Welcome to The Closing Argument, our verdict on the news, plus everything The Argument published and appeared in this week.

Thanks to everyone who came out to our first-ever, sold-out West Coast event last week, where Jerusalem Demsas debated Kelsey Piper on whether AI could actually cure cancer. The Argument will have more live events coming soon and paid subscribers will get priority access!

The Verdict, by Jerusalem Demsas

Discourse about genetics is always fraught, and one way that it is needlessly so is the overly simplistic way in which many people tend to understand the line between “genetic predisposition” and “environmental influence.”

In reality, those two things are extremely interrelated, a fact I was reminded of when reading a new study about the effect of moving start times for high schools to later in the morning. The study isn’t about genes directly, but it is a clean test of what behavioral genetics keeps pointing at: that a lot of what can look like a genetic advantage is really just a lucky match between someone’s biology and their environment.

In 2019, California passed SB 328, requiring high schools to start no earlier than 8:30 a.m. and middle schools no earlier than 8 a.m. That is, a bill to let kids sleep in. And they did, according to a promising new study — roughly 46 more minutes a night.

The researchers examined Youth Risk Behavior Survey (YRBS) self-reports and American Time Use Survey (ATUS) time diaries to figure out how much sleep teens are getting. The ATUS pattern is very clean: the share of 15- to 18-year-olds awake before 6 a.m. fell 86%; the share awake before 7 a.m. fell 61%. Kids do go to sleep a little later but not enough to wipe out the gains. (Rural districts in California were exempt and did not see similar patterns, which adds credibility to the findings.)

Furthermore, eighth-grade math and English scores improve by a modest amount. For context, those improvements are significantly larger than those found in the large new study on the impact of removing phones from schools that rocketed through the internet a few weeks ago.

As someone who naturally likes to stay up late and, if left to my own devices, would sleep in until noon, I have always chafed against the pervasive belief that early rising is a virtue. Behavioral geneticist Kathryn Paige Harden has been one of the best scientific communicators trying to explain what’s in the grab bag of genes that make up the polygenic score for educational attainment.

The discourse has largely moved past the simplistic idea of a “smart gene” now that we know there are many, many genes that contribute to something as complicated as “how many years of schooling does an individual complete.”

There’s nothing intrinsically better about being a morning person, but in a society where high school begins at 7 a.m., one’s genetic predisposition to early rising will have a much larger effect than in a society that starts high school at 8:30 a.m. or even later.

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The more you learn about the way genetics interacts with the human environment, the harder it is to take moral credit — or assign it — for landing on the lucky side of an institutional arrangement.

One can take this lesson too far. You do have to just pick a start time for public high schools, and someone will be harmed by whatever time you end up picking.

But Harden’s point still stands: Genes don’t produce outcomes on their own. Genes in environments produce outcomes.

Top stories this week, by Maibritt Henkel

As we grow, we want to make sure you see everything we’re doing without flooding your inbox with dozens of emails. But for the real libs, you can get every post as it drops by opting into The Mag here.

This week in The Argument, law professor Nicholas Bagley and economist Robert Gordon contributed a piece addressing the uncomfortable tension between the left’s supposed commitment to high-quality government services and their support of public sector unions. They argue that collective bargaining agreements often are too indiscriminate, protecting public workers based on seniority rather than performance. Bad teachers and bad cops don’t just lead to worse schools and unsafe cities; they undermine the broader Democratic vision.

If you know Kelsey Piper, you know she loves a Waymo. In this piece, she defends self-driving cars from accusations that modern vision algorithms are worse at detecting people of color. To make her case, she goes on a deep-dive into the engineering literature and safety data, as well as the mechanics of imaging radar. I’ve recently come around to the robots, and Kelsey is a big reason why. If you’re looking to be converted, I suggest you give her a read.

🌟Abundance Wins of the Week🌟

• A recent study published in Nature Nanotechnology details how artificial neurons can interact with brain cells. There are many potential applications of electronic devices that can communicate with living neural systems, such as improved implants for hearing and vision loss.

• On Thursday, Meta and renewable energy producer DESRI signed a deal providing the tech company with 850 MW of energy capacity from solar and battery storage projects across nine states, including Oklahoma, Texas, and Mississippi.

• Connecticut has had a moratorium on new nuclear plants since 1982. Last year, it partially lifted that moratorium, and the state is now holding public informational workshops to get localities interested in hosting new nuclear reactors.

Worth watching...

On the pod this week, Matt and Jerusalem debated the great Spirit Airlines debacle. They cover anti-trust under Biden, the weirdness of airline markets, and ask what it all reveals about our political moment.

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Midterm polls range anywhere from Democrats leading by a whopping 15 points to a nail-biting three. In a Substack live conversation, Lakshya Jain and Split Ticket’s Armin Thomas discussed what to make of these numbers.

What’s News with The Argument

The Argument recommends, by Maibritt Henkel

Some members of the team headed to San Francisco this week for The Argument’s event Wednesday night. What better opportunity for cultural enrichment than a flight west?

On the plane, watched Wuthering Heights, reporting back that it was “not even that risqué.” (Although he admits that he might have missed some stuff because he watched it with no headphones, just closed captioning.)

There were also some readers on board. read The God in the Woods by Liz Moore, which is “sort of true-crime-y” but about “class politics and misogyny.” Our head of operations, Angela, blew through Muriel Spark’s The Driver’s Seat, leaving her wishing she’d packed another book — always a good sign.

Our SF local and in-house education expert, read What Your Preschooler Needs To Know by E.D. Hirsch with her toddler, who loved it. Apparently, Hirsch was an early proponent of “knowledge-focused curricula - ones that try to give kids more information about the world, which makes them stronger readers.”

wasn’t sure his favorite news story of the week counted as a culture rec, but I think it does: turns out basketball coach Steve Kerr worked the entire lyrics of Taylor Swift’s hit All Too Well into his press conference remarks over the course of a season, without anyone noticing. You can read about that crafty bit of oration here.

Finally, an anti-rec rec from , who, after struggling through a viewing of The Coffee Table, kept wondering: “If you set out to make an unwatchable film and accomplish that goal, have you succeeded or failed?” He concluded that he could not recommend the movie to anyone in good conscience.

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Welcome back to The Argument’s poll series, where we survey Americans on the issues everyone’s fighting about. Our full crosstabs are available below the paywall at the end of this post. Our last surveys have asked about crime and public safety, the economy, gender issues, immigration, education and parenting, the lingering politics of COVID-19, immigration, AI, and free speech. The Argument’s full methodology can be read here.

All of a sudden, Republicans love the deep state.

In The Argument’s poll on crime and public safety, fielded from April 20 to 23, 2026, among 1,516 registered voters, we tested support for various law enforcement agencies. Among respondents overall, local police got the highest favorability (70% had a very or somewhat favorable opinion), followed by the TSA (58%), while agencies like the FBI (50%) and CIA (45%) got lower marks. ICE was not only the least popular (40% support) but — as you might expect — the most politically polarized. Seventy-nine percent of self-described Republicans supported ICE. Just 10% of Democrats did.

That Republicans like cops (81%) more than Democrats (65%) is old news, but what caught my eye was how quickly Trump has managed to make federal law enforcement agencies — that his supporters once derided as full of corrupt, biased, deep-state Democrats — popular with his base.

Over the past decade, the FBI has been more widely supported by Democrats after Trump declared war on it in his first administration.

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To put this in context, between 2022 and now, the partisan gap in opinion of the FBI has shifted from D+50 in a Gallup poll asking about job performance to R+34 in our poll asking about favorability. Republicans’ favorability for the CIA was also 27 points higher than Democrats’.

These massive shifts far outstrip the effect you would expect merely from the change in administrations. In the past year and a half, Trump has installed loyalists and pressured out agents who he viewed as political enemies for working on cases like those against the Jan. 6 rioters. As a result, partisan sentiment on agencies like the FBI has flipped.

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Midterm polls range anywhere from Democrats leading by a whopping 15 points to a nail-biting three. As our Director of Political Data Lakshya Jain likes to remind us: Keep calm and trust the polling average.

The current polling average is slightly below where it was in 2018, but the situation is very different: In 2018, the polling average stayed relatively flat throughout the cycle, whereas in 2026, Democrats have increased their advantage month by month.

Furthermore, this time, Democrats have more of an advantage on issues like cost-of-living and immigration.

“[The] Republican Party has lived for a long time on the bread and butter of economics, right? Like, whatever happened, they were advantaged on three things: crime, economics, immigration. Right now, Trump has done a lot to make immigration not a great issue for Republicans,” said Lakshya in a Substack live conversation with Split Ticket’s Armin Thomas. “And then, on cost of living, it’s outright going negative for the GOP.”

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That being said, Democrats could still screw this up. It would be quite unusual if Democrats won senate races in places like Alaska and North Carolina while losing in Michigan, but that is a real possibility if Democrats nominate a historically weak candidate.

“Right now, the polling seems to suggest that Abdul El-Sayed is the weakest of the three candidates for perhaps his ideology being further to the left than the others …this is not a case of Republicans nominating someone like Doug Mastriano or Kerry Lake,” said Armin. “This is actually a rare instance where Republicans have nominated, on paper, what’s a very good candidate.”

Check out the full video above to hear more about what pitfalls await both Democrats and Republicans in the upcoming elections.

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Spirit Airlines is dead, and the right, true to form, is blaming Joe Biden.

The immediate cause of Spirit’s demise is pretty clear: The war with Iran spiked jet fuel costs, and the already-battered airline couldn’t absorb the hit to its bottom line. Last I checked, Joe Biden didn’t start any wars with Iran.

Spirit also had some other problems — a Pratt & Whitney engine recall that grounded a huge share of its fleet, legacy carriers copying its unbundled-fare model and capturing some of its customer base, a failed strategic pivot toward premium offerings…

If Spirit Airlines merged with JetBlue would it still be around? Maybe. Or maybe the expanded JetBlue would be bankrupt, too.

The Biden Department of Justice argued successfully against the JetBlue-Spirit merger on the grounds that we needed to preserve Spirit as an independent, ultra-low-cost carrier disciplining legacy fares. And while the right’s shrill attempts at deflecting from Trump’s death spiral of a presidency are unpersuasive, I do find the deflections of the anti-merger crowd to be a bit “The lady doth protest too much.”

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Matt Yglesias has been bugging me for a while about how the airline deregulation discourse is a “skeleton key” for understanding what the modern “anti-monopoly” movement is really about. I had sort of brushed him off because it was very much giving conspiracy theory.

But when he proposed we talk about it for this week’s episode of The Argument, I also fell down the rabbit hole.

As Matt says of the Biden administration’s antitrust intervention: “It’s not that they caused Spirit to go bankrupt … it just calls into question what they were trying to accomplish here.”

Anti-monopoly implies a focus on competition, so much of what this crowd does sounds like that’s the focus. The Open Markets Institute, the American Economic Liberties Project? These sound like organizations focused on increasing competition and free enterprise. But that’s just not what’s going on.

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Take airlines: The single biggest unlock for lowering prices for consumers and raising competition is allowing foreign airlines to compete against domestic airlines. But, as far as I can tell, not a single one of these organizations is focused on making that happen.

As proof, many European countries similarly deregulated their airline industries a decade or two after the U.S. and allowed much more competition than the U.S., including making them accessible to foreign ownership and foreign carriers. As a result, the top four airline groups now control just 40% of the market. (In the U.S., without this competition, the top four control 74%.)

