McCoy Writing
Would Dickens' "A Christmas Carol" Resonate In the Bah-Humbug of Christmas Present?
One of my favorite themes is the idea that being jaded, cynical, and angry is not strength. On the contrary, maintaining your idealism and kindness in a sometimes harsh world is true strength. In 2010, I asked the question of whether Charles Dickens' "A Christmas Carol" would be published today, or whether it would be considered overly sentimental and naive in an age of dystopian vampire fiction. This piece was published in the Christian Science Monitor, just before Christmas 2010, and I was very proud of it.
All My Cat Needed to Know He Learned at Harvard
This is a light-hearted essay that explores different approaches to happiness.
Slide and the Family Bone
This is just a fun piece about the unbridled energies and joys of adolescence - playing the trombone in the middle school marching band, and trying to practice this unwieldy horse of an instrument - much to the chagrin of two golden retrievers who would have been perfectly happy never to have heard me play this loud and offensive instrument.
An Essay on Doing What You Love
Below is a link to an essay of mine that appeared in the Wall Street Journal as an Op-Ed piece in May of 2013. The title that was chosen by the WSJ was unfortunately blunt and didn't reflect what I believe was a more nuanced message in the actual essay. Even so, I wrote this piece over ten years ago, when I was feeling a bit more pessimistic about life, and since then, my thinking on this topic has changed considerably. I would never have written this essay today. With a little more perspective and life experience, I absolutely believe that we owe it to ourselves to follow our passions and "do what we love." Steve Jobs was right, as he said in his famous Stanford commencement speech in 2005: "And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become." I didn't know it then, but I really know it now - he's right.