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Author: Kevin Donahue
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One of our January staples of the decade I worked at Men’s Health magazine was “new year, new you.” It was the idea that the turning of the year was a chance to start something fresh and unprecedented in one’s life. It drove incredible interest (and web traffic), starting essentially on the 26th of December.…
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So in my continuing experiments with artificial intelligence, I decided to ask Claude, the chatbot created by AI startup Anthropic, to help me with some holiday gift-giving, specifically for my wife. I highlighted some of her interests, including her newfound love for pickleball as well as her longtime love – reading. Claude offered up that…
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Like so many other writers/editors, I’ve been playing with ChatGPT. Generally, as I’ve asked it to do very purposeful tasks, I’ve found it to be capable, lacking insight, and vulnerable to enormous gaps of understanding. My advice is, Use it … very, very carefully. So this morning, I brought in some of the fall harvest…
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Something from a few years back, getting out of my own tiny head … — When she thought about it, she realized she was a reaction to and reflection of her mom, in separate and unequal ways, that she was in many ways a series of responses to where she came from and how. And…
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This is my rule of incompetent executives and it says that, on average, they leave after 17 months on the job. The arc usually looks like this: Herb is announced to great fanfare. He comes from a company that you assume knows much more about Doing Stuff Right than your ragtag band. Often Herb left…
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I’ve seen Jason Isbell — with and without the 400 Unit — 16 times since 2014. And I have to say, he’s never sounded better, more sure of himself and his music, than last week at the State Theatre in New Brunswick, N.J. It’s hard to quantify, because I have seen some great concerts —…
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My wife loves Wes Anderson. A couple of Christmases ago, she got a book about him and his movies. She thinks everything he has done is great — from Bottle Rocket to now. Me? Not so much. I think there is good Wes (Rushmore, Royal Tenenbaums, Moonlight Kingdom, Grand Budapest Hotel), bad Wes (The French…
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Something I wrote a decade ago, that I think is worth sharing now … Families are like inchworms. Some members lead, some follow, but in the end they all end up in the same place, because it’s all one thing. If you’re at either end, it can be frustrating; that’s where the tensions start. But…
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These are weird times for movies. I don’t know if “going to the movies” is really a thing anymore, and movies now compete with all these TV shows for in-home screen time and attention. Over the last couple years, I just haven’t seen as many of the Oscar contenders as I used to, plus there’s…
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Jason Isbell remains my favorite musician these days, and there’s a lot of energy around him right now. There was a post on a Facebook fan group I enjoy for Isbell about how his wife Amanda Shires was not in the band photo that accompanied the release of the first single for his band’s upcoming…
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Like a lot of people, I played Wordle a lot this past year (see below). It’s ingenious, both simple and complex in the way that can remain intriguing over time. Six guesses to come up with a five-letter word sounds simultaneously super-difficult and pretty easy. Six seems like a lot, until you’re looking at S-A-E on…
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I turned 57 yesterday. It was fun. Virginia made a big deal of it. So did Facebook, longtime friends and work colleagues. And I’m uncomfortable with it. It’s not about the number, or the years past or the years ahead. Or what I’ve done or haven’t done. Instead, I’m a bit unsettled by the “me-ness”…
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