Here is the distinction I think matters: It is not cheating if the tool is amplifying the authentic value the writer brings. It is cheating when the tool is substituting for a value that the writer does not have. Continue reading The Best Product Should Win: How I’m Evolving the Way I Write
This noise does something to us. It keeps our bodies in a state of low-grade panic. Our hearts beat a little faster. Our thoughts race a little more. We feel tired but cannot sleep. We feel connected but somehow alone. Continue reading A Few Words for the Class of 2026 (From Someone Who Got Most Things Wrong)
“Our response is more democracy, more openness, and more humanity. But never naivety.”
He wasn’t being soft. He was being precise. He was saying: a free, trusting society is something we choose to keep being. The test of that choice is what we do on the worst day, not the best one. Continue reading Walls or Words: What We Choose to Build After the Shots Stop
That is not a modern literary pose. That is the oldest layer of the culture speaking. And Norwegians, for all their reputation for understatement, rather revel in it. The darkness is not something they have grown out of. It is something they claim. Continue reading The Crack in the Ice- On Nordic Noir
I find myself thinking about what it means to truly respect our children as adults. It means trusting that they know their own hearts. It means not imposing our expectations onto their choices. It means celebrating their flourishing, whatever form it takes. Continue reading In Defense of My Children’s Choice
This is how resentment reproduces itself. Keep people scrambling and they stay dependent on whoever promises to name their enemy and fight on their behalf. The resentment architects need your scarcity to keep you as a host. The moment you experience enough abundance, enough space, enough breathing room, you start to see through it. Continue reading THE CROSSING – Part Two of Two
The architects of resentment, of any age, share certain characteristics. They deal in enemies. They trade in scarcity, the sense that there is not enough, that someone else is taking what is yours, that the only answer is to fight. Their nationalism and their religion are transactional and tribal rather than transcendent. They don’t lift people toward higher ground. They plant people more firmly in the mud and tell them to be proud of it. Continue reading Part One of Two: On self-determination, equality, and the feudal logic we keep having to fight
This is the language of dehumanization. Not subtle, not coded, not requiring any interpretation. Just the plain assertion that some category of people belongs in rubble and ruin, that their reduction to ash is their proper place in the order of things. Continue reading A Season of Reflection — An Easter Message
But this post isn’t really about Iran. It’s about a pattern I see everywhere. A pattern of hubris and dehumanization that plays out on battlefields overseas and in our own communities and across dinner tables where families have stopped speaking to each other. The same inability to see others clearly. The same assumption that we have nothing to learn from people who disagree with us. The same surprise when those we’ve dismissed turn out to be more capable and more human than we wanted to believe. Continue reading The Cost of Hubris: Learning from Military and Social Patterns
This took some getting used to. In my experience growing up in America, changing your mind in public felt dangerous. It meant you were weak, or uninformed, or that you had somehow lost the argument. We treat conversations like competitions here, I think. Someone has to win. Someone has to be right. Continue reading Unpolished
