Democrats’ odds of walking the narrow path to a Senate majority have never looked better. But nobody should (or does) feel very secure about the out…

Read more

My father is a novelist and screenwriter who’s made several films and also worked on a couple of TV shows, plus some projects that never got off the ground. And while I’m not a film critic or a pop culture writer, the behind-the-scenes glimpses I’ve gotten over the years have always left me a little unsatisfied with the way these things are conventionally covered.

A lot of cultural commentary basically seems to me like what you’d get if you did political journalism without covering the ugly “how the sausage gets made” side of the legislative process, just naively taking what everyone says and does at face value.

The people who write about this stuff know better, obviously, but it’s sort of convention to pretend that they don’t.

One thing writers don’t like about writing novels is that it’s hard to get paid a lot of money, because selling novels to the public is not very lucrative. On the other hand, one thing writers do like about writing novels is that your imagination and creative desires aren’t limited by budgetary concerns.

After I saw the movie “American Fiction,” I picked up Percival Everett’s “Erasure” (the novel it’s based on) and was surprised to learn that unlike the movie, the book is largely set in Washington, D.C., where I live. The book includes some very realistic descriptions of the city, which is something you almost never see in film or television. D.C. is an expensive location to film. It’s common for projects like the first season of “The Night Agent” to shoot in Canada and just say it’s D.C. Ninety percent of the audience probably doesn’t care, but I live here, and I care!

The Jack Reacher books themselves are sloppy with settings and geography, so I sort of don’t mind that the adaptations are like this, too. “Night Agent” author Matt Quirk is meticulous about his verisimilitude, though, and I think it’s kind of annoying that doesn’t carry through into the adaptation.

But filming location is hardly the end of it. Every creative choice in film or television is also a business decision — and that’s especially true in television. With movies, the big business question is which projects get made at all. But television is kind of a grind-it-out medium, where tons of projects are produced and cost control matters a lot.

I was thinking about this when I was reading the New York Times “100 Best TV Shows of the 21st Century” list because while lists like these are quite literally made to be argued about, I just kind of dispute the premise that there are 100 good TV shows.

The medium does not always live down to Newton Minow’s infamous characterization of it as a “vast wasteland.” But what’s clear from the vantage point of 2026 is that while “The Sopranos” (ineligible for inclusion on the New York Times list because it launched in 1999) showed the world that television could be a forum for really great, really ambitious storytelling, it mostly hasn’t been. The success of that show created a brief flowering of efforts to push the medium, but so-called “prestige” television retreated relatively quickly into the same tropes and economic constraints that have always made television a land of mediocrity. And the exercise of list-building really drives that home.

What are lists for?

Again, viewed literally, the only real point of a list like this is to drive arguments and engagement, and on that level, mission accomplished by the New York Times.

But conceptually, I think the point of these exercises is to build a canon.

Read more

Read more

A huge swath of the institutional environmental movement is committed to the view that the most important thing is blocking new gas infrastructure. This position is a little bit embarrassing, which is why green groups explained on their internal strategy call that the plan is to say they’re pushing to improve the bill while actually working to kill it.

And I do think one must admit that permitting reform as climate policy is a bet.

It’s a bet that the battery optimists are correct that storage technology will keep getting better and cheaper so that this line will keep going up rather than hit a wall when the summer market gets saturated. It’s a bet that voters will continue to care about environmental issues and that future Democratic administrations will be able to enact substantive air-pollution regulations rather than relying on procedural shenanigans to handicap fossil-fuel infrastructure.

These bets might not pay off, but they are bets that most people in the climate movement say they believe in, and the people who actually do believe them are willing to take the bet.

On the other side, meanwhile, we have what I would characterize as the underpants gnome climate policy:

1. Block new natural-gas infrastructure

2. ???

3. Net zero!

It’s just not clear how this is supposed to work technically or politically. We only need to look to New England, where they’ve been attempting this policy for the past generation and it’s just not working.

The land of too few pipelines

The United States is a land of abundant methane, which means that in most of the country, burning natural gas is a low-cost way to generate electricity. In the parts of the country that are dense enough to have the requisite infrastructure, it’s also a low-cost way to heat homes and a convenient way to operate stoves.

But the northeastern United States does not have enough pipelines to fully meet New England’s demand for gas. As a result, the region imports liquefied natural gas (L.N.G.), which trades on global markets at a higher price than pipeline gas. This gas scarcity has not caused abundant clean energy to magically materialize in New England.

These are the underpants gnomes.

In the real world, renewables deployment has less to do with the ideological complexion of states and more to do with the physical fundamentals. The Great Plains are very windy, so there’s lots of wind power there. The Southwest is very sunny, so there’s lots of solar power there. Both the price of land and the ease of accessing it are also important variables. One reason Texas has become such an extraordinary solar champion is that Texas features many large parcels of privately owned low-value agricultural land.

None of this is true of New England. It’s less sunny, it’s less windy, the land is more expensive, ownership is dramatically more fragmented, and the terrain is much more forested.

None of these are insurmountable obstacles to building utility-scale wind and solar facilities, but they are definitely obstacles. If you want to surmount them, you need to take affirmative policy steps to do so.

I think there are obvious reasons why local elected officials are not incredibly eager to have the state use eminent domain to assemble big parcels of land and cut down trees and build solar panels, but you definitely could do this. And if you did it, the New England grid would get greener. Blocking new gas infrastructure, by contrast, does not solve the problems of renewables deployment. Instead, it has two main consequences.

One is that during adverse weather events, a lot of New England power stations switch to burning oil, which is dirtier than gas.

The other is that electricity is relatively expensive in New England.

This is good for encouraging conservation, but it’s bad for the local economy and also has perverse consequences from an environmental viewpoint.

The New York Times published a piece about the price of an electric car versus a gasoline car in every state. The two states with the best E.V. savings are Washington and Oregon, two politically progressive states with above-average gasoline prices and below-average electricity costs. Then there’s swing state Nevada, followed by two red states.

But the five worst states are all politically progressive states in the Northeast, where electricity is expensive.

You of course could make E.V.s attractive in these states by imposing really high gas taxes. But in practice that’s not happening, just like large-scale renewables construction isn’t happening. The upshot of the lack of gas pipeline infrastructure is just that electricity is expensive, so electrification is unattractive.

The home heat situation is even worse. New England is quite cold in the winter, and people often rely on heating oil (which, again, is dirtier than gas) or at times wood. It would be good to see more people switch to electric heat pumps, which are very efficient and will also let people cool their homes in the increasingly warm New England summers. Again, though, how attractive this is as an option is largely a function of the price of electricity. New England electricity is already expensive, and if price-insensitive green enthusiasts go out and switch to heat pumps anyway, that will only push prices higher unless electricity generation expands.

Obviously to solve climate change, you need that expanded electricity generation to be as clean as possible. But what I’m saying here is that blocking pipelines does not summon clean electricity into existence. A permitting deal, by contrast, actually does increase the amount of clean electricity.

It’s true that it will also expand gas infrastructure, but the actual impact of this on environmental outcomes is ambiguous, while the pure underpants gnome strategy is totally failing.

More to life than carbon

There are also non-climate interests at play in this debate.

Most politicians these days say that they care about affordability and the cost of living. Clearly, a law that makes the infrastructure of both gas and renewables easier to build is good for affordability and the cost of living.

