September brings change, including to The Adret. As of this week, I am now a grad student at Yale, which has obvious implications for what I read and my bandwidth to maintain the monthly digests. The last thing I want to do is to stop curating the reading list and community at the center of this Substack, but my goal is to adapt the format.

Starting next month, “The Best of…” will become “The Adret Digest,” sharing 5-7 articles on a mostly irregular cadence. I will share a Digest whenever I have gathered 5-7 pieces worth sharing, about every 3-5 weeks. By scrapping the monthly curation, I hope to be able to share fewer articles, more often, without the significant amount of re-reading and tailoring that “The Best of…” demanded.

Adret commentary pieces may also be more frequent than before. My hope is to drink from the firehose of academia and share worthy ideas here.

So, this is likely the last “The Best of…” until the end of the year, but certainly not the last set of reading recommendations. As always, The Adret is a community-driven project, so your feedback is warmly welcome.

Without further ado…

• 🌻 no data centers in my backyard. jasmine’s substack by (26 mins.)
  It would be easy to oversimplify the data center debate into a tech-backlash movement, NIMBYism, or some form of degrowth. At the heart of it, however, there are also important concerns about the processes that underpin our democracy and reactions to failed promises of growth over the last few decades.
  Losing our competitive edge in AI and compute are, in my view, threats to national security, so understanding these movements and addressing should be a top priority for policymakers.

• Reader submission: Does Silicon Valley dream of Philip K Dick? Financial Times by and (11 mins.)
  Few people appreciate the importance of reading science fiction to understand politics like Henry Farrell.

• What do consultants get paid for? Silicon Continent on Substack by (8 mins.)

  Having spent 4ish years as a consultant trying to explain my own job (although not specifically that kind of consulting), this is a very good summary.

• How Democratic Elites Think About Trump. Drezner’s World on Substack by (6 mins.)
  I have already covered how nostalgia and resignation are not strategies. This covers why mimicry isn’t either.

• How Alliances Survive: The Case Against Pessimism and the Path to a New Allied Order. Foreign Affairs (24 mins.)
  This likely undersells the feeling of betrayal among allies, but it nonetheless shows why despair and overemphasis on a break shouldn’t stop a strategy of allied coordination.

• Who supports free trade? Everyone. The Argument on Substack by (6 mins.)

  Free trade is not just for neoliberals anymore.

• China’s Quiet Quest to Dominate Latin America. Foreign Affairs by (11 mins.)

  My friend Natalia fleshes out a network of “small but beautiful” interventions. It also gives me plenty of ideas on how we could build a non-predatory, liberal network to mirror it.

Wishing you a busy but enjoyable September!

After a few very busy weeks, I am afraid this is a half-baked and very late “The Best of…” I have bigger updates professionally and for The Adret coming up, including a potential revamp of the newsletter to adapt to my changing schedules and more commentary pieces. More updates soon!

At least there was a commentary piece in July:

Without further ado…

• A Philosopher’s One-Word Theory to Explain Why the World Feels So Weird. Derek Thompson (20 mins., ~1 hour listen)
  An Agnes Callard theory is likely to make it into the Adret, so is Derek Thompson. The meta-level here is that Callard is, as far as I can tell, publicly explaining the uni-context for the first time on a podcast episode.
  I cannot stop thinking about the implications of the idea: where it is so obvious in day-to-day life and where context collapse still feels early.

• Reader submission: Andy Burnham’s regional privilege. The Financial Times (3 mins)
  Scathing.

• He’s the Last Great Land Artist You’ve Never Heard Of. The New York Times (15 mins)
  Land art is cool. I have always found it interesting to think about sculptural art that is both incredibly dependent on its physical context yet is mostly seen by people far away in photographs.1

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• Where the returns to AI go. Economic Forces by (13 mins.)
  This is quite technical and wonky but well worth the effort to understand the basic argument. I appreciate the implications it has for both how we interpret the (on and off) talks of a “bubble” but also about where the future of human work lies.

• America’s Surprising Energy Advantage. How to Beat China on Clean Power. Foreign Affairs (12 mins.)
  So often when we think about “competition” (with China) we think about how to do the same thing better. Which inevitably leads to doing the same thing but worse and starting from behind. Rather than seeking out process replication, I quite like seeking where potential advantages could be and dedicating time and energy in carving out an edge, in this case on energy.

• Why is it so difficult (and crazy expensive) to fly within Africa? An Africanist Perspective by (10 mins.)
  I have always wondered about this.

• America’s Maritime Policy is Fighting the Wrong War. Commenda Media (11 mins.)
  I have some quibbles with some of the details here but no one else has put all of this in one picture so clearly in some time, so it gets a mention in this half-baked edition.

Media

• The Bear Season 5
  More than lives up to the hype.

• you seem pretty sad for a girl so in love Olivia Rodrigo

• who asked? Domi and JD Beck
  My favorite duo. This is just brain melting good.

See you in a few weeks … maybe?

Hope August is great!

I deliberately avoid pieces that declare the death of something. For one, the obituary is usually premature; if you can interview someone involved in the current form of something, it is not dead. For another, just because it is being transformed, it does not mean we have lost our agency to change, reverse, or modify that course.

Today, the Financial Times published this piece:

• RIP the US state department. America’s diplomats used to have global sway. Now they are besieged by their own president. The Financial Times (12 mins.)

I do not blame the Financial Times for its millennial-coded “RIP State Department” headline, but I do have quibbles with those interviewed eager to offer their libations. They share a certain schadenfreude with those who critique the current state of affairs and declare hallowed institutions dead without offering ideas for change.

Past warnings do not merit sanctimony: the State Department is not dead, should not be dead, and cannot remain in its current weakened state. I hold no pretense that its previous iteration can be revived, but it would be foolish not to seek a better future, including strategically increasing headcount and budget.

Former officials and “foreign policy thinkers” cited in the piece make three cumulative claims:

1. the State Department needed serious reforms in order to adapt to the current global environment;

2. the current administration enacted reforms quickly, including reductions in force and growing politicization of career positions; and

3. a future Democratic administration is unlikely to want to restore the State Department to its previous state.

All three are pretty unobjectionable claims, as I have summarized them, even if not quite amounting to the death of the department. However, all three, as presented in the article, have serious deficits that should encourage a future administration to spend some political capital to reinvest in the diplomatic toolkit.

Long overdue reforms

The article concedes the trite proposal that “[d]epartment insiders acknowledge state was due a rethink.” Others have applied the same statement to USAID, the Education Department, NOAA, Social Security, or any number of government bodies and policies.1 However, the question at hand is not whether State should iterate to adapt to the times but rather to be hollowed out to make way for personal vendettas, corruption, and poorly-evidenced processes.

Reform requires a thoughtful assessment of what worked and what didn’t, and, more importantly, a candid understanding of the circumstances you are trying to adapt the institution to. There are solid ideas for the former, all ignored, but frankly, not that clear of a picture for the latter.2 Instead, the baby was thrown out with the bathwater and “insiders” are wondering if, maybe, the baby could have been due for a rethink.

Speed

Aside from valid complaints about the substance of the ongoing changes at State, the article also has an interesting observation on the speed:

“There is something to the argument that state was long overdue consolidation and modernisation,” says Jacob Shapiro, the John Foster Dulles professor in international affairs at Princeton University. But, he adds, “it feels like it was done very quickly, without a lot of analysis of the consequences for US diplomacy”.

Again, I do not disagree per se with Professor Shapiro’s point, but presumably, the fact that it was done “very quickly” is secondary to absence of analysis. Sure, thoughtful assessments take time, but if the goal is to adapt to the times then the study cannot take so long that the times have changed yet again. In government, speed should be counted as a virtue — the hollowing of the capacity to represent Americans abroad should not.

Misidentifying the problem as speed closes the door on the kind of restoration of diplomatic capacity that will be much needed in 2029. Responsiveness addresses both voter concerns about a government that has at times become too glacial and the demands generated by growing competition and global challenges.

No dreams

The article concludes with half-baked defeatism: “foreign policy thinkers” conclude that there is little political capital to return to American hegemony (as if that were solely dependent on whether swing voters felt like being the sole guarantor of global public goods) and therefore that “restoring” the State Department is unlikely.

“One strategist” (so courageous as to remain nameless) even concedes that the reforms were apt.3 However, strategy requires a clear-sighted desired end-state and deliberate paths to get there, not a feeble retroactive justification.

A better strategy would be to ask the right questions about what a fit-for-purpose State Department would look like and how to expend political capital to make that happen.

Americans may be wary of hiring thousands of civil servants or Foreign Service officers to create new capacity within the department, especially with skyrocketing national debt. However, they are also generally supportive of the kinds of global engagement that require a robust diplomatic corps: preventing conflict, strengthening ties to allies, and promoting free trade, among others.

Your friendly neighborhood State Department

If the State Department is not a vehicle to maintain power in a bygone era, then it should be reframed as a tool to solve problems, especially the ones it already handles.

Americans are traveling internationally more than ever. They may be eager for the State Department to invest in more staff that keeps them safe and aware of risks while abroad, unlike in recent cases.

It can also take on affordability, a top issue for voters. Already, the Department has been setting up monitoring and coordination mechanisms for critical minerals. Coordinating government demand signals, price floors, and subsidy schemes with partners and allies will require investments but can promote price predictability for suppliers and, downstream, for consumers.

The Department is also crucial in combating drug and human trafficking by coordinating with other governments, which it gets little credit for. The same applies to conflict prevention or climate cooperation.

Diplomacy should be treated as the means, not the end, and the end should be concrete. “Make America Safer, Stronger, and More Prosperous” means nothing. Protecting people while they travel, cutting costs, and fighting drug and human trafficking are known voter priorities that the Department helps tackle. With that framing, the appropriate reforms, reorgs, and budget restructures can more easily fall into place.

Anti-resignation

Unfortunately, nostalgia paralyzes the imagination needed to make these changes possible: if return is impossible, then why not leave lackluster solutions in place?

Nostalgia also limits the possibility to imagine the difference between restoring and returning, ironically preventing us from seeking out what has worked well in the past while avoiding its mistakes.

Treating political capital as a scarce resource, especially in foreign affairs, underestimates both how easy change can be and the rewards for effectiveness. Today’s changes at the State Department show how little political capital is required to make a major change. With a sharper strategic vision, speed can be leveraged to create momentum, and delivering a few effective results reduces the cost of initial congressional approval, with opportunities to iterate thereafter.

Peace Corps was first founded by executive order using existing appropriations and then established by Congress, the inverse of today’s agency demolitions but a model worth copying.

A new generation of “strategists” must have far more ambition to reimagine our institutions without conceding that their ongoing destruction is somehow partially warranted by vague notions of the “new order.”

Institutional death does not come from reckless change; it comes when we stop imagining that the institution can serve its purpose. The State Department, much like USAID and the rest of the foreign policy apparatus, can still deliver for people if we choose to build strategies for their potential.

Another month whizzes by.

I have been tinkering with the look and feel of the website side of the Adret, mostly without strong opinions or approach. Welcome any feedback!

