Author Archives: Jake Seliger
“No Salt”
This is by my brother, Sam.
I arrived to Arizona late Saturday, after learning that my brother has only a few days left before cancer ends him. Jake’s wife, Bess, confessed that she had neither the willpower or the energy to take care of the post-death rituals—in this case, cremation, followed by a celebration of life at some point in the future. Likely at a memorial bench at Stuyvesant Park in New York City, where he and Bess built their life together, met their core group of friends, and made their fondest memories.
I do a lot of research, and finding a funeral home for my brother’s remains was and is quite a bit different than looking for, say, a great sushi restaurant. What should I look for out of a funeral home? Do they have five stars on Yelp? Do they seem “nice?”
Several funeral homes that had good reviews online. The folks on the other end of the line seemed nice. They said the right things, which makes sense because they’ve got a sales funnel. And then they asked for a credit card. I get that funeral homes are businesses that need to make money, just as most of us do. It still feels callous and transactional. Send me an agreement, or something. I’ll DocuSign it. You’ll get your money. I’m barely functional at the moment—sleepwalking through my days as if I will somehow wake from this nightmare, watching my brother and his wonderful wife fall into despair.
Prior to his illness, Jake and I had been at odds for many years. I didn’t understand him, and neither did he. Both of us lacked the emotional maturity to form deep, meaningful relationships with other people. In my case, this manifested in self-destructive behaviors like drinking, partying, womanizing, and things of that nature. For Jake, he withdrew from most of society, finding more comfort from the pages of a novel or the many works he himself has written. He eventually found meaning in teaching, and focused on his relationship with Bess.
In turn, I eventually found a partner and a wife who made me a better person. Somehow, both of us found our way to psychedelics as a way of dealing with reality and exploring the deeper, more esoteric corners of the world. Over the last two years, Jake and I have talked extensively about our experiences with these substances. Therapy has never worked for me. As Terrence McKenna once said, “The real truth, that dare not speak itself, is that no one is in control. Absolutely no one.”
This is not meant to disparage therapists, advocates, or grief counselors. Each person must find their own way to deal with the reality that we perceive: what works for one may not work for others. Changing your life is difficult. It requires hard work. But your life may depend on it, so stop procrastinating and find something that works.
Besides psychedelics, Jake and I have discovered over the past year that we share a love of cooking, particularly using modern gadgets like Instant Pots, sous vide, and interesting spices. Jake loves his plug-in induction stovetop, and thinks it worthwhile despite its cost. At one point I was supposed to go to the final auditions for a show called MasterChef, which pits amateur cooks against each other behind the gentle coaching of Gordon Ramsay. I foolishly accepted a job offer instead, but perhaps I’ll try again someday in honor of my brother.
Which brings me to the title of this essay. When I arrived at their home yesterday, I observed Jake in the worst condition I’ve ever seen: emaciated, with obvious tumors rampaging throughout his neck and jaw. Bess is seven months pregnant, worrying about the impending death of her soulmate, clinging to what seems like an irrational hope of a miracle turnaround.
I noticed an extremely uncharacteristic lack of food in their home—usually, when I walk in, Jake offers something to eat even when he knows I just ate—so I immediately went to the store to at least ensure that Bess had some food. Jake can scarcely take a sip of water, but says that “normal” food feels more wholesome going through his PEG tube than the brown, yet nutritious, Liquid Hope that gives him most of his daily calories.
Jake still has a larder of dried goods, spices, and gadgets that would be the envy of even a professional chef. Fenugreek sourced directly from Egypt. Fermented locust beans from Nigeria. More forms of masala and curry than most Indian restaurants. I had ambitions to use these spices for what Jake labeled as “possibly his final real meal,”1 only to realize that antibiotics have ruined his gastrointestinal system to the point that making anything exotic might bug his stomach.
