But that was before Trump had the audacity to attempt some kind of repair to the landmark in the city of which he is the duly elected executive. I don’t honestly know the precise nature of these repairs, only that I have now seen countless pictures of workers painting the bottom of the pool a blue color, coating it with what I understand is some kind of sealant. Apparently it was leaking quite a bit of water, and maybe algae growth was also a problem? Again, I don’t know the details, and my considered opinion is that I am not and should not be required to know them, let alone have an opinion on repairs of a distant landmark that I never visit. Furthermore, as I understand it, these repairs cost our federal government a truly piddling amount of money and were accomplished in a matter of weeks in a town where civic projects run years late and billions over budget as a matter of course.

But despite my total lack of interest in the reflecting pool, my deliberate absence of an opinion or sense of ownership in its maintenance concerns, I find that I suddenly know quite a lot about the reflecting pool. Or at least, I have recently absorbed many factoids of unknown rigor about the pool, strictly against my will, from profoundly mentally ill individuals shouting them at me around the clock. Here’s a recent sample. I hadn’t checked in on the latest pool updates for several days because I’ve been traveling out of cell phone service range, so I hadn’t been aware that the news cycle had moved on from whether too much algae was growing in the pool and whether it was less than when a Democrat was in charge to allegations of partisan vandalism.

No, I don’t know what’s going on here. I’m not clicking on any of these stories to find out whether lunatics really are vandalizing a newly repaired monument to stick it to Trump, not that I would be surprised to find out they were. Nor do I particularly care to know about the pool’s decades-long battle with algae growth and leaks that the Obama administration tried and failed to fix, according to at least some of the lunatics or their counter-lunatics now choking the public commons on twitter and major news sites. Neither still do I care about the specifics of the water treatments being applied — and yet I now know, strictly against my will, that they include ozone and hydrogen peroxide, and that the filtration is insufficient.

Don’t bother correcting the record on any of these points, at least not for my benefit. I wish to know substantially less than I already do about the pool’s green waters and their troubled history, and have essentially no interest in sorting fact from fiction on this topic — about which, again (and I regret to keep repeating this), I care nothing. Completely contrary to my desires, valuable neurons in my brain have been enlisted into storing dubiously sourced facts and narratives and opinions about this pool, when they could have been put to far better use remembering in finer detail (to take an example off the top of my head) an adolescent over-the-sweater petting session during a screening of You’ve Got Mail starring Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan.

But you people won’t stop talking about the god damned pool. None of you knew the first thing about it a few weeks ago, but overnight you have developed expert-level opinions on algae treatments and domestic waterfowl toxins. The water color of the Lincoln memorial reflecting pool is a brainworm whose virulence is rivaled only by its utter triviality and stupidity. Not since “he crossed state lines” have I seen so many otherwise intelligent people incepted so thoroughly into parroting a set of opinions and talking points by a media blitz. It has pervaded the collective unconscious to a disturbing degree, creeping into conversations and contexts in which it has no place — asserting itself, Pavlovian, a neurotic tic of allegiance or defiance.

Last week I saw an incredible photo of lightning striking the Washington monument with a rainbow in the background, captured on fight night in the capitol. I’m not big on signs and portents, but it’s hard not to look at this image and come to the conclusion that America has the mandate of heaven, that we are being heralded by Nature herself as the greatest nation in history, a titanic force whose awesome power will echo in legend through the ages. No matter what you think of the current occupant of the White House, this photo taken on its lawn should bring a patriotic tear to your eye.

Immediately after I saw it for the first time, swollen with jingoistic fervor, I thoughtlessly shared it with a group chat of mixed company (some based, some cucked), proclaiming it as proof of our national greatness. The resident butt-hurt liberal1 immediately made some snide non sequitur about how green the water in the pool is now. I was dumbfounded, but I shouldn’t have been.

I’ve written in the past about the creeping influence of politics into ever more aspects of our lives, a totalizing mania to inject partisan commitments and ideological purity tests into every facet of society, no matter how trivial. This business with the reflecting pool makes me think there’s a bizarre converse of this tendency, specifically as it relates to Trump: the compulsion to imbue every act of the man, no matter how trivial, with ideological weight and calamity; to build partisan narratives and media coverage from the most banal and inconsequential moments of his life and presidency. I had previously understood “Trump Derangement Syndrome” as an overriding hatred of the man himself that makes it impossible for the afflicted to think rationally where he’s concerned, but after weeks of manic, round-the-clock reflecting pool coverage, I think I was missing a vital aspect of the phenomenon.
Yes, Trump attracts fierce criticism due to his (let’s be honest here) frequently impulsive policy proclamations, and for his uniquely insensitive (if hilarious) off-the-cuff remarks. It’s totally fair game to be mad about starting a war in Iran or cutting foreign aid, or to be upset about him insulting an ally or charismatic minority. It’s understandable, if dumb, to watch partisans reflexively oppose even reasonable policies he proposes without thinking through the details. But this is something else. The man can’t even paint the bottom of a pool without people losing their minds.

As for me, I want off the ride. I never want to hear about the Lincoln reflecting pool again as long as I live. Its domination of the news cycle for this long reflects a profound sickness in American culture and especially in our media. The obsessive coverage it has received, and the enthusiastic participation of our ordinary countrymen in spreading these partisan narratives and counter-narratives, can only be characterized as a kind of mental illness, a monomania rivaling Ahab’s. As a nation, we should feel deeply ashamed of the vapidity of this discourse, as well as of the effete, contemptuous elite pushing it onto us.

Shut up about the stupid pool.

This peculiar matchup is possible because Los Angeles holds so-called “jungle primaries” where the top two candidates advance to the general election regardless of party. Many commentators on the right consider this form of primary an abomination because it means that there is usually no republican on the ballot in cities like LA, which swings +50 D in federal elections. But personally I think it makes sense: if you know for a fact your city will never elect a republican, then at least give people a choice of two democrats in the general, rather than letting rabidly partisan primary voters effectively anoint the general winner. In any case, there’s nothing particularly unusual about two democrats beating out a republican for the top two slots in a primary in LA.

What is unusual is the third-place finisher on election night surging to overcome an 8-point deficit in the extended count after election night, which is what happened. Raman has been outperforming not only Pratt in the days since the election, but also the incumbent. She has since passed him in the overall tally.

This is possible because California conducts its elections by mail, and counts any ballots that arrive up to a week after the election as long as they were postmarked by election day. This means that in any close race, it’s impossible to determine who will win on election night. Ballots can trickle in and be counted for weeks afterward1.

This slow, eventually consistent process, coupled with the fact that republicans are said to vote earlier than democrats for whatever reason, means that an election-night lead for a conservative candidate in California is often a “mirage” that will vanish in the final tally. This rubs conservatives the wrong way, for obvious reasons. It’s not only frustrating to have to wait weeks for the final result. It’s infuriating to know that even a massive election-night lead is statistically likely to evaporate days or weeks later. And it rankles for another, even simpler reason: watching this happen looks like a dirty trick. It looks like fraud.

Spare me the scolding. I’m not a J6-er and I don’t think there’s good, solid evidence that capital-F Fraud has altered the course of any federal election in my lifetime. I understand the demographic differences that cause late-cast ballots to favor liberal candidates in states that allow voting by mail. I have no particular reason to believe that cheating is taking place (other than obvious incentives). I’m just telling you what this looks like to an outside observer: it looks dirty. It looks like the dominant party in a one-party state cheating to get the outcome they want.

Here’s another view of the evolving vote totals in the week since the election, demonstrating Pratt’s second-place finish steadily eroding while Bass stays comfortably on top.

Here’s yet another view, this one in terms of votes added per tally update. Raman gets a huge boost a couple days after polls closed, suddenly wiping the floor with Bass.

Again: this looks bad. From the outside, to an impartial observer, it’s indistinguishable from fraud. It looks like exactly what you would observe if the dominant party noted a deficit on election night, then injected just enough ballots over the following days to close that gap and come out on top, eliminating any threat of the outer party taking power in November. If you can formulate a just-so story to explain why the third-place candidate should begin massively out-performing the incumbent only in late-received ballots, congratulations and pat yourself on the back for being a rational plan-truster (Blue-team-coded). But you need to understand that your narrative is not convincing the opposition.

Twitter since the election is full of generally intelligent, typically non-conspiratorial people on the right furious with this outcome, convinced it’s brazen election fraud. They saw the pattern of vote updates above and decided the narrative of “younger progressives voted later and massively favored Raman over Bass” is nonsense. To them it looks like enemy action. And to be perfectly fair to them: how would they tell the difference?

Voting is by its nature an adversarial activity, a game played by participants who do not trust each other. The null hypothesis is that cheating will occur; it’s the job of election officials and the processes they design to prove to everyone involved that it didn’t. Elaborate procedures and customs are put in place to ensure that both sides will agree that an outcome is legitimate no matter which way it goes — things like voter identification requirements, a ballot chain of custody signed off on by both sides, and tallies conducted and communicated in the presence of observers from both sides. These procedures are necessary for the same reason that security systems and guards at jewelry stores are necessary, because the rewards for dishonest actors are too great to ignore.

Anyone passingly familiar with the history of electoral politics in the US knows that election fraud and dirty tricks were the rule rather than the exception for the entire 19th century and much of the 20th, perpetrated whenever political machines could get away with it. We know people will steal elections because they have, repeatedly, throughout history. The idea that we’ve evolved beyond the impulse to cheat at the precise moment when the stakes are the highest they’ve ever been is pure fantasy. We still regularly convict officials of election fraud, and one has to assume that the cases uncovered and successfully prosecuted are a small fraction of what actually occurs. So there is no question that elections are worth stealing, or whether people will try. The only question is whether we’ve done enough to prevent it.

In the case of California, it’s hard to escape the impression that state election laws are formulated with a reckless disregard to security, if not deliberately constructed to make dirty tricks easier. They’re one of several states where election officials must accept all ballots postmarked by election day, even if they are received afterwards (seven days in California’s case). This means counting continues at least a week after all votes have been cast, but more importantly, it means it is impossible to know how many total ballots there are when the tally begins. This in turn makes it possible in principle for unscrupulous actors to get an idea of how far behind their candidate is, then manufacture enough new ballots to take the lead. As a vector for election fraud, this exact method is as tried and true as they come, having been used to steal at least two American elections that we know of (LBJ’s Texas senate primary and Haye’s presidential election in 1876, which was so brazenly fraudulent that it nearly reignited the civil war).

But it gets even worse. By California law, ballots are still counted even when they’re missing a postmark, as long as the voter writes the date they filled it out on the envelope. This obviously enables the introduction of new ballots after the legal deadline.

(8) Vote-by-mail ballot identification envelope has no dated postmark, the postmark is illegible, and there is no date stamp for receipt from a bona fide private mail delivery service, but the voter has dated the vote-by-mail ballot identification envelope or the envelope otherwise indicates that the ballot was executed on or before Election Day and the ballot was received by the elections official in accordance with Elections Code section 3020.

But this kind of fraud remains strictly hypothetical. So far as I can tell, no one can provide proof it has happened. On the other hand, no one disputes the existence of the perfectly legal, technically-not-fraud practice of aggressive ballot harvesting. It’s a much bigger issue as it relates to a broadly shared sense of the legitimacy of the election, and featured prominently in the dialog around the disputed 2020 presidential race. Here’s how the Los Angeles DSA chapter coaches its ballot harvesters to interact with likely voters in a door-to-door sales script that would make the Avon lady blush.

Will you vote now?

• Ask at least 3 times.

• “X candidate is in line with all the values in our voter guide and we need your help to change this city”

• “I want to make sure that your ballot doesn’t get lost in the mail or in the city bureaucracy. If we fill it out together right now, there’s an official place to sign it over to me and I can bring it to the city directly either today or first thing tomorrow morning.”

These tactics are illegal when done anywhere near a polling station — you can’t even wear buttons or apparel endorsing a candidate there, let alone tell someone who to vote for. As for “filling out a ballot together”: enjoy your jail time. But at a private residence with a mail-in ballot, suddenly this kind of pushy sales pitch, up to and including a creepy kind of facilitated voting where an activist “helps” someone fill in their ballot, is perfectly fine. A child could understand how this system could be abused to take advantage of the least capable voters, yet the practice is staunchly defended as an essential part of the franchise.

Running elections this way is a choice. As recently as 2015 California required that mail-in ballots arrived by election day to be counted, which by itself would be a big improvement to the current process. It would make it possible to return results on election night in nearly all races, and prevent the late-ballot-stuffing loophole made possible by not knowing the total ballot count when the tally begins. But instead California is moving in the opposite direction, suing the city of Huntington Beach to prevent them from requiring ID to vote in municipal elections, then passing a statewide law to prevent any other cities from requiring ID either. As an impartial observer watching California from the outside, I have to question the true goals of such legislation. There’s only one thing I’m absolutely sure of: the democratic party, who holds a trifecta in the state government, thinks these laws help them and hurt the opposition, or it wouldn’t enact them.

No, I do not personally believe that the Los Angeles mayoral race was stolen. Signature verification, while not the most robust mechanism for fraud prevention2, provides at least some check on injecting fraudulent ballots that would probably hinder large-scale efforts to change the result. And at the end of the day, two democrats on top of a three-way race in a city that went 75% for Harris just isn’t that surprising. A Pratt second-place finish would have been an upset.

But it doesn’t matter what I personally think. What matters is whether California has an election system that produces results that appear legitimate to casual observers, as opposed to one that routinely produces results that appear fraudulent to a large chunk of voters. That appearance matters, and it matters at least as much as the actual security of the system. The disappointment a partisan feels at losing fair and square, in a process he trusts, is quite different from the rage he feels when he thinks he has been cheated. The fact that this feeling is becoming more common over time is bad. It’s an ominous sign. And you can’t restore trust in such a system by browbeating dissenters.

Yes, there will always be crackpots who deny the outcome of an election that goes to the other side regardless of how airtight the process is. That’s not an excuse to abandon a good-faith effort to make the system trustworthy enough to be credible even to — especially to — your enemies. It seems to me that democrats in California have decided that they don’t need to convince their enemies, and might even find it preferable to rub their noses in it and watch them squirm.

When it comes to elections, the appearance of impropriety is impropriety. It is incumbent upon our leaders to design a process that not only is secure, but that looks secure; that not only has integrity but demonstrates that integrity so forcefully it convinces all detractors; that consistently yields results people accept as legitimate even when they lose. This is the bar for a credible election system. California is choosing to fall short of this bar, and blaming republicans for being sore losers won’t change that fact.

But like every good innovation, it has always attracted its share of noisy malcontents. For my entire adult life people have been complaining about the unbearable burden of changing their clocks twice a year. Decades ago the proposal from the stop-messing-with-the-clocks crowd was to stay on standard time year round, like Arizona and Hawaii already do — every state has the option to do so under the Uniform Time Act of 1966. But today’s clock carpers have converged on a proposal to make daylight savings time year-round, to move the clocks forward one final time and leave them there forevermore. To date, 19 states have passed legislation to so do, but none of these laws can go into effect until Congress amends the 1966 act. Now Trump has signaled his readiness to do so, to put the entire nation on permanent DST with the resurrection of the Sunshine Protection Act.

It should go without saying that this is a terrible idea, but apparently it does need to be said. Year-round daylight savings time doesn’t work. DST only makes sense in the summer months when there is abundant daylight to take advantage of. In the winter, setting the clock an hour ahead of solar time means the sun comes up way too late, making most people commute to school and work in the dark. Permanent DST polls well with the public because people are familiar with early sunsets but not with late sunrises, and they aren’t smart enough to realize you have to pick one. They don’t actually like DST; they like summer. Setting the clocks forward all year long doesn’t give you an endless summer, just miserably dark winter mornings. People haven’t thought it through and would hate it in practice.

We know this is the case because we already tried it. In the 1970s the entire US went on year-round DST in response to the energy crisis. People immediately turned on the program and it was repealed in less than a year.

While 79 percent of Americans approved of the change in December 1973, approval had dropped to 42 percent three months later, the New York Times reported.

If we made DST year-round, most of the country would see the sun rise after 8 a.m. on the winter solstice.

Some unlucky counties wouldn’t see the sun until around 10 am. And what would we get in exchange for this depressing morning state of affairs? The sun would set for most of us around 5:30 instead of 4:30. I can’t wait to break out the grill and enjoy that lovely 5:30 December sunshine in the back yard.

This is a bad trade. We won’t like it when it arrives. But because people know they don’t like early sunsets they endorse it, not realizing that a trade for late sunrises is even required.

In any case, what exactly are the arguments against getting rid of the time change in the first place? I know that people complain about having to manually adjust clocks, but surely I’m not the only one who’s noticed that all the most important clocks in our lives are now self-adjusting. How many non-self-adjusting clocks do you have in your home in 2026? (I have two, the microwave and one hanging on a wall). Adjusting them is the work of moments, and we do it twice a year. This is not the kind of inconvenience that should steer national policy.

Technocratic wonks at outlets like Vox like to point out other externalities, like the increase in traffic accidents from everyone getting an hour less sleep. Accidents (not deaths) rise all of 8% on the Monday following the spring clock change. But they fall by a similar amount after the fall change, so it evens out.

Granted, there is one major real downside: kids keep waking up at their accustomed time for several days following a clock change, which is very irritating for parents of young kids in the fall. Everybody else gets that extra hour of sleep plucked from thin air, but not you, your little angels are going to stir at the same time their body always wakes them up. You can’t convince a 4 year old to go back to sleep for another hour like the clock says, you’re getting up with him.

But those times are fleeting, and the value we get from the clock adjustment is well worth this small cost. Getting to enjoy daylight at close to 10 p.m. in the summer instead of at 4 a.m. is great — but only if I can still have some daylight in the winter before 8, when I need to get the kids to school. That’s the wonderful deal that DST offers us, and we’d be fools to mess with it.

