Act into Fear and Abandon all Hope

The first time I received truly life-changing advice was when a friend pointed me in the direction of David Allen’s Getting Things Done. I was in the middle of getting my graduate degree, struggling to keep up with the demands of school, teaching, friends, and romance…

Debate and Dialectic

Election season is over in the US, but folks are still talking about how divided political conversation is. We hear that…

Narrativemancy 101: Why Paper Beats Rock

The first in (hopefully) a series of posts about using the power of narrative to teach, persuade, inspire, and explain. This entry attempts to provide a model for why narratives are so powerful, relative to personal experience and impersonal evidence.

Shopping for Happiness

This essay is an edited cross-post from my personal blog, Put A Number On It, in which I aim to change your life using high school math, a bit of rationality and bad puns.

“People who say that money can’t buy happiness just don’t know where to shop.” — One of…

In praise of emotive communication

This is a tale of two blog posts. The first is a Tumblr post that made me FEEL STUFF, and did so fantastically.

There are a lot of arguments about why the FDA is bad. Scott Alexander has posted about it several times on his site, and he’s far…