One of the January staples of my career while at Men’s Health magazine was “new year, new you.” It was the idea that the turning of the year was a chance to start something fresh and unprecedented in one’s life. It drove incredible interest, starting on the 26th of December. The fascinating part was that … Continue reading ‘New year, new you’? Try ‘new year, OLD you’
So in my continuing experiments with artificial intelligence, I decided to ask Claude, the chatbot created by AI startup Anthropic, to help me with some holiday gift-giving, specifically for my wife. I highlighted some of her interests, including her newfound love for pickleball as well as her longtime love – reading. Claude offered up that … Continue reading Holiday Adventures with an AI Chatbot
Like so many other writers/editors, I’ve been playing with ChatGPT. Generally, as I’ve asked it to do very purposeful tasks, I’ve found it to be capable, though lacking insight and vulnerable to enormous gaps of understanding. My advice is, Use it … very, very carefully. So recently, I brought in some of the fall harvest … Continue reading What Happened When I Asked ChatGPT to Write a Short Story About a Pepper
Something from a few years back, getting out of my own tiny head … Continue reading Mother of Stars and Darkness
We went to two movies this weekend. Surprisingly, they were both about parents and children. Other than that, they were wildly different. (Spoiler alert: I’m about to say things about both Everywhere Everything All at Once and Aftersun. If you care, stop now.) Everything Everywhere All at Once is an Oscar contender, starring Michelle Yeoh, … Continue reading 2 Very Different Parent-Daughter Movies
Like a lot of people, I played Wordle a lot this past year (see below). It’s ingenious, both simple and complex in the way that can remain intriguing over time. Six guesses to come up with a five-letter word sounds simultaneously super-difficult and pretty easy. Six seems like a lot, until you’re looking at S-A-E on … Continue reading 6 Things I Learned from Wordle
A while back I grabbed the website domain playful.li and launched a little project I called Playful, on the media platform Medium. I invited folks to play along, and some folks (most notably, my friend Bill Clinton) did. Within a year, though, I ran out of creative and physical energy for the project and it … Continue reading Let’s celebrate play, together!
My family moved one town over, from Hazlet to Matawan, in 1973, when I was in first grade. It was a “made-it” kind of move, in 1973 terms. We moved from a modest home, where the dormer walls of my room slanted inward, to the model home in a newly built neighborhood. We had a … Continue reading The Most Amazing Person I’ve Ever Known Has Died
Listened to George Saunders’ first collection of short stories, Civilwarland in Bad Decline, this summer and all the things I enjoy about Saunders’ writing were there. But the real treat was his writer’s note at the end, where he shared his experience as a not-so-young writer who pursued writing while living a middle class existence with … Continue reading Some ‘Mountain-Climbing’ Advice from Writer George Saunders
Virginia and I continued on a torrid pace of movie-watching, this time watching Jerry Maguire with friends on New Year’s Night. One couple had never seen it. I hadn’t seen it in more than a decade, maybe closer to two. Anyway, I reacted to it a little differently than I did back in 1996. Some thoughts — … Continue reading 6 Thoughts on Jerry Maguire, 26 Years Later
