This is the fourth part of six of my blogging “wisdom” project, which I am undertaking as part of The New Leaf Journal’s sixth birthday. Today is May 17, 2026. Back on May 16, 2020, I published what I recently described as my personal favorite NLJ article, Welcome to The Emu Café. The article begins: Welcome, one...

April Intro April 2026, the month including The New Leaf Journal’s sixth birthday, is in the books. The end of the month means it is time for our month-end review. In this article, I review the month that was in The New Leaf Journal and related projects in April 2026. April at The New Leaf Journal I published 16 NLJ...

Brief re-introduction On April 27, 2026, I celebrated The New Leaf Journal’s sixth birthday by announcing a project: I would publish six articles featuring the “wisdom” I have collected from my six years of running this humble online writing magazine. I not only promised six articles, but I also set an ambitious...

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I walked around Red Hook, Brooklyn, with a friend on the afternoon of May 3, 2026. Our walk took us to Red Hook’s Valentino Pier, which has what may be Brooklyn’s best view of the Statue of Liberty in New York harbor. My friend, who is known in these pages for having rescued a stuffed bird in Williamsburg in the...

The 2026 edition of Mother’s Day falls on May 10, six days from today (with “today” being May 4, 2026, the date of publication of the instant article). Back in 2021, I published a research article on Anna Jarvis and the early twentieth-century origins of Mother’s Day, with links to contemporaneous newspaper articles...

The New Leaf Journal celebrated its sixth birthday on April 27, 2026. To celebrate our website’s sixth birthday, I decided to undertake writing a series of six articles on wisdom I have accumulated from running and writing for NLJ. I will begin this series on the sixth anniversary of the publication of the first NLJ...

I opened an article by Zoe Skyforest for Hackaday titled GameCube Bot Records Your Play in a Weird Way. The article opened: If you wanted to record yourself playing on a GameCube, you could use a VCR to capture the video output on tape. “If you wanted” eh? “Could…” Talk about presumptuous. How about I wanted and I...

On March 14, 2021, I photographed a “banana bench” outside a townhouse stoop in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn. Not long after, on April 2, 2021, I documented that banana bench in Brooklyn Banana Bench Photo, wherein I erroneously attributed the bench to Gowanus, Brooklyn (It is actually in Boerum Hill). I did not think back...

Happy Birthday, New Leaf Journal! I made The New Leaf Journal public on April 27, 2020. Thus, today, April 27, 2026, is The New Leaf Journal’s sixth birthday. With the exception of 2024, I have published a “birthday article” for each of our prior birthdays. I took this photo of my afternoon coffee on July 20, 2025,...

Yesterday, I published an article about my former dreams of being a basketball coach and my unexpected one-game stint as a baseball coach when I was in high school. While it is the case that I once wanted to be a basketball coach, I never once wanted to be a teacher, despite my success in teaching a middle school...