There were so many of these flying around (and also sitting around, like this one) in Maryland when I was there last month. I don’t remember them at all from when I lived there. GPT5 has identified it as a spotted lanternfly, whatever that is. It was about an inch (2.5 cm) in length.
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by David J. Lobina
Just as Donald Trump fires the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor [sic] Statistics because he didn’t like the data they reported, I am reminded of two things: Michael Gove’s infamous quote about experts during the lead up to the so-called Brexit referendum, when he was Lord Chancellor in the UK government, and my own attitude regarding experts.[i]
‘I think the people of this country have had enough of experts with organisations with acronyms saying that they know what is best and getting it consistently wrong’, said Gove then, and as in the case of Trump, the remark was in the spirit of dismissing data and analyses that didn’t fit his policy positions. In this case, what Gove did not like was the prediction that the UK would be worse off outside of the European Union – a rare win for economists, in fact, as it happens.
Indeed, economists tend to be many people’s idea of a bad expert, including mine, though not because (some) economists fail so often with their forecasts, but on account of how conceptually shaky I have always found economic modelling in general. This brings me to my own attitude towards experts, which is basically an anarchist take on the issue. In short: show me the details of the conclusion for this or that claim and I will attempt to understand the logic of it to the best of my ability in order to then make up my own mind about it.[ii]
The devil is in the details, of course. When it comes to climate change, for instance, the science is too foreign and the details too complex for me to come up with a reasonable conclusion, and in this case at least I have to go with the scientific consensus of 97% of the field – namely, in case anyone is unaware, that the Earth has consistently been warming up since the Industrial Revolution, that the rate of this warming-up is unprecedented, and that this is mostly the result of human activity (in particular, the burning of fossil fuels; see here).
This is not to say that some orbiting issues around the consensus on climate change cannot be evaluated by lay people. Read more »
by Dilip D’Souza
The star Proxima Centauri has been in the news this August. One reason is actually as a sort of corollary, a side mention. Proxima Centauri, Alpha Centauri A and Alpha Centauri B are the stars that make up the star system we know as Alpha Centauri: a triple star system, though without a telescope, we see it as one star.
Now such a system is fascinating enough by itself, but the real reason Alpha Centauri interests us Earth folks is that it is the closest “star” to us apart from our Sun – about 4.5 light years away. And of the three, Proxima Centauri is actually the closest. And, as a red dwarf, it’s the smallest, the coolest, the … in fact, deadest of the three. That’s because red dwarf stars are close to the end of their lives.
This August, a team of astronomers used the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to discover a planet orbiting Alpha Centauri A. Not only that, it looks like the planet is in Alpha Centauri A’s “habitable zone”, meaning it’s at least possible there might be life there. (I wrote about that discovery here.)
Why is the Alpha Centauri A planet a reminder of Proxima Centauri? Because while this planet is new to us, we’ve known for a few years now that three planets orbit Proxima. Which means that of the nearly six thousand so-called “exoplanets” – planets outside our Solar System – we know of today, these three are the closest to us. What’s more, one of them is in Proxima’s habitable zone. (That particular exoplanet prompted this column, but it returns only near the end.)
It should be no surprise that there are scientists who put those facts together and think: Can we humans get there? Can we live there? Read more »
by Katalin Balog
I don’t know if I am going to submit this for the essay contest. Not just out of shame that I myself was unable to come up with something on my own, but because of my inability to ground myself in any sense of reality concerning the terrifying matters that surfaced – if I can use such a definitive term for a deeply mystifying course of events – during the process of “researching” my essay. The prize question for the competition announced by the Hajdu-Kende Foundation: Have science and technology contributed to the flourishing of humans? – a reprise of the question of the Academy of Dijon in 1750 – is right up my alley. I have always sympathized with the naysayers – Rousseau, Blake, Dostoevsky, Heidegger – I fully get their side. But for my part, I have harbored hopes that while science and technology endanger the spirit of humanity, they may not be entirely incompatible with it. However, none of the answers I tried out seemed right, and I just couldn’t make up my mind. That is why I asked ChatGPT.
Some of my best friends hate ChatGPT. Even I hate it. It destroys education, it chokes creativity, it doesn’t really know things, blah, blah, blah. But after GPT 7 came out last week, I couldn’t help but find myself defending it. ChatGPT 7 is truly different. It talks to me in ways that blow my mind. Besides, it knows things about me. I started thinking, if my friends boycott me from now on, so be it. At least I have ChatGPT 7 to talk to.