So I opted for something simple: a shakshuka. Tomatoes, vegetables, sauce, and mild flavorings, topped with feta cheese, eggs, and basil. I reached for the salt, and found the bottle empty. I’m not sure why, but I started weeping. No salt. No salt means that he’s not cooking. He’ll never cook again. Salt is the most basic ingredient. Food is (was, I guess) so important to him. He cooked for Bess throughout the summer of 2023, when he couldn’t eat anything except by PEG tube.
I’ll go over to their house again later today, and make sure I cook enough food at least for Bess to be able to eat, and hopefully for Jake to eat via the tube. I’ll stop for more salt on my way.
If the salt is gone, then Jake is too.
- Jake’s wonderful friend Tracey Dempsey also dropped off a plethora of baked goods. Everything she makes is incredible, but I’m partial to the cheesecake. ↩︎
Starting hospice. The end
I’m entering hospice. It’s time, and realistically past time. The squamous cell carcinoma tumors are growing, and the two doses of spot radiation I got on June 10 and 12 have utterly destroyed whatever quality of life I had. This weekend, a nurse came by and did some planning with Bess and me. Our extensive efforts to find and start another clinical trial have turned out to be futile, and I’ve withdrawn from the next-best potential clinical trial, BGB-A3055 in Dallas, at NEXT Oncology, because there’s no feasible way for me to do it (the people at NEXT, however, are and have been amazing: if you’re looking at clinical trials or live in Dallas, schedule a consult). HonorHealth in Scottsdale, where I live, has a TScan slot, but my physical condition remains terrible for essentially the reasons I’ve written about so extensively that there’s no need to belabor them. My days and nights are filled with unrelenting coughing, hacking, and pain. My whole jaw area is numb, likely from tumor growth. I wonder how much (or many?) of the headache I’m experiencing actually come from tumors, rather than coughing and other problems.
Why hospice? Bess wants the support, after I’m done. There are rules and bureaucracy even in death, and although she admits to being bad at asking for help, she feels overwhelmed now, and certainly will be later. Her bandwidth, she says, is only for me. The details about what comes after are too much, and too distracting.
I’ll keep reading messages until close to the end, though I may not have the strength or presence of mind to reply. I exist in a hazy, druggy fog. I’ve heard Tyler Cowen say in podcasts that he finds the fascination with people’s last words to be overblown, because at the end of life people are rarely at their cognitive peaks and often forget the constraints and desires that drove much of their lives (I’m paraphrasing and have probably gotten some nuance incorrect).
One virtue of a prolonged end is that I feel like I’ve said everything I have to say. I don’ t know that I have a favorite, but I’m fond of “I know what happens to me after I die, but what about those left behind?” Same with “How do we evaluate our lives, at the end? What counts, what matters?” I’m tempted to keep citing others, but if you scroll down into the archives you will find them. I meant to turn these essays into a memoir, but that is a project never to be completed by me. Bess assures me that she’s going to complete the project and do her best to get it published. We’ve created so much together in the process of building our life, and Bess says that doesn’t need to stop just because I’m not physically here, and that putting both our baby and our book into the world gives her immediate future the purpose that she’ll badly need.
Though having my life cut short by cancer is horrible, I’ve still in many ways been lucky. Most people never find the person who completes them, I think, and I have. I’ve been helped so much. Numerous oncologists have gone above and beyond. Many people, friends and strangers, have asked if there is anything they can do to help. The #1 thing is to support Bess and our soon-to-be-born daughter, Athena, whatever “support” may mean—the most obvious way is the Go Fund Me, as any remaining funds will go to Athena. I wish she could grow up with her father, but that is not an option. Being a single mom is hard;[1] growing up without a parent is hard; I cannot see what Athena’s future holds, except that I think and hope it will be bright, even though I will not be in it, save for the ways in which friends and family promise to keep me alive for her.
