It’s graduation season, which means you may be looking for a good gift for a young man heading into a new stage of life.

Books are usually a safe bet for a graduation gift, especially the kind a young man will actually find useful. Over the years, Kate and I have written four Art of Manliness books that would make especially good gifts for a recent high school or college grad.

The Illustrated Art of Manliness

This is the most recent of our books and the most fun to flip through. It’s a collection of the famous illustrations we’ve done with Ted Slampyak over the years, covering everything from how to throw a punch to how to run an office meeting.

It’s a great toilet book. You skim a few pages while you’re taking care of business, bone up on how to escape a bear or shake hands properly, and then get on with your day. 

The Art of Manliness: Classic Skills and Manners for the Modern Man

This is the book that started it all. It was published back in 2009, which makes it 17 years old. There might be a high schooler who was born when this book came out to whom you could now gift it. Some of the stuff in there is admittedly dated, like there’s a mention of Facebook pokes, which I don’t think have existed since the Obama administration.

But most of the content is still relevant because most of what a young man needs to know remains evergreen. How to change a tire. How to tie a tie. How to give a speech. The classics never go out of style!

Heading Out on Your Own: 31 Basic Life Skills in 31 Days

We self-published this book back in 2014, so it’s a little over a decade old. A few details have shifted (rental markets, for one, look pretty different now than they did then), but I’d say 95% of it is still solid. The book covers 31 skills a young adult needs to know when they’re heading out on their own: doing laundry without ruining your clothes, cooking a few basic meals, managing your finances, making small talk, shopping for groceries on a budget, living with roommates, maintaining your car, acing a job interview, and much more!

If you know a recent grad who’s about to be on their own for the first time, give them this one.

The Art of Manliness: Manvotionals

If you want to gift a young man a book that’s less focused on practical skills and more centered on the character of mature manliness, this is it. Manvotionals is an anthology of speeches, poems, and passages from books that speak to the classic manly virtues. You’ll find edifying excerpts from famous figures like Theodore Roosevelt and Marcus Aurelius, as well as lesser-known authors from the past who offered potent wisdom on how to be a man of strength and integrity. The reader can read a reflection-prompting passage a day, sort of like a daily devotional.

For a graduate stepping into a world that doesn’t always reinforce timeless virtues, having a book like this around can be a steady source of grounding.

Any of these books make a great gift for a young man graduating. You can find all of them — as well as other books we’ve written — on Amazon.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

The Machine Stops by E.M. Forster. Kate recently wrote a great piece on Dying Breed, pulling out seven insights modern folks can get from this short story/novella published in 1909. I’d known about “The Machine Stops” for a long time, but her piece finally nudged me to read it. The story takes place in a future where humanity lives underground in individual pods, each person isolated in their own room, every need met by a vast mechanical system simply called “the Machine.” People communicate through screens. They never travel because everywhere looks the same anyway. They’ve grown soft and pale and have developed a “horror of direct experience.” When the Machine breaks down, civilization, completely dependent on it, unravels. The story is incredibly good and incredibly prescient and will make you think about the role of tech in your life. It’s available for free online and short enough to knock out this weekend. 

The Monastery of the Damned: From the Ivy League to the French Foreign Legion by Nicholas Tobias. The French Foreign Legion has always fascinated me. The mystique of guys from 140 different countries forming up under the French flag, the notoriously harsh training, the willingness to take in men with messy pasts and forge them into something new. Tobias (a pseudonym) was a Princeton-trained Renaissance historian and a recent convert to Catholicism when he ditched his academic track to enlist. The book covers his twenty months in the Legion, including a six-month deployment to Afghanistan in 2009, and how the whole experience reshaped his romanticized notions of soldiering, manliness, and what he was looking for in the first place. Really enjoyed this one. 

Cloudhiker. Back in the late 2000s, there was a service called StumbleUpon. You hit a button and got sent to a random website based on your interests. I discovered a lot of weird corners of the internet through it, and I reckon a good number of you discovered AoM that way. Sadly, StumbleUpon shut down a few years back, and I’ve missed it ever since. Recently I came across Cloudhiker, which works basically the same way. Hit a button, get teleported somewhere you didn’t know existed. I’ve landed on a bunch of quirky sites like Stop Alien Abductions, a page of live airport webcams, and hypertext.tv, which is hard to describe but a lot of fun to interact with. Surf the web like it’s 2010 again.

Sergio Mendes and Brasil ’66. Mendes was the guy who brought bossa nova to American audiences in the 60s with his group Brasil ’66. Mixing Brazilian rhythms with English-language pop covers, his tunes make for great work music for when you’re grinding through email or filling out spreadsheets. It’s lively enough to keep you awake, but mellow enough to stay in the background. My parents had all the Sergio Mendes albums on vinyl when I was a kid, so I grew up listening to him. I still have those albums in my collection. If you’re looking for more bossa nova for your chill summer work soundtrack, check out Astrud Gilberto, Antonio Carlos Jobim, and Stan Getz.

On our Dying Breed newsletter, we published Memento Mori Not Working for You? Try Contemplating Your Immortality and Sunday Firesides: The Peace of Being One Person.

Quote of the Week

What the fool does in the end, the wise man does in the beginning.

—Spanish maxim

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

I haven’t touched a barbell much since January. I’ve been in a leaning out/hypertrophy/mobility-focused season of my training (highly recommend having seasons to your training!). I’ve been working exclusively with dumbbells and my cable machine. I’m chasing the pump. I’m loving it.

