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“Failure is always an option.” – Adam Savage of MythBusters Is it better to fail miserably and be forgotten, or to fail gloriously and make history? Would it be better to fail in obscurity and fade away into irrelevance? Or, should we seek to fail spectacularly in public view so that others may partake in…
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“One must be sane to think clearly, but one can think deeply and be quite insane.” – Nikola Tesla Have you ever caught yourself overthinking? Who hasn’t? It’s exhausting and often unproductive. Overthinking can make you feel like you’re running a mental marathon in quicksand. Yet, whenever we find ourselves facing a conundrum, we often…
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“The folly of mistaking a paradox for a discovery, a metaphor for a proof, a torrent of verbiage for a spring of capital truths, and oneself for an oracle, is inborn in us.” – Paul Valery, French poet and essayist. We human beings like to know things. Oftentimes, we believe we know more about a…
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“You gain more by not being stupid than you do by being smart.” – Phil Birnbaum, baseball analyst, “An Important Life Lesson from Blackjack and Baseball” In an article published on Slate.com, baseball analyst Phil Birnbaum talked about focusing on minimizing bad decisions rather than trying too hard to make the right decisions. Birnbaum continued…
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Incompleteness has been written about extensively in fields such as mathematics and philosophy. Sadly, it isn’t at all frequently discussed when it comes to volumes of complete works. A collection of complete works is supposed to be a group or set of literary, musical, artistic, or academic works created by a single author. Yet, one…
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What is “intellectualism?” It’s described as “the exercise of the intellect at the expense of emotions.” In other words, it’s where you convince yourself you’re smarter than everyone else by ignoring your feelings. I mean, who needs those pesky things when you’ve got facts and figures to throw around at cocktail parties? For the philosophers…
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This is a response to a particularly thought-provoking newsletter from one of my favorite Substack writers. It’s part of her 28-day Writer’s Notebook challenge to find joy in writing again. This particular post from Collected Rejections gave me pause. Valorie Clark discusses the word “inevitability,” its roots, and the conclusion she comes to is that…
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In the world of Pokémon Red, Blue, and Yellow (Generation I), one type oozes through nearly every corner of the Kanto region: Poison. From the very first routes to the Elite Four, players are inundated with noxious creatures – purple sludge monsters, smog-spewing orbs, venomous plants, and Zubat swarms. It turns out almost 22% of…
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Sabrina Carpenter’s latest single “Manchild” might just be one of the most brilliant pop songs of the 2020s. Beyond its catchy beat and sassy lyrics, the track doubles as sharp social commentary, and its music video unfolds as a pastiche of classic film moments that enrich the song’s narrative. In this deep dive, I’ll apply…
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Emily Dickinson is famous for her idiosyncratic grammar, liberal use of the hyphen, and seemingly random capitalization of words. Despite using typical poetic devices such as assonance, consonance, and alliteration in her works, her poems take unique forms with layouts often making them a bit cryptic. Are these idiosyncrasies in her poetry a sign of…