Author’s NoteThe Wizard of Musk is a creative homage to L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900), a timeless fairy tale of unlikely companions, false grandeur, and the discovery that the…
There is a great mystery haunting Western civilization. It has perplexed journalists, troubled intelligence analysts, and kept respectable people awake at night: Why does Donald Trump seem so fond of…
I have spent much of the past year writing about the decline of civilization. About empires that mistake power for wisdom, political movements that mistake resentment for virtue, algorithms that turn…
Author's note: This essay combines historical analysis with fictional scenes and dialogue. Chapter I: The Man Who Would Not Share His GoatLong before there were kings, taxes, armies, or economists,…
This is a work of political satire and fiction. Pete Hegland and the contemporary characters in this piece are invented. Their private conduct, crimes, addictions, conversations, and personal…
I. Ten Wars Disguised as OneOnce again, Iran and the United States are negotiating. Once again, intermediaries move between rooms because the two countries that have spent nearly half a century…
This is a work of fiction and satire. Public figures, institutions, events, and recognizable cultural motifs have been fictionalized, exaggerated, rearranged, or invented. Names have been altered…
My barber Tommy was standing behind me with a pair of clippers when he asked whether I had seen the news about the artificial-intelligence researcher who thinks AI might kill everybody. This is…
The argument began, as many serious arguments do, with parking.A man in a black SUV had stopped halfway across the entrance to a grocery store lot, apparently because the normal rules of geometry no…
I. The Strip That Was Never Meant to Become a CountryThere are places created by geography, places created by conquest, and places created because history ran out of somewhere else to put people. Gaza…
