Life

Stop perpetuating this myth. — My parents thought I was ugly. Actually, at first they thought I was worth entering in a slew of baby pageants. Apparently I won a bunch of them, and it was all downhill from there for a very, very long time. My dad made fun of me. My mom put…

It emerges at the junction of understanding of self and of others. — Social intelligence is one of the most difficult types of intelligence to develop. This is because, in addition to an understanding of self, it also requires you to have a decent understanding of how other people function. And then, at the intersection of those two types of understanding, social intelligence…

It can easily ruin a good thing. — I’ve spent thousands of hours reading and writing blog posts. I’ve seen endless variations of dating advice, and all manner of tips, some good, some bad. I’ve seen the common advice about avoiding temptation, not becoming complacent, and taking your partner for granted. There is one mistake that destroys countless…

The Trumpists’ Violent Tantrum Tells Us Exactly What They’d Do If They Ever Regained Power — The Trumpists. Ah, Christ. The Trumpists. Do you remember the world before these idiots, lunatics, fascists, and morons invaded decided what we all really needed was a rerun of the 1930s, only with MAGA baseball hats? It wasn’t perfect, but still. It was OK. It’s like remembering the world before…

“A man doesn’t require things more than his basic needs.” — “A mathematician is a device for turning coffee into theorems.” — Paul Erdős I’ve talked about several mathematicians in my blogs from Maryam Mirzakhani to Terrence tao, from Gottfried Leibniz to Leonhard Euler. I particularly take interest in speaking about mathematicians because they perceive the world and the universe around…

And not nice enough to the rest of us. — Her hypnotic eyes were the color of the desert and her hair was long and dark and perfectly straight, cascading down her back like waves of brown silk. She was beautiful on the day she was born. Her parents were both highly attractive and she later became a model —…

An in-depth look at the New York attack on Salman Rushdie — The stabbing of renowned author and free speech advocate Salman Rushdie in Western New York is a dramatic and disturbing reminder that freedom of expression is still under threat in the twenty-first century, even in America. I find it hard to remain silent after yet another heinous attack on the…

The old man kept whittling as the fire crackled and the sun sank lower in the sky. He sat against a lone tree in an old farm field. Years ago, he wouldn’t have been out in the open but this was different. His knife scraped against the old hawthorn stick…