Category: Criticism
-
Chapter 18 of Carl Sagan’s book “Billions and Billions” is called “The Twentieth Century” and begins with a couple of interesting quotes. I’ll reproduce them as they are quoted in full. Sagan lists three broad innovations of the twentieth century: All three Sagan says “have been brought forth by science and technology, a sword with…
-
“Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.” – Cory Doctorow Jared Henderson included this quote in a July 2025 video…
-
History is often poorly represented and so much is being lost to current generations. If you want to learn anything about history, good luck finding any decent guided tours. You must do much digging and piecing things together to get enough insight into history to make your trip worth embarking upon. Essentially, if you want…
-
“You gain more by not being stupid than you do by being smart.” – Phil Birnbaum, baseball analyst, “An Important Life Lesson from Blackjack and Baseball” In an article published on Slate.com, baseball analyst Phil Birnbaum talked about focusing on minimizing bad decisions rather than trying too hard to make the right decisions. Birnbaum continued…
-
Sabrina Carpenter’s latest single “Manchild” might just be one of the most brilliant pop songs of the 2020s. Beyond its catchy beat and sassy lyrics, the track doubles as sharp social commentary, and its music video unfolds as a pastiche of classic film moments that enrich the song’s narrative. In this deep dive, I’ll apply…
-
Emily Dickinson is famous for her idiosyncratic grammar, liberal use of the hyphen, and seemingly random capitalization of words. Despite using typical poetic devices such as assonance, consonance, and alliteration in her works, her poems take unique forms with layouts often making them a bit cryptic. Are these idiosyncrasies in her poetry a sign of…
-
Is Langston Hughes a Modernist poet? That question, once handed to me in a college classroom, now strikes me as too small for the man who so clearly saw poetry as a public force. Labels like “Modernist” tend to flatten voices into movements. But Hughes resists neat categorization. Yes, he wrote in free verse. Indeed,…
-
When George Washington took the oath of office in 1789, there was no blueprint for what a president should be. The Constitution provided a skeletal outline—vague by design, born from a fear of monarchy—but the practical and symbolic weight of the role was undefined. Washington’s true legacy lies in how he filled in that blank…
-
What makes a poem a poem? Is it the line breaks, the rhythm, or the imagination? Or is it the weight of lived experience sculpted into something sharp enough to cut through memory? For poets Michael Palmer and Philip Levine, the answer differs—not in opposition, but in intention. Both are celebrated figures of contemporary American…
-
On Jefferson, Hamilton, and the Elasticity of America’s Founding Document The year is 1790. The ink on the Constitution is barely dry, and already its meaning is up for grabs. At the heart of the young republic’s first major political schism lies a deceptively simple question: If something isn’t explicitly stated in the Constitution, can…