“Numident” might be the most important federal database you’ve never heard of.
It’s the Social Security Administration’s master dataset, and it contains the personal information of every American ever registered with Social Security, including names, addresses, Social Security numbers, and the names of people’s parents. Think of it as proof of your existence.
This file is cross-indexed against other massive databases like the Master Earnings File, which documents lifetime data on people’s wages and employment history.
It's a project of Studium; Studium's Constitutional Law Advisory Board includes Prof. and National Constitution Center CEO Jeffrey Rosen, Prof. and former ACLU President Nadine Strossen, Prof. and former Chief Judge Diane Wood, Prof. and Judge Doug Ginsburg, and Prof. Adam White. Volume II is now out, and it contains these articles:
Here's the introduction from the founder, Olivia Eve Gross:
Last weekend, we took you through the seven key Senate races of the 2026 cycle. Since that proved to be a rather popular feature, we hope you’ve kept your overnight bags packed, because it’s time for our House tour.
8/22/1998: On August 22, 1998, Barry Black led a Ku Klux Klan rally in Carroll County, Virginia. The Supreme Court considered the constitutionality of his prosecution for cross burning in Virginia v. Black (2003).
As if New York City weren't already an expensive enough place to live, legislation introduced to the City Council could soon make delivering packages in the five boroughs far costlier. Cloaked in the language of improving safety, the bill—recently endorsed by Mayor Zohran Mamdani—is little more than a thinly veiled attempt to strengthen the power of unions.
Francis Fukuyama is the Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at Stanford University. His latest book is In the Realm of the Last Man. He is also the author of the “Frankly Fukuyama” column at Persuasion.
In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Francis Fukuyama discuss why building things with your hands is an antidote to dependence on big tech, whether AI will erode the practical skills future generations need to survive, and what hobbyist robotics has in common with Ukraine’s battlefield ingenuity.
A very interesting piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education. Here are two brief excerpts, but they can't do justice to the whole piece, which covers much more ground:
One of the most prescient lines from George Orwell's 1984 the 1949 dystopian classic about Big Brother, regards that fictional society's endless surveillance: "You had to live—did live, from habit that became instinct—in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized." Modern Americans' instinct is to post their every thought and photo on social media, but we still should be wary of the way new technologies track and monitor us throughout our day.
Welcome back to The Weekend Press! Today, Chris Christie explains why men love “The Godfather.” Suzy Weiss argues that Lindsay Clancy is “O.J. for white women.” Kat Rosenfield on the strange case of “dog racism.” And more!
But first: Harry and Meghan get mugged by reality . . .
And so farewell, America’s prince.
This week, Meghan Markle and Harry Mountbatten-Windsor announced that, after six years making jam and reality shows in a Montecito mansion, they’re moving back to the United Kingdom, a country they once characterized as a racist hellhole.
“This, at a moment when progressives are laughing off the deranged things they said in 2020,” writes Kara Kennedy in today’s lead essay, “is the ultimate example of getting mugged by reality.”
The N.Y. Times (Katie Robertson) so reports, and adds that "The Times had not lost a defamation lawsuit brought in the United States over one of its articles in more than 50 years."
Here's an excerpt of the decision from Judge Annemarie Carney Axon (N.D. Ala.) in May (Spears v. N.Y. Times Co.) that allowed the case to go forward:
When data center opponents seek to hype the environmental strains caused by these facilities, they often describe their water and electricity usage in terms of household or community equivalents.
This data center will consume as much electricity as a small town. That data center's water usage is the same as 50,000 homes.
The implied takeaway is that this is a lot. But it's not really.
Speak Freely recently posted, "You Chose the Wrong Parents," an interview I did with them on migration rights. We covered many issues relating to immigration, including the case for migration rights, how immigration restrictions are similar to medieval serfdom, causes of anti-immigrant sentiment, what I think are the strongest arguments for restrictionism, and how migration relates to broader dangers of nationalism, zero-sum thinking, and widespread political ignorance.
If you've followed the battle lines of the gender wars recently, one of the most heated fronts is over publishing. Men, the story goes, don't read anymore, especially not fiction, because women in publishing have kept younger white male authors out of the industry. What's left is an industry trading on the fumes of romantasy slop. Hope you like fairy porn, otherwise, it's old science fiction novels for you.
Entering the new space age: The White House wants upward of 1,000 rocket launches and re-entries per year in the U.S. by 2030 and has unveiled a new policy initiative to this effect.
The final version of "Denaturalization's Missing Limit," my latest article with Cassandra Burke Robertson, is out in the Northwestern University Law Review Online. Here is the abstract:
Wednesday, District Judge Mark Norris (W.D. Tenn.) accepted the July 30 recommendations from Magistrate Judge Annie Christoff in Johnson v. Hall: