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It's like the Andy Warhol bit about how even the President drinks Coca Cola but instead it's that both me and the richest man on earth can give ourselves anxiety and a personality disorder through our phones...

Mea culpa: if you told me five years ago that the US would find itself in a quagmire with Iran, I would have believed you. If you had told me it would be first and foremost because of *running out of ammunition* I would have laughed at you...

I'm starting to wonder if El-Sayed winning could be a turning point for corporate control of politics for the simple reason that he's locked onto the idea that the mere fact that corporations are spending on his opponent implies the corporations expect a return on their investment at voter expense..

The temptation of course is to see this through the lens of World War, but I wonder if the better analogy is the sort of war where centralised control breaks down and there's not so much a substantive disagreement between powers but rather a struggle to reintegrate men under arms into society...

I wrote about an emerging love affair with Personal Protective Equipment in certain segments of Jordanian society years after COVID and seemingly only tangentially related to it, asking what it means about people's differing ethical commitments. Let me know what you think!

Is there (still) Bread and Salt Between Us? Culture Wars, the “Ick” and Jordan’s PPE RevolutionEarly on in my most recent fieldwork stint, I was walking in an upscale neighborhood in Jordan when I glanced in the window of an eatery and saw two well-dressed people (a man and a woman) eating h…notesontheconcrete.wordpress.com

I'm in the Middle East right now and every time I look at a traffic jam I think about how utterly cooked the US auto industry is (and the European one for that matter). Chinese electrics are completely ascendant, often brands you've never even heard of that are making perfectly nice cars.

When activists (including a number of Gulf Arab activists now languishing in jail) warned that Gaza-style infrastructural warfare could be a vision of our collective future, I think a lot of people wrongly assumed it would only impact the Wretched of the Earth...

Kuwaitis ration electricity as Iran hits power gridResidents of Kuwait, one of the world's hottest countries, are cutting their use of air conditioning at the height of summer, as Iranian strikes on power plants turn rationing into a national priority...www.france24.com

The *profound* unwillingness of this expert space to countenance this possibility is a big part of why we're back here now and probably stuck holding the tar baby. Would Trump have gone back for more if the experts and the markets who follow them had priced this in to begin with? I highly doubt it.