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This newsletter looks at the institutions we’ve built to hold society together — government, nonprofits, civic groups — and asks a simple question: are they actually doing the job, or just occupying the space where the job used to get done? I take a close look at what’s working, what’s broken, and what it would take for communities to handle more of this themselves. Subscribe for full access to the newsletter and the archive.

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The people reading this care about the same thing: institutions doing their jobs, and communities capable of solving their own problems instead of waiting on someone else, government included, to do it for them. Comment, argue, tell me where I got it wrong. If the work is worth something to you, a subscription says so.