Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.

What do you think of California? Frank Lloyd Wright embraced the continental tilt theory that everything loose rolls to California. (True enough.) Truman Capote sneered, “It’s a scientific fact that if you stay in California you lose one point of your IQ every year.” (False, I hope.) Author Edward Abbey said, “There is science, logic,…

​ ​“Democracy is four wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch.” Ambrose Bierce “If you want to know what God thinks of money, just look at the people he gave it to.” Dorothy Parker “The better I get to know men, the more I find myself loving dogs.” Charles de Gaulle…

​There are few things that make me feel more at home than chaos in the kitchen. Having grown up in a large, boisterous family and hosted countless pot-luck dinners, I love the hubbub, companionship, and delicious meals that somehow miraculously result from the combined efforts of an excessive number of cooks working feverishly in a…

Most of us are turning to comfort food, but some are expressing their angst with voodoo cooking. Photo: Tina Dawson, Love Is in My Tummy ​It happened at the Punjab burrito place in a nearby village. I was so delighted to see it had finally reopened that I didn’t stop to consider whether, after a…

​“It’s a course about what ?” I asked incredulously. “Why would you want to learn how to be grumpier?” The subject was a sensitive one, as the atmosphere around our house has been rather wobbly this week. For a start — and I know just how petty and trivial this is — we completed what…

There are guys you absolutely know are going to be trouble the minute you spot them, and the first person I met in Naples, Italy was one of them. Rich and I had been in town just ten minutes, at the tail end of a three-month railway journey some years ago, and already I had…

Do you have a pandemic playlist? Me neither. But then, I’m the least musical person on the planet. At the other end of the spectrum, the folks giving out vaccines at San Francisco’s vast Moscone Center decided to energize the staff and patients by playing songs that have now become famous around here for reducing…

“You won’t believe what we did last night,” a friend told me Sunday. “We went out to a movie! Every other row was blocked off, and there was hardly anybody in the theater. A few rows in front of us there was a woman with a collie dog. The movie was a classic comedy, and…

“I read somewhere that your house is a reflection of your soul,” my sister Kate once told me when her sons were little. She looked around at the chaos, rolled her eyes, then laughed. “God, I hope that’s not true.” I could see what she meant; it’s natural to believe our inner lives should be…

​“So he says, ‘Try to remember these twenty words, in order, with their numbers.” Rich was describing Jim Kwik’s online course Improve Your Memory Now from the Omega Institute . “He said he could teach us to recall them so well that if he said ‘eleven’ we’d immediately respond ‘skis.’” “How’d you do?” I asked.…