Washington, DC
Article
Washington, DC is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 14 times across 14 issues between February 20, 2021 and December 04, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as “even in that epicenter of supposed stagnation, Washington, DC”; “WASHINGTON, DC ( RSVP )”; “Jason Shea was born in Washington, DC in 1946”. It most often appears alongside California, ACX, Berkeley.
Metadata
- Category: Places
- Mention count: 14
- Issue count: 14
- First seen: February 20, 2021
- Last seen: December 04, 2025
Appears In
- Ezra Klein On Vetocracy
- Meetups Everywhere 2021: Times And Places
- Biography of Jason Shea, 44th US President
- California Gubernatorial Candidates From Z to Z
- Spring Meetups Everywhere 2023
- Meetups Everywhere 2023: Times & Places
- Mantic Monday: Judgment Day
- Prison And Crime: Much More Than You Wanted To Know
- Open Thread 371.5
- ACX Grants 1-3 Year Updates
- Open Thread 393
- Meetups Everywhere 2025: Times and Places
- The Bloomer’s Paradox
- Vibecession: Much More Than You Wanted To Know
Related Pages
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- California (7 shared issues)
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- ACX (6 shared issues)
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- Berkeley (6 shared issues)
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- China (6 shared issues)
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- facebook (6 shared issues)
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- India (6 shared issues)
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- New York City (6 shared issues)
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- Philadelphia (6 shared issues)
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- San Francisco (6 shared issues)
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- ACX MEETUP (5 shared issues)
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- Boston (5 shared issues)
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- Dallas (5 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
I think Andreessen is uncharacteristically underestimating the appetite for building. The absence of creation doesn’t reflect an absence of desire — even in that epicenter of supposed stagnation, Washington, DC.
WASHINGTON, DC (RSVP) Contact: John Bennett, johnofcharleston[at]gmail[dot]com; Google group, Facebook group Time: 5:00 PM, Saturday, September 11 Location: Gathering point is outside 1002 N St. NW, Washington DC, 20001. Follow the sign for "Free Utility" to the patio. Once a crowd gathers, we've also rented a nearby parking lot, where we'll have tents and food. Coordinates: https://w3w.co/decent.search.hurls
Berkeley: Saturday 8/28, 1 PM Boston: Sunday 9/5, 5 PM New York: Monday 9/6, 5 PM Washington DC: Saturday 9/11, 5 PM Lisbon: Saturday 9/18, 5 PM Madrid: Saturday 9/25, 11 AM Zurich: Sunday 9/26, 5 PM Vienna: Saturday 10/2, 1 PM Prague: Sunday 10/3, 5 PM Berlin: Saturday 10/9, 1 PM Paris: Sunday 10/10, 5 PM London: Saturday 10/16, 1 PM Oxford: Sunday 10/17, 5 PM Cambridge: Saturday 10/23, 1 PM Edinburgh: Sunday 10/24, 5 PM
Jason Shea was born in Washington, DC in 1946. His father, Jackson Shea, was a former war hero turned politician; a few years after Shea's birth, he would become Vice President of the US under Eisenhower. His mother, Shawna Shea, was the daughter of a prominent lawyer. Jason had two older sisters, a younger brother, and three half-siblings from his father's first marriage.
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WASHINGTON, DC, USA Contact: Skyler Contact Info: skyler[at]rationalitymeetups[dot]org Time: Saturday, April 29th, 07:00 PM Location: Froggy Bottom Pub: 2021 K Street NW, Washington, D.C. 20006 Coordinates: https://plus.codes/87C4WX33+3J Event Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/events/DRrEn7GDz8GksBdMR/washington-dc-acx-mini-meetups-everywhere-spring-2023 Notes: Group Info: Washington DC ACX/SSC has had an active group since the first Meetups Everywhere in 2017. We have socials, hikes, board game days, and other cultural events. We've collaborated with other nearby groups on EA topic focused discussions and rationality Dojo-type events. There exist two facebook groups for DC:https://www.facebook.com/groups/605023464809227/ and https://www.facebook.com/groups/433668130485595
WASHINGTON, DC, USA Contact: John Bennett Contact Info: WashingtonDCAstralCodexTen[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 9th, 6:00 PM Location: Froggy Bottom Pub, 2021 K St NW, Washington, DC 20006 Coordinates: https://plus.codes/87C4WX33+3J Group Link: Uptown: https://dcacxrationalitymeetups.beehiiv.com/ and https://www.facebook.com/groups/605023464809227, Downtown https://www.facebook.com/groups/433668130485595/ and https://groups.google.com/g/dc-acx. Notable Guests: Robin Hanson, notable economist Notes: We've rented out the Froggy Bottom Pub for the night, dinner and soft drinks will be provided. Alcohol available for purchase if desired, but no purchases are required. There is metered street parking on nearby blocks; the closest Metro stations are Farragut West and Farragut North.