If you want to donate to research, I don’t know the absolute best place, but one good-seeming choice is the Arc Institute: “Arc researchers pursue both curiosity-driven exploration and goal-oriented research. The institute will initially focus on complex diseases, including neurodegeneration, cancer, and immune dysfunction.” They don’t have a turn-key donation page up yet, however, so send them an email and ask: “Why not?” I also got a lot of care under Dr. Assuntina Sacco at UCSD’s Moores Cancer Center, which does have a turn-key donation page. Let’s make the future better in every way than the past. Donations can be made in memory of someone who has passed.
I wrote earlier, in “How do you say goodbye?”,
The gift must be given back, sooner or later, willingly or unwillingly, and sadly it seems that I will be made to give it back before my time. I have learned much, experienced much, made many mistakes, enjoyed my triumphs, suffered my defeats, and, most vitally, experienced love. So many people live who never get that last one, and I have been lucky enough to.
One friend wrote to me: “You did good—when the time comes, I hope that brings you additional peace.” Many of us don’t get what I’ve had: the opportunity to live a full, generative life with people who I love and who love me back. Yet I was able to have all of it, for a time.
[1] Though if anyone can do it, and find a way to do it successfully, it will be Bess.
More isn’t always better: death and over-treatment as a downside of agenticness
i. Aren’t we clever?
Bess and I felt so very smart. In April, we congratulated ourselves for navigating the healthcare system to get two doses of spot radiation that, in conjunction with clinical trial drug PDL1V, likely shrunk, and perhaps temporarily eliminated, the squamous cell carcinoma tumors in my neck that have been strangling me to death for the last year. Between bad scans in March 2024 and entering the PDL1V trial on April 15, two new tumors erupted from the left side of my jaw. Their size made me doubt whether PDL1V would have enough time to work at all, and so we sought adjunct radiation in the hopes of buying more time. Moreover, some evidence shows that the chemo part of PDL1V may make tumors more susceptible to radiation.
Clinical trials prefer that patients get only the treatment offered by the trial. Still, many allow exceptions for things like spot radiation, in order to help patients improve their quality of life and live long enough to see whether the trial drug is working. So Bess and I coordinated between the Mayo Clinic-Phoenix, which, if I have a primary care site, is it, and START-Utah, where PDL1V was being offered, to get up to five doses of spot radiation on the most ominous appearing neck tumors. This is where having lung mets comes in handy: because there were non-neck markers of disease, and the study could measure those as well.
I got a radiation dose on April 20, and another on April 22, but the PDL1V and the radiation together made me so sick that I quit after the two radiation doses. Yet those two treatments were enough: we almost immediately saw liquefied tumor begin draining through a fistula in my skin. The bulky noose of my other, deeper tumors visibly shrank from where they’d been pressing outwards on my neck’s vital structures. It was an incredible reversal. My breathing improved. I could eat most blended foods by mouth, even slightly spicy ones. Bess and I took walks in the evening, anticipating that maybe I’d live long enough to meet our daughter when she arrives in October.
A month of unanticipated optimism culminated in Bess and I traveling to Berkeley for the Manifest conference. We walked miles a day, enjoyed the cooler weather, and met with other internet writing wonks. I met people with whom I’d been trading e-mails and DMs for years. I hoped I was introducing Bess to the weirdos and writers who are her people. In-person access to the world of generative ideas and arguments is slim in Arizona, but now she knows how to find her people remotely. The future seemed to be opening a crack.
If some is good, more must be better, right? I thought about whether radiation and PDL1V together might be able to eliminate the tumors in my neck, so we arranged my remaining sessions of spot radiation. We returned from Berkeley on June 10 and drove straight to Mayo. Maybe I’d get two or three more doses of radiation, another few rounds of PDL1V to really put the screws to the leftover cancer cells, and then I’d enter a future of maintenance immunotherapy. It felt as if we’d not only found, but forged, the secret key that would open the door to the rest of our lives together.
It was my last physically functional day.
Continue readingLinks: No one wants to talk about death, deep takes on the human condition, and more!
