Facebook and Silicon Valley’s Gated Boomtowns

Feature Article by , July 9, 2017

Facebook has just announced its plans to build an old-fashioned “company town”—except that these days, since Millennials are never expected to act as if they leave college, it is called a “campus.” Facebook’s proposed Willow Campus in Silicon Valley’s Menlo Park won’t just have offices. It will have 1500 units of housing, along with grocery […]

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Dear Trump Critics: This Is an OODA Loop, Please Get One

Feature Article by , July 6, 2017

Our politics is settling down to into a distinct pattern. It goes like this. Donald Trump says or does something that ranges from the provocative, to the childish, to the utterly normal and unexceptional. The media and the opposition political party (but I repeat myself) then totally over-react and hyperventilate. They take something bad and […]

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Gated Boomtowns

Feature Article by , July 3, 2017

Policy Ideas for the Age of Automation, Part Two In this series, I have been considering what we can do to smooth the adjustment to a technological revolution in automation—but from the perspective of a skeptical free-marketer who doesn’t buy into ill-conceived utopian schemes like the basic income. In part one, I considered what policies […]

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Donald Trump Is Boring

Commentary by , June 30, 2017

There is a crisis in American politics. The crisis is that Donald Trump is boring. Normally, I wouldn’t mind a boring president. In fact, I prefer boring presidents. I like less drama, fewer scandals, and more focus on the issues—on actual legislative action and foreign policy decisions. But that’s not the good kind of boring […]

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Living in the World of Dynamite

Feature Article by , June 28, 2017

Political violence has seemingly come back into fashion this year, in part because of the so-called “resistance” against President Trump—itself a metaphor for violent guerilla warfare, in the absence of an actual tyranny that requires resistance. But it’s not actual violence that is in vogue so much as fantasizing about violence. Just in the past […]

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Lighting Fires and Filling Buckets

Feature Article by , June 25, 2017

Policy Ideas for the Age of Automation, Part One: Education Everyone is starting to become concerned that the machines are about to take away all of our jobs—at least, all of the jobs that we do now. Everything is on the chopping block to be automated, from flipping burgers to driving trucks to filing legal […]

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You Can’t Buy an Election

Feature Article by , June 21, 2017

Of course Jon Ossoff didn’t win yesterday’s special election in Georgia’s 6th district. Heck, it wasn’t even all that close. Karen Handel beat him 52% to 48%, a few points better than Donald Trump did in the same district. This was predictable. Ossoff was born in the sixth district, but he had lived an awful […]

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Freedom Is Not Perfection

Commentary by , June 15, 2017

The congressional baseball game shooter was clearly motivated by political hatred of Republicans. This hatred was clearly fed and magnified by his listening to hysterical partisan rhetoric and participating in online discussions that reinforced his political biases, painted caricatures of the evil of his future targets, and reinforced his emotions of anger and resentment. But […]

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Fear and Loathing in Charlottesville

Feature Article by , June 12, 2017

The fight over confederate statues in my hometown of Charlottesville has some of the fighters feeling pretty traumatized. Here is Dahlia Lithwick, Slate’s Supreme Court commenter, who is also a local. My little city in central Virginia has become the stuff of reality TV…. Now, when we come to meet in our town square, we […]

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Seven Solutions Flying Cars Need (and One They Don’t)

Feature Article by , June 8, 2017

Everyone’s very excited right now about “flying cars” because—hey, who wouldn’t be? It’s right up there at the top of the science fiction wish list, along with the robot servant who cleans your house for you. And now we’re being told pretty frequently that the flying car is on its way. But we’re not getting […]

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