Regional Briefings — Dispatches that read society, politics, economy and culture events from around the world via an interdisciplinary lens.

The Echoes in the Reflecting Pool: Spectacle, Silicon, and the Thermodynamics of an Aging Empire

How a Week of News Exposes the Fraying Infrastructure of Democratic Life: July 2–5, 2026.

The Architecture of Heat: Silicon Chokepoints, the Unitary Executive, and Ghost Cities

Notes from a World Building and Unbuilding Itself, June 29 – July 1, 2026.

The Weight of the Air: Friction, Chokepoints, and the End of the Frictionless World

From European heat domes to silicon bottlenecks, how the myth of a seamless digital world is crashing into hard physical boundaries—and dictating who gets left to sweat.

Algae, Algorithms, and the Edge of the Strait

Reading the Week’s News with Greenspan, Minsky, Braudel, Wallerstein, and Gramsci.

The Lost Mariachi, the Gilded Accord, and the Gallium Substrate

Reading the week's news with Andrew Tuck, Eric Schmidt, Fernand Braudel, and the hidden systems that actually write our treaties.

The Strait of Everything: A Field Guide to the Chokepoint

The Strait, the Kill Switch, and the Aging Muscle

A week that reopened one chokepoint and revealed another — and the matter that refused to disappear.

The Smuggler, the Trillionaire, and the Kibble of the Stars

Reading the Week's News with Plutarch, Melville, Sebald, Sontag, Hofstadter, and a Few Other Spirits of the Modern Closet

The Great Re-Embedding: How Resource Scarcity, Ideological Bipolarity, and Fractured Alliances Are Ending Late Liberalism

From the Open Access Blog.

Technological Acceleration, Social Precarity, and Institutional Crisis: Dispatches from the Fragility of Late Modernity

From the Open Economics Blog.

The Digital States of Exception of Late-Capitalist Modernity: Hyperreality and Consumption, Intellectual Spaces in Crisis and Demographic Transition

From the Open Access Blog.