INFINITUDE:

When I lost my intuition: For years, I practised medicine with cool certainty, comfortable with life-and-death decisions. Then, one day, I couldn’t. (Ronald W Dworkin, 3/03/25, Aeon)

Researchers have long recognised intuition’s relevance to professional judgment. In 1938, the businessman Chester Barnard wrote the now-classic book The Functions of the Executive, in which he described two distinct forms of managerial decision-making, logical and non-logical, with intuition an example of the latter. In 1957, the scholar Herbert Simon coined the phrase ‘bounded rationality’ to illustrate the same division. The psychologist Daniel Kahneman spoke of two systems for decision-making: ‘System 1’ for intuition, and ‘System 2’ for deliberate and analytical thought. In the 1960s, the neuroscientist Roger Sperry attributed logic and reason to the brain’s left side, and intuition to the brain’s right. More recently, the division has been used to distinguish between personality types, as in the Myers-Briggs personality model, where a person can be ‘intuitive’ or ‘analytical’.

Intuition was pigeonholed in this way not merely to try to understand it, but also to control it. For, within the secular world, intuition is the sole survivor from those primitive days when people credited human behaviour to mystical and spiritual forces, and science was inseparable from divine doctrine. Most of those forces were elbowed out of existence in modern life, and consigned to the religious sphere. But intuitive thinking was too useful a professional tool to simply be tossed aside. Even today, more than 60 per cent of CEOs rely on intuition, or ‘gut feeling’, to guide their decisions. Under some circumstances, 90 per cent of intuitive decisions prove correct. Nevertheless, the concept of intuition threatens science, upon which much of modern professional life is based. Science uses logic, observation and measurement to find truth, while intuition, derived from the word intueri, which means ‘to look within’, seeks truth through inner contemplation. The latter method harkens back to a dark age before clarity and frankness came to dominate the realm of thought. Thus, while given its due, intuition had to be contained within a well-ordered system that downplayed its connection with mystical thinking.

‘Intuition is nothing more and nothing less than recognition’ prompted by a cue, Simon wrote. In the mind sit memories stored away in oblivion, which, when cued, return to consciousness because a temporary use for them has been found. Simultaneously, a feeling of certitude arises. There is nothing miraculous about any of this, researchers insist.

Yet, it is when professionals lose their intuition that its mystical value shines through. For, in tough cases, when facts are lacking and the path forward is unclear, intuition arrives like a revelation. Intuition is an article of faith we assent to when reason has reached its limits. Belief in that revelation is what puts intuition on an altogether different plane of cognitive experience. There can be no relation between intuition and reason, not because they work through different sides of the brain. Instead, it is like the difference between the infinite and the finite; the infinite is out of all proportion to the finite, so that no comparison or analogy can be established between them.

CAIN WON:

Abundance and Its Discontents (James Livingston, 3/07/25, Project Syndicate)

[T]he vision Klein and Thompson offer makes the idea of abundance sound like what awaits the Tribulation Force of the Left Behind film franchise, whose members prove they are worthy of joining the Raptured in heaven by working hard against the anti-Christ on Earth. The abundance we need and deserve cannot be incentivized by monetizing it and attracting private investors and contractors emboldened by relaxed regulations and officials who are willing and able to bend the rules. Nor does it have to wait on the arrival of another “political order” that will deliver the goods because it tells a “better story,” as per the historian Gary Gerstle’s periodization of the US political party system (eagerly cited by Klein and Thompson). Abundance is here and now, abiding in the simple fact that economic growth doesn’t require more savings, more work, and more fossil fuels (and thus the incineration of the planet), because growth – at any pace – no longer demands larger inputs of either capital and labor.

It’s impossible tyo overstate deflationary pressures.

DOWN-N-OUT:

The Tale Of The Early-Round KO Of Muhammad Ali’s Champburger (Dan McQuade, February 28, 2025, Defector)

“In 1916,” Adam Chandler wrote in the book Drive-Thru Dreams, “Walt Anderson first performed the magical, calculated act of crafting tiny ground beef patties and then smashing them flat onto a steaming, onion-laced griddle.” To reassure customers scared of the meat industry after reading works like Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, Anderson had his employees cook the burgers on a griddle right in front of patrons. The sliders made Anderson $3.75 in profit on his first day. The motto of his restaurant, White Castle, was “Buy ’em by the sack.”

“White Castle made this big effort to provide this place that looked really clean,” Chandler told Defector. “They would grind the meat in front of the customers and they’d made a big show of everything being choreographed down to the second. Every bit of the experience was just really, really managed. And all the stores look the same, too, and that was meant to convey comfort and familiarity in a sense that you’ll be safe in any of these places wherever you go. Now we think of that as kind of being soulless and corporate, but back then that was a big deal.”

