The America I Once Knew

For America on its 250th birthday

The America I once knew believed that all people are created equal.

The America I once knew was founded on ideals.

The America I once knew believed in basic human rights and dignity.

The America I once knew cherished individual liberty.

The America I once knew believed in government of the people, by the people, for the people.

The America I once knew believed that voters should choose their politicians, not that politicians should choose their voters.

The America I once knew believed in the rule of law.

The America I once knew believed that no one is above the law, and in equal justice under the law.

The America I once knew respected the independence of its courts.

The America I once knew believed that public office is a public trust, not an opportunity for grift, corruption and self-agrandizement.

The America I once knew understood that power exists to serve the people, not the other way around.

The America I once knew believed that leadership carries responsibility.

The America I once knew believed that great power came with great responsibility.

The America I once knew believed that democracy depends on compromise.

The America I once knew defended freedom of speech, even when that speech was unpopular.

The America I once knew respected a free and independent press.

The America I once knew valued truth over propaganda.

The America I once knew believed that facts matter.

The America I once knew understood that patriotism is not blind loyalty or nationalism, but love of country.

The America I once knew welcomed disagreement without treating opponents as enemies.

The America I once knew valued kindness, decency, and good works.

The America I once knew believed that freedom carries obligations as well as rights.

The America I once knew believed that opportunity should depend on talent and effort, not birth or privilege.

The America I once knew revered innovation, expertise and education.

The America I once knew believed that diversity is a source of strength.

The America I once knew welcomed immigrants and refugees—a haven for people fleeing violence, persecution, and oppression.

The America I once knew measured strength by character rather than military power.

The America I once knew believed that alliances made America—and the world—stronger.

The America I once knew believed in free and fair trade.

The America I once knew believed in competition on a level playing field.

The America I once knew believed in the dignity of work.

The America I once knew believed in an honest day’s pay for an honest day’s work.  

The America I once knew protected the vulnerable and gave assistance to the needy.

The America I once knew kept its word.

The America I once knew stood against totalitarianism and fascism.

The America I once knew believed it could be a force for good in the world.

The America I once knew believed that every generation had a duty to leave the country better than it found it.

The America I once knew believed that hope is stronger than fear.

I miss the America I once knew.

Interesting People

Lately I've had the uneasy sense that I'm in danger of becoming a dullard.

When people I haven't seen for a while ask how I'm doing, I almost invariably answer, "Not much." Which isn't true. There's always plenty going on in my life. As there is in everyone else's.

Maybe too much has happened to distill into a single anecdote on the spot, so "not much" becomes the easiest way to move the conversation along.

Or maybe I've begun to assume that real life happens online, posted somewhere—on Facebook, Instagram, or whatever feed we've curated for one another. Note: I don't have Facebook or Instagram accounts.

I've been thinking about this since hearing Alain de Botton in conversation with Sam Harris. They were discussing self-reflection and, more broadly, the ways people lower their emotional barriers and come to know themselves.

At one point De Botton asks a deceptively simple question: Why are people boring?

His answer surprised me. Human beings, he argues, all lead immensely complex inner lives. Yet we've all met people around whom our own minds seem to go blank. We know we have things to say, but somehow nothing comes.

He suggests this has less to do with intelligence or experience than with self-exploration. A genuinely interesting person is someone who has spent time opening the doors of their own mind—not in an egotistical way, but with curiosity. Other people unconsciously sense that curiosity, and it invites their own. Conversation flourishes because both people are interested in making sense of experience rather than merely reporting it.

I've certainly experienced that. There are people who make you feel more articulate simply by listening. They ask how you are because they genuinely want to know. Their interest gives you permission to think out loud.

And then there are the opposite encounters. People ask the same question, but only as social lubrication. The exchange is transactional. According to De Botton, these are often people who haven't cultivated much curiosity about themselves either. They may travel widely, collect accomplishments, and accumulate experiences, but those experiences become content to upload rather than material to reflect upon. The outer life expands while the inner one remains largely unexplored.

When I answered "not much" the other day, I immediately regretted it. It felt dismissive, almost disrespectful.

Part of me suspected the other person wasn't really looking for an honest answer. Few people seem to be anymore.

But another part of me wondered whether I'd become complicit in exactly the habit De Botton was describing. Maybe "not much" wasn't simply an efficient reply. Maybe it was evidence that I hadn't done the work of turning experience into thought.

After all, something is always happening. The question is whether we've spent enough time with our own lives to know what it means.

Once we begin to think of ourselves principally as online personas, and experiences as 'content', it not only drains our real-life exchanges of vitality; it drains our own lives of meaning and interest—even to ourselves.

Answered Prayers

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Everyone is so sad these days

about the general shittiness of things—

how we neglect

and carelessly destroy

the world and each other

in small ways

in big ways.

Yet there are mornings we rise

to discover that

overnight the rain 

has glazed the streets

for the summer sun to bake the day

like fresh bread.

People stream into the streets

to ply their trades:

the scent of cinnamon buns

sweetens my walk to work;

a policeman blows his whistle

and waves traffic through;

above us,

welders stitch I-beams together

with birthday sparklers

to shape a bridge;

below,

street crews in orange jumpers

connect underground pipes

so that I need only 

press a park fountain button

when I am thirsty.

The music is undeniable—

one movement

after another,

like so many daily prayers 

answered

we barely notice.

The rhythm is poignant,

intervals of internal 

sadness

while outside the celebration

never stops.

Canada Day!!

Happy Canada Day!’

Y’all better be celebrating this great country you are privileged to live in!

Belonging

I’ve been watching, along with billions of others around the world, the greatest sporting event on the planet: the FIFA World Cup.

I’ve enjoyed the spectacle as much as anyone—the millions of spectators filling stadiums across North America, the colourful clothing, painted faces and thunderous chants. The anticipation (because, let’s face it, soccer is mostly anticipation), and then the explosion of joy—bordering on hysteria—that follows every goal and even every near miss.

And for what, exactly?

Twenty-two players dressed in tight shirts and shorts, running around an open field, trying to kick a sewn hunk of inflated leather into the opposing team's mesh. A skill for which many of them are among the highest-paid professionals in the world.

So why does this tournament captivate billions? Why is it the greatest spectacle on Earth?

It's not simply because we are privileged to witness the extraordinary talent of ball-kicking.

The answer, I think, is that the World Cup satisfies, better than any other mass-spectacle we have, our deepest human need: belonging.

Belonging lies at the heart of almost everything we value. It shapes our families, our friendships, our religions, our nations and our communities. It is woven into our survival instinct because, throughout most of human history, those who belonged to a group stood a far better chance of surviving than those who stood alone.

The worst punishments - spiritual ones like excommunication and physical ones like banishment and imprisonment - were based on being separated from the group.

We tell stories because they enhance our sense of belonging. We embrace religions, philosophies and ideologies because they give us a shared identity. We celebrate holidays, citizenship and traditions because they remind us that we are part of something larger than ourselves. We gather for concerts and sporting events for the same reason—not merely to be entertained, but to experience belonging.

We are born into a world we did not choose, knowing neither why we are here nor what awaits us. In that uncertainty, connecting with others satisfies more than our physical need for food and shelter. It fulfils our emotional need for companionship and our intellectual search for purpose and meaning.

The need is so powerful, so fundamental, that we sometimes carry it to extraordinary—even absurd—extremes. Every time I watch fans in makeup and colourful t-shirts, waving flags and blowing horns and generally losing their shit because a ball crosses a goal line, I'm reminded of just how profoundly we need to feel like we belong.

Part of me admires it. Another part wonders what might be possible if we channelled even a fraction of that passion into causes that shape our shared future: peace, human rights, democracy and individual freedom.

If even a bit of the mass sadness and disappointment felt when our preferred team loses a soccer match could be channeled into outrage at the poverty, suffering and injustices affecting so many people around the world. 

The capacity for collective commitment is clearly there. The World Cup proves it every four years. The real question is what else we might accomplish if our sense of belonging extended beyond our teams to our common humanity.

Eno

There's a moment in the wonderful 2024 documentary film Eno that shows archival footage of a television interview with the artist and musician Brian Eno in the 1980s. He is demonstrating how he replaced the paper diaphragm of an audio speaker with latex because it was more flexible and he wanted to experiment with how it would sound. He inserts a cassette, presses play, and the speaker immediately malfunctions and blows out.

A total disaster, right?

At first Eno reacts with alarm but then, listening to the muffled, thumping noise now coming from the broken speaker, he says, "Wait, listen to that."

It's a moment that perfectly captures the spirit of the documentary. For Eno, there are no mistakes or disasters in the creative process—only changing and unexpected conditions that create new opportunities.

The film is an affectionate portrait of the British artist, musician, and record producer. Eno first came to prominence in the early 1970s as a founding member of the glam-rock band Roxy Music and later became the producer of some of the most influential artists of the modern era, including David Bowie, Talking Heads, and U2. He is also known as a pioneer of ambient music—a term he coined and, as he admits in the film, eventually grew tired of.

Ironically, Eno was never formally trained as a musician. In Roxy Music he 'played' an early synthesizer, generating textures and electronic sounds that embellished the group's songs. His training was in visual art, and he says that the recording studio is his true instrument. He thinks less in terms of writing songs than of painting landscapes with sound. Ideas begin as notes, sketches, and diagrams in notebooks before being translated into music and other artistic projects.

