Kim and I find ourselves talking about our toy poodle, Buddy, with people who have come over for the first time and just met him, invoking a somewhat apologetic manner since Buddy can be a bit of a handful. We find ourselves saying that when we got him two years ago he was much worse and that he has really mellowed out over that time. Clearly, Buddy is getting more mature and is now a…
Kindness appears to emerge from multiple interconnected sources, both biological and cultural. From an evolutionary perspective, kindness likely developed because cooperation and mutual aid increased survival chances for our ancestors. We see similar prosocial behaviors across many species – empathy, reciprocal altruism, and care for group members. Our brains seem wired with capacity for empathy through mirror neurons and emotional contagion, allowing us to feel something of what others experience. There’s also a developmental dimension.…
It is said that we have now moved from the information economy into the attention economy. The concept of the attention economy emerged gradually through several waves of thinking. It was first articulated in 1971, when it was said that “in an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its…
Many people use the term purgatory without having been raised Catholic and therefore probably not really understanding the concept. Purgatory is a concept in Catholic theology referring to a state of purification after death for souls who died in God’s grace but still need to be cleansed of the temporal punishment due to sin before entering heaven. The doctrine holds that souls in purgatory are destined for heaven but must first be purified of any…
Yesterday, my old friend Mike Cobbold came down from Sacramento for a two day visit. As I have mentioned previously, I knew Mike during the last few years of high school when our respective families were stationed in Rome and we both went to Notre Dame International Prep School on the Via Aurelia. Mike lived with his parents and brother, Robert, near the school on the Via Aurelia. I was living with my mother and…
People seem to think that Rudyard Kipling, the British Nobel laureate who wrote about his experiences with colonialism, coined the phrase that “Only mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun”, but in fact it was Noel Coward in his musical, The Third Little Show (1931) where he says, “Mad dogs and Englishmen Go out in the midday sun. The Japanese don’t care to, The Chinese wouldn’t dare to, Hindoos and Argentines sleep…
Today it is scheduled to be a 90 degree day here on the hilltop. When I awoke in the middle of the night I checked the weather for the day and it said it was scheduled to be a high of 87. I guess that changed in the past few hours and I will admit that where I consider anything in the 80s on the hilltop to be pleasant (remember, the humidity is almost always…
As all my readers know, I am a dedicated storyteller by nature. I’m not sure why storytelling appeals to me so much, but it does. I like the creativity of the process, I like the expository nature of the process. I like the performative aspects of the process. And, since I like hearing a good story almost as much as I like telling a good story, I think its fair to say that I enjoy…
Comedy is on my mind today because we are planning to go see The Naked Gun, the Liam Neeson and Pamela Anderson remake by Seth MacFarlane of the 1988 Leslie Nielsen classic by the same name. I watch a lot of Liam Neeson (who doesn’t?) and just saw several of his new thrillers recently, so when I saw the New York Times profile on him in this new comedic role where he puts his gravitas…
I’m on a United Airlines flight from Denver back home to San Diego and based on two United flights (to Denver and back), which are the first I’ve taken in some time, I have to say that United is not doing a great job in the customer service area. I normally fly Delta or Jet Blue and while I occasionally have problems in first class with them, its relatively rare. United doesn’t seem to be…