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”
Tag Archives: Emmanuel Todd
The Demographic Shadow
In my 2022 post on Soylent Green, I traced how the film’s revelation, “Soylent Green is people,” dramatically literalized overpopulation as self‑consumption, a horror that lingers because it feels both absurd and, from an ecological perspective, plausible. That image was a cultural zygote: mutating into other forms of demographic dread across decades. In 2025, weContinue reading “The Demographic Shadow”
Elite Competition
Sing, Goddess, Achilles’ rage,Black and murderous, that cost the GreeksIncalculable pain, pitched countless soulsOf heroes into Hades’ dark,And left their bodies to rot as feastsFor dogs and birds, as Zeus’ will was done. Begin with the clash between Agamemnon–The Greek warlord–and godlike Achilles. So opens the Illiad. Homer focuses our attention on the combatants: this isContinue reading “Elite Competition”
Protective Arts 