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People take various policy implications from this (maybe “life sentences” should end at 65, since incapacitation is unlikely to help much after that). But here we’re interested in its potential to confound studies. A 20 year old who gets 5 years in prison is released at 25 - still young! - but a 20 year old who gets 10 years in prison is released at 30 - too old to be leaping on rooftops and running from cops. The National Sentencing Commission understands this problem, and matches the experimental and control groups by age at release. But this introduces a new bias - now they’re different ages when they start committing crimes. Might a person who starts crime at 15 be a more disturbed and committed criminal than one who starts at 20? Seems plausible. I think this might be responsible for a lot of the seemingly positive effect of sentences > 5 years. There are dozens of other studies on this topic, all hotly debated, so even in this part I’m only going to list a few highlights. Still, these are: Green and Winik (2010). They use random judge assignment, ie look at criminals with similar crimes who got lenient/strict judges and so shorter/longer sentences. They find that the total difference in rearrests is indistinguishable from zero. But the length of time in which they were measuring rearrests includes the time the offenders were in jail, so this is saying that incapacitation plus aftereffects was zero (plus or minus a margin of error), meaning that aftereffects must be detrimental and large enough to cancel out the benefits of incapacitation, just as Roodman claims. But this study looked at minor crimes where sentences were measured in months, so I think this matches our previous suspicion that aftereffects might be detrimental in short sentences but neutral-to-beneficial in longer ones. Roach and Schanzenbach (2015) More random judge assignment, this time in Seattle. They find that each month of longer sentence decreases future reoffending by one percentage point. Most of these sentences are short, so this contradicts our working theory that lengthening short sentences increases crime but lengthening long ones decreases it. Neither Berger nor Roodman really want to take this study too seriously; Berger objects that it’s an unusual study population (everyone entered a guilty plea), and Roodman objects that the judge selection might not have been truly random. Rhodes (2018) is a matching study - it artificially tries to create groups of prisoners who are as similar as possible except that one group got longer sentences. Its big advantage is that it has some people serving moderately long sentences (a few years), getting us out of the few-month range investigated by some of the other studies. It finds a mild beneficial effect of longer sentences: This study provides no evidence that an offender’s criminal trajectory is negatively affected – that is, that criminal behavior is accelerated – by the length of an offender’s prison term. If anything, longer prison terms modestly reduce rates of recidivism beyond what is attributable to incapacitation. This “treatment effect” of a longer period of incarceration is small. The three-year base rate of 20% recidivism is reduced to 18.7% when prison length of stay increases by an average of 5.4 months. We are inclined to characterize this as a benign, close to neutral effect on recidivism. What Do Our Experts Think? As mentioned above, these are only a few of the very many studies on this topic, and I’ve only given the briefest summary of each. Due to the complexity of this literature, I’m relying more than usual on the opinion of the expert reviewers. Berger (pro-longer-sentences) says: Considering the rigorous research published since the Nagin et al. (2009) review, the literature regarding length of stay on recidivism is still somewhat inconsistent, with many studies claiming no recidivism effects and some showing that increased prison length reduces recidivism slightly. However, just like the rest of the research examined thus far, the study methodologies vary in terms of their limitations, which could explain some of the mixed results [...] At present, there is no substantial evidence that a criminogenic effect exists in the aggregate. Thus, it remains unclear whether criminogenic effects exist, and if so, under what circumstances...Among the substantial number of published studies with varying methodologies, not one has found a large aggregate-level criminogenic effect. Roodman (pro-shorter-sentences) says: The preponderance of the evidence says that incarceration in the US increases crime post-release, and enough over the long run to offset incapacitation. A quartet of judge randomization studies (Green and Winik in Washington, DC; Loeffler in Chicago; Nagin and Snodgrass in Pennsylvania; Dobbie, Goldin, and Yang in Philadelphia and Miami) put the net of incapacitation and incarceration aftereffects at about zero. In parallel, Chen and Shapiro find that harsher prison conditions—making for incarceration that is harsher in quality rather than quantity—also increases recidivism. Gaes and Camp concur, though less