All Posts

Haunted Islands: What Lord of the Flies Really Teaches Us About Children and Violence In the myths we tell about ourselves, childhood is...

In every era, when the world begins to feel like a house without walls, someone appears at the door—not to save it, but to sit in it. To...

Before we judge a president by how he makes us feel—powerful, angry, vindicated, hopeful—we should begin with a simpler, more honest...

America is a nation built on the myth of abandonment and the fantasy of self-invention. Beneath the Fourth of July fireworks and frontier...

Why is there a crisis of appropriate adulthood in our culture today? We could start anywhere. In a courtroom where a child tries to name...

Bud Light was never the best beer. Not even close. It didn’t win taste tests, didn’t lead in innovation, didn’t inspire cult loyalty the...

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. stood before thousands in Nashville and offered a story that few would contest on its surface. He spoke of heroin...

(A nod to Kipling's If) If you can stay when roles begin their calling, And stand your ground as masks begin their falling; If you can...

I didn’t know what hypergamy meant until I stumbled across it in a forum thread that read more like a manifesto than a conversation. The...

The word “incel,” short for “involuntary celibate,” didn’t start as a slur or an ideology. In the 1990s, it was just a way for one woman...

(in the spirit of Longfellow’s narrative verse) I O’er gilded halls where banners gleamed, The cheering throng their voices raised,...

Elon Musk and the Manufactured Scarcity of the Future In 1971, when President Richard Nixon severed the U.S. dollar from the gold...

In the modern NFL, no two quarterbacks have defined greatness more differently than Tom Brady and Aaron Rodgers. Both possess...

Aaron Rodgers is a quarterback who makes the improbable look inevitable. His statistics don’t just lead the league—they often defy it. In...

In 2008, the global financial system broke—and with it, something deeper broke, too: the myth of accountability. The United States...

In the glorious, incoherent spirit of Calvin and Hobbes, Calvin ball is a game where rules are made up on the spot, retroactively...

Donald Trump didn’t invent the politics of spectacle, but he perfected its choreography. He didn’t just use media—he performed it, in a...

If there is one defining feature of this era, a throughline braided through its crises and contradictions, it is this: Americans were...

Calvin ball, the fictional sport from the comic strip Calvin and Hobbes, is one of the most enduring metaphors I’ve ever encountered. In...

I have never read Ocean Vuong’s work before. I didn’t come to him through poetry, or even literature. I came to him the way I come to...