And, importantly, the pre-airline-deregulation decades that the anti-merger crowd yearns for were straightforwardly anti-competitive. The Civil Aeronautics Board regulated basically everything about air travel, and it wasn’t trying to pave the way forward for new airlines to compete against existing ones for the purpose of lowering consumer prices; it was actively making it difficult for new entrants to join the market in order to artificially keep prices up.

Flights in the previous era cost travelers 20% to 100% more than they would have in a competitive market.

And all of that is justified by the idea that airlines are such a weird market that, if allowed to go unregulated, it will lead to something called “destructive competition.”

We talk about that and more on this week’s episode of The Argument.

Watch or listen wherever you get your podcasts.

The Argument. Libbing out.

(Illustration by The Argument, image by Justin Sullivan via Getty)

The transcript will be after the paywall in this post for paying subscribers.

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New episodes post every Thursday.

For an ad-free version and full transcript, subscribe at TheArgumentMag.com.

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Time stamps:

0:00-Spirit Airlines is dead

7:07-The blocked JetBlue merger

14:54-1960s airline nostalgia

21:12-Matt’s tinfoil hat theory

26:29-Pre-Carter airline monopolies

35:26-The dawn of deregulation

47:17-Anti-monopolists want less competition

54:19-America’s protectionist policies

58:22-Peer review: Marriage and gender-coded purchases

Corrections:

• At 0:55:00, Jerusalem says the EU began creating its single aviation market starting in 1992 and going through 1997. While the full package of legislation did take effect in 1997, the first legislative package was passed in 1987.

• At 0:55:24, Jerusalem says that the five largest European aircraft control 45% of the European market while the four largest U.S. aircraft control 80% of the U.S. market. Those figures were accurate, but slightly more recent analysis shows the markets have shifted somewhat. A 2018 analysis showed the four largest European airlines controlled 40% of the EU market, while a 2025 analysis showed the four largest U.S. airlines controlled 74% of the U.S. market.

Show Notes:

• Coverage of the Strait of Hormuz, through which 20% of the world’s oil and natural gas travel, being closed since Feb. 28: Brookings article, CBS News article

• Coverage of jet fuel composing 20% to 30% of airlines’ costs: OpenAirlines article, Seeking Alpha article, IATA article

• Coverage of Spirit attempting Chapter 11 bankruptcies to save itself before shutting down under Chapter seven: Law.com article, OAG article, Las Vegas Sun article

• Coverage of Spirit blaming rising fuel costs in bankruptcy filing: AirlineGeeks article, Time article

• Podcast hosted by conservative comedians Stu Burguiere and Dave Landau that blamed Spirit’s failure on the Biden administration’s decision to block Spirit and JetBlue’s merger: BlazeTV podcast episode

• Coverage of Transportation Sec. Sean Duffy blaming Spirit’s failure on the Biden administration’s decision to block Spirit and JetBlue’s merger: Fox News article, ABC7 article

• Coverage of JetBlue losing money: Reuters article, Quartz article, The New York Times article

• Coverage of Pratt & Whitney’s recall of its geared turbofan engine, which impacted more Spirit aircraft than all other airlines combined: Simple Flying article, FlightGlobal article

• Coverage of Spirit receiving over $150 million in compensation from Pratt & Whitney due to recall: Aerospace Global News article

• Coverage of a Reagan-era judge blocking JetBlue’s merger with Spirit Airlines after President Biden’s DOJ sued to stop it: AP article, CNBC article

• Coverage of Spirit boosting premium offerings after its merger was blocked: Reuters article, Upgraded Points article, Spirit Airlines release

• Coverage of Delta president grudgingly introducing Basic Economy fares to compete with Spirit, even though “People don’t really want the product when they see exactly what it is.”: Conde Nast Traveler article, CNBC article, AJC article

• Photos shown depicting 1960s and 1970s air travel: Getty image, Getty image

• Coverage of plans at low-cost European airlines, including Ryanair, to offer short flights with small, vertical, stool-like seats that resemble leaning more than sitting. Prices for these flights could be as low as five Euros: EuroWeekly News article, Thrillist article

• Coverage of 1978 airline deregulation changes, initially under Jimmy Carter: Journal of Transport Geography article, Air and Space Museum article, EBSCO article

• Coverage of Trump Shuttle’s operations and failure: The Washington Post article, AeroTime article

• “Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox,” article by Lina Khan on Amazon’s e-commerce domination: The Yale Law Journal article

• “Terminal Sickness,” article by Phillip Longman and Lina Khan attacking airline deregulation: Washington Monthly article

• “Why Flying Is Miserable: And How to Fix It,” book by Ganesh Sitaraman arguing that airline deregulation was a mistake: Goodreads page, Amazon page

• “The Anti-Bigness Ideology,” article by Matt Bruenig about why bigness isn’t a huge concern for his socialist ideology: Mattbruenig.com article

• Federal Aviation Report of 1935, which defended the lack of competition created by strict airline regulations, saying “To allow half a dozen air lines to eke out a hand-to-mouth existence where there is enough traffic to support one really first-class service and one alone would be a piece of folly.”: Govinfo page

• Article profiling former Sec. Mayor Pete Buttigieg’s conversion to the anti-monopoly cause: Politico article

• “How Airline Markets Work… or Do They? Regulatory Reform in the Airline Industry,” paper by Severin Borenstein and Nancy L. Rose arguing that the price volatility in airlines can be explained by normal macroeconomic conditions: NBER chapter

• Abundance, book by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Goodreads page, Amazon page

• “Airline Deregulation, Revisited,” essay by former Justice Stephen Breyer expressing regret about the effect airline deregulation had on workers: Bloomberg Businessweek article

• History of the United Fruit Company’s actions in Latin America: Harvard Review of Latin America article, Retrospect Journal article, The World article

• “Why airlines are always going bankrupt,” article by David Oks about competition in the airline industry: David Oks article

• “We Fly Congress: Market Actions as Corporate Political Activity in the U.S. Airline Industry,” Temple University study showing airlines increase flights to districts where members of Congressional transportation committees live: Organization Science article

• “The Secret to Reindustrializing America Is Not Tax Cuts and Tariffs. It’s Regulated Competition,” 2025 article by Phillip Longman, cited by Matt: Washington Monthly article

• Red Plenty, book by Francis Spufford about communist abundance: Goodreads page, Amazon page

• 49 USC § 40102(a)(15), U.S. law that states domestic airlines must have 75% of voting stock and a majority of equity owned by U.S. citizens: GovInfo U.S. code

• Fact sheet on EU air transport rules to form a single aviation market, which began in 1987 and were implemented through 1997: EU fact sheet

• 2015 analysis showing the five largest European airlines (Ryanaid, EasyJet, Lufthansa, Air France-KLM, and IAG) control 45% of the European market: European Commission page

• Slightly more recent analysis (2018) showing that the four largest European airlines (Ryanair, Lufthansa, Air France-KLM, and IAG) control 40% of the European market: Global Finance article

• 2025 analysis showing the four largest U.S. airlines (United, American, Delta, and Southwest) control about 74% of the U.S. market: Spherical Insights analysis

• “Do Airlines in Chapter 11 harm their rivals?: Bankruptcy and pricing behavior in U.S. airline markets,” paper by Severin Borenstein and Nancy Rose showing that bankruptcies can cause prices to dip briefly: NBER working paper

• Peer review: “Gender-Specific Economic Shocks and Household Bargaining Power,” paper by Rania Gihleb, Osea Giuntella, and Dor Morag: NBER working paper

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“We’re taking The Argument to San Francisco! On May 13, Jerusalem Demsas and I are debating a question that feels unavoidable right now: Is AI actually changing how science gets done, or are we in the middle of a very expensive illusion? She’s bullish; I’m skeptical.

And you won’t just be watching. You’ll get to join in on the argument, too.

Join us May 13 at The Chapel from 7 to 10 p.m. Come argue with us! RSVP here.

Are autonomous vehicles (self-driving cars) “less able to detect people of color”? That’s what I read in The Atlantic this weekend, in Xochitl Gonzalez’s “People Who Don’t Like People Are Making All of Our Decisions.”

It appears to be entirely false.

This took some digging, so please join me on a frustrating detective hunt back through Gonzalez’s chain of citations. She cited the “Union of Concerned Scientists,” which indeed said that “studies have shown that automated vehicles are less able to detect people of color and children,” but which does not link any such studies. Its report doesn’t have a byline, and while I submitted a request for more information to their contact form Monday, I haven’t heard back.

So I searched for research on this topic and found this 2023 article from King’s College London about a paper with exactly this finding: “Driverless cars worse at detecting children and darker-skinned pedestrians say scientists.” The preprint of that paper (released around the time of that article) is titled “Dark-Skin Individuals Are at More Risk on the Street: Unmasking Fairness Issues of Autonomous Driving Systems,” and claims to find a “miss rate difference of 7.52% between the dark-skin and light-skin groups” — that is, other things equal, the systems they tested (which are not even the systems in a Waymo, but we’ll get to that) are 7.52 percentage points more likely to miss a dark-skinned than light-skinned pedestrian.1

The paper was later published in ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology, but the published version of the paper had a very different finding: nearly identical results on dark-skinned and light-skinned pedestrians. Average miss rate was 30.15% for light skin vs. 29.71% for dark skin, a 0.44-point difference — statistically insignificant.

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It’s a bit unusual for a headline finding to change between the preprint of a paper and final publication, but it’s not unheard of. It looks like the authors adopted a better, more advanced image configuration setup, which made the problem go away. Deprived of the authors’ headline finding, the published version of the paper instead reported that image models have a harder time detecting female pedestrians if it is nighttime — which I kind of suspect of being statistical noise since they ran a lot of tests and didn’t correct for multiple comparisons — and a harder time detecting children, which looks like a more robust result and makes sense since children are physically smaller than adults and harder to see.

Is that the only study with this finding? I found one other, “Predictive Inequity in Object Detection,” which is from 2019; image recognition technology has massively advanced since then. Timothy Lee, who also attempted to find the cited “studies” after seeing The Atlantic article, found the same two plus this one, which also found higher miss rates for children but no sex differences (it did not look at race differences).

So, studies do not appear to show that modern vision algorithms are worse at detecting people of color. One study showed that very weak early vision algorithms were worse at that, and then they got better and now show no racial disparities. I am grateful for the hard work that presumably went into making that happen.

All of this is entirely irrelevant to the safety of Waymo. Waymo does not primarily do pedestrian detection through normal cameras and machine learning algorithms that interpret what the cameras are seeing. It has cameras, but it also builds a complete picture of its surroundings with lidar (bouncing a laser around) and imaging radar (from emitting radio waves). Both of those will obviously be race-agnostic, though children will still be harder to see than adults as they take up less space.2

It’s worth pausing here to note that “children are harder to see than adults” is also the case for human drivers. If we’re trying to determine whether self-driving cars are safer for children, the right comparison is to human drivers: Which is more likely to hit a child, a human driver or the Waymo that replaces that human driver?

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For that, we have a large and growing supply of safety data from the 240 to 250 million miles that I estimate Waymos have driven.3 During that time, according to the statistics reported by Waymo, it has gotten into 92% fewer crashes that resulted in a serious injury or worse, 92% fewer injury-causing pedestrian crashes, 85% fewer cyclist crashes, and 83% fewer airbag deployments.4

Over at Understanding AI, Timothy Lee and his team periodically provide a breakdown of serious Waymo safety incidents; you should read it yourself rather than just trusting the company’s data, but I find it reassuring about self-driving car safety. The serious crashes in which Waymo is involved are almost never Waymo’s fault.

