Founded 1983: Liberal Mindset; Conservative Morality

August 27, 2026

The God Arrives Early: Rod Serling and the Endings That Paid Their Bills

The series died the year before I was born, and it hardly mattered, because the reruns never stopped. On summer nights in Nebraska in the early seventies, on the only signal that reached my grandfather’s corner of the state, a man in a narrow black suit would step into the frame and speak to me as if the two of us had an appointment. He promised a fifth dimension, called it “the middle ground between light and shadow,” and stood aside to let the story convict somebody. As a boy I thought I was watching monsters. The show was running trials.

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July 11, 2026

The Necessary Art: Taking the Title Back

Today I am publishing a book about a theft at the center of Western culture, one its victims were trained to take as a compliment:The Necessary Art: Aristotle’s Six Elements in the Clinic, the Courtroom, the Proof, the Blueprint, and the Republic. It runs 342 pages in paperback, it exists in a Kindle edition and a free reading edition you can download right now, and the audiobook will follow as soon as the voice is ready. Those are the facts of the launch. What follows is the case for why this book exists, because its central fact has stood in plain sight for two hundred and eighty years while the people it names were trained to take the theft as a compliment: the professions of the working world were robbed of a word, the robbery has a date and a paper trail, and the word can be taken back.

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August 30, 2010

The Twilight Zone Effect and Tricksy Audience Endings

Amateur authors love to write dramatic red herrings and surprise endings that come out of nowhere because they enjoy fooling the audience into thinking one way and then taking them another way — even if it doesn’t make sense. I call these writer tricks — “The Twilight Zone Effect” — because in that famous television series, the ending of each show was always “unexpected” and “scary” and, perhaps, more often than not, “dreamlike” where a mere “waking up” nullified everything that happened.