Josh Shear – Final Archive – Page 2 – The final archive of the former JoshShear.com

A gratitude for today, and this moment

There’s a catch-all prayer in Judaism for gratitude. I’ll use my own transliteration here (that is, I’m going to write the Hebrew words using English letters in a rough pronunciation), but the prayer is called the shehechiyanu. The full prayer roughly translates to, “Blessed are you, Lord our God, who has granted us life, sustained…
George Washington’s Thanksgiving proclamation

I’ve been watching, sporadically, the lessons on Thanksgiving they’re teaching my five-year-old niece over Zoom, since that’s how kindergarten is taught these days. It is, of course, the child-friendly version, during which British religious refugees pilgrims spend a couple months struggling under harsh conditions to cross the Atlantic in a too-small ship called the Mayflower…
Banned

That brief, fairly-well supported (I thought) piece I wrote last week on forming a more perfect union? Facebook didn’t want it. In fact, Facebook seems to think my blog is simply not OK for their platform. And Instagram (owned by Facebook) seems to not want me at all. Hmm, both FB and IG are a…
In order to form a more perfect union

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America. I barely remember…
United we stand, untied we fall

It’s after 4 a.m. here on the east coast of the United States, the morning after the 2020 election. Lots of local races and ballot questions were decided, most of them important to somebody. Here in Georgia, we had a ballot question about requiring the government to spend money on the things they’re supposed to…
Vote

On Jan. 20, 2017, as my wife, our pup and I piled into the van to head up to celebrate my Dad’s birthday with him — at a place without a television, because he didn’t want to have to watch Donald Trump’s inauguration — my wife made a joke. I didn’t respond. I was very…
Fake it ’til you make it? Don’t

One of the things we talk about when dealing with impostor syndrome and in building confidence is faking it until you make it — that is, if you appear to be something you’re not long enough, you might become that thing. The trick here is to fool yourself, but be careful when trying to fool…
Game B

In a lot of ways, 2020 has felt like a giant shift in the world. It’s not just our COVID-19 quarantine and masking, during which a a lot of (mostly small) businesses closed, more (often large) businesses declared bankruptcy and suicide rates rose. Sports schedules changed, with the NBA and NHL taking off months between…
Replication and interpretation

In his manifesto Team Human (serialized on Medium), Douglas Rushkoff discusses, among many other things, musical notation. Musical notation, he writes, is meant to let other people play an approximation of the written work, not to replicate it. To hear what he means, listen to these four pros play the same Bach piece. All four…
Where’s your edge?

If you’re not listening, Brian Koppelman — the creator of Showtime’s “Billions” and writer, among others, of the films Rounders and Ocean’s Thirteen — has an excellent podcast called The Moment. He interviews creators (he has a fondness for musicians but also talks to authors, filmmakers and other) about The Moment they were called to…