And the farther north you go, the better a deal it is, because there’s a much greater difference in seasonal light levels. Don’t tell Harvard graduates, but this is a simple consequence of the geometry of the earth’s tilted axis as it revolves around the sun. As a result, northern cities have much more to gain or lose from sensible clock management than those on the southern border. Here’s a chart I found on Reddit of hypothetical daylight hours under different time systems for Seattle, the northernmost major city in the continental US.

Without DST, Seattle has to pick between dawn at 3:30 a.m. in the summer or 8:30 a.m. in the winter, both pretty bad options. Other cities aren’t quite as far north, but all of Yankeedom is in a similar situation. Northern states on the wrong edge of a timezone, like Michigan, are especially hard hit.

Permanent DST is one of the worst naively technocratic ideas this country has ever had, repudiated not only by common sense but also by previous historical experiment. My sincere hope is that some combination of Congressional sclerosis and reflexive opposition to anything Trump likes will kill this most recent bill, that it will quietly die an ignoble death without a vote like the last few did. But I worry. These are very dumb times, which could easily lead to the adoption of a very dumb policy.

My early unexamined faith was a product of my familial and social environment, not of any institution. The various churches of my childhood failed utterly to inspire a sense of the divine or the sacred within me. The quaint local chapel, the booming megachurch with stadium seating, the proudly non-denominational suburban cookie-cutter affair — these were temples to tedium, and, as I got old older, social awkwardness. But not faith. I did not feel the movement of the spirit in the songs we sang or the rambling parables related by the pastors. When we sipped from our plastic shot glasses of protestant grape juice and ate our oyster crackers, I understood the solemnity of the affair but sensed none of its mystery. I sometimes watched fellow worshippers raising their palms heavenward during prayer or song and wondered what they felt.

In adolescence, the salience of religious practice faded into the background. My family’s church attendance, always irregular, tapered off into a near-total lapse. My parents would remind us that Jesus was the Reason for the Season of Christmas, and on Easter they would answer the phone “He is risen!”, but on most years they failed to corral us into the pews before we ate our chocolate bunnies. They lacked the ardor required to haul a protesting family out of bed on Sunday mornings, and by high school we lost the habit entirely.

Then by early college I was a reluctant agnostic, and shortly after that an avowed atheist. This change in outlook overtook me gradually and then all at once, until one day I realized I was firmly convinced there was no God, faintly embarrassed to have ever fallen for such obvious lies. I fell from faith with sudden violence, landing in a rigid material realism with shock that gave way to smugness.

Nobody converted me to atheism. No one shamed me for my Christian beliefs. Nobody talked me out of it or made me feel stupid for believing in God. I was not shaken to learn new facts about the world, like a young-earth creationist dismayed to discover carbon dating and fossils. I had known by middle school that evolution shaped and created species, knew the facts of deep geological history. I understood the philosophical problem of dualism and free will. I was aware of the dizzying diversity of other beliefs historically and geographically. I had a ready answer for all of the problems posed by these facts, and none of them altered my basic belief in God.

But in late adolescence, when I turned my mind to the subject of belief itself, to consciously develop a coherent metaphysics that I could defend with the intellectual rigor I had begun to demand of the other things I believed about the world, God simply fell out, squeezed from between two mental keystones fitting together with perfect logical clarity. The worldview I had slowly and unconsciously adopted required belief, any belief, to be compelled by evidence — preferably repeatable, overwhelming evidence. It didn’t feel like I had chosen this belief system at all; fittingly, it felt compelled, the only possible conclusion one could reach if one cared about being right. I insisted that all of reality could be reduced to the interaction of matter and energy, described by mathematical formulae. Today I would probably characterize this worldview as scientific materialism or simple skepticism; at the time my philosophy major friends called me a “physicalist”. It left no room for mystery, or for God, or indeed for any metaphysics at all.

And yet. Sometimes, after a late night working on an important deadline, I would toss and turn, unable to sleep, my nerves keeping me awake. The anxiety of knowing I was already going to be under-rested for an important day made sleep impossible despite my exhaustion. In these moments, I would set aside my principled disbelief and pray: “Dear God, please let me fall asleep, and please let however much sleep I get tonight be enough. Amen.” It always worked. And in other moments of extremity, waiting in terror for bad news, imagining the worst, I would silently pray, asking God for peace and being granted it. It always worked.

I treated these relapses into faith as mere foibles, wrote them off as the force of habit, vestiges of my upbringing brought gasping to the surface by distress, moments of weakness when I lost sight of what I truly believed and became willing to grasp any straw. I considered them an intellectual failing. In my sober waking hours, I knew that these habits of prayer and faith were silly, ontologically indefensible. I wondered if I would always revert to the faith of my childhood under enough strain, retreat from the cold light of logic and evidence toward comforting lies.

Apart from these occasional lapses, I shed God from my daily life and thoughts for decades. Being purposefully alienated from God didn’t feel like a loss. In my work at various elite tech firms, living in a large progressive metro, I encountered very few devout people, and counted none among my close friends. I didn’t pity believers or look down on them; on the contrary, I flattered myself that I knew exactly where they were coming from, having walked in their shoes. I didn’t kid myself that I was happier or more moral than they were for my evolved lack of belief, but I did think I was braver in some important sense, daring to face reality as it was, not as I wished it were. While I understood that my family and many other people derived real benefits from religious practice, I believed I had advanced beyond the need for primitive superstition. I congratulated myself for having grown up and left childish things behind.

But my atheism was never as ironclad as I projected. Privately, I had doubts. I lacked full certainty in the non-existence of a world beyond our senses, of truths beyond the reach of reason. Taken to their logical conclusion, my beliefs amounted to nihilism, the death of all meaning and objective value. Any qualia of “meaning” I experienced could only ever be subjective and solipsistic, the result of mere chemical interactions in my body and brain, lacking any inherent value to an uncaring universe. “Just what enough hydrogen does when you leave it alone long enough.” In honest introspection, I didn’t truly believe this, nor did I want to. But neither could I justify any other conclusion from inside the belief system I had adopted. I was trapped: I reasoned myself away from God and from meaning, and I didn’t know how to get back.

My children led me back to God.

As a parent, you devote time thinking about the values you’re transmitting to your children and the impact those values will have on their lives. When it came to faith, I had gradually come to consider my godless nihilism to be a kind of privilege that I took for granted, bought and paid for by the faith of my fathers. It had been easy, safe, for me to abandon God. I had been raised with the certainty of his presence, in a community and culture that respected his commandments. I didn’t know if it was right to deprive my kids of that aspect of my upbringing, whether I believed in its metaphysical underpinnings or not.

But one thing became abundantly clear: to simply reject Christian metaphysics would not, in my children, produce the pure absence of belief I fancied myself having. Even if I succeeded in expunging from them any trace of the supernatural or the spiritual, my children would believe in something, as all people do. Failing to provide a belief system for them would leave them hideously exposed to whatever the broader culture chose to install there instead, beliefs that I looked upon with dawning horror. One way or another, they would be indoctrinated — and indeed, everyone agrees they must be indoctrinated, we simply disagree on the doctrine.

I have had many occasions in recent years to reflect on that famous quotation of C.S. Lewis about atheism:

Once people stop believing in God, the problem is not that they will believe in nothing; rather, the problem is that they will believe anything.

I had lately become quite wary of the self-destructive social currents we saw tearing through our peer group, and thought that Christianity could be an anchor for my children: a connection to the customs of their forebears, a rock to hold onto in the face of cultural sea change. Despite my personal lack of conviction in the metaphysics, it seemed a far better choice than sending them out in the world armed with nothing in particular and hoping for the best.

And so we enrolled them in our local Catholic school, following my wife’s upbringing. Despite my reasons for choosing the school and the expectation of their getting a religious education, I was shocked to discover that Catholicism wasn’t mere backdrop to their education but a central part: my children were not only learning about the sacraments and the saints, they were attending Mass with their classmates several times a month. Well, yes, my wife gently chided me when I expressed my surprise to her, what did you expect?

The truth was, I hadn’t really known what to expect. After being surrounded by the godless for so long, spending time around people who took religion seriously was surreal, like watching a pack of wolves trot across your backyard. Out of a sense of duty, curious to better understand what I had foisted on my children, I began taking the family to Mass, first at school events and then on Sundays. To my great surprise, I found that I liked it.

The kind of religion practiced at our parish chapel was alien to me, both to my adulthood atheism and to my protestant upbringing. The Catholics were disciplined and rigorous about their faith in a way I had never encountered in person. It had a weight, a formality totally absent from my childhood protestant churches, where the charisma of the preacher and an invitation to accept Jesus into your heart were the only structure. I discovered that I enjoyed the ritual and formula of the Mass: the confeitor, the readings, the psalms, the call and response, the recital of the lord’s prayer, the sign of peace, the endless kneeling and sitting and standing, and of course communion itself. Every week, every Mass the same: the same faces, the same chants, the same prayers, the same blessings. The repetition had a soothing, meditative effect on me quite apart from the presence of Christ in the Eucharist, which I still couldn’t bring myself to swallow.

This meditative aspect of the Mass, the endless standing and repeating and kneeling, gave me ample opportunity to reflect on what was drawing me to church as an unbeliever. Besides enjoying the rituals themselves, I was frequently moved by my children’s rowdy but obviously sincere piety, as well as the church community’s welcoming attitude toward our large family — an island of people who genuinely loved children in a sea of mild hostility toward them. Attending Mass as a member1 of the Church was filling several emotional needs I hadn’t realized I was lacking: first, belonging to a community of shared values; and second, regular time spent in quiet reflection and devotion to something bigger than myself. This latter part was puzzling to me, until it began to dawn on me that my unmet needs weren’t strictly emotional but spiritual as well.

Spirituality was a word I held at arm’s length even as I worshipped alongside believers. Privately, I thought of myself as “religious, but not spiritual”, and had begun to adjust my rigid epistemology accordingly, to acknowledge the utility of instrumental belief: a belief you adopt because you expect acting on it to make your life better, not because you are compelled by evidence. An instrumental belief can be held lightly in a state of superposition, neither accepted nor rejected in the moment but endlessly considered, acted out in a willful suspension of disbelief that vanishes with the last strains of the pipe organ. Allowing myself this kind of belief didn’t feel like a betrayal of my principles, and helped me make sense of my attraction to practices I had abandoned for decades.

At Mass each week I stood on the threshold of belief, holding the idea of God in my mind, turning it over, speaking the words but not truly accepting them. This sometimes made me uneasy, made me feel like a fraud and a freeloader. I was well aware that the metaphysics I couldn’t bring myself to accept were load-bearing elements of the Church’s function, that if everyone felt as I did the edifice would swiftly collapse along with all the benefits I was deriving from it. But did it actually matter? Didn’t God want my obedience, the presence of my children, at least as much as he wanted my belief? And in any case, if I was benefiting from Mass, by humbling myself before God, singing hymns, saying prayers — and I clearly was, the improvement to my life was unmistakable — then what did it ultimately matter if I believed in the truth of the gospel? This was how I rationalized my attendance as an unbeliever, somewhere between “cultural Christianity”, a social group, and a meditation class.

This fragile detente could not last. What I found both beautiful and troubling was that Mass made me feel things, upwellings of emotion I struggled to explain. Was this what people meant when they talked about feeling the presence of God? I didn’t know. But I began to understand that my conception of religious worship was in some ways backwards. I had always thought of belief as strictly preceding worship, of worship being an outpouring of those deeply felt beliefs. Of course that’s an important aspect of worship, but it can work just as well in the opposite direction: the act of worship, and especially the repetition of rituals, week after week, can lead to the formation of faith. I suspected that, in fact, this was the normal order of things for most people joining religions throughout history. I also suspected that the Catholics understood this quite well, and had adopted the rituals I found so compelling through a millennia-long process of refinement, retaining the ones that inspired the very feelings I was experiencing.

I couldn’t explain it or justify it, but I had begun to feel the presence of something, to seriously entertain the notion of a world beyond my senses, and this disturbed me. After twenty years of cynically dismissing mere feelings as an inadmissible form of knowledge, a sort of faulty limbic vestige that could only interfere with the beautiful machine of empirical reason, I didn’t know how to reconcile my growing conviction that there was something more. I couldn’t prove any of it, I had no evidence beyond my own intuition, but I felt it quite strongly at times. And in fact I realized that all of my strongest moral intuitions were just as unprovable, forever beyond the reach of a randomized controlled trial. I believed in the goodness of human life and procreation. I believed in the justness of natural law. I believed that good and evil were real and objective, not infinitely malleable to human judgment and custom. I couldn’t justify any of these beliefs with peer-reviewed evidence. What made God different?

I came to understand that there was a third, vital kind of belief, beyond those compelled by evidence or adopted for utility. It was possible to choose a belief, to accept it, to enter into it aspirationally with the hope of its truth despite lacking proof, to imbue it with substance by an act of will. It seemed to me that this was the form of belief implicit in asking if someone “accepted” Jesus as their savior — a kind of agreement or submission to a creed, entered into willingly and then made real by having chosen it. A decade earlier I would have scoffed at the idea that a person can or should choose beliefs in this manner. But after a year at Mass I couldn’t deny its instinctual appeal. My emotional stance had flipped without my noticing: rather than demanding justification for choosing such a belief without hard evidence, I wondered how it could be wrong to accept the creed of a faith that had already brought me such fulfillment in its practice. Imagining myself accepting the creed this way felt right, natural, just.

I still couldn’t honestly say I believed in God in the way I imagined other people did, or with the effortless sincerity of my childhood. But for the first time in decades, I wanted to believe, wanted to deepen and explore this new part of my life rather than remain on the sidelines. And so, with some misgivings, feeling like an impostor at times, I enrolled in RCIA classes to be baptized and join the Church.

At Easter vigil I was still an agnostic at heart, still not intellectually convinced of the reality of God and the resurrection, as I affirmed my belief in them and was baptized in front of the congregation. But I no longer considered those things self-evidently ridiculous. I wanted to believe in them, and had found parts of myself, in quiet moments when I managed to silence my inner skeptic, that did. I chose those beliefs of my own free will in front of my community, assented to them with every hope they were true, committed myself to acting in their name.

And maybe that’s the best I can ever do, maybe every intelligent person struggles with the basic precepts of faith, wrestles endlessly with his own faculties of reason to convince himself of something unreasonable. After all, isn’t this all a bit silly? Magic isn’t real, people don’t come back from the dead. Pre-scientific people told all sorts of myths about the world which we rightly dismiss today as primitive superstition.

But then. Sometimes, seated in the pews with my wife and children, I hear the swell of the choir, smell the tang of the incense. I see the statue of Mary, Christ mounted on the crucifix over the altar. I feel my children nestled into my side, my wife’s hand in my own, and I sense the presence of God.

And I believe.

My peers were responsible. They were liberated, enlightened, modern. Untouchable by something as trivial, as low-class, as base sexual jealousy. They were careful, prioritized open communication and diligent rule-following. Nobody got HIV, there were no accidental bastards. And they still got split down the middle. The unraveling of their marriages came as a shock to them, and then it was too late to undo.

I can trace the chaos of those years to the rise of a single book, 2010’s Sex at Dawn.

Using evidence from evolutionary psychology and anthropology, Sex at Dawn argues that monogamy is, if not strictly unnatural, then at least a very modern innovation that goes against our instinctive drives and inclinations, a mismatch with the way our distant ancestors lived and loved1. Through the book’s lens, infidelity is the inevitable outcome of impossible expectations we unfairly place on each other. Monogamy might have benefits, but for many people it is either an unrealistic demand or an unacceptable imposition on their happiness and self-expression.

To say that this book was fêted by the respectable print establishment would probably be an overstatement. But it was well received among the bien-pensant, including the half-dozen or so of my peers who read it and wanted to tell me all about it. Dan Savage, America’s leading sex columnist, called it “the single most important book on human sexuality” published in sixty years. The Times gave it a respectful nod in an article titled Married, With Infidelities, where they quote Savage’s endorsement of non-monogamy.

Savage has for 20 years been saying monogamy is harder than we admit and articulating a sexual ethic that he thinks honors the reality, rather than the romantic ideal, of marriage. In Savage Love, his weekly column, he inveighs against the American obsession with strict fidelity. In its place he proposes a sensibility that we might call American Gay Male, after that community’s tolerance for pornography, fetishes and a variety of partnered arrangements, from strict monogamy to wide openness.

There’s that magic word: tolerance. A certain kind of educated urban liberal will agree to nearly any proposition if you can convince them it’s the tolerant thing to believe. Their memetic immune system has been crippled by a pathological need to avoid judging even destructive choices, so harmful ideas can easily take root in their minds, like an AIDS patient who succumbs to a fungal spore that usually only infects eucalyptus2. And who says open relationships are harmful anyway? As long as everyone is consenting, what’s the big deal?

The big deal is that this shit is contagious. In the same way that having a close friend get divorced nearly doubles your own odds of splitting up, having poly friends makes you more likely to dip your toe in the lifestyle. In my own social group it started with a single woman. Whether she and her husband had an inclination to open up their marriage before they read Sex at Dawn I can’t say. All I know is that the same year they couldn’t shut up about the book she started arriving at our parties with her new boyfriend (who was this guy, and did her husband know? our other friends demanded in whispered asides). A year after that there was a handful of couples openly practicing non-monogamy of some flavor. A year again later, the divorces and breakups starting rolling in, and they haven’t ever really stopped.

At the time we were as guilty as any of them of failing the fundamental test of judgment, of declining to condemn reckless behavior with respect to one’s most important relationship. Who were we to judge, after all? And were we the smallest bit titillated and enthralled by the spectacle of it all? Didn’t we feel worldly being friends with members of an up-and-coming romantic avant-garde? Certainly we did, just as we could see the obvious appeal. Even as we demurred that it wasn’t for us personally, the arguments about personal liberty and stories about the benefits of “new relationship energy” made sense to us, jived with our self-conception as tolerant free thinkers. And in any case, what were we to do, jettison a growing subset of our social group for offenses — against whom, exactly? Not us, or so we thought at the time. It wasn’t our business.

