“You can’t get to that level without being smart.” Trump said this about world leaders in general. I would qualify that by saying you don’t have to be especially bright, but you can’t get to that level without other people believing you are smart.

Consciousness is never something I’ve thought very deeply about in the past. In my younger days I would’ve thought of it as the soul that is a separate substance from the body. Later on I would’ve seen it as an emergent property of physical processes where consciousness is simply the whole being greater than the sum of its parts. However, upon reading David Bentley Hart’s The Experience of God: Being Consciousness Bliss, I actually engaged for the first time what all the features of consciousness entail and whether or not emergence or other aspects of mechanical nature are sufficient to explain it.

My Easter reflections are coming a couple of weeks late, but better late than never. One of the things I find fascinating about the Gospels is that they do not actually describe how Jesus rose from the dead. There are no descriptions of him removing the burial wrappings, the stone being rolled away as Jesus emerges, or an angelic choir singing while he rises from the grave in power. Instead, all we have, at least in the canonical Gospels, are appearances after the fact.

Thirteen years ago I was browsing at a bookstore — I don’t remember which one or where. I came across an apologetics book by Peter Kreeft, a Roman Catholic theologian and philosopher. I don’t even remember the title, but I remember skimming a section where he argued that Genesis can be read metaphorically. That stuck with me, and I decided to actually give evolution a fair shot. My background was entirely the other direction.

“I think Madison never imagined or envisioned a Congress with no ambition. This is a Congress without ambition. This is a Congress without really a belief structure in defending legislative prerogative. They just are a rubber stamp for whatever a president tells them to do.” — Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), quoted by the Washington Post. This seems on point to me. It is one of the chief weaknesses of a presidential system of government with political parties.

This is a great take from Matt Yglesias on the strikes in Iran. In yesterday’s Slow Boring mailbag he had a good answer to a question about Congress reasserting its role in declaring war and authorizing military action. The problem is the Presidential system that we have makes it very difficult to end up with Congress actually controlling when military action happens and this goes back to the early decades of the republic.

Here are the books I finished reading in 2025. If I had to pick my top three they would probably be: The Scout Mindset Apple in China 1929 The Scout Mindset hit a certain rational/psychological niche of mine. It gave me a new way to think of intellectually moving through the world. Apple In China was fascinating from a historical/business standpoint, while also scratching an itch of Apple interest. 1929 was just a great financial history book, that didn’t get lost in the details, but did an excellent job shedding light on the characters who were involved in the crash

I recently finished reading John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs. I thoroughly enjoyed this book by Ian Leslie about the writing collaboration and partnership between John Lennon and Paul McCartney. I’ve been a fan of The Beatles for over 15 years now, and they became one of my favorite bands. This book added a lot of insight and depth to my understanding of their songwriting craft, the development of the Beatles, the breakup, and aftermath of the 70’s as well as John Lennon’s murder in 1980.

One of the things that I have learned over the years is how when it comes to the Bible is that there is no instruction manual for how it is to be handled. Any framework that is place on the Bible for interpretation is necessarily extra-Biblical. This is not a condemnation of frameworks that people use for Biblical interpretation, but it is a plead for people to recognize that there are many different ways to understand the Bible, and no one right single way.

There is a model of American history I’ve been toying with lately that helps to explain the moment we are in. I’m sure I’m not the first person to have come up with this, but I find it more useful than the dominant lens that is typically used. The normal model that you come across in political science is the sun and moon parties. You have the era where there is a dominant party and then a minority party that reflects the issues and concerns of the sun party.