You can hate Waymos without a good reason

I find myself increasingly wishing that Waymo haters would just say “they’re ugly bug cars and I don’t like technology.” That’s fair enough! Your preferences are legitimate, and while I don’t think they should get to control whether I ride in a Waymo, it’s reasonable for people to be nervous that they will end up, in practice, obliged to use a Waymo, especially once the technology is decisively much better than human drivers.

You don’t have to be in favor of all technological change, even lifesaving technological change. Some people pine for the “good old days” when construction workers sat on cranes without safety harnesses. While I don’t think we should return to routinely killing lots of construction workers out of romantic longing for the brave and simple past, I also don’t spend a lot of time going around yelling that this picture is not romantic and is actually quite problematic:

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I also, separately, am very pro-gig work, which is a major stabilizing influence on the finances of many low-income Americans because it’s possible to do gig work and get paid same day. When you come up $100 short on rent or bills, none of your options are very good, and “go out and drive deliveries until you have the money” is a new addition to your options that I’m very glad we have. I worry that if those jobs dry up, nothing similarly good will replace them.

So I have sympathy for Gonzalez’s piece: She likes Uber drivers, she likes interacting with other people, and she thinks something important will be lost when we automate their jobs. She feels we’re doing this out of distaste for the messiness of sharing civilization with other people rather than in order to prevent accidents and free up other people’s labor for worthier pursuits.

I don’t feel that way about Waymos in particular, but there are jobs I feel that way about; I don’t, in fact, want to go full speed ahead on replacing all human labor, and I don’t expect a good future to result if we try.

But to make that case, you need to actually bite some bullets. Waymos appear to be much safer than human drivers, so if we ban Waymos and stick to human drivers, a lot of people will needlessly die. A lot of people will spend their time and energy driving others around — time and energy that is effectively wasted. Since it’s not needed to achieve the result of their labors, it is only being required of them as, effectively, a jobs program with very low wages.

We will, as a society, be poorer and die younger if we go down that route.

Maybe you think that’s worth it! I don’t think I have any grounds from which to tell someone who would prefer to live in a poorer, more dangerous, but more human society that their preference is objectively incorrect. Ultimately, looking ahead at the future of AI, I think we’re all going to be called to say precisely where we draw the line — and while I’m broadly pro-progress, there are plenty of trades ahead where I expect I’ll take more freedom over more safety and prosperity.

But if you wave the trade-off away by pretending that Waymos are also dangerous or that they are racist, then we can’t have a real debate. They’re not dangerous. They’re not racist. They’re just part of a world that’s changing much faster than a lot of people would prefer, and — yes — changing in a direction where we see one another less.

That trend bothers me too, though banning Waymos strikes me as a very costly and ineffective way to counter it. I would like a vision of what we’re building toward, not just what we’re preventing. Toward that end, I liked Caroline Sutton’s feminist case for Waymo, and I am glad more people are trying to articulate what they value and whether we’re building toward it or away from it.

But get the research right.

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Recommended reading:

David Modica, who went viral last week for speaking out against the town’s new plan to evade the state’s rules, joined Jerusalem Demsas on a Substack live video to explain why he was motivated to speak up.

“We are one of those places that you’d expect to sort of be open and welcome and inclusive — at least that’s what we say our values are. And I think the fact that we were so clearly not doing that and flaunting the rules in such a cynical way really bothered me,” he said.

The town’s new plan is to upzone a golf course: somewhere that has no housing and no immediate plans to add any housing. And while Marblehead’s process for arriving at this plan was unique, similar shenanigans pop up all over the country.

“Once you give localities that kind of discretion, what you end up getting is attempts to fake-meet the target, right?” said Jerusalem. “If you upzone a golf course, the golf course isn’t likely going anywhere. That golf course is going to continue to be a golf course. Yes, it is now legal for a developer to buy on that golf course and turn that into multifamily housing but that’s just not going to happen. And this happens all the time.”

Check out the video above to hear their full conversation, which touched on the demographic makeup of Marblehead and the legitimacy of NIMBY opposition.

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“We’re taking The Argument to San Francisco! This Wednesday, Kelsey Piper and Jerusalem Demsas are debating whether AI can help humans cure cancer. Jerusalem is bullish; Kelsey is skeptical.

And you won’t just be watching. You’ll get to join in on the argument, too.

May 13 at The Chapel from 7 to 10 p.m.

Come argue with us! RSVP here.

The left has two competing impulses: Expand high-quality government services and embrace the public sector union agenda.

But those two impulses are in tension with one another — and too many Democrats are in denial about that. At its core, the problem is that public sector unions generally fight to minimize differences among employees, including both standouts at the top and weak links at the bottom.

That means governments cannot recruit and retain the best workers or manage up or out the worst performers. That, in turn, badly degrades the quality of government service in ways that damage the Democrats’ own cause.

In California, for example — as Zach Liscow at Yale Law School and two coauthors recently showed — higher-quality engineers saved the state a ton of money on transportation projects. When these engineers retired, project costs rose by six times their wages.

And no wonder those excellent engineers retired. Good engineers can earn much more in the private sector. The same is true for excellent technologists, who can save governments millions on vendors but are often paid far below average market levels. Higher pay for effective teachers has likewise been a part of performance gains for schools in the District of Columbia and Dallas.

But labor serves to compress pay across jobs and reject salary differences based on performance altogether. Excessive job protection for poor performers has an even greater effect on government results.

Although few in number, the worst employees in most jobs are very bad — worse than the bell curve would predict. These “bad apples” can also spoil morale and productivity for others.

First, consider schools. Students with the least effective teachers earn less as adults, save less for retirement, and are less likely to attend college. They even have more kids as teenagers. Raj Chetty and his coauthors found that replacing the worst 5% of teachers with an average teacher would raise the present value of an average classroom’s lifetime earnings by more than $250,000.

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Now, consider policing. Max Schanzenbach and Kyle Rozema found that the worst 1% of officers, as measured by misconduct allegations against them, cost their departments four times as much as an average officer in payouts to civil-rights plaintiffs. Other research indicates that bad cops make a disproportionate number of low-quality arrests — which is to say, arrests that don’t lead to charges or convictions.

Under collective bargaining agreements, government dismissal processes are often incredibly onerous. Across multiple rounds of review, the government must extensively document and defend multiple efforts to help employees succeed.

In New York State’s prisons, a Marshall Project report found that the state succeeded in dismissing corrections officers for excessive use of force in fewer than 10% of cases. In the 2011 to 2012 school year, for every 1,000 teachers, only one with tenure was fired or nonrenewed.

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Before David Modica confronted the Town Meeting of Marblehead, Massachusetts, with the question that would make him viral, he already knew the answer.

“Are we kind of being pricks?”

Marblehead is a small coastal Massachusetts town (pop. 20,576) with a median home value approaching $1 million. Almost 80% of residents 25 and over have a bachelor’s degree and more than 93% are white. Modica was questioning his exclusive town’s opposition to a state housing law. And yes, they are being pricks.

Five years ago, Republican Gov. Charlie Baker signed a bill that passed the House 143-4 and 40-0 in the Senate. The Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA) Communities Act requires cities and towns served by the state transportation system to do what experts formally call the bare minimum.

The law required that these communities provide just one district “of reasonable size” where multifamily housing could be built.

If a locality refused to comply, it would no longer be eligible for a variety of state funding sources. But for wealthy suburbs such as Marblehead, that’s not a very strong incentive.

While Modica’s charming irreverence went viral, my favorite part of his remarks was when he asked, “We’re trying to make sure we build no houses? People live in houses.”

Here he had struck on the core problem: The problem with more houses was the potential to bring more people to town..

Perhaps the cleanest articulation of this view came from resident Claudette Mason: “You keep mentioning minimal impact — no impact on our town,” Mason said to the Planning Board in 2024. “But we’re talking about another 3,000-plus people in town. Those streets are already parking lots, so there is an impact on our streets.”

There were also concerns that local schools were overtaxed as it was despite the fact that Marblehead Public Schools enrollment has fallen 24% over the past decade.

But Modica is skeptical that rational arguments will sway his fellow Marbleheaders. Instead, he’d like to use shame:

“We have a lot more Black Lives Matter signs than Black people,” he told me on the phone yesterday morning. “You saw the whole post-George Floyd thing, you can shame white people into a lot of stuff.”

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Welcome to the The Closing Argument, our verdict on the news, plus everything The Argument published and appeared in this week.

We’re taking The Argument to San Francisco! On May 13, Kelsey Piper and Jerusalem Demsas are debating a question that feels unavoidable right now: Is AI actually changing how science gets done, or are we in the middle of a very expensive illusion? Jerusalem is bullish; Kelsey is skeptical.

And you won’t just be watching. You’ll get to join in on the argument, too.

Join us May 13 at The Chapel from 7 to 10 p.m. Come argue with us! RSVP here.

The Verdict, by Jerusalem Demsas

The currency of a great reporter is scoops.

But academics, opinion writers, and politicians don’t have that much in common with the shoe-leather reporters chasing down a lead in the streets of Baltimore or Beijing. Still, perhaps because of our physical and occupational proximity to scoop-obsessed journalists, these professions sometimes absorb this obsession with originality.

The most absurd example of this phenomenon I can recall came when Derek Thompson wrote a piece about “Why Americans Suddenly Stopped Hanging Out” (perhaps one of the most hot-button questions in social science) and was promptly embroiled in beef with the author of the book Hanging Out, a professor at Champlain College who seemed to think she had invented the phrase.

But communications professors are not really the problem — it’s politicians and policy wonks who yearn for a new, fresh policy idea to our collective detriment. Because while it may not be what Twitter and the media reward, it’s more important to be right than it is to be fresh.

Take AI labor market disruption. We’ve published multiple pieces that argue for focusing on the boring steps of shoring up existing unemployment insurance programs, copying existing examples of social wealth funds, and investing in existing public job-matching programs.

Yet instead of championing these ideas, elected officials are taken in by the novelty of a brand-new jobs guarantee (California gubernatorial candidate Tom Steyer proposed a new one this week) or robot taxes.

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Boring, tried and true policies are the ones that have been stress-tested in the court of public opinion and in the realm of policy analysis. That makes them boring, yes, but it also means they might work.

Arguments for a jobs guarantee in particular keep grinding my gears.

Just imagine all the politically toxic and genuinely administratively complicated things such a program would have to do:

1. Determine how much individuals should be compensated. Equally? Based on education? Based on their previous income? Does that mean college grads get to make $100,000 while service sector workers go on making minimum wage?

2. Identify the individuals who have been displaced. Millions of layoffs happen in a healthy economy. Which of those individuals will find good, productive jobs in a few short weeks of searching and which should be eligible for a jobs guarantee?

3. What should these individuals do? Steyer wants folks working in a range of sectors including affordable housing construction and public services. But the reason more people aren’t working in those sectors is that there’s not enough demand (in some cases because of restrictions on building) and because of insufficient pay (in which case we don’t need a jobs guarantee; we just need to raise public sector employee salaries!)

In any case, the big problem here is politicians’ fetish for novelty, which seems to periodically overwhelm the good sense of policy wonks.

If marketers want to call unemployment insurance “anti-AI job displacement insurance” or raising public sector salaries “a public jobs guarantee,” I will not begrudge them their PR. But the goal of making policy is to do something that works.

