Boring Stuff

51 posts that are more like vegetables than candy.

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  • A Chola-period granite statue of the Buddha seated in meditation. Collection · 11 posts

    The Inner Life

    Meaning, the mind, and how to bear a life: Frankl, the spirituality of imperfection, and the truth about every kind of meditation.

  • The bowed bearded head and massive shoulders of the Farnese Hercules, an ancient marble statue. Collection · 6 posts

    Staying Alive

    How to take care of the one body you get: muscle, the heart, food, sleep, and the rest, plus how long a human can really live. The actionable science, with the hype stripped off.

  • Rembrandt's painting of Aristotle resting a hand on a bust of Homer. Collection · 12 posts

    How to Think, and What's Real

    How to think and what is real, from Plato and Aristotle to Darwin and Deutsch, each argument walked one move at a time, the dissenters kept in.

  • An illuminated page of the Guru Granth Sahib, with Gurmukhi script framed by orange, blue, and gold flowers. Collection · 11 posts

    The Sacred Books

    The ten books billions live by, each in its own language against the great English translations, with the keystones broken down where the translators split.

  • A detail of Anselm Feuerbach's Das Gastmahl, a torch-lit procession of garlanded revelers entering a feast. Collection · 7 posts

    Power, Story, and Love

    The human dramas: the Art of War on winning without fighting, the Odyssey on getting home, with power, story, and love still to come.

  • Two oarsmen in Thomas Eakins's painting The Biglin Brothers Racing pull in unison across calm water. Collection · 3 posts

    Career

    Managing people, warehouse software, and the work that starts after the sale.

  • A 19th-century painting of the neurologist Charcot presenting a fainting woman to a room of physicians at a Paris asylum. 20 Jun 2026

    The Book With No Blood Test

    A field guide to the DSM, psychiatry's catalog of about three hundred disorders, not one of which can be proven by a test. A tour of the labels, the conditions medicine can prove cold instead, and how sure you should be that a diagnosis is you.

© 2026 Ethan WillinghamFeeling lucky? ↗