Category: Essays
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Local Notes No. 2: Clyde Hill, WA’s Coin-Flip Mayor
On one unseasonably warm day in December 1975, two candidates vying for the mayoralty of Clyde Hill, WA, a 3200-strong suburb sandwiched between Seattle and Bellevue, met in the office of the King County Superintendent of Elections. Against all odds, the normal course of count and recount in the scheduled November election had exhausted itself…
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Local Notes #1: The Experience of Economic Change in Central Maryland Since 2000
The builders have picked up their shovels in Maryland. Cajoled, at long last, by the recent bounding pace of economic growth in the state between D.C. and Baltimore, these planners, developers, architects and contractors have brought something not seen in quite some time to the Old Line State – a renovation of the built environment,…
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Review: Peter Zeihan, “Disunited Nations”
If geopolitics ever found itself in need of a fabulist, it could do worse than to give Peter Zeihan a call. To be fair, geopolitics today does need a fabulist – one of the wittier passages in Zeihan’s recent book, Disunited Nations: The Scramble for Power in an Ungoverned World, concerns the moment in 1990…
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Three Movies about Memphis, and the Death of Place in Recent American Cinema
American movies have lost their sense of place. What did we lose when that happened?
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Sharing some John Ashbery, and Poetry in California
Wanted to pass along some beloved excerpts from John Ashbery, who I try my utmost to imitate. Nothing is like his poetry. An immodest little white wine, some scattered seraphs,recollections of the Fall—tell me,has anyone made a spongier representation, chasedfewer demons out of the parking lotwhere we all held hands? Little by little the idea…
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Addendum: Problems with Policing
I wanted to revisit the topic I and Will Chavez wrote about in our earlier essay, To Secure These Rights, in order to react to recent developments (and nondevelopments) and to share an excellent article out of Vox. That topic, you’ll recall, concerned the set of solutions – remedies was the word we used –…
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To Secure These Rights: Remedies for Healing the Wound Opened by the Police Murder of George Floyd
Fixing the problems in our country that led to George Floyd’s murder will take more than the conviction of the cops that killed him, or new federal legislation, though that will be needed. We’ll all need to work harder on making our communities more just, generous places to live.
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