Now a lot of politicians who say they care about this are clearly lying (see Trump on tariffs), but I think that’s bad. Democrats who are on the fence about this bill ought to look in the mirror and ask themselves if they’re lying when they say they care about affordability or if it’s a real concern of theirs. You have disagreements over impact within the climate camp, but the cost-of-living impact is unambiguous.

There’s also politics to consider.

Bill McKibben, writing against the permitting deal, analogizes it to a 2015 legislative deal that paired an expansion of clean-energy tax credits with the re-legalization of crude oil exports. At the time, proponents of the deal said that this was a win-win for the American economy and for clean energy. McKibben disagrees because he conceptualizes the entire climate issue as a kind of endless war of position against the oil industry, so anything that’s good for them is by definition bad:

As we lobbied via email, I exchanged opinions with a Senator deeply involved in that fight, and in this one. He assured me I was wrong—that the compromise would be “big, and net carbon reducing.” As it turns out, it’s possible that the disastrous bill may have been more important than the Paris climate accords. Over the course of a decade they turned America into the world’s largest hydrocarbon exporter, and rewrote the shape of global energy markets. They gave American oil interests the power to, among other things, help install Trump back in office. It was a well-meaning and utterly and profoundly disastrous compromise, one that the Serious People in DC and the press supported, as they will this one.

This read of the politics is silly. If the Obama administration had refused to do this deal in 2015, that wouldn’t have stopped Trump from winning in 2024. In the real world, a repeal of the export ban would probably just have passed in 2017.

But play out McKibben’s counterfactual and now you have Democrats — including vulnerable ones like Jon Tester and elected officials from states like Pennsylvania, Colorado, Ohio, and New Mexico with oil and gas industries — spending that year filibustering the bill. This makes Democrats’ political problems worse, not better.

Here in the real world, we’re looking at a potential Democratic Senate win that hinges on seats in Alaska and Texas. There’s a tradeoff between the desire to build a big tent coalition to check MAGA and the desire to engage in a relentless twilight struggle against the American fossil-fuel industry. I know people in the green movement don’t want that to be true and don’t subjectively understand themselves and their organizations to be undermining the fight for American democracy, but it’s the reality of the situation.

Speaking of democracy, imagine a world where McKibben had gotten his way and there’d been no American oil and gas exports over the past 10 years. Sanctioning Russia would be impossible and unthinkable. European dependence on Putin’s energy exports would be complete. It’s true that Europeans would be scrambling to invest in renewables and green technology, but in the real world, they’ve been doing that while also relying on American exports as a bridge. In the McKibben timeline, Ukraine is thrown to the wolves and Russia’s budget for military rebuilding and information operations is unlimited.

It’s in the geopolitical arena that the green analysis keeps falling down.

Efforts to influence global fossil-fuel consumption by constraining American fossil-fuel production have a terrible cost-benefit profile and always will. Democrats who understand how destructive Trump’s war in Iran has been to the global economy need to understand that green absolutists want to do to the United States of America what Trump has done in the Strait of Hormuz. It doesn’t make any sense.

The good news is that nothing in this compromise prevents a future Democratic administration from pursuing substantive Clean Air Act regulation of fossil fuels or a future Democratic trifecta from imposing a price on carbon dioxide emissions (perhaps one limited to the deeply unpopular data-center industry). And it won’t stop us from investing in innovative technologies that might reduce the world’s need for fossil fuels in key areas like aviation, maritime shipping, cement, steel, and agriculture.

Share

This was a slow week in housing news, but I had the chance to talk to Representative Josh Harder about the rollout of a new bipartisan Build More Agenda so wrote about that instead — you…

Read more

The Trump administration finalized a new regulation governing student loans back in July. At the time, it didn’t receive much attention outside of the higher-education specialty press, though the New Republic did publish an alarmist writeup of the change. The New Republic piece also did not receive much attention at the time.

Recently, though, the piece got quite a bit of attention when they re-promoted it with a tweet warning that under the new rule, “degrees for social work, art, religious studies, teaching aides, and music will be hit the hardest.”

I responded briefly on Twitter that making it harder for schools to build a business model around nonperforming loans is a good idea that originated in the Obama administration and, for my trouble, got roundly dunked on as an enemy of the poor and a hater of the liberal arts. Former Congressman Max Rose called me “a real A Hole,” and a whole bunch of folks mocked me for having studied philosophy.

But what we’re seeing here is the power of framing and negative partisanship.

The actual rule the Trump administration is implementing sets an extremely low bar for institutions to clear, asking essentially that graduates of a program have earnings that are, on average, higher than the earnings of people who don’t have a degree at all. So for an undergrad program, the test is “do you earn more than people who only finished high school?” and for a master’s program, the test is “do you earn more than people who only finished college?”

Philosophy majors actually have high earnings on average compared with other college graduates, so we’re light-years from barring loans to students studying philosophy. More broadly, though, every liberal arts program from every even remotely selective college easily clears this bar.

I was recently at Middlebury College, where you can take courses in not-so-lucrative fields like “food studies.” But while some like to poke fun at people who spend four years in college to get a humanities degree that does not have obvious labor-market value, it is in fact the case that the people who complete those degrees earn more on average than the average American with no college degree.

The actual targets here are overwhelmingly programs at the very low end of the American higher-education pyramid.

Subscribe now

About 55 percent of students in programs that would, as currently structured, flunk the test are at for-profit colleges. By enrollment, the largest fields that are going to lose out are things like certificate programs in cosmetology and culinary services.

Most of all, though, you have to understand that Trump’s rule is simply replacing a similar Biden administration rule, which itself was recapitulating an Obama-era regulatory effort. Trump has broadened the scope somewhat while also setting a somewhat weaker standard. I think reasonable people can disagree as to whether the Biden rule or the Trump rule is better all things considered, but fundamentally, they’re not that different, and the main problem is that neither quite goes far enough.

The federal government should not be subsidizing higher-education scams!

The fraught history of student loan regulation

A core problem with almost all discussions of higher-education policy is that 98 percent of the Discourse Class attended a selective college or university and is totally blind to the non-selective side of higher education that enrolls the majority of the students and is home to the vast majority of the problems.

This whole saga goes back to Obama’s first term, when the Department of Education decided it should put some teeth into legislative language stipulating that for vocational-education programs to be eligible for federally backed student loans, they needed to be preparing students for “gainful employment.” The department published a rule in 2011 that was aimed at cracking down on the worst-performing quarter of for-profit programs.

The targeted institutions were basically all for-profit colleges, and they vociferously opposed the measure, lobbying hard against Obama and also suing.

Republicans at the time perversely took the side of the for-profit colleges. There’s an unfortunate strain in American conservatism — also seen in the treatment of Medicare Advantage — that holds that it’s bad to spend money, but that as long as money is spent, it should be spent in a way that maximally aligns with predatory business interests.

Separate from the policy question, though, we had the legal issue of whether the administration really had the statutory authority to regulate in this way. And a federal judge ruled in 2012 that they did not:

Under the regulations, programs had to meet one of three tests or lose their eligibility for federal student aid: at least 35 percent of graduates must be repaying their loans, the typical graduate’s estimated annual loan payments must not exceed 12 percent of earnings, or they must not exceed 30 percent of discretionary income.

But Judge Contreras ruled that the 35 percent debt-repayment standard had no basis. “No expert study or industry standard suggested that the rate selected by the department would appropriately measure whether a particular program adequately prepared its students,” the opinion said. “Instead, the department simply explained that the chosen rate would identify the worst-performing quarter of programs. Why the bottom quarter? Because failing fewer programs would suggest that the test was not ‘meaningful’ while failing more would make for too large a ‘subset of programs that could potentially lose eligibility.’ ”

In an ideal world, Republicans would have just agreed that cracking down on bad student loans was a good idea, and the legislative process could have selected a nice, somewhat arbitrary round number — something Congress is really good at.

