Elon has been shaking things up lately. Especially for Twitter users. Many people had gotten used to thinking of Twitter as a sort of public space, a digital town square where every reasonable person could find their own soapbox, and perhaps even a few people to stop and listen to…

After staying at a pleasantly ignorable level for years, inflation is once again making headlines. And so the pundits and talking heads are falling over each other trying to explain what’s going on. And, of course, the Russian war in Ukraine, as well as lingering pandemic problems, are making their…

Back on 7 Apr 2021 I wrote a piece titled “The Decline of the Republican Party — First Gradually and then Suddenly.” For those who haven’t been paying attention lately — the suddenly part has now finally arrived. And then, back in May of 2021, I wrote a second piece…

I’ve started using my own Mac app Notenik as a project launcher lately, and I wanted to share how I’ve set this up, in case someone else might benefit from it. (Notenik is available as a free download from the Mac App Store.) I’ll try to break this down into…

It’s been a little while since I’ve posted anything from The Practical Utopian, so I thought it might be time to give everyone an update on what I’ve been up to over the last couple of months. Updates to Notenik Although I enjoy writing opinion pieces, and appreciate all of you who read…

I’ve been reading a lot lately about human tribes: Sebastian Junger’s excellent book Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging, and The Dawn of Everything, by Graeber and Wengrow, to name a couple. …

Along with many others, of course, I’ve been thinking a lot about the abortion issue of late. I guess I’ll start these reflections with my first exposure to the procedure, fourth-hand as it was. One of my college friends, in my freshman year at Michigan, had an older roommate who…

Towards a Reasonable Middle: Part 1 — A little over a century ago, Irish poet W. B. Yeats wrote what is probably his most famous poem: “The Second Coming.” The cultural context for the poem was, in some ways, similar to ours today: the 1918–1919 flu pandemic was still active, the First World War had recently ended…

A couple of things that happened recently got me cogitating on the idea of language as playground. First, I had a chance to hear Anne Curzan speak. Curzan is the talented and engaging dean of the College of Literature, Science and the Arts at the University of Michigan (my alma…