Category: Politics

  • Will Teach for Food: a Mini Memoir

    Today’s job market for recent college grads eerily resembles the academic job market in the 1990s: what are the lessons? The great graduate job drought, a dejecting article by Anjli Raval from the Financial Times ($) arrested my attention this week. Recent college graduates face long and difficult job searches. In the U.K., there are 140 applicants…

  • Leaps of Faith (but not that kind)

    How can we escape closed-loop thinking? (Hint: it’s not logic.) La Profesora turned me onto a recent episode of Your Undivided Attention, a podcast by Tristan Harris and Aza Raskin of The Center for Humane Technology. In “What Would It Take to Actually Trust Each Other? The Game Theory Dilemma,” Harris and Raskin talk with Professor…

  • Shakespeare and the Attacks on Venezuela

    Recent political events resemble a moment from “King Henry IV, Part Two.”  I am an apex nerd. My passions include science fiction, comic books, fountain pens (a fresh rabbit hole into which I’ve faaaaallen) and comedy. As a researcher, I examine how our behavior changes, and doesn’t change, in the face of new technologies, most…

  • My Quest to be Whelmed

    It’s hard to watch the news and harder to talk about it with people who might disagree. I’m overwhelmed. Are you? I’m a lucky guy. I have a happy marriage. I’m healthy. My wife is healthy. We live in a lovely suburb just remote enough that there’s not much crime, and we can still get…

  • The Paradox of No Choice

    An odd VENN diagram of tariffs and AI are narrowing our choices as customers. Will this change be permanent? What are the implications for products and retailers? Note: this piece takes its title from Barry Schwartz’s famous and terrific book, The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less. In 1985, Wendy’s ran a memorable, minute-long spot,…

  • Escape the Digital Cocoon

    The only way to reduce polarization is to talk with people in real life. Here’s one way to do just that *and* find a seat at a coffee bar. A while back, I was thinking about how our behavior would change as augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) became common. (This still hasn’t happened.)…

  • The Distraction Button

    What Sydney Sweeney and Jeffrey Epstein have in common, plus why it’s time to revive the word “Ridiculous.” For the Dispatch readers who aren’t compulsive media watchers, a summary: a scandal of the week involves the actress Sydney Sweeney in a new ad campaign for American Eagle jeans. The campaign’s tag line is “Sydney Sweeney has great…

  • A Scary Time

    Four shorter pieces this time: the so-called L.A. riots, the middle east, more on AI, and what would we call a third party? I’m not generally anxious, but the news of the last two weeks tested that. Here are reflections about two major news stories, one unsettling NYT article that deserves more attention, and my…

  • The Unbearable Complexity of Drug Pricing: My Ozempic Journey Continues

    Regular readers know that I’ve been taking Ozempic for the last few months because I have Type 2 Diabetes and also have struggled to lose weight. I’ve shared My Ozempic Journey from time to time (this issue is one of those times) and also talked about the Center for the Digital Future’s research about Ozempic Disruption generally. Since…

  • Are You Better Off…

    …than you were 97 days ago? Ronald Reagan’s 1980 question revisited. Last Monday, I posted “Are you better off than you were 91 days ago?” The vast majority of the friends who engaged said no. Today it is 97 days since Trump’s second inauguration. You have to be of a certain age or a U.S.…