How a bad mood can lead to great ideas — A terrible week at the office encouraged me to hate everyone. My foul mood triggered a Nietzschean trajectory: “Why do bad things happen to good people?” has been a moral and religious quandry for millennia. The answer might be that God doesn’t exist, and shit just happens. Or maybe God…

The story of my friendship with Andy Dick before he moved to LA — The Stand Up & The Heckler Chicago, 1988: Andy Dick, never known for his patience, was very mad at me. “When you press the buzzer, it buzzes,” he scowled, demonstrating how his front door bell worked. “And when it buzzes, it buzzes loud, and we fucking hear it the first…

How early struggles empower wordlers and lovers — Much has been written about poker being a metaphor for life: the bluff, the tell, the raw psychology of winning with only two blank cards and a smile. The same can be said for most games, including the latest viral sensation, Wordle. Although a single-player sensation, Wordle packs punch for…

How can you tell the difference between letting go and staying in? — Our society equates success with strength, failure with weakness. The opposite is true for close, meaningful relationships. Love that lasts accepts and embraces failure and weakness. We are terrified of revealing our core vulnerabilities. People might see us for whom we really are, and run. The freedom to fuck up…

The Universe looks nothing like the photos we’re being shown — Not to piss on anybody’s parade, but the new Webb telescope and its amazing images are COLORIZED. In other words, you’re not seeing these amazing cosmological objects as they would appear out of a space ship’s window. The main reason the new space telescope has such astonishing resolution is because…

How asking for what you need gets you what you want — Humans are sensitive creatures. None of us like to be told what to do, or be put on the defensive. Yet we have a societal tendency to assign others responsibility, and blame them for our own problems. These simple observations give a paradoxical twist to creating communication that actually works: …

Millions love Elon Musk for all the wrong reasons — Elon Musk reminds me of this incredible guitarist and shy narcissist from high school we worshipped. Carl would literally leap out of bed every morning, his day planned and activated before he even got vertical. By age 15 he was the best guitar player anyone had ever seen. He…

Extremely short and long natural processes hint at the infinite — The physicist Ernst Rutherford coined the term “half-life period” in 1906 to describe the amount of time half the total number of atoms in a given sample of isotopes decay into other elements. The number is exponential and probabilistic, and has been measured to vary across an astonishing spectrum from…

Back in the days of land lines these interactions were inevitable yet still terrifying — Hysterically retro and often the case: Every time I called a friend (and especially anyone I was dating) the fear of a parent answering was huge. Parent: Hello? Mookie: Hi! This is Mike. [I always identified myself and hated when others didn’t extend the courtesy] May I [not “can I” because…