The Inner Monologue

I have heard plenty of politicians insult the other party’s voters. What I find more interesting is when they manage to insult their own. Consider the Trump administration’s lawsuit over Alaska’s Senate election. Republican Senator Dan Sullivan is on the ballot. Another man with a similar name is also on the ballot. The administration argues…

When your past posts become more coherent than you are Every archive begins as an accident. No one starts writing with the intention of creating a system. You write because something itches. Because a thought won’t leave you alone. Because you want to pin a moment to the page before it evaporates. Over time, those…

Measuring Freedom by How Far You Can Go and Still Come Home Freedom is usually measured with the wrong instruments. We count dollars. We count rights. We count passports. We count square footage, speed, bandwidth, net worth. We ask how fast the car is, how many miles the plane can fly, how much vacation time…

The paradox that everywhere now looks like somewhere else There used to be a moment—often quiet, sometimes jarring—when you arrived somewhere new and immediately felt smaller. Not unsafe. Just unfamiliar. You knew you had crossed a boundary because the world behaved differently. Street signs made odd assumptions about what you already knew. Food smelled wrong…

New Mexico has a childcare funding problem, a rapidly growing data center industry, and an opportunity to connect the two. New Mexico has done something remarkable. It has committed to making childcare universally available, recognizing that early childhood education is not merely a benefit for working parents but an investment in the state’s economic and…

Here’s a fun little game. Take any sentence describing something Donald Trump has done and insert the word “inadvertently” immediately after his name. Then read it aloud. You may be surprised by how often the sentence sounds perfectly reasonable. In fact, sometimes it sounds more believable than the original. For example: Donald Trump inadvertently signed…

We talk about artificial intelligence as if honesty were a technical setting. As if truth were a dial you could turn to the right once the engineers finish tuning the model. More guardrails. More “alignment.” More responsible datasets. Then—click—the machine tells the truth. But this framing misses something fundamental. Truth is not a stable substance…

An Inner Monologue Essay Inflation is a peculiar economic threat. It doesn’t announce itself with a crash, a bankruptcy, or a sudden disappearance of wealth. It simply makes yesterday’s dollar worth a little less today. And tomorrow, a little less still. By the time most Americans recognize the damage, much of it has already been…

Every technology begins by demanding a human. Not metaphorically. Literally. Someone must pull the lever, open the valve, read the gauge, listen for the wrong sound, smell for danger. Early technology is not subtle. It announces itself. It requires ritual, expertise, and constant attention. It makes the human indispensable. The hidden pattern across history is…

We talk about happiness like it’s a destination, but we talk about contentment like it’s a rumor. Happiness is loud, measurable, Instagrammable. Contentment is quiet, subjective, and suspiciously resistant to optimization. Yet if you listen closely to how people describe their lives—especially the lives they envy—you’ll hear geography creeping into the story. “I was happier…