White Castle was an instant and smashing success. Knockoffs with names like Blue Castle and White Tower failed to capture the same magic, but by the 1960s, the country was dotted with chains like A&W, Tastee-Freez, and Dairy Queen. By the time places like Champburger were opening, McDonald’s was well on its way to becoming the largest chain in the country. Franchisee Ray Kroc bought out its founders, the McDonald brothers, and pushed through an ambitious program of expansion that continues more or less to this day. That globe-bestriding empire, and many only slightly smaller ones, was built through franchising.

The franchise system was a boon to company owners. In exchange for a percentage of profits and a franchise fee, franchisees received the rights to operate their restaurants under a set of guidelines laid out by the companies whose recognizable brands gave those franchises value. Those guidelines were generally quite strict; chains still strived for comfort and familiarity even after The Jungle was well out of customers’ minds. From a business perspective, the franchisee took on most of the material risk. Eventually companies would turn to making money from the land under their own restaurants, which they leased to franchisees.

Many of those franchises were start-ups from people in the industry. Kroc was a milkshake machine salesman; McDonald’s was one of his customers before he made his start as a franchisee. The company spread under Kroc; competing fast food franchises like Burger King and Kentucky Fried Chicken also found success. It was not long until celebrities started getting in on the action—not as franchisees, but as the faces of brands that wanted to expand in the same ways, if not on the same scale, as White Castle or McDonald’s.

The week before Ali reported to prison, Joe Namath was in Miami to open a Broadway Joe’s restaurant. Miami News sports editor John Crittenden described the scene: “When Joe Namath opened his restaurant here last weekend, it was done at great expense—extensive advertising, houseboat cocktail parties, the employment of buxom damsels wearing football jerseys to serve hero sandwiches.”

The celebrity fast-food craze can primarily be traced to the success of Gino’s Hamburgers, a restaurant founded by Joe Campanella, Louis Fischer, Alan Ameche, and Gino Marchetti in the late 1950s. All four had played for the Baltimore Colts, and the first location was in the city’s suburbs. In a city that loved its Colts, a restaurant owned by four of them predictably became a hit.

After that, it was just a matter of waiting for the Blue Castle/White Tower types to arrive. Those knockoffs came in varying forms, but they all had a celebrity attached. Namath had Broadway Joe’s. Johnny Carson had Here’s Johnny’s! Ron Santo had his own pizzas at Wrigley Field. Bart Starr owned drive-ins. Plans were in the works for something called Mickey Mantle’s Country Kitchen. While still with the Steelers, Brady Keys opened All-Pro Chicken. At one point his restaurants were so successful that they partnered with KFC to open Brady Keys’ Kentucky Fried Chicken locations in black neighborhoods. The colonel was pushed aside by a Pro Bowl cornerback.

Other companies attempted similar ideas. Minnie Pearl’s Chicken operated in white neighborhoods. It served the same food as gospel singer Mahalia Jackson’s Glori-Fried Chicken, a name that feels almost but not quite sacrilegious. Glori-Fried Chicken locations were either attached to Gulf gas stations or standalone properties designed by black architectural firm McKissack and McKissack and made to look like a church. (This part feels notably more sacrilegious.)

“It’s getting ridiculous,” an anonymous stockbroker told the Detroit Free Press in January of 1969. “A celebrity sticks his name on a chicken shack and suddenly it’s $50 a share.”

Champburger was the brainchild of three white Miamians: Edward Gale, Leonard Lurie, and Philip Brooks. They worked with the Ali associate and Southern Christian Leadership Conference lawyer Chauncey Eskridge to put together a prospectus for the business and looked for investors.

The Champburger prospectus was not promising.

SHERMAN WAS TOO CIRCUMSPECT:

Waiting for Liberal Democracy in the American South : Our country’s constitutional order is withering before us. In the states of the former Confederacy, democracy never fully flourished. (Alan Elrod, Mar 07, 2025, The Bulwark)

Liberal democracy has never put down deep roots in the South in the way it did across the rest of the country. The region never really abandoned its warped electoral politics and inclination to single-party cronyism, a Southern political instinct that helps explain how Democratic dominance transformed so completely into Republican one-party rule following the civil rights era. Inequality continues to define economic life in the region. […]

Bourbon rule across the South is a good starting place for understanding the challenges facing the region. The Bourbons—Southern Democrats of the planter and professional classes who opposed Reconstruction—came to dramatically shape American politics from the 1870s into the early twentieth century. For decades, this small elite fomented discord among poor whites to keep their political energies focused on their peers rather than their de facto rulers. As Reconstruction began to falter in the mid-1870s, Bourbon power brokers gained control in Southern states like Alabama and Georgia. By the 1890s, the Old South was aggressively reasserting itself. In 1896, the Supreme Court enshrined the principle of “separate but equal.”

