I have no fear of death. More important, I don’t fear life.— Steven Seagal A Steven Seagal quote? I know, but stick with me. Fear is an essential human emotion. It’s hardwired into our brains in a dozen different ways. And for much of human history, fear (and its cousin anxiety) kept us safe in a world…
Read more
It’s no longer controversial to say that we live in ethically troubled times. Turn on the news and you’re likely to find a scandal of some sort. And it seems that scandals that would have rocked the nation only a few decades ago are considered par for the course today. Just this year we’ve had……
Read more
Hungry for Snake Oil: Fyre, Juicero and Donald Trump If you haven’t noticed, we’re living in an age of the unbelievable. Think about it, within a 5 minute drive of my house I can get access to an incredible array of food and goods from across the planet. I carry a carry a cell phone in…
Read more
Ever since I read Atul Gawande’s Being Mortal(which I highly recommend), I’ve been stunned by how little we talk about death. I wrote this piece recently about the cultural obsessions with extending life. We want to upload our brains to computers, genetically modify our telomeres so we age more slowly, and just sustain our fragile…
Read more
We can’t all be heroes, because somebody has to sit on the curb and applaud as they go by. — Will Rogers I know Joseph Campbell famously said, “You are the hero of your own story.” But we need to stop. We need perspective. We’re in this thing together. The Internet empowers each of us to tell our…
Read more
Almost every day, I read headlines about embezzlement, insider trading or fraud. It’s so easy to find stories of people who’ve put their own interests above the interests of those around them. In those cases, I’m reminded of the many oaths that we make young people take. Special codes of behavior that we hope young…
Read more
Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself. — Leo Tolstoy We live in a world of unparalleled wonder. We may not stop and look at it often enough, but the technological progress of the last 100 years is astonishing Let’s run through some numbers. Global Poverty has been on the decline for…
Read more
“I am not sure that I exist, actually. I am all the writers that I have read, all the people that I have met, all the women that I have loved; all the cities I have visited.” — Jorge Luis Borges I just finished reading R. Jay Magill Jr.’s Sincerity. It’s a look back at a…
Read more
How often do you feel distracted? Better yet, how often do you feel like the day has flown by and somehow you’ve lost time? If you’re like me (and most Americans), it happens pretty often. We’ve all pretty much entered the attention Thunderdome. There’s an ad for something plastered on every surface. We have tailored…
Read more
“Concentrate all your thoughts upon the work in hand. The Sun’s rays do not burn until brought to a focus”. — Alexander Graham Bell We’re living in an age of “Why”. We want to be inspired by everything. Companies are fighting to articulate their social value. Politicians are sacrificing policy positions for narratives of inspiration or anger….
Read more