Legacy

The Discarded

Why I’m Running for Governor of California

I want to save California and America from the dangers of artificial intelligence.

Undoing Civilization: The Degeneracy of America’s Political Elites

“With Vice President Vance as President Trump’s heir apparent, it is difficult to envision a restoration of principled conservatism any time soon. Meanwhile, the country’s political class is plagued by general senescence and by kakistocracy among the younger politicians (think Congresswoman Alexandr

Fieldnotes: Annie Christain’s “The Vanguards of Holography” and Caroline Harper New’s “A History of Half-Birds”

“There is a sense of preparation through formal and informal erudition, meant to complicate what it means to write adequately about natural and human worlds, with fewer donnéees and more of a sense of a non-human cosmos, one of manatees and marsupials, in which each creature’s essence is not given t

The Non-Binary Runner Phenomenon

“However, for me, as a lifelong runner who has logged 10,000 miles on American roads in the past 10 years and who has competed in dozens of races from the 5K to the marathon since 2004, I disagree with Fedorowski. Adding a non-binary category to road racing is misguided and counterproductive.”

Strawberry Fields Forever: Amie Whittemore’s “Nest of Matches”

“Lilies/finch/flinches/nest/basil/hair/hat. I would swear before a jury that those are all legitimate off-rhymes, even if I were convicted of perjury for it. I wish that Shelley or Keats or Lorca or Miguel Hernández were alive so that I could pass this poem along to them.”

Cosmic Comic Kvetching in Anthony Immergluck’s “The Worried Well”

“The grand Guignol exaggeration provides an excellent comic read, as we fail to take completely seriously his worrywart grandstanding. Chances are, we have known someone exactly like him, who upon greeting us, got straight to describing their various medical conditions, real and imagined in excrucia

Walking and Thinking

“Nevertheless, I am often struck by how many great thinkers have also been great walkers.”

Why We Should Still Read Orestes Brownson

“What our country needs is a long-term, multi-pronged rediscovery of the true Constitution and a commitment to live by it. The thought of Orestes Brownson can help us in this rediscovery.”

Germany’s Lingering Hegelianism

“And so things continue as before, because in a post-historical era, sprinkled with German-Hegelian state worship and a view of oneself as the summit of civilizational development, there is no need to move from the spot one has occupied.”

What Progressives Need to Do

“No, not everyone on the Left supported these tyrannies, yet what progressives cannot escape is that much of the Left lent political legitimacy to regimes that destroyed and damaged tens of millions of lives, leaving festering wounds that still bleed today.”

Christianity and the West―Criticizing Lawrence Auster

“It was Christianity that became Europe’s unifying ideology and inspired figures from Charlemagne to Columbus.”

Midwestern Mice in Silk Kimonos: Yuki Tanaka’s “Chronicle of Drifting”

“[Yuki] Tanaka’s singular view, somewhat detached yet not lacking in compassion, soberly reckoning while allowing for flights of optimism, is, again, the product of the angle of vision of the flaneur, the stranger in town, the person who has seen it all but decides not to linger on individual premis

Redefining College: Adapting Higher Education for the 2020s

“However, if a single mother wants a faster track to employment and signs up for a six-month ‘micro-pathway’ at a local community college to become, for example, a junior data analyst or fiber optics specialist, she will likely have to pay out of pocket.”

Phantasmal Chaos

“As geography is transcended, the feverish antipathy between ‘somewheres’ and ‘anywheres’ stands to be sublated…in that, from the standpoint of cyber-space, ‘somewhere’ already means ‘anywhere’.”

Getting to Better American Health Outcomes

“We should think about health inequity not as differences in outcomes across categories of individuals but as structural injustice that harms the health of everyone.”

Language for Throat and Tongue: Elise Paschen’s “Blood Wolf Moon”

“[Elise] Paschen’s writing give new meaning to the term ‘ethnopoetics,’ taking it outside the boundaries of ‘traditional societies,’ ‘the informant,’ and the outsider who goes in to record ‘pre-literate narratives.’”

When Student Disengagement Meets Worker Disengagement, and a Solution

“Engagement is inseparable from hope and motivation. The top quartile of students most engaged in school are more than four times as likely as the least-engaged students to believe they have a great future ahead of them.”

The Myth of Neocon Anti-Nationalism

“However, it seems unlikely that this is because neoconservatism inherently favors open borders, as some critics have suggested. A more probable reason is neoconservatism’s penchant for compromise, pragmatism, and moderation.”

The Speech of Herbs: Melissa Kwasny’s “The Cloud Path”

“Yet what might in lesser hands become mere effusions is tempered with a wise, sometimes steely, sometimes self-abnegating, sometimes mournful contemplative voice that speaks of philosophical and personal concerns combined…”

Understanding Orwell on the Lesser Evil

“Five years later, Orwell published an essay called ‘Looking Back on the Spanish War,’ in which he states, ‘War is evil, and it is often the lesser evil.’”

Second Thoughts on Airline Deregulation

“The deregulation of air travel and other sectors of the economy in the 1970s was (and continues to be), in my view, a profound mistake. While controversial, I assure you that this contrarian take is not (entirely) a product of big-government sentimentalism from a crabby online socialist.”

Villa 351

“The news we got at first was dire,/the damage bad though not entire”

Letter: On “Our Life-World, Its Enemies, and the Enduring Power of Common Sense”

“Vice President Harris’s phrase could be described as the animating principle behind the whole modern project, as well as much of what we think of as progress: The more we unburden ourselves from nature and history, the more human ideas can determine what can be.”

Still in the Holler

“If a stranger comes around, if he’s wise, he will keep to the road and announce his business soon, clearly and loudly, then you’ll see what’s what. You’re not against him, but you’re not automatically for him.”

