My Year in Writing: 2016
54 Essays, ICYMI
My first article of the year was for Antiwar.com, where I had a weekly column:
My second piece was for Antimedia, which I write for periodically:
Another Antiwar column:
This Antimedia piece had major reach on Facebook:
Some geopolitical news coverage for Antimedia:
In my next Antiwar column, I apply the “herd mind” analysis inspired by Randolph Bourne that has been one of the biggest themes in my foreign policy writing:
My first of many anti-politics articles for this presidential campaign year. This was inspired by an article by Austrian economist Mark Brandly. I sent my piece to Mark, and he liked it so much, he said he would assign it in his university classes:
The movie Suicide Squad wouldn’t come out for months, but I wrote this article based on an early trailer, and after reading several issues of the comic book run from the 80s:
The killing of Lavoy Finicum, and how progressives gloated over it, really bothered me. So I wrote this article comparing it to the murder of Michael Brown and the equally disgusting response of conservatives:
Antiwar.com commissioned me to write a hand-out for tabling use at the International Students for Liberty Conference. I misunderstood what they were looking for, so my first try ended up being a libertarian anti-war manifesto compiling themes from many of my Antiwar.com columns from the past year:
Another piece written in outrage at a state-sanctioned killing:
Over the holiday break, I had read a great book on the Dulles brothers by Stephen Kinzer. It made me realize a parallel between the Cold War and the Terror War. In this article, I applied the “Gray Zone” analysis featured in several of my columns from last year to the Cold War:
Syria was one of my main beats as a geopolitics columnist:
More anti-presidential-campaign-madness stuff:
I followed up Kinzer’s book by reading David Talbot’s book on Allen Dulles. I wrote an article comparing the two:
The previous year, I delivered a lecture at the Mises Institute on “How the Fed Feeds War,” and adapted an article from my speech. Embedded in both was a way of explaining how the Fed inflates that I thought was better than any I had ever seen. I thought it deserved its own article, so I wrote one. This is perhaps the most well-crafted economics article I’ve written:
I went into some interesting political history with this piece:
I delivered a talk for Liberty on the Rocks in downtown Los Angeles based on my “Peace Is the Keystone of Liberty.” I spun off some of the new material I created for the speech into a new article:
In case you haven’t noticed, I really enjoy drawing detailed parallels:
Here’s me pointing out something that Islamophobes inveterately miss:
Outrage over US/Saudi war crimes in Yemen:
Combining my anti-politics and anti-war writing:
I had been reading Hayek for some curriculum work for FEE, which inspired me to write this piece, applying his thought to foreign policy. Larry Reed loved this essay:
A column smashing humanitarian interventionism:
An interesting profile:
Combining my anti-schooling and anti-war stuff:
I wrote an intro and conclusion and reached out to Isaac Morehouse, founder and CEO of Praxis, to write the list part of this “listicle.” He kindly and gladly obliged. This was my first byline on a FEE.org article, and it was a big hit in terms of traffic and shares. It was also the first of many articles of mine exploring how the freedom philosophy is a life philosophy.
Some of the themes of the previous article, applied to career success:
This Antiwar column weaves all the major movies of the Marvel Cinematic Universe and the DC Extended Universe and makes a sweeping point about what they say about our post-9/11 culture. I was pretty happy to have been able to pull it off:
Combining my anti-schooling, freedom/life philosophy, and anti-war themes:
This next piece was a major milestone for me. In it, I integrated my old work on Mises’s social philosophy with my work on Randolph Bourne’s war analysis from the past year. It weaved together two major eras of my writing career. The first link is the Antiwar.com version and the second one is the FEE.org version:
A quick piece for FEE:
The turmoil of the summer of 2016 had begun. I’m really proud of the high-minded content that FEE put out, which countered the media frenzy with a serene message of peace, liberty, and reconciliation. In response to the Orlando attack, I wrote this article once again weaving together several themes of my previous writing:
I managed to get this piece out rapidly after Brexit’s victory was announced, so it was a huge hit:
The next was ultimately an even bigger hit, thanks in part to being paired with awesome free ebooks. In this piece, I traced common themes through some of the classic short works of Mises, Hayek, Read, Bastiat, and Hazlitt.
Returning to the “impunity” theme of past article:
More response to the turmoil:
Combining my anti-political stuff with my anti-schooling stuff:
More Brexit coverage:
A restatement of my “Your Career Is an Enterprise” thesis:
Another piece co-written with Isaac:
This was fun:
For Mises’s birthday, I extended this older piece of mine.
A quick response to current events/discourse:
I gave an anti-politics talk for Liberty on the Rocks Atlanta. This Antimedia piece was based on the first part:
Reading Harry Browne’s How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World gave me an integrated framework for my anti-schooling and freedom philosophy as life philosophy themes, and stimulating my entry into self-help writing:
Next one based on the second part of my Antimedia talk:
Applying my anti-politics and self-help themes to the recent election outcome:
A tribute to the Age of Liberalism and the Industrial Revolution:
A sequel to the previous article, explaining how many societal advances were reversed:
Another self-help/life philosophy piece. Isaac Morehouse called this one phenomenal:
I really like the way I debunk the fallacy of technological unemployment in this newsy piece for FEE:
Another self-help piece, this time more specific:
At the end of the year, I edited a book called “Your Life, Your Work” that includes essays by Jeffrey Tucker, Isaac Morehouse, and more. It also features all of my FEE.org articles on career, self-improvement, etc., plus some older parenting articles of mine that I had reprinted on FEE.org this year. Here is the introduction I wrote for the book, which presents more systematically how the freedom philosophy is a life philosophy:
I reprint all of my articles on DanSanchez.me. You can also check out my “Year in Writing” posts for 2015 and 2014.
Thanks for reading!
