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This Was a Choice
The excuses are gone The excuses are gone, by now, reopening without redesign isn’t confusion or improvisation. It is policy. What is happening now is no longer confusion or shock or improvisation. It is not the fog of an unprecedented…
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The Rules Harden Quietly
By August 2020, emergency measures no longer feel temporary. Rules harden, enforcement becomes uneven, and governance shifts quietly from persuasion to administration.
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Trust Ships in Boxes
The Postal Service isn’t just delivery. It’s legitimacy. The story being told this month is that the fight is over mail-in ballots. That is true, but incomplete. The deeper fight is over whether the country can still run a basic…
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The Election Is a Moderation Problem
July feels like a rehearsal for November: the same lies, the same outrage, the same incentive structure. This isn’t just an election year. It’s a content-management crisis with ballots attached.
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The Restart Is the Risk
Restarting has become the goal, even though the systems being restarted have not been repaired. Speed is replacing caution, and risk is being reframed as resolve.
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The Shape of the Divide
By July 2020, disagreement stops feeling temporary. Fatigue hardens positions, expertise becomes aligned, and the crisis begins to organize people into lasting divides.
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The Pause Is Not the Repair
A global slowdown feels meaningful, but pausing a system is not the same as repairing it. What comes next matters more than the stop itself.
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The Return of Everything at Once
By June 2020, the crisis no longer moves in sequence. Public health, politics, and social unrest collide at once, fracturing attention and testing authority in real time.
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The Street Is an API
June is teaching the country a new truth: power isn’t just who can use force. It’s who can set the story, at scale, fast enough to feel like reality.
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The Great Reopening Performance
May 2020 didn’t just reopen businesses, it staged a declaration: we’re done with this. But reopening became symbols and vibes instead of systems, pushing enforcement downhill to the lowest-paid workers and turning public health into identity theatre. A performance asks…
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The Argument About What Comes Next
By May 2020, the shock has faded and the argument begins. Reopening, expertise, and “what comes next” are debated before the present has stabilized, turning uncertainty itself into a political battleground.
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Reopening Without Repair
The push to reopen is real, and so is the pain behind it. But reopening is not a switch. It is an allocation of risk, and without repair, it becomes a transfer of burden onto the least protected. Rules that…
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The Essential Illusion
April 2020 turned “essential” into a badge, but too often it functioned as camouflage. Praise and applause can’t substitute for protection, pay, and enforceable safety. The pandemic didn’t invent inequality, it made it impossible to ignore, drawing a brutal line…
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The Pandemic Lexicon
A plain-language glossary of the terms that reshaped public life in April 2020: flatten the curve, social distancing, essential workers, PPE, contact tracing, reopening, and the “new normal.”
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The Stimulus State
April 2020 turns crisis into administration. Relief is not just money, but a promise about who counts, and a test of whether institutions can deliver help with speed, clarity, and accountability. When stimulus becomes branding and oversight becomes “obstruction,” the…
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The Curve, the Clip, and the Click
March 2020 forced reality back onto the screen, but the feed still tried to turn it into content. The curve is not a metaphor, the clip is not leadership, and the click is not control. In a crisis measured in…
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When Everything Speeds Up at Once
March 2020 breaks the calendar. Systems show their seams, authority fragments under pressure, and private life becomes political overnight, while language struggles to keep up with events unfolding in real time.
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The Republic in Quarantine
March 2020 is a stress test, not only of hospitals and supply chains, but of the democratic habits that keep power accountable when fear is in the air. Emergencies expand authority, fracture trust, and tempt leaders to treat transparency as…
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The Two-Minute Hate Scroll
February 2020 doesn’t feel heavy only because the news is heavy. It feels heavy because the interface is. The feed delivers politics as a reflex, preloading judgment, manufacturing urgency, and turning outrage into a daily ritual that fits neatly into…
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The Pause Before the Headline
In February 2020, politics still feels noisy but containable. Risk is theoretical, systems are abstract, and attention is treated as infinite, right up until the month becomes a threshold.
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The Slow Coup of “So What”
February 2019 is not defined by one scandal, but by a habit: the national shrug. “So what” has become a governing posture, turning oversight into hostility and misconduct into background noise. Democracies don’t fail only through dramatic ruptures. They fail…
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January 2020: Attention Begins to Shift
Early signals consolidate into a story with shape. Institutions adjust cautiously, media reframes, and attention begins to move inward. January 2020 introduces doubt without yet declaring crisis.
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Notification Nation
In January 2020, politics doesn’t arrive as a newspaper or an evening broadcast. It arrives as a push alert. The attention economy has reshaped civic life into an endless stream of click-shaped urgency, rewarding visibility over integrity and reaction over…
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The Permission Structure of 2020
America didn’t enter 2020 with a reset. It entered with momentum, and momentum is what politics looks like when standards have already been weakened. From escalating conflict abroad to a Senate trial that feels prewritten, the real danger is not…
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The Year the Feed Learned Your Triggers
December 2019 closes with impeachment, primaries, and a country that feels permanently on edge. But the deeper story isn’t just what happened. It’s how the feed trained us to consume politics in fragments, perform identity, and treat constant emergency as…
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December 2019: Signals Without a Name
Year-end routines take over as institutions slow for the holidays. Small signals appear at the edges of attention, but there is no shared narrative yet, only information without urgency.
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The Center Cannot Hold, but It Can Be Rebuilt
December 2019 closes with the House voting to impeach President Trump and the Senate poised for a trial whose ending seems prewritten. But the real stakes are larger than one outcome. The question is what we will tolerate, what precedents…
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The Algorithm Is Running for Office
American politics in 2019 is less a town hall and more a group chat with no moderators. Impeachment becomes content, campaigns become mood rings, and every institution gets filtered through the attention economy. The deeper crisis is not just what…
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The Republic on a Razor’s Edge
America in 2019 feels like a nation trained to react faster than it can reason. Impeachment dominates the headlines, but the deeper crisis is cultural: truth has become tribal, institutions are treated like weapons, and the 2020 race is already…
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How Politics Slowed Down Before It Broke
An explainer on why political systems felt increasingly slow and unresponsive in late 2019, and how institutional drag shaped public trust before crisis hit.
