Archive
Browse all 66 articles across governance, urban systems, ecologies, and latitudes.
Blueprints and Blockades: Latin America's Planning Wins—and the Times They Were Stopped
Latin America did not lack planners or plans. It lacked uninterrupted time. Over the last century, the region produced sophisticated projects in transport, health, energy, and social protection. Many took root and quietly improved daily life. Others were intercepted—often by U.S. power, sometimes by U.S.-based firms—before they could mature.
The Client Is the People: On Lawyers Who Mistake a President for a Republic
In the labyrinth of American law, the first wrong turn is often grammatical. Swap a singular for a plural—the President for the People—and a whole architecture shifts by degrees until courthouses feel like vestibules to a single man's will. What opens as error hardens into habit; what begins as advocacy calcifies into allegiance.
What DOGE Actually Did: Ten Months of Fake Savings and Real Damage
What looks like subtraction is often scorched ground; what looks like reform is frequently a breach of law. Ten months in, DOGE's balance sheet is legible—and the arithmetic of claims versus facts reveals a permanent contest between institutions designed to be slow and appetites designed to perform.
Zoning as Destiny: How Regulation Shapes American Cities
America's housing crisis, racial segregation, and climate challenges share a common origin: zoning laws written a century ago to exclude and divide.
Fear, Trump, and the Edit: When One Splice Weaponizes an Entire Newsroom
A miscut speech, a $5 billion threat, and two resignations: how the BBC crisis reveals the asymmetric warfare against independent media. When power hunts for seams in newsroom armor, every error becomes a hostage situation—and even UK Labour ministers declare the BBC "must change."
The Art of Witness: How Experts, Archives, and Doctrine Restored Indian Country
In American Indian law, the most transformative victories seldom arrive with parades. They arrive as sentences: "Congress has not said otherwise." Those sentences depend on an architecture—expert affidavits, maps, ledgers, and a disciplined order of proof—that turns memory into law.
Urban Heat Islands: The Climate Crisis in Concrete
Cities are becoming furnaces. This essay traces how design, policy, and inequality create urban heat islands and proposes pragmatic, equity‑first interventions—shade, water, surface albedo, zoning reform, and community stewardship—to cool the most vulnerable neighborhoods.
App-Store States: Platforms as Quasi-Governments
In the museum of code there is a wing where the labels feel like laws. Merchants line up with packages and petitions, and somewhere deep inside the glass, an algorithm arranges who may be seen, which is a form of sovereignty.
The Care Grid: Treating Childcare and Eldercare as Infrastructure
Every city has a network you can't point to on a map. It runs under the hours of the day, not the streets. Treat care as a grid—with uptime targets, dispatch rules, and capacity planning—not as weather.
Why Hispaniola Kept Changing Flags: Spain, France, and the Road to Haiti
The island we now call Haiti and the Dominican Republic did not change hands because monarchs were whimsical. It moved with the tides of European war, sugar profits, and administrative exhaustion. This essay untangles the geography, the names, and the power ledger behind Hispaniola's shifting flags.
Stranded: Who Gets to Move
Public transportation is social infrastructure. How we design and fund it determines who can access jobs, education, and opportunity.
The Spanish Echo in the Non-Spanish Caribbean
Spanish heritage did not disappear from the English-, French-, and Dutch-speaking Caribbean; it migrated into other rooms of the house. This essay maps the living echo through Trinidad's parang, Jamaica's Spanish Town, Belize's bilingual markets, and the ABC islands' Papiamento—arguing that these traces are not antiquarian curiosities but working infrastructures of cooperation.
Ten Interventions That Bent a Hemisphere
Across the 20th century, U.S. covert and overt actions in Latin America traded short-term "stability" for long-term democratic fragility. From Guatemala's 1954 coup to Plan Colombia, the pattern is visible in declassified files: regime change at the top, mass graves at the bottom.
