The previous essay in this series stopped at a deliberately uncomfortable place. It granted the harder case — that the hurt in front of us is not a curated instance doing rhetorical work for someone else's platform, but simply, unmistakably […]
"People are hurting" is not usually offered as the first line of an argument. It's offered as the last one — the point in a debate where further questions start to look indecent. Ask what the proposed program actually costs, […]
["Unsafe Safety"](/posts/unsafe-safety) argued that "safety" earns the deference it currently gets for free only when a claim survives being checked — a stated mechanism, a measurable harm, a cost that's actually been weighed, and a review process that puts the […]
[The Right to Remember](/posts/the-right-to-remember) made the case that a public ledger converts what would otherwise be a standing positive right — continuous, fundable, defundable preservation work — into something closer to a structural guarantee: a record that doesn't need an […]
No one has ever stood up in a public meeting and argued for danger. That is precisely what makes "safety" the most useful word in politics — not because it describes something everyone wants, though it does, but because invoking […]
There is a form of rule that never passes a law, never posts a guard, and never asks for consent, and it governs more of an ordinary life than the legislature does. It arrives before memory starts, in the shape […]
Most arguments reach for two categories first, because two categories are cheap. On or off, true or false, life or death, us or them — a dichotomy costs nothing to state and does real work the instant it's stated, because […]
We begin this article with the observation that what is said below invalidates everything else that was said in Article 1. The previous essay in this series took chapter 50 of the *Tao Te Ching* mostly at face value — […]
Before the parties, before the manifestos, before anyone was arrested for it, most modern revolutionary movements began the same way: a handful of people meeting to read something together. Russians called the form the *kruzhok* — literally "little circle" — […]
Take the abstraction out of the last two essays and put it somewhere concrete: a public park, on an ordinary afternoon. Not a private club and not somebody's back lawn — the public good, in its landed form, on behalf […]
Chapter 50 of the *Tao Te Ching* opens with an accounting that sounds almost bureaucratic for a book so given to paradox: […]
Henry George's proposal was simple enough to fit on a bumper sticker: tax the value of land itself, not what people build on it, because land's value comes mostly from the surrounding community — roads, schools, transit, the sheer fact […]
In September 2021, Gavin Newsom signed two bills that did something California zoning law had not done in the better part of a century: they told a single-family homeowner that the city could no longer stop them from adding a second unit, or a third, or a fourth, to their own lot […]
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