I found it impossible to write this morning. My mind ruminated on the possible outcomes of the challenges represented by my to-do list for Monday. A rolling-tangle of dark anxiety was all that I could come up with. I staggered inwardly with nothing to say. Silence is preferable to adding to any readers quotient…
Received an email from a friend yesterday informing me of his enthusiasm for Antonio Damasio’s book, The Strange Order of Things. The work is about the importance of story telling. To say that story telling is important is to greatly underestimate the matter. I do not think it is possible to understand how our…
I am reading a book by Omar El Akkad. He is a journalist. He was born in Cairo Egypt and grew up in Doha, Qatar. He has filed dispatches from the NATO led war in Afghanistan, the military trials at Guantanamo Bay, the Arab Spring revolution in Egypt and the Black Lives Matter movement…
Yesterday I was a guest for a tenth birthday celebration. The party was a glorious event. The family affair was held in honor of Myles’s tenth birthday. Josh and Cassie were host to a house full of family and close friends. The feasting, story telling, the presents, the cake, everything was perfect to say…
In his essay on “How to Raise a Boy” Michael Kimmel offers these answers to the question: “What does it mean to be a good man?” This list of attributes were offered by several thousand young men around the world to Kimmel’s question. Integrity Honor Being Responsible Being a good provider, protector Doing the…
What? Sounds like a obscure cult? Do Panpsychists have a holy text? Could the condition be a recently diagnosed disease, for which a new wonder drug is being pitched on TV? I doubt you’d think any of those things. You’d be sensitive to the components of the word, pan and psyche. Likely you’d know…
If you are like me, you despair of finding a reliable source for “news.” In the old days, there was one source for everyone, the newspaper. The newspaper published daily, was delivered by a neighborhood kid, and you’d find your copy lying at the end of the driveway. Television news was a informative summary,…
I have spent a fair amount of time in Louisville, Ky. My daughter and her partner live there. While visiting I always grab a copy of the Leo. The Leo is an alternative weekly newspaper. The paper has an editorial policy that fearlessly takes the measure of the political and social scene in Kentucky. …
Visited a neighborhood bar last night in Chicago. The Duke of Perth is on Clark Street in the Lakeview neighborhood. I had never tasted Scotch until several weeks ago. A friend knowledgeable about the libation brought a bottle of his favorite malt to open an evening of philosophy discussion with a Scotch tasting. I…
“Everything flows” said old Heraclitus. Heraclitus of Ephesus, otherwise known as Heraclitus the Obscure lived about 500 BC. Heraclitus famous saying is pronounced, “panta rhea, ouden manei.” The literal meaning is: everything changes and nothing remains. Given this brief snippet of information, the most essential knowledge about this world and our life has been…
