The world is in need of many things. Yet another Substack is not one of them.

When I graduated from undergrad in May 2023, I created a newsletter to stay in touch with old friends and create a space to publish my ideas. You can find that now-defunct newsletter here.

As time went on, I had the great fortune of establishing relationships with some great editors at publications like National Review, The Dispatch, Front Porch Republic, and the Wall Street Journal, rendering my Substack somewhat useless (both because I had other avenues to publish my thoughts, and because these new avenues came with thoughtful editors who would polish my work, and therefore my thinking).

The relaunch of this newsletter, therefore, does not mean that I will begin publishing a lot of my original thoughts here. It does, however, mean that I will be aggregating what I write elsewhere and sending it straight to your inbox. I will also be using this newsletter to advertise goings-on and upcoming events relevant to my work, with a particular focus on higher education, workforce, and Arizona.

I plan to publish roughly once per month, so don’t worry about me clogging your inbox—nonetheless, I won’t be offended if you unsubscribe. The world won’t be saved by another Substack.

Recent publications

• Higher Ed’s Gravy Train is Coming to a Halt — FUSION Magazine
  In our era of extreme political dysfunction, we have rightly come to expect very little from Congress. Last year’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBB) stood out for defying this expectation, at least in part: Its higher education provisions are sweeping and provide a framework for substantive reform that better serves taxpayers and students.

• Starstruck in the Heart of the Desert — The Dispatch
  Nestled in Arizona’s corner of what 19th century explorers called the Great American Desert, a couple of hours by car from the state’s border with Mexico and only 30 minutes from Tucson, sits Biosphere 2. A sprawling facility made of white paneling and greenhouse glass rises among cacti and creosote, its architecture resembling what someone from the 1980s might have imagined a moon base would look like.

• Giving Greatness Its Due — Front Porch Republic
  Greatness, as it was classically understood, is an anachronism. Something to be scoffed at as delusion at best. Marty Supreme, for all of the doubt it casts on the pursuit of greatness’ superiority to other ways of life, nonetheless acknowledges its reality.

• 2026 News and Updates — ASU Alumni for Free Speech
  ASU AFS launches its board, refreshes its mission, and gears up for 2026.

• My Father’s Ghosts — The Dispatch
  In freeing ourselves from social constraints and the shame that naturally accompanies our shirking of natural obligations we were promised paradise. We have instead found ourselves lonely and rudderless. President George W. Bush spoke of the bigotry of low expectations. We have succumbed to the misery of no expectations.

Recent posts

What I’m reading

• Why Sending Student Loans to Treasury Makes Sense — Preston Cooper
  The US Department of Education recently announced that it signed an interagency agreement with the US Department of the Treasury to shift some of its functions related to the federal student loan portfolio to Treasury. Cooper argues that this arrangement could make a lot of sense: ”The mess that is the student loan portfolio is the product of six decades of policy mistakes, and new management won’t fix things overnight. But Trump administration skeptics shouldn’t dismiss sending student loans to Treasury out of hand. There are good reasons to hope for improvements.”

• A Republic, If You Can Teach It — Robert Pondiscio
  ”The erosion of civics is […] not simply a failure of pedagogy or curriculum, but a failure of purpose—a reordering of priorities that helps explain why civic education today feels so thin and peripheral. We have not merely forgotten how to teach citizenship; we have largely stopped believing that forming citizens is what public education is for.”

• Infinite Jest — David Foster Wallace
  Yes, I’m a performative male.

• How Well Do Americans Understand the Melting Pot? — Gil Guerra
  An excellent and intriguing read by my friend Gil Guerra, informed by recent research he did on intermarriage among immigrants to the United States from 1880-1930. “The melting pot was a hard-won achievement that rested on conditions conspicuously absent from our present approach to immigration.”

• The Futuristic Spirit of Phoenix, Arizona — Timothy Sandefur
  “...whereas California long ago outgrew whatever Western origins it might have boasted, the Grand Canyon State still feels like a new land.”

• Plymouth, Minnesota: The Midwestern Sublime — Kayla Bartsch
  ”My own suburb of Plymouth both assumes and demands that residents have a car. A landscape built for automobiles, however, does not necessitate isolation. As high schoolers, we piled in each other’s moms’ SUVs and drove around just to be going somewhere. Besides Target, we drove to Ridgedale mall, Southdale mall, the Mall of America, Caribou Coffee, Culver’s, a different Caribou Coffee, and each other’s houses. We blasted Cities97 on the radio and rolled our windows down no matter how cold it was. On Labor Day, friends from church drove to the fairgrounds in St. Paul and we gorged ourselves on Pronto Pups and cheese curds.”

• The Dawn of Petty Modernity — Nick Burns
  “Grand modernity was self-consciously Promethean and embraced a measure of danger. Petty modernity is afraid of that danger, rejects it, seeks to keep it under wraps.”

• America Cannot Withstand the Economic Shock That’s Coming — Gina Raimondo
  I’ve been thinking a ton about AI recently, and this piece stood out. ”A.I.-driven mass unemployment is a potential crisis on the horizon. This country cannot withstand the kind of economic shock I see coming. Without solutions, America’s anxiety will become rage — and political backlash will follow, targeting companies that make A.I., businesses that deploy it and politicians who back it. A new grand bargain between the public and private sectors can help us meet this moment.”

• Abundance is Not Enough — Christopher Beha
  ”Just as Mill came to temper his Benthamism with an opposing strain of Romanticism, today’s liberals would do well to take more seriously the anti-liberal critique of technocracy.”

New website

I recently launched a new website. You can find it here.

Recent travels

Montreal, Quebec, Canada, with my dear college friend Arjun.

Annapolis, Maryland, with my lovely girlfriend.

Burnt Hills, New York. My great grandpa (x4), Colonel Rexford, lived here.

Miami, Florida, for a conference.

Thanks for reading. Talk soon—and stay well.