A Vice President at a large technology company sits down at the end of the quarter to evaluate her engineering team. She has twelve direct reports. They have spent the quarter using AI tools heavily, as the company’s leadership has insisted they do. She must now write performance reviews. She has to say, in writing, … Read more
Friday’s post argued that what the Court did in Louisiana v. Callais is best described as breaking a structural link — a load-bearing connection that was holding up many actions at once, not just the Louisiana map. That post was about what. This post is about why now. Why this case, why this term, why … Read more
Justice Kagan opens her Callais dissent with a hypothetical. She knows it’s stylized, and she says so. Imagine a state shaped like a rectangle, with one of its six congressional districts a near-perfect circle in the middle. The circle is ninety percent Black. The other five districts, surrounding it, are ninety percent white. Voting is … Read more
Roosevelt Elementary started Year 1 of Elevate with 100 students. It ended the year with 400. The other two schools held roughly steady. The district grew from 600 students to 900, and the composition of that denominator shifted decisively toward the lowest-scoring school. That one fact explains the entire dashboard. Elevate worked. Every school’s average … Read more
A dispatch from the road, later than usual. The week covered the launch of the junk drawer series, a USPS post whose central mechanism acquired a fuel surcharge while the post was still fresh, a Supreme Court case in which the drawer breaks, and a Friday post on Iran that staked a prediction now counting … 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