Week 7 · 2025-02-10 → 2025-02-16 · 11 newsletters

Identity, Hidden Money, And Coalitions

identity-and-ambition · hidden-state-finance · coalitions-and-capital · grace-notes

Ten emails across seven days, which is the right reminder that 2025's inbox was a different animal from 2026's. No dominant news thread, no breaking macro story everyone piled onto. What did show up was a quiet trio of identity-and-ambition essays, two pieces on the off-balance-sheet plumbing of state finance, two on building coalitions and returning capital, and a few grace notes worth keeping. A sparse week, written sparsely.

Identity And Ambition: Three Writers, Three Decades

The most cohesive thread of the week came from three writers all asking, in different keys, the same question: what version of yourself are you allowed to become at this age, and what do you owe the version you used to be.

Alec McNayr ran the most personal of the three, a birthday post built around a Venn diagram, which he calls a "Venn Diaphragm Diagram" at the right level of self-aware cringe, about why he keeps making dad-joke videos and performing them at open mics. The piece is ostensibly about choosing a college major decades ago and ostensibly about wondering whether he is, finally, an artist. What it is actually about is the permission an adult gives themselves to make things that might be embarrassing. His commitment to keep his kids off the internet until they can choose their own online presence is the kind of throwaway line that lands harder than the thesis.

Liz Tran turned 40 this week and wrote her manifesto, which is built on what she calls Life Skill #3: "Fuck It and Be Happy." The line that anchors the piece is not the swear, it is the comparison to her own mother at 40, who was "still wearing mini skirts, rolling up to work late at 11 am, and chasing guys around like a teenager," while Liz is in sensible shoes and loose pants and a never-ending trail of toys. She admits she feels older in some ways and lighter in others. Her practice, recapturing childhood satisfaction rather than recapturing her twenties, is the cleanest framing of how to age well that I read this week.

Steven Schlafman ran the third panel of the triptych with "Do You Have to Grind to Be Great?", built around a question Jason Jacobs put to him on a podcast: can you achieve greatness and be happy, or does performance at that level require being tortured. Schlafman's answer in the moment was the conventional one, that greatness requires sacrifice. The essay is him sitting with the question afterward and rejecting the frame, asking instead whether we have inherited a narrow, incomplete version of greatness that worships effort and struggle while ignoring other ways people build extraordinary lives.

The take: read together, these three are doing the same work in three different decades of life. The shared move is to notice an inherited script, whether it is artist as suffering bohemian, mother as harried sacrificer, or founder as obsessive grinder, and ask what would happen if you put it down. Schlafman's piece is the most philosophical, Tran's is the most lived-in, McNayr's is the most personal. The triptych is the read of the week.

Hidden State Finance: Two Reports On What Is Not On The Books

The week's only real industry cluster was a small but unusually rigorous one: two long, technical pieces on how governments and central banks fund themselves through mechanisms that do not show up where you would expect them to.

Craig Kennedy at Navigating Russia published the full working draft of "Russia's Hidden War Debt," which identifies a previously underreported pillar of Russia's war financing. The argument: alongside the highly scrutinized defense budget, Moscow has been running a parallel off-budget scheme since February 2022 in which the state directs major Russian banks to extend preferential loans, on state-set terms, to a wide range of businesses providing goods and services for the war. That scheme has driven roughly 36.6 trillion rubles ($446 billion) of anomalous corporate borrowing since mid-2022. The piece argues this off-budget channel has become the main driver of Russia's 10% inflation, has elevated systemic credit risk, and is starting to constrain the Kremlin's war calculus in ways analysts who looked only at the official defense budget missed. Kennedy cites the underlying NBER working paper, the Russian enabling legislation, and the precedent statute the Duma adopted. The level of source documentation is unusually high for the format.

The Last Bear Standing ran the domestic counterpart with "Running on Empty," a sharp look at the Fed's three years of Quantitative Tightening. The argument: the Fed's $2.1 trillion balance-sheet reduction since June 2022 is largely an illusion of accounting, because over the same period usage of the Fed's overnight Reverse Repo Facility (RRP) has fallen by $2.2 trillion, fully offsetting the headline shrinkage. The monetary base has actually increased. The piece's contribution is to flag that the RRP overflow tank is now down to $68 billion, the lowest level since early 2021, and that as it trends toward zero, QT will for the first time actually begin to tighten by draining real banking liquidity rather than mopping up parked cash. The piece is calibrated, which is rare for the genre: it explicitly refuses both the "imminent disaster" and "total non-factor" framings.