My strength coach Matt Reynolds continues to create my programming, and one of the things he’s incorporated into my hypertrophy workouts is myo-reps. I’d never done ‘em before, but after a few months of doing them, I’m loving them. They’re a time-saver but highly effective. I can knock out a complete upper-body workout in about 30 minutes, I get a solid pump, and I’m putting on muscle and starting to look jacked.

If you’re short on time but still want to build muscle, myo-reps might be worth trying. They’ll at least shake up what might feel like a boring, rote workout rut.

Let me walk you through what they are and how to program them.

What Is a Myo-Rep?

Myo-reps were developed in the mid-2000s by Norwegian strength coach Børge Fagerli. They’re a rest-pause technique, which means you’re stringing together what would normally be several separate sets into one extended set with very short rest breaks scattered between that extended set.

Here’s how it works:

Pick a weight at 60–80% of your one-rep max; something you could lift for 10-15 reps. Do an “activation set” of 10-12 reps, stopping one or two reps shy of failure (a Rate of Perceived Exertion of 8 or 9). Then rest for about 10-20 seconds. Fagerli recommends counting out 3-5 deep breaths. I just count “one Mississippi, two Mississippi, three Mississippi” until I get to twelve Mississippi.

Then you do a “mini-set” of 4 to 5 reps with the same weight.

Rest another 10-20 seconds.

Another mini-set.

Rest another 10-20 seconds.

Keep repeating these mini-sets and short breaks until you can’t hit 4 reps in a mini-set. If you’ve got the weight set at the right amount, you’ll usually be able to complete 4-5 of these mini-sets.

So one activation set plus 3-5 mini-sets. You’ve essentially done what would be 4-5 traditional sets compressed into a few minutes.

The Theory Behind Myo-Reps

Muscle growth is driven by two main mechanisms: mechanical tension and metabolic stress.

Mechanical tension is the primary driver. It’s the force your muscle fibers generate when they contract against resistance. When a fiber is loaded hard enough, specialized mechanosensors in the cell trigger the signaling pathway that tells your body to build new muscle.

Tension isn’t about how heavy the weight feels to you. It’s about how hard each individual fiber is working. A moderate weight can produce high tension in a specific fiber if that fiber is doing all the work.

That’s where the “effective reps” model comes in. In a traditional set of 12, the first 6-8 reps don’t contribute as much to growth. You’re mostly warming up the high-threshold fast-twitch fibers (the ones most responsible for hypertrophy) by exhausting the smaller slow-twitch fibers first. The last 4-6 reps, when fatigue forces your body to recruit those big fast-twitch fibers, are where the magic happens.

Myo-reps let you skip the warm-up phase after that first activation set. Once you’ve fatigued the slow-twitch fibers, the fast-twitch fibers have to handle every subsequent rep. They’re working at maximum capacity even though the weight feels relatively light, producing the kind of high-tension contractions that drive growth. Nearly every rep in your mini-sets is an effective rep. That’s the idea, at least.

The short rest periods also create metabolic stress, which can (in theory) sensitize muscles to anabolic signaling. It’s why myo-reps feel so pumpy. You’re creating a hypoxic environment similar to what blood flow restriction training does, but without the bands.

Why Do Myo-Reps?

The biggest reason to do myo-reps is that they save time. You’re knocking out the equivalent of a few traditional sets in a few minutes. It’s been nice getting through my workouts in about half an hour.

But there are other benefits, too. Because you’re working with 60-80% of your one-rep max instead of grinding heavy weight, myo-reps are easier on your joints. The limited rest time forces you to train close to failure. Most guys leave way too much in the tank on accessory work. It’s hard to do that when you’re cranking out mini-sets with 12 seconds of rest. Myo-reps break the monotony of the traditional three sets of ten. And you get a great pump, which is nice.

Basically, myo-reps will get you results that are close to what you get with straight sets with long rests in between, in less time. They’re not completely optimal for strength-building, however, as the short rests make it harder to move more weight and achieve progressive overload. That’s why they work best as a tool for accessory work and as something to use every now and then to mix up your programming, rather than as a wholesale replacement for a traditional set/rest scheme.

Which Exercises to Use Myo-Reps On

Myo-reps aren’t for every lift. Because you’re pushing close to failure with very short rests, you need exercises where fatigue-induced form breakdown won’t get you hurt.

So don’t use myo-reps on heavy barbell squats, presses, deadlifts, or the bench press. The stabilization demands are too high, and getting stuck under a loaded bar during your fourth mini-set is a good way to end up in the ER. Skip Olympic lifts entirely. Cleans and snatches are explosive movements that need to be done fresh. And if you do Bulgarian split squats, pass on myo-reps. Requires too much stability.

For myo-reps, stick with machines, cables, and dumbbell movements.

Great myo-rep exercises include machine chest presses, lat pulldowns, cable rows, dumbbell shoulder presses, leg presses, leg extensions, hack squats, leg curls, dumbbell lateral raises, bicep curls, and tricep pushdowns. Anything where the path of the weight is guided or the movement is simple enough that you can grind through the last reps without your form collapsing. You could also use myo-reps with bodyweight exercises like push-ups and air squats.

How to Program Myo-Reps

If you’re doing a traditional barbell/strength focused program, keep your heavy compound lifts as traditional straight sets. You want fresh energy and full recovery when you’re squatting or benching near your max.

Save myo-reps for the back half of your workout when you’re doing accessory work.

Here’s a simple approach: pick two to three accessory exercises per workout to do as myo-reps.

So on an upper body day where the bench press is your main lift, do dumbbell shoulder presses, lateral raises, and dumbbell curls as myo-reps. On lower body day where the barbell squat is your main lift, do leg extensions and leg curls as myo-reps.

