The big Human Questions
A question worth sitting with. Longer pieces that follow an idea wherever it leads — through technology, education, culture, or the wonderfully complicated business of being human.
The Human Question
For questions that keep turning up where I least expect them.
A home for ideas, observations, and the occasional rabbit hole.
Here, the subject is rarely the whole story.
Where it began.
The first essay from The Human Question begins with a problem I keep returning to: what happens to our judgment when we become very good at borrowing someone else’s?
Essay
When Certainty Comes Secondhand
On trust, judgment, and what remains ours.
Trusting the wrong people is an old and well-documented human hobby.
I’m more curious about what happens when we trust the right ones.
The harder case is not the fraud or the fool, but someone whose judgment has earned our confidence over time. We have watched their arguments hold up, noticed things through them we might have missed, perhaps even changed how we think. Eventually, we stop checking quite so carefully.
Three ways of following a question.
What catches my attention and what I end up writing about are almost never the same. Sometimes a question deserves to be followed all the way down; sometimes an idea asks to be put to work; sometimes an observation is worth capturing before it disappears. The Human Question gives me room for all three.
Ideas that should affect what we do.
An idea worth acting on. Practical pieces that take an argument, problem, or emerging insight and ask what it should change in the real world.
Humans in the wild.
Something worth noticing. Shorter observations from the places where ideas actually meet people — classrooms, communities, technology, games, conversations, and everywhere in between.
Why I write.
I wanted to blog long before I believed I had anything worth blogging about. For years, I assumed writing publicly
required grand ideas, unusual accomplishments, or at least some convincing reason that a stranger should care what I thought.
Eventually, I realized I had it backwards. Some of what intrigues me most lives in the
nothing-specials: a conversation, an observation, a question I can’t quite shake. The smallest details are often where the bigger ones become visible.
So, primarily, I write for myself. I want a record of how I saw the world at 23, and someday at 30, 40, or 50.
I want to be able to look back and see not only how technology and society changed around me, but how my own thinking changed with them.
I love when something I write resonates with someone else, starts a conversation, or gives another person a new way of looking
at something familiar. That makes writing more rewarding, but it isn’t what decides whether an idea belongs here.
I write about what I want to remember, what I want to understand, and what I’m not quite finished thinking about.