What if you could ask Otto von Bismarck how he would get out of the Strait of Hormuz? Or put the AI build-out to J. Pierpont Morgan, the man who reorganized the railroads after the last great overbuild, and ask him whether it is a bubble? The Hitch does that. Each big question in the news gets a case, and each case seats the people who faced the same shape of decision before, tells their stories with the numbers intact, and lets them advise in plain, modern, first-person English.
Ask Otto von Bismarck how he would get a fleet out of the Strait of Hormuz once it had sailed in without a defined end state.
Case No. 1 · The Hormuz Trap →Ask J. Pierpont Morgan whether the AI build-out is a bubble, and who should be holding cash when the due dates on the data-center debt arrive.
Case No. 6 · The New Gilded Age? →Ask Andy Grove whether a frontier lab should walk out of the model business the way Intel walked out of memory chips in 1985.
Case No. 3 · Memories or Microprocessors →Ask Bill Gates what Microsoft should do about AI, three decades after his 1995 memo told the company the internet was a tidal wave.
Case No. 4 · The Second Tidal Wave →Ask Franklin Roosevelt what a party does with an insurgent wing it needs in the cities and fears in the suburbs, as he did in 1936.
Case No. 2 · The Rose at the Gates →Ask Alexis de Tocqueville why an exhausted political middle hands recruits to both extremes at once.
Case No. 5 · Extremes Travel in Pairs →A case is not a finished article. It opens with a story you can read or watch, it carries the charts, the data, and the histories underneath the story, and it ends in a ruling that is the author's alone. Then it stays open: the signals are read every month, the ruling is re-marked every quarter, and the case shows you exactly what changes its mind.
The histories are the method, and the voices are its risk. They are informed reconstructions, never quotations: what the record shows each person did and said, turned into advice on a question they never saw. Every figure a voice cites is sourced in the case's colophon. Numbers are load-bearing and traced to a source. Claims about living people are checked against the record before publication.
The ruling is scored in public on The Record. Signals are read monthly for the ruling, against it, or quiet; a signal with a date is graded once when the world moves, with the evidence that graded it, and grades do not move afterward. Being wrong on the record is part of the product.
The anatomy of a case
The Question. The live question, stated plainly, with the numbers that frame it.
The Histories. The times we built, fought, or argued like this before, told as stories with their numbers intact.
The Voices. The people who lived those histories advise in plain English. Informed reconstructions, never quotations.
The Objections. The strongest counterarguments, argued with the record rather than around it.
The Verdict. The base case, drafted. The ruling is the author's alone, signed and scored.
The Watchlist. Falsifiable signals, logged to the scoreboard and graded in public.
Reading the site
Cases is the front door: the open case first, the rest behind it. Each case has four tabs: the story, the charts and data, the history with the people who advised, and the signals. Cases opened before September 2026 were argued as council proceedings, with a bench of historical figures seated for the question; those chapters are carried unchanged inside their cases and marked where the editorial pass is still pending. The terms coined along the way live in the glossary.
Disagree with a claim? Reply to the letter and name it. Replies that change a case are logged in its update ledger with credit.