Not mystical orthodontia, but a survey of Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, Dickinson and others in or near American transcendentalism.

Per Ronald Coase, if you torture the data long enough, they will confess to anything.

Amateurs and professionals alike can learn more from bad examples than from paragons of perfection.

What can we learn from an accelerated survey of a complex national heritage?

Elle Cordova’s performance of a country song about a comet afords common ground for science and religion.

Departing a town that was once an entire world, in life and American literature.

Reviewing Ken Burns reviews, and reflections of friends on what Americans might want to know heading into 2026.

Scientific, political and pop-culture aspects of the International Geophysical Year (IGY) (1957-1958); cue Donald Fagen!

Thanks to Mikey Day and Nate Bargatze, the human aspects of measurement are fresh and vivid.

Mary Ann Evans defied in her life, but depicted in her works, social conventions and modes of belief.

How Wagner and Nietzsche came together, and how they exploded apart.

On republication of an infamous work by a philosopher who takes on apathy and cynicism and concludes it’s all bullshit.

Ways of thinking slow and fast, with illustrations and converse strategies.

A reconnaissance mission through the works of James Joyce.

A guide to collecting and distinguishing these philosophies of austerity.

Visualizing the market fair of medieval history and the Vanity Fair of John Bunyan.

A condensed guide to the instruments in a lawyer’s conceptual toolkit.

Novels of European-American manners, and psychological and philosophical texts, go down more smoothly with tales of bank robberies.

Returning to the Greek and Roman epics with the wisdom and the weight of the years.

Edmund Wilson traces the paths to socialism and literary modernism.