Dive Bar Professor
Ideas worth spending time with.
Essays, curricula, questions, and intellectual rabbit holes for people who never stopped wanting to know things.
latest Essay
why peace feels dangerous after trauma
What happens when you’ve spent so long surviving that peace starts to feel suspicious? An essay about hyper-vigilance, the strange grief of leaving survival mode, and learning to trust a life that no longer requires you to brace for impact.
Hypervigilance: When Your Body Still Thinks the War Is Happening
The Dark Night of the Soul is Not Aesthetic
The Guardian, Substack, and the Fight for the Narrative
from the desk
current curiosity
TAROT, ONE CARD AT A TIME.
I’m learning tarot the same way I like to learn anything else: slowly, curiously, and without needing to master it.
Each week, Dive Bar Professor will spend time with one card—its imagery, symbolism, history, and the questions it leaves behind.
Not so much “What will happen?” as “What might this help us notice?”
current rabbit hole
Why We Tell Ghost Stories: Western Pennsylvania Appalachia
I’m starting close to home, or at least close to where my family comes from. I’m digging into the folklore, ghost stories, superstitions, and everyday traditions of western Pennsylvania Appalachia, especially around Perryopolis, where my grandmother grew up.
I’m less interested in collecting spooky stories than in the things people carried without necessarily calling them folklore: warnings passed down, strange beliefs treated as common sense, stories everyone in town seemed to know, and the little rituals that survived simply because that’s how things were done.
Along the way, I’ll be asking my grandmother what she remembers—not just the stories themselves, but who told them, when they were told, and what people actually believed.
Wander through the archive
Enjoying what you’ve found?
—a growing collection of essays, observations, and conversations worth returning to.
