Writing
-
Frankfort in September
A few days in Frankfort, Michigan, on Lake Michigan with a friend from California. A pier, a fisherman with two salmon, a bike ride to Beulah, and a cross on Betsie Bay.
-
We Built These Systems
Last week an Anthropic researcher resigned with a warning that the models may kill us all, and every story said two companies have to fix it. Two companies did not build the internet. The systems the rest of us built assume one slow attacker who can be caught, and an agent is neither. The part that matters is ordinary engineering, and it does not wait on alignment.
-
Nobody Had to Care
The AfD’s 44 percent in Saxony-Anhalt is not a poverty story. Unemployment was three times higher twenty years ago and the far right got 13. It is the story of a region governed for thirty years by parties that nothing there could reach, and of a party that showed up when nobody else did.
-
Walking the California Coastal Trail
A morning walk on the California Coastal Trail from Miramar to Francis Beach. Pelicans, cypresses, a fence full of painted boards, and a concrete foundation nobody can identify.
-
Between the Silence and the Spectacle
I was drafted into the silence of postwar Germany and arrived in the spectacle of Reagan's America. Germany built a culture that could not celebrate its soldiers; America built one that could not hold its wars to account. Now Germany is being asked to rearm, and the question is whether anything exists between the two.
-
Legally, Again
The Weimar takeover was legal, not a mob. The same mechanism ran in Hungary, ran in Poland, and is running in the United States. An election changes the tenant; it does not dismantle the building. Structure helps, but structure assumes honoring.
-
That's Just How It Is
What caused the K-curve, and why don't American workers organize against the way they are being exploited? A 1971 confidential memo to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, fifty years of patient counter-mobilization across think tanks, courts, and political institutions, and a labor architecture built to require continuous firm-by-firm reorganizing. The asymmetry was by design.
-
We Kept Growing. Most People Didn’t
The pronatalist alarm and the AI displacement alarm arguing about the same problem from opposite sides. Both assume the growth model is intact. It has not been. The forty years since 1980 were workarounds — debt, asset inflation, immigration, central bank intervention — that kept the appearance of growth going while the broad-based productive expansion stopped happening for most of the population. AI removes the last workaround.
-
Our Faith?
Federal agencies under Trump's second term are speaking to workers in the first-person plural of Christian faith — USDA Easter emails, monthly agency prayer services, an OPM memo permitting workplace proselytizing. Federal whistleblower confidence collapsed from 71.9% to 22.5% in a single year. The establishment clause is eroding inside workplaces where saying you are uncomfortable risks your career.
-
A Talisman Against Fascism — In Loring Park
The Center for People and Craft is an emerging urban folk school in Minneapolis — a place where cross-cultural connection happens person to person, hand to hand, without hierarchy or gatekeeping.