About

As of late, I've been writing about software and politics, and increasingly the strange overlap between them.

Software is where I started, a decade spent building and debugging systems large enough that no one person can hold the whole thing in their head, which is its own education in reading between the lines of a stack trace, a commit history, or a postmortem. That habit of mind, chasing down what actually happened instead of what was announced, turned out to translate almost perfectly to politics, and specifically to the parts of it built out of FBI files, special counsel reports, and the kind of long-running scandal that eventually assembles a paper trail thick enough to investigate like a codebase.

Politics, FBI investigations, and scandals are the beat here, not for the horse-race commentary, but for the primary documents underneath it, which I read the same way I'd read a diff, line by line, looking for the part nobody thought to highlight.

My biggest influences writing this stuff are Scott Horton, Marcy Wheeler, and Tucker Carlson, three people who otherwise agree on almost nothing except that the primary source beats the press release every time.

If you came here from a post about Docker or Gentoo, don't be surprised when the next one is about a FISA application, and if you came here from Durham or Strzok, don't be surprised when the next one is about a kernel panic. It's the same read either way, just follow the paper trail wherever it goes.