The Curious Engineer

The Homebound Symphony

2023–2026

836 posts

← 2020–2022

2026 78

September 2026

  1. the last post
  2. the disappeared
  3. the beginning of a story
  4. in these late days

August 2026

  1. Dear Walter
  2. undermining Babylon System
  3. what I want when I read
  4. horsewhipping Ruskin
  5. John Crowley
  6. Tom and Wystan
  7. reliable
  8. a conversation, presented without comment
  9. retribution and malice

July 2026

  1. strangers
  2. four big books
  3. with extreme taste
  4. the cost of having been everywhere
  5. I’ve been everywhere
  6. the three careers of Vida Chenoweth
  7. the Bible of course is terrific
  8. if we had but faith
  9. bad humanists

June 2026

  1. idea injection
  2. pot, kettle, soccer, football
  3. my back pages: an unwritten book
  4. Kołakowski on religion
  5. promises
  6. critical hope
  7. the repaganizing of fantasy
  8. two thoughts on Gallipoli
  9. update on my use of Claude
  10. heresies of form
  11. beat and groove

May 2026

  1. Auden’s faith
  2. Rowan Williams on solidarity
  3. “And I will undertake all these to teach”
  4. the unimaginable has occurred
  5. narrative and history
  6. deadlines
  7. Groundhog Day
  8. enough is enough?
  9. against persuasion?
  10. predictable
  11. Gilgamesh: A Review
  12. this post is obviously against all new things
  13. Arnhem, summarized

April 2026

  1. condition versus cause
  2. tools, jobs
  3. Powers
  4. the martyr’s crown
  5. pocket full of … kryptonite? sunshine?
  6. the rest is …
  7. redistributing
  8. comments

March 2026

  1. against AI?
  2. what’s in a name?
  3. Worf has feelings
  4. human and Hedgehog
  5. political Mottramism
  6. Darmok

February 2026

  1. Build
  2. The reading life, the reading death
  3. There but for the grace of Time go I
  4. Homer’s symmetries
  5. Faster
  6. church and cinema
  7. DIY culture
  8. The Picard Principle

January 2026

  1. excerpt from my Sent folder: Trek
  2. a crisis in my fandom history
  3. MacDonald and fantasy
  4. reorientation
  5. analog elites
  6. normalizing
  7. angels in the architecture
  8. Excerpt from my Sent folder: Markdown
  9. done, not done, undone
  10. design amnesia

2025 159

December 2025

  1. expertise in action
  2. Daniel Treier, R.I.P.
  3. The Egyptian
  4. escape clause
  5. Claudia’s dream
  6. two quotations on historicizing
  7. where hope lies
  8. Hugh and Guy
  9. 47879 2
  10. epigraph

November 2025

  1. motion and machine
  2. excerpt from a letter to a friend
  3. Lady Jill Freud
  4. Malocchio
  5. like that
  6. a Euclidean mind
  7. W.H.A. and D.L.S.
  8. back to the brothers
  9. the acceleration of misrepresentation
  10. Tot
  11. Pynchon and Woolf

October 2025

  1. towards Old Man Willow
  2. Murray and Mann
  3. two quotations on economics
  4. the Newman problem
  5. paranoia strikes deep
  6. pinches of Pynchon
  7. judgment day
  8. look who’s reasoning
  9. one condition
  10. Socrates again?
  11. Ella’s Songbooks
  12. should Christians be anarchists?
  13. should Christians be leftists?
  14. revival, retrospection, assessment

September 2025

  1. a slightly embarrassed announcement
  2. consolidation of myth
  3. chaplains in the fire
  4. KK on publishing
  5. unenlightened self-interest
  6. that’s still how it goes, everybody still knows
  7. my Proustian moment
  8. the pleasures of reading

August 2025

  1. the AI business model
  2. something, everything
  3. notes of a supply officer
  4. a word to my students
  5. due diligence
  6. the daily driver
  7. a good and faithful servant
  8. the truth in view
  9. girl Friday
  10. Allan Dwan’s stories
  11. denialism and its counterfeits
  12. my anarchist notebook
  13. the rule book