As a producer, Eno developed a boundary-pushing philosophy that encouraged experimentation and created an environment in which musicians often discovered possibilities they would never have found on their own. Asked what made Eno so effective, Bowie responds in the film with characteristic amusement: "I have no idea."

Art-school graduates and dropouts who became successful musicians are not uncommon in Britain. Among them are John Lennon, Pete Townshend, David Bowie, Eric Clapton, and Freddie Mercury. They seem less common in the United States, though David Byrne is a notable exception.

I've never been a particular fan of Eno's solo music. I love Roxy Music, and I think Bowie's finest work emerged from his collaboration with Eno on the celebrated Berlin trilogy of albums Low, Heroes, and Lodger. 

What I appreciate most about Eno is his approach to the creative process and philosophy of life.

Increasingly rare today is his authenticity, the openness of his thought process and the way he joyfully embraces risk. He embodies a kind of intellectual freedom that pushes boundaries, not by imposing rigid control, but by welcoming chance, uncertainty, and complexity. If we choose to impose structure on the creative process, Eno argues, we must also leave room for the unexpected—for accidents, interruptions, in order to create a space for what the listener brings to the work.

For Eno, creativity resembles the organic processes of the natural world. An idea is like a planted seed that grows in directions that cannot be fully predicted as it encounters new conditions and influences.

To understand that philosophy in practice, look up Eno's creative tool Oblique Strategies: a deck of cards containing prompts designed to disrupt habitual thinking and invite unexpected solutions. Like the broken speaker in the documentary, the point is not to avoid accidents, but to recognize the accident as the beginning of something more interesting.

Watching Eno, I found myself thinking about the fertile cultural milieu in which someone like him could flourish creatively: the 1970s and 80s. In the film, Eno argues that great art is not the product of isolated genius so much as the convergence of historical, political, economic, and social forces that create an environment in which creativity can thrive. In other words, art is inextricable from the cultural scene, just as flowers and lichen are inextricable from their soil, or fish from their river. 

It's understandable that this is one of his major concerns today.

Eno views artistic creativity as environmentalists view the natural world—not as an inexhaustible resource, but as a fragile ecosystem. Just as biodiversity depends on conditions that allow life to flourish, creative breakthroughs depend on conditions that encourage experimentation, risk-taking, and even failure. It's part and parcel of the process.

What worries him is not that people will stop creating. Human beings are irrepressibly creative. Rather, it is that we may be eroding the cultural conditions that make genuine innovation possible. A society increasingly organized around efficiency, predictability, metrics, and optimization can still produce an endless stream of content. But content is not the same thing as creativity.

The question raised by Eno is whether we still value the kinds of environments that produce unexpected ideas, strange experiments, and beautiful failures. Because once those environments disappear, we may not immediately notice what has been lost. We will only discover it years later, in the absence of the works that were never given the chance to exist.

Stranger Than You Think

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The aliens have landed,

They visit when it's dark.

I think they're all left-handed,

The encounter leaves a mark.

Call the authorities,

Agents to direct us.

The army and the navy,

The people who'll protect us.

You'll find me in the bar, 

Telling stories with a drink.

'Cause out there on the road,

Life is stranger than you think.

I fell in love one time,

She made me feel alive.

I climbed aboard her spaceship,

Didn't know if I'd survive. 

You'll find me in the bar, 

Telling stories with a drink.

'Cause out there on the road,

Life is stranger than you think.

She took me to her planet,

In another galaxy.

She used sharp instruments,

To perform her surgery.

You'll find me in the bar, 

Telling stories with a drink.

'Cause out there on the road,

Life is stranger than you think.

Still not sure I believe,

What I know happened to me.

This alien abduction,

Was it just a fantasy?

You'll find me in the bar, 

Telling stories with a drink.

'Cause out there on the road,

Life is stranger than you think,

Life is stranger than you think,

Life is stranger than you think...

Judging Character

My late mother expressed a visceral dislike for trump from the moment he appeared on the political scene.

That surprised me because she rarely expressed opinions about politicians one way or the other. In truth, she never cared much about politics at all.

But there was something about trump that struck her as different. She felt strongly about him.

Mom was reclusive in her later years. She wrote fiction, maintained a blog, and largely kept to herself. She didn't socialize much.

Except on Facebook.

Facebook was almost tailor-made for her. It allowed her to stay connected with friends and family without having to see them in person. And that's where the trouble started.

She found herself in more than one heated argument over trump.

One day I asked her what it was about him that got her so worked up.

"He's a narcissist," she said.

"Aren't all politicians narcissists?" I replied.

"Maybe," she said. "We're all a bit narcissistic. But not like trump. He's a lying, destructive narcissist."

My mother instinctively recognized something that many political analysts, journalists, and voters either missed or chose to ignore. She saw a man with a bottomless need for attention and validation—someone who would say whatever was necessary to get it and who seemed incapable of caring about the damage left behind.

At the core of that kind of personality is an emotional black hole that eventually consumes everything around it. And as with a black hole, proximity is unsurvivable. As political strategist Rick Wilson famously titled his 2018 book, Everything Trump Touches Dies.

What strikes me now is how clearly my mother saw it from day one. I often find myself wondering how so many others failed to recognize what seemed so obvious to her.

Perhaps they saw it and decided it didn't matter. As long as trump appeared willing to give them what they wanted, character became a secondary consideration.

But that's the mistake.

Ultimately, character is not secondary. It is everything.

Which brings me to the Iran MOU.

Trump-supporting Jews around the world, and Israelis in particular, are suddenly confronting the same reality my mother recognized years ago.

Until recently, trump consistently polled as the most popular political figure in Israel, by far. Now, after the Iran MOU, many supporters feel betrayed because he failed to deliver what they believed he had promised.

People often support politicians the way children love a parent: completely and unquestioningly, until they stop getting what they want. Then affection instantly turns to anger.

It is a deeply immature way of engaging with politics, and not just poltics, most relationships as well.

If a politician promises people what they want to hear, many will overlook almost everything else. Trump understood that better than most. He built support by telling different audiences exactly what they wanted to hear.

The problem is that promises mean very little to someone without character. Commitments are tools. Principles are either non-existant or negotiable. Truth is whatever is useful in the moment.

What many Israelis may now be learning is what my mother understood from the beginning: politics ultimately comes down to character.

No politician gives people everything they want. Democracies do not work that way.

But character always matters because it tells you what remains when circumstances change and compromises become necessary. You may not always agree with a politician of character. You may not always get what you want from them. But at least you know where they stand and where their limits are.

My mother saw that trump lacked that foundation from the very beginning.

She wasn't a political analyst. She wasn't a journalist. She wasn't a political activist.

She was simply a good judge of character.

And as Heraclitus observed more than two thousand years ago, character is destiny.

MOU

It's not a deal, or even an agreement, it's a 14-point Memorandum of Understanding (MOU). Sort of like an agreement about an agenda for discussions. And that's the best part.

The rest is a disaster. Worst than most people imagined it would be. Terrible for the US. Horrible for the world. And an unmitigated catastrophe for Israel. 

It's not just complete capitulation, it's a road map for Iran to consolidate regional power.

Here are some juicy highlights:

4 — ...The United States of America further undertakes to remove its forces from the proximity of the Islamic Republic of Iran within 30 days after the final deal.

My read is that removing forces from Iran's proximity will be interpreted as including the bases in the Gulf states. 

 5 — ...The Islamic Republic of Iran will conduct dialog with the Sultanate of Oman to define the future administration and maritime services in the Strait of Hormuz in discussion with other Persian Gulf littoral states in line with the applicable international law and the sovereign rights of coastal states of the Strait of Hormuz.

My read is that this consolidates Iran's control over the Strait of Hormuz and the collection of 'administrative' fees.

6 — The United States of America undertakes with regional partners to develop a definitive, mutually agreed plan with at least USD 300 billion for the reconstruction and economic development of the Islamic Republic of Iran...

Trump is saying this will be private investment. Yeah, right. Private investors will be clamouring to invest with the mullahs and IRGC. 

7 — The United States of America undertakes to terminate all types of sanctions against the Islamic Republic of Iran, including the United Nations Security Council resolutions, IAEA Board of Governors resolutions, and all unilateral US sanctions, primary and secondary, in an agreed upon schedule as part of the final deal...

This one is self-explanatory.

8 —...The two parties also agreed to discuss the issue of enrichment and other mutually agreed matters related to the Islamic Republic of Iran’s nuclear needs, based on a satisfactory framework being agreed upon in the final deal. 

In other words, Iran is keeping their 'nuclear dust' and their program.

11 — The United States of America undertakes to make fully available for use the frozen or restricted funds and assets of the Islamic Republic of Iran upon the implementation of this MOU...

Can it get any better than sanction relief? It sure can because there are funds to unfreeze. 

Trump says that if Iran doesn't comply he’ll start bombing again. How likely is that as the midterm elections get closer. Zero. And Iran knows it.

Anyway, what’s not to comply with? This is everything they want and more.

Conclusion: The war was the best thing that could have happened to Iran. The Art of the Deal in action.

Stranger

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Earth is a stranger;

a shimmering,

spinning,

stranger

in the universe,

like a silver coin

tossed with a wish

into a river.