The Harm in the Middle: How 'Both-Sideism' Is Strangling Independent, Critical Media
Both-sideism is not neutrality; it is a production method that assigns equal weight to unequal claims, awards airtime as if truth were a parity contract, and punishes outlets that test reality before publishing. In today's asymmetric politics, this method doesn't balance coverage—it subsidizes bad faith and bankrupts independent, critical media.
Guardianship as Extraction: How Courts Dispossessed Native Wealth
In the American West, conquest moved indoors—into county probate courts. For Native families, the guardianship complex from 1890s-1950s didn't protect wealth; it redirected it through "approved" sales and fees that left wards with little more than a file.
The Long Reverberation: How the Spanish Civil War and the Franco Years Shaped Latin America
The Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) did not end on the Jarama or the Ebro; it spilled across the Atlantic and took up residence in classrooms, publishing houses, barracks, parishes, ports, and party headquarters from Tijuana to Tierra del Fuego. The Franco regime that followed became, at once, a source of exiles who rebuilt Latin American culture and a distant mirror admired by certain strongmen. Out of that contradiction—a defeated republic fertilizing democratic life abroad, and a surviving dictatorship flattering authoritarian imaginations—Latin America inherited institutions, habits, and cautions that still matter. What follows is a map of those legacies: intellectual, diplomatic, cultural, migratory, and political.
The Accidental Foundry: How Napoleon Broke Spanish America and Forged Latin America
Napoleon did not set out to invent Latin America. He wanted Europe, and the way to Europe ran through Madrid. Yet in toppling the Spanish monarchy, seizing Louisiana and flipping it to the United States, wrecking Spain's fleet, and turning sovereignty into a traveling mask with no face behind it, he shattered the imperial grammar that had ordered the New World for three centuries. From the shards came juntas, constitutions, caudillos, republics—an atlas of new futures. If Spain's empire died under French boots, Latin America learned to walk in the noise.
After Ten Months: What We've Learned About Power, Policing, and the Word We Hesitate to Use
Ten months into Trump's second term, we have enough evidence to test the term "fascist" in practice. Not by tallying tweets, but by looking at state power: who it targets, how it moves, and what it leaves behind. Three arenas tell the story: immigration enforcement, elections, and deployments as leverage.
Administrative Censorship: How Chilling Effects Spread
Censorship today arrives not in jackboots but in memos, forms, and pauses 'pending review.' This essay maps how administrative routines—procurement rules, complaint pathways, ambiguous guidance—convert discomfort into policy and policy into habit.
Upstairs Subsidies: Bailouts, Class, and the American Idea of Capitalism
In U.S. crises, public money moves fastest through pipes that already exist for capital. Banks receive oxygen in hours; households receive forms. The result is a recovery that tilts upward. This essay maps the architecture of those upstairs subsidies, the class and political consequences, and a rescue design that stabilizes markets by stabilizing people.
When Utilities Choose Governors
How physical systems—pipelines, grids, cables—shape political realities in American cities and define the geography of governance.
The Labyrinth of Three Clocks: Venezuela 1998–2025
María Corina Machado's Nobel Peace Prize arrives as Venezuela navigates 27 years measured by three clocks: output, distribution, and rights. A data-driven narrative tracking boom, crash, and the quietest clock—democracy—that decides repair.
The Textbook Wars
Texas HB 900 was struck down, but the machinery it set in motion—vendor pre-screening, procurement pressure, and quiet book removal—did not stop. This essay maps how procurement has become a side door for censorship and offers a counter-architecture to defend pedagogical choice.
Medellín''s Miracle? Urban Design, Politics, and the Limits of Transformation
Once suffering extraordinarily high violence rates, Medellín remade itself through transit, public libraries, and public-space investments. This essay traces the politics, innovations, ambivalences, and lessons for U.S. cities seeking equitable urban transformation.
