There are few words as elastic, as slyly evasive, as spirit.  It can mean the dead, the drunk, or the divine - and on certain nights, all three at once. The word itself feels distilled - boiled down from something raw and unruly into essence: what’s left when you’ve burned off everything else. Across centuries, we’ve been bottling our ghosts, decanting our gods, and pouring our grief into glasses, as though intoxication and recovery were just another kind of resurrection. Hum

There’s something faintly absurd about the way we pursue fun - like a cat chasing a laser pointer it will never catch. Modern leisure has...

The history of human persuasion is a long con dressed up as progress. Nations have been built, wars justified, and empires sold not with...

There are things one doesn’t talk about in polite company: politics, bowel movements, and other people’s children. The first two are...

There are questions that have no business being asked, and yet humanity keeps asking them. Why is there something rather than nothing?...

It’s a curious fact of modern life that we are never content to let a thing simply be . Every object, every gesture, every hiccup in the...

The world has many great monuments to human ambition: the Pyramids, the Taj Mahal, the Eiffel Tower. And then, in the hills of the...

Sociologists are telling us that Americans are drinking less, partying less, and generally turning into beige furniture. A recent Gallup...

A popular rallying cry of radio spin-doctors and nativist pundits alike is that in America people should just “ speak English .” The...

There are certain mysteries of human history we no longer question. Why did we build pyramids? Why did we invent mayonnaise? Why did we...

There’s something almost touching about the human obsession with order. We alphabetize spices we haven’t used in years, color-code sock...

I’ve been called many things. Some say I’m just a nut. A punchline in a tiki shirt. Something to stick a paper umbrella in while you...

There’s a peculiar sort of theater to the modern resume. It’s a place of minor fictions and quiet omissions, a curated collection of...

There are rituals, and then there are pastimes that dress themselves as  rituals - quietly asking to be taken seriously while wearing...

There are only two kinds of people in this world: those who believe there are only two kinds of people, and those who quietly suspect the...

There was a time, not too long ago, when thirst wasn’t an accessory – it was just something you dealt with. We used to gather water in...

There’s something revealing - almost indecent - about watching a person eat a taco. Not the sterile, lunch-break kind with a napkin...

There’s a particular comfort in believing that history happens elsewhere . In distant empires, over flickering black-and-white film,...

It begins, as most regrettable stories do, with a clear liquid in a bottle and someone saying, “It doesn’t even taste like anything.”...

We realize we’ve been absent in our postings recently. Apologies for that. We took the past couple weeks off because we’ve been doing...