Personal essays
Notes on attention, technology, judgment, and the small practices that shape a thoughtful life.
Judgment / September 15, 2026
Ask ten people what devolution means, and you will get ten half-formed answers. Some hear a polite word for states' rights. Others think it is a British...
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Political scientists have a name for something the Founders built without realizing it: Duverger's law. Usually, it is cited as an indictment of the...
Let me start with a confession: I flinch every time a politician says "for the public good." Not because I object to the public good. I take it seriously...
I have a problem with the phrase "illiberal democracy." Not with the reality it tries to name, but with the name itself. It takes a threat to liberty and...
The pitch for liquid democracy arrives wrapped in the language of choice. If you care about an issue, vote on it directly. If you lack the time or...
Most discussions of unitary versus federal government treat the question as though it were an organizational chart. Which is more efficient? Which is...
Most Americans remember the Nullification Crisis, if they remember it at all, as a dusty prelude to the Civil War. South Carolina throws a fit over a...
The Fourteenth Amendment's first sentence is not ambiguous. The ambiguity is in our reading. All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and...
Every ten years, Americans re-fight the same skirmish. One party screams that the other is gerrymandering. The other party screams back. Reformers insist...
Ask a roomful of politically engaged Americans what kind of government the Constitution created, and most will tell you a democracy. That answer is wrong...