The Long Read

This week: the moral case against industrial pig farming from an unlikely messenger, and the overlooked labor-capital tension that still explains almost everything about American politics.

The Way We Treat Pigs Is a Sin

Noah Smith is not an animal rights activist — and that's what makes this essay worth your Sunday morning. He opens as a self-described decent person who eats meat without much guilt, then spends several thousand words dismantling that comfort. The piece works through the cognitive dissonance at the heart of how Americans relate to factory farming: we extend moral consideration to dogs and cats based on their intelligence and emotional capacity, while ignoring that pigs score comparably on both measures. Smith doesn't moralize; he applies the same analytical rigor he brings to economics, treating the question of animal suffering as one that has actual answers rather than merely personal preferences. He takes on the "naturalness" argument, the "they're just animals" dismissal, and the economic-necessity framing in turn, and finds each one wanting. You will finish it having thought deeply about your diet, even if you haven't changed it yet.

Noahpinion · 22 min read

Sunday Thought: It's Still Capital vs. Labor, Stupid

Robert Reich has been making this argument for thirty years, and it keeps becoming more relevant — which is itself part of the argument. The piece works as both political economy primer and diagnostic tool: Reich contends that the partisan chaos of the current moment, the culture war noise, the identity-based sorting, obscures a simpler and more durable conflict running underneath. Capital has been consolidating its position over labor since the 1970s through a specific set of policy choices — weakened unions, deregulated finance, shareholder primony — and the grievances that have scrambled American politics since are downstream of that shift. What Reich does here that shorter takes don't is trace the mechanism: wages stagnated while productivity rose, that gap was papered over by cheap credit, and when the credit ran out, the consequences followed. Whether you find his framework complete or reductive, it sharpens every other piece of political analysis you'll read this week.

Robert Reich's Substack · 18 min read