Obama won re-election and in 2014 published a new version of the rule, one that stood up against multiple lawsuits.

Then Donald Trump won the 2016 election.

In early 2017, we saw a novel legal theory from the American Association of Cosmetology Schools that argued that using Social Security Administration data to assess the earnings of their schools’ graduates was unfair because so many of their former students are cheating on their taxes by underreporting cash income. They actually won in court with this argument. The whole thing became largely moot, though, because new Education Secretary Betsy DeVos was a huge ally of the for-profit-college industry and immediately announced that she wouldn’t enforce the rule.

Her refusal resulted in a lot of litigation around non-enforcement and also about the administration’s efforts to formally rescind the rule, but in the fall of 2020, the Trump administration eventually prevailed in court and killed the rule.

Subscribe now

Of course, right after that, Trump lost the election. Biden then came in and the whole rule-making process started over again. Initially, the Biden administration’s focus was student loan forgiveness, so it wound up taking all the way until fall of 2023 for a new version of gainful employment to get done. The rule they came up with was stricter than the old Obama-era rule because in addition to the debt-to-earnings ratio test, they also imposed an earnings premium test.

The main thing Trump’s new rule does is weaken the Biden rule by dropping the debt-to-earnings test. I know this is all pretty convoluted, but here’s a summary chart Claude made:

Trump did, however, strengthen the Biden policy in one respect: making it apply to all programs rather than only for-profits and non-degree certificates. In practice, this makes very little difference, and on net, there will be fewer failing programs under the Trump criteria than under the Biden criteria.

But it does perhaps explain why you see a progressive magazine denouncing it.

Trump is doing what he should have done in the first place

If you go back to Trump’s first term, the stated complaint about Obama’s regulations is that they were discriminatory against for-profit programs — a kind of protectionism for the traditional higher-education sector.

Some (though by no means all) people involved in making this policy in the Obama administration quietly agreed with that criticism. They felt that the administration, for political reasons, just decided it couldn’t take on the entire university sector. Their hope was that you could get something like the Obama rule in place and then eventually Republicans would level up by applying the same policy across the board.

Instead, they initially leveled down.

Trump’s second go-round as president has mostly been change for the worse. Relative to his first term, he’s been much more aggressive about abusing the powers of his office and has engaged in a much higher level of dangerous policy adventurism around everything from tariffs to Iran.

But in this case, we’re looking at an example of change for the better. He’s keeping in place the core of the Obama and Biden administration’s efforts around accountability for scam programs, and he’s addressing the discrimination concern by holding everyone to a standard rather than by eliminating the standard. It is true that this means a certain number of master’s degree programs in things like religious studies, mental health counseling, and studio art from nonprofit universities are going to be disqualified. But the vast majority of failing programs continue to be undergrad certificates or associate degree programs like cosmetology. That’s who was suing under Obama and Biden, that’s who was behind the bad policy of the first Trump term, and that’s who really loses out now that Trump is leveling up rather than leveling down.

I suppose your mileage may vary as to whether it’s good for traditional nonprofit universities to run low-value master’s degree programs as a cash cow, but I think it’s pretty bad.

Of course, not everything in life is about money, and if schools want to make the case that someone (taxpayers, philanthropists, I dunno) should give them money to make cheap or free master’s degree programs for counselors, that’s fine. But you shouldn’t be able to use the federal student loan program as a back-door cash grab whether you’re for-profit or nonprofit.

Subscribe now

The only problem with Trump’s rule is that he dropped Biden’s debt-to-earnings test.

Trump’s way of looking at it does nothing to distinguish cheap programs from expensive ones, which I think is a mistake. A certificate that costs $4,000 could be much more worthwhile than one that costs $40,000, even if the people who earn it make slightly less money than the people with the more expensive certificate.

Either way, though, all three versions of this rule have in fact been quite soft on the institutions they’re regulating. Nobody’s being asked to demonstrate that their programs have any causal benefit of any kind! All the government is asking for is the most naive earnings differential imaginable.

I’d be open to the argument that schools should be able to get out of hot water by showing some kind of non-monetary benefits to their students, but for that to make sense, you’d also want to ask questions about the causal impact of the program on earnings, which would be a much more rigorous bar to clear. It seems to me that America’s institutions of higher education are still getting off pretty easy here in terms of access to subsidized loans, and they ought to count their lucky stars rather than complaining.

Share

Read more

One month before Election Day, Democrat Manny Rutinel spent the afternoon in his campaign office north of Denver — a collection of rooms in a nondescript Thornton strip mall decorated with mismatched chairs, photos of the candidate in a c…

Read more

Read more

Before we get to the questions, I wanted to flag the unveiling of a new bipartisan permitting reform deal in the Senate. I don’t know that I have a whole column about this, but I do want to say that it seems like a very strong package that blends provisions to make electricity transmission a lot easier, provisions that are tech-neutral and would improve speed and certainty around energy project permitting, and some good ideas around data centers to make sure new large loads pay the cost of grid upgrades.

I also need to say that I misjudged Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, whose push to get people to talk more about climate change seemed misguided to me but apparently was coupled with a determination to negotiate a really good piece of substantive legislation. I still don’t literally agree with his take on “hushing,” his term to criticize Democrats who avoid talking about climate change, but he was actually doing the important thing here.

Now, Congress should pass the bill!

The risk is that people who at heart don’t want a deal kick it into the next Congress by arguing that there will be a better deal next spring and then we waste another year or two spinning our wheels rather than giving the next Democratic administration a chance to hit the ground running with renewables build-out.

If you’re a person who cannot countenance a bill that makes any concessions to the fossil fuel industry, then you will not like this bill. But you won’t like any bill that Donald Trump could conceivably sign in 2027 or 2028, or any bill that could conceivably pass the Senate — even a hypothetical filibuster-free Senate — in a world where Democrats are counting on Texas and Alaska to deliver their majority.

Whitehouse and Senator Martin Heinrich negotiated a ton of wins for electrification and renewables and geothermal in this bill, and it’s time to pass it.

If you’re new here, the Friday Mailbag is a weekly feature available to paid subscribers, who can submit questions in Slow Boring’s Sunday mailbox. This week we’re making part of the Mailbag free for all to read, but consider upgrading to paid if you’d like to submit questions and to receive the full Mailbag every Friday.

Subscribe now

B Wilder: You’ve given advice in the past for Democrats in red states to make inroads, but what would your advice be for Republicans in blue to states in order to provide checks and balances on the state legislature?

I think this is a sort of under-discussed issue, in part because in a lot of ways I think the playbook for blue-state Republicans is a lot easier and more obvious than the playbook for red-state Democrats.

After all, if you look at federal politics, the main Republican idea is to deploy culture war issues for maximal electoral benefit and then do business-friendly economic policy. In 2004, when opposing gay marriage was good politics, Republicans ran hard on it. By 2016, when it was bad politics, they dropped the issue like a rock. Federal Republicans don’t spend down political capital on cultural issues — they wield them to try to win races. All you really need to do to be sporadically competitive in blue states is just apply that exact same formula to an electorate where the median voter is more left-wing. Every single state has business owners and business executives and people who’d like to pay less in taxes. And the bluer states are in fact more likely to have wasteful spending that’s worth cutting.

