Thoughtful journalism on governance, cities, climate, and the Americas.
In U.S. crises, public money moves fastest through pipes that already exist for capital. Banks receive oxygen in hours; households receive forms. The result is a recovery that tilts upward. This essay maps the architecture of those upstairs subsidies, the class and political consequences, and a.
American cities like to narrate themselves in asphalt and appetite—bigger freeways, taller chillers, longer commutes. Then the heat arrives like a bell the size of a sky, and the old grammar buckles. The most quietly innovative urban work of the last quarter-century has happened in Latin America—in.
January 17, 2026
There are corporate deals that feel like weather—impersonal, atmospheric. And then there are deals where someone is adjusting the thermostat: deciding who gets heat and who gets frost. The battle for Warner Bros. Discovery belongs to the second category.
December 17, 2025
As Mexico's president asks Spain to apologize for the conquest, the United States watches from the sidelines. But settler colonialism left different scars than imperial colonialism. An essay on apologies, archives, and what contrition might purchase.
January 24
A registry exists in America—not written on paper, but in the quiet agreements between deans and donors, the lists passed from one elite institution to the next. It is a map of how pedigree is formed, multiplied, and normalized; how a child's odds of admission to selective colleges correlate with.
January 18
Stand by a substation at solar noon and you can hear the republic breathing: a dry chorus of fans, a smell of ozone, cables as thick as a forearm doing the humble arithmetic that keeps everything else lyrical—elections, novels, marriages. If the hum wobbles, the country stutters.
January 17
Forty million people will vote with faucets this decade. The Colorado—that purposeful blue thread stitched through seven U.S. states, 30 Tribal Nations, and two Mexican states—has been over-promised for a century and under-delivered for a generation. The legal wallpaper is ornate (compacts,.
January 17
Most borders are written in ink, but the U.S.–Mexico line is increasingly drawn in wire. It is a thin set of bridges—high-voltage interties, converter halls, relay cabinets—that allow two different electrical civilizations to borrow from each other when heat climbs, when hurricanes prowl, when a.
January 17
Three years into Russia's invasion, Western commentators still speak of Putin's failure. But viewed through the lens of great-power fracture, energy architecture, technology sovereignty, and Global South realignment, the war's true victors may not be who we assumed—and the United States sits atop a.
January 17
Trump's Donroe Doctrine isn't foreign policy - it's a business plan. Every threat advances authoritarian power consolidation and billionaire class wealth extraction.
January 6
The country is a mirror, but the mirror charges admission. From lobbying ledgers to algorithmic feeds, from data extraction to political influence, the machinery of consent has been privatized. A systems anatomy of how wealth, technology, and power intersect to reshape democracy.
December 13
In American Indian law, the most transformative victories seldom arrive with parades. They arrive as sentences: "Congress has not said otherwise." Those sentences depend on an architecture—expert affidavits, maps, ledgers, and a disciplined order of proof—that turns memory into law.
November 14