Check Out These Blog Posts From Steve McEllistrem

I got a garden seal the other day. I’d been looking forward to it for quite some time, having ordered it months ago, and it finally came, shipped by FedEx and left on my front stoop, blocking the door. I wasn’t sure what to expect, but when I opened the crate, sure enough, there it was: a garden seal. What, you may ask, is a garden seal? Well, as I’ve since learned, it’s kind of like a Hawaiian Monk Seal ...

I realize it’s ironic to write an article about why no one reads anymore, but I’m doing it anyway. And I’m not saying no one reads anymore. Obviously, people do. In fact, some people read as much as they ever have, consuming multiple books per week, gorging themselves on the tasty offerings of Shakespeare, Jane Austen, JK Rowling and more. But readers are slowly dying off, easing into extinction as newer and flashier means of grabbing our attention evolve. Why? ...

Many people won’t read science fiction. They have the idea that it’s all warp drives and space battles and bizarre aliens and they just don’t want to read that. It’s too far out for their taste. But not all science fiction is that way. Look at Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, which is more properly defined as speculative fiction because it doesn’t really embrace futuristic technology like most science fiction does. That’s a wonderful novel about where we might be ...

We want to know things with certainty. We want to be able to classify actions and things and people into categories we can place in mental files, sorted into neat folders that we can retrieve when necessary. We dislike doubt. Our entire existence is given up to learning. We go to school as children, eager to understand the world around us. Our teachers and parents (at least those who are involved in their children’s lives) preach the importance of knowledge ...