Download PDF The place is half-full, and I’m half-working, half-staring at a wall when the opening synth line threads through the room. That pulsing, driving riff. Kate Bush's “Running Up That Hill.” I feel it before I recognize it. Before anything like a thought arrives, my body goes warm. An involuntary smile...

Tolstoy’s Calendar of Wisdom — March 25 During our lives we help each other: sometimes we help other people, sometimes we are helped by others. But the world is formed so that usually some people mostly help others, and some mostly receive their help. "As you acquire objects, and you use them, you should keep in...

Growing up, there was a short pile of books sitting out on the cocktail table in the den of my childhood home, the kind of decorative arrangement that had been there so long they stopped being objects and became part of the air. One was Helter Skelter, Vincent Bugliosi's terrifying account of the Manson murders,...

This essay was originally published on March 24th as "Three Generations of Men, One Unsettled Question." It's already one of the most widely read pieces on this blog, but several readers who wanted to share it told me the title wasn't doing it any favors. They were right. Growing up, there was a short pile of books...

Sprezzatura. Say it out loud. Spreh-za-TOO-rah. Let it sit in your mouth for a second. Sounds like something you'd want to eat, or drink, or steal. By the time you get to that last syllable your hand is already moving on its own, thumb and forefinger pressed together, shaking in the air like an old Italian grandma...

On the theft of original thought and my fury at those who caused it. There are many times throughout the week when I purposely leave my phone at home or in the car, and certain situations where I simply refuse to take it out of my pocket. Small acts of resistance that would have been completely unremarkable fifteen...

I quote others only in order the better to express myself. —Michel de Montaigne In 1571, a French nobleman bought a château in Bordeaux with a round stone tower attached to it. He was thirty-eight, newly retired from public life, gutted by the death of his closest friend, and unsure what came next. He withdrew to...

For roughly seven hundred years, the big theological brains of Western Christendom bent themselves into magnificent logical pretzels over whether beings of pure incorporeal intelligence, massless and shadowless and wholly unbothered by the need for a decent sandwich, could occupy the same point in space. At the same...

Years ago, an AA sponsor said something to me that bypassed every defense I had against the idea of God. I was in early sobriety, a committed atheist, unable to square the program's spiritual language with anything I recognized as true. To me, the material world was the whole show. Stars were gas, death was a light...

A note before you read. This is an experiment. I've spent years accumulating ideas, knowledge, and ways of thinking about risk, ego, the body, the noise in your own head, the difference between a life you choose and one that chooses you. This post is what happens when you feed all of that into an AI and ask it to...

A note before you read—this is an experiment. I've spent years accumulating ideas, learning, and ways of thinking about risk, ego, the body, the noise in your own head, the difference between a life you choose and one that chooses you. This post is what happens when you feed all of that into an AI and ask it to...

I was channel surfing late one night when I came across a local news story about a guy who builds jet turbines for the Air Force at the USAF Research Laboratory in Ohio. Interesting, sure, but what really got my attention was the man's name: Dan Miracle. Not the Dan part. I don't like the name Dan. Never have. My...