In 1898, America’s first coup d’etat took place as the Democrats of Wilmington, North Carolina issued a “White Declaration of Independence.” They were attacking the coalition of black Republicans and white Populists that had control of the local government in the 1890s, which the old Confederates of the city found intolerable. With their resentment and rage being fueled by white Democratic powerbrokers, two thousand armed men forced out the duly elected government. None were more pleased by this result than their Bourbon backers.

V.O. Key Jr., one of America’s greatest scholars of Southern politics, blames this “banker-planter-lawyer” class for the South’s political and economic underdevelopment. Ostensibly pro-business but viciously self-interested, the Bourbons not only defended the South’s racial apartheid but also exploited the region’s poor rural whites, as the Wilmington coup attests.

The consequences of this, as of the Civil War, are still being felt. In a 2024 essay for Aeon, academic and writer Keri Leigh Meritt laid out the many ways the South as a region lags economically—pinned down by poverty, hobbled by an absence of public investments, and choked by a miasma of disillusionment and isolation:

Southerners in general are isolated and lonely, and wealth and power are heavily concentrated: there are a few thousand incredibly wealthy families – almost all of them the direct descendants of the Confederacy’s wealthiest slaveholders – a smaller-than-average middle class, and masses of poor people, working class or not. The South, with few worker protections, prevents its working classes from earning a living wage. It’s virtually impossible to exist on the meagre income of a single, low-wage, 40-hour-a-week job, especially since the US has no social healthcare benefits.

Vance’s comments on the Bourbons place them in a national frame, which brings us to another important dimension of the post-Civil War South. Historian Heather Cox Richardson and others have argued that the South’s oligarchic power structures were not dismantled following the defeat of the Confederacy. A number of modern studies have shown that, in many places in the South, the self-styled aristocrat Bourbons recovered their wealth and status in the years following the Civil War.

Always De-Nazifi.

SCRATCH A TERRORIST FIND A TRUMPIST:

Germany’s alleged Christmas market attacker was steeped in far-right ideology. Why didn’t anyone notice? (Jakob Guhl, March 03, 2025, The Prospect)

Our research team at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD), an international counter-extremism organisation, has examined al-Abdulmohsen’s online profile over the past eight years and found that he did in fact have a clear set of views—security services just didn’t spot them. Al-Abdulmohsen consistently expressed views inspired by the counter-jihad movement, a loose network of bloggers, thinktanks and organisations promoting anti-Muslim and often far-right ideas. He considered Islam to be a dangerous, violent and totalitarian ideology, not a religion. He described Muslims and Arabs as intellectually primitive, promoted conspiracy theories about the “Islamisation” of Europe and justified discrimination against Muslims. These posts are not outliers but rather part of a consistent pattern spanning more than eight years.

Despite the AfD’s attempt to use the Magdeburg attack as further evidence to support its anti-migration policies, the alleged attacker had supported the far-right party since 2016. In his view at that time, “I and the AfD were fighting the same enemy in order to protect Germany.” In December 2017, he even shared a post by Alice Weidel in which she blamed Islam for security threats to Christmas markets.

He also supported international far-right figures promoting counter-jihad ideology, including Dutch politician Geert Wilders. In April 2019, he retweeted a post in which Wilders justified revoking Muslims’ freedom of religion. In 2020, he shared multiple tweets by Wilders that said “Stop Islam” or “Stop Muhammadanism”. In August 2024, he shared a post calling Wilders a “hero”.

As early as December 2016, al-Abdulmohsen also expressed support for the British far-right and anti-Muslim activist Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, the founder and former leader of the English Defence League who goes by the name Tommy Robinson. In May 2024, he retweeted Robinson stating that “using the word Islamism let’s [sic] Islam off the hook. The problem is Islam.” In October 2024, he shared a tweet by Robinson promoting his new book, which he claimed provided “all the evidence of the replacement of Europeans by the oligarchy”.

Given the remarkably consistent beliefs in the alleged attacker’s online activity over nearly nine years, why were authorities in Germany seemingly unable to link him to the far right?

Because of Islamophobia.

WE ARE HUME’S CHILDREN, NOT LOCKE’S:

God, Liberty & Epicurus (Michael Lucchese, Feb 27, 2025, Athwart)

Zubia goes on to convincingly argue that this modern Epicureanism has consequences for Hume’s political thought. Although the Scotsman is commonly considered a critic of social contract theory and even a “prophet of counterrevolution,” his skepticism places him squarely within the liberal tradition founded by Thomas Hobbes. Whatever critiques he offered of the fanciful contractarianism of his day, Hume nonetheless conceived of society as a sort of contract to secure justice—and a particular kind of justice at that.

It is no exaggeration to say that Hume’s vision of justice is bound up with his sense of progress. “Political science, from Hume’s perspective, is tasked with locating and improving,” Zubia writes, “man-made social and political institutions that are responsible for moving human beings from barbarism to civilization, or, stated in slightly different terms, all of which convey his meaning, from partiality to impartiality, from savagery to humanity, from warfare to peace.” Hume was an ardent defender of the British constitution, then, because he saw it as a sort of “end to history,” a final answer to the problem of politics.

Specifically, Hume privileged utility over what Zubia calls “the classical tradition of moral and political theorizing” about the Beautiful. In Hume’s account, the British constitution, with its checks and balances and commercializing spirit, lowered the aims of government from virtue to security in a way that was simply more conducive to life by orienting it to the here and now rather than any vague religious concept of eternity. As Zubia describes it, “Hume’s political theory provides an institutional formula by which self-interest, in the form of avarice and ambition, might redirect and restrain itself.”

This account of Hume’s political theory may sound strikingly familiar to American ears. Does it not remind us of Publius’s maxim in Federalist 51 that “Ambition must be made to counteract ambition”? Certainly in the rhetoric of The Federalist, we can trace the influence of Hume’s political thought.

MUST HAVE THOUGHT HE WAS DEALING WITH AN UNDERAGE GIRL:

From the Berghof to the Oval Office: Notes on the most shameful day in the history of the Republic (Claire Berlinski, Mar 01, 2025, The Global Cosmopolitan)

A man sits across from power. His fingers tighten around the arms of his chair.

The bully makes no effort to mask his contempt. He sits rigidly, eyes burning with an unnatural intensity, fingers twitching on the armrest of his chair. When he speaks, it is not a conversation but an eruption—words spat like bullets, contempt laced through every syllable.

The outburst does not abate. It is not a speech but an assault, designed not to persuade but to disorient, to cow, to humiliate. The bully leans forward, slamming his fists against the table. His face reddens, his voice sharpens. He moves from insults to threats, from history to grandiosity. The great country he leads will no longer be mistreated, he says. Those days are over. The people have had enough. His words are not arguments—they’re sentences, verdicts, pronouncements of doom.

“You are nothing,” says the bully, not quite shouting. One of his lackeys smirks. “You think you are independent? You are a failure, a disgrace.” Behind him, the immense generals stand silent, unmoving. They don’t need to speak; their presence says everything. The visitor looks at them and understands what is being offered. This is not diplomacy. It’s a choice between submission and annihilation.

The visitor is allowed no rebuttal. He does not speak until the torrent of invective slows, and even then, his words are weak, uncertain. He tries to protest, to insist that he and his country are not to blame, that he has done all he could to maintain peace. The bully’s response is bitter, scornful laughter, as if the very idea is absurd. He rises suddenly—pacing now, shaking his head, muttering to himself in a fevered rant. “You will sign, or we will act. You will agree, or you will cease to exist.”

There is no need to say what that means. The visitor has seen the faces of the men behind him. He knows that even if he signs, this meeting is not a negotiation but an autopsy. He has been given no options, only demands. If he yields, his nation dies slowly. If he resists, it dies swiftly. There will be no help coming.

The year was 1938. The visitor was the chancellor of Austria, Kurt Schusch­nigg. The bully was Adolf Hitler. The place was the Berghof…

RELIGHT THE FUSE:

Reagan’s Philosophical Fusionism: Conservatism’s political power is derived from its ideas, not the other way around. (Donald Devine, Apr 4, 2014, American Conservative)

How did Meyer, Buckley, and Reagan think about fusionism? Fusionism to them was a philosophical concept. It was a philosophy that considered the principles of freedom and tradition as naturally interrelated in a tension whose resulting moral force created Western civilization and its American offshoot. Tension (the term Meyer preferred to fusion) was a force that could hold traditionalism and freedom together, which made both part of one potential whole. It was not the unitary logic of an ideology from a single principle deducing necessary conclusions, but a synthesis, a synthesis that Reagan said described modern conservatism. Yes, he conceived a city on a hill, but one always fighting to uphold both principles; for he also argued “freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction.”

