A collection of miscellaneous weekly blog posts below!
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Ever since the advent of the twenty-four-hour-a-day cable news cycle, America has altered her visual trajectory: we no longer look inward at are communities; all eyes, since the late 1990s, are focused on Washington D.C.; it’s up with macro and down with micro. The result? Communities have gone uncared for, reduced to localities our houses…
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A limerick from the first season of The Crown: There once was a girl named Sally Who never said “no” to a dally And when she sat on the lap of a well-endowed chap She cried, “Sir, you are right up my alley!” Another from the late Christopher Hitchens: It was said of the Bishop…
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The art of foreign policy is a good guy, making a deal with a bad guy, to get rid of a worse guy. The dilemma? Can the “good guy” live with an ideologically misaligned “bad guy” as a bedfellow? Perhaps as important: do we know for sure who‘s who? It’s always more complex and nuanced…
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The above is what I ride. I’ve always had Cannondale’s; there’re terrific bikes and handmade right here in America. I always dreamed of cycling across the country. Back when my legs were capable of making the journey, it would’ve required a six-week vacation. Now that I can afford the time, my legs would prove stubbornly…
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Years ago, Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson teamed up for the second time in a film called The Remains of the Day. Hopkins plays the head butler; Thompson plays the head house maid. Their sexual tension is palpable but Hopkins character, Mr. Stevens, puts duty above all else and won’t entertain a relationship. Meanwhile, they…
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Dear Michael, Stop what you’re doing, go to a mirror, look into it, and say thank you: Thank you for all the hikes, bike rides, and runs. Thank you for all the times you shook off the stress and adversity life unfailingly offers and exercised your way to a clear head. Thank you for understanding…
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My goodness, we are a complex and peculiar species, and I have lived nary a day without contributing to our complexities and peculiarities; I am a living breathing manifestation of all that’s wondrous and weird—a shiny thread in a quilt of ever-expanding madness, enriched by every encounter that has accounted for my miserly endowment of…
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Fate? Destiny? Who doesn’t enjoy grappling with issues and questions sure to induce a sneer from Richard Dawkins and a grin from Jordan Peterson? Once when asked, “Do you believe there is a God?” Jordan Peterson replied, “I live as though I do.” It was the perfect answer. Destiny, spirituality, and the deific: they tend…
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Once upon a time, the stars aligned; thus, a phenomenon of empirical cosmology handed me a key, a rare treasure that unlocked a universe within a universe. Inside this realm of unparalleled idyll, I was given free rein to explore. And thus, from the deepest of depths to dizzying heights, I traversed every quadrant; the…
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Patriotism? Mmm. It’s a term that has morphed, jumped the rails. Nowadays, some conflate it with, or have rebranded it “White nationalism.” A “white nationalist” is presumed male or, more specifically, a heterosexual male. In the West, white, heterosexual, and male have become an unfortunate trifecta; keeping to America, it’s become the 21st-century’s version of…
Michael's Corner 