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About Me

I’m a devoted husband and father to an awesome family. For work, I’m a currently an Executive Director at JP Morgan Chase focusing on Product Tooling. I’m a Product Manager who looks at the goals of the business and uses technology to deliver those business and customer goals. In the past, I’ve driven transformational change at Citi, AIG, and Amazon Web Services. For more information about what I do at work, please visit my LinkedIn profile.

My Writing

If you’re new here, check out my blog highlights. Also, take a look at my library.

My Blog

I collect stories. There are so many amazing things happening every day. I need to spend some time writing them down before they slip away. Some of these ideas are so powerful that they hit me like a bolt of lightning. It’s my job to capture that lighting and put it in a bottle to share it with you. I want to capture that feeling that Archimedes had when he had an insight sitting in the bathtub screamed “Eureka!” and ran naked down the street. I know that I’ll rarely if ever make it there, but that won’t keep me from trying!

Here’s some of my latest posts:

And here are some of my posts about AI and ChatGPT:

Blog Highlights

Here are some highlights from 2024

One of my favorite topics for the last few years is writing about AI. I explored it from a number of different perspectives:

ChatGPT has helped me quickly turn ideas into complete blog posts and respond in real-time to things I’ve encountered. This year, it made it easier to explore a range of interesting topics like:

With ChatGPT, I learned to capture the small, wonderful moments of my life in writing. It’s like catching a lightning bug in a jar—preserving fleeting beauty to reflect on later. I was able to write about appreciating the sunrise, visiting a classic movie theatre owned by Netflix, and how to turn a nighttime drive into a light show.

Finally, I spent some time writing about self-improvement. Some of my favorite pieces were about the importance of asking for help and practicing self-control. Surprisingly, I even learned a valuable lesson about communication from AI—it’s programmed to respond with honesty, helpfulness, and harmlessness, qualities we humans could aspire to as well.

My Virtual Library

I wanted a place to put all the stuff I think is awesome. Growing up, I always wanted to have a great library in my house. I remembered the excitement when I learned that I could buy the entire collection of The New Yorker in bound volumes and put them in my house. I’d imagined that I would collect great encyclopedias from the past to peruse whenever I pleased. They would live in mahogany bookcases that looked like they’d belonged to JP Morgan. Then I realized that a New York City apartment doesn’t have the space for a physical library. So I did the next best thing. I’ve created a virtual library that includes lots of the things I enjoy, like my favorite books, words, and humor. You can check it out on the menu at the top of the page.

Categories
Life Hacking Science and Math

Your 3 p.m. Coffee Is Still Awake at Midnight

I learned something fascinating this week that completely changed how I think about drugs. Remember in health class when we learned that alcohol goes out of your system at about 1 drink per hour? I used to think all drugs worked that way. I used to believe that if I take a pill and then after 4 hours or whatever it says on the bottle, the drug is out of my system. Wasn’t that true for caffeine, antihistamines, painkillers—everything.

Turns out, alcohol is the exception, not the rule. Most drugs don’t fade out in a straight line—they follow something called a half-life. And once you understand that curve, your medicine cabinet (and your coffee habit) start to look very different.

What Half-Life Means

The half-life of a drug is the time it takes for the amount in your body to drop by 50%. Think of it like a leaky bucket that loses exactly half its water every few hours, no matter how full it starts. After one half-life, half is left. After two, a quarter. After three, an eighth. After four, a sixteenth. The pattern keeps halving until the levels are so low they’re basically gone.

When it reaches 5 half lives it’s only 1/32 of its original stregthn and said to be fully out of your system. And here’s anoher thing about how drugs work. If you take double the dose, it doesn’t last twice as long—it only lasts one half-life more.

Why Does Alcohol Work Differently from Other Drugs

Most drugs leave your body in fractions. Imagine your liver and kidneys as workers who get faster when there’s more drug around. If there’s a lot, they clear a lot; if there’s only a little, they clear a little. That’s why most medications follow a half-life curve: every few hours, the amount is cut in half—½, ¼, ⅛, and so on.

