Nicola Jones

I had the opportunity to edit this great Q&A with a political scientist about bureaucracies, how they work, why and when they become corrupt, and how to reform them -- with patience, not a chainsaw. https://knowablemagazine.org/content/article/society/2025/how-to-make-bureaucracies-better

I am quoted in this nice piece looking at how journalists do their work, in particular how we deal with massive reports: https://www.theopennotebook.com/2025/04/29/roundtable-reporting-on-reports-how-journalists-harness-hundred-page-documents/

Disclaimer: I usually post links to stories published in the mainstream media. But this is just a random musing... it has not been fact checked nor published anywhere. Take it with a grain of salt. I am one of many people extremely concerned by what I see going on in the US right now. I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about all this and I think my concern boils down to 2 core issues. 1)    A shift towards ‘common sense’ truth In  medieval law, a person's character, reputation and background were deemed as important as actual physical evidence of any one particular crime; so, someone could be convicted for being a "bad sort" rather than because it was provable that they did something wrong. Likewise, you could be acquitted, despite evidence, if you swore your innocence and had enough high-standing people come in and act as character witnesses. It seems like the US is going back to that... it doesn't matter (to Trump) if Abrego Garcia really is or isn't in a gang,...