Metaphysical Image

Since you have already found this website, you can quickly discover most of what is worth knowing about me. I have a background in law (Georgetown University Law Center, Class of 1979) but I have worked most of my life as an editor and writer. Sometimes that has been as a legal editor, sometimes as a polemicist, and sometimes as an unaffiliated but not wholly unrespectable scholar.

After long thought, I realized that the most important thing in life is to be helpful. So, I have taken to explaining things, carefully and empathetically, and often at very great length. For the many kind people who ask: yes, I suppose the writings on this site do hang together, after a fashion. "Spengler with a Smile" is how I usually characterize the organizing principle.

Most of what I have written, and almost all that I have published, has been archived here. The exception is a column on airline regulation I wrote for many years, called The Federal Papers. Only a few samples of that column are online, the ones I judged to be of general interest. A now sadly dated version of my publishing history is available in my Curriculum Vitae.

Readers who visit my website seem to enjoy the book reviews best, and I enjoy writing them. I enjoy writing them best of all, however, when I am being paid for the exercise. Readers who are also publishers are invited to commission book reviews and other items. I am always happy to revise existing items for a reprint.