Alcohol is different. The enzymes that process it get overloaded quickly, even at normal drinking levels. Once they’re maxed out, they can’t go any faster. So instead of clearing a fraction, the body clears a fixed amount per hour—about one drink’s worth.

How This Plays Out in Real Life

To see how this works with drugs you probably have in your medicine cabinet, let’s look at some household names:

  • Ibuprofen (Advil, Motrin): ~2 hours. Quick in, quick out.
  • Naproxen (Aleve): 12–17 hours. Still hanging around the next day.
  • Diphenhydramine (Benadryl, in Tylenol PM, Advil PM): 4–9 hours. This explains why if you take Tylenol PM at bedtime, you’re effectively still taking half a Tylenol PM when you wake up. Hello, morning grogginess.
  • Loratadine (Claritin): ~8–10 hours. “Non-drowsy,” but very much alive in your system all day.
  • Sertraline (Zoloft): ~24 hours. Miss a dose and you’ll feel it for days as levels drop.

Unlike alcohol, which just grinds away at a constant rate, these drugs all taper off in fractions.

What Does This Mean for Caffeine

Now, about that 3 p.m. coffee. Caffeine’s half-life is about 5 hours, but it can range anywhere from 3 to 10 depending on your genetics, smoking, pregnancy, liver health, and even other meds.

So that medium coffee at 3:00 p.m.?

  • At 8:00 p.m., half of it is still in you.
  • At 1:00 a.m., you’ve still got a quarter left.

Which explains the midnight tossing and turning after what felt like an “innocent” afternoon pick-me-up.

Even though your “last cup was hours ago,” you’re carrying the equivalent of a small coffee’s worth of caffeine into the night. Your body doesn’t reset between doses—it accumulates.

Summing Up

That 3 p.m. coffee keeping you up at midnight isn’t bad luck—it’s math. Once you see the curve of half-lives, you realize your body isn’t careless or mysterious, it’s consistent. Drugs don’t simply vanish after the label’s “every 4 hours.” They fade in halves, and those halves shape how we sleep, how we heal, and how we feel the next day. The trick is not to fight it, but to learn the rhythm and work with it.

Categories
Books / Audiobooks Life Lessons

A September 11th Memorial: Firehouse

Every September 11th, the memories return: the falling towers, the smoke, the senseless loss. This year, I discovered it just a block from my apartment, in the pages of David Halberstam’s Firehouse—written by a neighbor I’d never met.

Halberstam, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author, lived nearby and was searching for meaning after September 11th, just as I am now. He spent two and a half months with our local firehouse to write a memorial not just to the firefighters who died that day, but to the firehouse itself and to all the firefighters in New York.

On that day, the New York Fire Department lost 343 men. Our firehouse lost two entire companies—the 12 men of Ladder 35 and Engine 40—one of the worst losses in the city.

Halberstam takes us inside the firehouse, into a culture normally kept private. It’s an insular brotherhood of men who eat together, live together, play sports together, and help repair each other’s houses. While we see the public face of firefighters—the men running into the Twin Towers when everyone else ran out—we rarely see what lies beneath. As Ray Pfeifer, a veteran of the firehouse, says, “People think they know what we do, but they don’t really know what we do.” They don’t understand the real danger of being in a burning building when there’s a collapse and the exits seem blocked.

The swagger of a firefighter isn’t arrogance—it’s earned. Take the captain’s code: first in, last out of every fire. It’s a point of pride that sets them apart, especially from police officers. While cops climb the ladder toward desk jobs and safer assignments, firefighters advance toward greater danger—lieutenants get closer to the flames than probies, captains closer than lieutenants. It’s a confidence born from their unique relationship with risk, which explains the firehouse joke: “If firefighting were easy, the cops would do it.”

“I have always admired acts of uncommon courage on the part of ordinary people,” Halberstam writes comparing them the heroes of the Civil Rights movement and the Vietnam War that he covered decades earlier. They live in a world of good and evil, where the good guys fight against a purely destructive force. As Angie Callahan, the wife of fallen Captain Frank Callahan, said, “Where else can you be brave in a time of peace, and where else can you do things that few other men do—deeds that save lives?”

