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The Fortnightly Circular
The Fortnightly Circular

Back Numbers

Every number of The Fortnightly Circular remains in print. The current number is on the front page; earlier numbers are collected here in the order they appeared.

Vol. I · No. 2 · Current number

Fall 2026

  1. Cover story · Education & Policy What Did McCleary Buy? By R.W. Calder The Seattle Times asks whether Washington is meeting its constitutional commitment to education. The court answered that in 2018 by counting dollars. A better question is whether the children learned anything, and on the one test that is the same in every state, the answer so far is no.
Vol. I · No. 1

Spring 2026

The inaugural number.

  1. Cover story · Foreign Voices Iran, Give Me My Country Back By Ramzi Khalil Nassar A Lebanese architect in exile since 1984 argues that the price of Tehran's grip on Beirut is measured in lost decades, captured institutions, and a country no longer answerable to its own people.
  2. Analysis · Geopolitics Nowruz vs. the Mahdi By J. Alderton Vane Iran's ancient spring festival and its messianic state religion are in a civilizational contest. The outcome will shape the Middle East for decades.
  3. Analysis · Finance & AI When Every LLM Says "Buy": Agentic AI and the Future of Fund Management By J. Alderton Vane If four leading AI systems unanimously recommend the same stock, has the research told you anything at all? A dissection of what human fund managers can still do that no model can replicate — and why most of them probably shouldn't bother trying.
  4. Analysis · Writing & AI When AI Prose Is Worth Reading By H.C. Whitmore The question is not who wrote the words. The question is whether someone with genuine curiosity and editorial judgment directed the work — and took responsibility for the result.
  5. Light Reading · History Stop Calling Me "The Great" By R.W. Calder by Alexander, Son of Philip of Macedon, King of Kings
  6. Light Reading · Culture & History Iran: From Zoroastrianism to Shia Islam By Eleanora Sefton Twenty-five centuries of spiritual identity, conquest, and reinvention on the Iranian plateau.
  7. Light Reading · Food & Culture A Brief, Occasionally Embarrassing History of Ice Cream By R.W. Calder Nobody knows exactly who invented ice cream, which is a travesty, because that person deserves a statue, a holiday, and possibly a Nobel Prize.
  8. Analysis · Politics & History My Side Always Wins in the Long Run By Eleanora Sefton Noah Smith says liberalism always wins in the end. We think he's mistaken — not because liberal ideas fail, but because the Great Conversation has no sides, and the movements that claim credit for progress are riding waves they didn't create.
  9. Analysis · Geopolitics The Experts Had Their Turn By J. Alderton Vane Gary Sick has spent forty years thinking about what he got wrong on Iran. He still hasn't considered the possibility that his method — not just his conclusions — might be the problem.
  10. Analysis · Politics & Technology Warning: The More You Use AI, the More You'll Turn Republican By H.C. Whitmore AI is following the climate pattern, not the internet pattern — and the partisan sorting has already begun.
  11. Analysis · Intellectual History The Woman Who Made Kant Interesting By Eleanora Sefton A Prussian countess shaped Kant's thinking for thirty years. The philosophical tradition barely noticed.
  12. Analysis · Technology & Policy The Internet Nobody Planned By H.C. Whitmore The most consequential technology platform of the late twentieth century emerged not from a grand plan but from productive friction between competing interests. What that means for AI.

The Fortnightly Circular · No. 2 · Fall 2026