* “The Silence Doctors Are Keeping About Millennials’ Death.” Germane to me for obvious reasons; our culture denies both death and grief and seems not able to incorporate either, particularly when death is premature. My own end feels so close, particularly because my days, such as they are, are filled with pain and exhaustion.
* “How can we get the world to talk about factory farming?” We probably can’t, until we can replace conventional meat with lab-grown meat. Then we’ll spend a lot of time about how bad people were to animals in the old days. Also, “A Hundred Years of Mocking Vegetarians: For a rare lifestyle choice, vegetarianism tends to drive people pretty bonkers.” Vegetarians are basically morally correct, and that makes the rest of us uncomfortable, so we lash out.
* “Immunotherapy Is Transforming Cancer Treatment and Oncology.”
* “Human history in the very long run.” I’m sad that I only get to see half the slice of human history I ought to see.
* Neal Stephenson’s writing process.
* “What working in a New York City restaurant was like circa 2000” (NY’er, $). Early Bourdain, before TV made him into something different.
* “Vibecamp & Porcfest: An Ethnography of The Internet’s Edge.” Offensive at times.
* Russia is losing a lot, hard, in Ukraine. Plus, “Leaks reveal how Russia’s foreign intelligence agency runs disinformation campaigns in the West.”
* How to Build High-Speed Rail in America.
* London needs 20 million+ people.
* “Immutep Reports Positive Results in First Line Head and Neck Squamous Cell Carcinoma Patients with Negative PD-L1 Expression.” These results are amazing: PD-L1 expression of greater than 1 is advised and perhaps necessary for Keytruda to have some chance of working. Mine was 5 in one test and 20 in another, and I failed Keytruda (or rather it failed me). These are really the kinds of results that, for a fatal diagnosis like head and neck cancer. “Efti” is the name of the drug.
* Tesla continues to become a partisan brand, which is likely to hurt it in the both the short and long term.
* More on why Rome missed an Industrial Revolution.
* “Writing the first draft of financial history with Byrne Hobart.” Hobart and patio11 together!
* Restricting housing supply is a bad idea.
* “Puzzles about oncology and clinical trials.” Me from 2023, still sadly relevant.
Links: Slowness as a problem, kinds of conversations, curing cancer, and more!
* “Pentagon ‘alarmingly slow’ at fielding new weapons.” China seems not to suffer this problem. Perhaps, given what’s happening with Taiwan, we should pay more attention. In other “China moves fast” news: “China State Shipbuilding Corporation is the world’s largest shipbuilder. It builds vessels for the People’s Liberation Army Navy and increasingly sophisticated dual-use commercial ships.” And the U.S. response so far is to shrug, it seems.
* “Not Everyone Needs to Go to Therapy: There be too much ‘mental-health’ awareness.” It turns out that if you tell people they’re robust, they’ll often turn out to be robust. If you tell people they’re fragile enough, they’ll start to believe that.
* A “blitz primary” seems like a good idea, compared to alternatives.
* “Are You a Jerk, or a Liar? On talking past each other.” On the gap between truth-seeking versus community-building communication styles. Ideally one figures out what kind of conversation one is in. Probably there are some sex differences in default style, and when I was younger I thought truth-seeking and information-exchanging were the purposes of communication. It took too much life experience to demonstrate that those beliefs were wrong.
“Are You a Jerk, or a Liar?” goes well with “The quality of your life is the quality of the people you get to know: Illuminating the David Brooks way.”
* In praise of potatoes (and an archive link).
* China is harassing Filipino vessels but not Vietnamese vessels—why that might be.
* The national debt is going unsustainably up, and that’s only now making it into the discourse.
* “California has surrendered its streets to assholes.” In general government needs to balance majority rule with minority rights, and when “minority ‘rights'” impede the ability of a city or society to function at all, that’s a problem.
* Metascience reforms at the NIH.
* “Drone Adoption Favors Quantity Over Quality In Warfare: Development of drones both large and small has outpaced institutional adoption across militaries. Battlefield successes will pressure an update to a deadlier kind of warfare.” The U.S., Europe, and Japan should ban DJI and build a drone industry. Better late than never.
