Profound sigh. Since it’s important to update when the world proves you wrong, and to leave a record of the fact that you updated -

I am really kind of depressed about the Bowen Yang cancellation / Groveling Apology Retraction.

Not because it particularly matters in the greater scheme of things, which it doesn’t. Not because it’s the worst thing to happen in the world of US politics recently, which it definitely isn’t. Certainly not because I care about Bowen Yang.

But, goddammit, I really thought we weren’t doing this shit anymore.

And apparently we are. Not as much as we used to be, not in as many places as we used to be, but - enough that, in the year of Our Lord 2026, with everything being the way it is, an actual-factual celebrity can be terrified by the mob into self-abasement for the crime of agreeing with Matt Yglesias about electoral strategy.

“They’ll never stop” is still wrong. The world changes, and the tides of culture ebb and flow, and at some point you really can’t wring blood out of a stone anymore. But I have more sympathy than I did a week ago for the people who think that they’ll never stop.

I am a believer in the “Mississippi Miracle,” where one of America’s worst-resourced school systems has achieved some of its best results in early reading through solid training and rigorous implementation of best practices. More broadly, I am bought in on the idea of what David Brooks hailed as “the biggest education story of the last few years … the so-called Southern surge, the significant rise in test scores in states such as Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, and Tennessee.”

But I do think it’s important to pay attention to the limits of this story.

It’s not a significant rise in test scores in states such as Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, and Tennessee. It’s just those four states.

That’s a great achievement by those states, but I’ve seen a fair amount of discourse using their example to hail red state governance more broadly.

Viewing this through a narrow partisan lens, it’s worth noting that Louisiana’s turnaround mostly happened under John Bel Edwards, a Democratic governor. But more to the point, there are way more than four red states. If we were actually seeing broad-based educational improvement as a result of conservative governance, that would be much more embarrassing for Democrats but much better for the country than the reality.

One reason that Mississippi has shot up the rankings is that not only have its scores been going up, but scores in most places are getting worse. As a result, a state can now be a top performer with results that would have been pretty average a decade ago.

That’s not to take anything away from Mississippi, where schools and state officials are doing a truly excellent job of combating these serious national headwinds.

But if you want to understand what Mississippi’s results do — and don’t — mean for American society, you need to get the ratio of figure to ground correctly. Mississippi stands out partly because the national background has gotten worse. Most red states aren’t seeing similar improvements, and students in blue states aren’t doing well either. The failures look different, but they’re still bad.

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Probably the best thing you can say about the conservative approach to education right now, all things considered, is that when Republicans give you a school system that doesn’t work, they also won’t spend too much of your money on it, which is at least coherent.

It would be nice, though, if both parties would take the task of school performance more seriously. This means not just learning from Mississippi, but re-embracing some of the lost lessons of the No Child Left Behind era.

The “Southern sag” that I just made up

Consider that if you add up public-school enrollment in all four surging states, it’s about equal to the number of school kids in Florida, while Texas has many more students than that. When I was a young pundit, Texas and Florida were the examples smart journalists would cite of conservative states that were counterintuitively doing better than virtue-signaling liberal states at educating their students. If the surging four were now joining Texas and Florida in delivering good results, that would be incredible news for America’s kids.

But look at the fourth-grade NAEP reading scores in Texas and Florida — they’re getting worse!

This “Southern sag,” unfortunately, involves more than twice as many children as are benefiting from the Southern surge.

Of course it doesn’t make a ton of sense to talk about a Southern sag, since there’s nothing distinctively Southern about it. It’s just that national scores have gone broadly down. They’re down in the South and down in the Midwest and down in every other region. They’re down in blue states and they’re down in red states. The achievements in MS/AL/TN/LA are genuinely worth celebrating and paying attention to, but the fact that Texas and Florida and all kinds of other places are moving backward also underscores that you can’t just blame Democrats or teachers unions or believe that Republicans have this figured out.

Indeed, the other “state” that has done pretty well during this period is Washington, D.C., which was a wildly below-average school system when I first moved here and is now almost exactly average for a big city.

D.C.’s fourth-grade reading achievements are not as impressive as Mississippi’s, but on the flip side our eighth-grade reading scores have improved more than theirs, indicating that we have perhaps done something right.

And I would say that one of the big things that is driving success in the minority of places that are succeeding is that those places are trying.

