire seasonal infection cycle. This means that foreign introductions are not required for the disease to spread and can potentially continue infecting within that population indefinitely.

That’s bad.

Oh, Canada

Back to Canada. The reason Canada lost its elimination status is because exactly this thing happened. Measles has been spreading within communities in Canada for over 12 months. It has become endemic, which means that is is consistently present.

How did this happen? There are many theories but it seems like the most coherent one is connected to the Canadian Mennonite community. The Mennonites are a Christian religious sect (denomination? I’m not sure) that has fairly low rates of vaccination. The ongoing spread in Canada seems to have originated from a Mennonite gathering in Ontario about a year ago and has spread continuously in nearly every province since then.

It’s difficult to know exactly what is happening with the data I’ve been able to obtain. Canada has had over 5,000 cases of measles in the last year but they only have 150,000 Mennonites. If these cases were even a majority of measles cases, that puts the rate of infection in the Mennonite community at about 2%. This is really high but it’s also pretty much in line with the rate of measles infection in the famous Samoan measles outbreak of 2019.

Canada seems to be in this pattern where there is a serious and large measles outbreak in a tight-knit community with very low vaccination rates, which then leak into the larger population and cause flare-ups, which die out because of the higher vaccination rates.

Elimination Round 2

There has been a lot of talk about measles in the United States (because it’s been a bad year for measles), but it really has been much worse in Canada. Keep in mind that Canada’s population is only 12% of the US population. If we charted Canada’s measles rate against the US, the US would look like a flat line.

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It’s been hard. It’s been bad. He was young.

So many of his friends were shocked by the suddenness of his death and have asked “what happened?” I have learned that this question means “did he commit suicide or did he die of an overdose?” The answer to both these questions is “no”. Past that, no one really cares about what happened.

I don’t want to over-share here because this is a family affair. He was my brother and I love him very much, but not as much as I should have.

I could write pages about my brother. He was good man who led a hard life. He was a veteran of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and his experiences there pushed him toward a lot of dark places. A lot of events in his life worked against him and he worked against himself a lot of the time. He fell into despair that I wish I could have helped with.

I’m being careful with the details because this story is not fully mine and I don’t want to give too much of it out. Grief is a difficult thing. It is usually private but the private nature of it means that most people aren’t prepared for it. It’s good to understand grief so that we can show it more appropriately when it comes for us.

The one thing I want to say about my brother is that he didn’t love himself enough. He didn’t commit suicide, but he also didn’t value his own life enough. In the wake of his death, people poured out their love for him. Everyone was devastated, everyone was shocked. The scale of passion for him, the scope of the love that we all had for him, it was all out in the open but a few weeks too late.

If I’m being honest, I’m not writing this to talk about my brother. I’m writing this to talk about us. About me and you. We need to reach out. If we need to be seen, let us tell our loved ones that we need to be seen.

Let’s reach out to the people who matter to us. Don’t push them off or push them away. They care for us more than we know. We can’t really know how profound that love is until we ask for it. It seems ridiculous to ask for love and attention, but I want to say as clear as day that this is much better than the alternative. The alternative is that they wish they could give that love and attention but they can’t because it is too late.

You are not replacable. No one will take your place, not ever. Your absence will be profound and it will be most profound among the people who are most important to you. Your absence will leave a gaping hole in the world. That’s how it should be. But that means that you are a bulwark against this grief. You are holding back the void by living here and loving those around you. Don’t give up on that. It’s important. You’re important.

Time is short. Make it count.

The Cast of Characters

Jonathan Crabb is director at Home Depot by day and a futu…

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This isn’t at all surprising to me because I have eyeballs and I am not ideologically blind to the reality that was staring us in the face. Four years ago, YouTube removed a scientific round-table on what Covid mitigation strategies were appropriate after the release of the Covid vaccine. It was an incredibly tame discussion between Governor DeSantis, Dr Jay Bhattacharya, Dr Scott Atlas, Dr Martin Kulldorff, and Dr Sunetra Gupta in which they made recommendations that, while uncontroversial in many European countries, clashed with the recommendations of the Biden administration.

I responded to this with my standard timidity.

The admission for this obvious thing might seem like a victory of sorts for those of us who have been sharply critical of Google and YouTube for their despicable censorship and cowardice in the face of vindicative political pressure. Some on the right are taking a victory lap for Google’s admission of guilt and sparkly new commitment to public debate.

