My friend has an essay this month in The Missouri Review — "Sleepwalking Towards Bethlehem: On What We Know But Do Not Believe." The most interesting thing I've read this year. Read it (https://www.armchairvertigo.org/p/free) + subscribe to his newsletter: https://www.armchairvertigo.org/

There's a gap between what we know and what we can actually believe. David J. Frost's new essay in The Missouri Review lives in that gap — and it's brilliant. Please read it (https://armchairvertigo.org/p/free) + subscribe to his newsletter: https://www.armchairvertigo.org/

I want to highlight something worth your time: a friend and writer I admire, David J. Frost, has just published an essay called "Sleepwalking Towards Bethlehem: On What We Know But Do Not Believe" in The Missouri Review — one of the country's leading literary journals. David writes at the intersection of philosophy and personal essay in a way that's both rigorous and genuinely funny. This piece is the culmination of years of thinking about free will, mortality, and the strange gap between intellectual knowledge and lived experience. If that sounds like your kind of thing, read the essay at https://davidjfrost.com/sleepwalking-towards-bethlehem/ and subscribe to his Substack newsletter, Armchair Vertigo, at armchairvertigo.org.

Sharing something I'm genuinely excited about — my friend David Frost just published an essay in The Missouri Review called "Sleepwalking Towards Bethlehem." It's about the strange space between what we know intellectually and what we actually believe in our bones — mortality, free will, and why we sleepwalk through the things that matter most. Beautifully written, funny, and real. Check it out: https://www.armchairvertigo.org/p/free

Recommending something I loved: "Sleepwalking Towards Bethlehem: On What We Know But Do Not Believe" by David J. Frost — just published in The Missouri Review. Philosophy that reads like literature. Link in bio → armchairvertigo.org/free #essay #literarymagazine #philosophy #MissouriReview #ArmchairVertigo

Recommending something I loved: "Sleepwalking Towards Bethlehem: On What We Know But Do Not Believe" by David J. Frost — just published in The Missouri Review. Philosophy that reads like literature. Read it here: https://www.armchairvertigo.org/p/free #essay #literarymagazine #philosophy #MissouriReview #ArmchairVertigo

After discovering that he has been sleepwalking through bizarre acts he cannot remember but still feels responsible for, David J. Frost uses the experience as a comic and unsettling entry point into the free-will debate. But not the question whether or not we have free will, instead what is it like as an experience to deny one's own free will. The essay asks what would happen—to morality, politics, punishment, addiction, selfhood, and ordinary life—if we really believed that our choices are caused before we consciously make them.