The Inner Monologue

The Arithmetic That Kills the “Sell Your Car and Uber Everywhere” Meme

There’s a tidy, seductive meme making the rounds again:Most Americans would be better off selling their car, using ride-sharing for commuting, and renting cars for longer trips. It feels modern. Efficient. Environmentally enlightened. The kind of advice that plays well in a tweet, a podcast clip, or a consultancy slide deck. It is also—outside of…
The Price of the Best Care in the World — And Why Americans Don’t Have It

Americans are routinely told a comforting myth about healthcare: that the reason we pay so much is because we have the best care in the world. The implication is moral as much as economic — excellence costs money, and if you want to live longer, healthier, better lives, you should expect to pay more. The…
The Coming AI Overbuild

Why the Collapse of an AI Bubble Could Unleash the Next Technological Renaissance There is a certain symmetry to history that reveals itself only in hindsight.In the late 1990s, telecom companies laid fiber like railroad barons laying track—fast, reckless, and with the full conviction that data traffic would grow infinitely. They buried fiber across continents,…
The Great American Tailpipe Divide: How Eliminating Federal Emissions Rules Turned Our Highways Into a New Front of the Culture War

There are moments in American history when policies designed for narrow ideological satisfaction accidentally reshape the country in ways no strategist intended. The abolition of federal vehicle emissions standards was one such moment. It was framed as a deregulatory liberation, a symbolic breaking of bureaucratic chains. But in practice, it cleaved the United States into…
The Continent That Sleeps Beneath Our Feet: The Deep-Time Future of the Rio Grande Rift

There is a quiet line running through the American Southwest—a crease in the crust that most people drive through without a moment’s thought. The Rio Grande Rift does not roar like the San Andreas, does not belch fire like the Cascades, does not tear the land open with the biblical drama of East Africa. It…
When the Story Runs Without You

There is a persistent assumption—especially in moments of cultural anxiety—that fiction is a confession. That every sentence a writer produces is a breadcrumb trail back to their private beliefs, values, and moral commitments. We treat novels like leaked diaries, short stories like masked speeches, and characters like poorly disguised avatars. When a work unsettles us,…
The Eternal Eve of Saint Nicholas

It was a common failing of mankind, in those earlier centuries, to mistake spectacle for virtue and ceremony for grace. Thus it was that Nicholas—whose name would one day be spoken with warmth by firesides and stitched into the fabric of childhood itself—passed through the world cloaked not merely in wool and fur, but in…
The Enclosed Car Wasn’t About Comfort. It Was About Escape.

We tend to tell the story of the automobile backwards. In the popular telling, early cars were open and rugged, then gradually became enclosed, refined, upholstered, insulated—marching steadily toward comfort and luxury as engineering improved. The implication is that enclosure was indulgent: a softening of a hard, honest machine. But that story misses a more…
The Problem With Labeling the Truth Every so often, a reader asks a well-intentioned question:Is this part real, or is it satire?Is that claim factual, or are you making a point? The short answer is: yes. The longer answer is that this blog contains facts, speculation, satire, parody, exaggeration, thought experiments, and occasionally outright fiction—and…
The YouTube Video That Could Have Existed in 1975

It is tempting—almost comforting—to believe that YouTube-style short films were impossible in 1975. That they are a native artifact of broadband, smartphones, and algorithms. That without digital cameras and free hosting, the idea of a thirty-minute explainer, monologue, or documentary produced by a single individual simply could not exist. That belief is wrong. It was…