For a generation, the safe harbor was heuristic work. “Learn to do the creative, non-routine thing the machine cannot.” That was the advice we gave our children. It was good advice. Until it was not. Continue reading The Ladder and the Leap
When real rising happens, it tends to happen at the meeting of traditions. Not in purity. Never alone. The cathedral and the thinking both grew from mixing. Continue reading Stop Chasing Shadows
So when the phrase resurfaces today, it is not arriving innocent. It carries a sixty-year-old job description: to make the constraint of popular majorities sound less like one policy preference among others and more like a patriotic duty. You can hold that preference honestly. But the slogan itself was engineered to skip the argument and go straight to the verdic Continue reading “Republic, Not Democracy”: A Misreading
It is my last night on the Rhine. The river is quiet below our balcony. The castles on the hills … Continue reading What I Learned in Europe About This Season in America
She told us, and here her voice changed, that we should not let ourselves believe the people taken from this street were only Jews. They were also gay men and women. They were intellectuals. They were scientists whose research had become inconvenient. They were people, she said, and she touched, very lightly, the side of her own head, with red hair. Continue reading What the Rhine Remembers
Here is the distinction I think matters: It is not cheating if the tool is amplifying the authentic value the writer brings. It is cheating when the tool is substituting for a value that the writer does not have. Continue reading The Best Product Should Win: How I’m Evolving the Way I Write
This noise does something to us. It keeps our bodies in a state of low-grade panic. Our hearts beat a little faster. Our thoughts race a little more. We feel tired but cannot sleep. We feel connected but somehow alone. Continue reading A Few Words for the Class of 2026 (From Someone Who Got Most Things Wrong)
“Our response is more democracy, more openness, and more humanity. But never naivety.”
He wasn’t being soft. He was being precise. He was saying: a free, trusting society is something we choose to keep being. The test of that choice is what we do on the worst day, not the best one. Continue reading Walls or Words: What We Choose to Build After the Shots Stop
That is not a modern literary pose. That is the oldest layer of the culture speaking. And Norwegians, for all their reputation for understatement, rather revel in it. The darkness is not something they have grown out of. It is something they claim. Continue reading The Crack in the Ice- On Nordic Noir
I find myself thinking about what it means to truly respect our children as adults. It means trusting that they know their own hearts. It means not imposing our expectations onto their choices. It means celebrating their flourishing, whatever form it takes. Continue reading In Defense of My Children’s Choice
