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Reconsidering Early Modern European Diplomatic Thought
In May 2018, the United States relocated its embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to its capital Jerusalem, a city whose status remains disputed. The Trump Administration’s decision to move the embassy sent two messages: an external one to Palestinians and their allies, signaling a decidedly pro-Israeli stance in U.S. foreign policy, and an internal…
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Opposing the Nihilistic War on Classical Economics
The Republican and Democratic parties have effectively declared war on classical economics. By disregarding the foundational principles that built liberal democratic capitalism, they undermine an economic order that has enriched much of the world. Classical economics rests on a simple premise: freedom in economic life leads to spur greater prosperity than the heavy-handed control of…
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Slouching Towards Economic History
Book Review: J. Bradford DeLong, Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century (New York: Basic Books, 2022). In 2016, President Barack Obama guest-edited the November issue of Wired magazine, contributing an essay that described the virtues of the present age and America’s bright future. He declared, “Because the truth is, if you had to choose any…
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Religious Violence and the State
Complexity, Variability and the Importance of Historical Context This historical essay, written for a graduate reading seminar on religion and violence, explores the intersection of religious violence and the modern state. A significant challenge in crafting this paper was the requirement to rely primarily on source materials from the seminar’s readings, encompassing around sixteen books…
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Finding Your Way
I started this website in 2007. Following the example of other bloggers who maintained careers and wrote on the side, I published anonymously and avoided details about myself. I’ve changed the name of the website three times, preferring Chicago Fog for both its simplicity and reference to where I live. Writing was a hobby. I…
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Crossroads
As the kids say, it’s been a minute. There’s no shortage of subjects to write about but time and energy are finite. I’ll start there. A full-time corporate career and part-time academic pursuits leave little time for writing. The short stories I’m always threatening to publish never measure up. I feel like the long historical…
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Was Historical Objectivity Overthrown?
This is an historiographic essay from my graduate program’s History & Theory reading seminar. I centered the paper on Peter Novick’s That Noble Dream: The ‘Objectivity Question’ and the American Historical Profession. This is a great book to read. I wanted to get more grounded in intellectual history as well as get more exposure in American history. I believe objectivity…
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Byron Nuclear Power Station: State Power and Grassroots Resistance
The following is a research paper I submitted in my graduate history program. While I doubt I’ll ever come back to the subject, I thought the paper was useful in two respects. First, we should have no delusions that nuclear power was a result of free market economics. The technology, commercialization, and construction of nuclear…
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Buffalo & Voting
We’re tired of mass-killing psychos. I think it’s best not to use their names or refer to the moronic ravings they spew before embarking on their psychopathic journeys. Imagine being one of these crazies. If you’re filled with revulsion within one second of picturing yourself holding a weapon or behind the wheel of a vehicle…
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The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth by Jonathan Rauch
Originally this post was going to be a book review page–one of the many I use as references in Chicago Fog’s essays and other posts. But as I read Jonathan Rauch’s The Constitution of Knowledge I realized I had a lot of thoughts on the book, and most of those thoughts were critical. So I wrote this very…
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Inflation, Citizen Musk, Dobbs, & Russo-Ukraine War
My plan to post a short reflection every week failed almost immediately. The dual demands of a full-time job and part-time academia meant little time for part-time writing. Nevertheless, I’ll try again. Inflation, Elon Musk buying Twitter, and the leaked first draft opinion for Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization eclipsed the Russo-Ukraine War in commentariat…
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Inflation & Establishment Media
Larry Summers was on Ezra Klein’s New York Times podcast to discuss the state of the world economy (here is the transcript). It was worth listening to only to hear Klein getting mugged by reality, although he still seemed to want to beleive Covid and Ukraine caused high inflation. Say what you want about Summers, but he admitted he…
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SCOTUS Appointment & Russo-Ukraine War
SCOTUS nominee Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson’s hearings were mostly uneventful. So far she’s saying what she needs to say to get appointed. She strikes me as a good addition to the Court because I don’t think she’s an extreme judicial activist. She handled the unfair question about the “definition of woman” as well as can…
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Ukraine Invasion
Very few people read. Readers make the investment of precious time and energy need a return on that investment. In thinking about this website, I wonder if I’ve had a good sense of what people want to read. I think it’s fiction–but that takes me a long time. And I think it’s essays–but I’m bad about…
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Overreaction
It’s October 2021 and the simulation is getting weirder and weirder. Strange how opinion journalists’ inevitable exhortation “we must do something” has become “we must do everything.” In the last 20 years, national rhetoric heated-up faster than temperatures in pre-Millennium climate change projections. In America, there was governmental overreaction to the three great calamities of…