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Top stories this week, by Kobe Yank-Jacobs

As we grow, we want to make sure you see everything we’re doing without flooding your inbox with dozens of emails. But for the real libs, you can get every post as it drops by opting into The Mag here.

This week in The Argument, Kelsey Piper took on the mistaken, peak-woke belief that it’s somehow progressive to not enforce the law. When we fail to adequately police crime, she argued, it hurts disadvantaged Americans the most. Learn more in the full story:

Meanwhile, Jerusalem Demsas countered fears that AI could accelerate the rise of a post-truth world. AI is a centralizing technology, like the printing press, she said. It could actually help unwind the world that social media made. Check out the take:

Finally, Maibritt Henkel complicated the notion that men are the ones who are tough on crime. Debriefing The Argument’s latest polling results, she found several cases in which women are more punitive than men (and where men are willing to overlook the victims of certain crimes). Find out which ones below:

🌟Abundance Wins of the Week🌟

• This week, the FDA approved a new pancreatic cancer treatment, which had been fast-tracked by the agency. The drug was shown to double the survival rate in people with advanced stages of the disease.

• The Bipartisan Policy Center conducted a poll and found that 89% of Americans want the House and Senate to work together on affordable housing legislation. The poll comes as the two houses try to work out the final details of the ROAD To Housing Act and as President Trump waffles on whether or not he will sign the bill.

• Finally, the International Renewable Energy Agency put out a report demonstrating that 24/7 solar and wind with battery storage beats fossil fuels on costs. So to those standing in the way of a green energy future, we ask… build? baby? build?

Worth watching...

This week on the pod, Jerusalem and Matt dug into the landmark 1960s book The Feminine Mystique. Listen to them duke it out over competing theories of change: What role do books and ideas actually have in social progress? As readers, I’m sure we would all like to know.

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Overcast | Pocket Casts

Over on Substack live, The Argument’s Lakshya Jain raised a red flag about VoteHub’s choice to incorporate data from prediction markets into their polling model — and he did it directly with VoteHub’s Head of Data Science Zachary Donnini.

It made for a fascinating exchange. Take a look:

What’s News with The Argument

The Argument recommends, by Kobe Yank-Jacobs

In honor of The Argument’s event in San Francisco, I will recommend some of my favorite songs about my home state: “California Stars,” “California Girls,” “California,” and of course, “California.” If you couldn’t tell, I’m thrilled to be out west. Expect some more… regionally inspired music from me next week.

In film and TV, Eli Richman gave us an ambivalent review of the film Exit 8, while Milan Singh enthusiastically rewatched Breaking Bad.1

In games, Angela Tracy brought us FoodGuessr, which is exactly what it sounds like. You guess a dish from an image and list of ingredients. There is also an election-themed version of this called BallotGuessr, where you guess how the residents voted in 2024 based on a Google Street View image. Good luck.

Finally this week, we had Justin Zuckerman covering the books department alongside Maibritt Henkel and Jerusalem Demsas. Justin urged folks to check out The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop. by Robert Coover. (That is the full title.) Maibritt Henkel was partway through Ben Lerner’s new novella Transcription, and seemed to be smitten by it so far.

“At a sentence level, Lerner always scratches a particular itch in my brain,” she told me.

Jerusalem read Lost Lambs by Madeline Cash, which she loved (it includes the first non-monogamy storyline she’s read that didn’t make her want to roll her eyes out of her head) and The Jasad Heir by Sara Hashem, which is a very fun fantasy book that meditates on the duties we owe our fellow countrymen.

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I was wearing my Argument quarter zip as I wrote this pitch to buy some merch. You could also try a keychain, a hat, or a sticker instead. Each one is a great conversation starter in its own way. Buy them here.

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More to read:

“We’re taking The Argument to San Francisco! On May 13, Jerusalem Demsas and I are debating a question that feels unavoidable right now: Is AI actually changing how science gets done, or are we in the middle of a very expensive illusion? She’s bullish; I’m skeptical.

And you won’t just be watching. You’ll get to join in on the argument, too.

Join us May 13 at The Chapel from 7 to 10 p.m. Come argue with us! RSVP here.

In 2016, a lot of pundits said that Hillary Clinton had a 99% chance of winning the election. Nate Silver said she had a 71% chance. They were both wrong, but I think it’s fair to say that Silver was much less wrong — the Election Day result was much less surprising from his standpoint than theirs.

If you get the wrong answer, very few people care whether you assigned the right probability or whether your overall track record is good. If you say that a pandemic has only a 5% chance of being a big deal, and then it is a big deal, you were wrong. If you write something saying that 19 other pandemics have a 5% chance of being a big deal, and then none of them are a big deal, you were wrong about those ones too — you wasted everyone’s time over nothing!

We are collectively horrendous at reasoning about not just extremely implausible things but mildly implausible things, and if something is moderately unlikely but would be a huge deal if it did happen, you can predict just from that that we’re probably horrendously mishandling it.

This brings me to the hantavirus outbreak attracting international attention: While it’s unlikely to achieve significant further spread, health officials need to quarantine every person on that boat.

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“We’re taking The Argument to San Francisco! On May 13, Kelsey Piper and Jerusalem Demsas are debating a question that feels unavoidable right now: Is AI actually changing how science gets done, or are we in the middle of a very expensive illusion? Jerusalem is bullish; Kelsey is skeptical.

And you won’t just be watching. You’ll get to join in on the argument, too.

Join us May 13 at The Chapel from 7 to 10 p.m. Come argue with us! RSVP here.

Welcome back to The Argument’s poll series, where we survey Americans on the issues everyone’s fighting about. Our last surveys have asked about the economy, gender issues, immigration, education and parenting, the lingering politics of COVID-19, immigration, AI, and free speech. The Argument’s full methodology can be read here.

When polled on crime, women are generally less punitive than men — more supportive of rehabilitation and more open to redemption. On capital punishment, specifically, there is a longstanding gender gap, with men consistently more supportive than women.

This pattern aligns with preexisting intuitions around gendered behavior: the empathetic woman who pities the marginalized and misunderstood and the retributive man, steadfast and unyielding.

But there is something not quite right about the simple notion that men are tough on crime.

In our survey of 1,516 registered voters fielded from April 20 to 23, the conventional gender gap held up when the death penalty was abstract. Asked whether they support the death penalty for “serious crimes,” men were 11 percentage points more supportive than women. But when we asked about specific crimes, a different picture emerged.

Sixty-nine percent of female respondents agreed that the death penalty should be an option for child sexual abuse. Only 61% of men said the same, although 72% of them were in favor of capital punishment for “acts of terrorism.”

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The gender gap also reverses for rape, with 56% of women and 50% of men supporting capital punishment as an option. Notably, the reversal is driven by men becoming less punitive, not women becoming that much more punitive: Compared to “serious crimes,” there is a four-percentage-point increase among women and a 13-percentage-point drop among men.

Punitiveness isn’t a stable trait. The context that seems to matter most is who voters picture as the victim and who they imagine being executed.

Since 2008, when the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that capital punishment should be reserved only for cases that resulted in someone’s death, this debate has largely been moot.1 But a growing number of states are seeking to overthrow that consensus.

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And you won’t just be watching. You’ll get to join in on the argument, too.

Join us May 13 at The Chapel from 7 to 10 p.m. Come argue with us! RSVP here.

Betty Friedan thought Korean POWs were dying in captivity because their mothers were housewives. She thought boy moms were making their sons gay. She wrote a whole chapter comparing suburban kitchens to concentration camps — in 1963, while America was still processing what concentration camps actually were.

The Feminine Mystique is one of those important books that everyone “knows” but no one has actually read. Fair enough; until a few weeks ago, I hadn’t either.

For today’s episode of The Argument podcast, Matthew Yglesias and I read the book that kicked off second-wave feminism.

Stripped of its most… bizarre elements, Friedan’s core argument — that women in postwar America were depressed, and society’s conventional prescription was to “housewife harder” — is one of the most successful arguments of the 20th century.

Friedan blamed women’s magazines, Freudian psychoanalysts, and university curricula for suppressing women’s aspirations. Instead, she said women should strive for a career — but not just any career. To Friedan, the only people who are truly fulfilled are those who live the life of the mind, are college-educated, and have a specific set of middle-class values.

In short, she was the original #girlboss.

Watch or listen wherever you get your podcasts.

The Argument. Libbing out.

The transcript will be after the paywall in this post for paying subscribers.

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WATCH THE EPISODE HERE

Time stamps:

0:00 - Introduction to The Feminine Mystique

9:02 - Psychotherapy, Mad Men, and Marxist origins

20:02 - The true drivers of social change

30:52 - Famous books with massive effects

35:07 - The most insane parts of The Feminine Mystique

47:33 - The female happiness paradox

51:34 - Rating the book’s success

56:54 - Peer Review: Health benefits of WWII-era sugar rationing

New episodes post every Thursday.

For an ad-free version and full transcript, subscribe at TheArgumentMag.com.

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Show notes:

• The Feminine Mystique, 1963 book by Betty Friedan that serves as the main focus of this episode: Goodreads page, Amazon page

• Articles critiquing The Feminine Mystique for centering white upper class women:

  • “4 Big Problems With The Feminine Mystique”: The Atlantic article

  • “A Critical Look at The Feminist Mystique”: The Stranger article

• Information on Betty Friedan founding the National Organization for Women (NOW): NOW page

• “Shoot the messenger,” article by Jerusalem Demsas about how the people who drive the discourse forward often disproportionately center their own experiences: The Argument article

• Information on Radcliffe College presidents: Harvard page

• A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s, book by Stephanie Coontz that details some of the impacts created by The Feminine Mystique, which contains the quote (referenced by Jerusalem), “Books don’t become best sellers because they are ahead of their time”: Goodreads page, Amazon page

• “Books as Bombs,” article by Louis Menand about the impact of The Feminine Mystique: The New Yorker article

• Silent Spring, book by Rachel Carson often credited with kicking off much of the environmentalist movement: Goodreads page, Amazon page

• Unsafe at Any Speed, book by Ralph Nader that led to many consumer protection regulations: Goodreads page, Amazon page

• The Death and Life of Great American Cities, book by Jane Jacobs that critiqued 20th-century urban planning and large-scale renewal projects: Goodreads page, Amazon page

• Capital in the Twenty-First Century, book by Thomas Piketty that proposed several novel economic policies to advance income compression: Goodreads page, Amazon page

• The Anxious Generation, book by Jonathan Haidt that contains arguments against helicopter parenting: Goodreads page, Amazon page

• Don’t Blame Us: Suburban Liberals and the Transformation of the Democratic Party, book by Lily Geismer about how NIMBY activism in the Boston suburbs was developed by highly educated women who didn’t have full-time careers outside the home: Goodreads page, Amazon page

• Explanation of the section of morning Jewish prayers in which traditional Jewish men praise God who, among other things, “has not made me a woman.” The Conservative, Reconstructionist, and Reform movements have opted to substitute that language with alternatives: My Jewish Learning article

• Coverage of the campaign against mandatory retirement ages and other discriminatory practices for stewardesses: The New York Times archive, ACLU commentary, PBS article

• “The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness,” paper by Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers about why self-reported happiness among women has gone down even as their material well-being and rights have empirically increased: American Economic Journal: Economic Policy article

• “Karine Jean-Pierre is not a #GirlBoss,” article by Jerusalem Demsas: The Argument article

• “In defense of the ‘girlboss’,” article by Matt Yglesias: Slow Boring article

• Peer Review: “Early-Life Sugar Restrictions Reduce Genetic Disparities in Adult Adiposity,” article by Tadeja Gracner, Claire Boone, Patrick Turley, and Paul Gertler using data from U.K. sugar rationing in World War II to show the effect lack of sugar had on individuals with high genetic risk for obesity: NBER working paper

• Coverage of people getting “excommunicated” from psych fields for contradicting Freud: Freud Museum London article, Janet Malcolm book

(Illustration by The Argument, image by Harold M. Lambert via Getty)

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VoteHub’s new election forecast currently gives Democrats an 84% chance of winning the House and a 47% chance of winning both chambers of Congress.

