Beit GamalielBeit Gamaliel

I recently took up farming. Well, not really farming, but I am trying my hand at growing some fruits and vegetables of my own. One project I have been working on for years now is avocado. I bought a dwarf variety years ago, and I have been faithfully caring for it: pruning, watering, and fertilizing. […]

For decades, the public school establishment has relied on a single talking point: we just need more funding. Every budget cycle comes with warnings of classroom cuts, stagnant pay, and under-resourced students unless taxpayers write larger checks.

In a previous post, I considered the mind-boggling case of the Lampsilis rainbow mussel—a creature with no eyes that somehow “knows” exactly how to construct an active, lifelike replica of a minnow to lure its prey. It is an evolutionary paradox: a blind creature emulating biodiversity it cannot physically see or comprehend. But this phenomenon […]

We often treat contentment like a destination—a quiet room we finally get to lock ourselves into once we’ve accumulated just enough stuff, status, or stability. But according to one of history’s most famous deep-thinkers on the subject, contentment isn’t a static room at all. It’s a muscle trained in the extremes. In his letter to […]

I have always been fascinated — and a little unsettled — by how confidently people extrapolate beyond what the data actually supports. A public school education steeped in humanist assumptions didn’t help calibrate that instinct. But recently, my daughter said something that stopped me cold and forced me to examine my own. What the Trendline […]