Language Matters Podcast

Substack Notes is allegedly where writers hang out. This is already funny. Because what you mostly see there is not writing. It is slogan mist. Little moral burps. Tiny pellets of virtue. Sentences with the confidence of philosophy and the nutritional value of airport gum. Most Notes are not arguments. They are badges. They do not begin with a question. There is no method. No architecture. No atte...

A person opens his phone and sees that everyone is angry. Everyone is saying the same thing. Everyone is mocking the same target. Everyone is repeating the same accusation, the same slogan, the same moral certainty. A politician has betrayed the country. A migrant has ruined the neighborhood. A woman has lied. A product has changed lives. A war must be fought. A man must be destroyed. A company mu...

There are empires that collapse under debt, corruption, war, loneliness, broken hospitals, bad schools, spiritual exhaustion, and the slow conversion of public life into private extraction. Texas, we are told, faces something worse. Tofu. This was the great revelation offered from the stage: that somewhere in the political wilderness, beyond the cattle, beyond the megachurches, beyond the oil well...

1. The Trial of the Very Serious People In America, no one causes a war. Wars happen. They emerge, like weather systems, recessions, opioid epidemics, and mysterious accounting irregularities. A war arrives already wrapped in passive voice. Mistakes were made. Intelligence was assessed. Options were considered. Concerns were raised. Red lines were crossed. The situation deteriorated. Escalation be...

I. Opening: The Word That Explains Too Much There are words that clarify reality, and there are words that absorb it. “Woke” has become the second kind. It is no longer a stable term. It does not point to one doctrine, one movement, one policy, one moral failure, or one political tribe. It has become a compression chamber for half the conflicts of contemporary American life. When someone says “wok...

I. I Live in a Sad World I live in a sad world. Not because the world lacks intelligence. Intelligence is everywhere now. It hums in the laptop, answers from the phone, drafts the memo, writes the code, translates the sentence, summarizes the meeting, predicts the next word, and pretends to understand the ache beneath the question. Intelligence has become ambient. It has entered the room like elec...

I. The Map Room There is a room somewhere in America where democracy is being handled without ceremony. It is not a battlefield. It is not a church basement. It is not a union hall, not a picket line, not a town square filled with people arguing about wages, rent, medicine, schools, childcare, or the closing of another factory that became a warehouse that became nothing. It is a conference room. T...

Prologue — The Man in the Cap My father looked like Robert De Niro in the photograph. Not the young De Niro of violence and appetite, not the actor with danger still under the skin, but the older De Niro: compact, watchful, ethnic, weathered by intelligence and disappointment, wearing his face like a city that had survived several regimes. My father stood second from the left, in a dark cap, outsi...

I have a modest proposal for peace in the Middle East. Now, obviously, I am not as smart as President Trump. Nobody is. The man’s brain is clearly a casino with chandeliers. And I am certainly not as smart as the leaders of the Islamic Republic of Iran, who have spent forty-five years turning one of the world’s oldest poetic civilizations into a graduate seminar in grievance management. But still....

I. The Writer Who Could Not Bless I came across a certain kind of writer online. He was not stupid. That must be said first, because stupidity would have made the encounter easier. One can dismiss stupidity without cost. But this was not stupidity. It was intelligence turned against elevation. He wrote in fragments. Little sentences. Jokes that seemed, at first, like jokes, and then, after a momen...

Before there were kings, there were bodies. Before there were laws, there were teeth, shoulders, noise, fear, display. The first hierarchy arrived without a crown. It arrived as posture. One animal took more space. Another yielded. One male threatened. Another looked away. A troop learned who could strike, who had allies, who got food first, who had to wait. The chimpanzee needs no management theo...

A law can still be alive and yet walk with a limp. That is the simplest way to understand the Supreme Court’s ruling in Louisiana v. Callais . The Voting Rights Act was not repealed. Black voters did not lose the right to sue. Racial discrimination in voting did not become legal. But something important changed. In a 6–3 decision written by Justice Samuel Alito, the Court affirmed a lower-court ru...

