Category: What I’m Reading

“They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.” —F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby Like Tom and Daisy Buchanan, famous literary characters…

“The days are long but the years are short.” Wise words, but they didn’t originate from the pen of the ancient Roman sage of Stoicism, Lucius Annaeus Seneca (4 BC- AD 65). A modern-day American author, Gretchen Rubin, coined the meme-ready phrase in her bestseller “The Happiness Project” to remind young, sleep-deprived, exhausted parents that…

Technology writer Nicholas Carr is a fellow Cassandra. For those not up on their Greek mythology, Cassandra was the original #metoo victim who spurned the sexual overtures of Apollo. In return, he cursed her to become a prophetess whom no one would ever believe.  I’ve been channelling my inner Cassandra for over twenty years, issuing stark warnings…

The worst culture shock I ever experienced wasn’t over chopsticks in Beijing or about the suffocating heat of Bangkok. It happened when we moved home to Vancouver after living abroad for many years. Canada was supposed to be familiar to me. Yet, I felt completely out of synch with everything around me, including my own life. …

Who stole my focus? Looking for answers, I recently read “Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention—and How to Think Deeply Again”. Author Johann Hari basically tells me to blame the tech companies for hijacking my attention.  They’re the bad guys, he argues. Their business models are intentionally designed to capture my eyeballs. Worse, they…

The subtitle of this book encapsulates my own message about digital minimalism in general and news consumption in particular: A Manifesto for a Happier, Calmer and Wiser Life. Its Swiss author, Rolf Dobelli, first published his manifesto in 2019 but his message could not be more timely. With the most recent US Presidential election and all the other…