Without further ado…

• Don’t Give Up on Global Order. Foreign Affairs (20 mins.)
  
  “The next president will have to be honest with the American people, explaining that tariffs are a mostly regressive tax on Americans; productivity gains and technology advances are far more responsible than trade for the decades-long decline in the U.S. manufacturing sector; the greatest beneficiaries of lower-cost imports are lower-income families; reducing barriers to trade and opening up new markets can create good, high-paying jobs for Americans; and protectionism and tit-for-tat tariff wars are more likely to be a path to 1930s-style economic stagnation than to the massive expansion of U.S. and global prosperity seen during the post–World War II era.”
  
  Not only am I a lover of long, semicolon-laden sentences; I am also a huge admirer of gutsy, thoughtful essays outlining what the future of American foreign policy can look like. Not to mention odes to the global order.1 Long time Adret readers will know recommendations like these are a motif of this newsletter; this piece stands among the best and marks a real evolution from 2025.

• How to make football more exciting. The Economist (3 mins.)
  Feels apt given the ongoing proceedings.

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  Get your hot summer reads here:

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• Did a Rowdy English Nobleman Mastermind the American Revolution? The New Yorker (15 mins.)
  A timely reminder of America’s global roots and the power of convening and coalescing. I can only hope that history gives us cause for optimism and perspective, even when it is otherwise hard to come by.

• AI Corner
  Oh look the AI corner is back!
  One of the goals of the Adret is to recommend , “A piece that challenges assumptions about the world we live in or how we tackle society’s challenges.” AI seems to be incredibly ripe for challenging assumptions, from water use to labor impacts, and to think about its implications for solutions.2

  • The Data-Center Panic Is Overblown. The Atlantic (7 mins.)
    It bears repeating that we are wildly overestimating the issues with data centers. Of course, there are legitimate local concerns, but there are also very legitimate localized benefits that need to be far more visible.

  • AI Isn’t Management. Programmable Mutter by (15 mins.)
    This is basically a professor calling someone out on not doing the readings, with serious, valuable real-world lessons to extract from it.

  • 🌻 the old world is dying. jasmine’s substack by (11 mins.)
    AI-related professional advice feels both perennial and ever-changing. Few people understand the AI world better than Jasmine Sun, and I utterly admire her clarity and writing chops here, even if Gramsci is overdone these days.3

• What are Frederic Church’s stunning landscapes trying to tell us? The Atlantic (17 mins.)
  I couldn’t miss the opportunity to have an article about the paintings at the top of the 2026 newsletters featured in one of the newsletters. It is also just a fun article about the meaning of art and interpretation. Plus, I have a delightful story about Henry James, if you ever want to hear it.

• How the Squamish struck gold in Vancouver. Works in Progress (17 mins.)
  I have been waiting for this article since about 2023, when I first heard of Senakw. It is obvious Adret fodder: building stuff, democratic creativity, and tribal sovereignty.

• More evidence won’t save development. Eat More Electrons by (8 mins.)
  From the authors of “Death to the Policy Report” and “How to Get Sh*t Done in Washington DC”.

• Ultra-processed food harms tied to content not manufacture, review says. Financial Times (3 mins.)
  Another angry buzzword doesn’t hold up. The abstract of the review is worth reading too: Science

Don’t forget to hydrate!

This month’s edition is special. Not only because it comes slightly late, but because it is more unfiltered than the usual “The Best of…”

Given a rather hectic May, I am sharing some of the better things I read, but not in the balanced and fully-curated approach of the usual digest. There are bristling pieces and pieces that throw punches where none land. There are many Europe-related ones: I spent a solid chunk of the month in Europe and its neighborhood.

Hopefully, my editorial haste is at least partially overcome by my latest Adret commentary piece about Armenia and diplomacy in an attention economy, linked below.

I will try to do more of this occasional writing, especially when there is something interesting to say, but will try get back to the usual highly-curated selection in June. No guarantees!

Without further ado…

• Washington diary. Works in Progress by (4 mins.)
  An ode to a lovely city. An ode to the illusions that build a common culture.

• Do more Europeans die of summer heat than Americans die of guns? By the Numbers by (3 mins.)
  Yes.
  (This is not even in my Europe cluster)
  Just a crazy chart. We all have fixable problems to solve.

• Jakarta’s Remarkable Urban Transit Transformation. In Development by (9 mins.)
  Jakarta is, by some sources, now the world’s largest city. Reading about its incredible public transport transformation is really uplifting, showing how to solve hard infrastructure problems in changing and dynamic spaces.

• Toward a working definition of paperclip-punk. Virtual Elena by (7 mins.)
  This is one of those where you will see it everywhere after reading this. Might as well be cool and early and well-informed. For your Spritz-laden summer patio conversations.

• Are you there Grok? It’s me, Margaret. AI as a centralizing technology. The Argument by (8 mins.)
  I am still not entirely convinced by the “centralizing technology” argument, but it at least gives a framework for wishful thinking. Now, imagine if we slow down adoption of a “centralizing technology” because of a decentralizing social media induced, anti-AI sentiment…

• A Cheat Sheet for Attracting Private Sector Talent to Government. Factory Settings by (12 mins.)
  Bringing talent to government will be a major challenge for the next few decades and has huge implications for how we solve problems we want to solve. I would welcome a comparative analysis of this approach. How do Singapore, Norway, etc. do similar things?

• China’s diplomatic successes are broad but shallow. The Economist (4 mins.)
  People who argue that diplomacy is all about capturing attention are SO vindicated right now.1

• How to cut suicide rates, healthcare costs, crime, and prices. The gatekeeping problem in 30% of US jobs. Positive Sum by and (7 mins.)
  This one is how you avoid getting talent in places you need it.

• The End of Foreign Aid Is Not the End of Development. How the World Can Do More With Less. Foreign Affairs (11 mins.)

  I share a lot of articles on this topic, but it never stops being informative or timely.

• Europe Cluster
  Over the last few weeks, I have recounted sitting at an event in the fall of 2018 about the “future of Europe.” After a pandemic, the invasion of Ukraine, some bruising elections within and without, so many conversations on the same topic today come to the same conclusions as that event in 2018.
  From this side of the Atlantic, these conversations are exhausting when they are so futile but also something to envy when people articulate visions for tomorrow. The pieces below articulate big debates about the future of the economy, politics, and democracy, with plenty for those of us on this side of the pond to worry about and learn from.

  • Americans defending Europe; Europeans criticizing it.
    There is a meaty debate about the European economy going on. I find the first two the most compelling, but recommend reading the rest:
    Silicon Continent #1: The two Europes (8 mins.)
    Silicon Continent #2: European stagnation is real (9 mins.)
    Krugman #1: Challenging the Narrative of European Decline (11 mins.)
    Krugman #2: Europe Versus America: A Response to the Critics (7 mins.)

  • The Labour Party Is Playing With Fire Over Its Future and the Future of the Country. Tony Blair (22 mins.)
    I have a lot of quibbles with this, but it is also just so articulate while throwing big punches.

  • This Is the Formula That Defeated Orban. New York Times by M. Gessen (15 mins.)
    The challenge is rarely identifying who to learn from but to learn from them.

Stay cool in June!

The streets of Yerevan are surprisingly quiet: tree-lined avenues and picturesque architecture rival those in the most beautiful European cities, a remarkable fleet of high-tech Chinese electric vehicles run side-by-side Soviet Ladas, and people walk at a brisk yet unrushed pace. Crosswalks look like traditional Armenian carpets, and Mount Ararat (but not its adret) imposes over the city.

Other than world flags on lampposts, little indicates that Armenia has just hosted its most important week of diplomacy: hosting nearly 40 European leaders for the European Political Community, an EU-Armenia Summit, a state visit by French President Macron, and the Yerevan Dialogue, a foreign policy conference.

I attended the latter last week—a refreshing venue for geopolitical discussions away from the recycled talking points endemic in Washington. It is hard to walk away from these conversations as an optimist (despite my recent comments), but it was equally hard to come away with the idea that all the obituaries for the global order are not somewhat premature. Instead, I left with the impression that there is incredible demand for more: engagement, connections, business, and diplomacy.

While the erudite talking point is to declare the state of the world a messy interregnum,1 that is neither an empirical observation nor a normative aspiration. Some use the undeniable chaos to seek a 180-degree turn to a nostalgic notion of a previous order. Others seek vindication for their long-standing cynicism by calling the world more transactional, realist, bipolar, or multipolar. Neither ends the chaos nor explains what got us here.

Here, I could contrive my travel journal into a grand strategic thesis, using travel’s illusions to confirm my priors.2 Rather than pastiching experience, I explore a few high-level themes from Yerevan to comment on the diplomatic landscape – not as global order or disorder – but rather as competition for scarce international political capital.

“Disruption” or hedge

Adret readers will be familiar with Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s now-seminal Davos speech calling for a new order amid “disruption” and a networked grouping of middle powers. While rhetorically compelling and extraordinarily well suited to the moment, its practical implementation falls short of its normative vision.

In Yerevan, ministers, officials, and think tankers from the European neighborhood and Asia alluded to Carney’s “variable geometry” but their statements, and the policies they aim to uphold, seem more aligned with the hedging that Carney warns against:

But when we only negotiate bilaterally with a hegemon, we negotiate from weakness. We accept what’s offered. We compete with each other to be the most accommodating.

This is not sovereignty. It’s the performance of sovereignty while accepting subordination. In a world of great power rivalry, the countries in between have a choice – compete with each other for favour, or to combine to create a third path with impact.

The Yerevan Dialogue was riddled with that kind of bilateral courtship towards the world powers, rather than coalitions of like-minded countries. There were calls for more Chinese investment in infrastructure, laudatory remarks towards President Trump’s dealmaking, and long-shot courtship for EU accession.

As Carney notes, the appeal of this approach is obvious: it keeps the options open while great power competition bears out. Variable geometry quickly erodes into variable norms, rules, and values. Canada can go sign trade agreements with dozens of middle powers, but it is still dependent on reaching major agreements with both China and the U.S. And, while coalitions of middle powers would be better suited to work together in these talks, such coalitions have yet to materialize (barring the long-standing inclusion of Mexico in North American trade).

If Carney’s proposal is to address a growing undersupply of global public goods, then the coalitions to provide them will struggle to compel smaller states amid hedging between world powers. Bilateral deals provide opportunities that are more easily sold at home with fewer objections than complex multilateral coalitions. Armenia is still invested in a U.S.-led infrastructure and investment peace plan, gradual integration with the EU, and a recently established strategic partnership with China. It also has a waning security partnership with Russia.

Relationship geometry like Armenia’s is not uncommon – in fact, it is the modus operandi of diplomacy across Latin America, Africa, and large chunks of Asia. It is not even wholly inconsistent with Carney’s “variable geometry,” but the shortfall of middle power coalitions is that smaller countries may not be compelled to support a geometry that delivers less than great power bilateral deals and likely take up more diplomatic time and attention.

A middle-power alliance requires two things: for countries to accept the limits of their individual influence and for those middle powers to choose each other over the great powers. The latter is where the proposition seems to be falling short. Middle powers will struggle to form coalitions with already hedging countries, forget about attracting crucial smaller states.

