Newsletter: October 2026

If mourning is a way of reflecting on our attachments and why they matter to us, gratitude is a response to that mattering. That anything matters at all is something to be grateful for.

Newsletter: September 2026

Weil’s mature political philosophy calls not just for solidarity with the oppressed but loving attention given to the afflicted. It’s one thing to say you stand by the afflicted. It’s another to look them in the eyes and ask them what they are going through.

Newsletter: August 2026

If soccer is an art, it’s a popular art, more like the Beatles than Anton Webern. During the World Cup, a large part of the world is united in humming the same tune.

Newsletter: July 2026

When doing philosophy, we’re tempted by a desire to step out of our own skins, to see the world as God might see it, free from our all-too-human perspective. Wittgenstein conceives of his later philosophy as an attempt to cure us of this temptation, to bring us back to the home in which our language lives.

Newsletter: June 2026

It’s more important now than ever to be clear and deliberate about what we think is worth paying attention to. Because if we aren’t, there are others who will be more than happy to direct our attention for us.

Newsletter: May 2026

The stories I tell about myself are always necessarily provisional and incomplete. If my life is a story, it’s less a polished narrative and more a constantly revised and updated draft.

Newsletter: April 2026

It may be the case that war is sometimes the best among bad options. But if we must go to war, we should approach it with the gravity and humility that comes with acknowledging that it’s our fellow creatures that we’re going to war with.

Newsletter: March 2026

Descartes had no way of knowing that he was inaugurating something that would be taught as “modern philosophy” four centuries later. In some ways, the Meditations presents a deliberate departure from what came before. In other ways, it feels Medieval.

Newsletter: February 2026

There’s a prejudice that I find all too frequently in the empirical sciences. The history of philosophy, on this view, is a history of better or worse guesses about the world that await scientific confirmation or disconfirmation. It’s only when we reach scientific maturity that we confirm the truths that philosophers can only guess at.

Newsletter: January 2026

Are fictional characters the kinds of beings toward whom one can have moral obligations? I think there’s a special way in which authors can betray their characters.