Demographics

Two or three years ago someone asked me to write an article on the vocation of masculinity for a themed issue of a magazine devoted to vocation. It didn’t make it into the issue, and I lost track of it. Since it’s still as relevant as ever, I decided to use it for this month’s newsletter. Enjoy.  read more »

Urban containment has significant costs. In commenting on the association between London’s urban growth boundary,¹ and the higher costs of housing, The Economist said: “Suburbs rarely cease growing of their own accord. The only reliable way to stop them, it turns out, is to stop them forcefully.  read more »

Yesterday’s Midterms were not a victory for conservative or progressive ideology, but an assertion of the growing power of geography in American politics. It was less a national election than a clash of civilizations.  read more »

On 16 September 2022 the 22-year-old Mahsa Amini died in a hospital in Tehran following her arrest by Iran’s Guidance Patrol. Although the details surrounding her death has been disputed, given that she suffered from previous brain injuries  read more »

Americans without bachelor’s degrees outnumber college grads 2 to 1. But if you and most people you know and have ever known are college graduates, you might not realize that most Americans are not like you and your cohort.  read more »

A new Hoover Institution (Stanford University) report indicates that California continues to shed corporate headquarters locations to other states.  read more »

There is probably no issue more requiring resolution in California than poor housing affordability. It is a threat to the preservation of the middle-class and the competitiveness of the state.  read more »

There’s a museum dedicated to Esperanto in Vienna—an archive and testament to one of the more ambitious movements to enter the world’s consciousness in recent centuries.  read more »

In 1976, my ethnically diverse, working-class county where blue-collar union households worked in factories and refineries, owned homes and sent their kids to college, agreed to string a 6-mile long fire hose across the Richmond Bridge to supply water to California's wealthiest and whitest county.  read more »

This midterm year, in which many states have to choose between non-entities and the certifiably insane, Ohio is blessed by a real political dogfight. The Senate battle between representative Tim Ryan and Hillbilly Elegy author, JD Vance, is becoming one for the ages.  read more »