Sketching the Lines of Conscience

History teaches that a small minority of people will follow corruption all the way down. They will excuse it, normalize it, translate it into partisan language, and eventually retreat into the laziest defense available: both sides do it. Examples abound, but the pattern is always the same: minimize, rationalize, compare, forget.

Fascist Kickback Cathedrals

TЯump‘s D.C. building spree is not about beauty. It is about possession. 

The Ceremony as Mirror

I have made jokes before about TЯump's fake masculinity: the makeup, the shoe-lift rumors, the girdle and Spanx jokes, the whole costume of dominance wrapped around one of the neediest public men in American life.

What Actually Carries Forward

There’s a familiar complaint in classrooms: “We’re never going to use this.” At the level of content, that objection is often correct. Most students will not carry specific formulas or niche facts into their adult lives in any direct way. This is often true in physics and chemistry, my subjects. But the mistake is in stopping the analysis there.