I made my Christianity Today debut to argue that churches should welcome children by design... and that means building child sized toilets into their bathrooms. I can see how much easier it is for her to use the child-sized, real-plumbing toilets at her school, but we don’t have the same option at church or at… Read More
Category: Articles
Putting a Price on “Unpaid Work”
At Deseret, I responded to Helen Hester and Nick Srnicek's After Work: The Fight for Free Time, and its thought-provoking ideas about how to value "unpaid work." Labor-saving innovations don’t make as much sense when the work process is valuable, not just the output. When work is evaluated for the formation it gives us, it’s… Read More
Piecing Together Our Broken Medical System
I loved reading Ilana Yurkiewicz's Fragmented: A Doctor's Quest to Piece Together American Health Care, and I'm glad to have gotten to write about it for National Review. The range of treatments that doctors can offer has gotten more and more advanced. Robotic suturing tools allow surgeons to conduct delicate surgery through minimally invasive laparoscopic… Read More
“Father” Is Not a Part-Time Job
Can you unbundle fatherhood from marriage? That's the topic that Richard Reeves and I are (politely) skirmishing over at Fairer Disputations. Reeves would like to see more support for and ideals of fatherhood where fathers live apart from their children and are not married to their mothers. Men need to know what they can uniquely contribute to their… Read More
Why Government Can’t Talk to Citizens
Whose to blame when government services don't work? I got to review an excellent book on the last mile of policy for Deseret. Social studies students learn how a bill becomes a law, but Jennifer Pahlka would argue that you can’t stop the story at the president’s signature. The administrative infrastructure and vendor contracts that… Read More
The Narrowness of Barbie Feminism
I was rooting for Greta Gerwig's Barbie, but I was ultimately disappointed by the movie. I got to review it for The Dispatch. Gloria comes off as the Betty Friedan of the film, giving voice to the problem without a name. She offers her lecture on the impossibility of being a woman to each brainwashed… Read More
The Colleges Cheated First
At First Things, I'm writing about Chat-GPT and cheating in college. The core problem—students only have a reason to cheat if they think they have no need to learn. The cheating began with university administrators, when they started to substitute a credentialing process for an actual commitment to the formation of a particular kind of… Read More
Cramming Child Care into CHIPS
At Deseret, I make the case against the child care benefit in the fine print of CHIPS, which would make child care a work-administered benefit at some semiconductor plants. Making child care a work-linked benefit means repeating all the problems of the employer-linked insurance and retirement plans, and adding a more serious problem. Child care… Read More
Embracing Amateurism in the Face of AI
As Chat-GPT and other machine learning models make it easier to generate text and art, I wrote in praise of doing something yourself, even if you do it badly, in Deseret. When you choose to be bad at something, you get to experience the joy of being an amateur in the classical sense. Today, “amateur”… Read More
The Best and Worst of Rings of Power
I wrote about Rings of Power for both First Things and Mere Orthodoxy. There's potential in the show, but the first season fell far short of good storytelling. At First Things, I wrote about the moral muddle of its structure: Tolkien’s stories aren’t mystery boxes. His characters have a very clear idea of what is… Read More