Michael Pershan, who tweets as @mpershan, is an interesting and thoughtful and wise man to talk to. I enjoy tweeting to him sometimes. With that disclaimer/recommendation out of the way, let’s talk about Mr. Pershan’s book. When is it best to study an example: early or late? As Pershan notes…

A piece I wrote about recreational mathematics inspired by (of course) Martin Gardner, is far and away the most popular thing I have ever written on Medium. Every week, it just keeps going, with hundreds of people reading it. To this day, I do not know why that is. Lots…

On an old pamphlet published by Peel District School Board, Ontario, Canada, in 1990. You can find interesting things in old cupboards in schools. The pamphlet pictured below was written by the program department in the Peel District School Board, in 1990. Shaking off the dust from the cover, let’s…

This piece on deficit mentalities in education systems was inspired by a staff meeting run by Dr. Andrew Campbell. “Matthew is too shy.” “Matthew needs to work faster.” Introversion was my main school “deficit”, and teachers treated it like an intrinsic property of “me”, something about me to be fixed…

Future Matthew Helps Present Matthew To Understand The Nature of Consensus Reality, An Unfinished Meditation On The Nature of “Self” It is an implied, if not outright true “fact” of quantum mechanics, that retrocausality may exist and in that case future Matthew is helping present Matthew out with everything from…

Tom Kuegler (Tom Kuegler) Advises Us To Write Like We Are Writing Letters To Our Younger Self, But Here I Am Literally Writing A Letter To My Younger Self. Dear Little Matthew, You don’t know it yet, but you will write this letter in the middle of a pandemic in…

Bob Dylan brought back Walt Whitman’s famous words this year, in the form of a song he called “I Contain Multitudes”. Here Dylan with his grizzled wit and 60 year old poetic persona recontextualizes Whitman’s famous words from his poem “Song of Myself”. As Dylan would have it…