The Exformation Newsletter

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King Tut's meteorite dagger: A weapon from the heavens
Tutankhamun's iron dagger was more expensive than his gold one. Its story highlights the significance of minerals in the study of history and political…
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Will Rinehart
March 2023
Unraveling the mystery: How FDA regulations kept COVID tests out of reach just a year ago
FDA red tape hindered COVID test availability. It is a familiar narrative that echoes the challenges faced by the first-ever pregnancy tests in the…
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Will Rinehart
February 2023
Reasons to celebrate Trump's return to Facebook
Meta's reinstatement of Trump's accounts show the power of self-regulatory organizations.
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Will Rinehart
January 2023
Population growth is stalling. Here is what it means for politics and economics.
Aging demographics will mean less creative destruction, fewer startups, misallocation, and increased pressure on political and social institutions.
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Will Rinehart
October 2022
The abundance agenda
Context to my recent Boston Review piece, the Henry Adams curve, and a list of action items to make the abundance agenda happen
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Will Rinehart
July 2022
The attention economy: a history of the term, its economics, its value, and how it is changing politics
Work your way to the end. I explain why TikTok users value the site by $5,600 per year and why the politics of attention explains Cambridge Analytica…
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Will Rinehart
April 2022
To unleash progress, excessive vetoes need to be restrained
Too many actors have veto rights over what gets built, slowing development and progress. We need to get serious about solving it.
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Will Rinehart
March 2022
As if we needed more evidence there's a privacy-competition tradeoff
Meta's bad quarter underscores the disproportionality in digital markets, small changes on privacy can have outsized impacts on competition
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Will Rinehart
November 2021
A progress report on the Emergency Broadband Benefit program
As part of a larger analysis of this program, I just released new county-level data alongside two maps that break down what's happening.
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Will Rinehart
October 2021
This one simple regulation will solve every teen's problems online
The Senate hauled in Facebook to explains its research on teens. At some point, we will need to admit that our problems are partly caused by…
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Will Rinehart
August 2021
The just say no campaign was a good idea. It just should have been applied to social media and called tethics.
exformation 8 | Space capitalism + a dive into the infrastructure bill + more
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Will Rinehart
July 2021
There might be too much advertising, but not for the reasons you think
exformation #7 | An infrastructure deal is struck, President Biden pulls back comments that social media sites are killing people, Sen Klobuchar files a…
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Will Rinehart
© 2023 Will Rinehart
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