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Learn to Manage the Shpilkes

The word “shpilkes,” which refers to a state of agitated anxiety, is probably unfamiliar to most non-Yiddish speakers. I am not a Yiddish speaker, but like many of us above a certain age I learned...

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“Rage-Farming”

Of all the political communication pathologies worsened by modern media technology, one of the lesser-known is “rage-farming.” It's an old idea in new clothes. Their biographers detail the pettiness...

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Pesky Pluralism, Part 2

The antagonist in the 2006 film The Illusionist  is a fictional 19th century Hapsburg crown prince, played by Rufus Sewell. Sewell's prince is vain and cruel in his personal life, and a dedicated...

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Pesky Pluralism, Part 1

One feature of the modern information environment is that it allows conspiracies and utopian fantasies of the left and right to grow undisturbed by reality. Utopian ideas are often the product of...

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“Flooding the zone with s**t”

As I have noted in several other posts (e.g. here and here), a second Trump presidency would represent a setback for the energy transition because of Republicans' turn away from green energy and...

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“It’s Hard to Be Humble”

In 1980, a country music artist named Mac Davis had a hit with a song called "It’s Hard to be Humble." The opening lines were “Oh Lord, it’s hard to be humble / When you’re perfect in every way.”...

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“I mow my lawn”

In my 20s I worked at a law firm whose system for evaluating the performance of attorneys included a "public service" component. This was fairly typical back then for big firms, and its aim was to...

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What Is “Capture”?

In chapters 2 and 3 of Climate of Contempt I describe the gap between folk wisdom about corporate dominance of the policymaking process and what empirical political science research says about that...

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Conservatives’ Dilemma

Because my book is aimed at the climate coalition -- and how misunderstanding of regulatory politics by some of its members slows energy transition policymaking -- many of my examples of...

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“It’s the Voters, Stupid”

The transition to a much lower carbon energy system will (eventually) require congressional legislation. That implies a significant change in the positions of existing members of Congress and/or...

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