His terrific new book says puzzles will save the world. I tell him to calm down — There are many things that I’m not nearly as good at as I think I am, none of which you need to ask my wife about. But the most surprising one is puzzles. After many months of trying, I finally solved the Rubik’s Cube by figuring out that I could…

With the help of data scrientist Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, author of the brilliant new book Don’t Trust Your Gut — I have long suspected that I was doing everything wrong. This is partly because people keep saying, “You’re doing everything wrong.” But it’s also because I have no data about how to live. I’m guessing at every decision. I have no algorithm. Data scientist Seth Stephens-Davidowitz has solved my problems…

If you want to. I sure don’t. — By writing for Medium, I now have my own business. I’m a publicist, promoting my columns on social media. I’m in customer relations, responding to readers’ comments. I’m a marketer, collecting a subscriber email list that I can use to sell my inevitable writing seminar. …

Your Step Into the Metaverse Is Adding to Our Loneliness — My iPhone wants to update your contact information to include your Memoji. When you send me a Snap, I see your Bitmoji. Both look a little like you, if there were only 200 people in the world, and all of them were thin, under 40 and maniacally excited about everything. …

Replacing talking with typing has made us anxious — We believe we are people of letters. Like our 18th century ancestors, we fire off missives and conduct epistolary relationships. We text, we tweet, we Facebook, we email, we Slack, we DM, we Bumble message, we Discord, we — well, one of us — Truth Socials. We are wasting our…

After the passing of E.O. Wilson, I take on the responsibility of picking the next great ant expert — When Mother Theresa died, we lost more than a saint. We lost an easy reference for altruism. Once, you could toss off a “Sure, I picked up that piece of trash, but I’m no Mother Theresa,” but those times are fading with her memory. When Albert Einstein died, we began…

The Oscar nominees were gifted a Scottish title. So was I. Why would people as powerful as us want such a thing? — More than money, fame, sex, or Medium subscribers, I am driven by status. I once emailed every lawyer I knew to ask them if they were ever cited in a Supreme Court decision after Justice Samuel Alito name checked me in a footnote in his brilliant concurring opinion in United…

Disruption may have reached all the way to our highest office — The incumbency advantage makes sense. My wife is more likely to have sex with me than my next-door neighbors, only partly because they are very old and very gay. Medium probably won’t replace me with a far better columnist next week because that would upset tens of readers. This is…