Better Strangers

A few years back, after my friend realized that I hadn’t seen like, any of the truly great movies of the 1980’s ( Big Trouble in Little China, The Goonies, Better Off Dead, Gremlins 2, etc.) he arranged for a year-long, once-a-month event he called “Matt’s Movie Mondays,” as a way to further my cinematic education. I was a little surprised that I’d seen so little of the era — before I’d gone into...

For my money, Carl Sagan wrote one of the most beautiful speeches to be given in the last century. I am speaking of his famous “Pale Blue Dot” speech, in which he looks at a picture of earth taken by the Voyager 1 spacecraft in 1990. Earth, in the photo, is a mere speck of light, a “mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.” It is impossible, looking at it, to feel significant. The Voyager 1 was one of...

In her classic gender-bending sci-fi book The Left Hand of Darkness , Ursula K. LeGuin makes a point about how our enemies can end up defining us: “To oppose something is to maintain it… To be sure, if you turn your back on Mishnory and walk away from it, you are still on the Mishnory road. To oppose vulgarity is inevitably to be vulgar. You must go somewhere else; you must have another goal; then...

Our mindset is a huge factor in helping us survive chaotic times. People who have trouble with change just don’t do well in moments of upheaval, whereas people who are flexible and adaptable tend to roll with the punches a little bit better. It’s forgivable that most of us fall into the former camp — our lives have been lived in an era of almost unprecedented stability and material wealth. Major,...

Writer’s note: my specialty is in neither science nor math, so I would ask the reader to be aware that I come at this with a spirit of curiosity rather than as any sort of expert, and thus may very well explain some of this badly. I encourage you to read the source book for a better understanding of what I’m saying here. At the end of Carlo Rovelli’s Helgoland: Making Sense of the Quantum Revoluti...

During the rise of Hitler in Germany, Wilhelm Reich, a prominent psychologist and the coiner of the phrase “sexual revolution,” hypothesized that suppressing sexuality was vital to any form of totalitarian government. His reasoning was that if people learned to trust their own bodies — their urges, their wants, their needs — then they’d also learn to trust their own sense of right and wrong. This...

The 80s and 90s were a strange time for music — studio labels were tightening their stranglehold on pop music, but the world was still bursting with new genres and trends like grunge, hip-hop, and rave music. One of the strangest pop music acts of the era was the British electronic band known as the KLF. The KLF had a string of hits, including the number one single “Doctorin’ The Tardis,” which is...

My favorite internet publication is going out of business this week. The Nib published political cartoons, mostly on the internet, but also in the form of stunning themed magazines which I now own every one of ( you can buy them here ), with the exception of the art I cut out of them and hung on the bulletin board over my desk. The Nib was founded by artist Matt Bors — most famous for the “Mister...

At I write this, Ben Shapiro is lighting Barbies on fire because he’s furious about the “woke” movie about a plastic toy. Jason Aldean, a country music star, is currently riding a wave of right-wing joy on the heels of putting out a song that kinda sounds like he’s advocating the murder of leftists. Elon Musk has turned the platform “Twitter” from one of the most vital spaces for journalists and a...

I spent the bulk of the 2010s working as a “content creator” online for a travel publication. It was meant to be my dream job — I’d fantasized about being a jetsetting journalist since I was a teenager — but after the 500th time I told someone what I did and they said, “That must be so cool!” I finally realized that 90% of what I was doing was writing horseshit listicles in a desperate bid for the...

One of my favorite bits in Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is when he settles in his hotel room, his body absolutely chock-full of illegal chemicals, and tries to calm himself out of a frenzied panic: By this time the drink was beginning to cut the acid and my hallucinations were down to a tolerable level. The room service waiter had a vaguely reptilian cast to his features, bu...

Imagine for a second: What do you think your dog experiences when you walk into your home? What strikes it first — the sound of your car pulling into the driveway, the jingle of the keys on your door, your smell wafting in with the outside breeze? Are you imagining the dog basically as yourself, but a few feet closer to the ground? Are its thoughts in English? Is it thinking something like “TREAT!...

