A resolution
Dear Francis,
Merry Christmas to you and yours!
'Tis the season—the season of resolutions and habits and promises. The new year is barreling toward us, and on Jan. 1, 2026, humanity will release into the atmosphere an untold number of little pledges, most of which will vanish into the unknown like so many escaped balloons at a children's birthday party.
Not my commitments, mind you. I intend on holding onto mine good and hard. As a child, I loathed the idea that my balloon might float away from me ad astra and burn up somewhere near the Kármán line, so I kept a tight grip on the string. And so it shall be with my New Year's resolutions.
At least, that's what I'm telling myself right now. Check back in with me in a few months!
One of my resolutions is to write to you more frequently. I so enjoy our epistolary conversations, and I wish to dedicate myself to scribbling at least a few thoughts to you once a week. You are a keen observer of human nature in general, and U.S. and European politics in particular, and it profits me mightily to bounce ideas off you and read your sundry cogitations.
In the last week alone, I have finished Susan Choi's lyrical and deeply human novel, Flashlight, re-listened to a 2020 podcast episode in which Ezra Klein interviews Yascha Mounk on cancel culture and free speech, absorbed about a million hot takes on the internecine conflict that has rent the right between conservatives and populists and postliberals and Christian nationalists and Catholic integralists and others who reject liberalism, and more.
The end result has been that I have a surfeit of ideas bouncing around inside the ol' noggin.
I have also had, as you know, a year of highs and lows. The first half of the year revolved around the death of my precious sister, whom I loved and miss more than I can convey. The second has centered on my first child, who is growing like a beanstalk in my wife's womb.
We have much to discuss.
At Christmas Eve service, we sang It Came Upon a Midnight Clear. One line stood out to me: "For lo! the days are hastening on." And indeed they are, with all the gloom and felicity that typically entails.
As Prince Charles Edward Stuart says repeatedly in the second season of Outlander, "Mark me!". Yes, mark me, Francis—I will write you with a regularity that will surprise and, I hope, delight you. Look forward to a steady stream of letters, and I will look forward to the same (because you have always been, unlike me, actually rather adept at responding in a normal amount of time).
With affection, SEW