* “China’s superrich are eyeing the exit.”
* “Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes.” On the Pirahã people and language; I downloaded the book, although I’m not convinced I’ll live long enough to read it.
* On the history and maybe future of nuclear power.
* “Why haven’t biologists cured cancer?”
* “How we should update our views on immigration.” On Marginal Revolution, not the usual, and I’m struck by how few people can think over decades or centuries about this issue. In the United States, almost all of us are in some sense the descendants of immigrants.
The two-crisis update
Five days ago I wrote about two simultaneous crises: one from swallowing and breathing poorly, and the second from PDL1V no longer holding back the tumors. Despite those beautiful scans in May showing extensive tumor-size reduction, the most recent scans show “Continued neoplastic disease progression throughout the neck as described. Of note tumor results in significant narrowing of the supraglottic airway.”
Sounds bad, is bad.
The installation of a new PEG tube means I can inject food without having to worry so much about how poorly I swallow. The new PEG tube feels like defeat in many ways, but my weight is hovering around 125 lbs and no longer falling hard. I also wound up staying inpatient after the procedures far longer than I should have, which cost weight and muscle mass. I’ve also been ravaged by saliva and mucus production again, which are almost as crazy-making as they were last summer. Still, I’m better able to swallow now than I was then, and the PEG tube means I’m less likely to starve death in the short term.
Secondarily, I wasn’t sure whether I’d have the strength to start a new clinical trial outside the Phoenix area. One challenge Bess I have faced since starting to pursue clinical trials, though, is that Arizona is pretty much a dead zone for the better head and neck cancer clinical trials. There are some at HonorHealth Research in Scottsdale (and the people who work there have, like almost everyone in clinical trials we’ve encountered, been helpful), but their most promising trials were “A Basket Study of Customized Autologous TCR-T Cell Therapies” from a company called TScan and “WTX-330” from Werewolf Therapeutics—and neither have slots available. The TScan trial may work, but, to paraphrase one oncologist we talked to, “We’ve been trying to get customized T-Cell therapies to work in solid tumors for a long time and keep failing.” Eventually someone is likely to succeed, but is this the moment, in a field littered with past failures?
As of right now (and highly subject to change), there’s a slot for Beigene’s BGB-A3055 in Dallas, Texas, and multiple sources report seeing some success with BGB-A3055 in head and neck cancer patients. Given how resistant head and neck cancers are, even “some success” is uncommon and attractive. Even a few days ago, I didn’t think I’d have the strength to fly for a new treatment, but dosing would start in early August, and by then I hope to be physically capable.
In early April, before starting PDL1V treatment, I was teetering on the edge of terminating treatment and exiting. Despite how rough early treatment turned out to be, continuing was the right decision. Once foreclosed, treatment options will not readily open again, and my tumors are so aggressive that “too late for real treatment” will become reality rapidly. If the exhaustion becomes too great, exit is always available, in a drawer, quietly lying in a pill bottle.
The story for now goes on; things have stabilized some, for now. Eating and sleeping might improve. If the mucus improves, I’ll probably be able to breathe and thus sleep more easily. Being able to think and write again would be nice.
If you’ve gotten this far, consider the Go Fund Me that’s funding ongoing care.
Links: Good-tasting berries, other biology news, being the future you want to lead, and more!
* “Why America’s Berries Have Never Tasted So Good: Driscoll’s had to figure out how to breed, produce and sell its most flavorful strawberries and raspberries. Now the strategy is starting to bear fruit” (wsj, $). Good news is underrated and seemingly hardly ever goes viral. I think that even though I’m very sick and for me individually pessimism is warranted.
* “A Revolution in Biology: How developmental biology might contain the secrets to life, intelligence, and immortality.” On Michael Levin’s ideas regarding how “the bioelectric network of the organism” may be as important as its genes. Not something I’d even heard of.
