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
Category: Articles
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
Hiding from Need at the Border and in the Womb
When we face a need that asks a lot of us, it's tempting to try to make the needy person invisible. At Deseret, I'm talking about how both parties try to avoid acknowledging the humanity and reality of the one in need—Democrats averting their eyes from the child in the womb, Republicans from the refugee… Read More
Greedy Jobs and Genericized Jobs
I got to write about Nobellist Claudia Goldin's Career and Family: Women’s Century-Long Journey toward Equity for Deseret. The whole book is fascinating, but what I wanted to focus on were the factors that made a certain kind of work a "greedy job" (long hours, pay scales quickly with intensity) or a "genericized job" (more… 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
Cushioning the Cost of Children
I like the sentiment of the call to "Make Birth Free!" but at the Institute for Family Studies, Patrick Brown and I are the wet blankets pointing out this proposal wouldn't help the most vulnerable mothers. For the poorest moms, birth is already free, at least in theory, but there are other gaps to close.… 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