To hand a book over is to consent to its imperfection in public, which is also to consent to having been a particular person, with particular limits, at a particular time. 

Nobody appointed us to decide who’s worthy of Augustine. Our actual job, the whole job, is to teach kids how to read and how to think, and then—this is the part everybody forgets—to get out of the way and let them do whatever the hell they want with it.

Four months ago, I submitted a fourteen-page paper to a well-regarded journal. Within days, an editor was assigned. The status changed to “under consideration.” It has not changed since.

A hangover is to Descartes what Diogenes’ plucked chicken is to Plato: a crude, all-too-physical rebuttal of the fantasy of a disembodied human being.

This essay was first prepared as a talk for a gathering at the Santuari del Miracle.

If the world is burning, the task is not to play the lyre while writing a history of fire.

Middle features the original score composed for Lo que hay en el medio, a choreographic piece by dancer and researcher Vanessa Vargas.

Socrates’ final words in Crito carry the weight of both an ending and a promise.

Walter Benjamin famously wrote that “hell is the province of those who are not allowed to finish what they have started.”

An argument ends by leaving behind some thoughts that were never refuted, only unaccommodated. They eat at the table of the book that excluded them.