Words
excerpt from my memoir manuscript
Just like yours, my quotidian experience consists of a continuous, self-conscious cavalcade of self-criticism. Everything about myself that comes before my mind, everything that appears on the spotlighted stage at the Cartesian Theatre, is made to do a pirouette and then is bathed in boos and hisses.
excerpt from an essay forthcoming in the Missouri Review, Summer 2026
My research into the psychological implications of free will denial would lead me to novel places on the intellectual landscape: to a confrontation with bodies of knowledge called “informational existential threats;” to the conceptual affinity between progressive political opinion and free will skepticism; to the idea of an Area 51 for anti-free will research; to the existence of brain scanning technology that can actually read the inner contents of your mind and can know what you are going to do before you know; and, finally, to a kind of mind control as real and unnerving as feline toxoplasmosis, which may or may not have contributed to the dissolution of my engagement to Kelly.
When I sat down in my office to start my research, the first thing I noticed about online pictures of Professor Robert Sapolsky was the compassionate twinkle in his eyes. Framed by long curly gray hair, and a gray Garibaldi beard, Sapolsky’s eyes sparkled like quartz in the Tolstoian rocky crag of his sun-wrinkled face. A specialist in neuroendocrinology, he’s spent thirty sunny summers in Africa studying simians. (Sorry! I couldn’t control myself.) Returning to the same troop of baboons each year, he’d observe their behavior, tranquilize them, and take blood samples.
Among many other of discoveries, Sapolsky found that baboons ranking low in the troop’s dominance hierarchy had chronically elevated levels of stress hormones (glucocorticoids) with concomitant negative effects on health, like hypertension, and on behavior, like an increase in isolated sulking and displacement aggression. Sapolsky estimates that nearly 50% of all violence among his troop of baboons is displacement aggression. Shit, as we know, flows downhill. “A high-ranking male loses a fight and so chases a subadult male, who promptly bites a female, who then lunges at an infant,” Sapolsky has written. The more a baboon displaces aggression after losing a fight for rank, Sapolsky says, the lower its glucocorticoid levels are when the good doctor, sans sunhat, tests its blood.
More Words
I’ve been writing recently about what we know but do not believe …
We know there’s a climate crisis, but we act as if we don’t believe there is. We know we will die, but we do not believe it moment to moment (unless your moments are characterized by preternatural terror). Also, we act like we do not really believe what we know when act against our better judgment, when we “know better” but do the wrong thing anyway—for example, in procrastination. Finally, some of us know we don’t have free will, but we have a hard time believing we don’t.1
On the topic of the psychological effects of denying free will—especially what it’s like experientially—I have a 7500-word essay forthcoming in the Missouri Review, Summer 2026 issue, expected in June 2026.
Subscribe to my Substack newsletter, “Armchair Vertigo,” where I collect my writing about what we know but do not believe. Sign up for a weekly intellectual amuse-bouche. And to be one of the first to get the link to my free will essay when the Missouri Review comes out in June.
Check it out: https://davidjfrost.substack.com/
Essays
“We should forget the Manchurian Candidate angle. Isn’t what Trump did bad enough that it almost doesn’t matter why he does it? We continue, vainly, to seek the proverbial smoking gun. The imponderable whys have crowded out the deplorable whats.”
Read more at The Smart Set
An excerpted chapter from my memoir titled “Halfway Twice is Not Yet Once”
at SLAB literary journal
“Naturalism, the idea that everything can be explained without reference to the supernatural, for Nietzsche is both the cause of nihilism and the only path to take as we struggle on after the death of God. It is therefore from a naturalistic perspective that we will best understand some of Nietzsche’s otherwise strange exhortations about how to go on living—his advocacy for a certain diet and climate, for instance. What is basic for humanity is not theology and philosophy, but physiology and psychology. For example, Nietzsche says he is interested in one question “on which the ‘salvation of humanity’ depends far more than on any theologians’ curio: the question of nutrition” (Ecce Homo, ‘Why I am So Clever’).“
Read more at Philosophy Now
“On January 6th, we witnessed the extraordinary danger credulity poses to democracy. One wonders whether or not we possess the critical thinking skills required by our era’s information ecosystem.”
Read more at As It Ought To Be magazine
I authored the first chapter of this book. My essay was titled “How Not To Watch Girls” after Adorno’s “How Not To Watch TV.”
Buy Girls and Philosophy at Amazon
My book review of my favorite author, Maggie Nelson’s book, On Freedom, published in Ruminate (no longer publishing).
Read in my archive
My book review of Joshua Alexander’s book Experimental Philosophy: An Introduction.
Read in Philosophia
My book review of Mustapha Chérif’s Islam and the West: A Conversation with Jacques Derrida.
Read in Philosophical Papers
- Who else can relate procrastination, climate change, free will, and death denial? But wait there’s more! Utilitarianism’s problem of publicity, many-worlds philosopher David Lewis’s epistemology in “Elusive Knowledge,” Socrates’s own theory of his Socratic method or elenchus, self-deception, tacit knowledge, persuasion and changing one’s mind, and much much more! ↩︎