If there was one obstacle, beyond laziness, that made me hesitate to get back to writing in more than the few-sentence bursts I regularly produce for Link Banana it was my uncertainty about what of value I could say. It’s not that I don’t think people need to hear things I think that I know—while […]

I’ve talked about Matthieu Ricard’s excellent Happiness: A Guide to Developing Life’s Most Important Skill twice before. This bit is about how we’re all so afraid to slow down. “Living it up” has become the leitmotif of modern man—a compulsive hyperactivity without any downtimes, no gap of unscheduled time, lest we end up alone with […]

Matthieu Ricard’s Happiness: A Guide to Developing Life’s Most Important Skill is probably the most important book in my life. No work has ever influenced so many aspects of my life or caused me to see the world so differently. Were there only one book that I could take with my to a desert island, […]

There’s a large soft spot in my heart for broad and sweeping pieces of advice about how to live you life. Even if I don’t agree with everything such poems, columns, commencement speeches, or songs say, I still like them. And even if they seem to be off on a few points, they say things […]

For a while, I was obsessed with the idea of slaying dragons. Perhaps it started when I read Tolkien’s immortal tale of The Hobbit, but it didn’t end there. Whenever low clouds would obscure the tops of the nearby foothills, I’d dream about venturing up there to slay the dragon that surely existed within the […]