That is partially a problem of scale and partially a problem of showing up: Carney’s words were very present in the Yerevan Dialogue; Canadian diplomats left with Carney the day before.3

Other “middle powers” were notably absent, with no speakers from Latin America and only think tank representatives from the larger Indo-Pacific countries. Meanwhile, President Macron led a sizeable French delegation, aiming to speak for Europe. America was represented by respected mid-level officials. It is simply easier for powers to show up by virtue of their large diplomatic corps, a shortfall that coalitions of middle powers would need to overcome.

But the focus on the middle power aspect of Carney’s speech is the wrong one. Rather, its moral argument – defending liberal values and multilateral institutions – is the more compelling part of the speech. However, until the middle powers can overcome their political capital shortage and coordination problem, Carney’s normative vision will continue to fall behind the unappealing alternative.

Attention grabbers

Ironically, Carney’s speech partially overcomes the deficits of its prescribed strategy by capturing attention. Its moral clarion call – both “principled and pragmatic” – continues to be repeated, including in Yerevan. Cornering the attention market, Carney has attracted scarce political capital for Canada to pen deals with countries, bring leaders to Ottawa, and attend fora like the European Political Community.

If middle power coalitions lack the coordination and diplomatic bandwidth to successfully create “variable geometries” vis-à-vis great powers, then Carney played the attention economy to tilt the playing field in Canada’s favor.

Grand diplomatic pronouncements underestimate that diplomacy itself is a scarce resource to be allocated, hence the small- to medium-state emphasis on courting great powers. Public diplomacy, like alliances, aims to change that allocation: grasping attention and reducing the costs of engagement.

Conferences like the Yerevan Dialogue – and accompanying displays of food, art, and culture – are tools of public diplomacy and soft power as well as worthy causes unto themselves. But the concrete outcome of Yerevan’s whirlwind diplomatic week is to draw attention to a country that benefits from additional scarce diplomatic attention from Europe and the U.S.

Diplomacy remains a deeply human art form, born of interpersonal relationships but constrained by limited time and attention. Conferences reduce the barriers to bringing people together, garner favor for the hosts, and focus on a narrower set of issues. A significant number of the participants at the Yerevan Dialogue had never been to Armenia nor spent much time working on it, but now, it is unlikely to leave their radar.

Exporting services. Where are Americans and Europeans?

After the end of the Cold War, American, and to a lesser degree European, goods and services became symbolic of an era of peace through commerce. Most emblematically, the “Golden Arches Theory of Conflict Prevention,” proposed by Thomas Friedman in 1996, says that no two countries with a McDonald’s have gone to war.

Of course, the tongue-in-cheek theory—rooted in a longer intellectual tradition—has some notable counterexamples: first in the NATO bombing of Serbia in 1999, then in the Russian invasion of Georgia in 2008, and again in Russian invasions of Ukraine in 2014 and 2022.4

Counterexamples aside, I was impressed by the lack of U.S. or European tech services in Armenia. Sure, WhatsApp is ubiquitous but so is Viber. Rideshare and food delivery are dominated by Yandex, a Russian everything app. While a small market, there is a ripe opportunity for Uber or Bolt, and the soft power benefits that come with it.

As the U.S. and Europe become bigger services exporters, export-promotion policy architecture needs to become fit for purpose. So far, it has mostly focused on exporting manufactured goods as a boon to labor markets, with services often not needing much support. However, as an attention-grabbing measure in great power competition, services and highly visible brands may be the next frontier of export promotion. Their magical war-preventing powers are unlikely to bear out – their soft power potential might.

I continue to be a big believer in diplomacy – in the maximalist sense – as a social exercise to solve international problems. Despite losing some vogue amid increasing competition, armed conflict, and humanitarian catastrophes, it remains a key component in their solution. A more interesting question is how diplomacy is adapting to the changing framework, from normative power to variable geometry to attention and reputation.

If I had answers, I wouldn’t be putting them on Substack. But the serene, midday streets of Yerevan held at least a few grains of what the global order currently looks like: not a messy interregnum but a competitive landscape seeking scarce resources. It is both the Ladas and the Hongqis5 with a few interspersed Mustang SUVs. It is the geopolitical competition of phone apps. It is about what fights for attention.

Hope you enjoyed the surprise Adret post. Aside from being a labor of love, The Adret is also a village effort. Please continue recommending reading and writing ideas, as well as sharing with friends, family, and like-minded rivals.

Share The Adret

Last week, a friend asked me something along the lines of “how do you stay optimistic?” My answer was less than eloquent.

In retrospect, all I meant to respond was, “I don’t have much of a choice.”

When I say I don’t have a choice to be optimistic, it is only because it requires some imagination to create opportunities for improvement. You have to delude yourself just a little bit out of the despondency.

After more than a year of The Adret, I am more compelled to keep sharing writing that reignites my own agency and imagination. I also feel more compelled to justify its existence, to continue demanding your attention, and to continue outsourcing my opinions to deft writers just as you outsource your reading list.1

Happy readings!

Without further ado…

• I found It: The Best Free Restaurant Bread In America. The Atlantic by Caity Weaver (48 mins.)
  Without turning The Adret into a Caity Weaver fan page (albeit merited), this is the gesamtkunstwerk of long-form journalism. It contains socioeconomic critique, family stories, sad moments, happy moments, laugh-out-loud moments, throwing a handful of people under the bus, and so much more. Few can dream of writing this well.

• Why Japan has such good railways. Works in Progress by and Matthew Bornholt (18 mins.)
  Anyone who likes thinking about trains (which is probably everyone) has asked themselves the Japan train question. I appreciate both the nuance of why privatization is important with the broader developmental problem to address. But, the public policy question is even more interesting: how do you allow markets to capture the windfall of the things they create?

• Netflix Culture: Freedom & Responsibility. Slideshare posted by Reed Hastings, co-founder of Netflix. (~125 text-light slides)
  Yes, this is a corporate slide deck, but, unlike generic drivel, this is a pretty remarkable presentation. I have a continuing fascination with the mechanics of turning good ideas into reality, so I found this particularly compelling. It is, of course, not replicable in every organization, but as founding principles, you have to admire its bluntness, courage, and potential.

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  I bet your friends would love this:

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• If America’s So Rich, How’d It Get So Sad? Derek Thompson on Substack (14 mins.)
  Another regular feature on this newsletter. It’s either your cup of tea or not. In this case, Derek has a grand theory of the never ending vibecession, with plenty of surprises.

• Price controls make a troubling return to the mainstream. The Financial Times (2 mins.)

  Sometimes, I just want someone to write a piece that says, “This is dumb. Stop.” This is that piece.

• Reader submission: The IT department: Where AI goes to die. The Economist by (4 mins)
  The reader submission returns!
  Other than a quibble on the intro, this is another really good anecdote about the barriers to AI’s transformational potential. It is super interesting to read bits and pieces on how AI will and will not change our lives, making our assessments based less on fear and more on calculating risks and rewards.2

• On Sanctions. Post Strategy on Substack by (10 mins.)
  Overused? Underused? Poorly used? Not strategic? Geopolitical virtue signaling? This is a short and sweet primer on sanctions from an insider’s perspective. There is a good reason Judd often makes it on these lists.

• San Francisco Solved Metro Vandalism With One Neat Trick. The Atlantic by (10 mins.)
  There are no simple answers in public infrastructure (see trains above). Solutions may go against our initial impressions, but this is pretty remarkable progress in improving access and quality in public transport, especially when coupled with broader changes to socioeconomic challenges.

• Death to the policy report. Eat More Electrons on Substack by (7 mins.)
  You know what? Yes. Why not?

• How Orbán defeated himself. Foreign Affairs (7 mins.)
  Good riddance. Like so many other spectators, I have waited for this moment for a long time. I have written papers and reports and memos on Orbán’s wrecking ball to the Hungarian economy and his insidious network. I have worked for between two to three organizations absolutely hated by his cronies. I believe I may have ended up on several of their “lists” of unsavory people. This is a long time coming. Moments like this is why we remain optimistic.

May is always a hectic month: see you on the other side!

2

And, no, AI does not use up a lot of water:

Andy Masley

The AI water issue is fake

AI data centers use water. Like any other industry that uses water, they require careful planning. If an electric car factory opens near you, that factory may use just as much water as a data center. The factory also requires careful planning. But the idea that either the factory or AI is using an inordinate amount of water that merits any kind of boyco…

Read more

a year ago · 360 likes · 66 comments · Andy Masley

Despite more promised, yet unrealized Adret content, we have now reached the start of a new month, calling for a wrap up of the best reads. Hopefully, these can serve as respite or perspective. As always, I welcome suggestions and widespread sharing.

Without further ado…

• The Incredible Story of the Cartel Olympics. The Atlantic by (53 mins.)
  You have no idea how this article will end. Cancel your evening plans. Book an hour to read it. Your reactions and assumptions will tell you as much about your view of the world as what the world actually looks like.
  It reminds me of one of my favorite books but telling you which is a spoiler. Check this footnote when you are done:1

• Current events
  Despite the mostly-perennial nature of Adret recommendations, I thought a few tangential articles could help make sense of it all.
  
  America’s New Way of Economic War. The dangers of a strategy with no doctrine. Foreign Affairs by (10 mins.)
  The superb Peter Harrell fleshes out the perils of capturing sanctioned ships, showing the need for, frankly, both strategy and doctrine for a new era of more assertive economic warfare. As he rightly states, it is hard to imagine putting the genie back in the bottle, but that only further stresses the needs for thoughtful and clear constraints.
  
  Pacific not pivoted to yet again. Duffel Blog (1 min.)
  Levity helps.
  
  Abundance Is a Better Foreign Policy. Riskgaming on Substack by (7 mins.)
  Many are saying this.

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  Polymarket odds you put your email in this box? 100%

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• How Metrics Make Us Miserable. Derek Thompson on Substack (20 mins.)
  Podcast format notwithstanding, this piece has lots of great ideas and points. I particularly feel Gen Z and younger Millennials are particularly polarized between pro- and anti-metrics sentiments. It’s easy to fall into the habit of optimizing every available number about life (my Substack reader numbers beckon).

• Why America is so much better than Europe at immigration. The Argument on Substack by and (9 mins.)
  The story of immigration backlash is not the same on both sides of the Atlantic, nor should the U.S. Europeanize its approach. Culture and language certainly play a role, but they are the less interesting variables to understanding what works. I have quibbles with the “who shows up” section, which confounds long-term outcomes with short-term ones (e.g. education % after ~45 years vs. current unemployment). However, it is otherwise a well thought out piece.

• The Mecca of the lanyard class. New Statesman (7 mins.)
  No one does highbrow-lowbrow like an English magazine.

• The Institute Behind Taiwan’s Chip Dominance. Asterisk Magazine (16 mins.)
  Taiwan may be one of the few countries where the rest of the world spends far more time thinking about its future than its past or present. A little bit of its history may teach us some valuable lessons.

