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.
I was ready to do something drastic.
My machine had been running hot for weeks. Disk usage climbing, performance lagging, the kind of quiet degradation that starts as inconvenience and ends as crisis. I had installed AnythingLLM to test it, decided it wasn’t ready, uninstalled it — and yet the space never came back. The numbers didn’t lie. Something was eating my disk, and I couldn’t see it.
The easy answer was staring at me: clean install. Wipe the whole system, start fresh, rebuild from zero. It’s the digital equivalent of the scorched-earth impulse — the one that says, if I can’t understand the problem, I’ll eliminate the conditions that produced it. I’ve done it before. Most of us have. It feels like control. It feels like decisiveness. It is almost always a confession that we have failed to understand what we are actually dealing with.
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I did not set out to use artificial intelligence as part of my writing process.
Like most things in my work, it began as a practical response to a problem. I was trying to clarify an idea—tighten an argument that felt structurally sound but poorly expressed. The tool I was using responded with something unexpected: not just a rephrasing, but a reframing. It wasn’t always correct. Often it wasn’t. But it forced a different question:
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Eight books, with another on the way. Different subjects, different tones — but the same underlying preoccupations: clarity, proportion, and the work of living well. Browse below, and if something catches your attention, the cover image will take you to Amazon.
Unstuck Unstuck is not a gentle book. It is a direct challenge to the habits of delay, justification, and self-deception that keep capable people from moving forward. Drawing on Stoic discipline and decades of lived experience, it argues that most obstacles are not external — they are internal negotiations we have learned to accept.
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“We are a way for the cosmos to know itself.”
Carl Sagan would have turned 91 today. For millions who first met him through Cosmos or the pages of The Demon-Haunted World, his voice remains a beacon — calm, curious, and utterly unwilling to surrender wonder to superstition. He invited us not merely to look up, but to understand what we saw, to marry awe with evidence.
1 · A Voice for the Ages Sagan’s gift was not just that he knew the universe — it was that he could make the universe knowable. At a time when science often felt remote, he made it intimate: hydrogen burning in the hearts of stars, atoms forged in supernovae finding their way into human hands. To watch him speak was to feel that curiosity itself was sacred.
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Every map I grew up with told the same quiet lie: that the story of this continent starts when a European ship arrives on its shore. Everything before that moment gets compressed into a kind of prehistory — vague, undated, waiting to be discovered into relevance. It’s such a natural way to tell the story that it takes real effort to notice it’s a choice, and a self-serving one. Nobody discovers a place that’s already inhabited. You only get to call it discovery if you’ve first decided the people living there don’t fully count.
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For much of the post–Cold War era, the Arctic was held up as the one place great-power rivals still cooperated — search and rescue, fisheries, scientific monitoring, the kind of work that doesn’t function unless everyone at the table shows up. Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine broke that. In March 2022, the seven other Arctic Council members — the U.S., Canada, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden — suspended their participation rather than sit across from Moscow.1 Russia has spent the years since trying to build a substitute reality: hosting its own forums, leaning harder on a partnership with China, and treating Arctic diplomacy less as shared stewardship than as a stage for proving it isn’t isolated.
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