Welcome to Buc-ee’s, the world’s most magical gas station—a place where travelers from every corner of this great country find comfort, refreshment, and a moment of cheer along their journey. Here, the spirit of the open road lives on—in the laughter of families, the sparkle of spotless tile, and the scent of freshly carved hot brisket and homemade fudge. It’s dedicated to wanderers and wayfarers who believe that even the briefest stop can be touched by joy.
We visited our first Buc-ee’s on our summer trip to Knoxville on I-81 to see my Abigai’s parents. We pulled into the Mount Crawford location, Virginia’s first Buc-ee’s. The first thing we noticed was its sheer size. This place is massive—120 gas pumps and 74,000 square feet of retail space, making it one of the largest convenience stores in the world. Despite over 600 parking spots, finding a space still took a minute. It was packed.
When we opened the door, we were hit with a low roar—the sound of hundreds of people crammed into the store. It felt like arriving at Magic Kingdom for rope drop, except this was 1 PM on an average Sunday. And the smell: sticky-sweet Texas BBQ sauce hanging in the air, promised something far better than typical gas station fare.
After hours in the car, we made a beeline for the bathrooms. Even with the crowds, there was no line. The bathrooms are enormous, with 50+ individual stalls. They’re legendary for their cleanliness, winning Cintas’s “America’s Best Public Restroom” award. As founder Arch “Beaver” Aplin said, “You can build it out of gold…but if you don’t clean it, at the end of the day, you end up with dirty gold.”
Then there’s the food. I like to call it rest stop gourmet. We grabbed soft, melt-in-your-mouth brisket sandwiches. We also picked up homemade fudge and a few bags of beef jerky (from two dozen varieties) from the jerky wall, plus Buc-ee’s signature snack: Beaver Nuggets, caramel-covered puffed corn.
But Buc-ee’s is so much more than the food and bathrooms. The brand is half the magic. Long before you see the store, Buc-ee’s billboards appear miles out—each one mixing dad humor with road-trip poetry: “Top Two Reasons to Stop at Buc-ee’s: #1 and #2” or “You Can Hold It… 262 Miles More!” By the time you pull off the highway, you already feel like part of the club.
Inside, that cartoon beaver grins from every shelf, turning ordinary merchandise into part of the experience. My teenage son bought a Buc-ee’s onesie to wear for Halloween—part joke, part personal brand building. That’s the power of Buc-ee’s: they’ve made a gas station mascot cool enough that a teenager will willingly wear it as a costume.
The Buc-ee’s Onesie
The souvenir shop rivals any tourist destination—like Cracker Barrel on steroids, selling Buc-ee’s branded and Texas-themed merchandise. We picked up tote bags and even a Buc-ee’s outdoor sofa. We wanted to continue the Buc-ee’s experience even after we went home.
But where did this magical place called Buc-ee’s come from? Founded in 1982 by Arch “Beaver” Aplin III (his nickname stemming from childhood and a quirky toothpaste-cartoon beaver mascot) and partner Don Wasek, Buc-ee’s began as a simple convenience store and gas station in Lake Jackson, Texas, with a goal of providing “clean, friendly, in-stock” service that would stand out. In 2003, it opened its first true “super-travel center” in Luling, Texas. By 2012, it had erected a 68,000-square-foot store in New Braunfels, widely deemed “the world’s largest convenience store” at the time.
After dominating Texas for decades, Buc-ee’s began expanding beyond its home state around 2018–19, starting with Alabama, then Florida, Georgia, and Tennessee.
Even with all of this brand equity, Buc-ee’s doesn’t have its own online store. That doesn’t mean you can’t buy Buc-ee’s merch online, though. In true Texas-sized entrepreneurial fashion, one fan, Chris Koerner, saw the gap and filled it. When he realized there was no way to order Beaver Nuggets or a Buc-ee’s hoodie from home, he loaded six shopping carts with every Buc-ee’s branded product he could find—650 items in all—and built an unofficial resale site called Texas Snax. Today, his company ships everything from jerky to plush beavers across the country, doing hundreds of thousands of dollars in sales each month. Buc-ee’s, for its part, doesn’t object—as long as he makes it clear that he’s independent from the company.
What Buc-ee’s understands—and what so many businesses miss—is that people don’t just want a transaction. They want an experience, even in the most unlikely places. Especially in unlikely places. In the middle of a long highway stretch, when you’re tired and restless, Buc-ee’s transforms a mundane pit stop into something worth talking about, worth remembering, worth taking home. That’s not just good business. That’s magic.
