The Frank Forum

**The Following Post is Adapted from a X post made earlier in the day by the author, it's been edited slightly from its original version** In 2012 I was 9 months into my deployment overseas. I had a two week leave at the latest you possibly could have it. To coincide with my then-fiancé's law school graduation. By this point, time was moving excruciatingly slow. As an engineering company we mostly knew our hardest missions were behind us, and thankfully we were kept very busy still, but we were very much in the rear. At the time I was disappointed by this, which is something I look back on with shame. My personal disappointment was more relief for everyone who cared about me. But you don't think about these things when you're a young man. In this era Afghanistan was becoming more and more of a mess, and worse, an unreported-on mess. ISIS was a “JV team” and I knew the country back home was checked out. This fact frustrated me further. When I got to the last point

  Skateboarding was an integral part of my childhood.  Though I was never particularly good - with my specialty being the tic tac , a trick that one of those skateboarding pugs could probably do - I enjoyed it thoroughly.  While skateboarding for me was mostly a solitary activity, I did, on occasion, meet up with friends to ride the metaphorical concrete waves.  In fact, an old buddy and I used to spend hours on end playing SKATE using silly, made-up tricks.  Sort of like this  (but nowhere as good, obviously).  Samuel J. Abrams, in an article published earlier this year for AEIdeas , described skate parks as "critically important third places that drastically improve neighborhood social capital and community strength."  Before I go any further, I want to make sure we're all on the same page about what "third places" are, so I'll let Ray Oldenburg, the man who pioneered the term, explain it himself: The third place is a generic designation for a great varie

  In one of my more popular posts , I remarked on my late introduction to the wonders of literature. Some, having read it, were incredulous. Perhaps they were under the impression that anyone who wears the sort of thick-framed glasses that I do must, in fact, be an avid reader. But, alas, it was only a few years ago that I came to understand the unparalleled power of reading.  It's absolutely imperative to note, though, that to really  be a reader requires one, not just to read books by authors who are ideologically uniform, but rather, to read damn near everything. I have, thus far, read books by libertarians, Marxists, liberals, post-liberals, neoconservatives, paleo-conservatives, moral relativists, feminists, environmentalists, and on and on. You come to realize - if you are reading the right authors, that is - that all of these ideologies offer something interesting to digest.  Edward Said made me rethink my, and our, myopic and utterly reductionist understanding of the dynami