VOL. I, NO. 12 • SATURDAY, JANUARY 24, 2026 • PRICE: ONE FURROWED BROW
THE REVIEW
“When the machine stops listening, someone ought to write it down”
A Gentleman’s Guide to the End of Competence
This Week: Why Governments Can’t Hear, History Might Be Fake, and Nobody at the Fed Agrees on Anything
Dear reader, if you’ve picked up this edition expecting cheerful news about human progress, we regret to inform you that the machinery of civilization appears to be running on fumes and denial. But take heart! We’ve assembled the finest scholarly evidence of institutional decay and dressed it up with as much wit as the subject matter permits.
This week’s Review examines what happens when the structures designed to perceive reality become incapable of processing it. We begin in Syria, where a regime that survived everything except its own hollowness vanished in eleven days last December—to the surprise of every intelligence service with boots on the ground. From there, we travel to the halls of academe, where scholars debate whether America has too many ambitious graduates or not enough chairs for them to sit in. The answer, delightfully, appears to be “yes.”
We pause at San Francisco’s permit office, a place where housing goes to die beneath 87 layers of paperwork. We peek inside the Federal Reserve, where grown economists vote in opposite directions on the same afternoon. And we conclude with a warning from digital historians: the robots are writing our past now, and they’re not particularly good at it.
The common thread? Systems optimized for stability tend to suppress the very feedback that might allow them to self-correct. The technical term is “brittleness.” The colloquial term involves stronger language. Either way, the effect is the same: things appear robust right up until the moment they aren’t.
So pour yourself something steadying, settle into your reading chair, and prepare to learn why nobody saw it coming—and why they probably won’t see the next one either. Your skepticism, as always, remains appropriate and encouraged.
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When Forever Ended in Eleven Days
The Assad Regime’s Collapse Shows What Happens When Nobody Tells the Boss the Truth
Syria’s government vanished faster than a permit application in San Francisco, and the intelligence services of five nations want you to know they’re just as surprised as you are.
The collapse of Bashar al-Assad’s regime in December 2024 stunned analysts who had spent years reluctantly concluding that the dictator had won his civil war. From November 27, when rebels launched what they expected to be a limited offensive, to December 8, when Assad fled to Moscow, the machinery of a fifty-four-year dynasty simply stopped functioning. Soldiers who had held positions for years walked away. Cities that were supposed to be impregnable fell in hours. The “frozen conflict” that diplomats had learned to live with turned out to be frozen only on the surface.
The speed of the collapse revealed something more troubling than mere military defeat: a systematic failure of information. Assad’s intelligence services, designed for regime security rather than honest assessment, had been incapable of telling him the truth about his own army’s rot. Iranian and Russian patrons, consumed by their own conflicts in Lebanon and Ukraine, had quietly withdrawn the support that had propped up Damascus since 2015. And Western intelligence agencies, blinded by what one analyst called “Syria syndrome”—the heuristic of permanent threat—failed to recognize the signs of hollow decay.
“Miscalculation on the road to war is often the tragic consequence of how leaders resolve the trade-off between good information and political security.” — Tyler Jost, Bureaucracies at War
Assad had resolved that tradeoff in the usual autocratic manner: by surrounding himself with loyalists who told him what he wanted to hear. By December, he likely didn’t know the extent of his army’s demoralization until the rebels were already in Damascus.
The economic backdrop was equally dire. In 2020, one dollar bought approximately 1,150 Syrian pounds. By November 2024, the exchange rate had reached 14,750. Ninety percent of Syrians lived below the poverty line. The regime’s promise that the “good life” of secular stability would return had become what scholars call a “fantasy bribe”—and the population had stopped believing.
For analysts watching other regimes that appear frozen—Russia’s managed stagnation, North Korea’s hereditary autocracy, Venezuela’s economic ruin—the Assad precedent suggests a practical heuristic: stop asking whether a regime will fall and start mapping the specific structural dependencies that would make collapse possible.