But of course that’s total nonsense, and dangerous nonsense at that. The norms around sex and relationships adopted by one’s peers are of supreme importance to one’s own life. They form the social background against which our own choices will be judged, to be found virtuous or lacking. They inform the expectations any new romantic interest brings to the table, the things they feel comfortable calling a deal-breaker or starting a fight over, what’s in bounds or off the table. And they contribute to our sense of social stability and harmony or lack thereof. I witnessed my peers tolerate the sort of drama and interpersonal chaos in their friend groups that you would more commonly see among, well, not upper-middle-class white college-educated professionals. And I watched them make excuses for it. I even fell into this trap myself, for a time.

Yes, these thoughts are spurred by Lindy West’s newest memoir. You thought you could escape, but no. It’s 9/11 for proudly fat girls who shouted their abortions, and it’s all anyone can talk about — particularly West’s extremely reluctant acceptance of her husband’s polyamory. But what I found very interesting is that every one of the several West post-mortem articles I read began with throat-clearing about how polyamory per se isn’t the problem here; it’s a respectable lifestyle choice that works well for lots of people, we promise! (You don’t know them, they go to another school). The real problem is that West’s husband’s behavior was non-ethical non-monogamy, supposedly because she wasn’t given a truly free and informed choice in the matter, or because she didn’t agree upon detailed rules he assiduously followed, or because he didn’t tell her about all of his dalliances before embarking on them.

It’s easy for me to believe her husband is a man of low character, maybe even an abusive asshole. But I find it absurd that his offenses are supposed to take on a completely different moral tenor on the basis of whether he said the proper incantations, filled out the right forms, before their commission. The man stepped out on his wife with multiple other women and then put her through the humiliation ritual of posing with his much more attractive new partner for media spreads. Are we so unmoored from basic morality that we have to hem and haw about whether his permission slip was signed with the right color ink?

Criticizing West and her husband for “doing poly wrong” misses the point, which is that polyamorous relationships are by their nature prone to drama, conflict, and violent failure. They are volatile, unstable, and this can’t be wished away or tamed by rules. Yes, there are successful long-term polyamorous couples. But for every one such unicorn there are dozens of open relationships badly floundering in interpersonal misery, marriages opening up to spill their guts onto the ground and die. Even when everyone is following all the rules and best practices, being open and communicative and self-aware, opening a relationship is extreme risk-taking behavior like doing hard drugs or riding a motorcycle drunk with no helmet. Something could easily, foreseeably go wrong and you could get hurt. You may as well criticize someone for “doing crystal meth wrong.” Was their technique really the problem?

These days I break from the typical liberal attitude of “none of my business.” Poly relationships predictably hurt people, including innocent bystanders and children, and we shouldn’t condone them. Broad tolerance of the lifestyle provides normative cover for men like West’s husband to demand some action on the side from their reluctant wives and girlfriends under the auspices of enlightened progressive values. His ultimatum about his poly desires, delivered to his sobbing future wife, didn’t take place in a vacuum, to be judged on its merits from first principles. Rather, it took place against the backdrop of over twenty years of activism by Savage and his allies to paint polyamory as a perfectly valid lifestyle choice, something a person should feel unashamed to request from a partner. Dan Savage walked so Aham Oluo could run. Down the street, to sleep with his attractive neighbor behind his wife’s back.

What’s missing from all these conversations about fidelity is a simple question: what is the purpose of monogamy in marriage, and why was it considered the Western ideal for thousands of years, even as we acknowledged that we frequently failed to live up to it? For that matter, what is marriage for? The liberal values of personal liberty and individual fulfillment from which polyamory derives its philosophical justification are directly at odds with the institution, which insists that we do not belong entirely to ourselves, but to our husbands and wives, as they belong to us. That our individual freedom and happiness is no longer our highest priority, that we have obligations to something larger that must come first.

Marriage constrains and limits our behavior by purposeful design. But those limits are beautiful. And more than beautiful, they are grounding. Paradoxically, marriage is freeing in the way of all permanent and unalterable decisions: this is my wife, for better or worse (in sickness and in health). There is no plan B, no backup person to turn to. I know what I must do: I have to make this work because the very foundation of my life depends on it. To introduce a plan B is to undermine what makes marriage function, the central promise to forswear all others, for all time.

You shouldn’t gamble with stakes that high, and with such terrible odds. You won’t be one of the lucky ones. It won’t work for you.

Our glorious forgotten past and who is to blame for letting it slip away

The Golden Gate Bridge was built in just over 4 years for $630M in today’s money. The Brooklyn Bridge took longer, over 10 years, but came in at a lower price, $518M in today’s money. The interstate highway system took even longer, over 40 years from conception to full completion, and cost a lot more too — but I’m being told it’s quite a bit longer than either of the bridges (unconfirmed at the time of writing).

Today these grand public works projects strike us as literally fantastical, built by a noble, now-departed race like elves. We live in their ruins, barbarians looking up in wonder at aqueducts. We can’t do it anymore, we don’t know how. San Francisco takes over 4 years and $14M to reopen a handful of existing bathrooms on the BART. The Second Avenue subway expansion cost over $1B per station, and the current phase is projected to cost over $4B per mile of track, still unfinished after 10 years. And the less we say about California’s boondoggle of a high-speed rail project, the better, but: the project has spent about $11B since 2008 on a train that is, as yet, imaginary, and is projected to cost $28B in a “zero risk” scenario in order to connect two cities in the central valley (notably not coming anywhere near to connecting SF with LA, which is what voters were promised, but Bakersfield is basically the same thing as LA when you think about it).

At the national level, legislation to approve large public works is mildly stymied since, by law, Congress is limited to passing a single gargantuan eighteen-thousand-page bill once per year. Nobody reads these bills or knows what’s in them before they vote on them, which is probably for the best. To the extent that they propose to build things or solve problems, it typically looks something like “Whereas: Americans need better access to veterinary gallstone procedures; we will expropriate $1.3B from the eleven top-earning taxpayers and give it to 1,067 NGOs to spread awareness of the symptoms of gallstones in domestic rats, mice, guinea pigs, jerboas, iguanas, and potbellied pigs1”. Everyone pats themselves on the back for a job well done, the veterinary lobby all gets a raise, twelve thousand or so otherwise functionally unemployable art history majors get to keep their jobs for another year, and somewhere in Nebraska, the elderly jerboa of Mrs. Elvira Chalmers is spared a slow and painful demise. The system works.

Meanwhile at the state and local level, where the lead of appropriated federal tax dollars must be transmuted into the gold of earth-moving and construction, do-gooders invariably encounter a legal hedge maze thrown up by obstructionist boomers with encyclopedic knowledge of local zoning laws absolutely hell-bent on spending their children’s inheritance on an army of lawyers to impede the project at every step, no matter what it is. In southern California, an area so chronically drought stricken and water deprived that residents must by law replace their lawns with fearsome cactus gardens2, boomers successfully blocked the construction of a massive offshore desalination plant that would have provided drinking water for tens of thousands of residents on the grounds that the slightly saltier water dumped back into the Pacific Ocean would make plankton sad.

Sure, there’s Baumol’s Cost Disease to consider when pondering why thing are so expensive and slow. And yes, we no longer have the testicular fortitude to write off dozens of workers plunging to their deaths as the cost of doing business3. But there is a much larger problem that harries and nips at anyone trying to accomplish anything in the modern American public sector: democracy. Not “electoral democracy”, i.e. voting — I mean the fact that every decision in public life, at every level of scale, is subject to an untenable number of stakeholders with a right to input. Notice must be given. Hearings must be held. Letters must be written and read. Studies must be commissioned. Lawsuits must be settled. And then whenever a 99.9th-percentile tenacity boomer wins a legal victory declaring their backyard the inviolable habitat of the Western crested beetle, we must do it all over again, from scratch. It’s unworkable.

A modest proposal

Let us slip into our care-worn leather Yarvin jackets and contemplate why it is that the will of the majority to solve problems can be so easily thwarted and incrementally postponed, costs ballooning at every impediment, and what we might do about it. Most proposed solutions involve doubling down on late-stage neoliberal technocracy: tort reform, regulatory streamlining, tripling the number of judges to reduce their backlogs. But here in the warm embrace of our leather, none of these ideas sit right. Technocracy is what got us here in the first place, isn’t it? When you’re in a hole, aren’t you supposed to stop digging?

Therefore I propose to cut the Gordian knot of citizen-institutional-obstructionism with the sword of executive power. Can you imagine what an executive with the ability to actually enact a mandate from voters could accomplish? Not the President, mind you — that’s too scary a prospect to even contemplate, I don’t kid myself that there would sooner or later be a drone strike with my name on it. And besides, the size of the women’s marches in protest would devastate the erotic werewolf novel industry, and who would stay on the job to care for Mrs. Chalmer’s jerboa in his time of need? No, when we play with a little bit of kingliness, or dictatorship, or fascism — choose your preferred euphemism or insult for an executive with the legal authority to get things done — we should take a lesson from the founding fathers and federalize it. No kings, certainly, I’ve seen the yellow signs being waved by geriatrics on street corners as well as you have. Very well. But what about Dukes, say? Or perhaps Counts? Maybe the odd Earl.

Picture the mayor of your city, or perhaps your county executive if you have those where you live, having placed upon his brow an elegant golden circlet, taking a vow to act in accordance with the will of the people who elected him. And then: acting in their interest, with the real authority to do so. A smaller, kinder monarchy, acting on a local level. What could such a mini-despot do?

Put down the phone, there is no need to call the ACLU tip line just yet! This is America, both the birthplace of and laboratory of modern democracy. We can imagine all sorts of ways to give our local executives useful amounts of power without torching our liberties at the same time. Here are some ideas.

The ex post facto veto

We have too many laws, at every level of governance, so many that a normal citizen cannot possibly expected to understand all of them and yet is held accountable for obeying them, ignorance being no excuse. Many of them are hundreds of years old, written by wigged racists who would spit tobacco on the floor of parliament before returning home to beat their wives for burning the stew. Most require an understanding of not only the black-and-white letter of the law, but also of the dozens of legal precedents set by court cases. They frequently conflict with one another as well as with common notions of goodness and sense. And we’ve only touched on legislative law here, not the morass of administrative rules that govern our lives in minute detail.

As a matter of practicality, we are very selective in which laws we enforce at any given time. Elected officials and bureaucrats alike have broad discretion to apply them or not according to their whims, with courts stepping in only rarely. And this is good! If we were to actually enforce all the laws all the time, we’d all be jailed for failing to wear an appropriate wig when arriving to our summons for operating our horseless carriage on a Friday during Lent.

But it’s also bad: bad, because it’s illegible and unpredictable. There’s no telling when some mouth-breathing, unelected pencil jockey with a chip on his shoulder will decide to make an example of one of us for getting a fourth cat while our neighbor gets away with buying a third illegal macaw that never shuts up.

Instead, let us invest the power to disregard inconvenient laws in a centralized place, in a person that we voted for: the executive. We already usually grant an executive the privilege to gainsay the legislature at the time of passage, the veto. But as we have seen this is far too limiting in practice. Let’s extend it to any time after a law has passed: the ex post facto veto. Just like with normal vetos, if a legislative body really likes their laws, they can keep their laws, with an appropriately overwhelming majority vote. But let’s make them vote to reaffirm the importance of banning miniature horses near school zones.

This is a lot of power, so let’s put some guardrails on it. Perhaps the executive can only retroactively veto laws older than 30 years or so. Perhaps he only gets to do this a dozen times per term. Maybe each city councilor gets a single counter-veto they can use. There are lots of interesting possibilities, and we can experiment across different cities and states to find what works best.

The executive carceral expressway

Nearly every city in America is currently plagued by a tiny number of unstable individuals assaulting strangers at random, smashing storefront windows, using the sidewalks as open latrines / drug dens, and generally making life miserable for their fellow citizens. Remarkably, most of the crimes for which these ultra-prolific repeat offenders are arrested are misdemeanors, which means they cycle quickly through the criminal justice system with little punishment, back onto the street to resume defecating in your entryway or assaulting your grandma4.

Removing even the 100 most troublesome such people from any particular city would be an almost unbelievable boon to the welfare of its residents, given the astonishing profligacy of their offenses against the public. In times past it was common for local law enforcement to convince such individuals it would be in their best interest to accept a one-way bus ticket to another city, but that’s unsporting and doesn’t solve the problem. So let’s solve it by jailing them more or less indefinitely.

Oh, calm down, Senator. We’ll give the mayor the legal authority to do this by creating a new offense of “offending the mayor with lawlessness”, granting the mayor the power to jail any denizen he chooses for increasingly long durations after they rack up enough misdemeanors. There’s no need to be cruel, and in fact punishment isn’t the point of this measure — the happiness and safety of the rest of the city is. So we’ll provide our handful of super-offenders with truly luxe accommodation and the public will still come out ahead in emergency room savings alone. Like all law in practice, our mayor will apply this power relatively sparingly, and he wouldn’t need to use it much. It’s difficult to overstate the amount of damage caused by the top 0.5% most prolific offenders, and there simply aren’t that many of them.

It must be acknowledged that this power could easily be abused, and that’s a fair cop. But with every used needle or pile of feces I have to step over on a public sidewalk I become more inclined to call this downside a fair trade. Let’s give tyranny a chance.

The judicial heave-ho

Everyone can agree that the judiciary is the problem with our current legal paralysis or regressive backslide, depending on which side of the bad orange rocket man you find yourself. There’s relatively little argument that judges wield a frankly unseemly amount of power over our lives and over their putatively co-equal branches of government. They can declare laws null and void at will, thereby overriding the will of the elected legislature. They can free convicted criminals on the thinnest of technicalities, thereby overriding juries of their peers. They can issue binding legal orders that cannot be countered except by a ruling from a higher court, which takes months or years. Judges claim a level of power that the legislature and the executive would kill to have. What’s more, a great number of them are appointed, not elected, to lengthy terms from which they are very difficult to remove.

Let’s change that. Troublesome judges have plagued the efforts of problem solvers and reformers since the beginning of the republic, with very little recourse available to either officials or the voting public who end up on the wrong side of a gavel bang. But there’s no reason to tolerate these enrobed menaces who derail our efforts at change: simply remove them from office when they overstep their power, by executive order.

Here I will plead incompetence as to the details of how this would be best accomplished. Judges are a crafty lot, and undoubtedly will find a legal basis to disqualify limits to their power, especially easier removal. This tradition is long and proud and stretches back to the very early days of our system of governance, and the court is very enthusiastic about discovering new powers people didn’t think they had.

But that’s no reason not to try! Let’s get creative. Somewhere in America lives a small town mayor who just had his pet legislative agenda of installing more bike lanes toppled by a judge serving a lifetime appointment, appointed by his predecessor with whom his family has been feuding for six generations. To that mayor I say: step up to the plate sir, pick up the gauntlet. The Hon. Judge Hatfield has made his ruling, now let us see him enforce it.

These are serious proposals, not jokes

Except for the ones that you find personally offensive and beyond the pale. Those ones are jokes, but the rest of them are serious.

America remains a sharply divided country. Perhaps this is the normal way of things, and we were lulled into a false sense of unity by Bill Clinton’s saxophone solo on the Arsenio Hall show. Or maybe it’s truly unprecedented and we are fated to descend into a barbarous and protracted civil war with sides delineated by whether one lives closer to a Walmart or a Trader Joes5.

But division shouldn’t stop us from figuring out how to let the majority get what it wants, especially on the local level. There’s no reason we must consent to be governed by the most obstreperously obnoxious minority with the most time and money on their hands to hire the best legal team. Democracy means that everyone gets a voice, sure; but, having gotten that voice, perhaps they would deign to get out of the way and let the majority govern as they see fit?

If you will allow me to slip into my cozy leather once more, power in America has a legibility problem. Nobody knows who is responsible for anything, because in practice responsibility is so diffuse there is often no one to blame, let alone someone able to wield power to address our grievances. It has been proposed by people much smarter than me that making power legible once more — by giving real power to the person everyone pretends has real power when they exercise their franchise — would result in greater responsiveness of government and increased effectiveness of our shared institutions.

Is this hypothesis true? Beats me. But I think it’s worth a shot, don’t you? Or were you happy with how things have been going, on the issue you care about most? And there’s no reason we need to start with the prize pig of the Presidency, we can eat this whale one bite a time. Let’s start small, by granting various new powers to America’s mayors and county executives. Let’s let the laboratories of democracy really cook and see what they come up with.

Let a thousand mini-Mussolinis bloom.

But. (With an introduction like that, you know there must be a “but” coming). I increasingly find myself in disagreement with Scott’s essays on social issues and public policy, despite broadly sharing his small-L liberal outlook. I often see him deploy arguments I consider specious in a manner I find off-putting. And I blame his devotion to The Church of Graphs1.

The Church of Graphs is dedicated to the meta-belief that knowledge must be formalized and quantifiable to be worthy of consideration. It demands that its adherents reject the evidence of their own eyes in favor of official facts and figures stamped with the imprimatur of a priestly expert class. Church members typically have curious blind spots in their understanding of the world that strike non-believers as ridiculous, but many very intelligent people are believers. Scott is a Bishop.

There’s no better example of what I mean than two of his recent posts, about crime and disorder.

