A Church is Burning
Tomorrow, millions of Americans will cast votes that will determine if we are to carry on living in our poverty of true and decent leadership. They will join millions of their fellow citizens who have already done so in defiance of plague and often of their own government, deciding if we are to live in a world where military strength is matched by moral restraint, wealth with wisdom, power with purpose. May your vote be an act of shedding the illusions and naïveté that once held us back. Of reclaiming the innocence, imagination, faith, generosity, pride, and friends we have lost. The future is now, and it’s time to take a stand so that the lost bells of freedom can ring out in our land. You can burn down my churches, but I shall be free.
America was supposed to be about content of character, not birthright
I was heartened by 4th of July well wishes from two of my fellow Americans. One is Russian. The other is Irish. Both are now also American—yes, both are celebrating their first Independence Day as American citizens. I was grateful for their reminders of hope in dark times. They’ve also inspired me to share nearly the entirety of Chapter Five of Field Blends (below) in which the core group of characters find themselves out in Virginia’s wine country debating the essence of what it means to be American 🇺🇸
We are living through generations’ failure to have created something better. Now America burns as the world weeps, and it is for us to put out the flames.
My generation, the “end of history” kids, came of age at the dawn of the era of the things which might have been. And all their trials and terrors and ghastly wonders. All the things which our ancestors might have wrought but would never have lived to see. And we live among it now, and it is us, and we are that which they made in their own eras of wonton foolery.
On “being local”, the terroir that—like food and wine—imparts unique character to us all
Field Blends is a story that both revels in localness—everything occurs in real-world places—and wrestles with the idea of home. These are such important questions, and they form part of why I used wine as a metaphor throughout the story. For wine—and all the rest we eat and drink—like people, is fundamentally rooted in place. Though often exported and passed around the globe, wine is a reflection of the terrain in which its grapes grew, the climate that surrounded it and the hands that tended it when it was young.
Bespoke Badger is quarantine at its best: Ten tips for making your virtual pub a great success
The Bespoke Badger is next level. It is quarantine—and the world—at its best because it brings people together over drinks, laughter, and serious talk in a way that I would have never imagined virtually possible six weeks ago. These are my observations as to how others can build similarly special virtual spaces with friends, family, colleagues, and strangers. The secret here is in creating virtually the same sense of community that we’ve long created in the physical world.
Millennials began turning 40 this year (and why that matters)
That the oldest are now turning forty is important not just because it must auger the end of an era when Millennial was a byword for the young, but also because it must auger the beginning of an era when this generation’s leadership in the world is a thing of the present. That era is here and now, not some distant time in the future.