The new interim government, led by Ahmed al-Sharaa of the former Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham, now faces the monumental task of rebuilding a country destroyed by fourteen years of war. With more than 50% of Syria’s basic infrastructure destroyed, more than half the population displaced, and 90% of Syrians living under the poverty line, the economic crisis is as severe as it gets.
Whether they succeed may depend on something Assad never developed: the capacity to hear bad news.
For Further Reading: Perspectives
PRO “The Fall of Assad: A Victory for Syrian Freedom and Regional Stability” Atlantic Council argues that Assad’s collapse presents historic opportunities for political reform and democratization, with Turkey emerging as a key stabilizing influence. atlanticcouncil.org — December 2024
CON “With Assad’s Fall, Syria Embraces Freedom But Faces Huge Challenges” Hoover Institution warns that widespread elation won’t last without discernible progress, and that American and European sanctions represent a “vice-like grip” around Syria’s neck. hoover.org — March 2025
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Too Many Chiefs, Not Enough Chairs
Scholars Debate Whether America’s Surplus of Ambitious Graduates Is Destabilizing the Republic or Just Annoying Twitter
The beetle expert says we’re doomed. The political scientist says we’re fine. Your correspondent suspects they’re both partially right, which is the worst possible outcome.
Peter Turchin, a Russian-American complexity scientist who began his career studying pine beetles before pivoting to the collapse of civilizations, has spent the past decade arguing that America is experiencing “elite overproduction”—a surplus of ambitious, credentialed individuals competing for a fixed number of positions of power. In 2010, he published a prediction in Nature that the United States would experience a spike in political instability around 2020. The Tea Party, Occupy Wall Street, the 2020 protests, and the January 6th Capitol assault have all been cited as confirmation.
Yascha Mounk, a political scientist at Johns Hopkins, published a direct rebuttal in December 2024 that cut to the heart of the theory. “A lot of the reason why some writers and academics have found the idea of a ‘surplus elite’ intuitively appealing is that they are disproportionately likely to know people who fit this description.”
Mounk’s argument is elegant: the perception of surplus elites is an artifact of the social circles inhabited by academics and journalists. In Brooklyn and North London, thousands aspire to be “the voice of their generation.” Their visible frustration creates an illusion of systemic crisis. But crucially, the market absorbs them. The PhD who doesn’t get tenure becomes a communications director. The failed novelist becomes a marketing consultant.
This is a serious challenge. If frustrated aspirants find decent employment anyway, where is the revolutionary fuel?
Arnold Kling, an economist and blogger, offered a synthesis that captures the tension: “What we have in surplus are social justice activists.” The problem isn’t economic immiseration but psychological disappointment—people who expected to matter discovering that they don’t, at least not in the ways they imagined.
The synthesis emerging from the debate suggests that Mounk is correct economically but Turchin may be correct psychologically. The “surplus” has been absorbed into corporate HR departments, university administration, and professional activism—positions where they can influence institutional culture without holding formal political power. Cultural wars are being fought not in the streets but within the machinery of organizations.
Francis Fukuyama, in a review that Mounk quotes approvingly, noted that Turchin “is able to detect elite overproduction in so many historical eras because he has a flexible definition of ‘elite.’ Who qualifies as an elite today? The category sometimes includes the top 1 percent of the income distribution, the top 10 percent, or any college-educated professional.”
Whether America has too many elites may depend entirely on how you count them. Whether it has too many frustrated ones seems harder to dispute.
For Further Reading: Perspectives
PRO “How Elite Overproduction Brings Disorder” Peter Turchin defends his thesis, arguing that the “wealth pump” transferring resources from workers to elites creates the conditions for instability, regardless of how individual aspirants find employment. peterturchin.com — April 2025
CON “Peter Turchin’s False Prophecy” Compact Magazine argues that Turchin’s approach “presents the world in such broad generalities that they are simply unfalsifiable,” obscuring more than it reveals about elite power dynamics today. compactmag.com — May 2025
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The 87-Permit Problem
How San Francisco Built a Machine That Speaks Without Saying and Plans Without Doing
If you would like to build a home in San Francisco, please allow 1,000 days for meetings. The fees will run over $500,000. The number of permits required is 87. The number of homes this produces is approximately none.
