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About Me

I’m a devoted husband and father to an awesome family. For work, I’m a currently an Executive Director at JP Morgan Chase focusing on Product Tooling. I’m a Product Manager who looks at the goals of the business and uses technology to deliver those business and customer goals. In the past, I’ve driven transformational change at Citi, AIG, and Amazon Web Services. For more information about what I do at work, please visit my LinkedIn profile.

My Writing

If you’re new here, check out my blog highlights. Also, take a look at my library.

My Blog

I collect stories. There are so many amazing things happening every day. I need to spend some time writing them down before they slip away. Some of these ideas are so powerful that they hit me like a bolt of lightning. It’s my job to capture that lighting and put it in a bottle to share it with you. I want to capture that feeling that Archimedes had when he had an insight sitting in the bathtub screamed “Eureka!” and ran naked down the street. I know that I’ll rarely if ever make it there, but that won’t keep me from trying!

Here’s some of my latest posts:

And here are some of my posts about AI and ChatGPT:

Blog Highlights

Here are some highlights from 2024

One of my favorite topics for the last few years is writing about AI. I explored it from a number of different perspectives:

ChatGPT has helped me quickly turn ideas into complete blog posts and respond in real-time to things I’ve encountered. This year, it made it easier to explore a range of interesting topics like:

With ChatGPT, I learned to capture the small, wonderful moments of my life in writing. It’s like catching a lightning bug in a jar—preserving fleeting beauty to reflect on later. I was able to write about appreciating the sunrise, visiting a classic movie theatre owned by Netflix, and how to turn a nighttime drive into a light show.

Finally, I spent some time writing about self-improvement. Some of my favorite pieces were about the importance of asking for help and practicing self-control. Surprisingly, I even learned a valuable lesson about communication from AI—it’s programmed to respond with honesty, helpfulness, and harmlessness, qualities we humans could aspire to as well.

My Virtual Library

I wanted a place to put all the stuff I think is awesome. Growing up, I always wanted to have a great library in my house. I remembered the excitement when I learned that I could buy the entire collection of The New Yorker in bound volumes and put them in my house. I’d imagined that I would collect great encyclopedias from the past to peruse whenever I pleased. They would live in mahogany bookcases that looked like they’d belonged to JP Morgan. Then I realized that a New York City apartment doesn’t have the space for a physical library. So I did the next best thing. I’ve created a virtual library that includes lots of the things I enjoy, like my favorite books, words, and humor. You can check it out on the menu at the top of the page.

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Human Behavior Life Lessons

Happy All the Time?

One of my wife’s favorite books from growing up was Happy All the Time by Laurie Colwin. It stands proudly on our bookshelf like a little totem to childhood optimism—a promise that somewhere out there, happiness could be a permanent state if you just figured out how to arrange your life correctly.

For a very long time, I believed that too. I even had a section on my website called “Happiness and Inspiration.” I thought that if I read enough, optimized enough, meditated enough—whatever the adult equivalent of eating my vegetables was—I could eventually arrive at happiness.

But this year, I realized I was chasing the wrong goal.

Continue reading “Happy All the Time?”
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Judaism Meditation

A Mindful Yom Kippur

Over the past year, I’ve been practicing mindfulness. I’d meditate for fifteen minutes a day, sitting quietly, watching my thoughts drift by. I was also working on my psychological flexibility, separating my thoughts from my emotions. At first, it felt like exercise for the brain: uncomfortable, sometimes boring, but strangely strengthening. Over time, though, I noticed something deeper.

I really saw the benefits of this on Yom Kippur. I realized how closely these practices mirror the essence of the holiday. In many ways, Yom Kippur is a 25-hour meditation—an invitation to step away from food, distractions, and earthly concerns, and instead focus on prayer, presence, and who we are in relation to God.

Continue reading “A Mindful Yom Kippur”
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Books / Audiobooks Media

Revisiting Truly Tasteless Jokes

The First Book of the Series

Why does my son watch these horrible Instagram influencers who spew misogyny, racism, and hate? There’s Andrew Tate, arrested on human trafficking charges. And Dan Bilzerian, who literally threw a porn star off a roof. I want to yell that my generation was different, that we were better, that we never fell for such garbage.

