“Humans encounter challenges in their environment throughout their lifetime, including adversity in fetal life and childhood, and societal stress, psychological trauma, and exposure to drugs in adolescence and adult life. We use a wide range of techniques in mouse models to mechanistically link environmental challenges, through epigenetic and transcriptional plasticity, to behavioral responses.” – Dr. Miklos Toth, OB/GYN who delivered the author

My name is Matthew Goldin, 32, NY-born, experimental mixed media artist and cultural strategist, conceived in the Beverly Hills Hotel—no tats, no education.

Growing up, I never joined in on the fun and games that the other kids liked to play. I preferred to depict, with great acumen, and to a rapt audience, the gulf between the world of ideas and the quotidian miscellany of chores and little anxieties that constitute this writer’s lived experience of a summer afternoon.

Eschewing depth, my style is characterized by surface tension so that readers can glide, like water bugs, and discover new ways of laughing and loving.

Most of the essays in this collection were written between 1991 and 2024, during a period when I was largely kidding. I hope you find them edifying.

Matthew Goldin lives in Los Angeles and posts on Twitter and Substack as @matthewgoldin.