Ideas

“Nick took the cork out of the grasshopper bottle and a hopper clung to it. He picked him off, hooked him and tossed him out. He held the rod far out so that the hopper on the water moved into the current flowing into the hollow log. Nick lowered the rod and the hopper floated in. There was a heavy strike. . . .”

Humans are not very logical creatures. The beliefs that we hold usually don’t come from spreadsheets and peer-reviewed science journals, but from the stories we tell each other. This has always been the case. . . .

1. Immigrants have always been feared and scapegoated in America. As Benjamin Franklin wrote in 1753, of German immigrants . . .

“There ain’t no asylum here/King Solomon he never lived ‘round here.” – The Clash, “Straight to Hell”

As Russian tanks roll across Ukraine, and Putin raises the threat of nuclear war, I wonder (dare I?) if the rise of authoritarianism, Putinism, and Trumpism in the United States is finally reaching its logical limit. . . .

There are two types of people in the world: adrenaline junkies and the rest of us. But even among adrenaline junkies, a spectrum of risk tolerance (or rather, risk pursuit) exists. . . .

About a week after 9/11, I went abroad for the first time. I was a junior in college, on exchange for the year. Now, Leicester, England isn’t the first place most people would visit in Europe, much less England, but I really enjoyed my time there, and it turned out to be a pivotal moment in my life.

The first thing that struck me when I got to Europe (maybe apart from being able to legally buy a beer in a pub at 19) was the density and walkability of it. . . .

Next year will mark the 60th anniversary of a seminal work in American political analysis, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” by Richard Hofstadter. . . . Sadly, his formulation has turned out to be more relevant in 2022 than he could have ever predicted. . . .

I grew up playing soccer. . . . When I moved to New York in my late twenties, I started playing pickup games. . . . I enjoyed playing again, but it was always a struggle to get a good game. Either there were too many people at a field, and you couldn’t get a spot, or the level of play wasn’t right. It’s no fun playing with people who are too far above or below your level. You either feel dispensable or indispensable, neither of which is good for a team sport. . . .