Your activation set should feel like an RPE 8 or 9. That’s about one or two reps shy of failure. Track your reps in the mini-sets. If you’re consistently hitting 4 clusters of 5 reps, bump the weight up next session.

Frequency-wise, you can hit a muscle group with myo-reps 2-3 times a week. Just remember these are an intensity technique. Don’t turn every set of every lift into a myo-rep set. That’s just a recipe for burnout.

Give Myo-Reps a Shot

If you’re like me and trying to build muscle without spending 90 minutes in the gym every day, give myo-reps a shot. They reduce your workout time, can make your workouts feel fresh, and can help you pack on some serious muscle.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

You hear a lot today about how our ample screentime is affecting our mental health. But how is it affecting our bodies, and how is that impact on our bodies affecting, well, our mental health?

My guest today will unpack the ways that digital technology is sapping our vitality, and offer a simple protocol to get it back. Her name is Manoush Zomorodi, and she’s the host of the TED Radio Hour and the author of Body Electric. In our conversation, Manoush explains why a day spent sitting in front of screens can leave you exhausted, even though you haven’t really done anything, and how small bouts of movement throughout the day can counteract that drain and keep you feeling energized and focused. She shares how much activity you need to offset periods of being sedentary, and how to realistically incorporate these movement breaks into your routine. We also get into the specific effects digital technology is having on our eyes and ears — and what you can do to prevent the damage.

Resources Related to the Podcast

Connect With Manoush Zomorodi

• Manoush’s website
• Manoush on IG

Listen to the Podcast! (And don’t forget to leave us a review!)

Listen to the episode on a separate page

Download this episode

Subscribe to the podcast in the media player of your choice

Transcript Coming Soon

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

How many streaming services are you paying for right now? If you had to write the number down from memory, could you get within five dollars of the actual monthly total? When was the last time you logged into that fitness app that’s been stealthily pulling $9.99 out of your checking account since 2022?

If you’re like most people, you probably don’t know exactly how many subscriptions you’ve got going, and when you check the numbers on them, you’re probably paying a lot more than you’d like.

I recently had David Bach on the podcast to talk about his book The Automatic Millionaire, and he made the case that finding small ways to cut your spending, and then investing that savings, will allow you to compound modest amounts of money into serious wealth.

One way to find these savings, Bach recommended, is to review your subscriptions — whether to apps or media — and cancel those you’re not using and really don’t care about.

My conversation with Bach nudged me to perform my own subscription audit; I’ll share the results of mine at the end of the article.

First, I’ll walk you through how to do an audit of your recurring subscriptions, cancel the ones you no longer need, and invest those savings to build your nest egg.

The Subscription Creep Problem

The average American household now juggles between 10 and 15 recurring charges a month. Streaming services. News subscriptions. Fitness and meditation apps. Cloud storage tiers you upgraded to when your phone filled up in 2020.

Consumer surveys suggest the average consumer loses about $204 a year to subscriptions they’ve completely forgotten about, and services that scan bank accounts for recurring charges routinely find between $180 and $400 in annual savings the first time they’re run on a new user.

Why does this happen?

Well, the subscription model is specifically designed to exploit behavioral inertia. Once you’re signed up, the friction of canceling feels greater than the $9.99 a month you’re paying, so you just keep paying. And paying. Some companies take this further with what researchers call “dark patterns.” They make it easy to sign up, but difficult to cancel. They hide the cancellation link or make it hard to see, and when you do decide to cancel, they may require you to call a retention specialist during business hours, chat with a bot, or, in the case of certain gym chains, mail a notarized letter to the home branch. It’s like the Hotel California: you can check in, but you can’t check out.

A lot of companies simply bank on you forgetting you have a subscription with them at all. Which is a safe bet: because each monthly subscription amount seems relatively small, your brain doesn’t register them as a big deal and prioritize remembering that they’re dinging your account in the background.

Yet the aggregate cost, projected over the decades you could have been investing that money instead, is not small at all. In fact, it can be yuge.

What the Compounding Math Actually Looks Like

Say you run an audit this Saturday and manage to cut $100 a month in subscriptions. $100 is a good chunk of change, but it’s not life-changing . . . in the short term.

Now take that $100 and automate a monthly transfer into a broad-market index fund — something like VTI or a standard S&P 500 ETF — averaging a historically reasonable ~7% annual return. Here’s what that turns into roughly over time:

• After 10 years of investing $100 a month: $17,309
• After 20 years of investing $100 a month: $52,096
• After 30 years investing $100 a month: $121,997

So if you’re in your 30s today and you run this audit tomorrow, over 30 years of regular saving/investing, you’re looking at six figures in retirement money that would have otherwise gone to apps and streaming services you’d practically forgotten about.

If you cut just one $9.99/month subscription, invest that $9.99/month for 40 years, and get a conceivable 10% interest rate, you’d end up with over $50,000.

Small cuts, invested consistently, turn into real money because compounding does the heavy lifting for you.

Ain’t compound interest grand?

How to Run a Subscription Audit

To run an audit of your subscriptions, you’ve got two options: app-assisted or manual.

The App Route

There are several apps on the market that will find and even cancel your recurring subscriptions for you. They make identifying and canceling your subscriptions more convenient, though the convenience will cost you.

Here’s a rundown of them:

Rocket Money. The most popular option. You link your bank and credit card accounts, and it pulls every recurring charge into one list. The free tier shows you what you’re paying for. For each charge you find, ask yourself one question: Did I use this in the last 30 days, and would I actually miss it if it disappeared tomorrow? If the answer is no, cancel it. Their premium tier, which runs $7 to $14 a month on a sliding scale, will actually call and cancel the services on your behalf, which is useful for the deliberately difficult-to-kill subscriptions.