July 2025

  1. Ulysses and me
  2. 47601 2
  3. Flanagan’s Ireland
  4. hail Satan, but don’t hail Jesus
  5. Cluny Brown
  6. rescue me, O Leviathan
  7. call and response
  8. Sayers and Graves
  9. enemies of the liberal arts
  10. viewpoint diversity revisited
  11. the original of Wimsey
  12. Constantine and Julian
  13. oh the irony
  14. Sayers and Constantine: 6
  15. Sayers and Constantine: 5
  16. Sayers and Constantine: 4
  17. two quotations on giving up and giving in
  18. Sayers and Constantine: 3
  19. Sayers and Constantine: 2

June 2025

  1. Sayers and Constantine: 1
  2. the health of the state
  3. getting through
  4. Cheese
  5. the composer as ASS and other exasperations
  6. mind donation
  7. Buckley
  8. two quotations on doing what I hate
  9. deskilling and demos
  10. two quotations on the humanism of leftovers
  11. nobody learns anything
  12. Swing Street
  13. total action
  14. Peers
  15. 47428 2

May 2025

  1. the plusses and minuses of Gioiatopia
  2. here we go again
  3. when Auden was wrong
  4. Alasdair Macintyre R.I.P.
  5. Doppelgänger
  6. two quotations on the brief dream of the human intellect
  7. yes it is a wonderful world
  8. John and Paul
  9. news that stays news
  10. sadness
  11. Tone
  12. William A. and the future
  13. sentences

April 2025

  1. first notes on consumption
  2. Clark’s Enlightenment
  3. the irrelevance of thinking
  4. a taxonomy of writers: 2
  5. Francis
  6. Moses the roadgiver
  7. Orange Man v Harvard (2024)
  8. on humanism: the big picture
  9. a brief thought on passengers and drivers
  10. standards
  11. forgiveness
  12. two quotations on the effects of phones
  13. handwritten moods
  14. two quotations from The Economist on AI
  15. assumptions

March 2025

  1. Kingsnorth’s Machine
  2. a correspondence
  3. The Box
  4. the sanctuary lamp
  5. spirits of discouragement
  6. the reducing valve and the therapeutic index
  7. a key distinction
  8. distributed localism
  9. vinyl space
  10. green tea and mescaline
  11. on Pygmalion
  12. Cat People
  13. words, words, words
  14. method and madness

February 2025

  1. retirement
  2. dueling letters
  3. the author’s views and ours
  4. Douthat on belief
  5. activism
  6. daffy-down-dilly
  7. Miss Climpson
  8. here we go again
  9. two quotations on survival
  10. true crime
  11. the integrity of the system
  12. happening
  13. Areopagitica

January 2025

  1. Orsinia
  2. Mank
  3. persuasion
  4. doubling
  5. one more round on politics and the university
  6. Garth Hudson, R.I.P.
  7. Humans
  8. things made and in-the-making
  9. two quotations on what exists
  10. you don’t have to be there
  11. priorities
  12. cui bono?
  13. contractualism
  14. ancestry

2024 225

December 2024

  1. the angers of that house
  2. Albion
  3. “gentle parenting”
  4. by the clear light of day
  5. the work itself
  6. Great 2
  7. five true things
  8. unforgiven
  9. intellectual furnishings
  10. further contributions to a demonology
  11. family matters
  12. ars longa
  13. the facts don’t care about your educational philosophy
  14. reasons for tolerance
  15. memory, gratitude, story
  16. 46942 2

November 2024

  1. Substack vs. Indie
  2. 46930 2
  3. 46926 2
  4. disposition
  5. 46919 2
  6. two quotations: Kingsnorth v. Peterson
  7. open up!
  8. Weil and antisemitism
  9. Shield the Joyous
  10. excerpt from my Sent folder: unions
  11. on linkage and editorials
  12. what’s up
  13. just asking questions

