When Jordan Peterson was at the peak of his popularity, I made the mistake of bringing up one of his ideas—”Do not let your children do anything that makes you dislike them”—at a family get-together. […]
Culture / Literature / Politics
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The Emperor Doesn’t Need Clothes—You Do
The Emperor has no clothes because the Emperor has no shame. Only his subjects must cover themselves. The Emperor, like God, “giveth and taketh away.” What he giveth and taketh away is your importance. The […]
Academia / Culture / Literature / Politics / Technology
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Books Will Abide, Though Readers May Not
James Marriott’s essay on the “dawn of the post-literate society” supports what to me has been evident for over a decade: in the wake of the smartphone, book readership has diminished and so has the […]
Class / Culture / Literature / Politics
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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 […]
Art / Culture / Literature / Poetry
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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 […]
Consumerism / Culture / Dystopia / Literature
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The Dystopia Files: Brave New World
Happiness, broadly conceived, is the predominant endeavor of human existence. It is the state we tell ourselves that we fundamentally want yet fail to achieve. It is what progress promises yet fails to deliver. And […]
Dystopia / Literature
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The Dystopia Files: Nineteen Eighty-Four
More than any other dystopia, George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four concentrates on its hero’s psychological state and his efforts to reveal the truth of the superstate in which he lives. Orwell’s meticulous attention to the engineering […]
Dystopia / Literature
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The Dystopia Files: Fahrenheit 451
In 1950, when Fahrenheit 451 first appeared as “The Fireman” in the magazine Galaxy Science Fiction, television was fast becoming a ubiquitous feature of the American home. The big three commercial television networks (NBC, ABC, […]
Dystopia / Literature / Philippic
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The Dystopia Files: Bend Sinister
Vladimir Nabokov’s 1947 novel Bend Sinister doesn’t focus on class war, a projected future or the awakening of an individual under authoritarian rule. It follows an exceptional man’s loss of all that makes his life […]
Culture / Dystopia / Literature / Philippic / Politics
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The Dystopia Files: It Can’t Happen Here
Sinclair Lewis wrote this political satire of American exceptionalism in the early 1930s, when one in four Americans were out of work and the complacent assumptions he’d ridiculed in Babbitt were rasped away by real […]