Author Archive: Paul Epps

I Suppose It’s a Rhetorical Question

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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?

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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

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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

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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

woman selecting packed food on gondola

A Trip to the Supermarket

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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 →

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

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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

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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 →

The French Connection

Gene Hackman, 1930-2025

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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

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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

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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 →

God, You’ve Done Enough

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I found the one prayer that seemed to serve the winter mood: O God, You’ve done enough, You’ve robbed me of enough, I’m too tired and old to learn to love, leave me alone for ever. — Graham Greene, The End of the Affair Read more →

Prevent trouble before it arises.
Put things in order before they exist.

— Tao Te Ching

Melancholy hypochondria. It is a terrible disease: it makes you see things as they are. — Gérard de Nerval

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