A life in words

  • City water caused my acid reflux; filtering eliminates it

    City water caused my acid reflux; filtering eliminates it

    For over a decade I’ve had on-and-off heartburn. But mostly it was no big deal—just one of those discontents of modernity—until a few years ago, when out of nowhere I started to have acid reflux. Not just any acid reflux—it was nasty. I’d wake up with pains shooting through my entire body. Or not be…

  • Harris and class

    First I’ll mention race: Harris’s ancestry is so mixed that in a sense it’s an error to assign her to any one of the traditional (and arbitrary) racial categories. She truly is a product of globalization of the gene pool, and is a taste of the inevitable future when Americans broadly have ancestors from all…

  • Where I’m at with Mormonism: a ramble

    Where I’m at with Mormonism: a ramble

    The question was always there in the back of my mind.

He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that. His reasons may be good, and no one may have been able to refute them. But if he is equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side; if he does not so much as know what they are, he has no ground for preferring either opinion…. Nor is it enough that he should hear the arguments of adversaries from his own teachers, presented as they state them, and accompanied by what they offer as refutations…. He must be able to hear them from persons who actually believe them; who defend them in earnest, and do their very utmost for them. He must know them in their most plausible and persuasive form….John Stuart Mill, On LIberty