Richard Adams died on Christmas Eve last year. That will always be a fact of my life, that I got engaged to Alex on the night of the day that Richard Adams, author of my favorite book of all-time, Watership…
Category: A Day in the Life
The Case Against Free Trade
I spend a lot of time arguing on Facebook. It comes and goes as a use of time. It’s often frustrating, but in the best moments, it feels like there’s a real opportunity to change someone’s mind. Facebook has become…
Obama’s Legacy, Trump’s Window, and the Future of Hope
I didn’t vote for Barack Obama in 2008, or in 2012. As regular readers will know, I also didn’t vote for the Republicans in those elections. I wanted to vote for him in 2008, came very close, but ultimately decided…
Start Walking
By any metric, 2017 has been a great year so far. Now that I’ve said that out loud (on print), in public, it feels like a jinx. And not just because of my erstwhile belief in Mack Truck Time, the…
Long Night’s Journey into Day
Content warning: language, depictions of possible mental health breakdown(s). 2:49 AM. I get a request for pickup at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel. It’s a little too early for it to be an airport run, though I’ve had at least one person…
The Singularity is Already Here
The Singularity is already here. It’s corporations, not computers. You’ve probably heard of the Singularity. It’s a hypothetical future event, dystopian in nature, wherein the need for human intervention in human affairs is swept aside by super-intelligent computers who self-teach,…
Haunted City
It’s Twelfth Night. Happy Twelfth Night, everybody! Here is my favorite song about Twelfth Night: It occurs to me that posting links to things isn’t really good enough for the long-term posterity of the web. Sometimes I review old posts…
Our Need for an Enemy: America’s Adversarial Obsession
“Down the corner by the hotdog stand I seen a man I said ‘Howdy friend, I guess it’s just us two’ He screamed a bit and away he flew Thought I was a Communist” -Bob Dylan, “Talking World War III…
What We Could (Should) Have Done for Aleppo
As a pacifist, one of the most frequent criticisms I face is that I am advocating “doing nothing” in the face of atrocities near and far. There are just bad people in the world, the argument goes, who will kill…
Expectations of American Power
I almost titled this “Donald Trump and the Expectations of American Power”. Just as you could title anything in the last decade “Harry Potter and X” and have it be an instant hit, so too does placing a “Donald Trump…