Thoughts
On tech, AI, business, and what actually works.
August 2, 2026
A thousand pages of Anthony Fauci's private pandemic diary went public in July 2026. The most damaging entries in it are true. The one that went most viral — that a COVID vaccine gave him a blood clot — isn't. That gap is the story.
July 31, 2026
Elon Musk says four more Democratic years would have legalized enough immigrants to turn every battleground state permanently blue — and he invited anyone who doubted it to check. We checked: four sub-claims, thirty sources, and one uncomfortable finding about his own favorite example.
July 21, 2026
Paris and Sacramento reached for the same billionaire tax in the same season — which tells you neither continent ever solved the problem. Europe's billionaires are half heirs who pay less income tax than America's; America's philanthropy creed is losing its race with compound interest. An investigation into two aging answers to the same question.
July 18, 2026
Marc Andreessen calls it 'The Deal' — the unwritten compact that made America celebrate its founders. He watched it break between 2013 and 2024, then watched Washington spend eighteen months rebuilding it by executive order. The full 6,500-word account, adversarially fact-checked — including the June 2026 week when the new regime pulled Claude Fable 5 off the market and started deciding who gets GPT-5.6.
June 24, 2026
The only force that ever durably crushed the world's largest heroin supply is the same movement that grew rich taxing it — and the Taliban have now done it twice. A four-decade history of Afghan opium, from the Soviet-era jihad to the 2022 ban and its fragile aftermath.
June 19, 2026
America fought two wars with Iran eleven months apart — the June 2025 Twelve-Day War and the February 2026 campaign that killed Supreme Leader Khamenei. In both, the victory announced on day one and the reality that emerged weeks later were different conflicts. A reconstruction of what was claimed, and what actually held up.
June 19, 2026
The $1.7 billion the Obama administration sent Iran in 2016 was a debt thirty-seven years in the making — money Iran paid the United States before the 1979 revolution. How it was paid, in untraceable cash and only after four Americans were freed, turned a defensible legal settlement into a decade-long argument over whether it was a ransom.
June 16, 2026
A trillion-dollar pay package revived the internet's oldest fantasy — that one rich man could end world hunger with a single signature. It's wrong about wealth, wrong about hunger, and wrong about history: a defense of the much-maligned billionaire.
June 16, 2026
Five months into Zohran Mamdani's mayoralty, a clear pattern has emerged: concrete early wins on child care, the budget, and crime — while his most symbolic promises on rent, buses, and groceries remain pending, deferred, or scaled down by the limits of the office itself.