Author: Joe

Donald Trump is back. Of course, he never actually went away. He is dependent on attention. To understand Trump's political ambitions we have to leave behind normal presumptions about politicians, both cynical and idealistic. Fundamentally, he is uninterested in using power to advance his interests, or in the service of a cause. Power is simply… Continue reading Nothing New in New Hampshire →

Donald Trump is a coward’s idea of a tough guy. A macho man hero for all the wilted simpering chumps that America produces in bulk. Costco commandos. Soft-in-the-middle militia men, struggling to secure their Amazon.com flak vests over bulging bellies. I can’t shake the feeling that if Hunter S. Thompson were still with us his withering… Continue reading Post-election notes from Florida, November 2022 →

This world makes small people. Even the big people are really just small people inflated to globe spanning proportions. Enormous depressing wind socks gyrating violently.  It starts with the screen, which sucks you into it and out of the world. So much time and energy and possibility offered up, a sacrifice given without remuneration.  Earbud… Continue reading Passing Thoughts from the Margins of the Semester, Part One →

"Tyranny offers relief from the burden of sanity and a licence to enact forbidden impulses of hatred and violence." (John Gray, The Silence of Animals) The other night I settled in to watch the US mid-term election, a bottle of single malt to hand, alone in dim lamp light. This has been my ritual since… Continue reading Slipping loose the burdens of sanity →

Some year ago, I heard Leonard Cohen's "Famous Blue Raincoat" for the first time. The exact year is lost but I was old enough, and pretentious enough in my music tastes, for it to be an embarrassing revelation. Yet, there's also a visceral rush in stumbling upon something fabulous that you should not have, but… Continue reading There’s music on Clinton Street all through the evening… →

Download In preparation for an upcoming holiday to Rome, I sought out a book about the city's history. Robert Hughes' Rome was recommended to me by a friend. Early in the book Hughes recounts a visit to a market held in the Campo dei Fiori where he encounters the brooding statue of the 16th-century Dominican… Continue reading Divinity and dust →

I’ve got a fascination with books that try to give the big panoramic statement--a big history, a big story. Lately, I've been making my way through Tom Holland’s Dominion, both fascinated by its scope and sceptical (in a way that's difficult to articulate) of its ambition. The same push/pull dynamic was there reading Simon Reid-Henry's… Continue reading Big Pictures, Small Moments →

In that hollow period between Christmas and New Year's Eve, impatient for 2021 to end but hesitant to enter 2022, I listened to "The Death of Nuance" in the concerned but indolent way middle-class-BBC4-listeners do. The programme argues we are caught within increasingly sharp political dichotomies, ensnared by technology, biology, unrelenting complexity. It all has… Continue reading Nuance →

“I’m a responsible scientist.”  Nah, mate, you’re a dead soul working in a mortuary world. To try to think beyond the horizon is a desire to live beyond the living, beyond the dying, to be lost among those never dead and never born. My method is a kind of philosophical necrophilia, a living soul in… Continue reading Methodology as mummification  →