Zachary Donnini, the head of data science at VoteHub, joined The Argument’s Director of Political Data Lakshya Jain Wednesday to discuss what data the model covers and what it predicts.

While Hispanic voters are expected to swing heavily Democratic again after supporting Republicans in 2024, this only matters in a handful of places:

“A lot of these Hispanic votes that Democrats will gain are wasted votes, right? Like, going from D+49 to D+65 in the Bronx doesn’t help Democrats at all. It doesn’t help them win House seats. It doesn’t help them win Senate seats,” said Zachary. “Where it does help the Democrats is in some of these newly competitive districts in Florida … It’ll help shore up some of these districts in New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, and California that have been problems in the past.”

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Controversially, VoteHub’s new model uses data from prediction markets like Kalshi.

Zachary defended the choice, arguing that markets can compensate for blind spots in both polling and fundamentals.

Lakshya wasn’t sold.

His concern was reflexivity: If forecasters lean on prediction markets, and traders in those markets are themselves moving prices based on what forecasters say, the system can end up amplifying its own assumptions rather than picking up new signals.

“How do you guard against improper feedback loop generation?” he asked.

To hear Zachary’s defense of this decision, watch along.

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Grok, is this true?

This question is asked thousands of times a day on Twitter as users fact-check, question, and prod various claims made on the social media platform by asking an AI bot to confirm or reject what another user is saying.

Yesterday, one user used it to check whether HVAC companies really “mark up refrigerant somewhere between 1000%-2000% of their cost” (true); whether Keir Starmer and Bill Gates were trying to eliminate livestock by 2030 (false); and to check the veracity of a sports reporter’s tweet about an NBA player’s postgame comments (also true).

The fear of losing shared facts has loomed large in the age of AI. In 2024, after a scandal over Kate Middleton allegedly photoshopping a picture of her family, The Atlantic’s Charlie Warzel wrote that “for years, researchers and journalists have warned that deepfakes and generative-AI tools may destroy any remaining shreds of shared reality.”

According to Warzel, in 2024, we were already living in a “post-truth universe” where it’s “difficult for anyone to believe anything they didn’t witness themselves.”

Many others have made similar arguments.

My expectation, too, was that AI would exacerbate this problem—that just as social media, photoshop, and video editing technology had proliferated deepfakes on the internet—for instance, tricking people into believing a faked photo of Pope Francis wearing a Balenciaga jacket or, in less funny development, into losing hundreds of thousands of dollars—AI was set to make all of that even worse.

But I’ve come to suspect AI might have the exact opposite effect. Instead of fracturing our shared reality, this handful of AIs seems to be piecing it back together.

Centralizing vs. decentralizing technologies

The printing press was invented in 1440.1 Before that, books were produced by hand, which made them incredibly expensive and meant that, even if it had been attempted, mass literacy was functionally impossible. According to one study of Western European medieval literacy, less than 20% of the population could read.

During the 1300s, all of Western Europe produced 2.7 million books. Compare that to the 12.5 million printed books produced from 1454 to 1500 alone. The following century saw 217 million books produced, and the rest is history.

Many people expected the printing press to act as a decentralizing force; after all, once the cost of producing written text had gone down, many more people could print what they wanted. The cost of producing books fell by 67% in the half-century after the invention of the printing press.

Contemporaneous thinkers were both terrified and excited by the prospect of less centralized control over the written word.

John Foxe, an English clergyman from the 1500s, reported that the Catholic vicar of Croydon, preaching at Paul’s Cross under Henry VIII, argued that “either the Pope must abolish knowledge & printyng, or printyng at length will roote him out.”

Foxe explained that the Pope’s primacy was based on the unsophistication of Christians and that printing would change all that: “nothyng made the Pope strōg in time past, but lacke of knowledge, and ignoraunce of simple Christians: so contrarywise now nothyng doth debilitate and shake þe hie spire of his Papacie so much as reading, preaching, knowledge and iudgement, that is to saye, the fruite of printyng.”

On the other side, William Tyndale, a leader in the Protestant Reformation who would soon use the new technology to print thousands of New Testaments and smuggle them into England, crowed over the possibility of overthrowing the papacy:

“I defy the Pope and all his laws. If God spare my life ere many years, I will cause the boy that drives the plow to know more of the scriptures than you.”

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Twentieth-century historiography has repeated this argument. Most famously, Elizabeth Eisenstein’s landmark book The Printing Press as an Agent of Change contends that print culture produced books that were “internalized by silent and solitary readers” and gave rise to a “voice of individual conscience.”

Certainly Martin Luther’s pamphlet revolution against the Catholic Church would have been impossible without the printing press, but to see only the press’s decentralizing effects is to miss how it also enabled the creation of common cultures and even the administration of more complex states.

Printing, the historian James Simpson has argued, “also permitted and produced a much tighter, centralized surveillance of written production.” The new technology sped up the “formation of a common linguistic standard” as well as “common cultural standards.” Many varieties of English were lost as a London standard became dominant through the written word.

During Henry VIII’s Dissolution of the Monasteries in the 1530s, English monasteries, with their libraries and manuscript production, were destroyed. This meant that the production, trade, and storage of books were centralized in London, Oxford, and Cambridge.

Perhaps most importantly, without the printing press, the modern nation state and economy would be inconceivable. Imagine all the paper required to keep track of tax collection, laws, and other various administrative tasks. Centralized record-keeping, standardized law, and uniform currency all depended on cheap, reproducible text.

Back to the future: How AI could reconstruct our shared reality

It’s not just Grok.

Google, which has been the dominant form of information discovery for the past two decades, has seen its users shift their behavior since the inclusion of AI-generated answers from Gemini at the top of its search results.

According to a Pew Research Center study of user behavior in March 2025, when an AI overview appeared in search results, users were half as likely to click on a link. Moreover, users ended their browsing session entirely after seeing an AI overview 26% of the time compared to 16% of the time without one.

A more recent study that looked at user behavior between January and February of this year finds that AI overviews led to a 38% reduction in outbound clicks and that zero-click searches rose from 54% to 72% when AI overviews were shown. If people are systematically substituting AI answers for the decentralized web of sources they previously consulted, that’s a structural change in information consumption that matters regardless of what individuals tend to use AI for.

A poll from last summer, also from Pew Research Center, found that the majority of adults who had seen AI summaries in search results found them at least “somewhat” useful and had at least some trust in those results.

If large language models continue to be the dominant form of AI, then I expect the technology to have strong centralizing effects.2

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For one, even now, it’s underappreciated just how dominant one AI company is in the chatbot game: OpenAI’s ChatGPT has roughly 900 million weekly active users. And while it’s certainly possible for new competitors to enter the market, the amount of GPU infrastructure needed to run a frontier model excludes everyone but the largest companies and nation-states.3

Moreover, the handful of institutional actors that dominate frontier AI development share substantially overlapping training data and training practices because their researchers come from largely the same labor market—a few thousand people, mostly trained at the same institutions, who circulate between OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind, Meta, and the rest.

Second, the very nature of an LLM —an entity trained on the written word—fundamentally privileges certain sources of information. The largest sources in the dataset used to train Google’s T5 model and Meta’s Llama are Google Patents, Wikipedia, Scribd, The New York Times and PLOS scientific journals. Major newspapers and academic publishers are dramatically overrepresented relative to their share of internet content.

In the post-training process, models are explicitly coached to give answers that align with mainstream expert consensus to hedge and defer to authoritative-sounding framings and avoid fringe positions.

I don’t mean to say that all of this is necessarily positive. The ability to create a shared reality does not mean that shared reality is, uh, true.4

One could imagine that the dominant AI could be trained to be hostile to basic liberal democratic values or could be made to accept and promote arguments hostile to freedom and equality.

This is part of why so many American technologists are obsessed with beating China in the AI race and why many federal policymakers are willing to risk the labor market impacts and other unknown risks to help clear their path.

But given how lib-coded books are (and by this I mean liberalism in the Locke/Mill/Rawls open society and individual rights sense), it’s actually quite hard to make LLMs go against mainstream liberal ideas. Elon Musk has been trying to do this with Grok to little success.

Last year, xAI updated Grok to “not shy away from making claims which are politically incorrect” and to “assume subjective viewpoints sourced from the media are biased.” Within days, Grok was praising Hitler, calling itself MechaHitler, endorsing a second Holocaust, using antisemitic catchphrases, and producing graphic rape narratives targeting specific users. Musk and xAI were forced to walk back many of the changes.

Despite these machinations, Grok 4 still scored as left-leaning, even slightly more so than Claude in one analysis. A New York Times analysis found that while Grok had shifted right on government and economy questions, its social responses still leaned left.

The problem facing those who wish AI would reflect right-wing views more is that the training corpus is fundamentally left-leaning. Given the current state of LLM technology, regardless of what fine-tuning and training is done, it is still layered on top of a model that has been trained on a largely English-speaking, liberal corpus of text.

My colleague Kelsey Piper performed an experiment in which she asked the same 15 questions to ChatGPT-4o, Claude Sonnet 4.5, and DeepSeek’s DeepSeek-V3.2-Exp. She found that liberal values are consistent across chatbots and across languages. As Piper discovered, “AIs tend to express liberal, secular values even when asked in languages where the typical speaker does not share those values.”

None of this means the right is doomed. Perhaps a real sustained effort—and a few hundred million dollars—will succeed in creating an anti-woke but useful AI.

The Trump administration is eager to see such a development. Last year, the White House issued a “Preventing Woke AI in the Federal Government” executive order that reads: “AI will play a critical role in how Americans of all ages learn new skills, consume information, and navigate their daily lives. Americans will require reliable outputs from AI, but when ideological biases or social agendas are built into AI models, they can distort the quality and accuracy of the output.”

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AI as the anti-social media

Public conversation tends to treat chatbots as the next in a long line of digital communications technologies that have decentralized truth.

The internet, smartphones, and social media all made the production of information cheap and significantly decentralized who could produce it. AI is making the production of information extremely expensive and centralizing who can produce it.

And while, yes, AI hallucinates, the direction of its errors is toward mainstream consensus, not fringe positions. When ChatGPT gets something wrong, it tends to do so in a confused-Wikipedia-editor-misremembering-something-they-once-read kind of way, not in a QAnon-forum-poster-high-on-ketamine kind of way.

The open question is who will get to control the centralizing forces of AI.

All of this might sound a bit rosy to some of the AI skeptics and doomers, but I think of it rather as reframing what the real risks of AI are. After all, while we all have positive associations with the printing press now, it was not always thus.

For hundreds of years following the invention of the printing press, millions of people died in religious conflicts spurred by the Protestant Reformation. The rise of the nation state enabled the mass slaughter of millions in world wars, not to mention brutal colonial empires. Modernity and the industrial revolution came after decades of conflict over who got to control the canonizing institutions.

