ESSAYS
Essays and reflections
Long-form writing on philosophy, technology, culture, faith, work, and the questions that shape a life.
Books for the Market, Books for a Life
The Ranking That Opened a Different Question A ranking of bestselling novels in Japan recently gave me an unexpected reason to think about reading.…
The Book Beside the Modem
Waiting for the Page to Arrive My first experiences of the internet in the late 1990s began with a sound. Before a webpage could…
The House Built by Writing
The Beginning Without a Blueprint When I started Tom’s Blog in 2019, I chose one of the most familiar templates available on WordPress.com. Anyone…
The Faith We Sang Together
The Hymns That Remember Us Only after many decades do we begin to understand what certain songs have carried for us. A traditional hymn…
The Attacker Without Intent
Behind Every Attack For most of the history of cybersecurity, one assumption has remained so basic that it rarely needed to be stated. Behind…
The Brief Age of Everything
The Return of the Question of Meaning A curious criticism has emerged from within the technology industry. Some of the people who helped build…
The Map That Turns Back on the Observer
The Human Desire for a Map Human disagreements rarely concern facts alone. People may receive the same information and reach opposing conclusions because they…
Beyond Life’s Turmoil
The Place Where We Usually Live A difficult conversation can occupy an entire day. A careless remark may remain in the mind long after…
The Library We Carry Within
The Strange Feeling That Something Is Missing Most people who spend time reading today eventually notice a curious feeling. They finish article after article,…
Standing Outside Our Own Time
The Difficulty of Seeing the Age We Live In One of history’s quiet ironies is that people rarely understand the age in which they…
Looking for something older?