Tired after more than twelve hours working day I was driving home through Andrássy Street recently and got slowed down by the taxi drivers’ protest. Blue lights, horns, yellow cars squeezed together like irritated bees. In that moment, when the city suddenly becomes a bottleneck of human frustration, you cannot help wondering how many strange incentives are packed into one square kilometer of Budapest traffic.
At first glance they looked … Read the rest
By Eric Le Roy
I might be giving the game away if I tell you I’ve been married five times and now present myself as an authority on the best way to sustain a happy ‘holy’ matrimony. You’ll be forgiven for asking: How can this chronic nuptial fuck-up possibly have anything to say besides “Here is some advice you should immediately ignore”? It probably wouldn’t help if … Read the rest
When I was a young lad long ago in the bland, faceless, smugly prosperous America of the 1950s, I had an itch to be somewhere else. As I heard the expression put first on the TV series “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”, I would indulge myself regularly in a game called “Anywhere but Here.” The Germans have a beautiful word for it: Wanderlust.
But … Read the rest
Work, in the long view, is a moving target. For most of our species’ history we did not “have jobs”; we had tasks that followed daylight, seasons, and stomachs. Hunter-gatherer life combined bursts of high effort with long stretches of social time—mending, storytelling, tool care, childcare. Ethnographic estimates vary, but the pattern is consistent: subsistence came in pulses, not in 8-hour rectangles. The body we still carry—ultradian focus cycles, circadian … Read the rest
It is a strange thing, how the brain calculates danger.
You would think a kilogram of fear is the same everywhere, like a kilogram of sugar. But it is not. Fear is priced locally. In one city you hear a car backfire and three people dive under the table, in another you hear automatic gunfire and people only speed up their steps because they are late for work. The bullets … Read the rest
