Chicago Fog
Essays and Stories
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Latest posts
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Reconsidering Early Modern European Diplomatic Thought
In May 2018, the United States relocated its embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to its capital Jerusalem, a city whose status remains disputed. The Trump Administration’s decision to move the embassy sent two messages: an external one to Palestinians and their allies, signaling a…
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Opposing the Nihilistic War on Classical Economics
The Republican and Democratic parties have effectively declared war on classical economics. By disregarding the foundational principles that built liberal democratic capitalism, they undermine an economic order that has enriched much of the world. Classical economics rests on a…
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Slouching Towards Economic History
Book Review: J. Bradford DeLong, Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century (New York: Basic Books, 2022). In 2016, President Barack Obama guest-edited the November issue of Wired magazine, contributing an essay that described the virtues of the…
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Religious Violence and the State
Complexity, Variability and the Importance of Historical Context This historical essay, written for a graduate reading seminar on religion and violence, explores the intersection of religious violence and the modern state. A significant challenge in crafting this paper was the…
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Finding Your Way
I started this website in 2007. Following the example of other bloggers who maintained careers and wrote on the side, I published anonymously and avoided details about myself. I’ve changed the name of the website three times, preferring Chicago Fog for both its simplicity and…
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Crossroads
As the kids say, it’s been a minute. There’s no shortage of subjects to write about but time and energy are finite. I’ll start there. A full-time corporate career and part-time academic pursuits leave little time for writing. The short stories I’m always threatening to publish…
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Was Historical Objectivity Overthrown?
This is an historiographic essay from my graduate program’s History & Theory reading seminar. I centered the paper on Peter Novick’s That Noble Dream: The ‘Objectivity Question’ and the American Historical Profession. This is a great book to read. I wanted to get more grounded…
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Byron Nuclear Power Station: State Power and Grassroots Resistance
The following is a research paper I submitted in my graduate history program. While I doubt I’ll ever come back to the subject, I thought the paper was useful in two respects. First, we should have no delusions that nuclear power was a result of free market economics. The…
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Buffalo & Voting
We’re tired of mass-killing psychos. I think it’s best not to use their names or refer to the moronic ravings they spew before embarking on their psychopathic journeys. Imagine being one of these crazies. If you’re filled with revulsion within one second of picturing yourself…
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The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth by Jonathan Rauch
Originally this post was going to be a book review page–one of the many I use as references in Chicago Fog’s essays and other posts. But as I read Jonathan Rauch’s The Constitution of Knowledge I realized I had a lot of thoughts on the book, and most of those thoughts were…
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Inflation, Citizen Musk, Dobbs, & Russo-Ukraine War
My plan to post a short reflection every week failed almost immediately. The dual demands of a full-time job and part-time academia meant little time for part-time writing. Nevertheless, I’ll try again. Inflation, Elon Musk buying Twitter, and the leaked first draft opinion for…
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Inflation & Establishment Media
Larry Summers was on Ezra Klein’s New York Times podcast to discuss the state of the world economy (here is the transcript). It was worth listening to only to hear Klein getting mugged by reality, although he still seemed to want to beleive Covid and Ukraine caused high…
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SCOTUS Appointment & Russo-Ukraine War
SCOTUS nominee Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson’s hearings were mostly uneventful. So far she’s saying what she needs to say to get appointed. She strikes me as a good addition to the Court because I don’t think she’s an extreme judicial activist. She handled the unfair question…
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Ukraine Invasion
Very few people read. Readers make the investment of precious time and energy need a return on that investment. In thinking about this website, I wonder if I’ve had a good sense of what people want to read. I think it’s fiction–but that takes me a long time. And I think it’s…
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Overreaction
It’s October 2021 and the simulation is getting weirder and weirder. Strange how opinion journalists’ inevitable exhortation “we must do something” has become “we must do everything.” In the last 20 years, national rhetoric heated-up faster than temperatures in pre-Millennium…
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Sound and Fury: The Last Stand of Isolationism
This is an historiographic essay written for my graduate history program discussing US foreign policy in the pre-war period. I think this is one of the most important chapters of US history. The change in global strategy occurred as the US reacted to Germany’s victory over…
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Trumpageddon
President Donald Trump lost the 2020 election. To most, that sentence states a fact. To many others, that sentence is just an ideological argument revealing someone’s epistemological preferences. And that’s the state of American civic life so far in 2021. The Art of the Steal…
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The Repression of Civil Liberties in the United States During World War I
I originally wrote this post as an historiography for a US History course for my graduate degree. In retrospect, I would do this paper differently if I had to revisit the topic. The book-by-book summary is now way to write a literature review. It’s pretty boring, plus my…
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American Discontent
I’ve always found it difficult to stay in the present. Chicago Fog comes from a love of history and a fascination with the ideas that shaped today’s world. At the same time I’ve always enjoyed futurism and the vision of science fiction writers, especially those who write near…
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Flyover Bourgeois GenX Man
I’ve witnessed history being made four times in my half-century of life: the end of the Cold War, 9-11, the Financial Crisis of 2007-08, and now the Coronavirus pandemic. Those events—spaced roughly by 10 years—play outsized roles in public dialogue and analysis. They are…