Dear Dave Smith (Wherever You Are)

I am writing to urge you to speak out against the ongoing destructive impacts of lockdowns. At the outset of this year, when no one knew anything about Covid-19, there was wisdom in rolling out various preemptive strategies. We initially complied with these restrictions, trusting that our government had the best interests of its citizens...

Why Sense and Essential Are No Longer on Speaking Terms

To me, our government's process for whittling down essential services resembles a scene from one of those foreign horror films—suddenly the camera pans to some sadist with a carving knife who asks his victim which part of his face he considers essential. When the man strapped to the chair tries to explain that he’s become...

Precision Through Imprecision: How Poetry Helps Clarify Truth

Like most students, my initial exposure to poetry didn’t so much whet my appetite as it did tie a millstone around its neck and throw it down a well. For starters, I couldn’t understand why anyone would want to spend so much time trying to be misunderstood. I also found it unsettling to watch my...

Why Arm’s-Length Cannot Be Our New Normal

Confession time. This post has lay half-finished, moldering in my writing closet of horrors, for close to a month now. My hesitations in publishing it are numerous but the main one is that I know there are some people (whom I love and respect) who will disagree with where I've landed. This is not the...

The Inhumanity of Transgressive Fiction

I’ve written in the past about dishonesty at work among the avant-garde. I say this because the “art” that so often emerges from such waters is rarely objectively beautiful, technically brilliant, or conceptually ingenious. Rather, its power seems to lie in its ability to shock and flatter. But there is another kind of deceptive exhibition that...

Chesterton, COVID, and the Overreach of Experts

I can’t really think of anyone I’d rather share a crockery of boiled kidneys with than the 400-pound, Right Honorable G.K. Chesterton. Who else can take a seemingly ordinary moment and guild it with the sparkling depths of a silver mine? Who else can see a trembling Pekingese and imbue it with all the righteous...

On George Floyd (And the Desolation of Mobs)

America appears to have caught fire—both literally and metaphorically. Over the last few days it seems that everyone with a secret ire has come out either to smash windows, graffiti the white house, or throw things at the police. Somewhere in the midst of this eruption of wrath there is genuine and understandable upset at...

Elizabeth Bartholet on How Homeschooling Destroys Children and Democracy

What is a fallacy? At its heart, a fallacy is an exercise in faulty reasoning. Fallacies can be divided up into both formal and informal categories. A formal fallacy is applied to arguments which may or may not be valid, but which fail to follow the established rules of logic. Even if your argument is...

In Pursuit of Mindful Nonconformity

Before we begin, I'm going to prologue this post so readers don't assume I'm a thoughtless cow for not addressing COVID-19. At this point, my general feeling is that the internet has had about all it can take of lay contribution to infectious disease research and that any new information is likely going to come...

Leave Before You Cleave: The Dysfunction of Permanent Dependence

Dysfunction is a special word we reserve for things which consistently fail to operate according to their design. We call a paper-making machine dysfunctional when it starts spitting out gooseberry muffins instead of paper, we call a non-stick pan dysfunctional when it starts resisting our efforts to capsize an over-easy egg on its surface.   ...