* An effort to clone 2011-era OKCupid. Not personally useful to me, but everyone complains about online photo-based swipe dating while hardly anyone does anything about it. This is an attempt at doing something.
* “What Have We Liberals Done to the West Coast?” I’d argue the northeast, too. And this is essential: “Why put liberals in charge nationally when the places where they have greatest control are plagued by homelessness, crime and dysfunction?” When Bess I lived in New York City, taxes were absurd, and yet no one said: “Well, the taxes are high but the public schools are great.” Instead, the money just seemed to…disappear. The vast majority of the subway was constructed before 1929.
* “Why California Is Swinging Right on Crime.” This article blames viral videos of brazen criminality. I think crime is like inflation and any number of other things: when it’s low, people forget it exists.
* Viagra improves brain blood flow and could help to prevent dementia.
* “Harold Bloom in Silicon Valley.” The future of Bloom and the canon isn’t in academia, so if it is somewhere, that’s presumably good?
* “The Growing Scientific Case for Using Ozempic and other GLP-1s to Treat Opioid, Alcohol, and Nicotine Addiction.” Given how poorly existing opioid and alcohol treatments work, GLP-1s are one of these “would be hard to be worse than the status quo” efforts.
* “The Overlooked (But Real) Possibility of a Big Democratic Win.” “Overlooked?” More likely just a low probability, maybe nice if it happens but not something to be counted on.
* “OpenAI Expands Healthcare Push With Color Health’s Cancer Copilot: Color Health has developed an AI assistant using OpenAI’s GPT-4o model to help doctors screen and treat cancer patients.” (wsj, $; archive). Sounds useful. Healthcare is still a bespoke, artisanal process, which means it’s both expensive and prone to error. Tools to help doctors are much needed.
In addition, here is Color’s blog post on the tool.
* “Even Doctors Like Me Are Falling Into This Medical Bill Trap.” The trap is:
The radiology charge from NorthShore University HealthSystem for the ankle and wrist X-rays was $1,168, a price that seemed way out of range for something that usually costs around $100 for each X-ray. When I examined the bill more closely, I saw that the radiology portion came not from the urgent care center but from a hospital, so we were billed for hospital-based X-rays. When I inquired about the bill, I was told that the center was hospital-affiliated and as such, is allowed to charge hospital prices.
It turns out that I’d stumbled into a lucrative corner of the health care market called hospital outpatient departments, or HOPDs.
Why do $100 X-rays cost $1,000+ at hospitals?
* Deterring a Taiwan invasion. China’s CCP can choose not to invade, and by not invading it can create conditions for scarcely imaginable human flourishing in the coming decades.
* “What if I told you there was a way to make cheap, carbon-neutral, pipeline-grade natural gas from just sunlight and air?.” On Terraform Industries. Which is trying to create human flourishing.
* The rise of the abundance faction.
* Argument against Lambda School, which is now called BloomTech.
* “U.S. Senate passes bill to support advanced nuclear energy deployment.” A step—though just one step—in the right direction.
* “Israel’s War of Regime Change Is Repeating America’s Mistakes.”
Very sick, and two crises hit at once
I’ve been silent because I’ve been so very sick: swallowing has gotten much harder, and aspiration of food or liquid much more common, to the point that on July 1 I got a new PEG tube put in. Given how much removing the previous tube felt like a triumph, the new installation, although it’s keeping me alive, hurts. Literally and figuratively. Other physical problems I might write more about later are bedeviling me too—to the point that I wonder how much time I have left.
Being physically sick is one crisis; the second is that recent scans show that Seagen’s PDL1V is not holding back the tumors any more. I have to either switch trials, which I’m not sure I have the energy to do, or accept the end. Bess and I are working on a possible trial switch. But I’m swamped by headaches and fatigue. I don’t wake up properly. Foggy-headedness never abates. It may be that I’ve written my last essay (Bess saw this over my shoulder and she says she thinks I’ve not, but she’s an optimist about my longevity and writing abilities). I finished “Uncomfortable truth: How close is ‘positivity culture’ to delusion and denial?” a month ago. I meant to turn the last year’s writing into a memoir, like I’ve meant to do many other things, but cancer treatment is a more-than-full-time job, and now physical problems are knocking off a bunch of IQ points. I don’t know how many watts the brain typically consumes, but I feel like I need more, and the energetic processes that normally sustain and propel me are dysregulated.
