Category: Effective Writing

Eyes Wide Shut

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19 COMMENTS

I was standing on the second-floor landing of a hotel lobby waiting for my wife. I knew she was coming soon, so I just stood there. I wasn’t looking at my phone … I wasn’t walking around … I was just standing there. Suddenly, I heard a door unlock and immediately realized I was directly in front of somebody’s room. Uh oh. I didn’t want to run away as if I had been deliberately lurking. But I couldn’t just stand there either without looking like someone who had been deliberately lurking. Fortunately, there […] Click to read more…

Judged By Our Judgement

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14 COMMENTS

(Listen to this post, here.) Unlike many of my married, male friends, I do most of the household grocery shopping (my friend Matt claims to have never once set foot inside one of these establishments). Frankly, it was kind of an accident. That’s because years ago, as a first-time father, I realized that a trip to the grocery store came packaged with 60 minutes of diaper-free peace and quiet. And so, several decades later, it’s still a thing I do. Yesterday, while waiting for the, let’s be honest, unbelievably slow-moving and […] Click to read more…

A Simple Writing Fix

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32 COMMENTS

(Listen to this post, here.) I just put a loaf of sourdough bread in the oven. Now, compare that opening sentence to this one: Each week, I bake a loaf of sourdough bread. Now this one: According to the Wall Street Journal, 13% of men over the age of fifty-five bake at least one loaf of sourdough bread weekly. Don’t worry, I won’t keep making up new sentences. But I think you’d agree, they are all more or less about the same thing: somebody, somewhere, is baking sourdough bread. And, any one […] Click to read more…

Game Time

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15 COMMENTS

(Listen to this post, here.) The last date I ever had occurred towards the tail end of the Reagan Administration, when I met my now wife, Linda. Leaving that phase of life was fine by me and even more fine by the single women of Boston who were subject to my inept attempts at flirtation. My problem, in addition to having zero discernable game, was that I never knew what to say to a stranger in a bar. I did my best, but I’d typically end up just blabbing away, with […] Click to read more…

3 Ways You Are Better Than A.I.

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33 COMMENTS

(Listen to this post, here.) I’ve been reading a book called, “The Armchair Economist,” by Steven E. Landsburg. It kind of reads like a slightly more academic prequel to Freakonomics, having been published a decade earlier in 1993, but still using economic principles to explain different things about the world, many of them counterintuitive. Things like… Why celebrity endorsements increase sales, even when the endorsements convey no information about the product. (p. 14) Why a world where paper is recycled results in a world with fewer trees. (p. 98) Why believing […] Click to read more…