If you don’t want to cancel a subscription outright, they’ve got a bill negotiation feature where they’ll work to reduce a bill for you, but they charge 35-60% of your first year’s savings as a success fee.

Hiatus. Like Rocket Money, Hiatus links to your accounts and scans for recurring charges, and like Rocket Money, it offers a concierge team that will cancel subscriptions and negotiate bills for you. The difference is the fee structure. Hiatus premium runs a flat $9.99 a month and doesn’t take a percentage of what they save you on negotiations — whatever they knock off your cable bill stays in your pocket.

Monarch Money. This is a cleaner, more privacy-focused alternative that picked up a lot of users after Intuit shut down Mint in 2024. It tracks your spending and groups recurring subscriptions into a single category for easy perusal. They don’t offer concierge cancellation services, but with the list of subscriptions, you can easily cancel subscriptions on your own. The privacy you get with Monarch Money will cost you $99 a year.

Copilot Money. A similar service to Monarch is Copilot. It automatically labels your expenses into certain categories so you can easily see your recurring subscriptions. It’s what I’ve been using lately. I check my subscriptions once a month and nuke any I don’t need anymore. It’s ad-free and privacy-first for $96 a year.

The Manual Route

If you don’t like the idea of signing up for another subscription in order to reduce your subscriptions, you can DIY your subscription audit:

Review bank account and credit card statements. Log into your bank and credit card accounts, download six months of transactions as CSV files, and dump them into a spreadsheet. Sort by merchant. The recurring charges cluster together. Search for terms like “subscription,” “monthly,” “Apple.com/Bill,” and “Google.”

Cancel the subscriptions you no longer want.

Review your Apple and Google Play App subscriptions. A lot of recurring subscriptions occur within apps on your phone. You can easily cancel these from your phone.

• On iPhone: Settings → your name → Subscriptions
• On Android: Play Store → profile icon → Payments & subscriptions → Subscriptions

Cancel the ones you no longer want.

Review PayPal recurring payments. There’s a good chance a lot of your recurring payments are happening via PayPal. Fortunately, they make it easy to cancel right from their platform. Log in to PayPal on desktop, click the gear icon, go to Payments, and click Manage automatic payments. You’ll see every merchant pre-approved to pull money from your account, and you can kill any of them with one click. This is often where the oldest forgotten subscriptions are hiding.

The upsides of the manual audit are that it costs nothing, doesn’t give third parties access to your data, and only takes about an hour.

But don’t delude yourself; if you’re not going to have the gumption to do an audit — and then follow through on the annoying work of actually canceling the unwanted subscriptions — pay for an app; it’s better to pay a little money to save a lot of money, than to save nothing and keep paying the inertia tax.

Don’t Forget to Invest It!

If you cancel $100 worth of subscriptions and then spend that same $100 at Bass Pro Shop on Saturday, you haven’t saved anything. You’ve just moved the money from one form of consumption to another.

If you want to get the most out of these savings, you gotta invest it. Bach recommends making your investing automatic, so you don’t even think about it. Set up a monthly transfer, scheduled for the day after payday, that moves whatever you’ve cut from subscriptions straight into an investment account. If you don’t have a retirement account, Vanguard, Fidelity, and Schwab will all let you open a Roth IRA online in about fifteen minutes. Need to learn more about IRAs? We’ve written about them.

If you’re already maxing your Roth, send it to a taxable brokerage account instead.

Do this consistently for years (along with regular retirement savings), and your 65-year-old self will have a nice little nest egg waiting for him.

My Subscription Audit Results

I used a combination of app-assisted and manual tactics for my subscription audit. I first looked at Copilot and filtered my transactions by “Subscriptions,” so I could see a list of all the transactions from the past year labeled as subscriptions. I found a few website/newspaper subscriptions that I barely used that were costing about $5 per subscription each month. Canceled those.

The big recurring subscription I found in Copilot was SiriusXM. It was $300 a year. Damn! Didn’t even know it was that much. It definitely wasn’t that much when I initially purchased it maybe five years ago. Guess they’ve been raising rates each year. I can’t even remember why we were once using SiriusXM enough to justify signing up once a free trial for it expired, but I do know we’ve hardly used it in the last several years, turning to our smartphones to stream music from Spotify or Pandora. Easy cancel.

The big payday for me came when I manually reviewed my Apple App subscriptions. I’d signed up for several apps’ yearly premium plans to unlock features that, at the time, I felt I needed. Each of these yearly subscription fees ranged from $50 to $100 a year. I used these apps for a few months, but then stopped. Forgot about them. If I hadn’t reviewed my Apple App subscriptions, these would have been automatically renewed for another year.

The other place where I found a lot of unused subscription fees was PayPal. When signing up for a subscription service, I’ll usually use PayPal to check out since it’s easier than pulling my credit card out of my wallet. I found several unused digital subscriptions there and canceled them right on PayPal.

When I tote up all the cancellations, I saved my family $1,323 a year, or about $110 a month. If I put that $110 into my retirement account for the next 22 years until I turn 65, and assume a 7% rate of return, it could turn into about $70K. Hot diggity! That’s a nice chunk of change.

I’m not anti-subscription altogether. I’ve actually gotten less stingy recently in ponying up for them in support of enterprises I genuinely enjoy; I don’t want the outlets I appreciate to die.

But moving forward, I’m going to be relentlessly ruthless about axing those subscriptions that don’t offer me value.

Do your own subscription audit, cut these finance vampires out of your life, and invest those savings.

Your future self will thank you!

