Meta’s stock collapse revealed what I already knew — I quit Facebook, Instagram and every other property owned by what is now called Meta nearly two years ago. It was at the time a rash decision and at first many of my friends and family wondered where I had “gone.” Soon, though, the people who mattered “found” me. It…

My search for an acre of escape — It was the rock that caught my eye. Dappled with lichen and lighted by the afternoon sun, it appeared to be the perfect place for contemplation. A spot where you could sit and write your novel, ponder your place in the universe, and perhaps reach some kind of equilibrium with…

This is the year to de-center your smartphone — For the sake of yourself and your country, it is time to get off your phone. Yes, I know you needed to see the latest inquiries into January 6th, the most recent QAnon theories, the debunking of those theories and then the debunking of the debunking. Then perhaps you’ll want…

A note on our global legacy — Old things become fresh again when you revisit them after a long absence. Take the simple icons that tell you in any airport, indeed in any public place in the world, where it’s ok to relieve yourself. I need to go. Where can I go? Oh, over there, toward sign…

I loved her and nature equally. Then I became a teenager. — The mourning dove was in my sights, exposed by a gust of autumn that had taken away all its cover. My mother loved mourning doves. She was the one who had told me that the dove was in fact “mourning” — not a denizen of the “morning” — the naming…

Pick up your spade, put down your device — “We must cultivate our garden.” When Voltaire wrote that famous concluding line to Candide, he could never have foreseen the degree to which humans two-and-a-half centuries later would fail to heed his advice. Instead of consistently re-tilling our belief system, planting questions about the nature of truth, and field-testing gambles…

What an epic history test teaches you about science, religion, climate change, and the future of the planet — Youth is wasted on the young. No, I mean it. It really is. Or, rather we old people waste our children’s precious youth by teaching them so poorly, so lazily, so un-energetically, that they have no choice but to knuckle under and just learn the facts. But, holy shit, try…

It’s more complicated than you think — “Whale Carpaccio — 130 Kroner.” Thus read an appetizer on a menu at a restaurant in Bergen, Norway, when I dined there a few years back. I wanted to sample this odd dish. What would the experience be like? Would the meat be chewy like pork, or flaky like fish? …

Moldova, Transnistria, and the passage of time in a bottle — Somewhere between the end of the USSR and the beginning of the present war, around about 1994, I think, I found myself in the former Soviet Republic of Moldova. Wedged between Ukraine to the East and Romania to the west Moldova is a stranded feeling sort of place in a…