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Agency without a self or free will
Argues that free will and a unified self are illusions, yet agency persists as the ability to shape probabilities, habits, and environments rather than exert sovereign control.
Writing in public
Uncompressed public thinking
Short, plain, unhedged essays on thinking and cognition, civilization, and identity — with poetry, story, and the small crafts of attention: coffee, calendars, kitchens, and code.
Featured post
Moral circles contract under scarcity and threat
Human cooperation and moral inclusivity expand during abundance and security but contract to family and local ties during crises like economic collapse, war, or pandemics. Traces this pattern from 1990s globalization through 2008, 2016, and 2020.
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All postsCultural evolution and the 300-times-faster headline
Charles Perreault's 2026 PNAS model estimates a mammal would need 88 million years and over 2,200 species to match the human range; humans did it culturally in 300,000 years. Examines how the "300 times faster" headline overstates the paper's claim.
Why you cannot notice the last time
Lastness is a relation assigned retrospectively by memory, not a perceptible quality of a moment, so the advice to "notice the last time" demands an impossible perception and produces unearned guilt. Finitude, unlike lastness, is present all along.
Costs of perpetual liminality on identity and attachment
Perpetual transition builds ambiguity tolerance while leaving identity unconsolidated and attachments provisional or clingy. Chosen movement and movement as avoidance of vulnerability look identical from outside but differ from inside.
Liminality as a permanent way of living
Liminality framed as permanent residence in transitional spaces—airports, provisional leases, unfinished identities—weighing the openness it buys against the grounded knowledge it costs, and contrasting those forced into the gap with those who choose it.
Start here
Essays that say what the rest is trying to do.
Two Latin mottos as inner and outer epistemic loops
Explains two personal Latin mottos—COGITA·DISCE·NECTE·ENUNTIA (later FARE) and PERCIPE·STRUE·EFFICE—as inner and outer epistemic loops linking thought, learning, connection, and action.
Why Feynman and Watts lectures still resonate
Feynman and Watts lectured before institutional caution, algorithmic clipping, and permanent crisis reshaped public speech, allowing uncompressed, adult, cross-disciplinary thought unfolding live rather than as artifact.
The wheel turns an old man and his son by the river
Short story in the style of Hemingway's Nick Adams by way of Maclean: an old man and his adult son sit by a river he has fished for decades, reflecting on lost records, faded memories, and the passage of generations.
The republic as something each generation must keep
Argues that the American republic's endurance is an ongoing achievement of recommitment rather than a guaranteed inheritance, drawing on Madison, Franklin, Arendt, and Jefferson while questioning what counts as continuity given the Civil War and Jim Crow.
COGITA·DISCE·NECTE·FARE