ESSAYS
Essays and reflections
Long-form writing on philosophy, technology, culture, faith, work, and the questions that shape a life.
What Are We Growing Toward?
The Tiredness That Rest Does Not Reach There are evenings when we close the computer and wonder why we feel so exhausted. We have…
When Knowledge Turns the Neighbor into an Enemy
A Sentence Heard at Mass On Sunday, my wife and I attended Mass. The second reading came from Romans 13:8–10, where Paul recalls several…
Living, Fast and Slow
The Drama Hidden in Pace One of the recurring dramas of everyday life is the tension between moving slowly and moving fast. Advice about…
The Flat World and the Globalization of Intelligence
The Work That Arrived by Morning One of the most memorable scenes in Thomas Friedman’s The World Is Flat involves an American executive completing…
The Permission to Enjoy Being Alive
When Exercise Begins to Feel Like Punishment Exercise is supposed to make us feel more alive. The heart works harder, blood circulates, breathing deepens,…
The Thinker, the Translator, and the Audience
A Small Name for a Larger Question Living outside Japan, I sometimes encounter a new Japanese expression after the conversation around it is already…
The Intelligence That Cannot Move a Text Box
Two Experiences of the Same Intelligence I recently found myself moving between two very different experiences of artificial intelligence. In one, I was having…
The Tools Between Thought and Words
A Writer Who Never Left His Word Processor There is something wonderfully anachronistic about imagining Seigo Matsuoka at work in the 2020s. Around him…
The Thought Within Every Practice
When the Formula Comes Before the Question Many students first encounter mathematics as a sequence of instructions. Memorize the formula, identify the type of…
The Right to Understand
The Documents That Refused to Speak Most people have encountered a document that appears to be written in English but does not seem addressed…
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