Shortly after her daughter went missing in 2008, Casey Anthony went to a tattoo parlor to have the words Bella Vita inked on her shoulder. Bella Vita means “beautiful life” in Italian, and the prosecution introduced the tattoo artist’s testimony, presumably as evidence that Anthony was celebrating when she should have been distraught over her… Read more
Reader and entrepreneur Greg Lowe suggests a new heuristic, the Collaboration Heuristic, that may be useful in facilitating workplace cooperation and productivity. It’s always gratifying to see readers take the core ideas of On Second Thought and apply them in the real world.
Selecting a book to read by the water is no trivial matter for me. I want something that’s accessible because—well, because it’s vacation, and I don’t want anything that resembles work. On the other hand, my past experience with picking pop fiction—thrillers and such—has often as not been disappointing. I think I want a “page… Read more
Independence Day is a time for national pride, and indeed we Americans have much to feel good about. But it’s also clear that many people outside our borders see us not as a proud people, but as a haughty and arrogant people. Pride has perplexed philosophers and theologians for centuries, and it is an especially… Read more
With the planet on the verge of extermination by alien invaders, U.S. President Thomas Whitmore summons all his rhetorical talent to rally Americans for an epic 4th of July battle, the “largest aerial battle in the history of Mankind.” The Earth faces annihilation, he warns a rag-tag assembly of patriots: “But we will not go… Read more
The Flat Earth Society was founded in Victorian England to preach one simple belief: Our planet is not a sphere. This was not a metaphor. Followers believed, quite literally, that we all inhabit a large disc, with the North Pole at the center and a large wall of ice at its edge. This particular brand… Read more
An inviolable principle of most addiction recovery programs is total abstinence. It appears that for true addicts, one drink or one toke or one line is enough to trigger a binge—and a likely relapse. This dogma is not so hard and fast when it comes to food because . . . well, because we all… Read more
In recognition of the Supreme Court’s decision on kids and video games, I thought I’d dust off this short essay from a few years ago on the considerable mental benefits of gaming, for kids of all ages. The decision means, among other things, that parents will have to–well, parent. My kids cut their video gaming… Read more