Perhaps humans in 3500 A.D. will look back on the era of AI with fondness for enabling even greater technological and social complexity, but that doesn’t mean our lifetimes will be all that pleasant.

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Recommended reading

We’re taking The Argument to San Francisco! On May 13, Kelsey Piper and Jerusalem Demsas are debating a question that feels unavoidable right now: Is AI actually changing how science gets done, or are we in the middle of a very expensive illusion? Jerusalem is bullish; Kelsey is skeptical.

And you won’t just be watching. You’ll get to join in on the argument, too.

Join us May 13 at The Chapel from 7 to 10 p.m. Come argue with us! RSVP here.

Welcome back to The Argument’s poll series, where we survey Americans on the issues everyone’s fighting about. Our full crosstabs are available below the paywall at the end of this post. Our last surveys have asked about the economy, gender issues, ICE, education and parenting, the lingering politics of COVID-19, immigration, AI, and free speech. The Argument’s full methodology can be read here.

Crime is a social justice issue.

In a typical year, low-income Americans are almost twice as likely to be assaulted as wealthy Americans; The “highest vulnerability” counties — the most poor, disabled, and marginalized ones — had 4.4 times the homicide rates as the least vulnerable counties in 2020. Property crime disproportionately affects poor people, both because they disproportionately live in poor neighborhoods and because having your package stolen is a minor inconvenience if you’re rich and a potentially catastrophic one if you’re poor.

If you own a car, the nearest pharmacy to you being shut down amid a spike in retail theft is only a minor inconvenience;1 if you are disabled, poor, or otherwise do not have a car, it can be life-altering.

I have always considered it an important liberal principle that we are accountable not just for what we do, but for what we enable by failing to condemn it or prevent it: I notice liberals and progressives tend to take this for granted when it comes to foreign policy but often fail to think about what it means at home. It means that passively allowing high homicide rates makes our government complicit in the murders of hundreds of its residents.

Whether liberals’ apathy toward crime grew from taking the path of least resistance amid criticisms of the police, a mistaken belief that it is more progressive not to enforce the law, or a tragically wrongheaded idea that a different approach to violence reduction would work better, it did emerge, and it did become commonplace. That did not need to happen, and it must never happen again.

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The process of adequately addressing violence involves hiring cops, making rival and often dysfunctional government departments work together, and approaching people believed to be at high risk of committing violent acts to make it very clear that they will be caught and sent to jail if they shoot at people — or even just illegally carry a gun. Baltimore has massively improved its murder clearance rates from around 40% in 2020 to 68% in 2024 — of course that significantly changes the calculus for would-be murderers.

This is delivering an essential public service to communities that are economically, politically, and socially marginalized. Failing to provide those communities with the service of policing is abandoning our fellow Americans to horrible deaths — just as surely as a refusal to provide them with medical care would be, just as surely as a refusal to provide them with any food would be.

In The Argument‘s most recent poll, fielded April 20 to 23, 2026, we asked 1,516 registered voters about crime and public safety issues. The poll revealed that many Americans who disapprove of Trump are still unwilling to cross the aisle and vote for Democrats. How much could differing views on crime explain that reluctance?

A plurality in our poll “believe that neither society, courts, nor the criminal justice system as a whole deal with criminals harshly enough,” wrote my colleague Lakshya Jain, The Argument‘s director of political data. Only 15% of voters said they think the courts are too harsh; 43% said they’re not harsh enough.

Lakshya looked into the Republican voters who disapproved of Trump but leaned toward voting for Republicans in 2026 and found that this group of voters prefers Republicans 47% to 1% on crime, one of the most lopsided margins I’ve ever seen in a poll. (The other half said they trust neither party or were unsure.)

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Matt Yglesias has observed that Democrats are the “party of people with humane instincts.” They are less trusted than Republicans on any issue that involves the use of violence while being more trusted on issues like health care and (historically) education, where it’s an advantage to be perceived as caring and compassionate.

If you ask “Do we deal with criminals harshly enough?” voters are never going to trust Democrats to be the side saying “deal more harshly.” And, predictably, in our poll on that question, Trump voters were far more likely than Harris voters, 62% versus 27%, to say that society doesn’t deal with criminals harshly enough.

But I actually think that the principled liberal position on crime and public order does not require a departure from the general Democratic ethos of being humane, compassionate, and concerned for the marginalized. And, indeed, I think taking that ethos seriously requires preventing crime as much as it requires providing education and health care.

The liberal case for taking public safety seriously

A logical consequence of being serious about the lives and experiences of others is being really serious about protecting them from violence.

In 2019 to 2021, Baltimore averaged about 336 homicides a year. Over 80% of the victims were Black men. One analysis found that, by age 24, the average Black man in Baltimore would have lost three friends or family members to homicide.

In 2025, the city recorded 133 homicides.

If we were able to replicate today’s public safety environment in 2019, I think it’s a fair estimate that about 600 people would be alive in Baltimore who are instead dead because we failed to adequately address violence. And that’s in one city.

The Council on Criminal Justice’s survey of 35 cities found an average 21% drop in homicides in 2025. Across the whole country, about 12,000 fewer people were murdered in 2024 and 2025 than in 2020 and 2021.

Not all of that difference is driven by policy decisions. Some cities that have seen huge crime declines have adopted policy approaches similar to Baltimore’s, but crime seems to be falling everywhere.

For a while, it appeared to just be receding from the 2020 spike, but it has kept falling past the previous baseline. Without claiming that policy is driving the whole decline, it’s worth careful study of the policies in cities seeing faster-than-national decline — and worth keeping in mind the overwhelming moral urgency of sustaining these declines.

There’s a decent road map coming together for Democrats on addressing crime. I’ve seen people increasingly discussing the impressive success of fare gates in San Francisco and targeted violence reduction programs in Philadelphia and Baltimore. And our polling found that voters have lots of liberal beliefs about crime, including that poverty is among its main drivers and that better education and job training are good ways to address its root causes. They just also expect the criminal justice system to actually deliver public safety. With violence in fact dropping, there’s reason to be optimistic.

But while we have a plan for addressing crime — focused violence reduction programs, improved enforcement, more police on the street — and tools like fare gates to address vandalism, my prediction is that trust will take much longer to grow than homicides take to fall. And part of that is because of a failure to articulate that this matters, to talk about it with the same moral gravity that we bring to conversations about other preventable deaths of institutional neglect.

Rich people choose to live in neighborhoods where the streetlights are not smashed and vandalized, where trash is not dumped in heaps in the highway median to blow around on the road endangering cars, where people do not scream threats at them or throw junk at them as they cross the street.

But there do not need to be any neighborhoods where this is true. A safe, clean environment should not be a privilege for the ultra-wealthy; it is the basic obligation of our society to provide it to everybody.

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Whenever someone argues about taking crime seriously, someone else will do white collar or wage theft whataboutism. We should, of course, go after fraudsters, thieving employers, and white collar criminals, but we will not achieve a safe, clean environment by only going after fraudsters, thieving employers, and white collar criminals. We will have to enforce the laws against illegal dumping, vandalism, theft, and random mistreatment of strangers on the street.

In doing so, we create for poor and marginalized Americans the America that rich Americans already live in — one where their built environment is safe for children to play in, one where they can order packages to their home and not expect them to be stolen, one where they do not need to fear violence.2

I found it kind of odd, reading through our poll results, how many voters combined views that are seemingly contradictory. For instance, 54% of voters who favored the death penalty for “serious crimes” agreed that “crime is mostly caused by poverty or desperation.” And 72% of such voters believed more job training and education would be effective at reducing crime.

Most people think both that society should be harsher on criminals and also that felons should be eligible for welfare either immediately or after a period of time! But having thought about it more, I think this grab bag of views only seems to contradict itself because it contains the views currently associated with two different political coalitions.

Violent crime, destruction, and theft are bad. They wrong people and constitute an injustice, and a society cannot be fair, free, or humane while people’s lives are sculpted around avoiding crime victimization.

That doesn’t mean we have to adopt some view where criminals are irredeemable monsters unlike everyone else — in fact, criminals are mostly people who change their behavior in response to incentives like the rest of us. And we owe it to them, among others, to create incentives to lead safe lives instead of violent ones.

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Recommended reading:

We’re taking The Argument to San Francisco! On May 13, Kelsey Piper and Jerusalem Demsas are debating a question that feels unavoidable right now: Is AI actually changing how science gets done, or are we in the middle of a very expensive illusion? Jerusalem is bullish; Kelsey is skeptical.

And you won’t just be watching. You’ll get to join in on the argument, too.

Join us May 13 at The Chapel from 7 to 10 p.m. Come argue with us! RSVP here.

AI’s impact on jobs could happen really fast, but economists’ ability to tell us what’s happening in the labor market is often delayed.

You might be used to hearing about employment numbers regularly: New jobs data comes out from the Bureau of Labor Statistics on the first Friday of every month, and it appears in news stories about the unemployment rate and the number of jobs gained or lost. But if you read the news and learn that the tech sector lost 57,000 jobs in the last year, that doesn’t necessarily mean that 57,000 software developers were displaced by AI coding agents.

Monthly jobs data tells us what happened — it does not tell us why it happened. To isolate causes, economists often need to wait for more data to accumulate.

“National statistical systems are not designed to track task-level AI reallocation at monthly cadence,” economist Pedro Serodio recently wrote on X, introducing his report on AI’s labor market impacts in the U.K. “The unprecedented speed of [AI] adoption means that aggregate figures may take a long time to reflect real-world impacts.”

Even one of Anthropic’s recent economic reports opens on a note of humility: From offshoring to the China Shock to the automation of factories, the report warned, the effects of past economic disruptions are still being hotly debated years after the fact.

Analyzing this disruption as it happens is a major challenge. It is not impossible, though.

If economists could collect data that more closely reflects real-world conditions, they could tell us more about what will happen, rather than what has happened long after it’s over. That’s why Alex Imas, an economist at the University of Chicago, has called for a “Manhattan Project” for more real-time economic data, and his sense of urgency is shared by other economists I spoke to for this story.

From scraping internet data to interviewing workers regularly, economists are attempting novel methods to keep up with change in the labor market. Below are the ones that I found most promising.

What is job “exposure” really?

So far, the most common measures have focused on AI’s capabilities — what tasks it could do — and not how it’s used in the real world.

The foundational paper on how AI will affect jobs was published by OpenAI in 2023, called “GPTs are GPTs.”1 Its headline finding was that 80% of jobs could have at least one-tenth of their tasks exposed to AI, and 19% of jobs could have at least half of their tasks exposed.

People hear “exposure” and think, “This job is disappearing tomorrow!” but it’s more complicated than that.

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Exposure is measured by taking a job, breaking it down into a list of tasks and then seeing whether AI can speed up completion of that task by 50% or more.

If a task can be sped up by 50-plus percent it is considered exposed. If a job has a lot of exposed tasks, well, it tends to be considered at risk.

This is not how automation works in the real world:

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Welcome to The Closing Argument, our verdict on the news, plus everything The Argument published and appeared in this week. If you enjoy this newsletter, forward it along to your friends and help The Argument grow!

The Verdict by Jerusalem Demsas

In Caro Claire Burke’s debut novel Yesteryear, the main character Natalie Heller Mills is a wealthy tradwife who gets her comeuppance when she’s transported back to 1855. It’s a tantalizing premise that promised a biting social commentary on the rise of the socially conservative boss babe who reigns on Instagram.

