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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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“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…
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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…
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“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….
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I’m on that pursuit of happiness and I know everything that shine ain’t always gonna be gold. — Kid Cudi We all know that the point of a good life is the pursuit of happiness, right? I mean, it says it right there in the constitution. “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” are among the inalienable rights…
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Money can buy you a lot of things, but it doesn’t make you a better person.
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