Keeping ideas connected to reality so they can serve our lives in reality.
Still Rocking at Sixty: The Endless Vitality of Iron Maiden
There are few things as wonderful to watch as musicians playing live and clearly loving every moment of it. A great musical performance, especially in an energetic genre like heavy metal, requires far more than just going on stage and playing a song. It’s a...
How Escape Rooms Can Make You a Better Thinker
Escape rooms are growing rapidly in popularity around the world, but most people still don’t know what they are. Put simply, an escape room is a room or building in which a group of people (typically between four and twelve) is locked and given a limited amount of...
Explore ‘Uniquely Human Moments of Triumph’ with Audiomachine
Many of us listen to music as we work, study, exercise, or read, and this can enhance our enjoyment of these activities. However, when I want to truly enjoy a song, especially an instrumental piece, I sit back and listen to it with my eyes closed. Focusing on the...
Ryan Holiday and the Timeless Lessons of Stoicism
The Stoic philosophers, including the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius and the slave-turned-philosopher Epictetus, lived some 2,000 years ago and didn’t have the benefit of more recent schools of philosophy, such as Ayn Rand’s Objectivism. Among other things, they...
I Can Reach Any Star: The Beautiful Philosophy of Star Trek: Enterprise
We're going to stumble, make mistakes, I'm sure more than a few before we find our footing, but we're going to learn from those mistakes. That's what being human is all about. —Captain Jonathan Archer, “Star Trek: Enterprise—Shockwave: Part 2” (2002) Star Trek has...
Freak Out with Tom Papa
Are you ready for intelligent, benevolent comedy? Let me introduce you to Freaked Out with Tom Papa. So much comedy is cynical or mean spirited or just not funny. This one-hour routine from 2013 is a beautiful exception. Tom Papa: Freaked Out appeals to the...
Helen Keller’s Five Keys to Being Happy
Once I knew only darkness and stillness. Now I know hope and joy. —Helen Keller. In 1882, when Helen Keller was nineteen months old, an illness left her blind, deaf, and consequently dumb. For the next five years, she lived essentially as a wild animal in the...
Ira Glass on Closing the Ideal-Actual Gap in the Creative Process
Several years ago, while procrastinating in graduate school, I discovered a short video clip that helped me at the time—and has now helped me again. The clip, posted below, is of Ira Glass, the award-winning producer of the radio show, This American Life,...
Eleanor Roosevelt on Being an Individual(ist)
“Remember always that you have not only the right to be an individual; you have an obligation to be one.” – Eleanor Roosevelt. What is an individual? The Cambridge Dictionary gives us a few definitions, the first two being: “a single person or thing,...