I. It came on a Saturday in early fall, not many years from now, and nothing about the morning suggested anyone would remember it.This Substack is reader-supported.

How Western Power Helped Create the Conditions Putinism Exploited

“EPA launches drinking water study looking for traces of abortion pills”

Friedrich: They’re exterminating the Jews.

The whole shitshow that is the American war against Iran keeps reminding me of Dune.

There is a lot of genuine fear surrounding the pace of AI research and the possibility that we are moving toward some form of autonomous, self-improving superintelligence, and I think those concerns, ...

Long before anyone invented borders between branches, mechanical nest-flatteners, Ministries of Reassuring Squawks, or the phrase “regrettable but necessary loss of chicks,” there was a great jungle c...

Let me preface this essay by sharing with you all that I want to start writing more essays about scientific topics that are of interest to me, partly because I have been fascinated by biology for a lo...

The reality is that the judicial system knows by now, unless everyone involved has been living under a fucking rock, exactly what this federal government and the Republicans enabling it are fucking do...

A perfectly reasonable list of demands, all doable if we had the will: 1.) A 99% wealth tax on every dollar of net worth above $1 billion. You can keep the first billion. Everything above it gets tax...

Whenever I tell people I’m traveling abroad, I inevitably get some version of the same handful of reactions from certain people: “Aren’t you worried about getting lost?” “I’d be way too anxious to do ...

I’ve been chewing on why some people around here hate me with such a weirdly personal fucking zeal, and I’ve landed on something much dumber and simpler than I expected: it isn’t the politics alone, a...

If Wisconsin Democrats were smart, and didn’t have spines that turned to gelatinous jelly the second the GOP raised its voice, they’d notice the pattern happening right in front of them and stop falli...

HALLELUJAH FOR THE HOUSE OF DOILIES!!!!

Republicans and now the gutless centrist Dems have found their new favorite hobby: clutching pearls over old quotes from Wisconsin gubernatorial candidate Francesca Hong.

Cute headline, but notice what the Manitowoc County DA never actually gives you: real independent numbers on the effectiveness of these cameras in solving crime.

The Trump regime is a grift.

How You Capture an Intelligence Chief

You start pulling this thread and the whole sweater comes apart:

These are real comments from real people responding to a local county supervisor who did the genuinely decent thing of notifying his constituents about a government surveillance camera on a public hig...

The thing that nobody wants to hear but that the historical record makes completely undeniable: no social justice movement, no matter how morally correct, how urgent, or how necessary, has ever achiev...

I am a cis-heterosexual white man from rural Wisconsin.

You know what?

Isn’t it interesting how the loudest, most sustained, most wall-to-wall eruptions of culture war discourse in this country have had a funny habit of arriving at the exact moments when class consciousn...

You and I, we wake up every single morning, drag ourselves out of bed, go to jobs we mostly tolerate to pay bills that never stop growing, file our taxes on time like good little citizens, follow ever...

It is absolutely fair and entirely understandable for the rest of the world to be pissed off at the United States right now, and especially at the Americans who keep electing the fucking worst of huma...

So real quick, genuine question: where exactly are the massive AI robot armies?

Before you read a single word further:

It is he who lives among us, who watches our Garden of Eden burn, who, in the slow rot of hubris and cynicism of his own making, forgets how to grieve the flame, and in its fevered, all-consuming glow...

Palantir’s entire pitch and operation depends on all of you being tech-illiterate and never having the chance to peek under the hood.

If you are an American and you are not a billionaire, you are not free.

Sharing what I posted on Facebook, as I believe this is an urgent and important conversation worth having everywhere.

In other developed countries (but not as developed as the most developed best country, America, obviously), citizens are guaranteed by law a significant amount of vacation time to enjoy their lives.

Y’all notice how the media’s suddenly trying to frame JD Vance as the calm, rational one, like he just got dropped into MAGA chaos with clean hands and nothing to do with this regime or recent develop...

A mind that won’t settle, a heart that won’t harden.

I’ve got a fix for this country’s embarrassing inability to recognize satire, humor, or even basic critical thought: make George Carlin mandatory in K–12.

I’m using Congressman Derrick Van Orden as the example here, partly because he’s from Wisconsin and thus a stain on the state’s reputation, and partly because he’s a perfect case study in what this ki...

The global economy runs on extraction layered over perception.

Friends,

What follows is simply a meditation on centralized power, the systems that sustain it, and the people beginning to understand how it works.

This is quite literally the Kremlin playbook.

What I want to say is not meant in any way to diminish the senseless loss of life of Renee Good and Alex Pretti.

If local and state law enforcement aren’t going to step up and do the job they swear an oath to do—protect our communities, the very people they’re supposed to serve—then someone else has to.