Baron Wormser: The Good Life
It’s plain that the world as we know it is literally choking on its machine- and money-driven complexity.
Baron Wormser: Poetry and Paradise
One of the defining aspects of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s first novel, This Side of Paradise, is poetry. The novel, devoted to the boyhood, young manhood, and then manhood proper (which is to say—war, disillusionment, and lost love) of Amory Blaine, traces the evolution of Amory’s sensibility.
Baron Wormser: Doing Great
If a book can be both good-natured and lacerating, Voltaire’s is that book.
Baron Wormser: Remembering the Alchemists & Other Essays
One sentence speaks for all his direct, well-wrought sentences: “We are inside the largest militarist society the world has ever known, and we are at war always.”
Vox Populi: The 15 most popular posts of 2022
During 2022, Vox Populi published 737 posts including poetry, essays and short films. Here are the fifteen most visited.
Baron Wormser: Lives of the Heroes
When I was a boy, around the ages of nine and ten, I read dozens of biographies. I can still see the books.
Baron Wormser: The Nightmare of Power
Over and over, I read and hear about power. The United States is a power, a great power, a super-power locked in ineluctable contests with other powers that pundits comment … Continue reading
Richard Cambridge: In Medias Res
Tom, the eldest son of Daniel and Helen Brownson, tells his parents he has dropped out of college. He is now in the crosshairs of the draft board and will be re-classified 1-A — a good chance he will be sent to — and possibly die in Vietnam.
Baron Wormser: Against Hope
Hope gives us a margin for our industriousness that keeps inventing new purposes for new machines, an industriousness that often seems to be only making everything worse.
Baron Wormser: The Shuffle
Lost my soul in the shuffle.
Got a self instead.
Not a fair deal, not even-Steven,
Not Roger-dodger.
Baron Wormser: “Technology is our fate” 
Thus spoke the high-modernist architect Mies van der Rohe in the middle of the twentieth century. Nothing since then has refuted his remark. If anything, a good deal more fuel … Continue reading
Baron Wormser: Oona
When you have a dog, you get to participate in another creature’s being, a creature who wants to be with you, a human being.
Baron Wormser: Ghosts
All the chatter about “family values” presupposes that women pick up whatever difficulties they are faced with and go forward with a happy, maternal smile. Seduced and abandoned does not exist in such an aggressively wholesome universe.
