Go onto Google and search for “I never went to college” or some such, and what do you find? You don’t find stories of people like me, someone who was a gifted kid, is a sophisticate, and a performing-artist type with intellectual curiosities but who … Continue readingI Never Went to College…or High School
Picture this: it is October 2024 and you’ve settled into the theater to see the new James Bond movie. The lights dim, the audience goes quiet, and at once the classic gunbarrel sequence with the unmistakable theme rocks you and everyone else in the theater. … Continue readingShadows Never Lie: The Next Bond Movie I’d Make
Weighing in at 53,000 words, my new space opera novel “The Saga of the Ilithianades” is out for your enjoyment! Buy it as an ebook, a paperback, or (ooh…) a hardcover at Amazon and crack it open! I’ll let the blurb at Amazon speak for … Continue readingThe Saga of the Ilithianades: New Sci-Fi Novel Out!
With “No Time to Die” out in theaters and the Daniel Craig era ending at long last, I’d like to offer some thoughts on where the James Bond franchise should go next. My franchise critiques roll on apparently! The Craig era’s principal flaw in my … Continue readingSome Thoughts on James Bond
In my latest novel, tentatively titled “The Saga of the Ilithianades”, the age-of-sail-style treasure hunt for a powerful alien artifact I highlighted as part of the story only really gets started around 40,000 words into it; up until then it’s literally a simple family saga, … Continue readingThe Saga of the Ilithianades: Radon Seas and Beyond
Kurt Gödel is famous for his “incompleteness theorems”, and ranks among the all-time great mathematicians (he was also a logician and a philosopher). What’s less well known about him is that he claimed to have discovered an “inner contradiction” in the United States Constitution, a … Continue readingGödel’s Loophole: My Pet Theory
What if I had a country to call my own, one that belonged to me, my very own answer to the Principalities of Liechtenstein or Monaco? First and foremost I’d want it to be a refuge of liberty, a free society where the best of … Continue readingIf I Had a Country
Why do employers generally require college degrees or high school diplomas to get a job? On one hand, it makes sense: a more knowledgeable man who has demonstrated he can stick with a long-term project is a better employee. On the other hand, it makes … Continue readingThe Puzzle of Credentialism
We should abolish elections and replace them with sortition, random selection from the citizenry, thus guaranteeing a representative body. I’ve posted about that before. But if we must have elections, what voting system should we use? Pure proportional representation, that’s what; specifically multi-winner ranked choice … Continue readingFor Proportional Representation
I feel a bit behind the curve, since only like yesterday did I discover I have a great affinity with that social-media aesthetic called “dark academia”. Maybe the fact I follow and love the @_DarkAcademia Twitter account and have for a long time should have … Continue readingAcademia, Dark and Otherwise