But then I remembered Truly Tasteless Jokes.

I was thirteen when someone passed me the book on that long bus ride from camp to Hershey Park, and I knew I was holding something special. It was a secret portal into adult humor—the kind of stuff that would get you grounded just for knowing it existed. This was the 1980s, that lawless time before warning labels. No gatekeepers, no protection—just forbidden fruit waiting to corrupt curious kids like me.

We’d huddle around our contraband. If you were there, you remember the jokes. If not, they’re too tasteless and horrible for me to print here. We’d memorize them and trade them like baseball cards, each one more shocking than the last.

It was taboo. It was like looking at dirty magazines, but somehow more accessible because they were just books in the bookstore. Just an aisle away from the Nancy Drew books. What I didn’t understand then was that this wasn’t just some random collection of offensive humor—it was a cultural earthquake.

A Cultural Phenomenon

Truly Tasteless Jokes wasn’t just an offensive book series. It was a legitimate cultural phenomenon. At one point, Blanche Knott had four books on the New York Times bestseller list simultaneously—the first time that ever happened.

The books were so popular that more respectable authors and publishers complained that the New York Times bestseller list was being defiled. This led to the creation of the “Advice, How-to and Miscellaneous” category on the bestseller list.

Looking back, Truly Tasteless Jokes was a product of its cultural moment. The 1980s were Reagan’s America—a deliberate rejection of the political correctness of the 1960s and 70s. As cultural critic Luc Sante observed, they were “a sigh of release, a sign that we weren’t living in the politically correct Sixties and Seventies anymore, and could behave like pigs if we wanted to.”

It was the original anti-PC phenomenon, a middle finger to civil rights progress and social consciousness. The jokes weren’t just offensive—they were intentionally, aggressively offensive. They were a backlash.

The Woman Behind Blanche Knott

The author on the cover was listed as Blanche Knott. I’d always thought this was a female pen name for a male syndicate who wrote the books—like Franklin W. Dixon was to the Hardy Boys. But the books, including dozens of sequels, had a single author—the improbably named Ashton Applewhite..1

Applewhite was an underpaid assistant editor at St. Martin’s Press, earning just $8,500 a year while writing book jacket copy. Between assignments, she collected offensive jokes on cocktail napkins and “While You Were Out” slips, stuffing them into her desk drawer. Her original title was her favorite joke: What’s the Difference Between Garbage and a Girl from New Jersey? The punchline: garbage gets picked up.

When the manuscript first made the rounds, one editor at Penguin said, “If we published this, the little bird would have to hide its head under its wing in shame.” A woman at another publisher told the agent, “We can’t publish this here. I’m not even sure we can Xerox this!”

But Ballantine did publish it. And America spoke—loudly, to the tune of millions of copies. It sparked copycats and even a VHS tape. The tape is fairly lackluster; however, it does include early clips of Andrew “Dice” Clay, who perfectly captured the spirit of the jokes in the book.

The Reckoning

There are different ways to look at the legacy of Truly Tasteless Jokes. The documentary Tasteless featured comedians defending the book and comedy in general, even when it sometimes hurt people, positioning it as a fight against cancel culture, with performers arguing that humor serves as a necessary release valve for society’s tensions.

Contrast that with the Decoder Ring podcast, where the host insisted on highlighting how awful the book was and demanded that Applewhite apologize for writing it—which she eventually did. While the impulse is understandable—these jokes are horrible—there was something deeply counterproductive about the whole exercise. The host was so focused on moral purity, so determined to distance herself from the content, that she completely missed the point.

That kind of heavy-handed liberal righteousness, that desperate need to prove you’re on the right side, that reflexive “you can’t talk about that” energy—that’s exactly what caused this phenomenon to emerge in the first place.

Going Forward

Here’s the thing about teenagers and offensive content: they’re going to find it. Whether it’s Truly Tasteless Jokes in the 1980s or Andrew Tate on Instagram today, kids are drawn to transgression. They want their forbidden portals into adult humor and adult rebellion.

