Joshua Wilbur is a writer and educator based in New York City. Read more of his writing at joshuawilbur.com. Email: joshwilbur [at] gmail.com
Website: https://www.joshuawilbur.com/
by Joshua Wilbur Last month’s most popular movie on Netflix is a horror show in the guise of a documentary. In 2020, reality has turned scarier than fiction, and The Social Dilemma expends more dread per minute than any episode of Black Mirror. It’s a timely, manipulative film, built for one purpose: to scare the…
by Joshua Wilbur There are times when I can’t look away from The Avenue at Middelharnis. Completed in 1689 by the Dutch Golden Age artist Meindert Hobbema, the painting has entranced viewers for centuries. The English landscapists of the Romantic period admired and emulated its unusual composition. A young Van Gogh saw The Avenue in…
by Joshua Wilbur This month I’m submitting a guest post written by an acquaintance of mine. His name, strange as it may sound, is One-Week Man. He suffers from an unusual quirk: he can only remember the most recent week of his past, and he can only imagine one week into his future. He is…
by Joshua Wilbur The Palio di Siena is a gorgeous paradox, a horse race with practically no rules in a city enamored with ritual. Representatives from the contrade, or neighborhoods, of Siena, Italy have competed in this unique spectacle since the 17th Century. Twice a summer, first in July and again in August, Tuscans and…
by Joshua Wilbur As you read these words, someone (or some thing) could be creeping up behind you. Maybe you’re sitting at your desk. Or at your kitchen table. Or on a half-empty train. Behind you looms an encroaching presence, a silent observer. I picture a middle-aged man in a black suit — a tired…
by Joshua Wilbur tl; dr: Skim-reading is a bad habit, all things considered. It’s detrimental to our sense of time and place. Screen technologies are fundamentally changing not only how we read but also how we think and what we remember. But readers shouldn’t take all the blame. Writers, editors, and creatives of all stripes…
by Joshua Wilbur I wake up just before sunrise. For weeks, I’ve gone to bed at exactly 10 PM because—as Shawn Stevenson shows in Sleep Smarter—a consistent bedtime is the single most important factor in waking up well-rested. Before getting out of bed, I perform a series of stretches to prime my body for the…
by Joshua Wilbur “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.” —Annie Dillard According to a July 2018 report from Nielsen, American adults now spend more than 11 hours a day on average consuming some form of media. The study considered time spent on television, radio, apps on smartphones, apps…
by Joshua Wilbur In college, I took a course on American poetry, but I missed the class on Robert Frost. To be honest, I slept straight through it. That particular winter was brutally cold. I lived in a worn-out house some fifteen minutes from campus, and the water heater in the basement was broken. So…
by Joshua Wilbur I first encountered a Big Dumb Object (“BDO”) in an underfunded school library in rural East Texas. Sitting cross-legged on the carpeted floor, I held a battered paperback just a few inches from my face, periodically turning it over to inspect the image on the book’s cover. Rama. I was twelve years…
by Joshua Wilbur Repetition, in itself, is neither good nor bad. Everything repeats. “Nature is an endless combination and repetition of very few laws,” said Emerson. Seasons come, and seasons go. But what’s true for seasons isn’t true for people. We tend to prefer some forms of repetition to others. At its best, repetition is…
by Joshua Wilbur This past Tuesday—September 25th 2018—was “National Voter Registration Day” in the United States. I didn’t register to vote on September 25th, and I’m not registered to vote as I write this now. I’m not proud of the fact. Far from it, I feel intensely guilty when I imagine some upstanding acquaintance asking…
by Joshua Wilbur I would never call myself a birdwatcher. I’m confident—arrogant even—about blue jays and cardinals, but everything else is a crapshoot. I identify finches as sparrows, sparrows as hawks, hawks as starlings. I’m more often wrong than right. That said, I do like to watch birds. In college, I would go to the…
by Joshua Wilbur The 2020s will have a name. In the nursing homes of the future, Millennials’ grandchildren will hear all about the coming decade. Gran will remove her headset, loaded out with VR-entertainment and the latest in biometric tech, and she’ll tell the kids about the world as it was in the third decade…