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.
The report the court ordered arrived at the end of the day, and it is a real document: six pages of narrative supported by a six-page sworn declaration from Matt Floca, the Kennedy Center’s executive director and chief operating officer, filed under 28 U.S.C. § 1746. It describes hazards that are not trivial. It also answers a smaller question than the one Judge Cooper asked.
This is a follow-up to Sealed on the Record, which covered the September 18 motions and the sealed exhibit they rest on. Here I want to take the new filing on its own terms, because the most important sentence in it is not about a hazard at all.
...
The government owed the court a sworn report today. What it filed on Friday was a request that the case be over, resting on a document the public is not allowed to read.
This is a follow-up to The Kennedy Center Deadline and to The Name Over the Door. The argument in both is unchanged. What is new is a procedural move that puts the case’s two halves in direct contradiction.
What was due today Judge Cooper’s September 17 minute order denied the plaintiff’s emergency request for a hearing and told the defendants to file, by today, a “detailed status report, supported by a sworn declaration from a knowledgeable representative of the Kennedy Center,” on the “temporary closure” and the emergency repairs (Minute Order, 2026).
...
I have graded all forty-four presidents, and I want to show the work.
What follows is the whole method, written out so that someone else can reproduce it, attack it, and see exactly where my judgment enters. The short version: the letter grades are mine, and the underlying scores are not. Every number below comes from C-SPAN’s 2021 Historians Survey, and the transcription was checked three independent ways before I used any of it.
...
Nearly every comparison of Barack Obama and Donald Trump is really a verdict on two men, and the verdict is usually the one the reader walked in with. Ask whether the forty-fourth president was better than the forty-fifth and you learn nothing you did not already believe.
There is a comparison underneath that one, and it is more interesting, because it can be decided with evidence instead of affiliation. Both men held the same office, inherited the same accumulated powers, and operated the same machinery. What differed was what each of them said about his own right to use it, and whether he left behind a standard by which he could be judged.
...
He will not let the building be repaired unless his name goes on it.
That is not a characterization. It is his own sentence, posted on September 15, 2026: the renovation “cannot begin until such time as the D.C. Circuit rules on the Board’s approved name,” and if the ruling goes against him and the Supreme Court does not reverse it, “the Reconstruction and the Renovation of The Kennedy Center will not take place” (Truth Social, 2026). To reporters the next day he was more explicit. “For me to get involved, and to take on long term, and to carry it, I think the Trump administration should certainly have recognition,” he said. “Because frankly, if we don’t do that, it’s going to close. It’ll end up being ripped down” (AP, 2026).
...
On Friday, September 18, the government filed two motions that change the shape of the Kennedy Center case. On Wednesday, September 23, it owes the court a sworn accounting.
This is a short update to The Name Over the Door. The argument there is unchanged. What has changed is who is defending what.
What the board did The board has fought this in two directions at once. It moved for a stay so the President’s name could go back over the door; the D.C. Circuit refused on July 8, holding that the government had asserted financial harm “without any specific facts or evidence” and that the removal had already happened anyway (D.C. Circuit, 2026). It has also taken the underlying judgment itself up on appeal.
...