If you’re interested in this sort of content, I encourage you to become a free subscriber to the Western Tribune and a paid subscriber to the 1912 Institute. Paid subscribers get access to paywalled Tribune content, quarterly editions of the 1912 Review (a forthcoming print magazine), an exclusive “Ditat Deus” (“God Enriches” — Arizona’s state motto) ball cap (see below), and free and discounted access to in-person events in AZ (and occasionally in DC and NYC). We’re offering a discounted price for members who join soon. Don’t miss out!

Last summer I drove in the shadow of Mount Yale, a 14,000 foot tall Colorado peak first climbed in 1869 by Josiah Whitney and a crew of, ironically, Harvard researchers. Named in honor of Elihu Yale—the primary benefactor of the eponymous university—the mountain is a tribute to the brave Easterners who settled the American West. Many of them were Harvard men. Others Yalies. Others yet Dartmouthians. They named creeks and cricks and peaks after themselves and their alma maters. And yet some of the greatest explorers were of a different variety altogether. They were Western men.

The Western man of the 19th century, before the homogenization of America’s regional sub-cultures, was educated “low and West.” Schoolhouses, where they existed, had no formal curricula. Eastern men, educated “high and East,” learned classical language and were intellectually formed by the Trivium (grammar, logic, rhetoric). Western men took whatever was thrown at them, often amounting to spelling, basic moral lessons, geography, and elementary history. Much of their education happened outside of the classroom, where they imbibed practical knowledge about agriculture, forestry, and land management from experience. Indeed, a Western education was, above all, practical. Its concern was transmitting enough knowledge to get young boys and girls prepared for life on the frontier of American civilization—leisure was wasted time, and education was a blunt force instrument necessary for the Baconian experiment that was Manifest Destiny.

John Wesley Powell was the son of a Methodist preacher. Born in 1834, the year that the British Empire abolished slavery and President Andrew Jackson was censured by Congress, Powell was a son of Mount Morris, New York, just south of Rochester. His father braved the Atlantic Ocean three years prior, immigrating to the fledging Republic from Shrewsbury, England. Powell’s childhood followed his father’s preaching, taking him to Ohio, Wisconsin, and finally, Illinois. Named after John Wesley, the famed Methodist preacher, Powell was raised in an incredibly religious milieu. As a young boy, Powell was assaulted by fellow schoolboys because of his father’s dogged, Gospel-inspired abolitionism. Writing to William Wilberforce in 1774, John Wesley described slavery as “the scandal of religion, of England, and of human nature.” Powell, and Powell’s father, agreed.

Where Powell’s early childhood was dictated by his father’s circuit-riding, his late childhood was dictated by wilderness expeditions. In his late teens, Powell met a mentor by the name of George Crookham. Crookham was a self-taught naturalist, historian, geologist, ethnologist, and zoologist—a rural savant.

“In an extraordinary number of cases,” wrote Wallace Stegner, “that first man of learning or enthusiasm that a frontier boy encountered gave his life a twist that it never outgrew.” Abe Lincoln’s first mentor was a lawyer. Powell’s was Crookham. Crookham’s influence on Powell’s life is inestimable: “it was an influence calculated to make Powell a leading citizen of some rural Athens, a member of the debating club, a lecturer on Lyceum circuits, a pillar of the crude structure that learning was building in the wilderness.”

Soon Powell became a naturalist in his own right, learning from fossil-collecting and studies necessitated by his occasional teaching at various schoolhouses. In 1860, he won a prize for his mollusk collection from the Illinois State Agricultural Society.

At the age of 27, having cast a ballot for Lincoln less than a year prior, Powell volunteered to serve in the 20th Illinois Infantry. Within a month he was mustered into federal service. After taking a brief leave of absence to marry Emma Dean, Powell went back to the front lines. At the battle of Shiloh in 1861 his right arm was severed by a Confederate Minié ball. He recovered quickly, and opted to serve out the rest of the war instead of enjoy an honorable discharge. At Vicksburg and various other now-famous locales, he spent his free time analyzing geological formations and collecting more fossils. By the time of General Lee’s surrender at Appommatox, Powell was a brevet lieutenant colonel, though he opted for the title of “Major” for the rest of his life.

