Posted on

The Whole Boodle

People keep asking me one question, so here is the answer, whole: the history, the intention, the meaning, the being, and, at the end, the me. “What’s a Boodle Boy?” I get the question at dinner tables, in podcast mail, in the pause after a lecture when someone has finally worked up the nerve. My business cards claim the title. My websites announce it. A consultancy of my own wears the name. The asker usually half-expects a punchline, because the phrase sounds like something a vaudeville comic would shout while falling off a stage, and some people assume the whole thing is a pun on Boles. Those vowels help, I admit. History does the heavy lifting. The honest answer needs a Sunday night in 1974, a Dutch probate record from 1699, a safe-deposit vault stuffed with bribe money in St. Louis, a candy raid at West Point, and a banana leaf piled with garlic rice somewhere on Luzon. It also needs a teenaged cadet holding a pot of coffee. Pour yourself a cup, and I will lay the whole boodle on the table.

Continue reading → The Whole Boodle

Posted on

The Moon Takes the Bow: The Longest Fight in the Sky, Scored on Love, Fear, Respect, and Attention

Two fighters have been circling each other since before anyone kept records, and the purse has never changed hands: the human gaze. In one corner burns a furnace so vast that something like a million Earths could rattle around inside it, the engine behind every green leaf and every heartbeat on this planet. In the other corner floats a charcoal-colored rock, airless and dead, throwing back about twelve percent of the light that hits it. On paper the match is a slaughter. In practice the rock has been taking rounds for ten thousand years, and the strangest fact on the whole card is a matter of scheduling, since only one of these two shows up for both shifts.

Continue reading → The Moon Takes the Bow: The Longest Fight in the Sky, Scored on Love, Fear, Respect, and Attention

Posted on

The Goldfish Never Said That

A fabricated statistic taught a generation to believe their minds had broken. The truth about attention is stranger, and it names a culprit nobody wants to indict. Picture the goldfish. You have met it a thousand times, in conference keynotes and morning television and the opening line of ten thousand blog posts. It swims in its little bowl of received wisdom and carries one damning number on its back: nine seconds of attention, a full second longer than the modern human animal. We hold nuclear codes and write string quartets, and we supposedly lose the thread after eight seconds while the fish swims on, victorious. The crown of creation, outconcentrated by a snack with fins.

Continue reading → The Goldfish Never Said That

Posted on

The Rented Crowd: Nero’s Five Thousand, the Paris Claque, and the Box That Laughed for America

For the better part of two decades, the laughter of the United States lived inside a padlocked box. Charles Rolland Douglass, a CBS sound engineer who had spent the war helping the Navy develop shipboard radar, built the device in the early 1950s and guarded it the way a sexton guards a reliquary. The laff box, as he called it, stood a little over two feet tall and worked like an organ: keys for titters, chortles, belly laughs, shrieks, a foot pedal to let a wave of mirth swell, crest, and die on command. Douglass wheeled it from studio to studio himself. Clients heard the output and never saw the mechanism. Only his immediate family knew what the inside looked like, and when he finally stepped back from the work, his sons carried the trade forward like a guild secret. The industry word for what he did was sweetening, which tells you the industry understood the product. Sugar is what you add when the thing itself goes down easier disguised.

Continue reading → The Rented Crowd: Nero’s Five Thousand, the Paris Claque, and the Box That Laughed for America

Posted on

Stand Up if You Plan to Play the Blues

If you want to effectively play The Blues — or any style of guitar, really — you need to get off your chair, strap in your guitar, and stand up!

Continue reading → Stand Up if You Plan to Play the Blues

Posted on

Curse of the Beautiful People

Have you noticed how people born beautiful are actually cursed throughout their lifetimes — even though they may not know it?  There is a viciousness about The Beautiful that seeps from the inside out and changes their natural shine into an ethereal ugliness.

Continue reading → Curse of the Beautiful People

Posted on

Banning Laptops and Beating WiFi

We are reminded of the early, heady, days of the internet when
university campuses were just beginning to provide WiFi access to the
school network instead of requiring a tethered Ethernet cable.  Students,
of course, abused the new wireless freedom by bringing their laptops to
class and surfing the internet when they should’ve been taking notes.

Continue reading → Banning Laptops and Beating WiFi