Short pieces on what the week actually cost.
Rome figured this out before it figured out plumbing. Keep the grain flowing and the games running, and a crowd that’s fed and entertained stops asking who’s skimming the treasury. The Roman satirist Juvenal, who coined the phrase around 100 AD — “panem et circenses,” bread and circuses — wasn’t praising the emperors for generosity. … Read more
You don’t need a name to know something’s off. You just need a nose. Here’s the smell: anyone who disagrees gets called crazy. Unpatriotic. A threat. Not wrong — dangerous. Not someone with a different read on the numbers — someone who hates this country, hates you, hates everything decent. That’s not an argument. That’s … Read more
Twenty-three hundred years ago, a king named Philip of Macedon figured out he couldn’t beat every Greek city-state at once. So he didn’t. He played them against each other instead — funded one side here, armed a rival there, let them bleed each other down — and walked in and took the whole board while … Read more
You know the guy. He gets in the elevator and rips off a fart, and before the smell even hits the back wall, he’s already looking at the person next to him — disgusted, shaking his head, stepping away like he’s the victim here too. Everybody in that elevator now side-eyes the wrong person. Nobody … Read more