After the war, Major Powell joined Illinois Wesleyan University as a professor of geology, passing on much of what he learned from Crookham to eager students. He soon after joined Illinois State Normal University, armed with “a confidence and dash and capacity to manipulate men that nothing but the army could have taught him so fast.” Powell secured a grant from the legislature in Springfield to support the Illinois Natural History Society and provide himself a salary of $1,500 to serve as curator of the Society’s increasingly voluminous collection. Some time during this period, a desire grew in him to go West and explore what he dubbed the “Plateau Region”—a hitherto uncharted land spanning southern Utah and the northern reaches of the Arizona Territory. The rest is history, as they say. Powell became the first man to navigate the entire length of the Colorado, embarking on multiple expeditions down the Green River and into the mile-high canyons of what would come to be called the Grand Canyon. He was appointed the second director of the United State Geological Survey (USGS) in 1881 by President James Garfield, serving until 1894.

Powell’s education was definitionally deficient. He was introduced to neither Aristotle nor Cicero as a boy. He learned hard work managing a country farm at the age of 12; botany, geology, and natural science from Crookham; how to lead men and persevere in great endeavors from the Battle of Shiloh. His school was the school of hard knocks. Experience, supplemented by an insatiable desire to answer the many questions pulsing through his brain, sufficed for his education. Like many Western boys, he was anxious to get his hands on any book he could find, lusting to satiate a thirst for knowledge that nothing this side of Heaven could quench. He did at times interact with formal institutions of higher learning, but never graduated. He was often distracted by expeditions and invitations to lecture at Young Men’s Lyceums. In other words, John Wesley Powell was no Henry Adams.

George Washington, the greatest of America’s founders, was also the least educated. Unlike his learned compatriots, Washington was remarkably under-read. It was one of his great insecurities. While it may be said that he succeeded in spite of his rudimentary education, Powell’s experience suggests that he succeeded precisely because of it. It was not in the schoolhouse but at Valley Forge that Washington acquired the skillset required to lead America in its most formative years: If he was to keep his post, if the Continental Army was to be more than a firefly in the long night of history, Washington would need to knit together the interests and affections of militias hailing from 13 different colonies that did not yet consider themselves citizens of the same nation.

Powell was a prophet, an American Jeremiah, who urged caution and reason at a time when his fellow countrymen were possessed by wishful thinking. Boosters and swindlers, a common type bred by the frontier, believed that the West was a land of boundless resources that could be extracted with impunity. It was this pride that nearly extinguished the American buffalo, relegated few surviving American Indians to reservations, and led too many antsy young men to their deaths in mine pits and boom town bars.

Powell’s education—one grounded in experience—taught him moderation and prudence. His experience of the West taught him its limits. The West would only be settled successfully if its laws and mores accorded with the climate. If Old World conceptions of water rights, land use, and agriculture were taken as Gospel, the project of the frontier would collapse upon its own edifice. Yet despite his keen understanding of the West’s limits, Powell was an explorer; a man unwilling to sit still; a man whose quest for knowledge frequently took him west of the 100th meridian and into the thrashing waters of the Colorado. One is reminded of Xerxes, preparing to cross the Hellespont and initiate an invasion of Greece. His dreams urged him on; his vizier urged caution. Both temptations—taking risks and taking precautions—co-mingled in Powell’s soul. It was his education that uniquely prepared him to balance them; to exercise clear-eyed courage where others urged recklessness.

In our time, when Americans lust for a hint of hope, perhaps Powell would’ve taken a different tack, in the spirit of Blaise Pascal: “If he exalts himself, I humble him. If he humbles himself, I exalt him.” But most of Powell’s contemporaries were prideful; exalted beyond good reason. He was a prophet fit for his time. A prophet that saw into the future not by building castles of cloud, but by navigating his nation on foot. He had the courage to dream. And his dreams, anxious to come true, were grounded in the sober quarry of reason.

On a cool September day at his summer home in Maine, the Methodist-born son-of-a-preacher died a great man—the kind of great man that can only be forged by the crucible of experience.

