The Inner Monologue

Once upon a time, American universities were the envy of the world—powerhouses of research that birthed the atomic age, the internet, and countless Nobel Prizes. But today, they’re too busy building climbing walls, hiring Vice Provosts of Student Wellness, and jacking up tuition to bother with actual science. The proof? arXiv, the open-access hub where…

For centuries, distance shaped destiny. A person born in Sussex in 1750 would almost certainly die within twenty miles of Sussex, surrounded by the same church bells, the same market stalls, the same gossiping neighbors. Geography wasn’t just a fact of life; it was a prison of identity. The same was true in rural China,…

For most of cinema history, a movie was an act of recording reality. Light fell on film; film preserved it. Then Pixar arrived and said, “Reality can be synthesized.” Suddenly the camera was optional. Pixels replaced photons. The rendering farm replaced the soundstage. And the rest of the industry has been chasing that revolution ever…

Oh, hello there, noble internet denizen. I see you’ve just stumbled upon a mildly interesting tweet, a moderately amusing TikTok, or perhaps even a gasp thought-provoking blog post. And now you’re hesitating. Should I share this? Is it… ethical? What if the original creator gets mad? What if I look like a content thief? Relax,…

There is a comforting simplicity in the rhetoric of economic nationalism: Raise tariffs, punish foreign cheaters, rebuild American greatness. It’s a tidy story. A rallying cry. A flag-wrapped solution served in a single sentence. But simple narratives are often seductive precisely because they conceal complexity. They avoid the uncomfortable truth that economic systems are biological,…

A humbling reality sits at the core of American political life: The President of the United States will never know you exist. Not your face.Not your voice.Not your life, your worries, your work, your dreams, or your disappointments. You will never brief them.They will never seek your counsel.You are a citizen — an atom in…

When we talk about America’s political split, we often gravitate toward the familiar battlegrounds—taxes, guns, schools, identity. But beneath those noisy arenas lies a quieter battlefield, one rarely examined directly: civility. Not the smiling politeness of customer-service scripts, and not the stern propriety of 1950s etiquette classes, but the deeper operating system of public life:…

A Roast Beef of Rhetoric Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to America’s favorite fast-food arena of public intellect:The Tweet Drive-Thru. No need for IQ tests today. No scantrons. No sharpened No. 2 pencils.Here in the United Tweets of America, merit is measured the modern way: Not by achievements… but by how you clap back online. Forget…