October 2024

  1. the Mathom-house
  2. 46876 2
  3. Harrington on Camus
  4. 46872 2
  5. essaying architecture
  6. Court and Spark, half a century on
  7. articulation
  8. juxtaposition
  9. a complaint about complaining
  10. trustfulness
  11. true believers
  12. two roads diverged
  13. Rorty’s bastard children
  14. AI Week!
  15. Auden’s allusions and my errors
  16. writing for money
  17. Saturn and Mimas
  18. administrivia

September 2024

  1. parochialism
  2. three further thoughts on re-enchantment
  3. summary judgment
  4. what Milton isn’t
  5. Jacobs’s First Law
  6. POS, not POSSE
  7. repairers
  8. build beautiful
  9. two quotations on humility
  10. my forever lament
  11. behind the scenes
  12. modes of representation
  13. a numbers game
  14. one more enchanted evening
  15. 46740 2
  16. the Jane Harrison show
  17. more on enchantment
  18. some enchanted evening
  19. the smog of unknowing
  20. 46717 2
  21. re-reading
  22. 46709 2
  23. 46706 2
  24. Tom
  25. unshelved
  26. Grahame and the Inklings
  27. 78s

August 2024

  1. coming … well, not soon, but later
  2. abolish grades
  3. Dr. J’s super-helpful advice to new college students
  4. Dickens and the fairy tale
  5. St. Augustine’s Day
  6. beyond the wild wood
  7. Woke
  8. a horrid region
  9. dark enchantment
  10. Rachmaninoff in Sydney
  11. Mildred Pope
  12. metaphysics and history
  13. topological theology
  14. The Game
  15. after the Re-Learning
  16. courting sickness
  17. on deciding not to read a book
  18. the diaconal charism
  19. anarchism as a spiritual discipline
  20. 46599 2
  21. colonialist owls
  22. the state and the people
  23. styles of acting, styles of being
  24. Guadalcanal: 6

July 2024

  1. Guadalcanal: 5
  2. 46570 2
  3. Guadalcanal: 4
  4. 46565 2
  5. Guadalcanal: 3
  6. Guadalcanal: 2
  7. Guadalcanal: 1
  8. victimology
  9. the rise of detective fiction
  10. 46548 2
  11. Hume’s characters
  12. Hume puts his cards on the table
  13. Hume and literature
  14. political proverbs
  15. un-football
  16. Moonbound revisited
  17. the arc of Hume’s history
  18. human voices
  19. 46475 2
  20. re-humanization
  21. donkey work
  22. Man Hunt (1941)
  23. on the edge
  24. supple and athletic minds
  25. Will Republicans Save the Humanities?

June 2024

  1. 46438 2
  2. counterparts
  3. money is magic
  4. when you’re ready to stop eating grass
  5. what love wants to say
  6. unconditional love
  7. a numbers game
  8. the uncanny valley of blogging
  9. a parable
  10. Soyinka and the mythical method
  11. Thomas of London
  12. 46380 2
  13. more on beauty
  14. starting over
  15. the wanderers and the city
  16. character
  17. the Pentateuch in brief outline
  18. excerpt from my journal
  19. automating bullshit jobs
  20. Genesis: the country and the city
  21. Genesis: fertility
  22. Genesis: orientation

May 2024

  1. Genesis
  2. clichés, yes or no
  3. Odd Man Out
  4. Ruskin revisited
  5. Journeys
  6. a petty resentment
  7. editing
  8. the attention cottage
  9. crushed again
  10. accountability
  11. 46229 2
  12. last words
  13. Ruskin on Color
  14. 46215 2
  15. the archetypal future
  16. temporary storage
  17. try not to think
  18. Perfect Days
  19. Christian Spirituality: categories
  20. intrinsic values
  21. 46195 2
  22. back to the brows
  23. elegance personified (really)
  24. the integrity of science
  25. P s a
  26. Refuge
  27. attention please
  28. brows illustrated
  29. Sayers the middlebrow writer