To give you a taste of the book, here’s how Halberstam describes Captain Frank Callahan and the two traits that define great firefighters: staying calm and doing the right thing.

Wherever the fire was, though, he was very good at it. Very professional, and very calm. Calm was important; it was one of the most important words in the vocabulary of firemen, and a word they did not use lightly. That and the phrase “do the right thing,” as in, “He was the kind of fireman who always did the right thing.” Staying calm for a fireman was crucial—for unlike most other peacetime jobs, firemen were in the regular business of the suppression of fear. Every call might be a ticket to a burning inferno where there was no light, where falling walls and ceilings cut off exit routes, where a floor could give out, and where a fireman could become disoriented and begin to feel his source of oxygen failing as he grew weaker and as the heat grew more fierce second by second. Therefore keeping calm was a critical part of the job. Every serious fire could trigger powerful impulses of fear, and if an officer shows that fear on the job, if he is not calm and not disciplined himself, then the fear will spread quickly through the men. Calm is the most basic of the positive words that firemen use to describe one another.

David Halberstam, Firehouse

It’s a mindset most of us can’t imagine—being paid to suppress fear while everyone else is allowed to feel it.

Doing the right thing was equally important. When the men speak of a colleague who does the right thing, they mean he will stay at his post under terrible conditions and not panic. Doing the right thing was going in and risking your life for a trapped civilian or fellow fireman. Firemen define each other by their codes of honor, which, because of the nature of the job, are mandatory and must be instinctive.

David Halberstam, Firehouse

But Halberstam reveals that heroism in a firehouse isn’t just about the dramatic moments. It starts with something as simple as washing dishes:

The men have to be able to count not just on their officers, but on their buddies. Doing the right thing also involves small, seemingly unimportant things in the firehouse. It begins when you are a probie, and it means following certain customs, such as being the first one to the sink to wash the pots and pans after meals. The firehouse, like the military, is based on doing little things right, because if someone does not do the little things correctly, then he probably won’t do the big things correctly. Moreover, in a firehouse, if you do not do your share of the routine work, someone else has to do it for you, in which case you pull down the house, and you are a hairbag. You do not wait for someone to tell you to do it, you just do it. There is an additional reason: Between moments of fearsome danger, there is often a lot of slack time at a firehouse, and if you do not have codes like this, then it would be very easy for people to become lazy and get in a rut, and for the entire house to lose its sense of cohesion and its purpose.

David Halberstam, Firehouse

This September 11th, I’m thinking less about the towers that fell and more about the men who ran toward them. Halberstam’s Firehouse reminds us that heroism isn’t reserved for history’s darkest moments—it’s practiced daily by ordinary people who’ve chosen extraordinary lives. They’re still out there, still running toward danger, still doing the right thing.

The inside covers of Firehouse feature black and white photographs of the chalkboard frozen in time—exactly as it appeared on September 11th.
Categories
Human Behavior

Let’s Have More 3 Day Weekends!

Isn’t it great to have a three-day weekend? We have a little extra time to breathe, sleep in, maybe go somewhere. We should have more of them.

But there’s nothing we can do about that… right?

Well—maybe. Unless we were more like China. In China, they noticed the same problem: people want longer holidays. More specifically, the tourism industry wanted longer holidays, but businesses don’t want to give up too many workdays. So instead of fighting about it, they rearranged the calendar.

In 1999 , they invented something called 调休 (tiáoxiū)—”adjusted rest.” It’s a system of make-up working days, where weekends are sometimes converted into regular workdays called “special working days” to create longer blocks of time off around major holidays.

And you know what? It’s absolutely brilliant. And also completely insane. Let me explain.

What China Actually Did (Calendar Tetris, Government Edition)

Picture this: Next Tuesday is Dragon Boat Festival—a nice little one-day holiday. The government is so nice that they even give you Monday off to connect it to the weekend. Then your Chinese colleague casually mentions, “Oh, by the way, we’re working this Saturday to make up for it.”

Wait… what?

This is adjusted rest in action. China takes their holidays and engineers them into blocks by borrowing weekend days. That three-day weekend you’re enjoying? You may have worked a Saturday or Sunday to “earn” it.

