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.
Peter, I am writing this in the open because you have never hidden what you think, and what you think deserves an answer longer than a post. I have read you for years, not the caricature but the actual essays. The Education of a Libertarian is the clearest thing you have ever written, and I want to begin by saying the thing almost no one who disagrees with you is willing to say. ...
Question: Seven weeks out, with Kansas handing Adam Hamilton his first independent lead of the cycle, Kalshi’s own desk reporting the Democrats at a record 57 percent for the Senate, and the pollsters calling Minnesota, Michigan, and New Hampshire all closer than the models do, is the majority closer than it was a week ago? Answer: The models and the markets moved decisively Democratic this week, and this time the forecasters moved a little with them. Kalshi’s Senate-control market crossed to the Democrats on September 14 and Kalshi’s own desk put them at a record 57 percent by September 17, their first extended Democratic price since April, with Polymarket sitting near the same number.1 Nate Silver’s FLIPR model rose from 50.6 percent on September 6 to 58.6 on September 14 and into the low sixties by the weekend, and Decision Desk HQ’s simulation ended the week with a median 51-49 Democratic Senate.23 The forecasters who do not model moved only twice, and both times toward a toss-up: Cook made New Hampshire one on September 15, and Inside Elections made Maine one on September 17.4 The ground moved with the models: the first independent survey of the cycle put Hamilton ahead in Kansas,5 Minnesota went dead even,6 El-Sayed opened his largest Michigan lead of the cycle,7 and Florida’s special election tied in a poll the Moody campaign answered with an emergency fundraising alert.8 ...
The President of the United States kept the National Symphony Orchestra out of its own building because he could not get his name onto the front of it. That is the sentence. Everything else in this essay is evidence. Not context, not nuance: evidence, for a claim that should not need arguing but apparently does, which is that the most powerful man in the world has spent nineteen months holding a national memorial hostage over a sign. ...
If you read the news about the 2026 election long enough, you come away with the impression that something enormous is about to happen to it. Two executive orders, a Postal Service rule, a citizenship database, a hundred lawsuits, agents at polling places, a Supreme Court case about mail ballots. It reads like an election under siege. Here is the strangest fact about all of it: as of the end of September, almost nothing has actually changed for voters. The executive orders are blocked. The Postal Service rule was denied by the Supreme Court nine days before the deadline to mail overseas ballots. The citizenship database is under challenge in Maryland. The Justice Department has lost every voter-roll case that has been decided, twenty-four of them in a row. The SAVE Act never passed. The Election Assistance Commission cannot adopt new standards because it has no commissioners left to vote.1 ...
On September 3, the Missouri Supreme Court ruled unanimously that the congressional map Republicans drew in 2025 and used in Missouri’s August primary “is not the law and has never been the law.” The map, House Bill 1, was suspended before it ever took effect because a referendum petition against it was filed in time. The November election will run on the 2022 districts instead, and the referendum sits on the ballot as Proposition A.1 ...
Yesterday, Apple released macOS 27. Golden Gate. It is the first version of macOS that will not run on a single Intel Mac, and it is the last with full Rosetta 2 support, the translation layer that let Apple silicon Macs run Intel software.1 Four machines that supported the previous release were dropped flat: the 16-inch MacBook Pro from 2019, the 13-inch MacBook Pro from 2020, the 2020 iMac, and the Intel Mac Pro from 2019.2 If you are reading this on one of them, yesterday was the day the current stopped. ...