My friends were the first two people kicked off of an extremely popular reality show. And I couldn’t have been happier for them. When the show was being shot, they were disappointed with their performance in the competition. But by the time they saw how their characters had been edited to fit certain roles on …

The main difference between me and Dr. Frank Ryan is that I’m lucky enough not to live near any cliffs. Ryan, the plastic surgeon behind many celebrity looks, was reportedly tweeting about his dog just before he drove to his death off a Malibu cliff. A person so familiar with the power of technology to …

I find myself alone and temporarily without a ride home in a nearly empty Vegas strip club. I order a twelve dollar Bud Light and find a seat on a bench about thirty feet to the side of the main stage. I’m not into it. The place is like an after-hours ghost town; it’s how …

Even in the era of Facebook, this was not a face I expected to see. A few weeks ago I might have argued that it’s almost impossible to shock members of Generation TMI. I would have been wrong. I was shocked by a recent Time cover that featured a photo of Aisha, an 18 year-old …

I’m going to invite you into my shower for a few minutes. Sorry about that, but it’s the only place I can really think these days. Recently, I was at Ritual Cafe in San Francisco’s Mission District downing quad lattes with my old friend Angus. At one point, he noticed an acquaintance who entered the …

People often say they remember exactly where they were when Kennedy was shot or when they heard some other world-changing piece of news. I remember where I was when the Haiti quake hit. And when the oil rig exploded in the gulf. And when I heard that Michael Jackson died. I was right here in …

The five most endangered words of the realtime internet era are: Let me think about that. Shirley Sherrod, the former rural development director for the Agriculture Department in Georgia found that out the hard way when she was fired by the Obama administration for her delivery of a supposedly racist speech. The speech was creatively …

I should open by admitting that I’m probably pretty wasted right now. I just took my headphones off after spending the past fifteen minutes listening to some of the droning music that is being heralded as the newest way to get high. It’s call i-dosing and in some quarters, there is a concern that these …

My streak of avoiding public school bathroom stalls came to a thunderous and emphatic end in seventh grade. Behind a locked metal door, I sat on a cracked, black toilet seat and let my bell bottom corduroys wrinkle around my ankles. The bathroom door opened. I heard the sound of steel-toed bootsteps. Big Paul paused …

Happy Birthday to David Galbraith. There, I said it. This seems as good a place as any to share that thought. I’ve been thinking about his birthday for about a week, ever since Facebook told me about it. But I couldn’t decide what to do. While I’ve enjoyed the occasional times we’ve spent together, I …