Accountability is key

The No Child Left Behind law that was passed on a bipartisan basis in 2002 seems to have worked well. But it led to significant bipartisan backlash and was largely dismantled in Obama’s second term, and things have generally gotten much worse since then.

And yet, almost nobody is calling for going back to a system that was delivering improved results.

I think people know, broadly speaking, that teachers and unions generally did not like No Child Left Behind because it threatened negative consequences for a poor-performing minority of schools. This reflects poorly on them and conservatives are right to believe that public sector unions often lead to bad public sector outcomes.

But in most cases, rather than “it reflects poorly on unions that they oppose effective education reforms, so we should blow them off and run school systems,” the trend on the right has been to behave as if the goal of education policy is to dismantle teacher unions. As a result, the biggest reform trends have not been the kind of curriculum efforts we see in the Southern surge states.

Instead, there’s been a ton of enthusiasm for vouchers and education savings accounts, which are basically efforts to replace public-school funding with tax breaks for spending money on your kids’ education. The evidence on the effectiveness of these programs has generally been negative in terms of the impact on student achievement. This is true including (and perhaps especially) in states like Tennessee and Louisiana, where the mainstream public-school systems have been getting good results.

The basic issue here, as we know from the higher education market, is that schools don’t really compete on the basis of being highly effective at teaching students.

The “best” colleges in America are the ones that attract the strongest applicants. And most students just want to go to the “best” schools. Nobody even attempts to measure whether the teaching and learning practices at Harvard and Princeton are effective; it’s not considered relevant to the undertaking. If you have strong religious motives for wanting your kids to attend private school, if you’re rich and inclined to send your kids to private school anyway, or if you’re not particularly interested in education and just favor the downstream political-economy impact of harming teachers unions, then subsidies or tax breaks for parents of private-school students is a great approach.

But if the problem with unions is they oppose accountability for results, then the solution can’t be to shift to a privatization system that makes accountability impossible.

Progressives should get their act together

What I will say on behalf of the conservative approach to education is that, while it doesn’t work, it’s at least coherent. Vouchers and education savings accounts do not, in practice, lead parents to select highly effective schools for their kids. But if you do want to do that, you’re allowed to under a privatized system.

And more broadly, while the school performance trends in Texas and Florida are bad, the school systems are at least cheap to run. I would say the general deal with state government in Texas is that Republicans have made it a very harsh place to be poor. There’s no Medicaid expansion, stingy benefits, a criminal justice system that’s focused on insulating the affluent from crime rather than having low rates of violence, and generally bad public health outcomes. The school system evolving in the same direction of doing a bad job serving high-need cases would be of a piece with all that.

But in defense of Texas, Republicans don’t really run around claiming to be the people who care a lot about helping poor people.

Democrats have landed in a weird equilibrium where they typically do say that things like public schools and education and the well-being of poor kids are important.

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If nothing else, they generally want to spend a lot of money on public schools — in which case they really ought to care a lot about whether they’re doing a good job.

A long time ago, a union leader offered “We can’t have public money without public accountability” as an anti-voucher line, and I think it was a good one. But then you have to have accountability in your public system!

One of the striking things about the No Child Left Behind era is that a lot of the abstract, high-level criticisms of the law made perfect sense. It’s not really reasonable to expect public schools to eliminate “achievement gaps” or deliver universal proficiency. In a country with millions of kids, if you have any kind of reasonably rigorous standards, then someone is going to end up left behind.

But despite these conceptual flaws, the simple step of measuring results and imposing (generally very mild) consequences for bad performance was good. It’s true that this annoyed various stakeholders — not only teachers, because parents did not like hearing bad news about their school or their kids. But as adults, I think we understand that you can’t actually improve at something unless you’re willing to get some negative feedback.

The Virginia test case

An interesting test case is coming down the line in Virginia.

The state has a newly elected Democratic governor, Abigail Spanberger, who has been cultivating a moderate brand. A new Democratic trifecta is obviously not going to voucherize the Virginia public-school system or cut school spending to give everyone a tax break. What they ought to do is what you would expect Democrats to do with a public-school system: try to make it better so as to deliver better results, especially for high-need kids.

The federal government is no longer trying to make states hold schools accountable for performance, but state governments are still allowed to do this. And as it happens, Glenn Youngkin’s outgoing administration brought in two former Obama Education Department hands (including friend of the newsletter Chad Aldeman) to recommend changes to the state’s school accountability system, recommendations that were released in December while Youngkin was a lame duck.