Or the way 

dogs and cats are

strangers 

to us.

Stranger still

that we seldom think

how strange life is,

and instead

invent words

like normal

when

in reality

normal

means dead.

Mrs. Sanderson

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Mother ordered me to go next door,

To Mrs. Sanderson who lives alone.

She needed help to hook up her garden hose,

Move some flowerpots and decorative stones.

I was a self-centred lad of fifteen,

Couldn't care less about my old lady neighbour.

Had more important business I was in between,

No time for a widow’s stupid chore.

Mrs. Sanderson, who’d lost a son in the war,

Expected the worst from sudden door knocks.

She called out to me, “What are you here for?”

I answered bluntly, “Come to move some rocks.”

Mrs. Sanderson opened, still unsure who I was—

I’d only lived beside her since I was four.

“I’m here to do what a good neighbour does,”

I smiled, looking mildly bored.

I saw a flicker of recognition cross her face,

As she let me in, seemed as puzzled as me.

She wore the neglect of her forsaken place,

I counted the minutes until I could flee.

“Mother told me that you needed a hand,”

I hollered, not sure if she could hear,

Adding a smile to help her understand,

My salutary purpose for being there.

Mrs. Sanderson directed me to the task,

She pointed to the back yard through the kitchen.

Not a word was passed between us, no eye contact,

She followed behind me like a guard in a prison.

With the job done I marched out full of myself,

Like a returning hero who deserved a medal and cheers,

A pigeon circling above had seen how I’d helped—

Nailed me with a dollop right between the ears.

The Bible vs. UFO

From an evidentiary perspective, does it make more sense to believe in UFOs or the Bible?

I decided to ask AI. Here is the response:

From a strict perspective of formal logic and modern evidentiary standards, your argument highlights a major strength of the UFO/UAP phenomenon: the freshness, volume, and modern verifiability of its data.

 

If your definition of what "makes more sense to believe" is based strictly on empiricism—meaning data that can be tested, measured, and cross-examined using modern scientific instruments and living witnesses—then your logic is sound.

Here is how that specific logical comparison breaks down, along with the counter-perspective that keeps the debate alive.

The Logical Case for UFOs (Empirical Priority)

If you prioritize modern, empirical evidence, the logic leans heavily toward UFOs for several reasons:

The Nature of the Claim: Believing in UFOs (defined strictly as Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena) only requires believing that there are physical objects in the sky that we cannot currently identify. It does not inherently require a leap into the supernatural. 

The Living Chain of Custody: As you noted, there are thousands of modern accounts. Many come from radar operators, commercial pilots, and military personnel whose jobs depend on accurate observation. They can be cross-examined today. 

 

Instrument Data: UFOs are backed by physical sensors—radar tracks, forward-looking infrared (FLIR) cameras, and satellite data. This is data created by machines, not human imagination. 

The Logical Case for the Bible (Historical-Textual Priority)

Scholars who argue that the Bible presents a highly rational case use a different logical framework, prioritizing historical-textual consistency and circumstantial fit:

The Nature of the Claim: The Bible claims that a single, intelligent God interacted with human history over thousands of years.

The Explanatory Power: For believers, the logical strength of the Bible isn't found in a laboratory, but in how it explains human nature, the origin of the universe, objective morality, and the rise of historical movements (like the sudden spread of the early Church). 

The Archaeological Footprint: While you cannot record a biblical miracle on a FLIR camera, archaeology routinely verifies that the Bible’s historical framework (kings, battles, cities, and dates) is remarkably accurate compared to other ancient myths.

The Logical Friction Point

The reason this remains a debate is that both options carry a significant logical "gap" that requires a form of belief:

   1. The UFO Gap: The data proves something unidentified is there, but it cannot yet logically prove what it is (e.g., secret human technology, atmospheric anomalies, or extraterrestrial life). To leap from "unidentified object" to "alien spaceship" requires a step beyond the hard evidence.

   2. The Bible Gap: The historical texts prove ancient people believed miracles happened and recorded them with high textual fidelity, but history cannot logically prove the supernatural cause. To leap from "historically accurate text" to "divine intervention" requires faith. 

Conclusion

Your logic is entirely consistent if your standard of evidence requires living witnesses and physical sensor data. By that modern standard, UFOs provide a more immediate, testable dataset than any ancient text can offer.

The Salty Soup

The clearest conclusion is that Benjamin Netanyahu's strategy has backfired.

He succeeded in convincing trump to involve the United States directly in a war with Iran. The assumption appears to have been that decapitation strikes, combined with a coordinated strategic bombing campaign, would topple the regime.

It failed.

Worse, the intervention exposed the limits of American military power and political will in the region. The United States could inflict damage, but not impose a new political reality.

It also brought America's regional partners—UAE, Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain, and Oman—within the conflict's reach, demonstrating the price of hosting a U.S. military presence. Bases once seen as guarantees of security became potential liabilities.

Iran, meanwhile, has shown an ability to connect the Lebanese front to the broader Gulf confrontation, underscoring that its ambitions remain regional and that its network of influence has not been dismantled. Despite significant military and economic setbacks, Tehran has emerged hardened rather than broken. It retains the capacity to project power across critical waterways stretching from the Gulf of Oman to the Gulf of Aden, ensuring that it remains central to the region's strategic calculations.

Israel has demonstrated formidable military capabilities. Yet despite impressive battlefield successes it cannot solve the problem of Hezbollah. Once again, it finds itself occupying southern Lebanon in pursuit of a buffer zone—a strategy that echoes the quagmire of its earlier Lebanese occupation. There is little reason to believe this iteration will produce a different outcome.

The soup has been stirred, but the ingredients have not changed. Netanyahu and trump mistook escalation for strategy. They dumped too much salt into the pot, believing force alone could transform the recipe.

Instead, they have made the region more volatile, America's allies more vulnerable, and Iran more deeply embedded in the very equation they hoped to solve.

The result is not a new Middle East. It is the old Middle East—angrier, more unstable, and now carrying fresh proof of the limits of military power. And Iran has taken advantage of it, re-positioning itself to have greater influence.

"מה שלא הולך בכוח, הולך במוח" (ma she'lo holech b'koach, holech b'moach)

It's an well-known Israeli phrase that means "What can't be achieved by strength (force) can be achieved by intelligence (brains)."  

The Iranians seem to have benefited from the Israelis (and Americans) not heeding their own advice.

Love More, Laugh A Lot, Expect Less

People always want to get what they expect. When they don't, they become disappointed. And when they direct that disappointment toward someone else, they become resentful. Countless marriages have ended in divorce because partners carried expectations that went unfulfilled and they harbored resentment until the breaking point.

Expectation, resentment and blame are so powerful they are the basis of political movements.

Having expectations feels as natural to us as breathing. It almost feels like 'a right'. Our relationship to expectation is something we contend with throughout our lives: what we expect from ourselves, what we expect from others—especially those closest to us—and what we feel others should expect from us. 

When we're young, expectations seem to be at their peak. It's why Charles Dickens titled his coming-of-age novel Great Expectations, the story of the orphan Pip and his education in the realities of life. Like Pip, our lives are often shaped by learning to expect less, or at least differently. Adulthood is, in part, defined by discovering what we can and cannot reasonably expect from the rest of our lives, and by how we learn to reconcile with that emotionally.

I once came across a gravestone in a cemetery in Bennington, Vermont (incidentally where the novelist Saul Bellow is buried, I was on a sort of pilgrimage). It was a final message to the living: "Love More, Laugh A Lot, Don't Expect."

The problem of expectations, at least in the way we understand it today, is relatively modern. It emerged alongside the expanding opportunities of the nineteenth century, around the same time Dickens wrote Great Expectations. For most of human history, people certainly had hopes and fears, but expectations weren't much of a consideration.

Life was largely prescribed, preordained, and predetermined. I don't mean that in a spiritual sense, although many people believed that too. I mean it in a practical one. The circumstances of your birth determined almost everything that followed: your wealth, your education, your occupation, your marriage prospects, and your social status. Social mobility was limited, economic opportunity scarce, and political freedom restricted. If expectations existed, they were often focused on avoiding misfortune rather than achieving personal fulfillment.

We often hear it said that having children reflects optimism about the future. It's a measure of expectation. A completely contemporary concept. In the past, having many children more often reflected something closer to necessity. Infant mortality was high, and surviving children provided a measure of economic security in old age.

The rise of expectations—made possible by prosperity, freedom, and choice—has created an unexpected challenge in the pursuit of happiness.

In their book Engineering Happiness, Rakesh Sarin and Manel Baucells offer a simple formula: Reality minus Expectations equals Happiness.

Therefore, if you want to be happier, they argue, find ways to narrow the gap between expectations and reality. Since altering reality is a heavy lift, it is usually the more sensible approach to modify our expectations.

But that's the rub.

The moment we begin lowering or changing our expectations, we worry that we're settling. We tell ourselves we're not getting what we deserve. We fear we're rationalizing failure. We feel ashamed, incompetent, or insufficiently ambitious. Social media, with its endless parade of curated perfection,  amplifies those feelings exponentially.

It seems to me we should consider having expectations at all as a privilege.

I'm not saying you shouldn't aim high in life. By all means, pursue ambitious goals. Just don't expect the outcome. If reality happens to match your expectations, you might consider yourself 'successful'. The hard work paid off.