convincingly because in their study harsher incarceration quality went hand in hand with lower incarceration quantity. Mueller-Smith sides with all these studies and goes farther, finding modest incapacitation and powerful, harmful aftereffects in Houston; but modest hints of randomization failure accompany those results. Some studies dissent from the majority view that incarceration is criminogenic. Roach and Schanzenbach find beneficial aftereffects in Seattle—a result that is also subject to some doubt about the quality of randomization. Bhuller et al. make a more compelling case that incarceration reduces crime after—in Norway. Berecochea and Jaman, one of the few truly randomized studies in this literature, also looks more likely right than wrong, and is also somewhat distant in its setting, early-1970s California. And there are the two Georgia studies, which upon reanalysis no longer point to beneficial aftereffects, but still do not demonstrate harmful ones either. Aftereffects must vary by place, time, and person. But the first-order generalization that best fits the credible evidence is that at the margin in the US today, aftereffects offset in the long run what incapacitation does in the short run. Nagin (neutral, tie-breaker) says: Compared with noncustodial sanctions, incarceration appears to have a null or mildly criminogenic effect on future criminal behavior. This conclusion is not sufficiently firm to guide policy generally, though it casts doubt on claims that imprisonment has strong specific deterrent effects. What conclusions do we draw from these studies of the dose-response relationship between time served and reoffending? The one experimental study is suggestive of a preventive effect, but that effect may be attributable to incapacitation. Two of the matching studies point weakly to a criminogenic type dose-response relationship, but both are extremely dated. The Loughran et al. (2008) study suggests a possible criminogenic effect of placement but finds no linkage between time served and reoffending. We draw no conclusions from the results of the regression studies. Not only are results extremely varied, but more importantly all of the studies suffer from a fundamental analytical flaw. This flaw relates to the potential sensitivity of regression- based studies to specification errors in the model of the relationship of age and offending rate. In other words: Berger and Nagin think evidence is weak and it’s kind of a wash and maybe there are slight criminogenic effects; Roodman thinks there are strong criminogenic effects that (on the current margin) are sizeable enough to approximately cancel out the benefit from incapacitation. So What’s Up With Roodman? At the risk of repeating myself: this is the question upon which this whole essay hinges. Everyone agrees that the beneficial effects of deterrence are real but small. Everyone agrees that the beneficial effects of incapacitation are real and large. Everyone except Roodman agrees that aftereffects range from slightly beneficial to slightly detrimental, for a net effect of incarceration significantly decreasing crime. Only Roodman says that aftereffects are large and detrimental, for a net effect of incarceration having no effect on crime. So where does Roodman disagree with everyone else? My impression is that the main difference is that Roodman gives more weight to certain judge selection studies. These find that being randomly assigned to a lenient vs. strict judge (and therefore on average getting a short vs. long sentence) doesn’t change rearrest rates after X years from the time the sentence started. This X year period includes both the time spent serving the sentence, and the time after release when aftereffects might materialize - ie they include both incapacitation and aftereffects. Since these studies fail to find any net effect, and incapacitation effects must be beneficial and large, Roodman concludes that aftereffects must be detrimental and large. Then he reanalyzes several of the other studies that other people use to demonstrate no or beneficial aftereffects, and finds them less convincing after reanalysis. So who is right? Roodman gets his strongest evidence from studies of short sentences vs. shorter sentences (eg going from 0 to 1 years, or 1 to. 2 years). These are naturally where we would expect the fewest benefits from incapacitation. But they’re also where we would common-sensically expect the worst aftereffects. Someone going from zero prison to one year in prison has had their life, career, and relationships profoundly changed, in a way that someone going from ten years in prison to eleven years hasn’t. This is consistent with the National Sentencing Commission study above. They found that aftereffects trended worse the shorter the sentences got, but didn’t investigate any sentences shorter than 2-3 years. If the trend continues, sentences shorter than that could have aftereffects > incapacitation. So maybe Roodman is right about shorter sentences, and everyone else is right about longer sentences. Going from a month to a year in prison is so disruptive and criminogenic that it risks canceling the benefits of eleven extra