From the Founders
Reflections, field notes, and shorter writing from the movement.
We use three words as if they were one. Patriotism, politics, and partisanship get folded together until it's hard to tell which we mean. Someone who argues fiercely for their side calls it patriotism. Someone worn out by the arguing calls the whole thing politics and decides to sit it out. The blurring feels harmless, [...]
From the Founders
Memorial Day is for the names. It is sometimes confused with Veterans Day, which honors the living. Memorial Day is for the dead: the men and women whose service ended in service. The day exists because a country that asks people to risk their lives for an aspiration needs a moment, set apart, to acknowledge [...]
From the Founders
How economic interdependence builds the peace that politics cannot. There is a principle hiding in plain sight: countries that trade with each other rarely go to war with each other. A new essay from HumanProgress.org by Walker Wright walks through the evidence, and the underlying scholarship is more consistent than most public conversation about war [...]
From the Founders,Worth Reading
Part 3 of 3 The first piece in this series described what has happened to public conversation: the shared room has fragmented, the incentives that govern public talk have shifted away from good reasoning, and the architecture of online discourse reliably sorts people into rooms where they encounter only weak versions of what other people [...]
From the Founders,Pillar Notes,Questions that Matter
Part 2 of 3 The previous piece argued that public conversation has gotten harder for structural reasons — fragmented information, attention-driven incentives, algorithms that sort us into rooms with people who already agree. That diagnosis sets up a question. What is genuine public conversation actually for? And what conditions does it need to work? Plenty [...]
From the Founders,Pillar Notes,Questions that Matter
Part 1 of 3 There used to be a room. Not literally, but functionally — a shared space where people who disagreed about important things could still talk to each other and be talked back to. A claim made in public was a claim that other people, reading the same paper or watching the same [...]
From the Founders,Pillar Notes,Questions that Matter
An invitation to the founding essay You feel it. Everyone does. A dinner-table conversation tips into confrontation. A friendship fractures over a political opinion. You scroll through the news and realize your first instinct is no longer curiosity. It is dread. We carry in our pockets more computing power than sent humans to the [...]
From the Founders