For more simple ways to build substantial wealth, listen to our podcast with David Bach:

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

If you’ve been following AoM long enough, you know I like philosophy. I’ve written about philosophy on the site and talked to lots of philosophers on the podcast. 

Philosophy isn’t some esoteric practice for me. It’s practical. I turn to philosophy to figure out how to live a good and meaningful life. 

But it’s also just fun. For me, at least. I enjoy seeing how humans from thousands of years ago tried to get their bearings in the world compared to humans living today. When you read, study, and talk about philosophy, you’re taking part in a conversation that’s been going on for millennia. And conversation is fun. I love a good conversation. 

To take part in any conversation, especially the millennia-long great conversation that’s been going on between philosophers, you need to have a basic understanding of what’s been talked about prior to you joining the chat. It’s no fun to be in a conversation where people make inside jokes or drop references that go over your head. The latter (and, actually, sometimes the former!) happens a lot in philosophy. Philosophers are always referencing other philosophers who came before them.

While you can and should read the primary texts of great philosophical works, many of these primary texts can be confusing and overwhelming. Sometimes it helps to have a guide to break things down for you a bit and help you get a handle on an idea. 

I ran into this issue a few years ago. I was reading Aristotle’s Metaphysics and was having trouble wrapping my head around forms and substance and actualities and whatnot. I read some supplementary books by professors on the topic but didn’t find them particularly clarifying. They were pretty muddled and dense. I was talking to a college professor friend of mine about my wrestle with Aristotle, and he told me he had a book that might help. 

The next time I saw him, he lent me his copy of a textbook called The Great Conversation: A Historical Introduction to Philosophy by Norman Melchert. He bookmarked the section about Aristotle’s Metaphysics. 

I read it and immediately saw the light. No joke. 

The way Professor Melchert laid things out allowed me to finally get a better grasp of the relation between forms and substance. I was able to turn back to Metaphysics and read the text with greater understanding. Even those secondary source books I had originally turned to for guidance started to make more sense. 

I gave my friend his book back and immediately bought a copy for myself.

It’s a textbook, so it’s expensive. I paid $80 on Amazon for a used edition. 

But man, totally worth the investment. 

The Great Conversation is the most approachable yet comprehensive book on philosophy I’ve come across. Melchert does a fantastic job summarizing the big ideas in history’s different schools of thinking, but does so without dumbing things down. He also covers pretty much everything, ranging from the pre-Socratics and going all the way up to the postmodernists. And he effectively shows how all of these schools of philosophy built on the previous ones. You’re able to get a birds-eye view of the great conversation of humanity.

I’ve found myself cracking open The Great Conversation again and again over the past few years. For example, I’ve been on a Kierkegaard kick this past year. The Danish philosopher is notoriously difficult to understand sometimes. When I’ve gotten stuck on some parts in The Sickness Unto Death, I go to the section on Kierkegaard in The Great Conversation and get some much-needed clarification. 

Several months ago, a book group I belong to was reading some Heidegger — another notoriously hard-to-understand philosopher. 

“Being is always the Being of an entity.” 

What in the heck does that mean?!

Well, in his chapter about Heidegger, Professor Melchert offers a rough idea that will get you going in the right direction, so you can better grapple with that statement. 

Heck, when I’m bored, I’ll open the book and read a random section. I’ve even taken it to the bathroom to read during my daily constitutional. Pooping and philosophizing. I think Galen would approve.

Having a copy of this book is like having access to a really smart, friendly, non-condescending philosophy professor in your home.

If you enjoy philosophy or would like to know more about it, I can’t recommend The Great Conversation enough. One of the best book investments I’ve made. 

With our archives 4,000 articles deep, we’ve decided to republish a classic piece each Sunday to help our newer readers discover some of the best, evergreen gems from the past. This article was originally published in May 2022.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

There are few places in modern life where we’re forced into such close quarters with strangers as the humble elevator. For a brief moment, people of all stripes — coworkers, neighbors, delivery drivers, and the guy who just reheated fish in the break room — are pressed together in a small, moving box. It’s a setting ripe for potential awkwardness and irritation.

That liminal space in an elevator also offers a small but meaningful opportunity to practice everyday courtesy. Like all etiquette, it isn’t about stiff formality, but rather a sense of awareness, restraint, and consideration for others. A few simple habits, as outlined in the guide above, can turn a potentially uncomfortable ride into a smooth, frictionless interaction. This is a situation that you actually don’t want to be memorable; if you make it into someone’s stories of an elevator ride, it’s likely that things have gone awry. 

Master these basics to become an elevator passenger with an air of gentlemanly grace.

Illustration by Ted Slampyak

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

While we often think of life as linear, my guest’s own life, along with a decade of research, has taught him that it’s anything but. In his latest book, What to Make of a Life, Jim Collins unpacks the cyclical pattern life actually unfolds in, and how to navigate it. He explains how we all go through periods of “fog” — times of disorientation and uncertainty — at least three times: in youth, after a life-changing “cliff” event, and as we move through midlife into older age. We find our way out of these fogs by what Jim calls coming into “frame” — aligning what you’re built to do with what you actually do in a way that feels enlivening and meaningful. And Jim unpacks the three elements that help you find, and re-find, this frame over the course of your life.

Along the way, Jim shares case studies of these principles at work, and we explore the role of luck, the inevitability of drudgery (even in work you love), and how to keep your inner fire lit over the long haul.

