If I could change the world, this is where I would start. I want more than anything for my family to be safe, healthy and happy. I worry more than I should, but I just cannot help myself. It is how I am built. I want more than anything for people and animals to all just live together in peace and harmony. I just read that when scientists examine our genes, we are all related. Humans share 99.9% of their genes with each other. Our closest relatives in the animal world – chimpa

"Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?" — T.S. Eliot, The Rock (1934) Technology has given us access to more information than any generation in history, and yet we have never seemed more anxious. We assumed that more information would make us wiser. Instead, it has often left us overwhelmed. The internet placed nearly all of humanity's knowledge within reach. But it also buried us beneath an endless stream of websit

An eighteen-year-old quarterback signs a seven-figure NIL deal before throwing his first college pass. Two lockers away sits the offensive tackle who will spend every Saturday protecting him. Without that tackle, the quarterback may never complete a season. Yet one is a millionaire before proving himself. The other may receive little more than a scholarship. NIL allows college – and in many states, even high school – athletes to profit from their name, image, and likeness th

"It is not death that a man should fear, but he should fear never beginning to live." — Epictetus My parents are getting older. Watching people who once seemed indestructible become slower and more fragile has changed something inside me. Turning fifty-seven has only intensified it. Mortality, once an abstract idea reserved for old age, now feels like an increasingly familiar companion. These thoughts and

"I would rather have questions that can't be answered than answers that can't be questioned." — Richard Feynman One of my favorite things about children is their relentless curiosity. "Why?" may be the word they use most. They ask how airplanes fly, why the sky is blue, why people die, why adults disagree, and why almost everything works the way it does. Somewhere along the way, many of us lose that habit. We stop asking questions, not because we've found all the answers, but

As I travelled through Chicago’s O’Hare Airport before sunrise, I couldn’t help but notice the people rushing to get where they were going. Some people were walking swiftly, hoping not to miss a connecting flight but still glancing at their phones and dodging everything in their path. When I reached my departure gate, I sat down and quietly scanned the area. There was the mother holding her young child still in his cartoon-themed pajamas. There were a couple of business peopl

Recently, on my fifty-seventh birthday, I found myself looking through thousands of photographs on my phone. In one of them, I found myself staring at someone I knew well yet hardly recognized. It reminded me of Odysseus returning home after twenty years in Homer’s The Odyssey. He survived Cyclops, storms, wars, and monsters. But perhaps the greatest change was not the world around him. It was the man who returned. None of us are the person we were ten, twenty, thirty, or eve