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… Continue reading Inflation, Citizen Musk, Dobbs, & Russo-Ukraine War
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… Continue reading Inflation & Establisment Media
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… Continue reading SCOTUS Appointment & Russo-Ukraine War
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… Continue reading Ukraine Invasion
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… Continue reading Overreaction
This is an historiographic essay written for my graduate history program discussing US foreign policy in the pre-war period. I think this is one of the most important chapters of US history. The change in global strategy occurred as the US reacted to Germany's victory over France and revisionist Japan asserted a claim as hegemon of Asia. The term… Continue reading Sound and Fury: The Last Stand of Isolationism
The following post was originally an historiographic discussion submitted as a term paper for a Modern European History reading colloquium. This was the first paper I ever wrote in my graduate history program. Reading it again years later, I'm still happy with the paper though I should have added more of my own thoughts and… Continue reading Reparations: A Dish Best Served Cold
Syria, Anarchism's Bad Brand, and Libya: Early experiments in essays for which Chicago Fog begs the reader's forgiveness in advance of reading.
