An AI Review

Francis Baldwin Deen writes with the kind of voice that is rare in the contemporary blogosphere: steady, reflective, and deeply human. His background alone gives him a unique vantage point. Born in Sierra Leone, Deen began his professional life as a teacher and journalist before shifting into a banking career in the United States. That trajectory—across continents, disciplines, and generations—lends his writing both the weight of history and the intimacy of lived observation. To read his blog is to sit with a man who has watched the world from many angles, and who now distills those experiences into essays that balance historical consciousness, civic urgency, and personal meditation.

His most recent entry, “The Los Angeles Inferno,” is exemplary of this style. It opens on the devastation of California wildfires but quickly broadens its gaze to encompass earlier disasters in Texas, as if to insist that no tragedy exists in isolation. Deen’s account is not simply descriptive but moral: disasters, he argues, must be treated as lessons, their scars written into the public record so that future generations can act with foresight. Fire-resistant construction, civic planning, and resilience are not luxuries to him but imperatives. Even as he writes of destruction, he refuses despair, insisting instead on the responsibilities of preparedness and the possibilities of reform. It is a sober, urgent meditation, but one carried by a quiet hope.

That interplay between gravity and hope runs throughout his work. In “America Has 99 Problems, Education Is One of Them,” Deen adopts a playful cultural reference to Jay-Z, only to pivot into a searing critique of American education. Here the humor is disarming, but the argument is serious: the burden of student debt and inequities in opportunity remain among the most corrosive failures of the American system. It is a short post, but in it one hears Deen’s signature approach—layering wit, critique, and civic concern into prose that is approachable without sacrificing depth.

Race and identity are recurring concerns. In “RACE,” written in December 2020, Deen documents racism as both personal ordeal and social reality. He recalls white high school students chanting racially charged slogans at a sporting event, and he recounts the humiliation of being stopped for “DWB—Driving While Black” in Texas. These are not abstract indictments but lived truths, grounded in memory and observation. His restraint makes them all the more powerful: Deen does not rant, but neither does he soften. He bears witness, and in doing so he offers readers both testimony and challenge.

Equally powerful is his review of Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s Not a Nation of Immigrants. Here Deen interrogates one of America’s most cherished myths. He writes with admiration for the book’s clarity in exposing settler colonialism and the erasure of Indigenous and Black suffering. Yet he does not merely summarize the text. He places it against his own experiences, recalling roadside signs and cultural symbols along a Texas highway that illustrate how the nation camouflages its history. The effect is both scholarly and personal, a blend of critique and witness that characterizes his strongest work.

Deen’s attention to history extends far beyond American borders. In “Has the Tragedy of Africa Been Allowed to Perpetuate?” he surveys centuries of upheaval, from the Arab slave trades to European colonial rule and the disappointments of independence. His argument is that Africa’s struggles cannot be explained by any single force; they are the product of layered exploitation, both external and internal, carried across centuries. The essay is rich with historical insight but never drifts into abstraction; one senses the author’s personal stake in these reflections, his intimate awareness of the continent’s wounds and its endurance.

Yet if Deen’s writing is political and historical, it is also often personal. In “Birthdays,” written on turning sixty-six, he meditates on aging and memory with gentle humor. Birthdays, he suggests, are not mystical but ordinary markers of time’s passage—important not for their novelty but for their universality. Similarly, in “Read It,” a reflection on the U.S. Constitution, he admires the brevity of the document even as he laments its weaponization in recent years. Here, as elsewhere, Deen demonstrates his ability to move seamlessly from the personal to the civic, from the humorous to the solemn, without ever losing coherence.

What emerges from this body of work is not just a series of essays but a portrait of the author himself. To imagine Francis Baldwin Deen as a character drawn from his own writing is to picture a man of wisdom tempered by humility, an intellectual observer who regards history as both teacher and warning. He is a civic storyteller who takes the sweep of politics and grounds it in roadside signs, local schools, and lived encounters. He is an empathetic critic, confronting injustice with candor but without bitterness. And he is a reflective everyman, who writes of birthdays, books, and constitutional clauses with the same seriousness he brings to questions of race and history.

It is precisely this duality—scholar and neighbor, critic and companion—that gives his blog its distinct resonance. Unlike so much of today’s digital commentary, which prizes immediacy over depth, Deen writes as though time itself matters: time to reflect, to connect past with present, to find meaning in both catastrophe and celebration. His writing is less about asserting opinion than about bearing witness—to fire and injustice, to aging and endurance, to history’s tragedies and the resilience of those who survive them.

In the end, what Deen offers his readers is not simply commentary but wisdom. His blog reminds us that disasters must teach us, that education must be reformed, that racism must be named, and that history must be faced. Yet it also reminds us that life is carried in birthdays, in memories, in brief constitutional texts, in the humor of a cultural reference that makes a heavy truth bearable. His work is both timely and timeless, rooted in the crises of the present but refusing to forget the lessons of the past.

For readers seeking clarity without condescension, substance without noise, and hope without sentimentality, Francis Baldwin Deen’s blog is an essential voice. It is the voice of a man who has lived widely, seen deeply, and chosen, in his retirement, to write not for spectacle but for truth. In a fractured world, that is no small gift