Going forward with these recommendations would help new Governor Abigail Spanberger deliver some real results on education quality and build her résumé for national leadership. On the other hand, she already spurned the state’s unions during the campaign by saying she would keep Virginia’s right-to-work status, and there’s some sentiment that she therefore owes labor some favors.

This doesn’t really make a lot of sense to me.

Having already done the courageous thing, stiff-arming the groups and winning without them, she should try to deliver on the idea that Democrats care about the quality of public services. There’s no real reason that “schools should do a good job of teaching” should be a right-coded idea — it’s not reflective of the trends in most states where Republicans are governing, and indifference to school quality does not align with any progressive ideas or values.

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A couple week’s back we visited Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater, a really lovely building that perfectly illustrates why you probably shouldn’t build a poured-concrete modernist gem over an active river in a region of the country that has multiple freeze-thaw cycles each year. Here is the current state of the house (we were there on the absolute final day before they close for six months of renovations/restorations):

So, on the one hand, a bummer to go to an architectural gem and not be able to see it. On the other, I really loved seeing Fallingwater in situ in person (context: my father was trained as an architect, my mother as a painter and lithographer; I grew up with a lot of art and in a lot of museums and a lot of opinions about architecture and design and construction ad nauseam). I especially loved the tension between this balanced, monumental, (in)famous building and this towering unnamed pine tree.

I spent the next week drawing it, compositing my photo and several existing professional shots of the building, so I could have untented Fallingwater in its place among the trees, scaled as I saw it at the end of December 2025. The results were five sketches: Fallingwater (i–v). My wife and kids were divided and which attempt came out best.

My son insisted it was Fallingwater (iii) (he couldn’t say why, but I think it’s because he was standing with me when I took the above pic, and liked how this sketch captures both cataracts and the pool between):

I preferred (iv), because it felt like I got the depth on the rocky outcropping right, and there was some stuff with line weight that worked out:

And my wife and daughter chose (v), with my daughter specifically liking that you could glimpse the windows and underpinning structure better:

In retrospect, I agree with my wife and daughter: Fallingwater (v) is best, but mostly because it makes the tree and the building equal protagonists in the scene. Also, the rocky outcropping is pretty good.

Elon Musk is America’s China.

That sounds like a silly thing to say, but what it means is that what the entire economy of China is set up to do — scale up high-tech manufacturing businesses — is something that only one man in America knows how to do. Only Elon has built China-like manufacturing businesses in America, and he has done it twice now — SpaceX and Tesla. When something like that happens twice, it wasn’t a coincidence.

Just to give you an example of how important this is, note that without SpaceX, China would be leaving America in the dust when it comes to space launches. But with SpaceX, it’s America leaving China in the dust:

One implication of this is that America needs to make it a lot easier to set up and scale a manufacturing business, so that our entire high-tech manufacturing sector isn’t dependent on one slightly kooky right-wing billionaire. But that’s a topic for another post.

A second implication is that if we want to know about the future of physical technology, we should listen to Elon Musk. In fact, Elon has a great track record of seeing and entering manufacturing industries that China zeroes in on later:

This is a good list, but it omits the most important items. The three industries that Elon zeroed in on very early, which made him much of his fortune — and which China has subsequently gone all-in on — are batteries, electric vehicles, and solar power. In fact, he still thinks these technologies are some of the most important in the world. In a recent interview, Elon said:

It seems like China listens to everything I say, and does it basically— or they’re just doing it independently. I don’t know, but they certainly have a massive battery pack output, they’re making a vast number of electric cars, and [a] vast amount of solar…
These are all the things I said we should do here [in America].

Elon didn’t go for batteries, EVs, and solar power because he was a climate-obsessed liberal; he correctly understood that there was a revolution underway in the technologies that humans use to produce, store, transport, and harness energy. He knew that whoever mastered that technological revolution would attain a dominant position in a bunch of different, seemingly unrelated industries.

In other words, Elon understood — and still understands — the importance of the Electric Tech Stack.