The question isn’t how to eliminate that impulse—it’s how to channel it constructively. When we create an environment where certain thoughts and jokes are so forbidden that they can’t even be discussed, we don’t make them go away. We just make them more powerful.

We need to resist the urge to sort everything into neat moral categories—good or evil, acceptable or unacceptable, worthy of cancellation or worthy of praise. Real people are messy. Real growth happens in the gray areas. When we demand that everyone meet some impossible standard of moral purity, when we insist that past mistakes define present character, we’re not creating a better world. We’re creating a world where we’re terrified of authenticity, and growth becomes impossible.

Footnotes

  1. Applewhite tells her story in Being Blanche, a 2011 Harper’s Magazine piece that’s worth tracking down. The article is paywalled, but most libraries provide digital access to Harper’s archives—and it’s an incredible read that reveals the woman behind the phenomenon. ↩︎

Categories
ChatGPT Human Behavior

From Sapiens to Silicon: The Evolution of Storytelling Species

I think I’m the most special person on earth—part of the most special species on Earth. Not because of my job or my talents or anything I’ve accomplished, but because I’m human. And if you’re reading this, you probably think you’re the most special person on earth too—for the exact same reason.

But what really makes humans special? According to Yuval Harari’s Sapiens, it’s not tool use—crows can bend wires into hooks. It’s not language—whales sing and bees dance. It’s not even raw intelligence. What sets us apart is that we can believe in things that don’t exist, and then build entire civilizations on top of them.

Seventy thousand years ago, we were evolutionary middle-managers. Not the strongest, not the fastest, not even the smartest animals around. We were just… adequate. Then something extraordinary happened—what Harari calls the “Cognitive Revolution.” We learned to tell stories and, more importantly, to believe them together.

Evolution’s Bug Becomes a Feature

What gave humans the ability to tell these stories? Bigger brains. The kind that could handle abstract thinking, symbolic reasoning, complex language. But at some point, our brains got so large they created a problem evolution had never faced: they literally wouldn’t fit through the birth canal.

We had to be born early, before our brains could fully develop. Human babies arrive half-finished, completely helpless, but infinitely programmable. A gazelle can run within hours of birth. Human babies can barely hold up their own heads.

This seemingly terrible design—a brain that devours 20% of our energy and takes decades to mature—became our species’ superpower. It’s what lets a caveman’s descendant become a medieval peasant’s descendant who becomes a modern computer programmer, all without changing a single gene. Same hardware, completely different software.

The Invisible Infrastructure of Civilization

Walk around any city and you’ll see the infrastructure: roads, power lines, water mains. But the real infrastructure—the stuff that actually holds it all together—is invisible. It’s made of stories.

Consider Apple Inc. You can’t touch Apple—it’s not a physical thing. It’s a legal fiction, a story we’ve agreed to tell about ownership and corporate structure. Yet this imaginary entity employs 150,000 people and moves more money daily than some countries see in a year. The story of “Apple” has become functionally real through collective agreement.

Nations work the same way. The border between New York and New Jersey exists nowhere in nature—it’s a line we’ve drawn on maps and in our minds. But people organize their entire lives around it, pay taxes because of it, even fight wars over similar invisible lines.

Human rights might be our most beautiful fiction. There’s nothing in the laws of physics that says humans deserve dignity or freedom. But we’ve collectively decided to believe in these concepts, and that belief has toppled governments and reshaped the world.

Silicon Storytellers

Now we’re trying something unprecedented: we’re teaching machines to tell stories.

Instead of neurons firing in skulls, it’s synthetic neurons firing across vast server farms. Instead of culture gradually shaping a child’s mind, we’re using training data to shape artificial minds in mere months.

And what emerges is not just smarter calculators or faster search engines. We’re building storytellers. Systems that can spin up convincing worlds, simulate human voices, and generate fictions that ripple outward into real consequences.

These aren’t tools in the old sense — hammers and plows that rest when we put them down. They’re more like co-authors we’ve set loose: storytellers who never sleep, never age, never forget.

