Being good at being a human is like getting certified to fly with instruments: it takes hours of training and we rarely get it right the first time. In a blog post last fall, anthropologist Melvin Konner wrote his excitement about the new science developing that would influence the study of the human condition. He framed […]
The overcrowded mind can lead to an unsettled soul. Over the years I’ve learned to trust my techniques for quieting my mind. I let my consciousness float, drift into an undefined space that suspends the forward momentum of thought, quiets down the chatter and waits for a structure to form. Even as I wait the […]
A Japanese poet once wrote that there is no utility in metaphor, that in the modern world the only valuable expression is of words that are specific to one thing. This is language as the table of existential elements: when used precisely, words make an objective reality that we can use to breach the gaps between […]
Yesterday I flew from the east coast to Los Angeles and watched two movies that were uncanny in the similarity of their view of the human condition. The moral synchronicity was more startling for the cultural chasm between the two films: the uber-Wasp corporate reality of the Reitman brothers’ Up in the Air and the […]