Last week, the 1912 Institute—where I serve as Board Chair—hosted the first event in a series of America 250-themed events in Scottsdale, Arizona. 50+ civic-minded Arizonans of all ages gathered to break bread and learn about Arizona's state constitution, the U.S. Constitution, and the state and national founding eras.

We had a stellar panel that included:

• Arizona Supreme Court Justice Clint Bolick

• Dr. Sean Beienburg, an associate professor at Arizona State University’s School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership

• Chris Cottrell, a 1912 Board Member and small business owner

• Joel Malkin, a 1912 Board Member and small business owner

Interested in attending events like this and joining a cohort of likeminded Arizonans who want to make Arizona the best state in the nation to live, work, and raise a family? Become a subscriber to the 1912 Institute today (subscribers get a complimentary “Ditat Deus” (“God Enriches”—Arizona’s state motto) ballcap:

Subscribe Now

Building a great city in the twenty-first century

One of the great insights of twentieth-century urbanist Jane Jacobs is that flourishing cities cannot be created from the top-down. They must grow organically. “Organic” growth, however, should not be understood to exclude personal will. Cities depend upon their people (in their private and public capacities, in their personal lives and through corporate endeavors) to flourish.

Moreover, great cities must assent to some level of competent public sector management: It is particularly important in resource-constrained environments such as Phoenix that the public sector plays a role in managing growth. Nonetheless, the public sector, insofar as it manages growth, must make room for non-state actors to build communities, organizations, and businesses without undue interference.

As the era of the Great American City comes to a close, we need not abandon the many blessings of city life. Our task—the task of policymakers, civil society builders, job creators, everyday people—is great. But it is far from insurmountable. The era of the New American City has begun.

Read the Full Essay Here

What I’m reading and listening to

• Mamdani Is Trumpifying the Democrats — Geoff Shullenberger

• Fusionism for the 21st Century — Henry Olsen

• We Don’t Know How to Talk About Assisted Dying — Valerie Pavilonis

• How to Become a Person After Smartphones Have Rotted Your Brain — Luke Burgis

• Finally, an Action Movie About Washington’s French and Indian War Years — James Parker

• Gen Z Doesn’t Trust Anyone — Ryan Burge

• The Death and Life of Great American Cities — Jane Jacobs

• Child’s Play — Sam Kriss

• Let’s Get Something Clear About America’s National Identity — Ross Douthat

Good afternoon and a belated happy Memorial Day! Over the last month, I’ve travelled a bit, published an essay for The Dispatch, and consumed plentiful content (perhaps too much). Without further ado:

Preview: The Movement to Revamp Civics

As America nears her quarter-millennium birthday, her citizens are remarkably pessimistic and disillusioned about the American Dream. A record number of us no longer anticipate high-quality lives in the near future. Institutions integral to our functioning and way of life—courts, the financial system, public schools, universities—have lost the faith of most Americans. Our major political parties continue to diverge ideologically, with a majority of those under 45 saying that it’s important to date or marry someone with similar political views.

These trends, coupled with a general malaise that most of us feel but struggle to articulate, have led Paul Carrese to ask what we’ve all been thinking: “Is it too late for America?”

Carrese is the author of a new book, Teaching America: Reflective Patriotism in Schools, Colleges, and Culture. (Full disclosure: Paul was a professor of mine and continues to be a close friend and mentor.) After spending his career in academia contributing to civic education—first, as director of the United States Air Force Academy’s academic honors program, and then as the founding director of Arizona State University’s School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership (ASU SCETL)—Carrese used a sabbatical to collect his thoughts and write them down. Carrese is what you might call a self-aware academic: quick to acknowledge the enormous privilege he and other residents of the Ivory Tower have been afforded; profuse in his thanks to parents, students, and taxpayers for extending this opportunity. Teaching America is the culmination of his lifelong ambition to contribute to America’s civic flourishing.