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• Why ATMs didn’t kill bank teller jobs, but the iPhone did. David Oks on Substack (17 mins.)
  is doing a superb job doing serious economic storytelling; this time about the kinds of technology that actually replaces jobs. I look forward to continuing to recommend his stuff.

• Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius. from the University of Illinois website by Jorge Luis Borges (25 mins.)
  ”Fiction? In The Adret?”
  ”Who said this was fiction?”
  This short story/article is one of those often referenced in obnoxious erudite circles, so reading it has a certain social benefit associated with it. Not to mention, it is actually a fun read.

• Why cheap waste management is key to stopping plastic pollution. Our World in Data by (4 mins.)
  Put this in the category of “Instagram didn’t tell me about this”.2

Happy April folks!

I’ve been traveling (maybe I will write about it), so this is coming a bit late and a bit rushed. Seems apt for the anniversary.

A little more than a year ago, I began writing the Adret and “The Best of…” It has been an interesting journey: full of odd articles and cramming as much reading as possible into the last week of the month. The occasional foray into original writing has also been a steep but rewarding learning curve, hopefully for my audience as well. This wouldn’t be possible without your support: the comments, emails, texts, and article suggestions are invaluable. Thank you.

Without further ado….

• Stop Meeting Students Where They Are: What I learned when I finally started assigning the hard reading again. The Atlantic (9 mins.)
  Assuming most of the Adret readers aren’t about to take a literature class, the most applicable advice here is really about what we demand of ourselves and how we measure the value of our time and effort. Everyone thinks they should read more (including myself), but why don’t we do it?

• China is killing the fish: An environmental danger almost no one is paying attention to. Noahpinion on Substack by (9 mins.)
  This is easily one of the largest global problems facing little to no scrutiny. It is an environmental risk with very clear geopolitical undertones. Also, unlike climate change, which increasingly has technological solutions that change the necessary politics,1 this requires substantial collective action when it is less likely to emerge.

• AI, AI, AI
  Everyone is writing about AI these days, often not assisted by AI. It certainly elicits many eye-rolls. If it is even half as important as its creators hype it up to be, then reading good analysis seems generally worthwhile.
  
  Why AI won’t wipe out white-collar jobs: The technology will expand their scope and raise their value. The Economist (6 mins)
  Not only is this a compelling yet self-interested argument, but it’s also cleverly written. Air traffic control is maybe not the best example, but we can live with the abstraction.2 “Do AIs dream of eclectic creep?” is an incredible pun.
  
  America’s $1T AI Gamble. Apricitas Economics on Substack by (7 mins)
  The numbers don’t lie.
  
  I Thought I Understood A.I. Companies. I Couldn’t Have Been More Wrong. The New York Times (6 mins)
  Put this squarely in the “upend assumptions” Adret bucket.
  

• Japan LLC has been trading its way out of a fiscal hole. Financial Times by and (6 mins)
  I’m allowed to share nifty, nerdy stuff like this.

• There Is Only One Sphere of Influence. Foreign Affairs (22 mins.)
  Contextualizing is really important — especially when international relations commentary often takes a few assumptions, e.g. about “decline,” and turns them into a sort of zeitgeist. I appreciate this article for laying out a somewhat different vision and assessment of where the U.S. is today, despite the risks that mistakes and bad policy can bring about.

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• Africa needs its own credit rating agency. Financial Times by President Bola Tinubu (2 mins)
  I have heard and read compelling arguments both for and against this. This is not among the most interesting. Instead, it is an interesting case study in international affairs communications: the President of Nigeria writing in a London-based financial newspaper about the “Africa premium.” It feels like something a professor should hand out with wide margins and expect markup and commentary.3

• I worked on Chagos, a deal worthy of Le Carré. The Times (9 mins.)
  This is a remarkable apologetic and inside view on the 2024 agreement between the U.K. and Mauritius to transfer the Chagos Archipelago to the latter, while keeping a U.K. lease on a military base used by the U.S. I commend the sincere effort towards transparency in a line of work—diplomacy— that so rarely rewards it. I appreciate the tricky balances between following international law and responding to a shifting global order. Readers are well served by both the discussion of tradeoffs and the ongoing crumbling of the deal, which stems from not selling the deal at home, leaving it vulnerable to cheap nationalist rhetoric in U.K. that made its way to influencing the White House. I also appreciate the shoutout to people-to-people exchanges.
  However, I have different views of how to best approach an article like this one and regret the author’s dismissive tone around some of the people and offices involved.

• How to Make Daycare, Healthcare, and Housing Cheaper. Positive Sum on Substack by (5 mins)
  I love lists. I even love lists when there are always competing and tricky political tradeoffs. However, this list gives me enormous optimism because it shows how little we need to do to tackle parts of what feel like enormous, intractable problems, with citations. We can indeed use salami tactics on our problems.
  So, here is a fun call to action (if you live in a relevant jurisdiction): copy-paste what you like from this list and an accompanying citation and email it to your city councilor or state legislator. Tell them to respond with their opinion on the issue. Let me know what they say.

That is it for this month. Wishing you a good beginning of Spring and a good Adret anniversary.

Back to our regular schedule and programming.

Although I would be remiss if I didn’t promote some of the excellent reads of 2025, which make for great consumption during frigid days.

2026 will be a wild ride. February 27 will be the one-year anniversary of The Adret; no party is planned.

Without further ado…

• AI-proofing yourself.
  A New Year’s letter to a young person: Take the messy job. Silicon Continent on Substack by (9 mins.)
  How to AI-proof your job. Financial Times by (3 mins.)
  The rapid advances of AI in the last few years, coupled with its still-lagging adoption, is starting to give glimpses of what post-AI work will look like: collaborative, social, messy, and deeply human-centric. Of course, better understanding AI is crucial to evolving with the market, but staying ahead will require lots of those long-derided “soft skills” and all of the muscles developed by studying the humanities. Both of these pieces get to similar conclusions, each in their own interesting way.

• “Principled and pragmatic: Canada’s path” Prime Minister Carney addresses the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting Prime Minister of Canada (9 mins.)
  Not to steal from but this speech is worth reading because it is as much an essay as an oral argument.
  It seems quite likely this speech will be cited for a long time and read in classrooms. I think it has two interesting and intertwined elements: one is the clarion call of the middle powers. The other is the beginning of what I would like to call “the liberal world order without the world or the order,” where the bare fundamentals of liberalism (more so than “values-based realism” or “progressive realism”) stand in a post-rules-based world.1

• Cheap ornament and status games: Was modernism originally a way to signal taste instead of wealth? Works in Progress by (9 mins.)
  Just a few days ago, I had (yet another) conversation where I had to defend my love for brutalism. I think this goes a long way to dispel some thoughts about who likes modernism, why it came about, and how it is still relatively unpopular.
  Bonus points for the cost disease reference.

• “On Being a Good Neighbor” draft at Stanford University’s MLK Center2 by Martin Luther King Jr. (~ 20 mins.)
  Seems relevant.

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  Is reading on your 2026 resolutions list? Are you falling behind? Fix it:

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• China pulls back on funding African projects. Semafor (3 mins.)
  This is so different from what people expect and talk about in DC. It takes a few seconds to update your priors.

• Did the CHIPS “Everything Bagel”...Work? Factory Settings on Substack by , , , and (40 mins. reading or 1:36 listening)
  I have mentioned before how much I am enjoying these posts because inside baseball is fascinating. But, this is broader than that: there are a lot of critiques about binding together different policy goals. This is at least one solid example of where approaching the problem with curiosity will show you that the simple critique is wrong.
  The real question is what the “pumpernickel bagel” theory could be.

• The Long-Term Benefit of Gentrifying Cities: Bringing rich and poor together has major benefits. The Atlantic (7 mins.)
  Reading that title might elicit skepticism, but this is a nuanced and well-cited piece. I think it is a rare and good example of how to condense social science research into popular press articles.

• Do markets make us moral? Financial Times (3 mins.)
  Again, some solid social science turned into a good piece. It asks good questions, leaves us with imperfect but interesting answers.

• Wall Street Investors Enter Single Family Rentals. Arpitage on Substack by (6 mins.)
  Whoops! One more social science paper turned into an article. Nice of the professor to promote his student’s work.

Disclaimer: The last recommendation is borderline on Adret criteria. It is bleak and gruesome. It is also very well written.

• I was kidnapped by idiots. The Atlantic (13 mins.)
  You’ll laugh at the smoking scene and suffer elsewhere. There is an unspoken lesson about the value of humor in dark times.

As always, this newsletter is a truly collaborative effort. Please send submissions and ideas!

Wishing you a solid February.

While the Adret is still less than a year old, the beginning of a new year is an excellent opportunity to share my endless gratitude for all of the people that have supported this project. From recommendations, to scrutiny and feedback, to likes and shares, this is forever a community-based project, even if very online.

In 2025, this little project has overwhelmed me with the immense amount of readable stuff online. I have no idea how many articles have been pared down to make the trimmed-down monthly roundups, but “The Best of…” has shared:

• 121 articles

• 2 TV Shows

• 2 books

• 1 music album

All of these (and more) are available in the Adret Library:

I have also written a couple of standalone or near-standalone thoughts, each make to take a long-term view of a particular line of thinking, aligning with the Adret’s founding vision:

• The blight of Nostalgia:

• Dishwasher problems:

• Growth:

• Lessons from my critic era:

This year will continue to focus on curation, which I hope has shown its value over the last 10 months. However, I also have plenty of thoughts that may still be interspersed between the “Best of…”

Now without further ado…

My 20-ish favorite reads of 2025 ranked:1

1. Writing is thinking. On the value of human-generated scientific writing in the age of large-language models. Nature Reviews Bioengineering
   Wholly unsurprising first pick. It’s not just about scientific writing either. It is about how we approach all of our work.

2. The Secret That Colleges Should Stop Keeping. Despite ever-higher sticker prices, the real cost of getting a degree has been going down. The Atlantic
   This was an early discovery for the Adret, and one of the stories that upended one of my biggest assumptions this year.

3. An Innocent Abroad in Mark Twain’s Paris. My quest for a true literary experience resulted in choucroute, a surprise organ feast, an epiphany at the Louvre, existential dread, and a rowboat. The Atlantic
   Easily the funniest thing I read this year. Caity Weaver wins all of the writing accolades from this humble publication.

4. Fleeing and panic is dumb.
   The first “cluster” of reads on the list about the need to stay resolute in difficult times.

   1. against the fleeing to europe industrial complex. a brief polemic. the late review by

   2. Schrödinger’s Democracy. The Argument Magazine by

5. Do You Actually Know What Classical Music Is? Does Anyone? The Atlantic
   As mentioned in my December piece on writing, my time working around classical music has influenced a lot of my thinking. This piece’s ideas are a concise reflection of so many of my frustrations about the genre for much of the last 10 years and proposes something genuinely helpful.

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   A brief aside:
   Despite my focus on foreign policy/national security, you will see that the top 5 are all not directly about that. Why? Because it is impossible to be good at understanding politics or geopolitics without context and breadth, even about music, higher ed, or just writing as a concept.