months of incapacitation. But going from ten years to eleven years mostly just gives you the incapacitation. Marginal Revolution This highlights a problem with all of these studies: we can only talk about particular margins. Imagine a country which currently incarcerates zero people, trying to decide whether to move up to a policy of incarcerating one person. If you only incarcerate one person, it will be the baddest dude in the whole country. That guy really needs to be behind bars! And we’re not worried about turning him into a hardened criminal, because he’s already maximally bad. Here it’s obvious that benefits outweigh costs. Now imagine a country which incarcerates 50% of its population, trying to decide whether to move up to 50% + 1. At this point, you’re imprisoning someone who went a few miles over the speed limit. You gain no benefits from incapacitation (he wasn’t going to commit any crimes anyway), but you stand to lose a lot from aftereffects (he’s probably a totally normal law-abiding citizen, so there’s a very high risk of ruining his life and turning him into a more hardened criminal). Here it’s obvious that costs outweigh benefits. So the question isn’t “do the costs of prison outweigh benefits?”, but rather “at what point between incarcerating 0% and 50% of people does the cost of imprisoning one more person start outweighing the benefits?”, or even “at the current US incarceration rate of 0.75%, does the cost of imprisoning one more person outweigh the benefits?” In some sense, this is what we’ve been investigating the whole time - all of these studies are being conducted at the current margin. But this hides big differences between them. We’ve already seen that European studies get stronger results than American studies. That’s because European countries have incarceration rates of ~0.05%, compared to America’s ~0.75%. In theory, Europeans countries’ incarceration rates are lower because they have less crime. But I notice that the European countries we’re talking about here all have high recent new immigrant populations, and in Europe these groups commit more crimes per person than natives. So it’s possible that Europe is still adjusting to being a high-crime continent, whereas America has already adjusted by raising incarceration rates. So one possible conclusion is that the benefits of incarceration strongly outweigh costs in Europe. I think this is clearly true by American values - we seem to care more about preventing crime, and be less horrified by imprisonment, than the average European. But there are many different margins even within America. Louisiana’s incarceration rate is >1%; Massachusetts is <0.25%. Some of the variance reflects the criminality of each state’s population, but other variance reflects the values of each state’s voters and policy-makers. We haven’t been keeping great track of which state each of our studies comes from, but plausibly the marginal prisoner in Massachusetts is a badder dude than the marginal prisoner in Louisiana, and releasing him is more likely to have costs > benefits. Margins also differ across eras. US incarceration ranged from 0.2% in 1970 to 0.95% in 2007 to about 0.75% today. Our studies cover this entire time period. This is probably why Levitt found stronger incapacitation effects (studying the 1970s) than Owens or Lofstrom+Raphael (studying the 2000s). Finally, there are the margins across sentences we discussed earlier. Going from zero years in prison to one year is a bigger deal than going from ten to eleven. When we examine our original question - does extending the average prisoner’s sentence for one year substantially decrease crime, we find that there’s no single answer - it depends where we are on all of these margins. Roodman’s skeptical position is most plausible for shorter sentences in high-incarceration areas, and Berger’s pro-prison position is most plausible for longer sentences in low-incarceration areas. So Why Do People Keep Saying That Prison Doesn’t Decrease Crime? We began with the observation that criminologists tend to deny that prison decreases crime. We now know why Roodman thinks this: he idiosyncratically believes that aftereffects equal (and so cancel out) incapacitation. But nobody else has even gotten this far. So what’s everyone else’s position? The Vera Institute is an anti-incarceration think tank. They have a policy paper titled The Incarceration Myth: More Incarceration Will Not Decrease Crime. It says: There is a very weak relationship between higher incarceration rates and lower crime rates. Although studies differ somewhat, most of the literature shows that between 1980 and 2000, each 10 percent increase in incarceration rates was associated with just a 2 to 4 percent lower crime rate. This is just taking the (real, positive) effect of incarceration on crime, and calling it “very weak”. Research shows that each additional increase in incarceration rates will be associated with a smaller and smaller reduction in crime rates. We saw above that this is true, but I find it annoying to mention here in this kind of advocacy context - it’s also true of everything else in the world! When the Vera Institute