Earlywood: Making Things Hard/Easy

Publisher’s note: Happy Saturday! Each week, we publish a free excerpt from one of the thousands of pieces I’ve written since 1996. Sometimes, it’s from a magazine article. Or a book. Or (in this case) a blog entry published in 2022. Each entry has been updated or annotated with some modern context or point of view. We hope you enjoy it.

For most of my c…