After the Guns, the Gravity: Where Gaza Talks Stand—and How Trump Rewrote the Leverage
As of October 14, 2025, an American-brokered ceasefire is in effect. Phase 1 is happening; final status is not. The ceasefire is a door ajar, not a house built. This analysis examines what Trump delivered, what he left out, and what a reality-based settlement must do next.
The Politics of a Name: What Trump's Columbus Day Proclamation Actually Teaches
A presidential proclamation does not rename a federal holiday; it performs it. Trump's 2025 Columbus Day proclamation rejects the dual-recognition posture of 2021–2024. Let's be precise about what changed, what didn't, and what a grown-up republic should do instead.
Judicial Erasure: Deleting Spanish Land Rights
In recent years, the Supreme Court has asked judges to test certain rights and regulations against 'history and tradition.' The words feel neutral, even comforting—like walking the family farm before making a will. But methods make worlds. A jurisprudence that privileges a particular.
America''s Other Founding: The Spanish Story
The most American thing about the United States is that we keep mistaking prologue for plot. We nod at Spain and Mexico in the opening credits, then hit fast-forward to railroads and robber barons. But the decisive drama—the social inventions, the legal improvisations, the urban.
Why the U.S. Treats Latin America Differently
Walk into any American newsroom on a slow afternoon and point to a globe. Paris elicits sighs; Prague, a study-abroad anecdote; Berlin, a memory of train schedules that ran to the minute. Say Tegucigalpa, and the room tilts. Not hostility—just air pockets of unknowing.
Vetocracy: Why America Can't Build
Every empire tells time with its roads. Rome had milestones; we have press releases. In 2021, Congress passed the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law—a vault of money large enough to make accountants need a hammock. The numbers are real; the cranes are not imaginary.
The Hidden Hemisphere: How Spanish America Built the United States—and Why We Forgot
Every nation is a story told about land. The United States has preferred the tidy novella: thirteen British colonies, a heroic revolution, then Manifest Destiny. But walk any city with your ears on—Los Angeles, San Antonio, Santa Fe—and the place names remind you that the harmony was written in.
The Bench of Mirrors: Conservative Judicial Activism and the Roberts Court
In American law, 'activist' is the powdered sugar we throw on the bench when we want to make someone else's footprints more visible than our own. Since the 1980s, the conservative legal movement has acted with strategic purpose—first under 'New Federalism,' then through the Roberts Court's project.
Neighbors at Arm's Length: The Anti-Woke Turn and the Architecture of Democratic Distance
From Florida's classrooms to Hungary's parliament halls, the 'anti-woke' movement reveals itself as more than culture war—it's a systematic attempt to redesign the distance between citizen and state, neighbor and neighbor, in ways that fundamentally alter democratic participation across the.
Pan‑American Solidarity: Shared Futures Across Hemispheres
Climate, migration, trade — the Americas are entwined. This essay argues that effective responses to shared crises require institutional designs that match hemispheric interdependence: joint infrastructure, finance, and democratic cooperation.
The Forgotten Republics of Light: Reading America Through the Ghost of New Spain
Beneath every American highway lies the dust of empires that spoke in another grammar. The Spanish colonial past offers an alternative genealogy where identity was not binary but layered—a continental experiment from Florida to California that still defines our moral noon.
Inventing Tradition: Originalism as Judicial Activism
Call it the constitutionalist's promise: decide by text, history, and structure rather than by vibe or partisan appetite. In principle, that's healthy. In practice, on the current Supreme Court, the methods deliver outcomes that lean the same direction over and over—and create a new vision of the.
Three-Card Constitution: The Federalism Dodge
When the Court abandoned tiered scrutiny in Bruen and demanded that gun regulations match the Nation's historical tradition, it turned constitutional litigation into an antiquarian contest. This detailed analysis examines how specific doctrinal moves reshape the balance of constitutional power.
The Double-Standard Doctrine
How Washington treats Europe like a roommate and Latin America like a distant cousin—and what it would take to change the house rules. An empire doesn't have to call itself an empire. Sometimes it just keeps two sets of house rules. When Europe coughs, the U.S. shows up with casseroles and cash.
