Part of my day job is parsing the human brain, as it is specifically applied to social thinking, group dynamics and communication. To...

I recently finished a book, AI in Sci-Fi: Fictional Artificial Minds and the Real World Awaiting Them, in which I survey the many AIs and...

I shared earlier that my mom had cultivated in me an interest in creative self-investment. Little did I know at the time just now rapidly...

My parents had eased up on the whole rock music thing, to the point where by my junior year of high school it was a distant memory. I had...

It was largely Star Trek that focused my mind on science and reason, starting around 1972 – but it was the World Book Encyclopedia that...

The Boys Club near Water Street and George Harrison’s “My Sweet Lord” were a start, music-wise; but it was when we moved out of the town...

Here’s one of the happiest pieces of the past for me. When we lived in Lexington, we were nestled in a quiet, very peaceful post-war...

A year after my week as the boyfriend of Mary Bock from Roachdale, that town rose to my attention again. As school resumed in the fall...

My Fundamentalist youth began, of course, the day I was born, at Kentucky Baptist Hospital in Louisville, to Fundamentalist parents –...

Men notice women. Women notice men. We’re wired to notice the opposite sex, and to experience attraction when we do. We couldn’t shut it...

In 1970, our family lived in East Point, Georgia, a community ironically to the west of Atlanta. My father had taken what would end up...

(Photo courtesy of Bill Roberts) Back to the summer of 1971. For reasons I was never clear on, I was on my first just-me-and-Dad trip...

“There are 492 billionaires in the United States, and not one of those losers has decided to become Batman.” ~Pinterest meme Since I was...

My dad’s church camp dean thing was only one expression of his propensity for youth ministry. Still just early thirtysomething himself,...

It’s the summer of 1971. We now live in Crawfordsville, Indiana, in a very old house on Water Street, built almost a century earlier. Up...

My ultimate fate was decided on the night of October 27, 1967. How do I remember that so precisely? It’s right there in Wikipedia,...

The idea of the “End Times”, that era of human history either directly before or directly after the Second Coming of Christ (depending on...

When you spend as much time in church as families like ours did – which is to say, every moment of every day you weren’t at home or in...

When I was a kid, growing up immersed in Midwestern Fundamentalism, we had to be pretty innovative in seeking out fun. We spent an...

Silicon Valley venture capitalist Peter Thiel, in a conversation with New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, weighed in on that most...