March 31, 2026
The piece argues that McDonald’s is more than a fast-food company; it is a metaphor for America itself. It traces the chain’s origins in efficiency, affordability, and disciplined system-building under the McDonald brothers, then shows how Ray Kroc transformed it into a vehicle for aggressive scale, franchising, and real-estate power. From there, the essay widens into a critique of American capitalism, arguing that the same values that create opportunity can, when left unchecked, mutate into greed, distortion, and cultural caricature.
View ProjectMarch 30, 2026
A systems essay on cultural entropy, systemic inertia, and ecological responsibility, this piece moves from theory to lived experience by tracing how decaying values and self-preserving institutions obstruct meaningful change. Anchored by a field story from the Aplomado Falcon restoration effort on South Padre Island during Hurricane Claudette, the essay argues that forecasting is not just prediction—it is action taken against delay, complacency, and the narrowing window between awareness and consequence.
View ProjectMarch 30, 2026
The Death Clock in the Toaster is a systems-level essay about planned obsolescence, e-waste, consumer psychology, and the deeper design failures embedded in modern industrial society. Using DDT as an opening warning and moving through recycling limits, chronic disease, and instant gratification, the piece argues that waste is not a side effect of the modern economy but one of its governing principles. At its core, the essay contends that the real problem is not any single product, fuel, or chemical, but a civilization designed around turnover, convenience, and engineered dependency.
View ProjectMarch 30, 2026
Goodbye Mr. Ant is a gonzo environmental essay about DDT, ecological fallout, and the uneasy line between scientific progress and industrial self-deception. Moving from the rise of DDT as a miracle pesticide to fieldwork in falcon restoration, the piece explores bioaccumulation, habitat loss, lead poisoning, and the moral ambiguity of “repairing” damage caused by the same systems that once profited from it. At its core, the essay argues that science is not the villain—capitalized science is, especially when truth gets subordinated to convenience, scale, and money.
View ProjectMarch 30, 2026
A satirical retelling of the Great Flood from the perspective of sea life, for whom biblical judgment looked less like apocalypse and more like the greatest all-inclusive resort in natural history.
View ProjectMarch 27, 2026
This essay is a broadside against the old alliance between power, religion, and bureaucracy. It argues that across centuries and across systems, the same pattern keeps reappearing: institutions that claim to guide humanity end up preserving themselves instead, often at the expense of curiosity, science, freedom, and ordinary human flourishing. From Persia and the Vatican to modern America, the piece traces how doctrine hardens into delay, how symbols become tools of control, and how entire societies learn to confuse moral language with moral action.
At its center, this is also an essay about American myth. It examines a nation that congratulates itself on liberty while repeatedly rationing it, a culture that wraps itself in religion while forgetting why secularism mattered, and a political order that turns every genuine human problem into spectacle, paperwork, or branding. The piece is angry, funny, historically minded, and intentionally unvarnished. Its argument is simple: different uniforms, different flags, different holy books—but far too often, the same animal underneath.
View ProjectMarch 27, 2026
This essay is a personal reckoning with the American century as it was sold to us and as it was actually lived. Moving from the shock of 9/11 through the theater of the War on Terror, the spectacle of mass media, the paralysis around school shootings, and the long shadow of U.S. foreign policy, it argues that September 11 was not an isolated rupture but the visible detonation of contradictions that had been building for decades.
At its core, the piece is about systems: how nations mythologize themselves, how fear becomes policy, how spectacle replaces understanding, and how ordinary people are left to absorb the cost. It is also about responsibility. Influence, power, and strategy are never neutral once placed in human hands. The same force that can build a civilization can just as easily deform one.
View ProjectMarch 26, 2026
The piece is a memoir-driven reflection on growing up inside late-20th-century American mythmaking and slowly realizing how much of it was performance. It begins with the author absorbing Reagan-era exceptionalism and schoolroom patriotism as a child, then moves through formative public events like the Challenger disaster, Waco, the O.J. Simpson chase and trial, and the Clinton scandal. Across those scenes, the essay shows how television and news culture shifted from informing the public to packaging trauma, scandal, and politics as continuous entertainment, turning national life into a live-feed spectacle.
At the center of the essay is the author’s growing disillusionment with the gap between America’s self-image and the lived reality beneath it. That abstract critique becomes deeply personal in the section about the author’s mother’s cancer treatment, when an insurance company drops coverage mid-treatment and permanently alters the family’s life. From there, the piece ties private suffering back to public policy, framing later protections like HIPAA and the ACA as rare instances where the system bent toward decency. In sum, the essay is about losing faith in national mythology, recognizing how media and institutions distort human reality, and measuring America less by its slogans than by what happens to ordinary people when they are most vulnerable.
View ProjectMarch 26, 2026
This essay argues that institutional investors are not primarily afraid of risk itself, but of exposure, blame, and public embarrassment. It explores how capital is often governed less by truth or utility than by committee defensibility, familiar narratives, and the need to make uncertainty look orderly.
Using drag racing as its central metaphor, the piece introduces the “Rascal King” as the rare operator who can translate real-world volatility into a form institutions can tolerate. At its core, the essay is about performance, accountability, and the tension between genuine innovation and the bureaucratic instincts of modern capital.
View ProjectMarch 25, 2026
This piece argues that selfishness is humanity’s default setting—not necessarily out of malice, but as a built-in survival architecture. By comparing biological and philosophical lenses, it shows that very different ways of studying human nature arrive at the same conclusion: left untrained, people tend to orient toward self-interest.
It then pushes further, arguing that our selfishness is intensified by the fact that human perception is narrow, local, and short-term. We protect what we can immediately feel and see, while future consequences, distant harms, and unseen interdependence remain faint. In that frame, generosity is not a natural reflex but an intentional achievement—something that must be taught, practiced, and designed into life.
At its core, the essay asks: if selfishness and limited perception are the baseline conditions of being human, what does it take to become generous on purpose and behave as if we can truly see beyond ourselves?
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