The De-Risked Hemisphere
Why Latin America's next boom is North America's best insurance policy. For two decades the world's factory pointed east by reflex. Then pandemics and geopolitics broke muscle memory. 'De-risking' entered the catechism, and procurement teams began measuring distance again—how far the ship must.
The Shadow Budget: Donor-Advised Funds, Dark Money, and the Administrative Map of Power
The shadow budget is not crime; it is design—a way of cooling taxes while heating influence, upgrading donor optionality into campaign durability. From DAFs to c(4)s to administrative calendars, this is the atlas of a gradient most cities cannot see but all cities feel.
Neighbors at Arm's Length
The double standard that warps U.S. policy toward Latin America—and how to fix it. Europe gets the Rules for Allies; Latin America gets the Rules for Neighbors. Here's a field guide to ending the whiplash.
The Movement Tax: Noncompetes Cage Workers
Thirty million workers bound by noncompetes; one quarter licensed with credentials that won't cross state lines. These are not guardrails—they are tollgates. A Friction Index maps the cost of movement; a Mobility Atlas charts the reform.
NAFTA's Second Act
A blueprint for a clean, fast, bilingual North American economy ahead of the 2026 USMCA review. Trade is a sentence written in verbs: make, certify, clear, deliver. For three decades, North America conjugated those verbs under NAFTA; in 2020 we swapped the grammar for USMCA and kept moving.
The Water Barons: Drought as Market
Post-2026 Colorado River rules, a bilingual law of the ditch, and the cities that already know how to share. Every politics is water politics in disguise. Draw the United States by rivers and you get a biography of arguments: the Colorado's improbable slingshot through seven states and two nations;.
The Landlord Leviathan: REITs, Private Equity, and the Price of Shelter
The landlord is no longer the woman downstairs with keys—it is a spreadsheet that lives in Delaware and dreams in waterfalls. When REITs and private equity own the marginal stock, rent becomes the solution to a covenant, not a neighborly bargain. A systems anatomy of financialized housing.
Solar Sovereignty in the Mojave
Ecological development for the Sonoran century—north and south of the line. Stand on a clear night above the borderlands and you will see two kinds of
The Shade Gap: Trees as Infrastructure
A solarpunk blueprint for America's hottest century—rights, rules, and the civic art of lowering the temperature. Here is the short version of the
Shrink to Grow: The Buyback Paradox That Hollowed American Industry
Rule 10b-18 created a safe harbor for buybacks in 1982. What followed was not theft but diversion—each dollar buying back shares cannot build factories, train workers, or seed the future. A patient anatomy of the machine and the futures it withheld.
Heat Commons
How a Spanish-American heat commons can save lives, redesign streets, and teach the republic courtesy. The map of summer is a moral document. It shows where trees stand, where pavements glare, where bus shelters exist because someone cared enough to draw a roof.
The Rebuild: Infrastructure as Redistribution
What America's infrastructure actually looks like in 2025—three places, four programs, one honest ledger. We like to pretend infrastructure is a sequence of ribbon cuttings—the pure joy of scissors through satin. In reality, it's a ledger written in three inks: authorizations (Congress),.
The Shadow Official Language: Spanish in Court
Why a bilingual republic is good law, good engineering, and the cheapest reform we haven't finished. Walk the United States with your ears open and you'll hear what the Census writes in ledgers: nearly one in five people speaks a language other than English at home—Spanish by far the most.
Reclaiming the Commons: Public Space as Power
Land grants, acequias, and the quiet path to Spanish-American co-stewardship. Every country carries an official fiction about who first drew the lines. In the American Southwest, the neatest fiction says the United States arrived to find a blank ledger, then wrote order into wilderness.
