Ugly Truth, Beautiful Game

(These ladies in Mumbai showed me how they played the beautiful game)

In Indiana, when I was a kid, we had wooden goal posts painted white. 

In Cambodia, the goals were orange cones.

In the Mosquito jungle of Honduras the goals were piles of fresh wood shavings–leftovers from crafting dugout canoes. 

In a slum in Mumbai, the goal was a puddle of water filled by a monsoon. 

In rural China, the goal was not to have to chase a ball down the terraced fields. 

Beautiful Game

While reporting around the world from some 60 countries, I’ve seen soccer/football played in almost all of them. Often the ball wasn’t a ball but a plastic…

Read More >
 
Add a comment

FTX, SBF, and EA: When a Do-Gooder Does Bad

One of effective altruism’s biggest givers, crypto-bro Sam Bankman-Fried (often referred to as SBF), may have built his billion-dollar empire on lies and under the cover of goodwill bought by his extreme giving. 

Ross Douthat of the New York Times referred to Bankman-Fried’s actions as “playing Robin Hood using proceeds from an over-leveraged Ponzi Scheme.” And he did so from his penthouse of pills and polyamory in the Bahamas. At least he had fun, but now the entire Effective Altruism (EA) movement is under fire. 

Just look at these headlines written after SBF’s fall:

Effective Altruism Committed the Sin It Was Supposed to Correct

Effective altruism solved all the…

Read More >
 
1 comment

Toilets

I don’t mean to brag, but my son Griffin has flushed more toilets on Ball State University’s campus than any other person in history. And he’s only eleven.

Most Fridays after I pick him up from school, we head to campus and choose a building or three to explore. We start at the first floor and work our way up and down the floors and halls. We check the floor plans, which sometimes show toilets, sometimes not.

We’ve visited the bowels of museums and auditoriums. New buildings with fancy efficient toilets, and old porcelain dinosaurs that flush with the ferocity of a T-Rex roar. 

It’s not completely stress-free. He wants the bathroom to himself. He narrates his…

Read More >
 
3 comments