publishes anti-mass-incarceration white papers, the 500th white paper will be less influential than the first. If I claimed that “research showed” this, and so they should stop publishing anti-mass-incarceration white papers, they would look at me like I’d gone insane. Get a life. The weak association between higher incarceration rates and lower crime rates applies almost entirely to property crime. Research consistently shows that higher incarceration rates are not associated with lower violent crime rates. This is sort of true. Research finds a stronger effect of incarceration on property crimes than violent crimes, although Levitt does find a violent crime effect of minus one violent crime per incarceration-year. Partly this is because violent crimes are rarer than property crimes, and so studies are underpowered to find them. And partly it’s because most studies are done on mass releases of prisoners, where (for example) the state has to release 25% of the prison population to decrease overcrowding, but they get to choose which 25% - and states are smart enough not to release the murderers and psychos. Still, if Vera Institute’s preferred decarceration policy is also smart, then it won’t release the murderers and psychos either, and this point will stand. So my interpretation of Vera Institute is that they’re making some good points about ways that incarceration isn’t an infinitely powerful cure-all, but that it’s deceptive to summarize them as “incarceration doesn’t decrease crime”. What about other groups? Prison Policy Institute has a list of “crime myths”. Myth #7 is that “Harsh punishments deter crime, making us safer”. They write: Many people mistakenly believe that long sentences, paired with austere and even brutal prison conditions, will have a deterrent effect on crime. But research has consistently found that harsher sentences do not serve as effective “examples” that would prevent new people from committing serious crimes. In 2016, the National Institute of Justice summarized the research on deterrence, finding that prison sentences, and especially long sentences, do little to deter future crime Here they’re using “deterrence” in the strict sense (that is, in a way that doesn’t count incapacitation), noting that it’s small, and rounding off “small” to “zero”. I’ve looked at some other sites and think tanks that claim to have arguments against the “myth” that prison prevents crime, and they’re all using these same two tricks. Either they ignore incapacitation and focus only on deterrence + aftereffects. Or they imagine some hypothetical prison super-fan who believes that incapacitation is infinitely effective, prove that it’s less effective than this, declare victory over this fake opponent, and then summarize their win as “prison has no effect”. What Are The Costs Vs. Benefits Of Prison? So a more honest version of the claim that “prison has no effect on crime” might be “the effect of prison on crime is weak”. How weak is it? We already saw one way to answer this: it probably prevents on average 7 crimes/year (6 property + 1 violent), minus some amount, especially for short sentences, if you believe in criminogenic aftereffects. For the shortest sentences at the highest-incarceration margins, it’s possible for the effect to be zero or less. Another way to answer is with elasticities. If we increase in incarceration rate 10%, how much crime do we prevent at the current margins? Levitt estimates 3%, Cohen finds 0.5-7%, and Dhodnt finds -2% (ie prison increases crime) but this is an outlier. Spelman writes: Our best estimate of elasticity is “in the neighborhood of [3% drop in crime per 10% increase in incarceration]” but “[a]ny figure between [2% and 4%] can be defended, and we should not be too surprised to find that the result is anywhere between [1% and 5%]” This broadly agrees with our numbers from Sweden, California, and El Salvador above. Small increases in incarceration cause small decreases in crime. Large increases in incarceration cause large decreases in crime. If you doubled the incarceration rate, locking up an extra million people, then crime would decrease ~30% at current US margins (maybe less, because you’re shifting the margin and getting diminishing returns). Would more prison be good or bad? We’d need to do a cost-benefit analysis. Surprisingly, Roodman does the best work here: after making his claim that costs and benefits mostly cancel out, he admits that most people won’t believe him, and tries to estimate the effect size in the “devil’s advocate” case where everyone else is right and he is wrong. He starts with our previous finding that incapacitation prevents ~7 crimes a year, and returns to the incapacitation studies to see what types of crime are most affected. Then he adjusts for the low level of aftereffects that everyone else believes in. I’ve redone his results for clarity. This table shows the total number of each type of crime prevented by keeping the marginal prisoner in jail for one extra year: Why does prison prevent negative robberies? Roodman is subtracting the small aftereffects found by other researchers, and the data for rare crimes is noisy, so probably this is