Andrew Varsanyi

Articles I liked from February 3 to February 21, 2026

Each week I share the articles and essays that I found most interesting, annoying, challenging, or important. Hope that you check them out too.

• The Undeclared Civil War Inside Poilievre’s Conservative Party by Kyla Ronellenfitsch in The Walrus – Read here
• Trump antitrust is dead (permalink) by pluralistic.net in pluralistic.net – Read here
• The Internet’s Nihilism Crisis by Charlie Warzel in The Atlantic – Read here
  

Roger Kimball isn’t always totally useless, but when he is, evidence appears in the next article in this list:

• Trumponomics is working by Roger Kimball in The Spectator – Read here
• ‘Vance Is Handcuffed’: The Tech Fight Bedeviling 2028 Republicans – POLITICO by Calder McHugh in POLITICO – Read here
  

We all need to start thinking way more about pricing and how companies, which have spent decades stealing our data and using it against us, now have the ability to manipulate prices and maximize extraction in our economies. This is going to be a big political issue sooner rather than later.

• Same Cart, Different Price: Instacart’s Price Experiments Cost Families at Checkout by Groundwork Collaborative in Groundwork Collaborative – Read here
• Policy Alternatives for Solving the Grocery Problem by Anil Wasif and Alexina Cather in Policy Magazine – Read here
• Jeffrey Epstein has exposed the rotten state of the UK’s constitution by Alan Rusbridger in Prospect – Read here
• The Harm to Consumers and Sellers from Universal Commerce Protocol, in Google’s Own Words by Ted Tatos in The Sling – Read here
• How Not to Defeat Authoritarianism by Adam Bonica and Jake Grumbach in Boston Review – Read here
• The Unusual Working-Class Message That Turned a Deep-Red District Blue by Monica Potts in The New Republic – Read here
• The Rise and Fall of the H-1B Visa by Brian Dan-Ding in American Affairs Journal – Read here
  

Another good article about why the third way of the nineties is till extracting costs from our democratic systems.

• The dark shadow of the Blairites by Aaron Bastani in UnHerd – Read here
• Democrats Confront the Party’s Questionnaire-Industrial Complex by Jonathan Martin in POLITICO – Read here
• Everything Costs More Because the Algorithm Says So by Vass Bednar in The Walrus – Read here
• MLB teams flee cash-strapped FanDuel Sports Network for MLB’s broadcast group by Evan Drellich and Katie Woo in New York Times – Read here
• Opinion | How the Capitalists Broke Capitalism – The New York Times by Oren Cass in New York Times – Read here
• The Week Anthropic Tanked the Market and Pulled Ahead of Its Rivals by Bradley Olson in WSJ – Read here
• Is Danielle Smith a Separatist? by Patrick Lennox in The Walrus – Read here
  

An older article that I actually just read, very worth a read.

• The dawn of the post-literate society by James Marriott in substack.com – Read here
• Evan Solomon Wants Canada to Trust AI. Can We Trust Evan Solomon? by Kate Lunau in The Walrus – Read here
• Britain hasn’t taken back control by Aaron Bastani in UnHerd – Read here
• Are we doomed? by David Runciman in London Review of Books – Read here