Sorry for my long silence!  I've been busy, just not on here.  I'll see how I feel about doing more of this, but I've been hoarding links, so I'll give you some of them here.  

Maybe we’re not facing a global decline in democracies.

How will the federal government spend the $1.25 trillion that Congress and President Biden has generated to build a stronger and more resilient infrastructure? This piece begins to tackle some of the challenges.

A war over Taiwan would be a bloody mess. And that’s if things go well.

Interesting idea, a four-day workweek; an experiment seems to have gone well.

On the disappearance of vacations, especially full week-long vacations, for the american workforce.  

This is totally fascinating. People in the American south live in a region that has poorer credit scores, and those county scores affect the credit score of everyone who lives there, no matter what. The lower scores seem rooted at least to a significant degree in medical debt. And medical debt is rooted to a significant degree in whether you have expanded Medicaid in the wake of Obamacare.  TL;DR: not choosing to accept the ACA fully has harmed the credit ratings of citizens of those states.

My colleague Herman Schwarz has an excellent piece, on what he calls “the Nokia risk,” namely "small countries, big firms, and the end of the fifth Schumpetarian wave"

This is a bit of special pleading about John McCain’s prophetic character (by one of his old staffers), but it’s a pretty detailed picture of the Zeitgeist in the just-concluded Munich security conference.  

He’s not wrong:

“I hold the view that today’s college curriculum deals inadequately with existential issues: evil, identity, intimacy, tragedy, yes, and pain. Indeed, I’d go further and attribute part of the humanities’ decline to the failure to engage systematically and holistically with these existential issues.”