April 2024

  1. St. Mark’s Place
  2. more rational choices
  3. advancing
  4. influence and citation
  5. more on costs and choices
  6. 46116 2
  7. rational choices
  8. Gilead revisited
  9. Costs
  10. Peace, Peace
  11. adult children
  12. 46073 2
  13. Wystan and Erika
  14. rewilding
  15. Narayan’s Malgudi
  16. everyone knows
  17. to be a pilgrim
  18. Bounce
  19. The Gardener
  20. a letter from Karl Barth
  21. against the factory of unreason

February 2024

  1. I’ll Be Back in Eastertide
  2. Class Notes: Two Renewals
  3. 45992 2
  4. Ceci N’est Pas une Current-Events Post
  5. 45990 2
  6. 45988 2
  7. Timing
  8. Class Notes: Enchiridion
  9. Class notes: Anarchy, Law, Pain
  10. 45978 2

January 2024

  1. Effectual Art
  2. 45965 2
  3. Maggie and her Books
  4. a small parable
  5. a note on plagiarism
  6. placing bets
  7. Fwiw 3
  8. head start
  9. ADD revisited
  10. 45933 2
  11. 45921 2
  12. looking ahead
  13. Silence, Violence, and the Human Condition
  14. Legal Sauce for the Legal Goose
  15. Bertolucci
  16. Arsenal mid-season report
  17. beyond the SCT
  18. The Next Turn of the Wheel
  19. The Real Value of a Catholic Modernity
  20. Who’s Counting?

2023 374

December 2023

  1. 45842 2
  2. on Wagner
  3. 45838 2
  4. Man, Moon, Book
  5. the good earth
  6. 45821 2
  7. Christmas gifts
  8. 45811 2
  9. 45817 2
  10. 45804 2
  11. cost-benefit
  12. words, words, words
  13. multiple social diseases
  14. repair as scapegoat
  15. art for humanity’s sake
  16. exam time!
  17. self-repair
  18. brokenism
  19. 45762 2
  20. Future Mann
  21. 45753 2
  22. bring back the blog
  23. a Beatly note

November 2023

  1. 45747 2
  2. 45745 2
  3. works for me
  4. conceptual Marxism
  5. 45740 2
  6. sound and effects
  7. the personal blog and essayism
  8. 45729 2
  9. writing about the Beatles
  10. two summative thoughts about AI
  11. structure and story
  12. costs, continued
  13. 45702 2
  14. an update on motives
  15. second thoughts, worse thoughts?
  16. candles
  17. Slanted and disenchanted
  18. what everything costs
  19. 45670 2
  20. Mann’s Joseph: 7
  21. 45668 2
  22. time well spent
  23. Mann’s Joseph: 6
  24. signatures
  25. Mann’s Joseph: 5
  26. 45633 2
  27. Mann’s Joseph: 4
  28. time to shut up
  29. Mann’s Joseph: 3
  30. beyond belief
  31. ignorance, vincible and invincible
  32. Mann’s Joseph: 2

October 2023

  1. Mann’s Joseph: 1
  2. greetings from Cahokia
  3. the smoker
  4. Mann’s Joseph: Prelude
  5. Smeagol, philologist
  6. adjusting expectations
  7. the wayfaring mind
  8. one cheer for “negative experience”
  9. the nature of the transaction
  10. periodicity
  11. But even at night …
  12. 45528 2
  13. diseases of the intellect
  14. 45514 2
  15. only mostly dead
  16. begin here
  17. the wisdom of Sturgeon
  18. back to my books
  19. vehicles to devices
  20. the danger of eulogy
  21. Austen and parents
  22. a path forward

September 2023

  1. I’m with “the bloggers”
  2. Auden, fifty years later
  3. 45449 2
  4. department of corrections
  5. my testimony
  6. The Child of Nature and the Citizen
  7. a silent adventure
  8. 45414 2
  9. gardening strategies
  10. fabulism
  11. Auden on Ischia
  12. repetition and summation
  13. x nay
  14. mechanical writing
  15. some thoughts on habitus
  16. Ophuls’ dancers

