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The Separation of Church and State
As the residual glow of the Christmas season fades, I spent an inordinate amount of time thinking about the ‘separation of church and state’ in the modern body-politic and wanted to convey to you my thoughts on the matter. Lest an inevitable cacophony of groans and a hurried exodus from this post ensue, let me ...
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Humanity in the Age of Terror
“The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.” -Isaac Asimov The Nuclear Precedent In the past, humanity could content itself to all manner of brutality and barbarism, confident in the fact that even if its lesser angels were allowed to run wild, the damage would be ...
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The True Lingua Franca
I am not, by nature, a particularly maudlin individual, so it was with considerable consternation that I found myself actively fighting back tears in the middle of a coffee shop the other afternoon. What made this all the more absurd was that the offending clip that evoked this most embarrassing of responses was, of all ...
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A Congressional Reset
And so the vox populi rings forth, with its sternest and most emphatic condemnation yet of our nation’s greatest deliberative body. An incredible 82% in a recent NYTimes/CBS poll disapprove of congress, a figure so high one would normally only expect to see it reserved for the fabricated election results of dictators. And though it may ...
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From Cairo to Omelas
And so it ends. It took just 18 days to unravel the work of 30 years. The dictator is no more. Less than 24 hours after he defiantly vowed to press on, unmoved by the masses demanding his departure, he was quietly ushered out, his departure unceremoniously announced by his deputy. As T.S. Eliot once ...
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Brief Thoughts on the International System in the 21st Century
I wrote this short policy memo for a class in my program. In light of my interest in the subject matter, I figured I would repost it to solicit feedback. The international system in the first decade of the 21stcentury is in some ways largely unchanged from the Westphalian construct that has governed foreign affairs ...