My wife and I are (finally, slowly) watching Breaking Bad. While we’re enjoying the show, I’m struck by how the main character, Walter White, justifies increasingly immoral actions under the guise of “providing for his family.” As a parent presently freelancing, I can relate to his concern; I stress about finding my next project in…
My wife returned to full-time work in early December, and since we were only able to find half-time childcare for our two-year-old, I’ve been working freelance part-time and spending my afternoons as the primary parent. It’s been exhausting, rewarding, terrifying, and exhilarating. A quick summary of my experience thus far follows.Financially: I earned less on…
TL;DR: If you can’t trust your employees with 24 hours’ access to email to say their goodbyes after you let them know they’re being laid off, you have a major problem with your hiring, firing, and/or internal communications. In the first season of Game of Thrones, we get an immediate sense of Ned Stark’s basic…
I have just made both the scariest and, I believe, best decision of my professional life. My wife just returned to the workforce after having parented our daughter full-time since her birth in 2020. Our daughter is enrolled in half-time daycare, so for the immediate future, at least, I am taking care of her from…
I recently decided to purchase more life insurance. We are a single-income household, and while my wife could go back to work in the event of something horrific happening to me, I wanted to make sure that she and our daughter would have ample time to grieve and decide what made sense for them. I…
There are three different ways to become a saint, each indicating something different about the individual involved. If the purpose of reading saints’ lives is to be inspired to live well and become a better person, some of these paths are more applicable to a modern context (at least in America) than others. First, there…
Asceticism and hermitism have fascinated me for a long time, (which might surprise those who know me as a convivial, gregarious person who loves an audience). Judaism’s focus on community are largely incompatible with such practices, so I’m not sure where the interest comes from, but I think it’s a combination of feeling daunted by…
We moved to our home in the country 5 years ago, and I was not expecting to see so many frogs, or to become so protective of them. They range from the fingernail-sized peepers that sometimes cling to our screen doors, to the fist-sized brown toads I sometimes find in the garden, but after a…
I started out thinking I’d be an econ major in undergrad. The positivity (v. normativity) of “rational actor” analysis appealed to me, and it felt like a way to employ my talents for quantitative thinking for something more than simple math problems. I took Microeconomics with Prof. Robert H. Frank at Cornell, and his “economic…
What do we do when we believe that people we disagree with are not only misguided, but evil, and a threat to our society, values, or even the world? If we believe that the depth of the threat excuses actions we would otherwise condemn (e.g., violence, humiliation, theft, separation of families), we are confronted with…
Jacob K. Lehman 