Life is short, though I keep this from my children. Life is short, and I’ve shortened mine in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways, a thousand deliciously ill-advised ways I’ll keep from my children. The world is at least fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative estimate, though I keep this from my children. For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird. For every loved child, a child broken, bagged, sunk in a lake. Life is short and the world is at least half terrible, and for every kind stranger, there is one who would break you, though I keep this from my children. I am trying to sell them the world. Any decent realtor, walking you through a real shithole, chirps on about good bones: This place could be beautiful, right? You could make this place beautiful. — Maggie Smith, “Good Bones” Read more →
Author Archive: Paul Epps
How Do You Fix Schools?
Given that 40 percent of American fourth graders have less than basic reading skills, and only 26 percent of 12th graders are considered proficient in math, you’d think that there wasn’t much on the mind of teachers other than the best ways to teach reading and math. WE DON’T HAVE TIME FOR THAT! WE’VE GOT TO FIGHT TRUMP! Among the initiatives approved at the latest annual gathering of the NEA, the nation’s largest teachers union: $3,500 to “defend democracy against Trump’s embrace of fascism by using the term facism [sic] in NEA materials to correctly characterize Donald Trump’s program and actions.” Even the teachers can’t spell. What a horror show. Read more →
Can Your Brain Run Out of Memory?
Yes! I can remember things I learned as a kid — addresses, phone numbers, musical pieces — but I can’t remember things I learned last week. I would think that things I learned, or tried to learn, recently would be easier to recall than things I learned a long time ago but that’s not the case for me. My brain is full. Read more →
Squirrelly Behavior
I was watching these two squirrels from the community fitness center . . . In the first photo below, you can see them on either side of the palm tree on the right. They had been chasing each other across the wooden beams to the left of the tree when one of the squirrels made a leap for the palm tree and the other one followed. One chased the other to the point they’re at in the photo and that’s where they stopped. The palm tree, in my opinion, was a bad move, because 1) It’s a very tall tree. From their current position, they’re less than halfway to the top. And 2) Even if they got to the top, there’s nothing to do up there. Look at the palm tree on the left. They’d just have to turn around and come back down. The coniferous trees, like the one… Read more →
I Suppose It’s a Rhetorical Question
There's never a shortage of people to tell you that pit bulls are not an inherently dangerous breed of dog. Only when pit bulls end up in the hands of a "bad" owner do they turn violent. So who do we blame when pit bulls with no owner kill people?https://t.co/1w7ov1nUO4 — Paul Epps (@paulepps) August 4, 2025 Read more →
Are We Lowering Our Standards Fast Enough?
Sometimes I worry that things are getting worse faster than we can lower our standards. I’m teaching a couple of ACT prep classes this summer. Part of the process of getting ready to do that is to learn what, if anything, has changed since I taught the classes last summer. Here’s what I found: Reduced the number of questions overall (44 fewer) Reduced the test length. Students can receive their college-reportable Composite score after 125 minutes of testing, rather than up to 195. More time per question. Reduced the number of answer choices in math questions from five to four. Students can now choose to take the ACT National test with or without the science section. State and district customers will choose whether to include the science section with the ACT test for their students. Read more →
Brian Wilson, 1942-2025
Brian Wilson was a California boy like me. Beach Boys music is part of the fabric of the world. Even my son, years ago at age 10, could sing Beach Boys songs by heart, almost. “And she’ll have fun, fun, fun till her daddy takes the TV away!” I had to straighten him out on that. “It’s T-Bird . . . not TV.” “What’s a T-Bird?” RIP Brian Wilson Read more →
In the Bookstore
I went down to the bookstore this evening and found myself in the poetry section. But for every thin book of poems there was a thick biography of the poet and an even thicker book by someone who’s supposed to know explaining what the poet is supposed to’ve said and why he didn’t. So you don’t have to waste your time on the best the writer could do, the words he fought the darkness and himself for, the unequal battle with beauty. Instead you can read comfortably about the worst the writer could do: the mess he made of his life, how he fought with his family, cheated on his lovers, didn’t pay his debts and not only drank too much but all the stupid things he ever said to the bartender just before getting 86’d will be printed for you and they’re just as stupid as the things everyone… Read more →