First we have Record Low Crime Rates Are Real, Not Just Reporting Bias Or Improved Medical Care. The title says most of what you need to know, and the article argues that falling reported crime rates are real, not a result of people being so jaded about crime and the justice system that they don’t bother reporting it anymore. The reference to medical care is addressing a popular argument that record-low homicide rates would be much higher in the absence of advances in emergency room care that turn murders into mere assaults, and Scott argues convincingly that this isn’t true. But while homicide is the single most reliably recorded crime due to the presence of a body, reported crime is down across the board. Here’s the rate of property crime, for example.

We have reason to believe that this decline isn’t solely due to reporting bias because the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS), which polls randomly selected residents to ask if they have been victims of a crime, also reports a large decline. These rates are per household rather than per individual, and do not include crimes committed against businesses. But this second, independent data source corroborates the narrative of falling crime rates.

Next we have Crime As Proxy For Disorder, in which Scott starts off unusually back-footed due to the amount of pushback he received on the first post. Scott’s discussion threads are quite lively and his audience enormous, so the usual concept of a “ratio” doesn’t apply to him as it would to you or I. But still: the original article attracted over 700 comments on just 360 likes at the time of this writing2. Scott’s audience was not buying what he was selling. In Scott’s words:

The problem: people hate crime and think it’s going up. But actually, crime barely affects most people and is historically low. So what’s going on?

In our discussion yesterday, many commenters proposed that the discussion about “crime” was really about disorder.

All the graphs say that crime is declining, but people believe it’s getting worse. This includes many members of Scott’s way-above-average-intelligence readership. Why is that? Scott proposes that maybe people’s perceptions on this topic are based on disorder, and proposes several indicators for disorder: litter, graffiti, shoplifting, tent cities. He then spends the rest of the post demonstrating with impeccably sourced and credentialed figures why none of these disorder indicators are actually getting worse, either. They’re all getting better, or there isn’t enough data to say.

• Littering seems to be down

• Graffiti is unclear, probably varies by city.

• Shoplifting seems to be up 20% from generational lows, but still lower than 1990s.

• Homelessness seems to be up 25% from generational lows, and equal to the 1990s.

• Tent encampments are hard to measure nationally; in SF, they are below pre-pandemic levels.

I’m not here to argue with Scott’s statistics. I think they’re about as accurate as we could hope to make them. I’m here to argue that you don’t require them to make sense of the world, and to give you permission to trust your own eyes on matters that affect your life.

Ways of knowing what’s true, and why to believe things

There’s a pretty old blog post circulating among rationalist types about three3 different ways of knowing things and why each is important. They have abstruse Greek names: doxa, episteme, and gnosis. These terms allow people using them to feel like they possess powerful esoteric knowledge about the world, but the concepts themselves are simple and useful

• Doxa is what we know because someone told us. If you read a book and learn a fact from it, or it changes your opinion on something, what you’ve learned is doxa.

• Episteme is what we know because we have used logic and reasoning to reach a conclusion from first principles or observation. If you read a policy statement and convince yourself it can’t work by thinking through obvious second-order effects it would create, your opinion is episteme.

• Gnosis is what we know because we’ve seen or experienced it firsthand. When you generalize about “how people are likely to treat a stranger in need” or “how should one live to be happy” based on examples from your own life, you’re applying gnosis.

When I talk about The Church of Graphs, I am talking about people who privilege doxa over gnosis and episteme. Members of The Church of Graphs live by one primary commandment: thou shalt not believe your lying eyes.

When a Church member encounters evidence from gnosis that would seem to contradict the sacred doxa, they will tie themselves in knots to defend the doxa as still correct, or at least more correct than whatever is being offered in contradiction. Say for instance that a Church member sees some guys emptying the shelves of a drug store into garbage bags, and there are other guys selling suspiciously similar merchandise from blankets on the sidewalk around the corner. They notice this happening multiple times over months, and they can’t remember ever seeing the same problem a few years ago; but the Graphs say shoplifting is down overall. The Graphs have supremacy over mere direct experience. And the Church has taught its members how to respond to heretics who claim otherwise.

They’ll begin by reminding you that your own observations are subject to a number of cognitive and other biases, among them Recency Bias and the powerful Availability Bias. Just because things appear to be getting worse to you doesn’t make it so. Your own experiences can’t be said to be representative, after all. Have you collected enough data to be sure? Perhaps they’ll concede that the official figures for crime are necessarily a lower bound, yes, but they’ve always been underreported, and there’s no reason to believe they are more underreported now than in times past. They may even quote part of their creed: “there is no evidence” that underreporting is a bigger problem than it used to be.

Of course, by “evidence” they are referring to doxa and only a particular kind of doxa. Your own experiences, those of people you know, conversations you’ve had with employees at crime-besieged stores, statements from business owners and corporations as they shutter locations due to safety and theft concerns — these are all hearsay, inadmissible forms of knowledge. To the devout, knowledge must be carefully collected, quantified, and vetted through proper channels. The highest blessing such knowledge can receive is when a set of facts and figures passes through a holy sacrament known as peer review, where high priests of the Church risk excommunication by vouching for its veracity4.

Church members have a second all-important commandment as well: thou shalt not think too hard about the Graphs. Thinking too hard, that is to say, producing episteme by applying reason to the Graphs in a manner that might undermine their conclusions, is strictly forbidden by Church teachings. Let us refer to one of these sacred documents, below.

It is inappropriate for the laity to attempt to practice discernment about these figures, to ask if it is remotely plausible that a city of 600,000 people experienced a scant 200 incidents of a crime as common as shoplifting during any month this century or the last. Worse still would be to allow such questions to cause a crisis of faith, to make one look upon such a Graph and others like it with suspicion, rather than reverence. Certainly the priests have license to ask such questions, and will communicate appropriate explanations and interpretations through one of the proper channels. But for a mere parishioner to attempt the same, without the proper training, and furthermore without the necessary reverence and openness to the Spirit, would be to place oneself in spiritual danger. This could cause one to come to the wrong conclusion, or worse — lose standing among the other deacons of the Church5.

But I’m not a Church member, so I have no standing to lose. In fact, I’m something much worse than even a simple heretic: I’m an apostate. I was one of the Church’s most faithful defenders and evangelists, spreading the gospel and commandments far and wide. I only left the Church after it failed me one too many times, after the gap between the Graphs and my personal experiences, and my own faculties of reason, became too wide to ignore. The Church led me to confidently believe too many things that simply weren’t so, too many times.

Let the record state that I’m not graphophobic (the deadliest sin recognized by the Church) — I frequently refer to charts of figures in my own intellectual work and in casual conversation, and hold them to be vital tools to understand the world. But I have been blessed to live long enough to discover the essential frailty of the Graphs, to find shocking cracks in their professional, impassive facades. And, more to the point, I have come to understand that an over-reliance on the Graphs leads to an impoverished and ultimately less accurate, less useful worldview.

The epistemic chain of custody and the mismeasure of misery

Consider the steps that must happen for the knowledge of a crime to reach you, when you rely on official compiled statistics as reflected in the Graphs. First, a crime is committed. And then:

1. The crime is either noticed by someone, or not. A bicycle stolen from a yard becomes, with enough time and uncertainty between the offense and its noting, merely “lost property”.

2. Assuming it was noticed, the crime is either reported, or not. Whether the victim considers it worth his time and effort to report depends on a variety of factors: how serious he considers the offense; whether he thinks anything will come of a report; whether it’s required for an insurance settlement; his sense of duty to the social compact in reporting crime; how much time and energy he has to spare; whether he even knows how to report a non-emergency crime, shares a language with the authorities, etc.

3. Assuming it was reported, the crime is either recorded, or not. Clerical errors of course happen. Paperwork gets lost or misfiled, software bugs prevent forms from being persisted correctly, or lead to their loss after the fact. A whole host of social and political pressures often apply at this step as well. Political officers high in the chain of command are held accountable for the number of reports, how the numbers compare to previous years, their clearance rates, etc. There are a hundred ways up to and including outright fraud to prevent an inconvenient report from being durably recorded and therefore becoming legible.

4. Assuming it was recorded, the crime is either classified correctly, or not. Think of a time you had an interaction with a police officer, perhaps in the aftermath of an auto collision, and had a chance to review what he wrote about the incident. Was his summary accurate? Or did he get important details wrong, including ones that shift the blame to another party? Social and political pressure here too can obviously play a role: an assault gets downgraded to disorderly conduct, or a mugging to simple larceny.

5. Assuming it was classified correctly, the crime is either compiled into a particular aggregate statistic, or not. This process typically involves not just computers or piles of physical paper, but often both, at various stages, with all the worst failures modes of both mediums coming into play. If you work in software, then you already know how susceptible to error such systems are and how frequently mishaps go unnoticed6.

Let us call this series of steps the epistemic chain of custody. They are the sequential steps which must occur between an event occurring in the real world and it appearing as doxa, thence to guide policy decisions for Church members. Every step in the epistemic chain of custody is lossy, and every step is subject to perverse incentives on the part its custodians. This is true not only of the process of compiling crime statistics, but in all putatively factual aggregations of numbers. To the extent that trends revealed in the data collected by such a process are meaningful, we assume that it’s because all of the errors are constant year over year, or else that they’re fluctuating more or less at random and cancel each other out. If the process of error accumulation has a persistent bias causing it to drift in the same direction year after year, it undermines the trend analysis altogether, making different years incomparable. Since we’re speculating — if you had to guess, if there were an overall bias in error drift, in which direction would you guess it flowed?

But let us grant that we trust the epistemic chain of custody completely, that we ascribe perfect accuracy to its flow. Even then, we must grapple with whether the chain measures what matters. Remember, the object-level dispute is: is crime getting worse?

The Church has two ways to answer this question: to count the number of crimes recorded by police agencies, and to estimate via survey the number of people who say they have been the victim of a crime. These are the two questions answered by the FBI’s Unified Crime Reporting program (UCR) and the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS), respectively. I submit that both of these metrics are mismeasures of how a normal person experiences crime, which is a question rooted in gnosis. Specifically, when a normal person ponders whether crime is getting worse, he asks himself, “am I noticing crime more often than I used to?”

If he answers in the affirmative, Church members pounce, explanations at the ready. Perhaps he is consuming media that highlights incidents of crime, making it seem more common than it is, through a sort of false, vicarious gnosis. Perhaps what he’s calling “crime” is just garden-variety disorder (is the man sprawled unconscious at your bus stop bothering you?). Perhaps he is in some way privileged, and patterns of crime have shifted to his demographic when they use to mostly strike the disadvantaged. In other words: there must be some nefarious bias which accounts for the delta between this person’s subjective impression and the true figures, as recorded in the Graphs.

But all of these explanations miss the point about how crime is experienced by normal people, because the true effects of crime are difficult to quantify and therefore turn into Graphs. To understand why, let us consider how a person experiences crime even if they are not, personally, a legible “victim”.

When I walk down my local commercial strip and notice that there is at least one boarded up plate-glass window or door on every block, I am experiencing crime, as are the thousands of my fellow-citizens visiting those same establishments. I wasn’t the victim of the crime, but I’m experiencing its effects, noticing and remembering it. (The NCVS does not include commercial properties.)

When I send my children to a local café to buy some pastry with cash, only for them to be sent home because the stores in my neighborhood no longer accept cash due to break-ins, my children are experiencing crime.

When my wife parks several blocks away from a fitness class to avoid a camp of derelicts doing drugs in the open on the most convenient route, she is experiencing crime.

When my bus stop is littered with refuse including obvious used drug paraphernalia, I’m experiencing crime.

When I enter a drug store and the products are all in locked glass cases, I am experiencing crime. (In fact, you could say I’m experiencing many thousands of crimes at once, their cumulative effect on this part of my life). When the drug store nearest me closes because of security concerns, I’m experiencing crime. Incidentally — if you read that the store pictured below and one in another neighborhood without locked cases were experiencing identical rates of theft, would you conclude that crime was a similarly serious concern in both neighborhoods?

When an aggressively crazy person enters my train compartment and proceeds to shout threats at passengers and the empty air, how many crimes were committed, and how many victims were there? Every person in the train is made to feel wary and upset by the unpredictable and potentially violent behavior of a lunatic. A single such person victimizes potentially thousands of people every day in his sojourn through a city, and yet on a typical day commits no legible crime.

These examples, all of which come from my own life and are related off the top of my head, have one thing in common: the blast radius of the offense is wide and durable, affecting far more people than could ever be included in a victim survey, and for a much longer time than the offense itself. In strict utilitarian terms this kind of crime is probably more impactful than a simple mugging or burglary, which affect a single household more intensely but for a brief duration. The crimes I experience day to day (that weren’t a part of my life a decade ago in the same city) are all this kind of crime. The term “quality of life crime” is apt: their cumulative effect on a block, a transit system, a neighborhood, is to degrade the lives of everyone who encounters their aftermath, the mitigations deployed in their wake. Their cumulative effect is to make us poorer, to make our lives worse.

And although we’ve established by now that the Graphs are missing something essential to our experience of crime, there are a great wealth of them, and they have much to teach us.

Apocrypha

As I said: I’m an apostate, which is much worse than a simple unbeliever. I’m well versed in the teachings of the Church, fluent in their language of charts and figures. And like any good apostate, I have my favorite apocryphal additions to the holy texts. On this topic, they’re not especially hard to come by, so let’s dig into a few of them.

First, vehicle theft. Up nearly 50% in 5 years in per capita terms. Post-publication update: this particular 5-year trend is a departure from the longer-term trend. It was not the author’s intention to mislead anyone on this point.

Next, theft of non-precious metals, especially copper. Thieves seem to be increasingly targeting public infrastructure such as street lights or light rail, stealing a few hundred dollars in copper in exchange for tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in repairs and weeks to months of downtime. By the FBI’s reckoning, such crimes have approximately tripled in five years. Note that there’s some confusion in the precise degree of the increase here because the UCR recently changed how participating municipalities and states report crime data, and several of the largest states (CA, NY, FL) have been very slow to adopt the new system.

Next, let’s look at two different views of shoplifting. First, here’s another disturbing new criminal trend: flash mobs. These are the mass-shoplifting incidents you may have seen on social media, where gangs of dozens of people, often teens, swarm a store and grab everything they can hold, then run out. This Lululemon store in Houston got hit with 51 shoplifting mobs in six months. Such incidents have tripled in the last five years.

Finally let’s look at shoplifting in Scott’s own San Francisco, where a disproportionate share of his readership also lives. Here’s the official shoplifting rate for San Francisco compared to the national average, lifted from Scott’s post (where he uses it to argue against the idea that shoplifting in SF is getting worse).

Here’s another view of that same data from the SF Chronicle, which we already looked at earlier:

What caused city-wide shoplifting incidents to double for one single month? According to The Chronicle,

A closer look at the data shows that the spike in reported shoplifting came almost entirely from one store: the Target at 789 Mission St. in the Metreon mall. In September alone, 154 shoplifting reports were filed from the South of Market intersection where the Target stands, up from 13 in August. And then, in October, the reports from this intersection went down again to 17.

What happened at this particular Target? Did the store see a huge spike in shoplifting in September? No, said store manager Stacy Abbott. The store was simply using a new reporting system implemented by the police that allows retailers to report crime incidents over the phone.

When asked why the shoplifting reports had decreased again in October, Abbott said she wouldn’t be able to answer any more questions and directed The Chronicle to the Police Department as well as Target’s media team, which did not answer questions either.

So a single Target in a troubled part of town using a more convenient crime reporting system caused the aggregate reports of shoplifting for the entire city to double. This single fact should, by itself, invalidate this entire data set. It’s a bad joke. I will leave the question of why this particular Target stopped using the shiny new phone-based reporting system for shoplifting, and refused to answer questions about it, as an exercise for the reader.

Note that all of these spiking criminal offenses fall into the category of “quality of life” crimes, and further into crimes with broad and lasting impact. A stopped train or darkened overpass, a shuttered store — these are crimes that affect thousands of people, far more than could ever hope to be recorded in the NCVS.

My goal in sharing this apocrypha is not to pit them against the other Graphs in a battle for supremacy. I think all of the graphs in this post, the ones showing crime declining and the ones showing it spiking up, are all approximately as accurate as we could hope. Their accuracy isn’t the problem. The problem is that they tell conflicting narratives that are at odds with one another, and with your own experiences.

Data is not naturally occurring. It does not exist in the white light of pure reason like a mathematical proof. It is compiled by people in service of some goal. And even when that goal is ostensibly completely neutral (the FBI really does want to know how much crime is occurring in the country), the very act of measurement, of quantification, entails judgment and lossy compression. It cannot help but elide essential aspects of the phenomenon being studied. It cannot help but mislead, even when wielded by smart and honest people with the best intentions.

You can believe your eyes

A commenter on Scott’s first post objects:

What would convince you the stats are wrong, or that they are some how not including our lived experience?

I lived in SF from 2007-2013 and again from 2021-2024. The first time the block on Mission between 15th and 16th was normal city block. Now, the entire block is one large illegal market with people selling stolen goods (assuming it hasn’t been cleaned up since 2024). Is that one crime per seller, per day? They’re out in the open, every day. They weren’t there before.

Is this an exception, crime is down over all but just not in SF?

I’m now in LA. There are illegal food stalls over over the place. Some people like them but irrelevant, a crime is being committed, nothing is being done. So every day I see these crimes. They weren’t here 10 years ago. Hence, my experience is crime is up since I visibly see it every time I go out.

When the evidence of your eyes is at odds with the Graphs, and you’re surrounded by serenely smiling Church members, it is a maddening experience. The phrase “gaslighting” is tossed around too often when simple “lying” or “bullshitting” is more appropriate, but in the case of the Church of Graphs it’s apt. Church members gaslight you: they tell you that your own experiences are, if not hallucinations or false memories exactly, unrepresentative. Untrustworthy. Lacking important context. Disqualified from true consideration by the elect.

