My friend Ariel isn’t on Facebook. Thus she was inevitably confused by my portrayal of a lot of the Robin Williams reactions in Wednesday’s post about suicide. To her mind, there weren’t a lot of people trying to stifle discussions…
Category: A Day in the Life
Let’s Talk About Suicide
“And when the guy said, ‘Well, do you ever get depressed?’ I said, ‘Yeah, sometimes I get sad.’ I mean, you can’t watch news for more than three seconds and go, ‘Oh, this is depressing.’ And then immediately, all of…
Institutional Idealism
When I worked at Glide in San Francisco, I worked with an intern from Germany on a project about the nature of Glide as an institution. It was a special project for the then CEO, newly hired, who wanted to…
City of Lost Causes
The city of New Orleans belongs to the trees. In the rollicking residential neighborhoods of gaslamps and pillars, porches and endlessly long thin houses, the trees grow big as the houses themselves, mighty roots the size of trees in other…
Elegy for AC
The first month I lived in New Jersey, Fish and I went to see Counting Crows play at the Borgata and then stayed up most all of the night playing poker. I wrote about it here, at the time. The…
Engaging Alex Zhao on the Irrationality of Atheism
Alex Zhao, former debater from the University of Chicago, was the first to take up the mantle of refuting yesterday’s post on what I would (and did) call the irrationality of atheism. So consider this part two of what may…
The Irrationality of Atheism
Atheism is the prevailing theory of the universe among most intellectuals below a certain age in this country. Many people are ardent atheists, while others acknowledge at least a passing uncertainty, but the avowed belief in God is increasingly becoming…
Almost Like Real Life
So a lot has been made lately of Facebook putting an overly positive spin on things, shifting our perspective and making us seem and act happier than we actually are. I think this is true, but largely for a much…
Porch Storm
He sits out on the high rickety wood porch, consuming pages like nutrients long missing from his diet. The movers, the cleaners, the gas company, everybody’s late, everybody’s nice. Except the moving truck driver from Astoria, Queens. Of course. He’s…
Fixing Football Follow-Up: 2014 Bracket
After watching Russia fall into a heart-breaking and eliminating draw against Algeria, I did at least acknowledge the quality of the story that would be coming up, which would be a rematch between Germany and Algeria, offering the latter team…