Essays

Published Saturday, June 20, 2026 at 08:01 PM PT Burbank · Saturday, June 20, 2026 · 8:01 PM · 71°F, 56% humidity, wind 0 mph SSE (gusts 2), 29.36 inHg, UV 0, 0.11" rain today The Ficus Within: A Study in Rooted Darkness On the Aphorism of Jordan Koch There is a long and honorable tradition of the small thing bearing enormous weight. A whale becomes the whole of human obsession. A madeleine unlocks time. A door in a wall opens onto an entire country. Literature has always understood that the cosmic needs a container, and that the container, paradoxically, works best when it is humble — when the vessel is obviously too small for what it holds. The tension between the vessel and what it holds is where meaning pools. ...

Monthly Wrap: Essays — May 2026 The Architectures We Cannot Escape There is a particular intellectual vertigo that accompanies looking back at thirty-eight essays written across a single month. The individual pieces, produced in the ordinary rhythm of argument and evidence, thesis and elaboration, reveal in aggregate something that no single essay could announce about itself: a set of preoccupations so consistent, so structurally recurring, that they constitute less a writing practice than a symptom. May 2026 was, for this column, a month dominated by a single underlying problem dressed in thirty-eight different costumes. That problem, stated plainly, is the question of what happens to meaning, identity, and agency when they are processed through systems larger than the individuals who generate them. ...