While my dedicated sections focus on specific pillars, the Essays section is where I explore the intersections. This is a space for synthesis—where Stoicism meets artificial intelligence, or where civic duty meets personal development.
These pieces are often more exploratory, serving as intellectual sketches and deep-dives into the questions that don’t fit neatly into a single category but are essential to a well-lived life.
On Tuesday, September 8, a 28-year-old researcher named Jacob Coxon resigned from Anthropic and said the people building the technology believe it could kill us all by the end of the decade. This week, the story did not fade, as stories usually do. It compounded. Evan Hubinger, Anthropic’s alignment lead, said he personally believed there was a greater than 10 percent chance AI could kill all humans within the next decade, and that the field did not yet have a plan to solve alignment.1 Paul Christiano, the former head of safety at the US Commerce Department’s Center for AI Standards and Innovation, said the recent pace of capability gains gave him “a meaningful risk that rapid acceleration in AI capabilities leads to catastrophic and irreversible loss of control in the very near term.”2 Two researchers named Wang, one at OpenAI and one at Anthropic, posted within hours of each other that recursive self-improvement was the danger “hard to overstate” and that “there is not yet a viable scientific plan” to make it safe.3 OpenAI’s chief scientist wrote that he expects the speed of progress to carry into systems that increasingly drive their own development, and called it “a time that calls for extreme caution,” adding, “I am concerned no one is prepared for the consequences of a continued rapid rise in machine intelligence.”4
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Question: Seven weeks out, with the war with Iran escalating into the heaviest shipping attacks of the cycle, Kalshi’s Senate-control market back to a Democratic price for the first time since April, and Kansas finally putting its two candidates on one stage Saturday, is the majority closer than it was a week ago?
Answer: The models and the markets both call it a coin flip, and for a moment this week they tilted together. Decision Desk HQ gave the Democrats 51 percent around midweek before the Republicans were back at 51 within a day, and Kalshi’s Senate-control market priced a Democratic Senate at 51 percent on September 7 before settling back to even; that was not the first Democratic price in the market’s history, as an earlier version of this report said, but the first since April.1 The ratings tables were quiet, so the movement was in money and polls instead: the GOP’s strongest super PAC made its first and biggest battleground buy of the cycle in Texas, where the president spent two days boosting a nominee he also mocked; the battleground surveys leaned Democratic across the board; and Kansas, the margin seat, got its debate at the State Fair. Democrats still need a net gain of four, and a 50-50 Senate belongs to Vance. The path still runs through North Carolina, two coin flips in Ohio and Texas, and a bench from Maine to Alaska, with Kansas as the margin seat.
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On Friday, September 11, 2026, an entire generation of Americans will mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of a day they never lived through. This year’s Patriot Day proclamation put it plainly: “an entire generation of Americans has now come of age with no living memory of that fateful day.”1 For those of us who do remember, the day is not history. It is a scar that still aches in certain weather. And the question this anniversary asks is not only what we remember, but what we learned, and what we owe.
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On Tuesday, September 8, 2026, a 28-year-old researcher named Jacob Coxon resigned from Anthropic and posted his reasons on X. He had previously worked at OpenAI. He wrote that neither company was acting responsibly, that they were “racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives,” and that the people building the technology “earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.”1 Two of his colleagues, still employed, backed him up. Evan Hubinger, a lead in Anthropic’s alignment division, wrote that he personally believed there was a greater than 10 percent chance AI could kill all humans within the next decade, and that the industry did not yet have a plan to solve alignment.2 Samuel Marks, Anthropic’s scalable oversight lead, added the line that should have stopped the conversation: “In general, the more senior the employee, the more concerned they are.”3
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On September 8, 2026, Canada’s retaliatory tariffs took effect at 12:01 a.m.: duties of 15 to 50 percent on more than 700 American products, worth about CA$27.6 billion, matched “dollar for dollar, rate for rate” against the tariffs Washington had just imposed on Canadian goods.1 The same week, the White House confirmed it was moving to ban Canadian dairy products and most alcoholic drinks from the American market.2 The day before, the president had threatened to block Bombardier, a Canadian aircraft maker that employs more than a thousand people in Wichita, Kansas, from selling in the United States unless it moved its manufacturing across the border.3
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I have spent the last several years writing about trust: what it is, how it is built, and what happens when it is spent. I have written about honor as a practical discipline, about corruption as a constitutional danger, about the bond market pricing the arithmetic rather than the promises. Underneath all of it is a question I keep coming back to, and it is the question a reader put to me recently: “How can I be sure Trump is telling the truth?”
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