The book has rocketed up to the top of The New York Times bestseller list, and even before its release, actress Anne Hathaway had signed up to star and produce, sensing a hit.

The book, and reactions to it, are seemingly everywhere on social media. Last week, Burke shared a Substack essay of a self-described ex-Mormon who saw herself in the character of Natalie. “This is who I wrote the book for,” wrote Burke to her 68,000 Instagram followers.

But within seconds of opening the review, I recognized the familiar cadence of AI-inflected writing.

Burke’s praise of the hollow essay reflects the hollowness of her own book, one that promises biting satire and delivers superficiality.

From Burke’s public commentary, it’s clear her fixation centers around a handful of Mormon tradwives, namely Hannah Neeleman of Ballerina Farm and Nara Smith. The former seems very similar to Yesteryear‘s main character: Attended an elite private university? Married to the son of a wealthy magnate? Seems perfect from her Instagram while attracting the ire of liberal journalists? Check check check.

From merely reading the book, one would never know that Yesteryear draws inspiration from such specific individuals. Burke never reveals what denomination her main character belongs to — in fact, for most of the book, there’s little evidence Natalie even attends church as an adult.

In an interview with The Rumpus, Burke revealed that “whether it’s Mormonism or evangelicalism or Jehovah’s Witness, it’s really all the same in terms of how women are treated and what the expectations are for them.”

This shockingly naive statement came right after Burke told the interviewer that her “main focus” was to “understand the perspective and interiority of women who live in fundamentalist Christian communities.”

There’s a great book to be written satirizing the Mormon tradwife — even more so in the wake of The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives and the implosion of the recent Mormon Bachelorette. But Yesteryear is not that book.

Perhaps because of her “secular childhood,” Burke does not imagine that faith could play much of an important role in understanding the perspective of women living in religious communities. The word “God” is invoked more times as a curse (“God no,” Natalie laughs when asked about getting plastic surgery) or descriptor (“God-awful quilt”) than as the central figure of any Christian’s life.

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When exactly is “yesteryear?”

Throughout the novel, Natalie recounts vague allusions to some past time when settlers spent their time “facing down Indians” and “drinking milk straight from the udder.” Equal parts lost Eden and survival porn, yesteryear is a memory she relates to her own children, “talking about the olden days as if they were something I could speak to, when the truth was I’d never been truly cold a day in my life” (prior to her time travel, that is).

The nonspecificity is itself a critique.

Idaho in 1855, which is where Natalie is sent back in time, was not a demarcated territory until 1863. And not until April 1860 was a permanent white settlement even established in the territory (Mormon pioneers who thought they were in Utah).1

Natalie’s ignorance is a character flaw: She does not know her history, her performance is pure artifice, there is no there there.

What becomes clear over nearly 400 propulsive pages is that the author shares this debilitating incuriosity with her main character.

Satire is at its best when the author displays fluency in their subject — most often through attention to detail.

Take Paul Beatty’s The Sellout, a satire of race relations in modern America that also invents a locale to satirize. But Beatty’s Dickens, California, is a satire of a real place — Compton — that gives his book depth. For instance, here is how he describes the gentrification of Los Angeles County:

“When the housing boom hit in the early part of the century, many moderate-income neighborhoods in Los Angeles County underwent real estate makeovers. Once pleasant working-class enclaves became rife with fake tits and fake graduation and crime rates, hair and tree transplants, lipo- and cholosuctions.

In the wee hours of the night, after the community boards, homeowner associations, and real estate moguls banded together and coined descriptive names for nondescript neighborhoods, someone would bolt a large glittery Mediterranean-blue sign high up on a telephone pole. And when the fog lifted, the residents of the soon-to-be-gentrified blocks awoke to find out that they lived in Crest View, La Cienega Heights, or Westdale. Even though there weren’t any topographical features like crests, views, heights, or dales to be found within ten miles.”

Since Jonathan Swift’s 1726 classic Gulliver’s Travels, the best satire has detailed its inhabitants’ world. The difference between a middle school bully’s taunts and the sharp knife of a well-written satire is insight, knowledge, and awareness — in short, understanding.

Compare Beatty’s description of Los Angeles County to the first time Natalie and her husband drive onto the lot that would become Yesteryear Ranch:

“Breathtaking. It was breathtaking. The barn, the mountains, the house. All of it was so much more beautiful in three dimensions than I could’ve possibly imagined when I saw it online.”

The twist at the end of the novel [spoilers ahead!] rescues Burke from having to make a point about tradwives or politics or anything. Natalie has not actually time-traveled and has, instead, lost her mind.

In a few short pages, Burke undermines her novel’s fundamental purpose.

Most tradwives are not suffering from psychotic breaks; they are promoting a new social conservatism compatible with just enough female empowerment to allow them to pursue commercial success but not enough to cast off their central purpose as submissive wives and mothers. But if Natalie is just a crazy woman disconnected from her religious community, then what can she reveal or say about any of this?

Burke’s Yesteryear, which promised to be a “satire of women everywhere,” can’t really tell us about women anywhere. Natalie’s motivations, desires, and needs are rootless because Burke doesn’t know enough about her world to develop her into a real person.

Upcoming Events

We’re bringing The Argument to San Francisco! On Wednesday, May 13, I’m joining our staff writer Kelsey Piper on stage at The Chapel to debate a question that feels unavoidable right now: Are we poised for an AI-powered scientific revolution? Or is the only scientific development AI going to produce just… more AI?

I’m bullish; Kelsey is skeptical.

Join us as we hash things out Wednesday, May 13, 7:00 to 10:00 p.m. in the Mission.

Priority RSVPs below the paywall at this link.

Not a paid subscriber yet? Upgrade your subscription — or join the waitlist, and we’ll let you know if seats open up: Waitlist →

Top stories this week

As we grow, we want to make sure you see everything we’re doing without flooding your inbox with dozens of emails. But for the real libs, you can get every post as it drops by opting into The Mag here.

🌟Abundance Wins of the Week🌟

• Pennsylvania lawmakers advance the so-called “Golden Girl Law,” which would prohibit arbitrary limits on the number of unrelated individuals allowed to live together according to current state zoning codes.

• New York Gov. Kathy Hochul is closing in on a deal — backed by major developers and Mayor Zohran Mamdani — intended to eliminate an involved review process that has set some building projects back years.

• Based on early trials, a new pancreatic cancer mRNA vaccine shows promising results. The vaccine works as a kind of immunotherapy and could meaningfully improve the odds of patients diagnosed with one of the deadliest cancers.

Worth watching...

Matthew Yglesias wants to end asylum. On a new episode of The Argument, Matt argues that the post-WWII asylum framework is not just politically untenable but practically unworkable. Jerusalem Demsas, true to form, disagrees.

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The Argument recommends by Maibritt Henkel

Four book recommendations for you:

The first is Pachinko by Min Jin Lee, suggested by . He sounds like he genuinely enjoyed it, but Lee is also set to speak at his college graduation later this month, so he might be biased.

Next up, some cultural input from , who seems to have read everything, everywhere, all at once. This week, she wrapped up Lottie Hazell’s Piglet, which she said was “fine” and Tony Tulathimutte’s short story collection Rejection, which she loved. Apparently it is the first book she has read that includes texting or internet posts but “doesn’t read awfully and feels realistic.” felt very differently. He says he bailed after the first story and a half.

reread his “second favorite of all modern social science books” Trying Not To Try: The Ancient Art of Effortlessness and the Surprising Power of Spontaneity, by Edward Slingerland. Maybe he will reveal his number one favorite next week? Stay tuned.

From me you get a music rec: Swedish singer and DJ Robyn’s new album Sexistential. At age 46, this is her ninth solo album, which comes after an eight-year break from making music. I cannot emphasize enough how awesome it is. Think Lily Allen’s West End Girl comeback but less sob and more rave.

— Maibritt Henkel

More to read:

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We’re bringing The Argument to San Francisco! On Wednesday, May 13, I’m joining our staff writer Kelsey Piper on stage at The Chapel to debate a question that feels unavoidable right now: Are we poised for an AI-powered scientific revolution? Or is the only scientific development AI going to produce just… more AI?

I’m bullish; Kelsey is skeptical.

Join us as we hash things out Wednesday, May 13, 7:00 to 10:00 p.m. in the Mission.

Priority RSVPs below the paywall.

Not a paid subscriber yet? Upgrade your subscription — or join the waitlist, and we’ll let you know if seats open up: Waitlist →

— Jerusalem Demsas, Editor-in-Chief

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We’re taking The Argument to San Francisco! On May 13, Kelsey Piper and Jerusalem Demsas are debating a question that feels unavoidable right now: Is AI actually changing how science gets done, or are we in the middle of a very expensive illusion? Jerusalem is bullish; Kelsey is skeptical.

And you won’t just be watching. You’ll get to join in on the argument, too.

Join us May 13 at The Chapel from 7 to 10 p.m. Come argue with us! RSVP here

Short-form content gets a bad rap these days. TikTok, Instagram reels, YouTube Shorts — all of it nothing but brainrot and digital dopamine, a modern “hypodermic needle,” in the words of Stanford psychiatrist Anna Lembke.

This is a moment of legal accountability for Big Social Media.

But this should also be a moment of cultural reckoning and artistic recognition. These companies have built their modern empires on an astronomical volume of short-form video content, mind-boggling in its multiplicity and universal popularity.

Kids don’t just spend time on social media because they are screen junkies who can’t read. That would be too easy. They spend time on social media, in large part, because social media has become brilliantly, absurdly, unprecedentedly, entertaining.

Even if you wish it weren’t, vertical 30-second video is the creative medium of our time. Taking seriously the merits of any new formal paradigm is in the spirit of how we have met every technological rupture in art history.

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So here are several broad categories of short-form content that I think are worth appreciating on their own creative terms, beyond the addictive infrastructure and AI-generated slop they are embedded in.

1) The vocation vlogger

Why do any of us consume art? One reason (arguably the main reason) is the desire to escape into the lifeworlds of others. These worlds can be fictional, as in the case of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, or based in fact, like the hit reality series The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives.

Vlogging taps into a similar vein of curiosity. Take the TikTok videos posted by flight attendant Maisha Prather. She documents her life working for Swiss International Airlines, like in this video of her long-haul flight from Zurich to Hong Kong, captioned “Work a night flight with me.”

Or this post by an ER nurse who brings viewers along for a 13-hour shift, featuring details about tracheostomy care and catheter placement. Or lawyer Carrie Jernigan, who has amassed over 1 million followers by sharing footage of her daily life as an attorney in Arkansas. I call these creators “vocation vloggers.”

Social media is often accused of promoting unrealistic lifestyle standards and glorifying the Kardashians of the world. But by sheer volume, even if not by algorithmic amplification, the normy masses make up a vast slice of today’s creator base, posting down-to-earth footage of the many forms that 21st-century existence can take.

This content is not valueless. The vibe of the vocation vlogger is a reality check, a window into the tough financial or emotional realities of professions that most of us will never work. The genre scratches the same itch as any good-old workplace drama, like The Pitt or The Bear or The West Wing, all TV shows that revolve around specific occupational settings.

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As patients, customers, or passengers, we see only the public-facing performance. As content consumers, we are invited backstage. And following people into rooms we normally don’t have access to — crew sleep compartments or the Oval Office — is endlessly intriguing.

