Commentary on how people live now. Technology and its effects, institutions and how they fail, and the cultural arguments worth having. Opinionated by design, because writing that hedges everything says nothing.
Critical ThinkingSeptember 6, 2026
The disasters that happen to ordinary people are boring: a power cut in a heatwave, a burst pipe, a job ending. Almost nothing in the preparedness market addresses any of it, because fear sells better than usefulness.
Artificial IntelligenceSeptember 4, 2026
Researchers trained a model on a meaningless maze and found a positive and negative axis that already existed in the base model. Steering it changes behavior far outside the maze. Here is what that evidence shows, what it does not,…
FictionSeptember 3, 2026
Bucharest is the centre of the global adult webcam industry and almost none of the work happens in bedrooms. It happens in studios in ordinary office blocks, in an industry the state declines to classify.
Critical ThinkingSeptember 3, 2026
Web rings were how you found things before search worked. I belonged to more than two hundred of them and ran a dozen, and when I finally closed my account it held 2,900 memberships. On 5 September 2000 Yahoo replaced…
Critical ThinkingSeptember 3, 2026
The page I published at ring-master.net in 2000 and 2001 after Yahoo replaced the WebRing system: what changed, what ringmasters said about it on the message boards, and the American Pie parody somebody wrote for the occasion.
Behind the BookSeptember 2, 2026
Four books ago I sat down to write about why Americans had stopped thinking. Each one dragged me somewhere I did not expect, and this is the book where all four of them meet.
Behind the BookSeptember 2, 2026
I did not set out to write this book. I set out to understand what I was watching on YouTube, and the view counts were too high for it to be fringe.
Behind the BookSeptember 2, 2026
My grandfather would talk about what happened to him. The problem was that nobody wanted to listen, because the story made people uncomfortable, and people get tired of being uncomfortable.
Behind the BookSeptember 1, 2026
A book that asks readers to examine their own prejudices has to go first. So the introduction is mine: what my parents taught me, what I believed for thirty years without testing it, and the club I was recruited into…
Critical ThinkingAugust 7, 2026
In 1984 a former Soviet propagandist described four stages for taking a country apart: demoralize a generation, destabilize its institutions, manufacture a crisis, normalize what follows. He said the first stage was already finished in America.
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