Better Strangers

This week’s podcast is about how the internet — not the state of the world — is what’s bumming you out. As someone who has worked in the attention economy, I have some insider tips for understanding why this is happening, and books to recommend if you want to go deeper. Here are the books (and the song) mentioned in the episode (with affiliate links, of course): A quick correction — in the episode...

When my son was born in February of 2020, we knew we would need to move to a new house soon, but we loved our apartment — it was a cozy second floor two-bedroom, it was where we’d spent the first two years of my daughter Sophie’s life, and we knew that in my wife's late pregnancy the stress wasn't worth the move. Instead, we nested, and focused on enjoying the last few months with Sophie where the...

I live right by the beach, and a few weeks ago, I had a pretty cool experience. It was rainy, so I went for a walk, and I saw a lot of cool ducks. That’s it — that’s the entire experience. Getting out into nature a bit more has been an incredibly pleasant experience for me — I spent much of my childhood in the woods at the bottom of our street, and I rarely saw wildlife beyond squirrels. But now,...

When my daughter was born, my wife and I decided to not post pictures of her publicly online. It was mostly about giving our kids a sense of autonomy about their digital lives when they reach the age where they care, but it’s been a more controversial decision than we anticipated. This week’s podcast is an attempt to explain our stance! Better Strangers is a reader-supported publication. To receiv...

This is an adaptation of a speech I made in 2019 at Brookdale Community College. A few years back, I was invited to a local community college to discuss what we, in the modest little corner of New Jersey that we live in, can do about issues as huge and seemingly untouchable as global human rights. It is a terrible topic for a speech. Human rights, for most of us, is just something to be depressed...

Everything in America is a cult. Corporations have their own internal cultures designed towards making employees feel like they are part of something important and messianic, instead of like, a coffee chain. You regularly hear CEOs saying stuff like, “We’re not selling cars, we’re selling dreams. ” That Don Draper nonsense might just be canny advertising, but it’s also completely batshit insane, a...

I used to be one of the Facebook political debate kings. Long essays. Impassioned pleas. Days spent in argument with total strangers. Jobs and relationships neglected in the crafting of a withering reply. The posting was — outside occasional volunteering and donations — the entirety of my political activism. After Trump’s election in 2016, when it became clear that Facebook had profited massively...

Hey guys! My newest weekly column is something I’ve been doing as part of the Jimble-Jamble for a while, and I decided that it deserves its own space. It’s simple: five book recommendations on a specific theme! I’d love to have guests posting these in the future, so if you want to suggest specific books on a theme, let me know! All links are affiliates with Bookshop.org, so if you buy something th...

When my wife and I had just started dating, we would occasionally go and visit her brother in New York. They had, at some point, become obsessed with the Animal Planet TV show, Finding Bigfoot: Further Evidence, and in between our trips to various bars and restaurants, we’d binge the show. Finding Bigfoot , if you’ve never seen it, features three members of the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organizati...

So this is cool! You get to hear me literally 60 seconds into my new career! I recorded this episode this morning, which is my first day after quitting my job at the public library I’ve worked at for the past decade. Instead of a read article, I decided to do a kind of loose discussion of what I found valuable about working in a library (spoiler: nearly everything) and what I found challenging (sp...

This was one of my least clicked on articles last year! So naturally, I’m making it my second ever podcast. Here’s the text version: This remains one of my favorite things I wrote last year, clicks be damned. I personally remain an atheist, but have gotten a bit more… pagan? I guess? In my 30’s, because I’ve come across this more playful way of thinking about Gods that works for me really well. Th...

First ever podcast, guys! This is a reading of my August 2022 article, “Be More Biased,” which you can see the text version of below: Remember to subscribe to get the podcast every Monday! Better Strangers is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other s...