"What You Hear in a Whisper"
3 Minute Read
Beginning seven hundred years ago, young people were apprenticed to a master until they could come into their own as skilled workers and contributors. Today, we use terms like ‘intern’ and ‘trainee’ to describe an apprentice system that prepares its graduates for positions of choice and accountability.
4 Minute Read
If, as my mother taught me, the road to hell is paved with good intentions, from what fictional materials must the journey not taken be made?
3 Minute Read
When leading a meeting or presentation, it’s never a bad idea to consider that your busy audience might have been tempted to skip it. To recapture their attention, prepare your remarks as if listeners were in the middle of the biggest crisis of their week and only you possess the information they need to get through it.
3 Minute Read
When pondering the future, it might sometimes seem easier just to let the present take us there, no questions asked. Fortunately, if awkward, even painful, the world has a way of begging certain questions. And when it does, maybe we should think twice before choosing not to answer them.
18 Minute Read
In which I follow up last month’s post by asking the question: Where’s Yours?
14 Minute Read
In which I begin a weekly newsletter by asking the question: What’s Yours?
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.
