Category: Personal

  • A Urinal in Troutdale: Shakespeare Sightings

    Shakespeare has been ever-present for centuries because of a peculiar quality of how the brand works, a quality that other brands can imitate. Here are two weird things about Shakespeare. First, while some people love Shakespeare, others view reading or seeing the plays as a punishment from God. Second, you cannot escape references to Shakespeare—not…

  • Retro Futures: “Redcrosse” and the view from 1997 and 2011 – Bonus

    Yesterday, April 27, 2023 was when the plot of my 2011 near future dystopian novel began… what a weird feeling. I’ve written before about Retro Futures, by which I mean looking at how the future looked to science fiction writers in previous eras, measuring what they got right and what they got wrong, and then thinking…

  • Keyword: Eventness

    Watching the series finale of “Star Trek: Picard” was a lonely exercise because most of the value of experiences comes from sharing them. Regret seldom punctuates my day-to-day life, but if I had Prof. Peabody’s Wayback Machine handy I would jump back a few days and then schlep up to Seattle or down to L.A.…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…