What This Is
Meridian Cadence Review is an independent journal of ideas — a space where current events meet political theory, where sociology interrogates power, and where philosophy asks the questions that political commentary usually skips.
This is not a neutral publication. It is written from a particular vantage point: that of a young American who finds the dominant political conversation — its binaries, its talking points, its comfortable amnesias — insufficient for understanding the world as it actually is. The mainstream discourse, split between two parties that increasingly resemble each other in their deference to capital and institutional inertia, leaves too much unexamined.
Meridian Cadence Review is an attempt to examine it.
The Approach
The work here draws on multiple disciplines because no single one is adequate. Political science explains institutions but not the people inside them. Sociology maps social structures but can miss individual agency. Philosophy asks the deepest questions but risks losing contact with the material world. Journalism grounds everything in fact but sometimes mistakes coverage for understanding.
The writers I return to — James Baldwin, Karl Marx, Alan Watts — each refused to stay in their lane. Baldwin wrote about race with the precision of a sociologist and the soul of a poet. Marx built an entire analytical framework from the ground up. Watts asked whether the questions themselves were the problem. That refusal to be disciplined into a single mode of thinking is what I aspire to here.
Every piece on this site will acknowledge what I don't know. Every analysis will name the biases I carry. That is not a weakness — it is what honest intellectual work requires.
Who Is Writing This
My name is Zachary Riccard. I am a student at Georgia State University studying Journalism and Political Science with a minor in Sociology. I started this publication for two reasons: to organize my own thinking, and to put a young person's perspective into a medium that is overwhelmingly dominated by established voices — people whose formative political experiences happened decades before mine.
Generation Z is not a monolith. But there are concerns, anxieties, and frameworks that feel urgent to people my age and peripheral to older commentators. Housing, institutional trust, the long shadow of post-2008 economic precarity, the specific texture of growing up online inside collapsing ecosystems — these deserve serious treatment, not just demographic polling.
What to Expect
The publication is currently broad in scope. That will narrow over time as I develop clearer areas of focus. For now, expect analysis of international affairs, domestic politics, cultural dynamics, and the occasional essay that resists easy categorization.
Each piece is written to be read carefully, not skimmed. If you are looking for hot takes, there are faster sites. If you are looking for someone willing to sit with a question until it yields something useful, you are in the right place.
A Note on Bias
I hold political views that fall outside the conventional American left-right spectrum. I am influenced by thinkers who were willing to indict entire systems rather than individual actors within them. I believe that understanding how we arrived at the present moment is inseparable from understanding what the present moment actually is.
I will tell you when my perspective shapes my analysis. That transparency is the only intellectual honesty I can offer — and I think it is more valuable than a false neutrality that serves no one.
Meridian Cadence Review is an independent publication. It has no institutional affiliation, no advertisers, and no agenda beyond the pursuit of rigorous, honest analysis.