The name is Magnus PS. <img src="https://i.imgur.com/vwzfPwz.jpeg" alt="Proosit" style="width:280px; height:280px; bor...
You can love pet rocks all you want. Still, nobody's gonna pay you to hold one. I've spent years reading about the elderly. Books, blue zones, long conversations with people who've actually finished the race. All trying to figure out what they wish they'd gotten right. And it keeps coming back to three things: your person, your health, your work. Get those three right and everything else ... the…
I had a list. Estonian. Debt-free. Family not certifiably insane. Grit, faith, an athlete with a strong mindset. I carried that list around for the better part of a decade, like a man carrying a treasure map to a mountain that didn't exist. Then I fell in love with a girl from Long Island who checked half of it, and I've never been so grateful to be wrong. That's the whole essay, really.…
Read these two sentences and see which one you find yourself nodding to before you've even finished. The government's gotten fat and lazy, and it's high time somebody made it earn its keep again. The richest country on earth ought to be ashamed that so many of its own can't afford to get sick. If it was the first, I already know how you vote. If it was the second, same trick, different jersey. And…
Ask ten Americans what it means to be American and you'll get eleven opinions, most of them shouted. We like to picture our founding as a moment of unity. A room full of powdered wigs, nodding in solemn agreement. It wasn't. It was a room full of men who despised each other's positions and stayed in the room anyway. That, right there, is the oldest American tradition. Older than baseball. Older…
Ask a man who his favorite Americans are, and you learn less about the dead and more about the living. So, here are mine ... A runaway apprentice who taught a city to stop burning. A man who treated grief like a mountain ... something you climbed, not something you sat in. Two brothers who might have been our last honest shot at living in the light Three different centuries. Three different kinds…
Two hundred and fifty years ago, men with everything to lose bet it all on an idea: that ordinary people might govern themselves. It was a reckless bet, and it paid off. For some, right away, and for the rest of us, eventually. That's the part worth sitting with. The Revolution didn't free everyone at once. It freed enough people, with enough conviction, that the freeing kept going for two and a…
This past Father's Day I took my wife to see Jack Johnson, who is, against all odds and all algorithms, still touring. We navigated our way past full lot upon full lot until we found our spot. We followed the herd through the gates. By the time he ambled on stage - no pyrotechnics, no dancers, just a man and a guitar - the whole arena had become one animal, breathing in time. ... I looked around…
This past weekend we celebrated Jaanipäev (St. John's Day), the summer solstice, the longest day of the year and one of the biggest holidays in the Nordic calendar. Long before anyone called it St. John's Day, it was simply Midsummer. A pagan celebration that stretched across ancient Europe, from Britain to Ukraine, marking the longest day / shortest night of the year, depending on who you asked.…
There are two kinds of people walking around this earth. There's the Tiggers. Bouncing, present, convinced the next thing is going to be wonderful. And there's the Eeyores. Tail dragging, clouds gathering, muttering that nobody ever tells him anything and that it probably wouldn't matter if they did. Here's the part that'll sting a little: most Eeyores don't know they're Eeyores. They think…
Over a decade ago, Sebastian Junger wrote a slim little book called Tribe. I read it cover to cover in twenty-four hours. I've been chewing on it ever since ... I picked it up in a Seattle airport. Walked past it first. Sat at my gate. Then, something in me wouldn't let it go. I went back. Bought it. And somewhere over the Cascades, it cracked something open in me. The timing mattered. I'd spent…