Nehaveigur

Category: Field notes

  • Misconceptions

    There’s more where that came from.

  • More Luck Than Sense

    I’ve been thinking about parenting recently. Having had three kids within three years has something to do with it. Specifically, I’ve been wondering about how…

  • Things That Don’t Work

    A list by Dyonmite. Some obvious ones like acupuncture or communism, some less obvious ones too, including tree-based knowledge organization and jokes.

  • Hair-raising Haircuts

    Hairdressers are notorious for the quality of their small talk. Mine is different. While we started out with small talk, our conversations have taken a…

  • The Thing About an Apple

    Here’s the thing about an apple: it sticks in the throat. It’s a package deal: Lust and understanding. Immortality and death. Sweet pulp with cyanide…

  • Trains

    Trains are different in America. Like so many other things (people, portion sizes, cars, ambition), they’re bigger here than they were in Europe. The part…

  • The River: Drowning

    Most winters, the ice was strong enough for skating, as long as you avoided the fast flowing sections where it was much thinner. As a…

  • The River: Boats

    For Christmas, I wanted a kayak. For months, I had been poring over the catalogs of various suppliers, comparing specifications and accessories and looking at…

  • The River: Power

    The mansion was built with the money the factory made my ancestors, and the factory was next to the river because it couldn’t have been…

  • The River: Turks

    For hundreds of years, the Habsburg and Ottoman empires waged war, a conflict that had its roots in the Crusades. The Ottomans besieged Vienna in…

  • The River: Fishing

    Beneath the surface, there were trout. On hot days they were suspended in the water without moving. My brother, for a few years, was obsessed…

  • The River: Home

    There was the crumbling Belle Epoque mansion, and around the mansion was an overgrown park, and behind the park was the river. To get there,…

  • Did You Do Your Best?

    Responsibility is a unique concept… You may share it with others, but your portion is not diminished. You may delegate it, but it is still…

  • Three Cheers for Ignorance

    Knowledge is power! Knowledge is what our civilization is built on. All those medieval monks dedicating their lives to understanding how the universe works? You…

  • When One is Most Alive

    There is an ecstasy that marks the summit of life, and beyond which life cannot rise. And such is the paradox of living, this ecstasy…

  • London Calling

    Don’t you just hate those market researchers calling you? They’re annoying. They’re persistent. If you make the mistake of answering your phone, they’ll steal your…

  • How Not to Eat Well

    People worry a lot about food. Is it authentic? Is it healthy? Is it local? Is it organic? Is it sustainable? Is it The Best?…

  • Ken Ilgunas’ Podcast Journey

    Ken Ilgunas’ experience of how podcasts have influenced him is similar to my own but he’s more articulate in describing it. He has also recently…

  • Specialization is for Insects

    A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet,…

  • Trust, But Verify

    “I want to double-click on that,” says the head of my division. We’re all sitting around a conference table and for once, there’s no laptop…

  • Podcasts

    The Google Podcasts app is going away on April 2nd, which suits me fine as I’ve been trying to escape to Google ecosystem of apps…