Geography Concepts: A Personal View

 This is exactly the kind of map that looks simple until you realize it is really a map of ships, empires, habits, climates, plantations, breakfast tables, and human stubbornness. Look at the map and it seems to be about two drinks. Tea in green. Coffee in brown. But of course it is not about drinks. It is about history pretending to be a kitchen cabinet. Start in China, where tea becomes not merely something you drink, but something you do. A ritual. A pause. A civilization in a cup. From there it moves along trade routes, into Central Asia, Russia, India, Persia, the Arab world, and eventually into that odd little damp island off Europe that will become obsessed with it. Britain does not just drink tea. Britain builds a timetable around it. But then comes the great imperial trick. Britain wants Chinese tea, but China does not especially want British woolen socks, machine parts, or lectures. So Britain looks at India and says, in effect: splendid, we shall grow China over ...

 Three Romes and a Funeral for an Empire Here is one of the great strange ideas in world regional geography: sometimes a city stops being only a city. It becomes a claim. Rome was not just a place on a map. It was power, law, empire, roads, armies, aqueducts, Latin, bishops, marble, and a certain confidence that history had chosen its favorite address. Then Rome, the city, declined. The western half of the Roman Empire collapsed in 476. But here is the trick: the Roman Empire did not exactly die. It moved east. Constantine had already built a new imperial capital at Byzantium, renamed Constantinople, in 330. It sat at one of the best geographic locations on Earth, where Europe and Asia nearly touch and the Black Sea opens toward the Mediterranean. It was a tollbooth, fortress, trading hub, imperial capital, and holy city all at once. Not bad real estate. To the people living there, this was not “the Byzantine Empire.” That name came later. They thought they were Romans. They ...

  AI and the New Machinery of Dispossession There is a habit, when a new technology arrives, of treating it as though it were self-contained. A machine appears, or a system, or now a model, and we speak of it as if it had descended from nowhere, immaculate, severed from history. We say: here is artificial intelligence. What will it do? Will it write our memos, drive our cars, diagnose our illnesses, perhaps compose our poems badly and our legal briefs passably? And because the machine dazzles, because it seems to speak, and because it answers in a tone of synthetic confidence, we imagine that the story begins there, with the glowing surface. But it does not. It begins much earlier, in an older pattern of human arrangement. It begins with the persistent genius of modern capitalism for finding new things to enclose, new spaces to reorganize, new habits to turn into property, and new forms of cooperation to convert into private gain. Artificial intelligence, in that sense, is not m...

  Why I keep writing in different “styles” You might have noticed that some of my posts sound different from others. That’s on purpose. I’m not changing personalities — I’m using different ways of seeing the world. In geography (and honestly in life), there’s never just one correct lens. Complex problems need multiple perspectives. So I’ve been writing through four different viewpoints to help practice that: The Networked View looks at how everything connects — how decisions in one place ripple through supply chains, ecosystems, economies, and communities. The Moral View asks what responsibility comes with knowledge and power. It focuses on people, consequences, and what we owe one another. The Inspiring View zooms out. It looks at humanity as one species on one planet, shaped by climate, resources, and long timelines. The Critical Lens asks harder questions: Who benefits? Who loses? Who controls the story? It examines power, inequality, and the systems beneath everyday...

  Rollover Neoliberalism: Extending Market Rule Beyond the Roll-Back/Roll-Out State in the Trump Era David McKay Abstract This paper revisits the well-known “roll-back/roll-out” framework of neoliberalization and proposes a related extension: rollover neoliberalism . If roll-back describes the dismantling of Keynesian/social-democratic protections and roll-out describes the building of new market-conforming institutions, rollover names a later tendency: neoliberal logics spilling into domains that were not previously central battlegrounds of market rule —a kind of “map rolling” beyond its old edges. Rollover neoliberalism is not merely privatization or deregulation; it is the proliferation of market metrics, contracting, quasi-markets, risk scoring, and managerial discipline into spheres such as immigration detention, platform-mediated work, digital information ecosystems, and administrative governance itself. The paper argues that Trump-era governance—across the first term (20...

You are standing in a parking lot in Minnesota in January, which is basically nature’s way of saying, “Sure, humans invented civilization, but I still own the thermostat.” A delivery truck idles nearby, exhaling little clouds like a bored dragon. A driver in a neon vest tosses a cardboard box onto a dolly. The box is ordinary. Brown. Anonymous. It could contain socks, a blender, a book about the fall of empires, or—because we live in the strangest timeline—an inflatable T. rex costume. It doesn’t matter what’s inside. Because the box itself is the story. Not the cardboard box—the other one. The box you never see. A steel rectangle, the size of a small room, that has quietly rearranged the planet. And to see how, you have to follow the box backwards. So: the truck. Why does the truck exist as an organism in North America’s ecosystem? Because the highway exists. And the highway exists because, in the mid-20th century, a bunch of governments decided to pour money into roads the w...