Vespucciland

I have a very strange commute. I get on the R train deep in the bowels of Brooklyn, then, instead of just riding it all the way into the city, I transfer at Atlantic/PacificBarclay. I have to climb up a flight of stairs, walk a good city block, climb down some more stairs, walk some […]

It’s been a beautiful summer. At least in New York. Winter was harsh, and all the predictors and prognosticators foresaw a summer perfectly representational of global warming: hot, humid, a regular morning commute armpit soaker. That’s what we’ve been getting the past few years. A decent May. A June that is just a bit too […]

“I am an American, Chicago-born, that somber city—and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way.” Those aren’t my words, but they could’ve been. That’s the opening of Saul Bellow’s quintessential mid-American novel, The Adventures of Augie March. No one, however, captured Chicago better than […]

I’m being set up. I can always tell. I walk into the bar and there are five other people. Two couples I recognize and some lady with dark hair and fishnet stockings, pale skin, nice legs, the former-Goth look I’ve always had an itch for. At least my friends know my taste, I think as […]

I hate those “Keep Calm and Carry On” shirts. Or mugs. Or bags. Or huggies. Okay, maybe hate is too strong a word, but I do have a visceral negative reaction to seeing someone wearing or toting something with a variation of that imprint. Immediately I know something about you that is completely inane: “Keep […]

Nietzsche’s Theory of Eternal Recurrence didn’t actually originate with Nietzsche, but rather – one might say – recurred yet again with him after being propounded many times before. It can be found in the philosophies of the ancients, as well as symbolized in the Buddhist wheel of time and the Hindu concept of karma and the […]

To get to the Billy Goat Tavern in Chicago you have to go to Lower Michigan Avenue. Upstairs in regular, normal Michigan Avenue you have the Tribune Tower and the Wrigley Building. If you continue north there’s a bunch of hotels, Saks Fifth Avenue, Neiman Marcus, Bloomingdales, the Water Tower, and the John Hancock building. […]

I used to smoke a lotta weed. Not A LOTTA lotta weed. Just a lotta. I never went to work stoned, never operated heavy machinery while blitzed (or at any other time for that matter), and never let it get out of hand where I would lose an entire weekend to a double chambered bong […]

Let me be frank. This is not about whether vaccines do or do not cause autism. They don’t. Andrew Wakefield, the guy who published the original paper stating that the MMR vaccine was linked to autism amongst children, has been completely discredited. The Lancet, the journal that published the article, fully retracted it. Wakefield has […]

There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy. All the rest – whether or not the world has three dimensions, whether the mind has nine or twelve categories – comes afterwards.  Albert Camus Stories […]