Standalone Essays
These essays live outside the usual channels, unbound by the constraints of platform or appetite. They follow their own length, pace, and structure, answering only to the demands of the subject itself.
A full-senses journey through the Wildwood Boardwalk, where salt air, frying dough, and neon light mix with the grit and charm of barkers, arcades, and late-summer crowds. Moving through its piers and side streets, the essay lingers in the heat, the noise, and the small human dramas that keep this looping spectacle alive, pulling you back each summer to step into the same unbroken story.
A fifty-year autopsy of the American idea of sacrifice, from Nixon’s “silent majority” to the pandemic’s essential workers, tracing how a single word became a spell for shifting burden downward. Through politics, policy, and cultural ritual, it shows how each generation learned to make someone else go first, pay first, or bleed first until the habit felt like common sense.