Interests & intellectual life

David designs knowledge architectures that use AI to extend human expertise across substantial bodies of research. He develops the intellectual direction and the system together: the questions worth pursuing, the sources needed to answer them, and the relationships among evidence and arguments. The resulting knowledge can support investigations, books, and briefings while incorporating discoveries that deepen or challenge the expert’s original understanding.

EDUT applies this work to a problem central to his writing: conspiracy narratives can assemble genuine facts into false explanations. That insight determines what the architecture must do. A documented association must remain distinguishable from evidence of control; repeated allegations must remain distinguishable from independent confirmation. David brings the subject knowledge to make those distinctions, the strategic experience to understand where the findings matter, and responsibility for designing the AI-supported capability that puts them to work.

David is interested in how a story acquires authority: who originates it, who repeats it, and what makes it credible to a particular audience. Reach is the easiest thing to measure and often the least informative. A media business can grow by giving its audience a satisfying account of its enemies while the institutions it opposes remain untouched.

Influence begins where information meets someone with the incentive and the ability to act on it. David examines what stands between a claim and a decision: the incentives of the people who carry it, the expectations of the audience that receives it, and the institutions through which it can have an effect.

Antisemitic conspiracy narratives are explanations before they are insults. They attribute wars, social upheaval or institutional failure to hidden Jewish control, and they can present themselves as investigation or political criticism while recycling an inherited structure. That is part of why they recur, and why they pass so easily from old texts into contemporary operations.

David examines the false account itself: what it claims to explain, why it satisfies, and what it makes seem justified. A response that objects only to the offense leaves the explanation standing.

David has spent fifteen years researching and working on the Middle East and Islamism. His analysis examines Islamist ideology, political objectives and institutional networks, and challenges the assumption that elections or engagement with the West necessarily moderate those objectives. His work on Qatar traces how regional actors exercise influence through American media and policy institutions.

Before the Abraham Accords, he advocated Arab–Israeli normalization based on shared security and economic interests. His Saudi writing examines the connection between social reform, opposition to Islamism and a renewed national identity rooted in the kingdom’s history and culture. It also challenges the assumptions and interests shaping Western coverage of these changes.

David examines America’s divisions as a conflict over first principles: justice, the common good and the legitimate powers of government. His writing asks what can hold a country together when its citizens have incompatible answers to those questions, and whether shared institutions can continue to accommodate them.

His national-divorce arguments explore political separation and the economic and cultural autonomy needed by communities whose institutions are hostile to their beliefs and way of life. His foreign-policy writing examines another consequence of the same disunion: Americans increasingly disagree about their country’s interests, allies and enemies because they disagree about what America itself should be.

Jazz interests David as music: the sound, the individual musicians, the choices they make and the pleasure of listening closely. Music, visual art and cultural criticism occupy an important place in his life, and he writes about them for their own sake.

He is also interested in the conditions that make creative life possible: the people, places and institutions that let artists find one another, develop their work and sustain a public.