dorsal1967

Essay · economics · September 2026 Retirement is the part of Keynes’s leisure that the rich countries actually took. For thirty years people left work earlier and lived longer; since about 2000 the exit age has been rising again, and in Portugal it is now tied by law to how long people live. This essay asks how long the last part of life lasts, how much of it is spent in good health, whether the pension that pays for it is enough, and who carries the adjustment.

Essay · economics · September 2026 For thirty years an hour of work in Portugal has produced about two-thirds of what the average European hour produces, and the Portuguese work more of those hours than anyone else in Western Europe except the Greeks. This essay takes Keynes’s question from America to Europe and then home: what the productivity bought, how much of it was taken as time, who got the income, what the crisis took away, and why the rent now eats the raise.

Essay · economics · September 2026 In 1930 Keynes predicted that within a century the rich countries would be four to eight times richer and would work fifteen hours a week. The first half came true with seven years to spare. The second did not come close, and the machines he feared would cause mass unemployment never did. Ninety-four years of data on output, hours, pay and jobs show where the productivity went: mostly into income rather than time, none of it into idleness, and since 1980, in America above all, a large part of it to the people at the top. Nobody chose that split; it was made for them.

Essay · society · September 2026 Fifteen years of argument about social media have produced a long list of harms to individuals and a short, contested pile of evidence for most of them. The list is the wrong place to look. What the platforms changed most reliably is not any one person but the things a society runs on: shared attention, trust, the people in the middle, the price of status, the enforcement of norms, the way facts are settled and the way children are raised. Most of those were already weakening. The platforms took the friction out. Generative AI is now taking out the last of it, and adding something new: you can no longer tell who is speaking.

Novel · in progress · September 2026 Twenty years after the Ministry of Doubt fell, transparency became law. Every decision a system makes about a person now comes with a reason, in plain language, on demand. Nobody lies any more. Nothing is hidden. Everything is explained, at length, by machines, and none of it can be understood. Tomas Reis reads explanations for a living. This is the story of his job becoming impossible without anyone deciding that it should.

Essay · traffic · September 2026 The car in front pulls away and, for a moment, nothing happens. Multiply that moment by every car in the queue and you get a wave that runs backwards through the traffic at twenty kilometres an hour, at every light and in every jam. Two simulations from first principles put a number on how much of a city’s stop-and-go is that moment, how much is everything else, and what a faster driver would actually be worth.

Essay · biology · September 2026 Thirty generations back you have a billion slots in your family tree and about two thousand pieces of DNA to fill them with. Everyone of European descent is descended from Charlemagne; almost no one carries anything of his. Ancestry runs on two clocks, one exponential and one linear, and the gap between them is where genealogy and genetics part company — and where the newest object in population genetics, a graph that holds the whole history of a species’ DNA, comes in.

Essay · physics · September 2026 Quantum mechanics was not discovered. It was assembled, over twenty-seven years, by two dozen people who mostly disagreed with one another and several of whom disliked what they had made. It began with a formula fitted to a furnace in Berlin, passed through a young man’s hay fever on a North Sea island, and was finished in a hotel in Brussels where its founders argued about what it meant and did not settle the argument. The argument was reopened in 1964 by a Belfast engineer working in his spare time, and closed, insofar as it can be, by three experiments that won the Nobel prize in 2022. This is that history.

Essay · physics · September 2026 General relativity is the one great theory of physics made by a single person, and the making took eight years of wrong turns, a borrowed geometry, a race to the finish and a calculation that gave its author palpitations. It was then confirmed by an eclipse, ignored for forty years, and revived by radio astronomers, pulsars and a generation of mathematicians who found black holes inside it. This is the story of how it was found, how it nearly died of neglect, and how it became the most precisely tested description of anything.

Essay · physics · September 2026 Two theories account for everything physics has ever measured, and each has passed every test set for it. One says the world is a smooth, curved geometry that moves under its own rules; the other says it is grainy, probabilistic and built from amplitudes that add. Where both apply at once they contradict each other, and a century of work on the single theory that must lie underneath has produced clues, candidates and no verdict. This essay sets out what each rulebook says, where exactly they fail to fit, what the leading attempts to join them have bought and cost, and the one experiment that might, within a generation, say whether gravity is quantum at all.

Essay · platforms · September 2026 Enshittification is a word for a mechanism, not a mood. Cory Doctorow named the sequence in which a platform is good to its users, then good to its business customers at the users’ expense, then good only to itself. The sequence was in the economics literature under a duller name thirty years earlier. A small optimal-control model reproduces it from three ingredients, puts a number on when the turn comes, and suggests why it came everywhere at once. Applied to the AI firms, it says where they are in the cycle and what to watch.