Against Storytelling “Walking around downtown SF, past giant Internet companies with thousands of employees, at some level you have to acknowledge that the things that really work just don’t have to try as hard as things that don’t. Or to put it even more simply: The best-designed stuff doesn’t tell you some high-minded story; it […]

Bad things happen for a reason, and other idiocies of theodicy “The essential difficulty of the problem of evil is how to reconcile its apparent existence with a loving, all-powerful deity. One popular method has been to reassert the inherent justice of the world, implying, if not explicitly claiming, the righteousness of the suffering that […]

Rules for a constitutional crisis “What a good lawyer does is tell a story that persuades. Not by hiding the truth or exciting the emotion , but using reason, through a story, to persuade. When it works, it does something to the people who experience this persuasion. Some, for the first time in their lives, […]

The Data That Turned the World Upside Down “Nix shows how psychographically categorized voters can be differently addressed, based on the example of gun rights, the 2nd Amendment: “For a highly neurotic and conscientious audience the threat of a burglary—and the insurance policy of a gun.“ An image on the left shows the hand of […]

An argument for eliminating the corporate income tax “The corporate tax comes, I think, from fundamental misconceptions. The first is that corporations are somehow like people, who when taxed bear some burden. No, corporations are just shells or buckets of money, people pouring money in or taking it out bear the entire burden.”