Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.

Two years ago, out of the blue, Rich announced that he wanted to become a consulting detective. I think he was kidding, but ever since then, he’s spent countless hours taking online courses in foiling pickpockets, following people, picking locks, and spotting micro-expressions and evasive techniques that reveal people are lying. Nowadays it’s nearly impossible…

During our 20 years in Cleveland, houseguests were such a rarity (I can’t imagine why) that Rich and I spent days preparing the house, weeks planning ways to entertain them and months afterwards writing to apologize yet again for the dog chewing up their favorite pair of blue jeans. Each visit was a seismic event…

The Wisconsin parents. Photo courtesy of Reddit / IMUGR / Facebook As a teenager, I could not have imagined many fates more excruciating than having my mom and dad post embarrassing pictures of themselves where my friends could see them. Apparently this has occurred to some of today’s harassed parents, who have resorted to using…

Photo by Hotelstvedi In last week’s post, I wrote about grisly stays in flophouses and soulless chains, but for annoyance and discomfort, it’s hard to beat the night I spent in Newark Airport. Our flight from Spain had arrived late, somewhere around midnight, long after our connecting flight had departed. In our naiveté, Rich and…

I have nothing against five star hotels – a little creamy elegance and fawning service never hurt anybody – but given a choice, I’ll always go for small, quaint and unusual. Give me a converted windmill, rice barge, convent or olive farm any day over a cookie-cutter corporate chain. There’s so much more to talk…

In last week’s post I wrote, “Age alone does not make you irrelevant.” Apparently the U.S. Transportation Safety Administration doesn’t agree. In January, it declared that travelers older than 75 no longer have to take off their shoes to pass through airport security. In its infinite wisdom, our government has decided that after our 74th…

Lately, in Seville, I’ve noticed a lot of people wandering the streets in pajamas. Well, not all that many, really, just three in as many weeks, which I suppose is a pretty small percentage of the city’s 703,000 residents. I went up to one particularly befuddled octogenarian and asked if he needed help. He looked…

There are rare, sublime moments when city planners bring together the perfect combination of vaulting ambition, wasteful spending and designed-by-committee bad taste to produce an architectural landmark so stunningly wrong that it will give everybody something to gossip about for generations. In Seville, ours can be found in the Plaza de la Encarnación . Photo…

Many years ago, Rich and I were in northern India near the Pakistan border and wanted to take an overnight train that would get us to New Delhi at 7:00 in the morning. We managed to get a private compartment; there was no bedding, of course, but we made ourselves reasonably comfortable during the chilly…

One night in the old Soviet city of Tblisi, Georgia, at the end of many hours of toasting and feasting, our host took out a knife the size of a machete. He seized the remains of the whole roast pig, which by that point in the evening had been reduced to a few rib bones…