Slow Boring

Wisconsin gubernatorial candidate David Crowley holds a campaign rally on the eve of Wisconsin’s primary election. (Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images) Back when I was a teenage political junkie, overall interest in politics was low, and interest in politics among young people was especially low. This was considered a big problem in many quarters of the adult world, and those who worried about the lack of youth political engagement would sometimes ask young people like me what I thought about it.

Derek Thompson coined the phrase “the anti-social century” to describe an incredible rise over the course of the 21st century in the amount of time that people spend alone. He recently joined Jerusalem and me to talk about it. This is an issue I’m concerned about. Recent technological progress has been very concentrated in the realm of home entertainment pursuits that have left people spending more time alone and lacking human connection.

The Texas State Capitol in downtown Austin. (Photo by Duy Do via Getty Images) A bill Texas passed last year is already proving its effectiveness at changing outcomes on the ground, according to the Texas Tribune. House Bill 24 took the wind out of the sails of a Jim Crow-era state law that had previously allowed neighboring property owners who collected… Keep reading with a 7-day free trial Subscribe to Slow Boring to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.

A businesswoman looks out over a dense city skyline. (Photo by Klaus Vedfelt via Getty Images) YIMBYs, people in the housing abundance movement, do not have a pope or a set of sacred authoritative texts you can consult to find out what we think about things.

Any time I read about water scarcity issues in the United States, I get kind of annoyed. For starters, the United States is a land of relatively abundant water. Our freshwater resources per capita are above average globally, and while we’re no Canada or Brazil, we easily outpace the world’s other major states in terms of water availability. We do have a problem, though: While on the whole the United States is quite wet, a significant region of the country is quite arid.

Incumbent Republican U.S. Senator Dan S. Sullivan of Alaska. (Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images) For the first time this century, the Pennsylvania state House district in Butler County, Pa. — the county where an assassination attempt against President Donald Trump occurred just over two years ago — will be a blue se…

Jordan Dworkin’s micro-site Ordinary Abundance has created a surprising stir on the internet. The site walks viewers through a modest contemporary apartment and reveals it to be full of contrivances that would strike our ancestors as almost impossibly delightful. Some of the initial reaction was over-the-top enthusiastic, which in turn prompted a level of negativity that took me aback.

On Wednesday, Matt’s piece, “Two Kinds of Moderate Democrats,” opened up a few lines of substantive conversation in the comments about how moderate Democrats can market or rebrand themselves ahead of elections — specifically the 2028 presidential primary. I wanted to invite you to discuss this idea further in a dedicated discussion post today. Below are… Keep reading with a 7-day free trial Subscribe to Slow Boring to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.

Happy Friday! The Slow Boring team is on the move today, so Halina’s Evening Edition tonight will be a short discussion post in place of her usual article. Evening Edition content and access to the comment section are just a few of the extra perks that come with being a paid subscriber. This is the end of my summer in Maine; I’m looking forward to being back in D.C., though of course there’s much to miss about this state.

A pre-chimney household gathered around an open indoor hearth. (Image created with ChatGPT) I’ve been thinking lately about the question of historical realism in dramatic depictions of the past. And also about chimneys. Their absence isn’t always obvious in either fictional (such as “The Odyssey”) or fantastical (such as “House of the Dragon”) depictions of ancient life, but chimneys are a more recent invention than you might think.