I’m a musician. I’ll admit that when I was a teen, I got into it as a way to improve my status with women. I don’t know that it ever helped much; I’m no superstar. Still, I’ve stayed a musician. Music has stayed functional in my life. But now, music represents something other than status [...]

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You’re in love, or so you think. You certainly feel in love, but now that you’ve been run through the mill a few times, you wonder what the feeling really means.
You love being loved. But think about it, why does this person love you? What’s the motivation? When someone says, “I love you,” what does [...]

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Loosely speaking, time is like zipping up a very long zipper. The future is open; the past is closed. The present is like the zipslide closing up possibilities. While we may not be able to determine what happened in the past, the past is nonetheless determined. The future is not. It’s unknowably open. There is [...]

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Most people even mildly interested in evolution have heard about the “selfish gene.” The concept is simple yet with counterintuitive implications. Richard Dawkins, who coined the term, argues that the best way to understand evolution is to imagine that genes selfishly want to preserve themselves, and so produce elaborate replicator vehicles (us) designed to help [...]

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“Give the work to the busy man,” my mother used to say. It made sense. A busy man (or woman, in her case) had momentum and a can-do spirit.
The technical name for a can-do spirit is self-efficacy, a belief that you are capable of being effective. Psychologist Albert Bandura, who coined the term, attributes this [...]

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