BEEW
BEEW
David
BEEW is growing. More essays, more series, more recos—and soon, a newsletter, some fun collaborations, and new ways thrive together as a community.
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I opened my news app this morning. By the fourth headline my mind stopped reading and started mapping. The map it made was one of contagion, a fire spreading without any formal announcement or congressional declaration or any of the...
Download PDF There is a man named Plinko who used to work as a clown on kids' night at a Ground Round restaurant in Jackson, Michigan. He was in his late forties or early fifties. His mother died of cancer, and somewhere in his grief...
Download PDF In 1953, Samuel Beckett wrote a play where two men wait for someone who does not come. They insist he will, they reorganize their entire day around his imminent arrival, and then, when he doesn't come, they calmly agree to...
Download PDF The place is half-full, and I’m half-working, half-staring at a wall when the opening synth line threads through the room. That pulsing, driving riff. Kate Bush's “Running Up That Hill.” I feel it before I recognize it....
Tolstoy’s Calendar of Wisdom — March 25 During our lives we help each other: sometimes we help other people, sometimes we are helped by others. But the world is formed so that usually some people mostly help others, and some mostly...
Growing up, there was a short pile of books sitting out on the cocktail table in the den of my childhood home, the kind of decorative arrangement that had been there so long they stopped being objects and became part of the air. One was...
This essay was originally published on March 24th as "Three Generations of Men, One Unsettled Question." It's already one of the most widely read pieces on this blog, but several readers who wanted to share it told me the title wasn't...
Sprezzatura. Say it out loud. Spreh-za-TOO-rah. Let it sit in your mouth for a second. Sounds like something you'd want to eat, or drink, or steal. By the time you get to that last syllable your hand is already moving on its own, thumb...
On the theft of original thought and my fury at those who caused it. There are many times throughout the week when I purposely leave my phone at home or in the car, and certain situations where I simply refuse to take it out of my...
I quote others only in order the better to express myself. —Michel de Montaigne In 1571, a French nobleman bought a château in Bordeaux with a round stone tower attached to it. He was thirty-eight, newly retired from public life, gutted...
For roughly seven hundred years, the big theological brains of Western Christendom bent themselves into magnificent logical pretzels over whether beings of pure incorporeal intelligence, massless and shadowless and wholly unbothered by...
Years ago, an AA sponsor said something to me that bypassed every defense I had against the idea of God. I was in early sobriety, a committed atheist, unable to square the program's spiritual language with anything I recognized as true....
A note before you read. This is an experiment. I've spent years accumulating ideas, knowledge, and ways of thinking about risk, ego, the body, the noise in your own head, the difference between a life you choose and one that chooses you....
A note before you read—this is an experiment. I've spent years accumulating ideas, learning, and ways of thinking about risk, ego, the body, the noise in your own head, the difference between a life you choose and one that chooses you....
I was channel surfing late one night when I came across a local news story about a guy who builds jet turbines for the Air Force at the USAF Research Laboratory in Ohio. Interesting, sure, but what really got my attention was the man's...