17 Nov. 2024. If the story always wins, where does that leave the storyteller?

26 Nov. 2024. What to the Buddhists is their self-no-self, to the Taoists is their doing-not-doing…

11 Dec. 2024. Vipassana is not a course of pampering at the spa...

18 Dec. 2024. A tricky distinction, but a vital one...

21 Dec. 2024. There are many ways to cross the line: this one has been nineteen years in the making :)

30 Dec. 2024. Hint: it's not for the glamour, the riches, or the fame...

4 Jan. 2025. We don't often think of helping others as an opportunity, rather than a burden; perhaps we should try it out a little more...

10 Jan. 2025. Doctor? What doctor? I'm fine! ...

19 Jan. 2025. I am speculating and thinking aloud here, not indulging in prophecy...

20 Jan. 2025. How to be happy on Inauguration Day, no matter where you stand...

30 Jan. 2025. A tribute to Joachim Fest.

19 Feb. 2025. That is the question; the answer is becoming more painfully clear with every passing day.

25 Feb. 2025. A tribute to Thorstein Veblen.

1 March 2025. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times...

18 March 2025. You can try to take the boy out of politics, but whether you can take politics out of the boy remains to be seen...

25 April 2025. If in seeing there is only seeing, in hearing only hearing, in feeling only feeling, and in awareness only awareness, then who is there to enjoy or not to enjoy the suffering?

5 May 2025 “The rain could turn to gold And still your thirst would not be slaked. Desire is unquenchable Or it ends in tears, even in...

6 May 2025. It's heavy, this one, but let me stress that grief is not the last word, not in the Odyssey and not in the book of life...

A piece on polemical politics (with a view to Herbert Kickl specifically) that I sent to Die Weltwoche on a whim last October, after more than thirty years of not writing anything for publication in German. To my surprise it got published...

Another swing at writing in German, back in October: a wide-angle reflection on the "bugbear" EU, that is, on its appeal as a projection space for all manner of discontents that may or may not have much to do with "Brussels"...

On more try in German: on how to understand Trump, if that can be done at all. Nothing very new here, I'm afraid, just another angle on an overworked theme...

Yet one more: on the demons of politics and the inescapable danger in making deals with them (with a bow to Max Weber).

A letter to the editors of Die Weltwoche, also from the fall: on the tricky relationship between countries divided by a shared language (and a few other things besides).

27 May 2025. Some reflections on how to deal with one's own capacity for stupidity, written on my birthday...