Two Old Men, One Time Machine, and the Lie Both Parties Tell

ChatGPT Image Dec 28, 2025, 01_16_44 PM

The phone box was parked in open space the way a confident cat parks itself on your keyboard: with total disregard for physics, your calendar, and your dignity.

From the outside, it was an ordinary public phone box, the sort you would ignore on a wet street in Manchester. From the inside, it was a lounge, a studio, a parliamentary bar, and—if you looked too closely at one corner—possibly a … Read the rest

The Throne and the Round Table

ChatGPT Image Dec 19, 2025, 08_17_35 PM

People like “strong leadership” for the same reason people like a single pill that fixes diabetes: it feels clean, it feels decisive, and it lets you stop thinking about the messy parts—diet, adherence, side effects, long-term damage. The problem is that politics, like medicine, punishes magical thinking. Fast action is not the same thing as correct action, and the price of being wrong at scale is paid in blood, debt, … Read the rest

Peace Without Miracles: De-Mythologizing Dealcraft

ChatGPT Image Dec 16, 2025, 02_39_13 PM

My friend shared an article with me today, and for a minute I could almost hear the choir warming up. Not the church choir—the political one. The kind that turns diplomacy into a superhero movie, where history is an impatient editor and the messy parts get cut for runtime. The article’s own author is more careful than the headline energy around it: he says Trump’s claim to have “ended … Read the rest