As the USA approaches its 250th birthday, please pause to consider these four often-overlooked words.
Category: Words to the Wise
Language is the most powerful tool in history, the code through which we humans connect or don’t. For decades, I’ve been trying to use it wisely and well—to build better arguments, tell better stories, create more meaning, and share more truths. Here’s what I’ve learned along the way.
The Struggle to Write Is the Struggle to Think
Ask most people to define “writing,” and they’ll tell you it’s the process of putting words down on paper, communicating what you already know. In reality, writing is often how you discover what you don’t know—and so how you learn to think better.
Write It Down
The things you write down, using your own words, begin to become the meaning you create for yourself, if for no other reason than because you wrote them down. And creating meaning is not a task any of us can afford to outsource.
Our Era Is Not “Post-Truth,” It’s “Loyalty-First”
In the history of truth, questions of loyalty came before questions of accuracy. In our current cultural moment, questions of loyalty seem to be ascending again, with some potentially dire consequences.
Read Closely, Listen Actively, Lead Wisely
Do whatever it takes to let yourself fully engage—to read and think and write back. The right people will love you for it.
What My Daughter’s Drawing Taught Me About Words
Language is a maker, not a mirror. And continuing to use it creatively is now more important than ever.
7 Basic Plots and How to Use Them
Stories are ubiquitous in human life, from the time we begin to make sense of the world to our final sentences. So learning how to tell them--and why--is essential.
Public Discourse in a Peekaboo World
Much of what we perceive about the world now reaches us through a multiplatform game of informational peekaboo–and we rarely stop to think about the weirdness of this fact.
Beware the Curse of Knowledge
Expertise can be its own worst enemy.
It’s a Wondrous, Marvelous, Maybe Even Miraculous World
Pragmatic people often say they don’t believe in miracles. That itself is arguably miraculous.
