Wright Steenrod

Noah Hawley attended Jeff Bezos's private Campfire retreat in 2018. His wife broke her wrist. He told Bezos directly - not as complaint, just as human information from one husband and father to another. Bezos looked horrified, an aide materialized instantly, and he was whisked away. No "I'm so sorry." No "do you need anything." Just escape. Hawley's thesis in The Atlantic is not that the ultra-wealthy are evil. It is something more precise and more unsettling: that moral reasoning develops through consequences, and the environment of extreme wealth systematically removes consequences from a person's life. When you can buy your way out of any mistake, fire anyone who disagrees with you, and exist in a social circle entirely composed of people who need something from you - the basic mechanism by which humans learn that other people are real goes dark. This is different from classic narcissism, which typically masks insecurity. What Hawley is describing is something rarer: a self-definition in which the individual has genuinely grown to the size of the universe and the universe has contracted to fit. Elon Musk calling empathy "the fundamental weakness of Western civilization." Trump asked about checks on his power saying the only thing that could stop him was his own morality. Peter Thiel concluding that freedom and democracy are incompatible. These are not poses. They are the logical endpoint of a psychology shaped by years of operating in a world that never pushed back. The Bezos encounter is the piece's sharpest detail because it is so small. He was not cruel. He was not contemptuous. He simply could not locate, in that moment, the impulse to respond like a person who understood that another person's wrist hurt.

Do the people in the 15 cars backed up at the Starbucks drive-thru not realize that if they park and walk in, there's no line at the counter, or do they just dislike getting out of their car that much.

Want economic development in Louisville? The biggest project in Louisville’s history would be removing I-64 along the waterfront. This would create more jobs, more increased property value, and more lasting growth than any stadium or pickleball court.

The US has 989 billionaires with a net worth of at least 5.7 trillion dollars hording our resources. If we distributed that $$$ equitably, regular Americans could leave their jobs and explore lives of creativity and self-growth, with food, clothing, and shelter provided for free.