Newsletter

  • Border, unruly

    I used to love crossing borders. When I was young, they smelled of adventure and exploration, of languages I hadn’t learned and could tune my ear to, of foods like a book to be tasted… Read more

  • For the love of winter

    These snowghosts! I like to think of them watching over the winter-quiet ranges all the way to Glacier National Park (the peaks of which you can see from here on a clear day) and beyond.… Read more

  • The Doctrine of Discovery’s Disastrous Legacy

    If you don’t know much about the Doctrine of Discovery and want to learn one thing of true importance this year, I’d make it that. You can start with any one of the resources linked… Read more

  • The starlight of integrity

    When I was 19, I watched my father walk into a meeting room with the Chechen mafia.  My father has run a small coffee roasting business in Moscow, Russia, since 1992—or ran it for 30… Read more

  • Competence Lost

    I’m going to be republishing some older essays, revised and updated, for the next few weeks, as a kind of field guide to specific commons- and ownership-related subjects that have been covered on my Substack… Read more

  • Co-imagine the future

    We had fresh snowfall recently, which was sadly washed out by rain for the next several days, but before it went I took a long walk around town to soak it all in. Look at… Read more

  • When you can’t walk away

    A Walking Life starts with what mainstream news sources call a “refugee crisis.” I don’t like that term any more than I like the term “migrant”—I love the richness that words hold, the worlds they carry,… Read more

  • When Writing Left Me

    When writing left me, I found out how much it made me. Read more

  • Abundance, or what it means to be free

    Walking composition Good news! I’ve finally finished the first messy, painful 10,000-word draft of the first full chapter of No Trespassing, on land ownership. After several attempts to structure it around the ranch in eastern… Read more

  • The gravity of a labyrinth

    Walking composition I’ve got a new interview about the physical and social importance of walking on philosopher and former professional baseball player Greg Hickey’s site KineSophy: The Ethics of Human Movement. It gets back into some of… 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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