I put together a 19-page beginner guitar booklet — 36 reading exercises in twelve units, plus a chord-and-rhythm companion that runs alongside them. There’s now a second volume too: Volume 1 is a reading primer with a songbook attached, and Volume 2 is a songbook with a reading curriculum hidden inside it. Both are embedded below; nothing to download, just scroll. If the embed doesn’t load for you, open the primer in a new tab. ...
Modesty Isn’t About Power. It’s About Beauty. A while back I argued that modesty was about power — a woman’s beauty is a kind of power, and dressing modestly was the responsible handling of it. Contain the power, don’t wield it carelessly. It felt right. It was built on a mistake I couldn’t see until I tried to make it measurable. The mistake: if modesty exists to limit a woman’s power, it should make her less striking, less noticed. It doesn’t. Set the provocative stuff aside — that’s its own category and everyone knows it. Compare two women both well inside the range of the ordinary: one in a sleeveless top and shorts, one in something modest but genuinely beautiful, cut well and chosen with care. The modest one has more presence, not less. If the point was to turn the power down, modest dress fails, because it turns it up. ...
Someone told Frank Sinatra his guitar sounded amazing. It was sitting in a stand. Frank asked how it sounded now. The tone was never in the guitar. Hand Eddie Van Halen a piece of garbage from a pawn shop and the brown sound is still there, because it was always in his hands, his ear, his technique. The guitar is inert. It waits. Whatever a guitar is “really capable of” is a fact about the person holding it, not the instrument. ...
I go out through the window. Glass and grey daylight and the drop, and then I’m on my feet in the yard with people already closing from three sides, close enough that going back in isn’t a thing I get to consider. So I run. There’s a dirt track leading away between the fences and I take it because it’s the only thing that isn’t a person. The track narrows. Barbed wire strung post to post on both sides, sagging, and the light is going, and I can almost see my own shadow laid across it — caught there, surprised, staying. Ahead of me there’s nothing. No voices, no work, no sound at all, which I keep mistaking for good news. Then one of them sees me and they all come at once, out of the dark on both sides of the trail. It’s manageable here. The trail is narrow enough that they arrive more or less one at a time, and I shoot and I move. That’s the last part I understand. ...
A note before starting: this piece is only tangentially related to the earlier parts of the series — it stands largely on its own. But the central thesis of Part 1, that humans differ in kind because of a deeper telos, turns out to be relevant here too — this time in defense of the carnivore. That application is not mentioned explicitly in the essay. The setup: why lions get a pass The standard vegetarian/animal-rights position doesn’t claim a lion is permitted to kill — it claims the lion is a moral patient but not a moral agent.1 The hinge is moral agency: only beings that can reason, recognize rights, and choose otherwise can bear duties or be held responsible.2 The lion can’t deliberate, so its killing carries no moral weight — it’s a physical event, not a moral one. The animal isn’t outside moral concern (as a patient it can still be wronged by us); it simply can’t do wrong, so its predation poses no moral problem to be solved.3 The asymmetry with humans isn’t “lions are excused” — it’s that the category of moral responsibility doesn’t apply to lions at all. Humans, who can hear and act on moral arguments, are the only beings the framework holds answerable. ...
A framework for animal moral status that doesn’t collapse into sentimentality or dismissiveness The previous essay argued that human dignity is grounded in kind-membership — that belonging to a kind whose nature is constitutively oriented toward self-transcendence is what makes a human being worth protecting, regardless of what any individual has personally achieved or can currently do. What do you do with the edges? Gorillas. Elephants. Dolphins. Animals that are clearly doing something cognitively that a cow isn’t. Do they just get lumped in with livestock? ...
On kind membership, potential, and the collapse of civilizational superiority There’s a question that sits beneath most arguments about how we treat animals, how we treat the vulnerable, and how societies have historically justified treating each other: what, exactly, grounds the special moral status of a human being? The intuitive answer — that humans are smarter, more capable, more morally complex — runs into problems almost immediately. What about the comatose patient? The infant? And more uncomfortably: what about the tribal community that has lived in the same way for thousands of years, with no written philosophy, no systematic theology, no recorded science? ...
The previous part lays out the idea from first principles: beauty is a kind of power — it acts on people before they consent — and the grown-up thing to do with power is to carry it with care, neither flaunting it nor burying it as shameful. That argument is deliberately narrow: it only speaks where power is in play, and it generates no dress codes. This part turns to a specific application: the place of modesty in Jewish life, and a failure mode the principle predicts. ...
The Innocence of Children Picture an isolated village in the hills. The children there have found little nuggets of gold in the streambed, and they play with them — flick them, trade them, leave them in the dirt. You watch and you smile. They are holding something that could build a house or buy a field, and to them it is a pebble that catches the light. That is innocence. It is not knowing the value of what you hold. The child who throws a heavy object at his brother’s head and misses, breaking a window instead, is guilty of the broken window and the thrown object both. And he is still innocent, because he cannot yet feel the weight of what he nearly did. He doesn’t see how close he came. The depth of harm, the full meaning of being responsible for another person — these are things a child develops into. Empathy at that depth is earned, not issued at birth. So a child can be guilty and innocent at once: he did the thing, but the thing has no real size to him yet. ...
A prosecutor in Los Angeles wants to convict someone who killed an attacker in self-defense. The attacker had a criminal record stretching to the moon. The prosecutor’s move: you couldn’t have known about that record when you killed him, so it’s irrelevant. The argument bugged me for weeks before I could name why. It’s not stupid. It’s the opposite of stupid — it takes a certain amount of cleverness to build. And that turns out to be the whole problem. ...