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.
Pick up a ream of copy paper in the United States and read the wrapper. It says 8.5 × 11 in, and it says 20 lb. Neither number describes the paper inside. An A4 ream has no such problem. It says 210 × 297 mm and 80 g/m². Both of those are properties of the sheet you are holding: its dimensions, and its mass divided by its area. Check them with a ruler and a kitchen scale and they come out right. ...
I have an apology to make, and I want to make it properly this time. I doubted the children’s investment accounts. I said they were a gimmick. I said the whole thing was a branding exercise with a stock chart attached. I was wrong, and I want to say so before anyone else does. Because the facts, as the administration has stated them, are remarkable. Nearly seventy million Trump Accounts have been created, more than sixty million of them by automatic enrollment, and every American child under eighteen with a valid Social Security number now has one. I apologize for the cynicism. It turns out you really can give every child in the country a financial stake in the future in a single quarter. ...
Question: Nine days before Election Day, Republicans are spending $26 million to defend Kansas, suing to block certification in Alaska and retreating from North Carolina, so why is control of the Senate still a coin flip? Answer: Because every one of those facts describes a party playing defense, and defense is not the same thing as defeat. Cook Political Report moved three Senate ratings on October 20: South Carolina from likely to lean Republican, Mississippi from solid to likely Republican, and Minnesota from likely to lean Democratic. Silver Bulletin moved Iowa from toss-up to lean Democratic a day later.1 That is four moves in seven days, three toward the Democrats, and together they describe a map that has widened rather than a majority that has settled. Kalshi put Democratic control at 68 percent on October 23, up from 62 percent on October 15 and from less than 43 percent on June 24.2 The market is not hesitating about direction. It is hesitating about the last mile, which runs through five states that the forecasters describe in five different ways, and nine days is enough time for the last mile to move either way. ...
Question: When the government tells a court that a board weighed a four-year phased renovation against a two-year closure, what happens if the board never saw the comparison? Answer: It withdraws it. On Wednesday, October 21, the Justice Department filed a notice of errata in the Kennedy Center case conceding that portions of three sentences in its pending motion “mistakenly describe” the JLL plan, that the comparison of a two-year closure with “an alternative four-year project with phased, partial closures” and the $41 million construction-cost figure drawn from it came from “an alternate version of the report provided to the Center on August 20, 2026, which was not provided to the Board,” and that the report the Board had was 160 pages, not 180. “Defendants regret these errors.” Filed the same day, Representative Joyce Beatty’s reply in support of her motion to compel says the government produced that August report for the first time on Monday, October 19, after the depositions had ended, and that it shows a phased renovation was feasible. Discovery closed Friday. ...
On April 14, 2025, Ryan Holiday was in a hotel room in Annapolis, getting ready to walk onstage at the United States Naval Academy. He had spoken there more than half a dozen times since 2019, as part of a series on Stoicism and the pursuit of virtue. The invitation to this one had come the previous November, and the subject was wisdom. He had sent his slides over the night before so they could be loaded onto the projectors. ...
He wrote nothing. Not one line that we can hold in our hands and call his own composition. Everything the world knows about Epictetus comes through a student who sat in his classroom at Nicopolis, on the Adriatic coast of Greece, and took notes fast enough to keep up with an old man talking. That student was Arrian of Nicomedia, later a consul and a historian of Alexander. He says plainly what he was doing: ...