Reprogramming Ourselves

It’s unsettling to realize that the truths at the center of our lives—money, nations, even identities—can be mirrored so easily by AI. But that realization also gives us enormous power.

First, it reminds us that the stories we tell about ourselves are just as flexible. I am the kind of person who always fails at math. I can’t change careers this late in life. These aren’t biological limits; they’re personal fictions. And like any fiction, they can be rewritten. Psychologists call this psychological flexibility—the ability to observe our internal narratives as constructs rather than absolute truths, and to consciously choose whether they still serve us.

Second, it shows us how much our attention really matters. Every belief system runs on attention—from religions to social media platforms to the voice in your head that won’t shut up at 3 AM. You can see this most clearly online: your feed isn’t some neutral window on reality. It’s shaped by what you click, what you linger on, what you reward with your time.

This principle extends everywhere. You don’t need to track every market swing or breaking news alert. You can choose where to invest your mental bandwidth. That story that you “should be” doing something else, feeling bad that you’re not more productive? You don’t need to listen to it.

Here’s the thing: attention is a finite resource. Shift how you spend it, and you’re not just curating your information diet—you’re curating your reality.

Categories
Life Hacking Science and Math

Your 3 p.m. Coffee Is Still Awake at Midnight

I learned something fascinating this week that completely changed how I think about drugs. Remember in health class when we learned that alcohol goes out of your system at about 1 drink per hour? I used to think all drugs worked that way. I used to believe that if I take a pill and then after 4 hours or whatever it says on the bottle, the drug is out of my system. Wasn’t that true for caffeine, antihistamines, painkillers—everything.

Turns out, alcohol is the exception, not the rule. Most drugs don’t fade out in a straight line—they follow something called a half-life. And once you understand that curve, your medicine cabinet (and your coffee habit) start to look very different.

What Half-Life Means

The half-life of a drug is the time it takes for the amount in your body to drop by 50%. Think of it like a leaky bucket that loses exactly half its water every few hours, no matter how full it starts. After one half-life, half is left. After two, a quarter. After three, an eighth. After four, a sixteenth. The pattern keeps halving until the levels are so low they’re basically gone.

When it reaches 5 half lives it’s only 1/32 of its original stregthn and said to be fully out of your system. And here’s anoher thing about how drugs work. If you take double the dose, it doesn’t last twice as long—it only lasts one half-life more.

Why Does Alcohol Work Differently from Other Drugs

Most drugs leave your body in fractions. Imagine your liver and kidneys as workers who get faster when there’s more drug around. If there’s a lot, they clear a lot; if there’s only a little, they clear a little. That’s why most medications follow a half-life curve: every few hours, the amount is cut in half—½, ¼, ⅛, and so on.

Alcohol is different. The enzymes that process it get overloaded quickly, even at normal drinking levels. Once they’re maxed out, they can’t go any faster. So instead of clearing a fraction, the body clears a fixed amount per hour—about one drink’s worth.

How This Plays Out in Real Life

To see how this works with drugs you probably have in your medicine cabinet, let’s look at some household names:

  • Ibuprofen (Advil, Motrin): ~2 hours. Quick in, quick out.
  • Naproxen (Aleve): 12–17 hours. Still hanging around the next day.
  • Diphenhydramine (Benadryl, in Tylenol PM, Advil PM): 4–9 hours. This explains why if you take Tylenol PM at bedtime, you’re effectively still taking half a Tylenol PM when you wake up. Hello, morning grogginess.
  • Loratadine (Claritin): ~8–10 hours. “Non-drowsy,” but very much alive in your system all day.
  • Sertraline (Zoloft): ~24 hours. Miss a dose and you’ll feel it for days as levels drop.

Unlike alcohol, which just grinds away at a constant rate, these drugs all taper off in fractions.

What Does This Mean for Caffeine

Now, about that 3 p.m. coffee. Caffeine’s half-life is about 5 hours, but it can range anywhere from 3 to 10 depending on your genetics, smoking, pregnancy, liver health, and even other meds.

So that medium coffee at 3:00 p.m.?

  • At 8:00 p.m., half of it is still in you.
  • At 1:00 a.m., you’ve still got a quarter left.