   ---

6. Understanding China cluster.
   One of my goals for this year has been to broaden my reading on international affairs and how we think about its impact at home. No issue feels as big or as pressing as the China challenge, especially with a deluge of writing about it. Here are a few of the most helpful pieces I shared this year.

   1. What Are the United States and China Competing For? The Dignity of the Individual, and the American Idea. Choosing Victory on Substack by
      I may not wholly agree with everything here, but it is so important to articulate the why of U.S. + allied competition with China.

   2. Underestimating China. Why America Needs a New Strategy of Allied Scale to Offset Beijing’s Enduring Advantages. Foreign Affairs
      ”Allied scale” is my top NatSec idea of 2025.2

   3. The China Model’s Fatal Flaw. Why Beijing Can’t Overcome Overcapacity. Foreign Affairs

7. On Engagement. The debate over who should meet with whom. Why it paralyzes U.S.-Africa policy. Post Strategy on Substack by
   It is so easy to think about what foreign policy you want without fleshing out its mechanics. Judd is doing top-notch work in explaining how we do diplomacy and how tools and engagement are crucial to get right, at least as much as lofty values.

8. The contested economic future cluster.
   2025 has been a year of competing visions for the world economy. For the U.S. this has spurred debates about the failures and successes of “neoliberalism” (a term inconsistently defined, often maligned, and regardless of policy, likely to be relegated to scapegoat status). New ideas about “post-liberalism” or “post-neoliberalism” abound, with their own inconsistencies and rather broad stroke attempts to fix many problems at once. These pieces take pretty clear stances on the debate.

   1. The Post-Neoliberal Imperative. Contesting the Next Economic Paradigm. Foreign Affairs

   2. The Post-Neoliberal Identity Crisis. Drezner’s World on Substack by

   3. Globalization did not hollow out the American middle class. The protectionist narrative is more myth than fact. Noahpinion on Substack by

   4. After the Trade War. Remaking Rules From the Ruins of the Rules-Based System. Foreign Affairs

9. The Real Reasons Your Appliances Die Young. NYT’s Wirecutter
   This was the “most clicked” recommendation of the year. I loved sharing something that wades into the perennial discourse of whether things used to be better (looping to nostalgia) with tangible implications.

10. The imaginary war on American workers. We’re in trouble without more immigration. The Argument on Substack by
    Ignore the thorny politics at your own peril, but ignore the economic reality at everyone else’s.

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11. How our brightest minds get trapped in the City. Money is just one reason why graduates are drawn to finance, management consulting and corporate law. Financial Times by
    There are a million articles decrying the pipeline to consulting, finance, and big law. Most of them make some moral argument about needing to contribute to society (rightfully so) or complaining about only seeking wealth. I appreciate the more articulate perspective here: it is about risk aversion.

12. The End of Thinking. The rise of AI’s “thinking” machines is not the problem. The decline of thinking people is. Derek Thompson on Substack
    Ties in nicely with #1. It would be easy to read ’s argument and interpret it as a reason to be pessimistic, but hard problems, addressed early should be reasons to be optimistic or at least spur action. This one feels quite approachable.

13. How a Hazelnut Spread Became a Sticking Point in Franco-Algerian Relations. The wildly popular Nutella competitor El Mordjene has been banned by the European Union, a move some see as politically motivated. The New Yorker by
    Imagine a piece that somehow has a little bit of a lurking Abundance question, a little bit of complicated cultural politics, and some nitty-gritty international affairs. All told firsthand. This is the prime foreign policy narrative storytelling we need more of.

14. The Anti-Abundance Critique on Housing Is Dead Wrong. Derek Thompson on Substack
    If you’ve ever wanted to learn how to intelligently refute someone’s arguments, this is how.

15. What’s the carbon footprint of using ChatGPT or Gemini? By the Numbers by
    ”Google says that its median text query uses around 0.24 Wh of electricity. That’s a tiny amount: equivalent to microwaving for one second, or running a fridge for 6 seconds.”

I have really enjoyed curating reads in 2025, and I hope to continue helping you outsource your reading list in the year ahead. If you have not already, subscribe or share this newsletter below:

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Wishing all of you a very excellent 2026, full of good reads and, more importantly, full of time with great people!

Wait… it’s still December. Why is there a “The Best of…”?

This month’s roundup comes a few days early, assuming good writing won’t come between now and Jan 1, to make way for a special New Year’s edition: “The Best of 2025.” If you are slightly remiss on your Adret syllabus or a new reader, you will get the delightful opportunity to get the cliff notes. For now, you will have to make do with a concise December list for the lull before the new year.

Without further ado…

• Can we break the human development-environment trade-off? The opportunity to build a human-nature relationship that is not zero-sum. Sustainability by the Numbers on Substack by (11 mins.)
  When I started this newsletter, I emphasized that I would rarely write my own takes because there are so many good ones out there. Here is a good example, I wrote this piece about growth and its relationship to the environment in September. However, this piece from Hannah Ritchie nails part of it down better than I did. The best way to become an optimist is to be reminded we all the ability to contribute to making the right choices: Hannah’s piece is perfect reminder of it.

• How did the CIA lose a nuclear device? The New York Times (34 mins.)
  The picture of Nanda Devi above serves a purpose after all. For 10 months of occasionally contrived mountain metaphors on this Substack, there doesn’t seem to be a sun-facing side to this story.

• Schrödinger’s Democracy. The Argument on Substack by (7 mins.)
  There is an important struggle in pointing out how bleak things are without discouraging the kind of responses that ensure things get better. It is easy to eulogize and mourn what we’ve lost or to sit on a pedestal as the Cassandra that predicted it all. As always, I try to advocate for the relatively open window of opportunity to fix the problem — in this case America’s faltering democracy and the enormous chance we have (again) to fix it.

• Working Draft: Beer Market Structure. Capture, Concentration, and Anti-Trust. Public Works on Substack by (25 mins.)
  If you have forgotten a few interesting things from your econ classes or just want to think economics in a different way, I am really enjoying Jack’s series on the Beer market, especially after some very online brouhaha over stadium beer prices and monopolies.

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• Why the West was downzoned. In the space of a few decades, nearly every city in the Western world banned densification. What happened? Works in Progress by (33 mins.)
  A meaty read but also a fascinating story about the common dynamics in Europe, North America, and AUS-NZ on how we ended up with downzoned cities. I particularly love the mention of customs checks to enter a city. There serious promise in framing up zoning as an economic benefit for homeowners to be seized rather than a pure risk to their property prices.

• We Let AI Run Our Office Vending Machine. It Lost Hundreds of Dollars. Wall Street Journal
  Please read the story and avoid the significantly less enlightening video.1

• Who Influences Whom? Reflections on U.S. Government Outreach to Think Tanks. Brookings Institution (5 mins)
  A 2014 punch to the (former) nameless peons like me (and I guess not great for the principals either).

Short and sweet! Next edition coming up soon!

When asked “what is an important skill to succeed in international affairs?,” I have a categorical answer: good writing. LLMs have thrown a small wrench into the mix by making it significantly easier to fake it.

Since any good The Adret reader knows that writing is thinking, maybe all I was trying to tell any young-er professional who would listen is “you need to be good at thinking.” Unfortunately, that sounds like terrible advice and is a complete disservice to the many very successful and hard-working people in this line of business who are wholly incapable of coherent thought.

However, thinking through writing is a perfectible skill. I have had plenty of paths and techniques to make me a better writer, even if I am unsure I am a good one. One of the most impactful was far, far away from policy: writing classical music reviews.1

A DJ goes to the concert hall

A handful of years ago, when I was a college student, I converted my latent passion for listening to classical music into joining the college radio station. After weeks of training, I became a radio DJ of the unsexiest kind: a classical music one.

Empowered by my command of the airwaves, I discovered that for the measly price of writing a concert review for the station’s website, classical music venues would gladly give away premium seats. With a press pass and an inflated ego, I ventured to critique some of the best performers the world had to offer, despite never having played an instrument.

Immediately after my first concert, I realized the problem with concert reviews: by the time I would draft, edit, and publish them, the concert series would have ended. A reader checking the website on Monday would read a glowing review of a concert they could never attend.

So, how do you write a review that both encapsulates an experience and makes it enticing enough for an audience that can never replicate it? Here, I defer to the lessons of the inimitable Alex Ross of the New Yorker. A good review establishes why this performance matters and places it in a context independent of the performance itself. In a few hundred words, I had to make the reader imagine sitting in the same concert hall, then place that experience in some larger commentary about music or society, and then give my own two cents.

If you have ever written in a policy setting, you can see where this is going. Those concert reviews needed to parachute someone into the middle of the action and just as quickly pluck them away to see the big picture. Writing a memo for a principal is pretty much the same.

Lessons from the Symphony

Making policy is flying blind towards an unknown future: you are piloting a metaphorical plane to a safe landing based on short glimpses of evidence and educated guesses. A concert review is the reverse: you are hoping you can help someone infer an experience in the past by placing it in a relevant context in the present. Both are information problems that must be solved by the writer/briefer.

A few lessons from my time reviewing concerts are broadly applicable:

1. You don’t know what your reader knows

Like the readers of classical music concert reviews on a college radio station website,2 unable to attend the same concert, decision makers rely on the curated information a writer provides to understand a specific context, making it easy to either over- or under-explain.

No one will be particularly irked if you explain something they already know, as long as it is important and concise. Explanations and details serve as emphasis; they remind the reader of the mechanisms at hand and that without understanding them, the problem cannot be solved. Details about things that don’t matter are distractions.

So, remind your audience that in Beethoven’s 9th, the scherzo comes before the slow movement, unlike in most Classical symphonies,3 building up anticipation for the Ode to Joy. Don’t tell me that someone sneezed at the end of a movement.

2. Get to the point

There is a concert review I wrote that basically says “I had fun.” Well, 20-year-old me, that’s nice but the review is awful. Even an after-action-review of a successful policy rollout requires context and replicable steps. But, just as I can’t relive that concert, a memo is only useful when it says something and it says it quickly.

Set the scene and quickly get to the point. Tell me that the contemporary piece in the program shows a shift in the thematic focus of a major orchestra towards pieces about the experience of minorities in America. Or, tell me why making a statement on a policy overseas furthers U.S. commitment to democracy.4

3. There is always a decision

You have to have a thesis statement and it must require a decision from your reader: whether to buy your argument or not. My first concert reviews were more like concert descriptions. The next few were good/bad commentary. The better ones spoke of the implications: what does this mean for music performance today? What was the music director trying to say by choosing these pieces? In today’s social/cultural context, what does a 100-year-old piece tell us? How does the proposed shift in U.S. foreign policy affect people’s lives?

But, rather than imposing your view, you must leave the reader to make up their own mind or the principal to make an important call, all based on empirical evidence you provide and the recommendation you make. For example, a good review tells you that a contemporary percussion-focused concert is a direct connection to the protest movements of the early 2020s—a cathartic release for troubled times. The reader then has to decide whether they agree or not.

4. Jargon is a burden

Technical terminology is a useful social signaling device; it establishes your credibility as an author. If you are certain your audience knows the term, use it. Otherwise, you distract from your point.