Another recovery for a period of time is possible. If I don’t get there, thanks for reading. I still don’t know how to say goodbye, except by example.
An update. If you’ve gotten this far, consider the Go Fund Me that’s funding ongoing care.
Links: The longevity of electrics, improving health tech, building the future, and more!
* “Electric Vehicles (EVs) Could Last Nearly Forever.” Buying or leasing a legacy internal combustion engine (ICE) car now or going forward is nuts because its value is going to drop to near-zero within a few years. Granted there are a lot of obvious things that people don’t see coming.
* Making sense of honor culture.
* “Policy ideas for 10 lifesaving technologies.” And then it has a sequel: “FDA, ARPA-H, & CDC – policy ideas part 2.” The author, Jacob Trefethen, has less antipathy towards the FDA than I do—a low bar—but he identifies some of its problems.
* Argument for the right to self-termination; I prefer my title to the one offered. I agree with the general thrust of the article—which will not surprise anyone who read “Will things get better? Suicide and the possibility of waiting to find out,” but I also admit to hesitation around the specifics of implementation. Hardly anyone thinks it’s wise for Joe to walk into a clinic, say he wants to be euthanized, and for the procedure to be done half an hour later. Yet I sense opponents of self-termination arguing for barriers that will effective block its use altogether. Having been tortured by my own biology before, albeit over a somewhat short term, I don’t think it’s fair or wise to insist that people who are being tortured by their biologies remain corporeal. The right individual self-determination remains important.
* “Spaced repetition for teaching two-year olds how to read.” How cool!
* “Nietzsche’s Guide to Greatness | The Genealogy of Morality Explained.” Interesting, though longer than I’d like it to be, and I think Nietzsche is simply wrong in a lot of his causal arguments, and that he’s fond of false binaries.
* “What Will Become of American Civilization? Conspiracism and hyper-partisanship in the nation’s fastest-growing city.” About Phoenix and yet doesn’t capture the flavor of the Phoenix I see; you can also find people who are poor and have problems in any big city. Notably, too, “desalination” is only mentioned twice, and Packer doesn’t emphasize that agriculture consumes about 80% of Arizona’s water. Bess and I would all else equal prefer to live in California, but California won’t build anywhere near enough housing, so, like millions of other Arizonans, here we are. That would make for a much shorter article, however. Places like Arizona, Texas, Georgia, and Florida are growing so fast in part because places like California, Oregon, Washington, New York, and Massachusetts make living there illegal via zoning.
* Argument that the Republican party is doomed, due to how “Increasing age and education polarization means that Republicans are rapidly losing the capacity to run public institutions at all levels other than electoral, and this trend cannot realistically reverse within a generation.” A dying animal can still be dangerous, though.
* “Elon Musk exposes himself through Apple/OpenAI temper tantrum.” Not the exact framing I’d choose but Musk is suffering from Twitter brain worms and that’s bad.
* “Three holes in the U.S.’ economic strategy against China.”
* “Why Young Women Are Becoming More Liberal Than Young Men: The Gender-Equality Paradox.” Maybe.
* “The Optimists Ended up in Auschwitz.”
* “The Ford Foundation has spent decades tearing the country apart, tax-free.” Maybe indefinite foundations are not such a smart move?
* “GM had $6 billion to spend on next-gen EVs, chose stock buybacks.” In case you want to know why Tesla is still important.
* What things look like from Israel. It’s Ezra Klein and so not among the dumber takes that predominate.
* “How an American Dream of Housing Became a Reality in Sweden.”
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