I came across a piece in the current issue of The Atlantic I’ve been thinking about ever since. It’s an attempt to map the fault lines in American politics right now as the product of fractures in the society as a whole, and it begins with this profound insight:

Nations, like individuals, tell stories in order to understand what they are, where they come from, and what they want to be. National narratives, like personal ones, are prone to sentimentality, grievance, pride, shame, self-blindness. There is never just one — they compete and constantly change. The most durable narratives are…

The NY Times published a piece recently by Adam Grant, the title of which was “There’s a Name for the Blah You’re Feeling: It’s Called Languishing”

Grant defines languishing as “a sense of stagnation and emptiness.…. The feeling as if you’re muddling through your days, looking at your life through a foggy windshield.”

Psychology types think about mental health on a spectrum from depression to flourishing. Flourishing is the peak of well-being, a strong sense of meaning, mastery and mattering to others. Depression is of course the valley of ill-being; feeling despondent, drained, worthless.

Languishing is, according to Grant, “the…

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…