Musical Instruments and the Difficulty of Mastery

One of my favorite places to go is the Musical Instrument Museum. Located in the northern reaches of Phoenix, it’s about an hour’s drive from my home. But the drive is always worth it, whether I am attending a cultural event, a live concert, or wandering for hours through the museum itself, captivated by their […]

Questions are our most powerful intellectual tool. In fact, every invention is the result of someone formulating a question, and then wrestling with that question. There are times I feel particularly contemplative, and I thus ponder questions that are deep, and strange, and peculiar. Sometimes I find myself staring at the ceiling at night, plagued […]

It is interesting to note that there are scientists out there that try to measure the relative pain from various stings that we humans sometimes encounter. There’s even a famous Sting Pain Index called the Schmidt Sting Pain Index. It’s one of the strangest projects in entomology (i.e., the scientific study of insects). Created by […]

I put the title of this article in quotations because it is said in some circles that Winston Churchill once repeated those words 3 times (and only those words) in a speech he gave to a graduating class at Oxford University. Having read more than a half-dozen major biographies of Churchill, and never having seen […]

Flying first class ain’t cheap. I almost never do it. However, a case could be made for doing so if one is traveling a very far distance and must arrive as fresh as is possible. Yet even in such cases, it’s anybody’s guess if forking out the extra money is worth it because the unknown […]

One of the most memorable pieces of show music to come out of The Sound of Music was a song called My Favorite Things. The lyrics from the first three verses were captivating: Raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens Bright copper kettles and warm woolen mittens Brown paper packages tied up with strings These […]

My profession (and my nature) finds me in the enviable position of being able to observe others, especially how others interact with those around them. It’s a great learning experience. Although I am a professional speaker, and thus, find myself now and then up on a platform in front of an audience, I realize it […]

A lot of people are frightened by spiders. We even have a nursery rhyme perpetuating this fear: “Little Miss Muffet, Sat on a tuffet, Eating her curds and whey; Along came a spider, and sat down beside her, and frightened little Miss Muffet away.” (Personally, I imagine it would have been the curds that would […]

Birthdays are an opportunity to celebrate our individual humanity. Birthdays are also a chance to celebrate the individual humanness of others we care about. Birthdays give us an annual moment to look deeply into the heart of someone and say how we feel about that person. Birthdays summon our deepest wellsprings of camaraderie and enable […]

Within the history and structures of Western academic thought emerge certain lines of demarcation. We cluster our collective learning and knowledge under the Arts and the Sciences. (I could add, were I inclined, the Letters, by which I mean literature and scholarly writing in the humanities — not just creative works, but the broader intellectual […]