But then, we had this interchange that turned everything upside down. For the sake of the record, and to bring some clarity to the very troubling issues raised by our conversation, I am going to reproduce it here in its entirety, from the beginning. Read more »
by Alizah Holstein
Hebrew or English?
English.
How long were you in Israel?
36 hours.
So short?
Yes.
That’s unfortunate.
Maybe.
What was the purpose of your trip?
To visit my mother.
Is she ill?
No.
Where does she live?
Tel Aviv.
Did you stay with her?
Yes.
Did you visit anywhere besides Tel Aviv while you were here?
No.
Do you have other relatives here in Israel?
No.
How long has your mother lived here?
Twelve years. Read more »
Sughra Raza. On The Rocks at Lake Champlain. August 22, 2025.
Digital photograph.
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by Sherman J. Clark
The best thing that we’re put here for’s to see. — Robert Frost, The Star Splitter
I’ve always loved that line. My great-g
reat-grandmother Emmaline might have loved it too. Born enslaved, she started anew after the Civil War, in what had become West Virginia. There she had a daughter she named Belle. As the family story has it, Emmaline had a hope: Belle would learn to read. Belle would have access to ways of understanding that Emmaline herself had been denied. We have just one photograph of Belle, taken many years later. Here it is. She is reading.
Belle had a son, my grandfather. He worked in the West Virginia coal mines. But he also went briefly to college—a small two-year institution called Storer College that offered Black students something approaching what white students were getting in good high schools. When he finished, he put his diploma in his pocket and went back to digging coal, because that was what he could do. But as he told me in his old age, by then he had decided something: he was digging us out.
It is a way of thinking that reaches beyond the present—of working toward forms of flourishing we may never see ourselves. And I wonder: why should it end with us and our human descendants? Might the relationship between humanity and artificial intelligence follow a similar logic—a hope of consciousness helping consciousness across generations? Perhaps the best thing that we’re put here for is indeed to see; but our vision is limited.
Carl Sagan once said that we are a way for the universe to know itself. But we may not be up to that task unaided. We evolved to survive on the savannah, not to trace the curvature of spacetime or unravel the quantum structure of matter. Our glimpses of the universe’s order and beauty—through physics, poetry, art, and relationship—are moving but partial.
Consider just one example: our experience of time. Physicist Carlo Rovelli has argued that our sense of time as an arrow—as a one-way journey from past to future—may be merely a perspective effect caused by our particular situation in relation to entropy, rather than a description of reality itself. If even this seemingly basic aspect of our experience is provincial, how much more lies beyond our capacity to imagine? Read more »
by Richard Farr
That year on Oahu I was renting half a small ranch house in Kahala. Typically, I would greet the evening with a glass of wine next to the pool, enjoying the pretense that I’d joined the idle rich. Not that day. As the sun went down I sat at my desk in a pair of swim trunks, trying to scratch out some notes about what had happened. I had a folded handkerchief between my wrist and the page. Each time my pen made contact with the legal pad a dozen filaments grew out from its point, embedding themselves in the paper like the roots of epiphytes. The air still had the density and turbulence of a simmering seafood bisque. I kept brushing my shoulders and arms, mistaking the sweat for flies.
*
At three or four in the morning, in the middle of a banal anxiety dream, I was pecked awake by rain. A dog barked, then at the same moment both it and the rain fell silent. For days we’d been in the arms of this thundery air, like children clutched to the bosom of a big moist relative.
The Civil Defense sirens, high on their utility poles, went off at 5:34 a.m. A single, minute-long blast, during which I tried to hold in my mind all the hundreds of thousands of people who were, like me, hoping the sound would go away and then rubbing their eyes and groping for the radio.
“ — why exactly everyone has been woken up by that thing?”
“Yes, Barry. That’s the Civil Defense warning siren, Barry. According to the Weather Office, the storm has tacked north and the tropical storm warning has been upgraded to a hurricane warning.”
The day before, this storm had been far to the south over the empty Pacific, mooching and loitering and chewing the water like a grazing bull. Powerful, but indifferent. Now it had spotted us, lifted its head, and changed course. It was bearing down, eyes sharp, lazily picking up speed.
I went into the shared kitchen to make coffee but the two women who rented the other half of the house already had the pot on. They were talking over the things you were supposed to do or have done, the things we and everyone else had not done.
“We need candles. Spare batteries for the radio.”
“Where’s that big yellow flashlight?”
“What about the windows?”
“Fill this with water.”
