America’s Housing Dilemma: Building for a Future with Fewer People Op-Ed - “Bringing this back to the United States: While we need to address our current housing crisis, the goal should not be to build, build, build anywhere at any cost.” 9/16/2024
New Poems:
Introducing Jonathan Church’s podcast:
Scribe in Disguise: Amy Beeder’s “And So Wax Was Made and Also Honey” Essay - “[Amy] Beeder’s nimble adaptiveness and ability to key her lexicon to a wily set of speakers and dramatic personae in And So Wax Was Made and Also Honey are what make this rare book command attention.” 9/15/2024
Why Transhumanism Is Unrealistic and Immoral Essay - “Utopians often produce evil because their movement’s aspirations become paramount—that is, more important than avoiding acts ‘traditionally perceived as immoral.’ If enough people follow Istvan on the transhuman roller coaster, people could eventually get hurt.” 9/3/2024
Fierce Lyric in Karla Kelsey’s “Blood Feather” Essay - “Blood Feather stages scenes of both unexpected victory and chronic defeat in the three featured lives, while allowing us to imagine an alternative history for these women, had they been listened to and given latitude to exercise their rightful prerogatives in the culture at large, rather than retreating into conventional expectations of femininity.” 9/1/2024
Portrait of a Stubborn Ukrainian Essay - “He was flanked by fields of dead sunflowers that could not be harvested because of the renewed Russian offensive.” 8/29/2024
Where an Anti-Aging Theory Goes Right (and Wrong) Op-Ed - “We need more visionaries and integrated fields…because just as the human body is a complex interplay of atomic, molecular, cellular, and systemic processes, so too must be our approach to increasing healthy lifespan.” 8/26/2024
Reading Alasdair MacIntyre’s “After Virtue” in Modern New York Interview - “The change with After Virtue, however, is that in an important sense [MacIntyre] turns against modernity as a whole. He argues that the move to modernity involves the destruction of morality—that in modernity we no longer know what we’re talking about when we deploy moral language.” 8/24/2024
The Hidden Obstacles of Parenting from Prison Essay - “But enhancing the experience of children with incarcerated parents does not require a wholesale restructuring of prisons. Most parents in prison desperately want more contact with their kids, hoping to break the destructive cycles they have been caught in.” 8/23/2024
Ekphrasis and Eugene Datta’s “Water and Wave” Essay - “Once the speaker’s psyche and voice are introduced via questions, the photo in a sense begins to dissolve, becoming secondary, important, vital in its own right, but not ultimately defining. Thus the fecund faithlessness of poetry.” 8/18/2024
Optimism vs. Reality in Longevity Science: Analyzing Zoltan Istvan’s Senescence Inference Essay - “Although [Zoltan] Istvan’s general pessimism is understandable, the Senescence Inference takes the pessimism too far for a number of reasons.” 8/11/2024
Burning Britain Op-Ed - “Political violence, particularly against minorities, has no place in a democracy. However, neglecting the undeniable social and cultural repercussions of mass immigration is a grave mistake that only serves to empower the hard right.” 8/6/2024
How To Write Lyric Poetry Essay - “This lyre-derived heritage survives robustly in the lyrics of pop songs, guitars now taking the place of the lyre and the orality of the human voice singing taking precedence over all.” 8/4/2024
When We’re Overly Optimistic about the Pace of Life Extension Research Essay - “Sadly, biological humans are likely to be mortal for centuries more unless a dramatic increase in both resources and life extension scientists is marshaled.” 8/1/2024
The Danger in NATO’s Slow Attrition Strategy in Ukraine Essay - “Aside from the hazard of China or Iran adding to the number of ongoing wars, the currently slow attrition strategy is only working against President Putin because he is trapped.” 7/26/2024
Our Fractured Togetherness: The Political Realism of Lynn Nottage Essay - “Given the depth and severity of the divisions displayed in Sweat, we are led to wonder if healing is even possible. But as a ‘doctor of American democracy,’ [Lynn] Nottage not only offers troubling diagnoses of our diseases but also prescribes remedies.” 7/25/2024