I don’t know about your world, but success counts for a lot in mine. Especially in America, defining goals and running your life in their direction loom large if you expect to feel like a complete human being. …

Many of us are struggling to maintain hope for humanity. The reluctance to get serious about a warming planet. The fiercely divided response to COVID. The global groundswell of naked authoritarianism. The culture of contempt, oozing from cable news and social media, that poisons our politics and makes it seem…

We hear a lot about “tribalism” in politics these days, especially in the US. It does seem like a useful idea for thinking about the miserable state of our discourse, invoking as it does warring factions that aren’t quite sure what they’re fighting over. But as it stands, “tribe” is…

Irrational anger must be a bug in the software, right? The spouse who crashes their life partnership with an outburst. The driver who lashes out at a policeman and winds up in jail. The worker who tells his boss to take that job and shove it. When people fly off…

NO NO NO! No garlic press! Get thee behind me, Satan!!! Great article until I got to that point. What you want is a garlic twist. Whole cloves to uniformly chopped (not pulverized and juiced) garlic in seconds. THEN swish it in soapy water and you're done. Now the idea of cleaning a garlic press fills me with rage. https://www.amazon.com/Garlic-Twister-4th-Generation-Clear-dp-B0796N2GN4/dp/B0796N2GN4/ref=dp_ob_title_kitchen

Look at you. You’re swimming in miracles, and they barely register: You carry an all-knowing supercomputer in your pocket that connects you instantly across the world. You have an unlimited selection of foods and goods from everywhere, and you have the means to buy them. Your odds of dying from…

What a miserable word “nuance” is. Unlike words like “philosophy” or “psychopath”, its etymology is obscure, so it seems a little disingenuous. It even sounds sneaky: its hardest phoneme is that sibilant ‘c’, as in “snake” and “sneak”. Could it be French? Yikes! So it’s easy to be leery of…

“Live in the Present!” “All you have is Now.” “Today is a gift. That’s why they call it The Present.” “No matter where you go, there you are.” I wonder if everyone is as weary and leery of these dictums (dictae?) as I am, their meaning dulled from sheer repetition…

One sunny afternoon, I was in my bedroom and I noticed a fly trying to get out through a window. The window itself was a large fixed pane, with open panels on each side, but the fly was trying to fly out through the unyielding middle. This was not an…