I had this thing pre-ordered back in 2012. I was excited for a new Pynchon. And then I got a few pages in and gave up for whatever reason. That was a decade ago now. I did pick it back up and went back at it. …

Back when I was a baby in undergrad, I saw my professors and wanted to have their job. How nice, I thought, it must be to only teach a few classes a semester and have all that free time. I sought out graduate school and even then, my main waring…

No Thin Blue Lines I want to talk about this flag but first I want to talk about infrastructure. I live in a suburb that was founded in the late nineteenth century. Some of the houses date from then but there are a lot more that were built in the postwar boom in suburbanization…

The most recent floated proposals on student loan cancellations is that the Biden administration wants to cancel ten thousand in loans per borrower, with an income limit of about 300K per family. I support this, in part because it will materially help me out, but it doesn’t go far enough. …

It was Memorial Day weekend. Anita was out of town. …

I’ve been thinking about the claim I heard — that the 9/11 hijackers were anti-imperialists. It may have been deliberately provocative but had a germ that’s sat with me. It sparks my hate for the phrasing of “the war on terrorism,” as it was an empty and abstract phrase. A…

This project examines one set of texts from the Golden Age of Science Fiction — Isaac Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy. The Foundation Trilogy was first published as a set of connected stories from 1942 to 1950. From 1951, these stories were collected and expanded on as they were published in three…

Defended 11/10/2021 Good afternoon. Welcome to my defense. As an introduction, I want to talk about four things. The process, my challenges, what I’ve learned, and possible extensions. First though, I want to thank everyone here for their role in getting me to this place. It has been a bit…