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There is, after all, a pervasive worry, among the political class, that college students, ensconced in their own bubbles, could use a bit of shock therapy from a man unconcerned with preferred pronouns, trigger warnings, and the humanity of Palestinians. But it also shows how the political class’s obsession with universities blinds it to everything else. And the everything-else of Kirk’s politics amounted to little more than a loathing of those whose mere existence provoked his ire.

Faced with the prospect of a Kamala Harris presidency, Kirk told his audience that the threat had to be averted because Harris wanted to “kidnap your child via the trans agenda.” Garden-variety transphobia is sadly unremarkable. But Kirk was a master of folding seemingly discordant bigotries into each other, as when he defined “the American way of life” as marriage, home ownership, and child-rearing free of “the lesbian, gay, transgender garbage in their school,” adding that he did not want kids to “have to hear the Muslim call to prayer five times a day.” The American way of life was “Christendom,” Kirk claimed, and Islam—“the sword the left is using to slit the throat of America”—was antithetical to that.

Kirk habitually railed against “Black crime,” claiming that “prowling Blacks go around for fun to go target white people.” He repeated the rape accusations against Yusef Salaam, a member of the exonerated Central Park Five who is now a New York City councilman, calling him a “disgusting pig” who had gotten away with “gang rape.” Whatever distaste Kirk held for Blacks was multiplied when he turned to those from Haiti. Haiti was, by Kirk’s lights, a country “infested with demonic voodoo,” whose migrants were “raping your women and hunting you down at night.” These Haitians, as well as undocumented immigrants from other countries, were “having a field day,” per Kirk, and “coming for your daughter next.”

There was an “anti-white agenda,” Kirk howled. One that sought to “make the country more like the Third World.” The southern border was “the dumping ground of the planet,” he claimed, and a magnet for “the rapists, the thugs, the murderers, fighting-age males.” “They’re coming from across the world, from China, from Russia, from Middle Eastern countries,” he said, “and they’re coming in and they’re coming in and they’re coming in and they’re coming in…”

Kirk’s bigotry was not personal, but extended to the institution he founded, Turning Point USA. Crystal Clanton, the group’s former national field director, once texted a fellow Turning Point employee, “I HATE BLACK PEOPLE. Like fuck them all … I hate blacks. End of story.” One of the group’s advisers, Rip McIntosh, once published a newsletter featuring an essay from a pseudonymous writer that said Blacks had “become socially incompatible with other races” and that Black culture was an “un-fixable and crime-ridden mess.” In 2022, after three Black football players were killed at another college, Meg Miller, president of Turning Point’s chapter at the University of Missouri, joked (“joked”) in a social media message, “If they would have killed 4 more n-ggers we would have had the whole week off.”

The tragedy is personal—Kirk was robbed of his life, and his children and family will forever live with the knowledge that a visual record of that robbery is just an internet search away. And the tragedy is national. Political violence ends conversation and invites war; its rejection is paramount to a functioning democracy and a free society. “Political violence is a virus,” Klein noted. This assertion is true. It is also at odds with Kirk’s own words. It’s not that Kirk merely, as Klein put it, “defended the Second Amendment”—it’s that Kirk endorsed hurting people to advance his preferred policy outcomes.

What are we to make of a man who called for the execution of the American president, and then was executed himself? What are we to make of an NFL that, on one hand, encourages us to “End Racism,” and, on the other, urges us to commemorate an unreconstructed white supremacist? And what of the writers, the thinkers, and the pundits who cannot separate the great crime of Kirk’s death from the malignancy of his public life? Can they truly be so ignorant to the words of a man they have so rushed to memorialize? I don’t know. But the most telling detail in Klein’s column was that, for all his praise, there was not a single word in the piece from Kirk himself.

More than a century and a half ago, this country ignored the explicit words of men who sought to raise an empire of slavery. It subsequently transformed those men into gallant knights who sought only to preserve their beloved Camelot. There was a fatigue, in certain quarters, with Reconstruction—which is to say, multiracial democracy—and a desire for reunion, to make America great again. Thus, in the late 19th century and much of the 20th, this country’s most storied intellectuals transfigured hate-mongers into heroes and ignored their words—just as, right now, some are ignoring Kirk’s.