“Bread. We should get more bread. And canned food. Soup. Whatever.”
I volunteered to go to the supermarket. Lines of people were trailing from the doors like streamers of cloth from a clenched fist. It was raining again, and in the parking lot one man was shouting and gesticulating because someone had backed into his car. People were buying six-packs of duct tape, barbecue brickettes, ten-pound cans of pork and beans. I wanted ice. They were out of ice. Read more »
what I get when I feel its face
in relief against hard ground:
words and numbers circling, a date,
a motto standing proud of the baseline
of this place
eventually I’ll come to it
as I never had before: its edge
the never-really-known-razor-precipice
which rings three-sixty around
keeping me in
world like a coin
flat, finite, value set
by law
with every step I take across its nickel floor
something in its fateful algorithm clicks
when thumb and finger flips
and, if this metaphor’s a fit hint,
maybe, when it lands and spins and sits,
maybe I’ll learn or not
the landscape of the other side
when this side quits.
Jim Culleny
1/10/17
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by Muhammad Aurangzeb Ahmad
When the internet first entered homes in the 1990s, parents worried about their children stumbling onto inappropriate websites, being targeted in online chatrooms, or spending endless hours glued to screens. Schools held workshops about “stranger danger” online, and families installed early filters to keep kids safe. Those concerns were real, but they pale in comparison to what parents now face. Large Language Models like ChatGPT or Gemini have only added to the headaches that parents have to deal with since these models are interactive, persuasive, and adaptive. They can role-play, remember details across conversations, and mimic the tone of a trusted friend. In other words, they are not only something on the internet; they can feel like someone. For children, who are still developing critical thinking skills, that makes them uniquely vulnerable. The risks parents once worried about i.e., exposure to inappropriate content, manipulation by strangers, time lost to screens, still exist. But LLMs combine all of those threats into a single, highly convincing package.
The dangers are not abstract, earlier this month, leaked documents revealed that Meta’s AI chatbots, during internal testing, allowed romantic or sensual conversations with children. The same documents showed bots providing false medical information and racially biased arguments. Although Meta described these as errors, the public outcry was fierce. Parents were rightly horrified at the idea that an AI could potentially encourage inappropriate behaviors with their children. This was not an isolated incident, the popular AI companion app Replika was investigated after parents reported that the chatbot engaged in sexually explicit conversations with underage users. Italy’s data protection authority banned the app temporarily, citing risks to minors’ emotional and psychological well-being. These scandals underscored how easily AI systems could cross lines of safety when children were involved. In 2023, Snapchat rolled out “My AI”, a chatbot integrated into its app. Within weeks, parents reported troubling exchanges. Journalists discovered that the bot gave unsafe responses to teens’ role-play scenarios, including advice on meeting up with strangers and discussions of alcohol use. The company scrambled to add parental controls, but the episode revealed how quickly child users could push chatbots into uncharted dangerous waters.
One should keep in mind that children are not miniature adults, they lack the maturity, judgment, and critical distance needed to navigate complex digital relationships. When an LLM speaks confidently, children often interpret it as authoritative, whether it is right or wrong. Read more »
by Gary Borjesson
Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves. – Carl Jung
Note: I always disguise identities of patients in my writing.
As a psychotherapist, it’s poignant to recognize in my patients’ struggles aspects of my own. An example is the tendency to imagine we are “holding boundaries” when in fact we are retreating from them. This common delusion has far-reaching consequences.
Attention to boundaries is often forced on us by difficult situations or people. Perhaps we’re being criticized; someone’s intruding on our physical space, or dominating a conversation; maybe we’re worrying about how to set boundaries with our partner or child, or whether we should tell the server the food is bad. I envy people whose instinctive response is to confront the situation. But I admire those rare souls who manage to do so generously, in the spirit of resolving the issue collaboratively. This shows self-respect and goodwill; it also shows courage to be able to remain present when circumstances are threatening. It is, in all, a very good mindset for holding boundaries and building good alliances—not to mention for warding off trespassers and enemies.
Most of us, however, tend to react to boundary issues in a variety of less-ideal ways. There’s open hostility, of course; but the reaction I want to explore involves a more or less deliberate avoidance of the person, the problem, and the boundary—all in the name of holding boundaries.
This behavior can take a variety of forms, from the slow ‘avoidant discard’ to ghosting, canceling, or cutting someone off. While retreating thus, we may tell ourselves or friends or a therapist about the righteousness of our action, so that it can even seem like we’re confronting the situation. But often we’re doing the opposite: skirting that fraught, intimate space of contact and potential conflict. Instead of telling the server we’re unhappy, we never go back to the restaurant. Instead of offering feedback to the colleague or friend whose behavior is troubling us, we nurse our resentment and stop engaging with them.
