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“The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity.” — Dorothy Parker
Featured Essays
Bound by Chains: Calvinism and the Justification of Black Oppression
The same Puritan reflex that equated labor with divine favor was, within a century, repurposed to sanctify slavery. It was read as proof that white prosperity was providence and Black labor was only duty. This piece traces that twisted inheritance from Cotton Mather's slaveholder reassurances through Reconstruction's betrayal to the redlining and 'respectability' politics still shaping the present, drawing on Black theologians and writers — Douglass, Du Bois, Cone, Baldwin — who most clearly named the hypocrisy.
The Myth of the Chosen Nation: Puritanism and the Birth of American Exceptionalism
Winthrop's 'city on a hill' didn't stay religious for long. By the 1800s, it had become Manifest Destiny, and the Puritan idea that labor proves worth had been stripped of its theology and put to work justifying continental conquest, immigrant exploitation, child labor, and the federal troops sent to shoot striking workers. This piece tracks that progression and lands on the line that anchors the whole series: 'American Exceptionalism is simply Puritan anxiety scaled up to the size of a continent.'
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