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
Books I Hope to Read in 2023
2022 had the most babies and the fewest books read, both in total, and off of my "to read" list for the year. This was predictable. I read 7/11 of my "to read" books, and 85 books/26k pages across the year. Nothing earlier than 1950, either, I think (though Goodreads gets this wrong if I… 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
The Race to the Bottom in Sports Gambling
At Deseret, I'm writing on the particular perversity of legalized sports gambling. States touting possible revenue from taxes aim to profit from the degradation of their citizens. It’s as though a state instituted a tax on adultery, and then began promoting websites like AshleyMadison and held press conferences with prostitution rings. By advertising invitations to… Read More
My Favorite Books of 2022
This year began with a baby, had a move in the middle, and I'm now getting to discover what normal might look like in our new state. These were my favorite books I read over the course of the year, listed in roughly chronological order. Women's Work: The First 20,000 Years: Women, Cloth, and Society… Read More
The Cost of Evading Moral Argument
At Deseret, I'm writing about the hamstrung compromises we get when people disagree on moral grounds but fight on practical grounds. I'm writing specifically on the death penalty, but it's only one, particularly painful example, of how America sometimes makes a controversial policy legal but impossible. For years, the moral issue of the death penalty… Read More
Reckoning With Reality
I got to write for National Review on why vocational education and home economics should be part of everyone's education. These tracks are exercises in truth-telling and help make good citizens. In effect, our goods are leased, not owned. Even if we’ve paid for them outright, they are designed to be beyond us and to… Read More
How Reversible are LARCs?
For a long time, I've wondered how easy it is for poor women to get IUDs removed. Long active reversible contraception (LARCs) are strongly recommended for poor women, but they can face the greatest barriers to seeing a doctor, and can be stuck, unable to have the children they want. I was glad to get… Read More