Aside from this attitude being patronizing and dehumanizing, it’s also simply wrong in most of the ways that matter for your own life. As with many social problems, crime is by its nature hyper-localized, with different cities, or even adjacent blocks in the same city, inhabiting divergent public-safety realities. What does it matter to me to know that crime is getting better (on paper) nationally, or even in my city as a whole? I don’t live nationally, nor in my city as a whole — I live in the particular place that I live, and shop in the particular places that I shop, and I can see those places decaying from year to year7.

For that matter, what does it matter to me, as a father and husband, to know that crime was more common in the 1990s? I mostly believe the Graphs on this point, and the older people in my life tell a story that agrees with the data. But my wife and children weren’t being periodically terrorized by street addicts and lunatics in the 1990s, that’s happening to them today, when it wasn’t 10 years ago. The stores are locking up the merchandise and going out of business due to rampant theft today, not in 2016. You can weave a narrative that the 2010s were an uncommonly lawful time in America, and we’re now returning to historic norms, but what good does that do me? My kids need to ride the bus right now, in a city that’s recognizably sketchier than in my relatively recent memories. They don’t get to wait for things to get better.

In one sense, the insistence on high epistemic standards for one’s beliefs about the world is laudable, especially for someone in Scott’s position — he can plausibly direct the course of national policy. One could argue that Scott has a duty as an influential figure to restrict his factual claims to those that can be independently verified and vetted. For him, vibes and gnosis do not cut it. And when it comes to matters of national or regional concern, there are practical limits on gnosis that prevent it from being sufficient to understand the world. I would never claim that facts and figures from third-party accounts beyond one’s personal experiences can be excluded from one’s worldview8.

But in another sense, strict insistence on only this formal, quantifiable form of knowledge is itself another kind of bias, an overzealous discounting of forms of evidence that cannot be made to fit cleanly into the Graphs. It’s a blind spot. And Scott would be the first to acknowledge that he is not without his own biases; in fact he is more open and honest about them than any other public intellectual I know. In this case, he prefers a libertarian social policy with fewer people incarcerated or otherwise involuntarily confined. He talks about this at length in his other writing on the topic, and he confirmed his rhetorical goals in a third post in the series, the first two not having convinced his readers:

So I think it’s important to argue that no, crime rates really are down, and it’s not just reporting bias or modern medicine, and that this argument neutralizes a real and influential group of people trying to make the contrary argument that murder/crime rates are up, and to push policy based on that position.

Here I must disagree with Scott in the strongest possible terms: I want to forcibly confine the small number of criminals, street addicts, and lunatics responsible for a wildly disproportionate amount of crime and disorder. Doing so would improve my life and the lives of nearly everyone in my city, including many of those forcibly confined. It would make the world a better place. But my city insists on the right of lunatics and addicts to roam free and unmolested like protected wildlife, and Scott wields his Graphs in service of that same goal. I find this intolerable and will continue to object to it whenever I see it. And I will call foul when I see smart, well-meaning people gaslight their fellow citizens into dismissing the evidence of their senses in favor of figures on paper.

As for me, I’m not fettered by the same standard of notoriety and decorum that Scott is. To my occasional chagrin, I remain a very minor internet microcelebrity in no danger of inadvertently steering the national conversation. Therefore, like animals and proles, I am free: free to establish the epistemic standards that appear to me best suited to understanding the world and my place in it. I am neither a federal court nor a newspaper of record, and permit a certain free-wheeling impulsivity to my judgments as I see fit. Yes, gnosis is limited by definition, and sometimes appears almost useless in understanding the world beyond one’s own horizon of experience. But this isn’t so: gnosis can and must serve as your gut check to the barrage of third-party doxa we are all subjected to on a daily basis. Only the grounding of gnosis can administer the smell-test necessary to separate essential information from fun trivia from malicious propaganda.

And as for your own life, the place you work, the people you know and the place you live: you have eyes. Use them. Don’t let the Church shame you into closing them.

Our kids have in the past asked us what to do when their schoolmates bring up Trump or other political topics, because they don’t know what to say. Our advice is simple: tell them politics is boring and change the subject. Did you try that this time? we asked. Yes, but it didn’t work — his friends were enjoying the trash talk as much as he was, all of them reveling in that oldest of schoolyard pursuits: ganging up on a shared enemy. Our kids were the weird ones for feeling uncomfortable about the intrusion of boring grownup stuff into recess.

Fifteen years ago I would have said that it should be uncontroversial that a nine-year-old child shouldn’t have an opinion on national politics, and that we shouldn’t care what it was if he did. But the world has very clearly moved on. The kids think it’s normal to talk this way because they hear mom and dad do so constantly. They have the same opinions their parents do, as is only right and natural, but unlike in the possibly-imaginary rosy recent past, there’s less protective urge on the part of parents to shelter kids from this rancorous and unsavory aspect of the adult world, to guard their innocence, to let them be kids while they can. On the contrary, children’s involvement in political activism has been progressively normalized by every important institution in their lives, from the shows they stream on Netflix to the social media their parents consume to the lesson plans in their schools. It’s in the air and water.

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True, I had spent the intervening decade punishing my brain cells with a variety of substances licit and illicit, some of which must have left a mark. I would sometimes look at my Mormon colleagues with wry admiration, reflecting enviously on the growing cumulative substance abuse gap that separated us. Here I had been stewing my fragile neurons in a toxic soup of feel-good chemicals while they chastely labored for their own improvement and the glory of God. What kind of freak does that, I groused internally.

It was cope, of course. Even at 22, regularly taking eight beers and a bong rip straight to the frontal lobe of a Thursday evening, my total intellectual output was higher and more easily coaxed than it would be just a handful of years later. At 20 I taught myself to play guitar well enough to get laid while taking a full college course load, working part time, and partying two or three nights a week. At 28 I struggled to find the energy to do more than push play on the new Netflix DVD after work most evenings. What happened to my youth, could it really be spent so young?

We tend to think of cognitive decline as something that affects the elderly, the Bidens and Trumps of the world, not men and women in their prime. But this is wishful thinking. We don’t start classifying decline as such until it reaches some threshold of reduced capacity that both of our last two presidents were obviously on the wrong side of to varying extents. But this threshold classification scheme conceals an underlying reality of steady, near-linear decline from a young age. The uncomfortable truth, established by countless studies, is that raw cognitive power peaks early in life and declines steadily until death.

The decline I began to notice in my late twenties wasn’t my imagination, and it didn’t stop then. The decades since have continued on the same trajectory — I look back with wry envy at the 27-year-old concerned he was already past his peak. He wasn’t wrong, but he couldn’t understand how far he had to slide. I would pay a lot of money to be him again.

I’m simply not as sharp as I once was. It takes me longer to learn new things, to understand and choose the best course of action from the options in front of me. I tire out more easily. I’m slower, more prone to being derailed by interruptions and wrong turns. I can’t work through the night or power through a hangover like I used to. I’m getting old, and the worst is still to come.

But if I’m older and slower, surely I’m also wiser. What of the countervailing effects of life experience, the accumulation of skills and knowledge? Don’t those offset the decline? Yes, a bit. Tanner Greer notes that unlike measurements of raw cognition, career achievement among intellectuals tends to peak quite a bit later.

In most fields creative production increases steadily from the 20s to the late 30s and early 40s then gradually declines thereafter, although not to the same low levels that characterized early adulthood. Peak times of creative achievement also vary from field to field. The productivity of scholars in the humanities (for example, that of philosophers or historians) continues well into old age and peaks in the 60s, possibly because creative work in these fields often involves integrating knowledge that has crystallized over the years. By contrast, productivity in the arts (for example, music or drama) peaks in the 30s and 40s and declines steeply thereafter, because artistic creativity depends on a more fluid or innovative kind of thinking. Scientists seem to be intermediate, peaking in their 40s and declining only in their 70s. Even with the same general field, differences in peak times have been noted. For example, poets reach their peak before novelists do, and mathematicians peak before other scientists do.

Greer is more interested in creativity than raw cognition — his essay linked above is pondering why public intellectuals seem to have short shelf-lives. So it makes sense when thinking about careers whose output involves synthesis of crystallized knowledge that a peak in early middle life is to be expected, after accumulating lots of experience but before general cognitive decline becomes too advanced to seriously impede one’s facility with analyzing and manipulating that knowledge.

But what about us non-scholars, those of us in the general knowledge economy, we whose economic viability depends on rapidly learning new skills and tools on demand in a constantly shifting landscape? Mark Zuckerberg ruffled feathers when he publicly stated his preference for younger employees, saying “young people are just smarter” than their older peers. But he was right. It might be illegal to discriminate against older people in hiring, but it’s objectively correct to expect them to be slower to learn and grow on the job. We may bring more to the table in terms of our experience, but it’s simple vanity to insist we can keep up with the fresh-faced kids. And when your experience counts for little because the entire industry’s tech stack rotates every five years, then what?

Forgive me for only discussing these nerdy brain concerns. I don’t want to give my loyal readers the impression that I’m one of those un-embodied weaklings, out of touch with the beauty of his own strength and physical prowess. In fact I take nearly as great a pride in my grace and endurance, in the capabilities of my physical body, as I do in my meaty intellect. But here again I can find no relief from the ravages of time. In the physical realm the situation is if anything even more dire than in the realm of the mind. At age 25, a 95th percentile performance among men means you can run under a 6-minute mile. At age 75, a 95th percentile performance means you can slowly climb stairs.

This is a shocking level of decline, but if anything it undersells the true horror of aging. Everyone understands that loss of physical performance is part of getting older, even if they’ve never quite internalized how steep that loss will be. But radically reduced VO2 max is just the tip of the iceberg.

Even by my thirties I noticed my body taking much longer to recover from injuries, and eventually came to the grim realization that new wounds would never fully, 100% heal. From that point on, I was playing for keeps: each sprain or torn muscle would be with me for the rest of my life, no question. Now in my forties, the injuries I sustained as a younger man continually return to haunt me, aches and pains from accidents decades ago. Sometimes I’ll be in pain all day because of how I slept the night before. And under it all: inexorable metabolic decline, decreased organ function, slowly accumulating, irreparable cellular damage.

I haven’t mentioned concerns about appearance, but that’s only because I’m not a woman. Women’s anxiety around aging drives 20% of consumer spending, conservatively.

I’m sorry to be a downer. Aging sucks, and anyone telling you differently is trying to sell you something. The only positive aspect is getting to finally reap the benefits of a life well lived, assuming you lived well: the love of family, a nice place to live, financial security, a firmer grasp of the world and your place in it. I’m very blessed to have all of these. I know many aren’t so lucky.

And one more positive aspect: learning to let go of youthful anxiety about legacy. Like many precocious and sensitive young men, preoccupation with this topic sometimes weighed heavily on me in my youth. Surely I would accomplish the great things my teachers and peers always assured me I would, surely my achievements would echo down through the ages. But as I crested my late twenties and entered my thirties, I began to worry: when? Simply earning a lot of money, some promotions and other career accolades, a collection of hobbies and skills, minor notoriety online, the odd bullshit patent or publication, surely those things didn’t qualify as true greatness. And no, they didn’t, they don’t. This used to gnaw at me, and it doesn’t anymore. Now in the twilight of my youth, on the threshold of true middle age, the only legacy I care about is biological and material, the success of my children and their children, what I’ll provide them and how they’ll remember me. I expect many men begin to feel the same way as they approach my age.

Or maybe they don’t. Maybe they’re consumed by the fear that they’re working against the clock and will ultimately lose the race with their own inevitable decline before leaving a mark that satisfies them. Probably many of them are right. I understand completely. Just because I’ve made peace with my lack of greatness doesn’t mean I like it.

I write these essays because I’m compelled to, for reasons that remain partly mysterious to me, but that must surely involve some large dose of ego, with leaving a record that persists beyond my frail mortal shell. The idea of my great-grandchildren and their peers reading my shitposts in snatches of intermittent electrical coverage in between dodging the seeker-killer robots hunting them in the ruins of industrial civilization, of finding some joy or insight therein, does make me smile. It makes me feel like I really will outlive myself, the same way those great-grandchildren will outlive me, and carry part of me with them. And isn’t that what we all hope for, when we think about getting old and dying? That it will all have meant something. That the things we did in life, what we leave to those who come after us, will in some small way make a difference. That we mattered, and lasted beyond ourselves.

A winner has a healthy appreciation of his abilities, and a keen awareness of his limitations;

a loser is oblivious of both his true abilities and his true limitations.

Maybe I’m biased here, but unlike most of the aphorisms in this book I feel like this one isn’t really about character at all, it’s just IQ. Every very capable person I’ve ever known has possessed a pretty accurate idea of his abilities and limitations, and the less capable tended to as well. Maybe this is more true today than it was in Harris’s time — we’ve gotten better at running the Sort, people tend to find their level and are hyper-aware of where it is. Today only real idiots have a self-image badly out of sync with their actual abilities.

A winner takes a big problem and separates it into smaller parts so that it can be more easily manipulated;

a loser takes a lot of little problems and rolls them together until they are unsolvable.

Most of these sayings apply pretty equally to both men and women in most contexts, but this is the rare counterexample that seems strongly gendered to me. Here Harris is speaking about analytical ability — analysis is from the Greek for “loosening up”, breaking something down into parts; its opposite is synthesis, “bringing together”. Men are generally quite a bit better at analytical modes of thought and action than women (I said generally, please don’t yell at me). I’ve often noticed the “loser” tendency in the women in my own life, including my own dear Mrs. Kitten, and it’s maddening to deal with. So to some extent Harris is simply describing masculine virtue, which makes this less applicable than I imagine he wanted it to be. But there are of course easy-to-do steps that analytically-challenged people can take to improve on this, such as making detailed lists and checking items off, so I’ll give him a pass.

A winner knows that people will be kind if you give them the chance;

a loser feels that people will be unkind if you give them the chance.

This is the 60s liberal in Harris asserting itself, and also a good working definition of a high-trust society. I generally feel this way, despite being frequently disappointed and occasionally taken advantage of. It’s the optimist in me.

Before applying this advice in your own life, poke your head up for an honest assessment of whether you live in a high-trust community.

A winner focuses;

a loser sprays.

Harris wrote a daily newspaper column for decades, in addition to the book here and several others. I tend to think of this advice as being about consistently applying effort to the same things, day after day and year after year, rather than limiting your scope to a narrow set of pursuits. Stephen King famously writes around 1,000 words every morning as his daily routine. That’s about two single-spaced pages (this post is around 600 words). After 50 or 100 days of that, he has a novel. He’s written 85 so far.

That’s all for this week. Forgive the intermission for the Christmas season, when I was frequently traveling with family and away from the flatbed scanner I use to upload these images. I’ll resume the normal Sunday schedule for this feature beginning today.

But the truly disturbing part is that Good’s behavior is far from an outlier. German blogger recently echoed my own shock at how quickly activist tactics have escalated in his essay Courting death to own the Nazis. In the excerpt below he’s describing not Renee Good’s fatal encounter with immigration police, but another white woman in Minnesota successfully employing the exact same tactic Good used, blocking a public road to prevent an ICE vehicle from moving, and proudly posting the entire episode to TikTok. You don’t know her name because she survived the incident she incited without injury, but she’s one of thousands of newly radicalized activists playing a dangerous game of interference with federal law enforcement. Click through to watch the video, it’s very illustrative.

The most instructive moment in this clip (again, one of dozens) comes right at the beginning, when our heroine tells the ICE agents whose car she is blocking that “We can play” because “my car’s bigger than yours.” This random woman who probably has kids in school and a mortgage and a miserable ex-husband on the hook for god knows how much in child support thus openly contemplates weaponising her vehicle against multiple armed law enforcement officers. That level of middle-class political radicalisation is pretty amazing if you ask me.

Objectively speaking, these ICE-watching women engage federal law enforcement officers in repeated rounds of chicken. Their aim is to edge beyond being a mere nuisance and cause meaningful disruptions, while hoping always to stop short of becoming a serious, actionable threat. This is a very hard balance to maintain because of course threats are perceived subjectively. Where exactly the line falls will vary from officer to officer and from situation to situation, according to a multitude of imponderables. Anyone who plays like this is trying to get shot, whether she realises it or not.

“We can play,” the soccer mom monologues to TikTok while maneuvering her car to prevent an SUV of heavily armed men from driving down a public street. Like Good, the fact that her actions are incredibly dangerous, that her situation could unpredictably spiral out of control and result in her death or someone else’s, seems to never cross her mind. Why are so many middle-class people, and especially women, behaving with such reckless disregard for their own safety, seemingly without realizing it? Yes, they oppose immigration enforcement, they consider ICE’s mission illegitimate. But most people who hold these views do not engage in direct action with armed law enforcement, and even fewer would put themselves in a position to be beaten or shot by physically obstructing or interfering with officers. Yet a critical minority of mostly white, mostly middle-class activists, disproportionately women, have been radicalized into this extreme form of activist protest in large numbers. How did this happen?

To understand why, first understand that activist groups of the kind that Good belonged to encourage their members to use the exact interference tactics she employed, as well as other, even more dangerous ones. These groups publish various guides on how to prevent law enforcement from fulfilling their mission or arresting their fellow travelers. They conduct training sessions for members to rehearse these tactics before deploying them in the field. They are well organized and well funded.

Below is an excerpt from a publication circulated by ICE Watch Minnesota, one of the activist groups with which Good was reportedly affiliated. Here they advocate surrounding law enforcement officers with civilian cars as a “de-arrest” strategy, calling this tactic “the lowest level of risk”.

The group also shared the following flyer on Instagram, encouraging its membership to interfere with ICE operations by “block[ing] the kidnappers cars with multiple cars” and “ask[ing] white witnesses to put their bodies” in the way of officers. If this advice sounds familiar, it should.