A few weeks ago, we celebrated Ari’s bar mitzvah. Words can’t really capture the feelings I have about it. Watching my son become an adult, surrounded by family and friends—there’s nothing like it. Yes, we had a fun party. But a bar mitzvah is more than that. It’s a spiritual life event.
This transformation—from ordinary celebration to sacred moment—is the heart of Jewish practice. As Rabbi Harold Kushner says in his book To Life!: “Everything in God’s world can be holy if you realize its potential holiness. Everything we do can be transformed into a Sinai experience, an encounter with the sacred. The goal of Judaism is not to teach us how to escape from the profane world to the cleansing presence of God, but to teach us how to bring God into the world, how to take the ordinary and make it holy.”
Ari’s Moment to Shine
First of all, I need to give Ari all the credit in the world. He stood in front of everyone—family, friends, our entire community—and led the service, read Torah, and delivered his d’var Torah with a voice that was loud, clear, and thoughtful. This was his moment, and he owned it.
For his d’var Torah, he worked with our friend Doron. They studied together for many sessions as Ari figured out what he wanted to say. Doron pushed him, as his study partner, to dig deep and find his own meaning. His Torah portion, Nitzavim, was almost impossibly perfect for the occasion. “You are all standing today,” it begins—and there was Ari, literally standing before us, taking responsibility for his own Jewish life. He taught us that the Torah “is not in heaven”—it’s not distant or unreachable, reserved for angels or scholars. It’s here with us, in our mouths and in our hearts, in the way we walk, think, and act.
He illustrated this lesson with his own observation. At Camp Ramah, he noticed that the song during the Torah procession was much faster than at Habonim. At first, he thought it was just a different tradition. Then he realized: at Habonim, you walk all the way around the shul, so you need a longer song. At camp, with a smaller space, the song had to be faster—like how the Jeopardy music is exactly 30 seconds because contestants have 30 seconds to answer.
He owned this whole line of thought—taking the general lesson that we need to adapt Judaism to our context and making it his own, all within the framework of Jewish tradition. He was proud of his thinking, and everyone was impressed. The Cantor even cried. This is the kind of thinking of an adult.
Over the past few years, I’ve watched Ari take responsibility for this work. He studied hard for his Torah portion, showing up week after week to prepare. He volunteered for his mitzvah project, packing care packages and writing cards for American soldiers overseas through an organization honoring Stu Wolfer, a Jewish American soldier killed in Iraq who worked with my wife. As Ari pointed out, real tzedakah costs something—it comes from the prime hours of your day, not just leftover time or money.
Ari’s best moment happened at an unlikely point. The Rabbi made a joke during the service. It was kind of an awkward joke, as he’s a new Rabbi and didn’t know the community that well. In fact, this was his first large event. He said, “I’m going to tell you a secret. You became a bar mitzvah when you turned 13.” Ari, genuinely surprised, did this very physical double-take—hands to his head, “Oh my God, you’ve blown my brain!” The whole crowd cracked up. That humor, that ease in front of everyone, helping the Rabbi co-lead the congregation—it was pure Ari.
The Power of Ritual
What does it mean for a 13-year-old to become a man? He still can’t drink, vote, or drive. But rituals serve a purpose—they take ordinary events and make it holy.
I used to scoff at the idea of birthday parties: “Why celebrate? It’s just another day.” But I’ve realized that a birthday is an opportunity—it’s a vessel, an opportunity you fill with meaning. It becomes a moment for people to focus their energy on you, to make it special.
A bar mitzvah is a birthday party on steroids. It’s one of the few times in life when friends and family will fly across the country to mark an occasion.
When God comes to your party, something shifts. What was merely fun becomes a simcha—joy with purpose. It’s about sanctifying life itself. Everyone came not just to have a good time, but to witness an important milestone: Ari’s sacred transition from boy to man in Jewish tradition.
The Gift of Presence
In addition to having God’s presence, we also had the presence of all the people who came to celebrate. Those who traveled from out of town, those who participated in the service, and even those who simply woke up on a Saturday morning, rolled out of bed, and came to shul.
This collective energy is what fuels a simcha. As William James wrote, “My experience is what I agree to attend to.” Each person who shows up is making a choice about where to direct their time and attention—and that choice matters.
The pandemic taught me just how much. Suddenly it became easy to “attend” a bar mitzvah or funeral virtually. You could drop in on an event without changing out of pajama pants, maybe playing Angry Birds when things got boring. No travel required, no time lost, no real inconvenience.