We used to have a lot of guys like that.

When I was a kid, Rudy Giuliani was mayor of New York City. He was vocally pro-choice, favored gay rights, and was very clear that his vision of “tough on crime” politics included gun control. He was also, in a way that reminds me more of Zohran Mamdani than Bill de Blasio or Eric Adams, very celebratory of the 1990s version of actually existing New York as an aspirational city of immigrants and diversity. Richard Riordan was also mayor of Los Angeles during this time period and had a similar profile — even tending to brag that he was supporting marriage equality before the vast majority of national Democrats.

By 2026, I would say blue-state Republicans are suffering from three problems.

One is that Donald Trump personally is such a titanic issue. It’s not just that Trump is a really big deal and also super-unpopular in blue places. It’s that he does inappropriate and abusive things that insert himself into local affairs. His habit of trying to cheat in and steal elections, for example, gives people reason to believe that if California had a Republican governor right now that he might be pulling shenanigans to subvert the integrity of the midterm House races. The successful blue-state Republicans of the Trump era have taken clear anti-Trump stances, but most Republican Party voters sincerely love Trump. Charlie Baker had a successful run as a Trump-critical moderate governor of Massachusetts, but rather than the state party seeing him as a model for success, they went in an explicitly MAGA direction post-Baker even though there is no universe in which that was going to work in the Bay State.

This Trump divide can play out in different ways in different institutional contexts, but it keeps being important. Consider the California governor’s race. Matt Mahan, the successful moderate Dem mayor of San Jose, tried to run as a tough-on-crime, business-friendly reformer. If he’d taken second place and made it to a runoff against Xavier Becerra or Tom Steyer, I think there’s a reasonable chance that Mahan would have won. But California Republicans wanted to vote for Steve Hilton, a Fox News contributor and a Trump supporter, so Mahan didn’t make it to the runoff. Now it’s Hilton in a runoff with Becerra that Becerra is obviously going to win.

Whether it’s internal to G.O.P. primaries or in tactical decision-making around these jungle primaries, you’re just not seeing a spirit of pragmatism among blue-state conservatives.

This then just raises the question of whether conservatives actually want to win races in these states or just prefer to complain. I get the sense that a lot of right-wing people are annoyed that Zohran Mamdani has taken a pragmatic approach to law enforcement and crime keeps falling. They would sort of rather see New York City be punished for its sins with far-left governance that causes the city to fall apart. Conservatives on the merits think the California wealth-tax proposal is a bad idea, but I think a lot of them will be happy if it passes — they would enjoy watching the state’s economy suffer a crisis more than they would enjoy getting their way on the issue.

Last but not least, most Republicans in the urban Northeast seem to conceptualize a critical economic policy issue — land use regulation — as primarily a culture war topic.

When Mikie Sherrill ran in New Jersey she endorsed some very tepid YIMBY ideas and for her trouble got denounced by her Republican opponent Jack Ciattarelli, who characterized the state as suffering from an “overdevelopment crisis.” Republicans in the state legislatures of New York, Connecticut, and Maryland have likewise been uniformly hostile to zoning reform. I understand the political psychology of this. Blue-state Republicans are emotionally oriented in opposition to urbanity and to the state government, so the idea of preemption to facilitate density is anathema. At the same time, it simply makes no sense to have a pro-business, pro-growth agenda in these states while ignoring what is by far the largest regulatory barrier to growth. NIMBY conservatism in the context of the actual urban/suburban American Northeast is just a crank movement rather than a problem-solving one.

Unfortunately, I see a lot of conservative elites who live in the Northeast Corridor and ought to know better engage in apologetics about this rather than try to reorient their state parties. I know it would be tough for the Manhattan Institute to just plainly say that New York Republicans are on the wrong side of the single most important economic issue facing the state, but the fact is they are.

Kevin Zielnicki: Patterns of overreach, backlash, and political blunder have me thinking about the original Thermidorians and an alternate history hypothetical. We follow our timeline up to 9 Thermidor Year II and the overthrow of Robespierre. From here, something diverges (better constitutional design? better monetary policy? better foreign policy?) such that instead of the fatally unpopular Directory leading to Napoleon’s coup, France gets a government that will mature into a stable liberal democracy. What does an enduring First Republic look like? And how does this alter the broader political trajectory of Europe?

When I took a French Revolution class in college, the professor took a very narrow view of the revolution and ended it with the overthrow of Robespierre rather than exploring the period between his overthrow and Napoleon’s seizure of power. But I think the most plausible point of departure here may be the Coup of 18 Fructidor.

What happened here is that the Directory, the five-man government that ruled France after Robespierre’s fall, was, as you said, unpopular. As a result, in the elections of March and April 1797, monarchists of different stripes won a majority of seats. Rather than accepting these results, three of the five directors along with Foreign Minister Talleyrand and Napoleon and his allies in the military staged a coup and purged the legislature. This was essentially a “destroy the village in order to save it” moment for the French Revolution, which left in place a regime with limited popular support and no ideological legitimacy whose whole base of support was just the army. Devolving from there into a dictatorship led by the army’s most popular and successful figure was a logical progression. But the coup itself was a somewhat non-obvious move. The immediate impact of purging the monarchists was to shift political control back to the left, contrary to the original purpose of having established the Directory in the first place. The plotters themselves did not necessarily like each other all that much or have aligned views about the direction of policy. If they’d just been less cooperative with each other, it’s not that hard to imagine the newly elected deputies taking their seats.

In theory, a monarchist majority might have meant an end to the revolution and the restoration of the monarchy. But the experience of the 1871 French elections, which generated a monarchist majority and no coup, suggests a different possibility. What happened in 1871, at the dawn of the Third Republic, is that the monarchists were themselves divided about exactly what kind of system they wanted to set up, nobody could secure majority support for anything, and France ended up becoming a durable republic.

Flash back to 1797, and the monarchist deputies-elect seem to have been a mix of hardcore absolutists who wanted a return to the ancien regime from before the French Revolution and people who were more like advocates of the kind of constitutional monarchy that the French Revolution had originally tried to set up. It strikes me as very likely that had the new deputies taken their seats, the median members would have been constitutional monarchists who would have found that the Bourbon royal family itself had no interest in being constitutional monarchs. The deputies would have ended up needing to try to manage a republican form of government that simply held some conservative attitudes toward things like religion. Bonaparte’s coup in the main timeline was, in part, an effort to shift policy back to the right after the Fructidor coup swung things to the left. Without the original coup there is less demand for the subsequent one. And it is at least possible that the mix of Napoleonic military success with relatively conservative government in Paris means that the revolutionary wars come to an end.

In real history, the Treaty of Campo Formio, signed between France and Austria shortly after the Fructidor coup, basically restored peace in Europe. But Britain did not join the peace, and eventually a new broader European war broke out. Perhaps with constitutional monarchists awkwardly running a republic, Britain signs a deal. With Europe at peace, Bonaparte is a celebrated war hero but not actually commanding an army or having further adventures and ends up going into civilian politics — like a French version of Andrew Jackson. In this timeline he is an ideal front man for the avowedly pro-republic, pro-revolution forces who want to regain a majority in parliament and need a respected popular leader.