When Carrese asks whether it’s too late for America, anyone who knows him knows it’s an almost-rhetorical question. There is something in him—a mix of Christian hope and old-school Yankee optimism—that refuses to believe in American decline. But to understand Carrese’s carefully considered hope, which he distinguishes from blind optimism, we must first understand where he thinks American civic education has gone wrong, and why the poor state of that education is so intimately tied to our national malaise. […]

Full Essay Here

What I’m Reading/Listening To

• Why Your Best Ideas Aren’t Original (David Epstein, Derek Thompson): “The great bottleneck of progress is question-framing. Once a problem is framed with sufficient clarity and precision, the answer almost wants to be found. Once Malthus articulated his grim theory of resource scarcity and competition precisely enough, two scientists on opposite sides of the world arrived at the same revolutionary solution within years of each other. The answer was, in some sense, already waiting.”

• Here are the undergraduate programs that pay off (and some that don’t) (Todd Wallack): “The biggest payoffs for students seeking bachelor’s degrees occurred in engineering and architecture, business and economics, and security and protective services degrees. Liberal arts, recreation and fitness studies, and social sciences students saw the lowest returns among the categories included in the report.”

• The Part of the Declaration Nobody Reads (Eli Lake): “We don’t do this for light and transient causes—that’s in the document. Whether or not it’s actually about taxes, they don’t want the world to think that’s what the American Revolution is all about.”

• Douthat: Pope Leo’s Election Suggests ‘American Situation’ Is the Church’s Future (Jonathan Liedl): “The Church in America’s ability to ‘compete’ amidst pluralism and cultural conflict may be a model for Catholics worldwide, ‘The New York Times’ commentator told EWTN News.”

• More Colleges Are Closing. It’s About Time (Roland Fryer): “A common objection is that earnings are too narrow a measure. Many argue that college produces transformation, citizenship, character—things a wage record can’t capture. They’re right that earnings aren’t everything. But they’re wrong that the closing schools have any comparative advantage in producing them. The Gallup-Purdue Index, surveying more than 30,000 graduates on workplace engagement and life satisfaction, finds that institutional type—private vs. public, selective vs. not—explains almost none of the variation. The same is true for civic engagement, marriage and health.”

• Elite graduates are pulling back from grad school (Gad Levanon): “In 2003, the best-selling career advice told ambitious college seniors to go to law school, med school, or business school within a few years of graduating. Today the share of graduates from America’s most selective colleges who start graduate school within five years of finishing their bachelor’s degree has dropped almost 10 percentage points — from about 51% to 41%. At less-selective schools, the rate is flat.”

• Is Miami a Failure of the Assimilation Model? (Gil Guerra): “Miami presents a challenge for conservative assumptions about politics and culture. No American city is more emblematic of recent GOP gains with Hispanic voters: Donald Trump carried Miami–Dade County in 2024 by 11 points, a staggering swing from Hillary Clinton’s 30-point margin in 2016. But Miami’s apparent incorporation into the Republican coalition has not settled the deeper question of whether the city’s Hispanic majority has assimilated into the American mainstream, or is merely a parallel Spanish-speaking community that happens to vote Republican.”

• What an Ivy League Education Really Gets You (Rose Horowitch): “So the people who go to the fanciest colleges tend to have the most successful careers—this is not exactly news. The question of why this is the case, however, is surprisingly tricky to answer. Perhaps the super-achieving and super-privileged teens who get into Princeton would have thrived after college no matter where they went. Maybe (hear me out) they owe their success to the academic lessons imparted by world-class faculty. Or the answer could just be that employers are dazzled by the name of the school on the diploma.“

• The University That Chose to Shrink (Kate Hidalgo Bellows): “At a time when most colleges are chasing enrollment gains to shore up finances, Arizona is doing the opposite. In the fall of 2025, the first-year class shrank by nearly one-fifth — a change that leaders describe as intentional. The president and provost felt that too many freshmen were coming in unprepared. They wanted to increase the graduation rate, which is lower than that of any of Arizona’s mutual peers. And they wanted to decrease how much financial aid was being doled out to students who weren’t from Arizona.“

• Harvard’s ‘Annoying Socratic Gadfly’ Takes a Victory Lap (Evan Goldstein, Len Gutkin): “Harvey C. Mansfield spent six decades championing lost causes. At 94, he’s suddenly winning.”