August 2023

  1. an exercise in branding
  2. bureaucratic sustainability
  3. once brothers
  4. The Scriptural BCP
  5. against apps, for wander lines
  6. what the bird said
  7. Tirzah Garwood
  8. There Babylon is builded in the Waste, founded in Human desolation
  9. Dylan’s conversion
  10. outreach and generativity
  11. 45300 2
  12. 45290 2
  13. 45283 2
  14. R.I.P. Robbie
  15. possible new tagline for this blog
  16. nurturing
  17. 45277 2
  18. 45275 2
  19. 45273 2
  20. Encyclopedia Babylonica 6: Ellul
  21. two quotations on corporations
  22. a blessed 89th birthday to the Mad Farmer
  23. 45261 2
  24. 45165 2
  25. 45247 2
  26. Encyclopedia Babylonica 5: a brief hiatus
  27. 45239 2
  28. 45181 2
  29. ignore strenuously
  30. Encyclopedia Babylonica 4: System

July 2023

  1. 45233 2
  2. on technologies and trust
  3. 45222 2
  4. 45220 2
  5. Encyclopedia Babylonica 3: Daniel
  6. 45204 2
  7. abnegation
  8. Encyclopedia Babylonica 2: Belshazzar
  9. excerpt from my Sent folder: favor
  10. Encyclopedia Babylonica 1: welcome
  11. 45184 2
  12. 45178 2
  13. 45167 2
  14. Unanswered Questions
  15. 45161 2
  16. a little ride in the time machine
  17. 45157 2
  18. 45152 2
  19. 45129 2
  20. 45131 2
  21. my new title
  22. personal organization
  23. starting from zero
  24. academic bullshit
  25. Little, Big
  26. more on SCOTUS and university admissions
  27. Forums
  28. patriotic effusion for Independence Day
  29. 45021 2
  30. Tubing

June 2023

  1. reading SCOTUS
  2. Thomas Pynchon, America’s Theologian
  3. 45057 2
  4. the system
  5. Counterman implications
  6. more on Korematsu
  7. 45040 2
  8. banal utopias
  9. public opinion
  10. 45029 2
  11. in defense of Esther Summerson
  12. Cities, appendix: Sin City
  13. Cities 10: last things
  14. not for me
  15. Cities 9a: the City of God coming down
  16. Cities 9: ends and means
  17. Cities 8: parallels
  18. absolutizing (slight return)
  19. absolutizing and abstraction, conservation and piety
  20. Forthcoming: The Shield of Achilles
  21. Cities 7: a digression on reading
  22. Cities 6: causes
  23. Cities 5: a digression on longtermism
  24. Cities 3b: City and Church

May 2023

  1. Cities 3a: political theology
  2. Cities 4: Secondary Epic
  3. Cities 3: hypothesis
  4. Cities 2: archetype and antithesis
  5. The City and the City
  6. excerpt from my Sent folder: the day of reckoning
  7. I’m no Mr. Miyagi
  8. 44895 2
  9. Tim Keller
  10. the culture question revisited
  11. the three paths of micro.blog
  12. Book Review: Heidegger in Ruins
  13. 44873 2
  14. 44868 2
  15. locating intellectuals
  16. without principle
  17. cosplaying Kingship
  18. 44853 2

April 2023

  1. the Return of the King
  2. 44828 2
  3. a revaluation
  4. 44820 2
  5. Oklahoma and Muswell Hill
  6. an unresizeable window
  7. Christianity and … ?
  8. Reporting World War II
  9. unstacked
  10. the spoils of victory
  11. me against technopoly
  12. 44742 2
  13. beyond daylight ethics
  14. the Oppenheimer Principle revisited
  15. 44727 2
  16. adjustments
  17. 44695 2

