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This Changes Everything (Part II--How the magic happens)
Oh, please stick with me here. I have no idea whatsoever how to do what I’m about to do, but I’m hoping we can muddle through it together. Today I am writing the second of a three-part series on how unexpectedly my life has been changed by the purchase of a new “self-driving” Tesla. In the first part, I recounted the extraordinary difficulty I had in deciding to make a purchase that would enrich its loathsome manufacturer. Writing that was first-person storytelling—familiar t
Eliot Daley
32 minutes ago18 min read
This Changes Everything
This Changes Everything At 2:15PM on March 14, 1974, an elderly driver lost control of his vehicle while exiting a parking lot on University Place here in Princeton. It lurched across the road and onto a sidewalk where a three year old girl was standing next to her brother and mother in front of a masonry pillar. The vehicle crushed her into a hideously unrecognizable mass. The entire community was deeply traumatized. Some of us still are. Our daughter who was only nine at
Eliot Daley
Oct 214 min read
"A Republic--If You Can Keep It"
But…what if we can’t keep it? What if our Republic is destroyed? Do we have a Plan B? It never seriously occurred to me that perhaps we couldn’t keep it. I was only four years old when I read “Ben and Me”, a charming little biography of Benjamin Franklin for children, ostensibly written by his pet mouse Amos. Ever since, I have carried with me Franklin’s famous statement naming the new form of government the Founders had created—a Republic—and his warning of its vulnerab
Eliot Daley
Jan 138 min read
The Best Gift of All: A Second Chance
Most of us who messed up when we were teenagers didn’t wind up in prison. Instead, we went on to learn how to make a living, prepare for a career, make connections, find a job, be coached by a mentor, balance risks and rewards, maybe fall in love and create a stable family life among supportive friends and neighbors. But those who did become incarcerated spent months or years going nowhere. They spent soul-crushing days at menial, repetitive, distasteful tasks with maybe
Eliot Daley
Dec 23, 20257 min read
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