Category: Personal

  • The Problem with More: Coca-Cola, Electric Cars, Email, Facebook and Satisfaction

    I Pac-Man chomp my way through many articles each week, digesting most with a tiny burp and leaving them to the brass-knuckled mercies of memory.  Yet two recent pieces have stuck with me: Matt Richtel’s October 10th piece in the New York Times, “In California, Electric Cars Outpace Plugs, and Sparks Fly” and Roberto A.…

  • Notes from Bergen 4: the world is less virtual than we think

    It’s 8:30am as I begin writing this post.  Just minutes ago Kathi and our son trotted off towards the University of Bergen, where she’ll drop him off for his last day at Nygard Skole — the Norwegian immersion program he’s attended this year — before going to her last day at the University.  My daughter…

  • Daniel Kahneman kicks my ass, or Reading Fast and Slow

    Like Moe, the schoolyard bully in Calvin & Hobbes, Daniel Kahneman has taken away my cognitive lunch money for the last four years.  To be clear, it isn’t the 81-year-old Nobel laureate himself: it’s his best-selling 2011 book Thinking Fast and Slow. Let me back up. I read fiction quickly, sometimes gobbling up a novel…

  • “Change Your Life” Productivity Apps & How to Use Them— Updated!

    I first wrote about the suite of applications, services, products and gadgets I use to keep my head above water almost three years ago.  In the intervening time things have changed (Smartr/Xobni, for example, has gone away), hence this fresh list. Here are my 14 “Change Your Life” apps and how I use them. Please…

  • Vonage = a Practical Tip when Moving Abroad (Notes from Bergen)

    From the “Department of Things I Wish I’d Taken Care of Faster” Department… Executive Summary of this post: if you’re moving out of your home country, then get a VOIP line that lets your relatives call as if you’re down the street. The Story: Before we left Oregon at the end of last summer for…

  • Thanks to the Kindest of Strangers

    Dear Reader, please help me get this post to Charlie, my hat rescuer, so that he knows how grateful I am. The Story: If you’ve seen me or photos of me the last few years, then chances are you’ve seen me wearing this cap: The cap is from the Goorin Bros shop on NW23rd Street  in Portland,…

  • Notes from Bergen 3: Paternal Victories

    “Dad,” my teenager daughter asked one recent morning as she picked her way through over-easy eggs, seedy toast and Earl Grey tea. “What have you eaten for breakfast?” At a quick scan it’s an innocuous question, but down, deep down, subterranean with stalactites, a parenting victory glints in dim light. Here’s what I mean. This year…

  • Pragmatics: you can only walk through one door at a time

    Sharon washed up at the table next to me during a post-conference dinner here in Bergen and opened up over beer and reindeer steaks. She’s a bright young woman about to finish a Masters in finance and economics who doesn’t know how to approach the post-graduation void. Sharon started reeling off different directions and opportunities,…

  • Against Disruption: Louis Menand, Douglas Adams, Books and Technology

    Have you ever smacked into a glass door when you didn’t realize it was closed?  I have.  It hurts.  The intersection of my face and a glass door happened at my great aunt’s tiny desert house in the 80s, where the mix of a trick of the sunlight and my distracted boyhood mind made the…

  • My 2014 in Books

    I read a lot — magazines, two newspapers, email newsletters, and countless social-media-shared links I chase down digital rabbit holes. I’d never know anything, for example, without Jason Hirshhorn’s magnificent daily Media Redefined. But I’m lost without books.  Actual books.  Whether paper or digital, if I’m not reading at least two books then I get…