Writing in public
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.
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Political legitimacy rests on present performance rather than founding consent: the "I never signed" objection proves too much, while reliance on institutions and historical exclusion both become evidence about whether the state currently protects those it binds.
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Reflection on how the saturation of urgent warnings destroys the ability to distinguish genuine alarm from manufactured outrage, using Cassandra as a foil: prophecy depends on scarcity, moderate voices read as absent, and truth becomes legible only in hindsight.
Traces how the SS moved from extralegal party militia to a self-governing state within the state, and finally to abolishing legal order entirely, with each step requiring tacit permission from those in power.
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.
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.
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.
Essays that say what the rest is trying to do.
Critique of the maxim to stay silent when unsure what to say, arguing it conflates not knowing what to say, having nothing to say, and not yet knowing what one thinks, and misreads Socrates as its witness.
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.
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.
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.
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