The rewriting and the ignoring were done not just by Confederates, but also by putative allies for whom the reduction of Black people to serfdom was the unfortunate price of white unity. The import of this history has never been clearer than in this moment when the hard question must be asked: If you would look away from the words of Charlie Kirk, from what else would you look away?

Meta has gone after AI in the same way they went after the metaverse, by splashing money around and rushing to build products fast. They’re spending tens of billions building out data centers and related AI infrastructure. They’re tossing out incredible compensation packages in the hundreds of millions of dollars to top AI researchers.

Facebook is now the cultural symbol for useless slop and disinformation, while ‘that’s so Reels’ is now a common insult for terrible shortform video content - and you get the first theory of Meta. It’s a laughable company whose core business is increasingly uncool, a company in decline, a company that falls flat on its face any time it tries to change things up.

Call Meta uncool all you’d like, metrics are up across the board. They’re getting higher user engagement, higher user counts, and they’re selling more ads at a higher price-per-ad. The numbers are up in virtually every way on every platform - Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and even Threads.

They can afford to make huge bets on speculative new technologies because they have more money than they know how to spend. Why not spend all that money on the metaverse or on AI? What else are they going to do with it? Zuckerberg still controls the company and he’d prefer to invest in new technology rather than just pay himself fat dividends. This is the second theory of Meta - a unbelievably successful company whose core business is booming and who spends a lot of money on speculative investments simply because they can.

It’s like when safe area insets appeared in iOS 11: it wasn’t clear why you needed them until the iPhone X came along with a notch and a home indicator. And then it changed everything.

There has also been an emphasis on “concentricity”. It’s an impossible thing to achieve and an easy target for ridicule. But it’s another case where Apple wants to take control of the UI elements that intersect with the physical hardware. All of this makes me think that Apple is close to introducing devices where the screen disappears seamlessly into the physical edge. Something where flexible OLED blurs the distinction between pixels and bezel. A new “wraparound” screen with safe area insets on the vertical edges of the device, just like we saw with the horizontal edges on iPhone X.

Other challenges, like infusing your own branding into an app with clear buttons will be easier to reason about once the reality of the hardware drops. Until then, stay away from the edges and wait for Apple to reveal the real reason for Liquid Glass.

Whilst it’s not exactly the same concept, I really felt the virtues of slow method thinking whilst reading Katalin Kariko's memoir on her research in developing the mRNA vaccine. The main thing that stood out to me was her slow methodical-ness in cleaning, preparing and thinking about experiments.

Being slow ‘forces’ me to think about strategy a lot because I need to make the best use of my time. This works well because science is so vast, and so strategy is important.

Writing to me feels more suited towards slow, patient thinkers. You have to shuffle words around many times before you get what you want to say.

We are being ravaged by diseases of despair. We don’t eat well. Our sedentary lifestyles are bad for physical and mental health. But we don’t talk nearly enough about the successes of public health and the advancements of science, which have largely been pushed by agencies, doctors, and research Kennedy and the Trump administration are now attacking. Our food, though more processed, is less contaminated thanks to FDA regulation. Infant mortality has plummeted. Cancer deaths have dropped 34% since 1991. Death rates from childhood leukemia are down six-fold since 1950. Vaccines for measles, polio, hepatitis B, and HPV have saved millions of lives. Smallpox was eliminated. Measles cases are down 99% (despite some recent outbreaks). U.S. life expectancy rose in the 20th century by over 30 years. Cardiovascular disease mortality has fallen about 75% from the 1950s. Even the maternal mortality rates in the U.S. may have been overstated, and new studies show our numbers are much more in line with other developed nations. HIV and AIDS deaths are down 54% since 2010 alone. Overdose deaths fell in 2024 by a whopping 27%. The list goes on and on and on. In short: We’re doing a lot of things right, and doing them in large part because of these agencies, scientific research, new drugs, new vaccines, and new treatment protocols. Quite obviously, these achievements are not enough to warrant burning the entire system down.