From there any number of things could have happened, including Napoleon establishing himself as dictator. But I choose to believe that a peaceful transfer of power from non-Jacobin republicans to constitutional monarchs and then back again might have created a sufficient democratic norm to stabilize the situation. To me, though, the point is that the Fructidor coup is a key turning point because it’s the moment when the people with the correct “republic good, Reign of Terror bad” take turn against their own principles and create a situation where there’s really no rescuing the project.

Wandering Llama: Let’s say SlowBoring uses an AI for a research task. The AI agent seeks to find the answer to the best of its ability, and finds out a classified government report has the best answer. It hacks into the government system to get it and provides you with the output.

Questions:

1. Was a crime committed?

2. Who is liable? SlowBoring or the AI provider?

3. Should the government charge anyone? What is an appropriate punishment?

The genius of common law is that the answers to (1) and (2) are discovered by humans through the trial processes depending in part on prosecutors’ discretion around (3). I would say as a voter that it would be unreasonable for a district attorney to charge an L.L.M. user with a crime for an innocuous prompt. We’re looking instead at some kind of negligence charge against the maker of the L.L.M. The punishment would be financial penalties and, ideally, a consent decree around model behavior.

In practice, though, a big part of the solution to A.I.-enabled hacking is going to be A.I.-enabled cybersecurity. That’s especially because it’s easy to imagine a world where a lot of people end up using open-source models where this kind of liability deterrent may not be efficacious.

Broadly, though, I would say that a transition to a world where A.I. means “lots of random computer hacking happens” would be a process that generates a lot of grief and dramatic news stories but ultimately lands in a fine place. The main thing is really just that there are currently thousands and thousands of American institutions that can afford to be fairly casual about their information security and are going to need to tighten up practices — including by using A.I. to do the tightening. That’s a big deal, but I also think focusing on it excessively is a little bit like looking at the invention of the automobile and thinking, “What happens if criminals use cars to speed away from the cops? What if they use them to move rapidly from city to city doing crimes?” Those things obviously did both happen, but law enforcement officers also use cars. More broadly, you’re sort of missing the forest for the trees if you’re thinking about the impact of cars on society primarily through this lens.

To me, the big problems with A.I. are all about the possibility of an intelligence explosion and deceptive alignment leading to a genuine loss of human control. The hacking concerns fit into a “normal technology” bucket, and I think the common law is robust enough to address these issues.

Matt Dreyer: I’m going to D.C. indigenous people’s day weekend with a 7 year old and a 10 year old who have no recollection of being in D.C. in their lives. What should I prioritize in two days? They love the songs from Hamilton which makes Revolutionary War adjacent sites slightly more appealing though it’s not a strong preference.

I would say kids of that age are really in the sweet spot for the National Zoo and the Smithsonian’s Natural History (dinosaurs) and Air and Space museums, all three of which are conveniently free. A cooler fall day in particular is an ideal time for the zoo. Also I really like the zoo.

In terms of “Hamilton”-themed attractions, there is of course the Jefferson Memorial (which can be a great walk if the weather is nice or an annoying slog if not) and George Washington’s estate, Mount Vernon, which is just a bit out of town and I think a good visit but maybe too time consuming for your schedule. If you happen to be nearby, a lot of downtown hotels are very close to the Alexander Hamilton statue that’s due south of the Treasury building, which I personally like a lot. I think the U.S. Botanic Garden at the far southeastern end of the National Mall is a kind of underrated site, personally, and a good place for kids. A seven-year-old may love the carousel that’s right by the Smithsonian Castle.

Oliver: I want MY’s opinions of LKY.

Read more

Read more

New episodes post every Thursday.

Show notes:

• Dril tweet referenced by Matt:

Read more

When you’re finished reading today’s post, I hope you’ll check out the latest episode of “The Argument” podcast, where Jerusalem and I talk about how immigration is hurting the cause of liberalism in Europe. Paid subscribers can watch or listen ad free and read the transcript and show notes here. Free subscribers can watch the episode on YouTube here or listen wherever you get your podcasts.

Reading all of the 25th anniversary posts about September 11 last month, it seems that the modern consensus is that while the 9/11 attacks were bad and immoral, the American response was also bad.

I think this consensus is good.

But in the course of forging that consensus, I think many have been swept up in the notion that everything that was bad about the American response was “overreaction.” And I don’t think that’s right.

Part of the tragedy of the 9/11 response is that here we are, 25 years later, and the genuinely evil Taliban is once again in charge of Afghanistan. In a world full of problems and tragedy, Afghanistan (where girls over the age of 12 are officially banned from receiving education) is a pretty egregious outlier. The new Taliban regime is also harboring jihadi militants who are clashing with Pakistan’s military, and there are indications that al-Qaeda cells are regrouping in Afghanistan.

Obviously nobody wants the United States to invade again. But this is not a good situation!

The Taliban was, as of the fall of 2001, not the internationally recognized government of Afghanistan. They had terrible values. And their habit of harboring international terrorists who killed thousands of Americans was a perfectly legitimate casus belli under customary international law and the United Nations charter. It would be a lot better for the region and for the world if America had won the war in Afghanistan. And it’s driven me crazy for years that the media gave so much more scrutiny to the implementation details of the Biden administration’s withdrawal of forces at a point when the war was already unwinnable and had no public support than it gave to the prior 20 years of failed policy.

Because I think it’s clear that the United States messed up quite badly, but not by “overreacting” or relying too much on military force. Rather, the mistake was being way too complacent about the rapidly achieved win against the Taliban by the Northern Alliance (a coalition of anti-Taliban militias mostly composed of members of Afghanistan’s minority Tajik and Uzbek ethnic groups) and therefore not committing nearly enough resources to Afghanistan.

It was fashionable at one point to argue that the Bush administration’s passion for invading Iraq had fatally undermined the good war in Afghanistan. And while that view later became unfashionable because it inspired a bad policy choice of its own, I think it holds up reasonably well.

Subscribe now

The economy of force

I recently read Carlotta Gall’s book “The Wrong Enemy: America in Afghanistan, 2001-2014,” which while excellent, suffers from the classic reporter’s aversion to clearly stating a thesis. She does, though, assemble the facts to tell a clear story, and if you want a much more detailed and vivid account of the war than I can possibly offer in one column, you should read it.

Though the Taliban ruled most of Afghanistan as of 9/11/2001, they were very much engaged in an active military conflict with the Northern Alliance. Right before 9/11, the Taliban had succeeded in assassinating the Northern Alliance’s main leader, Ahmad Shah Massoud, and perhaps would have won the war if not for the attack on the Twin Towers.

But the towers fell, and the United States became very interested in helping the Northern Alliance win the war.

The floodgates were open for supplies, and Northern Alliance fighters were the sudden beneficiaries of American close air support and special forces. Pakistan, which had been the Taliban’s best friend, panicked and cut it off.

This rapidly turned the tide and led to the fall of several major Taliban-ruled Afghan cities. By the time the Taliban tried to regroup in its southern heartland, the 10th Mountain Division, the 101st Airborne, and some NATO and Australian special forces had joined the fight. As a result, the Taliban collapsed rapidly and a lot of loose talk about “the graveyard of empires” looked silly.

But the Taliban’s leadership wasn’t dead, and they didn’t surrender.

Instead, they and many of their fighters retreated to Quetta across the border in Pakistan. After laying low for a brief span of time, they began to launch what was at first a low-level insurgency in the rural south of Afghanistan. And instead of really responding to this, the American government maintained low troop levels in the country and undertook a major invasion of Iraq.

The weak American presence on the ground from 2002 to 2006 had several consequences.

