How general disparagement prepared me for the next big phase of my life. WRITTEN AND ILLUSTRATED BY PETER MOORE MY PRIVILEGE WAS SUBSTANTIAL. But it’s not as if my childhood was an extended spree. My three older brothers frequently pointed out what a puny dope I was. It hurt to hear that, especially because I was puny and dopey. One brother pioneered the practice of “keeping a bruise going”…

WRITTEN AND ILLUSTRATED BY PETER MOORE #1: No pickles were harmed in the creation of this newsletter. The editor of parade magazine (circulation 33 million) popped up in my email a couple of months ago, asking The Question of our Age: “Do play pickleball?” Unlike everybody else in the world, I answered, “uh…no.” But, as a journalist, ignorance is my competitive…

David Foster Wallace points out one of the limitations of privilege: Not understanding you have it. I had announced my intention to quit Paris to my journal, but I still had five days left there, including my birthday — a grand occasion to dramatize myself and the Quest of My Life. “29 October: Happy birthday to me!” “And this is my 22nd birthday,” I wrote, clearing…

Peanuts, Cracker Jacks, and these exceptional human beings, included in the high price of admission to a stadium near you. MY GOLDEN AGE as a baseball fan was the late 1980s, when I lived a mile from Wrigley Field, and the Cubs were fielding — surprise! — decent teams. …

Wherein I discover my aptitude as a hitchhiker, meet another guy named Peter Moore (but decline to buy him a cocoa), and learn how to spell “dirndl.” THE SUMMER BEFORE I LEFT FOR PARIS, my dad fished an antiquated map of Europe from his shoebox of National Geographic treasures, and vouchsafed it to his wandering son. He did the same, a few years later, when I was traveling with friends in central Africa, and it was, alarmingly…

Get to know your new, heavily armored neighbors before they give you the skin-wasting disease formerly known as leprosy. FOR THOSE WHO WORRY that loss of habitat, climate change, and Ginni Thomas are causing new waves of extinction, I have glad tidings: Armadillos are doing just fine. In fact, since crossing the Rio Grande in the 1850s, they’ve been expanding their territory steadily northward in the U.S., reaching all…

How my dad helped me parse my privilege, long before I understood what that even meant. IN LATE OCTOBER, I had a drowsy morning in the Paris Metro. It was interesting to watch people on the way to work — an alien culture for me. We were rolling toward La Gare de Lyon, where my travel companion David Copperfield and I caught the train to Switzerland. …

Stranger in a strange land? Your tongue can show you the way home. I HAVE ALWAYS been good at accents. I learned this as a seven-year old, when I flawlessly repeated the ad line “It’s not fried, it’s Shake n’ Baked, and I hepped!” with a deep-south accent. …

The leaves are down. The mornings are dark. Robert Frost says that’s OK. This time of year brings its own kind of dread. After the pumpkin glow of Halloween, the dark of November comes on, even before I’ve eaten the leftover candy. Clearly, it’s time for a reboot. Fortunately, Robert Frost felt the same way in 1913, when he wrote the poem whose…