A life in words

  • Fired

    It’s like a fire. It burns, The anxiety, the fierce desire To preserve this reserve Of liberty To maintain the promise The magic The myth Of us as one people Of government for us And by us And of us. Oh let it not perish From the earth. Let not our times Be the times…

  • My heart is weary

    This is my post about the election. It’s a grab-bag, but I have too many thoughts bouncing around for a single coherent narrative right now. After this, I’m done with politics for a long time. It’s already taken enough of my life—of all our lives. And So It Is It appears we will have President…

  • 2016 Ballot Preview!

    This venerable blog has gone many places. We’ve dealt with many and diverse issues, from psychiatry to terrorism, grad school to dating, government surveillance, wild west storytelling, bailouts, fake relationships, a profile picture contest, Spain travelogues, trivialities about long-defunct software packages, and many other topics of intense importance and relevance to our very day and age.…

The principal difficulty lies, and the greatest care should be employed in constituting this Representative Assembly. It should be in miniature, an exact portrait of the people at large. It should think, feel, reason, and act like them. That it may be the interest of this Assembly to do strict justice at all times, it should be an equal representation, or in other words equal interest among the people should have equal interest in it. Great care should be taken to effect this, and to prevent unfair, partial, and corrupt elections.John Adams, Thoughts on Government, April 1776