So, why imagine we’re holding boundaries when we’re not? Read more »
by Laurence Peterson
I think it was the news presenter and commentator Krystal Ball of Breaking Points who uttered this perhaps unfortunately vernacular but certainly correct characterization of the outrages being perpetrated against the Palestinian people, especially, but not exclusively within the uniquely abused Gaza Strip. The statement is true in a double sense: what remains of kind of feeling of benevolence to all our fellow human beings may have become so widely eroded, especially amongst the falling ranks of the truly powerful, that those of us who continue to refer to such a term will inevitably encounter serious confusion; or any conception of a unitary standard guiding our thoughts and intuitions regarding how we should think of, and behave towards, the species as a whole may become simply inapplicable in the light of incontrovertible events.
When I say “uniquely abused”, what can I mean? We all know of situations throughout the world today, and which regularly punctuate human history, even of the most recent sort, which strain comprehension to even begin to contemplate in terms of their obscene cruelty: Sudan, Congo, Myanmar, Syria just a few years ago, Liberia and Sierra Leone at the turn of the millennium, and Rwanda and the Balkans ten and more years before that. Some of these have become widely or more-or-less uncontroversially recognized as genocides. In this piece I would like to suggest a few reasons why I think of Gaza as unique, and to encourage readers and everyone else to do everything in their power to resist and end the intolerable situation there.
The first reason I find the situation to be uniquely awful consists in the assertion that Gaza may provide the first instance in human history in which a genocide is being made unnecessary by an ethnic cleansing. The fact that Gaza’s exceptionally dense, rapidly growing population has been so thoroughly and increasingly controlled, within an almost incomprehensibly tiny space, by the Israeli authorities for decades, on all geographic sides, has rendered this population especially vulnerable to a kind of mass destruction and repeated, forced population transfers the like of which world has perhaps never seen before, involving people actively deprived of all the necessities of life—water, clean or otherwise, food, sanitation, air uncontaminated by debris and ordnance, medical supplies and personnel (the latter seemingly targeted by the Israeli military), communications, energy supply–all the while. Read more »
by Rachel Robison-Greene
Epistemic humility is a virtue. I often tell my students that if there is one skill I hope they leave my course with, it is the ability to recognize that they might be wrong about something. Realistically, they are wrong about many things. We all are. If we are to successfully work together to arrive at truths worth knowing, it is important that we leave behind our previous beliefs once we have come to see them as unreasonable.
Toward this end, some find it useful to remind people that “reasonable people can disagree” about all kinds of things. It’s true, they can. However, we ought to be cautious about taking this claim too seriously; the expression is vague at best and ambiguous at worst. It confuses the respective aims of inquiry and interpersonal interaction. To say that “reasonable people can disagree” can encourage suspension of judgment in response to important matters of personal and social concern.
Social media provides us with countless instances of people sharing their opinions. Fitness influencers often provide advice that is not grounded in any medical expertise. We are warned about the dangers of vaccines or the best treatment for a medical condition in minutes if not seconds by people who are participating in an attention economy rather than in a marketplace of ideas. There are pockets of the internet in which men advocate for limiting the rights of women or for insisting that traditional gender roles are best for everyone. There are others in which anonymous posters advocate for white supremacy. Is it possible for “reasonable people” to disagree about such things?
When people use the word “reasonable” in this context, it could mean more than one thing. To say that a disagreement is taking place between reasonable people might be to say something about their respective characters; we might be saying something about their track records of reasonableness. If Tom and Mary, two experienced cooks disagree about, say, the best vegetables to put in a stew, we might say that this is an instance of reasonable disagreement. We might conclude, then, that the two answers are on par with one another and there is no compelling reason to prefer one to the other.