The Price of Roots: Licensing Immobility
Thirty million Americans are bound by noncompete clauses; one in four workers faces licensing barriers. These restraints suppress wages, block entrepreneurship, and turn exit into a debt event. The fix: ban broad restraints, price the narrow ones, port credentials.
The Buyback Standard: How Rule 10b-18 Turned Markets Into One-Way ATMs
A 1982 SEC safe harbor made buybacks routine. Today they move hundreds of billions quarterly, driven by EPS targets and executive comp—with thin disclosure and lopsided gains. The tool isn't the problem; the incentives and opacity are.
The Shadow Constitution: Administrative Law
How Spain and France still shape American rights—if you know where to look. Every legal system keeps a diary and a dream. Ours files the diary under 'common law' and the dream under 'the Constitution.' But across the South and West there is a third ledger—stamped in Spanish and French—that still.
Six Votes: The Supreme Court Revolution
The Roberts Court before and after 2020—how a jurisprudence of 'tradition' remapped power, rights, and the administrative state. Historians will draw a clean fold in the timeline of the Roberts Court. On one side (2005–2019): incrementalism with sharp elbows.
Power Lines as Colonial Control
Puerto Rico's democracy, bankruptcy, and the grid that could teach the mainland how to heal. If you want to see the United States without makeup, fly to San Juan and wait for the lights to flicker. In that twitch you can read the whole civics lesson: a people who are citizens without a presidential.
Brackeen: The Case Against Tribal Sovereignty
Louisiana v. Callais and the quiet attempt to end Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. Some revolutions arrive as fireworks. Others arrive as docket numbers. Louisiana v. Callais is the latter—a case that began as a fight over one congressional map and swelled into a vehicle that could cripple or.
The Language Penalty: Speaking Spanish Costs Power
How to run elections, permits, and emergencies in two languages—and why it makes a republic smarter. Every morning, millions of Americans begin their day in Spanish and end it in English (or vice versa). The republic is bilingual in fact, yet too many of our most consequential interactions with.
The Profit-Price Channel: How Market Power Turns Shocks into Inflation
Between what we pay and what it cost to make runs a corridor of hidden doors—contracts, fees, platforms, habits—where a quiet arithmetic decides how much of a shock becomes a price and how much becomes a profit. The profit-price channel, mapped with equations and evidence.
The Activist Card: Judicial Hypocrisy
Conservative judging since the 1980s—and the paradox of a movement that won by denouncing its own reflection. The term 'judicial activism' is the judiciary's favorite insult and our public square's dullest knife. Everyone uses it to describe the decisions they don't like; few define it before.
The Activists Who Said They Weren't
How a conservative legal movement rewrote American law from the 1980s to today. For forty years, the conservative legal movement has sold a deceptively simple ethic: judges should interpret, not make, the law. The method was restraint; the result was revolution.
The Archive: Spanish Records Prove Native Claims
Building the bilingual memory infrastructure the United States forgot it needed. A country that cannot search its past will mis-govern its future. Ours keeps half its memory in another language—acequia minutes, merced deeds, mission ledgers, notarial protocols, diseños, parish censuses—a.
New Orleans and the Cities That Could Have Been
Cities are usually born of stubbornness or luck; New Orleans was born of geometry. A kink in the Mississippi offered a natural levee and a commanding bend—close enough to the Gulf to smell salt, far enough upriver to dodge the worst of the waves. That curve made the city a hinge between the.
The Atlantic Speaks Two Languages
The future likes to hide in plain geography. One shore is Spain: reforming, digitizing, and growing faster than its neighbors, with a power grid now majority-renewable. The other shore is Latin America: a continent of copper and code, lithium and logistics.
Madrid After Miami: How Spain Can Become the Hemisphere''s Other Capital
For a generation, Miami has styled itself the 'capital of Latin America'—a boast stitched from air routes, private-banking ledgers, and the glow of Spanish-language studios on the Palmetto. The proposition of this essay is not to deny that reality but to widen the map: Spain can shoulder a.