Ars Est Mendacium

The first thing you see is not a chord, not a face, not even a name. It is motion. Four young men in suits run like they are late for their own lives, and behind them comes a crowd that looks less like fans than weather, a sudden front rolling down a London street. The camera keeps up just enough to prove this is real, or at least real enough that your body believes it. It is a funny opening, until you notice what the joke is actually built on. They are not running toward something. They are running away from everything. That is the quiet truth inside  A Hard Day’s Night . For all its grin, for all its bounce and wordplay, it is a film about being pursued, packaged, scheduled, and watched. It looks like play while describing work. It laughs while documenting a life that cannot stop long enough to feel its own weight. That is why it still holds. Not because it is “about The Beatles ” in the commemorative sense, but because it is about the moment a human being becomes a public obje...

I’ve owned  The Art of War  longer than I can remember. That’s not a boast. It’s an admission. Some books don’t arrive as events. They arrive as companions. They sit on shelves. They move houses. They get replaced when bindings fail. You don’t talk about them much because they’ve already done their work quietly. They become part of how you think without announcing themselves. I read Sun Tzu early in my career, when everything felt sharper and more absolute. I read it again later, when decisions carried names and consequences. I read it again after that, when experience had stripped away some certainty and replaced it with caution. Each time, the book felt less like instruction and more like a warning. Less about how to win and more about how easily you can lose by misunderstanding what you’re actually doing. Sun Tzu never cared about battle the way people think he did. He cared about restraint. About clarity. About recognizing when force is a failure of imagination rather tha...

Most paintings about death want something from you. They want belief, or fear, or reverence. They want you to leave reassured that the end has been explained, domesticated, and given a narrative shape you can live with. Even when they are dark, they tend to offer instructions on how to feel. The Cup of Death  does not. It offers no lesson, no promise, no warning. It presents a moment that has already resolved itself, and asks nothing more than your willingness to witness it. The longer you stand with it, the clearer this becomes. There is no struggle underway. No moral argument is being staged. Whatever needed deciding has already happened off the canvas, somewhere internal and inaccessible to us. What remains is not drama, but procedure. That is why the painting feels so still. That stillness is not peace. It is acceptance after resistance has been spent. Painted in the late nineteenth century by  Elihu Vedder ,  The Cup of Death  shows a winged figure guiding a wom...

Photos by the author, Antietam National Battlefield , December 2025. You don’t expect to find yourself in a line of cars that feels like a vigil. Yet that’s how the evening began: creeping westbound along Route 34 , heaters humming, everyone tucked into their own little pocket of warmth while the December air hardened outside. Cars were already parked along the shoulder, neatly arranged as if part of the ritual. No chatter. No horns. Just a silent procession of headlights, each one pointed toward a field that has known more darkness than most landscapes in this country ever will. We waited along that stretch with the kind of patience people usually reserve for chapels. The radio stayed off. No one around us cracked their windows. We watched the condensation collect at the corners of the glass. At the same time, a YouTube video droned softly from a phone, the Threads of the National Tapestry episode titled “Sheer Unadulterated Violence.” An unflinching reminder of what happened here, n...