Stoic Backgammon is Live The dice choose the numbers. You choose the move. Stoic Backgammon is now available on Amazon. Hardcover, paperback, and Kindle editions are all available now. This book is not a strategy guide with philosophy sprinkled on top. It is not a Stoicism book with dice metaphors. It is both, and it is neither. Nine chapters, each built around a backgammon concept and a Stoic principle. The anchor. The blitz. The prime. The bear-off. ...
Subject: The Pause “You have power over your mind—not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength.” — Marcus Aurelius, Meditations (paraphrase — no translation contains this wording; the genuine 4.18 in Long’s rendering is “How much trouble he avoids who does not look to see what his neighbor says or does or thinks, but only to what he does himself”) (Long, 1862) There’s a moment between stimulus and response where everything lives. ...
I did not set out to use artificial intelligence as part of my writing process. Like most things in my work, it began as a practical response to a problem. I was trying to clarify an idea: tighten an argument that felt structurally sound but poorly expressed. The tool I was using responded with something unexpected: not just a rephrasing, but a reframing. It wasn’t always correct. Often it wasn’t. But it forced a different question: ...
🪞 A Reflection The clearest high point of 2025 was finally giving my writing the honesty it had been waiting for. I stopped circling the truth and began trusting it. Pages that had stalled for years moved once I allowed myself to write without self-protection or apology. Writing became less about producing and more about listening—staying present long enough for the right sentences to surface. Much of that work is finding its way into Misaligned, a book I plan to publish on June 10, 2026, shaped by questions I’ve carried for decades. The year didn’t resolve my story, but it helped me tell it more truthfully. ...
🪞 A Reflection “Most people can bear adversity. But if you wish to know what a man really is, give him power. This is the supreme test.” — Ingersoll, said of Lincoln (“Abraham Lincoln: A Lecture,” 1895) Attribution note: this line is routinely credited to Lincoln, but it does not appear anywhere in his writings or speeches. It is a compression of Robert G. Ingersoll’s tribute to him: “Most people can bear adversity. But if you wish to know what a man really is, give him power. This is the supreme test.” “Abraham Lincoln: A Lecture” (1895). ...
“We are a way for the cosmos to know itself.” Carl Sagan would have turned 91 today. For millions who first met him through Cosmos or the pages of The Demon-Haunted World, his voice remains a beacon: calm, curious, and utterly unwilling to surrender wonder to superstition. He invited us not merely to look up, but to understand what we saw, to marry awe with evidence. 1 · A Voice for the Ages Sagan’s gift was not just that he knew the universe; it was that he could make the universe knowable. At a time when science often felt remote, he made it intimate: hydrogen burning in the hearts of stars, atoms forged in supernovae finding their way into human hands. To watch him speak was to feel that curiosity itself was sacred. ...
🪞 A Reflection “Science is more than a body of knowledge; it is a way of thinking.” “Science is a way of skeptically interrogating the universe with a fine understanding of human fallibility.” — Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World, ch. 2, and Charlie Rose, 27 May 1996 Source note: the two clauses above are real Sagan, but they come from two different sources and had been joined into one quotation. The first is from The Demon-Haunted World*, ch. 2; the second from Sagan’s final* Charlie Rose interview (27 May 1996), reprinted in Conversations with Carl Sagan (2006). Neither source contains the other’s clause. ...
I always knew the universe was enormous. At least in the abstract. But it took Carl Sagan to make me feel it. Not as trivia, but as orientation. Not as a chapter in a book, but as a posture in life. Sagan didn’t say, look at the stars. He said, look at us because of the stars. There’s a difference. One informs. The other transforms. As the world gets louder and more certain of itself, I return to Sagan, not for nostalgia, but calibration. He wasn’t offering escape. He was offering proportion. ...
Look again at that pale blue dot. A speck suspended in sunlight. Every person you’ve ever loved. Every shout, every triumph, every quiet act of grace. All of it, balanced on a pixel. Distance compresses us. It turns conflict into noise and perspective into truth. From out there, certainty looks small. Humility looks like intelligence. Curiosity looks like courage. The Pale Blue Dot does not diminish us. It clarifies us. ...
🌎 Reflection: The Contributions of Invasive Humans Last Monday was Indigenous Peoples Day, which means we once again pretended that reflection counts as redemption. Politicians tweeted something solemn, schools trotted out platitudes, and by early Tuesday we were back to bulldozing what was left. History books call it exploration. The truth is simpler: invasion with better PR. We arrived, took what wasn’t ours, renamed everything, and congratulated ourselves for our courage. The native peoples gave us corn, medicine, and balance. We gave them disease, treaties written in disappearing ink, and a few casinos to make the math look fair. ...