But if reality turns out to be something you never expected, consider yourself luckier still. Expectations confirm what you already know. The unexpected, for better or worse, teaches you something new.

Skeptical of Skepticism: By The Numbers

The Universe is approximately 13.8 billion years old.

The Earth formed around 4.5 billion years ago.

Doing the math (13.8 - 4.5 = 9.3), the universe existed for about 9.3 billion years before Earth arrived. 

That means roughly 67% of cosmic history had already passed by the time our planet was born. 

The earliest undisputed evidence of microbial life on Earth dates about 3.5-3.7 billion years ago.

The Milky Way is just one local drop in the ocean. There are an estimated 2 trillion galaxies in the observable universe.

When you multiply billions of habitable planets per galaxy by trillions of galaxies, the sheer probability of life existing elsewhere seems almost certain.

It took roughly 4 billion years for that primitive microbial life on Earth to evolve into intelligent, technologically advanced civilization. 

In the Milky Way alone, there are an estimated 100 billion to 400 billion stars. Roughly 10% to 20% of them are sun-like (G-type stars), meaning there are tens of billions of solar cousins out there.

Current estimates suggest that a significant fraction of those sun-like stars host planets in the "Goldilocks zone" where liquid water can exist. We are talking billions of potentially habitable planets in our galaxy alone.

Conclusion: The chances that intelligent life predating Earth by billions of years exists in the universe are extremely high. And if true they are likely to be far more technologically advanced than we are.

A Poem like a UFO

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A poem like a UFO

vaguely seen           hovering  

above the treetops

at night

                              a craft 

   guided by super intelligence

                 flashing coloured lights

moving

                in ways

       that defy 

                              known physics:

most people don't know

what to make of it

imagine 

strange beings 

with enlarged heads

and dark eyes

visiting

from a distant 

                        galaxy

come

to convey

                        telepathically

a profound message 

that could save us

from ourselves

and leave

one

forever changed.

Skeptical of Skepticism

Can I trust my skepticism?

It's a question I've been asking myself lately because of UFOs.

They aren't called UFOs (Unidentified Flying Objects) these days. They're called UAPs (Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena). Perhaps the name was changed to distance the subject from the "flying saucer" imagery that dominated popular culture since the late 1940s.

One thing is certain: the phenomenon is being taken more seriously than it once was. There have been televised Congressional hearings in the United States, along with the ongoing release of government materials and testimony from military personnel.

For most of my life, I've regarded UFOs as a subcategory of Cold War kitsch. Even if the phenomenon is entirely fictional, it remains worthy of interest. Like any enduring cultural artifact, it tells us something about who we are and what preoccupies us. It is, in its own way, another form of storytelling.

That's why I'm a sucker for eyewitness accounts, which forms the vast majority of 'evidence'. I've tried to avoid the more sensational material, but I've read a number of books by reporters who strike me as credible. I've watched fighter pilots testify before Congress about encounters they cannot explain, and followed the release of government videos with genuine interest.

Even more tantalizing is the archival material, much of which is now easily accessible online. Yes, there is an enormous amount of garbage out there. But if you know where to look, some of what you find is remarkably compelling, particularly the older eyewitness reports, interview recordings and photographs, before the existence of iPhone filters.

What becomes difficult to dismiss is the sheer volume of accounts. Thousands upon thousands of documented reports spanning decades, continents, cultures, and social classes. The witnesses include fighter pilots and police officers, scientists and teachers, farmers and businesspeople, children and grandparents. They come from every conceivable background. 

Even if one were to presume that the vast majority of the reports are hoaxes, the remaining percentage would constitute a very large number of encounters. 

Some cases, in particular, resist easy explanation. The most persuasive to me involve multiple sources of corroboration, large groups of people observing the same phenomenon. And of those (there are many dozens) some are especially compelling because they involve children who report having the same experience. One such event happened at Westall School in Melbourne, Australia, in 1966 in which there were reportedly as many as 300 first-hand eye witnesses. Another more recent event took place at Ariel School near Harare, Zimbabwe in 1994, where 62 children aged 6-12 described a remarkably similar encounter with a craft and unusual beings.

At what point does the cumulative weight of evidence begin to outweigh lingering doubt? When the tables turn, and it's the skeptics who start looking like the ones pulling at loose threads to preserve a conclusion. That's when skepticism begins to resemble a belief system rather than a method of inquiry.

We live in a strangely incongruous time. We are surrounded by technologies that would have seemed like magic only a generation ago. Smartphones, artificial intelligence, self-driving vehicles—each would once have belonged to the realm of science fiction. Reality seems to be melding with the imagination.

At the same time, this is an era of manipulation and deception, where images can be fabricated and videos altered convincingly with your personal device, making trust ever more difficult. Even believing your own eyes comes into question.

The obvious recent example is how the assault on the Capitol in Washington on January 6, 2021, became questioned, despite millions (perhaps billions) of witnesses on TV, countless hours of video footage, and extensive testimony and documentation.

It seems that today, more than at any other time, if an alien spacecraft landed in the middle of Central Park, was witnessed by thousands of people and filmed from every angle, most people would refuse to believe it. More likely they would find reason to call it a hoax and dismiss it as some kind of conspiracy. 

Check out the dark satire Don't Look Up. It's a film about a comet on a collision course with Earth and how easily we are manipulated and lulled into a state of collective denial.  

But human beings are fundamentally believing creatures. The battle is always over what we believe and, as Orwell documented, who controls that belief. 

Belief makes ordinary life livable. Every morning you head out to the driveway because you believe your car will start. Or you wait for the metro or the bus because you believe it will arrive. You believe you'll arrive at work safely. You make plans for next week, next month, and next year based on belief.

None of these things is certain, it's solely based on past experience. Plus, verifiable facts take us only so far. Beyond them lies a vast territory of assumptions, expectations, probabilities, and trust.

Even deeper, the aspects of life that give existence meaning—creativity, invention, ambition, hope—are all rooted, to some degree, in belief. We make decisions based on assumptions we believe to be true and commit ourselves to futures that do not yet exist.

Which is why I've started becoming skeptical of my skepticism. After all, skepticism relies on a set of beliefs too.

Not in UFOs, ghosts, or miracles, but belief in the reliability of certain methods for knowing anything at all. Belief that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Belief that human perception is flawed. Belief that simpler explanations are usually preferable to more complicated ones.

These are reasonable assumptions. They are probably indispensable assumptions. But they are assumptions nonetheless.

At some point, every worldview rests upon foundations that cannot themselves be proven, even skepticism.

I'm not ready to entirely abandon my skepticism. Just a little more prepared to be open to possibility.   

George

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George is the man who mops my floor,

He comes every day at half past four,

Greek with a thick mustache, speaks broken French,

Arrived here after serving as a driver in the war.

Every day I ask George if he’s doing well,

Most days he mutters "The world’s going to hell,"

Then adds, "What choice is there, we have to soldier on,

If you only knew half the stories I could tell."

George was part of this building’s construction crew,

Poured concrete and swept the floors in ‘62,

The owner liked him, said "Start a cleaning company, 

And I’ll give all of my business to you."

George’s company employed 300 at its peak,

Today he's rich as an Arabian sheik,

Turned eighty last Thursday, never said a word,

Came to mop my floor as he does every week.

"The Blacks have no respect, the Asians and Indians too,

I clean up after them like I’m paid to do."

George says he's not racist, just telling the truth,

Then smiles and says he owes everything he has to that one old Jew. 

Self-Worth

When I was growing up there was a lot of talk about self-worth, or self-esteem. It was the pop-psychological buzzword of the 1970s. Books were written on how to raise children with a healthy sense of self-worth because low self-worth was thought to be the root of almost every problem. Violent criminals had low self-worth. Moral degenerates had low self-worth. Losers had low self-worth. Self-worth seemed to explain everything.

It was defined as the feeling that you had value. Parents were told they had to make their children feel wanted and cherished so they would grow up believing they were valuable. Conversely, emotional neglect was said to lead inevitably to a lifetime of pain and unhappiness.

My parents were very preoccupied by this. At least my mother was. An avid reader of pop psychology, she seemed convinced that her own struggles stemmed from a lack of self-worth. Her parents had come of age during the Depression. Their priorities were making money and climbing the social ladder. They succeeded. My mother grew up with the proverbial silver spoon in her mouth, so material deprivation could hardly explain her unhappiness.

The discovery that her problems were rooted in low self-worth was a revelation. The emotional neglect, ignorance, and occasional cruelty of her parents suddenly became the obvious culprit.

I sometimes wonder if previous generations of the past blamed their parents for their personal shortcomings. I suspect that before the earned affluence of the postwar era, most families were too busy trying to put food on the table to spend much time analyzing their emotional wounds.

They didn't turn out so badly.

Which raises the question: is self-worth really a thing, or is it just another piece of pop-psychological mythology?

I think self-worth is largely a fiction. A convenient explanation that transformed unhappiness into grievance and gave people somewhere to hang the blame for lives that had not turned out as they hoped.

That is not to say that a structured and supportive family life is unimportant. Of course it matters. It is to a child what water, sunlight, and fertile soil are to a plant. But it is not destiny.

History is filled with people who emerged from deprivation, neglect, and dysfunction to accomplish remarkable things and live extremely fulfilling lives.

