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Could Kristen Bell, Elon Musk, and Jeff Bezos end global hunger?

I rarely publish essays on my website anymore. For more regular updates, I’ve started keeping a weekly newsletter on Substack. I subscribe to Yuval Harari’s theory of social progress: society improves when we replace a bad story (slavery is okay, women shouldn’t vote, governments should run businesses) with better stories. So that’s what I’m trying to do with this essay; I’m trying to replace a…

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#Agri-Intellectuals #Agriculture #Gates Foundation #Kenya #Nairobi #Wakanda

Winter Journal #1: The Matrix

I saw The Matrix Resurrections — all two and a half hours — in the IMAX theater yesterday afternoon. Somehow, more than two decades have passed since I first (and last) saw the original. I would have never seen the reboot had a friend not invited me — a reminder that diversity in friendships brings with it diversity in experiences. Here’s what I wrote in my journal on February 12, 2000, when I…

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#Philosophy #San Francisco #The Matrix

Conversation in the time of Covid: needy extroverts and empathetic introverts

I’m sitting in a park drinking a cup of coffee and doing some reading for work. Or at least I’m trying to. I haven’t been able to concentrate for the past 30 minutes because a nearby woman has been loudly monologueing into her cell phone about the injustices of the world and the stupidity of all other people. It’s hard to believe that anyone could be so patient as to be listening to this…

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#conversation

Deep Reading as Secular Spirituality

“Intellectual stimulation is an emotional experience for me,” remarked the mathematician and polymath Eugenia Cheng. Her words have stayed with me.

Around 7 this morning I was sipping my favorite brew of coffee in the living room, listening to the ambient background of Pacific Notionson KEXP, and watching a thick fog slowly retreat back to the ocean. This is my church time. Intellectual…

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A few thoughts on beginning the second half of life, part 1

On June 8, 2008, I was living in Medellín, Colombia teaching librarians the basics of digital media, when I used the service FutureMe to send an email to 40-year-old me 12 years in the future:

Steven Johnson was one of my favorite bloggers and authors throughout my late 20s. Though he is more than a decade my elder, I saw something of myself in our shared appreciation of literature,…

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#Day One #James Hollis #Meditation #Nonviolent Communication #Steven Johnson

A review of Cool Gray City of Love

Call it historical schadenfreude: I’ve been greatly comforted over the past couple of months by reading historical accounts of just how much worse things used to be a century or two ago. Take the 1906 San Francisco earthquake as an example. I already knew that it destroyed 80% of the city and killed around 3,000 people, but I had no idea that up to 500 of those deaths were caused by soldiers…

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#Allen Ginsburg #Gary Kamiya #Jack Kerouac #Maya Angelou #Oakland #San Francisco

Highly Recommended: Audiobook of Trevor Noah's Memoir

Highly Recommended: Audiobook of Trevor Noah’s Memoir

I was one of those overly ironic Gen Xers who stopped watching the Daily Show after Jon Stewart retired and a millennial took over. So I didn’t know much about Trevor Noah other than the occasional YouTube clip that made its way across my social media feeds. But what a life! It’s difficult to believe all that has happened to this guy in such a short amount of time.

I started reading the first…

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Why is Karl Ove Knausgaard Afraid of Therapy?

Book Six, the final volume of Karl Ove Knausgård’s My Struggle, is a massive 1,161 pages. According to my Kindle, it takes the typical reader more than 25 hours to get through it.

How does the most celebrated and scandalous work of 21st century literature end? More than 400 pages are dedicated to Hitler’s life, including critiques of his previous biographers. It is also an intellectual history…

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#Karl Ove Knausgaard #Therapy #Writing

[Podcast] Reno to Albuquerque Alejandro Nothing defines a road trip like its soundtrack. Tomorrow Alejandro is driving from Reno to Albuquerque and was in the market for some musical accompaniment.

#Flagstaff #music #Podcast #Road Trip

Will Online Video Make the World a Better Place?

Originally published on PBS MediaShift on January 5, 2008.

The impact of the digital divide (or at least the bandwidth imbalance) is most pronounced when it comes to online video. In regions where lightening-fast internet connections are taken for granted, such as North America, Western Europe, and East Asia, it has become a common occurrence to observe teenagers watching YouTube videos on…

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#Jehane Noujaim #Pangea Day #YouTube

Bringing a Little Wild to the City

With this essay, I hope to resolve two related questions that I’ve struggled with throughout my 30s. First, why do I feel so much more authentically me when I’m in nature, even though I choose to spend 97% of my time in cities? Why do I become more observant, appreciative, and relaxed when I’m in the forest, outside of civilization? Is the same true for others? The second question: What do I…

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#Meditation #nature #Psychadelics #Robert Wright

Bicycle Diaries Part 2: The Stories We Tell Ourselves

Continued from part 1 here.

Cazadero is at the base of King Ridge Road, one of California’s most scenic (and fun) stretches of cycling. But first you must pay the entrance fee: a steep, curving climb up, up, up alongside a river that becomes a creek and narrows to a trickle at the top.

Soaked with sweat, my water bottles nearly empty, I arrive to the top of the ridge, and I felt like a…

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#Alison Gopnik #Cazadero #cycling #King Ridge Road

Bicycle Diaries Part 1: Esprit de Corps

It was surprisingly easy to wake up at 4:30 in the morning. Well anyway, it was easy enough to wake up when Iris gently shook my shoulder to point out my buzzing, beeping cell phone on the night stand.

Through the living room windows facing south, San Francisco was utterly dark, the street lamps of the Excelsior neighborhood twinkling on the hillside beneath the crest of MacLaren Park. In the…

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Reflections on 15 Years of Blogging

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#blogging #mexico

The Future of Work: The Self-Improvement, Inclusion, and Care Economies

Here’s the US unemployment rate over the past ten years from the Bureau of Labor Statistics — hovering around 10% in 2010 and below 4% today. We all know that the robots are coming for our jobs eventually. We all know that there will be another recession eventually. But for now, in the midst of this bizarre political climate, we couldn’t ask for a better economy. The stock market continues to…

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#economy #School of Life #work

[Review] How to Change Your Mind

I was reluctant to read Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dillema back in 2009. I equated it with foodies, which I equated with bourgeois snobbery. But after enough recommendations from dear friends whose opinions I value, I gave in and ended up writing a fawning, long-winded reviewfrom Buenos Aires, which included the line “few other books have given me so much reason to re-think my own beliefs,…

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#Michael Pollan #Psychadelics #Psychology

Growing Up With Dave Eggers

I came of age with Dave Eggers’ writing, beginning with A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, which described a number of themes that were central to my life when I first read it in 2001. My emerging adult identity was stirred by the raw urgency of his writing and the audacity of a twenty-something eager to process his inner angst and distribute the results through bookstores and libraries…

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#Dave Eggers #San Francisco #Yemen

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