top of page

The Kilorant
All Posts


The Orphan Republic: American Myths, False Fathers, and the Dream of Reparenting
America is a nation built on the myth of abandonment and the fantasy of self-invention. Beneath the Fourth of July fireworks and frontier...
Kelly Watt
Apr 255 min read
4 views
0 comments


If you can be anything be an Appropriate Adult. It's what the World needs now.
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...
Kelly Watt
Apr 257 min read
0 views
0 comments


The De Beers of Brittle Brands. Bud Light
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...
Kelly Watt
Apr 244 min read
4 views
0 comments


When Rhetoric Replaces Responsibility
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. stood before thousands in Nashville and offered a story that few would contest on its surface. He spoke of heroin...
Kelly Watt
Apr 248 min read
1 view
0 comments


If You Can Stay
(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...
Kelly Watt
Apr 241 min read
0 views
0 comments


The Idealized Chad's Seed of Discontent
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...
Kelly Watt
Apr 248 min read
2 views
0 comments


Seed of Discontent: How a Culture of Entitlement Redefined the Meaning of Sex and Self
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...
Kelly Watt
Apr 246 min read
1 view
0 comments


The Useful Idiot’s Lament
(in the spirit of Longfellow’s narrative verse) I O’er gilded halls where banners gleamed, The cheering throng their voices raised,...
Kelly Watt
Apr 232 min read
1 view
0 comments


The De Beers of Innovation
Elon Musk and the Manufactured Scarcity of the Future In 1971, when President Richard Nixon severed the U.S. dollar from the gold...
Kelly Watt
Apr 236 min read
3 views
0 comments


Talent wins games, but trust wins Legacies
In the modern NFL, no two quarterbacks have defined greatness more differently than Tom Brady and Aaron Rodgers. Both possess...
Kelly Watt
Apr 236 min read
2 views
0 comments


Why Stats Don’t Always Win Rings
Aaron Rodgers is a quarterback who makes the improbable look inevitable. His statistics don’t just lead the league—they often defy it. In...
Kelly Watt
Apr 225 min read
0 views
0 comments


The Performance Dividend
In 2008, the global financial system broke—and with it, something deeper broke, too: the myth of accountability. The United States...
Kelly Watt
Apr 205 min read
6 views
0 comments


Calvin Ball Anyone?
In the glorious, incoherent spirit of Calvin and Hobbes, Calvin ball is a game where rules are made up on the spot, retroactively...
Kelly Watt
Apr 206 min read
2 views
0 comments


The Kayfabe Presidency: Trump, Wrestling, and the Psychodrama of American Politics
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...
Kelly Watt
Apr 206 min read
0 views
0 comments


A Pesky Virus in the Presence of a compromised Economic Immune System
If there is one defining feature of this era, a throughline braided through its crises and contradictions, it is this: Americans were...
Kelly Watt
Apr 195 min read
3 views
0 comments


Life on a Calvin Ball Court
Calvin ball, the fictional sport from the comic strip Calvin and Hobbes, is one of the most enduring metaphors I’ve ever encountered. In...
Kelly Watt
Apr 195 min read
0 views
0 comments


The Algorithm Sent Me a Poet: Finding Ocean Vuong
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...
Kelly Watt
Apr 194 min read
2 views
0 comments


Twins of Power: Nixon, Trump, and the American Shadow
They could have shared a whiskey in a dim room—two brooding men of power, both watching the door, both convinced someone was listening....
Kelly Watt
Apr 173 min read
2 views
0 comments


The High Priest of Techno-Optimism
At the height of his ascent, Elon Musk stood as the high priest of techno-optimism—the world's richest man, architect of a car faster...
Kelly Watt
Apr 174 min read
2 views
0 comments


When the Clown is Chosen
He speaks and the room shifts. Not because he says something true, but because the air around him bends to accommodate his belief. I have...
Kelly Watt
Apr 144 min read
2 views
0 comments
bottom of page