So, without further ado, and recognizing that life advice from someone who has yet to cross the venerable age of sixty is somewhat pretentious and likely to be wrong, here are thirty-five short, simple pieces of advice that my experience has taught me: There is only now. The future is an illusion, it does not exist and may never exist.…

Stoicism is often thought of as a dour philosophy. A stoic is defined in the Oxford English Dictionary (Second Edition)as one who practises repression of emotion, indifference to pleasure or pain, and patient endurance.Nothing could be further from the truth. Stoicism, as practiced by the Romans, is a practical philosophy for serenity.…

In The Lions of Al-Rassan, Kay crafts a fictional world inspired by al-Andalus and the Spanish Reconquista, one poised on the brink of its own reconquest. When we begin the novel, the Asharite (Kay’s Muslim analogues) Khalifate of Al-Rassan, which had conquered the lands once known as Esperaña from the Jaddites (Kay’s Christian analogues) three hundred years ago, has fallen and splintered into a patchwork of city-states ruled by petty kings.…

I first watched Leonard Nimoy on Star Trek, where he played the character that made him, in many ways, famous. I did not watch—until much later—the series. No, my introduction to Mr. Spock came through the movies. The “token alien” in the movies, he spoke to me, an alien in many strange lands.…

This blog emerged from a period of introspection and change spanning the two years from 2012 to 2014. On December 17, 2013, I was admitted to the MBA class of 2016 at Wharton, ending a year-long business school application process. In June, after spending three years in law school and six years as a transactional attorney specializing in private investment funds and corporate mergers and acquisitions, I left the legal profession.…