March 2023

  1. 44691 2
  2. my proposed law
  3. libraries vs. publishers
  4. beseball revisited
  5. learning from Hume
  6. Technoteachers
  7. 44686 2
  8. 44682 2
  9. 44679 2
  10. 44674 2
  11. Retro
  12. 44672 2
  13. 44654 2
  14. just purchased
  15. humanism renewed
  16. 44665 2
  17. 44644 2
  18. the arbiters
  19. as it must to all men…
  20. 44646 2
  21. slight return
  22. Hiatus 2
  23. of bad book reviewers and writerly cults
  24. 44625 2
  25. 44614 2
  26. 44583 2
  27. 44619 2
  28. 44610 2
  29. excerpt from my Sent folder: progressive
  30. same old song
  31. 44564 2
  32. 44575 2
  33. unstacked
  34. 44585 2
  35. the sovereignty of mercy
  36. 44572 2
  37. 44569 2
  38. 44559 2
  39. 44551 2
  40. 44566 2
  41. 44562 2
  42. 44546 2
  43. possibility
  44. 44554 2
  45. beyond creepiness

February 2023

  1. 44544 2
  2. 44542 2
  3. unsimulated
  4. in brief
  5. 44534 2
  6. a better way
  7. 44526 2
  8. 44524 2
  9. 44520 2
  10. the evacuation of choice
  11. 44515 2
  12. 44513 2
  13. 44507 2
  14. 44505 2
  15. 44489 2
  16. books as toys
  17. plain speaking
  18. 44502 2
  19. 44435 2
  20. the classics are all right
  21. his harshest critic
  22. 44495 2
  23. Albert Murray and me
  24. 44492 2
  25. Twits
  26. 44404 2
  27. 44468 2
  28. 44463 2
  29. question and answer
  30. strings and bows
  31. 44454 2
  32. tradeoffs
  33. 44449 2
  34. 44444 2
  35. self-sacrifice and despair
  36. 44398 2
  37. 44429 2
  38. 44432 2
  39. 44437 2
  40. Blake domesticated
  41. 44414 2
  42. frictionless ignorance
  43. 44406 2
  44. Operation Diogenes
  45. 44381 2
  46. 44295 2
  47. 44379 2
  48. be your own algorithm
  49. Fwiw 2
  50. 44376 2
  51. 44374 2
  52. 44372 2
  53. 44254 2
  54. doin thangs
  55. Gigo
  56. 44283 2
  57. Lebenswelt
  58. 44279 2
  59. inertia

January 2023

  1. weapons and separations
  2. more, please
  3. 44265 2
  4. schooled
  5. 44263 2
  6. 44260 2
  7. the end of the timeline era
  8. note to self
  9. 44215 2
  10. Dunsany’s games
  11. focal practices for pilgrim people: intervals
  12. burn after reading
  13. 44212 2
  14. reflections
  15. R. I. P. Lin Brehmer
  16. enshittification
  17. the buffered self in Fairy Land
  18. 44209 2
  19. moderation in consistency: fantasy edition
  20. the post-literate academy and this blog
  21. two views of Iain McGilchrist
  22. 44187 2
  23. 44171 2
  24. 44183 2
  25. 44131 2
  26. trouble
  27. comping
  28. the ed-tech business model
  29. 44165 2
  30. 44111 2
  31. Peeved
  32. 44154 2
  33. 44142 2
  34. the Christian and the hearth
  35. 44140 2
  36. 44138 2
  37. allegory of … something
  38. one more word on Kael
  39. Truth
  40. greatness in film
  41. one of the classic blunders
  42. 44104 2
  43. projects and methods
  44. 44093 2
  45. 44090 2
  46. 44087 2
  47. 44085 2
  48. 44079 2
  49. why Kael matters
  50. 44053 2
  51. pre-empted
  52. 44063 2
  53. Cassiodorus College
  54. 44055 2
  55. the home’s sacred fire
  56. 44051 2
  57. 44048 2
  58. The Year of Focal Practices

← 2020–2022