A rise in economic-protectionist sentiment seemed a non sequitur to me in 1992, the year the USSR formally ceased to exist (three years after the Eastern Bloc’s escape from its orbit) — even though I was unemployed in the first half of that year and half-wondered if this was how crazy homeless people got their […]
The second half of 1991, my first “semester” after college, is perhaps best captured in a vignette each from nine towns to which I traveled, each offering a possible model for my then-unfixed, then-uncertain adult life, with the first vignette involving the fear of imminent thermonuclear war.
•Washington, DC: Having been a good libertarian for two […]
There were two very important reasons I wasn’t too nervous as the semester of graduation from Brown arrived and I faced the prospect of entering the real world: namely, my parents (who I hope are doing well today — hi, Mom!), who had not only paid for college but, simply by always being sane, low-key, […]
There are times that encourage conspiracy theories — times of our lives (or rather, I suspect, psychological developmental stages) as well as points in history.
College kids, or perhaps people in their early twenties or so generally, love conspiracies — perhaps because the brain, having newly turned its attention to the confusing kaleidoscope of […]
Living as the one third-year student amidst a nice bunch of freshmen in early 1990, I felt fairly at home in the role of pseudo-old-man. One freshman, Naomi Camilleri, introduced me to Flaming Carrot comics, leading me to trend weird-ward in my comics reading after the preceding decade and a half of sticking almost […]
How could one not turn into a libertarian under the circumstances I faced in the second half of 1989?
My summer vacation reading list, gradually written up as a result of my growing curiosity about the tension between the collectivism touted at Brown and individual liberty, sounds almost excessive in retrospect. While some people have […]
This week, in 2007, I’ve just seen a Marxist acquaintance argue in a debate that the government knew in advance about 9/11 — and I’ve seen the New York Times print a notice about the fact that a letter they had run contained plagiarized material — by a plagiarist who is a student at Brown […]
I saw presidential candidate Ron Paul on a talk show — and was very skeptical.
It was July of 1988, and Ron Paul, then running as the Libertarian Party candidate, appeared on The Morton Downey, Jr. Show, an almost self-parodic harbinger of shoutfest shows to come, complete with a microphone stand referred to as “The Loudmouth,” […]
As I headed back to Brown in early 1988 to finish my freshman year, I took inspiration from a winter vacation that included reading Allan Bloom’s Leo Strauss-influenced book The Closing of the American Mind (recommended to me by my high school friend Paul Taylor’s conservative dad, one of the numerous suggestions he gave […]
Flashback! Shocking Origin Saga Begins Here! Now It Can Be Told!
As I entered Brown in the fall of 1987, I didn’t expect to be the sort of person who takes an interest in politics (just literature). The only way in which America had seriously disappointed me up to that point was by […]