And have no fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness, but rather expose them. — Ephesians 5:11
A Trip to the Supermarket
As I was walking up to the local supermarket, one of the cart wranglers was near the entrance saying — loudly — “Number one! Eyewitness News!” Now this is a grown man, of what looked like Middle Eastern extraction, although that’s not really relevant. As I got closer, he asked me, “Have you heard that?” “I don’t watch the news,” I said. “It’s depressing, It’s dishonest. It’s the same things happening every day: A car chase on the freeway, someone got killed, someone got robbed, someone got stabbed on the Metro, a boy wearing makeup won a girls’ track meet.” “I love the news,” he said. “I’d like to be a reporter.” If anyone reading this is looking to hire a challenged but enthusiastic reporter, message me. I exited the store through the other door, where two young people had a table set up, selling stuffed animals to benefit… Read more →
Act Like You Know What You’re Doing
I’ll let you all in on a little secret If I could share with you a thing or two If you just act like you know what you’re doing Everybody thinks that you do — Joe Walsh, “Lucky That Way” Read more →
The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane. — Marcus Aurelius
A Kind of Sadness
There is a kind of sadness that comes from knowing too much, from seeing the world as it truly is. It is the sadness of understanding that life is not a grand adventure, but a series of small, insignificant moments, that love is not a fairy tale, but a fragile, fleeting emotion, that happiness is not a permanent state, but a rare, fleeting glimpse of something we can never hold onto. And in that understanding, there is a profound loneliness, a sense of being cut off from the world, from other people, from oneself. — Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse Read more →
Bob Dylan on Why Music Keeps Getting Worse
I remember something Dylan wrote about most popular music artists in his book Chronicles: Volume One, and that is that making music “isn’t their destiny.” Van Morrison has an album called Born to Sing: No Plan B. Other than making music, there wasn’t anything else these guys could have done. When I think of the artists whose work has meant a lot to me, I’m not recalling anyone who seems to have gone into the music industry to make money by churning out songs that sound like everyone else’s songs. In fact, for most of the people I’m thinking of, that wasn’t even an option at the time they started. If you could make enough money to support yourself with music, you were doing well. Now you can make money putting out songs that sound like every other song, which is good in a way, because you can be a… Read more →
This Is What Propaganda Looks Like
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Gene Hackman, 1930-2025
Gene Hackman died in his New Mexico home, which is not shocking in itself, given that he was 95 years old. The shocking part is that his much-younger wife died and one of his dogs died at the same time. Well, that may not be quite right . . . they were all found at the same time, but had apparently been dead for a while. As I write this, the reasons for the more-or-less simultaneous deaths remain a mystery. Maybe it’s just a really, really amazing coincidence, three living beings all dying at the same time. I’ve seen Hackman in a lot of movies. I liked his work. The French Connection and Unforgiven are two of my favorite movies. French Connection was the first R-rated movie I ever saw. My dad took me when I was 14. RIP Gene Hackman Read more →
Goodbye Joy Reid, et al
How naive of me to think Joy Reid was fired over ratings: https://t.co/ToLxT96iNN pic.twitter.com/MoJh3WsPwm — Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) February 25, 2025 Joy Reid is one of many media personalities being shuffled about recently. Joy Reid oozes racial hatred from every pore. She used to laugh at “white tears.” Who’s crying now? After being fired, Reid will have more time to grope around for some kind of an explanation for how little influence she and people like her have over increasingly large numbers of the American public. Imagine that you’re an MSNBC host and every day you show up and say the same things. Trump is a fascist. Trump is a racist. Trump is the new Hitler. Trump’s going to destroy our country. Trump is a rapist. He’s a white supremacist, white nationalist. Then you see a huge portion of the country vote for the person that you’ve been obsessively condemning… Read more →
Garth Hudson, 1937-2025
With the recent death of Garth Hudson, there are no more surviving members of The Band. They’re all gone, or maybe they’re all back together. Every member of KISS is still alive. And yet there are people who can’t understand why I don’t believe in God. RIP Garth Hudson View this post on Instagram A post shared by Robbie Robertson (@robbierobertsonofficial) Read more →
Maybe You’re Dumb and He’s Smart
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