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… Continue reading Was Historical Objectivity Overthrown?
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… Continue reading Byron Nuclear Power Station: State Power and Grassroots Resistance
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… Continue reading Buffalo & Voting
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… Continue reading The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth by Jonathan Rauch
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
President Donald Trump lost the 2020 election. To most, that sentence states a fact. To many others, that sentence is just an ideological argument revealing someone's epistemological preferences. And that's the state of American civic life so far in 2021. The Art of the Steal Trump is a fascinating character. Before getting to denouncing him,… Continue reading Trumpageddon
I originally wrote this post as an historiography for a US History course for my graduate degree. In retrospect, I would do this paper differently if I had to revisit the topic. The book-by-book summary is pretty boring, plus my research was not very through--a few of those sources were not worth mentioning. Still, this… Continue reading The Repression of Civil Liberties in the United States During World War I
A view of US politics as of August 2020.
I’ve witnessed history being made four times in my half-century of life: the end of the Cold War, 9-11, the Financial Crisis of 2007-08, and now the Coronavirus pandemic. Those events—spaced roughly by 10 years—play outsized roles in public dialogue and analysis. They are omnipresent in people’s imaginations as they wrestle with current affairs. However,… Continue reading Flyover Bourgeois GenX Man
This was a paper I wrote for an Atlantic History seminar in my graduate history program. In retrospect, I wish I would have worked on finding additional sources. The paper is informative but not insightful. I have a fascination with private military force--this stems from reading too much libertarian science fiction and letting my mind… Continue reading Mercenaries: Private Military Force in the Atlantic World
