Latest Posts
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‘New year, new you’? Try ‘new year, OLD you’
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.… Continue reading
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Holiday Adventures with an AI Chatbot
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… Continue reading
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What Happened When I Asked ChatGPT to Write a Short Story About a Pepper
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… Continue reading
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Mother of Stars and Darkness
Something from a few years back, getting out of my own tiny head … Continue reading
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2 Very Different Parent-Daughter Movies
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… Continue reading
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6 Things I Learned from Wordle
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… Continue reading
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Let’s celebrate play, together!
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… Continue reading
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The Most Amazing Person I’ve Ever Known Has Died
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… Continue reading
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Some ‘Mountain-Climbing’ Advice from Writer George Saunders
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… Continue reading
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6 Thoughts on Jerry Maguire, 26 Years Later
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… Continue reading