But something essential was missing. These virtual gatherings felt hollow, and it wasn’t just the technology’s fault. What makes occasions like these special isn’t the logistics or even the food—it’s that people feed them with something vital: their time.
This is when I finally understood something I’d always dismissed as a cop-out. In the days of the Temple, we gave animal sacrifices. Today, we’re told, the sacrifice we bring is our time. I used to think this was just a convenient excuse for the absence of ritual offerings. But now it makes perfect sense.
Time is the most valuable thing we have. We each have limited time on earth, and how we spend it defines our lives. When people gather to celebrate together, that collective sacrifice creates something sacred. As William James also wrote, “The greatest use of a life is to spend it on something that will outlast it.”
To really create a wonderful simcha, everyone must give part of their life to it—their presence, their energy, their attention. Each person becomes a contributor to something larger than themselves, breathing life into the celebration until it becomes truly alive with shared joy and purpose.
I went into Ari’s bar mitzvah expecting to feel proud, but I experienced so much more. When my friends and family give their time—the most precious thing they have—to sanctify a moment in Ari’s life, something shifts. I’m not just throwing a party. I’m participating in something ancient and sacred, bringing God into the world one shared moment at a time. No wonder words felt inadequate.
I have a secret: I’m not perfect. I’ve stopped trying to be. Why am I telling you this? Isn’t a blog post supposed to help you become a little more perfect? Not this one. This is about giving up the constant struggle for perfection, and in doing so, leading a better life.
The Imperfectionist is the title of Oliver Burkeman’s blog. These essays are compiled into his book Meditations for Mortals, which I thoroughly enjoyed. The title sounds simple, but it has a very British double meaning. I originally thought the word “mortals” was referring to ordinary people, but it also refers to the finitude of life.
I’d been searching for a book of daily meditations—something that could set my day off on the right note. This one has truths I’d always sensed but couldn’t name. I’ve read the whole thing back to front 3 or 4 times this year, for 10 minutes each day while my tea steeps and the house is still silent.
Before this, he wrote columns for The Guardian about productivity, convinced that if he just found the right system, he’d finally get everything done. But each trick only bred more tasks—the emptier his inbox, the faster it refilled. Doing more didn’t bring calm; it just changed the game of whack-a-mole. Eventually he saw that the goal wasn’t to finish his infinite list but to change the way he thought about it. His solution: treat your to-do list like a river, not a bucket—something that flows endlessly past you, from which you can dip a few meaningful things, and let the rest drift on by.
The book draws on wisdom from across centuries—Stoics, Buddhists, existentialists, and even comedians—and packages it all in clear, modern language. It answers many of the key questions of life like:
What should I do with my life? Carl Jung says: discover your life task—the thing your deeper self is already moving toward. You don’t choose it; you uncover it. The work isn’t to decide what to become, but to listen closely enough to become what you already are.
How do I keep from feeling overwhelmed? Create a done list. Instead of staring at what’s unfinished, notice what you’ve already done. It’s as simple as not deleting the items on your to-do list once they’re completed.
What if my life could’ve turned out better? Maybe it could have—but then it wouldn’t have been yours. Simone de Beauvoir marveled that out of hundreds of millions of chances, one sperm met one egg and became her. Change even a tiny detail, and you disappear.1
What should I do when I feel completely lost? As comedian Mitch Hedberg put it: “If you find yourself lost in the woods, fuck it, build a house.”
Burkeman even has BBC radio shows exploring these ideas further. I particularly enjoyed An Inconvenient Truth,2 where he argues that convenience culture is a bit of a fraud. Companies try to convince us we need their products to remove life’s inconveniences. He uses the example of a hypothetical baby care app that raises your child without any hassle. Would anyone actually want that? Of course not—because inconvenience is where life is lived.
Each morning, as my tea steeps, I still listen to one meditation and let it settle. I still make mistakes—I get frustrated, I leave tasks undone, I make mistakes. But now I see those things differently. They’re not failures. They’re just life as a mortal.
Note: Much of Burkeman’s work is available for free on Spotify and/or the BBC.
To me, reading The Power Broker by Robert Caro always seemed like an intellectual bullying move. There are some of us that can’t get through a 1344-page book, no matter how hard we try. It’s just not going to happen. Even the audiobook clocks in at 66 hours long.