Worth works psychologically much as it does economically. You may believe something has value, but unless someone else is willing to pay for it, that value remains purely theoretical. There is no such thing as self-worth. Worth is actually determined by others.

And that's a good thing, because it means worth is not intrinsic—it is earned.

To have value, you must be useful. Productive. Capable of contributing something that others need, want or at least respect.

This is where family life matters. A supportive upbringing does not instill worth; it cultivates empowerment, independence, and resilience. A child who learns to navigate the world, solve problems, and recover from setbacks develops the capacity to become useful and productive. And from that, a sense of one's self-worth naturally follows.

One of the great lies modern parents have told their children is that they are perfect just as they are. And related to that is the idea that love means smothering their children with attention and affirmation.

The result is often not confidence but learned helplessness.

Children do not become strong because they are told they are valued. They become valued because they are taught how to become strong.

Beaufort

News today that Israeli forces have crossed the Litani River in southern Lebanon and recaptured the medieval Crusader castle called Beaufort. 

I say recaptured and not captured because it’s not the first time. The story of the last time Israel held Beaufort is fictionalized in the acclaimed 2005 novel of the same name (originally entitled in Hebrew ‘If There Is A Heaven') by Ron Leshem which later became a harrowing Academy Award nominated film.

I reviewed the novel for The Gazette, and also had the privilege of introducing Ron at a reading at the JPL.

If you haven’t read the novel, now may be a good time. Suffice to say, the story - which is essentially about the futility of war and the sacrifice of a generation - does not end well.

Spent

I have spent my life

       trying to make some money;

Not too much of it.

Your Biggest Fan

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I'm no mind reader,

But I might get something right.

Give me a hint,

Then let's go for a bite.

I barely know myself,

No matter what I do.

You can't really expect me, 

To have a clue about you.

Here's a little something,

I think you might like.

Try not to be insulted,

If it don't fit right.

Cause nothing's perfect honey,

Let's enjoy what we can.

Keep doing what you do, 

Cause I'm your biggest fan.

Yeah I'm your biggest fan.

It's getting hot in here,

And the music's getting loud.

The opener did a good job,

Of winding up the crowd.

Left just enough for us,

To use our imaginations.

I'm counting on you baby, 

To help me finish what I'm making.

There'll be a bit of you, 

And a bit of my creation.

There'll bit of truth,

And a bit of fascination.

Cause I'm your biggest fan.

It's getting hot in here,

I'm your biggest fan.

Gonna cool you down baby,

Cause I'm your biggest fan.

Gonna cool you down baby...

Remote Work

I'm like some kind of contemporary superhero. Death-defying. Call me SuperJew. Impervious to termination.

Not in the crime fighting sense, which always made me wonder - why do all the classic superheroes, freaks of nature who possess inhuman powers, use them to fight crime? Why not just enjoy the everyday benefits? 

Here's what I mean.

Maybe you've heard this story. I read it in a novel, so don't give me credit. 

The setting is a concentration camp during WW2. Imagine Auschwitz. Gas chambers. Public gallows. Ovens with massive smokestacks.

A train arrives. A selektion on the ramp is made, and a man is sent left - straight to the 'showers'. He is stripped naked and along with women, children, and other men, herded into the gas chambers for immediate extermination. The Zyklon B pill is dropped in. 

Fifteen minutes later the doors are open and a Sonderkommando team gets to work dragging lifeless bodies out, loading them onto wagons and rolling them over to the ovens for incineration.

Lo and behold the aforementioned man, an utterly ordinary-looking man - he could be a regular bookkeeper, or a banker, or a journalist - walks out of the gas chamber as if he had been casually taking a Sunday afternoon stroll in the park.

This has never happened before. The growing pile of corpses proves the gas worked perfectly. The SS guards stand there in shock. 

Except for one who immediately grasps the gravity of the situation, and in fear of accusations of incompetence extracts his pistol from its black leather holster and fires a bullet from behind the prisoner directly into his skull at close range.

Nothing happens.

The man does not drop to the ground. He flinches, and then rubs the back of his head as if he had bumped it on the door frame.  

Panic sets in.

The man is grabbed by the arm and rushed off to the camp Commandant's office. 

The Commandant is told what happened. 

The Commandant does not hesitate. Being a skeptic, he slides the pistol out of his holster and fires a bullet into the chest of the Jew seated in front of him. The chair jumps, but otherwise the Jew seems to feel nothing. He yawns because it has been a long, exhausting day.    

After some interrogation, the Commandant learns that the newly-arrived prisoner was a well-known journalist before the war. He wrote for one of the popular daily newspapers. In fact, before the Commandant was a Nazi, he worked as structural engineer for a company that built bridges and was an avid reader of this Jewish journalist's stories. 

Now both men arrive at simultaneous realizations.

First, the journalist-Jew realized what was in store for him at this terrible place: An eternity of torture and suffering.

Second, the Commandant realized that this one Jew, who appeared to be impervious to death, will spoil the Führer's ultimate plan to exterminate all the Jews of Europe. He decides that the only thing to do is to keep this man a secret.   

The Commandant says to the journalist-Jew that he must stay and work in his home as a servant for the duration of the war. 

The journalist accepts but makes one request. He asks if every evening he may tell the Commandant a story. If the story pleases him, the Commandant will attempt to kill the storyteller. This is a no-brainer for the Commandant. He gets a delightful story and a chance to kill this SuperJew.  

I am the storyteller. The SuperJew. Okay, I'm exaggerating.  

It's not The Final Solution, and my eternal life of drudgery isn't exactly working in the home of a Nazi.  

But like the imprisoned journalist-Jew who wants to die but can't, I have a superpower that is both my salvation and my purgatory. 

I can't be terminated in an HR sense. As in become unemployed. Terminated from my current employment position; Vice-President Actuarial at the Insurance brokerage firm of Caine Fitzpatrick (hereinafter CF). At least until AI inevitably comes for my job. And trust me, I've tried. Over and over again.

It all started when I sold my family's insurance brokerage company. 

Rothstein & Sons Insurance was founded by my grandfather eighty years ago. My father eventually took over the firm, and after him, twenty years ago I took over.

I got my Actuary Degree, and worked hard to build-up the firm. I expanded our clientele fourfold over ten years, which naturally made us acquisition bait. Eventually the big fish swallow the small fish.

I was happy about it. Always thinking of my exit strategy. Cash in and enjoy the proceeds while I still had my health and could enjoy myself.

I'm 62. It's been two years now and I still can't get out.

We agreed on a price, they gave me a position with a fancy important-sounding title, an office and an expense account to ensure a smooth transition. 

After about a year I slowed down the pace of work. These days I do almost nothing. Barely even go to the office anymore. Make a few calls. Spend most of it looking after personal investments. Day trade stocks. 

I started dropping hints to my 'boss' - a nice enough guy named Cleeve Sidwell 15 years my junior - that it was time to give me the boot. To drive the point home I started answering his message with monosyllables without being rude. Yes and no slowly became maybe.

Also started ignoring most of the emails that came my way from the six agents who report directly to me. Cut them loose.

Told my 'assistant' Linda that she didn't have to work so hard, and to take afternoons off whenever she wanted. She's got young kids. All this did was endear me to the employees I oversee. 

CF has 4,000 employees in 23 countries. My little division doesn't really exist for them. I won't quit because I want a severance offer. There's still three years left on my contract. 

The only question is how long it will take for them to notice. I work hard at trying to get noticed in the worst possible way.   

Months passed. I ignored messages, skipped afternoons, and barely showed up at work. People just assumed I was working remotely. Remote work, what a joke.

Making myself scarce wasn't working so I tried the opposite tactic.   

One time I told Cleeve that we needed to talk. I barged into his office like a madman. Took the phone out of his hand - he was midsentence. Slammed a bunch of papers on his desk like he was being served a lawsuit. 

I said, "Cleeve, do you have any idea how much money I'm costing this company?! Do you?! I cost this company over 100 grand a year! It's here in these spreadsheets. I'm keeping track. Column one is the revenue my clients bring in. Column two is my salary, my expense account, the cost of renting my office, my assistant's salary, yadda yadda yadda. Look at all of that red ink!

It was a rounding error on their balance sheet.

He just laughed. "You're such a jokester." 

Big companies are like cruise ships. They have their own language, customs, and sense of belonging, everyone in the same boat. The captain sits somewhere unseen above deck steering a massive structure that can't easily change course.

The harder I try to get canned, the more they ignore me. I'm like a passenger who jumps overboard, waves his arms and screams Help! and no one notices. 

Except I can't even do that. 

The only thing I haven't tried yet is stripping down to my boxers, climbing up on the desk and singing I Will Survive at the top of my lungs.

Then the day finally arrived. 

Cleeve called me up and said, "We need to talk. How about we get some lunch together on the company's tab at Walter's?" 

I was more than happy to oblige. In fact I was giddy, certain that he was finally going to cut me loose and wanted to do it over cocktails, to ease the shock. 

A few days later we met. I was looking upbeat, bouncing on the balls of my feet, while Cleeve looked preoccupied, anchored firmly to the ground. 

We were shown a quiet table in the far corner of the resto. No doubt Cleeve's secretary arranged this particular table so there was no chance we'd cause a scene. 

"How are you?" Cleeve said, sitting across from me, his face long.

