On an otherwise normal afternoon in 1955 Robert Stein, a young editor at Redbook magazine, sat at a table in the Gladstone Hotel in Manhattan, slamming rounds of scotch in rapid succession and fighting back a rising swell of panic. He had bitten off far more than he could chew…
There is a debate raging about Christmas that you probably have never heard about. It is a long-standing and acrimonious debate, which stretches from the halls of academia to the cathedrals of Rome. …
The new layout for Medium went live today. I like it, a lot. I’ve been concerned for a while about how stories get buried in authors’ profiles, and I was hoping that at some point Medium would structure things so that interested readers could browse through authors’ back-catalogs quickly. …
There is a small collection of Black Stallion novels on the desk in front of me, bordered by two ornately carved bookends depicting flowers in bloom.
I am unsure what type of flowers they are. Lilies, perhaps? …
The early rumblings about the Omicron variant left the world in a state of uncertainty. Most of the important questions that we had when we first started to hear about Omicron were not possible to answer without more information—how fast would it spread? How many people would it kill? How…
Hello, readers!
It is the end of December. This month has brought about some interesting changes. I mentioned in my last letter that I would be crossing the border into Mexico and starting my travels around the world. It happened later than I anticipated — I didn’t make my crossing…
One of the most harrowing tales in Homer’s Odyssey is when Odysseus and his men landed on the island inhabited by the Cyclops, Polyphemus. …
I didn’t start meditating until after my brain had broken.
It took several things going wrong in quick succession to plunge me into my worst episode of major depression. Some problems stemmed from my own poor health; a year prior I had learned that I had Type II Diabetes, and…
It is a rainy night. The surface of the highway, visible through the gentle haze of rain outside of the bus window, glows faintly with the reflected red of a thousand brake lights. I am mostly alone. The other passengers on the bus, like me, are either absorbed in their…