just an artifact. I round this to zero for the full analysis. If we’re trying to calculate the costs vs. benefits of imprisonment, we need to put a cost on all these crimes. This is hard to quantify - a robber may steal $100 worth of goods, but valuing his crime at $100 in costs ignores the disutility of (eg) living in fear Roodman uses two methods: first, he values a crime at the average damages that courts award to victims, including emotional damages. Second, he values it at what people will pay - how much money would you accept to get assaulted one extra time in your life? These estimates still exclude some intangible costs, like the cost of living in a crime-ridden community, but it’s the best we can do for now. Here are his answers (I’ve taken the geometric mean of the two methods): So one extra year of incarcerating the marginal criminal saves society $44,000 in crimes prevented. Now we add in the opposite side of the ledger: the costs of incarceration: According to Roodman, the average prisoner costs the state $31,000 per year. He got his data from 2008, and it’s since ballooned to about $60,000, but we’ll keep his number so that everything is from the same time period. (also, as always, California is more expensive - here it’s $120,000) Roodman also adds in the costs to the prisoner. He uses some surveys to value the disutility of the suffering caused by a year in prison at $50,000; additionally, the prisoner loses about $16,000 in earning potential. The end result: if you don’t count the costs to the prisoner themselves, and you don’t use the more modern number, and you’re not in an expensive state like California, then the marginal incarceration-year saves society about $13,000. If you do count those things, or you’re in an expensive state, the costs far outweigh the benefits. Realistically, most people won’t care about analyses like this. They’ll be more interested in the unquantifiable costs and benefits, including: The “benefit” of feeling like justice has been done and an evil deed has been avenged.
Inline links: Green and Winik (2010), Roach and Schanzenbach (2015), Rhodes (2018), incarceration rates are lower because they have less crime, The Vera Institute, The Incarceration Myth: More Incarceration Will Not Decrease Crime, a list of “crime myths”, Cohen, Dhodnt, Spelman, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!FI6X!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F6865dbc9-fe86-4467-ab7b-829c1425a81b_189x133.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!X8oH!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F13ddcc41-7e70-4a3c-bd25-c046f2bf811d_404x177.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!ltt7!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F7484d67f-e24d-4511-ac8f-f7b20efed758_458x273.png
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1: The Horizon Fellowship is a full-time US policy fellowship that places experts in AI, biotechnology, and other emerging technologies in federal agencies, congressional offices, and think tanks in Washington, DC for 6-24 months. No prior policy experience required, jobs are fully-funded. Learn more and apply by Aug. 28.
Inline links: Learn more, apply
Contact: Kayla Contact Info: cori14[a t]gmail[period]com Time: Saturday, October 4th, 5:00 PM Location: Teaism Penn Quarter, 400 8th St NW, Washington, DC 20004 Coordinates: https://plus.codes/87C4VXVG+XM Group Link: https://dcacxrationalitymeetups.beehiiv.com/; https://www.facebook.com/groups/605023464809227 Notes: Multiple Teaism locations exist; please join us at Teaism Penn Quarter on the lower level! Food and tea will be available for purchase.
Inline links: https://plus.codes/87C4VXVG+XM, https://dcacxrationalitymeetups.beehiiv.com/, https://www.facebook.com/groups/605023464809227
(for Washington, DC, see “DC”)
In Jason Pargin’s I’m Starting To Worry About This Black Box Of Doom, a manic pixie dream girl cajoles a shut-in incel loser to drive her and her mysterious box cross-country. The further they drive, the more evidence starts to build that she is a terrorist and her box is a nuke. As our protagonist becomes increasingly desperate to turn around and return to his comfortable world of social media feeds and psych meds, she pleads with him to come out of his shell, learn to trust people offline, and have a sense of adventure. The book’s dramatic tension comes from our simultaneously rooting for his character development and worrying that it might be a ruse to manipulate him into blowing up Washington, DC.
Inline links: I’m Starting To Worry About This Black Box Of Doom
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Backlinks
- ACX Grants 1-3 Year Updates
- Biography of Jason Shea, 44th US President
- California Gubernatorial Candidates From Z to Z
- Ezra Klein On Vetocracy
- Mantic Monday: Judgment Day
- Meetups Everywhere 2021: Times And Places
- Meetups Everywhere 2023: Times & Places
- Meetups Everywhere 2025: Times and Places
- Open Thread 371.5
- Open Thread 393
- Places: W
- Prison And Crime: Much More Than You Wanted To Know
- Ruben
- Spring Meetups Everywhere 2023
- The Bloomer’s Paradox
- Vibecession: Much More Than You Wanted To Know