This piece was in Aeon magazine a little while ago, The self is not singular but a fluid network of identities | Aeon Essays. It’s an interesting piece, well worth a read. It makes the case that the usual way regular people think of the self is mistaken. It is not simple, like a soul,…
My own mother didn’t recognize me. We had agreed to meet in front of the Burger King at the corner of Main and Asylum. I was sitting on a giant planter, my head tilted slightly down as I scrolled through social media. She looked at me, and kept walking. My phone rang a few moments…
It’s all UConn’s fault. I would pop in to watch a Celtics game now and then to see how my boy Kemba, the Greatest Hero of the Big East, was doing. But there were these other guys on the team. One of them looked a little like Kemba, but even as I watched Kemba, I…
I used to say that I didn’t like seafood. Sure, I’d eat fish sticks and shrimp, but anything seafood related that I would eat had to be pulverized and breaded to the point where it was barely recognizable. A friend introduced me to the wonders of real seafood recently- crab legs dipped in butter sauce,…
Dear Mark, These are trying times for so many people. The scourge of [insert social ill which inspired most recent mass shooting] continues to leave deep scars on the soul of our nation. As the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King once said, [insert quote relevant to most recent mass shooting]. Here at Every Nonprofit Ever™,…
“That’s the future mayor of Hartford right there.” That’s how my friend introduces me whenever we meet someone new together. I know that part of it is an acknowledgement of how much he appreciates what I think about politics and government, and I’m humbled by his compliment. But I also know that there’s not-very-subtle subtext…
Hey everybody! I want to invite y’all to my new Twitch channel, Jam Sessions! It’s a creative writing stream where I write live while interacting with the chat and, hopefully soon, take your phone calls. I’ll be live at www.twitch.tv/jam_stunna, and you can find the uploads of my videos there and at my YouTube channel,…
Back in February of 2012, I started a blog called Proof I Never Want To Be President (Of Anything). The name of the blog was a joke about the way the press covers politics. If a politician ever misspeaks, it is a “gaffe” and the press goes on and on about it. And, even worse,…
In his book Deschooling Society, Ivan Illich takes issue with the way that children are treated. In Chapter 2, “Phenomenology of School,” Illich writes, His thoughts about childhood in relation to school have really stayed with me, especially as a result of the pandemic. Making society “livable for the young” takes on a whole new…
For the uninitiated, First Contact Day is a holiday in Star Trek. It celebrates April 5th, 2063, the day that aliens (namely the Vulcans) make first contact with us. To the rest of us, it represents one of the most important future dates in human history. I believe that there is life elsewhere in the…
