Author: Steve Ainslie

Three different people asked me about my limp the other day after I first injured my knee. All three took the time to ask why I was walking slowly, listened to my brief tale of woe and offered sympathy. When I bumped into them a few days later after I was walking more normally, each…

There’s something I don’t like about the way my favorite pools operate. There’s something about every close friend I have ever had that I despise. There are many things about myself that I detest. Even with people who have been closest to me we might not appreciate each other’s taste in music, spending habits, sense…

Katherine Mangu-Ward has said much of nonfiction writing is bloated with fluff. She says many books should have been magazine articles. I’ve heard this before and have to agree. Over the past year, I’ve borrowed at least 100 nonfiction books from the library and tried to read all of them. Some have been quite good….

My forced downtime these last 3 days as I waited for my knee injury to get better made me a bit crazy. Between working out, doing yoga and walking the dog I’m on my feet moving for at least 6 hours every day. Adding in swimming for an hour and chores pushes that to around…

In 2014, Ezekiel Emanuel — a health policy expert, medical ethicist, and oncologist — published an essay titled “Why I Hope to Die at 75.” In this recent article, Emanuel, who is now 65, explains why he will likely maintain his position to stop accepting all medical treatment at age 75. His original essay was…

Ever since Snickers died, Wiggles and I have been bonding more and more. I’ve noticed that she follows me around more and wants to snuggle in my arms more often. I have made deliberate efforts to pay more attention to her – leaving my headphones out during our and talking to her instead, playing games…

I have been reading Brett Easton Ellis’s book “White“, which is purportedly about social media, freedom of speech and likability. After a few chapters, I gave up. What I liked about the book was that Brett and I are both Gen-X kids so his cultural references to movies, being a latchkey kid, independence, school etc….

In his book Collapse, Jared Diamond wrote about a few island societies that thrived for hundreds or thousands of years. He compared these to other societies, many of which grew to huge populations before they eventually ran out of resources and collapsed (hence the obvious choice of book title). A community of the long-lasting, small…

When I was scooting my kitchen chair back from the table last week, I hard to push hard enough that I thought I better replace the felt pads on the legs because they must be worn down again. I have felt pads on the legs of all my furniture because it makes it easy to…

This week on NPR News, the lead story covered how Americans feel about abortion, politics, the economy, education, etc. They presented statistics about falling consumer confidence, a rise in political divisiveness, distrust in the government, yada yada yada. After a few minutes of this, they quoted the source of their data – a Marist/NPR poll…