Resources Related to the Podcast

• Good to Great by Jim Collins
• All Rise: The Remarkable Journey of Alan Page by Bill McGrane
• Self-Renewal: The Individual and the Innovative Society by John W. Gardner
• Sunday Firesides: You Never Know How Many Chapters Are Still to Come
• Sunday Firesides: Do the Right Thing, for Right Now
• AoM Article: The 5 Best AoM Podcast Episodes on Finding Meaning and Purpose
• AoM series on finding your life’s vocation

Connect With Jim Collins

• Jim’s website

Listen to the Podcast! (And don’t forget to leave us a review!)

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This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

Growing up in the 80s and 90s, if my dad wasn’t watching In the Heat of the Night on our wood-paneled television, he was sitting in his recliner with a book in his hand. But not just any book. Popular, mass-market paperbacks. Thick ones, with embossed covers and those pages with that distinct mass-market paperback smell. I love that smell.

Back then, a lot of fathers were reading these paperbacks, which I’ve taken to calling “90s Dad Novels.”

90s Dad Novels were written by a handful of guys who, between them, basically owned the bestseller list for a decade. I’m talking Grisham, Crichton, King, and Clancy. 90s Dad Novels weren’t high-brow literary fiction. Nobody was winning a Pulitzer for these yarns. But their authors were masters at what they did. They knew how to write exciting, engaging, entertaining stories. The 90s Dad Novel was, and remains, the perfect vacation read.

A lot of 90s Dad Novels got turned into blockbuster movies. You’ve probably seen a bunch of them.

I’ve been doing a lot of heavy reading lately and needed a break. So I decided to go back and revisit some of these 90s Dad Novels (I read a few of them when I was in middle school and high school) and also pick up a few I’d never gotten around to. And let me tell you: 90s Dad Novels hold up.

Here’s a list of 10 to check out. Pick up a few for your summer reading. What’s nice about 90s Dad Novels is you can get them cheap at a used bookstore. Mine were $1.50 each.

When you’re done, enjoy watching the generally quite good films these books were turned into, while wearing a polo shirt, pleated khaki shorts, and white New Balance sneakers. (If you happen to own a 1996 Buick Roadmaster like we do, all the better.)

It’s going to be a fun, chill 90s Dad summer.

90s Dad Novels to Check Out

The Firm by John Grisham (1991)

This is the novel that started the Grisham juggernaut. Mitch McDeere is a hungry young Harvard Law grad who gets recruited by a small, mysterious Memphis firm. The money seems too good to be true. And, of course, it is. There’s a reason the firm is so generous with its recruits, and once Mitch figures out what it is, he’s in a race for his life. I was able to knock this page-turner out in a few evenings.

The movie adaptation starring Tom Cruise, Gene Hackman, and Jeanne Tripplehorn is also a great flick.

The Hunt for Red October by Tom Clancy (1984)

Yes, this book was published in 1984, but we’re calling it a 90s Dad Novel because 90s dads were still reading this thing a decade later. This is the book that introduced Jack Ryan, a literary character about whom books and shows are still being made. A Soviet submarine commander named Marko Ramius has gone rogue . . . or so it appears. He’s taken the USSR’s most advanced nuclear sub, the Red October, and is heading toward the American coast. CIA analyst Jack Ryan has 24 hours to convince the brass that Ramius is trying to defect, not attack.

The 1990 Sean Connery film is one of the better book-to-movie adaptations of the era.

Ten-year-old Brett enjoyed the video game version of the movie based on the book, too.

The Green Mile by Stephen King (1996)

In the 80s and 90s, Stephen King pumped out one bestselling 90s Dad Horror Novel after another. The Green Mile was something a bit different. Originally published as six slim paperback installments (King’s experiment in old-school serialized fiction), the novel is set on death row at a Southern prison in 1932. Paul Edgecombe is the block supervisor. John Coffey is the enormous, gentle man who arrives convicted of a crime you’re not sure he committed, and who turns out to have abilities nobody can explain.

The 1999 film adaptation starring Tom Hanks is one of the all-time best film adaptations of a book and spawned a great meme in the 2010s that you can use when you’re really, really tired.

The Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe (1987)

Bonfire of the Vanities is a bit different from the other books on this list. Wolfe was a literary heavyweight, and Bonfire is more highbrow than your typical 90s Dad Novel. But 90s Dads were definitely into it, and it’s incredibly readable and a lot of fun. I love Wolfe’s writing style.

Sherman McCoy is a Wall Street bond trader who considers himself a “Master of the Universe.” He’s pulling down a million bucks a year, lives in a Park Avenue co-op, and has a wife, a daughter, and a mistress. One night, he picks up his mistress at JFK, takes a wrong turn off the expressway, and ends up in the Bronx, where things go very, very wrong for Sherman. What follows is Sherman’s slow-motion unraveling as the incident gets picked up by a washed-up tabloid reporter, an ambitious Bronx DA, and a publicity-hungry reverend, each of whom sees an angle to work.

Wolfe’s satire of 1980s New York — Wall Street greed, tabloid journalism, racial politics, social climbing — is sharp, funny, and surprisingly still relevant in 2026.

The 1990 film adaptation starring Tom Hanks, Bruce Willis, and Melanie Griffith is famously one of the biggest Hollywood flops of the era. But I watched it, and if you go into the movie expecting it to not be as good as the book, I think you can enjoy it.

The Pelican Brief by John Grisham (1992)

Another blockbuster entry in the Grisham canon. Two Supreme Court justices are assassinated on the same night. A Tulane law student named Darby Shaw writes a speculative brief connecting the murders to a Louisiana oil tycoon with friends in high places. She shares it with her professor/boyfriend, who then shares it with the wrong person, and suddenly Darby becomes a target of people in high places. The pacing is fast, fast, fast. A lesson from this book is if you ever get a manila envelope that says “Pelican Brief” on it, throw it away immediately so you don’t die.

