publications
2022
The Arieti Project
The Arieti Project: Dialogues Past and Present is a collection of video and audio dialogues recorded with and by my long-time friend, teacher, and editor, James Alexander Arieti, Ph.D. to mark his retirement as Thompson Professor of Classics at Hampden-Syndey College. The site also features my essay on the role of the Classics in modern culture and life.
2022
Thematiks
The origin of this project was a years-long search for an easy way to stay current with the best academic business research. Rather than spend hours looking through business school websites, I wanted one site where we could read translations of great research with real-world business relevance. Unable to find such a resource, I decided to create it.
2025
Critic at Large
This newsletter is a weekly look at cultural creations — literature, art, film, music, etc. — old and new. Each week I examine a particular work and discuss its artistic and creative value. My aim with each post is to illuminate cultural works, especially ancient and/or obscure creations, worth experiencing.
2023
The Rules of Persuasion
The Rules of Persuasion analyzes persuasion as a social process rather than a speaking technique. Drawing on rhetoric, history, and institutional communication, it studies why messages succeed, fail, or produce unintended effects. The book concentrates on the audience’s role in constructing meaning and on how persuasive methods can stabilize cooperation or distort judgment. The project revisits classical rhetorical theory and traces its operation in modern environments, including leadership communication and networked media.
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2026
My Leaf and I
In June of 2022, my son Enzo, who had just completed his first year of journalism school at the University of Maryland, was killed in a bicycling accident. In the year that followed his death, I kept an online journal that chronicled the road I traveled after losing my son. That story of loss, sorrow, and, ultimately, peace is contained in this volume.
2026
The Angel of Numbers
In the 1970s and 80s, Italy lived through an intensely brutal war to control the emerging heroin trade that plunged the nation into chaos and almost destroyed it. In the midst of this constant violence and death, Magistrate Paolo Borromeo risks everything to battle the unseen forces of organized crime tearing the nation apart. Inspired, and based on, the life of legendary Italian prosecutor Giovanni Falcone, The Angel of Numbers tells the moving, and heroic, story of Borromeo, his wife Anna, and the men and women on both sides of this epic struggle for the soul of a nation.
2027
Eight Below Zero
Eight Below Zero tells the story of the secret trials of an inner circle of eight ministers and generals after the death of the dictator they served for three decades. Set in an unnamed country, it is an examination of the allure of tyranny and the forces that corrupt those who give anything to hold and keep power.