This is the first installment in a new column I’m writing called Psycho Geography! It’s an every-other-week on Monday thing, alternating with Book Rex. Reminder that if you only enjoy some of my columns, you can pick and choose which you receive here . Modern travel is a nightmare. Tourism is responsible for roughly 8% of all global carbon emissions, mass tourism is regularly eroding and destroying cultural heritage sites and natural wonders, and the stress of millions of tourists inevitably war...
Mar 27, 2023•7 min
For as long as I can remember, I’ve been obsessed with dystopias. I watched every zombie movie I could, I read every book about every bleak wasteland, I obsessed over Cormac McCarthy’s The Road , I got into impassioned debates about The Dawn of the Dead slow zombies vs. 28 Days Later fast zombies, and as a game with my friends, I’d strategize about what I’d do during a zombie apocalypse. Around the time of my daughter’s birth, though, I recognized that I didn’t have any sense of what a positive ...
Mar 22, 2023•7 min
In (slightly belated) honor of St. Patrick’s Day, I wanted to offer an Irish-themed Book Rex. My ancestry is that of an American mutt — if you looked at my DNA breakdown, you’d notice that my ancestors seemed particularly indiscriminate about what sort of white person they coupled with, and you’d maybe mutter to yourself, “well, at least they were indiscriminate about something .” But the strongest cultural connection my family had was to its Irish roots, which we celebrated by doing extremely A...
Mar 20, 2023•7 min
Your dog knows way more about your intimate business than you’d be comfortable with. Today’s episode is about the scientific concept of the umwelt , which is the perspective that different animals have on the world, and how this is influenced by different sensory abilities. I think imagining animals realities is a fun and humbling way of understanding just how limited our perception of reality really is. The books referenced in today’s episode are: And: As usual, these books are affiliate linked...
Mar 17, 2023•20 min
Consider this possibility for a second: Watching the news every day is making you less informed about the world. This is not to say you don’t understand what’s going on in Ukraine. It’s not to say you aren’t up to date with which basic democratic right the Worst Supreme Court in History™ is dismantling at this very moment. It’s not to say you don’t know the names of most of the major world leaders. It’s not to say you don’t fully understand what’s going on with Silicon Valley Bank and its fallou...
Mar 15, 2023•7 min
Hey guys! This week’s podcast is a fairly personal one about restarting a writing career while dealing with lingering mental health issues. My main note is this: if you’re going through something, please seek help! It does not have to be professional help, although that is a very good option. I first got help years ago after a friend opened up to me about his mental health struggles, so I’m very pro-sharing. The more we talk about this stuff, the less stigmatized it gets, and the less alone we f...
Mar 10, 2023•20 min
A version of this appeared on my website for the 100th anniversary. I’ve developed different conclusions since then! 106 years ago today was the start of the February Revolution in Russia. It was, quite possibly, the most important single event of the 20th century. Without the October Revolution, there is no Stalin. With no Stalin, it's possible that many western powers would not have seen Hitler as the lesser of two evils (the French right wing, as Hitler marched on Paris, shouted "Better Hitle...
Mar 08, 2023•17 min
In the latter half of the 20th century, a group of people called the Discordians discovered something magical: the Number 23. They came to call this esoteric bit of wizardry the “23 Enigma,” and pointed out that, once you start looking for it, there are all of these strange recurrences of the number 23 in the world. A small sampler: LeBron James and Michael Jordan, the two greatest basketball players of all time, both wear the number 23 on their jersey. David Beckham, Don Mattingly, and hockey l...
Mar 01, 2023•8 min
Given that the entire planet is conspiring to destroy our ability to pay attention, it’s not a surprise that sometimes we can’t commit to or focus on a novel. If this is you, I have a suggestion: don’t even try! Instead, get back into the reading habit by reading short fiction. This was not a medium I held in particularly high regard until the pandemic, when I realized I needed a short palette cleanser before bed each night, and couldn’t easily jump back into a 300-page novel without getting dis...
Feb 27, 2023•5 min
Hey everyone! I am dragging a bit! Pandemic mental health stuff caught up to me, so instead of original content today, I am providing an audio version of my favorite ever column, which was originally titled “Against Forgiveness” and was then changed to “Forgiveness and Time” on Better Strangers. Then, at the end of the recording, is Dylan Thomas’s reading of W.H. Auden’s “As I walked out one evening,” which is the poem I cite in the beginning. If you want to read the original text here it is — t...
Feb 24, 2023•15 min
In 2014, just before I got engaged to my wife, we watched the first season of the show True Detective , and I was completely taken by Matthew McConaughey’s character Rustin Cohle. Cohle is a pessimist — not a half-assed Eeyore pessimist who just looks at the glass half empty, but a philosophical pessimist, someone who thinks the existence of humanity is a mistake. He gives a particularly miserable speech at one point in the show, while talking with his detective partner Marty Hart. RUST: I think...
Feb 22, 2023•11 min
Note: As always, these books are affiliate linked to Bookshop.org, which means that if you buy through the link, I get a small kickback. This does not have any effect on the books I choose. I never affiliate link to Amazon. If you, like me, come from a certain demographic group (white, male, etc.) you were likely raised to feel misty warm feelings at the sight of the American flag or the sound of the national anthem. There are still enormous swaths of the American public that act like this: they...
Feb 21, 2023•7 min
Having a hard time with the winter? Read an obnoxiously long book! This has been my strategy for getting through Seasonal Affective Disorder for a few years now, and it’s been one of the main things I’ve begun to look forward to in the winter time. Here are the first two books I mentioned: And these are the hard books: As always, all books are affiliate linked to Bookshop — if you buy through here, I get a small kickback, but that does not influence what I choose! Better Strangers is a reader-su...
