Tag: covid-19


  • 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 system without turning it into a battlefield. The Postal Service is the kind of institution…

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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 you to believe. A plan asks you to trust, and trust has to be earned.

  • 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 aren’t enforced become theatre, trust becomes the second casualty, and “freedom” turns into a slogan…

  • 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 between who gets to stay home and who is expected to

  • 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 real danger is a republic that can announce action faster than it can perform it.

  • 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 bodies and time, the real test is whether we can build an information culture that…

  • 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 optional. A republic can survive quarantine. The question is whether its standards can.

  • 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.