Yesterday Virginia voters ratified a constitutional amendment giving the General Assembly temporary authority to redraw the state’s congressional districts before 2031. Most of what you will read about the result over the next few days will concern seats — specifically, whether Virginia Democrats will in fact net four additional House seats in November under the … Read more
Here is what today looks like. The ceasefire, which was originally set to expire Tuesday evening Eastern time, will now expire Wednesday evening Eastern time — the deadline has slipped by roughly twenty-four hours, which is about the time it takes to fly from Washington to Islamabad. Vice President Vance is reportedly departing today for … Read more
A quick correction on The Only Clause Available, published Friday. I wrote there that the US–Iran ceasefire expires Monday. It expires Wednesday, the 22nd — the two-week truce began April 8, and I miscounted by two days. (Ed.: A formal theorist, miscounting.) The prediction itself stands for Wednesday: a renegotiated form of ambiguity rather than … Read more
Here are two statements about the same agreement, issued within twenty-four hours of each other, by officials who were present at its creation. Donald Trump, April 8, 2026: “There will be no enrichment of Uranium, and the United States will, working with Iran, dig up and remove all of the deeply buried Nuclear ‘Dust.’” Iran’s … Read more
For more than a century, the constitutional status of religious exemptions from childhood vaccine mandates sat quietly unresolved. States offered exemptions — or didn’t — as a matter of legislative discretion. No court had to rule on whether parental religious objection was a constitutional right or merely a policy option that legislators could extend or … Read more
Monday’s post introduced the junk drawer as a structural feature of any well-designed classification system — not a failure to be corrected, but a load-bearing component. It offered a typology: the lost key, which is in the drawer because it is waiting on information that hasn’t arrived yet, and the screwdriver, which is in the … Read more
Yesterday’s post was about junk drawers — about what happens when you ask a classification system to sort an unruly world in real time, and about the organizational costs of pretending the system is tidier than it is. I had barely finished writing it when I came across a news story from two weeks ago … Read more
Every home and office has one. You know which drawer I mean — the one with the takeout menus and the dead batteries and the rubber band that used to hold something together and the key that opens something, somewhere, you just can’t remember what. It is not a disorganized drawer. It is a perfectly … Read more
This is the third of three posts this week on prediction markets. Monday was about information — the signal that travels before the message. Wednesday was about jurisdiction — the classification question that reproduces itself at every level you try to answer it. Today is about something prior to both: whether the classification of a … Read more
Naked Capitalism linked to Tuesday’s post, which brought some welcome new readers to this blog. For those arriving fresh: welcome, and this post is a good place to start — it’s the second in a series, but it’s written to stand on its own. In the last post, I wrote about work that Maggie and … Read more