The Threshold of Midlife
Thresholds: Essays on Becoming Human Every threshold asks not merely what we will do next, but who we are becoming.
July 28, 2026
The Threshold of Success
Thresholds: Essays on Becoming Human Every threshold asks not merely what we will do next, but who we are becoming. The people who come to see me after a success typically justify the request for consultation as exhaustion, or that the marriage has become stale, or that they’ve been irritable with people who don’t deserve […]
July 25, 2026
The Quiet Room
When somebody finally achieves the goal they’ve been pursuing, notice how quickly they reach for the next one. Not months later. Days, usually. Sometimes it’s the same evening, the champagne going flat on the counter, and there’s already a fresh target getting sketched on a napkin. We call this ambition. Drive. A healthy refusal to coast. I’ve come to suspect it’s closer to panic than any of us would like to admit.
July 20, 2026
Meno’s Thousand Speeches
About a third of the way into Plato’s Meno, a rich, well-connected young man loses the thread completely and gets irritated about it.
Meno had walked in confident. Virtue was his subject. He’d given, by his own count, thousands of speeches on it, to large audiences, and they had all been well-received. Then Socrates asks him what virtue actually is. Three attempts later, Meno has nothing. He accuses Socrates of being a torpedo fish: the flat electric ray that numbs whatever touches it. Both my mind and my mouth have gone numb, he says. I’ve got nothing left to answer you with (Meno 80a–b).
July 15, 2026
Living from the Neck Up
The picture comes to us most directly from Descartes, who argued in the Meditations on First Philosophy (1641) that mind and body are fundamentally different kinds of substance, the mind a thinking, non-physical thing, the body an extended, mechanical one. In his Treatise on Man, he went further and described the body explicitly in the language of machinery: nerves as pipes, animal spirits as hydraulics. The philosopher Gilbert Ryle later mocked this whole arrangement as “the ghost in the machine” (Ryle, The Concept of Mind, 1949), but the mockery never quite dislodged it. Culturally, we still mostly live inside the Cartesian frame.
July 13, 2026