Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.

​“Does our township have an emergency plan?” I asked officials a few days after 9/11. I was living in semi-rural Ohio, just two hours from the Pennsylvania field where United Flight 93 crashed down. My neighbors and I were all keenly aware that plane had passed through our airspace and could, if events had unfolded…

​​Nowadays, everybody’s writing glowing articles about Seville, and unfortunately it’s pretty clear some haven’t even researched the city, much less visited it. Here’s a gem from Vogue : “ Nicknamed ‘The Frying Pan of Europe,’ this Andalusian hotspot (literal hotspot) is drenched with baking heat for 3,000 hours on an annual basis… However, if you…

Stephen Akehurst, proprietor of The Greek Kitchen , in Athens, Greece. Photographed by Ioanna Fotiadi for Greece Is One of the things I loved most about being a teenager was all the sneaking around. After years of being a studious, obedient Catholic school kid, around age fifteen I suddenly discovered the joys of clandestine shenanigans.…

Did you ever notice there are no recipes for leftover chocolate? That’s because it doesn’t exist, at least not in my family. When Rich first started coming to our summer reunions, he showed up with a two-layer box of See’s Nuts & Chews for each of my sisters. “I’m not saying I can be bought,”…

​Did I ever tell you about the night I was on my way to New York to be interviewed on national TV and managed to get myself locked inside a museum in Cleveland? This was back in the nineties, when I was living in Ohio and serving on the board of a minor downtown museum.…

​Today is our 32nd wedding anniversary. Yes, Rich and I were married two days after Christmas, creating maximum inconvenience for family and friends, especially those arriving from out of town. Selfishly, we chose this awkward date to enable us to take two weeks off work for our Costa Rica honeymoon. And although we’d talked of…

Shortly after I broke my finger in the Peruvian Amazon ​Some years ago in Peru, Rich and I were paddling canoes in an obscure subsidiary of the Amazon (the river, of course, not the online retailer) when I broke my finger. I’d like to tell you I sustained the injury wresting with an alligator, fending…

With so many of you writing to ask me about the practicalities of living in Spain, I thought you might like to hear the story of my friend Sarah Gemba, who moved to Seville about the same time I did, following a very different trajectory. She arrived as a teenage student and is now the…

​“So we’re going to take the train through the famous Chunnel at last,” I remarked rapturously. Rich and I had been talking about it for years — ever since the Chunnel opened in 1994, in fact — and last September, as part of a surprise birthday excursion, he arranged for us to take the 2.75-hour…

“Is a groveling email offering to pay damages enough?” I asked Rich the morning after the party. “Or do you think this requires www.FakeMyDeath.com?” “Let’s see how they respond to the email,” he said soothingly. “Maybe it’s not as bad as you think.” It all started innocently enough when an American friend here in Seville…