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
Let me confess a small heresy: I do not think humans are special in the way humans think they are special. We are special in the way a child believes their drawing of a house—with the square body, the triangle roof, and the smoke like string beans—is special: charming, energetic, a little messy, and convinced that everyone else must put this masterpiece on the fridge. When the child becomes an … Read the rest
By Eric Le Roy
Have you ever gazed into a circus mirror that stretched you until you looked like a tapeworm or a spaghetti noodle with eyes? Or breathed in a blast of helium and then tried to talk, sounding like an idiot from Looney Tunes, so bad that even a therapist would piss himself laughing?
These are distortions, of course, but then so is a cartoonist’s … Read the rest
