Category: Personal
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Musk, Twitter, NPR
When the Twitter owner and Tesla CEO wrongly labeled NPR as “state-affiliated media” NPR fought back in a powerful way, but it’s only a start. What needs to happen next? Money has no morals. Money erodes morals because it washes away context and specificity in favor of interchangeability. Think about the differences among giving a…
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Analog Icebergs, Digital Oceans
Forget ChatGPT and Bard, if you want to experience a miraculous technology try a kitchen sink. I learned this the hard way a few nights ago when our sink backed up. No kitchen sink means no convenient place to clean the dinner dishes, nowhere to wash away the bits of food waste that we can’t…
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The New York Times’ Moral Lapse
The Gray Lady blew it when it decided to review Jared Kushner’s new memoir, no matter how scathing the review. Your correspondent also blew it by posting about the review. When people learn that I’m an atheist often the first thing they say is, “oh, so you don’t believe in God?” “No,” I push back…
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Why it’s so hard to think
Digital technologies crowd out our analog ability to make connections. That’s a problem since analogical thinking is what makes us human. In the middle of the night, Sting’s song “Moon over Bourbon Street” went through my head. I hadn’t thought of it in years, maybe decades. I love Sting, but I hadn’t listened to his…
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Nothing is ever meant to be
The difference between stories and real life is that stories make sense. We humans love stories. We love to tell stories, and we love to consume stories even more. “Tell me a story!” little children command. Whether our stories are sweeping novels like Anna Karenina, a sweeping collection of TV series like more than a half…
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How Risk is Changing
The world seems more dangerous today than it ever has before, but study after study shows that we’re safer now. Hans Rosling’s Factfulness, Matt Ridley’s Rational Optimist, and Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature are three books that dig into this. In part, life feels more dangerous today because we have so much information about bad things that happen…
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Micro-post: Why I miss “Glee”
The last episode of Glee aired in March of 2015, more than six years ago. I still miss it even though the suds-to-singing ratio got out of whack in the final seasons, so I didn’t watch regularly. Despite the high school soap opera—or maybe because there’s no escape from high school until graduation for most…
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The Nature of Human Thought: “Stop Trying to Make ‘Fetch’ Happen.”
One of the enduring mysteries of everyday cognitive life is why some things pop into our minds. Today’s example for me happened while I was cleaning up the breakfast dishes. Out of nowhere the line, “Gretchen, stop trying to make ‘fetch’ happen. It’s not going to happen” from the classic movie Mean Girls came to…
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Technologies of Grief
When a family member dies the script is clear: you scramble the jets, cancel your appointments, lean on a friend to watch the dog, and get there. For me, that means getting to Los Angeles from Portland. My aunt, Marlene Meyer, my mother’s sister, died on May 15th. She was 86, vibrant, still working as…