It happens all the time throughout the Chinese calendar. Here’s the 2025 Chinese calendar. Note the special working days.

From teamedUP China, a Chinese recruiting firm

Why It Worked in China

This system works in China because of something you see everywhere there: an almost supernatural ability for society-wide coordination around shared priorities.

Take gaokao (高考), China’s college entrance exam. The entire country comes to a standstill for three days in June—construction sites go silent, airlines reroute flights, and businesses turn down music. It’s not just government policy; it’s collective buy-in because everyone understands this matters.

The same cultural DNA makes adjusted rest work. When the government says, “We’re all working Saturday so everyone can have meaningful family time,” there’s immediate social consensus. Chinese workers embraced this system because it delivers what they genuinely value: real time for family visits across this massive country. When your parents live 1,000 miles away, a single day off is useless. But a week-long Chinese New Year break? That’s life-changing.

When Beijing publishes the holiday calendar each October, 1.4 billion people simply adjust accordingly. No endless debates, no union disputes—an entire civilization synchronizes like a coordinated dance.

Why It Would Never Work in America

Now imagine trying to implement a make-up day policy in the United States. It would be chaos.

It doesn’t work for us because we’re too beautifully, chaotically diverse. Just think about all the observant Jews who can’t work on Saturday for religious reasons. Or the millions of retail and service workers whose schedules are already scattered across seven days a week. Or the parents juggling childcare around school schedules that don’t align with federal holidays. Or the freelancers and gig workers who don’t even have traditional weekends to begin with.

We’re just not the type of society that’s good at making collective decisions, even when they’d benefit everyone. Try to get Americans to agree on synchronized vacation schedules and you’ll trigger the same cultural immune response that makes us argue about daylight saving time for decades without ever actually changing anything.

What We Do Instead

So what do we do in the US instead? We move the holidays. That’s why most federal holidays that fall on weekends get shifted to the nearest Monday, creating automatic three-day weekends without anyone having to work extra days. It’s a far simpler and more elegant solution for our individualistic culture. No make-up days, no synchronized scheduling, no arguments about who has to work when. When Washington’s birthday falls on a Wednesday, we just shift it to the nearest Monday.

The trade-off? We don’t get those spectacular week-long vacation blocks that China engineers. Our longest federal holiday weekend tops out at three days. But for a country that can’t even agree on what to call carbonated beverages, maybe that’s about all the coordination we can realistically handle.

Categories
Life Lessons Meditation

What I Wish I Learned in College

Colleges teach you how to think. What they should teach is how to live a life that matters.

On the train up to Yale for an event, I told my friend Cherie, “Whenever I go back, I get this feeling of anxiety. It’s not about other people judging me—it’s about me judging myself. Am I doing enough? Am I worthy of having gone here?”

She didn’t hesitate. “Oh yeah. I have that too. It’s called Yale-ing.”

That was it exactly—the quiet, constant self-surveillance that comes from trying to measure up to an imaginary, idealized version of yourself. Yale searches for the most driven, unconventional, obsessive people it can find and gives them space to run. What looks like drive from the outside is often anxiety on the inside—a constant need to prove themselves again and again. They’re insecure overachievers.

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Categories
Life Lessons Meditation

In Praise of Idleness

For most of history, people worked so they could have leisure. We’ve somehow flipped it: now we have leisure so we can work better.

Somewhere along the way, we decided that being busy was the same thing as being valuable. If your calendar is full, you must be important. If your inbox is overflowing, you must be needed. If you never stop moving, you must be living a good life.

It’s a strange inversion of history. The ancient Greeks even had a word for this: scholē. It meant “leisure,” and it’s the root of our word school. Leisure wasn’t a reward for hard work; it was the highest state of being. Work was a means to secure leisure, and leisure was where life actually happened — in thinking, creating, learning, conversing.

The early idea of the “liberal arts” came from the same place. They weren’t job training. They were the “arts befitting a free person” — skills in language, reasoning, mathematics, and music. They were for people who had the time and freedom to explore ideas without having to justify every minute in terms of productivity.

