I have an essay forthcoming in The Missouri Review!
It's an essay about free will denial and is part of my larger project about truths we know but cannot believe, which I am exploring here in the Armchair Vertigo newsletter. Please share with a friend.
The Missouri Review will be publishing my 7500-word narrative nonfiction essay on free will denial in their Summer 2026 issue. My essay is about the gap between what we know versus what we believe and can actually live by—focusing on free will deniers like Robert Sapolsky, Stanford biologist, and author of Behave and Determined.
From my essay:
Sapolsky is convinced we do not have free will; so, from his perspective, he knows it. But he’s admitted he catches himself reverting to the default setting of free will belief every time he nonchalantly accepts responsibility. “Someone says, ‘You’re dressed nice today,’ and I say, ‘Thanks,’ as if I had anything to do with it,” Sapolsky joked during a guest appearance on NPR’s Radiolab.
The essay is expected to appear on the Project MUSE website on June 19, with physical copies reaching subscribers later in mid-July. The free will essay is part of a larger project about what we know but do not believe.
I’m using the weeks before publication (and after) to build a larger conversation around those ideas here in the Armchair Vertigo newsletter and website.
Thank you for already being a subscriber. Please consider sending this or later newsletters to anyone you know who might be interested. It would help me out a lot.
And it’s all free. (Free and paid get same content. Paid is just a way to say thanks for those with the monetary means.)
Subscribers can look forward to more behind-the-scenes posts on what it was like to write the forthcoming piece. Plus companion essays on other truths we know but do not believe. One long-form essay each week. No mere “content.”
Ask a friend to subscribe if they want literary nonfiction about what it’s like to live with ideas—philosophical and scientific—that clash with ordinary life… that disturb our pre-theoretical ways of being, and derange those practices, ideas and concepts germane to day-to-day living.
Read me for:
The examined life as literary subject: I experiment in the genre of “autotheory,” à la Maggie Nelson. It’s theory applied to one’s own life. Ideas made felt, not just understood.
Literary nonfiction about mortality, meaning, happiness, grief, and self-deception: What resources can philosophy provide to an atheist grieving the loss of a loved one?
Live philosophical debates made personal: especially the dispute between Sam Harris and Daniel Dennett over free will, which Adam Gopnik called “the only debate worth having.”
Subscribe to my Armchair Vertigo newsletter
One substantial essay each week (sent to your email inbox), plus shorter amuse-bouche on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays (posted to the website, not sent to your email). Additional features will follow, if the subscriber list grows, like a curated list of interesting reads midweek.
Brief bio
With an essay forthcoming in The Missouri Review, I’ve also published essays in The Smart Set, SLAB literary magazine, Philosophy Now, and elsewhere. I wrote the first chapter in Girls and Philosophy, an Open Court anthology about Lena Dunham’s groundbreaking HBO show Girls.
For more than ten years, I’ve taught philosophy classes, exclusively online, for Alamance Community College in North Carolina.
I live on the Oregon coast with my dogs, Fritz and Lou Salomé, 3000 miles from Brooklyn.
More credentials of which I’m proud, even though their achievement must be chalked up to luck, given there’s no free will:
B.A. in English from Columbia University
M.A. in Philosophy from the University of California at Irvine
Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Still here? Read this next:
If you want more of the philosophical side of things—
Here’s an accessible history of the changing concept of happiness from the ancient Greeks to the Founding Fathers through to today. Plus, I show how hedonism and relativism insinuated themselves into happiness’s definition.
If you want a more literary narrative—
Here’s the true story of my best friend’s death at fourteen-years old, which made me ask “Why?” so urgently that it turned me into a philosopher. Originally published in SLAB literary magazine, Issue 16. Archived here on Armchair Vertigo.
Still want more from me?
Find additional selected writings here on Substack.
Find links to the original venues of selected essays: linktr.ee/davidfrost.
My homepage: davidjfrost.com.
Subscribe to my newsletter now.
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Addendum: About The Missouri Review
For readers outside literary publishing, The Missouri Review is one of the country’s most respected literary journals. Here are a few ways it shows up in rankings of literary magazines.