The housing crisis gripping American cities has many fathers, but bureaucratic sediment—the accumulated layers of rules, regulations, and administrative requirements that restrict institutional adaptation—deserves special recognition. Scholars describe a condition where minor protocols adopted decades ago create feedback loops that reward adherence and punish innovation, eventually calcifying into what they call “institutional lock-in.”
San Francisco has not explicitly banned construction. Instead, it has accumulated what one analyst called “extortionary compliance costs” and “discretionary review” processes. To understand the sweep of the problem, it is necessary to dive into the leviathan that is San Francisco’s city government—a compounding set of confounding procedures that necessitates securing at least 87 permits, enduring 1,000 days for meetings and paying more than $500,000 in fees on average for any residential project.
The permits come from everywhere: 15 from the Planning Commission, 26 from the Public Utilities Commission and Fire Department, 19 from the Department of Building Inspection, 17 from Public Works, and 10 related to public spaces. Each requirement may have seemed reasonable in isolation. Together, they form an impenetrable wall.
The phenomenon extends far beyond San Francisco. In Los Angeles, the median permit approval time was 31 months for multifamily developments that required a full environmental review; in Santa Monica, it was 77 months. In Toronto, according to international data, approval timelines rank second-last among 34 developed economies.
Marc J. Dunkelman, in his book Why Nothing Works: Who Killed Progress—and How to Bring It Back, argues that this paralysis emerged from good intentions. Populist backlash from government overreach in the mid-20th century led to an effort to return power to ordinary citizens. But giving veto power to too many people and groups has led to institutional gridlock, crippling our ability to get things done.
The political response has been bipartisan, if contradictory. Governor Newsom has pushed legislation to streamline California permitting. The Trump administration issued executive orders targeting regulatory requirements that “alone account for 25 percent of the cost of constructing a new home.” About $90,000 of the cost of new construction is due to regulation and regulatory compliance, according to Realtor.com’s chief economist.
Both sides agree something is broken. They disagree on which regulations to cut. In the meantime, America remains 3.7 million housing units short, and the machine continues to hum—processing its own procedures rather than external reality.
For Further Reading: Perspectives
PRO “Want More Housing? States and Cities Must Cut Red Tape” Governing Magazine argues that state and local leaders must streamline permitting, noting that processes designed to protect communities have led to delays, increased costs, and empowered opposition. governing.com — April 2025
CON “Gov. Newsom Signs Groundbreaking Housing Legislation” Institute for Responsive Government celebrates California’s AB 130 as proof that “effective government doesn’t equate to slow government,” suggesting reform need not gut environmental oversight. responsivegov.org — September 2025
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The Committee That Cannot Agree
Inside the Federal Reserve’s Unusually Public Disagreements About What Money Should Cost
Three dissenting votes. Six “soft dissents” visible in the dot plot. One Fed Chair trying to explain why grown economists can’t agree on whether inflation or unemployment is the bigger problem. Welcome to monetary policy in the age of uncertainty.
The Federal Reserve’s December 2025 meeting produced something rare in the history of American central banking: three dissenting votes accompanied the Federal Open Market Committee’s decision to cut interest rates for a third time in 2025. One dissenter wanted a larger cut. Two wanted no cut at all. The committee voted 9-3 to lower rates, then released projections showing six additional officials who thought the year-end rate should have been higher.
“Collegiality on the FOMC is breaking down.” — Samuel Tombs, Pantheon Macroeconomics
The divisions reflect a deeper problem than mere disagreement about economic forecasts. A new working paper from researchers at the University of Texas examines historical FOMC transcripts and finds that participants’ beliefs about how monetary policy works shape their votes as much as the data itself. Policymakers who believe monetary policy has stronger effects on real activity are more likely to cite output as justification for easing; those perceiving stronger price effects emphasize inflation as reason for tightening.
