Deep articles exploring American politics, urban and environmental planning, and the solar-punk future
Once suffering extraordinarily high violence rates, Medellín remade itself through transit, public libraries, and public-space investments. This essay traces the politics, innovations, ambivalences, and lessons for U.S. cities seeking equitable urban transformation.
In American law, 'activist' is the powdered sugar we throw on the bench when we want to make someone else's footprints more visible than our own. Since the 1980s, the conservative legal movement has acted with strategic purpose—first under 'New Federalism,' then through the Roberts Court's project.
September 15, 2025
As of October 14, 2025, an American-brokered ceasefire is in effect. Phase 1 is happening; final status is not. The ceasefire is a door ajar, not a house built. This analysis examines what Trump delivered, what he left out, and what a reality-based settlement must do next.
October 9, 2025
Every empire tells time with its roads. Rome had milestones; we have press releases. In 2021, Congress passed the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law—a vault of money large enough to make accountants need a hammock. The numbers are real; the cranes are not imaginary.
September 22, 2025
A presidential proclamation does not rename a federal holiday; it performs it. Trump's 2025 Columbus Day proclamation rejects the dual-recognition posture of 2021–2024. Let's be precise about what changed, what didn't, and what a grown-up republic should do instead.
October 6
In recent years, the Supreme Court has asked judges to test certain rights and regulations against 'history and tradition.' The words feel neutral, even comforting—like walking the family farm before making a will. But methods make worlds. A jurisprudence that privileges a particular.
October 2
The most American thing about the United States is that we keep mistaking prologue for plot. We nod at Spain and Mexico in the opening credits, then hit fast-forward to railroads and robber barons. But the decisive drama—the social inventions, the legal improvisations, the urban.
September 29
Walk into any American newsroom on a slow afternoon and point to a globe. Paris elicits sighs; Prague, a study-abroad anecdote; Berlin, a memory of train schedules that ran to the minute. Say Tegucigalpa, and the room tilts. Not hostility—just air pockets of unknowing.
September 25
Every nation is a story told about land. The United States has preferred the tidy novella: thirteen British colonies, a heroic revolution, then Manifest Destiny. But walk any city with your ears on—Los Angeles, San Antonio, Santa Fe—and the place names remind you that the harmony was written in.
September 18
From Florida's classrooms to Hungary's parliament halls, the 'anti-woke' movement reveals itself as more than culture war—it's a systematic attempt to redesign the distance between citizen and state, neighbor and neighbor, in ways that fundamentally alter democratic participation across the.
September 11
Climate, migration, trade — the Americas are entwined. This essay argues that effective responses to shared crises require institutional designs that match hemispheric interdependence: joint infrastructure, finance, and democratic cooperation.
September 8
Beneath every American highway lies the dust of empires that spoke in another grammar. The Spanish colonial past offers an alternative genealogy where identity was not binary but layered—a continental experiment from Florida to California that still defines our moral noon.
September 4
Call it the constitutionalist's promise: decide by text, history, and structure rather than by vibe or partisan appetite. In principle, that's healthy. In practice, on the current Supreme Court, the methods deliver outcomes that lean the same direction over and over—and create a new vision of the.
September 1