January 16, 2026

THE BARBARITY IS THE POINT:

January 16, 2026

Before and After the Trigger Press That Killed Renee Good: Regardless of whether deadly force was legally justified, Renee Nicole Good’s death was preventable (Michael Feinberg, January 14, 2026, Lawfare)

Based on what has been publicly released, the whole interaction between Good, Ross, and the other ICE officials was a series of unforced errors by the government. The entire encounter, even accounting for Ross’s own footage, illustrates the general lack of professionalism with which ICE has operated over the past few months and its abandonment of its own internal policies.

This article will not wade into the debate over whether deadly force was justified at the exact moment Ross fired into the vehicle (that debate will largely focus on a narrow legal question—did he have a reasonable belief that Good would use her car as a weapon to hit him—in a manner that will frustrate many observers, and should rely on a much larger tranche of evidence than many observers realize). Because even if Ross’s deadly force was justified in the moment he fired his weapon, what much of the nation has now seen was not professionalized or situationally appropriate law enforcement. It was a series of incredibly bad choices leading to an unnecessary death. At every step which led to the fatal trigger press, ICE could have behaved differently. It could have behaved more tactically. It could have behaved more humanely. The nation—to say nothing of Renee Nicole Good’s family—deserves an honest accounting of why it did not. […]

Minnesota defines a peace officer as “an employee of a political subdivision [i.e. a local municipality] or state law enforcement agency,” and only grants their federal counterparts arrest authorities for the purposes of state and local violations when a number of conditions are met. The most important of these prerequisites requires that the federal officer be on duty, acting at the request of a local or state officer, and operating pursuant to the supervision of that local or state officer. At this point, neither ICE management nor any executive branch officials have argued that these conditions were met; indeed, the tenor and tone of statements by the Minneapolis mayor and Minnesota governor would certainly suggest otherwise. The proper remedy, then, for Good’s obstruction of traffic would have simply been for the ICE officers to request that local police join in the response and facilitate the movement of her vehicle.

But let’s put this argument aside, for the moment.

One Economy to Rule Them All

REMOTE WORK DEMONSTRATES THE SUPERFLUITY OF MANAGEMENT:

January 16, 2026

Welcome Back to the Office. You Won’t Get Anything Done: Return to office mandates aren’t about output. They’re about asserting control (Kathy Chow, Jan. 5, 2026, The Walrus)

Unsurprisingly, employees are almost universally against RTO mandates. One 2024 study from the University of Pittsburgh found that 99 percent of companies that implemented them saw a drop in employee satisfaction. Part of the problem is that people are back to the commutes they avoided during the pandemic. In some cases, these commutes are longer than they used to be. As housing costs increased over the past few years, many people moved away from cities with the expectation that they could continue to work remotely.

Countless reports have also documented how RTO rules negatively impact women in particular. In places where day care is either unaffordable or unavailable, women typically shoulder the consequences. Many mothers choose lower-paying jobs that allow them to work from home so they can juggle child care at the same time. All this has likely contributed to another depressing fact: over the past two years, the gender pay gap has widened for the first time since the 1960s. […]

Why, then, are employers rounding up their workers so insistently, with both stick and carrot? (There are the mandates, of course, and then there are the flashy constructions. Jamie Dimon, the chief executive officer of JPMorgan Chase & Co., just cut the ribbon on an extravagant skyscraper in Manhattan. It includes a luxury gym, meditation rooms, and indoor spin studios. Allegedly, the architect consulted wellness guru Deepak Chopra.) Management typically cites productivity as a key reason for bringing workers back into the office. But several studies have shown that hybrid work does not impact productivity. To the contrary, it improves job satisfaction and reduces quit rates.

It may be that the problem is precisely that people are too satisfied with their jobs. Some members of the C-suite have admitted that they implemented RTO mandates to encourage people to quit. RTO mandates offer a way for companies to reduce their staff size without having to pay severance—a tantalizing possibility for employers embattled in the Sisyphean quest to maximize shareholder value.

