Why is name-dropping so irresistible? For one, it gives you a sense of importance and makes you think it validates your relevance. Yet, its delivery and the reception are almost always opposite. It rarely makes you look good. It almost never has the effect one intends it to do. It doesn’t produce admiration, respect, or even jealousy or resentment.

If anything, name-dropping makes you look like a person with a lack of self-awareness, desperate for importance. It is the hallmark of the insufferable.

I always admire people who are paradoxically humble and down-to-earth. If they name-drop, it is entirely unintentional. In their indifference to things like these, they reveal a deeper alignment of two forms of awareness: of the self and of of other people.

And that takes real work. That is difficult to obtain. That is worthy of admiration.

I spent the weekend in Fire Island Pines. I met some incredible personalities as they invited me into their homes. A non-trivial amount of time was spent listening to conversations. Most of it was people talk.

I have been contemplating on the ethics of gossip —when it is permissible and how to practice it well. The main problem with gossip within a friend group is this: a friend who gossips to you about another friend is very likely do the same to you —save for confidants and romantic partners, where a code of confidentiality is baked into the relationship. It is fascinating how gossipy friends are rarely aware that they are publicly advertising that behavior to their audience. And in so doing, they are communicating to others that they are not worthy of trust. “If he is saying that about Pat, I wonder what he is saying about me behind my back?”

On the other hand, gossip serves as a systems-level self-corrective mechanism that lowers the reputation of perceived bad actors in a social graph. By spreading these warning signals to multiple vertices, it reduces the kinetic energy of a specific vertex or node in the social graph. In this sense, gossip serves as sort of an auto-immune response to a threat. The problem with this is when the information is slander, exaggerated, or simply untrue. Then it invites the formation of a second layer of gossip about the untruthful gossiper. It all quickly becomes a corrosive stack of layers of conversation that is built on untrustworthiness and cattiness.

True relationships cannot survive this. Genuine friendships rely on a sense of mutual trust, that ethereal and vanishing element that is earned by the drop and lost by the buckets.

People like to talk about people. To be high-minded and oblivious to this is to disengage from public life. Even Eleanor Roosevelt was talking about people when she denounced it:

Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people.

One axiom remains the gold standard: praise people behind their back and criticize to their face one-on-one. If you are going to contribute in negative gossip, make sure you have already said that to their face. This not only protects you from back-firing, but is just a staple of being a good person. And that reason alone should be enough.

9/11 is reaching its quarter-century anniversary. Americans are at a point in their history where the events of 9/11 are beginning to slip meaningfully from living memory into the crepuscular pages of history. At some point, they will cross a line in the next few years where more than half of their population was born after 9/11 or were too young to remember.

I was 6 years old. All I remembered was my brother snatching away a weekly magazine from my hands featuring that harrowing explosion of the second plane in the front cover. I remember learning more about it years later in middle school.

The moment Americans find themselves, fully simmered in the post-truth era, is already troubling. In this mist of confusion and mistrust, Americans may not be able to do what Timothy Snyder urged to: to remain calm when the unthinkable arrives.

The Weinmar Republic of the 21st century may very well end in another Reichstag Fire-like event.

Unless they remember their history.

A recurring memory:

I was in the first class of Cultural Foundations at N.Y.U. London. The Professor was discussing the syllabus and expectations for the rest of the semester. He presented a dilemma he thought most of us would encounter at least once in the semester as freshmen: that we would have to choose between going out to a party or stay in and do the readings. He reenacted a hypothetical conversation between two students, emphasizing the temptation and the allure of going out and having fun. He warned us we would encounter many more of those moments in our lives.

He was right.

I choose to swim. I choose to get quality sleep. I choose the 9pm bedtime. I choose the repetitive healthy meals. I choose the boring routine.

Choosing to do the readings has served me well.

This summer I did my first trip to Fire Island Pines to volunteer for the annual Pines Party —a weekend-long celebration on the beach and private house parties.

Where have I been all this time? Why did I self rejected from even doing a day trip? I am already 31 years old and I had rejected myself from paradise for so many years. The mind plays funny tricks…

One of the highlights of that trip was going to a house party near dusk. It offered its guests an open deck overlooking the Great South Bay. What a view! And the music! The DJ, playing over the deck, with the bay as her acoustical backdrop. The sun, perched over the horizon, was the disco ball.

At some point, a bevy of swans emerged from the horizon, waltzing towards us, as if entranced with the music, only to continue waltzing towards that magical sun, setting on the mainland.

I often wonder where would I be had I trusted myself more and ignored what the naysayers say. It is a lesson to learn and relearn to have the courage to become the person you want to become. To take action. To build. To create. To experiment. To fail. To try again. To fail again. To try again. To overcome.

Hoy comienza la cuarta década. Tengo unas ganas enormes de hacer cambios en la trayectoria en la que me encuentro. Veo mi futuro por el cañón de una escopeta. Bendito el retorno de Saturno. Es tiempo de escuchar mi voz interior, de no desperdiciar esa tolerancia al riesgo que trae la juventud. Es tiempo de pausar y reflexionar. Quizâs viajar por un rato, o cambiar de carrera, moverme a otro continente, iniciar nuevos proyectos, aprender una nueva lengua, hacer nuevos amigos, o descubrir nuevas pasiones. El reloj se acelera y me reuso vivir una vida de potencial desperdiciado. Le temo a la mediocridad. Le temo a la complacencia aprendida. Le temo a la blandeza de la aceptación. Me reuso a la conformidad que trae la paz interna y equanimidad.

Si el objetivo de esta existencia es de encontrar paz rumbo a la santidad y liberación del mundo terrenal —qué aburrido. La iluminación espiritual apaga la flama de la pasión. Hay mucha riqueza en la realidad por descubrir y compartir.

Cualquier novela o historia requiere de personajes imperfectos con personalidades defectuosas para hacerla interesante.

Una vida sin (drama) no vale la pena vivirla. Por alguna razón Sócrates, el sabio de los sabios, eligió ser el tabano social de Atenas.

Bienvenido sea la abundancia, drama, e intriga.

Alexis de Tocqueville named his 1835 book “Democracy in America”, not “American Democracy.” I think he did it intentionally. As if he knew that democracy is rare and precious, not exceptional or inevitable, much less inherent to a nation or city-state. He has been proven right.

Wouldn’t it be nice to have an interactive tool that allows you to play with visible absorption spectrum curves and see how the geometry and distribution of single or multiple curves affect the resulting color? Can the same color be produced from different combinations of curves?

Something similar should be applied for particle size distribution curves, where you see the effect on the distribution of particles in a virtual two-dimensional cross section.

Someone needs to code and implement this. It would help enliven the inanimate textbook graphs .

David Hume once asserted that “reason is the slave of passions.” I think he is right. Nietschze’s Apollonian and Dionysian dichotomy of intellect and pleasure, of self-restraint and disinhibition, of prudence and folly, is not a binary choice, nor a uni-dimensional spectrum. These may reinforce. Reasoning begins with curiosity, and ends with boring blandness. Curiosity is the eros of the mind.

The next time you want to write, figure out what makes you angry and use that as fuel for sound reasoning.