There’s a lovely moment in the play Hamlet where the title character tells his friends that he has sworn an oath of vengeance to a ghost, and he will now be feigning insanity in order to get to the bottom of the ghost’s claims. His friends, Marcellus and Horatio, are understandably taken aback. HORATIO O day and night, but this is wondrous strange. HAMLET  And therefore as a stranger give it welco...

Look: I can’t say I’d recommend depression. It’s not a particularly fun time. In terms of enjoyability, I’d put it at zero out of five stars. BUT, it has been a weirdly fascinating experience? Without fetishizing it, it has taught me an enormous amount about the world and myself, to the point where I can’t imagine myself without having experienced it, and am skeptical that I would want to. If you...

One of the things I bump up against a lot by posting hopeful content on the internet is anger and scorn at the idea that I’m saying, “hey, maybe things will turn out okay.” One comment on a recent post of mine suggesting that we could transition to something new said, “The world will be destroyed by 2031. 95% of the population will be dead.” I was impressed by this commenter’s confidence, and was...

I talk a lot about the difference between hope and optimism on Better Strangers, and a big part of embracing hope is committing to making things change for the better yourself . This is opposed to the optimistic stance, which puts its faith in something outside the self. There’s a really lovely Mr. Rogers quote that goes around whenever anything bad happens: “When I was a boy and I would see scary...

Earlier this week, I published a TikTok that was a riff on my articles “How a different understanding of time can help you cope” and “ Against Forgiveness. ” It’s got us a few new followers, so I figured it would make a good theme for this week’s Jimble-Jamble. Here are some cool books, movies, and shows to check out if you wanna go down the mind-bendy rabbit hole of thinking about what time is an...

I occasionally like to irritate people on the internet by arguing that unsolicited dick pics disprove the Golden Rule. The argument goes like this: The Golden Rule says “Do unto others as you would have done unto you.” People who send unsolicited dick pics are, theoretically at least, saying, “Hey, I’d like to see naked pictures of you. So here’s a naked picture of me.” It is not a popular opinion...

If you pay attention to environmental activist groups like the Sunrise Movement or the Extinction Rebellion these days, you’re likely to hear a lot of talk about “growth” and “degrowth.” This comes from the environmentalist diagnosis that climate change — as well as a dozen other ecological problems like ocean acidification, ocean plastification, air pollution, water scarcity, and so on — is cause...

Happy Friday, everyone! Here’s some stuff to send you into your weekend. The Power Dynamics of Food My dear friend Kae Lani Palmisano has launched a new podcast, Power Dining , which covers the interplays between power and food. Kae Lani is one of my favorite people to work with, so when she asked if I would discuss the power dynamics of culinary travel — which I covered back in my days as a trave...

I am not often jealous of the religious, but I do wish I could believe that bad people like Donald Trump or Vladimir Putin would burn in hell for all eternity. From a purely moral and philosophical standpoint, I find the concept of heaven and hell to be repugnant, but, but , it is a neat little trick for bypassing fury at all of the injustices of the world. Someone’s a dick? Fine. They’ll get thei...

Nearly every time I’ve told someone they are a pessimist, they’ve replied with something along the lines of “I’m not a pessimist, I’m a realist.” I will admit — this is a superb response. It is not correct, but it is condescending and infuriating, and it makes it very difficult to continue the conversation, which is presumably the point of the response. The idea is that reality is bleak, and that...

Hey everyone! I thought I’d share a common theme in some of the books I’ve been reading lately — how to cope with a chaotic world. I talked about a different aspect of this, coping with nihilism, in the Almost Awakened podcast earlier this week. Listen to that here: The books I mentioned in today’s podcast are: This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or g...

There was a decade, probably between 1998 and 2008, where I didn’t walk into a public library a single time. This is, I think, probably a common American experience. At some point, you stop going there for Story Time and you can rely on your school library for books, and then you buy a Kindle which is useful for traveling, even if it is made by the worst corporation ever, and you just kinda forget...

Last week, on the recommendation of a friend (and a bunch of TikTok commenters) I read A Psalm for the Wild-Built , Becky Chambers single-sitting solarpunk novella. I’m gonna do a quick break here with a photo of the book, and use that gap to warn you that there are mild spoilers below. It shouldn’t ruin your reading of the book, as it’s not that kind of a book, but if you plan on reading it, mayb...