Josh Shear – Final Archive – Page 23 – The final archive of the former JoshShear.com

Fuck busy; remember what’s important

If I’m honest with myself, I’m feeling a little roots-less this week. In mid-June, we took a final trip to the house I grew up in, and brought some furniture and family keepsakes back to Syracuse. My parents have, by now, made it to Charleston, SC, where they bought a house a couple of years…
What’s YOUR secret?

In order for any of this to make sense, you need to click on that photo of Mackenzie above and spend eight minutes watching her Facebook video. I am so not going to give you a spoiler here. I’m secretly a writer. You wouldn’t know it from reading this blog, because the posts aren’t regular.…
Learning about moderation from fire

One of the things I’ve been doing to relax this winter is putting a fire in the fireplace. I can sit with a book, or with the TV on, or I can just sit and watch the thing burn with a glass of wine in my hand. For hours, occasionally getting up to throw on…
Be amazing at it while it’s yours

I get the feeling there are a lot more lazy people in the world than mediocre people. At least, I hope so. I’d like to think that most people, in their private lives, are remarkable. Why are so many people, then, unremarkable in their public lives? We interact with a lot of people most days,…
Charles Barkley was right: The decline of sport as a noble endeavor

During the summer of 2010, as basketball fans waited for a really big free agent season to pan out, the Miami Heat re-signed their star Dwyane Wade, and in a moment of managerial genius, managed to sign LeBron James and Chris Bosh – all three at discounts so they could afford to have two other…
Honor among thieves

When I first started on the college newspaper as opinion editor (1999ish), I wrote a piece about the recently arrested-and-jailed Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski. You might remember he made a 20-year habit of mailing pipe bombs from a cabin in the woods of Lincoln, Montana, where he had moved in the early 1970s to live as…
10 Septembers, 20 Septembers

Revolutions happen overnight; apathy takes time. We’re approaching the tenth anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, hijackings. This was a one-morning, shock-and-awe event. We all knew, while our parents’ generation had the assassination of John F. Kennedy to say, “I remember where I was when I found out…,” this would be that event for Americans…
Jason’s homemade brocolli calzones

This is a recipe by Jason, a Syracuse attorney known on Twitter as @jaseface1. I’m not usually a recipe kinda guy, but I’ll mix it up and give it a shot when I get back into the starches in a few weeks. 1 package active dry yeast 1 cup warm water 2 tablespoons olive oil…
Taking the hippie out of permaculture

Call a person a “futurist,” and everybody crowds around to hear a tale of doom – and maybe what we can do to avoid it. Call a person a “hippie,” and everybody runs for cover. I think the difference really is in the language each uses. When someone talks about thinking seven generations, or 20…
The problem of dichotomy

I made a mention of Buy Nothing Day in a tweet – for the uninitiated, that’s today in the U.S. and tomorrow in the rest of the world. In the U.S., it is “celebrated” (such as it is), alongside Black Friday, the first “official” shopping day of the Christmas season. When the person to whom…