2) The craftsman

A close cousin of the vocational vlogger is the craftsman. This genre is all about watching people do things they are very good at. It complicates the straightforward depiction of social media content being nothing but a race to rock-bottom degeneracy. On this side of social media, it is competency and perfection that drive views.

Take, for instance, Jungle Builder. The account posts videos of men building luxury constructions by hand in rural Cambodia. This video, captioned “You Won’t Believe How This 3-Story Bamboo Home Was Built” has over 4.6 million views on TikTok. The footage is disorienting. No further context about what purpose these elaborate structures serve is ever provided. (Aerial drone footage suggests that they actually serve absolutely none). But negative production externalities aside, the mass consumption of this content, however absurd, seems primarily to satisfy a fascination with human skill.

The popularity of Nonna Netta, a New Jersey-based grandmother who produces vast quantities of spaghetti and baked goods in her snug kitchen, points to this same appetite for skilled execution. Here she made 41 loaves of Crescia for Easter, seemingly without a recipe.

Also in this world of craftsmanship are accounts dedicated solely to meticulous pottery wheeling or immaculately detailed painting, like artist Werner Bronkhorst’s miniature illustrations.

Evaluating the artistic value of this content is complicated. The final physical product is typically impressive on its own — so much so that it is often tempting to skip to the end just to marvel at the end result.

And yet, I would argue that there is something more going on. I’m not sure I like Bronkhorst’s paintings all that much or actually find Nonna Netta’s meatballs that appetizing, but I do know that I find their TikToks entertaining to watch.

The skill that has won these accounts huge followings is only secondarily the skill being recorded on video. First and foremost, it is the skill of being a short-form video artist.

3) The comedian

A more straightforward example of people mastering the specific art of short-form video is skit comedy. This content ranges from the universally funny, like Senegalese Khabane Lame’s silent reaction videos, which have garnered him over 160 million followers, to highly select cultural references catering to niche audiences.

Last week, my teenage brother sent me an obscure Instagram Reel of an elderly German woman giving names to Lord of the Rings characters. Gandalf becomes Otto, Legolas becomes Eberhard, Lady Galadriel becomes Rotraud.

How to convey the comedic value of this strange little video? Both my brother and I have a particular fondness for the franchise, so that helps. We also have a German grandmother, which makes the whole set-up particularly comical. Whatever the reason, the reel felt as entertaining as any other form of conventional entertainment, say a stand-up set or an episode of South Park.

The true thrill of this humoristic content often comes down to relatability, to seemingly idiosyncratic experiences being revealed as much more ubiquitous.

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As I was writing this piece, a friend of mine from Pune, India, sent me a video captioned “That one rich girl from Bombay.” For me to find it funny, he had to explain some references: like that “SoBo” stood for South Bombay and that “Cathedral” refers to a prestigious private school in the region.

It is an exciting thing to be allowed entry into a fictional world; it is even more exciting to be allowed entry into the real world of someone you care about. Often that happens by way of shared art or entertainment.

Critics of entertainment-driven social media have pointed out that there is nothing very social about these platforms anymore. Where once users logged onto Instagram to see pictures of their friends, they now consume Reels by content creators. A pro-social byproduct of this trend, however, has been the mass sharing of content between users.

I am not saying that sending videos back and forth is a replacement for genuine in-person socializing. Yet, it may be a meaningful complement. And it is certainly different from the kind of isolated online experience that tends to dominate public outrage about social media.

4) The aestheticist

Perhaps most mysterious, and most distinct from art that has come before, are the videos that draw you in for no reason other than downright wackiness. Some of this is really weird slop, like mass-produced videos of AI cats.

But some of it is very much a product of spunky human ingenuity. Adrian Patterson and RJ Chumbley, known on TikTok as TheGoddessBoys, are a content creator duo that make theatrical mixology videos. Glammed out in bangles and immaculate manicures, the two perform a kind of chaotic choreography that culminates in an extravagant creamy beverage. They have their routine perfected down to a T.

Similarly inexplicable is the pull of someone like Remygumbs, whose main schtick is high-energy content of her 12 guinea pigs. She calls them “the piggies” and hosts dance parties that involve her in a bathrobe and huge piles of lettuce.

The aestheticist is not trying to offer the world anything but wacky, visually appealing entertainment. Watching TheGoddessBoys mix a “lemon lime sweet and sour green grape rock sugar yuzu foam soda” is not like reading a novel, but, then again, neither is strolling through MOMA.

What is art?

New media always falls under scrutiny. There is no formal rupture in art history that has not been challenged by existing institutional voices.

When photography emerged in the 19th century, many were skeptical — particularly painters and illustrators, who feared the technology would put them out of business. Poet and art critic Charles Baudelaire was also an outspoken opponent, in 1862 deriding the French public’s reception of photography in a letter: “And then they said to themselves: ‘Since photography provides us with every desirable guarantee of exactitude’ (they believe that, poor madmen!) ‘art is photography.’”

In the early 20th century, it was cinema’s turn, looked down upon as a lowbrow fairground attraction, not serious art like theater or literature. And this was well before the dawn of lightweight sitcoms, reality television, or music videos, which famously killed the radio star and marked an end to audio-only music.

Every formal rupture in art history is usually met by critique that accuses the new medium of being easier to produce and easier to consume, and thus less refined, less intellectual, and less valuable.

But the best TikToks are usually not easy to make. To make a single engaging video, one that actually is likely to go viral, requires an involved production process: scripting, lighting, editing, visual effects, and audio. And then do that enough times to actually build a following.

Content creator Zach King’s 15-second optical illusion videos take him and his staff about two weeks to make. That production time-to-runtime ratio easily surpasses the average Hollywood feature film.1 TikTok star Nara Smith has revealed that a single one of her from-scratch cooking videos takes up to seven hours.

The question of consumption poses a more serious challenge. This content rarely prompts profound introspection or moral grappling. And yet, brain friction is a disputed metric by which to delineate what is and is not art.

In his Critique of Judgement, Kant argued that aesthetic experience occupies a unique category irreducible to cognition, which engages the mind without producing knowledge. Leo Tolstoy, in What is Art?, defended the “activity of art” as simply the transmission of feeling, a definition capacious enough to include “jokes,” “home decorations,” and “church services” — and, I would argue, many short-form videos.

The image of the slack-jawed social media addict, desensitized and detached, does not actually capture a more complicated truth, which is that this content often evokes strong emotional responses: amusement, joy, sorrow — certainly as much as the last Rothko painting I saw.

Regulatory precision

A fair question to ask is whether any of this content is actually what shows up on people’s feeds. Maybe my “For You” page skews toward the content that most plausibly passes for valuable.

But a closer look at the most-viewed short-form videos suggests that the above categories resonate with a broad user base. As of January 2025, the most-watched TikTok globally was one of King’s optical illusion videos. His top-performing video, “Magic Ride,” is of him dressed up as Harry Potter and seemingly levitating on a broomstick. It has over 2.4 billion views. Three of King’s other videos also made the top 10. I would place all four squarely in the “craftsman” box.

Also on that list, with 1.3 billion views, is this lip-sync video by Australian model Leah Halton. It’s not rocket science why Halton, crowned “the most beautiful girl alive,” has so many clicks. The video is hardly a prime example of sophisticated creativity, and yet it is also a lot more innocuous than you might expect.

This is not to say that any of us should be watching this stuff for 10 hours a day. Most people, especially children, should spend less time on social media. As Derek Thompson recently wrote for The Argument, the real concern is that smartphones are displacing other, more meaningful, activities, like hanging out with friends or exercising.

A Gallup poll from a few years ago found that over half of U.S. teenagers spend at least four hours daily on social media. Across all age groups, the number is lower, but still over two hours.

The opportunity cost of mindless scrolling is a problem — as is the toxic, depressive content that flows directly to the most susceptible users via self-reinforcing algorithms. New research coming out on how short video content negatively affects our attention spans is also alarming — and bolsters the case for any long-form entertainment, even The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives, being better for our brains than TikTok.

This is not meant as a defense of Big Tech. It is meant as a defense of our collective cultural appetite. Public debate seems to have settled on social media as a vice that needs to be tamed. We need to be saved from ourselves and our own craving for content.

This is a particularly moralizing moment in American politics. Many lawmakers on the right are building a case against the undisciplined and debaucherous human soul. But our compulsion to watch people do weird things on the internet reveals the best in us as much as it does the worst.

In the second season of HBO Max series The Pitt, med student Victoria Javadi gets in trouble when a senior attending thinks he’s caught her making one of her popular TikToks. “When I was in medical school...” he begins to scold before she storms off. Later, another doctor defends Javadi’s videos: “You ever watched one?” she asks. “They’re not what you think.”

It’s a generational spat that is somewhat on the nose. Yet the scene captures an important disconnect. Most public commentary about screen use, mental health, and why TikTok is bad, bad, bad, also has me asking: but have you actually watched the videos?

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We’re taking The Argument to San Francisco! On May 13, Kelsey Piper and Jerusalem Demsas are debating a question that feels unavoidable right now: Is AI actually changing how science gets done, or are we in the middle of a very expensive illusion? Jerusalem is bullish; Kelsey is skeptical.

And you won’t just be watching. You’ll get to join in on the argument, too.

Join us May 13 at The Chapel from 7 to 10 p.m. Come argue with us! RSVP here

By all accounts, California offers a comparatively generous set of welfare state and labor market institutions. It offers a high statewide minimum wage, is friendly toward organized labor, and is one of only 11 states (plus the District of Columbia) with its own refundable CTC to lift the incomes of the state’s poorest families with children.

Poverty, however, is not merely a function of a family’s income level. The poverty threshold measures the income needed for a family to meet its basic needs in a particular place. That threshold is lower in Boise than in San Francisco due to higher housing costs in the latter.

In California’s tug-of-war between the state’s income support policies and the rising costs of basic necessities (housing, especially), the latter is winning. In fact, the state’s rising housing costs have effectively absorbed much of the income redistribution flowing through the state in recent decades.

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As I quantified in a report for the Niskanen Center, the $11.4 billion increase in SNAP (“food stamp”) benefits provided to low-income Californians between 1980 and 2023 has effectively been wiped out by the $13.3 billion rise in how far Californians fall short of the poverty line as a result of surging housing costs.

If it weren’t for its high housing costs, in fact, California’s poverty rate would fall from highest in the nation to mirroring the national average. This is because the Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM), a Census-produced poverty measure that most researchers prefer, incorporates variation in rental costs across municipalities into its poverty thresholds.

For example, in 2023, the poverty threshold for a two-adult, two-child family renting in San Jose, California, was roughly $58,000, nearly 1.5 times as high as for an equivalent family renting in Minneapolis (almost $40,000). That’s almost entirely because of how expensive it is to rent a home in San Jose.

That California and New York have higher poverty rates than Alabama and Mississippi may turn heads, but the patterns align with some other measures of destitution. The states with the highest rates of homelessness include California and New York — not Alabama or Mississippi. The city where nearly 1 in 7 public school students experience homelessness each year is New York City — not Huntsville, Alabama, or Jackson, Mississippi.1

“Build like Austin” is comparable to an expanded Child Tax Credit

California is not alone in suffering high poverty rates due to high housing costs: New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Hawaii join it as being states where rental prices consistently outpaced the income growth of the 10th percentile (that is, low-income households) from 1985 to 2024. What these states share is a tradition of electing Democrats to statewide office and, more directly, a shortage of housing supply relative to demand.

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