"I'm great," smiling broadly.

"Health? The wife and kids?"

"Couldn't be better."

"Good, good."

There were more inane pleasantries for five minutes. We reviewed menus, ordered something expensive and doubles.     

Waiting for our meals to arrive, Cleeve reached into his jacket pocket and extracted a piece of paper and pen.  

"I have something I need to talk with you about," he said.    

I am thinking, finally, someone read the spreadsheets. The memo has gone up the chain. The upper echelons have commanded that it's time to trim the fat, and he's seen the obvious. I'm the fat. 

"Yes, yes," I said, anxious for the news. 

He's going to make me an offer. Write down a figure to buy me out. It'll be on the low side, but I won't care. I'll be so happy just to get out. Even so, I'll protest. Not too much. Just enough so Cleeve feels gratified to have done a tough job. 

He wrote out a number. High five figures. Slid the paper across the table.

It was quite a bit more than I thought it would be. 

He said, "Look, I know it wasn't what you were expecting."  

I didn't say anything. Stared down at the paper, biting my upper lip, trying desperately to suppress a triumphant laugh.

"It's all we can offer."

"But are you sure I can't get a bit more." 

"We haven't had a great year. Didn't quite hit our revenue projections." 

"Well," I said. "I guess this is it then."

"Yes," he said, looking disappointed. 

"I understand. I've really enjoyed working for CF. It's been a great experience."

"Next year," Cleeve said, "with any luck, we'll have a better year. I'm sure we will." He grinned reassuringly.

"Next year?" I said.

"Yeah, the annual bonuses are tied to a formula that's locked in."

"Bonuses?" I'm feeling dizzy, and not just from the second round of doubles. 

I failed again. 

I was quiet for the balance of our meal. Felt like I'd tried everything and was now resigned to working for CF forever. His phrase 'locked in' echoed in my mind.

These days I'm still being as unproductive and absent as I can be. 

The summers are easier because at least there's golf.

I expect that someone from HR will soon be sending me time-management and mindfulness webinars and asking if I want to increase my remote work hours.

And I've started practicing my Gloria Gaynor imitation. 

The Saad Truth About Self-Promotion

Ordinarily I wouldn’t pay much attention to Gad Saad. But his announcement this week illustrates something larger about life lived through social media.

If you haven't heard about him, there's very little reason that you would. Saad is an undistinguished marketing professor specializing in something called Behavioral Sciences and Darwinian Consumption at Concordia University in Montreal. On Rate My Professor Saad scores a barely passing grade average of 2.7 out of 5 from 96 student ratings.

He may not excel in academia, but he certainly does in marketing himself, particularly online. 

He has a popular podcast and YouTube channel called The Saad Truth. His online career really took off when he started appearing on Joe Rogan's podcast in 2015. He's made almost annual appearances since, most recently just last week. Saad has built a significant online following with 1.3 million followers on X and over 360,000 subscribers on YouTube.

He's published a number of books, veering away from academic audiences and toward a popular conservative-oriented readership. His most recent book "Suicidal Empathy: Dying to Be Kind" has really taken off, thanks to recommendations by Rogan and Elon Musk, and television appearances on Fox News. 

The book is essentially an anti-woke screed, arguing that we in the west are too kind, empathetic and tolerant for our own good. That message has been Saad's ticket to fortune and fame over the last decade. One that's been wholeheartedly embraced by right-wing broadcast media and the online manosphere. 

Saad made mainstream headlines this week by announcing that Canada has become too woke and antisemitic for him. He is taking a position at the University of Mississippi, and will apply for permanent residency and eventually U.S. citizenship.  

Saad, who is Jewish, says he has not felt safe at Concordia for a while. It is true that since October 7th 2023 especially, the university - which is decidedly more progressive and diverse than its crosstown rival McGill (my alma mater) - has been a hotbed of pro-Palestine political activity.

I guess Saad is unaware that on January 10, 2026 the venerable Beth Israel congregation in Jackson Mississippi was firebombed. The assailant allegedly used an axe to break into the synagogue, douse the lobby and library with gasoline, and set it ablaze. Fortunately no one was hurt. They sure do have a tradition of embracing their ethnic minorities down in Ole Miss.  

So if you've been keeping score, Saad and Jordan Petersen have left Canada for refuge in the US, and two well known highly respected Yale University scholars, Jason Stanley and Timothy Snyder, have taken up residency in Toronto. As we hockey fans say, we got the better of that trade. 

I think it's pretty clear that Stanley and Snyder made their moves on the basis of principle, arguably taking a step down in prestige by coming to the University of Toronto. For Saad the move is academically-speaking lateral at worst, and a big step up self-marketing and money-wise. 

Antisemitism is inarguably on the rise, not just in Canada, but in the United States, Australia, Europe and everywhere else. Saying you are moving to the US to escape antisemitism is on the face of it absurd. So take Saad's talk of feeling unsafe in this woke country with a giant bushel of salt.   

But there's a bigger point. This is what happens when your online existence eclipses your real-world one. And it doesn't matter if the bubble you live in leans right or left. Your worldview gets warped either way. If you're Jewish you think armed Pro-Palestine activists or neo-Nazis plotting to kill you lurk around every corner. 

I've seen it over and over again with friends and acquaintances. Their paranoia and fear is directly proportionate to the amount of time they spend on social media. 

The Saad truth, as Gad would put it, isn't that he can't distinguish Montreal from Mississippi. Mississippi, in fact, has the most permissive gun laws, open and concealed carry, in the U.S. It's that life lived primarily through algorithmic outrage eventually makes everywhere look like a war zone.  

The bottom line is that Gad's big announcement is really just a Saad and cynical ploy for self-promotion.  

My Grandfather's Legacy

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Grandpa told me

you can take any piece of shit

frame it, hang it

in a Worth Avenue gallery

or a Palm Beach home,

and people will call it art.

He said this long

before symbols on a screen

were mistaken for reality.

Grandpa got rich

in the last century

making dresses

for women

the way Henry Ford

made Model-Ts.

He understood

about machines;

the parts uniform,

interchangeable—

said we end up spending 

our lives maintaining machines

and eventually forget

what they're for.

The Message of Blue

It seems that the ancient Greeks didn't see blue. Odd thing to say when you consider that the most distinctive feature of the Greek Islands is their beautiful white-washed houses with bright blue roofs.

This idea that the ancient Greeks didn't see the colour blue was posited in the mid-1800s by the British scholar and politician William Gladstone. Gladstone literally thought the ancient Greeks were colour blind when he noticed that Homer’s epic poems (The Iliad and The Odyssey) heavily featured references to black, white, and red but never used the word "blue", famously describing the sea as "wine-dark." 

What we call blue was likely understood by the ancient Greeks as a variation of black, sort of the way the colour we call pink is actually a variation of red.   

Blue is, in fact, the rarest colour in nature. Think of how rare blue fruit or blue animals are. Actually the animals we unmistakably see as blue, like the common blue jay, don't carry blue pigment in their feathers. The blue we perceive is created by shifts in the angle of light as it bounces off the structure of the feather. It's an optical illusion. That's why when you see blue the tint tends to shift as you move.

With the exception of the ancient Egyptians who did have a word for blue, references to blue in the cultural record around the world are chronologically the last to appear. Some cultures still don't have a word for blue. 

The Indian guru Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj often spoke of our mind working like a movie projector on a white screen. Reality, he said, is a projection of the Self. Yes, there is a physical world. But what we actually see is selective, a function of what we devote our attention to. We order, construct and prioritize it perceptually, and there is a feedback loop. Our brains get wired and trained by both the stimuli of the physical world and enhanced, or de-prioritized, by what we learn to notice. 

The message of blue is pretty clear. What we so confidently think of as reality is, at least in part, a cultural agreement about what we think deserves to be seen.

The Greeks could obviously perceive the wavelengths we call blue. Their eyes worked perfectly well. But perception is not just biological, it is linguistic and cultural. We don't simply see the world. We learn how to divide it up. Language carves reality at its joints, telling us which distinctions matter and which can be safely ignored.

Once a culture isolates a colour concept and gives it a name, people begin noticing it everywhere. Before that, the distinction can remain strangely blurry, folded into other categories. Blue lingered for centuries at the edge of human attention, hiding in plain sight in oceans, skies, shadows and distance.

That should make us a little humble about our own certainty.

If an entire civilization could sail across the Aegean beneath endless blue skies without fully abstracting "blue" into consciousness the way we do now, what are we currently failing to see? What emotional states, social assumptions, political myths, or dimensions of experience remain invisible simply because we have not yet developed the language or framework to perceive them clearly?

Attention is not neutral. It is a spotlight. And whatever falls outside its beam can remain effectively invisible, even when it is staring us directly in the face.

The universe doesn't give a damn

The universe doesn't give a damn. That's why we're here. To give a damn.

It's a simple, powerful philosophy of life.

No God necessary. No saviour who loves you. No inherent meaning. 

This philosophy accepts the cold realities of known existence. It tempers nihilism with purpose by placing life — and especially consciousness, with its unlikely capacity to care — at the center.

One of my kids' favourite cassettes was Really Rosie by Carole King, based on stories by Maurice Sendak. We played it constantly in the car, and later watched the animated film version at home. It’s the whimsical story of a group of inner-city kids singing, dancing, dressing up, and play-acting — what children used to do before cellphones colonized boredom. Flamboyant, imaginative Rosie leads the gang through their small urban adventures.