When I became the co-head of the Classical department, I edited my fellow DJs’ pieces. Often, their analysis relied on their knowledge of music theory. If I don’t know my rubato from my giusto, then the average reader certainly doesn’t and an explanation will derail the piece. Yet, if you explain what a movement is to classical fanatics, they will find you annoying. Again: your job is to know what your audience knows, even if you don’t.

5. Don’t fall in love

Writing those concert reviews was torture compared to my school assignments. The latter were constrained by rubrics and “correct” or “incorrect” assumptions and methods. Music, like policy, is muddled, even more so when removed from the performance. If you fall in love with what you’ve written, you will be too scared to delete it and start over, especially when it is often the best course of action.

You should always assume that your writing will get better, not just as you edit and rewrite a specific piece but also through time. So, like my reviews, you will one day read what you’ve written and hate it. Some of my reviews live on in the internet, and like the recordings of my radio shows from the same time period, they are embarrassing to relive. Others have been, thankfully, relegated to obscurity.

Conclusions

My last classical concert was a few months ago. Even after many years, I spent time after the concert thinking what I would say if I had to write a review. Of course, I knew whether I liked it or not and I knew what I liked and disliked. But that is boring. I’m not sure if I actually figured out what it should mean. Had I decided to write something down, I likely would have pulled every thread of my thoughts into a coherent idea. Fortunately, I am in a different line of business.

Without sounding like a luddite, I fear that people starting their policy careers (or, worse, their music reviewer ones) could more easily be starved of the trials of writing blind. LLMs are superb at writing something without “understanding”; that is the point after all. As a policy analyst or concert reviewer, you don’t have a choice. You and your audience are flying the plane blind and, for a brief moment, you are the only one who can catch a glimpse, a guess at the future, before it fades to darkness as the runway looms on the horizon.

Practice makes perfect here. Each concert I attended led to better reviews. I noticed more, I arrived with questions, and I left with the feeling of unease about capturing not just a fleeting moment but a broader statement. In my time in the private sector, writing tech policy memos for companies was a similar exercise: which of all of the things going on matter to this client at this point in time?

Government presented a different challenge: when your mandate is so broad, it is easy to get distracted about which outcomes you seek, making it easy to analyze the process of policy as the outcome itself. That is effectively like writing a concert review that says you had a nice night out—inward-looking rather than impact-driven.

It would have been impossible to improve my writing—and therefore my own thinking—without repetition. Not just rewriting the same concert review but going back again and again to new concerts and sharpening my critique and analysis.

That is not to say that an LLM can’t be helpful in the process. This piece will go through editing and feedback from both thoughtful people and AI. But your positive impact as a policy writer is, for now, still well served by having a good thought once in a while—and like the performers in a concert, that demands practice. Memo after memo, concert after concert, until each glimpse gives you more clarity.

P.S.

Go to a classical concert. Orchestras and chamber music groups have gone to incredible lengths to make their programming accessible and fun. It’s a great excuse to dress up (you will have more fun if you do) and listen to something interesting. Tickets can be cheap. If your friends don’t want to join, then go solo — everyone is looking at the stage anyway.

They say absence makes the heart grow fonder. So, here is your (slightly) delayed curated digest from November.

I am planning lots of The Adret content in December, including “The Best of December” AND “The Best of 2025”. Stay tuned.

Without further ado…

• The Message in the Medium. A love story told in books. Asterisk Magazine by (17 mins.)
  I absolutely love how the much-needed explanation of “The Road Not Taken” is embedded in a rich and almost mystical love letter to books as objects. Any article that manages to upend a widely-held notion as a half-afterthought to a bigger idea is welcome here.

• How Diplomacy Works in Africa. Statecraft on Substack by and (1 hour 35 mins. listening or 50 mins. reading)
  I am always hesitant to share a podcast or podcast transcript, given "The Best of” is about written material, but it is so easy to recommend this conversation. Few people are so bluntly discussing the mechanics of diplomacy like Judd and few people are talking about the mechanics of good governance like Santi (hence their frequent inclusion in “The Best of…”).
  I could write pages on “care and feeding” and why it is so misallocated in our diplomacy, and maybe, with time, I will. For now, read/listen to this.

• The realities of being a pop star. charli’s substack by (8 mins.)
  Yes, you read the author right.1 I found this excellent and, possibly, candid. Her comments about “fame and moral responsibility” are particularly interesting and timely. Why do we expect pop stars to reflect our views of morality more than, say, politicians?

• Liberalism can win back the working class. Here’s how. Financial Times (12 mins.)
  When Acemoglu drops an FT piece, it is generally advisable to read it. While the AI section needs some slightly more concrete mechanisms on how to make his vision happen, I think there is a lot here to reconcile the blame game of left-of-center politics today. I wonder if this could benefit from comparisons to currently governing center-left governments and where they are doing well (e.g. Australia) or not (e.g. U.K.). I also really value the unstated distinction between centrism and liberalism or the need to eschew wishy-washy visions for positive governance that delivers.

• Building things…
  I have a growing obsession with how we build things: the concrete processes (including policy) that makes “stuff”. It’s ironic that after turning so much into digital “things” (like this newsletter), we are now looking to find ways to return to building the physical (even if, like chips, they enable digital life). There are threads of that in Abundance and Breakneck but also in bad nostalgia and fringe ideologies. There is a lot of value in questioning and thinking about the process of building to achieve the ends we desire.

  • No (Process) Risk, No Reward. Design a process that lets you win. Factory Settings on Substack by (11 mins.)
    Sure, you may not love thinking about how to build government processes that work as much as I (or some readers) do, but the story of the CHIPS office, chronicled on that Substack, is quite interesting. Especially for a program that has gotten a lot of flack, it’s pretty fascinating to understand the risk and tradeoffs.

  • How ASML Got EUV Lithography. Factory Settings on Substack by (14 mins.)
    This is a really wonky piece. But it tells a story about the perils of erratic government policy and funding (including faulty industrial policy) and the blessings of allies. Today, it is easy to imagine something like ASML ending up in the hands of rivals.

  • What a toad tells us about Europe’s housing problems. Silicon Continent on Substack by (5 mins.)
    In the U.S., it is easy to think of the enormous barriers to building more housing as a problem relegated to our own communities. This is a nice piece to think comparatively (which I feel like is always in short supply).

  • Why the Time Has Finally Come for Geothermal Energy. The New Yorker by (22 mins.)
    Who would have guessed fracking would save us all?

Media

• Lux by Rosalía. Apple Music or Spotify

  • Review: Rosalía Doesn’t Want to Take It Easy. On “Lux,” her intense and expansive new album, the artist transgresses the limits of pop music. The New Yorker (5 mins.)

  • I don’t often recommend music, but this is just stunning. It’s somewhere between a scholarly effort and the musical equivalent of an everything bagel.

Friends’ corner

As a friend and mentor put it to me earlier this year, “the water is warm” when I asked about starting a Substack. Luckily, I have not been the only one to find this tropical paradise full of incoherent ramblings, 3000 word pieces that would have been a tweet 8 years ago, and the occasional gem. In the spirit of Thanksgiving, I want to start a long overdue “Friends’ Corner” where I share Substacks written by people I know and admire.

I have already given indirect shoutouts to (from ), (from ), , and (from and ). All of them are putting out excellent stuff and encourage me to write more often or to be a better writer. For November, I have a new, more direct shoutout:2

is doing some cool writing on her ‘stack. There’s Abundance references and inside baseball on government. What more could you want? Plus she advocates for using more TikTok in foreign policy discourse, which is the kind of thing that I hate to have to agree with.

The Bench

Welcome to The Bench — my creative, intellectually free corner of the internet. This is where I'll share my half-baked thoughts on foreign policy and working in Washington.

By Alia Awadallah

So, as I said, expect more in your inbox this month. In the meantime, I hope you have a wonderfully festive month.

So I promised more writing between the “Best of September” and this one. It didn’t happen. You really don’t want my rough draft. Aren’t you at least glad you have nicely curated pieces to read?

Please feel free to nag me about writing more. If you don’t, I will assume you never wanted it in the first place.

Without further ado…

• How our brightest minds get trapped in the City. Financial Times by (7 mins.) (reader submission)
  A recurring theme here on The Adret is the need to overcome the feeling of powerlessness in the face of the world’s challenges. This piece provides an important critique: it is hard to feel like you can solve problems if you avoid working on them. Sure, advising a fast casual restaurant chain on M&A opens a lot of doors and teaches you a lot of lessons, but it doesn’t give you agency beyond saying “never ending pasta bowls aren’t profitable enough.”1 It is also ironic that I am saying all of this, but I won’t bore you by saying I am different.

• Please let the robots have this one: Self-driving cars are way safer than human drivers. The Argument on Substack by (6 mins.)
  There is, rightfully, a growing tech-skeptic sentiment, ironically spreading through social media. While we should always be concerned about technological risk, we should not let those fears prevent us from quickly adopting things that make our lives better. Self-driving cars are squarely in that category.

• Lincoln’s Revolution: How he used America’s past to rescue its future. The Atlantic (11 mins.) (reader submission)
  As a country that has always had a knack for rejecting the past, we often struggle on how to use it to imagine the future. But history has a lesson for that too.

• The China Model’s Fatal Flaw: Why Beijing Can’t Overcome Overcapacity. Foreign Affairs (16 mins.)
  Your life today is shaped by the economic decisions made in Beijing and across regional hubs in China. If you are American, this may be the most influence a foreign state has had on daily life in your lifetime. Understanding China will only become more difficult as competition becomes entrenched, but I think, regardless of where you work or live, it is so important. I really appreciate how well illustrated and data-backed this particular article is.

• What the left can learn from evangelical churches. Programmable Mutter on Substack by (11 mins.)
  Persuasion in politics is so often seen through the lens of high school debate, at least by the non-insignificant group of politicos who got their start there. I find this perspective quite interesting, reminding me of some of my YMCA days.

• We’ve Forgotten What ‘Soft Power’ Is. Foreign Policy (8 mins.)
  So much of “rebuilding” U.S. foreign policy systems will require understanding the constraints we operate in. “Soft power” is certainly no exception, especially as a tangible, operational objective not a pie-in-the-sky justification for politically inviable programs.

• The Louvre Heist Is Terrific. The Atlantic (5 mins.)
  I was looking for an excuse to comment on the heist.2 Plus, I should never miss a chance to list a piece by Caity Weaver.
  I would also like to commend French job security because as far as I can tell, not a single person has resigned or been fired for the small lapse in security. Truly le rêve français, my friends.

• How Airbus took off. Works in Progress Magazine by (17 mins.)
  Grand industrial policy should always be approached with a pinch of skepticism. It’s not doomed per se, but policymakers often make it about solving half a dozen problems at once. Airbus continues to be a remarkable story with some replicable and non-replicable lessons. The article could mention a bit more of the political environment that allowed its original success.

• Eliminating contrails from flying could be incredibly cheap. Sustainability by the numbers on Substack by (11 mins.)
  Two plane articles?!?! Bonkers. And this one veers very close to conspiracy-bait.
  I do really like the dense, number heavy policy analysis, complete with a good accounting of tradeoffs.

