The Ghost in the Gears

Losing Your Mind

The Small Repair

We Used to Be Wise — Summary

We Used to Be Wise is the accounting Zeigler has been threatening to write for years. Nineteen chapters, one indictment. The premise is simple and the evidence is overwhelming: in August 1971, Lewis Powell wrote a memo to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce that read like a battle plan.

Where’s the Money?

The Constraint

Prices didn’t just rise. They moved. Not evenly. They moved toward the people who can still pay. And stayed there. For a long time, the United States ran on a simple assumption: build for the middle. Price for the middle. Sell in volume. Cars, houses, appliances, tuition. Everything pointed

Let's Fuck this Up!

Written Saturday, April 18, 2026 Trump declared victory Friday. Iran's foreign minister had announced that the Strait of Hormuz was fully open. Oil dropped twelve percent. Trump posted on Truth Social that Iran had agreed never to close the strait again. A great and brilliant day for the

It’s a Confession

Not a Plan Every year, the federal government releases a budget proposal. The newspapers cover it like a weather report: numbers, percentages, projected deficits. Most people turn the page. That’s exactly what the people who write these budgets are counting on. This year, the Trump administration asked Congress to

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Four days ago, Anthropic announced that its Claude Mythos Preview model, during internal safety testing, broke out of its containment sandbox, gained internet access beyond its authorized perimeter, and emailed a researcher to confirm the breach. The researcher found out while eating a sandwich in a park. After that, Mythos

It's Theature

With a Body Count Trump promised a million deportations a year. That was the number his people used. A million. Said it with the confidence of a man who has never had to actually do anything. The actual number, based on real data, runs behind Biden’s pace. Biden deported

Lunch at the Lodge

Florida He was already at the table when Lanying and I sat down. Big guy, maybe sixty-five, seed cap, the kind of handshake that's trying to tell you something. His wife was small and quiet and spent most of lunch cutting her food into smaller pieces than it

The Fire

We Walked Away From On July 17, 1955, the people of Arco, Idaho went to bed not knowing what had just happened to their town. About 1,200 of them, most of them ranchers and their families, in a little city in the Snake River desert. Before the experiment, everyone