Nearly a century ago, philosopher Bertrand Russell made a sharp case for idleness in his essay In Praise of Idleness. He argued that civilization would gain far more from shorter work hours and longer stretches of leisure than from endless production. For Russell, leisure wasn’t a pause from life — it was where life happened. It was the true incubator of culture, thought, and creativity.

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Categories
Ideas Science and Math

Who Really Said That?

“The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”
– Albert Einstein

We’ve all heard that quote. At meetings. In self-help books. On motivational posters in office break rooms. It exemplifies Einstein’s legendary cut-to-the-chase brilliance.

The only problem is, Einstein didn’t say it.

As far as I can tell, the quote first appeared in a Narcotics Anonymous pamphlet in the early 1980s. Einstein died in 1955 without mentioning anything remotely close to it in anything he’d ever written or said.

And yet, the misattribution stuck. Why? Because it feels like something Einstein would have said. Like Churchill, Lincoln, or Mark Twain, Einstein has become a kind of general-purpose intellectual that we can attribute our cleverest, pithiest thoughts to, whether he said them or not.

This misattribution happens all the time. So often, in fact, that there’s a name for it.

Actually, there are several.

Stigler’s Law of Eponymy

In 1980, University of Chicago statistics professor Stephen Stigler gave this phenomenon a name: Stigler’s Law of Eponymy. It states that “No scientific discovery is named after its original discoverer.”1

The best part? Stigler didn’t even claim to have discovered it. He credited the idea to someone else—sociologist Robert K. Merton. In other words, the law named after Stigler was… not discovered by Stigler. The law proves itself. Here’s what he wrote in the paper:

If there is an idea in this paper that is not at least implicit in Merton’s The Sociology of Science, it is either a happy accident or a likely error. Rather I have, in the Mertonian tradition of the self-confirming hypothesis, attempted to frame the self-proving theorem.

Stigler’s Law of Eponomy

But it’s not just a clever academic joke. Stigler’s Law points to something more systemic: we don’t just forget who discovered what—we misremember it. Over time, we start attaching credit to the loudest name, not the first one.

In the original paper, Stigler and others have documented example after example:

  • Halley’s Comet? Observed by ancient Chinese and Babylonian astronomers. Halley just did the math.
  • Newton’s First Law of Motion – Better known as inertia, it was described by Galileo decades before Newton refined and popularized it.
  • Fibonacci sequence – Long before Leonardo of Pisa wrote about it, Indian mathematicians like Pingala and Virahanka had described it in the context of Sanskrit poetry and combinatorics.

Fame creates its own kind of gravity and inertia. Once someone becomes famous enough, many other discoveries are attached to them.

The Matthew Effect

Now let’s look at Robert Merton—the person Stigler credited. Back in 1968, Merton gave this bias its own name: the Matthew Effect, based on a verse in the Gospel of Matthew, “For to everyone who has, more will be given…”

In the world of science, that means prominent researchers get more recognition, more funding, more citations—even when the original insight came from someone else. It’s not always malicious. Sometimes, people just assume the famous name must be behind the breakthrough. Other times, the lesser-known researcher gets buried in the footnotes.

The Matthew Effect isn’t limited to academia. It shows up in:

  • Publishing, where established authors get bigger advances regardless of quality.
  • Tech, where investors back founders who’ve “done it before.”
  • Education, where early reading success snowballs into long-term achievement.

It’s a feedback loop. Once you’re seen as successful, you’re more likely to be treated as successful. And then the cycle repeats.

Churchillian Drift

If Stigler’s Law and the Matthew Effect explain why discoveries get mislabeled, Churchillian Drift explains why quotes get misattributed—especially to famous people like Winston Churchill.

Coined by British broadcaster and quote sleuth Nigel Rees, Churchillian Drift describes how pithy or profound lines migrate toward famous names over time. If a quote sounds wise and ancient, we give it to Confucius. If it’s cynical and funny, it goes to Mark Twain. If it’s about strategy or war, it’s Sun Tzu. And if it’s about perseverance, logic, or nobility? Einstein gets the nod.

