In October of 2022, Taylor Swift released her album Midnights, which contains the hit song “Anti-Hero.”1 Part of this musical poem’s brilliance is that it’s a personal confession of a universal truth, namely that there’s an anti-hero in all of us. That’s not a very comfortable truth to admit, as Swift does with endearingly playful […]
As someone who values generosity, I wish I could be more enthusiastic about “Giving Tuesday” than I am. After all, what could be bad about a national day of giving, the development of a cultural consciousness that generosity deserves our attention? Personally, it’s easy for me to feel a bit overwhelmed (and sometimes annoyed) by […]
For the first time in my now middle-aged life, I recently ran a half marathon. If you would have asked me a year ago what I thought of such athletic endeavors, I might have called them a popular form of torture. So what in the world could have inspired me to do this? Positive peer […]
As a high school English teacher, one of my favorite activities to organize for my students was a Shakespearean insult contest. Two students would face off and cast their most acerbic aspersions at each other, ideally to the cheers and jeers of the rest of the class. It was far more fun than slogging through […]
No one can have it all. Knowing this, however, doesn’t seem to prevent me from trying to have it all every now and then. So sometimes I write to remind myself of truths that I easily forget, like this one about trade-offs: He who is not indifferent to fame and pleasure, as well as to […]
Conscious of Marshall McLuhan’s famous statement, “the medium is the message,” a friend recently shared these thoughts with me: We are about to enter into a new phase of virtual technology. The iPhone 13 mini is supposed to be the end of the line. What is next is goggles. Someone from my high school reunion wrote […]
My uncle Stathi is an enthusiastic etymologist. In simpler English, he enjoys studying the meanings, origins, and histories of words. During a visit several weeks ago, he reflected on the meaning of the Greek word for giving thanks, ευχαριστώ (eucharisto). Had I ever considered, he asked in wide-eyed wonder, the different shades of meaning for […]
A friend responded to my last article on anger and its management with the following: Right now, mentally, I’m really angry at the anti-vaxxers, and at #45 (I stay mad at him…), and I’m not sure how much reading of your article is going to help. Leaving aside the highly politicized topics of vaccines and […]
Over the past few years—a stressful period during which a contentious presidential election, a coronavirus pandemic, and the death of George Floyd all occurred—you may have felt some anger from time to time, beyond your normal experience of the feeling. Even if you wouldn’t call it “anger”, increased levels of impatience or frustration certainly count. […]
Reflecting on an unexpected growth in business revenue during the pandemic of 2020, a client sagely quoted the naturalist Edward Abbey: “Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.” Or of a coronavirus, one might say these days. If my client’s business were a tree, one could say that it […]