Not Cleverness

Annoyance Bingo.Lose your patience. Win big. ✧✧✧ Game play begins Tuesday, April 21, 2026, at 12:00am PT — First Prize: $100 ✧✧✧ The Origin of Annoyance Bingo. For years, I’ve asked mourners at funerals to track the least compassionate things said in an attempt to comfort them — and send me the best (and worst) examples. The idea: when someone

  Episcopal Bishop John Shelby Spong would answer the question “how shall we express love?” with a single word: “Wastefully.”    ✧✧✧   We don’t express love wastefully. A story and then some thinking about why.   ✧✧✧   It’s 2006. I’m in NYC to—among other things—celebrate the fifth birthday of my first niece, Maya.  I wait outside her school

For reasons a team of psychoanalysts might have been able to crack, my dad couldn’t get the three-word phrase “I love you” to come out of his mouth. I knew he loved us. It’s just he couldn’t say it. I rationalized that I didn’t need to hear those three words, but it hurt anyway. This is the story about how