I do not join them. This is not a victory. This is simply the admission of wrongdoing without any form of punishment for the guilty or restitution for the injured. The Biden administration got exactly what they wanted without consequence. They won and it wasn’t a temporary victory.

This is a strategy that the left has deployed many times now. In a moment favorable to them, they fire, censor, and otherwise destroy their enemies. Then, when the tide turns against them, they say “oopsie, maybe we went too far. Well that’s over now, no need for retribution (which would make you a hypocrite) or restitution (which is really just affirmative action when you think about it). We kicked you down and you need to just stay in the mud while we mouth the words ‘I’m sorry’ with our fingers crossed behind our backs.”

If I seem uncharitable and upset, it’s because this is not the first time I’ve see this pattern play out.

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Dr Philip Bunn, Jonathan Crabb and I have been talking about the pros and cons of generative AI for about a year and Dr Bunn has seen fit to invited us all to Covenant College for a discussion on the promises and pitfalls of generative AI in the context of a Christian education and a Christian worldview in general.

From the official source:

“On Wednesday October 1st at 6:30pm, you can join Assistant Professor of Political Science Philip D. Bunn and Covenant alums Jonathan Crabb (Computer Science, 2000) and Matthias Shapiro (Pre-Engineering, 2001) in Mills 270/280 for a conversation on new Artificial Intelligence tools, their prospects, and their challenges for Christians in college and beyond. With Jonathan’s work in corporate technology and Matthias’s work as both a practitioner and educator in the technology industry (formerly: Disney, Microsoft), our guests will provide real-world knowledge and experience to help answer questions we all are wrestling with in academia.”

Covenant College is a Christian college located at

Mills 280/280
14049 Scenic Highway
Lookout Mountain, Georgia

You can grab this link to the campus map, or you can download this much funnier version from me.

Feel free to DM me on X or leave a comment if you’d like to come. Looking forward to seeing you there!

I was shaken. I am still shaken. If you follow me on the worlds most insane social media platform, I’ve been a mess. I’m all over the place with anger, frustration, and grief. I have a lot of important things to do and it is very hard to do them right now because my mind is on Charlie Kirk.

I did not know Kirk well before he was killed. I’ve watched a lot of Charlie Kirk since he died. I was more impressed than I thought I would be. I think Charlie and I missed each other by about 5 years. I saw him 10 years ago as a younger man, full of fury and energy and I interpreted that as ideologue, a grifter, someone who would follow the party line regardless of direction for the purpose of money or influence or fame.

But as I’ve watched him through the many videos, I see someone who I didn’t see on Twitter. I see someone who was funny, thoughtful, well-read, smart, and who loved to engage people. He seems really good in so many of these interactions.

As I’m seeing this, I’m also hearing from my more liberal friends about the severity of Charlie’s thought crimes. If you’re looking for a good summary of what both the right and left thought of Charlie, click that link.

But in this moment, the most shocking thing I see is how people can watch a man die in front of them and their first thought is to demonize him. And then their second thought is to lie about him. And their third thought is to make sure everyone knows, in enormous detail, how evil he was.

I am at the end of my rope with this.

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Something Has Happened

Something happened with Charlie’s death. Things have changed. The attitudes and conversation has shifted and I’m not sure everyone fully realizes what has taken place. I’ve seen liberals say “oh you’ll forget about this in a few months” and I’m a little shocked that their theory of other minds is this broken.

For myself, I’ve set a new bar for public debate and conversation. I need people to show me that they think their opponent is a human being.

As an example, Ilhan Omar compared Charlie Kirk to “Dr Frankenstein whose monster shot him through the neck”. That is psychotic thinking. That is the sort of thinking that leads to genocides, to indiscriminate murder, to the slaughter of innocents for being on the “wrong side” of some political debate.

This brings us to a new normal. There is no compromise possible with people who watch a man die for the crime of speaking and say “good”. They have placed themselves outside the range of reasonable discourse. They have thrown up a flare that says “I do not think my opponents are humans and, because of this, they may die as dogs”.

This is the last straw. These people are no longer welcome in civil society. They may rage and yell and spew their bile, but their opinions, thoughts, and arguments will no longer take space in my mind.

From here on out, the starting point of any argument, any debate, is the question “Do you think your opponent is human? Will you mourn their death? Are they worthy of life and liberty?” If the answer is “no”, then this person is lost. They have allowed their souls to be consumed by a hatred so profound that I doubt even they fully understand it . They have lost themselves to the demon of politics.