Which explains the midnight tossing and turning after what felt like an “innocent” afternoon pick-me-up.

Even though your “last cup was hours ago,” you’re carrying the equivalent of a small coffee’s worth of caffeine into the night. Your body doesn’t reset between doses—it accumulates.

Summing Up

That 3 p.m. coffee keeping you up at midnight isn’t bad luck—it’s math. Once you see the curve of half-lives, you realize your body isn’t careless or mysterious, it’s consistent. Drugs don’t simply vanish after the label’s “every 4 hours.” They fade in halves, and those halves shape how we sleep, how we heal, and how we feel the next day. The trick is not to fight it, but to learn the rhythm and work with it.

Categories
Books / Audiobooks Life Lessons

A September 11th Memorial: Firehouse

Every September 11th, the memories return: the falling towers, the smoke, the senseless loss. This year, I discovered it just a block from my apartment, in the pages of David Halberstam’s Firehouse—written by a neighbor I’d never met.

Halberstam, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author, lived nearby and was searching for meaning after September 11th, just as I am now. He spent two and a half months with our local firehouse to write a memorial not just to the firefighters who died that day, but to the firehouse itself and to all the firefighters in New York.

On that day, the New York Fire Department lost 343 men. Our firehouse lost two entire companies—the 12 men of Ladder 35 and Engine 40—one of the worst losses in the city.

Halberstam takes us inside the firehouse, into a culture normally kept private. It’s an insular brotherhood of men who eat together, live together, play sports together, and help repair each other’s houses. While we see the public face of firefighters—the men running into the Twin Towers when everyone else ran out—we rarely see what lies beneath. As Ray Pfeifer, a veteran of the firehouse, says, “People think they know what we do, but they don’t really know what we do.” They don’t understand the real danger of being in a burning building when there’s a collapse and the exits seem blocked.

The swagger of a firefighter isn’t arrogance—it’s earned. Take the captain’s code: first in, last out of every fire. It’s a point of pride that sets them apart, especially from police officers. While cops climb the ladder toward desk jobs and safer assignments, firefighters advance toward greater danger—lieutenants get closer to the flames than probies, captains closer than lieutenants. It’s a confidence born from their unique relationship with risk, which explains the firehouse joke: “If firefighting were easy, the cops would do it.”

“I have always admired acts of uncommon courage on the part of ordinary people,” Halberstam writes comparing them the heroes of the Civil Rights movement and the Vietnam War that he covered decades earlier. They live in a world of good and evil, where the good guys fight against a purely destructive force. As Angie Callahan, the wife of fallen Captain Frank Callahan, said, “Where else can you be brave in a time of peace, and where else can you do things that few other men do—deeds that save lives?”

To give you a taste of the book, here’s how Halberstam describes Captain Frank Callahan and the two traits that define great firefighters: staying calm and doing the right thing.

Wherever the fire was, though, he was very good at it. Very professional, and very calm. Calm was important; it was one of the most important words in the vocabulary of firemen, and a word they did not use lightly. That and the phrase “do the right thing,” as in, “He was the kind of fireman who always did the right thing.” Staying calm for a fireman was crucial—for unlike most other peacetime jobs, firemen were in the regular business of the suppression of fear. Every call might be a ticket to a burning inferno where there was no light, where falling walls and ceilings cut off exit routes, where a floor could give out, and where a fireman could become disoriented and begin to feel his source of oxygen failing as he grew weaker and as the heat grew more fierce second by second. Therefore keeping calm was a critical part of the job. Every serious fire could trigger powerful impulses of fear, and if an officer shows that fear on the job, if he is not calm and not disciplined himself, then the fear will spread quickly through the men. Calm is the most basic of the positive words that firemen use to describe one another.

David Halberstam, Firehouse

It’s a mindset most of us can’t imagine—being paid to suppress fear while everyone else is allowed to feel it.

Doing the right thing was equally important. When the men speak of a colleague who does the right thing, they mean he will stay at his post under terrible conditions and not panic. Doing the right thing was going in and risking your life for a trapped civilian or fellow fireman. Firemen define each other by their codes of honor, which, because of the nature of the job, are mandatory and must be instinctive.

