I’ve always been told to just say no to smoking. That whatever fleeting pleasure a cigarette offers, it subtracts minutes from our lives, plants cancers in our lungs and mouths.

The one awful puff I took of my friend’s cigarette in middle school was enough of a deterrent for…

The New Yorker ran a great profile last week of Magnus Carlsen, the 20-year-old from Norway who rose to No. 1 in the global chess rankings last year. It made me think some cool thoughts about the intersection between creativity and the infinite, but it will take me a minute to get there, so bear…

You know what the most horrible sight is to a runner? It’s a runner who doesn’t enjoy running. They’re easy to spot — drenched in…

One of my favorite blogs is LeslieMILES. Each post is a succession of images, curated according to loose interpretation of a…

Surf is such an appropriate word for the way we consume ideas on the Internet. It’s fast and smooth, and it stays on the surface. With a few notable exceptions, what I do on the Internet isn’t reading at all; it’s surfing and it’s skimming, as if meaning could be skimmed off the surface of text like…

The awakened and knowing say: body I am entirely, and nothing else — and the soul is just a word for something about the body.
-Nietzsche

The first time I encountered Nietzsche was in this quote, printed as a chapter heading to an…