One is that it left the American troops who were there reliant on air power to protect themselves. This style of warfare performed well during the initial overthrow of the Taliban, but as a means of securing the countryside, it meant that the United States was killing innocent people.

Another is that allied troops were spread too thin to secure broad swaths of the country. People living in the insurgency-impacted region were in a worst-of-both-worlds situation: The Americans couldn’t necessarily protect them from the Taliban and also might accidentally destroy their homes in an anti-Taliban air raid.

Third, it meant few soldiers were available to train Afghan police and military forces.

As the insurgency gained steam starting in 2006, the United States started pouring more troops in. Then under Obama, there was another troop surge, which did temporarily reverse insurgent gains.

Subscribe now

But through 2010, there were consistently more troops in Iraq than in Afghanistan, often many more. Even the Obama-era peak deployment in Afghanistan was much smaller than the peak deployment in Iraq had been.

Considering allied forces only makes this more striking. For a couple of years at the beginning of the insurgency there were more coalition (primarily British) troops in Iraq than there were Americans in Afghanistan. As unpopular as the Iraq War was globally, a lot of governments wanted to do the Bush administration a favor. If the favor Bush wanted had been more and earlier help in Afghanistan, he could have gotten that easily. And of course the United States could have sent dramatically more soldiers to Afghanistan and secured every southern town.

But that wasn’t his priority, and this mattered not just for the disposition of forces but for diplomacy.

The other enemy

Beyond troop levels, a huge consequence of the focus on Iraq is that the American government didn’t prioritize developing a coherent relationship with Pakistan. As George W. Bush eventually admitted in his memoirs, after the United States agreed to lift sanctions on Pakistan, make Pakistan a major non-NATO ally, and give Pakistan billions of dollars in aid, the country turned around and screwed him.

“Over time,” Bush writes, “it became clear that Musharraf either would not or could not fulfill all of his promises.” At another point he observes that “[s]ome in the Pakistani intelligence service, the I.S.I., retained close ties to Taliban officials. Others wanted an insurance policy in case America abandoned Afghanistan and India tried to gain influence there.”

Pakistan’s affection for the Taliban is a bit perplexing (as noted above, they are now at war, which seems like it should have been predictable) but also pretty longstanding.

One dimension of this is that Afghan nationalists have traditionally disputed the British-drawn border that separates the Pashto-speaking parts of Afghanistan from the Pashto-speaking parts of Pakistan, so Pakistan prefers Islamists to these secular nationalists. Another dimension is that Pakistan thinks Islamists are reliably anti-Indian. More broadly, Pakistani intelligence has long backed Islamist fighters in India and the Baluchistan corner of Iran.

Pakistan might prefer a world where Islamist groups in its neighboring countries were hermetically sealed off from al-Qaeda and from each other, such that it could turn support for any given group on or off like a switch, but the world doesn’t work that way.

Relatedly, the Pakistani government’s perception, at least early in the war, was that if it tried to root out Taliban safe havens inside Pakistan, it would have a domestic civil war on its hands. Alternatively, it could encourage the most fired-up jihadis in the country to go across the border and fight in Afghanistan. Rather than make tough choices, the Pakistanis preferred to defer as much as possible — fitfully cooperating with the United States against al-Qaeda but not moving against the Taliban’s refuges, while their intelligence services retained a lot of quasi-deniable channels to the Taliban.

Over time, this created a self-fulfilling prophecy whereby the Hamid Karzai government in Afghanistan was hostile to Pakistan and friendly with India, which became further reason for Pakistan to prefer the Taliban.

Steve Coll’s book, “Directorate S: The C.I.A. and America’s Secret Wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan,” is named after the branch of Pakistani intelligence charged with relations with the Taliban. Coll is somewhat more sympathetic than the aforementioned journalist Carlotta Gall is to American policy choices in this regard, arguing that turning a blind eye to Pakistan’s support for the Taliban paid real dividends in fighting al-Qaeda.

One point where Coll and Gall therefore end up disagreeing is on whether Pakistani intelligence was genuinely complicit in Osama bin Laden’s presence in their country. What’s agreed, though, is that by the time of the American raid on his compound, the relationship was strained and nobody in the American government regarded the Pakistani government as reliable or trustworthy. The decision was made to just muddle through as best we could, without a coherent take on the endgame for Afghanistan.

Subscribe now

Obama’s surge to nowhere

The basic “Bush lost Afghanistan by focusing on Iraq” narrative that I’m pushing is an argument that Barack Obama made on the campaign trail in 2008. It’s fallen out of favor in part because after winning the election, Obama sort of governed on the premise that you could throw this into reverse — drawing troop levels down in Iraq and surging forces into Afghanistan.

This surge meant that finally, by 2010 and 2011, we were properly investing in Afghanistan.

And according to Gall’s reporting, it worked in a limited sense. The insurgents were substantially beaten back. Civilian casualties didn’t end by any means (it’s still a war), but with more boots on the ground, there was a much higher ratio of “Americans providing useful security” to “Americans blowing stuff up from afar,” and people noticed. More engaged American commanders were able to facilitate some governance improvements in the south. The war effort still had its share of problems. Notably from the standpoint of my interests (though not Gall’s or Coll’s), Afghanistan not only adopted a presidential mode of democracy (always a mistake) but also had a weirdly centralized form of government with the president selecting regional governors.

But the fundamental issue, as Gall was able to forecast at the time, was Pakistan and America’s limited patience. The surge was designed from the beginning to be temporary. Everyone knew it was temporary, and the Taliban was foreseeably going to be able to wait the Americans out across the border and then come back. Which is exactly what happened.

I don’t want to say the war was categorically unwinnable by the time Obama took office, but there was just no way the United States was going to fully and durably commit to this level of effort starting in the eighth or ninth year of the war. The surge feels to me more like an effort to say that we tried than actually trying.

But that’s because the time to actually try was in 2002 and 2003.

Back then, the Taliban was defeated. Pakistan had its finger in the wind about the future of the region. If the United States had done an Iraq-scale troop deployment at the time, the insurgency never would have gained strength. If Afghanistan rather than Iraq had been the focus of American diplomacy, the Pakistanis might have been persuaded to drop their dumb hedging strategy with the Taliban that ended up backfiring on them anyway.

After 25 years and two big wars, plus smaller engagements in Syria and Yemen and Libya, it’s easy to mash the conflicts of the era together into one big blob of mistakes and failure.

But it’s genuinely quite relevant that for the critical early years in Afghanistan, we had more than 10x the troop levels over in Iraq on a mission with dubious legal and moral grounding while treating a much more legitimate effort as a backwater until it was too late.

America didn’t overreact in Afghanistan. We massively underreacted, and the embarrassing and tragic failure there should be seen as part of the cost of invading Iraq.

Share

As a reminder, paid subscribers can watch or listen ad free to this week’s episode of “The Argument” or read the transcript and show notes here. Free subscribers can watch the episode on YouTube here or listen on your podcast app of choice.

The midterm momentum continues to shift left as Democrats post big leads on the generic ballot in new polls, including Quinnipiac’s on control of the U.S. House (September 24-27, 1,032 registered voters) and the Wall Street…

Read more

At this point, everyone who cares about education policy at all has probably listened to Emily Hanford’s “Sold a Story” podcast series, or pretends to have, and is aware that there is a correct way to teach children to read and also a different way that dominated education schools for a generation. There are now many state- and city-level pushes to institute correct instructional practices grounded in “the science of reading,” and the main question is about how declarative policies relate to actual practice rather than what the practice should look like.