• Creative Destruction: 2025 Nobel Prize in Economics

  • Creative destruction is a miracle. It’s also a political problem. The Argument on Substack by (10 mins.)
    Nothing like an article that turns a Nobel Prize headline into a thoughtful policy piece.

  • Creative destruction & building belonging. Simple but Not Easy on Substack by (3 mins.)
    This is a pretty impressive article written by a sitting congressman. As always, kudos to any staff that makes it possible.

I also co-wrote a piece for an online European publication, but fortunately, it doesn’t meet The Adret criteria. Go find it elsewhere. It did bother some Russians…

Feel free to hit reply to this email and share some good reads, especially if you thought this month had too much political/geopolitical stuff.

Wishing you a thankful November!

As mentioned last month, I am separating the periodic The Adret rant from “The Best of…” mostly to keep up the quality of both.

There are also a handful of publications on the horizon, including some rough journaling / behind the scenes of international relations work and what it really looks like. Given none of this is written yet, I cannot promise a timeline, so keeping an eye on your inbox continues to be the best way to keep up.

And, please, keep sharing ideas and feedback on how to improve The Adret! Your enthusiasm makes it all possible.

Without further ado…

• Bohuslav Martinů Is One of Music’s Great Chameleons. The New Yorker (5 mins.)
  I can’t believe I have not shared something from the eminent Alex Ross here. And, given this newsletter is coming live from Central and Eastern Europe (more on that soon), the Martinů homage felt extra apt.

• The real deadline isn’t when AI outsmarts us — it’s when we stop using our own minds. The Argument on Substack by (8 mins.)
  It will be really easy to lose your job to AI if you give up thinking altogether. (There is also a longer version, if you’re into that kind of stuff.)1

• DC: The City of Fractal Success. On the professional climb to nowhere. From my friend and DC world confidant ’s Substack (6 mins.)
  I love it when people I admire write something that so easily shows the world why I admire them. As a fellow participant in the race, I think having the clarity to seek satisfaction and fulfillment is so important, no matter whether you zoom in on the fractal or not.

• Does Society Have Too Many Rules? When regular people seem burdened by bureaucracy, and the powerful act as they choose, it’s worth asking whether we’ve forgotten what makes rules effective. The New Yorker (12 mins.)
  A bit of a hot take but deeply related to so many of the issues we feel today in politics. As I wrote a few months ago, political frustration often reflects legitimate concerns about unfairness.

• “A lack of appreciation for physical process knowledge helps explain why America is in trouble.” On Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future. Programmable Mutter on Substack by (9 mins.)
  I feel like 2025 will be the year of the trendy, very soft economics book about fixing American malaise. And, it will be the year of the good Substack post about said book.

• Fixing Foreign Aid Requires Confronting Fundamental Tensions. Foreign Policy (7 mins.)
  “This criticism suggests that there is a single policy song sheet that every agency—except development agencies—is singing from. In reality, U.S. foreign policy has always pursued multiple aims—security, democracy, trade, climate, health, and beyond—because the world itself is complex. That range of objectives has been a strength in helping the United States to navigate a complex world, not a flaw.”
  This is just such a good quote. I am constantly amazed by how much commentary there is that conflates strategy with simplicity. Practical strategy allows you to offset some of the weighty tradeoffs of the grand strategy.

• Illiteracy is a policy choice. Why aren’t we gathering behind Mississippi’s banner? The Argument on Substack by (12 min.)

  One of the reasons I started this newsletter is to share policy wins, which are so rarely celebrated. Being better informed about what works build political capital to multiply successes rather than languishing in the problems.

• Is Gaudí gaudy? The New Yorker (30 mins.)
  What does it mean to build something according to the intent of its designer?
  The author, however, mistakenly downplays how awe-inspiring the Sagrada Familia is — it’s a bit elitist to assume the TikTok-makers are any less impressed or to say it no longer stands out.

• Mexico and the Road U.S. Democrats Can Never Take. Persuasion on Substack by Quico Toro (7 mins.)
  This is among the better takes on Mexican politics online, a topic nearly wholly blinded by partisanship and odd associations with the U.S. The article is missing maybe 2-3 paragraphs to be properly comparativist: how are class structures different between Mexico and the U.S. leading to this gap? What are the real coalition options in both countries? To me, this article is about tradeoffs that you can’t wish away when building coalitions, but lacks the fundamental question of coalition building: whether you have a critical mass.

A bit of a short list this month — it’s been busy. I would be remiss not to mention the first standalone The Adret piece on economic and personal growth:

Keep sharing feedback and ideas! There are a lot of ideas in the Adret pipeline!

Wishing you an excellent and spooky October!

One of the motifs in The Adret is growth, mostly the economic kind but occasionally the personal one. In previous editions, I discussed both nostalgia and frustration as hurdles that rob us of a better future. Now, I want to turn to a foundational component of that future: the pursuit of growth.

Even if the economy (or your personality) is not terrible per se, a little growth goes a long way. In fact, any of the various goals we set for society (or for ourselves) are likely either much more difficult or downright impossible without growth. Both pursuits struggle with distributional challenges, limited resources and inputs, making excuses, and thinking things are fine just the way they are. However, eschewing stagnation is essential to getting out of the doldrums. Before this turns into a self-help essay, I will avoid overextending the personal/economic metaphor and stick to my political chops to show a little bit of why we should re-learn to love economic growth.

Growth and its discontents

The pursuit of economic growth feels more contested than it has been in generations, challenged by growing awareness of both scarce natural resources and the plateauing global population. Superficially, the skeptical sentiment is often expressed in TikTok frustrations about the horrors of a 9-to-5 or claims that wealth creation only benefits old people and billionaires. The “degrowth” movement is the more academic flavor of the same claim, advocating for shrinking the global economy to save us from climate change. While still relatively fringe, degrowth has gained ground among environmentalists and is even a part of mainstream politics in Europe. Proponents criticize growth-seeking capitalism as the “ideology of a cancer cell” — unaware that tumors are more into feudalism than Adam Smith.

Often, these growth-skeptics argue that the problem is not the size of the pie as much as its distribution, noting that enormous redistribution would fulfill individual and societal needs, allowing for stagnating or shrinking the economy to reduce resource use. Given outsized inequality, that seems, at face value, to lend a progressive flair, but a closer look shows that it is an insidious cover for injustice and regression.

Splitting the pie

Here is a thought experiment: for either growth-stagnation or degrowth to work, one would have assume the current “pie” of the world economy is sufficient to sustain a high quality of life. Given existing poverty, the idea would then demand massive redistribution of that pie, or just be willing to accept poverty as it is. However, even redistribution of the existing pie leaves a world with an unacceptable standard of living.

To illustrate this, the global average income per day is about $22. In the U.S. it is about $93.1 Full redistribution would ask us to, somehow, redistribute those $71 dollars (and whatever the gap is in other countries) in order to get everyone to around the $22 of spending power per day.

While the 45% of people around the world that live under $8.30 per day would love a bump up to $22, I seriously doubt most Americans or Europeans would be willing to forgo their current living standards.2 These measures are all adjusted for spending power, so redistributive degrowth is asking for all of us to be poor, to stop the growth that would get us out of that poverty, and then, further impoverish everyone.

If you reject nostalgia and accept that most people on Earth have staggeringly low standards of living, then growth is the only way out, redistribution or not.

And, while the global numbers are bleak, they show why growth has delivered over the last few decades: in 2000, 71% of people lived with less than $8.30 per day, adjusted for purchasing power. In 2025, that number is 45%, so we have cut that by about 1% per year.

Given this progress and the still-dire situation, it is not surprising that non-wealthy countries do not have a degrowth movement advocating for them to be locked out of better futures, including access to the basic healthcare, education, and energy infrastructure.3 Even a slight slowdown of global economic growth means accepting more wanton death through communicable disease and malnutrition. Already, we are far too numb to the misery of the world, and no amount of redistribution of current resources would fix it.

If not through only redistribution, growth-skeptics are also often proponents of some form of depopulation, reducing the number of pie-eaters while inevitably also shrinking the pie. Never mind that population growth is already plateauing, with tricky implications in tow.4 Shrinking the global population would not even have a measurable impact on climate change, as we would lose the benefits of more people thinking of new ways to mitigate it.5

Even the baseline proposition of degrowth, that growth is inevitably resource-draining is not backed up by data. Economic growth is now decoupling in key areas, requiring ever fewer resources and labor for increasing returns. Technology has allowed us to make great strides in labor productivity. And, we have for the most part begun to separate economic growth from carbon emissions, as shown below.

6

Politics of it all

Even if the economics of growth-skepticism do not quite add up, proponents generally lean on vague ideas about the “non-economic” (more likely the “non-monetary”) benefits of ditching a growth model or capitalism entirely. There are plenty of lofty videos claiming that “growth capitalism” has erased the value of cost-free favors for your neighbors and bartering systems.7 By my count, it has also nearly erased childhood mortality.

My test for political theories of change is whether there is a path to realization beyond “everyone magically changes their mind one day.” Wholesale degrowth has no such path. Rather, I rail against it because a half-baked form is both feasible and taking root.

For all of the aforementioned reasons why the status quo is simply not good enough, there are plenty of advocates for injecting lethargy into our political systems and economies. However, it is not the TikTok on “internalized capitalism” that is doing so. Rather, it is the broader pessimism that the growth-carbon decoupling isn’t going to solve climate change. It is the city councillor proposing yet another review of whether building something is “worth it for the community.” It is the zero-sum view of trade. It is the post-liberal right-winger talking about needing to bring back the “strong gods” of community and nation. It is also the environmental advocate for banning planes or international travel. It is those that want to get rid of AI and data centers by hyping up their water and electrical consumption. All of it is taking our political frustrations for current inaction and proposing regression and nostalgia in exchange.

This soft-growth-skepticism will build all kinds of disparate coalitions. Nostalgia is not only fuel for what we now conceive of as “the right,” but has plenty of proponents among more socially liberal groups and those seriously concerned about the environment. It will also be a convenient cover for incompetence and bad politics. Seeing another set of bad GDP numbers can cause you to fire the statistician or you can just say growth is baloney and that at least you are saving a polar bear by impoverishing your people.

A political agenda for growth is a leap of faith. Unlike nostalgia, it does not come with an imagined past. Growth is risky. The tech boom of the last few decades has given us enormous access to information and communication, reforming how we read and write and seize opportunity, both in wealthy and poorer countries. But it has also made us lonely and isolated. Growth requires us to fix the plane as we are flying it. But, that is better than crashing it for some longing of the ground.

Conclusion

Rather than a solution for both inequality and the climate, stalling economic growth is a comfortable idea for relatively wealthy people in wealthy countries that feel “left behind” by the current system while being among its greatest beneficiaries. At best, it is some combination of “let them eat cake” and pulling up the ladder behind you. At worst, it will increasingly become a comfortable narrative for lackluster politicians to justify their faltering economies or their attempts to entrench inequality at home and abroad.8

While there is plenty of legitimate frustration with the structure of the global economy, we cannot throw the growth baby out with the bathwater.9 Embracing flawed magical thinking that shrinking the global economy will make distributional battles easier is doing just that. Instead, embracing growth is a key part of any progressive project: a world with higher standards of living has the resources to make life both more equitable and less full of strife.

