About

I spend most of my time looking for the same idea in different places — the moment when a pattern in one tradition turns out to be a pattern in another, not because someone borrowed it, but because the structure was always there, waiting to be surfaced. Hermetic principles in the archive. Sufi parables inside Borges stories. The geometry of one system of thought visible through the lens of another. What I mean by “thinking” is this: the discovery that two apparently unlike things share a structure, and that the structure teaches you something neither thing could teach alone.

I teach French at a high school in the Chicago suburbs, and the classroom is where most of this thinking gets tested. Teaching is not a day job that funds the intellectual life; it is the intellectual life in its most demanding form. What I know about attention, about reading, about how understanding actually works — I learned most of it from seventeen-year-olds who had no reason to pretend.

The rest of my working life is civic: grant writing and capacity-building for the township, the slow work of making local institutions function rather than merely persist. It is structurally similar to teaching — you show up, you do the unglamorous thing, and the thing holds together because someone did.

What I am reading and thinking about right now is here. What formed me is here. What I think about teaching is here. What I build is here.

I live in Chicagoland with my partner Rania. We are building a life together across two countries and two languages, which turns out to be its own kind of structural comparison.