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.
This article examines the economic and geopolitical position of the United States as of mid-2026. It analyzes the recent deceleration in real output growth, the persistence of above-target inflation, and the trajectory of public indebtedness, and it relates these macroeconomic conditions to the country’s standing within the international system. The analysis concludes that the principal constraints on the American position are endogenous in origin: they derive from domestic fiscal decisions and from the attenuation of the legitimacy that underpins the country’s alliance relationships, rather than from the direct exercise of power by rival states.
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Steven Miller,
I’m writing to you as a Stoic, an atheist, and a progressive: not to convert you, but to challenge you. I don’t share your faith, but I do share your humanity, and it’s on that common ground that I want to speak. My goal isn’t to mock or dismiss you, but to ask you to consider the consequences of your words and actions, and to reflect on whether they align with the values you claim to uphold.
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I have spent years writing about honor as if it were an antique: a virtue our ancestors practiced and we merely study. Stoic biographies, civics essays, a shelf of books about how a person builds a defensible inner life. I used to think the point of that work was personal: how do I hold myself together when nobody’s watching? Lately I’ve had to sit with a second, less comfortable question underneath it. What happens to a country when the people running it stop asking that question at all?
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The 2026 Senate Map: A Race-by-Race Guide The setup: Republicans currently hold the Senate 53–47. Thirty-five seats are on the November 2026 ballot — 33 regular contests plus two special elections to fill vacancies. Democrats need a net gain of four seats to take the majority; Republicans can afford to lose only two and still hold it outright (a loss of three produces a 50–50 tie, broken by the vice president).
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Elon Musk and the Engineering of Chaos: A Scholarly Assessment Question: Is the man stupid, evil, both, or something else?
Thesis: He is not stupid. He is not evil in the sense of personal malice. He is something more historically novel and institutionally corrosive: a techno-libertarian demolitionist who mistakes engineering intelligence for governing wisdom — a man who has spent three decades acquiring, building, and destroying institutions according to a single algorithm (identify inefficiency, slash personnel, declare victory, move on), and who has now applied that algorithm to the federal government, the public square, and the very idea of institutional continuity. He does not seek to rule. He seeks to reboot. And in the gap between the crash and the reboot, millions suffer.
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Mike Johnson and the Problem of Bad Faith: A Scholarly Assessment Question: Is the man stupid, evil, both, or something else?
Thesis: He is not stupid. He is not evil in the sense of personal malevolence. He is something more dangerous and more explicable: a true believer of above-average intelligence who has substituted a closed theological epistemology for empirical reasoning, and who has proven willing to abandon democratic norms and institutional integrity when they conflict with his eschatological politics. In short, he is a competent ideologue operating in bad faith — not because he is incapable of recognizing truth, but because he has trained himself to reject it when it threatens his worldview.
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