This is where economic growth also meets the personal: growth is the foundation for optimism. Investing, whether in yourself, the economy, or even politics, requires the belief that things will be better in the long run. Imposed scarcity, on the other hand, demands hoarding and retrenchment. So, while I said that your personality may not be terrible, it is certainly more likely to be if you are dreaming of degrowth.

How to achieve growth (and the distributional outcomes within it) is a different and more complicated topic, but a much more valuable conversation to have once you love growth. Personal growth is the same way. And, the best ideas for both will always find a home in The Adret.

Happy readings and hope you liked the rant.

A little housekeeping:

First, I have put together The Adret Library, an index compiling all the pieces shared on “The Best of…” and categorized into topics. If you find yourself on your way to a dinner party looking for an interesting conversation starter, then this is the place to go. Or, if at that party you find yourself arguing with someone about AI’s electricity consumption, then you can cite your sources. All of the pieces are meant to be relatively timeless, so the Library should be a good long-term resource.

Take a look below, and you can always find it on the homepage:

Second, starting this month, I will be a tad more direct in why I am recommending each piece, rather than cryptic descriptions. I measure success if you get to read at least one interesting thing each month from the list, especially if it takes away from some doomscrolling time. So, I am working to make that easier by also including my occasional two cents in italics.

Third, instead of writing an intro this month, I have written a longer piece that should arrive in your inbox/feed in a week or so. This will be the first of a series of irregular essays on perennial issues or observations. The core of The Adret is still “The Best of…”, so these essays are more of an opportunity to make an argument without distracting from the top-notch writing out there.

As always, feedback is more than welcome!

Without further ado…

• “The global trading system as we have known it is dead.” How do we reap the benefits of trade in a new, fractured world? Foreign Affairs (23 mins.)
  Top read for the month. It hits all The Adret criteria. Technical and future-forward, while accepting some real world constraints of the new era of trade. Bookmark this for 2029.

• “There is no real plan for American economic stability or for a generous welfare state without more immigration. Full stop. Period.” The Argument on Substack by (10 mins.)
  For all of the commentary on immigration, we too easily forget the societal benefits. Change the stats a little bit and it applies to much of the developed world.

• Cost is not why we are not covering our buildings with ornamentation. Works in Progess on Substack by (24 mins.)
  While I am always eager to find economic explanations for things, this is a pretty compelling counterargument and a call to use our technology to bring back the ornamentation that people like.

• $7 billion. $600 billion. $8.5 billion. How the U.S. (and others) outsource their ambition to mostly imagined private sector money. Aid Interrupted on Substack by (5 mins.)

• Airline credit cards are keeping airlines afloat. The Economist (4 mins.)

  • And, maybe, American airports are getting better? Drezner’s World on Substack by (4 mins.)
    I agree with the piece, but I have a ton to say about the implications of lounges, cards, and shinier airports. Buy me a coffee to find out.

• What happens when you respond to a scam/spam job recruitment text message. Slate (20 mins.)

• Africa’s “arbitrary” borders are not the cause of bad governance today. An Africanist Perspective on Substack by (12 mins.)
  Maybe the biggest difference between relatively well-read people commenting on international affairs and both academics and practitioners is how seriously they take geographic explanations.

• The Atlantic’s readers share their sources of daily happiness. The Atlantic (5 mins.)
  #9 is gross.

• Your personal chatbot use isn’t an environmental catastrophe (with plenty of evidence to show for it). Sustainability by the Numbers on Substack by (10 mins.)
  There is a whole slew of articles coming out doing similar math. I like this one the best. Clearly there is a need to upend the current discourse around the environmental impacts of using ChatGPT et. al.1

  • And there are ways to make the impact on electricity costs smaller. Power & Policy on Substack by (8 mins.)
    This is a really technical read — far beyond my own expertise — but I think it is relatively accessible anyway. More importantly, it proposes solutions quickly and directly to a problem many of us are already feeling the repercussions of.

A policy heavy month!

Don’t forget to send feedback and reading suggestions.

I hope September has great things in store for all of us!

Summer brings an enjoyable sort of disorder into life: moving about between work and vacation, between the spare ideas that did not materialize in the Spring and the looming stress of the Fall.

Last month, I wrote a brief musing on nostalgia as a political and personal emotion. You can read that here:

The nostalgia I described last month is often rooted in frustration about the current state of affairs. We find friction in all aspects of our lives. In some cases, in fact, in many, this friction is productive: it puts us in problem-solving mode, gives us an immediate purpose, and brings satisfaction when resolved.

Politically, however, our frustrations are different. The friction we encounter is a product of larger networks and tangled incentives. Frustration with the state of the world is not like a malfunctioning dishwasher: we are keenly aware that our agency is at best a small sliver of a wave needed to enact change. It is easy to feel powerless, but despondency doesn’t relieve the frustration.

In response, we blame figures — or “devils” which are the corporal or institutional form of our grievances. Rising housing prices are a frustration for young people like me, making the home-owning American Dream feel like a distant reality. So, we pick a scapegoat: private equity or builder monopolists, which in bite-sized explanations feel like a cabal puppeteering their way into robbing us of our dreams.

But, unlike my decade-old dishwasher not starting two days ago, housing costs don’t have an easy explanation. Also unlike the dishwasher, there is a genuinely helpful instruction manual out there for housing.1

The instruction manual in politics comes from lots of writing, reading, and experimentation. Its largest problem is the dizzying array of disparate ideas, academic papers, and punditry. But, sifting through all of it and building an understanding of the issues converts the macro frustration of politics into the kind of micro friction we should be facing every day. When we read, write, analyze, and talk about problems, we begin to treat politics much like the smaller problem of my dishwasher: start at home, crowdsource ideas, try a bunch different things, and rally some other people. Turning it into a digestible problem can also bring a little bit of purpose and satisfaction, much like my eventual solution to the dishwasher problem.2

So, this month’s Adret picks include bits about our agency as thinkers and writers, as readers of history, and as family-builders (or not), as well as the usual hodgepodge of plain-old good stuff.

Without further ado…

• Writing is thinking. Nature Reviews Bioengineering (2 mins.)

• The contradictions of Oklahoma. The Guardian (10 mins.)

• Choosing family.

  • Financial Times (3 mins.)

  • The Atlantic (11 mins.)

• Showing up and listening is a political virtue. Vogue (15 mins.)

• Go back to school, with espresso martinis in tow. New York’s The Cut (7 mins.) I am not saying they should have included the Adret’s but…

• Poisoning pigeons in the park. The New Yorker (7+ mins.) Reading this requires multiple YouTube interludes to listen to the songs.

• The Real “Kill Switch.” False Positive on Substack (10 mins.)

• Lost luggage voyeurism. New York’s The Cut (17 mins.)

• Winners telling us how to win with creativity. The Permanent Campaign on Substack (8 mins.)

• Even with setbacks, there is an irreversible change on climate underway. Foreign Affairs (10 mins.)

Small aside before the last recommendation. No, I am not about to ask for money (yet).

In late June, Derek Thompson (author of Abundance) started a Substack. To my curatorial dismay, he is putting out non-stop top-notch content. I could fill a “The Best of July” with his stuff, and likely a couple of months after that. The only reasonable thing to do is to 1) recommend you subscribe, 2) share some of my favorites from July, and 3) significantly raise the (already high) threshold to include his work in the future.

So, subscribe here:

Derek Thompson

A newsletter about abundance and building a better world.

The highlights:

• Dunking on the monopolist theory of housing shortages. DT on Substack (15 mins.)

• The mysteries of the baby boom. DT on Substack (9 mins.)

• Should we put Ozempic in the water? DT on Substack (14 mins.)

• Serial killers are gone. DT on Substack (7 mins.)

As always, please keep sharing feedback, ideas, and articles!

In the meantime, have an excellent August.

Nostalgia is a powerful drug. Having spent the early part of June under its influence, Nostalgia is most effective when it reminds us of times when specific (and often more) social connections filled our lives and transformed who we are. However, it also robs us of the possibility to dream of a better future. By idealizing the past, we flatten our ambitions to recreating something that never existed, at best, only to inherit the worst of it.

I am far from the first to argue that social media and the internet are nostalgia machines—making romantic versions of the past instantly accessible. Even AI-generated images are now tinged with yellow hues, the automated near-nostalgia of the Ghibli meme craze of a few weeks past.

Politics — not just in the U.S. — are increasingly discussed in nostalgic terms, most emblematically in a slogan ending with “Again.” So powerful is the message of returning to long-lost glory that its global opposition, despite winning occasionally, are so far unable to come up with a better alternative. Nostalgia forces them to argue that there was never a “Great” to begin with (uninspiring), that things are still “Great” (feels off), that greatness doesn’t matter (seriously?), or that there is a different version of “Great Again” to aspire to, despite the original not specifying any.

But in my college reunion-fueled nostalgia high, I realized it has some utility: it reminds us of what we cherish. If we can allow ourselves to cultivate those elements, without wanting to dig up the past, then it can build the fundamentals of a plan for a better future. That calls for a direct acknowledgment of the shortcomings of that past and calling out the lies that nostalgia requires.

For example, it isn’t true that we earn less today than in the past (actually, depends where you live) or that manufacturing jobs are a panacea. Or, that college was this incredible time when you spent time with all of your friends 24/7. Rather, those sentiments mean we should focus on what kinds of economic growth and jobs will deliver the best outcomes in the future, and how to keep up the bonds with those college friends (including, hopefully, when they read this Substack).

So, this month I have curated a few notes on nostalgia from economics to your home appliances and, as always, a bunch of other interesting miscellanea.

Without further ado…

• Nostalgia: gross. Foreign Affairs (13 mins.)

• Reader submission: Why is the U.S. fighting China? Choosing Victory on Substack (12 mins.)

• DC’s hero making the trains run on time. Statecraft on Substack (33 min. podcast or 24 mins. transcript)

• The importance of engagements (no rings required). Post Strategy on Substack (8 mins.)

• You are (mostly) the reason why “things don’t last as long as they used to.” NYT’s Wirecutter (20 mins.)

• Reader submission: Cancer’s Bayesian problem and the troubles of treatments. (All technical writers should take a cue from this form of narrative explaining) The New Yorker (25 mins.)

• A cackle-worthy amuse-bouche for your summer vacation. The Atlantic (27 mins.)

• How to redistribute to urbanize. Works in Progress (22 mins.)

• A hefty explanation of the ongoing battery revolution. Construction Physics on Substack (12 mins.)

• A liberal definition of liberalism. Social Research (11 mins.)

• Sweet spread of geopolitics, or the battle over hazelnut spreads. The New Yorker (27 mins.)

Please keep commenting on your favorite pieces, sending me links to read, and spreading the good word.

Stay cool out there — it’s pretty toasty (I have yet to get some Southern Hemisphere readers). Happy July!