Category: big ideas
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On the Banality of Profound Truths
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 […]
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Be Here Now
Sometimes you work very hard to reach a moment of clarifying insight. Sometimes they just fall into your lap. Sometimes that clarifying insight quickly reveals itself to be illusory. To have been too simplistic. Or poorly articulated. Or wrong. But sometimes you sit with that moment of clarity for a bit–spinning it around, looking at […]
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On Privilege
White privilege, as you may know, is a sociological concept describing the advantages enjoyed by white persons beyond what is commonly experienced by the non-white people in those same social spaces (nation, community, workplace, etc.). It differs from racism or prejudice by the fact that a person benefiting from white privilege need not hold racist […]
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Signal, Noise, and Lou Dobbs
Jarrod Trainque (flickr) Signal to noise ratios are something most people are at least mildly familiar with. They’re the reason that you either turn off the radio or change the station as you drive out of the range of the station you were listening to. But where radio on road trips is the obvious place […]
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Retroview: Happiness: A Guide
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, […]
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OPW: Finding Commonality Inside Iraq
Earlier this week I encountered a pretty interesting piece in the New York Review of Books. Entitled “As Iraqis See It,” the piece gives an inside look into the lives of Iraqis working for the McClatchy news organization, one of America’s biggest. McClatchy provides these reporters with a blog, called Inside Iraq, which is where […]
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The Triviality of Difference
Everywhere you look, especially as a teenager, the world is full of others. Of people “not like me.” And though teenagers feel this most intensely, few do not feel it regularly. Just look at the latent antipathy that exists in this country toward Iranians. Or Arabs. Or Mexicans. Or even the French. Surely these people […]
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The Myth of the Magic Bullet
I’ve long been seeking one thing–a song, a poem, a quotation, even a book–that once found will magically save all people–save them from their greed, their fear, and their unnecessary antipathy for one another. One day I met my anti-prophet, who told me this: I’m here to tell you that it doesn’t exist, it can’t […]
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Ignorance is Dangerous
I’m tired of it. Just plain tired. Ignorance is not now, nor has it ever been, bliss. Bliss–extreme happiness, perhaps spiritual in nature–is not caused by ignorance of the world around you. If discovering the message of Jesus is bliss, than ignorance clearly is not. For it is only through knowledge–becoming aware that Jesus died […]