By Eric Le Roy
Sometimes a death in the family comes like grief poured over your head, a bucketful of black water. You can drown that way. Sometimes it feels like liberation. Often, it’s more of a handshake. That’s how it was with my Dad and me.
Earlier this week, a friend told me that his mother had passed. She was 93. My friend has also been subjected … Read the rest
There are people who leave religion because they hate it, and people who leave because they loved something in it and could no longer pretend. I understand the second group better. Not because they are smarter, but because they are usually gentler. They are not trying to win arguments. They are trying to stop lying to themselves.
Most believers I have met are not hungry for control. They are tired, … 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
Content advisory 18+ The other day a friend of mine was trying to explain something during a lesson we were having on Skype. He is a 49-year-old Russian businessman who used to live in America. He is very pro-American, or, shall I say, pro-West, in terms of what he considers its more highly evolved way of life. BUT he is Russian at heart, which I can only explain (to myself … Read the rest
The news that the Russian wheelchair-bound singer Yulia Samoylova has been given a three-year ban from entering Ukraine — thus spoiling her chances of representing her country in the Eurovision — causes me to recall the time when I first came to Russia. I confess — with more than a little shame now — that back then I couldn't have told you much about which country was which. I thought … Read the rest