I’ve written a lot about electric technology, and why it’s the key to the future of every nation and every industry on Earth. In a post back in 2024, I argued that what we’re seeing is a wholesale shift away from combustion, toward technologies that harness electricity directly:

For a more in-depth explanation, I strongly recommend this very long post by Packy McCormick and Sam D’Amico:

Not Boring by Packy McCormick

The Electric Slide

Welcome to the 1,269 newly Not Boring people who have joined us since our last essay! Join 248,515 smart, curious folks by subscribing here…

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5 months ago · 939 likes · 72 comments · Packy McCormick and Sam D'Amico

Basically, electricity is more controllable than combustion; pushing electrons through a wire simply offers you much finer control over where the energy goes than blowing up hot gases to turn some gears. For a long time, electric technology was limited by low energy density, low power density,1 and weak magnetic field strengths — combustion gave us the oomph that electricity just couldn’t give us.

But then in the late 20th century, we2 invented three things that utterly changed the game. These three inventions were the lithium-ion battery, the rare-earth electric motor, and power electronics. A little over a year ago, I wrote a post about why these three inventions were such game-changers:

Basically, these three things allow electric motors to replace combustion engines (and steam boilers) over a wide variety of applications. Batteries make it possible to store and transport electrical energy very compactly and extract that energy very quickly. Rare-earth motors make it possible to use electrical energy to create very strong torques — for example, the torque that turns the axles of a Tesla. And power electronics make it possible to exert fine control over large amounts of electric power — stopping and starting it, rerouting it, repurposing it for different uses, and so on.

With these three technologies, combustion’s main advantages vanish in many domains. Whether it’s cars, drones, robots, or household appliances, electric technology now has both the power and the portability that only combustion technology used to enjoy.

Elon Musk understood this decades before people like me ever did, which is why he entered the electric car business very early. And over time, Elon’s vision for the car industry has increasingly been proven correct. Sales of internal combustion cars peaked almost a decade ago and have been declining ever since, while sales of electric cars have only grown:

This shift isn’t just being driven by Europe subsidizing EVs at the urging of climate activists, nor by China incentivizing its citizens to buy its companies’ cars. Much of the world, from Asia to Latin America, is beginning to make the switch:

As of 2025, more than a quarter of total global car sales were EVs.

This shift is likely to accelerate rather than slow down. As I wrote back in 2024, now that the basic problems of energy density, power density, and torque have been solved, EVs are simply a superior technology:

They have many fewer moving parts, meaning they’re a lot easier and cheaper to maintain. They’re a lot more energy-efficient. You can charge them at night at your house, meaning you rarely have to go to a charging station. They’re quieter, and they have faster acceleration. There are a number of popular arguments against EVs, and all of those arguments are wrong — EVs now have very long range, EV batteries last for many years, charging stations can charge your car very quickly, there are plenty of minerals to give everyone in the world an EV, batteries are easy to recycle, and so on.

EVs are going to win, and there will be a tipping point — different in each country — where the whole market just flips from combustion to electric. One reason that tipping point comes very fast is that gas stations have a network effect — when enough consumers switch to EVs, there aren’t enough gasoline-powered cars on the road to make gas stations profitable, so they start closing down, which makes EVs even more attractive.

Elon Musk understood all this long ago, and it made him the world’s richest man. China caught on a little bit later, and now dominates global auto exports as a result. Europe is starting to understand it as well.

But apart from Elon, the rest of America doesn’t yet understand it. The Trump administration has canceled subsidies for electric vehicles, and most of the U.S. auto industry (except for Tesla) is shifting away from EVs:

U.S. automakers are shifting production from electric vehicles to gas-powered vehicles and are reducing spending, laying off workers, and repurposing EV battery plants to energy storage plants due to reduced consumer interest in electric vehicles and fewer government incentives…The Trump administration rolled back financial incentives for consumers to buy electric vehicles…and is modifying automobile efficiency standards…to eliminate the requirement for EV purchases…

Ford is writing down $19.5 billion, with additional EV losses of $13 billion since 2023. The EV transition has cost the company $32.5 billion. Ford plans to switch production at a new factory in Tennessee to gas-powered pickup truck models from electric models, cancel an electric commercial van model, remake the F-150 Lightning vehicle into a hybrid from a pure electric vehicle, and convert its Kentucky EV-battery factory into a battery-storage business for utilities, wind- and solar-power developers, and AI data centers.

The main reason America is missing the EV transition is that we’ve insisted on thinking of EVs in terms of climate — as a “green” technology whose purpose is to save the environment, rather than a superior technology whose purpose is to save you time and money. Trump canceled EV subsidies because he associates them with the environmental movement and the political left.

