Edokwin Editorial

This year, my favorite therapist who shares his name with a hardware company, Grainger, has been thinking carefully and publicly about forgiveness; what it is, what it isn’t, and what it costs the person who withholds it. One of his cleaner observations is that forgiveness is not restoration. It requires only one party. The person who was harmed does not need t…

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you probably noticed a certain viral “Open Letter” come across the bow. I saw it first, the day it dropped (June 3rd - 2026), when it was at less than a hundred likes and shares. The piece currently stands, as of June 8th, at just shy of 5k on this platform alone, and has probably escaped containment, as the kids say, several times over—meaning being shared outside its niche, even shared off-platform and across the broader internet.

I’m sitting here trying to figure out how to open what is, in many ways, a very positive piece. A friendly change of pace in some regards. Many know me as a critic. Some think me a hater. But I contain multitudes, and I stand on the shoulders of giants. Let me tell you who I like. And, if I may, who I am like. My role models. My inspirations.

On hanlon's razor, epistemic privilege, and the difference between a right versus a microphone There is an old Catholic maxim that cuts through centuries of ecclesial Latin with uncomfortable directness: error non habet ius — error has no rights. The proposition is not subtle. It holds that falsehood, by virtue of being falsehood, forfeits any claim to protection, platforming, or propagation. Truth has rights. Error does not. The Church drew the obvious conclusion and acted on it.

Once a month I post a recollection and admission of sorts. My fears and foibles, my trangressions and travesties. It is an exercise I developed at home and in private, inspired by Eastern spiritual practices. Now I bring it to you in the confines of this secluded refuge. A ritual repentance.

Incentives, Principles, and Playing the Long Game In 2023, a superPAC running influence operations for Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s presidential campaign approached social audio creators with an offer: $500 per episode to promote RFK on the mic. The money came with one condition—keep quiet about where it came from. I was among those approached. I declined. I’m telling you this not to congratulate myself.

And We Shouldn’t Care Even If It Were Christopher “Chris” Nolan is one of the Top 5 greatest living directors in anglophone filmmaking. He is best known for speculative epics like Inception or Interstellar, as well as elevated genre fare like the Dark Knight trilogy. His last film, Oppenheimer, cleaned up at the box office, enamored critics and audiences alike, and even soared through the preening annual cinematic tradition colloquially known as Awards Season.

Advice from a Man of the Left to People Who've Falsely Surrendered the Moral High Ground There’s a particular kind of conversation you’ve probably had—or watched, or enabled—that goes something like this: someone makes a claim steeped in tribal self-flattery, and you reflexively recoil.

Why the Rivers of Change Flow Through Emboldened Allies, Not Coddled Enemies Uri Kurlianchik said something worth sitting with: “My main objective online is not to change the minds of my enemies, but to make my friends bolder by showing them that they’re not alone.” It’s a clean formulation. But it implies something most political writers won’t say outright, so let me say it: persuasion, in any meaningful political sense, is largely predetermined. You are not changing minds.

Let’s address an open secret that anyone could work out by adding up my outputs: I do more paid than free pieces now, yet that used to be inverted. For a long time the ratio was heavily weighted toward free— free feed on Substack, free pitches on spec, free Tumblr, free everything. Yet there was always a small and growing paid side…on the periphery. The…