Colleague, News, and Opinion Links for the Week of May 10, 2026
Newsletter #454 -May 14, 2026
Highlighted Links
A few suggestions about links that we think are especially interesting.
Social / Economic Complexity
Why Capitalism Persists — An analysis of the ways in which competition and conflict play an essential role in producing the creative tension that has made capitalisms of so successful.Social / Economic Complexity
So Nobody Is Going to Pay Taxes Now? — A description of just how far US politicians have gone in trying to win votes by offering ever more generous tax cuts (while avoiding the corresponding cuts to government services).Race / Anti-Racism
The Self-Defeating Condescension of an Anti-Racist Education — A thought-provoking (and doubtless controversial) critique of the way in which progressives think about race and racism.Nihilists
What the Hell Is Microlooting? — An exploration of an important new word -- a word that reveals yet another giant crack in the social contract and the socioeconomic system upon which we all depend.Bridge Building
Rejecting the Rejection of Empathy — More on the ongoing and surprising debate over whether empathy is a force for good or ill.Violence
The Year of the Molotov Cocktail: American Antigovernment Violence Hits a 30-Year High — Disturbing data on the trend toward increasing levels of political violence -- something that is not very surprising, but very worrying.Communication Complexity
Shoot the messenger — A provocative argument that the class of people who shape public debate can’t see our their blind spots.
Reader Suggested Links
Highlighting links suggested by our readers. Please send us links to things that you find useful.
Theories of Change
David Brooks: “I’ve Got One More 10-Year Chapter in My Career, Probably” — David Brooks has left the Times, but he is not disappearing from the pundit scene. He explains why he left, and what is next for him.Constructive Communication
The Problem With Hasan Piker’s Einstein Story — A thought-provoking exploration of more and less constructive ways of engaging controversial ideas.Race / Anti-Racism
“Pawns in a White Man’s Political Game” — A comprehensive review of the long history of the civil rights movement -- a review that helps us understand how we got to where we are now.Artificial Intelligence
Why the A.I. Job Apocalypse (Probably) Won’t Happen — A hopeful and, we think, pretty persuasive description of the way in which societies and economies will adapt to AI’s ability to dramatically lower the cost of information.Constructive Communication
Strict Uniforms. Ancient Philosophy. Can a Public School Cure Our Toxic Politics? — A pretty appealing description of benefits of a “classical” education focused on teaching people how to think and constructively interact with one another.Effective Problem-Solving
The Ecosystem of Deliberative Technologies for Public Input — Ensuring public opinion and policy preferences are reflected in policy outcomes is essential to a functional democracy. A growing ecosystem of deliberative technologies aims to improve the input-to-action loop between people and their governments.Violence
Idiots Killed Sanity — A sobering assessment of the sources of evil that have become increasingly accepted and normalized and increasingly dangerous.
Colleague Activities
Highlighting things that our conflict and peacebuilding colleagues are doing that contribute to efforts to address the hyper-polarization problem.
Constructive Communication
Political Perception Gap Lesson Plan/Presentation — A slide deck from More Like Us that educators and others can use to teach about the Perception Gap and why diminishing it is so important.Bridge Building
Art, Politics, and Strangers: The Unexpected Way to Bridge Our Divides — Conceptual artist David Deighton created ‘art as civic science’: talking politics with strangers in national parks. He uses active listening to bridge divides.Theories of Change
Strategy Is Not the Problem: Why Issue-Based and Systems Approaches Break Under Pressure without Defensible Decisions — The central problem is not choosing a strategy. The central problem is making allocation decisions that cannot be sustained once they are tested.Theories of Change
How a Smaller “Them” Gets Us to a Bigger “We” — A new image of what civic engagement work should be: the building of “long bridges” to others in an effort to recognize their shared humanity and stake in a shared future.Theories of Change
Stop trying to ‘educate’ people into changing. Science proves it doesn’t work — When confronted with evidence that contradicts our beliefs, we’re more likely to question the evidence than to update our views.Psychological Complexity
Democracy is about people: Are we paying enough attention to the brain? — “Brain capital,” as different from “human capital,” has both strong explanatory power in analyses of democracy and is an organizing concept for policy interventions to support democratic resilience.The Hyper-Polarization Threat
Why We Viscerally Resist Talking to the Other Side – Mónica Guzmán — This episode explores why we’ve come to view curiosity as a threat and how our political labels have been transformed from descriptions of our beliefs into shields that prevent us from seeing the humanity in our neighbors.Constructive Communication
How To Motivate Americans’ Conversations Across Politics — James Coan and Imre Huss explain the power of Perception Gap corrections and other methods to lower barriers and increase positive motivation.Civil Society
Defending Local Stability: The Business Response — How business owners and leaders can prepare for possible federal deployments, protect their teams, and advocate for their communities.Developing a Unifying Vision
Building the Democratic Economy Now — Scot Nakagawa reflects on the economic infrastructure we need before Democrats can win.Saving Democracy
Bowling with Strangers: Fresh Theory for Reviving Struggling Democracies through Demonstrations 2.0 — What if the future of democracy depends not on louder protests, but on deeper human connection? In Bowling with Strangers, Marc Gopin says the power of civic gatherings are the relationships we build while we are there.Saving Democracy
3/4 of Americans Say the System Is Broken. That’s Where Our Movement Begins. — What if the issues both parties use to tear us apart could be transformed into places where we could prove that “We the People” can still govern ourselves?Saving Democracy
Policy by the People — A book review examining experiments across the world that have tried to remove politicians from the decision-making process. Have they worked?Saving Democracy
The Prerogative to Pardon — As with everything else, Donald Trump is pushing the pardon process to the breaking point. Can it be salvaged? Should it?Artificial Intelligence
Crocodile tears: Can the ethical-moral intelligence of AI models be trusted? — This paper introduces an ethical-moral intelligence (EMI) framework for evaluating AI models across dimensions of moral expertise, sensitivity, coherence, and transparency.Education
Harvard Law faculty share ‘Why I Changed My Mind’ — Though (ideally) academia is a place where revising one’s ideas is a constant, in reality getting something ‘wrong’ can be scary. Three former Harvard professors share such moments of reckoning in this video.Non-Violence
Why Gen-Z Is Rising — Erica Chenoweth and Matthew Cebul analyze the global surge of Gen Z-led protest movements, showing how economic insecurity, exclusion from power, and corruption are driving youth mobilization worldwide.
