I was asked recently to provide advice to a new college grad. Here is the core of what I wrote. My advice to you is to write. Your writing doesn’t need to have a specific structure, and you don’t have to write for a specific audience, but getting your ideas down on paper is a service you can render to your future self. The important thing is to write with some regularity, even if not often....

I’ve been reading Noah Yuval Harari’s Sapiens and have reached the chapter in the book where he tells of the profound impact that the Agricultural Revolution of our species had on ourselves and on the planet. In basic terms, the Agricultural Revolution was the period a little over 10,000 years ago when our species very gradually made the transition from subsisting as foragers and hunter-gatherers to settling down as farmers, living in settlements and villages with accompanying fields of domesticated crops and cattle....

On March 14, I went to see the launch event of Sam Harris’s Waking Up Book Club, where he and Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker shared the stage at the Dolby Theatre to discuss Pinker’s new book Enlightenment Now and a range of philosophical topics. Among the things they touched on were science, humanism, politics, and artificial intelligence. About halfway into their conversation, Sam prompted Pinker to speak about the rise of the alt-right....

This weekend, I attended South Bay Horn Day 2017 where I was reunited with my teacher and friend, Daniel Wood. As he announced at the end of the evening concert program, this happened to be his last year at the helm of the South Bay Horn Day event, with no one as of yet having stepped up to take the reins. The event has run for six consecutive years, and in that time has built some great relationships among the network of horn players in the Bay Area, while also offering an environment in which some really beautiful musical moments have been crafted....

A symphony really doesn’t deserve to be delivered to its audience through the copper filament of a pair of headphones. For all the labor that goes into a 40-minute work (both in composition and preparation on the part of the ensemble) that sees its finer details realized at the hands and lungs of sixty-some-odd musicians, it’s really a disservice to have the sound injected directly into one’s head cavity. It is not possible to really experience a “wall of sound” when the sound begins and ends as a whisper from a mere earbud....