The Inner Monologue

The Day America Declared Puberty a Legal Qualification

Lowering the age of majority in the United States to 14 would not be a reform.It would be a confession. A confession that we have finally given up pretending adulthood is about judgment, experience, or responsibility—and have instead decided it is merely about paperwork and vibes. Supporters would call it empowerment. Freedom. Trust in youth.Opponents…
Why I Don’t Respond to Comments (and Why That’s the Point)

I never respond to comments on my blog. This fact bothers some people far more than it should. In an era where engagement is currency and reaction is treated as proof of relevance, silence is often interpreted as arrogance, neglect, or hostility. Surely, if someone took the time to write, the least I could do…
Four Miles of Steel: How the American West Rewrote the Physics of Freight

There are places in the American West where the landscape still seems too large for human systems. The horizon stretches without interruption, towns are measured in hours rather than minutes, and infrastructure has always had to decide whether it will submit to geography—or dominate it. Nowhere is that decision more visible than on the railroad.…
“And Do the Other Things”: What Kennedy Was Really Asking of America

When John F. Kennedy stood before a crowd at Rice University in 1962 and declared, “We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things,” he wasn’t padding a sentence. He was embedding a worldview. The Moon gets the headlines. The rockets get the documentaries. But “the other things” is…
The Infrastructure We Complain About Is the Infrastructure Others Dream Of

There is a quiet absurdity embedded in modern wealth: the louder a society complains about its infrastructure, the more likely it is that its infrastructure already works. In wealthy nations, people rage about potholes that would be impassable roads elsewhere. They curse broadband speeds that would be transformative in poorer countries. They treat a delayed…
The Utility of Poverty: Why Extreme Wealth Requires Someone Else to Stay Poor

Consider a hypothesis that sounds inflammatory only because it is usually left unstated: poor nations are not a failure of the global economy; they are a structural requirement of it. The modern international system does not merely tolerate poverty—it organizes around it. Disproportionate wealth is not an accidental outcome layered atop globalization; it is a…
The $20 Olive: How Distance Turns Food Into a Luxury

Somewhere in a Mediterranean open-air market, a vendor scoops olives from a shallow bin. The price is written on a piece of cardboard in marker. No branding. No story. No adjectives. Just olives—food so ordinary it barely deserves explanation. A kilogram might cost five dollars. Maybe less. In the United States, those same olives—same cultivar,…
January 1 Is a Suggestion, Not a Beginning

Every year, billions of people participate in a collective fiction: that January 1 represents a clean break in time. Fireworks explode, resolutions are declared, and language briefly pretends that something has ended and something else has begun. But beneath the noise, the world keeps moving exactly as it was the day before. Budgets don’t reset.…
The First Place That Will Rename Itself for Trump Won’t Be New York—It Will Be a Message

There is a certain inevitability to the question. Not if, but where. At some point, some jurisdiction in the United States will attempt something more radical than a highway sign or a commemorative plaque. A town council vote. A county resolution. A ballot initiative. A place that decides it does not merely want to honor…
“The Cloud Is Just Someone Else’s Computer” – And Other Hilariously Bad Tech Takes

Oh, you’ve figured it out, haven’t you? The big secret of cloud computing. All those fancy terms—”elastic scaling,” “multi-region redundancy,” “serverless architecture”—are just smoke and mirrors. Because, as any truly enlightened tech bro will tell you: “The cloud is just someone else’s computer.” Wow. Deep. Profound. Revolutionary. Let’s all pack up and go home, folks.…