The citizen-led anti-ICE operations taking place in Minneapolis and in every city where ICE shows its masked faces are better understood as a kind of militia action, rather than as a form of protest. Even when technically non-violent in nature, these operations are designed to provoke a violent response from law enforcement, thereby producing mediagenic victims to use in propaganda. The goal is to trap enforcement efforts in a double bind — either obstruction tactics disrupt immigration enforcement, so activists win; or somebody gets hurt or killed for the dozens of cameras filming every encounter, producing a new martyr to dominate media coverage, so activists win.

Activist networks encourage their members to engage in behavior that they know will result in martyr production when applied at scale in a simple equation: X activists engaging with Y officers per day with a violent confrontation rate of Z% will lead to N new martyrs per year. The logic is as predictable as it is sad. Each new martyrdom is not a regrettable tragedy, it is a tremendous boon to the movement, motivating swells of protest and inducing fresh blood to enlist so the cycle can continue.

A few months ago I tried to organize my thoughts about whether we are at war in light of the increasing frequency of this kind of conflict, and discussed the role of so-called “stochastic terrorism”, the idea that broadcasting an urgent moral crisis will predictably lead some number of your least stable listeners to take violent action.

Everyone understands, at a gut level, that the language of existential conflict, spoken by serious national figures and broadcast widely, is a call to violence that someone, somewhere, will take literally and act on. The official term for this in 2025 is stochastic terrorism, and the danger of such terrorism from the right was breathlessly discussed as a major concern by the left in a series of hand-wringing interviews and media puff pieces right up until the moment that two separate assassins made attempts on Trump’s life. Since then the term has been quietly mothballed, because to take it seriously implicates Joy Reid and MSNBC, to say nothing of many sitting Senators, in our ongoing political violence. If you tell your supporters that democracy and our way of life are at stake, that a literal fascist dictator is coming into power, and you repeat these messages non-stop for the better part of a decade, you cannot then act surprised when somebody takes a shot at Orange Hitler.

Stochastic terrorism is a vital concept in understanding the fourth-generation warfare of our slowly simmering maybe-civil-war, and I’d like to submit a related term for consideration: stochastic martyrdom1.

Stochastic martyrdom is the encouragement of activist tactics that will predictably get activists hurt or killed when applied at scale, coupled with false assurances of personal safety for the people employing them. The martyrs created by this process are then used (quite effectively) as propaganda for the activist cause in a positive feedback loop. The repeated assurances that radically dangerous tactics are actually perfectly safe explains the preponderance of women throwing themselves in harm’s way, as well as the uncanny “we’re just playing” affect adopted by so many of the women filming themselves confronting officers armed with lethal weapons. And the importance of these false assurances explain the widely circulating myths that federal immigration officers can’t touch or arrest US citizens, that they have no authority over you to order you to (for example) stop blocking a public road, like a sort of leftist sovereign citizen movement. Obviously these ideas are dangerous lies, and I would bet money that Good had heard and believed them.

I ended that essay a few months ago by concluding that, no, we probably aren’t at war. Not by most recognizable definitions, not by historical comparisons with conditions we did not call war at the time and don’t today.

And if this is a war, it’s a pretty genteel one at the moment. Recalling Days of Rage again:

“People have completely forgotten that in 1972 we had over nineteen hundred domestic bombings in the United States.” — Max Noel, FBI (ret.)

I still think that’s true. There’s a certain sense in which the escalating political violence we’re experiencing is a cold civil war, and it can be useful to think of it that way in certain contexts. But for the most part, for most daily uses, I would call that label a distraction. To me, the more salient issue is the breakdown of consensus around the legitimacy of law and law enforcement in general. In the case of immigration law in particular, a very sizable minority of our fellow citizens do not consider ICE or its mission legitimate, an attitude which echoes broadly voiced doubts about the legitimacy of policing as a whole during the Summer of Floyd. And there’s an obvious parallel to the capitol riots on January 6, when partisans attempted to interfere with the lawful execution of a federal election on the grounds that various alleged dirty tricks and irregularities made its result illegitimate. That resulted in an activist death too, although one that got significantly less sympathetic press coverage. In both examples, we saw sizable groups willing to confront with direct action what they perceived as illegitimate laws, and in both cases participants possessed an uncanny and false belief in their own safety in pursuing such action. These conditions are guaranteed to produce a steady stream of violence and martyrs.

The battle over ICE is nowhere near settled, it’s certainly not the last source of political violence we’ll see during this administration or the next, and my guess is that things are going to get worse before they get better. I remain hopeful that the forgotten and nearly unbelievable level of violence of the early 1970s will not come to pass again. But I wouldn’t count on it.

But as happy as the screams and laughter of the kids were, my own thoughts were, as ever, darkened by discourse. Since reading it a few weeks ago, I’ve been ruminating and reflecting on Drunk Wisconsin’s essay Christmas is a secular holiday. His thesis is that Christmas’s religious origins are now mere historical curiosity, and that the actual holiday, as celebrated by actual Westerners, is completely secular. Consider the extreme outsider view:

An alien lands in the middle of the US in December and starts learning about Christmas. Superficially, Christmas is about lights hung on the outside of single family homes, Christmas trees decorated with ornaments, and wreaths hung on doors. It’s about familiar Christmas music getting played on repeat and Christmas movie marathons at night. It’s about buying presents for your loved ones, particularly kids. There’s deep lore behind common Christmas characters: Santa Claus delivers presents to kids on Christmas night by landing his reindeer-pulled magical sleigh on their roof and coming down the chimney, his lead reindeer is a bully victim named Rudolph with a glowing red nose, he lives at the North Pole and has elves help him make toys all year long, he keeps a list of naughty and nice kids, and sometimes his wife makes an appearance, particularly when it’s a movie about his origins.

Once you get past that surface-level stuff, Christmas is really about cozy winter vibes and curling up in front of a fire place with a mug of hot cocoa, even if the fireplace is on your TV. It’s about nostalgia for the Christmases of your youth, listening to the same songs that have been played for generations, and watching comforting movies with a joyous moral message. It’s about family, about parents and grandparents watching the sparkle of youthful naivety in their kids’ eyes as they see the presents Santa left them under the tree on Christmas morning. It’s about embodying a Christmas spirit, about Christmas magic, about something that extends beyond the physical and feeds the soul.

Having learned all of that, I would say the alien understands Christmas. If he is a particularly thorough student, he might dive into the origins of this holiday and may be surprised to find out that Christmas is a specifically Christian religious holiday. It turns out that this holiday isn’t about coniferous trees or presents or Santa at all; it’s about the birth of Jesus Christ, the god-messiah of the Christian faith. It turns out that none of the stuff he learned about is relevant to Christianity at all, and that no official Christian church requires its members to decorate their houses in lights or set up a tree or pretend reindeer can fly. Only having learned this does he look back and admit that there are some religious elements peeking through here and there in all of that consumed Christmas content.

The typical American who celebrates Christmas, even if they are Christians who attend church on occasion, do not primarily celebrate the birth of our savior. They celebrate a secular mythos of Santa and reindeer, of family togetherness, of gifts and generosity. Jesus may make an appearance, but he’s a footnote, not the main show.

Of course this observation is nothing new. Devout Christians have been complaining about the secularization of the holiday for so long that it was already a punchline in the early 90s, in the Dana Carvey era of SNL.

That battle having been conclusively lost, the religious right retreated to a much weaker grievance, which itself has been so widely lampooned that it too mostly serves as a punchline among bien pensants: that there’s a “War on Christmas”, a distributed campaign of erasing public celebration of Christmas in favor of a generic “holiday season.” Usually people grinding this axe will point to examples in commerce and media, whether that’s Starbucks printing a different message on their seasonal merchandise, or the local news affiliate dropping traditional coverage of Christmas celebrations such as tree-lightings. Governments have additional reasons to tread lightly here given the capricious nature of first-amendment litigation, which is why public schools now grant a Winter Break and nativity scenes on government property are rare. There are too many examples to point to individually, and it’s easy for casual observers to convince themselves that public, communal celebrations of Christmas are in steep decline, even if far from extinct. The Christian faith and the Christmas holiday in particular are no longer ubiquitous, near-universally shared cultural assumptions, as they were even a few decades ago.

The War on Christmas is a frustrating front in the culture war. It’s at once obviously, undeniably taking place, but prosecuted in such a way that responsibility is murky and diffuse, no one in particular to blame. It’s also clearly not the case that public celebration of Christmas, by private actors, has been in any way meaningfully curtailed or outlawed — you can tell your coworkers and neighbors Merry Christmas, you won’t get fired or sued.

And yet. There clearly was a War on Christmas, and Christmas lost. People complaining about what people write on their end-of-year holiday cards or on their coffee cups are fighting a war that was conclusively decided decades ago, and most haven’t seriously reflected on this fact. The Christmas they seek to save, the second-most important religious holiday for what remains a massive majority of Americans, has already been strip-mined of religious significance in popular culture, its meaning hollowed out, its celebration crassly commercialized. The war is over. Christmas lost.

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I’m late to the party on this article, so lots of ink and invective have already been flung back and forth. If you missed it, take the ten minutes and read it, it’s worth the time. But as my pinned tweet implies, I think it’s probably beyond dispute that this feminization has occurred, and that this is a very consequential development. Andrews explains why:

Everything you think of as wokeness involves prioritizing the feminine over the masculine: empathy over rationality, safety over risk, cohesion over competition.

…

Female group dynamics favor consensus and cooperation. Men order each other around, but women can only suggest and persuade. Any criticism or negative sentiment, if it absolutely must be expressed, needs to be buried in layers of compliments. The outcome of a discussion is less important than the fact that a discussion was held and everyone participated in it. The most important sex difference in group dynamics is attitude to conflict. In short, men wage conflict openly while women covertly undermine or ostracize their enemies.

Any casual observer old enough to remember life as late as the 90s can think of a dozen ways this process has manifested in their own lives. It’s much harder to think of counter-examples to this general trend, although people of course try. But on the whole I just don’t think there are many good-faith objections to the fact of the Great Feminization. Rather, people are left arguing about one of two things:

1. Is it actually Good that this is happening? Maybe the dysfunction we observe in every institution that becomes female-dominated is actually caused by something else. Or maybe it’s the case that what we perceive as dysfunction is just the pain of a paradigm shift, that we’re in the middle of a realignment of values that will ultimately lead to a better world.

2. No, it’s Bad, actually. Whose fault is it?

Andrews addresses both of these questions. As to the first, whether it’s a good thing or a bad thing, she writes,

The problem is not that women are less talented than men or even that female modes of interaction are inferior in any objective sense. The problem is that female modes of interaction are not well suited to accomplishing the goals of many major institutions. You can have an academia that is majority female, but it will be (as majority-female departments in today’s universities already are) oriented toward other goals than open debate and the unfettered pursuit of truth. And if your academia doesn’t pursue truth, what good is it? If your journalists aren’t prickly individualists who don’t mind alienating people, what good are they? If a business loses its swashbuckling spirit and becomes a feminized, inward-focused bureaucracy, will it not stagnate?

As to the second, whose fault it is, Andrews places the blame on social engineering and civil rights law:

Feminization is not an organic result of women outcompeting men. It is an artificial result of social engineering, and if we take our thumb off the scale it will collapse within a generation.

The most obvious thumb on the scale is anti-discrimination law. It is illegal to employ too few women at your company. If women are underrepresented, especially in your higher management, that is a lawsuit waiting to happen. As a result, employers give women jobs and promotions they would not otherwise have gotten simply in order to keep their numbers up.

This is basically the same hypothesis laid out in 2023 by Richard Hanania in his book The Origins of Woke and taken apart by Scott Alexander in his review. Hanania focuses more on race than gender, but it’s the same argument: the cultural changes we now call wokeness are downstream of the ever-ballooning set of contradictory workplace requirements we call civil rights law. Andrews sees the institutional and cultural dominance of women as the ultimate cause of the turn to wokeness , but also traces such dominance back to civil rights law.

But this explanation is unsatisfying. Alexander writes:

Even the book’s own history of the civil rights movement seems to undermine its thesis. This history, remember, is that Congress tried to pass reasonable and limited laws, and then woke activist judges and bureaucrats kept expanding them into unreasonable power grabs. And that (he says) was the origin of wokeness. But if a movement has captured the judicial branch and the civil service, it seems like it must have already originated. Grant that this was an older form of wokeness more clearly grounded in the anti-segregation struggles of the 1960s. But that just brings us back to the question of where the new 2010s version of wokeness came from, which the book also doesn’t answer.

I’m here to agree with Alexander and disagree with Andrews and Hanania as to the cause of wokeness and the Great Feminization. Politics and law are downstream of culture, not vice versa. And western culture has been feminizing and liberalizing for at least the last few hundred years. Choose any long-run trend relating to culture — whether it’s eligibility to vote, birth rates, literacy, non-farm labor participation, graduation rates, violent crime, take your pick — and you will observe steady, gradual change since the dawn of industrialization, all in the same direction. There are shockingly few lines of delineation marking the passage of particular laws, or supreme court rulings, or the outcomes of elections. What we now call wokeness or the Great Feminization are simply arbitrary labels that we place onto these very long-running trends.

Where on the above two charts did the Great Feminization occur? It’s a trick question: neither of them go back nearly far enough. It was already well underway by 1955, long before the civil rights act and the EEOC were more than a twinkle in a young communist’s eye.

Let’s approach it from another angle. The second chart demonstrates that women became a majority of new college graduates by 1990. Why, then, have we constantly heard since that time that women face unfair discrimination in higher education, that we must level the playing field with scholarships and programs targeted at increasing women’s college participation? Do people not understand women already out-perform men in college graduation?

In most cases, they do understand that, at least at some level. But on a more visceral level they still feel that women are simply more inherently worthy of our attention and resources than are men, a bias shared by essentially everyone throughout the West. There are good reasons to believe this bias is simply baked in through the process of biological and cultural evolution — women are the bottleneck to reproduction, and any tribe or culture which didn’t elevate their needs above men’s got out-reproduced and therefore outcompeted by those who did. But we have empirical, quantified evidence of the phenomenon since at least 1994, when the “women are wonderful effect” was first coined. Despite what activists might claim, women’s needs are on the whole given more attention than men’s, and in general people like women more, want to be around them more, want to give them considerations and privileges above and beyond what’s afforded to men. Steve Stewart-Williams just published this graph detailing the large advantage in hiring enjoyed by women across a variety of fields in academia:

Both men and women very strongly preferred female candidates with identical on-paper qualifications, and this was true both in fields that are male-dominated (engineering) and female-dominated (psychology). Nobody in a psychology department is worried about running afoul of a lawsuit for not hiring enough women, but they still prefer female candidates by at least 2 to 1. (The sole exception was male economics professors, and even there they barely split in favor of men, within the margin of error).

So it’s easy to demonstrate that preference for women far exceeds what is required by civil rights laws. It would be foolish to claim that such laws didn’t accelerate the process, and it’s also easy to find cases where overzealous application of the laws produced perverse and lopsided outcomes, e.g. the elimination of some men’s sports programs under Title IX due to too few women being interested in fielding a team. But on the whole, I subscribe to a bigger-picture view which considers civil rights laws and social feminization as both being part of the same process, driven by cultural and technological changes. The law is as much effect as cause.

My own personal experience with these changes has been working for elite tech companies over the last twenty-something years, and I tend to specialize in especially gear-headed domains where the male-female ratio is even more lopsided than in tech as a whole. I’ve seen first-hand how the behavioral norms of an organization shift as women go from being more than a token minority to even a small minority. The famed “boys club” of tech, the “frat-house” environment so decried by women’s activism in the mid-2010s, is a real thing. I saw it first hand. But only on teams where there was, at most, one or two women, and they were “one of the guys.” As soon as there were even three women, even on a team of dozens of men, the behavioral norms shifted abruptly to what women preferred. Out: nerf gun fights, push up contests, casual put downs, practical jokes. In: listening, collaboration, small talk, implicit social status games. Nobody had to be threatened for this change to occur, certainly not by lawsuits. Even computer nerds, famously socially blind, quickly adopt more feminine norms when women enter a social space. And the point at which this happens is nowhere near the 50% female Andrews implies is required. It happens as soon as there is any visible group of women, almost no matter how small. Their preferences are instantly afforded more consideration than men’s by tacit consensus.

Civil rights laws that apply to schools and the workplace cannot explain the feminization we have witnessed in all arenas of society. They can’t explain why boys getting in fights went from being a rite of passage to an almost unbelievably gauche catastrophe involving therapists and lawyers. They can’t explain why 80% of animated feature films released in the last decade have a girlboss protagonist. They can’t explain why playgrounds have been systematically neutered, or why free-range children get policed called on them. And they can’t explain why women are responsible for 80% of fiction book sales, or why so few publishers appear interested in men’s reading preferences.

Personally I place a much greater emphasis on evolving cultural attitudes, changes that have shifted our shared understanding of virtue away from masculine strengths — thing like hierarchy, competition, and reason — toward feminine strengths such as empathy, collaboration, and nurture. The people driving these changes are not by and large pressured by lawsuits, although those play a role on the margins. Rather, they prefer the feminine virtues because they genuinely favor women’s social norms over men’s, and because they are true believers in a progress narrative that insists women are permanent underdogs who need special consideration and favoritism in every process. Women’s concerns get more attention because of our biological and cultural predisposition to care more about them: women's tears win in the marketplace of ideas. Simultaneously, technological changes in how we produce value for one another in the real marketplace of the economy have placed a premium on those same feminine virtues. Today, the primary measure of merit during childhood and adolescence is being able to sit quietly, focus on boring work, cooperate with others, and conform to social expectations. It wasn’t a false “social engineering” experiment that produced these changes, but a real response to real changes in the nature of work and value production.