The Buster’s Hand: Sunni Brown Wilkinson’s “Rodeo”

“In her exquisitely physical Rodeo, Sunni Brown Wilkinson takes her place among those superb modernists, early and late and post, who recognize the combination of mutability and continuity across poetic epochs that is a key to lyric’s continuing strength and relevance…”

How Close Are We to Escaping Dying? The Current State of Cryonics

“This mainstream acceptance raises a key question: If vitrification can preserve embryos and organs like kidneys, why wouldn’t similar principles apply to brain preservation of cryonics?”

What James Lindsay Gets Wrong about “Right-Wing Postliberalism”

“Recently, however, James Lindsay has sparked a contentious debate on this topic by disparaging postliberals as ‘woke right.’ We will examine [Alasdair] MacIntyre in the context of this vibrant debate.”

Jimmy Carter: A Man Ahead of His Time

“It should be noted, however, that President Carter was not only the Great Humanitarian. He was also the Great Deregulator.”

God’s in the Weeds: Daneen Bergland’s “The Goodbye Kit”

“Eve about to be cast out of the Garden kills as the mistress of straight-faced understatement. There is no fury, no rebuke, or if there is, it has not set in yet. Instead, we get rationalizing, looking on the bright side, and philosophical self-doubt.”

Letter: Reflecting on “These People All Know Each Other”

“Collegiality may grease the wheels of society, but when does it become dysfunctional or oppressive? Or, to raise another question, what are the advantages of rudeness?”

In Reply to Walter Block: Sticking with Democratic Socialism

“Of course, the question of whether healthcare should be socialized is only a small piece of my general disagreement with [Walter] Block on political economy. Still, it is a vivid enough example to stand in for all the bigger questions.”

Our Life-World, Its Enemies, and the Enduring Power of Common Sense

“Similarly distinct from the regular life-world is the world of academic theory, in which, as in the fantasy world, theoretical constructs are often divorced from any dependency on practical outcomes.”

A Three-State Solution to the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

“As Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin said on the White House lawn in 1993 during the Oslo Accords, the progenitor initiative of what is required exactly now: ‘Enough of blood and tears. Enough.”

Sand, Ash, or Mud: Valerie Witte’s “A Rupture in the Interiors”

“As for most poets, [Valerie] Witte’s writing is intensely personal, whatever form it may take. No ‘experimental’ poet could be more candid and direct about her intention of ‘examining in a new way’ matters close to her heart.”

Vigilantism and the Sex Offender Registry

“Social media and online articles about these incidents boast ten or even 20 comments praising the vigilante for each one condemning the act of violence.”

Rejoinder to Ben Burgis: The Case for Laissez-Faire Capitalism

“According to that tried and true statement, ‘wealthier is healthier.’ Free enterprise leads to greater wealth and, thus, to greater health and longevity, ceteris paribus.”

Start Making Sense: “Say Hello to Metamodernism”

“Just as [Greg] Dember’s generation inherited modernism and felt a need to rebel, today’s younger generations have inherited postmodernism and no doubt feel the same urge to keep the sense of cultural evolution progressing.”

Little Engines of Self: Joy Manesiotis’ “Revoke”

“It is a remarkable feat of poetics to create epic sense out of the most micro of human materials.”

The Case for Democratic Socialism

“Capitalism has done much to develop the economic machinery of the modern world to the point where all of this is possible. But it is long since time to move past the capitalist phase of our history and institute something better.”

On the Trump Coalition

“The economic situation during the Biden administration eroded and degraded the average American’s ability to participate in the life of the nation as an economically self-sufficient citizen.”

Itching for the Infinite

“Further examples abound, but suffice to say, at least as far as these prominent modern thinkers were concerned, epicureanism for the masses does seem to denote something quite real.”

Appreciating America’s Distinctly British Heritage

“The United States’ British roots also have value because they provide a link to a history older than any homegrown alternative the United States possesses.”

At Home in the War

“At the end of the summer, I got a bit too close to a Russian artillery round, a mistake that earned me a week in Kharkiv Regional Hospital. When the doctors cleared me, I walked home.”

Notes on Kitsch: Janice Harrington’s “Yard Show”

“As witness of this exaltation of the gaudy, the poet reclaims kitsch as a redemptive force, a vital stream of art, when it is mindfully connected to a set of local traditions, the heritage of a group that had to strive hard to find its native expression using the materials at hand.”

Does America Have a New Natural Governing Party?

“These are not new principles. They defined the Republican Party for most of its history, a party that had always included a progressive element.”

Winds of the Great Shame

“And as she lay on her death bed, as she must have felt a cancerous tumor slowly taking her life, she would also have looked around her and seen the stern and damaged but also joyous legacy she would leave behind.”

How to Read Poetry

“If I have become something of an expert reader of poems, it is in part because long ago, I learned to linger on the surface of things, rather than push past their specifics in order to arrive quickly at instant profundity.”

Why Most Americans Didn’t Buy the Harris Campaign

“Hard as they tried to suck us through the black hole leading to their alternative-facts universe, inundating us in a steady stream of misinformation even as they, again ironically, accused us of peddling misinformation, we resisted.”

The Dead Are Difficult: Jenny George’s “After Image”

“The tone of After Image is simultaneously calm and feverish, as the bereaved one moves along a spectrum from numb to utterly passionate, up and down, yet never hysterical, never heaping ashes on her head.”

The Dueling Cases for Donald Trump and Kamala Harris

A Merion West contributing writer and editor respectively make the case for each candidate for President of the United States.

The Discontents of Capitalism

“Why, in fact, do we feel compelled to ask if capitalism is failing? Why do we wonder if capitalism is moral? Why do 57% of respondents in an Edelman Trust Barometer survey believe that ‘capitalism as it exists today does more harm than good in the world?’”