David Halberstam, Firehouse

But Halberstam reveals that heroism in a firehouse isn’t just about the dramatic moments. It starts with something as simple as washing dishes:

The men have to be able to count not just on their officers, but on their buddies. Doing the right thing also involves small, seemingly unimportant things in the firehouse. It begins when you are a probie, and it means following certain customs, such as being the first one to the sink to wash the pots and pans after meals. The firehouse, like the military, is based on doing little things right, because if someone does not do the little things correctly, then he probably won’t do the big things correctly. Moreover, in a firehouse, if you do not do your share of the routine work, someone else has to do it for you, in which case you pull down the house, and you are a hairbag. You do not wait for someone to tell you to do it, you just do it. There is an additional reason: Between moments of fearsome danger, there is often a lot of slack time at a firehouse, and if you do not have codes like this, then it would be very easy for people to become lazy and get in a rut, and for the entire house to lose its sense of cohesion and its purpose.

David Halberstam, Firehouse

This September 11th, I’m thinking less about the towers that fell and more about the men who ran toward them. Halberstam’s Firehouse reminds us that heroism isn’t reserved for history’s darkest moments—it’s practiced daily by ordinary people who’ve chosen extraordinary lives. They’re still out there, still running toward danger, still doing the right thing.

The inside covers of Firehouse feature black and white photographs of the chalkboard frozen in time—exactly as it appeared on September 11th.
Categories
Human Behavior

Let’s Have More 3 Day Weekends!

Isn’t it great to have a three-day weekend? We have a little extra time to breathe, sleep in, maybe go somewhere. We should have more of them.

But there’s nothing we can do about that… right?

Well—maybe. Unless we were more like China. In China, they noticed the same problem: people want longer holidays. More specifically, the tourism industry wanted longer holidays, but businesses don’t want to give up too many workdays. So instead of fighting about it, they rearranged the calendar.

In 1999 , they invented something called 调休 (tiáoxiū)—”adjusted rest.” It’s a system of make-up working days, where weekends are sometimes converted into regular workdays called “special working days” to create longer blocks of time off around major holidays.

And you know what? It’s absolutely brilliant. And also completely insane. Let me explain.

What China Actually Did (Calendar Tetris, Government Edition)

Picture this: Next Tuesday is Dragon Boat Festival—a nice little one-day holiday. The government is so nice that they even give you Monday off to connect it to the weekend. Then your Chinese colleague casually mentions, “Oh, by the way, we’re working this Saturday to make up for it.”

Wait… what?

This is adjusted rest in action. China takes their holidays and engineers them into blocks by borrowing weekend days. That three-day weekend you’re enjoying? You may have worked a Saturday or Sunday to “earn” it.

It happens all the time throughout the Chinese calendar. Here’s the 2025 Chinese calendar. Note the special working days.

From teamedUP China, a Chinese recruiting firm

Why It Worked in China

This system works in China because of something you see everywhere there: an almost supernatural ability for society-wide coordination around shared priorities.

Take gaokao (高考), China’s college entrance exam. The entire country comes to a standstill for three days in June—construction sites go silent, airlines reroute flights, and businesses turn down music. It’s not just government policy; it’s collective buy-in because everyone understands this matters.

The same cultural DNA makes adjusted rest work. When the government says, “We’re all working Saturday so everyone can have meaningful family time,” there’s immediate social consensus. Chinese workers embraced this system because it delivers what they genuinely value: real time for family visits across this massive country. When your parents live 1,000 miles away, a single day off is useless. But a week-long Chinese New Year break? That’s life-changing.

When Beijing publishes the holiday calendar each October, 1.4 billion people simply adjust accordingly. No endless debates, no union disputes—an entire civilization synchronizes like a coordinated dance.

Why It Would Never Work in America

Now imagine trying to implement a make-up day policy in the United States. It would be chaos.

It doesn’t work for us because we’re too beautifully, chaotically diverse. Just think about all the observant Jews who can’t work on Saturday for religious reasons. Or the millions of retail and service workers whose schedules are already scattered across seven days a week. Or the parents juggling childcare around school schedules that don’t align with federal holidays. Or the freelancers and gig workers who don’t even have traditional weekends to begin with.

