What is 'All That is Solid'?

This is my substack, All That is Solid (ATIS). Most of the writing will probably be about politics, maybe some stuff about forecasting, and possibly a couple of posts about cultural issues. It is free, and will remain free for the foreseeable future. The name of the substack, ‘All That is Solid’, is a shortened version of ‘All that is solid melts into air’, a line from the Communist Manifesto (although I am not a Communist), and also the name of a book about modernity by Marshall Berman. I think it’s an evocative turn of phrase, and although Marx and Engels used it to refer to the tendency for the bourgeoisie to constantly alter the relations of production, it also seems suited to life during a pandemic and describes some of the political changes over the past decade (Trump, Brexit, collapse of social democracy, and so on). I want to write about some of those political developments and use data to figure out why institutions that seemed to have fairly solid foundations are changing and/or collapsing.