But the price of playing this mind game with employees is not negligible. For one, management can’t control who will quit, so it’s a rather risky way to reduce the size of a company. You could lose the guy who never does anything, but you could also lose your star player.

The other reason that employers often cite for bringing employees back in-person is “company culture.” But Daisley told me that bosses are “not necessarily being honest about what work was and what we want to go back to.” He recalled that, back in 2019, one of the most common complaints among employers was that workers were sitting around the office with their headphones on. Of course, the headphones that the C-suite were grumbling about from their corner offices were necessary if a worker had any desire to get work done while people around them took calls, crunched chips, and clacked on keyboards. Prior to COVID-19, office space leased per worker had been declining steadily since the 1990s, and employees were increasingly piled on top of each other. If good fences make good neighbours, then no fences presumably make very bad neighbours. All this to say, the “company culture” for which employers are so nostalgic has not existed for a few decades.

Isuspect the real motivation behind RTO mandates has nothing to do with productivity or company culture and everything to do with control. That is what the modern office was designed for, after all.

Identitarianism Joe Biden

THE SHARED WEIRDNESS OF THE LEFT/RIGHT:

January 16, 2026

Great Power Politics: Adam Tooze on Bidenomics (Adam Tooze, 11/07/24, London Review of Books)

We are left asking how this four-year period fits into recent American history and what legacy it leaves. The National Defence Industrial Strategy (NDIS) offers to do some of the work for us. Like other, better-known documents of the Biden era – Jake Sullivan’s speech on ‘Renewing American Economic Leadership’ at the Brookings Institution in April 2023, for instance – the NDIS is historically self-conscious. The basic Biden narrative was of America’s fall from greatness, starting in the 1990s, when the industrial fabric of the nation began to fray and China’s manufacturing capacity surged. Now China and other competitors are rising fast. The home front is undermined by polarisation and social dysfunction. But, with measures such as the Inflation Reduction Act, the CHIPS Act (which increased spending on semiconductor research), the bipartisan infrastructure law and the NDIS, the Biden administration was attempting a national rebuilding centred on industrial production and a revalorisation of manual work.

One of the sleights of hand this narrative performed was to claim the current moment, and Biden’s response to it, as unprecedented. In his Brookings speech, Sullivan announced that the administration was calling time on neoliberalism. In his farewell letter, Biden described the IRA as the biggest climate measure in history. The NDIS is supposed to be the first document of its type ever issued by the Pentagon. In fact, neoliberalism lives on precisely because it continuously reinvents itself. The IRA may be a first in the US, but Europe puts more money into climate solutions and China’s subsidies for its microchips industry are four times those of the US. The facts were less important, however, than the claim of novelty. Bidenism wanted to respond to America’s many crises not with orthodoxy but by making a historically significant break.

In October 2023, Sullivan wrote in Foreign Affairs, the house journal of the US foreign policy establishment, that the world had entered the third era of American power since the Second World War. The article seemed to be modelled on one of George Kennan’s famous memos staking out the terrain of the Cold War. As a source of inspiration, the Kennedy moonshot moment has some appeal. But within the Biden administration, it was the 1930s and 1940s that captured the imagination. Jigar Shah, who runs a $400 billion loan programme at the Department of Energy, liked to evoke the Second World War in his attempts to inspire America to do ‘big things in a very short period of time’.

The irony, of course, is that this narrative is anything but new. In all but name, this is MAGA, and credit for it belongs to the Trump team in the 2016 campaign. If we were to date it precisely, as good a moment as any would be Trump’s speech to the Republican National Convention on Thursday, 21 July 2016, in which he portrayed the nation as besieged by violence and terrorism. That moment was telling because President Obama responded in the following days that he saw a very different country. Americans weren’t living in a gothic world of doom. They were taking their kids to school and to sports camp. They were getting on with finding real solutions to real problems. Trump wasn’t all that Republican or even conservative, he implied; Trump was just weird.

January 16, 2026

THE BARBARITY IS THE POINT:

REMOTE WORK DEMONSTRATES THE SUPERFLUITY OF MANAGEMENT:

THE SHARED WEIRDNESS OF THE LEFT/RIGHT:

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