The Long Read

This week: a Krugman-Zucman dialogue on taxing the ultrawealthy that doubles as a policy origin story, a long argument about why American higher education is buckling under expectations it was never built to meet, and a meditation on why some things — comics, careers, franchises — should be allowed to end.

Talking Again With Gabriel Zucman

Krugman sits down with Gabriel Zucman — the economist whose work on offshore wealth and tax avoidance became the intellectual backbone of the global minimum tax movement — for a conversation that reads less like an interview than a seminar. Zucman walks through how his research gets built, why the Forbes 400 undercounts wealth concentration in specific, correctable ways, and how an academic paper becomes a G20 negotiating position. Read alongside Krugman's companion piece on wealth taxes, it's the rare policy conversation where you leave understanding the mechanism, not just the slogan. For anyone who wants to know what "tax the rich" actually requires in practice — the data infrastructure, the loophole-by-loophole fights, the diplomacy.

Paulkrugman · 28 min

Forbes has been publishing its 'rich list' of the 400 wealthiest Americans since 1982.

We asked too much of the American university

Noah Smith's essay traces how the American university became, over decades, the load-bearing wall for an ever-expanding list of national ambitions — social mobility engine, research powerhouse, credentialing gatekeeper, culture-war battleground, immigration pipeline — and asks whether any single institution could have carried all of it without cracking. Smith makes a genuine argument: he is specific about which functions the university does well, which it never should have taken on, and what happens now that political and financial pressure is forcing a reckoning on all fronts at once. The piece rewards the full read because the payoff is in the synthesis — by the end, the "crisis of higher ed" stops looking like one story and starts looking like four or five different institutions wearing a single trench coat.

Noahpinion · 30 min

They Don't Need to Go On Forever

A personal piece — Jonathan Snook, prompted by a webcomic about narrative endings, works toward a broader argument about why our culture has lost the ability to let things finish: franchises, careers, collections, even relationships to our own past selves. Paired with his companion piece on his decades of comic collecting, it becomes something richer than a blog post — an essay about the difference between accumulation and completion, and why "more" replaced "enough" as the default creative and commercial instinct. Unhurried, specific, and the kind of piece that changes how you look at your own unfinished shelves.

Snook.ca · 18 min