All of these factors pull in the same direction, toward feminized social norms. There’s no magic bullet, no law or set of laws we can repeal, to shift them the other way. And many of the people agitating for such changes wouldn’t like the result. Talk to somebody who went to high school in the 70s or 80s and they’ll tell you the most horrific stories about fights and bullying, events that used to be taken for granted that we now consider exceptional. Or ask someone who worked a corporate job in that era about the kind of abuse and harassment they had to endure from superiors before HR departments existed. Relatively few people would take the deal to return to those conditions. In a very real sense, the process of feminization is the process of domestication, of enabling the human animal to get along with others of our kind in the increasingly large and complex social systems that we build.

The question is what natural limits this process might run into, what checks on its continued elaboration into the realm of the absurd might exist. Andrews worries that the feminization of the legal system in particular represents an existential threat to Western civilization’s standards of objective justice, and I struggle to raise a real objection. But I also struggle to imagine a future where such an absurd collapse doesn’t come to pass eventually, not as a sudden event but as a slow and unequally distributed decline that we began decades ago. A society that manages to reverse it wouldn’t much resemble the one we live in, a society that I love despite the increasing weight of contradictions it must carry to function at all. A sudden turn to religious nationalism ala The Handmaid’s Tale remains the mad fantasy of fetishists, not a genuine possibility in our civic evolution. The same is true of half-trolling calls to #RepealThe19th — the society that would do such a thing bears little resemblance to our own, and you wouldn’t like living in it. And in any case, who do you think voted to pass the 19th Amendment in the first place?

And yet, it’s impossible to escape the conclusion that the trend of feminization can’t go on forever. Therefore, it won’t. I don’t know what will break first or how, only that there are no simple answers. And that something has to give.

A winner says, “There ought to be a better way to do it;

a loser says, “That’s the way it’s always been done here.”

This closely echoes the moral in an earlier saying:

A winner says, “Let’s find out”;

a loser says, “Nobody knows.”

You see this theme about the value of intellectual curiosity, about being willing to take risks by reexamining old assumptions and tampering with something that’s working well enough. Unlike many of the messages in this book, it’s fundamentally progressive in its outlook — it insists that a better world actually is possible, if only we’re willing try for it.

A winner respects those who are superior to him, and tries to learn something from them;

A loser resents those who are superior to him, and tries to find chinks in their armor.

On the other hand, Harris’s obvious respect for natural hierarchy is unavoidably conservative and shines through in many of the sayings, especially in this one. There’s an uneasy tension between Harris’s insistence that anyone can better themselves through the conscious adoption of better principles and practices, and his clear belief that there are in fact natural winners and losers, that some people are simply better than others. Here he tries to square the circle: hierarchy might be natural and inevitable, but that doesn’t mean one can’t improve their relative station by emulating their betters.

Early in life I found this lesson hard to learn and hard to apply. At school there was no one superior, even among the faculty — at least, in the single metric (intelligence) I had internalized was the only one that really mattered. Other kids were more athletic or more popular than me, but it never occurred to me they might be worth emulating in any way, their social or sexual success easy to rationalize as inconsequential compare to my intellectual ability. But then in college, and especially later still in elite tech, I finally encountered true peers who could best me in any domain you might care to name, including my prized intelligence. It took me a long time to recontextualize my own place in the hierarchy, and to develop a new understanding of myself as a person with superiors. It was hard, and painful, but I think I managed it well and came out the other side a better person for it. Over the. years I’ve been fortunate to know many exceptionally intelligent and virtuous people, and I’ve rarely caught myself resenting their greater success.

A winner paces himself;

a loser has only two speeds: hysterical and lethargic.

As we’ve discussed in the past, I dick around. But in the main, I don’t consider dicking around to be an act of lethargy. Instead it often seems like my wandering attention gets the best part of me, my most essential energy, leaving the lethargy for the boring but important work I need to attend to. No, I don’t have ADHD, I’ve taken tests. And in any case I think it’s pretty silly for someone who graduated college with honors and spends all day at a desk doing detail-oriented computer work to claim they have an inability to focus that rises to the level of disability. Rather, I think Harris here is capturing an essential human struggle familiar to anyone who has ever postponed the necessary, which is to say nearly everyone. The reason so many of these sayings are compelling to me, years later, is that I don’t clearly and instantly empathize with the winner — I can see the loser in myself, understand it as a set of bad habits to be overcome through practice and effort.

A winner knows when the price of winning comes too high;

a loser is overly eager to win what he cannot handle or keep.

Again we see echoes of an earlier aphorism:

A winner knows what to fight for, and what to compromise on;

a loser compromises on what he shouldn’t, and fights for what isn’t worthwhile fighting about.

This is a theme that clearly weighs heavily on Harris, choosing one’s battles with wisdom and forbearance. He communicates the same moral over and over with different words and emphases, as we’ll see as the series continues.

Attentive readers will notice I’ve elided pages 34 and 35. This is because the book is divided into chapters Harris calls “Scorecards”, and we’ve now entered the beginning of Scorecard Two.

That’s all for this week. See you next Sunday.

Just ask any right-wing masculinity expert on Twitter and they will be happy to prove to you that America doesn’t have a housing shortage. They’ll show you dozens of affordable real-estate listings in flyover country that today’s young people are too lazy and entitled to live in. These spoiled college graduates have the gall to look you in the eye and complain they can’t find a house they can afford when falling-down 2-bedroom ramblers in dying factory towns are going for under $200k. And some of these starter homes are less than a 45-minute drive from a meat packing plant or fertilizer distributor, where a general manager can earn in excess of $65,000 per year.

To left-wing accounts there is an acute housing crisis affecting everyone making the objectively correct choice to crowd into one of the dozen desirable metros every other college graduate of working age wants to live in. But not to worry, there are still great deals to be found, so long as you aren’t racist. You aren’t racist, right? Simply choose from among a generous handful of beautifully diverse neighborhoods where housing is almost suspiciously affordable, many of them a short walk to a bus line or train station. Complaints about the safety and orderliness of these neighborhoods and the public transportation serving them are either overblown, white nationalist propaganda, or both.

Both of these accounts get things right in their arrogance, and both are determined to ignore important economic and social realities that confront a new generation of Americans seeking to enter the housing market.

America doesn’t have a housing shortage. But it does have a shortage of desirable housing, in good neighborhoods, close to good jobs. Efforts to spread concentrated demand for desirable metros more broadly, by changing the preferences of home seekers, are doomed to failure. Our current trend of urbanization is hundreds of years old, driven more by changes in technology than by changes in culture. Treating the problem as one of mere personal preference ignores how long in the making the agglomeration of technocapital has been. You will not convince any critical mass of young people to forego the perks of urban living — proximity to other ambitious young people, cultural amenities, and of course access to professional jobs. Nor will you convince anyone outside of a dedicated cadre of true believers to discount the evidence of their own eyes and move to an urban neighborhood where rent is depressed by crime and disorder, where public transit is haunted by the same. Not if they can afford another option. Not if they can afford a car and a commute from a more orderly place.

Nor can you lure young professionals from their urban and suburban enclaves by artificially bolstering the economic prospects of flyover territory. The well-meaning idea to re-locate federal department offices to slowly dying former factory towns may save those particular towns for a time, but will not create new desirable metros, only new second-tier towns one small step above the ones young people are dying to escape. And with the possible exception of Starbase, company towns are a dead letter, for the same reason: a person uprooting their entire life to relocate for a job prospect will, all else being equal, choose a destination with other options if this one doesn’t pan out. You can get incredibly mission-driven people, like those who dream of colonizing the solar system, to move to your special economic zone. And people with few other prospects, like our massive federal bureaucracy, will suffer as they must to remain employed. But normal, middle-of-the-road college educated professionals will keep choosing New York and San Francisco, and they’re right to. That’s where their peers are, and that’s where the jobs are.

Where does that leave us? If a few dozen desirable metros continue to capture most of the new job prospects and therefore new residents, why won’t their housing prices continue to inflate ever higher? This is the path most major metros are currently on, and they all have two things in common: they refuse to build enough new housing, and they refuse to adequately police their bad neighborhoods. Both of these are policy decisions, and the federal government must break them of both, at the same time, with the same legislation.

For decades, housing policy at every level of government has served to subsidize demand: housing vouchers; sweetheart loans to certain privileged classes; new homebuyer credits; the mortgage interest deduction. All of these policies send more dollars chasing the same scarce supply of housing, driving up prices in the metros where population growth clusters. All of them are counterproductive to making housing affordable. It’s time for a new approach. It’s time to subsidize supply.

It’s time to build, and it’s time for the federal government to help.

As we’ll see in a moment, the money to accomplish a significant increase in multi-family home production is not astronomical by the standards of the federal government, but for it to be deployed, cities and states must get out of the way. Which means we must first address the reasons why so many of our most desirable cities so consistently oppose every effort to increase density.

Cities have a whole slew of procedural mechanisms by which new construction is slowed down and made more expensive. Historic preservation ordinances in San Francisco and other anti-density cities prevent derelict shacks being torn down and replaced with apartments. Many cities require a lengthy period of public notice, comments, and hearings before construction can begin, procedures which frequently drag on for years. Some municipalities require developers to include a certain number of low-income units, which naturally lowers the income they can expect to reap from the finished building and drives up the rent on every other unit. Once a project is finally approved, cities inflict a radically cumbersome and expensive permitting and inspection process that introduces further delays and inflates the final cost. And last but not least, we can’t avoid mentioning the final boss of urban density arguments: restrictive zoning. Cities dedicate broad swathes of their footprints to low-density development, either topping out at two or three stories, or restricting entire neighborhoods to single-family homes only.

All of these mechanisms to stymie density can best be thought of as rationales, ad-hoc excuses motivated by other concerns entirely. Neighborhood residents will use every tool at their disposal to prevent density because they accurately perceive that it brings crime and disorder along with it. Dismissing these concerns as racist or classist, sneering at the people expressing them as parochial NIMBY rubes standing in the way of progress, won’t put such concerns to rest. It doesn’t help the clarity of the debate that the urban liberals who live in neighborhoods opposing density are ashamed of the real reasons for their opposition, talking about “neighborhood character” or other canards to avoid admitting the ugly truth that they fear their prospective new high-rise neighbors, especially the ones in the mandated affordable units. And they’re right to.

Americans can only isolate themselves from crime and disorder through price discrimination, and this ugly truth is at the heart of all American housing policy. As long as Americans correctly intuit the relationship between density and crime, they will oppose the former to avoid the latter. And because we live in a free, democratic society, they will successfully find ways to do so through policy. This is why we find ourselves in the position that we do vis a vis density, and why it’s so difficult to make forward progress.

Any credible solution to housing affordability must begin by addressing the elephant in the room and crushing urban crime and disorder. Without the guarantee that new density won’t compromise the peace and safety of their neighborhood, Americans will oppose it, and even if they ultimately lose the battle, the procedural hurdles they introduce will inflate costs and slow construction to well under the pace needed to accommodate growth, let alone drive down rents. A generation hence the NIMBYs may ultimately have lost the battle against density, but young Americans paying crippling rents can’t afford to wait that long. We cannot defeat the NIMBYs in our lifetime and remain a democratic society — if we are to silence their objections to density by force of law, we must also truly address their concerns, by drastically reducing urban crime and disorder.

Therefore, we humbly propose the Cities Are Safe and Affordable Act, or CASA.

CASA is a single legislative bundle that addresses the two primary causes of American housing cost as a package: crime and anti-density housing policies. It is a grand bargain with something for everyone: law and order for the right, urban density for the left. These two concerns are fundamentally inseparable and must be addressed together. They are two sides of the same policy coin.

The basic framework of CASA is to introduce new federal mandates to reduce crime and increase new multi-family housing construction. These mandates include a new batch of minimum-sentencing guidelines specifically targeting the serial offenders who commit such an outsized proportion of crime. Crucially, it would require sentences of rapidly escalating length for repeat offenses not only for felonies but for certain misdemeanors, since so many blue states have recently reduced the severity of quality-of-life crimes like shoplifting, vandalism, and drug-dealing. For housing, CASA requires each state to demonstrate that each of their three largest cities took one or more steps to make housing more affordable: building a certain number of new units; reducing the median cost and length of the permitting and inspection process to under a new federal benchmark; eliminating low-density zoning in a certain proportion of the city. Or cities can obtain a waiver by showing median rents are dropping in real terms, proof that there is enough housing regardless of any policy choices made.

To get states to agree to these new requirements, CASA dangles an amount of strings-attached federal money they will find impossible to turn down. The federal government cannot of course mandate criminal penalties or housing policies in any particular state. But they can dictate that states which fail to adopt such reforms become ineligible for federal aid packages, such as the new construction loans and other subsidies that will be part of CASA. This is the same approach famously employed during the Reagan administration to compel states to raise the drinking age to 21, and has already withstood constitutional challenges. The states have the disadvantage of only being able to spend what they raise in tax revenue, but the federal government has no such restraints. It can and should use the power of the purse to break through the logjam of local inaction on density and crime in one stroke, with a carrot-and-stick approach to both problems.

In exchange for adopting anti-crime and pro-density reforms, CASA rewards states with generous block grants. On the housing side: tens of billions of dollars of zero-interest loans for housing developers building new multi-family housing in cities with rapidly rising rents, a massive supply-side subsidy that would kick off a building boom throughout the country. For the states themselves, a separate but equally massive fund will be made available to spend on whatever vaguely housing-related or economic-justice projects they might want to pursue, giving plenty of leeway to squeeze different pork-barrel projects in to make the money harder to turn down. On the crime side: new anti-crime block grants ensure states wouldn’t have to shoulder the increased criminal justice spending on their own. These grants would offset the cost of beefed up policing forces and prosecution, as well as finance the construction and staffing of new prisons. The federal government could also build and run prisons of their own in cooperation with the states, taking advantage of the much lower cost of prison operation in states like Mississippi and Arkansas relative to California or Massachusetts.

What might the cost of this proposal look like in absolute terms? First, let’s look at current home construction budgets nation-wide. As of September of 2025, the US was on pace to spend $419B building new single family homes, and only $113B on multi-family development. By means of direct comparison, in 2025 the US spent $36B on section 8 housing vouchers. The same money directed to zero-interest construction loans and grants would represent a 30% increase in available funding for new multi-family buildings.

And the cost of this new legislation could be significantly offset by eliminating the mortgage interest deduction, which has already become irrelevant to the vast majority of middle-class homeowners since the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act increased the standard deduction to well above what most homeowners pay in mortgage interest. Doing so would raise tax revenue by around $30B per year on top of the reforms included in TCJA, and by over $100B per year if those reforms aren’t extended.

But, I’ll be honest: costs are not top of mind as I write this essay. Entitlement programs are going to eventually overrun the federal budget without massive reforms that we seem incapable of reaching in our current polarized climate. I have some amount of faith that the US will survive that storm when we’re finally forced to confront it, but the total lack of serious discussion about that looming problem makes the current administration’s fiddling on the margins of discretionary spending seem petty and vindictive. Trump’s budget proposal for 2026 would cut section 8 voucher funding and replace it with state block grants for rent assistance, resulting in a total reduction of spending of around 60%, saving around $20B. This is a mistake — that money should be redeployed, not simply cut. Trump and his allies should wield the power of the federal government to achieve the policy outcomes they want, rather than abdicating it. Instead of reducing entitlement spending by such relatively paltry amounts, to be lost in the coming budget crisis from Social Security and health spending, they should redirect such money in pursuit of policy goals they care about, such as reducing crime and housing costs for young Americans.

Oscar Wilde quipped that a cynic is a man who knows the price of everything, and the value of nothing. The idea of massive, new federal spending is enough to make many on the right blanch. But unlike most federal spending, we would not be simply pouring it into a bottomless pit of entitlements — we would have a lot to show for it, in the form of cheaper housing and safer cities. Those things are worth having. They’re worth spending money to obtain, even at the cost of accelerating our looming debt crisis. And the federal government is uniquely capable of spending money to obtain them.

A winner shows he’s sorry by making up for it;

a loser says “I’m sorry,” but does the same thing the next time.

Again worth noting that Harris was considered a liberal in his time, but this sort of message of personal responsibility, which occurs throughout the book, demonstrates a very conservative mindset. It’s indeed a pretty old fashioned idea that sometimes mere words are not enough to redress a wrong, that sometimes a costly show of contrition is necessary. And more than that, that an apology is itself perfectly meaningless without true change.

A winner would rather be admired than liked, although he would prefer both;

a loser would rather be liked than admired, and is even willing to pay the price of mild contempt for it.

I vividly recall reading this as a young man and meditating on exactly the difference between these two desirable things, admiration and popularity. It was clear to me even at that young age, from my own limited experience and from the example of my father, that it’s very possible, even likely, to earn someone’s respect in the long run by making hard decisions they don’t like you for in the moment. Further, that such respect is far more important and durable than capricious popularity. It’s maybe the single most important lesson about how to be a leader I’ve heard put into words, and it’s served me well in a variety of roles in my life.

Read more

The author of this arresting machine hallucination goes by the handle bandyquantguy, and he made it using a variety of AI tools, including Google’s Veo 3, which creates short video scenes from text prompts. He’s made a lot of them — this is #28 in the “Paint World” series.

When I saw Le Voyage on twitter earlier this week, I was too quick to dismiss it, and the entire medium of AI-generated video, as “not art”. The debate over what is and isn’t “art” is ultimately too tedious to be interesting to me, and always resolves to a maximalist definition (“if it made you think or feel something it’s art”) or a subjective one (“someone thinks this is art so it is”). So, fine. AI video is an artform. I don’t think this is much of a concession given that many people would gladly hang AI-generated prints on the walls of their home. Not should it be controversial given the creeping definition of the term “art” in the modern era, which long ago expanded to encompass purely-conceptual pieces like the infamous banana taped to the wall.

And it’s not recent. Painting a fictional signature on a urinal was gallery-worthy over 100 years ago, as Marcel Duchamp demonstrated with “Fountain.”

