Lana Del Rey dropped a new song yesterday, but I’m not going to write about it, not yet anyway. I need to let her music settle in before I try to describe the feelings evoked. Instead, I want to go back to her “Norman Fucking Rockwell” album and the song “How to disappear.” In many…

This essay is a great example of one of Montaigne’s most interesting methods — making a strong declarative statement up front, then taking up most of the essay with counterexamples. The first two paragraphs build to this assertion: we lend our goods and our lives to the needs of our friends; but to communicate one’s…

The overwhelming feeling I take away from this essay, after walking through the careful process of translation, is that human beings are constantly in states of mixed feelings. But these are not mitigating emotions about subjects, things that push us towards a less emotional, more moderate response. Rather, they are accentuating emotions. We feel so…

Essay 15 from Montaigne has never held much importance to me. It is another of his early military strategy essays, this one concerned with the consequences of defending a military outpost for too long, or in other words, knowing when to retreat or surrender. He starts out noting examples of troops that kept fighting to…

The act of translating brings out deeper meaning in Montaigne’s text for me than simply reading another translated text one more time. Take this essay for example. For one, I translate the title differently than I’ve seen it in other places, and I believe this translation better fits the conclusion of the piece. But I…

It’s one of those days where all thoughts are a jumble, so I’m just going to surrender to it and throw out a disjointed blog post: If I were still in the business of political messaging, I would be advising Democrats to refer to Trump’s tariffs as the “Republican national sales tax.” Because that’s really…