Category: Criticism
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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…
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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…
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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…
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If Elizabeth Bishop is a cartographer of the visible, then Robert Creeley is a geometer of the felt. One sketches every ridge; the other just the angle of the slope. Their poetic modes may seem like opposites on the surface—Bishop’s obsessive clarity versus Creeley’s elliptical sparseness—but together they reveal something crucial: the power of poetic…
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There’s a dangerous myth that still lingers in how we teach, critique, and canonize writing—particularly essay writing. It’s the idea that language is fixed, finalized, etched in stone. We’re taught in grammar school that the first draft must already point toward the final product. Then, revision is about perfection, not possibility. But the essay was…
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“Being a queer girl isn’t something you decide. It’s something you survive, until you get old enough to claim it.”—Emily Pratt Slatin, Friendship Bracelets And Other Broken Promises This quote from my wife, Emily Pratt Slatin, is surgical. It names what so many queer femmes—especially lesbians and trans women—have lived: not a “choice” but a…
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Christianity, at least in its most accessible, franchised form, is like McDonald’s. You don’t have to look for it—it finds you. Neon promises of salvation on every corner, identical services dressed up in regional accents, all offering the same combo meal: sin, confession, redemption. I’ve come to see churches as chain restaurants of the worst…
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No institution has done more to arrest intellectual progress under the guise of divine authority than the Church. For over two thousand years, Christianity has braided guilt and power into a crown it insists you wear humbly. Apologetics, especially the polished, genteel flavor popularized by C.S. Lewis and his successors, don’t exist to explore truth;…
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Anti-intellectualism flatters the ego by lowering the bar. It preaches that ignorance is purity and intellect is arrogance—but that’s just cowardice with good PR. We’ve been herded into a comfortable disdain for complexity, told that questioning is elitism, and that clarity is snobbery. It’s trendy to sneer at ‘book smarts’ and glamorize gut feelings. But…
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Life has become like a shitty MMO RPG with strategic elements. While this might sound like a spicy critique of modern life, it’s hard not to see some frightening comparisons when we start seriously criticizing the systems we find ourselves trapped in: bureaucracy, career ladders, performative social media quests, productivity tracking, even gamified apps that…