My grandmother handed me a nickel, pointed toward the road, and sent me to buy an ice cream cone at a store named Grammy’s. I was 4 1/2 years old. It was a hot, humid summer night, the kind where the porch screen door sticks and even the neighbors’ dogs are too tired to bark. The memory ...
One of my education professors built an entire course around one uncomfortable idea: too often, we are not taught how to think. We live “stimulus-response lives.” He said most people walk into a room, hang their brains on a hook, and don’t question anything. In retrospect, he might have ...
I was scrolling the other day and came across a man named Robert Arnold on TikTok. He was talking about crayons. His verbal essay stopped me cold. He was describing a 128-count box of Crayola crayons. As a kid, that wasn’t just a box. That was success, and the fancy names of the colors were ...
Periodically, a news story comes across my iPad that I just can’t stop thinking about. This story started like this: “On February 21 police officers were dispatched to a bar.” That opening line drew me in almost as fast as “A Florida man ..." “The caller was the bartender,” and ...
Things are starting to look like we may be the only species that has a chance to stop its own potential demise. The apes never held hearings about Homo sapiens taking over, but Congress, Silicon Valley, and cable news talking heads are debating the future of artificial intelligence. ...
Because my dad was raised on a farm by Italian immigrants who neither knew nor cared about American baseball, football, basketball, or even track, I grew up in a non-traditional Western Pennsylvania household. There was zero pressure to constantly practice “being a real man” by boxing, ...
