Remember when you were 13? Remember being shy and awkward about everything (shawkward, if you will)? Remember parties with the cool kids where you felt totally out of place? Bo Burnham does. And he brings all those memories flooding back […]
Water navigation. Entertaining tourists. Playing DJ. Pulling people around on inflatable tubes. Captaining a tour boat on the lake seems like the best job. Or at least, so I thought as I watched a young Lake Lanier dock hand at work today. […]
Who doesn’t love theme parks? Disney’s Magic Kingdom gives us the lands of “yesterday, tomorrow, and fantasy.” EPCOT takes us around the world. Universal Studios takes us into the movies, from Harry Potter to The Mummy. We’re even more fascinated by fictional theme parks like […]
If you live in a major city in the US, you’ve probably already borne witness to the scooter revolution. For short distance trips down city sidewalks, the motorized, smartphone-unlockable scooters provided by companies like Bird and Lime are kicking butt […]
Have you ever been doing your best to do door to door selling in a small, strange Florida beach town when your smartphone dies on you? I have.* There are few things more stressful – and I really needed to […]
We’ve all heard that “the medium is the message.” But when I look back through the collected artifacts of my grandfather’s life, I can see that medium has a lot to do with memories also. The stories of many of our […]
The Internet can be a place of many strange delights and many time-wasting distractions. But it’s hard to deny is that it has given people access to invaluable education. There’s plenty of written history to be had, but the web (particularly Youtube) has made […]
Time travel is really quite easy. All it takes is noticing. We’re each surrounded by portals connecting and blending our past and our present. On the streets of Charleston I walked tonight, gas street lamps and cobblestone streets live alongside Uber ridesharing. Of […]
“Radical” is a scary word, but radicals are (fundamentally) just very consistent people. If they believe in a principle, they believe that it applies to the very root (“radix” – a Latin term) of things. If they believe in non-aggression as a […]
“No one is coming to save you.” In Six Pillars of Self-Esteem, Nathaniel Branden penned this line to remind his readers of their self-responsibility. While many of us imagine that we’ll be swept away from our miseries and weaknesses by some […]
Most people don’t fall in love with certain kinds of music because of time signatures, good rhythm, or even particularly good melodies. There’s little element of music theory appreciation in most people’s love of music. People love music because it takes memories, associations, feelings […]
“And when I run, I feel His pleasure.” I know it’s not reverent, but I still chuckle when I hear this quote. These words are from Eric Liddell, the Scottish runner and Christian missionary celebrated in the movie Chariots of Fire. I’m […]
Lyft and Uber have inspired a new renaissance of ways of getting around – but much of it is happening off the road. This afternoon as I ran through Atlanta’s Piedmont Park and on the Atlanta Beltline, I could see […]
In Mastery, Robert Greene paints a thorough picture of apprenticeship and the power it has had to shape great creative careers throughout history. In one form or another, apprenticeship has been part of the path for masters from Leonardo da Vinci to Benjamin Franklin. Apprenticeship […]
There are plenty of good reasons to stay late at the office, even if you’re not a workaholic. For me as a young employee, making the time to commit some later nights has given me access to large slots of […]
I started occasionally attending jiu jitsu classes several months ago. In all my time so far, no one ever sat me down and told me the rules of jiu jitsu. There has been no theory, little top-down explanation of terminology, and in […]
I recently attended one of the best birthday parties I can recall. What’s odd is how this party stood out to me at all. It had no bumping music, no fancy lights. No one was drunk or high or gorging on fine […]
What would life be like if you were aware of being in a story? For some time now I’ve been fascinated by the idea of the monomyth popularized by thinkers like Joseph Campbell, C.S. Lewis, and (more recently) Jordan Peterson. […]
Salesforce. Marketing automation. Certified public accountancy. Javascript. There are lots of skills these days that can look great on a job application. But there’s one skill that (while it won’t look good on a resume) will help you breeze through […]
With apologies to Rodgers and Hammerstein , you can now imagine Julie Andrews* singing about everyone’s favorite part of Atlanta, in all of its silliness and excess and beauty. Yuppies on scooters And gentrification King of Pops snacking and revitalization Dog […]
One of the great temptations of growing older is the temptation to throw your own past onto the “mgarbage bin of history” The past carries so much baggage – from your mistakes to your missed opportunities to your past blindness […]
I cut my teeth as a young employee in part by working in a hardware store back in the summer of 2014. Hardware stores are magical places, and they’re perfect places to be if you want to learn about home maintenance […]
In my book, Ned Stark is the foremost fantasy authority on leadership. Ned demonstrates great leadership more in his actions than in his words, but he says some things which get to the root of leadership: “Bran thought about it. […]
Hope rises next to fear Coffee and cortisol mix in the veins of a thousand doubtful warriors Leaving comfort for fresh new chaos The city skyline beckons Age and experience next to youth in the same line Lines of cars cutting through […]
I don’t always watch television, but when I do, I gravitate toward shows that dive into characters and events based upon real times and people in history. These are some of my favorite series: Victoria – Victoria is the story of a […]
Tonight I went out for karaoke with a group of libertarian friends. As a bunch tied together by common interests and beliefs and work in the area of political philosophy and economics, you wouldn’t think of us as the outgoing creative […]
I’m told it’s important to set realistic expectations for any kind of search of places to rent, so I’ve written down some of my modest goals: 1. Defensibility – Must have arrow slits, good battlements, and plenty of places from which boiling oil […]
It seems that so many fantasy stories center on the relationship between death and life – and the various ways in which it can go wrong. From Tolkien’s Numenoreans to Rowling’s Deatheaters, the villains in many stories become villains because […]
If you’re going to learn one style of popular partner dancing, east-coast swing is surely the most versatile. You can use it for dancing to swing and big band music but also for boogeying to blues, Western swing, and rockabilly. There’s a wonderful […]
There is an old idea in the Judeo-Christian tradition that humans were given dominion over the earth to rule in the image of God. It’s a remarkable idea, made more remarkable by the fact that such dominion appears to be shared […]