I told a friend how sometimes when I wake up before the alarm I get my best ideas. Most of the time I don’t write them down, figuring if they’re important enough, I’ll remember them when I wake up for the day. I learned the habit of not trying to save everything during my first silent meditation retreat. They don’t let attendees bring anything to write with. At first I[…] Keep reading →

Carl Erik Fisher, M.D., is an addiction psychiatrist, bioethics scholar, and author. He is an assistant professor of clinical psychiatry at Columbia University, where he studies and teaches law, ethics, and policy relating to psychiatry and neuroscience, especially issues related to substance use disorders and other addictive behaviors. He is the author of the nonfiction book The Urge: Our History of Addiction, an intellectual and cultural history of addiction, interwoven[…] Keep reading →

Different people define middle age differently, but having just turned 51 I think I’m in it by all definitions. Physical My first sense of my body physically declining came in my early thirties, when my potential to compete in ultimate began to decline. Before then, I always felt motivation to practice since I knew the next year my potential would be higher. After then, no matter how much I practiced,[…] Keep reading →

While writing up a longer piece on my experiment going off the grid, I looked up when I bought the solar panels and battery. Going through my old records, I think I only bought five or ten things besides food in about a year or so, all from Craigslist or thrift stores, used. I don’t keep meticulous records, so I may have missed some things. Going backward, a couple weeks[…] Keep reading →

Growing up in the 1970s and 80s, I remember people saying about visiting places of natural beauty, from campgrounds to local parks to national parks, beaches, and so on: “Leave it better than you found it.” “Take only pictures, leave only footsteps.” Today, every place possible in America has litter. I saw litter at every stop of the forty-eight hour train ride from Los Angeles to Houston, where we would[…] Keep reading →

Someone suggested I learn about a writer named Pico Iyer. In an interview I listened to he talked about the musician Leonard Cohen, who apparently spent time living as a monk. Cohen’s practice, according to Iyer, included scrubbing the floor. The practice doesn’t sound glamorous. You can hire someone to do it. Why bother if you can afford not to? The movie Amazing Grace, about William Wilberforce, showed John Newton[…] Keep reading →

Since sharing my September 11 experience on the podcast, I lost $10 million on September 11, 2001. Here is what I learned from those who sacrificed and served, I’ve shared my story of loss with friends and family. As I have for twenty years, I hedged describing that loss with the context of those who died, those who volunteered to put themselves in harm’s way with the intent to defend[…] Keep reading →