Washington’s Birthday: The Man Who Gave It Back Twice
Washington was not the cleverest man in any room he entered. What he had was rarer: he could be trusted with power, and twice he handed it back when nobody could have made him.
Category: Writing (Page 11)
ObservancesLincoln’s Birthday: The Hardest Job Anybody Has Held
Lincoln had about a year of formal schooling and taught himself everything else. Then he was handed a fracturing country, and he held it together without helping himself to the power the emergency offered.
ObservancesTalk Like a Pirate Day: Why the Joke Survived
A private joke between two friends in 1995 became an international observance in 2002. I drove to a pirate faire for it once, in the worst costume present.
ObservancesBats Day: The Afternoon a Crowded Street Parted
Bats Day has brought the goth community to Anaheim since 1999. I went in 2006, dressed after a fashion, and watched Main Street part for a friend who had decided completely what she was doing.
ObservancesArmistice Day: What a Renaming Costs
For thirty-six years the United States called 11 November Armistice Day. Then it became Veterans Day, and a specific moment gave way to a general one.
ObservancesVE Day: The War That Was Still Running
Germany surrendered on 8 May 1945 and Europe filled the streets. The war had four months left to run, and my grandfather was still a prisoner for every day of it.
ObservancesVJ Day: The Record That Only Exists Because Somebody Wrote It Down
The surrender took about twenty minutes aboard the USS Missouri. My grandfather had been a prisoner for three years and four months, and the record of it survives only because he sat down afterward and rebuilt it from memory.
ObservancesRedneck Christmas: What Fans Call the Daytona 500
The Daytona 500 has an official name, a sanctioning body and a trophy. It also has names nobody printed on anything, and those are the ones worth listening to.
Critical ThinkingThe Sunk Cost Fallacy: Why Smart People Keep Paying for Bad Decisions
A sunk cost is any resource you cannot get back, and letting it influence the next decision is the fallacy. How to spot it in your own work, how to tell it apart from persistence, and how writers use it…
Behind the BookBehind the Book: Sins of the Internet
It began around 2000 as a couple dozen HTML pages and grew across 25 years into a book. Here is the story behind my moral critique of the digital age.
Behind the BookBehind the Book: A Treachery of Legions
The general who won 69 AD for Vespasian and then disappeared from history. Here is the story behind my Roman novel about Marcus Antonius Primus.
Behind the BookBehind the Book: Ridiculous Things People Actually Believe
An episode of Ancient Aliens started it. Here is the story behind my unsparing field guide to conspiracy theories, pseudoscience, and the machinery that sells them.