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 ...
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, ...
When tourists visit the estate known as Linden Hall at St. James Park, they typically focus on the visible things like its amazing stonework and Tudor-style architecture. They see the sense of permanence rising from the hills a few miles from Dawson. What often is left unobserved is how that ...
I come from a family where grown men cry. My dad cried at the drop of a hat. Don’t get me wrong, it was not in a melodramatic way. It was that quiet, involuntary welling up that happens when a TV ad lands perfectly. You know, like when a soldier returning from war surprises his kid at school, ...