When you’re done with the book, check out the 1993 film, starring Julia Roberts and Denzel Washington.

Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton (1990)

The 90s Dad Novel that launched a multi-billion-dollar franchise. Welcome to Jurassic Park!

A billionaire builds a theme park full of cloned dinosaurs on a Costa Rican island. A chaos theorist, a paleontologist, and a couple of kids are among the first visitors. Things go wrong. Very wrong. Even though you’ve probably seen the movie and know the plot, you gotta read the book. It’s darker and weirder.

The 1993 Spielberg film is a classic. Never gets old. Our kids loved it. It should be added to the list of movies every millennial dad should introduce his kids to.

Clear and Present Danger by Tom Clancy (1989)

Jack Ryan gets pulled into a covert American military operation against the Colombian drug cartels after the President quietly authorizes a war nobody is supposed to know about. When things go sideways, the soldiers on the ground get abandoned by the politicians who sent them there, and Ryan has to figure out how to bring them home. This was a quick read. I really enjoyed it.

The 1994 Harrison Ford film is entertaining. It also guts about two-thirds of what makes the book interesting.

The Last Heroes by W.E.B. Griffin (1985)

Griffin is the outlier on this list in that he’s not as well-known as the other 90s Dad Novel authors, but he had a devoted following among dads who were into military history.

The first book in Griffin’s Men at War series, The Last Heroes is set during the early days of WWII and the birth of the OSS. A group of wealthy, well-connected Americans is recruited to run covert operations before the government has any real infrastructure for that kind of thing. One of those missions was tied to securing uranium for the top-secret development of the atomic bomb.

If you like this one, you’re in luck! Griffin wrote about a hundred more.

Needful Things by Stephen King (1991)

A mysterious shop opens in Castle Rock, Maine. The proprietor, Leland Gaunt, sells people exactly what they most want, and for extremely cheap. The catch is a small favor — pulling a cruel prank on a neighbor. The pranks escalate. The town tears itself apart.

King called this his farewell to Castle Rock, which he’d been using as a setting since The Dead Zone in 1979. The place goes out with a bang.

Sphere by Michael Crichton (1987)

A team of scientists gets deployed to the bottom of the Pacific Ocean to investigate a spacecraft that’s been sitting on the seafloor for 300 years. Inside the spacecraft, they find a perfect golden sphere. Things get weird: the subconscious of each crew member begins to manifest into reality. And we’re not talking the manifesting that the girlies are doing on TikTok.

High-school Brett enjoyed this novel. The 1998 movie adaptation starring Dustin Hoffman, Sharon Stone, and Capital One spokesman Samuel L. Jackson is fun.

Bonus: My American Journey by Colin Powell (1995)

Not a novel, but this list wouldn’t be complete without it. Colin Powell’s autobiography was the dad gift of 1995. It was the gift dads got because no one knew what to get Dad, and you randomly saw it on Christmas Eve on the front table at Waldenbooks at the mall after visiting KB Toys.

Turns out it’s actually a great book. Powell’s life is a genuinely remarkable American story, and he tells it plainly and without a lot of self-congratulation.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

Few things have captured the passion, the sometimes obsession, of men like the motorcycle. There’s no mystery as to why this is. Motorcycles represent a peculiar combination of several manly elements: danger, speed, singular focus, solitude, mechanics, noise, and physical skill.

Many famous men were motorcycle enthusiasts; they combined their passion for things like acting, music, and adventure with a love of bikes. Motorcycles were a perfect outlet for their zeal for life; riding the open road with the wind in their faces left them invigorated and inspired. Today, we take a look at the relationship ten famous men had with their motorcycles.

T.E. Lawrence

A skittish motorbike with a touch of blood in it is better than all the riding animals on earth, because of its logical extension of our faculties, and the hint, the provocation, to excess conferred by its honeyed untiring smoothness. —T.E. Lawrence

T.E. Lawrence, aka “Lawrence of Arabia,” was a passionate motorcyclist and a devotee of the Brough Superior. Brough Superiors were considered the “Rolls-Royce of Motorcycles,” and Lawrence had his custom-made; short of stature at 5’5″, he ordered his bikes with a smaller back wheel to accommodate his height. Lawrence owned seven Brough Superiors during his lifetime, referring to them as his Boanerges (sons of Thunder), and calling each George (the first was George I, the last George VII). In 1935, while riding George VII and awaiting delivery of George VIII, Lawrence swerved to avoid hitting two boys on bicycles, was thrown over the handlebars, and died a week later from his injuries at age 46. Lawrence loved to ride his bikes fast and hard; he was likely going around 100 mph, the bike’s top speed, at the time of the accident.

Marlon Brando

It still pleases me to be awake during the dark, early hours before morning when everyone else is still asleep. I’ve been that way since I first moved to New York. I do my best thinking and writing then. During those early years in New York, I often got on my motorcycle in the middle of the night and went for a ride — anyplace. There wasn’t much crime in the city then, and if you owned a motorcycle, you left it outside your apartment and in the morning it was still there. It was wonderful on summer nights to cruise around the city at one, two, or three a.m., wearing jeans and a t-shirt with a girl on the seat behind me. If I didn’t start out with one, I’d find one. —Marlon Brando

Before he became famous, Brando cruised the streets of NYC on his bike, and in the coming decades, whenever his fame started to feel oppressive, he’d get on his motorcycle and simply head out into the Southwest, riding through the desert for miles on end.

In the iconic film, The Wild One, Brando rode a 1950 Triumph 6T Thunderbird.