I think it’s less understood that this specific fiasco in early literacy was downstream of the education theory world’s broader turn against explicit instruction.

This has always struck me as a bit odd because “teaching things to people” is of course a human endeavor that exists outside the context of “being a K-12 teacher.” And it seems to me that outside of school, explicit instruction is the dominant instructional method.

I once took a knife skills class, and they just show you how to chop an onion. You trim the stem. You cut in half from end to end. You peel the skin. You make vertical slices that leave the root intact, then horizontal slices, and then another set of vertical slices across the third dimension. Here’s a neat graphic from “The Art of Manliness.” There are also many videos demonstrating this method.

There is a specific, correct way to do this, and part of learning to cook is being told how to do it.

A person with excellent spatial reasoning could probably figure this out from first principles given an onion and a knife. But the normal way to learn to chop is to be explicitly shown. Chopping a bell pepper is a little different, but you can be shown that, too. You don’t just give people knives and tell them to experience the joy of chopping. Because even though some people really love cooking and find it to be an amazing avenue for self-expression, it’s also useful to know how to chop vegetables, and the best way to get from zero to vaguely competent is to be taught the proper way to do it and then given the opportunity to practice.

Education school theorists, for reasons that are disputed, seem to dislike this idea.

From Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s “Emile” to Paulo Freire’s “The Pedagogy of the Oppressed,” a long tradition in the field mashes up romanticism with left-wing politics and sentimentality about the point of school to suggest that there’s some other, secretly better way of teaching things to beginners than just literally teaching them.

But while there’s certainly more to life than explicitly instructing novices in the basics, across a huge range of domains, that really is the foundation of knowledge. You need to master sounding words out before you can analyze literature, and it’s extremely helpful to have your times tables and other basic math facts memorized so that your brain can think about more elevated mathematical questions without constantly tripping over the calculations.

Learning is fundamental

The association between fuzzy educational practices and left-wing politics strikes me as rather contingent.

The Soviet Union and its satellite states in Eastern Europe, for example, all ran school systems that would read as strikingly “right-wing” by American standards (of course, these regimes weren’t exactly defunding the police, either). Antonio Gramsci also apparently had traditionalist ideas about elementary education.

But in the contemporary West, a constellation of odd pedagogical notions has a very particular ideological alignment.

Read more

Read more

On my income tax return, the largest source of income by far derives from the fact that I am the co-owner of a business whose profits “pass through” to me as an individual without being separately taxed at the corporate level.

These kinds of pass-through business entities are increasingly common in the United States, and you see them in many fields. To reach a certain scale, of course, you need to be able to take on more investors, and it would no longer work to organize as a pass-through. But for smaller firms, it’s an advantageous way to organize.

The upshot of this is that on the official balance sheet of the United States, I am an example of a person who is earning a high income primarily thanks to my status as an owner of capital. Wealth begets wealth, and the working man gets screwed.

But of course in the real world, I work at the company I own and my blogging labor is our main product.

This is an idiosyncratic industry, but it turns out to be a pretty typical Rich Guy Scenario.

That’s the message of a great new book, “The Everywhere Millionaire,” by Owen Zidar and Eric Zwick. They look at the roster of American households who have a net worth of more than $5 million — a nice round number that gets you about 4 percent of the population, or about five million households. And of those five million, roughly three million are what the authors call Main Street Millionaires: owners of privately held businesses rather than C.E.O.s or investors in giant corporations.

The average wealth of these Main Street Millionaires is $25 million per household, and because there are millions of them, they collectively hold dramatically more wealth than the billionaires of the Forbes 400. Plus, in absolute terms, way more wealth has been added here than in the Forbes 400, since the wealth of the Main Street Millionaires started so large and the cohort grows rather than being capped.

Much of the book is dedicated to telling the stories of individual Main Street Millionaires.

The publicity for the book says that these stories “suggest the American Dream is not dead and many paths to prosperity remain open today.” And that is definitely one takeaway here — it’s simply not the case that you need to get into a super-elite college and then go found a tech company or work at one of the prestigious companies from the Chetty, Deming, and Friedman study of the Ivy League to become rich. Indeed, if you’re smart and hardworking and really just want to make a lot of money, these prestige pathways may be a bad idea. A very large share of America’s Main Street Millionaires own and operate companies in banal fields; they’re HVAC contractors or beer distributors who out-hustle the competition in a defined geographic area and make a lot of money.

But what I think is more interesting about the book is the somewhat unfortunate implications for politics.

Tax problems everywhere

One issue with this proliferation of highly profitable small businesses is that they’re a tax nightmare. The way the tax code really “wants” to work is for everyone to work for a giant company. Some people earn modest wages and others are highly paid executives, and everyone is taxed on a progressive basis. Then everyone who earns money spends some of it and saves some of it. Money that you save earns a return in the form of capital gains or dividends, and that income is also taxed but at a lower rate than wage income because it’s good for long-term growth to encourage saving. The corporations themselves also pay corporate income tax, and that income is their revenue less their costs.

People owning small businesses messes things up.

Read more

Mortgage rates rose above 7 percent for the first time since the beginning of 2025, with the average rate on a 30-year home mortgage hitting 7.03 percent on Thursday, according to data from Freddie Mac.

Home loan rates are pegged to the 10-year Treasury bond yield, which hit a n…

Read more

The New York Times dropped a story on Wednesday about former House member Mary Peltola, one of Democrats’ top recruits in a critical Senate race, about her behavior toward staff.

The people who work for congressional Democrats are, by definition, Democrats — they want Democrats to win elections, and they don’t like Republicans. So you’d expect them to have a reasonably high bar for participating in a hit piece against a Democratic Party politician in a tough race. You’re expecting to see revelations of financial scandals or physically endangering staffers or some other kind of misconduct that truly shocks the conscience.

What we get in this story instead is what I would characterize as ticky-tack bullshit.

The candidate got angry and yelled sometimes (so did Chuck Schumer when I was an intern in his office). That’s a good reason to, maybe, ultimately prefer to work for another member. They also tag her for having used the words “faggot” and “retard” in private. I grew up in Greenwich Village and was always very woke on the former term, but I’ll admit that the r-word was very much part of the vernacular in the 1980s and 1990s, even in a very left-wing place. I used to say it a lot. After receiving a good talking to from a friend circa 2008, I have made an effort to purge it from my vocabulary but have not fully succeeded.

Peltola is eight years older than I am and from Alaska. I don’t think she should talk like that. But I also think that if you don’t understand that linguistic norms shift over time and that older people are often a bit behind the curve of linguistic change, you really don’t understand politics.

The drive to structure politics around language policing rather than the substance of what people do has been a toxic force in progressive politics for years, and folks doing practical work in frontline seats and frontline races need to stay away from it. A Democratic Party whose staffers are such cocooned snowflakes that they can’t restrain themselves from leaking against their boss over salty language — rather than trying to have a calm, respectful internal conversation about it — isn’t going to make it.

But what really got me was this thing about a lizard:

For some on her staff, one task exemplified the disregard Ms. Peltola appeared to have for her employees: feeding her daughter’s pet chameleon, Meatball.

Meatball’s preferred diet consisted of live crickets, according to three staff members familiar with the demand, including two who fed the chameleon. Ms. Peltola instructed aides to purchase the insects at a pet store and then feed them to Meatball.

