The Essay Archive

Long-Form Essays on Culture, Politics, and Philosophy

A working library of sustained argument. Twelve years of writing on the questions that recur — why we read, what we owe each other, and how language survives its own abuses. Filed under culture, politics, and philosophy.

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Philosophy · 28 min read

The Refusal: On Inheriting What We Did Not Choose

We do not pick the language we think in, the country we are born into, or the century of our asking. And yet something in the philosophical tradition keeps returning to the figure of the autonomous chooser, as if inheritance were a stain to be scrubbed clean. A long essay on Hannah Arendt, John McWhorter, and what we might owe the past that made us — argues for a more honest kind of freedom.

November 12 28 min 142 responses
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Politics

Civility Is Not a Position: A Reply to the Centrists

The demand for politeness is doing the work that the argument cannot. Notes on the rhetoric of "tone" in the second decade of the twenty-first century, and why I no longer find the request charming.

24 min Oct 28 211 responses
Philosophy

A Defense of Slowness: Reading Heidegger in a Hurry

We have been told, repeatedly, that there is no time. But the demand for speed is itself a metaphysical claim, and a contestable one. A meditation on the temporality of attention.

31 min Oct 19 94 responses
Philosophy

Cavell, Ordinary Language, and the American Skeptical

Stanley Cavell read Wittgenstein as if he were reading Thoreau. The result is a philosophy unusually at home in the vernacular — and a way of writing that resembles, more than anything, a long letter.

22 min Sep 22 52 responses
By Subject

Three Categories, One Mind

The divisions are practical, not doctrinal. An essay on a film may end in a question about justice; a piece on the Supreme Court may conclude in a meditation on attention. The categories exist so you can find what you came for.

Culture

Books, film, music, and the slow conversations that hold a civilization together.

31 essays

Politics

The arguments about the arguments — power, institutions, and the rhetoric that animates them.

27 essays

Philosophy

The texts behind the texts — readings, disagreements, and inherited questions.

26 essays

Commentary

Shorter pieces in response to the week — written quickly, never carelessly.

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One essay, one short note on what I am reading, and an occasional correction. No tracking, no growth-hacking, no selling of the list. Unsubscribe with a single click. Sent only when there is something worth saying.