News and Opinion
From around the web, more insight into the nature of our conflict problems, limits of business-as-usual thinking, and things people are doing to try to make things better. (Formerly, Beyond Intractability in Context.)
Interstate War
A ‘Crushing Victory’ and a ‘Military Mistake for the Ages’ — From a military perspective, a revealing and much more nuanced look at the successes and failures associated with the actions of all parties to the ongoing war with Iran.Artificial Intelligence
There’s a 900-Year-Old Answer to Our Most Modern Problem — An extremely perceptive assessment of the ways in which common law-based strategies are able to constrain unreasonable behavior by AI firms without the need for any new legislation.Effective Problem-Solving
My politically homeless views — A compilation of great ideas that neither political party seems to want to champion -- ideas that a new moderate political party might pursue.Race / Anti-Racism
Ideas of Slavery: John Samuel Harpham’s ironic history — An in-depth attempt to write a global history of slavery (and related practices) -- a history that goes beyond simple stereotypes and helps us understand the forces that made this type of inhumanity possible.Education
Documenting a Decade of Academic Meltdowns — An attempt to write a history of the complex array of events surrounding the academic “cancel culture” that has done so much to shape our contemporary political environmentSocial / Economic Complexity
America is losing its most valuable resource: People — More insight into the complex relationship between long-term demographic change and a society’s vitality.Violence
Private industry needs anti-drone defenses too — A startling essay that makes clear just how much of our society’s critical publicly and privately owned infrastructure is vulnerable to attack by small, easily smuggled drones.Artificial Intelligence
The AI people have been right a lot — As we struggle to imagine a future dominated by AI, an appeal to listen to the folks who know this technology best.Social / Economic Complexity
Truckers Kill More Than 5,000 People a Year. Regulators Are at Fault. — An eye-opening look at the inconsistent way in which our society addresses the risks associated with various industries.Psychological Complexity
Fuel for thought — A profound essay asking us to reflect on the biological nature of our brains and our thinking.Social / Economic Complexity
What will be scarce? — An essay that applies lessons from past periods of great technological innovation to the AI revolution. It simply asks how we will want to spend the money that we save by using AI technologies.Climate / Environment / Health
RCP8.5 is Officially Dead — Good news -- the most dire projection of the likely impact of climate change is being withdrawn because it’s no longer thought to be a realistic possibility.US Politics
The YOLO Presidency — Yet another attempt to understand President Trump’s complex psychology. This article focuses on his apparent desire to ultimately be seen as one of the most transformative leaders in world history.US Politics
Two Cheers for Abundance Liberalism — A thoughtful assessment of the advantages and disadvantages one of the most promising strategies for building a broadly based political consensus.Corruption
The Evolution of Trump’s Corruption — New information on the staggering (and, likely, unprecedented) level of corruption surrounding the Trump White House.Violence
The American Way Is Under Fire — Thoughts on the far-reaching implications of the attack on the White House Correspondent’s Dinner (and so many other recent acts of political violence).
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About the MBI Newsletters
Two or three times a week, Guy and Heidi Burgess, the BI Directors, share some of our thoughts on political hyper-polarization and related topics. We also share essays from our colleagues and other contributors, and every week or so, we devote one newsletter to annotated links to outside readings that we found particularly useful relating to U.S. hyper-polarization, threats to peace (and actual violence) in other countries, and related topics of interest. Each Newsletter is posted on BI, and sent out by email through Substack to subscribers. You can sign up to receive your copy here and find the latest newsletter here or on our BI Newsletter page, which also provides access to all the past newsletters, going back to 2017.
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