We’re just not the type of society that’s good at making collective decisions, even when they’d benefit everyone. Try to get Americans to agree on synchronized vacation schedules and you’ll trigger the same cultural immune response that makes us argue about daylight saving time for decades without ever actually changing anything.

What We Do Instead

So what do we do in the US instead? We move the holidays. That’s why most federal holidays that fall on weekends get shifted to the nearest Monday, creating automatic three-day weekends without anyone having to work extra days. It’s a far simpler and more elegant solution for our individualistic culture. No make-up days, no synchronized scheduling, no arguments about who has to work when. When Washington’s birthday falls on a Wednesday, we just shift it to the nearest Monday.

The trade-off? We don’t get those spectacular week-long vacation blocks that China engineers. Our longest federal holiday weekend tops out at three days. But for a country that can’t even agree on what to call carbonated beverages, maybe that’s about all the coordination we can realistically handle.

Categories
Life Lessons Meditation

What I Wish I Learned in College

Colleges teach you how to think. What they should teach is how to live a life that matters.

On the train up to Yale for an event, I told my friend Cherie, “Whenever I go back, I get this feeling of anxiety. It’s not about other people judging me—it’s about me judging myself. Am I doing enough? Am I worthy of having gone here?”

She didn’t hesitate. “Oh yeah. I have that too. It’s called Yale-ing.”

That was it exactly—the quiet, constant self-surveillance that comes from trying to measure up to an imaginary, idealized version of yourself. Yale searches for the most driven, unconventional, obsessive people it can find and gives them space to run. What looks like drive from the outside is often anxiety on the inside—a constant need to prove themselves again and again. They’re insecure overachievers.

Continue reading “What I Wish I Learned in College”
Categories
Life Lessons Meditation

In Praise of Idleness

For most of history, people worked so they could have leisure. We’ve somehow flipped it: now we have leisure so we can work better.

Somewhere along the way, we decided that being busy was the same thing as being valuable. If your calendar is full, you must be important. If your inbox is overflowing, you must be needed. If you never stop moving, you must be living a good life.

It’s a strange inversion of history. The ancient Greeks even had a word for this: scholē. It meant “leisure,” and it’s the root of our word school. Leisure wasn’t a reward for hard work; it was the highest state of being. Work was a means to secure leisure, and leisure was where life actually happened — in thinking, creating, learning, conversing.

The early idea of the “liberal arts” came from the same place. They weren’t job training. They were the “arts befitting a free person” — skills in language, reasoning, mathematics, and music. They were for people who had the time and freedom to explore ideas without having to justify every minute in terms of productivity.

Nearly a century ago, philosopher Bertrand Russell made a sharp case for idleness in his essay In Praise of Idleness. He argued that civilization would gain far more from shorter work hours and longer stretches of leisure than from endless production. For Russell, leisure wasn’t a pause from life — it was where life happened. It was the true incubator of culture, thought, and creativity.

Continue reading “In Praise of Idleness”
Categories
Ideas Science and Math

Who Really Said That?

“The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”
– Albert Einstein

We’ve all heard that quote. At meetings. In self-help books. On motivational posters in office break rooms. It exemplifies Einstein’s legendary cut-to-the-chase brilliance.

The only problem is, Einstein didn’t say it.

As far as I can tell, the quote first appeared in a Narcotics Anonymous pamphlet in the early 1980s. Einstein died in 1955 without mentioning anything remotely close to it in anything he’d ever written or said.

And yet, the misattribution stuck. Why? Because it feels like something Einstein would have said. Like Churchill, Lincoln, or Mark Twain, Einstein has become a kind of general-purpose intellectual that we can attribute our cleverest, pithiest thoughts to, whether he said them or not.

This misattribution happens all the time. So often, in fact, that there’s a name for it.

Actually, there are several.