American consumers are avoiding EVs because of this, and also because of a lack of charging stations. The Biden administration promised to build a vast network of EV charging stations, but managed to build almost zero, largely because the initiative was larded up with unrelated contracting requirements. So many Americans still think they won’t be able to charge their EV on a long trip, and are sticking with gas cars as a result.

The ramifications of this failure will go far beyond the auto market. The reason is that the components that go into making EVs — the batteries, the motor, and the electronics — are increasingly the same components that go into making a vast array of other high-tech products. I have a video interview with Sam D’Amico where he explains this, and Sam’s long post with Packy McCormick also explains it in detail. But for a shorter explanation, let me recommend this recent post by Ryan McEntush of a16z:

a16z

Everything is Computer

Steve Jobs famously sold the iPhone as three inventions in one. In truth, it represented something much more foundational: the first mass-market machine that bundled compute, power, sensing, connectivity, and software into a single, tightly-engineered package…

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7 days ago · 137 likes · 7 comments · Ryan McEntush

Ryan explains that when the components that go into electronics are the same as the components that go into cars, drones, robots and tons of other stuff. This allows Chinese manufacturers like BYD and Xiaomi to leverage truly awesome economies of scale:

Once [the iPhone] existed, everything else started to look the same. Your laptop, smart TV, thermostat, doorbell camera, refrigerator, industrial robot, drone: all of them follow the same basic recipe. Even an electric vehicle, once you peel back the sheet metal, relies on the same ingredients — batteries, sensors, motors, compute, and software, just in a different skin. We no longer live among truly distinct technological paradigms, but within a world of variations on one single idea: the smartphone, endlessly turned inside and out and scaled across every domain. Everything is a smartphone…

Consumer electronics is about scale…Unlike legacy internal-combustion vehicles, electric vehicles draw heavily on components and device primitives shared across many other industries…Much of today’s most important technology rests, almost inadvertently, on the foundations built by [the consumer electronics] ecosystem…An electric vehicle is a smartphone with wheels. A drone is a smartphone with propellers. A robot is a smartphone that moves…

BYD, the global leader in batteries, builds cars, buses, ships, and trains. DJI makes drones, but also cameras, radios, and robotics hardware. Even Dreame, a Chinese vacuum company, just debuted an electric supercar. These firms are not “diversifying” in the traditional sense. Rather, they are…repeatedly assembling the same electro-industrial stack — batteries, power electronics, motors, compute, and sensors — into new permutations.

This means that China’s Everything Makers can make not just cars and electronics more cheaply than America can, but almost everything else as well — because almost everything is being eaten by the Electric Tech Stack. Even the software industry is being eaten by the Electric Tech Stack — AI is eating software, and AI requires huge amounts of electric power and battery stabilization in order to run its data centers.

Currently, China generates much more electricity than the U.S. does — partly because it’s willing to build out solar power, where in the U.S. solar is often blocked by local NIMBYs, “environmental” permitting laws, and a hostile Trump administration. But China also builds most of the world’s batteries, meaning that American AI is going to be dependent on Chinese batteries as well.

On top of all that, America desperately needs the Electric Tech Stack for its national defense. I pointed this out in a post back in September, and Ryan talks about it a lot as well. Drones are taking over the modern battlefield, and drones require batteries and rare-earth electric motors — the same components that go into the EVs that America is now refusing to build.

Thus, America’s weakness in EVs, batteries, and rare earths threatens to become a weakness in everything — a weakness in AI, a weakness in drones, a weakness in robots, and so on. Because we collectively decided that EVs are hippie-dippy climate bullshit, we ignored the key physical technologies that increasingly underlie all of manufacturing, including defense manufacturing.

Throughout America’s history, we have been at or near the forefront of every single major technological revolution. We were leaders in railroads, mechanized agriculture, industrial chemistry, electricity, mass production, internal combustion/automobiles, aviation, plastics/polymers, nuclear, space, telecommunications/TV, genetics, semiconductors, computing, the internet, mobile, and AI. This technological leadership enabled us to remain the world’s leading nation for over a century.

But now we are missing the big one. We are missing the Electric Tech Stack. We treated it as a climate issue instead of an issue of raw national power and industrial might, and we allowed it to become a political football. As a result, China is mastering this crucial technological revolution, and America is forfeiting it. Our entire existence as a leading nation is under threat from this remarkable failure of vision and leadership.

We should have listened to Elon Musk about the importance of the Electric Tech Stack. We should still listen to him now.

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