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Now a newsletterer?

After twenty years of blogging, I have followed my fellow netizens to Substack, where I am publishing a weekly newsletter. You can subscribe via the form to the left and please drop me a note with a link to your newsletter.

Taking Notes

Thinking out loud in my corner of the internets.

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I’ve been writing here for over a decade now. In hindsight, only a handful of those posts are still worth reading.

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Latest Essays

The Carlsbad Marathon

It was about five o'clock in the morning when Cindylu, with her sweet little voice — all chamomile and honey — says, "Oso, you should probably put some vaseline in your butt crack." That's when I knew I was in for more than I had signed up for. It all...

In turns out that …

I'm finishing up Clay Johnson's The Information Diet, which I am enjoying immensely. I've been at a couple events with Clay, but haven't had the chance to sit down and shoot the shit with him. From what I've seen and read, though, he seems like an immensely likable...

Protest Infatuation and the 4th Wave of Democratization

Along with David Brooks, Jeffrey Goldberg, and Jad Abumrad, Kurt Anderson belongs to my select fraternity of idealized, intellectual American man-crush. So I was kinda, well, crushed when I read his cover story for this year's Time Person of the Year. Like the rest of...

[Inequality] A US – Latin America Middle Class Reversal?

Last Sunday Jorge Castañeda wrote an opinion piece in the New York Times Sunday Review warning Americans what happens when a country doesn't have a middle class. Yesterday he extended his argument in an hour-long interview with Tom Ashbrook. Castañeda argues that...

El Coco is Gonna Get You

My problem is the following: I get to a point where I have 7 or 8 drafts of ambitious yet incomplete blog posts that, if my to-do list is to be believed, will 'soon' be published. But my to-do list is not to be believed, not ever. And so these drafts sit and collect...

Too Much Information – Week Ending September 23

What follows is a hyperlinked version of the weekly newsletter of the Information Program of Open Society Foundations. Next week Becky Hogge will take up the newsletter one again. You can continue to follow new editions at her blog. News Global Open Government...