Despite categorizing many of my posts as ‘educational content,’ I rarely set out to teach you something in a rigorous fashion; instead, I am usually attempting to explicate a specific concept or idea, without providing full context or progressing through an entire topic.
A Not Unactive Post About George Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language”
Orwell's essay on "Politics and the English Language" is among my most oft-cited pieces on language and writing, and its lessons and criticisms are as valid today as they were in 1946.
A News Story
Breaking news: we're discussing "the news" for today's post. A massive topic, with entire facets meritorious of their own posts, but for today I prefer to focus on the most fundamental questions when analyzing the news as a concept: what is the news, and is "news" valuable?
Still Relevant: The US Constitution
For all the millions of words which have been written, starting with The Federalist Papers, on the US Constitution, what is perhaps most striking about it from an initial inspection is its brevity.
Thoughts on John Milton’s Areopagitica
It was in this pursuit that I came across John Milton's Areopagitica, which is considered by many amongst the first, cogent defenses of the right to freedom of speech.
A Constant State of Anxiety?
The human mind is an astonishingly, perhaps incomprehensibly complicated entity, and there is absolutely a capacity for it to malfunction; however, the only tool we have to diagnose it is...the human mind, which is as fallible as it is amazing.
Common Law
In legal theory, common law and statutory law are the two primary forms of rulemaking in a given legal framework: statutory law being the explicitly written laws of legislatures, executives, and bureaucrats, and common law being laws derived from judicial precedent and from the implications of the shared moralistic and political environment.
Society’s Origins
When I unearth an article that I can make applicable to writing and storytelling, I have no compulsions against sharing it with you. This week, that’s a paper from Science Advances on how societies initially arose: “Disentangling the Evolutionary Drivers of Social Complexity: A Comprehensive Test of Hypotheses.”
A Crisis of Responsibility
A very good friend of mine recently suggested that we as a society are currently suffering from a crisis of responsibility, and ever since then I have been finding it a remarkably insightful lens through which to analyze current events, perspectives, and opinions that I observe being promulgated.
Private Matters
What separates human beings from other animals? What makes us distinct, different, unique, what traits do we alone have who have done things that no other species has on Earth? For that matter, what is different between a person hunting for subsistence and a person settling the Fertile Crescent?
IGC Publishing 