What should be done about the lost in this situation? They certainly should not be teaching the children of the people they hate. They should be purged from schools, universities, and any form of law enforcement. This isn’t cancel culture, not by a mile. This is the recognition that when someone is eager to deny the humanity of their fellow men, there is no limit to what rules they will break, what horror they will commit, what evil they will engage. This person cannot be given any form of power over the people they despise. They should certainly not be trusted around children.

This opinion seems harsh as I state it here, but it is the result of watching a significant chunk of people claim the the words coming out of Charlie Kirk’s mouth meant that it had to be closed with a bullet. We cannot live with someone who suggests that the world is a better place when a human whose greatest crime is a verbal disagreement is put death in a public forum. These are evil people and cowards. They wouldn’t pull the trigger themselves but, having watched this man die on video in front of them, they say “he got what was coming to him”. This is not a stable place for a civil society. We cannot tolerate this attitude and still live together.

The starting point for engagement in the public sphere has to be “I think the world is better with you in it”. Anyone who can’t come to this position needs to be pushed outside the arena. They can watch the debate, but they are not welcome. They can keep their anti-human nihilism to themselves.

In this video, Gladwell is referencing his panel at the 2022 MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference on transgender athletes. Gladwell says that he is ashamed of his performance on that panel because he allowed himself to be “cowed” and that, furthermore, if the panel were held today it would run entirely in the opposite direction*. What he is trying to say here is that the panel represented not the truth of the matter nor what people really believed about the topic but what they were supposed to believe and were pressured to believe.

Writer Tim Miller was dismissive of Gladwell’s portrayal, claiming that Gladwell (and other powerful and wealthy people) “said the en vogue thing then and they are saying the en vogue thing now.” This interpretation makes sense. Miller is essentially claiming that there is no courage to be found in Gladwell’s reversal, he is merely floating along with the tide. JK Rowling went a bit further, calling Gladwell a “weathervane… a man who’d have named names, but felt a bit uncomfortable about it afterwards.”

Stepping outside the specific critique of Gladwell, Megan McArdle relayed her experience in trying to write about Lia Thomas and how terrified everyone was when talking to her about things as innocuous as swim competition timing rules. She ticks off story after story about people who were terrified to say anything at all because they feared the cancel cops.

“I just said I was going to cover the race. People absolutely unloaded - not conservatives, who just rolled their eyes, but nice liberals who donated to Planned Parenthood and HRC. They would unleash unprompted rants about how unfair it was.

But none of them would ever say that publicly. They figured I was safe, because right-leaning columnist. They didn't want to be quoted, they were hiding it from a lot of their friends, and they were both afraid, and furious that they were afraid to state the *utterly obvious fact* that males have an athletic advantage.”

All in all, this is yet another instructive event that teaches us about how much people self-censor and how many people end up living by lies. And if this story were only about transgender athletes and self-censorship, I wouldn’t be writing about it here. My bigger concern is how this impacts institutional integrity, the wisdom of experts, and how we can build a world in which we can be confident we are able to find the truth.

We Need To Elevate Dissenters

At the tail end of Covid, I wrote a piece for the American Spectator called “Covid Aftermath: Repentance and Reconciliation”. In it, I leaned into a very Christian view of repentance as a model for reforming the relational bonds that had been broken during the pandemic. I think it holds up well.

The most important part of my vision is the “reconciliation” bit at the end in which I make a plea to elevate the dissenters.

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As we prepped for this podcast, she shared a few supporting pieces that are good to go through as we navigate this topic. She also introduced me to the term “Brokenism” to describe how the most important divide in our culture isn’t left-right but “those who believe there is something fundamentally broken in America, and that it’s an emergency, and those who do not.”

I think there is something in this, especially because I think the upcoming generation feels this more potently (and will impact it more powerfully) than older folk.

We also talked about the importance of physicality, which led Alana to recommend County Highway, a “magazine about America in the form of a [physical] 19th century newspaper”.

Finally, if you’re inclined toward reading more about excellence, culture, art, and beauty, check out the latest IM 1776 issue “The Culture Stone”. IM 1776 is really well done literary journal and I’ve enjoyed every one of their issues.

Here is the recommended reading for this podcast:

Everything is Broken - January 14, 2021 - Alana Newhouse

Beauty Has Become Our Enemy - December 19, 2022 - David Samuels

The Death of Cool - July 13, 2025 - David Samuels

Brokenism - November 21, 2022 - Alana Newhouse