Throughout his essays, Montaigne warns about using law to shape human behavior—he thinks it’s at least a waste of time and potentially an oppressive ethos. He doesn’t think human beings are capable of such constant virtue: I find from experience that there is a difference between the leaps and sallies of the soul and a…

In the last of his very short essays, I disagree with most of what Montaigne has to say in it. I don’t believe people should begin a glide path towards death when they reach a certain age. Actually, one of my summer activities has been leaning into my workout routines to become stronger than I’ve…

The title creates a word picture and expectation of what’s to follow. A reader might naturally expect this essay to be about something like the Hamlet story—about how indecisive people, unable to take necessary action, end up causing significantly more pain as a result of their dithering. But that’s not what Montaigne has in mind….

Blame Ridley Scott and his 2000 movie “Gladiator” for this: our conception of the thumbs-up, thumbs-down gesture is the exact opposite of what it was during the reign of the Roman Empire. Anthony Philip Corbeill of the University of Kansas completed a study of this in the 1990s and determined in gladiatorial bouts, thumbs up…

This essay lands at a critical moment in my project. It was March 2023, and things were going well. My essays were getting better. I was expressing myself honestly, for the first time, about an important person in my life. Acceptance was a key feature in my personal narrative. And then I had a brief…

It’s good to know that my capacity for being annoyed has not waned over the years. I re-read this Montaigne essay, a simple recitation of things he liked about the Roman Empire, and wondering if I came up with anything interesting to say about it 12 years ago. And then I saw that, nope, I…