Feb 17, 2023•20 min
This article was originally published on my personal website in 2021. No one “got” the late 20th century like Kurt Vonnegut, the science fiction writer and humorist best known for his 1969 World War II book, Slaughterhouse-Five. He saw the dangers of late capitalism, of religious fanaticism, of climate change, and of technological change with such clear eyes that it would be too difficult to read him if it weren’t for the fact that he was also very humane and very funny. All told, he published 1...
Feb 15, 2023•14 min
Note: As always, these books are affiliate linked to Bookshop.org, which means that if you buy through the link, I get a small kickback. This does not have any effect on the books I choose. I never affiliate link to Amazon. In my previous job as a librarian, I had the job of buying new comics for the local library. It was maybe my favorite part of the job — in the past, not much had been set aside for the section, and over my tenure, I got to expand it by the thousands. Comics were among the hig...
Feb 13, 2023•6 min
This week’s podcast is about how the internet — not the state of the world — is what’s bumming you out. As someone who has worked in the attention economy, I have some insider tips for understanding why this is happening, and books to recommend if you want to go deeper. Here are the books (and the song) mentioned in the episode (with affiliate links, of course): A quick correction — in the episode, I mention the myth that carrots help you see in the dark. The British propaganda campaign was not ...
Feb 10, 2023•26 min
When my son was born in February of 2020, we knew we would need to move to a new house soon, but we loved our apartment — it was a cozy second floor two-bedroom, it was where we’d spent the first two years of my daughter Sophie’s life, and we knew that in my wife's late pregnancy the stress wasn't worth the move. Instead, we nested, and focused on enjoying the last few months with Sophie where there was just three of us. We planned on getting a place with three bedrooms after the rough first mon...
Feb 08, 2023•8 min
I live right by the beach, and a few weeks ago, I had a pretty cool experience. It was rainy, so I went for a walk, and I saw a lot of cool ducks. That’s it — that’s the entire experience. Getting out into nature a bit more has been an incredibly pleasant experience for me — I spent much of my childhood in the woods at the bottom of our street, and I rarely saw wildlife beyond squirrels. But now, here on the shore, I regularly see hawks, migratory birds, and occasionally foxes, snapping turtles,...
Feb 06, 2023•6 min
When my daughter was born, my wife and I decided to not post pictures of her publicly online. It was mostly about giving our kids a sense of autonomy about their digital lives when they reach the age where they care, but it’s been a more controversial decision than we anticipated. This week’s podcast is an attempt to explain our stance! Better Strangers is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episo...
Feb 03, 2023•15 min
This is an adaptation of a speech I made in 2019 at Brookdale Community College. A few years back, I was invited to a local community college to discuss what we, in the modest little corner of New Jersey that we live in, can do about issues as huge and seemingly untouchable as global human rights. It is a terrible topic for a speech. Human rights, for most of us, is just something to be depressed about, and that is because activists and advocates like myself are notoriously bad at making people ...
Feb 01, 2023•15 min
Everything in America is a cult. Corporations have their own internal cultures designed towards making employees feel like they are part of something important and messianic, instead of like, a coffee chain. You regularly hear CEOs saying stuff like, “We’re not selling cars, we’re selling dreams. ” That Don Draper nonsense might just be canny advertising, but it’s also completely batshit insane, and people that actually work at these companies often believe it . American culture spends a lot of ...
Jan 30, 2023•5 min
I used to be one of the Facebook political debate kings. Long essays. Impassioned pleas. Days spent in argument with total strangers. Jobs and relationships neglected in the crafting of a withering reply. The posting was — outside occasional volunteering and donations — the entirety of my political activism. After Trump’s election in 2016, when it became clear that Facebook had profited massively off of the misinformation campaigns led by both the president-elect and shady foreign operatives, as...
Jan 25, 2023•7 min
Hey guys! My newest weekly column is something I’ve been doing as part of the Jimble-Jamble for a while, and I decided that it deserves its own space. It’s simple: five book recommendations on a specific theme! I’d love to have guests posting these in the future, so if you want to suggest specific books on a theme, let me know! All links are affiliates with Bookshop.org, so if you buy something through that link, I get a small cut. Today’s Book Rex is on how the internet is destroying our lives,...
Jan 23, 2023•7 min
When my wife and I had just started dating, we would occasionally go and visit her brother in New York. They had, at some point, become obsessed with the Animal Planet TV show, Finding Bigfoot: Further Evidence, and in between our trips to various bars and restaurants, we’d binge the show. Finding Bigfoot , if you’ve never seen it, features three members of the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization (BFRO) and a skeptical field biologist, who search for proof of living Sasquatches in a process t...
Jan 18, 2023•9 min
So this is cool! You get to hear me literally 60 seconds into my new career! I recorded this episode this morning, which is my first day after quitting my job at the public library I’ve worked at for the past decade. Instead of a read article, I decided to do a kind of loose discussion of what I found valuable about working in a library (spoiler: nearly everything) and what I found challenging (spoiler: also nearly everything). I referenced a Drag Queen Story Hour article in the episode, you can...
Jan 16, 2023•21 min
This was one of my least clicked on articles last year! So naturally, I’m making it my second ever podcast. Here’s the text version: This remains one of my favorite things I wrote last year, clicks be damned. I personally remain an atheist, but have gotten a bit more… pagan? I guess? In my 30’s, because I’ve come across this more playful way of thinking about Gods that works for me really well. This is not my best recording job — I’ve still got one week left at my job, after which I’ll be able t...
Jan 09, 2023•15 min
First ever podcast, guys! This is a reading of my August 2022 article, “Be More Biased,” which you can see the text version of below: Remember to subscribe to get the podcast every Monday! Better Strangers is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit betterstrangers.substack.com...
Jan 02, 2023•22 min
