Jan 14How to face a civil warNothing is inevitable until it happens. Discussions about impending civil conflict don’t necessarily mean civil conflict is impending. Certainly, there are ways to avoid political violence through negotiation and reconciliation. Those possibilities are remote, right now at least, because our warring factions haven’t quite committed themselves to a declaration of…4 min read
Jan 12Counting grains of wheatHow small is our human family? We imagine it to be so large — 7.7 billion individuals as of this writing. 6 billion was an unthinkable mark within my lifetime. Every year that passes, the unimaginable occurs. The unprecedented. Numbers so large our little brains can’t fathom. And yet every…2 min read
Jan 1Before the clock turns. . .You can stand athwart history yelling ‘Stop!’ all you’d like, but you’re never pushing back that iceberg. You can decry this period as ‘late-stage capitalism’ self-assuredly, but until the true egalitarian ideal is achieved, your words are merely aspirational. Very little a society experiences is unprecedented per se, but anything…New Years Eve2 min read
Nov 23, 2021Who Are Guns For?Bullshit fills in the space common decency leaves open in social discourse. Where a sense of fairness compels someone to extend an opportunity to respond, bullshit floods the intention and drowns the listener. Take the agonizing, decades-long debate over gun control. Where decency leaves the opportunity for firearms advocates to…3 min read
Nov 2, 2021The OpeningThe impressions reality leaves upon the universe, we call those information. Our lives leave impressions — hints & evidence — of our existence. What scientists measure is information, impressions in the fossil record, impressions of the light spectrum, the impression left by states of matter colliding. . . Patterns which…1 min read
Jan 28, 2021Nuh Part 1: Getting SituatedLocated about three hours south of Amman, Jordan’s capital city, is one of the country’s most iconic monuments, Petra — or ar-Raqmu as it is known in the local Arabic. For readers with a limited knowledge of the region and its history, you may have seen ar-Raqmu’s most famous feature…3 min read
Dec 15, 2017Four Quartets — T.S. EliotWhile Hilda Doolittle was living a life of exploration, across London a bank manager fretted about his marriage. Thomas Sterns Eliot, a Missourian who spoke with considerable British affect, earned a reputation as a poet, a classicist, and a critic for his depictions of urban life in the 1920s and…Books4 min read
Dec 9, 2017Trilogy by H.D.Caught within the uncertainties of war, H.D. began writing these poems while living in a London under siege. As her adopted city lay prone to aerial assault from Germany, Hilda Doolittle resumed a correspondence with her former therapist, Dr. Sigmund Freud. Although he had died a few years prior, it…History4 min read
