"The Flash and Outbreak of a Fiery Mind"
9 Minute Read
Or How the Brain Makes Room for the Mind Like a Seurat painting, incremental change appears on the scene point by point. Trusting the big picture to take care of itself once our entire canvas has been thoughtfully dotted, we free our minds to focus on adding new colors.
< 1 Minute Read
(Remembering Maui)
12 Minute Read
Or the Problem of Ethics in the Dark I learned the story of Cain and Abel around the time my younger brother and I were expected to share our first bin of Legos. After my five-year-old brain worked out how I could possess his half of my inheritance without getting caught, I conceived a plan to eliminate both “Abel” and the all-seeing God who would surely question “Cain” after the deed was done.
14 Minute Read
[For Karl] When the knell tolls, like a scatter of pebbles across this archipelago of human being, its resonant frequency finds its way into not just my heart but yours beating but a stone’s throw away.
11 Minute Read
Thomas Aquinas argues for deliberate will. René Descartes thinks and therefore is. Celine Dion belts My Heart Will Go On. But sometimes, the body just does stuff.
9 Minute Read
[For Mark] What heaven brought you and me cannot be forgotten Stephen Stills, Southern Cross From a child, I would, on rare occasions, look at a thing and sense from it a timeless, ineffable outreach. “Look at me. Notice me. Remember me. You’ll wish you had.”
8 Minute Read
Want to change your spots? Not until we see the past for the feral creature it is and, with trepidation, let it into our house, train it not to bite our guests, and give it its own dish will we reduce the odds its jaws will one day spring back upon our necks.
11 Minute Read
When I dug into the recursive transformation of one of my dad’s revisionist paintings, it occurred to me that when we care for it the way a painter revisits an old canvas, the past is liberated to leap forward into its own future.
9 Minute Read
Or How Orson Scott Card Taught Me to Understand Shakespeare Without Uttering a Word
13 Minute Read
A longer-than-average post about shorter-than-average words and the subliminal messages they breathe into our mind’s ear.
4 Minute Read
In Timor-Leste, I meet a man who foretold the future.
2 Minute Read
In which I declare a sixty-year-old event, diagnose it thirty years later, and foretell its future thirty years later still.
18 Minute Read
The proper aim of life, even at its least creative, is handwritten on a secret card placed face down on the table before we draw our first breath. Our mothers, by some undiscoverable trick of love and light, seem always to know each word on the underside of not just their own card but of ours as well.
8 Minute Read
Your love is such a thrill. But your love won’t pay my bills. —Janie Bradford & Berry Gordy, Money
7 Minute Read
Being and Change is a U-tube. But what is a U-tube when it’s at home?
4 Minute Read
This post was mostly written by a computer scientist/physicist friend of mine, Ken Ritley, and his favorite AI. It took me all of two minutes to sprinkle about my contribution to Ken’s dialog with a machine. Judge for yourself which of its three authors speaks to you.
11 Minute Read
In which I pose the question to anyone who stopped (or started) something because of the Pandemic: Have you now restarted (or stopped) it?
11 Minute Read
Or How I Inadvertently—and Then Intentionally—Impersonated a Secret Service Agent at a Special Preview of The Phantom of the Opera.
