Reading List

The most recent articles from a list of feeds I subscribe to.

Why the Ukraine war is so hard to end

At the height of the Iraq war, bloggers coined the term “Friedman unit” in reference to the New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman’s habit of claiming that the next six months would be critical in determining the outcome of the conflict.  Everything has sped up quite a bit in our post-Twitter era, so perhaps it’s […]

Vox’s new membership program, explained

Since our founding in 2014, you’ve supported Vox in our mission: to help everyone understand our complicated world so that we can all help shape a better one. We think of you — our audience — as being at the heart of everything we do. With every story, podcast, and video we create, we ask […]

The right debates just how weird their authoritarianism should be

What happens when you put four of the Trump right’s leading intellectuals together in a room? You see what it looks like when a political movement gets high on its own supply. The conversation in question is a recently published two-hour video roundtable hosted by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, an organization dedicated to educating and […]

The 65-year-old theory that helps explain why the Democrats keep losing

Democratic strategists think the party has a messaging problem. Post-election autopsies overflowed with countless cross-tabs of how Democrats “underperformed” with demographic after demographic. There are endless debates about which words poll better (should Democrats stop using “microaggression”?) — as if anybody were even listening. Third Way’s “Signal Project” exemplifies this paralysis. The center-left think tank […]

Human bodies aren’t ready to travel to Mars. Space medicine can help.

One day, Mars might become a home to humans. But first, there’s the cinematic, sci-fi challenge of making the Red Planet suitable for life. There’s a problem, though: The typical person can’t get to space safely. That throws a wrench into the whole “let’s move to Mars” plan in the face of extreme climate change […]