After graduating from college, I moved to San Francisco, where I acquired a taste for Chinese food. The food is good, the portions are large, and back then the prices were cheap — important considerations for an impoverished recent graduate — and at the end of every meal you get a fortune cookie....

Thanks to Callum and Maddie at the amazing Pints of Knowledge for hosting me and The World in A Phrase on January 28. And thanks to all the incredibly engaged folks who came out to Soho Comedy House to juggle words, ideas, and balls.

There was a blank sheet selected from the globe — once again, ...

My talk delivered at the International Aphorism Conference in Wroclaw, Poland on October 24, 2025

Whenever I’m lucky enough to travel to another country, or return from abroad to my own, I’m always reminded of an aphorism by the British novelist Norman Douglas:

You can tell the ideals of a nation...

I once stayed in a hotel in Vienna, one of those self-­consciously designed establishments with backlit photos embedded in the walls and tubes of blue, red, and yellow light placed strategically around every common space. My room had a soft blue light in it, a queasy kind of light that made me je...