Bob Dylan

In 1966, Bob Dylan’s career was going full throttle; several of his albums had gone gold and platinum, he was touring the world, and he was soon to publish a novel. His schedule and impending commitments were brutal. Success was crashing over him like a wave — a wave that perhaps would have drowned him if a mysterious motorcycle accident hadn’t intervened. While tooling along near his Woodstock, NY home, Dylan apparently crashed his 1964 Triumph Tiger 100 and suffered an injury to his vertebrae. While he was not taken to a hospital, he enjoyed a long convalescence; he did not return to touring for almost a decade. The accident provided Dylan with a way to slow down his life. He would later say:

When I had that motorcycle accident . . . I woke up and caught my senses. I realized that I was just workin’ for all these leeches. And I didn’t want to do that. Plus, I had a family and I just wanted to see my kids.

Clark Gable

While this seems to be a posed press photo, Clark Gable did indeed ride a motorcycle, a 1934 Harley Davidson RL to be exact.

Hunter S. Thompson

But with the throttle screwed on there is only the barest margin and no room for mistakes. It has to be done right . . . and that’s when the strange music starts, when you stretch your luck so far that the fear becomes exhilaration and vibrates along your arms. You can barely see a hundred; the tears blow back so fast that they vaporize before they get to your ears. The only sounds are the wind and the dull roar floating back from the mufflers. You watch the white line and try to lean with it . . . howling through a turn to the right, then to the left and down the long hill to Pacifica . . . letting off now, watching for cops, but only until the next dark stretch and another few seconds on the edge . . . The Edge  . . .  —Hunter S. Thompson, Hell’s Angels

Writer Hunter S. Thompson earned his motorcycling chops the hard way: by riding his BSA A65 Lightning for a year with the Hells Angels. His experience riding with (and getting stomped by) the gang became the book, Hell’s Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga.

Clint Eastwood

While Eastwood was only an occasional rider in his personal life, he rode motorcycles as part of several of his films. In Coogan’s Bluff, for example, he chases an escaped criminal through Central Park while astride a Triumph Bonneville.

Charles Lindbergh

As a boy, Charles Lindbergh had a keen fascination for the mechanical workings of machines generally and for internal combustion engines in particular. When he was in high school, he ordered a twin-cylinder 1920 model Excelsior “X” motorcycle through the local hardware store. Lindbergh was a shy and quiet young man, but he rode his bike fast, hard, and, as his classmates remembered it, rather recklessly. “I loved its power and speed,” he admitted. On the way to town, Lindbergh would tear down a path that ran past a power plant, through a thicket of bushes, and along the steep banks of the Mississippi River. As an observer remembered, “it seemed like he wanted to see how close to the edge he could get without plunging in.” The owner of the plant became so concerned that he closed off the trail. But the future pilot was as cool on that bike as he was behind the controls of a plane; he never had an accident.

Buddy Holly

In 1958, coming off a tour and flush with success, Buddy Holly and the Crickets decided to spend some of their hard-earned money on new motorcycles. They flew to Dallas and started shopping the local bike stores. But the owners, unaware of who these young lads were, treated them dismissively; the owner of the Harley dealer practically pushed them out the door. But they found what they were looking for at Ray Miller Triumph Motorcycle Sales, where each man picked out one of the latest models: Buddy chose an Ariel Cyclone, J.I. picked a Trophy, and Joe B. decided on a Thunderbird. The guys then headed back to Lubbock on the bikes, but not before stopping by the Harley dealer to show off their new rides.

James Dean

Hope for teenage nerds everywhere: James Dean on his first real motorcycle, pre-smoldering angst.

Of course, the “Rebel Without a Cause” had a thing for motorcycles. He got his first real motorcycle at age 15, a 1947 CZ 125cc. He was the only kid in his small town in Indiana with his own motorcycle, and he rode it full throttle, losing two teeth in a fall. The locals called him “One Speed Dean.” And that one speed was “wide open.”

When he dropped out of college to pursue acting, he traded his beloved CZ for a Royal Enfield 500cc vertical twin. But he wouldn’t hold onto that bike for long. While home in Indiana on break from working on a play in NYC, Dean decided to ride his Royal Enfield all the way back to the Big Apple. But when it broke down along the way, he traded it in for an Indian Warrior TT. When Dean arrived back in New York, he had the bike serviced at a shop . . . where Steve McQueen worked as a mechanic.

Later, wanting to emulate Marlon Brando, Dean bought a Triumph TR5 Trophy, the last bike he rode before he died.

Steve McQueen

There is perhaps no famous man we associate more with motorcycles than the King of Cool, Steve McQueen.

Before Steve McQueen made it big as an actor, he would compete in — and win — weekend motorcycle races on the first bike he owned: a used Harley. Even when Hollywood success came calling, acting gigs always had to compete against his passion for motorcycles. McQueen amassed a collection of over 100 motorcycles, his favorites being vintage Indians. When the weight of celebrity grew too stifling, McQueen would grab one of those Indian bikes and tear out of Tinseltown and onto the open road. McQueen loved off-road racing as well, and raced the Triumph TR6 in everything from the Baja 1000 to the prestigious International Six Days Trial.

The TR6 also famously makes an appearance in The Great Escape. In that film, McQueen performed many of his own stunts; however, contrary to popular belief, it was not McQueen who jumped his bike over the barbed wire fence in that iconic scene. Because of insurance concerns, Bud Ekins was called in to make the leap.

With our archives 4,000 articles deep, we’ve decided to republish a classic piece each Sunday to help our newer readers discover some of the best, evergreen gems from the past. This article was originally published in March 2011.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.