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.
I keep three federal dockets open, and I check them twice a day. That sentence needs defending, because it sounds like a hobby. It is not, or not only. Two of the three cases ask a question the same in kind, and it is the question that has mattered most in American law for four years: when a statute tells the executive branch to do something, what happens when the executive branch declines? ...
There is a kind of lawsuit that is not really a lawsuit about law at all. It is a lawsuit about whether the government will do the thing it said it would do. Phang v. Blanche is one of those, and it is worth following not because the legal question is hard, but because the legal question is easy and the government has spent five months finding ways not to answer it. ...
There is a habit in political writing of treating a document as a symbol. Project 2025 has been a symbol for two years now, which means most of what has been written about it is about what it stands for rather than what it says. That is a loss, because the document is unusually specific, it is public, and it can be checked. So let me do something unglamorous. Let me consider the source. ...
I want to make two claims, and I want to keep them apart, because collapsing them is how this argument usually fails. Theocrats are delusional. Theocrats are dangerous. Those are not two ways of saying the same thing, and each needs its own evidence. Let me define the term first, because I am using it more broadly than a dictionary will. A theocrat, as I mean it, is not only someone who wants a formal church-run state. It is anyone who claims a divine warrant for the use of state power: the man who says God requires the law to read one way, and equally the man who says America is a Christian nation and its law should reflect that. The American figures I discuss below mostly take the second position rather than the first, and the most careful of them meet the theocracy charge head-on rather than dodging it. Reno, whose essay I engage in full, raises the worry himself and answers it with Pilate. I apply the word anyway, because the thing that makes this politics dangerous is not the constitutional form its adherents prefer. It is the warrant they claim, and that claim is the same in both cases. ...
This morning I published a ranking of all fifty-six Speakers of the House, built on a rubric I stated in full: tenure, legislative output, institutional change, each graded zero to four, summing to twelve, emitted as a three-digit profile string so anyone can attack the arithmetic. In that table, Mike Johnson is twenty-seventh, with a profile of 220 and a score of four out of twelve. I put the number in the paper because I believed it. I stand by the method. And I want to use this space to say plainly that the number is close to worthless as a statement about the man, that the reason is a specific defect in my own rubric, and that the defect has a shape I should have seen before I shipped it. ...
The presidency has been ranked for eighty years. Schlesinger started it in 1948, Siena has run it seven times, C-SPAN four times, and there are two dozen surveys in between. You can find a president’s standing on ten named characteristics, with the per-category scores, on a live web page. The Speakership has been ranked once. In 1998. By a master’s student. That is the whole of it. Dennis Roy Still, at Iowa State, mailed a questionnaire to sixty congressional scholars and asked them to rate fifty Speakers on four questions. His abstract calls it, accurately, “the first attempt to rank the U.S. House Speakers” (Still, Ranking the American Speakers, Iowa State University Digital Repository). Nobody has repeated it in the twenty-eight years since. Still’s scholars could rate only thirty-eight of his fifty, and the six Speakers who have held the gavel since 1998 were not in his survey at all. Eighteen of the fifty-six people who have been Speaker have never been rated by anyone. ...