It’s branding by attribution. The quote becomes “better” if we imagine a titan of history saying it.

So What Do We Do With This?

At the surface, it’s just cultural laziness—there are only so many “famous” people in the public’s mental Rolodex, so we assign them everything. But it’s also more subtle and damaging: it reinforces the idea that only a handful of people in history are worth listening to.

This doesn’t just happen with quotes. It happens with scientific discoveries, artistic breakthroughs, and even entire branches of mathematics. As I wrote in The Fibonacci Sequence, Brought to You by Fibonacci (and Absolutely No One Else), history often remembers the person who popularized an idea, not the person who actually created it. The result? We get a distorted picture of how progress really happens.

The next time you hear a clever quote—or a “fact” about who discovered what—you don’t have to just nod along. You can check. Quote Investigator, run by Garson O’Toole, traces famous lines back to their earliest appearances. That’s where I found the true story of the Einstein quote.

You might find that the quote in your PowerPoint isn’t from Churchill, but from an obscure 19th-century pamphlet. Or that the mathematical sequence you love owes more to India than to Fibonacci.

Finding the truth behind these attributions means going beyond the headline version of history—the one where “Einstein was smart” and “Newton discovered everything.” What you get instead is the messy, collaborative, and far more human version of how ideas actually spread.

  1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stigler%27s_law_of_eponymy ↩︎
Categories
Books / Audiobooks Writing

A Short History of Thinking on Paper

I love notebooks.

I love the ritual of pulling out my Leuchtturm Bullet Journal and pretending—for a few minutes each day—that I’m a nineteenth-century poet in a French cage, writing up my deep and progound thoughts. Most of the time, it’s my work list and reminders for my kids’ homework. But still.

I like that I can carry a physical artifact of my thoughts. That I can plan my day in a truly analog fashion. That I can step away from screens and write things down, slowly, by hand.

In a world where it’s normal to carry around a supercomputer in your pocket, a notebook starts to feel like an extravagance. A tiny luxury. Which is strange when you think about it. The iPhone is a thousand dollars. But it’s the twelve-dollar notebook that feels indulgent.

That’s why I was so excited to stumble across The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper by Roland Allen.

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Categories
Human Behavior Science and Math

The Cafeteria Conspiricy

Voronoi diagram of people enjoying a park from Kottke.org

The strangest thing happens to me when I visit the cafeteria at work. People will come in from out of town and we’ll go to lunch with about 10 people. But there’s nowhere that we can find for 10 people to sit together. There will be a number of seats in a row and then one or two people there to break it up.

It’s like everyone is intentionally spreading out across the room as far as they can. It feels like there’s a conspiracy to keep us from finding a table.

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Categories
Judaism Life Lessons

What $1 Can Buy

This is a story about an experiment in giving.

I’m used to walking down the street and seeing someone sitting on the sidewalk with a sign:

“Homeless. Please Help.”

And I feel it—that tension. That deep, emotional tug to help.

But then the mental calculus starts. There are so many great causes I could be supporting with that dollar. I could give to a food pantry. Or support addiction recovery. Or donate to a shelter with wraparound services. Or contribute to an organization that tackles root causes like housing policy or mental health care.

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Categories
Life Lessons

Ivy League Trading Cards: The Heroes of Early Women’s Education

When I wrote the blog post last year, Yale Needs Women, I found myself cringing at how President Kingman Brewster handled coeducation. He didn’t so much throw open the gates as grudgingly unhook the latch—mostly because Princeton had just started to admit women, and Yale’s admit rates were taking a hit. Brewster famously insisted on still admitting 1,000 men each year to ensure Yale’s mission of “producing male leaders” wasn’t disrupted. The women? They could come—so long as they didn’t get in the way.

Yale, in short, was pretty awful. But many Ivies were pretty bad. Dartmouth women arrived in 1972 to frat chants, hate mail, and banners reading “Better Dead Than Coed.”

But there were some heroes in the fight for coeducation. I thought I’d use ChatGPT to create some trading cards of the Heroes of Ivy League Coeducation. Here’s my first attempt. At the bottom, I’ll show you how you can help me out!

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