Recent Travels and Updates

I was in Charleston, South Carolina over Memorial Day weekend for a good friend’s bachelor party. It was great fun—and I got to see Fort Sumter from the water!

On Thursday, May 14 the Postsecondary Commission released its study examining the value-added earnings outcomes of students enrolled in Texas public higher education at an event hosted by the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, DC.

The study examines the outcomes of 935,767 students who enrolled in 86 public institutions in Texas between 2008–09 and 2018–19 and pursued a bachelor’s degree, associate’s degree, or certificate.

I recently took a daylong weekend trip to Middleburg, Virginia. It’s a hidden gem.

I spent a weekend in New York City, and attended a characteristically NYC party.

Below is a very short essay I wrote for what was to become a printed magazine published by residents of Tempe, Arizona (the college town where Arizona State University is situated). The magazine never got off the ground, but I didn’t want these words to go to waste—particularly because its animating theme (localism) is, ironically, quite universal. Without further ado:

The idea of a “local” paper, or magazine, or periodical seems pretty quaint to us. I mean, at least to those of us living out West, where every other person we know came here yesterday, and may well leave tomorrow. If the zeitgeist of our age is one of movement, mobility, and rootlessness—and therefore also one of displacement, isolation, and alienation—then we are in the land where that zeitgeist is most truly itself. Tocqueville recognized that America was the consummation of democracy and its spirit of equality. The American West is the consummation of our contemporary restlessness.

Again, the idea of “local,” to us, often seems like a quaint dream bound up with nostalgia. Our parents, or our grandparents, or our great grandparents enjoyed the local diner, the local movie theater, the local dive bar, the local paper. But all of us—college students, young professionals, urban cowboys, suburban renegades—we’ve lost all that. We’ve either moved on from a parochial past, or declined from a golden age, or however you want to frame it. The bottom line is that we frequent Starbucks, Whole Foods, and Chipotle, and we like it that way. No reason to feel any shame about it.

I will be the first to admit that there’s a certain comfort I feel in visiting a Starbucks in Huntington Beach, Arlington, or Cairo and it feeling just like I’m back at the Starbucks off South Forest Ave. We might visit a thrift shop or an old haunt that’s miraculously survived the acceleration of globalization to show that we actually care about what once was called “local.” These places warm our hearts, for sure, but we are always drawn back out into the “real world” of commotion and the next big thing.

No matter the almost inevitable placelessness of our modern situation, we cannot lose sight of an important fact (it may well be the most important fact of our lives): We come from somewhere. We live somewhere. Our lives, no matter how bound up in constant movement, constant motion, constant striving, are lived in space and in time. No innovation in economics, physics, or biology will ever erase those basic restrictions on our existences. We are contingent upon a near infinite array of variables, and bound by more things outside of ourselves than we can imagine.

This is all to say that there will always be something local about each of us, and we’d be well advised to seek a recovery of the “local” in our lives and in our shared life.

We have the ironic privilege of our local community being the pinnacle of rootlessness. That means we have the unique opportunity to patch a new quilt together based on the remnants we find lying around. It means that more than conserving a treasured past, we’re blessed to imagine a new future; to build a legacy that one day our children and grandchildren will be able to call their inheritance.

Like Saint Benedict during the twilight of the Roman Empire, we are called on to build a beachhead for the future here in the present. While I certainly hope our efforts are more fruitful than Comrade Lanski’s, this magazine attempts to live up to what the great American novelist Joan Didion claimed was the summation of Lanski’s organizing in her collection of essays titled Slouching Towards Bethlehem: “a minor but perilous triumph of being over nothingness.”

This magazine is one small contribution towards this broader mission, one which more people from every angle ought to think more about, and contribute more to. This magazine, if all goes well, will be something truly local. That’s worth cherishing.

The last month has been a whirlwind. I was back in Arizona for a few weeks for Easter and some meetings, I found my way to New York to visit my girlfriend, and I’m writing this dispatch after a few days of work just north of Dallas, Texas.

