Every once in a while during our decade-plus sojourn in the Upper Midwest, I’d wonder where all the fireflies were. Because it always seemed that I rarely saw them. I don’t know if that’s peculiar to the Twin Cities area, or Minnesota, or the Upper Midwest more generally, but it just seemed like there were very few fireflies (or, as we called them as kids, lightning bugs). I’d assume that I was imagining that phenomenon (or lack of one, I suppose), except that on moving back to Pennsylvania I was struck once again by how we can watch the fireflies dance every summer evening. They’re everywhere and always something of a mystery and...

Occasionally, when I have a hard time deciding between options on a menu, I have joked that while I’m great with big decisions – whether to get married, buy a house, or change jobs – I can get paralyzed by the prospect of choosing between (as I had to do just the other day) General Tso’s Chicken or Pad Thai. That’s not entirely true, of course. I sometimes agonize over big decisions as well! ☺ Which is maybe one of the reasons I find the whole topic of understanding how we make choices so interesting. In this TED Talk, lawyer-turned-philosopher Ruth Chang invites us to think differently about how we make hard decisions. Several...

Mistakes. We all make them. And, by and large, we all dread them. I get that. I hate making mistakes. They make me feel foolish and incompetent. They undermine my confidence and make it harder to reach my goals. They feel like setbacks, if not out and out failures. And sometimes those mistakes are costly or painful or both, to me and to others. Mistakes are therefore something to be avoided. That’s the common narrative we tell ourselves about mistakes, and there is something deeply and obviously true about that story. But there’s another story as well. And that is that mistakes, if we pay attention to them, have a great deal to teach us....