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.
Society & Culture
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
When Miyako Bellizi designed costumes for Marty Supreme, she spent “a lot of time thinking about Timothée Chalamet’s underwear.” One-piece union suit, typical in the early 1950s, or the newfangled boxers? She wanted to be period correct.
Hers was a professional choice. For the rest of us, wearing vintage…
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.
Līlā
Defending a liberal arts education is equivalent to celebrating līlā/ play. Enabling and encouraging līlā is more than just desirable, it is necessary. My thesis is thus līlā/ play is the intellectual disposition that enables epistemic humility, which in turn is the central goal of a liberal arts education.
Board Games and Human Nature
Like comic books and animation, board games became more artful, more expensive, more interesting to adults. For millennia, games had been folk culture, passed down for generations, the play communal. Now they are a craft, sometimes even an art, designed and authored, often with a deliberately niche appeal.
Father and Child Reunion
In the process of traveling with my youngest daughter to five races, I learned that my crude assumptions about the nature of Formula 1 drivers were wrong and that my daughter was an F1 authority to be reckoned with.
The Difference Between Making Promises and Keeping Them
The man asking if I am a Christian is a Puerto Rican chef living in Dallas, someone I met in the strange expanse of the internet, specifically within a Chinese gaming platform called Age of Origins.
Searching for Luck in Las Vegas Playing the Same Game on Two Different Floors
At the slot machine that night, I also had no control. I even lost my money. I did not feel so anxious. But at the trade show, I kept worrying more, trying harder, all the effort to feel in control, but did the odds change a lot? Maybe not.
How Shopping Became Miserable
One foot on a tangle of tree root, I looked down at my beloved Merrell hiking boots and noticed big, frayed holes on both sides. Time to spring for a new pair. To be loyal, I went—in the flesh—to REI, but they had only waterproof hiking boots. “Tariffs,” muttered the…