No Bosses, and No Rewards

I have two personal mottoes: The first one is from a Talking Heads song, and the second one is the title of this blog because it applies to a lot of the most interesting questions: Many of the posts and favorite texts here were prompted by a book I’d read recently or been reminded of,

Find the Beautiful

Bill Bryson’s book, The Road to Little Dribbling: Adventures of an American in Britain, provided lots of interesting stories—anecdotal and historical—about a number of Britain’s small towns as he drove, walked and rode from the southern coast of the island to its northern tip. He said, “One of the things that I really, really like

TV Worth Watching

David Bianculli, the TV critic for National Public Radio’s Fresh Air since 1987, is the founder and editor of a website called, TV Worth Watching. The title is called for because, as David Byrne said, “People like to put the television down,” but television is no more monolithic than movies, magazines or books. There is

Getting Better, XV

Last month, David Byrne’s web site, Reasons to Be Cheerful, shared The Year in Cheer, over 100 “bits of good news that kept us sane in 2020.” These are my favorites: The world is gaining two million acres of leafy cover per year, an increase of about five percent since 2000. Police in Durham, England

Just Waiting

When my kids were growing up and we were choosing one of our VHS movies to watch, sometimes I would kiddingly say, “Let’s watch Le Mans!” and they would inevitably respond in unison, “No!” I don’t know if they ever saw it all the way through, but they saw enough to know they didn’t want

We Are What We Eat

In 1996, John Perry Barlow authored a Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace that said: “We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth. We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how

Be simply yourself

Both of my sons have their birthdays this season, so pondering their lives is normal for me at this time. In his biography of Ulysses Grant, Ron Chernow said when Grant’s second son, Buck, entered Harvard University, the President shared “as close to a statement of his philosophy as Grant ever came up with for

But I Don’t Think of You

I don’t want to be defined by my dislike of something. I told a friend recently that as I get older, “I find myself trying more to treasure the things I value and less to abhor the things I don’t.” It seems to me that paying no mind to someone or something objectionable can often

It’s Not Like a “Y”!

As a young computer programmer, I unwittingly demonstrated the importance of eliciting complete and clear requirements, even for a modification to an existing system. Less than three years into my first programming job at a large company, I was asked to make a change to a system that streamlined the ordering of supplies from “trusted”

Books With or Without a Screen

People love to own physical books, according to Meryl Halls, managing director of the Booksellers’ Association in the U.K. “The book lover loves to have a record of what they’ve read,” she said, “and it’s about signaling to the rest of the world. It’s about decorating your home, it’s about collecting.” Most of the books