Lorne Michaels just completed the 46th season of Saturday Night Live, a show he created and executive produced for most of its existence. It began, of course, in 1976 with an incredibly talented group of future superstars, including Chevy Chase, Dan Aykroyd, and the source of my first tears over a celebrity death, John Belushi.

To have identified such a talented group of people once could have been dumb luck. But Michaels has renewed the cast dozens of times since then, finding and launching comedic giants year after year, decade after decade. As I get older, and struggle to keep…

Think back to high school, specifically to your high school classrooms. Odds are that on some wall in some class was some version of a poster called the Ascent of Man. Even if there wasn’t, I’m sure you’ve seen it… From left to right it depicts a hunched over chimpanzee, then some other kind of ape walking on two legs, then some kind of missing link walking erect, followed by beings that look more and more human, culminating in the image, at far right, of some walking White guy. It’s the story of human evolution, in pictures, and it’s one…

Think about a situation that’s caused you pain. Odds are, the roots of that pain were in you missing some fundamental truth… about what was happening, about another person, even about who you are, and what you need.

Let me pick this apart a little.

First, pain comes in many forms: physical pain, acute pain, dull pain, emotional pain, financial pain, etc. It often comes suddenly, from an accident or trauma out of the clear blue sky. When my sister-in-law received a cancer diagnosis on the eve of a big family trip, there was plenty of pain to go around…

Sometimes you read something that just stays with you. John Higgs’ Stranger Than We Can Imagine: Making Sense of the Twentieth Century is a book like that, and it helped this Gen X’er understand what’s different about Millennials and Gen Z, in the context of all the generations that preceded them. The book is definitely worth reading in its entirety, but I thought I’d try and share just the arc of generational history I found fascinating.

It starts like this… For centuries, humankind boiled down to a guy (always) who decided things; and everyone else, who pretty much did as…

Middle School sucks. It sucks especially for kids really trying to be good, kids who’ve been taught their whole lives that being good will bring the rewards of love, validation, and reciprocal kindness. My kids were all like that, and to a person each has run headlong into the wall of pimply, mis-shapen, performative cruelty that is early teen sub-culture.

I’m no stranger to this. I’m a sensitive person, even more so as a boy from a heavily Italian strip-mall suburb in Rhode Island. I still remember the crushing realization that some people had no desire to be good, to…

Friedrich August Kekule was a professor of chemistry who became obsessed with trying to figure out the structure of Benzene, an organic compound found in petrochemicals. Benzene is a natural constituent of crude oil, a colorless but highly flammable liquid with an aroma some consider sweet. If you like that gas station smell, like me, you probably agree.

Benzene’s flammability made it a potent and valuable energy source, but its properties weren’t well understood because its structure didn’t seem to make sense. It was known to be comprised of carbon and hydrogen, in the molecular formula C₆H₆, but the particular…

My youngest child is having some trouble at school right now. Some kids are giving her a hard time, teasing in the cruel ways middle school kids have always teased each other, torments familiar yet born anew with each generation.

Having survived three prior Middle School experiences (or I guess 4, counting my own,) I was ready with the appropriate Dad-ism when she told me what had happened. “People only have the power over you that you give them,” I said, with knowing intensity. I let her noodle on that for a moment, answering her very practical questions before delivering…

It’s pretty much common knowledge that capitalism is broken. Right wing media would have us believe there’s a growing rift between those who want to fix it and those who want to swap it for something else, but my sense is we could get consensus on at least the underlying problems if we were a little less focused on extracting political advantage from the continued division.

What we should be focused on instead is what we can do to improve the reality we all saw with our own eyes during the pandemic… crippling inequality, poor access to healthcare, racial bias…