Ray Oldenburg gave us the phrase "third place" in 1989, and the rich world spent the next few decades demolishing every example of one. The first place is home. The second place is work. The third place is everything else, the café, the pub, the bowling alley, the…
I don't believe we live in a simulation. But I understand why the idea refuses to go away, because somewhere around 2016 the plot stopped making sense and nobody bothered to fix it. The writing got lazy and the show just kept running. Look at the actual sequence.…
If you want to understand the next twenty years of geopolitics, you do not need a stack of foreign policy journals. You need to understand how a leading-edge chip gets made, because that process is the most concentrated, most fragile, and most strategically loaded supply chain in human history, and…
Public discourse is exhausting, and I think I finally know why. Almost nobody is saying what they actually think. They are all performing a position instead. Politicians say what polls well. Journalists frame the story to fit the outlet's line. Academics chase papers that will get cited rather…
Something I can't stop noticing is that nothing works as well as it used to, and I don't mean that in the back-in-my-day way. I mean it structurally, across systems that have no connection to each other. Airlines cannot keep to their own schedules. Hospitals fall…
The thing I keep noticing, across very different industries, is that the middle of everything is thinning out. Middle-class jobs. Mid-tier companies. Medium-sized countries and the leverage they used to have in a negotiation. Moderate political positions. The forty-something professional who, ten years ago, would be hitting the most valuable…
Sometime in the last forty years the institutions that used to carry risk on your behalf quietly handed it back to you, and they did it while telling you that you had just been set free. The clearest case is the pension. For a good stretch of the twentieth century…
Housing is the defining political issue of this century and almost nobody treats it that way. We talk about it as if it were weather, as if prices rose the way tides rise and the market simply did what markets do, and all of that language quietly hides the fact…
