How can I help? I say this to my daughter all the time. I usually mean it as a redirection for some kind of tantrum, or a snafu in the routine of an average nameless morning. It’s better than saying no or telling her what to do, or worse yet, doing it for her. Each […]
behavior
In 2015, I wrote a post ostensibly about a funny-looking seabird called the booby. It’s about evolution and biology I suppose but in truth, it’s really about the forces of nature that drive at least some of our actions. And how those forces aren’t always good. In my last post I made the case for why we […]
The other day I made a plant friend. My plant friend is some kind of squash. Pumpkin, maybe. It grows along the edge of a community garden that I walk by on my way to work. Like many of those squash-like plants, it uses tendrils to anchor itself, clinging in tight spirals to the fence […]
I’ve been spending a lot of time lately thinking about my bloodlines. Perhaps it’s my impending fatherhood, perhaps I’m just at that age. I’ve been tracing my grandfathers’ heritages back through the Revolutionary War and to the Tudor conquest of Ireland. I’ve planned a trip to Norway, which is my grandmother’s homeland, and hope to […]
Marriage is like a sweater. A yellow sweater you bought, and couldn’t return. So says Dan Gilbert, a psychologist at Harvard, and one of the 20 outrageously accomplished behavioral scientists who spoke at a 1-day summit at Stanford last week. Gilbert studies happiness, not knitwear. And his main point is that we humans are terrible […]