Groucho Marx famously said that he refused to join any club that would have him as a member, which is altogether funny, telling, and true. How many of us feel this way about a great many things? Desiring only the things we can’t have, and entirely uninterested in the things within our grasp. If we can achieve it, how good could it really be? If we were accepted, how low must the threshold have been?
Browsing CategoryEssay
Embrace Your Baldness And Be Free
How to go bald gracefully without the fear and anxiety of losing your hair When I was in the fifth grade, one of my best friends was this kid who wore two hearing aids. His name was Stephen Lesko. Why I remember that little piece of trivia is beyond me.…
Crossing The Rubicon
In which I attempt to chart a strategy for making the most of things as the ship sinks into the icy waters and the band plays on Originally published March 2023 In 49 B.C., Julius Caesar led his army to the banks of a small river that marked the boundary…
A Great Social Rewilding Is Coming
As the enshittification of the internet hits its apex and begins to collapse under the weight of a tsunami of AI slop, humanity may very well find itself back where it started, rediscovering the genuine world of books, art, music, travel, entertainment, food, and nature. Authentic experiences that have the…
Teaching Kids To Fish
Teaching children is not about memorization; it’s teaching them to be curious about the world Originally published in July 2021 You’ve seen the memes on social media, extolling the virtues of teaching life skills to kids in public schools. Stuff like how to balance a checkbook, file your taxes, or…
You Don’t Understand America As Well As You Think You Do
Originally published in 2022. There is far too much joy expressed in predicting our eventual demise, and we’re sick of it I see it a lot, especially on social media platforms that are likely to include non-Americans, such as Mastodon or Medium. It is the full-scale breakdown and analysis of our culture,…
Welcome To Our Funny Little Circus
Before we begin, if you signed up for email alerts and didn’t receive and respond to the confirmation email, it’s more than likely in your junk folder, just as any future emails will be without your immediate intervention. Go fix that now, so you don’t miss anything. We want you…
The Lost Art of Listening
Maintaining quiet confidence in the face of uncertainty My wife Jane is the type of person who likes to ask a lot of questions during a movie. She has never quite accepted the idea that the filmmakers are only interested in revealing the amount of information they want to reveal, at…
We Can Be Heroes
How tragedy plus time equals comedy “I wish you could swim, like the dolphins, like dolphins can swim. Though nothing, nothing will keep us together. We can beat them, forever and ever. We can be heroes, just for one day.” — David Bowie Tragedy plus time equals comedy. You could probably amend it to…
Is Your Imagination Robbing You Of Real Experiences?
A vivid imagination can let you explore life in ways otherwise impossible, but is it keeping you from experiencing the real thing? The Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman said that he never allowed himself to dream of winning the Nobel, because as a child, growing up during World War II,…