Essays

• essay · Aug 2026

  When Hubris Masquerades as Vision

  Fraud has a simple logic — concealment for profit — that we readily recognize and prosecute. A more dangerous adjacent phenomenon starts with genuine certainty rather than concealment: a founder or leader convinced they alone can see the way forward, and an institutional apparatus around them that rewards conviction over evidence until the two become impossible to tell apart from outside.

• essay · Apr 2026

  Möbius

  Some claims are structured so that their conclusion is also their evidence — self-sealing claims that specify no evidence that would satisfy them. The central case is Merrick Garland's handling of the federal investigations into Donald Trump: not a failure of intent, but the specific error of trying to disprove an unfalsifiable claim.

• essay · Apr 2026

  Painted Footsteps

  Generative AI can produce output that sounds like expertise. This essay examines what happens when the appearance of expertise becomes cheap and widely available — and the pipeline problem it creates, as the junior work that builds toward real judgment gets automated away just as its appearance becomes easy to fake.

• essay · Mar 2026

  Beyond the "Worst of the Worst": The Human Cost of the Detention Surge

  Immigration enforcement policy reaches much further than its stated rationale of targeting violent offenders. This essay looks at what the policy actually covers and whom it actually affects — a substantially different picture, in service of accuracy rather than an argument against enforcement itself.

• essay · Mar 2026

  Truth and Contradiction

  Contradiction is supposed to do corrective work — but that depends on an epistemic infrastructure that is now weakening. The problem isn't primarily the supply of false claims; it's the erosion of the mechanisms that make contradiction matter.

• essay · Feb 2026

  After Fluency

  Writing has always been both a signal of thinking and a means of developing it. AI-assisted writing breaks that coupling — eroding fluency as a proxy for sound thinking, and threatening the process by which we build the capacity to think at all.

• essay · Feb 2026

  Checks Without Illusions

  The American constitutional system separates power across branches, but omits an enforcement question: what actually makes the checks function, and what happens when someone treats constitutional norms as optional. An honest accounting of which restraints have real teeth and which depend on voluntary compliance.