Years ago, a friend of mine and I discussed an important idea about human relationships. He argued that we should focus on where we agree with others, rather than where we disagree. This struck me as a good concept to ponder further. Eventually, my thoughts on the matter grew into what became this essay. Basically,…

Humans are stubborn, willful little creatures. We’re relentlessly determined to understand the nature of, well, everything. But as much as we act like cosmic detectives, we don’t have the skill, the right tools, or even a faint idea of what the mystery is we’re trying to solve. Sure, we can keep pretending we can wrap…

As Charles Schulz once said, “Life is like a ten-speed bicycle. Most of us have gears we never use.” This brilliant observation sums up so much of the human condition. We’re all equipped with potential, yet most of us coast along, our metaphorical legs doing the bare minimum while we let life roll downhill. Of…

When I was knee-deep in the digital marketing swamp, I thought I could keep up with it all—knowledge, trends, my inbox, you name it. My goal was to become some kind of 21st-century renaissance woman who would become one of the expected heroes of the information age. Yeah, I was dead wrong about that. It…

Recently, Emily Slatin and her friends Luke and Lucas from the YouTube channel Luke Explores checked out the now long-abandoned I-86 Diner in Parksville, New York. It’s a relic of the grand tradition of American dining—one of many across the nation buried beneath the weight of greasy takeout bags and UberEats orders. Thanks to what…

One newsletter I once read talked about “sliding door moments.” (That newsletter now requires a paid subscription to read, so I’ve killed any reference to the original link.) This a reference to a 1998 movie with a young, gorgeous Gwyneth Paltrow called Sliding Doors. In that film, Paltrow’s character has two divergent encounters with a…

I wrote these few thoughts about the portrayal of exploring the atom in a work of legendary Russian-American physicist George Gamow’s that I came across in high school (2003 or 2004). They are high-level observations from me for the time… “On George Gamow’s Clever Way of Presenting the Atom” While personally I knew of the…