essays/index.html

Left over from the old unreasonable.org. See the new site! These are some of my hopefully-interesting essays and papers. The opinions expressed are mine and not necessarily those of any other person or organization.

• Some speculations on the drive to alter consciousness. Written for an Honors seminar on the brain and the mind. November 1990.
• Essays about the war on drugs. These four essays were written for Engl 391H, an Honors section of the required upper-level writing class at the University of Maryland, College Park.
  • The first addresses why our current policy is problematic: what's wrong with the War on Drugs? March 1991.
  • The second focuses on how the problem came to be: why do we have a War on Drugs? April 1991.
  • The third focuses on the damage to Constitutional principles caused by the War on Drugs. April 1991.
  • The fourth puts it all together and develops a strategy for attacking the problem. May 1991.
• Letters to the Editor of the Diamondback, the UMCP campus newspaper.
  • A piece about the Gulf War. I'm proud of this one; I think it's as good as any other editorial on the war I saw around the time. January 1991.
  • Thoughts on vegetarianism and the appointment of poultry magnate Frank Perdue to the University of Maryland Board of Regents. March 1991.
• In November of 1992, some friends and I put on a large vegetarian potluck, the "Veggie Fest," an opportunity to educate and dispel the common myths about vegetarianism and to answer the most common question: "What do you eat?" We created a program for the event featuring essays by the organizers; this is mine.
• The CDA is a crime against humanity. February 1996.