On the other hand, it sounds like an awesome book. Barack Obama and Conan O’Brien call it their favorite book. One of my favorite podcasts, 99% Invisible, even ran a book club on The Power Broker, using it to unpack how power quietly shapes cities. Guests included The Good Place creator Michael Schur, former U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, and even Caro himself. The New Yorker even published a satire piece on this phenomenon.
I’d resigned myself that I was never going to get to it. But then I discovered that the book was serialized into a series of articles in The New Yorker. These articles appeared in the issues in the summer of 1974. True to form, this was one of the longest serializations, broken up into 4 pieces for a total of 79,000 words—the length of a substantial book:1
“The Best Bill‑Drafter in Albany”, July 14, 1974
“If the End Doesn’t Justify the Means, What Does?”, July 21, 1974
III: “How Robert Moses Got Things Done”, August 4, 1974
IV: “Point of No Return”, August 11, 1974
Reading these articles, I realized that Robert Moses didn’t just shape New York—he built it. Every time I drive around the city, I find myself asking: How did all these roads get here? I understand the Manhattan grid of the early 1800s, but what about the highways, bridges, and parkways? None of them have changed in my lifetime, yet most were built only after the automobile arrived around 1900. The answer, it turns out, is Robert Moses. As Caro says in the introduction:
Standing out from the map’s delicate tracery of gridirons representing streets are heavy lines, lines girdling the city or slashing across its expanses. These lines denote the major roads on which automobiles and trucks move, roads whose very location, moreover, does as much as any single factor to determine where and how a city’s people live and work. With a single exception, the East River Drive, Robert Moses built every one of those roads. He built the Major Deegan Expressway, the Van Wyck Expressway, the Sheridan Expressway and the Bruckner Expressway. He built the Gowanus Expressway, the Prospect Expressway, the Whitestone Expressway, the Clearview Expressway, and the Throgs Neck Expressway. He built the Cross-Bronx Expressway, the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, the Nassau Expressway, the Staten Island Expressway and the Long Island Expressway. He built the Harlem River Drive and the West Side Highway.
Only one borough of New York City—the Bronx—is on the mainland of the United States, and bridges link the island boroughs that form metropolis. Since 1931, seven such bridges were built, immense structures some of them anchored by towers as tall as seventy-story buildings, supported by cables made up of enough wire to drop a noose around the earth. Those bridges are the Triborough,[*] the Verrazano, the Throgs Neck, the Marine, the Henry Hudson, the Cross Bay and the Bronx-Whitestone. Robert Moses built every one of those bridges.
Scattered throughout New York stand clusters of tall apartment houses built under urban renewal programs and bearing color, splashed on terraces and finials, that in the twentieth-century American cityscape marks them as luxury dwellings. Alongside some of these clusters stand college lecture halls and dormitories. Alongside one stand five immense dingy white expanses of travertine that are Lincoln Center, the world’s most famous, costly and imposing cultural complex.
Caro, Robert A. The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York.
This doesn’t even mention the 148,000 apartments and 600+ playgrounds. That’s why this cartoon, from this summer, is still so relevant:
New Yorker Cartoon, Emily Berstein, July 28, 2025
Caro spent seven years researching The Power Broker. Remember, this is a man who has only written two major works in his life—the other being his still-unfinished, multi-volume authoritative biography of Lyndon B. Johnson. Caro was such a relentless researcher that Robert Moses stopped speaking to him after Caro began asking pointed questions that challenged Moses’s official narrative.
Caro carefully unfolds the history of these projects. One of my favorites is how suburban Long Island exists largely because Robert Moses wanted to get New Yorkers to the beach. In the 1920s, when he was Parks Commissioner, Moses envisioned a vast network of beaches and parks—Jones Beach, Sunken Meadow, Hither Hills—that would offer working-class city residents a democratic escape from the sweltering, crowded tenements of New York. But the problem wasn’t just building the beaches—it was getting people to them. So Moses didn’t just build parks; he built the parkways to reach them. With meticulous strategy, he secured funding, dodged political opposition, and used obscure legal provisions to seize and rezone land for long, scenic highways like the Southern State, Northern State, and Wantagh Parkway. These roads weren’t just infrastructure—they were invitations.
Once the highways were built, people flooded out of the city in their cars, and where they stopped for recreation, they eventually stayed to live. The desire to reach the beaches started a new pattern of suburban growth. Moses didn’t just give New Yorkers access to sand and surf; he redrew the map of where people could imagine their lives unfolding. What began as a public amenity strategy became the foundation for postwar suburban expansion—sprawling communities along the corridors that led to the coast.
