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.

The Master said, ‘Yu, shall I tell you what it is to know[?] To say you know when you know, and to say you do not when you do not, that is knowledge.’Confucius, The Analects, II.17, trans. D. C. Lau, Penguin 1979