Writings

There's a lot of wisdom—the kind of wisdom that one finds across cultures, though in different ways and different words—in these opening lines to the Mettā Sutta: This is to be done by one skilled in aims appreciating the state of peace: Be capable, upright, &…

Re-reading Gil Fronsdal's The Buddha before Buddhism, I'm again struck by simplicity of the earliest teachings: You're always stressing yourselves out. You can stop. The fact that his later followers took this simple message and turned it into a religion, with all the many…

Tom Stafford on why policy preferences don't neatly create "median" or even "centrist" voters in practice: In one-dimensional space, like that of the traditional left-right divide, the centre is densely populated and closer to each of the extremes than the extremes are to each…

The oldest branch of liberal thought remains its most emancipatory. It asks how everyday practices affect freedom, often without our knowledge. It treats power with relentless suspicion while it praises good law. It rejects fundamentalisms, celebrates basic virtues, and recognizes the limits

Practices organize social life. Yet they’ve received surprisingly little attention in the study of politics—little by political scientists, still less by practitioners.

The Constellation-class frigate offers a cautionary tale on unsustainable ambition. The New York Times: In 2020 the Navy had a simple plan to build its next fleet of small warships, the Constellation class: take a European design and build it in America.