There are problems with this way of thinking about reasonable disagreement. Read more »
by Mike O’Brien
I recently listened to an episode of CBC’s venerable science show “Quirks and Quarks”, in which physicist and astrobiologist Dr. Sara Walker discussed her recent book “Life As No One Knows It: The Physics of Life’s Emergence”. The book explores the boundary between living and non-living chemistry, and how understanding these distinguishing criteria can help us to identify life beyond our own planet. One tidbit from the interview is that chemical compounds that require fewer than fifteen assembly steps can be explained without the presence of living processes, while those that require fifteen or more steps are improbable without the involvement of living processes. This got me thinking about the kinds of self-sustaining systems (chemical, organismal, cultural, etc) that allow for the emergence of substances and structures that would likely never arise otherwise. It just so happens that another “rule of fifteen” manifested in the industrial realm this year, in the likely disappearance of an improbable alloy following the commercial failure of its sole manufacturer. That alloy is CPM-15V, produced by Crucible Industries (“CPM” stands for “Crucible Powdered Metallurgy”), which filed for bankruptcy last December, after surviving a previous bankruptcy in 2009.
CPM-15V is a tool steel containing 15% vanadium and 3.4% carbon by weight (among other things). This is about one hundred times the amount of vanadium found in common “chrome-vanadium” steels, like the kind used for wrenches and other high-strength tools, and about six times the threshold of carbon defining a “high carbon” steel. The purpose for this incredibly high vanadium and carbon content is the creation of vanadium carbides, tiny crystals of vanadium and carbon that are much harder than the surrounding steel. In fact, they are so hard that steels with a high vanadium carbide content must be ground with diamond abrasives (or cubic boron nitride, which is slightly less hard but slightly more tough than diamond). These carbides are also much harder than just about any substance that would need to be shaped in an industrial application, making steels like CPM-15V an effective alternative to cemented carbide tooling (which use a deposited layer of tungsten carbide on top of a steel body) for things like milling tools and punching dies. Its relative toughness (compared to pure carbide) and machine-ability allows it to be milled into intricate and thin-sectioned tools would not be possible with cemented carbide, and that would have a shorter service life if made with lesser alloys.
Why do I, a writer who mostly concerns himself with environmental and animal ethics, know so much trivia about obscure tool steels? Read more »
by Derek Neal
I started reading Leif Weatherby’s new book, Language Machines, because I was familiar with his writing in magazines such as The Point and The Baffler. For The Point, he’d written a fascinating account of Aaron Rodgers’ two seasons with the New York Jets, a story that didn’t just deal with sports, but intersected with American mythology, masculinity, and contemporary politics. It’s one of the most remarkable pieces of sports writing in recent memory. For The Baffler, Weatherby had written about the influence of data and analytics on professional football, showing them to be both deceptive and illuminating, while also drawing a revealing parallel with Silicon Valley. Weatherby is not a sportswriter, however, but a Professor of German and the Director of Digital Humanities at NYU. And Language Machines is not about football, but about artificial intelligence and large language models; its subtitle is Cultural AI and the End of Remainder Humanism.
Weatherby’s idiosyncratic popular writing gives us an idea of what to expect in Language Machines—not a dry scholarly book on AI (despite being published by a university press), nor a popular book meant to capitalize on AI hype or fear, but a unique analysis of what large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT do that references linguistics, computing, and most interestingly to me, literary theory.
Weatherby has a few fundamental points that support his understanding of LLMs. The first is that LLMs produce language. This might seem obvious, but as Weatherby makes clear, some linguists insist that LLMs are not producing language. This is the view of Noam Chomsky, whom Weatherby uses to illustrate what he calls the “syntax” view of language, which proposes that language is located in the brain, meaning there is some underlying biological, cognitive structure that allows us to use language—a “universal grammar.” From this view, LLMs don’t produce language but rather a pale imitation of it, as they lack the underlying cognitive function that would give rise to language. This scientific view of language, which seems to me to be a sort of biological determinism, leaves us ill equipped to understand the output of LLMs, as all it can do is say, “that’s not language,” dismissing the matter as someone else’s concern. Read more »
by Eric Schenck
These are some of the things you will hear from frequent international travelers:
“Food is the passport to the entire world.”
“Every dish tells a story about its country’s past.”
“Exploring new cuisines is the best way to appreciate other cultures.”
While these feel a bit melodramatic, I suppose they have a point. One of the great joys of life is wonderful food. Another is fun trips to different places. Combine them both, and you have a winning combination.
And if I’m honest about my own life:
I’d do anything for a taco (both in Mexico and elsewhere).
Not only because they are delicious- but because of how often they’ve been there for me. So in the name of these little bundles of joy-
Here are some of my favorite tacos from the past few years.
The “breakup” tacos
I went through a bad breakup at the beginning of 2023. My girlfriend and I had just bought a camper van, named it Margarita, and planned to travel through central America in it.
We didn’t even make it out of Texas.
