A Year In, the MAGA Labor Market Story Has Fallen Apart

https://newsletter.mikekonczal.com/p/a-year-in-the-maga-labor-market-story

I wish I could tell you that the reason people in their twenties can’t find jobs and the reason many of us are likely to be poorer over the next few years was more sophisticated than “we’re going to turn all the girlbosses into tradwives once they see all the manly men at the USA iPhone-screwing factory.” But I don’t think it is.

The bleak irony is that even after sacrificing real prosperity to chase this 4chan-level political economy, they still won’t achieve their goal. The jobs aren’t coming back, the wages aren’t rising, and family formation won’t be rescued by trying to rewind the labor market to a world that never existed in the first place.

Learning The Elite Class: my experience at fancy parties

https://aella.substack.com/p/learning-the-elite-class

“I’m thinking of running for office,” says the man in front of me. He has a greying beard and clean glasses. “I have some connections way back from boarding school who are thinking about funding me.”

I know boarding school is a thing, but I’d never heard of anybody I met, or any of their friends, having anything to do with boarding school for the first few decades of my life. Aren’t those gender segregated, or is that just a trope? Is it all year, including the summer? Is that a thing where parents send bad kids? Unclear. I think it probably costs money to go, which is why I never heard anyone mention boarding school when I was growing up.

Boarding school must be fancy, though, if kids who go to boarding school end up rich enough they can fund each other. I try to imagine growing up in a world where my old friends grew up to do something other than running their own gutter-cleaning business or working in middle management at Walmart or becoming a housewife. It must be super cool to have known anyone successful who you met before the short period of time ago that you became successful.

Read Something Wonderful

https://readsomethingwonderful.com/

100 Tips for a Better Life

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7hFeMWC6Y5eaSixbD/100-tips-for-a-better-life

 29. You do not live in a video game. There are no pop-up warnings if you’re about to do something foolish, or if you’ve been going in the wrong direction for too long. You have to create your own warnings. 

30. If you listen to successful people talk about their methods, remember that all the people who used the same methods and failed did not make videos about it. 

31. The best advice is personal and comes from somebody who knows you well. Take broad-spectrum advice like this as needed, but the best way to get help is to ask honest friends who love you.

The Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics

https://laneless.substack.com/p/the-copenhagen-interpretation-of-ethics

The Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics says that you can have a particle spinning clockwise and counterclockwise at the same time - until you look at it, at which point it definitely becomes one or the other. The theory claims that observing reality fundamentally changes it.

The Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics says that when you observe or interact with a problem in any way, you can be blamed for it. At the very least, you are to blame for not doing more. Even if you don't make the problem worse, even if you make it slightly better, the ethical burden of the problem falls on you as soon as you observe it. In particular, if you interact with a problem and benefit from it, you are a complete monster. I don't subscribe to this school of thought, but it seems pretty popular.

Why One Man Is Fighting for Our Right to Control Our Garage Door Openers

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/04/technology/personaltech/why-one-man-is-fighting-for-our-right-to-control-our-garage-door-openers.html

Too often, we are losing control of our personal technology, and the list of examples keeps growing. BMW made headlines in 2022 when it began charging subscriptions to use heated seats in some cars — a decision it reversed after a backlash. In 2021, Oura, the maker of a $350 sleep-tracking device, angered customers when it began charging a $6 monthly fee for users to get deeper analysis of their sleep. (Oura is still charging the fee.)

For years, some printer companies have required consumers to buy proprietary ink cartridges, but more recently they began employing more aggressive tactics, like remotely bricking a printer when a payment is missed for an ink subscription.

The activists and tinkerers rebelling against superfluous hardware subscriptions and fighting for device ownership are part of the broader “right to repair” movement, a consumer advocacy campaign that has focused on passing laws nationwide that require tech and appliance manufacturers to provide the tools, instructions and parts necessary for anyone to fix products, from smartphones to refrigerators.

