Stories and songs have a rich and beautiful friendship. The best songs place you inside of a story, sometimes leaving you room to fill in the narrative gaps. The best stories stir up soundtracks [...]

There will be a lot of internet ink used today to talk about the life and work of Anthony Bourdain. As I write this on Friday morning, people are filling twitter with words from him and about him.

Let’s say you’re sitting around the office watercooler (is this still a thing?) or some other work gathering area where small talk happens. But you don’t want to keep the talk small. You want to [...]

Since Bill Gates put out his summer reading list this week, and he seems to be doing all right for himself these days, we might as well follow his lead and put out a list too. Even if our adult [...]

I’ve worked in restaurants, retail stores, miniature golf courses, non-profits, for-a-little profits, and academic institutions. I haven’t had all the jobs there are to have but I’ve had enough [...]

In the Rebel Pilgrim office, we are people who pay attention to stories. That’s what we talk about when we’re standing around in the space between meetings or over lunch. Stories are like our [...]

While Monday brings out the phantom quarterbacks in a lot of offices, we often spend a portion of our Monday playing armchair comedians and debating the sketches on “Saturday Night Live.” It’s [...]

This is the kind of post that should probably be read in a rocking chair on a front porch with old-timey music playing on a phonograph in the background. I feel like that’s what I’m doing as I [...]

In her beautiful coming-of-age novel, Kitchen, Banana Yoshimoto puts this question in the mind of the lead character, Mikage: “Is this what it means to be an adult—to live with ugly ambiguities?”

In less than two weeks, the men’s basketball team from the small 15,000-student Loyola University Chicago has orchestrated three shocking upsets during the NCAA tournament. With defeats over [...]

We were in Texas recently to shoot some footage for a documentary when I saw a billboard for a company boasting that they were “probably the best on the planet.” I got so hung up on the phrase [...]

My career in the restaurant business was short-lived but involved one night that seemed to go on forever. One of our chefs spent the time between the lunch and dinner shift drinking a whole [...]