Slow the Roll
As he tooled along, his car turned over 100,000 miles. He was a guy who had a car with a 100,000 miles on it. He had a lot of miles on him too. He wondered how many that would be, briefly tried to do the math.
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The Most Important and Most Neglected Virtue
As director of The Honesty Project, funded by the John Templeton Foundation, Dr. Christian Miller wants to rectify the omission. “Honesty was neglected in the realm of academic philosophy for much of the twentieth century,” he points out, “and there’s no clear answer why.” Maybe it scares us.
Fate Can Be Cruel, Friends Crueller
Social media only exaggerates the power of a mean remark, spreading it far and wide, memorializing it forever. Which is why Mich Hancock, who built a company on her adroit use of social, is now pushing to “make the internet a kinder place.” She admits her plan sounds “a little fluffy”—but when she tells me what drove her, it is clear just how much weight has landed behind simple kindness.
The Mosquitoes of Winter
Thank goodness for the Christmas tree, bringer of joy and emotional warmth, driven down on a truck from Mississippi or North Carolina. Its tiny lights and ornaments collected for decades infuse the subtropical house with seasonal cheer, even if you can see the warm, wet road and piles of hurricane debris past it through the windows.
Allergic to the World
In some ways, the paranoia of someone with allergies is an accurate metaphor. The world is full of potential toxins, and anything could sicken us at any point. Some folks can hang on to the illusion of safety; others have bodies less easily fooled.
The Monolith #MeToo
The column in the desert (we will call it a monolith as shorthand, though it was not stone) was made by human hands, with precision-milled sheets of stainless steel and rivets. More intriguing: It had stood there undiscovered for four years. The idea that anything can go undiscovered for four years cheers me.What is depressing is what came next.The copycats.
The 2020 Dumpster Fire
Talk of post-traumatic stress disorder is a little too dramatic for those of us who just worked from home next to a dog and a cozy space heater. Delayed trauma is the terrain our frontline workers will have to navigate. But there is newer research on post-traumatic growth, Bono says, and any of us can grow from this crazy year. The trick is to stay aware and reflective, not just guzzle a vat of champagne and sashay, relieved, into 2021.
After the Hurricanes, the Holidays
The Capital One tower in Lake Charles, Louisiana, still missing most of its glass after the hurricanes. It is 72 degrees and raining again in Lake Charles. It has been raining off and on for days. There is an ongoing mosquito infestation, despite two US Air Force…
Why We Try So Hard to Change Our Beloved
Most of us do not live in "The Twilight Zone," where we could literally poison our beloved. Yet we begin a relationship convinced that we can, and should, change them.
Pathetic ‘Mischief’: 3 Figures of the Alt-Right
Richard Spencer at his mother’s house in Whitefish, Montana, in a scene from ‘White Noise.’ The Atlantic’s first documentary, White Noise, is directed by Daniel Lombroso, who also did the camera work. It was Lombroso who captured the images in 2016 of white nationalist Richard Spencer (“a…