Author: sts
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Mid-Cycle
Notes from the Field — Dispatch, May 27, 2026 Redistricting in the United States is supposed to happen once a decade, after the census. The census counts people. The count determines how many House seats each state gets. Legislatures then draw the maps. The process has always been political — the party in power draws…
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The Grand Jury Room
Notes from the Field – June 21, 2026 The “Broadview Six” case did not fall apart because the prosecutors were bad lawyers. It fell apart because a federal judge read the grand jury transcripts and saw what was in them — and then noticed that the version submitted to her by the prosecutors had pages…
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Two Countries, One Diagnosis
Notes from the Field – May 25, 2026 In the same week in May 2026, two opinion pieces appeared in two countries about the same problem — and neither author knew the other was writing it. In the United States, political scientist Lee Drutman appeared in a New York Times opinion video with columnist Ezra…
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Lower-Value Human Capital
Notes from the Field – May 22, 2026 The executives who announced the layoffs didn’t use the same words by accident. They used them because the words are accurate. Standard Chartered CEO Bill Winters, at an investor briefing in Hong Kong on May 19, announced the elimination of approximately 7,800 back-office jobs — more than…
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The Original Frame
Essay 16 — What was said before the room was built Steve Sagnotti · steves-head.space The preceding two essays named what can be built — the structural repairs, the shovel-ready work, the floor beneath the displacement wave. They are real and worth building. They are not the whole answer. The whole answer is older. It…
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A Stability Frame
Essay 15 — What can be built before the window closes Steve Sagnotti · steves-head.space “The best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago. The second best time is now.” — Chinese proverb “We are trying to construct a more inclusive society. We are going to make a country in which no one…
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The Reframe
Essay 14 — What a structure that can actually stand would look like Steve Sagnotti · steves-head.space “The conventional view serves to protect us from the painful job of thinking.” — John Kenneth Galbraith “Where all think alike, no one thinks very much.” — Walter Lippmann What it would take to build a different room…
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The False Frame
Essay 13 — How the room that worked was converted into one that cannot Steve Sagnotti · steves-head.space “The liberties of a people never were, nor ever will be, secure, when the transactions of their rulers may be concealed from them.” — Patrick Henry, Virginia Ratifying Convention, 1788 “This disposition to admire, and almost to…
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The Converging Frames
Essay 12 — Two Rooms. Two Frames. One Year: 2031. Steve Sagnotti · steves-head.space “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” Upton Sinclair, I, Candidate for Governor: And How I Got Licked, 1935 “The hour is coming, and now is.” John 5:25 Essay…
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Out of Frame
Essay 11 — What the frame excluded from consideration Steve Sagnotti · steves-head.space “They covet fields and seize them, and houses, and take them away. They oppress a man and his house, a man and his inheritance.” Micah 2:2 “Woe to those who add house to house and join field to field, until there is…
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