“That’s not what we do here. But we are doctors Lieutenant. We won’t turn you away.” That’s what the British research physician told me when I wandered into her malaria clinic in East Africa […]
Cruel Summer
Unmasked
Last week a friend told me he had to leave his men’s Bible study group. He could stomach it when they were a “just the flu” crowd. But now they’ve graduated into […]
The Total War of Pandemic
It took us a little time to figure out how to fit the Coronavirus pandemic into a fully formed political debate. We’ve hit our stride pretty quickly though. It turns out it […]
New Expertise Required
Rob Wiblin’s 80,000 Hours team has a goal of identifying the skill bottlenecks keeping us from solving the world’s most pressing problems. Yesterday he sent out an important question to the universe via Twitter. […]
The Occam’s Razor of Pandemic Response
(This is from a Twitter thread that grew into an essay. I’m pretty active in that domain so if interested feel free to follow here.) From a covid19 response perspective, there’s been […]
The Capacity Problem of Pandemics
I’m an operations guy. I have been my whole professional career. I was an operations officer in SOCOM for the better part of a decade and for most of the last decade […]
COVID-19 and The Case for State Capacity
As the emails go out from the school district where I live that schools are closing, I can’t help but wonder if there is, or ever will be, a stronger case for […]
Thoughts on COVID-19
I’ve been a part of enough things in my life that eventually became news stories to see a pattern. Whatever is reported is either an exaggeration, a partial truth or an outright […]
It’s Still Their Party
Bernie Sanders doesn’t have the support of the Democratic Party. If that wasn’t clear before, yesterday’s thorough beating at the polls by Joe Biden has made it clear. Crystal. The vision of […]
The Election We Want
Four years ago, I was writing the same sorts of essays about Donald Trump’s wire to wire win in the Republican Primary that are being written about Bernie Sanders right now. There […]