Sorry for no midweek update until now. Been in Portugal for work this week. However, I’ve now had some time to get back to writing after some serious work (and one day of serious baroque sight-seeing in Mafra-more on that later). Once again, I cant update the piece on the making of national power as the article I’m working on is going through another round of revisions. I think/hope it will be worth the wait, but for now until that article is ready I can’t say any more (apologies Adrian).

I have been souring on Twitter for a while now. At first my main complaint was how nasty everyone seemed to be — and how the service seemed to reward those people. Since Elon Musk bought Twitter, however, my issue is the utter capriciousness that governs the site. It appears to operate almost entirely based on one man’s whims. The latest of those whims was to limit Substack content — and put messages suggesting the content might have been harmful — in response to the news that Substack was rolling out a new feature called Notes.

Note: This series is based on several podcasts I recorded about the events of October 7th and the resulting war in Gaza. Please leave suggestions, criticisms, citations, corrections, etc. in the comments. Subsequent changes to the text will not be marked, but each draft will be given a new revision date here: 6/25/24. We live amid the tides of history, but rarely know it. To know it is to see a familiar landscape suddenly inundated, and to recognize that anything can happen at any time.

The Washington Huskies fell to 12-0 last Saturday, suffering a three-point victory when Grady Gross kicked a 42-yard field goal on the final play of the game. No less than an authority on college football than Jim Moore offered a blunt assessment of Washington’s prowess or lack thereof. I’ve also been told – repeatedly – that Washington is about to get smoked by the best one-loss team in the history of college football.

A question is asked often about poetry and not nearly as often about other kinds of creative expression: "what is poetry?" It's a strange question, isn't it?  Imagine if dancers routinely pondered the question "what is dance?" or if painters frequently discussed "what is painting?"  Only a few experimentalists in other arts seem to worry about such definitions, yet poets care a lot. After spending hundreds of hours during my MA program in poetry discussing and pondering the question with my fellow students, I made it part of my life's work to define poetry to my own satisfaction.