While my dedicated sections focus on specific pillars, the Essays section is where I explore the intersections. This is a space for synthesis—where Stoicism meets artificial intelligence, or where civic duty meets personal development.
These pieces are often more exploratory, serving as intellectual sketches and deep-dives into the questions that don’t fit neatly into a single category but are essential to a well-lived life.
On Friday, September 11, 2026, an entire generation of Americans will mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of a day they never lived through. This year’s Patriot Day proclamation put it plainly: “an entire generation of Americans has now come of age with no living memory of that fateful day.”1 For those of us who do remember, the day is not history. It is a scar that still aches in certain weather. And the question this anniversary asks is not only what we remember, but what we learned, and what we owe.
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On Tuesday, September 8, 2026, a 28-year-old researcher named Jacob Coxon resigned from Anthropic and posted his reasons on X. He had previously worked at OpenAI. He wrote that neither company was acting responsibly, that they were “racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives,” and that the people building the technology “earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.”1 Two of his colleagues, still employed, backed him up. Evan Hubinger, a lead in Anthropic’s alignment division, wrote that he personally believed there was a greater than 10 percent chance AI could kill all humans within the next decade, and that the industry did not yet have a plan to solve alignment.2 Samuel Marks, Anthropic’s scalable oversight lead, added the line that should have stopped the conversation: “In general, the more senior the employee, the more concerned they are.”3
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On September 8, 2026, Canada’s retaliatory tariffs took effect at 12:01 a.m.: duties of 15 to 50 percent on more than 700 American products, worth about CA$27.6 billion, matched “dollar for dollar, rate for rate” against the tariffs Washington had just imposed on Canadian goods.1 The same week, the White House confirmed it was moving to ban Canadian dairy products and most alcoholic drinks from the American market.2 The day before, the president had threatened to block Bombardier, a Canadian aircraft maker that employs more than a thousand people in Wichita, Kansas, from selling in the United States unless it moved its manufacturing across the border.3
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I have spent the last several years writing about trust: what it is, how it is built, and what happens when it is spent. I have written about honor as a practical discipline, about corruption as a constitutional danger, about the bond market pricing the arithmetic rather than the promises. Underneath all of it is a question I keep coming back to, and it is the question a reader put to me recently: “How can I be sure Trump is telling the truth?”
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Question: Eight weeks out, with the forecasters moving races toward the Democrats and the president’s super PAC spending its first general-election dollars of the cycle, is the Senate majority within reach?
Answer: The models call it a coin flip. Inside Elections moved four races toward the Democrats this week, Sabato’s Crystal Ball’s best guesses land on a 50-50 Senate, and the money is following the map: Trump’s MAGA Inc. made a $10 million buy in Texas, its first of the cycle. Democrats still need a net gain of four, and a 50-50 Senate belongs to Vance. The path runs through North Carolina, two coin flips in Ohio and Texas, and a bench of races from Maine to Alaska, with Kansas as the margin seat.
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My name is Philip, and I have TDS. I have had it for years. I have it so badly that I read the news every morning, I check the polls, I have opinions about the federal funds rate, and I once wrote an entire essay about the legal record of the forty-seventh president. The symptoms are severe and, I am told, incurable. I am here to tell you that I do not want a cure. I am proud to have TDS, and I think you should be too.
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