Happy New Year!

Looking back at 2025

This year the Rocinante podcast took up most of my creative energies and ended up becoming a kind of educational exploration, which is what I wanted it to be. It required a lot of reading and it was absolutely worth it. The world is clearer to me now than it was this time last year, from Nixonian drug policy to the stopping power of water. In 2026 I’m going to immediately get back to writing too but for now I want to look back over some of the episodes I most enjoyed, in case you missed them.

I hope you all have a happy New Year. Thank you for your support and thanks to Sean Padraig McCarthy and Nick Biddle

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Our first official episode in which we discussed our show’s title, Rocinante, and our love of Gore Vidal…

In this one we discussed Caravaggio as a model of how visionary patronage can bring out the genius in an anti-social person…

In this one I talked to Louis Elton about his Nation of Artisans project and asked if man-made art has a future…

In this episode I spoke to Philip Cunliffe about his book on nationalism…

Sean and I discussed Michael Hudson’s work on financialization and civilization…

I learned a lot from Mearsheimer’s book on international relations realism. Learning the basics of development (which you can get from Erik Reinert’s Other Canon) and the basics of realism are the best guide to understanding anything that is happening in the world, past present or future….

I happened to spot a Don Quixote appreciation post on Notes by an excellent writer and thinker Toby Shandy and decided to invite him on to discuss it…

In which we discuss Nixon’s good drug policy…

Our epsiode on free speech…

We had the historian Donal Fallon on to discuss the tragic and extraordinary life of Roger Casement…