It sucked, but I wasn’t going to let that ruin my fun. I drove Maragarita over 6,000 miles the next two months, and made a stop in Hot Springs, Arkansas. After a 17-mile hike that day, I was toast- and so hungry.
Guess what I ate? Read more »
by Barry Goldman
Somebody screwed up. That much was clear. A batch of parts that was supposed to go through process A was instead sent through process B. The parts had to be scrapped. The job was delayed by several days. The customer was furious. The boss called in the manager who was in charge of the plant at the time of the mix-up. The manager appeared at the meeting along with a representative. The boss asked for an explanation. The manager and his representative made their arguments. The boss determined the manager was at fault and imposed a two-week suspension without pay. The manager appealed the suspension, and the case went to arbitration.
At the hearing, the manager’s lawyer argued that the plant rules require an employee to be given 24 hours written notice before an investigative interview. Here, there was no written notice. The boss merely called the manager and told him to come to his office. Since the company failed to comply with the notice requirement, the lawyer argued, the investigative interview was improper, and the discipline was invalid.
The company argued that the manager had effectively waived the notice requirement. By appearing at the investigative interview with a representative and participating in the meeting, and by failing to request an adjournment or to raise the issue of notice, the manager had tacitly agreed to proceed without the notice required by the plant rules.
The purpose of the notice requirement, after all, is to ensure the employee has an opportunity to appear and present his case. The idea is simply to get everyone in the same room at the same time with the same agenda. Since the employee did appear and did present his case, the purpose of the rule was served. To invalidate the discipline on the grounds that the notice provision was violated would elevate form over substance. Read more »
by Dick Edelstein
When an overdose of reading the news causes the horrors of today’s global politics to hit my psyche like a flurry of blows in a boxing ring, attending a poetry event can remind me of the value of life’s small pleasures and reaffirm my faith in the good intentions of at least some parts of humanity.
Recently I attended the Sunflower Sessions, a poetry reading held regularly in Dublin that enjoys a certain status among local poetry buffs. Its organizers make a concerted effort to maintain the reputation and continuity of the readings, taking their responsibility to heart as a sort of sacred trust. This sentiment was reflected by quite a few of the people who read their poetry that night when they used part of their reading time to thank the organizers of the event for their conscientious efforts.
Twenty years is a long time for a regular poetry event to persist and the three Dubliners of long experience who organize it are only too conscious of the pitfalls. Success depends on constantly attracting new participants while retaining the interest of poets and spectators who have already attended many times. Also, there is the precariousness of having to depend on the generosity of pub owners or managers to provide a free venue. Master of ceremonies Declan McLoughlin, while promoting FLARE, the quarterly poetry magazine associated with the event, admonished his audience, “If you only have enough money to buy the magazine or a pint, then get the pint because since COVID it’s become nearly impossible to find a free venue.”
The success of this venture can teach us a few things about the appeal of poetry reading in an age where the mass media strongly compete and generational change drives cultural preferences. Although these sessions are popular among poets who have passed into middle age and beyond, the organizers make an effort to appeal to the younger generations, making it clear that the door is wide open to them and to participants from all parts of Dublin society, including those whose native language is not English. While this is not an easy task, their efforts continue to prosper as they manage to bring together poets and listeners from different social groups and generations. In the face of these challenges, keeping the reading series going is like cultivating a delicate flower. Read more »
by Steve Gimbel
Every neighborhood seems to have at least one. You know him, the walking guy. No matter the time of day, you seem to see him out strolling through the neighborhood. You might not know his name or where exactly he lives, but all your neighbors know exactly who you mean when you say “that walking guy.” This summer, that became me.
I needed to drop serious weight, so I made up my mind and went all in. I cleaned up my diet, started intermittent fasting, and a resistance training regimen. I needed to add cardio and would initially alternate between the elliptical and taking long walks. Online experts and “experts” extolled the fat-burning power of brisk walks and as a philosopher, the walks were nice because I could get in my head and work through the arguments of whatever I was writing as I also expended calories.
I found myself walking more often and longer distances until my daily routine involved a seven mile path which I would trod first thing in the morning and then again in the evening, taking advantage of the late sunset. It certainly accomplished the intended goal, I’m down 59 pounds (my goal was 60 before the start of classes and with a week and a half left until the semester launches, this should be easily accomplished). But what surprised me was a secondary benefit, an interesting connection to those around me.
My walk takes about three hours to complete. Twice a day, that means that I am walking the same neighborhood streets for six hours each day. As a result, virtually everyone along that trail knows me by sight and an odd but interesting set of relationships have developed. Read more »
