Peter Thiel Isn't a Conservative Anymore
July 2025
I’m not saying that conservatives have to like stagnation or anything; they can think that growth and freedom are good, important values. But conservatives do have to recognize that stability is also good and important. That “peace and safety” are necessary conditions for growth and innovation. And sometimes that involves being a bit more cautious and restrictive: because you have to take seriously the idea that not every new thing is good. That there’s a downside risk to “disruption,” and that part of the government’s job is to manage and mitigate it.
Sexual Misconduct Training Is Often Worse Than Useless
October 2025
I am an eternal optimist. I believe that if you mostly just let people do what they want, most of them will most of the time act in mostly good ways to each other. I am also an eternal pessimist. I believe that there are some people with malice in their hearts — Lincoln called them the “lawless in spirit” — who will unhesitatingly do very nasty things to other people if given the opportunity. I think that, excepting certain common moral blindspots, people tend not to be hopelessly confused about what is right, and what is wrong. In particular, I think it’s unlikely that very many students entering college are unsure of whether it’s good or bad to rape, assault, abuse, and harass their classmates.
Lock the loud up, New Haven
September 2025
Driving into New Haven this August, I met the northeast in half a dozen unmuffled and shiny BMWs. Each in turn roared down the on-ramp and merged with a jerking motion; they began to weave haphazardly between all three lanes of traffic, brake-checking semi-trucks and terrorizing all the sleepy Saturday-evening-road-trippers they could find. To call it a culture shock would be an understatement. My home is Ann Arbor, Mich., a college town much like New Haven, only midwestern, around half as big, and essentially without violent crime or sadistically reckless motorists. Above all else, Ann Arbor is quiet. I’ve lived on a campus there before, sleeping in a dorm room with the window open, and it’s eminently possible to go weeks without waking at 4 am to the sound of a tricked-out, entirely-unoiled Dodge Challenger tearing through downtown.
Curtis Yarvin — mellow out, dude
October 2025
What if we thought of the neo-reactionaries not as right-wingers who happen to be revolutionary, but as revolutionaries who happen to be right-wing? The framing feels a bit unnatural — we’re conditioned, today, to think of political movements first in terms of their ideology, and second in terms of their methods. But revolution isn’t merely a method — it’s an attitude toward the world, a vibe, a feeling more profound even than ideology. The revolutionary’s mindset has always been, as Canadian political theorist Bernard Yack puts it: “Modern institutions have deformed me. They have made me the weak and miserable creature that I am.” Out of this feeling flows the ideology — a story about how the institutions are deforming everyone, and which alternative ones wouldn’t — and the method — often violent revolt. What we see are only these surface-level manifestations. Diverse as they appear, the core pathos is always shared.
We Don’t Need ‘Trust.’ We Need Ambivalence.
September 2025
For most of the history of higher education in America, everyone understood this was the point: To give a select few exceptionally clever kids a shot at living a life of the academic, the abstract, the noumenal—what it might be fitting to call the Life of the Mind—knowing all would benefit to some extent, but expecting most to leave the Ivory Tower behind. The Life of the Mind was decidedly not its antithesis, Real Life, and no one expected it to be. It involved education in all sorts of wacky things—readings in Plato, Virgil, Karl Marx, and Michel Foucault, or exercises in analytic and algebraic topology of locally Euclidean metrizations of infinitely differentiable Riemannian manifolds (bozhe moi!)—which were all abandoned to hazy memory once students left campus for their Real Lives. Sure, some of the best of the best in the humanities went deeper and wackier into their favorite wacky things, and got jobs teaching them to the next generation—but everyone else moved on. They got jobs at banks and at consultancies, Marx and Foucault gathering dust together on their bookshelves. And then something changed.
Cut the Fat
October 2025
Yale has got a lot of non-academic staff on payroll. Some do important IT work, or clean the halls or feed the students—but around half, more than 6,000, are “managerial & professional,” or M&P, staff. Their duties are often decidedly more nebulous. You can find M&P bureaucrats installed in every corner of every department at Yale. We’ve got a Center and an Office and a Committee and a Procedure and a Protocol, and oh my God, one million IRBs, for every single little thing. And it’s not like all their work goes on only in the background—certainly not all these jobs are of the bullsh– variety. No, their impact can be felt.