The idea that both principles were required was lost when progressivism insisted that tension, balance of power, duality, pluralism, and decentralization could all be unified under a single science of administration. By mid-20th century, the triumph of progressivism was complete. Both freedom and tradition would be subject to science. What Meyer et al.—explicitly following F.A. Hayek—did was to give the old ideal of synthesis new life. In fact, it did take a “debating club” at Buckley’s old National Review to draw out its conclusions. The freshly stated fusionist synthesis inspired a generation on the right and did become successful enough that some of its principles did have a brief life under Reagan’s administration. Once he left, however, political leaders only interested in the coalition as a step to power lost the sense of interrelatedness between the two principles and became confused and then exhausted. That is the problem today.

Even under Reagan there were factions that only viewed their own single ideology as the whole. There was always a coalitional aspect to “fusionism,” but those leading the coalition at the beginning understood the necessity of both freedom and tradition. They also understood that while communism was the preeminent threat, it was—as the founding conservative document, the Sharon Statement, put it—only “at present” the greatest threat. Anti-communism was not a principle but one aspect of a tradition that justified self-defense, a pragmatic necessity to preserve freedom and tradition. Likewise, libertarianism by itself had no rooted value structure even to minimize theft under the guise of reducing inequality. Traditionalism alone could become authoritarian and rigid but, as libertarian Hayek noted, free societies require customs and traditions to sustain them.

While factions will always exist, leaders of such single ideological perspectives necessarily will be viewed as partisans of that faction and will not be accepted as movement-wide leaders. Only one who internalizes the necessity of both liberty and tradition can make it work. That was Reagan’s secret to success and the only path forward. He was not a carpenter of stools but a synthesizer of Western wisdom, recognized as such by a sufficient number to be granted power. What the conservative movement needs most today is more philosophical debating clubs and less talk about power. If it gets the former right, the latter will follow.

BE DECENT:

A simple act of kindness from his favorite athlete changed his life forever (Jeremy Rutherford, Feb 27, 2025, The Athletic)

Jim Marquardt was 16 and seeking some privacy. He had an important letter to write and his short attention span couldn’t compete with the TV in the living room, so he retreated upstairs to his sister’s bedroom.

He shut the door and started scribbling. It was a Saturday night, and while his brain was telling his right hand what to write on the white legal pad, his ears were listening to the St. Louis Blues hockey game. He loved the team and specifically its goaltender, Mike Liut. He tuned into KMOX radio to hear Hall of Fame broadcaster Dan Kelly belt out, “What a spectacular save by Liut!”

On this particular night, the volume was low because Marquardt had to be dialed in. In a page or two, the high school sophomore wanted to capture what to say to his sports hero.

He poured his heart into his words, and as a poor student hoping for the letter to be perfect, he later took it to his English teacher for help. The teacher wondered why a student with flunking grades was suddenly motivated but made the corrections nonetheless. It was handwritten, so every mistake meant a rewrite. The final product was five pages and took a month to finish.

“I remember everything I wrote in that letter,” says Marquardt, now 59.

MAGA IS A CULT:

How a son spent a year trying to save his father from conspiracy theories (Zach Mack, February 26, 2025, NPR)

Reporter Zach Mack and his dad are living in separate realities, and it’s tearing their family apart.
This story is an accompaniment to a podcast series released by NPR’s Embedded called Alternate Realities. You can listen to all three episodes here or wherever you listen to podcasts.

About a year ago, my dad bet me $10,000 that he could foretell the future.

It all started when he texted me a picture of a list. Writing in barely legible cursive, he had scribbled 10 politically apocalyptic predictions. My dad was foreshadowing verdicts of treason for Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Joe Biden and the Clintons, who would go down for murder as well. Biden would ultimately be removed from office, and so would the governor of New York and the mayor of New York City. It went on. Donald Trump, who was seeking reelection, would have all charges leveled against him at the time dropped, all while being reinstated as president without the need for November’s election. He also thought that the U.S. would come under nationwide martial law.

For all his catastrophizing, I wouldn’t describe my father as a paranoid person — I tend to think of him as an optimist. He’s very friendly, the kind of father who cracks a lot of dad jokes with strangers. But like so many Americans, Dad had gotten swept up in conspiracy theories. Chemtrails, Biden body doubles, the idea that a shadowy cabal he calls “the globalists” is secretly running the world — these are just a few secret plots my father believes in.

The list, however, was something new. My father was now predicting the biggest shake-up in the country’s history, and he was absolutely certain that it would happen within a year.

At the bottom of the page was a challenge: $1,000 for each of the 10 predictions that were supposed to happen sometime in 2024.