Featured post
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.
Recent
All postsWhy the institutional distrust cycle has no internal brake
Leaders exploit low institutional trust by degrading agencies rather than reforming them, making the play cheaper each cycle. Real grievances lend cover, citizens lose the ability to separate warranted from manufactured distrust, and blanket cynicism becomes reversed credulity.
Why wealth needs institutions, not personal political power
Wealth without institutional protection is vulnerable to state seizure, as medieval expulsions of Jewish financiers, Edward III's default on the Bardi and Peruzzi, and Russia after Yukos show; secure property depends on constrained government, not personal influence.
Money as speech and the agenda-setting power of wealth
Buckley v. Valeo and Citizens United frame political spending as expression, while critics call it power; both focus on persuasion. Drawing on Schattschneider, the argument is that money's decisive effect is defining which alternatives get debated at all.
How business is done as a rhetorical defense
Examines the phrase "it's how business is done" as a test for distinguishing fair market conventions from scams, using real estate commissions, Enron, and drug pricing as cases.
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