The biggest systemic risk to markets right now. Will it be the pin to pop the “everything bubble?” The yen carry trade has long been the financial world’s favorite magic trick: borrow yen at 0%, sell it for dollars, then plow the proceeds into whatever shiny thing is booming that month: U.S. tech stocks, crypto, […]
Who Possesses the Tender Plant?
by Sean Dempsey Inspired by a true story of dismal woe… Spoke an aged gardener,As he tapped his gentle knee:“By thy green thumb and patient eye,I pray thee, hark to me! A tale of love and loss I’ll tell,Of root and tender leaf,Of a plant I loved more true than man,And lost to mortal grief. […]
Options 2: The Hunt (Coming Soon – a Sequel by Stephen Dempsey)
Prologue The morning he stepped out of South Station, Boston felt like a verdict. Wet brick, ferry horns, the shiver of a gull’s cry over steel water. He stood a moment under the awning with his father’s old briefcase in hand, breath wisping pale, and watched the crowd carry its coffees toward another ordinary day. […]
The Plight of the House of Dempsey
By Sean Dempsey8/29/25 During the waning of a drear and tempestuous season, while the dank forests of New Hampshire trembled beneath winds unseasonable and a melancholy haze spread like a funeral pall across its pale and resolute villages, there came into my possession a mysterious, but not unwelcome, letter whose contents so disquieted the chambers […]
Forgive Our Happiness
Sean Dempsey8-18-25 The lanterns burn with pallid light,And the corridors are still;Yet walls divide both joy and blight:Both mercy and its ill. The midnight hush is cold and long,The air with ether sweet;The measured steps of nurses’ throngBeat soft on weary feet. A mother clasps her newborn son!His cry: a trumpet clear.Her weary heart declares […]
An Honest Tale of Luxury, Apathy, and the Decline of All Things Civil
By Sean Dempsey, 07/20/25 Let no one say the following is allegory or invention. It is, I assure the reader, entirely true, having been performed not upon the floor of Parliament nor the pages of moralist tracts, but in a respectable laboratory, by a respectable scientist, using respectable mice. In the Year of our Lord […]
Compare and Contrast – Dempsey/TS Eliot
T. S. Eliot’s The Hollow Men and Sean Dempsey’s America, 2023 both confront the spiritual and moral decay of civilization, but they do so from opposite emotional poles. Eliot’s poem is elegiac: a whispered lament for a world hollowed out by inertia and disillusionment. His “stuffed men” drift without agency, trapped in the shadow between […]
The Good Knight
By Sean Dempsey, 07/08/25 The Good Knight He took no oath before her eyes,Nor knelt where others came.He watched the world behind her gate,And never spoke his name. They say he once was something more,A banner, or a flame;But all he kept were ragged threadsAnd shoulders bowed with shame. He waited where the garden ends,Where […]
Mid South Turnkey Homes: The $90,000 Nightmare at 2028 Amity
By Sean Dempsey Date: June 03, 2025 If it seems too good to be true, it probably is… That phrase should be stamped in 100-point bold on the front door of Mid South Turnkey Homes, located at 5865 Ridgeway Center Parkway, Suite 300 Memphis TN 38120. Because what my wife and I endured with this […]
Kafka’s “The Trial” Analysis vs Dempsey’s “Justice”
Sean Dempsey’s short story “Justice” (which is an extract from his 2022 work “A Sad Collection of Short Stories, Cheap Parables, Amusing Anecdotes, & Covid-Inspired Bad Poetry”) works best when read not as a replacement for Kafka, but as a narrowing of Kafka’s nightmare. Kafka gives us the whole disease. Dempsey gives us the moment […]