Language Matters Podcast

On February 28, 2026, the United States and Israel launched a joint military assault on Iran, a civilization that had survived Alexander the Great, the Arab conquest, the Mongols, the British Empire, and several thousand years of foreigners explaining what was best for Persia. This time the foreigner was Donald Trump, a former casino proprietor from Queens who had promised Americans an escape from...

Friends, Tonight, I find myself returning to one of the first essays I published on Language Matters: To Love a Nation Is to Know Its Ghosts. I wrote it in March 2025, tracing a history that began with the Founders themselves—particularly the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, when a republic barely a decade old began criminalizing dissent and treating immigrants as threats to its survival. The less...

There is a Frenchman standing in the street protesting a pension reform. He is sixty-two years old. His back hurts. He has worked for forty years, paid his taxes, and would like to spend whatever remains of his life doing something other than working. Unfortunately, he has made the catastrophic mistake of allowing himself to be photographed. Within minutes, an Israeli commentator discovers that hi...

I. The Emergency Committee for the Preservation of Everything The emergency meeting began at nine in the morning, which Professor Bartholomew Grievance considered an act of Marxist aggression. He had spent the previous evening recording a three-hour podcast explaining why civilization was collapsing because a university librarian in Vermont had suggested renaming the motherboard the parentboard. H...

There is an awkward conversation the West has been avoiding for some time. It concerns a rather unfortunate development: the empire is ending, the colonies are no longer interested in being colonies, and the inhabitants of the imperial center are beginning to discover that maintaining an extraordinarily comfortable civilization becomes considerably more complicated when the rest of the world stops...

I. The Morning He Was Gone Kallstadt, October 1885 — Katharina The bread had not yet risen when I found his letter. It was lying on the kitchen table, beneath the little glass we kept for drinking water. At first I thought he had left me some instructions, perhaps something about his clothes or the money I had given him. He was always writing things down, that boy. Numbers, mostly. What things cos...

Chapter One: The Price of Glass The first window broke at nine seventeen. It belonged to a shop on Avenue Montaigne where a handbag cost more than Nassim Belkacem’s mother earned in six months. Nassim knew this because his friend Kévin, who had never owned anything more expensive than a stolen iPhone, announced the price before throwing the brick. “Four thousand euros!” he shouted. The glass shatt...

On October 7, 2026, Marco Rubio stood beneath the Acropolis in Athens to celebrate the greatness of Western civilization. Of all dates, October 7. Three years earlier, Palestinian armed groups had massacred Israeli civilians and abducted hostages. Israeli forces had also killed Israeli civilians that day in incidents linked to the Hannibal Directive, a practice intended to prevent captives from be...

Chapter I — The Road into Musk Once upon a time, in a country so large that no man had ever seen the whole of it, there was a road that led through a forest of ancient oaks into a peculiar kingdom called Musk. No one knew precisely where the kingdom began. There were no walls, no gates, and no guards demanding passage. There was only a crooked wooden sign beside the road, upon which someone had pa...

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 Vladimir Putin? Some suspect blackmail. Others suggest ideological affinity. Entire libraries have been written about authoritarian psychology, masculine insecurity, and the mysterious chemistry betwe...

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 human contempt into revenue, and the peculiar animal that learned to speak, worship God , constructed magnificent institutions, and somehow remained perfectly capable of enjoying another person’s hum...

Author's note: This essay combines historical analysis with fictional scenes and dialogue. Chapter I: The Man Who Would Not Share His Goat Long before there were kings, taxes, armies, or economists, there was a man named Urak who killed a goat. It was a magnificent goat, with enormous horns and an expression of permanent disappointment. Urak had followed it for three days through the mountains of...

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 histories are fictional. I. WE ADMITTED THAT OUR FACES HAD BECOME UNMANAGEABLE “Close your eyes.” “I don’t close my eyes.” “You do if you want me to get under them.” Secretary of War Pete Hegland stared into...

I. Ten Wars Disguised as One Once 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 defining one another as enemies still struggle to sit normally across a table. Once again, uranium is somewhere near the center of the conversation. But uranium is no longer the whole conversation, if it e...

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 accordingly. I. THE FLAG In Which Several Employees Discover That Management Has No Idea What It Is Doing The first thing Elowen knew about herself was that she had a job. The second thing she knew was th...

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 apparently what barbershops are for now. There was a time when a man sat in a barber chair and was asked whether he wanted the sides tapered. Perhaps someone argued about baseball. Maybe an elderly man comp...

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 longer applied to him. There were cars behind him. There were cars trying to get out. There was a woman with a stroller attempting to cross. The man remained where he was, blinking at his phone. I wat...

I. The Strip That Was Never Meant to Become a Country There are places created by geography, places created by conquest, and places created because history ran out of somewhere else to put people. Gaza belongs largely to the third category. In 1948, as the war that accompanied the birth of Israel spread across Mandatory Palestine, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fled or were expelled from th...

There were three pints of Guinness on the table, three microphones, three black T-shirts, and enough private infrastructure represented in the room to make Louis XIV look like a moderately successful regional landlord. Nobody wore velvet. Nobody bowed. There were no trumpets, no Swiss Guards, no Hall of Mirrors, no duchesses waiting six hours to witness the sovereign put on his trousers. The table...

The Men Who Walk Upright Sometimes the strangest thing about being human is that nobody else seems to find being human strange. A man walks past me in Austin wearing a fitted shirt. He has spent years manufacturing his shoulders. He has fed them protein, lifted iron against gravity, denied himself certain foods, repeated the same movements until the body answered. His chest presses against cotton....

I. The Grocery Receipt The total was $187.43. Daniel Mercer looked at the screen as if it had accused him of something. He had bought chicken thighs, eggs, coffee, detergent, toothpaste, frozen dumplings, spinach, apples, yogurt, two onions, a bag of rice, and a box of cereal whose price suggested the oats had been individually educated. He pressed CALL ATTENDANT. A woman in a blue vest appeared....

There is a political genre I have come to distrust. It begins with an invitation to imagine. Imagine waking up without debt. Imagine never worrying about a medical bill. Imagine housing guaranteed as a right. Imagine working fewer hours. Imagine retirement secured by the public. Imagine food, energy, medicine, education, and transportation no longer organized around profit. This is more or less ho...

There is still Arabia. They tell me this as though I have forgotten. The ships are waiting on the Euphrates. The engineers have measured the water. Men have counted horses, grain, timber, sails. Somewhere beyond these walls there are scribes making lists of things I will need for countries I have not yet conquered. I am thirty-two years old. My body is burning. Babylon breathes outside the chamber...

I. A Possible Tuesday What follows is not a prediction. It is a possible Tuesday in a future we still have time not to build. Maya wakes at 6:17 because her body has not yet learned that there is nowhere she is expected to be. For twenty-three years, mornings had consequences. At twenty-four she was an analyst. At twenty-nine, a manager. At thirty-six, a director. At forty-two, she could walk into...

There is something about the faces of Iran’s rulers that has always bothered me. I do not mean that as physiognomy. I do not believe evil announces itself through the arrangement of a man’s eyebrows, nor that cruelty can be diagnosed from a photograph. History has given us smiling murderers and severe-looking saints. But watch enough footage of Ruhollah Khomeini speaking, and then Ali Khamenei, an...