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Why merely useful glasses get forgotten
I see well enough to leave my glasses behind. That sounds better than poor eyesight, but it isn't.
Writing in public
Uncompressed public thinking
Short, plain, unhedged essays on thinking and cognition, civilization, and identity, with story and the small crafts of attention: coffee, calendars, kitchens, and code.
Featured post
When every voice is Cassandra
Cassandra saw truly and no one believed her. Now everyone claims her gift in the same vocabulary of emergency, and I can't tell the prophet from the propagandist by sound alone.
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All postsProblem-as-opportunity framing is a conditional advantage
The person who approaches a problem like an opportunity, the maxim goes, has an advantage the person who sees an obstacle "will never understand." Now try it on a genuine dead end.
Why government is not weather
Treat government like weather, the advice goes: something to adapt to, best met with a coat. Against the demand to hold opinions on everything, that's a relief. But no one decided this morning's temperature.
Conviction, fanaticism and the republic's capacity to change its mind
No one has done more damage to the United States, a sentence goes, than those most certain they are saving it. The abolitionists were certain. So were the marchers in Birmingham.
Why wars end through reconciliation, not defeat
Versailles ended World War I on paper and fed World War II. After 1945, former enemies became partners. Force can stop the fighting, so what does it leave unfinished?
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Essays that say what the rest is trying to do.
Why the say-nothing rule fails thinking out loud
If you do not know what to say, say nothing. The line circulates without an owner, and its usual witness is Socrates, who talked continuously, to strangers, at length.
Why Feynman and Watts lectures still resonate
Feynman and Watts gave lectures decades ago that still sound better to me than any talk I'll hear next year. It can't be calmer times: Feynman helped build the bomb.
The wheel turns: an old man and his son by the river
An old man sits with his thirty-six-year-old son beside the river he has fished for forty years. He once counted every fish he took from it. He no longer remembers the number.
The republic as something each generation must keep
A 250th birthday invites the grandest reflex: we have arrived, the founding is secure. Set that beside the Civil War and Jim Crow, and it gets harder to say what exactly has lasted.
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