Plain talk about things that actually matter
Political writing without a team jersey. Explainers that show you the scope, the scale, and what it costs where you live. Satire when the facts already made the joke for me.
Latest writing
All posts →Now that we're winning, everybody slow down
The frontier labs have discovered safety at exactly the moment they finished winning. The safety argument is real. So is the other thing.
Read it →Small potatoes, five days of oil
The backup route around the broken oil route is also broken. Diesel is above six dollars. Officials would prefer you not connect these.
Read it →Data centers and almonds
Everyone has an opinion about server farms and nobody checks the numbers. Here is the water, the land, and the electricity, side by side with the crop nobody protests.
Read it →New pieces, straight to your inbox
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Three things I do here
Books
Fiction that takes the machinery seriously. Legal thrillers where the law is real and the technology is closer than you would like.
See the books → 02Recovery
Verified resources you can use today without paying anyone a dollar.
Find resources → 03Speaking
Talks and panels on recovery, second chances, the legal system from the inside, and what AI is doing to all three.
Get in touch →Who is writing this
I am Karl Rominger. I write fiction, I write about politics, and I write about recovery. Those sound like three different jobs. They are not. All three are about what happens when systems meet people, and which one bends.
The political writing comes in two flavors. Explainers, where I lay out the scope and the scale and the local cost of something and let you decide what you think. And satire, for the weeks when the straight version would not do the story justice.
The recovery writing is the part I take most personally. There is a page here with resources on it. Use them. Send them to somebody. That page costs nothing and asks nothing.