Essays

Unstuck Brutal Guidance for Getting Out of Your Own Way Executive Summary Unstuck is a no-nonsense guide to breaking through inertia and self-sabotage. It rejects motivational fluff and insists on discipline, responsibility, and daily action. The core message: stop waiting — move now. 8 Core Principles Stop Stalling — Waiting for the “right time” is an illusion. Take one step now — action creates momentum. Your Excuses Are BS — Excuses are lies we tell ourselves. Face the truth, and act on it, however small. Embrace Discomfort — Growth demands discomfort. Avoid comfort traps and toxic influences; lean into struggle. Don’t Negotiate with Yourself — Motivation fails — discipline wins. Lower the bar, stop debating, and show up daily. Action Comes First — Clarity and confidence come from doing, not thinking. Small wins lead to streaks and momentum. Stack Wins — Life will hit hard. Reframe setbacks, control what you can, and adopt a “so what?” mindset. Persistence Over Perfection — Consistency beats flawless effort. Build systems and routines that sustain growth. Don’t Miss Twice — Slipping once is normal. Failing twice breaks the streak. Reset quickly and keep moving forward. The Stoic Thread Drawing on wisdom from Epictetus, Seneca, and Marcus Aurelius, Unstuck reminds us: you cannot control the world, but you can control your choices. Courage, discipline, and clarity are cultivated, not gifted. ...

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. ...

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 ...

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 ...

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?” ...

Question: Eight weeks out, with the forecasters moving races toward the Democrats and the president’s super PAC spending its first general-election dollars of the cycle, is the Senate majority within reach? Answer: The models call it a coin flip. Inside Elections moved four races toward the Democrats this week, Sabato’s Crystal Ball’s best guesses land on a 50-50 Senate, and the money is following the map: Trump’s MAGA Inc. made a $10 million buy in Texas, its first of the cycle. Democrats still need a net gain of four, and a 50-50 Senate belongs to Vance. The path runs through North Carolina, two coin flips in Ohio and Texas, and a bench of races from Maine to Alaska, with Kansas as the margin seat. ...

My name is Philip, and I have TDS. I have had it for years. I have it so badly that I read the news every morning, I check the polls, I have opinions about the federal funds rate, and I once wrote an entire essay about the legal record of the forty-seventh president. The symptoms are severe and, I am told, incurable. I am here to tell you that I do not want a cure. I am proud to have TDS, and I think you should be too. ...

The title of this essay is a statement of record, not of opinion. Donald J. Trump is a convicted felon. A jury of twelve New Yorkers found him guilty on all thirty-four counts of a felony indictment, and no court has reversed that verdict. He is also a man against whom two further federal indictments, one state indictment, and a series of civil judgments were brought, with outcomes ranging from dismissal to final judgment. The purpose of this essay is to set down that record precisely: what was charged, what was proven, what was dismissed, and what stands today. The record is long, and it is public. It deserves to be read whole. ...

Danger and uselessness are usually treated as opposites. A dangerous president is one who is too effective, too capable, too determined; a useless one is merely a disappointment, a man who fails without consequence. The alarming possibility, and the one the record now supports, is that the two are the same fact. The danger of Donald Trump is not that he is powerful. It is that he is powerful and incompetent, and the combination does not cancel out. It compounds. The incompetent exercise of vast power is how wars are started, economies are damaged, and institutions are broken. This essay sets down the evidence for both claims, because they are one claim: a president who cannot govern is not a harmless president. He is the most dangerous kind. ...

The year 2075 is forty-nine years away. That is the same distance as 1977 is from today, and it is worth pausing on what that means. A person born in 1977 has lived through the end of the Cold War, the rise of the internet, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the invention of the smartphone, the first decade of artificial intelligence, and a pandemic. Forty-nine years is a lifetime, and it is also the span in which the world’s population will grow by two billion people, the global temperature will rise past thresholds that have never been crossed in human history, and the political order that emerged after 1945 will either be repaired or replaced. This essay is an attempt to look at that year soberly, without panic and without comfort, and to set down the two paths that are actually available. They are not predictions. They are the two futures that the evidence says are possible, and the difference between them is being decided now. ...