Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.

Let’s face it, we all do incredibly foolish things on occasion. Back in the 1960s many of us spent years experimenting with dubious substances that makes me wonder, in retrospect, how any of us made it into the 1970s alive and with more than six functioning brain cells. And think about all the ludicrous risks…

​As you’ve no doubt noticed, things have gotten messy lately. And I don’t mean you-need-to-clean-your-room messy, I’m talking about full-scale, five-alarm pandemonium, as if we’d all just learned that the Earth’s been dislodged from its orbit and is falling into the sun. Not pleasant, obviously. But extremely energizing . And no one is more energized…

​We Americans are famous for finding geographic solutions to all sorts of problems. Trouble at home or college? Road trip! Can’t find a job? Move across the country! Want to add a bit of zing to your retirement? Go abroad! As a travel writer, I love covering (and living) these stories. ​ ​I was raised…

The Baltic States: Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania ​Watching resistance movements growing around the globe, I’ve started thinking of places I’ve visited where oppressed people have won their freedom against seemingly impossible odds. Last year Rich and I traveled through the Baltic States, where much of the last century involved occupation by the Russian Empire, the…

When I was a teenager, a student at a nearby high school asked his history teacher the inevitable question about why good Germans did nothing while the Nazis rose to power. The teacher, Ron Jones , hit on a creative way to demonstrate the answer. His classroom experiment began the next Monday with a description…

​Wednesday morning, I had a truly astonishing experience. I sat in a coffee house surrounded by more than a dozen people of various ages and nationalities, and — get this! — not one of them was using an electronic device . I didn’t see a single laptop or iPad, and while one woman did pull…

​“I got out of bed in the middle of the night,” my sister Kate recalls. “And stepped into a pool of water.” She tried to wake her husband, but he just mumbled in his sleep, “Put a towel on it.” “I don’t think that’s going to do it, honey. The entire house is flooded.” That…

​I am very excited about my new biometric American passport. And I really hope that I get to see it someday. Because like just about everything else that happened in 2016, it’s gotten . . . complicated. It all started simply enough. To avoid even the remote possibility of a hiccup in my ability to…

About four o’clock Sunday afternoon, Rich and I strolled out of our house in downtown San Anselmo, California and ran into a neighbor in her eighties. She was jauntily attired in pajamas, bathrobe, and slippers to walk her dog. “Some things never change,” Rich murmured happily. ​ ​Embracing eccentricity is one of the hallmarks of…

Our route on the “In Search of America” tour When you live abroad, you always worry that you might start to feel a bit disconnected from your home country. America is something you have to stay in practice for, and I don’t want to lose my touch. Arriving in my native California just in time…