In other words, the same data produces different conclusions because Fed officials are operating with different mental models of the economy.
The research also finds that dissent carries costs. FOMC members who dissent find their ability to influence policy in subsequent meetings significantly curtailed. This creates incentives toward consensus that may not reflect genuine agreement—a monetary policy version of the “bureaucratic filtering” that blinds organizations to uncomfortable truths.
Kansas City Fed President Jeff Schmid, who dissented against rate cuts in both October and December, explained his reasoning bluntly: “By my assessment, the labor market is largely in balance, the economy shows continued momentum, and inflation remains too high.” He noted that contacts in his district report “widespread concern over continued cost increases and inflation.”
Atlanta Fed President Raphael Bostic, preparing to retire, acknowledged the challenge: “If underlying inflationary forces linger for many months to come, I am concerned that the public and price setters will eventually doubt that the FOMC will hit the inflation target in any reasonable time frame.”
The Fed has one tool and two mandates. It cannot simultaneously boost employment and fight inflation. As Chair Powell put it: “You’ve got one tool, it can’t do two things at once… it’s a very challenging situation.”
The honest answer may be that no one knows what money should cost right now. The question is whether the institution designed to decide can tolerate admitting it.
For Further Reading: Perspectives
PRO “How the Fed Makes Decisions: Disagreement, Beliefs, and the Power of the Chair” UT Austin Macro Research argues that visible disagreement at the Fed is healthy, allowing diverse views to surface rather than being suppressed by consensus-seeking dynamics. sites.utexas.edu/macro — December 2025
CON “FOMC’s Credibility on Inflation Could Be at Stake” Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta warns that “a half decade—and likely soon to be longer—of missing the inflation target could well imperil the Committee’s credibility as a steward of price stability.” atlantafed.org — December 2025
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When the Robots Write History
AI Is Becoming Humanity’s Record-Keeper, and It’s Not Particularly Good at Checking Sources
The machines are now writing the first draft of history. Unfortunately, they’re writing it based on statistical averages of what history probably looked like, which is not the same thing as what actually happened.
Generative AI systems can produce vast amounts of historical narrative at unprecedented speeds. They can also fabricate events, misrepresent demographics, and fill gaps with plausibility rather than evidence. Researchers call this phenomenon “synthetic history”—AI-generated accounts that align with algorithmic probabilities rather than historical truth.
“AI-generated historical content frequently lacks the rigorous verification processes that human historians employ. While artificial intelligence can compile vast amounts of historical data rapidly, it often fails to validate the credibility of its sources, leading to distortions and inaccuracies.”
The danger is twofold. First, bad actors can inject fabricated past events into the historical record to support current political narratives. Second—and more insidiously—the mere existence of high-quality synthetic media allows anyone to dismiss real evidence as fake. Scholars call this the “liar’s dividend”: once everything could be fabricated, nothing can be trusted.
The American Historical Association’s guidelines on AI in history education articulate the core limitation: Large language models “can produce material that appears polished and credible, but assessing their outputs demands critical skills that the models themselves can neither teach nor foster.”
Marnie Hughes-Warrington, author of Artificial Historians, offers a more optimistic framing. “AI is not a threat to history if we see the invitation to be involved in its making. By bringing historical expertise to AI development, we can create more effective and fair artificial historians while preserving the critical thinking and contextual understanding that defines quality historical scholarship.”
But the window for such involvement may be closing. AI models trained primarily on digitized, English-language, mainstream content effectively erase the oral histories of the Global South and the non-digitized records of marginalized communities from the future’s memory. What isn’t online may cease to exist.
In 2024 alone, election-related AI misinformation was documented across a dozen countries and more than ten different platforms—an unprecedented scale of synthetic content designed to mislead.
The proposed solution—“open provenance” systems using blockchain technology to create tamper-proof records of data origins—represents a shift from trusting archivists to trusting code. Whether this is salvation or surrender remains contested. But the alternative—a future in which no one can distinguish real evidence from plausible fabrication—is worse.
