Your Real Biological Clock Is You’re Going to Die

At 47, Tom Scocca realizes most of us are living under the illusion that we have unlimited time, and are free plot out the different phases of our lives to our liking. He crunches some numbers and comes to the conclusion that sooner or later — and who knows which it will be — every one of us is a goner.

Author: Tom Scocca
Source: Hmm Daily
Published: Oct 18, 2018
Length: 6 minutes (1,576 words)

John Joseph Scocca, 1940-2012

A son’s eulogy for his father:

“A few years ago, when my son Mack was a baby, we took the train to Aberdeen, and we made the mistake of counting on the Harford County taxi system to pick us up. It was cold and raining, and the baby was cold and getting rained on. And after half an hour, with the dispatcher still promising a cab in 10 minutes, he loaded an oxygen bottle into the car and headed down West Bel Air Avenue, the oxygen ticking in the passenger side, to get his grandson in out of the rain.

“I remember that oxygen bottle. His pulmonologist explained things this way, once: every day, he was climbing a mountain. He lived at the altitudes where adventurers falter and die. Weeks ago, the doctors saw his CO2 levels and said he would be dead in days. They thought they were dealing with someone from sea level. He had already climbed mountains to teach class, to visit his sister, to see both his sons married.

“He kept climbing. He climbed a mountain to sit at his kitchen table with his wife, and drink his coffee. He climbed mountains to see his younger grandson in his arms. He climbed further than anyone could see.”

Author: Tom Scocca
Source: TomScocca.com
Published: May 15, 2012
Length: 6 minutes (1,547 words)

Unveiling the Capital City of the Future

But I already knew the numbers, more or less, before I ever got to China. The reality behind the numbers was something else. It began to register with me at the Great Wall, at Badaling. I arrived there in August 2004, my first time on the Chinese mainland. It was almost exactly four years—1,458 days, to be exact—before Beijing was scheduled to host the Summer Olympics. This meant very little to me at the time. Experts were proclaiming or warning that the world was at the dawn of a Chinese Century, and China saw the Olympics as a chance to prove the proclamations true, to demonstrate that its capital city had become a great global metropolis. Though I didn’t yet know it, I would be living through that demonstration from the inside. I would become the audience for the display of the New China and a part of the display itself—tied to Beijing by habit and blood, but still a foreign body, for China to tolerate or not.

Author: Tom Scocca
Source: PopMatters
Published: Aug 26, 2011
Length: 18 minutes (4,662 words)

The Shadow Editors: When Did Perez Hilton Become More Famous Than Paris Hilton And Why Were We Not Informed?

“That is a good point. They were eager, historically, to cover Paris, but they are exceedingly less eager to cover Perez. In part, I think because he has a platform via which to castigate, undermine and rebut? I think publications dislike both Hiltons equally. But they were never afraid of Paris, because she had no editorial product of her own.”

Author: Tom Scocca
Source: The Awl
Published: Sep 23, 2009
Length: 9 minutes (2,470 words)