There are a lot of exciting projects I’ve been working on, and I’m excited to share some of them in this email update—though many of them will have to wait. Anyways, let’s start with why I’m in Texas:

Everything’s bigger in Texas

Over the last several days I had the pleasure of taking a look under the hood of the University of North Texas (UNT), a sprawling regional public institution of higher education located just north of Dallas, as part of my work at the Postsecondary Commission. A few takeaways:

• Higher education is not one sector, but several sectors. If higher education were viewed like any other sector of the economy, we’d have differentiated it long ago. UNT is a completely different beast than, say, Texas State Technical College—a 2-year technical and trade college—or Yale, or UT Austin. The “product” offered by UNT is, on its face, the same as is offered by other 4-year institutions: A bachelor’s or some other equivalent credential. But the market of students served, the type of degree earned (engineering is a very different degree from music theory), and the non-skill-related value of the credential (signaling, access to new and higher net worth social capital, etc.) vary wildly. The more higher ed leaders and policymakers differentiate between institutions as they think through how the sector might be reformed, the better. As institutions stare down an enrollment plateau, declining foreign enrollment (formerly a cash cow), and other pressures, expect differentiation among institutions to accelerate, and the traditional 4-year liberal arts model to become less of a standard.

• The vast majority of students do not attend private elite 4-year liberal arts colleges, despite their outsized representation in our national discourse. The average student attends a school like UNT, insulated from many of the issues plaguing our elite institutions by virtue of the sort of institution it is: Commuter students, adult learners, and the institution’s embeddedness in the local community immunize the university from the sorts of monocultures that develop at places like Harvard or Yale. This can be very positive, though I still think there is something to be said for the development of a healthy monoculture, particularly at elite liberal arts institutions: The liberal arts, to a certain extent, relies upon the creation and maintenance of a sort-of “closed society”—it will always be a semi-aristocratic endeavor.

• Higher education is its own world, replete with its own culture, vocabulary, power structures, and internal dynamics. This is the second institution I’ve toured as part of an accreditation visit with the Postsecondary Commission, and it continues to strike me how much of higher education is insider baseball (and I don’t necessarily think this is a bad thing). The organizational structure of your average university is unlike any other enterprise in American society, although institutions—especially resource-constrained institutions—are coming to adopt more traditional governance models (with presidents taking on more of a CEO role and incorporating formalized faculty input with declining frequency).

Recent publications and posts

• Sun Belt Rising — Not enough attention has been paid to the Sun Belt. Our national consciousness remains mired in nostalgia and continues to under-index the incredibly bright trajectory of states like Arizona, Nevada, Texas, Georgia, and Florida.

  • “The Sun Belt’s growth is not a pro-natalist success story. It’s mostly a story of sustained net positive migration, driven primarily by Americans leaving other states and new arrivals from abroad. The decline in natural population increase (births minus deaths) from 2011 through 2024 is not a result of declining births (these held steady, at ~840k per annum), but of more deaths (climbing from ~482k in 2011 to ~655k in 2024). I suspect this is a result of the Sun Belt’s large elderly population. A surge in international immigration in the early-to-mid 2020s—which can be presumed to have leveled off significantly given the Trump Administration’s restrictionist immigration policy—contributed mightily to more recent surges in Sun Belt population growth.”

    

    

  • “Interestingly, Sun Belt economic growth is driven more by population growth than by gains in per-worker output. The Sun Belt is slightly more productive than the Rust Belt and has reached rough parity with the national average, but it hasn’t yet pulled ahead of U.S. national productivity. The Sun Belt closed most of its per capita income gap with the Rust Belt by the early 1980s but the two blocs then moved roughly in lockstep for decades, both stuck a few points below the national average. Real GDP per worker has improved marginally in the last quarter century compared to the national average (especially vis a vis the Rust Belt) but it still underperforms the national average.”

  

  • “Our contemporary politics is coming to be shaped by two certifiably American worldviews. Rust Belters have experienced American decline firsthand. They grew up in towns with hollowed out factories, declining populations, and a general air of pessimism. Every day, they are reminded of what was—they mourn a world lost. Their grievances are not without basis. Sun Belters grew up in places built yesterday: new suburban developments, exurbs, and skyrises. Every day they are reminded of what can be—they anticipate a world to come. If they have grievances, they are with Rust Belters, who, to them, are mired in a past that can never be restored.”