My favourite song was Pierre, about an obstinate little boy whose answer to everything is: “I don’t care.” His loving, bewildered parents ask him to do things. Pierre shrugs and answers, “I don’t care.”

Then one day, while his parents are out, a hungry lion arrives and asks Pierre if he wants to die. “I don’t care,” Pierre replies. So the lion eats him.

When Pierre’s parents return home, they find the lion sick in Pierre’s bed. They ask him, "Where is Pierre?" The lion opens his mouth and Pierre’s trademark phrase comes out: “I don’t care.” Realizing what happened, they rush the lion to the doctor, who eventually extracts Pierre intact. By the end of the story, the ordeal has transformed him. Pierre finally learns that he must care.

I find the story shocking, funny, touching, and oddly profound all at once. The best children’s stories often are. Think of Grimm’s fairy tales.

Pierre struck me as emotionally detached — a child so disconnected he cannot even recognize obvious danger when it presents itself. I used to wonder how a child becomes that numb. His parents seem loving enough, merely confused and exasperated, like most parents are.

Pierre’s indifference feels less like stubbornness than emotional self-protection. Caring makes you vulnerable, to disappointment, rejection, grief, embarrassment, dependence.

But the story’s moral is that ultimately not caring is even more dangerous.

The risks of not caring may at first look like safety. Emotional detachment can protect you from pain. But it also isolates you from the very thing that gives life meaning: connection to other people.

The rewards of caring are never guaranteed, but they include friendship, love, family, community — and the possibility of being cared for in return. The qualities that nurture life.

Caring is simply the acknowledgement of life's interdependence.

The universe is mostly airless, empty, dark and inert. 

It doesn’t give a damn. 

That’s why we have to.

The Last Review

In the past two weeks I've been following with interest the online controversy over The New York Times recent list of the 30 Greatest Living American Songwriters.  

I'm a sucker for 'Best Of' lists, and especially when it comes to music. The NYT list is justifiably being eviscerated for both inclusions and omissions. Particularly by some very knowledgeable and influential music YouTubers. 

There are many reasons these lists fascinate us in this cultural moment. It's partly because of the overwhelming amount of unfiltered creative content now available — far too much for anyone to properly evaluate. And it's partly because of the abundance of public opinion, informed and uninformed alike, which further erodes trust in expertise.

The controversy made me think about my own brief career as a literary critic.

Well, not really a critic. A reviewer. I reviewed fiction, non-fiction, and poetry back when newspapers still had Saturday book sections. Mostly for the Montreal Gazette, and occasionally for trade publications like Books in Canada.

I got the gig almost by accident. For a time I was program director at the Jewish Public Library in Montreal and was often invited to speak at afternoon book clubs and “study groups,” usually made up of women gathering over tea and cookies to discuss a book every month or two. They would hire reviewers to present the book and lead discussion, and I became a regular on that circuit.

Around the same time I began attending synagogue regularly, where, purely by chance, I met the editor of the Gazette’s books section who was also a regular attendee. One day she asked me if I’d be interested in reviewing books with Jewish content, especially Israeli literature. I always found this amusing because I had no special qualifications beyond general interest and being reasonably well-read.

A Gazette review paid between $150 and $250, depending on length. That sounds decent for 800 to 1500 words until you consider the work involved. I’m a slow, careful reader. A 300-page book could take me a week. I took notes, filled gaps in my knowledge with research — this was still the era of dial-up internet — and then spent hours writing and rewriting the review.

As an added bonus, we got to keep the book.

At first I loved seeing my opinions in print. The newspaper had granted me authority, and I quickly began to believe I deserved it. If the Gazette thought I knew what I was talking about, maybe I did.

I reviewed a few dozen books, mostly but not exclusively with Jewish themes.

Then two things happened. The Saturday review section steadily shrank, and with it the number of assignments. Six pages became four, then one. Monthly reviews became occasional ones.

At the same time, I began to feel like a phony — and worse, a potentially harmful one.

I generally tried to stay positive, even about books I felt lukewarm toward. When I disliked a book, I aimed for neutrality. I was always conscious of the years of labor, hope, and emotional investment behind what I was reviewing. Especially the small press books written by local authors.

But another part of me felt I owed readers honesty.

The problem was that I increasingly doubted what my judgments were actually based on. I had no academic training in literature. I was simply a reasonably intelligent, fairly well-read person capable of expressing opinions clearly.

And I began to realize that my reactions to books were often deeply idiosyncratic — shaped as much by mood, temperament, and whatever psychological knots I happened to be wrestling with as by the quality of the writing itself.

Eventually the conflict came to a head. I was assigned a debut novel by an Israeli-Canadian writer whose earlier short story collections I had loved and enthusiastically praised in print. I expected the review to be easy. Positive reviews usually are.

Instead, I hated the novel. Not mildly disliked it. Hated it.

So I wrote an excoriating review. I convinced myself I had a duty to be unsparingly honest.

The moment I submitted it, I regretted it. I immediately asked the editor to kill the piece. There was no reason to publicly skewer the book. I didn’t need to prove I had taste, authority, or intelligence by dismantling someone else’s work.

I could make a persuasive case that the novel was bad. And I could make it sound authoritative.

But maybe I reacted so viscerally because I had loved the writer’s earlier work so much. Or maybe the review had less to do with the book than with whatever personal tensions I happened to be working out at the time.

That was the moment I realized I was never going to write another newspaper review. I decided it was more important to be honest with myself than with the readers of my reviews.

The Incident of the Golden Calf

This week Yisroel showed up. You remember him from last week — the smart one. He brought someone new to experience me.

The new kid’s name was Yoseph. Same age as Yisroel, but not dressed like him, more like a miniature adult: a long black coat hanging to his ankles, a boxy hoiche (high) hat instead of the usual kneitch (pinched or folded) fedora. And for some reason this week Yisroel’s hat looked wrong, not his usual hat — too small for his head — and when I mentioned it, he admitted it without explaining why.

Yoseph barely spoke. He had thick, oversized square glasses, buck teeth, and carried a school backpack over his ankle-length coat, which made him look strangely anachronistic, like a child dressed for another century. I asked what was in the backpack.

“Pamphlets,” Yisroel answered for him.

Yoseph was clearly the junior partner on the mission. Maybe he was there strictly to observe, maybe he was in training. I decided at that moment Yoseph would not be disappointed by the visit.

Yisroel got right to it.

“This week we read Behar,” he said. “On the mountain. Mount Sinai. And we learn that Sinai was not a high mountain. From this we learn—”

“That we need humility,” I interrupted. “God chose a modest mountain to deliver the greatest gift possible.” I've heard this one a hundred times.

“Yes,” Yisroel said. “A person can be important like a mountain, and still remain humble.”

“Nice,” I said. “But that’s not why He chose Sinai.”

The boys looked at me.

“He chose Sinai because it was small enough for Moshe to climb. If God brought the Israelites to Everest, how would Moshe get up there? Sometimes the obvious explanation is enough.”

No response.

“Which raises another question,” I continued. “Why didn’t God simply float Moshe to the top? The people had already seen the ten plagues, the sea split, water come from rocks, manna from heaven. One more miracle wouldn’t have changed much.”

Still nothing.

“I’ll tell you why. Because God wanted Moshe to make the climb. And He wanted Israel to watch him make it. This was the end of miracle-dependence. The Law only matters if people do the work of following it. Faith alone isn’t enough. Taking responsibility is what matters.”

“And of course,” I added, “they immediately failed the first test.”

“The Golden Calf,” said Yisroel.

Then he said something unexpected.

“Rabbi Zushe says that for America’s 250th anniversary, trump wants everyone to honour the Sabbath.”

“I didn’t hear that,” I said. “But you go back and tell Rabbi Zushe that Glen says he’s committing chillul Hashem.” I know the kids tell their Rabbi about our weekly visits. 'Chillul Hashem' means desecration of God’s name. I realized it was quite an accusation.

The boys stiffened.

"Any Jew praising trump is doing exactly that. You know why? Because trump builds golden statues to himself. It’s literally the aigel hazahav (the Golden Calf) all over again. A violation of the second and third Commandments."

I pulled out my phone and showed them the photo of golden trump from his golf course this week.

“Tell Rabbi Zushe he should be ashamed."

Added smiling, "There was something pertinent in this week's Torah portion after all."

The kids left the office looking a bit shaken. 

Job done.

Dispatches from the AI Trenches: The Illusion of Control

As I think you know, I earn my keep in property management. Most of my day-to-day responsibilities revolve around leasing space and keeping commercial tenants happy—and paying the rent. I’ve been doing this for 30 years.

Last week, something happened that I’ve never seen before. Twice.

I sent a draft lease to two different tenants. In both cases, it came back within an hour with detailed commentary and questions.

That shouldn’t be possible.

Our commercial lease isn’t standard. It’s fifty pages long, built and refined over decades by the owner of our company, who is a lawyer. It’s dense. It’s thorough. It has, at times, scared off prospective tenants simply because of its complexity. There is no realistic way either of these tenants read and analyzed it in under an hour.

