As this article points out, COVID-19 isn’t the only thing shortening American lives. This past decade, life expectancy in the US began declining for the first time in generations. This reversal, which COVID only exacerbated, […]
Tag: politics
(Sunday Thought) The Best Show On Television
Politics shares many of the characteristics of professional sport. It has teams, complete with owners, managers, and agents. It has a regularly scheduled season capped in contests in which score is kept and a winner […]

(Art) My Dystopian Library – Pt. 2
It’s a well documented fact that when I’m between projects or can’t write for some reason, I design book covers I don’t need. All of these were actual old covers that I simply modified to […]

(Art) My Dystopian Library – Pt. 1
It’s a well documented fact that when I’m between projects or can’t write for some reason, I design book covers I don’t need. All of these were actual old covers that I simply modified to […]
Western Gothic
My parents have been binge-watching the Paramount show Yellowstone, which is not about the infamous National Park but rather is a kind of cowboy Game of Thrones in the modern American West. I can’t stomach […]
III. The New Rules
Earlier this week, I summarized both Orwell’s and Umberto Eco’s views on a species of thought, which we might call ideological factionalism, that has always been with us but which seemed to be in retreat, […]
II. The Unending Task
Yesterday I wrote about Orwell’s 1945 essay “Notes on Nationalism,” where nationalism meant a manner of thinking that could attach itself to more than just a state. Orwell says he chose the word because it […]
I. The Emotion I Am Speaking
If you haven’t read Orwell’s “Notes on Nationalism,” it is a classic and a chief example of why he is a writer of the first class. The title is unfortunate, which he admits in the […]