I came home from work late the other night. Like most nights I stopped at the Safeway to get some fresh vegetables for dinner, but this night I was too late and Safeway was closed. There is a 7–11 in the Safeway parking lot and when I’m too late for…

Instead allow them to share your joy. I’ve always been drawn to the idea of being a full time writer. I guess everyone who likes to write sometimes thinks about making a living at it. Making money doing something you do for pleasure in your spare time seems like the…

When we think about the value of a college education, it is usually in the context of making a living. We expect that a college education will result in higher earnings over the course of our lifetime. This idea has been drummed into us for the last thirty years. …

Math anxiety is contagious: It’s transmitted by parents and teachers We’re in big trouble… Among industrialized nations, Americans have the worst relationship with arithmetic and math. According to a 2015 Pew Research study, in a field of 71 countries, American 15 year olds placed 28th in math scores. Those 15 year olds will grow up to be Americans adults who cannot do simple math. …

I would have stayed in Oregon. Oregon is a great place to be if you want to be cold. It’s dreary and rainy most of the year, always damp, even in the summer, and never really dries out. And it smells. Not a bad smell, really. More like wet dirt. And Cedar trees. That’s because the dirt is usually wet and cedar trees like wet dirt. I grew up…

We have to spend eternity with them? I had a rather disappointing thought today while I was contemplating the nature of the universe. Specifically I was thinking about what happens to us after we die. I don’t have any firm beliefs about life after death. The idea of a heaven or life after death has always seemed unlikely. Consciousness — that sense of individual identity express as “I” or “me” ceases to exist…

Life is like a journey through a funnel. As we get older a funny thing happens… It seems like the world in which we live gets smaller and offers diminishing opportunities. …

My father, Victor H. Napier, was born in Portland Oregon on May 7, 1920. Imagine the world he was seeing when graduating from high school in 1938. As he looked to the east, my father would have seen the Dust Bowl, and tens of thousands streaming towards California, immortalized in…

But that’s what we like to think. Every four years we go through a Presidential election. You can’t miss it. Every newscast leads with an election story, talking heads go on incessantly, true believers scream at each other and after a few weeks we all get sick of it. We can’t escape it. We rarely see it…