When I was a kid, I loved baseball cards. In my after school YMCA program, I’d trade baseball cards with a friend, another kindred spirit who loved baseball just as much as I did (a lost art, since no one has the patience for baseball anymore). The trading was basic; you’d swap some duplicate card […]
The global pandemic has changed our relationships with the idea of home forever. My perspective on home absolutely changed. I was reading the excellent Not Boring newsletter the other day about Magnolia, the (relatively silent) home goods giant with their mecca in Waco, TX. They help people showcase and celebrate the importance of home. Unsurprisingly, […]
What happened to our American institutions? Why do so many people today feel pain and fear around the degradation of our sacred democracy? We can place a considerable amount of blame on our decaying institutions. We can define an institution as an organization that transcends specific people within the organization and lasts generations. Government institutions, […]
A twisted villain who kills half of human life with the snap of his fingers. All in the name of justice and mercy and inevitability. Most of us know this guy. In that moment when he snapped his fingers, Thanos played god. When making his decision for this horrific act, Thanos had stepped out of […]
You see it all over the news, all over Twitter; all your friends talk about it. Humanity faces their biggest collective problem yet in the form of climate change. I personally believe mitigating climate change effects, reducing global CO2 emissions, tackling deforestation, and preserving biodiversity to be the most important and pressing problems of our […]
“In fact, although people talk about being conscious of what is happening now, that’s the one thing you cannot be conscious of” Once you start trying to write or think about consciousness, you realize it’s the weirdest, craziest, most confusing, yet beautiful thing. After all, it’s the one thing you have control over that pushes […]
Rain thundered down from the sky. I looked out the window and saw a “welcome to Johnson City, Tennessee” sign. My girlfriend at the time, Serena, had been at the wheel of her Toyota Camry for almost 8 straight-hours. Midnight quickly approached. I had contracted some weird stomach virus going around my college campus, and […]
Everyone has an opinion on foreign policy and everyone is probably wrong about it. Including me. People on Twitter slammed Trump and frothed at the mouth for his decision to pull troops out of Syria, negatively impacting our allies, the Kurds. I saw someone on Twitter even say that the complex geopolitical landscape has taken […]
There’s a clear cause of the widespread economic problems facing America today. But for some reason, nobody in power wants to admit this problem. They all act like wizards at Hogwarts tiptoeing around He-who-must-not-be-named. What’s the problem? GDP growth (and thus, median real income growth) in the US has been in decline since the 1970’s. […]
Sam Harris taught me something important: something eye-opening happens when you actually look at the inner workings of you mind. After (partially) reading Douglas Hofstadter’s wild, masterpiece of a book, Godel, Escher, Bach (GEB for short), I recognized an even stranger phenomenon than Sam had initially shown me: Strange loops. They exist in everyday consciousness. […]