I turn fifty-eight this Wednesday. I have been planning for retirement with something closer to obsession than diligence: watching accounts I cannot influence, building calculators to predict a future that has no obligation to cooperate with them, and treating Social Security as the floor beneath the floor. I never trusted the state enough to loveContinue reading “The Body as Verdict”
Category Archives: Opinions
July 4, 2026
Normally I would append this personal observation as a coda. My post on the Imperial Presidency below is too clean, too intellectual; a register I hide in when I need to process something that has not yet resolved itself emotionally. For all the veneer of historical distance, the current public discourse feels shallow to me,Continue reading “July 4, 2026”
Pandora and Helen
Helen is not the subject but the test case. She is the figure around which questions of causation, perception, agency, and the reliability of language organize. The movement runs from Homer, where she is a condition, through Euripides and Gorgias, to Thucydides where she disappears entirely and the mechanism persists. The distance between the laterContinue reading “Pandora and Helen”
Protective Arts 