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The Conceit of the Clock: Aristotle, Time, and the Hunger That Devours Us

Aristotle opens his investigation of time in Book IV of the Physics with a question so destabilizing it threatens to collapse the inquiry before it begins: does time even exist? His reasoning is not coy. The past has ceased to be. The future has not yet arrived. The present, the “now,” is not a duration but a limit, a dimensionless boundary between what was and what will be. If the parts of time do not exist, and the one element that does exist is not itself a part of time, then time appears to be nothing at all. This is not a classroom riddle. It is a genuine ontological crisis, and Aristotle treats it as one.

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Announcing Prairie Voice: Where Yesterday’s Wisdom Meets Tomorrow’s Questions

Prairie Voice launches today, not because the world needs another website, but because the present has become incomprehensible without the past. We live in an age of unprecedented change, facing questions that feel entirely new: How do we maintain human connection through screens? What does work mean when we produce nothing tangible? How do we raise children when childhood itself has been digitized? These questions aren’t new. They’re variations on themes our ancestors knew intimately. Prairie Voice exists to excavate that buried wisdom and translate it for contemporary crisis.

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Disparity Between Political Translation and Human Transliteration

Words are toxic and dangerous things. We currently have a Presidential contender who threatens his opponent with prison if he wins, and if he doesn’t win the election, then that means the election was rigged against him. That sort of clear and obvious threat against Democracy is not just craven and crass, but unwise — however, his threats are precise and clearly inform us all of his intentions and insanity.

We only need to travel back to the United Nations on October 12, 1960 and watch Russian leader Nikita Khrushchev take off his shoe and bang it on the podium while threatening to “bury us” all!

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Leave Behind Amber, Not Accolades

As we age into society, there are certain human truths we not only begin to learn, but then start to live — and it is in moments like those, like the one we’re sharing now in the rare “long form” live read on the internet — that I want to urge you to abandon the trophies and the tricks and the cunning surrounding our lives and to instead leave behind something that matters, footfalls suspended in amber, creating your own fossil record.

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Precious or Precocious and an Eerily Dissimilar Disambiguation

I’m always fascinated by labels and meaning and the attributes we actively choose to apply to people and thoughts and concepts. Disambiguation is important — words have previously defined meanings — and to purposefully change the common use of a word to fit a narrow political stream, or a personal agenda, is both dangerous and daunting. There are two words I’ve lately been pondering: Precious and Precocious!

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