The take: read together, these two are doing the same work in two different jurisdictions. Both are arguments that the visible balance sheet of state finance is misleading, and that the action lives in the off-budget or off-balance-sheet plumbing that conventional analysts undercount. Kennedy on Russia is the more dramatic claim, but the Last Bear piece is the one that matters for the next twelve months of US markets. Both are worth the time investment they ask for.

Coalitions And Capital: Building The Apparatus, Returning The Cash

Two pieces this week were about doing the unglamorous middle-game work in their respective domains: building political infrastructure, and actually returning money to LPs.

Justin Mares at The Next made an argument I have not seen elsewhere in this form: that health has become, for the first time in his lifetime, a voting issue, and that the opportunity is to build "the NRA for health." The framing is precise. The NRA holds outsize political influence relative to its 3 to 5 million members because that membership is fully united around a single issue and votes accordingly. Mares argues a similar coalition is now possible around the loose MAHA agenda, that it could organize voters whose top political issue is health, and that it could apply real pressure to federal and state legislatures as states compete to brand themselves as health-focused. Whether you agree with the politics or not, the strategic argument is the right shape: small, organized, single-issue coalitions punch above their weight, and the health-as-politics window is open in a way it has not been before.

Shruti Gandhi at Array Ventures ran the other "build the apparatus" piece, an LP update arguing that DPI (distributions to paid-in capital) is the metric that actually separates top-tier venture funds from paper-return funds. Array fully returned its 2016 Fund I in Q1 2024, has distributed capital to LPs every year for the past five years, and is positioning that DPI track record as the differentiator in a market where, by their numbers, the average time to liquidity now exceeds 14 years and unicorns like Databricks, Stripe, SpaceX, Figma, and Notion are staying private well past the historical 7 to 10 year window. The piece is part marketing and part argument, but the argument is correct: in a venture environment where exits have stretched and paper marks proliferate, actual cash returned is the only number that survives the cycle.

The take: both pieces are about the institutional work that does not photograph well. Mares is arguing for building voting infrastructure rather than running campaigns; Gandhi is arguing for returning capital rather than marking up the next round. In a week that otherwise leaned reflective, these two were the most operator-shaped reads.

Grace Notes

Bora at Design Explained ran "Cognitive Overload," a clean walkthrough of the principle that user attention is a finite resource and most product surfaces overload it. The checklists are the standard ones: minimize visual clutter, lean on existing mental models, offload tasks via intelligent defaults, autopopulate fields. The framing that "human brains have a limited amount of processing power" and that exceeding it makes users miss details, abandon tasks, or get overwhelmed is a reminder worth keeping in front of any team shipping an interface.

Gabby Lord at omglord ran the week's Valentine's grace note, "I can buy myself radicchio," which is exactly what it sounds like and exactly what the genre needs. Leah Velleman at Gretchen McCulloch's newsletter ran a delayed Q2 2024 update from the linguistics world, covering the published case study on Crash Course Linguistics, the 2024 LingComm Grants funding a coloring book, an etymology channel, a podcast on references, an English Parliament radio show in Nigeria, a Saussure-themed Italian podcast, and a trans-languaging art show, plus the news that her ASL 102 class is on Zoom now. Both pieces were the right size for the week.

Three Takeaways from the Week

The identity-and-ambition triptych is the read worth carrying out of the week. McNayr, Tran, and Schlafman are running the same play across three different stages of life, and the consistent move of noticing an inherited script and asking whether you have to keep performing it is the most useful frame to apply against your own week. The fact that three independent writers landed on the same shape with no obvious news peg makes it more interesting, not less.

The Kennedy and Last Bear pieces taken together are the under-the-radar macro read of the week. Both are arguments that the visible numbers, the Russian defense budget and the US Fed balance sheet, misrepresent the actual fiscal posture, because the action has moved off-budget or to offsetting accounts. If you only carry one macro signal into Q2 2025, it is that the conventional dashboards on state finance are increasingly poor proxies for the underlying flows.

If you only revisit three pieces from the week, I would suggest Steven Schlafman on whether you have to grind to be great for the cleanest reframe of the inherited success script, Craig Kennedy's Russia's Hidden War Debt for the deepest single piece of original research this week, and The Last Bear Standing's "Running on Empty" for the calibrated take on what QT actually has and has not been doing. Three reads, sparse week, no padding.