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Under Revision is an independent publication launched in August 2026 by Dean Hatton.

My writing is an effort to learn effective philanthropy. I have found that I cannot see far or well enough without the writing.

We arrive in this life as takers, returning to those who care for us only an unintended love, a purpose we did not mean to give. Then comes the long middle, in which we take and give at once. And some of us are granted, before the end returns us to dependence and to taking again, a season that can be nearly all giving. I am in that season now, and I want to spend it well.

What I have learned is that the giving worth doing is mostly illegible. Its effects fall in the long view, past the horizon where results can be counted; it's found in the slow formation of people and the institutions that form them; work whose fruit I will likely not live to see. That is a hard way to give, because it offers so little to measure and so little to show. Writing is how I contend with it. On the page I can reason toward a good I cannot yet observe, test what I mean by it, and keep faith with ends that will not resolve in my lifetime. These essays are that reasoning, done in the open.

In my writing, I return to a few questions that won't leave me alone: what it takes to form a mind capable of independent thought, what freedom asks of the people who would keep it, and how attention to what lies outside us might be the beginning of both knowledge and love. They come from a life spent in business, providing for a family, and now building a philanthropy. They come out of a growing conviction that the deepest problems we face are problems of formation, of what kind of people we are becoming, before they are problems of policy or technique.

Neither the diagnoses nor the prescriptions are new; I build on ideas of amazing thinkers like Aristotle, Augustine, Aurelius, Burke, Emerson, Lewis, Murdoch, Weil and Whitman. My aim is novel synthesis in contemporary settings.

These are essays in the old sense: attempts, not verdicts. They are personal without, I hope, being merely private, and they are willing to be wrong out loud, because I think that the willingness to be wrong is not a weakness of the form but its whole point. I work in the tradition of Montaigne more than the op-ed, which is to say that I prefer building toward a conclusion rather than announcing one. I use my case as the material closest to hand, and invite the reader to do real work rather than be told what to conclude. If you want quick takes, this won't be the place. If you want to watch someone try to think something through and are willing to think alongside, you may find something here.

A word on how the work is made. I use AI to create useful friction in my work; not to reduce friction. I write with AI as an interlocutor and editor, the way an earlier writer might have worked with a research assistant and a sharp-eyed editor, except faster and at any hour. It surfaces sources and counterarguments, tests my claims against the strongest versions of what I'd rather not confront, and catches what I've stopped seeing. What it does not do is think for me. The questions, the architecture, the judgments about what is true and what must go, the willingness to stand behind a hard sentence, these are mine, as are the failures. I know some editors and readers I respect draw the line against work made this way, and I don't think they're being foolish; they are protecting something real: the trust that an essay is the record of a person having actually thought. I believe that trust survives my way of working, and I'd rather make the case by showing the work plainly than by hiding how it was done. You can judge for yourself.

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