So this debate didn’t originate with AI tools. Anyone familiar with the development of photography has heard the failed argument against its consideration as an artform: that the use of a tool that precisely records an image reduces the practice to mere craft, the artist to technician. But photography requires technical mastery not dissimilar to other built artforms, as well as a keen eye for one’s subject, hard work in creating or scouting tableaus to photograph, and above all, an eye for beauty — or, in other words, taste.

All of these elements are present in AI-generated imagery as well, especially taste. The term “slop” is apropos for the vast majority of images created by these tools, simply because the people creating them are so enamored of its novelty that they fail to exercise any discretion in what they share with others. It’s like the old joke: What’s the difference between a good photographer and a bad one? The bad one shows you every photo they take. The AI art we don’t dismiss as “slop” is that tiny minority that was curated by somebody with taste.

So, it’s not the case that AI art isn’t “art”. It’s that AI art has no artist.

Suppose you find an old oil lamp in woods. You rub it and out pops a genie, who grants you three wishes. You ask it to create you a world-class oil painting of an old man cradling a newborn or something similarly schmaltzy, and the genie bobbles its head and produces an opus to rival all the renaissance masters. Who is the artist, you, or the genie?

We built that genie. “We” in this case refers to a couple distinct groups of people: first, the scientists, engineers, researchers, programmers, and technicians that developed the machine learning algorithms and then embodied them in silicon; second, and just as importantly, the countless human artists, writers, and other creatives that uploaded their creative work to the internet to be ingested by these hungry shoggoths. When you type a prompt into an AI tool, the creator of the product is, by metaphorical weight, 99.999999% not you. To the extent such work has authorship, it’s almost infinitely diffuse, spread so thin as to be meaningless. You didn’t make that, the genie did.

Asserting that your genius with prompting rises to the level of creative artistry is so delusional and wrong-headed that one struggles even to call it narcissism. It’s more like a category error. Everybody has met a guy who insists that he had the idea for a famous app like Instagram or Snapchat way before it was released. Even granting this is true (it never is), the idea is not the important part. Ideas are cheap. Execution is hard, and execution is everything. And in the case of AI art, the execution is 99.999999% the work of other people.

Last week a finance guy went viral for making the risible claim that a household income of $140,000 is the minimum to not live in poverty. There was lots of incisive criticism of this claim, but what I found most astounding was the author’s response to an accusation that AI wrote his article. Yes it did, he responded, and I’m proud of it.

This mindset is utterly alien to me as a writer, akin to a celebrity with a ghost-written memoir insisting that she did in fact write it herself since she was interviewed by the ghost-writer. It seems to view creative production as simply a means to an end, the act of creation itself dreary busywork we should be glad to offshore to less valuable entities like an LLM ghost-writer. I suppose I don’t have any real objection to treating art or writing as mere commodity with no provenance if your aim is something other than creative expression, such as creating things to be sold or trying to influence policy. But it seems to me that the typical AI art booster wants to have their cake and eat it too, to outsource the creative work onto the robot and still claim the output as a true expression of their own beautifully unique individuality. Speaking again as a writer, an LLM does not “help you write” by producing text in response to your prompt. It replaces your creative voice with its own.

If there’s anything to fear and despise about the rise of AI art, it’s not that creative types will be put out of work, although many surely will. But that’s the life of an artist since time immemorial — for most of human history only the truly exceptional artist could make a living on their work, usually with the support of a wealthy patron. Rather, the real threat this technology poses is devaluing the very act of creative expression itself by flooding the market with good-enough simulacra of creativity. Duchamp and the banana-tape guy first became famous in their local art scenes for creative genius, then laundered that fame into their bizarre conceptual art pieces using the fame as collateral. There is no shortcut to this process. An unknown concept artist painting his name on a urinal is simply a lunatic rightly ignored by everyone. The most skilled prompt “artist” is at best a technician, and their work will be swallowed by an endless ocean of similar products with nary a ripple, producing not even the traditional fifteen minutes of fame.

AI slop is harmless enough on its own, but the danger is that drowning us in slop will inevitably devalue real art in a simple equation of supply and demand.

The true test of any artform is this: can the person making the art possibly hope to get pussy as a result of their efforts? Or, to be less crass, can they use their artwork to gain social status and acclaim? If no, then they are not an artist. Prompt authors will not get pussy, therefore they aren’t artists, QED. But worse than that, the hyper-saturation of infospace with spectacular AI-created artwork, even if ultimately shallow and empty, actively suppresses the urge for human artistry. Save me the bromides about true creatives being in it for the love of the game — status-seeking is an irreducible human motivation, and when you remove that incentive it cannot but warp the outcomes in predictable ways.

Art cannot and will not ever die. If there’s a silver lining in this situation, it’s that the firehose of slop will naturally sour the public toward conceptual art, which they mostly already don’t like. Democratizing the production of Duchamps, taping a banana to every wall, will only serve to further undermine and accelerate the collapse of “idea as art.” Expect the post-AI era of art to emphasize the real and the physical, to feature unforgeable signals of labor, skill, and effort above mere conceptual novelty or beauty of form. That would be a nice outcome, and I hope it comes to pass.

As for bandyquantguy, the tweet featuring his AI-generated painted world went massively viral on Twitter for a few days, generating millions of views. But almost none of this infamy splashed onto the author’s original YouTube videos, which the tweeter helpfully duplicated and uploaded instead of embedding (although to his credit, he did provide links in a follow-up tweet). Paint World #28 currently sits at a whopping 4,100 views on YouTube, not even a muffled sneeze of attention by the standards of online virality. Considered together, these numbers may herald the arrival of a new artform, but they categorically do not signal the arrival of a new artist.

Or — if they do, his name is Veo.

The comics

A winner isn’t nearly as afraid of losing as a loser is secretly afraid of winning.

A winner goes through a problem;

a loser goes around it, and never gets past it.

A winner says, “Let’s find out”;

a loser says, “Nobody knows.”

A winner knows what to fight for, and what to compromise on;

a loser compromises on what he shouldn’t, and fights for what isn’t worthwhile fighting about.

Commentary

Our first comic is about people who define themselves in terms of their resentments and shortcomings. In modern times, we might say they define themselves as being on the side of the oppressed rather than the oppressors.

A winner isn’t nearly as afraid of losing as a loser is secretly afraid of winning.

Harris’s prognosis for these losers is obviously as true today as it was then. In winning, they lose their sense of identity and sense of themselves. They can’t accept this outcome, and so immediately find new ways to identify as a loser.

Next, a simple truism about the value of dealing with problems directly.

A winner goes through a problem;

a loser goes around it, and never gets past it.

In my opinion this view is somewhat rooted in the emancipatory spirit of ‘68, the idea that there must always be a solution to a problem if one has the courage to confront it and demand justice, and this strikes me today as somewhat simplistic or even naïve — many problems in one’s life are in fact insoluble and therefore better avoided. As a general rule of thumb and definition of personal virtue, surely Harris has the right of it. But this one in particular falls flat for me with the wisdom of some life experience.

Next, a statement about the value of curiosity.

A winner says, “Let’s find out”;

a loser says, “Nobody knows.”

I’m an engineer by trade and training, and it’s still surprising how rare genuine curiosity is even among engineers — and it’s far more common there than most places. The typical working software engineer is shockingly uninterested in why things work beyond the surface level, often being totally satisfied with a working solution they don’t understand at all. (/* Don’t touch this line, it needs to be defined here for some reason */). You can get a long way with this mindset, but the true master always demand a depth of understanding that normal people find off-putting.

Finally, a saying about how to behave in conflict.

A winner knows what to fight for, and what to compromise on;

a loser compromises on what he shouldn’t, and fights for what isn’t worthwhile fighting about.

What I love so much about these little sayings is their deceptive depth and nuance. There doesn’t seem to be anything here, at first glance. Of course you should fight for what’s important, and only compromise on things you can afford to! But when I reflect on my own behavior and that of my peers I can see how easy it is to violate these simple rules. In every case, Harris’s loser is more instructive than his winner. Everyone can recall a conflict in which they became so fixated on a petty detail that they lost sight of the bigger picture and came out worse because of it. And in our personal relationships, the thing we compromise on (but shouldn’t) is, all too often, the relationship itself.

That’s all for this week. Come back next Sunday for a new batch. Hope to see you then.

Harris was a syndicated newspaper columnist with wide appeal — 180 newspapers carried his daily column “Strictly Personal”. This book appears to be a side project of his that reflects the broader themes of his writing, and was published in 1973 as an obvious rebuttal to the counter-culture movement. Major themes include traditional Christian virtues, personal responsibility, and self-reliance.

My dad had a copy of this book and would often refer to its parables in our daily life. He put so much stock in its wisdom that he purchased over a dozen copies to give as gifts to friends and acquaintances, which is how I got mine. As a child and young man, I enjoyed the very-1968 illustrations accompanying each aphorism more than the little sayings themselves, and didn’t see much beyond the obvious in them. As a grown man and a father, I’ve come to realize this book is one of the things my father was right about. I wish it were more widely known.

Winners and Losers is out of print, Harris is dead, and his work is mostly forgotten. I think that’s a shame, so I’m going to be publishing a few pages at a time every Sunday going forward until I run out. Harris’s estate and publisher retain the copyright on his work.

The book is divided into sections called “Scorecards”. We’ll be starting at the beginning with Scorecard One.

Enjoy.

A winner makes commitments;

a loser makes promises.

When a winner makes a mistake, he says, “I was wrong”;

when a loser makes a mistake, he says, “It wasn’t my fault.”

A winner works harder than a loser, and has more time;

a loser is always “too busy” to do what is necessary.

New additions in this series will be published every Sunday for the next several months, until I run out.

The two remedial math classes, Math 2 and Math 3B, are both quite new, and teach math typically learned in K-8 and high school, respectively. But the naming is a little confusing: Math 3B is new as of 2024, and used to be called Math 2. It was the original remedial math course, and was introduced in 2016 to deal with a small number of admitted students who weren’t prepared for college-level math courses.

Math 2 was designed by the UC San Diego Mathematics Department to remediate skills gaps in high school mathematics topics (Grades 9-11), due to the observed need to provide a 10-week on-ramp for a small number of students to our normal precalculus courses (Math 3C and Math 4C). It was first offered in 2016, and from 2016-2021 it successfully served a small number of students (usually less than 100) that needed this additional support in their first quarter at UC San Diego before entering Math 3C or 4C.

The number of admitted students needing this remedial instruction remained small until 2020, after which enrollment ballooned.

Then things got worse: beginning in 2023, Math 2 instructors started to complain that their students were missing basic math skills from K-8 instruction.

In Fall 2023, the Math 2 instructors observed a new and alarming spread of skill gaps in the Math 2 students that quarter, with many severe gaps going back to mathematics taught in middle and elementary school.

Thus Math 2 was downgraded to K-8 skills, and the original Math 2 (high school skills) rebranded to Math 3B. Both were meant to address gaps in math knowledge for students who would need math in their prospective majors.

What kind of gaps? Here are sample questions from a test prepared by the math department to assess the skills of these remedial students, each labeled by the grade level of the skill and the percentage of such students who got it correct.

We’ll come back to these in a moment, but first let’s look at an overall summary of the results. Overall, only about half of the remedial students could claim 5th grade math ability, and only 19% had 8th grade skills.

Helpfully, the math department calibrated its grade level assessments by giving the same test to five public school kids in California — bright kids, one assumes, but K-8 students nonetheless. Their performances are marked by the colored arrows in the bottom chart, which demonstrate that the median score for remedial math students admitted to UCSD in 2023 is about on par with a 5th grader. For the 2025 school year, UCSD admitted 665 such students (on top of another 256 who couldn’t do high school math).

What happened? How did the quality of admitted students fall so far, so fast? The report spends a lot of time blaming poor kids for this outcome. No, really.

In 2013, the California state legislature introduced a supplemental funding framework for California K-12 public schools, the so-called Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF). The subset of California public schools in which more than 75 percent of the school’s total enrollment is composed of students who are identified as either eligible for free or reduced-price meals, or English learners, or foster youth, are eligible for additional funding through the LCFF program. The subset of California schools that meet these eligibility requirements are referred to as LCFF+ schools, and since 2016, University of California tracks enrollment from LCFF+ High Schools. The 2016-17 state budget for the UC system included “one-time funding for 19 support services for low-income students and students from underrepresented minority groups”. The one-time funding was intended to increase the number of applications, admissions, and enrollments from LCFF+ high schools to the UC, a contract signed by then President Michael Drake. Since 2017, each fall UCOP must submit a report on what UC has done to support LCFF+ schools.

So there’s legal and political pressure increase admission from schools with predominantly poor kids, and the UC system got a sweet kickback from the state legislature in exchange for agreeing to admit more of them. And for whatever reason, UCSD ended up with more of these academic albatrosses future scholars, starting in 2022.

UC campuses have participated unevenly in these changes to LCFF+ admissions and enrollments. In 2021, UC Riverside and UC Merced admitted the largest numbers of LCFF+ students, while Riverside and Irvine enrolled the most. Beginning in 2022, however, UC San Diego took the lead, with enrollment jumping from 894 in 2021 to roughly 1,800 in each of the following three years (2022-2024). By comparison, most other campuses saw only modest increases. UC Berkeley remained below 1,000, and UCLA below 1,100 LCFF+ enrollments.

For those not in the know, Riverside and Merced are the two down-market UC schools, admitting 76% and 91% of applicants respectively (compared to UCLA’s 9%). You won’t catch anyone wringing their hands about Riverside’s math skills, certainly not writing long mystified reports asking where it all went wrong. Their function in the system, the UCSD report seems to tacitly imply, is to absorb that kind of student so that the rest of the UC doesn’t have to deal with them. So what changed? Why did those students suddenly start getting into prestigious UCSD, traditionally the third-pickiest UC school, around 2021?

Oh.

So without standardized testing, how does the UC decide whom to admit? By a complex process they call “Holistic Review” or HR. The report dedicates 6 pages of dense, unbroken text to explaining this process without once describing what factors are included beyond high school GPA.

The process of our Holistic Review for first-year applicants can be divided into two stages. In the first stage, readers score each application with consideration of a range of factors derived from BOARS guidance.

There you have it, “a range of factors.” (BOARS apparently stands for Board of Admissions and Relations with Schools). They do mention that they have various statistical corrections to deal with grade inflation and inconsistent grading practices when appraising high school GPA, but otherwise that’s all you get, “a range of factors.” Or “a variety of other factors”, as below.

Beyond these highly quantitative factors, holistic readers are trained to look out for a variety of other factors that all conform within the BOARS list of approved considerations in admission and use the PIQs (a series of short essays) and activities lists to determine more about the student’s background, potential, and life experiences.

Every UC school, barred from using standardized test scores in admission, does something similar. So why is it that UCSD seems to be, uniquely among the elite UC schools, admitting so many dummies? Here I can only speculate, but my honest guess is that the UCSD admissions staff and administrators who oversee the program have a particular, shall we say, soft spot for certain kinds of “life experiences” that some students may have been wisely coached to include in their applications. But that’s just speculation.

More importantly, having recognized the magnitude and severity of the problem, what are they going to do about it? Remember, they cannot use standardized test scores in their admission process. Briefly: they recommend using a new model they invent called the Math Placement Outcome (MPO), which looks at applicants’ math grades and makes various adjustments for the student’s school. The big issue with this idea, which they do note, to their credit, is that a relatively meager difference in math grades separates students who can’t do algebra versus those headed straight into calculus. Specifically, 3.65 v. 3.84.

Recall that this average high school math GPA of 3.65 among Math 2 enrollees corresponds to approximately a 5th grade level of math skills. Can the MPO find a signal in the 0.19 grade points that separate an A- in calculus from a being unable to name a triangle? Good luck!

It’s important to cut through the cope and HR-speak and discuss what these results actually mean. What does it mean that a quarter of remedial admits got this question wrong?

For some of the questions, such as simplifying complex expressions involving fractions, or expanding the square of an algebraic expression, you can will yourself to believe that an otherwise smart kid has been badly served by their math instruction, or has simply forgotten how to do that kind of problem in the years since being taught. But being unable to fill in a “3” in the box for the problem above? That points to a deeper deficit that can’t be described as a “gap” in understanding. There’s no trick to remember here, just an elementary level of symbolic reasoning and the ability to count. A student who can’t do this problem simply isn’t very bright, and is extremely unlikely to succeed in university courses absent radical dumbing-down and thumbs on the scale at every turn. That the university admitted about 200 such students last year should indict the entire admissions process.

The UCSD freshmen taking Math 2 are not to blame for their situation. They haven’t done anything wrong and shouldn’t be the subject of our anger or ridicule. There will always be a left-hand side of the bell curve, and somebody has to land there — in fact, half of all kids do. They’re not worse people because they’re less bright, and in fact they have every chance to achieve as much wealth and happiness as their brighter peers (IQ is correlated with income, but surprisingly weakly).

But they don’t belong in college, and they can’t be in college without radically changing what college is, what it’s for. This shouldn’t be controversial, and in most other universities, it’s not. Lots of colleges went test-free during covid and admitted whomever their hearts whispered they should, and in every case the result was a disaster, an unmanageable wave of unqualified freshmen who looked good on paper (or tugged at the heart strings just right) but couldn’t do the work. Nearly every university learned their lesson quickly and reversed course. California is uniquely stubborn in this respect, but now there are legal headwinds suggesting the UC schools will be brought to heel as well.

I find myself torn between sympathy for bright California high school kids being denied admission to give a spot to more sympathetic kids who can’t handle algebra on the one hand; and the fervent desire to see California maximally pursue these destructive policies as an object lesson to the rest of the country on the other. But what I know for sure is that things can’t go on like this forever, and so they won’t. If a university degree is to mean anything at all, then it must exclude those who can’t fill in the box.

Whether that happens before or after the UC system implodes is anyone’s guess. I’m rooting for you, UCSD.