There is a room in many homes now that was once meant for a child. No one says this directly. The room has been renamed. It is the office, the guest room, the storage room, the place where the treadmill waits under a folded blanket, the place where boxes from the last move remain unopened because no one has had the energy to decide what part of the past still deserves a shelf. Sometimes there is a...

I. The Choir of Respectable Ghouls They came quickly, as they always do. Before the smoke had fully entered the archive, before the facts had hardened into sequence, before any human being had been permitted the privacy of an unprocessed reaction, they arrived with their grave little faces and their clean microphones and their moral sorrow already warmed to room temperature. The respectable ghouls...

1. The Night of the Mourners They are mourning again. Not a person this time, not a city, not a vanished republic, but a boundary: the old confidence that when a sentence appeared before us, a human being had paid the full cost of its making. The mourners gather wherever language still matters. They gather in literary circles, classrooms, publishing houses, group chats, comment sections, faculty l...

I. Before I Explain Myself Lord, before I explain myself, let me say plainly that I am not innocent. I have been wounded, yes. I have been lonely, misread, underheld, overtired, and hungry for forms of mercy I did not know how to ask for cleanly. I have lived in exile from many things at once: from nations, from fathers, from stable belonging, from the ordinary ease by which other men seem to move...

I. The Ship Nearing the Song There are dangers that announce themselves with claws. There are others that come not as violence but as invitation. The first kind arouses vigilance. The second asks for recognition. The first strikes the body. The second asks for consent. It is the second kind that more often destroys a man. The sea is already full of memory when the ship nears the place. Odysseus do...

I. The Misused Voice There are certain names the modern world invokes not to understand, but to borrow force from. Nietzsche is one of them. He survives in fragments now: a line about strength, a line about God, a line about rising above the herd. Detached from the life that produced them, such sentences circulate as ornaments for vanity or permission slips for hardness. He is quoted to sound seve...

I. The Wound There are moments in the life of a republic when blood does not remain blood for very long. It becomes symbol. Then permission. Then law. He stood under the lights as many men before him had stood under lights: swollen with grievance, padded by applause, carried upward by the low mechanical faith of crowds. He had been known for appetites, for vulgarity, for lies worn openly as style....

Opening The question of comfort There are many ways a civilization hides from itself. One is by teaching its people to experience history as weather. The house is warm. The road is paved. The shelves are full. The supermarket glows. The car starts on the first turn. Plastic wraps the fruit, the toy, the bread, the medicine. The plane rises from the runway as if flight were ordinary. The radiator c...

I. Before Israel, There Was Canaan Before the city became an argument, before it became a promise, before it became a wound recited in prayer and blood, there was Canaan. The land that would later be called holy by Jews, Christians, and Muslims was not born holy in the abstract. It was a corridor. It was a bridge between Egypt and Mesopotamia, between empires that could never leave the Levant alon...

I. The Work He Carried Had No Name There is a particular humiliation that belongs to modern institutions, and because it is bloodless, because it leaves no mark on the skin, because no one raises a hand or voice, it is rarely called by its proper name. A man is given work of consequence. He is trusted with systems that touch revenue, product, operations, timing, risk, sequencing, and the difficult...

I. The City at the End of the March In July of 1099, men from France and Normandy and Flanders entered Jerusalem in a state that no ordinary political language can describe. They had crossed mountains and disease and heat and hunger. They had marched for years toward a city they did not know, in a land that was not theirs, under a sky that had not watched their childhoods. Many of them had likely...

I. The Men in Charge Cannot See the System They Operate There are moments when a civilization reveals itself not through its ideals, but through the quality of mind it entrusts with power. The recent confrontation with Iran offered one such moment. Not because strategic error is unusual, and not because war is ever simple, but because many of the relevant failure modes were foreseeable in advance...

Prologue: The Strait Closes The world always pretends surprise when history finally reaches its throat. One morning the screens fill with the same narrow body of water. Anchors drop. Tankers wait. Traders stare into terminals as if numbers could pray. Admirals reappear on television. Men who have never loved a civilization begin speaking in clean abstractions about deterrence, escalation, leverage...