This week is an experiment in more-but-shorter posts. I’ve been meaning to run such an experiment for a while, and this week it happened more-or-less naturally: I didn’t have a 2,000-word idea, and several notes from the weekly summary were getting too long.
So anyway, three posts in addition to the summary: “Trump Went to Jared” about the ascendancy of the President’s born-rich son-in-law as a paradigm for how to succeed in the Second Gilded Age; “Freedom (Comcast’s) vs. Rights (Yours)”, which follows up on the freedom vs. rights idea I first noticed when talking about Reconstruction, that the rights of the weak depend on institutions that restrain the freedom of the strong; and “Can We Get Real About Opioids?”, pointing out how we dodge the real issues about drugs, and how Trump’s approach to the opioid problem is still doing it.
They should come out in that order, between 8 and 11 EDT, with the weekly summary (Russia, ongoing congressional dysfunction, climate change, nonbinary gender, and a bunch of other stuff, closing with another reworked classic “The Boy From Mar-a-Lago”) around noon.
The Weekly Sift 