Aides initially went to Ms. Peltola’s apartment in Washington to feed Meatball, but the congresswoman later brought the reptile into her office on Capitol Hill. On at least one occasion, the crickets escaped in the office and had to be recaptured, according to two former aides who witnessed it as well as a photo viewed by the Times that showed aides in the office trying to trap the crickets using manila folders and small paper cups.

The problem here isn’t about politics at all; it’s about life and work and an attitude toward work that I’m afraid I’ve seen from a lot of younger people over the past 10 years. If your boss wants you to do something, just go do it! If you find the work unpleasant and don’t want to keep doing it for the long term, that’s fine. Nobody stays in a job forever, and it’s always reasonable to want a better one.

But you know what’s a good way to get a better job? Work really hard at the job you have and impress people. Feed the chameleon!

When you’re young and don’t have the experience or knowledge of your more senior colleagues but also don’t have competing family responsibilities, you should be the one who is willing and eager to take stuff on and become a valued member of the team.

Members of Congress have a hard job

Last week, I flew to Burlington on Monday to speak at Middlebury College that evening, then back to D.C. on Tuesday. Then on Wednesday I took a train up to New York City for a dinner about energy policy, then returned to D.C. on an early morning train so I could appear on a Thursday afternoon panel. It was a kind of exhausting week, but I also like my job and it’s nice to talk to college students and in the end it was all fine.

Subscribe now

Being a member of Congress from Alaska pays a lot less well than writing the #14 U.S. Politics Substack and also involves constant travel back and forth to Alaska, which is a lot farther away than Vermont. Beyond that, you have to travel around Alaska during your visits home, which is a major logistical challenge. Juneau is 700 miles from Fairbanks, which is 350 miles from Anchorage. Large swaths of the state are much more remote than those three cities. People need to travel around Alaska by air on small planes (Peltola’s husband died in a plane crash in 2023).

When I was an intern at Rolling Stone, one of my job responsibilities was that every morning I was supposed to pick up a poppy seed muffin and a coffee for one of the editors.

He liked heavy cream in his coffee but was under doctor’s orders to reduce his fat intake, so rather than switch to skim milk, his solution was that I was supposed to use an eyedropper to dispense a very small and precise amount of cream into his coffee.

To this day, I do not understand why he didn’t pick up his own breakfast, why he didn’t act more normal about the dairy, or any of the many other aspects of this scenario. I did not enjoy this task — I am still complaining about it 26 years later! But I’m also not going to name the guy because even if I think the task was dumb, it’s not a scandal. He wasn’t falsifying stories or embezzling funds. And, actually, outside of this one specific unreasonable thing about the eyedropper of cream, he was pretty nice. Perhaps the time it would have taken him to put his own eyedroppers of cream in his coffee really was critically important to the future of journalism.

Regardless, Mary Peltola must be busy as hell!

Members of Congress, especially ones on the front lines and/or with logistically difficult commutes from D.C., have a really hard job. Basically the only mitigation available is that they have staff to help them. And even though being a congressional staffer doesn’t pay very well,1 it is a prestigious job that can position you well to move on to other things. Your job, as a staffer, is to help your boss do her job better. Your boss’s job is to represent her constituents, to contribute constructively to the legislative process, and to win elections.

What your boss needs help with on any given day is going to vary. Maybe she needs a briefing on some issue. Maybe she needs to arrange a trip to Nome. Maybe she needs somebody to feed her pet lizard because she was held late for votes and needed to reschedule a meeting with someone important. Feed the lizard!

This thing where the crickets got loose seems legitimately annoying, but that also sounds like the staffer who was supposed to be feeding crickets to the chameleon fucked up. It’s not like Peltola was letting crickets loose in the office as a prank.

Complain about real misconduct

While the poppy seed guy was pretty nice and helpful except for his breakfast routine, the big boss of the magazine, Jann Wenner, was a giant asshole.

He once screamed at me over the egregiously messy state of my desk in front of everyone. I will admit to being a messy person who has been known to let the state of his desk lapse pretty egregiously. But in this specific scenario, the messy desk he was mad about wasn’t even my desk!2 I was just standing near the desk. Somebody did step in to point out that it wasn’t my desk, but I got no apology.

Even so, it’s not a crime to be an asshole.

Years later, Ben Ryan accused Wenner of serious sexual harassment, which Wenner denied. But Ryan’s allegations seem well-corroborated by his contemporary diary and his then-boyfriend. Joe Hagan, separately, reports in his biography of Wenner that he “was known for his jovial sexual harassment.”

I’m glad that Ryan came forward, and I think it’s pretty twisted that a bunch of people in media made excuses for or protected Wenner despite what seems to have been a pattern of pretty widely understood harassment. If I’d seen him do something like that — as opposed to just seeing him be unreasonably unapologetic about a situation in which he was objectively in the wrong — I like to think I’d have blown the whistle to someone.

If your boss is sexually harassing people, or insider trading, or taking bribes, or stealing money, or any of the many other genuinely criminal things that sometimes happen in the workplace, then by all means, tell a journalist. But if you just don’t like something about the job, get another job.

It’s a good idea to work hard when you’re young

I do get that as a congressional staffer, you feel you should be doing elevated work related to legislation and constituent service, not operating as a part-time personal assistant.

But also, think about this: You could spend time summarizing a document for your boss that she doesn’t have time to read in full because she’s too busy going to the pet store to pick up crickets, or you could go buy the crickets because she’s too busy reading the long document. Either way, you’re being helpful, and that’s the job.

Subscribe now

More broadly, I worry that because the left believes, as a public policy question, in labor rights and good working conditions, it also creates a memetic environment in which young people are not instructed in the value of working hard, especially when you’re young.

But something that’s hard about a junior role is that to advance in your career, you really need to accomplish two different things. One is that you need to master more advanced skills so that you’re capable of doing higher-level work. The other is that you need to impress more senior colleagues and be seen as a helpful and diligent person. There can be a conflict between these things because the stuff that it’s most helpful for you to do — feeding lizards and putting eyedrops of cream into the coffee — tends not to be the stuff that builds skills. But the edge most young people have is a lack of responsibilities and competing demands on their time. You’re not letting your spouse and kids down if you feed the lizard and write the policy memo. You just need to put in extra hours.

When I was in my first job, one of the things my boss wanted me to do was wake up every Sunday morning and watch the Sunday morning TV interview shows that the news networks all did and summarize them for our audience. This was a pretty annoying task, schedule-wise. And I suppose I would have been within my rights to ask for comp time during the week. But the other problem with the Sunday morning gig was that I didn’t think it was very interesting. It didn’t generate articles that I was proud of or that built my reputation or that would help me get my next job. But taking comp time would have meant doing less of the normal work for the magazine that actually helped me advance. So I didn’t want to do less normal work for the magazine — I wanted to be a helpful employee and I wanted to generate good articles, so I did both. And then I also wrote my personal blog.

And when I got my next job, it was really a blogging gig on the strength of the success of my personal blog. But I had also amassed some of the skills that come from working in a real newsroom and writing structured columns and also also had bosses who would testify that I was a helpful person who pitched in and did what was needed.

It kinda sucked to work that many hours, but I know people who were serving in Iraq or washing dishes in restaurants at the time, so in the grand scheme of things I don’t think spending 2003 to 2005 toiling in the content mines makes me the greatest martyr in the world.

If you want to have a chill life, that’s fine. But the person who becomes chief of staff is going to be someone who has really dedicated themselves to the vocation. You should be aware of that and not interpret every demanding boss as a scandal.

Share

Read more