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Washington, DC — and pieces with no single place

279 pieces · page 10 of 14
The Record Decline That Did Not Reach Everyone
August 18, 2026
US overdose deaths fell 27% in 2024, the steepest one-year drop ever recorded, and life expectancy hit a record high. Both are real. Neither reached every community equally —…
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The Country Got Safer, and Almost Nobody Noticed
August 18, 2026
Murder fell 11.6% in 2023 and 14.9% in 2024 nationally — among the fastest declines on record. For two decades, most Americans told Gallup crime was rising even in years it was…
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The Largest Job in America Pays the Least
August 18, 2026
Home health and personal care aides are the single largest occupation in the US economy — bigger than registered nursing — and among the lowest-paid. The workforce filling it is…
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Ninety-Five Years of Government Violence Against Citizens. Zero Convictions.
August 18, 2026
Wounded Knee, Ludlow, Tulsa, Kent State, and MOVE span nearly a century and five different targeted groups — and share one identical outcome. No government official or officer…
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The deal nobody wrote down
August 18, 2026
Every American history textbook calls it the Compromise of 1877: a secret backroom deal that ended Reconstruction. What's actually documented is much narrower -- a 15-member…
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The porters carried the network
August 18, 2026
White passengers called every Black Pullman porter "George," regardless of his real name -- a habit descended from naming an enslaved person after his owner. The same men were…
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We live near people like us
August 18, 2026
One in three North Dakotans has Norwegian ancestry, the highest concentration of any group in any state. DC has the largest Ethiopian community in the US; Minnesota has the…
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The weather you were never going to have
August 18, 2026
Roughly 25 million Americans live in the two states where snow, on average, does not fall at all. Seventy-one percent of the country lives outside every county that touches the…
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What we said we are — the promise the country had to write down twice
August 16, 2026
Most Americans believe the Bill of Rights has always protected them from their own state government. It did not -- for the republic's first eighty years those ten amendments…
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Acceptance of people showing up
August 16, 2026
Almost nobody actually gets to choose whether difference arrives -- in a family, a neighborhood, a country. It shows up on its own schedule, through a parent's remarriage, a new…
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The capital had a seat, and Congress took it back
August 15, 2026
About 712,000 people live in Washington, DC — more than live in Wyoming or Vermont. They pay more federal tax per person than the residents of any state. They have no vote in…
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The manual nobody hands you
August 15, 2026
A new car comes with two or three manuals. A new driver needs 40 to 70 hours of documented instruction. A new baby comes home after formal parent training that can run as short…
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The current culmination
August 14, 2026
The wheel wasn't invented to move anything. Every tool since has followed the identical two-step pattern -- one person solves a narrow problem in front of them, a different…
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One canon, one truth
August 14, 2026
In 1987, a University of Chicago professor published a bestseller arguing American universities had abandoned a single, correct body of thought for empty relativism, and that the…
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Not opposed, the same economy
August 14, 2026
The country's default framing puts the Farm Belt and the Rust Belt on one side and Wall Street and Silicon Valley on the other -- two Americas, pulling apart. The single largest,…
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Three Apps in Three Months: What Building With AI Actually Looks Like
August 13, 2026
The dominant narrative about AI and developers is replacement. That's not the only real experience out there. A 40-year developer's own account of shipping three real, working…
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Open Data Isn't the Same as Usable Data
August 13, 2026
BLM, EIA, and FRED are all real federal data sources, integrated the same afternoon -- a silently-null field, a row that splits five ways without warning, and one that just…
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Why this site exists
August 13, 2026
Nobody hides the fact that the country keeps re-running the same trade. Nobody has to. No institution's job is to hand a reader the version of history that connects 1790 to a…
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The trade we keep remaking
August 13, 2026
In 1790, the federal government agreed to fund a broad public good and let the benefit land unevenly on purpose, then closed the deal with a side trade nobody wrote into the law.…
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The golden age that never was
August 13, 2026
Bowling leagues, church membership, and fraternal lodges all really did collapse over the last sixty years, and the data is real. But the story that frames this as a lost golden…
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