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

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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.”

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’).“