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The Infrastructure Hypothesis

Examining Why Nothing Changes We notice something missing from the articles we read about crises: calls to action. Not just absent—systematically absent. The diagnosis is intricate, the stakes presented as existential, the moral clarity apparent. Then nothing. The reader closes the tab, scrolls to the next story, and continues.

The Great AI Triple-Talk

When Everyone's an Expert and Nobody Knows Anything Artificial intelligence is either transforming everything, about to collapse in a spectacular bubble, or desperately needs better change management. Depending on which expert you ask, AI is simultaneously the solution to enterprise productivity, a massive speculative delusion, and a workflow

The Happiness Trap: How Institutions Weaponize Wellbeing

"If you're happy and you know it, clap your hands." Finland has topped the World Happiness Report for eight consecutive years. This statistical triumph feels increasingly surreal when you learn that roughly half a million Finns—nearly 10% of the adult population—are trapped in a

The Bubble, the Breakfast, and the Billionaires

Ted Gioia made his AI bubble essay free to all readers this week, and the timing feels almost cinematic. Markets have been on a jittery seesaw, NVIDIA's chart looks less like a rocket and more like a stalled elevator, and even Sam Altman is whispering "bubble"

The Careful Curation of Crisis

When Documentation Becomes Performance There's an almost therapeutic quality to Heather Cox Richardson's latest dispatch—the way it transforms a bewildering array of governmental chaos into a coherent story of democratic erosion. National Guard troops spreading mulch, mass firings at health agencies, data breaches, budget freezes:

Architectures of Urgency: Walls of Text and the Infinite Scroll

From a POSIWD lens — Purpose of Systems in What’s Done — viral doom essays are more than pieces of commentary. They are artifacts of the systems that produce and circulate them, shaped by the incentives of algorithmic platforms and the behaviors those platforms reward. These essays rarely do what they

How to Hate the Game (As Well as the Players)

A Field Guide to Principled Cynicism in the Age of Performative Democracy Fresh in my inbox this week: Oregon Democrats asking for money to support Texas Democrats who fled the state to break quorum and block Republican redistricting. "The gloves are off," they announced, "and Texas Democrats

The System Worked (and That's the Problem)

A systems-level autopsy of United States v. Skrmetti — and how institutions convert moral urgency into outcomes that betray their values. This essay was written not in cynicism but in grief — and with care. It is offered in the hope that more honest accounting of how systems behave can help us

When Satire Becomes Science

How a Game About Corporate Crisis Management Predicted Sig Sauer's Playbook Or: The Day Our Fictional Framework Started Writing Real Press Releases The Timeline That Broke Reality Tuesday Morning: We read Open Source Defense's brilliant analysis of Sig Sauer's P320 crisis, which laid out

The Wall is Working: Why Immigration Dysfunction is By Design

Why a Working Immigration System Is Politically Impossible "The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house." — Audre Lorde The rational design of a functional immigration system isn't a mystery. Align visa caps with labor demand. Create legal infrastructure for cross-border mobility.