The best smart people in my opinion are those who are unafraid to pose a challenging idea, even a contrary idea, but can do so without becoming a bore, or worse, a wrecking ball. Elite skills need to speak for themselves without practitioners having to mentally file everyone else into hierarchical categories.
Read MoreTHE ENDOCRINOLOGIST
Even with all of the many satisfactions — the patients who counted on him, the years of work it had taken him to build his reputation, a measure of financial security — the doctor longed for something elsewhere.
Read MorePLAYING BY HEART
It's not the kind of music that matters in this case. It's all about how it's played.
Read MoreTHE MARGINALIZATION OF ORIGINS
In an era with seemingly endless, ubiquitous invention and creation, how could we ever have time for all of the books we told ourselves we ought to read, all of the old black and white movies we thought might enjoy late at night on the couch, all nine of Gustav Mahler’s superb, challenging symphonies?
Read MoreLUST
There’s a reason so much art has to do with love and sex and desire in its many forms. Lust empowers us to short circuit intellect so we can access other forces.
Read MoreIT'S GETTING BETTER ALL THE TIME
Find a crack in the road: fix it. Cause a foolish fender bender: learn from it. Develop a better highway ramp: build it. In the churning, maddening mass of growling engines, I sometimes cling to the thought that genuine progress might be afoot.
Read MoreTHE OTHER SIDE
Fully alive, we see the world in a stage of constant changing, and if we give into that eternal state of change, we begin to understand that the present doesn’t exist at all. There can only be what came before and what’s yet to happen.
Read MoreEFFORT
Success only comes from doing the thing that you want to say “you’ve done”, but that doesn’t always mean that you’re going to have a good time doing it.
Read MoreEVIDENCE OF HUMANITY
The lights in the darkness are evidence that people have accumulated themselves and their energies. Behind these lights are stories and sorrows, triumphs and traumas, pleasures and, above all, perseverance. In the bright patches of light shining from a darkened globe there are concentrations of humanity, and come what may, they represent forces beyond any singular individual anywhere.
Read MoreFEVER DREAMS
Ideas often come when I least expect it. When they burst into mind unannounced or unescorted by linear thought, they’re often my clearest creative lights, regardless of the subject. The obvious dilemma is figuring out how to keep a grip on what I was doing a moment before without losing the details of the new thought that’s just appeared.
Read More