What I’m reading and listening to

• “Conservatives Need a New Way of Doing Local Politics” (Craig Ruiz) — Craig, a fellow at the nascent 1912 Institute, argues that Republicans’ recent setbacks in Arizona’s Salt River Project Board elections were, ironically, the result of a successful get out the vote campaign. Instead of adopting progressive GOTV tactics, Ruiz instead encourages conservatives to bring what national policy thinkers call “Secret Congress” to the Phoenix Valley:

  • “That is why debates about whether the SRP electorate leans Republican or Democratic are largely a distraction. No grouping of 36,000 voters can be representative of the whole SRP electorate. Whereas national elections are decided by winning over swing voters, SRP elections and many other local elections are decided by the unusual dynamics that motivate people to turn out in ultra-low-profile contests.”

  • “When conservatives play the ‘groups’ game, they only trigger the progressive activist class into action. The good news is that there are proven ways that populist movements can withstand group resistance on low-profile issues.”

  • “For too long, conservatives have treated local politics as a base mobilization game just as progressives do. Because of their sophisticated activist network, progressives can get away with this in a way that conservatives cannot. But local politics is not simply the domain of the most highly-engaged voters and the activist groups that mobilize them. It is also a world of policymaker relationships, effective communication, bold ideas, and shared cultural values. Conservatives should harness the whole gambit of strategies available to them. The SRP election presents an opportunity to experiment with new methods of policy influence and offer Arizonans a brand of conservatism that responds to the pressing issues close to home.”

• “America at 250: Our Lost Opportunity” (Robert Pondiscio) — “If we cannot give young Americans a shared national celebration, we can still give them something else: adults who absorb tension so children don’t have to; institutions that teach ideals before indictments; and educators who understand that attachment is the prerequisite, not the antithesis, of an honest reckoning.”

• “New Sages Unrivalled” (Dean Ball) — “Our country was born in improvisation, and Americans are often at our best when we are improvising with little more than principles, knowledge, wisdom, and chutzpah. America has always done well by leaning into the wind, even when it blew harshly in our face. When we are at our best, we stand defiantly against the storm. And our pursuit of greater knowledge, and of our founding ideals are, in the final analysis, the only defenses we have, our sole ballasts against the gusts.”

• “Lessons from State Tuition Recovery Funds for Consumer Protection in Higher Education“ (Preston Cooper & Chris Robinson) — When institutions of higher education shutter it’s mostly taxpayers who pay for resulting student loan forgiveness. Preston and Chris argue instead for, essentially, nationwide tuition recovery insurance—paid for by institutions instead of taxpayers:

  • “A federal common fund, inspired by state tuition recovery funds, would not reinvent the wheel. Twenty-two states have operated versions of this model for years, with mixed but instructive results. The ITT and Corinthian closures showed what happens at the federal level when there is no equivalent backstop: Billions of dollars in discharged loans land on taxpayers who had no say in how those institutions were run. A common fund could shift those costs where they belong—onto the institutions drawing from the federal loan system in the first place.”

• “Hope or Hype? What to Make of Yale’s Report on Trust in Higher Ed“ (Rick Hess) — “In short, it’s far too early for higher ed reformers to proclaim victory. Yale’s report is a promising chapter, but most of this tale is yet to be written.”

• “The Hobbit” (J.R.R. Tolkien) — The Hobbit needs no explanation.

• “The university that doesn’t exist yet” (Gad Levanon) — “The disruption to higher education is not that AI replaces universities. It is that AI may make possible a new kind of institution — cheaper, leaner, faster, and eventually credible enough — that can outcompete a large part of the market. That would be painful for many existing colleges precisely because, for many students, it could be a better deal.”

Some photos from Arizona

Arcosanti, Arizona. An artists’ colony.

The Arizona Biltmore. Phoenix.

Construction in Tempe, Arizona.

Taliesen West. Designed by Frank Lloyd Wright.

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.