For Further Reading: Perspectives
PRO “The Rise of ‘Artificial Historians’: AI as Humanity’s Record-Keeper” TechXplore reviews Hughes-Warrington’s book, arguing that historians should engage with AI development rather than merely resist it, bringing expertise to create “more effective and fair artificial historians.” techxplore.com — June 2025
CON “AI Assistance and the Emerging Threat to History” Aire Apps warns that the sheer volume of AI-generated content creates “an unprecedented imbalance in information ecosystems,” threatening to marginalize human scholarship through digital saturation. aireapps.com — April 2025
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EDITORIAL
The Brittleness We Cannot See
This newspaper has spent the past several pages documenting systems that appear robust until the moment they aren’t. A regime that survived everything except its own hollowness. An economy of aspirants absorbed but not satisfied. A housing market strangled by its own protections. A central bank that cannot agree on whether money should cost more or less. A historical record being overwritten by algorithms that cannot distinguish fact from plausibility.
The common thread is what scholars call “feedback failure”—the systematic suppression of negative signals that would allow systems to self-correct. Leaders surrounded by loyalists who tell them what they want to hear. Bureaucracies that reward adherence over innovation. Committees that penalize dissent. Archives that prioritize what’s already digitized over what actually matters.
The most dangerous condition of any system is not chaos but hollow stability—a state where structures appear permanent right up until the moment they evaporate. Syria looked robust on the surface because it possessed all the traditional indicators of state strength: a security apparatus, a military, international allies, territorial control. What it lacked was invisible until the test came.
The question this poses for the developed world is uncomfortable: How many of our own institutions are running on the same closed loop, processing their own procedures rather than external reality? The permit office that cannot build housing. The intelligence service that cannot perceive change. The Federal Reserve that cannot form consensus. The historical profession that cannot keep pace with synthetic content.
The solutions proposed by scholars fall into two camps. The first—what we might call the “relational turn”—seeks to rebuild human connections between institutions and the people they serve. Trust-based relationships. Co-creation. Tolerance of inefficiency in service of legitimacy. The analog solution to a digital crisis.
The second—the “immutable turn”—seeks to anchor reality in cryptographic verification. Blockchain provenance. Trustless systems. The assumption that human institutions are too corrupted to be trusted, so truth must be secured by code instead.
These paths are not mutually exclusive, but they represent different theories of what has broken. The first says we need to rebuild trust between humans. The second says trust is already broken beyond repair and must be replaced with verification.
Neither path is easy. Neither is certain to work. But the alternative—continuing to assume that surface stability reflects genuine robustness—is how regimes fall in eleven days and nobody sees it coming.
The brittleness is structural. So must be the solutions. And the first step is admitting that the machine has stopped listening.
For Further Reading: Perspectives
PRO “How 2026 Could Decide the Future of Artificial Intelligence” Council on Foreign Relations argues that governance mechanisms, not technical capabilities, will determine whether AI strengthens or undermines institutional trust, making proactive policy development essential. cfr.org — January 2026
CON “Artificial Intelligence and the Growth of Synthetic Data” World Economic Forum emphasizes that technical governance alone is insufficient—executive and policy leadership must treat synthetic data governance as a strategic priority rather than a technical afterthought. weforum.org — October 2025
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Production Note: This edition of The Review was produced through collaboration between human editorial judgment and AI-assisted research. The factual claims presented have been sourced from academic research, journalistic reports, and institutional publications from November 2025 through January 2026. Readers are encouraged to follow the “For Further Reading” links to engage with primary sources directly. Your skepticism remains appropriate and encouraged.
Coming Next Week: The Trust Deficit—examining how declining institutional confidence affects everything from vaccine adoption to tax compliance. Also: Why do some bureaucracies still work?
© 2026 The Review. All rights reserved. Editor: The Armchair Epistemologist | Submissions: letters@thereview.example