Newsletter

  • There were wolves in the woods – and we both belonged

    Welcome (or welcome back!) to On the Commons. Here, we explore questions as varied (but related) as: Why are 3 little-known 15th-century papal bulls still being weaponized against Indigenous sovereignty today? How is the right to forage for food related… Read more

  • History is won by those who live it

    Over half a lifetime ago, I was walking with some friends along the harbor road of Ephesus, once an embattled, storied, and thriving city of Ionia (and then Greece and then Rome and various lesser-known… Read more

  • The time that is given to us is not for us to choose

    In late 2016, a . . . situation, let’s call it, battered my town. A neo-Nazi site had picked up a disagreement over a local building’s ownership, and the result was months of online and… Read more

  • Trespassing, or air that smells of home

    The following is a reprint of my essay “Trespassing,” published in the Air volume of Elementals, a new anthology from the Center for Humans & Nature. You can read other republished selections from the anthology by Eiren Caffall in Orion,  Andrew… Read more

  • Analog

    After recording the audio version of my most recent piece here, on the 1805 property law case Pierson v. Post, I spent a very frustrating hour trying to get my voice recorder to talk to my laptop.… Read more

  • Fox Owns Herself

    If you’re new here, welcome to On the Commons! Here, we explore questions as varied (but related) as: What is the difference between attention that fractures us and attention that restores? What role have three 15th-century papal bulls… Read more

  • The deep ethics of optimism

    Swan Lake, Montana, nearing sunset, through the smoky haze of a nearby prescribed burn. In 2016, a month or two before that year’s U.S. presidential election, I was at a two-week interdisciplinary artist’s residency at… Read more

  • Moral codes that withstand the wreckage of history

    At the age of nineteen my grandfather, Jacob Davidovich Malchik, flipped an electric switch, saw a working light bulb for the first time, and knew his future waited somewhere outside his muddy Ukrainian village. In… Read more

  • Nothing in Excess

    I recently spoke with a class at Michigan State University about walking, health, and cultural views of wellness. As happens during most of my talks with college students, at least one came prepared with a… Read more

  • Dis/connection

    The bacon was frying slowly and the water wouldn’t boil. I was poking at both over the camp stove, rain beating the tarp overhead, when my sister asked me something. “I was just thinking,” I… Read more

Welcome to On the Commons!

This is a mirror of the newsletter I write on Substack, On the Commons. Same writing, different platform!

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