The Ken Burns Effect

https://mattlira.substack.com/p/the-ken-burns-effect

Millions of Americans now inhabit information ecosystems that barely overlap. Most public figures avoid crossing these boundaries; some out of fear of unfriendly audiences, others because they worry that stepping outside their own silo will provoke a backlash from their closest allies. Burns’ latest tour defies that trend, as one of our nation’s great storytellers has moved effortlessly from The Today Show to Theo Von’s podcast, from The Late Show with Stephen Colbert to Joe Rogan’s studio. What stands out is not merely the breadth of platforms he visits, striking as that is, but the authenticity with which he delivers his message. Burns shares the American story with a consistent sense of moral seriousness and intellectual credibility without condescension or pandering, addressing the best versions of his hosts and their audiences.

Mercy Otis Warren: "Look Over the Theatre of Human Action"

https://www.battlefields.org/learn/primary-sources/mercy-otis-warren-look-over-theatre-human-action

The study of the human character opens at once a beautiful and a deformed picture of the soul. We there find a noble principle implanted in the nature of man, that pants for distinction. This principle operates in every bosom, and when kept under the control of reason, and the influence of humanity, it produces the most benevolent effects. But when the checks of conscious are thrown aside, or the moral sense weakened by the sudden acquisition of wealth or power, humanity is obscured

How to be more agentic

https://usefulfictions.substack.com/p/how-to-be-more-agentic

Learn to love the moat of low status

The moat of low status is one of my favorite concepts, courtesy of my husband Sasha. The idea is that making changes in your life, especially when learning new skill sets, requires you to cross a moat of low status, a period of time where you are actually bad at the thing or fail to know things that are obvious to other people.

It’s called a moat both because you can’t just leap to the other side and because it gives anyone who can cross it a real advantage. It’s possible to cross the moat quietly, by not asking questions and not collaborating, but those tradeoffs really nerf learning. “Learn by doing” is standard advice, but you can’t do that unless you splash around in the moat for a bit.

Maybe you’re not Actually Trying

https://usefulfictions.substack.com/p/maybe-youre-not-actually-trying

People are not just high-agency or low-agency in a global sense, across their entire lives. Instead, people are selectively agentic.

Let’s say that life is divided up into three theaters: work, relationships with others (all kinds) and relationship to self (physical health, introspection, emotional development, all of it). I think it’s the rule, rather than the exception, that people are stuck at an earlier stage of development in at least one area. There is one theater of life where they’re not Actually Trying — where they’re approaching serious problems with the resourcefulness of a teenager, though they are now capable adults.

In my particular corner of the world, there are tons of high-achievers in work. These are ingenious people shaping the world through innovations in science, technology, and policy. But many of them haven’t applied the same ingenuity to their interior experience or relationships. These are people who could successfully launch a product in a foreign country with little instruction, but who complain that there aren’t any fun people to meet on the dating apps.

It seems like, by default, you are stuck with whatever level of resourcefulness you brought to a problem the first time you encountered it and failed to fix it.

Your enemies might be right about you

https://sahar.substack.com/p/your-enemies-might-be-right-about

If your enemies are attacking you and winning, there’s a good chance it’s because you have a real weakness.

It’s not that they’ll be nice enough to attack your weakness with compassion: they’ll twist truth and be as unscrupulous as they can get away with. It’s not that they’ll only attack you for things you’re actually wrong about: maybe you are weak because you’re correct but unpopular. But it still is a real weakness. Either way — you have a problem.

Even if it’s all horribly unfair — understanding where people don’t trust you, where they don’t like you, where you’re misunderstood, where people are liable to scandalous lies about you — that’s information. Useful information.

When we’re fully enmeshed in a social scene, we keep track of who is important, and who is an annoying barely tolerated crank. We forget that others looking in have neither the context nor desire to make that distinction. The worst members of your team often become its public face: the edgelords, the conspiracists, the assholes, the scolds, the predators, and worse. You know who will make sure to show you when that happens? Even when it hurts your feelings — especially if it hurts your feelings? Enemies. God bless them.