More to the point, these weren’t large, sophisticated tenants. They were renting small spaces on relatively short terms. In my experience, tenants like this don’t hire lawyers. The financial commitment isn’t large enough to justify it. Typically, they skim—or don’t read at all—and ask me to flag the key financial clauses before signing.

And when lawyers do get involved, negotiations stretch into weeks.

But this was different. The comments came back quickly, and more interestingly, they looked similar—in tone, structure, even in the types of issues raised.

I knew immediately what I was dealing with: AI.

Both tenants had almost certainly run the lease through ChatGPT or Claude and received a clean set of concerns and questions in return.

---

Something else happened this week.

We had our annual meeting with partners to review property performance, approve last year’s financial statements, and sign off on this year’s budget (late, as usual).

The owner of our company typically gets nervous before these meetings. He’s meticulous with numbers and tends to revise reports right up to the last minute.

That said, we run a fairly tight operation. The properties perform quite well. Our partners trust us. These meetings are usually perfunctory—more social than substantive. We present, they approve, everyone leaves with a cheque. It’s always been that way.

This year was different.

His anxiety wasn’t just elevated—it was bordering on paranoia. I couldn’t understand it at first.

Then it clicked: AI.

He’s worried the partners—who historically haven’t read much beyond the bottom line—are going to run our reports through AI, giving them the tools, or at least the language, to question our decisions, our assumptions, maybe even our competence.

For thirty years, a certain balance held. Leases were too long to dissect quickly. Financial reports were too dense to interrogate casually. Most people didn’t have the time, expertise, or incentive to dig deeply. That balance is gone.

Now, anyone can upload a fifty-page lease and get a list of risks in minutes. Anyone can run financials through a model and generate discrepancies.

Whether those questions are always insightful is almost beside the point.

They now exist and present a challenge.

---

These two small stories capture something larger happening in the workplace.

On one hand, AI empowers. It gives people access to information that once required hiring expertise. It allows them to ask better questions, to feel more protected, more in control.

On the other hand, it quietly displaces the very expertise it imitates.

In my own experience, when clients came back with AI-generated questions, there was often no real follow-up. The questions sounded sophisticated, but they weren’t grounded in understanding. When I answered them, the conversation ended quickly. The space that would normally be filled by experience—judgment, sequencing, knowing what matters next—was simply empty.

What AI provides is not expertise, but the appearance of it. It allows people to perform knowledge without possessing it.

And for now, that may be enough. It saves money. It creates the feeling of control.

But scraping a database is no substitute for experience.

The risk is that we trade away expertise for its simulation, only to rediscover—too late—that knowing what to ask is not the same as knowing what to do.

The real cost will not just be job loss, but the erosion of judgment, the thinning out of skill, and a quiet loss of dignity in work itself.

Mother Earth

I'm thinking about the term Mother Earth. Not in the flaky, Gaia, New Age woo-woo metaphoric sense. In the sense that the term is literally true. 

We have literally emerged out of the Earth. We are made from the very chemical compounds that formed with the Earth's creation. We have been shaped and developed along with the evolutionary timeline of the planet and in response to it. Life emerged from its material, its energies, its climate, its forces. What we call “life” is not something placed on top of the Earth. It is something the Earth does.

Nerve by nerve, instinct by instinct, perception by perception, we are calibrated to the Earth's rhythms: light and dark, season and scarcity, sound and silence. Even things that seem esotheric, our sense of beauty for example, is not arbitrary. It's recognition of the conditions that made us possible.

We don't live in nature, we are nature. It's why when you go for a walk in the forest something inside you settles. The noise in your head drops a notch. That response isn’t spiritual, it’s biological. What some researchers call the Biophilia Hypothesis: we feel at home in the conditions that made us.

Think of the opposite, how it feels to live in the city. Towers of glass and steel, lengths of asphalt and endless right angles. Artificial light overriding circadian rhythm. Environments designed not for human coherence, but for efficiency, extraction, and control. It produces anxiety, alienation, and numbness—as though it were a malfunction of the individual rather than a predictable response to an unnatural environment.

We like to imagine that human ingenuity has freed us from dependence on the Earth. That we can engineer substitutes, optimize inputs, transcend limits. But everything we eat is still a variation on a single theme: plants, animals, fungi. All of it grown, fed, or assembled from the same planetary chemistry. We do not create nourishment. We reorganize it.

The illusion of independence is made possible by layers of abstraction. And the more layers there are, the more we forget where things actually come from, and the more distant we become from who we are.

The further we push into environments that ignore this fact, the more we should expect not just ecological breakdown, but psychological and social fragmentation as well. 

Every harm we do to the environment, the more we bury our heads under digital covers, the more we lose a sense of ourselves. 

This summer, I'm going for more walks in the woods.

The Messianic Agenda

For some time now, I’ve been circling an uncomfortable idea: that elements within Israel’s current leadership are not just indifferent to the condition of Jews in the diaspora—but may, in a deeper ideological sense, see their deterioration as useful.

Call it, for lack of a better term, the Messianic Agenda.

To be clear, I don’t believe Benjamin Netanyahu wakes up in the morning plotting how to make life harder for Jews in Montreal, London, or New York. His explicit project is to permanently foreclose the possibility of a two-state solution and consolidate Israeli control over Palestinian land. That much is visible in policy, in coalition choices, and in political instinct.

But Netanyahu does not govern alone. He sits atop a coalition that includes figures like Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir, for whom politics and theology are not separate spheres. In their worldview, history is not just something to be managed—it is something to be fulfilled.

And within that worldview lies the ancient idea of the ingathering of exiles: that Jews will ultimately return to the land of Israel as a precondition for redemption.

You don’t have to stretch very far to see the implication. If Jews are comfortable, secure, and integrated in the diaspora, why would they leave? But if life becomes precarious—if antisemitism rises, if belonging begins to fray—then aliyah is no longer an abstract ideal. It becomes a necessity.

I am not suggesting a coordinated policy to export instability. That would be too crude, too conspiratorial.

What I am suggesting is something subtler and, in its own way, more troubling: a governing ethos that is perfectly willing to absorb, perhaps even quietly validate, the consequences of its actions on diaspora Jews, because those consequences align with a deeper religious and ideological current.

If Jews abroad become targets of anger toward Israel, that is regrettable. But it also reinforces the core Zionist claim in its religious-nationalist form that Jewish life outside Israel is ultimately untenable.

This marks a profound break from the Zionism many of us in the diaspora grew up with.

In the 20th century, Zionism was a partnership. Israel was fragile, resource-poor, and dependent. Diaspora Jews, especially in North America, provided capital, expertise, and political cover. We did so not out of religious conviction, but out of historical memory and cultural attachment. Israel was not where we had to live. It was the place that ensured we would could live anywhere without worry, because we always have somewhere to go if we had to.

I remember that ethos vividly.

As a child, I would paste small paper leaves onto a cardboard tree at school, each one representing a modest donation to the Jewish National Fund. Some kids were enthusiastic about it, filling tree after tree with leaves. There was always competition to see who could make the most trees. I wasn`t one of those kids. My tree looked as bare as the onset of winter. It was a source of some shame and embarrassment. 

I have a black and white photograph of my grandfather Sam from the early 1960s. He stands with a group of men around a woman, her hair covered with a kerchief, at a sewing machine. He is inspecting the way two swatches of fabric were sewn together with the practiced eye of a master in his field. As one of Canada's most successful garment manufacturers, grandpa Sam had been invited by the Prime Minister of Israel himself, to help develop the country`s fledgling textile industry. That, too, was Zionism: practical, collaborative, outward-looking.

That version of Zionism assumed a strong, confident diaspora as a permanent feature of Jewish life. A partner in state-building.

Today’s version is different. It is more insular, more absolutist, and more overtly theological. It does not look to the diaspora as a partner so much as a population in waiting.

At the same time, the environment for Jews outside Israel is becoming more volatile. Social media is becoming saturated with conspiracy theories that would not have felt out of place in The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Old tropes—of secret control, of blood libel, of dual loyalty—have returned with modern packaging and algorithmic amplification.

Some of this is tied to Israel’s recent actions. America's involvement in the war with Iran has become a lightning rod for antisemitic conspiracy. 

Some of it is opportunistic. The internet doing what it does best: flattening distinctions and rewarding outrage.

But the result is the same. The line between criticism of Israel and hostility toward Jews is increasingly blurred, and diaspora communities are left to absorb the consequences.

Here is the paradox.

The more exposed diaspora Jews feel, the more Israel can present itself as indispensable. And the more indispensable it becomes, the less incentive its leaders have to moderate policies that contribute to that exposure in the first place.

This is not a conspiracy. It is a feedback loop, one that does not require anyone to consciously design it in order to benefit from it.

The tragedy is that it risks eroding something that took generations to build: a relationship between Israel and the diaspora rooted not in fear, but in mutual investment and shared purpose.

What replaces it may be something narrower, more coercive, and ultimately more fragile—a Zionism that depends not on the flourishing of Jewish life everywhere, but on its contraction.

The 21st century version of Zionism increasingly pursues a Messianic Agenda. The ingathering of the nations is always in the background. 

For Jews who don't relate to that Israel, our ancestral homeland risks losing its meaning and importance. 

Worse, when the Israeli government makes moves that don`t consider the international consequences, diaspora Jews feeling increasingly at risk, may understandably turn against it. And that is regrettable.