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No TACO on This POTUS
It’s hard to be popular. But I think a good way to do it is to say a lot of things that aren’t true and see if it excites people. You tell them that you’re going to take over Greenland, annex Canada, build a Golden Dome over the United States, have your bust carved into…
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Are We in Decline Yet? The Wikipedia Page
It’s obvious that the United States is in decline. But what does decline mean? According to Edward Gibbon, it’s a loss of virtue, particularly a decay of public service and civic duty. In the case of the Roman Empire, Gibbon thought that luxury and complacency were the cause of it, along with Christianity, which made the Romans…
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Area Consumer Thinks About Brick and Mortar
Today I went into Staples to buy a ream of paper. I immediately noticed that the store layout was identical to that of every other Staples I’d been in: the red panels and white lettering, the red carpeting and white shelves, the sans-serif type that was so contemporary fifty years ago. I thought, this must…
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Reflections on the Narrative of Frederick Douglass
Years ago, I heard a passage from Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass on Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History podcast. It was in episode 68, “Human Resources.” What impressed me was not only its power and eloquence, but the difficulty Douglass had in writing it. It’s difficult to write about atrocities in elegant prose. It’s…
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Who’s the Cooler Dictator?
The other day Trump staged a hang sesh with Salvadorian president Bukele. He got the party rolling by saying that Bukele “is a friend of mine and we went through this together and got along very well during my entire period, uh, uh, of time.” Though he did not specify what they went through or…
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My Poetry Divorce
Near the end of my 25-year marriage to poetry, a friend jokingly called my books “stocking stuffers.” That was when I stopped questioning what I could do to make poetry more relevant and entertaining and began questioning why I had devoted myself to it in the first place. What about poetry had absorbed me so…