Now you can read my work on the popular news app called Flipboard

By David McElroy · June 18, 2018

After several months of testing and integration, I’m happy to tell you that my articles are now being published on Flipboard, a popular iOS and Android app.

Flipboard became popular quickly when it was launched in 2010 for the iPad and it was quickly extended to the iPhone. It’s now available on Android, too. It’s primarily a mobile app, but it can be accessed from a browser on Mac and Windows as well.

Although I will be one of the smaller publishers on Flipboard, I’ve been excited to see that the app has already been sending substantial traffic to my site. Although I haven’t promoted it at all, there are days when a quarter of my visitors are coming from Flipboard.

On Flipboard, you create your own reading experience by telling the site which subjects interest you. Over time, you can continue to “train” the software about what interests you. As you “like” certain things and tell it “less like this” about other things, the system gets better at knowing what things will be tailored to your taste.

The system isn’t perfect. It sometimes categorizes articles with subject tags that are wildly wrong, but it should improve over the years.

My articles generally appear there about two days after they’re published here. If you use Flipboard, feel free to take a look here, but I appreciate those of you who still access the articles directly. I’d rather have direct readers, but Flipboard is a great way to expose people to my work who would never have seen it otherwise.

Let me take this opportunity to remind you how much I appreciate every reader. In the last month, thousands and thousands of readers have come from 183 countries and territories — frequently from places I’ve never even heard of. (Do you know where Mayotte is? How about St. Pierre & Miquelon?)

Only about half of readers come from the United States. It’s an amazing opportunity to be able to write for readers coming from places all around the globe. It’s exciting to me to see so many returning visitors from cities and countries where I’d like to visit.

I appreciate every one of you and I apologize that I’ve become unable to answer all of the email you send to me. I read everything you write and I wish I had time to come up with insightful advice for everyone who writes. It always amazes me how similar our emotional experiences can be, even though we have different backgrounds and different languages.

So thanks for reading. I really do appreciate you being here.

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I haven’t posted anything new in my YouTube series about narcissism in the last couple of weeks, so some people have been asking about it. There’s nothing wrong and I’ll be back soon. The issue is simply a technical problem because of a piece of equipment that died. Here’s a brief video I posted on YouTube to explain.

On a live awards show Sunday night, one man made a joke about a female celebrity. The husband of the celebrity was offended and hit the man who made the joke. Or maybe it was staged for entertainment. Who knows? Who cares? Social media is full of discussion — and even arguments — about this idiocy today. This baffles me. Let’s assume for a moment that the event happened as reported. People have been having such idiotic fights ever since there have been humans. Half the bars in the world see such brief dustups regularly. It simply doesn’t matter. The fact that so many people believe they need to talk about this — or even need to have opinions about it — is more evidence of the bizarre media brainwashing that convinces many to care passionately about brain-dead trivia. Your life will be happier and saner if you focus on yourself, your family and your friends, not on whatever scripted (or spontaneous) bilge that the media wants to pipe into your home.

I’m in the middle of migrating this website to new servers this week. This means you might encounter some unexpected behavior until I get all the bugs worked out. Clicking on my links (including this one) might cause your browser to give you the message that it’s a site without a current security certificate. It’s not actually unsafe, but there’s something which isn’t yet set up for the security certificate. I apologize for any such errors you might encounter while the process is going on. If you notice any problems with content which didn’t migrate properly, I would appreciate you letting me know the details at davidmcelroy@mac.com. Thanks for your patience.

I often wonder what animals think when they look at us and consider the society we’ve created. Yes, I know this is fanciful and unrealistic, but what if they could? Would they be astounded at how we treat each other? Would they be disgusted by the ugliness and pettiness which fill so many of our daily interactions? The truth is that I’m feeling pretty disgusted with humanity tonight. I made the mistake of reading some online interactions that I should have avoided — and it sickened me. The people involved appeared to be vile and stupid and arrogant. I wish I could pretend they’re a tiny minority, but I know better. It’s times such as this when I most need to escape much of “civilization” and disconnect from their world. If humans are going to be worthy of “ruling this planet,” we have a lot of growth to do. And I fear that growth is nowhere in sight. So my buddy Thomas, above, and all of his friends would be right to judge us harshly — and to think, “Why do you folks get to be in charge?”

I should have expected this, but I honestly didn’t. The article I wrote last week about disagreements over treatment for autistic children brought me angry emails. You could almost call it “hate mail.” Of the five emails about it so far, two have been to tell me that I’m wrong to even listen to critics of the most popular therapy for autistic children — and the other three tell me I’m wrong for not condemning the treatment as the “obvious” abuse it is. If you read the article, you know I didn’t take a position on the issue, because I simply don’t know enough to have an opinion. But by talking about the issue, I stepped into a heated controversy. The emails from the two sides convinced me of nothing. But they did give me even more empathy for the unfortunate parents who have to figure out for themselves where the truth lies for their children.

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