Stigler’s Law of Eponymy

In 1980, University of Chicago statistics professor Stephen Stigler gave this phenomenon a name: Stigler’s Law of Eponymy. It states that “No scientific discovery is named after its original discoverer.”1

The best part? Stigler didn’t even claim to have discovered it. He credited the idea to someone else—sociologist Robert K. Merton. In other words, the law named after Stigler was… not discovered by Stigler. The law proves itself. Here’s what he wrote in the paper:

If there is an idea in this paper that is not at least implicit in Merton’s The Sociology of Science, it is either a happy accident or a likely error. Rather I have, in the Mertonian tradition of the self-confirming hypothesis, attempted to frame the self-proving theorem.

Stigler’s Law of Eponomy

But it’s not just a clever academic joke. Stigler’s Law points to something more systemic: we don’t just forget who discovered what—we misremember it. Over time, we start attaching credit to the loudest name, not the first one.

In the original paper, Stigler and others have documented example after example:

  • Halley’s Comet? Observed by ancient Chinese and Babylonian astronomers. Halley just did the math.
  • Newton’s First Law of Motion – Better known as inertia, it was described by Galileo decades before Newton refined and popularized it.
  • Fibonacci sequence – Long before Leonardo of Pisa wrote about it, Indian mathematicians like Pingala and Virahanka had described it in the context of Sanskrit poetry and combinatorics.

Fame creates its own kind of gravity and inertia. Once someone becomes famous enough, many other discoveries are attached to them.

The Matthew Effect

Now let’s look at Robert Merton—the person Stigler credited. Back in 1968, Merton gave this bias its own name: the Matthew Effect, based on a verse in the Gospel of Matthew, “For to everyone who has, more will be given…”

In the world of science, that means prominent researchers get more recognition, more funding, more citations—even when the original insight came from someone else. It’s not always malicious. Sometimes, people just assume the famous name must be behind the breakthrough. Other times, the lesser-known researcher gets buried in the footnotes.

The Matthew Effect isn’t limited to academia. It shows up in:

  • Publishing, where established authors get bigger advances regardless of quality.
  • Tech, where investors back founders who’ve “done it before.”
  • Education, where early reading success snowballs into long-term achievement.

It’s a feedback loop. Once you’re seen as successful, you’re more likely to be treated as successful. And then the cycle repeats.

Churchillian Drift

If Stigler’s Law and the Matthew Effect explain why discoveries get mislabeled, Churchillian Drift explains why quotes get misattributed—especially to famous people like Winston Churchill.

Coined by British broadcaster and quote sleuth Nigel Rees, Churchillian Drift describes how pithy or profound lines migrate toward famous names over time. If a quote sounds wise and ancient, we give it to Confucius. If it’s cynical and funny, it goes to Mark Twain. If it’s about strategy or war, it’s Sun Tzu. And if it’s about perseverance, logic, or nobility? Einstein gets the nod.

It’s branding by attribution. The quote becomes “better” if we imagine a titan of history saying it.

So What Do We Do With This?

At the surface, it’s just cultural laziness—there are only so many “famous” people in the public’s mental Rolodex, so we assign them everything. But it’s also more subtle and damaging: it reinforces the idea that only a handful of people in history are worth listening to.

This doesn’t just happen with quotes. It happens with scientific discoveries, artistic breakthroughs, and even entire branches of mathematics. As I wrote in The Fibonacci Sequence, Brought to You by Fibonacci (and Absolutely No One Else), history often remembers the person who popularized an idea, not the person who actually created it. The result? We get a distorted picture of how progress really happens.

The next time you hear a clever quote—or a “fact” about who discovered what—you don’t have to just nod along. You can check. Quote Investigator, run by Garson O’Toole, traces famous lines back to their earliest appearances. That’s where I found the true story of the Einstein quote.

You might find that the quote in your PowerPoint isn’t from Churchill, but from an obscure 19th-century pamphlet. Or that the mathematical sequence you love owes more to India than to Fibonacci.

Finding the truth behind these attributions means going beyond the headline version of history—the one where “Einstein was smart” and “Newton discovered everything.” What you get instead is the messy, collaborative, and far more human version of how ideas actually spread.

  1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stigler%27s_law_of_eponymy ↩︎