Different Styles in Business Management
Nobody should want to run a business like the lighter factory, with its puny, per-unit profit scheme. No American company would even try to do what the Chinese do, by hyper-control of their people.
Society & Culture
Why We Need the Loch Ness Monster
Surely the most delightful of our monsters is Nessie. Nothing jarring or subliminally weird in her backstory, no hopeless crushes on miniature mortals, no wreaking of harm or sucking of blood or heedless toppling of skyscrapers. Just a friendly, long necked, improbably ancient creature who surfaces now and again,…
Why Friction Will Always Find You
Risk in romance is friction with the potential of reward. Being alone is the friction of no prospect of reward whatsoever.
Sensory Gratification Is Free (and Freeing)
Gloppy paint, a velvet couch, the ridges meant to cool a coffee cup to the touch, a lid that when spun emits a hollow sound of increasingly lower pitches as it empties, like a bottle whistle….
The Class System Needs Redefined
What could class mean now in America, where populists decry education as brainwashing, influencers look rich in things and lifestyles, and oligarchs spend their time pasting fool’s-gold to everything instead of governing for the benefit of the people?
The Emotional Autopsy of Watching Your Team Lose
There is no arguing against winning and success, which invariably feels great. The problem with winning is that it is nowhere near as interesting as failure. It sounds just like the loser to complain that winning is “boring,” in that it prompts no reflection or analysis. But that complaint also rings true.
Writing is Like Making Love
The best thing about writing for oneself is that you always own your own work and can do exactly as you like with it.
Why David Eckstein Deserves a Bobblehead Doll
I am not a collector of sports memorabilia, but I did collect a box of David Eckstein cereal, EcksO’s, and I have a feeling that, on July 12, I will possess a David Eckstein bobblehead doll as well. Play ball!
Put a Time Machine in Your Closet
Why has clothing gotten less practical, less sustainable, and less comfortable?
The Woodson Boys
To become good at chess is to master skills that would allow one to succeed in a perfect world. And to lose sight of that world, to forget to dream of how things could be, is to lose a great deal, even if it is in this world that we will always be mired.