It’s written with the pace and drama of a novel, but at heart it’s a tragedy. Caro structures The Power Broker like the story of a fallen hero—someone who begins as an idealist and ends as a cautionary tale. In the early chapters, Moses is a sympathetic character: a brilliant reformer who wants to clean up the graft and inefficiency of Tammany Hall, a man who genuinely believes parks and public works can ennoble a city. But as his power grows, so does his arrogance. The same moral certainty that fueled his reforms hardens into something darker.
Caro captures this transformation as a novelist would. The idealist who once built Jones Beach so ordinary New Yorkers could see the ocean becomes the autocrat who lowers the parkway bridges so buses—and thus poor and Black families—can’t reach it. The planner who once dreamed of playgrounds for children ends up bulldozing their neighborhoods to make way for expressways. By the time he’s slicing the Cross Bronx through the heart of working-class communities, he’s stopped seeing citizens at all—only obstacles.
The only problem with the book is that it’s too powerful—and for decades, it’s been almost the only story we have about Moses. Written in the spirit of the 1960s and ’70s Jane Jacobs movement, it reflects a moment when the tide had turned against Moses’s brand of top-down modernism. By then, expressways had become symbols of destruction, not progress, and the neighborhood voices Moses once ignored were finally being heard. Caro channels that spirit, using Moses as both subject and warning: the man who thought he was saving New York by remaking it in concrete and steel was, in Jacobs’s eyes, dismantling the very fabric of the living city.
The book uses Moses as the embodiment of an entire era—making moses into a villain. Caro channels all the arrogance, blindness, and hubris of mid-century modernism into a single man, as if Moses alone poured the concrete and cleared the neighborhoods. But Moses wasn’t acting in a vacuum—he was the product of a culture that worshiped progress, trusted technocrats, and believed problems could be solved by building something big. By personalizing that system, Caro gives us a gripping story, but also a convenient scapegoat. The real story isn’t just about Robert Moses; it’s about everything going on at that time.
And there’s a larger problem: there’s really only one major book about him—and it’s a 1,344-page tome. While the book offers different sides of Moses, there’s only one theory of the case, and it’s from Caro. His Moses—the brilliant tyrant who built New York and broke it in the same breath—became the definitive version. Over time, that version hardened into truth.
When The Power Broker came out in 1974, New York was falling apart—graffiti on the subways, crime in the headlines, garbage piling up on the sidewalks. The city that had once believed it could build its way into the future was now on the verge of bankruptcy. Caro’s book didn’t just tell the story of Robert Moses; it told the story of a whole generation. It gave shape to what people were already feeling—that the modern world, with all its glass towers and expressways, had failed them. The Power Broker offered them an explanation.
So even reading the entire book doesn’t give you the whole story. Paul Goldberger, the architecture critic for the New Yorker, adds some crucial context. Goldberger reminds us that Moses wasn’t some rogue genius operating outside his era—he was his era. Every major American city in the mid-century was tearing itself apart in the name of progress, trading subways for expressways and neighborhoods for parking lots. Moses just did it bigger, faster, and more visibly than anyone else. To say he single-handedly ruined New York is to miss the deeper truth: that he was the clearest expression of what America believed at the time—that the future could be engineered. Goldberger writes that “Moses didn’t bring down New York, and he didn’t single-handedly sell its soul to the automobile. Indeed, New York probably comes closer to having a workable balance between cars and mass transit than any other city in the country.”2
I’m so glad that I finally got to read The Power Broker, in its abridged form. It is a phenomenal book, full of history, drama and intrigue. But the book needs to be read in context. The book’s subtitle, “Robert Moses and the Fall of New York,” doesn’t really ring true 50 years later. We wouldn’t have the Triborough Bridge or the Long Island Expressway. We wouldn’t have Long Island as we know it today.
For me it’s personal. Moses bulldozed working-class neighborhoods to build Lincoln Center, which jumpstarted the redevelopment of the Upper West Side—the theaters, restaurants, and brownstones that define it today. As part of that transformation, he built our apartment building in Lincoln Towers. I owe my home, my kids’ elementary school down the block, and the neighborhood I love to Robert Moses.
Footnotes
I was able to download the PDFs from the New Yorker digital archive from the New York Public Library. ↩︎
Paul Goldberger, “Eminent Dominion: Rethinking the Legacy of Robert Moses,” The New Yorker, February 5, 2007. ↩︎
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.
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.
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
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. ↩︎
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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